Starrbelow

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Only that she—she was not true. She lied.’

  ‘She lied for your sake, to save you pain. For that she sacrificed everything: she sacrificed me, she sacrificed him’—the small hand gestured to Lord Weyburn—‘she sacrificed my—my other mother, here, who I think was my true mother after all. She lived for you, she died for you. What is there to forgive?’

  ‘There is nothing, little son,’ said Sapphire. ‘You are right: the word was mine. Lord Frome knows well there is nothing to forgive.’

  ‘There is much to forgive,’ said Lord Frome, ‘but, God help me, all of it in me!’ He released her hand. ‘I must go home to Catherine.’ He gave the ghost of a smile. ‘I must break it to her that she is dispossessed.’

  ‘By her brother,’ said Sapphire.

  ‘By her …? Oh, Mother, am I Catherine’s brother?’

  ‘Her half-brother, Nicholas, since her mother was yours also. But …’ She looked between the two men. ‘As to all this—what are we to do?’

  Charles Weyburn stood with his back to the high marble mantelpiece where long ago he had stood and watched her come into that room—and loved her from that hour. Now she stood by his side, soon night would fall and he would hold her once again in his arms and make her his own at last; not in violence and angry contempt as on that other night, but in tenderness and love. ‘Let it rest as it is. I have her at last, nothing more matters to me. Nicholas is my heir, let me simply acknowledge him my son; I will say that I lied about that night in August.…’

  ‘This leaves Sophia’s reputation still undefended.’

  ‘Nothing matters,’ said Sapphire, echoing, smiling back into her lover’s eyes. ‘I have him at last, nothing more matters. Let the wicked Lady Weyburn live on in the minds of the gossips: what would her Grace of Witham do without her?’ She gave her hand to him again. ‘While she lives on, our Christine rests quiet in her grave.’

  He withdrew his hand. ‘No, Sapphire, it will not do.’ He had never called her by her nickname before. ‘It is proved that the child was conceived long before August.’

  ‘Who cares what’s proved?’ said Charles Weyburn. ‘I claim him as mine.’

  ‘They will think you are duped. Her name will suffer more than ever.’

  ‘We will go back then to the story she told Christine: that I came to her, secretly, after the wedding.’ He smiled at the boy. ‘Let us begin now, Nicholas; let us forget that other father—you are my son, and most proudly I am your father. You are heir to Starrbelow.’

  He was heir to Starrbelow; he was a prisoner here in this beloved home which thus imposed its burden upon him for ever—when all he longed for was to be gone from it, to be free.… And this much-loved mother, to whom he had been all in all, was not his mother, and this man, who so kindly and proudly claimed him as his son, was not his father: and he was all in all no longer. And yet, for his rights, they were prepared to sacrifice their own fair names to the end of their days: or sacrifice, alternatively, the fair name of his true mother, who had died to defend it; to tarnish the great name of the Earl of Frome, and of his sister Catherine.… And all for an inheritance he must accept if it were his, but which he would give his whole, music-starved young soul to avoid.… They watched him as he stood, small and slender in his narrow coat of dark brocade with the lace ruffles at his bony, childish wrists, and the child’s face, sick with a child’s intemperate, heart-whole longings.… To claim Starrbelow—and eat out his heart all his days for that other destiny, for the kingdom of his mind; or to choose that kingdom and renounce his rights.

  And, young as he was, child that he was, yet, reared in the high tradition of the best of the great landowners of England, living upon their own land, among their own people, dedicated in the service of their own inheritance—he knew there could be only one answer. The one was a matter of choice, the other of duty. He was heir to Starrbelow.

  Until …

  He turned at last. He said, suddenly smiling: ‘In all this, my lords and my lady Mother, I think you’ve forgotten one person after all. You’ve forgotten—we’ve all forgotten—one person, yet to be born.’ And he came to Sapphire and slipped his thin hand into hers and laid his weary head against her arm and kissed the brocaded sleeve of it, lightly and lovingly, in the very ecstasy of his happiness.

  ‘I am your heir, my lord,’ he said to Charles Weyburn, ‘until you and she have a son of your own.’

  SIXTEEN

  The painted pole made a plop and a splash, the water racing down its length to merge again with the unruffled pewter of the canal. A boy’s voice called gaily in stumbling Italian, ‘Hey, poppe! Let me try now.’

  ‘A fine mouthful I shall get from your grandmother,’ said the gondolier, laughing, ‘if you fall in and half drown yourself. She says you are too much, my little lord, with the gondolieri.’

  ‘And this is the one,’ said Catherine, loftily, looking out from beneath the canopy into the sunshine, ‘who was to dedicate his life to musicians and “thinkers”.’

  ‘You should not try to say “musicians” while your baby teeth are missing and you have not yet got your new ones,’ said Nicholas, grinning. ‘And a man may think, let me tell you, while he poles a gondola along—and make music too.’ And he threw back his head and sang in his high, boyish voice the first line of a love song. The gondolier caught up the melody, a girl looked down from a window and smiled at them and waved and began to sing too. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it is my tune, and already everyone in Venice is singing it.’

  ‘The more’s the pity—I think it a very silly little tune.’

  ‘That’s unfortunate,’ he said, ‘since it was written especially for you.’

  She could not resist his good-temper, she burst out into genuinely childish laughter. ‘Oh, Nicholas—you fibber! It was written for your mother—for my Aunt Sophia.’

  ‘You can call her my mother,’ he said. ‘She is more than my mother—more than any mother.…’ He spoke without bitterness, only lightly and lovingly.

  Firenze met them at the steps of the palazzo—that old home from which so long ago a girl whom all Venice called La Zaffiro had gone forth to meet her destiny. ‘My dearest boy—are you safe? You have not been trying to pole the gondola? It is so dangerous.’

  He leapt out on to the steps and hugged her briefly. ‘Oh, Nonna—how you fuss! Come, Catherine.…’ He put out a thin brown hand and hauled her not very ceremoniously up from under the canopy. ‘This girl!—you’d think she was out and about in society already, with her airs and graces.’

  ‘The Earl of Frome’s daughter does not scamper about like a barefoot Venetian guttersnipe,’ said Catherine.

  He might have retorted that the guttersnipe referred to was a prince of Hanover, but he only laughed at her; he did not even remember. She said to Firenze, ‘Where is my father?’

  ‘He is within, child. He is writing a letter.…’

  Gossip Wit received the letter and soon all London rang with the news of it. He wrote without the consent of his friends, Lord and Lady Weyburn, said the Earl of Frome; but justice must be done, and after long thought he had decided that there could be no better way of—of dispensing it, than to confide in her Grace; to inform her Grace of the truths which now, for the first time, had been made known to him. For who could doubt, wrote the Earl, with one of his own rare gleams of ironic humour, the pleasure with which her Grace would disseminate the knowledge that would clear Lady Weyburn of every suspicion against her—would expose to the world her loyal and generous self-sacrifice for the sake of her injured friend.… And as for her, as for his own most deceived and greatly wronged Lily—as her memory remained pure and sanctified in his heart, so, he knew, would the world, at her Grace’s kind hands, respect it. Her child, after her, was acknowledged Lord Weyburn’s heir, until such time as his lordship might have a son of his own to succeed him; the Hanoverian inheritance was to be formally renounced. Meanwhile he himself had brought both children abroad and here in Venice was establis
hing the boy where his heart longed to be, under music masters, in the care of Lady Weyburn’s mother. Lord and Lady Weyburn remained at Starrbelow.…

  Lord and Lady Weyburn remained at Starrbelow, Lord Frome and the children were far away beneath Italian skies; and the storm broke and raged and blew over all their heads, uncaring; and blew itself out and some new scandal arose to take its place. For Prince Anton of Brunswick might be proved a villain but he was dead and therefore dull and was forgotten, and The Lily of Lillane kept her purity still but was dead and therefore was dull and was forgotten; and the wicked Lady Weyburn was wicked no longer—and therefore was dull and was forgotten. True, the story reached Hanover and there was an exchange of letters, alarmed on one side, reassuring on the other: Prince Nicholas of Brunswick, while asserting his full right to the title, herewith through the medium of his guardians formally renounced it and all other claims, in favour of his late father’s brother and of his brother’s heirs after him—offspring, it now appeared, of complaisant Gertrud.…

  ‘Poor Anton used to say,’ said Sapphire, laughing, ‘that she was like a young carthorse.’

  They stood in the Long Gallery—that gallery where on a December night Christine had walked with the Earl of Frome; and now once again it was December. ‘The carthorse remained, it seems,’ said Charles Weyburn, ‘in the stud that had been planned for it: and now there are lots of Hanoverian foals kicking up their heels as friskily as little carthorses may. And good luck to them! What would our young racehorse have done in such a stable as that?’

  ‘My Nicholas! Oh, Charles, I worry about him. He writes home so gallantly; yet do you not think he sometimes must miss me, far away in Italy?’

  ‘Who—Nicholas?’ he said, laughing at her. ‘You women are insatiable—must there be two men to whom you are indispensable? Nicholas is as happy as the day is long, even if he did step backwards into a canal and get a ducking, besides ruining his precious fiddle. Leave Nicholas alone. It is I that miss you.’

  ‘Miss me? How can you miss me? I am with you.’

  ‘I know—that’s what makes it so dreadful.’ And he laughed again, but he took her into his arms and held her close, not laughing. ‘Oh, the long years—the long, lost years! How should I not be in the habit of missing you?’

  ‘We are together now, dearest, for ever and ever. We begin again.’

  ‘We begin again, yes, now that at last I have found you.’ And he forced her head back as, long ago, he had held her in that first wild kiss in the December woods at Frome. ‘Give me your soul, Sapphire! Open your lips under mine and give me your soul; press your lovely body close against my body, let me feel you one with me, never to leave me, never again to be less than all my own.…’ In the steel ring of his arms he felt her tremble, relax succumb, suddenly stiffen again. Her white hands fluttered against the brocade of his coat. Shaken with longing, he held her a moment more—and then released her. ‘What is it, my heart? Don’t you want to be here in my arms?’

  ‘Oh, Charles!’ She stood trembling, her two hands gripping his coat-sleeves, her cheek pressed against his heart. ‘It’s only that … Only that …’ She looked up into his face, blushing a little, and contrived a rather shaky laugh. ‘It’s only that I know too well where all this leads.’

  ‘It leads to the heaven of heavens,’ he said. ‘A four-poster bed.’

  ‘Not at seven o’clock in the evening, my lord, if you please!’

  ‘Is it but seven?’ he said, also laughing; and he looked out into the late sunshine lying silvery over the long green lawns, the honey-coloured stone, the woods and meadows and streams, all the lovely curve of the land about Starrbelow. ‘How strange it is, Sapphire, that till I found you again, I never discovered that the day lasts far too long!’

  Hand in hand, they wandered through the great galleries, under the moulded and gilded ceilings, through the splendid rooms with their treasures of porcelain, ormolu, crystal, rich tapestried hangings, marbles, paintings, marquetry, rosewood, inlaid mother-of-pearl; and so came at last to the long ballroom where now the Guardi picture hung above the tall white mantel—the painting of the ‘Woman of Venice’ in her green and crimson and gold, wearing in her deep gold hair the little golden ship with its rubies and peardrop pearls; wearing on her lips the old inscrutable, sorrowful, scornful smile. And he left her and went and stood between her and the picture, facing down the great room. ‘Stand there in the doorway,’ he said, ‘where first I saw you. I want to see you smile.’

  And she stood there, framed by the crimson curtain, where she had stood that night long ago; and the blue eyes met his across the long lost years and looked down into his inmost heart; and she smiled at him.

  A new smile, all his own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christianna Brand (1907–1988) was one of the most popular authors of the Golden Age of British mystery writing. Born in Malaya and raised in India, Brand used her experience as a salesgirl as inspiration for her first novel, Death in High Heels (1941), which she based on a fantasy of murdering an irritating coworker. The same year, she debuted her most famous character, Inspector Cockrill, whose adventures she followed until 1957. The film version of the second Cockrill mystery, Green for Danger, is considered one of the best-ever screen adaptations of a classic English mystery.

  Brand also found success writing children’s fiction. Her Nurse Matilda series, about a grotesque nanny who tames ill-behaved children, was adapted for the screen in 2005 as Nanny McPhee. Brand received Edgar Award nominations for the short stories “Twist for Twist” and “Poison in the Cup,” as well as a nomination for her nonfiction work Heaven Knows Who.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1958 by Mary C. Lewis

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3739-6

  This 2016 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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