Reed-thin Lys, with her perpetually frightened face, had an even more bizarre story. With a rope around her neck, she had been led into the local cattle market by her disgusted husband, who complained that she was too thin and always weeping, and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Lys was not the first to be so auctioned nor would she be the last—it was a custom that had often amazed European travelers. But this day Margaret was present and startled everyone by bidding Lys in. Lys had fallen to the ground in relief and embraced Margaret’s knees, for she had been terrified of the coarse men who were bidding on her. Lys too had found a refuge in a spacious room in the big attic which she shared with Clytie.
“Marry again, if you choose,” Margaret sometimes told Lys. “What you had was no marriage, no matter what the law says!”
But Lys, like Clytie, clung to the only real home, the only real kindliness, she had ever known.
Remembering all that, Constance dabbed swiftly at her eyes lest Margaret turn and see her crying. As she did, something rubbed against her ankles and she looked down at “Tiger,” the big purring tiger-striped cat who, Clytie had told her, had come to them out of a storm last winter “with his paws in bad shape and his tail near froze.” He was fat and sleek now, but his checkered career was revealed by his nicked ears and his scars and his stubby tail that looked as if it might have been shortened by an enemy’s teeth. She reached down and gently stroked his soft fur.
Margaret Archer, she thought, had found an outlet for her generous nature here on remote Dartmoor—she collected strays, the unwanted.
Of which, Constance supposed, she herself was one.
Constance did not learn about Tony Warburton until one day when they took a long walk together on the moors. The day was sunny, the autumn air was fresh and bracing with a tang to it that made the spirits soar. Around them the dwarf oaks and clumps of ash and willow, all that remained of a long-ago forest, assumed a wild beauty of their own.
Margaret had been telling her that these slopes, where tin and copper and even silver and gold had been mined in centuries past, would become a carpet of wild flowers come spring. She had just guided her around a low-lying green bog when Constance interrupted excitedly.
“Look, isn’t that celery?” she cried, staring in surprise at a tall branched plant with many striated stems, growing at the edge of a marshy strip of water. She bent down and pulled off a stalk, would have bitten into it experimentally but that Margaret dashed it away.
“That’s cowbane,” explained Margaret. “Here.” She bent over and pulled up one of the three-foot-tall plants, showing a cluster of fleshy roots. “Observe it well and remember it, for had you eaten it, you would surely die. Another name for it is poison hemlock.”
“But you told me cattle graze here in summer!”
“And some die from eating it. But they are probably newcomers, imported from other sections of the country that are unfamiliar with it. Those who graze here avoid it or they do not last long.” She was tearing up the clump with her hands and tossing it away to dry and die in the sun as she spoke. She bent and rinsed her hands in the marsh water and gave Constance a meditative glance. “I think the calves learn by watching the mother cow and having her nudge their heads away from things that are bad for them, even as a human mother would.” She beckoned. “But up ahead is what I brought you to see.”.
They walked on, feeling the damp under their shoes, and then as they crested a low rise, Margaret waved her arm to indicate a circle of standing stones, looking strange and Druidical in this desolate place. “Men once lived here, worked here, loved here—and had bad kings, even as we do now. The ruins of their camps and hill forts are all about. I suppose we shall never know who they were.”
She sank down gracefully on a large stone and Constance sat down across from her. And as the shadows lengthened across the lonely moor Margaret told her about Tony Warburton, ending with, “I knew I did not want Tony to see me like this. Ever. So with my brother Clifford’s help I contrived my own ‘death.’ Clifford came to Bath and carried back a closed coffin that contained stones and blocks of wood. I followed, draped in mourning black, in a coach with my old nurse who pretended I was her sister who had ‘helped nurse poor Margaret during her illness.’ ” She gave Constance a mocking look. “I attended my own funeral.”
“You didn’t?” breathed Constance.
“I did indeed. Clifford, as usual, was against it, but I wanted to see who took my death badly—and who did not.” There was a look of suffering on her face as she spoke and Constance guessed that Tony Warburton had taken it badly and that Margaret had been hard put not to throw aside her disguise and run to him. “Then I took my faithful nurse with me and together we found this place—at the world’s end.”
Above them a narrow slice of moon, so white it appeared almost green against the lavender of dusk, rode the sky. The moors had changed their character now as the creatures of the night replaced the creatures of the day.
“Where is she now? Your old nurse?” wondered Constance. “She died three years ago this Michaelmas. I miss her.” But you miss Tony Warburton more....
“Did you never see Tony Warburton again?” she asked with a catch in her voice.
“Oh, yes.” Margaret turned to Constance with a mocking look in her emerald eyes. “I attended his wedding. To Lucy Weatherby.”
“What?” cried Constance. “Do you mean to tell me that he married someone else?” For somehow she had imagined an eternally grieving Tony Warburton, endlessly alone, refusing to be comforted.
Margaret gave her a grim smile. “Indeed he did! A short two months after my ‘death.’ Oh, it hurt me at first but—I forgave him after a while. I attended the service in widow’s weeds, so draped in black veiling that none could tell who I was. And it took all my powers of restraint, I can tell you, not to stand up in the church and shout ‘This man is mine. That woman cannot have him!’ And afterward I left and went on my search for a place that would be eons away.”
“I am surprised you did not leave the country,” gasped Constance. I would have wanted to put a thousand leagues between myself and the man who could forget me so easily!
Margaret gave her a crooked smile. “But you see I wanted news of Tony... Clifford writes me once a month and tells me how Tony fares and how things go in the Valley of the Axe. And occasionally parcels come, for he procures for me things I find difficult to buy here—nice lengths of cloth, for example. I will look among those he has sent and see if there is something from which to fashion a dress for you. Remind me when we get back to the house.”
But Margaret needed no reminding. In her bedchamber she sorted through a chest full of unused lengths of material, but found none to suit her. “They are all bronzes and orange-golds and rusty colors that become a woman whose hair is flaming red,” she complained. “But your coloring, Constance, is as different from mine as the mists that rise over these moors are different from the bright sparkle of the Axe as it knifes through the Valley. Tomorrow I will take you to Totnes and we will see if we cannot find some suitable fabric there.”
Constance was amazed for she had somehow imagined that Margaret never ventured out except to buy staples for the larder. But the next day, with Constance riding the gentlest of the two horses Margaret kept in her small stone stable, they set out.
“You ride very poorly,” Margaret observed, watching Constance mount awkwardly and jog along.
If you think this is bad, thought Constance, you should have seen me tearing through the night, more off my horse than on, clinging to the saddle and praying I would not be thrown! With armed men somewhere in pursuit! Aloud she said, “I was not allowed to ride at Claxton House—they thought it above my station.”
Margaret’s frown behind her mask was almost a palpable thing. “I will purchase you a gentler beast in Totnes—mine are too spirited.”
Over heathery upland, in the shadow of the high tors, they rode toward Totnes, that ancient cloth town at the head of the Dar
t estuary that lay at the foot of lonely Dartmoor. Stone Age peoples had used these vast and remote granitic uplands as a summer pasturage, and later farmed here. Near Totnes they passed by the remains of an old “blowing house” where tin had been smelted in the twelfth century. Once Margaret detoured so that Constance might view the ruins of a deserted medieval village, abandoned at the time of the Black Death.
In the bracing wind they stared out across the mouldering granite stones and Constance felt as if those stones were speaking to her, telling their tale of tragedy as the Black Death walked across England. She cast a sudden stricken look at Margaret in her black velvet riding mask, sitting her horse and staring so stoically at the ruins, and thought. The Red Death walked here too and brushed by Margaret, mocking her by letting her live.
Constance was enchanted by Totnes with its steep, narrow, winding streets and overhanging Elizabethan houses. The remains of its wandering walls reminded her of a romantic past, for in medieval days Totnes had been a walled town covering some ten acres and much of that wall still remained, while looming above all was the keep and bailey of a ruined Norman castle. And never once while there did Margaret remove her riding mask—except to sleep.
In the market place they bought fresh fruit and vegetables and packed them home on the back of the fractious horse Constance had ridden in. The beast, she thought whimsically, looked affronted at being used as a pack animal. But it was a relief to Constance to ride back on the horse Margaret purchased for her in Totnes—a gentle gray mare with soft eyes and a winning nature.
And they brought back with them several lengths of French gray linen and some mauve linsey-woolsey and lavender homespun wool.
But even that was not enough for energetic Margaret. She wrote to her brother and the next letter that came was accompanied by a man with two laden packhorses behind him. And what they revealed set Constance’s violet eyes aflame with amethyst sparks:
“Fashion dolls!” she breathed, when the first parcel was unpacked and she saw the stiff little figures with their billowing skirts and careful coiffures, all clothed in the latest fashions from Paris. For Spain no longer led the fashion world and it was French fashions that were now universally copied.
“Clifford has done well,” murmured Margaret as the next package spilled out a long length of lavender sarsenet silk and one of rippling violet velvet. She held the material up critically and turned to survey Constance. “He has followed my instructions—indeed this velvet matches your eyes.” Other packages revealed plum plush, rich purple wool so soft and pliable it seemed like silk itself, gleaming silver tissue, heavy Flanders point lace and spider-delicate French lace, sheer organzine silk of a misty pink-toned gray, an enormous amount of lawn and finest cambric for chemises, stiff mauve plush and amethyst satin for petticoats and silver lace, quantities of the popular narrow braid known as galloon and silk embroidery thread to decorate them and—Constance gasped at this—several pairs of silk stockings with fancy clocks, and red-heeled shoes and tall pattens and some satin slippers just made for dancing and riding boots all in her size, plus a wide-brimmed hat afloat with lavender plumes held in place by brilliants, a pair of handsomely embroidered leather riding gloves and several pairs of beaded silk ones.
“I can’t believe it!” gasped Constance as a silken shawl and a sweeping purple velvet cloak with a lavishly fur-trimmed hood spilled out of the baggage that had been hauled to them across the moors.
“Had my brother Brandon lived,” said Margaret crisply, sorting out a selection of ribands and pins and thread and needles, “you would have had even more. So don’t protest or try to prevent Clifford and me from doing these little things for you.”
Overwhelmed, Constance fell silent. And for the first time since her childhood felt cherished.
“We’ll make changes in the designs,” was Margaret’s decision as she studied the fashion dolls. “Most of these are too fussy. We must make the most of your long clean lines, your elusive slenderness. And we’ll do it with the sweep of a skirt, with careful draping, with a minimum of ornamentation.”
Constance looked at Margaret in awe. Not even her mother, dainty and fashionable though she had been to the last, had considered making sweeping changes in the fashion dolls. They were from Paris, they were to be followed slavishly.
But independent Margaret had other ideas. Not for nothing had she been called the most elegantly dressed young lady in Somerset! She would make a bird of paradise out of a charming meadowlark!
With characteristic energy, she set about it—and lost herself in creating new designs that were even smarter than the dainty fashion dolls. She worked endless hours, stitching, fitting, pressing seams herself with heavy irons, tossing back an unruly lock of her flaming red hair that stuck damply to her forehead as she perspired by the hearth that kept the irons hot.
She would allow no one else to touch these garments and Constance was a pliable model, willing to stand till she was stiff while Margaret pinned and pinned.
In a way, that interest in clothes was what kept them going that winter. For as winter closed in and fierce Atlantic storms swept in from the sea across the forbidding moors, as sleet and stinging rain pounded alike the stunted trees and lost bogs and weathered rocks, as freezing gale winds screamed across the granite tors and threatened to knock down the chimneys of Tattersall House and tear off the roof thatch, Constance came to know a loneliness of the spirit such as she had not known before. A cut-off feeling as if the rest of the world had disappeared, been swallowed up somewhere, and she and Margaret and the two servants were alone and drifting in an endless desolate landscape.
These wintry days when it was too cold to go out except for necessity, when fingers were frostbitten and milk froze in the pail and they worried about the warmth of the farm animals and piled their straw bedding high to keep them warm, she and Margaret huddled about the fire wearing blankets for shawls. They listened to the wind, howling like a lost soul across the moors. And they ate potatoes baked in the hot ashes, hot apple fritters, and batter pudding with thick, yellow-crusted, Devonshire cream so stiff it could hold a spoon upright—cream that came from the red Devon cows who lowed in the small stone barn. After supper they sometimes played whist. Margaret was an expert player. Constance thought wistfully that Margaret was an expert in all things worldly—she rode well, she played cards well, and with her strength and grace she would certainly dance well. What a daunting beauty she must have been with that sudden flashing smile that showed a row of perfect white teeth, and her brilliant emerald eyes! And then she would go back to shivering and hoping the fire would not go out.
Christmas was the worst. They roasted a goose and from somewhere Margaret produced some sprigs of holly. Lys managed a plum pudding and they all drank hot buttered rum and sang Yuletide songs around the hearth—but every face was wistful, remembering loved ones, better days, forgotten dreams.
Not till after she had gone to bed did Constance face the kind of Christmas she had confidently envisioned last summer—a Christmas of dancing and kisses beneath the mistletoe and then of cuddling down into a deep feather bed in the firelight and making love. A Christmas with Dev.
Alone in her bed beneath the cold moon of Dartmoor, Constance wept.
It would have stunned her to know that in York, Dev—broke and cold and in hiding—was spending a Christmas as bitter as she.
Somehow the Twelve Days of Christmas were got through and it was January—a freezing January with the wind whining through the eaves and howling down the chimneys. And it was followed by a February that dumped wet heavy snow upon them and made the world a white wasteland, stretching ever away beneath a leaden sky.
In January Margaret’s politics had been made clear to Constance when they learned that Sidney and Russell and Essex, arrested for complicity in the Rye House Plot, had been executed in early December on Tower Hill.
“Judge Jeffreys accepted faulty evidence! He has legally murdered them!” Margaret hurled a pewter cha
rger across the room so hard it dented the cupboard.
“I am surprised you remain hidden away on these moors—feeling as strongly as you do,” ventured Constance.
Margaret whirled about. It was on the tip of her tongue to say angrily that she did not remain hidden away, that every summer she rode out carrying messages for the Cause of the Duke of Monmouth, that all of England knew her as The Masked Lady. But she stopped just in time. No need to involve Constance in her own dangerous games. Constance had much to live for—she had not.
“I but speak my mind!” she said and went back to her sewing. And as she sewed, she told Constance about life at Axeleigh. And about Constance’s real father—Brandon Archer. Deeply in love with Anne Cheltenham, he had been riding to London to marry the pregnant Anne when a blizzard had swept down from the north, he had missed his way and frozen to death.
Constance swallowed. She had a sudden vision of that dark windswept figure resolutely bearing toward London where his Anne awaited and realizing in his last bitter moments that he wasn’t going to make it—that he was never going to see his Anne again.
“How terrible,” she said softly, “that he didn’t get to say good-by to her,”
“He did—in a way. For He had scratched in the snow the letters A-n-n-e. It must have been the last thing he saw in life—her name.”
Constance closed her eyes and felt hot tears burn her eyelids. But the sob that caught in her throat was for Dev too. Someday they would catch Dev and hang him—and would she even know it? Or would he shimmer forever just beyond her vision the way the trees and the coarse grass of Dartmoor shimmered beyond the mists that rose on winter nights?
Margaret was wistful too. For speaking of Brandon’s tragedy had brought the Valley of the Axe back to her and she was seeing through the walls and across the moors and over the Blackdown Hills, across time and space—to a lover.
And a night of love when, brimming with the overconfidence of youth, she had lured Tony Warburton away from the dancing and into the vast shadowy attics of the Hamiltons’ massive black-and-white Tudor mansion. The music had drifted up to them, dim and far away like something half remembered. She had stood in a pool of moonlight shining in through one of the great dormers of the big half-timbered structure—stood there the better to see the complicated system of hooks she was unfastening. Because they must hurry. A late supper would soon be served and if they were not among the throng below they would be missed, tongues would wag and perhaps Clifford Archer would hear of it—and demand his reckless sister settle down and agree to a crying of the banns.
Lovely Lying Lips Page 24
