Authors: Christianna Brand
‘
Eh bien
—and then?’
‘Back and forth, back and forth,’ said Olwen, ‘the book, the papers, looking about for more papers, and then…’
‘
Mon Dieu
, girl, have you got not
le mouchoir
? The hankersneef, girl, the hankersneef!’
Olwen lifted the corner of her apron and gave a resounding blow. It was all about very little, however, just the habit, thought Madame irritably, ugly and tiresome, like the girl herself. ‘
Alors
,
continuez
! This
histoire
,’ said Madame, guarding against too much complacence in her not very admirable confederate, ‘is not so very interesting, but you may as well finish with it.’
Olwen saw the promise of wealth dwindling uncomfortably. She in her turn affected an air of indifference. ‘No, right, Ma’am!—perhaps it is not so very important.’
‘Tell, tell!’ said Madame, impatiently. ‘
Continuez
! Relate!’
‘She tore it up,’ said Olwen, carefully brief.
‘Tore it up?
Mon Dieu
!—tore it up, destroyed it? This book?’
‘Not the book.’ The fish well and truly hooked, she proceeded expectantly. ‘Tore the pages out of the book, Ma’am, pulled out some of the papers from the bunch—’
‘Very well, and then—?’
‘I heard Bethan coming past the nursery, I couldn’t stay, I had to leave the window…’
‘So—is that all?’ said Madame, controlling a deep disappointment. She shrugged hugely. ‘That is not so much after all.’
‘No, Ma’am,’ said Ulwen, with downcast eyes.
‘There is more? What more have you seen?’
‘Only, next morning,’ said Olwen, up high again, ‘Bethan came from the schoolroom with a dustpan and brush in her hand. “Is that ashes?” I says to her. “There’s no fire in the schoolroom. It’s summer.” And Bethan says—’
‘Says what, girl, for heaven’s sake?’
‘ “No, no,” she says. “Just, Miss has been burning some papers in the grate.” ’
‘I have in my drawer,’ said Madame, ‘a very pretty little piece of ribbon, Olwen—I have just thought how nice it would be to trim your Sunday bonnet. And I shall give you some shillings, three shillings perhaps; but half you must spend on a dozen hankersneefs—you shall take a time from your free afternoon next month to go and buy some. And continue to keep the watch upon Mees. One does not like to—
fouiller
: I think you say the peeping,’ said Madame piously, ‘but it is for the sake of the cheeldrain. You can listen, perhaps, if she tells the below-stairs anything about the books…’
Miss, however, told nobody anything about the diaries—or nothing at least, of what pages she had removed from them; not even Hil. She did suggest to him, however, an excellent new plan to further their enquiries. An old woman was ill in the village. Would it not be nice if the children were encouraged, now that they were seven years old and might be taught to carry out such duties, to visit the poorer tenants, with appropriate comforts? Their mother, no doubt, before her illness, would have carried out such lady-of-the-manor visitations and her mother-in-law before her and so to generations back. The general gossip of the parish might well be productive of an anecdote most valuably adding to the outcome of their investigations. The affairs of the manor impinged very directly upon its tenants, and such people had long memories; she wondered that she and Hil had not thought of it before.
He
might fall into easy gossip with the men. She and the children could start with this particular sick old woman. Who knew what memories might be evoked of past lives and deaths?
‘Do you suppose Madame would concede a drop of broth for us to carry to her, by way of introduction? We could represent the propriety of the children taking on such little tasks…’
‘We won’t worry The Walloon,’ he said, laughing. ‘Bron will smuggle some out to you—she makes a famous broth, and a suitably nourishing custard…’
‘Bron?’
He corrected himself, laughing again. ‘Bron! I mean Menna, of course. Bronwen is her second name; they occasionally call her by it. By any name, she’ll certainly oblige you as to the old woman, and you know how those ones love to dilate on birth, marriage and death.’
‘Especially on death. Such women seem positively to revel in discussion of other people’s departures from this life.’
‘It’s their only excitement,’ said Hil. ‘Birth is common enough, a great deal too common for most of them, poor souls; and marriage too often a mere scrambled joining-together, under the parental eye. But death—death is a shared emotion, we all face it, we all dread it; within the parish it entails some ceremonial which all may attend, a gathering-together afterwards among those who can afford it, for the “baked meats”. And death among the gentry—well, that must be quite a special excitement for them: the fine hearse brought over from town, and the horses with their plumes, the flowers and the grand mourning dresses, all the lords and ladies come from half across the county to pay their last respects. And it’s the custom of Aberdar on such occasions, to subscribe to a gathering (which, however, they do not themselves attend) in the village hall.’ He shrugged. ‘Quite a jolly outing, as they say. Everything but the seaside.’
‘Oh, Hil! I think they have more feeling in the village than that? These poor young Hilbourne wives; dead in childbirth, early widowed or losing young children—’
‘Yes, yes, I say nothing against the people. The Manor is very good to them: compared with many, they’re well taken care of, and they’re grateful. I only meant that such things aren’t soon forgotten, the deaths and disasters especially; and it’s death and disaster, alas, that you and I, in the enquiry, are interested in. Anyway, let’s hope that this particular sick old woman has a conveniently long memory; and of matters that count.’
Pages of an old diary, torn out and destroyed. A handful of letters and accounts, torn up and destroyed… That this particular sick old woman would certainly have just such a memory as he described, it apparently did not occur to her present benefactress to mention. This particular sick old woman—in a neighbouring village, in fact, not even their own—though long retired, had been for many years the local midwife.
And suddenly—drama. A letter arrived addressed directly to the Manor, in the recognisable hand of Sir Charles Arden who had written the original recommendations which had got her the post; and, very pale, Miss Tettyman crept to the bedside of the Squire. ‘Forgive me, sir, but I must leave you. If only for a little while—’
So thin and haggard, lying there on his couch by the bedroom window, with the peak of his bent knees fallen sideways, for lack of strength, against the sofa-back. ‘Oh, dear God!—are you going?’
‘For just a little while, sir. I’ll return.’
‘You will? You
will
?’
‘Oh, sir—yes. Yes, I will.’ But her voice strengthened to a new purpose. ‘I will indeed, sir, I promise it.’
‘When can you return?’
‘Just a matter of a few days, perhaps. I will try. But they are—there is great trouble at Greatoaks. I must go to them.’
‘It is only this,—that if you don’t return soon, very soon…’ His thin shoulders rose and fell in the ghost of a shrug. ‘There is not much time left for me,’ he said.
Tears filled her eyes. She knelt down by the couch and took his wasted hand in her own and kissed it, laying it for a moment against the unscarred cheek.
‘I’ll come back to you—and to the children,’ she said. ‘I promise it.’
‘It is of such very great importance to them. And to my peace of mind.’ He hesitated. ‘I had been going to—I had thought of asking you…’ But he released her. ‘You are in a fever to go to where, also, you’re needed. Just so that you come back!’
‘I’ll come back,’ she promised. ‘I’ll come back.’
How stay away ever again from Aberdar Manor—where all her heart now lay? She scribbled a note to Hil, explaining the circumstances of their need for her at the Park, and within an hour she was gone.
More ashes, this time in the empty grate of the bedroom. ‘Come back?’ said Tante Louise, improvising re-arrangements with the Squire for the care of the children. ‘She won’t come back. The wife is dying—Mees has gone to her paramour.’
‘Lady Arden dying? How do you know this, Louise?’
From the remnants of a letter, this time too hastily burned to have been totally destroyed: sufficiently, however, to have been to some extent misunderstood. ‘She—well, she said as much, let slip something to that effect—she will hardly remember, I dare say, that in her haste she did so. But now the wife dies—the lover at last is free.’
He closed his ears against it, shook his weary head. ‘Oh, Edouard,’ she said, speaking as she usually did with him, in French, ‘you never will hear a word against Mees. But she is one for the men, my dear! Even Hil, have you not seen with what eyes she looks at Hil?’ Now he did lift his head and stare at her, suddenly startled. She improved upon it. ‘And he too. All those hours they spend together…’ She shrugged. ‘Madame Menna will not like that too much, I dare say.’
‘Menna? And Hil? Menna is twice his age.’ But he regretted immediately having exchanged a word with her upon such a subject. ‘It is no concern of yours or mine. It is Miss Tettyman who is in charge of the children. She will come back to them.’
But Tante Louise had seen where she had touched him on the raw. ‘And to Hil?’ she said; and when he did not reply, looked at him more closely and saw that he had fainted.
That day he was too weak but next morning he sent for Hil. ‘She swears that she will come back—’
‘She’ll come back,’ said Hil. ‘Or she wouldn’t promise.’
‘You seem very sure.’ He said cautiously: ‘Does it mean anything to
you
, if she returns or stays away?’
‘Well, of course. The children—’
‘To you, James?’ He had no words to waste. ‘You know that… You could never marry her, you must never marry…’
The long, long history, traced back now through this means and that, built up into a family tree which, for very space upon the paper, excluded all but the tragedies. A new generation, flourishing two hundred and fifty years ago; the happy marriage, the full family. And then—the eldest son of that marriage, killed in the flower of his youth; Isabella, the widowed daughter, sitting so rigid in the niche in the ancient church with her stiff pointed hands, her dead baby lying across the lap of her robe. The boy-child surviving, had grown up, married and then—hardly yet into manhood, like his father had been killed instantly in the hunting field. His child brought up in the sorrowing family, had brought in a new wife from a fine healthy stock, only to fall with her first child into a
dérangement
, spending the rest of her long life locked away in the company of ‘friends’ whom no other person could see or hear, in a sort of terrible, mad contentment all of her own. Her child, in its turn…
‘It is the curse upon the place, James, there is no happiness for any marriage in Aberdar. The line must end. And you are a Hilbourne, directly in line.’
‘For God’s sake, Edward, I must have some woman in my life.’
‘Then you must beget no children upon her.’
‘What sort of manage is that?’
‘For this sweet girl—no marriage at all.’ He cringed away from the vulgarities of Madame Devalle; but…‘If she returns—’
‘She will return.’
‘That woman, The Walloon, says that she will not. She says that there is—another lover; who will now be free.’
‘That emanates only from the ugly imaginings of a woman frantic with anxiety as to her own situation,’ said Hil, steadily. ‘If ever there was another whom she loved—well, we can’t help loving, there need be no wrong in that if we don’t give way to it. But if ever there were such a love, then I believe that it’s over. She will return.’
‘To you?’ said the Squire.
‘Perhaps. I have to admit to you, Edward, now, that I could pray on my knees that it might be so.’
‘James, for God’s
sake
! You can’t bring her—and yourself—under the curse of this doomed line.’ He paused, gestured feebly towards the decanter on the table beside him. Hil poured out a half glass of wine and held it to his lips. ‘Rest a little, you’re overtiring yourself.’
‘No, no, it must be said now.’ He closed his eyes for a few moments nevertheless and then with an effort resumed. ‘I had been intending to discuss this with you, as once we did before, though at that time you said you cared nothing for her. There were reasons then against my marrying. Suppose I had recovered my strength… But that is now past hope. I have not very long to live. If I were to marry her, the children would have a mother; what else is to become of them?’
‘You seem less concerned with
her
survival under the curse,’ suggested Hil, unable to keep the dryness out of his voice, ‘when you consider it from your own point of view.’
The Squire looked at him sadly. ‘Ah, my poor James! Do you not think what I must feel for you? But—this is for the children; and here is what seems to me. A marriage to me would be no marriage—there could be no children from it, to bring the doom upon her. Look here, at your papers. Who is affected? The young wives, the young husbands, the children. But she—’
‘
She
is a nothing, who is to be used for the benefit of Lyneth and Christine?’
‘She would be mistress of all these great estates, of all this wealth. She has much to lose, but she would have these ready-made children whom already she loves. She has something also to gain.’
‘You have not considered,’ said Hil, driven by his own bitterness to unwonted cruelty, ‘that your wealthy young widow might very well marry again.’
‘I have thought of that also,’ said the Squire, sadly. ‘I am not a fool, brother. But—such a marriage if it were outside the family, would not come under the curse. It would not be within this doomed Hilbourne line. Only one marriage could bring that about—to her destruction—’
‘And to mine,’ said Hil.
A long hour passed. The Squire lay back against his pillows, utterly spent and spoke no further word. Hil sat beside him with his head in his hands. When at last he moved, he rose and went over to the window and stood staring out at the summer greens, from the golden green of the willows, the emerald of the grass, to the dark evergreens beyond. He said: ‘So there is only one way left to me. Only one way.’