One morning in May some seven months later, the subject of her own appeal or otherwise was uppermost in Ellin’s mind.
The day was overcast after a week of sunshine; and standing by an open casement of the Parsonage, she felt the sense of restlessness which often came in her experience with changes in the weather. Her bedchamber depressed her with its threadbare druggets and drab mock-india paper.
But not as much as her reflection in the tarnished dressing glass.
‘Prisoner of Lochleven,’ she declaimed theatrically, pulling back her hair to study the effect – although today not even the idea of portrait sketching could divert her, and with a sigh she turned back to the window. Down in the churchyard and glebe field, the green proof of God’s abundance was burgeoning from fleshy stalks and swollen buds. The birds were singing their small hearts out. The world was young, and so was she - but no one seemed to care! Once life had seemed so full of possibility.
‘But now another spring is come and all but gone,’ she thought with a sharp pang of disappointment, ‘while I sit on my thumbs!’
After their excitements on the causeway, Ellin had enjoyed her frequent calls at Chalkdean. The elder Mr Corbyn was reserved still to be sure; still unromantic to a fault. But the man’s unfailing kindness to his patient and his skill as a physician could hardly be denied. So when Papa returned to Sellington and Ellin’s care, she’d missed her visits to the Manor – and from that time forward, accounts of winter weather harnessed to her own unending chores and sickroom duties, competed on the pages of her journal to bore his daughter witless.
Papa by then was walking with a stick. The broken bone had knitted and the scab healed over within a matter of mere weeks. But other wounds were slower to respond. The sense of panic she’d detected in her father during their fatal confrontation on the bridge remained in evidence throughout his recuperation. Ellin saw it in his eyes and heard it constantly in his complaining voice. Then on the morning they discovered Zebediah Fowler’s body at the Gap, she watched it swallow up his principles entirely. The boy’s skull had been smashed.
‘Which shows ’e must’ve fallen, poor lad; slipped an’ fallen from the cliff.’ The village spoke with but a single voice’ – even Zeb’s own father – repeating the words blankly like a church response.
Mary Codsall, scrubbing with a zeal that was entirely new, declined to look the parson in the eye. But Ellin thought about another young man on the beach where they’d found Zeb, and of the rhyme he’d chanted then:
‘Ah, but leave ’em alone an’ they’ll come home, A TAGGIN’ NO TALES BEHIND ’EM!’
Papa’s accusations from that day had been directed at the French exclusively. At the end of February, on the day appointed for a national fast to focus God’s attention on the virtues of the English, he’d hobbled up the pulpit steps to denounce the Jacobins across the Channel – a breed who, as another orator had put it, were thirsting for the blood of their own offspring. Yet in comparison with what had gone before, the parson’s rhetoric was quite without conviction – and the proof of his humanity that Ellin now perceived in him, brought nothing with it of affection or respect.
She sighed again, and leaning from the window filled her lungs with the fermenting perfume of regeneration – unsure of what it was about it that disturbed her, but recognising in herself an ache for something primal. Something better, bolder and more beautiful than life had yet seen fit to offer!
She recognised the ache. But it was not until the younger Mr Corbyn suddenly rode into view below the window – returned to Sellington from God alone knew where! – that Ellin apprehended Adam entering her longed-for Eden.
His improbable hair, the first thing that one always noticed, was cropped short – too short to tie; coaxed forward in a tousled ‘Brutus’ style that gave liberty to curls. With his usual disregard for what was right, he’d ridden forth without topcoat or hat - without even a token chapeau-bras to clamp beneath his arm – yet might have stepped out from a fashion plate for the elegance of his appearance. His neck-cloth was of black silk and expertly tied. In contrast, his calamanco weskit was more brilliantly yellow, more daringly abbreviated than any Ellin had beheld; so short in the waist that a handsbreadth or more white lawn was clearly visible beneath. The bold black-and-yellow theme was carried even to the breeches – tiger-striped from hip to knee like the hose of some medieval courtier – and on downward to the gold tassels and black leather of his riding boots.
A young popinjay if ever she saw one!
But a youth no longer. Now a man for sure.
And now he had dismounted, to secure his horse not twenty paces from her father’s gate to a ring in the churchyard wall. ‘And in a moment he is bound to look up and see me,’ Ellin thought with an anticipatory thrill of excitement, forcing herself this time to remain in full view at her window.
She raised her chin.
‘Anybody may blame me who likes,’ she thought defiantly. ‘But I’ll not be moved from my own window, why should I be, on account of such a coxcomb!’ (While at the same time making sure that this time he’d not catch her looking – gazing at the hills behind the church instead, and arching back a little to define the outline of her small breasts when viewed from underneath.)
Even in the flush of their spring growth the downs looked pale against the greenness of the combe; speckled and splotched like a great bolt of muslin, white-spotted with the fleeces of their grazing flocks. ‘So count the sheep, tally them in pairs as shepherds do,’ Ellin instructed herself on a sudden nervous impulse. ‘How does it go now? Come, you must remember…
‘Wintherum wontherum twintherum twontherum wagtail– that’s ten. Whitebelly coram dar diddle den– which is twenty; and who cares if he is watching?’ For watching her he certainly must be by now; looking up to cover his surprise with the expression of smiling impertinence she knew so well. Fancying himself so great!
‘Etherum atherum shootherum cootherum windbar – thirty;’ willing her to turn her head and look down. As if she’d ever dream of giving him the satisfaction!
‘ Windbar– thirty. Then, bobtail, bopeep… No, not ‘bopeep’! What in folly’s name can you be thinking of?’ But now she’d lost the rhythm, lost the words – ‘lost her sheep, an’ can’t tell where to find ’em…
‘So start again, you gull. Come - Wintherum wontherum…’
She was trying so hard to tally them, doing her utmost not to look. But with Ellin, doing her utmost never quite seemed to answer; and when at last she came to steal a peek – the merest little glimpse – it was to discover him part-turned away from her, in conversation with a strapper of a female whose great suet-dumpling breasts laid claim unmistakably to be those of the farmer’s daughter, Annie Ashby.
Not that anything could have persuaded Ellin to so much as pass the time of day with the posturing dand in the church, she told herself – not if he’d begged her on his knees! Which being so, what object could there by in blaming providence for Ann Ashby’s appearance on the scene?
‘If Aaron Corbyn cares to pay court to a trumpery overstuffed baggage of that girl’s type,’ she informed her glaring image in the dressing glass. ‘Then good luck to him, I say. ’Tis certainly of no great consequence to me!’
Aaron’s own view of providence just then was unsurprisingly more favourable. Not for him his brother’s habit of restraint; for unlike Rafe, he seldom swam against the stream of his own inclination. He needed a woman. Providence most obligingly supplied one; cause and effect – as simple as life itself! Since the replacement of his lovely mother with the censorious and horse-faced Aunt Drusilla, he’d taken every precaution to avoid those feelings of tendre that so inconvenienced men in dealings with the other sex. Deliberately he’d unhitched his carnal appetites from the emotions they drew in their traces; and now his brother Ray was the only soul on earth he truly cared for. Aside of course from himself.
For Aaron there had always been girls like Nan Ashby; he barely thought of them as individuals, unselective as a Tom sparrow. This one was handsome in her own blunt-featured way. His eyes moved openly over her body. ‘A fine big gal,’ as men called her behind her back and sometimes on it. ‘Plenty there, lad, to hold on by!’
To meet him, the farmer’s daughter had sprugged herself up in printed muslin, with a beribboned bonnet and a scarlet band knotted around her neck in the latest callous female fashion à la guillotine. Although thank heaven she’d stopped short of having her back hair shorn à la victime. Because for Aaron, the girl’s most obvious visible attractions were the rope of flaxen hair that drooped across her shoulder – and below the braid, as if upthrust to meet it, a pair of magnificent white bubbs. (Upthrust and squeezed together in a double-cheeked parody that only a rig, he told himself, could fail to recognise and respond to.)
But first there were the rules of courtship to observe, as a charade which even notoriously loose-rumped stammels like this one demanded of their swains. And who, when all was said, could play that game better than Aaron; always at his gentlest in anticipation of an act of violence.
‘So have you missed me, Nan?’ he asked her - eyelids, gingery lashes drooping; sprawling back against the wall, to slowly massage his own thighs with the flat of his palms – no woman’s body half as interesting to Aaron as his own.
‘Miss you? Oh lor, Sir, like we’d miss turnpike gates!’ She smiled, not at the man but at a gravestone at his back; fiddling all the while with her fat pigtail.
‘Oh yes, a thoroughly good natured girl,’ he thought, ‘who’d as likely lie down when she’s asked to sit! And how would her father like to hear what Nan gets up to between milkings?’ he wondered. ‘To hear he has a hedge-whore for a daughter?’
He watched her tugging at the braid; twitching it up from her breasts to stroke her freckled neck – up to her lips, back to her breasts… Aaron could feel the saddle muscles tense beneath his palms. But he’d not reach for her, not yet. The rule was that he first must sing a little for his supper.
‘So did you think that I’d forgotten you?’ he asked her, kicking at a pebble with the toe of a polished boot. ‘D’ye think that I’d come home without a cadeau in my pocket for my Nan?’
She laughed; a gurgling, provocative sound from deep within her throat. ‘Doan’t ye come that with me, Aaron Corbyn. I know ’ow many beans make five; an’ I’d say ye’ve forgotten me more times un ye’ve danced Moll Peatley’s jig with Frenchy mam’selles! As for yer ‘cadow’,’ she added slyly. ‘If ’tis what ye’re showin’ in the front pocket of yer breeches, then I’ll lay I’m not the only Judy ye’ve brung it ’ome to, neither!’
‘Lord save us! Whatever next will the girl say? So are we onto Moll Peatley’s jig already?’ Aaron raised his hands and his eloquent brown eyes together in a mock horror. ‘Why Ma’am your boldness takes m’ breath away! But won’t you leave me in my breeches even for the time you’d take to peep into my saddle-bag? For my life I swear I’ve never known a girl so mighty quick to go to work, and slow to claim her wage.’
He stepped behind her, taut-strung as a dancing master, while Annie rushed excitedly towards his horse. The gift he’d brought her was a gown-length of ramaged velvet, cut from a bolt in his Fécamp warehouse and tossed into the cabin of his lugger for the crossing.
As the girl unfolded the exquisite fabric; rubbing it against her cheek, draping it around her like a toga, he allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. Whatever Pitt’s government or Brother Ray might have to say, the import of such goods must stand to benefit more folk on both sides of the Channel than they could ever harm – in work for Lyons weavers whose art must otherwise be sacrificed to war - in bread for the starving pécheurs of Fécamp, whose herring boats were long since requisitioned or destroyed – and in a living wage for all the men of Sussex who depended on such trade.
In the months since Rimmer’s overhauling on the causeway, Aaron had crossed back to England only thrice. In November he’d responded promptly to Rafe’s letter; although, if truth be told, less for fraternal duty than a need for further capital – with unemployment in the Norman ports and Paris’s insatiable demand for gold, opening the way for contrabanding on an unprecedented scale. When he arrived there in July, Aaron had been hailed in Fécamp as its saviour. Within a week, its mayor had issued him a trading licence, on the condition that his master and crew should be selected from redundant Fécampois. Within a month, he’d leased a vacant warehouse on the Quai Vicomte; and in November chartered and equipped his own Chasse-marée- a gaff rigged lugger with a shallow keel – commencing trading at the age of twenty as a master smuggler in his own right.
In April he’d received a second letter from his brother enclosing a clipping from the Sussex Weekly Advertiser that reported landings on the coast at Crowlink and at Cuckmere Haven, and guessed at a connection with the death of Fowler on a nearby beach. An article which, Rafe opined, must draw attention to the scale of the illicit trade and spur the Revenue to action. So Aaron had again returned to the rank atmosphere of Harris’s closed waggon on the heath, to decide on landing sites along the cliffs where ropes and derricks might be used, and find new routes for caravans avoiding local villages to make directly for safe-houses further inland, at Hailsham and East Grinstead. Then afterwards at Chalkdean, for the sake of his poor brother’s nicety of conscience, he’d forced himself to take another dose of moralising with as good a grace as he could summon – whilst looking out across the stable roofs to plan a more rewarding meeting with Sam Ashby’s daughter.
And now here she was in the undoubted flesh, thrusting gratefully against him; cocooned still in the velvety embrace of her French gift – looping it around him and pulling on the loop to bind them closer… closer to his own reward!
Aaron freed himself to stoop swiftly, then to straighten. The girl flinched, drew in her breath, hauled on the velvet noose. ‘Gawd’amighty, ye young beswaggers, ye’r all the same,’ she murmured appreciatively. ‘My word y’are!’
‘And you, Ma’am, as variable as April sky.’ (Although in truth he’d found her willingness just faintly disappointing.) ‘So where shall it be, Nan? In the shaw again, behind the church? Or must we imitate the Hellfire brethren, my love, and improve on our acquaintance here among the gravestones?’
Her neck smelled of perspiration, warm hair and cheap scent. He rubbed his cheek on it, as she’d rubbed hers against the fabric - and still in that position, raised his eyes deliberately to the stiff figure of the other in the window; the little parson’s daughter, watching all along!
‘And now for shame, Miss Rimmer, where’s your blush – staring down so guiltily, as if it were your petticoats that I was lifting; your little pipkin, Miss, beneath by fingers!’
Without direct intention, Ellin crammed her hair into a cap and slipped quietly down the parsonage stairs, through the kitchen and out-kitchen into the greenery beyond. She felt weak, fearful of proceeding - and yet unable to remain inside; drawn after them by an urge stronger than her father’s warnings, more potent than the murmurings of her own conscience… She was Eve reaching for the apple; Pandora working at the casket’s gilded catch - poised on the very edge of a revelation she could not have held back from to save her very life!
By the time she reached the churchyard gate, they had already cleared the stile behind. To follow she must stoop beneath the drooping garlands of the thorn copse. Waist-deep in nettles and flowering parsley, she tracked them by the stems their feet had broken, listening like an animal for the rustle of a movement up ahead. A natural spring at the base of the scarp, spilled from its pool to feed the stream that passed the churchyard to the village duck pond. Ellin could see its dark gleam through the leaves and already knew where she would find them. At the centre of the copse, a massive oak spread limbs like serpents out across the water – a monument to its own age, for such trees grow but slowly in the chalk. Between them, its canopy and the convoluted platform of its roots had created a small glade about the pool. A place where village children came to fish for roach or tench; where yellow butterflies danced through the shadows; where Ellin on occasion came to sketch, or search for cress and mint. Or just to stare at her reflection in the water – standing where Ann Ashby stood against the mossy oak…
Annie with her back against the tree, white-knuckled, holding up her skirts.
Aaron Corbyn’s booted feet, stamping the ground-ivy round the roots to fill the glade with its sharp hopbine odour – and Ellin standing absolutely still. Breath burning in her throat. Eyes only for the mounting violence of the man’s assault.
If Aaron thought of Ann at all, it was as no more than a vessel; an object of sensation as immaterial as the blackbird chuckling its warning from the tree above – as pointless as the velvet cloth about Nan’s shoulders. For it was not her need, but his that drove him. A force which sprang, not from the woman but from the strength and energy of his own body, and from his plain delight in both.
The girl’s mouth gaped. But Aaron’s own lips were compressed; his eyes wide and unfocussed – every sense enslaved now to anticipation. Drawing in and pressing – pressing irresistibly, to gather for the leap…
Ah now – and NOW!
To leap, and leap again! Milt spouting, springing out of him like some marvellous winged creature. Great now, greater than any damn female - all the lifeforce in him soaring for its freedom!
…only, as it must, to take the leaden shot.
To gasp and to convulse – and flutter, still convulsing, down to earth.
Returning later to his horse, and with as little after-course of courtesy or gratitude to the jade as he could get away, Aaron felt no more than any man might feel at such an ebb; a sense of heaviness and diminished force – as if the little spurt of cuckoo-spit he’d left within her body had contained some buoyant energy of its own.
Yet not entirely spent, no never that. Because for Aaron the mastery of weakness brought with it another kind of satisfaction – to feel his pulse slow and his breath return to normal; to stride the strength back into his limbs with no thought for the woman he had used. Or for the other, crouching in the undergrowth with her small hands clutched to her breasts.