North Side of the Tree. Maggie Prince

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       Chapter 5

      Occasionally in life there comes a moment when you just have to lie down and say, for now I can do nothing; for now I give up. I do so then. I lie down on my bed with my face to the wall. Then I get up, close the bed-curtains and lie down again in darkness. I feel betrayed. How could they? Worst of all, my mother has colluded in my imprisonment. How could she who defies convention herself? I thought I knew her. I have never felt more let down.

      “Beatrice, it’s for your own good,” she says when she returns an hour later and whips the bed-curtains open. “People heard what you said. Stupid, stupid girl! Do you want to be hanged for murder? I don’t believe for a moment that you did it. You’re obviously just trying to protect James. Do you think that great lummox can’t look after himself? We’ve told everyone you have a brain fever, brought on by the fall, and didn’t know what you were saying. Now we have to let it die down, so please be good and stay here in your room for a week or so, while people forget about it.”

      “And James, Mother?” I enquire. “Is he in the meantime to be hunted down and hanged?”

      “Well, presumably not, if you tell us who really committed this murder. It wasn’t James, was it? Are you going to tell me what really happened? It may not go so badly for the murderer, if he was indeed saving you from the men. Who was it, Beatrice? You do know, don’t you?”

      I turn my face away. “No. I don’t know.”

      “Was it James?”

      “No.”

      “Then you do know. Come along, child, who was it?”

      “I don’t know!” I shout.

      My mother turns away. “Then I’m afraid your father is set on incriminating James.” She crosses to the door. I jump off the bed and follow her.

      “Mother, you can’t allow it! It’s obvious that Father only wants him out of the way because of Verity.”

      “I can’t stop him, Beatrice. I have tried.”

      “Then I shall tell everyone – the magistrate, everyone – that I did it.”

      My mother walks out and slams the door behind her, calling through it, “Not from here you won’t, Beatrice.” It is ridiculous – ridiculous and humiliating. I cannot quite understand how I managed to get myself into this situation, from which there appears no way out. I have heard of girls being locked away before, but never dreamt it could happen to me.

      They manage my imprisonment very well. I almost feel as if they have been waiting to do this, as if there were some unspoken agreement between everyone that I have been getting above myself. By the end of the first week I am beginning to think I truly do have brain fever, the boredom and sense of being trapped are so great. By night I lie awake listening to the shrieks of owls, and by day to the screams of pigs, as autumn slaughter gets under way along the valley. It is necessary work, so that we may all eat through the winter, and make soap and black puddings and leather gloves. Usually on our farm I decide on the pig, and the day it shall be dispatched. This year my mother tells me they are managing the autumn work quite well without me – the barns are well filled and she will be asking Leo to kill one of the pigs in a fortnight. There will be no more Scots this year, so now we can settle down to preparing for winter.

      One day I hear sounds of fighting from further down the valley, and I learn later from Germaine that a pitched battle has been fought at Low Back Farm. Verity has, it seems, moved there from the parsonage, and my father and his henchmen have been attempting to retrieve her, and to capture James Sorrell. However, James now has henchmen of his own, and my father’s forces were driven off.

      I have a few visitors, always with the door locked behind them and a henchman on duty outside. It is mortifying. They come as if to an invalid, all keeping up the ghastly pretence that I am ill with brain fever and must be enclosed for my own good. Mother, to whom I cannot bring myself to speak, looks concerned and tired. Kate brings hot possets and titbits from the kitchen, and the news that John has called every day but has not been allowed in. Germaine comes with her sewing, and books of poetry to read to me. One day I wake from an afternoon doze to find Gerald here with her. From where I lie in the dark recesses of my bed they are framed by a gap in my bed-curtains, clutching each other in a wild embrace. I watch the soft triangle of Germaine’s underjaw as they kiss frantically, and am filled with sadness. I think of Robert, and the moment I chose not to go to Scotland with him, and for the first time I believe I made the wrong decision.

      The weather turns cold and windy. Kate lights the fire in the chimney hole in my room, and the draught under the door fills the chamber with smoke and half suffocates me. I sit with tears pouring down my cheeks, only partly because of the smoke. Kate jerks her chin at the door which Michael, the sly new henchman, has locked behind her. “I don’t hold with this,” she says, “shutting you in here when there’s work to be done. Farm’s going to rack and ruin. Brain fever my arse. You’re no dafter than you ever were. Your father gets nobbut gristle from me till he lets you out.” She hammers on the door for it to be opened.

      “Kate,” I whisper, “Kate, please let me out. Please, I beg you.”

      From outside comes the sound of Michael unlocking the door. Kate turns her short-sighted gaze on me. “Oh lass, we’d all fain let you out if we could, but what would your father do? Our lives wouldn’t be worth the living, if we still had them to live.”

      Michael stands in the doorway, listening. “Best be careful, Goody Kate,” he says with a grin.

      I could have warned him, had I been so inclined, that it is deeply unwise to antagonise Kate, but I do not, since it will be a pleasure to ponder the frightful things which she will now do to his food.

      “I thank you for your advice, lad,” she says to him as he pulls the door to. “For certain it will guide my actions.” Michael gives a self-satisfied laugh.

      Sunday comes, and I am not even allowed to go to church. John comes over again afterwards. I hear his horse, which has a distinctive, petulant whinny, and I catch a glimpse of him arriving as I peer out of the awkward angle of my window. My father, whom I can hear coughing and wheezing upstairs, does not go down, and no one opens the door to the visitor. After a while John gives up hammering on it and instead stands shouting up at the battlements. Eventually СКАЧАТЬ