Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

  “Nils!”

  He seemed so like an apparition in the bright moonlight, as if he had been summoned to the spot by some uncanny spell in answer to her wish for a member of her own family, that Val could hardly believe he was real. She felt like Faust. But he came stiffly down the steps, smiling still, and gave her a light kiss on the ear.

  She grasped his arms, laughing with surprise and pleasure, looking up at him.

  “It really is you! You’ve grown even taller! I thought you were a dream. But how in the wide world do you come to be here?”

  “Off the steam packet from Liverpool, my angel. Waiting for you to come home and welcome me in. And a devilish long time you took about it. I’m half starved; they feed you like slave cargoes on those boats.”

  “There’ll be something inside; Chloe always leaves me sandwiches when I’m late back. Wouldn’t she let you in?”

  “Not she! In spite of all my asseverations that I was your kith and kin.”

  Then Val recollected Benet, who was still standing halfway up the steps with an expression of well-bred calm and detachment.

  “Won’t you introduce us?” he said.

  “Oh, Benet! Forgive me! I was so surprised! I hadn’t the least expectation—it’s so long—Benet, this is my brother Nils—Nils Hansen, Benet Allerton. Nils, Benet and I have just become engaged to be married.”

  “Well, well! Is that so? Congratulations to the pair of you,” drawled Nils, glancing carelessly from one to the other. “I’ve arrived at just the right time, then?” He smiled, grimaced—and then yawned widely. “I’m sorry, Val my dear, but if you’ve the key, I’m really a bit too tired just now for social stuff.”

  “Of course—you must be.” She found the key at last. “Here.”

  Nils picked up a small Gladstone bag from the shadows where he had been sitting.

  “Gracious, is that all you brought across the Atlantic?” Val asked, laughing. “How long do you plan to stay?”

  “Oh, I’ve another bag, but I left it at the steamer office and walked. The street hasn’t changed a bit, has it?” he said, fitting the key into the lock.

  “How long is it since you were here—fifteen years? Have you brought Kirstie with you? And the children?”

  “Good heavens, no! But it’s partly about them that I’ve come. That’s a long tale, though. I’ll tell you later—”

  He had opened the door and was moving through into the stuffy hallway in which the radiator from the hot-air furnace, installed by Mr. Montgomery shortly before his death, creaked and clanked and let out a dusty smell of warm metal.

  “Phew! How well I remember that smell!” said Nils.

  Val heard a slight sound behind and turned to see Benet’s brougham roll off at a gentle trot. With a pang she realised that he had left without his usual goodnight kiss. Had he felt excluded by her brother’s sudden arrival? Were his feelings hurt? Well, she would put everything right tomorrow. They had arranged to go for a walk in Central Park after lunch. And, in the meantime, how delightful to have Nils here, someone of her very own to confide in.

  “Come along to the kitchen,” she said. “We can talk there.”

  Chapter 2

  Somehow they had ended up in the garden. Late though it was when Val returned, she could not bear to remain in the house, which felt like a small stuffy box filled with darkness. Lured out by the freshness and brilliance of the night like swimmers who cannot bear to leave the water, they had wandered outside. In spite of her fatigue, and the hour or so that had passed since she left the ball, Val was still feverish, tight as a coiled spring; she felt restless and trapped, and knew that she would not be able to fall asleep for a long time yet.

  The house on Twenty-third Street had a little paved court at the back, where Miss Chumley fostered nasturtiums in summer and tubs of roses and baytrees all the year round; a sooty lilac exuded fragrance in springtime. The old wooden swing still stood in the middle, relic of Val’s childhood.

  “Will it bear me?” asked Nils.

  “Goodness knows . . . ”

  She was pacing round the little yard, brushing the withered lilac leaves with her long velvet skirt.

  Nils shrugged and folded his long length into the swing seat; lounging there, sandwich in hand, he idly kicked himself to and fro.

  “But do you mean to tell me you hadn’t considered all this before?” he asked.

  They were discussing her engagement.

  “Why in the world should I? No—it never even entered my head. Benet hasn’t once suggested that I would be expected to give up my job when we married.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him about it this morning? on the way home?”

  “I—I couldn’t.”

  “Perhaps he was being an ostrich about it all,” Nils ruminated. “Didn’t want to face what he knew his family would say.” He skilfully stifled a yawn. “But if you had children, you’d have to stop working.” He rested his head against the swing rope, turning his face up to look at the moon; the silvery light aureoled his blond hair giving him the appearance of some medieval saint strung up in a position of torment.

  “Oh well, that’s another matter. If I had children it would certainly be different. But I don’t want children. I don’t intend to have any, or not for a long time, anyway.”

  Unseen by Val, his brows shot up at this; his mouth turned down at the corners.

  But all he said was, “Had you told Benet that?”

  “We hadn’t discussed it.”

  “You don’t seem to have discussed much, my angel.”

  It was doing her good, this conversation with Nils; now she began to realise how much she needed to discuss. And he appeared really interested, asked questions, drew out the whole history of the evening from her, laughed appreciatively at her descriptions of Mr. Dexter, Mrs. Chauncey, old Mrs. Allerton, and the male cousins. Yet he was dispassionate, nonpartisan, seemed merely as if he were concerned to lay bare as many facts as possible and do justice to both sides with sleepy impartiality.

  “Benet’s mother and sister always quite civil to you?”

  “Oh yes—they are rather stupid but kind—”

  “Is he well off, Benet? What does he make a year?” And when Val told him the sum—which she had learned, not from Benet, but from a colleague, a law reporter on the Inquirer—“Is that all? But there’s family money too, of course. Mind you, if I were in your shoes, I’d let my pride go hang, if somebody offered to support me in idleness! What a cursed stiff-necked girl you are, after all.”

  “You wouldn’t really choose to do nothing—just live on someone else’s money?” she said with real curiosity.

  “Why not? If there was enough? What’s so deuced elevating about having to work one’s fingers to the bone, day in, day out?”

  “I like my work,” said Val. “I enjoy writing my stuff for the Inquirer. Some day I want to write a book, about social conditions.”

  “Yes, I remember you always were a restless little busy bustling inquisitive sort of creature,” he said, yawning again. “ ‘Member that time you smelled smoke and came yelling down to old Abby, Tabby, whatever her name was, saying the house was on fire—”

  “And it was you and three boys smoking Papa’s cigars?” She chuckled. “How angry you were with me.”

  “Nothing like as angry as the governor . . . That was the last thrashing he gave me before Ma decided to leave him. Matter of fact,” he said, “I’m in the journalism line of business myself now; devilish hard work it is, too, but at least it’s quite entertaining, I’ll say that, more gentlemanly and more perks than cutting up corpses, anyway.”

  “What are you doing now, Nils?”

  It was never easy to get information from him, but, asking questions in her turn, Val gathered that Nils, who seemed from his school and college days to have acquired a circle of friends drawn
from the topmost echelons of London society, now made his living by writing a kind of highly superior Notes-about-Town column for the London Morning Post.

  “It ain’t half bad,” he said. “Of course, people pretend to turn their noses up at that kind of thing, but, bless you, they all read it before any other news, they’re as pleased as punch when their own names are in; I get invited to so many houses that I can afford to pick and choose, too; needn’t put in a Friday-to-Monday at home above three times a year, unless I want. It’s wonderful how civil fellows are when they know you write for the papers.”

  “But what about Kirstie and the children? Do they come with you on these visits?”

  “My dear girl! Don’t be an ass. One can hardly take a parcel of squalling brats to houses like Chatsworth or Rosings. Kirstie would be all right on her own, of course, perfectly unexceptionable, but she don’t care to leave the children; and we never seem able to keep a nursery maid for more than a month—she never seems to trust ‘em. Besides, Kirstie ain’t much for social flimflam.”

  “How are Kirstie and the children? Tell me about them.”

  “They’re all right, I daresay,” he said vaguely. “Funny little things. People say the boy’s like me. I don’t see it. I suppose the girl is like Kirstie.”

  He did not seem very interested in his offspring. Val supposed that many fathers were like this; hers had been a lucky exception.

  She had never met her brother’s children, or his wife, a young Scottish heiress whom Nils had encountered during the second year of his medical training at Edinburgh. It seemed possible that his courtship of this moneyed girl had been the cause for the premature termination of his studies. Val knew the bare bones of the matter, that they had married in the teeth of spirited opposition from Kirstie’s family, had traveled in Europe for a year or so, spending lavishly, and had then settled in London. The picture of their life that she had formed was lacking in detail; her correspondence with Nils, though friendly enough, had been irregular, with long gaps; she really knew very little about what had happened to him, particularly in his childhood, after their early separation. To the day of his death her father had been extremely reticent on the subject of his estranged wife. Val knew that her mother had never remarried, and that Mr. Montgomery had always given her an allowance; but since she apparently kept up a stylish small house in Bruton Street with a carriage and a manservant, had a weekly salon, and paid regular visits to Deauville and Baden-Baden, it was to be assumed that she had acquired some additional source of revenue. It was all a region for speculation. After that wintry farewell at the wharfside, Val had never seen her mother again; the first visit to Europe with her father had been a year after Mrs. Montgomery’s death. One of his purposes, Val knew, was to settle various monetary affairs which his wife had left in disorder. They had not seen Nils on that visit. He, having just come of age and inherited some money left him by his own father, was traveling with friends in Italy. However on a subsequent visit they had gone to Scotland, renewed acquaintance with him, and had some pleasant outings together in Edinburgh.

  Val, impressed by her half-brother’s easy charm and blond elegance, could not understand it when, after one of these occasions, Mr. Montgomery had sighed, and, half to himself, murmured, “Poor Nils; eh well, we’ll see.”

  “How do you mean, Papa? Why poor Nils? What will we see?”

  “I hope he has inherited more than cash from his father’s side of the family, my pet.”

  To the sixteen-year-old Valla, Nils appeared to have everything: grace, assurance, knowledge of the world, wit, intelligence, and high spirits. If he could not be called handsome, at least, wherever he went, his long comic face and lint-fair mop of hair attracted people and amused them; he had friends all over Edinburgh.

  But when she said this to her father he merely and with total irrelevance, remarked, “I’m glad you stayed with me, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, so am I, Papa.” She gave him a hug. It had never occurred to her that there might have been any alternative. “Did Mama want me to go with her, then?” she asked in surprise.

  But he evaded a direct reply, and said, “It was different for Nils, of course. He went off to school at once. And he was not my boy, after all. No—it wouldn’t have done at all for you.” He closed his lips firmly and would say no more on the subject, at that, or any later time.

  Now—“Were you happy at school, Nils?” Val asked irrelevantly.

  “God, no! It was a dismal hole—halfway between a prison and a barracks. And the food! Worse than you’d get in the workhouse. American boys would never endure what the English upper classes put their sons through. And of course all the other fellows laughed at me, at first, because they said I talked like a damned Yankee. But I soon got out of that. And one has to go to school, after all. That’s where one makes friends and meets the fellows who are going to be useful later on. And my father had been to the place, and his father—so in the end they accepted me. I got into Pop, and all that. But it’s long ago now. I’d almost forgotten about it.”

  “Shall you send little Pieter there?”

  “Of course,” he said indifferently.

  “What about the girl—Jannie?”

  “English girls don’t go to school. Anyway girls don’t need an education. Besides she’s—not clever. She’ll find a husband, I daresay. Kirstie’s family might have come round by the time she grows up; there are a couple of flinty old aunts who could just as well do something for the child, when they’ve got over their spleen.”

  “What is Kirstie like, Nils?”

  “What is she like?”

  He looked at his sister blankly. His large, rather protuberant slate-blue eyes had a way of turning almost opaque when he was faced with a troublesome question; at the same time he had a trick of projecting his full lower lip away from his teeth and rubbing a hand over his chin. “Oh—it’s a beastly bore trying to describe people. She’s not a bad little thing, I suppose. A deal smaller than you—wouldn’t come up to your shoulder. You’ve grown into a deuced fine girl, my love.”

  “Oh, never mind me! Is she dark or fair?”

  “I suppose you’d call her fair. Ringlets. But it don’t curl naturally—she has to put ‘em in with crimping pins. I tell her she ought to rouge, too, but she won’t. Her manners are on the retiring side; timid, you could say. Not much to say for herself in company. Though she has plenty of ideas of her own when she’s by herself. More than one wants, ‘n fact; she can be a beastly bore, sometimes, about ethics and principles and things; it’s the Scotch in her. She don’t go down too well in society, not lively enough. In the houses where I go you’ve got to hold your own. Now, you’d go down uncommon well, my angel.”

  “Oh, what nonsense, Nils! As if I’d be interested in that kind of life. I don’t like fashionable circles any more than Kirstie does. New York society is quite bad enough.”

  “Bah—New York!” He dismissed it with a shrug. “Colonial—what can you expect? A lot of strait-laced, provincial tallow traders. London society is quite another thing, you’d find. Of course parties over here are a thundering bore. But in London, anything goes, if you’re clever. The Prince of Wales has all manner of friends—actors, painters, bankers, jockeys—anybody who can talk well and has done something notable can get on.”

  “Have you met the Prince of Wales?” Val asked, curious in spite of herself.

  “Lord, yes, over and over. He stays in people’s houses, you know, for weekends, as informal as you please.”

  Much to her own surprise, Val found her curiosity pricked by his descriptions of London life. Not the grandeur; she told herself that she did not give a rap for people’s riches, or for their family and aristocratic pretensions: what if they could trace ancestors back to the Norman Conquest? That proved nothing; anybody could do the same who took the trouble to search through town records; merely to have all your forbears listed sa
id little, after all, as to their quality. But the greater freedom of thought in London’s world, the respect for literature and the arts—that did attract her. She questioned Nils about Ruskin, Rossetti, Miss Nightingale, Herbert Spencer—disappointingly he had met none of them. But he had plenty of anecdotes about other prominent personalities—the duke of Clarence, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Sir Charles Dilke, the Aylesford-Blandford scandal, the mysterious character known as “Sherry and Whiskers,” Disraeli, Mrs. Langtry, Irving, Kendal—“a good-looking bounder”—Bancroft, and George Lewis—“the lawyer who has all the scandals of the rich up his shirt-sleeve.”

  “Well, perhaps I should like it,” she conceded at length. “When Benet and I are married we plan to come to Europe, and I want to stay in London for several months, so you can introduce us to all your interesting acquaintances, Nils.”

  “Glad to, my love. But when do you plan to get married?”

  “We haven’t fixed on a definite date yet. I had thought perhaps some time next fall, about a year from now. But—well, lately I have begun to think perhaps it would be better to wait till the following spring . . .”

  “In other words,” said Nils—he spoke in his habitual soft lazy drawl, but the glance he threw her was very shrewd—“in other words, you ain’t so sure, now, that you want to get hitched up at all, is that it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Nils! I do love Benet with all my heart—he’s a good, sweet, intelligent, valuable person—but marriage seems such a ball and chain!”

  “You’re deuced right it is,” he said with feeling.

  “I just am not prepared to give up all my freedom in order to lead a stuffy conventional, aimless empty life with nothing in it but paying calls and leaving cards and giving dinner parties and going to the opera on Mondays and Fridays at the Assembly of Music.”

  “Why not Tuesdays and Wednesdays?”