Death Devil's Bridge (2 page)

Others might have thought it a dream, but not Bess. She had never forgotten the sight of her grandmother silhouetted against the bright, full moon, but she was not exactly clear about the details—just how Gammer and her friends managed to get off the ground, that is. The task seemed easy enough, however, and Bess was a brave, strong girl. So she tried it herself, taking a running leap off Black Rock with Gammer's ash broomstick under her. But all she gained from the experiment was a torn skirt and two badly scratched knees. Questioned at home, she confessed to her effort to get off the ground and begged Gammer to tell her how flying was done.

But Gammer, alarmed, sternly bade her hold her tongue. “Such un-Christian foolishness!” she cried. “Put it out o' yer mind this instant, Bessie. Flyin'! Why, I niver heard sich nonsense in all me life!” The two cronies vanished from the cottage fireside, Bess never again saw Gammer soar over the bramble hedge, and not one more word was spoken on the subject. When the old woman died at last, in Bess's thirtieth year, the secret of flight died with her.

During the next dozen years, Bess—who remained unmarried—was so busy with the work of supporting herself that she had little energy to spare for fanciful dreams of flying. Gammer had left her a dairy cow and some hens, and Bess made a small living from the milk, cream, butter, and eggs she sold in the village. She supplemented this income by peddling the asparagus, broccoli, and cauliflower from her garden and by harvesting the willows that grew plentifully along the River Stour, weaving the wands into baskets. She also raised bees, in neatly thatched wooden hives ranged on the sunny side of the wattle fence across the back garden.

Indeed, so bustling and busy and pleasantly earthbound was Bess's life that her childhood ambition lay like a forgotten memory in the bottom of her heart—until, that is, the day she noticed a loose slate in the hearth and raised it to discover a cavity beneath. From this hiding place she lifted a curious leatherbound book, printed in black letter and unquestionably ancient, its brown pages annotated with spidery handwritten notes.

Reading was reserved for the candlelit hour before bedtime, which Bess always spent with the newspaper supplied by her friend Sarah Pratt, cook at Bishop's Keep, several miles down the lane. Now, having discovered the book, Bess was so curious that she could scarcely wait until evening to read it. Unfortunately, however, the black-letter text and spidery annotations could not be deciphered by the light of her candle. So on the following day, Bess purchased a paraffin lamp, an acquisition she had deliberately postponed. She had an inborn distrust of modern inventions, such as the post-office telegraph which clattered so loudly that one could scarce make oneself heard, or Lord Marsden's new horseless carriage, which he drove with such reckless abandon. But the lamp proved quite useful, and Bess sat down in its circle of light to decipher the ancient text.

To her disappointment, though, the mysterious book turned out to be nothing more than a collection of ancient recipes. She was about to cast it aside, when she turned a page and found “A Receipt for Flying Ointment.” Her eyes widened and, tilting the book to the light, she read the recipe with a swelling excitement. Some of the ingredients—honey, goose grease, thyme, basil, chicory—were familiar staples of her larder and garden. Soot (whatever could be the purpose of that ingredient?) could be had from her chimney, while plovers' eggs, pig's blood, and some of the less familiar plants (water hemlock, for instance) would have to be specially procured.

Breathlessly, Bess put down the book and considered. The ointment sounded perfectly odious, to be sure, but what did that matter if it got her over the bramble hedge and into the air, like Gammer Gurton? The biggest problem, of course, was gathering the more unusual ingredients without arousing anyone's suspicion. And it was not just the fear of ridicule that caused Bess to proceed with caution. The last witch burned to death in England had been set afire near this very village, scarcely ten years before Queen Victoria took the throne. Bess had no intention of giving her neighbors the slightest excuse for honing their tongues on her doings. Whatever she did, she would do in secret.

So it was that Bess was out and about with her basket on this late-summer night, just as the full moon began to rise over Dedham Vale. Following the recipe's instructions, she had scraped from her chimney the pinch of soot, gathered the required number of plovers' eggs, plucked the requisite wild herbs, and was at this moment on her way to Bishop's Keep to obtain the pint of fresh pig's blood Sarah Pratt had promised to save for her. The footpath was now almost completely dark, and she picked her way with caution, half-wishing she had not embarked upon this phase of her mission so late in the evening. But as the recipe specified that the monkshood should be gathered at moonrise and the spot where it grew was more than halfway to Sarah's kitchen, the journey was necessary.

The path dipped steeply through a narrow opening in the dense hedge. Clutching her basket in one hand, Bess half slid down the embankment and into the lane. Bishop's Keep was less than a mile away and Sarah would have a cup of hot tea and her pint of pig's blood ready and waiting, no questions asked, no answers required. She shook herself, squared her shoulders, and began to march briskly up the road.

She heard it before she actually saw it. The sound—a loud metallic clatter and clank-reminded her of the noisy threshing machines that had replaced the hand-harvesting of the fall corn. But because the lane was so deep and the tall hedges grew nearly together over her head, the horrible sound seemed to reverberate all around, and she could not tell from which direction it was coming, or which way she should run.

Her breath coming short and fast, Bess pressed her hands against her ears, standing paralyzed with fear in the middle of the lane. It was only when she saw the bright white lights bearing down upon her that she realized that she was about to be run down by that most dangerous of modern inventions, a horseless carriage. She flung herself off the road, landing with a mighty splash in the water-filled ditch. Drenched, mouth and eyes filled with mud, she sat up, hurling curses after the motorcar—Lord Marsden's motorcar—which had disappeared with a great clatter around the turn.

It took several moments for Bess to drag herself out of the ditch and scramble to her feet in the lane. She found her basket, retrieved what she could of its contents, and started off toward Sarah's kitchen, muttering. A half-mile farther on, as the moon was casting a pale light over the way, she stumbled onto Old Jessup's body, lying in the grassy ditch, at the gate to Bishop's Keep.

The hour before dinner, while we wait for late-arriving guests and for the announcement that the table is ready at last, gives us time to tell our friends grand tales about our lives.

—JENNIFER LASHNER
Our Victorian Grandmothers

 

 

 

“L
ord Marsden, the Honorable Mr. Charles Rolls, and the Honorable Miss Patsy Marsden,” Mudd announced from the drawing room door.

Lady Kathryn Ardleigh Sheridan stood and took her husband's arm as they went out onto the terrace steps to greet their guests. The open windows had admitted the clackety-clank of Bradford Marsden's Daimler pulling up the gravel lane and his sister's fresh laughter as the trio alighted, and Mudd's announcement was entirely superfluous. But announcing guests was Mudd's job, and Kate did not interfere. When she had inherited Bishop's Keep from her aunt Sabrina Ardleigh several years before, she had determined that she would change only what was unjust or just plain unacceptable to her American sensibility, and would accommodate herself to the rest.

But when she and Charles Sheridan were married three months ago in a private ceremony in the village church, Kate discovered that she had much more to accommodate than she had reckoned with—a disconcerting discovery, to be sure, for Kate loved her new husband deeply. She must love him, she reasoned to herself, to be willing to give up her freedom, her hard-won independence, and become the wife of a man who (upon his brother's shortly expected death) would inherit his father's peerage, his family's estates at Somersworth, and the dependency of his mother and his brother's wife.

At the thought of her mother-in-law, Kate flinched. She had wanted Charles's family to attend their wedding, but he had dissuaded her. Kate was anxious to meet her new family, so a few days later, they traveled to Somersworth. But when the dowager baroness learned that her son had not only married without her knowledge but had chosen a wife who was both American and Irish, she became hysterical. Dinner that evening was an agony, and Charles and Kate had left the next morning.

“I'm sorry,” Charles had said miserably, as they drove away in the carriage. “I thought she would take it with a better grace. I hoped—” He took her hand. “But she'll come round. She will come to love you, as I do.”

Kate hardly shared his confidence, but she managed a smile. “Until she does, we have our home at Bishop's Keep.”

“Then you don't mind staying there, my dear, until all this is sorted out?”

Kate thought of the moldy old pile that was Somersworth Castle and the angry old woman who ruled there, and nodded vigorously. “As far as I am concerned, we can live at Bishop's Keep forever. It suits me perfectly.”

Bishop's Keep seemed to suit Charles, too. He had spent most of his time in the last few months modernizing the old Georgian house, installing water pipes and plumbing and gas lighting and an electric dynamo which (he claimed) would eventually power all manner of mechanical appliances. There was even talk of adding a telephone as soon as the Exchange came to Dedham.

Charles's innovations did not always work the way he anticipated, however. The pipes clanged as if a dozen smiths were pounding on them. And Mrs. Pratt was so afraid of the new gas cooker that she refused to touch it until Charles himself demonstrated its safety features. But Charles was so proud of these improvements that Kate scarcely had the heart to criticize, or even to remark that she herself was rather fond of paraffin lamps, however old-fashioned they might be.

Kate pushed aside these ungrateful thoughts and welcomed their guests, who were still goggled, capped, and coated. “Please,” she said to Patsy, “let me help you with your things,” and stepped forward to unwind her pretty young friend, the daughter of Lord Christopher and Lady Henrietta Marsden, from the heavy veil that covered her elaborate ash-blond coiffure. When the layers of motoring apparel had been removed, Bradford Marsden, Patsy's elder brother and a close friend of the Sheridans, introduced Charlie Rolls.

Unencumbered of cap and goggles, Rolls was revealed to be a darkly handsome young man of nineteen or so—just Patsy's age—with deep-set eyes, dark brows, and a rakishly devil-take-it air that owed something to the alertness of his look and the willful, almost arrogant lift of his firm chin. Kate had understood from Patsy that he had just completed his first year at Cambridge.

“He's the third son of the first baronet of something-or-other,” Patsy had confided, revealing in those words his lowly social status. “But Charlie's position scarcely matters. I don't intend to marry him, or even to fall in love with him—just to enjoy his company. Whatever Mama says,” she had added defensively.

Kate did not reply, although inwardly she applauded Patsy's independence. Several years before, Lady Henrietta had arranged the marriage of her eldest daughter, Eleanor, to a wealthy candy manufacturer—a marriage that had proved disastrously unhappy. Kate knew that Lady Henrietta intended her youngest daughter to wed Squire Roger Thornton of Thornton Grange, the stern, dry offshoot of an old county family whose extensive lands adjoined Marsden Manor. She would be aghast at Patsy's friendship with the brash young man from Cambridge, whose father, Lord Llangattock, had only recently been admitted to the peerage. Charlie Rolls might be handsome as a lord, but his lack of title and fortune made him practically unmarriageable.

However, Lord Christopher and Lady Henrietta had taken themselves (and Eleanor and her infant son) to the south of France on extended holiday, leaving their younger daughter under the watchful eye of Patsy's spinster great-aunt, Miss Penelope Marsden. Great-aunt Marsden was not the vigilant chaperon that Lady Henrietta imagined her to be, however, for she retired at an early hour with her lapdog and a box of sweetmeats, leaving her niece to her own entertainments.

Currently, Patsy was entertaining herself with the Honorable Charlie Rolls, who was the houseguest of her brother Bradford. She was also spending a great deal of time at Bishop's Keep, where Sir Charles was teaching her the craft of photography. He had instructed her in the fine points of darkroom practice and had ordered two cameras for her from the London Stereoscopic Company, in Regent Street: a lightweight, pocket-size Vesta folding camera and a Frena Number One, which took lantern-size plates. Patsy seemed talented, and Kate hoped the girl would pursue photography half as enthusiastically as she was pursuing the young Mr. Rolls.

The last guest arrived a moment later. He was Barfield Talbot, the vicar of St. Mary's the Virgin, a stooped, elderly man with pale blue eyes deeply set in an aquiline face, beneath a mane of white hair. The good vicar was dressed carelessly, his cravat askew, coat missing a button, and hair as wild as if he had just that moment dismounted from the safety bicycle that he rode on his parish rounds. He hadn't, of course; he had been fetched by Pocket in the pony cart.

“Ah, Kate, my dear,” he said, with special affection, and bent low over her hand in an old-fashioned, gentlemanly way. “It is good to see you looking so well. Marriage clearly agrees with you.”