by Betty Burton
They went up the long front drive to the great house. The whole place looked entirely different from how it had appeared in the summer mists a week ago.
Now one could see how well chosen was the site of the original house in the lee of the downs. Standing four-square, its windows evenly spaced to balance the central, columned entrance, the imposing mansion faced the drive. It was surrounded only by grassland and a few Cedars of Lebanon, so that there was nothing to distract the eye from the lines of the building.
“I wonder what the House thinks of its new master,” Jude said. “Looking at it from here I can’t imagine young Squire Goodenstone there. It looks a few sizes too large – needs cutting down to fit.”
Fred laughed. “Like a pony in a shire-horse stable?”
“That’s it!”
It was not only the sun shining upon the house that gave it a different appearance, something else had changed. It had come alive. Windows were open, there were chairs and umbrellas outside, some small dogs were running in and out of the main entrance and white caps of serving maids could be seen moving about within the house. Quite different from the gloom of a week ago, when Jude had seen only Mrs Cutts and Mary Holly.
“Hello,” said Fred Warren. “Looks like Young Harry has returned.”
“Oh Lord!” said Jude. “You don’t think we shall have to see him?”
They went to the side of the house and were let into the library by a man-servant. Fred had suggested that they might start by selecting for the Manor library all those books with the bright bindings that Master Harry had liked. Then make up a list of all rare and illuminated books, bound prints and maps.
They worked quietly for a couple of hours. Occasionally Fred would say something, explaining why a particular thing was special. He became quite animated about a book entitled, The Historyes of Troye, which he explained was a rare and early printed book. In fine mimicry of Young Harry’s high voice he said, “Oh fudge, Warren! Don’t want that old thing. Chuck it out!” causing Jude to burst into laughter that seemed inappropriate in the ornate room.
“I never thought Old Sir Henry had it in him,” said Fred. “His choice of works is impressive. Everything from Atterbury’s Sermons to illustrations of Cook’s third Voyage.”
The fact of it was that at the time when he had believed he was likely to become a knight of the realm, Old Sir Henry had spent a fortune bringing his house up to the scratch of high rank and had purchased the entire library from the estate of a parson who had more taste than his inheritors.
Fred was on the library steps and Jude writing at a desk when the door was flung open revealing Harry Goodenstone and a dainty woman. She was wearing a pink silk dress that touched the floor and a fashionable, huge, soft muslin mob-cap, frilled to match the dress. Before they noticed the two librarians, Harry raised his hand to his mouth like a trumpet. “Larhdies and Ginnlemen – tra-ra – Miss Car . . . lotta.”
“Oh Harry, you’m such a fool sometimes,” she said, mimicking a Hampshire country dialect that did not match her elaborate dress.
Then they saw Fred and Jude.
“Ah,” said Harry Goodenstone, quite unperturbed by the fact that his performance had been seen by them. “So you’ve made a start then, Warren. And Miss Judeth.” He turned to the pink lady. “Lotte, this here’s the one that slapped me in the face with her bonnet . . .’member I told you? Cheered me up no end. All that lot of mumbling old crows.”
Jude laughed.
“I’m sorry, Mister Harry. I wasn’t laughing about my bonnet, but . . .” She stopped.
“Go on, what was it?”
“It sounds disrespectful to Old Sir Henry . . . to Squire Goodenstone. But it wasn’t about him,” and she told him what she had said about crows at the funeral.
It was not extraordinarily amusing, but it did not take much to make Young Harry laugh.
While this exchange had been taking place, the little pink lady held on to Young Harry’s arm, smiling at everybody and everything. They were both a bit affected by a good sampling of Old Sir Henry’s wines.
He patted her white arm. “This is my Lotte. I dare say the whole village knows by now that Lotte has come to stay. Has it reached Blackbrook market, Warren?
“Well, it don’t matter who knows. I don’t care a fig. The old devil fancied a title for me. Threatened to cut me off. So now he’s gone and she’s come.” A little bantam cock crowing at a cornered hen.
“And now she can come, she says she won’t. Put up every sort of reason not to come. Says she couldn’t live down here. She’s fell in love with the house though. Hey, Lotte?”
Lotte had moved away from him and was idly fingering some books that were on a side table.
“What are you going to do with these, Harry?” she asked in her low, soft Hampshire voice, not unlike Jude’s.
“Chuck it out if you like.”
“Well that’d be a shame,” Lotte said. “There’s a lot of work gone into making these. You should always respect good work, Harry.”
Apart from her elaborate cap and dress, Lotte behaved quite naturally and, unlike Young Harry in his present state, had few affectations. She was lithe and slim and talked and moved gracefully. At first sight she looked about twenty; her face and arms were as delicately pink and white as her dress and she had good, white teeth. But when her features were not animated, you could see that she was probably nearer Young Harry’s age.
Jude watched and listened, quite fascinated by the unexpected interruption.
Young Harry went and sat on the arm of Lotte’s chair and spoke in a normal, serious tone.
“Warren. I tell you this and you can tell the whole countryside if you care. Lotte and I have been together ten years. In London and Bath and places like that Lotte is treated like a princess, which is no more than she deserves. If I can rid her of this notion that she don’t want to live in these parts, then she shall be the squire’s lady.” Then he returned to his cocksure manner. “Say, Lotte, let’s give them a puzzle to guess you.”
“Oh no, Harry.”
“Oh do, Lott. I’ll wager Warren’s heard of you.”
He spoke to Fred. “Lotte here is famous for her art. Here she is: ‘Lotte’. You say you do not know her, but I will lay you a guinea that you have heard of her, even in Blackbrook. Come, Lotte – the nunnery.”
“Oh, Harry. Sometimes you’re such a babe with your games and puzzles. Very well.” She smiled indulgently and got up.
“Wait!”
Young Harry pushed aside a table and drew two chairs together.
“Here.” He beckoned at Jude. “Warren, here.” He indicated that they should be seated, then adopted an exaggerated pose beside Lotte, pointing to the door.
“To a nunnery, go!”
“A minute, Harry.”
Lotte took off her mob-cap and removed a bone skewer that was holding her hair up. The hair cascaded down to her wasit; fine, pale moonlight blonde and dead straight.
And from Jude’s subconscious leaped the answer to Harry Goodenstone’s puzzle.
She guessed the reason why Lotte did not want to come to live in Park Manor, in Cantle; why Mary Holly was here; why she had treated Jude so strangely.
Harry again took his pose. “I shall say Hamlet’s line . . . ‘To a nunnery, go!’ ”
What subtle change came over Lotte as she spoke, Jude could never fathom, but there was a kind of enchantment in the room, her voice was clear and her Hampshire dialect curbed:
“ ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’observed of all observers – quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells ja
ngled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!’ ”
That evening and the next day, Jude worked at anything that would keep her from spending any time alone with Bella. She believed that she was sorting out how best to tell her about Charlotte Holly without too much hurt, but what she was truly doing was avoiding an emotional contact so soon after the other.
When she had arrived home from the House, she had said she felt unwell and had gone upstairs. In the morning she got up early and started at once on the plot furthest from the house; hoeing, weeding, thinning-out. In the middle of the day she saw Bella stumping down the slope with a knotted cloth of food.
“Here.”
Jude stopped work and took the bundle.
“She wasn’t drowned with your father then. You wasn’t bad, was you? You seen her.”
Jude felt ashamed of her cowardly prevarication. “I didn’t know how to tell you. Who did?”
“Dicken.”
For the second time in less than a fortnight, Jude saw the scar-tissue that had grown over the twenty-year-old wound re-opened, as she told her what had happened up at The Big House.
“So she’s famous then.”
“Yes. The name she uses is Charlotte Trowell. Fred has read about her. He says she is very well-known.”
Bella, her chin trembling, said with frustration in her voice: “Why then do she have to come back to Cantle? Why couldn’t she a stopped up in London? Why couldn’t she let sleeping dogs lie after all this time? What do she want – to rub our noses in it? Don’t she think I had enough? Do she think he’s here? If she wants her own back, she won’t get it from the dead and drowned.”
She paused. Jude did not know how to reply.
“Well,” she continued after a while, “I suppose it’s only natural now she’s famous and got the Goodenstone money behind her. She don’t have to care what people says.”
“I don’t think it is like that.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t think she wants to come back. I don’t think Young Harry even knows she was ever in Cantle. He kept on about how he had persuaded her to come, about how once she got here she’d like the place. All this business about the library is because he wants to build her a little theatre there so she will like the house more. He thinks it is because she wants to stop in London. She’s kept saying to him, ‘Harry, you’re such a fool. Harry, you’re such a babe’ and that’s true. He is a fool. But he thinks the world of her.”
Bella, who had been gazing at the ground about two feet in front of her, looked up at Jude.
“He must know. You reckon he lived with her ten years. Ten years, and he don’t know she was here when she was a girl? It’s beyond belief.”
“Well, I don’t think he knows. Why should he? She probably told him a cock and bull story. He don’t strike me as being the brightest of men.”
“He got a big shock coming to him, then. My eye, it’d knock a better man than him sideways, finding out something like that after all this time.”
“After she had done that acting, Young Harry was pleased as punch. Fred and I said how beautiful it was, and it was. It was the most beautiful words I ever heard said.
“Young Harry said he’d bet I never knew what it was she was reciting and I said, ‘Ophelia.’ They were all surprised, because it’s an old play. She seemed really pleased and she said to come and look at some more plays.”
Go on.
“We went into a little room off the library, just me and her. I didn’t know what to do or say. I thought she was bound to ask something about me, just for talking sake. She said, was I Mr Warren’s daughter? I said no, I was a farm girl.
“ ‘What farm’s that, then?’ she said. Perhaps she’s a good stage actress, but she couldn’t stop goose-pimples on her arms nor going pale when I said it was a farm the other side of the village. And she asked me straight out, ‘What’s your name then, Judeth?’ and I told her and she said, ‘A course’ very quiet, to herself like. Then she said, ‘I dare say red hair like yours runs in the family,’ and I said yes, that it was like you and Jaen and Hanna. And we didn’t have time to say anything else.”
Bella was miles away, somewhere.
“Mary Holly was born old,” she said, as though it was something that had been staring her in the face, but that she had not realised. “Not only that, she was born resentful, except to her – that one. They was as different as a corn-lily and a tater plant. Come from Rathley. I think it must a been one of the dairymen who brought Mary here. I seems to remember there was one called Holly when I first come here.”
Jude sat quietly, waiting for her mother to go on. One word and Bella would be back again, saying, “Ah well, no use digging up old bones.”
“I shan’t never forget that morning Mary come round the back door. ‘I believe our Charlotte have gone off, it’s all she said. I knew who she’d a gone off with. She asked me if I knew where they might a been going and I asked her who she meant. ‘The Master have been after our Charlotte.’ And I knew she was right. I don’t know how, but I knew.” Bella gave a short snort of laughter. “I was sick right there and then. And I knew what it meant. There an’t but one thing that makes you that sick in the early morning. It was you, Jude. I got to admit it, I could a done without you on the way just then.”
Putting the puzzle of Bella together was difficult for Jude, but another piece fell into place.
“I never seen hide nor hair of neither of them since, and it’s above twenty year ago.”
For people who work the land or keep animals, there is never a day in the year that is entirely free of work, but Sundays are easier than the rest of the week since only the essential work is carried out. Jude sometimes spent Sunday afternoons writing her journal or commonplace book, but more often she spent her leisure hours walking the downs.
Sometimes she took Hanna, but Hanna did not appear to feel the same thrill and love of the hills that Jaen and Jude had felt. Perhaps it was impossible when one grew up with no one of the same age to roam wild, invent games or make magic in a fairy-ring. Or maybe it was that Jude’s affection for the chalk-hills was caused by a sensitivity to the air that had blown over them and the water that had filtered through them. Maybe Hanna was protected. She was content to stop with Bella and make ring mats whilst Jude climbed and roamed.
On the Sunday following her second visit to Park Manor, Jude’s mind was on fire with all that she had learned over the last few days and with what might happen next. She had written for hours, hoping that might help her to sort her thoughts out a bit, but when she came to read it back, very little of it made sense.
Now, as she climbed Winchester Hill, she wished that she was as light and lithe as when she was six or seven, so that she could scramble to the top of Old Marl or Tradden and come racing down one of the gentle slopes, unable to stop. She remembered the freedom of near flight, when each step was a momentary touch of the grass, and the wonderful exhaustion at the bottom.
Winchester was the furthest hill from Croud Cantle. Its back was to the north and its shoulders were outlined with the fortifications. On Marl, Tradden and Beacon, the only visible signs of their use by people were the raikes, tracks and footpaths that criss-crossed over them. But Winchester was different.
Apart from the ruined fortifications, on the north side – where the blade-bones would be if they were human shoulders – there was an upright tree-trunk of a stone as big as a man. It was a mysterious object to strangers and a magic place to the witches and warlocks of the four parishes. South facing, just below the shoulder on the left breast was Bell Tump.
There was nothing there except a hump surrounded by a hollow and a ridge, as though some ancient god or giant had thrown down his hat and grass had grown over it. There was a tale that it was an ancient burial ground, but it looked nothing like any burial g
round the villagers had seen. To be on the safe side, however, they tended to avoid the place.
So, down the ages, people had come and gone on Winchester Hill, but on that Sunday there was none left there but Jude.
It was high summer and from the crown of Bell Tump Jude looked down upon the geometric fields of the Cantle valley. Some were still bright green, some were straw-coloured and some, as at Croud Cantle, were mottled from the variety of the crops grown. Dunnock Brook and the village pond were symbols drawn on the valley floor.
Jude wanted nothing more from life at that moment than to sit and look. After a while, she lay back against the slope and gazed at the upturned blue bowl of the sky. Slowly she relaxed and was able to think separate thoughts, instead of the turbulent muddle of the last few days.
“Books by the yard don’t get bought by riding to hounds, nor by entertaining and parties and the like. They get bought by taking land from people who have worked it all their lives.” In the midst of going over some of the things her mother had said, Will Vickery’s opinion jumped into her mind. Not only his opinion: Will Vickery the man approached her thoughts.
Sometimes, when Fred Warren talked to her about ideas that were written up in some of the pamphlets he brought her to read, Jude felt her blood course with excitement. Fred had visions and ideals. When he was speaking about a changed world or about ordinary people who had actually tried to change it by taking the law into their own hands, he excited Jude. He confused her, or she confused herself. Jude was aroused by talk of ways of taking hold of the world and shaking it up, so that people who had grabbed more than their share would fall on their heads.
On that same Sunday, also with a turbulent mind, Charlotte Holly, who had become Charlotte Trowell since she was last here, decided to walk out on the chalk-hills. The last few days had been a strain. She knew that she must either leave and get Harry to go too – and quickly – or go by herself. And she would have to tell him a lot more than she had ever done about the years after leaving Cantle; the years before she knew him. In any case, it was all bound to come out. And when it came out, she did not know how Harry would behave. He had always been jealous. He was pleased when men fell at her feet as Ophelia, but promised them a duel if they did the same when she was Lotte.