Robert Armstrong looked over the land and saw that it was irrigated by the river. He saw that the banks were firm and the waterway free from weeds and rubbish. He noticed how well maintained were the hedgerows, and that the cattle were gleaming and the fields ploughed straight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll have it.’
‘You can’t sell it to him, not that foreign fellow,’ people said. But all the other potential buyers tried to beat Mr May down on price, and played one trick after another to get some advantage, and the black fellow offered the asking price and stuck to it, and what is more, Mr May had been with him as he walked round the farm, had seen that he appreciated the straightness of his plough lines, had seen how he was with the sheep and the cows, and before long he had forgotten the colour of Mr Armstrong’s skin and understood that if he was to do the best thing for his land and his livestock, then Mr Armstrong was the man.
‘What about the men who have worked for me so long?’ asked Mr May.
‘Those that want to stay shall stay, and if they work well over time they shall see their wages go up, and if they do not work well, then they must go after the first harvest,’ said Armstrong, and so it was agreed.
A handful of labourers refused to work for a Negro, but the rest stayed, though they muttered at first. Over time, as they got to know the new boss, they discovered that his blackness was only superficial and that underneath it all he was a man like any other, and even a bit better. A handful of the men – young like himself – clung on to their contempt, sniggered to his face and made gestures behind his back. They used their scorn for him as a reason to be slack in their work – why should they labour for a man such as he? – but they still took their pay on a Friday, and when they spent it in the inns around Kelmscott they spoke ill of him. He appeared not to notice, but in reality he was keeping a close eye on them while he waited to see whether or not they would settle.
In the meantime, Robert Armstrong had to make friends. The man he knew best was the man he had bought the farm from, and he took to calling once a week on Mr May in the cottage not very far from the farmhouse. There he would sit for an hour, discussing farming with this man who was happy to talk about the work that had been his life and that he had grown too frail to do. Mrs May would sit knitting in the corner, and the more she heard their visitor’s voice, which was better educated than most, and the more she heard his laughter, which was generous and rolling and made her husband laugh in turn, the more she liked him. From time to time their daughter came in, bringing tea or cakes.
Bessie May had fallen ill as a small child and the lasting result was that she swayed from side to side in her gait. As she walked, there was a distinct sinking as she stepped on to the left foot. It drew stares from strangers, and even people who knew her and knew the family said that she ought to be kept in instead of going about ‘like that’. If it had only been the gait they might have frowned less than they did, but there was also the eye. She wore a patch over her right eye – not the same one all the time, but a different one depending on the colour of her dress. She had, it seemed, as many patches as dresses, sometimes made from offcuts of the same fabric, with ribbon ties that went around her head and disappeared into her pretty fair hair. She had an air of neatness about her, a care for her appearance that people found troubling. It was as if she thought she was the same as any other girl, as if she expected the same prospects. She ought, according to public opinion, to have retreated into the family home, to have made plain that she knew what everybody else knew: that she was unmarriageable, that she was destined for spinsterhood. Instead she hobbled into the heart of the church to take her place in the middle pews when she might have slipped in at the back and sat quite unnoticed. In good weather she limped to the bench on the green and sat with a book or a piece of embroidery; in winter she wore gloves and walked wherever the ground was level enough; when it was freezing she cast envious glances at those whose legs permitted them to risk the ice. Behind her back, malicious boys – the same ones, in fact, who made jeering gestures behind Robert Armstrong’s back – imitated her swaying, drooping way of walking. People who knew her from childhood, before she wore the patch, remembered the way her eye showed too much white, while the pupil veered up and away. You couldn’t tell where she was looking or what she was seeing, they said. There had been a time when Bessie May had friends. A little coterie of girls, who walked to and from school together, called at each other’s houses, took each other’s arms when they walked. But as the girls became little women, these friendships fell away. The other girls were afraid, perhaps, that Bessie’s deformities might be contagious, or that the men would keep their distance from any girl with Bessie at her side. By the time Robert Armstrong bought the farm, Bessie was lonely. She walked with her head high, smiling, and outwardly there was no alteration in her manner to the world, but she knew that the world had altered in its manner to her.
One of the alterations was in the way that the young men of the village behaved. At sixteen, with her fair curls and her pretty smile and her neat waist, Bessie was not without attraction. If you saw her seated, when the patch was away from you, you would think her one of the loveliest girls in the village. This was not lost on the young men, who began to eye her in a vulgar way. When lust and scorn live alongside one another in the same heart, they make devilry. If they came upon her in an empty lane, the young men leered at Bessie, rushed at her, knowing she could not easily hop sideways to avoid their outstretched hands. More than once, Bessie arrived home from an errand with a muddied skirt and grazed hands, having ‘tripped’.
Robert Armstrong knew what the gang of young men on the farm thought of him. In his discreet scrutiny of them, he had also understood what they thought of Bessie May. One evening when he arrived for one of his regular visits to the May household, Mr May shook his head. ‘Not tonight, Armstrong.’ His friend’s trembling hands and tearful eyes told him of some crisis. Watching the young men on the farm, hearing a snatch of laughing conversation in which Bessie’s name was mentioned boastfully by one of the lads, accompanied by a vulgar gesture, he feared he knew what the crisis was.
In the next few days, he did not see Bessie. She was not at church and she was not on the bench by the green. She did not run errands to the village and she did not tend the garden. When she reappeared, something had changed in her. She was neat and active as before, but the simplicity and naturalness of her interest in the world had been exchanged for something grimmer. A determination not to be beaten.
Overnight, he thought about it. He made his decision and then he slept, and when he woke the decision still seemed to be a good one. He intercepted Bessie on her way to take her father’s lunch to him, on the riverbank where the hawthorn gave way to the hazel. He saw her start and take fright when she realized there was nobody else in sight. He put his hands behind his back and looked at his feet as he spoke her name. ‘Miss May. We have spoken little before, but you know who I am. You know I am a friend of your father’s and the owner of this farm. You know I pay my debts on time. I have few friends, but I am nobody’s enemy. If you should ever need anyone on your side, I beg that you would come to me. There is nothing I should like more than to ease your life. Whether that be as a friend or as a husband is a decision that is yours to make. Please know that I am at your service.’ He raised his head to meet her astonished eye, gave her a brief bow and departed.