Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

  This coach journey was just as exhausting as the train trip had been, and Jannie was sick almost as often. But this time, at least, they could open the little front window and beg Jock to stop, at which he would grumblingly pull up, protesting that at yon gait they’d be a week on the way. Val was able to bathe Jannie’s face in little icy rushing roadside brooks and make her take deep gulps of the piercing air. Pieter wanted to eat his dinner sitting by one of the streams, but the wind was too cold. They drank some of the ice-cold water in the horn cups that Robina had provided, and then jumped back into the coach to eat her oat bannocks, cheese, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in ham and breadcrumbs, and delicious biscuits which Jock, thawing a little under the influence of food, said were Tantallon cakes. He also informed them that they were now crossing the Lammermuir hills and that they had better hurry up with their eating, for there was still twenty miles to go, and soon they must leave the turnpike road and take one that was by no means so good.

  “Worse than this?” said Val, who had suffered the ruts and potholes as philosophically as she could, but already felt bruised in every joint.

  “A muckle deal waur,” said Jock with gloomy satisfaction.

  “And if it snows? What do we do then?” she asked, for clouds were piling up to the north.

  “Gin it snaws, we must e’en sprattle on, for there’s nae mair clachans twixt here an’ Ardnacarrig—naught but moor and taw, rig and brae.” Jock made it sound unutterably barren and dreary. “Gif it hadna been for a’ this havering an’ ganthering we’d be there the noo,” he went on accusingly.

  “Oh, well, in that case let us get going as quickly as possible.”

  The children were reluctant to get going. By now both were tired, after their early start; Jannie was peevish and lachrymose, while even the equable Pieter developed a whining note in his voice and asked with exasperating frequency how long it would be before they arrived.

  “Oh, how can I tell?” snapped Val, and then felt ashamed of herself; she was an adult, after all, equipped with mental resources to enable her to bear discomfort and unhappiness; whereas they, poor things, with no such advantages, had mislaid their parents and lost their home, and had not the least control over what would happen to them next. Unfortunately, though, their orphaned and helpless state could not render them any more lovable in Val’s eyes; she felt extremely sorry for them, but by now she was heartily sick of their company and the responsibility it incurred; she longed to be free of them.

  “Aunt Valla,” said Pieter presently in a small subdued voice.

  “Well?”

  “When shall we be going home? To our own home, I mean, in London, where we have all our things?” he said with quivering lip.

  That one got under Val’s defences. She thought of the dusty litter of straw in front of the house in Welbeck Street, the men carrying out the last of Kirstie’s furniture. Really uncertain how to answer, she looked at the little pale fair-haired boy in his rough blue kerseymere coat, and he looked back at her pleadingly.

  “Want Mama!” wailed Jannie, who, like a miner’s canary, was always lightning-quick to pick up any hint of trouble in the atmosphere.

  Val held a vague belief that the truth should be told to children at all times—but now she was faced with the question: how much truth can children endure? More particularly at times when they are tired, apprehensive, and under strain?

  “Pieter, I don’t know,” she prevaricated. “Quite soon, I hope. When your father and mother come back from wherever—when they come back. But in the meantime I’m sure you’ll enjoy Ardnacarrig. It’s right by the sea, you know. You can play on the beach and—and sail boats and find shells. And old Elspie will look after you—I expect she’ll be kind, like Robina. She looked after your mother when she was little.”

  From out of his dusky corner she could feel Pieter’s eyes on her, studying her sceptically.

  “Aunt Valla?”

  “Yes, Pieter?”

  “Where are Papa and Mama? Why don’t they come back?”

  “I don’t know where they are, Pieter,” she said again, helplessly. “Wasn’t it careless of them to go off without leaving us their address? I expect each of them thought the other had done it. Probably your father had some writing business that he had to do in a hurry—perhaps somebody invited him to a big house a long way off, and so he had to leave, all in a rush, and he took your mother with him—”

  It all sounded so plausible that she was almost believing it herself, but Pieter said flatly, “No. It didn’t happen like that.”

  Val was stopped in her tracks. She said with caution, “How do you mean, Pieter?”

  “Mama went off first, before Papa came back from America.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t there. I was out with Mercy, getting cakes for our tea, and a man came to take Mama on a ship. When we got back, she was gone!”

  “On a ship? Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But how do you know that? If she was gone when you got back? Did she leave a note? A message?”

  “No, she didn’t. She told Jannie, and Jannie told me.”

  “Jannie was there when the man came for your mother?”

  “Yes, and he said Mama was to come with him on a ship,” Pieter repeated.

  Val studied the pair in helpless perplexity. Could she possibly believe this tale? Jannie did communicate with Pieter, she knew, but her statements and requests were mostly simple ones, concerned with her bodily needs, which her brother interpreted partly through familiarity with her sounds and gestures, partly, Val thought, from a kind of intuition. But could Jannie have framed a complicated report like that? On the other hand, Pieter could not have invented it, for he was a fundamentally truthful child and also, Val thought, somewhat unimaginative.

  “Jannie?” she said gently. “Did a man really come and ask your Mama to come with him on a ship?”

  But Jannie, as so often, took no notice at all; her eyes were blank, fixed on some distance that she alone could see; she was half curled up, leaning against her brother, and sucked her finger, meanwhile vigorously rubbing the thumb of the same hand against her woollen collar. The collars of all her clothes became damp and matted after each day’s wear.

  Val turned her attention back to Pieter.

  “Well then—if your mother went off—”

  “With a man, on a ship,” he repeated.

  “When your father came home, what did he do?”

  Could Kirstie have eloped? Sailed off to Italy with some romantic lover? That sounded too improbable; too out of keeping with the quiet domestic girl who hated big parties, who had a fiercely protective love for her children and would never leave them with a stranger. But marriage to Nils must be a desperate affair—perhaps she had finally rebelled against the financial ups and downs, the contrasts of poverty at home and high society abroad, the dubious shifts and stratagems that Nils probably employed in order to keep them afloat. By the time all Kirstie’s own money had been spent she must have been thoroughly disillusioned with her husband.

  Just the same, Val could not believe that she would abandon her children.

  Why not take them too?

  But perhaps she had meant to send for them, and Nils had prevented it?

  “When Papa came home, Mama sent him a letter. And a present.”

  A present?

  “What kind of present?”

  Pieter shook his head. “I don’t know. It was in a box. About so big.” He sketched a shoebox size. “Then Papa was dreadfully angry.” He stopped, searching his vocabulary, which had supplied the wrong word. “Upset,” he substituted. “There was a man there that day when it came.”

  “The same man who had gone with your Mama?”

  “No. This one was called a bailiff. What’s that, Aunt Valla?”

  “I
’m not quite sure, Pieter. A sheriff’s officer, maybe?”

  But Pieter did not know what that was.

  “Well, then, Papa packed up our clothes, after that, and took us to the woman’s house.”

  “Mrs. Pipkin.”

  “Yes. And then you came.” He paused, and then said with hardly veiled anxiety, “Will you stay with us now till Mama and Papa come to fetch us?”

  Val swallowed. She could not tell a flat lie. She said, “We’ll see, Pieter. You see, we don’t know how long that will be. And I have to earn my living.” But the look of desperate anxiety on Pieter’s face made her feel horribly guilty.

  Jannie had become restless again and was flinging her small firm body from side to side, keening to herself on a high note like a seagull.

  “Stop that noise, please, Jannie.”

  Jannie took no notice.

  “Ask her to stop, Pieter. Shall I tell you a story?”

  “Couldn’t we read those books?” He looked longingly toward the bag with the books in it.

  “The carriage joggles too much. You’d be sick, like Jannie.”

  The worsening of the road predicted by Jock had been no exaggeration; their progress had slowed down to a crawl; even so, the carriage lurched sickeningly from side to side at every turn of the wheels.

  “Sing a song!” Pieter suggested. “Jannie likes that too.”

  Val racked her brain. What could she recall from her own childhood? Her mother had never sung to her, but Tabitha had—and her father used to come up to her room at night and sing her to sleep sometimes . . . “One more, just one more song, please, Papa!”

  Slowly they came back: “Turkey in the Straw,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Comin’ Round the Mountain,” “Marching Through Georgia,” “Come into the Garden, Mrs. Bond.” She hummed, then sang; Pieter joined in when he recognised the song. And when they were singing Mrs. Bond, Val was amazed to notice that Jannie had apparently made some kind of contact with what they were doing, and was singing dilly-dilly-dilly to herself in a high, queer little voice, but on the right notes. It was the first intimation that she could be reached by any outside activity.

  Val prolonged the singing as long as she could; then, when she ran out of songs, recited all the poems she could remember.

  Meanwhile, outside, interminable heathland went past, purple-grey, brown, at last dusky, hardly visible; the road was now so rough that she hoped Jock knew what he was about and had not accidentally turned from the track and struck off across the moor. But presumably he was now in his home territory? Surely they must arrive within the next hour?

  “That’s nice, say it again,” said Pieter sleepily.

  I know more than Apollo

  For oft, while he lies sleeping

  I hear the stars

  At mortal wars

  In the wounded welkin weeping—

  “Wounded welkin weeping‚” he repeated, in an echo of the voice she used for recitation, and then, to Val’s utter astonishment, Jannie too dreamily murmured to herself, “Ooning ‘elkin ‘eeping” before finally and definitively falling asleep, her head propped on her brother’s chest. His own drooped over her and they lay curled together, breathing deeply and softly. Val stretched out her legs with caution and lay back, utterly exhausted, luxuriating in the silence and mental solitude. Please heaven let them sleep on till we arrive.

  Her mind went back to Pieter’s tale. Where could Kirstie have gone? Aboard Lord Clanreydon’s yacht? No, that was a silly notion—obviously if she had, Lord Clanreydon would have known about it. Well then—where? Where did people go on ships? Could she have sailed round the coast to Ardnacarrig? Would they find her waiting there? It was tempting to hope so, but presumably someone would know about it—Jock, Robina Gourlay—if that had been the case?

  Another very strange anomaly from Pieter’s tale struck her: Pieter had said that Mercy was their only servant when the home was broken up. And he had been out with Mercy buying cakes when the “man from the ship” came and Kirstie went off. But in that case she must have gone off leaving Jannie alone in the house? Would Kirstie do a thing like that?

  Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong about Kirstie, Val thought tiredly. Perhaps she had a secret life unknown to Nils. Or perhaps there was somebody else in the house; why do I wear out my wits trying to solve such a remote problem? Why don’t I use a bit more energy on my own problems?

  Her own problems, at the present time, seemed even more remote; remote as the Antipodes. In her mind’s eye she recreated the pages of the letter that she had written last night to Benet from Robina’s house and had posted early this morning.

  “Dear Benet: Since I have been in England I have come to a very hard decision; and I am writing to release you from our engagement . . .”

  But how exactly had she come to this decision? She hardly knew herself. Two weeks in New York—almost three on the boat—a week in England, less than that—and already Benet seemed immeasurably far off, completely irrelevant to her life, like some character in a novel that she had read long ago. During her days in London she had hardly given him a thought; her heart had accepted his absence with total equanimity, as if, long since, without her being aware of it, her feeling for him had quietly wound down, closed, and come to an end.

  “I don’t love Benet,” she had discovered with astonishment, sitting on the train, traveling north. “How strange! I don’t love him any more. Did I ever love him?”

  She tried to throw her mind back into the climate of their early days: walking down Fifth Avenue, her arm in his; Benet buying her a bunch of violets; that had been a happy time, a sweet, serene time; their good future together had lain ahead like a sun-filled orderly landscape; she had felt a fondness, a respect for Benet, a happy security in his embrace. And then, unnoticed at the time, but most visible in hindsight, shadows had begun to spread over this landscape. Recurring minor, and then major, clashes of viewpoint stood about in it like withered thorn trees; and the strange thing was, thought Val, looking back, that Benet never even noticed them; he simply assumed that I would adapt my views to his; he never remotely perceived that there could be variations from his standpoint.

  She had hardly realised the boundaries, the limitations of the morality within which she had proposed to pass the rest of her life, until she was away from them. But now, separated from this code and able to view it with detachment, Val shuddered at the deadly prospect of boredom and stultification which it represented; at the taboos, the areas defined as “unpleasant” “morbid” “vulgar,” the people who were “our kind” and the larger number who were not. “Never talk about money, and think about it as little as possible.” “Writers?” she remembered Mrs. Allerton saying. “Rather peculiar people. Of course Scott and Irving were gentlemen; but people like Melville and that Edgar Allan Poe definitely aren’t; you couldn’t receive them in your home—and as for Harriet Beecher Stowe—!”

  Well, I have cut myself off from all that, Val thought, but what have I got instead? What do I do now? Could I live in Edinburgh and earn a living by writing?

  In spite of its blackness and grimness and ferocious climate she had found the bleak northern town exhilarating; she liked its wildly jutting landscape and its wild people talking their incomprehensible language. It is a little like New York without the propriety, she thought. Though I suppose, as soon as I came to know it well, I would find that Edinburgh has its own deadly proprieties, its kirk sessions, gossip, and exclusions. As an outsider at the moment I feel free of that. But how long can one live as an outsider, without putting down some kind of roots? Well, I have one contact in Edinburgh, she thought, I have Sir Marcus; I expect that would lead to others, and others of a congenial kind . . .

  She was entertaining a pleasing vision of herself as mistress of a salon, holding court among Edinburgh’s poets and philosophers, established in some elegant Queen Anne house in Moray Plac
e or India Street, when the carriage gave a particularly violent lurch. Jannie murmured plaintively in her sleep, and a bale of heavy material thudded down on to Val’s feet.

  “We’ll no’ be long now,” called Jock from the front.

  Peering out into the dusk, Val saw that they had dropped down from the high moor and were descending a narrow glen massed with trees that grew thick but not tall—oaks, she thought, mixed with pine or fir, but it was difficult to be sure in the bad light. A thin dusting of snow outlined the contours of the rough track. To their right, not far off, a stream tumbled downwards in a series of waterfalls; the roar was plainly audible and occasionally she caught a flash of white spray through the trees. This will be a wonderful place for the children in springtime, she thought with a shiver; it’s too bad they have to see it first at such an adverse season.

  Now the ground began to flatten; they had reached the foot of the glen. The road bore round to the right, skirting a stone wall behind which grew evergreens; it was plain that they were close to the grounds of a big house. They crossed a humpbacked stone bridge and passed between a pair of large but dilapidated and ivy-grown gateposts. Then followed a further half mile between the evergreens along a tolerably smooth sandy track and suddenly, making a sharp left turn, Jock drove his horses under a stone arch, and so into what seemed to be a cobbled yard, where he pulled them to a halt.

  Jannie whimpered sleepily. Pieter said, “Is this the place, Aunt Valla?”

  “I guess so,” answered Val. Her heart sank. Not a light seemed to be showing anywhere; but Jock had climbed down from the driver’s seat and was now opening the door to let them out. Then without more ado he began unloading the stores from the coach.

  “Which is the way in?” said Val, shivering. They had been lucky with the weather, she supposed; their journey had not been hindered by snow; but it was bitterly cold here, even colder than it had been on the journey.

  “The door? Why, yonder,” Jock said, jerking his head toward a corner of the court. “Nae doubt Mistress Elspie will stir hersel’ tae come oot in her ain good time,” and he returned to his unloading.