Chapter 17: Cassie in Hartglade Pt I

Part I
CASSIE

I think Madam recognised my disappointment as I saw the rear end of his horse swaying gently from side to side as he lazily departed without even saying adieu to me, Laeticia and Lucy.

Was it then that I burst into tears and Madame put her arm around my shoulder? "He is still ignoring you, then?" She had a way of making you feel better when you're so pissed off you felt like screaming and shouting and raving at everybody around.

He was ignoring me. I'm sure he knew what I felt. I had really been trying my best. Was it so obvious that even Madam could see it? I allowed my face to adopt an aggressive look, taking an angry breath and..."SMACK!"

The whole of the side of my face burned red, my fists clenched, I was about to fight back until I saw the look in Madame's eyes. "You silly little girl with your temper tantrums. Did your mother never take your knickers down and slap your bottom? If she did she ought to have done it a damn sight harder. I see you as a precocious child, selfishly, using your little intelligence just to make yourself feel superior. And you've grown to develop those cutting remarks, self-centred and rude, you can be obnoxious and you are a nasty-minded bitch! I thought you were getting over that, but no, your true self must out, mustn't it?"

I was really taken aback; Madame had never spoken to me like that before.

"Oh yes, if you knew how much you can make his life a misery..." She dragged me far away so that Amina never hear a word she threw at me. My wrist hurt as I stumbled over new gravel and churned up mud. Once she had got me behind the barn, Madame really laid into me verbally.

"That's precisely why our young gentleman, your guardian, doesn't want you in between the sheets. He only gave you a fucking because it's a requirement around here to knock up his young housekeepers. I don't think he'd be able to face you if he had a choice. I've no idea why he brought you home from the orphanage and I'm damned if he could explain it either. Did you know that your reputation there was so bad that you would have been lucky to find another man?

You know what happens to those who don't take advantage of what's been offered to them?"

I had no idea and it was only a few days later when I pursued the matter, that I realised that I'd be on the train back through Lush and never to be heard of again. What became of the rejects from Pionova, nobody knew. I'd had one life foreshortened and it looked as though I was ending this one the same way, but as a result of my own stupidity.

I stood there reeling against the back of this new barn that was being erected next to the hut. The home truths* that she threw at me had me recoiling in shock.

Truth hurts and didn't I know it, as she told me what I had been really like.

"And don't just think that half an hour smiling prettily will get you your own way. You've got to decide for yourself what's important in life. Now, for you, your biggest problem is your own self-centredness. Lose it! We all know that you've been running around him smiling and doing your best to get in between the sheets. Why?"

Madame continued the tirade, not giving me a chance to recover. "Nothing wrong in your being happy, but have you ever heard the expression, 'it's better to give than to receive'? You heed well what I say."

I listened as she told me that all I wanted him in bed for was for my own satisfaction. "Until you change your ways, you know you'll never get him to bed and you'll end up as an egotistic bitch; unliked, ignored and detested by all. You can't go throwing your weight around here. If you do, you'll end up sleeping in the pigsty. Now, my dear, you just work out whether you want to live in a happy family environment where you work with everybody around you, but don't try to cajole them solely for the purpose of getting your own way."

I listened carefully as, for the first time, she openly regurgitated details of my previous life. Reading between the lines, I began to understand facts about regeneration that I had only half surmised. With no pulling of her punches she detailed how I had made Chuck's life a misery by the misuse of my authority and taking advantage of his pleasant nature. I learnt how he, on his part, the mild mannered young man, he refused to report me to the management at Stonecrete C&E. He did not want to cause any furore, preferring the quiet life.

"That's not going to happen here, you help to change him. He's had a couple of years to settle down and think. Once that young man starts exploring his capabilities, I could well see him whipping you to death."

A pitying look came to Madame's eyes, "Please don't do that to my Chuck. Your demise would not affect anyone but for the better, but he already questions how harshly he's treating you, feels bad about it, he does.

"At heart he is a pleasant natured character. Generally he puts other people before himself. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT TO DO," she pronounced not loudly, but so firmly that I knew exactly what she meant. If I had any doubts about it she explained what it was to put somebody else and their interests before your own.

Madame never let me forget that for the next ten days. Every morning Madame gave me a lesson I'd never forget. She terrified me, but what really scared me were the repercussions of my behaviour if I failed to learn from her.

Some days she had me in tears as she related the depth of the misery I had caused a simple engineer who had been just trying his best. This was the first time that anybody had spoken to me openly about pre-regeneration times, although Madame was very emphatic that I should never ever discuss such matters with anybody apart from my guardian. "Some people on Earth had such an awful time that they should never remember the horrors experienced, think of the German concentration camps, think of Stalin's gulags, think of people being tortured to death for the pleasure of others. These are the predominant people who have been given a second chance and many of them have no wish to remember their former existence. Never discuss a previous life with anyone but your guardian," she insisted

She frightened me, but then I began to question why Chuck had been selected to come here. Had I made his life so terrible? And why had I been so fortunate enough to be given a second chance?

She told me more about Chuck than I had ever known. I began to respect him. I think that it was when I began to ask what he liked that Madame realised that she had succeeded.

Every day I endeavoured to do my best for the homestead. It was only later, months later, that I appreciated how Madame could wind women around her little finger. I bet she could do the same with the men, too.

Laeticia too, I heard her talking to, as if the horticulturist were a little girl, putting her right on something.

I'm not sure how many days Madame stayed and lectured me, but it was a part of my life that was a turning point. I think Madame recognised that I was changing in my attitude because one day as she was going into town she asked if I would like to come too.

"Of course," I responded, "but not if you think that Chuck would object." For some reason that reaction appeared to please her. We took the small waggon because we still had a few things to bring back and Laeticia with Lucy were coming in as well. Laeticia had visited Hartglade a number of times to pick up various odds and ends that she needed with her planting. It was not unusual for her to make the trip every couple of days, leaving others to carry out the transplanting of seedlings and watering of them.

On the way we dropped in at the brickworks. There, waiting to be loaded onto the waggon were a dozen or more lavatory bowls complete with 'U' bends. I'd never seen anything like them on Pionova. Lucy and Laeticia, had no idea what they were, obviously they had no memory of pre-regeneration times. I just explained what they were, and that they took the place of a holed plank that covered a narrow pit dug in the ground and moved every few days to a virgin hole when the smell got too much to bear.

How we loved it when cabbage was on the menu. Cabbage leaves carefully dropped to cover all the shit, dampened the rising odours. No more smells in the privy, I thought, seeing this ceramic ware. You don't know how much better that made me feel.

A labourer started loading finished grey coloured lavatory bowls onto the cart, and it was made clear to us that this was their job. I think Laeticia was with Madame as they wandered off to try to get more pot containers made to be used in the growing of seedlings.

There were more surprises in store for me. Accompanied by Lucy, we observed the individual manufacture of the ceramic ware. There was only one man doing it, and I could see how he had roughly shaped half a dozen bowls complete with U bend.

Next to them I could see a couple he had carved to a more perfect shape. Now, he was smoothing one with a very fine sandpaper which he dipped into water every minute or so. This resulted in a smooth surface almost like glass, to which nothing would adhere when the item was fired I presume.

Beyond that I saw a couple of finished items waiting to be fired, but these were covered and had been painted in some almost transparent glaze. I'd never seen this process before and would have enquired more; but the potter, if that's what you call him, was, to say the least, a most taciturn man.

Instead there was activity going on in another new building that attracted me. No, I'd never been there before, but it was obvious the building was newly built; there were even droppings of mortar that had not had time to be worn away, dropped on the ground. Yes there were lots of signs that it was new, it smelt new. I wandered inside and a peculiar looking artisan broke off from his work to make Lucy and me very welcome.

I say that he was peculiar because his face sort of hung down in a very unusual fashion over his lower jaw at either side.

It was warm inside the room, and the leather aproned man took a breather from his work, moving to a large barrel where he filled his mouth with water from a ladle and swallowed.

"Marnin', Miss," he welcomed me in a most unusual accent partly Germanic and I just don't know what the other was. To me it appeared to be a hodgepodge of Eastern States and some peculiar British dialect.

By the time that I had discovered how he had greeted me I responded, "Good morning."

"Vou ' be comin' to see as 'ow your windows is comin' on?"

I suddenly realised the new farmhouse was going to have lots of glass. Chuck had mentioned something about how expensive it was to import glass, and much of it was broken after the long trek. Then a couple of days later, he had told me that he had found a glassblower*. Now me, I had no idea what a glassblower was. This red-faced funny man persisted in telling me. First he showed me lots of small triangular panes (this confused me as it had nothing to do with glassblowing) and then he picked up a hollow rod and he dipped it into a vat that he got burning more brightly with a foot bellows.

At the end was a gobbet of clear plastic-like stuff. "Molten glass," he muttered, before twisting his rod around and dipping it again. Suddenly he lifted it up, still spinning the rod in his fingers, and placed his lips to his end of the rod.

His cheeks suddenly billowed out as I began to understand. He was blowing through the tube and at the end, like a balloon, the air pushed a bubble inside the misshapen sphere at the far end.

What was more amazing; the way this bubble of air grew larger to form a ball or was it the sight of his face? As his skin stretched, his cheeks came out like two red balls on each side of his face.

I could see that whenever he paused twisting the bulbous end of molten glass, gravity caused the blob at the end to be misshapen and start to fall down. He soon righted this by vigorously twisting again until he had formed what he considered a satisfactory sphere at the end. With a pair of iron shears he expertly cut the top off the sphere, allowing it to drop off back to the molten glass vat to be reused.

He continued to twist the remaining part of the sphere, a bowl shape, until the glass cooled down. Then with a practised little twist of his hand he let it fall from the end of his pipe onto a leather cushion.

It was unfortunate that Madame took that moment to come in, but I think he got another splodge of glass on the end of his pole thing and spun it round until th re was a small flat disc at the end. Madame was not interested, I couldn't understand why; it was really interesting, she distracted me again. Damn! By the time I next looked, the disc was now seen as the base of what was to become a wine glass. It had a stem of glass attached, and he was accurately letting this stem adhere to the upturned bowl.

I couldn't believe it, five minutes later he had a perfect tall wine glass produced, "That's for vou, mein fraulein," he pronounced as if I were just a tiny girl, "Vor brightneeng up my day, is that what vu are saying?"

I agreed that he had brightened up my day, too, I was amazed by this display of his expertise.

I understood that he was bemoaning the fact that as a 'meister' glass blower he was being paid to spin glass.

"Spinning?"

"Ya, for the grand mein herr," he said, which I took to mean Chuck.

Later Madame was to say, "That man was butchering the Germanic language, but then he's a Bohemian* after all." I knew bohemians were some form of weird artists who wore funny jackets, and he was certainly weird and judging by his work, a true artist.

It was only later, a year afterwards, that I discovered that his native language was not German, but Czech, and he massacred the German language when he attempted to speak it, but did use Germanic words for anything that he wasn't sure about in English.

Of course this was irrelevant at the time. I was querying what he meant by 'spinning', and he proceeded to explain that he had been contracted by Chuck to make windows, and what was worse, Chuck insisted the frames be all a regular size.