Brides of Aberdar (27 page)

She talked at last, with desperate earnestness, to Hil, riding with him on his rounds of the manor lands; talked with Christine; talked with Tetty: was persuaded, fell to planning, grew in a sort of innocent eagerness whose roots were deep in the ingrained selfishness of a heart too long ever-indulged. It must all be minutely and elaborately thought out: one slip and how dangerous could be this terrible game!

Positively and absolutely, the girls must exchange identities—at least until the fish had been securely hooked; and to disguise themselves was not simply a matter of exchanging pink and blue—the lockets, coral and turquoise, that she had given them, darling Tetty, at that wonderful Christmas party long ago!—that happy evening when nevertheless Hil had said to her that one day she would betray them—and, betraying, destroy them all. Not a matter nowadays of colours to differentiate. There was between them no smallest mark of difference, but servants, long used to them, had no difficulty in catching a tone or a turn of phrase or only a nuance in their approach to daily life, and recognise one from the other; and now even the servants must be deceived.

It was decided at last that Lyneth must become ‘ill’, and so keep to her room—one of those odd Hilbourne malaises, said the doctor, that seemed to attack the family, impossible of exact diagnosis; and indeed, pale and thin after the long wearing weeks of her subjection to the ghosts, it was not difficult to suppose her very unwell. Nor need she now visit Plas Dar, to the further unedification of her future mother-in-law; in a new hope of happiness in her marriage, she must ingratiate herself again in that quarter, and it was impossible while Lenora and Richard prodded and teased her.

Lady Jones received the news with mingled anxiety and relief. ‘I have not quite got over her behaviour when she was last here, my dear,’ she said to Lawrence. ‘Perhaps it will be a good thing to have a few days for us both to recover ourselves. On the other hand, Lawrence, dear, she does seem very
young
to be so—so nervous and highly strung, and so easily fall ill. Her mother was so much the same, and
her
health… The family don’t make old bones, my dear, it isn’t promising when you think of such a stock for your children…’

Lawrence, advised by the Manor, agreed that it might be politic to absent himself for a short while from home, on a round of visits to the friends of his rapidly closing bachelor days.

So Lyneth lay languidly a-bed and Christine, apparently fearless of possible infection, was with her by day and slept on a couch at the foot of her bed by night; and for a few nights shivered and shook and gradually got used to the cold and the unease in the room and felt it less. As Lyneth had been, so it seemed was she, from the experience of many generations of family haunting, conditioned, as it were, to accept the ghosts; and gradually, gradually—faint, faint outlines growing clearer, faint, faint voices seen and heard as through a mist, through heavy veiling—becoming firmer, becoming more audible, becoming—real. It is happening, she thought to herself and her heart thrilled with terror at the growing knowledge of what she had condemned herself to. The voices came across to her, Lenora’s beautiful deep velvet voice and Richard’s, so tender and full of laughter: so sweet to the ear. But underneath, she thought they are cruel, they’re bent on mischief, they come here only to break our hearts: all this is a charm to win us over—and so break our hearts. And she wondered what release there would be for her at last—how soon the end would come. Not for a long time, not till the endless years had worn her down? For what was to destroy her? She had no husband to pine for, no babe to die with its birth, no worldly suffering to fear. If they should stick to the letter of their law, should abide too strictly to the rules of the anathema…? An unhappy bride, they had sworn, and she would not, after all, be a bride.

But with this generation, Lyneth now suggested, the situation had subtly shifted, for the first time the marauding ghost-lover was himself in love. If Christine could attract that love to herself—that chill, intangible, terrifying love—would they, please God! be satisfied with that?—and let them go, those two who in all the world were most dear to her. No thought that once more Lyneth was having her way and everyone around them as usual abetting her in it, ever entered the loving and generous heart. But she could not pretend to herself that she was anything but deeply afraid.

The ghosts were not pleased by the new arrangement. ‘She can’t hear
us
; but how can you speak freely, Lyneth? What joy can we have in our being together?’ Not knowing as yet that Christine could now hear them speak, they were aware that she could hear Lyn’s voice replying to them. To leave them free to express themselves, Christine curled up on the day-bed and pretended to sleep.

For the moment, Lyneth must dissemble, pretend to be a little cooler in her devotion to Lawrence; in no way failing in her intention to marry him (Lenora was adamant as to that) but more warm towards Richard. It would make them feel warmer towards
her
, warmer towards Christine—that was what mattered—when Christine came to take her place. And with Lawrence away, and no dangerous visits to Plas Dar on the horizon, it was easier—moreover, when they were not threatening, how delightful in fact they could be! To others, the very thought of such spirits was strange and frightening, only because they were not of this world; but to her, as such, they held no terrors: she accepted them without reserve.

Lenora suggested: ‘Is she put here to spy on you, Lyneth?’

That other sweet face with its look of sorrow, of courage, of goodness: the blue eyes, the silkily golden hair…‘I think she is not one to lend herself to spying,’ said Richard.

‘Not to spy,’ said Lyneth, ‘but to watch me, perhaps, and try to make out from what I say when I talk in my sleep, as they call it, what’s troubling me.’ Tomorrow, she whispered, giggling, she would see that Christine took something to make her sleep soundly, and then they could all chatter away as much as they wished.

‘We are going in for friendly chatter now, are we?’ said Richard, gratified and surprised.

‘Now that Lawrence has gone away,’ she said, I feel different, I feel more free.’

‘And yet, poor, dull earthy clod whom one day, you swear, you’ll marry! Over my dead body!’ he added, laughing. ‘But in fact we need never meet people in the Other World; we see very few; only those who have been very bad in their lives, or very stupid, or—well, who have in some way deprived the Light of their bright offering. Lenora and I—we’re debarred by our sins from almost all social intercourse; we must be sufficient unto ourselves.’

‘Though we do sometimes bump into some of the more earth-bound, returning here to do a little haunting of their own.’

‘A fine one you are, my brother, to complain of bumping! One day,’ said Lenora to Lyneth, ‘he actually barged against the Queen herself, in his haste to be off somewhere! Against very Majesty in person! “You are hot to be with your mistress, are you, my young villain?” she says, and raps him across the knuckles and tells him to be off, then, and not keep Isabella waiting…’

So gay and easy, so light-heartedly chattering away to entertain and amuse. And yet, thought Christine, curled on the day-bed, anxiously listening, beneath it all the threat implicit, ‘
We
are here, sweet Lyneth, for no purpose but eventually to break your little heart.’ And this purpose must, as soon as might be, be transferred to her own. Well, my heart is broken already, she insisted to herself. What have I to lose? But to grieve was one thing; to add sick fear to a simple sorrow was something else indeed. And she knew herself to be sick unto death with fear.

Nevertheless, it must be done; and a day came when she could suggest with outward ease that her sister might leave the sickroom for a spell downstairs; and so at last propose a short ride. ‘But not over to Plas Dar,’ warned Richard, materialising from nowhere as they sat at the window of her ladyship’s drawing-room, looking out at the thin sunshine of a late autumn day. He spoke to Lyn but Christine observed that for the briefest moment he had glanced as though for confirmation at the lockets, the coral and turquoise which to this day, for easy identification, they still wore. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘not nearly so far—’ and disguised the words hastily as though she had not heard and replied. ‘Not really far. Just at walking pace along the river bank…’

From that ride returned two girls ‘idenkital’ as once Lyneth would have said, in all but the exchange of their lockets. Christine wore the coral now; and the groom said, easily, assisting her down from her pony, in the lovely old walled-in stable yard, ‘Enjoy your ride, Miss Lyn?’

‘Oh, dearest,’ said the true Lyn, walking back with her towards the house, ‘now it begins! Now I am you; and you—’

‘And I am theirs,’ said Christine, very pale.

‘Dearest—even yet—’

‘No, no. The whole thing is under way, we don’t know what more danger it might involve if we were to go back on it.’ All the same, now that the moment had come she was deeply, deeply afraid.

Lady Hilbourne met them in the hall, all three carefully rehearsed. ‘Lyneth,’ she said to Christine, ‘you look very pale, my dear, I hope you have not overdone it?—ridden out too soon, having been so unwell.’

‘No, don’t trouble yourself,’ said Christine. ‘I’m a little tired but I’ll have an hour alone in my room resting. I shall do very well.’

Two pairs of eyes watched her, anguished, as she slowly mounted the stairs, but she went on steadfastly to Lyneth’s room. And they were awaiting her there.

She sat down at the dressing-table, with a shaking hand pulled off the little feathered riding-hat. Richard knelt to assist in tugging off her boots. ‘Though why I should, when you go galloping away out of my reach,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. I am powerless to come trotting after you.’

‘You—you never trotted a horse in your life!’ said Lenora. ‘At full gallop always, hardly looking where you were going, leaping off to apologise to some poor crone for splashing her with mud—splashing mud without apology on all and sundry of others who came in your way.’

‘It was for that, our aunt never forgave me—for who else spread tales to Isabella’s father of my misbehaviour at court?’

‘You were a fool, Diccon, to upset the woman—but when were you not? When did you ever give a thought to your own advantage?—Isabella’s father was right when he called me your keeper. Without me… But there was no guile in him, Lyneth,’ said Lenora, looking at him indulgently. ‘No guile at all.’

‘Yes, well… Forgive me,’ said the pretended Lyneth, faltering, ‘but I am so tired. My first outing after my—illness…’ She tried to force her voice to easy familiarity but the words stuck in her throat; she thought that once again he glanced as though vaguely puzzled at the coloured centre of the locket she now wore. She got up, pretending to move rather stiffly, from her seat. ‘So long I’ve not been riding…’

‘Lie down, child, and relax yourself,’ said Lenora, already gracefully disposed upon the little day-bed: an early wedding-gift from Tante Louise’s store of French gim-crackery, intended for the foot of a larger bed than the small four-poster with its looped-back frilly curtains. ‘Richard, help her off with her jacket. I confess,’ she added, ‘that I wish our haunting need not be confined to this house. I had a fine figure for a riding habit, Diccon, if you remember?’

‘Magnificent: an hour-glass in velvet and feathers. Even the Queen remarked upon it, Lyneth! “As well you were not at court in my father’s day! He’d have had you a-bed within the hour.” ’

‘And to the block a week later,’ said Lenora. ‘And for my part, the one as unwelcome as the other. Gross old man!’

‘He was not gross always,’ said Richard. ‘Our gran’dam to the end referred to him as The Golden Lad. Elizabeth was far less beautiful, for all her wardrobe was more magnificent even than his.’

Christine had thrown herself down on the bed in her shirt and the divided riding skirt. Richard perched on the edge, one hand, though she felt it only as a sort of disembodied chill, lying close against her own. She said, to distract attention from her involuntary recoil: ‘I don’t understand about your dress…’ But one must beware of repeating questions that Lyneth might already have put to them and she amended: ‘I have never entirely understood how you come to be dressed as we are nowadays. You’re always so elegant but in the costume of today: yet I suppose there were no tailors and dress-makers in your Other World?’

‘We explained it to you before,’ said Lenora. ‘You see us as you expect to see people, you clothe us in your mind. In our own eyes, we wear the clothes of our own time: don’t you sometimes get a whiff of that scent we used so much? Richard’s leather cloak was never properly treated and stank if it wasn’t well perfumed.’

‘As I daresay I did myself,’ said Richard, ‘by present standards.’

‘And so did we all. But Lyneth translates us into her own terms; and I am grateful, my love, for the elegant taste with which your mind dresses us. And, of course, in the Other World there are no clothes, as such. We are shades, we’re shadows, even to one another, moving forward through the shades and shadows to the Light. Till we see ourselves gradually reassemble, as it were, in our great skirts and ruffs and capes and slashed sleeves; and then we know it’s time to come back. You see us now, as you see us. But
I
see Richard in his doublet and hose, with his beautiful single earring—a great pearl drop that the Queen herself gave to him, plucking it from the bodice of her gown, telling him to wear it to remember her by, while he was away from her. “I would, Madam, that I might lie but once as close to your heart as this happy pearl has dwelt,” says our lad, brushing clean the floor with the feather of his hat, “then should I need no jewel to remember you by.” Villain, villain!’ said Lenora, laughing, shaking her head. ‘He was at that moment in preparation to come here to Aberdar.’

‘And in a fine sweat lest Her Majesty take me at my word,’ said Richard, ‘since I had no heart then for any but my Isabella—who proved not to be
my
Isabella after all—’