Linda mourned the pheasants until someone from the village told Jim Jarvey, the lodgekeeper, who carried the news to the house, that ‘a masterous gaudy old bird’ had been seen in Layer Wood.
‘They won’t be there long,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, of course we could warn everybody not to shoot them, but what about poachers? My preserves are pretty sharply looked to, but Layer isn’t all mine, and everybody isn’t so strict.
I’m afraid you’ve seen the last of them.’
However, they were there this afternoon and Linda called to them and flattered herself that they did hesitate for a moment before taking wing. Perhaps it was as well, she thought, that, since they had gone back to the wild they should have abandoned their former lameness completely. Safer so.
It was dusk when she reached home and full dark by the time she had taken off her outdoor clothes and settled down by the fire in the small sitting-room, with a tea-tray on a table beside her. The whole long peaceful evening stretched before her; and she was luxuriating in the thought when a servant came and asked when would it please her to see the bailiff—now, or later on ?
‘I’ll see him now,’ Linda said, and laid aside her book. When the man entered she greeted him with a tentative smile, and saw with dismay that she had been right in thinking that he would resent these interviews. He returned her greeting civilly enough, bringing one big brown hand up to the lock of straw-coloured hair which fell over his brow, but his expression, which was surly, did not lighten.
‘Sir Richard said, my lady, that you wished me to come and report to you every day.’
That was, of course, exactly how Richard would put it, making it seem as though the idea were hers. And she could not—in the circumstances—contradict. Also, she thought, with just a flash of spirit, suppose she had said so; would it have been so extraordinary? While Richard was away she was in charge and had a perfect right to demand that the bailiff report twice a day if she wished. But this bout of self-assertion lasted only a second; the rightness of her position was undermined by her knowledge that Richard had arranged these interviews as a form of penance for them both. Richard’s malice poisoned everything.
‘Well, you see,’ she said placatingly, ‘I shall be sending letters to my husband regularly, and what you tell me will give me something to write about. Please sit down.’
He was not placated, and too late she realised that to mention the matter of letter-writing was a tactless mistake; it sounded like a spy reporting.
‘Thank you, no, my lady. I’m in my working clothes. That was one thing I wanted to ask you. Do you wish me to come when we knock off work, or later on, when I’m cleaned? I’ve taken the worst off my boots, but I’m still a bit doubtful whether they’re fit to be in the same room with a lady.’
‘That depends entirely upon which you prefer. To come back would mean more walking, wouldn’t it?’ She seemed to remember hearing Richard say that Hadstock, offered the choice between lodging at the smithy and a cottage in Berry Lane, had chosen the latter. ‘I always make a round after supper,’ Hadstock said. ‘In that case then, if you prefer it, look in later on. But now please sit down. Do you drink tea? I know many men despise it.’
‘I like it, but I won’t have any now, thank you all the same. I shall be making my own later on.’ ‘Do you live alone?” ‘I live alone.’ ‘In Berry Lane, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, my lady.”
The brief, unyielding replies might, she thought, be put down to awe of her—but she had heard from Richard some verbatim accounts of things Hadstock had said to him during their differences; and his manner might also be the result of shyness in the presence of a female. Yet nothing in his posture or expression indicated shyness; he sat at ease, not fidgeting, and looked straight at her with a cool, unabashed look. His eyes were greyish-blue, light against the weather-beaten skin, and numerous little lines radiated from their outer corners. He was defying her to put the interview on an easier footing, and with a sigh Linda abandoned the attempt and asked the question which she had been deferring. What was there to tell about the day’s work? As though he had memorised a distasteful lesson, he
reeled off the day’s doings. Because of her ignorance hardly any of the things he mentioned evoked any mental image in her mind, and when he had finished all she could think to say was:
‘You seem to have been very busy.’
‘I am glad that you are satisfied, my lady.’ he said, and rose to his feet. ‘Have you any orders to give me about tomorrow?’
‘Orders?’
‘Sir Richard said I was to report to you each evening and take my orders from you, my lady.’
‘I think he meant only the event of his having sent some special orders from London, Hadstock. He knows that I know nothing about farming. And I am sure that he knows also that you know exactly what to do.’ ‘Then I’ll wish you good night, my lady.’ ‘Good night, Hadstock.’
Except that the succeeding interviews took place later in the evening, that Linda never repeated her gesture of offering refreshment and that Hadstock had changed out of his working clothes, that first meeting between them set the pattern.
Then, when Richard had been gone a little more than a fortnight, something happened.
At mid-morning on a bleak, windy day Farrow, the builder in charge, was shown into Linda’s room. He seemed to be in a state of excitement.
‘We’ve come on something we hadn’t reckoned for, my lady,’ he said. ‘There’s a hole and something beyond it just where the new foundations are being dug. Job Ramsden stood there digging and then he disappeared. He ain’t hurt. But to find a hole just where the foundations was to go’ll put out all our plans. I thought you should know.’ ‘I’ll come and look at it,’ Linda said. ‘Wrap up warm, my lady. It’s raw out.’ The trench which was being dug for the new front wall of the house ran across the space where, forty years earlier, Richard’s mother had planned her ‘purple’ garden, the fashionable craze of the year after her marriage. Linda
picked her way through the uprooted and dying lilacs and wistaria and perennials which had gone on yielding their purple blooms unheeded year after year. At a point where the new trench was nearing its limit its neat, narrow line gave way to a rounded depression with a hole in its centre. Close to it a dazed-looking man was wiping soil from his eyes and spitting.
‘It’s probably an old well,’ Linda said to Farrow, as they neared the spot.
‘Begging your pardon, no, my lady. There’s stairs, and Job said something about an arch. More like a cellar.’
They stood by the hole. The reason for the collapse was plain to see in the ragged edges of ancient rotted timbers which projected from the soil. Down into the hole ran the flight of shallow stairs, smothered with earth and stones and fragments of sponge-like wood.
“Tain’t no cellar, ma’am—m’lady, I mean,’ said the man who had fallen. ‘So far as I could see in the gloom, it looked more like a church arch, all carved like.’
‘Ah,’ said Farrow, ‘some of them old monks’ doings. They was all about here, back in the old times when they started the sheep up at Flocky.’
Linda stooped and took up a branch of one of the murdered lilac trees—the buds which should have been next year’s leaves and flowers were already there, with their promise—and with it scratched away the soil and stones from the uppermost stair. White and smooth, the marble which the Roman galleys had brought to this barbarian, marbleless colony gleamed up at her. Of the Romans, of the galleys, she knew nothing; but she recognised marble. No cellar entry, this.
‘Get a lantern,’ she said. Then, turning to Job, she asked:
‘Are you really unhurt?’
‘A bit shook up, m’lady. Thought I was a gonner for a minute, I did, earth opening under me feet that way. Then I hit the stairs and went down on me … like youngsters go downstairs, m’lady. And then what with the arch
and a great space beyond, all dark. Aye, that shook me up.”
‘And yelled, he did, as though Old Scrat had got hold of him I’ Farrow said. But he spoke absently. Job’s accident and the hole and the stairs and the arch and whatever lax beyond were of no moment to him; he was working out what the find meant in terms of constructional difficulty.