Brides of Aberdar (32 page)

‘Arthur loves me too.’

‘It’s not Arthur you’re married to. You gave your promise to Lawrence. And Lyn, you’re not going to break your promise to Lawrence, you’re not going to break his heart; you’re not
going
to, Lyn, I won’t let you.’

Lyneth was recovering from the shock of confrontation, was growing resentful. ‘What business—?’

Christine’s hand clawed ever more tensely at the white bosom of her dress. ‘What business? Of mine? Dear God!—do you ask that? I gave him to you, I handed him over to you because you wanted it, you’d cozened him into wanting it, too. I took all your terrible burden upon myself, Lyn; for your sake and his I gave myself over to the ghosts, I lowered myself into hell. What business is it of mine?—do you think I’m going to suffer this daily, this hourly—this nightly—sacrifice just to see you go off on some new flight of fancy, leaving Lawrence alone—?’

‘What use am I to Lawrence if I really love Arthur?’

‘You don’t really love Arthur, Lyn. It’s just a bit of romantic nonsense, an escape from everyday life. If Arthur goes away, you’ll turn back to Lawrence.’

‘What right have you to—?’ Lyneth sought evasion in digression. ‘All this fuss about your sacrifices! What’s so dreadful about it, after all? You’d lost Lawrence, there was no happiness for you any more, you said so yourself. Now you’ve got your ghosts—’

‘Who in fact are
your
ghosts—’

‘They let me go, they’ve no power over me any more.’

‘You’re still the Hilbourne bride, Lyneth. I changed places with you and they believed that I was the bride. But you are, really—that bride you were then. And if they came to understand that they’d been deceived…’ At the thought of their cold fury, a shudder ran through her thin body. ‘But if I must—I would tell them.’

‘Tell them what you like,’ said Lyneth. ‘I’m safe from them. They have no powers outside this house. Well, quite simply, I won’t go into the house again.’

Below them the little river splashed its way over its silvery stones, about them were bright flowers and the scent of roses; but they stood confronting one another and in all the warmth of the afternoon sun, were thrilled through with the chill of cold fear. Christine said at last, slowly: ‘You will have to come into the house, Lyneth. Because if you don’t, you’ll never see your child again. Until you go in and fetch her—she’ll stay in the house. She won’t be allowed to go.’

‘Not allowed—? Who will keep her there?’

‘
I
will keep her there,’ said Christine. ‘And the ghosts will keep her there. And—and you know it of old, Lyneth—the house itself will keep her there.’

Lyneth burst into tears again. ‘But if I come into the house—the house will keep me too, Christine. And I shall be in their power again. And if you tell them—if they’re angry…’

And yet… A new hope rose in her. She cried out: ‘The Anathema! They’ve failed in the Anathema—they would haunt the bride, it said, but they haven’t haunted the bride, they’ve failed in it. There’s nothing to be afraid of after all: they’ve lost their powers, they’ll revert back to their Other World and the search for the Light and all the rest of it. They’ll never come back to Aberdar to haunt again.’

Christine said steadily: ‘
They
may not, Lyn. But
I will
.’ And she left her sister and half running, stumbling, throwing out a hand for support to the balustrades of the terraces, pausing for breath, driven on by the sound of her sister’s footsteps behind her, she made her way up, half-fainting to the house and ran through the hall with its new-lit fire, and into the library and there stood, utterly exhausted, in the doorway.

Tetty was there, sitting as though frozen in the big old wooden armchair that had been here in this room since un-remembered time; the little girl crouched, cowering, against her knee.

And the ghosts were there.

The child, set down, had run in ahead of Lady Hilbourne and found Tomos in the hall on his knees before the great fireplace. ‘I’m lighting a few sticks, Miss Christina, to make us all warm… Oh, m’lady, with your ladyship’s permission—it seems so cold today indoors, even if there’s sunshine outside. I thought I’d better light a fire or two for this evening.’

‘Yes, very well,’ she said absently.

‘And one in the library, m’lady? You’ll be sitting there after dinner?’ With Tante Louise gone, she had somewhat altered her habits, preferring to the more elegant rooms, the low-ceilinged library with its smell of polished oak and the leather bindings of the books—upstairs Christine would be communing with her ghosts and it was an agony to be with her. ‘Yes, Tomos, thank you,’ she said again vaguely.

Christina clung to his hand. ‘Tina light fire wiv Tomos, Tina help Tomos!’

‘Yes, yes, darling, we’ll go with Tomos.’ She dropped her shawl on to the arm of a chair and led the way through to the library and when the man was gone, fell wearily into the Squire’s old oak chair and stared bleakly into the flames that flickered and curled about the dry wood, reaching up bright hands towards the coals. The child, seeing herself abandoned to her own pursuits, stood on tiptoe to reach the treasures on the desk beneath the window—there was a gold seal with the family crest carved in agate which was a familiar delight. She took it over to the fire and crouched down as close as possible to its warmth. For it was very cold in here.

Very cold—though through the multitude of little squared-off panes, the late afternoon sunshine still shone bright. A foreboding, thought the woman sitting staring into the fire. It had always come when something terrible was going to happen, the cold—this kind of cold. And now… How ill, down there on the terrace, Christine had looked! If Lyn were really to leave Plas Dar, to run away, to desert Lawrence… And she heard that young voice in her ears, that once so much-loved voice, Lyn’s voice: ‘Look inward, Tetty, and see whose fault it is! If I’m cruel and wicked, it was you who made me so; deep down inside you, you’re cruel and wicked yourself…’ And: ‘If I condemned my sister to take my place in the life she leads now—you abetted me in that…’ Oh, God, she thought, how black and withered is the bough of that once green tree that was so fresh and lovely when I was young…!

She was roused by footsteps, running, stumbling. The door was flung open and Christine almost tumbled into the room. She looked dreadfully ill, her white face patched with high colour; seemed hardly able to catch her failing breath. She stood reeling in the doorway. She said: ‘You’re here!’ But she was not speaking to her step-mother.

Tetty cried out: ‘The ghosts…!’

Once before she had seen them like this: as in a dream had heard the rustle of silk against silk, had caught in the flicker of firelight, Rembrandt gleams of jewels and gold; had known the strange, musky scent that once again pervaded all the room. Once before in a—dream?—the little governess, promoted all in an hour to be mistress of this age-old house, of all this great domain—lying back, half-fainting, in the big oak chair that perhaps had been here when they’d come in their silks and velvets to plead their lost cause. And now they were come again, they stood there before her: the woman so dark and beautiful, with her curving figure like a painting by the French artist, Ingres—in glittering ruff and great blue velvet hooped skirt; the young man with his curling red-gold hair, in the doublet and hose of his day, the coat of softest leather hanging over one shoulder, the dagger at his thigh, and at his ear the great, softly gleaming, dangling pearl. And she heard their voices. They cried out together: ‘Lyneth!’ and ‘Lyneth!’

Christine leaned in the doorway. Holding her side, gasping, as pale as death. She said: ‘I came to tell you this, Richard. I am not Lyneth. I am Christine.’

‘
Christine
—?’

‘Lyneth was the bride. I took her place. We thought you need never know.’

They seemed to shrink into themselves, to lose something of their bold beauty, standing gazing back. Lenora said: ‘You deceived us?’

‘Lyneth wanted to marry and be happy. She wanted to go away from Aberdar and not be—not be haunted…’

The little girl, Christina, whimpered and trembled. She asked wonderingly as she had asked a little earlier, in the hall: ‘Aunt Lyn! Nobody dere?’

‘Lyneth,’ said Lenora, and, all a-glitter with its great jewelled rings, her white hand shook, ‘what have you done?’

‘Have I brought you to harm?’ said Christine. ‘I’ve broken the chain of the Anathema?’

‘What does it mean to us?’ said Richard to his sister. ‘She has destroyed it.’

‘It means that we are destroyed with it,’ said Lenora. ‘We are lost. The cycle is broken, we can never come back.’ And she seemed suddenly to regain whatever terrible power was invested in her still, and turned upon the cringing girl. ‘You’ve done this to us! You’ve destroyed us, reduced us to nothingness. We shall be there for ever now, in the Other World, shades among shades, groping our way through the grey curtains of mist, wandering, wandering.

‘Towards the Light, Lenora?’

‘That is beyond our reaching, little brother, who have clung for so long to this world, wreaked so much bitter vengeance here: who took our own lives, extinguished our own sparks of the Light. We shall be wanderers for ever.’ Her fingers curled themselves into claws. ‘What powers have we left while there’s yet time, what hell can we let loose upon her for the hell she condemns us to—?’

But Richard went across and took the cowering girl by the arm, and brought her forward into the room; and now she did not shudder from the misty dankness of the touch of his dead hand against her hand, for she herself was growing very close to death. Death from no cause but that she had no will any more to live: the death that down the ages had come, strangely and without visible symptoms, to the brides of Aberdar. He recognised it also. He said to his sister: ‘We won’t hurt her. We can’t hurt her. She’s very close to us now. And we love her.’

‘
You
love her,’ said Lenora. ‘Long, long ago, with my death, I came not to understand the meaning of the word. But you died for love; you have never entirely lost the sweet taste of it.’

‘Then let me love her still. Do nothing to hurt her. She meant no harm—only goodness towards her sister. She gave herself up to us, she suffered—a living creature spending her life with us who are dead.’ And he threw out his hand, ringed also and sparkling. ‘Look at her! What more do you want? She’s dying, we’ve killed her…’

‘It’s their fate to die,’ said Lenora. ‘That is the whole point and meaning of the Anathema: that they shall pine and suffer and die—the brides of Aberdar.’

‘But she was not a bride,’ said Richard.

Lady Hilbourne sat silent, turned to stone; even the child seemed paralysed, looking on with wide blue eyes, small hands clasped on the seal of agate and gold, engraved with the family crest. Christine seemed not to see them. She faltered: ‘If I have harmed you—’

‘You have destroyed us,’ said Lenora. ‘Already…’ And indeed already to the silently watching woman, they seemed less brilliant, the beautiful pair standing there before the fireplace: their colours less glowing, their jewels not so bright. Richard said, shrinking back, ‘The shadows, Lenora—the grey veils of the Other World—closing in on us.’

‘They are closing about me too,’ said Christine.

‘Yes,’ said Diccon. He held out his hand to her and his hand was as grey as ash now, and as fragile. ‘Will you love us, Lyneth, when you share death with us?’ But he corrected himself. ‘You aren’t Lyneth. Lyneth was the one who cheated us—for reasons of her own, Lenora, not like this lovely, sweet one, in selflessness.’ The ashy hand fisted itself, he lifted up his white face beneath the pale silver sheen that had been so bright an aureole of red gold. ‘She is the one who should be punished for ever more.’

‘Don’t waste your last strength in anger,’ said Lenora, as pale as he. ‘Already it has grown to be a feeble thing. We have lost the power to punish.’

Christine said in a voice low but terrible: ‘Give me the power and when I am dead, I will punish her for you. For you and for myself.’

‘Punish her—?’

‘Teach me how to come back from the Other World, teach me to haunt this world as you have haunted. If you can’t come back, let
me
come back and use the same power over Lyneth, false, wicked Lyneth, as you have used through these long years in your eternal revenge…’

‘You are a living creature,’ said Lenora. ‘How can we invest you with the powers of a ghost?’

‘Then let me die. I would so much rather die.’

Richard said, ‘But when we are gone—would you still wish for death? You would be free: you could gather back your strength, there might yet be a human lifetime of happiness before you.’

‘There would be no way then to punish Lyneth. Lyneth has betrayed us all, she has betrayed her husband—her love and mine.’

‘If she should return to him—’

‘How can she return? She has broken her faith with him. And betrayed all my sacrifice. I must have revenge.’

‘She is close to death,’ said Lenora, very quietly to her brother. ‘The love is ebbing out of her heart. She wants only cruelty and revenge.’

‘She is like you,’ said Richard.

‘You died of love, Diccon, and even in death, retained some part of your heart. It has been all our weakness. She is dying, but she’s dying in hatred, all she wants and ever will want now, is revenge.
I
know. So let her come with us; she has no place any longer in this world of theirs.’

‘Then…’ the voices dying away, diminishing as they themselves diminished away into ghosts, into nothingness. ‘Then Lyneth—Christine—come with us, dearest, come with us, come with us…’

‘Put your arms about me, Diccon, hold me, communicate your death to me, let me die and go with you. And if I have lost to you, your need for vengeance, then I will take it on my own dead shoulders, and carry it on for you…’

Their arms were about her and it was as if a grey mist enfolded her. And the mist grew thinner and thinner and was there no more: nothing remained but a girl in a white dress lying on the floor in the glow of the firelight in that old, dark room.

Lyneth, hesitant, frightened, just outside the great front door, heard a single scream of terror and ran forward through the hall and into the library. Her step-mother was crouched on the hearth-rug, holding the dead girl in her arms; and the child… The child was talking, with up-lifted face, smiling and bobbing, holding out eager small star-fish hands—to someone who was not there.