Charity (11 page)

It was even worse. Charity had to draw out the bedpan from beneath him and he was partially stuck to it. The smell was overpowering and she had to hold her breath and look away.

‘Go and empty it, girl,’ Uncle Stephen bellowed at her. ‘I don’t want you peering up my arse while she wipes it.’

It was almost full to the brim, and slopped as she walked. This time she couldn’t hold back the nausea and as she emptied the pan into the lavatory she brought up her breakfast too.

‘No Scrabble tonight, Charity, it’s time we discussed the future.’ Uncle Stephen moved his wheelchair till he was facing her. His face seemed even more bloated tonight, a sly look in his small, sharp eyes. ‘We thought the beginning of September would be a good time for you to come back permanently.’

As his words growled out, Charity felt as if someone had pulled a trapdoor open under her feet and she was falling into a pit.

She looked to her grandmother, hoping for some support, but Grandmother bent her head, afraid to meet her eyes.

‘Permanently!’ Charity looked at him in horror.

Stephen Pennycuick had no interest in female children and Charity had turned out to be much as he’d expected, frail, skinny and timid. She did, however, have two unexpected attributes: his mother liked her and the girl wasn’t afraid of hard work.

‘Yes of course permanently.’ He waved his hands in a gesture that said she had no choice in the matter. ‘Your grandmother needs help, and there’s nothing else for you.’

In that instant Charity knew this was what he’d always intended, this week hadn’t been a holiday but a trial period and she had played right into his hands.

‘I want to work with children,’ she said in a small voice. ‘It’s kind of you to offer me a home, Uncle Stephen, but I’d be lonely here.’

‘Bosh.’ Stephen’s fat face grew an even darker shade of purple. ‘You’ll have too much to do to feel lonely. Besides the village is only down the road, you can visit Oxford.’

Charity had already discovered that the village of Studley-cum-Norton had nothing more than a post office. Even the bus into Oxford only ran once a day.

‘But the children?’ She blurted out. ‘It’s so far away from them!’

‘They’ll be away at boarding-schools soon,’ he snapped. ‘They don’t need a nursemaid at their age.’

Charity sensed she was edging towards a trap, the kind with steep sides she’d never get out of. She needed advice from Lou and Charles before she said another word.

‘You won’t mind if I think it over first?’ she said more boldly than she felt. ‘I didn’t expect this.’

Stephen Pennycuick had never considered that females had minds of their own. They were there to be decorative, useful and to provide comfort for men. Two or three times in the week he’d been brought up sharply when he discovered this girl was actually quite bright.

‘I suggest you think of your brothers and sister.’ His tone was oily, his words carefully chosen to frighten her. ‘As their guardian I have the right to provide for them as I see fit. Any awkwardness from you and I might very well feel less amenable to them.’

The threat hung in the air. Charity looked across the room to her grandmother for support, but she was studying a book as if she couldn’t hear or see anything. She was old and growing frail and although she wasn’t cruel like her son, she was selfish.

Charity had learned from Ellen that staff, with the exception of Jackson, never stayed long. Grandmother wanted Charity as a companion, a nurse and a housekeeper, someone to take over when she was too old to cope.

As her son wheeled his chair round and made for the door, she allowed herself to look at Charity for the first time. ‘Stephen has suffered greatly since he was wounded. He lost his legs and his wife and it’s hardly surprising he’s so bitter sometimes. Until his father died a few years ago, he didn’t consider the future of Studley very much. But once he inherited it, all at once he realised what it stood for.’

Charity frowned, not understanding what she meant.

‘His family were all brave, strong men,’ Grandmother went on. ‘For eight generations they’ve fought for their King and country and this house signifies their courage, fortitude and patriotism. Stephen saw himself and this house crumbling and he didn’t know where to turn. All at once he can see fresh troops: the line isn’t dead. All he has to do is make sure your oldest brother receives the right upbringing and education and Studley Priory can stay in the family for another few generations.’

‘You mean Toby would own it one day?’ Charity asked, hardly able to believe what she was hearing.

‘Well provided he lives up to Stephen’s expectations.’

‘And Prue? What’s he got in mind for her?’

‘From what we understand she is very bright. Stephen intends her to go to a good school, to turn her into a lady of quality.’

‘But if I say no, what then?’ Charity couldn’t bring herself to admit she considered Stephen spiteful enough to do something disastrous to all of them if she refused. ‘Will it spoil it for Toby? And James is only a baby. What about him?’

‘Stephen is a little hot-headed. He hasn’t thought all this through yet. My suggestion is that he leaves all three of them with the Charleses for the time being, then once you’re settled here and their schools are sorted out, they spend the holidays with us.’

That last evening, as she sat with her grandmother, Charity learned what had happened to her mother. Grandmother stated the facts in a cold, detached way, almost as if she were talking about someone else’s daughter, but Charity could see that dredging up the past cost her dear.

Though Stephen went away to Eton, followed by Sandhurst, Gwen’s education had consisted of scratchy lessons with a governess. The summer of 1939 she was eighteen and left to her own devices because of the threatened war.

‘All the male staff enlisted,’ Grandmother explained. ‘Jackson joined the brigadier as his batman. Even Miss Cody the governess left to offer herself as a nurse. When Rory Calhoun came by one day and offered his services I was delighted. The house and grounds were becoming terribly neglected and able-bodied men were much in demand.’

Charity sat very still on the bed. She wanted to picture the scene and find the missing piece in what she knew of her mother.

‘The man was an Irish gypsy,’ Grandmother said. ‘He had been turned down for active service because of an old injury to his leg, though aside from a slight limp I could see nothing wrong with him. At the time I saw him as a godsend: groom, gardener, plumber, carpenter and chauffeur, he handled it all. Henry held him in very high regard, even gave him a room above the stables. It never occurred to him that the man would seduce his daughter.’

‘Mother fell in love with him?’ Charity had read enough romantic books to identify with a happy black-haired Irishman, even if she was too young to understand about first love.

‘But why wouldn’t you let Mother marry him if he was nice?’

‘Oh Charity! Your grandfather was an officer and a gentleman. It just wasn’t done. Gwen was an innocent trusting girl who was taken in by a charming wastrel.’

‘But poor Mother – was she very upset?’

‘She ran off! We sent her to some relatives in Sussex once we’d dismissed Calhoun, but she never arrived. Henry refused even to try and find her. As he pointed out, there was a war going on and he didn’t want her shaming the family further.’

‘When did you see Mother again, then?’ Charity asked. She had a strong feeling her grandmother was only telling her part of the story.

‘Not until ’44. It was chaos here. Bitterly cold. What with rationing and no help in the house it wasn’t very welcoming. On top of that the house had been requisitioned by the military, so there were strange men coming and going at all hours. I was in bed with influenza when Gwen just arrived out of the blue with your father, Bertram, in tow and informed me they were getting married.’

‘Did you like my father?’

Isobel Pennycuick gave her granddaughter an odd look, as if she wondered what had prompted the question.

‘I was impressed by him,’ she said. ‘He was a handsome man, big and strong with a beautiful speaking voice. But he made me nervous. He was too forceful, too opinionated.’

She couldn’t bring herself to tell Charity the whole truth; not now, not ever. Gwen had become a different person in her long absence. The old Gwen had been vibrant and confident, could ride as well as any man, dance, sing and charm anyone. But that pretty daredevil was gone. In her place was a clean but shabbily dressed woman, her hair scraped back in a tight bun, looking much older than a twenty-three-year-old. The old Gwen had gone for ever.

‘Why did she have to marry Father? Couldn’t she have got a job somewhere?’

The old lady hesitated. It was a golden opportunity to warn her granddaughter against the dangers of tasting the sweetness of first love without the security of marriage. Something worse than losing Rory Calhoun had robbed her daughter of her looks and youth.

Charity picked up the picture of her mother that had been taken at her uncle’s wedding. She felt unbearably saddened by the fact that such a happy, pretty girl should grow up to become the defeated, bitter woman she remembered. ‘I wish she’d told me about all this. I shan’t ever keep secrets from my children.’

‘You might.’ Isobel Pennycuick caught hold of her granddaughter’s hand tightly. ‘You’ll understand that one day. None of us goes through life without being ashamed of something.’

It was the first time she’d touched Charity since the girl had arrived.

Chapter Five

‘How could that old bastard make her help give him an enema?’ Lou ranted to Geoff. ‘I suspected he was a pervert!’

Charity had told Geoff most of the tale about her stay with her uncle during the ride home from the station but it was heavily censored for the benefit of the children. Later she spilled out the whole story.

It was raining heavily, as it had been all day, but in the den it was cosy, the curtains drawn and a large jigsaw Lou had been doing with the children left out on the table.

‘I hate the man without even meeting him.’ Geoff moved from a seat at the table and flung himself down beside his wife on the settee. ‘I don’t like any of his ideas, but most of all I despise his plans for Charity.’

Lou had a really bad feeling about Stephen Pennycuick. It seemed to her this man was seeing the children as lumps of clay he could mould as he chose, without any thought to their needs, personalities or talents. Although at the moment Charity was their prime concern, Toby was another problem area.

As the months had passed it had become clear that Toby was a little disturbed. He was sneaky, told lies and on several occasions Lou had suspected he stole pennies from her purse. Worse still in her eyes was his tendency to bully other children. He seemed to look for weakness and then prey on it.

Yet however much they felt for all four children, they had no choice but to comply with the colonel’s wishes. He was their legal guardian and to go against him would only jeopardise the future of the entire family.

‘We’ll have to move fast,’ she said. ‘Find Charity a job he can’t argue about.’

‘But what?’

‘It would have to be a live-in one.’

‘A school?’ Geoff raised one eyebrow. ‘Under-housekeeper, assistant matron or something? We could suggest it was good training for her.’

‘If we side with Charity, he might take the others away,’ she said in a weak voice. ‘What do we do, Geoff?’

Geoff pondered the question for a moment, stroking his wife’s neck comfortingly.

‘There’s no guarantee he’ll let us keep them anyway,’ he said at length. ‘But if we didn’t try to protect Charity’s interests, we’d never forgive ourselves.’

‘I’m not so worried about Prue,’ Lou said. ‘A good school and an upper-class environment wouldn’t do her any harm.’

Geoff smiled. Neither of them had any doubt that Prue would pass her eleven-plus with flying colours. She liked order and nice things, gravitated to those children at school who came from good homes. She was anxious to have ballet and piano lessons and expressed a strong dislike for all things ‘common’. The truth was, she was a little snob and at heart she was very much a Pennycuick. If she knew her uncle was intending to turn her into ‘a lady’, she would heartily approve.

‘It might turn out all right for Toby too,’ Geoff said reluctantly. ‘You know my views on public schools, but he’d probably relish it – all that sport and plenty of male company.’

‘But the holidays?’ Lou pulled a face. ‘I bet that stupid man hasn’t even thought of that! Toby’s a little rascal and he needs love and stability. A bully of an uncle is hardly a good role model!’

Geoff patted her hand.

‘Let’s concentrate on Charity first,’ he suggested. ‘Who knows, he might lose interest in the others when he’s had a chance to think about it.’

‘Pigs might fly!’ Lou said darkly.

‘It looks a nice place!’ Charity studied the Bowes Court school prospectus intently. It was in Heathfield, Sussex, a part of England she’d been told was very lovely. The photographs showed a splendid mansion set in acres of playing fields and it had a reputation for being a fine, if lesser-known, public school for boys. ‘But what would I do there?’

‘They are looking for a kitchen maid.’ Geoff smiled reassuringly. ‘That doesn’t sound very thrilling, but the vicar’s niece worked there for a year and she loved it. You’d be helping the cook, laying tables, all the things you help us with here, only on a bigger scale. There’s other staff for company, you’ll have a nice room and long holidays you can spend with us. If you continue to study, in a year or two’s time you’ll be able to move on to something better.’

Charity was nervous about working anywhere and the thought of having to leave the Charleses’ home was terrifying. But this was a better prospect than working for Uncle Stephen, and she trusted Geoff’s judgement.

‘When can I go for an interview?’ she said in a tremulous voice.

‘I’ll ring now.’ Geoff smiled encouragingly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you down there. We aren’t just going to abandon you.’

Geoff went off to this study to telephone the school, but his heart was still heavy. Charity had been back from her uncle’s for two weeks now and he knew she was still brooding about it.