Brides of Aberdar (9 page)

‘And have you not?’

‘None that I would wear this afternoon, Madame, at any rate.’

‘Not even the pretty little
cadeau
which you recently received? A chain, I believe, with a small pendant in gold and turquoises—the flower you call in English forget-not-me?’

Now she flushed like a rose. ‘Madame is not particular as to how she obtains her information, I think.’

‘Not when one must watch the proper conduct of one who has in her care innocent children.’

The little girls, ever perceptive, had caught the chill in the two voices, and were upset by it. Hil took a hand of each. ‘I think your dear Tetty has no need of any thing extra, has she?’ he said, looking down at them, smiling. ‘Just her pretty dress and her pretty ribbon bow—’

‘And her sweet, pretty face,’ said Menna, the cook, deliberately. ‘And her sweet, pretty smile.’

She could afford to be generous—Menna. She was beautiful. In her middle forties now, she must be, for she had worked at Aberdar almost thirty years but her face was the purest oval, dark hair drawn down into a low bun at the back with the scrap of white muslin and lace on top, an apology for the regulation cap. On the tall side, her figure was extraordinarily graceful, softly and warmly rounded, her skin a uniform creamy white as though she were carved in soft ivory.

Everyone turned to look at her now, with a smile of gratitude. The children flew to clasp her round her waist, gazing up at her lovingly: ‘Oh, Menna, you’re pretty too!’

‘Nobody calls
me
pretty,’ said Tomos, teasing them. He suggested: ‘Why doesn’t Menna give us a bit of a song then?—and we’ll all join in.’ He added, ‘If you’re willing, sir?’

The little girls were enraptured. ‘Oh, yes, Menna, yes Menna! The one about the swan. The one about Bronwen. Bronwen means white, in Welsh,’ they confided to Tetty in their artless way. ‘The song is about a swan called Bronwen, “the snowy-breasted swan”.’

‘Sing
Ar hyd y nos
, Menna,’ suggested Hil. ‘Everyone knows that, everyone can join in.’

‘He’s shy because he made up the one about the swan. No, no, Menna, sing about the white swan! We all know that too.’

The lovely golden voice, pouring out, untaught, untrained, yet sweet and true as a bird’s: ‘
Bronwen, y cariad
—Bronwen, my loved one, my snowy-breasted swan…’ The fine tenors and sopranos joining in in harmony, footmen, house-boy, nurserymaid, tweeny-maid, stable-hands, farm-folk, ringing the big room, all shyness and awkwardness shed in the lifting-up of hearts in the natural, everyday joy of their singing. Tante Louise, sitting stiff and resentful in her chair beside the Squire, stared round at them all in amazement: Miss Tetterman with tears in her eyes.

If, at the end, either expected an outburst of applause, they were disappointed. These were the Welsh, people who sang as naturally as they talked or breathed. It was their gift, unacknowledged as anything out of the ordinary; common to all. It was perfectly accepted that the two little girls should hardly wait for the last dying fall, to run forward to the tree. ‘Can we all have our presents now?’

Miss Tetterman had made tactful preparations. Hil and Tomos lifted each a child to a pre-arranged package. Having had no competition, the embroidered pinafores were accepted with suitable delight, at once tied over the tiered crinolines held out by half a dozen starched petticoats, and the lace-edged pantalettes. They ran round offering sugared almonds, with little sketchy bob curtseys to the staff, all now sitting rather stiffly on benches against the white panelled walls. Tante Louise was horrified at so rapid a dispensation of the precious French dainties. ‘
Et, de plus—faut-il, mon cher, faire les révérences aux domestiques? Quant à moi, ce n’est pas du tout comme il faut!
’

‘It is perfectly proper,’ said the Squire, also in French, ‘that young children should show respect for their elders—’

‘
Mais, ce ne sont que les domestiques
.’

‘—servants or anyone else. They offer the children their love and kindness and the children love them in return…Or perhaps,’ he said, smiling a little, ‘it is the other way about. They’re so confiding and sweet… After all, Louise, are they not?’

‘They are well enough,’ said Tante Louise, shrugging. In the depths of her cold heart, there was always a stirring of unease that these children should so have intruded themselves with their small melting-points of love. ‘
Mais, enfin—c’est très ennuyant! Tous les bonbons—ils sont finis! J’avais beaucoup de difficulté les obtenir. On peut donner à ces sauvages
—one may give anything to these savages, what do they know? Des “bull’s eye” would do them as well or much better
. Cà me rend furieuse
.’

And indeed all the almonds were gone. ‘Now, Tetty, what? Now, Tetty, what?’

‘Lots more presents, my loves, for everyone. And look what comes next! From your dear papa!’

Riding habits—positively their own riding habits with little shining boots, and caps with a jaunty feather. They were enraptured. But it was all so exciting. ‘What next? What next?’

From herself, tiny gold lockets, each centred with a semiprecious stone, a turquoise for Christine, a coral for Lyn. ‘Now we shall need no pink and blue ribbons to tell you apart…’

More cutting down of packages, more raptures, more handings-round. Hil moved unobtrusively to her side. ‘You are going to have trouble when you get to the top of the tree.’

She stood with him in an angle of the walls, a little apart from the throng. ‘Oh, Hil, yes! What a fool I was to dress the dolls differently!’

‘You never learn, do you?’ said Hill. She glanced up to see if he were not half-teasing her, but he looked cold and angry. ‘By that time, they’ll be tired, even Christine won’t be easy to persuade, the old witch will back up her favourite and for that matter so will everyone else, including yourself—how can you all be so blind? And the whole thing will end in disaster, the Squire will be distressed—’

‘And all through my fault,’ she admitted, wretchedly. ‘All because I didn’t think.’

‘Much worse than that,’ he said, almost savagely. ‘It’s because you did think; thought only beneath your conscious thought, perhaps, but thought. Because the truth is that you
wanted
there to be a choice. Recognise it or not, you wanted there to be a struggle, you wanted your pet to win, you wanted to give in to Lyneth and have her love you the more for it. Why worry about Christine—win or lose, she will love you just the same with all her generous little heart; but the other one—she will love you, yes, but she’ll love you that much more if you give her what she wants.’

The children danced about the tree, were lifted up, reedy arms extended to take down the wrapped gifts from the upper branches; hung over the recipients, eagerly watching the unwrapping and exclaiming and exchange of thanks. The little dogs hopped about their feet with small, shrill yappings. ‘Oh, the dogs, the dogs! Haven’t we got any presents for the dogs?’

But Tetty had thought of everything. There were sugar-biscuits tied up in tiny separate packets and a bone for each, wrapped in silver paper. ‘At least,’ she said resentfully to Hil, ‘you can’t accuse me of favouritism among the dogs.’

‘You are angry with me?’ he said.

‘
You
are angry with
me
. And to speak out fairly, I don’t know that you have any right to be. Is it for you to upbraid the governess for her conduct towards her charges?’

‘You mean from my menial position as a servant here?’

‘You say that to be cruel. I know very well that you are not a servant here.’

‘You have been listening to the Squire,’ he said with a small self-deprecating shrug.

‘I’ve been listening to you, Hil. And looking at you. And thinking about your name: thinking about
you
.’

‘Well, then, I can only hope,’ he said grimly, ‘that you have not also been talking about me.’

She turned away her head and now all the light and movement about her was blurred with tears. ‘As if I would! As if I’d do anything to—to betray you, to betray the Squire! I’ve made mistakes, perhaps; perhaps you’re right to warn me about the children. But I love them both, I love—I love this whole place, I love the Squire and I love all the people. You know nothing about me, Hil, nothing about my background and my origins, you know nothing about the inner me, about what’s in my—in my heart. But this is all my world now, I’d do nothing to betray it, nothing to betray any of you—’

He looked down at her and now in his face there was something that seemed to her heightened emotions, to be a sort of terrible pity. ‘Why do you look at me, Hil, like that?’

‘I… Well, I have some—gift,’ he said. ‘If it is a gift and not a curse. At any rate I—know things. And I know that one day, in the far future, you
will
betray us. In spite of all these fine sentiments, not even knowing perhaps that you are doing so—one day you will betray us; you will destroy us all.’

Cold fingers, icy fingers, brushing against her cheek.

T
HE SPRING CAME, HERALDED
by the tiny blue blossoms of the squill, crouched close to the burgeoning earth, and the snowdrops followed, and crocuses, purple, yellow and white, studded the grassy terraces; and the fruit trees were speckled with their small, pale buds, shining against the dark branches; the great mulberry dormant still, purple against the long golden tresses of the willow trees, drooping over the rushing stream. And with the thin sunshine, the Squire crept down from his room and would sit for a little while in his library and, from the closed window, watch the children bowling their hoops up and down the gravelled drive, Lyneth as ever the clever, the skilful one; or playing hopscotch on a pitch scratched out for them on the flagstones by Hil, or skittering by on their ponies with Miss Tettyman in ever watchful attendance, the small dogs dancing out of the way of the polished hooves. But if now and again the young-old face lighted up with a smile, it too soon grew sad again. He sent for doctors, for lawyers, for financial advisers. He sent for Hil.

Hil came in with his small quick nod of the head that had nothing in it of servility, only much of a sort of affectionate respect. The Squire half-struggled up from his chair and relapsed back into it. ‘James! Thank you for coming.’

He closed the door behind him, carefully. ‘Better settle for Hil, Squire, once and for all. That way, you’ll never drop into error.’

‘Everyone knows, James; everyone must recognise the colour of your Hilbourne hair; everyone knows our father’s conquests of the village girls.’ He mused: ‘He was unhappy. What Squire of Aberdar has ever been otherwise?’

‘No one blames him…’

‘No, no: my mother always ailing, a recluse. And God knows, he paid for his sins in the end. I, at any rate, am ever grateful to him for having given me a brother.’

Hil went to the small table set out with decanter and glasses. ‘Shall I pour out some wine to help us through the coming ordeal? For an ordeal, alas, most of our discussions nowadays must be.’

‘As usual, it’s about the fate of the children, James.’ The thin hand lifted the glass of wine almost as though the weight of it were too much. ‘We both face what’s to come. But the children—’

‘You know that I’ll never desert them. I love them as if they were my own.’

‘At my death, our cousins, Henry and John, would be jointly their guardians.’

‘John is childless. What if he were to wish to take them into his home? Is that what you fear?’

He almost cried out: ‘Never! It must never be! The children must never be taken from Aberdar. I had but to think of it—and you see what has been the result. The house will keep them here. There is some strange force…’

‘We’ve long recognised it, brother, you and I—who are of the Hilbourne blood.’ He suggested: ‘You had thought of building a house elsewhere on the estate—?’

‘I shall never now build a house anywhere; but it makes no difference—this has been a clear sign to me that literally the Manor has its power to keep its—victims—within its walls. The children must never try to leave it.’ He rested a moment as though exhausted; rallied his strength. ‘If your situation is made clear to my—our—cousins, surely that will be sufficient to influence them to leave the little girls here under your care, with Madame in overall charge—and she is to be trusted; and the governess—’

‘Who is not to be trusted,’ said Hil.

‘Not trusted? She’s a very pearl; what ever fault could you find in her?’

‘I spoke involuntarily and I wish I hadn’t. It’s only that—you know that I get odd fancies, believe that I see into the future…’ But he would not trouble a dying man with his fathomless fears. ‘I know of nothing against her: nothing. Nothing real.’ But he suddenly looked shrewdly into the pale, anxious face. ‘You have no idea—? No thought in your mind—?’

‘A thought in my mind is all it could ever be,’ said the Squire, wearily. ‘But it has been there. Unthinkable: my poor Anne not yet a year dead. And yet—to leave one here who would have a real, legal control over Lyneth and Christine. And what has she to lose?—a poor governess with no future—’

‘Madame hints,’ said Hil, suddenly inexplicably dry, ‘that she has at least a past.’

‘—poor foolish woman, she is frightened of finding Mees taking precedence over her here—’

‘—and with some justification, it begins to appear?’

The Squire seemed hardly to hear him, lifting the glass again to his lips, shakily setting it down gain. ‘I am a dying man. She would become mistress of wealth, of all this great manor, a ready-made family, two children whom already she truly loves…’

‘And a promising future,’ said Hil, grimly, ‘as a highly eligible widow.’

‘Well—I told you it was but a thought, passing through my ever searching mind…’

A scutter of hooves on the gravel outside and they went scampering by, gaily waving towards the window in hopes that Papa might be there and would glance out at them. Miss Tetterman followed them soberly in her own neat habit of the customary sepia brown, with a small hard hat. Their father looked out with love at the two happy faces with their shining, blue eyes and the soft, fair curls. ‘It is enough to kill a man with the pain of it,’ he said, ‘to have such terror for them.’