Theirs Was The Kingdom (31 page)

He was sitting on a pile of folded sacks when she returned, knees clasped in his hands as he stared morosely at the glow under the copper. Shock was having its effect, even on a big, phlegmatic ox like Denzil Fawcett, for every now and again he yawned and shivered, so she went out and got the blankets from the waggonette and brought them in, draping one of them over his shoulders and then looking to the stew that was beginning to bubble.

He said, watching her ladle the savoury mess into the bowl, “Why are you doing this? It isn’t right for someone like you to be here, with the prospect o’ riding home in the dark,” and she replied, handing him bowl and spoon, “I’m not going home. Not until it’s light and you’ve had some hot food and rest. Then I’ll get things organised over there and send more help. A lot of your stuff could be salvaged at the back, and when it is we must find somewhere with a roof on to store it until you need it again. Here, eat man. Eat it all. There’s plenty here,” and roused by her gentle bullying, he took the bowl and began to sup.

The moon had risen by the time he had finished, so she told him to unharness the mare and turn her loose. “She won’t stray,” she said, “she never does if I’m about,” and while he was gone she made a bed of the sacks, stuffing one of them with clean straw for a pillow and using the blankets she had brought as coverings.

He looked down at it with amazement when he came stumbling back, but when he began yawning again she said, authoritatively, “Lie down and stretch out. Try and sleep, for you’ll have a lot to attend to in the morning.” He began to obey her but moved like a big, clumsy automaton, so that she knelt and unlaced his boots, pulling them off, pushing his stockinged feet under the blankets, and tucking the end under the improvised mattress.

He said, sleepily, “You can’t stay, Miss Stella. Woulden be proper to. Why don’t you ride bareback over to Nine Oaks. It’s not much above a mile and the moon’s bright.”

“Stop worrying about me and go to sleep. Mother knows where I am and approves of me being here,” and when he wrinkled his brow she gave a little gurgle of laughter, the first time she had laughed in what seemed like years, so that the sound, and the sense of relief that accompanied it, surprised and puzzled her.

“Who would have thought of me tucking you up in bed in your own piggery?” she said and then, moved by impulse to express the utterly irrelevant sense of fun that was pushing through the crust of her isolation, she bent forward and kissed his unshaven cheek, blushing the moment she straightened herself, but it did not matter. Shock had finally caught up with him and he was asleep.

Tryst saw little of Stella Swann that autumn and winter. All through what remained of September, through the months of October and November, she was at Dewponds every day, often from round about nine in the morning until it was dusk. They would see her toiling up the drive in the waggonette, her muddied skirts gathered about her knees, her hands holding the reins slackly, her copper hair, as like as not, free of pins so that she looked as if she had been romping in the hedgerow.

Henrietta watched her with a kind of awe. She was a complete stranger to the girl she had packed off to the ruined farm with a load of blankets on the night of the fire, but neither did she bear the least resemblance to the shallow, feckless girl who had romped about the house, horse crazy and chock-full of impudence, before she married Lester Moncton-Price. She seemed, in some ways, to have aged ten years in less than two; yet, in another way, she looked not only young but radiantly healthy, her face glowing under a film of brickdust and flecks of spent ash when she heaved herself down from the box, went up to wash and was back again, clean but tousled, in five minutes to eat a farmhand’s supper.

They knew, of course, what she was about over there. She was acting as builder’s mate to Denzil Fawcett, who had elected to restore the farm almost singlehanded and seemed to be doing it. Curious passersby, wandering along the banks of the river of a morning, would sometimes see him perched on a roof beam, hammering and sawing, with the girl halfway up the ladder, her mouth full of nails and perhaps a short length of planking or a sheet of zinc under her arm or held between her breast and the stone wall he was raising to replace the charred cob. It was astonishing, observers told one another, how much two people seemed to achieve working upwards of ten hours a day on such a daunting task. By late October all the litter had been carted away and burned. By early November the six survivors of Stephen Fawcett’s herd were back in a rebuilt byre. Towards the end of November, when dusk stole into the dell before five o’clock, new roof beams and rafters had been slotted in and Denzil had begun thatching, moving inch by inch up the steep pitch of the roof to the blackened chimneys, then inwards towards the right angle of the building where it abutted the byre.

Sometimes the girl would be handing him things, but more often, as the thatching progressed, she was in the stable, temporarily roofed by a tarpaulin, where such furniture as had been saved had been stacked, together with a huge washtub full of blankets and linen. Christmas came and went and they were still at it. Then the day came, around mid-February, when they spent all morning resetting the lintel and rehanging the great studded door on its hinges.

It was bright and frosty that particular morning and towards noon, when the door was in place and Denzil was oiling the lock, Stella went around to their temporary kitchen quarters in the store-shed and boiled two great mugs of cocoa, carrying them back to where he stood, surveying his handiwork.

He said, with schoolboy exuberance, “It fits, Miss Stella! It opens and closes a treat. Look at that now!” and he swung it to and fro for her benefit.

“Well, why wouldn’t it fit?” she replied. “You measured it times enough. And something else I’ve been meaning to tell you. Do stop calling me ‘Miss’ Stella. It sounds terribly stuffy, and anyway it isn’t the kind of title due to a bricklayer’s mate, plumber’s mate, carpenter’s mate, reed-cutter, and charwoman about here. I don’t call you ‘Mr. Denzil,’ do I?”

He had to think about this. He gave considerable thought to most things. “No,” he said, at length, “but then you wouldn’t, would you? Coming from the big house, I mean?”

“You’ve got a big house of your own,” she said. “I should know, for I helped build it. Just look at my hands, Denzil Fawcett.”

He looked at them and pursed his lips, in the way she had noticed so often during their partnership. What he saw seemed to displease him for he frowned, saying, “Ah, they’m fair ruined! But I kep’ telling you to wear gloves, didden I?”

“You get nothing done with gloves on,” she said, and then fell to examining his work more closely, noting the new floorboards just over the threshold, and the new banister rail he had fashioned from a discarded ladder they found in one of the undamaged haylofts.

“It’s marvellous,” she said, “absolutely marvellous when you think hardly anyone has had a part in it except you, Denzil.”

“I woulden ha’ cared to tackle it on my own. You’ve been around since the first, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, with modest, pride, “I have that, but I’ve only handed you nails and bundles of reeds, and run errands of one sort and another. My mare and mother’s cob have done more than I have.”

He seemed to be considering something and the effort creased his brow so that his expression reminded her of that first night, when she ordered him to bed on a pile of sacks.

“What’s bothering you now?”

“How to say thank you, I reckon,” and she flashed back, with a laugh, “I’ll show you how. Pick me up and carry me over the threshold!”

He regarded her so solemnly that she laughed again, “Well, why not?”

“You know very well why not, Miss Stella,” he said, carefully, “because o’ what that means.” He stood fidgeting with his enormous hands, looking for all the world like a yokel at a fair who had just been the victim of the three card trick.

She was sorry then, sorry that he should take it for granted that she was teasing him and said, hurriedly, “Suppose that’s what I want it to mean? Would you do it then? If no one was watching?”

He surprised her then, moving with remarkable speed for someone so big and clumsy, and scooping her up as though she had weighed no more than a bag of feathers, marched through the door as far as the foot of the stairs. But here, where she expected to be set down, he did no more than readjust his grip, spinning on his heel and rocking her, as she had seen him cradle one of his lambs.

Crushed hard against his massive chest, she was physically aware of his strength, of the kind that had enabled him to perform so many herculean tasks in the last few months, at the same time solving as many problems as Crusoe when he found himself alone on the island. A kind of joyous recklessness swept over her, so that she threw both her arms round his neck, pulling his face down to hers.

His kiss did not match his strength. It was not really a kiss at all but more of a salutation, short and infinitely restrained, so that even if anyone had observed it they would have been entitled to regard it as brotherly, she supposed. She realised then that he still needed a great deal of prompting, but there was no sense in neglecting an opportunity unlikely to come again.

She said, boldly, “That’s it then, Denzil! Assuming you mean what I mean, and I sincerely hope you do.”

But at that he looked terrified and set her down hastily, so that she had a horrid fear that she had taken far too much for granted. She remembered also something she had forgotten all the time they had worked here, that this was not merely his home but his mother’s and his sister’s, and that possibly he too was remembering this but had no words to explain his dilemma.

Then she decided she was wrong again. There was a glazed look in his eye, as if he was seeing something, and experiencing something, that was incomprehensible to him and was so far out of his depth that he doubted if he would ever find bottom again. His helplessness touched her, so that she thought, “ We can’t leave it here… if he’s too shy and too tongue-tied to take the initiative, I shall have to finish what I started, with only myself to blame if I make a fool of myself!” She said, desperately, “Listen, Denzil, say what… whatever’s in your mind! Perhaps I
was
jumping to conclusions. I mean, there’s your mother and sister Ruth. You have to finish rebuilding here and you have to restock, but I’m not afraid to say right out that I love you, and that until I came here, the night of the fire, I hadn’t the least idea what love was or could be. I’ll wait, for as long as you like. Or I’ll go away, and leave you to settle in and take your time. It’s for you to say. I’ve said enough. Too much, I wouldn’t wonder.”

He had continued to stare at her with that bemused expression, but when she said the words “go away” he suddenly came to life, making a wild and fiercely negative gesture with his right hand, as his look of bewilderment changed to one of alarm. He caught up her hands, pressing them both to his mouth, and blurted out, “Leave…? Go away…? Don’t talk o’ such things. Don’t say it nor think it!” It was as though the broken protests were a cipher, releasing the key to his pent-up thoughts, so that he rushed on, “All this time… long before you showed up that night… years and years, ever since I picked you out o’ that ditch, under Short Wood, wi’ mud all over you…! By God, but you can’t
blame
me for bein’ slow, for not understanding…! You an’
me
? Man and wife on our own land? Can you think for one minute I’d ever want anything else, or ask anything better, so long as there was breath in me body?”

It was a declaration unlike any she had heard about or read about so that it seemed not to qualify as a proposal, even allowing for her efforts to bring it about. Yet, when she measured him in her mind against all the other men she had flirted with or who had flirted with her, or someone like Lester Moncton-Price, whose proposal had been phrased like an attorney’s letter, he seemed to her the only man in the world who qualified as a suitor, and ten times as impressive as all the heroes in the romances that had come her way through her mother or Phoebe Fraser. Intense pride possessed her, that she could be in receipt of so much steadfastness. This was like rebirth into a world where the sun shone every day and the memory of the last two years was so blurred as to be all but banished from mind and memory.

She said, raising a hand and stroking his cheek, rough with the day’s bristles, “I’ll make you a good wife, Denzil. A far better one than I would have made you before. I think we could be very happy here, the two of us, providing I could get it through your head that I’m finished with all that foolishness about us coming from different worlds. I daresay you’ll think I treated you badly when I was younger, but since then I’ve been treated very badly myself and it teaches you something. I didn’t in the least understand the kind of person you were until this awful thing happened to you, and instead of whining and moping, the way I did, you at once set about putting all the pieces together again, without so much as a call on anyone to help. Well, there it is, and I daresay most people would think me very forward. But I don’t care about that either. The truth is I only care about you, and what becomes of you now that you’ve made up your mind to start all over again.”

She wondered then if he had been listening, or whether what she was trying to say had got through to him, for his brain moved as ponderously as his body, step by step, studying the landscape with a countryman’s eye for pitfalls and possibilities. He said, triumphantly, “There’s one thing you don’t know. Mother won’t never come back here to live. She says she couldn’t, on account o’ what happened to father. As to Ruth, she’s courtin’ a chap over at Twyforde Green, and like to be married before the year’s out. Wait on, you said. Well, I’ve done wi’ waiting. Seems like I been waiting all my life and there’s on’y one thing that’d come between you and me right now.”