Béatrice was her father’s younger sister, neither as haughty as Matilde nor as vapid as Mildred. “Shall we wander a little?” she said. “Make ourselves seen?”
“No, Aunt, I think I’ll go back. I’m not feeling well.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
Her aunt spoke close to her ear. “Is it your time?”
“No, it’s not that. Not for a few days yet.”
“Are you so regular, then?”
“Yes.”
“We ought to stay longer. They’ll take it amiss if we don’t.”
From the darkness, Imogen appeared, with Isolda. “Good blaze, isn’t it?” she said, once they had acknowledged Aunt Béatrice.
“One of the best,” said Eloise, wondering whether Imogen had reconsidered the proposal made by Isolda’s elder brother, Bernard.
“Have you seen Ralf?”
“No, I don’t think we have.”
“We can’t find him anywhere. He’s not at home. Isolda wants to dance with him.”
“Imogen, I don’t!”
“You do. Well, I want you to dance with him, and that’s almost the same. Better, really.”
Aunt Béatrice was following the conversation with an amused expression. She liked Imogen’s vivacity; had told Eloise so.
While not obviously attractive, Isolda would have appeal for men. Her dissent had been unconvincing. Eloise, as she made herself smile too, discovered that she was not yet immune to jealousy. Ralf was probably at the byre, the workshop. She had sometimes seen him going there. He would stay long after dark.
Not mentioning the workshop, Eloise added her suggestions to Imogen’s speculations on her brother’s whereabouts.
Isolda was unsuitable. She was not good enough. Imogen, too open, had misjudged; but this was just the beginning of a long process in which she, with the best intentions, would offer help to her brother in finding a mate.
The two girls set off in quest of their prey.
“I want to go back now,” Eloise told her aunt.
“As you wish. But I must just greet the Steward’s wife.”
Before Eloise could prevent it, she had started towards the Caffyns, who, together with other members of the household, were also watching the dance.
Eloise considered walking home on her own. Her aunt would be annoyed; but what of it? It was her duty to play the chaperone, and in that she had already failed. Compared with the duty that held Eloise in its grip, her aunt’s was trivial indeed. She deserved to be made unhappy, to feel guilt, to taste a grain of the bitters that, thanks in part to her, had come to flavour every minute of her niece’s life. Eloise watched her talking to Mrs Caffyn and was on the point of deciding to leave.
She felt a touch at her elbow.
“I must see you again,” Ralf said.
His expression and tone of voice were not just urgent, but desperate, made even more ghastly by the flames.
“Eloise, it’s been three months. You’re driving me mad. —”
“Stop it.”
His grasp on her elbow tightened.
“You’re hurting me.”
He released her at once. “Meet me somewhere.”
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“By the Three Sisters. I’m going there now.”
“My aunt’s coming back.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Eloise had no chance to compose herself. Aunt Béatrice said, “Who was that you were talking to?”
“Imogen’s brother, Ralf. She’s still looking for him.”
“Such a polite, industrious young man,” Béatrice said. “Good-looking, too.”
“If you say so, Aunt.”
“What, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, I think he’s very good-looking. I’m sure Isolda’s swooning.”
“You can’t blame her. I wouldn’t mind being twenty years younger myself. Have you been out to the mill?”
“Not yet.”
“We must go. Tomorrow, if it stays fine. Ask Imogen. Then he can show us round.”
Eloise did not reply.
“Are you still feeling unwell?”
She knew that she should say she was. She pictured herself walking back to the Hall with her aunt, then sitting with her at table while the servants brought the food. She foresaw the long and tedious evening, culminating in the moment when she could shut her door and be alone. She would kneel, as always, to her prayers. After that she would go to bed.
I must see you again.
The Three Sisters were a trio of oak trees at the other end of the green, near Ralf’s house. They were divided now from the bonfire by the workmen’s tents. At their base stood a bench. One day last summer she and Imogen had examined it. Over the years, the weathered surface had been covered in carvings by village boys. Most were harmless; one or two had been vigorously effaced.
She had felt uncomfortable there. The bench was a place for assignations. In his choice of meeting-place, Ralf could not have made it easier for her mentally to break with him once and for all.
Eloise imagined him sitting there in the dark, waiting in vain.
“Thank you, Aunt, I’m a little feeling better.”
“Shall we stay longer?”
“A few minutes, if you wish.”
At Lammas, in the way he had let her go, she had known that he understood. He knew the penalty as well as she did. But tonight he was different. That grip on her elbow had arisen from something raw and disturbing, like the vanished carvings on the bench. She recognized it in herself. It had informed their kiss: her first, but not his.
On that August night, the sheets against her skin, she had wondered what else he knew. Since then her abominable lecture from Aunt Matilde had at last made her understand her place. She had no cause to look down on Mary Ibbott.
It’s been three months. You’re driving me mad.
In a growing ferment of indecision, she walked beside her aunt. All she wanted, all she had wanted during those three months, and for years before, was to be with Ralf. That was impossible. She would have to end it, as she had tried to do on Lammas Day. But that meant seeing him again, talking to him, risking the same result. It would not do. And she had already told him as much.
Later, she realized that it had been the sanction itself, as much as his words, that had made her let Béatrice walk her towards the Caffyns, and from there to other gatherings which needed to be acknowledged and smiled at, nearer to and further from the flames, until, among the confusing shadows of the spectators, her aunt’s face was fully averted in conversation and, on impulse, Eloise seized that moment to detach herself and move away.
She guiltily raised her hood. The music and hubbub of voices grew quieter as she found a course through the edges of the crowd. She came to the dimness of the road on the northern side of the green. From there, having turned left, she started towards the three oak trees.
At this distance from the fire there was little but starlight to guide her steps. Feeble glows showed here and there in the cottages to her right. Opposite them, on the green, the vague forms of the workmen’s tents passed her by, apparently unoccupied.
The oaks had yet to lose the bulk of their leaves. The three trees were as one, their intermingled branches forming a single overtowering darkness, in antithesis to the fire: not sending up but drawing down the sky, down and through the trio of trunks, more and more of it as she drew near.
“Eloise?”
Her eyes had grown more accustomed to the night. She made out a silhouette rising from the bench and moving towards her. She was expecting a touch, or even an embrace, but neither came.
“You mustn’t talk to me,” she said. “I don’t need to say why. Forget me.”
“I’d rather be dead.”
“Don’t. It’s finished. It never even started.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I came to tell you to leave me alone.”
“Whe
n can we be together?”
“Never. I’m betrothed. By permission of the King. Can’t you understand? Even this is treason.”
“I thought we could meet at the workshop, but that’s too close to the Hall. They’d see the lamp. It’s got to be the mill. That’s the only place.”
“Did you hear what I said? I’m not going to meet you anywhere. Ever.”
“Come to the mill, when everyone’s asleep.”
“I’m leaving now. Don’t try to approach me again.”
“I’ll be waiting for you. All night.”
“I won’t come.”
“You will.”
“Goodbye, Ralf.”
She walked away, towards the fire, more distressed than she had believed possible, even after the past few months. It really was finished. She had uttered the words to dispatch him at last. Here was the end to her silly dreams, and the launching of her adult life. Under those trees, under those branches which must have overheard so much, she had finally grown up.
When she was sufficiently recovered, Eloise approached the flames and allowed herself to be found. “There you are,” Aunt Béatrice said, her anger plainly tempered with relief. “Where on earth have you been?”
For the first time in many years, Eloise told a serious and premeditated lie.
* * *
That night she could not sleep. She lay listening to the owls. There were two, one in the churchyard and another in the garden, their shrieks and moaning hoots deadened by the shutter, the glass, and the lined holland drapes.
The smell of the bonfire was penetrating all those barriers, though faintly. There was just enough wind to make the smoke drift.
The green was not visible from here. The flames would by now have died to a glow, flaring now and then as they took hold of a twig from the corona of unburned stuff surrounding the embers. In the morning men would come with pitchforks and heap it all up. The fire would go on for days, even in rain, leaving a great mound of ash which would be requisitioned by the groundsmen for the kitchen garden. Even after that, the Hallowmas fire lived on as a circle of burnt and barren soil, eight or ten feet across, where the grass hardly had a chance to regrow.
Eloise opened her eyes in the darkness.
Since Lammas Day she had relived their kiss so many times that it no longer seemed real. Her memory had bleached its substance away. What had happened had become confused with the rest: with her most private fantasies. Before Matilde’s instruction, those images, in part, had been blurred.
At times she had imagined Ralf coming to her room in the night. He would know her door, just as he knew Godric’s. He might even know how to traverse the corridor, and before it the solar staircase, without treading on the boards that creaked. But how would he get into the Hall? The outer doors were locked at night. There was only one safe route: through the parlour window. Even that required the window and its shutter to be left unlatched. Indoors, there was a low table under the window, and outdoors a bench. But beyond the bench lay a path of shingle which crunched underfoot. He would have to approach by means of the lawn and cross the path with, at most, two cautious steps.
Even so, how could he fail to be heard, arriving or leaving, by someone upstairs? By her father and mother, or one of her vigilant aunts?
But tonight, only Aunt Béatrice was here, and she was two doors away. The chambers on either side of this one lay empty. Tonight, Eloise realized, it would be possible.
His longing, his incompleteness, might even equal hers. She thought of his handsome, tortured face in the firelight, the frenzied grip on her elbow, his words under the trees. She had no doubt that, at this moment, he was waiting for her at the mill.
If she were very quiet, she could steal along the corridor and down the stairs. Her aunt would not hear. From the stairs she could flit into the parlour and climb through the window, cross the path, and follow the lawn round the side of the house.
The mill was a long way off. Bella was in her stable. Her hoofs would sound on the cobbles. The noise could be deadened with two pairs of thick woollen stockings, just like the ones Eloise had in her shelves; but what of the Groom, who slept down there, and the dogs in the kennels, which would surely bark as she went by? And how could she saddle up in darkness?
Bareback: she would ride bareback, and cling to the mane. Out towards the harbour and the staith, out along the new chalk roadway to the mill she had never seen; under the autumn stars she would find him there.
But to do that, she would have to have left Bella in the paddock, and tonight Bella was in the stable-block.
Eloise let herself consider walking to the mill. She could dress and leave now, this minute. She even felt her body tense as if in preparation for rising.
Ralf no longer cared about the sanction. Nothing mattered to him, but her. This was how it had been before, in that far-off time. Then, too, had they not risked everything?
The owls had stopped calling. They, perhaps, had found each other, or settled their dispute.
“I won’t come,” she had said.
“You will.”
“No, Ralf,” she whispered bleakly, alone in her bed, seeing again the vellum of the sanction, its ribbon, and its crimson seal. “I won’t.”
11
High tide arrived in the middle of the morning. Without careful scrutiny it was never easy to say just when it turned: just when the flood finally became slack water and slack water finally became the ebb, and Ralf today did not have time for that.
He was so heady with exhaustion that he was afraid of falling off his ladder. Using a wide, long-handled, hogshair brush, he was one of two men applying tar to the weatherboards of the mill. His ladder was equipped with a standaway, two props with cushioned ends, which kept the tops of the rails a foot from the wall. To this was fitted a safety platform where tools – or a bucket of tar – could be kept.
The tarring had begun yesterday, and would with luck be finished by tonight. It was transforming the look of the building. Walking along the track at dawn, Ralf had thought the approaching mill already seemed smaller and neater. The gleam of wet tar would soon fade to matt, making an agreeable contrast with not only the roof but the stone surfaces, when they were built, of the culvert and the sea-gate wall. Like the future stonework, this rectangular blackness would mark out the structure as man-made, yet the mill was also beginning to harmonize with its setting.
Ralf had developed a strong sense of the place. He had spent nearly every weekday here since the beginning of August. He remembered his excursion with Imogen, but most of all, as he worked, he thought of his few minutes alone on the dike with Eloise.
The spot where they had sat had been dug up, refashioned, and hidden under the ground floor. On the floor above, perhaps exactly above, would be the hurst and its two millstones.
He knew he should not have approached her the previous evening but, having seen her alone in the firelight, he had been unable to stop himself. And then, talking to her again, looking into her face, something had given way inside him.
As hope had faded in the early hours, he had walked back from the mill in time to get home well before breakfast. He had gambled on no one coming downstairs in the night. His rumpled bed, in the parlour, had remained untouched.
At the table, to allay suspicion, he had complained of not sleeping well. In truth, he had not slept at all.
“Ralf!” his father called, from the ground. “Time for your break.”
“I’ll just do this bit!” After that, the ladder could be moved.
He was wrong to have asked her, wrong even to have thought of it, and doubly wrong to have spent the night, cold and uncomfortable, at the mill. He had been right before, and yesterday evening, under the Three Sisters, she had been right too. She was always right. It was finished. He would never be alone with her again.
Ralf’s inattention was punctured by the shock of realizing that, like Eloise, the brush-handle had just slipped from his grasp. He swore under his breath as h
e watched the brush making a graceful, end-on-end turn. It hit a chalky puddle twenty-five feet below. Mud spattered against the sill and the untreated boards just above.
A shout of mock approval came from three or four of the men at the brazier, further along the dike.
He grinned at them and made a gesture of indifference, at which there were smiles. “Damn it,” he breathed again, took the tar-bucket and started climbing down, still thinking of Eloise. “Damn everything.”
In his break he drank a steaming beaker of tisane and ate a couple of oatcakes smeared with soft cheese. They tasted somewhat of tar, but he was glad of the hot drink: the wind, while not strong, had veered more to the north. The sky remained blue. In the harbour channel five or six boats, far apart, were tacking towards the fishing grounds. A long way off, against the sun and level with the end of the Point, Ralf thought he recognized the Meg. Hundreds of brent geese were floating there, waiting out the tide. They were insolently tame, and would do no more than swim a few yards to avoid an approaching boat. But their eyes were beady: at the first hint of a weapon the whole flock would take wing.
Drinking the last of his tisane, Ralf looked across the pen and along the bund, watching the diggers. Today there was a full complement of thirty, with half a dozen from Mape. The mud-caked barrows and mud-caked men were passing to and fro, along glistening lines of duckboards. Ralf was not sorry to be tarring instead. He had done more than his share in the pen, digging, barrowing, packing, manhandling lumps of rock, setting flints and slopping mortar.
He replenished his tar-bucket and left it to heat while he moved the ladder along and hammered the securing-pegs into the ground. This morning he was working on the inland face of the mill.
“Mind yourself up there, won’t you, lad?” said his father, as he passed. “Don’t overreach.”
“I’ll be careful. I always am.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Ralf had moved the ladder twice more and was about to climb down to do so again when motion registered in the corner of his eye: three distant riders on the access track, women. Even at this range he knew the horses. One was Hennet, another Bella, the third the mare used by the paternal aunt, Béatrice. They had crossed the arable field and were just starting along the base of the dike. Far behind them was a fourth rider, possibly the Steward, or the Baron himself.
The Tide Mill Page 24