by Joan Aiken
Lady Hariot continued to worry about my place of abode.
‘I have heard questionable tales of Dr Moultrie,’ she said. ‘He is a lazy old wretch, that is sure. I doubt if he can be a good influence on you, child – and he tipples disgracefully; only last Sunday, at the rail, I was scandalized by the smell of eau-de-vie. Can his teaching really be of any further benefit to you?’ Now that you are acquiring manners and deportment here at the Hall, was her unspoken corollary.
But I made haste to reassure her. ‘Truly, ma’am, he is very clever, and I learn a great deal from him of – of literature, and Latin, and ancient history, and much else besides. I do believe he could answer any question that I thought to put.’
And he would, I knew, be furiously angry at any suggestion that I might discontinue my visits to the parsonage; in fact when I first began going up to the Hall he had become very morose, threatening and choleric; much pacification and blandishment were required before he would accept that I was not to be wholly reft away from him and would not blacken his character to the Squire. His enmity was not to be thought of; indeed it was a terrifying prospect.
Lady Hariot sighed. ‘Learning and superior character do not always go hand-in-hand, I know. And certainly learning is never to be despised; especially in such a remote neighbourhood as this, where we have to make the most of our advantages.’
I daresay she was thinking of the Squire, who fell asleep nightly over the first page of the newspaper and never progressed to the second.
So I was suffered to continue my lessons at the rectory, where, indeed, I learned far more than Lady Hariot reckoned; and which lessons were by no means unalloyed pleasure; but, as with Mr Godfinch, I esteemed that my safest plan was to acquire all the knowledge that came my way, by whatever means, and trust that some part of it would, in the future, repay any evils or inconveniences encountered during its acquisition.
Thus my chequered life proceeded; the happiest times were when, up at Kinn Hall, Triz and I had leave to wander in the grounds or the gardens, or ramble down to the shore. (Though in the latter case we were subject to countless warnings and prohibitions; Lady Hariot understood vaguely that in the past some child from the village had been drowned by the incoming tide, and we were therefore never permitted to go down to the beach save when the tide was on the ebb.)
Triz, even by the time she reached the age of six, remained small and delicate in stature, with a gossamer fairness of hair and complexion; she ate like a bird and was sadly susceptible to colds and coughs. She must be watched at all times with the utmost vigilance lest she take a chill from damp slippers or stockings; so our excursions had to be confined to the warmest, mildest, most windless days. (Sometimes I used to sigh, recalling the immense walks I had undertaken with Mr Bill and Mr Sam, striding on for miles on miles, regardless of rain or wind.) But my outings with Triz had a charm all their own.
She loved me to tell her stories. At first I related all of those most clearly remembered from Dr Moultrie’s little chap-books, of Gold-Locks and the tale Jack the Giant-Killer, and that of Mr Philip Quarll, the English Hermit. But I soon ran through these and, Triz still demanding more, I bethought me of the strange tale that Mr Sam and Mr Bill had put together between them (though Mr Sam did by far the greater part); so, recalling as best I could and half-chanting such of the verses as returned to me, I took her through the adventures of the mariner and his unlucky mess-mates who sailed to the Southern Polar Regions, and how the hero killed the great sea-bird and of the fearsome fate that befell him. This tale kept her spellbound, and she asked for it over and over again. Then, as the addict calls for his laudanum, she demanded more and yet more, so I was constrained to fall back upon history, real or invented, and tell her the sagas I had read of Saxons and Normans, of Hereward the Wake and Robin Hood, of Joan of Arc and the British queen who fought the Romans. But her favourite amongst all these were the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which I had found in a book of Sir Thomas Malory among Dr Moultrie’s volumes. (This was the book I had soiled with jam, after which episode Dr Moultrie had never permitted me to lay fingers upon it again. But still I had such a vivid recollection of the stories – for I loved them as much as Triz did – that I was able to pass them on to her with every detail still burnished in my mind.)
Over and over I told her of the arm rising from the lake to catch the falling sword, when the wounded king lies dying on the field of battle, and how the ladies arrive in the magic barge to rescue him, and how he promises Bedivere that one day he will return to rule once more.
This was the part that Triz found full of such haunting appeal. And so did I, for that matter.
‘I wonder what Sir Bedivere did after the barge had rowed away?’ she would sigh. But that I could not recall; if I had ever known. ‘I wonder where he went? I wonder if he ever did see King Arthur again?’
Not very far eastwards of Nether Othery, as the crow flies, lay the great hill of Glastonbury, under which King Arthur is supposed to sleep, until the summons arouses him to come back to the help of his people. Mr Sam had once told me about this, and I told Triz.
‘Oh!’ she breathed. ‘If only we could go there! How I wish that I might see that place!’
In the meantime, we often played a game; that one of us was King Arthur and one Sir Bedivere. She, as Arthur, would give me her sword (a bulrush, plucked from the side of the pool in Kinn Hall garden) and I would promise to fling it into the pond, but would fail twice to do so because of the value of the jewels in the hilt; but at last, after bitter reproaches from the dying king, I would cast it out into the water. Then we would pretend to see the magical barge approaching, with seven queens all robed in black. (Here I clung to the stated number of three queens, but Triz insisted on seven.) Then she would pretend to climb, groaning, into the barge, and turn to say, ‘I will into the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.’ And I would fall a-weeping on to my knees and call, ‘Come again, my dear Lord King Arthur, come again !’ Meanwhile Triz, since there was no magic barge, would hide herself among the bulrushes. This play we acted over and over again, to our great satisfaction, alternating the parts.
I suppose Triz must be the only person with whom I have never felt impatience. When we played, I always took the lead – except in this play of Arthur. Whatever I told her, she received as gospel. She would have given me any of her possessions in a moment, if I had asked for them. She was like my younger sister – a gentle, fragile being who must be treated at all times with cherishing care.
I was never hasty or sharp with her. All she asked, I performed. When she must have the lesson explained, or the way to work out a sum demonstrated, or the lines repeated, or the passage in the book found and marked for her, I did it at once, calmly, however many times it might be required. Over and over.
Is it any wonder then, at the end of the day, when I ran down the driveway and back to Byblow Bottom, that my feet, of their own accord, went faster and faster, my breath came quicker and quicker, that I flung myself into the untidy village like a fish diving back into its native element?
***
The end of my sojourn at Othery came with dramatic suddenness.
The season once more was autumn. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and Triz seven or eight, still pale and frail but pretty as a primrose. Matters at Kinn Hall, I was aware, went badly; the Squire displayed open animosity against Lady Hariot while she, silent and reserved, kept her own counsel, never alluded to him in his absence and spoke to him only on matters of domestic necessity. It was not a happy household. Yet we children, like birds or small woodland creatures before an approaching storm, kept to our normal ways and went about our humble affairs, busy and self-absorbed, without paying much heed to what took place above our heads.
One day the Squire had gone off to join a meet of the stag-hounds at Ottermill, high on the moor. We, therefore, assuming him away for the day,
breathed more easily and, once our French and Italian lessons were done, roamed out into a sparkling world, for night storms had dashed many leaves from the trees, and the air, cleansed by rain, was wet and fresh.
‘The scent will be very good for Papa’s hunting,’ said Triz.
Strangely, for he never regarded her and spoke to her only to reprimand, she seemed to feel a kind of sorrowful affection for Mr Vexford; I think she perceived that he was a weak and not very intelligent man, who must be aware that his wife had him at a disadvantage and could always best him in argument if she chose; his only recourse was to rail and shout at her.
Lady Hariot was lying down in her bedroom with a headache – there had been furious words at breakfast, I gathered – so, after we had played in the garden for a while, we told Prue that we were going down to the cliff top to gather blackberries.
‘Don’t ye goo down on the rocks, now,’ warned Prue. ‘Tide’s a-making. ’Twill be high just after noon.’
Knowledge of the state of the tide came as naturally as breathing to the people of the coast. We promised that we would go no farther than the cliff top.
So, carrying baskets, we ran down the path of worn slippery rock, between meadows, to the rough clumps of bush that fringed the cliff top where I had first met Lady Hariot. I wondered what had become of Biddy; no news of her ever came back to Othery.
I was feeling melancholy, because Hoby that morning had received a letter from his father informing him that he had been secured a scholarship at Eton College, and was to transfer there at once.
‘’Tis very advantageous,’ Hoby said hopefully. ‘For sure I’ll get a King’s College Fellowship and can go on to Cambridge, and then I’ve a chance of a seat in Parliament or some public position. After all, a fellow can’t rusticate in Byblow Bottom all his life.’
‘That be true enough – ’ when I was down in the village, I naturally reverted to its language – ‘but, oh, Hoby, I’m feered that at Eton they’ll larrup and ill-use ye sore. Remember Dickie Chester.’
Dickie, one of the fifteen children of Lord S———, had gone to Eton and wrote many most miserable letters back to his sisters about the hideous conditions in the Long Chamber, the dormitory where all collegers slept together, locked in without ushers or masters, from eight at night till seven in the morning, where debauchery and tyranny and evil practices went unchecked. And how Ascot Heath, the Master, would beat seventy boys at one time, each as hard as the one before.
‘Well, I can stand up for myself,’ said Hoby stoutly, and clenched his fists. It was true he had grown tall and lanky enough, already as tall as a grown man, more likely due to a diet of poached pheasant and salmon than from Hannah’s haphazard housekeeping.
I knew that I would miss Hoby sorely and worry about him. Though he teased me, and did things that filled me with fury, and others of which I deeply disapproved, yet we were good friends and kept each other’s confidence. I was afraid that at Eton he would be held in very low esteem, because of his rustic manners. Unlike me, he had never been given the chance to learn the ways of gentlefolk – except on his father’s brief visits – and had often scornfully rejected my offers to correct his speech.
‘What the pize do it matter how a fellow talks?’
Thinking these anxious, melancholy thoughts about Hoby, as I dropped blackberries into my basket, I suddenly saw him run at speed over the broken ground at the head of the little coombe, or dingle, on the southernmost lip of which stood Kinn Hall.
Half a dozen boys from Byblow Bottom followed him, and they soon came panting up to Triz and me. She gazed at them with wonder and apprehension, for now she never had any dealings with the village children, and as a rule they kept out of her way.
‘Such fun!’ gasped Will. ‘Th’owd buck’s a-making this way, heading for the watter, see – any minute now I forecast ye’ll get a glim of mun.’
‘There!’ shouted Jon. ‘There mun be! Racken a’ll goo up the track to Ashett! No – a waint! A be a-coming this way! And theer be Squire, hard ahind him! How a ridth! Squire be raring mad, a rackon. What be tu? Tryin’ to head the buck?’
A huge stag was bounding across the meadows with a mixed pack of hounds in full cry close behind him, crying and yammering in a frenzy of excitement. The stag carried his head high with a desperate air as if, once he looked down, the weight of the massive antlers would cause him to trip and fall. The dogs’ tails threshed like branches in a gale.
‘Oh, the poor thing!’ cried Triz. ‘What will he do?’
‘A be makin’ for the watter,’ explained Will. ‘But ol’ Vexford be a-trying to cotch mun first.’
The Squire, galloping his grey cob as if seven devils were in pursuit, had taken a circle westwards and was now coming up along the cliff edge on the left hand side of the stag who, ignoring him, made full tilt for the break in the head of the cliff.
The rest of the hunt, far away in the rear, hallooed, shouted and blew on horns.
Everything happened at once, very fast.
The stag leapt out unhesitatingly from the cliff edge and fell down, down, twenty feet, into the tossing waves which were now at the tide’s highest point. But they were not deep enough to save the poor beast; we saw him crumple among rocks, and then his body was washed to and fro among them, still feebly struggling.
‘God dammit!’ shouted the Squire, galloping along the cliff edge.
At the same moment, the grey cob lost his footing on a treacherous bit of loose overhang. Man and horse plunged over the edge and fell, as the stag had done, down on to the barely covered rocks below.
‘Fegs! Look at that! Owd Squire be done for, I reckon!’ gasped Hoby. ‘Come on, lads! We’d best goo down and haul ’un out.’
He and the other boys scampered down the roughly cut steps that led to the beach. The rest of the hunt coming up, dismounted with cries of consternation. Some followed the boys. Some ran to the village for ropes, brandy, hurdles.
But nothing they did could benefit the Squire, who had dashed his brains out on a rock; or his poor grey nag, who had broken two legs and had to be shot.
***
The Squire’s younger brother, Frank Vexford, inherited the manor; he was a needy man who had hitherto lived in a precarious way, farming at Moretonhampstead, and he made his appearance up at Kinn Hall to claim his inheritance before the flowers had withered on the grave. Apart from the entail, the Squire had had a little money of his own (half of it Lady Hariot’s) but, because of the bad relation between them, every penny of this was left away from her, to other kindred, as he explained in a vengeful letter lodged with lawyers in Taunton.
‘Because my undutiful and blameworthy wife Hariot has absented herself from my bed and refused me my lawful rights of wedlock since the birth of her daughter, I hereby disinherit them and declare that they do not deserve any consideration whatsoever from me.’
‘Ah, the spiteful old bugger,’ said Hoby, when this news percolated about the village, as of course it very soon did. ‘What’ll the poor lady do?’
‘Go and live with her own kinsfolk, I suppose.’
I hardly dared go up to the Hall until a message came from Triz beseeching me to do so.
When I went, I made my way, as had become my usual habit, through a pair of french doors that led into what had been Lady Hariot’s favourite drawing room, where we children had been used to take our piano lessons. Since nobody was to be seen, I sat myself down at the pianoforte and began playing a soft, melancholy little sonata by Haydn, for I thought that this was the best way of advertising my presence to Triz.
A voice exclaimed: ‘Deuce take it, that’s a pretty tune! And you are a pretty little fairy – with your rosy cheeks and your copper-red hair – far prettier than my wan little tadpole of a niece! But who the blazes are you?’
The man who said this was staring at me across the top of the piano. I could guess
in a moment who he was, by his red complexion, small mean mouth and close-set eyes; he was as like the old Squire as one pea to another, and must be his brother. I jumped to my feet, saying, ‘Excuse me, sir! I did not know anybody was at hand; I will leave at once,’ nervously enough, but he came quickly round and caught me by the arm, fondling me in a very unwelcome manner.
‘Not so fast, not so fast, no harm done, my pretty –’ and then his eye fell on my right hand, and he retreated as if he had picked up a viper, exclaiming, ‘Devil take it, what’s that?’
I could have burst out laughing, the change in his demeanour was so sudden and so marked. But I made my escape and ran upstairs to the room that was still called the nursery, while behind me he was stamping and bawling, ‘Who is she? Get that monster out of my house!’
I found Triz and Lady Hariot hard at work packing clothes in boxes.
‘Oh, dear Lady Hariot! Where shall you go?’
She gave me a small, wry smile.
‘Well, my dear, we must just walk our chalks, as they say. I am lucky that my sister, Anna Ffoliot, in Lisbon, has always said that she would take us in if matters – if matters chanced to fall out as they have done. So – to Lisbon we must go.’
‘Lisbon? In Portugal ?’
‘Yes, my child, and there’s the advantage of studying the use of the globes! A Spanish vessel is due in Ashett this Thursday, and we must board her at break of day. Indeed it is a piece of good fortune for us that she calls this week, for funds are decidedly low – I won’t deny – and my brother-in-law Francis wishes us out of his house as soon as may be.’
My throat was tight with woe. I could hardly speak.
‘But – but – but – but this is your home.’
‘Not any longer, my poppet. Women build nests, but men make bequests, and scatter them. Heigh-ho!’
