World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Soon be finished," said Lady Henshaw.

  Two other dogs, a black Siberian and a black Iceland dog, came dashing across the kitchen, uttering strange cries—a mixture of a yelp, a bark, and a howl—at her. In later visits, Nora got to know them quite well, though they steadily treated her as hostile from that day forward. But their hostility was not that of dogs on their own territory, repelling a stranger. Indeed their bravado was only a thin mask for a kind of guilty cowardice, as if they knew, and you knew, and they knew that you knew, that their real territory was somewhere else—somewhere forgotten or mislaid—and that they were only practising, keeping the skill alive in a lame-hearted way, here at Henshaw Park. Nora decided at once that both were insane; and nothing happened later to change her mind. On this afternoon, seeing the demented light that shone from their eyes, she ignored them.

  The two servant girls stared at her; and with sinking heart she realized that both of them were also—to put it kindly—rather simply furnished in the attic floor. She shrank from their inane inspection of her and walked out of their view; at least, with normal servants she would have been out of view, but one, the more obviously nitwitted of the two, lowered her head and continued to survey Nora from under her arm, giggling all the while.

  From her new location Nora could see into the scullery, where the open window was partly blocked by the upper half of a goat; it had its forehooves in the sink and was licking drops of water off the tap as they formed, which they did at a rate of about one every second. She suddenly wanted to run from the house; only Lady Henshaw's kindly smile and the friendly gleam in her eyes stopped her. "There's a great goat poking its head through the scullery window, drinking from the tap," she said.

  Lady Henshaw nodded. "It was a dreadful mistake, putting that tap in. They always left the pump alone."

  "That should do it," said the horse-doctor.

  They all let go of the dog while the larger of the two maids dragged it from the table to the floor, where, closely followed by the weight, it fell to the stone flags with a thud that would have broken any human bone. It stood, unshaken, took three inebriate steps in a semicircle, then sat and licked its tar-encrusted flank. The two other dogs joined in, lapping eagerly, as if the leg were a bowl and the tar was the greatest of delicacies.

  "If they insist on eatin' that muck, ye'd best put some down for them on a plate," Lady Henshaw said.

  The doctor obeyed eagerly, emptying the tar bottle to its very dregs. "It'll kill them," he said in a voice filled with hope.

  Madoc, still at the doorway, sniffed gloomily; he knew better. Lady Henshaw went to the scullery and swilled almost all of the blood and pus from her hands and arms. The goat took no advantage of the sudden gush of water from the tap but waited until it was turned off again, and even until the final driblets had subsided, before it resumed its measured one-per-second licking. As there was no towel or cloth, or curtain, Lady Henshaw walked past Nora yet again, still with that same warm smile, and went this time to the stable yard. "Come on out!" she called when she reached it.

  Nora obeyed, to find her ladyship standing in the court swinging her arms like windmills. She seemed quite unable to coordinate the two limbs, so that they went fast or slow in total independence and often hit each other, quite hard. Several times Nora wondered why she did not cry out in pain. The hem of her skirts, swaying in sympathy, scattered goat-dung pellets about the floor of the yard like grape shot. Several dozen goats stood about the place—including the coach-house and stable roofs—watching her with that incurious intelligence which sooner or later fills the eyes of any cloven-hoofed creature that lives close to human kind for long enough.

  "Quite mild again," Lady Henshaw panted through her exertions. "Let us stroll."

  They went out through the stableyard gate and took a gravel lane that wound around and slightly up the hill. To their left was Henshaw Wood; to their right, reaching south through the gap in the Blackstone Hills, was the canal, the railroad, and the turnpike. Most of the workings were, from this angle, concealed in cuttings. The oval shaft and the now engineless numbers ten and eleven shafts were clearly visible though—as was Rough Stones, about on a level with Henshaw Park.

  "Very inhospitable of me," Lady Henshaw said. "But you probably don't

  want tea or things of that sort."

  Nora, remembering the conditions in which the tea and its accompaniments would likely be prepared, had to agree, despite her thirst.

  "We shall both have a glass of port in a minute," Lady Henshaw added. The lane turned on itself and Nora could see that it wound gently upward, through the woods, in a series of s-curves. Occasionally she caught glimpses of a small, temple-like structure higher up.

  "Hate sharin' me place with all those beasts," her ladyship went on. "The vet says I shouldn't. He gave me a list as long as granny's tongue of all the pests and diseases they can catch from humans. But he doesn't have the task of drivin' them out all the time. Besides, I pay him."

  "Some of those branches look rotten," Nora said. She had never seen a mature woodland so neglected.

  "Some of them?" Lady Henshaw said. "Everything needs attention. But it's all too much. People think I don't know. They think I don't notice. But I do."

  The older woman's vulnerability, so suddenly laid bare, was the last thing that Nora had expected to encounter. She had the strongest feeling that in some obscure and very roundabout way, the other was asking for her help. She quickly dismissed the thought, for what could she, so ignorant of society and of any world beyond the line from here to Manchester, what could she know or do that might help a Lady, a "baroness in her own right" as John said—whatever that meant?

  "It isn't as if I don't try," Lady Henshaw continued. "I can't tell you the number of times I prepare everything and even begin…the woodland…the roof…the well…the coach house—d'you know there are two good coaches in there that can't be got out because the floor's collapsed under them? But we get nowhere."

  "What…why do you stop? What goes wrong?" Nora asked. A robin hopped ahead of them around the next curve; it looked back as if seeking approval for its moves, then it flew to a nearby briar and sang its twit-twit alarm call.

  "I've a coachman with more airs and graces than an oratorio. I've three simpletons as maids, which I am forced to through my connection as patroness of the Stanfield Asylum…" She paused to kick a lump of coal off the pathway. "Also it's cheaper. One can't blink that fact. Two pounds a year instead of eight is a lot saved. And I've a butler who opposes me in everything. Of course, I shall dismiss him, as soon as I have found someone to take his place. Oh yes!"

  "Do you mean Madoc? The one who showed me into…in, today? I thought

  he was your postillion."

  The decaying woodland was all about them now, shutting out the view and filling the air with the cloying smell of wet fungus.

  "You're more rational than he is," Lady Henshaw answered. "He thinks he's a Welsh prince."

  Nora was by now beyond surprise; she looked back at the other with polite interest.

  "He does," she continued defensively. "A Welsh prince. He has a chest filled with mouldering old papers that prove he's the lineal descendant of some ancient Welsh prince called Madoc who, or so he swears, discovered America. It's all lies, of course, but as it's either in Latin or Welsh, I'm powerless to prove it to him. Between you and me, it's my opinion that he's not entirely compos mentis." She nodded confidentially and lowered her voice almost to a whisper to reinforce the truth of it.

  The final bend led up a short leg to a broad clearing on the side of the hill in the midst of which stood an elegant little gazebo, elliptical in plan and with six pillars supporting a shallow copper dome of the same shape. The two pillars nearest the hillside, which still rose behind the building for two hundred feet or more, were tied into a thin wall, rendered with stucco, and showing traces of a former mosaic decoration. A natural spring had been harnessed into the design, its waters rising up a concealed
pipe and streaming forth between the lips of a grotesque icthyogriff, or fish-tailed griffin, into a stained marble bowl. The overflow was led away, rippling and gurgling, down the hillside. Nora felt thirstier than ever.

  "The only good servant I've got," Lady Henshaw concluded, "is Shawn McGinty, me groom." She stooped before the cupboard beneath the bowl and fished out a key from her bodice. "And he's lost all his teeth," she added.

  The cupboard proved to contain an assortment of unwashed wine glasses and three bottles of port, one already drawn. They sat in the gazebo, hemmed in by the blackened trunks of damp trees, beneath a sky of remorseless and unrelieved gray, and sipped indifferent port from cracked glasses. It was not the way Nora had imagined herself spending this Sunday afternoon.

  "Well," Lady Henshaw said at last, "we can't fritter away the whole afternoon in idle chit-chat. The reason I've brought you all this way…" She looked hard at Nora suddenly. "You can keep a secret?"

  "None better," Nora said.

  The other nodded happily. "Tell your husband, of course. Don't believe in

  secrets there. But I'd be grateful if ye'd let it no further. The fact is, I'm writing a romance, d'ye see." She watched to see the effect the news had on Nora, who gave no hint other than that she considered it the most natural thing in the world for Lady Henshaw to be doing—especially as she had shouted it to the four winds only yesterday. Satisfied, she continued:

  "It's a tragic tale with a happy ending. The hero, you see, is an aristocrat stolen away at birth by gypsies and then sold into a poor family. At the last, to be sure, all is discovered by a most ingenious interplay of circumstance, and the young duke is restored to his rightful inheritance; but before that he has the most rash experiences."

  "It sounds quite entertaining," Nora said. To herself she wondered why the poor might want to buy a baby—especially as there were cheaper and more pleasurable ways available. "Is that water drinkable? May I? I'm very thirsty."

  Lady Henshaw merely nodded, eager not to be distracted. "The fact of the matter is—I know so little about life among the lower orders…it is extraordinary how ignorant one can be without knowing it. The simplest things: where they keep their money…how they go marketing…how they manage without a servant…what dances they do…it really is quite monstrous—the depth of one's ignorance."

  Understanding dawned on Nora at last: She was to be some sort of advisor to Lady Henshaw on the ways and habits of the lower orders! She laughed in modesty, not in such a way as to offend. "Why don't you just go up and down the valley…your neighbours here, all around."

  "Neighbours?" Lady Henshaw was puzzled. "Well, yes, I suppose they are neighbours—in strictly geographical usage. But no no no no no no, I don't need to. That's why I'm so pleased to have found you."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. You are one of our sort, yet you have lived so long among them."

  Nora did not trust her ears. "One of your sort? I am one of your sort?"

  Now the other looked doubtful. "It was your grandfather, James Telling, Squire of Normanton?"

  Nora nodded. "Great-grandfather."

  Lady Henshaw was vastly relieved to have the fact confirmed. "Hunted with my maternal grandfather. So there you are!"

  "But what possible…" Nora's voice trailed off. "You mean that signifies? My great-grandfather?"

  "Of course it signifies, you goose! It is all, that matters. You wait until you read my book. It is all explained there. Do you imagine for one moment that I would open my doors to you and…and…and take you strolling if you were just some middling sort of person? If you were not a Telling by blood?"

  In later years, Nora was to remember these casual statements, and even to think of them as among the most illuminating things that Lady Henshaw ever said to her; at the time, though, they left her even more confused. "You mean, the fact that I know nothing of the ways of society, no French, cannot play music, or sing after notes, cannot compose a letter, have read no clever books…"

  Lady Henshaw had begun shaking her head and wafting her hands about dismissively as soon as Nora had reached her first instance; by now, the motion was so violent that she was afraid the other might shake herself apart. "You'll soon pick up all that. It seemed a fair exchange to me. You tell me the ways of the lower classes—among whom it was your unfortunate lot to sojourn, a mistake now quite properly rectified—while I tell you the proper modes of behaviour." She cleared her throat, holding up a hand to prevent Nora from saying anything just yet. "Also, I thought you might care to learn how to master a horse and ride to hounds."

  Nora suddenly divined that a brain far cooler and more calculating than anything yet revealed lurked beneath that eccentric and seemingly dissociated exterior. In that fraction of a second she revised all her estimates of—and revalued all the gossip she had heard concerning—this remarkable lady.

  "I accept—and gladly," she said. "You honour me, your ladyship. And it's a poor return I can give, I think."

  Lady Henshaw patted her arm. "I shall be the judge of that." They returned their glasses, unwashed, and Lady Henshaw locked the cupboard. "Don't call me 'your ladyship,'" she added. "That's servants' talk. You will call me 'Lady Henshaw.'"

  "Mrs. Thornton has been helping me with some instruction," Nora said, not wanting to seem disloyal to Arabella, who had so zealously and steadfastly guided her all these weeks.

  "And ought to continue so," Lady Henshaw said. "But always remember that hers is necessarily a very middle-class view. They are what the French call bourgeois. The Thorntons. Not like us. She is from the south, which is so spoiled by new fortunes and by tuft-hunters treading on one another's pretensions…I eat goatsmeat but do I bleat or try to scale rooftops? Your navvies eat beef but do they grow horns and moo? Of course not—yet that is how the middle classes digest all these books on etiquette that people are scribbling now. They turn into little walking vade-mecums of behaviour. It shall be my especial aim, dear Mrs. Stevenson, to spare you such a fate. You must know what to do—but, even more important, you must know when not to do it. And that," she sighed, "is something the whole Tribe of Mrs. Thorntons could hardly tell you."

  Going back through the stable yard, Lady Henshaw said, as if on the most sudden impulse: "Have a look at another hack of mine." And she threw back her head and bawled, "McGinty!"

  They were back in upside-down land. One of the stable doors began to fall outward, ponderously. When the dark V it created was only thirty or so degrees from vertical, a lithe, elfin figure leaped through it into the yard and positioned itself to catch the door before it fell all the way.

  "Lost count of the times I've told him to mend that hinge," Lady Henshaw said, and she gave McGinty a nod.

  When Lady Henshaw had said her groom had lost all his teeth, Nora pictured an old, shrivelled man, employed for his wisdom rather than his strength. But McGinty could not have been more than thirty. With his red, moonish face and almost permanent elfin smile, he looked like a juvenile Punchinello; he was often suspected of devilment or wit where he had intended only plain action and speech. Nora pitied him his lack of teeth until, on a later visit, she saw him demolish a large, crisp apple as efficiently as any horse would have done, bare gums or no bare gums.

  In response to her nod, McGinty, having replaced the door, now opened it, from the outside, the way it would open if it had hinges. Moments later he reappeared leading a magnificent blue-roan gelding with black legs. It stood quiet as a lamb, head up, ears pricked, eyes alert, as it might stand for a portrait. There are some horses that proclaim their quality at first sight, even to the most ignorant, and this was such an animal. She dug her fingernails into its withers and raked them back to its flank. Such muscle! And then down, from its shoulder to its elbow. How the flesh trembled over its chest! It turned and nuzzled her.

  "Magnificent!" she breathed.

  McGinty gazed at her in an astonishment that turned to glee when she said: "Worth eighty if it's worth a farthing."

  "Eig
hty, is it!" McGinty exclaimed. "Sure wasn't I on him this very mornin', and didn't the fella lepp Henshaw clough without the spur? There's not a hedge nor wall in the whole West Riding he wouldn't lepp and ye'd think him on his way to bed! And the pedigree that's on him…"

  "It's all right, McGinty," Lady Henshaw said. "We're not selling."

  "I'm glad it's yer ladyship says so. Sure if ye were I'd not advise a penny under