Shelter from the Storm

Shelter from the Storm

Elizabeth Gill

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Hodder and Stoughton

This ebook edition published in 2013 by
Quercus
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7th Floor, South Block
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Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Gill

The moral right of Elizabeth Gill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78206 178 6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Also by Elizabeth Gill

FAR FROM MY FATHER'S HOUSE

THE SINGING WINDS

UNDER A CLOUD-SOFT SKY

THE ROAD TO BERRY EDGE

SNOW ANGELS

For Jean and Edmund with love

Mary Cameron stood by the window. The snow was falling faster now, almost horizontal, in those big square flakes that usually meant a hap-up. It was always at its worst in March, just like the dark before dawn. Past the snow she could see the workings of the Black Prince Pit, and beyond that, where the snow blotted it out, was the fell and the road which eventually led to Durham. When she had been little she had thought that road opened up the world. These days it seemed only to heighten her isolation.

The child stirred in her arms and she pressed him more tightly to her so that he opened his black eyes and his tiny fists clenched and unclenched and he made a little gurgling sound in his throat, waving his arms about and smiling. There could be no mistake, no confusion. He was not her husband’s child, and though she had prayed long and hard over it, the moment the boy was born she knew that he was the evidence of violence, of a mindless deed. If there had been no consequences she would have tried to draw a curtain in her mind over what had happened more than a year ago, but it seemed to her that she saw more and more clearly the candles lit upon the altar, the gleaming cross shining gold, the ruby that the man wore in his right ear. It was strange and terrible, the detail she remembered. If there had been no child she could have surrounded herself with the rest of her life,
her husband, Alf, and her small boy, Tommy, but the talk in the village was that no woman who had tried harder to get away would have had to suffer such things. Born guilty. In the cold quiet, with only the graves of the dead around her, the dark man had turned what should have been pleasure into the kind of sick horror that held her in its grip. She had not since then been able to turn to her husband and not remember, and when she had known that she was pregnant her heart had told her that it was not over.

It never would be over.

‘Mary!’ Alf called to her from below. ‘The Harmers are here. Hurry up!’

He wanted it over and done with. Since the boy had been born Alf had barely spoken to her, not touched her in affection, not looked at the child, which was to everybody’s eyes an Egyptian’s son, unmistakable, with thick black hair, eyes which turned as dark as the very coal that was their life, and a skin that was toffee-coloured. For all that she loved him, but there was no choice. Alf had said that she must give up the child and end the disgrace.

She held him so close that he began to cry a little in protest. The Harmers were good, God-fearing people. They had no child. They had a house in Oaks Row with a view across to Weardale, they had money because Mr Harmer had a good job as a clerk at the brickworks, but this was the end for her, she must give up the child completely, Alf had insisted, and she could not do it.

‘Mary!’ His voice was urgent; it held a harsh note. She wrapped a thick blanket around the boy. It would be a cold walk back past the Catholic church and down the Store bank and left into Oaks Row. Such a short way and so far. The snow was a blizzard; it even obliterated the pithead where the wheel went round and round and the men worked night and day and the coal came out. It went on and on, nothing stopped it; even though she could no longer see it she knew. It went on and on like the fell went on and on, and the days and the nights.

She turned away, into the shadowed gloom, and holding him very close she walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs to where she could see Mrs Harmer well wrapped up against the cold, wearing a close-fitting hat, and Mr Harmer looking up. Her instincts told her to run down the stairs and out the door but she couldn’t. There was no escape. When she reached the bottom of the stairs Mrs Harmer came and took the child and with sure instincts he began to cry. Mary thought her heart would burst. Alf went and held open the back door and the Harmers left without a word.

Tommy, who had been standing there all the while, wondering what was going on, ran across to her and hid his face against her skirt and then Alf closed the door and she watched them through the kitchen window, going up the back yard and out of the gate and down the lane, and then they were gone from sight and there was nothing but the whiteness of the snow and everything was lost.

*

The snow was thick on the pavements and the road and it was some time before the Harmers reached the sanctuary of their house. They stamped the snow off their boots before entering. It was cold in the hall. Mrs Harmer took the child up the stairs and put him into the wooden cradle in the tiny freezing back room. He was crying hard by then; she had not realised that a child could make so much noise. She left him there and went out and closed the door, but he could be heard clearly through the ceiling.

A tiny fire burned in the sitting room. She faltered as she went in.

‘I think he may be hungry,’ she said.

Mr Harmer looked at her.

‘Feed the body and destroy the soul,’ he said.

*

Rebecca Forster looked doubtfully at the weather. She had planned to leave that day. She had gathered together as much money as she could find, though it was a pitiful amount; her husband paid all the bills himself and gave her nothing. She had spent the last five years of her life here at Stanley Hall and she could bear no more. It was a Palladian house built in the 1740s, and a more plain, stark building she had yet to come across. It was big and square and stood alone upon the edge of the moors beyond the village as though it had lost its way. When her husband Randolph had brought her there she had thought to be happy, but he cared nothing except for the pit which had been his father’s; it was his entire life. The pit had made the family prosperous but was making less and less money since the demand for coal had dropped. They could no longer afford fine clothes, trips away or any of the things that would have made life here bearable.

Urgency gripped her. She must leave now while Randolph was at work. The child was six months old, spring was almost here. It was the right time to go. She wrapped him up carefully and looked at him. He was beautiful. He looked like her, with fine fair hair and calm eyes. Since the moment of his birth he had not troubled her and she loved him. She put on her coat, picked up her bag and her child and began to make her way along the hall towards the dog-leg stairs and the front door. She tried not to hurry, she was afraid to drop him, but to her dismay as she reached the bottom the front door opened and there stood her husband, covered in snow, dripping wet.

‘Going somewhere?’ he said.

Rebecca tried to face him, look him in the eyes.

‘I would like the carriage.’

He laughed. It was a most unpleasant sound.

‘I’m not going to order the carriage in this weather. If you want to go, get out.’

‘I can’t walk in this with a child. It’s too cold.’

‘You’re not taking him anywhere.’

She let the bag fall and clutched the child to her.

‘I can’t go without him.’

‘Oh yes you can.’ Forcibly he took the child from her while it cried and she resisted and then he put him into the pram which stood by the wall near the door and he gripped her arms cruelly and threw her out into the snow. Not content with having deprived her of child, money and possessions, he kicked her where she lay several times. She would have cried out for help though there was nobody about, but the breath was knocked from her.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘get away! Start walking.’ He picked her up and pushed her. It was all she could do to keep her feet. He pushed her several yards and then again towards the huge gates at the end of the short drive, and then he gave her a final push until she was outside and he locked the gates. ‘I hope you go to hell,’ he said.

There was no way back through the high walls and locked gates. Rebecca leaned against the gates pleading for her child as he walked away without a backward glance. The snow had increased until it was a blizzard, until very soon she could not see the house. There was nothing to do but begin to walk. The village was only half a mile away but she could not see more than a few yards. She was hurt, too, not aching but in a great deal of pain where he had kicked her. The snow increased until she could see nothing, and although she looked hard for the lights of the village they did not appear. Could she have taken a wrong turning? She had walked this way hundreds of times, since he would rarely allow her the carriage or any freedom. She had no friends, he said; what did she need money or transport for? She was going nowhere. At night he shut himself into his study and drank hard, and sometimes he came to her bed and used her similarly, though of late it had not been often. Alone there day after day with the servants and her new baby she had thought she would go mad. He said the child was like her, weak and sickly. It was not true. The baby had ailed little in the past six months since his birth.

She could not bear to think of him left behind without his mother. Randolph had no care for him and servants did what they were paid for. She walked on blindly, but still there were no village lights. She was almost numb with cold, could not feel her fingers or her feet, and the snow was heavy where it had settled upon her clothing. It weighed her down. It was several inches deep by this time and walking was a problem. It was, she thought, smiling a little, like her childhood holidays, wading through water at the seaside, the push and force of it against her legs. It had been cold too, the North Sea, bitter even in September. She imagined what it would be like at this time of the year, the waves breaking hard, crashing against the solid wet depth of the sand.

Her steps grew slower and slower and the wind threw the snow about, round and round her like a ring game. Suddenly she thought she could see the lights of the village in the distance. She was certain she could reach it. There it was again. But the more she tried to go forward to meet it the farther it seemed to move away, like someone beckoning with a lantern and moving back as she moved towards him. It was so frustrating it made her want to cry, except that she was too tired for that. She kept on going, hoping to catch a glimpse of it again, straining her eyes through the white curtain that the snow had become. The light did not come back, as though it had gone out for good, or as though she had taken another wrong turning; it was easy enough in such weather. And then the snow was suddenly higher than a mountain in front of her, and as she moved to the side to go around it she stumbled and fell and then the ground which had seemed so solid beneath her feet cracked and gave like a rotten stair and she was soon enveloped in icy water, which crashed and swirled around her and held her in its deep grip. It was a shock, and she was not certain whether the water was cold or whether in fact it was hot. How odd. She could not get out and to her relief it didn’t really matter, it was not at all important. She could see the light again, and unlike before it was getting nearer. It would
soon reach her and whoever it was would pull her out of the water and away from the enormous snowdrift and in the meanwhile she must close her eyes because it had been such a long way and she was so tired and she could see her child’s face, his beautiful peachy skin and his wide eyes. She could see him, touch him, hold him in her arms. It was going to be all right, all she had to do was wait. She would sleep until help arrived.