The Miller's Daughter by Margaret Dickinson

’im saying
they’d never get their hands on it, that there’d allus be a Forrest at the mill.’ The kindly woman paused, knowing she was in danger of touching on a painful subject for Emma.
Sarah cleared her throat and went on. ‘But then well things got a bit more serious.’
    ‘Why? What happened?’
    Suddenly, Sarah was evasive. ‘I – er – I’m not sure. Some rivalry over his wife, I think.’
    Emma laughed aloud. ‘Not over Grandmother Forrest. Surely not.’ Emma had never known her grandmother. All she knew of her was the picture of the sour-faced old battleaxe adorning, if
that could be the right word, the wall in the best parlour upstairs. It was a companion picture to that of her husband, Charlie Forrest, and showed a formidable woman with her hair pulled severely
back from her face. She had a thin, hard mouth and piercing eyes that seemed to follow everyone around the room, as if she was still watching all that went on in the family down the generations.
Emma had often marvelled that huge, laughing, jovial Grandpa Charlie could have ever married such a woman.
    ‘Eh?’ Sarah glanced at her, a puzzled expression on her face and then she said, ‘Oh no, not her. Not ya grand mother.’ She chuckled. ‘No, ya can’t
imagine any young fellers fighting over that owd beezum, can ya?’
    ‘Then who? Sarah, just who are you talking about?’
    Sarah looked away, uncomfortable now, as if she was already regretting having said so much. She faced Emma and took a deep breath. ‘It was between ya dad and Josiah that things got –
well – worse. Over – ya mam.’
    Emma stared at her. ‘My mother? But how, I mean, what happened?’
    But now Sarah shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘I dunno the details.’
    ‘Oh, really, Sarah, fancy telling me all that and then leaving me high and dry. Who does know? Luke?’
    Sarah whirled round, surprisingly quickly for her size. ‘Now don’t you go asking him. He’ll give me a good hiding for opening me big mouth.’
    Now Emma laughed. The very idea of Luke even raising his hand to his dear Sarah was just a joke. Sarah, reassured, turned away but Emma stared after her thoughtfully. Somehow she had to find out
the truth because instinctively she felt it had something to do with Jamie and herself. Maybe this so-called family feud really might affect their future happiness together.
    That evening Emma laid the table with care. A smooth white cloth, the best dinner service and the silver cutlery that had been a wedding present to her parents from Grandpa
Charlie. A small frown of concentration furrowed her forehead as she tried to drag from the recesses of her memory, the vision of her mother teaching her, a ten-year-old girl, the niceties of a
formal dinner party.
    ‘Now, my darling, watch carefully. Knives, forks, dessert spoons and forks, soup spoons – just so,’ her mother’s low, cultured voice had instructed as the young Emma had
watched her long slender fingers with their well-shaped and manicured nails lay out the cutlery. Now, glancing down at her hands with their short nails and skin that was chapped and calloused by
work, Emma was reminded sharply of the difference between the delicate, pianist’s hands of her mother and her own.
    ‘I suppose I’ve probably inherited old Charlie’s mill-building hands,’ she murmured aloud to the empty room and sighed. But her mother had scarcely lifted a finger about
the house. She had done no housework, had not even cooked or baked. Sarah, as the live-in maid, had done everything whilst the lady of the house had reclined on a sofa, cosseting herself with her
current pregnancy. It had seemed to the young Emma as if her mother had always been in a ‘delicate condition’. Pampered and fussed over by her husband who talked constantly about
‘This time everything will be all right. This time we shall have a son. The next Charles Forrest.’
    But each time, often in the middle of the night, there had been