Bride of Pendorric
Page 33
What damage she would have done to Hyson if I had not come to Pendorric when I did; the child was neurotic, her head full of strange notions. She was already beginning to believe that she stood in the same relationship to Lowella as Deborah had to Barbarina. Barbarina had won her devotion by preferring her to her gayer sister; and that was when the damage began to be done.
But there again events worked against her. Hyson had endured the terrifying experience of being locked in the vault with me. She had known, because of the hints Barbarina loved to give the child, that something was going to happen that day. She believed that the figure she saw in the graveyard, when she had hidden herself there, was the ghost of Barbarina. Barbarina had been unwise to involve the child, but, because she was already identifying Hyson with Deborah, could not stop doing so. And when Barbarina opened the door of the vault and sang the song which was to lure me inside, Hyson slipped in. Thus we were locked in together and from that moment Hyson began to understand the horror of death, that it did not come lightly, that there must be suffering before oblivion was reached.
Then she saw her mother in the hospital and she must have known that Morwenna was lying where I was intended to be.
Death was hateful; it was frightening; and it touched those she loved. Her own mother. And even for me she had some affection.
She was frightened; and when she saw me going off with Barbarina in the car, guessing for what purpose, she broke into hysteria, which so alarmed her father that he sent for Dr. Clement, but it was some time before they could understand the meaning of her incoherent words. Dr. Clement’s first action was to telephone Roc; and Roc immediately drove to the Manor.
Yet although I lived so dangerously up to that night when Roc came to me in Devon, it was during the following months that I learned so much more of life than I ever had before; the months of safety and serenity.
For one thing, I learned the story of the boy who lived in Louisa Sellick’s house on the moor. Morwenna must have grown up, too, because she confessed to Charles that he was hers. She had been afraid to do so before because the boy was the result of a brief passionate love affair which had occurred when she was seventeen.
Rachel Bective, who as a child had so longed to be asked to Pendorric that she had locked Morwenna in the vault in order to blackmail her into giving her an invitation, had proved a good friend. She had looked after Morwenna during her trouble and of course Roc had been at hand. It had been his idea to ask Louisa’s help, and he and Rachel took the child to her; Louisa had been only too glad to do what she could for Petroc’s children.
As Roc said to me: “I couldn’t tell you the truth when I’d sworn to keep Morwenna’s secret. But I did intend to persuade her that you should be brought in. The trouble was she was so afraid of Charles’s knowing.”
There had been fear and drama in Pendorric before I arrived.
During the last year we have gone a long way towards turning Polhorgan into a home for orphans. I am going to be very busy keeping an eye on this particular project as I shall be starting my own family. Rachel Bective is going to be a nursery governess to the orphans, and Dr. Clement will be at hand to advise when we need him. The Dawsons will stay on and although there may be a little friction now and then between them and Rachel, that is inevitable, I suppose. I don’t like Rachel—I doubt whether I ever shall—but I have wronged her in my thoughts so much that I try very hard to change my opinion. She was merely enamored of a way of life which was not hers. The romantic big house must have been very appealing to an orphan, brought up by an aunt who had children of her own and didn’t really want her. She saw her main opportunity in life when she was sent to a good school paid for with the money her parents had left with instructions that all of it be spent on their daughter’s education. She had attached herself to Morwenna and clung; but she had been a good friend in Morwenna’s trouble and often visited Bedivere House—as Roc did—to bring Morwenna news of a son she dared not see until she had confessed to Charles.
The twins have now gone to school—separate schools. Hyson had a holiday, a holiday at Bournemouth alone with her mother after Morwenna’s recovery. They both needed to recuperate; and we feel that in time Hyson will grow away from that sinister influence which Barbarina cast about her. We shall have to be very careful in our treatment of Hyson.
This then, has been an illuminating year.
We all seem to have grown up, become wise; but then I suppose it is experiences such as these which make us learn our lessons quickly.
Morwenna has cast off the burden which, like Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, she has carried for fourteen years, and Charles, she discovered, was less self-righteous than she had believed him to be. Indeed he was a little sad and reproachful that she had not trusted him all those years.
As a result Ennis and Louisa are often at Pendorric. Morwenna would not take the boy from Louisa, but she does want to share him, and I have an idea that in time he will be to Charles the son he did not have.
It may well be that one day we shall have to give up Pendorric as we know it. We shall probably have to throw it open to the public and have strangers walking through our rooms. We shall have our own apartments of course, but it will not be the same.
Roc is reconciled. “You can’t fight the times,” he says; “it would be like trying to fight the sea.”
All the money I have will be used on Polhorgan and that is how Roc wishes it to be.
He often teases me, reminding me that I once thought he schemed to marry an heiress and then planned to murder her.
“And yet,” he said, “you loved me … after your fashion.”
He is right. During those months of danger I was deep in physical love with Roc; I knew only what I saw, what I heard, what I sensed.
But there are many facets of love and of these I am learning more every day; and so is he. And that is why when we walk down the cliff gardens to Pendorric Cove and look towards Polhorgan, high on the cliff, or to Cormorant Cottage, where Althea Grey once lived, we remember those doubts which, while they did not diminish our passion, yet were a sign that we had just begun that voyage of discovery which our life together will be.
Also by Victoria Holt
The Mask of the Enchantress
The Spring of the Tiger
My Enemy the Queen
The Devil on Horseback
The Pride of the Peacock
Lord of the Far Island
The House of a Thousand Lanterns
The Curse of the Kings
On the Night of the Seventh Moon
The Shadow of the Lynx
The Secret Woman
The Shivering Sands
The Queen’s Confession
The King of the Castle
Menfreya in the Morning
The Legend of the Seventh Virgin
Kirkland Revels
Mistress of Mellyn
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BRIDE OF PENDORRIC. Copyright © 1963, by Victoria Holt renewed 1987. Reprinted with the permission of Patricia Hamilton. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
First published by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
eISBN 9781429994170
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holt, Victoria, 1906–1993.
Bride of Pendorric / Victoria Holt.—1st St. Martin’s Griffin ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-38416-6
ISBN-10: 0-312-38416-5
I. Title.
PR6015.I3B7 2009
823’.914—dc22
2009007149
First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: June 2009
ria Holt, Bride of Pendorric