Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

  “Why, you’ve got Pig,” said the boy. “Look, Jannie—it’s Pig!—she dropped him, when Papa was bringing us to Mrs. Pipkin’s,” he explained seriously to Val, “and we thought we’d lost him for good.”

  The sight of Pig seemed to have a beneficent effect on little Jannie. She clasped the wooden object tightly in one hand, while sucking the thumb of the other, meanwhile leaning against her brother. No new tears rolled down her pale cheeks. Val took this opportunity of showing Pieter his mother’s letter. She was not sure whether he was able to read the faint scrawl, but at least he evidently recognised the signature at the end and appeared reassured.

  “Can you walk a bit farther?” Val asked, when they had reached Marylebone station, and emerged above ground.

  “How far?”

  Val consulted her map again. “From here to Grosvenor Square. I should think it may take half an hour.”

  “I can,” Pieter said. “But Jannie may get tired.”

  “Oh well, in that case I’ll have to carry her.”

  “Why aren’t you taking us back to our own house?” Pieter asked as they walked rather slowly down bustling Baker Street, Jannie clinging tightly to her brother’s hand on one side and Val’s on the other, flinching slightly as wagons and horse omnibuses flashed past.

  “Because your mother and father aren’t back yet.”

  “Oh.” After a minute the boy added, “Where are they?”

  Val had seen this coming. “I don’t know, Pieter,” she said. “I think they must still be traveling. Wasn’t your mother supposed to go away for her health?”

  “Yes, I think so,” he answered doubtfully.

  “I’m sure they’ll be back soon.”

  She tried to make her voice as confident as possible, and he apparently accepted her assurance.

  Presently Jannie’s pace began to drag more and more.

  “She’s tired,” Pieter said. He added explanatorily, “She’s only little, you see.”

  Val picked up the child and settled her as comfortably as possible on her arm. Jannie was a frail, thin little creature—somewhere between two and three, Val would have guessed—but even the smallest three-year-old makes a surprisingly heavy burden after a short time. It was a relief when at least they reached the spaciousness and quiet of Grosvenor Square.

  “Here,” said Val, putting Jannie down by the garden in the centre, “I should think you could walk a few yards by now. Oh,” she added in dismay, noticing a damp stain on her own coat sleeve, “You’re wet!”

  She knelt down and felt the child and discovered that, instead of proper underclothes, Jannie had on merely a sodden flannel napkin.

  “No wonder she couldn’t walk. Her legs are all chafed.”

  “I know. Mrs. Pipkin wouldn’t give her proper drawers because she wet them such a lot. She’s like that all the time now,” said Pieter resignedly.

  “But she must be about three? Surely she ought to have stopped wetting herself by now?” Val was extremely vague about when this should happen, but before the age of walking, surely?

  “Yes she had stopped. But she started again, at Mrs. Pipkin’s,” said Pieter.

  Val gave an impatient sigh, and then checked herself. It wasn’t the child’s fault, after all. But what a way to arrive at the mansion of an unknown marchioness who might not even, for sure, be Kirstie’s aunt. If only the Jersey Hotel were a bit closer. But that was a good half hour’s ride away, even if a cab had been in sight, which it was not, and even if Val had had enough money on her. Whereas number forty, Grosvenor Square was just across the road—a large, handsome house with a white-pillared porch.

  “Come along children,” said Val, sighing again. “We’ll go and see if that’s where your great-aunts live.”

  Holding their hands she crossed the street, entered the pillared porch, and put her finger firmly on the brass bell push.

  Chapter 6

  After a short pause the door was flung open by a black-coated manservant. He gave no flicker of recognition at the sight of Pieter and Jannie but impassively inquired Val’s name; just the same, from something in his demeanour, she felt instantly certain that he had seen the children before.

  She gave him her card and asked if the marchioness of Stroma was at home.

  “I will ascertain, ma’am, if you will be so good as to take a seat.”

  He spoke with a slight brogue; Val, unfamiliar with variations on the English accent, could not be certain if it were Scots, but it reminded her of the voices she had heard when in Edinburgh with her father.

  “Can you tell Lady Stroma” (she hoped this was right) “that I am Mr. Nils Hansen’s sister.”

  He went off with her card. Val sat down collectedly and looked round the hall, which was about the size of the whole ground floor in the Twenty-third Street house, floored with marble, and decorated with stags’ antlers and numerous sharp-pointed and lethal-looking weapons. A banner hung in one corner.

  The children remained very quiet and subdued beside her, but Pieter murmured, “That was great-aunt Louisa’s butler. His name is Sutherland.”

  “Oh, so you have been here before?” Val was relieved.

  “Yes, once we came to tea. But Jannie was sick on the rug.”

  “Her ladyship will see you, miss,” said the butler returning. “Please to come this way.”

  They ascended a broad flight of marble stairs, Jannie with great difficulty, and were shown into a long, high, handsome room on the first floor. Two ladies were seated, very upright, on high-backed chairs at the far end of the room, below the marble bust of a Roman emperor which stood on a black column. It might well have portrayed an uncle or grandfather of the ladies; their physiognomy was markedly similar to that of the bust, particularly as to the arched nose, curved nostrils, and high, patrician expression; Val entertained a fleeting irreverent suspicion that the bust had been acquired because of the resemblance.

  “Miss Montgomery, my lady,” announced the butler.

  “How do you do, Miss Montgomery,” said the taller and more impressive of the ladies. “This is my sister Honoria.”

  Val made the journey down the room.

  “How do you do, Lady Stroma, Lady Honoria. It is kind of you to receive me.”

  “And to what do we owe the honour of making your acquaintance, Miss Montgomery?” inquired Lady Stroma. She spoke in a high, dry voice, through her nostrils; it sounded, thought Val, like the honking of a flight of geese.

  “Well—” said Val. “It’s a long and quite complicated story. I wonder if, while I tell it, the children might—might perhaps go and play somewhere? Also, little Jannie has had a slight mishap and could do with some attention—”

  “Tuts!” said Lady Stroma. “Sutherland—call Dundas!”

  Nervously on the children’s behalf, Val awaited the arrival of this person.

  Dundas, when she appeared, looked, at first sight, alarming—she was a lady’s maid in grey poplin and starched cambric, tall and severe as a grenadier—but when Lady Stroma said, “Take Miss Kirstie’s children away and see to them, Dundas; the little girl requires changing,” she exclaimed, “Och, maircy, the puir bairn! Here, come awa’, Miss Jannie, till I sort you,” in a voice as soft as a moorland mist, and the children went with her willingly enough.

  While they were being ushered out, Val took covert stock of the ladies facing her.

  Lady Stroma certainly appeared sufficiently formidable, with very black hair, just beginning to silver, a cold grey piercing eye, a thin, arched mouth, and deep incised lines running downward from her fastidiously dilated nostrils. Pride, said those nostrils. Pride, said the long, slender, bony hands, the immense diamond brooch, the waterfall of exquisite lace, the black draperies.

  The younger sister, Lady Honoria, was less alarming. Her face, though aquiline, seemed cast in a softer mould, her lips were less r
esolute, and the grey brocade dress she wore owed more to fashion and femininity than did that of her sister. Her skin was pale as paper and she did not look well; a cough shook her at frequent intervals.

  “Now, Miss Montgomery: how can we serve you?”

  “First, Lady Stroma,” said Val, “do you, by any chance, know where my brother and his wife—your niece—are at this moment?”

  Lady Honoria looked extremely startled. Lady Stroma thinned her lips even more fastidiously.

  “I understood that they were to go on some cruise with that politician person. Reydon—Clanreydon, he calls himself now—as if he had ever belonged to a clan! A plausible parvenu of the worst type—flashy, self-seeking, and a Whig, furthermore.”

  “My sister and I have always been Tories, naturally,” murmured Lady Honoria.

  “Are they not back from the cruise?” inquired Lady Stroma.

  “They never seem to have set off on it,” said Val. “But they have left their house in Welbeck Street and—and nobody seems to know where they are.”

  Briefly she explained the cause and circumstances of her own presence in London, and how she had discovered the children—passing rather hastily over the portion of the story relating to Miss Letty Pettigrew.

  “And—and I can’t describe to you, Lady Stroma how—how very unsuitable were the circumstances in which I found the children with this wretched woman in Islington.”

  “Well?” said Lady Stroma. “How do you propose that my sister and I should concern ourselves in this matter, Miss Montgomery?”

  Her tone was most unpromising, but Val continued firmly.

  “I am only in London for a short visit, Lady Stroma—indeed, I haven’t funds to support myself here unless I am provided with somewhere to live and can acquire a few newspaper connections”—Lady Stroma’s long lids came three-quarters of the way down over her chill grey eyes at this vulgar suggestion— “but you, I believe, are the children’s nearest relatives on their mother’s side—I was wondering if they could not stay with you—just until their parents reappear.”

  She tried to speak as if this were a reasonable and foregone conclusion, stifling her own growing doubts of such a lucky and simple solution to the problem.

  “That is quite out of the question,” said Lady Stroma instantly. “Why, pray, should we have them? I must tell you that we never made the slightest attempt to conceal our disapproval and displeasure at our niece’s imprudent marriage, Miss Montgomery.”

  I’m sure you didn’t, thought Val.

  “You may be a very good sort of young lady yourself—we know nothing of you to the contrary—but there is no getting away from the fact that your brother is little better than an adventurer, and moreover keeps highly undesirable company, of the most flashy and meretricious kind. No, my niece has made her bed and she must lie on it; we have washed our hands of her affairs.”

  “But the children! Why visit your disapproval on them? These matters are no fault of theirs. And they are your kin, after all.”

  “There is something in what Miss Montgomery says, sister,” put in Lady Honoria in her softer voice.

  “They seem to be well-behaved, quiet little things,” Val went on persuasively. “Could they not stay here just—just for the moment?”

  “Quite impossible, Miss Montgomery.” Oh, bother you, you old battle-axe! thought Val impatiently. But then Lady Stroma went on to explain, with a more natural and human manner than she had hitherto used, “In point of fact my sister and I leave England less than twenty-four hours from now; we are catching the London, Chatham, and Dover express sleeping car tomorrow morning at ten, traveling straight through to Nice, where my sister is to spend the winter, as she has delicate lungs, while I plan to travel on to Constantinople and the interior of Persia.”

  “Oh—I see.” Val was very much dashed. Obviously it was out of the question that two highly bred and elderly ladies should take the children along with them on such a trip. “I suppose the children couldn’t remain here, in your house?”

  “No, young lady. The house will be shut up. Our servants, of course, accompany us, and nobody will remain here except a caretaker.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “But what is to prevent you, Miss Montgomery, from remaining in London, hiring an establishment, and retaining the children with you until your brother returns?”

  “I can’t afford to hire a house, Lady Stroma.” Down came the pale lids again. “And I have my living to earn. I don’t really have time to look after the children.” Val was slightly nettled at being thus relegated to the status of child-minder.

  “Oh—I see—” Lady Stroma gazed vaguely down her high-bridged nose as if such a possibility were too bizarre to have occurred to her. “I see . . . How unfortunate.”

  A slightly uncomfortable pause ensued, which was broken by the arrival of yet another deferential, black-coated manservant, a spare, white-haired man who might, from his air of consequence, have been a steward. He coughed and murmured, “Ahem! I wouldnae have interrupted ye, mem, if it were not airrgent. It’s with regairrd tae paiking up yer diaries. Shall ye be traivelling wi’ the hale clamjamfrey o’ them on camel back, or merely a selaiction?”

  “Oh, a selection; but I must have at least forty; I will come and show you which. Excuse me, Miss Montgomery—”

  Lady Stroma, rising, swept from the room, so much, in her draperies, resembling the black marble column that Val, despite a strenuous effort to do so, quite failed to picture her on camel back; imagination simply boggled at the task.

  Lady Honoria, having ascertained that her sister was out of earshot, said hurriedly, in a low voice and a much more friendly manner than she had hitherto used, “I have read a number of your newspaper articles, Miss Montgomery, which Kirstie has kept and shown me on various occasions—I have so much admired your enterprising spirit and your superior literary style!”

  This wholly unexpected commendation almost brought tears to Val’s eyes. She returned Lady Honoria’s timid smile with one of warm gratitude.

  “Why—why, thank you! I had no idea—” Fancy Kirstie having done such a thing—having taken the trouble to get hold of the newspapers—and they must have been mostly American ones—and saved up her articles! For the first time, Val had a sudden feeling of fellowship for her ghostly little sister-in-law.

  She would have said more, but Lady Stroma sailed back, the affair of the diaries having been settled.

  “Sister, I have had an idea,” said Honoria, who seemed heartened by her brief exchange with Val. “Why should not the children go up to Ardnacarrig? The air up there will be good for them, poor little pale things, much better than London, there would be old Elspie to look after them, just as she looked after Kirstie; Doctor Ramsay could keep an eye on them, and we can leave word for Kirstie that that is where they are to be found. Now, do you not think that an excellent plan?”

  “It is not a bad notion,” conceded Lady Stroma. “In fact, McPherson made exactly the same suggestion to me. Their board need not be a consideration at Ardnacarrig; there is plenty of bedding, the oat harvest has been a good one—” (Oats? thought Val. Anyone would believe the poor things were horses.) “and they need not be an added expense in fire and candles, for I daresay they would in general be out of doors, or in the same room as Elspie. And at least there would be healthy influences at Ardnacarrig to counteract the unwholesome environment in which they have hitherto been reared. Yes, I believe that will be the best plan. But you have overlooked one important detail, Honoria—how are they to be transported to Ardnacarrig? McPherson and Sutherland come with us to Nice, so do Dundas and the other servants—we can hardly require old Elspie to travel all the way south.”

  “Where is Ardnacarrig?” asked Val.

  “It is our house in Scotland, Miss Montgomery.”

  Val had a sudden recollection of her brother: “They have a devi
lish great barracks of a place up in Lammermuir; when they die, all their cash comes to Kirstie . . .”

  She had been walking with him in Central Park when he said that; what an infinite time and distance off that day seemed; worlds away. Astonished, Val realised that during the last twenty-four hours, she had hardly given Benet a thought, or any other member of the Allerton clan.

  A house in Scotland. And somebody called old Elspie who would look after the children. That seemed like a perfect solution to the problem. They would be in the country—healthy, cared for—

  “If it is only the question of escorting them up there, Lady Stroma, I could very well undertake that,” she said. “I wouldn’t have the least objection—in fact my American editor has suggested that I might go to Scotland. I could travel with them to your house and leave them with—”

  “Elspie, our housekeeper, Kirstie’s old nurse. If you can accompany them, Miss Montgomery, I believe that will do very well,” said Lady Stroma. “Scotland will be good for the children. Perhaps, once they are there, Kirstie will allow them to remain. We have been concerned for them from time to time, I must confess.”

  Concealing her surprise at this admission, Val ventured, “The little boy resembles you, Lady Stroma. Have you noticed his hands? They are exactly like yours.”

  “Indeed? I had not observed it,” said Lady Stroma loftily. But just the same she seemed gratified. Now she began to act like a general. She summoned McPherson once more.

  “McPherson, I wish you to procure three tickets on the Caledonian Flyer from King’s Cross tomorrow for this young lady and the two children.”

  Val interposed.

  “It is exceedingly good of you to offer to procure my ticket, Lady Stroma, but that will not be necessary—I had not the least intention—”