Influences of Stars

Chapter 13

Midway through collecting the washing, Tibby stood back and realised she had a shadow- old Jim the cat followed her as she looped round the line, dragging the basket filled with newly clean sheets, made warm and cosy by their age, behind her. Each time she paused, Jim lifted up his paws to try to jump in. Laughing, she had to lift his paws so that for a moment, he stood on his hind legs, before she slowly lowered him to the ground. When she had done this several times, her mam shouted from the door, "Won't you shut him up in the shed until you're done?"

"Never!" Tibby called back. Her mam shook her head, but this just made her laugh even more.

Mr Marlow saw this scene as he approached the Abbot household, one which had always been alive with the sound of joviality. Any home with six children could be called nothing other than fine, though some said this was a little too unruly. Lord, he hoped his son wouldn't be so undisciplined with his children, regardless of how soft Miss Abbot wanted to be.

Seeing her act so light, as if the world was alive around her, Mr Marlow couldn't see how she could bring the proper severity a marriage required. He lamented his son's task, but if Yeardley called him to it then there was nothing to be done.

"Mr Marlow," Tibby said. There was an edge to her voice. Did this have something to do with Yeardley? Perhaps he had been sent here to deliver a message? She forced herself to be unusually receptive despite dull as he was. "Are you here to see pa? Would you like me to fetch him?"

He nodded. "If you would. Thank you."

Tibby ran out to the fields, not considering for one moment that she shouldn't be running about when a man could see her. He was simply so filled with what Mr Marlow had to say that she couldn't stand to stretch the wait out for a moment longer than it needed. Lord, she wished the men would just speak to her!

When Mr Marlow and her pa had met together downstairs, the children gathered against the door and tried to decipher what was being said without being too noisy themselves. Their mam had drifted outside to clean the privy, pretending that she didn't know what they were doing.

"Do you think Yeardley doesn't want to marry you anymore?" asked one of her brothers.

"I wouldn't blame him," Tibby said. When some of them murmured a laugh in response, she hushed them and returned to listening, though they spoke so quietly that all she could hear was that soft lowness of men's voices. She hoped it contained beauty and not misery.

Every moment waiting for her pa to come through was agony. Tibby could hear her siblings whispering and feel their breath upon her hair, though she felt so faraway from them that they could have disappeared and she wouldn't have noticed. She just wanted to know! Lord, when would Mr Warren leave?

The scraping of the chairs was the most heavenly sound she had ever heard. Mr Marlow left not long after and a quiet descended upon the house, broken only by her pa's footsteps approaching the door. Everybody rushed backwards to hide they had been listening, except Tibby who stayed firm before him. She took no time to press him, asking so many questions he had no means to speak despite her calls for him to.

"Tibby, calm down," he instructed her. She tried to slow her breathing. "You're not to marry Yeardley," he told her, unable to stop himself from smiling a little as she collapsed into relief. For too long she had been hanging by the neck, an inch from suffocation. Now she had been released, gasping for air but free. Her vision began to clear.