All the dear faces (23 page)

“
You kicked him in the . . . ?"

“
I did. He should have trouble walking for a while, I should think, never mind anything else.
”

The door opened a crack and the white, anxious, puzzled face of Phoebe peered through it, her own pale blue eyes
round and uncertain. Annie turned and held out a hand to her and the young girl, with Cat behind her, followed by the dogs, tumbled over the threshwood to stand beside her. The animals, sensing the change of atmosphere, recognising the laughter and easing of tension, wagged their tails, eddying about Reed and his Bess with no sign of their former enmity.

“
This is Phoebe. She will stay with us now."

“
Will she indeed?" Reed scarcely looked at the plain child, his eyes reluctant to leave the golden burnished loveliness, the radiant smiling good humour of the woman who minutes earlier had struck him in the face. He had no conception of the expression which softened his own, arrogant, compelling features and the line of his well-cut, sensuous mouth. The joy in him was an emotion he had never known before and because of it, he had not yet learned to hide it. For that sweet and special moment, that laughter-filled, bewitched moment, his relief made him careless and he lifted his hand, needing to touch her, to put an enquiring tender finger to her chin or cheek, to tuck behind her ear a wild and curling tendril of her hair. She was looking down at the girl, her own expression gentle and she did not see it, but Phoebe did and the tension, the fear, the wariness she was to know with most men, fell away, for this man would never harm this woman. Phoebe was no more than a young inexperienced girl, but she had been brought up in a harsh world where love, or affection, was scarce and therefore because of its rarity, she was quick to recognise it. It was there, warm, strong, unbreakable, between Annie and her child. A natural love, protective and maternal, but this was different. The same, but not the same. She had never seen it between a man and a woman but, because at that moment he was making no effort to hide it, it was instantly recognisable.

“
You seem to attract stray young things to you, Annie Abbott," he said musingly, his eyes twinkling with his rare good humour. "What are you to do with this one?" He winked at Phoebe, who hung her head and drew patterns
on the grass with her foot, not awfully sure what to make of it.

“
She will be invaluable to me, won't you Phoebe? We'll help one another. She needs a home. I need a . . . friend. I have not many of those and she and Cat will be company for one another when I'm not here. She is already a great help to me, look. I am teaching her to make swill baskets . . ."

“
So I see. And do her talents run to fetching me a tankard of ale, that is if your establishment has such a thing? And if you feel the need to pour it over my head, I will quite understand.
”

They smiled at one another. They knew it would not last, this accord, this lightening and melting of their equally strong and wilful spirits. There was between them an unacknowledged affinity, a magnet which drew them together, whether it be in anger or fascination, a pulling towards each other of their senses which seemed to have the capacity to flare into an instant and flowing pleasure the moment they met. They did not want it, either of them, but a need, a compulsion in him drew an immediate response from her, a female thing which recognised that need and rushed to satisfy it. Her loveliness, her spirit, her defiant rebelliousness towards those who would have sent her packing, her humour, but most of all her vulnerability, called out to the male in him, bringing forth an emotion he had never before known. The need to protect, to cherish, to nourish. All these things lay between them, soft, tender and as yet fragile, but hidden beneath them was a raw and fierce desire to know, in all its glory, the sensual love which can bind together a man and a woman with bonds which are unbreakable. It was in his eyes, narrowed and watchful, even as they smiled, and in the answering curve of her parted lips. It was trembling in the air about them, muted now and subdued in the presence of the child and young girl, but ready to become clamorous and swelling with their ardour should they find themselves alone
.

They sat together on the drystone wall whilst he drank
the tankard of ale Phoebe brought him. The sunshine fell warm and benevolent about them. The air was pure and sweet. The wild flowers grew willy-nilly in a great profusion about them, and in every crack and crevice of the wall, filling their nostrils with a heady perfume which can only come with spring. The grass, greening and thickening in the field, was tufted with primroses and cowslips and behind them, standing against the old farmhouse for as long as the building itself, the great hawthorn tree showed the first signs of its golden bronze foliage. Up on the mountain pasture, the ewes and their lambs, returned there after lambing to await 'clipping' in July, called anxiously to one another, and high in Annie's coppice, a cuckoo sang. Larks wheeled in the deep blue of the sky above them, their song vying with that of the cuckoo and Annie and Reed held their breath and their own sharp tongues so as not to disturb this sudden lovely peace which had surprisingly overtaken them
.

They talked of this and that. The troubles in Ireland where it was thought rebellion would take place, a disaffection of the people, many of whom lived in misery and privation, predisposing large masses of them to rise up against it. The potato blight of several years ago had been repeated, the crops ruined and the people starving, so could you wonder at the unrest which prevailed there and the influx of the hundreds of thousands of starving Irish beggars who were leaving to escape it, many of them to the north of England
.

There was also trouble in France, rebellion again amongst the poor and destitute, where it was said Louis Philippe, King of the French, the 'Citizen King' as he was called, was in danger of losing his head as a Louis before him had done, and last month here in England, Feargus O'Connor, leader of the Chartist movement, had declared his intention of marching across Westminster Bridge at the head of what was to have been a peaceful protest, to lay his beloved Charter at the feet of Parliament. A pilgrimage it was to have been, involving 200,000 men from every part of the country and with so many involved, surely it
would be bound to succeed. One man, one vote and a secret ballot was not a lot to ask for, surely, among the six points of the People's Charter
?

But it was illegal for more than twenty people at one time to present a petition to the House of Commons. Of the 200,000 who were expected, nowhere near that many turned up for where was an out-of-work weaver or collier to get the fare to travel from Bradford or White-haven to London? There was no march. Those who did get there discovered no grand banners, nor bands to play them in and the confusion was appalling when the barricades erected by the police, expecting violence, were come up against. Special constables guarded every corner. There were many soldiers deployed and when at last those who got through arrived at the House of Commons, it all came to nothing, deflating like a pricked balloon.

“
Will they not get what they ask for?" Annie's face was alive with interest and concern, for it seemed to her, had she been a man, one who could find no work and no hope of feeding his children, she would have marched on bare and bleeding feet all the way to London to demand it. It also seemed to her that this Chartism had a great deal in its favour if it helped the vast mass of men and women who had no voice anywhere in this great land, to speak up and be heard.

“
Not this year they won't, nor next if the men of property have their way."

“
Like yourself you mean. You have a vote I presume."

“
I have, though the young men who march up and down in military formation do not believe I should, or if I have it, so should they. They will not let it rest, those who call themselves the 'physical force'. They will continue to meet and shout for Justice and Democracy even though they were defeated and sent scurrying home with their tails between their legs last month, and eventually, I suppose, they will get what they ask for. A vote for every man over the age of twenty-one . . ."

“
And women?"

“
Women? What about women?" He turned to look at her enquiringly, his mind and senses bemused by the way the sunlight tangled in her bright hair, streaking the copper with gold. It curled vigorously about her head, a great chrysanthemum halo which she had attempted to plait but which, with a life of its own, tumbled and twisted across her shoulders and down her back. She had tied a scrap of bright green ribbon about it, dragging it back from her forehead but it only served to enhance the fine, creamy pearl smoothness of her skin, the fierce dip of her golden brown eyebrows and the deep brown concern in her eyes which refused to believe that men should have a vote and women should not.

“
What about women! Our brains are as capable as yours of choosing a man, or even a woman . . ." she grinned gleefully, ". . . yes, even a woman to serve us in Parliament. A woman who would know what we need . . .
”

He began to smile. A short barking laugh burst from him in sheer and absolute amusement at her effrontery, her wayward and foolish effrontery, since the very idea of a woman having any voice in anything, let alone the running of the country, was so madly absurd that he took her to be joking
.

She was not. Her bright face darkened ominously and she jumped down from the wall, her short skirt swinging gracefully about her calves. She reached for the empty tankard which swung idly in his hand and, tossing her wild gypsy hair back from her shoulders she squared up to him somewhat in the manner of a pugilist who has just climbed into the ring.

“
What is there to laugh about, Reed Macauley? Why should I not have a vote like you? I am expected, in view of the fact that I have no man to do it for me, to support myself and my child, and I am not the only woman who is forced to it. I have seen them on my travels, wives separated from their husbands by war or other misfortune, deserted when their men go off, as men do, to fight in some God-forsaken place in the Empire. They
have no choice but to work and decide their own lives and though many of them can't do it and end up on the Poor Law, many succeed in wresting some sort of living .. ."

“
Don't, Annie, there's no need . . .
”

His face, which had been ready to crease into a smile of disbelief, had become soft, transformed by his amazing need to help this self-willed woman. The expression on it was one his own servants, his friends, even his own mother, would not have recognised. He did not care for it, this hunger of hers to be independent, to be her own master, to stand up and take her place among the farmers of the community as she seemed intent on doing. He had not been consciously aware of it but he had been waiting, hoping in his secret heart that she would be overcome by the sheer enormity of it, unable to manage, forced by hunger and the need to succour her child, to ask for help. His help, since no one else concerned themselves with her except Bert Garnett and Reed was well aware why he hung about Browhead. And Reed would be there when she did. When she needed him. He got no further than that. He did not think in terms of what he might gain from Annie Abbott's delightful dependence on him, but he was a man, was he not, and would not turn away from any show of gratitude she might think it politic to offer.

“
Don't struggle like this, Annie. Don't . . . fight so. Can you not see it will come to nought for they will not let it. They will do everything in their power to stop you succeeding, so won't you let me . . . help you . . . ?"

“
Help me? How?" She stared suspiciously into his face, looking for the reason behind his offer but by now his emotions were well hidden.

“
I'm sure there must be something you need, something I have which . . . Why don't you let me . . . ?" Pamper you, make life soft and easy, dress you in pretty gowns and . . . His eyes became unfocused as his dreaming unspoken thoughts and the images they evoked filled his mind. She did not like it.

“
And what would you expect from me, Reed Macauley?" Her head lifted imperiously and her eyes were a vivid, flashing topaz in her colour-flooded face. "No man gives to a woman without expecting something in return, or so I have found."

“
I have not said I want anything." He vaulted from the wall to stand before her and down the field, at the sound of the raised voices, Phoebe and Cat turned to stare, their hands busy with the buttercups and daisies which they were weaving into collars for the two dogs. The dogs stood up uncertainly.

“
Can you not accept help without looking behind every offer for an ulterior, motive?" he continued, thrusting his hard, uncompromising face into hers.

“
No, I can't," and she did not back away. "Experience has taught me .. ."

“
Experience! Jesus God, this life you have led has made you suspicious of .. ."

“
Everybody, Reed Macauley. Everybody who wears trousers and that includes you. A favour here and a favour there and having accepted them, then I am in your debt and no doubt you would be riding down here on your fine horse to collect your dues ... "