Free Alice's Girls by Julia Stoneham Page B

private world of grief, into which her father had briefly and cruelly intruded, telling her that because she had defied him shewas cursed and that her sins would bring the wrath of God down onto the heads of all whose lives touched hers.
    While Alice was shocked by the effect Jonas Tucker’s visit had on his daughter, and concerned by the distress it caused her, Rose wrestled with more complicated concerns. Hester’s widowhood made it likely that, after a while, Dave would approach her. Rose’s feelings about this were confused. While she was fond of Hester and, in other circumstances, would have welcomed her as a daughter-in -law, and although Reuben had been a fine, upstanding lad, she was not entirely happy with the prospect of her son raising another man’s child, having, understandably enough, expected her grandchildren to have been sired by her own son, rather than by someone else’s. This, however, was not her main concern, which lay with Hester’s mental state. Her subservience to her father and to his fanatical religious beliefs seemed, to Rose, to have affected her sanity.
    Rose had watched, from her cottage window, when Dave, on a twenty-four-hour pass, approached Hester in the cider apple orchard. She guessed, correctly, that he was asking her to be his wife and promising to raise Reuben’s child as his own, and she knew, by the droop of his shoulders as Hester left him, that she had refused him.
    ‘I don’t know what to think an’ that’s a fact!’ she confided miserably to Alice. ‘It bain’t so much the babe, ’cos Reuben were a nice enough lad an’ died for his country an’ all.’
    ‘And for ours, Rose,’ Alice added, quietly.
    ‘Yes, and for ours. I knows that, Alice … But you can see what I mean, I’m sure. A woman would rather have her own son’s flesh and blood for a grandchild … But, no. It bain’t just that, see, ’tis Hester herself, poor child! She’s … well … a bit … odd, bain’t she, Alice? Which be understandable, what with losing poor Reuben and the way her father do go on! I never heard of a religion so full of evil! ’Ow would my Dave cope with all that? I don’t reckon ’twas Reuben’s death as drove Hester half out of ’er mind, neither! T’was more likely her father and what he said to ’er that day he come ’ere! You ’eard ’im! Wicked it were! Poor child. I don’t know … And now she’s sayin’ she don’t want to go to Reuben’s folks over in America! When that would surely be the best thing all round!’ Rose paused, hoping for Alice’s approval of this solution to Hester’s problems. ‘Don’t you reckon it would be?’ Alice kept to herself her honest opinion, which was that for Rose, Hester’s immediate departure for Bismarck, North Dakota, might have been the ‘best thing’, but for Hester herself, for her unborn child and possibly for Dave, too, it might not be. The warden’s silence on the subject did not escape Rose.
    The land girls, who were keenly following every twist and turn of Hester’s story, were more outspoken.
    ‘I reckon you’d be ’appy to see the back of her, Mrs Crocker,’ was Gwennan’s opinion. ‘Pack her off with the other GI brides, eh? Then p’raps your Dave would settlefor some nice local girl with a dad who’s not a ravin’ loony like that Jonas Tucker!’
    ‘I just want what’s best for Hester,’ Rose declared emphatically, but the other girls were clearly sceptical and the discussion would have continued had Alice not put a stop to it.
    Two days later Hester vanished. Although officially, having left the Land Army, her welfare was no longer its responsibility, Margery Brewster, as local village registrar, assuming that Hester had returned to her parents’ smallholding in north Devon, had persuaded the Ministry of Agriculture to allocate to her enough petrol for her to drive over the moor to confirm Hester’s safe arrival there.
    While Margery’s description of what she found – the