Kirkland Revels

by Виктория Холт

  “The difference is that you caught your intruder,” said Simon. ” I wish we could discover who this monk really is.”

  ” At least,” I put in,” I shall be on my guard for the future.”

  Simon changed the subject and I found myself talking of the affairs of the neighbourhood: The home farm which was attached to the Grange and which he managed, and the smaller homesteads on the estate of which he would one day be the landlord. It was clear that he and Hagar felt deeply about the Kelly Grange estate, but in a different way from that worship of a house which I imagined obtained at the Revels. I had never heard the Rockwells discuss their tenants in the same way, and I was sure that Sir Matthew would not greatly care whether a man had been hurt when ploughing or that his wife was expecting a child again.

  Hagar might look back on the traditions of the past but she had her keen eyes on the present. She might long to be mistress of the Revels and for Simon to be its master, but that did not mean she was indifferent to the Kelly Grange estate. Far from it. I believed that she would have liked to unite the two.

  As for Simon he was so much the practical man; a house would never mean more to him than the stones of which it was built; the tradition in his opinion, I was sure, should be made to serve man, not man tradition.

  There was so much about him that angered me, for I could never forget his hinting that I was a fortune-hunter, but on that day I needed his clear cold common sense, and I was grateful for it.

  So those two gave me the strength and courage I badly needed. I knew that when I was alone in my room that night I should remember them and their belief in me, and it would help me to believe in myself.

  He drove me back at five o’clock and, as I heard him drive off and turned to go into the house in which the first shadows of evening were beginning to fall, I, felt my courage begin to ebb.

  But I kept thinking of those two and as I mounted the stairs to my room I did not once look over my shoulder to see if I was being followed, although I wanted to. Matthew, Luke and Ruth seemed to watch me rather furtively through dinner; as for Sarah, she had made no mention of the affair, which surprised me. I managed to appear quite normal.

  After dinner Dr. Smith and Damaris called to take wine with us. I was sure that Ruth had sent for him, telling him what had happened, for when Damaris and Luke were whispering together, Ruth drew Sir Matthew aside Aunt Sarah had already retired and the doctor said to me: ” I hear there was a little trouble last night.”

  ” It was nothing,” I said quickly.

  ” Ah, you have recovered from it,” he said. ” Mrs. Grantiey thought she ought to tell me. I have made her promise, you know, to keep an eye on you.”

  ” There was no need to tell you this.”

  “A nightmare, was it? That was what Mrs. Grantiey called it.”

  ” If it had been merely a nightmare I should not have left my room and awakened others. In my opinion it was not a nightmare.”

  He glanced at the rest of the company and whispered:

  ” Could you tell me all about it?”

  So once more that day I told the story.

  He listened gravely, but made no comment.

  “You may not sleep very well to-night,” he said.

  ” I think I shall.”

  ” Ah, you are a young lady of such sound good sense.”

  ” I propose to lock my doors so that there is no possibility of the joker’s coming into my room. Then I shall feel perfectly safe.”

  ” Wouldn’t you like a sleeping draught?”

  ” It will not be necessary.”

  ” Take it in case. You don’t want two bad nights running. I’ve got it here with me.”

  ” It’s unnecessary.”

  “There’s no harm in having it at hand.. Put it by your bed. Then if you can’t sleep … take it and in ten minutes you’ll be in a deep and restful sleep.”

  I took the small bottle and slipped it into the pocket of my gown.

  ” Thank you,” I said.

  ” You needn’t fear,” he told me with a smile. ” You won’t become an addict after one dose, believe me. And I want you to have good nights . plenty of rest and good plain food. So don’t think you’re being brave by refusing to take the draught. Think of the rest and relaxation you need … for the little one.”

  ” You are very attentive. Dr. Smith.”

  ” I am very anxious to look after you.”

  So when I retired that night I put the sleeping draught by my bed as I had promised. Then I searched my room and locked the doors. I went to bed ; but I did not sleep as readily as I had believed I should. I would doze and start out of my sleep, my gaze going immediately to the foot of my bed.

  I was by no means a hysterical subject, but I had received a violent shock and even the calmest of people cannot expect to recover immediately.

  One of the clocks in the house was striking midnight when I took Dr.

  Smith’s draught. Almost immediately I sank into a deep restful sleep.

  Within a few days I had completely recovered from my shock, but I was still watchful. Nothing else of a similar nature had happened, but each night I locked my doors and was now sleeping normally without those distressing sudden awakenings to stare about the room, looking for an apparition.

  The household had ceased to refer to the incident, and I guessed that in the servants’ hall they had decided that it was one of the queer things which happen to women who are expecting a child.

  But I was no less determined to discover who had been disguised as the monk and, as I brooded on it one morning, I remembered that Hagar had said there had been clothes of all kinds in various chests about the house. What if in one of the chests there was a monk’s robe? If I could find such a thing I should be on my way to solving the mystery.

  There was one person who might be helpful in this respect. That was Sarah—and I decided to go along and see her.

  It was after luncheon, at which she did not appear, when I made my way to her apartments in the east wing.

  I knocked at the door of her tapestry room, and I was pleased when she called to me to come in.

  She was delighted that I should come to see her without being asked.

  ” Ah,” she cried, creeping round me and standing with her back to the door as she had the first time I had come here, ” you’ve come to see my tapestry.”

  ” And you,” I answered.

  That pleased her.

  “It’s coming along nicely,” she said, leading the way to the window-seat on which was the blue satin coverlet she was making for the cradle.

  “Nearly finished,” she said, spreading it out for me to see.

  ” It’s exquisite.”

  ” I was afraid,” she said.

  “Afraid?”

  ” If you’d died it would have been such a waste of time.”

  I looked astonished, and she said: ” You were in your bare feet. You might have caught your death.”

  ” So you heard about it?” I said.

  ” I’ve used such a lot of my blue silks.”

  ” What did you think about … my fright?”

  “All that work would have been in vain.”

  ” Who told you about it?”

  ” But it would have done for some other baby. There are always babies.” Her eyes widened and she went on: “Perhaps Luke’s. I wonder if Luke will have good babies?”

  ” Please don’t talk about my child as though it will never be born,” I said sharply.

  She recoiled as though I had struck her.

  ” It made you angry,” she said. ” People are angry when they are frightened.”

  “I’m not frightened.”

  ” Are you angry?”

  ” When you talk like that about my baby.”

  “Then you’re frightened, because angry people are really frightened people.”

  I changed the subject.

  “The coverlet is lovely. My baby will like it.”

  S
he smiled, well pleased.

  ” I went to see your sister a few days ago. She told me about a Christmas-time when Matthew dressed up.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and began to laugh. ” They quarrelled so,” she said. ” She made his nose bleed. It went all over his jacket.

  Our governess was cross. They had nothing but bread and water for a whole day. He’d dressed up, you see . to frighten her. ” She looked at me. her brows puckered; I could see that she was struck by the similarity of the incidents. ” What are you going to do, Hagar?

  What are you going to do about . the monk? “

  I did not remind her that I was Catherine. Instead I said:

  ” I want to see if I can find the clothes.”

  ” I know where the hat is,” she said. ” I was there when he found it.”

  ” Do you know where the monk’s robe is?”

  She turned to me, startled. ” Monk’s robe? I never saw it. There is no monk’s robe. Matthew found the hat and he said he was going to frighten her when she was asleep. It was a hat with such a lovely feather. It’s still in the chest.”

  ” Where is the chest?”

  “You know, Hagar. In that little room near the school room.”

  ” Let us go and look at it.”

  ” Are you going to dress up and frighten Matthew?”

  ” I’m not going to dress up. I merely want to see the clothes.”

  ” All right, she said. ” Come on. “

  So she led the way. We went through the schoolroom and past the nurseries till we came to a door at the end of a corridor. She threw this open. There was a smell of age as though the place had not been ventilated for years. I saw several large chests, some pictures stacked against the walls, and odd pieces of furniture.

  ” Mother changed the Revels when she came here,” mused Sarah. ” She said we were overcrowded with furniture. She put some here … and some in other places…. It’s been here ever since.”

  ” Let us look at the clothes.”

  I saw that there was a film of dust on everything, and I looked intently about me, for if anyone had been at these chests recently would they not have left some mark in the dust?

  I saw an imprint on the top of a chest which was Sarah’s, and she was now ruefully looking at her hands.

  ” The dust,” she said. ” No one’s been in here for a very long time.

  Perhaps not since we were children. “

  It was not easy to lift the lid, as the thing was not only heavy but stiff; but we managed between us.

  I looked down at the garments which were there. Gowns, shoes, cloaks, and there was the hat itself on which Sarah seized with a cry of triumph.

  She put it on her head and she looked as though she had stepped right out of the picture gallery.

  ” Hagar must have had a fright,” I said.

  “Hagar wouldn’t be frightened long.” She was looking at me intently.

  “Some people are not frightened for long. For a while they are and then … they stop being frightened. You are like that, Hagar.”

  I was suddenly conscious of the stuffiness of the attic, of the strangeness of the woman who stood before me, whose childlike blue eyes could be so vague and yet so penetrating.

  She had bent over the chest and brought out a silk pelisse which she wrapped around her. The hat was still on her head.

  ” Now,” she said, ” I feel I am not myself. I am someone else … someone who lived in this house long long ago. When you wear other people’s clothes perhaps you become like them. This is a man’s hat though and a woman’s pelisse.” She began to laugh. ” I wonder, if I put on the monk’s robe, whether I should feel like a monk.”

  ” Aunt Sarah,” I said, ” where is the monk’s robe?”

  She paused as though thinking deeply and for a moment I thought I was on the road to discovery. Then she said: ” It is on the monk who came to your bedroom, Catherine. That’s where the monk’s robe is.”

  I began taking clothes from the chest, and as I could not find the robe I gave my attention to the smaller trunks and ransacked them.

  When I could not find what I sought I felt deflated. I turned to Sarah, who was watching me earnestly.

  “There are other chests in the house,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She shook her head. ” I hardly ever leave my part of the house.”

  I felt the faintness coming over me again; the room was so airless, so confined; it smelt of dust and age.

  What did Sarah know? I asked myself. Sometimes she seemed so simple, at others so knowledgeable.

  Did she know who had come to my room in the guise of a monk? I wondered if it had been Sarah herself.

  As this feeling became stronger I wanted to get away, back to my own room. I wondered what would happen to me if I fainted in this room among all these musty relics of the past, as I had in Hagar’s house.

  ” I must go now,” I said. ” It has been interesting.”

  She held out her hand to me as though I were an acquaintance who had made a formal call.

  ” Do come again,” she said.

  Gabriel and Friday were constantly in my thoughts. I was still hoping that one day Friday would come back to me. I simply could not bear to think that he was dead. But there was one matter which surprised me; although I remembered so vividly the occasion of my meeting with Gabriel, I had to concentrate to remember exactly what he looked like.

  I reproached myself for this because in some ways it seemed disloyal; and yet, deep in my secret thoughts, I knew that although we had been husband and wife, Gabriel and I had been almost strangers in some respects. Each day some revealing action had betrayed to me the fact that I had a great deal to learn about him. I told myself that this was due to an innate reticence in his nature. But was this so? I had been fond of Gabriel; I had missed him deeply; but what did I miss?

  Was it a friend rather than a lover?

  Now I carried Gabriel’s child and I believed that when I held my baby in my arms I should be happy. Already I loved my child and the force of my emotion was teaching me that the feeling I had had for Gabriel was shallow compared with this new love. I longed for the spring as I never had before because, with the coming of spring, my baby would be born. But there were many dark days between me and that happy time.

  The weather had set in damp and, even when the rain ceased, the mist was with us. It crept into the house like a grey ghost, and shut out the view from the windows. I liked to walk whenever possible, and I did not mind the rain for it was not cold yet and was that gentle damp which came from the south and which put a soft bloom on the skin. I felt very well, only impatient of the dragging of time.

  I was delighted when I noticed for the first time the lines of green in the brown fields on the Kelly Grange land. The young wheat was pushing through the earth: the promise of a new year and a reminder that spring was on its way. My baby was due to be born in March and this was November. Four more months to wait.

  I had been over to Kelly Grange to see Hagar, and Simon had driven me back. We no longer talked of the monk incident, but I had not ceased to be watchful; and there were occasions when I woke in the night startled from some vague dream and hastily lighted a candle to make sure that I was alone in my room.

  My feelings towards Simon were undergoing a change and this was the result of my friendship with his grandmother. Hagar always welcomed me and if she did not say how pleased she, was to see me—she was after all a Yorkshire woman and therefore not given to demonstrations of affection I was certainly made aware of her pleasure in my company.

  And when I was with her the conversation invariably turned to Simon. I was reminded again and again of his many virtues. I believed I understood him; he was blunt even to the extent of tactlessness; there was a hardness in his nature which I imagined no one but his grandmother had ever penetrated; but he radiated practical common sense; he liked under taking difficult tasks, which most people would find impossi
ble, and proving that they weren’t all part of the arrogance, of course, but admirable in its way.

  He was not uninterested to women. Hagar hinted at certain entanglements. Not that he had suggested marriage with any of these women. Hagar saw nothing immoral in this: a liaison would not have been nearly as shocking to her as a mesalliance.

  “He has far too much sense for that!” she said.

  “When he marries he’ll marry the right woman. He’ll see to that.”

  “Let us hope,” I retorted, “that she whom he considers right will be able to apply the same adjective to him.”

  Hagar looked startled. I think it astonished her that any one should not see this grandson of hers as she did. Which showed, I told myself at the time, that even the most sensible people had their weaknesses.

  Hagar’s was undoubtedly her grandson. I wondered what his was. Or if he had any at all.

  Still, I should always be grateful to him for believing my version of what I saw in my bedroom that night, and I was less cool with him than I had been before that happened.

  I said good-bye to him and went straight up to my room.

  It was late afternoon and in half an hour or so the darkness would descend upon us. There were shadows on the stairs and in my room, as I opened the door I felt that horrible sense of evil which I had experienced when I opened my eyes and saw the monk.

  This was perhaps a slight matter to arouse my feelings. but it was reminiscent: the curtains were drawn about my bed.

  I walked straight to them and drew them back. I was half expecting to see the monk there, but of course there was nothing.

  I looked hastily round the room and went into the powder- closet.

  There was no one there.

  I rang the bell and very soon Mary-Jane appeared. ^ “Why did you pull the curtains about my bed?” I demanded.

  Mary-Jane stared at th bed. ” But .. aw.Ssim … I didn’t …”

  ” Who else would have done that?”

  ” But, madam, the curtains are not drawn about your bed.”

  “What are you suggesting? That I imagined they were? I have just drawn them back.”