Born to Trouble (17 page)

His eyes were twinkling and Pearl couldn’t help but smile. ‘He must be very well trained to tiptoe to order.’

‘Absolutely, but then you have no idea how often he and I come across a damsel taking the air late at night.’

Pearl’s smile widened. She was feeling strange – happy, excited, apprehensive. She didn’t really know how to explain it. But from the first moment she had caught sight of him, she had known that this was what she had been hoping for when she’d left the others tonight. And it had happened. She had met him, she was talking to him, and he was walking her down the lane . . .

Pearl and Christopher didn’t arrange to meet the next night, but when she slipped out of the camp again she knew he would be waiting at the bend in the lane. When she turned the corner he was standing stroking his horse’s muzzle, talking to the beast in a low voice, and for a moment her heart stopped. Then it raced madly as he raised his head and saw her.

She had brushed her hair until it resembled raw silk and changed into a clean blouse, but her old skirt and ugly stout boots she could do nothing about. She had noticed the previous evening how his clothes were of the finest quality and cut, his knee-high leather boots shining and without a mark to blemish the smooth surface. Everything about him was wholesome and fresh. When he’d led the horse the night before, she’d looked at his hand on the reins and his fingernails had been short and spotlessly clean. A gentleman’s hand, one that had probably never done a day’s hard labour in its life. But he couldn’t help what he was born to, she’d chided herself, as though the thought had been a criticism. Which it had, in a way.

‘Hello, Pearl.’

Again the sound of his voice made her shiver inside. She looked into his face. It was slightly flushed and his eyes were bright. ‘Hello,’ she murmured shyly.

‘I was hoping you might decide to take the air again.’

He spoke as though she was a highborn lady strolling around her manicured gardens. A silence ensued between them for a moment, then Christopher unfastened the horse’s reins from a branch of a tree, saying, ‘Shall we walk a little?’

He had thought of nothing but this moment all day. And what course of action he would take if she didn’t come. But she
had
come. Struggling to keep the elation from sounding in his voice, he said, ‘You were able to escape your fetters once more then?’

He’d spoken lightly but he knew immediately he’d said the wrong thing, even before Pearl replied hotly, ‘If you’re implying I’m a captive then you’re wrong, Mr Armstrong. The gypsies respect their womenfolk, that’s all, and they have good reason for making sure they’re protected when close to the towns. Some folk seem to think gypsies have loose morals and they tar them all with the same brush.’

Her phraseology was interesting. This time Christopher considered his words. ‘Forgive me, but you speak as though you are more of an observer than one of them.’

‘I – I wasn’t born a gypsy, if that’s what you mean.’ So he’d been right. All day he’d been trying to reconcile how she fitted into the Romany community. Her fair skin and blue eyes and slender build was at variance with the sturdy, black-haired individuals he’d seen working in the fields. Carefully, he said, ‘May I ask how you came to join them?’

There was a long pause, the silence broken only by a pair of male blackbirds fighting noisily in the hedgerow, one of which flew away as they approached, with the other hot on its tail.

‘They found me when I was ill and alone and took me in,’ Pearl said quietly.

‘How long ago was that?’

‘I was eleven years old.’ The tone of her voice warned him not to pursue this line of conversation. Restraining his burning curiosity with some difficulty, Christopher acknowledged that he would have to tread carefully if he didn’t want to spoil things. He didn’t qualify in his mind what he meant by ‘things’, he only knew if he frightened her off now he would regret it for the rest of his life.

Casually, he said, ‘They’ve obviously been good to you.’

‘Aye, they have, very good. And kind.’

‘I should imagine you’re someone it would be easy to be kind to.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ She gave him a small smile.

They walked on in the deep twilight until they came to the place where they’d met the night before. Motioning towards the wall with his hand, Christopher said, ‘Shall we sit a while?’ As she nodded, he quickly took off his coat and laid it on top of the dusty stone, saying, ‘There, that should be comfortable enough.’

The simple action brought home to Pearl that he was from a different world, not that she really needed to be reminded of it. She’d been saying the same thing to herself all day long. It had been folly to come tonight; a man of his class would want one thing and one thing only from a gypsy girl. And yet . . . he didn’t seem like that.

Christopher now looked at her and saw she was perturbed in some way. Her earlier comments about how people viewed the gypsies in mind, he said gently, ‘I’m glad you decided to take a walk again tonight. I was hoping we might talk a while.’

‘You – you’re the son of the Mr Armstrong who owns the estate, aren’t you?’ Discreet enquiries under cover of casual conversation out in the fields that day had elicited this information. There were two sons of the present landowner and his lady wife, she’d been told, although one, the younger lad, was away at university down South for a large part of the year.

‘Yes, I am. One of them anyway. I have an older brother, Nathaniel.’

Having tied up his horse, Christopher came and sat down beside her. The faint scent of woodsmoke hung in the still air. The woodman had been felling the straight, eight-year-old chestnut underwood growing at the back of the estate earlier in the day, the grey smoke from his woodfire billowing out into the blue sky. If Byron had been here, Pearl knew he would have skulked around once it was dark to see what he could salvage. Walking sticks cut from chestnut always sold well and took no time to fashion, unlike his carvings. But she didn’t want to think of Byron, not now.

‘I’ve been longing to see you all day.’

Christopher’s quiet confession brought Pearl’s eyes to his. Then she turned her gaze away, looking towards the hedgerow on the other side of the lane, her cheeks pink.

‘Do you mind me talking like this?’ he asked after a moment or two.

‘I – I don’t know. I don’t want you to think–’ She stopped abruptly, not knowing how to continue.

‘I don’t.’ He replied to what she’d been unable to voice. ‘Please believe me when I say this, I only wish for us to be able to get to know each other a little. I wouldn’t harm a hair of your head. You have my word on that.’

His coat was thick and soft, she could feel the beautiful material beneath her hands where they rested either side of her on the wall. She had never felt cloth like this; she had never met anyone like him before. She was trembling inside but not with fear; she somehow knew he was speaking the truth when he said he wouldn’t hurt her. ‘What is your university like?’ she asked.

‘My . . . ?’ He stared at her. ‘Do you really want to know?’

She did. She wanted to know everything about him, starting from when he’d been a little boy and right up to the present day. She didn’t say this though, merely nodding her head.

‘Well, the university is full of men like me whose family don’t really know what else to do with them.’ Then he shook his head. ‘No, that’s not fair. There are plenty of good, intelligent men who are following a worthwhile goal and who will emerge at the end of their education equipped to follow the career of their choice. I envy them, I suppose.’

‘Because you don’t feel like that?’

He shrugged his shoulders, privately amazed he’d told her so much. ‘I’m the younger son. This means my brother inherits and takes over the estate and my father’s business enterprises in due course. Which is all to the good, I might add. Nathaniel is as ideally suited to this role as I am not.’

Pearl’s brow wrinkled. ‘What will you do then? When you leave the university?’

‘The truthful answer to that is I don’t know.’

Pearl stared at him. It seemed amazing that a young man of his wealth and power had no clear idea about his future. He could do anything, couldn’t he? ‘What would you like to do?’ she asked. ‘If you could choose anything, regardless of your position?’

He smiled. ‘Regardless of my position? I would like to have a bookshop, a dusty little bookshop where people could browse all day long without having to buy anything if they didn’t want to. It would house the works of writers which span centuries, from Anglo-Saxon laments to Tudor husbandry, and from Regency
fêtes-champêtres
to the modern day. Dickens, Addison, William Blake, Wordsworth . . . Beautiful literature, particularly that which has a powerful feeling for the countryside, as I do. Words paint pictures, you know. Like yesterday. When I saw you in the corn-fields I was reminded of a poem which finishes,

“Speak but one word to me over the corn,

Over the tender, bowed locks of the corn.” That’s how I felt.’

Pearl was entranced. ‘Who wrote the poem?’ she asked a little breathlessly. ‘What was it called?’

‘Summer Dawn by William Morris. He was a poet and novelist and painter.’

‘And you learned about him, about poetry and books at university?’

Christopher nodded. ‘I’m studying for a degree in English Literature.’ He didn’t mention the magnificent library at home, a room which – to his knowledge, at least – his father had never entered and Nathaniel only once or twice.

English Literature,
thought Pearl. Even the sound of the words was daunting. He was as far removed from her as the Man in the Moon.

But of course he was, a part of her mind answered harshly. What had she expected? He was a fine gentleman, used to servants and beautiful clothes and sitting on a horse watching others work.

‘What’s the matter?’

His grey eyes were tight on her face when she looked up. ‘I – you shouldn’t be here. Your family wouldn’t like you talking to me.’

He didn’t deny this. What he did say was, ‘My grandfather was a shopkeeper, as was his father before him. They both had a penchant for gambling though, and my grandfather was particularly good at it. Some said he cheated – but it could never be proven. One night he staked everything he had in a game of poker. He won. It would seem he always won when he needed to. Overnight he rose to the dizzy heights of a rich country gentleman and within a few short years he had convinced himself that others saw him as he wished to see himself. He made sure his only son – my father – married into an old aristocratic family who needed his money to keep the wolf from the door and were prepared to sacrifice their daughter for the right sum. Distasteful, isn’t it?’

She did not reply, and he went on, ‘Shortly after the marriage, my grandparents were killed and my father inherited. My mother dutifully bore him two sons and then retired to the west wing of the house, leaving my father to his quarters in the east wing. At social functions they are cordial to each other, the rest of the time they rarely speak or acknowledge each other’s presence. My mother has her circle of friends and enjoys her dinner parties, bridge clubs, balls and other gatherings; my father has his little empire, his club and an elegant hostess who knows all the right people and says all the right things at the right time. That, Pearl, is my family.’

‘And your brother?’ she asked softly.

He hesitated. ‘Nat is Nat. We’ve always rubbed along well together, although we’re quite different.’ He turned to her, his hand close to her fingers on the wall but without touching. ‘What I’m trying to say is, the Armstrongs are not what they seem. If that game of cards had turned out differently, my grandfather would have been forced to work down the mines or in the steel yards – anything to earn a crust like thousands of other working-class men.’

‘But it didn’t turn out differently.’

‘No, it didn’t.’

It was dark now, but the moonlight was as bright as the night before. It painted moving pictures where the faint evening breeze rustled the leaves on the trees and the shadows danced. The fragrance in the air and the warm balmy night were soothing, but the silence which had fallen between them stretched and quivered until Pearl found herself saying, ‘I was born in Sunderland and Seth, my eldest brother, looked after the family when my da died.’

‘Is he living with the gypsies too?’

‘No, no. Seth and Fred and Walter were sent to prison. For thieving. But they did it for us, for my mother and baby brothers. They weren’t bad, not really.’ She made a wide sweeping movement. ‘That’s what people always say, isn’t it, when one of their own gets into trouble? But in this case it’s true. My da set them on with McArthur when they were just bairns . . .’

As her voice faltered and died, Christopher stared at her. He’d known from the moment he set eyes on this girl that she would make an impact on his life, even if it was only that he’d forever carry the memory of her standing in the golden corn under a brilliant sun with her hair cascading down her back. But now he’d spoken to her, he knew that wouldn’t be enough. His voice little more than a whisper, he said, ‘Tell me. Tell me everything, from the beginning.’

Pearl brought her hands into her lap and looked down at them as she began speaking. She told him everything. Afterwards, she was amazed at herself but there, in their quiet shadowed little world, the words came easily because it didn’t seem real. It was as though they had stepped out of time.

At some point Christopher’s hand took one of hers but he didn’t interrupt her. It was only when she finished speaking that he said softly, ‘I’m glad the gypsies found you, Pearl. They have my undying gratitude.’

Slowly now she looked at him. Two days ago she hadn’t known he was alive, but now she had the strangest feeling that she knew him better than anyone in her life. She didn’t smile when she said, ‘I’m glad too, but I must go back now.’