Brides of Aberdar (26 page)

Hil’s house had been reconstructed from two ancient cottages, filled with his own choice of simple furniture carved by generations of local craftsmen. Lady Hilbourne stepped inside, white-lipped after so many years of estrangement from a home that she had once prayed with all her heart might come to be her own. He bowed her silently to a chair, not offering to touch her hand. Christine said: ‘Tetty has agreed to come and try to persuade you, Hil, to agree to what I suggested to you earlier today.’

He poured a glass of Madeira, handed it to her to pass on to her ladyship. ‘Lady Hilbourne will have no more success than in the past twelve years I have ever had in any attempt to persuade
her
to anything.’

Tetty rose from the tall wooden saddle-back chair. ‘As I find my present situation extremely objectionable,’ she said, ‘and apparently am to be given no hint of what the conversation is to be about, I may as well take my departure.’

He raised his voice above hers. He said with a deep anger: ‘Sit down again! The time is past for your bitter games at the expense of these two helpless girls.’ She sank back into the chair almost as though in fear that his hand had been raised to strike her. ‘You have betrayed them as long ago I foretold that you would,’ he said. ‘Now the time has come for you to make such amends as you may—to Christine, at least. She has conceived a plan. For my part, I utterly refuse to accept it; and if you have one shred left in you of the gentle heart that once you had—’

‘It was you that turned it to stone,’ said Tetty.’

‘—you will reject it, too. Christine—?’

Christine stood between them. She spoke very quietly and calmly, but her hands were gripped together tightly to keep them from shaking. She said: ‘Please don’t be angry: don’t be angry with one another. Just for once—let your minds turn only to Lyn and me.’ To Tetty she said: ‘Please listen to me, Tetty, with an open mind. There are forces in the world which we don’t understand but which we have to accept. In our world at least, in the world of the Hilbournes, we have to accept them; and at last a time has come when we understand them. Lyneth understands it all, she knows; and she has told what she knows to Hil and me. You will refuse to believe it because you don’t want to believe it—but it is true. A curse was laid upon this branch of the family long ago, in the days of Queen Elizabeth—a malediction—’

A dream. Long long ago, a dream whose message, unrecollected, through all the years had haunted her mind. She said, stammering, ‘Yes. It was… I dreamed. They were… In the old library—so beautiful, they were so beautiful then… When I woke, I found that I had knocked over a glass at my hand.’ She said, staring ahead of her as though stupified: ‘I remember that I thought the spilt wine was blood.’

‘Oh, Tetty! You saw them?’

‘A dream. I thought it was a dream. I’d been asleep and dreaming. It had all been—such a terrible day, so strange and terrible, I thought I’d fallen asleep—or fainted. But I forgot what the dreams had been about.’

‘I believe that you saw them, Tetty. Lenora and—’

‘—and Diccon,’ said Lady Hilbourne.

‘Oh, God, Tetty—yes! You did see them. She does call him Diccon.’

‘The Squire,’ said Hil, and he also could hardly control his voice. ‘He dreamed… In that same room, he dreamed and when he awoke, he too thought that the spilt wine was blood.’

‘It was the night he died,’ said Tetty. ‘The night I myself married into the Hilbourne family. I dreamed…’ And she seemed almost to dream again. ‘She cried out… She held him in her arms, he was lying across her knees and the blood stained all her dress and dripped down… Dripped down… He had red ribbons on his shoes and the blood dripped down on to the red ribbons… And she lifted up her head and cried out—howled like a dog, lifting up her head and howling it out like a dog! A curse, she said, a curse! An anathema. Never in all the years to come, should there be…’

‘Never again,’ said Christine, ‘should there be in the Manor of Aberdar, a happy bride.’

Hil reached for the glass of Madeira and put it into Lady Hilbourne’s hand. ‘Drink it,’ he said. ‘It has been a bad moment for you.’ He returned to his seat. ‘They appear to Lyneth,’ he said. ‘Their ghosts—Lenora and her brother, Richard. It was her Anathema. And it took many forms—no wonder we could never exactly decide its terms. Young girls died—young men died: little children died—girls seemed to go insane, lived on but in seclusion, communing with people who were not there. Not all of them of the Hilbourne blood—but having all of them one thing in common: that suffering came often through the suffering of others, to Hilbourne daughters when they married—and to other men’s daughters who married into this family, the sad, mad brides of Aberdar.’

‘Is it strange,’ said Christine, ‘that they have never appeared visibly to haunt Tetty? She was a Hilbourne bride.’

‘An hour of marriage,’ said Tetty. ‘And God knows,
unseen
they have haunted me. Could you ever say that
I
had been a happy Hilbourne wife?’

‘And now,’ said Christine, ‘Lyneth is a bride of Aberdar. And they are with her night and day—the ghosts. You have heard her in her room at night, Tetty—talking to them. As our mother talked to them: and all the mothers and grandmothers, back and back for two hundred and fifty years.’

Tetty said, her hand to her mouth, ‘They won’t let her marry Lawrence?’

‘Oh, yes, she must marry—they all marry, don’t they? There must be succeeding generations to be haunted. But once married—’

‘She’ll leave the house,’ said Tetty, quickly. ‘She’ll be at Plas Dar.’ But she added, ‘Can they follow her there?’

‘No, they can’t haunt outside the Manor. But you can ask yourself,’ said Christine, ‘whether the Manor will let her go.’ She went to the window and stood staring out across the twisted chimneys of Aberdar far below, to the hillside across the stream where the chimney-pots of Plas Dar might be glimpsed among the trees. ‘So you see,’ she said, ‘she is doomed. Lyneth is doomed.’

‘I will never agree to this plan of yours, Christine,’ said Hil, violently. ‘Never, ever. It is monstrous. I will never agree to it.
Never
.’

‘That’s why I have brought Tetty here,’ said Christine. ‘To—to persuade you—to agree to it.’ To her stepmother she said, returning to where she had so quietly stood before, still gripping her hands tightly together, ‘Doomed—what a word to apply to Lyn, so gay and happy and sweet, so spoilt and petted, so totally unfitted to meet trouble and danger! But for me… Well, I won’t apply so huge a word to myself but in my own small way, I also am doomed—never to be happy again, full of hope and joy.’ She said, quickly: ‘I may have said bitter things to you, Tetty, sometimes, but I blame no one for this: not really. I bestow my idiotic love where it isn’t wanted and idiotically can’t fall out of love and I know that I never shall. It’s my fault for loving with this kind of love—I’ve written my own doom for myself. So…’ She took a deep breath. ‘So, since Lyneth has the capacity to be happy and I know that I never shall be again—why should I not simply change with her and be unhappy in her place?’

Now indeed Lady Hilbourne started up out of her chair. ‘For God’s sake, Christine—offer yourself to these monsters?’

‘They’re only monsters if they’re thwarted, Tetty. I know this from Lyn. They want to force her into a sort of love for Richard: but she fights back, she’s in love with Lawrence,
I
wouldn’t fight back. What have I to lose?’

‘Oh, my darling child! My heart of gold!’

‘You couldn’t agree to it?’ said Hil, quickly. ‘It’s impossible.’

‘Oh, dear God! Never!’

‘He already has a—feeling—for me,’ said Christine, disregarding them. ‘He saw me, in fact, before he saw Lyn: you remember that evening, Tetty, when I told you two guests had arrived whom I didn’t recognise? And he supposed that I was Lyn—the girl he had come to haunt. With our being so much alike—’ She said bitterly: ‘He would not be the first young man to become confused as to which of us he really loved.’

‘Oh, my poor, darling child—!’

‘And something very strange has happened,’ said Christine, going resolutely on. ‘Richard is dead, he’s a ghost, and a ghost has no heart to love with. Lenora is the same—and has no heart to love with; only revenge and hate. But Richard died for love, he killed himself for love of a girl called Isabella—and Lyn and I are living images of that girl he died for. So that, in his own strange way, he has love in his heart—and so he may have it for me as well as for Lyn.’

Hil said quickly: ‘But Lyn is the bride.’

‘I have thought it all out,’ said Christine. ‘I haven’t forgotten that.’ Her stepmother had sat down again in her chair and she came and crouched at her knee, taking Tetty’s cold hand in her own trembling hand. ‘Gradually, gradually, I must take Lyn’s place. I must be with her all the time, close to her, so that Richard becomes a little confused between us. And at first sometimes, and at last always, Tetty, we must make the exchange—you must talk to me as though I were Lyneth, she and I must take over from each other, she must call me by her own name, we must change rooms and clothes, I must talk with Lawrence as though I were Lyn… That will be the hardest part,’ she said, sadly, ‘and I daresay for him too. To seem to love me.’

‘On the contrary, my dearest, may he not be the one to fall in love with you—again.’

‘God forbid,’ said Christine, ‘that I should do such a thing as to take him away from my sister. But he wouldn’t anyway; Lawrence is like me, once he loves, he loves for ever. And don’t talk too much about my heart of gold! It may seem all very fine and noble to be doing this for my sister; but I think, at bottom, I’m doing it for love of Lawrence.’ She smiled, almost—grimly. ‘For his sake—so that someone else may be happy with the one I love.’

Hil waited until she had finished. Then he said: ‘It is utterly out of the question. I shall not allow it. I have only to go into the house—where Lyn is, they are present, listening. I shall speak out this plan of yours, and that will be the end of it.’

‘
Tetty?
’

Lady Hilbourne wrenched her own hand from the pleading grasp. ‘Oh, Christine—no! You have made sacrifices enough. This time I shall not give way.’

‘Well, then… I’ve come not unprepared for this. So—now I will force your hand. Hil—you were faced once with something so—so terrible, so horrible, that since that day, surely, you haven’t been able to look at your own face in a mirror without a sort of—loathing.’ At Lady Hilbourne’s cry of repudiation, she leaped to her feet, leaned over her suddenly, cold with a fierce determination. ‘Be silent, Tetty! Be silent!’ To Hil, she said: ‘I’ve been talking—asking: no one realising how much they were telling me. But I have put it all together, all these scraps of talk; and I know. You sent away poor, innocent, darling Menna, not able to give her even a sign of what your reason could be; not daring even to dismiss her with a word of love. To this day, she lives breaking her heart over your rejection, over your lack of any sort of explanation. And Hil, Menna is ill, perhaps she’s dying—what if I were to tell you something so that she might at least spend her last days with her heart at peace?’ He stood speechless, confounded. She clutched at her opportunity. ‘Silence shall mean consent, Hil. If I make this possible—you in response will make my plan possible.’ And giving him no chance to speak, she said: ‘There was a—mistake. A terrible mistake. Papers were mixed up, wrong entries, I don’t know. It was nobody’s fault. But—you can have proof of it, assurance of it; I was told of it an hour ago, in perfect innocence… Long ago, Menna had a child. But, Hil,
your
mother died with your birth. Menna was nothing more to you than you had always believed her to be. Her child was a girl.’

F
OR A LONG, LONG
time they were silent, the three of them: Hil sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands covering his face, wet with his tears. Tetty sat trembling, watching him; rose and went over to him at last, knelt at his feet. He raised his head, incredulous at finding her kneeling there. She said, her voice low and shaking: ‘Oh, Hil!—all these sad years, what have I done to you?’

He made no direct answer, said, shuddering still, ‘I could have known all this time. But how could I bring myself to go among them, in the house, in the village, in that other village where the midwife lived—asking questions, reminding them, opening out the truth—?’

‘I don’t ask your forgiveness, how can I? But—it wasn’t I who spoke, something, some hideous force inside me—’

‘Never mind now, Tetty,’ said Christine. She came over and caught her step-mother by the hand. ‘Get up, Tetty, leave Hil now; we’ll go.’

Hil stood up. ‘Christine, what have I done, letting myself be persuaded into this plan of yours? Whatever it has meant to me—’

Tetty stood with Christine in the doorway. ‘As to that, Hil, don’t break your heart.
You
may give your consent—but she is safe, for
I
never will. The time of playing favourites is gone: if either must suffer…’ She trembled but she said steadily, ‘It mustn’t be Christine. She can’t manage—not one moment of this terrible plan, without my help and I’ll never give it, I’ll speak it out in front of the ghosts as you threatened to do. I will never agree to it.’

He assisted them into the saddles, lifted up the little dogs; with hardly a word more, they rode away down the steep path. Tetty said at last, ‘Do you think he will ever forgive me? It was a mistake on my part that has ruined his life.’

‘When he gets over the shock, yes,’ said Christine, ‘I daresay he may forgive. A mistake, he must forgive.’ She looked steadily ahead of her. ‘What he could never forgive, Tetty,’ she said, ‘would be that it had been a deliberate lie.’

‘I will do anything you ask me,’ said Tetty into the long, cold, terrifying silence that followed, ‘to help you in your plan, Christine.’

Lyneth rebelled: fought against it, wept, utterly refused to consider such a thing: wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t discuss it, wouldn’t even entertain such an idea, absolutely no,
no
, NO!

And yet, thought Lyneth, and yet—it was true that poor darling Christine would never be able to be happy because she would always love Lawrence; and after all, if you couldn’t have the person you loved, Richard was so terribly handsome and delightful—if you didn’t love, well, if it were no use your loving—somebody else. She herself loved Lawrence and
could
have him, so that was different. And of course the ghosts were cruel and frightening with her, but they wouldn’t be with Christine, because Christine wouldn’t be rebelling against their wishes. When first she, Lyneth, had known them, it had been wonderful, they’d had such fun together, such a lovely conspiracy against all the living people, such jokes. It was only when the jokes were turned against her, to make her fall out of love with Lawrence… But they wouldn’t turn against Christine.