Fourpenny Flyer (55 page)

‘How long would you be there?'

There would be no avoiding it now. He must tell her. ‘Six years.'

‘Six years?' she yelled. ‘Have you took leave of your
senses, Frderick Brougham? Six years? You lie there calmly telling me we're to be six years apart?'

‘You could come with me,' he tried. ‘We need not be apart.'

She ignored that as being too preposterous for comment. ‘I thought you loved me.'

‘I do. I do.' Oh this was worse than he'd feared. ‘'Tain't a matter of love. 'Tis a matter of employment. I am fifty-five, Nan. I get no younger. I must progress. I cannot stay in the doldrums for ever.' But every word he said was taking him further away from her.

She scrambled out of her bed and put on her nightgown, pulling it violently over her head. ‘Go where you please, then,' she said, snatching up her clothes. ‘'Tis all one to me, since you do not love me, nor never have so far as I can see.'

‘Nan! Nan!' he said. ‘I thought you knew me better than to say such things.'

‘I thought I knew you better,' she answered, putting on her slippers. ‘But it seems I don't. If you really loved me you wouldn't leave me for six whole years, no matter what. Oh no, you don't love me.'

‘At the start of our affair,' he said, trying to be reasonable, ‘we agreed that we should both continue with our work, neither interfering nor competing with the other. We were to be partners, if you remember. 'Twas my particular concern that my presence in your life should not harm you in any way. So how you can possibly accuse me of not loving you is quite beyond me. Everything that has happened between us during the last seven years should have given you proof otherwise.'

‘It en't the last seven years what concern me now,' she said, ‘'tis the next six.'

‘Nan!' he implored. ‘Don't, I beg 'ee. What is six years? 'Twill soon pass and then I will return. We shall look upon it as nothing. No time at all.' But he was wasting his breath. She was already at the door.

‘I shall sleep in the blue room,' she said. ‘You'll not miss me. The night will soon pass. You'll look upon it as nothing. But don't 'ee look for
me
in the morning.' And
she stamped her feet, glared and marched from the room, slamming the door behind her.

It was a very long night and took for ever to pass. Several times he got up and paced to the door thinking he might go down to the blue room and ask her forgiveness, but pride deflected him. Several times he drifted into sleep, to wake seconds later with the hope that she'd returned, but he was alone. And at last, when the dawn chorus began and the first grey smudges of dawn lightened the sky, he got up and overcame his pride and tiptoed down the corridor to see her.

The blue room was empty. She was up and gone.

Never mind, he comforted himself. I will take some breakfast and then I will call in at Easter House on my way to Chancery Lane and make all right between us.

But at Easter House Mr Teshmaker told him she had caught the early morning stage to Bury. ‘She's gone for the summer, so she says,' he reported. ‘Did you not know, Mr Brougham sir?'

‘A creature of sudden whim, our Mrs Easter,' he said, trying to make light of it. But the news made his heart sink.

It would have sunk even further had he been able to see the foul mood she was in when she arrived in Bury.

When Bessie came to the door to greet her and see to her luggage and inquire after her journey, she was alerted by the brittle speed of her. ‘You work too hard, me dear,' she said sympathetically, as Nan brisked up the stairs, skirts swishing.

‘No, Bessie,' she said, as she went, ‘if you ask me I don't work hard enough. There'd be a deal less heartache if I had a deal less time.' And although she sounded her usual friendly self that was an odd thing to say.

Bessie followed her, but more slowly, trying another tack as she climbed. ‘Is our Mr Brougham a-followin' 'ee down?'

‘Don't speak to me about Mr Brougham,' Nan said, turning to face her old servant, her face dark with fury, ‘for I can't abide it. Dratted man! Where's Thiss? I need to see the books.'

‘Never know'd her in such a humour,' Bessie said to her
daughter when she came visiting the next afternoon. ‘Snap yer 'ead off soon as look at yer. And yer pa said she was that quick with the books he barely 'ad time to open the pages. Not that she 'ad nothink ter find fault with. You know yer pa, everythink shipshape an' orderly. An' now she's off out, all on 'er own in the pony-cart, an' drivin' the poor animal that hard you'd never believe. That ain't like our Nan Easter, drivin' without company. An' no sign a' Mr Brougham.'

‘Then 'tis a lovers' quarrel,' Pollyanna said sagely. ‘You mark my words. An' the sooner 'tis mended the better.' And she went back to Rattlesden to report it all to Mrs Hopkins and Mrs Harriet.

‘Mr Brougham will write to her,' Annie said when she heard. ‘Or visit. 'Twill pass. These things always do. Is she to visit us, do 'ee think Pollyanna? Did she tell 'ee?'

‘Tomorrow, ma'am,' Pollyanna said. ‘I was to be sure to tell 'ee, and here's me forgetting.'

‘He'll write,' Annie said. ‘And if she's at all melancholy the children will cheer her.'

But four fraught weeks went by and no letters from Mr Brougham arrived and Cosmo Teshmaker reported there was a rumour that he had accepted a position as Governor to some West Indian island. Nan was still in a most peculiar mood, which was hardly to be wondered at if the rumour were true, so her children decided they would have to take action. They met in Annie's parlour one Saturday evening after their own children were in bed to decide what should be done.

‘'Tis my opinion Cosmo has the right of it,' Billy said. ‘Never known him wrong when it comes to rumour, damne if I have.'

‘Poor Mama,' Annie said. ‘How she'll miss him. Is he to be gone long?'

But nobody knew the answer to that. ‘It could be for ever,' John said lugubriously, ‘and how we shall cope with her then I cannot think.'

‘She only seems happy when she's with the children,' Matilda said. ‘I don't understand it, indeed I don't. I've
never seen her like this before.'

‘Neither have we,' Annie said, ‘which is why something must be done.'

‘She don't laugh,' John said. Her lack of laughter worried him more than anything else.

‘She don't come to town,' Billy said. ‘She sends letters but she don't come to town. That ain't like her either.'

‘Perhaps,' Matilda offered, ‘one of us should try to talk to her about it.'

‘You can talk to her if you like,' her loving husband said. ‘Just so long as you don't ask me.'

‘No,' Annie said. ‘I don't think that would do at all. She don't take kindly to us knowing her affairs at the best of times.'

‘And this ain't the best of times,' Billy pointed out needlessly.

‘Perhaps,' Harriet tried, ‘we ought to write to Mr Brougham and tell him how she is.'

But John and James thought not. ‘It is not for us to interfere between man and wife,' James said. ‘Even those who are man and wife without benefit of clergy.' But he couldn't think of anything else that could be done instead. It was very difficult.

‘The children are our greatest hope,' Annie said at last, when they'd all brooded in silence for several minutes. ‘At least she is happy when she's with the children. How if we throw a party for her and the children? At least that might cheer her.'

So although they knew a party wouldn't solve the real problem, they set to and planned one. For, as Billy said, what else could they do?

Bessie tried to help her mistress by cooking special meals and making sure that the house was always full of flowers, but although Nan thanked her, that didn't solve the problem either.

‘Never mind, Goosie,' Thiss said. ‘You keep on. Water on a stone, eh?'

So she kept on. And three days later when she was arranging a bowl of roses in the drawing room window, she looked up and there was Mr Brougham striding across
the square in his fine blue coat and that nice grey hat of his.

‘Mrs Easter!' she called, running from the room to warn her mistress. ‘It's Mr Brougham come at last.'

Nan was writing letters in her study. ‘Humph!' she snorted as she put down her pen. ‘He has, has he? Well then you'd better show him up.'

It didn't sound very encouraging.

But when Mr Brougham had been shown into the study, her mistress grinned at him, and that was more hopeful.

‘Well?' she said, when Bessie was gone. ‘All packed and ready for the Indies are you?'

He had come to Bury intending to talk sense to her, to argue the case for this governorship sensibly and logically and reasonably, as befitted a barrister-at-law, but the sight of her bright face, there, looking up at him, rousing him, her bright, intelligent, loving face, drove all sense and logic and reason straight out of his mind. She was so quick and alert and full of vitality, brown eyes gleaming, wide mouth spread, dark curls springing from her forehad as if they had life of their own, and those two tender wings of white hair on either side of her temples to remind him that they were both ageing and that life was short, oh maddeningly short. And in the moment he knew without doubt what he had suspected all along: that no matter what post he was offered, he simply couldn't leave her. She was more precious to him than any promotion and she made his ambition look the paltry thing it was.

He sat down in the armchair beside the window. ‘No,' he said mildly. ‘I am not.'

‘Indeed?'

‘Indeed.'

‘And why not, pray? You'd best look slippy or you'll not be ready in time.'

‘I'm afraid, my dear,' he said drily, ‘this is one journey I shall have to forgo.'

‘You mean to turn it down?' she said her voice rising with hope and relief.

‘I've turned it down.' Smiling at her, loving her, holding out his arms to her. ‘You are an impossible creature, my dearest, but I love you dearly and I cannot leave you.'

She ran to him at once and smothered his face with kisses. ‘That's – the best – day's work – you've – ever – done.'

‘I've to be in Exeter in two days' time,' he said, when he could get in a word between kisses. ‘I hoped that you might accompany me there.'

‘Bessie!' she yelled. ‘Pack my bag. I'm off to Exeter with Mr Brougham. We will travel after the party,' she told him. ‘We've a children's party in Rattlesden tomorrow. What fun!'

That night Harriet wrote at length to her diary, while John was over in the rectory with James.

‘I am so glad of this return,' she confessed, when she'd described it in detail, ‘which is a great surprise to me, for I never thought I would rejoice at the resumption of a love affair, which I was always taught to consider a grievous sin. And yet I do. I do indeed. It is such happiness to see them together again. They love one another so dearly. They were arm in arm all afternoon I declare, and looking so happy with one another.

‘Perhaps it is love itself which is important and not the outer forms and ceremonies. The important thing to them is that they are together again, husband and wife without benefit of clergy as dear James said a few days ago. How I have changed to be saying such things! I hope it is for the good. I
think
it is for the good.

‘This is an extraordinary family. You never know what is going to happen in it next. We shall have some sport at the party.'

And it was. Great sport. For Nan was quite herself again, running races, and organizing a blancmange-throwing competition, full of her old intoxicating, happy energy. And when they were all exhausted, the maids served tea and they all sat down among the cushions under the shade of the holm oak to enjoy it.

And the gate gave a sudden click and there was Caleb Rawson walking up the path.

Harriet was so amazed to see him after all this time that she didn't know what to say, but James was on his feet at once, with his hand outstretched in greeting. ‘Why Mr Rawson,'
he said, ‘how splendid to see you again. Come in, come in and join the party. Allow me to introduce my mother-in-law, Mrs Easter, and Mr Brougham. Mr Rawson came here some years ago to address the local Hampden Club. You spoke of Peterloo as I remember.'

‘Aye. I did that,' Caleb agreed as he shook hands.

‘Do you still live in Manchester?' James went on, for the man certainly looked as though he'd been travelling.

‘Nay,' Caleb said, smiling, ‘I left Manchester more than three years since.'

‘Then where have you come from?'

‘I've come from Norwich Jail,' Caleb said. ‘They let me out this morning.'

The news had a stunning effect on all his listeners. James and Annie were instantly full of pity, Nan and Frederick were intrigued, John and Billy interested, Matilda thrilled, and the children, having glanced at their elders to see which way the information ought to be received, were impressed.

But Harriet was torn with such a conflict of emotions that she still couldn't speak. To see him again like this, in stained, torn clothes, with the pallor of jail on his skin and the smell of jail still cloying about him, made her pity him as she had never done before, but the knowledge that he was a hero and a martyr, that he'd been jailed for the cause – for he must have been jailed for the cause, just like Mr Hunt – roused the most passionate admiration too. And the admiration increased when he told them all of the weavers' strike, and his arrest, and the way he and his companions had whiled away the time in their dungeons under the castle planning the next stage in the campaign for reform, and how he'd come out of jail and gone straight back to his loom, ‘where't job were kept for me, by great good fortune, and my room an' all.'