Summer’s Last Retreat Read online

  ‘Glad I am, glad that it wasn’t Blodwen as I thought. She wouldn’t really be that cruel, would she?’

  Arthur, wanting to own up and take his share of the punishment that Barrass was certain to give, was confused. Barrass looked pleased! He swallowed nervously. ‘We didn’t mean it to happen,’ he mumbled at last.

  Barrass turned to him so swiftly that Arthur fell off the wall in his haste to avoid the swipe that must now certainly come. He wriggled away as he was offered a hand to help him rise.

  ‘So you were in on it too? What is it about me that no one wants me to have a home of my own?’ Barrass asked, but there was no rise to his anger.

  Once it was clear that Barrass was not going to lose his temper and hit them, Olwen felt suddenly sick. ‘You were so glad that Blodwen hadn’t done it – you don’t really care about losing your home, do you?’ she said, bending forward at the waist and trying to look threatening. ‘Barrass, you aren’t going to marry her, are you?’ The dismay on her small face and the scolding in her voice was comic and Barrass burst out laughing.

  ‘I want to be someone important when I’m a man,’ he said when his laughter subsided. ‘And for that I’ll need a wife who wants the same.’

  ‘I’m important,’ Olwen said stoutly. ‘I’m the daughter of the finest fisherman in the whole of Wales!’

  Barrass tousled her hair, making the damaged fringe stand up comically, and laughed again.

  ‘Come on, let’s see if there’s anything to save.’ How could he explain about choosing a wife to a girl who was still a child? And how could he tell her that the place he had worked on, and of which he had been so proud, meant less than a temporary shelter, a shack made of driftwood or a borrowed pigsty, after the curt dismissal of his efforts by Blodwen on the previous day?

  The three of them set off, Barrass taller and larger and making the guilty pair look smaller than usual by comparison. Arthur and Olwen were dressed with reasonable neatness but Barrass was a sight that made even those used to seeing him stop and stare.

  His face was a mass of angry sores where fleas had bitten, and his clothes were made for someone other than he, so they were like a second skin in parts and drooped over his body in others. The trousers were torn and shortened by the fringing of age, and showed ankles as badly bitten as his face, bald head and neck. Children jeered at him as they passed, jumping away from him and calling him names. He seemed unaware of it, he had suffered it all his life and thought it unlikely to change.

  Olwen and Arthur walked a few steps behind him until Olwen realized that this might be taken for fear of catching his fleas, and she moved up to walk as defiantly close to Barrass as she could without actually tripping him. She was his only real friend and he must be regularly reminded.

  They had walked only a few yards before Arthur was halted by the shouting of Pitcher warning him that the cleaning of the yard was waiting to be finished. Reluctantly, Arthur returned to his work and Olwen skipped happily along beside Barrass.

  It was clear there was nothing to be done to save any of the contents of the old stone barn. The tarpaulin had fallen early victim to the flames and once that had gone, there was nothing to stop the rain spoiling anything the fire did not destroy. Barrass shrugged and walked away.

  ‘There’s plenty of time for me to find somewhere before the winter sets in,’ he said. The realization that Blodwen had not ruined his home made the loss easy to bear.

  Olwen believed that it was her cheerfulness that had helped him over the shock and disappointment, and she joked and laughed and was excited and happy when he joined in her merriment. ‘Please God, keep him away from pretty girls while I grow up,’ she muttered to herself, an often repeated prayer.

  * * *

  In the alehouse Arthur worked in the cold cellar below the bar-room, but even there he could hear the shouting between Pitcher and Emma on the first floor. He crept up the stone steps and, pushing his head up above the trap door, listened with a grin on his thin, almost skeletal face. It was not the first time he had heard them quarrelling and the subject was not new.

  ‘But Mr Palmer,’ Emma said, her voice rising in a parody of the well-spoken woman, ‘Mr Palmer, we must do all we can to help our daughters. How can they attract the attention of suitable young men if all we have is this small room, and it overlooking the yard with all its muddle of barrels?‘

  Emma was short and well rounded, small features taking up only the centre of her plump face giving her a doll-like appearance. The cap she wore wobbled as she scolded him, a frilly frame for her puffed cheeks and the double layers of her chin. Her well-shaped hands fluttering around her middle made the chains on her brass Chatelaine jingle their disapproval.

  ‘It’s how we earn the money to buy all the fancy clothes you insist they need! Stop pretending we’re something we ain’t, Mrs Palmer. You shame me from myself. Make me feel like apologizing for being Pitcher Palmer, alehouse keeper, and I once had a pride in being just that. Shame me from myself, that’s what you do, Mrs Palmer!’ His voice was raised with anger, although Emma sensed his defeat as he looked away from her and lowered his head.

  Emma sobbed, not softly but with all the breath she could find within her large bosom. She breathed deeply and let it out in wails of dismay until Pitcher lowered his head even further and gave in.

  ‘All right, we’ll make you a drawing room if that’s what you really want, although I can’t see what the hell we need such a place for. Got enough rooms as it is, seems to me.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Pitcher.’ Emma’s voice had lowered to the refined tone she normally used. Only on occasions of anger – or when she was quarrelling with Pitcher – did the careful and controlled voice slip.

  Pitcher went downstairs from the room which Emma called the parlour and towards the door leading to the yard. He passed the cellar entrance and could hear Arthur busily moving things about and whistling while he worked, but was unconvinced that he had not stopped to enjoy the row.

  ‘If you missed any of that, let me know and I’ll fill in the gaps for you!’ he growled as he passed the trap door.

  Adjoining the alehouse was a building that had been empty for several years and was in a bad state of repair. He stared up at it, working out how best he could incorporate the two buildings into one, allowing for a room large enough for Emma to call a drawing room and use when the suitors she dreamed of were invited to call.

  * * *

  It did not take Barrass long to realize that, for whatever reason, he no longer carried fleas. The confidence that brought gave him the courage to refuse when Pitcher offered to re-shave his head. He knew that at last the hair could be allowed to grow.

  By the time Pitcher was ready to start on the rebuilding work, Barrass was transformed into a handsome youth who attracted the admiring gaze of most of the local girls – and their mothers.

  ‘If you want work permanent,’ Pitcher told him one day, ‘you can come-along-a-me. I want a strong lad to help shift some rubble and get everything ready for the new walls.’

  ‘Any chance of a place to sleep?’ Barrass asked.

  ‘Not if you got fleas, boy. Mrs Palmer won’t stand for you to bring fleas into her house.’

  Barrass pulled off the worn and too large shirt he wore, showing the almost healed spots on his powerfully built body. ‘Not a bite to be seen.’

  Pitcher nodded. ‘All right, boy, you come-along-a-me and we’ll find you a corner somewhere.’

  ‘He could share the cellar with me, Pitcher,’ Arthur offered.

  So Barrass found himself a home of sorts and work to keep him fed and, eventually, clothed with garments that fitted him.

  The cellars beneath the alehouse were extensive, leading back further than the house itself and reaching to the storage barns and the malt-house beyond the yard. In the first of these was stored the ale and small beer which Pitcher and, when she could be persuaded away from her social calls, Emma made. Beyond that room were several others, one of whic
h held the brandy, gin, and wines bought legally and with proper receipts from the suppliers in Swansea, but which he had no licence to sell.

  Another room, half hidden by a collection of rarely used barrels and boxes, held the results of other transactions: Wines and ankers and half-ankers of brandy that had arrived at night without the need for receipts, just a quick exchange of cash and the constables and customs none the wiser, although members of both organizations frequently applauded Pitcher on the quality of his liquor.

  He studied the layout of his building carefully and began to draw an idea of what he envisaged, to discuss with Emma. Using the upstairs rooms for a drawing room was not what he wanted. He had a long-held dream of several properly furnished bedrooms to rent out to travellers.

  The room where he sold his ale and food was not large and he did not want to extend it, but furnish a second one so he did not have to turn away the occasional visitors who asked for a room where they could eat in private. With some of the upstairs rooms decorated and furnished, he could accommodate visitors. Travellers came for the sea air, and if he had a comfortable house, they would stay and spend their money with him instead of at the inns, taverns and alehouses six miles away in Swansea.

  He imagined the house full of beautifully dressed and wealthy gentlemen – sometimes with their ladies – all sitting at well-filled tables beside his fire, and all having well-filled pockets. But first, as Emma constantly told him, his daughters had to be settled. Once they were off his hands, he could then turn to increasing his trade.

  * * *

  In the large, rambling, once beautiful old house about two miles inland from the seaside village, Dorothy Amelia Ddole sat examining the house accounts. A strikingly handsome woman in her late forties, she wore her iron-grey hair pulled back in an untidy bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were deep-set and alert, as if waiting and watching for someone to make a move of which she did not approve.

  She was very thin, almost gaunt, and her height of almost six feet emphasized her lack of roundness. There was a hardness about her, an expression that made people a little afraid, yet there was humour too in the eyes and the set of her mouth. With her at the round table near the mullioned window was Henry Harris, the secretary whom her husband still employed although the need for him was no longer valid.

  Henry Harris was an old man, and when William Ddole gave up the two small mines and the shipping rights he had inherited from his father, he kept the old man on, unwilling to allow his servant to face the workhouse. So Harris lived frugally but with sufficient comfort in a house near one of the farms.

  Dorothy pointed an imperious finger at an item in old-man’s spidery writing and demanded that he read it out to her.

  ‘Really, Henry, your words almost leave the page as soon as they’re written! Haven’t you the strength to press a little harder on the quill? I swear I will open this book one day and find all the pages as clean as when the book was delivered!’

  ‘Sorry, Mistress Ddole, but I find it difficult to form the letters some days. Most days I manage well enough,’ he added swiftly, ‘most days I manage very well.’

  ‘Will you try to work faster on those days and rest when things are not well with you?’ She spoke loudly and harshly, but there was no anger in her for the old man. She used the same tone whether she was speaking to a friend, her children, her husband or a recalcitrant puppy.

  ‘I will try, Mistress.’

  To Henry Harris she sounded more cross than usual and he gathered his papers together, anxious to be gone before her patience finally gave out and she told him she no longer needed him. Without the few shillings she and her husband paid him he would be hard put to pay for food and the services of Bessie Rees who came in daily to attend his wants.

  He hurried out of the house, the books and papers under his arm, a small, anxious man, thin and bent with age, white hair flying around his head and shoulders. Before he had gone more than a few yards he was called back. Dozy Bethan, called so because of her dreaminess, who worked in the dairy and the stillroom, invited him to stay for a drink of buttermilk, which she knew he loved.

  They went around the house and re-entered at the door of the kitchen, where Florrie the cook and Carrie, the daughter of Bessie Rees, his cleaning lady, were preparing vegetables for the evening meal.

  * * *

  Henry was right about Dorothy Ddole being more than usually irritable, but the reason was not himself. She had suffered periods of intense pain in her stomach. She at first put these down to too many sour apples, which she loved, then, as the pains grew more frequent and intense, to indigestion following her long rides straight after a heavy meal.

  Doctor Percy had at first given her some powdered oyster shells, which he had dried in the sun and ground in a mortar before sieving it into a fine alkali powder. It had eased her discomfort for a while. She had tried eating less, and in fact that was not a hardship as her appetite was no longer as healthy as it had once been. Now she had decided to call in Doctor Percy again to ask for more of the soothing medicine he gave her.

  The doctor arrived as Henry Harris sat sipping the delicious cool buttermilk which, Henry did not fail to notice, had been taken from the pail ready to feed the piglets. The thought did not spoil his enjoyment. Dozy Bethan might be irritatingly slow in all she did, but he knew she was meticulous in cleaning her utensils.

  When he was leaving he passed the door of the study where he had been looking through the books with Mistress Ddole, but stopped when the door began to open. A rather shy man, he could not face explaining about his invitation to sup buttermilk in the kitchen with Dozy Bethan and Cook, so he darted back into the nearby doorway of the drawing room. What he overheard startled him.

  ‘A temporary affliction, Mistress Ddole, of that I am sure,’ Doctor Percy said. Then after a few whispered words from Mistress Ddole which Henry did not catch, the voice went on, ‘I’m sure we can relax and not worry unduly, nothing more serious than a temporary affliction, Mistress Ddole. The pain we can do something about. We must not worry, it will be as transient as a summer storm.’

  Mistress Ddole came further out of the room and Henry heard her say urgently – and for her, quietly – ‘And you will say nothing of this to Mr Ddole if you please, Doctor Percy.’

  ‘Not a word, not a word. No purpose served in worrying William unnecessarily, Mistress Ddole. We’ll see how things progress, shall we, and make up our minds at a later date? Now, shall we meet again next week? But, please send a servant for more of the medicine or for me to call if you are further worried. I am at your service, Mistress Ddole, at your service.’

  Mistress Ddole spoke again, too softly for Henry to hear, and the doctor replied,

  ‘Of course I will be silent of the matter. I am not a scaremonger, as you must surely know. Not,’ he added hastily, ‘that we have anything to fear.’

  Henry gasped, his hand over his mouth to hush the sound. So this time the rumours were true! Doctor Percy’s bumbling reassurances were proof enough. She really was ill. He hurried off as soon as the doctor had mounted his horse and ridden away to his next call. Bending further forward in anxiety to begin his arrangements, Henry hastened home.

  He had work to do. He needed to arrange things so that William Ddole understood how indispensable he was. He would make sure no one but he could manage the accounts of Ddole House and its farms. Once Mistress Ddole was gone, he felt sure that William would want to retire him and take on a younger, fitter man and that he must avoid – whatever he had to do to the neat and carefully kept books.

  A few moments later Dorothy Ddole went to the stables and demanded that her horse be saddled, then, after taking a spoonful of the medicine the doctor had left her, rode out at great speed, scuffing dust and hay out of the stable in a cloud. She galloped past Henry and on across the muddy fields as if trying to escape from the devil. All day she rode, the horse lathered and distressed as she urged him on to chase anything that moved – including a child ca
ught climbing down from a tree with some cherries, who had to jump first through a bush and then into a stream to escape. Back home, she bathed and dressed, and when her husband came home she was calm, and apparently without a care.

  * * *

  In Pitcher’s alehouse it was Emma who dealt with the accounts. She hated anything to do with the way they earned their money, but knew that if she left it to Pitcher, many accounts would not be served and many more forgotten. At the end of every month she sent Arthur, or one of the boys who hung around looking to earn a penny, to the various houses where goods had been delivered or food and drink taken at the alehouse and for which the money was still unpaid.

  She tutted disapprovingly as she looked at the money owed by William Ddole. He made his own ale and had need to buy very little, having his own supplies of wine and spirits brought in from France, yet the account for drinks supplied when he brought people to the alehouse to discuss business deals had mounted up, and for the past several months had not been paid. She went to the top of the stairs and called her husband.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Emma, they’re like that, the wealthy, often leave things for months but they always pay in the end. It isn’t the likes of William Ddole we have to worry over, you just try getting that miserly old Kenneth to pay what he owes, that’ll keep you busy till Christmas!’

  ‘No, husband, this will not do. I want you to send someone with the account and a note saying to “pay it at once if you please”. Then they’ll be shamed into settling it.’

  ‘And maybe go somewhere else in future! This isn’t the only alehouse in the place as well you know! No, just send the account at the usual time and we’ll see what happens.’

  Emma did not reply. She did not lie to him, she simply did not do as he asked!

  ‘Barrass,’ she called out of the first-storey window, ‘I want you to come here without showing Pitcher. I have a job for you.’