There was an iron pump at the trough. Meg lifted the handle up and down; water splashed into the bucket.
‘Ma?’ she whispered, thinking how it had once been for Dorothy Blundell and how her life had ended in the cold and dark of a mucky yard. ‘Oh, Ma.’ She sucked in her breath sharply, then arranged her mouth into a smile as Polly waved from the far archway. ‘Coming!’ she called.
Twelve fat brown hens had run to greet them; drank long at the water trough, then pecked up the wheat Polly threw, feathered bottoms bobbing as they scratched.
‘Oh, they’re lovely!’
‘Don’t get fond of them, Meg. They aren’t pets! Would you like to collect the eggs?’
Collecting eight brown eggs, Meg thought, had been just about the nicest, most countrified thing she had ever done. She had laid them carefully in the empty feed bucket, then placed them in the wooden egg rack in the pantry.
Mind, meeting Polly’s gran had been something altogether different. It might even, Meg thought as she watched big black birds settling in the far trees, have been a disaster, but for the lies. More lies!
‘Meg Blundell, is it?’ asked the old lady whose gnarled hands rested unmoving on the counterpane. ‘How strange. We once had a housemaid called Blundell – Dorothy, her name was. Would you perhaps know of her?’
Her eyes were troubled as she said it, Meg thought, a look of apprehension in them, as if she had needed the stranger who stood at her bedside to deny it.
‘Dorothy? Oh no. Ma was called Hilda.’ Clever of her to have it all worked out – just in case! ‘An’ she wasn’t never a servant; worked in a tobacco factory. She died three months ago.’
‘Ah, yes.’ A small smile – almost of relief, Meg thought – moved the comers of Mrs Kenworthy’s mouth. ‘Just that the name brought it back …’
‘Blundell’s a common enough name around where I was born,’ Meg was quick to answer. ‘There’s even districts of Liverpool with Blundell in them. And me da died at sea,’ she added, to take care of the nameless scallywag. How glib a liar she was becoming – she who’d always prided herself in telling the truth and shaming the devil!
‘I’m very glad to meet you, Meg Blundell, for all that.’
‘And I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs Kenworthy.’ Meg took the offered hand carefully in her own, knowing that hands so swollen hurt a great deal and must not be shaken. ‘And I’m glad I’ve come here to work. It’s so beautiful. You can’t imagine how different it is from Liverpool.’
‘Where, in Liverpool?’
‘Lyra Street.’ And that took care of Tippet’s Yard, Meg thought as she offered the road where Kip’s sister lived. ‘A lot of houses got bombed around there, but I was lucky.’
‘Poor Liverpool,’ the old lady sighed. ‘We had relatives there once. One of them – a cousin – died without issue and left some of his property to my son. John, that is; Polly’s pa. But he got rid of it very quickly; sold it off. I don’t think it brought a lot at auction …’
Sold? But he’d given one – as near as dammit, that was – to her ma, hadn’t he? But for all that, ‘Ar,’ was all she said, because it was best Mrs Kenworthy shouldn’t be reminded about a place called Tippet’s Yard, or about the name signed beside that of Dorothy Blundell. She wouldn’t learn the truth by admitting whose daughter she was, because people like the Kenworthys wouldn’t tell it to her if they thought it would be hurtful. Their sort never did things that hurt.
‘Do you want us to stay for a while, Gran?’
So they talked about Davie, and how many more days it would be until he came on long leave, and Mark too. And Meg told of the thrill of collecting eggs and how lovely it was to live at Candlefold and how awful that That Lot in London could just take your house!
‘But it might have been worse, Meg. We could have had an army unit who would be marching up and down all the time, and sergeants shouting orders and men doing target practice! And those people could have thrown us out completely, don’t forget! I’m grateful they let us keep this old part, and the kitchen garden and the acres. At least we are still here. One caring owner, as they say, for six hundred years. At least we’ve been able to hold on, unbroken. And I’m slipping down in bed! Could you prop me up again – save Mary having to do it?’
So one either side of the high single bed, Polly and Meg lifted her gently, placing pillows at her back and beneath each arm for support.
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Kenworthy opened her eyes. She had closed them in anticipation of pain to come, and there had been none. ‘That’s much better. Awful of me to be so helpless …’
‘No it isn’t,’ Meg defended. ‘An’ I’m used to lifting ’cause Ma was sick for a long time with TB – and I didn’t take it,’ she supplied to save any bother. ‘I’ll come up again – see if you want anything doin’, Mrs Kenworthy.’
She had taken a liking straight away to the woman who lay so still in the lace-covered, old-fashioned bed. So softly spoken, and thanking them gratefully for comfying her in bed. Not like the old girl up the stairs, and her able to walk about and do things for herself had she wanted to! And ringing her bell to summon a long-ago housemaid to do her skivvying!
Had she once, Meg thought now, as the distant trees began to fade into the night, rung her bell and had Dorothy Blundell hurried up the stairs to do the nanny’s bidding? Had Ma carried up nursery meals when the baby in the christening gown was growing up? Mind, Ma wouldn’t have known Polly who, Meg calculated, must have been born after she left. Ma’s replacement would have answered the ringing then!
Poor Ma. Did she leave Candlefold in tears, even though they had cared for her and put a roof over her head? Had she turned for just one last look? And had she longed, even as she left, for the man who was the cause of it all to make an honest woman of her?
Well, Ma had managed without him, Meg thought defiantly. In spite of the shame and having to wear a cheap wedding ring, Ma had kept her end up till she caught TB from a woman she helped nurse, Nell said; probably when she had washed her and laid her out and got her ready for the undertaker. Ma needn’t have died if she hadn’t had to do things like that.
Yet she came up trumps in the end, God love her! Ma it had been who’d enticed her to this place where there were eggs for breakfast and fields and trees and flowers and kindness. And Dorothy Blundell’s daughter was stoppin’ here, no matter how many lies she told! And what was more, she would keep her mouth shut until she found out what she wanted to know and was good and ready to tell them who she really was. And where she had been born!
‘Come in,’ Meg answered the gentle tap on the door.
‘Thought you might be asleep …’
‘Nah, Polly. Been sittin’ at the window, thinking about today, watching it get dark. It’s like another world after Tip – after Lyra Street. Wasn’t I lucky, chancing on Mrs Potter?’ She swung her legs to the floor.
‘But we were lucky, too. Did you ever find the relations you were looking for, by the way?’
‘Weren’t any relations.’ My, but news travelled fast in Nether Barton! ‘Don’t know why I said that. As a matter of fact, I’d just got sick of Liverpool – the mess after the blitz, and so many killed, I mean – that I jumped on the first bus I saw and ended up here. Just a day away from it all, it was supposed to be.’
How many more lies?
‘And you saw the card in the post office window, and asked directions to Candlefold?’
‘Well, the store I worked in had been bombed. I needed a job and, like I said, Ma and me used to talk a lot about livin’ in the country. One