Eliza’s Daughter (4 page)

But I shook and shook my head, more obstinate as he became more pressing, and at last simply ran away from the boys and hid myself in Farmer Dunleigh's haymow until they were well out of sight. In truth I had some regret at missing the fair, but knew full well that, although Hoby meant kindly
now,
after they had drunk a fair quantity of cider, as they were bound to do, the boys would grow wild and silly and their company would be worse than none.

I wandered along the deserted village street. Tom and Hannah had left already, in hopes of picking up early bargains. Biddy also was gone; along with them, I supposed; at all events her door was locked; I felt faintly surprised that she had not left me in charge of Polly and Triz. Given this freedom, I took myself off in the direction of Growly Point, past the horsepond and the Squire's orchards of gnarled, wind-twisted apple trees.

Growly Point was one of my favourite spots. The Squire's house was perched on top of the headland, along with a chapel and a stable block; behind it huddled a stand of wind-slanted beeches, and before it the gardens rolled down the hillside in steps and ledges, with a small brook meandering among them, which lower down formed the boundary alongside the public footpath. This was a stone track that led through a wishing-gate and on, past meadow and plough-land, to a dip in a low cliff.

Passing through the lych-gate I made my usual wish ‘that Mr Bill and Mr Sam come back', then hurried on, glancing up to the left where some of the gardens were in view filled with great drifts of late daisies and roses, and pink-and-white tall-stemmed flowers, their name unknown to me; but most of the garden was screened by high evergreen hedges. Until I reached the cliff top and looked back, the house itself was not visible. Then it seemed huge and menacing, with two great twisted brick chimneys like wolves' ears, and all its windows glaring at the sea.

On the footway I was not trespassing, I knew, yet the spread of those wide, watchful windows gave me, as always, a prickle on my shoulder blades. I sped round a corner of the path. Here it led steeply, through a cleft in the cliff, down to the shore. But I turned westwards and made my way farther along the cliff top until I reached a kind of den, or nest, where I had been used to come after the departure of Mr Sam and Mr Bill. In this sheltered nook, among thistles and dried grass, and sloe and bramble-bushes, I could with luck spend hours peacefully doing nothing but watch the comings and goings of the tide.

And the tide here was worthy of attention. A track led along the shore from Ashett, but natives of the place took it only with discretion and a number of incautious strangers were drowned every season, despite being warned. For the shore here, beyond the point, was treacherous, formed not of sand, but from curious strips of flat striated rock running in mazy patterns, many of them so regular that they appeared to be the work of man, others so irregular that they seemed like the distracted jottings of some giant pencil. Mr Sam had loved to study them from the cliff top and try to describe them in his notebook. Among these rock ledges it was all too easy to be caught by the incoming tide, for it rushed into the bay very fast, and the channels between the strips of rock varied greatly in depth and the water gushed through them in wayward spurts and torrents.

Down below the spot where I sat, the rock strips ran in huge concentric curves like the markings on a giant oyster. Blue crescents of water showed where the tide was turning; gulls and oyster-catchers whirled and swooped and cried and paddled, feasting on the mussels and whelks and barnacles before they should be covered by the incoming water.

. . . I sat and longed for the company of Mr Bill and Mr Sam. I remembered those words – ‘long and lank and brown, as is the ribbed sea-sand'. Perhaps Mr Bill had been looking at this very beach when they came into his mind; the curved formations could easily be the ribs of some great beast. Over the next headland a great pale lopsided hunter's moon sailed upwards, and I remembered how dearly Mr Sam loved the moon. ‘She is the only friend,' he said, ‘who can accompany you without walking.'

When I am grown, I vowed, I will go in search of those two men. When I am a woman and have money of my own, I will travel, I will find them. And I made great plans for earning money; I would write plays and tales and verses, as the two men did; I would have my tales published and make a fine name for myself. And besides that, I would be very beautiful, so that people would love me and never notice my hands.

So I sat and dreamed. And the afternoon floated by like a wisp of cloud, like the soaring moon. As for the boys and the fair, I never gave them another thought, although before I had felt no little pain at being obliged to refuse Hoby's offer and hurt his feelings. Sometimes he came here to Growly Head with me, and when we were alone together he seemed like a different person. Yet he would soon forget his offer and my refusal, I knew, and simply dismiss me from his mind as a queer little body, full of wayward fancies.

‘Child! How still you sit!' said a voice above me. ‘I have been watching you these two hours and you have never shifted a single inch, I do believe, during the whole of that time!'

I gave a violent start of surprise, almost, in my confusion, tipping myself over the edge of the cliff.

‘Oh, ma'am! How you startled me!'

‘Hola!' she said, laughing. ‘Don't fall down on to the rocks! Now I am sorry that I took you unawares. That jump you gave when I spoke made up for the whole two hours' inactivity.'

She must herself have been sitting equally motionless. For now I saw her plainly – a lady seated quite still in a hammock of grass, up above me and on the opposite side, as it were, of my little gully. The dress and shawl that she had on were thinly striped in straw-colour and grey, and she carried a green lacy parasol; her whole costume might have been designed, and perhaps was, to melt into her background and render her almost invisible. Her face was thin and brown, very tanned; her hair, plainly dressed in bands, was fair, almost grey. She seemed faintly familiar; I thought I must have seen her in the village, but not for some time. Around her neck, on a velvet ribbon, she carried a little pair of field-glasses.

Her eyes were very strange.

‘Don't hurry off, my child,' she said, as I began to scramble to my feet. ‘You have as much right here as I . . . perhaps more. Are you from Ashett?'

‘No, ma'am. From B-Byblow – from Nether Othery.'

‘I believe I may have seen you there. Do you – are you an orphan?'

‘Yes, ma'am. I live with Mrs Wellcome.'

A light came into her eyes at that. She made a move as if she would have questioned me; but then changed her mind.

Inquisitively, as a child will, I studied her eyes.

They were a beautiful dark grey but one of them, the left, was cast or twisted sideways, so that while the right one met my own gaze, the left stared away over my shoulder. This gave a queer effect; as if the whole of her mind was never, at any one time, fully upon oneself or upon what she was saying.

‘I have been watching the birds,' she said, smiling, touching the field-glasses. ‘Like you, I take great pleasure in sitting and observing what is to be seen. But in future I shall have less leisure for doing so.'

‘I – I am sorry for that, ma'am,' I said politely. ‘If so be as you enjoy it.'

‘Oh no. Oh no, it has been an enforced holiday. Tomorrow begins a new era.'

I liked listening to her. Her language, her low musical voice reminded me of my two lost friends. But all the time, at my back, I felt the great house with its pricked ears, its staring eyes. As she rose to her feet I scuttled hurriedly up the slope. She sighed.

‘Goodbye, my child.'

‘Good evening, ma'am.' I curtseyed and fairly ran off up the hill towards the wishing-gate, wondering where the lady came from.

***

Back at home chaos and consternation reigned. Hannah and Tom were returned from the fair. (I noticed a stout bundle of calico, and so knew what the next two years' dresses would be made of; no doubt Tom's tools were in the shed.) The boys, all three, lurked in the back kitchen. Some neighbours were in the parlour. All attention was trained on Biddy, who sat enthroned by the hearth. She was in tempests, in storms, in floods of tears.

‘
My little Polly!
Oh how, oh how could such a calamity have happened? Oh, oh, I'll never be happy again.'

Others besides villagers formed her audience, I noticed: Mr Willsworthy from the Hall – why was he here? Also Dr Moultrie, back from conducting his funeral at Over.

‘I was gathering mussels on the shore – to make a mussel pie –'

Why in the world would Biddy Wellcome do that? I wondered. She never gathers mussels. She never ever makes a mussel pie. The only thing Biddy ever does in the kitchen is make herself a cup of tea, and tell the foster-children to gobble down their taties and be off to bed.

‘I was gathering mussels – I was carrying little Tirrizz, bless her heart, so she wouldn't cut her little tender feet on the sharp mussel shells –'

And when did you last carry little Tirrizz? I wondered. And where had all this happened?

The mussel beds were all on the beaches east of Ashett.

‘Did you inform the coastguards?' asked Willsworthy in his hoarse rasping voice.

She whirled on him.

‘In course I told them! Or – leastways – I sent a message by Frank and Charley Tedburn. Oh, my poor heart! Oh, my little Polly. Shall I ever, ever see her more?'

She lapsed into hysterical sobbing.

‘In the midst of life, God moves in a mysterious way,' said Dr Moultrie.

I stole into the back room. Nobody was paying any heed to me. All eyes were on Biddy. In the kitchen I found the boys, Hoby, Will and Jon, lugubriously contemplating a single rush basket in which slept a child.

With my heart crashing painfully against my ribs, I tiptoed across the floor and inspected the occupant. There slept Polly Wellcome, in heavy, red-cheeked, open-mouthed slumber which suggested to me that she had been given a few drops of laudanum in her Daffy's Elixir (a mixture to which Biddy sometimes had recourse if she wished to go out of an evening).

‘Wh-where's T-Triz?'

My teeth chattered so much that I could hardly utter.

‘That
be
Triz,' said Will. He was a large, fat, stupid lad, who, although nearly twelve, had not yet succeeded in learning his letters. ‘Polly's drownded,' he added.

I met the eye of Hoby.

He explained: ‘Biddy, you see, keeps saying that it was Polly who drownded. And you better not give her the lie; old Willsworthy would be down on you like a chopper.'

‘But - but –'

‘Well, Biddy ought to know her own child, didn't she? If she says it was her own little 'un got drownded?'

That was Jonathan, whose mind moved sensibly enough, but he was, I knew, amazingly short-sighted, could hardly see more than a yard away from his nose, always came last in the games when the boys shot arrows or played at marbles. He had never looked closely at either child, I was sure of that.

‘Hoby – what
happened?
What does Biddy say?'

‘Why,' said Hoby, scratching his head and frowning, ‘Biddy says she was out gathering mussels with the pair of kinchins, down on Growly Point rocks – and that the tide came in extra fast, and Polly was swept away down one of the wynds.'

That was what the local people called the rock channels.

‘But,' went on Hoby slowly and thoughtfully, ‘I don't say but what that tale has me in a puzzle.'

‘Why, Hoby?'

‘Well, this is why: Biddy was at the fair until three; I saw her then, with my own eyes, colloguing with an old rapscallion wearing gold rings in's ears. So how the pize would she have had time to get down to the shore? The tide would have been flooding afore that; the mussel beds would have been covered over. And she warn't there earlier, for after dinner the lads and I saw her start off to Ashett with both the kinchins; didn't we, Will, Jon-o?'

‘Ay, that's so,' they said.

‘But –'

Then I began to think.

‘What is Willsworthy doing here?'

‘Why,' Hoby explained, ‘this very morning, it seems, a message came down from Kinn Hall that Lady Hariot is better now, come home from Madery, cured of her sickness, back on her pins, and wants little Triz took up to the Hall, right away tomorrow, so as to be with her rightful ma.'

‘Oh, my heart alive . . .'

‘So Triz is to be sent off tomorrow.'

‘Biddy is going to send
Polly –
being as how she's lost Triz –'

None the less, something about the story seemed to me to be wholly wrong. And queer. Why, suddenly, would Biddy take Triz down to the shore and lose her – just when this summons had come? Why should she send off her own child to the Hall? Biddy was not a devoted mother, certainly, but she did show a kind of animal affection at times, when she would suddenly pluck Polly from the ground and give her a few smacking kisses. Towards Triz she had never displayed the slightest feeling. So – what was behind this? Did she want to part with her own child? And would nobody notice that an exchange had been made? Nobody guess?

‘Where does she say she was gathering mussels?'

‘On Growly Rocks.'

‘She never was there,' I said with confidence. ‘Never. I sat up on the cliff head the livelong afternoon, and there was not a soul on the rocks all that time. Not a single soul. And there was – there was another lady on the cliff, who would say the same.'

‘You going to go in that room and give Biddy the lie?' said Hoby with his wicked sidelong grin, eyes bright under sandy lashes.

‘What do
you
think she did with Triz, Hoby?'

He shrugged. ‘Sold her to the gypsies? Triz was like a liddle elf-maid, anyway. Maybe they'd want her.'