Rather to Kitty’s surprise Jonas did indeed agree with no argument and even with pleasure to the idea of a musical evening. And to her almost equal astonishment the next few days were the happiest she had spent since leaving Suffolk. Blithely unpredictable as always, the Isherwood children took to her singing lessons like small ducks to water. All but Jeremiah had reasonably tuneful voices, and what he lacked in musicality he made up for in volume and enthusiasm. There was a certain amount of brotherly and sisterly squabbling regarding the choice of solo voices – the children being nothing if not supremely confident in their own abilities – but this was soon settled by the choice of a solo each, and the rehearsals continued relatively peacefully. When Matt called to take her for a walk on Sunday in weather that had at last turned enjoyably spring-like and warm he remarked upon the change in her.
‘Why shouldn’t I be happy?’ she asked in response to his comment. ‘I’m settling down here. I like it. It suits me.’
He glanced about him, his mobile face caustic. ‘This dead-and-alive hole?’
She made a quick, only half-playful lunge at him, clipped his ear smartly. ‘Yes. And there’s no need to be rude. We can’t all be gay blades.’
He looked at her, curiosity in his eyes. ‘You really like it here?’
She shrugged. ‘Yes,’ she said, staunchly.
‘But – don’t you ever feel – well, cut off? Lonely?’
She shook her head. ‘Why should I? The family are always—’
‘I’m not talking about the family. I mean – you work for them, don’t you? However fancy they wrap it up. I mean – mates—’ Ever restlessly energetic he vaulted in a single exuberant leap over a stile, and then waited with some impatience and no offer of help as she followed him, necessarily more decorously. ‘Mates,’ he repeated, as they strolled on in the sunshine, ‘someone of your own. What goes on here? Are the islanders friendly?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly say that.’ She bent to pick up a piece of twig, switched it idly in the grass as she walked. She saw no reason at all to tell her brother that apart from the fairly civil but meaningless exchanges she shared with the tradesmen who called at the house she had barely passed a word with anyone but the Isherwoods since the day she had arrived. ‘They tend to keep themselves to themselves.’ And no reason either to mention the covert glances that she knew followed her when she took the Isherwood children down to the hard to play, the sudden silences that fell as she passed, or walked into a shop. What did it matter? She was bound to be an outsider in this ancient, almost tribal community, with its rivalries and its gossip. She was perfectly content to be so. And happier, certainly, than she had been these many months.
It took an incident two days before the much-anticipated birthday celebration to show her, however, that old scars had not, as she had been too ready to believe, entirely healed and that her peace of mind was as fragile and easily shattered as fine-blown glass.
Late one afternoon, with pale April sunshine lighting the distant seascape and touching the new-budding trees with gold, she turned from the small kitchen window from which she had been watching the children playing in the yard to find Amos standing, quiet and still, in the doorway behind her. She started violently. He stepped forward with a quick gesture of concern. In his hand he held several sheets of music. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you jump.’
‘It’s all right. I didn’t hear you, that’s all.’ As always the sight of him stirred her to a turmoil that affected voice and nerves and drove her to fury at her own weakness.
‘I wondered if you’d got a minute spare to run through these with me?’ He held up the dog-eared song sheets.
She forced a smile. ‘Of course. If you’d like.’ She walked briskly past him and led the way to the parlour and the piano. Slim, bright fingers of sunlight probed through the west-facing, latticed windows. She perched uncomfortably upon the piano stool, back ramrod straight.
‘It’s a fine evening,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I told you, didn’t I, that the island was a prettier place when the sun shone?’
‘Yes.’
Her monosyllabic replies apparently disturbed him not at all. ‘Just wait till summer comes. You’ll never see a finer sight than sails on the Blackwater in the summer sun.’
She did not reply, but busied herself at the piano, clearing the music stand of music, settling herself upon the stool, clearly dismissing his attempt at friendly conversation. He watched her for a moment, his expression entirely unreadable. Then he came close behind her, leaned over her shoulder as he put a piece of music upon the stand. ‘Let’s try this one, eh? It’s The Pretty Ploughboy. D’you know it?’
She played a quiet chord. ‘Yes. I’ve heard it certainly—’
And then, despite her stubborn defensiveness, the miracle happened again; they were instantly absorbed, all restraint falling from them as they shared the gift of music. Within minutes, in easy companionship, they were playing and singing, laughing at a wrong note, a stumbling phrase, enjoying again that extraordinary communion of spirit as their voices rose in impromptu harmonies.
‘It was early, early, in the spring, When my true love went to serve his king—’ Laughing he snatched the song sheet from its rest and tossed it on the table. ‘No, no. Not that one. It’s too sad. And anyway – it’s got no tune at all. Try this one—’
The sun dipped to the mainland skyline, shimmering in lucent glory upon the distant waters, painting the skies with an artist’s palette of red and gold. In the breaks in their music they could hear the shrieks of laughter of the children as they played outside and, distantly, the sound of a herd of lowing cows as they plodded heavily to the milking parlour; while here within the sunlit room the music wove an enchantment that brought, fleetingly, happiness such as Kitty had all but forgotten could exist. Her voice rose, strong and clear and beautiful, perfected and tuned by her desire to please the young man who watched her, smiling his pleasure, sun-gilded head turned towards her, cornflower eyes intent – not, for this precious moment, another’s husband and father to her children, but simply the object of all Kitty’s desires, all her first, fierce, tender infatuation.
‘That was grand!’ he said when she had finished. ‘You’ll sing it for us on my birthday?’
‘If you’d like me to.’
‘I should say so! Oh – and that reminds me – Pa asked’ – he was sorting once more through the sheets of music – ‘ah – here it is – I’m sure you must know it—’
As she stared at the piece of music he placed before her the laughter and the happiness fled from her as if it had never been. She sat like a statue.
He did not notice. ‘You know it?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded peculiarly distant in her own ears. She cleared her throat, violently, laid wooden fingers to the piano keys, fluffed the introduction inharmoniously and had to start again. ‘All round my hat I will wear the green willow—’
The drawing room at the Grange. Anne’s fair, laughing face. Her brothers – her now-dead brothers – chaffing her for her slight, child’s voice. ‘Let Kitty sing! Let Kitty—!’ Sir George, bluff and hearty, with his dogs and his guns, his contraband brandy and his endearing passion for a long-lost city. Then Anne’s face again, as she had seen it that day on the dunes above Dunwich, stunned and desolate with grief. ‘Oh, young men are false and they are so deceitful—’ She stopped singing abruptly, in mid-breath. A few bars later, with treacherous tears blinding her, she stopped playing also and sat, rigid, fighting the waves of misery and homesickness that crashed over her.
‘Kitty? What is it? What’s the matter?’
She hardly heard the words. Blindly she stood, stumbled away from him to the window, resting her head upon the wooden frame and crying like a heartbroken child. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tried to say, her voice hiccoughing with the helpless violence of her tears. ‘I’m sorry—’
He was beside her. With no thought and no predesign she turned to him, to the human comfort of his arms, his soft, consoling voice. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. It was several long minutes before the storm passed. She stood trembling then, tear-drenched eyes closed against the rough warmth of his cotton shirt. Then, slow and dreamlike as the transition between sleep and waking she became aware of where she stood – within the close circle of his arms, his heart beating steadily and strongly beneath her wet cheek. Aghast, she tried to pull away. With no effort he held her. She felt, light as the touch of a butterfly, the brush of his lips on her disordered hair. Beyond her own trembling she could sense his; even in her inexperience recognized the surge of excitement that was its source. She lifted her head to protest, and could not, caught by the expression on his sun-darkened face as he looked at her, by the dramatic line of bone, the brilliance of the blue eyes.
A moment before he bent his head to her she knew he would kiss her, and she could no more have stopped him – or herself – than she could have stopped her own breath. With all her helpless, innocent first love in her eyes she watched him, waiting. His mouth was warm, and unexpectedly soft as a girl’s, yet oddly and excitingly demanding. Nothing – not Anne’s ill-informed if interesting speculations, nor the hasty and entirely unsatisfactory experiments with Tom, the stable lad at the Grange – had in any way prepared her for this assault on her senses – an assault of savage sweetness such as she had never known could exist. For the space of perhaps a dozen heartbeats they clung together, enmeshed in the golden light that poured through the window, before he released her and stepped back, his sun-bright face flushed.
The kitchen door slammed. ‘It’s mine, I tell you! It is!’ Sounds of a scuffle, and a muffled crash. An aggrieved shriek. ‘I’ll tell Kitty of you! I will!’ A lifted, tear-filled voice. ‘Kitty! Kitty!’
‘Kitty—’ Amos began, softly and fiercely.
The howls from the kitchen grew louder, punctuated by sounds that could only mean a stand-up fight.
Her eyes never leaving Amos’ intense face, Kitty backed away from him.
‘Ki-tty!’ Another crash.
With no word to Amos Kitty turned and fled.
A new kind of agony now. No longer the half-acknowledged, childish longing for a lovely, unattainable object, but an obsessive memory she could not erase, a restless physical need, the more painful for not, in her innocence, being clearly defined, coupled with a shame so deep she hardly knew how to face him, or the others, certain that her sin – for sin it certainly was to lust so for Maria Isherwood’s young husband – must clearly show, burned upon her face like the brand of whoredom she had read of in the Bible. It was as if the touch of Amos’ lips had opened some fearful Pandora’s box of emotions and longings, the existence of which in all of her nearly eighteen years she had never even suspected. She had not known it possible to want anything – need anything – as she now wanted – needed – Amos Isherwood’s touch. It was her nightmare that she might betray herself, crawl to him, beg him, embarrass them both with the appalling intemperance of her feelings. For certainly, of course those moments in the parlour could not have meant to him what they had to her. With her stupid, childish weeping she had simply aroused in him an understandable desire to comfort which, in the warmth of the moment, had translated itself to a transient lust. What man with Maria Isherwood to warm his bed would so much as glance at skinny, inexperienced Kitty Daniels? And with that bitter thought came another unwelcome emotion; jealousy gnawed her, despicable and deadly. What in God’s name, she found herself wondering wretchedly, was happening to her?
The musical evening, so happily anticipated, was for her and, she assumed, for Amos a purgatory of embarrassment from which she could not escape soon enough, though everyone else, even the difficult Maria, seemed to enjoy it greatly. Kitty played and sang mechanically, eyes riveted to the music before her, every nerve in her body painfully aware of Amos, standing tense as a strung wire next to her. On the rare occasion she glanced at him he avoided her eyes. In the intervals between songs he went immediately to Maria, perching upon the arm of her chair, even once sitting on the floor at her feet, a sight that no matter how she tried to prevent it turned a bitter blade in poor Kitty’s heart. By the end of the evening she had decided in her own mind that she must leave. To endure the cruel torment of his close proximity was more than she could bear. She could not, of course, go immediately – Martha’s child was due in about four weeks, and Kitty suspected that to abandon that strangely lonely woman at this stage might trigger disaster – but as soon as may be she would go. Matt still talked occasionally of London and of the high old times they’d have just as soon as she saw sense and agreed to go. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
On that cool, windy night of Amos’ birthday, standing at her uncurtained attic window watching in bleak envy the small, flickering light that gleamed fitfully from an upstairs room in the cottage by the gate, Kitty, miserable tears sliding down her face, resolved to speak to her brother soon about leaving for London in a couple of months’ time.
Determined as she had been, however, at the moment of making that decision, Kitty’s suggestion to Matt was never made. It was just four days later – four days in which an almost desperate Kitty retreated into a shell of silence, barely acknowledging Amos when they chanced to meet – that he, face unusually forbidding, stepped quietly into the kitchen where she was preparing the family meal and closed the door firmly behind him.
She stared at him, knowing the blood to be draining from her face. Then, very carefully, she put down the spoon she had been using and clasped her hands very firmly before her. She would not have him see their trembling. She did not speak.
‘Lost your tongue?’ he asked, harshly.
The roughness of his tone took her entirely by surprise. She blinked, took a sharp breath.
‘Well?’ A disturbing, pent-up anger was clear in his voice, in the brilliance of his eyes.
‘I – no – of course not—’
‘Well, you could ha’ fooled me these past days. Not good enough to talk to, am I?’
‘Amos – please—!’ She was shaking now, her brain and tongue paralyzed by his presence and his unexpected anger.
He stepped closer, only the width of the table between them. ‘You playin’ with me?’ he asked, very quietly. ‘Are you? You the kind of girl likes to make a fool of a man—?’
‘No! Of course not!’ He came around the table towards her. Incredulous, half-frightened, she stepped back from him. And yet she was aware of something else – aware that beneath her confusion and distress her heart had taken up a steady, driving beat of intense excitement. She loved him, oh, how she loved him! And he was here – his angry attention concentrated upon her alone. The thought flashed into her mind that she would not care if he struck her. The recognition of that appalled her. She lifted her head fiercely. ‘Don’t come a step nearer! Don’t dare!’
He stopped. Had she been a little more experienced she might have recognized the flicker of calculation in his eyes. Then he turned away, hands spread upon the table, shoulders hunched almost to his ears.
She held herself rigidly from him.
He lifted his head at last. ‘God, Kitty – I’m sorry. Truly I am. It’s only that – since the other day—’ He shook his head, his face a boy’s again, pleading, ‘I couldn’t stand it that you might hate me—’
‘Hate you? Hate you?’ There was a small, incredulous sob of laughter in the words. ‘I don’t hate you.’
Something gleamed again in his face and was gone. She caught her breath, knowing that she had betrayed herself.
From above their heads a weak voice called, ‘Kitty?’
‘God Almighty!’ Amos said, voice ragged with frustration.
‘Kitty!’ Martha’s voice was querulous.
Kitty cleared her throat. ‘Coming.’
‘Kitty – wait—’ He caught her hand as she turned. ‘We can’t leave it like this. You know we can’t. Meet me. Tomorrow. We have to talk—’
She stared at him, wordless.
‘Five Acre Barn,’ he said, his voice low and rapid. ‘You know it?’
She did not reply.
Almost he shook her. ‘Kitty! Do you know it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow afternoon. About three. I’ll meet you. Pa’s going into Colchester, so we’ll be in by then.’
‘I—’
‘You’ll be there—’ The words were imperative, only barely a question.
Of course she would not. The suggestion was outrageous.
‘Kitty—! You’ll be there!’
‘Yes,’ she said.
How she got through the endless day she never could afterwards recollect. After an all but sleepless night she had climbed tiredly from her bed determined not to keep the tryst; but one glance at Amos’ unsmiling, questioning face in the soft light of an April dawn before he and his father left for the Girl May undid all those hard-won resolutions at a stroke. As the day wore on she swung exhaustingly upon the pendulum of her emotions, swinging from a wild anticipation that took no count of right or wrong to an utter determination not to go. Then, as the hour approached, the innate and uncompromising honesty that was her pride and her bane forced her to admit it – since he had spoken those words, ‘You’ll be there,’ she had known that she would be, and that no power on earth would stop her.
She left the house at a few minutes to three, the basket that was to be her excuse if questioned swinging in her hand. Half a mile along the track from the house she struck out across the fields to where the barn known as the Five Acre stood, on a rise of ground overlooking the wide Blackwater, sheltered by a grove of wind-twisted oak trees. The day was fine and clear, high clouds scudding across the blue vault of the spring sky, their fast-moving shadows dappling earth and water beneath them. Out on the water stood the wing-like sails of the oyster fleet, very close together, hardly moving as they dredged with the tide, their manoeuvres like the stately, esoteric patterns of a dance of which only they knew the steps and the purpose. She watched for a moment, her eye caught by the peaceful beauty of the scene. Seabirds wheeled and called above the little smacks. A mile or so away the smoke from the clustered chimneys of the City drifted fragrantly in the air.
By contrast to the bright day the lofty interior of the vast barn was dark, cool and still. She paused at the wide empty doorway, its cavernous, dusty depths awaiting the year’s harvest. A bird fluttered about the soaring, ancient beams of the roof. Gleams of sunlight, sharp as bright needles in the gloom, glinted through holes in the tiles of the roof and the planks of the wooden walls.
‘Amos?’ Her uncertain voice echoed to the vaulted roof.
Silence hung like a curtain. Dust motes stirred, shimmering in the air about her as she stood, tense and waiting.
Her heart sank. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t come. Had probably never intended to come—
‘Amos? Are you there?’
There was a flash of movement in the shadowed darkness, and there, smiling, he was. Against all real hope, all expectation, he was waiting for her.
She knew and did not care that all the longing and love she felt for him was in her face as she turned to him.
Neither spoke. In a few long strides he reached her, caught her shoulders with quick strength, pulled her to him, covering her face, her hair, her neck with kisses. Drowning in the excitement of it she clung to him, her hands in his hair, on the wind-roughened skin of his face, touching his features with her fingertips as if struck blind and seeing him with her touch. When they drew apart they were both trembling, and the silence was a strange one: what words now could explain, excuse, debate?
He retained a hold upon her hand. ‘Kitty,’ he said softly at last, and then again, ‘Kitty.’ And it was as if that simple repetition of her name were enough to settle all arguments, answer all anguished questions. ‘Lovely, lovely girl.’
She shook her head, blushing.
‘Oh – yes. I thought so the very first time I saw you, with that wild, white face and lovely eyes—’
Wordless she reached a hand to his face, touched his lips, warm and soft, lightly with her finger. The scuttling, whispering darkness of the barn enclosed them. They might have been alone in creation. She thought she had never seen anything so truly beautiful as his face, shadowed and smiling. And in that moment the world’s judgement mattered not a fig. ‘I love you,’ she said, simply, and there was such relief in the saying of the words that she could have sung with sheer happiness. ‘I love you,’ she said again.
He laughed softly, teasingly, throwing back his head. ‘And I thought you hated me!’
‘Of course I didn’t,’ she said and then, with strange and gentle perspicacity, ‘You knew I didn’t.’
Perhaps wisely, he did not reply to that, but drew her, unresisting, deeper into the darkness to where a pile of dry, fragrant hay was piled against the wall. Laughing still, he sank back into it, pulling her after him. At the last moment, however, she let go of his hand, and as he lay, arms wide, smiling up at her she sat almost decorously beside him, straight and still, her long legs tucked beneath her spreading skirts, her hands clasped in her lap.
He folded his arms behind his head, narrowed his eyes as he watched her. ‘Take down your hair,’ he said abruptly, then as a soft afterthought, ‘Please.’
She did not move.
The long, tangled lashes flickered, veiling but not hiding the bright devil of excitement in his vivid eyes. ‘Please,’ he said again, the intense word as much command as plea.
She could not resist him. At that moment she would have done anything he had asked. Slowly she unpinned the heavy coils of hair, shaking them out onto her shoulders, veiling her face as she bowed her head.
He reached a long arm, coiled an uncompromisingly smooth and straight lock about his finger. Then he reached further, tangling his hand painfully into her hair, pulling her to him. She did not fight him. He pulled her on top of him, then as they kissed rolled over so that his body pinned hers beneath it. As suddenly as a leap of flame a searing excitement took her, wiping her brain clear of everything but the fiercest desire she had ever known, a wild conflict of submission and aggression that melted her body beneath his whilst her long, strong fingers and sharp teeth matched his force with a strength and wildness of her own. He shuddered, burying his face in her disordered hair. She felt his fingers at the buttons of her bodice and she stilled, biting her lip, fighting a small lift of panic.
‘Kitty—’ he said. ‘Kitty – help me—’
Never in her life had her breasts been bared to a man’s eyes. That alone – the expression on his face as he looked at her – before he had touched her swelled them and engorged the teats. With lips and tongue then he teased her, until, arching her back, she moaned a little. He transferred his mouth to hers, stifling her breath, taking her wet nipples between roughened thumb and forefinger, squeezing and pulling lightly and rhythmically with a relentless, practised, sweetly painful force. The waves of excitement that took her were all but unbearable. Then he pulled away from her and was kneeling above her, the dramatic, gilded head outlined in the light thrown by the dipping sun through the doorway, his face in shadow. Their wild movements stilled for a moment. She lay waiting, trembling, for the first time afraid. His eyes never leaving hers, he reached to her disordered skirts.
She moved her head sharply, in an almost unconscious, panic-stricken negative.
‘It’s all right,’ he said in a voice that beneath its gentleness was threaded sharp with excitement. ‘I won’t hurt you. I promise. I won’t do anything to hurt you. I want to see you, that’s all. To touch you. I won’t hurt you – I promise I won’t hurt you—’
Almost hypnotized by his voice and the brilliance of his eyes she lay, still as a rabbit that is prey to a stoat. She did not move as he pulled her skirts to her waist and deftly untied the tapes of her drawers. As if from very far away she heard her own voice, ‘No – please—’ Another whisper in the whispering darkness.
He took no notice. His swift hands moved with sure confidence and then she lay all but naked in the darkness, the warm air cold as shame upon the pale, fine skin of her belly and thighs. She was shaking now, uncontrollably, with fear and with that intolerable excitement that his touch induced in her.
‘There, now. Gently. Gently—’ Fingers, lips, tongue, feather-light, shockingly arousing. Never had she dreamed of such pleasure, of such enslavement to touch and sensation. He knelt above her, mastering her, and affording her, she realized as she lay beneath his knowing fingers, the extremes of pleasure that for the moment he denied himself. A tide of delight rose mercilessly from his manipulating fingers, and she abandoned herself to a climactic violence of pleasure and pain that burned in her body like fire, a fire that fed upon itself, demanding and addictive. She reached for him, crying his name. He held her for a moment as she drifted in darkness upon waves of weakening sensation. Then, ‘Now—’ he said, and his voice was harsher, more urgent. ‘Now, pretty Kitty – you’ll help me, won’t you? See – like this—’ He guided her hand, smiling into her astonished, half-frightened eyes. ‘Ah, no – don’t cover yourself. Let me see you. Now – kiss me—’ He too was now all but naked, his slim body a flame of white in the darkness. ‘Kiss me there – and yes! Like that! – don’t worry – you won’t hurt me—’ And the darkness of that strange afternoon deepened and became more complex as she explored his willing body and watched its power pulse and grow and then spend itself beneath her hands and questing tongue. She had not dreamed herself capable of such things – guilt and shame crouched within her, waiting – waiting for the inevitable aftermath of such sin, waiting to lift a leering head and promise the punishment that must surely follow such wickedness. Yet as she lay beside him, her face buried in his naked shoulder, she could not bring herself to regret. She loved; with her body and her soul she loved. That, surely, could not be entirely wicked? Yet she was downcast and silent as, avoiding his eyes, she dressed and recoiled her hair about her head, and he noticed it.
He lifted her chin with his finger. ‘What’s this?’
She shook her head, eyes downcast.
His smile, had she seen it, held a small glint of gentle triumph. ‘Silly girl. Tell me.’
She turned from him. ‘You know. You’re married—’
‘You knew that when you came here this afternoon. Yet still you came.’ The tone had a sudden, hard little edge to it that turned her back to face him, anxiously.
‘I didn’t mean—’
He stopped her mouth with his, the momentary harshness gone. ‘Of course not. Darling Kitty – pretty Kitty – listen to me. My marriage to Maria is no marriage. You must know that? The moment I saw you I knew you’d understand me as she never could. We’re doing no one any harm, you and I. How could we be?’ He stopped, watching her intently. She shook her head, bemused. ‘You’ll meet me again? Here?’
She hesitated for only a moment. ‘Yes.’ There was a finality about the word that frightened her a little – yet there was no other answer she could give.
He relaxed, smiling again. ‘I’ll let you know when.’
‘Yes.’
He kissed her again. ‘We’ll have to go. You first, I’ll follow in ten minutes or so. We must be careful.’ The words were matter-of-fact. Dimly she perceived that the deception had begun.
She nodded, turned to leave, then stopped, driven to saying just once more those words that she had denied herself so often, the words that made wrong right and excused everything. ‘Amos, I love you.’
She saw the flash of his smile in the shadows before she stepped into the world beyond the cool darkness, submitting herself to the sword-stroke of light and warmth beyond the door, and refusing for a moment to consider the fact that not once in all their whispering and lovemaking had he used those words to her.
Her world became dominated by Amos, her days measured by the times of their meeting, her life ruled by her desire for him. She prevaricated shamelessly, to herself no less than to others, in order to see him, however briefly, to touch him, and also to convince herself that what they did was not truly wrong. So consuming was her reckless infatuation that such considerations as pride and honesty, until now her touchstones, weighed little against it. There were of course occasions when the sharp teeth of guilt and doubt gnawed like rats in a far dark corner, when her good sense and dignity struggled to reassert themselves; but a swift, hidden smile, a glimmer in the lucent eyes as he looked at her and she would be lost again. There were times when she wondered if her feelings and her deceptions were not too transparent, for she was ill-used to subterfuge. Was it her imagination that Maria’s hostility to her had deepened? That the resentful glances that she had grown used to receiving from the charmless Hannah now seemed to hold an unpleasantly sly and knowing gleam? But when such worries assailed her she reassured herself that it could not be so. Her conscience might be sleeping, but it was by no means dead, and if she jumped at shadows she had at least the sense left to see those shadows for what they surely must be – the reflections of her own guilt. In her heart she knew that what she and Amos were doing was wrong, and could come to no good end. In moments of honesty she knew there to be no future for her with him. Yet this first passion of her young life so ruled her that she told herself she did not care. She lived for the day and for the sight of Amos, for their swift glances and their bittersweet hours in the great barn that had become their haven. Her tender conscience she salvaged with that magic word ‘love’ – they loved, so what they did could not be judged by the yardstick exercised by ordinary people in ordinary situations. Her suspicion that she was not the first nor likely to be the last to use this perilous reasoning to justify the unjustifiable did nothing to prevent her clinging stubbornly to it. On the gale-swept day in May that she surrendered her body to him, fully and willingly, she felt no added burden of guilt. He had her soul already in his keeping; to yield her body to his pleadings and so assuage their fierce hunger for each other was a small thing by comparison. They lay together afterwards and listened to the wild summer rain that lashed from the sea to fling itself in fury at the great wooden walls of the barn, and in the storm-filled silence she seemed to hear the words ‘I love you’ so clearly in her heart that almost she could convince herself that he had spoken them.
During the first days of June, with the oyster fishing season finished till autumn and the spring’s lambs growing plump upon the sea-girt grasslands, Martha Isherwood, in drawn-out anguish and almost at cost to her life, bore to Jonas another lusty son, Thomas Paul. The prolonged and painful labour, culminating in the barbarously agonizing, life-and-death struggle of birth, appalled and frightened Kitty. During the week that followed she and the slatternly midwife from the City fought to keep the guttering flame of life burning in the pallid creature who lay unmoving in the big bed, showing interest neither in her newborn child nor in the tiresome ministrations of those who fought to save her. Despite a spent lack of co-operation on her patient’s part, Kitty refused to give up. Stubbornly she stayed by Martha, talking, cajoling, scolding, forcing the exhausted woman to take broths and soups, refusing to listen to her feeble protests. And then as summer settled in at last to the world beyond the latticed windows and the swallows and martins swooped, calling, about the eaves of the old house the ebbing tide of Martha’s strength was stemmed and, painfully slowly at first, her health began to improve.
It was not until three weeks after Thomas Paul’s birth, with Martha at last on the slow road to recovery, that Kitty realized with something of a pang that her own eighteenth birthday had passed, unmarked and unnoticed, the week before. It being no one’s fault but her own – she having neglected to mention her birthday to anyone in the house – she could hardly complain, and anyway any self-pity she might have been tempted to indulge in was completely dispelled by the arrival on the following Sunday afternoon of her unchangingly unpredictable brother with a gift of a shining jet necklace with matching earrings and brooch and a bunch of flowers large enough to have decked the whole of Mersea church.
‘Matt! They’re lovely! Thank you so much!’ She held the necklace to her throat, turned this way and that, admiring her reflection in the glass front of the kitchen dresser. Judiciously she had refrained from enquiring as to the source of the gift.
He grinned, pleased. ‘Come on – put them on – let’s show these bumpkin islanders what a pretty girl looks like—’
They strolled together down the lane towards the village. It was a perfect day; for once there was a mild land-breeze that, soft with the fragrances of early summer, lacked the chill knife-edge of the easterlies. It sighed, softly, through the tall, waving grasses that rippled in the sunshine as if mimicking in play the movement of the distant waters on the calm estuary. A lapwing lifted almost from their feet as they passed, and wheeled, calling eerily, above their heads, whilst high above it a lark spilled her golden torrent of song through the sunlit air to the earth below. They stopped for a moment and leaned upon a ramshackle gate, looking in companionable silence across the glimmering waters to the mainland with its picturesque lifts of tree-mantled land and its tall church spires. ‘Well—’ Matt turned from the view, restless as always, and leaned on his elbows, his back to the gate, one heel hooked into the bars, his dark head tilted to the sun. ‘When are you going to change your silly mind and come to London with me, moi owd Kitty?’
She glanced at him in surprise. It had been some time since he had mentioned any thought of leaving. She had over the past months assumed that he had become as settled in Colchester as she was on the island. He moved his head, avoiding her eyes. She frowned a little, feeling a small stirring of unease, noting for the first time a certain tension about him, a strained tautness about his face that was at odds with his usual easy laughter. She shook her head. ‘I—’
‘Oh, all right, all right, I was only joking.’ He turned again, drummed his fists lightly against the wood of the gate, his voice, his stance, everything about him, suddenly too careless, too studiedly casual.
She watched him for a moment longer. She knew him too well. ‘Matt? Is something wrong? I mean—’ All the old anxieties that had been lying in ambush, camouflaged by distance and by a certain amount of deliberate self-deception, sprang to life, full blown. ‘You aren’t in some sort of trouble?’
‘Oh, for Gawd’s sake!’ The edgy exasperation that underlay his grin was ill-concealed and did little to reassure her. ‘’Course not! Hey – by the way’ – the words came in the same breath, blatantly changing the course of the conversation – ‘tell me something – you been having any trouble with that Amos? Heard a few things about him the other day – he bothers you, you let me know, eh?’
She blinked at him abstractedly, half her attention still taken by her concern for him. ‘What? What do you mean? What have you heard?’
‘Oh, come on – you must know?’
‘Know what? Who have you been talking to?’ He had her attention now.
‘On the way back from here last time I stopped off at The Rose – you know, the big place at Peldon, t’other side of the Strood?’
‘I know it.’ Strangely she found her throat to be dry. She cleared it, nervously.
‘There’s a girl there – Maisie Biggs – nice little thing. Well, we got talking and I told her where you worked.’ He lifted his eyebrows, whistled a little, shook the fingers of his right hand as if they had been burned. ‘By, did she have some things to say about Amos Isherwood!’
‘Things? What sort of things?’ Somewhere in the pit of her stomach a small twinge of acid discomfort had flared, unpleasantly bringing saliva to her mouth.
He turned and looked at her, dawning surprise in his eyes. ‘You mean you really don’t know? The lad’s a regular tomcat by all accounts. Why do you think there’s not a village girl’ll work for the Isherwoods? If there was one who wanted to, her family wouldn’t let her, so says Maisie. The last girl – the one before you – he got her in the family way and they threw her out. And it isn’t the first time, neither, why – that snooty old wife of his—’
Kitty’s hands, that had been lightly clasped on top of the gate, were clamped now to the splintered wood as if to life itself. She heard her brother’s voice, struggled to follow the words, as if from a great distance: ‘—laughing stock of the island, Amos Isherwood and his rutting ways – got his comeuppance when Maria’s father escorted him to church with a shotgun—’
It was as if she had known. Had he laughed, she found herself wondering somewhere in a small, agonizingly cool corner of her mind, to find her so easy?
‘—and according to Maisie there’s dark alleys in Mersea that the lad wouldn’t venture down alone. Half the fathers and brothers on the island are after him—’
His voice went on, but she heard no more. Cold waves of humiliation washed through her, making the blood rush in her ears so that her brother’s voice rose and fell eerily, blinding her eyes so that the sunlight that had been so golden and welcome a short while before seemed harsh and hurtful.
‘Gawd, Kit,’ Matt said, heedlessly relishing the joke of his knowing more about her employers than she did, ‘did you really not know? I know you said the islanders were close-mouthed, but this really takes the biscuit – Here—!’ He stopped suddenly, frowning. ‘He hasn’t tried anything on, has he? I mean to say—’
She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to cover her ears and her eyes and never to hear or see anything ever again. She stood, calm and still, even, faintly, smiled. ‘Not a thing. I suppose I can’t be his type.’
Easily reassured, he shrugged. ‘’Course he’s a good-looking cove, I’ll grant him that. Not surprising they fall for him like skittles, eh?’
‘I suppose not.’ With an effort of will that all but drained her she pushed herself away from the support of the gate. ‘Matt – do you mind if we go back? I don’t like to leave Martha for too long.’ To her own utter astonishment her voice was perfectly cool and normal.
He shrugged. ‘We can go back now if you like.’ He hesitated, and though Kitty was now too distracted to notice it, the too-confident over-brightness was back in his voice: ‘’S’a matter of fact I wouldn’t mind getting back a bit earlyish myself.’ He winked, swaggering. ‘Got to see a man about a dog.’
They turned back towards the house. Kitty walked in silence. Now that her shocked brain had started to work again she realized that she did not for a moment doubt Matt’s gossip. Nor was she stupid enough for one moment to doubt the relevance of the story to herself. It was as if some small part of her had known, had always known, that her flawed lover with his sapphire eyes and hard, knowing hands would in the end prove himself the punishment for her sin. As she walked collectedly beside her brother, in the small, stubborn corner of her soul that had remained untouched by Amos Isherwood’s charm, she cringed, flinching from her own folly and self-delusion. A handsome face, an ounce of attention, and she had come running like a bitch to snapped fingers. The warm tide of humiliation rose higher. Then, somewhere in the recesses of her aching heart a very small voice asked – perhaps not? Perhaps, with me, it was different?
Then why, asked the plangent voice of common sense, tart with the relief of release after so long in thrall, has he never once told you he loved you? For you well know he never has—
Her brother seemed entirely unaware of her abstracted silence. He chattered on – only vaguely did she register what he was talking about – a mysterious deal, the big one – enough to set them up – take them at last to London—
‘Yes,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Why not London? A new start entirely—’
‘Dead right.’ He was pleased. ‘Just give me another couple of days. Then I’ll let you know – well, here we are—’ They paused at the gate, in the shadow of the cottage in which lived Amos and Maria. In the tiny garden little Joseph played, hunkered to the ground, his attention entirely taken by the heap of stones around which his solemn private game was centred. Kitty averted her eyes sharply from his fair, sun-gilt head.
‘I’m sorry?’ Her brother had spoken, but she had not caught the words.
Grinning he jerked his head towards the cottage. ‘I said keep a weather eye out for matey there.’ He raised the dark, wing-like eyebrows that were so much like her own. ‘I’d hate to have to sort him out. He’s bigger than me.’
Stiff-lipped, she laughed with him. ‘I will,’ she said.
She faced Amos in the barn, their barn – and who else’s? she had wondered bitterly as she had walked across the fields – quiet-voiced, all her pain in her eyes and in the bleak line of her mouth. ‘Amos – why didn’t you tell me about – about the others? About the girl you got pregnant?’
He moved towards her, easy penitence in the summer-bright face, confidence in his reaching hands. ‘Kitty—’
She stepped away from him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked again, flatly.
He half turned from her, his shoulders lifting in a shrug of quick exasperation. ‘What would have been the point?’ The soft mouth was petulant.
At least, to her relief, he had not bothered to deny or try to excuse. She looked at him for a long, bitter moment, words teeming in her head, refusing utterly to order themselves and come to her tongue. Blindly and without speaking she turned from him.
The hand that seized her arm was not gentle. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’
With a violence born of self-disgust at the effect that his touch still had upon her she wrenched herself free. ‘Leave me alone.’ But, strong as she was she was no match for muscles toughened by fishing and farming. He held her with ease. Incensed, she fought him as he pulled her to him; and felt how her struggles inflamed him. ‘Amos, let me go! Let – me – go!’
He turned her to him, his hands brutal on her shoulders, shaking her, then holding her, arms pinned to her side, helpless. ‘Tell me, Kitty – pretty Kitty—’ he said, his voice low and trembling with that familiar excitement that communicated itself to her through his touch like the running line of flame that devours a fuse, ‘tell me why you are so angry? What has changed? What has truly changed?’
She trembled in his hands, speechless.
‘I’ll tell you, shall I? You’ve discovered that you were not the first. Is that so terrible? Did I ever pretend otherwise?’ He shook her again, like a boneless doll. ‘Did I?’
Bleakly she shook her head.
‘Then why the commotion? For God’s sake – I have a wife and children – you knew that – yet it did not stop you—’
This time in fury she did manage to pull away from him. Her smoothly sun-browned face was poppy bright. She turned from him. ‘You never loved me.’
‘I never said I did.’ It was wholly reasonable, wholly hurtful.
She flung around to face him. ‘How many others have there been? How many others like me, who were weak enough, stupid enough to be gulled into playing your games with you—?’
His shrug was totally dismissive.
Her spoiled love was like a sickness, tainting body and mind; she was powerless against its malice. ‘I hate you!’ she spat.
Had he not laughed she might never have touched him again. But he did and, goaded beyond control, the tinder of her temper flaring balefully, she hit him with every ounce of strength she possessed powering the blow. Her knuckles, more by luck than intent, caught his mouth and she felt sharp pain as his teeth caught her skin, saw the bright blood blossom upon his lips. With a grunt of anger he reached for her, pinning her arms to her sides, trapping her struggling body with his own. Locked so together they tumbled, thrashing, to the dusty floor, Kitty taking the brunt of the fall with Amos’ not inconsiderable weight on top of her. He took no notice of her cry of genuine pain. With savage, excited strength he pinned her beneath him, stopping her cries with his mouth. She tasted his blood, salt and warm. Felt the treachery of her own body, knew herself even now to be incapable of denying him this final act of aggression and submission. She stilled, panting. He lifted his head, looking at her with triumph in his eyes. ‘I thought I loved you,’ she said, softly and scornfully, ‘I really believed I loved you.’
He took her then, with self-absorbed force, and she neither resisted his violence nor denied him his pleasure. Instead she rode herself upon the thrusting waves of his strength in an abandonment to lust that was all that was left of her blighted love. When he had done she very composedly stood, wiping his blood from her mouth with her handkerchief, re-coiling her disordered hair, re-ordering her clothing. Then she stood looking down at him. He lay upon his back, utterly relaxed, watching her through half-closed eyes, obviously confident still of his hold upon her. Neither of them had spoken.
Her voice was soft and clear, hard as diamond. ‘I shall leave as soon as I can,’ she said. ‘But I shan’t run away from you. I’ll wait until my brother and I are ready to go. In the meantime’ – she paused, her face expressionless – ‘if you so much as touch me again, Amos, I’ll kill you. I promise it.’
And, seeing the sudden flicker of the girlish lashes, the astonished and wary expression in the blue eyes, she had at least the empty satisfaction of knowing that he believed her.
Her bravado lasted less than an hour before crumbling into miserable self-pity and a total inability to think clearly. At first she waited for Matt, watching for him, rehearsing how she would tell him that she had decided at last to go to London. But a week passed, and then two, and he did not come. She was not particularly worried – he had left it longer than this between visits on other occasions – but found herself in the grip of torpor, will-less and dispirited, from which she could not break free. She lived as she had lived before, ate and drank and spoke as she had done before – even occasionally smiled, though rarely laughed; but it was as if something within her had died and in its passing had taken something of herself with it. She tended to Martha and the children, looked after the house, tried to ignore the sly question in Hannah’s eyes that followed her too closely and too often.
Hannah it was who turned the knife in the wound – deliberately? maliciously? Kitty neither knew nor cared – by breaking the news that Maria was pregnant again. The news, just a week after the scene with Amos in the barn, woke many emotions; jealousy, self-disgust, and above all, fear. Foolishly it had never occurred to Kitty that she too could easily suffer the fate and public humiliation of the girl who had been her predecessor. Supposing she should be pregnant? The belated thought terrified her. She lay awake for long, anguished nights, begging God to spare her that, anything else – any punishment – she would accept; but please, oh please, not that. For two weeks her life became an intolerable, drawn-out agony of waiting. By the end of that time, with her period a scant day late, she was convinced that the worst had happened and was ready to die of it. When the proof came, late that night, that she was not after all carrying Amos’ child she cried impassioned tears of relief and gratitude and then slept the sleep of the dead for the first time in weeks.
It was as well that she did – for it was in the seeping, pearly, pre-dawn light of the following day that her brother came, hunted and desperate. She woke to the rattling sound of pebbles against her window. She lay for a moment, groggily confused, eyes still throbbing and swollen from the tears of the night before. The sound came again. She slipped from her bed and opened the window. Matt’s marked face, white as alabaster, stark in the pale light, stared up at her. Even in the half-darkness she could see the blood, the purpling bruises.
‘My God! Matt! What—?’
‘Ssh!’ Every line of his body was desperation. ‘Kitty – I have to talk to you—’
‘Wait. I’ll come down. Go to the front door. Hannah sleeps in the kitchen.’
Her fingers like thumbs, she pulled on her woollen robe and, still fighting the loosened plaits of her long hair, fled down the stairs to the door. He was waiting outside, shivering, running blood.
‘Good God!’ she said, horrified, and reached to pull him in.
With surprising strength he resisted her. ‘No.’ He was far gone in exhaustion and pain, yet the intransigent obstinacy she knew all too well and that had got him this far, battered as he was, showed in the line of his bloodied mouth. ‘Can’t stay. Have to get away. Came to—’
‘Matt!’
‘Came to say goodbye an’’ – he grinned twistedly, staggered a little, righted himself – ‘an’ to borrow – some money—’
‘Matt, for heaven’s sake let me at least tend to those cuts—’
‘Can’t. Too many people know about you. Someone’ll put two an’ two together an’ start lookin’.’
‘Who? Who’s looking for you?’ The sinking of her heart put sharpness in her tone.
Once again the grin was crooked, distorted by crushed lips, but it was recognizably Matt’s. ‘All the world an’ his wife. Friend. Foe. The law’ – his knees buckled again and he leaned against the wall – ‘and the lawless. I’ve really done it this time, moi owd Kitty. Like you always said I would.’ He pushed himself away from the wall, made a gallant attempt to stand upright. Through the heartbreaking bravado she could all but smell his terror.
She stared at him. ‘Matt – what were you thinking of? Coming here. If they guess – anyone who wants you only has to stand guard on the causeway—’
He drew a massive, trembling breath. ‘Had to say goodbye, didn’t I? Couldn’t just go off – not like before. Don’t fuss. I can swim.’
‘In that condition?’ She was appalled. ‘Matt – surely it can’t be as bad as that? What – what have you done—?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing they won’t cut my throat for.’ He tried again to grin, but looking at him in despair Kitty knew that he was not joking. He was next to delirious with pain and exhaustion. If she let him go like this she knew instinctively he stood no chance at all. The thought cleared her head; suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she was herself again, quick-thinking and positive. She caught him firmly by the shoulders, propped him against the wall. Wait here. Don’t move.’
‘What’re you doing?’ His speech was getting more slurred with every word.
‘I’m coming with you. The skiff’s on the hard by the church. If we take that we’ll be in Salcott in half an hour and Maldon by noon. No one will catch us then. Wait!’ she exhorted him again, fiercely and unnecessarily, and sped indoors.
The mile-long journey to the beach, encumbered by her injured brother and the small bundle of possessions she had hastily thrown together, seemed like ten. As the sky grew progressively and threateningly brighter, and the ghostly, transparent summer moon faded, she tried to hurry Matt, knowing that only one inquisitive early riser could be their undoing. Bravely, but almost at the end of his tether, he hurried his stumbling steps. When at last they reached the skiff it was all he could do to tumble aboard and collapse like a heap of bloody rags in the scuppers. Single-handed, desperation lending her strength, she kilted her skirts about her waist and pushed off, then scrambled inelegantly aboard and laid hold of the oars. At the far rim of the world the first crimson light of morning bloodied the moving waters.
‘Well,’ Matt said, uncertainly, from somewhere near her feet, ‘it’s off to London at last, eh?’ He paused. Then, ‘About bloody time, an’ all,’ he said, and passed out.