The Black Mountains (32 page)

Ted laughed, but the joke somehow brought a knot of suppressed nervousness into his throat. He went on, up the hill and into the narrow lane where the honeysuckle grew wild in the hedges. As he reached the pair of cottages he bypassed the path to the front door, walking along under the hedge to the back of the house.

This was his best point of attack, he reckoned. Rebecca was more likely to be at the back of the house and if he knocked at the front door, it would be easier for her father to keep him there and prevent him from seeing her.

He could hear the murmur of voices and thought perhaps they were sitting outside as his mother sometimes did on a warm evening. He rounded the corner and was almost surprised to find the yard and the lawn beyond it deserted. But when he looked towards the house, there, framed in the kitchen doorway and almost filling it with his bulk, was Alfred.

He was not wearing his jacket, and beneath his waistcoat, a billowing white shirt made his shoulders and arms appear more vast than ever. A gold watch chain strained importantly across his chest, and above his stiff collar his face was mottled putty and puce. Ted, however, was determined not to be overawed. Last week, descending from the churchyard wall, he had somehow had the aura of an avenging angel. Here, in the doorway of his own kitchen, he was at least human.

“Good evening,” Ted said politely. “I've come to see Rebecca.”

At once, Alfred Church swelled. His watch chain strained more tightly than ever, even his height seemed to increase.

“Go!” he roared. “You're not wanted here. I thought I made myself clear!”

“Oh, yes, you did,” Ted said “But it's Rebecca I want to see, not you. And it's not what you think. I want to marry her …”

“Marry her?” Alfred repeated incredulously. “ You think I would allow my daughter to throw herself away on the likes of you? You must have taken leave of your senses. In any case, she is betrothed. And that is the end of the matter.”

He went to shut the door, but Ted moved quickly, putting his foot in the way.

“Wait a minute! What are you talking about—Rebecca betrothed?”

“Young man, remove your foot and get out of my house. Rebecca is betrothed, I tell you.”

“Betrothed! She's not bloody betrothed—unless it's to me.”

“To you? A filthy fornicator? I'd see her dead first!” Alfred's eyes were burning now with the righteous fury of a madman, and fear for Rebecca's safety came to Ted in a great, sickening rush. Who could tell what lengths Alfred would go to keep his daughter, in his eyes, pure? Who could tell to what lengths he had already gone?

With a desperate, mighty heave Ted pushed at the door, and Alfred, taken by surprise, gave enough ground for Ted to be able to see that the kitchen behind him was empty.

“Becky!” he shouted, through the half-open doorway. “Becky, where are you?”

Suddenly, Alfred stepped aside, and the door flew open with such force Ted almost fell. “What the hell …” he began, but before the words were out, he understood. Alfred had stepped into the kitchen, and now he reappeared with a studded leather strap clutched in his huge fist and dangling threateningly.

“Now will you get out?” he bellowed, raising the strap until it was level with Ted's face. “Now will you leave us alone? You will not see her again, you sinner, you defiler of innocent girls …”

His fury mounting, he swung his arm back across his body and the evening sun caught the metal teeth of the strap, making them gleam coldly against the dark leather. Ted's reaction was instinctive and violent. If this man thought he was going to thrash him, he had another thing coming!

Before Alfred could bring the strap down on to his head, his arm shot back with the swiftness and precision of a piston, and he sank his balled fist into the soft, unprotected belly, six inches below the straining watch chain.

Alfred was a big man, but not a fit one. As Ted's fist connected, he crumpled, an expression of surprise on his face, and the belt dropped uselessly from his grasp. Then, clutching at his stomach, he sank to the floor in a gasping heap to retch over the bright rag rug.

Ted snatched up the belt and stood over him threateningly.

“Don't you ever try that again, mister! Ever!”

A small frightened sound caught his attention, and he looked up from the heaving man to see Rebecca and her mother in the kitchen doorway. The older woman pushed her way through, dropping to her knees beside her husband and trying to raise his head. But Rebecca did not move. Her face was ashen, her small, firm breasts rising and falling with her uneven breathing.

Ted took a step towards her. “ Becky, you're coming with me.”

Her eyes went to her father, and she covered her mouth with trembling hands. “You've killed him!” she whispered through her fingers.

“I've winded him, that's all, but I'll break his bloody ribs if he ever tries anything like that again. Now, get your things, Becky. You can't stay here.”

On the floor. Alfred began to stutter a protest, and Winnie raised her eyes appealingly to her daughter.

“Becky!” Ted said sharply, but she did not move, standing as if mesmerized by the scene before her.

Alfred, wheezing and coughing, pulled himself on to his knees.

“Get out!” he gasped, and his weak voice was somehow more awe-inspiring than his stentorian roar. “ Get out before I call a policeman and have you arrested.” His face diffused, he clutched his chest, and gasped again. Winnie fell upon him, loosening his collar and whimpering softly, and Rebecca, pale and trembling, caught at Ted's arm.

“Please go, Ted—please. You'll only make things worse. Oh, don't you see what you're doing?” The tears filled her eyes and began to run down her cheeks, and frustration and anger rose in Ted again. He looked from the small, anguished face to the man and woman on the floor, and realized that for the moment there was nothing more that he could do.

He crossed to the doorway, towering now above the heaving body and looking with distaste at the sweat-beaded head.

“I'll go for now,” he said. “But I'll be back. And don't you lay a finger on Becky, either, or I swear I'll break your bloody neck!” Then, not trusting himself to stay in the house a moment longer, he pushed open the kitchen door and went out.

Somehow he had to get Rebecca away from that madhouse, he thought as he wandered back the way he had come. And he had to do it soon, before her spirit was broken completely by her monster of a father. Somehow he had to get her far enough away from Hillsbridge so that Alfred was no longer able to reach her with his bullying and his threats. How he would do it, he didn't know. But if he thought hard enough, there had to be a way …

Tossing the belt into the thickly woven centre of a nearby lavender bush, Ted dug his hands into his pockets, and walked towards the scarlet sunset.

ALL NIGHT Ted lay awake, tossing and turning on his hard flock mattress as he ran over the events of the evening again and again, and searched for an answer to the seemingly insoluble problem of how to get Rebecca away from her father.

But it was the following Monday that the germ of an idea was soon in his mind. It was dinner-time, the half-hour break when the miners squatted down together along the sides of a roadway, to eat their cogknocker and cheese and drink their cold tea.

Today, James and Ted had been joined by Walter Clements and Reg Adams, a Bath-born lad who had recently begun work at the pit as a carting boy.

To Ted and to the others, Reg was something of a puzzle. In some ways, he reminded Ted of Jack, for he had the same quiet manner, and the same lack of interest in what Ted termed “the good things of life.” But there the likeness ended, for Reg seemed far more knowledgeable about what was going on in the outside world than Jack had ever been, and there was a wiry strength about him that surprised everyone who saw him dragging a putt of coal.

When he had first come to apply for the job, O'Halloran had privately given him a week at the outside, and had even speculated that the lad might not come back after his first day. But the days had become weeks, and Reg was still there, working as hard as he had to and no harder, and entertaining his work-mates with his strange talk and his wild predictions about the course of the war.

That dinner-time, the talk had somehow turned to conscription.

“It's bound to come,” he said in his soft, almost girlish voice. “You've only got to read the papers to know that.”

In the light thrown by their candles, the others had exchanged glances. They hadn't read anything about it in their papers. There'd been talk, yes, but talk was cheap, and there still seemed to be train-loads of young men responding to Kitchener's war cry without bringing in conscription.

“You know what it's going to mean, don't you?” Reg chattered on, and Walter laughed deprecatorily.

“Oh, ah, we do. There'll be a lot more like you after nice safe jobs in the pit, while our lads are off out to fight Kaiser Bill.”

“No, you don't understand,” Reg said earnestly. “If they bring in conscription, it'll mean you can't go. Didn't you know that?”

“Can't go? What d'ee mean?” James asked. “How be 'em going to stop us?”

The boy threw a crumb of cheese towards a mouse who had seen the circle of light and approached it boldly.

“They've got to have coal,” he explained. “And mining is one of those jobs you can't have a woman doing. Well, when all the men who don't work in the pit get called up, there won't be none to take up any vacancies down here. So they'll have to make sure there aren't any vacancies—leastways, as few as they can manage. And it'll be the same with munitions, they say.”

The other three men stared at him. They hadn't thought of it that way, but now it had been pointed out to them, they could see the sense of it. Most men in Hillsbridge worked in the pits anyway, but a good few of those who didn't had joined up already, and most of the rest had professed themselves willing to “ attest” since Lord Derby had called for it. And if conscription came in, there wouldn't be an able-bodied man between nineteen and forty-one left in England, let alone here in Hillsbridge.

“That's why you come here to work, isn't it, Reg?” Walter Clements asked, voicing aloud the question most of the men had muttered behind Reg's back. “ You want to get out of being called up.”

“That's right,” the boy admitted “They might get me anyway, of course. After all, I haven't been here all that long, and I can just imagine some red-faced pen-pusher taking a delight in sorting out those of us who ran to the coalfields after the war started. But at least it's a chance.”

James, thinking suddenly of Fred, whose expected letter home was several weeks overdue, and who might, for all he knew, be wounded or dying, stabbed the air with a vehement finger.

“You'm one of them slackers they'm after, Reggie,” he said bitterly. “And I hope they bloody well catch up with ' ee.”

The boy chewed slowly on his cogknocker, then raised his head to look directly at James.

“I suppose that's what a lot of folk think,” he said philosophically. “Well, that's, just too bad.”

Ted rubbed his chin.

“Why, Reg?” he asked. “Are you scared, or what?”

“Course, I'm scared. I bet they're all scared when it comes to the point. But that's not why I don't want to go.”

“Why then?”

“Because it would mean leaving me mother to cope with the youngsters and my father all by herself, and she's not fit.”

“What's wrong with your father, then?”

“He's a cripple. He used to drive a mail van in Bath, and he had an accident that really bad winter—1910, wasn't it? The hill was slippery, the horse couldn't stand, and the jumping van ran away with him. He tried to stop it—there was this taxi cab coming up, you see—but it went over his legs. Since then … well, he can't do no work, nor nothing else much, neither.”

A silence fell on the little group. Accidents, men who couldn't work any more, both were too close to home for them to mock again.

“So that's it, you see,” Reg went on. “ I do most things me father would do if he was fit. The next two to me are girls, and they're both away in service, and then there's Bert, but he's not well. He had scarlet fever when he was a nipper, and it's left him with a dicky heart. So I'm sort of relied on, really.”

James drew the back of his hand across his mouth in a gesture of embarrassment.

“Don't take no notice of what I said, Reg lad. I didn't know the half of it, did I?” he conceded, and the others muttered their agreement, made awkward suddenly by the discovery that they could know so little of the personal troubles of a boy they had worked alongside for a month and more.

For his part, Ted was horror struck by the catalogue of woes that made his own childhood seem like one long holiday. But when he returned to work, drawing the putt along the topple, it was the earlier part of the conversation that returned to his mind.

Supposing Reg was right? he thought, and conscription did mean that no one from the pits could be accepted into the military. Might that not only be a short step away from the day when miners would be obliged to stay in the pits—for the duration of the war at least? And who could say how long that would be? Why, already all the folk who had predicted it would only last a few months had been proved wrong. Already more than a year had gone by, and there was no sign of an early armistice. Good grief, if they brought in some sort of law about it, he could be stuck in the pit for years.

Ted momentarily slackened his pace, resting on his heels and letting his back support the weight of the tub, while a sinking feeling swept through his body.

Since meeting Rebecca, he'd been too preoccupied to give any more thought to leaving the pit, although he didn't suppose anyone would threaten his father's livelihood as Gait had done.