Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton

by Rowland Hughes

  Thus she was musing vaguely, when there was a knock at the door. Her father’s steward, staff in hand, announced in much the same tones that he would have used at a funeral:

  ‘Mistress Barbara, your honoured father bids me say that he awaits you below.’

  Barbara Worth rose to her feet with a swish of skirts. She was a swift and vivid mover. ‘I am ready,’ she said composedly.

  She threw one last glance over her shoulder at the maiden face in the mirror and walked out of the room.

  Her father was waiting for her at the foot of the great staircase. Relations, guests and members of the household, all wearing bride’s favours, crowded the hall, and watched with curiosity and emotion the kiss that the grave man gave his only surviving child. He hung a thin gold chain, with a pendant in the shape of a fine ruby heart encircled with diamonds, round Barbara’s neck. ‘Daughter, your mother, who is now doubtless a blessed saint in heaven, required me on her deathbed to give you this jewel on your wedding morning. Wear it, child, and strive to emulate her in fidelity, modesty and obedience.’

  Barbara’s face twitched. She looked like a child who is going to weep. Her mother had adored and indulged her, and Barbara had reciprocated her love with a passion and possessiveness that she had felt for no other living being except herself. Her mother’s death from smallpox when her daughter was fourteen had left Barbara furiously if silently resentful. She had not forgiven God for this untimely removal.

  She regarded the ruby with pride as it glowed on her breast. How red it looked, like a huge drop of blood on her creamy skin. She trusted that marriage would develop her bosom. She was tall for her age, small-waisted, and long-legged, but as yet too thin.

  She only half listened to her father’s admonition. He was saying in a low voice, ‘He is a gentleman and will soon be your husband. It will be your duty to study his wishes and your honour to conceal his faults.’

  She thought with a spurt of rebellious contempt, ‘And my faults? Ah! I will conceal them myself!’ But she nodded her head dutifully.

  Nurse, now sobbing openly, wrapped her nursling in a white velvet cloak and hood edged with fur. Her father took her by the hand and led her to the door. The family coach had been refurbished for the occasion. It was black with silver standards and adornments. The coachman and footmen were in new green serge livery. The stolid coach-horses of the shire breed (capable of taking their turn at the plough when necessary) had new green reins, and red ribbons in their manes. The other coaches which were to take the rest of the wedding party were equally fine. And so Barbara Worth drove away from her home.

  Inside the coach Barbara and her father jolted along together in a solemn and stuffy silence. Her father regarded her with a new, almost respectful interest. He had been greatly saddened and disappointed at the death of Barbara’s two elder brothers, one in infancy, the other as a promising young student at Oxford University. A daughter, even a pretty one, was a poor substitute, to his mind, for two sons. Moreover Barbara’s looks, so different from his wife’s placid comeliness, gave him a feeling of slight unease. But now that she was to become the wife of a man of Sir Ralph Skelton’s worth and consequence she seemed to him safer and more accountable, a daughter of whom any man might be proud. He remembered that she had always acted dutifully, whatever she might have looked, that she was motherless. He wished, with an odd fleeting feeling of compunction, that propriety and custom had enabled him to give her some practical advice about his own sex to help her on her way. But of course the girl must learn by experience as every young wife before her had had to learn.

  It was a fine morning for a wedding. The sky was full of light, and dove-coloured clouds. In the east the rising sun, hidden behind a smoke-grey cloud, poured down the benediction of its rays upon the waking earth. The horizon was the colour of a peach, the western sky a tender, elusive blue. Sunlight gleamed on the muddy puddles in the road, the pools in the fields, the bare branches of the trees; the shadows lay light as veils on the shining grass. Bird song and clumps of snowdrops proclaimed the spring.

  As the coach passed through the gates of the park a crowd of villagers and tenants waved their hats and wished the young lady of the manor joy in her marriage. All the short way to Bishops Worthy church was lined with gaping, cheering country folk.

  Their squire accepted the homage as a due and natural tribute to his God-ordained status in the county. Barbara inclined her head graciously to them through the new-fangled glass windows, lowered for the occasion.

  A stylish equipage, consisting of a coach with a silver body and gilt standards, and six outriders, rumbled past them. The armorial bearings showed that it belonged to Lord Hogarth, Barbara’s maternal uncle, down from London for the wedding, and in a hurry to reach the church before the bride.

  There was such a press of coaches, riders, guests, servants and beggars round the lych gate of the little church that it was several minutes before the bridal procession could be sorted out and set in motion. Musicians led the way with fiddles and flutes, followed by a bride-page carrying a bride cup of silver gilt in which was stuck a gilded sprig of rosemary. Now came the bride, young, immature yet seductive in her finery, two little bride-pages in satin suits and lace (nephews of Sir Ralph) leading her by the ribbons on her gown, thus symbolising the modest reluctance of the virgin to enter the married state. Behind came the bridesmaids walking two by two, each with their sprig of rosemary in their hand, their chaplet of snowdrops and violets on their heads. And behind again the principal kinsfolk and guests, in all the bravery of periwigs and curls, velvets, silks and satins, laces and ribbons, muffs and fans, cravats and buckles, velvet shoes and embroidered stockings, as brilliant in the rustic churchyard as a flock of exotic birds.

  The bridegroom and his groomsmen were waiting at the church. As Barbara was led up to Sir Ralph Skelton she thought with a sudden physical shrinking, ‘This is my fate!’

  She raised her strange green eyes and looked dispassionately at the man she was to wed. He was thirty-six, fresh enough looking even to the arrogant eyes of sixteen, well set up enough with an air that his friends would call dignified, his detractors consequential. His periwig of light brown hair suited his florid complexion. His eyes were blue and prominent, and he had sandy lashes. There was nothing distasteful about his appearance nor anything to stir the senses. He was richly dressed in a long-skirted coat of carnation velvet with a vest tunic of silver cloth and black velvet breeches. He wore knots of peach-coloured carnation and silver ribbon on his shoulders in compliment to his bride, and red heels to his shoes. He drew himself up as he met his bride’s gaze, smiled at her complacently and reassuringly.

  Something wild and innocent in Barbara cried out in panic, ‘No, this can never be my fate! Escape before it is too late!’ But she knew that it was too late, and with downcast eyes and a demure smile gave her bridegroom her hand.

  The ring was on her finger. A gold ring with a posy of Sir Ralph’s own choosing engraved inside, ‘God make me prolific, obedient and sedulous.’

  Barbara Skelton twisted the unaccustomed ornament round her slender fourth finger while, with eyes fixed in apparent devotion on the clergyman, she mused on all that she would do now that she was a married woman and Lady Skelton.

  Old Mr Belcher was in his element. Wedding sermons were his speciality. Many a newly joined couple had knelt before him to receive his advice and admonition, and if their unions had not always turned out satisfactory it was certainly not Mr Belcher’s fault, for he made a point of stressing the perils and trials as well as the blessings of matrimony, urging young couples to honour one another and bear with one another’s foibles, also to practise those innocent arts that increase and stimulate love. What these arts were Mr Belcher did not specify, leaving this to his hearers’ imaginations.

  The bride, being the weaker vessel, naturally came in for the larger slice of Mr Belcher’s advice. Barbara, through her day-dreams, heard herself being admonished to be good-tempered, obedient,
and modest. She must eschew gossip and be a right housekeeper, preferring her home to all other places, and not decking herself up like Jezebel to attract the attention of strangers. She must not ask if her lord was wise or simple, but must honour and obey him in all things.

  But Sir Ralph too came in for his smaller share of the homily. Husbands who were choleric and testy with their wives were justly to be censured, while Mr Belcher deplored the masculine habit of speaking slightingly of women’s constancy, comparing them to clouds in the sky, motes in the sun, snuffs in the candle and the like.

  Carried away by his own eloquence Mr Belcher soared into less prosaic regions. The husband and wife should illuminate each other’s lives like two candles; like two flowers the sweet perfume of their godly lives should mingle; their voices should join in harmony like two well-tuned instruments. It really seemed as if there would be no end either to his similes or his sermon, but at last Sir Ralph and his bride emerged from the dim church into the pale February sunshine. The bell-ringers, inspired by a draught of ale and ten shillings distributed among them by order of the bride’s father, rang out a lusty peal, the crowd cheered, and sweet rushes and snowdrops strewed the path down which Sir Ralph Skelton and his lady walked smilingly arm in arm.

  The first part of the wedding-day festivities – the feast given by the bride’s father at his house – was over. The long, rich and highly indigestible meal had been consumed, toast upon toast had been drunk, the guests dipping their sprigs of rosemary into their tankards, the bride bowing prettily in response over her glass; the bride’s cakes, enclosed in iced sugar to form one large cake, had been broken, with laughter and jest, over the bride’s head. Her gifts had been admired – the fine jewels which were now to be hers, the green velvet riding saddle with silver fringes and lace, the money-chest painted with landscapes and nosegays in the Dutch fashion, as well as such dainty trifles as a diamond bodkin and a silver fork. Scarves, gloves and rings had been distributed among the guests.

  Custom decreed that the newly wedded bride should remain for three weeks among her own people but, at her future mother-in-law’s request, the motherless Barbara was to go at once to her new family. Now, as the short afternoon faded, Sir Ralph carried his lady off to Maryiot Cells, and all the relations and friends (many of them flushed and unsteady on their feet) followed in their coaches or on horseback exclaiming, not for the first time that day, on the conveniency of a match between two such close neighbours, which thus enabled them to enjoy the friendly rivalry of both Sir Ralph and his father-in-law’s hospitality.

  The Great Hall at Maryiot Cells was festooned with ropes of evergreens, fashioned by the industrious fingers of the bridesmaids. Scores of wax candles, set in silver sconces, put to shame the twilight that crept in through the leaded lights of the casement windows.

  The Dowager Lady Skelton stood with her family grouped around her to receive her guests. She was a dumpy little woman with a flurried expression who might or might not have been pretty once. The best proof that she must have possessed some attractions lay in the person of her married daughter Lady Kingsclere, a large opulent blonde who, though somewhat handicapped by the prominent blue eyes of the family, had a brilliant pink and white skin and an abundance of yellow hair that entitled her to consider herself a beauty. The death recently of an older married daughter in childbirth, and the death long ago of two young daughters and a son from smallpox, had left large gaps in the Dowager Lady Skelton’s family. Henrietta Kingsclere was only twenty-four years old. Secure in the possession of a fine white bosom, a handsome if dull husband and two sons, she displayed a patronising affability towards her young sister-in-law.

  Her younger brother, Roger Skelton, a slight, pale, pink-eyed youth, was twenty-one. He had just returned from a tour of Europe during which he had acquired some bad statuary and a passion for gaming.

  The youngest member of the family, Paulina Skelton, was a silent, self-contained girl of twelve. Unlike the rest of her family she had clear-cut features and an intelligent expression. She eyed her new sister-in-law distrustingly, thinking that she would not buy a horse that had such uneasy nostrils and eyes.

  As the guests poured into the house, the damask curtains were drawn, candle after candle broke into its little flower of flame, the musicians in the gallery struck up the strains of a coranto.4 Lord Kingsclere, as the highest-born gallant in the room, led out the new Lady Skelton. Behind them flowed the bright train of the dancers, making the gay music visible with their gaily clad bodies. The colours, orange-tawny, grass-green, yellow, peacock-blue, flame, carnation, violet, scarlet, black and white, mingled and shifted, as though the dancers were gaudy threads being shuttled to and fro by an invisible hand.

  Before feet had had time to grow too weary or foreheads too sweaty beneath heavy periwigs, supper was announced. Maryiot Cells, always renowned for its hospitality, lived up to its highest standards that wedding night. There were the wines of France, Spain, the Rhineland and the Orient, as well as homely ale, for the thirsty, and for the hungry a bewildering display of eatables, from the solid toothsomeness of collared pig and stewed carps, to the more refined tastiness of marchpanes, pistaches and chocolate amandes. Yet all but the elderly, the stout and the gouty were ready to dance again when the repast was over, to dance the spirited galliard as well as the stately pavane.5

  To claim a dance and a kiss from the bride was the privilege of each male wedding guest, and young Lady Skelton declared laughingly that she needed a hundred mouths and as many pairs of feet to fulfil her obligations. As it was, a wild and buoyant gaiety upheld her, a gaiety without root or reason, born of the moment, of her youth, of the wine and music and bright colours, the flattery, the kisses and the laughter. An unwonted flush stained her cheeks to a pale carnation, her lips were moist and red, her eyes gleamed between the long lashes, her dark burnished curls hung loose. So debonair and heedless she seemed that more than one of the older ladies regarded her curiously, hardly knowing whether to pity or disapprove, for after all marriage was a serious thing, as the poor, giddy young creature would soon find out, and no cause for wanton jollity.

  But Barbara neither noticed their pursed lips nor would have cared had she done so. This was her hour, brimful of the excitement, the sharp edge of delight for which she craved. All time was gathered up in this room of shimmering candlelight and quivering music, and laid at Barbara Skelton’s feet as a wedding gift.

  But Sir Ralph had other notions. He was showing signs of restlessness, as his friends noticed with sly amusement. It was past midnight and time for him to claim his bride.

  They were dancing a cushion dance, which entailed more kissing than ever.6

  ‘She must come to and she shall come to and she must come whether she will or no,’ went the refrain, and then: ‘She must go fro and she shall go fro and she must go whether she will or no.’

  As Barbara frolicked her way through the dance her bridesmaids, at a nod from the Dowager Lady Skelton, came forward to escort her to the nuptial chamber. Instantly the dancers swarmed round her, scrambling with shouts and laughter to snatch the lucky love-favours from her gown. Flushed and dishevelled, her low-cut bodice slipping from her shoulders, Barbara made her escape and ran up the Great Stairs.

  From above she could hear that the dancing had begun again. She leant for a moment against the balustrade listening to the muted sound of music and tripping feet and voices from below.

  ‘She must go fro and she shall go fro and she shall go whether she will or no.’

  The words, unaccompanied by the candlelight and smiling faces had a sinister sound as though some obscure threat lay behind their apparent inconsequence. Standing there in the shadows in her pale gown Barbara felt like a forlorn and resentful ghost. To be out of the bright centre of things, to be forgotten, even for this brief space, was to taste something of the anonymity of death. Why could she not stay where she belonged among those riotous young people below, instead of being undressed and put to bed with a
man whom she did not love?

  But to her bridesmaids this was the crowning moment of the day. A vicarious excitement was apparent in their gestures and voices. ‘As though they prepared me for my execution,’ thought Barbara sulkily. Before undressing her they urged her to partake of beer and plum buns swimming in a bowl of spiced ale. ‘To keep away timorous thoughts, dear cousin,’ murmured Ursula Worth kindly. Penelope Carew laughed boldly, ‘Oh never you fear! She will cheer up quick enough when her bedfellow comes.’

  Arabella Crosbie worried, ‘I hope we have remembered to put everything in the benediction possett – milk, wine, yolk of eggs, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg … Moll, did we remember the nutmeg?’

  But Moll Kirby and her sister were admiring the bridal bed. It was richly upholstered with olive green, rose and silver brocade hangings and curtains, and topped with plumes of ostrich feathers. Ann Kirby fingered the head valances. ‘Lord! this is the finest bed I have ever seen. Why, Her Majesty couldn’t wish for better. You ought to beget some pretty little children in it.’

  Barbara said complacently, ‘Sir Ralph is wondrously free and kind in his behaviour to me. He will deny me nothing.’ Arabella recalled her companions to their duty. ‘Come now, girls, or the groomsmen will have undressed Sir Ralph before we have Barbara ready.’