Brides of Aberdar (21 page)

She protested, ‘But I am engaged to marry him.’

‘—and riding, wicked girl! Now that isn’t fair—he can’t conjure a horse out of the Other World and go galloping after you. Outside the Manor, we lose our existence—our existence in this world, that is. We are prisoners within the doors of this old house.’

‘I saw you once outside it.’

‘Ah, well, just at the door. That was at your poor Mama’s funeral—who died for love of Richard, so only fair that we should have our rein relaxed to that extent. Our rules are precise, but they do give way just an inch or two, for very special occasions.’

‘For the interruption of a young lady’s betrothals, for example,’ said Richard. ‘Fortunately the fountain courtyard is almost part of the house. But you saw that, even for my poor Anne’s funeral, we could go no further than the driveway.’

‘
Your
Anne? Do you say that my mother was in love with you?’

‘We’ve told you,’ said Lenora. ‘What else did she die of, poor sweet thing? Mind you, she was always a rather weak creature—’

‘She was always ill…’

‘She kept to her room,’ said Richard. ‘That needn’t mean she was ill.’ And he added with a laugh and a half-wink that she had not been alone there.

Lyneth sat curled up on the little four-poster bed, its white curtains looped back with pink satin bows. ‘I don’t understand. My mother—was in love with Richard?’

‘Of course,’ said Lenora. ‘All the Hilbourne girls, the Aberdar Hilbournes—fall in love with Richard. We have explained it to you—it is the Anathema.’

‘And even my poor mother?’

‘She pined for me, poor sweet Anne; and so she died. But you are made of sterner stuff, you’ll fight me all the way—’

‘Even to the extent of marrying your dull young man,’ said Lenora.

‘I hope she need not do that,’ said Richard. ‘This is not gentle Anne, or Eleanor; or Margaret before her, or Anastasia, that lovely young creature from Gloucestershire.’ He said to Lyneth: ‘You are going to be one of my true loves.’

Lenora played with the pretty things on the dressing-table. ‘They have to marry and get heirs, Diccon, or what becomes of
us
? We should have no brides to return to, we should cease to exist—as this world knows existence.’

‘She has a sister, let
her
do the marrying and begetting.’ He spoke rather roughly and did not look at Lenora. ‘You are different, Lyneth; with you, it’s somehow different. Usually—well, I live up to Lenora and her Anathema: it was pronounced for my sake and the game amuses me, I’m not broken-hearted for my poor young ladies; as she reminds me, I have no heart to break. But this time… Perhaps it’s the business of the identical twins: perhaps my feeling, such love as I have to offer, is doubly strong.’

‘You had better fall in love with my sister too, no one can tell the difference. Then your heart will be divided between us and as it is non-existent, neither of us need worry about you, you need not break ours.’

‘But he is here for no other purpose,’ said Lenora.

‘Indeed, sweet Lyn, you must break your heart for me,’ said Richard.

‘Even living, I’m said by some people to have none,’ said Lyneth, ‘any more than you have. So you will have your work cut out. Furthermore, I am a betrothed young lady; all the nonsense means nothing to me.’

A look that in life Lenora had known too well, came to his face, that face of a handsome, wilful child. ‘In that case, we as may as well fade away and be gone.’

She cried out, protesting: had not meant to offend him, only to tease. ‘Do come back! Do come back!’

‘We will come back.’ She heard Lenora’s voice from out of nowhere. ‘And when we do, little cousin, you will find perhaps that it is not only you who know how to tease!’

They went riding that afternoon, the three of them—Lawrence must meet Hil, in his new situation as Lyneth’s betrothed. That Hil had disapproved of her none too covert pursuit of Christine’s erstwhile lover, Lyneth well knew, but he was so much a part of their lives that she could not ignore him. But they returned without having seen him, only to find him standing consulting with the head groom in the stable yard—that great, beautiful walled-in square where long ago he had sat with the new nursery governess and told her, ‘I am so terrified for them.’

But now he came forward, amiably smiling as they clattered in over the cobbles, helped the girls to alight, held out a friendly hand to Lawrence. ‘I hear that you are to be congratulated. Of course, I wish you all possible happiness. And to you, my darling,’ he said to Lyneth; and did not look at Christine.

As in those days she had hung on Miss Tetterman’s arm, so Lyn now clung close to him as though to wheedle her way back, not into his affections which she knew to be ever constant, but into his good graces. And she was hard to resist, sweet thing, with her pretty little ways, and head over heels in love; she had wanted the boy for the wrong reasons, he thought, but now that she had him, there was surely no doubt about her devotion? And he… He has changed once, thought Hil to himself, but the early love was a boy’s love and now that he has come to a man’s love, it will be for ever. If, in the back of his mind, a thought stirred that said, ‘God help him!’ he refused to acknowledge it. One of his darlings must suffer but it was too late now to alter that.

He put out his free hand to her, nevertheless, unobtrusively and she took it and came and walked close on the other side of him. ‘Your little hand is cold, Christine,’ he said, for a moment caught off his guard.

‘I think I have a slight chill. It’s nothing. I shall—get over it,’ she said: but he knew in his heart that it was a confidence between them, and did not refer to the chill.

‘I think she has bad nights,’ said Lyneth. To live skating over Christine’s griefs was impossible: all the household knew of her past love, all the household watched with compassion the drooping figure with the sad, pale face—however much, recollecting herself, she straightened up and spoke and smiled as though nothing afflicted her.

Tetty knew, of course, Tante Louise knew—‘But Lyneth, you throw yourself away on the boy,
ma chérie
. I weesh for you a so-great marriage, you can be a fine lady; let Christine have thees boreeing Lawrence,
tu es méchante, ma petite
, you want heem only because you cannot have. And this is a game you know very well—it is the same game you play with heem. Every girl in France know this game, her Mama teach her, do not be too easy for to get.’ And the staff knew. Miss Christine had loved him since she was a little girl, but of course Miss Lyneth was so gay and clever, she could not help it if the young gentleman settled for her, at the last. You could not help Christine by pretending, thought Lyneth; and she could be trusted to accept that, and play the same game.

Now Christine said smiling, that she would probably rest better for a little more quiet in the adjoining bedroom. ‘I suppose she is dreaming of you, Lawrence. She chatters like a magpie, in her sleep.’

Hil stood stock still, their clinging hands fell away as he dropped his arms to his sides. ‘She—
what
?’

‘It’s a family habit,’ said Christine, lightly. ‘Our mother did it too. We used to press up against the door when we weren’t allowed to go and see her, do you remember, Lyn? We thought there was somebody with her but Papa said no, no, when she was feverish she talked in her sleep.’

‘And I am feverish for love of Lawrence,’ said Lyn, peeking round Hil to smile at her betrothed. Does she hear the ghosts too, she thought, or is it only me, replying to them? We must all keep quieter. Despite their abrupt departure the night before, there was no doubt in her mind that they would return; she had not seen them today but she had been mostly out of the house, and he couldn’t leave the Manor, Lenora had said, so—her mind toyed naughtily with the idea of teasing him; it was what Tante Louise had suggested—‘do not be too easy for to get’. Not that he was going to get her anyway, for all his fine figure and his red-gold Hilbourne hair. Her Lawrence was her true love; after all, she had given him her word.

Hil wrote to her ladyship, one of his rare notes, always formal and cold. ‘I do not know if Christine has yet mentioned to you that since Lyneth became engaged to marry, she has taken to “talking in her sleep”. Their mother from the time of her marriage, increasingly talked with people whom no one else could see; she was thought by the uninitiated to be mad. One dreads that this may be the beginning of what their father wished to avoid when he tried to prevent the children from meeting possible future lovers. I have no idea that anything can possibly be done about it, but I take the liberty of bringing it to your ladyship’s attention.’ He dared make no suggestion—the response would be to take exactly the opposite course, to whose detriment it seemed not to matter at all. And anyway—suggest what? One might speak to Lyneth—but what could one say? If she were already in thrall to that curse which he had long believed hung over the family, she was unlikely to confess to it—to ‘betray’ those terrible visitors from the world unknown. Her mother, he knew, had never spoken of them; challenged, she would reply with a little start, ‘Oh, how ridiculous!—I must have been talking to myself,’ till the time came, when she would only murmur, ‘to my—friends…’ And so she had died.

And so before her, Eleanor had died… And Margaret…. And Anastasia had had to be ‘kept away’. And the Christines and the Lyneths, the old family names, dying young or growing to a sad, mad old age… The sad, mad brides of Aberdar.

The following morning, the housemaid emptied from her ladyship’s waste-basket the torn shreds of the note: patched them together but couldn’t make out Mr Hil’s handwriting, and tossed them on to the kitchen fire. And Lady Hilbourne summoned Tante Louise and opened consultations on the wedding arrangements.

That night, in her prettiest
peignoir
, Lyneth curled up against her heaped pillows and—dreamed of Lawrence, of course. Nor, as an hour passed and another, were her dreams interrupted. She thought, It’s because I said that his—nonsense—meant nothing to me; that I was not for him. But I told them I was only teasing… And she remembered with a moment of chill that voice saying out of the darkness that she would find that it was not only she who ‘meant to tease’. Perhaps, she thought, after all it will be better if he doesn’t come again. They were so beautiful, so charming, it was all so—flattering; but sometimes just a tiny bit frightening, too…

They returned, however; and this time as Lenora had subtly warned it might do, the teasing took on a very sharp edge…

A dinner party had been arranged to introduce the young lady’s affianced, and his parents, to her nearest family, her father’s cousins, Henry Hilbourne and John, and Catherine and Maria, their wives. Their consent in fact had been necessary, but the match was an unexceptionable one, there could be no disagreement. Lawrence, dashing on ahead, down the steep path on the other side of the river from Plas Dar, arrived first and was duly saluted and made much of. ‘My parents are using the carriage, they must come the long way round through the village…’

Sir Thomas Jones was a full Welshman, a short, dark, bright-eyed man, forceful and a little pompous: very happy with a marriage that would unite even more closely the two manors marching together—pity it had not been the heiress but he had always been fond of that charming little minx, the twin sister. His wife was a pretty, pink and white woman, softly fat; conscious of a slight inferiority in birth, particularly pleased to be connected by marriage to her aristocratic neighbours.

‘But I hope our dear Lyneth will not inherit the family health,’ she said as their carriage rumbled up the winding drive to the Manor House. ‘The mother died so young. And she was a strange girl, you remember? When first she came as a bride, we were friendly enough and then she seemed gradually to become stand-offish—I thought at first it was personal to myself, but no, soon all the neighbours were treated the same, she would accept no invitations, or cancelled those she did agree to—’

‘She was fatally ill, my dear. Do you expect her to have capered about to oblige her acquaintance, till she fell down dead?’

‘But that is what I say, Sir Thomas. You take me up so quick. At the age of twenty-three—she takes ill and dies.’

‘Well, our own pretty chick is as blooming as a rose, there’s nothing wrong with
her
…’

Perhaps not: he had to confess, however, that upon this occasion his favourite’s manner was not at all what one would have wished. He observed that the grim step-mother bent upon her a puzzled and anxious eye.

For Lyneth, usually so easy and happy, confident in her modest little airs and graces, seemed suddenly over-whelmed with self-consciousness and affectation; with sideways glances about the room as though she exchanged private jokes with hidden friends—jokes, moreover, hardly complimentary to the present company; compensating with little bursts of rather feverish chattering, biting on her lip to conceal a naughty smile, actually bursting into smothered giggles as, with due formality, the guests took their places at the dining-table. What on earth had come to the child? ‘Lyneth!’ said Lady Hilbourne in a warning undertone.

‘Oh, Tetty! I’m sorry, but—’

But They are here! Lenora, leaning with her beautiful curved white arm propped negligently against the oak, softly dark, of the high mantelshelf, Richard moving here and there in comic imitation of strutting Sir Thomas, of Maria and Catherine bowing their coiffured heads to left and right, full of graceful civilities; of Cousin Henry, huffing and puffing, and Lady Jones with her twittering anxiety to please—actually taking a chair, the wretch, the devil!—so that positively the poor woman sat down in his lap!

‘Oh, my lady—have a care!’ called Lyneth in involuntary warning; and blurted foolish explanations, ‘I was afraid the chair was unsafe—not quite comfortable—’

‘But indeed, dear child,’ piped Richard in her ladyship’s deprecating voice, ‘
quite
comfortable! Suits us both to perfection.’

‘The chair is like all the others,’ said Lady Hilbourne, stiffly. ‘Do you find it does not suit you, Lady Jones?’