Connan told me often of the uproar in the house when I was missing. He told me of the child, who came and stood patiently beside him, waiting to be heard; how she tugged at his coat and sought for the words to explain.
” God forgive us,” he says, ” it was some time before we would listen to her, and so we delayed bringing you out of that hellish place.”
But she bad led them there . through the door into the lepers’ squint.
She had seen us, she said.
And for a moment Connan had thought that Peter and I had left the house together, slipping out that way so that we should not be noticed.
It was dusty in the squint—for no one had entered it since Alice had gone there with her murderer; but in the dust on the wall was the mark of a hand, and when Connan saw it he began to take Gilly seriously.
It was not easy to find the secret spring in the door even if it had been known that it was there. There was an agonising search of ten minutes while Connan was ready to tear the walls down.
But they found it and they found me. The found Alice too.
They took Celestine to Bodmin where she was eventually to be tried for the murder of Alice. But before the trial could take place she was a raving lunatic. At first I believed that this was yet another scheme of hers. It may have started that way, but she did not die until twenty years after, and all that time she spent locked away from the world.
Alice’s remains were buried in the vault where those of an unknown woman lay. Connan and I were married three months after he had brought me out of the darkness. That experience had affected me even more than I realised at the time, and I suffered from nightmares for a year or more. It was a great shock to have been buried alive even though one’s tomb was opened before life was extinguished.
Phillida came to my wedding with William and the children. She was delighted. So was Aunt Adelaide, who insisted that the wedding take place from her town house. Thus Connan and I had a smart London wedding. Not that we cared, but it pleased Aunt Adelaide who, for some reason, seemed to have the idea in her head that it was all her doing.
And so we honeymooned, as we had originally intended, in Italy and then we came home to Mount Mellyn.
I dream over the past when I have told the story to the children. I think of Alvean happily married to a Devonshire squire. As for Gilly, she never left me. She is with me now. At any moment she will appear on the lawn with the eleven o’clock coffee which on warm days we take in that arbour in the south gardens where I first saw Lady Treslyn and Connan together.
I must confess that Lady Treslyn continued to plague me during the first years of my married life. I discovered that I could be a jealous woman and a passionate one. Sometimes I think Connan liked to tease me, in repayment, he said, for the jealousy he had felt of Peter Nansellock.
But she went to London after a few years, and we heard she married there.
Peter came back some fifteen years after he left. He had acquired a wife and two children but no fortune; he was, however, as gay and full of vitality as ever. In the meantime Mount Widden had been sold; and later one of my daughters married the owner, so the place has become almost as much home to me as Mount Mellyn.
Connan said he was glad when Peter came back, and I laughed at the thought of his ever feeling he needed to be jealous. When I told him this, he replied: ” You’re even more foolish about Linda Treslyn.”
That was one of those moments when we both knew that there was no one for us but each other.
And so the years passed and now, as I sit here thinking of it all, Connan is coming down the path from the gardens. In a moment I shall hear his voice.
Because we are alone he will say: ” Ah, my dear Miss Leigh …” as he often does in his most tender moments.
That is to remind me that he does not forget those early days; and there will be a smile on his lips which tells me that he is seeing me, not as I am now, but as I was then, the governess somewhat resentful of her fate, desperately dinging to her pride and her dignity falling in love in spite of herself his dear Miss Leigh.
Then we shall sit in the warm sunshine, thankful for all the good things which life has brought us.
Here he comes and Gilly is behind him . still a little different from other people, still speaking rarely, singing as she works, in the off-key voice that makes us think she is a little out of this world.
As I watch her I can see so clearly the child she once was, and I think of the story of Jennifer, the mother who one day walked into the sea, and how that story was part of my story, and how delicately and intricately our lives were woven together.
Nothing remains, I thought, but the earth and the sea which are here just as they were on the day Gilly was conceived, on the day Alice walked unheeding into her tomb, on the day I felt Connan’s arms about me and I knew he had brought me back to life.
We are born, we suffer, we love, we die, but the waves continue to beat upon the rocks; the seed time and the harvest come and go, but the earth remains.
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Mistress of Mellyn Page 28
