by Joan Aiken
“If kissing’s i’ fashion, aa’ll hev a share,” said the maid addressed as Janet laughing, and she too came forward and was hugged by Alvey, followed by Becky.
“Times change,” said Janet. “Ye’d not have din that afore ye went, Miss Lou! Reet starchy and chill ye were in they days.”
Alvey glanced guiltily at Isa, who raised her brows in mild reproof, though she was smiling too.
“Yoong Mester Chibburn’s in to see Miss Meg,” Becky told them then. “Ye’d best gan to the morning-room; Miss Parthie’s there wi’ them and if aa knaw out o’ the matter, she’s driving them fair desprit.”
“Oh, poor Meg! We’d better go at once. Come Al—Emmy.”
“Umble pie for your dinner tonight, Miss Lou.”
“Umble pie?” said Alvey, startled off her guard. “Why—?”
“Dyen’t ye mind? Umble pie were elwis yer favourite. Aa’ve syeved the umbles of a week sin we had a stag brought in—”
“Of course she remembers your Umble Pie, Mrs Slaley, we were talking about it only yesterday in the carriage,” cried Isa, giving Alvey a pinch, “with the oranges and lemon and Canary—she can’t wait. Come along, Emmy.”
As they left the kitchen the smiles were replaced by gravity behind them; the fate of Annie Herdman, Alvey guessed, had cast a shadow over the entire household.
“Heaven help me—how shall I ever maintain this charade?” she murmured, following Isa down yet another broad, stone-flagged passage. “My tongue continually betrays me.”
“Oh, pho, pho! You are doing excellently well. What can such trifles matter? Nobody remarks them.”
“But they may remember and add up. And sooner or later I shall perpetrate a major mistake. I find it so difficult to portray Louisa’s character!”
“Oh, never mind that. Everybody is delighted to find Louisa humanized by school and the passage of time,” said Isa shrewdly. “Now: do not be forgetting that John Chibburn was once your suitor. Some finesse, I grant you, is called for here.”
Isa’s meaning was plain to Alvey as soon as they entered the morning room. Meg, hitherto amiable and easy enough with her substitute sister, was all on edge, a mixture of assertiveness, conscious pride, and nervous watchfulness. While John Chibburn himself, a rosy, fresh-faced young man, with no pretension to looks, but a pleasant, simple manner, appeared, for the first few moments, a trifle confused, as if he hardly knew how to comport himself between the old love and the new. Though, to do Louisa justice, she had never encouraged him. “I soon sent him about his business,” Alvey recalled her saying. An air of austere, lofty erudition, Alvey decided, would soon confirm the young man in the fitness of his choice; and she contrived without loss of time to be so extremely learned, to drop so many French and Latin and German tags into the conversation, to lard her remarks with so many literary and historical references, that Mr Chibburn was soon looking quite aghast, and immensely relieved at the fate he had escaped, while Parthie, who had been driving the engaged pair mad with her fidgety and intrusive presence, began yawning uncontrollably and seized an early chance to slip away. Meg’s relief and improvement in spirits, on the other hand, were instantly apparent.
Arrangements for the wedding were under discussion and, since Lady Winship was so wholly uninterested in the business as to be useless in the character of an adviser, they were awaiting the arrival of the old lady who had, in her day, married off three younger sisters of Sir Aydon, and could claim to be an expert.
When she presently made her appearance her first task was to allay the anxieties of Meg, who had wondered if the wedding must be postponed because of the fatality in the house.
“No such thing, my child,” she said with energy. “That would be to make altogether too much of the affair, and set the neighbourhood wondering. No: it will be better by far to continue with arrangements as planned. Of course we are all greatly grieved about poor Annie and her bairn, that goes without saying, but it will be giving a wholesome and a fresh turn to everybody’s thoughts, and especially your parents, if the ceremony goes on as planned.”
Meg looked her satisfaction at this judgment, but said doubtfully, “Ma’am, what about my brother James? May he not be distressed—?”
“Well! If he is, he must stay away.”
“Oh, I hope he does not!” cried Isa, and added, “Besides, Papa wrote to him about the wedding some time since and he is supposed to be on his way; I do not see how he is to be warned—”
“Word flies about fast enough,” said the old lady frowning a little. “In any case, James must take his chance.”
There was a ruthless streak in old Mrs Winship, Alvey decided; she seemed to rate as of small consequence the shock the poor young man must receive, on his arrival home, at hearing that his sweetheart and his child had died untimely.
Appearing aware of this critical appraisal, the old lady glanced in Alvey’s direction and remarked briskly, “By the bye, Louisa, the children, Tot and Nish, are awaiting your attentions in their schoolroom; Aydon wishes you to hear their hymn. Since you are become so learned you may as well outline a course of study for them to pursue. And high time too,” she added sotto-voce.
“Yes, Grandmamma; of course I will do that.” Alvey, taken by surprise, had risen to her feet and was halfway to the door when she realized that she was uncertain where the schoolroom lay; but Isa came to the rescue, murmuring, “They still take their lessons in the pele tower, as we used with Miss Waskerley.”
Alvey nodded gratefully. Only after leaving the morning-room did she begin to wonder how to reach the pele tower; that it was at the northern end of the house she knew, but where was the entrance? She turned along a corridor that led in the right direction, hoping to find some helpful stairway, but found none, only a door that led out of doors. Here she was hesitating when accosted by a gardener’s boy with a basket of logs.
“Looking for something, Miss Lou?”
This would never do.
“Yes—I dropped a pin,” Alvey said, by good fortune spotting the gleam of one lying on the cobbled pathway; and she picked it up and stuck it nonchalantly into her collar, before adding, “Can you tell me where the children are, Master Tot and Miss Nish?”
He grinned. “Ay! Maister has ‘em pint up in the pele room!” and nodded to a door behind him. “I jist tyuk some wud for the old leddy’s room, so I knaw that’s whur they are,” and he went on, with his basket, through the door from which Alvey had just come. Relieved, she opened the second door, and found that it gave on to a spiral stone stair. After climbing three turns of this she reached, first, a door that opened into a bedroom—from its antique furnishing, plainly that of the old lady; the next door revealed a well-appointed water-closet; a third, another turn higher, revealed a circular room, equipped with tables, books, and maps. Here she found the two children.
They looked up warily, from their copy-books, and eyed her, she could not help feeling, as prisoners observe the approach of the torturer.
“Have you any use for a pin?” asked Alvey briskly. “I just picked up one from the path down below,” and she took it from her collar and handed it to the little girl, who appeared as amazed and doubtful as if she had just been awarded the Holy Grail.
Since she was slow to take it—“I will pin it into your tucker,” said Alvey, and did so; “it is odds but it will come in useful for something.”
She was aware of the child’s eyes, trancedly following the motion of the pin, and her own hand carefully inserting it.
“Now, then!” said Alvey. “I am to hear your hymn; but I daresay you do not have it by heart yet?”
They shook their heads, agreeing; their eyes bored into her like woodpeckers’ beaks. The boy’s were dark-grey, almost black, narrowly set near the bridge of his nose. He would, Alvey thought, resemble his grandmother quite markedly when he was grown older. The girl’s were several shades lighter, wi
th a greenish tinge.
“Well: there is no use my hearing the hymn if you do not know it yet,” Alvey went on matter-of-factly into the silence, which she found somewhat daunting, “so, instead, I will read you a poem which I think well of myself.”
The four eyes consulted with each other; their looks, which had lightened just a little at the word read, darkened with gloom again at the word poem. Alvey drew a small leather-bound volume from her pocket. “Have you ever heard of Mr Walter Scott?” They shook their heads. “What? And you live so near to his country? Well, listen to this. It is from a longer poem called ‘Marmion’.” And she began to read, “‘Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west—’”
They sat motionless, mouths ajar, utterly concentrated, hardly seeming even to take breath, until she reached the last line, “‘Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?’” and shut the book.
A pause elapsed; then the boy asked, in a low, amazed tone, “Is that a true tale?”
“It must be!” exploded his sister excitedly. “For it’s all around here! The Esk river—that’s none so far off, at Longtown—and Canonbie—and the Solway—it is all about here! But who was young Lochinvar?”
Alvey was obliged to confess that she had not the least idea. “Perhaps your father would know?”
“I doubt he wouldn’t; but Grannie might,” said the boy.
“We’ll ask her. She knows that kind of thing,” agreed his sister.
Alvey was well pleased at the excitement the poem had generated. Gone were their looks of apathy and distrust. They begged for more, and she read them a portion from ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’. They were enchanted with Lord Cranstoun’s Goblin Page, his fiendish supernatural habits, and propensity for yelling “Lost! Lost! Lost!” on every occasion. After his abduction of the Heir of Buccleuch she stopped.
“But what happened?” demanded Tot. “Did the boy get home?”
“What became of the Goblin Page? Who was he?”
“That you may find out for yourselves. I will leave the book here,” said Alvey cordially. “Now I think you had better do some writing. I suppose you are very good at that, since you are so interested in reading?”
“No, we are not,” said Tot flatly.
“Oh? Well, never mind. Write down for me a page of things you might need to make an island handsome in the river; and then draw a picture of that island.”
No response. Their looks met again. “Have you paper?” inquired Alvey, turning to survey the room’s resources. “Yes, I see some; and paints; but they look rather dry and dingy. Never mind, we shall just have to imagine the colours.”
She furnished each child with paper, colours, and writing materials. A glum, hard-breathing silence fell. Alvey strolled to the window and looked out, over a hotch-potch of gabled slate roofs and massive stone chimneys, upward to the distant height which Isa had named Blackshaw Crag. It would be easy to imagine an armed lookout man posted here, on the watch for marauding Scots pouring over that hill . . .
“Does—” that stair lead on to the roof, Alvey was about to inquire, when she remembered that it did, and that she would be supposed to know; she changed her question to “Does Papa still allow us to go on to the roof?”
They nodded, and she mounted the stair, which wound around the circular room, to a door above, which gave into a small, dim chamber. From that, another door opened on to a leaded roof.
Here, the prospect was glorious: eastwards, to the wooded slope down which they had come yesterday; north, along a narrowing valley, the course of the Hungry Water, to enfolding blue hills; westwards, to Blackshaw Crag; south, to yet more hills. Not a roof, not a habitation in sight. Not a live creature to be seen, save some grazing sheep; not a sound to be heard but the cawing of rooks and distant cry of a curlew. Oh my dear wicked Lord Love, thought Alvey, you are going to thrive in this place, though it is the last place in the world that you would choose to inhabit; and she reflected fondly on her creation’s predilection for balls, gaming houses, soirées, and the delights of city life—delights which Alvey depicted with all the freedom of one who had never experienced or expected to experience them. Would the children downstairs, she wondered, be entertained by the adventures of Lord Love? His escapades were really of a very harmless nature, much more so than the libertines who figured in the romances issued by Minerva Press—tattered copies of which Alvey had observed on the shelves of the room downstairs, doubtless a relic of the departed Miss Waskerley. Alvey could not help adjudging Lord Love and his exploits far superior to them. And if that was all the children had in the way of reading matter, the poor things had been atrociously neglected. Really it was time somebody took them in hand.
With a sigh, feeling the icy air bite through her thin dress, she returned inside and fastened the door. After carefully descending the inside stair, which had no rail, she returned to the table and inspected the children’s compositions.
“I PLANT ILAND WITH PLANTS” Tot had written, and Nish: “i paformed a grate meny tasx on knewmerous ilands, dekorating them al over with cort stones, bewtifle flars, mos an leves.i made a depe chanl an raste botes along it.i helpt tot with his iland an plantd litletreas on the damp sand.i made a hege of hasl twigz. i made a litil pule an gardn beds wit fethrs. the day as wel spent but wer rathr tard.”
Both their pictures were excellent. “Who taught you to draw?” Alvey asked.
“Isa.”
Alvey had observed, during the journey, Isa’s dexterity at whipping off small sketches of the ship, the crew, the shoreline, the docks—anything that took her fancy.
“When you can write as well as you draw,” Alvey told the children, “you shall each make an illustrated story-book. I shall show you how. Now, I have had enough school-teaching for one day, and I am sure you have had enough learning. You may run outside, but take care to come home soon enough to learn that hymn, which I shall hear tomorrow.”
“But Papa said—”
“Papa did not intend you to spend the whole day indoors,” said Alvey, confident that Sir Aydon would neither know nor care how long their incarceration lasted. A cautious light brightened in their eyes.
“We can really go?” said Tot, and disappeared like a stone from a sling, in case she should rescind the permission. Nish remained behind for a moment, studying Alvey gravely.
“You are not really our sister Louisa, are you?” she said.
“What makes you think that?” asked Alvey, deeply startled.
“I know you cannot be she. So: who are you?”
“Well—shall we say—for the moment—that I am your fairy godmother?” Alvey cautiously suggested.
Nish pressed her lips together, frowned, half-nodded, then with a final, lingering, unsatisfied stare, left the room.
Alvey waited a while, until she had regained her composure.
What to do? Tell Isa? Or wait and see what happened next?
Somehow she felt fairly certain that public exposure was not likely to result from the child’s disbelief in her. Who would pay heed to a statement from such a source? If, that is, either of the children were inclined to make such a statement, which Alvey doubted; they seemed to lead a separate life of their own, without reference to their elders.
They have been amazingly neglected, thought Alvey. If I had written a composition like that when I was eight or nine, Mamma would have had something to say!
Still, they did enjoy Lochinvar and the Goblin Page.
Heartened by this thought, she left the room and descended the spiral stair. Observing Mrs Winship’s door open, and the room, so far as she could see, empty, she turned through it, reckoning that it must be a shortcut to the first floor of the house.
What was her dismay to find Parthie, scarlet-cheeked, half hidden in an alcove, turning over a bundle of papers tied with brown ribbon that lay in a small rosewood desk.
“Oh! S-sister Louisa!” stammered Parthie. “How—how you surprised me! I had not—I had not thought anybody was—that is, Grandmamma asked me to find her receipt for wedding cake—”
“I see,” said Alvey calmly, and walked on through the other door. She was in haste to reach the room she shared with Meg; while on the leads she had been visited by a new and brilliant inspiration regarding the doings of Wicked Lord Love, and she was eager to make a note while it retained its first freshness and gloss.
The bedroom was tidy and empty; the beds were straightened, and somebody had given a stir to the great china bowl of dried rose petals and lavender that stood on the chiffonier. In the grate a peat fire gently smouldered.
Luxury! thought Alvey, and applied herself to work at the window table.
Only twenty minutes later did it occur to her that the bundle of papers which Parthie was inspecting looked much more like letters than household receipts—in fact they looked remarkably like letters in Louisa’s handwriting.
Bursting out of the tower door on to the cobbled path, Nish ran into her brother who was waiting outside.
“Come quick!” said he. “Mrs Slaley gave me some pepper cakes and a whole bundle of bannocks. And she says, sister Lou has turned out a right gud ‘un! Let’s go up the Hungry Water.”
“Bide a moment.”
Nish darted round the corner and across the sweep to the Lion pool. (No one had taken seriously Sir Aydon’s order to fill it in, nor would they). Nish tweaked the pin from her tucker, dropped it into the water, and whispered, “Dear Lord Mithras, thank you for answering my prayer. You are a great god! Yours to command, Annis Winship.”
Then she followed her brother down the cart track. As she ran she half-sang, half-chanted:
“Are ye going to Whittingham Fair?
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one that’s there
For once he was a true love of mine . . .
Tell him I made him a cambric shirt
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme