Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  ‘—who won’t accept the idea of a curse upon them. So you and I—’

  ‘You and I?’

  ‘Who else cares about them? You love them, I know. I think we should join forces to try to discover what may threaten them, if anything does, and how to control their lives if their father does die.’

  They had stopped by the ancient font, the thin evening sunshine pouring down upon them through the heavy stained-glass windows. And he looks like something from a stained-glass window himself, she thought; like a saint of the olden days with his beautiful face and the halo of his red-gold hair. Her spirit rose in a sort of exultation at the thought that she might so work with him as he had suggested, come closer to him, share his very mind with him. But she dragged her thoughts from herself and her sudden longings. ‘Do you really think the Squire will die?’

  ‘I think he may. He believes it himself and, God knows, every day he seems to grow more—shadowy.’

  ‘To believe that one is going to die—to believe one is not going to get better—is no way to help oneself to get better. So much is in the mind.’

  ‘He believes, you see, that it’s part of the curse upon him.’

  ‘Dear heavens! And that then the curse would pass to his children?’

  ‘I think he believes it is already upon them. But what shape it takes exactly, no one can fathom. I thought that if, while he yet lives, we might trace some form to it, discover when it was uttered, under what circumstances, we might be able to help him, perhaps to discredit or at any rate to isolate it, as it were, from an all-embracing threat. For instance, we have seen today that while succeeding generations flourish, suddenly the next and the next fall to tragedy. Was that when the curse began?—with that Sir Edward whose daughter, Isabella, died in childbirth, already a widow? Or, if we work backwards—as you know, the Squire’s own wife, Anne, died young—and from the time the twins were born, or even before, had been ailing—imagined people about her: the servants believed she was mad. His mother before him—well, that marriage was unhappy from the beginning, his father turned for comfort to other women and, still a young man, was killed: to all intents and purposes committed suicide. And so it went on; even his grandfather took some infection from his small son, and both died, only a little girl being left to inherit. She, marrying a Hilbourne cousin, presumably by arrangement, carried on the name. And so it goes on.’

  ‘Marriage between close relations is never very safe?’

  ‘That is the modern thinking.’

  ‘So mightn’t this be the explanation? That whenever the property fell to a female—to preserve the Hilbourne name, such a marriage between cousins was arranged, and so we get the deaths in childbirth, deaths in infancy, the mental instability. Death by accident—that must occur now and again without any curses on a family. The rest may yet be accounted for quite naturally?’

  He stood with his hand on the heavy carved stone of the font, looking down at her with something like astonishment. ‘I was right, indeed, when I said you had a quick mind in your clever head—’

  (In my ‘pretty head’ was what you said, she thought; and regretted the alteration.)

  ‘—and here you come forth, with a more reasonable explanation that anyone has yet thought of. If we could trace back to these same marriages… At any rate, I will put your suggestion to the Squire and it may well go a long way to allay his fears.’ His face was alight with enthusiasm; he snatched up her hand and kissed it. ‘If only for the peace of mind it might give him,’ he said. ‘I can never thank you enough.’

  She thought as she closed her hand, fierce and protective over that almost unthinking, impulsive, all too meaningless kiss—that already he had thanked her enough to reward her for the rest of her days.

  CHAPTER 9

  NOW THE SQUIRE SAT in his chair no longer, but was supported at midday down the broad staircase by Tomos and the footman, and lay all afternoon on a day-bed arranged in his library, propped up against cushions, his thin legs bent at the knees, forming a peak beneath the light rug, slanted inwards to rest against the side of the couch. Ill and deeply depressed, he paid ho great heed to Hill’s insistence upon the possibility of a natural explanation of the sequence of family tragedies; but he gave all assistance to the search for proof, decreeing that Miss Tettyman must have such free time as she herself thought proper, and use it as she would. She took it as sparingly as she might without in any possible way neglecting her charge of the children, excusing such hours as she did spend away from them by the reflection that it was all ultimately to their advantage. And all that time was spent with Hil.

  Tante Louise was predictably enraged and disgusted. ‘So now, Mees, it is not the stable-boy but the farm-servant?’

  ‘You would not blame me, Madame,’ said Mees sweetly, controlling her temper, ‘for attempting to raise my station in the world?’

  ‘You will not get far with that one.’ She used an ugly expression. There was no need to pretend not to grasp its meaning. ‘That woman, that Menna—she could tell you!’

  Miss Tetterman laughed outright. ‘Menna! Hil—with the cook! And she is older anyway, old enough to be his mother.’

  ‘N’importe! He will take what comes, that one! Closed away here from the world of loose women who would give him what he needs; and he could give them back as good, je vous assure. But you yourself are hardly without experience—you would recognise that.’

  Now she did cry out in outrage. ‘Madame!’

  ‘Oh, you may not allow it even to your secret thoughts, it is all very beautiful, it has all been for love, has it not my English Mees, so bien élevée, so comme il faut! But don’t trouble yourself, I see in you what beneath all this wonderful propriety you really are. You think I am blind but I am femme du monde, my dear, I have eyes to see that you are one who is passionate.’

  Miss controlled herself from the sick trembling, the ague of trembling that suddenly assailed her. She said more steadily: ‘I think that the eyes you see with are jealous eyes, Madame. It is Olwen who reports all this filth to you.’

  ‘Olwen! How dare you so speak to me? I do not consort with the servants, I am not such as you are. For this impertinence, Mees, you shall regret, I shall speak with Sir Edouard—’

  ‘Speak away, Madame. You will find that the Squire will not listen to calumny against Hil, picked up from a foul-minded housemaid, sick with her own self-pity. Nor of Menna, so long with this household, so loving and loyal.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Menna, indeed. Loving, indeed! And loyal indeed, to the poor sick wife of the old Squire, your master’s father! She is one of those, my dear, and you may take it from me: I have seen enough of them, I perfectly recognise her kind. Which, after all, unless I am much mistaken, whether you know it or not, is your own. You are hot after the men, the pair of you…’ She spoke by now almost entirely in French, gabbling it all out in a rapid stream of hate. It will be best, thought Miss Tetterman, that I seem not to understand, she shan’t know that my ears have been sullied by all this dirt and vilification. Lovely Menna, easy and kind—and Hil, with his face of a saint, the sunshine pouring through the golden glass lighting a halo about his red-gold head…

  But lying through the sleepless night in her white, curtained bed, she heard the harsh voice screeching still in her ears: the ugly phrases, hardly comprehensible to her inexperience and yet somehow all too fully understood. And, ‘Even to your secret thoughts… I see you as what, beneath all this outward propriety, you are. You are one who is passionate—’ No, no! she had cried out silently: and yet…‘You have within yourself great depths,’ her father had said, in those long hours of her vigil at his dying bedside. ‘Have a care! Love is all-beautiful. But there, again, may come the lightning flash: and when it comes, beware that your passion may be sweet and pure, and not grow too fierce and rampant, beyond your control.’ One flash had come in the too recent past, that had all but destroyed her in a sickness of bitter resentment, would have destroyed her but for remembrance of t
hose tender counsellings. Had there come again that other lightning flash that had no hatred in it but only too much of love? Is this glow in my heart, this longing in my body, the innocent fresh passion that goes with a girl’s love for a man? Or is it the rampant dark weed that that woman sees in me? And…

  And had the lightning flash struck her lover too?

  So the spring passed and she wandered with her pretty darlings through the flowery meadows and watched the skittering of the lambs and the gentle ambling of the milch cows, the springing of the crops, painting over the rich brown earth with their first wash of palest green and so to the summer… For the rest… For the rest, positively Miss was neglecting the little girls. She took them with her when she could on earlier outings but the longing to be alone with Hil grew in intensity and soon she was permitting herself excuses—to wander about the old churchyard reading the inscriptions on its headstones was hardly a suitable occupation for them, one afternoon after another. Their lessons she attended to with the strictest fidelity: all morning they toiled away, though happily enough at their sums and their pot-hooks and their reading, chanted their ‘times-tables’ and the dates of the English kings: thumped dolorously on the schoolroom piano or settled in rapture to be read to, from carefully instructive books. But their luncheon over and the prescribed half hour’s rest, lying flat on their bed with pillows in the smalls of their backs to ward off curvature of the spine—it was time to take exercise; and how often nowadays it occurred that Tetty was too busy, and Olwain would be told to take them on their ponies to the field set up with low hurdles, and practise them in jumping, or Bethan to ramble the meadows with them, singing like three little larks as they gathered the flowers for daisy-chains and cowslip balls.

  By tea-time, certainly, Tetty would be back again, as happy and laughing and kind as ever, their dear, lovely Tetty, and nowadays with such a sort of—shiningness—about her; and there would be stories of knights and ladies, Arthur and Guinevere, Lynette and Elaine; and darling Sir Galahad and brave Sir Lancelot. The children loved Galahad best of all the knights and so did Tetty sometimes, only sometimes she seemed to love Lancelot even more; the little dogs found themselves rechristened Gawain or Merlin—Merlin was a splendid dog who performed amazing feats of magic not unaided by Tetty’s simple sleight of hand—and Enid and Sir Bedivere. So even if Tetty did go out rather often in the afternoons, she made it all up to them. And there were the attics.

  The attics were largely given over to the servants’ bedrooms. In the East Wing, the maids slept two to a bed, only the cook and the parlourmaid having rooms to themselves; and in the West Wing, the men. But there were yet the lumber rooms with their accumulation of the abandoned treasures of literally hundreds of years. There the little girls spent hours of bliss, hauling out the old playthings, the once-precious ornaments, the rotting satins and silks of generations of Hilbournes, long ago dead and forgotten. And here Miss Tetterman also spent hours of bliss: for she had discovered the diaries…

  The diaries—old bills also, old books of accounts, old bundles of letters, filed tidily away after this death or that, until the powers that be should find time to attend to them…‘Sits in the schoolroom night after night,’ reported Olwen, ‘turning over them old pages, passing some over, peering into others as if they was the story of her life. If I stand in the window of the nursery, I can see her sitting by the fireside, all the papers around her…’

  Most interesting. Was Mees perhaps contemplating a little mild blackmail?—recent history in the Hilbourne family had been of dubious propriety. Olwen had overheard the old women in the bakeries retailing to the younger staff not unlikely gossip about the present Squire’s father. No blame to him, poor man; what a life with that wife of his, just the one delicate boy and after him, the bedroom door locked against her young husband! Run a bit wild, he had, not a girl for miles around had been safe with him and then gone and got himself drowned in the Dar, lower down towards Penrip; drunk as a lord he had been, galloping through the village, on his way to some assignation, no doubt, on that moonless night. But the women had caught sight of the sallow face listening at the crack of the door and they closed up like oysters, and Olwen—and Madame—had had to be satisfied with that.

  Now, however…‘Last night,’ confided Olwen, her fingers already closing in anticipation of the bribe to come, after all she had to tell, ‘I see her—reading, she was, through one of them books and she stops and stares at the pages and turns backwards and forwards in the book, and snatches up a bunch of papers, and searches through and then…’ She paused for effect and gave one of her unbeautiful sniffs.

  ‘Eh bien—and then?’

  ‘Back and forth, back and forth,’ said Olwen, ‘the book, the papers, looking about for more papers, and then…’

  ‘Mon Dieu, girl, have you got not le mouchoir? The hankersneef, girl, the hankersneef!’

  Olwen lifted the corner of her apron and gave a resounding blow. It was all about very little, however, just the habit, thought Madame irritably, ugly and tiresome, like the girl herself. ‘Alors, continuez! This histoire,’ said Madame, guarding against too much complacence in her not very admirable confederate, ‘is not so very interesting, but you may as well finish with it.’

  Olwen saw the promise of wealth dwindling uncomfortably. She in her turn affected an air of indifference. ‘No, right, Ma’am!—perhaps it is not so very important.’

  ‘Tell, tell!’ said Madame, impatiently. ‘Continuez! Relate!’

  ‘She tore it up,’ said Olwen, carefully brief.

  ‘Tore it up? Mon Dieu!—tore it up, destroyed it? This book?’

  ‘Not the book.’ The fish well and truly hooked, she proceeded expectantly. ‘Tore the pages out of the book, Ma’am, pulled out some of the papers from the bunch—’

  ‘Very well, and then—?’

  ‘I heard Bethan coming past the nursery, I couldn’t stay, I had to leave the window…’

  ‘So—is that all?’ said Madame, controlling a deep disappointment. She shrugged hugely. ‘That is not so much after all.’

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ said Ulwen, with downcast eyes.

  ‘There is more? What more have you seen?’

  ‘Only, next morning,’ said Olwen, up high again, ‘Bethan came from the schoolroom with a dustpan and brush in her hand. “Is that ashes?” I says to her. “There’s no fire in the schoolroom. It’s summer.” And Bethan says—’

  ‘Says what, girl, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘ “No, no,” she says. “Just, Miss has been burning some papers in the grate.” ’

  ‘I have in my drawer,’ said Madame, ‘a very pretty little piece of ribbon, Olwen—I have just thought how nice it would be to trim your Sunday bonnet. And I shall give you some shillings, three shillings perhaps; but half you must spend on a dozen hankersneefs—you shall take a time from your free afternoon next month to go and buy some. And continue to keep the watch upon Mees. One does not like to—fouiller: I think you say the peeping,’ said Madame piously, ‘but it is for the sake of the cheeldrain. You can listen, perhaps, if she tells the below-stairs anything about the books…’

  Miss, however, told nobody anything about the diaries—or nothing at least, of what pages she had removed from them; not even Hil. She did suggest to him, however, an excellent new plan to further their enquiries. An old woman was ill in the village. Would it not be nice if the children were encouraged, now that they were seven years old and might be taught to carry out such duties, to visit the poorer tenants, with appropriate comforts? Their mother, no doubt, before her illness, would have carried out such lady-of-the-manor visitations and her mother-in-law before her and so to generations back. The general gossip of the parish might well be productive of an anecdote most valuably adding to the outcome of their investigations. The affairs of the manor impinged very directly upon its tenants, and such people had long memories; she wondered that she and Hil had not thought of it before. He might fall into easy gossip with the me
n. She and the children could start with this particular sick old woman. Who knew what memories might be evoked of past lives and deaths?

  ‘Do you suppose Madame would concede a drop of broth for us to carry to her, by way of introduction? We could represent the propriety of the children taking on such little tasks…’

  ‘We won’t worry The Walloon,’ he said, laughing. ‘Bron will smuggle some out to you—she makes a famous broth, and a suitably nourishing custard…’

  ‘Bron?’

  He corrected himself, laughing again. ‘Bron! I mean Menna, of course. Bronwen is her second name; they occasionally call her by it. By any name, she’ll certainly oblige you as to the old woman, and you know how those ones love to dilate on birth, marriage and death.’

  ‘Especially on death. Such women seem positively to revel in discussion of other people’s departures from this life.’

  ‘It’s their only excitement,’ said Hil. ‘Birth is common enough, a great deal too common for most of them, poor souls; and marriage too often a mere scrambled joining-together, under the parental eye. But death—death is a shared emotion, we all face it, we all dread it; within the parish it entails some ceremonial which all may attend, a gathering-together afterwards among those who can afford it, for the “baked meats”. And death among the gentry—well, that must be quite a special excitement for them: the fine hearse brought over from town, and the horses with their plumes, the flowers and the grand mourning dresses, all the lords and ladies come from half across the county to pay their last respects. And it’s the custom of Aberdar on such occasions, to subscribe to a gathering (which, however, they do not themselves attend) in the village hall.’ He shrugged. ‘Quite a jolly outing, as they say. Everything but the seaside.’

  ‘Oh, Hil! I think they have more feeling in the village than that? These poor young Hilbourne wives; dead in childbirth, early widowed or losing young children—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I say nothing against the people. The Manor is very good to them: compared with many, they’re well taken care of, and they’re grateful. I only meant that such things aren’t soon forgotten, the deaths and disasters especially; and it’s death and disaster, alas, that you and I, in the enquiry, are interested in. Anyway, let’s hope that this particular sick old woman has a conveniently long memory; and of matters that count.’