by Joan Aiken
I am not ungrateful. I had the time, and shall cherish the recollection of it until my dying hour.
I have risen from my couch and write these lines by the last glow of the embers. B. will not notice my absence from his side – he has this idea that abstinence from his connubial rights will shorten his time in purgatory and win him a swifter passage to paradise. You can believe that I am glad of this.
I have a Christmas gift for you, but it is not of the kind that can be tucked into our secret hollow in the old sycamore. No, you will have to wait until March or perhaps April to have knowledge of it.
Goodnight my love, my love. A happy Christmas to you. I shall see you across the church tomorrow,
L.
Dearest L.,
The snowdrops in the parsonage garden are just beginning to show their tips above the ground. I wonder if yours are showing in the cherry orchard? (I think our garden is more sheltered.) I remember the wonderful greenish-white counterpane of snowdrops between the black cherry boles when you and I first met there. You said: ‘Are you telling your fortune by counting cherry trees, Mrs Godwin?’ And I was shy, not knowing how to reply.
Later you made up a nonsense rhyme:
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
Butcher, baker, collier, nailor,
Lawyer, farmer, carter, whaler,
Parson, mason, bosun, jailer
None of these
Her heart can please
Only one, in the cherry grove
Has power to capture Lucy’s love.
By the time you made up that rhyme, the celandines and wood anemones were replacing the snowdrops, and our honey-time had begun … It makes me happy to remember.
As I walk abroad now, the village women are beginning to look at me in a friendly way and to wish me Godspeed. Your Christmas gift will perhaps arrive in time for Easter.
My love, my love,
L.
Dearest L.,
Now the daffodils, which yesterday were whipping in the gusty wind, making a brave show – now they are bent and shattered under sharp snow and slashing hail. May it not be so with my hopes. I walk heavily now, but my heart is joyful. My preparations are all made – I have a cradle, robes, shawls, caps and a most loving welcome ready for the reminder of our halcyon orchard days. B. has at last become aware of my condition – but it does not seem to cause him any wonder or dubiety or mistrust … He thinks it a gift from heaven (as do I), or that it must, somehow, have come about without his having been aware of the matter (which, you might say, is the case).
Do I wish for a boy, or a girl? I will not tempt Providence by expressing a wish…
This comes with all my love,
L.
My dearest, dearest L.,
Now my time will soon be here. After this week I do not think I shall be able to make my way to the hollow sycamore, so here is an end of our correspondence. And, should anything untoward happen, should this be my last letter, it comes only to express again my deep, undying love. You were right that our clandestine meetings must cease. They did not become us, they did not become our companions, our duties, our lives. But the feelings remain, and leave a glow that will irradiate all the rest of our days.
Still yours, on the edge of the abyss,
L.
Entry on a scrap of paper found in Sir Lewis de
Bourgh’s diary
She was brought to bed of a boy on this 23rd day of April 18—. She did not survive the birth. The boy, christened Barnabas Joscelyn by Mr Godwin, was put out to nurse in the village. I did not see the child.
Entry on another scrap of paper in Sir Lewis de
Bourgh’s diary
My wife, distressed at an outbreak of typhus fever in the village, ordered little Eadred to be fetched home from the foster mother’s cottage. I made inquiry of Godwin as to his infant, likewise fostered out, but he informed me, without any signs of distress or anxiety, that it was lost; that the wet-nurse, a woman named Smith, a connection of the Hurst family, had left the village with the hop-pickers when they returned to their winter quarters in London (or wherever they hail from), taking little Barney along with her, as it seems she had developed a great fondness for the child. Godwin seemed relieved to be quit of the charge, an obligation to pay for the child’s maintenance. He is a strange man. Has he always suspected? Or known? Is he glad to be rid of it? I found myself greatly distressed by the discovery of this loss – the more so as little Eadred does not thrive – C. is terrified that he has caught the fever from the village children. She herself is again in a promising way, so cannot devote herself to the child as much as she might wish.
I am not well – my head aches; my heart aches – I think more than I should do of L.
Little Eadred has left this world. Poor child! I should feel more grief than I do; sadly, he took after his mother, and I found it hard to love him as I ought; he was too fond of his own way and paid little heed to others. I had always wished for a girl child, and cannot help hoping that C.’s next will be a child of the female sex.
Oh, if that child were not lost, how happy should I be!
I have taken the fever – I suppose from Eadred, or from my rambles about the village while making discreet inquiries about little B.J. I suppose I am come by my deserts. I did wrong by C. to marry her without love. And in my intrigue with L., I wronged both her and her husband, a harmless, God-fearing man (though of a gloomy puritanical turn of mind).
I must try to put my affairs in order. My mind turns much on that child. How I wonder what has become of him.
* * *
‘Have you read it through?’ said Anne to Joss.
‘Ay, and a right struggle it were. Why do he have to make his g’s like p’s and his s’s like f’s? I never in all my born days saw such a scrambly hand.’
‘Never mind that! Don’t you see what it means?’
‘It means your dad and Mrs Godwin did what they ought not. And they got punished for it.’
‘I don’t see that. Lady Catherine got punished too – her child died. And she and that child hadn’t done anything wrong. It’s queer – I never felt sorry for my mother before, but now I think I do. My father sounds rather a selfish man.’
‘Seems they should never ha’ got married. Him and Lady Catherine.’
‘But never mind that,’ Anne said again. ‘Don’t you see what this means?’
‘Well…’ Joss said slowly, ‘mebbe I do and mebbe I don’t.’
‘That little garden book your mother left you – with notes written in the margin – don’t you see, it is the same handwriting as the writing in those four letters from L. She must have given the book to Mrs Smith. You were that baby – Barnabas Joscelyn Godwin. The – the person that you believed to be your mother was really your foster mother. She took you off to London – perhaps when the money stopped coming from Mr Godwin. Or because she wanted to keep you. Mrs Smith, was that her name?’
‘Ay,’ said Joss, pondering. ‘Petronella were her given name. Petronella Smith. She kept house for the old boy, Sir Felix, a-many years. And he learned me Latin and she learned me how to live by my wits. But she always did say, true enow, that I’d have good luck did I come back to Hunsford. Or, at least, find out a secret.’
Joss sighed, pulled up a long stalk of grass and chewed on the tender end, then added:
‘But what good luck is there in finding out that I’m Mrs Lucy Godwin’s bastard? I loved my mam – Petronella. She done her best for me. What do I know about this Mrs Lucy, except that she picked up her skirts for his lordship?’
‘Poor thing,’ said Anne, pulling out another stalk of grass. ‘I feel sorry for her. She sounds as if she had a lonely life. But anyway, don’t you see,’ she repeated, ‘it means that you and I have the same father!’
‘Ay,’ Joss slowly agreed, ‘so it do…’
* * *
Lady Catherine had great difficulty in getting Ben Trelawny to converse. For several days he tended, from time to
time, to return to his first premise and tell her that he was the Angel of Death and she, an unclean spirit sent by Kismet to tempt him from the holy course of meditation that would, in the end, put him in contact with his lost loved ones.
‘I have lost loved ones too!’ said Lady Catherine irritably. ‘You are not the only person who has had troubles in their life.’
But she was obliged to concede that to have lost a wife, three children, his entire fortune and an unpublished volume of verse which he had hoped that some English publisher would accept and bring out – all this greatly exceeded the loss of a son in his third year and a husband whom she had never valued above half.
But during one of Trelawny’s rational periods, she persuaded him to take down the flitch of bacon and hack some slices off it. These, with eggs from the store hidden in a hole in the cliff outside, made a substantial difference to their diet.
Now that she had access to the environs of Trelawny’s cabin, Lady Catherine realized that, though it was not precisely on an island, it might as well be until the flood subsided. The building abutted, on the point of a steep cliff, between two converging torrents, branches of the Brin River. There was no safe way across them as yet.
‘Why do not people in the town come and rescue us?’
‘Firstly, m’dear, they don’t know we’re here. And second, the poor souls likely got enough trouble themselves. There’s a third branch of the river runs through the town. My guess is, if it’s up as high as these, half the town is washed away.’
Halfway up the opposite cliff, caught in a tree, could be seen what Trelawny told Lady Catherine was the wreckage of her carriage.
He himself had been setting out to buy bread in Brinmouth village – ‘It was afore the floods come down so bad, you could still cross by the stepping-stones’ – when a crash from above made him look up, and he saw the coach come hurtling down the face of the cliff; a woman had been flung out and fell straight into the torrent, where she must have been swept out to sea. ‘But she must ha’ been dead already, falling from that height.’ Trelawny himself had climbed up to the carriage, in which he found another female, deeply unconscious. ‘There was no means of getting you back up on the road, m’dear, so I fetched a rope and lowered ye down.’
‘You did all this by yourself? But could you not procure assistance from the village?’
‘No time for that, lady. The Brin water was coming down powerful quick – as ’twas, I only just fetched ye into the cabin afore the flood had ris’ up three feet, and there’d a’ been no way of getting ye to dry land.’
‘So you saved my life.’
‘Did’n do so bravely then myself, did I?’ said Trelawyn with a wry grin. ‘Reckon all that hoisting and dragging brought on a fit of the fever that struck me down after the wreck of the Sweet William. All I remember after that was lying on the floor and finding that somebody was dribbling sour-apple jam down my gullet. If it come to saving lives, ma’am, I reckon ’tis about quits betwixt us.’
And I probably saved you from drowning when the water came into the hut, also, Lady Catherine thought, but, contrary to her usual habit, she did not solicit praise for this.
‘How long do you think it will be before the flood subsides?’ she asked.
Three or four days at least, Trelawny guessed.
‘You think no one will come in search of you?’
‘Nay, poor souls. The Brin River comes down powerful heavy after a day’s rain, and we’ve had not one day, but a whole fortnight – they’ll have enow to do looking after theirselves. ’Sides, I’d left this cabin for a farm on the moor – only came back for a purpose I had.’ He hesitated.
‘Why did you dwell in this wild cabin, Trelawny?’
It had been many years since Lady Catherine had felt so much interest in another human being. But in such a small neighbourhood, comprising only one neighbour, it was only reasonable to avail oneself of what interest lay to hand.
‘Well, ma’am, ’tis a story that, properly, is not all mine to tell. But, seeing as you was so solicitous as to fetch me back into this vale of tears,’ – he did not sound entirely grateful for this service, Lady Catherine noted – ‘I’ve a notion I owe it ye. ’Twas like this, d’ye see…’
He stopped and scratched his white locks with a twig picked from the firewood pile, remarking, ‘’Tis to be hoped the water do go down before too many days, or it’ll be cold comfort and raw vittles for us.’
‘Proceed with your story, my good man.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was fetched out of the sea after the wreck of the Sweet William, I lay like a corpse for a matter o’ three weeks … I’d been carried to the doctor’s house – there’s a tolerable clever doctor in the town, Dr Lantyan – and when I began to speak and look about me and act like a human, he asked me if I’d any kin somewhere about the land who might pity my extremity and send me a few guineas. I told him of a nephew and niece in the north country, children of my dead sister, my only living connections. Whether they would come to my aid I did not know, for ’twas long enough since there’d been any word between us, but in the old days there was a kindness betwixt my sister and me. So Lantyan wrote them a letter, telling of my plight. Meantime I removed to this cabin, which was standing empty, for I’d been a charge on the doctor long enough. But a reply came, friendly enough, from my nephew, sending a sum sufficient to keep me for a few weeks. Being somewhat recovered by then, I wrote a grateful acknowledgement to him, and removed myself to a farm on the moor where I took lodgings. At this point, d’ye see, I began to take myself in hand.’
Trelawny stopped and looked hard at Lady Catherine.
‘Did ye ever dream of me, ma’am?’
‘Indeed no!’ she replied, much astonished.
‘Well, I’ve dreamed of ye, a-many times. ’Tis like this…’ He paused and reflected for a moment or two. ‘When I was lost in the sea, and all my loved ones lost, and all my goods and my fortune, not only that but the verses I had writ, those being the fruit of many years of contemplation – well, ma’am, ’twas like being stripped naked. And when I came back within myself after that calamitous loss and dispossession, I discovered a strange thing about myself. I found I had the power of foretelling events in my dreams. Some of them are trifling enough – a broken pot, a herd of cattle crossing the track, a sailor singing a shanty, a child picking a posy – but, time and again, I have dreamed of you, ma’am.’
‘How singular. How very singular!’ Lady Catherine spoke with disapproval. She did not care for the supernatural; one of her prime motives for the razing and demolition of Hunsford Castle had been the extirpation of its numerous ghosts. ‘I wonder why you should do so?’ Her tone of distaste suggested that his dreaming about her was an invasion of her privacy, which she felt to be unwarranted.
‘That I cannot say, ma’am. I would not choose to do so – ’tis enforced upon me. But, anyways, living at this farm I began, as I say, to take myself in hand. I wrote, again, some of the verses I had lost. I wrote a memoir of my dear wife and children. I found a few pupils and taught them mathematics – I have always had a great partiality for algebra and geometry. Thus, I made enough to pay for my lodgings. And I dreamed a great deal and found comfort in my dreams – ’tis like hearing music playing in some faraway land – I feel the assurance that I shall see my loved ones again, not in this sphere but in some other…’
‘But then,’ said Lady Catherine, as he had again come to a halt, staring at the open door and the swollen river that rushed past it, ‘but then, if you were safely and industriously established at the farm, and teaching mathematics’ – her tone suggested that she found this a decidedly uncongenial and peculiar way to earn a living, but each to his own taste – ‘why, what made you return to this dismal dwelling?’
‘Ah, well, I was coming to that. I had a second letter from my nephew. He wrote to me that, if I were destitute, he had the means of assisting me to earn a sum of money. ’Twas in furtherance of a trick, a prank, a s
tratagem that was to be played upon a certain lady of his acquaintance – a certain Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She was to be waylaid, abducted, on her journey to visit a relative. She was to be kept confined for a certain period of time…’
‘What are you telling me, sir?’ ejaculated Lady Catherine, pale with wrath.
* * *
Maria Lucas, visiting Wormwood End with a pot of soup from the parsonage, found Anne de Bourgh there, arranging snowy boughs of cherry blossom in a copper jug.
‘Oh, I interrupt you! I will not stop – I just came to bring this.’
Ambrose said, ‘You are both of you more welcome than I can say. Do not think of leaving. Please stay and take a glass of cowslip wine.’
‘No, don’t go, Miss Lucas,’ Anne gave Maria a friendly smile. ‘Stay, and heat up your soup. Mr Mynges, you should eat it at once. You are growing so thin – I believe you have lost weight since I saw you last, and that was only two days ago.’
‘Please, will you not call me Tom? I miss hearing that name used.’
‘Tom, then.’
‘Tom,’ both girls said at the same time, and Anne asked, ‘Where is Alice?’
‘She spends very little time in the house. She misses him. She is mostly to be found on the wooden bench under the plum tree where – he – used to sit at the end of the day…’
Young Tom’s voice shook, and Maria laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.
‘Look, here is your soup made hot. It is Charlotte’s speciality – chicken and partridge with almonds and cream. Do try to take a little. She sends her very best regards, and would have come herself, but with the children, you know – and Mr Collins needs a great deal of attention just at present. He is in a state of utter desperation over Lady Catherine’s absence.’
‘Has anything more been heard about that?’ asked Young Tom, obediently swallowing a spoonful of soup. ‘It is a strange business indeed – strange and shocking.’
