What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  Vi-vi sat, cold, frightened, filled with dread, looking into the two old faces, the heavy square old face of Great Aunt Honoria, the pinched pink face of Great Aunt Felicity with its prominent thin white nose. ‘You put the scarf there—tied it across the banisters: and your cousin was killed?’ But hadn’t there been a fuss, she asked; an enquiry, an inquest…?

  ‘An inquest, yes. There always has to be it appears, in a case of sudden death; who ever may be the parties concerned. We spoke to the Chief Constable, of course—a gentleman still, my dear, even ten years ago: not one of these upstarts risen from the ranks that they have now. But he couldn’t prevent an inquest, not even he. However, he kindly arranged for a verdict of Accidental Death with nothing to suggest what had caused the fall. We had removed the scarf of course, by his advice, and he saw to it that the costume was not mentioned. Indeed, we arranged a story between us that William had always been careless with the tie of his dressing-gown, leaving it trailing, and must have been coming down to the—er, the bathroom: there was some temporary fault with the cistern upstairs…’

  ‘You mean to say that the Chief Constable himself hushed the whole thing up?’

  ‘There are advantages to being a Fitzmerrian, my child, as you will find. And then when we told him it was poor Adelaide who had put the scarf there—well, he knew her, you see, he understood that she could never be held responsible.’

  She sat for a long time, silent, staring at them and found to her amazement that her hands were actually trembling. Many months more, she had to live on with these three old ladies, until her husband came home; and even then, was bound by a promise never to confide in him. But she would: she was never coming to Fitzmerrian again. ‘You will remember your undertaking,’ said Great Aunt Honoria, into her thoughts, ‘not to mention this to anyone? Not of course that they would believe it. Edward, as I said earlier, was a boy then; he, like everyone else, accepted the Coroner’s verdict. But should you break your promise…’ She lifted her head and listened. ‘There goes the stable clock, Felicity; ten o’clock. I hope that wretched groom is back from his evening off and not making more trouble in the village.’

  A hint? A threat? Could it be that they knew…? ‘You could never get away with it now,’ said Vi-vi. ‘As you say, even Chief Constables have changed, these days.’

  ‘“Get away with it?” Get away with what?’

  ‘Get away with murder,’ said Vi-vi.

  ‘With murder? My dear child, you are hysterical, this unfortunate story has unhinged you.’ She sat there, square and stolid, her heavy hands folded in her lap. ‘How could it be murder? Cousin William had so thoroughly convinced us—hadn’t he, he and Emmeline together?—that we were dealing with a ghost.’ But there, repeated Great Aunt Honoria, the young were so impressionable. Poor Emmeline, for instance—she had never seemed quite the same after Cousin William’s accident: had she, Felicity? Never again the frisky young foal, kicking up its heels wherever the grass grew green. Very sad it had been when she and dear Hubert were killed: she had been shaping into quite an admirable member of the family. And Elizabeth too and dear little Virginia—they both had started off a little—skittishly; but now, though they unfortunately seldom came as they had done, to stay at Fitzmerrian, they did both seem to have settled down a lot better. ‘As you will also, my dear, I’m sure. The Family—young people don’t quite understand at first but, as you yourself will find out, it is a very real thing. The sense of family—the honour of one’s family: there is nothing really one should stop at, to preserve it.’

  ‘Not even murder?’ said Vi-vi.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Great Aunt Honoria.

  And the stable clock struck the quarter and she got up and left them, creeping away, very, very thoughtful—lovely Vi-vi Fitzmerrian, who henceforth would guard her husband’s honour and play with fire no more. Aunt Felicity watched her go. She said: ‘Do you think she believes it?’

  ‘She’ll never be quite sure,’ said Honoria. She added: ‘As you say, it does always seem rather unfair on those who are not here to defend themselves. Dear William!—and dear, good little Emmeline!’

  ‘And that poor dear Chief Constable!’ said Felicity, laughing.

  ‘But they both had a great sense of family: Cousin Willie, I mean, and Emmeline. And a sense of humour, too. I think they’d be more—amused—than resentful?’

  ‘If she were to tell Edward—?’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Honoria. ‘The others didn’t. The coroner’s verdict was of Accidental Death, due to the fall over the dressing-gown cord. She knows that Edward would ask himself why we should tell her such a tarradiddle.’

  ‘Poor darling Willie! How often we’ve warned him, “Willie, dear, you’ll trip over that cord one day and break your neck!”’ Aunt Felicity rose to her feet. ‘I shall go to bed myself, Honoria. Your imagination is more vivid than mine; I do find these recitals very exhausting.’ In some ways, she added, wouldn’t it be simpler just to get rid of Mario?

  ‘Oh, we couldn’t do that,’ said Great Aunt Honoria. ‘Grooms are so hard to find these days; and Mario really is an angel with the carriage horses.’

  13

  The Kite

  BUZZARDS YOU MIGHT SEE a-plenty; but the kite, the majestic kite—he was rare; and being rare, was precious. Perhaps a dozen pairs left in the whole of Great Britain, no more; and she, Miss Bellingham, had actually had a pair nesting on her land.

  If a pair of kites nested on your land and reared their young, you were awarded a Bounty; and Miss Bellingham duly received her Bounty. Not that she needed an odd few pounds; she was well enough off and if she chose to live in a cottage in the deep heart of Wales, had made it as comfortable as a rather stout, elderly lady could require, and lived there solely because she preferred to. No, it was not the money: it was the pride—the pride and the feeling that from now on this kite belonged to her. She took to keeping account of his movements, sending off innumerable postcards to the guardians of the kite, full of information, and confirmation or denial of information, already perfectly well known to them. The guardians threw the postcards into the waste paper-basket: all they required of Miss Bellingham was that she should protect the nest.

  And she protected it. Not a soul was allowed near the cottage or surrounding woods; in sunshine or in rain she patrolled her few acres and drove away all who might disturb the great one and his queen. Not that visitors were many—the cottage was too remotely situated to be troubled by more than an occasional motoring tourist, probing into the lonely valleys in search of even more scenic delights; but the kindly farmers would every now and again jog over in their vans and Land-rovers, up Miss Bellingham’s rutty lane ‘just to see that the old lady’s all right’—and by no means appreciated being turned back with brusque assurances that she lacked for nothing and would have to say goodbye now as she was very busy… For of course she said nothing of the nesting kites: above all, one must keep them secret against the curious, the predatory, the undisciplined ignorant: from the irreverent.

  The years passed, the kites moved elsewhere to nest; but his lordship still visited Miss Bellingham’s land—sailing over, high, serene, majestical, when the whim seized him, and always to Miss Bellingham’s delight. ‘Kite visited today, twelve noon,’ she would write on a postcard to the kite guardians, perhaps once a week; in a life almost totally devoid of other incident, this was a red letter day. Others must watch for the long forked tail, for the glint of russet, for the crook of the wing-tips, to distinguish him from the blunt-tailed buzzards: but not Miss Bellingham. She knew him for himself—for his lazy sweep of the air he owned, for the swift, controlled swoop, the calm, unhurried return, slowly upward circling, into the blue remoteness of his kingdom. The buzzard might be hustled and harried by raven flocks; the lord of the air sailed on through the scruffy ranks, unruffled, and the foe fell back…

  The seasons came and went and a new spring arrived; and in February, surprisingly in those parts where, even in the heart o
f winter a bitter cold is unusual—came the snow. At the first sign of it, while the country was still but an exquisite pearly green, not yet blotted out with white, came the farmers, bucketing and sliding up and down the steep hills with chains on their wheels. ‘Better get out, Miss Bellingham, while you can. You know what it’s like here when the snow drifts: this road will be impassable, it always is. And who knows how long it will last? Better get out.’

  Miss Bellingham had no intention of getting out. Every winter her relatives came and forced her away, took her to homes where, long used to her solitudes, she felt cramped and harassed, ill at ease. But they would not discover before it was too late to reach her, the news of February snow in these faraway valleys: she would escape them this time. On the other hand, she could not have the farmers struggling over—she had no telephone—fighting their way through to her, just because she chose to be obstinate and remain. ‘It’s all arranged for,’ she lied. ‘My nephew will be coming for me later today. You know they never leave me here in hard weather. He’s coming today.’

  They went away, thankful, and passed the word round the tiny community. No need to worry about Miss Bellingham: her friends were taking her to safety till the snow was gone. Miss Bellingham sighed happily and settled down to her self-created besiegement.

  The small birds were grateful for her presence, poor little things: the sparrow, the robin, the tiny Jenny Wren and of course the sly jackdaw with his monastic grey cowl… And seeing them all feeding there as the bitter weather went on, the buzzards swooped down also, to see what might be going. And then one day—one day, royalty itself: the kite.

  Who said the wild creatures couldn’t be taught by man? The buzzards, consistently driven off by flapping arms and screeching voice, soon enough learned to come no more. The kite, on the other hand, enticed with lumps of meat from the deep-freeze, as soon knew he was welcome. At first she must go far afield to tempt him down, slipping and stumbling over the frozen paths, over the fields when the paths became indistinguishable from the rest of the land—to place the offerings only as near as his wary aloofness would admit. But soon, because her legs were growing weak under the unaccustomed exercise, she must place them closer; and still he came, and still he came nearer, starved into daring, until one day he took meat from the wooden table set up just outside her door, where in summer time she would sit and take her own meals—took meat from the very table where Miss Bellingham herself would eat. From within her small, deep-set cottage window, she watched him and could have cried for joy. She had taken the King’s Bounty: now she would earn it and place him for ever in her debt.

  In these days she could send no postcards: the postwoman came no more, crawling like a bug in her little green van, up the twisty lane; but she started a diary in an old exercise book: ‘Today, Feb. 6th., kite approached within two yards of house. Quite true that rim of eye is pronounced yellow. Eye very bright and proud.’

  The days passed, the snow fell no longer but still lay deep, wind-swept into drifts along the lane, levelling the fields into flat white sheets, damming up, icing-over, the sluggish stream. No thaw came. The resources of the deep-freeze began to get low. Miss Bellingham cut down the kite’s ration and her own. He came now regularly to the table: had seen her watching from the window and after the first shock and swift, evading flight, took no more heed of her. But more and more it was becoming an effort for her to get out to the table; the snow, iced over into a piste by the back and forth passing of her feet on her errands of mercy, had grown skiddy and treacherous. Once or twice she slipped and fell and the effort of raising herself again to her feet, made her heart thump and her mind grow grey and blurred. One day, standing at the table with the meat in her hand, she felt suddenly strangely ill and was obliged to sit down abruptly in the old wooden arm-chair and let the world swim round her in a sudden swirling of darkness and light. And her hand dropped the meat without volition on her part and somehow—somehow it came to her that time had passed without her knowing anything of it. The kite was wheeling above her head; he had not been there when she first began to feel ill. ‘I have had a little faint,’ she said to herself. But she knew it was more than that.

  The kite hardly waited for her slow, stumbling return to the cottage before he swooped down upon the meat. ‘Kite came within five feet,’ she wrote in the diary. ‘True that bill is strongly hooked.’ Next day she waited, very, very quiet, only half way to the door—and again down he came; and that afternoon she stayed nearer the table still: and still he came. It was very cold waiting there, but worth it—worth it! One day, she thought, if the cold lasts long enough, if I am patient enough, he will take it from my hand.

  She ate very little now. The other birds had finished up her store of frozen fruit and vegetables and nowadays sought elsewhere—or sought no more, poor little things, clamped frozen to frozen twigs. And the bread was all gone and even such meat as she allowed herself, she begrudged for the kite’s sake. And there came another little fainting spell and this time a numbness of her left arm and leg; and Miss Bellingham recognised in a mind growing increasingly woolly and vague, that she could not go on for very long more. And if she were to die—who then was going to feed the kite? She feared that she would have the strength for very few more journeys out to the table. Fortunately, she had, while she still could, removed what was left of the meat from the depths of the refrigerator: the weather was sufficiently cold to keep it wholesome and the kite could not have eaten it solid frozen. She looked at it despairingly: so little left that she must somehow eke it out day by day: if she were to place it all out on the table in one last great effort, would he not take it all at once and then have none left for the rest of the time until the thaw came? Might not—worse and worse—the buzzards return and seeing the meat there, unguarded, swoop down and help themselves? And… ‘I would have liked before I die,’ she confided to the diary, painfully scrawling with her stub of pencil, ‘to have had him take meat from my hand, just once.’

  And that day—that very day—so he did. Limping and struggling, dragging herself by slow, painful inches, she had got out to the table and there collapsed again into the chair and for a long time lay sprawled there, the meat still held in her out-stretched hand. So long, indeed, that the kite grew weary of circling unobserved about the old, grey tumbled head and came down closer—closer—closer: and, since the enemy made no move, swooped at last and with a wild snatch tore the food from her lax fingers and with two great thrashing flaps of dappled wings, soared up again into the whiteness of the sky. The violence of his up-winging awakened and startled her. She felt very ill and the halting journey back to the house took longer than ever. But that night she scrawled triumphantly in the book: ‘Not true that kite will not feed from human hand.’

  Next day she retained her consciousness but lay as she had before, across the table; only this time she watched him. The cold was bitter but, wrapped in her old winter coat, she seemed strangely, hardly to suffer from it, sitting there hour after hour, waiting for his coming, the meat held out temptingly; waiting, when the meat was gone, to gather strength to make the slow, creeping journey indoors again. By night she did not undress, just lay down by the warm oil radiator and there slept her oddly untroubled sleep, building up courage again for the next day’s effort. But again that evening she was able to record faithfully in the diary: ‘Kite alighted on the table, took food from hand, ate it close by. Beak very fierce and strong. True that crown of head is almost white.’

  But still the freeze held; and now there was meat for only one more day.

  She sat for a long time that morning, huddled against the warm radiator—thinking. No more food for the kite; and if the cold lasted much longer—already it must be unprecedented for this time of year—what would become of him: what would become of him, her love, her lord, her king of the air? No man in all her life had claimed an ascendancy over the heart of Miss Bellingham: mind and body she had remained all too free of the dominance of the male over feminine
frailty; in her youth much longed for, in age deeply regretted—the sweet, the easeful submission to a strength superior to her own. Now into her blurred mind, shot through with fantasies of that long-ago, starved youth, had come a hazy recognition that here at last he was: the over-lord, to be submitted to, sacrificed to, body and soul…

  Body and soul.

  Her soul in a very short while would be with God; but was it not woman’s duty—should it not be her delight—to give up her body to the dominant male?

  ‘Alive I have served him,’ she wrote, the letters straggling crazily across the page of her diary, ‘why shouldn’t I, dead, serve him still? In life I have suffered in serving him. I shan’t suffer when I am dead.’

  And she struggled out of the old coat and, thinly clad carrying only the diary and stub of pencil, with the small remains of the meat, for the last time she made the painful journey, crawling now on hands and knees, out to the table; and hoisted herself up somehow and once again, exhausted by the effort, fell back unconscious in the wooden arm-chair. And this time when she awoke to sensibility, sensibility was indeed almost all that remained to her. In the right hand a little strength, in the leg also, perhaps; but not enough any longer to move the dead weight of the left. Willing or not—now there was no more possibility of changing her mind. The die was cast: at this sacrificial altar the victim had tethered itself without hope of escape. Painfully she wrote: ‘Do not be distressed. It is what I have chosen to do.’

  The whirr of his wings was like thunder as he swooped, the beat of them fanned the grey hair back from the balding crown. Proud as a king, an emperor, proud as a god—scornful of danger now, he strutted with a click of curved talons, the bleached silver of the birchwood boards. Fierce was the yellow-rimmed brilliance of his pale eye, sizing her up. When he had gone she feebly added her note in the diary: ‘He is only waiting till…’ The writing tailed off.