Free The Stony Path by Rita Bradshaw

under the worn, darned sheets, Hilda was ready for him, her invective flying forth before her husband had time to open his mouth. ‘Well? I trust you’re satisfied with your afternoon’s work?’
     
    ‘What?’ He had been about to change back into his working clothes but now he paused, his brow wrinkling. She was in a tear about something, but then that wasn’t surprising. That scrawny frame of hers held a capacity for venom that had used to amaze him in the early days of their marriage.
     
    ‘Don’t look at me like that, you big galoot. You know full well what I mean.’
     
    Henry’s mouth had thinned and now his voice was a snap when he said, ‘I don’t know an’ I don’t care, there’s the cows to be seen to.’
     
    ‘The cows to be seen to.’ Hilda repeated the words with acid mockery, her lips curling back from her teeth in contempt. ‘That’s all you’re fit for, to see to the cows, Henry Farrow. Well, for your information, I’m talking about the way you allowed that gormless yap to argue with Frederick.’
     
    Henry said nothing for a moment, then, on a deep intake of breath, he growled, ‘Luke Blackett has been workin’ down the pit for nigh on fourteen months, he’s no lad, an’ furthermore, he’s entitled to his own opinion same as everyone else.’
     
    ‘His opinion!’ It was said cuttingly, Hilda’s plain, sallow face wrinkling in a sneer. ‘How can someone like him have an opinion?’
     
    By, he’d do for her one day, so help him. Lying in this damn bed twenty-four hours a day, making his life and everyone else’s a misery, turning the screws whenever she had the chance ... She was a devil of a woman, and yet she’d been so quiet, so contained when they were courting. Uppity maybe, but then she’d been entitled, being Frederick Weatherburn’s stepsister. How often had the words he’d said to Eva come back to haunt him? ‘Happy doesn’t come into it.’ By, if ever there’d been a self-fulfilling prophecy, that had been it. And Eva wasn’t happy, he knew that, although they’d never spoken of it or the past. What he should have done, that day his mam found the pair of them, was to have taken Eva and gone far away somewhere. She’d have gone with him. Oh, aye, she would. Followed him to the ends of the world, Eva would have.
     
    He brushed the thought aside as Hilda continued to rant and rave, divesting himself of his clothes and pulling on his grimy working breeches and shirt without looking at his wife again. He let her voice flow over him and around him but not into his head; he knew from such scenes in the past that his detachment was the one thing that reduced her to a heap of quivering frustration and then a stony silence that could go on for days, weeks maybe, if he was lucky.
     
    But it was as Henry was leaving the room that his wife’s voice, now low, hissed at him, ‘I’ll make it my business to see Eva’s brat and those other two hulks don’t set foot in this house again, you see if I don’t. They’re a bad influence on the girls, especially Polly. She runs wild when they come, and Luke and Arnold aren’t even family, and Michael looks as though he’s riddled with the consumption—’ Then she stopped with a surprised squeak as Henry swung round.
     
    ‘Shut your evil mouth.’ Henry’s face was turkey red with temper and he no longer appeared to Hilda as the stoical, long-suffering, weak individual she thought she knew. He was staring straight into her startled eyes and his own were narrowed with hatred. ‘Them little lasses don’t have much of a life as you well know, but they look forward all week to seein’ their cousins – an’ they look on Luke an’ Arnold as their cousins just the same as young Michael. You do anythin’ to spoil the one thing that gives ’em a bit of pleasure, an’ so help me, woman, I’ll swing for you.’
     
    ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that.’ Hilda’s voice was choked with outrage but threaded