Life seemed to have become unreal during the months that followed. Harriet was the only one who was content. She went about hugging her secret joy, and in the way I remembered so well she began to dominate the household.
She would get us all together to sing ballads in the evening—myself, Charlotte, Gregory Stevens and often Matthew Dollan, who was constantly riding over. Charlotte was aloof with him, as though she knew that I hoped they might be attracted and was determined to foil me.
Harriet would tell stories of her life as a player and her audience would be tense with excitement. She certainly was a true Scheherazade, for she had a trick of stopping at an exciting point and saying: “No more now. My voice is going. I have to protect it, you know.”
Edwin and Leigh would creep in and listen. They thought her enchanting and she made a special point of charming them. Even Priscilla would toddle up and watch her wonderingly while she sang or talked.
Anxious as I was about my relationship with Carleton, saddened by the fact that I was not the one who was expecting a child, I allowed myself to be drawn into her spell and I would find myself excited by her as the others were.
Through the winter months she grew larger but nonetheless beautiful. There was a wonderful serenity about her which added to her beauty.
Even Sally Nullens was excited by the prospect of a new baby in the nursery.
I said to her one day: “Sally, you’re longing for this baby, I know.”
“Oh I can never resist them,” she admitted. “There’s nothing as beautiful as a helpless little baby to my mind.”
“Even Harriet’s?” I said.
“Whatever else she is,” answered Sally, “she’s a mother.”
I had not noticed that Charlotte had come into the room. She was so self-effacing. She seemed to want not to be noticed.
“Do you think she will have an easy confinement?” I asked.
“Her!” cried Sally, her eyes flashing suddenly. “With her it will be like shelling peas. It is with her sort. …”
“Her sort …” I said.
“There’s something about her,” said Sally quietly. “I’ve always known it. They say witches have special powers.”
“Sally, you’re not suggesting Harriet is a witch?” murmured Charlotte.
Sally said: “I’m saying nothing.”
“You just have,” I reminded her.
“I can only say what I feel. There’s something … some special powers … I don’t know what it is. Some call it witchcraft. I don’t like it and I never will.”
“Oh, Sally, what nonsense. She’s just a healthy and attractive woman …”
“Who knows how to get what she wants.”
Charlotte and I exchanged glances which implied that we shouldn’t take old Sally too seriously.
It was February when Harriet gave birth to her child, and as Sally had predicted it was an easy birth. She had a son and I must admit I felt a twinge of envy.
It was a week or so after the birth of the child, whom she had christened Benjamin, when Carleton came home.
He embraced me warmly and I felt a sudden thrill of happiness. I determined that in time, when I had recovered from this lassitude which had been with me since my miscarriage, I also would have a son.
Carleton noticed at once. “You’re better,” he said. And swung me up and held me against him.
“I’m glad you are home,” I said.
We walked into the house arm in arm. I said to him: “We have an addition to the household. Harriet’s child has arrived.”
He was silent for a moment and I went on: “It’s a son. Trust Harriet to have a son.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “trust Harriet.”
I went with him to her room to see him. She was in bed; her Benjie was in his cradle and Sally hovered.
Harriet held out her hand to Carleton. He took it and it seemed to me that he held it for a long time.
She withdrew it and said: “Sally, give me Benjie. I want to show him off. I tell you this, Carleton, he is the most beautiful baby in the world. Sally will bear me out.”
She sat there. How beautiful she was, with her magnificent hair falling about her shoulders, her face serenely happy, her lovely eyes soft as I had rarely seen them.
I was deeply aware of Carleton. He was watching her intently. I thought again it was like one of those tableaux, full of meaning.
Benjie thrived. Sally said she had never seen a baby with a finer pair of lungs. When he bellowed, Priscilla watched him in wonder. He showed a determination to get what he wanted from his earliest days. He was beautiful with big blue eyes and dark tufts of hair. Priscilla liked to stand and watch Sally bathe him and to hand her the towels.
I had never seen Harriet so contented before. Her maternal instincts surprised me, but I told myself cynically that she loved her baby partly because he consolidated her position here. Of course as Toby’s widow she had a right to be in the house, but the fact that she had borne one of the heirs to lands and title made her position doubly assured.
But even so I was aware of growing tension all about me. I fancied that Harriet was alert, that she was engaged in some secret adventures. Perhaps it was my imagination, I told myself. Perhaps I could never really forget.
I sometimes wandered to the edge of the gardens to the arbour in which Edwin had died. It was such a gloomy place, and the shrubs about it were becoming more overgrown than ever. It looked eerie, ghostly, as the scene of a tragedy can become when people hate to go there and build up legends about it.
Chastity had let out that the servants said it was haunted. Haunted, I thought, by Edwin. Edwin who had been cut off suddenly with his sins upon him, caught in the act by Old Jethro the reformer. I wondered what Harriet felt when she went past it. She had participated in that death scene and must remember, but she never said anything when the arbour was mentioned. Harriet, I believed, was the sort of woman who in an adventuring life put unpleasant events right out of her memory.
For the last few months there had been complaints about the pigeons and the damage they were doing to the fabric of Eversleigh Court, and the grooms and menservants were constantly taking potshots at them. Ellen said that everyone in the neighbourhood was getting tired of pigeon pie and pigeon stews, or roast pigeon and pigeon cooked in pots.
“I tell them,” she said, “they should be glad of good food whatever it is.”
Carleton had said the boys might shoot at them. A moving target would give them good practice. I often heard them boasting together of the number they had shot. Then they would take them along to the cottage people.
It was one summer day. I was in the garden picking roses and I thought suddenly of another occasion when I had been similarly engaged and when Carleton had come upon me there and how we had talked and bantered and he had asked me to marry him.
The scene of the roses brought back memories of that day vividly and the excitement I felt even though I had pretended not to want him. Then I went on to think of our marriage and the sudden awakening of what was new and exciting in our relationship. What had happened to that now? Perhaps it was impossible to keep passion at such fever heat. Perhaps there had been nothing deeper than that. I kept comparing my relationship with Carleton to that which I had shared with Edwin. How romantic my first marriage had seemed, how perfect! And how foolish of me to think it was so! It has been a sham from the beginning. And yet I could not forget it. It had done something to me. People were affected by experiences, naturally. They became warped and suspicious. That was how I had become with Carleton.
The scent of roses, the heat of the sun on my hands, the buzzing of bees, and memories carried on the warm summer air … and then suddenly … it happened. I was not sure what it was. Except that I fell towards the rosebush and the sky began to recede further and further away. I had put my hand to my sleeve and touched something warm and sticky … I was aware of looking at my hands … They were as red as the roses in my basket. I was lying agai
nst the rosebush, slipping silently into the grass. It seemed to take a long time and then there was nothing.
I was in someone’s arms being carried. Carleton. I heard a child’s voice screaming: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t.” Vaguely I thought: That is Leigh. Then a voice—Jasper’s. “You godless imp. You’ve killed the mistress.”
After that the darkness was complete.
I was aware of Carleton all the time. Carleton talking, Carleton bending over me, Carleton angry. “How could this have happened? By God, I’m going to find out …” Carleton tender. “Arabella, my darling, darling Arabella …”
And awakening suddenly, a small figure at my bedside. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t. It came right over my head. It did. It did.”
The light was dim. I opened my eyes.
“Leigh,” I said. “Little Leigh?”
A hot hand seeking my free one. I seemed to have lost the other.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t.”
Then: “Come away, Leigh.” That was Sally’s voice, gentle, understanding. “She knows you didn’t.”
“Leigh,” I said. “I know.”
Sally said softly: “Poor mite. Brokenhearted he is. They think it was him taking potshots at the pigeons.”
I knew then that I had been shot. As I had put up my hand to pluck the red roses the pellets had entered my arm.
The doctor had removed the pellets. They had been deeply imbedded it seemed, and that was why I had been so ill.
It was a blessing, they said, that they had struck me in the arm.
Carleton was often at my bedside and I felt a great comfort to see him there.
It was three days before he told me. Then I had recovered from the fever which the operation of taking the pellets away had caused.
“I shall never forget it,” he said. “Leigh screaming and running and seeing you there on the grass. I was ready to kill the stupid boy … but I have my doubts now. Do you remember what happened?”
“No. I was picking roses. It was warm and sunny and now and then I heard the sound of shooting. There is nothing exceptional about that. Then it happened. … I didn’t know what it was at first. I heard the shouting and I realized there was blood …”
“So you saw no one?”
“No one at all.”
“Not before you started picking the roses?”
“No. I don’t remember.”
Carleton was silent. “I’ve been very worried, Arabella.”
“Oh, Carleton. I’m glad. I’m so glad you care enough to be worried.”
“Care enough! What are you talking about? Aren’t you my wife? Aren’t I your loving husband?”
“My husband, yes. Loving … I’m not sure …”
“Things have been difficult lately, I know. I expect it’s my fault. All that fuss about the child we lost … as though it was your fault.”
“I understand your disappointment, Carleton. I’ve been touchy, anxious, I suppose, disappointed in myself for having disappointed you.”
“Foolish pair! We have so much. It makes one realize it when one comes near to losing it.”
He bent over me and kissed me. “Get well quickly, Arabella. Be your old self. Flash your eyes, scorn me, lash me with your tongue. … Make it like it used to be. That’s what I want.”
“Have I been too gentle?”
“Aloof,” he said, “as though there is something keeping us apart. There isn’t, is there?”
“Nothing that I have put there.”
“Then there is nothing.”
I was content while he sat by my bed. I was longing to be well again and I was determined to bring about that happy state.
He said: “I was so worried about that shot. I have to find out where it came from. The boy was so insistent. I don’t think he could be lying. He’s a brave little fellow. Not afraid to own up when he’s done wrong. He was so insistent. He was there alone. He is a good shot and I had given my permission for them to shoot the pigeons. He was doing nothing wrong. He said he wasn’t shooting in your direction at all. There weren’t any pigeons there. They were fluttering down from the roof. He said the shot went right over his head, to you, and it occurred to me that someone might have been hiding there in the bushes at the side of the house.”
“Someone hiding to shoot me. Why?”
“That’s what I wanted to find out. That’s what bothers me. I had an idea, and I went to see Young Jethro.”
“You think that he …?”
“It was an idea, and if it was possible to get to the bottom of this I’d made up my mind to. I went to the old barn where his father used to live and I said, ‘I want a word with you, Young Jethro.’ He was a little puzzled and I said, ‘Your father shot my cousin. Now my wife has been shot in the arm—but that may have been a lucky chance—and I wondered whether your family made a habit of shooting at mine.’”
“Carleton! Do you really think …?”
“Not now. He swore to God that he had done no such thing and I am sure a man with his beliefs would never swear to God unless he was telling the truth. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I’ve never killed none. If I was to, I’d be unworthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. ’Tis wrong to kill. It says so in the Bible. “Thou shalt not kill.” Should I kill another soul I could suffer torment for it.’ Then he fell down on his knees and swore to me that he had not been near the house that day. That he knew nothing of the accident. He had no gun. I could search the barn. He never killed … not even pigeons. He didn’t think it was right and fitting to kill God’s creatures … And so he went on and on … and I was convinced that he was telling me the truth.”
“Perhaps it was Leigh, after all.”
“It seems likely. He was there. He had the gun. He was shooting pigeons. Yes, it seems very likely. And yet … He was so insistent. He cried and cried. Sally couldn’t comfort him. He kept saying he didn’t do it. The shot had come right over his head … which points to the bushes behind the house. Never mind. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he didn’t realize which way he was shooting. He’s not usually an untruthful boy.”
“If he did, it was an accident.”
“But of course. As if Leigh would want to hurt you. He adores you. But I’m going to find out … if I can.”
“Who else could it be? If it be? If it wasn’t Leigh or Young Jethro …”
“It could have been one of the servants who is afraid to own up.”
“Perhaps we should forget it.”
“You’re getting too excited. Yes, perhaps we should forget it.”
But I knew he went on thinking of it, and I lay back in bed feeling cherished and greatly comforted.
But not for long. As my arm began to heal and first it came out of its bandages and then out of its sling and I saw that there was only the faintest scar to remind me of it, I began to sense a tension in the house, a lurking fear, the awareness that all was not as it outwardly seemed.
“You’ve had a proper shock,” Sally Nullens told me, and Ellen confirmed this. “First that miss,” went on Sally, “then this. It’s too much for one body to stand. It begins to have its effect on the nerves, that’s what.”
Ellen said: “It’s funny how shocks come … never one at a time. It’s often in twos and threes.”
“Am I to look out for number three?” I asked.
Sally said: “It’s always well to be on the lookout. But just at first we’ve got to get you well. I’ve got a very special cordial and it takes a lot of beating, don’t it, Ellen?”
“Are you talking of your buttermilk one?”
“That’s the one,” said Sally. “You shall drink it every night, Mistress Arabella. You’ll drop into a nice peaceful sleep and we all know there’s nothing like that for putting you to rights.”
So they talked to me, but although I drank Sally’s buttermilk cordial, I did not sleep well. My anxieties, it seemed, went too deep to be lightly thrust aside.
My suspicions had retu
rned. Did Carleton really love me? Did he really want me now that I had failed to give him a son? What a magnificent delusion he had created with the Roundheads when he had pretended he was one of them. He was as good an actor as Harriet was.
And Harriet? There was something about her. She was sleekly happy, although she was no longer so much with her son, and I did not believe this contentment came from motherhood. I remembered when she had come to England with Edwin and me. Was it the same satisfaction I had glimpsed on her face then?
What did it mean?
When I walked out in the gardens, my footsteps invariably took me towards the arbour. It was beginning to exert a fascination over me. Now that the trees were losing their leaves I could see it from my bedroom window and I made a habit of looking at it.
Once when I found my footsteps leading me that way, I heard my name being called and turning saw Chastity running after me.
“Don’t go there, mistress,” she said. “Don’t go nowhere near that place. ’Tis haunted.”
“Oh, nonsense, Chastity,” I said. “There’s no such thing as hauntings. Come with me and we’ll go together.”
She hesitated. She had always been particularly fond of me since the day when I had given her a pretty button.
“Come on. We’ll go and look. I’ll prove to you that there’s nothing to fear. It’s just four walls overgrown by shrubs because no one has cut them back for a long time.”
She put her hand in mine, but I was aware that she was trying to drag me back as we went along.
I opened the door and stepped inside. The place smelt a little musty. The dampness of the wet wood and the smell of leaves permeated it.
They were together here … Harriet and Edwin … My eyes went to the window where the fanatical eyes of Old Jethro had looked in. I could almost hear the shattering of the glass, the firing of the fatal shot … at closer range than the one which had been fired at me. I could picture Harriet, stunned, and yet collecting her wits quickly enough to run to tell Carleton what had happened.
Philippa Carr - [Daughters of England 05] Page 35