Brides of Aberdar (3 page)

A man had met her at the railway station who looked very much unlike a mere groom but nevertheless acted as a mere groom, humping up her trunk on to the rear platform of the pony carriage, respectfully handing her in—yet was there not a trace of irony in his servility?—and silently driving her through the country roads and up the long curving, rutted drive. Now he climbed down and held out his hand as she stepped from the carriage; went forward and jerked briefly on the bell-rope at the heavy old oak front door. Well, I’m in for it now, she thought. Too late to turn back now. But I’m not going to stay…

And out from behind one of the two rounded pillars of the porch a small girl darted forth and, tipping the hooped crinoline till it jutted out like an inverted bowl behind Miss Tetterman’s spare figure, clasped her about the waist. Miss Tetterman looked down into eager blue eyes, to pale golden hair softly stirring in a little breeze—and thought that, perhaps after all, she was going to stay.

To the end of her life, this was to be the effect upon all those who came to know her, of Miss Lyneth Hilbourne, now something less than six years old.

From behind the second pillar emerged, less exuberantly, her mirror image. Miss Tetterman saw again that faint stirring of the floss of fair hair and somewhere in the back of her mind noted that in fact the day was utterly still, no breeze blew. But astonishment over-topped hardly recognised mild surprise. ‘Goodness gracious! They told me that you were twins, but nobody ever mentioned—’

‘We’re identikal’, said Lyneth. ‘Everyone gets quite amazed.’

‘She always says idenkital,’ said Christine, looking at her sister with a kind of proprietorial pride. ‘She likes long words. She’s the cleverest.’

‘Yes, well, but—’

‘
I
think idenkital is nicer than the right—than the other way,’ said Christine quickly.

‘How ever am I going to tell you apart?’ said Miss Tetterman, duly checked. I shall have to tie a blue ribbon on one of you and a pink on the other.’

‘I want the pink ribbon!’ cried both little girls, hopping excitedly, and, ‘No,
I
want the pink ribbon,’ repeated Lyneth, insistent.

‘Oh, Lyn, you know how I like pink—!’

‘We will toss up for it,’ said Miss Tetterman pacifically.

‘No, no, I want it! Christine doesn’t really mind.’

‘All right. She can have it,’ said Christine. She assured Miss Tetterman, ‘I don’t mind. I don’t really like pink
much
better than blue.’

‘I shall decide,’ said Miss Tetterman—the Tetty of so many years to come; but in the depths of her heart she knew even then, that she would give the pink ribbon to Lyneth. Lyneth who had been the first to run out to welcome her—plain, colourless Alys Tetterman with her scarred, spoilt face, finding herself nowadays unloved, almost entirely unfriended—to welcome her with the all too conquering charm of an innocent outpouring of too facile love.

The door swung open and she took a hand of each child and said, almost gaily: ‘Well—had we better not go in?’

And yet—how chill it struck her, entering through that heavy oak door. She felt the man’s eyes upon her and turned her head and saw in his deep glance something that seemed like fear.

The narrow entrance that had done well enough for the first squire of Aberdar Manor, had long since been widened out to form a large square hall, overhung like a balcony by the first floor landing. A broad staircase led up from it, heavily carved and in its own way handsome and, here at the heart of the house, to the anxious newcomer somehow solid and reassuring.

She stepped in, the children walking backwards, looking up into her face. She knew that they were looking at the scar that ran, still hardly healed, from temple to jaw down her left cheek. ‘You are looking at my scar,’ she said. ‘I had an accident some while ago, with a runaway horse.’ She added, comfortingly, ‘I am used to it now, I forget it. And soon you will, too.’ She never forgot it for one moment of her life.

Very thin and by reason of her thinness looking taller than in fact she was; very properly governess-y in her smooth brown crinolined skirt, tight, trim jacket, boots and gloves of black kid, straw bonnet trimmed plainly and yet rather daringly with two bands of velvet ribbon, one brown, one black. A man-servant, opening the door to her, ushered her, with her charges, into the hall. ‘You can wait ’ere. I’ll tell ’em.’ He spoke with a strong Welsh accent, showing no pronounced respect for either the new arrival or her future employers. She stood quietly beneath the heavy mantel overhanging the huge empty grate.

The children seemed fascinated by her, and not only because of the scar. ‘Are you going to stay with us?’

‘Well, yes, I hope so,’ she said.

‘Do you like our house?’

‘Have
you
got a nice house?’

‘Is your house as big as this?’

‘Well,’ she said again, ‘where I come from is a very nice house too, certainly. And, yes, as big as this—even bigger. I’ll show you a picture of it some day.’

‘Were you the governess there?’

‘It was my home,’ she said, quietly.

The servant had reappeared, gestured to the open doorway. ‘Please to go in,’ he said. His tone seemed very subtly to have altered.

The children followed her. At the door she said: ‘You had better let me go alone.’ A woman’s voice said with a very strong French accent, ‘But certainly, children, stay out!’ and a man’s, quiet but firm, ‘Let them stay with us.’ She held a hand of each of the little girls as she went into the room.

Through the rest of the house, Tante Louise had been busy, stripping the old oak of the accumulated polish of three hundred years so that now it gleamed with an almost ghostly pallor; cleaning and repainting the ceilings, replacing the heavy old carved tables and chairs with the elegant furniture already being shipped over from her Paris home. But there in the Squire’s own library, little in the past two and a half centuries had suffered any change.

Madame had remained seated, stiff and resentful, controlling her secret fears—relieved, however, to some extent by the sight of the terrible disfigurement. As the Squire rose to his feet, she said in her rapid French: ‘Well—she warned us in her letters, but one must say, the scar is grotesque. However, who wants a pretty governess? This one at least won’t find some neighbouring poor tutor and marry herself off while we still have need of her. And for the rest, she seems quite neat and suitably dressed,
tout à fait comme il faut
…’

Miss Tetterman opened her mouth to say that her preparations for educating the young had not excluded lessons in French, but she closed it again. It would be too embarrassing for the Squire to become aware that she had understood the heartless shrugging off of her life’s tragedy. Nor did it occur to Madame, armoured in contempt for all things English, that a poor governess should be so equipped; and since clearly the children would learn the language from their aunt, Sir Edward had given little thought to it. Now since Tante Louise clearly assumed her ignorance and the young lady herself made no denial, he accepted it as a fact that she spoke none. He hastened, however, to bring to an end so ugly an introduction, saying with a little bow that Madame Devalle was remarking upon Miss Tetterman’s charming and agreeable appearance.

‘Sir Edouard Heelbourne,’ said Madame, performing introductions. ‘Father of the cheeldrain.’

Impossible to recognise at first sight—so worn he looked and frail—that he was quite a young man; not much over thirty, perhaps. A tall thin man who might have been handsome but for the air of exhaustion, of pallor, as though at any moment he might drop back into his chair from the sheer weariness of going on living. ‘We are happy to see you, Miss Tetterman. It’s very good of you to come.’

‘Of course she comes,’ said Tante Louise. ‘She is the governess. Shall she stay away?’ She spoke at last directly to Miss Tetterman. ‘
Moi, je suis Madame Devalle, la tante des enfants, et leur gardienne. Oh, ma foi, je parle comme d’habitude Française!
—I speak in French, Mademoiselle, without thinking. I am saying, I am the guardian of the children now that their mother is dead. So—we have taken big chance to engage without first to see you, but you were not yet enough well to come so far after this—accident,’ she gestured towards the scar, ‘and you have had good reference from this Sir Charles Arden. You have been long time with this family, you leave only because the young lady have grown too large—?’

Lyneth danced up and down. ‘Oh, oh!—did she get very fat? Why couldn’t you stay with her just because she got fat?’

‘Tais-toi!’ said Madame irritably. She resumed. Well, Mees—we have had many applications for this very excellent situation. If you do not suit, then very easily you may be dismiss and we find us another one. This you understand?’

‘It goes without saying,’ said Sir Edward, ‘and might as well not have been said.’ He made a second small courteous bow. ‘We hope that all will go well and you will be with us until
our
young ladies—’ he smiled at them ‘—have grown too large.’

‘Yes, yes!’ cried the children, clinging to Miss Tetterman’s hands; and, ‘At least I will try,’ said Miss Tetterman.

‘It is an old house,’ said Madame Devalle, as though excusing it. ‘And very—
comment dit-on “sombre”
?’

‘Miss Tetterman has a lovely house,’ said Christine. ‘And much bigger than this. Haven’t you?’

‘Where, before, you were serving?’ suggested Madame Devalle.

‘It was my home, Madame,’ said Miss Tetterman, as she said to the children. She used the French pronunciation of the appellation.

‘Oh, ho! Do you then call “home” the place of your servitude?’

‘I had known it all my life, Madame. I was encouraged to retain my own pride. What you call my servitude shall never be a shame to me.’

‘Nor need be,’ said Sir Edward, ‘in this house.’

‘
Tout de même
, one must not be too proud,’ said Madame Devalle. ‘There will be, of course, the education; but also to put on the children their clothes—’

‘It is not the business of the governess to dress her pupils, Louise.’

‘It’s Bethan that dresses us—’

‘They will soon learn to dress themselves,’ said Miss Tetterman. She smiled down at them. ‘Except for the difficult hooks and eyes at the back. And even then, they may help one another.’

‘—and attend how they are eating their meal.’ Balked of any sign of the victim’s taking undue offence, she insisted, ‘And make clean and tidy their rooms.’

‘Is there no nursery-maid, Louise, for goodness sake?’

‘If the
gouvernante
is so grand for the work—’

‘You referred to my “serving”, Madame. I now understand better. But housework is not commonly included in the duties of an instructress.’

‘I expressly insisted, Louise, that there should be the usual extra help for the nurseries.’

‘I simply examine into the character of Mees,’ said Tante Louise, loftily. There was in fact a nursery-maid who would attend to all the duties outlined. ‘Bethan washes us and helps us dress,’ said Christine again, ‘and brings our meals to the nursery. Won’t she still?’

‘That matter is settled,’ said her father, calmly. ‘Miss Tettyman understands it all perfectly well—’

‘Oh, Papa, her name is Miss Tetterman!’

‘I always get names wrong,’ he said, smiling at her in his faded way. ‘I daresay for all my trying, you will remain Miss Tettyman to the end.’ The small, sketched bow again. ‘And let us hope that that will be a long way away. We must try to make you happy here.’

There is a magic in the place, she thought. For all it seemed so grim, there is some magic that will keep me here. Now, having lost all that in her twenty-four years she had come to care for, she had not thought to find love and happiness again. But here I am, all in half an hour in love with a pair of welcoming children; and finding it in my heart to find something almost of affection, what you will—for this man!

‘It will not be my fault if I am not happy,’ she said, dropping him a small bobbing curtsey in return for the bow, hastily bestowing the same on Madame, and preparing to lead the children away.

‘You Hilbourne men!’ said Madame Devalle in French before the door had closed. ‘You do nothing, you try nothing but within half a minute every female you meet
s’évanouit à vos pieds
.’

‘Then it’s a good thing for them that I meet so few,’ said. Edward Hilbourne. Poor pale, thin governess, with her scarred face and clear hazel eyes and that something about her of—gallantry! I don’t think
she
will swoon all that easily, he thought, at my feet or at any man’s.

But let them swoon as they would, as far as he was concerned it would do them no good—and no ill. There would be no more marrying for the Squire of Aberdar.

The man-servant’s name was Tomos, a Welshman from the south, something under forty years old perhaps, of middle height, very dark, rather swarthy indeed, but with a bright and teasing eye: he loved a drink and a laugh and a kiss from a pretty girl and a great deal more if she would give it to him. He returned to the staff quarters with surprising news. ‘Right enough she’d be—but for the scar, right down the side of her face. And thin—thin as a sparrow and dressed like a sparrow too, all brown and a streak here and there of darkness; but the feathers as sleek and flat as if they’d been oiled over, not a fold, not a wrinkle…’

‘A bit on the dull side then?’ suggested the footman, Rod, who had hoped for better things.

‘Well, a sparrow can be bright enough, mind, a nice clean country bird with none of the gloss taken off his feathers from the dusty streets. But that’s her dress. More like a hazel-nut she is herself,
crau collen
, we call them in Welsh; eyes bright, hair the same colour, very soft and smooth but a little curl creeping out from her bonnet, escaping.’

‘Nothing much escapes you, Tomos James,’ said Menna, the cook, laughing, ‘where a girl is concerned. You’ve set eyes on her half a minute in all.’

‘Aye, but there’s more to come. Come from some grand family she has—big man-shun, bigger than this she told the children; and proud as a little peacock. Though like I say, more sparrow than peacock every other way.’