The Cuckoo's Child (11 page)

‘Well, it seems he was killed by a blow on the back of his head. And no, it's unlikely to have been a fall,' Womersley said, forestalling the comment he saw might be coming. ‘It looks like somebody had a grudge against him, a score to settle, something like that. Any trouble of that sort lately?'

It was the first, obvious question and often brought an immediate answer. Murder rarely happened out of the blue, something had to have led up to it and usually friends, family, neighbours or workmates, somebody or other, would be well aware what it was all about, and have a good idea who was likely to have been responsible.

But the manager shook his head.

‘Come on, Mr Hirst, you had some words with him yourself a couple of weeks back? You – and young Mr Beaumont . . . that's Mr Gideon, right? Angry words, a right old row in fact.'

‘How did you come to know that? No, don't answer. I suppose it must have been all over t'shop in half an hour, it were loud enough.' His speech was becoming broader, slipping into its native accents as he became more agitated. ‘Everybody knows we were always fratching, Ainsley and me, but it didn't mean owt, I've worked here ever since I left school and there's not much I don't know about the business, it's just how we were. We never fell out for more than five minutes. I'll admit this was a bit different, though. There was Gideon and young Tom Illingworth – he's my nephew – in it this time . . .' He paused to rub a hand down his face, pulling its lugubrious folds even further down.

‘Go on, Mr Hirst.'

‘Ainsley had some sort of idea to bring Tom into the business, which were the daftest idea he'd ever had and I told him so to his face. Tom is my sister's lad, he's a qualified engineer and he knows and cares nowt about the wool trade. But Ainsley always had a taking for the lad, helped him with his education and that. Tom just laughed when he heard what Ainsley wanted.'

‘And that was all?'

‘Not by a long chalk, it weren't. Ainsley told him he were an ungrateful young pup, after all he'd done for him, and that made Tom get his rag out – not easy, but when he does . . . I didn't like it myself. Ainsley had never needed anybody else in the business before . . . and why should he now, especially when he had Gideon coming up? Then the lad himself had to go and chip in, and ask where he came in on all that.'

‘And what did Mr Beaumont say to that?'

‘He told him right sharp to hold his tongue. That fair set t'cat among t'pigeons, and Gideon shouted some more at his granddad and then stamped out. He can have a rare temper on him an' all, sometimes, he isn't a Beaumont for nowt, but it's soon over, just like it was with his granddad, bearing no ill will. He's a bit impetuous at times, that lad, but he has his head screwed on. He's right, Ainsley should have given him more rope. He forgot he were running this place on his own when he were Gideon's age.' He sighed again. ‘Well, choose how, it were all over summat and nowt and if you're thinking one of us held a grudge about it and then took it out on Ainsley, you've another think coming.'

It seemed eerily quiet without the noise of the machinery rumbling in the background. ‘What would you say, Mr Hirst, if I told you Mr Beaumont knew he was a dying man?'

‘Dying?'

‘According to the doctors, he'd been diagnosed some time since with a tumour on his brain that meant he couldn't have lived for much longer, anyway.'

If the information about the way Ainsley Beaumont had died had been a shock, this had shaken Hirst to the core. He was again left speechless, the blood draining from his heavy face. ‘A tumour?' he repeated at last. ‘Diagnosed? You mean he
knew
?' After a moment, he added, ‘Well, that accounts for it, that and a lot more.'

‘Accounts for what, Mr Hirst?'

‘When we were having that set-to, he shouted at Gideon, “You can do what you like when I'm dead and gone, but till then, I'm still here, think on!” It's what folks say, I know, but I tell you, without the word of a lie, it fair gave me a turn, coming from Ainsley. He was never one to think that road, never mind say it.'

He gazed, upset, at the scratches and stains on the bare surface of the wooden table. ‘Killed? Oh God, I don't know what they're going to make of that, up at Farr Clough.'

‘Mr Hirst, I'd be obliged if you'd keep all this to yourself for the time being.'

‘What? Not tell the family?'

‘I suggest you let them remain in happy ignorance for the time being. I'll see them myself tomorrow.' This afternoon he would need to go back to Huddersfield to report to his superintendent. ‘It'll come better officially, and there's no point in upsetting them before we have to'

‘Well,' Hirst began indecisively. ‘I don't know. They'll want to know. She'll—'

‘I'm not asking you, Mr Hirst, I'm telling you. Just keep it under your hat for now, right?'

‘All right, if that's what you say.'

Nine

Everyone took the tragedy in their different ways. Gideon, preoccupied and withdrawn, spent so much time down at the mill that he was hardly visible, while Una, although fighting off a heavy cold, buried herself in the back room amongst her papers, taking refuge in her work for the Cause, working as if the deadline for the publication of the next issue of
Unity
was something she had to meet under threat of execution. Laura was left much alone in the evenings after her day's work in the dusty library. She was trying to finish as quickly as possible, feeling that her presence in a house of mourning must be intrusive, but meanwhile, was there anything she could do to help? she asked Una. She wasn't sure that she could be of much use, though . . . all the business seemed to be done on the typewriter, which she had no idea how to operate.

‘Oh, you'll soon pick it up,' Una said impatiently. ‘I have a stack of letters to be sent out about that meeting next week in Halifax and I need the envelopes addressing, so we'd be glad of your help, wouldn't we, Jess?'

Jessie, who often stayed on to help after her day's work was done, said, ‘One thing you can do is come down with me instead of Miss Una when I take this petition down into Wainthorpe.'

‘Rubbish, Jessie, I'm perfectly well. It's only a chill,' Una said.

‘Caught tramping up and down the streets in pouring rain, just to distribute leaflets.'

‘We have to let people know about the Halifax meeting.'

‘It's a raw, damp day out there. You go standing out in that lot and you'll be asking for it.'

Laura, standing the following day with Jessie outside one of the mill gates at closing time, to get signatures on a petition to be sent to Parliament – votes for women, naturally – reflected wryly that if her friend Eva could see her, she would congratulate herself on being right, having known all along that sooner or later Laura would succumb and be persuaded to strike a blow for women's freedom. She drew her scarf tighter. If she
was
here through new-found convictions, instead of through default, she would have felt less miserable, frozen to death as she was.

At least she had seen something of Wainthorpe and gained a considerably more attractive impression of it than when she first passed through it in the trap with John Willie Sugden. Mills there were, of course, large and small, and at the poorer end of the town, a crooked maze of narrow, grimy streets, yards and alleys. As for the rest of the place, she had noticed some good buildings, plenty of shops, a big elementary school and a small park where the town brass band played in the summer. And always, wherever you were, high on the hillside, looking immensely far away, was Farr Clough, a black silhouette standing out against the dark grey background of the hill behind it.

But she'd had little time for more than a cursory look around, and now dusk was falling and the mill due to close. Laura's task was simply to stand holding the petition clipped to a board, while Jessie stood on a box waving her arms and shouting to exhort the women to sign as they came out of the mill, still in their black pinafores under their shawls.

In the end, they obtained thirty-nine signatures, though Jessie said it was only a drop in the bucket. Laura was surprised to find herself quite exhilarated, though afraid at one point that the situation might turn ugly, as so many encounters did. Some of the mill girls made rude comments and joined the men in jeering at them, but most of them wished them good luck as they lined up to sign, which Jessie judged a marvel in itself, since they were at the end of a gruelling day and many of them must have been anxious to get home in order to make their husband's and children's teas.

They were just packing up – numb about the hands and feet, but flushed with success – and Jessie was inviting Laura to take a cup of tea with her and her father on her walk back up to Farr Clough, when a rattling sort of motorcar that turned out to belong to Dr Widdop's assistant, a young man called Matthew Pike, drew up behind them.

‘Glad to see you,' he said, quite evidently having known they were going to be there. ‘Hop in.'

Jessie seemed not at all averse to this. Nor was Laura, for though his motorcar was very far from the last word in luxury, it was a long way up to Farr Clough and a cup of hot tea wouldn't come amiss.

He was quite young, this doctor, spectacled, gingerish, untidy and every bit as energetic as Jessie. He congratulated them on the success of their venture and seemed altogether very anxious to assert his support for women's liberation, though how much of this was due entirely to his beliefs, and how much due to his wanting to impress Jessie, might be open to interpretation, Laura felt.

The shock of losing the master of Farr Clough, the man whose presence had dominated all their lives, had not robbed Amelia of her antagonistic approach. She and Laura met in the hall the next day, where Laura was exchanging a few words with Gideon before he went down to the mill. To all intents and purposes, Amelia seemed to have completely recovered from the hysterics she had fallen into on hearing of the accident at the mill.

‘You'll be leaving us now, then, Miss Harcourt,' she stated bluntly, without any attempt at finesse.

‘The job isn't finished,' Gideon said before Laura could reply, looking hard at his mother, ‘and I hope Laura will agree to stay until it is.'

‘Oh, we can forget that. Nobody ever bothered with the library before, and I doubt anybody will want to, now. There's no need for it.'

‘On the contrary, it's something that ought to be completed.' This unusual show of authority from her son halted Amelia for a moment, then she simply turned and walked away in her usual stiff and unbending manner. ‘Well, will you stay and finish, Laura?' he asked.

If that was what he wished, she was willing to do so. ‘I don't want to upset your mother, but I confess I feel I ought to finish what your grandfather wanted.'

‘Who knows what he wanted?' He shook his head. ‘The truth is, I haven't the faintest idea. All the same, I reckon sorting those books was long overdue. You're doing a splendid job, and maybe we can open up the library again and make proper use of it. Please, I hope you'll stay – and take as long as you like.'

Facing the garden, and the prospect of the valley below, the library could have been one of the most attractive rooms at Farr Clough, though that was far from the impression it had made on Laura when she first entered it. A pair of library steps, a few straight chairs set around a huge central table as if for a meeting, drugget on the floor and not a picture or an ornament in sight. A tightly buttoned grey and brown tabby plush armchair, looking like an uncomfortable afterthought which had just been brought in, stood near the black marble fireplace in which a fire had been lit, large enough to roar halfway up the fireback when it should get going, though the chimney at that moment had thought otherwise, and was protesting by throwing intermittent billows of smoke into the room.

Unlike the rest of the house, where Mrs Beaumont's good housekeeping was so much in evidence, the room had clearly received no attention. It smelled overwhelmingly of musty old books which obviously hadn't been touched for years. They lay on the shelves anyhow, thick with dust, not always in neat rows with their spines facing outwards, but sometimes stacked in tottering piles, or leaning drunkenly against each other.

Someone had provided paper, pens and ink, and a large protective apron had also been left on the table. Setting to work, Laura had soon found some of the books almost too big to lift, as if reluctant to relinquish the same positions they'd occupied for generations, their titles as dry and dusty as the books themselves, and their contents surely of no interest to anyone but the scholars who had written them.

Today, with the fire going nicely, she had decided to forget Amelia Beaumont's animosity and tackle the last wall of shelves. She was a strange woman, almost impossible to imagine her as the twins' mother, physically or otherwise, although she might once have been beautiful, or at least striking in a strong, dark, gipsy-looking way. Perhaps they took after their father. No one ever spoke of Theo. There wasn't a single photograph of him anywhere in the house . . . but then, they didn't seem to go in much for family photographs – there were some of the twins, principally one with their grandfather, and one of a rather beautiful woman in a ball dress with a long train, holding a fan, with feathers in her hair, who must be Lady Tyas, their great-grandmother.

Perched on the very top of the library steps, to the accompaniment of sneezes, she was dusting the space left by
Delineations, Historical and Topographical, of Yorkshire
, asking herself crossly why Mr Beaumont had not simply employed a housemaid to tidy up his old books, when she noticed a roll of paper which had slipped behind the next few books, tied around with a black silk ribbon.