Finders and Keepers (9 page)

‘Yes, Mr Pritchard.'

‘Sir,
always,
sir,
girl,' he reprimanded sharply.

‘Sorry, sir.' Her tears soaked into the pillow she'd stuffed with goose-down.

‘And a word of advice – keep that brother of yours in check, or I'll be forced to take action.'

‘Yes, sir.'

His footsteps echoed down the wooden staircase, the back door slammed, but she didn't leave the bed until she heard the wheels of the trap rattle over the cobbles in the yard. Swinging her legs to the floor, she left the bed, wrapped herself in the bottom sheet and crossed the landing into the narrow room built into the archway that spanned the two halves of the farmhouse. Taking care that she couldn't be seen from outside, she moved to the side of the window and watched the agent drive up the road that led to Brecon.

She felt dirtier than when she spent a day scrubbing out the pigsties and cowsheds. Cleaning up after animals was filthy but honest work. The things Bob Pritchard did to her were foul and degrading, and if it weren't for her brothers and sister she would have killed herself the first time he'd violated her.

But before her mother had died, she had made Mary promise that she would care for her brothers and Martha until they were old enough to care for themselves. Her mother hadn't needed to elaborate. Martha was young, but not too young to attract the attention of the agent.

She ran down the stairs to the stone scullery behind the kitchen that housed the well. Turning the wheel, she drew up a bucket of freezing cold water. Throwing the scrubbing brush and a sliver of a green carbolic soap into the enormous stone sink that almost filled the room, she rubbed the soap on to the brush and began to scrub every inch of her skin. Her face, her neck, her breasts still sticky with his spittle – between her thighs, her chest, her arms and legs, and she didn't stop, not even when the scratches she'd raised began to bleed.

‘I think I've shown you everything you need to see, Mr Evans.'

‘I am grateful for the tour, Miss Adams.' Harry followed Diana Adams along the corridor to a dark-wood staircase.

‘The rooms on the floor below were the principal bedrooms when the castle was a private residence. We have turned them into small wards. Some have four beds, some six. But there are no patients in them at present. They are all outside, either on the terrace or the balconies.'

‘Yet Mr Ross was still in his room?' When Miss Adams didn't comment, Harry realized the man was too ill to be moved.

Miss Adams led him down to the ground floor. She showed him the modern X-ray equipment and pointed to a closed door labelled ‘Silence – Operating Theatre'.

‘Although it's not in use today it's kept sterile, so I can't take you in there.'

‘Doctor Williams warned us that it wouldn't be possible to operate on my grandfather.'

‘Not if his lungs are also affected by pneumoconiosis.'

‘So, all you can really offer my grandfather is fresh air?' Harry only realized how that sounded after he'd spoken. ‘I'm sorry, I don't mean that as a criticism. He will be getting precious little of that in the isolation ward of the infirmary he is in at present.'

‘Fresh air, the benefit of our medical expertise and the twenty-four-hour care and attention of qualified and trained nurses and doctors in antiseptically clean surroundings designed to prevent the contraction and spread of secondary infections,' she recited as though she were reading from a brochure. ‘You know there are no drugs that can cure his condition?'

‘Yes.' Harry knew it, but he wished that Miss Adams and her father wouldn't emphasize the fact.

‘But there are medicines that will help control his pain and make him comfortable. My father is also a great believer in a healthy, nourishing diet rich in fish oils.' She looked at him, and he noticed that her eyes were darker than his, almost navy blue, but there wasn't any warmth in their depths. ‘I would rather that you had not witnessed my argument with Mr Ross, Mr Evans. It may have given you the impression that our rules are unduly harsh. But they are designed not only for the benefit of our patients but also to stop the spread of the disease within our staff and any visitors.'

‘I realize that, Miss Adams.' Harry hadn't been quite so irritated by anyone since his schooldays when he'd been subjected to the teachings of masters prone to over-explanation.

‘There is one more thing you should see before you come to any firm decision about your grandfather's treatment.'

They left the main building and walked down outside corridors which were obviously recent additions.

They stepped on to a covered, paved yard, surrounded on three sides by what seemed to be workshops of some sort. Harry assumed they had been the stables, outside dairies, stillrooms and storerooms when Craig-y-Nos had been a private residence.

‘This roof was erected by Madame Patti so she could leave and enter her carriage without getting wet. She couldn't afford to catch cold, when her voice was her fortune.'

A middle-aged hunchback with yellow skin opened the door to one of the workshops. ‘You need a box, Miss Adams?'

‘No, thank you, Fred, not now. I'm showing Mr Evans around the sanatorium.'

Fred touched his cap and retreated, but not before Harry saw that the floor of the workshop behind him was covered in wood shavings and sawdust. A half-finished coffin, resting on trestles, stood in the centre of the room.

‘You make your own coffins?'

‘Yes.'

Harry took a deep breath. He dreaded the answer but he had to ask the question. ‘Do you have many deaths here?'

‘Yes, Mr Evans.'

‘How many people do you cure?'

‘“Cure” is not a word my father chooses to use. Tuberculosis weakens the system. What may appear to be a full recovery is frequently reversed when a patient returns to poor living conditions, or a less than healthy way of life. Insufficient rest, drink, poor diet, a strenuous job – one or all of those things can precipitate a relapse.'

‘And if the patient returns to an ideal home life, with a good diet and plenty of rest?'

Seeing that he wasn't prepared to be fobbed off, she said, ‘Twenty per cent of the patients who have entered Craig-y-Nos since my father took his post have been certified sufficiently free from infection to be returned to their homes.'

‘Two out of ten,' he murmured. That moment he realized he had yet to accept his grandfather was going to die. He was still hoping against hope for a miracle that would save his life.

‘I have to visit the children's ward. If you have decided to bring your grandfather here, you will find the clerk in the office. It is the third door on the right down that corridor.' She pointed to her left.

‘May I see the children's ward?'

‘Why?'

Miss Adams's curt, professional manner had made Harry curious to see how she behaved around children, but he could hardly admit that was his reason. ‘I'd like to see the facilities you offer children,' he answered lamely.

‘They are exactly the same as the ones we offer adults, but if you want to inspect them, keep your mask over your face. Children are just as contagious.'

They entered a ballroom-sized, light and airy conservatory that overlooked the gardens at the back of the house. Not all of the beds had been pushed outside, and Harry blanched when he saw children the same age as his brother, Glyn, and some even younger lying pale, wan and skeletally thin in cots, their faces as white as the sheets drawn to their chins.

‘Miss Diana?' a girl called out when they approached her bed. She smiled when Miss Adams turned to her.

‘I'll be in to see you – all of you – at teatime. And, I happen to know there's a surprise.'

‘Oranges!' one young boy cried hopefully.

‘Not oranges, Aled, but something just as nice.' She walked between the rows of cots and beds, and Harry noted that she knew every patient by name and had something personal to say to each of them. All the patients were lying flat on their backs, some in contraptions that resembled straitjackets, and he couldn't help feeling that they must be bored witless with nothing to do other than stare up at the skylights.

He wanted to help, to say something comforting to the children who gazed at him with searching, trusting eyes, but to his embarrassment he couldn't think of a single thing. So intensely grateful for his good health that he was almost ashamed of it, he left the conservatory, turned his back on the rows of beds on the terrace, pulled his mask from his face and walked away from the sanatorium.

Inhaling the ‘fresh air' that was all Craig-y-Nos really had to offer its patients, despite what Diana Adams had said, he strode down the paths and stone steps that linked the flowerbeds and shrubberies, and headed for the river. He crossed a narrow footbridge and looked back at the castle. Its massive grey bulk towered above the trees, seemingly even larger and more imposing from the back. Perched high on the hill overlooking the valley, it dominated the beautiful and lonely countryside.

It was ideally placed for quarantining people with a virulently infectious disease that proved fatal in eight out of ten cases.

Mary returned to her bedroom as soon as she had dried and dressed herself. She stripped the linen from her bed and bundled it downstairs. Dragging the iron bucket to the well, she filled it with water and set it on the range to boil. Hoping that David wouldn't forget to buy soap, she grated the last of what she had into the wooden laundry tub. When the water started bubbling, she poured it in, whipped the suds into lather, threw in the sheets, bolster and pillowcases, and pounded all trace of the smell and sweat of the hated agent from them with the dolly until her arms ached and she no longer had the strength to lift or twist the wooden pole.

Only then did she tip the tub into the stone sink and rinse the bedding in fresh water. After wringing out as much water as she could with her bare hands, she tossed the linen back into the tub and carried it out to the washing line behind the yard. Pegging the sheets, pillowcases and bolster securely with dolly pegs, she hauled the line high and knotted it securely around the nails her father had hammered into the pole.

Exhausted, consumed by loathing for the agent and herself for allowing him to use her, she sank down on the grass. The day was balmy, the sun warm on her bare head and arms. She looked down the hill to the reservoir on the valley floor. Built the year she had been born, it glittered blue and beautiful with the reflected light of the sky and the flickering images of the bare hills that encircled it.

Her father had told her that he hadn't wanted Swansea Council to flood the valley but the agent before Bob Pritchard had told him their landlord had no choice but to sell the council the best grazing land on the Ellis Estate. If he refused, he would have been taken to court, fined more money than most people saw in a lifetime and still lose the land because it was needed to generate electricity for the town of Swansea. Although what a reservoir of water had to do with electricity had been a mystery to her father and remained one to the entire family.

But when all the local objections had been ignored, and the inevitable had happened, her mother said it had been a blessing in disguise because the only thing that could possibly have made the view from the back of their house more beautiful was water. And although Swansea might think it owned Crai Reservoir, it didn't, because the only people who saw it every day were the Ellises. Her mother had come to regard the reservoir as the Ellises' private lake, and so did Mary.

No matter what she did around the farm she was aware of its presence. As the seasons changed so did the reservoir. Its surface, cold, dark and brooding under winter skies, was transformed by the sun. Sparkling and fairy-like in spring and summer, it became wild, windswept and rough when autumn winds blew down the valley from the hills.

Sometimes, she dreamed that she was walking towards it for the very last time, because once she reached its edge, she would carry on walking until the waters closed over her head. And then she'd feel nothing … be nothing …

A breeze ruffled her washing and a wet sheet slapped her face. Jolted back to the present, she thought of her brothers, shopping in Pontardawe, and Martha working in Craig-y-Nos. For their sake she had no choice but to carry on.

She returned to the yard and picked up a wheelbarrow and spade from the barn. An hour later she had dug up enough carrots, potatoes, onions and parsnips to make a vegetable stew for their supper, and cut leeks and beans to flavour it. The raspberry canes, which had never done well, yielded enough fruit for a small summer pudding. She stacked the vegetables carefully, balanced the spade on top and wheeled the barrow back into the yard.

A flurry of wings and high-pitched cackling alerted her to a fracas amongst the chickens. One of the Leghorns was attacking a smaller Friesian bird, pecking it savagely and aiming for its eyes. The Friesian was valiantly trying to retaliate, in between dodging its attacker's beak, but it was no match for Leghorn, and blood seeped down its feathers from the wounds on its head.

Mary dropped the handles on the barrow. She saw the vegetables and fruit rolling over the dirty cobbles, but the sight that would have normally appalled her barely registered. She dived on both birds and caught the Leghorn at her second attempt.

Everything went blank until she was conscious of a pain in her leg and she realized she was on the ground. The handle of the barrow was digging into her thigh. Birds were flocking around her, and to her dismay she saw they were pecking at the fruit and vegetables that had taken her over an hour to harvest.

Her hands were warm and sticky. She looked down and saw that she was holding the severed head of the Leghorn in one hand and its body in the other. Blood flowed sluggishly from its neck, soaking her fingers and her skirt. She had wrung its neck and from the mangled state of the head, used more force than necessary.