Miss Appleby's Academy

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Emma Appleby's arrival in the County Durham village of Tow Law provokes deep suspicion in the locals who want nothing to do with her – except for pub landlord Mick Castle. When Emma opens an academy and sets herself up in competition with the local school, she provokes a savage response from the community. But she will not be deterred – even when her past is revealed and Mick is forced to choose between family and love.

Release date: January 31, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

It snows a lot in New England. After the fall when the leaves have turned to lime and crimson and orange and given up the unequal fight and dropped from the trees like jewels the weather turns hard and great square flakes light the sky.

Emma Appleby, almost thirty, loved the winter best of all. Her father said that when she was his age she would long for the spring, but she delighted at making snowmen when she was small, skating on frozen ponds when she grew older, and she didn’t think she would ever give up her regard for her favourite season nor cease to listen for the sound of sleigh bells at Christmas and gather with her family and friends in the little white church to give thanks for another year.

She liked to walk for miles, and would encourage her father out day after day to enjoy the snow scenes. So it was nothing special that particular afternoon in December that they were two miles from home and following carriage tracks along the top of the ridge.

She stopped at the very highest point where the tracks were dug deep into the snow: they were twisted and turned as though the coach had gone out of control. There were deep ruts and gouged-out tracks, perhaps because of horses’ hooves, and the snow was flung away everywhere. Emma was afraid to look and only glad her father was there, because at the very height of the ridge you could see to the bottom. More snow was displaced and there was the coach, overturned as she had feared. She cried out and put her hand over her mouth.

Emma gasped, and her father, coming up behind her, panting, followed her gaze, and then he forgot his tiredness and he too stared. Below, the brown horses were lying at unnatural angles and there was blood, bright scarlet, and the snow around was all shapes and turns. Emma hesitated for only a few seconds and then, regardless of the revulsion which came upon her, she began to plunge downward while her father called after her, ‘Wait, Emma, the drifts may be very deep,’ and since the snow came up to the top of her thighs and impeded her progress somewhat but did not stop her, he too began to lift his legs high enough so that he made progress through the three-foot-high covering. It was difficult to do that, but Emma barely noticed it. Her heart beat hard and even when her breathing shallowed for the effort she waded on through the sea of white, trying to stop herself from worrying about what tragedy she would find.

She did not stop until she had reached the carriage, but she could see then the upside-down coach, and there were people inside. Nobody was moving and they too were lying like rag dolls in confusion, in ways which made her think they would never move again. She took another breath so that she would not let herself break down in tears. There was no room here for such things, she told herself, there must be something she could do. She heard her father’s voice. Like any good parent he would have shielded her from whatever disaster he could, but Emma took no notice.

She got down in the snow. Inside the coach there were four people as far as she could make out, and none of them was moving. One door could not be reached because the coach lay on its side. The other was somehow jammed shut, and hard as she tried, and hard as her father tried, they could not budge it. She glanced away as though if she did so when she glanced back the scene would have been some mirage which was gone, but the stillness all around confirmed what she had feared, that there was no one left alive from the accident.

Her father walked all around the outside, and she followed him. There were another two men who had been thrown clear, the driver and another passenger who no doubt had been on top at the front. She looked up back to the ridge where she and her father had seen what had happened, and she thought that the driver must have lost control in the ice and been taken too close to the edge and then had been able to do nothing to stop the accident.

‘I must go back for help,’ her father said.

‘No, let me go. I’m faster than you.’

She didn’t listen any further. It wasn’t much of a choice, she thought, to stay with the dead or run for help which she knew was beyond them, but it was the only thing to do. She was glad of action even though her legs ached before she had gone half a mile in the depth of snow, and it seemed to her a very long time before she came in sight of the little white town which was her home. She could see the church spire first and it lifted her spirits because she was so tired by then.

She ran up the wide road towards her brother’s house. Laurence and his wife had not been married long. She could not think what else to do. It was Saturday afternoon, just after lunch, and most people were still indoors after the midday meal. He would know what to do, he was reliable, he was a lawyer, a good lawyer she corrected herself, glad to think of something which did not really matter here. The front gate was open, it could not be closed because of the amount of snow. She ran up the path, slipping because it had been cleared only that morning and had set hard. She tried the front door and it gave (nobody ever locked their doors), and she shouted and almost fell into the hall as her brother came out of the dining room, staring at the fuss she was making.

On seeing him Emma felt such relief that she wanted to cry. She was too out of breath to cry and speak, so she poured out the story as fast as she could and he listened. He was a good listener, it was part of his job to do that, and he was tall and solid and sturdy and he was a happy man with all his married life to look forward to, and such things made people strong, Emma knew.

Happiness freed you to meet whatever problems arose.

*

He didn’t interrupt, he nodded, his eyes grew wide and his expression stern, his mouth went into a line and when the tale was finished he was already putting on his coat and boots and saying to her, because his wife had come into the hall and heard the tale too, ‘Stay there with Verity.’

‘No,’ Emma said. ‘I’m coming with you.’

‘There’s nothing you can do. They’re all dead, you said so—’

‘I don’t know so,’ she argued, ‘and I’m not leaving you and Father.’ There was no logic to this, she felt he was right. She could hardly use tools to break into the coach, she could not pull dead bodies from it, and her brother, as her father, was trying to shield her, and she knew that it made sense; she might even be a burden to the men in some way.

‘Besides, I can show you exactly where it is.’ He argued no more. He was already out of the door and he would go to his neighbours and friends and those who had the ability to determine what happened next: the doctor, the firemen, the police.

Verity too urged her to stay at home. Verity was big with her first child and moved slowly, but Emma ignored her and went back through the front door again. She had the feeling her brother could find the place with a few directions, but she wanted to be there trying to do something useful. The men were ready in a very short time and she ploughed back through the snow, feeling not tired now but glad to be useful.

The light was already beginning to fade. Once darkness had set in it would be a lot more difficult to do anything at all. Laurence jemmied open the door, but her initial reaction had been right: the four people inside were dead. The six bodies had to be carried back to the town on a big cart. The rest could be left until another day.

‘Are you ready?’ Laurence said when it was so dark that she could not see his face.

Emma hesitated.

‘There’s nothing more to be done and certainly nothing a woman could do here,’ he said briskly to hide his emotions. He even turned away.

Still Emma hesitated. ‘In a moment,’ she said.

He looked at her as he had always looked at her when he was exasperated. As siblings they had so little in common, she thought, and although younger than her, he was forever telling her what to do. The cart left, the men went and she stood. She didn’t know why, Laurence was right as usual, she could achieve nothing here, and yet she could not go. Something which had happened here was still going on. She couldn’t have explained it to him, he would have said it was nothing but old wives’ tales, women’s superstition and ridiculous, but he did not linger any further. He was as tired as the rest.

Emma’s legs ached. She longed to go, but couldn’t. She walked around. She tried not to look at the carriage or the dead horses or the different bits and pieces which had been thrown clear because of the accident. It grew quiet. She was not sure she could find her way back in the darkness. She stood for another moment as she watched Laurence’s tall figure fading away into the night and then she heard something, or did she? She listened. There it was again. Crying. It could have been some kind of bird or an animal. Whatever – it was something in distress, and in this temperature it would not last the night.

‘Laurence, wait!’

‘Come on, Emma, hurry up,’ he responded, stopping. ‘It’s freezing hard and Verity is all alone in the house.’

‘Wait!’

He heard the urgency in her voice and did not start walking again. She went round and round the scene of the accident, stopping every few yards, but there was silence. Had she imagined it? Then, but faintly, she heard it again and moved in the direction of the noise. She was getting nearer. It happened once more and she thought if she hadn’t moved closer she would have lost the cry altogether, abandoned it as a figment of her imagination. There was finally a very faint cry and she could see in the shadows a small form.

‘Laurence!’

He was near her now. Emma got down in the hard snow. A cold wind was cutting across the bottom of the valley. She scooped up the form. It was warm, but only just to her touch.

‘Oh my God, it’s a baby. Go back to the coach and see if you can find anything to wrap it in.’

He paused as though he would argue and then he went and came back with some kind of huge blanket and they wrapped the child in it and started for home.

*

‘You came to us out of the snow,’ she would tell George afterwards. Nobody lied to him, nobody pretended that he had been born in Mid Haven. His parents had been Irish immigrants on their way to who knows where when exhaustion, poverty and an overturned wagon had claimed them and their friends.

At night she would tell George stories of how his parents had come from Ireland in a very large ship, hoping for a better life, they had got him to the New World and could manage no more, but he had Emma and her father and the prosperity of a town like Mid Haven.

It was indeed a haven, she always thought, with its college, lovely buildings, pretty streets and squares. The New England houses were well built of white wood and it was prosperous. It had culture, education and people like her father, she thought affectionately, people who cared about those less fortunate than themselves.

From the beginning Emma found herself desperate to keep the child. Her father certainly gave the matter no more thought: he accepted George into their household with joy and would sit the little boy on his knee and read to him things which would have been well beyond the child’s comprehension, though George always seemed happy sitting there, listening to her father’s melodious voice as he talked of the things which mattered to him: philosophy and science. He would read poetry and George would sit quite still and watch the pages of the book and absorb the words.

Her brother, Laurence, said that it was ridiculous, the child was too young to understand. Laurence had told her that she should not keep the child: she was an unmarried woman, whatever would people think? He should go to a couple who might raise him, but Emma did not take his advice.

‘I found him,’ she said. She might just as well have claimed him as she would a game, she thought with guilt afterwards.

Her mother had died some months before and their household was silent with grief. She and her father now had something to do besides wish things were otherwise. The child made a huge difference.

‘You have no idea what he’ll be like,’ Laurence said.

‘He’s a boy like any other,’ Emma said.

At least Laurence did not suggest that he and Verity should take George. Verity was delivered of a boy two months later and they had sufficient to cope with, Emma judged. Laurence, she knew, had looked at the child’s black hair and blue eyes and milky skin. He was so obviously Irish, and the Irish were not well liked here. They did not stay, they moved further into the country as George’s parents had been trying to do.

George was a sunny-tempered child. The first words he said were her father’s name and hers, and Emma was delighted every day by his company. She taught him the names of the flowers and trees in the garden. He loved to watch the birds come down to drink from the stone birdbath and take baths, the bigger ones in turn, the small brown birds jumping in and out of the water in game. George liked to run about in the spring warmth, and for her to run giggling after him.

She could not imagine having had a child of her own and loving him more. There had been a time when she looked on other women’s children with envy and wondered why she had been singled out for such a life and wished for a husband and a home and for somebody to shut the bedroom door with them both inside, but it had not happened and yet she had George and he was a delight.

As he got older and went to school, waiting for George to come home each day was one of the pleasures which made Emma’s life worthwhile. He would run all the way back because although he liked school he liked to be with her much more. He would fling open the door, throw his schoolbag towards the hallstand and then call her name from halfway between the various downstairs rooms, and when he saw her he would run and throw his arms about her. She did not think that life could be any better.

*

‘You have too much to do,’ Laurence said, and sighed heavily as he closed the sitting-room door. Emma looked up. She had been mending George’s torn trousers. He loved climbing trees and was forever tearing his clothes.

It had been a long hot summer and although she usually enjoyed the summer it seemed to her that since her father had been taken ill in June the heat had been relentless and the yellow flowers had grown so tall that they had overbalanced onto the lawn. The fruit had not ripened as it should have done for lack of water: the plums had shrivelled stonelike upon the trees and the apples and pears were lost among the many leaves which overshadowed them. The blackbirds had had the best of the strawberries and blueberries because she had not had enough time to pick them.

‘Could George not have done that for you?’ her sister-in-law Verity had said, and Laurence added, ‘What an idle little fellow he is.’

She had tried to distract George from her father’s illness by telling him to go fishing or swimming with his friends, but George had devoted himself to her father and would read him to sleep while the bumble bees buzzed their way through the second flowering of the purple chive clusters below, the windows open to the garden.

‘What were you thinking of, putting a herb garden there?’ Verity asked. ‘It’s the perfect place for roses.’

Emma could smell the thyme which flowered a delicate shade of pink, the lemon balm which overran the path so that you could not help standing on it and dispersing its clean sharp scent into the afternoons. Her father loved the smell of the herbs; he had said in jest before the stroke which took his power of speech that he loved it better than any flower because it reminded him of Emma’s wonderful dinners.

The evening of the stroke, when she had hoped he was getting better, she looked in on him after George had gone to bed. She thought he was asleep. The weather had broken, she was glad of the cooling breeze but was about to close the window against the rain when she heard him murmur to her from the bed. She stopped.

‘Leave the curtains open, child, I like them like that. I like to see the rain and hear it when I drop off and it’s the relief of it. Leave the lamp off, open the window and let the air in.’

She obeyed him, and the smell of fresh rain on the herbs beneath was calming.

‘You haven’t called me “child” in years,’ she said, going to him, only half able to see how he looked because his face was in shadow. ‘You seem a little better.’

‘I’m worried, Emma.’ He moved about in the bed as though he were uncomfortable, and she went over and smoothed the sheets and coverlet as she had a done a hundred times since he had been taken ill. She wished she could do more.

He patted the bed and she sat down.

‘There’s nothing to worry over,’ she said in her strongest voice. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Oh Emma, what a very bad liar you are.’

She tried to laugh this off, but the lump in her throat wouldn’t allow it. She shook her head.

‘I have nothing to leave you—’ he said.

‘I won’t need anything, Father.’

‘It’s all been so badly done, and I’m sorry.’

The tears would not hold and began to glass the front of her eyes. She moved herself as though the distraction would stop them, and when her voice came out it was the whisper she had promised herself it would not be.

‘You’re all the world to me,’ she said. ‘The best father a woman ever had.’

He shook his head and moved about even more, so agitated. ‘I’m sorry for the things I did in my life which were ugly and hurtful. I wish there was some way I could make up for them now, but there isn’t. I’ve had to live with it.’

‘You’ve never hurt anybody,’ she said, dismayed that he should regard himself in this way.

He lay back on the pillows and his voice was weaker. ‘When you’re a young man you think everything you do is right, you’re brought up to believe it. It doesn’t matter how bad it is because the world is yours and women and children they come second.’

‘Please, don’t upset yourself. There’s no need.’

‘Do you remember the garden path at home? The smell of the herbs reminds me of it and your mother calling you into the house for your tea.’

Vaguely she thought she could hear her mother’s voice, in a wild cold place and the house where the fires were big.

She had chance to recall nothing more because her father’s face and his body began to alter as the stroke invaded him. Those were to be the last words he said.

*

She had tried not to think about that conversation, she still held that he would get better. She had to hold on to that, there seemed nothing else, but she was reminded of it all once again; she could not tear her mind from the memory. She tried to concentrate on Laurence now, thinking that he might suggest she should hire someone to help in the garden. She was taken aback when he said, ‘George should go away to school.’

Emma was so shocked that she didn’t know what to say, and took refuge in, ‘Father is devoted to him.’

‘Most of the time I don’t think he’s aware of anyone. He’s sleeping more and more deeply.’

Emma wanted to shout out loud that he was doing nothing of the kind, instead of which she blinked down at the tidy needlework as though there were more to do.

‘Dr Shuttleworth says he won’t last the week,’ Laurence said.

Emma bit off the thread now that the trousers were finished, folded them and found herself unable to move or speak.

‘I thought I would come round later and go through Father’s papers. There are so many of them which he’s ignored, it could take weeks.’

Emma wanted to scream and shout that their father was not dead yet, but she felt a sudden sympathy for her brother because he didn’t look at her and she thought that perhaps sorting papers was his way of dealing with something which men were not allowed to acknowledge hurt them deeply.

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ she said with energy, and she waited for him to look at her, but of course he didn’t. He didn’t ever seem to look at her directly: he always had such important things to do and so many of them.

He merely nodded and went away home for his evening meal.

He came back almost straight afterwards, as though for once he wanted to be in the house; perhaps he too wished for a way to hold off their father’s death and thought, as a man might, that if he were there and the doors bolted death would have no way in. It was a foolish notion which Emma rather liked, but instead of her brother’s presence being of comfort it was quite the opposite, and all the time he was there in the study she moved from room to room trying to be efficient and accomplishing nothing.

In the end she went and opened the study door. There were papers stacked beside him and he said, in an attempt at humour, ‘I don’t think he’s ever thrown anything away,’ and Emma smiled in acknowledgement of the attempt and moved further into the room as Laurence frowned at the papers in his hand. ‘Look at this.’

She went and bent over to look.

‘It’s really old,’ Laurence said, ‘just some notes about a lecture he was probably giving. It’s from when we lived in England, well, not me obviously, but you and Mother and Father. He never talked about it, did he?’

‘You’re too young to remember. He did say something before he was so ill, but it was vague. And I don’t remember much, just a house set up high in the village where we were. Tow Law Town. A little mining town in the middle of County Durham. We were happy there. He used to lift me up and throw me up high and catch me. He seemed so tall.’

‘He was. Is,’ Laurence amended.

‘So are you.’ Her brother was one of the tallest men in the area. Somehow she had always thought it would have made him kinder, that he might hold off life for her, that he might have shielded her and her father as he grew older, but he never had. Perhaps he was the kind of person whose ability to love was limited to his wife and children. It must be, she knew, a great responsibility.

He got up abruptly, in case, she thought, he was about to show his feelings. He said it was late and Verity would be expecting him home. Seconds later he was gone, leaving the desk untidy. Would he come back tomorrow? Would he spend part of each evening there so that she could grow used to him and maybe they would talk more about their early life and she could tell him things which he could not remember? She thought she might like that.

*

Long after she had imagined George in bed she found him asleep beside her father. She would have left him there, but he sensed her and opened his eyes.

‘May I stay here?’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

George looked intelligently at her and then, after making sure the old man’s eyes were closed and his breathing steady, he turned to her once again. ‘He’s going to die soon, isn’t he?’

‘No—’

‘Please don’t say that. It’s the kind of thing Aunt Verity would say. She told me he would go to the angels last time I saw her.’ George raised his eyes to the ceiling, but they were glassy.

Emma smiled at this. ‘Everyone dies eventually,’ she said.

‘It isn’t eventually yet,’ George said, closing his eyes and turning towards her father.

Emma kissed him goodnight and went off to her bed. She tried not to think about her father dying; she didn’t think she could bear it any more easily than George could. She didn’t sleep. The night was warm. Usually she loved the fall, but this one was already on its way and she did not think her father would live to see their favourite time of year. She felt as though the leaves, having had too dry a spring and summer, would not turn the usual gold and rust and orange. This year it was as though they had shrunk away, curled up against the wind, shrivelled.

She lay awake until she heard the clock in the church strike three and then she got up and wandered across the hall. George and her father lay as before but not quite, she realized. There was something different. Her father was stiller than he had been. She walked quietly around the bed and then back again, and she sat down softly in her mother’s favourite rocking chair and waited for the dawn because she did not want the little boy to wake up and discover alone that the man he had thought of as his father had died in the night.

*

Judge Philips was a friend of theirs, so although he could have left it to other people, after the funeral was over and the mourners had gone, he lingered. Laurence said to him, ‘I expect after all that tea, Judge, you’d like something a little stronger.’

The Judge slid his huge wobbling backside forward in Emma’s best chair. She had feared for it ever since the moment he had sat down because it had been her father’s chair, and as he rose to his feet she wished for perhaps the tenth time that she had moved it into another room where it could not be so ill-treated. He reached the table where he had deposited what she realized now was the will, picked it up and waved the papers at Laurence and said, ‘After you, good sir.’ He nodded towards the door.

‘Can you read that here, Judge?’ Emma asked.

Both men looked surprised and she realized that they were not used to her questioning such things.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘this is not women’s work.’

‘Are we to hear second-hand how things are left?’

The Judge looked apologetically at her and then at Laurence, and after Laurence nodded the Judge said, ‘There is no mystery to it. Your father naturally left everything other than a few small bequests to his son.’

Emma stared.

‘Did you expect it to be otherwise?’ Laurence said, and she heard the note of ice in his voice.

She remembered then that her father had said he could leave her nothing. She understood now that he had meant this literally and although she urged herself to put such thoughts from her mind she felt afraid for her future and for George.

‘Why yes, why should I not? What about my home?’

‘It’s the family home, of course,’ the Judge said.

‘Laurence and Verity already have a perfectly good house just as large as this one.’

‘Which will be sold,’ Laurence said.

Verity added, ‘You didn’t really expect to go on living in a huge house like this by yourself? That would look odd to others.’

Emma realized they had already spoken about this between themselves and worked out what they would do. How naïve she had seen.

‘I’m not by myself,’ she objected.

‘Once George goes to school you’ll be quite alone,’ her sister-in-law said.

‘George isn’t going anywhere.’

There was a short pause and then the Judge coughed and wheezed, and he said, ‘My dear Emma, your brother becomes George’s guardian. It will be his decision alone.’

There was another silence and somehow it sounded quite different from any before. Even the shadows which were stealing across the grass in the back garden, the first dead. . .