Lisa Read online

  Lisa

  Joan Van Every Frost

  © Nordon Publications 1979

  Nordon Publications have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1979 by Nordon Publications Inc.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For John, with all my love

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  1

  As far as she could see, the rolling upland moor glowed purple with its annual splendor, looking almost gay under the bright, hard September sky. Most of the year it was so dark a green that it almost looked black, a mysterious sea that rolled endlessly to the horizon. The wind, already tinged with a winter edge of chill, whipped her cloak about her legs, plucked tendrils of dark red hair from under her hood, and sent purple cloud shadows racing across the brilliant heather that stretched as far as the eye could follow.

  “Will you miss me, Toby?” she asked. “I know I shall miss you dreadfully.”

  The boy with her was a good deal larger that she was and two years older, but his face, though handsome, was soft, unformed, and his blue eyes were those of a child. His work clothes were patched neatly and bleached nearly white by countless hours of hanging in the sun to dry. He had on a dirt-blackened leather vest that didn’t come near to meeting around his broad chest. He chewed on a blade of grass from the clearing where they were sitting. “Ay no be wanting you ter go,” he said unhappily, his face screwing up like a small boy’s. “Me da gave me Sally. If’n Ay kin sell ’er at the fair and give you the money, will you still ’ave ter go?”

  “Toby, Toby, you can’t sell your mare now before you’ve trained her. And anyhow, the money wouldn’t last long and I’d still have to go.”

  Since she was nine, for ten years all she had known was this wild country that surrounded the Price farm, making of it an island in a sea of gorse, bracken, and heather. Other isolated farms, many of them abandoned, dotted this land where heath rose along the foothills to become moor in the uplands. Many of them were little more than small, stingy clearings chopped out of the brush, bases for the sheep that made up the only crop that thrived on the poor soil. The farms still inhabited had cleared land around the rough stone farm houses to provide additional fodder for the animals, but added little to the skimpy living of the struggling families that lived on them.

  “You be of age now, Lisa,” her Aunt Sarah said one day recently, “to marry or go make yer living elsewheres. We no can keep you more.”

  Lisa remembered the panic with which she heard the words. Her Aunt Sarah and Uncle John were craggy, wizened people in body and soul, hard to love but all she had. She didn’t remember when she had come to them, didn’t in fact remember any of her early childhood. Her aunt and uncle were taciturn, not given to frivolous speech, and she had had to piece together in bits that her mother had died in some terrible accident and that her father had brought her here and offered to pay John and Sarah Price to raise her. How had he found them, and why? For four or five years money had been sent for her upkeep through a law firm in London, but then it mysteriously stopped. Was her father dead? Who was he?

  The Prices were not inhuman, and they kept her on for years after the payments ceased. But now the farm would not support three adults. Had Lisa been a boy, his male body and muscles could have been used to increase the acreage and bring in more crops to sell, but in rural England of the 1880’s there were few things more useless than unmarried grown girls who ate their heads off and could offer little in return.

  The usual solution, of course, was marriage into a neighboring farm family, but life was hard and cruel on the farms of that area, and most children died of one thing or another before they were five years old. Aunt Sarah herself had borne eight children, three of them dead in childbirth and four out of five of the others dead before they were three. Only Rafe survived, a large scowling youth who ran away years ago as soon as he was big enough to be of any real use. The surrounding farms contained only children, married couples, and one twenty-one-year-old halfwit named Toby.

  Dear Toby ... Lisa’s full mouth quirked fondly. He wasn’t a halfwit, like they said, only an innocent. His body had gone on growing, but his mind had somehow stopped at the age of around eight or ten years old. His eyes were a guileless blue under his corn silk shock of hair, and large as he was, he had a sweetness about him that even children seldom possess. When she had first begun to explore the moor not long after she had arrived on the farm, she had come upon a scene she wouldn’t soon forget.

  “Kill ’im! Kill ’im!” came a chorus of gleeful children’s voices from a clearing ahead where an outcropping of rock discouraged even the hardy gorse and heather.

  Cowering mutely against the rock face was a boy half again as large as his tormentors, who were around five and six years old. Had they been any older, they would in truth have killed him long since, but even so his face and arms were torn and bloody from the rocks the little devils were throwing.

  “Stop that this instant!” she shouted, flailing at them with both hands.

  Startled by her sudden attack and unfamiliar way of speaking, the boys fled, although she was hardly much larger than they, but she had the advantage of moral right. She made the weeping boy spit on her handkerchief and cleaned him up as best she could. Then she tried to get him to go home with her, but he only looked frightened all over again and shook his shaggy head wildly.

  “Ay’m no to be in other houses,” was all he would say over and over again, his blue eyes panicked.

  She gave him the boiled sugar sweet she had filched from Uncle John’s supply — he had a terrible sweet tooth — and wiped his face once more. At last he shambled off, sucking happily at his candy. When she told Aunt Sarah about it, the grey head wagged portentously.

  “Ay told Annie she should not be out walking in the full of the moon. Ay told ’er and told ’er. That Tobiah be a moon child, and moon childer don’t never grow up.”

  Moon child he may have been, but he was also the solace of Lisa’s childhood. She would run barefoot with unerring speed along the maze of tracks across the moor to whistle him away from his farm three miles away. Together they set rabbit snares and downed birds with sling-shots. Their families never realized they were together; instinctively the children never let on they were seeing each other. Their truancy, had it not produced food for the pot, would have been ended before it began, but wild hare stew and bird pie were not to be regarded lightly in diets that contained so little meat.

  She and Toby developed a language all their own. Like the animals Toby instinctively knew so much about, they used expression and body movements almost as much as sounds. Lisa spent the better part of a year trying to teach him to read, but he could only grin and shake his shaggy head. She herself didn’t remember learning how to read, only that her earliest memories at nine included sneaking into the parlor to read the big family Bible in the glass case. On market days they would often get a torn piece of newspaper around something they had bought, and she read those, too. Politics, pieces of murder cases, social events — they all became a part of her view of a strange outside world she could hardly understand exis
ted. Her only other source was the Farmer’s Almanack that Uncle John struggled through each year, his gnarled finger moving laboriously from word to word as he held the dog-eared pamphlet as far from his aging eyes as his arm would reach. Consequently, Lisa had a phenomenal amount of information about the endless religious wars of the Old Testament and the preferred months, days, and phases of the moon for everything from planting crops to making warts disappear. She once saved Tommy, the farm cat, from dying of rat poison by forcing salt water down him as the Farmer’s Almanack had suggested for small children in the same plight.

  Her natural speech was not at all the local dialect used by the farm folk around, though she could imitate it when she chose. Ordinarily she spoke as she had when she came. Had she had any playmates besides Toby, they would no doubt soon have laughed her into becoming copies of themselves, but Toby was utterly uncritical and the Prices seemingly uncaring. People to whom she helped sell eggs, butter, and garden vegetables on market days never commented, since there she took to mimicking the local speech.

  Lisa always enjoyed the market days, the only time she ever left the area immediately around the farm to travel by cart to the little village of Dunwiddleston, pronounced Dunston. The drive itself might have been dull, except that her forays in the heather with Toby had taught her to take careful note of the soaring hawk, the all but invisible rabbit trail, and the foot marks of weasels, rodents, foxes, and various birds in the dust at the edge of the road. To her the country was always changing and new; she never tired of watching all its moods.

  Lisa turned over and lay on her stomach on the yellow grass, twirling a blade of hair-grass between her fingers. “Perhaps I should apply to Hartsite for a position,” she mused. “I wonder what it would be like to live in a great house like that and spend my whole day dusting and cleaning just the downstairs like Amy Sallus does. She says it takes her half the morning only to polish the silver. But I don’t think I’d like it working for that doctor who goes around looking so unpleasant, what with that awful black beard and scowl. No one’s ever seen his wife since she took to her bed, have they? I wonder, is she even still alive?”

  “They do be saying in the village all kinds of things,” Toby replied. “They say the ’ousekeeper is the only one ter see ’er and they say the sister’s ’usband didna kill ’isself but was kilt by ’er lover who got scairt and run off and left ’er.”

  Lisa sat up and wrapped her arms around herself and gave a mock shudder. “And then there’s the brother that rides to Burresford all the time for drink and wenches. I wonder what he’s like. A weak chin, like as not. The doctor and the housekeeper are the only ones I’ve seen in all the years they’ve been here.”

  The great grey stone house a half hour’s ride from Dunwiddleston was originally called Heart’s Delight when it was built in the seventeenth century on a moorland shooting estate by a minor lord for his new bride, but for several centuries since had been known only as Hartsite to the local people. The family who owned it now was headed by a tall, grimvisaged doctor in his middle thirties whose full black beard went with his usual frown.

  The Jarrell family had only occupied the house for seven years, and were of course accounted outlanders by the Dunwiddleston folk, who were inclined to view with suspicion any family there less than a hundred years. Their housekeeper, Mrs. Lewis, the Jarrells had brought with them, but the other servants were local people. Their tales of what went on behind the stone walls were received avidly, though there seemed to be little enough to repeat. The rumors flew, however. A rural population with little to entertain them but conjecture can startle with their flights of imagination. Mrs. Lewis, a homely woman in her middle thirties, was said to have conceived a child by Dr. Jarrell — or some said by Eric his younger brother — and to have been aborted by the doctor. Another story had it that the sister’s husband, who had committed suicide, was in truth killed by her lover, who then abandoned her when he discovered that all of the money would remain in her older brother’s hands.

  The truth of it all, no one knew. The Jarrells’ only visitors were very occasional people from other parts of England, and Dr. Jarrell had been heard by Jane, the upstairs maid, to remark that the local doctor was a butcher and no wonder physicians had such a low social standing. The family didn’t attend church, which cut off the only other local source of possible friendship on any sort of equal footing, so they lived in a kind of splendid isolation as far as the surrounding countryside was concerned. Even young Master Jarrell did his helling elsewhere and was known to disappear for days at a time on his big sorrel stallion in the direction of Burresford, a textile town far larger than Dunwiddleston. His reputation came from having been seen there now and then much the worse for drink, and like as not with a woman no better than she should be on either aim.

  “Let’s see,” Lisa went on dreamily, “the young master will be so taken with me that he’ll ask for my hand in marriage. I’ll tell him no sir, that I would only marry a young man pure in heart. And then he’ll get on his knees and promise faithfully to give up all his evil ways, and we’ll have lots of children, all with weak chins.” She laughed and tickled Toby under the chin with her now frazzled piece of grass.

  “Where’ll Ay be?” Toby asked, grinning. He loved it when she made up stories for him.

  “You’ll be my paramour and eat off silver plates and drink from crystal goblets. I think the word paramour is marvellous; it promises all sorts of lovely wicked things. Having a paramour must be much nicer than just having a lover.”

  “Ay’d like that all right,” Toby said. “Will there be lots ter eat?” he added hopefully.

  “Of course, Toby. There’ll be, let’s see, roast suckling pig with a cinnamon apple in its mouth and tender young lamb cooked with mint and nightingales’ tongues — ”

  “Wat be they?” he broke in.

  “A nightingale is a bird that sings beautifully. Perhaps if you eat the tongues, you can sing beautifully, too.” She never thought to consider that nightingales were neither biblical nor any part of the livestock mentioned in the Farmer’s Almanack — nor did any frequent the moor country round about — and wonder how she knew of them. “And there’ll be all kinds of savory puddings and spices and — Oh, Toby,” she wailed suddenly, “I don’t want to go to Burresford. It’s bleak and ugly and dirty beyond belief. Nothing but coal smoke and black grime and smelly garbage and dung in the streets.”

  The only time she had ever been to Burresford, to attend the wedding of the grocer’s granddaughter, she had been only thirteen years old, and after a brief period of exhilaration had gotten sick on the wine at the wedding. She remembered that the grocer’s wife, a great beefy woman with a red face, had pointed and laughed at her. Fat and bald, with bad breath and a coarse laugh, the grocer himself was no better than his wife and very different from his brother John. He had pinched her cheek harder than affection would have warranted with the one hand while surreptitiously grabbing a handful of her bottom with the other. Lisa shuddered at the idea of being trapped with these people even for a day or two. But what could she do? She was, she thought bitterly, in a position little better than that of the draft horses Toby’s father was taking to Burresford to sell.

  2

  With two fingers to her mouth, she blew a shrill bird call. Through the branches of gorse she could see the farmyard belonging to Toby’s father. Still muddy from the last rain, the trampled ground presented a bleak aspect. A farm cart with the off wheel leaning against the shafts lurched drunkenly toward the barn, a gaggle of scrawny chickens scratched about the dung littering the yard, and a muddy black and white calf bawled mournfully from its tether.

  Lisa whistled again, but Toby didn’t appear. She frowned. She had to say goodbye to him. Where could he be? If he’d been riding one of the young draft horses he was training, she would have come across him on the heath. The one thing Toby excelled at was handling horses. It was as if he were part horse himself, and many times she had seen him,
his light shaggy hair looking as manelike as that of the horses, soothe down a trembling, sweating young horse until the colt backed calmly between the shafts of a wagon as if he had been doing it for years. As part of their gentling, he always broke them to ride as well, even though they would do no more than carry a farmer in from a far field after plowing. And he often rode one young horse out while leading another for her to ride, on the pretext he would be teaching them to work together as a team.

  Lisa sighed and walked openly down toward the farm house. Toby’s mother, a tall, gaunt woman of forty who looked nearer sixty, came out to meet her.

  “Bless you, child, it’s not till tomorrow that you and Rob go to Burresford.”

  “I know, Missus Stoner, but Aunt Sarah wanted to be sure of the hour.”

  “Rob do usually go at five, just before light. Toby’ll be going as well to handle the young horses. He and Rob’re out now ter see if they can catch a few wild ponies to take along. Toby said he’d seed some over by Smithson’s Trace.”

  There were still occasional bands of wild shaggy ponies roaming the area. Shy as deer, they were hard to catch and harder to tame, but there was a good market for them in Burresford, where they were sold to the coal mines to pull the heavy cars of coal deep beneath the surface of the earth. After several years of darkness, the ponies slowly went blind. Lisa hoped that Toby and his father wouldn’t catch any. If they did, the ponies were tied to heavy posts all night to fight themselves to exhaustion, and then hitched up to draft horses that weighed more than twice as much to be hauled to Burresford. More than ever now Lisa sympathized with the ponies who had known nothing except the wild freedom of the moors and heath. It was said that they could even pick their way unerringly across peat bogs where a single misstep would put a pony belly deep and helpless in the odorous mud.