Wishing Water (2 page)

Too late now to argue. Too late to complain she was in her best dress and she really mustn’t risk spoiling it. And Lissa desperately wanted to prove she was as good as him.

‘Keep still,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t frighten the fish away with your cackling. I’ll show you.’

She carefully kilted her skirts between her legs, tucking the hem into her waist band at the front, stuffing the trailing bits up the lace-trimmed elastic of her best knickers.

Then she waded slowly out into the fast-flowing stream, close to the bridge where there were fewer stones and the water spread out wide and deep and dark beneath a tunnel of greenery. As it came above her knees she stopped. For what seemed an age Lissa waited until the tiny minnows had grown used to the pale trunks of her legs and brushed against them with casual ease. Very slowly she bent down, holding the jar in the flow of the river. At first there was nothing and her heart fluttered with despair.

Then she saw it, a great fat black cloud of darting fish. In seconds her jar was crowded and she swooped it out of the water with a cry of triumph.

‘I’ve done it. See.’

Her delight was short lived, for the swift movement rocked a stone beneath her foot and the heavy water took instant advantage, pushing resolutely against her. Even as she struggled to find her balance Lissa knew herself lost. Holding the jar high in her hand to save her precious fish, she sat with infuriated dignity, almost up to her chin in the deep water.

Meg stared at Lissa with horror in her grey eyes. ‘How could you?’ She widened her gaze to encompass the two muddy boys, unusually subdued. ‘How could any of you behave so badly, today of all days?’
 

They all stared miserably at the pools they were making on the slate floor, deeming it prudent not to reply.

‘Upstairs with you, madam.’ Meg ordered, then jerked a thumb at her two nephews. ‘You two had best go to the outhouse, clean that mud off and get out of those wet things. I’ll find you something dry to wear, though I can’t promise it’ll fit, nor save you from trouble when you get home.’
 

She felt a jolt of pity for their sad faces as they trailed off to do her bidding. At any other time Meg would have laughed at their predicament. It was no more than childish fun after all. She could remember she and her brother Charlie being in exactly the same predicament on any number of occasions. But she was short on humour today. Kath’s letters always seemed to put her in a temper, even now, after all these years. There was still the gnawing fear that she would come for Lissa and take her back with her, and Meg would never see her lovely girl again. Canada was the other side of the world, after all.

She could remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the time Kath had come for her daughter. Lissa had been seven years old by then. Seven years in Meg’s care, and Kath had imagined she could simply collect her, like a parcel, and ship her away. But Meg had refused to allow it.

‘Lissa stays here with me, at Broombank, where she belongs,’ she’d said, and that had been that.

Surprisingly Kath had made no protest. She had merely smiled her beautiful smile, shrugged slender shoulders and walked out of Meg’s life with that elegant swinging sway to her hips, to start life in Canada with her new husband.

She’d written once or twice a year since then, often claiming that she would visit soon, but nothing had ever come of these promises.

Until today.

A soft touch at her elbow brought her back to the present. ‘Here,’ said Tam, handing her a steaming bowl. ‘Sponge her down quickly with some warm water and she’ll be right enough. Did you never get mud in your own eye, Meg O’Cleary?’
 

Meg looked lovingly into her husband’s face and her lips lifted into a smile. How could she resist when she loved him so much? Tam leaned over the bowl and dropped a kiss upon her nose.

‘Tis a lovely woman you are, Meg, when you’re thinking with your heart. I’ll go and deal with them two tearaways and take them back meself. See if I can stop your father tanning their hides. He is staying at Ashlea again, is he not?’
 

‘Yes,’ Meg sighed. ‘Poor Sally Ann.’
 

‘She gets on with him better than you do. I’ll see these lads don’t suffer his wrath.’ Taciturn and dour to a fault, the boys’ grandfather Joe was supposed to be retired in Grange-Over-Sands but spent every moment he could at his old home, Ashlea, using the excuse that he was helping his daughter-in-law, Sally Ann, widowed by a stray bomb, and never remarried. Joe had remarried, at the end of the war, but the marriage hadn’t prospered.

‘Thanks.’ Meg gave Tam a warm smile of gratitude, drew in a deep breath and started up the stairs. Lissa could be as troublesome to deal with in her own way as Joe. There were no arguments from her now as Meg stripped off the sodden dress. No tantrums or tears as the dripping, best white underwear with the lace trim was replaced by everyday interlock vest and knickers.

‘You’ll have to wear your yellow cotton frock,’ Meg said, hiding a smile as she saw the pretty nose wrinkle in disgust. ‘Don’t like it.’
 

Meg sighed, biting back the retort that perhaps Lissa should have thought of that before she decided to go fishing for minnows, but managed, with difficulty, to hold her tongue. ‘Which then?’ thinking over Lissa’s wardrobe which shrank daily as the child grew. Soon, all too soon in Meg’s opinion, she would be a child no longer. Budding womanhood would take over. It was certainly long past time they had a talk about it.

‘I shall wear my jersey skirt and blue embroidered blouse,’ Lissa said, deciding on what she considered to be her most sophisticated items.

‘Isn’t it rather warm for jersey?’

‘You’re wearing a skirt and blouse.’
 

So the blue jersey it was. The tangled dark locks were brushed and fresh ribbons found to put them back into their tidy bunches, one at each side of the rosy, scrubbed cheeks. The sparkle was back in the arresting eyes, the tongue loosened once more into chatter. ‘Oh do let’s hurry, Meg. We mustn’t be late. What will she be like? I don’t remember her. Will she like me?’
 

The questions came thick and fast as they set off to walk the two miles up to Larkrigg Hall. Meg’s heart went out to the child, for didn’t her own anxiety match Lissa’s?

‘Of course you will recognise her, once you see her. She will be surprised how much you have grown.’ Meg didn’t like to talk about the love aspect. She couldn’t. She found it impossible to credit Kath with the ability to love a daughter she’d abandoned so soon after her birth. Not even a war would have persuaded Meg to do such a thing. But then there had been other, more pressing reasons, best not remembered.

The slopes of Larkrigg Fell rose gently ahead of them, with the steep crag of Dundale Knott at their backs, its comical lop-sided appearance belying the very real dangers to be found on the crags and crevices that scarred its surface. As her beloved dog, Rust, had once discovered to his cost. He was at her heels now, as always. Battle-scarred and not so spry as he’d once been, yet fit enough to walk the fells with her every day tending the sheep, despite his thirteen years.

‘Come on, old boy,’ she urged, a softness to her voice whenever she addressed him. ‘He’s panting a bit more than he should, Lissa. Maybe I’d best retire him.’
 

Lissa rubbed the dog’s ears, one brown, one black. ‘You know he couldn’t take to that. Where you are, so must he be.’
 

Funny thing, loyalty, Meg mused. It could cement a friendship or, misplaced, just as easily ruin one. Hadn’t she learned so herself once?
 

To their left was Allenbeck. It began high on Larkrigg Fell where it gathered its strength to burst out as a waterfall, known locally as a force, and tumbled onwards through Whinstone Gill, a deep cleft cut into the rocks forming a wooded ravine, till it ran out of power and passed under Gimmer bridge at a more sedate pace.

Now they climbed the sheep trods through Brockbarrow wood which in its turn flanked the southern shores of the tarn. Brockbarrow wood. The place for a lover’s tryst. And betrayal.

‘What shall I say to her?’ Lissa worried. ‘What can we talk about? She doesn’t know me or any of my friends.’
 

Anxious dark blue eyes gazed up at Meg. Jack’s eyes. She swallowed. ‘Tell her all about yourself. About how you like to help on the farm, how you’re learning to play the harmonium. How you are changing schools this year and mean to go to the High School.’
 

‘If I pass my certificate.’

‘Of course you’ll pass.’
 

‘I’m so nervous. Isn’t it silly?’ A small hand crept into Meg’s and she squeezed it encouragingly.

‘I’m pretty nervous myself as a matter of fact.’
 

‘Are you?’ An odd relief in the voice.

Somewhere high above a curlew mewed its plaintive, lonely cry, but Meg was aware only of Lissa’s deep thoughts. The worst part of Kath’s letters were her promises to visit, the way they unsettled the child, made her think and ask endless questions.

‘Tell me again how you came to Liverpool to find me,’ Lissa asked, wriggling close, and Meg stifled a sigh.

‘I’ve told you a dozen times. Kath couldn’t keep you. She was going into the WAAFS’ because of the war. She gave you to me to keep safe, at Broombank.’
 

‘Did she come to see me a lot? Did she miss me?’ Lissa frowned. ‘I can’t seem to remember.’
 

‘It was difficult, with the war and everything,’ Meg hedged.

‘I suppose so.’ More deep thoughts, Lissa wishing she could understand it all properly. She wished and wished so hard sometimes that it hurt, deep in her tummy. If only her mother would come, just once. Her child’s faith in the goodness of life made her certain that Kath would be kind and beautiful and tell her that she loved her, and Lissa would learn all about that secret part of herself she couldn’t quite discover.

She worried sometimes that perhaps it was her fault that Kath had left. Perhaps she’d been a disappointment and her mother had been glad to give her up.

Today, at last, all those fears could be swept away.

All Lissa had ever seen of the world was this dale, these familiar mountains. She ached to see the rest of it, live the life she felt was her due. She adored Meg and Tam, loved them as if they were her real parents, but what kind of life might she have had if she’d been Lissa Ellis instead of Lissa Turner? How would she have been different? It was hard to work it out.

A tall Scots pine stood like a sentinel on a small rise before her. Beyond that, Lissa knew, was the last sheep trod they needed to climb. This would join the long sweeping drive that led up to Larkrigg Hall through a pair of stone gate posts. It was a fine, nineteenth-century house, set high on a ridge as its name implied, surrounded on all sides by strangely shaped rocks and crags that poked out of the thin soil like old bones. A house that might have been her home, if things had been different.

Or she might, even now, have been in Canada, seeing other mountains, riding the ponies on her mother’s ranch. These dreams had filled her head for years, keeping her awake at night. Now, she was sure they were about to be realised.

‘Will she tell me who my father is, do you think?’ Her voice was soft, robbed of breath by the wind and the intensity of her excitement.

Meg and Kath had both avoided this part of the story. How they had both loved the same man, Kath had borne his child and Meg had loved her and brought her up. It hurt and embarrassed them both still, to think of it.

Meg drew the child into the circle of her arms. ‘One day we’ll talk about it,’ she said with a smile. ‘When you are old enough to understand.’
 

‘I’m old enough now. I’m eleven. Not a baby any more, Meg.’
 

No, more’s the pity, she thought, and tightened the ribbons that were, as usual, slipping down the glossy curls. ‘It isn’t important, not really. You have me and Tam. Remember that we love you. You are our own darling child so far as we are concerned.’
 

‘I know.’ Lissa wished that it was enough. But somehow it wasn’t.

Larkrigg Hall, a rectangular, solid house, bigger than it looked at first glance, with a plain, protestant look to it, stood at last before them. Only its tall trefoiled windows and great arched storm porch relieved the austerity of the grey stone walls. Meg pushed Lissa forward and politely rattled the knocker, for the inhabitants of Larkrigg Hall did not follow the more usual country custom of using the back door for callers. Meg could feel her heart start to thump uncomfortably at the thought of Kath waiting within.

The door creaked open and Amy Stanton, Rosemary Ellis’s housekeeper, stood four-square on the slate step. Solid and forbidding, taking her pleasures where she could find them in ill health and local disasters, she almost smiled upon them now.

‘She hasn’t come,’ she bluntly informed them. ‘Mrs Wadeson sent a telegram this morning. She says she’s sorry but she won’t be here after all.’
 

The door had almost closed before Meg came out of her shock. Slamming her hand against the polished panels she stopped it most effectively, but then she hadn’t spent years lifting and managing sheep to be put off by an old door, solid oak or no. ‘What did you say?’