Shadow Baby (14 page)

But Leah was not stupid. It was all a means to an end and the more subtle and original the means the more need to watch for the hidden end. She thought she saw his intention when he gave her lilies on Easter Day and hoped he might be allowed to express his unbounded admiration for her loveliness which had bewitched him. She knew she was meant to blush and simper and thank him, and then he would take this as a signal to proceed in what was, after all, likely to be only a common-or-garden seduction. But she did neither. She knew all about him by then. She had heard the tales of his wild living, of how he was back in this bleak part of the world only because he was being hounded for money and had come to get

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it from his parents who had saved him from prison many times before. He was a rogue and she knew he was and would not be caught. ‘Thank you for your lilies,’ she had said primly, ‘they will look very well upon the altar table if the vicar will accept them, and as for my loveliness, before God we are all lovely.’ She had said it quite stern-faced, with due solemnity, but afterwards she had laughed at the astonishment and consternation in his eyes. If he thought her deeply religious, so much the better.

They were observed all the time. A road which looked empty was never empty of eyes watching from somewhere. They looked down from a cottage on a hill or through a hedge where a lone plough was driven in a field. He might not know this but she did and she was glad of it. It governed her behaviour, this certain knowledge that she was being watched. She had a hidden audience and performed for it. They would say of her, those who slyly spied on her, that she never gave Hugo Todhunter an inch, never allowed him anything approaching a liberty, that she showed herself immune to his unwanted advances. But she was not immune and that became the hardest of all things to conceal. She was not immune to his very looks and it made her feel guilty. It was wrong, in her own opinion, to admire a man for his looks. It was foolish, just as foolish as thinking one’s own looks of consequence. That was the kind of attraction she feared and of which she was wary. Yet Hugo Todhunter was not generally thought of as handsome. He was not tall enough or broad enough to qualify as a truly handsome man and he did not turn women’s heads in the street. But it was his looks she liked, his rough, unkempt hair, the darkness of his hair and eyes, his litheness, his brown complexion, not ruddy but olive-toned, and his air of concentration. He seemed always to be listening as they walked the road silently together and it made her curious.

It became harder and harder to keep silent and it was she who broke the silence in the end, asking him, irritably, why he insisted on accompanying her along the road in such a way. ‘Are you tired of it? Shall I leave you in peace?’ he said, and she was weak enough to say she did not care, only wondered at the pointlessness of the ritual. He said that to him it was not pointless, that on the contrary it gave him great pleasure and satisfaction, but that each day he met her he was deeply afraid he would be turned off like a dog. ‘How could I turn you off?’ she exclaimed scornfully. ‘It is a free country, this is an open road.’ He said she only had to express indignation at his

arrival by her side and he would never dare to come again. There and then she should have expressed this indignation but she kept silent, and by her silence betrayed her interest. It made him bolder. He began to talk, though not in the manner she had imagined. He told her things, little bits of history about the area, little anecdotes about when he was a boy. He never asked questions of her or seemed to need any but the most superficial response. And still when they reached the Fox and Hound he bowed and left her, never entering the pub.

Weeks went by, months, and nothing ever changed, except the weather. With the first fall of heavy snow she was not able to walk the road at all and was shocked at her own dismay. She would not see him and it grieved her out of all proportion. The snow lasted a week. She thought he might come in search of her if he missed her as she missed him, but there was no sign of him and she chided herself for expecting him. She dreamed of him every night and woke excited, though all they had done in her dream was walk together as they always did. The moment the snow melted she was out on the road hardly daring to look for him and relieved to the point of faintness when she heard him gallop up behind her. All winter it was the same - the snow, the impossibility of walking, the missing of him, the secret joy when she saw him again.

In the spring, he made a move. She knew it was that, a move: she recognised it as such, but by then she felt he had earned the right to make it. ‘Do you only walk here,’ he asked her, ‘along this road?’ She said that mostly, as he knew, she did, but that in the summer, when the evenings were light, she sometimes walked down by the river on Sunday, if it was pleasant weather, if she were not needed at the Fox and Hound. She was fond of the river, she was told she had been born in a house on the banks of a river. He took note and the following Sunday, as she had anticipated, he met her down by the river. It felt strange to see him there. She felt awkward, but he was more at ease. They walked, they parted, she went on to church. But during the week he said there was a river walk he was fond of some miles away and he wondered if he might drive her in his pony trap to it, and they could walk it together. She was quiet for a moment not through any doubt as to the answer she would give, nor out of any desire to tease, but because she knew how significant a moment this was. She had only to accept the first invitation he had issued in almost a year for her interest to be declared. So she accepted.

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They were seen, of course they were seen. They did not try to hide, there was no subterfuge. He picked her up in the pony trap at the Fox and Hound. They drove some four miles and walked the river walk and they drove back again, whereupon an avalanche of warnings and advice fell upon her ears. She was not deaf to the dire threats of disaster. She took heed. Hugo Todhunter was said to have been forced by his angry parents to spend this past year at home while they settled his debts, but was now on the brink of being sent by them to a new life in Canada where they had connections. They would not permit him to stay in the country and once more ruin himself, but had made it a condition of their saving him from prison that he would go into business under his uncle in Vancouver. It was to be his last chance. There were even those who told Leah the date he was due to leave and they did not quite believe her when she said she had no interest in knowing it, it was nothing to her.

But Hugo had not mentioned any departure to her, though he had begun to talk about his past life. ‘I was spoiled,’ he confessed, ‘I was overindulged by my parents. Oh, I had the happiest of childhoods and paid the penalty.’ Leah, who had known no happiness either as a child or since and barely knew the meaning of the word indulgence, ventured to inquire how there could be any penalty. ‘I took my luck for granted,’ Hugo said. ‘I expected my luck always to be there and so I tried at nothing.’ Leah was careful. It struck her as suspicious that a man should so berate himself. What did he expect? That she should protest, that she should not believe such self-depreciation, that she should be charmed by it? She thought hard before she made any comment and then said only, ‘How unfortunate.’ Hugo nodded. He went on to confess he had caused his parents great pain and if he tried for a thousand years to make amends he could never succeed. Leah thought the ‘thousand years’ extravagant and coughed. ‘You do not know the agony of being ashamed,’ Hugo said. ‘There is no worse feeling to know that I am to blame for my own misfortune.’

Again, Leah thought hard. Should she point out that he had only just, in fact, placed blame on his parents for spoiling him, from which he alleged all else had followed? Or would he resent this, would he judge her unsympathetic to what he evidently considered a noble confession? He looked so truly sorrowful, she wanted so badly to comfort him. ‘You can make a new life,’ she finally said, ‘and please your parents.’ He smiled and said it would take a great deal to please them and, as he had acknowledged, he could never make up

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for the worry he had already caused them but that he intended to try. He said it had been a hard year. He said he did not know how he would have survived it if it had not been for her. She had given him hope. She, who was so pure and beautiful and modest, who conducted herself with such grace and dignity … She had stopped him then. She had told him he did not know her and should not speak such nonsense. She was merely a poor girl, an orphan, who worked to live and had no other life and few hopes or aspirations. She did her best and that was all. He said it was for that he admired her - she had nothing and did her best and he had had everything and had done his worst.

So they might have gone on if she had not tripped and fallen and cut her head open on a sharp stone and passed out for an instant with the loss of blood. When she came to, he was cradling her in his arms and kissing her and showering her with frantic endearments, and there was no more hope of keeping her distance. She loved him. It was simple, after all, defying all sense but true nevertheless. He asked her to marry him there and then and she accepted and that was the happiest moment. But it was only a moment. It did not last nor, really, had she expected it to. He said he had told his parents who had raged and stormed and would not hear of such a marriage; and she asked why he had ever thought they would. He had no money, none at all, and neither of course did she, and all prospect of marrying was hopeless. He said he would have to go to Canada and restore his fortunes and then return and claim her. She accepted this, it was inevitable, there was no other way. So they had their own ceremony, in the little church before he left, and she did not regret it for one minute nor pine for a real priest and a real service.

Nor did she regret the child, except for the first days of uncertainty when her mind filled unpleasantly with all the practicalities of her position. She had Hugo’s address in Vancouver and she wrote to him at once, as he had instructed her to do should anything untoward occur. He had wished her to write weekly, as he would write to her, but with bowed head and hot cheeks she had been obliged to confess she was barely literate. He vowed that when he returned from Canada and they were married properly he would educate her himself. He painted a fetching picture of them both sitting side by side on the riverbank with open books on their knees and a slate and pencil at their side. She was intelligent, he said, he could tell she was and she would learn quickly. But he was relieved

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that she could, if with difficulty, write her name and some simple words and could copy his own name and address on to an envelope. It was fluency she lacked, the ability to pen a letter expressing her feelings and, similarly, though she could read simple sentences, a solid page of writing was a blur to her and took hours of laborious scrutinising before it made sense.

Her message, some six weeks after his departure, had been crude: ‘I am well,’ she wrote, ‘I am with child. I am happy.’ Afterwards, she wondered if she was wise to have proclaimed her happiness but she had not wanted him to think her distraught or that she was accusing him of ruining her. He had not ruined her. He had never forced her and had most conscientiously acknowledged the possible consequences of their love-making. She had told him she would take the risk if he would and that, in truth, as he could see, as he could feel, she could not hold back. How, later, could she ever convey to those who questioned her the urgency and power of that desire? It was impossible. She remembered only that it was so, that she was overwhelmed, without being able to call up the exact sensations. Where her sharp mind was at the time she did not know and did not trouble to search for the answer once it was over.

Money arrived immediately, even before his passionate, remorseful letter half of which she failed completely to decipher. Fifty guineas, in the form of a banker’s order, payable on proof of identity at a bank in English Street, Carlisle. The part of his letter which she could understand, if with difficulty, said that the presentation of the ring he had given her would serve to identify her together with a sample of her signature. The ring had his initials and hers intertwined on the smooth inner surface, and he had already sent the signature on her letter to the bank for them to match it. He had thought of everything but was in an agony of apprehension on her behalf. Correctly, he envisaged she would have to leave the pub and urged her to find some lodging in the village where she would be safe and comfortable until the child was born. More money would follow, he said, and by the time she was brought to bed he would have booked his passage home and would come to claim her.

But she did not try to find lodgings in the village. She did not wish to stay there, among people who despised Hugo and who would sneer at her condition and see her as a victim of his villainy. It was her own choice to return to Carlisle, where she had been born, and she went there full of confidence, excited at the new life which

was opening before her. She was very far from being a wronged woman, humble and penitent. She swept into the bank as though she was perfectly accustomed to doing so and met the eyes of the clerk to whom she presented Hugo’s draft with some hauteur. She knew her signature revealed the uncertainty of her hand but she did not care. He gave her a pen and a fresh piece of paper and she saw him watch as, with immense concentration, she formed the letters of her name, making, as ever, a mess over the double ‘s’ in Messenger try as she did, she could never stop those letters running into each other and looking ugly. Then she had to remove her ring, which she never liked to do. She watched anxiously as it was lifted up and looked at through a magnifying glass and then, to her consternation, taken out of her sight into some back room to be checked by an invisible person. It was only then that she felt vulnerable and that her position seemed precarious. Once the ring was back on her finger she was reassured - as she was by the money, fifty guineas counted in front of her into a cloth bag with a drawstring. She pulled the string tight.