Wild Grows the Heather in Devon

by Michael Phillips

  “A certain parcel of land comes to mind,” the bishop added when the two met to speak of the matter. “With a little house on it—you used it formerly as a gamekeeper’s cottage, I believe.”

  Lord Rutherford eyed him skeptically.

  “Seeing as how you no longer employ a gamekeeper,” the bishop continued, “and the place, as I understand it, is vacant, I should think it a fair exchange in order to insure that you are able to retain the larger portions of your estate.”

  “But I still have immediate obligations.”

  “There may be an additional cash advantage to you in such a transaction,” replied the bishop. “Let us propose your making a grant of the land and a small portion of the woodland, and my paying you personally for purchase of the dwelling.”

  “What could you possibly want with such an out-of-the-way place?” asked Lord Rutherford.

  “I have always coveted it,” replied the bishop, “thinking what an enjoyable country home it would make when the pressures of my position become too much to bear. A spiritual retreat, as it were.”

  Henry Rutherford smiled wryly. The idea of his gamekeeper’s cottage being used as a site for meditation and prayer was altogether too humorous.

  He was loathe to part with the cottage, yet realized he had little choice. His ancient ally had become an extremely influential man. This one transaction could significantly alleviate both his legal and financial anxieties.

  The deal was soon consummated, secretly of course. Only one other soul would ever know of it. She who already possessed one secret with the two men would in time share this one as well.

  ————

  It was several years later when the bishop chanced to see the woman on the streets of the village. Whether it was ill luck or divine providence that caused their paths to cross, the reader himself must determine.

  Bishop Crompton did not make a habit of visiting the village when at his retreat. On this present occasion, however, a pang of nostalgia swept over him for the old parish where he had begun his ecclesiastical career. He was no longer a young man, and in recent months his conscience had begun to whisper to him concerning many things he had done, as well as what manner of man he had been.

  Suddenly approaching along the street near his former church, he saw the woman he had not laid eyes on since that fateful stormy night. He knew her in an instant, as she did him.

  In truth, the events of that night had begun gathering themselves more forcefully about the old midwife’s memory, for the year approached when she had planned to divulge that which would unlock the mystery only these two knew. She had, however, begun to harbor doubts concerning such revelation. The young woman had turned out not of altogether virtuous character, taking more after their father than her brother. The notion had come to her recently that perhaps providence had decreed the deceit for future good of both estate and village.

  She was in a quandary over what to do. Seeing the former vicar thus jolted her, as if the meeting carried divine import.

  The bishop nodded stiffly, thinking to pass her by. But the midwife paused, then spoke.

  “I know why you are in Heathersleigh Cottage,” she said.

  “Yes, and what is that to me?” he replied.

  “Just that there you are with plenty to eat, while me and mine have nothing but gruel to keep us alive. You received fifty pounds and the house. What have I got to show for my silence?”

  “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “I have a married daughter who now has a young one of her own and another on the way. It’s all any of us can do to put food down our throats. These are evil times, vicar, especially for one who knows what I know. Surely a man such as yourself is not beyond feeling compassion for the likes of us.”

  Squirming behind his collar, Crompton managed a few moments later to conclude the awkward interview.

  But for days thereafter he was plagued with the woman’s words. He could not deny them to be true. He had all his life enjoyed plenty. She, whose need was greater, possessed next to nothing. Yet what could he do? What should he do?

  The bishop’s health decreased as his age advanced. Still further did his conscience waken as the years added to their number. He retired from his official position, took up permanent residence in his wooded cottage in Devon, which had from the moment of dubious transfer belonged to him rather than the Church.

  ————

  When the good bishop Arthur Crompton died a year or two later, all thought it strange and highly irregular that the unmarried man who had risen so high in ecclesiastical circles should leave his home to an aging local peasant woman with whom not a single individual could recall seeing him talking even once.

  Perhaps not so many would have considered it strange had they heard the words feebly whispered from between his dying lips: “My Father, it has been a life too much wasted loving myself, too little given to listening to you and doing what you told me. I cannot help it, for this life is done. I shall serve you more diligently in the next. Forgive my foolishness. You have been a good Father to me, though I have been a childish son. Perhaps now you will be able to make a true man of me. In the meantime, do your best with this place. Make good come of it, though I obtained it by greed. Bless the woman and those who follow. Give life to all who enter this door. May they know you sooner than I.”

  He paused, closed his eyes in near exhaustion, then added inaudibly—

  And now . . . I am ready . . . take me home.

  None heard the words, save him to whom they had been spoken. He heard, and he would answer.

  Most vexed of all by the curious turn was the aging Henry Rutherford, who, now that his fortunes had again reversed, would have done anything to resecure the property and oust the old woman. But he had no legal recourse. The will, brought forth by the bishop’s solicitor, was legally irrefutable.

  There were now only two alive who knew the connection existing between the man of the cloth and the woman of swaddling clothes—she herself, and he whose secret both had sworn to protect. It was a secret she never revealed as originally planned. In the end, she could only conclude that the blessing had indeed been passed on as God intended.

  Both bishop and peasant carried the knowledge of their unknown alliance to their respective graves.

  Everyone said the woman’s former profession must have made her privy to some fact which resulted in the strange bequest of the former bishop’s country home. No living soul ever discovered what that secret was.

  Thus did a second mystery come to be added to the first.

  *Pronounced Heathers-lee

  Root of Strife

  1865

  A five-year-old boy tiptoed toward the darkened bedchamber where an old man lay, as the boy thought, asleep.

  He had seen the nurse leave and walk down the hallway a few moments earlier. Now curiosity drove him toward the door. It stood half open.

  He paused and cast a peek inside. The room was dusky, for heavy curtains were pulled to keep out the sunlight. He inched through the opening without touching the door, entered the room, and now paused.

  Across the floor, on a bed between sheets of white, lay the thin form of Lord Henry Rutherford, who had always seemed to him ancient, and now looked to have left the reckoning of earthly years behind altogether. One of his thin arms lay outside the bedcovers at his side, appearing even whiter to the youngster than the sheet, though not quite so white as what hair he still possessed atop a skull over which the skin seemed to have been stretched rather more tightly than seemed comfortable.

  With eyes wide in fascinated awe, the boy crept forward.

  Instinctively he knew his grandfather was dying. He could not help being afraid. Everyone had been walking about the Hall and speaking in hushed tones, with doctors and nurses coming and going, for a week. For just such reason they had come from the city to visit. A faint odor in the room contributed to the dreadful terror of the place, a smell which indicated something other than h
ealth was present.

  He reached the bedside and stopped. He stared down upon the ashen and wasted face. Lord Rutherford had not spent his life putting others ahead of himself. This flaw of character contributed to the fact that as he now came to the end of his earthly days, he was exceedingly wealthy, and at the same time nervously ill at ease over his prospects for the future. As yet he had found no way to make use of the former fact to alleviate the latter concern.

  The expression on his countenance, as he now slept fitfully, looked as if he were having an uncomfortable dream over precisely this moral dilemma. No slightest twitch of facial feature, however, betrayed that life still existed within him.

  The boy was well aware of the old man’s peculiarities, for Lord Rutherford and his cavernous old manor house were the stuff of many a family legend. Into the eager ears of wide-eyed nieces, nephews, grandchildren, cousins, and servants had been passed the certain knowledge that portions of the Hall were haunted, some said with the ghost of Lady Rutherford and various of her also-departed sisters.

  Truth being no requisite ingredient to the receptive acceptance of such tales, they had grown through the years, gaining credibility from the strange noises that issued from the upper portions of the house in winter—the very time of year when, as everyone knew, Lady Eliza had breathed her last. Old Lord Henry himself believed that she had returned to the Hall to haunt him, confided two or three of the eldest servants, for had he not undertaken to board up that region of the garret through which she always contrived to slip between the here and hereafter? It was failure of these efforts, they said, that in the end had driven him mad.

  All this, along with the spookier embellishments of a rising generation, went through the boy’s brain as he continued to stare at the bed. His heart pounded, wondering what was happening deep inside the frail form.

  Suddenly both the old man’s closed eyelids fluttered and twitched, as if his eyes were rolling about inside their sockets.

  In panic the boy thought to flee. But his feet remained nailed to the floor. Now the ancient eyes began to open, as if the sense of some presence beside the bed had awakened him. He spied a form, yet knew it not as his grandson from London. His pupils widened, but he yet lived within the fading fragments of the dream which left him more slowly than his consciousness returned.

  The old man’s eyes widened and locked onto those of the boy, which returned their gaze with mute terror. It was indeed as if a ghost had come to life right before the boy’s eyes.

  Suddenly the thin arm shot from the bed.

  The grip of ancient fingers closed around the youngster’s arm with a strength they had not exercised in years.

  In abject horror, the boy’s heart pounded within him like a drum. But he remained still as a statue.

  “Cynthia . . . my dear young Cynthia,” the old man whispered, “—you’ve come back, just like I prayed you would.”

  The boy tried to speak and identify himself. But his tongue could find no more power of movement than his legs. His grandfather was mistaking him for his mother!

  “God forgive me . . .” said the old man, his voice gaining strength, “ . . . we’ll set all to right now that you’ve come back—”

  He closed his eyes and relaxed a moment to draw in a breath.

  “I . . . I was a fool . . .” he tried to begin again, in a faltering voice, “ . . . they were terrible times . . . I had to protect . . . they tried to take the Hall . . . it was your mother . . . if she had only—”

  The terrified boy could not begin to grasp the significance of the few cryptic words that followed. And then they were cut short.

  Suddenly light blazed into the room.

  “Giffy!” cried the nurse, bounding through the door. “What are you doing disturbing your grandfather?”

  “I . . . I only came in for a look,” stammered the boy.

  “Don’t you know he is weak and mustn’t be disturbed!” she reproached, hurrying toward the bedside as if her rights of both ownership and protection had been seriously violated. “Go back to your cousin—he’s playing outside. You stay with Charlie, do you hear!”

  She took hold of Lord Rutherford’s thin hand, unwrapped its fingers from the boy’s arm, and laid it back at his side on the bed. In the few seconds since the nurse’s entry, the last lingering remnants of the man’s dream dissipated into forgetfulness. He lay back on his pillow and breathed easily.

  While the fussy nurse attended to him, muttering angrily and chastising herself for leaving the room, the boy crept silently out, the possessor of a secret whose significance he was as yet unaware of. The shock of seeing the dying man pushed the odd message for some time from his mind.

  It was a secret no other mortal would ever share. His grandfather died later that same night, speaking not another word to a living soul.

  1

  A Mother’s Dream

  An observer overlooking the southwest tip of England in the summer of 1894 would have beheld a rocky and historic coastline. From Land’s End to Bournemouth stretched harbors and shipping centers from which centuries of pilgrims, merchants, sailors, and pirates had set sail to all points of the known world.

  In front of that coast spread a deep blue sea, its water not warm like the Mediterranean, yet more temperate than any other spot surrounding the many isles that combined to make Great Britain. Above it rose a sky which on this summer’s day shared its bluey vastness with an abundance of white moving clouds.

  Coastal cliffs and inlets, river mouths and coves, all met the splashing water at the dividing edge between sea and land. Beyond rose the hilly downs of the shires of Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset, and Devon, those counties of England’s great southern peninsula which protruded westward into the Atlantic. Their inland domains gave way to green rolling hills, occasionally rugged, many patches of wooded forest, and great green stretches of grass and pastureland.

  The terrain that surrounded the village of Milverscombe in the county of Devon was a particularly gentle and inviting one, with sufficient change to offer infinite interest, yet without any aspect that a traveler viewing the landscape would consider severe. No mountains could be seen, though hills rose and fell from horizon to horizon. No seascape presented itself, though in fact the rocky shores of the Bristol Channel lay only some fifteen miles northward. No great forest of fairy-tale depth worried local youngsters at play, though trees and wooded areas abounded. The nearest city of size was Exeter, but villages and hamlets were numerous.

  It was a land good for doing most of the things man has been given to do upon the earth, and the many cattle, occasional sheep, and yet fewer horses, along with cultivated fields of grain and potatoes, gave evidence that the men of the region were doing them. The greater proportion of the terrain, however, yet remained untilled and ungrazed, and thus unspoiled and untamed for the walkers who enjoyed exploring its fields and public footpaths with no more concern for property boundaries than common courtesy would dictate.

  Today, on just such an excursion, a small boy and girl sprinted with carefree abandon up a grassy knoll toward where a single daisy had popped its white-and-yellow head out of the ground.

  “I got it! I got it!” cried the girl, reaching the crown first, not because she was faster than her older brother, but because the competitive fires burned less brightly in him.

  She plucked up the flower in a single motion. She turned clutching its slender stalk and ran back down the hill to where her smiling mother strolled with slow contentment, a few beads of perspiration beginning to gather on her forehead.

  “Look, Mummy—look at the pretty flower.”

  “It’s beautiful, Amanda,” said the woman, stooping to give the daisy a sniff as her daughter held it up, though she knew the fragrance would not be an appealing one.

  “I got it before George!” added the girl.

  “I saw that, dear. My, but you are swift for such a little girl.”

  “I’m almost five, Mummy. That’s not so little.”
<
br />   “How right you are, Amanda!” laughed the mother. “Not so little after all.” Together they continued on up the knoll, as the woman contentedly glanced about her at the peaceful countryside.

  It was not exactly a solemn region, as the highlands of the north are solemn. Once at the remote edge of England’s borders of civilization, this land was now ever more thoroughly crisscrossed with roads and railways. Industry, invention, and progress were steadily coming to the entire isle. Yet even in such modern times at the close of the great century there remained a hint of wildness here, reminding one of the days when ancient Celts fled westward to escape the invading Saxons. Many open, remote, and unspoiled places still could be discovered where human progress had left no discernible imprint.

  Devon was not quite as modern yet as London, Surrey, and Kent. And that was perfectly agreeable to Jocelyn Rutherford. She preferred a home in an out-of-the-way place, far from the staring eyes of London society.

  Six-year-old George was not so much interested in the flower in his sister’s hand as in the barely recognizable shape just poking its head out of the ground beside the stalk Amanda had so unceremoniously severed. As Jocelyn and Amanda approached the spot, he bent down on his knees, with face six inches off the ground, to examine it.

  “What are you looking at, George?” asked his mother. A little sigh as she spoke betrayed her fatigue from the walk.

  “I think there’s another daisy inside this little green ball,” he said.

  “I want it!” cried the girl in gleeful enthusiasm, squirming down energetically beside him.

  “It’s not ready, Amanda,” said the boy. “It’s not a flower yet. It’s only a bud.”

  “What’s a bud?”

  “Like a rolled-up flower before it gets to be a flower.”

  “When will it be a flower, George?”

  “I don’t know—when it gets enough sunshine to open it.”

  The boy jumped up. “Come on, Amanda—let’s find another!”