Children of the Tide (30 page)

‘Nonsense, William,’ Ellen remonstrated with him. ‘How can that be when we have all these fine young people about us?’

Sammi came and put her arms around him to comfort him. ‘We’ll never be wiped out, Pa. The Fosters and the Rayners will go on for ever. Tell him, Tom – we will, won’t we?’

Her father sighed but smiled at her earnestness. ‘Yes, of course we will, Sammi. How could I think otherwise with all of these kindred?’

Tom looked up at the question and gazed at her. He didn’t answer, but a deep hurt filled his eyes. He excused himself and abruptly left the room.

‘Please stay, Sammi,’ Betsy had pleaded with her. ‘I can’t manage on my own. I don’t know how to cope with sickness – and if Da should die I wouldn’t know what to do. Please, please stay.’

Sammi agreed that she would stay a little longer. Betsy was in a deep shock, her face was pallid, she couldn’t stop trembling, and she could hardly bear to go near her father’s bedside. The doctor came in every day to administer the medication, and arranged for a woman to come in and change Thomas’s bedding and take it away for washing, whilst Sammi, at frequent intervals, bathed her uncle’s face with cool water when he sweated with pain. Sometimes he became lucid and tried to speak to them. He asked for Tom and gave him instructions on who he should
send for to help them with the milling while he was incapacitated; he had forgotten the details of his accident and thought that he was laid up with some sickness.

At other times he was delirious and called out for his father and mother as if he were a child again; or he would shout for his wife to bring him a jar of ale into the mill.

Betsy became increasingly more depressed and each day pressed Sammi for assurance that she wouldn’t go home.

‘But
you
must tend your father, Betsy,’ Sammi admonished her. ‘He needs you more than me.’ She felt so tired, her uncle’s demands were beginning to exhaust her, yet she felt compelled to sit by his bedside and watch over him when Tom and George were working so hard and so long, and Betsy spent more and more time lying on her bed weeping and saying that she felt ill.

The fantail had been replaced on the cap, and the farmers were starting to harvest the barley which spread across the land like a layer of golden sand; the wheat was on the turn from its verdant hue to pale gold, and Tom said if they didn’t do the milling, then the farmers would take it elsewhere.

‘There are plenty of other millers willing to do it,’ he said, wiping his forehead with a cloth and accepting a jug of lemonade which Sammi had brought in for them, and replying to her scolding that they were working too hard. ‘But we could do with some help.’

‘Could you not get a young lad to help with the sacks?’ she asked.

‘He’d have to be strong.’ George took a gulping draught from the jug. ‘Those sacks are not exactly full o’ feathers. We couldn’t tek on any recklin’.’

‘Would you take on Luke Reedbarrow, Tom? I saw him in the lane the other day and he asked how your father was. He said if there was anything he could do—’

Tom’s face became tense. ‘We’ll manage,’ he muttered.

‘Aye, he’s a big strong fellow,’ George interrupted, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. ‘He wouldn’t have any bother lifting ’sacks.’

‘I’ll think about it.’ Tom turned away. ‘Come on, let’s get a move on or we shall be here all night.’

That evening Uncle Thomas seemed quite rational and asked Tom quite clearly where Mark was. ‘I need to speak to all of my lads, Tom, to make things clear. This illness is taking its toll on me. My head hurts and my legs ache summat terrible. I can’t seem to move ’em, and it seems to me that a miller is no good wi’out his legs, no good at all.’

‘Your legs are broken, Da.’ Tom, conscience-stricken, endeavoured to be honest with his father. ‘You won’t be milling again. You can take it easy now; George and I will take over.’

His father pondered this for a long while; Tom wondered if he had done the right thing in speaking out, when his father spoke again in a whisper, ‘Tha’d better try and find Mark then, for tha’ll not manage wi’ just two of thee. See if he wants to come back, equal partners with thee, though it’s not as I planned; and George, well, George isn’t cut out to manage, though he’s as good a worker as any, but I know tha’ll see that he’s treated fair.’

‘Aye, Da. I’ll look after George. He’s just a babby in arms where money and business is concerned. But I don’t know where Mark is. He’s not written home yet.’

His father gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Then tha’ll have to get some help. We can afford it. And Tom—’ he reached out a limp hand towards his eldest son, ‘—everything’s taken care of if owt should happen to me, if sands o’ time should run out and I snuff it, sudden like.’

Tom felt a lump come into his throat and he tried
hard to swallow. ‘You’ll be all right, Da. You’ll soon be up and able to take care of ’accounts and farmers’ bills and such like.’

His father ignored his stammering and turned to gaze out of the square window to the sky beyond. On the window-sill were pots of bright red geraniums and sweet-smelling musk and a bowl of roses which Sammi had brought in, in an attempt to brighten up the sick-room.

‘All accounts are up to date,’ he went on. ‘We don’t owe anybody; tha’ll find everything tha needs in my strong box when time is right. And Tom,’ he turned his gaze back to him, the effort to speak was becoming harder, ‘tha’ll need to get wed. It’s doubly hard running a mill wi’out a good woman by tha side.’ He gave a weary sigh. ‘I know. I know how hard it is, and ’bed is cold and lonely at night.’

‘I’ll leave it to George to get wed, Da,’ Tom said in a bid to amuse. ‘He’s the one that ’lasses chase, not me.’

‘Nay, it has to be thee, Tom. Firstborn needs a wife at ’mill, aye and some sons to carry on after. Find thyself a helpmate, somebody who’ll share thy troubles and joys. And find George a good strong lass to look after him. Ask Sammi, she’ll help thee find somebody to suit thee both.’

‘And what about Betsy, Da?’ Tom joked, though he had no laughter in him. ‘Do you want me to find a husband for her, too?’

His father wearily shook his head and closed his eyes. ‘Betsy is a law unto herself. She’ll go her own way. She’s not like ’Fosters at all. I don’t know who she’s like. Somebody from a long way back, I reckon. No, Betsy’ll make her own bed and happen she’ll lie on it too.’

Tom waited until his father dropped off into an exhausted sleep, and strode off down the lane and into the village. He crossed over a dirt road and turned down a narrow lane which led to a cluster of
cottages and the thatched house and smallholding where the Reedbarrows lived.

Mrs Reedbarrow answered his knock. She was a tired-looking woman who had borne six children after Luke; one child had died, two of the girls had gone to work in Hull, and the three younger ones were still at home. She wore a handmade tucked and pleated bonnet on her fading fair hair and a sacking apron wrapped around a loose black skirt, which did nothing to hide her pregnancy. She pointed with a wooden spoon towards the long garden where she said Luke was working.

He had his booted foot on a fork, digging up a bucketful of early potatoes and throwing the haulms onto a heap where there was other rotting vegetation. The garden was neat and orderly. Rows of onions, their straight stalks green and lush, stood next to a row of young cabbages, and beyond them were the feathery tops of carrots.

‘Everything growing well, Luke?’ Tom bent to pick up a potato and rubbed off the skin with his thumb. ‘You’ve got a good crop of spuds.’

‘Aye.’ Luke straightened up. He towered over Tom by about three inches. ‘I’ve got green fingers like thou hast miller’s thumb. But growing ’taties and carrots doesn’t bring in as much brass as milling corn.’

‘No,’ Tom agreed. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’ He threw the potato back into the bucket. ‘I wondered if you could spare some time to help out at ’mill? You’ll have heard about my father’s accident? We’d be pleased to have some extra help. Usual labouring rate.’

Luke scraped the heavy soil off his boot with the fork. He nodded his big head and pushed back his fair hair out of his eyes and looked Tom straight in the face. ‘I wondered when tha’d get round to asking. Are there any conditions?’

Tom hesitated, then before turning on his heel
replied, ‘No. None but the usual when working in a dangerous place.’

‘Right then.’ Luke stabbed the prongs of the fork into the earth. ‘I’ll be round first thing in ’morning.’

James read Gilbert’s letter and noted that although Gilbert had said how ill his father had been, the emergency was now passed.
If anything should happen to my father then I won’t go home again
, he pondered.
Mother doesn’t care about what I do, nor does Anne, and Gilbert will soon be married to Harriet and will be busy in his new life. I should always keep in touch of course, with Gilbert – and with Sammi
, and guiltily he bethought himself,
I must write to Sammi. I cannot explain of course, that I’m now sure I haven’t experienced sexual union, but I’ll tell her that I am almost certain that the child isn’t mine and therefore do not feel compelled to support him. She will be upset, I expect, as she will have grown fond of him. But it cannot be helped
, he debated,
it will be hard enough making a living for myself without providing for someone else’s offspring
.

However, as the days passed, he began to grow anxious about his father and decided that he would, after all, pay a short visit. He put on a velvet jacket which Madame Sinclair had bought him as a gift, and, looking in a mirror, he adjusted his cravat. She often gave him presents: a pair of silver cufflinks, a Venetian glass bottle for holding hair-dressing, a pair of kidskin gloves which she insisted he wore to protect his artistic hands and blithely describing them as mere trinkets when he demurred over accepting them.

He would call upon her this morning and tell her that he must travel to Yorkshire to visit his sick father.

‘Oh, my poor James. How very sad for you, of course you must go.’ She greeted him once more in the conservatory when the maid took him through. ‘But
it is a great pity that you must go at this time, for I was about to send a message asking you to call on me tomorrow.’

How lovely she is
. He gazed longingly at her in her simple gown of white muslin which draped and folded its softness around her.

She invited him to sit beside her on the chaise longue and gave him her hand to kiss.

‘Tomorrow, Madame? Is there something special about tomorrow?’

‘Ah. Every day is special since meeting you, James,’ she said softly. ‘But I wanted you to meet someone, a friend from Italy.’

‘A friend?’ He was struck by a pang of jealousy. He knew nothing of her life before she came to London, and she had always deflected his questioning when he had asked her of it.

‘Is he a lover?’ he blurted out. He couldn’t bear it if the answer was yes. He felt so gauche, so young and inexperienced in comparison with her, for she teased him and flattered him, and he felt that she was inviting him to proposition her, yet he didn’t dare.

‘A lover, James? Would you care so much if he was?’ She playfully teased him.

‘Yes,’ he replied vehemently. ‘I would mind very much. I would probably kill myself.’

‘How?’ She gazed at him and stroked his thigh with her fingers. ‘How would you kill yourself?’

He drew in a sharp breath. She knew so well how to disturb him. ‘I would drown myself in the Thames or throw myself beneath a train,’ he said huskily. ‘I have told you that I love you. I cannot bear it if you love someone else.’

‘But if I have loved someone else in the past, that is all right,
si
?’

‘I cannot help what has gone before.’ He touched her cheek with his fingers, her skin was soft and fragrant. ‘But I want you to love only me now.’

‘I haven’t said that I love you, James.’ Her eyes were
dark and deep, and the scent of orange blossom in the conservatory was overpowering; he was suffocating with the perfume and the desire to hold her in his arms. ‘But I think that perhaps I could,’ she whispered.

He couldn’t believe what he heard. Did she mean what she said? Or was she teasing him yet again? But her face was gentle, not playful or tantalizing but tender, with a seductive softness in her eyes.

‘Madame – Mariabella,’ he breathed, ‘I ache for you. Please, don’t torment me! Either send me away or let me stay and show you that I love you.’ He clasped both her hands and pressed them to his lips, then raised his eyes to hers. ‘I adore you. I have never loved anyone else.’ His ardour threatened to engulf him as she drew him towards her and he bent his head to kiss her on the mouth.

He trembled and closed his eyes. Her lips were warm and soft. He kissed her again, taking courage when she hadn’t spurned him, and held her in his arms, feeling the shape of her body between his arms.

She pulled away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began. ‘Forgive me.’

‘No. No. There is nothing to forgive,
amore mío
,’ she whispered, touching her fingertips to his lips. ‘But not here.
Viene
. Come with me.’

He followed her in a vacant, dreaming reverie, barely noticing where they were going as she led him out of the conservatory, through the cool hall, so cool after the heat of the conservatory that he shivered, up the curving staircase to a landing lit by a tall window, and with two closed doors.

She put her hand on the door-knob of one of the doors and ushered him inside. ‘
Un momento
, James, and I will come to you.’

James sank down and put his head in his hands. At last, she would be his to love, but— He was filled with self-doubt. What if he made a fool of himself? She would surely know that he was unskilled in the
art of love; perhaps she would expect more from him than he could give? She was foreign after all, and a married woman! Beads of perspiration gathered on his forehead. Suppose her husband came to visit unexpectedly? Suppose the maid came in whilst they were
in flagrante delicto
? It didn’t bear thinking about. Perhaps, after all, he should make his excuses and leave and come ba