by Joan Aiken
“Both of us? Have you take leave of your wits? Both of us? When you have not a shadow of right to be there?”
“No? But I must leave you; I shall have a great deal to do. I wish you both good day.”
Alvey made her way down the stairs and across the market-place to the Black Bull. She had intended visiting the bookshop—she had ordered Alphonsine, The Female Quixote, Margiana, and Ida of Athens, and hoped to find them ready for her; she wanted to ask Mr Allgood if there were yet any tidings of her novel—but all these plans had been driven completely out of her head. Finding an ostler she had the Phantom resaddled and set off mechanically on the well-known road across the Tyne bridge and back to Birkland.
The servants must be told, she thought. I cannot bear that they should think me a deceitful interloper who sneaks off without daring to wait for the truth to be discovered. But the family? The children? Old Mrs Winship? Sir Aydon? How can I bear to tell them—just now?
It is too sudden. I should have had some warning; some notice.
Well, to do her justice, Louisa did say that she had written me a letter about her change of plan. I wonder what became of that letter?
It was a fortunate circumstance that old Phantom knew every stone and heather-clump along the road home, for his rider did little to guide him; she rode with a loose rein and used her handkerchief more than once.
Suppose I never ride this road again? After tomorrow? How shall I be able to bear that?
Through the tight net of her grief, Alvey was acutely conscious, more than ever before, of the beauty that lay about her. Even the road under her horse’s hoofs seemed to have acquired a luminosity that she had never previously observed; the specks of granite grit shone like diamonds in the sun’s declining rays. As she rode over the high spine of the hills between Hexham and Birkland all that familiar, far distant landscape, distinct in every detail, it seemed, for over seventy miles, to the mountains of Cumbria and the western ocean, was invested with a mournful clarity and brilliance, like the dream of a prisoner waiting for his execution.
And Louisa did not even want to come back! She sets no value on this place. Her only object is the money, in order to found a seamen’s mission in Liverpool.
I suppose I should really be grateful, mused Alvey, shaking a couple of tears from her eyes in order not to miss the curved shapes of the pine-tree tops in the Birkland plantation, while the Phantom began his careful plod down the steep hill—as a writer I should feel gratitude for the existence of Louisa. What a character! I am quite sorry now that I did not introduce her into the story of Lord Love. She would soon have sent him to the right-about.—I wonder if she did really convince herself that the whole substitution scheme had been my suggestion? I fancy that she might be capable of such a mental transposition; her own intentions are so supremely important to her that any obstacle to them—even her own faulty behaviour—must seem so trifling as to be almost non-existent. And then, quite non-existent.
Am I a shameful coward not to dig in my heels, refuse to quit Birkland so tamely, remain and face the horrible scene that must take place with the two of us proffering our different versions of the story?
Well, if I am a coward, it is not only for my own sake. It would be too childish and selfish to remain and dispute what is, after all, a point of no ultimate significance. When I am aware that the family have so many other, and graver matters to distress them.
I could write to Sir Aydon, she thought wistfully—perhaps when I am established in Newcastle, I could write to him from there, to explain—
The sight of the old grey house through the pine trunks, almost undid her. I will take care to remember it like this, she promised herself, with the sun’s rays falling sideways on red bark and grey stone. Then, to her considerable surprise, as she came closer, she perceived a whole group of persons, out on the gravel sweep in front of the house. They all seemed to be talking excitedly.
Alvey was reminded, for a brief, nostalgic moment, of her first arrival at Birkland; of how Lady Winship had come with uncharacteristic speed from the front entrance to warn the girls about the fate of poor wee Geordie.
How terrified I was then, Alvey remembered. And oh, how I wish this was that day again!
But what has happened? It must be something of a terrific nature to fetch them all out—Sir Aydon, Amble, Surtees, Blackett—Lumley—the children—who can have arrived?
Then she noticed a stranger—a tanned, weathered young man whom she was sure she had never seen before, though his cast of countenance was in some way familiar. A cousin, a nephew?
“Who is that?” she murmured to Surtees, as he came to help her from the saddle.
“‘Tis young Sim Whittingham, Miss Emmy, poor Annie Herdman’s cousin back from the wars. He’s been telling Sir Aydon how he was took by the press-gang and born off to sea, eighteen months agone, and only won free from his ship when the peace come, and then he was a plaguy long way from home, in the West Indies, and had to work his passage back, and only come in to the port of Newcassel yesterday—”
“Poor fellow,” said Alvey, wondering parenthetically if he had come to Newcastle on the same ship as Louisa and her lieutenant. “That Press Gang was certainly a shocking, wicked institution.”
“You’re reet there, Miss Emmy,” said Surtees, leading the Phantom away to the stables.
Skirting the excited group, Alvey slipped hastily indoors, grateful for the opportunity to make her way upstairs to her own room while everybody’s attention was focussed on the newcomer.
In a vague manner it occurred to her that the household seemed unusually stirred by this arrival; had Sim been a groom? a gardener? a house servant? She did not recall his name having been referred to above a couple of times, casually, by the children; what was his connection, apart from his relationship to Annie? Something about a sled . . . ?
Her mind was so tired and bruised from the encounter with Louisa that she could spare little energy for conjecture; the true significance of his return did not come home to her until dinner time when the children told her with round eyes:
“Sim is here! We were afraid he might be dead, but he’s come back. And he’s told Papa that he was the father of Annie’s baby.”
“What?”
“Well; we knew that all the time, of course,” added Nish.
Alvey gazed at the child blankly, in silence, for a moment; finally, finding her voice, said, “You knew all the time?”
“Yes; when we met Annie running up to Pike Force that evening, she told us to say goodbye to Sim for her, if ever he came home again. She didn’t know where he’d gone. He was her dear lover, she said. And we weren’t to tell a soul else.”
“And so you have kept quiet about it all this time?”
“Of course,” said Tot, and Nish nodded. “She asked us to.”
And what else, Alvey wondered, may those children know about, that they think it better not to reveal? Or about which they have been asked to keep silent?
Sir Aydon said heavily, “He’s a good, decent fellow, poor Sim. He took the news like a man, though anybody could see it was a sore blow to him. He was truly attached to Annie. Not like old Amos . . . Sim used to work over at Tinnis, for Chibburn, but I shall offer him a position here, if he wishes; looking after estate matters, under Lumley, perhaps. Lumley’s not so young as he used to be. Whittingham’s a good, handy lad, and has got a bit of book-learning in the navy, he tells me, bettered himself. Ay, ay, it was a bad business, a bad business . . .”
“He looks a little like James,” Alvey said absently. “I was trying to think, before dinner, of whom he reminded me. It is James, of course—” Her mind was still principally elsewhere.
Sir Aydon cleared his throat.
“Well, as to that—I daresay you have forgotten—perhaps never knew?—that Sim’s mother was said to be my uncle Robert’s daughter—”
&nb
sp; From what seemed another lifetime, Alvey remembered Isa’s voice saying, “bastards were quite a commonplace in our family during the last century. It is said that our grandfather and great-uncles fathered dozens, about the countryside . . .”
How stupidly frightened I was, on that ride towards happiness.
Well, she told herself robustly, perhaps I shall find happiness in the town of Newcastle. Who knows what is waiting for me there?
“And that naturally accounted,” Sir Aydon was explaining laboriously—for whose benefit? Alvey really must pull herself together and attend to him—”that accounted, you see—the likeness transmitted through two generations—accounted for people taking the notion into their heads that wee Geordie must be the child of James—or—or myself—”
And perhaps, poor man, you wished it was so, Alvey thought briefly. How can I take my books? Must I leave them behind? I do not see how I can carry a bundle of books on horseback. I had best leave a box of things and ask Louisa to see that they are sent on to me when I have a direction to which they can be forwarded. All that has to be arranged . . .
She felt unutterably desolate.
After dinner she went to visit the old lady who was greatly brisked up and full of interest at the news of Sim’s return.
“At least,” she said, “that clears up one skein of the mystery. Sim Whittingham! Well, well, why did I never guess at such a likely solution? But it is true he was not here very often; working over at Tinnis he only revisited Birkland on feast days and holidays . . . Let us hope, at all events, that Charlotte, now she knows Aydon is free from imputation, may see fit to issue forth from her seclusion . . .”
But if it was she who killed the child?
Suppose that is another secret that Nish and Tot have been been asked not to reveal?
“I hope she may come out. Oh, I do hope so,” said Alvey. “Ma’am, there’s something I must tell you.”
“What is it, child? You look very pale. You have no ill news of Meg? Or of Parthie?”
“No, nothing of that kind, no ill news at all. In fact, in a way, I suppose you could call it good news. Ma’am I believe that you have always, or almost from the start, been aware that I was not the real Louisa—have you not?”
“Humph!” said old Grizel. She regarded Alvey sharply, quirking up the corners of her pouched mouth into a sceptical twist. “Don’t tell me that you are commencing to have a tender conscience about that, at this late stage? You have played the part of Louisa a great deal better than she would have played it herself. Yes, yes, of course I knew! Saw through you from the start. Had received a letter from Louisa—some long time previously, while she was at that school, presumably before she had conceived the plan of substitution—describing the extraordinary resemblance between herself and one of her school-mates—put two and two together, therefore, when she became, all of a sudden, so unexpectedly compliant about renouncing her missionary ambitions.—Well, well, what is it? Louisa has not won a martyr’s crown, I trust—not been put to death by incensed Hindoos?”
“Oh, no—”
“Then what? You’re in some predicament, hey? Just as I expected. You’re in love with James and wish to marry him, is that it?”
“No, no, ma’am, nothing of that nature.” Though Alvey could not help clenching her hands. She took a deep breath and said, “It is simply that the real Louisa has returned.”
Later she went to tell the servants. As she had expected, the news came as no surprise to any of them.
“Aabody cud tell ye weren’t Miss Lou,” said Mrs Slaley. “We kenned it fra the first. Weel, not preceesely the first, but verra soon; yer ways were that different—”
“Miss Lou always fainted dead away at sight o’ blood,” said Amble. “I always did ask myself how she’d fare in wild, foreign parts—”
“An’ yon cat o’ the owd leddy’s could never abide her—”
“Aweel, she jist didna have yer nature, Miss Emmy, that’s the lang and the short of it.”
“And mun ye go? Canna ye bide? There’s room for the twain o’ ye, and we’d a deal liefer have ye than her. She was a sour-natured body, even when she was a wean in her cradle, was Miss Lou. And that’s a fact.”
“No, no, Mrs Slaley, there’s no place here for two of us. And she’s the rightful child of the house, after all. She wants to come back, she wishes me to leave. I plan to go to Newcastle, I expect I shall be able to earn a living there by teaching French or music—”
“Ye can bide with my sister Bessy,” said Mrs Slaley at once. “She’ll be prood to have ye. And that way we’ll no’ lose touch with ye. She has a bakery in the street called the Side, next to the Collingwood Arms tavern—”
Last, Alvey went to say goodnight to the children.
“I have hardly seen you all day,” she said.
“Well, who chose to go to Hexham? And never brought us back any books! What was the point of going?”
Alvey could not speak, but Tot said kindly—
“Well, tomorrow we’ll work hard all morning at our lessons. And perhaps we won’t even go out with Papa in the afternoon. He’ll wish to talk a great deal with poor Sim, I daresay.”
Nish was half asleep. She muttered, “I wonder if Sim’s coming back will make old Amos feel more friendly towards our family? Now he knows wee Geordie wasn’t James’s child, or Papa’s . . .”
“You should not talk about such things,” said Alvey absently. “You are too young.”
“Why? When everybody knows about them. And we knew, after all, the whole time,” Tot pointed out.
Alvey was sitting on Nish’s bed, where both children were curled up. Darkness came late these days; the room was luminous with dusk; it was still possible to see.
Tell them or not? she thought. No. I can’t. I’m a coward. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated. They would argue. And that would be too painful.
She said goodnight and quietly left the room. How could I dare to sit in judgment on James? I am just as great a coward as he was.
She called back, “Don’t stay awake too late talking!”
As for herself, she was up most of the night, packing, and slept not at all, and rose at five in the morning.
Come back tomorrow at this hour, Louisa had said; but Alvey could not bear, now that sentence of banishment had been issued, to remain an extra half-hour, an extra five minutes, at Birkland. She would ride to Hexham and wait there, in the abbey church, until it was time for the coach to Newcastle.
“I fair hate to see ye go, Miss Emmy,” said Surtees, leading round the Phantom.
Alvey nodded, not trusting her voice. Then she thought of something.
“Just a moment, Surtees.”
Detaching a crooked pin from her collar, she walked across the sweep and dropped it into the Lion pool. Several others lay there, slowly rusting. The ferns drooped around the edge of the basin. The clear water gushed down, out of the lion’s mouth, and would go on doing so for hundreds of years.
Then Alvey let Surtees help her into the saddle, and rode off along the road to Hexham.
Chapter XVI.
Mrs Bessie Robson had a pie-and-cake shop in the Side, Newcastle. The two downstairs rooms of her house were given over to the business, which was a thriving one, and the rooms on the next floor she inhabited herself. But the two attics, with their sloping ceilings, were unoccupied, and Miss Clement was kindly welcome to the use of them, Mrs Robson said, for so long as she wished to stop. Mrs Robson was a widow, her husband, a corn-chandler, having been carried off by the cholera during a bad epidemic some five years previously.
“And then, at first, I did use to have lodgers, but, the business picking up and going on so prosperously, I reckoned I’d please maself and only take quiet decent folk now and agin, as it’d be no dole to have in the hoose. And I can see that th’art one o’ that kind, Miss Cleme
nt, let alane coming wi’ my sister Fanny’s good word.”
So Alvey took up residence in the two neat little rooms with white scrubbed board floors, sloping ceilings, a couple of pegs on the wall to accommodate her clothes, a chair, a wash-stand with jug and basin, and a narrow bed. There was no table, but the sills of the dormer windows were wide and square, and only a foot from the floor; she supposed she could use one of them for a writing-desk. Both rooms could have been tucked into her bedchamber at Birkland, and left plenty of space over. At the rear, the window looked across a timber yard. Beyond that could be seen slate roofs, black now in relentless rain; beyond them, higher buildings, church spires, the masts of ships; beyond all that, somewhere to the west, must be the hills she had abandoned.
For the first two weeks of Alvey’s sojourn in Newcastle the rain poured down daily, almost continuously.
“I’ve nivvor knawn a June like it,” said Mrs Robson.
At Birkland rain had been bearable—even a pleasure—because of its beauty: layered clouds of it moved up the valley, torn fragments or slanting grey lines obscured the trees, or changed them to silver; hills appeared or vanished, as the clouds parted and then joined again; the river’s voice grew louder, the grass grew greener. But here in the city, rain brought only ugliness, dark, and discomfort. Steaming drayhorses stamped and shuddered and hung their heads; filthy water poured in torrents along the cobbled thoroughfares; coaly smoke hung in the damp air, thick and gritty; the roofs and chimneys of the gaunt buildings were hidden in murk. To Alvey, accustomed to the immense silence of Birkland, the city’s noise seemed shattering; all day every day factory bells rang, steam hissed, voices bawled, wheels and hoofs clattered incessantly over the paving, hammers clanged and saws shrieked. Under the heavy cloud of rain, all such noise seemed doubled in volume. Alvey hated the town, the blackness of every object in it, she hated the row and dirt, the ugly hard shapes of the buildings, the bad smells, above all the sense of being totally enclosed, hemmed in all around, for miles in every direction, by swarming people and houses; she hated the suffocation, the hunger caused by the lack of a single green thing; there was not a branch, a leaf, a blade of grass to be seen. At first she did not even wish for fine weather; where could be the benefit? there were no fields to walk in, no hills to climb; but after she had been soaked through several times over she became desperately weary of the incessant, torrential downpour. Besides, there was nowhere to hang her wet things, except in her small and chilly chamber. At Birkland, returning from a rainy walk, one turned automatically into the great cheerful kitchen, where a couple of ranges always burning kept the flagstones warm underfoot; shoes and outerwear left there would dry overnight, and Ellen or Stridge would have brushed and pressed them by next morning; here, even after several days, garments put on again would be as damp as when they were taken off.
