Letitia Or The Convalescent Heart

by Catherine Bowness

  It was only then, as the light moved slowly from one side to the other, that he noticed the cover was not on straight; instead of being positioned centrally over the entrance it stuck out a little on one side and left a gap on the opposite portion.

  “Letty!” he cried, peering into the depths with his lantern held high.

  Playing the light over the gap and attempting to see into the bottom – something it was more or less impossible to do even in daylight and with the entrance wholly uncovered – he noticed what seemed incontrovertible evidence that she was there for, partway down, snagged upon a fern growing out of the wall, was the length of black silk. He could see it waving slightly as the raindrops hit it.

  As his heart fell from its accustomed position down what might have been an oubliette in his body, he strove to find a rational explanation for the presence of the silk some six feet below the rim. She might have thrown it down – she had, after all, quarrelled with him just before going outside and might have wished to dispose of anything which had touched him – or it might have been blown by the wind, which had grown noticeably stronger when the rain began. However, that seemed unlikely in view of both the raised wall and the grille; it would have been more likely to have been snagged upon the grille than to have slipped between its bars and come to rest against a fern.

  “Letty!” he repeated, now in a groan of despair. “Oh, my darling, if you’re there, if you can, pray answer me! It is your own Archie searching for you – coming to rescue you. Answer me! Letty!”

  There being no answer, he paused again and once more played the light of the lantern over the top of the shaft. “Letty!” he called again, dropping to his good knee and leaning over to shout straight into the void. “Letty!”

  While he was kneeling beside the oubliette and shouting his beloved’s name into its depths, the rest of the men in the Castle emerged, equipped with lanterns, and began to search for the missing girl.

  “She is down there,” he said when he was joined by one of the footmen. “See, the cover has been moved!”

  “So it has, my lord,” the footman agreed, flabbergasted.

  “Who moved it?” Archie asked, getting to his feet and confronting the footman.

  “I don’t know, my lord. Could it have shifted in the wind?”

  “No; it is enormously heavy. I shouldn’t think a hurricane could move it. But it will have to be lifted off now and someone will have to go down and bring her up. Fetch some rope so that we can send someone down. I would go myself except that I am so cursed disabled that I don’t think I’d be much use. Go quickly, man, don’t stand there with your mouth open!”

  The footman scurried off and Lord Archibald stayed where he was and continued to call Letty’s name until his voice was hoarse.

  Alerted by the report from the footman, the Earl found him there a few moments later.

  “Stop shouting,” he besought. “You will damage your voice.”

  “My voice!” Archie exclaimed with contempt. “Why should I care about that when she is down there?”

  “You do not know that,” the Earl argued. “It seems most unlikely.

  Is that how you found it?” he added, pointing to the cover.

  “Yes. Someone has moved it.”

  “It does look that way,” the Earl agreed, beginning to look grave and examining the gap between the edge of the cover and the gaping hole. “But she could not have fallen through there unless she climbed down and forced her way past the cover. There is hardly sufficient space even for someone as slender as Letty.”

  “But, look, that piece of silk I was using as a sling is wrapped round a fern. How could that have got there?”

  “Blown by the wind, I should think. It’s not reasonable to base your whole theory on that piece of material.”

  “If she’s not down there, where is she? I might have thought she’d run off with Sharpthorne if he had not been in the saloon just now. Do you think it more probable that she’s run off with someone she just met or has fallen down the oubliette?”

  “I don’t think either is very likely, but I will see if I can get the door open from below. Matt said you’d asked for some rope and were intending to send someone down. Would it not be easier to go in from the bottom the way we did as boys?”

  “Perhaps. I seem to remember it was rusted up when we last tried.”

  “Yes, it was, but we’re men now so a bit stronger, I suppose. I’ll have a look and, while I’m doing so, I expect she’ll turn up anyway. Do you want to come with me?”

  “No, I’ll wait here and direct operations with the rope. Who do you think moved the cover?”

  “I have no idea; either it was some of the servants for a lark or it was someone with malicious intent. I suggest you observe the men who come to help closely. We’ll find her, never fear!” he added, wincing at the sight of his brother’s tragic expression.

  “I don’t doubt it, but in what state will she be?” Archie asked bleakly.

  The Earl did not reply; he was already on his way back to the Castle. The entrance to the dungeons was through a locked door in the basement of the West Tower.

  But Letty did not hear Archie shouting for she was at that point still lying insensible on the palliasse; his voice might have been instrumental in bringing her back to consciousness but, if it was, she was unaware of it.

  By the time she had regained her senses and begun to call for help, Lord Archibald had stopped shouting and moved away so that neither heard the other’s anguished cries.

  Stubbing her toe against the soft heap lying in the mud, Letty opened her mouth, not to cry out - for she had already discovered there was no point in wasting her energy on such an exercise - but because she found herself almost unable to breathe for horror; the place where she had always understood her heart to reside seemed suddenly to empty itself, the organ plummeting downwards and leaving a horrid gaping hole in the middle of her body.

  “Oh, God, oh, God,” she whimpered. Whether she was calling on the Almighty for help or simply using His name to express her horror, only He knew. She did not.

  What? Where? Who? How long? Passed through her mind in such swift, jumbled succession that, even if there had been someone able to answer her questions, there would have been no time for him or her to do so.

  She knelt down and extended a hesitant hand to the bundle. It lay, so far as she could tell in the dark, in a bent position, its legs splayed awkwardly and its head in the mud. As her hand explored the body, she encountered a bunch of feathers still attached to a hairdo which, although she rather thought it had suffered a certain amount of damage, still appeared to be partially intact. There had been various dowagers at the ball wearing feathers but the one who immediately came to mind was the Countess.

  “My lady!” she exclaimed. “Countess! Is it you? You’re not dead, are you?”

  There was no answer so that Letty was very much afraid that she was but then she remembered the thin little cry that had been so eerie and so maddening. Now she realised it must have been coming from this person for, Countess or not, it was certainly a person. She began to wonder if the body had been here for centuries, was an older corpse also sporting a coiffure replete with feathers for, so ignorant was she about the most ordinary things, she did not know that, unless carefully preserved, bodies disintegrate with time.

  “You weren’t dead a minute ago,” she chided. “So I don’t believe you can be now. Pray answer me – pray say something unkind so that I know you are still alive!”

  She began to shake the body and eventually thought to roll it over so that the face, which had been partially buried in the mud, was uppermost. As she did so, the cry came again, thinner and more excruciating to hear. She must have hurt her by manhandling her. She could not see anything, but she could now feel skin beneath her fingers, as opposed to hair, and began to wipe the mud from it.

  “You’re not dead!” she said accusingly. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, I promise I did not mean to. Can you
hear me? Speak, groan, pray, pray make some sound to reassure me that you’re alive! Probably you have a mouthful of mud; let me see if I can get some of it out.”

  Suiting the action to the word, she pushed her fingers into the flaccid mouth; it felt like inserting them into a bowlful of gruel and, now afraid that the old lady would choke if she was not careful, Letty rolled her over again so that she was lying on her side, and began to scoop out fingerfuls of mud.

  Nothing much happened as a result of this and the Countess, if it was she, remained still – alarmingly still.

  “Are you breathing?” Letty asked, “or are your lungs full of mud too?”

  She did not know what to do but remembered hearing somewhere that people pulled out of rivers had to be hit on the back so that the water came out. She supposed that mud – and this mud was almost liquid, like thick soup or the sort of gruel which the Countess was apparently in the habit of consuming, should come out in the same way. In any event, if Lady Stonegate was already dead, she would not mind Letty hitting her, indeed she would not know about it.

  Painfully, she climbed over the body and applied herself to punching the Countess somewhere in the middle of her back with as much force as she could muster.

  After several thumps she was rewarded with a modicum of success for the Countess gasped, groaned more loudly than she had yet been able to manage and began to heave.

  “That’s right,” Letty encouraged, recalling her nanny’s unsympathetic advice when she had eaten something unpalatable. “Bring it all up, my lady!”

  And the Countess did. Once she had begun, she seemed unable to stop and her body shuddered with her efforts. It was perhaps fortunate that it was so dark for Letty could not see what was coming out of the old lady’s mouth although she could hear the most frightful sounds, like a rock being cleaved in two by something resembling an earthquake and soon the air in the oubliette began to reek unpleasantly, so that Letty thought that it was not only mud which had been cast forth.

  When the Countess’s efforts to rid herself of everything she had ingested in the last few hours ceased, she fell back into the mud and began to shake like a blancmanger.

  “You are cold,” Letty surmised. “And I’m sure it’s no wonder.” She put her hand inside her dress, intending to draw out the piece of black silk, although she did not think it would be a great deal of help. But it was not there and then she remembered that she had put it around her own shoulders when she left the Castle because it had been raining.

  “I wish I had something to wrap around you, but I have lost the piece of silk that Archie was using as a sling and all my clothes are sodden. I wonder if any of the straw in the mattress is dry; I suppose it might be. Let me go back and see if I can pull some out.”

  But, as she turned away, the Countess uttered a cry not unlike that of a baby put down in its bed when it would rather remain in its mother’s arms and a hand fumbled for Letty’s.

  “It is all right,” Letty said reassuringly, achieving a surprisingly warm and reassuring tone, “I am not going far, I promise, just to fetch some dry straw. I’m sure someone will find us soon,” she added.

  “Don’t leave me,” the Countess cried, almost in her own voice, although it was much thinner and more pleading than Letty had ever heard it before.

  “I won’t; I will be less than a yard away.”

  “Don’t go. Stay. You might not find your way back.”

  “I don’t think there’s very far I can go,” Letty argued. “Here, take my petticoat. It is not quite so wet as the rest of me.”

  She rose awkwardly, her injured ankle giving way until she managed to steady it, and, lifting her dress, pulled off her chemise and wrapped it around the Countess’s shoulders, pulling it tight across her breast and tying it in a knot so that she was almost swaddled like a baby.

  “There! Is that not better? Now,” she went on, having an idea of how to reassure the old lady that she had not been abandoned, “if you hold one end of my hair ribbon and I tie the other to my wrist, we will not lose each other. The mattress is no more than a yard away, I promise.”

  She pulled the ribbons out of her hair, tied the several small lengths together, gave one end to the Countess and tied the other to the hem of her dress, thinking that her skirt would extend the length sufficiently for her to reach the palliasse, while remaining attached to the Countess.

  “Hold tight!” she said. “I will not leave you, I swear.”

  It took, as she had said, only a step to reach the mattress but, once again, she came upon it unexpectedly and tripped, falling forward on to it.

  The Countess, feeling the tug of the ribbon, exclaimed in panic, “Letitia!”

  “Do not fret,” that damsel replied, now well in charge of the situation and perhaps almost beginning to enjoy helping someone worse off than herself. “I have only stubbed my toe upon the mattress. Hold still and I will see if I can pull any dry straw out of it.”

  This was easier said than done for the calico in which the straw was bound seemed to be extraordinarily tough and, no matter how many times Letty ran her fingers over it, she could find no slit. It had obviously been well made – too well in the circumstances. It felt very damp and Letty was almost certain the straw would prove to be wet all the way through, but she supposed that, reluctant as she was to apply her mouth to the covering, she must in view of her promise to the Countess. There seeming to be no alternative, she knelt down and pierced the cover with one of her teeth.

  Having done this, she found she could expand the hole by tearing the material until she had a large enough opening to put her hand inside. The top half of the mattress, although dampened by the rain, was not by any means saturated; they had had a number of dry, sunny days recently so that, although the ground was muddy, the centre of the palliasse had remained surprisingly dry. Excited by the realisation that her idea seemed to be proving fruitful, she began to tear out quantities of the straw.

  “It does seem to be dry in the middle,” she told the Countess. “I will bring some back and soon you will have a dry bed to lie upon and a straw blanket to wrap yourself in.”

  “Dear girl,” the Countess surprisingly murmured. “I’m sorry I was unkind to you.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Letty said at once, gathering up an armful of straw and making her way back to the Dowager. “I thought you didn’t like me much,” the added, spreading out the straw and rolling the old lady on to it.”

  “I didn’t,” her ladyship admitted. “Thought you were a skimpy-scampy little minx. Now, I think I love you more than anyone in the world.”

  “Oh, my lady,” Letty exclaimed, so overcome that she bent down and kissed the old lady’s cheek.

  Chapter 36

  She went back for more straw. Now that she had proved she could find her way backwards and forwards, the Countess seemed prepared to trust her and no longer insisted on clutching her end of the ribbon. It was not long before she had not only got Lady Stonegate out of the mud, but covered her in a layer of straw and provided her with a pillow of the same.

  “Thank you, child,” her ladyship said humbly.

  “Not at all,” Letty replied, taking the old lady’s hand and holding it. “Do you know if there is a way out of this place other than climbing up the walls?”

  “Oddly enough, I think there is. Those naughty boys, my sons, found a way in when they were children. There is a whole network of dungeons under the Castle and most of them can be reached on foot. This one is cut off from the rest, but there is a way in, although I am by no means certain that it is a way out.”

  “It must have been if they came in,” Letty pointed out.

  “I imagine they took care to leave the door – or whatever the means of entry was – open when they came in. It’s possible they brought that mattress in as I don’t suppose our forebears would have bothered to provide their prisoner with such a degree of comfort.”

  “Do you think I should investigate?”

  “I own I
would much rather you did not just at present as I find myself excessively reluctant to be left on my own. They will find us, never fret. My sons will not leave any stone unturned to find you, my dear, and I suppose eventually they will miss me too. I was on my way to the North Tower so that I do not expect anyone except Baxter will notice that I am missing until well past breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Shall I sing to you?” Letty asked. “I know it would be scant comfort to hear me play but I have been told that my voice is not so very, very bad.”

  “I have been unkind to you,” the Countess said, ignoring Letty’s offer to sing. She seemed bent on confession and reluctant to be soothed.

  “Yes, but I was unkind to you too.”

  “I was mean first,” the Countess insisted.

  “You were no doubt desirous of protecting your son from contracting what you considered to be an unsuitable marriage,” Letty explained gently.

  “I am afraid my motives were far less honourable,” the old lady said. “In truth, I did not want him to marry at all because I was afraid I would be sent away.”

  “It is perfectly understandable,” Letty murmured. She did not like this new, humble version of the Dowager any more than the old, waspish one and, aware that the woman was badly hurt and much weakened by her ordeal, had no desire to encourage her in this despondent vein.

  “Pray hear me out!” the Countess said with something of her old vigour. “Since it seems only too likely that I will die soon, I am determined to make a confession and – lacking a priest – must make do with you!”

  Letty did not answer because she suddenly recalled the earlier scene when there had been a suggestion that the Earl had been poisoned. The Countess’s constant refrain on the subject of her stepson’s digestion, together with her hints that his rich diet would one day kill him, had taken on a sinister aspect since she had admitted her reluctance to have him marry at all.