Dorothy Eden (14 page)

“Where are the Four Hills?” Hetty asked Julia.

“At the other side of the Loburn woods. They’re a succession of low hills. They make rather a long ride.”

“When can I do it?”

Julia gave her a dispassionate assessing look. “Oh, I’d say in a month or so. You need stamina.”

“I’ve got stamina.”

“Well—if you take a tumble, Hug isn’t going to thank me.”

“I want to, one day soon,” Hetty said stubbornly.

“When I decide you’re ready. Allow me my professional pride.” Julia seemed to be finding something hard to say. “Are you all right, Hetty?”

(Are you pregnant, Hetty?)

“Of course I’m all right.”

“Well, do say if you’re not. I don’t want the blame for any accident.”

Unexpectedly from then on, time began to pass pleasantly. It was because Hetty’s love for the old house and garden was growing absorbing enough to be a passion. Not the stables and the acres of woodland, and the sheepfolds and the Four Hills Hugo spoke of. She could regard those things dispassionately. But the shadowy house with its dim corners and sudden glimpses of colour and light, and the garden, even the dark yew walk and the sombre lake that looked like a mirror smoky with age no matter how bright the day, became infinitely precious to her.

By June the roses were beginning to bloom. Hetty decided the white rose garden, situated in a secluded part of the garden against an ancient brick wall smothered with pearly climbers, was her favourite spot of all. No one else seemed to come there although one day, as a gust of wind swayed the rich blossom, she thought she had seen a pale figure move and seem to dance across the grass. For one frozen moment she had had the fantastic notion that it had been Clemency. She had sprung up and swayed with dizziness and fright. Kitty, in leather apron and gardening gloves, ambling across the lawn, had seen her distress and come running.

“What’s the matter, Hetty? Seen a ghost?”

“No, no, of course not. But I did see something. It must have been one of the maids in her white apron. Going to get vegetables for lunch, I guess.”

“This isn’t the way to the kitchen garden. You
have
seen the ghost.”

“The
ghost? What do you mean?”

“An unhappy lady who is rumoured to haunt the rose garden. She was supposed to have drowned, I believe.”

“D-drowned!”

“Sorry, Hetty, I didn’t think … That’s an emotive word for you. But this was about two hundred years ago. We can’t still weep for her. Besides, even if she was unhappy, she has chosen the best part of the garden as her bit of paradise. Hetty, are you all right?”

“It must have been a trick of the light. I was half asleep.”

“At eleven o’clock in the morning? Then you’re not all right.” Kitty’s eyes were shrewd. “You’re going to have a baby, aren’t you?”

Hetty nodded. “Perhaps. I’m not sure. I think so.”

“Aren’t you going to see a doctor?”

“I was waiting. What can a doctor do? If the baby’s there it will grow.”

“True. Well, it’s your secret. I won’t give it away if you don’t want me to. Are you going to tell Hugo?”

“No,” Hetty said sharply. “Not until it’s absolutely certain. I’ve thought about it all, Kitty, over and over. I could just be out of sorts after all those emotional things that have happened. Women’s rhythms do get out of order.”

“In spite of putting that so politely, you do think it’s a baby, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do think so.”

“Well, jolly good luck,” said Kitty generously. “If it’s a boy it will put Freddie’s nose out of joint. Poor little frog. Not that he’ll care at this stage in his life, but one day he’ll loathe not getting Loburn. All the Hazzards are the same about that. Well, Hetty, if that’s the condition you’re in, don’t let me see you climbing ladders after Tom Grubb as I did yesterday.”

“No. That was foolish of me. I won’t do it again. I’m only so passionately interested in what’s going on. I do want the roof finished before Hugo comes home on leave. Tom says it will be by the end of the summer, provided he can get enough help. Before the winter rain, anyway. So all that damage will stop happening. And then I’m going to find the most beautiful chintzes and brocades in London, and oh, Kitty, I’m getting fascinated by needlework. I’m going to spend the next ten years covering the worst worn chairs, beginning with the music room—” (which will be mine, surely, by then, Lady Flora having given up the piano and other earthly pursuits). “I’m planning an azure blue background, with corals and creams and grass greens. Subtle colours, mellowed already.”

“Well,” said Kitty, “for a graft to a strange tree, you seem to have taken pretty well.”

“Did you think I would be a social climbing New Yorker?”

“Yes. We all did.”

“I’m not,” said Hetty. “And I won’t ever be an unhappy ghost, either.”

“That’s an odd thing to say. Are you tempting fate?”

“No, I’m challenging it. Hugo’s got to come back safely. So has Lionel. To justify—” But she stopped there. She was getting careless. She had been going to say, “To justify what I have done.”

All the same, one couldn’t be flippant about ghosts, or dismiss them lightly.

An eerie thing, that afterwards Hetty put down to the fancies of pregnancy, happened. She was in the picture gallery on the first floor of the house. She often walked there. It was quiet, and nobody interrupted her examination of the portraits and her meditations. One portrait in particular fascinated her, that of a young woman in a yellow dress. The colours were faded, the eyes dim, the face long and pointed and delicate. She had meekly clasped long-fingered hands and meekly closed lips. Yet the depredations of time had not quite taken away a wilful, even wanton look in eyes that must once have been very bright. The clothes suggested the late seventeenth century.

A fancy came over Hetty that this was the lady who haunted the garden.

“Who were you?” Hetty asked aloud, and a quick brittle voice answered, “Why do you care? You won’t be here long enough for it to matter.”

No one had spoken. The voice had not come from the long dead lady. Nor even, more chillingly, from Clemency. The silence had never been disturbed.

T
HE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN WAS
going badly, judging by the lengthening casualty lists. Lionel wrote that he had had what used to be called “putrid fever” and that that description was particularly apt. “It is pretty prevalent and I am lucky to have had only a mild dose. We consort with too many flies, that’s the trouble. They’re worse than the Turk himself. But I’m well again.”

“Thank goodness,” Kitty cried thankfully. “I don’t care what happens to that campaign, and I don’t care if you call me unpatriotic. So long as my husband comes home.”

Hugo wrote one of his increasingly formal letters, as if the very composition of the sentences were an effort, or as if his so new and only slightly-known wife was already half-forgotten.

“I hear you have begun on the repairs to the house. What a practical person you are, you surprise me all the time. And generous, too, since I believe the money is coming out of your own coffers. When I see all the empty and destroyed châteaux in this country, I selfishly like to think of my own home being preserved, and I am glad you appear to have the same feeling for it. At least a war like this has never been fought on English soil, which is about the only thing one can find in its favour. How is the riding going? Julia tells me the horses are in good shape. We will have a gallop when I am next home …”

We? Did he mean Julia or herself?

Hetty had at last gone to see Doctor Bailey in Cirencester, the Hazzard family doctor, not because she needed her pregnancy confirmed, but because those two strange ghostly experiences still haunted her.

“Would a woman in my condition have fancies, doctor?”

“Indeed, yes. Particularly about food.”

“No, I mean tricks of the imagination. I sometimes think I hear things that simply can’t be there.”

The doctor smiled indulgently.

“You mean ghostly voices?”

“Sort of.”

“Ah well, I’d put that down to your dreadful experience on the
Lusitania.
You’re suffering from delayed shock, I expect. How do you like Loburn, by the way? The house?”

“Oh, I simply adore it. I feel as if I utterly belong there. If that doesn’t sound presumptuous.”

“Well, there you are, my dear. You’re an American accustomed to much more modern houses, and you obviously have a keen imagination. You’ve responded too well and you think the old house has been talking to you. You’ll forget it all when your husband is home and your baby born. By the way, have you told Hugo about the baby?”

Hetty shook her head.

“Then do so, and cheer him up.”

But Hetty had made a decision not to tell Hugo her news. Wait, she kept saying to herself. She wanted to be cautious. It would be so dreadful to disappoint him if something went wrong. She said as much to his mother.

Lady Flora said in a gentler voice than usual, “Hetty, you do realise that Hugo could be killed? Wouldn’t you like him to have the pleasure of knowing about his child?”

“I just hoped to be able to tell him in person.”

“You can’t be too sentimental in wartime, my dear.”

Julia, who had listened to this conversation, said only, “Did you ask the doctor about riding?”

“He said a reasonable amount of exercise was fine. We didn’t specifically mention horses.”

Julia’s eyes were curiously still. If the coming baby aroused bitter jealousy in her, she was not going to show it.

“You must be careful,” said Lady Flora. “Personally, I think you should leave horses alone in the meantime.”

“We country women don’t take too much account of these things,” Julia said. “Didn’t you ride when you were expecting your children, Lady Flora?”

“I did. For one thing my husband expected it of me. But not after the fourth month. One doesn’t need to be foolhardy.”

“I would do the same,” said Julia. She spoke dreamily, as if she were visualising herself in such a condition. “However,” her voice became brisker and harder, “since I’m not, Hugo and I can go on having our early morning gallops. Until you’re available, Hetty, of course.”

Hetty was stung.

“I’m available now. I thought that was what we were agreeing on.”

“Then we really will have to work at your seat, won’t we?”

Lady Flora looked at the two girls questioningly.

“But you’re not expecting Hugo home, are you? Either of you?”

“No,” said Hetty. She gave Julia a steady look. “And I think I would be the one to know.”

Julia gave a small tight smile. “No one knows in wartime. Hugo’s a pretty good fixer. If he can wangle leave, he will. Just to see that filly I bought at Newmarket. If nothing else.”

Bitch, thought Hetty. Cool secretive bitch. Why couldn’t Lady Flora see the potential danger of a jealous woman and get her out of the house? Was there a chance, when the baby was born and she had totally to accept Hugo’s marriage, that she would be realistic and dispatch Miss Julia Pemberton for good? Perhaps Hetty would have to go to the lengths of showing her that letter,
“I will never give you up … Never, never, never.”

In the meantime Hetty was not only unable to master the situation, she was also stubbornly determined not to be thought a coward by these supremely confident English women. She would continue riding, but with care. She was so longing to be able to meet Hugo in the sparkling early morning and show him how well she looked in riding clothes. Horses were the strongest link between him and Julia. If that could be weakened she would have won her first victory.

Was she lonely? Kitty was friendly, but abstracted, always busy with her hospital work or her gardening. Lady Flora’s façade was impeccable, but beneath it, Hetty was sure, was a deep-seated antagonism and a resentment for the daughter-in-law whom she had had to accept because of a convenient bank balance. As for Julia, even without personal rivalry, she was not the kind of person whom Hetty would have wanted as a friend. They had nothing at all in common.

But this mattered little, for the good reason that she was not accustomed to having friends. She was getting on splendidly with the servants who, although at first surprised by her lack of formality, eventually decided that they liked it, especially the younger maids. Cook was still suspicious but beginning to unbend. Mrs Evans, the housekeeper, would never have unbent if she had been there to see how Hetty so capably took over her duties, going about the house and into the kitchen, the servants’ sacred domain, freely and without apology.

Even Lady Flora was forced to admit that the house was running smoothly. She said more than once that she would like to have met Hetty’s mother, who must have been a remarkable woman to have trained her daughter so well. Only practical, Hetty had answered. Most American women were.

But getting on with servants was a far cry from having personal friends of one’s own class. Lady Flora had murmured something about arranging a small “At Home”, adding that it was too bad that circumstances had denied Hetty any of the brilliant social life she had expected.

Hetty, however, was reluctant to entertain a lot of stuffy county folk without Hugo at her side. She would go to church on Sundays and sit in the Hazzard pew to be stared at, but couldn’t parties wait?

“Of course they can, my dear,” Lady Flora said with a graciousness that indicated her relief. “Now if the boys were home for Christmas that would be wonderful. But I expect it’s too much to hope for.” In spite of the circumstances, Hetty didn’t entirely lack companionship. The odd little boy Freddie, as solitary as she was, had taken to following her about. He wanted to talk about Achilles and Apollo and Hector, he said. The people Daddy kept writing about. Were they soldiers? Wouldn’t Hetty tell him about them?

So she searched in the library for a copy of the
Iliad.
She had never read it herself, and doubted if even the well-stocked library in New York had had a copy of this book. But after Lionel’s reference to the shining eyes of Zeus in his letter to her she had become as curious as Freddie.