Summer's End (23 page)

‘I might.'

‘Can you or can you not?' Phoebe was outwardly calm. She was after all the Rector's daughter, and Len Thorn could not read her dreams.

‘Yes.' He seemed disconcerted, she noticed with relief, for that meant she was winning the game. ‘I'll be up tomorrow for Miss Poppy. I'll be seeing you then. Ten-thirty.'

‘I shan't be there.' She spoke too quickly, and he sensed victory.

‘Afraid of me then?'

Phoebe rushed away in confusion, aware she was wrong. She wasn't winning, and she wouldn't be anywhere near the stables tomorrow. She'd go to Tunbridge Wells – or would it be better to face her fears? She'd see how she felt tomorrow.

‘Where do I put this ham, Mrs D?' Harriet wiped the sweat from her eye and picked up the ham in one continuous movement.

‘In the larder, miss. Where do you think?' Mrs Dibble called from her stillroom, as she liked to call it. Old cupboard was more like it in Harriet's view. ‘And I thought I told you to do them dustbins out with paraffin and soft soap again. Them flies is tedious busy.'

‘I'm a housemaid, not a kitchen skivvy.'

‘This week you're a kitchen slave like we all are, Miss Hoity-Toity. Mrs Lilley told you that.'

The wedding was only a week away now, and the tempo and the temperature were both increasing.

‘I've a job for you, if you don't like kitchens.'

‘What?' Harriet was suspicious of jobs.

‘Go down to the village and speak nice to Mrs Lettice.'

‘Why?'

Mrs Dibble delivered her broadside. ‘Because we ain't got no raspberries, that's why, thanks to you. They're all gone. He couldn't keep 'em back in this hot weather. Shrivelled and turned.' There was complacent gloom in Mrs Dibble's voice. ‘If you'd ordered them when I said –'

‘I did. He forgot.'

‘Get down to Mrs Lettice, girl. It's eight o'clock already. She'll be closing. Her brother out at Hartfield does raspberries. Happen he'll have some left. He'd better, for your sake, Harriet.'

Smarting with injustice, Harriet crammed her old straw hat on, determined to get her own back somehow. The chance presented itself as she saw Mary Tunstall passing the Rectory gate, she who did for the Miss Norvilles, poor simple soul. ‘Hallo, Mary. My you're brave.'

‘Why's that?' Mary was unaccustomed to girls as smart as Harriet speaking to her.

‘Walking back this time o' night with him around.'

‘Who?' Mary gaped.

‘That awk Fred Dibble. Ain't you seen him hiding in the bushes when girls go by? He'll jump out one day, you'll see.'

‘Whatever for?' Mary was bewildered.

‘Ain't your mother ever told you? He likes to see girls,' she whispered in Mary's ear, ‘without anything on. Nothing at all. He looked in at me once. You want to be careful.'

Mary thought about this. ‘I don't walk around with nothing on.'

Harriet forgot about patience with poor Mary. ‘He'll tear 'em off you, like he does to others,' she shouted. ‘Ain't he ever even touched you? Can't you sense him
watching
when you walk up that long lonely path to the Castle?'

Beware the beast, flee the bear, don't face it.

‘I just came,' Phoebe announced airily to a remote corner of the
stable, ‘to tell you Poppy's not very well, so Father says –'

‘Father says stay away from men, eh? That it, Miss Phoebe?' Len Thorn spoke very softly. ‘Pity. A lovely girl like you is just waiting to be kissed. You must be fifteen now, I'll be bound. Won't be long to wait now.'

‘I'm seventeen.' Phoebe was indignant.

‘Is that so? You're a woman, I see, now I look further.' His eyes travelled down slowly, then up again. ‘Did you ever wonder, Miss Phoebe, what life is like outside this Rectory here?'

‘Of course. I'm going to finishing school in September.'

‘Will they teach you to finish this?'

Face the formless bear. She had no choice. He stretched out his arms for her, kissed her, not like the curate, but taking her breath away and forcing her mouth open, sucking greedily, surrounding her with hot breath. She seemed to be clamped to his chest, yet she was certain she could feel his hand on her leg. How could it be, for it seemed to be her stockinged leg, and then before she could react, it was clamping her between her legs, and a pain, well, not a pain but something, shot right through her. What was he doing now? Whatever it was, she was quite certain she didn't want him to do it, and moreover he
shouldn't
be doing it. Then suddenly she was free, her skirts falling back.

‘There now, Miss Phoebe,' he said hoarsely, ‘you're too pretty, that's the trouble.' He stared at her and she knew she should run away or cry out, but she seemed curiously immobile. He ran one hand over her chest, almost absently, and bent forward to kiss her again. She knew she should move, but she didn't. This time he didn't try to force his tongue into her mouth but kissed her quite gently, and the feel of his lips on hers was rather nice. This time that pain, or whatever it was, was exciting as it travelled down her. ‘Pretty, pretty, Miss Phoebe.' His tawny eyes seemed to be searing into her; he released her, and this time she did move away.

‘Will you tell your father, Miss Phoebe?' The note of cocky defiance wasn't in his voice any more, but she couldn't seem to take advantage of it.

‘No. If you don't do it again.'

‘Not unless you provoke me, Miss Phoebe.' His nonchalance was coming back now, and he whacked Poppy on her side, as if to reiterate his point.

His face haunted her dreams that night, not so terrifyingly as before. The formless blank shape came curiously, excitingly, but insidiously, creeping towards her, around her, into her, merging in the black shadows that were dancing outside the Rectory windows.

Next day a deeply troubled Mary told her mother about the shape in the bushes who would jump out and tear off her clothes; the mother told her neighbour, who warned her daughter, who giggled about it with her friend, who was so scared that Mary had been stripped mother-naked on her way to the Castle that she told her sister, who told her brother, who told … and pretty soon even Joe Ifield knew Fred Dibble was up to his nasty tricks again.

She hadn't seen Jamie.
Agnes tossed and turned in her bed; counting sheep, counting pies, nothing worked. He hadn't been at the gate in Silly Lane as he usually was on her half-day off, and pride had kept her from marching up to the ironmongery to seek him out. What if she'd sent him straight into Ruth Horner's arms again, what then? Had she cleaned the slicing machine? One dark thought after another chased through her mind. A drumming inside her began to beat insistently, growing louder and louder. Bang, she'd lost him, bang, he'd marry Ruth, bang, he'd kill himself – it
wasn't
inside her. It was outside, an insistent beating, men's voices, women's too. Outside the Norville Arms, was it? She lay there rigid, unable to be sure this was not another nightmare. Then she was sure; it came nearer. They must be in the High Street, banging, shouting, clapping – not a drunken rabble, though. She sat up in bed, rigid with fear. This was far more sinister: determined, menacing, organised threat with the sound of marching feet. Then it stopped for a moment as though it were gathering strength. It was a little further away now, further up the High Street, by the ironmongery. And then she knew:
Jamie.

It was as if the whole of her insides were turned into one gigantic silent scream. Rough music. Her ma used to tell her about it, how it hadn't been done for many a long year, how all the villagers turned out of their homes to gather in front of someone's door to show their disapproval by banging anything they could lay their hands on, then attacking the cottage itself with brooms, tin pails, anything. It were worse, so ma said, than anything the village policeman might do. It hadn't died out, though, for tonight they were doing it to her Jamie.

She moaned to herself, her arms clasped round her, rocking to and fro in agony. When that didn't help she drew the sheets over her head, to distance the noise, but nothing could extinguish the sound of Jamie's voice in her ear crying, Are you one of them, Aggie,
are
you?

She heard a door slam. That would be the Rector going out to calm them down. Tensely she waited, counted each step he must be taking, calculating the time it would take him to reach the crowd and shame them into silence. It took fifteen minutes longer than she had thought before the dull roar became a low rumble, and then nothing, as the protesters slipped away into the darkness and at last she fell into a troubled sleep.

‘No, Laurence, I fear you are wrong, sadly wrong. My department looks not to Ireland for the dogs of war, but to Europe.' Sir John paced up and down his study, his brandy and soda as yet untouched, which was a sure sign of his agitation, the Rector realised.

‘But even if Russia mobilises in support of Serbia, how are we affected?'

‘If Russia fights, Germany joins Austria. It will follow, as the night the day.'

‘And if so?'

‘France has a treaty with Russia, and moreover may welcome the chance to regain what she regards as her honour, lost in 1870.'

The Rector stared at the Squire. He was tired after his interrupted night. When the troubles of Ashden were so time-consuming, he lacked the energy to grapple with those of the outside world, especially those that could not affect England. Nevertheless he tried. ‘And because we are morally bound to France by a mutual understanding, we may be drawn in? Surely not. It is a European war. France would not be so foolish as to expect it, and even if she were, she will realise we cannot support her, because of Ireland. And even if there were no Irish problem, there would be no public support to ally ourselves with France in this present difficulty. No, all this is mere sabre-rattling.'

‘The Kaiser has wanted to rattle a sabre at England for many a long year.'

‘But not to take on our Empire. He is foolhardy, but not foolish, surely.'

‘Foolish? If he believes that England faces the other way, faces Ireland not France, he might well wish to take his chance to humiliate her, or, worse, count on our neutrality to pursue his own plans of Empire. When he is master of Russia and France, he might reason, he can pick off England at will.'

‘Your theory is just that. It can have no realistic basis.'

‘At the moment the Cabinet agrees with you. I trust with all my heart you and they are right, Laurence.'

‘Caroline.' Isabel hurtled through the door. ‘Come and help me.'

It was an order. Reluctantly, Caroline left Cicely Hamilton's
Marriage as a Trade.
She had escaped to her room only five minutes ago, creeping out of a tense discussion between her mother and Mrs Dibble over, of course, the likelihood of rain on
the day,
as the weather had perversely grown cool and close, and the worrying rise of a shilling per sack of flour in Liverpool because of the current uncertainty. When the talk turned to raspberries, she had fled to her book.

Her aunt had spoken of Miss Hamilton with disgust, as a renegade to the militant cause, since she had left the WSPU to join Mrs Despard's Women's Freedom league. Nevertheless she had lent Caroline her book and
that
was shocking enough. Marriage, in Cicely Hamilton's view – and, Caroline supposed, Aunt Tilly's – was no better than prostitution in that women were forced into it for economic reasons. As Ruth Horner had just avoided, Caroline was bound to agree. Not herself, though. Never. With Reggie, it would be an equal marriage. For Isabel …

‘Smell
this
.' Isabel marched her to her own room where she had set up her home-made perfume apparatus, a glass funnel suspended between two supports over a glass bowl. The Rectory's best blooms stood wilting in a jug (naturally Isabel had forgotten to give them water). ‘It doesn't smell at
all.
It's all Percy's fault. He wouldn't get me the pure alcohol I wanted. No one
cares.
I
hate
being poor.' She sat on the bed sulkily while Caroline sniffed cautiously at the results.

She glanced at Isabel. ‘It's not the perfume that worries you, is it?'

Isabel bit her lip. ‘No. I've decided I'm scared,' she announced dolefully.

‘Of what? Robert?' Caroline could not take her seriously, and was inclined to be impatient. Compared with poor Agnes's problems,
Isabel's were slight indeed – and entirely of her own making. Did she even know, Caroline wondered, what had been going on in the village this week, and would she care? Guilt overcame Caroline for she was all too well aware that the dark shadows over the village, much as she sympathised with Agnes and Jamie, were failing to touch her as they should, such was her own happiness.

‘Of marriage. But I do want to get married, don't I?' Isabel burst into tears, and, alarmed at this proof of sincerity, Caroline went to comfort her.

‘I can't answer that, darling, because I'm not in your head, in your heart or in your shoes. Perhaps you're a little worried about sharing a bed with someone?'

‘Perhaps,' Isabel muttered, then loftily, ‘of course, you wouldn't understand.'

Caroline would. She felt caught up in a web of mystery and excitement about her own wedding bed which filled her with strange feelings. Even the words ‘wedding bed' sent a happy shiver of anticipation through her. But what if her guess was right and Isabel didn't really love Robert? Then she could well understand how Isabel might dread it as an ordeal. ‘Robert will be kind and gentle, I'm sure.'

‘That may be the trouble,' Isabel said under her breath, covering it quickly with, ‘He's wonderful of course.'