‘What do you mean, Christine? What do you mean?’
‘It is because we are so much like his first love, Isabella—the girl he died for. It has awakened a heart in him, a sort of living, human heart, in the ghost of the dead. And this terrifying heart of his, he has lost—not to Lyneth but to me.’
‘Oh, dear God—!’
‘Their minds are very strange,’ said Christine, ignoring the involuntary outcry of agony. ‘Their minds and such hearts as they have are very strange. How should they not be? They are the minds and hearts of the people of Elizabeth’s day, how could they be anything like our own? Brief periods, at long intervals, among living people, they who are dead—knowing nothing of anything outside that old manor house.’ She mused over it. ‘If ghosts could be said to be mad, I should say they were mad.’
Her step-mother buried her face in her gloved hands. ‘And you are at their mercy, my poor darling child.
‘Better I than Lyneth, Tetty.’ She said deliberately: ‘Don’t you agree?’ And after a little while, into the chilling silence: ‘At least you are too honest to deny it. And so I must do what I now intend to do. Remain with them as “Lyneth”—never make the exchange back. Give myself over entirely to their—mercy.’ She said again and now it was not a question: ‘Better I than Lyneth, after all.’
The habit was upon Lady Hilbourne nowadays to sit stiffly erect, to set a guard upon her eyes and tongue; but now she crouched back in the dark corner and could hardly keep away her tears. ‘Better I than Lyneth—don’t you agree?’ And she was back to that first hour of her arrival, the little heart-weary, sparrow-governess, in her neat brown skirt and jacket with the bold touch of black in the trimming of her bonnet, that even the intimidating Madame Devalle had admitted to having some chic: standing before the great front door, swearing to herself that this gloomy old house should not hold her for long… And the small darting figure appearing from behind the pillar of the portico, clasping her about the waist so that the hooped skirt swung out behind her: Lyneth with her golden hair and limpid blue eyes, making her winsome way into the sorrowful heart. True, Christine had followed, but it had been Lyn who had come first and who in the other sense, from that day on had always come first. I am guilty, said the stricken woman to herself: I am guilty. And now—‘Better that I should suffer, than that Lyneth should?’ She said, fighting for release from her own sick self-knowledge, ‘How can you give yourself over to them, Christine, as you call it? All they want is the bride and for her to marry and continue the next generation…’
‘Lyn may do that,’ said Christine. ‘Calling herself by my name. She can escape to Plas Dar and there be safe from them. And I must ask them to release me from my brideship—believing me to be Lyneth: and offer myself to Richard—who loves me—as his bride.’ She hurried over it, skated over the words. ‘So there need be no break in the continuity of their hauntings; or so they will suppose until I die and they must go back to their Other World and discover—too late to do us any more harm—how they’ve been tricked.’
Her step-mother was not listening to her. ‘Offer yourself as a bride to that—that dead thing, that ghost? How can a ghost have a—have a bride?’
‘God knows,’ said Christine. ‘That I have yet to find out.’
That day, when first she had arrived, when these two young creatures whom in all the world alone she loved—how strangely he had looked at her, Hil, with that look of fear in his bright blue glance. And, ‘One day you will destroy us all,’ he had said to her; and that day was come. It was seldom now that she gave a thought to the great scar that ran down one side of her face. Now she put up her hand to it. She thought: It’s as if it ran down across my soul. Aloud she said: ‘You make me feel, Christine, as though this great scar of mine disfigured not only my face but my soul as well.’
‘Oh, Tetty—!’ She moved across the smooth black leather of the upholstery and put her arms about her step-mother, kissing the scarred cheek, laying her silky head against the shaking shoulder. ‘Forgive me, darling! I don’t mean the harsh things that I say. I’m frightened and sometimes my heart seems to be breaking and I sink with terror at the thought of what must be done. But it must be done: and to force you to help me, I use what weapons I must, cruel though they may be.’
‘And yet you’re right in what you say. You ask me to choose between yourself and Lyn—’
‘It’s for myself as well—God knows what their vengeance might be! For myself as well as for Lyn; and for Lawrence. Just—play my terrible game with me, Tetty, and all my words are unsaid: just help me through!’
Now, without prompting, her ladyship, taking only Lyneth with her, went up to the house on the hill. ‘I come again to ask your advice.’ She said stiffly, ‘I think that you resent the fact that upon the last occasion I was here, I gave a sort of promise, and seem not to have lived up to it. Christine has explained to you—’
‘—that she blackmailed you into acquiescence. By what means—?’
‘If you were to know that, she would have no hold over me! She saw her mistake and said, looking frightened, ‘I mean only that if everyone were to know—’
His face grew dark. ‘A secret? From me? About Menna’s child?’ And he swore as he seldom did. ‘Sweet Jesus—!’
Lyneth stood un-listening by the lattice window. ‘What is it, Tetty, what’s happening? You do things behind my back, all of you. All the plot about our deceiving the ghosts… And now there’s to be more to it?’
Hil steadied himself, went over to her, brought her back to the centre of the room where once again Lady Hilbourne sat stiff-backed in the tall wooden chair, hands gripped together, trembling, the great scar gleaming blue-white against the ivory white of her blanched skin. She said: ‘I couldn’t be alone, Lyn, telling you this. Christine has given herself over to him—to the ghost, Richard. She has promised to belong to him entirely. In your name, Lyneth, she has promised to give up the marriage with Lawrence. She—’ She broke off, tears filled her eyes, she held out her hand. ‘Come to me, Lyn, please, and put your hand into mine. To help me to explain to you.’ And clinging tightly to the small hand, she told her. ‘They are never to know of the substitution. She is to remain “Lyneth” forever. She—she calls herself his bride.’
‘It is an abomination,’ said Hil as he had said before, to Christine.
‘It is done,’ said Lady Hilbourne. ‘She has spoken to him, she has made it impossible to retreat from it. And for the rest—who knows about the exchange? You know, Lyneth, and I know and Hil knows. Nobody else. Everyone else believes already that you are Christine; and as Christine you are to remain for the rest of your life.’
What in its simpler form had seemed such an enormity, dwindled before the single purpose now almost always uppermost in that self-centred little heart. ‘But, Tetty—it’s not Christine that Lawrence is going to marry.’
Hil stood watching them: would not speak, would contribute nothing. An abomination! Tetty said: ‘It was Christine whom Lawrence first loved.’
‘You mean he’d turn back to me—believing me to be Christine?’
‘He would never do that,’ said Hil with a sort of faint rising of hope, though what in God’s name he might hope for, he hardly knew. ‘His heart is like hers—once given, given for ever. He will always love Lyneth.’
‘Well, but, Hil—he wouldn’t have to change. After all, I am Lyneth.’
He paced away across the room, came back. ‘It’s of an extraordinary subtlety. Lawrence is in love with Lyneth. Why should he cease to love her because she wears another name?’
‘He would think he was being disloyal?’ suggested Lyneth, doubtfully.
‘And yet…’ said Tetty, ‘remember that all his life, till a few months ago, he loved Christine. But to let him suppose himself falling in love with her again—I think we dare not risk it.’
‘You dare not do it!’ said Hil. ‘It would be monstrous. To confuse him, to play about with his love and his loyalties—no one has
a right to do such a thing to a man.’ He decided: ‘If it has to be done, God help you all!—then he must be told.’
‘Well—I had thought of that,’ said Lady Hilbourne. ‘But heaven knows how it could ever be explained to him? We have learned to accept the situation, the curse upon the house, the hauntings… But Lawrence—?’
Back to what really mattered. ‘You mean I’m to go on always pretending to be Christine and Lawrence would have to pretend to jilt me and go back to Christine?’
‘You must be the one to do any jilting, Lyn. After all, you are supposed to be in fact where Christine is—shut up most of your time in the west wing, communing with people that no one else can see or hear. Nobody has forgotten the dinner-party or your odd behaviour there, or your objections to going to live at Plas Dar. Lawrence has been abroad quite a long time now. By the time he returns, you are widely known to have become more and more a recluse—your sister will see to that—and so to have turned away from the marriage. It will be perfectly natural if he appears to mend his broken heart with his first love. There’ll be no disloyalty, the supposed Lyneth will agree, will encourage it. She’s become ill as her mother was before her. In due course, as “Christine”, you will marry him and simply move into your life with him.’
‘So continuing the line for further tragedies,’ said Hil.
‘You’ve admitted yourself, Hil, that these girls could not have been locked away all their lives from society, prevented from a natural way of life.’
‘Besides,’ suggested Lyn shrewdly, ‘when our line through all this self-sacrifice had died out—our cousin Arthur or his heirs would simply move in and start it all over again. The curse is upon the brides of Aberdar.’ She asked: ‘Has it affected all girls married from this house? The younger sisters and so on?’
They thought back through their researches, made so long ago. ‘I think,’ said Tetty, ‘it was to the heiress that the worst came, or to the girl who married the heir. They couldn’t haunt more than one girl at a time?—or they’d have haunted Christine as well as Lyneth. I think just—no bride was happy here, but that’s as far as it went.’
‘So if they’re haunting Christine now—’
‘—you are safe from them. And when you marry you can leave Aberdar altogether—’
‘You needn’t think I’m going to spend my life in that horrid Plas Dar. The old woman doesn’t want me there—’
‘She will if she believes that you are Christine,’ said Tetty.
‘Well, anyway, I’m not going there. If the ghosts are satisfied with haunting Christine, then Lawrence and I can safely live at Aberdar.’
‘Very well then,’ began Tetty easily, but Hil interrupted her. ‘You are not living at Aberdar, Lyneth: not you and Lawrence! I beg your ladyship’s pardon, but she shall not bring him here to live under her sister’s nose and break her heart even further: day after day, a witness to their happiness. Dear God!—has she not given enough, hasn’t she sacrificed enough?’ In a mounting rage, he turned upon them both. ‘You are a monster of selfishness, Lyneth, I loved you so much but I tell you now that you are a pitiless monster. And not the only one: for she was the one, her precious ladyship here, she was the one, who taught you to be so. I have gone all this way with these ghastly plans of yours, because Christine, in her selflessness, forced me to agree. But I’ll go no further. Before ever Lawrence moves into Aberdar Manor, a happy thriving bridegroom at all this bitter, bitter cost to Christine—I shall take steps to prevent it. I shall come to the house and where the ghosts can overhear me, I shall speak out everything I know; and God help you all then!’
The old bitter anger flared up in remonstrance, the broken pride. ‘Don’t you dare to defy me, Hil! Don’t you dare to enter my house, I shall not permit it…!’
‘Very well, then,’ he said, ‘I won’t enter it. I will stand outside, instead, and declare to the world the truth of that “mistake” of yours, my lady—that sweet, pretty, fragrant idea dreamed up in your ladylike mind, your pretty idea of a revenge: revenge upon guilty—if you will—and innocent alike.’ He stood over her, his fist clenched as though to restrain himself from lifting it against her. ‘Go now! This house at least is mine and I wish for you to be in it, no more than you want me in yours. Go—and take your apt pupil with you! But when your decision is made, send me word of it, because till I know that she and Lawrence shall live—where I care not, but not at Aberdar—then this double threat hangs over you. I will have Christine no further betrayed.’ Lyneth cried out to him, but only to bring upon herself the storm of his bitter rage, bursting its bounds at last. ‘Don’t speak to me, Lyneth, I want no more of you. Get up, go, go with her!—you were sweet once, as she was herself: but she turned away from that in the savagery of her pride, and she has made you what you are. You are two of a kind. But let either of you make one move that will cause Christine an iota more of pain than already she’s taken on herself for your sake—for your sake, selfish, unfeeling, ungrateful little beast that you are…!’ He broke off. He said wearily to Tetty: ‘Why do I rail at the wretched girl? It is all your fault.’
She stood before him, almost physically reeling under the hail of words. She said: ‘Long ago, you told me that you could see into the future; you told me that one day I should destroy you all.’
‘I still see into the future,’ he said. ‘And you have not done with us yet.’
CHAPTER 20
HER LADYSHIP ORDERED OUT the carriage and drove over, unaccompanied to Plas Dar. Lady Jones received her cagily but the purpose of the visit seemed after all to be only a civil offer to act as courier, in carrying messages—gift packages, perhaps, to her absent son? ‘I am taking my girls to spend Christmas abroad. They have neither of them seemed recently in the best of health.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Lady Jones a little too eagerly. ‘I have heard that dear Lyneth—’
‘—and I think that a spell of sunshine would do them both good.’
And do you no harm, thought Lady Jones, eyeing her guest curiously. You’re grim enough in the ordinary way, and sallow as—as… What could one think of that was sallow? Like a dried root of ginger, Sir Thomas used to say. ‘I always think of her as a root of dried ginger dressed up in an ugly brown frock.’ But now positively she was a death’s head, so grim and grey. ‘And I hope you also will benefit: you do not look well.’
‘We can all do with a change, I daresay. Aberdar is a cold house in the winter, situated so low. I had thought of Rapallo, on the Italian coast…’
‘I fear that you will not find dear Lawrence at Rapallo,’ said his mama, a trifle loftily. ‘Lawrence is spending his Christmas doing the sights of Rome.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Lady Hilbourne, sweetly. ‘If a certain young lady is spending her Christmas in Rapallo?’
For it had been decided that the final transition should be made away from home. Lawrence must be given time to absorb the shock of the curious revelations that would have to be made to him—not a word about the anathema, just vague explanations which his guileless heart would accept without too much questioning, considering the source—the three trusted sources—from which they came.
Lady Hilbourne would hint at symptoms in Christine of that strange malady which had afflicted her mother… This odd whim that she should change places with her sister, adopt her name… An over-anxiety, perhaps, on their part, to deny her nothing; and after all, what need it matter to anyone outside their four selves, if Christine became Lyneth and Lyneth called herself Christine? Everyone was aware of that old boy-and-girl love affair: it would be easily accepted that under the circumstances, he had turned back to where his heart had always belonged… And Christine herself would suggest to him in the listless way nowadays only too real in her, that it would help her if he would accept this absurd, this irrational notion of hers; she was ill, at the mercy of these inexplicable impulses—but he must forgive her and would never, ever reveal to anyone what between the four of them, they had agreed?
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br /> And Lyneth would be sweet and cajoling as only she could be: anything to comfort their poor, darling ailing Christine and anyway how splendidly such an exchange would suit herself, Lyneth, and him! His mother had always cared most for Christine, had been distressed for her, when he had altered his allegiance; as Christine, she would bring to their marriage no back-log of rebellious impertinence; and if he would agree to play their game, to indulge poor Christine in her fantasies and keep it all a secret now and forever—she on her part would undertake to accept the broom-cupboard and the re-conditioned gun-room, and make herself happy and acceptable in their life together at Plas Dar…
Word would be allowed to trickle back home that, under the influence of the sunny skies of Italy, the old romance had blossomed again, the temporary infatuation was dead. But, alas! poor dear little Lyneth seemed not well at all—growing ever more difficult and odd, her ladyship would confide to Tante Louise, knowing that the sad tidings would soon emerge in bursts of volubility. In hopes of improvement, they were extending their sojourn abroad for another week or two…
Lawrence, ever sweet and simple, was putty in their hands.
And yet another week or two. It was February before, late in the evening, tired-out after the long journey, Christine went up, pale and drawn, to the room that had once been Lyneth’s—and found him awaiting her there. Richard alone: Lenora was not with him. He said coldly: ‘You promised us that if we agreed to your going, you would not stay long away.’
‘I couldn’t come. It was not in my power.’ She took off her cloak wearily and threw it across a chair. ‘But I am here now. And what I undertook to promote before you would let me go—is done. It is arranged that my sister—that Christine—shall be married early in the spring.’
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