Authors: Christianna Brand
N
OW EVEN THE OUTSIDE
world seemed darkened, as though a black cloud had passed over, obliterating all the summer sunshine. No light in the room but the flicker of firelight on polished oak panelling, and the gentle, warm glow of leather-bound books. Lyneth stood in the doorway her hand fisted against her mouth. ‘Oh, God, Tetty! Oh, God, oh
God
! Oh, Tetty, no—not Christine!’
Her step-mother crouched on the floor, her crinolined skirt spread all about her, holding the slender white figure in her arms. ‘She’s dead, Lyneth.’ She laid her scarred cheek against the harsh pale hair that had once been so soft and sweetly curling. ‘Oh, Christine, my lovely darling! She’s dead, Lyn, she’s dead.’
‘Tetty,’ said Lyneth, her mouth stiff, ‘look at Christina!’
Christina in her bright summer dress with the lace-edged drawers peeping out, calf-length, below—bobbing and bowing, holding out her little hands, all smiles and eagerness—infinitely pathetic, terrifying, grotesque. ‘Lyneth,’ said Tetty, ‘she said—Christine said—that she would carry on the Anathema. She would be revenged.’ And she pleaded with the white-clad figure, lying like a broken flower in her arms, ‘Oh, Christine, my darling, no—not this!’
Lyneth said frantically: ‘The ghosts—?’
‘They’ve gone, they’ve vanished, they’ve—gone back. But now Christine…’
‘She wouldn’t be so cruel,’ said Lyneth, bitterly weeping. ‘She couldn’t be so cruel.’ She rushed over and took the little girl into her arms. ‘Come to Mama, darling—Christina talk to Mama!’
But Christina wriggled herself away and ran off across the room. ‘Aunt Lyn not go ’way, Aunt Lyn, Aunt Lyn—!’ and as though in propitiation, held out the golden seal. ‘Look what Tina got! Tina give it to Aunt Lyn?’ Lyneth followed her, tried to hold her but again she struggled free. ‘Not want Mama. Want Aunt Lyn.’
Lady Hilbourne knelt upright now, the dead girl forgotten, staring in utter terror at the capering child. She prayed: ‘Oh, dear God, Christine—if you’re here, listen to me, listen to me! Don’t do this, darling, don’t punish us in this terrible, terrible way. If we injured you—’
If they had injured her! For a selfish whim, aided and abetted, as Christine herself had said—they had broken her happiness in two, she who had asked so little in life, but her only one true and for-ever love; had condemned her to communion with spirits, careless whether they be friendly or malign. ‘Do you call me bitter, Tetty?’ she had said, ‘—because from my prison upstairs I must watch her wearing the treasures that you should have guarded for me from her vanity and greed. I am very naked without them and my heart is like ice. And if one touches ice, one will feel the cold too.’
And Lyneth: ‘If I am cruel and wicked, Tetty, it was you who made me so…’
And…‘I have a gift,’ Hil had said to her, long, long years ago when still the young tree of her life had been fresh and green, before the lightning flash had come. ‘I—know things. And I know that one day far into the future, you will betray us. You will destroy us all.’
That day was come.
She stumbled to her feet. She went over to where the child still danced and smiled. She too addressed the unseen. ‘Christine—hear me! If I can lift this burden from you… If they would release you… After all,’ she suggested, desperate with anxiety, ‘I also was a Hilbourne bride.’
Lyneth cried out: ‘Tetty?’
‘If I could take Christine’s place, Lyneth. If I could give my life for hers… You would go back to Lawrence, Lyn—?’
‘Oh, Tetty, yes, yes! Anything, anything. I’d try…’
‘Plead with them, too Lyn. They may not yet be so far away; plead with Christine…!’ And she knelt again, taking the little girl in her arms. ‘Ask your Aunt Lyn, Tina, ask her very nicely, say please, please do this for me, please, please take Tetty into the Other World and come back to us instead.’ And as the child only stared at her, uncomprehending, she insisted: ‘Ask Aunt Lyn—just say please, please, let me go!’
‘Don’t want to go,’ said the child. ‘Tina stay with Aunt Lyn.’
‘Christine, for God’s sake!—hear me, listen to me! Don’t punish this child for my sins.’
Lyneth looked down into the upturned, happily smiling small face, framed in its dancing curls. She said: ‘Tetty, I don’t think it’s Christina who is being punished. It’s you and me.’
‘Oh, Lyneth—Christine always so gentle and kind: could she really break your heart like this?’
‘After all,’ said Lyneth and fell again into a storm of weeping, ‘I broke hers.’
Outside the sun shone bright again, but in this dark room it was piercingly cold. They were silent, only the child chattering happily away, running back to the desk to fetch another toy to be shown to—nobody. Lyneth said at last: ‘Will Christine never let me go?’
‘It is not the same curse,’ said her step-mother. ‘They didn’t haunt children, the curse was upon the brides of this house. But the house… Will the house still imprison you, Lyn?—will it imprison the child?
‘And if not?’ said Lyn. ‘If I take her and never bring her back—?’
‘Aunt Lyn says, Tina come back,’ said the little girl. She asked wonderingly: ‘To Aunt Lyn?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said her mother. ‘You shall come back. But come with Mama now, darling.’ She caught the child and lifted her. ‘Come now with Mama, Tina, and come back to Aunt Lyn another time.’
The little girl struggled and cried. Lady Hilbourne said: ‘Can Christine—? Those others, they couldn’t haunt outside the house. Is it the same for Christine?’
As though in reply—‘Put down, put down!’ cried the struggling child and, set down on her feet again, ran to the centre of the room, holding out an eager hand. ‘Aunt Lyn come in the garden wiv Tina? Come and play in the garden?’ Disappointment spread across her little eager face. ‘Can’t come in the garden? Aunt Lyn can’t come out?’
‘Christine has given the answer,’ said Lady Hilbourne. To the nothingness in the room, she said: ‘Christine—tell the child. Tell us the terms of your curse upon us. To punish us, Lyneth and me—you will haunt Christina? But you won’t hurt her—?’
‘Aunt Lyn not hurt Tina,’ said the child, protesting. But again her face changed, took on a shadow of fear. ‘If Tina’s good.’
‘Oh, Tetty,’ said Lyneth, ‘if she’s good!
If
she’s good—if she does what Christine wishes, if she leads the life that a ghost decrees she should lead. If she doesn’t…
You
couldn’t know, but Christine—the living Christine—she and I knew very well what that could mean.’ She went if possible even more white, her hands shook with fear. ‘Oh, my poor baby!’
Still and quiet, the dead girl lay half-forgotten. Her stepmother said, looking down at the thin face that had been so lovely, ‘She could never be cruel to Christina, Lyn, she loves her.’
‘She is a ghost now,’ said Lyneth. ‘Ghosts can’t feel love, they have no hearts. Richard—I don’t know, Richard seemed sometimes to be—different. He said once that he had loved our mother; but Lenora said, “How could you love her, there’s no such emotion in you. You are dead and the dead have no heart for loving.” And Christine is dead.’ To the unseen Christine, she begged: ‘Will you let me take her now? You say you can call her back.’ She went to the child, tentatively, picked her up, acquiescent and, finding herself free, rushed out with her through the hall and into the sunlit garden; and they were gone.
They were gone; and I am alone, thought the weeping woman, crouched beside the dead girl, lying all askew now, ugly with death, on the hearthrug. Alone in this great gloomy old house—living out the rest of my days, alone with a ghost. So many years since she had come here, a girl in all the green freshness of her youth; and the lightning flash had come and riven in twain the blossoming tree of her life and into the dark and withered fork of the tree, had poured all her bright spirit. The ghosts, she thought. I believed I had got off scot-free, I was free of their haunting. But I was a bride of Aberdar, I was going to him—who is a Hilbourne also—as a bride; I was about to become in fact, however little I then knew it, a bride indeed to a Hilbourne of Aberdar Manor. Was it likely that I should escape their malignity? They turned my thoughts to darkness; and now they punish me for the sins of their own creation. All my life has been a punishment at their hands and this is the ultimate punishment, to be lived out for the years that remain.
Yet—need the years indeed be long, need they come at all? Here in this room, firelit now as it had been firelit then, that young, young man had pulled out his bright dagger and for love of a girl, destroyed his own life. Here but an hour ago, a young girl for vengeance had taken his dead hand in hers and willed herself to die. Can I not die too then? Why need I continue to live?
To die? To take her own life? Or—simply to leave this place. What keeps me here? Would the house itself restrain me? But no, for a time had been when she herself had been a bride of Aberdar, and whatever tricks they might to her destruction have played with her spirit, her body had been free to go when she would. The house in itself would not keep her; and their power was gone.
But they would keep her. The house would keep her; Christine, a ghost, would keep her. The old power was gone, but a new power was in their hands. For the baby, Christina, must come to the house if Christine summoned her; and how could Lyneth endure, she thought, to watch her child dancing and posturing, all alone, a puppet in the hands of the merciless dead? I must remain she thought, to be here when she comes. And she would come: the pale ghost would summon her back, poor little bewildered child, the innocent instrument of vengeance. I must be here when Christine calls for her; and it can only be to this house, because nowhere else has Christine the power to haunt…
Nowhere else! Only here in this house, in this old, dark, gloomy manor house of Aberdar.
If there had been no Aberdar…
But if there were to
be
no Aberdar…
She wasted no time in indecision; ran to the great hall, furiously pressed on the bell to summon Tomos. ‘Get all the servants out of the house! Take them out by the back doors; keep them away from the house!’ And almost before, bewildered but obedient, he had gone, she had caught up the Paisley shawl from the chair where she had tossed it but an hour ago, and thrust it into the fire he had been lighting there. The fine wool took the flame and, whirling it about her, she rushed from window-curtains to upholstery of couches and chairs, flung on to the smouldering horsehair the contents of an oil lamp smashed against the wall and spilling its contents over the dry old oak panelling; heaved open the great door so that the draught might drive the conflagration before it up the oak staircase, into the salons with their delicate furniture, ready-made sticks to keep the bonfire a-flame…
And heard low laughter: and they were there, pale as shadows, faint as a mist through which their fine jewels glimmered like sequins on a veil. And they called in their thin voices, ‘Christine! Christine! Christine, come to us while we still have even so frail a handhold with this world on earth. The house is going, not even you can haunt it then. Come with us, forget your anger, your vengeance. Come with us and we can be together for all time in our wandering through the Other World.’
She came through from the library, the white shadow in the white muslin dress she had worn in life. ‘I can’t come with you. I dare not betray the Anathema. I should be for ever an alien, poised between this world and the Other World, never to belong to either. I could never come back.’
‘We are aliens too, Christine. We failed also in the Anathema; we belong nowhere, we are wanderers. Come with us, move with us through the grey shadows and they need not be so grey—’
‘I can’t leave before I have exacted my vengeance,’ said Christine. ‘I must steal Lyneth’s treasure from her, as she stole mine from me.’
‘Christine, the house is burning—there is nowhere for you to come back to, you can haunt here no more…’
Tetty stood in the centre of the great hall and felt nothing of the heat of the flames licking up to the old wooden linen-fold panelling of the walls. ‘Christine, I can hear your voice now, your ghost-voice; even, dimly I seem to see you. Darling, dearest Christine, forget this terrible threat—tell me that you can’t still exact it, now that the house has gone?’
Did you think you could still control me, Tetty, as you did when I was a child? Do you think you can command the dead? Your strength is gone. I have been with the dead for so long and now I, myself, am dead—you have no power over me, whatever you may do. I will still be revenged.’
‘Then—revenge yourself upon me, Christine. Let me die here in the flames, let that be enough.’
‘You betrayed
me
, Tetty. But Lyneth has betrayed Lawrence, and my love for him, and his love for her. That’s where my vengeance lies. Not upon you.’
But now the musky scent was there, all too well remembered: and in the light of the flames, the glitter of jewels unseen. And the fading voices: ‘Christine, the Other World is closing in about us, come with us, there’s no more time. A moment and we shall be gone…’
‘Let the wind of your going fan the flames,’ she cried out to them, ‘burn the house, let it burn, let it burn fast!—and for that brief time while it burns, wait for me: and then I shall be with you.’
And the fire roared up anew, surging towards the floors above, far sooner than any ordinary blaze could have reached them. Tetty stood there, unmoving, in the centre of the great hall. ‘Christine, I could not live, I won’t live, with the knowledge of what I have done, to bring all this terrible thing to pass…’
The dim voice said: ‘It matters nothing to me, Tetty, whether you live or die. Either way, you will be punished enough. I ask nothing more of you.’
And suddenly—Hil was there, standing in the blackened orifice of the doorway, looking with horror at the tottering staircase that led up to the old nursery rooms, in the west wing; and cried out: ‘Christine?’
She said dully: ‘Christine is dead,’ and moved her head in a gesture towards the library.
He flung himself towards it, forcing his way through the flames devouring the wooden framework of the doorway, and in a moment returned, holding the dead girl, ungainly, in his arms. ‘For God’s sake, Tetty—are you still here? Get out of this place, the whole house is tumbling in, are you mad?’ And as she remained as though transfixed—still carrying his burden, he thrust out roughly at her with his shoulder. ‘Move, get out!—must I put her down, let her he here to be consumed by the fire, because you won’t stir to save yourself?’ And he barged at her again with his shoulder, pushing her towards the open doorway. She stumbled before him, out into the open air.