by Rumer Godden
In the valley Borowis has his cache for catching otters – he never sees an otter; he has a raft and a harbour built of stones and mud in long hours of toiling in the river – mostly by Ripsie and John Henry – and an armoury stocked with food in a hollow tree, though the air gun must not be left there at night; Ripsie carries the air gun. He keeps his egg collection there too; he is an enthusiastic egg collector.
‘I put you in charge,’ he says to Ripsie when these enchanted years are ended by his and John Henry’s being sent away to school. ‘Instead of having lessons with Snoddy,’ says Borowis contemptuously. Mr Snodgrass is the last of a line of resented tutors. ‘Tutors! They treat us like children!’ says Borowis.
He should have gone to school long ago, for he is quite out of hand. It begins in small ways when he is not more than nine and breaks into the larder and steals the fruit out of the cherry pie, putting the crust back so that it is innocently carried in to Jared in the dining room. Jared’s temper, with the servants, is short these days, and the whole house is upset. This is the first of many stealings and when Jared at last comes upstairs after dinner to beat them, he beats John Henry, but Borowis has wound himself in all the sheets so that by the time Jared has unwound him, they are helpless with laughing and even Jared cannot whip. Borowis and John Henry have perpetual battles with the village boys in which both sides get hurt; they poach with the boy poacher, Jim Neot, trespass and play truant, and the tutors leave almost as soon as they have come.
‘You will have to make up your mind to let the boys go to school,’ Jared tells Lady Patrick.
‘And stay here alone with you?’ But Jared, humbly, has his way, for it is obvious there is nothing else to be done, and Borowis goes to Rugby, John Henry to a preparatory school for a year before joining him. Borowis is heartlessly pleased, but to shy John Henry, it is agony. On the last night they have dinner downstairs and there is roast duck, Borowis’s choice. Ripsie, of course, knows all about it and rejoices, though she will have no chance of eating the duck. John Henry does not eat it either; he chokes on the first mouthful and, slowly, his head sinks down and down until it is on the tablecloth. Jared and Lady Patrick take no notice; she goes on talking – in front of the boys she keeps up appearances – while Borowis kicks John Henry under the table. ‘Jod, don’t be an ass,’ but for once John Henry does not respond.
‘I put you in charge,’ Borowis tells Ripsie. ‘Take great care of the egg collection and don’t let anyone touch the heron eggs. They are probably worth ten shillings each!’ Ripsie lifts and dusts them as if they were worth ten pounds.
‘It will be the most valuable collection in England, when I get a chough’s egg,’ boasts Borowis.
‘I shall get one for you.’ Ripsie says that quickly before John Henry can. ‘I shall get you a chough’s egg.’
‘Don’t be silly. You are a girl,’ says Borowis. ‘It’s terribly dangerous. They nest high on the cliffs and you have to hunt because you hardly ever find one. I knew a chap who broke his neck, didn’t I, Jod?’
‘Yes,’ says John Henry faintly.
‘Both you and John Henry are forbidden near the cliffs,’ orders Borowis. ‘I shall get one for myself in the hols,’ but Ripsie sets her lips.
John Henry often tells the story, known throughout the village, of how Ripsie got the chough’s egg. ‘Jim Neot told it to me. He said he wouldn’t have believed it of such a little tacker.’ Mrs Quin never mentions it.
‘First she had to get to the seaside, miles,’ John Henry tells, ‘and remember this was before there were motor cars. She knew where the choughs were supposed to nest, at Pentyre Head, and she got up at four in the morning and walked, and begged a lift in a carrier’s cart. All the breakfast she had was some slices of bread; Pentyre Head is almost sheer up from the beach and at high tide the sea comes boiling in; the noise is enough to frighten anyone, let alone the dizziness – and choughs are quite big birds, you know, bigger than crows and she was a bit of a thing …’
‘I was twelve,’ says Mrs Quin coldly, for this is not until the next summer when the boys have been at school a year.
‘You were still tiny,’ says John Henry, and goes on. ‘When Jerry Paul, the coast-guard, spotted her, there she was up on the ledge.’
‘Well, I couldn’t get down,’ says Mrs Quin.
‘Jim Neot says you might have starved there, or turned dizzy and fallen two hundred feet. She was soaked and bleeding,’ says John Henry, ‘her fingers and knees half raw. They had to lower a man on a rope to reach her.’
‘And a good scolding I got,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘From all the Pauls and from my mother when I got home. The doctor from Polzeath brought me in his trap.’
‘But she had the chough’s egg,’ says John Henry.
The second day of the summer holidays is Borowis’s birthday. Birthdays at China Court follow a ritual, of presents after breakfast and, in the afternoon, tea on the dining-room table which is decorated with flowers and has in the centre a cake with candles. The cake is on a plate that, when it is lifted, plays a tune. Ripsie knows all this as well as any Quin child, though she, of course, has no birthday kept. Later Mrs Quin continues the ritual for her own children, then for Tracy; she cannot imagine changing it and on this July day of 1891, Ripsie is completely unaware that the boys have outgrown it.
Two days before, Jared goes up to meet the boys in town; it does not occur to Ripsie that ‘town’ is London – the only town she knows is Bodmin. He has taken them, she hears, to ‘Lords’, which she supposes is a home of the St Omers. Borowis has had his first suit made to order at Rowes – ‘no more reach-me-downs,’ says Borowis – and they are to go to the Haymarket – which she sees as the open-air market at Bodmin, but filled with stooks of hay. They dine at the Criterion and come home next day.
As soon as she judges their breakfast is over, Ripsie is ready, standing at the gate.
She stands there in the lane, waiting for John Henry to remember and fetch her in; her small bare feet feel over the stones; occasionally she scratches the back of her calf with the other foot, but her hands never move; they are holding the chough’s egg.
She has blown it, as Borowis taught her, keeping down her disgust with the fishy raw slime she draws out, and has kept the shell in cotton wool in a fuller’s-earth box, until the boys come home, ‘until Boro’s birthday,’ breathes Ripsie.
She always knows when he is coming though he does not write. In all her years of loving Borowis, she never has a letter from him. ‘No, I had no love letters,’ Mrs Quin tells Barbara. With something of Borowis’s cruelty, she does not count the gentle shy love letters John Henry writes to her all through his life. ‘You were abominable to John Henry,’ says Barbara, but she sounds amused. ‘Abominable.’
‘I wasn’t,’ says Mrs Quin and immediately contradicts herself. ‘Yes, I was.’ Then in her harshest voice she says, ‘He shouldn’t have touched what didn’t belong to him.’
Once again Barbara is quick to understand. ‘Yes. It was you and Borowis all the time,’ she says.
‘All the time,’ says Mrs Quin.
Every holiday Ripsie gets the harbour and raft ready and stocks the armoury in the tree, carrying the precious air gun there every morning, taking it home every night. Everything is kept ready, but somehow the holidays seem to be gone and Borowis has not been even to look. He means to – Borowis always means well – but he does not, and the biscuits go mouldy and the bull’s-eyes consolidate into a sticky lump, the sherbet dries up. John Henry would have eaten them, but Ripsie will not let him. ‘They are for Boro,’ she says sternly.
Now the chough’s egg, in all its cream-green and flecked beauty, has been taken out and polished and laid in a small nest she has found and decorated with moss and flowers. ‘What? You got it!’ Borowis, she knows, will say little more than that, but Ripsie is not used to feeling proud and she expects no more, though it is possible, ‘just possible,’ whispers Ripsie aloud, that he may give a whistle which will show his astoni
shment and say, ‘Jolly good,’ or, ‘Good for you.’ ‘It will be the most valuable collection in England now, won’t it?’ Ripsie will say in sublime faith, and she hovers, hoping that John Henry may even fetch her in time to see, through a crack in the door, the birthday presents.
The hope fades as time goes on; endless time, it seems to Ripsie. She begins to wonder what is happening. Breakfast must be over long ago; if she had been less intent she would have heard a commotion around the house; she cannot see through the rhododendrons to the front door, but she could have heard sounds, yet it is as a complete surprise that she sees John Henry and Lady Patrick coming.
First John Henry appears, running to open the gate; then Lady Patrick riding her Reynard. Lady Patrick never looks as hard as when she is riding, nor as beautiful; her black habit fits as if she were cased in it, its low lapels, satin-faced, open to show her wide folded stock, and she gleams, from the tip of her boot which just shows under her heavy skirt, to the bun of her hair in its net under her bowler with its narrow curled brim.
Like the kitchens and what Mr Alabaster called the ‘offices’, the stables are too big for the house, ‘and so much more better,’ as Minna says in surprise when Groundsel takes her over them. In his time there are only two ponies left; the little girls share them and, for a while, there is Stace’s hunter. Then the ponies are given away, Stace’s hunter is sold, and a solitary Welsh pony is kept for the tubcart; then that is given up and there are none. In 1892 a pair of loose-boxes are turned into a garage for John Henry’s first motorcar, a six-and-a-half-horsepower Humberette with one c. gear and three speeds. Greatly daring, he pays one hundred and fifty-seven pounds, ten shillings, for it, and the quarrymen build a cement hut on the edge of the orchard for the petrol, which is delivered in twenty-gallon drums.
In Lady Patrick’s younger days the stables are a world in themselves. It is she who floors them with brick, enlarges them by four loose-boxes, makes a new harness room, a flat over them for the coachman and head groom, and adds the gilded weathercock so that all the village can look down and catch its extravagant glitter. There are plenty of horses then: Maxim, Jared’s hunter, and Jezebel, his hack, used also for the dogcart; Lady Patrick’s Irish hunters, Reynard and Sorrel, her pair of greys for the carriage, Sugar and Spice; a cob for the grooms to ride and, up to now, Basket, the boys’ pony. There is a carriage, the dogcart and the tubcart and a large stable staff, coachman, head groom, two underlings from the village, and a boy. ‘No wonder her mother’s money all went,’ says Mrs Quin.
Now as Lady Patrick rides down the drive, looking over her shoulder and reining Reynard to one side, Borowis comes into view around the rhododendrons and Ripsie catches her breath; he is riding a little roan-coloured mare, so deep a roan that her coat shines almost blue. She tittups and circles, making a tattoo on the drive with her hoofs as if she were dancing and, ‘He had her for his birthday,’ carols John Henry to Ripsie. ‘She’s a real hunter. Her name is Mirabelle. That means beautiful little plum!’
‘They are turning that boy into a young pasha,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon when he hears. ‘Bringing a hunter over from Ireland, and he only fifteen,’ and in John Henry, though he sounds happy and excited now, the memory of Mirabelle always stings: ‘I never had a hunter,’ he says it again when Stace is given Mrs Moonlight. Borowis and Stace – John Henry seems caught between them: Mirabelle and Mrs Moonlight, dark roan and grey dapple. They gradually seem one and the same little mare to Mrs Quin.
‘Bring her along, Boro.’ Lady Patrick’s voice is curt, but even Ripsie can hear the pride in it. Borowis, in his riding clothes, the checked coat and shallow brown bowler, is always a stranger to Ripsie, gone to a world where she cannot follow him; now his face is white under his freckles, and as hard as Lady Patrick’s, his eyes a blaze of excitement. Ripsie should have seen he has no scrap of thought to spare for anything but the new mare, but, when he comes to the gate, she cannot help it, she holds up the nest.
The mare plunges and, as if he did not recognize her from any village child, he says curtly, ‘Get out of the way.’
‘Boro, she has got something for you. It’s – it’s—’ and John Henry peers nearer. ‘Gosh, it’s – yes it is! Boro, it’s a chough’s egg. A chough’s! Bet you she got it herself.’ John Henry knows at once what is at stake and he tries hard to catch his brother’s attention. ‘A chough’s egg for your birthday.’
Borowis is not graceless; he tries to pay attention, but Lady Patrick has ridden up the lane and the new mare fidgets and strains. ‘For my birthday?’ Borowis manages to say, but he is watching and feeling the quickness of Mirabelle.
‘For your egg collection,’ Ripsie says it stiffly. She will die rather than show that either he or she is personally involved. ‘For the egg collection,’ and she looks far up and over his head, but by now Borowis has remembered. The egg collection in the hollow tree in the valley; it belongs with his armoury, an air gun, a harbour – but that is ages ago, thinks Borowis. Collecting eggs? Bird’s-nesting? That is for John Henry; for children. He, Borowis, has Mirabelle now and Jared has said he can practise with the .22 rifle and Lord St Omer has promised to lend him a shotgun and take him in his butt when pheasant-shooting begins. Borowis has to drag his mind a long long way back to birds’ eggs; his mind does not want to be dragged, but even at this distance it can recognize what it means to get a chough’s egg and, ‘Good for you,’ says Borowis. They are the words Ripsie longed for, but there is something absent-minded in the way he says it and she is not deceived.
For a moment Borowis sees her standing there in the lane in her bare feet and faded cotton frock, holding the carefully flowered nest; for a moment he understands, but Mirabelle tosses her head, her fetlocks dance and he has no more time to see, or even to think and, bending down, he says generously what he thinks will be the best possible thing – only he is not thinking. ‘Rip, you can have my egg collection,’ says Borowis.
He has not ridden a yard up the lane when something hits him in the back. It is the nest with the chough’s egg.
Jared does not come out riding with them even though it is Borowis’s birthday. Maxim and Jezebel stay in the stable. Jared and Lady Patrick still drive to meets together and he puts her up in the saddle – he will not let the groom do it – but they keep apart. He rides out on business, and she often orders a horse out and hacks across the moor, but they never ride together. He will not be at the birthday tea, and will be silent and taciturn at dinner, ‘if he isn’t drunk,’ says Lady Patrick. She is not silent when the boys are home, she keeps up a pretence, but the more simple Jared finds it difficult to remember. Pringle, who waits on them, has known him go through the whole of dinner without speaking a word. It is fifteen years ago today that Jared begins to hate himself.
A spiral of smoke goes up from the China Court nursery chimney, a spiral that is instantly seen in the village. The nursery fire has been lit.
A stillness is over the house and garden. Its familiars come and go, but quietly; everyone is doing what they have to do, but every now and then they stop and listen, except Cook, who is nervous and has alternate attacks of temper and hysterics. She is, for one thing, upset about the nun who has come over from Ireland. ‘Why not a good monthly nurse I ask you?’ says Cook belligerently.
‘Sister Priscilla is a kind of monthly nurse,’ says the more broadminded Pringle. ‘She were there when her ladyship were born. Poor lorn thing, it’s nice for her to have someone from her own family,’ but Cook is not to be mollified.
‘Nasty creeping things, they rattle.’ She means Sister Priscilla’s beads that click as she walks. ‘Never thought I should find meself in the same house as papists,’ says Cook darkly.
‘We will bear with you, Cook, if you will try and bear with us,’ says Sister Priscilla’s calm voice behind them. ‘May I have some hot water, please?’ She has dared to come into the kitchen herself and Cook is so affronted that she lets an oven ring fall with a loud clang on the stove. It knocks ov
er the kettle which falls in the fender and narrowly escapes scalding the kitchen maid, who screams. Jared shouts, ‘Stop that infernal clatter in the kitchen,’ and Cook goes into hysterics again.
One person is working steadily. Polly is radiant as she remembers things afresh, things she has laid by for a long time, laid by but not forgotten, though she is slow. It is as if she had to find her way back, ‘twenty-three years to Damaris,’ says Polly. ‘Damaris was the last.’
She moves steadily about the nursery: pieces of muslin are boiled in a bowl ‘for the eyes and nose’ says Polly; olive oil is warming; an apron of old soft towelling, cotton wool for wiping are ready; the bath of white enamel is on its iron stand. China Court babies have new bassinets and baskets, frilled and muslined; Adza, for Damaris, embroiders a whole new set on white over pink, with rosebuds and green leaves, but the bath is always the same. ‘Vaseline,’ says Polly, ‘scissors; needle and cotton, for stitching the binder.’ Polly never uses a safety pin; they are not safety in her day. Towelling squares and clothes are airing on the fender, the layers of clothes that Polly does not question a baby should wear: binder and diaper, a long wrapover flannel petticoat, a white lawn petticoat, then a robe and short crocheted jacket. When Polly carries one of her babies, the robe falls to the hem of her own dress. ‘All that weight on those poor little legs,’ exclaims Barbara when she is shown the baby clothes. ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t grow up crooked.’
‘They didn’t,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘The Quins have always had straight legs.’
Each garment is stitched with minute even stitches – ‘like a row of tiny pearls,’ says Adza teaching small Mary, Eliza, and Anne to sew: hemming, herringbone, feather-stitching, buttons so small that fingers can hardly fasten them, smaller loops, infinitesimal tucks, bindings of white silk.
