The Stony Path Read online

  ‘What?’

  ‘Henry. Shall I take him a sup the night?’

  Walter’s head had been bent over the kitchen table but now he raised it slowly, looking into his wife’s eyes as he said, ‘Aye. Aye, take him a sup, lass.’

  Alice motioned with her head but she didn’t speak again before leaving the room with a big mug of black tea, and Walter continued staring after his wife as the sound of her footsteps echoed on the bare wooden stairs leading to the upper storey of the house. He heard the door to Henry’s bedroom open and close, and when his wife’s tread didn’t sound again assumed she had remained with their son.

  By, this was beyond his understanding. He dragged his hand across his face, which was still sweating as a result of the beating he had given Eva. His own flesh and blood behaving worse than any harlot. Even the worst of the whores down on the dock sides in the East End and Monkwearmouth kept it out of their own backyards. And it was her, not him Oh aye, it was Eva all right, he was with Alice on this. She was bad right through, tainted.

  Walter reached out for his own mug, which Alice had passed to him before she’d poured Henry’s tea, but as he raised it to his lips the nausea he’d experienced in the barn when Alice had come round sufficiently to acquaint him with the full facts overcame him again, and he put it down without tasting it.

  And him up there getting wed the morrow! On this thought he turned from the table and rose, walking to the kitchen door, which was open. Outside, he stood looking up into the darkening sky, and as if in answer to something which had just been voiced he reiterated out loud, ‘Aye, it’s that trollop all right. Look at ’em; she’s twice the size he is an’ as brazen as they come, the lad wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

  Well, she’d remain where she was, bound and gagged like the dangerous animal she’d shown herself to be, until the lad was safely away. Henry had to marry Hilda. Walter flexed his great hands, letting his chin fall into his neck before he again raised his head to the charcoal sky, in which the first stars were beginning to appear. It was a good match, a marvellous match – his lad marrying Weatherburn’s stepsister. The Weatherburn farm’s fields adjoined theirs, and the farm was doing well – more than well – unlike theirs. Blood was thicker than water in these situations, and an ally like Weatherburn wasn’t to be sneezed at.

  Walter turned abruptly, stepping back into the dark kitchen now lit only by the glow of the fire, and walking across to the heavy stone mantelpiece running the length of the range. He reached for the clay pipe lying at one end and, picking out a thin coil of tobacco from a small earthenware jar next to where the pipe had been, retraced his footsteps outside.

  Why had he only had one son and him as slight and small as his mother, whereas his daughter took after the Farrow side? The thought of Eva brought Walter’s blackened teeth grinding together, and he walked across to a roughly made bench set against the wall of the farmhouse and sat down, working the twist of tobacco between his fingers until it was sufficiently shredded to fill the pipe.

  Once he was puffing he rose again, walking across the yard and out in the opposite direction to the cow byres. Five minutes brought him to the crest of a slight hill, beyond which stretched sheer blackness, but as though he could see the Weatherburn farm – situated east of South Farrington with its fields adjoining Silksworth – and on beyond into the expanding suburbs of the rapidly growing town of Bishopswearmouth, his eyes continued to roam back and forth.

  How often had he complained about the four-mile drive into the heart of Sunderland? he asked himself. Plenty, especially when the weather was bad and the horse and cart got bogged down in snow drifts that had him digging out the wheels every ten yards or so. But he was thankful for it now, by, he was that. In the villages and the towns you only had to sneeze for it to be common knowledge. The chill inside him deepened. He’d kill Eva, aye, with his bare hands before he’d let a word of this lot get out. They might not have two farthings to rub together but he’d always been able to hold his head high; he’d be damned if the Farrow name would be brought low by his own kith and kin.

  Henry would do what he was told. The certainty of his son’s malleability brought Walter no joy, only the nagging sense of irritation he always felt when he thought of his younger child. And then he shrugged the feeling off with a physical movement of his massive shoulders. He needed Henry and his new wife living and working on the farm; pray God Hilda was fruitful and would give him a quiver of grandsons to bring fresh life to the place. Big, robust grandsons, lads who would turn the ailing fortunes of the Farrows around and continue the blood line.

  He turned slowly, pulling his cap further on his head as he began to retrace his steps to the farmhouse below. Another month or two and he was going to have to face letting old Amos and his son go, possibly Wilf too, after hay-making. Their four shillings a week wages along with their perks and their cottages wasn’t much compared to what Weatherburn paid his men, but nevertheless he couldn’t stretch to it. But how was he going to manage without them? By, he didn’t know which way to turn, and that without this latest trouble his slut of a daughter had brought upon him. He’d wring her neck for her ...

  ‘It’s done then.’ It was the evening of the following day and Henry was married. Alice and Walter hadn’t spoken a word during the ten-minute drive home from Stone Farm in the horse and cart, but once in the yard and before she climbed down from her seat Alice had turned to her husband and voiced what was in both their minds.

  ‘Aye, as you say, it’s done.’ Walter could see Amos in the far field through the rapidly deepening twilight, and his voice was preoccupied when he said, ‘I’d better go an’ check they’ve done all I wanted afore they turn in. I’ll send the lad’ – Walter always referred to Amos’s youngest son as the lad despite the fact he was eighteen years of age and did a man’s work – ‘to see to Bess an’ the cart. You go in, lass.’

  Alice clambered down from the cart mindful of her Sunday frock, and stood watching the tall, broad figure of her husband as he walked briskly out of the farmyard to the lane beyond. She continued to watch him as he opened the large wooden gate set in the dry-stone wall bordering the field, and, after fastening it again, walk across the field through the herd of grazing bovines to the approaching Amos.

  You go in, lass. What Walter had really meant was for her to go in and see to Eva. The thought brought her brow into a frown. He’d made it very clear over the last twenty-four hours that their daughter was her responsibility, emphasising that nothing must be done or said to upset Henry’s new wife when the couple returned from their few days at the Grand Hotel in Bishopswearmouth. Which was all very well, but he knew Eva’s strength of will and blind stubbornness – he should do, she got it from him.

  Alice shut her eyes, screwing them tight as though in pain, and when she opened them again her mouth had set into a hard line and she didn’t look towards her husband and his farm hand but turned and entered the kitchen.

  The fire was all but dead in the range. Alice glanced at the faintly glowing embers, which was all that remained of the fire she had so carefully banked early that morning with slack and damp tea leaves. She’d better get that going before she did anything else; Walter would want his sup of tea and shive of lardy cake before he went to bed. He was a great one for his supper, was Walter.

  She drew her stiff hessian apron off the peg behind the kitchen door, well aware that she should go and change her dress before she touched the fire. The shadow of what she had to face when she climbed those stairs had been with her all day, clouding the wedding service at the parish church in Silksworth and the jollifications at Stone Farm afterwards, and even now she was putting off the moment.

  She placed some kindling on the embers and blew it with the bellows until the fire sparked and sent flickering flames licking at the tinder-dry scraps of wood, muttering the while, ‘She won’t keep her mouth shut when the other un’s here, not Eva, an’ then there’ll be murder done. Aye, there will right enough. Mur
der.’

  When the fire was blazing and the kettle was on the hob Alice forced herself to leave the kitchen, lighting the oil lamp before she left and placing it in the middle of the scrubbed table, and taking a tallow candle to guide her way upstairs.

  She walked first into the room she had shared with Walter for the last twenty-two years, placing the tin candlestick holder in the small grate the room contained and then quickly stripping off her Sunday frock and small straw bonnet, which she placed on top of the chest of drawers. This item of furniture, along with a small double bed with a straw mattress and an ancient narrow wardrobe, made up the entire contents of the room, and the floorboards were bare, without even a clippy mat for cold winter mornings. Not that she minded about bare floors; it had been the straw-filled mattresses and pillows at the farm which had caused her several sleepless nights when she’d first come here, Alice reflected, pulling on her coarse print dress and the calico apron before slipping her feet into her working clogs. Even at the workhouse where she’d lived the first fourteen years of her life, before coming to work for Walter’s ailing mother, they’d had flock mattresses. It had taken her weeks to get used to the straw piercing her face and pricking her body through her calico nightdress.

  They would have flock-filled mattresses at Stone Farm, she’d be bound; Hilda was going to have to get used to plenty once the newly-weds were back, same as Alice herself had when she’d first come here. She nodded to the thought, not without some satisfaction. She didn’t like her son’s new wife and the airs and graces Hilda adopted.

  Stone Farm might be a grand place compared to this, but when all was said and done, Hilda had no real claim to it. Her stepbrother’s mother had died in childbirth with Frederick, her first child, and when Frederick Weatherburn’s father had married Hilda’s mother, some eight years later, the woman had been a widow and Hilda a little lassie of three or thereabouts. So Hilda was barely related to Frederick in truth.

  Alice found this thought comforting and it was not the first time she had dwelt on it, but now, as she heard her husband in the kitchen below, she was galvanised into action.

  Eva’s small room was the last of the three bedrooms the farmstead boasted, and like her parents’ and brother’s rooms was devoid of comfort and merely provided a narrow iron bed with a straw mattress, and a row of pegs on one wall for her clothes.

  Alice opened the door quickly and stepped inside, shutting it behind her and walking over to the bed, which was set under the window and directly facing the door. She felt very tired and had a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach, but it was less to do with the rich food the wedding feast had provided than the catastrophe her children had brought upon them all.

  There was a feeling of revulsion in her as she stared down at the dim shape of her daughter on the bed, but it was threaded through with a certain amount of reluctant pity. Walter had all but ripped the clothes from Eva’s back when she had fought him, but big as her daughter was, Walter was bigger. By the time Eva had reached the end of herself and her clothes were hanging in strips, her father had still possessed the strength to use his belt on her. He would have killed her if she and Henry hadn’t finally managed to drag him away. Alice ran the back of her hand over her dry lips. Numerous times they’d tried but Walter had shaken them off like an enraged bull and gone back to the squirming figure on the floor.

  The memory mellowed Alice’s voice as she said, ‘You awake, lass?’ It was probably the softest tone she had ever used to her daughter, but then, as she lowered the flickering candle to the trussed form on the bed and the small flame illuminated the enmity blazing forth from the green eyes, it surprised her into taking a hasty step backwards.

  Alice’s face was a touch paler and the hand holding the candle was trembling when she again stepped close to the bed, but her voice carried its old strident note when she said, ‘Don’t you dare look at me like that, girl, not after what you’ve done. You should be cryin’ an’ beggin’ the Almighty to forgive you – aye, an’ your da an’ me an’ all. When I think of the shame of it, an’ to entice Henry to fall so low! Wicked you are, wicked.’ She stared at Eva and the green eyes stared back at her above the gag Walter had ordered must remain in place while they were out, and then Alice emphasised her words again as she repeated, ‘Wicked, through an’ through.’

  But bad as she was, Eva was still a human being; they couldn’t keep her tied up like this forever. She’d been twenty-four hours now without food or drink, and those weals on her back and legs needed more goose fat.

  Alice put the candle holder on the floor by the bed, saying as she did so, her voice deep and flat, ‘I’m goin’ to take the gag off, an’ if you know what’s good for you you’ll keep quiet, girl. Your da’s downstairs an’ he’ll not take any nonsense, you understand me?’

  Eva’s hair was caught in the strip of cloth Alice had tied so hastily that morning. Her daughter had been dozy from the excessive dose of laudanum Alice had forced down her minutes before, but even so Eva had wrestled against Walter’s grip as he’d held her down for Alice to reapply the gag, and it had been an uphill struggle to get it in place.

  As soon as her mouth was free, Eva’s voice came in a croak, saying, ‘He’s married?’

  Not a word of remorse. Henry, it was always Henry. Alice straightened, her voice rising again as she cried, ‘Aye, he is, all legal an’ proper like, so that’s that an’ there’s nothin’ you can do about it, girl. An’ this marriage was Henry’s idea, don’t forget that. Biggest gliff of me life I got the day he told us he was walkin’ out with Hilda Craggs, Weatherburn’s stepsister, an’ her as plain as a pikestaff an’ with a tongue on her an’ all. We might not sit at a fancy table of an evenin’ an’ have a cook an’ kitchen maid to wait on us, but to my mind Henry could’ve done better than Hilda Craggs.’

  Alice’s voice had lowered on the last words; Walter had a pair of cuddy-lugs that could hear the grass grow, and she knew he’d hear no word against the match. The farm was all that mattered to him, it always had been, and he was looking at Frederick Weatherburn’s stepsister as a means to an end.

  ‘I’m havin’ a bairn, Mam.’

  Alice had been about to tackle the ropes biting into her daughter’s wrists and ankles, but now she froze, one hand going to her throat and the other clutching the material of the apron at her waist, and her voice was a whimper when she murmured, ‘No, please God, no. No, Eva. Tell me you’re lyin’.’

  ‘I’m not lyin’.’

  It was the underlying note of fear beneath the flatness which convinced Alice her daughter was indeed speaking the truth. Her mouth opened and shut twice before she was able to say, ‘Does ... does he know? Henry?’

  ‘No.’ Eva shut her eyes tightly, and when she opened them again Alice saw – for the first time in everything which had happened, including the beating her father had inflicted – tears glistening in the green eyes. ‘I was goin’ to tell him when you found us, but ... but I didn’t think he’d go through with it anyway – marryin’ her – not when it came down to it.’

  ‘How far gone are you?’

  ‘Not far. Two months.’

  There was silence in the room for some seconds, and then, as Alice bent and began to slowly work at the knots in the rope at her daughter’s wrists, she said, ‘He’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you? He’ll kill you, girl.’ And Eva didn’t need to be told to whom her mother was referring.

  Walter did not kill his daughter, but once Eva had washed herself in the tin bath in the scullery that, together with the dairy on one side and the kitchen on the other, made up the sum total of the downstairs of the farmhouse, he told his wife to take the girl to her room. He didn’t look at Eva as he spoke, neither did he acknowledge her presence, but once Alice had smoothed more goose fat on her daughter’s seared flesh and settled Eva in the remade bed with a glass of milk and a thick chunk of bread and dripping, Walter came to the threshold of the bedroom.

  Eva stopped eating the moment he
appeared, and although there was no trace of the cocksure daughter he knew in the quiet, white-faced girl who stared at him, her father noticed that the green gaze was steady and burning with some dark emotion. Well, that was all right, likely she’d need a remnant of her old spirit if what he had in mind came to pass. The thought was totally devoid of pity. ‘Your mam’s told you you stay put until I’ve made up me mind what’s to happen?’

  Eva nodded once.

  ‘See you do, else you’ll be out of here in just the clothes you stand up in an’ it’ll be the workhouse. Do I make meself plain?’

  Again the brown head nodded, but Walter noticed with some satisfaction that the white face had turned a shade paler. Alice had fed the bairns stories about her beginnings along with her milk, and both his son and his daughter had a healthy fear of the hell on earth that was the workhouse.

  ‘Da—’

  Eva’s tentative voice came to an abrupt halt as Walter held up his hand, his palm towards her. ‘I’m not about to soil meself by havin’ a conversation with you.’ There was a moment of utter silence. ‘You’re nowt to me, dead an’ buried like the muck from the privy, but I care about me good name an’ you’ll not take that down with you while I’ve breath in me body.’