Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  Lady Hilbourne wrote a note next morning, addressed to the outside office. ‘I understand that you gave a promise to the Squire before he died that you would remain here on the manor and run the farms and estate. To this I agree. For the future, submit to me on paper, regular and detailed records of all business conducted in respect of it; and note that I am now mistress here and everything shall be exactly as I decree. For the rest, never seek to communicate with me in speech or in any other way, and never ever again come into my presence. As to Christine and Lyneth—their cousins are now joint guardians, under myself; their legitimate relatives, that is. I wish that you should gradually, with as little pain to them as possible, withdraw from familiarity with the children. I shall explain to them that I have had some grown-up disagreement and am no longer “friends” with you. That is all.’ But in fact it was not quite all. She added: ‘Supposing you should feel inclined to rake up your late father’s history and that of his “victim”, do not trouble yourself. I came upon it in the course of other investigations which I then shared with you and, intending at the time only to protect from further curiosity the names of those concerned, your own among them, I destroyed the evidence. The old woman who confirmed it was dying and is now in her grave. For myself, you may feel safe from any danger that I shall ever again soil my lips by referring to it. This is all I have, or ever shall have, to say to you.’ She signed her new initials: A.H.

  He replied very briefly. ‘I shall continue on the estate as my half-brother wished. I shall continue to offer to his children such protection and care as I can, as he also wished. That I shall ever do them harm, that I shall ever so much as mention your name to them, is outside the question; but I will not refuse them my friendship. Meanwhile, I take leave to remind you of his two last injunctions: First, that no effort be made to remove them from the Manor. Secondly, that they shall be so brought up that there is no danger of their ever in the future marrying, and so bringing down upon a new generation whatever curse is upon this branch of the Hilbournes.

  ‘For the rest, God knows your wish coincides with mine—that you and I need never for the rest of our lives, confront one another again.’

  ‘I take leave to remind you…’ Enough in itself to turn her mind to a black perversity.

  She tore the sheet across and threw it into the fire.

  Madame Devalle came to her in abject fear for her own future. ‘I suppose, Mees, if now you are the mistress here—’

  ‘I am mistress here. And my title is Lady Hilbourne. To you in future, it will be “my lady”.’

  ‘Oui, Madame—yes, milady. But now, then—you speak of the future… Sir Edouard m’a promis…Je n’ai pas aucune place, Mees—milady. Nowhere for to go.’

  ‘Who asks you to go? What Sir Edward promised will be carried out. But you are no longer the grand lady, Madame, issuing orders and undertaking nothing more. The cook, you tell me, has duly departed?’

  ‘Mais, encore, ma chère, cette excellente Menna—pourquoi—?’

  ‘Madame, understand—to you I am not “my dear”. And as to why?—there will be no more whys. That I speak, is sufficient. But the fact remains that by reason of her long employment here—in one capacity or another,’ said her ladyship with an unlovely curl of her lip, ‘she has more or less had the running of the house. Her replacement cook—will cook. Her place will be in the kitchen. All other duties will now fall to yourself—if you want to remain, you remain as housekeeper, responsible in everything to me. If Tomos and the rest of the staff wish to remain under the new circumstances, they may do so, as long as I am satisfied with them. Otherwise they are welcome to leave. As to Olwen, however—dismiss her at once. Pay her the very least that is owing to her and turn her out of the house. We will no longer harbour any spies of yours.’

  It did much for her sick heart to see the woman standing there humbly, her large, ugly face grey with anxiety. ‘You had better take a chair, Madame. I wish to get matters straight with you. As to the children, all will remain exactly as it has been, they will be entirely in my care.’ She spoke now and for the future always to Madame in French. ‘I shall move my rooms, however. Bethan may sleep in my present bedroom and attend to them during the night—reporting to me for any instructions. I shall choose a bedroom and boudoir for myself in the main part of the house. And for you—you may remove to quarters more suitable to a working housekeeper. And set yourself up an office, also, as things were before the household fell under the control of—the kitchen. Consult me when all is decided, and I’ll see if I approve the arrangements.’

  Madame, her gooseberry eyes a-goggle, her hand clapped to her mouth. ‘Such French, such fluency! All along, you have understood everything I said?’

  ‘All along. A pity you didn’t make yourself aware of it, Madame, isn’t it? You might not now find yourself reduced to the situation of a mere upper servant which when I first came, you would have assigned to me.’ She waved a cool hand in dismissal. ‘You will have your meals served to you in future in the housekeeper’s room. The children will take all theirs with me in the dining-room.’

  ‘In the housekeeper’s room? I am to eat alone, in the housekeeper’s room?’

  ‘Unless you prefer to be with company, in the servants’ hall?’

  Madame stood her ground a moment longer. ‘I think, my lady—that this is rather more than any woman should be asked to accept. If I am to be treated this way—I can hardly remain here.’

  ‘You are entirely welcome to depart,’ said the kind, sweet, pretty-spoken little Miss Tetterman of twenty-four hours ago.

  Olwen came cringing to her, weeping, creeping. ‘Miss—Madam—my lady—don’t send me away! I have nowhere to go, nowhere, nowhere.’

  Her ladyship sat now at the elegant desk in that drawing-room which with such exquisite taste Madame Devalle had furnished—for herself. ‘Presumably you have friends—turn to them to help you.’

  ‘Miss—my lady—I haven’t a friend in the world.’

  ‘No friends? Such a charming, happy-natured, appreciative young woman as yourself? If I thought you could ever speak less than the truth, I should hardly believe you.’

  ‘I’ve had a hard life, my lady. All hands seem against me—’

  ‘This hand is against you,’ said her ladyship, lifting up her own. ‘And for very good reasons. So be out of my sight: I care not two farthings where you go. But first—what is that paper in your pocket?’

  ‘My lady—?’ But she handed it over. Lady Hilbourne took the sealed envelope. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Madame wrote me a recommendation, Madame—’

  As a sneak and a spy? She tore the note to pieces. As to such attributes, I can write you an even better. Madame has only set you to work: it is I who have felt the results. You will take no recommendations from Aberdar Manor.’ She rang for Tomos. ‘The pony-trap at once. Get this girl into it and instruct Owain to set her down at the railway station and so we are done with her. I think no one is likely to miss her?’

  ‘Anybody can play at being respectful,’ Tomos had said to the staff, gossiping about the governess, newly-arrived. ‘I do it myself, when I must.’ Now he stood with suitably downcast eyes. ‘I believe she has very little money, m’lady, and no friends. Have I your permission to arrange for her at least somewhere to go?’

  ‘What do you care where she goes? Do you not know the part she has played here?—creeping and spying, listening at doors, tale-bearing…’

  He realised his head and his dark eyes, bright with his bright Welsh intelligence, looked back into hers. ‘Some people, m’lady, well, they seem to be born—not loveable. But the Squire—with your permission, m’lady—the Squire, he used to say that when we’ve done with charity and even with mercy, there still remains something he called compassion. He would say that compassion is to care for those whom one needn’t love nor even like; nor even approve of.’ As she sat silent, looking back at him, he ducked his head in a sort of bow and asked quietly: ‘Is it your
wish, my lady, that I should see that the girl is treated with—compassion?’

  If for a moment her own warm heart responded, now there were icy hands, always, to drag it down into cold depths of the malignity of that old anathema. Balked by the Squire’s death from the usual pattern of marital disaster, the curse turned itself inward upon her, the bitterness was of her own making. She said coldly: ‘No, it is not my wish. However, if you must be sentimental—very well.’ But as he took the wretched girl’s arm and pushed her towards the door, she called him back. She said, in the new hard voice that for the rest of her life she was to use with all but the children, ‘The rest may do as they please, and welcome to go if they will. But as to yourself, Tomos—do you go or stay?’

  ‘I’ll stay, my lady,’ said Tomos and for a moment lost something of his vaunted false subservience. He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I think you have need for me here.’

  The weeks passed, it was autumn. There came letters from Greatoaks Park, beseeching, imploring. The sick woman’s longing had become an obsession. Dearest Alys was rich now, mistress of a great house and estate, that was all understood; but did she not owe something still to those who for so long had been all her family? No stipulations should be made, nothing further demanded, if she would but bring the little girls with her to all the lightness and grace of this lovely place, so much better for them, surely, than the gloomy old manor house she had described? ‘Dear Alys—I am soon to die!’

  And after all, was she not mistress now, indeed, free to do as she pleased and with control over the children? The constant presence of one, unseen, unheard, uncommunicative except for brief, formal notes about business matters, hung nevertheless like a shadow increasingly oppressive over her sick and lonely heart… To escape—to leave this place for ever and lead her life with her darlings in the care of the dear old man, in the freedom and sunshine of that much loved home..! I need not move the children altogether from the Manor, she thought; if I seem only to be going for brief visits, if now and again I bring them back here—could the house then revenge itself upon me or on them? And anyway… A door opened carelessly, an injury more severe than at first appreciated… Am I to be kept prisoner here all my life, out of superstitious dread? Are the children—?

  She sent for them. ‘A plan, my pets! Aberdar is so sad and lonely now, without Papa. How would you like to come with me for a visit to Greatoaks?’

  A name to conjure with, familiar to them now through stories of her childhood in the vicarage close by, of her pupil, Charlotte, the girl that had ‘grown too large’…‘But could we take the dogs?’

  ‘And could we take Ivory and Ebony?’

  ‘Oh, yes, the dogs, of course. As to riding—’ Her heart shuddered within her; she felt fairly sure that all but the carriage horses would be unacceptable now in the stables there. ‘But there is a great lake with a boat on it—’

  ‘A boat!’

  ‘—and a little island in the middle where we can row out for picnics.’

  Ecstasy. But, ‘When could we come home?’

  ‘Well, as to that—we could see how long you wanted to stay.’

  ‘Only,’ said Christine, ‘we wouldn’t like to go away for too long, because of all the people here and especially Hil.’ And at mention of Hil, a question too oft-repeated: ‘Where’s Menna, Tetty?’

  ‘I’ve explained to you, Menna had to go back to her family in South Wales, her mother was old and ill.’

  ‘Christine remembers now that Menna told us she hadn’t got a mother any more. She died and that was why Menna came here to the village, and then later on she came to work at Aberdar. She did have a brother.’

  ‘Well her brother then, was ill: she had to go in such a hurry, we may not have got things right.’

  ‘And Olwen left. Did she go in a hurry too?’

  ‘I didn’t like Olwen and when I became the mistress here, I sent her away.’

  ‘You didn’t send Menna away, Tetty, did you? That wasn’t why you and Hil weren’t friends any more? Hil loved Menna.’

  ‘I’ve explained it all a dozen times. Now, no more about it, please.’

  ‘Well, it’s only—we’ve been thinking—’

  ‘Think about something else then. Do you want to go and stay at Greatoaks, and have picnics on the lake? And there’s a dovecote there, the doves come and sit on your hands and peck away at the grain…’

  And yet her heart smote her—that corner of her heart that was left still under her own control. Am I doing this for my own sake, to get away from—him? Or for theirs? She knew that it was dangerous in the extreme, that even so half-and-half a plan went contrary to all their father’s instructions as to their future; that by no foolish pretences would They be deceived—the unknown They who nevertheless held over them all, those threats from the Other World. Do I dare? she thought. Do I dare?

  A note was delivered on the following morning, addressed to her in that well-known, once so much loved hand. ‘I understand that you propose taking the children away, at least for a protracted stay. I beg you, do not remove them from this house. I remind you of what happened to their father when he went so far as even to contemplate such a step. By now you must believe in the threat to them, if they leave Aberdar.’

  She left the note unanswered, immediately put aside all doubts: went ahead with preparations, wrote to Lady Arden that she would stay at least through the winter, see the old man over the days of sorrow that, alas, must come. Would arrange for care and companionship for him during such times as she must, with the children, return to Aberdar, dividing their time perhaps between the two homes, at least for the rest of Sir Charles’s life. To her staff, she repeated only that she was leaving with the two little girls and did not know when they would return. That message, she was aware, would soon filter through to the house on the hill.

  On the night before their planned departure, Bethan, dragging two screaming children, interrupted her sleep. ‘Oh, m’lady, a fire! A fire in the nursery, the chair tumbled into the grate, the wood caught alight, all the room in flames..!’

  Bells ringing, feet scurrying, Tomos in control: a small conflagration, soon subdued. But the little girls wept and clung, and in the morning were heavy-headed and feverish. Overtired, over-excited… On the following day there was no improvement; on the third, she sent for the doctor. Nothing ailed them, no sort of diagnosis seemed forthcoming. ‘They are Hilbournes, my lady, the whole family seems prone to these mysterious maladies… Nothing for it but to wait patiently for their recovery.’ But the days passed and they tossed on their white bed, dull-eyed and listless, refusing food, rapidly losing weight.

  Tomos came at last and stood before her, shifting uneasily, as she sat alone in the library, staring mindlessly ahead of her. ‘M’lady—sorry to disturb you. But we’ve been saying—saying in the hall, m’lady… The children… This is a strange old house; it seems like the house doesn’t want them to go, the same as it wouldn’t let the Squire take them, either. If—if you was to cancel the visit, my lady…’

  The servants’ hall, indeed! She knew very well from whence, so carefully rehearsed even to the deliberate stumbling, the message came. ‘Oh, nonsense!’ she said. ‘Are the children to be kept prisoners at Aberdar by a lot of ignorant gossip among the staff? I’m surprised at you, Tomos. They were over-excited, caught chills, running about bare-foot, in their nightgowns, unattended in all the commotion. They’ll be well in a couple of days and I shall then use my own judgment—and nobody else’s—in taking them away as I’d decided.’ And you may repeat that message to the one who instructed you, she said in her mind, and let him know once and for all, that in all things I shall resist him implacably. ‘Very well, Tomos. That will do.’

  ‘Yes, m’lady,’ said Tomos but he did not immediately turn and go; only stood for a moment looking with his bright eyes into her face. He said at last: ‘If your ladyship will excuse me—is there a slight mark—’ his fingers indicated a spot on his own forehead—‘ov
er your ladyship’s eye?’

  ‘A mark?’ She turned to the mirror which hung between two windows and, as the door closed quietly behind him, bent forward and peered into it.

  And thought: There is no mark—no specific mark. Is this what he intended me to see?

  The ravaged face, staring, glaring back at her. Sickly pale, and yet with a strange dark look as though a cobweb obscured the soft sheen of ivory: thin, eyes feverishly bright. The great scar gleaming bone-white across the hollow of the cheek. A face that had been filled with kindness and love, with nothing in it now but anger and bitterness. Is this me? Can this be me?—that girl that I was so short a time ago? Filled with hate, filled with cruelty, with rage and resentment—at the mercy of… At the mercy of… And she tore herself from the torment of that face looking out at her, flung herself down on her knees, crouched there, helplessly weeping. What forces are these that work within me, that will not let me be? In her mind she knew that his betrayal had been contrary to his own heart’s desire: had been on his part also, a sacrifice, to put out of his reach once and for all, the possibility of bringing into the world more children to suffer… To suffer as she suffered now. What forces compel me? she had asked herself—and knew that they lay in that malediction that had been pronounced so long ago upon the family of the Hilbournes of Aberdar. Why pretend?—why pretend no such thing exists? I know that it exists. I dreamed… I dreamed… But force her mind as she would, she could not recall the dream. Could not recall those words cried out in wild vengeance for that young man robbed of his bride-to-be. Never again… Never again…

  She rose at last and returned to the looking-glass and faced herself once more; and even as she gazed, the tears seemed to dry on her ravaged cheeks, the look of piteous helplessness to change back to one of bitter resolution. She moved away sharply, rang the bell, said to the manservant, attending, ‘See to the fire, Rod, what are you about? This room is like an icehouse.’