by Rumer Godden
‘Had they seen a light then?’
‘Ask anyone,’ says Polly.
‘But what light?’
‘They says, like a will-o’-the-wisp, but it was her, striking matches. She had a lantern under her cloak. She didn’t light it before she went through the village because I guess she thought she could slip through without notice. She lit it under her cloak, but it looked – eerie,’ says Polly again and shivers. ‘With the matches spluttering and dying it was fitful, might have been the will-o’-the-wisp, and then when it steadied I saw she was …’ Polly’s voice died too.
‘Was …?’
‘Kneeling by a grave,’ whispers Polly. ‘She had set the lantern down, her cloak round it to hide it, and was undoing a little bundle. Oh! I don’t know what I thought it was,’ says Polly, ‘but it was books.’
‘Books?’ Lady Patrick is incredulous.
‘Yes. She held them up one by one, so he could see,’ says Polly in a gasp of horror.
‘Who could see?’
‘Jeremy Baxter.’
‘Who is Jeremy Baxter?’
‘Old Mr Baxter, who worked for the master. Him who died. You know.’
‘How could I know?’
‘He was clerk to the master. He died of the drink, and she was kneeling by his grave, and holding them for him, and showing them to him, as if he was alive!’
‘Showing them to a grave?’ says Lady Patrick.
‘Yes,’ says Polly certainly. ‘Oh milady, it made my blood turn cold, but I crept up and hid behind one of the big headstones.’ And Polly breaks into fresh sobs. ‘Showing them to him in his grave, and all the way back those boys followed her. Do you wonder?’
‘Perhaps Jared will interfere,’ says Lady Patrick.
‘They say she has been peddling things to Jacob Hinty.’
‘Hinty. That old drunkard at the crossroads shop? Nonsense.’
‘They say she put the Eye on Mrs Morren who had that idiot child.’
‘That was inbreeding,’ says Lady Patrick, who is not delicate.
‘They say they have seen Kitty fly, tubcart and all.’
‘Oh, Polly! Don’t be absurd.’
‘Absurd or not, when that starts it’s like a bonfire. They will mob her and hurt her. What can I do?’
‘I will tell Jared to talk to Eliza.’ Lady Patrick is bored.
‘Jared can’t talk to Eliza. It’s like talking to a stone wall,’ says Polly and lazy Jared agrees.
‘It’s probably only old wives’ tales,’ says Jared. ‘Liz has always been queer. Leave her alone and it will all die down,’ but Lady Patrick has lived in an Irish village and uneasiness stirs; she pushes it down. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. They, none of them, are anything to do with me.’
Four months later, early one morning, the men come down from the quarry to fetch Jared. A granite cutter who lives out on the moor has brought the news in. Kitty has been found placidly grazing, but with her reins tangled round her knees, the broken shafts behind her and, farther on by the bridge, is the tubcart, overturned and smashed against the granite bridge wall. Eliza is lying on the sward.
‘If she was thrown on the grass, how did she get that bruise on her forehead?’ It is a bruise with a gash on it, as if from a stone; Lady Patrick’s words die away, and, ‘Kitty wouldn’ bolt,’ say the men in the stables. ‘’Er was a brave old mare, steady’s a rock. Kitty wouldn’ ’less somethin’ ’ad frightened ’er.’
A resentful silence hangs over the village and it is many years before there is any more friendliness between it and China Court. ‘And it was a scandal,’ says Jared still scalding. ‘Smashed whisky bottles all over the bridge. What was she doing?’ cried Jared.
‘Taking them to Jacob Hinty. Your whisky.’ Lady Patrick is amused, but to Jared this is a further humiliation, a final endorsement of inferiority.
They are advised to bury Eliza at Canverisk, or better still, in Bodmin, ‘where no one knows.’
‘Everyone knows,’ says Jared. ‘The whole county. Well, let them know,’ and a stiffness comes in him, something of the backbone of Eustace and Great-Uncle Mcleod. ‘She was my sister, my mother and father’s daughter, she will be buried where she belongs in the family grave,’ and, as when she was small, the family protects her. No one scrawls rude words about Eliza on the polished granite; a few people even put flowers on the grave and, after a while, the children come back to play in the church-yard.
Then Jared discovers the bills, his bills and Eliza’s; there is such a difference between the totals that even Jared cannot help seeing it. Shops send in demands, ‘shops I had paid,’ and Jacob Hinty comes drunk one day, roaring for his whisky. ‘It must have been hundreds of pounds,’ says Jared, ‘but what did she do with it?’
There seems no answer to that.
He and Polly search the White Room and find not as much as five pounds. Eliza’s purse has been flung far into the heather where it moulders and turns back to earth; it is the only money she has ever wasted.
Jared finds the key of the brass-bound case, unlocks it, and flips through the notebooks ‘but only more petty figures, more cheating,’ he says. He bestows no more than a glance on the list of books. ‘There isn’t a trace,’ says Jared. He cannot get over the whole strange affair. ‘Showing books to Jeremy Baxter. She was mad.’
‘She wasn’t mad,’ says Lady Patrick. ‘She was lonely.’
Homes must know a certain loneliness because all humans, are lonely, shut away from one another, even in the act of talking, of loving. Adza cannot follow Eustace in his business deals and preoccupations as she cannot follow Mcleod the Second or Anne or Jared – no one can follow Eliza. Mr King Lee, kissing Damaris, has no inkling of the desolation he has brought her, just as Groundsel only half guesses Minna’s; Jared hides himself from Lady Patrick, and John Henry and Ripsie, in their long years together, are always separated by Borowis. The children especially are secret; Adza, Lady Patrick, Mrs Quin have to learn, each in her turn, that it is no use asking where they have been, though they come back from their adventures, their brows thick with what has happened to them. It is better not to ask questions. ‘It’s like sticking pins into me,’ protests Eliza dramatically to Adza, while Borowis parries Lady Patrick’s wistful probings with the skill of an accustomed diplomat and, ‘Even if they told you,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘you would never really know.’
Loneliness can be good. Mrs Quin learns that in the long companionship of the years after Tracy goes, when she and Cecily are alone in the house; companionship of rooms and stairs, of windows and colours; in the gentle ticking away of the hours, the swinging pendulum of the grandfather clock. ‘I was happy,’ Mrs Quin could have said. Contented loneliness is rich because it takes the imprint of each thing it sees and hears and tastes. ‘There’s time if one is alone,’ says Mrs Quin. She is, of course, conditioned to it, Ripsie is the most solitary of children, but there is another kind of loneliness that sears and, ‘Poor silly tragic exaggerated Lady Patrick,’ says Mrs Quin.
Bursts of laughter sometimes come through the baize door at the end of the passage, bursts instantly hushed; they cannot quite be hushed because the kitchen wing teems with a heady life of talk, gossips, quarrels, laughter. On the house side of the door is silence.
No one is comfortable then in China Court. It is quiet; few guests come in those middle years and the boys have their own haunts; the nursery has become the schoolroom and they have their lessons there, or else they are away in their hide-holes in the garden or the valley. Jared sleeps alone in the dressing room next to the shut big bedroom, Lady Patrick in the Porch Room. He sits in the morning room where Adza and the girls used to sit. The drawing room they keep for state occasions is Lady Patrick’s natural habitat; its space does not daunt her; she fills it with flowers, and her embroidery frame is by one of the fireplaces in winter, in the garden window in summer. When she is not hunting or riding she sits there all day, and every evening she waits there for the clock to chime ten and a
nother day be done.
At the beginning Jared besieges her. ‘Sweetheart. Pat. Sweetheart.’
‘My heart is not sweet,’ says this new stony-eyed young Lady Patrick. It is not sweet; it is like the heart in those statues of Christ in the convent, a heart pierced and bleeding, ‘only His is so great it consents to go on bleeding, mine is dried up,’ says Lady Patrick.
Harry St Omer, red and embarrassed, comes to speak for Jared. ‘Men do things like that,’ he says miserably. ‘You must forgive him, Pat.’
‘It isn’t Jared I can’t forgive. It’s myself.’ Harry has not imagined she could be as haughty. ‘My father was right,’ says Lady Patrick. ‘Clonferts shouldn’t marry persons like this.’ She speaks with infinite disdain. ‘I don’t know how I could have so forgotten myself. There is no more to say.’
There is no more. The house is full of whispers, the whole county gossips, but Lady Patrick says not a word. ‘She has her pride, that one,’ says Polly. Polly, privileged, tries to talk to her; Mr Fitzgibbon’s honest old eyes look anguished, but Lady Patrick lets the pride make a shell that fits more and more closely around her.
Harry St Omer attacks her. ‘It was your fault for going away. Jared missed you.’
‘I was away two days.’
‘And another thing,’ says Harry. ‘Jared was always – well, er – he liked them a bit low,’ says Harry. ‘He adores you, Pat, but sometimes – I mean nice women are – well, perhaps – you might be, er – too nice a woman, too delicate for him.’
She bends her head over her embroidery because a blush that she cannot stop is burning her body, from her thighs up to her forehead; she longs to cry out, ‘I’m not a nice woman. If ever a man should have been satisfied, it was Jared. I was mad about him. I threw myself at his head. I behaved – that bed with the brass lover’s knots was my world, no it was my heaven. That’s why I came stealing back …’
There is an owl then in the China Court garden at night. It sits on the flagpole giving its melancholy cry, high above the house and the elms, the glimmering slope of the hill. It sounds lost and lonely out there in the night and moonlight makes it cry more. Now when there is moonlight, Lady Patrick tells Pringle to draw the curtains.
‘They are drawn, milady.’
‘Then shut the windows,’ but she can feel the moonlight through the closed glass and velvet. ‘It was moonlight when I came back, cruel white moonlight, showing everything so that it was clear, beyond a doubt. Oh, why did I come back?’ She asks that question again and again.
The paradox is that Jared does not wish her to go. ‘Why do you want to?’ he asks.
‘I don’t want to,’ she says, ‘but, all my life, every year, since I was a little girl at school—’
‘So many years!’ teases Jared.
‘Every year, I have made my retreat.’
‘Retreat from what?’ He is still teasing.
‘Too much world,’ says Lady Patrick slowly.
‘But what do you do?’
‘Listen. Think. Pray. Get clean.’
‘Are you so dirty, my little love?’
‘Yes,’ says Lady Patrick. She is thinking of a conversation she has with Father Blackwell last time she sees him. ‘You can spare four days,’ says the Father.
‘For the God who made me?’ she says flippantly.
‘Yes,’ says Father Blackwell, not flippant.
‘He made Jared too. He shouldn’t have made him so well if He didn’t want me to love him.’ She tilts her chin at the priest. ‘Now go on, Father. Tell me I love him too much,’ but Father Blackwell can surprise her.
‘Too much and too little,’ says Father Blackwell.
‘Too little?’
‘I should like to see you love Jared enough to hurt him when it’s necessary,’ says Father Blackwell, ‘and’ – he pauses – ‘to let him hurt you.’
She says certainly, confidently, ‘Jared would never hurt me.’
Jared himself decides her going. ‘Let the old father boil his head,’ says Jared disrespectfully. ‘You don’t need him. I’m your religion now.’
‘Ssh!’ She puts her hand over his mouth, but it is true. She has no religion now but Jared, and, on her second night, she comes back, stealing in – ‘Like a little vixen in season,’ she says, catching her lip in her teeth each time she remembers – but it is not only that; she is homesick.
The convent gives her a feeling of chill. It is not austere. Dozemary Abbey is adequately furnished in every way, but it is plain almost to bareness and Lady Patrick feels there like an overfeathered bird. She takes off her jewellery and gives it to Hester’s successor to keep for her – even to a convent Lady Patrick does not go without a maid – but she still feels overdressed. The plain neat bedroom, the refectory table severely laid and served, the recreation room with its one round table and chairs against the walls, the women making their retreat with her, the silence, all depress her. ‘You don’t want to be thinking of friends and furnishings here,’ says the Guest Mistress, but Lady Patrick longs for talk and laughter, for China Court’s rooms of colour and softness, flowers, firelight. The silence seems to her only an empty one; she does not want to think serious thoughts, or any thoughts at all; she wants to live, to be. There is the emphasis on pain, poverty, struggle, and death; the bleeding heart; the cross; they seem to her, who has accepted them all her life, morbid now. She is seeing with Jared’s eyes: the cross, forgetting the figure on it, the heart’s wound and not that it lives. ‘I don’t want to see,’ cries Lady Patrick, ‘see or hear.’ She only wants to bury her head on Jared’s shoulder and shut out the whole world.
‘Jared! Jared!’ and that night she comes, almost running up the drive, leaving the disgruntled groom at the stables. ‘Fetched from Dozemary village at nearly ten o’clock at night, made to saddle two drowsy horses, ride nine damned eerie miles across the moor at night!’ He grumbles under his breath all the way. The maid is left behind to be fetched in the morning; the Mother Superior is icily disappointed, the Guest Mistress nearly in tears, all the nuns shocked and hurt. ‘I don’t care,’ says Lady Patrick now. ‘I’m at home.’
She has not thought of how she can get in; she does not want to ring the bell, send it pealing through the house to startle everyone; she wants to surprise, to come like a thief upstairs, shed her clothes and slip into the warm bed beside Jared, though he may be sleeping in the dressing room of course. She walks around the house, leaving footprints in the heavy dew, trying the garden door, the back door, while the moonlight watches. The dogs bay in the kennel, but they always bay when there is a moon.
One window is open a crack, a slit of a window below the pantry. ‘So that’s how they close the house.’ She does not know that the knife-boy sleeps here in what was built as a cupboard. The open window is against all his mother taught him, but the cupboard is so small and airless that he would stifle if it did not leave a crack.
A crack is enough for Lady Patrick. She pushes the window up. She is slim and agile, and, even in the heavy skirts of her habit, can swing herself up on the sill. She turns on it, brings her legs through and, feeling with a cautious toe in the darkness, finds the knife-boy in his truckle bed. They scream together, her scream stifled, his loud, and, ‘Ssh!’ says Lady Patrick peremptorily, tumbling on the bed. ‘Ssh! Don’t move. Stay where you are. It’s her ladyship.’
‘Her ladyship!’ Not really awake, confused with fright, astonishment, and a certain amount of pain, for she has tumbled straight on top of him, he does stay where he is and in a moment cannot believe what he has felt and seen and heard, for Lady Patrick’s eyes have lost the first shock of gloom and she has found the door and vanished.
The knife-boy stays, propped up on one elbow looking at the door where it has closed. He looks, his mouth open, then he rubs his sticky nose on his hand and goes back to sleep.
The stale smell of him, though, stays on Lady Patrick as she sits down on a hall chair to shed her riding boots. It is a struggle – she is not use
d to taking them off herself; a maid usually bends over, her back to her mistress, the foot with the boot between her legs, and Lady Patrick puts her other foot on the print-skirted rump, pushes, when the maid is propelled in a run across the room and the boot comes off. Now Lady Patrick thinks she will have to wake the knife-boy again to help her, but at last she gets the boots off and, in Lady Patrick’s fashion, leaves them lying on the hall floor. She goes up the stairs in her stockinged feet, her skirt trailing on the steps; her cheeks are hot after her struggle with the boots, and her heart is so eager that she cannot get her breath and she has to pause and lean against the banisters at the top of the stairs.
‘Jared. Jared,’ she will whisper, and he, half waking, will open his eyes, confused, unable to believe. ‘What? Where?’ and then, as through sleep he understands, in happiness like her own, his arms will reach out for her, gather her in. ‘Sweetheart. Little Pat. Sweetheart.’
Outside the dressing-room door she stops and listens, then very carefully turns the handle. He is not there. The single bed is smooth; his clothes are on the chair. Quickly she tosses her hat on the bed and undresses, letting her clothes fall round her on the floor, pulling the pins out of her hair impatiently, feeling its weight drop against her skin. She takes Jared’s comb and runs it through the long strands until they are silky. Then, her hair in a cloak round her, her eyes bright with mischief, very quietly she opens the bedroom door – and the owl seems to be calling in her ear, the moonlight is ice cold.
It floods the room so that there can be no illusion, no mistake: Jared is asleep in the wide bed and beside him, in her space, is a mound under the bedclothes; on her should-be-empty pillow lies a black head, asleep too and turned where she had wanted to hide from all pain, on Jared’s shoulder.
‘And they were married and lived happily ever after.’ That is the ending in fairy tales, Perrault, the Orange, Green, or Violet Fairy Books, and the children believe it. Weddings and Fathers and Mothers are the two favourite games. ‘What do you want to be when you are grown up?’ people ask John Henry and he always answers, ‘A father.’
