All the dear faces Read online

  “Don't be daft, Sal," Annie said again, but less caustically, with less certainty. There was nothing in the world she would love more than to go to the playhouse with Sally and Mim. To be as carefree, as free as they were allowed to be, even if it was only for a few hours. She went nowhere that was not connected with the farm except for the year in which she had been allowed to go to school in the village. She had been twelve then and had known nothing, but in those twelve months she had absorbed more than Sally and Mim had learned in three years. She could read and write and add up and do 'take-aways'. She had learned a smattering of history and geography, for the teacher, finding Annie wanted to learn and was not just passing the time as Sally and Mim and most of her other pupils were doing, had shown an interest in her and had even lent her her own precious books. Sense and Sensibility by Miss Jane Austen and Mr Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. These had given Annie a taste, not, alas, fulfilled, to read more, to see more, to know more and how was she to do that, labouring round her father's farm until she was married when, she presumed, she would do the same round her husband's. William Shakespeare was a great writer of plays, so her teacher at the Dame school had told her and perhaps it might be one of his that was to be shown in Keswick.

  “What's on?" she asked abruptly.

  “On where?" Mim answered, popping another blackberry in her mouth.

  “What play is it?"

  “'Tis called The Outlaw of Sicily."

  “Did a chap by the name of William Shakespeare write it?"

  “Nay, don't ask me. Who is 'e, anyway?" Mim was clearly unimpressed, and anyway, did it matter? "He's a great play writer."

  “Well, I don't know if 'e wrote this 'un, but it says on the playbill that there's to be dancin' betwixt each part."

  “Dancin' . . ." Oh, how she loved to dance. Not that she'd done much but at the last 'boon clip' she had twirled in the 'Cumberland Square Eight' with Davy Mounsey, to the music of Dobby Hawkins' fiddle and to her astonishment her father had allowed it. The speculative gleam in his eye had gone unnoticed by her as she stamped her foot and threw back her growing hair, again, amazingly, allowed to hang free, though Lizzie Abbott saw it and so did Aggie Mounsey, both aware of its significance.

  “What time you goin'?"

  “Mid mornin'. Faither'll give us a lift to Keswick but we've to walk back."

  “Threepence, you say?"

  “Aye." Sally clasped Annie's hand, gazing earnestly into her face, seeing for perhaps the first time what no one had perceived before. Annie had always been scrawny, with her collar-bones looking as though they were about to break out from beneath her delicate white skin. She had thin, square shoulders, an extreme boyish slenderness, brittle and fine-textured, all hollows and angles with a pointed face in which her eyebrows flew rejoicingly up or ruefully down depending on the mood of her father. She had the rich, woodland colouring of a fox, her eyes just as golden and hunted but now, with her expression one of growing excitement, she seemed to light up, come alive, to crackle with anticipation and she was quite incredibly lovely.

  “Will tha' come then?" Sally felt her own excitement begin to snap.

  “If me mother'll give me threepence. That's if she 'as it, an' that's if Faither's up on t' fell again an' if 'e's to be there all day, an' if . . .”

  It seemed Lizzie did have threepence to give her daughter and more besides which of course no one knew about, saved painfully over the years, a farthing here, a farthing there, stolen, Lizzie supposed it was, whenever she could do so undetected, from the egg money, the butter money, money that passed through her hands in the transactions over besoms and swills, most handed over faithfully to Joshua except for what was hidden behind a certain loose stone in the cow shed.

  She had been aghast and yet, looking into her daughter's pleading face, a face suddenly lovely and bright with hope, she could not find it in her heart to refuse since the child had nothing in her life but hard work from cock-crow to nightsong. Giving in to the only impulse she had ever known since the one she had succumbed to when she had accepted and married Joshua, she pressed the threepence into her daughter's hand, kissed her cheek and told her to be back before her father returned from Middle Fell. Her face worked painfully as she watched the light, dancing feet of her child, almost fifteen, run down the track towards the farm gate where Jem Mounsey and his girls waited for her. She had on the dress Lizzie herself had been married in, carefully stored in lavender in the press in the bedroom, a light shade of tawny brown which, on Annie, as it had not done on Lizzie, looked exactly right. It was too short and a mite too tight across the breasts, causing a pang of misgiving in Lizzie for, with her glorious hair brushed until it stood out from her head and down her back in a brilliant copper cloud, Annie was enough to catch the eye of any man which worried Lizzie even more. But how could she resist that pleading face, those vivid eyes which, after all, were asking for very little? So innocent. A ride into Keswick with a perfectly respectable family to see the players which evidently Jem and Aggie Mounsey thought fitting for their girls to see.

  As Annie turned to wave rapturously, Lizzie's eyes looked up towards Middle Fell and she prayed lustily that Joshua would remain there until nightfall.

  They stood at the back of the playhouse, Annie and Sally and Mim, their young minds enchanted, their young eyes bright with the joy of it, for they were no more than children and did not see the tawdry costumes, the artificial deportment and speech of the actors, the triviality of the story. They were transported into fairyland, the land of myth and legend and imagination, and with the rest of the unsophisticated audience they cheered and howled, wept and laughed, loving every minute of it. In the first interval between parts, when Annie felt a tap on her arm, she did not at first recognise the young man beneath the appalling stage make-up as the leading male player she had just seen on the stage. He was quite alarming close to with his drawn-on black moustache, his gypsy ear-rings, his boots and his cutlass and for a moment all three girls shrank back.

  “Ladies, forgive me. I had not meant to frighten you,”

  he said, smiling his wicked 'outlaw's' smile. His voice was soft, deep and completely irresistible and his chocolate-brown eyes gazed into Annie's. He took her hand and raised it to his lips and the girls, all three, stared at him, hypnotised by his beauty and his charm, like three little rabbits which have suddenly come across an extremely handsome fox.

  “I saw you from the stage," he went on, "and could not resist coming down to greet you. I could tell you were enjoying my poor performance and . . . well . . .", his smile deepening to reveal two engaging clefts — in a woman they would have been dimples — at each side of his mouth. "I could never withstand a pretty woman and when there are three of them it seems the challenge is tripled.”

  The word 'pretty' would have been enough but to be called a 'woman' when one is only fourteen was heady stuff and Sally and Mim began to preen. In sharp contrast Annie's face appeared to pale. She became still and hushed as though in the presence of some being who is truly from another world, a world in which gods lived, for surely this could only be one of those. Her hand had remained in his and her eyes, enormous, clear and incredibly lovely as she fell headlong into the pit of love for the first time, did not even blink. He kissed her fingers again and she could feel his lips burn her flesh and beneath the bodice of her mother's wedding-gown something quivered. It was the most delightful feeling but at the same time it hurt her. She felt a great need to put up her hand and draw this man to . . . to . . . She was not sure what it was she wanted, or what to do about it since, apart from her father, when she was a child, she had been touched by no man.

  “The music has begun. Will you not dance?" he asked her softly. Her heart knocked frantically and her mouth was so dry she could not have spoken if her life depended on it but her limbs worked independently of her mind as he led her down towards the stage. Her cheeks burned with a bright flame as, with the practised ease of the accomplished seducer he put his h
ands gently about her waist and whisked her away in the lively, noisy reel 'The Circassian Circle'. She had seen it performed and had tapped her foot longing to join in on many occasions and she found that her body did the dancing for her while her benumbed mind dwelled in the rapture Anthony Graham had introduced her to.

  “Won't you tell me your name?" he whispered in her ear before he returned to the stage for the second part of the play.

  “Annie . . ." The first word she had spoken since he had burst into her life like a shooting star across an empty, navy-blue sky.

  “Wait for me at the end of the performance, Annie," he pleaded, kissing her fingers again, holding her hand for a moment before he sped away to his role as the Outlaw of Sicily.

  “I see you have another little chicken all ready to be plucked," his ageing leading lady said acidly.

  “And why not since there's nothing here to excite one's interest. "

  “They get younger in every town," she replied sneeringly.

  “Which is more than can be said of some I could mention.”

  Sally and Mim were persuaded by Anthony to walk ahead of himself and Annie as the four of them sauntered up Market Place.

  “We can't 'ang about, Annie," Sally managed to mutter into the unheeding ear of her friend who was drifting along in the direction of Greta Bridge and the road to Hause on the solicitous arm of The Outlaw of Sicily. He had not stopped to remove his make-up nor change his costume in his eagerness to catch Annie when the performance ended.

  “I . . . don't mind if you go on, Sal."

  “No, you go on ... er . . . Sally, is it? I'll see Annie to her door.”

  Sally eyed him doubtfully. Did he know how far it was from Keswick to Hause? Did he even know that Annie lived up that way or even where it was and how long it would take him? His queer get-up looked even queerer in the broad light of day. Though she had initially fallen under his fascinating spell, as Annie and Mim had done, she was not quite so bewitched as Annie appeared to be and her reason told her that no man, particularly one as handsome and silver-tongued as Anthony Graham, would walk a girl like Annie a distance of ten miles just for courtesy's sake. He had another performance that evening, he said, and Sally knew he would certainly not be back in Keswick by then, and anyway, Annie was her friend and she couldn't just walk off and leave her with a perfect stranger, could she?

  “'Tis five miles or more ter Hause," she said resolutely.

  “Five miles!" Anthony came to an abrupt stop, seemingly unaware of the comically disbelieving faces the townsfolk turned in his direction. "I thought you lived in Keswick, Annie." For a moment his face was thunderstruck, then he gently pulled her round to face him, a winsome smile softening what had almost become petulance.

  “But you'll come again tomorrow, won't you? There's no afternoon performance so you and I could spend some time together. You could take dinner with me at my lodgings at The Packhorse before I go on in the evening. Please say yes, Annie. I would be devastated if I thought I was never to see you again.”

  So would she.

  “Please, Annie." He whispered her name, softly, lovingly, and in a tone no one, not even her own mother, had ever used. He gazed longingly into her eyes and she thought she would swoon with the sheer joy of it. He held her hands to his chest and she felt the strength, the warmth, the absolute masculinity of him as his heart beat against her hand. Nothing had prepared her for this, this thrill of quivering excitement, this trembling his touch set in motion and which ran deliciously through the whole of her body, right down to her knees. They felt as though they were made of jelly and her face was on fire with it. Her skin prickled and yet at the same time glowed and she could refuse him nothing, her eyes told him.

  “Tomorrow at noon," he said encouragingly.

  “Yes." Her eyes held stars but it meant nothing to his well-hidden and self-seeking heart.

  Sally and Mim hurried, but Annie Abbott floated, light as thistledown along the five miles of lake road from Keswick to Hause, past the darkening mass of Dodd Wood on the right, the quiet beauty of Bassenthwaite Lake on the left. The sun had almost gone from the sky and the shape of Broom Fell across the water was dark and featureless but the glory of it had leaked into the lake itself, turning the flat surface of the water to a burnished golden-orange. The fells on the far side were reflected in it, a perfect mirror-image and a dark trail of cloud, golden-edged, poured across the water and the sky, one silhouette duplicating the other. From over the meadows which lay between the road and the lake, a tiny light burned in the windows of St Bridget's Church, and from those of the farms and scattered houses, looking like golden stars in the deepening darkness.

  Annie could not have hurried had she tried. She had just lived through the most exciting experience of her young and drab existence and she still dreamed in it and in the dazzling remembrance of the man who had captured her innocent heart. She would see him tomorrow. She was to 'take dinner' with him at The Packhorse. She hadn't the faintest idea how she was to manage it since her father knew her every movement, or at least he did until today, but she would do it somehow, she told herself airily as she skipped along the last bit of track which led to the farmgate of Browhead.

  “Wheer's t'girl?" her father had asked her mother. The men of Lakeland were thrifty, not only with their emotions – of any kind – and with their cash which was more often than not in short supply, but with their words.

  “She'll not be far away, Joshua," her mother had faltered placatingly and when Joshua Abbott had demanded to know exactly where that might be, Lizzie Abbott could not tell him for after twenty years of marriage to him, twenty years of servitude and uncommunicative constraint to his dour and unbending will, indeed ever since she had come to Browhead as a trembling bride of sixteen, her mental processes had become severely hampered by her fear of him.

  Her mind had gone dead as Joshua waited for an answer. Her tongue had stuck to the roof of her mouth and though he had never struck her or their daughter, she had cowered away from him as though expecting a blow.

  He was waiting for Annie where the farm track ran down to the road. He hit her for the first time that evening.

  “Where've tha' bin, girl?" he wanted to know, and who with? which were the words he most wanted to speak for since the night of the 'boon clip' when she had danced in such a lively fashion with Davy Mounsey, his dejected and faltering hope of a son had risen like air. Not a son, of course, but the next best thing. His farm and Jem Mounsey's allied in marriage and a man who has land, even if it comes with a bride attached to it, will look after it. He'd tie it up, naturally, so that it would still be Abbott's farm, Abbott's land, with his grandchildren working on it, but now, in the space of a day, since he had left this morning feeling more optimistic than he had for years, she had threatened the tentative dream he had allowed himself and set it to shaking and crumbling like a weakened drystone wall. All dressed up in some flibbertigibbet's gown — not even recognising the dress in which his own wife had married him and in which she had looked as pretty as a hedge rose — she had been off somewhere on her own and returned so flushed and brilliant he could only suspect the worst.

  She refused absolutely to tell him since she did not want to involve her mother who was grovelling by the fireside like a whipped dog and when Joshua opened the door and pointed silently out into the yard she had gone, her head high and defiant, her cheek swollen, the flesh about her eye already beginning to change colour.

  “Tha'll sleep in t' barn tonight, girl," he said to her, "wheer't th'animals sleep an' in t' mornin' thee an' me'll 'ave summat to say to one another. Think on it an' remember this. No one defies me in me own 'ouse. Now get out theer an' get some sleep fer there's a field ter be ploughed tomorrow.”

  The walk back to Keswick was long and dark and her clogs blistered her bare feet. She did not weep nor did she do much thinking except to repeat the words which had sung in her head ever since Anthony had winked audaciously at her over the footlights and st
olen her innocently beating heart.

  `I love him, I love him, I love him,' the song went and the rhythm of it moved her tired body along the deserted road. The night was inky black. She could see nothing, only her country senses keeping her on the track where she might have blundered into the dangerous and densely packed tree trunks of Dodd Wood on her left or down to the rippling, deep and equally dangerous waters of the lake on her right. Stones chinked beneath her feet and an owl hooted close by, the suddenness of it making her heart leap in alarm. A farm dog, sensing her passing, or perhaps scenting the fox which was raiding the hen-coop, barked hysterically, then stopped in mid-voice as though a heavy hand had persuaded him to do so.

  She reached The Packhorse at midnight, just as Anthony and the troupe of strolling players who were drinking with him were becoming deep in their cups. They were singing some bawdy song, crashing their ale pots on the table and the landlord, whose wife did not care for such `goings-on', being accustomed to a less vigorous class of customer, shepherds and farmers and the like, was about to remonstrate.

  The whole of the bar-parlour fell silent as Annie hesitated in the doorway. She had the look of a weary child about her, pale, delicate with great smudges beneath her wide, frightened eyes. The bruise her father had given her made her appear even more vulnerable and when Anthony Graham saw her hovering there his masculine body surged towards her in ferocious and uncaring need. He stood up triumphantly, then moved across the room to take her hands, bringing them to his lips in the gallant gesture for which her girlish heart had craved on the long walk from Hause. He turned for a moment to wink at his friends who whistled and clapped their hands and stamped their feet in perfect understanding, but Annie was too tired, too love-struck to know what it meant.

  “Come," he whispered smilingly, leading her away from the noisy group and up the stairs until they reached the door of the room he shared with three others. Guiding her through he locked it behind him and within five minutes, less, Annie's trembling and virginal body was revealed to his lecherous gaze in all its naked innocence. He did not speak nor even kiss her. What was there to say? She was already his with no need of pretty speeches or persuasion.