A Country Marriage (33 page)

How could Annie do that: be so
clever
with her words? It was tantamount to—

‘George, this ain’t right,’ she hissed, feeling her face burning.

His grip on her fingers tightened.

‘Be still.’

‘Now, I understand that when the deceased was found to be missing, a search was conducted,’ the coroner was stating. ‘Is there anyone present who can provide an account of the conducting of that search?’

‘Aye, sir.’ Letting go of her hand, George shot to his feet. ‘George Strong. I’m… the deceased’s brother.’

With her head bowed, she listened to her husband recounting how several times, he and Will had gone out searching but failed to find any sign of their brother. He made no mention that they had instead come across Robert or of what his brother had seen but then, as he was to later point out; no one had asked him about that. He had answered, truthfully, what he had been asked; no more and no less.

Finally, the coroner called on Thomas Strong, by which time most of the ‘facts’ were already evident.

‘And what would you say about the manner of your son whilst engaged in the harvest?’ he asked.

‘He worked hard. We all did. He was glad when it was done. We all were. He was lookin’ forward to a fair old randy. He was a good son; my firstborn and heir.’ Two seats along, she felt sure that she heard Annie snort, and saw how George’s hand moved quickly towards her. ‘He had much to be thankful for.’

For the first time, though, she was struck by something: Tom may have been evil but he was still Thomas and Hannah’s son. She tried to imagine herself in thirty years’ time, in the same position with Jacob, but it was too awful a thought to pursue. If Jacob was lying there like that, all bloated and distorted by the river on account of something awful that he had done, how would she feel? There was, she realised, simply no way of knowing, but she did feel certain that her grief and disappointment at his death would be far greater than any bitterness or anger for whatever deed it was believed he may have done. Lost in her thoughts, she became aware of a new concentration in the barn and looked up to hear the coroner saying, ‘…accidentally drowned…’ at which point proceedings appeared to come quickly to a close, with the people around her starting to stir. Wiping ineffectually at her tears for Hannah and Thomas, she felt George reaching for her hand.

‘What does it mean?’ she whispered to him, holding back her more pressing questions about the concealment of certain facts.

‘Just that it’s all over,’ he whispered back and turned towards Annie, who she saw nod towards her in-laws.

‘They got what they wanted, then.’

‘There was never any doubt of it,’ she heard her husband reply, as he helped his sister-in-law up and led them both out of the barn and into the unexpectedly bright, sunlit afternoon.

*

On the afternoon following the inquest, Tom Strong was buried in Verneybrook churchyard, with the entire family and most of the villagers present to see him laid to rest. With the service complete, the mourners from the village repaired to The Stag to discuss the sad death of one of their number – a surfeit of ale widely assumed as the cause of the accident – and mull over the sparse details that had emerged from the inquest. But as the family, too, started to drift away from the churchyard, Mary noticed Annie remaining rooted to the spot and nudging George, she nodded back to the graveside.

Turning to see Annie standing alone in the spot that she had occupied throughout the burial, George watched as she removed her shawl, which until now she had worn close about her face and let it fall onto her shoulders. A thin shaft of sunlight broke through the steely clouds, catching her ebony hair and a brisk but warm wind rushed across the exposed hillside, ruffling the grass and sending the first of the fallen leaves scurrying around her feet as she stared out across the valley. Her black skirt was billowing about her legs but she made no move to restrain it and as he stood with his wife and looked at the isolated figure standing motionless at the grave, he felt torn in two.

‘I better go back to her,’ he said with a glance to Mary, the discomfort of deceit twisting at his insides. ‘You go on down with the others and I’ll bring her home when she’s ready.’

‘Aye. Course.’

Arriving alongside her before she even looked up, he waited until he was sure that the family had moved out of sight down the hill before putting his arm around her waist and pulling her to him, her head coming to rest on his shoulder.

‘Oh George, what have I done?’

Inside his chest, his heart seemed to lurch.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He frowned. Clearly she was still in shock. But he hadn’t mistaken her question, though, he was sure of it. ‘Perhaps I ought more properly be asking what do I do now?’

‘You do nothing. You just take your time… and mourn.’ Even as he said it, though, it sounded trite and inadequate and like something Martha or his mother would advise. Why on earth would she mourn the man? Stuck for anything more helpful, though, he kissed her forehead.

‘I don’t need to mourn. Tedn’t
grief
,’ she said, sniffing and lifting her head to look at him. ‘I shan’t mourn him. No, ’tis guilt.’

To better look at her, he loosened his clasp and held her further away.

‘
You
aren’t to blame for this, Annie. This was Tom’s doing, fair an’ square. All of it.’

What he wasn’t expecting by way of response was that she would shake her head.

‘No.’

And it occurred to him then that perhaps she was about to tell him something that he really didn’t want to know.

‘
No
?’

‘No, this was
my
fault; if I’d been more of a willing wife he wouldn’t have gone after Lottie.’ He exhaled, feeling how the tautness in his chest softened and grateful to have evidently misunderstood her. ‘It ain’t him dying that burdens my conscience so much as what he did to
her
. There was no need for her to suffer his vile ways and that’s summat I shan’t ever forgive him. I
hated
what he did to me but at least I was his
wife
. Poor Lottie did nothing at all to deserve any of it.’ He watched while apparently preoccupied, she straightened her skirt and tugged at her shawl. ‘I can’t see how I’ll ever live with the thought that if I hadn’t refused him, he wouldn’t have gone after her.’

The sight of tears running over her misshapen cheeks hardened his throat to a lump.

‘You can’t know that, Annie,’ he reasoned, once again pulling her closer; the warm feel of her body against him surprisingly comforting. ‘You refusing him don’t excuse what he did. And anyway—’

‘What?’ she asked, turning sharply towards him.

‘Well I didn’t mention this to anyone but I saw him eyeing Lottie improperly at the harvest home and that was afore he… the matter with you.’ Into his mind, accompanied by a flood of something that felt like guilt, flashed a picture of Tom staring across the barn. ‘I should have thought summat of it but well, I assumed it was just the ale getting to his senses.’ Recalling then the look on his brother’s face, he hastened on, ‘I never imagined he’d go after her. I mean, you got to agree it was unthinkable. So if
you’re
to blame, then so am I for ignoring what I saw.’

‘But
you
couldn’t have known.’

Shifting the weight of her body against him, he sighed.

‘Well, it wasn’t so much that he was
looking
, rather what he was
saying
; strange ramblings, they were.’

‘Like what?’

‘Nonsensical stuff, mostly. I don’t recall it now but I’ll own to being puzzled by it even at the time and so maybe instead of accusing him of being drunk, I should’ve listened to him.’

‘I doubt it would have made much difference. No one was ever able to reason with him.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, pulling a little away from him. ‘Young Robert…’

‘Aye? What of him?’

‘Was he truly just passing by Lottie’s room when he happened to hear summat?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘I thought not. I was more of a mind that he was, well, shall we say,
watching
her?’

‘Me and Will promised him we wouldn’t say anything.’

‘Poor soul: coming across his own brother doing that to her. I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to hunt him down and do for him.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think—’

‘But you don’t think it was an accident, either, though, do you?’

It was, he knew, the matter bothering all of them, not that any one of them would dare to give voice to such thoughts.

‘In truth, I don’t know what to think,’ he answered, ‘but it does strike me as unlikely.’

‘Hm. On the other hand, though, I never had him down as someone to take his own life – someone else’s, aye, for certain – but his own, no, never.’

‘Me neither. If there’s one thing you can say about Tom, it’s that he was never afraid to face consequences; his knack of talking himself out of difficulty was well known, although maybe this time, he realised he’d gone too far.’

‘That mid be. But even if he
had
been riddled with guilt, I still don’t see him drowning hisself; for a start, I’m fair certain he lacked the courage.’

‘None of which leaves us any the wiser,’ he pointed out, beginning to feel that this was doing neither of them any good.

‘So do you think someone could have… pushed him in?’

He paused to consider the very point that had been troubling his own thoughts, but although Tom didn’t have a great many friends, neither did he have any real enemies, which really only left Robert – or her, possibly – with sufficient inclination to do away with him; after all, he did only have her word that her injuries had been inflicted in their bedroom.

‘Can you imagine anyone getting the better of Tom in a scuffle?’ he asked, recognising that he did so largely to deflect from what, to his mind, was still a nagging possibility. She certainly had sufficient grievance. And there were parts of the evening, late on, when he couldn’t say for certain where she had been.

‘Perhaps they surprised him,’ he heard her suggesting.

‘Perhaps,’ he conceded, reflecting how Robert had been adamant that when he saw Tom leaving Lottie’s room, he had hesitated a while before running out of the yard after him and how, by then, he had lost sight of him in the dark. It was plausible enough. Although Robert spent a good deal of his time avoiding any sort of confrontation with Tom,
this
time, it had involved Lottie and he knew only too well how being in the thrall of a woman could make a man act rashly. Very rashly. He sighed and looked over his shoulder. ‘C’mon then, let’s go home. It don’t do no good standing here,’ he said, anxious not to get drawn into further discussion about one or two of the more perplexing matters in all of this. And in addition to which, he did wonder at the appropriateness of standing with Annie, discussing Tom’s demise so close to the rawness of his grave.

‘I’ll tell you what else I been wonderin’ about, too,’ she said, evidently not listening, though, ‘and forgive me for this, George, since I know he was your brother, but I got no one else to talk to about it. See, no one else truly knew what he was like; not only that, but it’s also plain they were never interested in finding out, either.’

When she slowly lifted her head, he watched her stare out across the hillside, the wind whipping at loose strands of her hair, until, carefully avoiding his eyes, she raised a hand to tuck them behind her ear. Wondering what was on her mind now, he turned her to face him but just as quickly, she looked away again.

‘What? What is it?’

‘Well, see… it’s just that
on
occasion
, I got to wonderin’ whether it was
women
that roused him at all… or whether it wasn’t… young lads.’

‘
Lads
?’ he exclaimed, feeling how his body shrank away from her. ‘
Tom
?’

‘Well, when you think about what he liked to
do
for his pleasure.’

‘I’m not sure I see. I mean, did you ever
catch
him with anyone? Or did he ever
say
anything to make you think it?’ In his astonishment, he couldn’t decide what shocked him most; the notion that his brother might have been perverted or that Annie might suggest it.

‘No, I didn’t. But more than once over the years I came to thinking that there might be summat… wrong with him. And just because I can’t say for certain that he didn’t ever act on such an urge, doesn’t mean he didn’t ever want to. You got to admit, it would explain all manner of things.’

‘No, Annie, I can’t think that was likely, at all. I just can’t.’ He shook his head and stared down at the fresh, brown earth of the grave, realising that in truth, he didn’t have the least idea
what
to think, any more. There was certainly a lot that he had only recently started to discover about his brother and while he knew that Annie was shrewder than most women, surely on this occasion she had to be mistaken? It pained him enough accepting that Tom had clearly enjoyed being cruel but what she was now suggesting… well. He shook his head and frowned, his discomfort growing at something only now occurring to him; that maybe when Tom had been rambling on and staring wistfully across the barn, he hadn’t been looking at Lottie at all but at the group of lads larking about in the corner. No, that was just coincidence; it had to be. But then, she did have a point. After all, what man in his right mind, taking Annie for his wife, would constantly seem so disgruntled; so
dissatisfied
?