Pit Bank Wench (16 page)

‘Don’t!’ Emma tightened her arms about the trembling body. ‘Don’t go on, try to rest.’

But in between the racking sobs, the quiet almost soulless voice went on.

‘I followed them to the barn. I saw him snatch the frock from her, take her clothes off one by one, run his great hands over her nakedness, slap her hard when she tried to pull away. I thought . . .’ almost choking, the girl looked into Emma’s face ‘. . . I thought that would be all he would do, that he wouldn’t . . . that she was too little. But then, when he began to undo his trousers, I knew that he would, even with a child like Lily! So I crept out of the barn and made a noise, calling his name as though I were Liza come to look for him. He scuttled off pretty quick then and I went into the barn to comfort Lily. She told me what Coombs had been doing to her though I needed no telling. I held her for hours, held her while she cried for her dead mother, but in the end I fell asleep and when I woke Lily was gone. She were found that morning floating in the canal. The child had killed herself because of Eli Coombs and from that moment I vowed someday to kill him!’

‘You must not think such a thing,’ Emma said softly. ‘Believe me, I know what you are feeling but you must not think of killing. You must leave the punishing to God.’

‘God!’ The girl threw up her head. ‘There is no God. If there were he would not permit a man such as Eli Coombs to live!’

A man such as Eli Coombs. Emma stared towards the dull red glow. Nor one such as Caleb Price.

And what of Carver Felton?

‘
You must leave the punishing to God.
’

That was what she had told the girl sobbing in her arms. But was she prepared to do the same?

Langton had not asked again about the business that had taken Paul from home.

Carver untied his silk cravat, drawing it slowly through his fingers.

It had gone as he’d known it would, the liberal supply of wine washing all thoughts of business from Rafe Langton’s mind, leaving only those centring around the pretty Melissa.

Laying aside the cravat Carver continued to undress, concentrating hard on the events of the evening to keep his mind from returning to that night some weeks ago when he had encountered the girl. No, he would not think of it now. Kicking free of his trousers he walked into his bathroom and plunged his face into cold water. She had been a pit bank wench, nothing for him to dwell on.

But Melissa Gilbert was no pit bank wench. Drying his face, he returned to the bedroom.

Harriet had continued to ask about Paul. Why had he been sent to Birkenhead? When did Carver think he might return? Her questions had been relentless and he had answered them, but all the while his attention had been on her husband. He had watched Rafe’s face. Not once had the man’s eyes left Cara’s cousin, and rarely had Cara’s own eyes left Rafe. Jealousy! Even from his seat next to Harriet he had seen it burn in those green-gold eyes. Jealousy! He smiled slowly. It was a useful tool. One that he would use when he was ready.

It had been while they were seating themselves in the elegant drawing room – Carver grateful once again that his mother’s taste in furnishings had not followed the heavy Victorian styles – that Harriet at last arrived at her intended goal.

Did Paul have a special friend? Was there perhaps a fiancée somewhere? The smile died from Carver’s mouth, leaving a tight line. Harriet Langton was an inquisitive bitch but her ferreting this evening had produced no rabbit. Paul was nearing his majority, she had announced, calling to Melissa to listen. Soon he would no longer be his brother’s ward. Then he would be wanting a wife, someone to share his life and his home. She had beamed at Melissa Gilbert, a world of meaning in her eyes, and Carver had caught the open annoyance in Cara Holgate’s face. His brother was a catch for any woman. Money, property, a half share in a business that dominated the area and gave much of the town its living. Yes, Paul Felton was a prize worth the winning but he was not on Cara Holgate’s carousel. Or was her cousin not the prize on offer?

Her reply to Harriet’s ill veiled innuendo had been razor sharp, her voice hard as steel. Melissa was currently recuperating from an illness, certainly not husband hunting.

Carver walked over to the bed.

Cara had insisted that her cousin was too young yet to think of marriage, to tie herself to husband and family. She should travel, see a little of the world before settling down.

The shadows at the edges of the room remained untouched by the flickering light shed by the oil lamp he preferred to gaslight. Carver saw in them the shadows that had crept into Cara’s eyes, that had touched her mouth as her cousin had replied that, yes, she would like to see other parts of the world, but would enjoy them more with a husband at her side.

Cara had laughed then, but Carver saw the shadows remain. When that time came, she had said, Melissa would not make her choice from among mine owners and iron founders, she would not make her home among the smoking chimneys of the Black Country. Why, even the Queen had ordered the curtains of her carriage closed when she had travelled through it by train.

That might be true or it might not, Harriet had retorted, her pride in what she saw as her own high social standing locally stung. But black or not it was the heart of this country. The coal and the iron taken from it and the graft of its colliers and iron workers had done more to secure wealth for England than any backside that had sat on the throne or any of them that called themselves lords.

Carver smiled now as he had then. Harriet, for all her injured pride, was right. The towns were the heart of England, they were its treasure, its black pearl. One Cara wished to own but was reluctant to wear. Or, it seemed, to permit her cousin to wear.

Reaching for the night-wear he had ordered specially tailored, and continued to have made since rejecting odious flannel nightshirts, he slipped his arms into a blue silk jacket, feeling the coolness of it against his skin.

Just what had Cara in mind for her cousin? He slipped buttons one by one through hand-stitched buttonholes. If not a husband from among her wealthy acquaintances, then what? Was it her intention the pretty Melissa should follow her example, not take a husband at all but an assortment of lovers, receiving no wedding ring in return for her favours but just about everything else?

Perhaps it was not such a bad return. He fastened the last button. Certainly for him anyway. He could avail himself whenever he wished for the price of a bauble, and without sharing a marriage bed. Yes, that suited him, or at least it had until Cara had turned her beautiful greedy eyes on Felton industries.

Blue silk trousers clutched forgotten in his hand, Carver stared hard into the lingering shadows. Paul would soon be twenty-one, he would be entitled to his share of Felton industries. That he could have; wealth, property, land, a part in the running of the business! All of that he could have. The experience he was gaining and had gained would serve the purpose it was meant to, to separate him from that girl; for marriage to her he could not allow his brother. A wife Paul may take, but she would not be the child of a Doe Bank collier!

Slipping his legs into the cool silk, drawing it over his hips his mind returned the picture of a young girl with hair the colour of harvest moonlight. A girl with a basket over her arm and a shawl about her shoulders.

Throwing back the covers he dropped into bed at the same time turning off the lamp. Lying back on the pillows darkness rushed in on him but the shadows that filled his eyes gained no entry to his mind. The face imprinted upon it stared back at him, that soft mouth trembling with fear, lovely eyes wide with accusation.

‘Bloody wench!’ Carver swore softly. ‘It’s as well I sacked her father. Now we are rid of them Paul will soon forget he ever knew the girl!’

But would he, Carver, forget? Could he forget when at every instant his guard slipped that lovely face returned to haunt him? He had wronged her but it had been for Paul, for his sake. He had wanted only to protect his brother.

But had it been just for Paul? Carver stared into the shadows. How much of the truth would he allow even himself to know?

Memory sweeping him back to that night in the coppice he saw again the beautiful startled face upturned to his, the wisps of moon-kissed hair floating in the breeze.

Remembering his own words Carver lay still beneath the realisation of the truth.

Thoughts he had smiled over earlier in the evening returned to him but he was not smiling now.

Sometimes tools could be turned against their user.

Chapter Eleven

Her joints aching after spending the rest of the night in the lee of the rock, Emma pushed herself wearily to her feet. In the distance grey smoke curled into the soft pearly light of the morning sky. The barn had been consumed by flames, just as her own home had been.

Pain, hot and fierce as ever, flooded through her. All of her family gone! Her mother, her sister and her father, all taken from her by that terrible fire.

And that other fire, the one from which spirals of smoke still drifted, had that too taken life? Had Eli Coombs and his wife, guilty as they might be of abusing the girl still sleeping on the ground, also been taken by the flames? ‘No,’ she whispered from between white lips. ‘Please, God, no!’

‘What?’ Rubbing sleep from her eyes, the girl looked up at Emma. ‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ she parried the question, not wanting to talk of what had happened at Doe Bank, nor ready to share the horror.

‘Where will you be going?’

Emma glanced at the horizon, the tendrils of smoke returning memories that curled icy tremors along her spine. Clenching her teeth she tried to force back the past horror, tried to face the new fear forming in her mind. Where
could
she go? How would she earn her living? She would not be welcome on the waste heaps of any other coal mine; pit bank women had a hard time scraping together the coal chippings they sold for a few pence. It was difficult enough for them to earn their keep locally. They would not share it with her, she would not be tolerated on their territory.

Scrambling to her feet, still rubbing at her eyes, the girl Emma had pulled from Coombses’ barn looked at her as she put the question again.

‘Where are you going?’

That was a question Emma had asked herself, only one of the many hiding in her heart.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly.

‘Where were you bound for last night when you came to the farm?’

Emma brushed stalks of grass from skirts still damp from the night’s rain.

‘I was not bound for anywhere in particular.’

The girl’s thin face clouded and her lips trembled as she turned away.

‘You don’t have to worry that I’ll tag on to you. I just thought we might walk a ways together, that’s all.’ Her voice shook. ‘But you go wherever it is you were headed last night and . . . and I’ll go somewheres else. I don’t want to be a burden, not to nobody.’

Seeing the hurt in the girl’s eyes as she turned away, Emma felt its echo inside herself. The girl did not want to be a nuisance, she would hold her own pain locked inside herself, just as Carrie had done.

‘I didn’t mean that having you with me would be a burden,’ Emma said quickly. ‘It is simply that the place I’d meant to go, where I’d hoped to stay, isn’t there any more.’

‘I see.’ The girl’s voice was dull and flat with disbelief. ‘It just disappeared, like in a fairy story!’

If only it
had
been a fairy story. If only she could have woken to find that Carver Felton’s rape of her, that the deaths of her parents and sister, had been a story she had read the night before and the horror of it would disappear with the morning mist. But it would not. Emma felt the sharp ache of it anew. It would not disappear, would never leave her.

‘It has gone,’ she said gently. ‘But not by any stroke of a fairy wand. Plovers Croft was knocked down, flattened on the orders of its owner.’

‘I heard tell of that.’ The girl twisted round to face her. ‘The folk that passed through told of it, about losing their homes and having to leave behind what they couldn’t carry. Many of the women were in tears and the men close to it. But though they hadn’t had so much as a cup of tea since early morning, they got nothing from Liza but sharp words. That woman never knew the meaning of the word charity! But why did the owner have the houses pulled down? Nobody seemed to know when they were asked.’

‘Owners don’t give reasons.’ Emma remembered her father’s summary dismissal from the Topaz coal mine.

‘No, they just chuck people out on to the street. Lor’, I wish the same thing would happen to a few of them. Let
them
feel what it’s like to be without a home and with nowhere to go. They wouldn’t be so quick to give folk their marching orders if they’d had a dose of their own medicine! So what has become of the folk you hoped to lodge with? Have they gone on the road?’

Drawing the shawl from her shoulders Emma gave it a brisk shake, dislodging blades of grass and stalks of heather. ‘Jerusha lived alone. She was a friend of my family’s and I had thought to stay at her house at least overnight. But when I reached the Croft the house was gone.’

The girl’s hurt giving way to curiosity, she asked, ‘Jerusha? Would that be Jerusha Paget who knows the use of herbs and such? I’ve heard Liza speak of her, but can’t say I remember a woman of that name pass by the farm yesterday.’

‘She didn’t go by way of the farm.’ Emma replaced her shawl, fastening the corners beneath her breasts. ‘She’s gone to live at Doe Bank.’

‘She’s a friend of your family, you said? So how come you aren’t travelling with your folk?’

‘I think it’s time we moved on.’ Emma’s mouth set firmly. The girl’s enquiry was only natural. Why would Emma not be with her family? But she was not prepared to answer.