Witch from the Sea

by Philippa Carr

  “You are referring to …” I began hesitantly.

  “The first marriage. So tragic. But it has all turned out for the best, hasn’t it?”

  I felt a shiver down my spine. His first marriage! He had not mentioned a marriage to me. What had happened? Where was his wife? She must be dead. Otherwise how could I be his wife? And why was it so tragic?

  It seemed as though a chill had crept into the hall. I could see Lady Alice watching me intently. There was a glint of amusement in her eyes. She would realize of course that Colum had told me nothing of his previous marriage.

  It was in the early hours of the morning before we retired. Together we looked into the nursery next to our own bedchamber, to assure ourselves that Connell was safe.

  When we were in bed and the curtains drawn I said to Colum: “I learned tonight that you had been married before.”

  “Did you not know it?”

  “Why should I? You didn’t tell me.”

  “Did you think a man would get to my age and not take a wife ere that?”

  “It seemed strange that it was never mentioned.”

  “The point never arose.”

  “That seems strange to me.”

  He drew me towards him. “Enough of others.”

  But I could not rest. I said: “Colum, I felt so foolish. That woman mentioning it and I not to know.”

  “Alice is a sly creature. She was jealous of you.”

  “Why? She has a husband. Has she no children?”

  He laughed loudly. “A husband. That poor stick! Much good he is to her. He is incapable of begetting children.”

  “I’m sorry then.”

  “Don’t waste pity on Alice. She is not at heart displeased. She has free range to select her bedfellows and he is complacent enough. As for children, I doubt she wants them. She would find them a nuisance and they might spoil her figure.”

  “You know her … well?”

  “Oh, very well.”

  “You mean of course …”

  “Exactly.”

  There was a change in his manner. No tenderness now but a certain brusque impatience—the first since the last weeks before Connell’s birth. I sensed that he was irritated by my reference to his previous marriage.

  “So she and you …”

  “Oh come, wife. What is wrong with you? I’ve known many women. Did you think Castle Paling was some sort of monastery and I a monk?”

  “I certainly did not think that … but our guests …”

  “You must grow up. You must not be a silly little Linnet twittering in her cage and thinking that comprises the world. Some of us are made in a certain way and so must it be. I never fancied going lonely to bed.”

  “So it was jealousy that made her …”

  “I don’t know. She will doubtless have another lover now. What matters it? I grow tired of this.”

  “I want to know about your wife, Colum.”

  “Not now,” he said firmly.

  But later I returned to the subject. The christening guests were gone and we were together in the nursery. We had dismissed the nurse so that we were alone with the child who lay in his cradle while Colum rocked it. The child watched his father all the time. It was an affecting scene to see this big man gently rocking the cradle and I was overcome with a deep emotion. I should have been completely happy, but for one thing. I knew he had had mistresses. That was to be expected, but I could not forget his first wife. I wanted to know something of that marriage, whether he had cared for her, how desolate had he been when she died. Why was he so reluctant to talk of her, or was he? Did he just feel an impatience to go back over something that was over.

  “Colum,” I said, “I think I ought to know something about your previous marriage.”

  He stopped rocking the cradle to stare at me, and I went on quickly: “It is disconcerting when people speak of it and I know nothing, and I suppose now we shall be entertaining more. To make a mystery of it …”

  “It is no mystery,” he said. “I married, she died and that was the end of it. There was no mystery.”

  “How … long were you married.”

  “It must have been some three years.”

  “That is not very long.”

  He made an impatient movement with his shoulders but the hand on the cradle remained gentle.

  “What of it?” he said.

  “And then she died. How did she die, Colum?”

  “In childbed.”

  “I see, and the child with her?”

  He nodded.

  I felt sorry for him then. I thought of all the anguish he would have suffered. He had so wanted a boy and she had died and the child with her.

  I was silent and he said: “Well, is the interrogation over?”

  “I’m sorry, Colum, but I felt I should know. It seemed so strange to hear of such a thing about one’s husband through others.”

  “It is over and done. There is no need to think of it.”

  “Can something like that … a part of one’s life … be dismissed like that?”

  His brows shot up and he looked angry. “It’s over, I tell you. That’s an end to it.”

  I should have stopped but I couldn’t. I had to know.

  “You must think of her, Colum, sometimes.”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “But it was such a part of your life.”

  He released his hold on the cradle and stood up. He came towards me. I thought he was going to strike me. Instead he took me by the shoulders and shook me, but not harshly.

  “I am content with what I have now,” he said. “I have a wife who pleases me, who can give and take pleasure. It was not so before. Moreover she has given me this boy. I could regret nothing that has brought me to this. Listen, wife, I am content, and if I were not I would tell you so. I would have nothing … nothing otherwise. Let it be.”

  I lay against him and felt the tears in my eyes. I knew he would hate to see them, so I broke away and went to the cradle and knelt down looking at my son.

  Colum came and stood on the other side of the cradle looking at us both. There was exultation in my heart then. What did it matter that he had married before, that he had been Lady Alice’s lover? He was not a man to suppress his desire and it would always be fierce. Again I thought of my father. These were the two men in my life whom I truly loved. Odd, that they should have been two of a kind. But they suited women like myself and my mother. We needed such men—and it was comforting to realize that they needed women like us.

  I knew instinctively that his first wife had been too meek, that he had never cared for her as he had for me. He had told me that and I could not help feeling gratified.

  But there was more to come.

  It came from Jennet. She was the sort of woman who could be taken from one place and planted with the greatest ease in another, like some plant that yearns so much to grow that it will flourish in any soil. In the short time she had been at Castle Paling she had not only acquired a lover but had struck up friendships with other servants and behaved as though she had lived at the castle all her life.

  She was warm-hearted, generous in all things, not only her favours, and there was something endearing about her in spite of a certain incompetence. My mother was often impatient with her. I think in her heart she never forgave her for betraying her with my father. After all, it must have been a strain to have one’s husband’s bastard in the house and his mother too. It was the same with Romilly. My mother was an extraordinary woman. I wondered what I would feel like if Colum brought his mistresses into the house with their offspring. However to get back to Jennet, she it was who brought this shattering knowledge into my life.

  She was now Connell’s nurse. After all, I trusted her more than I did anyone else; I knew too of her love for children. She was inclined to spoil the boy of course but I suppose we all were.

  There she was clucking over him one day and chattering away to him and she said: “I reckon your father th
inks the world of you, my little man. Oh, he does and all. And that’s clear to see. And you know it. Yes, you do.”

  I smiled at them and I thought of her as a young woman when Jacko had been born and how she must have loved him.

  Then she said: “Boys! They always want boys. The Captain was the same. Show him a boy and he was that pleased. Nothing too good for his boys. It’s the same with this master. It must have been a terrible disappointment to him …”

  “What, Jennet?”

  “Well, when he couldn’t get one with that first wife of his. Well, ’twasn’t for want of trying. Time after time he were disappointed.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about the master’s affairs,” I said.

  “’Tis common talk in the kitchens, Mistress.”

  “What do they say down there, Jennet?”

  “Oh, that she was a poor sick creature and the master wasn’t with her as he is with you.”

  “They’re impertinent,” I said, but I couldn’t quite suppress the glow of triumph.

  Jennet did not notice the reproof and I was glad. I thought: I may find out through Jennet and the servants more than I can from Colum. It was only natural that I should feel a great curiosity about my predecessor and I could see no harm in doing a little innocent ferreting.

  Seeing my interest Jennet warmed to her subject. There was little she liked so much as gossip.

  “Oh yes,” said Jennet, “a poor timid thing, she were. Frightened of her own shadow. The master, they say, do want someone as can stand up to him as you do, Mistress. They say you be just the one for him and he knows it. This poor lady, frightened she were, frightened of the castle and ghosts and things and most of all of him.”

  “Poor child,” I said.

  “Oh yes, Mistress, and the master he did want a son and it seemed she could not give him one. There was lots of tries, as you might say. She’d be so and then she’d lose it, and then so again. Only once did she stay her full time … and that was the last. Once she went seven months though. The others … they were all quick, as you might say.”

  “She must have had a very uncomfortable time.”

  “She did. And the master he were mad, like. Shouted he did … called her a useless stock. That’s what he called her. They’d hear him shouting and his rage was terrible. Woe betide any who went near him when he was in these rages. They used to be frightened that he’d do away with her. And she was afraid too. She told her maid … Mary Anne, it were. She’s with one of the Seaward men now and works over there. She told Mary Anne that sometimes she feared he’d do away with her.”

  I felt I had had enough and wanted to hear no more. Of course I liked to have confirmation that he was content with our marriage and that he found his second wife more attractive than his first, but I could not bear this talk about his cruelty to her.

  “All right, Jennet,” I said. “That’s enough. Servants exaggerate.”

  “Not this time, Mistress, for Mary Anne did say she was real terrified. And when she was so again she was so frantic she did not know what to do. You see she believed she’d never have the child and she was so sick and ill every time. She thought she would die, and she told Mary Anne that she ought never to try for children. The doctor was against it. She ought never to have married because she knew it would kill her sooner or later. She said she had pleaded with him and he had said that if she could not give him children what good was she to him …”

  “I don’t want to hear any more servant’s gossip, Jennet,” I said.

  “No, Mistress, no more you do. But they did wonder why she didn’t run away and go home to her family. ’Twas not all that far.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I could scarce believe it when I heard,” said Jennet, “seeing that we’d been there, like, and was on terms with the family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Mistress, the master’s first wife was the sister of the young gentleman we all thought you’d take. Her name before her marriage was Melanie Landor.”

  I felt dizzy suddenly. In my mind I was transported back to Trystan Priory. I was in a small room looking at a picture of a fair young girl.

  I could hear a voice saying: She was murdered.

  That girl had been Colum’s first wife.

  YSELLA’S TOWER

  IT HAUNTED ME. I could not get her out of my mind. I could imagine her so clearly in this place, having seen her picture. It was strange how that had impressed itself on my mind. I could not forget the anguish in her mother’s eyes; I could hear the underlying hatred in the voice as she had said: “She was murdered.”

  And Jennet: “Sometimes she feared he’d do away with her.”

  Why had he married her in the first place? Had he been in love with her? A fair innocent young girl. He liked innocence. He had liked it in me. He took some savage delight in destroying that innocence as he had on that first night I had spent in Castle Paling.

  I was thinking about him, this man who was the father of my child. What if I had failed as Melanie Landor had? I had delighted him only because I had given him what he wanted.

  I could not get her out of my mind. I looked for signs of her about the place. When I walked the ramparts and looked out at the sea I thought of her standing there and the fear that would have hung over her. It was as though she walked beside me, appearing at odd moments, a shadowy presence to haunt me, to cast a shadow over my happiness. Poor frail Melanie who had failed to please him and who had died because of it!

  No, not because of it. She had died in childbed. Many women did. A husband could not be blamed for that.

  I kept hearing her mother’s fierce murmur: She was murdered. I must make allowances for a mother’s grief. And how strange that she should have been Fennimore’s sister. But was it? They were not distant neighbours. Marriages were arranged between people of their position.

  What were the Landors thinking now? They would know that I, whom they had chosen to be Fennimore’s wife, was now married to the man who had been their daughter’s husband.

  What had they thought? How strange that my mother who had seen them since my marriage had not mentioned this fact to me. It would have been so natural for her to do so.

  I was betraying too much interest in my husband’s first wife. Jennet, quick to realize this, garnered knowledge for me.

  “It were in the Red Room she died, Mistress,” she told me. And I must go to the Red Room.

  How dark it was. How full of shadows, and there was the big four-poster bed. I went to the window and looked out to the stark drop to the sea. I could almost feel her then. It was as though a voice whispered: Yes, I thought often of throwing myself down. It would have been quick … anything better than my life with him.

  Fancy, sheer fancy! What was the matter with me? It was the room with the dark red bed curtains—heavy, embroidered in red silk of a darker shade than the background. I pictured her shut in behind those curtains, waiting for him to come to her.

  “Her room were the Red Room,” Jennet told me. “He would go to her there. She didn’t share a room with him, like. They did say he were with her only to get a son.”

  I was ashamed of allowing Jennet to tell me so much; but I had to know; it was a burning curiosity and more. It was not so much that I wished to discover the truth about Colum’s relationship with his first wife as to learn more of him.

  I pictured his hatred of her. He despised weakness. He liked me best when I fought against him. She was too gentle, too meek, and she was terrified. His only interest in her would be that of procreation. Because of her position she was his wife and on the material side it would have been a suitable marriage; it was only those two who were unsuitable.

  He would have his mistresses there in the room which I shared with him now doubtless, and in the dark Red Room she would be visited now and then.

  There was terror in this room. It lingered. I could imagine her so well. When she was pregnant she would be afraid of death and w
hen she was not she would be afraid of him.

  And how was she equipped to fight against her fate? Poor child, brought up in the gentle Landor home where life went on smoothly and people were kind and polite to each other. I had seen something of life. I knew and had grown to love my father who was such another as Colum. I was prepared. I was the fortunate one, the loved wife who had not failed him and in less than a year had given him the son on whom he doted.

  I wished that I could get her out of my mind. I could not. I could never go near the Red Room without looking in.

  “Poor Melanie,” I would murmur. “I hope you are at peace now.”

  Edwina who was descended from a witch on her mother’s side had certain powers. Once when Carlos was at sea and involved in a fight with a Spanish galleon she had had a vision of it and known that he was in danger; sometimes she foresaw events. It was a strange uncanny gift. I remember Edwina’s telling me once that if people experienced violent emotions in a certain spot they left behind them some disturbance which was apparent to those with special insight.

  I now wondered whether Melanie had left something of this behind. I lacked those special powers but perhaps because I was in her place, I could sense something here.

  I half hoped and half feared that she would return in some form. Perhaps that was why I went to the Red Room so often.

  I liked to go there at dusk, at that time of day when the daylight is fast fading and it is not quite time to light the candles. Then the room was at its most ghostly.

  It was November, the anniversary of that day when Colum had brought me here. He remembered it and had said: “You and I will sup alone together as we did on that day. It is a day I regard as one of the luckiest in my life.”

  I had dressed myself in a russet velvet gown, and wore my hair loose about my shoulders—quite unfashionable but the style most becoming to me; and on that very day I could not resist going along to the Red Room at dusk.

  I stood there. There were dark shadows in the room. Soon the light would be gone altogether.

  “Melanie,” I whispered, “are you there?”

  And as I stood there, I felt the hair rise from my scalp for the door was slowly opening.