The World From Rough Stones Read online

  She walked a few steps with no obvious purpose. Her limbs swung easily, as countrywomen's limbs do—especially those who carry bundles on their heads. She looked steadily at him.

  He sat where she had been.

  "Oh—cold under your skirts is it?" he asked.

  He carefully hid his lust until a price was set. He turned away from her level, gray gaze. Inside he shivered. His heart began to race.

  "I didn't mean that," she said wearily.

  "Need a little warming?" he persisted. Some good clothes and a few months away from the sun and weather would transform her; she'd be a damned handsome girl.

  "I've a belly needs meat," she said.

  "Ah."

  This was it.

  "It'd cost thee. I can't frig with the likes of thee for naught."

  "Three bob," he said, looking away at the horizon. "Three and six if ye really please."

  "Five," she said, "I'm no regular gay girl. I'm not lightly given."

  Prudence and lust fought for him. He ducked to let a bumblebee pass; briefly, his eye held a frozen image of it, laden with orange pollen.

  He turned to her and thought he saw a kindred longing in her. It ought to have made him insist on his offer but it had the contrary effect.

  "Four and six," he said. "Five's all I've got, and I'll not be left without coin."

  Now that their bargain was certain, she looked at him more closely, seeking some attraction to make his intimacy less distasteful. Only once before in her life had she been reduced to such desperate measures; and then it had taken six pennyworth of gin to ease the contract.

  He was on the tall side. Slender, but wiry, too. There was muscle there if he wanted to use it. He had a long, angular face with a firm chin, chiseled lips, and bright, roving eyes. They were stripping her where she stood. The thought excited her, and she began actually to want him.

  Her manner changed at once. She grinned and stretched. He could sense every plane of her flesh beneath that thin blue dress and petticoat. He walked past her and took her wrist, meaning to lead her to the cornfield nearby. But she shook free and stood her ground. He turned back. Until this moment, her face had stood out, light against the shade of the tree plantation. Now, seen from within that shade, she became a dusky silhouette against the sunstruck hills and trees beyond. Her gray-brown eyes dully glinted a message he could not read; had she been weeping? Then, as she smiled again, her teeth shone like dim gemstones. Now it was she who held forth her hand. He took it.

  "We can go in here," she said.

  "Is it not private property?"

  She laughed. "Private enough," she said. "We'll get no complaint from its owners. I'll warrant thee that."

  Even in the heart of the plantation, there was no relief from the torrid afternoon.

  "Here's a level place," he said.

  She snorted—was it a laugh?

  A stone outcrop, three-quarters covered with turf and weed, promised an adequate bed. Her hobnail boots grated as she turned to loosen her clothes. He rolled his jacket for the small of her back and spread his waistcoat for her head. He turned to face her. Their eyes met. Again he shivered for lust. She, too, was possessed. He was suddenly so absorbed by her that he forgot precisely what to do. For an unreal age, they bent down, down, down towards that bed. In that same daze, he threw her skirts above her waist.

  The sudden hot reek of that unwashed body threw him into a frenzy. He tried to thrust his hands up under her dress, beyond her waist, but the twine was still too tight.

  "Wait!" she said, laughing as he fiddled urgently with the knot.

  He could not wait. He ripped open his buttons and threw himself over her. She was hot and very smooth. He spent himself at once, almost without joy.

  She stopped laughing. She stopped breathing. Her lips went thin with anger.

  She looked up at him in venomous disappointment and struck repeatedly at his shoulder. "No," she kept saying. "No! No…"

  He jigged again, clasping her to stop that punching.

  "That was only starters, sweet," he said. "I'll not stop." Inwardly he wondered why he bothered.

  Her joy was as sudden as her rage and as natural. Unable to get at her breasts either via her waist or down her tight sleeves, he caressed them through the thin material of her dress, astonished at the voluptuousness of it.

  She moaned beginning her ecstasy. He drove slower, deeper, spinning her out. It was a long, long crescendo that almost brought him to spend again.

  Then, the animal gone, he envied her delirium and cursed the body that had spent itself so quickly. It was all so meaningless. Why had he stopped here at all? Now he would be exhausted—and with four more hot miles to walk.

  She stirred in terminal exhaustion. He looked at her, eyes shut, smiling to herself, almost pretty. He lay upon the huge bolster of her body, suddenly conscious of the odour and sweat that bathed them both. He rolled off and, with the stench strongly in his nostrils, fell at once into a mindless slumber.

  It cannot have lasted long, perhaps not above five minutes. He awoke to disperse the cloud of flies that had settled on him. The girl was still beside him, now sitting up, looking at him with a strangely level gaze. He did up his buttons and sat half facing her. "Why look at me like that?" he asked.

  For answer she opened her hand. A sovereign glinted in her palm.

  "I found yon there." She pointed where her head and his waistcoat had hung back over the stone.

  "I'm vexed what's to be done with it. It can't be yours for ye said ye hadn't but a crown about ye. So…?"

  "It must have fallen from my waistcoat pocket," he said.

  "Oh aye."

  "They say wagered money's soon forgot. And it's true, for that's how I won it. I forgot I had it, for it cost me nothing to get."

  The coin gleamed between them still. He looked at her boots; one thin sole had parted from its upper. The hobs were worn to little metal flecks.

  "You keep it," he said.

  Nora let it lie there, as if he had offended her. "I must've pleased," she said.

  Was she joking?

  "Don't joke, girl…by the by, what's your name?"

  "Me what?"

  "Name. Your name?"

  "Oh! Molly. They call us Molly," she lied.

  "Well, listen, Molly, you turned a very common, brutish act into…"—how could he put it to her?—"…a glimpse of paradise."

  "Oh aye," she giggled.

  "So don't spoil it."

  "Right, master. To be sure, master." She reacted facetiously to his tone of command.

  "Didn't it take you that way at all?" he asked.

  "I never knew it any other way," she said simply.

  "By the by," he said, "I'm Walter." He always liked them to think of him as himself.

  She nodded, her thoughts elsewhere.

  Still the coin shone between them.

  "For God's sake, pick it up," he said. "It lies there like an accusation."

  She stared at it sullenly. "The way ye gives it us makes us feel cheaper than what we settled on first."

  "You have sensibilities above your station," he sneered. "Look at your boots. Ye could get a new pair and a good meal for that."

  At last, she picked it up, but without urgency, as if it had been a dead leaf. "Aye. Well," she said, "I'm bound for Leeds, so can't say nay."

  Then there was an extraordinary optical illusion: where the coin had lain was a crisply carved, old-fashioned letter E. He had to twist his head to be sure the carving was real.

  "Someone's cut his name here," he said.

  It was her turn to look puzzled. "Well, that's not strange," she said.

  "A letter E…L-Y-E…lyes…in-ter…Ye gods! 'Here lyes interred…' It's someone's grave. Nicholas Everett's grave."

  "I thought ye knew. It's the old churchyard."

  "No. Ye gods! I thought it was a grove. A plantation. We've desecrated a grave. Hundreds of graves. How could I not have seen!"

  He knew well
enough why he had failed to notice.

  "Eeee," she said. "One minute thou art glimpsing paradise. Next minute, it's desecration!"

  She lay down again, totally relaxed. Sunlight dappled a pattern of blunted lace across her.

  "Thank the gods I didn't know. What were you doing out here?"

  "Tending our dad's grave. He were the last to be interred here. I thought as I'd give it a last tending afore I tramped back." She did not open her eyes.

  "Is he long dead?"

  "Four month." She wondered why she lied; he had died before last Christmas.

  "A great loss. A grievous loss."

  She looked old suddenly. The hand in her pocket turned the sovereign over and over. She opened her eyes and stared unseeing at the pale green canopy that shimmered above. When she spoke it was in a glum, low register, with a voice no longer feminine.

  "Aye. He were more than a father to us. Me mam died of birth fever when I were fourteen. He frigged with us then, while he lived. Mebbe that's why me mind were on it when ye stopped by."

  Walter hardly breathed. He knew then that she had spoken the truth when she had said she was not "lightly given." She was a rank novice. Everyone knew that the poor had their own disgusting ways.

  The things he'd seen among the navvies—even beasts would die of shame. But when their girls wanted to earn a shilling or two by catering for people of taste and quality, they soon learned what to hide and what to show. This Molly creature hadn't even taken her first lesson. He cursed himself for giving her a pound—that fatal detumescent generosity of his. He felt defiled.

  "I'm saying why thou had me that easy," she added.

  She thought again of her father. Poor, lonely man failing slowly at everything he tried—except at loving them, all five of them, crammed in that wretched one room. What could this fine gentleman, who could afford to wager whole sovereigns and who had only to show the glint of gold to get anything he wanted… what could he possibly…?

  She had to stop thinking like that. Always thinking of her father. It did no good.

  "But…your own father?" he said.

  "Aye. And a good father. Nay, lad—ye knows nothing, your sort. He worked hisself into yon grave. Fendin' for us. Me and the family."

  "How many were you?" Walter steered her from the subject.

  "Five."

  "And now? Where are you all now?"

  "The bairns is dead. One died of rats. With rat bites, ye know. Me brother went into service in Leeds last October. And me other brother's transported."

  "What for?"

  "Forming a trade union, a 'combination.' Administering an illegal oath. Damn fool!"

  "What did the other one die of? The other…bairn?"

  Her lips tightened.

  "Well," he said, "no business of mine, I suppose." He began to arrange his clothing.

  "I couldn't help it." she said, now looking at him. "I had to go out. To earn. I had to get to market. Weren't no fault of mine there weren't no door to the hovel. Coroner said that. The hovel weren't no more nor a pigpen itself."

  "I see," he said "He strayed."

  "She. Aye, she strayed. Right into the jaws of Tom Jones's boar as weren't penned. There were naught left but one arm to bury."

  "Dear God!" he said. "Ye gods."

  Still the thought of this girl and her father seethed within him. "But…you and your father! Weren't you afraid of conceiving? Didn't you get with child?"

  She took his tone as a challenge. Her lip curled in scorn. "Child! There was none come to term. They was nothing but little kittens. Meagre wrecklings born dead and soon cold. And sooner forgotten. I tell thee—thou hasn't lived, thy sort."

  He could not tell if she was sad or past all anger. He said nothing, though his eyes were fixed upon her face. What terrible revelations! What a terrible existence they hinted at! He wondered at the force that drove such people to survive. The thought struck him: Perhaps even now a new life, half his, was kindling in her—to be born, to survive plague and disease, to worm its way up through the gauntlet of human cruelty and indifference, to eat its meagre fill, to get drunk, to frig, beget, and die. The futility of human existence was encompassed within the few cubic yards of air, earth, and flesh immediately around him—even the vanity of the half-deciphered legend in the stone. What a farce!

  He stood up. "I have work to finish," he said. "Keep the sovereign. Get some better boots."

  She smiled but did not rise. Only half her mind was on him. She swished her skirts above her ankle and grinned wryly at her boots. Renewed lust faintly stirred him.

  "If you're making for Leeds," he said, "you'll want the canal. That's the easiest way over to Todmorden."

  She smiled indulgently, unfurling his waistcoat and dusting it before she passed it to him. He liked seeing her hands moving over cloth. The next female hands to do that, he realized, would be Arabella's. He tried to feel ashamed of this conjunction of thoughts.

  "Aye. Mebbe they'd say nothing to thee. But they put dogs on us at Oldham Cut. Towpath's private property, ye see. I'll take the packhorse trail. That's the best road."

  "Oh, they'd chase me off, too. Molly. Canal folk have no love of railroad men. You'd best hurry. There's thieves up on top there."

  "Thieves!" Now her scorn was frank. "What've I got that—" And then she remembered her sovereign. "Oh aye!" It was a very young girl who bit her lip with such exaggeration and grinned up at him.

  "I said, didn't I—soon forgot!"

  "Eeeee!" She stood up, dusting herself off with those same firm hands.

  "If you want to stop this side till morning, there's a navvy gang you'd find shelter with."

  "Navvies! I'd as soon sup with the devil."

  "Ah," he told her, "this one's different. They sleep under a roof. No rowdies. Between one randy and the next, they're churchwardens. Ask for Lord John. That's what they call him. Say Gaffer Thornton sent you."

  Chapter 3

  The afternoon was almost done by the time Nora reached the cutting for Summit Tunnel. This part of the line, east of Littleborough, was not yet open, though it ran as far as the drift for the tunnel; only supplies and company men used the track. And Nora.

  As she strode in her shoddy boots along the new roadbed, she sang aloud, "I walked by the brook, I walked by the mill…"

  From time to time her mind's eye roved back over the sullied land behind her—the flats that ran far into Cheshire, beyond where she had ever been. Dimly, she remembered when she, a girl of ten, had come this way from Leeds with her father. Eight years ago. The number of factory chimneys must have doubled since then. Or trebled. Ahead, the hills and dales were an even dimmer memory. But somewhere among them was Leeds. Home. Her memory of that was an unfinished patchwork, parts blank, parts filled in minutest detail. The cottage, the clacking loom, the smell of wet wool, their own green field in Hunslet with its ragged edge on dirty little Dow Beck, just before the river Aire swallowed it. There were railways there now, people said. She wouldn't know the place. But she would; of that she was sure.

  "Can tha tell us where Lord John's at work to?" she asked a labourer at the foot of the cutting.

  "Aye luv. 'Oo sent thee?"

  "Gaffer called Thornton."

  "'Im what's engineer up at Summit?"

  "'Appen."

  "Oh aye. 'E told thee to ast for Big Lord John then? Gaffer Thornton?"

  He seemed to have no purpose in persisting so. She wearied of him.

  "Aye. 'E told us."

  The man began to move away. "'E's just round the cuttin' theer," he said as he walked. Then he stopped. "'E's workin' the first drift o' Summit Tunnel. But tha mun wait on till a comes oot. They'll stand no wench in a drift. No wench underground tha sees."

  "Ta. I can wait of 'im."

  Before the tunnel's mouth she climbed a ladder up the side of the cutting, ten feet or so, to reach the sun. There, she sat astraddle a rock and waited.

  From deep in the tunnel came the clang of iron on iro
n, well muted by distance. Heralded by a long swelling rumble a horse emerged at the trot, pulling a line of tubs laden with millstone muck from the driftway. The noise almost masked a deeper and more distant roar, like a far-off thunderclash.

  Even before the navvy with the horse stopped, Nora knew that something about the second noise was wrong. It had been too loud and too long. On the far side of the cutting two others, sorting some shuttering for the masons, also stopped. All three listened to the silence. Then they ran to the tunnel entrance. The two sorters sprinted straight into the dark. The horseman put fingers in his mouth and blew an urgent, piercing whistle. A blacksmith and his attendants, down near the mouth of the cutting, stopped and took up the whistle until a gang setting out a stone wall to the south of the track even farther away dropped their work and came running. At the same time, another gang sprinted down from the first shaft up on the moor. The urgency of it thrilled Nora and she stood up to gain a better view of the tunnel mouth.