A Country Marriage (47 page)

‘First… of many… I hope.’

Light-headed with relief, he laughed and, unwinding her shawl, lifted it from her hair and let it fall to the ground.

‘Do you feel it?’ he whispered urgently, her great gulps for air heaving her body up and down against his chest.

‘Aye. Makes me feel—’

‘Alive!’

‘Yes!’

‘Roused!’

‘Yes!’

‘And gives me an almighty desire to do this!’ he declared, lifting her face towards him until his mouth felt the smooth coolness of her lips and the generous warmth of her reaction.

‘Aye but it makes me desire for more… than just that,’ he heard her murmuring as she finally pulled away, and he felt how her hands were reaching inside his jacket and her fingers were unfastening his belt.

Chapter 19

Fair Women

‘George, will you take me an’ James to the fair?’ Annie greeted him, as under cover of darkness he stole into the barn one evening.

‘Hmm?’ Slipping his arms under her shawl, he rubbed her back through the thin fabric of her blouse. ‘’Tis a chilly one tonight, for sure.’

‘Aye,’ she agreed absently. ‘So will you then?’

With a groan, he let his hands drop.

‘Why the sudden interest in the fair?’

‘Because James wants to go and it don’t seem fair to deny him just because I can’t go on my own.’

‘I might have to bring Mary.’

‘I doubt she’ll want to come; no woman in their right mind wants to tramp around the fair in the cold – but if she does, well, then she does. At least James will get to go.’

‘Well, if you leave it be for now and get me nicely warmed up, I’ll see what I can do,’ he half-promised, eager for her to drop the matter.

‘Not unreasonable I suppose,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders and, blowing out the lantern, climbed ahead of him to the hayloft.

*

‘Fancy a trip to the fair this year?’ George asked Mary as they finished supper the following evening.

‘Oh, I don’t think I want to go trailing about in the cold,’ she replied, reaching to set their rinsed bowls back on the shelf. ‘But do the decent thing an’ go with him anyway, will you?’

Instantly, something in his chest turned hard, and with seemingly no control over his reaction, he heard himself blurting, ‘
What
?’ and then far too quickly for comfort, ‘Who?’

‘Good Lord, don’t tell me you ain’t seen it?’ Watching her place the lamp back in the centre of the table, he tried to think about what she had just said. She
knew
about
James
? No; surely if she had found out then she wouldn’t be talking to him in such a calm manner? Surely, she wouldn’t simply drop something as momentous as that into a conversation about a matter as mundane as the fair? Or would she? What if this was a trap to confirm some or other suspicion that had been gnawing away at her? Suddenly fearful of the ease with which an innocent remark uttered at cross purposes could trip him up, he tried to work out what to do. ‘George?’

‘S-seen what?’ he heard his voice asking as if of its own accord.

‘Oh, George, for heaven’s sake! That Robert is still soft on Lottie, of course. I thought even
you
knew that much.’

He reached for the chair-back, panic rushing out of his body with such force that he was left feeling dizzy.

‘Oh, aye. That.’ One by one, he peeled his fingers away from their grasp on the chair, struck by the clarity of something: that one single moment of carelessness could mean the end for him.

‘Well, the other day Tabitha was saying that she thinks he wants to take Lottie to the fair,’ he became aware of her explaining in her light and chatty manner, ‘but they need someone to chaperone them, which is why I supposed you were suddenly minded to go.’ Both of them, it seemed, were beset by the same sin of presumption. ‘Although I
also
hear that Annie wants to take James and so, as it happens,
she
needs someone to go with as well.’

Deciding for the moment not to comment, he watched her scraping crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand and then wiping them into the fire, amazed at how light-headed he felt now that the weight of his guilt was lifting. Not only that – but a perfect excuse had unexpectedly opened up before him.

‘An’ if I do take them, you’re happy to bide here, then?’ he asked, his heart beginning to slow. He saw her nod and smile brightly back at him.

‘Aye, ’tis fine by me. I’d much rather stay here in the warm with Jacob – but tell Annie to bring her Luke up here an’ I’ll see to him for her.’

‘You’d
do
that?’ Sometimes the women in his life were beyond all fathoming.

‘Course. I mean, it must be hard for her with them two boys. And a second babe won’t make much difference to me for a few hours.’ She dumped a pile of clothes on the cleared table and set about folding them, evidently waiting for him to respond.

‘All right then,’ he said eventually, ‘if you’re certain. I’ll do it for the sake of Robert’s courting prospects and Annie’s young James.’

‘Oh, you’re a good man, George Strong,’ she said, leaning across to kiss his cheek.

‘If you say so,’ was the reply he chose; one that as possible replies went, seemed
broadly
honest. But, as he stood shaking his head, he wondered – and not for the first time lately – whether the life he had taken to living was worth all of the anguish that went with it.

*

The following morning, with concerns of her own, Mary sat on the bed and peered into her tiny looking glass to examine what little of her face she could see through the coating of pale grey dust on its surface. Exasperated at the mirror’s inadequacy, she turned it face down and drew it across the blanket but although this wiped away wide streaks of dust, any improvement to her reflection was minimal. Less than amused, she pursed her lips and stared back, thinking it altogether possible that the dust had been a kindness, serving to blur the scale of her dishevelment. The words ‘hedge’ and ‘backwards’ came to mind, and with a disgruntled huff, she pulled a thick strand of hair across her face and screwed up her eyes at it. Much as she had been expecting, it looked brittle and unkempt. Tossing the looking glass across the bed, she sighed. Why couldn’t her hair look more like Annie’s? It wasn’t that she considered it important to make an effort for George – after all, he was her husband – but she did have a sudden desire to look nice for Francis, the thought of whom put an idea into her head.

*

‘The thing is,’ she explained, as she followed Martha through to her kitchen later that same morning, ‘I’m ashamed to admit that I seem to have become a bit untidy and I don’t think that’s particular fair on George.’ Lies –
white
lies, she stressed to herself – seemed to trip readily from her lips these days, a recognition that became unsettling if she stopped too long to dwell on it. ‘An’ I’m also ashamed to admit that the other day in church, I was looking at your hair and admiring how it’s always so neat and shiny. So I was wondering whether maybe there’s summat you can show me to make mine a bit less… well, straw-like,’ she finished with a laugh.

‘Aye, well,’ Martha said with a smile back, ‘some folk are just blessed with better hair than others but even so, I can show you summat to mix up and use. Now, if you were fair-haired like Lottie, I’d say a chamomile rinse, and for red hair like mine you need calendula, but brown hair, well, that’s easiest of all to make shiny.’

‘It is?’

‘Now, watch this. Two egg yolks into a bowl and try not to let in the white,’ she heard Martha instructing as she watched her cracking the eggs. ‘Now, a drop of brandy’s best.’

‘Oh.’

‘But if you can’t get brandy, then the same amount of dark ale will do. See how much I added?’ Martha asked, putting the stopper back in the bottle. She nodded. ‘Now, you need to add enough water to make a paste of it. It’s got to end up thin enough to spread through your hair but still thick enough to stick to it, so it’s best to add it little by little. Cold water, mind, not hot, or you’ll cook the eggs!’

She laughed.

‘I understand.’

‘Now, see how smooth an’ thick it is?’

She peered into the bowl.

‘Aye. Not much of it though, is there?’

‘Believe me, ’tis enough. Now, you wash your hair the same as always, getting it as clean as you can and being sure to rinse away all of the soap, since ’tis the lye that makes your hair brittle. Then you spread this through with your fingers. Make sure to get it on as much of your hair as possible, but in particular, you want it on the ends.’ As Martha mimed the action of spreading the mixture through her hair, she nodded. ‘Then you leave it for a few minutes but
not
so long that it dries or you’ll have a fearful job to get rid of it. Then you just rinse it out with cold water, lots and lots of cold water.’

‘Don’t it make your hair smell horrid, though?’ she asked, sniffing the brownish paste and coughing from the fumes of the brandy.

‘Not if you rinse it out proper, no.’

‘Then I’ll give it a try’

‘Take this, then,’ Martha said, handing her the bowl. ‘Mind how I made it?’

‘I do.’

‘And let me know how you get on with it.’

‘Well, ’tis my dearest hope you’ll be able to see
that
for yourself!’ she replied.

*

On the day of the trip to the fair, as the feeble afternoon sun dropped below the verney copse, a thick, autumnal fog stole up the Wem Valley to where, later that evening, Mary watched her husband, illuminated in the grey murk by a moon high overhead, readying the horse and cart.

‘What a night for it,’ she heard Annie remark as she emerged from the mist and swept down the steps to where she was huddled in the doorway. ‘But this is most kind of you,’ she added, handing Luke into her arms.

‘Pleased to help, I’m sure,’ she replied, looking beyond her to where James was jumping about in the lane and talking excitedly to George. With a quick glance down at baby Luke, she looked back up to see her husband handing Annie up onto the cart. ‘Be careful, all of you,’ she called to them. ‘And make certain to see everything,’ she added, waving a hand to Robert and Lottie in the back.

‘We will,’ she heard her husband’s mist-muffled reply as he flicked the reins and the cart lurched away to be promptly swallowed by the fog.

Back indoors, she settled Luke – who struck her as rather more drowsy than her own son – and then stood by the fire to get warm. Well, they were gone: so far so good. Now she just had to find a way to contain her excitement – not that he would be long. And indeed, barely five minutes later, hearing his now-familiar tap at the door, she raced across the room to find him standing in a cloud of silvery breath, his hair rimed with tiny beads of mist.

‘Francis!’

‘What a night,’ he announced, and stepping inside, promptly peeled off his shirt and draped it over the stool closest to the fire. ‘I’m proper shrammed.’

‘Lord, you
are
cold,’ she agreed when he turned back to embrace her and she could feel the chill of his skin like a slab of ice through her blouse.

‘Know any good ways to warm me up, then?’

With her face resting against his shoulder, she didn’t need to see his face to know that he was grinning.

‘I
might
be able to think of summat, aye but first, we should get you out of the rest of them damp clothes,’ she answered, reaching for the button of his breeches, unable to conceal a smile of her own.

‘Well, I’m sure you’d know best,’ he replied, ‘so it’d be churlish to—’

But his answer was cut short by the shrill cry of an infant, and dropping her hands to her sides, she hung her head.

‘It’s Jacob. He’s been real miserable all day. Look, I’d best go an’ see to him.’ Cursing her son’s uncanny sense of timing, she turned away and climbed the ladder to the loft. But after trying for several minutes to settle her grizzling son, she eventually came back down with him wailing and wriggling in her arms. ‘I can’t get him back to sleep,’ she explained in a voice that she knew sounded pitiful. ‘And now he’s woken Luke, too.’

But, rather than looking annoyed, she noticed that Francis got up from the chair and, stepping towards her said, ‘Here, give him to me.’ And before she could think to object, he had lifted Jacob from her arms. She stepped back, frowning at the sight of him with her son against his shoulder, soothing a hand up and down his back and whispering, ‘There, there. Shush, Jacob it ain’t your ma’s fault, lad. She’s just a mite…
impatient
this evening.’ Feeling how her mouth had fallen wide open with amazement, she realised then that she had never imagined Francis with a child. ‘You been runnin’ her ragged all day?’ he was asking the infant, his face that of someone entirely at ease. ‘Well, how about now then, just for her, you be done with all this noise, eh?’ The tone of his voice sounded even and restful, and to her disbelief, her son’s fretful whining softened. ‘There, that’s so much better, ain’t it? Good lad. Now then, if you go to sleep for me, I promise that when you wake in the morning…’ and at this point she saw him turning slowly to face her, ‘your ma will be all calm an’ happy.’

To her utter astonishment, she saw Jacob’s eyelids flickering, and a moment later, realised that he had fallen fast asleep against Francis’ shoulder.

‘Whatever magic did you use?’ she whispered, gently lifting the child back from him.

‘That’s the very same question my sisters always used to ask,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘They were forever bringing me their screamin’ babies but ’tis just a knack, I suppose.’

‘Well it’s a terrible handy one,’ she told him, and still shaking her head in disbelief, turned to take her son back upstairs.

‘So,’ he said, when she finally returned and stood in front of him, ‘anything else you’d like me to do whilst I’m here?’