Chapter Two #2
She allowed herself to listen again to Vanessa, who was saying, ‘…but we must see what we can do about it in London, when the Season starts. Arrange for you to be at the same dinners and balls and so on. In the right setting with a new gown or two, you will look so different he may forget the whole incident. Men are very easily distracted…’
Miss Rowsham drifted away again. She would like to be married – to have her own establishment rather than be spinster companion to Vanessa for the rest of her life – and she thought she would quite like to marry Richard Tallant, who seemed amusing.
But she didn’t imagine he would ever offer for her, so there was no point in thinking about it.
The heavy rains after Christmas had caused Rose, the head housemaid, to cancel the walk she had promised to Michael Woodrow, the dairyman at Hundon’s, the home farm.
The Christmas Season was always hard work for the servants, and when the guests finally departed the bill for the tiredness accrued was presented. So she had not been sorry not to go.
Besides, the idea of her and Woodrow ‘walking out’ was silly, wasn’t it?
She was not a young girl and she had never been pretty: people would think she was chasing him (the words ‘old maid’ hovered about in there somewhere).
They would laugh at her. She had a jaundiced view of men, anyway, after her experiences with the old earl – the present earl’s father.
He had been – well, let’s just say, not a nice man.
She thought Woodrow would probably forget all about it and she wasn’t entirely sorry.
But when the rains stopped and the dry weather set in, she received a note from him.
It was brought up to the house by a boy, one of the numerous Cox family (she thought it was Albert, one of the very young ones, anyway – she couldn’t always tell them apart).
The note reminded her of her promise, revived the scheme, and asked when her next free afternoon would be.
So she had to decide – the boy was fidgeting from foot to foot waiting to take the reply – whether to turn him down for good, or see him again. She decided, for no very firm reason, almost a mental toss of a coin, to see him again. It would be more interesting than not seeing him, that was all.
‘He said you’d give me a penny for taking it,’ the boy said, as he received her note.
‘Don’t you tell lies, Harry Cox!’ Rose snapped (she recognised him now from the bump on his nose where a dog had bitten him when he was a toddler).
She knew Woodrow would have paid for message-and-reply – and he was canny enough not to give the little wretch payment in advance.
‘Take it back or not, it makes me no never-mind. Now clear off!’
The child grinned gappily. ‘You and him walkin’ out? You sweet on him?’
‘None of your cheek! Clear off, before I give you a clout.’
He skipped backwards a step out of range, stuck out his tongue, and strolled off with an indescribable swagger.
Rose went back in, shaking her head over such delinquency at a tender age. Harry Cox couldn’t be more than five, and was already steeped in villainy. We’ll see him hanged at the end if it, she told herself.
When she arrived at Hundon’s, Woodrow was waiting for her at his front door, and she remembered what she had put out of her mind for the last few weeks: how nice-looking he was. Despite her best intentions, she felt a little pang, and made up for it by being as discouraging as possible.
‘I think it’s going to rain,’ she said. ‘We should put off.’
‘It isn’t,’ he said genially, ‘and we shan’t.’ He closed his front door and took his place beside her, walking towards the gate. His herd dogs, Fly and Jess, appeared from nowhere and joined the expedition, glancing up into his face for clues. Was it fun, or work? Would there be cows?
‘How’s your sister?’ Rose asked. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘I visited before Christmas,’ he said. His sister was confined in the Asham Bois insane asylum, having tried to kill him with a kitchen knife. ‘I don’t think she knew who I was.’
‘Are they treating her well?’ Rose had no idea what went on inside an asylum. She had grown up with the horrors adults employed to scare you into good behaviour. If you carry on like that they’ll come and fetch you away to Asham Bois!
‘It seems like a nice place – a bit like a hospital, but brighter. I think there’s a separate ward where they lock up the violent ones. But on Martha’s ward they can go out into the grounds if they want. They do gardening, grow some of their own food. She’s put on weight since she went in.’
‘So you don’t feel bad about it any more?’
‘Of course I do. But I couldn’t help it.
There was nothing I could do. I talked to her for a quarter-hour but she just stared at nothing, as if she didn’t know I was there.
And then they led her away, like – like a big child.
’ He looked at her. ‘She’s my only kin. Our parents are dead, and now she’s gone. ’
‘That’s what happens,’ Rose said briskly.
If he wanted her to feel sorry for him he was out of luck.
‘When your parents die there’s no home to go back to.
I’ll never see my brothers again. That’s how it is.
But you’re not so bad off. You’re a man, you’ve got a house and a job. You could get married if you wanted.’
As soon as the words left her mouth she regretted them. What a thing to bring up!
He laughed, and the dogs ran back to see what he wanted. But he only said, ‘Oh, Miss Hawkins, you’re such an original!’ And then he changed the subject. ‘That train crash up at New Ashmore, that was a terrible thing.’
She was more comfortable talking about that.
There had hardly been another subject in the servants’ hall.
It seemed the local down train had just started out of the station when the fast up train had come off the rails on the curved section just before the station and smashed into it.
That much was known for a fact. But since both drivers and firemen had perished there was no-one to give a definitive account, and theories as to the cause abounded: the up train was late and the driver had been going too fast; he was drunk; he had suffered a heart attack and died; a wheel on the locomotive had broken; there was a section of loose rail that had derailed the train.
One ingenious ‘eye witness’ had seen men fighting on the footplate; another had seen the driver and fireman jump from the cab just before it reached the curve.
Latest reports said that twenty-five people had been killed and thirty-eight injured badly enough to be taken to the hospital. It was such a serious accident that reporters had been sent down from the London papers, and the village had been crawling with visitors of a ghoulish turn of mind.
‘We had people from the papers turn up at the Castle,’ Rose told Woodrow.
‘They must have been told about his lordship and Mr Richard and Lady Alice helping out, and came wanting pieces to put in their papers. His lordship refused to see them, so then they tried to talk to us below stairs.’ She tossed her head indignantly.
‘As if any of us wanted our names in the papers!’
Woodrow said, ‘I suspect there might be one or two who wouldn’t mind.’
She shrugged. ‘In any case, Mr Moss saw them off. He gave them the sharp side of his tongue, and told Frederick to chuck ’em out. Well, Frederick’s a big chap, so those paper men hopped it with their tails between their legs. I almost felt sorry for ’em.’
‘Only almost? They were only doing their job, weren’t they?’
‘Then they should get another job. I don’t pity them. They just wanted talk about blood and such.’
‘You’re very fierce,’ Woodrow said admiringly. ‘I heard there was one of the estate people who was a real hero – Axe Brandom?’
‘Oh, yes. We heard a lot about him from the tradesmen coming up. And Allsuch, the under-gardener, told our Daisy those paper men had come sniffing round the outdoor staff asking about him, wanting to know where he lived so they could go and talk to him.’
‘I had one come and ask me the same thing,’ said Woodrow. ‘But there’s been nothing in the papers bar his name, so I suppose they couldn’t find him. Living in that cottage right up in Motte Woods…’
‘Those London men’d never walk that far,’ Rose said with a sniff. ‘Uphill as well. And they’d get lost in a wood.’
‘Is he all right, though – Brandom? I haven’t heard.’
‘Josh – you know, his brother that’s one of our grooms – he said he’s laid up in his cottage with a strained back.
Can’t work. He can just get about enough to feed his animals.
But Josh said he’ll mend all right in a week or so.
’ She added, in an impressed tone, ‘His lordship went to see him, did you know?’
‘Is that right?’
‘He did. Went up there himself, in person, right up to the cottage, to shake Axe’s hand and tell him well done.’
Woodrow said, ‘I don’t really know Axe Brandom, except by reputation, but I suspect he wouldn’t take kindly to a lot of fuss.’
‘You’re right there,’ Rose said. ‘He never says much when he comes up to the house with logs. Solitary sort of chap. He’s never married, nor even walked out that I’ve ever heard, though he’s a good-looking man that girls’d be foolish over.’
‘Good-looking, is he? You’re making me jealous,’ Woodrow said, smiling.
She gave him a hard look. ‘Don’t you start getting soppy! I said I’d go for a walk with you, but if there’s to be any nonsense, I shall turn around and go home.’
‘Am I not allowed even a little bit of soppiness?’
‘Not a bit. I won’t have it.’
‘You’re a hard woman. Here, the path’s slippery just here, I can’t have you going over and getting muddy. Take my arm.’ He crooked it towards her.
‘You think that’ll soften me up?’ she said suspiciously.
‘Not at all. Your hardness is what I admire most about you,’ he said. ‘You’re like a diamond. Nobody would want a soft diamond, would they?’
‘You’re daft, you are,’ Rose said. But she took his arm.