Jack Mercybright (The Apple Tree Saga Book 2), page 2
‘Perhaps now,’ he said to himself, ‘a man may be able to get some sleep!’
In the morning, while his can of water was boiling, he walked about inspecting the cottage. It was very old, built with a sturdy timber framework and clay infilling, now mostly fallen out, so that only the criss-cross beams remained. The thatch was almost all gone from the roof; so were the floorboards of the upper storey; but the brick-built chimney stood intact and the oak framework was perfectly sound, and in his mind’s eye he saw it as it must once have been: its timbers well tarred, its panels whitewashed, its casements gleaming in summer sunlight: all trim and neat among its fruit trees.
Across the garden, there were two brick-built sheds and a lean-to, with tools and a ramshackle cart inside. So the cottage, it seemed, had once been the farmhouse, displaced, probably, by some larger, more modern building elsewhere. He could not see where, because grey wet mist still curtained the landscape.
While he walked about, trying the timbers with his shut-knife, a peremptory voice called out to him, and two women came down the orchard. One, very young, dressed in a dark red hooded cape, was the girl Nenna of the night before. The other was a woman of perhaps thirty, with strong features and a high colour in her cheeks, and dark hair severely braided over her ears. They came through the gate into the garden, and the older woman spoke sharply.
‘You’re trespassing here. Do you realize that?’
‘I do now you’ve told me,’ Jack said.
‘This land is mine. This cottage is mine. I don’t like tramps lighting fires in my buildings. You might very easily have burnt the place down.’
‘I ent, though, have I, as you see for yourself?’
‘Is that your horse up there in my orchard? What right have you to make free with my grazing?’
Jack took his hand from his trousers pocket and offered her twopence.
‘D’you think that’ll pay for the thistles he’s eaten?’ The younger girl smiled but the older one looked more haughty than ever.
‘What is your name? Where have you come from all of a sudden? What are you doing hanging about in my cottage?’
‘My name is Jack Mercybright. I’ve come from Aston Charmer, up Woeborough way, and I’m travelling about in search of work. Is there anything else you’d like to know?’
‘There’s no work here. I’m laying men off at this time of the year, not taking them on. And you’ll get the same answer everywhere else about here, especially as ‒’
‘As what?’
‘Especially as you seem to be lame.’
‘That don’t stop me working.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t help you.’
For a moment she looked at him, hesitating, almost as though she might change her mind. But suddenly her glance fell away and she pushed past him into the cottage. He was left with the girl, who made a wry face at him, repudiating her sister’s behaviour. Then she came closer.
‘Were you here last night?’ she asked in a whisper.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t speak ‒ I thought it’d scare you.’
‘I knew I smelt woodsmoke, but I thought perhaps Bevil had been here before me.’
‘He came a bit later. I reckon he must’ve mistook the time.’
‘Don’t say anything to my sister. She doesn’t approve of Bevil, you see. At least, she wouldn’t approve of my slipping out at night to meet him.’
‘Why don’t you tell her to go to the devil?’
‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I’m under age, and she’s my guardian. We’re not really sisters, properly speaking ‒ Philippa’s father married my mother ‒ and I’d have no home if it weren’t for her. The whole of the property is hers, you see.’
‘Aye, I heard her say so,’ Jack said, ‘two or three times.’
The older woman came out of the cottage, shaking the dust from the hem of her skirt.
‘Been checking?’ he said. ‘Been making sure I haven’t damaged the straw or sacks or the few old hurdles you’ve got stored in there?’
‘I suppose I’m entitled to safeguard my own property?’
‘Since you value your property so much,’ he said, ‘why let it fall to rack and ruin?’
Again she gave him a long hard look, and it was some time before she answered.
‘Let me give you a word of advice!’ she said then. ‘If you’re looking for work, as you say you are, you’d be wise to keep a curb on your tongue. No employer will stand for impertinence and a man of your age ought to realize that. As for me, I’ll thank you to get out of my cottage and on your way as soon as possible.’
‘All right. Just as you say. I’ll move on when I’ve had my breakfast.’
And he watched them walking away up the orchard, where the younger girl paused to pat Shiner’s neck in passing.
When he was gathering his things together, packing his satchel, he found a bracelet on the floor, which the woman had dropped while searching the cottage. It was solid silver, in hinged halves, and, among some delicate tracery, was engraved with her name: Agnes Philippa Mary Guff. Jack hung it up on a nail in the wall, where it was bound to be seen at once, but then, on second thoughts, he took it down and put it into his pocket instead, deciding to take it to the farm.
On his way up he saw how neglected the fields were: pastureland rank with reeds and mare’s tail; hedges and headlands so overgrown with briar and bramble that they measured fifteen feet across; and, in the few poor acres sown with winter corn, the sparse blades were labouring up, sickly and yellow, choked by weeds and poisoned by the rabbits infesting the hedgerows.
The farmhouse was a big square building of grey roughcast walls and brown paint-work, its windows much curtained with lace and velvet, giving it a look of closeness and darkness. He made his way through the back yard, between tumbledown barns, cowstalls, sheds, and arrived at the back door of the house. But as he put up his hand to the knocker, a white bull terrier sprang growling from its kennel under the mounting-block and hurled itself at his outstretched arm.
The dog’s big teeth went right through his sleeve and sank into the flesh of his forearm, penetrating as far as the bone. Jack hit out with his left fist, but the dog only growled more ferociously, closing his eyes and laying back his ears, impervious to the blows on his flat hard skull. The brute was tugging with all his strength, growling and snorting, his jaws clenched as he tried to bring his teeth together through flesh, muscle, sinew, bone.
Jack looked round and saw an old riding-crop hanging up on a hook on the wall. He took it down, thrust it under the dog’s collar, and twisted it till the collar tightened. The dog snarled, trying to shake Jack’s arm as he would a rabbit, but the collar was now pressing his windpipe. He was gasping and choking; his eyes were rolling, showing their whites; and another twist made him lose his senses. The flat head lolled, the jaws relaxed, and he gave a cough deep in his throat. Jack took out the crop and threw it aside. He took the dog’s upper jaw and eased its teeth out of his flesh. The animal slumped down onto the cobbles and lay on its side, its legs rigid.
Jack took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt-sleeve. He was walking across to the cattle-trough when the house door opened and the older sister came out on the step.
‘What have you done to my dog?’
‘What’s he done to me, more like!’
‘You shall pay for this, I promise!’ she said, and then saw his arm, where the blood was welling up from the punctures. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said quickly, and led him into a kind of wash-house.
‘Your dog’s unconscious, that’s all, though he’s lucky I didn’t choke him to death. I was in the mood for a moment or two.’
‘You must have taken him unawares. We don’t get a lot of visitors here.’
‘With him as a pet, I’m not surprised.’
‘Roy’s a good house-dog. It’s what he’s there for. But I’m sorry you’ve been hurt, all the same.’ She ran a tap into the sink and held his arm under the icy cold water. ‘Stay like that. I’ll get some ointment.’
She went through into the house. He heard her voice in the passage. The girl Nenna came into the wash-house but stood a little way away, white-faced and wincing. Seeing her without her hood, he realized she was young indeed, probably not more than sixteen.
‘What’s up with you? Don’t you like the sight of blood?’
‘No. I hate it. It makes me feel sick.’
‘I ent all that keen, neither, specially when it’s my own,’ he said, ‘and I’m making a fair old mess of your nice clean slopstone.’
The older woman came back again. She turned off the tap and dried his arm. She was quick and efficient, smearing the wounds with carbolic ointment, binding them round with a thick cotton bandage, tying the ends in a neat knot about his wrist.
‘Why did you come here, anyway? I thought I told you to take yourself off?’
‘I found this,’ he said, and gave her the bracelet. ‘You dropped it on the floor of the cottage.’
‘Did I? How extraordinary! I’d no idea. The catch must be faulty. I shall have to take it to be repaired.’
She put the bracelet into her pinafore pocket and became preoccupied, rolling up the spare strip of bandage, replacing the lid of the ointment jar, swilling the last of the blood from the sink. Her manner amused him. He could read her thoughts. He was not surprised by her next words.
‘I believe you mentioned you were looking for work?’
‘Ah. That’s right. But you said you had nothing to offer me.’
‘Well … there’s not much to do at this time of year.’
‘There is on this farm,’ he said bluntly. ‘The state it’s in, you certainly shouldn’t be laying men off. ‒ You ought to be getting them out stirring. Your ditches want cleaning and your hedges want laying and that’s nothing more than a bit of a start-off.’
‘I can’t afford to employ a lot of men.’
‘You can’t afford not to, the way things are. Another two or three years of neglect and this here farm will be useless to you.’
‘Yes! Yes! It’s just what I tell them!’ she said, in a little burst of passion. ‘But the labourers here all take advantage, knowing they’re dealing with a mere woman.’
‘Even when that woman is you?’
‘I can’t force them to do things, can I? I can’t stand over them with a whip! And, anyway, I don’t know enough to decide what’s best.’
‘I know enough,’ Jack said. ‘Take me on and I’ll set things to rights.’
‘You’re very persuasive.’
‘I need to be ‒ I’m down to my last eighteen pence,’ he said.
‘I can’t afford to pay a bailiff’s wages.’
‘A labourer’s wages will suit me.’
‘Perhaps I do owe you something,’ she said, ‘seeing my dog has done you such damage.’
‘You owe me nothing!’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get that straight before we start. You’ll be paying me my wages for the work I do, not as compensation for a dog-bite.’
‘Very well. I’ll take you on for a trial period and think again in a month from now. At least I can be fairly sure you’re honest, since you brought my bracelet back to me.’
‘Aye, that’s why you left it there, warnt it?’ he said. ‘To see if I was an honest fellow?’
‘Rubbish!’ she said, the colour flaring even more redly on her cheekbones. ‘You flatter yourself, I do assure you! Do you think I would risk losing a solid silver bracelet just to test a labourer’s honesty?’
‘Not much risk, considering how easy it would be to trace me … a limping man with an old grey horse … travelling about in search of work. You’d have had your bracelet back in no time.’
‘Utter rubbish, I do assure you!’
‘Just as you say,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Have it your own way. You’re the gaffer.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and looked at him with hostile eyes. ‘Exactly so, Mercybright, and I counsel you to remember it always!’
Chapter Two
His arm was so swollen that it stretched the sleeve of his jacket tight. He could scarcely move it. It was stiff to the shoulder and the slightest touch was agony. For three days he could do no work, and spent the time tramping about all over the farm, till he knew every acre from boundary to boundary.
One afternoon, while inspecting the lower fletchers, he met a man named Joe Stretton. It was getting dark, and Jack was prodding the flooded ditch with a long pole, when he sensed someone watching from the opposite side of the hedgerow. The man stood perfectly still, a grey shape in the grey dusk, his head seeming to rest on his shoulders, so short and thick was his huge neck.
‘Who’re you?’ he asked, as Jack stood up and looked straight at him, in between the tall thorns. ‘You the chap that’s been strolling about, poking your nose in everywhere, acting as if you was God Almighty?’
‘Ah, that’s me,’ Jack agreed. ‘And who might you be?’
‘My name’s Joe Stretton. I work on this farm and have done for nigh on forty years. Except I’ve been laid off this past two fortnights.’
‘Are those your snares I seen about the fields?’
‘Yes. What of it?’ And Stretton raised both his arms up high, above the level of the overgrown hedge, showing the rabbits dangling in bunches from each hand. ‘You got something to say about it, have you?’
‘No. Nothing. There’s too many rabbits about the place so you go ahead and keep them down.’
‘Who are you to have such a say-so? You a foreman or bailiff or what?’
‘I’m just a labourer, same as yourself.’
‘But why’ve you been took on here at all, that’s what I should like to know? You! ‒ A stranger! ‒ When I’ve been laid off and others like me?’
‘That’s just my good luck, I suppose,’ Jack said.
‘And how long d’you reckon your luck’ll hold? ‒ From Christmas to Easter, if I know the missus who runs this farm, and then you’ll be out on your ear like us others. God Almighty! It makes me spew! I’ve got a sick wife, did you know that? I’ve got four children still at school and I’ve been on this farm since I was a tadpole yet you come along and take my job! So what’s that Miss Philippa think she’s doing?’
‘I dunno,’ Jack said. ‘You’d better ask her.’
Later that day, returning along the edge of Hew Meadow, he caught his foot in one of Stretton’s snares and measured his length in the wet mud, falling on his swollen arm. The snare was the usual kind set for rabbits: a running noose of copper wire fixed to a peg stuck in the ground; but the noose was twice the size used for rabbits, the wooden peg twice as strong, and Jack felt sure that the snare had been set on purpose for him: a warning to him that he was not wanted at Brown Elms Farm.
He had set himself to clean out the big main watercourse known as the Runkle, but although he got the waters moving, running clear over the pebbles, the field-ditches remained choked, for the drains and outlets had all fallen in. So he set to work to clean out the ditches, starting in the big Bottom Meadow, working from the bank with the long-handled graffer.
‘Still puddling about, making mud pies?’ Miss Philippa said, coming to see what he was doing. ‘When will you start doing something useful?’
‘First things first,’ Jack said, ‘and that means drainage.’
‘I hear you’re still sleeping at Perry Cottage. You don’t need to do that, you know. I could get you lodgings with one of the cowmen.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I’d just as soon stay as I am.’
‘What, sleeping rough like that, in this sort of weather?’
‘I’m all right. It don’t worry me.’
‘I might even have a cottage for you, if you prefer to be alone. Up at Far Fetch, beside the wood. You may have seen it.’
Jack stood up straight, his legs straddling the wide ditch, his feet wedged in the mud at the sides. He looked up at her, standing above him, among the alders.
‘I know the cottage. It’s Joe Stretton’s. What would you do about him and his family?’
‘Stretton would have to go, of course.’
‘You’d give him the push?’ Jack said. ‘Turn him out to make room for me? Now why is that? Because you think I’m better value?’
‘Stretton is a surly malcontent. He’s a trouble-maker and always will be. He’s been here so long he thinks he ought to be in charge of the farm.’
‘Then why not put him in charge as a proper bailiff? If he’s an old hand, he deserves it, surely? A farm runs better if the men have someone to look to for orders, and each one knows exactly where he stands.’
‘I give the orders on this farm.’
‘Ah. I know. That’s why it’s gone back the way it has done.’
‘I warned you before, Mercybright! ‒ I won’t be spoken to in that manner by you or by any other men I employ!’
‘And I warn you! ’ Jack said, growing impatient. ‘If you sack Joe Stretton, you lose both him and me together, ’cos I don’t want your blasted cottage nor any lodgings with your cowmen neither! I’m fine and dandy as I am so leave me alone and let me get on with what I’m doing.’
He stooped again over the ditch and began shovelling sludge from the bottom, flinging it up to the top of the bank, careless whether it splashed the woman’s skirts as she stood above him among the alders. He was tired and wet. His knee was giving him a lot of pain. His arm still ached where the dog had bitten him. And he was suddenly so out of patience that one more word would have set him on his travels again. But the next time he glanced upwards, Miss Philippa was no longer there.
Sitting at his fire in the ruined cottage, he ate his supper of bread and boiled bacon and drank a mugful of strong milkless tea. The night was a wet one. Rain dripped through the floorboards above and squeezed through the walls to trickle down, glistening darkly, inside the crumbling plasterwork. His bedding of straw and sacks was soaked, because there was now no dry place to put it, and as he sat eating, two rats crept out of the deeper shadows to drink from the puddle in the central floor.
