Starrbelow

by Christianna Brand

  Within the low bodice of the disordered dress—a locket: not hung by a chain but thrust away, hidden away there as though thrust out of the sight of men, close against her secret heart. Ringed round with brilliants suddenly glinting in the flame of a guttering candle—a pale handsome face with a lock of forward-falling hair looking back into a face grown suddenly sick with fear, staring down at it. A miniature, ringed with brilliants. A name, and a date. ‘For ever—Anton. Ladyday, 1754.’

  NINE

  Sapphire wrote a letter, and pale and trembling Christine went to Lord Frome. ‘I have heard from Sophia. She is in great trouble. She wants me to go to her.’

  He took her hand kindly; he led her out on to the terrace, looking down and away from Frome Castle over the lovely lawns and gardens, over the sunlit meadows, over the grey rooftops of Starrbelow lying in the plain beneath them. They leaned upon the balustrade of the terrace. He said: ‘Lady Weyburn is born to trouble, Christine. She is not of your world; you must leave her to her own.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t desert her.’

  ‘She has disgraced her name, Christine, and Charles Weyburn’s name: wantonly and flagrantly, as though of set purpose she has put herself beyond the pale. She is no friend for you.’

  ‘She is the best friend I have in the world,’ said Christine steadily.

  ‘You did her a kindness once: she was grateful—but what has she ever done for you?’

  She could not tell him that for her sake her friend had made herself Weyburn’s cheap and easy prey: had longed to fly from Starrbelow, but stayed so that Christine might remain near Frome—she could not tell him how fully and faithfully that old, trivial debt was daily and hourly paid. ‘All she has done for me is not to be told. I, at any rate, won’t desert her now.’

  He leaned there, a quiet, dull, rather stubby man, looking at her in his own quiet way as she stood, so tall and slender, so white and china-blue, so grave, with the lovely upward-sweeping brows: her beauty had ever been touched with melancholy, she was not ardent and gay as her friend could be. He said, ‘Christine—of all women in the world, I think of you as one who could touch pitch and be undefiled, who could grow up out of the mud as pure a lily as the name they give you; but even you must be blown upon by the reputation of this friend of yours.…’ He looked into her face, white and sorrowful but adamant. ‘What is this trouble she writes to you about?’

  ‘It is—a secret trouble.…’ She looked down at the letter in her hand. She amended: ‘She has had a—a disagreement with Lord Weyburn. She wants me to accompany her back to Italy.’

  ‘To Italy?’ he said, astounded. ‘This woman—wants you to go off with her to Italy?’

  ‘She is—she is distracted. It is all something I can’t explain to you, but she must go; my cousin, Charles, now insists upon her going at once, and—she has no friend in the world but me; she cannot go off alone, broken-hearted as she is—’

  ‘She has no heart to break,’ he said, angrily.

  ‘She has a heart; you do not know her, my lord. She has a heart.… At any rate,’ she said, ‘I must go with her.’

  He was silent. ‘Your mother—what does she say to this?’

  ‘I have not spoken to her yet; but she will weep and wring her hands and at last will yield because she must.’

  ‘She cannot allow you, Christine, to go off unattended to a foreign land with this—adventuress; it cannot be allowed.’ He thought it over in his deliberate way. He said at last, ‘If you are adamant—and I know your will, Christine—will you accept my escort to Italy?’

  She looked at him absolutely astounded; the pink flush mounted up into her pale face. ‘You come! On such a journey! No, you could not.’

  ‘Is there, something, then, disgraceful, after all?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I cannot explain it to you, but it is not disgraceful, she is not disgraced. As for your coming—would you lend your reputation to such a—a flight, I suppose it will be called?’ He began to speak but she interrupted him. ‘It is the same for me, no doubt, but my friend is my friend, to you she is less than nothing, why should you harm yourself in her service?’—

  ‘It would be in your service, Christine; and I harm myself no more than you do.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but you do,’ she insisted. ‘What am I?—a young woman in society, with a respectable name, no doubt, but not a great one—’

  He interrupted in his turn. He said, ‘You might have a great name, Christine, if you chose.’

  It had come. She had known for many days now that it would come; it was not the exquisite realization of hopes and doubts that it would once have been, but it was the culmination of all her life’s dreams, that dream which, single in purpose, she had hugged to her breast from her childhood’s days. And now it had come. He said: ‘I am a dull man, Christine. I am not handsome and clever as your cousin, Charles, is handsome and clever, who loved you too—who would have brought light and laughter into your life and a sort of gaiety I could never aspire to. While he was free … But he has ruined himself, caught himself up with this gypsy friend of yours, and so—’ He broke off. He said: ‘I have not understood your feeling for Charles. I did not know. At your birthday ball … You must forgive me, Christine: I loved you, I have always loved you, but I held back on his account, because I thought he would be the best man for you, because I could not think but that you must love him. And then, to see you repudiate his love—and in such a fashion! I had to go away, to think it all over; since then I have waited, not daring to rush in too soon.…’ He muttered and stumbled. All England had known since her earliest girlhood that The Lily was in love with that dull dog Frome; but now he, ordinarily so calm and strong, stammered like a lovesick boy to beseech her hand.…

  But it was not till almost a year later that Christine dared leave her friend in Italy and creep back to accept as a gift of forgiveness and trust the love he had offered so humbly—before she threw in her lot with that of the infamous Sapphire of Starrbelow.

  On the morning of August the second, 1754, a gentleman waited upon Prince Anton of Brunswick. He came as a friend of Charles, Baron Weyburn of Starrbelow. In a matter concerning the honour of his family, Lord Weyburn called upon Prince Anton to meet him in a duel with such weapons as His Highness selected: the duel to be to the death.

  Prince Anton stood, ashy pale. ‘So he hass discovered?’

  Lord Pearsham stifled his curiosity. ‘You do not deny the imputation?’

  ‘The imputation iss against the lady: but she was deceived, she is guiltless. The challenge is to me, and it is just. I will meet Lord Weyburn—with pistols—at such a place as he appoints.’ He said, ‘Iss this usual in England, to add in a challenge, “to the death”?’

  ‘His lordship is prepared to leave England to fight in Belgium or France.’

  ‘Very well. It iss just. He hass been greatly wronged. I will arrange for seconds,’ said Anton, wearily. But he caught at the man’s sleeve. ‘Iss it possible for me even for five minutes to see—to see Lady Weyburn before I fight?’

  ‘To see Lady Weyburn! Good God, man, you must be mad! To see Lady Weyburn—before going out to fight with her husband!…’ He turned on his heel. ‘My friend will brook no delay. How soon will you meet him?’

  They met at dawn thirty-six hours later, on the bare sandhills of the Belgian coast, having left London secretly and in haste before that morning was out. Lord Weyburn, twice wounded, still cried out, ‘To the death!’ and reloaded yet again, forcing back his seconds and the Prince’s at pistol-point. ‘Stand where you are—and fire!’ This time he waited until the Prince—at close range—had fired, and missed. He said, ‘Now I have you!’ and levelled his pistol. ‘You have witnesses,’ he said to Lord Pearsham, quietly wiping the weapon as the rest rushed over to the fallen man, ‘that you all did what you could to prevent me: that I forced you off with threats to your lives; that I stood unprotected and let him take aim at me: that only then I kil
led him.’ And he walked over to the frantically working group and said coolly, ‘Is he dead?’

  All about them the coarse grey sand, thrust through with raggety tufts of coarse grey grass; in their ears the mutter of the cold grey sea, splashing in monotonously along the endless cold grey line of the coast. In the sand where he had fallen, the body of a young man that once had been handsome and tall lying oddly angled, the head against a crook’d right arm; grey face grown rigid, grey eyes closing, grey lips muttering, monotonous as the waves on the shore. ‘What does he say?’ said Weyburn, standing, gun in hand, blood oozing through his waistcoat and his sleeve.

  ‘Listen for yourself,’ said Sir Adam Bodkin, getting up to make way for him, brushing sand from his knees; slipping something into his pocket as he stood aside.

  Charles Weyburn knelt down by the dying man. He caught the first syllables, the word ‘Lady …’, and ‘tell’, and again what seemed to be ‘Ladyday’. ‘He asked to see Lady Weyburn before he met you,’ muttered Lord Pearsham into his ear. ‘I refused, of course.’

  ‘He did not see her?’ said Lord Weyburn quickly.

  ‘No, no; we were all out of Town before a chance arose. But—he is dying, my lord; some message …?’

  ‘You may take any message he can give you now,’ said Charles Weyburn grimly. ‘He is gone.’ He stood up and threw down his pistol to lie by the dead body. ‘There is my weapon: let all the world know it is mine.’ He bowed to them. ‘I thank you all. I hope there is no trouble in this for you—remember that I shot him against your intervention; he and I by arrangement carried extra loadings, you knew nothing about it. For my part, a carriage is waiting—you will not see me again, I suppose, for a long time.’ He bowed to them all. He said to Lord Pearsham, not troubling to lower his voice, ‘You may tell Lady Weyburn that he died with her name on his lips,’ and turned and walked away from them, limping from the wound in his side, hugging his bleeding arm close to his breast. ‘To the hospital,’ he said in French to the driver of the fiacre, awaiting him, ‘and drive fast.’ He added: ‘You will recall that you found me by the roadside, wounded and bleeding, neither of us knowing how I came there; and, even if in the past half-hour you have heard it, that you do not know my name. Until I can leave the hospital, nobody must know who I am. I look to your promise.’ With his good arm he chinked gold pieces in his pocket; the man assisted him into the carriage, and he looked out for the last time across the cold wastes of the water, towards the dim, half-seen, unseen outline of the white cliffs of home.

  Lady Weyburn had been back many years at Starrbelow—the child Nicholas was a sturdy boy—before Charles Weyburn saw those white cliffs again.

  PART TWO

  TEN

  They stand one on either side of the rosewood spinet—two children in the great ballroom at Starrbelow where, ten years ago, Lord Weyburn stood also, and watched the crimson curtain lift and Sophia Devigne come through. Two children—Nicholas, who up to this day at least has been known as Nicholas Weyburn; and Catherine, only child of the Earl and Countess of Frome. ‘Perhaps at this very moment the trial is ending—or is ended already, Catherine!… Is that not the sound of the wheels of a coach on the Camden road?’

  ‘And then we shall know!’

  ‘We know already,’ says the boy, stoutly. ‘My mother is innocent.’

  ‘That’s not what the servants say, Nicholas. They say she was wanton and you born out of wedlock and not Lord Weyburn’s son.’

  ‘They would not dare say it to me,’ he cries, fists clenched.

  ‘Nor to me; but they whisper it among themselves. And such words!—“wanton” and “whore”.…’

  ‘You should break in upon them and bid them hold their vile tongues.’

  ‘Yet if it be true—why, then you are nothing here, Nicholas; and I am my cousin’s heir.’

  ‘What would you want with such an inheritance—you whose father is Earl of Frome, ten times richer and greater than Baron Weyburn of Starrbelow?’

  ‘My father’s estates will not come to me; since he has no son of his own, they must pass to his brother’s line. Lord Weyburn, however, as you say,’ says Catherine, loftily, aping, poor little precocity, the housekeeper at Frome, ‘is but a mere baron and so his inheritance may go to his next of kin, male or female; and, my mother being dead, I am his next of kin. Besides, Nick, you want Starrbelow no more than I need it. You are no country squire and never will be. You had rather wander Italy with a fiddle tucked under your chin—you have told my mother as much a hundred times.’

  ‘Your mother understood me, Catherine. She alone could feel about music as I do; it was she who gave me my first violin, she said I should be a great master one of these days.’

  ‘Well, and now she is dead,’ said Catherine, bleakly, sharp-voiced, ‘and can say so no more.’

  ‘None loved her more than I, or will miss her more.’

  ‘And yet,’ says the child, ‘it was your mother who murdered her.’ But she relaxes immediately against his shoulder, throws her arms about his neck, hides her sweet face, grown childish and soft again, against his cheek. ‘Oh, Nicholas, my little cousin Nicholas, forgive me! I am a vile wretch to repeat what they say, to speak so of your mother who would never have harmed a hair of my mother’s head: your beautiful mother whom you love—and whom I love also, Nick, even though she would cheat me of my birthright.…’

  ‘It is not your birthright,’ he says, pushing her away.

  ‘And I say it is.’

  ‘To say so is to call my mother a wanton.’

  ‘Well, and so the world does call her a wanton; and whore and cheat and murderess to boot, my mother’s murderess; my father believes it too.…’

  And the sound of wheels is heard and the distant clang as the great, gilded, wrought-iron gates are flung open and the coach comes through.

  It was the Duchess of Witham, of course, who was originally responsible for the travesty of Sapphire Weyburn’s ‘trial by society’—the trial, to bring it down to its simplest issue, to establish whether, as Lord Weyburn claimed, his wife in fact remained his wife in nothing but name; or whether, as she swore, the marriage was finally consummated and the result of that consummation Nicholas her son. The Wit was by this time in her middle age—a terrible old jade with her hard, bright, high-coloured face and her hard, high, hooting voice; powerful in in wealth and position, uninhibited in speech and conduct, armoured in vanity. She encountered him one day, in the spring of 1764, riding through the park. It was ten years since his marriage. Lady Weyburn had for the first weeks after her desertion remained quietly at Starrbelow; had then burst upon the world in an orgy of frivolity and much worse, and had then disappeared from the scene, going off to her mother in Italy—returning a year or two later with a son who—tacitly, at any rate, though she was known to have made no overt claim for him—was accepted as Weyburn’s; his lordship being elsewhere and unable to comment. Since then she had remained in almost total seclusion at Starrbelow, close neighbour and once again close friend of the Countess of Frome—whose husband, however, refused her his countenance; visiting with the Countess now and again in London but otherwise never leaving home. Lord Weyburn, for good and sufficient reasons as all the world knew, had gone abroad and stayed there; yet now was to be seen cantering coolly through the park in the thin, spring sunshine, as though he were not still the most gossiped-about man in Town.… ‘By all the saints! ’Tis Charles Weyburn! Stop! Stop the carriage! Lord Weyburn! Weyburn, come over here.…’

  Only direct ill-manners could refuse such a summons. He rode over reluctantly and dismounted, standing with one hand on the door of the painted carriage with its enormous emblazonment of arms, his expression saying clearly that it must be done sometime and might as well be now. ‘It’s a thousand years since we saw you, Weyburn. You look—older.’ She stared at him appraisingly, avid for signs of awkwardness or strain. ‘It must be eight years since you left England—no, more, nine or ten. Let me see, that affair of poor Anto
n of Brunswick was in the spring of ’54—no, that was the marriage, the end of May: the duel was in August, I remember.…’

  ‘Your Grace has an excellent head for dates,’ he said coldly.

  ‘When the events are worth the recollection, no doubt I have. Why have you stayed so long?’