‘Not to spy,’ said Lyneth, ‘but to watch me, perhaps, and try to make out from what I say when I talk in my sleep, as they call it, what’s troubling me.’ Tomorrow, she whispered, giggling, she would see that Christine took something to make her sleep soundly, and then they could all chatter away as much as they wished.
‘We are going in for friendly chatter now, are we?’ said Richard, gratified and surprised.
‘Now that Lawrence has gone away,’ she said, I feel different, I feel more free.’
‘And yet, poor, dull earthy clod whom one day, you swear, you’ll marry! Over my dead body!’ he added, laughing. ‘But in fact we need never meet people in the Other World; we see very few; only those who have been very bad in their lives, or very stupid, or—well, who have in some way deprived the Light of their bright offering. Lenora and I—we’re debarred by our sins from almost all social intercourse; we must be sufficient unto ourselves.’
‘Though we do sometimes bump into some of the more earth-bound, returning here to do a little haunting of their own.’
‘A fine one you are, my brother, to complain of bumping! One day,’ said Lenora to Lyneth, ‘he actually barged against the Queen herself, in his haste to be off somewhere! Against very Majesty in person! “You are hot to be with your mistress, are you, my young villain?” she says, and raps him across the knuckles and tells him to be off, then, and not keep Isabella waiting…’
So gay and easy, so light-heartedly chattering away to entertain and amuse. And yet, thought Christine, curled on the day-bed, anxiously listening, beneath it all the threat implicit, ‘We are here, sweet Lyneth, for no purpose but eventually to break your little heart.’ And this purpose must, as soon as might be, be transferred to her own. Well, my heart is broken already, she insisted to herself. What have I to lose? But to grieve was one thing; to add sick fear to a simple sorrow was something else indeed. And she knew herself to be sick unto death with fear.
Nevertheless, it must be done; and a day came when she could suggest with outward ease that her sister might leave the sickroom for a spell downstairs; and so at last propose a short ride. ‘But not over to Plas Dar,’ warned Richard, materialising from nowhere as they sat at the window of her ladyship’s drawing-room, looking out at the thin sunshine of a late autumn day. He spoke to Lyn but Christine observed that for the briefest moment he had glanced as though for confirmation at the lockets, the coral and turquoise which to this day, for easy identification, they still wore. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘not nearly so far—’ and disguised the words hastily as though she had not heard and replied. ‘Not really far. Just at walking pace along the river bank…’
From that ride returned two girls ‘idenkital’ as once Lyneth would have said, in all but the exchange of their lockets. Christine wore the coral now; and the groom said, easily, assisting her down from her pony, in the lovely old walled-in stable yard, ‘Enjoy your ride, Miss Lyn?’
‘Oh, dearest,’ said the true Lyn, walking back with her towards the house, ‘now it begins! Now I am you; and you—’
‘And I am theirs,’ said Christine, very pale.
‘Dearest—even yet—’
‘No, no. The whole thing is under way, we don’t know what more danger it might involve if we were to go back on it.’ All the same, now that the moment had come she was deeply, deeply afraid.
Lady Hilbourne met them in the hall, all three carefully rehearsed. ‘Lyneth,’ she said to Christine, ‘you look very pale, my dear, I hope you have not overdone it?—ridden out too soon, having been so unwell.’
‘No, don’t trouble yourself,’ said Christine. ‘I’m a little tired but I’ll have an hour alone in my room resting. I shall do very well.’
Two pairs of eyes watched her, anguished, as she slowly mounted the stairs, but she went on steadfastly to Lyneth’s room. And they were awaiting her there.
She sat down at the dressing-table, with a shaking hand pulled off the little feathered riding-hat. Richard knelt to assist in tugging off her boots. ‘Though why I should, when you go galloping away out of my reach,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. I am powerless to come trotting after you.’
‘You—you never trotted a horse in your life!’ said Lenora. ‘At full gallop always, hardly looking where you were going, leaping off to apologise to some poor crone for splashing her with mud—splashing mud without apology on all and sundry of others who came in your way.’
‘It was for that, our aunt never forgave me—for who else spread tales to Isabella’s father of my misbehaviour at court?’
‘You were a fool, Diccon, to upset the woman—but when were you not? When did you ever give a thought to your own advantage?—Isabella’s father was right when he called me your keeper. Without me… But there was no guile in him, Lyneth,’ said Lenora, looking at him indulgently. ‘No guile at all.’
‘Yes, well… Forgive me,’ said the pretended Lyneth, faltering, ‘but I am so tired. My first outing after my—illness…’ She tried to force her voice to easy familiarity but the words stuck in her throat; she thought that once again he glanced as though vaguely puzzled at the coloured centre of the locket she now wore. She got up, pretending to move rather stiffly, from her seat. ‘So long I’ve not been riding…’
‘Lie down, child, and relax yourself,’ said Lenora, already gracefully disposed upon the little day-bed: an early wedding-gift from Tante Louise’s store of French gim-crackery, intended for the foot of a larger bed than the small four-poster with its looped-back frilly curtains. ‘Richard, help her off with her jacket. I confess,’ she added, ‘that I wish our haunting need not be confined to this house. I had a fine figure for a riding habit, Diccon, if you remember?’
‘Magnificent: an hour-glass in velvet and feathers. Even the Queen remarked upon it, Lyneth! “As well you were not at court in my father’s day! He’d have had you a-bed within the hour.” ’
‘And to the block a week later,’ said Lenora. ‘And for my part, the one as unwelcome as the other. Gross old man!’
‘He was not gross always,’ said Richard. ‘Our gran’dam to the end referred to him as The Golden Lad. Elizabeth was far less beautiful, for all her wardrobe was more magnificent even than his.’
Christine had thrown herself down on the bed in her shirt and the divided riding skirt. Richard perched on the edge, one hand, though she felt it only as a sort of disembodied chill, lying close against her own. She said, to distract attention from her involuntary recoil: ‘I don’t understand about your dress…’ But one must beware of repeating questions that Lyneth might already have put to them and she amended: ‘I have never entirely understood how you come to be dressed as we are nowadays. You’re always so elegant but in the costume of today: yet I suppose there were no tailors and dress-makers in your Other World?’
‘We explained it to you before,’ said Lenora. ‘You see us as you expect to see people, you clothe us in your mind. In our own eyes, we wear the clothes of our own time: don’t you sometimes get a whiff of that scent we used so much? Richard’s leather cloak was never properly treated and stank if it wasn’t well perfumed.’
‘As I daresay I did myself,’ said Richard, ‘by present standards.’
‘And so did we all. But Lyneth translates us into her own terms; and I am grateful, my love, for the elegant taste with which your mind dresses us. And, of course, in the Other World there are no clothes, as such. We are shades, we’re shadows, even to one another, moving forward through the shades and shadows to the Light. Till we see ourselves gradually reassemble, as it were, in our great skirts and ruffs and capes and slashed sleeves; and then we know it’s time to come back. You see us now, as you see us. But I see Richard in his doublet and hose, with his beautiful single earring—a great pearl drop that the Queen herself gave to him, plucking it from the bodice of her gown, telling him to wear it to remember her by, while he was away from her. “I would, Madam, that I might lie but once as close to your heart as this happy pearl has dwelt,” says our
lad, brushing clean the floor with the feather of his hat, “then should I need no jewel to remember you by.” Villain, villain!’ said Lenora, laughing, shaking her head. ‘He was at that moment in preparation to come here to Aberdar.’
‘And in a fine sweat lest Her Majesty take me at my word,’ said Richard, ‘since I had no heart then for any but my Isabella—who proved not to be my Isabella after all—’
‘And so you might just as well have taken up Her Majesty’s invitation and found all your family splendid places at court. Though, true, as with her papa, such invitations too closely followed up,’ said Lenora, ‘were more likely to find your head on the block than upon her pillow.’
‘And wouldn’t have found us here,’ said Richard, ‘where I had so much rather be.’ Sitting close, he lifted Christine’s hand and bestowed upon it a light kiss that sent cold thrills through her veins. Crudely instructed, with many nods, winks and allusions by Tante Louise in the realities of marriage, she shivered at the thought of what strange mysteries she must undergo when she finally submitted to Richard all her will?
CHAPTER 19
NOW IT WAS CHRISTINE’S turn to absent herself as much as possible from her sister and opportunity for close comparisons between them. And gradually this transition took over, Tetty addressed her as Lyneth, Lyneth herself addressed her as Lyneth, she dressed in Lyneth’s clothes, rode Lyneth’s horse; called Lyneth by her own name, Christine. Tante Louise might look vaguely puzzled, at first all the staff might look vaguely puzzled, but in the end who could quarrel with the obvious facts? Nor did the ghosts seem less than accepting; they appeared not at all to the real Lyneth and already to her were becoming more remote, ever fainter outlines to her sight, ever more voices to her hearings. She and their step-mother were desperate with gratitude, Lady Hilbourne at first anxious and guilty, but coming to accept that there had been no other solution, that Christine was fated for less than happiness anyway, that it was right that one at least of her two children should know a real life; what was the point, she would say to Lyneth, wearily mulling it over, in their both suffering? ‘Well, that’s what I feel, Tetty; if it had been the other way about, I’d have done the same for Christine, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, of course you would, dearest,’ said Tetty, and did not dare to ask herself if this were true. ‘I feel so dreadfully worried about you, my darling,’ she said to Christine, ‘but as Lyn says—’
‘As Christine says,’ said Christine, correcting her easily; but with a warning look. She led away from dangerous subjects. ‘You mean I have been talking again in my sleep? But what does it matter—some people do, some people don’t. I dream a lot, yes’—night after night, indeed, as the weeks crept by—‘but always nice pleasant dreams, stop worrying about me! It was to Christine now that these ears listened unseen; which must be every moment deceived.
Meanwhile, active preparations for the wedding had been unobtrusively relaxed. Lady Hilbourne had written a tactful note to Lady Jones to suggest that dear Lawrence be advised to extend a little his tour of visits: young girls were kittle-kattle and dear Lyneth, though firm in her intentions, was a highly-strung creature and must perhaps be allowed a little more time to prepare herself for so great a change. Lady Jones thankfully acquiesced and the spring, rather than the coming winter, would perhaps suit everyone best. ‘Though its never coming at all would suit me best,’ she confided to Sir Thomas, in a nowadays not unusual burst of tears.
‘Oh, come now, my love, you must get over her foolish behaviour that evening! How prettily she asked your pardon afterwards! I never saw anything like it. It’s a splendid match, the manors running so closely side by side, though for that matter a pity that he shouldn’t have stuck to the heiress. Still, this one will have a fine inheritance; and—kittle-kattle says her step-mama, well, just the word for it. These marriageable girls are much like cattle on the market, a pretty little heifer is not your great lumbering milch cow; and you’d rather have a mettlesome young racehorse, wouldn’t you?—than any rough mare from the Shires, for our fine young stud?’
‘There is no need to be coarse,’ said her ladyship, bursting further into weeping.
‘You’ve married a rough racehorse yourself, my love, I fear,’ said Sir Thomas and gave her a pat not unlike any he might have bestowed upon the said creature; and would hear no more.
Christine wrote a little note to Hil. ‘I must speak with Tetty out of the range of my Familiars with their listening ears. If I order the carriage, and come down to the stable-yard to meet it—could you be there?’ It was nowadays something of an effort for her to walk even so far but he met her half-way and gave her his arm. ‘But Christine, you alarm me—what now must be said to her ladyship in so much privacy? No more, please God!—of these terrifying plans of yours?’
‘Well, it is a plan; but one which in fact may abate the terrors.’ She stood with him, watching as the horses were led out to the waiting carriage. ‘What beauties they are! And a perfect match.’
‘Her ladyship spends very little on herself; but what she has is of the very best. The best of step-daughters, however, came to her rather by chance than by choice.’ Not, he said rather sternly, that he would call them very equally matched.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, in perfect innocence. ‘Lyn had always been far cleverer than me: people have always admired her the most.’
‘Oh, Christine—’ he said, in almost comical despair.
On the cobblestones, polished smooth by the centuries of wear, hooves scraped and chuffed with the backing of the horses between the curving shafts; from the boxes all around the square yard, mild faces looked out enquiringly, soft pink noses were upwards lifted, to snuff for the scented promise of an apple to come. He watched with an abstracted air to see that the bits had been comfortably adjusted, loops and buckles fastened securely. He said: ‘You have brought me here to say something particular, Christine.’
Her pale face grew shadowed. ‘Yes, well… It’s what I have to talk to Tetty about. Hil—something has happened. It’s been happening gradually, but now I know it. With all such strange heart as he has to give—Diccon has come to giving his heart, not to Lyneth but to me.’
His own heart seemed to thud within his breast. ‘What is this leading up to? For God’s sake—’ and he looked into her face and saw that she was white with fear. ‘And so—?’
‘And so I must talk to Tetty,’ said Christine. She leaned her cheek for a moment against the rough sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’d thought…’ She said, summoning up the ghost of a smile: ‘But that was foolish: no use at all, talking about it to you!’ And she stepped up into the carriage and before he had time to protest, was driven away. He put up his hand to hide from the stablemen the thrusting tears for the helplessness, the hopelessness, the terror of it all.
Lady Hilbourne was waiting in the porch of the Manor and was duly handed in. They sat each in a corner, wrapped in warm rugs. ‘So, Christine—?’
For once it was a natural cold. The oaks stood naked to the chill, their leaves heaped in their winter gold at the feet of the great dark boles; on the hillsides, the bracken was coloured the same tawny gold as the fallen leaves. In the fields, the cattle huddled close for protection, their sweet breath wreathing white in the chilly air, the sheep kept close against the rising banks beneath the hedgerows, leafless now; and in tree or bush or hedgerow, no bird sang. Only the chuff-chuff-chuff of the horses’ hooves on the softened surface of the road made any sound and the squeak of leather against leather, the whirr and rumble of the turning wheels. In the closed-in darkness of the carriage, it seemed as though they drove through a world unpeopled but by themselves and they spoke in small, hushed voices as though even they hardly existed within it. Only at the end of Christine’s recital, did Tetty raise her voice. ‘Never, Christine; never! I won’t hear of it!’
‘You are hearing of it, Tetty. And as you helped me before, you must help me now.’
‘Last time you—blackmailed me.’
&n
bsp; ‘And I will again.’
‘Dear God!’ said Tetty. ‘For the rest of my life—are you going to hold that threat over my head?’
‘For the rest of my life. But,’ said Christine, ‘that won’t be for very long.’
‘That is too terribly likely, Christine, if you insist upon this horrible plan of yours. But I shan’t allow it. Do what you like—tell Hil what you like. In my pain and rage, I told him a lie about his birth: my excuse must be that some force within me tore out the words from me. I have thought sometimes that when I came back to Aberdar—a Hilbourne bride, in fact, whether I were to marry Hil or as it turned out your dying father—the ghosts closed in upon me, with all their malignity—’
‘And turned you, yourself, into a thing malign.’
She bowed her proud head. ‘Nothing you can say to me, Christine, can outdo what I have said to myself, of myself, through these long years. But that he should know…! However—I repeat, if you must tell him, tell him! I’ll be blackmailed no more. I will have no part in this abomination that you propose for yourself.’
‘Then we must use that word again—doomed. Lyneth is doomed—probably both of us, but certainly Lyneth is doomed to God knows what vengeance if they find out the deception we’ve practised upon them.’
‘You didn’t think of this when you began it all.’
‘In fact, dear Tetty, it was you who began it all—when you turned my little sister from a loving and giving heart to a greedy and grasping one. But, in fact, when I thought up my plan, this was already in my mind. But there was no use in my trying to demand too much of you and Hil. I let you suppose that when Lyn was safely married and moved away to Plas Dar out of their reach—I could somehow make a peace with them. Perhaps, in the back of my mind, I believed that I could: the reality would have been more than I could yet endure to contemplate. I thought, as I say—with Lyn at Plas Dar and safe, I could reveal the truth to them, ask them to accept me in her stead, haunt me, tease me, bring all the world to suppose I was mad, as they were doing to her, as they did to our mother. They would have been angry: it would mean that they’d failed in the continuance of their anathema, they’d lost the power to come here and haunt again. All that I was prepared for. But this… Even I couldn’t foresee how it would go.’
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