The Travelling Man Read Free Page A

hair was bundled up into a man’s cap; she had the pointed features of a half-starved child, but her eyes wore the bleak expression of a disillusioned woman. A piece of sacking round her waist formed an apron of sorts, and her feet were stuck into miner’s boots. She would be, he reckoned, about fourteen years old. If that.
    ‘Miss Clancy?’ Was she deaf, dim-witted? Or both?
    Annie felt her mouth drop open and forget to shut itself. Nobody had ever called her Miss Clancy before. Not even the priest, and he knew his manners if anybody did. The shock of it brought her to her feet. The pleasure of it made her blush. Wiping her hand first on her long skirt, she shook hands with the stranger, too flabbergasted to think of the right thing to say.
    ‘Your father said I would find you here.’
    Annie couldn’t hide her astonishment. So this was the lodger who was looking for a place to stay and a job down the mine? This man had an ease and grace about him, with a voice that held the lilt of music. To her way of thinking all sailors had rough red faces half hidden behind bushy beards, but this man was clean-shaven with a head of close black curls. His skin was different too, swarthy, not grey like her father’s when the pit dirt was washed from it. He was out of place; he didn’t belong. As out of place as a flower on a muck midden.
    ‘I’m Laurie Yates,’ he was saying. ‘I told your father I would look around for a bed, but he insisted I come here.’
    Annie was getting her breath back now. For a minute or two she’d been in danger of letting herself be taken in by a soft voice and a wheedling smile. But this Laurie Yates was only another man, with an appetite to satisfy and dirty clothes to wash. She wasn’t going to let him soft-soap
her
, even if he had got round her father over a tankard of ale.
    Deliberately she turned her back on him to get seven plates down from the range.
    ‘You can’t stop here, Mr Yates, there’s not the room.’ She set the plates round the table. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Not even room for a little ’un.’ She turned round suddenly, long skirt swinging out. ‘You can see how it is without me having to spell it out for you.’
    Laurie Yates could see how it was all right. When the fresh colour had drained from this young girl’s face, he had seen the clear imprints of fingers on her left cheek. Oh, no indeed, there was no room for an extra one in this small room dominated by the big table and the black fireplace with its lofty mantelpiece. He smiled on her.
    ‘I’ll be on my way then, Miss Clancy. I’m sorry to have bothered you. A man only needs half an eye to see that one extra would be an intolerable burden on your hospitality.’
    ‘Sit down!’
    Annie pointed to her father’s rocking-chair. ‘I’d be a disgrace to me mother if I didn’t offer you a sup of something or a bite to eat.’ She studied him, hands on hips. ‘She never sent a stranger away from the door without giving him a crust, even if it was the last in the house. So for me mother’s sake, Laurie Yates, sit yourself down.’
    She added a good handful of oatmeal to the stew simmering in the big black pan, bending over showing the rounded shape of her buttocks, totally without self-consciousness, like a child, not caring how she looked or what she revealed.
    Laurie was intrigued. She wasn’t a child, and yet she was entirely without feminine guile, if that was the word he was thinking of.
    She straightened up and pointed the wooden spoon at him. ‘Have you ever been down a mine, Mr Yates?’
    The smell coming from the pan was bringing the saliva to Laurie’s mouth. He had walked from Blackburn, and apart from a hunk of bread and a drink of water, his stomach had remained empty all day. He was so hungry he could have snatched the spoon from her and helped himself to the thick bubbling stew, stiff with potatoes, laced with onions and nutty with oatmeal.
    Yesterday a woman tending her herb