“It was King Alfred burning the cakes,” came a low voice from behind a gravestone. I turned to see Ailith rising, holding her cloak tightly about her. She nodded toward the broken stone frame in the chapel wall. “Not appropriate for a chapel, really, but the Allenbys never wanted anyone to forget whence we came,” she remarked, picking her way over the stones to where I stood.
“A lovely spot,” I remarked, nodding toward the sloping hill and the pretty sweep of the river as it tumbled over the rocks.
“One of the prettiest in Yorkshire,” she agreed. “It is no surprise our family chose to bury its dead here rather than build a house for the living.” The words were laced with wistfulness and I wondered if she knew precisely how much the Allenbys had lost.
She stepped forward, lifting a graceful hand to gesture toward the ruined chapel. “There was an arched roof there, and even a few tiny flying buttresses to support it. It was meant to be a cathedral in miniature. It was quite a work of art in its day. I am told architects used to come from all over Europe to study it.”
We began to walk, choosing our steps carefully amidst the broken stones. “What happened to it?”
She led me around to where the interior of the chapel must once have stood, and I gasped. The stones here were scorched deeply.
Ailith shook her head sadly. “That is what your neighbours will do when a family insists upon sheltering priests.”
I put out a tentative hand to touch the blackened stones. “The villagers did this?”
“In the time of Elizabeth. Our family had known some prominence during the reign of the first Mary, but with her death, our hopes for a Catholic restoration were dashed.” She nodded toward the chapel stones. “The queen sent agents north, ferreting out all of the recusants they could find. They tore houses apart looking for them. Sometimes local people helped in order to curry favour. Here, the villagers decided to take matters into their own hands. After they found the priest’s hole in the house and dragged our poor priest screaming from its sanctuary, they turned him over to the queen’s men. He was burned alive.”
I started at her mention of the priest’s hole, but she went on, her face expressionless as her voice. She was reciting a story she had been told, but its horrors did not touch her.
“After they had burned the priest and all the Roman articles of worship, they burned the chapel. They dared not lay hands on the family, but they destroyed everything we held most dear. The statues of saints, the Alfred chapel, the tapestries depicting the life of the Virgin Mother. All were destroyed.”
“That is dreadful,” I told her, trying and failing to imagine the peaceful people of Blessingstoke ever turning upon Father or laying a hand against his estate at Bellmont Abbey. But then, Father had always looked to their benefit, and I wondered not for the first time at the antipathy that seemed to exist between the Allenbys and the villagers who ought to have owed them a livelihood.
Ailith turned then and left the shelter of the ruined chapel. “Come, Lady Julia. I should like to show you something,” she called over her shoulder. I obeyed, coming to stand beside her where she had paused in front of a gravestone. Unlike the other Allenby monuments, some grand, all beautiful, with weeping angels or statues of saints, this was a plain slab, the chiselled words sharp and black against the dark grey stone.
* * *
Sir Redwall Allenby 1848-1887
Let not be shut in my soul
Let not be fettered my shadow
Let be opened the way for my soul and for my shadow
May it see the great god.
* * *
A gay little bundle of daffodils rested on the stone, and I knew Ailith had laid them there. She nodded toward the inscription. “It is an Egyptian funerary text. Redwall used to read me poetry sometimes, and funny little fables. But once he read to me a darker book, one that spoke of death and the passage of the afterlife. I remembered it, and told them to carve it into his gravestone. He was ill when he came home from Egypt, you know. I think his travels destroyed him. I think he knew he would not leave this place.”
Her cool composure had not deserted her—her voice did not tremble, nor did her calm gaze waver—but I saw her hands tighten until the knuckles went quite white. I had never pitied her more. She had lost her beloved brother, and as nearly as I could surmise, had no idea that he had arranged to leave her penniless. It seemed likely she had never seen the macabre little relics hidden in the priest’s hole either. They had been close then, as I was to my own brothers, but he had only permitted her to know that much of his business as it suited him to reveal. I longed to ask her about the financial arrangements at Grimsgrave, or about the gruesome little mummies, but when I turned to her, I saw the beginnings of a tear shimmer on her lashes. I could not do it.
I pressed her arm instead and offered her a kindly smile. “It is a lovely quote, and a fitting one for a gentleman who was so devoted to his studies.”
Ailith nodded and blinked furiously. Ever mindful of her dignity, she would not weep, not in front of me, and I tactfully bent over and pretended to fuss with my bootlace to give her time to compose herself.
I wandered to the next stones, a series of small markers, identical down to the tiny cherub carved in each.
“Those were Mama’s,” Ailith said, coming up behind me. “She calls them her ‘disappointments.’ Most of them were born after Redwall and I, one came after Hilda.”
“How tragic,” I breathed. “There must be five, no, six of them.”
Ailith nodded. “Yes, all of them dead at birth. Mama said they were taken justly, as a punishment for her sins, hers and Father’s.”
There seemed no possible response to that. I knew the notion was a popular one, but I had little use for any divinity that would punish innocents for the crimes of their parents. I bent and put a fingertip to the last in the row, the smallest cherub in the graveyard, barely larger than my palm. It was beautifully carved, and I wondered if it had given any comfort to Lady Allenby, or if she denied herself the solace of visiting her children’s graves.
After a moment I straightened and we left the little graveyard together. The wood seemed friendlier now that I had a companion, and as we walked, Ailith pointed out the things I had missed—a clump of violets blossoming in a bit of moss, a pretty bird with red wings I had never seen before. I did not take note of its name, but she seemed very knowledgeable about the creatures of the small wood, and I complimented her on her understanding of the wild things.
“It is my kingdom,” she said, her voice lightly mocking. “The wood, the graveyard, the moor. There is not an inch of it I do not know, not a foot of it I do not command.”
We had passed Godwin’s cottage and were just emerging from the wood onto the moor path back to the Hall.
“Do you not wish to travel? Have you never been to London?”
“What could I possibly desire there?” she demanded. “A dirty city full of strangers?” She drew a great deep breath of moorland air. “Everything I require is here.”
I thought of her sister, running away from Grimsgrave with the travelling artist, her brother venturing to faraway lands, even Hilda, retreating into her books, and it seemed sad to me that Ailith had been nowhere, had seen nothing.
But just then the path turned and I could see Grimsgrave, and for an instant I saw it, not as it was—an age-blackened house falling to ruin—but as it had been, a gracious and elegant manor house, lording its austere beauty over an even more austere and beautiful moor. And I thought of the unbroken line of the Allenby family, stretching back in time, tethered by the blood of kings, and I marvelled that they had held their little domain for so long. Viewed in that light, it seemed tragic that it had slipped from their grasp.
I paused on the path and Ailith turned, her expression quizzical. “It is a fine view,” I told her, nodding toward the house.
“Very little to admire now,” she commented without rancour. She might have been a property agent assessing an in
vestment. “But it was once magnificent. There was a painting over the fireplace in the dining room, commissioned just after the east wing was added, and it was a very good likeness, my grandmother used to say. She knew the house before the wing crumbled. Hers was the last generation to know the house whole.”
Ailith began to describe it for me as her grandmother must have done for her: ladies trailing silken hems over the wide lawns, swans gliding gracefully over the glassy pond, gentlemen in velvet breeches waving plumed hats as they spurred blooded horses home from the moor.
“They did not mix with the neighbours, you understand,” Ailith told me carefully, “but they hosted parties for their cousins and more distant relations. That is how the masters of Grimsgrave chose their brides and kept the bloodline of Allenby unblemished. Not a single bride was ever taken who did not bear some strain of Allenby blood.”
I raised a brow, but did not comment. Father had often said that the wild eccentricity of the Marches was due to too many generations of close breeding. He had insisted upon tracing my mother’s ancestry for twenty generations to prove they shared no kin. “Fresh blood,” he always said, “is the key to good breeding, in horses or in children. Someone ought to tell the queen that,” he would invariably add. He did not approve of the heavy concentration of German blood in the royal family, and I doubted he would approve the Allenbys either.
“So many weddings celebrated here,” Ailith went on. “So many births, burials. So many centuries, and still it stands.”
“It is a noble tribute to the Allenby family,” I told her.
“Noble once, and it will be again,” she said, darting a meaningful glance at me.
I chose my words carefully. “I believe Mr. Brisbane can make a very worthy contribution to its heritage. He would never destroy the integrity of such a place. He would only restore it to its former grandeur.”
Brisbane had not said precisely that, but I refused to believe he would do something as ludicrous as pull the entire house down and put up a modern monstrosity of red brick with crenulated towers. It might be the fashion, but Brisbane only chose those fashions which suited his aesthetic, and I could not believe modern architecture was one of them.
“Of course he would put it to rights,” Ailith said, tipping her head winsomely. “Hilda shall never permit him to do less.”
I struggled to understand her meaning, but she did not wait for a response. “She will take over all of the restorations herself when the time is ripe. He will want her to, and it would be her duty as the mistress of Grimsgrave.”
I did not speak. There were no possible words. She started up the path and I walked next to her, meek as any lamb to the slaughter.
“Of course, he has not asked her, but that is merely a formality these days. A woman knows when a man has intentions, don’t you think?”
The beautiful cornflower-blue eyes that looked into mine were entirely guileless. She was merely repeating what her sister had told her, and I realised, as I ought to have realised before, the true cause of Hilda’s antipathy. She might prefer my brother’s company, but she was determined to save her home for her family. The little snippet had set her cap at Brisbane and meant to drive me away.
“And has Brisbane given any indication of his intentions?” I asked, certain of the reply.
“Oh, no, but then he would do the thing properly, would he not? He would wait until he has secured Mama’s blessing, and I think she would demand rather a lot. Of course, he ought to ask me as the eldest, but I should never accept him.”
I resisted the urge to smile. “Would you not?”
Ailith laughed and linked an arm through mine in a rare gesture of friendship. “Of course not. That was finished many years past.” She paused, then laughed again at my obvious bemusement. “Has he not told you? We were not just playmates together. I was the first girl he ever loved.”
THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER
With a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument Smiling at grief.
—William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night
The next day I carried the midday meal up to Lady Allenby. She was abed with another attack of her rheumatism, and as Mrs. Butters and Minna were busily occupied extinguishing the pudding Minna had managed to set alight, I offered to take the tray myself. Neither Ailith nor her sister were to be found, and I was glad of it. After Ailith’s pronouncement of the day before, I was not certain I could manage civility. Ailith had not struck me as an unkind woman, but I could not make her out, and the more I thought about our conversation, the more confused I became. Surely she knew of my attachment to Brisbane. My very presence in the house was of such monstrous impropriety it must have shouted news of my affections from the rooftops. Ailith could not have repeated her sister’s intentions innocently.
But perhaps it had been meant kindly. We had become friends after a fashion, and it was entirely possible that Ailith knew something I did not about her sister’s scheme. Hilda had shown herself to be impetuous and coarse. What treachery was within her sights? If Ailith suspected some mischief, she might well warn me simply out of her own natural kindness, and perhaps out of some lingering affection for Brisbane, her childhood playmate. Of their youthful dalliance, I could not even begin to think. My mind positively reeled at the thought, and I decided to turn my efforts to the situation at hand.
It had occurred to me that with a little deft questioning, I might learn something from Lady Allenby, and a nice little chat over her marrowbones might be just the thing.
Mrs. Butters thanked me profusely as I took up the heavy tray. “Oh, that is a kindness, my lady! It saves my hips, it does. Stairs are unkind to an old woman. I think you must be a Sumerian!”
I thought for a moment before I realised she had meant Samaritan. I smiled at her and sniffed appreciatively at the tray. There was a plate of marrowbones, a sauce boat full of thick gravy, and a rack of toast, along with a few other little dishes of tempting morsels—pickles and radishes and some of her favourite bottled mushrooms. Lady Allenby exclaimed with delight when I appeared in her room, pushing herself up onto her pillows.
“My dear, how kind of you,” she began. I hastened to put the tray down and slid a careful arm behind her to help her settle more comfortably. She was dressed in a worn velvet bedcoat, its silken ribbons shredded a bit, but still a beautiful blue that flattered her eyes. Her hair had not been dressed, but she had donned a simple lace cap, the old-fashioned lappets framing her face. Altogether she looked like a queen of old, receiving statesmen in her bed of state as courtiers looked on.
I settled the tray and poured out the tiny glass of quince wine that Rosalie had recommended. Lady Allenby looked a little scandalised, but pleased. “A bit is just the thing for rheumatism,” she agreed. She nodded toward the window. “Would you draw back the curtains, my dear? I see a bit of sunlight peeking round the edges.”
I obeyed, careful not to tear the fragile draperies from their rings. Sunlight spilled over the windowsill and into the room, motes dancing in the warm, buttery light. I glanced down and realised her bedchamber overlooked the kitchen garden. I could see the few little beds still struggling to produce, and the ruins of the beehives tucked into the crumbling stone wall. I commented upon them to Lady Allenby.
“They must have been charming in the day,” I finished. “I have never seen any quite like that, with such detail.”
She smiled wanly. “And the bees appreciated it, I am certain they did. They gave tremendous amounts of the sweetest honey. I tended the hives myself until last year.” Her smile faded and her expression took on a faraway look. “They were quite my little companions, so brave. They gave their lives to assuage my pain,” she said, rubbing at her swollen joints.
“I beg your pardon?” Surely I had not heard her correctly.
“The sting of a bee is a sure remedy for rheumatism. When my hands were at their worst, I used to thrust them into the hives. The bees stung me and aft
er the first shock of the pain, there was relief, blessed relief. But I never forgot it cost them their lives to do it. I always felt so terribly guilty afterward. And then last summer after Redwall died, it seemed the proper time to let them go. One windy day, I opened the hives and destroyed the queen’s chamber. The hive fled, and my bees have never come back. That is why the garden failed, you know. No bees to work it, and they will never return here.”
The sunlight had fallen on her face, cruelly, for it revealed the furrows and wrinkles of her ruined beauty. I wondered if Ailith ever looked at her and mourned what she would become. Or if Redwall had ever looked upon a mummy queen and thought of his mother, I thought with a shiver.
“You ought to eat before the toast goes quite cold,” I told her.
She did not hear me, or at least she gave no sign of it. “I did the right thing by sending them away. My hands are quite ruined, but pain purifies, that is what God teaches us,” she said with a nod behind me. I turned to see a prie-dieu, ebony with a cushion of the finest needlework I had ever seen. A prayer book lay open upon it, and overseeing all was a representation of Christ upon the cross, dripping with the gore of Crucifixion.
I said nothing, and Lady Allenby nodded. “You are not of the Roman faith, my dear. You would not understand. To suffer is to understand Him, and His suffering for our sins and the sins of the world.”
I felt faintly embarrassed, as I always do when earnest people discuss religion. My brothers and sisters and I had been raised Anglican, of course, and all of the momentous events of our lives had been celebrated within the ceremonies of the Church. But we seldom attended of a Sunday, and discussions of spirituality were few and far between. We were far likelier to argue over the whereabouts of Shakespeare’s lost play or the plight of prostitutes in Whitechapel, both pet subjects of Father’s and Aunt Hermia’s. God was rather far down on the list of our personal interests.
“You are young yet,” Lady Allenby assured me. “Many do not turn to God until life has revealed all of its bitterness and the promise of the hereafter is the only solace left. There is a natural order, you know. Ordained by God. It ought not to be disturbed by man.”
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