Brides of Aberdar (2 page)

‘Arranged? Not arranged by herself!’

‘Arranged by her father, sir. That need be enough for you.’

The fine handkerchief of Holland lawn, gripped tight in a hand, very strong, for all it was so white and much be-ringed. ‘Sir, she loves me as I love her, we are promised. For God’s sake, you would not part us? She could never be happy—’

‘An infatuation soon forgotten, romantic nonsense from a fairy tale. Marriage is a serious affair.’

Lenora in rising indignation: ‘Cousin Edward, there is nothing lightly romantic about my brother’s love for Isabella, nor hers for him. They have made vows, exchanged tokens—’

He interrupted. ‘I pay no attention, Madam, to the nonsense practised at your fine court: all this talk of romantic devotion, revolving around your shrivelled old virgin queen. I regret that my sister, despite my objections, however briefly carried my daughter there. Isabella is long promised—to a fine young man, John Lloyd, my neighbour, whose estate, marching with mine—’

‘Sir, my brother will inherit a fortune ten times more than a few acres of mudland!’

‘That is not the question. There has been too much intermarrying. I adhere to the theory that it may lead to instability of the mind.’

‘I remind you, cousin, that my father himself was a son of first cousins.’

‘Very well—and what is your brother’s reputation at court? Dare-devil Dick do they call him, or some such name—?’

‘He lacks patience, sir, he is without fear. But there is no wrong in him, none. The Queen herself has said it: “My pretty, sweet Diccon is sound as a hazel-nut.” ’

‘Very well: and has added, has she not? that nevertheless it’s as well he has his devoted sister to continue as his—guardian.’

Richard put his hand in automatic gesture to the hilt of his dagger. ‘Sir, my sister is my friend—not my keeper.’

‘I suggest no serious flaw,’ said the Squire, less roughly. ‘But the seeds are there, they are sown in your ancestry. You are a dangerous young man. You are not for my daughter.’

He looked not very dangerous now: his hand had fallen from the dagger hilt and he stood staring, all the bright hope drained from his face, pale as the great pearl swinging at his cheek. He stammered: ‘But we are promised. How can we forget—?’ And now a wild look did come into his eye. ‘I will see her myself, I shall ask her—’

‘Diccon!’ cried Lenora, catching him by the empty sleeve of his jacket.

‘—I shall not leave this place until I have seen her…’

The Squire rose and pulled on a bell-rope. ‘Very well. I had hoped to spare you this. But I see that only the full truth will do.’ To the servant at the door he said, ‘Ask her ladyship to come and to bring my daughter here.’

The mother came to the door, urging forward the girl, white-faced, head hung: very young, very lovely, blue-eyed and with soft, palely golden curling hair; frightened and yet with a faint air of sulky defiance. ‘Oh, Richard! I am sorry, but… Cousin Lenora, don’t look at me like that! I was foolish, Richard cozened me—’

Brother and sister, side by side, stock still, gazed back in utter incredulity. Lenora cried out at last, and now her hand crept to her brother’s wrist in a restraining grasp: ‘You have broken faith with him?’

‘He has coerced her,’ cried Richard. ‘Bullied her!’

‘Better tell the truth, girl,’ said her father. As she remained silent, cowering, he spoke for her. ‘Already there was a firm understanding when she went to the court. There her head was turned by your fashionable nonsense. She came home, moped two days, confessed all to her mother. She is now formally betrothed. But for this sudden descent upon us, you would have been informed and the matter ended.’

They seemed hardly to hear him. Lenora cried out, ‘You have betrayed him!’ and Richard, ‘Isabella, speak to me, tell me in your own words, I’ll believe no other. You repent? It is ended? It was all a—nothingness?’ As she remained silent, his sister burst out again, and with unlovely oaths. Isabella said sullenly, ‘Don’t dare to call me such names!’

‘Names! I’ll call down worse than names upon you! Liar, false betrayer, I’ll call down my curse upon you, I’ll see you shrivel and die—’

‘Come away, Isabella,’ said her mother, trembling at her daughter’s shoulder. To Lenora, standing like a fury in her rage and pain, she cried back: ‘It is you who have been the betrayers—a young, innocent girl, tricked with fair words and false pretences…’

‘For God’s sake! Is this what you have told them, you unclean bitch? That he tricked you, cheated you? He couldn’t trick a child. I’ve told you, the Queen herself had said it, “the heart that knows no guile”. But to excuse yourself to your precious lover here at home, your gross, land-grubbing bumpkin…’

‘Lenora, no, no!’ Richard cried out in pain. ‘Poor innocent—!’

Isabella, dry-eyed, stealing sly glances at her father’s face. ‘Oh, Richard, yes, I was too young and foolish! It was all so seductive, the sighs and pleadings, the dancing in the great hall and the games, the old harridan clapping her speckled hands to see the antics of her pretty Diccon with his latest love—’

‘Isabella, you were my only love. You said I was your only love—’

Her father cut him off short. ‘That will do. She is the one that has done the cozening, boy, and now seeks to excuse herself by betraying you.’ He said to her mother: ‘Take her out of my sight,’ and to the young man, standing there, ashen, white-lipped, staring after the closing door: ‘Why would you press me? You could have placed the fault on me and so kept your illusions. But no, you must insist and now you know all the truth. You are not wanted here, cousin, neither by her parents nor by the girl herself. You have used the right word. It was all a nothingness.’

Did he sleep, did he dream?—the Squire of Aberdar, in the year of 1840, lying back in the great chair, broken, exhausted, late back from the funeral of his young wife!—dreaming of that hour, here in this very room two hundred and fifty years ago. This room, despite the bright firelight, grown cold and dark as death: oak-panelled, beautiful as a Rembrandt painting with its glow of colour, of satin and velvet, its glimmer of jewels in the flickering of the flames—Lenora, eyes flashing black fury as bright as the jewels themselves. The pretty dagger hung in its sheath at the young man’s thigh, a deadly toy which yet must be commonly carried in those perilous days. He put his hand to the hilt, the white hand heavy with rings, diamond and emerald, ruby and pearl. Stammering, stumbling…‘This is your word? We shall never..? We are parted..?’

‘It is
her
word, boy. You heard her for yourself. You had better—’ But the Squire broke off, cried out: ‘Put away that knife!’, and leapt forward trying to wrest it from the upraised hand. He fell back, helpless. ‘Oh, my dear God! Sweet Jesus—!’

An age of high romance in the sway of a virgin queen, of chivalry, of danger, of too-ready death, when a kiss might banish a woman to oblivion, a man to the block—an age when dark spirits were abroad, when the throne itself lent ear to soothsayers and astrologers, when ladies’ maids ran errands for witches’ potions, and waxen images were pierced through with pins to bring about disaster: when life and death were all too often black and secretly contrived… A dream?—of bright blood springing, of velvet dyed to crimson, of the silent drip, drip, drip of red upon the red bows on the red-heeled shoes: of Avenging Fury, crouched like a Pieta with the slender body lying across her knee: ‘A curse upon you! My anathema upon you and all your house, upon all your family down the ages for ever, till the end of time! Your daughter, treacherous bitch that she be, and her children and her children’s children—this death shall be upon them, my curse upon them, they shall never know happiness, never in love nor in marriage….’ And as the shuddering man again moved forward, she cradled the dead body close against her breast as though it might ward off further danger. ‘Never again! From the very fires of hell, I’ll reach out to you and keep this curse alive—in this branch of the Hilbourne family, never again shall there be…

‘Never again… Never again…’

A servant came upon the two little girls huddled, crying, outside the closed door. ‘Oh, Tomos, Papa fell down! There’s somebody in the library, talking to him. But there wasn’t anybody in there….’

Nor was there now; only the Squire, lying half insensible across the arm of the carved wooden chair, the fallen glass still dripping its red wine. ‘What? Tomos? Yes, yes, I am well enough. I have been asleep, I think. And dreaming…. Dreaming….’

‘A nightmare, sir? You look so pale, Sir Edward, your hands are so cold. The poor mistress taken from the house today—you are tired, sir, exhausted: no wonder you should fall asleep and dream bad dreams. But these, sir, you may forget. Dreams need mean nothing, sir; we may forget such dreams.’

‘I have forgotten,’ said the Squire. But he stared down suddenly at the spilt wine. ‘Is that blood?’ he said.

T
ANTE LOUISE WAS A
Belgian, from the south, a Walloon—who, however, had married a Frenchman and lived most of her life in France—hideously ugly, with a frog-face and rolling grey-green eyes, yet of so resolute a chic that no one had ever yet recognised her as even plain. Her hair was dyed to an impossible auburn and her coiffure and
maquillage
always just so much ahead of the times—for the propriety in such matters of
ces Anglaises
, she cared not a fig. Her lingerie was exquisite, her outer garments extravagantly smart. How it could have been contrived, why for that matter she should have gone to such trouble for so limited a world of appreciation, who could say?—but in all her years of exile on the quiet old Montgomeryshire estate, she relaxed not a fraction of her vigorous
toilette
. It was typical of Tante Louise that in time for the funeral, she should have achieved the very last word in black bombazine trimmed with the newly fashionable jet, and the tall bonnet with its high white plume. All arranged in advance, perhaps, for just such an event. That also would be typical. Tante Louise was not blessed with a sentimental heart.

In the ensuing months, she left undone nothing that might restore health and vigour to the ailing house. It was not to immure herself in a tomb, she said, that she had left her
appartement
in Paris,
si chic, si bien meublé
; and, unhampered by delicacy or doubt, she scrubbed and swept and polished away the memories of three hundred years, banishing the heavy, dusty carved wood furniture and the ancestral portraits with their long, thin noses and bunched red mouths, and ruthlessly painting over moulded plaster, scrubbing down panelled oak. Gay carpets were imported, light wall-papers, delicate furniture, all the chic of the elegant Paris of her past. When Sir Edward protested she replied crudely: ‘You wish then your daughters to follow in the way of your poor wife in this gloomy place?’ and he was silent immediately and for many hours to come. She had no wish to wound; but why trouble with long argument when here was the sure, swift way to victory? He would be thankful in the end; men had to be managed, it was always so.

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, eyes watched: ears listened. From another world, another life, another—somewhere—eyeless, yet other eyes watched, other lips communicated; mindless yet observed, made judgments: with no future, yet peered forward into the future—and waited. And voiceless, yet whispered.

Brother and sister, voiceless—whispering. One day…

One day, it will be time for us to go back there and haunt again.

One battle Edward Hilbourne won against Tante Louise. ‘The nurse is too old and grim, the children must have someone younger and easier, someone kind.’

‘You do not suggest, mon cher Edouard, que je ne suis pas gentille vers ces enfants?’

‘No, of course not. I’m speaking of who ever has the actual care of them. They need someone not so old-fashioned as this one, not so strict and cold.’

‘It is necessary to have a nurse well-trained, one who knows the manners, what is comme il faut. They are mal-élevées. Their poor mother—’

He interrupted as if he would not hear the words, repudiated them. ‘No one’s asking you to find some bouncing country girl. It’s not in fact a nurse they should have. They are over five years old, they need more lessons, they need a governess.’

A chill doubt entered her heart. A governess—some bright, pretty young woman who would settle in, take over the children, take over the Squire himself—marry him, dispossess her of all that was left to her, now that she had given up her Parisian home and possessions. She determined upon resistance. ‘Oh, ho, a fine gouvernante—’

But he interrupted her, unwontedly impatient: ‘Louise, please just do as I say. Find a young woman able to instruct them; and dismiss the nurse.’

‘Find! Dismiss! Is it for me to have your orders, Edouard? Am I not mistress here, do I not take the place of their mother?’

He looked into the sallow frog face, the prominent grey-green eyes. He said flatly: ‘No.’ But, after all, who else would even try? ‘Nobody can do that,’ he said, more gently, ‘but I’m grateful to you for being here, Louise, truly grateful. I need you. Only, meanwhile, please do as I say, and find a suitable young person.’ He summoned a smile, dragged up from the depths of his desolate heart some shreds of the old, easy Hilbourne charm. He said in his excellent French, ‘You are far too intelligent, ma chère, not to know just what I mean. So please help me! Be kind!’ It always pleased her to hear her own tongue spoken. After all, he thought, she must be lonely too.

‘I will make the advertisement,’ said Tante Louise.

So Tetty came—Miss Alys Tetterman, a neat compromise between the two schools of thought.

No atmosphere, indeed, in which to mend a breaking heart. Dear heavens, thought Miss Tetterman, arriving, what a gloomy place! I shall have to get away, I could never bear it here…

Lying in the lap of the low, thickly-wooded hill, with no outlook but across the gravelled drive and terraces (flowerless, but at least green-grassed now, for it was full summer and that poor young wife and mother had been three months dead), to the narrow stream of the Dar which gave the Manor its name, flowing on to feed the great river Severn, many miles away; across the stream and immediately to the up-rising slope of the opposite hill, closing it in. A long, two-storied building, begun as a simple manor house and since much added to—but altered in its early days, so that it had lost nothing of its Tudor characteristic. No stripes of black and white, but built of brick and stone, an ungainly sort of house, stout pillars holding up its heavily-brooding portico, three sets of projecting oriel windows divided into many squares of glass panes, clusters of twisted chimneys rising from the peaked roof, with their turreted chimney-pots. I shan’t stay in it, thought Miss Tetterman, I couldn’t! I’m here now but I have my precious little hoard of money, I can afford to make a change if I wish. I shall just have to keep a look-out in the advertisements. There must be a more cheerful situation to work in than this…