Brides of Aberdar (28 page)

‘And so you might just as well have taken up Her Majesty’s invitation and found all your family splendid places at court. Though, true, as with her papa, such invitations too closely followed up,’ said Lenora, ‘were more likely to find your head on the block than upon her pillow.’

‘And wouldn’t have found us here,’ said Richard, ‘where I had so much rather be.’ Sitting close, he lifted Christine’s hand and bestowed upon it a light kiss that sent cold thrills through her veins. Crudely instructed, with many nods, winks and allusions by Tante Louise in the realities of marriage, she shivered at the thought of what strange mysteries she must undergo when she finally submitted to Richard all her will?

N
OW IT WAS CHRISTINE’S
turn to absent herself as much as possible from her sister and opportunity for close comparisons between them. And gradually this transition took over, Tetty addressed her as Lyneth, Lyneth herself addressed her as Lyneth, she dressed in Lyneth’s clothes, rode Lyneth’s horse; called Lyneth by her own name, Christine. Tante Louise might look vaguely puzzled, at first all the staff might look vaguely puzzled, but in the end who could quarrel with the obvious facts? Nor did the ghosts seem less than accepting; they appeared not at all to the real Lyneth and already to her were becoming more remote, ever fainter outlines to her sight, ever more voices to her hearings. She and their step-mother were desperate with gratitude, Lady Hilbourne at first anxious and guilty, but coming to accept that there had been no other solution, that Christine was fated for less than happiness anyway, that it was right that one at least of her two children should know a real life; what was the point, she would say to Lyneth, wearily mulling it over, in their both suffering? ‘Well, that’s what
I
feel, Tetty; if it had been the other way about, I’d have done the same for Christine, wouldn’t I?’

‘Yes, of course you would, dearest,’ said Tetty, and did not dare to ask herself if this were true. ‘I feel so dreadfully worried about you, my darling,’ she said to Christine, ‘but as Lyn says—’

‘As
Christine
says,’ said Christine, correcting her easily; but with a warning look. She led away from dangerous subjects. ‘You mean I have been talking again in my sleep? But what does it matter—some people do, some people don’t. I dream a lot, yes’—night after night, indeed, as the weeks crept by—‘but always nice pleasant dreams, stop worrying about me! It was to Christine now that these ears listened unseen; which must be every moment deceived.

Meanwhile, active preparations for the wedding had been unobtrusively relaxed. Lady Hilbourne had written a tactful note to Lady Jones to suggest that dear Lawrence be advised to extend a little his tour of visits: young girls were kittle-kattle and dear Lyneth, though firm in her intentions, was a highly-strung creature and must perhaps be allowed a little more time to prepare herself for so great a change. Lady Jones thankfully acquiesced and the spring, rather than the coming winter, would perhaps suit everyone best. ‘Though its never coming at all would suit
me
best,’ she confided to Sir Thomas, in a nowadays not unusual burst of tears.

‘Oh, come now, my love, you must get over her foolish behaviour that evening! How prettily she asked your pardon afterwards! I never saw anything like it. It’s a splendid match, the manors running so closely side by side, though for that matter a pity that he shouldn’t have stuck to the heiress. Still, this one will have a fine inheritance; and—kittle-kattle says her step-mama, well, just the word for it. These marriageable girls are much like cattle on the market, a pretty little heifer is not your great lumbering milch cow; and you’d rather have a mettlesome young racehorse, wouldn’t you?—than any rough mare from the Shires, for our fine young stud?’

‘There is no need to be coarse,’ said her ladyship, bursting further into weeping.

‘You’ve married a rough racehorse yourself, my love, I fear,’ said Sir Thomas and gave her a pat not unlike any he might have bestowed upon the said creature; and would hear no more.

Christine wrote a little note to Hil. ‘I must speak with Tetty out of the range of my Familiars with their listening ears. If I order the carriage, and come down to the stable-yard to meet it—could you be there?’ It was nowadays something of an effort for her to walk even so far but he met her half-way and gave her his arm. ‘But Christine, you alarm me—what now must be said to her ladyship in so much privacy? No more, please God!—of these terrifying plans of yours?’

‘Well, it is a plan; but one which in fact may abate the terrors.’ She stood with him, watching as the horses were led out to the waiting carriage. ‘What beauties they are! And a perfect match.’

‘Her ladyship spends very little on herself; but what she has is of the very best. The best of step-daughters, however, came to her rather by chance than by choice.’ Not, he said rather sternly, that he would call
them
very equally matched.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, in perfect innocence. ‘Lyn had always been far cleverer than me: people have always admired her the most.’

‘Oh, Christine—’ he said, in almost comical despair.

On the cobblestones, polished smooth by the centuries of wear, hooves scraped and chuffed with the backing of the horses between the curving shafts; from the boxes all around the square yard, mild faces looked out enquiringly, soft pink noses were upwards lifted, to snuff for the scented promise of an apple to come. He watched with an abstracted air to see that the bits had been comfortably adjusted, loops and buckles fastened securely. He said: ‘You have brought me here to say something particular, Christine.’

Her pale face grew shadowed. ‘Yes, well… It’s what I have to talk to Tetty about. Hil—something has happened. It’s been happening gradually, but now I know it. With all such strange heart as he has to give—Diccon has come to giving his heart, not to Lyneth but to me.’

His own heart seemed to thud within his breast. ‘What is this leading up to? For God’s sake—’ and he looked into her face and saw that she was white with fear. ‘And so—?’

‘And so I must talk to Tetty,’ said Christine. She leaned her cheek for a moment against the rough sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’d thought…’ She said, summoning up the ghost of a smile: ‘But that was foolish: no use at all, talking about it to
you
!’ And she stepped up into the carriage and before he had time to protest, was driven away. He put up his hand to hide from the stablemen the thrusting tears for the helplessness, the hopelessness, the terror of it all.

Lady Hilbourne was waiting in the porch of the Manor and was duly handed in. They sat each in a corner, wrapped in warm rugs. ‘So, Christine—?’

For once it was a natural cold. The oaks stood naked to the chill, their leaves heaped in their winter gold at the feet of the great dark boles; on the hillsides, the bracken was coloured the same tawny gold as the fallen leaves. In the fields, the cattle huddled close for protection, their sweet breath wreathing white in the chilly air, the sheep kept close against the rising banks beneath the hedgerows, leafless now; and in tree or bush or hedgerow, no bird sang. Only the chuff-chuff-chuff of the horses’ hooves on the softened surface of the road made any sound and the squeak of leather against leather, the whirr and rumble of the turning wheels. In the closed-in darkness of the carriage, it seemed as though they drove through a world unpeopled but by themselves and they spoke in small, hushed voices as though even they hardly existed within it. Only at the end of Christine’s recital, did Tetty raise her voice. ‘Never, Christine; never! I won’t hear of it!’

‘You are hearing of it, Tetty. And as you helped me before, you must help me now.’

‘Last time you—blackmailed me.’

‘And I will again.’

‘Dear God!’ said Tetty. ‘For the rest of my life—are you going to hold that threat over my head?’

‘For the rest of my life. But,’ said Christine, ‘that won’t be for very long.’

‘That is too terribly likely, Christine, if you insist upon this horrible plan of yours. But I shan’t allow it. Do what you like—tell Hil what you like. In my pain and rage, I told him a lie about his birth: my excuse must be that some force within me tore out the words from me. I have thought sometimes that when I came back to Aberdar—a Hilbourne bride, in fact, whether I were to marry Hil or as it turned out your dying father—the ghosts closed in upon me, with all their malignity—’

‘And turned you, yourself, into a thing malign.’

She bowed her proud head. ‘Nothing you can say to me, Christine, can outdo what I have said to myself, of myself, through these long years. But that he should know…! However—I repeat, if you must tell him, tell him! I’ll be blackmailed no more. I will have no part in this abomination that you propose for yourself.’

‘Then we must use that word again—doomed. Lyneth is doomed—probably both of us, but certainly Lyneth is doomed to God knows what vengeance if they find out the deception we’ve practised upon them.’

‘You didn’t think of this when you began it all.’

‘In fact, dear Tetty, it was you who began it all—when you turned my little sister from a loving and giving heart to a greedy and grasping one. But, in fact, when I thought up my plan, this was already in my mind. But there was no use in my trying to demand too much of you and Hil. I let you suppose that when Lyn was safely married and moved away to Plas Dar out of their reach—I could somehow make a peace with them. Perhaps, in the back of my mind, I believed that I could: the reality would have been more than I could yet endure to contemplate. I thought, as I say—with Lyn at Plas Dar and safe, I could reveal the truth to them, ask them to accept me in her stead, haunt me, tease me, bring all the world to suppose I was mad, as they were doing to her, as they did to our mother. They would have been angry: it would mean that they’d failed in the continuance of their anathema, they’d lost the power to come here and haunt again. All that I was prepared for. But this… Even I couldn’t foresee how it would go.’

‘What do you mean, Christine? What do you mean?’

‘It is because we are so much like his first love, Isabella—the girl he died for. It has awakened a heart in him, a sort of living, human heart, in the ghost of the dead. And this terrifying heart of his, he has lost—not to Lyneth but to me.’

‘Oh, dear God—!’

‘Their minds are very strange,’ said Christine, ignoring the involuntary outcry of agony. ‘Their minds and such hearts as they have are very strange. How should they not be? They are the minds and hearts of the people of Elizabeth’s day, how could they be anything like our own? Brief periods, at long intervals, among living people, they who are dead—knowing nothing of anything outside that old manor house.’ She mused over it. ‘If ghosts could be said to be mad, I should say they were mad.’

Her step-mother buried her face in her gloved hands. ‘And you are at their mercy, my poor darling child.

‘Better I than Lyneth, Tetty.’ She said deliberately: ‘Don’t you agree?’ And after a little while, into the chilling silence: ‘At least you are too honest to deny it. And so I must do what I now intend to do. Remain with them as “Lyneth”—never make the exchange back. Give myself over entirely to their—mercy.’ She said again and now it was not a question: ‘Better I than Lyneth, after all.’

The habit was upon Lady Hilbourne nowadays to sit stiffly erect, to set a guard upon her eyes and tongue; but now she crouched back in the dark corner and could hardly keep away her tears. ‘Better I than Lyneth—don’t you agree?’ And she was back to that first hour of her arrival, the little heart-weary, sparrow-governess, in her neat brown skirt and jacket with the bold touch of black in the trimming of her bonnet, that even the intimidating Madame Devalle had admitted to having some chic: standing before the great front door, swearing to herself that this gloomy old house should not hold her for long… And the small darting figure appearing from behind the pillar of the portico, clasping her about the waist so that the hooped skirt swung out behind her: Lyneth with her golden hair and limpid blue eyes, making her winsome way into the sorrowful heart. True, Christine had followed, but it had been Lyn who had come first and who in the other sense, from that day on had always come first. I am guilty, said the stricken woman to herself: I am guilty. And now—‘Better that I should suffer, than that Lyneth should?’ She said, fighting for release from her own sick self-knowledge, ‘How can you give yourself over to them, Christine, as you call it? All they want is the bride and for her to marry and continue the next generation…’

‘Lyn may do that,’ said Christine. ‘Calling herself by my name. She can escape to Plas Dar and there be safe from them. And I must ask them to release me from my brideship—believing me to be Lyneth: and offer myself to Richard—who loves me—as his bride.’ She hurried over it, skated over the words. ‘So there need be no break in the continuity of their hauntings; or so they will suppose until I die and they must go back to their Other World and discover—too late to do us any more harm—how they’ve been tricked.’

Her step-mother was not listening to her. ‘Offer yourself as a bride to that—that dead thing, that ghost? How can a ghost have a—have a bride?’

‘God knows,’ said Christine. ‘That I have yet to find out.’

That day, when first she had arrived, when these two young creatures whom in all the world alone she loved—how strangely he had looked at her, Hil, with that look of fear in his bright blue glance. And, ‘One day you will destroy us all,’ he had said to her; and that day was come. It was seldom now that she gave a thought to the great scar that ran down one side of her face. Now she put up her hand to it. She thought: It’s as if it ran down across my soul. Aloud she said: ‘You make me feel, Christine, as though this great scar of mine disfigured not only my face but my soul as well.’

‘Oh, Tetty—!’ She moved across the smooth black leather of the upholstery and put her arms about her step-mother, kissing the scarred cheek, laying her silky head against the shaking shoulder. ‘Forgive me, darling! I don’t mean the harsh things that I say. I’m frightened and sometimes my heart seems to be breaking and I sink with terror at the thought of what must be done. But it must be done: and to force you to help me, I use what weapons I must, cruel though they may be.’