Beyond the Veil of Tears (44 page)

It was Jack who said, ‘Get out of our way.’

‘Listen, boy, I could buy and sell you a hundred times over, so don’t try and tell me what to do.’

‘Jack, please, leave him. Albert, go and get a court official.’ Angeline caught hold of Jack’s arm, seeing the fury in his face. ‘Jack, he’s not worth
it.’

Oswald’s eyes narrowed. ‘Jack, is it? So that’s it? Reverting to type, are you? They say water finds its own level, and scum settles with scum.’

‘I’m warning you—’ Jack never had time to finish what he was going to say, because with a roar Oswald sprang at him, taking him by surprise. It was pure instinct –
and Jack’s nimbleness – that saved him from being felled to the floor, because if the blow Oswald had launched had reached its target, it was doubtful Jack could have withstood it.
Certainly his jaw would have been broken. But Jack was lighter and slimmer, added to which he had been brought up in a district where most disputes were settled with the fists from an early age.
Ducking so that the blow merely glanced off his shoulder, he came back at the heavier man with a punch worthy of the boxers at the Michaelmas Fair.

Oswald staggered backwards, his feet sliding out from under him on the wet, slippery pavement, and ended up in an undignified heap sprawled in the gutter. For a moment he appeared stunned, but
then, as Randall came to his aid, helping him to his feet, he let loose a tirade that would have caused a sailor to blush, shaking off his coachman’s hand as he did so.

Albert and the court official came running, along with a constable who had been attracted by the commotion and the screams of the ladies. Mr Havelock was restraining Jack, and the other three
were holding onto Oswald when he suddenly became quiet, muttering, ‘All right, all right, take your hands off me. I was provoked, damn it! Can’t you see that? Let me go, I
say.’

The constable had caught the gist of what had gone on from Mr Havelock, and it was he who now said, ‘I suggest you go home, Mr Golding. Straight home. Do you understand me? Otherwise I
shall be forced to escort you to the station. And we don’t want that, do we, sir?’

The constable and the court official escorted Oswald to his carriage, standing in front of the group on the pavement as the coach trundled off in the pouring rain. Angeline was as white as a
sheet at the ugliness of the scene, and Miss Robson had needed smelling salts from Nurse Ramshaw when the fighting was over. Among the women, it was only Myrtle who appeared relatively unperturbed,
and she summed up what the men were thinking when she said, ‘Well, he’s had that coming for a long, long time, and he couldn’t have landed in a more suitable place than the
gutter.’

Jack chuckled, putting his arm round Angeline’s waist, careless of those present. He wasn’t prepared to hide how he felt about this glorious woman at his side for one minute more.
‘He’s beaten, and he knows it. He did his worst in court, and it backfired beautifully. He won’t dare show his face around these parts again.’

Angeline said nothing. It wasn’t the moment. But she knew, as surely as night follows day, that Oswald was more dangerous now than he had ever been. And now that he had an inkling about
Jack and her, it wasn’t only her own safety she was concerned about. From this day forth she would never know a moment’s peace. Jack and Mr Havelock could count today as a victory, but
she knew she hadn’t won. She shivered, the memory of Oswald’s enraged eyes clear in her mind. The war would go on until one of them ceased to draw breath, or until he accomplished what
he had tried to do when he had her locked away – and really sent her mad this time. Because how could she live, looking over her shoulder every moment of every day for the rest of her life,
without losing her mind?

‘All right, my love?’ Jack had noticed her silence and now he drew her round to face him, his gaze on her face. ‘What is it? You’re not still worried about Golding, are
you? We have the separation, and I tell you now I shall not rest until you are legally divorced from that fiend. You are not alone. You have me. Forever and ever.’ He kissed her and then
tucked her arm in his, and as a group they walked away from the courthouse, with the others talking amongst themselves.

Yes, she had Jack. She hugged the thought to her. And her dear friends, her job, her little home. And she wasn’t the young, silly girl she had been when she met Oswald Golding. She was a
woman now – a woman who had carved a new life for herself against all the odds, a good life.

A coach drove past them and immediately her eyes flashed to the window before she realized it wasn’t the Golding crest on the side of the door. She sighed, the sound inaudible, at the
realization that she could talk to herself till the cows came home, but the fact was that Oswald would forever be the shadow at her elbow from now on, an evil presence that would haunt her day and
night. She just had to learn to live with it. She had no other choice.

Oswald found it difficult to sit in the coach, so great was his rage. The humiliation he had endured in court had been compounded by his ignominious defeat at the hands of the
man he now believed to be Angeline’s lover. She had dared to sit there, acting as pure as the driven snow and looking as tragic as any wronged heroine in a novel, when all the time she had
been sporting with a damned clerk. At least Mirabelle had class, much as he would like to get his hands round her pretty little neck and squeeze till her eyes popped.

They were passing an inn, and now he yelled at Randall to stop the coach. Leaving the coachman outside in the pouring rain, he entered the public house and found a seat near the roaring fire,
ordering a bottle of whisky from the buxom barmaid. When he left the premises over an hour later the bottle was empty and he staggered slightly as he climbed into the coach, swearing and cursing at
Randall as the coachman helped him into his seat.

The rain had eased, and as they left the town the sun came out, touching the newly washed countryside with the mellow golden light that precedes the onset of dusk. They passed meadows gilded
with the yellow blooms of buttercups, horse-chestnuts displaying their spiky blossom amid great fan-like leaves and creating a vivid patchwork of green and white. Overhead the skylarks soared
joyously in the heavens. Inside the coach Oswald sat in drunken moroseness, muttering foul obscenities and occasionally rousing himself to shout and swear at Randall when the coach bumped over a
pothole or two.

The massive gates into the estate were open when they reached it, and as the carriage bowled along the gravelled drive, Oswald sat up straighter. His anger had not abated one jot; rather it had
been fuelled by the amount of alcohol he’d poured down his throat. The desire to hurt something, or someone, was so strong he could taste it. On reaching the forecourt, he flung open the
carriage door and descended, glaring at Randall as the coachman made to drive off. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘To the stables, sir.’ Randall recognized the signs and kept his voice even, knowing that in this mood the master would pick on the slightest inflexion to accuse him of being
insubordinate.

‘Get someone else to see to the horses. I’m going shooting, and you’re accompanying me.’

‘Me, sir?’ It wasn’t unusual for the master to go and kill a few birds and rabbits, and maybe the odd deer, when he was in a temper, but normally the gamekeeper had to put up
with his curses and snarling when he missed a target. ‘You don’t want me to inform Brodie that you need him?’

‘If I wanted that, wouldn’t I have said so, you fool? I’m not waiting for Brodie – it’ll be dark soon, dammit. Now do as you’re damned well told.’

‘Shall I change, sir?’ Randall glanced down at his livery.

‘Not unless you want my boot up your backside.’ Oswald strode into the house, shouting for Palmer to fetch his guns from the gun cabinet. Within minutes the two men were tramping the
grounds of the estate, Randall in his coachman’s regalia and Oswald equally unsuitably attired in the formal clothes and shoes he had worn for the court appearance.

Randall was carrying the guns and heavy canvas bags for the kill, skidding and sliding in places where the sticky mud made the ground slippery in their inappropriate footwear. Ahead of him,
Oswald continued to turn the air blue with descriptions of what he would do to Angeline when he got the chance. Randall, who wasn’t easily shocked, having been coachman to Oswald for years,
felt defiled just listening to it. He had watched the young mistress – as he still thought of Angeline – outside the court as she had faced the master, and had seen the fear and dread
in her face. And she had good reason to fear him, Randall told himself. The master was quite capable of buying the services of ne’er-do-wells to do his dirty work for him; he wouldn’t
think twice about having the mistress and this clerk fella done in.

Oswald lurched and then fell heavily, striking Randall’s hand away when the coachman tried to assist him, and breathing fire and damnation as he hauled himself unsteadily to his feet once
more. They were now some way from the back of the house, but had not made for the usual, more straightforward route to the fields and woodland where the shooting would take place. Randall had known
better than to query this, however, and had simply followed his drunken master, inwardly swearing as his livery had become more and more dirty. It would take his wife hours to get the stains out,
he was thinking, when suddenly the sound of breaking wood, followed by a shriek and the master disappearing from view, brought him up short.

He didn’t need to think about what had happened, for the stench that hit him was answer enough. The master had fallen into one of the cesspits that this part of the grounds, at the back of
the building, contained. The cesspits were specially dug holes to accept the human excreta from the house via channels that dropped away some twenty feet deep, with an access point covered with a
lid of wood. A well-built cesspit, as these were, could last for more than two or three years without having to be emptied, being well lined with stone and brick. Clearly the cover of this one,
however, had perished and become rotten, without anyone noticing.

Randall walked gingerly to the edge of the pit, the smell nearly choking him as he peered down into the foul depths. Oswald must have gone right under the mass of rotting, gassy excrement and
urine, because his hair and face were black as he floundered and trod the obnoxious mass in an effort not to sink again, coughing and spitting as he called out, ‘Get me out of here, damn you.
I’m suffocating.’

Randall looked behind him and saw, buried in the grass and mud, the long wooden ladder that the scavengers used when they came to empty the cesspits – one man going down into the depths
and filling a tub by immersing it in the excrement, which two of his comrades would then haul up and carry, suspended on a pole, to their cart. It was a dangerous and unpopular job. Scavengers were
reported to suffer from suffocation from the gases, a wide range of illnesses and sometimes temporary blindness. Smelling the full force of the cesspit now, Randall could understand why.

He had actually bent down to pick up the ladder when he froze, a picture of his brother’s mutilated face searing the screen of his mind, followed by a hundred and one other degrading,
shaming incidents that he had been forced to watch, or endure himself, over the years. And he thought of this latest incident with the mistress – as kind and as bonny a lass as you could wish
to meet.

Straightening slowly, he walked back to the edge of the cesspit, where the smell and gases made his eyes begin to water. Oswald was clawing at the sides of the pit, which were slimy and foul, in
a vain effort to get a handhold, and Randall watched him for a moment before he said, his voice deep and throaty, ‘Don’t like it much down there, do you, sir?’

‘What?’ Oswald was choking and gasping, his voice rasping. ‘Get a ladder down here, man.’

‘You remember me brother, sir? Toby by name, but of course you wouldn’t know his name. We’re not even human beings to you, are we? But you might recall what you did to him,
even if you don’t remember his name, cos you took his eye out with your whip. Handsome fella he was, our Toby, and just sixteen years old when you maimed him for life. Walking out with a lass
from the village, he was, but she couldn’t stomach how he looked after, and upped and married someone else. Hard for the lad to take.’

‘Shut up about your damned brother and help me.’ Oswald was wheezing now, a note of panic in his voice.

‘I don’t think I will, sir, if it’s all the same to you. In fact, I think you’re exactly where it’s fitting for you to meet your end, covered in filth and human
muck. You’ve dished enough of the same out in your time, haven’t you?’

There was a horrible gurgle as Oswald must have swallowed some of the putrid sludge, and then a mad thrashing and animal whimpering.

The smell was making Randall gag and he moved away from the edge of the pit, walking back a few yards and listening to the cries and strangled pleas and curses, as he shut his eyes and lifted up
his face to the sun. After a while the sounds became weaker. And eventually there was a silence, broken only by the cooing of wood pigeons in the distance.

Randall waited for another thirty minutes because, although he did not regret what he had done, he couldn’t stomach looking down into the bowels of the pit once more to make sure the
master was dead. Then he slowly bent down and reached for the guns and walked back the way he had come, breaking into a run as he neared the back of the house. Bursting into the kitchen, he
frightened the cook and kitchen maids witless, shouting frantically, ‘Help! Get help! The master’s fallen into one of the cesspits!’

The news report about the landowner, Mr Oswald Golding, who had drowned ‘monstrously in the household’s excrement’ was talked about for weeks, until another,
more worthy news item took its place in local gossip. The inquiry into the tragic accident ascertained that a number of events had led up to the incident. The deceased had been drinking heavily in
the hours before the accident occurred – a local barmaid testifying that Mr Golding had consumed a whole bottle of whisky in the public house in which she worked, and had been unsteady on his
feet when he left the premises. On arriving home, he had apparently insisted that his coachman – rather than his gamekeeper, who knew every inch of the estate and would most certainly have
directed Mr Golding away from the area of the cesspits – accompany him on a shooting exercise. The cesspit into which the unfortunate Mr Golding fell had a decaying wooden top through which
he had dropped and, being twenty feet or so down, he had had no chance of climbing out without assistance. By the time the coachman had run to the house to fetch help, the deceased had breathed his
last, suffocated by the fumes. A ladder had been hidden in overgrown grass and nettles, which the coachman had not seen, although the inquiry stressed that no blame could be attached to the man
because of this. Indeed, the amount of alcohol Mr Golding had imbibed was most likely the prime cause of the accident, making him careless and unwary, and possibly more easily overcome, once he had
fallen. Here the coroner had remarked in an aside that he certainly hoped this was the case anyway; the thought of a man thrashing about and slowly suffocating in such foul conditions was the stuff
of which nightmares were made. Such a grisly end one wouldn’t wish on one’s worst enemy . . .