Authors: Sophie Dash
After so long travelling, her legs were unsteady and her head was cloudy. The sun’s heat still clung to the earth, emanating warmth. Long shadows stretched from the woods and cast spiky shapes against her gown, like claws and barbs and thorns. It would be a clear, muggy August night.
A bulky man with faded clothes and a patchy beard crossed her path. When he saw her he paused, midway to a small, walled garden, with a bucket in his hands. His flinty eyes scanned her.
“You’re her, ain’t ya?” he asked, before looking past her, to where the luggage was left in the road. “The rest up the lane?”
Ruth nodded.
The man offered a noncommittal grunt, before he walked on to fetch it.
Lips dry, Ruth called after him with a question almost too quiet to hear, for she resented asking it. “Where – where’s Mr Roscoe?”
“S’gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Town, I s’pose.”
“When will he be back?”
“Don’t know.” The gruff man paused, water sloshing over the bucket’s rim. “The wife’s inside. There should be a little supper left, if the pigs haven’t ’ad it yet.”
Ruth gave another dumb nod before she carried on, knuckles white on her luggage handle. A worn line along the fractured stonework led to a side door; kitchen smells escaped from it and her stomach woke up, painfully empty. She had consumed little on the journey, too anxious to eat. An old black dog grumbled at her when she passed over the threshold. At the noise, a rosy-skinned woman looked up from her chair by a dirty window. In her hands was an old shirt she was darning. A smug, ugly expression pulled at her lips when she saw Ruth. There was no surprise on her face and she made no effort to disguise her scrutiny.
“You’d have met Simms,” she said, pulling on a loose thread and going back to her work.
It was no better a welcome than the one she’d had at Miss Lamont’s Academy when she was twelve. Cold, cruel and unfeeling. She’d survived that experience in one piece. Only she had known that situation was temporary. This, here, was for ever.
“There’s stew in the pot.”
Ruth glanced over the blackened fireplace. Its warm, sweet smells seemed to hold decades of old wood smoke and forgotten memories. She did not know where to start, where everything was or what to do. Her arms seemed weighed down with more than she could carry, even though they were empty at that moment. An apology was soon to rise, about to climb out from her mouth, until she bit it back down. It had been a long time since someone apologised to her – thought of her –
considered
her.
A huff and the older woman was on her feet, rattling through shelves and cupboards, bustling around Ruth and making every effort to show her she was an inconvenience.
“I suppose you can call me Nessa,” she said, casting unpleasant glances towards Ruth, as though she were a strange curiosity at a traveller’s show. With heavy motions, Nessa put a bowl down and Ruth sat in front of it. After the older woman’s immense performance in fetching such a meagre meal, Ruth was obliged to eat it – and she was hungry enough.
“He’s got you with child – is that it?”
The spoon stilled at Ruth’s lips. “No.”
“That’s what the village says.”
After all the rumours in London, the opinions of a small village didn’t seem to matter.
The stew was wholesome, if plain. Ruth ate without words, making no talk, thinking little, moving mechanically under Nessa’s firm gaze. There was a battle going on; the woman wanted to seem stronger, but Ruth put herself above it with her silence. She’d been bullied by too many people for far too long to crumble now – or even to care.
What would the girls at the academy think if they could see her now? The news should have reached them already and the name Ruth Osbourne would be used as a warning.
This is how far a young woman can fall.
These are the dangers that men present.
If even she – the best of us – can stumble, so can you.
Listless, Ruth asked, “Where’s my room?”
***
Whatever ‘preparations’ had been made for her arrival had been minimal, if any had been made at all. At least Isaac was absent from the rickety old house. For now.
The master bedroom was on the floor above. It was a dusty space with panelled walls that were more wormwood holes than actual wood. It smelt old. The sheets were clean at least, even if nothing else was.
Ruth ran one hand along the fabric, eyes hard. “What time does Mr Roscoe usually get back from town?”
“Why are you asking me? He’s your husband,” replied Nessa, and Ruth half-expected her to cackle. “Besides, he ain’t at the town, he’s at the village inn.”
“Pardon?”
“He’s holed up there for the time being,” said the woman, wallowing in her superior knowledge. “I don’t think he’ll be coming back to the farmhouse for a long while and I reckon I know why.” A pointed sneer. “You be wanting anythin’ else?”
“Not from you,” said Ruth, back straight, fists tight, as the woman shuffled from the room and closed the door. Isaac was staying at the inn? Did travelling on ahead not give him enough distance from her that he sought it now? Was he already that sick of her and
why
did she care? It shouldn’t hurt her, but it did.
What would she have been doing right now were she Mrs Pembroke? A honeymoon, perhaps. To a place filled with beauty, sumptuous furnishings and endless food. She had never been one for material possessions, always putting practicality first, but now that such a life had been taken from her, the clothes she wore seemed far too plain, the food she tasted far too weak, the spaces she found herself in far too small. In another reality she’d have ended up with Albert. Perhaps it was simply a way to make herself feel better, but Ruth told herself that no finery, no jewels, no travel would have been worth marrying that toad.
The view from the bedroom window showed her that the gold had faded from the tallest treetops, the sun having fled and given the world up to shadow. Ruth was tired, though she told herself she’d never be able to sleep. Not with what was to come.
Isaac is no toad,
she thought.
But he certainly behaves like a beast.
She curled up on the bed, legs tucked against her, and promised herself she wouldn’t rest. Would Isaac return to her tonight?
Do I want him to?
Ruth decided she would wait and be alert and prepared for what a marriage night – however delayed – would bring.
Within minutes she was gone.
***
Sunlight’s probing fingers woke Ruth a little after dawn. The birds sang at their loudest, claiming the morning for their own. There was no moment when she could have believed she was elsewhere, no forgetful, wistful second where she was ignorant. Ruth knew exactly where she was and why she was there.
What have I done?
The room had adopted last night’s coldness and she felt worn, her gown lined and layered with all the filth from her travels. She wanted to peel back her own skin and scrub away at it, for it was as though all that grime had somehow sunk down deeper than she’d ever imagined it could. All her sins, all her mistakes, had caught up with her until she’d never purge them or clean them away.
Reality had finally set in.
Better to get up, to start moving, or else she’d never leave the bed.
Ruth would stay there for ever, a ghost in the corner room, left to fade away. And where was Isaac? If she kept busy, she’d cope. It had always been her mechanism, her way to handle any situation. Ever since she was little it had helped, for her uncle had never believed in idleness.
Chin up. Back straight. There’s work to be done.
Even Ruth’s nails itched with inactivity as she pulled on the door and crept along the hallway. Her feet were loose in her unlaced boots, grit rattling around beside her toes. The hazy light streaming through the windows was warming as she moved downstairs, in search of the outdoors, with a hope that a light summer breeze could clear her head.
Already she preferred this place to London. After all, no one had called her a whore and spat at her. That, at least, was a mercy. Although she wouldn’t put it past Nessa, who was in the kitchen, bustling around and scrubbing pots. Ruth did not have the strength to face her.
She roamed the overgrown, untended, wild grounds and its dry, golden fields. A walled vegetable garden was fat with marrows and Ruth tripped her way through it, careful to mind any fragile stems. Only one corner seemed tended to and useful, the rest gone to seed and left to rot. Beyond it was a rose garden, long-strangled by the nettles that grew around it. The wall had partially given way on one side and she leant against it, disturbing a few flat stones and the creatures that lived beneath them.
“I didn’t think he’d marry a girl like you.” Simms spoke up, Nessa’s husband whom she had briefly crossed paths with yesterday. He had a scythe slung lazily over his back and seemed more alert than anyone else that morning, small eyes twinkling.
Ruth was ready for another argument and her fingers balled into fists at her sides. “Then who did you think he’d marry?”
“No one I can rightly mention to a lady like yourself.” He smiled an easy smile that had a few teeth missing. “The lad had all the village girls after him with that face, he did. That was back in the day, afore he took himself off.”
To Ruth, the younger Isaac Roscoe sounded as worrisome as his older counterpart, at least where women were concerned.
“They knew better than to marry ’im though,” sniffed Simms, leaning one hip upon the drystone wall. “Not after what happened to his father.”
“Oh?” Ruth knew friendship when it had been offered and she could recognise a man who liked to talk. In her conversations with men before, although they were more like lectures, she’d been told to listen and had done so from politeness. This was different. The information Simms gave her now was a gift she wanted to receive. “What happened to his father?”
“I don’t suppose no one’s told you nothin’,” remarked Simms rightly. “Ain’t fair if the whole village, the whole o’ Falmouth knows it and you don’t. The late Mr Roscoe lost it all to his brother – the whole estate. They tricked him and got him to gamble it away. Took it right from under him. Then his son, Isaac’s cousin, inherited the lot. Never liked him much. Spoilt he is.” Simms clicked his tongue. “He sold the land the minute he could, took the money, rented it out to anyone and let it fall into the heap it is now.”
Ruth could see the effects, the rot and the ruin, their bedraggled surroundings that her organised mind fought to make right. It was her role in life, or had been at the academy. To make it better, to help, to roll up her sleeves and get stuck in. She shook her head, shaking off the image. “Why?”
“The lot across the hill at Trewince.” He nodded north, to where the hill sank down into a valley. “They were in trouble after the mines closed down; it were a rough time. Isaac’s father was a sad man after he lost his wife, and didn’t seem to mind losing the rest. Didn’t seem to care about anything.”
“Not even his son?”
Simms shrugged. “Isaac ain’t got nothing. Even this house ain’t his; his cousin lets him stay to keep that Lady Mawes happy – and your Mr Roscoe lets us stay, if the wife and I mind the place.”
Though their version of ‘minding’ was to shut the house up and stick to the smallest rooms – a pauper’s living.
“He’s not ‘my’ Mr Roscoe.”
Another shrug and Simms left her, venturing out along the well-worn meadow path.
“Mr Simms,” called Ruth. “This rose garden – it’s yours?”
“It ain’t nobody’s. Hasn’t been for a long time.”
“Would you like help with it?”
He gave a noncommittal wave that Ruth took as a ‘yes’. It wasn’t the garden she’d long dreamt of, with honeysuckle climbing up a far wall and lavender by the gate. It didn’t even resemble a garden at all. It was half-dead, unloved and abandoned. And it was hers now. As was the man she’d married, who could not even stand be around her.
***
It eased Ruth’s mind to get her hands dirty, to work, to do what came naturally to her. At the academy she had spent many a weekend beside the elderly Mr Lamont, the botanist, trying to pick up his knowledge. Weeding was not easy and she didn’t want it to be. The ground was hard, the air dusty, the tangle tough to break through. Within an hour her dress was far ruined. It had been beyond salvation anyway. A constant anxiety had drowned her while in London but she had lost it now, well, most of it, provided she did not dwell on her new, absent husband. Ruth scraped back her hair, twigs and all, into a scarf. Simms had thrown an old pair of leather gloves her way when he’d stumbled across her, but made no other comment. The old black dog she’d first seen by the kitchen, May, had come to join her, content for quiet company. Now and again her grey muzzle nudged Ruth’s elbow, a demand for attention that she gave.
Many flowers were familiar – common daisies, wild poppies, blue cornflowers – and yet many defied her knowledge. What wild, ragged flora did they grow off the Cornish coast? What wild, ragged men, for that matter?
Now you’re free to hate me as you please.
Did she? Not as much as she wanted to.
Pins and needles wormed up Ruth’s legs. The sun was hot on her skin and yet this was the first time that she had felt like herself since… Since the ball when Isaac had asked her to dance and given her the choice to say no…
It was a trick. He was using you. Don’t let him do it again.
The entire day passed in that fashion, with her mind a spinning top that circled the same turgid doubts and frustrations again and again and again. Dinner came and she ate alone in the kitchen.
A tense knot formed in Ruth’s stomach as she trod up the stairs and took the bedroom, one she did not share with another. She and Isaac were man and wife now and she assumed their union would be made legal. She knew what the law and the church said about consummation.
As before, she slept like the dead, and she slept alone.
He never came.
***
Three days passed by in the same fashion. August was drawing to a close and Ruth waited for Isaac to show himself. He never did. It was unexpected. But she hadn’t known what to expect. Was the man simply drinking, trying to forget her, punishing her – or more likely himself?