Brides of Aberdar

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Oh, Tetty! You saw them?’

  ‘A dream. I thought it was a dream. I’d been asleep and dreaming. It had all been—such a terrible day, so strange and terrible, I thought I’d fallen asleep—or fainted. But I forgot what the dreams had been about.’

  ‘I believe that you saw them, Tetty. Lenora and—’

  ‘—and Diccon,’ said Lady Hilbourne.

  ‘Oh, God, Tetty—yes! You did see them. She does call him Diccon.’

  ‘The Squire,’ said Hil, and he also could hardly control his voice. ‘He dreamed… In that same room, he dreamed and when he awoke, he too thought that the spilt wine was blood.’

  ‘It was the night he died,’ said Tetty. ‘The night I myself married into the Hilbourne family. I dreamed…’ And she seemed almost to dream again. ‘She cried out… She held him in her arms, he was lying across her knees and the blood stained all her dress and dripped down… Dripped down… He had red ribbons on his shoes and the blood dripped down on to the red ribbons… And she lifted up her head and cried out—howled like a dog, lifting up her head and howling it out like a dog! A curse, she said, a curse! An anathema. Never in all the years to come, should there be…’

  ‘Never again,’ said Christine, ‘should there be in the Manor of Aberdar, a happy bride.’

  Hil reached for the glass of Madeira and put it into Lady Hilbourne’s hand. ‘Drink it,’ he said. ‘It has been a bad moment for you.’ He returned to his seat. ‘They appear to Lyneth,’ he said. ‘Their ghosts—Lenora and her brother, Richard. It was her Anathema. And it took many forms—no wonder we could never exactly decide its terms. Young girls died—young men died: little children died—girls seemed to go insane, lived on but in seclusion, communing with people who were not there. Not all of them of the Hilbourne blood—but having all of them one thing in common: that suffering came often through the suffering of others, to Hilbourne daughters when they married—and to other men’s daughters who married into this family, the sad, mad brides of Aberdar.’

  ‘Is it strange,’ said Christine, ‘that they have never appeared visibly to haunt Tetty? She was a Hilbourne bride.’

  ‘An hour of marriage,’ said Tetty. ‘And God knows, unseen they have haunted me. Could you ever say that I had been a happy Hilbourne wife?’

  ‘And now,’ said Christine, ‘Lyneth is a bride of Aberdar. And they are with her night and day—the ghosts. You have heard her in her room at night, Tetty—talking to them. As our mother talked to them: and all the mothers and grandmothers, back and back for two hundred and fifty years.’

  Tetty said, her hand to her mouth, ‘They won’t let her marry Lawrence?’

  ‘Oh, yes, she must marry—they all marry, don’t they? There must be succeeding generations to be haunted. But once married—’

  ‘She’ll leave the house,’ said Tetty, quickly. ‘She’ll be at Plas Dar.’ But she added, ‘Can they follow her there?’

  ‘No, they can’t haunt outside the Manor. But you can ask yourself,’ said Christine, ‘whether the Manor will let her go.’ She went to the window and stood staring out across the twisted chimneys of Aberdar far below, to the hillside across the stream where the chimney-pots of Plas Dar might be glimpsed among the trees. ‘So you see,’ she said, ‘she is doomed. Lyneth is doomed.’

  ‘I will never agree to this plan of yours, Christine,’ said Hil, violently. ‘Never, ever. It is monstrous. I will never agree to it. Never.’

  ‘That’s why I have brought Tetty here,’ said Christine. ‘To—to persuade you—to agree to it.’ To her stepmother she said, returning to where she had so quietly stood before, still gripping her hands tightly together, ‘Doomed—what a word to apply to Lyn, so gay and happy and sweet, so spoilt and petted, so totally unfitted to meet trouble and danger! But for me… Well, I won’t apply so huge a word to myself but in my own small way, I also am doomed—never to be happy again, full of hope and joy.’ She said, quickly: ‘I may have said bitter things to you, Tetty, sometimes, but I blame no one for this: not really. I bestow my idiotic love where it isn’t wanted and idiotically can’t fall out of love and I know that I never shall. It’s my fault for loving with this kind of love—I’ve written my own doom for myself. So…’ She took a deep breath. ‘So, since Lyneth has the capacity to be happy and I know that I never shall be again—why should I not simply change with her and be unhappy in her place?’

  Now indeed Lady Hilbourne started up out of her chair. ‘For God’s sake, Christine—offer yourself to these monsters?’

  ‘They’re only monsters if they’re thwarted, Tetty. I know this from Lyn. They want to force her into a sort of love for Richard: but she fights back, she’s in love with Lawrence, I wouldn’t fight back. What have I to lose?’

  ‘Oh, my darling child! My heart of gold!’

  ‘You couldn’t agree to it?’ said Hil, quickly. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Oh, dear God! Never!’

  ‘He already has a—feeling—for me,’ said Christine, disregarding them. ‘He saw me, in fact, before he saw Lyn: you remember that evening, Tetty, when I told you two guests had arrived whom I didn’t recognise? And he supposed that I was Lyn—the girl he had come to haunt. With our being so much alike—’ She said bitterly: ‘He would not be the first young man to become confused as to which of us he really loved.’

  ‘Oh, my poor, darling child—!’

  ‘And something very strange has happened,’ said Christine, going resolutely on. ‘Richard is dead, he’s a ghost, and a ghost has no heart to love with. Lenora is the same—and has no heart to love with; only revenge and hate. But Richard died for love, he killed himself for love of a girl called Isabella—and Lyn and I are living images of that girl he died for. So that, in his own strange way, he has love in his heart—and so he may have it for me as well as for Lyn.’

  Hil said quickly: ‘But Lyn is the bride.’

  ‘I have thought it all out,’ said Christine. ‘I haven’t forgotten that.’ Her stepmother had sat down again in her chair and she came and crouched at her knee, taking Tetty’s cold hand in her own trembling hand. ‘Gradually, gradually, I must take Lyn’s place. I must be with her all the time, close to her, so that Richard becomes a little confused between us. And at first sometimes, and at last always, Tetty, we must make the exchange—you must talk to me as though I were Lyneth, she and I must take over from each other, she must call me by her own name, we must change rooms and clothes, I must talk with Lawrence as though I were Lyn… That will be the hardest part,’ she said, sadly, ‘and I daresay for him too. To seem to love me.’

  ‘On the contrary, my dearest, may he not be the one to fall in love with you—again.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Christine, ‘that I should do such a thing as to take him away from my sister. But he wouldn’t anyway; Lawrence is like me, once he loves, he loves for ever. And don’t talk too much about my heart of gold! It may seem all very fine and noble to be doing this for my sister; but I think, at bottom, I’m doing it for love of Lawrence.’ She smiled, almost—grimly. ‘For his sake—so that someone else may be happy with the one I love.’

  Hil waited until she had finished. Then he said: ‘It is utterly out of the question. I shall not allow it. I have only to go into the house—where Lyn is, they are present, listening. I shall speak out this plan of yours, and that will be the end of it.’

  ‘Tetty?’

  Lady Hilbourne wrenched her own hand from the pleading grasp. ‘Oh, Christine—no! You have made sacrifices enough. This time I shall not give way.’

  ‘Well, then… I’ve come not unprepared for this. So—now I will force your hand. Hil—you were faced once with something so—so terrible, so horrible, that since that day, surely, you haven’t been able to look at your own face in a mirror without a sort of—loathing.’ At Lady Hilbourne’s cry of repudiation, she leaped to her feet, leaned over her suddenly, cold with a fierce determination. ‘Be silent, Tetty! Be silent!’ To Hil, she said: ‘I’ve been tal
king—asking: no one realising how much they were telling me. But I have put it all together, all these scraps of talk; and I know. You sent away poor, innocent, darling Menna, not able to give her even a sign of what your reason could be; not daring even to dismiss her with a word of love. To this day, she lives breaking her heart over your rejection, over your lack of any sort of explanation. And Hil, Menna is ill, perhaps she’s dying—what if I were to tell you something so that she might at least spend her last days with her heart at peace?’ He stood speechless, confounded. She clutched at her opportunity. ‘Silence shall mean consent, Hil. If I make this possible—you in response will make my plan possible.’ And giving him no chance to speak, she said: ‘There was a—mistake. A terrible mistake. Papers were mixed up, wrong entries, I don’t know. It was nobody’s fault. But—you can have proof of it, assurance of it; I was told of it an hour ago, in perfect innocence… Long ago, Menna had a child. But, Hil, your mother died with your birth. Menna was nothing more to you than you had always believed her to be. Her child was a girl.’

  CHAPTER 18

  FOR A LONG, LONG time they were silent, the three of them: Hil sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands covering his face, wet with his tears. Tetty sat trembling, watching him; rose and went over to him at last, knelt at his feet. He raised his head, incredulous at finding her kneeling there. She said, her voice low and shaking: ‘Oh, Hil!—all these sad years, what have I done to you?’

  He made no direct answer, said, shuddering still, ‘I could have known all this time. But how could I bring myself to go among them, in the house, in the village, in that other village where the midwife lived—asking questions, reminding them, opening out the truth—?’

  ‘I don’t ask your forgiveness, how can I? But—it wasn’t I who spoke, something, some hideous force inside me—’

  ‘Never mind now, Tetty,’ said Christine. She came over and caught her step-mother by the hand. ‘Get up, Tetty, leave Hil now; we’ll go.’

  Hil stood up. ‘Christine, what have I done, letting myself be persuaded into this plan of yours? Whatever it has meant to me—’

  Tetty stood with Christine in the doorway. ‘As to that, Hil, don’t break your heart. You may give your consent—but she is safe, for I never will. The time of playing favourites is gone: if either must suffer…’ She trembled but she said steadily, ‘It mustn’t be Christine. She can’t manage—not one moment of this terrible plan, without my help and I’ll never give it, I’ll speak it out in front of the ghosts as you threatened to do. I will never agree to it.’

  He assisted them into the saddles, lifted up the little dogs; with hardly a word more, they rode away down the steep path. Tetty said at last, ‘Do you think he will ever forgive me? It was a mistake on my part that has ruined his life.’

  ‘When he gets over the shock, yes,’ said Christine, ‘I daresay he may forgive. A mistake, he must forgive.’ She looked steadily ahead of her. ‘What he could never forgive, Tetty,’ she said, ‘would be that it had been a deliberate lie.’

  ‘I will do anything you ask me,’ said Tetty into the long, cold, terrifying silence that followed, ‘to help you in your plan, Christine.’

  Lyneth rebelled: fought against it, wept, utterly refused to consider such a thing: wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t discuss it, wouldn’t even entertain such an idea, absolutely no, no, NO!

  And yet, thought Lyneth, and yet—it was true that poor darling Christine would never be able to be happy because she would always love Lawrence; and after all, if you couldn’t have the person you loved, Richard was so terribly handsome and delightful—if you didn’t love, well, if it were no use your loving—somebody else. She herself loved Lawrence and could have him, so that was different. And of course the ghosts were cruel and frightening with her, but they wouldn’t be with Christine, because Christine wouldn’t be rebelling against their wishes. When first she, Lyneth, had known them, it had been wonderful, they’d had such fun together, such a lovely conspiracy against all the living people, such jokes. It was only when the jokes were turned against her, to make her fall out of love with Lawrence… But they wouldn’t turn against Christine.

  She talked at last, with desperate earnestness, to Hil, riding with him on his rounds of the manor lands; talked with Christine; talked with Tetty: was persuaded, fell to planning, grew in a sort of innocent eagerness whose roots were deep in the ingrained selfishness of a heart too long ever-indulged. It must all be minutely and elaborately thought out: one slip and how dangerous could be this terrible game!

  Positively and absolutely, the girls must exchange identities—at least until the fish had been securely hooked; and to disguise themselves was not simply a matter of exchanging pink and blue—the lockets, coral and turquoise, that she had given them, darling Tetty, at that wonderful Christmas party long ago!—that happy evening when nevertheless Hil had said to her that one day she would betray them—and, betraying, destroy them all. Not a matter nowadays of colours to differentiate. There was between them no smallest mark of difference, but servants, long used to them, had no difficulty in catching a tone or a turn of phrase or only a nuance in their approach to daily life, and recognise one from the other; and now even the servants must be deceived.

  It was decided at last that Lyneth must become ‘ill’, and so keep to her room—one of those odd Hilbourne malaises, said the doctor, that seemed to attack the family, impossible of exact diagnosis; and indeed, pale and thin after the long wearing weeks of her subjection to the ghosts, it was not difficult to suppose her very unwell. Nor need she now visit Plas Dar, to the further unedification of her future mother-in-law; in a new hope of happiness in her marriage, she must ingratiate herself again in that quarter, and it was impossible while Lenora and Richard prodded and teased her.

  Lady Jones received the news with mingled anxiety and relief. ‘I have not quite got over her behaviour when she was last here, my dear,’ she said to Lawrence. ‘Perhaps it will be a good thing to have a few days for us both to recover ourselves. On the other hand, Lawrence, dear, she does seem very young to be so—so nervous and highly strung, and so easily fall ill. Her mother was so much the same, and her health… The family don’t make old bones, my dear, it isn’t promising when you think of such a stock for your children…’

  Lawrence, advised by the Manor, agreed that it might be politic to absent himself for a short while from home, on a round of visits to the friends of his rapidly closing bachelor days.

  So Lyneth lay languidly a-bed and Christine, apparently fearless of possible infection, was with her by day and slept on a couch at the foot of her bed by night; and for a few nights shivered and shook and gradually got used to the cold and the unease in the room and felt it less. As Lyneth had been, so it seemed was she, from the experience of many generations of family haunting, conditioned, as it were, to accept the ghosts; and gradually, gradually—faint, faint outlines growing clearer, faint, faint voices seen and heard as through a mist, through heavy veiling—becoming firmer, becoming more audible, becoming—real. It is happening, she thought to herself and her heart thrilled with terror at the growing knowledge of what she had condemned herself to. The voices came across to her, Lenora’s beautiful deep velvet voice and Richard’s, so tender and full of laughter: so sweet to the ear. But underneath, she thought they are cruel, they’re bent on mischief, they come here only to break our hearts: all this is a charm to win us over—and so break our hearts. And she wondered what release there would be for her at last—how soon the end would come. Not for a long time, not till the endless years had worn her down? For what was to destroy her? She had no husband to pine for, no babe to die with its birth, no worldly suffering to fear. If they should stick to the letter of their law, should abide too strictly to the rules of the anathema…? An unhappy bride, they had sworn, and she would not, after all, be a bride.

  But with this generation, Lyneth now suggested, the situation had subtly shifted, for the first time the marauding ghost-love
r was himself in love. If Christine could attract that love to herself—that chill, intangible, terrifying love—would they, please God! be satisfied with that?—and let them go, those two who in all the world were most dear to her. No thought that once more Lyneth was having her way and everyone around them as usual abetting her in it, ever entered the loving and generous heart. But she could not pretend to herself that she was anything but deeply afraid.

  The ghosts were not pleased by the new arrangement. ‘She can’t hear us; but how can you speak freely, Lyneth? What joy can we have in our being together?’ Not knowing as yet that Christine could now hear them speak, they were aware that she could hear Lyn’s voice replying to them. To leave them free to express themselves, Christine curled up on the day-bed and pretended to sleep.

  For the moment, Lyneth must dissemble, pretend to be a little cooler in her devotion to Lawrence; in no way failing in her intention to marry him (Lenora was adamant as to that) but more warm towards Richard. It would make them feel warmer towards her, warmer towards Christine—that was what mattered—when Christine came to take her place. And with Lawrence away, and no dangerous visits to Plas Dar on the horizon, it was easier—moreover, when they were not threatening, how delightful in fact they could be! To others, the very thought of such spirits was strange and frightening, only because they were not of this world; but to her, as such, they held no terrors: she accepted them without reserve.

  Lenora suggested: ‘Is she put here to spy on you, Lyneth?’

  That other sweet face with its look of sorrow, of courage, of goodness: the blue eyes, the silkily golden hair…‘I think she is not one to lend herself to spying,’ said Richard.