‘Where do you be going, Ann, when you be taking the coach to Dover every week?’
‘That be none of your business, Samuel Banister,’ she said with a heavy wink.
He smiled, accepting her answer with reluctance, then they drank together in amiable silence until the landlord burst from the back room with a loud snort. ‘The bath be a-ready,’ he said to Ann, then turned to Sam. ‘You be settling your bill tonight?’
Sam nodded and emptied his leather purse onto the bar.
‘That bain’t what we were agreed,’ the landlord said, having counted the money.
‘That be all I got,’ Sam replied, watching as Ann tottered through to the back room.
The landlord grunted something as he scooped up the money. ‘Be seeing yourselves out.’ He walked around the bar over to the two sleeping smugglers and banged his fists on the table between them. ‘Out!’ he barked. He moved quickly around the room extinguishing the tallow candles between his fingers. Without saying another word, he ventured through a side door and was gone. The two remaining smugglers wobbled out, leaving Sam sitting alone at the bar in all-but-pitch darkness; the only light the soft flickering flames of the open fire on the far side of the bar and the enticing yellow glow emanating from the open door to where Ann was bathing.
He finished the final dregs of his rum and water, then stood on his skittish legs, not knowing what to do next. He tried to pull sense from his sluggish and broken thoughts; he could just wait here for her to finish bathing, then walk with her back home. Or, he could yield to his returning desire and go to her. A third option, the one that he could feel his clearheaded-self pushing him towards, was that he leave right now and walk home alone.
Sam bent down and, inconsistent with his feelings, picked up the severed leg, carried it over to the hearth and tossed it onto the fire. He watched, briefly, as the long black hairs instantly tightened into tiny black curls before evaporating into a fizz. Sam caught sight of the toenails, each edged in black filth, before turning away as the repellent smell of burning flesh began to reach his nostrils.
His previous deliberation had softened and a decisiveness about what to do next had arisen. He walked, as if not quite in control of himself, around the bar and into the back room.
Ann was there, in the dull and battered copper bath. Her face was clean now and her wet hair was trailing into the steaming water. She rolled her head in his direction but her face remained impassive; she simply stared at him, watching as his eyes ran down her body to below the waterline. Then, she stood up and turned to face him with a playful smile.
He watched, somewhat breathlessly, as the warm streaks of water trickled over the curves of her body. Her left hand reached out towards him.
Chapter Twenty-One
21st September 1824, Aldington, Kent
Ann was grinning proudly, mirroring the wide smile on Miss Bowler’s face.
‘Read it again,’ Miss Bowler suggested, nodding enthusiastically at Ann’s slate. It was a dictation, another of John Clare’s poems.
Ann looked down at her handwriting. It was a peculiar leaning script, the letters all of a different size, but it was legible, as Miss Bowler had insisted. Ann cleared her throat and sat up straight, holding the slate as she had seen Miss Bowler’s girls doing: ‘My loves like a lily, my loves like a rose, My loves like a smile the spring mornings disclose. And sweet as the rose, on her cheek her love glows, when sweetly she smileth on me.’
Miss Bowler clapped a tight neat little clap then took the slate from Ann. ‘We’ve got some work to do on apostrophes, but that is for another day.’
Ann nodded absentmindedly. She was focused on her slate, wishing that she could take it away with her to show everyone how far she had come. Here was solid proof that Ann Fothergill could read and write. But soon—any moment now—Miss Bowler would tell her to wipe it away and the evidence would be gone forever. Not that it mattered, really. Whom would she show? Nobody in the entire world but Miss Bowler knew of Ann’s lessons. She had almost told Sam and Hester at various points in the last year but at each time she had feared what would inevitably be their first question: why was she doing it? Ann did not have an answer and as much as she loved the lessons, she knew that the possibility of ridicule would be enough to draw them to an instant end.
‘Since you are becoming such an expert in poetry, Ann,’ Miss Bowler flattered her, ‘perhaps it’s time that you wrote your own poem.’ Ann looked up with a look which must have expressed her abject horror at the prospect, for she added, ‘There’s no need to look so terrified!’
‘I don’t not even know where to be beginning.’
‘I don’t even know where to begin,’ Miss Bowler corrected. ‘What do you know of love, Ann?’
Ann laughed in a short mocking way before she had even had the time to consider the question. ‘I don’t not…I don’t know nothing about love.’ She spoke the words like an embarrassed confession. She thought, for the first time with a hint of indignity, of the male acquaintances whom she had known in the past. Some had been isolated, others had lingered, but none had remained.
Miss Bowler took this as a surprise. ‘Well, what about your parents?’
And there, for the first time, Miss Bowler had shone a light on Ann’s past, inadvertently forcing her to reveal her background, or to lie about it.
She chose neither option and said, ‘You be wanting me to write a love poem about
