Mary Or The Perils 0f Imprudence

by Catherine Bowness

  Sometimes Mary gathered tiny flowers, of which there was an abundance, and arranged them exquisitely in minute vases but today she had begun with a collection of almost coarse oxeye daisies. These were hard to pick on account of the strength of their stems which resisted her and often hurt her fingers so that, when she saw that rosebay willowherb – which had been on the point of flowering for some time - had at last begun to open, she was delighted and added several stems to her bunch. Although beautiful and an extraordinary colour somewhere between pink and purple, she had always thought it an unsatisfactory bloom on account of its habit of displaying, at one and the same time, a variety of florets in varying stages of development. Even today, at the very start of its season, some, at the bottom of the stalk, were already brown and wilted, those in the middle were in full, glorious bloom but there remained, at the top, a large number still to reach maturity. Amongst these, some were on the point of opening - plump and almost glistening with promise; and some were still so tight in bud that she doubted they would open now. She had plucked them before they had reached a stage where maturity was assured; very likely these ones – at the top of the stalk - would die without setting seed. She fell to likening them in her mind to people of differing ages and, contemplating their arrangement on the stem, was struck by their likeness to a family.

  She had begun to remove the withered flowers with quick, neat movements of her fingers, believing that the whole would be more pleasing without the presence of the shrivelled ones, when she was afflicted with an overpowering sense of sadness as she thought of the old lady – and by extension all old people. No one was interested in them; indeed their faded looks rendered them distasteful to many. Most people did not quite like to detach them from the stalk until they fell off by themselves but a number of relatives watched their progress towards extinction with ill-concealed impatience.

  Lady Leland was a great grandmother: she had given birth to several children, not all of whom still lived; even her grandchildren were mostly married now. Her youngest daughter, whose husband’s habits were profligate and who had already been bailed out several times by his sons-in-law – each, most commonly, only once at the beginning of his marriage – eyed her mother’s fortune with a jealous regard and, constantly in want of funds, was a frequent correspondent. The sight of her handwriting rarely failed to vex her ladyship.

  “I wish she would not importune me in this way,” she had exclaimed only that morning when Clarkson, her butler, had proffered the silver tray on which he was accustomed to arrange her ladyship’s letters. “I will not read it,” she added when he had left the room. “Pray consign it to the flames, Mary.”

  Mary took the offending missive and glanced at the handwriting.

  “I daresay you have quite come to dread the sight of those curls and strokes,” her ladyship observed, watching her companion.

  “I own I wish she would not write so frequently. But do you not think you should read what she has to say? She might be telling you of another great grandchild or – or something of that nature.”

  “Unlikely. And, if she is, I shall hear of it from another source very soon, I expect.”

  “It might convey bad news,” Mary said, averting her eyes from the letter.

  “I shall no doubt hear anything of that sort from someone else too,” the old lady said, but there was a tremor in her voice. She looked at her companion, who stood before the fire with the letter in her hand. “You had better give it to me then.”

  Mary returned and handed the offending object, which had become imbued with dread as each had imagined what awful news might be contained therein.

  Lady Leland broke the seal and spread out the single sheet of paper; it was covered in large writing as muddled and inconsistent as the content. “I always find it surprising that such a weak-spirited female should form her letters in such an extravagant manner,” she observed, peering uncomprehendingly at the page. “I cannot read a word,” she complained after she had spent several minutes frowning at the letter.

  “Would you like me to fetch your spectacles, my lady?”

  “Yes, I suppose you will have to for I cannot reasonably ask you to cast your eye over it, although I own that the sight of these atrocious periods almost plunges me into a depression.”

  “Whips you into a rage more like,” Mary said, going to the door.

  When she returned with the spectacles, Lady Leland took them from her, frowned horribly and attached them to her face before holding the sheet of paper at an angle where it caught the sun streaming in through the windows of the breakfast room.

  Mary sat down and poured herself another cup of coffee.

  “No; it is the usual hogwash,” her ladyship said after several minutes of moving the letter backwards and forwards, both into and out of the sun and close to and far from her eyes. “No matter how hard I try to find anything of the least import, there is nothing. Nobody has died, although I daresay she hopes I have, and nobody has been born so far as I can make out. Put it in the fire, my dear. We need not concern ourselves with it any further.”

  She held out the piece of paper with a look of disgust upon her face as though it were contaminated. Mary took it, averting her eyes from the familiar scrawl, and consigned it to the fire where she saw the writing briefly illumined by the flames before it disappeared entirely.

  She thought of this scene as she walked along the river bank in the sunshine and curled her lip. The despised letter was merely the latest in a series of such missives. Lady Leland had on this occasion shown considerable restraint by not reading out any of Lady Benstead’s emotionally incontinent periods, but she had done so in the past, much to Mary’s distress.

  She knew that poor Lady Benstead was a miserable woman, married to an indifferent and dissolute husband. It was no doubt at his insistence that she wrote these letters. Sometimes they begged for instant help, various pressing creditors being listed to back up the demands, but more often they referred to the future – a future when Lady Leland would have no further need for either money or jewels. Lady Benstead was uncertain of the identity of her mother’s beneficiaries but wanted to make sure that she was, if not the only one, at least amongst them. Although not possessed of a strong will, she nevertheless showed a surprisingly tenacious streak, judging – inaccurately as it happened – that such an old lady as her mother might need to be reminded of the importance of making sure that her worldly goods were disposed of in the most useful manner.

  “She is afraid that I will leave everything to you, my dear,” Lady Leland had said on one occasion.

  “You have not, have you?” Mary asked anxiously.

  “Not yet, but I shall do so. You have shown me uncommon devotion and wasted your life at my beck and call; I am determined that you shall be rewarded.”

  “I am already rewarded,” Mary said. “You are excessively generous to me.”

  “If I were able to make you as rich as Croesus,” her ladyship declared, “I would not have rewarded you sufficiently. Unfortunately, I do not have it in my power to leave you such a very large sum, but you shall have all that I do possess.”

  Mary’s conscience troubled her on this subject because she knew that, if her ladyship did make a will in her favour, she would inherit a tidy sum which would save her from ever having to find another position. She was uncomfortable with the fact that Lady Benstead, in particular, would complain that she had exerted undue influence over the old lady. If it had simply been a case of her employer bequeathing her a favourite brooch – or even a small sum of money – she would not have felt so uncomfortable about it, but she knew that it was her ladyship’s intention to leave her every penny she possessed.

  Mary shook herself impatiently. She had been sent on a walk to enjoy herself and should do so without agonising over what her employer chose to do with her money when she no longer had any use for it herself. In any event, the old lady loved her and it did not seem to Mary that she cared much for most of her relatives; c
ertainly she had not a good word to say for Lady Benstead, although Mary realised that criticism of a family member by no means precluded affection. Poor Lady Benstead, who had been a Beauty in her youth, had unfortunately not been able to replace this attribute, as it faded, with any improvement in her character.

  Resolving to cease to argue with her employer on this matter at least, Mary turned her gaze upon the river. It was neither particularly wide nor, she guessed, particularly deep, but it presented a charming picture on a fine day, the sun striking its ripples with flashes of gold and the slight breeze causing the wild flowers, which grew so delightfully along its banks, to stir gently as though determined to draw attention to themselves.

  Her eye lit on a clump of bright yellow flag irises standing beside the water. These, unlike the rosebay willowherb, were at the very end of their season; many were already past their best but there remained several in the group which would, she thought, add a dramatic note to her bunch. The strong colour of the irises would not blend well with the willowherb but perhaps they need not do so: if she picked several they could be displayed in a different vase in a different room where their saturated yellow would not clash with the vivid purplish pink of the other.

  The river had, with time, worn the ground over which it flowed into such a deep groove that it now meandered several feet below the path on Lady Leland’s side. To reach the irises she must climb down the bank. Although softly clad in grass and scattered with smaller, less dramatic but no less beautiful, flowers, it sloped steeply down to the water and Mary, whose character inclined towards the heedless, strove to exercise caution. The sensible option would have been to forego the flowers but, once an idea had taken root in her brain, she was disinclined to follow such a prudent course.

  She knew the path intimately, having often walked this way, and was therefore aware that there was no diminution in the distance between the path and the water for several miles; if she wanted the irises, she must climb down to the water’s edge.

  It was only when she took the first step that she perceived the magnitude of the task she had set herself. It came to her, almost with horror, how foolish she had been to embark on such a quest for it was almost impossible to stand upright on such a steep gradient. She was on the point of abandoning the project, not without regret, when she found herself imagining her employer’s scorn for a young woman so lacking in courage that she was unprepared to climb down a small hill to pick the flowers she desired.

  Lady Leland had reached a vast age without, so far as Mary could tell, ever having refrained from doing almost exactly as she wished and Mary knew that part of her attraction for the old lady lay in her own, often imprudent, boldness. Having begun the descent, she must proceed for it would be cow-hearted to turn round now.

  She lifted the second foot and moved it down to join the first, thinking that, if she advanced by gradual means, one step at a time, she would be bound to arrive safely at the bottom. No sooner had she done so than she found herself wobbling in a dismaying manner, her body swaying this way and that, so that she did not dare to lift either foot again for an appreciable interval. Attempting to regain her balance sufficiently to attempt another step, she held out her arms at right angles but this did not answer the purpose for she continued to teeter alarmingly.

  A moment later, as a wave of fear possessed her, she decided that the venture must be abandoned: attempting to walk down an almost vertical slope towards a river when one was unable to swim could not be accounted a sensible way to behave; even Lady Leland would judge it unwise. She must do without the irises.

  Unfortunately, having decided on this eminently sensible course, she was unable to retrace even those two tentative steps which she had already taken. When she attempted to turn round, she found that no amount of holding out her arms enabled her to balance and, now terrified of falling down the bank and into the river, she dropped to her knees. She was barely a foot below the path but probably close to ten feet above the water. It must be possible to climb back up no matter how humiliating. In any event, it really did not matter how silly she looked for there was no one to observe her.

  But she found, to her intense annoyance, that even this demeaning posture did not enable her to reach the path; she could move neither forward nor back on account of being more or less hobbled by her skirt, which had wound itself around her legs. If she wished to progress she must release it. She lifted one hand from the ground and tugged at it but it was far too tightly twined around her limbs; her efforts to free one leg succeeded only in tightening the bonds on the other and further unbalancing her. Wrestling with it and growing increasingly enraged as it resisted her, she twisted this way and that in something approaching a frenzy until it defeated her and she fell down the bank.

  She rolled rapidly, over and over, bumping and bouncing in an exceedingly painful manner until she reached the water.

  The day was hot, the clouds had dispersed and the sun blazed unopposed from the sky but, in spite of this, the water struck her overheated body as shockingly cold.

  She hit the water with some force, having gained considerable speed as she rolled. Although there was a brief pause when she reached a sort of shallow shelf at the edge – where the irises were growing - this was not wide enough to hold her or to interrupt appreciably her momentum; it served only as a platform from which she dropped into the deeper water where she disappeared below the surface.

  She bounced up again almost immediately, struggled, took a ragged, frantic breath and plunged beneath the surface again, this time in a more vertical position. She realised, as her feet searched repeatedly for the bottom, that the river was considerably deeper than she had supposed. Just because it was not particularly wide did not, evidently, mean that it was not deep.

  She had some idea of how a person was meant to swim, having observed dogs doing so, and indeed, once or twice, horses, and attempted to move her arms and legs in a similar motion but, although she did bounce up into the air again, she was unable to make any progress towards the bank. Now that she was vertical, it seemed to her that it was only too easy to keep dropping; she wished that she could somehow align herself horizontally for that seemed, from her observation of dogs and horses, to be the proper position for swimming. Sadly, no matter how much she wriggled and thrashed, she did not seem able to arrange herself in any other manner than the vertical.

  While, earlier, she had comforted herself with the thought that there was unlikely to be anyone in a position to observe her attempts to crawl up the bank on her hands and knees, now she was afraid that there was unlikely to be anyone who would have seen her plunge into the water or be in the least likely to hear her screams.

  “Help! Help!” she yelled but soon realised that, there being nobody to hear, this was not going to be much use; indeed, she feared that she would drown all the quicker if she continued to waste what breath she had in screaming; all she would achieve was to fill her mouth – and ultimately her lungs – with water.

  She was not far from the bank but nevertheless too far to be able to scramble out. How awful, she thought, to drown only a foot or so from land. She was able to reach the irises and grasped a handful of their stems. But, in spite of their sturdy appearance, they would not hold her weight and merely came off in her hand. She wished she had considered a little longer before launching herself down that wickedly tempting bank; no doubt she was justly served: drowning was clearly the price she must pay for her greed. Mary already knew from experience that rash action could be expensive.

  Although her efforts did not take her any nearer to a place where she could stand, or keep her head above water more than intermittently - or mitigate to any noticeable degree the panic which was beginning to seize her - they did succeed in allowing her to breathe from time to time, particularly if she kept her mouth shut as she went down and opened it the minute she surfaced. In any event, they kept her alive long enough for a hero to arrive upon the scene.

  Chapter 3

  �
��Hold on! I’m coming!”

  It was a male voice; looking up amongst her splashes and in between her sinkings and risings, she had a glimpse of him and his horse as they reached the top of the bank on the other side. She saw him jump off, discard his coat and boots and plunge into the water.

  In a few seconds he had hold of her; locking his arms around her waist, he lifted her half out of the water and swam back to the bank.

  It proved, however, to be a great deal harder to get out of the river than it had been for either of them to get into it. The bank on this side was considerably less steep than on Lady Leland’s but there did not appear to be any kind of a shallow shelf, which might have helped the man to climb out. He attempted to stand with his burden still in his arms but, failing to gain a firm foothold, sat down abruptly with a splash, Mary still clasped against his chest.

  “Hold on,” he repeated in comfortingly calm accents. “It is no use us both wallowing at the edge of the river like this; we shall be here all day if we are not careful.”

  “If you let me go, I daresay you will be able to climb out,” she said humbly, supposing that a sacrifice was called for on her part.

  “Yes, but if I let you sink now there will not have been much point in my getting so wet. Take my hand and hold fast to it regardless of whether I succeed in standing - or fall over again - and we shall no doubt be able to get ourselves to dry land eventually. So long as you do not let go, I think I can safely promise that you will not drown. The main thing now is for me to find purchase for my feet.”

  As he spoke he unclasped his hands from around her waist, locking her against him with only one arm momentarily while he proffered the other hand.

  “Hold fast,” he repeated, “and fear not. You will be quite safe if you simply let yourself lie on the water.”