The Embroidered Sunset

by Joan Aiken

  “You know Mrs. Crabtree, then?”

  “Oh yes, dearie, she always lived at Appleby. She and I were never close friends, of course, but still I shan’t object to a chat with her now and then.”

  Aha, thought Lucy, here’s a first-hand witness coming up; someone who actually knows Aunt Fennel. What a piece of luck. Patience, patience, and all will be neatly unravelled. Dear Max, I’ll be just a little longer than I expected, on account of the measles and this job, but it’s very temporary—something tells me strongly that Mrs. Marsham doesn’t want me sculling around in her one-woman kingdom longer than strictly necessary—so the end is in sight.

  She glanced up at the rise of moorland which they were skirting. A sky of plum-grey cumulus had assembled, through which the sun ducked palely; scurrying cloud shadows over the convex land were exactly the same colour as the sky above but in a darker tone. Far away, on a humped bloomy shoulder of hill three immense silvery globes were aligned across the slope like beached moons.

  “What are those things, Aunt Fennel?”

  “What things, dearie?”

  “Over there.”

  “Too far for my poor old eyes. What are they like?”

  “Round and silver, like balloons, only bigger.”

  “Oh, those. Something to do with the Russians, dear. When the Russians are coming I believe they ring a bell.”

  “Kind of bicycle bells. I see,” Lucy said cheerfully. Aunt Fennel always came out the winner in these little contests, but Lucy bore no ill-feeling on that account. She was becoming daily fonder of the old lady.

  “Lot of nonsense, if you ask me,” Aunt Fennel went on. “If the Russians did come, I daresay they’d turn out to be like anybody else. Very fond of cucumbers, I believe, and jam in their tea. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s home-made jam.”

  Lucy drove slowly, her eyes on the racing purple-black shadows.

  “Don’t you sometimes feel like doing another picture, Aunt Fennel?” she said.

  She put the question, expecting another fobbing-off answer about weak eyesight, but Aunt Fennel surprised her by saying,

  “Yes, dearie, sometimes I do. Well—you never know, if there’s some old garden-room or store-room at the Hall where I could have my bits and pieces and paints—I don’t deny it would be rather nice.”

  Lucy almost held her breath. Aunt Fennel was smiling to herself, a sweet, secretive smile, like that of a frail, ancient mouse who has just discovered a whole Stilton cheese. “If my eyes are up to it, of course. But we shall have to see. That matron probably wouldn’t allow me,” she ended tranquilly. “Fond of her own way you can see that one is.”

  “Where are all your picture materials, Aunt Fennel?”

  “Why, at the cottage, dearie. At High Beck.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to go and have a look over the place—see your things aren’t getting mildewy or eaten by moths?”

  The old lady considered.

  “Well—I don’t know—” she said doubtfully.

  “Do you have the key on you?”

  “Oh yes, dear, of course; I always carry it.” Aunt Fennel laid a hand protectively over her diaphragm.

  “Well then—?”

  “But suppose That Other One was still lurking around, waiting for me to come back?”

  “Aunt Fennel.”

  “Yes, dearie?”

  “Who is That Other One?”

  “Oh, dearie, I couldn’t tell you!” The old lady sounded appalled at such a suggestion. She pulled out a handkerchief from a little black velvet bag and pressed it against her forehead. Her lips trembled. A violent green flavour of tansy drifted about the car.

  “But why not?”

  “If he knew that you knew, he’d be after you too, as like as not.”

  Lucy knit her brow over this tangle.

  “But, Aunt Fen—”

  “Well, dearie?”

  “How do you know that I don’t know?”

  “Well, you just asked me, didn’t you? Where’d be the sense in asking if you knew?”

  “Oh gosh,” Lucy said, “we’re going round and round. But what made you certain that I wasn’t something to do with That Other One? Suppose he really sent me to clobber you?”

  “Well, dearie, I was a little doubtful at first—” Doubtful, thought Lucy, remembering that agonising pursuit over the shingle. “—But when I came to know your character, of course I very soon saw you couldn’t have had anything to do with That Other One. She’s a good little thing, I thought, as soon as I knew your character.”

  A thin, birdlike claw came out and patted Lucy’s hand on the steering-wheel; Lucy gave the claw a squeeze, replaced it gently in the owner’s lap, and drove on, feeling unusually humble.

  “Dearie—”

  “Yes, Aunt Fen?”

  “You are looking out for that tractor, aren’t you?”

  “Oops, thank you—not quite my usual care and attention!”

  With a slight grin, Lucy deflected her course. The danger had not been imminent; the tractor, on which was mounted a telescopic crane attachment with a rake and saw-blade combined, was chugging slowly along on the other side of the lane, demolishing the hedge to half its height. The driver’s attention was concentrated on keeping his chopping attachment tilted at the right angle; he had little to spare for other traffic.

  “None of that sort of thing when I was young,” Aunt Fennel said disapprovingly. “People cut hedges properly with bill-hooks in those days, instead of leaving them a nasty haggled mess. And as for those roadside sprays—they just ruin the wild flowers.”

  “But what about That Other One if you come to live at Wildfell Hall?” Lucy said, harking back to their previous topic. “Shan’t you be worried about him there?”

  “There’ll always be company—he wouldn’t dare come into a big, well-run place like that. Besides, he wouldn’t expect me to come back there, you see.”

  This sounded rational, and was certainly unarguable.

  “Did you know that man driving the tractor?” Lucy said irrelevantly.

  “Good gracious, dearie, I couldn’t see as far as that—not to recognise a face!”

  Thirty all, thought Lucy. She said mildly, glancing sideways,

  “Your hearing aid is switched off, did you know?”

  “I can always hear much better in the car,” Aunt Fennel explained serenely. “It’s the vibrations, I daresay.”

  Forty-thirty.

  “Anybody you’d like to call on in Appleby as we pass through?”

  “I don’t think so, love, thank you all the same. Dill and I had got so old, we didn’t bother with seeing neighbours much. Most of our own friends had died long ago, young folks don’t want to be bothered visiting two queer old ladies—daresay they hardly knew which of us was which.”

  Game and set to Aunt Fennel, Lucy thought.

  “—But I would rather like to go and just look at High Beck,” Aunt Fennel ended. “Do you think you can get your car up the lane?”

  “I’ll have a darn good try. But what about That Other One?”

  “Well, I was thinking—you can lock up the car, can’t you? You always lock it when you go off and leave it in that underground car park place?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you could lock me inside the car, couldn’t you, while you went to the cottage? And then even if That Other One was about, he couldn’t get me, could he?”

  As so often with Aunt Fennel, Lucy hardly knew whether to laugh, cry, or curse; the old lady’s mixture of fantasy and common sense filled her with admiration and despair. Never having lived at close quarters with a car before, Aunt Fennel had taken a huge fancy to little PHO; she was never so happy as when being driven about, no matter where, and now seemed to have endowed the little Austin with magical protective qualities as well.


  “Sure I could lock you in. That’s a fine plan,” Lucy said gently. “What do you want me to do at the cottage?”

  “Well—you could have a little look round, make sure things aren’t getting too damp. And—yes, you could bring out one or two things—canvases and tubes of paint, and my embroidery bits, if any of them are worth saving.”

  “Right, then, here we go.” Lucy braked to a crawl and turned left up a cart-track which parallelled the stream on the opposite bank from the haunted public lavatory.

  “There’s a footbridge by the cottage, isn’t there?”

  “That’s right, dearie. There’s room to leave the car just this side of the footbridge. Sometimes in really bad weather, when there’s been a lot of rain or snow up on the moor, the beck floods right up over the footbridge and then the cottage is quite cut off; you can’t climb the cliff at the back, you see, or we couldn’t anyway; once we were cut off for three weeks.”

  “That must have been fun,” Lucy remarked, cautiously manoeuvring little PHO on up the steep stony track, with the stream in its gully below on her left.

  “Oh it was, dearie.” Aunt Fennel’s tone was full of reminiscent pleasure. “Of course we always had plenty of stores and our own eggs and vegetables—Dill made the bread, and we had parsnip wine and elderberry jam.”

  “What about mail . . . fuel?”

  “Plenty of wood. And no one ever wrote—except once your Aunt Rose, to thank me for the pictures. Delighted with them, she said they were.”

  Lucy felt a pang, remembering Aunt Rose: “Wilbie told me to write a letter of thanks and put them up in the attic. She’d never know.”

  She said warmly, “They were marvellous pictures, Aunt Fen. I specially liked the Infant Samuel. Are there any left in the cottage?”

  “I daresay, dearie. I really can’t remember,” the old lady said vaguely. “I gave away most of my things when I made up my mind to leave. Old Colonel Linton said he’d take them round to people for me. Very kind, he was; when Dill was alive he often used to come in and have a glass of our home-made wine.”

  “Colonel Linton. Would he be the old boy who lives at the vicarage? White hair and rather deaf and short-tempered?”

  “He’s had a lot of troubles, dearie.” Aunt Fennel’s tone was reproving. “He used to own the Hall and all the land round here, you know, but he lost all his money at the races and had to sell up. Very sad that was; his people had been here since goodness knows when.”

  Another first-hand witness; good, thought Lucy, edging little PHO away from the precipitous bank of the stream and into a kind of niche in the steep bank on her right. I must go back and have another try at Colonel Linton.

  She parked and got out by the footbridge. Aunt Fennel began a lengthy rummage among her garments; first she removed several scarves, then unbuttoned the front of her woollen dress and liberty bodice. Some hooks about midway down the front of her corset were then unfastened with considerable difficulty.

  “Can I help?” asked Lucy.

  “No thank you, dearie, I can manage; ha, here we are.” She hauled on a sort of fishing-line attached to a safety-pin and up came a little chamois-leather bag, warm and creased. “This is where I keep the wealth, you see,” and once again her face broke into its triumphant smile. Incredulous, Lucy had a momentary glimpse of a thickish wad of currency notes before Aunt Fennel extracted a door-key from the middle of the wad, which she replaced in the bag. She then began the complicated process of restowing and rebuttoning.

  “Aunt Fennel—”

  “Yes, dearie?”

  “Do you think it’s sensible to carry all that about with you?”

  “Where else would I carry it, dearie?”

  This seemed unanswerable.

  “But if you’ve got such a lot of ready cash, why go to all that trouble to change a cheque at the drugstore?”

  Aunt Fennel was scandalised. “This is only for emergencies.”

  “Oh, I see . . .”

  Rather shaken, Lucy got out of the car and carefully locked Aunt Fennel inside it.

  “Shan’t be long!” she called loudly, emphasising lip movements, and made her way down to the footbridge. It was a slender affair, made of transverse wooden slats which were slung on two strands of heavy fence wire, triple-twisted; it jiggled and swung as Lucy crossed it, and she had to hold on to the wire guard-rail on both sides. Below her the cider-coloured beck dashed between mossy stones. Down three wooden steps from the bridge—what a structure for two old ladies to cross every time they went to the village!—and then up a stairway of irregular stone slabs to where High Beck cottage perched, halfway up the bank-side. Terraced flower-beds in front of the cottage had reverted to wild but still showed a few marigolds and nasturtiums among the tangle of rank growth. Two granite pig-troughs on either side of the front door were full of buttercups.

  The key turned rustily and Lucy stepped inside.

  A smell of dank and cold met her; damp stone primarily, and behind that a whiff of soot and mouldering wood. A flight of narrow stairs faced the porch; doors lay on either side; Lucy chose the left and found herself in a large kitchen with a red-flagged floor, a dresser, a grandfather clock stopped at twenty to five, a table, and two wooden stools. In one wall was set a primitive cooking-range with oven; a door at the back led to a scullery, and there were seats inset under the two windows, which had heavy wooden shutters pushed back. No pictures on the papered walls. Lucy tried the other little front room, which had evidently been used as a parlour and had a trellised wallpaper with roses and bluebirds, very damp and peeling. No pictures here either, but in a fireside cupboard she unearthed a box full of embroidery silks and scraps of material, too sodden and mildewed to be any use. Upstairs in one of the two little bedrooms stood a stack of old frames and pictures, the kind found in farmhouses, Victorian engravings and water-colours. One or two of them had been painted over with a matte colour, or had a bit of linen stretched across them; evidently Aunt Fennel had thriftily used these as the base for her own works. Lucy also found some tubes of oil paint, hardened and useless. No pictures; evidently Colonel Linton had made a clean sweep, or somebody else had; it would, of course, be easy for anybody to enter the cottage with its broken windows.

  She turned and looked out of the casement at the tree-filled glen and slender, spidery bridge. Down below, out of sight from here, the beck could be heard chattering among its rocks. On the other side little PHO and Aunt Fennel waited patiently.

  Lucy turned back to her investigation of the house. She did not know what she had expected to find; only that she was not finding it. Photographs? Evidence of identity? There was nothing of that kind. But what met and engulfed her, stronger than the smell of damp soot, was an almost unbearable sadness, a feeling of betrayal.

  “You abandoned me! You left me alone to die!”

  “I couldn’t help it.” Lucy muttered—to whom? To the house? “It wasn’t my fault! I wasn’t even here.” But the reproach went on assailing her, until she wanted to press her fingers into her ears, into her heart. It was like a continuous cry of pain. Thank God I didn’t bring Aunt Fennel up here, she thought. If I feel it so, how could she have borne it? No wonder she left. It’s as if there were a curse on the place.

  Her head had started to throb violently. She picked up an armful of the canvases at random and made her way awkwardly down the narrow stairs with them. Pausing in the kitchen to rearrange the load she was overtaken by a giddy spell and had to wait, leaning against the doorpost, till her sight cleared. For a moment she had the mad impression that she could see two images, one superimposed on the other, like a three-colour picture out of register. She saw the kitchen furnished, sunlit, fire in the range, cat asleep on a rag hearthrug, wallflowers in a brass pot on the table, a grey-haired figure in a print overall busy chopping something on a pastryboard . . . The picture faded.

  “Hell�
�s bells,” Lucy muttered. “Seeing spooks, yet! I’m getting out of here.”

  “Come back!” the little house entreated as she dumped her load of canvases and turned to lock the door. “Please, please come back!” Then, ominously, “You will come back, you’ll have to come back.”

  “Oh yeah? You have got a hope!” She stuck the key in her pocket and hitched up the canvases once more. A tabby cat, the one she had seen on her former visit, wrinkled its nose at her in a silent hiss and fled round a waterbutt. Lucy picked her way cautiously down the stone steps. She felt drained and sick; her head still throbbed. Negotiating the unsteady swing bridge with the canvases took all her concentration. She made her way slowly back along the track to little PHO. Aunt Fennel appeared to be dozing, chin on chest, and started violently when Lucy unlocked the car door.

  “I got some canvases, Aunt Fennel, but the embroidery things weren’t worth bringing. Too damp—all rotten. I’ll put these in the trunk.”

  She did so, then sank into the driver’s seat.

  “How did the house seem, dearie?”

  How to explain, or how to conceal, that frightening miasma of grief and reproach?

  “Oh well—it was rather dusty and damp,” she said.

  “You have to expect that when a house is left empty,” Aunt Fennel said placidly. “Otherwise everything all right? You look a bit pale dearie—you didn’t see anybody? No one about? Not—not That Other One?” She sank her voice to a whisper.

  “No—nobody. It’s just that one of my headaches has hit me. It’ll be better in a minute.”

  “Oh well now, we know what’s good for that, don’t we—comfrey tablets. And a sniff of my rosemary essence-such a good thing Mrs. Tilney let me use her kitchen to make some.”

  “I can’t swallow a tablet just now, Aunt Fennel, bless you, but the rosemary’s lovely—a big help. Let’s get out of here, shall we?”