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Authors: Mary Stewart

The Ivy Tree

BOOK: The Ivy Tree
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The Ivy Tree
Mary Stewart
2011

A classic tale of deception and suspense. An English June in the Roman Wall country: the ruin of a beautiful old house standing cheek-by-jowl with the solid, sunlit prosperity of the manor farm - a lovely place and a rich inheritance for one of the two remaining Winslow heirs. There had been a third, but Annabel Winslow had died four years ago . . . Then a young woman calling herself Annabel Winslow comes ‘home’ to Whitescar, a spark into the powder-keg of ambition and frustration and long-dead love.

THE IVY TREE
Mary Stewart
First published in Great Britain in 1961 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
This edition 2011
Copyright © Mary Stewart 1961
The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN: 9781444720471
Book ISBN: 9781444720464
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Fredith and Thomas Kemp
CONTENTS
A north country maid up to London had stray'd,
Although with her nature it did not agree;
She wept, and she sighed, and she bitterly cried:
‘I wish once again in the north I could be!
Oh! the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in the North Country.
‘No doubt, did I please, I could marry with ease;
Where maidens are fair many lovers will come:
But he who I wed must be North Country bred,
And carry me back to my North Country home.
Oh! the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in my own country.'
Seventeenth Century Traditional
1
Come you not from Newcastle?
Come you not there away?
Oh, met you not my true love?
Traditional
.
I might have been alone in a painted landscape. The sky was still and blue, and the high cauliflower clouds over towards the south seemed to hang without movement. Against their curded bases the fells curved and folded, blue foothills of the Pennines giving way to the misty green of pasture, where, small in the distance as hedge-parsley, trees showed in the folded valleys, symbols, perhaps, of houses and farms. But in all that windless, wide landscape, I could see no sign of man's hand, except the lines – as old as the ridge-and-furrow of the pasture below me – of the dry stone walls, and the arrogant stride of the great Wall which Hadrian had driven across Northumberland, nearly two thousand years ago.
The blocks of the Roman-cut stone were warm against my back. Where I sat, the Wall ran high along a ridge. To the right, the cliff fell sheer away to water, the long reach of Crag Lough, now quiet as glass in the sun. To the left, the sweeping, magnificent view to the Pennines. Ahead of me, ridge after ridge, running west, with the Wall cresting each curve like a stallion's mane.
There was a sycamore in the gully just below me. Some stray current of air rustled its leaves, momentarily, with a sound like rain. Two lambs, their mother astray somewhere not far away, were sleeping, closely cuddled together, in the warm May sunshine. They had watched me for a time, but I sat there without moving, except for the hand that lifted the cigarette to my mouth, and after a while the two heads went down again to the warm grass, and they slept.
I sat in the sun, and thought. Nothing definite, but if I had been asked to define my thoughts they would all have come to one word. England. This turf, this sky, the heartsease in the grass; the old lines of ridge-and-furrow, and the still older ghosts of Roman road and Wall; the ordered, spare beauty of the northern fells; this, at my feet now, was England.
This little world. This other Eden, demi-paradise . . 
.
It was lonely enough, certainly. We had it to ourselves, I and the lambs, and the curlew away up above, and the fritillaries that flickered like amber sparks over the spring grasses. I might have been the first and only woman in it; Eve, sitting there in the sunlight and dreaming of Adam . . .
‘Annabel!'
He spoke from behind me. I hadn't heard him approach. He must have come quietly along the turf to the south of the Wall, with his dog trotting gently at heel. He was less than four yards from me when I whirled round, my cigarette flying from startled fingers down among the wild thyme and yellow cinquefoil that furred the lower courses of the Roman stones.
Dimly I was aware that the lambs had bolted, crying.
The man who had shattered the dream had stopped two yards from me. Not Adam; just a young man in shabby, serviceable country tweeds. He was tall, and slenderly built, with that whippy look to him that told you he would be an ugly customer in a fight – and with something else about him that made it sufficiently obvious that he would not need much excuse to join any fight that was going. Possibly it is a look that is inbred with the Irish, for there could be no doubt about this young man's ancestry. He had the almost excessive good looks of a certain type of Irishman, black hair, eyes of startling blue, and charm in the long, mobile mouth. His skin was fair, but had acquired that hard tan which is the result of weathering rather than of sunburn, and which would, in another twenty years, carve his face into a handsome mask of oak. He had a stick in one hand, and a collie hung watchfully at his heels, a beautiful creature with the same kind of springy, rapier grace as the master, and the same air of self-confident good breeding.
Not Adam, no, this intruder into my demi-Eden. But quite possibly the serpent. He was looking just about as friendly and as safe as a black mamba.
He took in his breath in a long sound that might even have been described as a hiss.
‘So it is you! I thought I couldn't be mistaken!
It is you
 . . . The old man always insisted you couldn't be dead, and that you'd come back one day . . . and by God, who'd have thought he was right?'
He was speaking quite softly, but just what was underlying that very pleasant voice I can't quite describe. The dog heard it, too. It would be too much to say that its hackles lifted, but I saw its ears flatten momentarily, as it rolled him an upward, white-eyed look, and the thick collie-ruff stirred on its neck.
I hadn't moved. I must have sat there, dumb and stiff as the stones themselves, gaping up at the man. I did open my mouth to say something, but the quiet, angry voice swept on, edged now with what sounded (fantastic though it should have seemed on that lovely afternoon) like danger.
‘And what have you come back for? Tell me that! Just what do you propose to do? Walk straight home and hang up your hat? Because if that's the idea, my girl, you can think again, and fast! It's not your grandfather you'll be dealing with now, you know, it's me . . . I'm in charge, sweetheart, and I'm staying that way. So be warned.'
I did manage to speak then. In face of whatever strong emotion was burning the air between us, anything that I could think of to say could hardly fail to sound absurd. What I achieved at last, in a feeble sort of croak that sounded half paralysed with fright was merely: ‘I – I beg your pardon?'
‘I saw you get off the bus at Chollerford.' He was breathing hard, and the fine nostrils were white and pinched looking. ‘I don't know where you'd been – I suppose you'd been down at Whitescar, blast you. You got on the Housesteads bus, and I followed you. I didn't want you to recognise me coming up the field, so I waited to let you get right up here, because I wanted to talk to you. Alone.'
At the final word, with its deliberately lingering emphasis, something must have shown in my face. I saw a flash of satisfaction pass over his. I was scared, and the fact pleased him.
Something, some prick of humiliation perhaps, passing for courage, helped me to pull myself together.
I said, abruptly, and a good deal too loudly: ‘Look, you're making a mistake! I don't—'
‘
Mistake
? Don't try and give me that!' He made a slight movement that managed to convey – his body was as eloquent as his face – a menace as genuine and as startling as his next words. ‘You've got a nerve, you bitch, haven't you? After all these years . . . walking back as calm as you please, and in broad daylight! Well, here am I, too . . .' His teeth showed. ‘It doesn't necessarily have to be midnight, does it, when you and I go walking at the edge of a cliff with water at the bottom? Remember? You'd never have come mooning up here alone, would you, darling, if you'd known I was coming too?'
This brought me to my feet, really frightened now. It was no longer imagination to think that he looked thoroughly dangerous. His astounding good looks, oddly enough, helped the impression. They gave him a touch of the theatrical which made violence and even tragedy part of the acceptable pattern of action.
I remember how steep, suddenly, the cliff looked, dropping sharply away within feet of me. At its foot Crag Lough stirred and gleamed under some stray breeze, like a sheet of blown nylon. It looked a long way down.
He took a step towards me. I saw his knuckles whiten round the heavy stick. For a mad moment I thought I would turn and run; but there was the steep broken slope behind me, and the Wall at my right, and, on the left, the sheer cliff to the water. And there was the dog.
He was saying sharply, and I knew the question mattered: ‘Had you been down to the farm already? To Whitescar?
Had
you?'
This was absurd. It had to be stopped. Somehow I managed to grab at the fraying edges of panic. I found my senses, and my voice. I said flatly, and much too loudly: ‘I don't know what you're talking about!
I don't know you!
I told you you'd made a mistake, and as far as I'm concerned you're also behaving like a dangerous lunatic! I've no idea who you think you're talking to, but I never saw you before in my life!'
He hadn't been moving, but the effect was as if I'd stopped him with a charge of shot. Where I had been sitting I had been half turned away from him. As I rose I had turned to face him, and was standing now only two paces from him. I saw his eyes widen in startled disbelief, then, at the sound of my voice, a sort of flicker of uncertainty went across his face, taking the anger out of it, and with the anger, the menace.
BOOK: The Ivy Tree
7.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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