Dark Side of the Street - Jack Higgins [33]
The hut was larger than it had looked from the farmyard and in reasonable condition. There was fresh hay inside, dry and sweet and sacks of feedstuffs, probably for the sheep. He lit a cigarette, went back outside again, and crossed to the scattering of rocks that formed the spine of the hill.
From there he had a clear view of the main road in the valley below shrouded in mist, a gleam of water beyond. A reservoir, perhaps a lake? He turned away and with something of a shock, found that Molly Crowther was standing watching him.
She made a strange melancholy figure, fitting perfectly into that dead landscape in an old black coat with the padded shoulders fashionable during the war years. A scarf was bound tightly around the strong peasant face.
"Hello there," Chavasse said, walking to meet her. "Did everything go all right?"
She nodded with a curious indifference. "The priest didn't waste much time. He was getting wet."
"Where's your father?"
"Gone into the next village with Billy. He dropped me down there on the road. It's quicker to walk over the hill and I wanted to check on the sheep."
"Do you look after them?"
"Most of the time. Billy helps me when he's in the mood. The trouble is he doesn't know his own strength. One minute he's fondling a lamb, the next its neck is broken. He isn't very reliable."
"I see your point." Chavasse hesitated and went on, "I'm sorry about your mother."
"I'm not," she said with brutal frankness. "She had cancer of the stomach during the last year of her life and refused to go to hospital. I had to look after her. It wasn't much of a time for either of us. She's well out of this place anyway."
"Don't you like it here?"
She turned on him in surprise. "Who could like a place like this?" She flung out an arm that seemed to embrace the whole wind-swept landscape. "Even the trees grow crooked here. It's a dead world. I sometimes think the only living things in it are the sheep and they're like Billy--witless."
"Why don't you leave?"
"I couldn't before--there was my mother to consider. Now it's too late. I'm squeezed dry. I wouldn't know where to go."
There was real pain in her voice and Chavasse felt genuinely sorry for her. "Perhaps your father could help. He may intend to now that your mother has gone."
"There's only one thing he wants to do for me--God knows he's tried that often enough." She laughed harshly. "My father died when I was three. He was a gypsy like my mother. She met Sam Crowther at Skipton Market ten years ago and married him within a week. The worst day's work she ever did in her life."
"You sound as if you hate him."
"And this place--all I ever wanted was to get away."
"Where would you like to go?"
"I've never really thought about it." She shrugged. "Some place where I could get a decent job, wear nice clothes, meet people--London, maybe."
From her vantage point it must have seemed as remote as the moon and just about as romantic. "Distance lends enchantment," he told her gently. "London can be the loneliest place on earth."
"I'd take my chances." They had reached one of the boundary walls and she leaned against it, arms folded under her breasts. "It must be marvelous to be able to go places--do exciting things--like Mr. Youngblood, for instance."
"Five years in gaol," Chavasse said. "Another fifteen to go if they catch him--perhaps more now. Nothing very romantic there."
"I mean before that," she said with a slight trace of impatience. "He was a smuggler, you know."
"Amongst other things."
She rushed on, looking animated for the first time since he had known her. "I read an article about him in one of the Sunday papers last year. They said he was a modern Robin Hood."
"I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Depends what the original was like."
"But it's true," she insisted. "They published an interview with an old lady who'd been treated with eviction because she couldn't pay her rent. Somebody told Mr.