Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  He said eagerly: ‘To the clodhopper?’

  ‘To Lawrence. He has transferred his affections back to his childhood love. They will live at Plas Dar. He is out of my life.’

  His arms, like a chill fog, wreathing about her. ‘And you are mine? You are my love for ever? You are my bride?’

  She threw out her hand as though in the last terrible moments to clutch at reality, at sanity—at life. But Death had his arms about her. Oh, my little sister, she thought, oh, Lawrence—my two only loves, both false to me and yet I must do this for you! And reality and sanity and life itself were slipping from her failing grasp…‘You are my love for ever? You are my bride?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For ever. Your bride.’ And she descended into hell and knew that hell need not be the fire and brimstone of her childhood upbringing, but as cold as death. For all through that night, she lay in the arms of the dead.

  CHAPTER 21

  AND THE SPRING CAME and another spring and another; and at Plas Dar, ‘Christine’ lived as the pretty little, charming little wife, burgeoning into motherhood, the admiration of all—not quite so sweet and gentle, perhaps, as in former times, but she seemed to have inherited from her sister, Lyneth, some of those old witching ways. Lyneth, the poor dotty sister, meanwhile, a byword in and around the wide manor lands of Aberdar—for in these days of easier communication, such secrets were harder to keep than they had been twenty, forty, sixty years back, as succeeding brides fell victim to the strange family malady. She kept very much to her rooms now, which once had formed the nursery suite: a Lady of Shalott who ‘having no loyal knight and true’ would yet stand sometimes at her window to look down to where he rode, coming across the little bridge to visit her. False lover but true friend: to her sad eyes so brave, so beautiful, so shining still—Sir Lancelot.

  For the rest—no company but her ghosts. Now and again she would take a drive with Lady Hilbourne, but, ‘What is the use, Tetty? We can never speak freely in the house, they are watching and listening all the time. Solemnly order the carriage and go wandering about the countryside so that we may talk together—but what have we left to say? News of the neighbourhood, of the house and the estates—what interest is any of it to me nowadays? I shan’t live long enough to know how it all develops. Or at least, I hope I shan’t!—but they’ve all died young, the brides of Aberdar. And I could tell you why.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, darling child—are you so unhappy?’

  ‘The other dear, darling child you care about is at Plas Dar, Tetty, and she at any rate is happy. At least, I hope she is? Is she truly so?’

  ‘My dear, why do you ask these painful questions? Yes, of course, she is, why shouldn’t she be? In her situation, all her days must be filled with happiness.’

  ‘I have a right to ask, after all. I pay for every hour of it.’

  ‘You insisted upon this course, Christine. We had no power to prevent you. Must you now spoil all your great goodness, by this over-riding bitterness?’

  ‘But you did have the power to prevent it, Tetty: never to have let any of it happen. She could have found happiness anywhere; but no, she had to steal mine, and you had the keys of the safe and you handed them over. Do you call me bitter because from my prison upstairs, I must watch her in possession of the treasures that you should have guarded from her vanity and greed? I am very naked without them; shivering with cold, my heart is like ice. And if one touches ice, Tetty, one will feel the cold too. We had better drive back.’

  ‘Do you think my heart is not like ice?’ said Tetty, and lifted a hand to knock a signal to the coachman to turn for home.

  And Hil tried a little experiment, booking a table for luncheon in the old Lion Hotel in Shrewsbury, a short train journey away: Mr Dickens himself had stayed there and written about the place—what if they were actually to see him!—what if he were staying there now?

  Christine was very thin nowadays, her face always haggard and pale; a travesty of the lovely young creature of only three years ago, with her bright eyes and the sheen on her yellow hair. He was almost afraid to subject her to the day’s excitement but she kept up with him gallantly, breasting the hill up from the station and down again—‘The wonderful street names, Hil—Wyle Pole and Dog Cop! And all the old houses, as old or older than Aberdar.’ And it was so wonderful to be able to walk unrecognised—‘Nobody to pity the poor harmless lunatic or scuttle off out of my dangerous way!’

  ‘My poor darling, dearest—what can I say? If you could only get away, leave the place, go where they couldn’t follow you—’

  ‘The house wouldn’t let me go, Hil, you know that. It’s been tried too often. And—well, I mustn’t distress you, it’s not all horror, darling, day after day. One gets used to it, as one gets used to almost anything. Richard in his own strange way loves me…’ She concealed the shudder that ran like cold water through her veins at the memory of such manifestations of that love as she could not speak aloud. ‘And for his sake, Lenora is fond of me, they try to keep me happy with them; and their conversation, heaven knows, is more entertaining than that of anyone left in the world who would trouble to converse with me now…’

  ‘What can they have to talk about?’

  ‘Well… Three people cooped up in a choice of two or three narrow rooms! Twice a day, I used to go down and sit at the dining-room table with Tetty: but even that I’ve given up. We both knew that every word we spoke was listened to, it was all so strained and I was hardly a stimulating conversationalist, I daresay—what do I know of present-day affairs? All the politics I hear is of Mr William Cecil and his machinations and the plots of poor Mary of Scotland and was it right or not that she should die? I keep forgetting myself among everyday people and coming out with some remark about the complications with Spain—no wonder they think I’m out of my mind!’

  But her spirits revived as they reached the inn, moved through the beautiful old ballroom, designed by the brothers Adam (‘It puts Plas Dar and poor dear Sir John Soane in their place!’) and into the dining room. She said as they settled at their table, ‘I mustn’t be too much filled with self-pity, Hil. After all, it doesn’t happen to everyone to live in total familiarity with the days when this very hostelry was building! So fascinating to hear casual reference to events in history that one hardly realised really and truly took place. To them, Henry VIII was a gross old man who would have tumbled Lenora into bed if he’d ever set eyes on her; they talk of people going to the block as we talk of dismissing an unsatisfactory servant. And of course Lenora knows every tuck and placket of the clothes they wore; she says all those jewels were very rough and ill-cut beside what has been seen since in the modern world.’

  He was filled with anguish by the transparency of the brave effort. ‘You have your piano, Christine? And do you still dabble at your painting?’

  Ah, well, as to that, no. All our earnest training in the arts has been wasted on me. Lyneth, I daresay, rattles away at Plas Dar to the admiration of all, but what do my ghosts know of Mozart and Haydn?—to them all music is compounded in the scrapings and pipings of fiddles and lutes for Her Majesty to dance to. I must say, she does grow a little wearisome: every other word is ‘the queen’—and a grotesque enough creature she must have been by then with her rotting teeth and the pock-marks covered over with thick white paint. And as for art—you’d think no one but Master Holbein had ever laid brush to canvas…’

  The room was huge and sombrely magnificent and the table shone with starched napery and bright silver and glass. Wine was poured. ‘Do you realise, Hil, that that waiter is almost the only stranger I’ve spoken to, literally for years?’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Hil, I’m sorry, I’m sorry to seem to harp on about my troubles all the time—but cooped up there all my life, darling, all my life, in three small rooms with no company but the dead—people who are dead, Hil, people who are dead…!’

  He leaned his forehead on his hand to hide his own tears. ‘What can I say to you, what in God’s name c
an one say?’

  ‘Oh, well… There’s always my Hil, my ever-loving, my ever-kind! But, when you think of it, no one else, really. Tante Louise regards me in her practical way as simply a poor madwoman and talks to me as though I were five years old, and as for Tetty, I seem not to be able to keep myself from reproaches; besides, all her heart is at Plas Dar, these days, with Lyneth and the baby Christina.’

  ‘Lawrence comes to you sometimes?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and we walk on the terrace when it’s not too cold, out of hearing—though, of course, he doesn’t realise it—of my Familiars. Each time I promise myself an hour in heaven, but in the end he just talks about the property and is innocently surprised to find the poor lunatic betraying so intelligent an interest. Of course he’s wretchedly conscious, my honest Lawrence, that in fact it’s really all mine.’

  The situation was a strange one now since, in passing over her identity to her sister, Christine had also passed over her inheritance. ‘Not that I mind, Hil, you know that; I never have. Let her have it, she has everything else that I care about. I sometimes wonder that she doesn’t insist upon moving in her Manor—why put up with a wing in her father-in-law’s house when she is heiress to all our great estate?’

  The fact was that Lyneth did not move into Aberdar Manor because she feared to come again under the domination of the ghosts, but Hil only said mildly: ‘She wouldn’t want to disturb you, Christine. Of course she regards it as your home.’

  ‘How untypically accommodating of her,’ said her sister, ironically, ‘since in fact it is mine.’ She shrugged wearily. ‘Ah, well—it will all be hers in reality when I am dead. And that won’t be long now. You have only to look at me. The very image, they’re murmuring behind my back, of my poor mother in those last days when anybody still saw her outside her room. And, once again, Lyneth wins. I was never a bride and so, though they don’t yet know it, my ghosts have broken the conditions of the anathema. They’ll go back to their Other World, and this time with no thread tying them still to this one. Lyn won’t be haunted, her children won’t be haunted—the curse won’t operate any more.’ She gave a small, grim smile. ‘Unless I decide to take over and haunt Lyn in my turn.’

  ‘Oh, Christine—’

  ‘Don’t be too troubled about me, Hil,’ she said. ‘I ought not to rest all my burdens on your sad shoulders. You grieve because darling Menna is dead—?’

  ‘That was all so long past,’ he said. ‘It’s a quiet sorrow. I torment myself with the thought that it stems from my abandonment: but in fact the physical causes were clear and it seems she died happy and in no pain.’

  ‘I envy her with all my heart,’ said Christine. ‘But for me too it will be soon over; and I shall be grateful to die. They say there’s this—Light. There can be nothing to prevent me, at least, from making the journey towards it, where everything will be bathed in something I haven’t known for a very longtime—where there will be hope.’

  ‘And your ghosts—?’

  ‘—what will become of them? A return to the grey mists and veils of their Other World, I suppose, with no relief now of promised return, no spying down meanwhile on the lives of the victims of their vengeance, of the victims to come. And so Lyn’s children will be free; but also, I suppose, all the generations to come. In which case, after all, I shan’t have suffered and died in vain.’ She rose and began to gather together her possessions, ready to depart. ‘So at least, darling Hil, and with all my thanks—we end on a happier note…’ And again she insisted, it had been a simply lovely day.

  A lovely day. But the day would end and the night would come; and all night long she would lie, passionless, in the arms of the passionate dead.

  CHAPTER 22

  AND ANOTHER SPRING PASSED and another. Tante Louise, with one of the girls living across the river at Plas Dar and once-beloved Lyneth mopping and mowing in the west wing, found that she could no longer endure the gloomy old house, in the loveless company of her ladyship alone, and announced that her rheumatism and other ills made it imperative to return to Bruxelles and spend her last years where her origins had been. ‘Very well,’ said Lady Hilbourne to the devoted slave of some fifteen years’ endurance, ‘when do you wish to leave?’

  From his remotion in the little house up above the Manor, Hil imposed a properly sufficient annuity—‘I take leave to remind your ladyship that Madame Devalle furnished several of the rooms at Aberdar with her own quite valuable possessions. Unless she is to remove them, she should be recompensed for these; and beyond that, Sir Edward gave certain undertakings…’

  ‘I find no written evidence,’ said her ladyship, replying in the customary stiff note, ‘of any undertakings.’

  ‘They were made in my presence,’ wrote Hil in answer. ‘But if your ladyship objects, I will have a word with Christine, who—whatever else Lyneth has usurped—in hard fact is still his heir.’ To Christine, he suggested: ‘You owe her a lot, my dear?’

  ‘Do you think so, Hil?’ said Christine in her sad voice. ‘She was hardly my best friend where Lyneth’s claims were concerned.’ But she added: ‘Whatever you thought it correct to give her—please double the amount at my expense.’

  Summer came and though the tiny girl at Plas Dar was now three years old, there seemed, to the chagrin of Sir Thomas and Lady Jones, no promise of any further family. Lawrence, under parental hints not very subtly conveyed, shrugged his shoulders and said tightly that there was plenty of time. He was not nowadays, poor Lawrence, the easy-going, laughing young man that once he had been. That little wife of his, said the neighbourhood, gossiping: it was odd how much she had changed! Miss Christine had seemed of the Hilbourne twins to be always the sweeter and more gentle, but she was proving as self-centred a little huzzy as ever her sister had been. A pity the boy had ever left Lyneth and gone back to his first love; but then, on the other hand, poor Lyneth—quite mad these days, one had heard, mopping and mowing up in that attic of hers! It was a strange family. Her poor mother, Anne Hilbourne, she’d been just the same…

  The child had been christened Christina—after her own mother, said the gossips, how typical! But Lyneth was paying this one grateful tribute at least, to that great sacrifice which daily, nightly, was offered—literally—in her name.

  And now… In the long-ago days, it had been Christine and Lawrence Jones, Lyneth and her cousin Arthur; and Arthur, broken hearted at Lyneth’s defection, had gone off to foreign parts—not in fact to hunt big game as she had then flippantly suggested, but to develop a devotion to travel abroad and, with intervals, to pursue it over three or four restless years. But now Arthur was at home and thought it innocent enough to call upon his old friend, Lawrence, at Plas Dar; the more so that, after all, it was Christine who was Lawrence’s wife. His own past love, Lyneth, he heard with sorrow, was now stricken with the family malady, living at Aberdar and almost totally a recluse.

  So Arthur came to Plas Dar—and within the hour the old magic was at work. Unaware that this was in fact his first true love, he found himself trapped in the fatal fascination of the supposed Christine and knew that he must flee from disaster as fast as he could go. But how escape when danger wore so smiling a face and held out to him welcoming hands? He felt himself drowning in honey and in all too short a little while, forgot all but that the honey was sweet.

  For—it had been true perhaps when the ghosts had said that Lawrence Jones was a dull young man. If to be sweet tempered, easy-going and doggedly devoted was to be dull, then Lawrence was dull. And life at Plas Dar was dull, with the parental eye always upon her. Scarcely out of her teens, already tied down by marriage and motherhood, predictably an illogical resentment had taken root within her. And now…‘Well, Tetty, it’s your fault, you should never have let me marry him.’

  The summer had come and Lady Hilbourne sat out on a bench on the lower terrace, looking across the little river to the hillside in all its leafy green. Over forty now and very much the matron, she wore always a tiny crown of the han
dmade lace that Tante Louise brought back from her native Brussels, with two streamers of pale brown velvet hanging down at the back, to match the inevitable dress of plain russet or sepia, tight and tailored in the bodice, flowing out into a rigid crinoline.

  Lyneth, however, was very smart and bright these days, very much in the current fashion of hitched-up skirt over a scarlet petticoat, worn short to expose the charming little tasselled boots with their painted heels. She had driven over in the dogcart with the little Christina—carried into the house by Tomos to visit her aunt in the upstairs rooms; the young gentlemen were at this moment to be seen, riding down the path that led to the little bridge across the river, coming from Plas Dar. ‘Not a word in front of them, Tetty, about all this!’

  ‘Lyneth, I cannot believe that you’re serious. Leave Lawrence—!’

  ‘I should never have married him.’

  ‘We tried to dissuade you, but you would have him.’

  ‘Only because I didn’t want her to have him. I was just a spoilt child—if only you’d been a little more clever with me, I might still have been free, now, today—I’m not yet twenty-three—with a whole glittering world to choose from and maturity enough to choose a lot more wisely. Well, now it’s going to end, and if you don’t like it, look inward, Tetty, and see whose fault that is.’

  Even she, thought her step-mother, stiff and erect as ever on the old stone garden seat, even she who all her life has been my pet and my darling, now turns against me. She said grimly: ‘Don’t try to absolve yourself of blame, Lyneth, by forcing it all back to me. You were greedy and jealous and in your egotism you have brought your wonderful sister to what she is now—’

  ‘She would have come to that anyway. She’d have married Lawrence and, being a bride, she would have been haunted. It’s only that she’s come to it at second hand.’