Deception Page 5

Sighing, propping her chin on her fists, Nish took herself to the last point reached in the serial saga of which she told herself daily instalments.

  “Then Nish and Tot rode on their white horses up the hillside to Sewingshields Castle, where King Arthur and all his court lie sleeping in the deep cave, waiting for a brave knight to blow the bugle-horn and cut the white garter with the sword that hangs above. Nish tried her hardest to blow the bugle-horn, but it was all choked up with sand, like the one Mr Thropton dug up in his garden. Then Tot picked up the sword, but it was so heavy he could hardly lift it. So they had to look around for help. ‘Who’ll help me cut this garter?’ shouted Tot, and a voice from the darkness shouted, ‘Let ye wait, and I will!’”

  Chewing on a pithy stem of reed-grass, Nish meditated. Who was going to come out in answer to that call? Far ahead, in the distance, she could see the glowing culmination of her story, with King Arthur in splendour, restored to life and majesty on his golden throne, and the rescuers, Nish and Tot, reclining on velvet cushions at his feet, wearing cloth-of-silver, with ruby chains round their necks. But how to defer that ending as long as possible, until the sun set and Tot woke?

  I need a sub-plot, Nish might have said if she had been a more sophisticated author. I’ll help you, says the voice inside the cave, if in return you’ll bring me—what? What might the voice want, what difficult thing? And, for that matter, who was the voice, wicked or good?

  Frowning, chewing, Nish plaited away at her story and, like a chain attached to a ship’s anchor, it flowed through her, unreeling; as fast as it took form it raced away from her again, out into darkness, and was lost.

  At last, just after sunset, Tot woke, and they started home.

  On their way, not far from Pike Force, they passed a shepherd’s hut.

  “Old Amos is getting dooms queer,” said Nish, glancing up at the hut with a shiver. “Last time I saw him he was thrashing his dog dreadfully. And he yelled out, as I went by, that he’d as lief thrash me, or you, or wee Geordie, if he could get his hands on us.”

  “He does thrash wee Geordie—if ever he gets the chance. That’s why Annie keeps Geordie at the hall, not in the village.”

  “I know—who’s that coming up the burn?” Nish stared ahead, screwing up her eyes against the sunset light. “See—down there? Carrying something heavy?”

  Nish and Tot were extremely late home to supper.

  Chapter IV.

  The old lady’s room was kept scrupulously neat. This was not difficult to achieve, for she had very few possessions; as she grew older, and her propensity to mislay articles increased, she discarded more and more of her belongings. “I can’t do with things that need dusting,” she told Charlotte, her daughter-in-law, and so dresses and shawls were ruthlessly cut up for patchwork, feathers burned before the moth could get at them, and unwanted articles of furniture carted up to the attics. Charlotte would not have been above accepting some of the discarded garments if they had been offered—nor would Meg and Parthie—the materials were often sumptuous, and ample too, for Granny Winship had been a noted belle in her day, a day when skirts were so wide that ladies had to pass sidelong through doorways and cloaks contained enough stuff to cover a small sopha. Just one of her dresses would have cut up into two or three of the skimpy things they were wearing nowadays. But the offer was not made, and Duddy, the old lady’s personal maid, chopped up the garments with a look of grim approval; Duddy was of a religious persuasion that held the wearing of finery in this world to be an almost insuperable barrier to eligibility for the next.

  Despite its bare polished floor and emptiness, Parthie liked to visit the old lady’s bedchamber. Her elder sisters never came here. Old Grizel was too sharp-tongued for Meg, too satirical for Isa. But Parthie rather enjoyed her grandmother’s fierceness; so long as it was not directed too often at herself. And even when it was she endured it, letting most of the shafts pass over her head; Parthie was adept at disregarding unpleasant or inconvenient matters, and she greatly relished old Mrs Winship’s objurgations on other members of the family.

  “Your sister Isa will never catch a husband if she walks about screwing up her eyes in that peering shortsighted way that makes her look so ugly; she will have wrinkles before she is twenty-five. And her posture is scandalous; I do not know why Charlotte does not insist that she lie on a backboard every day. Or rather, I know quite well; Charlotte cannot be bothered to take the least pain about anything but her garden.”

  “My posture is good, ain’t it, Grandma,” said Parthie smugly, straightening her plump shoulders and eyeing herself in the old lady’s cheval glass.

  “Don’t let me hear you say ‘ain’t’, child. And don’t smirk at yourself in the glass. Once Meg is back I presume that mooncalf John Chibburn will come calling again every night; the man is little better than a bumpkin. How Aydon could permit the only one of his daughters with some looks to ally herself with a man who has nothing but his acres to recommend him—but that is Aydon all over. The wedding cannot take place too soon for me.”

  “Oh, I do wonder what kind of stuffs Meg will have brought back for the bridesmaids’ dresses,” sighed Parthie, for whom on the contrary the month to Meg’s wedding seemed an eternity of waiting.

  “As for the notion of Tot dressed up as a page—I’m sure I don’t know how he and Nish will ever be made clean and tidy enough—let alone the fact that he will probably disgrace us by throwing a fit in the middle of the ceremony—Why your mother doesn’t do something about that pair of young ones—allowing them to run wild over half the countryside, day after day—! By the time I was Nish’s age I had already embroidered three samplers. How will she ever learn if she don’t start young?”

  “But you must always have been a wonderful needlewoman, Grandma,” enthused Parthie, turning to look with sycophantic admiration at the immense tapestry that hung on the inner wall. “How old were you when you began that—thirteen? And it took you twenty-three years to finish?”

  “Don’t soft-soap me, girl. Fetch my chamois and my orange-stick; you may as well be of some use while you are here. And bring the Madagascar Liquid.”

  Granny Winship never especially favoured Parthie; but she was glad of a willing helper to run small errands about the house, for, these days, she seldom left her room before dinner-time, and Duddy was becoming more and more cross-grained. Parthie greatly enjoyed a chance to look into the old lady’s drawers and shelves; besides the sense of importance and responsibility that her commissions conferred. She fetched the toilet things as requested, and a cloth damped with rosewater. She always hoped for an excuse to visit the old lady’s water-closet. It was the only one in the house; Sir Aydon had had it installed five years ago for his mother, but, after that, parsimony or lack of interest caused him to suspend his improvements, and the rest of the family must make do, as they always had, with chamber pots and close stools. An ancient pele tower, used for defence in previous centuries when bellicose Scots might be expected at any moment, formed the northern end of Birkland Hall. It was next to Granny Winship’s room, and part of its corner buttress had been ingeniously converted to this practical purpose. Past the door of the closet a spiral stair led on to the higher storeys of the tower; these rooms were thought to be slightly haunted, which caused Parthie to avoid them, though her younger siblings Nish and Tot used one of them as a school room.

  The brass and mahogany fittings of the water-closet were what Parthie deeply admired, and she never entered it without the resolve that when she was grown and married she would have just such another. On one occasion she had incautiously let fall some hint of this intention to her grandmother; who, for once, did not snub her, but gave her a long, strange, dispassionate look and then murmured to herself an old country saying which Parthie did not understand: “Hoo dear’s it, gin it costs yor life? Eh, hinny, it’s dirt cheap.”

  In general the two got on well enough. “What like of da
y is it now?” the old lady asked—for Parthie had arrived at the same time as her grand-mother’s breakfast. “Draw back the curtains, child, and let me take a look at the sky.”

  The chintzes in this room had once been adorned with a splendid design of red, blue and green Indian parrots, but they were now so faded as to be almost indistinguishable; it was with scorn that Parthie pulled them back. Hers, in the room she shared with little Betsey, were much prettier.

  “It’s a bonny day,” she said looking out. “A bonny day for my sister Louisa’s homecoming.”

  The old woman sniffed. “Hech, sirs! I doubt there’ll not be overmuch rejoicing when that one’s home again. Not if she’s as stiff-necked and proud-stomached as when she went away. Which I’ll lay she will be. She gets her obstinacy from Aydon; not that he’d admit it—How old were you when she left, child?”

  “Eleven, Grandma.”

  “Humph. So you remember her well enough.”

  “Oh yes. I used to sleep with her in those days. She said her prayers for an hour, morning and night. And never read anything but commentaries on the Bible.”

  “Affectation!” the old lady muttered impatiently. “Showing off. Better she should read the Bible itself.” And she thumped a well-worn copy of the testament which lay on her bed table, beside the bowl of salted porridge. “Pour my tea, child, and tell me what’s doing out of doors. Can you see the carriage yet?”

  Mrs Winship’s windows faced eastwards, to the wooded hillside above the house with the carriage-drive curving down it, and the gravel sweep before the front door.

  “No, Grandma, there’s naught to be seen.”

  “Try the pele window, that shows more of the driveway.”

  Parthie obeyed, slipping into the water closet on the way, to rub her finger luxuriously on Grandmamma’s rose-scented soap in the handbasin. Then she climbed a quarter-spiral of the stair and stood on tiptoe to peer out of the pele window. This, being higher, commanded another stretch of the drive as it wound uphill among the pine-trunks; also the fern-clustered stone basin at the foot of the bank which was known to the family as the Lion pool.

  “Well?” called Mrs Winship. “Can you see the carriage?”

  “No I can’t,” replied Parthie in a puzzled voice. “But I can see Annie Herdman.”

  “Annie Herdman? What’s she about, in front of the house, at this time? Why isn’t she in the nursery?”

  Old Grizel had run the house for forty years, before her son Aydon married, and in the interim between his first and second wives; she still knew where every member of the household should be, at any given hour of the day.

  “She’s taking something out of the Lion pool,” Parthie said. “But even if I stand on tiptoe I can’t see what it is.”

  A grievous, keening cry broke the calm of the morning; even up here, behind thick walls and embrasured windows, the woe in it could be heard.

  “Ah! Eh! My wean! My wean! My wee Geordie!”

  “Save us! What’s with the woman?” said Mrs Winship sharply.

  Soon other voices could be heard clamouring, and the sound of many feet running from the front entrance across the gravel. Dogs barked and from another part of the house a bell rang vigorously.

  “That’s Mamma’s bell,” said Parthie, listening. “She’ll want to know what it’s all about.”

  “What is it all about?—Is your mother still abed? When I was mistress of Birkland Hall I would have been up an hour past, and visited the stillroom and dairy—”

  “Mamma was up, some time ago; I saw her going out to her garden—”

  Parthie returned to the old lady’s room and looked out of her window.

  “Well? Well? What’s to do?”

  Parthie was seldom troubled by anything that did not concern herself, but at this moment, turning from the window, even she looked shaken.

  “I think Annie fainted,” she said slowly. “She’s lying on the ground—they are trying to revive her. I think—I think it was wee Geordie—that she pulled from the pool—”

  “Drowned?” Suddenly the old woman’s shrunken lips were whiter than her mottled cheeks. The spoon fell back into her porridge bowl with a clatter. “Annie Herdman’s baby? The one they said was fathered by your bro—” Belatedly remembering her companion’s age she snapped tight her lips as Parthie stared at her, round-eyed; then she broke out again. “I told Charlotte it was a piece of folly to employ that girl as a wet-nurse. Surely there must have been some other body about the countryside that she could have found for little Katie?—Go away, child, go away, and send me Duddy; and find your mother and say that I must speak to her at once. Run—don’t stand there gaping. Run!”

  Shocked, pale beyond even her naturally colourless complexion, Parthie threw a last dismayed look at her grand-mother, and ran stumblingly from the room on her thick, ugly legs.

  The three girls seemed to have been travelling for an interminable time. Twice Archie had paused to rest the horses; on the first of these occasions he had produced a repast of oatcakes and cheese from a basket, and they had breakfasted perched on a bastion of the Roman Wall, which flowed away from them in either direction, seesawing up and down over the hilly landscape like a granite serpent.

  The air in this land was like iced wine, thought Alvey, shivering; it braced and tingled, made your blood run faster and your thoughts whirl inside your head. Alvey had never drunk iced wine in her life but the simile struck her as so happy that she resolved to note it in her journal at the first opportunity, for future use.

  “Does the wall really run from side to side of the whole kingdom?” she asked, munching oatcake.

  “Certainly it does! Did you not learn Roman history at Mrs Camperdowne’s?”

  Meg’s reply held a coolly snubbing inflection. She looks down on me, thought Alvey unresentfully. I am a girl from nowhere who has stooped to this underhand trick, coming to live like a parasite among her family, and for what reason? In order to make up fictional romances. What a vulgar, trivial motive, she thinks. Meg is not going to betray me, because that would be equally to betray her sister Louisa, but she is not—ever—going to accept me as an equal, and she can’t help making this plain. Well, thought Alvey, I don’t care a pinch of snuff for Miss Meg Winship, who, in any case, is going to be out of Birkland Hall and off the scene by this time next month, and she answered composedly,

  “Julius Caesar, why yes, of course we did. And Nero and Claudius. But somehow I had never imagined the Romans being up here. It seems so—so far from Rome.”

  “Not only were they here; they stayed for an immense time. Mr Thropton, our rector, dug up an old Roman water tank in his garden (his house is thought to stand on the site of a Roman military encampment—he is always digging up bits of Roman pottery among his cabbages),” said Isa. “The tank must have begun leaking, he says, for they gave up using it as a reservoir and, instead, sharpened their swords on the stone sides. They sharpened their swords for so long that the sides are quite worn away. Imagine it! They were here nearly four hundred years.”

  “Four hundred years,” Alvey repeated dreamily, gazing around her as the girls climbed back into the carriage. They were on a considerable height of land and could see for many miles, over many ranges of hills, hard and sharp in outline. “Where does Birkland Hall lie from here?”

  “Over there—to the north-west.” Meg pointed. “Close to the Scottish border. Our ancestors were continually being pillaged.”

  “Or pillaging,” said Isa.

  “What a lot of history has happened here!”

  “History takes place everywhere,” Meg informed Alvey.

  “But more in border country,” said Isa.

  Their next stop was at a village inn, for a lunch of cold meat, buttermilk, and bowls of berries called “noops”. The berries were more delicious than any fruit Alvey had ever tasted, and she asked where they
came from.

  “Oh, they are found up on the moor. They are just noops,” Isa replied vaguely.

  As they began the third stage of their journey, Isa fell more and more into a kind of bemused, adoring contemplation of the landscape. “Look at that” she would sometimes murmur to Alvey, gesturing at a black procession of wind-curved trees silhouetted along the sharp line of a ridge; “or those clouds”, pointing to a dark-grey ragged mass over a pale rolling expanse of moorland, glittering with dry grass; “or the shape of that hill”—duplicating with her hand the long hog’s-back curve which terminated in a sudden vertical drop. “All these shapes are so familiar—so much a part of our own country—I do not believe you would find anything quite like them anywhere else in the whole world. Poor, poor Louisa! How can she bear to live elsewhere? I never could.”

  “Louisa!” sniffed Meg. “Louisa would notice no difference between Newcastle and the Gobi desert. Louisa is not interested in such things. But now, Alvey—I should say Emmy–we ought to be putting you to the question. We have left you idle far too long. What does my Papa look like?”

  “A red-faced gentleman of middle age, slightly balding, with gingery brows and whiskers turning white. He walks with two sticks because of a hunting accident.—Why is he Sir Aydon, by the way? Is that a hereditary title?”

  “No, it was bestowed on him for services to the Duke of York at Willemstadt.”

  “And Mamma?”

  “Tall and stoutly built with a handsome face, high colour, and grey eyes. Hair dark, with specks of grey. Generally to be found working in the garden in an old green cape and hat,” promptly replied Alvey.

  “Her maiden name?”

  “Fenwick.”

  “She was an heiress from Yorkshire. Papa did well for himself when he married her,” Isa remarked with detachment.

  “Papa has the coal-mine, however,” said Meg, glancing at Alvey to see how this was received. “—Grandmamma Winship?”

  “An old lady, very pale, hook-nosed, bright black eyes. Beautifully cared-for lace caps. Has a maid called Duddy with a hare lip.”