Settling the Account (3 page)

Beth looked guilty. ‘I don’t mean to.’

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of
dreaming,’ Frank said, and Beth turned her soft gaze on him in a
smile. The little girl’s eyes were a shade somewhere between brown
and green, and it could not be denied that they tended to have a
dreamy expression. Frank was not in the habit of staring at himself
in mirrors; if he was, he might have recognised Beth’s eyes as the
image of his own.

‘It doesn’t get the work done, does it?’
Maudie said. ‘And Ma’ll be wild if we don’t get it all finished.
You know what she’s like. She’s
so
bossy,’ she added in a
long-suffering tone.

‘Now, Maudie, don’t talk about your ma like
that,’ Frank chided. ‘You couldn’t ask for a better mother than
you’ve got.’ He chose not to hear Maudie’s muttered response,
though he had to hide a smile at her wounded expression. She was so
very like her mother, but Frank suspected she would never become
quite as adept at getting her own way. Unlike Lizzie, she did not
have a vague, easy-going mother to hone her skills on.

*

It did not enter Lizzie’s head to knock on
the door of the house that had been her second home all through
childhood. In the kitchen Sophie was lifting a tray of scones from
the range while two-year-old Andrew helped himself to raisins from
a jar on the table. She looked up at Lizzie’s entry and regarded
her in mild surprise.

‘Keeping well, are you, Sophie?’ Lizzie
asked.

‘Mmm.’

Making conversation with Sophie was always
something of a challenge; even Lizzie, who was not usually worried
by one-sided conversations, found her heavy going.

‘You’re looking well,’ she remarked. Sophie
patted the bulge of her latest pregnancy and smiled at Lizzie, but
said nothing.

‘Andrew’s growing, isn’t he?’ Lizzie
tried.

‘Yes,’ Sophie agreed, eyeing her son
proudly.

‘And Boy will be starting school this year,
won’t he?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good.’ Having exhausted the range of polite
conversation, Lizzie turned her attention to her real object.
‘Where’s Aunt Susannah?’

Sophie frowned in thought. ‘In the parlour.
Doing fancy-work.’ She looked doubtfully at Lizzie. ‘Jane’s
home.’

Lizzie gave a short laugh. ‘Yes, I know
Jane’d be better company. But it’s Madam I want to see, believe it
or not. Thanks, Sophie, I know the way.’

Susannah looked up from her needlework and
raised her eyebrows on seeing who her visitor was.

‘Well, Mrs Kelly! What an unexpected
pleasure. Sophie’s in the kitchen,’ she said, returning her
attention to her embroidery.

‘It’s you I’ve come to see, not Sophie.’

‘Really? I suppose I should be flattered.’
Susannah craned her neck to peer past Lizzie. ‘You haven’t brought
any of your children, have you?’

‘No, they’re all at home, so you needn’t
look so worried.’ Without waiting to be asked, Lizzie took a
seat.

Susannah made to rise. ‘I’ll tell Sophie to
make us a pot of tea, then.’

‘Don’t worry about me. Sophie’s up to her
elbows in baking, I don’t want to put her out.’

‘Sophie seems to enjoy that sort of thing,’
Susannah said. ‘Baking and scrubbing and looking after children. Of
course, she was brought up to that style of life. Well, what do you
want?’

‘It’s Amy. I’m worried about her.’

Susannah looked startled. ‘What’s wrong with
her? Is she sick?’

‘Sick in the heart, maybe,’ said Lizzie.
‘It’s about that trouble she had before she got married.’

Susannah’s expression tightened, and she
gripped her embroidery hoop more firmly. ‘Whatever do you mean,
bringing all that up again? It’s all behind Amy now, you’ve no
business stirring it up when she’s nicely settled.’

‘Oh, yes, very nicely,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘A
nice way to be settled, stuck with a grumpy old so-and-so like him.
And we all know whose idea
that
was, don’t we?’

Susannah fixed her with a steely gaze. ‘I
don’t intend debating the matter with you, Miss Lizzie. I don’t see
that it’s any of your business, anyway. He was the best she could
get, and she jumped at the chance.’

‘Jumped at it! Crawled into it, more
likely,’ Lizzie shot back. ‘Because you made her. Oh, she’s never
said it in so many words, but I know you twisted her arm to make
her do it. Just because you wanted her out of the way so Uncle Jack
would forget about what your brother did.’

‘Be quiet!’ Susannah hissed at her. Both
hands jerked outwards to grip the arms of her chair, and her
embroidery tumbled from her lap to the floor. ‘I’m not going to
listen to an interfering little madam like you telling me what you
think of me. Why is it your concern who Amy married, anyway?’

‘Because I love her! I’d have done anything
to make Amy happy. Not like you—you didn’t care what happened to
her as long as she was out of the way. You didn’t care how he’d
treat her.’

‘And what would you have had me do? Keep her
at home forever with a bastard child? Having her know everyone in
town was calling her a whore behind her back? At least I found her
a husband. He mightn’t be much, but he put a ring on her finger.
It’s easy for you to spout a lot of fine words about loving her—I
didn’t notice you offering to give her your precious Frank.’

‘What?’ Lizzie gaped at her, anger driven
out by astonishment. ‘I-I couldn’t have done that!’

‘Why not?’ Susannah pounced. ‘I thought you
said you’d have done anything for her. That didn’t include finding
her a husband, did it? You left that job to me, and then you’ve the
impertinence to tell me you don’t like my choice. Why didn’t you do
it for her, then? I’m sure your wonderful Frank would have treated
Amy as nicely as you claim you wanted for her.’

Lizzie was not used to being on the back
foot. ‘How could I have done that?’ she asked, an uncharacteristic
quaver in her voice. ‘I couldn’t have made Frank marry her, even if
I’d…’ She broke off without completing the sentence. She hadn’t
wanted to. The thought had never entered her head. It was a
ridiculous idea… or was it?

‘Couldn’t you? Really? I must say, from the
way people speak about Frank I’d got the impression you could make
him do anything you liked. I don’t see that it would have been so
hard to talk him into marrying Amy instead of you, not an
easy-going fellow like your Frank. It was no use my even thinking
of trying to win him around at the time, not when you had him well
and truly in your clutches, but I’m sure you could have done it if
you’d wanted. He might even have taken in her child as well. After
all, men always seemed to think Amy was terribly pretty—much
prettier than you, certainly. She and Frank would have made a
rather nice-looking couple, don’t you think?’

Lizzie’s mouth hung open as she tried to
absorb the notion that she should have given up Frank to Amy. She
stared down at the square of carpet, then turned back to meet
Susannah’s eyes.

It was the look of satisfaction on
Susannah’s face that brought Lizzie back to her usual good sense
with a bump. ‘What a load of rubbish!’ she said in disgust. ‘You’ve
never even thought of Frank marrying Amy till just this minute—you
just said it to upset me.’

‘Oh, yes, you would say that, wouldn’t you?
Much easier to pretend it’s all my fault.’

‘I know what you said to Amy when you made
her marry Charlie—some of the things you said, anyway. You went on
and on about how no one else would want her, only a grumpy old man
like Charlie. And now you’re making out Frank would’ve married her
if I’d just said the word. You can’t have it both ways, you know.
You’re just a nasty old… old battleaxe,’ she said, swallowing the
riper abuse that hovered on her tongue. ‘You can’t stand seeing
anyone else happy, can you? Just because you’re such an old misery,
you want everyone else to be miserable too.’

‘How dare you speak to me in that fashion?
You can leave my house this minute.’ Susannah stood up, drawing
herself to her full, impressive height, and pointed to the door in
a dramatic gesture.

Lizzie stood to face her, unaware of the
contrast between Susannah’s tall, angular form and her own
well-rounded one. She had to tilt her head up to meet Susannah’s
eyes. ‘I’m not going until you tell me what I need to know. I
want—’

‘Do you think I’m going to listen to a
little baggage like you abusing me? Get out of my house.’

‘No!’ Lizzie shouted. ‘Just shut up a minute
and let me say—’

‘I won’t listen for another—’ Susannah
stopped speaking, and turned to face the door. ‘What do you
want?’

Lizzie followed her gaze and saw Sophie
standing in the doorway, a frightened expression on her face.
Little Andrew clutched his mother’s skirts and peered nervously
around her, his mouth wreathed in jam.

‘You all right?’ Sophie asked, her eyes
flicking from Susannah to Lizzie. ‘I heard a bit of a fuss.’

‘Yes, yes, we’re quite all right,’ Susannah
said with an impatient wave of her hand. ‘You can go away, Sophie.’
Sophie hoisted Andrew on to one hip and went obediently, casting an
anxious glance over her shoulder.

Susannah followed their retreating forms
with a disapproving gaze. ‘Such a grubby child,’ she murmured. ‘He
seems to attract dirt like a magnet. I’m sure neither of my boys
ever got into the state he does.’

She turned back to Lizzie, but the fire had
gone out of her mood. She managed no more than a look that combined
languor and hostility. ‘Go away,’ she said, resuming her chair and
retrieving her embroidery from the floor.

‘Not just yet.’ Lizzie sat down once again
opposite Susannah, and stared back undaunted when Susannah glared
at her. ‘All I want is for you to tell me something about what
happened to Amy.’

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake! Are you going to sit
there all day going on about that? I’ve the most frightful headache
coming on, too. I told you, that’s all behind Amy. It’s high time
you forgot about it—I’m sure she must have by now.’

‘I thought it was all behind her, too,’
Lizzie admitted. ‘But it isn’t. And she hasn’t forgotten anything.
And now with this business in the papers—’

‘What on earth are you going on about?’
Susannah interrupted. ‘What have the newspapers got to do with
Amy?’

‘This baby farming thing, of course. Amy’s
got it into her head that the woman she gave her baby to was like
that one down south. She’s going on about giving her baby away to
be buried in the garden, and all that. I need to—’

She stopped abruptly at the expression on
Susannah’s face. She had thought the older woman was angry before;
now she saw her white-faced with cold rage.

‘Is that what you think of me?’ Susannah
said, her voice so quiet it was barely audible, but far more full
of fury than her earlier shouts had been. ‘You hate me so much that
you think I’d do something like that? You actually think I gave
Amy’s baby to a murderess? A helpless child—my husband’s
grandchild—and you accuse me of that?’

Up till this moment Lizzie had not thought
beyond Amy. It had simply not occurred to her to muse on Susannah’s
guilt or lack of it. Now she studied the question for a few moments
and came to a rapid conclusion: Susannah might be selfish and
ill-natured, but she was not capable of that atrocity.

‘No, I don’t think you did,’ Lizzie said. ‘I
think you probably thought you were doing it for the best—to tell
you the truth, back then
I
thought it was best for Amy to
give the baby away.’

Susannah looked somewhat mollified. ‘When I
think of the trouble I went to over that business,’ she said in a
hurt voice. ‘Getting Constance to find a suitable woman, going to
see the woman myself to check that she seemed satisfactory—and the
money
your Uncle Jack had to pay for her to look after the
baby. And all that time having to keep it secret from Mother and
Father—I was never quite sure that Constance wouldn’t go telling
Mother, just to cause trouble.’ She looked at Lizzie with a small
gleam of triumph in her eyes. ‘I told Constance it was you. I said
it was my husband’s niece who’d got in trouble, and I was doing
them a favour by getting you sorted out. “Poor Elizabeth, she’s
rather a simple sort of girl.”
 
’

If Susannah was hoping for a bite from
Lizzie, she was disappointed. The notion that people she had never
met, and almost certainly never would meet, might think badly of
her was not likely to trouble Lizzie. She shrugged and turned back
to the real issue.

‘Anyway, what matters is how Amy feels about
all this. Like I said, she’s got it into her head that this Mrs
Crossley woman’s done away with the baby—now, you know and I know
that it hasn’t happened,’ she said quickly to forestall a fresh
outburst, ‘and if she was feeling herself Amy would know it too.
But she’s got into a state over it, and the only way she’s going to
come right is if I can convince her some way or other that the
baby’s all right.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’
Susannah asked.

‘I figured it out.’ There seemed no need to
explain that it had been Frank’s idea to try and contact Mrs
Crossley; Lizzie thought it for the best that no one in the family
found out just how much she had told Frank about Amy’s ‘bit of
trouble’. ‘I thought if I wrote to the woman who took the baby and
got a decent sort of reply from her, that’d put Amy’s mind at rest.
I mean, the woman wouldn’t answer if she was a baby farmer, would
she? She’d have run off somewhere by now with all the money.’

Susannah stood and began pacing restively
about the room. ‘I think you should leave well enough alone. It
seems ridiculous, bringing up all that old trouble. Tell Amy she
should pull herself together—making such a fuss over it all!
Goodness me, hasn’t she enough to keep her busy without dwelling on
the past? She’s got a house and a husband, and two children—that’s
all you farm girls want, isn’t it? What’s wrong with her, brooding
like that?’