Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  (She was not doing too badly, little penniless Miss Tetterman, with her humble background and her poor, scarred face. Here at her feet, wealth and a title; and, though she might not yet be aware of it, the possibility that a few brief weeks, days even, of unfulfilled wedlock might yet make her mistress of estates ten times the size of Greatoaks Park! But…)

  But… Oh, my love, she thought, my only-ever and for-ever love, my shining one!—what wealth and grandeur would compare with what you might one day offer me? A true love, a true marriage, a home that would be truly mine, our children and the—release of this desire, this craving for your arms about me, this sickness of my longing for you! She said at last: ‘That you should suspect me of greed, of a sort of blackmail, my lady, is simply to revert to your earlier low opinion of me. You are ill, and I won’t let myself resent it as I might. The simple truth is that… There is—there is a man—’

  ‘A man! You have a lover?’

  She put her hand to her scarred cheek. She said with angry pride: ‘Of course, it is impossible to suppose that any man could since I am become—have made of myself—a thing so revolting that none could bear even to look at me…’ Lady Arden cried out in horrified repudiation, but she over-rode her. ‘It may be that you are right; it may be that I am not loved and must wear out my heart in longing. But at any rate, I won’t remain here to be taunted for the very sacrifice I made for your sakes. I will go where there is no cruelty except from one or two whom I may despise.’

  Tears, pleadings, a total self-abasement. ‘Alys, forgive me, forgive me! my situation is so cruel, dearest, forgive me if I say cruel things…’ She consented at last to remain the few days she had promised to Sir Charles. ‘But no word shall be spoken of my future wherever it may lie: but reconcile yourself to the fact, my lady, make what arrangements you can—it will not lie here.’ Very sick and weary, she retired to her room: four days later, forced herself to genuinely loving farewells and with a heart uplifted in hope, started back for what to her had now become home.

  Now no pony-trap met her at the station, but the family carriage with Sir Edward’s two beautiful bays; and, to her alarm, Dr Meredith was there and old Mr Johnson the family lawyer. She gasped out: ‘The Squire?’

  ‘His condition is grave. We will explain while we go.’ As the carriage started up, the doctor repeated: ‘Very grave. A matter of days, a day or two perhaps, hours perhaps.’

  ‘He had a relapse?’

  ‘He has been fading steadily. From what cause, I don’t pretend to know. Ever since that blow on the head when the door fell back against him…’ He shook his head, bewildered. ‘It is a strange family. So much remains unexplained. But Mr Johnson wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘The Squire lies on his death-bed, Miss Tetterman. All arrangements are made—the Vicar is with him now, a new will has been drawn up ready for his signature; he is desperately ill but Dr Meredith and I attest to his being of sound mind, there can be no later complications. Sir Edward wishes you to marry him before he dies.’

  She cried out in desperate repudiation. ‘I couldn’t! I couldn’t!’

  ‘For God’s sake, girl—what have you to lose?’

  The old, hopeless merry-go-round of argument. She said flatly: ‘I am in love with another man.’

  The lawyer’s head fell forward in a gesture of defeat. He had known and cared for the family for many years. The doctor said, crisply: ‘In a matter of hours, my dear young lady, you will be a widow.’

  Mr Johnson looked up again. ‘Not so fast! There is no pretence but that the marriage would be for any reason but the benefit of the two children: to give them a guardian. What use, if she is then to marry elsewhere and leave them?’

  ‘She would be their step-mother. She might take them with her.’

  ‘He is absolutely adamant that they must not alter their residence, they must not—ever—leave Aberdar Manor.’ But after a moment, the old man said slowly: ‘I wonder if I might guess, Miss Tetterman—that your attachment need not bring about any move from Aberdar?’

  ‘Ah? Well? Might you not be tempted then, my dear,’ said the doctor, ‘to eat your cake and have it?’

  ‘To do a great, great kindness,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘To give these children their only chance of security, to send a good man in peace to his death, instead of in torment, and in due course to find your own happiness with no sort or kind of blame attaching to you, in the eyes of any man who might love you. And the man I am thinking of—surely he, who cares so deeply for the Squire and these two little girls—surely he would be the first to urge you to this course, at whatever temporary sacrifice to yourself and him?’ As the carriage drew up at the door of the Manor, he implored: ‘At least before you refuse this request, speak to—this man: discuss it with him!’

  The house looked very squat and heavy after the austere beauties of Greatoaks Park and the chill as she entered the hall came as almost a shock. The cobweb hands that just occasionally had seemed to touch her face now brushed roughly against her cheek, it seemed as though for a moment the wound broke open and bled again. And with its bleeding, her heart bled also, a bitter bile of the old resentment and rage at the treatment that had been meted out to her when that wound was new. ‘You? You have a lover?’ Lady Arden had said to her in astonishment, and, ‘It may well be,’ she had replied, ‘that I have been made into a thing so revolting that no man could bear to look at me.’ That one man had looked at her and with eyes of love, she could not bring herself to doubt and yet now found herself questioning, almost with resentment,—‘or is it only with eyes of pity?’ The children greeted her rapturously but she found herself oddly unable to respond and they fell back, hurt and puzzled. ‘It is only that I am so cold,’ she said, but felt that she spoke irritably. ‘I have taken some chill…’

  The doctor came downstairs. Over their heads, he said to her: ‘A decision must be made very soon.’

  In the carriage she had been filled with kindness towards the dying man, not entirely repudiating within her own mind the proposal that would release his soul in peace. Now with those icy hands bruising her face, she found herself feeling only an angry rebellion that once again she was to be sacrificed. ‘Well, Doctor, I will do as you ask; I will talk it over with—that one I spoke of. But I promise nothing.’ Puzzled herself, and troubled, by the sudden change in her emotions, she wrapped her shawl again about her. ‘I will go now,’ she said. ‘But keep your hopes low. I am not a heifer to be dragged from one altar to the other…’

  Little Miss Tetterman, belovèd Tetty, so loving and ever kind: what hidden force—it seemed from the moment she had entered the house—had brought her to so ugly a bitterness.

  But free of the chill in the house, she felt herself grow warm again; looked back in astonishment at the revulsion in her feelings during the past half-hour, felt her heart again in its tender glow at the thought that in a moment she would be with her own true love. Whether or not he would agree to the proposed marriage—for a few brief hours—to his dying brother, she hardly knew. He loved his brother deeply, only a half-brother though he might be, and illegitimately so; and the enormous benefit to the children must count for a great deal in his mind. The thought occurred to her that such a marriage might, through the laws of consanguinity, preclude their own; the lawyer had not mentioned it, but he might well be unaware of the relationship. The marriage would be one ‘in name only’, demonstrably unconsummated—would that make a difference? But she must leave it to him to decide; and, at least, in a very few minutes she would know once and for all, that she was loved. For she would not deceive herself; she knew, she knew that it must be so.

  At his house, if he were not about the estate, he would be in his office. And he was there, sitting at his big desk, all set about with tidy heaps and sheaves of papers and books. His fine hands played with a pencil, his head was bent, staring down at the unmarked sheet of white blotting paper in its leather holder. Her heart turned over, sick with that wild upsurge of passion th
at nowadays ever assailed her at the very thought of him. She said softly: ‘Hil!’

  The pencil snapped across. He leapt to his feet, confronting her, and his face was deathly white. She faltered: ‘I came to—I have something to—to tell you, to ask you—’

  He almost cried out. ‘Don’t say it, don’t speak it! First I must… I have to tell you… Since you went away, I have been married.’ He fell silent, he looked as though he might faint.

  Now she also was terribly pale, her hands clapped across her mouth, staring at him. ‘Married?’

  ‘To Menna,’ he said. ‘I was married this morning, to Menna.’

  She repeated again, stupefied: ‘To Menna?’

  ‘You had better know it all,’ he said. ‘It ended but… Menna… She had been for the past several years, my—woman.’

  Beautiful Menna, with her soft, deep bosom, her soft white rounded arms; whom she had heard him call, as though by a slip of the tongue, Bronwen. Bronwen, who in the happy innocence of the children’s Christmas party had sung—against his protest—that song he had composed—had composed for her. ‘Bronwen, my cariad, my snowy-breasted swan…’ She stammered: ‘You have been… You and she have been—lovers?’

  ‘I am a man who—who can’t live without a woman. Until I knew you—’

  ‘And now you have married her?’

  ‘For reasons—’

  She said quickly but even as she spoke she recognised that it could not be true; and yet, for what other reasons? ‘A child..?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘She’s past child-bearing. Indeed, it’s just because of that…’

  His voice continued but she did not hear him. Her mind was in her room upstairs in the Manor house, where she had sat one evening, tearing a page from an old book, wrenching across a handful of papers, letters and accounts, putting a match to them, beating the wrinkled black fragility into a tiny heap of ashes: was in a cottage room, with a dying old woman babbling out the secrets of fifty years as the local midwife. Her hands ceased their trembling, clenched themselves into white claws, her dead white face grew grim and rigid, it was almost as though in her own throat she heard the death rattle of her love. And cold, cold!—piercing her, enfolding her, a sort of black ice seemed to fill all her heart and mind.

  ‘As a fine tree, split by the lightning flash,’ her old father had said to her, never dreaming of the lightning flash that might yet strike his daughter down, ‘may grow to one side of the river fork, now fresh and sweet and green—to the other, dark and dry,’ so now her whole being poured itself into the blackened side of the riven tree. And the cold was there, the cold, like an icicle driving itself deep down into her heart, driving into her mind one monstrous decision. Those old papers torn up and destroyed… She said with slow deliberation: ‘You have not been by any means the lady’s first lover?’

  ‘She has never concealed it from me. There was a child.’

  ‘By your own father. Before you lay with her, so did your own father? She being then a girl, sixteen years of age, living in the village: who later came back as servant maid here?’

  ‘It was all so long ago.’

  ‘Having born a girl child which was taken away immediately from the mother and brought up elsewhere?’

  ‘She has no idea where the child is now.’

  ‘She need not look far,’ she said grimly and could hardly believe that her own voice spoke. ‘For her sake, to confuse future search perhaps, and distress to all… she was deceived. The child was not a girl. The child was a boy.’ And moving away from him, turning away from him forever, she glanced back and said with a smile of terrible triumph: ‘I hope you will be very happy together. You and your—woman—and now your wife. She is your mother.’

  Down at the house they were waiting, everything ready in anxious expectancy. She took the frail hand in her own cold hand, a word was spoken, a look bestowed upon her of heartbreaking gratitude: and two hours later, the widowed Lady Hilbourne walked down the broad staircase of her Manor home and issued her first command. ‘Madame Devalle—you will at once dismiss the cook and set about finding another.’

  CHAPTER 11

  SHE WAS EXHAUSTED. ‘I will speak to the staff in the morning,’ she said to Tomos, summoning him to stand before her in the small room that the Squire had used for such business as was not conducted with Hil in the estate office, unconnected with the house. ‘Tonight, the children are to be told nothing, tomorrow I shall explain it all to them. Meanwhile, except for Bethan, nobody is to approach them; inform the staff of that.’ And up in the nurseries she kissed the children, forcing herself to tenderness, and said only that Papa was too unwell tonight, even for the goodnight visit, and she herself so weary after her long journey that she would let Bethan put them to bed and just spend the evening quietly alone. To Bethan she gave orders. No hint was to be given of any changes in the house and nobody, nobody was to be allowed to speak to them. This included Madam, if she should make any attempt to see them. ‘But, Miss, if she insists?’

  ‘I am “my lady” now, Bethan, if you please. And as to Madam, you will find that she won’t insist. Just tell her what I have said.’

  ‘Yes, Miss—m’lady,’ said Bethan with a scared little bob.

  In the drawing-room, she found Tante Louise in a state of almost total disarray. She stood in the doorway. ‘Has that woman gone?’

  ‘She had left the house already. Mais, je ne comprends pas—’

  ‘There is no need for you to understand. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want to be left alone—I shall sit in the library.’

  ‘In the Squire’s room?’

  ‘Do you suppose he will rise from his deathbed and protest—as to where his wife chooses to situate herself? Have a tray sent to me there. Some soup—’ But Menna would have prepared the stock from which the soup would be drawn. ‘No, no soup. But whatever small cheese-dish the girls can prepare, and a slice of fresh bread from the bakery—a fresh loaf, understand, from the bakery: and a glass of claret. Attend to it now, please. And meanwhile, nobody sees or speaks to the children, except Bethan alone; attend to that also.’

  ‘Eh bien—it is evident,’ said Madame in her own tongue, speaking her thoughts aloud, confident of not being understood, ‘that the upstart is not slow to seize her position, to place herself above those who, up to now, have commanded her—’

  ‘I am glad you appreciate it, Madame,’ said her ladyship, in her own fluent well-accented French. ‘I shall explain to you in the morning, exactly what will be your position—if I choose to keep you on, here. Meanwhile, the tray please, and without another word. I shall spend the evening in the library and I wish to remain there undisturbed.’ She turned on her heel and walked out of the room, leaving the woman standing, gaping after her.

  A girl brought the tray, with her small, timid bob curtsey. ‘Thank you, Hannah. You may come back for it in half an hour: I shall leave it on the table outside the door—I don’t want to be disturbed again.’

  ‘But she was disturbed,’ said Hannah, bringing back the tray later, to the kitchen. ‘This time of night—who could it have been? People was talking in there, in the library.’

  ‘No one has called,’ said Tomos. ‘Rod, you haven’t answered the front door?’

  ‘Haven’t stirred from the kitchen fire,’ said Roderic. He added: ‘And thankful we’ve all been to have it. Funny thing, a death in a house: the whole place feels suddenly—well, you could call it as cold as death.’ But whoever could it be, they all wondered, curiously, talking to her new ladyship there?—in that room, sacred to the Squire alone, who would tenant it no more.

  Did she sleep? Did she dream?—sitting alone in that old library where once the Squire of Aberdar had slept and dreamed, who now lay dead upstairs. There came at any rate a heavy perfume that seemed to pervade the whole room, a rustle and murmur as of silk against silk, of velvet on velvet: a gleam in the shadows here and there, a shimmer of gold. And a whispering… A whispering…

&
nbsp; (For—somewhere, of course, must there not be—a Shining? A radiance drawing up into its light the souls of the dead, as the sun draws up the dew. But between the coming of the dark and the coming to the Light—a world of veils, a shadowy maze through which the pilgrim soul must wind its way to that remote brilliance: a half-world in which it may yet be possible to turn back, to pierce through the darkness of death to a something of life again, however unreal and intangible. What, is eternity, if a moment of it, a few days, years, centuries, as the world counts time, may not be spent as the spirit wills, still in contact with the life-before-death?)

  And if a curse has been pronounced, how not remain to see that curse put into operation, generation after generation? How not come back? And in that room, many generations ago, a curse had been pronounced, an anathema. ‘Our curse upon you—upon you and upon all generations to follow you… Never again… Never again…’

  ‘Only a Hilbourne could understand,’ that young girl was to say long years ahead, ‘only someone of the Hilbourne blood.’ Her new ladyship might not be of the Hilbourne blood, but she was a Hilbourne now. Whether or not she knew it at the time, she had entered the house that afternoon a Hilbourne bride—and from the maze of grey veiling, those cold hands had reached out to her, influences ugly and malign seized upon her uncomprehending mind and heart. Up there on the hill above the house was the new home of another who had also that day become, in name, a Hilbourne—beyond their grasp, who could haunt only within the walls of the Manor, but to be reached by a messenger, helpless to resist, to lift the sword that would slash across all hopes of happiness for either. ‘Beware the black shrivelled fork of the riven tree!’ her father had said: when the lightning flash came, ghostly hands had been at work already—guiding her towards the dark.