(A plaintive, real human voice from the kitchen called, ‘Damask, ain’t you about finished in there?” and she called back, ‘In just a minute, Mother.’)
And she waited. Presently God spoke. With the utmost clarity. He told her that she could work out her own salvation and punishment. She was to wait until Amos came home and finished off the boots. Then she was to deliver them to the Manor. By that time she would be late and must take the Lower Road to Muchanger—the haunted road. So she would show, in one act, the sincerity of her repentance and her faith in God who would protect
her. It was all as clear and simple as any order she had ever received in her place of servitude. She got up from her knees, immensely relieved and determined to ignore something which’ had begun to move, coldly and creepily, somewhere just behind her apron band. Hastily she finished the tidying of the workroom and went back into the kitchen, where her mother, with a shawl over her shoulders, huddled by the fire, clumsily and slowly peeling the potatoes for the evening meal. Every fourth Saturday was for the Greenways a feast day. Damask was free on that day from twelve o’clock, and by missing the servants’ midday dinner at Muchanger she could be home by one o’clock or soon after, buying sixpenny-worth of pudding beef on the way. The pudding could be on the boil by two o’clock at latest and ready to eat by six. She could then share the feast, wash the plates and be back at Muchanger by eight. And there was enough pudding left to be heated up and eaten on Monday and Tuesday of the following week.
‘You do look muddled,’ Mrs Greenway said. ‘Come now and hev a sit-down and a bit of chat. Did I hear a knock on the door?’
‘Sir Charles, come for his boots. I promised he should have them tonight. Father’ll just have to finish them off before he has his supper and I’ll take them up.’
Mrs Greenway did not comment upon this. There had been a time—nearly four years ago it had ended—when she and her daughter had been on one side, Amos on the other. They’d never gone against him, or defied him … but there it was, they’d been together and he’d been alone. Then there’d been that revivalist meeting at Summerfield with a Mr Whitwell preaching, and all of a sudden Damask had gone over to the other side. Mrs Greenway had been very lonely ever since. Religious fervour, she thought, was very much like some sort of disease; some people caught it, some didn’t, no matter how much they were exposed to it. She never had. Loyalty to Amos had carried her to hundreds of meetings, she had sat through innumerable sermons, knelt through innumerable
prayers and never experienced any change. She had conformed to pattern, never did any work on Sunday, wore plain clothes, attended chapel as long as she could walk to Nettleton, never said a bad word, but her heart was not in it. She would look round at her neighbours, Matt Juby and Matt Ashpole, and naturally be glad that Amos was not as they Were, drunken ne’er-do-wells; but wasn’t there, she wondered, a middle way, the way of her family, where a girl could wear a pretty dress and curl her hair … and a man tend his business and make a good living and be proud of it?
And wouldn’t it have been better if Amos had made enough money—as he was well able lo do—to let Damask go and be apprenticed, as she herself had been, to the dressmaking instead of going to work in the kitchen at Muchanger? She had once ventured to say as much to Amos, just at the time when Damask was of an age to begin work, and he had looked at her with astonishment. ‘What can it matter?’ he asked. ‘So long as she leads a good life, what do it matter where?’
‘Well, service is a hard life, and Damask ain’t very big. And she’s dainty-handed, she’d do well at Miss Jackson’s.’
‘She’d hev more temptations, living in the town, and be more prone to get vain and giddy. I shall get over to Muchanger, time she start, and fix so she hev one Sunday every month so as to attend chapel.’
Now, looking at her daughter’s hands, still slender and shapely, but rough and reddened from hard work, Mrs Greenway gave a little secret sigh; and looking at scraped-back hair whose prettiness had once been her pride, she sighed again. Then she rebuked herself, and thought what a good girl Damask was, and compared her with Matt Ashpole’s ripstitch of a daughter, Sally. And then she asked herself again that old tiresome question, was there no middle way?
Meanwhile Sir Charles had found ample justification for his ride beside the Waste. It was not the first time by many. Once he had found a stranger, a Nettleton man,
slyly taking fuel there, quite illegally; another time he had been just in time to save Shad Jarvey’s donkey from drowning in the pond, and a fine mess he’d made of himself, dragging it out of the mud; and on more summer evenings than he could be bothered to count he had come across couples engaged in illicit love-making in the—one would have thought—unpromising and unsuitable shelter of the gorse bushes which edged the Waste. The opportunity of preventing the begetting of bastards was not likely to offer itself this afternoon in October daylight; June evenings were the dangerous times. Still, one never knew; young people were quite unaccountable.
He did find, however, two of Matt Juby’s snub-nosed, ill-clad brats amusing themselves by throwing stones at two tethered cows: Bert Sadler’s with the broken horn and Jim Gaunts with the defective quarter. He bellowed at them in a voice which could have been, and probably was, heard in Nettleton.
‘Stop that, you young devils, and come here to me.’ They came cringing, and he gave them, not a talk upon kindness to dumb creatures, which he would not have known how to deliver, but a stern lecture upon the ill-effects upon the milk-yield of cows thus made unduly active; and to impress the lecture on their memories he followed it with two good stinging cuts with his crop upon each ragged behind. That, he reflected, riding on, was the way to keep order; constant vigilance, prompt rebuke. Given a free hand, he knew himself capable of keeping all England in order, and the Continent too, if it came to that. Disgraceful the way the Continent had been going on lately. Not that it had ever been properly run— and here he had the evidence of his own eyes; for he, in his youth, had made the Grand Tour. And he summed it up in a verse of doggerel which had been his only excursion into the world of creative art. He had written it in a letter to his father, and also in the visitors’ book of the inn, just near the St. Gotthard Pass, where he had spent the night and entertained the spirit of poetry for a brief moment. It ran thus:
‘In France I ate well, but paid dear for my meat; In Germany there was nothing but calves’ flesh to eat; In Italy the inns are bad and the people are beasts; But the Swiss, honest Swiss, charge fair for their feasts.’
It might not be verse of the highest standard, but it summed up tersely and accurately young Charles Shelmadine’s reaction to ‘foreign parts’; it also emphasised his difference from his father, who had enjoyed every mile of his tour, and often harked back to it with wistfulness.
Nothing else demanded immediate action. He noted with approval that the geese were doing well, and his mind slid forward to Christmas. He reared no geese of his own, but he always bought half a dozen, spreading his custom justly among his tenants. He observed with interest that Shad Jarvey’s donkey was still alive and able to forage; the beast must be of incredible age. He marked, with disapproval, the fact that Matt Juby’s cow still had husk. Only a fortnight ago he had drawn Matt’s attention to the fact and offered him the necessary linseed and hore-hound to make it a draught, and a long-necked bottle with which to administer it; but the loplolly fellow had evidently done nothing. It was typical of Juby to allow his boys to stone other people’s cows on one part of the Waste while his own coughed itself to a skeleton on another. If Juby wished to share in the Christmas dole he’d have to mend his ways.
The Waste ended in a thicket of gorse and bramble and bracken, beyond which lay a grass-covered ridge called the Dyke, which ran in a ruler-straight line between the river bank and the ride which ran through Layer Wood. The rector, who was something of an antiquarian, believed it to be part of a Roman road which run direct between Colchester and the sea. He had been talking for twenty years of doing some digging to test his theory, but he had never had time; he never would have. The Dyke’s interest for Sir Charles was that it made a firm boundary between