To Everything A Season

by Judith Glover

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Born in the shadow of an ill fortune which she fights to forget and marked by a childhood of neglect, Amy Weldrake Flynn has grown into an independent and headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of three very different men. There is Ralph Herriot, gentleman farmer, cultured and charming, friend of Thomas Hardy; David Linton, a hard-working country doctor married to a spoiled and demanding wife; and Ellis Bates, Inspector of Schools for Lewes. It is only after a tragedy which threatens to ruin her whole life that Amy can hope to find the love and security that have eluded her for so long. To Everything A Season is the third classic romantic saga in the Sussex Quartet that began with The Stallion Man, now available in eBook for the first time.

Release date: May 21, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

Amy woke with a start.

In the echoing stillness of the night the hall clock downstairs was striking three; but that was not what had disturbed her.

Then it came again. A child’s scream.

She dragged herself up in bed, clumsy still with sleep as she fumbled about in the dark for the box of vesta matches to light her candle. Her wrap was lying where she had thrown it across the brass bedrail little more than two hours ago. Wearily she reached for it as she got up, pushing back the heavy waves of hair that fell round her face; then, taking the candle, opened the door and went out barefoot on to the half-landing.

The house was silent again, the stilly hush broken only by the ponderous tick of the mahogany longcase clock in the entrance hall. The young woman stood, uncertain. She hated this place with its dark panelled walls, its ugly furniture and oppressive atmosphere. She would never have agreed to come had she not been driven to leave her own home by her uncle Harry Weldrake’s latest “housekeeper”, a vulgar loud-voiced creature whom Amy had loathed on sight and lost no opportunity to provoke into stormy rages.

The child’s scream, when it came again, made her jump violently. Shielding the guttering candle-flame with a hand, she hastened down the short flight of stairs to the main landing, which ran as an open gallery almost the width of the house and overlooked the hall below. The nursery wing, occupied by little Laura Bates and her brother Esmond, lay at the far end.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

A door on the left swung open as Amy went past and the children’s father, Ellis Bates, came out holding up an oil lamp before him. Despite the lateness of the hour he had still not changed out of the formal dress suit worn last evening to a meeting of the board of schools inspectors.

“What’s wrong?” he repeated.

“It’s Laura.” Amy paused and turned back to answer. “She’s having another nightmare, I shouldn’t wonder. What happened yesterday was enough to frighten the wits from anyone, let alone a four-year-old baby.”

“She has a nervous disposition. Like her mother.” Ellis Bates’s voice was toneless. “Don’t fuss the child, or she’ll be spoiled.”

“But listen to her!”

From the darkened end of the landing, beyond the closed nursery door, a low plaintive sobbing was now clearly audible.

“I’ve a strong stomach for most things,” Amy went on heatedly, “but even I was sufficiently unsettled by that crypt to lose my sleep tonight. The stench in the place … half-rotten coffins stacked about the walls. Thank God the light was so dim, or we might have seen things to unquieten our minds even more … things best decently buried, not kept down in the cellars to be visited after tea of a Sunday—”

“I’ve already had your views, thank you,” he interrupted tiredly. In the brightness of the lamp, the lines of weariness on his handsome features were cast into sharp relief. “Have I not promised to ensure that any future such visit is forbidden when the children are at Heydon House?”

He had said as much before he left for the board meeting, when Amy, returning with the two little ones from spending a few days with their great-aunt, had burst into the study to protest indignantly at the horror they’d been forced to experience in her house.

It was no new thing for Laura and Esmond, that macabre descent to the family vault to pay their respects to the departed. Since the tragic death of their mother in a carriage accident two years ago in 1889, the ritual had been observed on each of their periodic visits to the great-aunt, their only surviving maternal relative, who resided alone in decaying grandeur high on the Sussex Downs, passing what remained of her days in communion with the family dead interred in a private crypt in the cellars of the old house.

The visit just made had been Amy Flynn’s first taste of this grisly custom. As temporary governess, she had been looking after Ellis Bates’s children for less than three weeks and had been quite unprepared for the ceremony which invariably followed Sunday high tea at Heydon House. True, seven-year-old Esmond had hinted in his odd little way at something sinister; but the new governess had dismissed his words as the embroidery of a vivid imagination, being more concerned for his sister’s clinging tearfulness and nightly terrors.

“Don’t fuss the child,” Ellis Bates repeated as she made to turn again towards the nursery. “Leave her be. She has Esmond with her for company.”

“How can you be so heartless?” Amy flung back at him. “Have you never learned that children need comforting for their fears? Or has working in board schools taught you only the need for obedience and self-discipline?”

His face tightened at once.

“That will be enough. Remember you are only here in my house at the request of my mother. It was not my wish to have you.”

“And it was not my wish to come. But for Laura and Esmond I’d rather have found myself lodgings elsewhere in Lewes.”

She faced him across the width of the landing, and though her expression was half-hidden by the shadows of candlelight, Ellis Bates caught the note of defiance in her voice.

He could remember Amy Flynn when she had run the streets as wild as any gutter urchin. His years as a student at university, and later as a master and then inspector of schools, had removed her for long periods from his life; but he had watched her in his mind’s eye mature from a child into a spirited young beauty whose nature, knowing neither fear nor falsity, exhibited warmth and directness with a strong-willed independence.

Despite the stigma of her paternity and background, she was the only woman ever to arouse in Ellis Bates the power of emotion; but he would rather have died than admit as much to anyone.

“I came here because I was needed,” Amy continued, “and because Aunt Bashford asked it of me.”

“My mother only made the suggestion since you required somewhere to stay, having put yourself out of home—”

“Was I then expected to stop at Tea Garden Lane as skivvy to some music-hall drab?”

“No, of course not. You know well enough my opinion of Mr Weldrake and the fashion in which he chooses to run his household. But while you are lodged beneath my roof, I must ask you to respect the discipline I exercise with my children. You undermine my authority and make the task of correction the more difficult by coddling Esmond and Laura with too much attention.”

Amy made a half-gesture of the hand.

“At least let me go in and settle her,” she said; and without waiting for further response swung round and walked from him, her bare feet moving soundlessly across the Turkey-carpeted floor.

He watched her enter the nursery, heard the gentle murmur of her voice quietening his child’s sobs. Lips compressed into a bloodless line, he turned back into his own room and shut the door.

“There, there now, Laura. Hush, it’s all right. There now.”

Amy drew aside the bedclothes and lifted the quivering little body on to her lap, smoothing back the curls from the wet face.

“Hush, now … hush.”

She glanced over her shoulder towards the window. Framed in its oblong, the gleam of his fair hair reflected palely against the panes, young Esmond stood staring out into the moonlit garden.

“Why is the blind up, Esmond? What are you doing there when you should be abed?”

The boy’s response was curiously matter-of-fact.

“I’m looking for Mama.”

“Now don’t be silly,” Amy said sharply. “Draw the blind at once and come away.”

He obeyed reluctantly.

“But she is there,” he insisted when the lamp on the chest of drawers had been lit and the night shut out. “I saw her beneath the trees looking up at me.”

“No …” wailed Laura, her arms tight about Amy’s neck. “No, ’Smond.”

“What a naughty, wicked boy you are to frighten your sister so! I shall box your ears if I hear you repeat such nonsense. Your poor Mama is dead—”

“But I did see her,” he protested. “And I heard her calling to me, too, just as she does at Great-Aunt Lovell’s.”

Amy let out a loud sigh of exasperation. Esmond’s easily stimulated mind was being fed the most unhealthy diet by these visits to Heydon House. It was a place full of horrors … old Mrs Lovell tapping with her stick along gloomy cellar passages … the echoing drip of water … the fetid smell of mouldering decay … and, worst of all, that sinister chamber of the dead shrouded in darkness behind its rusted grille. What sensitive child could possibly remain unaffected?

Yet this was an age when the ever-present reality of death was held up as a constant reminder of the transience of life and the fate awaiting every mortal soul; an age when the grave was regarded as but a prelude to the after-life, and its grisly spectre dangled before young children to frighten them into good behaviour.

“Mama is not really out there?” Laura whispered against Amy’s shoulder.

“Of course not, my pet. What Esmond heard was only a little owl hunting for its supper in the garden.”

“Your Mama is dead too, is she not?” Esmond came and seated himself on the bed beside them, tucking up his knees beneath his nightshirt to rest his chin.

Amy made no answer.

He turned his head sideways and looked up at her, waiting.

It would be an untruth to say yes; though for all the life Rosannah Flynn had, shut away inside an institution for the insane, she might indeed as well be in her grave.

“I have no father,” Amy said finally, evasively. “He passed away when I was very small.”

“How fortunate for you.”

“Esmond!”

“Oh, pray don’t be offended,” he cried in his strange little adult fashion. “I merely meant I would’ve preferred it if my Papa had died instead. We would not have missed him quite as much as Mama, would we, Laura?”

There was a pause, then a shake of the small head beneath its tangle of brown curls.

Looking from one to the other and seeing their pale, closed faces, Amy felt the same quick pity which had first prompted her to come to this house, despite being always so ill at ease in Ellis Bates’s company.

“You should not say such things of your father,” she chided gently. “It is not his way to show you love as your Mama did, but you mustn’t think he cares any the less for you both, even so. Be good, now, and love him as you did Mama.”

Laura’s arms tightened their grip and the sobs began afresh.

Since the death of Sophia Bates there had been no one to give these two much affection. Their father was coldly reserved, incapable of demonstrating his emotions openly. He provided for his children as handsomely as any other professional man of good income, with dancing and music classes, a pony for Esmond, nursery toys for Laura; yet there was never any warmth in his giving, never any spontaneous gesture of kindliness, no playful relaxation in their company, or sharing of pleasure in their interests.

Their young lives, bound by a regimen of lessons and loneliness, had grown bleakly austere without the softening presence of their mother. Little wonder they still missed her so.

Amy Flynn knew all too well what it was to hunger for a parent’s love. She had never known her father—nor, indeed, her mother. For the first twelve months of life she had been fostered out with a wet nurse, and taken in by her Uncle Harry Weldrake’s childless wife to be raised as their own.

Within a few years more that marriage had ended amid a blaze of public acrimony in the divorce division of the High Court of Justice. Thereafter Weldrake, though Amy’s legal guardian, had lost all interest in his small niece, and until being removed to the south coast by another relative, she had been left to roam the Lewes streets, dirty, unwanted, and often hungry. It was a bitter schooling and its lessons hard learned; but an inborn resilience had inured the child to need and the marks of neglect were never deep enough to scar her.

From this guttersnipe existence she was plucked at the age of seven by her father’s sister Isabelle, a clergyman’s wife, and taken off to the very different world of a quiet Eastbourne parish. These next few years were to prove the only settled period of Amy’s childhood. Too soon, alas, they had to end: Rosannah Flynn, judged sufficiently sound of mind to leave the Bethlehem Hospital at Heathbury, was released into Harry Weldrake’s keeping and her young daughter uprooted and brought back to Lewes.

Their reunion failed completely. Rosannah hysterically refused to communicate in anything other than French, and since Amy spoke none, her efforts to understand this frightening stranger produced only tears and frustration. Within two months of the release Madame de Retz—as her mother insisted on being called—had tried to burn down the house, and was hastily returned to detention in bedlam.

It had been a nightmare interlude, and the child quite naturally wanted to go back to her Aunt Belle. For some reason Weldrake would not allow it. Instead, she was made to remain at Tea Garden Lane as a drudge to the women he brought there; and though she repeatedly ran away, the Law, being on the side of the guardian, had repeatedly returned her.

“Why are you sighing so?” Esmond asked, curious.

His voice, breaking the silence now that Laura had at last been lulled to sleep in Amy’s arms, made the young woman jump a little.

“Oh, was I sighing? Perhaps I’m tired. It’s time we should all of us be abed.”

“No—do stay a while longer,” he pressed her. “You haven’t said about visiting Grandmama at Bonningale. Will Papa let us go, do you think?”

“Ssh …” Amy put a finger to her lips. “Not so loud.”

Moving quietly, she placed the sleeping child down and covered her with bedclothes; then, reaching out, took Esmond by the hand and led him to his own room next door. There was only a night-light burning here and its feeble rays edged in dark relief the treasures of his young world: a case of mounted butterflies, a hobby horse, a wooden fort with painted lead soldiers, birds’ eggs, books; and on the wall above his bed, a pastel portrait of Sophia Bates before her marriage.

Amy tucked him in and bent to kiss him goodnight. For a moment the boy’s arms were flung about her neck and his cheek pressed to hers.

“Will he, Amy? Will he let us go to Grandmama’s? You did ask him?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he say?”

“That he would think about it.”

Esmond released her and fell back against the pillows, his mouth turned down. Amy was leaving at the week’s end on a visit to his Grandmother Bashford, who lived on the far side of the country. The family were celebrating the engagement of the youngest son, Henry Bashford, to a wealthy landowner’s daughter; and since the occasion fell within the week or so before a new governess arrived to take over Amy’s responsibilities here in Lewes, she had suggested that the children go with her.

“It’s always such fun at Bonningale,” Esmond said wistfully from the shadows as she closed his door. “I do hope Papa will give his permission.”

Returning towards her own room, Amy noticed at once a light shining out from it. She hastened up to the half-landing, and was astonished to find Ellis Bates there. He had changed now into a crimson quilted bed-robe and was standing at her table holding in his hand the opened pages of a letter.

“What are you doing—? How dare you read that!”

She made a swift grab for it, but he held it away at arm’s length, and there was responding anger in his own voice as he snapped back, “How dare you invite such correspondence in my house. I have warned you before, I will not permit you to receive this man’s letters.”

“What business is it of yours whose letters I receive? You have no right to come prying. I suppose you saw the envelope lying in the hall yesterday and let curiosity get the better of your manners.”

She made another lunge. “Give me that!”

For reply Ellis Bates sent the closely-written pages fluttering to the floor. As the young woman swooped to retrieve them, he caught her by the arm and pulled her against him.

“What are you doing?” she cried out again, beating at him with her fists. “Let go of me!”

The wrap fell away in the struggle, leaving her in nothing more than her linen night-shift. For one awful moment she thought he meant to strike her; but instead, he shoved her violently aside and turned away.

After a few tense seconds he asked bitterly, “Why must you persist in encouraging Linton’s attentions?”

“What attentions?”

Amy snatched up the scattered pages and thrust them out at him. “Look—you’ve just read for yourself what David wrote. News of Weatherfield. The village fête … his wife’s health … In God’s name, where is the wrong in that?”

Ellis Bates straightened the cord of his bed-robe. Already, he very much regretted inviting this scene, regretted the suspicions which had driven him against all logical reason to seek in David Linton’s letter the proof of a relationship more than friendship between these two.

“You know where the wrong lies.”

He had no doubt that the respectable Doctor Linton, married to an ailing, demanding wife, was more than a little in love with Amy Flynn; and however hard he fought to suppress such feelings, this had stirred up a raw and corrosive resentment. Unable to rest since he had seen that envelope on the entrance hall tray, with its tell-tale Weatherfield postmark and firm, clear hand, Ellis had given in to the darker promptings of temptation and stolen up here to Amy’s room to search for it while she was tending his children in the nursery.

Slowly he looked across at her again. The net curtain at the dormer window had been looped aside, and above the treetops the pearly greyness of a summer’s dawn breaking on the rim of the Downs lent a ghostly outline to her slim figure.

His eyes moved coldly over her face, that face of defiant beauty, straight dark brows contrasting with the corn-gold fairness of her hair. The touch of her warm skin just now, so invitingly soft, had both roused and repulsed him. As ever, her very nearness threw him into a turmoil: he seemed always to be in two minds about her, hating her with his head, as it were, while feeling something quite other for her in his heart.

Harshly he said, “It was wrong to have you to live here. I should have known. Should have known better than invite you beneath my roof. You create nothing but trouble wherever you go.”

“I create trouble?” came the spirited retort. “What have I done? I respect your wishes. I keep out of your way. I see after the well-being of your children—”

“You have always brought trouble. You were born to it. Born with the taint of incest and murder. A mad woman for mother … a father hanged for the killing of his mistress’s husband …”

“My father was not hanged—”Amy began; and Ellis Bates saw by her suddenly stricken expression that he had trespassed far enough.

He could not restrain himself. “Oh, let us not split hairs. He choked himself to death by his own hand rather than live locked up with his guilt. There is the same bad blood in you as there was in him, and doubtless it will lead you to the same bad end.”

He swung away towards the door, and still the words of hurt came spilling out.

“There will be no visit to Bonningale for Laura and Esmond. You are no fit person to care for my children. Mine or anyone’s. The sooner you are gone from my house, the better.”

The first time David Linton and Amy had set eyes on each other, she was seventeen years old and sitting in tears in the garden of the alehouse in Weatherfield.

This ancient hostelry had belonged to the Flynns since the 1830s, and situated as it was within a few hours’ travel of Lewes, Amy had sought refuge here on several occasions from her guardian’s harsh authority. Its present licensee was her father’s half-brother, Joel Adams, a stolid individual whose red-haired Irish wife had given him a family of eight children.

It was on account of the smallest of this brood that David Linton had called that September evening in 1888.

He had spent much of the day visiting outlying hamlets on the edge of the Ashdown Forest, something he generally did twice a month to attend the sick and elderly and those others unable to make the journey to his surgery in the small market town of Weatherfield. Though dusk was starting to fall, the air was still very close and the young doctor had been glad to accept a tankard of ale from Joel Adams to slake his thirst before continuing his way home.

Taking it into the garden, he was enjoying a rare moment of solitary peace when he became aware of somebody sobbing quietly within the concealment of a rose arbour; and going over to see what was amiss, had discovered Amy Flynn.

“I do beg your pardon,” he said at once as she raised a tear-stained face from her hands at the interruption. “I didn’t mean to intrude. But you seemed troubled. Can I help you in any way?”

Amy’s appearance at this time was still gawkily immature, and the hardships of her young life had caused an unfortunate abruptness of manner to develop. Her only answer to the doctor’s solicitous enquiry was to thrust out her lower lip and stare resentfully ahead of her.

He was a patient man, and not in the least deterred by this ungracious response. Putting down his tankard on the rough wooden table, he removed his curly-brimmed bowler and took a seat beside her in the shade of the arbour.

“You’re a stranger to these parts, surely?” he began conversationally. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before. Linton is my name. David Linton. May I know yours?”

Amy shifted herself to the further end of the bench and sniffed. Wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of a hand, she said sullenly, “It’s Flynn.”

“Flynn? Not one of the Weatherfield Flynns?”

There was a terse nod.

The doctor regarded the young girl with fresh interest. “Then you must be—let me think. You must be one of Dinah Flynn’s grandchildren?”

A pause. Then another nod.

His pleasant face grew suddenly grave and he said slowly, “You’re Frank’s daughter.”

This time there was no answer.

“I’m sorry,” he went on after a moment, “but I can’t for the life of me recall your given name. I ought to, I know. We’re family almost. I met your Aunt Isabelle and Mr Bethway when they came to visit—”

“Oh, you know them?” Amy’s expression brightened a little at this mention. “You know Aunt Belle and her husband?”

“It was only the briefest introduction through our rector, I’m afraid. After evensong one Sunday. He’s writing a paper for the local history society on families in the parish and had somewhere uncovered the fact that the Lintons and Flynns are distantly connected.”

The girl pulled out a handkerchief from her jacket sleeve and blew her nose. He was pleased to see that she had stopped crying, at least. She made such a sorry little picture; and her woebegone appearance only added to the general unkempt look about her—clothing rather shabby, skirt hem fraying, elasticated boots scuffed and down at heel.

“Please tell me your name,” he pressed again gently.

“It’s Amy, sir. I was christened Aimée—” she spelled the name out for him—“on a whim of my mother’s. It’s French, you know. But no one’s ever called me anything but plain Amy. Who … who did you say you were?”

More animated now, she twisted round on the bench and looked directly at him as she put her question. He had nice eyes, she decided at once: a warm hazel brown and full of good humour. She had always noticed people’s eyes before anything else about them. The face was pleasing, too, an honest and kindly face, clean-shaven but for thick side-whiskers which gave him an old-fashioned rural appearance: whiskers, beards and suchlike facial adornment were going out of style now in Lewes.

“My name is David Linton,” he told her once more, smiling a little at this earnest scrutiny.

“And do you live in Weatherfield?”

“Yes. I have a medical practice here.”

“Oh. You’re a doctor?”

He took up his tankard of ale and drank from it, then nodded.

Amy examined him further. She had been crying because Irish Kate Adams disliked her so, and had flown into a temper that afternoon saying Amy was insolent and lazy and gave herself airs, swanning about the alehouse as though she owned the place, when everyone for miles around knew what shameful bad deeds her father had done to lose it.

“Your family comes from these parts, did you say, sir?”

“My father’s people, yes. From Shatterford. But my wife … my wife Louisa, she’s a Londoner. I met her while doing my training at the London Hospital in Whitechapel.”

He set down the emptied tankard. At one end of the garden a small apple orchard had been planted. Someone had told him there used to be a ratting pit there years ago, and that the body of a murdered man—killed by this girl’s father in a fight—had been hidden nearby. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence amid the setting of such a peaceful scene. The apple boughs were heavy with ripening fruit, the evening air filled with the scent of roses trailing over the arbour, and from the distant fields came the faint “come-up, come-up” of a dairyman calling in his cattle from pasture.

“And what of you, Amy?” he had asked. “Won’t you tell me about yourself? Where you live, what you do?”

There was something so patently genuine in this stranger’s interest that the girl had found herself, almost for the first time in he. . .