The Monkey's Wedding

by Joan Aiken

  “Of course you are familiar with the legend of Midsummer Village?”

  “Of course I am,” the man said more graciously. “I shall relate it to you. It concerns a beautiful girl, the daughter of a farmer here in the valley. Both her parents died when she was in her teens, and she ran the farm single-handed.”

  “When did all this take place, excuse me, sir?”

  “In the reign of Henry VIII. The girl, Edith, her name was, made a success of the farm. Her neighbours said the ghost of her father drifted beside her constantly, advising and instructing. No doubt he felt it was the least he could do, as he had made her promise not to marry.”

  “Why?”

  “He came of a very old family, descended from the Danes, and he couldn’t bear that the last of the line should change her name. He held her to her promise, though she was in love with a young man in the village. You can’t argue with a ghost. She stayed single. She was famous for her butter and eggs, and her fine pigs and her cowslip wine. In any case it is doubtful if the man would have married her—he was considerably above her in birth and had a twin sister to whom he was very devoted.”

  “What became of the farmer’s daughter?”

  “In the end, oddly enough, a man came to live in the village who bore the same name as her father—and so, though she didn’t love this man, she married him.”

  “Was he a poet?”

  “I am hardly qualified to pronounce on that,” the elderly man said fastidiously. “On her deathbed, after many years of married life—she was struck by lightning one summer day and died shortly after—it is said that Edith cried out: ‘I have been alive only on three days in my life: the day I met him, the day he kissed me, and the day I lost him.’ She was not referring to her husband. Since then, according to legend, the village exists for three days only in every year.”

  He looked round complacently at the lichened roofs and the towering elms. Grey cloud had begun to cover the sky, but on the village the sunlight still lay like concentrated gold.

  “That’s a most interesting tale, thank you, sir,” Andrew said. The elderly man inclined his head slightly as they moved off with their equipment, and then he took a notebook from his pocket and strolled away, writing in it.

  “Now who?” said Tod.

  A woman was coming towards them. She carried a large basket of cowslips, and their colour was reflected in her massive coil of yellow hair.

  She smiled at them in a friendly way and asked if she could help them, in a voice soothing and agreeable as the warmth from a baker’s oven.

  “We wondered if you’d care to give us your views on the sale of Midsummer Village?” Andrew said.

  “Well, yon Carrock’s on a fool’s errand, isn’t he?” she said, and laughed.

  “Are you familiar with the legend of the village?”

  “Of course,” she said. “We’re all brought up on it. My father used to tell it to me when I was a little thing. There was this young chap, Samuel Cutaway, oh, way back in the time of Henry the Seventh, he was to have been a monk but they dissolved the monasteries. Samuel fell in love with a farmer’s daughter, but she hadn’t any time for him. On account of this he went voyaging off with some of those early explorers and came back at the end of seven years with a pocket full of gold and a foreign bird. He became parish priest of the village here. He was a philosopher, he used to write essays. When he first heard the bird, in Africa it was, or maybe Australia, the song of it so bewitched him that he said while a man was listening to it he could explain the whole riddle of the universe. He brought the bird back with him. Some say it was a lyre bird, others a hoopoe.”

  “So did he explain the riddle of the universe?”

  “He never got the chance,” she said laughing. “The bird wouldn’t sing in this cold climate, or only for the three hottest days every summer. Samuel took to drink, a gallon of cowslip wine every day in memory of the farmer’s daughter who’d slighted him. And with every glass he drank he declared he would have been the greatest mind of his age if only the bird could be made to sing all the year round. So they say the village only exists now on the three days in summer when the bird would sing and he was listening to it and finding his answer to the riddle of the universe. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I must leave you now, I have to meet a friend.”

  “Thank you for your story,” Andrew called after her as she hurried away.

  “Here’s the vicar,” Tod muttered in his ear. “He’s sure to be full of opinions.” The vicar was a spare-looking man with a thin mouth, who gazed at them in faint disapproval while Andrew explained the reason for their presence.

  “Have you any views on the sale of Midsummer Village, sir?”

  “I? Views? Certainly. The Trust have no right to sell, Carrock has no right to buy. You should not sell times, or lives, or seasons.”

  “And the legend of the village—you know it, sir?”

  “Naturally. It concerns a brother and sister who lived here in the reign of Charles the First.”

  “Twins?”

  “Yes, twins. You know the tale?” the vicar said sharply.

  But Andrew merely looked attentive, and so the vicar told his story. “This pair, Laura and Esmond Fitzroy, were so devoted to one another that they swore never to marry. But Esmond had a scientific bent and became more and more engrossed in studies until at last he retired to live in a tower—you may see it over there—” The vicar gestured towards a crumbling grey ruin among the beech woods. “His was a mind far in advance of his age. He achieved early discoveries in the uses of electricity, could make copper wires glow by magic, according to contemporary reports, and had a metal mast affixed to the roof of his tower, down which he received mysterious messages from celestial regions. The sister became jealous because he neglected her for his research—she was not intelligent, poor thing, merely had a talent for taming animals—so she put it about that he was in league with the devil. The villagers besieged him in his tower. He kept them at bay for three days—during which time he said he was receiving messages from on high telling him how to preserve the village for ever—and before they managed to drag him out there was a violent storm, and the tower was hit by lightning. Esmond, was killed and everybody said it was a judgment.”

  “What became of the sister? You said her name was Laura?”

  “Oh, she married.” The vicar dismissed her with brief contempt. “The legend goes that, out of revenge for his sister’s betrayal, Esmond caused the village to disappear, and return for three days only each summer.”

  “That is extremely interesting, and thank you, sir,” Andrew said.

  “Glad to be of service.” The vicar gave Andrew his card which was inscribed The Rev. S. E. Cutaway.

  They left him and went along to drink cowslip wine at the Fan-Tailed Pheasant, where Bill was already enwreathed in more than a breathalyser’s bouquet.

  Coming out half an hour later they saw the fair-haired woman whom they had already met strolling towards them deep in conversation with a man in postman’s uniform. She waved to them and, when they were within speaking distance, called:

  “I forgot to tell you that he married.”

  “Who did? The philosopher with the singing bird?”

  “Yes. He married, late in life, a girl who became so annoyed with his excuse of not being able to write unless the bird was singing that she swore she’d train it to sing all the time. She did, too. She had a way with animals.”

  “I suppose she also had a twin brother who died?”

  “That’s right, love. Well, I must be getting along to make my hubby’s dinner. Good-bye Esmond, dear,” said the fair-haired woman. She smiled at the postman and they kissed; she walked swiftly through a pair of large iron gates leading to a house among trees.

  “And do you believe that this village exists on three days only each summer?” Andrew asked.

  The postman, who was young and black-haired, grinned at him mockingly.

  “I’d have an easy job
if that was so, wouldn’t I?” he said.

  “But what do you think?”

  “I’m not paid to think. I finished with thinking a long time ago.”

  With a casual flip of his hand, the postman walked off towards a small combined village store and sub-post-office.

  “Well? What did my brother have to say?”

  Andrew turned at the voice and saw the girl they had interviewed first.

  “Have they told you some good stories?” she asked teasingly. “Shall you have to come back, do you think?”

  “I—I’d like to,” Andrew began uncertainly.

  “Next time you come I’ll show you my house, and my pets. But you have to pick your day, remember! Now I must hurry—there’s going to be a storm.”

  “She’s right,” Tod said when she left them. “We’d best load up quick.”

  Andrew turned to look at the girl, who was entering a gate halfway along the village street. She waved her hand.

  “Careful with the driving Bill,” Tod said. “You’re on the wrong side.”

  “Someone’s greased the steering,” Bill grumbled. “Listen: Don’t they half have some songbirds in this village! What’s that—a nightingale?”

  “They sing louder when there’s a storm on the way.”

  The van wove precariously along the village.

  They were about half a mile beyond the last house, entering the beech woods, when lightning struck the bonnet.

  When Andrew next opened his eyes, he was in a hospital bed, with a drip-feed attached to his arm.

  “Are the others all right?” he asked, as soon as he was able to speak.

  “Shock and concussion, that’s all. You were all three lucky, considering the state of the van. Now, here’s your father to see you, Mr Carrock—but he mustn’t stay more than a few moments.”

  His father looked, as usual, prosperous, portly, and puzzled.

  “Can’t think why you have to gad about the country doing this ridiculous TV job,” he grumbled. “If only you’d settle down and help me with the business, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. What’s the matter with you—can’t I give you everything you could possibly want?”

  “Not quite,” Andrew said, and smiled at his father weakly. “Listen, Father—about that village you want to buy—can’t I persuade you to change your mind?”

  “Why?”

  “It isn’t the sort of place that ought to be bought.”

  “Matter of fact,” said his father, “I don’t need any persuading. Went to take a look at it—nothing there but a dip in the downs, some fields, and a lot of sheep. No houses. Not even ruins! Godforsaken spot. Forgotten all about it till you brought it up. Now, make haste and get better, my boy.”

  He gave his son an awkward, affectionate pat and hurried out.

  Andrew lay thinking about a pair of luminous grey eyes.

  “I wonder which story was the true one?” he mused. “I must ask Tod what he thinks.”

  But Tod and Bill had no theories to offer. Shock and concussion had taken away their memory of all events before the crash, and both of them persisted in declaring that they had never discovered the village at all.

  The Helper

  Paris in the rainy morning: like a series of triangles cut from pewter. The wet grey streets met one another at acute angles, shutters peered down slit-eyed, the town reflected a murky, watery sky. It was unfriendly, repulsing. Hostile.

  Frost, consulting the professor’s letter again—Charles-Edouard Aveyrand, Academician, 48 rue Lecluse—saw that he would not need to take a taxi or the metro; it would be an easy walk from the Gare St. Lazare. And he could do with a walk; he was hungry, stiff, and chilled to the bone from the night journey.

  He ought to have remembered that address. And as he walked towards it, he did begin to remember.

  “Knowing you to be an official of the British Patent Office,” the professor had written in his formal stiff English, “and remembering our agreeable association of some years ago, I made bold to invite your assistance in this matter. My finances in these days are a matter of some anxiety, otherwise I would not have troubled you. My daughter Menispe invites herself to be recollected by you and regrets a lack of correspondence between the families since the sad death of your charming daughter.”

  Striding along the chilly canyon of a street, between high narrow grey houses and motorbikes that continually snarled at his elbow, Frost thought of Menispe Aveyrand. There was little need for her self-invitation, he thought. Only too easily could he summon up the image of the girl who, for five successive years, had come to stay en famille with the Frosts, learn English, and be, virtually, an adopted sister for Louise. Both girls had been only children; the arrangement, initiated through a school club, had proved so successful that when Menispe was not spending holidays in England, Louise went to the Aveyrand apartment in Paris.

  Menispe at age nine had been a skinny waiflike little creature, all pale freckles and bony, sharp features, with an unexpectedly engaging triangular grin, a mobile face, never still for a moment, stringy fair hair, and shrewd hazel-green eyes. She was witty even then, mechante, but also touching; deprived of a mother since the age of six, she attached herself to the Frost family with passionate, starved affection, like a stray kitten offered its first bowl of warm milk. She and Louise had been inseparable, written each other immense weekly letters during the school terms, counted the days to each reunion. Frost and his wife had been “chere tante Josephine” and “gentil oncle Frank” in dozens of polite, dutiful bread-and-butter letters always signed “affectueusement, votre belle-fille, Menispe.”

  The last visit, of course, had been that of Louise to the Paris apartment; after which, nothing more had been heard from Menispe.

  Frost wondered, detachedly, how she had turned out. There had been a boyfriend, hadn’t there, Lucien; what had become of him?

  Perhaps she had married him.

  The apartment house in which Professor Aveyrand lived was high, colourless, forbidding, with a mansard roof and so much exterior embellishment in the way of shutters, ironwork, lanterns, balconies, that there seemed hardly enough wall to sustain them. Inside, Frost remembered the varicose-veined marble and brown flock wallpaper, and the terrifyingly slow lift, with a heavy glass door, and room for only two persons inside, which creaked its way up from floor to floor.

  It was in that lift that he had first been alone with his daughter Louise after the final visit, when he had come to fetch her home. She had gazed away over his shoulder as if he did not exist, although they were obliged to stand almost pressed together. When he said, “I wonder what our chances are of getting a taxi?” she looked at him with the same total boredom as if he had speculated on the chances of the Tory candidate in the Stockton-on-Tees council elections.

  Numero Onze, in trailing metal script on the door; the bell inside clanged at some distance, harshly, as he stood waiting in the close, windowless passage, only elbow-width, and lit by what appeared to be a three-watt bulb.

  After a longish pause the door was opened by Professor Aveyrand himself. He had aged immensely since Frost’s last visit; was gnarled, shaky, dwarfish, and stooped, like some ancient Nibelung creeping out of his crevice on the scent of gold. And that, Frost told himself sharply, was a thoroughly unfair judgment. The professor had always been the most abstracted, unworldly figure, plunged in the past and his studies; money was of no importance to him. Indeed, if he had not been so oblivious to what went on about him, of what his daughter was up to, at the time of that last visit, Frost might have been alerted a bit sooner, the calamity might never have happened . . . Enough of that.

  By now the professor had gingerly, hesitantly, ushered him in. They were sitting on two upright chairs upholstered in hard brown velvet, facing one another across an empty marble hearth closed by a steel shutter. The apartment smelt dreadful—unaired, dusty, with a hint of something decaying—perhaps the plumbing needed attention, or a mouse had died in the pantry; it did n
ot look as if the place ever, nowadays, received the attentions of a maid.

  “. . . since I retired had sufficient time to pursue my hobby,” the professor was explaining—one thing, he had got down to business right away, no beating about the bush, there was that much to be said for him, thought Frost. Well, so much the better; who would want to spend an extra minute in this dank, depressing place with its horrible associations? “My family, of course . . . ,” the professor went on. “Interested in these matters for generations . . . Indeed an ancestor of mine in the sixteenth century . . . treatise on solar and planetary energy . . . as a matter of fact, he narrowly escaped execution for heresy . . .”

  Frost dutifully returned the old man’s thin smile as he added, “Fortunately his patron was Cardinal Richelieu—the affair was smoothed over. He had to burn his books, of course, but . . . Before that . . . twelfth-century Sieur d’Aveyrand . . . brought back books on alchemy and physics from the East—and a wife too, a Moorish astrologer . . .”

  “Indeed,” Frost commented, politely concealing irritation and boredom. Now he remembered Menispe, aged twelve, airily boasting, “Of course I was named after a Saracen princess that one of our ancestors brought back from the Crusades. Don’t you think it’s rather parvenu not to know your family history?” “Snobbish little thing,” he had teased her. “Non, ce n’est pas snobbisme, oncle Frank, c’est pratique!”

  “What a very commendable record of your ancestors you have kept, Professor,” he remarked. “I’m afraid in our family we can hardly trace our forebears beyond a pork butcher in 1893; but perhaps that is just as well. I daresay they were nothing to brag about.”

  The professor’s pained, reluctant acknowledgment of this pleasantry made it evident that his views on the subject were widely divergent from those of Frost; he said, “Well, it is true . . . must be admitted that there are advantages . . . but now, let me show you my specifications.”