The Travelling Man (40 page)

A bit of both, she suspected.

Biddy had known all along that this would happen. She would look through the window one day and see Mr Armstrong bringing Annie Clancy back. Even though it wasn’t the romantic scene she’d imagined with Annie leaning against him, her face upturned for his kiss. Instead, they just walked in together as if there was nothing extraordinary in it at all.

Biddy thought that Annie looked as if she’d gone three rounds with a fairground boxer. She was covered in mud and her face was the colour of unrisen dough.

‘Rustle up some supper quickly, and bring mine through when I’ve stabled the horse. Annie’s joining us again,’ Mr Armstrong said over a disappearing shoulder.

‘Oh, I’m glad! Really glad!’ Biddy clasped her hands together. ‘He’s not best pleased,’ she told Annie. ‘He’s been in a rare old state since the day you left.’ She unhooked a ladle from the fireplace alcove. ‘Like a man possessed he’s been. Pacing the carpet in his den, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, like a caged lion.’

Annie had forgotten that Biddy talked just like an ’a penny book. She sat down suddenly as if her legs had given way and stared round at the familiar kitchen. Biddy brought a crusty cob of bread to the table and began to slice it into thick chunks.

‘In the morning you can tell me all you’ve been doing, but for now just get some of that broth down you. Do you feel as ill as you look?’

‘Worse,’ Annie said, but she was smiling properly for the first time that day. The warmth of her welcome, the kindness in Biddy’s eyes, the fact that she was prepared to wait till the next day to hear Annie’s story, was almost too much to bear.

When Biddy came back from taking Seth’s supper through to the den, Annie was fast asleep where she sat,
her
head down in her arms, the bowl of broth pushed to one side.

Biddy felt extremely frustrated, if the truth were told. She could have wept. It was like reading a story with the last page missing. Annie had gone up to her bed in her old room without opening her eyes properly, without even hearing Biddy tell her how she’d kept the bed made up and aired for this very moment.

When she’d cleared away and banked the fire up for the night, she went to bed herself. There was a light showing underneath Mr Armstrong’s door, so it looked as if this could be one of the nights he spent sleeping in his chair by the dying embers of the fire.

Biddy felt personally let down. Things weren’t working out at all in the way she’d dreamed they would. There was Annie upstairs and Mr Armstrong down, with hardly a word exchanged between them since they came into the house.

She set her candlestick down on the high table by her bed, took off her cap and pulled the pins from her hair. At least they were under the same roof again, and this time there was no Mrs Martindale to put a damper on things. The best romances were the ones that took their time – the blossoming of true love couldn’t be hurried. Mr Armstrong had given a meaningful look up at the ceiling when she’d told him that Annie had gone to her bed worn out.

Biddy took off her stays and had a good scratch.

She was sure, positive, that when he raised his eyes like that his expression had been one of utter yearning.

‘Utter yearning,’ she said aloud, liking the sound of the words on her tongue.

The pain in Annie’s ear woke her up around three o’clock in the morning. At once her hand went to her head and she sat up, rocking herself, whimpering till the dagger-sharp agony faded a little.

Gradually, as her eyes became used to the darkness, she made out the shape of the wardrobe, and the tallboy set beneath the window. The blind had been pulled down but she could see the pale yellow outline of the window. There was no fire in the grate, but that last time the flames had touched the walls to a soft rose, and whenever she opened her eyes the animal doctor had been there, waiting and watching, his presence solid and reassuring.

After Kit Dailey and the maid Johnson had almost killed her, Seth had sat in the bedroom at the Grays’ house, watching and waiting in just the same way.

‘I’ll always be there if you want me to be.’ Had he said that, or had she dreamed it?

‘I’ll never forget you,’ Laurie Yates had said. ‘You are so lovely,’ he had whispered as he kissed her.

‘You’re so lovely,’ Seth had said, and his mouth had been hard and demanding on her own.

Annie swung her legs over the side of the bed, lit the candle, held it up – and saw the parcel on the dresser. In the half-light it was a dirty tattered bundle.

‘I hid it from him, chuck. It’s yours. It came in the post. From foreign parts.’

Florrie’s big face was running with sweat as she’d handed the parcel over. Annie could see her now, slopping her untidy way back down the street.

The paper came away easily as she tore at it. It was damp to the touch and smelled of rancid mutton fat. Annie pulled one layer away, then another, and yet a third – then caught her breath in astonishment.

The white lace tablecloth was so fine, so delicate that at first she thought it was a bridal veil. But when she stood up and shook it out she saw the round shape of it, knew that the delicate lace would hang down in perfect folds when it was draped over a rounded table.

‘So Laurie remembered my dream,’ she told Biddy the next morning, holding the lace cloth up for her to
admire
. ‘It was just a silly daydream really, but he remembered.’

Biddy had no intention of listening to anything good about the travelling man. Mr Armstrong had taken one look at the cloth and gone straight out, calling for his dog in a voice that had it running as fast as if he’d fired a starting pistol.

Biddy told Annie that she bet at least four poor foreign women had gone stone-blind making the lace cloth, and that Laurie Yates would have paid no more than a shilling for it, if that.

‘It’s his conscience talking,’ she said scathingly. ‘He thinks that a handful or two of hand-made lace can make up for all the anguish he’s caused you. If it was mine I would toss it on the fire to show my contempt.’

‘That would show I was still foolish enough to care for him,’ Annie told her, examining the cloth with a critical eye. ‘I think it would come up beautifully if I starched it lightly and pressed it on the wrong side with a hot iron. It would look different again.’

‘Oh, Annie …’

The next minute they were holding on to each other, laughing so much they failed to see Seth watching them from the doorway.

‘You’ve chased the haunting sadness from his face already,’ Biddy told Annie, after he’d gone out.

She thought how beautiful the phrase had sounded when she’d first read it in a story about a scullery maid who had brought joy and love back into the life of an embittered lord of the realm, who owned half of Cumberland, four houses in London and a chain of shops, but who was spiritually as poor as a cripple with a begging bowl.

They worked together through the days, settling back into their old rhythm of Annie doing the bulk of the work and Biddy skiving off to read whenever she got the chance.

Seth came and went from the house, eating alone in
his
den and twice in that first week not going to bed at all. Annie worried about him, and one dark evening took the swinging lantern down from its nail and walked to the verge of the long garden to see if there was any sign of him coming back down the hill. There was a heavy drizzle in the air, the wetting kind. She couldn’t think why he hadn’t set off for home much earlier as he must have seen the cows lying down in the fields. She had seen them – she had known that rain was on the way.

‘Does he never take any account of the time?’ she asked Biddy.

‘Never.’ Biddy looked up from her book, keeping her finger on her place. ‘Sometimes he doesn’t come home at all.’ She said this for the benefit of seeing Annie’s face change, her expression grow bleak.

‘You mean when he goes to Manchester?’

Biddy excelled herself. ‘Oh, when he goes there he’s often away for as long as a week, coming back mighty pleased with himself.’

‘He has his own life to lead.’

‘And of course he’s a man,’ Biddy said. She glanced down at her book. ‘A virile, handsome giant of a man,’ she read. ‘With passion throbbing in his veins.’

Annie, she noted with immense satisfaction, had gone as red as a new scald.

Seth had found Jake Tomlinson’s cow down with milk fever, though the calf was doing well.

‘The loss of a deep milker like her’ll cripple me financially, Mr Armstrong.’ Jake shook his head mournfully. ‘I can see by the look on th’ face tha doesn’t hold out much hope.’

Seth tried to look more optimistic than he felt. If the animal had been conscious he could have given it a sedative. As it was, he would have to give choral by the rectum. He would also, if necessary, spend the whole day stimulating the cow’s spine with embrocation. It was too late to tell Jake that if his precious cow had been kept on
oat-straw
and hay for the six weeks prior to calving, this might never have happened. Jake had his own methods and wouldn’t be moved from them, and at the moment his distress was so great that Seth could hardly bear to look at him.

‘D’you reckon she’ll pull through, Mr Armstrong?’

Seth continued his massaging, using long deep strokes in a soothing rhythm. ‘We’re not beaten yet, Jake. Not by a long chalk. You go and do what you’d normally be doing. I can manage on my own.’

He was lying so uncomfortably on the dirt floor that his whole body ached. A draught from the ill-fitting door was the only breath of air in the badly-ventilated cowshed. Jake’s pastures were poorly drained, almost bare of trees, so that his animals found little respite from summer fleas. Yet they thrived, with an inborn capacity for adapting themselves to circumstances, as if knowing how dearly they were cherished. Dearly-loved wouldn’t be too strong a word, Seth supposed.

Twice during that long day Jake’s missus came out with food and drink, and twice Seth refused the food but drank the hot sweet tea laced with sugar. By the late afternoon he was able to tell Jake with truth that the cow was responding. When the shadows lengthened and the drizzle of the day had turned to a good honest rain, he knew the animal would live.

He was so stiff and weary, he stumbled as he walked away from the small farmholding, still hearing Jake’s overwhelming gratitude in his ears. Rain dripped from the overhanging trees which lined his path as he trudged through the mud. He marvelled, not for the first time, at the patience of the farmers and their almost passive acceptance of whatever the weather could chuck at them. With no more needed than a few days of sunshine the corn would be ripe, but only the other day a large flock of swallows had flown over the fields making for the south, at least a month earlier than usual – a bad sign, even to an optimist.

Seth crossed the lane in order to skirt the dark wood, walked on down the familiar road until he turned a corner and saw the lights of his own home, shining out from every single window. Smiling because he knew that Annie was there.

Lying sleepless in her bed that night Annie wished she hadn’t sounded so much like Mrs Martindale, fussing over him, giving him a towel to dry his hair, telling him that she would fill the hipbath, put a handful of mustard in it and leave him to soak away what she was sure could easily be the onset of pneumonia.

‘He’s as strong as an ox,’ Biddy had reassured her. ‘I’ve seen him come in, shake the drops from him, then stand by the fire till his clothes steam-dried. He hated you mothering him. Anger was flashing from his eyes like living sparks, and a pulse was throbbing in his strong jaw.’

‘Stop talking like that!’ Annie had heard herself shouting, then she had yelled at a cat for doing no more than raking its claws along the already tattered chair cushions.

Now at last the house was quiet. Biddy had gone to bed telling Annie that she understood, that however Annie behaved she would always understand. Annie gave a deep sigh.

What was it making Biddy so annoyingly understanding? Why had she scuttled off to bed with that silly expression on her face? That simpering look, as if she was a bit doo-lally.

There was an ache in Annie’s head that had nothing to do with the beating her father had given her. She was trembly without being cold; her heart was beating rapidly though she lay perfectly still. She was bewildered, unhappy, so nervous that when Seth had slammed the door of his room behind him, obviously irritated by her fussing, she had wanted to run after him to say she was sorry.

Sorry for what? Only one way to settle that.

Annie was half-way downstairs, her long nightgown trailing behind her, and still she didn’t know what she was going to say.

‘I’ve come to say I’m sorry,’ she told him, standing in the doorway still shivering from a cold she couldn’t feel.

He was reading as usual, with his empty pipe on the small table beside him. He was wearing his dressing-gown; his fair hair was sleeked back – still damp, she guessed.

‘For what?’ The light grey eyes were steady. ‘For what?’

‘For fussing you when you came in. For mothering till you took your wet things off. For behaving as if I was your mother.’

‘Do you feel like my mother, Annie Clancy?’

She hung her head. ‘No, I don’t.’

He got up from his chair, came round her and closed the door. ‘Then what
do
you feel like?’ He was standing very close to her. ‘Is that what you’ve come downstairs in the dead of night to tell me?’

‘I don’t know …’ The admission came from her on a long drawn-out sigh.

‘Look at me, Annie.’

Slowly she raised her head, looked straight into his eyes. She had always thought they were the kindest eyes she had ever seen in a man, but now, in the darkened room, they were filled with a tenderness that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else but the deepest love.

‘Seth?’

She had never of her own volition touched a man like this before. Her fingers traced the line of his eyebrows, the curve of his cheek, lingered at his mouth. She swayed towards him, tracing the shape of his lips, parting her own in anticipation of a kiss, closing her eyes. Failing to see the hesitation in his expression before he took her in his arms.