Beneath the Soil Read Free Page A

as picture-postcard prettiness, or a series of quaint photographs in a calendar they would send to relatives back in the city.
    The others had fallen quiet.
    â€˜Sit yourselves down,’ Mrs Caseley told them, with an effort at hospitality. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’
    â€˜No, really,’ Suzie protested. ‘You don’t need to bother. We only wanted to ask you whether there are any cottages on the farm. Somewhere a married labourer might have lived and brought up his family.’
    But Mrs Caseley was already retreating into the kitchen.
    The Fewings sat on the hard-cushioned furniture looking at each other in some embarrassment.
    Suzie whispered to the children, ‘If she offers you something to eat, say no, thank you.’
    The picture was running through her mind of Philip Caseley, agitated, with the gun in his hand. How strained was this marriage, the two of them all alone up here, with money tight?
    She need not have worried. Mrs Caseley came back with a tray set with flowered cups and saucers of strong tea. Suzie was relieved to see that she hadn’t opened a packet of biscuits in their honour.
    She had thought that the woman hadn’t heard her question as she left the room, but the farmer’s wife said as she set down the tray, ‘Well, no. I can’t say as there are any cottages standing on the farm. If there were, I’ve no doubt Phil would have had them done up and sold them off. Lord knows we need the money. But there are some broken-down walls back in the woods. Cob needs to keep its hat and boots on. If you don’t put a roof on it and keep it out of the wet, it’ll sink back into the earth it was got from.’
    Suzie felt a thrill of excitement. The ruins of a cottage might not look much now, but she knew if she saw it, her imagination could supply the picture of what it had once been. She would be able to see Richard setting out to work on the farm in the early morning; Charlotte in her apron, feeding the chickens, making butter, scrubbing floors. And the children. How many of them were there? Six, she thought, before they packed up their belongings and took the long journey down to the coast and the dockyard town.
    She jerked back to the present.
    â€˜Where can we find these ruins?’ Nick was saying. ‘Is it OK if we go looking in the woods? Your husband had been out shooting when we met him. We wouldn’t want to get mistaken for a fox, or whatever it was he was after.’
    The spoon rattled against the cup Mrs Caseley was handing to Millie.
    â€˜You heard that, did you?’ There was a moment of silence. ‘No. You’ve nothing to worry about. Go back down the track until you see a smaller path going off to your left. It’ll be a couple of hundred yards down there. I hope you’re not wearing your best clothes. Likely as not it’ll be grown over with brambles. Phil and me, we’ve not much call to go down there.’
    â€˜Do you come from Moortown yourself?’ Suzie asked. ‘I’ve got quite a few ancestors there. We might be related.’
    â€˜I was Eileen Taverner before I was married. On my mother’s side it was the Hutchings. I can’t say as I know much about them before Granddad and Granny Hutchings. They kept a greengrocer’s shop. How far back they went, I couldn’t tell you.’
    â€˜I’ve got Taverners on my family tree! Charlotte Day’s father was a Taverner. He was a stonemason, out near the tollgate on the east road.’
    She had hoped Eileen Caseley might react with enthusiasm, and they could have enjoyed speculating about how close their relationship really was. But the woman’s pale, tired face showed no reaction. The fear all the Fewings had sensed in the farmyard had faded, leaving a dull apathy. Suzie shivered. How nearly might this have been her own experience?
    Yet why was Eileen Caseley dressed so smartly this Saturday afternoon on the farm?