Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  Christine leaned in the doorway. Holding her side, gasping, as pale as death. She said: ‘I came to tell you this, Richard. I am not Lyneth. I am Christine.’

  ‘Christine—?’

  ‘Lyneth was the bride. I took her place. We thought you need never know.’

  They seemed to shrink into themselves, to lose something of their bold beauty, standing gazing back. Lenora said: ‘You deceived us?’

  ‘Lyneth wanted to marry and be happy. She wanted to go away from Aberdar and not be—not be haunted…’

  The little girl, Christina, whimpered and trembled. She asked wonderingly as she had asked a little earlier, in the hall: ‘Aunt Lyn! Nobody dere?’

  ‘Lyneth,’ said Lenora, and, all a-glitter with its great jewelled rings, her white hand shook, ‘what have you done?’

  ‘Have I brought you to harm?’ said Christine. ‘I’ve broken the chain of the Anathema?’

  ‘What does it mean to us?’ said Richard to his sister. ‘She has destroyed it.’

  ‘It means that we are destroyed with it,’ said Lenora. ‘We are lost. The cycle is broken, we can never come back.’ And she seemed suddenly to regain whatever terrible power was invested in her still, and turned upon the cringing girl. ‘You’ve done this to us! You’ve destroyed us, reduced us to nothingness. We shall be there for ever now, in the Other World, shades among shades, groping our way through the grey curtains of mist, wandering, wandering.

  ‘Towards the Light, Lenora?’

  ‘That is beyond our reaching, little brother, who have clung for so long to this world, wreaked so much bitter vengeance here: who took our own lives, extinguished our own sparks of the Light. We shall be wanderers for ever.’ Her fingers curled themselves into claws. ‘What powers have we left while there’s yet time, what hell can we let loose upon her for the hell she condemns us to—?’

  But Richard went across and took the cowering girl by the arm, and brought her forward into the room; and now she did not shudder from the misty dankness of the touch of his dead hand against her hand, for she herself was growing very close to death. Death from no cause but that she had no will any more to live: the death that down the ages had come, strangely and without visible symptoms, to the brides of Aberdar. He recognised it also. He said to his sister: ‘We won’t hurt her. We can’t hurt her. She’s very close to us now. And we love her.’

  ‘You love her,’ said Lenora. ‘Long, long ago, with my death, I came not to understand the meaning of the word. But you died for love; you have never entirely lost the sweet taste of it.’

  ‘Then let me love her still. Do nothing to hurt her. She meant no harm—only goodness towards her sister. She gave herself up to us, she suffered—a living creature spending her life with us who are dead.’ And he threw out his hand, ringed also and sparkling. ‘Look at her! What more do you want? She’s dying, we’ve killed her…’

  ‘It’s their fate to die,’ said Lenora. ‘That is the whole point and meaning of the Anathema: that they shall pine and suffer and die—the brides of Aberdar.’

  ‘But she was not a bride,’ said Richard.

  Lady Hilbourne sat silent, turned to stone; even the child seemed paralysed, looking on with wide blue eyes, small hands clasped on the seal of agate and gold, engraved with the family crest. Christine seemed not to see them. She faltered: ‘If I have harmed you—’

  ‘You have destroyed us,’ said Lenora. ‘Already…’ And indeed already to the silently watching woman, they seemed less brilliant, the beautiful pair standing there before the fireplace: their colours less glowing, their jewels not so bright. Richard said, shrinking back, ‘The shadows, Lenora—the grey veils of the Other World—closing in on us.’

  ‘They are closing about me too,’ said Christine.

  ‘Yes,’ said Diccon. He held out his hand to her and his hand was as grey as ash now, and as fragile. ‘Will you love us, Lyneth, when you share death with us?’ But he corrected himself. ‘You aren’t Lyneth. Lyneth was the one who cheated us—for reasons of her own, Lenora, not like this lovely, sweet one, in selflessness.’ The ashy hand fisted itself, he lifted up his white face beneath the pale silver sheen that had been so bright an aureole of red gold. ‘She is the one who should be punished for ever more.’

  ‘Don’t waste your last strength in anger,’ said Lenora, as pale as he. ‘Already it has grown to be a feeble thing. We have lost the power to punish.’

  Christine said in a voice low but terrible: ‘Give me the power and when I am dead, I will punish her for you. For you and for myself.’

  ‘Punish her—?’

  ‘Teach me how to come back from the Other World, teach me to haunt this world as you have haunted. If you can’t come back, let me come back and use the same power over Lyneth, false, wicked Lyneth, as you have used through these long years in your eternal revenge…’

  ‘You are a living creature,’ said Lenora. ‘How can we invest you with the powers of a ghost?’

  ‘Then let me die. I would so much rather die.’

  Richard said, ‘But when we are gone—would you still wish for death? You would be free: you could gather back your strength, there might yet be a human lifetime of happiness before you.’

  ‘There would be no way then to punish Lyneth. Lyneth has betrayed us all, she has betrayed her husband—her love and mine.’

  ‘If she should return to him—’

  ‘How can she return? She has broken her faith with him. And betrayed all my sacrifice. I must have revenge.’

  ‘She is close to death,’ said Lenora, very quietly to her brother. ‘The love is ebbing out of her heart. She wants only cruelty and revenge.’

  ‘She is like you,’ said Richard.

  ‘You died of love, Diccon, and even in death, retained some part of your heart. It has been all our weakness. She is dying, but she’s dying in hatred, all she wants and ever will want now, is revenge. I know. So let her come with us; she has no place any longer in this world of theirs.’

  ‘Then…’ the voices dying away, diminishing as they themselves diminished away into ghosts, into nothingness. ‘Then Lyneth—Christine—come with us, dearest, come with us, come with us…’

  ‘Put your arms about me, Diccon, hold me, communicate your death to me, let me die and go with you. And if I have lost to you, your need for vengeance, then I will take it on my own dead shoulders, and carry it on for you…’

  Their arms were about her and it was as if a grey mist enfolded her. And the mist grew thinner and thinner and was there no more: nothing remained but a girl in a white dress lying on the floor in the glow of the firelight in that old, dark room.

  Lyneth, hesitant, frightened, just outside the great front door, heard a single scream of terror and ran forward through the hall and into the library. Her step-mother was crouched on the hearth-rug, holding the dead girl in her arms; and the child… The child was talking, with up-lifted face, smiling and bobbing, holding out eager small star-fish hands—to someone who was not there.

  CHAPTER 23

  NOW EVEN THE OUTSIDE world seemed darkened, as though a black cloud had passed over, obliterating all the summer sunshine. No light in the room but the flicker of firelight on polished oak panelling, and the gentle, warm glow of leather-bound books. Lyneth stood in the doorway her hand fisted against her mouth. ‘Oh, God, Tetty! Oh, God, oh God! Oh, Tetty, no—not Christine!’

  Her step-mother crouched on the floor, her crinolined skirt spread all about her, holding the slender white figure in her arms. ‘She’s dead, Lyneth.’ She laid her scarred cheek against the harsh pale hair that had once been so soft and sweetly curling. ‘Oh, Christine, my lovely darling! She’s dead, Lyn, she’s dead.’

  ‘Tetty,’ said Lyneth, her mouth stiff, ‘look at Christina!’

  Christina in her bright summer dress with the lace-edged drawers peeping out, calf-length, below—bobbing and bowing, holding out her little hands, all smiles and eagerness—infinitely pathetic, terrifying, grotesque. ‘Ly
neth,’ said Tetty, ‘she said—Christine said—that she would carry on the Anathema. She would be revenged.’ And she pleaded with the white-clad figure, lying like a broken flower in her arms, ‘Oh, Christine, my darling, no—not this!’

  Lyneth said frantically: ‘The ghosts—?’

  ‘They’ve gone, they’ve vanished, they’ve—gone back. But now Christine…’

  ‘She wouldn’t be so cruel,’ said Lyneth, bitterly weeping. ‘She couldn’t be so cruel.’ She rushed over and took the little girl into her arms. ‘Come to Mama, darling—Christina talk to Mama!’

  But Christina wriggled herself away and ran off across the room. ‘Aunt Lyn not go ’way, Aunt Lyn, Aunt Lyn—!’ and as though in propitiation, held out the golden seal. ‘Look what Tina got! Tina give it to Aunt Lyn?’ Lyneth followed her, tried to hold her but again she struggled free. ‘Not want Mama. Want Aunt Lyn.’

  Lady Hilbourne knelt upright now, the dead girl forgotten, staring in utter terror at the capering child. She prayed: ‘Oh, dear God, Christine—if you’re here, listen to me, listen to me! Don’t do this, darling, don’t punish us in this terrible, terrible way. If we injured you—’

  If they had injured her! For a selfish whim, aided and abetted, as Christine herself had said—they had broken her happiness in two, she who had asked so little in life, but her only one true and for-ever love; had condemned her to communion with spirits, careless whether they be friendly or malign. ‘Do you call me bitter, Tetty?’ she had said, ‘—because from my prison upstairs I must watch her wearing the treasures that you should have guarded for me from her vanity and greed. I am very naked without them and my heart is like ice. And if one touches ice, one will feel the cold too.’

  And Lyneth: ‘If I am cruel and wicked, Tetty, it was you who made me so…’

  And…‘I have a gift,’ Hil had said to her, long, long years ago when still the young tree of her life had been fresh and green, before the lightning flash had come. ‘I—know things. And I know that one day far into the future, you will betray us. You will destroy us all.’

  That day was come.

  She stumbled to her feet. She went over to where the child still danced and smiled. She too addressed the unseen. ‘Christine—hear me! If I can lift this burden from you… If they would release you… After all,’ she suggested, desperate with anxiety, ‘I also was a Hilbourne bride.’

  Lyneth cried out: ‘Tetty?’

  ‘If I could take Christine’s place, Lyneth. If I could give my life for hers… You would go back to Lawrence, Lyn—?’

  ‘Oh, Tetty, yes, yes! Anything, anything. I’d try…’

  ‘Plead with them, too Lyn. They may not yet be so far away; plead with Christine…!’ And she knelt again, taking the little girl in her arms. ‘Ask your Aunt Lyn, Tina, ask her very nicely, say please, please do this for me, please, please take Tetty into the Other World and come back to us instead.’ And as the child only stared at her, uncomprehending, she insisted: ‘Ask Aunt Lyn—just say please, please, let me go!’

  ‘Don’t want to go,’ said the child. ‘Tina stay with Aunt Lyn.’

  ‘Christine, for God’s sake!—hear me, listen to me! Don’t punish this child for my sins.’

  Lyneth looked down into the upturned, happily smiling small face, framed in its dancing curls. She said: ‘Tetty, I don’t think it’s Christina who is being punished. It’s you and me.’

  ‘Oh, Lyneth—Christine always so gentle and kind: could she really break your heart like this?’

  ‘After all,’ said Lyneth and fell again into a storm of weeping, ‘I broke hers.’

  Outside the sun shone bright again, but in this dark room it was piercingly cold. They were silent, only the child chattering happily away, running back to the desk to fetch another toy to be shown to—nobody. Lyneth said at last: ‘Will Christine never let me go?’

  ‘It is not the same curse,’ said her step-mother. ‘They didn’t haunt children, the curse was upon the brides of this house. But the house… Will the house still imprison you, Lyn?—will it imprison the child?

  ‘And if not?’ said Lyn. ‘If I take her and never bring her back—?’

  ‘Aunt Lyn says, Tina come back,’ said the little girl. She asked wonderingly: ‘To Aunt Lyn?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said her mother. ‘You shall come back. But come with Mama now, darling.’ She caught the child and lifted her. ‘Come now with Mama, Tina, and come back to Aunt Lyn another time.’

  The little girl struggled and cried. Lady Hilbourne said: ‘Can Christine—? Those others, they couldn’t haunt outside the house. Is it the same for Christine?’

  As though in reply—‘Put down, put down!’ cried the struggling child and, set down on her feet again, ran to the centre of the room, holding out an eager hand. ‘Aunt Lyn come in the garden wiv Tina? Come and play in the garden?’ Disappointment spread across her little eager face. ‘Can’t come in the garden? Aunt Lyn can’t come out?’

  ‘Christine has given the answer,’ said Lady Hilbourne. To the nothingness in the room, she said: ‘Christine—tell the child. Tell us the terms of your curse upon us. To punish us, Lyneth and me—you will haunt Christina? But you won’t hurt her—?’

  ‘Aunt Lyn not hurt Tina,’ said the child, protesting. But again her face changed, took on a shadow of fear. ‘If Tina’s good.’

  ‘Oh, Tetty,’ said Lyneth, ‘if she’s good! If she’s good—if she does what Christine wishes, if she leads the life that a ghost decrees she should lead. If she doesn’t…You couldn’t know, but Christine—the living Christine—she and I knew very well what that could mean.’ She went if possible even more white, her hands shook with fear. ‘Oh, my poor baby!’

  Still and quiet, the dead girl lay half-forgotten. Her stepmother said, looking down at the thin face that had been so lovely, ‘She could never be cruel to Christina, Lyn, she loves her.’

  ‘She is a ghost now,’ said Lyneth. ‘Ghosts can’t feel love, they have no hearts. Richard—I don’t know, Richard seemed sometimes to be—different. He said once that he had loved our mother; but Lenora said, “How could you love her, there’s no such emotion in you. You are dead and the dead have no heart for loving.” And Christine is dead.’ To the unseen Christine, she begged: ‘Will you let me take her now? You say you can call her back.’ She went to the child, tentatively, picked her up, acquiescent and, finding herself free, rushed out with her through the hall and into the sunlit garden; and they were gone.

  They were gone; and I am alone, thought the weeping woman, crouched beside the dead girl, lying all askew now, ugly with death, on the hearthrug. Alone in this great gloomy old house—living out the rest of my days, alone with a ghost. So many years since she had come here, a girl in all the green freshness of her youth; and the lightning flash had come and riven in twain the blossoming tree of her life and into the dark and withered fork of the tree, had poured all her bright spirit. The ghosts, she thought. I believed I had got off scot-free, I was free of their haunting. But I was a bride of Aberdar, I was going to him—who is a Hilbourne also—as a bride; I was about to become in fact, however little I then knew it, a bride indeed to a Hilbourne of Aberdar Manor. Was it likely that I should escape their malignity? They turned my thoughts to darkness; and now they punish me for the sins of their own creation. All my life has been a punishment at their hands and this is the ultimate punishment, to be lived out for the years that remain.

  Yet—need the years indeed be long, need they come at all? Here in this room, firelit now as it had been firelit then, that young, young man had pulled out his bright dagger and for love of a girl, destroyed his own life. Here but an hour ago, a young girl for vengeance had taken his dead hand in hers and willed herself to die. Can I not die too then? Why need I continue to live?

  To die? To take her own life? Or—simply to leave this place. What keeps me here? Would the house itself restrain me? But no, for a time had been when she herself had been a bride of Aberdar, and whatever tricks the
y might to her destruction have played with her spirit, her body had been free to go when she would. The house in itself would not keep her; and their power was gone.

  But they would keep her. The house would keep her; Christine, a ghost, would keep her. The old power was gone, but a new power was in their hands. For the baby, Christina, must come to the house if Christine summoned her; and how could Lyneth endure, she thought, to watch her child dancing and posturing, all alone, a puppet in the hands of the merciless dead? I must remain she thought, to be here when she comes. And she would come: the pale ghost would summon her back, poor little bewildered child, the innocent instrument of vengeance. I must be here when Christine calls for her; and it can only be to this house, because nowhere else has Christine the power to haunt…

  Nowhere else! Only here in this house, in this old, dark, gloomy manor house of Aberdar.

  If there had been no Aberdar…

  But if there were to be no Aberdar…

  She wasted no time in indecision; ran to the great hall, furiously pressed on the bell to summon Tomos. ‘Get all the servants out of the house! Take them out by the back doors; keep them away from the house!’ And almost before, bewildered but obedient, he had gone, she had caught up the Paisley shawl from the chair where she had tossed it but an hour ago, and thrust it into the fire he had been lighting there. The fine wool took the flame and, whirling it about her, she rushed from window-curtains to upholstery of couches and chairs, flung on to the smouldering horsehair the contents of an oil lamp smashed against the wall and spilling its contents over the dry old oak panelling; heaved open the great door so that the draught might drive the conflagration before it up the oak staircase, into the salons with their delicate furniture, ready-made sticks to keep the bonfire a-flame…