The Hungry Tide (55 page)

In consternation she started to explain, but he raised his hand to hush her as he continued, ‘But there was no need for him to tell me. I already knew. I saw him that night after thy Tom’s wedding, I watched him come in and waited till he came out.’

He put his hand on her head and gently stroked her hair. ‘He’ll not marry thee, Sarah, love. That sort stick to their own. Just ’same as we do!’

She turned away. How wrong Joe was. John would have taken a chance, she was the one who wouldn’t. A great lassitude came over her. She was so weary of struggling with her emotions, of trying to keep them in check. Perhaps if she were married to someone else she would forget him. No – never, never. But maybe John would let her go, cut the bond which held them and set her free.

She raised her head. Dear Joe, he was willing to take her though he knew she loved someone else. She badly needed comfort, someone to take away this ache inside. She put out her hand and he grasped it tightly.

‘All right Joe, I’ll marry thee.’

He shook his head in amazement. After all his hopes he could hardly believe it. ‘Tha means it, Sarah? Promise?’ He could barely speak.

‘Yes, Joe. I mean it. I promise.’ Her eyes were bright and moist, but she gave him a trembling smile. It was something after all to give happiness to someone else, even though you were dying inside.

‘And you’ll not see him again?’ His voice was anxious but she detected a command in his plea.

She felt she was bleeding as the wound cut deeper. ‘Just once, Joe, to tell him. I owe him that at least.’

‘Aye, that’s right. Tha’ll need to tell him. Then it’s finished with.’

Sarah waved to Harris to stop as he was driving out of the iron gates of Garston Hall. ‘Will you give this message to Mr Rayner, please. Be sure to give it to him yourself and not hand it to anyone else.’

She was sure that Harris would be discreet, but she had penned the letter to John in terms that would not give rise to suspicion if anyone else should read it.

‘’Be glad to, Miss Sarah, I’ll be seeing him this morning.’ He started to move off and then turned round to call to her. ‘I heard thy ma say she was going to come over to see thee, she’s on her way now.’

She smiled her thanks and set off down the path which wound round to the rear of the house to meet her. Maria waved to her from the kitchen door.

‘Tha’s saved me a journey, Sarah. I was just coming to see thee. Mr Masterson is asking after thee.’

‘Oh, but—?’

‘It’s all right, ’mistress and Miss Lucy are away. They’ve gone gadding off to London again, and poor maister is in such pain with his leg.’

She pushed back a stray lock of hair beneath her linen cap and Sarah noticed the predominant silver strands, and the fine lines etched on her mother’s forehead. Maria had aged since the fever and had taken a long time to recover, but the arrival of Lizzie’s and Tom’s bawling lusty son on Christmas Day had given her a renewed lease of energy, and while she and Lizzie and Sarah had gazed fondly at the newest Foster, Tom and Will, with the assistance of Joe and Martin Reedbarrow, had got roaring drunk as they’d wetted the baby’s head.

Sarah ran her fingers along the bannister rail as she slowly climbed the wide staircase up to Mr Masterson’s room. She thought of John: he’d said that he’d slid down here on the day she was born. She remembered looking down at him as he had stood in the hall on the day he told her about it, and she remembered too the strange nervous exhilaration she had felt as she listened and watched him, searching his face to know if he felt it too.

The house was quiet and restful. It smelt of beeswax and flowers, and she was saddened that she could only come here when Mrs Masterson and Lucy were away. Although she was happy in her cottage it was here at Garston in the spacious, handsome rooms that she felt as if she was at home; and soon, when she married Joe, she wouldn’t be allowed to come at all.

‘Sarah. How pleased I am to see you!’ Isaac sat propped up with cushions and his legs stretched out on a stool. ‘I can’t tell you how much pain I’m in with this dratted gout. Can you bathe my legs like you did last time?’

She did what she could for him, bathing his swollen toes and swathing his legs with comfrey leaves.

‘No, don’t go, please stay a little longer,’ he said as she prepared to leave. ‘I get so little company when Mrs Masterson and Lucy are away. Tell me all that you have been doing since last I saw you.’

She sat on a low stool beside him and talked of her garden and her visits to the market, and of Tom and the mill, of the difficulties of keeping down the price of flour and of the antipathy towards millers by the general public. He discussed with her the new Humber Dock which was being dug and which he hoped to buy shares in, and the continuing hazards of the whaling industry.

He patted her hand. ‘I have enjoyed our talk. Come again if you can. I wish—’ He stopped and scratched his sparse grey beard as he meditated, then shook his head ruefully. ‘Ah, well.’

‘Yes, sir?’ She waited, her brown eyes smiling fondly.

‘Nothing, Sarah. It doesn’t matter. It was just a fancy.’

She curtsied and left him. She hadn’t mentioned that she was going to be married. She wanted John to be the first to know, although she suspected that Joe had already told his father, who in turn had told Will, for her father had put his arm around her shoulder the last time she had seen him and had spoken of his friendship with Martin Reedbarrow and what a good solid Holderness family they were.

‘Just as we will be, Sarah, given time. Starting with our Tom and his son. ’First Foster to be born here.’

‘No, Fayther. I was the first, don’t forget!’ she had objected vehemently, and her eyes flashed. Her father looked at her in surprise.

‘Aye, well, I meant on ’male side. Women change their names when they wed, and if tha should decide—’ He trailed off indecisively.

She had put her chin in the air and said defiantly, ‘I would still be a Foster, Fayther, nothing can change that, ever.’

Gratified, he laughed. ‘That’s ’spirit, Sarah. Tha’s a Foster all right. Tha’s got red hair and temper to prove it.’

She waited by the old church each evening as dusk was falling, when the treetops stood out in shadowy silhouette against the darkening sky and the horizon was lost in a roke of grey.

On the fourth evening, as the dusk was turning to darkness and she was about to return home, she saw him walking below her on the sands. He raised his hand and smiled and she knew with sinking despair how her news would wipe away the smile from his face and bring him only misery.

She scrambled down the cliffs before he could attempt to come up to her and as she came to the bottom of the incline he reached up to help her, lifting her into his arms and holding her there. He kissed her tenderly, her face, her lips, then with a groan he drew her to him, bending her willing body to his.

‘I’ve missed you so much, Sarah. I want you so much that it hurts.’

Unable to resist she arched her neck towards him and he kissed the long line of her throat, running his hands over her, feeling the shape of her body beneath her gown.

‘I love you, love you, love you,’ she whispered as her body melted against his. The words echoed in his ears with the pounding of the waves.

‘Don’t ever leave me again, Sarah. I am nothing without you,’ he implored softly. ‘My life, my being, it is nothing if you are not there to share it with me.’

Safe in his arms, she dreamily watched as a bright, white moon appeared in the night sky, highlighting a drift of clouds, touching their downy edges with silver. But as the sands turned white by its light, she felt their sharpness beneath her, and reality reasserted itself as if the moon had illuminated her mind, reminding her that her path led elsewhere and that she was promised to someone else.

She whispered her news haltingly to him and he stared, disbelieving.

‘I will always love you, John,’ she cried, clutching his hand. ‘Even though I can’t be with you. Even though we must live our lives apart, we’ll be together. Nothing can separate us. We belong to one another – in spirit and mind, if not in body.’

Angrily he pushed her away. ‘How can you say that? How can you join your life to someone else without thinking of me?’ He seized her shoulders violently. ‘I can’t wait until the great hereafter and live in Hell now. I need you, Sarah.’

She wept, sobs shaking her body. ‘How I wish this was another time; another place, when perhaps it wouldn’t matter who we were. When we might not have to bow down to convention or society’s rules, when we could please ourselves only and not think of others!’

‘You’re fooling yourself, Sarah, there will never be such a time. There will always be prejudice and narrow-mindedness, but it has to be faced, to be met head on, otherwise we’re lost.’ He pleaded with her. ‘We can face it together, you and I.’

She shook her head. ‘I was too afraid, and now it’s too late. I’ve made a promise that I must keep.’

She reached out to him, imploring him to understand, but he stormed away from her and stood at the water’s edge watching the waves as they broke softly on the sand.

‘And what about me?’ He spoke quietly as if all the fight had gone out of him.

She put her fingers over her lips and breathed softly, ‘Marry Miss Pardoe, John. She’ll be a fine wife for you.’ Tears ran down her cheeks.

‘What? What did you say?’ By chance his fingers had closed on the letter that was in his pocket.

‘Marry Miss Pardoe. She’ll be good for you, she’s kind and beautiful and she cares about you.’

He strode back to face her and pulled her up from where she crouched on the sand. ‘I’ll make my own decisions, and I’m making one now. I’m going away, I was coming to tell you when I received your message. I’m sailing to the Arctic. I shall be too busy trying to stay alive to even think about you.’

He took her head in his hands, kissed her fiercely and then held her at arms’ length. ‘We shan’t meet again, don’t you or your intended bridegroom worry about that, but I’ll tell you this, Sarah. You’ll see me in your sleep and in every waking moment. When you are lying in his arms you’ll feel me there between you. You will never be rid of me, not if you live to be a hundred. You will never have any peace, not in this world or the next, I promise you.’

She stood watching as he walked swiftly away, his long strides making deep footprints in the damp sand. She watched until a prominence of broken clay ridges hid him from view, and then she slowly turned to make her solitary ascent back up the moonlit cliff.

John let the heavy door close with a bang, bringing Janey hurrying out of the kitchen.

‘Oh, Mr John.’ She took his cape from him. ‘We’ve kept supper hot for you. Master’s gone to bed but he asked would you go up as soon as you’ve eaten?’

‘Bring a couple of bottles of wine and some cheese to Mr Masterson’s room, nothing more.’ His voice was brusque, and she dipped her knee and gazed at him anxiously. ‘I shan’t require anything else, thank you. Don’t wait up.’

He climbed the stairs two at a time. He intended to get drunk, so drunk that he wouldn’t remember anything of this evening. Not the sweetness of her lips and the drowning depths of her eyes. Not the consuming jealousy he felt that she was to marry that hulking farmhand. He couldn’t bear the thought of him laying his great body next to hers, crushing her fragile form beneath his.

He might take her body but he’ll never possess her mind, her thoughts, he told himself wretchedly, but he knew that it wasn’t enough; he couldn’t comprehend that he would never see her again, that she was gone from him for ever.

He staggered into his uncle’s room, already half drunk with emotion, and Isaac looked up irritably from his bed where he lay snug beneath a fur rug, his nightcap pulled about his ears. ‘What the devil are you up to? Where have you been? Janey said that you had arrived and then gone straight out again, and now you come crashing in, waking all the household!’

It didn’t matter that the household consisted only of himself and the servants. Isaac did not like his tranquillity disturbed in such a manner. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘Not yet, sir, but I intend to be, that is if you will allow me the facilities of your cellar. I’ve taken the liberty of sending down for some wine.’

‘Hmph. Most of it’s yours anyway. I’m not allowed to drink the stuff with this dratted gout.’ Isaac adjusted his cap and pulled his rug around him. ‘You’d better tell me what’s going on.’

John paused as Janey came in with the cheese and wine and some bread which she had brought as an afterthought. It was not like Mr John to refuse his supper.

‘I don’t know that I want to discuss it, Uncle,’ he muttered after she had gone. ‘Sufficient to say that I have had a great disappointment and that I am feeling as low as it is possible for a man to be.’

He poured a glass of wine and drank it quickly. The sooner he was drunk the better. ‘I came to tell you that I am going to London for a few days, but that I shall be back in time for the
Northern Star
’s sailing.’

‘Why you should want to go away on this trip anyway, I can’t fathom,’ Isaac said grumpily. ‘You know I can’t get to the office just now.’

‘Another two weeks and you’ll feel better, the doctor told you that, and anyway the staff are perfectly capable of running the company for a few weeks.’ He poured another glass of wine and Isaac watched him curiously.

‘I need to get away and I’m curious about this trip. The captain reckons on pushing further north to follow the whales, and I’d like to be there if he’s going into uncharted territory. We have to think of the men’s safety as well as the profits.’

‘If you’re going to London you might look in on Isobel and Lucy. Find out when they are coming back.’

John hesitated, he’d forgotten that his relatives were in London. ‘Are they staying with the Pardoes again?’

‘They’ve rented a house so as not to be an inconvenience to Miss Pardoe!’ Sulkily he watched as John drank his wine. ‘Isobel even wants me to buy a property down there so that they can go down every season, so that Lucy can meet the right company.’

He looked longingly at the wine bottle. ‘Pour me just one glass, there’s a good fellow. Just one can’t hurt.’