The Disgrace of Kitty Grey (8 page)

I stopped turning the handle of the churn and ran outside thinking she had hurt herself in some way, but her face was so pale, so shocked, that I knew it was something much worse than this.

‘Will's not there!' she cried. ‘He's gone!'

I picked her up and hugged her. ‘What do you mean? I expect he's over on the other side of the river.'

‘No! He's not. I waited and waited and looked everywhere, but he's gone away!'

My first thought was that he had drowned and, terrified and anxious that Betsy should not know this, I put her in the care of one of her ‘sisters' and said that I would go down and sort things out, that he was
s
ure to be there and perhaps he was just having a game of hide-and-seek. Not even waiting to find Mrs Bonny and tell her where I was going, I ran down the field as fast as I could, twice tripping over my feet in my anxiety. As I ran I looked for his boat, hoping to see it plying its way back from the other side of the river, but when I got a little nearer I realised that it was pulled right up on the opposite bank, just as if Will had taken a fare over and stayed on that side. I also saw that there were two men and a woman standing on the landing stage on
this
side: passengers waiting to be taken across.

When I reached them, I could hardly breathe enough to speak. ‘Is he not here?' I asked desperately, and the three of them shook their heads.

‘I have been waiting near half an hour!' said the first in line, the baker's boy. ‘I've a full tray of bread for the Millbridge market. I've never known him be away so long before.'

‘Nor I,' said the woman. ‘Where can he be?'

I ran into his hut and, though admittedly it was difficult to tell, it didn't look as if his canvas bed and rough old blanket had been slept in. I looked under the bed, where he'd kept a tin box containing a few things that had belonged to his parents, but this box had gone – as had his oilskin cape, his boots, spare shirts and extra pair of breeches. I went outside again, crying with shock, and informed the others.

‘Perhaps a thief in the night . . .' the woman said, but I shook my head wordlessly. I already had my suspicions about where he'd gone.

‘He liked a swim in the mornings,' the second man said, and then offered to swim across to the Millbridge side of the river, just to ‘make sure he's not over there'. This was what he said, but what he meant was that he wanted to make sure Will was not in the water somewhere, caught up in weeds, drowned in the deep water. He stripped to his breeches and dived in, while the rest of us poked about in the shallows and amongst the bulrushes, but they knew, of course – and I knew – that if his possessions had gone, then he must have gone with them. And I could guess where.

‘He was always talking about London,' said the baker's boy, when the other man had swum across and reported that he had seen nothing untoward. He looked at me sympathetically. ‘Shall I go over, get the ferry boat and row it back?'

I shook my head and told him to leave it on the other side, saying that if Will had gone off for the day somewhere, on his return he would want to find the boat exactly where he'd left it.

‘In the meantime, what shall we do for a ferryman?' said the woman, tutting impatiently. ‘My daughter lives in Millbridge and is expecting me to look after her children. She can't go to work otherwise. I must get over!'

We discussed this – or they did, while I stared across the water, shocked and speechless. The baker's boy said he knew someone else with a boat and he would ask this man to run a temporary service ‘until Will comes back'.

‘If he ever does,' I said.

I sat there with Betsy on my lap until the next milking time, both of us watching the river flowing on and on towards the sea and feeling totally desolate. I knew that I would never see him again, for if he had truly loved me, surely he would have stayed by my side.

Chapter Eight

 

 

‘Have you heard from your sweetheart yet?' Patience asked a few weeks later.

I pretended not to hear her, which was foolish because it meant she had to say it again, but louder, so it seemed to me that everyone in the kitchens heard and there was a moment when everything stopped; the servants ceased pounding, kneading, polishing, scouring or crimping and waited to hear what I was going to say in reply.

I felt my face flush. ‘No, I haven't. Not yet,' I said stiffly.

Of course I hadn't. I didn't think, in all the time I'd been working at the hall, that any of the kitchen staff had ever received a letter. If they had, it would have been a minor sensation and Patience and everyone else would most certainly have heard of it. Letters sometimes came for Milord and Lady, and for the aristocracy and Honourables and plain wealthy ladies and gentlemen who stayed at the hall, but never for any of us.

‘But I don't suppose your lad is clever with ink and parchment, is he?' she persisted.

I shrugged.

‘Though even if he can't write, he could surely have got a message to you by some other means.' On this, too, being received by me in silence, she added, ‘The cheek of the devil, some lads! Fancy him up and leaving you with his little sister to care for.'

I think she would have gone on provoking me until I snapped back, but thankfully Mrs Bonny appeared from the still room. ‘That's enough chatter from both of you,' she said. ‘Go back and make sure the butter has come together, Kitty. We need it for supper.'

I nodded and escaped, taking my irritation out on the butter churner and turning the handle so hard and fast that the whey came off, the butter came together and then began to separate again so that I only just caught it in time.

 

I had been desperately miserable in the days that followed Will's departure. At first I couldn't believe he had really gone; for a day or more I thought that he must be playing some sort of trick on us and would appear, laughing and teasing us for being worried. After that I almost convinced myself that he must have rowed over to Millbridge to buy something and had had an accident, but the fact that all his possessions had disappeared didn't make sense of this explanation. And why hadn't he left me a note? He might not have been able to write a whole, proper letter – in fact, I knew he wouldn't have been able to do that – but he could at least have scribed a few words:
I will send for you soon
or
I love you
or even just
Sorry
, and added his name. I found nothing, however
,
even though I practically took the hut to pieces. Why hadn't he left us anything? The obvious answer was that he was too embarrassed about leaving us; too ashamed of himself.

After I'd wept enough to fill a milking bucket, I began to grow angry. How dare he just go off and leave Betsy with me? How despicable! I became so resentful of him then, so furious, that for a time I almost wished he'd drowned in the river rather than stopped loving me. For I knew he must have stopped loving me to go away.

The day we found out he'd disappeared I'd finally quelled my own tears, then sat Betsy down quietly and told her that Will had gone to London to make his fortune and one day would come back again, a rich man, and take us to live in a big house. She didn't believe me – but then I didn't believe me, either – and for two whole weeks she stopped speaking. I observed her with her little friends, saw her standing watching their games, occasionally nodding or shaking her head in response to a direct question. She barely ate, and became pale and sad, while I seethed with rage about Will, furious at what he'd done, and longed for some means to inform him just what misery his selfish actions had caused.

Mrs Bonny was very kind to both of us. Betsy, of course, no longer took her meals with Will, so on the face of it was costing the household money, but for those first two weeks she hardly ate a thing anyway, just kept going on some ends of cheese which she nibbled like a mouse. After two weeks or so her appetite and speech began, gradually, to return, but she still didn't cost a lot to keep, for she would either share my portion or help herself to a ladleful of meat and vegetables from the stewpot which hung permanently over the fire. It was a rich household and there was no need for anyone ever to go hungry.

More pressing was the question of where Betsy would go during the day in the winter, for the other children either had little jobs on the farm or went back to spend the day with their mothers. A very young child in a dairy, however, is a danger to itself and others. For the first few days, she wanted nothing more than to go down to Will's hut and, after looking in it carefully to make sure that he hadn't arrived back in the night, stare endlessly over to the other side of the river, where the ferry boat still stood, saying, ‘But where has he gone?' and looking far more miserable than any five-year-old should ever do.

Wanting to keep her occupied and entertained, I hit upon the idea of encouraging her to learn how to make the simplest of corn dollies from lengths of straw. These proved popular, and she gradually made them for all the children and then moved on to the adults. Pressing these on the other servants, she would wish them a good day and give them a solemn smile, and as a consequence became quite a favourite – everyone had a greeting or a sweetmeat for the poor little orphan girl who'd been abandoned first by her sister then by her brother.

As for me, I feared that they just thought me a fool to have been taken in by him.

 

September wore on and the whole family went to Bath to take the waters. They met Miss Sophia there, who, according to more scraps of news which fluttered down to us from Faith, begged to be allowed home, but was refused. To retaliate, and still pining for her lost love, she was rude to the man whom her father had particularly wanted her to meet. By way of contrast, Miss Alice had attended the Assembly Rooms every night and danced on several occasions with a man who was a literary figure as well as being, word had it, worth ten thousand a year. She was, apparently, quite besotted with him, and Lord and Lady Baysmith were said to be pleased with the match.

Later in September, Miss Alice had two lady cousins staying with her, so the house seemed a merrier place. Betsy, very much admiring their gowns and their hair ornaments, took to watching their various comings and goings from the house and had soon made them all corn dollies, which she was too shy to present to them but which I passed on by means of their maids. Subsequently, these Misses – bored and, I think, seeking to do Good Works – asked to meet Betsy. They came to the dairy one afternoon and Mrs Bonny had me dress Betsy in a clean smock and present her as a poor little abandoned child – which, I suppose, was exactly what she was. Betsy curtseyed very prettily and the young ladies each gave her a silver coin. Though it was but an amusement for them, it made Betsy smile again.

By the end of September everyone in the house owned at least one corn dolly, and Mrs Bonny professed to be anxious about them, saying that – seeing as they were fertility symbols – she hoped she wasn't going to lose all her girls to motherhood.

At the beginning of October the weather suddenly turned and I started to worry not only about what Betsy was going to do in the winter, but what she was going to wear, for she had no warm clothes, no outer garments or strong boots to wear when the rain was lashing down or it was snowing. I grew angry with Will again. Why hadn't he thought of that? Why hadn't he sent money from London or made some provision for Betsy before he went? She badly needed a set of winter clothes and, even more – the poor lamb – a kindly mother and father to nurture her, but clothes and foster families cost money and I had none. In all this time I had not heard a word from Betsy's sister Kate, either, and wondered, if she ever came back, whether she would even know where to find the child.

The cousins departed and Miss Alice returned to her books, now reading them in the drawing room in front of the fire or sometimes, if her mother was not at home, in the
petit salon
. One afternoon, with Faith on an errand somewhere and the other staff busy, I was asked to take in more clotted cream for Miss Alice's afternoon scones, so I quickly found a clean smock for myself, scooped some cream into a dish and carried it up on a tray.

She barely registered my presence at first, so engrossed was she in the book she was reading, but just pointed to the table and motioned for me to put the dish down. Suddenly, however – for she was not usually so ungracious – she seemed to realise what she was doing and spoke up quickly to thank me.