‘I’m quite all right now, thank you,’ she said in the prim way he detested.
‘Well, I’m glad of that. What the hell did you think you were doing, walking in the middle of the road with your eyes shut? Isn’t it dark enough?’
‘I was frightened,’ she said. ‘She was so near me I could feel the horse’s breath on me.’ ‘Who was?’ ‘Lady Alice.’
He broke into laughter. ‘Only horse came near you tonight was my old Short! There were we spanking along and there you stood. If he didn’t have better sense than you do we’d have run you down. Fancy you, of all people, believing those daft old tales.’ He was pleased to find this proof of weakness and human feeling in her.
‘Well, maybe it was silly.’ She thought for a second. ‘Yes, it was silly … but all alone, in the dark … And I
had another reason. Squire was found dead just here only a little while back.’
‘Squire? Good God! Is that really true?’
‘Mrs Hart herself told me. I went up to the house with these … Oh, where are those boots?’ She felt about in the darkness while Danny said slowly:
‘That’s wonderful; the very best thing that could happen.’
‘I don’t see why.’ she said, stooping to gather up the parcel. ‘My father’ll miss his custom; so will a lot of other people.’
‘There’ll be a new Squire, silly. Younger and not so set in his ways. Nobody could be so pig-headed as the old man was. Ha ha; now we can all go ahead and get on.’
‘That’s what I must do now. I was late to start with, and I’ve still got a long way to go.’ She pulled the hood of her cloak into place.
‘Where are you now?’ Danny asked.
‘The same place. Muchanger.’
‘Then what are you doing on this road? The Turnpike’s shorter and doesn’t have ghosts.’
‘This is a bit shorter from the Manor end of the village; I told you, I went up with these boots. And I have another reason.’
‘Meeting somebody?’ He wasn’t yet aware that the answer to that question mattered to him; he asked it teasingly.
‘No, I wasn’t. That’s just the sort of thing you would think, Danny Fuller.’
‘I only asked,’ he said, ‘because I thought you might get scared again … alone, in the dark, with all these ghosts about. Lady Alice, dead and buried hundreds of years I I am surprised at you.’
‘I’m surprised at myself. But … being frightened was part of it… part of why I was on this road, I mean. And perhaps … Well, I must get along now.’
‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘You hop up and I’ll turn round and drive you to Muchanger.’
‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you very much, but
I’d rather walk.’ ‘Why?’
She stood silently, trying to put her reason into words that would not sound too offensive. ‘You aren’t afraid of me, surely.’
‘Not afraid,’ Damask said. She added, speaking slowly, so that what she said should be precise and unmistakable, ‘But somebody might see us. And any girl you ever look at is talked about, you know that. I don’t want people saying that I’m one of your jilts.’
‘Don’t talk so daft,’ he said. ‘Who’s to see us? You can’t go lugging that great parcel all the way to Muchanger and getting scared again. If you don’t get in the cart I shall turn round and drive slowly alongside; then, if there was anybody to see, you would be talked about. Come on, now, hop up.’
She still hesitated, engaged in one of her inward debates. It was dark; she was late and the parcel was heavy. Also, in her hour of need Danny had arrived; it looked as if God had sent him. Perhaps it would be all right. ‘Well, thank you very much.’ she said. Danny climbed nimbly into the cart and held out his hand to help her up.
The old horse turned unwillingly and went slowly in the direction which for him was all wrong, leading as it did away from his stable, his well-earned supper. Danny did nothing to hurry him.
The seat of the cart was a plank, stretched from side to side and capable of being removed when the vehicle was needed for farm work; one half of this seat was occupied at the moment by a big linen bag full of snippets of silk and velvet which Danny had that afternoon collected from Miss Jackson, the dressmaker. Mrs Fuller, during the long winter evenings which were her only leisure, occupied herself by making patchwork quilts which were popular in the six parishes as ‘bride gifts’. She had a standing arrangement with her cousin the dressmaker by which all ‘pieces’ were exchanged for a dressed fowl, a dozen eggs, a loin of pork and a pound of butter now and again.
Earlier in the afternoon, seeing Danny off to Baildon, Mrs Fuller had said, ‘And take my piece-bag along. And don’t go chucking it in the back of the cart like you did last time. All the pieces stank of muck and the bag had to be washed. Tie it on the seat aside you.’
So there it was, and there were Damask and Danny forced to sit very close to one another on the other half of the seat. And Danny was large; he had his father’s big bones, not yet stripped and made angular by constant hard labour, and he was better nourished than his father had been in his youth, for Mrs Fuller was not one of those farm-wives who marketed the best produce and fed her family on what was left. Early in her married life she had made that plain to Mr Fuller when he once ventured to mention that his mother’s habit had been to ‘make do with what’s over’.
‘Your mother bore eight children and reared two and your father died at forty! Glory be to God, what’s the use of a farm if it can’t feed you? Before my family starve in the midst of plenty we’ll leave the farm and move into town where I could earn food at least.’ That silenced Fuller, whose wife before her marriage had kept a thriving little pastry-cook’s shop in Baildon and made money with her quilts besides. So Danny and his sister Susan had grown up straight and strong and handsome beyond the average, and their father, despite his hard work and what Mrs Fuller called his ‘worritting nature’, had already outlived his father by six years.
Sitting in such close contact Danny and Damask were very much aware of one another. He could smell the odour of the cobbler’s workroom in which her hood had hung all afternoon; he could smell soap and now and again an elusive whiff of lavender and rosemary. But he could also smell something more positive and pervasive, the ghost-stink of the muck for which the cart had been used during the week. That brought something else to mind and provoked the first remark to be made during the drive.
‘Father’s going to try stall-feeding some beasts this
winter,’ he said. ‘He took the kitchen for a byre and Mother agreed to try it if he promised to buy a gig with the first profits he made. She’s been mad for a gig ever since Fred Clopton bought his.’
She could find nothing to say to that. On the fringe of her mind there dwelt for a moment the certainty that it was all concerned with a worldly and therefore unworthy ambition, something her father would decry, but it seemed not to matter very much just now. ‘Would you like to ride in a gig, Damask?’ ‘I don’t know. This is really the first proper ride I’ve ever had in a cart even. My only other ride was in Shad’s donkey rig.’
The idea that a ride in the despised old farm cart could be a treat, an experience, was amazing, and touching.
‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring the cart and drive you the whole way next time. When will you get out next? Next Saturday?’
‘Oh no. I have a Saturday once a month. The others get two—they’re very lenient at Muchanger—but my other day out is a Sunday so I can go to chapel.’
The last word dashed him, reminded him of her difference, her primness, the withheld prettiness which he resented. But that only lasted a moment, because he could feel her there pressed against his arm and thigh, very small, and warm and soft, and smelling so nice and clean. ‘Four weeks from now, then, I’ll call for you and drive you home.’
‘I know you mean kindly, but that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘I told you.’
‘Told me what?’ This was the kind of conversation he was most at home with, half-teasing, half-probing, trying to make a girl say something out of which something else could be made.