Chapter 25
Chapter 25
The air smelled of iron and stung like splinters. The ground Jem had walked over from the house was hard, each blade of grass edged with frost. Early afternoon and the sky had an odd yellow tinge. The bare trees were a scribble of black against it.
It was going to snow.
The hills were already blanked out. Day by day he had watched the snow thicken on the tops, until it was hard to make out where the icy horizon met the hard white sky. As the temperature dropped, he had the uncomfortable feeling that the outside world was disappearing; that they were being sealed off.
In the servants’ basement, Susan listed signs and portents—a halo around the moon, the sheep huddling together under the trees—and Mrs Gatley talked about previous winters when Coldwell had been cut off for weeks, inaccessible to the grocer’s cart, the postman’s bicycle, visitors. Her tone was one of I-told-you-so warning: Lady Hyde had been daft to make all those grand Christmas plans. If the weather closed in, no one would be coming to Coldwell.
Nor leaving neither.
Those words had haunted Jem these past few days. The thought of them all being trapped together, beyond reach of the outside world, filled him with an unease he couldn’t shake off.
His patience was as brittle as the twigs underfoot. He didn’t trust himself not to snap at the slightest provocation from Henderson, so he avoided him as much as possible. Still, he was always aware of him, watching, like he had that day at the gate lodge, never letting Jem forget he was on borrowed time. And so, as the days darkened and the weather closed in, Jem had the sense of something gathering to a head. The atmosphere shifting, as if some sort of reckoning was coming.
Instinct told him to leave while he still could, but the next quarter day, when wages would be paid, was at Christmas, and it pained him to leave without what he was owed. And, of course, there was Kate. If he had his way, he would leave with her, but, having forfeited that chance, he wouldn’t go without her blessing at least.
The wicker hamper he carried bumped painfully against his leg and he shifted it to the other hand, so it bashed the other shin. It was less of a weight now, returning to the house, than it had been when he’d brought it out, laden with hot soup, game pie, jars of chutney, bottles of claret and port. The novelty of the new gamekeeper hadn’t yet worn off, and Hyde went out to play with his guns most days, picking off the game birds that had been allowed to breed undisturbed during the years when there had been no ritual of annual slaughter at Coldwell. Today he had demanded a picnic lunch, a table and canvas chair at which to eat it, and a man to serve it. As first footman that dubious honour went to Thomas, thank Christ. Jem had only to trail back and forth, burdened with cushions, china crockery, silver cutlery, and rugs to bring indoor comfort to Hyde’s outdoor whimsy.
Thomas, poor sod, had looked frozen to the bone when Jem had unloaded the hamper. He was wearing one of the old coachmen’s coats, but even so, his ears were scarlet, his lips almost blue, and he had seized the jar of soup and clutched it against his body to absorb the warmth for a few moments. Jem had promised to bring two small jars of hot water to slip into his pockets when he came back with Hyde’s plum crumble and coffee.
Leaving the cover of the woods, he paused and set down the hamper, flexing his stiff hand. It took a moment for him to notice that it had begun to snow: fine white flakes, barely there. Not heavy enough to fall properly, they blew on the wind, like ash.
He was bending to pick up the hamper when he became aware of movement between the trees to his left. He didn’t look round immediately, but busied himself unfastening the hamper and making a show of looking inside, unhurried.
‘It’s cold out, Davy,’ he called out casually. ‘Starting to snow too. You’d better get yourself off home.’
He stood up as he finished speaking, and caught a glimpse of Davy Wells’s scowling face before he darted clumsily behind a tree, leaving half of himself still visible.
Abandoning the hamper, Jem trudged towards the tree, and the shoulder and arm that stuck out from behind it.
‘It’ll take you a good while to walk back to the village from here, Davy. Set off now and go quickly and you’ll be back in the warmth before your mum starts to worry. She won’t want you being out in the snow, will she?’
Davy didn’t move. Keeping his head bent, he didn’t look at Jem either. It was as if he was hoping to make himself invisible so Jem would leave him alone.
Jem sighed, at a loss. Already the snow was falling faster, more decisively. The flakes were still fine, but they had lost their timidness and the air was a mass of swirling white, softening the great solid shape of the house, almost obliterating the dark tower at the top of the hill. Jem thought of the walk across the park and the time it would take, and the ever-present uneasiness quickened. The hamper stood where he’d left it, waiting to be carried back to the kitchen and refilled. He couldn’t offer to take Davy back himself, though something told him he ought to.
He tried again.
‘You’re not supposed to be here anymore, Davy. Remember?’ Pausing, he lowered his voice, his eyes darting back towards the woods. ‘Look, if Henderson sees you, you’ll be in trouble. He’s out shooting with Sir Randolph—’
The name had a dramatic effect. Davy cowered away and clapped his hands to his ears, his face screwed up in anguish.
‘Davy—it’s all right—’
Alarmed, Jem reached out to reassure him, but Davy twisted away and stumbled a few paces backwards. With a panicked glance at Jem, he turned and began to run.
‘Davy!’
But he didn’t look back.
It was a good thing, Jem told himself. At least Davy was on his way home now, even if he’d had to frighten him into going. Battling guilt, he watched him run across the stretch of open ground, tripping every now and then on tussocks hidden beneath the gathering snow, leaving a trail of messy footprints on the thickening white.
‘Well, that’s that, then.’
Mrs Gatley’s chest was puffed up with self-importance, her tone almost pleased as she took her apron off after dinner and sent Joseph to fetch her coat. ‘I told you it was a fool’s mission to make those plans for Christmas. There’ll be no visitors making their way out here for a good while, that’s for sure. At least we’ve plenty of supplies in for the household. As long as someone can get down to the farm for butter and milk, we shouldn’t want for anything.’
‘I’ll send the lads over with the old sledge,’ Gatley muttered gruffly. He had come in from the walled garden to escort his wife home and stood in the doorway of the servants’ hall, clutching his cap between his callused hands, looking out of place in this domestic setting.
But then, there was a sense of reality being suspended and the normal order of things disrupted. The windows were dark, but there was a strange glow to the sky and Gatley had brought with him the metallic scent of frost. The servants’ hall seemed very full, with the Twigg boys standing by the fire to get warm (it was perishing in the grooms’ loft, they said) and Johnny Farrow planted firmly in Kate’s chair at the far end of the table, while outside the snow kept falling, cutting the great house adrift from the rest of the world.
‘Bert Oakley’s lad came to pick him up on the pony trap. Didn’t fancy his chances of making it back to the village in this,’ Gatley said. ‘Brought the news that Mary Wells has been taken bad. Nellie Crawford from the White Hart found her collapsed in the yard, frozen to the bone. Her heart, they reckon.’
A current of consternation went around the room. Mrs Gatley put a hand to her own ample chest in alarm.
‘Is she all right?’
Gatley shrugged. ‘Nellie’s taken her in for the time being, Oakley said.’
Kate imagined a room above the pub; the noise coming up from the saloon bar below, the smell of ale and tobacco smoke. But Mrs Wells was lucky to have that. She wouldn’t be able to afford Dr Seymour or the subscription for the cottage hospital in Hatherford, and she wouldn’t want to leave Davy to go to the infirmary at Sheffield Union Workhouse.
‘I hope they’ve taken Davy in too,’ she said. ‘Or someone has. He won’t manage on his own.’
Gatley turned his cap between his hands, frowning. ‘That’s the thing. Lad’s disappeared, Oakley said. Asked if I’d seen him up here. He checked the gate lodge on his way down—no sign of him there, and we’ve given the woods a quick going over.’
‘I saw him.’
Jem spoke from the shadows. He had been leaning against the dresser at the far end of the room, but he straightened up, suddenly tense. ‘He was out in the woods earlier, when I took the hamper out. I spoke to him. Told him to go home before the snow came properly. He was—’
He stopped abruptly.
‘He was what?’ George Twigg prompted.
‘I don’t know. Upset. Agitated.’
‘I’m sure someone will have notified the constable in the village,’ Kate said, with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘He’ll have organised a search, I’m sure.’
‘Not in this weather,’ Johnny Farrow said.
Thrusting a hand through his hair, Jem squeezed past Johnny Farrow’s chair. The Twigg boys moved aside to let him through.
‘Where are you off to?’ Stanley asked.
‘Going to look for him,’ Jem said grimly.
Kate felt a ripple of fear at the thought of the bitter cold, the silent woods; the snow that muffled sound and covered things up. She was standing by the door, and without thinking put her hand out to stop him. She wanted to tell him not to go but didn’t know how to without giving herself away.
‘Don’t be daft, lad.’
Gatley, not troubled by appearances nor hampered by a forbidden, ill-advised love, beat her to it. ‘You wouldn’t last five minutes out there in this weather—it closes in fast up here, mark my words. Davy Wells knows this estate like the back of his own hand. Folk might write him off as simple, but he can look out for himself in the woods, no doubt about that. Chances are he’s safely back in the village long since, but if he isn’t—if he is up here—he’ll have found himself somewhere safe, like he has many a time before. Got an animal’s instinct, has Davy.’
Mrs Gatley gave a grunt of assent. ‘That’s true. We always used to say he was part boy, part fox, that one. Mary could never keep him indoors; even as a little ’un he’d let himself out at night and wander. He knows this park better than anyone, so wherever he is, I reckon he’ll be all right. Which is more than could be said for you, Jem Arden, if you go out there looking for him.’
Kate realised that her hand was still on Jem’s arm. She withdrew it, but not before she’d noticed Eliza looking at her from the other side of the table, her jaw set hard and her eyes flinty in the glow of the lamp. Beside her, Susan shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated shiver.
‘You’ll be like poor Samuel, wandering the Coldwell woods for all eternity. Or the souls of the lost travellers on the road to Hatherford, with the coachman whipping his ghostly horses…’
Eliza gave a snort of disdain and rolled her eyes. Kate was suddenly struck by how much she’d changed these past few months. She’d always had a cynical streak, but it had been tempered with a quickness of wit and sweetened with a sense of fun. Now, above the shawl she was permanently huddled into, her face looked puffy and sallow. Sour. Kate wondered what had taken the bloom off her. Or who.
‘You can sneer all you like, Eliza Simmons, but it’s true,’ Susan retorted, craning forward to look down the table. ‘Johnny Farrow’s seen them—haven’t you, Johnny? Tell the story.’
The old coachman nodded slowly and sucked on his pipe. Around the room an expectant silence stretched. Huddled on his hard chair by the door, Joseph’s eyes were as round as saucers. Mrs Gatley, who had sunk into Mr Goddard’s chair, made no attempt to get up, her coat spread across her lap, her hands folded comfortably on top of it.
‘Winter of ninety-seven, it was…’ Johnny Farrow began ponderously, around the stem of his pipe. ‘Bitter cold, hard frost for days. Sir Henry was coming home from a stay at Whittam Park, but the train was delayed… black as pitch by the time we set off from Sheffield. Well… the snow started as we reached Hope End Farm. By the time we got up to the top by Gallowstree Heath it was fair coming down. That was when I saw it…’
All eyes were on the coachman at the far end of the table, just beyond the circle of lamplight. All except Jem’s. His head was turned towards the window, and he watched the white flakes tumbling through the glowing dark.
Johnny Farrow told his well-worn tale of the ghostly coach with its phantom horses galloping hell-for-leather through the blizzard, but it was Jem—a few feet away from Kate and a thousand miles beyond her reach—who looked haunted.
Outside, the snow had changed everything. The landscape of the park was unrecognisable, and even the sky looked different, lit by a yellow glow, like a lamp burning low behind a shaded window. Only the dark silhouette of the tower remained as a fixed point of familiarity. It cast a long blue shadow on the snow, like an accusing finger pointing towards the house.
Sir Randolph’s spaniel dashed around in circles, burying his nose in the snow and snorting, not knowing what to investigate first. Joseph hunched his shoulders and watched, dully aware that last winter he would probably have run about with the same excitement.
But he’d grown up a lot since last winter.
‘Boy!’
His voice cracked and the shout came out deeper than he’d expected, as if a stranger had spoken. The dog took no notice, rushing up the slope towards the woods. There was no way Joseph was going after him if he went in there. Not after all that talk of ghosts in the servants’ hall.
‘Must be six inches deep already,’ Jem said absently. He had offered to come with Joseph when he took the dog for its last run of the day, and stood now, his body taut as he scanned the line of the trees. Joseph had been grateful for the offer; he thought Jem must have noticed that he was afraid. With a thud of disappointment, he realised now that Jem hadn’t come for his sake at all, but to look for Davy Wells.
‘It’s so white,’ Joseph muttered. ‘I’ve not seen owt like it before. In town it always melts and turns dirty as soon as it touches the ground. Everything looks so… clean.’
It was as if the world had been made pure and new. The spaniel let out a couple of high, excited barks and bounded joyfully forward, sending up sprays of powder as white as the sugar cones in the stillroom. It was deceptive, the purity. Beneath the pristine snow was mud and stones, secrets and lies.
This whole beautiful place was rotten with them.
‘Jem?’ he said tentatively, but the footman had begun to move away, following the furrows the dog had left in the snow. Joseph dug his hands deep into the pockets of his fustian jacket and set off after him. His footsteps faltered as his cold fingers closed around a sixpence.
At first, he had been happy about the coins Mr Henderson gave him. It was something… to be noticed and singled out for praise. Joseph was as invisible as Samuel’s ghost to Mr Goddard, and treated much the same as Boy the spaniel by Thomas and the girls. It had given him a glow of pride when Mr Henderson called him a bright lad, and said he was shaping up to be a useful servant.
He didn’t have to like Sir Randolph’s valet to recognise that as a good thing. You had to toady up to all sorts of rum characters if you wanted to get on, and he didn’t want to be a workhouse nobody, scraping mud off boots and carrying coal for the rest of his days. Mr Henderson had promised him his own uniform—a proper tiger’s livery—and a special job waiting on at the house parties Sir Randolph was going to have for his gentlemen friends. The sixpences were just the start, Henderson said—rewards for the scraps of servants’ hall gossip Joseph gave him. He’d get proper money from the toffs, for being loyal and discreet and a good sport (whatever that meant).
Too late he’d realised the trap Henderson had set for him.
He’d seen the growing collection of coins as a means of washing off the stain of his early life; of distancing himself from the snivelling kid who had cowered from his father’s fists, and becoming the man he wanted to be—a man like Jem. But in earning those coins, he had proved himself the opposite. In trying to make himself worthy of Jem’s friendship, he’d been required to betray it. Just as Henderson must have planned.
He trudged up the hill in Jem’s wake. It had started to snow again, and flakes brushed his cheeks and caught in his lashes. He had decided that the only thing to do was to talk to Jem… carefully. Sound him out for advice without quite letting on what he’d done.
‘Jem…’ he tried again, quickening his pace to catch up. ‘Wait! There was summat I wanted to ask you… About—’
He paused. Jem turned and walked backwards for a couple of paces.
‘About what?’
A volley of barks echoed like gunshots through the frozen night, making them both jump. Boy was standing at the edge of the wood, staring into its darkness, the fur standing up in a ridge along his back.
Fear turned Joseph’s mind blank and made his voice quaver. ‘What’s he seen?’ Animals were supposed to be able to sense spirits, weren’t they? Johnny Farrow said the carriage horses had squealed and skidded and refused to go forward when the phantom coach appeared. But it was clear Jem’s mind wasn’t on ghosts. He started to run, feet sliding on the snow as he scrambled up the slope towards the trees.
‘Davy! Davy Wells—is that you?’
With his heart rattling against his ribs, Joseph followed. He would rather have turned and run back to the light and warmth of the servants’ hall, but he didn’t dare go back without the dog. As the shadow of the trees fell over him, he saw Jem stop, his hands going to his head, his shoulders slumping.
‘Deer,’ he said flatly, as Joseph caught up. ‘They must have come down from the hills to shelter from the cold.’
Joseph looked past him and saw a pale shape move between the trees. He laughed uneasily, relief loosening his insides. ‘I thought it was the ghost lad. Susan said it were a winter’s night like this when he tried to run away. Should’ve waited until it were warmer, the daft sod…’
He said it to make a joke of his own embarrassing fear, but Jem didn’t laugh. He carried on staring into the trees, his whole body tense, like he was listening intently. But not to Joseph. He gave no sign of having heard him at all.
‘I don’t know why you’re shouting ’im, any road.’ Joseph muttered, kicking up a plume of snow. ‘Not going to answer, is he? Never speaks. Come on, let’s go in. I’m half froze to death.’
Reluctantly Jem tore his eyes from the trees and turned away. Joseph felt a flare of anger towards stupid Davy Wells as they trudged down the hill, the spaniel bounding ahead, Jem glancing back towards the wood every few paces. Joseph hoped he might remember the conversation that had been interrupted, and pick it up again, but he didn’t, and pride prevented Joseph from trying himself.
They walked in silence.
When he was younger Joseph used to wish he was invisible, to avoid the force of his father’s fury. Now it felt that he might be. That he had faded into the nothing his father had always said he was, like the trail of their footsteps, fast disappearing in the freshly falling snow.