I had let Francis believe that I could persuade Iris to show the leaflet to her father, but it was only now that I realised why she could not.
12
Sam Denman took a jack-knife from his pocket, inspecting the blade and wiping it clean on his trousers. I drew back quietly and watched him from behind the gatepost, intrigued by his every move as if he was an animal I had spotted in the wild. He glanced at the stack of small hay bales propped against the wall of the stable yard and then ran the knife through the rope that bound them, the loose end snapping free. He wiped the knife again and reached high to release the old tarpaulin, which had covered the bales. Then he stabbed his knife into a bale, raising the weight on his knee and carried it through to the barn where the dark shapes of horses mingled in the dim light. I watched Sam for a good few minutes. I could have watched him all day.
Some thought Sam strange, but I thought him misunderstood, and a little exciting. On my fifteenth birthday he had given me a lucky rabbit’s foot. It had not been tied where the joint had been severed, the bone hard and white at the cut and the blood still sticky on the clumped fur. I had felt fortunate to have the affections of a boy such as Sam, although I did not think the rabbit so lucky. Sam said his childhood in the farms of Evesbridge had been hard. He would think of nothing of stringing crows to the fences to protect the feeds or of stabbing his knife into the neck of a lame horse to drain the blood. Sam was different from the other boys in Missensham but I did not see this as a warning of what was to come.
My mother only tolerated Sam because he was some sort of relative on my father’s side of the family. He was the kind of person that she would have usually crossed the street to avoid, but there had been a time that my parents had welcomed Sam into our home and he had lodged with us in the parsonage so that he could attend the school in Missensham during the months when there were no crops to sow or harvests to gather. I think my mother must have seen it as a duty to her husband, or at least some kind of Christian charity, for when my father died and Sam came of age, she wanted little to do with him.
Sam was a working man now and when I looked at him I no longer saw anything of the boy who had lodged with us. He was strong but his build was slight, and his clothes seemed to hang off him. At almost nineteen years old, I did not know if he would grow any more. His skin was already speckled by the sun and winds, but his beard was scant and still had a hint of boyish gingeriness. He was a man, I thought, if only just.
When Sam bent to pick up the next bale, I took up a stone and aimed it at his back. The shot missed but the crack of the stone on the hard ground made him stop and look up, resting the bale on his knee.
‘I’m working, Nell,’ he said, as if he had been expecting me. ‘You know that some folk do.’
‘But it’s been a long time, Sammy,’ I said, ‘and I am bored at home – you know that.’
He set down the bale and came over to the gatepost, rubbing the sweat from the back of his neck. ‘I hear you are not at home so much anymore,’ he said. ‘You’ve got finer company now. Are you sure you should be calling here and not taking tea at Haughten Hall?’
I walked past him into the yard. ‘I don’t care for tea,’ I said, ‘but I know you’ve usually got some bottles of cider about the place.’
‘Is that all I’m good for?’ he joked, following me back into the yard. ‘I thought you wanted more of me than my cider.’ But when I did not answer he added firmly, ‘No, Nell, I’ve got no cider.’
‘There’s no need to be like that!’ I said. ‘I only meant so as you could have a break. Sit and have a drink with me, Sammy. Water will do just as well.’ I pointed to the pump by the side of the tack room.
Sam squinted up at the sun, as was the way out in the farms, for there was no clock in the stable yard and the church bell could only be heard in the right wind. ‘Alright,’ he said shortly. ‘Go and sit down. I will need to finish up here.’
I sat on the bench by the pump, making sure the wall that hid the yard from the main house shielded me.
Sam took up a broom and started to sweep the loose strands of hay under a low fence and on to a little vegetable patch, which already had the early leaves of leeks and spinach pushing from the soil. The yard was tidy, the winter’s mud and mildew cleaned from the brickwork and not so much as a bucket out of place. A couple of horses hung their heads from the loose boxes and I could see the shadows of several more mingling under the low roof of the barn.
When he had finished, Sam propped the broom up against the tack room wall and began to work the pump handle, water splashing into the bucket below. I thought he would wash his neck but he did not, just washed his hands very carefully with a well-worn bar of carbolic soap.
In the barn, a horse whinnied, a flash of white among the darkness and the thud of a hoof.
‘Isn’t that Edelweiss?’ I said as the white flank turned back into shadow.
Sam stopped washing at last and dried his hands on a kitchen towel. ‘The Caldwells’ horse – yes.’
‘What is she doing here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that horse always seems to make it back here one way or another,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Now I’m teasing her with Sultan. He’s a bit long in the tooth but the only stallion I have at the moment.’
‘They want Edelweiss to foal?’ I said. ‘I thought Sir Howard barely knew about horses and would not want to suffer another.’
He pulled up a bale so that he could sit next me. ‘Well, that daft old git insisted on the mare. I warned him that she was headstrong and he would be better off with a gelding but little princess Caldwell would have the white mare – it was something to do with a horse that her mother once had.’
I thought of the painting in the study of Haughten Hall, the one of the girl and the white horse. Iris’s mother had owned a white horse, so of course, Iris would have one too, but now there was nothing left that would surprise me about this girl who lived in the shadow of her dead mother.
‘Right from the off, Sir Howard has been saying that the horse is trouble,’ Sam continued. ‘He wants his money back, but the horse has a little spirit, only that. She is a sweet thing with the right rider. Now Sir Howard is forbidding his daughter to ride at all so he thinks the only way he will make his money back is by having her covered. It’s all down to something that happened on the common the other day when the horse got spooked.’
‘Oh, that,’ I said looking down at my boots. I did not want to admit that I had been there that day on the common and failed to calm the excitable dog. I thought of what Sam had said about the sweet nature of the horse but the memory of when she had reared – the sight of her muscular chest rising above me, her eyes wide and nostrils flaring – made me think otherwise.
Then I realised that Sam had said nothing more and was looking at me, his eyes fixed on mine.
‘So, miss,’ he said. ‘It is not often we meet alone without your mother.’
‘No,’ I said, but did not know what else to say for his voice seemed deeper and firmer and his stare had become so hard that I felt I could no longer look at him.
‘Come.’ He stood up and held out his hand and I took it and followed him past the loose boxes and through a split stable door into the old tack room where he lodged. He sat down on an old straw mattress in the corner and took his boots off.