Suki, p.42
Suki, page 42
‘And now Miss Melissa is to marry his repellent friend.’
‘She’ll get no joy of him,’ his erstwhile fiancée said. ‘For I never knew a man so full of himself, nor with such vile breath.’
‘She’ll be mistress of a fine house,’ Suki said, adding with happy spite, ‘which might console her.’
Ariadne was suddenly intensely serious. ‘Were we wrong, think ’ee, in what we said?’
‘No,’ Suki said, with equal seriousness. ‘We were not. If any woman marry it should be for love. Without it, we’m no better than beasts in the field, put to breed for profit.’
‘How glad you will be to have your lover home,’ Ariadne said enviously. For Suki had told her how soon that homecoming was to be. ‘Would mine had been so true.’
‘You might love again,’ Suki said consolingly, ‘and find a truer man.’
‘I think not.’ Ariadne sighed, but recovered quickly. ‘One thing is most certain. I’ll not stay at home to belong to my father, nor marry to belong to a husband. There must be another way and I mean to find it.’
Suki understood her completely. ‘An’ stay mute till you do,’ she said.
Ariadne opened her mouth to agree but then turned her head, alerted by the sound of footsteps in the lane below them. ‘There’s someone coming,’ she said. ‘How if ’twere your lover?’
Suki stood up at once with William on her hip. Could it be the Captain? Could she hope for such a thing? There was such a fluttering in her throat, like a bird in a cage, throbbing and pulsing. It couldn’t be him, could it? He’d have ridden Beau. Oh, let it be him, I’ve waited for him so long.
The footsteps drew nearer, and as the walker rounded the bend below them and emerged from the shelter of the trees, they could see that it was a stocky young man in his working clothes and that he’d walked a fair distance, for he was moving with the long-legged rhythmical stride of someone well into his journey. Suki drooped with disappointment. He wasn’t the Captain. She’d have known his splendid stride anywhere and, besides, this man was too poorly dressed.
Then he looked up towards them and she saw that he was her brother John. ‘Something’s amiss,’ she said and went down at once to find out what it was.
Her brother took off his hat at their approach and wiped his forehead with it. He looked so anxious it was hardly necessary to ask him if something was the matter. ‘’Tis Pa,’ he explained. ‘Got hurt up the quarry yesterday. Ma says can you come?’
For a second, Suki couldn’t understand what he was talking about. ‘The quarry?’
‘Yes. Ma says can you come?’
‘What was he a-doin’ in a quarry?’ Suki said, angered by the folly of it. ‘He’m a farm worker. You might ha’ knowd he’d get hurt in a quarry. He’m dangerous enough with a rake.’
‘He was earnin’ a bit of money to buy Ma a new dress.’
‘What do Fanner Lambton have to say about it?’
‘I don’t know. Can you come?’
‘Is ’e bad?’
‘’Aven’t seen un yet, to tell the truth,’ John confessed, twisting his hat in his hands. ‘That Mr Aylock’s such a tartar. He don’t give you time for nothing. Ma came over this morning and persuaded un to let me come here on the stagecoach to Chipping Sodbury. If we goes back the same way tomorrow morning, we can catch Mr Jones at market, an’ he’ll take ’ee on to Twerton. ’Tis all arranged.’
Suki wasn’t interested in the stagecoach or any other travelling arrangements. Her concern was solely for her father. ‘What did he hurt? His back? His legs? What part of un?’
‘Fingers,’ John said enlightening her. ‘Fingers of his right hand. Ma says he’m bad. Can you come?’
Fingers, Suki thought. Why, fingers are nothing. He’ll soon get over that. But she’d go and attend to him because he was her Pa, poor old thing — and, besides, a trip to Twerton would bring her close to Bristol and that was what she wanted more than anything. She could ride there from Twerton or tease a lift on a cart. She might even contrive to be there at the very moment when that Bonny Beaufoy came in. Right on the quayside, awaiting him. Oh yes, she would certainly go to Twerton.
‘Come up to the house,’ she instructed him. ‘Mrs Norris will find ’ee some supper an’ somewhere to sleep, an’ we’ll go back at first light.’
Given her mixed reasons for agreeing to accompany him, she was quite ashamed to see how relieved he was.
They set off together in the small cart with the groom to drive them, just after dawn the next morning so as to be in good time to find an inside seat on the stagecoach, but it was a long, uncomfortable, rackety journey down to Bath, even with a hamper of food and ale from Mrs Norris to sustain them on the way. The weather was sticky, the roads in poor repair, and because he was cooped up inside a coach for hours, William was fractious. He grizzled and complained and climbed all over Suki from the start of the journey to the end. She was heartily sick of him by the time they reached Bath and very glad to find Mr Jones’s nice clean airy cart waiting for her in the market.
Yes, he said, he’d been expectin’ her. ‘Just you hop aboard, me dear. I shall be finished here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’ So she kissed her brother goodbye and settled beside the dog for the last three exhausting miles to Twerton.
It was growing dark by the time they arrived at the farm, William was sound asleep and she was bone weary. But she was encouraged by the sight of her old home. The sagging thatch was gone, replaced by a splendid piece of work, close-packed and so dry and neat that the straw ends bristled in the setting sun. The door had been mended too and the walls plastered and whitened with lime wash. This must be Pa’s doing, she thought, as she carried her sleeping baby towards the door. So he can’t be too bad.
But then she stepped into the kitchen and the odd combination of scents and smells in that crowded room alerted her again, for besides the ones she expected, of cabbage and boiled bacon, scrubbed table, the mustiness of Mrs Havers’ unwashed clothes, the sharp ammoniac smell of chicken shit, a strong odour of pig, there was an equally strong smell of blood and another, at once cloying and rank, that she couldn’t identify.
Apart from the smell, the room was exactly as she remembered it. Mrs Havers was sitting in her usual place in the chimney corner, plainly in the middle of one of her grumbles, Molly and Tom were in their usual place under the table and her mother was mending stockings by the light of a single candle, holding the work up to get as much benefit from its little beam as she could.
As soon as she saw Suki she rose to her feet with a cry of welcome. ‘Oh, my dear girl. I’m that pleased you’m here. Thank the Lord.’ And Molly and Tom scrambled out from under the table to fling their arms around her and hug and be hugged. But her father sat where he was in the shadows, cradling his bandaged right hand protectively with the fingers of his left, and Suki saw at once that he was in pain and ill. She handed her sleeping baby to Molly and crossed the room to attend to him.
‘What you been a-doin’ then, Pa?’ she asked. Now that she was close to him, she could see that his bandages were heavily stained with blood and knew that the rank smell was pus.
‘Little contree-tom,’ her father said apologetically. ‘I shall soon mend,’ He glanced quickly and anxiously towards his wife, warning Suki in the old subtle way that she wasn’t to make too much fuss for fear of upsetting her mother.
‘When you last have them dressings changed?’ she said, practical as ever.
‘They was onny put on day afore yes’day,’ he told her, still apologetic. His face was grey in the candlelight and his eyes strained.
‘I’ll do ’em for ’ee now.’
‘No, no,’ he protested weakly, but she was already bustling about the room to fetch a bowl of water and some clean linen.
‘He’ll let you see to un, I shouldn’t wonder,’ her mother whispered, producing a flat dish from under a pile of dry clouts. ‘He won’t let us come near un. He’m mortal bad.’
‘I made un a dish of penny royal,’ Mrs Havers complained. ‘An’ he wouldn’t so much as put his lips to it. The trouble we’m in, dearie, you wouldn’t believe the half of it. There’s that poor little babba been so sickly you wouldn’t believe, an’ we all knows the outcome of that, an’ Mrs Lambton took to her bed, poor soul, an’ now your pa. ’Tis more than human flesh an’ blood can stand. I said so to your poor ma onny this morning…’
Suki let her ramble on and paid no attention to her, for the smell of pus had roused the most unpleasant forebodings. She poured the last of the day’s water from the ewer into the kettle, set it on the fire to warm and tore a clean clout into little strips for bandages, then dabbing and soothing, she began to ease the dirty dressings from her father’s fingers. She hurt him so much that he groaned despite himself.
I must be ready for it to be nasty, she thought, as she eased the last red rags from his quivering hand. But even then, half prepared as she was by his pain and her mother’s concern, she was horrified at what she saw. His two middle fingers had been hacked off at the knuckle and the stumps were swollen and black with bruises and oozing yellow pus. And I said ‘’twas only fingers’, she thought with shame. ‘Only fingers,’ My poor dear brave old Pa.
‘Run up the farm and see if Farmer Lambton could spare a mouthful of Hollands,’ she said to her brother. But as he ran from the room, her father gave a shuddering moan and fainted away.
‘Hold his hand still,’ she told her mother, ‘an’ we’ll clean it all we can while he don’t feel nothin’.’
‘Poor soul!’ her mother mourned. ‘An’ never a word of complaint! ’Tis always the same with un. He don’t like us to know how bad he is. Never did.’
‘You’m the bravest man alive,’ Suki told her father’s insensible head. She was washing his wounds as quickly as she could, but even so she wasn’t quick enough. He came to long before she’d finished, and had to endure several groaning minutes before Tom ran back with the gin. Then they struggled on together, in the short numbing time the spirits eventually bestowed.
But at last the wounds were clean and freshly bandaged and her father had been sick, which didn’t surprise any of them, and she’d sponged his face and wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in his truckle bed.
‘Don’t you go a-sayin’ a word, you foolish creature,’ she scolded him lovingly when he tried to thank her. ‘Just you get yourself warm and get yourself better. I’d do anything at all to make you better. You know that.’ Then she had to turn away from him, for pity was making her cry.
‘I’ll clean up for ’ee,’ Mrs Havers offered, gathering the dirty rags to burn them on the fire. ‘I never knowd he was so bad an’ that’s a fact. Poor soul.’
‘Shall you stay here?’ her mother whispered. ‘Or go up to the farmhouse?’
Suki hadn’t thought so far ahead. ‘I’ll go to the farm, if they’ll have me,’ she said. ‘They’ve a cradle there for William.’
‘Then you’d best know the news,’ her mother told her. ‘The babba died last week. Poor little thing. She’m in a poor way over it.’
So that was what Mrs Havers was rambling on about, Suki thought. ‘Poor Mrs Lambton,’ she said, flooded with pity for her. ‘What a terrible thing to happen. No wonder she’m took to her bed. They’ll not want me in the house at a time like this. I shall sleep here with Molly. We can find a drawer for William, perviding ’tis long enough. I’ll walk across an’ see them in the morning an’ say how sorry I am. What a parlous thing to happen.’
Such a morning it was, golden with the promise of noonday heat, lush with birdsong, heady with the scents of summer, a morning for courtship and sweet talk, for gathering flowers and stitching bridal gowns, not visiting the sick. But she coaxed her father to a breakfast of ale and bread, fed William until his belly was as tight as a drum, left him with Molly and walked across to the farmhouse notwithstanding.
She was upset to see how neglected it looked. The floor was strewn with dirty rushes, the ashes of last night’s fire were still grey in the grate and, although there was no dust visible to the eye, the bench looked smeared and the table grubby. But it was the sight of Farmer Lambton that upset her most of all, for he seemed to have aged and shrunk and was stooping in a way she’d never noticed in him before. There were more wrinkles in his cheeks, more lines in his forehead and his eyes were bloodshot and deep shadowed. But he made her welcome and urged her to come in. ‘She’s abed, I fear, and none too well,’ he explained. ‘But she’ll be pleased to see you, Suki. I’m sure of that. Go you up.’
Annie Lambton lay propped among her pillows in a room that smelt of blood and phlegm. There was a phial full of green liquid on the table beside the bed, an unemptied chamber pot beside it, and a small white bowl, full of blood and vomit, tipping sideways on the coverlet just out of reach of her hands. The windows were shuttered, as though air and sunlight would be injurious to her, and in the half-light that seeped through the cracks in the wood, her face looked grey and heavily lined. She had made an effort to plait her long hair but the plait was tousled and straw-dry, her eyes were shut and much sunk in their sockets and she was wincing with every indrawn breath, her chest was shrivelled and sunken, too, and her hands lay against the coverlet as if they had been discarded there.
‘Oh, Annie!’ Suki said, forgetting the proprieties in the distress of the moment. ‘I’m so sorry to see you so ill.’
‘Not ill,’ Annie said, with her eyes still shut, ‘I’m dying, Suki. I been a-dying these seven days since my poor Connie was took.’
Suki rushed to deny it, ‘No! No!’ But the effort of speaking had provoked such a spasm of coughing that denial was useless. She held the bowl beneath her friend’s straining mouth and caught the blood as she coughed it up and knew that death was tearing her down with every gasp.
‘Could you fancy anything to eat?’ she asked when the spasm was over. The poor lady was mortal thin and looked as though she hadn’t eaten for days.
Annie was beyond food. ‘A stoop of ale to moisten my mouth,’ she whispered, and coughed again.
The ale was fetched and three sips taken painfully, the patient’s face and hands were washed with a soft cloth, the bowl and the chamber pot taken down and emptied on the midden, the floor swept and sprinkled with vinegar, but no amount of loving care made any impression on Annie Lambton who had drifted into a murmuring unconsciousness as soon as she lay back on the pillows.
‘She’m dying,’ Suki said to her mother when she was back in the cottage.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Brown said. ‘Poor soul. What a blessing you’m home. You’ll do what’s needful for her, won’t you, my dear? We must pray for an easy end. Not a word of it to your pa. We’m keeping it from him, bein’ he got pains enough of his own.’
And so have I, Suki thought, for I wouldn’t have wished such suffering on either the one of ’em, and it pains me cruelly to see it. But there was tomorrow’s dough to knead and set to rise — no matter how she might be feeling — and a stew pot to fill with pot herbs and scraps of bacon, and her father to be coaxed through his supper before his wounds were cleaned and dressed again.
That night she lay awake in the narrow truckle bed beside her sister, too full of sadness to sleep. How suddenly your life can be turned about, she thought. Two days ago, I was playing with my William under the chestnut tree in Appleton without a care in the world, except for wonderin’ when the Captain was like to come home and feeling cross with poor Farmer Lambton for telling tales on Miss Ariadne. And now here I am with Pa sore injured, that poor babba dead, Mrs Lambton a-dying an’ the farmer like an old man. ’Tis a mortal sad world and we’m all a-tangled up in it, whether we will or no, on account of we loves each other. ’Tis only them as don’t love as are free to come an’ go as they choose. She knew there was no hope of a visit to Bristol now. She would have to contain her soul in patience until Jack came to Twerton of his own accord and, in the meantime, do what she could for her patients.
It was distressing work, for however hard she tried to help Mrs Lambton, the poor lady grew weaker by the hour, drifting in and out of consciousness, racked with coughing and too fatigued to lift her head from the pillows. The priest arrived to administer the last rites and sat with the farmer for two hours afterwards, doing his best to comfort him, and the farm labourers came and went, murmuring how sorry they were and hoping the mistress would take a turn for the better, but they all knew the truth of it.
‘’Twill not be long, I fear,’ Farmer Lambton said on Suki’s seventh evening in the farm.
She was wrapping herself in her shawl ready to walk back to the cottage. ‘Should I stay with her overnight, think ’ee?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ll sit up with her. ’Tis the least I can do and little enough in all conscience.’
It was the least and the last. The next morning when Suki came tripping back across the yard he met her at the door with the news that Annie was dead. It had been a cruel passing, with a deal of blood, and he was still stunned by it.
‘I never thought to see such blood,’ he said, shaking his head as if he were trying to shake the vision of it away. ‘’Twas the blood that killed her, Suki. She died of the blood. Such blood! Could you ask Mrs Havers to come over. She’ll need laying out and there’s such a deal of cleaning to be done. I never thought to see such blood.’
Suki was glad to run back to the cottage to fetch the old lady, for she was aching with such anguished sympathy for the farmer that the tears were streaming down her cheeks. How cruel to die so, after all she’d suffered. ’Twas monstrous. Monstrous.
It seemed even more monstrous when she and Mrs Havers arrived in the bedroom, for the bed was so badly soaked with blood that it had dripped through the feather mattress on to the floor. There were two chamber pots full of it and even the walls were scarlet spotted. ‘My dear life!’ Mrs Havers said. ‘’Tis like a shambles.’ They washed their dead mistress between them, mourning at how thin her body was. They dressed her in a fresh nightgown, brushed her tangled hair, and laid her on clean sheets with a wild rose between her hands. Then they emptied the chamber pots and scrubbed the floor and washed down the walls.
