The Hidden Years Read online

  Liz had done what she could to restore the room to some kind of order, feeling that if she could somehow recreate for Edward in this one room some faint shadow of what it had once been, it might help to soothe the anguish she could see he suffered.

  Hardly a day went by without him blaming himself for what had happened, without him saying he should never have married her, never have brought her here. He seemed to hate seeing her work, although Liz herself was surprised to discover how much she was enjoying it. To her there was no hardship in the gruelling task of scrubbing and rescrubbing, of searching diligently through piles of assorted rubbish, just to make sure that nothing of value was discarded. Even when she could see no possible use for an article, she still meticulously put it on one side just in case, at some later date, when Edward was able, he might discover it to be some long-lost childhood treasure.

  No one seemed to know what had happened to the original contents of the house. Liz was an intelligent girl, but, while suspecting that the Johnsons had disposed of it, she had no idea that Edward was allowing her to believe that rather than allow her to know the truth, which was that he thought that Kit had sold everything he could that was of value, and that for some reason of his own he had decided to allow the house itself to fall into disrepair. Had not only allowed, but for some reason had almost encouraged it.

  It was Edward who discovered the desecration of the small cellar his grandfather had painstakingly built up, and, together with the debris of bottles and broken glasses, other evidence that the parties Kit had brought here to drink the rich clarets and rare vintages had not been comprised of only male friends.

  Edward kept this information from Liz. It was bad enough that he had deceived her so much already. She had believed she was coming to a comfortable home, where she and her child would be cared for and cosseted. Instead… instead, she was down on her hands and knees scrubbing filthy floors…

  Edward hated seeing her do that. He was an old-fashioned man, who had been brought up by distant, formal parents. In his eyes Liz was a precious and fragile creature, who should never have to demean herself with such tasks.

  Liz did not share his views. Some part of her was almost enjoying the challenge of the house, now that she had overcome her initial shock. Now, with her pregnancy well advanced, she was no longer having to deal with her earlier enervating sickness.

  One of the farmers, introduced to them by Ian Holmes—the one who had grudgingly allowed them to pay for the services of four of his labourers to repair the worst of the damage to the roof—also, and equally grudgingly, passed on to Liz the information that the best thing she could get for her garden was a pair of goats.

  'They'll give you good milk as well. Not that it's to everyone's taste…'

  Liz received this information cautiously. It seemed almost too good to be true. An animal which would clear the wilderness that was the garden, and leave it ready for digging over for the spring, and who would be at the same time providing them with milk.

  She would have liked to ask Edward's advice, but she had quickly discovered that he knew nothing about farming, nor, it seemed, did he wish to learn. Where she was discovering an eagerness to find out just what kind of hens it was which produced the big speckled brown eggs that Mrs Lowndes had generously slipped to her the first time she had plucked up her courage and sought out the farmer, Edward seemed to think such interests unsuitable for a lady.

  A lady… Just for a moment Liz had been tempted to laugh, to remind him that she wasn't a lady—but she knew to do so would hurt his feelings.

  She was beginning to discover things about Edward that she had not noticed before. That he was perhaps a little snobbish… not in any unkind way, but that such things as the social distinctions between the classes, between himself and, for instance, the farmers—even though the latter were far, far more comfortably off than Edward himself—were important to him, and, because she was his wife, it was equally important to him that she maintain his standards. To Edward that meant preserving a certain distance from other people, a certain aloofness, which Liz found did not sit comfortably on her shoulders.

  She wanted to please Edward but she wanted to be herself as well. She felt equally uncomfortable when the farm labourers referred to her as Mrs Danvers while she, so much younger than they, had to call them by their given names.

  Through her marriage to Edward she had stepped into an unfamiliar world… a world where, she was beginning to discover, money was not the main criterion of a person's social standing. It was the world described to her so fondly by her aunt, but now she was seeing it from the other side of the green baize door which in her aunt's day had separated the servers from the served.

  Another piece of useful information she elicited from Jack Lowndes was the surprising fact that some of the lush, crop-filled fields to the other side of the village did in actual fact belong to the estate.

  'Water meadows, they be,' he told her. 'Rented from the old master by Jimmy Sutton these forty year or more… Paid a good rent for them, Jimmy did, but since the old master died, and that son of his took over…'

  Liz knew a little of the ways of country folk, having observed them in her aunt's village.

  Cautiously she asked Edward if he knew anything about the receipt of rent monies on some of the land.

  This was another facet of the man who was now her husband she was coming to know. She realised how sensitive he could be, how proud and touchy on some subjects, and she knew that he would not welcome being told his business by a member of the class which, she suspected, he tended to despise, deep down.

  She was right to be cautious. He frowned over her question and demanded to know what made her ask it. She said, as innocently as she could, that she had noticed from the estate map which she had rescued that the estate seemed to include some land along the river.

  It wasn't entirely untrue. The estate map did show the water meadows, but she doubted that she would have looked for them without the fanner's tip.

  She watched as Edward shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He hated being confronted with facts that were unknown to him. Liz, who was beginning to recognise his small tell-tale gestures of discomfort, tried to smile and appear unconcerned. They were so desperately short of money. Edward had told her that much. If there were rents due to the estate…

  'Perhaps your late uncle's solicitor might be the best person to ask,' she suggested hesitantly.

  Edward seized on her suggestion thankfully. The shock of discovering the dilapidation of the estate had been a blow he was finding difficult to throw off. The knowledge that he had inherited Cottingdean—so much loved, so completely lost to him—the knowledge that he would marry Liz, and that he would after all have an heir, a child to pass that estate on to, had filled him with such unexpected euphoria that the reality had seemed an even crueller blow.

  He felt lost, bewildered, almost resentful both of Cottingdean and at times of Liz herself. And yet she was working so hard, doing so much… He had no right to feel resentment. She was wonderfully kind to him, always putting his comfort before her own, and if she treated him like an old and infirm uncle, well, what had he expected? He had always known that she would never feel desire for him, and even if she had… He saw the anxiety darkening her eyes, saw how her face had fined down, grown inexplicably more mature, so that now for all her youth she was truly a woman and not a child any more, and he felt the burden of his guilt increase intolerably.

  It was he who had done this to her, who had brought her here, who had made her in his way just as many false promises as Kit had in his.

  Only Ian Holmes knew the truth about the child she carried. He too had known Kit and he had shaken his head over Edward's insistence that Liz was to be allowed to retain her untarnished image of his cousin.

  'She's a very intelligent young woman. Sooner or later she'll realise. He wasn't popular in the village… Right now they're keeping quiet. They don't know her well enough to say anything, but, sooner
or later, it's going to come out. He used to come down here, you know… bring women with him…' Ian Holmes pulled a disgusted face. 'I know it was wartime and that men under the kind of pressure he was under need a release, but with him…'

  No, let Liz keep her illusions for as long as she could. She had precious little else to sustain her, poor child.

  Edward looked at her, and saw her red, swollen hands, swollen from scrubbing floors, her skin scratched from where she had spent an entire afternoon picking soft fruit from the tangle of canes in what had once been the kitchen garden… He remembered his mother and his grandmother, with their soft white hands. And cursed himself again.

  'I'll write to Peter Allwood,' he promised her. 'His family have been our solicitors since my greatgrandfather's time—but don't get your hopes up too high, my dear.' What he didn't want to say to her was that Kit might well have sold off any land that was of value, and that that could be why there was no rental income from the water meadows she seemed to think belonged to the estate, but he had always been a cautious man and he didn't wish to disappoint her unless he had to.

  It was the discovery of the water meadows that prompted Liz to make her tour of the estate.

  She set off early one afternoon, having checked that Edward was comfortable. She had cleaned out the library as best she could, but nothing would induce Edward to use it. He complained that he felt the cold and preferred the warmth of the kitchen and its range, although Liz knew quite well that he abhorred the necessity for them to practically live in this room. Kitchens were for servants, in his view, and she suspected that until now he had never done anything more than walk through one in his life.

  Her pregnancy showed now, all the more so perhaps because the rest of her was so slender.

  Food was short and money even shorter. It broke her thrifty housewife's heart to see so much wastage in the garden, when they were so badly in need of food.

  She had persuaded Mrs Lowndes to sell some of her hens, but as yet these temperamental birds had not started to lay for her, and she was beginning to be concerned that they would cost her more in food than they would ever produce in terms of eggs.

  As to the goats… she was making discreet enquiries about these beasts, although no one locally, it seemed, knew where they might be obtained.

  The best person to advise her would probably be her own shepherd, Mrs Lowndes had told her.

  This had surprised Liz. She had met young Vic, as he was called, only once. He had arrived at the house three days after they had moved in, apparently having heard on the grapevine of their arrival. Liz, who had from Edward's description visualised the shepherd as a gnarled old man in his seventies, had been taken off guard by the arrival of a tall, dark-haired stranger, only a handful of years older than she was herself, and at first, intimidated by the height and breadth of him as he stood at the kitchen door, had automatically stepped back from him, forgetting that she was a wife and soon to be a mother, and conscious only that she was being confronted by a healthy young male animal, who in some complex and illogical way was bringing something threatening into her life.

  When he had asked uncertainly for Edward, she had been forced to admit him into the kitchen, but she had stood guard behind Edward's chair as fiercely as a young vixen with a single cub while he introduced himself, and Vic, who knew almost as little about women as Liz did about men, knew enough about the female of the species to recognise that her silent aggression concealed fear… fear for herself and resentment on behalf of her husband.

  Vic had been orphaned as a very young child, and had spent his growing years almost exclusively in the company of his grandfather.

  Since he had spent all this time either with his flock or his dogs, Victor had grown up isolated from his peers, a quiet, intense boy, who had quickly absorbed everything the older man taught him and who in addition to those skills had an additional gift which his grandfather had quickly recognised.

  'A natural, he is,' he would boast to his cronies, on his rare visits to the Lamb. 'Got a rare feel for the beasts… Loves them like a woman, he does, big softie. Seems to know when one of them's ill…'

  It was this sensitivity that allowed him to see past Liz's rejection of him, to sense her fear and feel compassion for it. He could also sense her spirit, her strength, and he knew as instinctively as he knew when one of his flock ailed that it would be this woman who would hold together the inheritance of the man she stood guard over.

  His grandfather had died the previous winter, and since then Vic had been living alone in the small farmhouse which had always been the shepherd's private domain. Once the Cottingdean flocks had been famous for their wools, but over the years the stock had deteriorated, decimated by sickness and disease. Now, despite the care he lavished on them, the sheep were in poor heart. In the evening, with nothing else to do, Vic read avidly. He had learned a good deal about the art of cross-breeding sheep. It was his dream to produce a flock which would give the richest fleece of any breed, a fleece that would be prized the world over… But for that he needed a decent ram, not the services of Tim Benson's old ram, whose progeny were stringy and good for neither meat nor fleece.

  But good rams, the kind of ram he had in mind, cost money. They were experimenting now in Australia and New Zealand, producing beasts from the old hardy British stocks, but more disease-resistant, capable of much heavier fleece yields, and a different kind of fleece, one far more suited for modern machinery.

  Let others dream of producing a beast that gave the maximum meat. A softie, his grandad had called him, and perhaps he was, but no lamb of his rearing would be fattened and then slaughtered, when it could instead be allowed to live, and every year reward his care and patience with a fine rich fleece.

  This was Vic's dream: that one day his flock, his ewes, his ram would be talked about in tones of awe and respect everywhere where men of sense and knowledge gathered to discuss such things. But one look at Edward had told him that this man would never share such a dream. That Edward could never have any conception of what such a dream might mean. He felt heart-sorry for Edward, witnessed his wounds and disabilities not with shock but with compassion, and saw also that something in his life had also wounded the man's spirit.

  He knew too with a knowledge he neither questioned nor wondered at in any prurient manner—it was simply a matter of knowing—that the child his wife carried could not be his. That, though, was their affair and not his, nor anyone else's.

  Edward looked at the young shepherd and felt an instant frisson of aggression and resentment… but his sprang from causes very different from Liz's. His aggression came from the knowledge that in Vic he was looking at a man who was the finest of his species, a man whose goodness, whose essential spirit shone out of him, a man who would never allow life to destroy him, because he would never blame life for that destruction.

  His resentment sprang from looking at Vic and seeing a whole man, a healthy man, a young man.

  A man who ought to have been serving his country in recent years, not looking after sheep. He said as much, and waited for Vic to react.

  Vic smiled at him. Strangers often asked him that question, with varying degrees of aggression. He never resented their curiosity, understanding quite well what lay behind it.

  He'd had rheumatic fever as a child which had left him with a weak heart. The army had rejected him when he first tried to join up, and, as Dr Holmes had gently told him, he would never be fit for that kind of active service.

  Sometimes in the spring when they were lambing, when he worked exhaustingly through the day and night, his chest would grow tight and pain would tingle in his arm, but then he would rest for a while and the pain would go, and he was too content with what he was doing to concern himself about something over which he had no control.

  He said as much, explaining his disability without apology or self-pity.

  It was impossible not to believe him. Truth, honesty, shone out of him.

  And now, althoug
h Liz knew quite well that it would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to ask Vic to show her round the estate, to explain to her the working of the flock, to advise her on how best she might restore some sort of order to her garden, and turn it into the healthy, productive plot she had glimpsed on her one brief visit to his farmhouse, she held back from doing so. Not just out of reserve, but out of resentment as well, she acknowledged.

  It was wrong of her to resent Vic. Without his care, she had been told, the estate flock would have disappeared long ago. She suspected humiliatingly that his wages had not been paid since Edward's grandfather's death, but it was a subject she felt unable to broach with Edward… Perhaps when the solicitor came they would know more.

  She spent the afternoon exploring the estate, using as a guide the map she had copied from the one she had found, and taking care to avoid Vic and his flock, without knowing why she felt this need to do so.

  A part of her recognised that he was essentially a kind and gentle man whom she had no need to fear, but then there was his maleness, and her awareness of it… an instinctive female awareness of him as a man.

  The visit from the solicitor was illuminating. The estate did still own the water meadows and he was shocked to discover that rents were not being paid on them. He would, he advised Edward, recommend that the matter was dealt with straight away.

  Peter Allwood was a small, thin man, with a dry, precise way of speaking. If he found the state of the house a shock he hid it well. If he found the fact that she was married to Edward and expecting a child a shock he hid that equally well.

  Once he had gone, Edward consulted Ian Holmes on the best way to deal with the matter of the outstanding rent. He was beginning to trust Ian, Liz recognised. She too liked the North Country doctor with his forthright manner.