The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (35 page)

Her glance met Mr Turnbull's and he noticed, at Richard Shelmadine had done, the lack of the expected expression. The glance did not say, 'Poor old thing!' or 'I manage her well, don't I?' Nothing. Yet the glance itself started a train of thought in the lawyer's mind. Of course Miss Parsons wished to leave the girl a legacy, and that was reasonable enough. She deserved something. And even if, by the strictest legal standards, Miss Parsons was not in her right mind, she was, on the other hand, certainly not a lunatic and there was nothing in the least out of the way in her wishing to reward the devoted attention of one who had come into her life since the other will was made.

'I wish to make my will,' Miss Parsons said. 'There is no need to make a new will, you know...' And, dear me, he thought, it would be easier if the young woman were not present.

'Everything to Damask,' said Miss Parsons. 'This is Damask. Damask Greenway, my only friend.'

The girl set down her glass and said, 'Dear, I told you not to bother. Please don't bother.' To the lawyer she said, 'This is all very embarrassing for me. You talk to her.' She walked away through the open french window into the garden.

Mr Turnbull breathed more freely and began to make legal phrases in his mind.'...if still in my employ.' That was it. How much? Well, feeble-minded people often lived to a great old age and became very cantankerous. The girl might have an ordeal ahead of her...say five hundred pounds.

'I wish to make my will. Everything to Damask. To Damask Greenway, everything.'

'Yes, yes, I heard you. I think that would be hasty and unwise. After all, she might leave you, get married or...or leave for some other reason----'

'She would not. She promised. She promised and I promised...' She jumped to her feet, spilling the beads, which fell in a little tinkling shower. 'Plenty of lawyers," she cried in a rising voice--'about, I mean; plenty of lawyers about. My money, all my money and my will. I wish to make my will. Everything to Damask, Damask Greenway...'

'Now please, please, my dear madam, don't upset yourself...I am not trying to cross you. I only say that such a matter...you see, in your case everything is a considerable bequest, very considerable. I think it should be discussed calmly.'

'Calmly. Calmly." Miss Parsons Repeated the word as though she had never heard it before. Then her face took on an expression of immense cunning. 'She didn't say that. I only say what she says. That is the safest way. You see, I'm very forgetful; very forgetful indeed.' She looked about vaguely and presently saw all the tiny beads, pink and blue and green and silver, scattered on the floor. 'Now you've made me drop my beads,' she said, her face crumpling like a child's. 'Oh dear, oh dear.' She began to cry, loudly and complainingly, like a child.

'Now please, please,' said Mr Turnbull. 'Look, I'll collect...' He dropped, with a cracking sound as though twigs were breaking, to his knees and began to gather up the little beads with fingers which were suddenly ten times their usual size. Miss Parsons, crying more and more loudly, stood stock still so that he was grovelling almost under her skirts and he had a sudden memory of the first time he had ever been in this house...fifty years or so ago, with his father, just after the Captain's death and she'd been...and he'd been...Dear, dear, the damage the years did...'

He was conscious of nothing but relief when the girl came hurrying through the french window again.

She took the old lady by the arm and said, 'I told you not to upset yourself. Just over some spilled beads. Please, Mr Turnbull...I can pick them all up in a moment. There now. Everything is all right. There, there.'

She had Miss Parsons in her chair again. Mr Turnbull got stiffly to his feet. Their eyes met.

'I wish to make my will,' Miss Parsons said with all the vigour and freshness of someone making a statement for the first time.

Mr Turnbull remembered that the one thing he dreaded was an apoplectic fit, and never, so far, had he been so dangerously near it.

'Darling, you don't need to make a will,' the girl said. 'You have one nice will already.'

Mr Turnbull made his escape with those ridiculous words ringing in his ears. Nothing, no protests, no attestations on oath, could have so firmly established in his mind the conviction of the young woman's complete integrity. 'You have one nice will already!' And she'd been there when he mentioned that that will was five years old...She was no fool, she must know what that meant. And her one thought had been to comfort the poor demented old woman. It seemed unbelievable, but there it was; he had seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears. Completely disinterested. And why, in the name of God, should the Guildhall Feoffees, who had never done anything for, never even heard of Miss Parsons, benefit from her estate instead of that truly remarkable, selfless creature Damask Greenway? And after all, with every bit of mind and will left to her, his client had expressed her feelings. Should they not be respected?

Before he retired on that lovely June evening Mr Turn-bull mad a short simple draft of the new will by which Amelia Caroline Parsons bequeathed her whole estate to Damask Greenway.

He then went to bed and slept well and waked to the burst of song with which the birds were greeting the dawn. He felt restored and refreshed by the sound sleep he had enjoyed, and remembered, with amusement, his feeling of threatening stroke on the previous afternoon. Absolute nonsense; it just showed what tricks one's mind could play one. And then, suddenly, quite irrelevantly, when he was thinking so rationally about Miss Parsons and her will, he remembered a performing dog which he had seen at Baildon Fair, long ago when he was young enough to take interest in that event. The sore point of the performance was that the dog did exactly the Opposite of what its master commanded. Extremely easy to train a dog that way, dogs not being aware of the difference between 'stand' and 'sit', 'come' and 'go'; but it would surely not be easy, would in fact be impossible, fantastically impossible, to train an old lady, however feeble of mind, to the point where when you said 'Don't bother' she began to bother madly, and when you said 'You are making it pretty' she took that as a cue to say, 'I wish to make my will.' Really, thought Mr Turnbull, that I should dream of that comparison shows that my mind is not what it was...or that I am still half asleep. He plumped up his pillow, and then, the birds having exhausted their first exuberance, went back to sleep again. But in the morning he handed the rough draft of the new will to his clerk, who would make a fair copy. 

The harvest ripened and was gathered. For all with corn to reap that was a fortunate year. Labour was very cheap. Out from the Waste Cottages, now besieged between the new fences and the sterile highroad, came every being who could totter on its young legs or stagger on its old ones; so the price of labour went down and down. But the price of the garnered corn stayed, on account of the war, at its peak.

That year even Captain Rout, that inefficient farmer, had his rent money ready for Michaelmas, and was also able to increase his order for smuggled brandy brought in by the gang who operated from Bywater. He was, moreover, able to buy his wife a fine new dress, the first she had had for years. That meant that when, just before All-Hallows' E'en, Mrs Fred Clopton of Flocky Hall invited them both to a party--as she had done in previous years --Mrs Rout was able to accept. Similar invitations she had refused, scornfully, concealing her true reason, which was that it was unbecoming for the wife of a gentleman who had, when all was said and done, borne the king's commission to appear at any gathering where she could not outshine a farmer's wife, however up and coming that farmer might be. Mrs Clopton had attributed the refusals to sheer snobbishness, for which she had at once admired and hated Mrs Rout, and had persisted with her invitations. When the final acceptance arrived she said to Fred, 'Ah. I knew the time would come when she was sick of her own company! And I'm glad it's this year, when Mrs Thurlow Lamb is coming with her airs and graces. It'll show her.' An obscure statement, but perfectly lucid to Fred, who understood his wife's social aspirations and indeed shared them so far as his daughters were concerned. He agreed that there was no point in sending the girls to the Female Academy at Baildon and having them taught French and the pianoforte, and drilled on the backboard, if they were then to come home and revert to mere farmers' daughters, as their mother assured him they would unless some exertion were made. Money, which he was making 'hand over fist', wasn't enough; social advancement was needed as well.

The Harvest Horkey that year was a particularly lavish affair, as well it might be, the Squire having done so well out of the enclosure. Going home, replete and exhausted, the villagers remarked less upon what there was to eat and drink, and upon the wonderful fiddling of the little hunchback who had come to supplement Jim Lantern's playing, than upon the peculiar game which the Squire's friend, Mr Mundford, had played with some of the girls. There was no point in it, no prize, no result. He just went round offering one girl after another a bit of pale pinkish stone like a pebble. 'Will you be good enough to hold this in your hand while I count ten? Thank you, that will do.' Daft like, wasn't it?

Even Richard, when they were drinking together late in the library, mustered curiosity enough to ask, 'What were you up to all evening, Alec?'

'Reconnoitring,' said Mr Mundford simply. 'You may be grieved, if not surprised, to learn that of your village girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty not one is a virgin.' He took the stone from his pocket and fingered it.

That tallies with the rector's theory that no man will ask for the banns to be put up until he's well and truly caught,' Richard said. Then he added curiously, 'But how can you tell...there wasn't time...'

'I passed this about. It's a very special piece of stone. I bought it from a slaver in Zanzibar--you will appreciate its value to him when I tell you that in the hand of a virgin it changes colour and turns blue. Which is also interesting; you can trace there the derivative trend of Christianity. Mary's colour is blue, is it not? I gave two hundred guineas for this, and it is worth every penny. Tonight, for example...it turned colour once--a little creature with flaxen hair and a pink dress. Before I could reach you and ask you her name she'd vanished, and presently she slipped back into the dance looking rather sheepish. I invited her to hold it again...and alas ...' He ended with a laugh. Then, abruptly serious, he said, 'After all, it is a thing we must face. We need one by the end of October and some preparation will be necessary. They're so damned coy. I know: I've been through this before. It is very difficult to make them believe that it's a purely passive part. To have one handy, one capable of being worked upon, would be very convenient. The best subject I ever found was at Medmenham--quite simple-minded, with a passion for port wine. Believe it or not, it had no effect upon her, she drank it as a kitten drinks milk, liking the taste and wanting more and more. I only wish I had her now,' said Mr Mundford wistfully. 'She was just right; but then Medmenham, as I've told you before, was wrong. I said so at the time. If you credit one side with power, then you must credit the other; and that was an abbey, consecrated soil, and there was the stumbling-block. Dashwood didn't really believe either way...what I attained I attained despite him and the other fools." As always on the rare occasions when he spoke frankly of his intentions and aims, a startling change came over him; into his suety face and tallowy fingers the blood seemed to flow, carrying warmth and colour and vitality; his ordinarily cold eyes grew luminous. When he spoke of the Power he sought it seemed to be already his; when he spoke of the Power he worshipped it seemed to be there, in the room, oppressively overwhelming, even to Richard Shelmadine. He could make the incredible seem credible, the fantastic merely a matter of common sense.

Damask first learned of the Fullers' return from exile when she met Danny face to face along the drive just before dusk on a Saturday evening late in September-- the evening of the Harvest Horkey. She usually chose Saturday evenings for her visits to her mother, since Amos was almost certain to be out of the house then, either working on his new chapel or attending a week-night meeting in one already established. She had, with some reluctance, abandoned the attempt to give Julie bacon and cheese and butter and plum cake and other solid comestibles which seemed of such small value in the Dower House and of such enormous worth on the Waste. Julie dared only accept a little tea and sugar and, at intervals, fresh bottles of the medicines, and these she hid away, furtively.

That Amos had sold him the land, and once or twice the mention of the facts had been 'on the tip of her tongue', as she put it to herself; but she shrank from saying anything which might cast the slightest gloom over these brief visits. Damask had survived--had enjoyed, indeed, a stroke of wonderful good fortune; still, you never knew how deep a wound might have gone or how it might ache, all hidden away. Once, during the summer, Julie herself had suffered a pang when she saw Sally Ashpole-- Mrs Danny Fuller--visiting her mother and carrying a really bonny bouncing baby in her arms. Nice dresses and pretty ornaments and what Julie called 'plenty to do with' were all very well, but did they entirely make up? Her grandmotherly instincts called out that they did not. On that day she had felt with renewed force that Amos in selling Danny the land had been disloyal to his daughter. Damask closed the door of the Dower House behind her that Saturday evening, settled the basket with the tea and sugar and medicines more comfortably on her arm and began to trip along the drive. It curved slightly around a clump of laurels, now neatly clipped back, and as she rounded the curve there was Danny. They came face to face and it was a perceptible while before he recognised her. Matt Ashpole had said in his gossipy way that she was at the Dower House and the old lady thought the world of her, but that had not prepared him for this elegant vision; he had indeed been wondering whether she would answer the door to him, and what their attitude towards each other would be. Now, recognising her, he gave a sheepish grin, 'Why, hullo, Damask.'