Brides of Aberdar (34 page)

Outside on the terrace, Lyneth stood with Christina held close in her arms. ‘Oh, Tetty, Tetty, you’re safe!’ At the front door they encountered Arthur Hilbourne, arms across his face, preparing to plunge into the blazing hall; Lawrence was smashing with his fists at the panes of the library window, shouting out Christine’s name. They stood, stricken, the two young men, staring at the burden carried in Hil’s arms. Hil said simply: ‘She’s dead.’ The tears were running down his cheeks.

Lawrence stammered out, ‘Is there anyone left in the house?’ But no, Tomos had been sent to warn the staff before the fire had started. Tetty shook her head dumbly. ‘But go down to the stables,’ said Hil, ‘help get the horses to safety. All the outbuildings…’ He blundered on with his burden to the steps of the terrace, stood for a moment indecisive. ‘Oh, Christine—my sweet, my darling…! Where shall I lay you down?’ and he went with her at last down to the lower terrace and laid her very gently on the grassy pathway and folded her white hands on the breast of the white muslin dress; and caught up a flower from the bright border and put it between the lax hands; and came away, leaving her there.

And so the old house burned: the ancient timbers of the roof collapsed, and brick and stone rained down with a heart-sickening crash: around the little squares of the panes, the lead was melted, the windows bulged outwards and crumbled, exposing the greedy flickering of flame within. They stood huddled on the upper terrace, staring spell-bound as a brief hour wrought the destruction of all that had taken so long to grow, and endured four hundred years more. Lyneth hugged her child close in her arms, her step-mother stood dazed and exhausted, clutching to herself, not knowing that she did so, the scorched remains of a Paisley shawl, brilliantly patterned against the dull brown of her dress, the small dogs crouching, whimpering, about her hems. The young men together with the staff were fighting to save the outer buildings, the bakehouses and laundries and dairies, the coach house and stables. But Hil remained and, as dusk began to fall, said heavily: ‘I think the end is coming. It hasn’t been—human: no house could burn like this, in so brief a time. But now it’s gone. Aberdar has gone for ever.’

Only the porch intact, with its heavy, clumsy old pillars from behind which long ago they had darted out, those two small figures of enchantment, and straight into the lonely young heart of Miss Alys Tetterman: where, yet, it had suddenly struck her so chill, where first she had seen that look in Hil’s blue glance, of foreboding and fear. Only the solid old porch still standing and a yawning blackness slashed through with great tongues of flame, where the wide oaken door had been.

Well—the fear was over now: the ultimate terror. ‘You are safe,’ she said at last. ‘You are safe, Lyn. You and the little one. Where there is no house, they can haunt no more.’

Lyneth clasped the child close. ‘Oh, Tetty—Christine?’

Tetty glanced warningly towards Hil, almost imperceptibly shook her head: why add to his pain by the history of the past hours? ‘The ghosts could haunt only within the house,’ she said. ‘Now the house is gone.’

‘And Christine has gone?’

‘Christine is dead,’ said Hil, heavily. ‘She is lying down there with her blue eyes closed for ever, and flowers in her hands. She is gone.’

And the little girl cried out: ‘Aunt Lyn!’, and struggled down from her mother’s arms, suddenly powerless to contain her, and ran towards the ravaged house. In the blackened doorway, with its background of falling timber and flame, Christine stood in her white dress and held out to her welcoming arms.

They stood in anguish, held by some force they could not control, unable to move. Lyneth screamed out: ‘My baby! Get her back, call her back!’

But the little thing trotted forward not even glancing back over her shoulder. ‘Aunt Lyn! Aunt Lyn!’

‘She is there,’ said Lady Hilbourne, ‘Oh, dear God!—Christine is there. And
they
are with her—the others are with her there.’

Standing there, one on either side of her—faintly, faintly, only faintly to be discerned, imploring in their dying voices, ‘You must come with us, Christine, come! There is no more time.’

‘We are going to the Other World,’ said Christine to the child, holding her little hand. ‘Just a little while, and we’ll be so happy there; you’ll be happy there, darling, always with your Aunt Lyn…’

But the child looked back into the house with frightened eyes. ‘All fire, Aunt Lyn!’

‘Yes, yes, darling, but soon it will be forgotten, soon we shall be far away.

‘Christina go ‘way now,’ cried the child, beginning to whimper, beginning to try to pull away her hand. ‘Too hot!’

‘She’ll be killed,’ cried Lyneth, screaming. ‘She’ll be burnt alive! They’re shades, they’re ghosts, they feel nothing, but she… Oh, my poor little girl—!’ and Hil fought frantically against a power that held him fast where he stood. ‘I’m helpless, I can’t get free—!’

‘Do you see them, Hil?’ said Tetty.

‘I see no one. Only that Tina is standing there close to the flames. Why doesn’t she come back?’

‘
I
can see them,’ said Tetty. ‘And hear their voices. After all—I was once a Hilbourne bride, I’m a part of it all.’ And she called out urgently, across the intervening space, ‘Christine—set me free, let me come to you!’

‘I am taking Tina with me.’ To the child now piteously sobbing, wrenching at the tightly clasping hand, she said, ‘Hush, hush, my darling! It’s nothing—you see, Aunt Lyn feels nothing.’

‘She is a living creature,’ cried Tetty, imploring, her voice raised to carry above the sounds of the falling masonry and crackle of flame. ‘You are a shade, Christine, you feel nothing. But she’s frightened of the heat and the flames, and soon she must die in agony if you don’t let me come to you and take her away.’ And as the child still screamed and struggled, she insisted, ‘Will you torture her, Christine, because you must torture us? You who in life were so gentle and kind—’

‘And happy,’ said Christine. ‘It’s easy to be kind and gentle when you’re happy. But you and Lyneth between you—you ended all that. I’m not kind any more, I feel nothing in my dead heart but anger and revenge. And to punish you, I’m taking Christina into death with me, into the Other World, the world of shades…’

In five minutes, thought Tetty, the fire will have reached them, they will be engulfed in the flames; and when the screams have ended, she will be gone; and Christina will be gone too, the darling of our hearts, into the Other World, and that will be the end—to which for Lyneth and me there will never be an end. But at a sudden crash as a light spar of wood fell, smouldering, and a scream from the child, she tore herself forward from the chains that seemed to bind them all to helplessness and somehow impelled herself nearer to the burning house. ‘Christine—you are Christine still! Look at her little hand!’

Across the back of the plump wrist, so white and sweetly dimpled—a searing scar where the burning wood had fallen, suddenly flaring. The child sobbed, ‘Aunt Lyn—Tina hurt, Tina hurt—!’

Tetty forced herself ever forward, fell on to her knees. ‘Oh, Christine—darling, have mercy, have mercy! Not upon us, Christine, not on Lyneth and me, we will give up our lives to you. But this tiny child—’

Lyneth, crying out from where she stood as though frozen into immobility. ‘Christine, take my life—in the fire if need be—but don’t let my baby die in agony…! Oh, Christine, my other half, my twin, my sister—find it in your generous heart to forgive me—to have pity. Forgive me!’

Growing fainter now, diminishing, the dying-away voice. ‘I am a ghost now, Lyneth, I have no heart—not to pity nor to have mercy—no heart to forgive. I am a ghost, I am dead.’

‘For love, Christine,’ said Tetty. ‘You are like—that other one. You died for love.’

‘If I find love now in my dead heart,’ she whispered, ‘I must go for ever to a place where there is no love: no love, no pity for
me
, no hope, no Light to wend my way to; no ending, for ever…’

The voices were gone: only their echo, faintly calling. ‘No more time, Christine… No more time… If we leave you, if we are parted now—then we lose you forever. Exact your revenge, bring the child with you, but come with us, come with us…!’

Faintly, as though through a mist, they all saw her now, for a moment, the white form standing erect in the dark hollow of the doorway, holding the little girl’s hand in her own hand, the white form that fell away to grey ash, trembling, frail; saw how at last she bent and lifted the child’s little hand to her cold, dead lips and released it, and remained for a moment while it ran towards its mother, holding out the dimpled arm with the ugly mark of the burn across the wrist. And heard a voice almost imperceptible to the ear: ‘I am coming… Wait for me, I am coming…’ And she was gone.

And the solid, stout old pillars of the porch collapsed and crumbled into nothingness; and the whole world seemed for a moment suddenly absolutely still.

‘And so Aberdar burned down,’ said the girl to her sweetheart, sitting there nested in the tawny bracken, where soon the green shoots, curled like bishops’ crooks, would come springing through: looking across the stream to the tumbled ruins, the broken terraces all starred about now with long-neglected flowers. ‘And everybody went away, the new house was built on another remote part of the manor, and that was the end. Hil lives still in the house up above, and he comes down sometimes and walks among the ruins; but if you ask him if there are ghosts there now, he says: “No. Only me.” He is getting old now, Hil, and his eyes are always sad. I think he would be glad if he might see a ghost sometimes—if he could see Christine with her blue eyes and her soft, fair hair, just as young as she was in those old days—his lost Christine.’

‘Perhaps she will one day stop for a moment in her wandering,’ said the boy, and lean out “from the gold bar of heaven” and call to him. She seems to have been so sweet and kind, the real Christine.’

‘Oh,’ said the girl, thankfully, ‘you do understand? You do accept it all, this old, frightening story? And it hasn’t changed your mind?’

‘I accept it. It’s like a sort of dream,’ he said, ‘and as a sort of dream, one must accept it. But of course it changes nothing between you and me.’

The duenna was coming back, walking down the wooded path, moving at her regular, stately pace, the hems of her brown dress with its smoothly rounded bustle, brushing the faces of the woodland flowers, upturned to see her pass. And again the young man thought, How strange she seems! How erect and colourless amidst all the flowery green! But the girl leaped up and ran to her, throwing an arm in easy, familiar affection about her spare shoulders. ‘Now he knows it all, the whole story, every word of it. And there you are, Tetty, I told you!—he doesn’t mind a bit.’

And she put out her other hand to her lover; and for the first time he observed across her slender wrist the white mark of an old, forgotten scar.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1982 by Christianna Brand

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

ISBN 978-1-4532-9050-7

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