by Deryn Lake
The Silver Swan
Deryn Lake
© Deryn Lake 1984
The right of Deryn Lake to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in the UK in 1984 by Frederick Muller Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Once again —
To Bill Lampitt, Jacqueline Getty Phillips and Geoffrey Glassborow
and to
Roger Chubb, Ena Daniels, Erika Lock, Carole Restorick and Shirley Russell for their unfailing kindness and enthusiasm.
Table of Contents
Part One
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Part Two
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Epilogue
Bibliography
THE SILVER SWAN
The silver swan who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
Thus sung her first and last and sung, no more.
Farewell all joys, oh death come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live,
More fools than wise.
English Madrigal by Orlando Gibbons, 1612.
Part One
Prologue
On the eve of her fiftieth year she dreamed such a dream. She wandered in a wild forbidden land where peacocks flew and Barbary apes laughed aloud; where the earth glinted with the colour of emerald and topaz; where through luscious trees snow-shored lakes of crystal could be glimpsed and strange white horses pawed and tossed their manes at the sapphire sky.
And in this ecstatic place where good and evil ran joyously side-by-side she saw her life spread out before her. And though she longed to turn away she was forced to go onward and upward to the place where white peaks gleamed in the sun and where redemption awaited and where all her deeds, whether they be for good or for bad, would be dwarfed to mere pygmies at the high altar of the world.
She knew that if she did not wake she would die — her spirit ascending too far for her earthly shell to contain. And so she threw herself beneath the waterfall that rolled slumberously down from the mountains, shafting into a million diamonds as it fell smokily into the river below. As the waters closed over her she gave one last sad sigh — and thus she woke, with that sound echoing about her and her soul disturbed by leaving that land of death and beauty.
For a while she could see nothing but the sparkle of the cascading stream and then, slowly, her eyes picked out the hangings of her bed and beyond them the familiar shape of her room. She was safe, she had escaped from the relentless fantasy of night and come home. But the very notion of being there made her tremble. And that small frightened movement set the bed curtains swaying, reminding her vividly of the thing she dreaded thinking about more than any other; the malevolence that had come to torment her when she was twelve turning her existence into an agony of noise and dread.
Lying there watching the dawn turn the bedroom walls to rose, she thought of Hyacinth, as she had every day of her life from the second they had met. He had filled her waking and sleeping moments for all those long years and yet she could hardly remember his face, sometimes going to an old and faded sketch book and looking through it. But Sibella was drawn there too, and for that sweet spritely face to suddenly look up at her was a hurt she was rarely strong enough to withstand.
An orange tint was suffusing the dawn as her mind turned once more to her birthday and to the callers from London who would soon be descending upon her in dozens to toast her — the most celebrated hostess of the day and arbiter of all that was exquisite — her fiftieth year. And so she must rise and indulge her one fancy — washing her face and body in water from a spring that bubbled earthwards, deep from the hills of Malvern.
She had first seen it with her mother and Mr Pope, and then she had returned when she had been nineteen, and drunk deeply from the mysterious spring. And, as if she had accidentally stumbled upon the Fountain of Youth, at forty-nine Melior Mary’s features and body were as young and as supple as those of a woman in the early part of her twenties.
She had never revealed the mystery of the spring to anyone though secretly she doubted whether it really contained any magical properties. She had bathed in it within a few months of losing Hyacinth and on the day he had gone the fire that burns out the human body, the fire known as living, had been extinguished. And though she might charm and entertain, sit for portraits by Mr Joshua Reynolds and young Mr Gainsborough, be toasted and flattered and wooed, nothing mattered at all. Her nickname — Queen of Ice — was true.
But, nonetheless, every month one of her footmen took his place on the public stage leaving from the Saracen’s Head at Snow Hill in London and proceeded to Malvern where he went quietly into the hills and bottled the water. She did not care for him to make the journey privately for, however often he would change his times or route the meanest chaise in her coach-house would — combined with the distinctive silver livery that denoted a servant of Melior Mary Weston — attract the attention of such gentlemen of the road as Sixteen-String Jack or Tom King. It was not safe for a servant of the great heiress who owned the magnificent and famous Tudor mansion — Sutton Place — to travel abroad unaccompanied.
Remembering the tradition that now rested solely in her hands made her, as always, breathe slightly faster as she got out of bed, slipping a dressing gown of flowered silk over her shoulders. Before her the delicate lines of her room, decorated in white and silver, greeted her eyes as they had done every morning since her girlhood. When the malevolence had been banished and Sibella Hart had come, there had been a great change round. The old apple loft, apparently used by the original Lady Weston — her ancestress and wife of the builder of Sutton Place — had been restored as a bedroom for Melior Mary, the smaller room leading off it had been made ready for the orphan.
Now she had turned it into a dressing room packed full of clothes — enormously hooped petticoats made in richest stuffs, tumbling over gowns of French finery: beavers, hats, bonnets and scarves; yards of Spanish broadcloth and damasks, velvets and silks. Pair upon pair of high-heeled shoes jostling wig boxes and jewel cases; Turkey handkerchiefs rubbing shoulders with coloured feathers, trays of pearl pins and turbans.
As she moved towards the window her reflection in the long glass adorned with a golden unicorn echoed the gesture. She turned to look at herself and found that nothing had changed. In her angled face where the cheekbones slanted upward the same enormous eyes — swept by the jet black lashes that were part of her fame — gazed out as usual. Mr Pope had described them as the colour of April violets loved by rain — but then he had seen everything with a poet’s eye, the eye of a man who loved beauty in nature.
Then there was her hair. She supposed that it was the single thing caused by the malevolence for which she could be grateful. For at the age of twelve her thick black locks had turned silver and so it had remained. And though she had wigs in abundance she preferred to leave her curls au naturel, sweeping them up in a mass of ringlets and jewels for formal occasions, but letting her hair hang about her shoulders like a silver cloudburst when she was alone at Sutton Place
.
She leant nearer the glass and delicately traced the curve of her eye with her finger. It was an extraordinary but visible fact. Like the great courtesan Diane de Poitiers, Melior Mary had found the secret of eternal youth.
On an impulse she let the dressing gown slip to the floor and appraised herself with the cold eye of one who receives no joy in what she perceives. It was as she thought. Without a shred of conceit she saw that she was perfect; no flaw in the glittering jewel except the coldness of her soul. She shook her head watching the silver sheen of her hair as it bounced about her shoulders. She would have changed it all, been transformed into a fat, greasy pig-herding slut if Hyacinth could have been hers.
She picked up the dressing gown and placed it round her shoulders, for she was suddenly chill in the early morning air. Crossing to the window she threw it open and leaned forward, arms folded upon the casement, so that she might look out all the better. The view on every side was of sweeping lawns where peacocks — introduced to Sutton Place by her mother Elizabeth — strode and displayed, their weird shriek of ‘Sill, sill’ cutting the stillness.
And, leaning out of the window she could see the whole of the back of Sutton Place standing in the midst of the gardens laid out by her forebears. It glowed at her in the early sun, the ember brick warm to the touch. Yet it seemed to her — as she gazed to right and to left — that it was a watchful house combining a mixture of both grandeur and foreboding.
And yet she loved it. She could not contemplate life anywhere else. Let the London set do what they will, she could not bear to be parted from her magnificent mansion. It had known her loves and her hates, her joys and her terrors. It had seen her conception and birth. It would, in time, see her death.
Standing there in the morning light Melior Mary was suffused with memory.
1
Beneath a sky heavy with unshed snow, through a park glinting with rime and crystalline with hoar frost, a carriage wended its slow and silent way down the drive of Sutton Place. Through the windows two anxious faces peered out; one — the woman’s — staring, as if her very life depended upon the great gates that lay before her; the other — the child’s — craned backwards, as if it could wrest to her by sheer willpower the house that, though looming overall in the bleak landscape, had just now vanished from view, as the drive bent serpentine.
Everywhere was the silence of mid-winter. Not a bird sang in Sutton forest, not a rabbit twitched a nervous nose — yet somewhere the hunters were out, for in the distance hounds yelped for a hungry fox and the high brassy blast of a horn rent the ice-crisp air.
This far trumpeting made the woman go white to the lips and urge the coachman on to greater haste, but it gave the child a look of hope, of thoughts of rescue at hand; for though Melior Mary Weston loved her mother Elizabeth, she loved nothing so much in the world as Sutton Place — the mansion which had been in her family for nearly two hundred years, and to which she, though nothing but a child — and a girl at that — was nonetheless sole heir.
Yet a stolen glance at her mother’s determined face, and the sight of the gates beginning to swing slowly open before the oncoming equipage, was enough to dash any idea that her father might yet appear and stop them running away. That even now, at this last and desperate moment, his great red-coated figure might suddenly lurch into view before them, holding up his arm — whip in hand — and roar out, ‘Damn you Elizabeth, what the devil do you think you’re doing?’
For all her fear of her father’s moods Melior Mary would have welcomed him. He represented the way of life that she had always known and enjoyed and, above all, he represented Sutton Place. He loved the house as much as she and was always speaking of family and tradition and the duties of great landowners.
It was not his physical resemblance to the Westons that gave rise to this love of heritage however. For he stood, unlike any of the family portraits that hung in the Great Hall, over six feet tall with massive shoulders and a dark, swart complexion out of which blazed two brilliant eyes. When he was angry, which was quite often, his pupils dilated so alarmingly that the irises appeared pitch black. He was known amongst the servants as the Satyr.
There was wild blood in him. His mother — Melior Mary’s grandam — had been nothing more than the daughter of an inn-keeper. But mine host had made good, bought land, and set himself up as a country squire. And his child, though quite the stupidest woman in the world, had been pretty enough to attract Richard Weston of Sutton Place — the fifth and the last to bear that name — as a husband. So it was this mixture that had gone to make up John Weston and it was after the strain of the inn-keeper Nevill — with its fierce, gypsy-tainted blood — that he had taken.
And, though still too young for it to be truly obvious, the inherited wildness was there in Melior Mary. She had had a restlessness about her ever since she had been born; a carefree exploring urge, not suitable for a female child. For different reasons both her parents had wished she had been a boy. And now she wished it herself for she felt that had she been male, she could have jumped out of the carriage and young as she was, have lived free in the forest.
A movement in her must have attracted Elizabeth Weston’s attention for, just for a second, the mother stopped her rapt contemplation of the opening gates and laid a hand upon her daughter’s arm giving her, at the same time, a sad and earnest glance. She was so much everything that Melior Mary’s father was not that it was almost as if their marriage had been one of both nature and society’s crueller jokes. The opposite of John in every way possible: short — not even five feet tall — and delicately made; her hair fair, her skin white, her eyes the light blue of a forget-me-not, Elizabeth’s manner was so gentle that she could no more have been deliberately cruel than died.
And socially she bore the pedigree that for John had been ever tainted in himself by the introduction of gypsy blood from the inn-keeper. She was the daughter of an aristocrat, Joseph Gage, and his heiress wife Elizabeth Penruddock; for brothers she had Sir Thomas Gage of Firle and the rich and fashionable Joseph the second. She was unimpeachably a member of the upper class.
But now she was flying, despite the conventions of her upbringing, from her husband. For nothing had ever been right between John and Elizabeth Weston. The only things they had had in common were their child and Sutton Place. Beyond that mutual interest ceased. Her love of music, poetry and the arts were an anathema to him; she abhorred his preoccupation with hunting and energetic outdoor pursuits. From the very beginning their arranged and loveless marriage had been unfulfilled.
Yet, for the sake of a quiet existence, the two of them had — up till this fraught and terrible moment — passed several years as befitted the owners of a great estate.
John had given orders, hunted, got drunk, occasionally gone to London — where he had patronized the Ladies of Drury, gone to the coffee houses and bowed to Queen Anne. Elizabeth had supervised the day-to-day management of Sutton Place, ordered new clothes, played cards with the other great ladies from round about, embroidered and sung. Their child Melior Mary — still too small for a governess according to custom — perfected her riding, copied out characters set by her mother, played with her toys and felt lonely. There was no sign of a brother or sister to add to the uneasy household.
But, nonetheless, life had not been dull during those years of truce for there were a great many visitors to Sutton Place to liven affairs. The most frequent of these was John Weston’s low-born mother. Much to Melior Mary’s dismay the old lady’s coach would appear in the courtyard, with what seemed the regularity of clockwork, and out would get her grandmother — her once beautiful face now marred by a frill of fat — complete with an equally obese pug tucked under one arm. The pair of them would then take a seat in Elizabeth’s saloon and, so it seemed to the child, remain there for the entire visit, cramming cups of chocolate and confitures — or saucers in the case of the dog — into their mouths with unnerving speed. As the animal had also acquired the mistress�
�s unfortunate habit of breaking wind, Melior Mary’s dutiful daily visit to pay her respects was an agony of dismay lest she should laugh aloud and earn a beating at her father’s hands. Elizabeth sat calmly through it all, frequently leaving the room on the excuse of household matters and thereby forcing John grudgingly to entertain his mother on his own.
On one such occasion Elizabeth, once outside the door, collapsed with laughter, throwing herself onto a window seat and stuffing her fist into her mouth. Melior Mary, coming upon her, joined in. She loved fun and gaiety and it felt awfully sweet in the sunshine to snuggle close to her mother, sniffing the sweet scents of her. Elizabeth’s arms had gone round her daughter and they had indulged in silent laughter together until John’s great frame suddenly loomed over them and they were given a piercing look from his dark eyes.
‘And what causes this amusement?’ he had said coldly.
Inwardly Elizabeth sighed. She was not afraid of him but she detested arguing so much that a thrill of unease swept her. She cast about for an excuse but nothing was forthcoming, so wearily she began to tell the truth.
‘Your mother’s dog...’
‘Is fierce in its farting, sir.’
This last from Melior Mary.
Fortunately this struck John as amusing, and he had put his head back and given one of his rare laughs. Both Elizabeth and Melior Mary had joined in and, just for a moment, everything was as it should have been between the three of them. The husband putting his hand on the wife’s shoulder and she, in return, slipping her fingers over his and the child looking upwards at the two of them and smiling too much.
Another visitor — though one that Melior Mary greeted with enthusiasm — was Elizabeth’s younger brother, Joseph Gage. His arrival was always heralded by a huge Negro servant — dressed from head to foot in scarlet and gold — sprinting to the Middle Enter as if the hounds of Hell were after him, and beating upon it with a fist like a thunderbolt. This was followed, after a breathless moment or two, by the appearance of Joseph himself, riding in a carriage built for maximum speed and wearing the very latest fashion — diamonds glittering in his sword-hilt, on his fingers and about his person — while on his head he would sport the latest creation in wigs, powdered, and topped by a hat decorated with plumed and swaying feathers. He went nowhere without his slave who constantly walked ten paces behind his master.
