The Other Cathy by Nancy Buckingham

his wounds with snow and bound them with clean strips of petticoat torn from her bundle; but William later recounted with relish that some witch-like incantations had accompanied the application of a balsam made from leaves of Adder’s Tongue. Making him as comfortable as possible, she had taken the baby and gone to summon help, and the local doctor freely admitted that Ursly had saved the boy’s life, while contemptuously dismissing the curative properties of her balsam. But William’s mother had been more generous, insisting out of her gratitude that Ursly should take a situation at Bracklegarth Hall and make her home there with the baby. She was an excellent seamstress, but the position which started off vaguely as sewing-woman became more obscure as the years went by until she was virtually Maud Hardaker’s companion. The family resented Ursly’s privileges, and she would doubtless have been sent away when Maud Hardaker died but that Uncle Randolph’s wife Henrietta had taken a liking to her. While Chloe took charge of the household management, the ailing Henrietta and Ursly would spend long hours alone with each other. However, after Henrietta had been laid to her rest, Uncle Randolph had dispensed with Ursly’s services; even though, for Cathy’s sake, he kept Seth on. Old Ursly had been banished with a small pension to this remote homestead tucked away in a fold of the moor, relic of the Hardaker who first sought to augment a meagre living as a smallholder by becom ing also a weaver of cloth, over a hundred years ago.
    As Emma stooped to fill the kettle with silk-soft, sparkling water, she thought guiltily that she had defied Uncle Randolph’s wishes on two counts; he did not want his family to have any contact with Ursly, whom he regarded as a meddle some old woman; furthermore, she had ridden across the moor alone, something forbidden in the family almost to the point of superstition ever since Uncle William’s accident all those years ago.
    Returning indoors, Emma watched while Ursly stirred the peat fire into life and placed the kettle on the hob.
    ‘Seth told me something this morning, Ursly,’ she said at last. ‘He told me you’ve been saying that Cathy won’t see the winter. It was wrong of you. How could you possibly know any such thing?’
    ‘Happen I do know, then.’
    ‘But it’s ages since you’ve seen Cathy. Dr Mottram, who attends her, has never suggested that it might be so soon. He says Cathy might survive another year or two yet.’
    Ursly’s breath hissed through her lips. ‘Doctors! What use are they? When my mistress slipped her babies, three on ’em, the doctor couldn’t do nowt. ‘Twas only when she did beg me to aid her that she came safe through to childbed, with Miss Cathy.’
    ‘My Uncle Paget says that’s all nonsense,’ Emma ventured.
    ‘Aye, he would, wouldn’t he? The old doctor now, he did have t’grace to admit that I saved young Master William’s life. These ones now, they’d deny me that if they could.’
    Emma nodded, for it was all too true. Neither Uncle Paget nor Bernard had a good word to say for the old woman. They deeply resented it when their patients, failing to find them selves cured by conventional medicine, went along to Ursly for her mysterious herbal concoctions, and often, according to hearsay, with miraculous results.
    ‘Anyway, it was a blessing for Uncle William that you found him that day,’ Emma said. ‘Otherwise he might have lain there for hours and bled to death, or been frozen in the snow. What a lucky chance that you happened to be going across the moor.’
    The myopic eyes glinted. ‘Chance, tha’s saying it was?’
    Rebuked, Emma went on, ‘Well, anyway, how did you come to be on that lonely track, Ursly? You must have been heading somewhere.’
    ‘I never got there, then.’
    The old woman rose stiffly and made the tea in an earthenware pot, putting it aside to draw.
    ‘You never got where?’ asked Emma,