Brides of Aberdar Read online

  ‘Lenora, no, no!’ Richard cried out in pain. ‘Poor innocent—!’

  Isabella, dry-eyed, stealing sly glances at her father’s face. ‘Oh, Richard, yes, I was too young and foolish! It was all so seductive, the sighs and pleadings, the dancing in the great hall and the games, the old harridan clapping her speckled hands to see the antics of her pretty Diccon with his latest love—’

  ‘Isabella, you were my only love. You said I was your only love—’

  Her father cut him off short. ‘That will do. She is the one that has done the cozening, boy, and now seeks to excuse herself by betraying you.’ He said to her mother: ‘Take her out of my sight,’ and to the young man, standing there, ashen, white-lipped, staring after the closing door: ‘Why would you press me? You could have placed the fault on me and so kept your illusions. But no, you must insist and now you know all the truth. You are not wanted here, cousin, neither by her parents nor by the girl herself. You have used the right word. It was all a nothingness.’

  Did he sleep, did he dream?—the Squire of Aberdar, in the year of 1840, lying back in the great chair, broken, exhausted, late back from the funeral of his young wife!—dreaming of that hour, here in this very room two hundred and fifty years ago. This room, despite the bright firelight, grown cold and dark as death: oak-panelled, beautiful as a Rembrandt painting with its glow of colour, of satin and velvet, its glimmer of jewels in the flickering of the flames—Lenora, eyes flashing black fury as bright as the jewels themselves. The pretty dagger hung in its sheath at the young man’s thigh, a deadly toy which yet must be commonly carried in those perilous days. He put his hand to the hilt, the white hand heavy with rings, diamond and emerald, ruby and pearl. Stammering, stumbling…‘This is your word? We shall never..? We are parted..?’

  ‘It is her word, boy. You heard her for yourself. You had better—’ But the Squire broke off, cried out: ‘Put away that knife!’, and leapt forward trying to wrest it from the upraised hand. He fell back, helpless. ‘Oh, my dear God! Sweet Jesus—!’

  An age of high romance in the sway of a virgin queen, of chivalry, of danger, of too-ready death, when a kiss might banish a woman to oblivion, a man to the block—an age when dark spirits were abroad, when the throne itself lent ear to soothsayers and astrologers, when ladies’ maids ran errands for witches’ potions, and waxen images were pierced through with pins to bring about disaster: when life and death were all too often black and secretly contrived… A dream?—of bright blood springing, of velvet dyed to crimson, of the silent drip, drip, drip of red upon the red bows on the red-heeled shoes: of Avenging Fury, crouched like a Pieta with the slender body lying across her knee: ‘A curse upon you! My anathema upon you and all your house, upon all your family down the ages for ever, till the end of time! Your daughter, treacherous bitch that she be, and her children and her children’s children—this death shall be upon them, my curse upon them, they shall never know happiness, never in love nor in marriage….’ And as the shuddering man again moved forward, she cradled the dead body close against her breast as though it might ward off further danger. ‘Never again! From the very fires of hell, I’ll reach out to you and keep this curse alive—in this branch of the Hilbourne family, never again shall there be…

  ‘Never again… Never again…’

  A servant came upon the two little girls huddled, crying, outside the closed door. ‘Oh, Tomos, Papa fell down! There’s somebody in the library, talking to him. But there wasn’t anybody in there….’

  Nor was there now; only the Squire, lying half insensible across the arm of the carved wooden chair, the fallen glass still dripping its red wine. ‘What? Tomos? Yes, yes, I am well enough. I have been asleep, I think. And dreaming…. Dreaming….’

  ‘A nightmare, sir? You look so pale, Sir Edward, your hands are so cold. The poor mistress taken from the house today—you are tired, sir, exhausted: no wonder you should fall asleep and dream bad dreams. But these, sir, you may forget. Dreams need mean nothing, sir; we may forget such dreams.’

  ‘I have forgotten,’ said the Squire. But he stared down suddenly at the spilt wine. ‘Is that blood?’ he said.

  CHAPTER 2

  TANTE LOUISE WAS A Belgian, from the south, a Walloon—who, however, had married a Frenchman and lived most of her life in France—hideously ugly, with a frog-face and rolling grey-green eyes, yet of so resolute a chic that no one had ever yet recognised her as even plain. Her hair was dyed to an impossible auburn and her coiffure and maquillage always just so much ahead of the times—for the propriety in such matters of ces Anglaises, she cared not a fig. Her lingerie was exquisite, her outer garments extravagantly smart. How it could have been contrived, why for that matter she should have gone to such trouble for so limited a world of appreciation, who could say?—but in all her years of exile on the quiet old Montgomeryshire estate, she relaxed not a fraction of her vigorous toilette. It was typical of Tante Louise that in time for the funeral, she should have achieved the very last word in black bombazine trimmed with the newly fashionable jet, and the tall bonnet with its high white plume. All arranged in advance, perhaps, for just such an event. That also would be typical. Tante Louise was not blessed with a sentimental heart.

  In the ensuing months, she left undone nothing that might restore health and vigour to the ailing house. It was not to immure herself in a tomb, she said, that she had left her appartement in Paris, si chic, si bien meublé; and, unhampered by delicacy or doubt, she scrubbed and swept and polished away the memories of three hundred years, banishing the heavy, dusty carved wood furniture and the ancestral portraits with their long, thin noses and bunched red mouths, and ruthlessly painting over moulded plaster, scrubbing down panelled oak. Gay carpets were imported, light wall-papers, delicate furniture, all the chic of the elegant Paris of her past. When Sir Edward protested she replied crudely: ‘You wish then your daughters to follow in the way of your poor wife in this gloomy place?’ and he was silent immediately and for many hours to come. She had no wish to wound; but why trouble with long argument when here was the sure, swift way to victory? He would be thankful in the end; men had to be managed, it was always so.

  Meanwhile…

  Meanwhile, eyes watched: ears listened. From another world, another life, another—somewhere—eyeless, yet other eyes watched, other lips communicated; mindless yet observed, made judgments: with no future, yet peered forward into the future—and waited. And voiceless, yet whispered.

  Brother and sister, voiceless—whispering. One day…

  One day, it will be time for us to go back there and haunt again.

  One battle Edward Hilbourne won against Tante Louise. ‘The nurse is too old and grim, the children must have someone younger and easier, someone kind.’

  ‘You do not suggest, mon cher Edouard, que je ne suis pas gentille vers ces enfants?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m speaking of who ever has the actual care of them. They need someone not so old-fashioned as this one, not so strict and cold.’

  ‘It is necessary to have a nurse well-trained, one who knows the manners, what is comme il faut. They are mal-élevées. Their poor mother—’

  He interrupted as if he would not hear the words, repudiated them. ‘No one’s asking you to find some bouncing country girl. It’s not in fact a nurse they should have. They are over five years old, they need more lessons, they need a governess.’

  A chill doubt entered her heart. A governess—some bright, pretty young woman who would settle in, take over the children, take over the Squire himself—marry him, dispossess her of all that was left to her, now that she had given up her Parisian home and possessions. She determined upon resistance. ‘Oh, ho, a fine gouvernante—’

  But he interrupted her, unwontedly impatient: ‘Louise, please just do as I say. Find a young woman able to instruct them; and dismiss the nurse.’

  ‘Find! Dismiss! Is it for me to have your orders, Edouard? Am I not mistress here, do I not take the place of their mother?�
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  He looked into the sallow frog face, the prominent grey-green eyes. He said flatly: ‘No.’ But, after all, who else would even try? ‘Nobody can do that,’ he said, more gently, ‘but I’m grateful to you for being here, Louise, truly grateful. I need you. Only, meanwhile, please do as I say, and find a suitable young person.’ He summoned a smile, dragged up from the depths of his desolate heart some shreds of the old, easy Hilbourne charm. He said in his excellent French, ‘You are far too intelligent, ma chère, not to know just what I mean. So please help me! Be kind!’ It always pleased her to hear her own tongue spoken. After all, he thought, she must be lonely too.

  ‘I will make the advertisement,’ said Tante Louise.

  So Tetty came—Miss Alys Tetterman, a neat compromise between the two schools of thought.

  No atmosphere, indeed, in which to mend a breaking heart. Dear heavens, thought Miss Tetterman, arriving, what a gloomy place! I shall have to get away, I could never bear it here…

  Lying in the lap of the low, thickly-wooded hill, with no outlook but across the gravelled drive and terraces (flowerless, but at least green-grassed now, for it was full summer and that poor young wife and mother had been three months dead), to the narrow stream of the Dar which gave the Manor its name, flowing on to feed the great river Severn, many miles away; across the stream and immediately to the up-rising slope of the opposite hill, closing it in. A long, two-storied building, begun as a simple manor house and since much added to—but altered in its early days, so that it had lost nothing of its Tudor characteristic. No stripes of black and white, but built of brick and stone, an ungainly sort of house, stout pillars holding up its heavily-brooding portico, three sets of projecting oriel windows divided into many squares of glass panes, clusters of twisted chimneys rising from the peaked roof, with their turreted chimney-pots. I shan’t stay in it, thought Miss Tetterman, I couldn’t! I’m here now but I have my precious little hoard of money, I can afford to make a change if I wish. I shall just have to keep a look-out in the advertisements. There must be a more cheerful situation to work in than this…

  A man had met her at the railway station who looked very much unlike a mere groom but nevertheless acted as a mere groom, humping up her trunk on to the rear platform of the pony carriage, respectfully handing her in—yet was there not a trace of irony in his servility?—and silently driving her through the country roads and up the long curving, rutted drive. Now he climbed down and held out his hand as she stepped from the carriage; went forward and jerked briefly on the bell-rope at the heavy old oak front door. Well, I’m in for it now, she thought. Too late to turn back now. But I’m not going to stay…

  And out from behind one of the two rounded pillars of the porch a small girl darted forth and, tipping the hooped crinoline till it jutted out like an inverted bowl behind Miss Tetterman’s spare figure, clasped her about the waist. Miss Tetterman looked down into eager blue eyes, to pale golden hair softly stirring in a little breeze—and thought that, perhaps after all, she was going to stay.

  To the end of her life, this was to be the effect upon all those who came to know her, of Miss Lyneth Hilbourne, now something less than six years old.

  From behind the second pillar emerged, less exuberantly, her mirror image. Miss Tetterman saw again that faint stirring of the floss of fair hair and somewhere in the back of her mind noted that in fact the day was utterly still, no breeze blew. But astonishment over-topped hardly recognised mild surprise. ‘Goodness gracious! They told me that you were twins, but nobody ever mentioned—’

  ‘We’re identikal’, said Lyneth. ‘Everyone gets quite amazed.’

  ‘She always says idenkital,’ said Christine, looking at her sister with a kind of proprietorial pride. ‘She likes long words. She’s the cleverest.’

  ‘Yes, well, but—’

  ‘I think idenkital is nicer than the right—than the other way,’ said Christine quickly.

  ‘How ever am I going to tell you apart?’ said Miss Tetterman, duly checked. I shall have to tie a blue ribbon on one of you and a pink on the other.’

  ‘I want the pink ribbon!’ cried both little girls, hopping excitedly, and, ‘No, I want the pink ribbon,’ repeated Lyneth, insistent.

  ‘Oh, Lyn, you know how I like pink—!’

  ‘We will toss up for it,’ said Miss Tetterman pacifically.

  ‘No, no, I want it! Christine doesn’t really mind.’

  ‘All right. She can have it,’ said Christine. She assured Miss Tetterman, ‘I don’t mind. I don’t really like pink much better than blue.’

  ‘I shall decide,’ said Miss Tetterman—the Tetty of so many years to come; but in the depths of her heart she knew even then, that she would give the pink ribbon to Lyneth. Lyneth who had been the first to run out to welcome her—plain, colourless Alys Tetterman with her scarred, spoilt face, finding herself nowadays unloved, almost entirely unfriended—to welcome her with the all too conquering charm of an innocent outpouring of too facile love.

  The door swung open and she took a hand of each child and said, almost gaily: ‘Well—had we better not go in?’

  And yet—how chill it struck her, entering through that heavy oak door. She felt the man’s eyes upon her and turned her head and saw in his deep glance something that seemed like fear.

  The narrow entrance that had done well enough for the first squire of Aberdar Manor, had long since been widened out to form a large square hall, overhung like a balcony by the first floor landing. A broad staircase led up from it, heavily carved and in its own way handsome and, here at the heart of the house, to the anxious newcomer somehow solid and reassuring.

  She stepped in, the children walking backwards, looking up into her face. She knew that they were looking at the scar that ran, still hardly healed, from temple to jaw down her left cheek. ‘You are looking at my scar,’ she said. ‘I had an accident some while ago, with a runaway horse.’ She added, comfortingly, ‘I am used to it now, I forget it. And soon you will, too.’ She never forgot it for one moment of her life.

  Very thin and by reason of her thinness looking taller than in fact she was; very properly governess-y in her smooth brown crinolined skirt, tight, trim jacket, boots and gloves of black kid, straw bonnet trimmed plainly and yet rather daringly with two bands of velvet ribbon, one brown, one black. A man-servant, opening the door to her, ushered her, with her charges, into the hall. ‘You can wait ’ere. I’ll tell ’em.’ He spoke with a strong Welsh accent, showing no pronounced respect for either the new arrival or her future employers. She stood quietly beneath the heavy mantel overhanging the huge empty grate.

  The children seemed fascinated by her, and not only because of the scar. ‘Are you going to stay with us?’

  ‘Well, yes, I hope so,’ she said.

  ‘Do you like our house?’

  ‘Have you got a nice house?’

  ‘Is your house as big as this?’

  ‘Well,’ she said again, ‘where I come from is a very nice house too, certainly. And, yes, as big as this—even bigger. I’ll show you a picture of it some day.’

  ‘Were you the governess there?’

  ‘It was my home,’ she said, quietly.

  The servant had reappeared, gestured to the open doorway. ‘Please to go in,’ he said. His tone seemed very subtly to have altered.

  The children followed her. At the door she said: ‘You had better let me go alone.’ A woman’s voice said with a very strong French accent, ‘But certainly, children, stay out!’ and a man’s, quiet but firm, ‘Let them stay with us.’ She held a hand of each of the little girls as she went into the room.

  Through the rest of the house, Tante Louise had been busy, stripping the old oak of the accumulated polish of three hundred years so that now it gleamed with an almost ghostly pallor; cleaning and repainting the ceilings, replacing the heavy old carved tables and chairs with the elegant furniture already being shipped over from her Paris home. But there in the Squire’s own library, little
in the past two and a half centuries had suffered any change.

  Madame had remained seated, stiff and resentful, controlling her secret fears—relieved, however, to some extent by the sight of the terrible disfigurement. As the Squire rose to his feet, she said in her rapid French: ‘Well—she warned us in her letters, but one must say, the scar is grotesque. However, who wants a pretty governess? This one at least won’t find some neighbouring poor tutor and marry herself off while we still have need of her. And for the rest, she seems quite neat and suitably dressed, tout à fait comme il faut…’

  Miss Tetterman opened her mouth to say that her preparations for educating the young had not excluded lessons in French, but she closed it again. It would be too embarrassing for the Squire to become aware that she had understood the heartless shrugging off of her life’s tragedy. Nor did it occur to Madame, armoured in contempt for all things English, that a poor governess should be so equipped; and since clearly the children would learn the language from their aunt, Sir Edward had given little thought to it. Now since Tante Louise clearly assumed her ignorance and the young lady herself made no denial, he accepted it as a fact that she spoke none. He hastened, however, to bring to an end so ugly an introduction, saying with a little bow that Madame Devalle was remarking upon Miss Tetterman’s charming and agreeable appearance.

  ‘Sir Edouard Heelbourne,’ said Madame, performing introductions. ‘Father of the cheeldrain.’

  Impossible to recognise at first sight—so worn he looked and frail—that he was quite a young man; not much over thirty, perhaps. A tall thin man who might have been handsome but for the air of exhaustion, of pallor, as though at any moment he might drop back into his chair from the sheer weariness of going on living. ‘We are happy to see you, Miss Tetterman. It’s very good of you to come.’