The Hiding Places Read online

  ‘At least she gets that one errand run,’ her father said, ruefully. He set off in the cart at dawn, twice weekly, to take the bulk of their milk, cheese, butter and eggs to Chippenham market.

  Flies circled in the shade of Germain’s Lane, despite the early hour; the air hung heavy with the garlicky stink of the ramsons gone over and the fox-musk foliage of wood anemones. The white dust lane ran down the wooded north-west slope of the hill that Clemmie had just climbed, out of the sunken pocket of land that cradled Weavern Farm, bypassing several large loops of the By Brook river. Clemmie tipped back her head to watch the torn fragments of sky, painfully blue, beyond the branches. A dark shape circled there; she added buzzard to the morning’s list, and then squirrel, as one leapt between trees overhead – an agile flash of bright red fur. Beech and oak and elm; a thick new canopy that had caused the spring flowers to die back. Only honeysuckle remained, scaling a young elm and blooming among the high branches. When she walked on, imprinted scraps of the bright sky stayed in her eyes and half-blinded her.

  Clemmie had walked this route, and carried this aching yoke across her shoulders, more times than she could count, but when Slaughterford Mill appeared at the bottom of the slope, it always made her stop to look. An array of buildings and sheds, hunkered on the river; the tall, steaming chimney; the thrum of noise from the paper-making machine, thudding down into the ground and then up through her feet. As she crossed the little footbridge over the river she heard the roar of the overshot waterwheel, hidden in its pit below ground. The sudden smell of metal and steam and grease, of men and brick and labour, so unlike anything else in the world. And there was a new reason, too, that the mill made her senses prickle. The boy. She might walk around a corner and catch sight of him, and knew her thoughts would both scatter and narrow in, onto him, to the exclusion of everything else. She couldn’t forget what he’d done, and wanted to see him exactly as much as she did not, so, in confusion, she stopped to listen to the wheel for a moment, tipping her forehead against the wall to feel its constant beat, and the crash of the water, vibrating into her skull. She was still there when the foreman happened to pass, and roused her.

  ‘Up you get, lass, and take that milk out of the sun.’ He smiled kindly beneath his thick moustaches, which were redder than the rest of his hair, and bushy like a fox’s tail. Clemmie trusted this man. He never came too close, nor tried to touch her.

  She did as he said, walking on into the mill yard, but it troubled her, this looking out. This watching; this hoping to find. She had never done it before; she liked to simply see, not to look. Only a few women worked at the mill, in the canteen and in the bag room, a long, low building close to the water’s edge. It was immaculate inside, but freezing in winter – swept elm floorboards and polished walnut benches, not a drop of machine oil or ink anywhere to spoil the finished paper as it was stitched and glued into strong bags for sugar, flour, suet. In summer it smelled deliciously of beeswax, cotton and wood, but Clemmie wasn’t really allowed inside – not with her filthy feet and her muddy hem. A couple of the female workers were on their way to clock in as she passed, and one waved to her – dark-haired Delilah Cooper, who was in Clemmie’s memories of long hours spent at the dame school in Slaughterford, when they were barely old enough to walk. Watched for a fee by an old woman with a sour face, in her cottage; kept out from underfoot during the working day and eventually taught the bare basics of the alphabet, some songs and prayers. Delilah’s face conjured up the smell of ten small children, kept all day in one room; of watery porridge and smuts and the cold stone floor. The other woman eyed her flatly, suspiciously, but Clemmie didn’t mind. She liked the scrape and clatter of the women’s pattens on the yard, and the clonk as they kicked them off at the door, carrying on in their boots and shoes. She shut her eyes to listen.

  ‘Not right in the head, that one,’ said the scowling woman.

  Clemmie took the milk to the canteen, then went across to the old farmhouse, a substantial stone house around which the mill had grown up and taken over like unchallenged nettles. Few now remembered Chapps Farm before the mill, and the farmhouse, in which Clemmie’s great-aunt Susan had been born – suddenly one morning, on a straw mat in front of the range – now housed the mill’s offices, where the foreman and his clerk had their desks, and Alistair Hadleigh too, from Manor Farm, who owned it all. He was a kind man; Clemmie liked his face, which was always ready to smile, and the way he nodded and spoke to the men when he inspected their work. As though he respected them, even though, to Clemmie, his wealth made him seem another order of being altogether. The clean glow of his skin fascinated her; he seemed to breathe different air. Sometimes she carried on walking, through the yard and out the other side. That morning, she went up the old farmhouse’s stairs and knocked at the door to Alistair’s office. He looked up from his desk, his forehead laddered with worry lines.

  ‘Ah, Clemmie. You’ve caught me quite unawares. Had we arranged for a lesson?’ he said, in a vaguely distracted manner. Clemmie turned to go. ‘No, no – do come in. Fifteen minutes won’t make or break a thing today.’ He got up to shut the door behind her. She caught a whiff of his hair oil, and the very masculine scent that hung about his jacket. No one else in Slaughterford had hands as clean as his. The surface of his enormous desk was hidden beneath piles and piles of paper – some samples that the mill had made, some finer than that, and typed upon. Clemmie couldn’t have read the words even had she been inclined to try. She went to her usual place by the window and turned her back to the glass. She liked to stand in silhouette, knowing that her face was partly obscured. ‘Now,’ said Alistair, perching on the edge of the desk. ‘Have you been practising?’ Unabashed, Clemmie hitched one shoulder to tell him that she had not. Alistair didn’t turn a hair. ‘Well, never mind. Shall we start with the breathing exercises I showed you?’

  The lesson did not go well. Clemmie swayed her weight from foot to foot, and wished she hadn’t bothered. The time was not right; she couldn’t concentrate, and tired easily. Looking defeated, Alistair patted her shoulder as she left. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We shall get there in due course, Clemmie. I’m certain of it.’ Nancy Hadleigh was climbing the stairs as Clemmie went down. Instinctively, Clemmie turned her body away slightly, clamping her arms to her sides, and avoided her gaze. Nancy was difficult, and hard. Nancy had a stare like iron nails, and only ever spoke past Clemmie, never to her.

  ‘Really, Alistair, what do you hope to achieve?’ said Nancy, at the office door.

  ‘There’s no earthly reason why that girl shouldn’t talk,’ said Alistair, quietly. ‘She only needs to be taught.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you must take it upon yourself to be the one to do so.’

  ‘Because nobody else cares to, Nancy.’

  ‘Well, you must realise that speech is not all people say you’re teaching her, shut away in your office together. It’s hardly wise, to make yourself the subject of such rumours. Least of all now.’

  ‘Really, Nancy. I’m sure nobody thinks any such thing.’

  ‘I doubt your hothouse flower would approve, if she knew.’

  ‘You make it sound like something seedy, Nancy, when it’s nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Well, I just hope you’re not giving the girl ideas, that’s all.’ Their voices faded as the door closed, and Clemmie carried on down the stairs, unconcerned.

  She went over to the shop to collect any letters for Weavern Farm – there were generally precious few. The shopkeeper gave her something small – sweets or cheese or an apple – for saving her son the long walk out to Weavern to deliver them, and that day Clemmie chewed a toffee as she carried on her way. But the boy. The boy. His name was Eli, and his family were bad – the Tanners. The worst on God’s green Earth, her father, William Matlock, had once said, as he forbade any of his girls to fool about with any of their boys. They’d had a Tanner in to help cut the hay one year. He’d made several attempts to corner Clemmie’s sister, Josie,
who’d been twelve at the time, and in the end left her with a cut lip; and when he was told to go he’d gone with two of their hens. Now William’s face curdled dangerously at any mention of a Tanner. But Clemmie couldn’t help thinking about the thing she’d seen the boy do – the thing he’d done for her. She couldn’t help but picture his face, so at odds with itself that she hadn’t quite worked it out yet – her instincts, normally good enough at guiding her, went blind and were no help. There’d been blood beneath his fingernails, and deep scratches on his hands. He’d smelt of beer and sweat, of something hard and mineral, but, underneath that, of something better. He’d told her his name – defiantly, as if she’d challenged him: I’m Eli. And then not another word. The silence had been painfully loud.

  But he was nowhere around; if he was working at the mill that day then he was already inside. Sometimes he worked at Rag Mill, the smaller mill, just a little way upriver, which pulped rags for the paper mill. Clemmie remembered seeing him leading the shaggy pony that pulled the cart of sloppy stuff between the two. Tugging at its bridle as it twisted its head in protest, his face screwed up in anger. So much anger in him – so at odds with what he’d done for her. She gazed towards Rag Mill, but had no call to go further upriver. The malty smell of Little & Sons brewery – one of her favourites – drifted down to her, but she left the mill yard troubled. She would go back along the western side of the river, through the trees. There was no path but she knew the way. She felt watched as she went; she was used to the feeling and knew it at once: the weight of eyes. This time, though, she looked around and tried to see who it was – tried to see if it was the boy. Eli.

  2

  The Doll

  Pudding did her best to look smart. The new Mrs Hadleigh was – finally – coming to the stables to see the horse Mr Hadleigh had bought for her, in the hope that she would take to riding. Irene Hadleigh had been at Manor Farm for almost six weeks already, as spring had swelled into summer, and the fact that few in the village had seen or met her was causing mutterings. The most sympathetic rumour was that she was an invalid of some kind. There’d been enough of a hoo-hah already, when they’d married up in London after a whirlwind courtship, rather than in St Nicholas’ church, squat and solitary in a field in the centre of the village. When the old Mr Hadleigh had been married, the whole village had been invited to a fête in the orchard at Manor Farm, with beer, bunting and apple bobbing. Not that Pudding had been alive to see it, but she’d heard it talked about; and recently she’d overheard Mrs Glover, who ran the tiny shop, complaining to Dolores Pole about the lack of a celebration. Before she’d even arrived and apparently shunned them, the villagers had felt cheated by the new Mrs Hadleigh. Pudding liked the idea of this sudden wedding though – she imagined a passion too urgent to be borne, the need to possess and be possessed, and the thought gave her a hungry feeling. She yearned to yearn for somebody, and to be yearned for; a puzzle of feelings she couldn’t yet decipher. Such passion must surely have left traces on Irene Hadleigh. Some kind of glow from within, perhaps. And since Pudding had only caught brief glimpses of her – sitting out on the back terrace with her face down; or blurry, gazing from a window of the house – Irene Hadleigh had become a kind of distant, glorious, near-mythical figure. At the thought of actually meeting her Pudding’s heart galloped absurdly.

  Manor Farm had five loose boxes and a larger stable they called the cob house – where the two-seated gig and the cob pony who pulled it lived – arranged around a small yard to the west of the farmhouse. It was all built of the same golden limestone as the rest of Slaughterford, quarried out of the hillside above the mill in some earlier century. This yard was where the riding horses were kept, and it was Pudding’s domain. The farm’s three pairs of working horses – six mighty shires, all feathered feet and muscle – were kept together in skillings behind the top barn, and looked after by a short, wiry man called Hilarius. He wore the same long canvas overalls every day, come rain or shine; nobody knew his age but he was ancient, and had been at the farm since he was a child – far longer than anyone else. His parents had come from somewhere in Europe, originally; his eyes watched the world from within a network of creases, and he didn’t say an awful lot. In summer he slept on a straw mattress on a mezzanine in the cavernous great barn; in winter he moved into the loft above the cob house. It was his job to get the working pairs harnessed by seven o’clock every morning, ready for the carters to take out; and to rub them down, feed them and turn them out when they returned from ploughing or sowing or whatever at the end of the day. With nods and gestures and demonstrations, Hilarius had taught Pudding a lot of what she knew about stable work, and the rest she’d taught herself from a book called Sound Horse Management, which she’d got from the library in Chippenham.

  Hay was fetched from the rickyard, up the hill, where it was stacked and thatched on staddle stones to keep it dry. One of the farm’s many small sheds had been put aside as a tack room and fitted out with a pot-bellied stove, to prevent the leather blooming, on which Pudding could boil a kettle to make tea. There was an ancient stone water trough outside which doubled as a handy mounting block. Pudding kept the tack room as spotless as the yard – so spotless that the laundress had joked, one day, that the sparrows would have no scraps to build their nests. After that she’d taken to scattering a few wisps of old hay onto the muck heap each morning. Just during nesting season. At least there was plenty of mud around the field gates for the swallows and martins – they’d arrived a few weeks before and set about patching up their nests in the eaves of the stables, and were so sweet Pudding didn’t even mind it when they dropped their mess in her hair. Pudding’s charges were five: Mr Hadleigh’s towering brown hunter, Baron; Tufty, the pony he’d had as a child, now implausibly saggy and ancient; Nancy Hadleigh’s hack, Bally Girl – though Nancy rode less and less frequently, with her hip; Dundee, the cob that pulled the Stanhope gig when someone wanted to go into town; and now Robin, the gelding for Mrs Hadleigh. He was only just bigger than a pony and as mild as anything, but not heavy or a plod. Even his colouring was gentle – honey brown. Irene Hadleigh couldn’t fail to like him.

  Pudding brought him out onto the yard just before eleven and gave him one final polish. She nudged him to straighten him up when he slouched, tipping a back hoof, wanting to show him in his best light. He was a reflection of her work, after all, and Pudding wanted more than anything to be the best girl groom possible. Well, not more than anything. She thought of Donny, and her mother too; and of the mystery of yearning. But otherwise, it was what she wanted most. Her father still wanted her to go on to secretarial college, or perhaps even university, as Donny had planned to, once upon a time. Donny was meant to have been an engineer – he had a natural talent for it, and understood machinery of all kinds – but the Great War had changed all that. Dr Cartwright called this summer a trial run at being a groom, but, at fifteen years old, Pudding knew exactly what she wanted. She was going to excel. She was going to make herself indispensable to the Hadleighs, and she was going to stay in Slaughterford with her family. For a minute or two she wondered who on earth she would marry, there in Slaughterford, but then the clip on one of her braces popped open as she bent down to pick up Robin’s foot, and she blushed even though there was nobody to see it, and reminded herself that marriage was the least of her concerns. Then she heard footsteps and voices from the house, and, flustered, refastened the clip and brushed the horsehair from her sleeves as best she could.

  Manor Farm was the most northerly house of Slaughterford, on the steep lane that headed off to Ford, the next village north along the By Brook. From the farm there was a wide, sweeping view of the rolling valley, almost impossibly green with summer, with the church on one side, the mills down on the water, and the cottages in between. The valley was too steep for crops – it was all woods and grazing, and the far fields were dotted with sheep and bronze cattle. The riverbanks to the south were so thick with trees that the water was only visible down
by the bridge, where three lanes met – Germain’s, which joined Ham Lane to Biddestone; the lane to Ford in the north, and the lane towards Thickwood in the west. All the lanes were narrow and made of crushed limestone, and anyone travelling along them caused a cloud of white dust. The weather had been hot and sunny but it had been raining at night, so that the field gates and water troughs sat in churned mud. The air was slightly damp, the By Brook ran swiftly, and there were insects everywhere. With this glorious backdrop Nancy and Irene Hadleigh walked across to the yard from the house. For an idiotic moment, Pudding felt she ought to stand to attention, and clean forgot what to say. Luckily, just as the women arrived alongside him, Robin broke wind quite loudly, and she couldn’t help but laugh.

  Irene Hadleigh recoiled, and kept her distance, watching Robin as though she half expected him to lunge at her, all teeth and fury. It gave Pudding the chance to have a good look at her. She was medium height and whip-thin, with the kind of elfin delicacy that Pudding longed for. Her dark hair was cut into a glossy bob across her ears; her eyes were similarly dark, with smudges underneath them, stark in her pale face. And there was something so immobile about her face, something so frozen, that Pudding couldn’t imagine her laughing. She was like a china doll, and quite unreadable. She was dressed in immaculate riding clothes – white breeches, a tweed jacket and a stock – and Pudding racked her brains in panic, having no recollection that Robin should have been tacked up for riding.