Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  ‘It will never seem cold while we’re with you, my pretty one.’

  ‘No, I understand that,’ said Lyneth. ‘Now that you’re here, I understand it. Before it did often seem—mysterious. A lot of things seemed vaguely strange but now, of course, the mists clear away…’ Having seen them seated upon the little silk-upholstered bedroom chairs, she hopped back on to the high four-poster and sat comfortably curled up against her pillows. ‘It all seems so delightfully familiar.’ To Richard she said: ‘But you and I met a little while ago, didn’t we?’

  ‘Does it seem a little while to you?’ said Richard, putting on a languishing air. ‘To me it has seemed eternity till I saw you again.’

  The sweet face grew a little pink with embarrassment. ‘You were very naughty. You interrupted my young man in the declaration of his intentions.’

  ‘Too late, alas, to prevent it altogether.’

  ‘But we are promised. I love him.’

  ‘Nonsense, sweetheart!’ said Lenora. ‘One may love a dozen young men at your age, one by one or even two or three at a time. Richard was head over ears about a girl—Isabella, her name was—just a few years ago—’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty,’ said Richard, behind his hand to his sister, grinning, ‘to be more precise.’

  ‘—but he has long ago entirely recovered from it.’

  ‘Oh, I hardly claim that, Lenora,’ said Richard, lounging long-legged in his chair, watching the small cloud of chagrin pass over the lovely little face at this hint of a rival. He assumed a look of gentle sorrow. ‘All I claim is to be doing my best not to sigh too long for what may never be.’

  ‘And is she lost to you indeed?’ said Lyneth, a touch too eagerly. He certainly was a very beautiful young man, as beautiful as Hil had been in those long ago days of her childhood, who nowadays was grown so grave and sombre, with all the light gone from the red-gold blond of his hair.

  Lenora sat on the stool before the dressing-table, the mirror reflecting back her face with its flashing dark eyes and the smooth, dark coils of her coiffure. ‘Lost indeed. But I still have hopes of his ultimate resignation.’ She looked at them both, teasingly. ‘Isabella, in fact, much resembled you; and Diccon has always adored a blue-eyed blonde.’

  ‘Alas, however, that this particular blue-eyed blonde is already promised!’

  ‘As long as you preface that with “alas”!’ said Richard, ‘may there not be hope for me?’

  She said, vaguely bewildered, ‘But—are you not a ghost? Can you ask me to give up my flesh and blood lover for a ghost?’

  ‘He is not precisely proposing for your hand in marriage,’ said Lenora, lifting an ironical eyebrow.

  ‘He won’t ask that I love another man outside my marriage?’

  Richard looked at her, languishing again. ‘Why need you marry at all?’

  ‘Nonsense, Richard,’ said Lenora sharply, ‘she must marry. It is a necessary part of the Anathema.’

  ‘An anathema? There is actually a curse on our family?’

  ‘Come, Lyneth, nonsense, you must have known something of it? You’ve felt our hands touching you, you’ve known that we prevented you and your sister from leaving the Manor…’

  ‘You put this curse on us, Lenora?’

  ‘My dear child, it was my Anathema. That this house should never—’ Richard gave her a warning look. ‘—that we should always come to visit any daughter of this house about to be married… And so we come back and visit; and as it just happens, now and again, these girls fall to the charms of Diccon—’

  ‘How could they help it?’ said Richard, laughing.

  ‘—and your mother was one of them.’

  ‘But—my mother was a married woman.’

  ‘The affair of course was in no way improper, my dear.’

  ‘How could it be? I don’t physically exist,’ suggested Richard, shrugging.

  ‘In that case, you haven’t got a heart to feel.’

  ‘Feeling—being in love, for instance—is an emotional matter: not physical.’

  ‘And are you now suggesting that you are in love with me?’ said Lyneth, with an air of pretty provocation.

  ‘My hand on my non-existent heart!’

  ‘Do you call it non-existent;’ said Lenora, ‘when time after time you lose it to the Hilbourne young ladies?’

  Lyneth’s mind wandered back vaguely to the long family history of brief lives, or lives tinged with inexplicable malaises. ‘But often those girls have been not real Hilbournes. They’ve been outsiders, marrying into the family, marrying the sons.’

  ‘Richard doesn’t make these fine distinctions. As long as the young ladies come to him here. He can’t haunt outside the house.’

  ‘You haunt only Hilbourne young ladies—?’

  ‘It does show a certain particularity,’ said Richard, ‘whatever Lenora may say about fine distinctions.’

  ‘Or vanity? You can’t bear to see another man get the better of you? You must entice away the pretty girls?’

  ‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? They will persist in choosing such delectable charmers. And now I see before me the most delectable of all.’

  ‘Who however is not for you,’ she persisted. ‘I am promised.’

  ‘Yes, and must marry,’ said Lenora with a warning glance at him. ‘There must be future generations or we can’t come back here again. Even in the Other World, we should lose our identities.’

  He shrugged. ‘She has a sister. Let her sister see to the future generations. Not that—’ He broke off and looked rather uneasily at Lenora.

  ‘I think that even to oblige him,’ said Lyneth, teasing, ‘my sister is unlikely to do that. Her heart really is engaged, once and for ever, to another man.’

  ‘You say that as though your own were less totally committed?’

  ‘Now it is you who are making fine distinctions,’ said Lyneth sharply. But her own heart gave a little shake.

  ‘At that rate, she is certainly not for Diccon,’ said Lenora. ‘His sights are set—though for the moment he seems, most strangely, to have forgotten it—upon young ladies who will marry in good time and produce heirs for this branch of the family.’

  ‘Then his plight is most pitiable,’ said Lyneth, assuming the arch look that had enchanted so many of her adorers. ‘For my sister is not likely to marry—and therefore it seems is not for him: and I am about to marry and therefore most certainly am not for him.’

  ‘In this case, we need trouble you no further,’ said Richard, a little too crisply for her comfort’s sake; and as abruptly as they had come—they were not there. She was a little frightened to discover how much she was upset by the fear that they might not return.

  But they returned. Pert young ladies were to be taught a lesson and they were long, long practised in the art of their terrible courtship.

  No easy rest for Lady Hilbourne either, tossing uneasily in the huge four-poster in her beautiful bedroom in the main body of the house. To her door came Christine, timidly knocking. ‘Oh, Tetty—I haven’t wakened you? I heard you moving.’

  ‘No, I’m sleepless tonight. And you too, my poor darling?’ Christine came close to the bedside, took the outheld hand in two of her own. ‘It’s more than that, Tetty. I feel so frightened. Lyneth—through the wall between our rooms, I could hear her talking—well, talking in her sleep, I suppose, but it sounded so—so…’

  The guilty heart lurched in her breast. ‘Lyneth talking—?’

  ‘She’s excited, Tetty, I suppose, and restless and talking in her sleep? Only…’

  ‘Only what, Christine?’

  ‘Only that it was more like a—conversation! Like people talking, not just Lyn muttering to herself, as people do when they’re asleep.’ She crouched by the bedside, her face as white as the white embroidered nightgown with its ruffles of lace. ‘Tetty—our mother… They say she used to—to talk to—well, to herself.’

  ‘I’ll come, darling,’ said Tetty. She got out of bed, found a wrap and
, filled with a fathomless sense of guilty fear, took her step-daughter by the arm and hurried with her along the cold corridors towards Lyneth’s room. Outside her door, they paused. No sound from within. She put her trembling fingers to the door-handle and slowly and softly turned it. ‘She’s asleep,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. She’s fast asleep.’

  Fast asleep, curled up against the heaped pillows, the golden hair tumbled about the sweet, innocent face; and on her lips a little smile.

  ‘But what a strange, musky scent there is in here,’ Lady Hilbourne said.

  Somewhere, she had smelt that perfume before.

  CHAPTER 14

  LAWRENCE JONES, APPEARING NEXT morning with a bouquet of flowers, to enquire after the health, strength and happiness of his lady after so eventful an evening, was received with a honeyed coolness a little shattering to his confident ardour. And indeed, compared with all the grace and elegance of last night’s apparition, he did appear suddenly as really rather an ordinary young man, after all; honest and eager, a little too easy of achievement—no rival blue-eyed blonde lurked in the recesses of Lawrence’s memories: a boyhood devotion to her sister Christine, of course, but that had proved ephemeral. Slept well?—indeed yes, she had slept very well thank you; and she smiled to herself as she added that she had been disturbed only by delightful dreams. He took this with natural simplicity as referring to their mutual happiness.

  And the ring? It was a little disappointing to discover that instead of wearing it every moment of her waking life, she had left it on her dressing-table upstairs. How explain that as she lifted it from its place of security in her dressing-table drawer, a cool hand seemed to take it out of hers and replaced it. She started to stammer out that it was too precious to be worn about the house and grounds all day, but something, some hint of mockery in the air, impelled her to say instead: ‘I can hardly be seen parading that great flashing stone around, at this time of the morning.’

  He had spent hours of agonising doubt in its choice. Now he suggested rather unhappily: ‘Perhaps I should have found something a little less… Well, more suitable for everyday wear. But my mother approved it.’

  Now the mockery was audible and a murmur of laughter; and to her terror, suddenly they were there!—standing on the stairs looking down to where they two stood before the great fireplace in the hall. And she found herself saying, ‘Tante Louise says that diamonds should never be worn before sunset; and whatever else, in such matters Tante Louise is faultless.’

  ‘My mother would agree with her,’ he said, a trifle put out by this reflection upon her good taste. ‘But she takes it to refer to heavy bracelets and necklaces, I think, and so on. Perhaps also to a large obtrusive diamond ring. That would be why she advised the sapphire.’

  From the stair, they looked encouragement with smiles of mischievous glee. She saw them as in modern-day dress, charmingly fashionable, so handsome, so beautiful—and the red-gold crop of hair outshining all. But she forced her eyes away, said, shrugging: ‘Oh, well, of course—if Lady Jones draws a distinction between a large obtrusive diamond and a large obtrusive sapphire—’ and heard the chafing sigh of ghostly clapping hands.

  Simple he might be and so much less—exciting, than she had thought him, with his clear brown eyes and the dull brown hair, curling, that only yesterday had seemed so full of golden lights; but he was not without spirit. He suggested with a stiff little bow: ‘Perhaps you would prefer to return the ring to me—’ he paused long enough to catch the startled flash of blue—‘and have it replaced by something more acceptable to you—and of course to your Aunt Louise.’

  Laughter on the stairs, downright derisive now: but she ignored it in her sudden apprehension. ‘Oh, Lawrence, no! I didn’t mean… I only meant…’

  A relief then, when Christine came down, brushing by them unseeing—they parted, standing aside with impish courtesy to make way for her—and with a smile on her pale face, touched Lawrence’s hand and kissed her sister, to wish them both joy. Yes, she had slept well, thank you; but in the early hours had heard this wicked girl talking in her sleep, enough to waken the dead…

  Well, indeed, you might say that, said Lyneth with a conspiratorial glance upward; just exactly what she had been doing! Now the laughter was mocking no longer but fond and indulgent. Over their heads, Richard made her a little bow and kissed his hand to her. She looked anxiously to see whether Christine or Lawrence observed anything; but he seemed only to shiver a little and she wrapped her shawl more closely around her, both looking out, vaguely puzzled, at the hot August sunshine. On the stairs, Lenora signalled secretly to Richard: She’s yours!

  How swiftly they had struck!—beguiling her within the first few moments of their manifestation in her bedroom, to this tiny conspiracy of a—flirtation—with Richard; so that she could not immediately fly to her sister with confidences, the ghosts have appeared to me, not just brushes of their chill hands but in—well, what looks like the flesh. What does this mean, what shall I do? How can I counter them, come away from their influence? Instead they had chained her with sweet looks and words, into a sense of conspiracy which kept her silent. But it was, after all, only a flirtation and not of her making, either, and she frowned at them with a laugh beneath the frown and shook her head. The frown said, ‘You’re naughty, don’t tease me, leave me alone!’ and upon the frown the pair vanished, were there no more.

  Christine said, ‘What are you looking at, Lyn?—what’s the matter?’ and with her words, there was a small yelp and one of the dogs was scrambling down the stairs just where they had stood.

  Lyneth cried out, ‘Oh, he’s limping, he’s hurt himself!’ and flew up to get him. ‘Oh, Lawrence—his little foot!’

  Lawrence took the dog from her, handling him with the ease of the country-bred young man, accustomed to dealing with animals. ‘It’s nothing: he has a pin caught between two paws.’ The present generation of dogs were christened after characters from favourite novels. This one was Mr Rochester, commonly addressed as Sir in the manner of Miss Eyre. ‘Oh, my darling, oh Sir—a pin! Where can he have picked it up?’ and Christine, no less terrified, ‘Lawrence, it isn’t sticking into him?’

  ‘It’s my Mr Rochester, Lawrence!’

  ‘Well, hold still, Sir, will you?’ said Lawrence. ‘One little tweak and we’ll soon have it out.’ His strong brown fingers delicately parted the pads and with a squeal and wriggle, Mr Rochester found himself set down on the ground, only to be snatched up again to comforting hugs and pettings. ‘I think it is I who should be getting the kisses,’ said Lawrence, laughing.

  ‘Oh, kind, sweet, clever Lawrence, yes, and here is one for you!’ And she put her warm arms around his neck and with her cheek against his murmured that she was sorry she’d been so horrid, she loved her ring, she was just cross and scratchy after the late evening, it had been her fault, her fault…

  But that night it was all fun again: the three of them sitting at ease about the pretty bedroom, tenderly teasing. ‘Diccon has been moping all day, darling, watching you walk about with—him—’

  She protested, ‘But I am engaged to marry him.’

  ‘—and riding, wicked girl! Now that isn’t fair—he can’t conjure a horse out of the Other World and go galloping after you. Outside the Manor, we lose our existence—our existence in this world, that is. We are prisoners within the doors of this old house.’

  ‘I saw you once outside it.’

  ‘Ah, well, just at the door. That was at your poor Mama’s funeral—who died for love of Richard, so only fair that we should have our rein relaxed to that extent. Our rules are precise, but they do give way just an inch or two, for very special occasions.’

  ‘For the interruption of a young lady’s betrothals, for example,’ said Richard. ‘Fortunately the fountain courtyard is almost part of the house. But you saw that, even for my poor Anne’s funeral, we could go no further than the driveway.’

  ‘Your Anne? Do you say that my mother was in love wit
h you?’

  ‘We’ve told you,’ said Lenora. ‘What else did she die of, poor sweet thing? Mind you, she was always a rather weak creature—’

  ‘She was always ill…’

  ‘She kept to her room,’ said Richard. ‘That needn’t mean she was ill.’ And he added with a laugh and a half-wink that she had not been alone there.

  Lyneth sat curled up on the little four-poster bed, its white curtains looped back with pink satin bows. ‘I don’t understand. My mother—was in love with Richard?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lenora. ‘All the Hilbourne girls, the Aberdar Hilbournes—fall in love with Richard. We have explained it to you—it is the Anathema.’

  ‘And even my poor mother?’

  ‘She pined for me, poor sweet Anne; and so she died. But you are made of sterner stuff, you’ll fight me all the way—’

  ‘Even to the extent of marrying your dull young man,’ said Lenora.

  ‘I hope she need not do that,’ said Richard. ‘This is not gentle Anne, or Eleanor; or Margaret before her, or Anastasia, that lovely young creature from Gloucestershire.’ He said to Lyneth: ‘You are going to be one of my true loves.’

  Lenora played with the pretty things on the dressing-table. ‘They have to marry and get heirs, Diccon, or what becomes of us? We should have no brides to return to, we should cease to exist—as this world knows existence.’

  ‘She has a sister, let her do the marrying and begetting.’ He spoke rather roughly and did not look at Lenora. ‘You are different, Lyneth; with you, it’s somehow different. Usually—well, I live up to Lenora and her Anathema: it was pronounced for my sake and the game amuses me, I’m not broken-hearted for my poor young ladies; as she reminds me, I have no heart to break. But this time… Perhaps it’s the business of the identical twins: perhaps my feeling, such love as I have to offer, is doubly strong.’