The River Within

by Karen Powell

  ‘Thank you, Mary,’ said Miss Price. ‘Lennie? Do you have something for us?

  Danny swivelled in his chair and stared around the classroom, daring anyone to say a word. There was no sniggering as Lennie walked to the front, though. Lennie was calm and pale and not the sort a lad could tease even if they wanted to. She was too queenly for that. Either she wouldn’t notice you doing it, or it would not matter to her.

  ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ she said, when she reached the front of the classroom.

  Miss Price nodded her approval, explaining to the rest of the class: ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson,’ as if that meant anything.

  Lennie set down a book on the desk in front of her. Danny could see, from its shiny plastic cover and the label on its spine, that it was from the school library, which consisted of a bookcase with five shelves in the entrance to the school building. Lennie folded her hands together, long and white like a saint’s, and began:

  ‘On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye,

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

  And thro’ the field the road runs by

  To many-tower’d Camelot’;

  Her voice was low and clear, and there was no other sound in the schoolroom.

  ‘Willows whiten, aspens shiver.

  The sunbeam showers break and quiver

  In the stream that runneth ever

  By the island in the river

  Flowing down to Camelot.

  Four gray walls, and four gray towers

  Overlook a space of flowers,

  And the silent isle imbowers

  The Lady of Shalott.’

  Danny felt his chest swelling with something like pride, though that made no sense. For one awful moment he thought he might cry.

  Beneath the moon, the reaper weary

  Listening whispers, ‘ ’Tis the fairy,

  Lady of Shalott.’

  He would have placed bets on someone laughing at the word ‘fairy’ when it was bad enough having to listen to poetry in the first place, but the room remained still.

  No time hath she to sport and play:

  A charmed web she weaves alway.

  A curse is on her, if she stay

  Her weaving, either night or day,

  To look down to Camelot.

  She knows not what the curse may be;

  Therefore she weaveth steadily,

  Therefore no other care hath she,

  The Lady of Shalott.

  Her gaze was fixed over his head as she told the tale of an imprisonment, of an empty life and it seemed to Danny’s youthful soul that she must be telling the story of her own future.

  I’m half sick of shadows!

  Lennie pronounced these words with a sudden vehemence that made Danny jump, and in that moment he knew that he must find a way to rescue Lennie Fairweather from the life which others had mapped out for her.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lennie, August 1955

  The door unlocked with a singular jiggle and a grate of metal. No workaday clothes here. Had her father got rid of them or put them away in some corner of the attic? Here were fabrics that shone and slipped over your fingers; a fox stole curled in upon its hanger as if asleep; a little lace jacket, pale green and delicate as a web. She had come here often as a young girl, not in search of the shape of a mother she could not remember, but in play, the wardrobe as dressing-up box.

  The last time she had taken that particular dress from its place in the wardrobe—it must have been at least a year ago—it had been wide of her frame by several inches and the precise cut of its lines had hung off her body in an unstructured mess. How young she’d looked. It had made her cross with herself: a silly, Russian doll version of a woman. The other dresses were pretty but made of flimsy, flyaway fabrics that clung to her skin. The silver gown was different. As she stepped into it, feeling the cool material against her bare skin, Lennie wondered again how her mother could have afforded such a dress, a long, heavy, sweeping skirt and a halter neck. Desperately old-fashioned, she feared. Today everyone was wearing short dresses with starched petticoats beneath the skirts, and tight bodices. This dress must have been bought or made well before the war, in imitation of some Hollywood movie star’s perhaps.

  It was beautiful. She knew that much even before she checked her reflection. She had grown and the dress now fitted her perfectly, dipping between her small breasts and clinging to her torso and hipbones, before it fell in fluted lines to the floor. Like a column from a temple, she thought, lifting her hair from her shoulders and standing on tiptoe to look at herself in the octagonal mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. A strange new self—poised, defiant—stared right back.

  The sky was clear and high, exposing her. The satin dress slid on her skin in an unfamiliar way. Gravel shifted beneath her heels as she made her way onto the driveway leading up to the Hall. Small, sharp stones kept slipping inside the open toes of her sandals, as if punishment for her temerity. A car hurtled up the driveway towards her, and she stumbled, turning her ankle as she drew herself into the shadow of the trees. Safety beneath that dark canopy. She should have worn ordinary shoes and carried the sandals with her. Above her, the stars signalled a message Lennie could not understand. The moon pressed down upon the branches of the sycamores that lined the driveway. Almost certainly her father would hear about this: there were servants at the house who had earned their positions by reporting everything they knew to Peter Fairweather. Thomas had warned her not to make a fool of herself, and yet here she was in their mother’s dress on her way to the party. Even if Thomas had left for Jamie Markham’s poker night, he would find out what she had done and be furious. She should go back to the cottage right now, before it was too late.

  Her father liked to begin with these sycamores, on the odd occasion when a tourist party from York ran out of rainy-day distractions and happened upon the Hall. How they had been planted out before the Hall itself was complete, over two hundred years since. See how they form a green tunnel over the driveway, and would the ladies and gentlemen care to view the plans drawn up all those years ago? Lennie did not care about landscapes and dead people’s drawings, but she felt at home here, beneath a sycamore that had planted itself firmly in the ground, like the leg of some ancient giant, swollen and knotted. Trees were something true. She pressed her cheek against the rough mosaic of bark and, breathing its breath, sharp and woody, quietened.

  The lights of the car had died, its occupants swallowed up by the Hall. She must find Alexander before the Faversham girl who had her eye on him could seek him out; before Alexander could disappear to another country, or within himself. You couldn’t get past the surface of him when he did that, a kind of the flatness entered his voice. She couldn’t remember losing him in that way when they were small and just playmates. This was something new.

  The Hall loomed larger as she approached, sounds of laughter and music on the air. She could not go to the main entrance in her slipshod sandals and a dead woman’s dress, just announce her own arrival. Why was nothing as simple as it needed to be? The lamps on either side of the portal glared out of the dark like lighthouses. It was no good. She was not a hard, polished girl in a car full of laughter. She did not know anything.

  Lennie glanced over her shoulder. She could not see the river from here, only the break in the woods above it, but she could still feel it and hear the call of it, cold and black and alive, forever altering. An odd sensation rose up in her, like something tearing free of its moorings. She pushed it down, made her way towards a small wooden door in the garden wing that would, she knew, allow her quickest access to the back of the house. It was unlocked.

  She saw him from the pathway: an outline against the hot, glassy light of the salon. She could smell the foreign cigarettes, knew him by the angles of his body. She would need to h
urry, before anyone could draw him back in and put him beyond her. She could not run in sandals, nor must she ruin them, these shoes with the imprint of her mother’s feet on them. She bent down and with hurried fingers unbuckled the thin, worn straps. Her feet free, she stepped off the gravel path. The ground sprung softly beneath her weight, her feet, long and pale and alien in the dark grass, beating down the distance between him and her.

  Annie Faversham pranced into view behind the glass like a glossy show pony, red mouth opening and closing on emptiness, she and Alexander standing side by side. Lennie approached more slowly now, eyes fixed on those confident teeth that gleamed squarely, as if they might take a bite right out of Alexander. She had heard that Annie was striking, and it was the right word; not pretty, but handsome in a vulgar, vital way, all movement and feigned impatience, tossing her head, and turning here and there, so that everyone could admire her small, muscular figure. Out in the darkness, Lennie was transparent, insubstantial, a moth beating at the glass with silent wings.

  ‘Helena?’ Alexander’s voice.

  Had he seen her or sensed her?

  Lennie turned from the opening door and stood very still. She saw herself as she hoped he might, back, bare and white in the moonlight, the curve of her breasts.

  ‘You must have hurt yourself,’ Alexander said. His hand went to his pocket, reaching for his cigarettes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hands,’ he said.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ she said; her voice rang out as if it belonged to someone powerful. She had summoned him and he had come.

  Alexander was moving towards her, his expression changing from puzzlement to something else as his vision adjusted to the darkness beyond the salon. A breeze carried the scent of damask roses across the Lawn. Lennie had painted her lips crimson. Would he suppose her a mermaid in the silver dress, or perhaps some strange perfumed goddess?

  ‘Why are you dressed like a whore?’

  CHAPTER 14

  Venetia, 1932

  Angus came to collect her in a shiny green Sunbeam sports car, which brought her younger brothers tearing out to the yard to admire it. There was a lengthy drive ahead and so she had worn her long coat and a headscarf. Her mother insisted on extra blankets to warm her knees, though Angus promised her they would stop off along the way. They drove down the Northumbrian coast, all empty beaches and castles rising out of the sea mist. Venetia thought that if one were a romantic type—she’d decided some time ago that she was not—one might almost expect King Arthur and his knights to come galloping across the sands.

  Angus drove fast but Venetia was pleased to see that he slowed down almost to a crawl when they passed two riders on a narrow country lane. When they stopped to buy petrol from a small garage, he let the owner’s young son clamber all over the car, lifting the bonnet so that the boy could look at the Sunbeam’s 3-litre engine. They discussed something called dry-sump lubrication in earnest, man-to-man fashion.

  Later, they stopped for lunch at The Welcome Inn, a deserted roadside pub so inhospitable it made them slightly hysterical. Angus began to tell her about his family. ‘You mustn’t mind them,’ he said. ‘Father lives like a bachelor really.’ He pushed his chair back and leaned in towards the fireplace, holding his hands over the miserly molehill of coal the landlady had reluctantly lit on their arrival. He didn’t look unduly worried at the prospect of the meeting. ‘Mother died years ago, you see, when she was having James.’

  ‘Who else is there? Apart from James, I mean?’ Venetia gave up on the gristle pie they’d been served and helped herself to one of Angus’s cigarettes instead.

  ‘Just my grandmother, Thomasina. Now she really is bats. She’s about a hundred and eighty and mostly keeps to her rooms, but don’t be too alarmed if you happen to see some spectral creature wandering about. Her husband Teddy died years ago, just at the end of the war, and she likes to go to the chapel sometimes to pray for him.’ He sat back while the landlady’s daughter removed their barely-touched plates with a sniff.

  ‘You have your own chapel?’

  ‘Just a small one. It was built by the Knights Templar, so it’s the most ancient bit of the house. Dates back to 1200 and something. The Hall’s on the site of the old preceptory, though there’s nothing else left of that now. The chapel’s rather sweet but it only gets used properly a few times a year, when the Reverend turns up for Evensong.’

  It was evening by the time she saw it for herself. They drove through a gateway, with a small cottage to one side, and onto the tree-lined driveway. Richmond Hall came into view, the little chapel looking as though it had been tacked onto one end as an afterthought.

  ‘It’s been perfect weather for riding,’ said James, jogging down the steps to take Venetia’s bags from the car as they pulled up. ‘You’ll be exhausted now, of course, but maybe tomorrow . . . .’

  ‘Venetia’s tougher than you imagine,’ said Angus, clapping his younger brother on the back. ‘You should see what she ate for lunch.’

  Richmond Hall’s grandeur was all in its breadth. The interior of the house mirrored this first impression, its tiled entrance hallway leading through to a long, widthways corridor with curving staircases at either end. Lying directly behind the corridor, and running parallel to it, were the main rooms, linked to one another like a paperchain, so that the footprint of the house was a long, narrow rectangle, with a garden wing at one end of it—a later addition, Angus told her, in the style of Palladio—and the chapel at the other. From the driveway the house had looked splendid but as the Sunbeam drew closer, Venetia saw that parts of the building were in poor repair. Inside, the house was an odd combination of luxury and dereliction, the bedrooms icily cold with windows that rattled in the wind while the public rooms were gracious, with sumptuous, jewel-coloured hangings and oil paintings of vast battlefields or hunting scenes, yet furnished with an odd jumble of utilitarian bits and pieces, lamps that didn’t match, ornaments that looked as if they’d been swept up from various places and hurriedly bundled together, and the odd piece of once-exquisite furniture, now with a leg missing, or a cover faded or ripped at the seams. The salon, which lay at the central point of the house, was magnificent when you first entered it, with its view out over a great expanse of lawn, the glowing wood of the grand piano, elaborate cornicing and its painted ceiling, but the plasterwork was rotting and the carpet so badly frayed you had to be careful not to trip. At least it was warm in there—Sir Laurie, the boys’ father, insisted the two vast fireplaces at either end of the room were lit at this time of year, masking the damp in the air.

  She was relieved to be introduced to Thomasina instead of chancing upon her by accident in the draughty corridors of the Hall. Angus and James took her up to their grandmother’s rooms on the first floor—‘She’s fairly sane today,’ Angus assured her—where she was dozing beside the fireplace in a small sitting room, surrounded by miniature figurines of her beloved Beatrix Potter characters. The room was cluttered with family photographs. Thomasina pointed out those of her two grandsons, as well as one of Sir Laurie as a young man, beside a small girl with serious eyes and a direct gaze.

  ‘That’s my younger child, Violet,’ said Thomasina, picking up the photograph with trembling hands. ‘She went off to be a suffragette. Ridiculous.’

  ‘Did she come back?’ Venetia asked.

  ‘No no. Silly creature wore herself out with all that protesting. People should stay where they belong.’ Thomasina herself was so small and dried up that Venetia feared she might rattle like a seed pod and blow away if the wind were ever to catch her. ‘Grinling Gibbons!’ Venetia jumped as Thomasina banged her stick on the floor. ‘The fireplace. I saw you notice it.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She had no idea who or what Grinling Gibbons might be but in a room that was plain and small in proportions, she had not been able to miss the huge wood carving over the fireplace: a twisting garland of nut-brown
leaves, seed pods and flora that looked as though they had been swept up from a forest floor. This wooden garland framed a panel above the mantelpiece, with a swag at its centre point, from which hung a tangle of carved birds—pheasants from a shoot, she thought—their feathers, beaks and claws intertwined and all fashioned in intricate detail.

  ‘And whose friend are you?’ said Thomasina, her small blue eyes suddenly sharp. She looked at Venetia and then at each of her grandsons. Her bones sat close beneath her skin and, just for a moment, Venetia could see how striking she must once have been.

  ‘We met at a ball recently, Grandmother,’ said James. ‘We know Venetia’s brother too.’

  Thomasina had already lost interest, addressing Angus now. ‘Have you spoken to your father about Dido and Aeneas, my boy?’

  ‘I shall remind him,’ said Angus. ‘Would you like some tea brought up for you, grandmother?’

  ‘No, you can all go now.’ Thomasina sat back in her chair and pushed her twiggy legs towards the fire. ‘Visitors are dreadfully hard work.’

  ‘Are Dido and Aeneas the dogs?’ Venetia asked as they went downstairs. Two Labradors—‘Proper dogs’ Angus said—had been bouncing up and down the steps when they arrived.

  ‘No.’ said Angus. ‘It’s one of the bloody paintings in the salon. Grandmother is obsessed about getting the lot cleaned up. The ceiling too, but especially the paintings because it was her grandfather who had them done. He had some fellow from Rome brought over especially.’

  ‘Does your father dislike them?’

  ‘I’ve never asked him. It’s just that it will cost an arm and leg getting electricity in everywhere and there’s always something or other that needs doing first.’