The Colours of Love (13 page)

‘
For whom?
’

‘Don’t speak to me in that tone. I am not responsible for what has taken place over the last twenty-four hours.’

‘She is your grandchild, Clarissa,’ said Harriet, her voice low but penetrating, and then she shrank back against the pillows when it appeared that the other woman was about to spring on her, so great was her rage.

‘If you are wise, you will not repeat that.’ Clarissa breathed deeply, then continued, ‘Hubert and I are not without influence, remember that.’ Turning to her son and husband, she said coldly, ‘There is nothing more that can be accomplished here today, so I suggest we take our leave.’

‘Monty?’ Harriet tried one last time. ‘You will regret it, if you let Esther and the baby go. It’s not too late. If you go to her now, you can make it right.’

He stared across the room at her, indecision clear in his face, and then, as his mother said sharply, ‘Montgomery, did you hear me? We’re leaving,’ his eyes dropped, his shoulders slumped and he followed his parents out of the room.

Harriet sank back against the pillows once she was alone, the pain in her chest gnawing at her, as it was wont to do when she became upset or anxious. Guilt and remorse were weighing heavy, but she still couldn’t believe that Monty wouldn’t go to Esther. He loved her – she knew he loved her. This couldn’t be the end. He would stand up to Clarissa; he had to.

When the door was thrust open some moments later, she thought it would be Monty come to say he had changed his mind, but it was Theobald who walked in, quietly locking the door behind him. He hadn’t said a word the whole time Clarissa and the others had been in the room, and she hadn’t seen him since the evening before, until he had brought them to see her. Now he stared at her, his heavy-jowled face mottled with the temper he was controlling, and still he didn’t speak. It was Harriet who said, ‘Have they gone? Has Monty gone?’

He didn’t answer this. What he did say, and very softly, was, ‘I could kill you for what you’ve done. They could ruin me, the Grants. Do you know that? They might not have much in the way of wealth, apart from that decaying estate of theirs, but who they know is invaluable to me. And now you’ve ruined everything. They’ll never allow Monty to link his name with mine.’

She didn’t plead with him or try to excuse her actions, for she could tell by his face it would be useless.

‘Monty had already agreed to come in with me, after the war, and with him at my side all kinds of doors would open, but now you’ve made enemies of them.’

‘Is that all that concerns you? What the Grants think?’

‘Don’t take that tack. Not after what you’ve done.’ He moved closer, his eyes like two bullets as he ground his teeth. ‘Useless, you’ve been, from day one. Dropping my sons before time one after another – nothing could thrive in that scrawny body of yours. Do you know what they’d do to a mare that couldn’t breed? Shoot it, because it’d be no good to God or man. All I wanted was one son to bear my name, damn you.’

She was frightened now. There was murder in his maddened gaze. ‘I knew how much you wanted a child, that’s why I did what I did. We both knew there could be no more babies.’

‘So it was all for me? A dutiful, loving wife giving her husband what he wanted?’ He gave a bark of a laugh. ‘Except that you’ve never been loving, have you, Harriet? In bed or out of it. Oh, I’ve known you’ve always despised me at heart, like your dear parents and the rest of them, but no one else was going to offer you marriage, were they? Not looking like you do. A dried-up stick at twenty-odd – that’s what you were. I should have known, damn it. I should have seen what was in front of my eyes. A dockside whore as a wife would’ve been better than you.’

He had reached the bed, and as her hand fluttered to her chest, he stared down at her, seeing her fear. ‘You’ve made a monkey out of me, presenting that half-breed bastard as mine, and there’s not a man worth his salt who would blame me for what I’m about to do.’

Before she realized his intent, he had whipped the stack of pillows supporting her thin frame to one side so that she thudded flat on the bed, and as she opened her mouth to scream, he pressed one of the pillows over her face. She barely struggled, her worn-out heart seizing up almost immediately, but he kept it in place for some minutes, more for the satisfaction it gave him than for anything else.

After a while he removed the pillow and looked down at her. She looked peaceful, serene even, and he felt a moment’s anger that she hadn’t suffered; but then, he reasoned to himself, it was probably for the best. This way no one would assume anything other than that she had passed away in her sleep.

Methodically he arranged the pillows as they had been when he came into the room, and settled Harriet against them, smoothing her hair and placing her hands together on top of the counterpane. Then he walked across the room, unlocked the door and left the room without a backward glance.

PART THREE

Caleb

1944

Chapter Nine

In the fourteen months that had passed since Joy’s birth, Esther had not once regretted returning to Yew Tree Farm the day after Harriet had been found dead in her bed. She would have liked to have stayed for the funeral, but in the circumstances that was impossible, as Theobald had made abundantly clear. She’d left the estate with Joy in her arms and in just the clothes she stood up in, and with Theobald’s curses ringing in her ears.

She had arrived in Yorkshire not knowing if Farmer Holden and his wife would take her in, but there had been nowhere else to go and – heartsore, exhausted and at the end of herself – she had returned like a damaged fledgling to the nest where it had been safe. And there she had told her story to the farm’s occupants, sitting in the kitchen while a blizzard raged fiercely outside and the wind howled and moaned. But inside there had been warmth and kindness and acceptance, from the five women at least. Farmer Holden had been a little stiff and taciturn, but his wife had clucked around Esther and the baby like a mother hen, and Priscilla, Beryl, Vera and Lydia – although shocked and amazed at the turn of events – had rallied round and, as one, supported their friend in her hour of need.

Inevitably there had been gossip among the folk in the nearby village, once they had seen Joy, but Esther refused to hide her baby away as though she was ashamed of her. She knew she had done nothing wrong. Foreign servicemen from all over the Empire might have arrived in the British Isles, but she had
not
been unfaithful to her husband and she wasn’t going to act as though she had been. The people who mattered to her knew the truth; the others could – as Priscilla put it – take a running jump. But . . . it still hurt, as she had confided to her friend.

‘Don’t you dare let anyone make you feel bad,’ Priscilla had said fiercely, her heart going out to Esther; she knew she had been so looking forward to the birth of her child and was deeply in love with her husband. ‘None of this is of your doing, darling. You remember that. And Monty might come to his senses, when he has had time to think things through.’

Even as Priscilla said it, part of her was thinking that Monty wasn’t good enough for Esther. If he couldn’t support her now, when she needed him most, how did that bode for the future? Esther was still the same Esther, and Joy was the sweetest baby imaginable. Didn’t he realize that all this had been as much a shock for Esther as for him? Not only that, but Esther had lost the woman she had always thought of as her mother, and was coping with that grief too. And he had simply walked away.

As Priscilla hugged her friend, she wished she could have ten minutes alone with Monty – preferably with a sledgehammer in her hands. And next in line would be his hateful mother.

‘If you could have seen Monty’s face when he looked at the baby,’ Esther whispered brokenly. ‘I don’t understand it, Cilla. He knows she is his, and yet he let his mother dictate to him like that. He . . . he was ashamed of her, and me.’

Priscilla didn’t understand it, either, but then she had never understood racial discrimination. She’d had a fight with her own father about it, before she had left to join the Land Army. They’d been having dinner and she had made a comment about Hitler’s cruelty towards the Jews. Her father hadn’t exactly condoned Hitler’s prejudice, but he’d made a remark about there being two sides to every situation. During his time in India, he’d said, a daughter of one of their close friends had actually become ‘close’ to a young high-ranking Indian who was a Hindu. Of course her parents had been horrified when they had discovered the affair, and had her shipped off to her grandparents in England post-haste.

‘Why horrified?’ she’d asked her father.

‘Because he was an Indian – a native,’ her father had replied, as though she was dense. ‘And of a different religion too. Same with the Jews. They should all be living in Israel.’

‘What does the colour of his skin or his religion matter, if they loved each other?’ she’d replied, starting an argument that had ended up rocking the house. Her father had ranted that if these were the sorts of ideas she had picked up at her private school, and at the finishing school in Switzerland that he had sent her to at great expense, then he regretted every penny; and she had fired back that he was no better than a Nazi. Worse, in fact, because at least the Nazis blatantly declared what they were. Of course she had always suspected how her parents felt, but it had never come out into the open before, possibly because she saw so little of them. A nanny and then boarding schools had seen to that.

Now, remembering all that, she said quietly, ‘Esther, I don’t understand how America can send their black GIs to fight alongside their white countrymen and yet deny they’re equal, or how the colour of their skin makes some people think they are better than other human beings, but it happens. I confess I’d never really thought about such things before the war, so perhaps – if nothing else – it’s good that it has stirred such issues up. Especially among flibbertigibbets like me. Maybe, after the war, the world’s going to be more of a melting pot, because one thing is sure: it won’t go back to how it was. In all sorts of ways.’

Esther had nodded. ‘Maybe,’ she said, with a little catch in her voice, adding, ‘I miss my mother, and Rose. I’m not even sure what Rose thinks about everything. She’s very set in her ways.’

And then, two weeks after Esther had arrived back in Yorkshire, Mrs Holden answered a knocking on the farmhouse door one afternoon, to find Rose standing on the doorstep. She’d come to find Miss Esther and the baby, Rose told the farmer’s wife. Her late mistress had been generous to her over the years, and she had a nest egg put by that would support the three of them for a while. She had stayed just for the mistress’s funeral, but then she had told Mr Wynford what she thought of him and had left, so she wouldn’t be getting a reference from him. But that didn’t matter, not as long as she and Miss Esther and the little one were together. Wicked, it was, how Miss Esther had been treated; she hadn’t been able to sleep since it had happened. So saying, Rose had burst into tears, appearing so bereft that Mrs Holden had whisked her inside and made a pot of tea, over which the two women had chatted for some time.

The upshot of this was that Rose moved into the already crammed labourer’s cottage with the girls and Joy, sleeping in the front room on a pallet bed that Mr Holden put in a corner, as the two bedrooms – one holding three single beds without an inch between them, where Lydia, Vera and Beryl slept; and the other, two single beds for Esther and Priscilla, along with Joy’s cot – were chock-a-block already. It was Mrs Holden who had made it happen, declaring to her dubious husband that Rose’s appearance was the best thing that could have happened. It meant Joy would have a nursemaid during the day when Esther was working, and Rose could lend a hand when required in the house and dairy; and heaven knew she needed help, Mrs Holden had finished darkly. Men had no idea what was involved in cooking and cleaning and washing, besides seeing to the dairy and the swill for the pigs and collecting eggs from the hens.

The farmer had been wise enough not to protest too hard, although he hadn’t relished having yet another female about the place. A man’s man, he’d known where he stood with his male workers before the war. Women were a different species. Not that he had any complaints about the Land Girls; he had to admit they worked like the dickens and tackled anything. They’d even taken the muck-spreading in their stride. The first time he’d told the girls to take the big, steaming heap of manure from a corner of the stable yard out to the fields by horse and cart and spread it on the land, he’d expected some reluctance, but they’d obeyed without protest and worked for hours on end. He knew from experience that it brought on searing backache and raw, aching muscles, but you wouldn’t have known it, except that they were quieter than usual during the evening meal. No, he had no complaint about their work; he just wanted to get back to normal. That was all. Although what normal would be after this damned war was anyone’s guess.

Nancy Holden had known exactly what her husband was thinking when she told him she wanted Rose to stay. He was a transparent individual at the best of times. But from the first moment she’d seen Rose standing on the doorstep, she had warmed to her. They were about the same age, which was nice, and she felt they could be friends.

For her part, Rose was delighted. She’d be looking after little Joy, which couldn’t suit her better; and giving a hand to the farmer’s wife, in return for bed and board, meant that her nest egg stayed intact. After an emotional reunion with Esther when they had both cried, Rose settled into life at the farm like a duck to water.

It had been balm to Esther’s sore heart when Rose sought her out, and she had told herself that, with Rose understanding and supporting her, nothing else mattered.

But – and Esther would rather have walked on hot coals than admit this to a living soul – it hurt when people misjudged her and took satisfaction in making their feelings known. Because it was assumed she had slept with a black GI and had been ‘caught out’ in adultery, a certain type of man thought Esther was easy prey, and their female counterparts took pleasure in slighting her. It didn’t help that her speech betrayed her as upper-class, either. She’d actually had one indignant Yorkshire matron accost her in the village shop and declare that with her ‘advantages’ she ought to know better, and set an example to those girls less fortunate than herself.