‘And they’re suspiciously quiet,’ said Mr Montague, who was not without experience. ‘Some women shout and thwow things and then you get angwy yourself and you’re saved. But when they cwy, quietly, that is dangerous; you begin to pwomise them things. Do you think, that perhaps Wichard would welcome an intewuption?’
‘I should welcome a glimpse of the lady,’ said Mr Mundford.
‘To the wescue then!’ cried Mr Montague. He got up and opened the door into the breakfast-room tentatively and politely, saying, ‘Wichard, we are waiting for you’; then he saw the way the girl was standing, plainly triumphant, and the way Richard was sagging, sweating profusely in his chair. Too late, he thought; he’s promised her a hundred a year.
Mr Mundford had taken a look too and interpreted the scene otherwise. As Mr Montague stepped back from the doorway he moved forward.
‘We,’ said Damask, turning the stare upon him, ‘are having a private conversation.’
‘Which one member of the party seems not to be enjoying very much,’ said Mr Mundford smoothly. ‘Sometimes, you know, an impartial third person …’ He moved towards the chair and said in a bantering voice, ‘Manners, man, manners. Get up and introduce me.’ Richard looked at him with agonised eyes and scrabbled with his fingers on the table’s edge and sweated more profusely.
Mr Mundford looked at Damask, who looked back at him. Blundering fool … just when she was proving …
‘We have no wish to be interrupted,’ she said brusquely. They fought one another over the candles for a moment.
‘And I have no wish to be intrusive,’ said Mr Mundford blandly. ‘Helpful, yes.’
Then for God’s sake help me, if you can,’ said Richard thickly.
Is it not remarkable,’ said Mr Mundford, with his eyes on Damask, ‘how, in an extremity, people not ordinarily attentive to the Deity appeal to other people in His name?’ He smiled as he spoke and, reaching out one leg, kicked the leg of the chair in which Richard sat. ‘Get up,’ he said. And Richard was in possession of his legs again.
‘Monty is alone, and you need a drink,’ said Mr Mundford, ushering Richard out of his own breakfast-room.
‘Try on me,’ said Mr Mundford before Damask could speak. As proof of his willingness to be ‘tried on’ he moved to stand conveniently for dropping into the chair.
‘It would be no use,’ she said, rather sullenly.
‘Never mind. Try. My name is Alec Mundford.’
All right, she thought, she’d show him. Coming in like that and spoiling everything. An upsurge of anger, which in the circumstances was understandably mistaken for an uprush of power, swept over her.
‘Sit down, Alec Mundford,’ she said, desperately willing it to happen. But he remained standing.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I am stronger than you—as yet. But you are young. And I confess I felt a weakening of the knees— Tell me, how long have you practised this art, and to what purpose?”
‘It came a year ago, in August. Quite suddenly. A woman was going to throw me out of somewhere where I wanted to stay … and she couldn’t; nor could her husband. Then I knew.’
‘And what had happened in August a year ago?’ Sullen again, she said, ‘Nothing.’ ‘Come, come,’ said Mr Mundford. ‘You remember. You and I must be frank with one another if we are to work together.’ ‘Work together?’
‘Why not? It would never do for us to oppose one another, would it? But we’ll speak of that later. Tell me what happened in August last year.’
‘I had … a shock. And it was a hot day. I fainted; my mother thought I was dead.’
‘And where were you during that time?’ ‘How did you know?’ she asked sharply. He did not bother to answer, he just looked at her and waited.
‘In a place,’ she said at last. He nodded. ‘And there were voices … and light was something you could touch and handle; and colour … colour was something you could taste … and time was … you could see it. It sounds all confused, but that was how it was, and I understood it… then.’
‘And you returned with this power?’
‘That was how it seemed. Nobody had ever done what I wanted them to do until then.’
He nodded again. ‘Now do something for me,’ he said. He took from his pocket the lump of pale pink stone. ‘Hold this in your hand, will you?’
She hesitated. ‘What is it? I don’t want anything else to happen to me. You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone—and Sir Richard if he’s your friend, though he did cheat me.’
‘I’m not going to take anything away from you. I told you, we must work together. Just hold this in your hand.’
Reluctantly she took the stone and held it.
‘Now give it back.’ He snatched it quickly and looked at it eagerly. ‘And colour,’ he quoted delightedly, ‘was
something you could taste.’ He slipped the stone back into his pocket. ‘Working together,’ he said, ‘there could be no limit to what we could do.’ He brooded for a moment. Then he said, ‘Tell me, what do you want most in the
world?’
The pulse began to beat in her throat again.
‘Something I can never have now…’
‘Why not?’
‘It is too late.’
‘Ah, but you forget. “Time was … you could see it!” Remember? By that measure it can never be too late. What is it that you want? I swear to you—by the things we both know—that if you will work with me you shall
have it.’
‘But he’s married now.”
‘How young you are,’ Mr Mundford said, almost do-tingly. ‘How young and how innocent–-‘
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Once the harvest was over the year seemed to go downhill rapidly; the evenings drew in and the usual early October gales stripped the trees and howled around the ill-fitting doors of the Waste Cottages, presaging worse weather to come. Those who had potatoes to dig dug them thankfully, watched by envious eyes.
Matt Ashpole, In that October, received what he called ‘a smack on the snout’—one against which even his remarkable foresight had not warned him. He had foreseen and had spoken to Mrs Sam Jarvey about the ‘draught’ which would blow, cold and bitter, when destitution overtook the Waste-dwellers. He had himself lately felt its breath. Quite a third of his carrier’s business had been concerned with taking little bits and pieces of produce to market and buying other little bits and pieces for his neighbours. That trade was now virtually dead. But he had sold all his fencing stakes and he was counting on Shipton’s walnuts. So one blustery October morning he drove along to Bridge Farm to come to terms with Mrs Shipton as he had done in previous years.
She was not in the kitchen, so he banged on the door and shouted. Receiving no answer, he took Gyp by the bridle and led him to the rickety fence which separated the yard from the stackyard and left him so close to one of Shipton’s haystacks that no sensible horse could have failed to take advantage of the position. He then went, on foot, to take a look at the walnut crop. And there, to his surprise and horror he found Shipton and his missus—her
head tied up in a duster—armed with linen props, beating
down the nuts with their own hands. ‘Hullo, hullo!’ he said. ‘Ain’t late this year, am I?’ Shipton gave him a sour, sheepish look and went on
with his beating, but Mrs Shipton lowered her prop and
stood with it like a standard-bearer while she said, briskly:
‘This year we’re gathering ‘em, sacking ‘em and selling ‘em, and taking what profit there is to be had, Matt Ashpole. Letting you do it was all part of the loplolly state of affairs what brought us to ruin!’
‘Ruin, missus?’ said Matt, remembering all the fat pigs in the straw, all the stacks in the stackyard. ‘Come now, you ain’t the one to talk about ruin, surely.’
‘I ain’t talking about it; I’m dealing with it,’ retorted Mrs Shipton.
The old bitch must be mad, Matt thought; and there was nothing to be gained by arguing with a mad woman armed with a linen prop. He shot Shipton a glance, a nice blend of sympathy and derision which Abel affected not to see, and walked slowly back to where he had left his old horse, which, being a prudent animal, had made the most of its chance.
‘Come on, Gyp,’ he said, climbing into the cart, ‘we’ve gotta find some other way of turning a honest penny. I don’t know what things are coming to, that I don’t.’
Even his sturdy spirit was cast down for a while as he remembered better days when sometimes—not often, but sometimes—a job would go begging, when Matt Juby maybe would rap on his door and say, ‘Matt, do us a favour. Dead rat under the floor at Flocky and I promised to go and hunt it this morning and now my cow is dropping her calf.’ Nowadays the smell of a dead rat to be hunted and disposed of, a dead sheep to be buried, an overflowing privy to be emptied, brought half a dozen men running, all ready to accept a cut-throat price for the job. Terrible times we live in, surely, Matt thought. But the rhythm of the old horse’s plodding hoofs soothed him, and the sight of the animal itself, narrow-hocked, bony- . Terrible times