‘What will we do then?’
‘You can help me if you want.’
He helped her pull the cow out from the rocks and coax it down the incline to the path. He used a strip of gorse to beat the cow forward. He even risked a playful gorsing of Miggy’s thighs. Try as she might she couldn’t stop her smiles. Miggy had two creatures captive on her rope, the heifer and the man. She felt as mossy as the ground. She’d give Ralph a kiss of thanks when she got home for helping with the cow. Where was the harm in that? Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.
They were halfway to the safety of the cottage and thinking only of themselves when Aymer Smith, touting his Duty along the coast, caught sight of them. He was in a cheerful mood. What a relief it was for him to be free of the bells, the guests, the corridors of the inn, to walk, and contemplate the fascinations of the coast. He had noticed, as he progressed away from Wherrytown, how one mile differed from the next, how landscape could transform in minutes from welcoming to inhospitable, how vegetation changed from rich to meagre, how time appeared to wind back on itself so that the 1836 of Wherrytown, its modest comforts and its steadiness, seemed a hundred years away as he approached Dry Manston. There weren’t many trees for shelter now. And what trees there were, compared to those around the town, were angular. They shrank and thickened; they turned their trunks against the wind, and wore more bark. The people did the same. Aymer could regard himself as lean and willowy compared to them.
He called to Ralph and Miggy to wait for him, with a directness and informality that in a town would be considered improper. A morning out of Wherrytown had taught him that the diffidence and the reverence that marked the Spirit of the Age when strangers of two classes or two sexes met on city streets had not yet migrated here. The kelping families he’d encountered hadn’t been paralysed by such a visitor. They didn’t gape or turn away. They spoke to him openly, shook his hand and asked unsolicited questions. Boys and girls — children in nothing else but size — investigated him, pulling his clothes, pressing the leather of his boots, and treated Whip, Aymer’s new companion, to strips of fish, yet didn’t offer Aymer anything to drink.
He rehearsed with their parents the innovations in the soap industry, and what it meant for kelpers. ‘We’ll manage without kelp, God willing,’ they said. ‘The fishing’s good enough these last few years. There’s pilchards up tonight and we’ll do well.’ Aymer wondered why he’d come so far, with such a conscience, if the damage to their lives when the patronage of Hector Smith & Sons was withdrawn would be so inconsequential. Perhaps, if they had offered some brief signs of dismay, he would have felt less slighted.
‘You’ll miss the money, surely?’
‘Hah! Mr Howells has most of it!’
The kelpers took Aymer’s shilling and some bars of soap, and called their daughters for inspection, the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump, the sour and the sweet, and all of them smiling wildly. This Kitty, fourteen years of age, was healthy and hard-working. She’d make a decent maid. This Mary, only ten, was useful round the house and would be glad of any work in Hector Smith & Sons. This Janie, seventeen, could work as hard as any man, ‘Look at her muscles, Mr Smith!’ and she could wet-nurse, cook or scrub. Did Aymer know of anyone who could offer employment to any of these girls? Aymer wrote their names down in his notebook and made promises he knew he couldn’t keep. They’d let him take their daughters there and then, he felt, and not expect to see them any more, so long as they had ‘prospects and positions’.
Aymer’s appetite for kelpers and their daughters was diminishing when he saw Miggy Bowe and Ralph Parkiss with their stolen cow.
‘Good morning, sirs,’ he called, a long man in a black tarpaulin coat, hurrying to catch up with them on the path. ‘Please stand and wait for me.’ They turned to answer him. He waved. They stood stock-still, uncertain what to do. Miggy knew the type of man he was, though he was out of season, a winter cuckoo. From time to time, usually in the spring and summer, she’d come across such pale-looking fellows walking on the coast, with knapsacks on their backs, and walking sticks. These were the only people that she’d ever met that were more than a day’s walk from their homes — apart from Ralph. They might be alone, in pairs, in groups of four or five. Often they were lost. They asked directions to the Cradle Rock which, it seemed, they’d travelled all this way to see. Their purpose was to touch and sway the Rock. They’d missed it by a half a mile or more. There’d always be a penny in it if Miggy would lead them to the Rock and show them where they had to put their backs to set it in motion. Sometimes these men took their easels to the beach, or sat on dunes with sketch pads on their knees. Sometimes they came with hammers and broke up rocks, fossil-bibbing, or spent inexplicable hours attending on the sea birds. Miggy would then earn pennies by showing where the razorbills were nesting, or clambering down loose cliffs to collect gulls’ eggs for them. Occasionally there were ladies, too, with umbrellas and clothes that were, for Miggy, colourless and disappointing. One of Walter Howells’s men from Wherrytown or George from the inn was often in attendance as a guide and porter. Then there’d be a picnic on the sand and Miggy, if she smiled and was polite, could importune some bread and mutton for herself. She dreamed some man — some gentleman — would buy her for a penny and take her far from home.
Aymer didn’t have a bag or easel. She presumed he was a man who’d missed the Cradle Rock. Except he didn’t seem lost, but purposeful. Perhaps he’d come about the Belle. An excise man? No, he was far too tall and clerky, and excise men didn’t work on the Sabbath. A shipping agent, then? Someone with proper title to the cows? Now Miggy was alarmed. He waved at them again, and whistled. A dog — the same small bitch that had gone off with the American sailors the day before — ran out of the furze, circled the stranger, and then ran barking towards Miggy, Ralph Parkiss and the heifer. The young cow broke away and ran. Miggy didn’t attempt to hold her. She let the rope fall. She waved back at the man, and when she lowered her arm tucked her neckchief, the red-and-white ensign from the Belle, under her smock. Perhaps he was a ship’s officer. He had the ship’s dog, after all. And one sleeve of his coat was armless. Perhaps he’d hurt it in the storm. Perhaps he’d lost it in a brawl with pirates, or a whale, or in the war with Bonaparte. Perhaps he’d seen they’d roped the cow. Ralph would be in trouble. Miggy Bowe rocked from foot to foot. She was set in motion by two men like the Cradle Rock, swaying, heavy, inconsolable. Her heart was beating fast.
‘Is he your captain, Ralph?’ she said.
‘I don’t know who the fellow is. I saw him at the inn last night.’
The dog did not respond to Aymer’s ‘Down, Whip. Down.’ She’d found two friends, one who smelled of other dogs, and one who was a shipmate. She nuzzled Ralph. She jumped at Miggy’s legs and licked the stains of breakfast from her fingers.
‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Aymer reached them on the path. He put his hand out, first to Ralph. ‘I know you, sir, I think. We dined together at the inn. Yes, yes. I know a face.’
He turned to Miggy.
‘My little lady,’ Miggy said, using Whip to shield her from the handshake that Aymer was offering, ‘come to see us, have you, sweet? Is she yours, this little ’un?’ Aymer blushed. Not his first blush of the day. He hadn’t known she was a girl, a pert-faced, handsome girl at that. She was dressed like a farmboy.
‘I’m Aymer Smith of Hector Smith & Sons,’ he said. His face had quickly cooled and paled. ‘And you? What are your family; kelpers?’ Any hopes that Miggy had that this man had lost an arm to whales were shattered. His voice was not heroic, but clipped and fussy. You might imagine him to be distinguished, dashing at a distance, but now his face was close she saw he was quite old, older than her mother anyhow, and gaunt. He had a second arm, as well. It moved below his coat.