Deception

by Joan Aiken

  Without any hem or needlework

  For once he was a true love of mine . . .”

  Chapter VI.

  Alvey had expected a summons, at some point, from Sir Aydon, to an interview in which he would admonish her about her past and lecture her about her future. But none came. Sir Aydon saw no need for it. His was neither a strong nor an optimistic nature; given agreeable circumstances he could be as cheerful and active as any, but the recent fatality had thrown the whole framework of his being ajar, and it would be months before he recovered.—Meanwhile Louisa was back at home, apparently behaving herself, making no trouble; all too well he remembered the stormy scenes of earlier years before she had been packed off to school in the south; he wished no repetition of those, and was glad that she appeared to have given over such ways. His daughters were of no interest to Sir Aydon. It was the part of girls to be biddable, industrious, and quiet; if they behaved otherwise, then there was something wrong with them, they were disordered, and he neither understood nor wished to have any dealings with them. Sir Aydon was good-natured up to a point; he could be generous, on his own terms; and he was possessed of physical courage, had led his brigade with considerable dash and earned the knighthood, to which none disputed his desert, in the battle of Willemstadt under the Duke of York’s command. Shortly afterwards being obliged to sell out on the death of his father, he had reluctantly left a military career to tend his estates, and passed the larger part of the ensuing twenty years in the hunting field. The estates were, in consequence, somewhat neglected, but still he had a respectable income from the coal that lay beneath a distant part of his land: enough to provide for his children and allow him to live as he chose. Marriage to Charlotte Fenwick, a Yorkshire heiress, after the death of his first wife Maria, had handsomely augmented his fortune, and the girls would be respectably dowered.—It was his sons who were the real affliction of his life and, since he detested affliction, and had no method of coping with it, he thought about his sons as little as possible. The imminent arrival home of his son James for Meg’s wedding was an evil which there was no eluding; he felt it like a black cloud of gloom, already covering half the sky. He could not talk to the boy; had nothing to say to him; that was the end of the matter. Boy! James already had the age and stature of a man. Yet, since going away to school, and then to Cambridge, his views and tastes had diverged so far from those of his father that they seemed to belong to different species.—And Tot bade fair to go the same way: sullen, sly, secretive, wilful, odd: god knows where the strain came from, not from the Winship side of the family, that was certain. The only one who had given him any joy, any joy at all, was the little fellow—but no use thinking about that. Indeed, thinking about that brought on such severe agony and terror, of a kind never before encountered, that a door instantly slammed in his mind. Any, any distraction was preferable, even that of one’s wife asking some trivial, irritating question.

  They were assembled in the breakfast parlour, the hot dishes on the sideboard, Sir Aydon awkwardly walking about eating his oatmeal. This ritual he achieved with no little difficulty, because of the two sticks required for his support. Watching the ceremonial feat, every morning, for Alvey, was an entertainment shot through with apprehension; yet his dexterity must certainly be applauded.

  “Why does your father eat his porridge walking about?” she had inquired of Isa.

  “Oh—from respect. Because oatmeal is the national dish of the north country. So men stand up while they eat it.”

  “Dear me! As when ‘God Save the King’ is played?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Why must not women also stand?”

  “I do not know,” replied Isa after a moment’s reflection, wrinkling her brow and screwing up her eyes. “I never gave the matter any thought. Women’s observance of such a practice is not important, I conclude.”

  I wonder what Wicked Lord Love would think of that? reflected Alvey, watching Sir Aydon add cream and salt to his portion of oatmeal. The dish containing it was of frail Japanese porcelain, brought home in the last century by Lady Winship’s grandfather, who had been an extensive traveller.

  “. . . Eh?” said Sir Aydon, abruptly coming out of his abstraction with the vague impression that his wife had addressed him several times. “I beg your pardon, my dear, what was that you said?”

  He treats her with a heartrending, gentle courtesy, Alvey thought; as one would a person who is mortally ill and not aware of it. Why? Is she mortally ill?

  “Mr Thropton,” said Lady Winship patiently for the third time. “Is coming to see you again this morning about arrangements for Meg’s wedding. And—” her voice shook and sank to a murmur “—about the little—about the child’s—”

  He made an angry, dismissive gesture with his hand. Amble walked swiftly from his station near the sideboard and received the empty oatmeal dish.

  “Kidneys, Sir Aydon?”

  “No, fish. No, a few eggs and a piece of ham. Can you not see the fellow, Charlotte?—Oh, I suppose I had better,” he muttered. Sir Aydon liked to get out in the mornings and hoist himself painfully about the grounds, interviewing bailiff, steward and gardeners, countermanding the orders he had given yesterday, looking into everything, and generally making his underlings long for the days when he would have been off a-hunting several hours before daylight. “What time does the fellow come?”

  “At noon.”

  Mr Thropton, Alvey recollected, was the vicar, who tutored James in Greek and Latin and now teaches Tot and Nish one day a week. He plainly had not taught them a great deal; they had acquired a few principal parts of verbs and declensions of nouns by rote, which they mumbled with no apparent understanding. Still, Miss Waskerley had not long been gone; perhaps Mr Thropton’s régime was of fairly recent duration.

  “A slice of oatcake, Emmy?”

  “Thank you; I will take a small portion.”

  Alvey had acquired a passion for the gritty, nutty oatcake, thin as a wafer, brittle as a biscuit, which was one of the staple foods of the household, served at every meal, sometimes as well as, sometimes in lieu of bread.

  She spread honey on it and ate it with relish.

  What a pleasant thing this breakfast ceremony is, she thought. So leisured. So civilized. Thick smooth damask on the table. Heavy silver. Asters in a cut-glass bowl. Amble presiding over the chafing-dishes. Sparkle of pale sun on red leaves around the window. Cloudhaugh shining in the distance. (Alvey was learning the names of the hills).

  “You never used to like oatcake, sister?” said Parthie inquisitively. “I remember that you detested it.”

  “Tastes change,” replied Alvey, raising her brows, looking coolly into the pale guileless eyes. “I have been deprived of oatcake four long years; now it tastes like ambrosia.”

  “What is ambrosia, sister?”

  “Go to the dictionary and look it up.”

  I must not snub Parthie so often, she thought repentantly. I must find some means of gaining her liking. Or at least respect. But she is such a pest!

  One of the dogs, Ginger the spaniel, came and flopped heavily against Alvey’s leg, looking up at her with soulful liver-and-yellow eyes, hoping for a crumb. Alvey, who disliked dogs, surreptitiously jerked her leg to dislodge him, but he only leaned the more heavily.

  “It is so sad that old Gelert died,” Parthie said in a false tone of melancholy.

  Nobody responded for some time until Isa, glancing up from a note she had been reading, said, kindly, “Why, Parthie? All dogs do die. And Gelert was seventeen years old. It was time he went.”

  “Gelert would have been so pleased to see sister Lou—sister Emmy back. He loved her dearly. He would have been so happy, if only he had lived to see her—”

  “Well, he didn’t,” snapped Sir Aydon. “Don’t talk so much, Parthie. Gels should be seen and not heard. Hold your tongue and eat your breakfast.�
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  “I have finished. May I be excused, Mamma?”

  “Yes.”

  Parthie said in a virtuous tone, “I will go and see if Grandmamma needs me,” and skipped clumsily from the room, leaving Alvey to congratulate herself on the death of old Gelert, to whom her arrival must have been a bitter disappointment.

  “Meg, you had best attend your father and Mr Thropton also. There will be a great many things to consider and discuss,” remarked Lady Winship, rising to leave the breakfast room.

  “Oh Mamma, must I? Is that necessary?” Meg came out of a pretty abstraction; to the uninformed eye she might have appeared to be thinking of her lover. In reality, Alvey knew, her thoughts were occupied with guimpes, frills, ruches, tucks, hem-stitched handkerchiefs, and paper patterns. “Must I?” she pleaded again. “I have so much to do with Grace and Mrs Galt.”

  “Yes, you must.” Lady Winship’s answer came with vague but inescapable authority as she herself escaped to go to her garden.

  “Oh—!” grumbled Meg, and then, “Well, I shall be in the sewing-room; I will come down when Mr Thropton is here. May I be excused, Papa?”

  Isa said, “Fanny Beaumont has sent a note inviting Meg and Emmy and me to spend the night of the Hexham assembly at her father’s house. May we do so, Papa? It is very kind of the Canon to suggest it—”

  Sir Aydon looked beleaguered. “You mean that you wish to attend the Hexham Assembly? Just now? And pass a night at Canon Beaumont’s house?” He sounded as if a trip to the South Pacific were in question. Isa replied patiently, “Meg and Fanny Beaumont are very fond of one another, Papa. And, once Meg is married and living at Tinnis Hall, which is so very much farther from Hexham they will have many fewer chances to meet. And it will be a chance for Emmy to meet—to renew old acquaintance with some of our neighbours. Also I am persuaded that our mother must have various commissions, relating to the wedding, which we could execute for her in Hexham.”

  Alvey plucked up her courage, remembering that Hexham boasted a circulating library and stationers’ shop.

  “I could purchase some books for the children,” she suggested.

  “Books?”

  “Lesson books,” she amended hastily. “They seem to have so few.” And what there are, far too babyish and years out of date, she could have added.

  “Books!” muttered Sir Aydon again, his red, weather-beaten countenance creased sideways in disgust, as if he had bitten a lemon. It was not so much the idea of the books themselves; simply that any innovation, the effort arising from any decision requiring to be made, irked him so severely that it was almost agony. Amble, refilling his master’s cup, gave the young ladies a reproving look. “You must ask your mother,” said Sir Aydon, and, ignoring the refilled cup, limped with speed from the room, adding, “When Mr Thropton comes, Amble, I shall be somewhere about the stables.”

  Alvey said to Tot and Nish, who were about to slide from the breakfast-room, “I shall be up in the Tower Room in ten minutes to hear your recitation.” Their faces fell; they gave her melancholy, acquiescent nods and disappeared. Isa looked after them in mild surprise.

  “They seem remarkably biddable. How in the world did you achieve that?”

  Alvey replied after a moment’s thought, “I believe it was a lucky chance.”

  Then she ran up to the room she shared with Meg. In her drawer of the window table she kept, as well as the manuscript of Wicked Lord Love, a small memorandum book in which she scribbled down her thoughts and impressions; she liked to do this as soon as possible after the occurrences that had given rise to them. Now she jotted down her thought about Sir Aydon, and added, “How can he have received a decoration for promptness and courage in battle? But that was twenty years ago. What has changed him since? Was it the hunting accident?”

  Grace the maid, shaking Meg’s coverlet, said, “Th’owd leddy was asking for ye, Miss Emmy, hinny. Bids ye gan in and hev a word wi’ her on your way up to the childer.”

  That will save going all the way down and up the outer stair, Alvey thought. But she was not a little apprehensive, as she set off, at the prospect of the forthcoming interview. Old Mrs Winship’s pouched eye had a discomposing shrewdness in its gleam.

  When Alvey knocked and entered she found the grandmother still in bed, wrapped in a woollen bedgown and warm nightcap over her scanty white locks and tied under her chin, for the mornings were growing daily sharper; a thick white frost, today, rimed the gravel sweep, which was screened from sun by the piny hillside until midday. No footprint had as yet defaced the pure white, only the prints of birds, Alvey saw, as she stood by the old lady’s window.

  Parthie was bustling importantly about the large bare room with silver-topped toilet bottles, primrose vinegar and oil of almonds.

  “Put those away, child, and bring me my spectacles. And be off with you,” commanded the old lady. “You can go and help your sister Meg, I daresay she has plenty of seams that need sewing.”

  Parthie left, with a resentful look. The cat Maudge, which had been basking in a lozenge of sunshine on the polished floor, came and rubbed against Alvey’s leg, and she scratched under its chin.

  Old Grizel scrutinized her thoughtfully for a moment, and said, “Now, miss! Pay attention! You seem to have returned with a degree more sense than you took away. Which is no bad thing. Matters here—as you or any fool can see—are all at sixes and sevens. I daresay they will improve, but not without a push. A steady head is needed. Anything you can do to mend matters, to give your parents’ thought a better turn—to take their minds off this sad business of Annie Herdman and her bairn—will be for the good of the whole household.—I treat you, you see, almost as if you were a stranger, an impartial bystander; because you have been away for so long.”

  “Oh, but—” began Alvey confusedly, taken by surprise, “That is, what can I possibly—?”

  I am not here to mend matters for the Winships, she thought. I am here to write my book!

  “Quiet, girl! Let’s have no mawkish hypocrisy. I was pleased to see you come back with so little of that air of self-importance and superiority, and that morbid longing to distinguish yourself by martyrdom, which made you so detestable as a sixteen-year-old.”

  And as a twenty-year-old, thought Alvey. How well she knows Louisa.

  “Don’t spoil the improvement by false modesty,” continued Mrs Winship, giving Alvey another basilisk stare. Like many persons who are slightly deaf, she had a trenchant, resonant, commanding voice. That, together with the effect of the very thick-lensed glasses she wore perched on her eagle’s beak of a nose, and the paperwhite pallor of her crumpled face, produced the effect of a statue giving utterance, some formidable oracle or Delphic Sibyl. Alvey stood mute and paralysed.

  “Of course—in a way,” said the old woman thoughtfully, “it is quite a pity you are not kicking up a dust and demanding to carry the gospel to Sumeria, or wherever it was.” She sniffed. “That would have caused a different kind of commotion; might have shaken them out of their melancholy.”

  “Well I am afraid I have no such intentions,” said Alvey firmly. A pretty kettle of fish it would be, she thought, if they suddenly agreed to permit me to go after all, and there were two of us out there converting the heathen. “In any case—when my brother James comes home, that is bound to stir up the tragedy all over again.”

  It seemed to her that the old woman gave her an especially glittering glance.

  “Yes, miss! And that is what I am wishful to speak about. When James comes, there is sure to be trouble. And your sisters will be of precious little use, for they never are. Meg is too self-absorbed—”

  “It is her wedding, after all.”

  “Don’t interrupt. Certainly it is her wedding; and a good thing too. For all the use she is, she might as well be out of the house as in it; I wish that mutton-headed Chibburn joy of her. As for Isa, mooning on about Nat
ure in some mystical way, her head’s too far in the clouds to be any practical help.”

  “That isn’t true!” objected Alvey, remembering Isa’s kindness and timely interventions on many occasions.

  “Yes it is true. And don’t contradict me. Nobody pays any heed to Parthie—fortunately!—and the young ones are too small. So that leaves you, miss.”

  “Ma’am, I do not fully comprehend your meaning.”

  “Pho, pho, girl, don’t talk moonshine.”

  “What would you have me do, Grandmother?”

  How odd! thought Alvey. I never had a grandmother to confide in. If mother’s mother—or father’s—had been living, had been there—matters might have been different . . .

  “You know what I wish, girl, perfectly well. You don’t lack for sense! I’ve been taking notice of you, these last few days; you sit there demure and mumchance enough, but you miss nothing, and you’ve a glib, canny tongue, too, when you please to speak. I want you to put your heart into this business: when James comes, to try and bring him and Aydon into some kind of accord—or at least avert any disastrous breach—”

  But I don’t even know this James! Alvey wanted to expostulate.

  “Oh, I’m aware that you and James were never good friends in the past,” Mrs Winship went on, with another penetrating glance. “All the more reason he should turn to you now, if he finds you friendly, if he finds you ready to be his partisan and give him good advice. For a partisan he will certainly need!”

  They may need one even more, reflected Alvey, picturing James’s very probable disgust and outrage at the parents whose selfish, uncaring and thoughtless usage had condemned his mistress and child to a needless death.

  “The child—wee Geordie—”

  “Oh, not only that affair. There will be other sources of friction. I have heard from James—He writes to me sometimes—” Her glance went to the little rosewood desk. “Which reminds me. Fetch me here those papers, child. The bundles tied with brown ribbon.”

  Alvey went to the desk and carried over several packets. One of them might have been the bundle which Parthie had been investigating the other day. On closer inspection, it was indubitably letters in Louisa’s neat ladylike handwriting.