Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  Giles gives a thoughtful nod. ‘Yes, I did believe in him, that’s why I was fascinated to see, and came over when I heard about this commune in the grounds of my future home. I was travelling in Australia studying primitive religions and cultures. Callister sent me a message via the proverbial grapevine.’

  Giles Ormerod looks nothing like his fellow travellers. He has neatly cropped hair, he is closely shaven, his clothes look clean and his shoes are expensive Timberlands. He wears silver-rimmed John Lennon glasses. What could he want with a man like Callister?

  ‘I’d resigned myself, years ago, to being disinherited, everyone in my family thought Fabian would be bound to have an heir eventually. And then, when Helena had the twins and they turned out to be girls, everything seemed slightly more hopeful. Then she died so suddenly, so tragically, and that’s when I arrived. That’s when Callister put his interesting proposal to me.’

  ‘You were to marry Honesty? But what good would that have done?’

  ‘I was to marry Honesty and Callister swore that he would protect my inheritance.’ Giles looks embarrassed. He gives an apologetic smile. ‘Oh, I know it all sounds crazy, how could one man affect the course of fate? But I was impressed by his knowledge, he’d researched the subject of voodoo extremely thoroughly. We all believed him, most folks still do.’ Giles clears his throat, aware of his doubting audience. ‘He has this incredible ability, you see, to make you believe in him and his supernatural powers, he commands a profound and mystic devotion. Hitler had the power, they say. And Jesus Christ, of course. I was fascinated, I suppose, it was my subject, I was young, and impressionable, and rebellious, I had nothing better to do with my life, and I fell in love with the way of life and I fell in love with Honesty.’ His last words sound bitter. He turns to the sobbing woman beside him and urges tenderly, ‘Don’t cry, Honesty, please don’t cry any more…’

  Honesty says nothing, just fiddles with the diamonds on her fingers.

  ‘So Archie comes along and changes everything,’ says Billy. ‘Callister is exposed for the fraud that he obviously is.’

  ‘No, not all at once. It was getting very oppressive, and stranger and stranger, dabbling in stuff I didn’t like. Drinking blood. Sacrificing animals. Bizarre sexual practices. I was getting fed up, unwilling to hang around any longer in spite of the financial inducements—Honesty’s money was giving us all a carefree, easy life—eager to get back home to my folks although we are not a wealthy family by any means. I confronted Callister with my doubts a few days ago and he went quite crazy. “Don’t you think I’ve got it all worked out?” he stormed at me. “Oh thou unbeliever…” and that sort of crap.’

  Honesty breaks in, her voice high and hysterical, ‘And that’s why we think he’s gone off on his own, with Archie, realising that it’s not going to work, Giles told him he’d had enough, and now Callister is determined to squeeze as much as he can out of Fabian before he is forced to quit.’

  ‘Well, he’s not quite on his own,’ Giles reminds her. ‘He’s taken Demelza with him.’

  ‘Don’t make it worse. Don’t rub it in. D’you think I don’t know that?’ And Honesty leans against Giles for support, her muscles quivering and aching as if some lethal poison has been poured into them.

  This is terrible, worse than anything Ange has imagined, it’s a nightmare of everything she has ever dreamed or despised. Some fanatical madman, some sinister shaman has taken her child, and God knows what he’ll do if he finds himself thwarted.

  ‘Daddy mustn’t know.’ Honesty starts crying again. ‘If Daddy knew how we’d planned and plotted he’d think we were all waiting for his death.’

  ‘And weren’t you then?’ asks Ange, feeling her legs collapsing under her, faced with the immediate threat of falling weakly to the floor. ‘And it’s obviously only jealousy that has brought you here today.’

  Round and round the problem they go as time rushes on.

  Is there any way of contacting Callister and telling him that the child he has is not the true heir? Threatening him with the fact that if Fabian was told the truth there would be no money coming his way, only the police with a full description of not only himself, but the weird Demelza, also.

  ‘Can’t we just wait and let Fabian pay the money?’ cries Ange. ‘Wouldn’t that be simpler and safer?’

  Giles says quietly, ‘I don’t think there’s any hope of Callister handing the child back alive.’

  ‘But why not?’ Angela shrieks. She cannot believe this. She listens in pain and sickening confusion.

  ‘It’s just the sort of person he is. He’s fanatical. He’s insane. OK, he wants the money, but he wants vengeance, too. As he sees it, he’s wasted all these years hanging around waiting for an eventual fortune and now that has slipped from his grasp. Apparently Helena told him straight out that if she bore his child she would confess all to Fabian, so that put paid to his blackmailing plan. No, we have to contact him somehow. And as quickly as we can.’

  Billy, puzzled, argues, ‘But he must have known, as soon as Archie was born, he must have seen that you would never inherit, Giles. So why didn’t he give up there and then?’

  ‘Callister is not the sort to give up. He’s a man obsessed with his own imaginary powers. And when Helena went and conveniently died as a result, he thought, of his own sick spells and incantations, he fooled himself into believing in his own infallibility. Her death, he said, could not be a coincidence. He’d made a doll, you see, a witch-doll, out of clay and bits of Helena’s hair and an old boot he found in the grounds. Within a few days Helena was dead. Callister honestly believed he’d done it. He thought it would work on Archie as well. Given time.’

  Ange gasps incredulously. ‘Oh no! The man’s mad. Did he make a witch-doll of Archie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Honesty admits. ‘But I never believed in any of that. No, I suspected he’d killed Helena with his own bare hands, I believed they must have argued…’

  ‘And you still worshipped him? Believing that?’ Ange is aghast. Fresh tears spill down her face. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that this maniac might kill Archie one day?’

  Honesty looks calm again, thinking of Callister, almost serene in a kind of stupor, and there is a slight smile on her lips, her eyes are big and staring. Oh yes, you can see how powerful Callister must be, it is more than a trick, more than a smattering of devious magic, what sort of satanic monster would destroy not only another human being, but cut off their link with all humanity too?

  34

  ‘WHOEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD come to this?’

  Evelyn, the old sweetheart, has dozed off in his bathchair beside her, the twins are no doubt discussing the whole hair-raising affair between themselves in the dovecote, Maudie and Nanny Barber have trailed back sadly to Halcyon Fields, Fabian is in his study with Ruth Hubbard and Simon Chalmers, still trying to organise the cash, and Lady Elfrida is left in the great hall talking to the miserable stag’s head.

  She cannot bear to stray far from the phone.

  Maudie has been her usual irritating self today, sticking her oar in, suggesting dark and wholly imaginary theories. How could this present disaster be in any way connected to poor Helena’s death?

  Maudie wants her head seen to. Maybe she’s going senile early. It’s lucky that Nanny Barber was born with the patience of Job and manages to deal with Maudie sympathetically and firmly. Keeps the woman in her place.

  It was only eight or nine years back that Maudie came to the Old Granary with her grievous tale of absolute woe. Apparently she’d been contacted by her long-lost daughter, ‘The state have no business to backtrack on their original promises of confidentiality for life,’ said Maudie, pulling her thin self upright, anger darkening her dull brown eyes. Why did she never remove that appalling hairnet? Lady Elfrida doubted if there could be much hair left underneath… treating hair as if it doesn’t exist for all these years, keeping it wired to your skull, well, that can’t do it much good can it, it is surprising that Maudie doe
s not suffer from alopecia.

  ‘And I have to tell you, Lady Elfrida, much against my conscience but I have to inform you that you are carrying the hereditary gene for muscular dystrophy!’

  ‘I say! How dare you, Maudie! How dare you come to my home and insult me like this, my bloodline stretches way back to Marshal Blücher who helped Wellington at Waterloo I’ll have you know, there’s never been anything like that in our family, midear, rest assured about that!’

  ‘Did you know?’ Maudie would not be shamed into silence. ‘Did you know this, milady, all those years ago when we… is that the reason you decided to do what you did?’

  ‘Silence, Maudie, we agreed we would never refer to that.’

  ‘Yes, I know we did,’ said Maudie, having the decency to blush. ‘But circumstances have changed, the state has now seen fit, not only to allow adopted children to contact their natural mothers, but it also provides specially trained social workers to help them to do so!’

  Lady Elfrida froze. ‘Shocking. And the child…?’

  ‘Yes, the child got in touch with me. Right out of the blue. A letter, to start with, followed by a telephone call. I wanted to ignore them both, of course, and I would have done, except that she insisted she had to find something out, a matter of life and death, she said, her whole future hung on the answer.’

  One of her heads was coming on, she could feel the nausea rising, always the first sign of a migraine. ‘We did what was best at the time,’ she moaned.

  ‘We did what was best, but now the past has come back to haunt us.’

  ‘That’s a silly expression, Maudie,’ said Lady Elfrida, cooling her forehead with a stick of eau-de-cologne. ‘And far too dramatic in the circumstances. Nothing is haunting me.’ She has to keep the sticks in her handbag these days, the older she gets the more troublesome these headaches become. Evelyn says it is probably a tumour, but then he would look on the black side.

  ‘How about your relatives, back in Germany?’ Maudie persisted. ‘If this is the case, and it certainly seems to be, there must be other boy children affected through the generations, and, as you say, you have a long and distinguished family line.’

  In the background Evelyn sat in his bathchair listening to the cricket.

  ‘Cripples? Our family have suffered no more or no less than any others,’ said Lady Elfrida firmly, dismissing the rare and sad occasions when some distant relation sent news of a little tragedy. Most of the Ormerod women are lucky enough to have boys, which made her delivery of a girl child all the more annoying, and although the matter was quite illogical, Fabian’s failure to father an heir on so many occasions felt all the more frustrating. Because Fabian would… he would… wouldn’t he… she supposes. Why not?

  ‘What makes this girl, this lost daughter, come forward with such a serious accusation?’

  Evelyn huffed and turned up the sound on his television set.

  ‘It wasn’t an accusation exactly, it was a question,’ said Maudie. ‘And of course I couldn’t answer it so I had to come to you. Apparently she was pregnant, she was over the age, considered a risk after forty, but she and her fiancé desperately wanted to start a family. They obviously couldn’t wait. She got pregnant. She went for tests. She told them she wanted the tests to be absolutely thorough. They had to test for the slightest danger. They discovered the hereditary gene in her amniotic fluid. The scan showed her child to be a boy and he was affected. Fifty per cent of children born to mothers who carry the gene are. She was forced to have an abortion.’

  ‘How tragic,’ said Lady Elfrida. ‘How very sad for her. But if I am a carrier—what a terrible, unfortunate word—if I am a carrier then how about Candida, living quite happily and healthily down in Bath with her deerhounds and her two sweet boys?’

  ‘Candida could well be a carrier like yourself,’ said Maudie impatiently. ‘You ought to warn her and we just have to hope that Candida’s boys have escaped unharmed. But the twins couldn’t possibly be affected. The twins and Honesty are perfectly safe, as we both know, because Fabian has absolutely no Ormerod blood in him. But I had to come and ask you, don’t you see?’

  ‘I resent the fact that you have broken our sacred pact,’ said Lady Elfrida coldly. ‘When we decided on our course of action all those years ago it was as much for your good as mine, might I remind you.’

  ‘I know that, milady, and I’m not complaining…’

  ‘Well it sounds as if you jolly well are,’ said Lady Elfrida uncomfortably, peering hard at Maudie through her pale blue eyes. And then she couldn’t help herself, she had to ask, ‘So tell me, what did the child look like?’

  ‘Not a child any more. A middle-aged woman. Like you, milady, of course. Big and strong with bright blue eyes, not little and wiry like His Lordship. She was rather taken aback, of course, to see me sitting in the café waiting for her, tall and thin and sallow complexioned, but she said nothing. Not then. She was too concerned about getting an answer to her question, she was very upset, and I had to tell her I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Elfrida, ‘in our day they didn’t have such clever tests, it would be quite understandable if you didn’t know you carried such a terrible blight…’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Maudie quickly, affronted. ‘You do.’

  Lord, Lord, it is so easy to become confused. ‘Well, I just hope and pray, Maudie, that you didn’t give anything away. If Fabian ever found out…’

  ‘It might do him good, bring him down a peg or two,’ said Maudie stiffly.

  Maud Doubleday has always been resentful over Fabian’s haughty attitude—he still insists on referring to her as Miss Doubleday, in spite of the fact he has known her all his life—not just to her personally, he is the same with all the servants, preferring to leave a respectful distance between them and us.

  What had Maudie hoped, poor girl, at the time? That he might grow up to love her, but no, all his affections were and still are reserved for Nanny Ba-ba. Maudie has never been special to Fabian, no matter how hard she tried at the start. She doesn’t have that way with children. They are put off by her dry and rather surly nature.

  All Elfrida could promise her then—can it be forty-eight years ago now?—was that she was giving her son the best future she could possibly have imagined. She would have been forced to have him adopted, Martin the hall-boy wasn’t involved at the time. He might have fancied her later, but that was too late for Maudie’s child, his future had already been decided, the next Lord of Hurleston. What more could Maudie ask for under the hapless circumstances?

  The swap, as Evelyn lightly refers to it, wouldn’t have been possible but for the fact that Maudie’s aunt was the local midwife, booked to attend Lady Elfrida’s confinement—until the neurotic Ffiona and the self-obsessed Helena came along, all the Ormerods were born at home in the four-poster bed at Hurleston, that was the custom. Lady Elfrida was well on her way, grabbing the embroidered hangings, suffering in as much silence as she could muster when Maudie came shambling up to the house from the village, calling for her aunt, crying out that she, too, was in labour.

  It seemed best and more convenient to put the dratted girl to bed in one of the servants’ attic rooms.

  Maudie’s aunt chatted on to pass the long and painful waiting hours. How sad it was that Maudie couldn’t keep her baby. But then, these girls must learn, loose morals might be acceptable in some stratas of society but when you’re just an ordinary working-class lass and your man lets you down you have to face the consequences. At least Maudie’s aunt had agreed to have her, Maudie hadn’t been forced into one of those terrible mother and baby homes.

  Elfrida was shocked, quite frankly, when Maudie’s aunt announced that her first-born child was a girl. ‘I say! Are you sure?’ she queried, sitting bolt upright and peering over the heavy covers.

  ‘Quite sure,’ said Maudie’s aunt with joy, ‘a beautiful, bonnie bouncing girl, eight-and-a-half pounds.’

  ‘Well, the weight sounds righ
t, but the sex does not.’

  ‘There. Here’s you praying for a lad and disappointed, and there’s poor Maudie upstairs wailing over her strapping son!’

  ‘Your niece has had a son?’

  ‘She has, my lady, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And she’s going to give him away?’

  ‘Sadly, she has no choice.’ Maudie’s aunt was pottering round the room, clearing up the mess before she would invite His Lordship, back from a good day’s hunting, to come and view his first-born.

  ‘Hang on a minute, hang on.’ Elfrida shifted her bulk in the bed. ‘Let me think about this a minute. Pass me my mirror and comb, I must look an absolute fright.’

  Maudie’s aunt sat on the bed beside her, smoothing the counterpane as nurses feel obliged to do. Her constant fiddling was infuriating. Elfrida wanted to smack her hand.

  ‘How d’you think Maudie would feel…?’

  And one thing led to another. Maudie’s aunt’s initial protests were soon overcome and Maudie herself was approached. It didn’t take the demented girl long to agree, and no wonder. She could stay on at Hurleston, live in if she chose, with a good safe job and what is more, she could see as much as she liked of her baby… watch him grow through childhood… watch him come to a privileged manhood, whereas, if she did not agree, she would never see her son again.

  Funnily enough, Elfrida felt little for her daughter, no more than an unwanted pedigree puppy, oh, she would make sure she went to a good home, use a reputable adoption agency as Evelyn would advertise his dogs in Horse and Hound, responsibly, only the best, no shilly-shallying. But other than that she hadn’t had time to bond—that’s what they call it nowadays isn’t it—to bond?

  The only thing that worried Evelyn when he was told of the new arrangement was bloodlines and stock and Elfrida had to agree. But Maudie’s aunt assured them that Maudie came from a long line of decent English peasantry, respectable folk who knew their place, acted as beaters now and then in the Suffolk village where they had lived for generations. They were decent Christian people, they’d shipped Maudie off, hadn’t they, for fear of the scandal?