Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I could only nod my bewilderment. The topiary garden, with giant chess figures carved in ancient yew, was one of Athmore’s curiosities, and Old Daniel was the preserver of its tradition, carving the yew year after year to keep the traditional forms intact.

  “Of course I remember,” I said.

  His pale eyes stared at me without blinking and his lips moved tremulously as he tried to speak. It struck me suddenly that something had terrified him.

  “It’s the rook’s play next,” he said in the tone of a conspirator who spoke of evil. “The rook’s play! Don’t you forget that, Miss Eve. Don’t forget as how Old Daniel tol’ you it’s the rook’s play and the king had better watch out.”

  I tried to calm him with my promise. “If you say so, I’ll remember,” I said, wanting to escape his wild look and the way he reached for my hand.

  Miss Davis’s high voice came to us clearly as the tour neared the ruins. I would not stay to watch strangers tramping over a place that had once belonged to me. At least I had my pictures, and I told the man a hurried goodby and ran back through the woods by the way I’d come. Miss Davis would deal with him now, find out what was troubling him. She would know how to manage, if indeed he had become senile in the last two years.

  The day was cool and in spite of my hurried return to the house, I was glad of the trench coat I had brought along against England’s cold and rain. Once more I hunched into its collar, as all the disguise I could manage, and walked idly around the side terrace. Because of Old Daniel’s odd urgency I wanted to see the topiary garden again. I passed the tall French windows of the red drawing room without daring to give them more than a glance, and stepped out upon the narrow strip of sloping lawn behind the house.

  At the foot of the grassy slope began the Victorian garden of trimmed yew that Old Daniel had cared for nearly all his life. Each geometrical figure was hewn to the exact form he had preserved out of the past. It was a curious work of art, yet somehow I had never cared for the garden. Maggie was ridiculously proud of it, but to Justin it was an oddity, like a Victorian whatnot. Though he objected to the expenditure of working time required to maintain it, he nevertheless suffered the garden as a showpiece of Athmore, and he knew it would break Old Daniel’s heart to give it up. So it had continued year after year repeating itself in all the fantastic growth that was forced upon the yew. For me, even now, there seemed something repellent about these dark, still figures, poised in their unending game.

  The topiary chessboard spread away from me across the rear of the house, wide and deep, with those pieces which remained in play meticulously represented, from king and queen down to a number of pawns, all engaged in a game and already in play.

  I stood at the edge of the garden and was glad that the sun was shining. Once I had played a moonlit game of hide-and-seek with Justin in this place and I had lost him—a tall, black figure among other black, tall figures of yew—and I had lost myself too in the midst of alien, inhuman shapes. It had been oddly frightening until he found me and pulled me into his arms, held me close so that I turned from shivering child to woman and forgot the chessmen.

  But I must not think of that now.

  Since no one hailed me, I stepped out among the chessmen and wandered through the maze they quickly formed around me, their heads hiding me from the view of overlooking windows. All the yew figures were of great size. Even the pawns came to my shoulder, with kings and queens towering high, and rooks and bishops looking down upon me. I stood in the shadow of the prickly greenish-black mass of a mitered bishop and felt safe from being sighted at the house. My knees had a tendency to weaken and I let them buckle under me and dropped to the velvet grass.

  It was easy to lose myself in the grotesque shadow of the yew, and I bent my head forward so that my long hair swept across my face, veiling me further. Sitting there I gave myself up to nothingness. I wanted neither joy nor agony. I wanted only to live a full, busy life at home and forget about happiness that was only an illusion, about a love forever lost. I did not need Justin anymore. Here in the topiary garden at Athmore I told myself this and let my mind and my emotions go blank.

  Only my outward senses were still alive. I could feel the prickle of yew at my cheek, the springy turf beneath my knees. I could respond to a butterfly flitting past, yellow as the sunlight, and breathe the marvelously clean, green-gold air of country England. My hearing was alert enough too, and I caught the sound of a voice not far away—and stiffened.

  It was a man’s voice and I would never forget the deep timbre of those tones, or the faintly grating quality of harshness that could underlie it when Justin was angry. The harshness was there now.

  “Every bit of glass in the place was smashed,” he said. “But very quietly. The guard heard nothing and the dogs barked too late to do any good.”

  “Is the damage serious?” a woman’s voice asked. “Or is it the further delay that matters most?”

  This voice was Maggie Graham’s. I’d have recognized her low, softly clipped tones anywhere. I whipped back the dark curtain of my hair and looked around the yew bishop. The two were coming toward me and I was helpless to move. Maggie looked tall and sturdy and fit as always—a handsome woman in her slightly old-fashioned brown tweeds. She would be forty now—five years older than Justin, and still a vital, striking woman. But it was not upon Maggie that my attention focused so helplessly.

  “Both,” Justin said in answer to Maggie’s question. “Both serious and delaying. Nearly all of one phase was destroyed. This is more ugly mischief. The worst yet. I’ll put a guard on duty tonight.”

  Their words meant little to me, though perhaps this was the reason for the barred entrance gates. Now, however, I wanted to look rather than listen. To look at Justin’s face until I was satisfied—as I had longed to look during all those empty nights when I conjured it up before me from more than three thousand miles away.

  He seemed older and a bit thinner than I remembered. The crease down his left cheek had deepened and his mouth had a straight, grim look about it. The white streak running back from his forehead through light-brown hair—that streak I had once thought romantic—had widened. His aristocratic nose seemed more than ever like the beak of some bird of prey—a hawk perhaps. Its slightly flared nostrils could widen in moments of stress, and it was the moments of stress I remembered best because there had been so many of them. None of the Norths were known for keeping their tempers.

  I could not move. I could neither jump to my feet and confront them on their own level, nor crawl miserably away to hide among the chessmen. They continued toward me, and it was Maggie who saw me first. As a rule she was equal to anything, poised and unruffled, no matter what the crisis, as she had needed to be, playing more mother than cousin to Justin and Marc ever since her own mother had died years ago. But now she blinked and gave me a brief stare before she looked away. The look was enough to make Justin turn. His expression did not change except for the deepening of the crease in his cheek, the tightening of his mouth. He stared at me for a long, dreadful moment and then came directly toward me.

  I had not thought it would be like this. I had imagined myself facing him coolly, wondering what I had ever seen in such a man. I’d never expected to shiver, I’d never expected that I would warm to fire, then freeze into ice. I dared look only at his long feet in their scuffed country brogues. I dared not raise my eyes higher than his shoes and gray trousers.

  “Get up!” he ordered me. “What are you doing hiding in the bushes? Was it you last night in my workshop smashing about out of pure devilment?”

  He had not changed. He had always been capable of saying outrageous, arrogant things when he was angry. Though why he should fly into a rage at the sight of me, I didn’t know.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Justin,” Maggie said. I think for once she was not as calm as she pretended, though she went on to lie with quiet assurance. “Eve is here because I invited her to Athmore. Though I can’t think why she’s come into the
garden without announcing herself.”

  Her words were a reprieve I had not expected. At least I was not to be thrown out ignominiously, even though I had not waited for Maggie in London. When she bent and held out her hand to me, I saw the sparkle of a star sapphire on her engagement finger, where before she had worn only her widow’s wedding ring. I noted, but did not think about it till later. I gave her my hand and let her pull me to my feet with her strong grasp. Once standing, I braced myself, with hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, and my feet well apart. My eyes were on a level with Justin’s chin, and again I looked no higher. What an impossible, unlovable man he was, I assured myself.

  “Of course she can’t stay here,” Justin told Maggie. “I won’t have her at Athmore.” And then to me, roughly, “How did you get in?”

  “Through the gate,” I said. “I came with the tour.”

  “Then we owe you a tea, at least,” Maggie put in cheerfully, paying no attention to Justin. “Did you know we have Thursday Tea Tours nowadays, Eve? With one of us presiding. It’s a way of getting visitors to come all that way from London. And it’s much better for business.”

  Justin looked as if he might explode. His lean face had darkened and his eyes were the color of Athmore stones on a winter day. But he could not strike us, shake us, or crack our heads together, as he might very well have liked. So he turned on his heel with such force that he ground a hole into Daniel’s turf and strode away toward the house. Maggie watched him go and shook her head sadly.

  “He had a good deal to upset him just now. And you’ll be one more worry. But perhaps that’s how it must be.”

  “I—I won’t stay,” I faltered, growing a little angry, now that I need not look into Justin’s cold eyes. Angry not only with him, but with myself—a mixture that was hurtfully familiar.

  Maggie studied me. She had dropped my hand once I was on my feet and she offered no warm, welcoming move in my direction. There was no reason why she should. All her loyalties were given to Justin—and even more to Marc, who had always been her favorite, as I knew only too well. I must come very low in the scale of her consideration. Yet she had kept me here by the lie she had told Justin.

  “Why did you come here by yourself?” she asked quietly. “I would have brought you.”

  “I—I’m not sure. I suppose I haven’t felt anything at all for a long time. Until your letter came. Then everything began to hurt dreadfully—the way something hurts after you’ve been frozen to a state of numbness and the blood starts to flow again. So I didn’t want to wait. I couldn’t live with a feeling like that. I’d rather be angry. I’d rather feel misused—and I knew I could count on Justin to give me that. When was he ever fair or kind? Now he’s given me exactly what I need. And he gave it to me right away. I’m over caring. I’ll go home at once!”

  Maggie reached out and took my left hand in hers, turning it curiously about. She touched the finger that wore no wedding ring, looked at the palm as though she might do her amusing little palm-reading act.

  “You’re shivering,” she said. “And no one can go on being angry forever. Americans give in to their emotions too easily, I always think. I suppose that’s why they get on so well with the Italians and the Irish. You were always one to talk about loving and hating in one breath and at high pitch.”

  The old twinge of irritation went through me. How the English loved to generalize about Americans—even Maggie, who had an enthusiasm for us most of the time.

  From a distance we could hear the sounds of the tour returning. Miss Davis’s tones were cultured, but carrying, as she pointed out the charms of Athmore on the way back to the house.

  Maggie dropped my hand. “Go with the others. Come in with them when Caryl brings them to the drawing room for tea. In the meantime I’ll get a room ready for you. You have a bag?”

  “But—but Justin—?” I began.

  I remembered her generous smile that could nevertheless be a touch shrewd and knowing. “Hurry and join your group,” she said.

  I did not hurry. I trailed after them slowly, knowing the way well enough and still trying to get myself in hand, feeling betrayed by the intensity of my own reactions. I threaded my way through tall yew shapes and returned to the terrace in time to follow the last member of the tour between white columns and under the wide fanlight of the door.

  “This is the famous Hall of Armor,” Miss Davis was telling her charges, sounding a little more by rote than she had in the beginning.

  I stood just within the door of the long echoing room that connected the two wings of the house. The ceiling was remotely high, and ornate with plaster whimsies. Across the room’s great width the marvelous staircase, recessed in its own bay, wound upward with stately grace. I stood with the toes of my shoes resting upon a red marble diamond set among the white. Spreading away from me, the great expanse of red and white marble gleamed in sunlight cast through tall windows that rose on either hand. Along the walls, between the windows and at the far ends of the hall, stood the pieces of Spanish armor John Edmond Athmore and his sons had taken pride in collecting—some of them perhaps at first hand from the bodies of Spaniards. Many of these pieces had been saved from the fires that had attacked the original Athmore Hall, just as a few of the precious paintings had been saved.

  In its place of honor opposite the door hung the famous portrait of John Edmond in the prime of his life, shortly before his tragic death. Sometimes I had thought Justin looked a little like him, and for that reason I would no more than glance at the picture as Miss Davis mentioned it.

  Her low heels tapped the marble, and we followed her to the door of the red drawing room in the south wing. I closed my eyes for an instant before I stepped across the sill, longing foolishly to recapture my first sight of the room as it had seemed when I’d first entered it so eagerly and timidly when I was nineteen.

  The red and gold damask of the walls had been brought from Italy, Justin had told me, and I heard the echo of his very speech in Miss Davis’s pronouncements. I let my attention wander in further recognition, paying little attention to her words.

  The great rugs were richly faded Persian, the chairs and sofa upholstered in a muted Chinese red. And there were touches of chinoiserie everywhere—a cabinet of red lacquer here, a small inlaid table there. On the shelf above a black marble fireplace stood the lovely Ming horse I remembered. In fact, I remembered everything—from the tall French windows that opened upon the side terrace and were framed in dusky red draperies threaded with gold, to the burnished brass scrollwork of andirons on the white marble base of the hearth. The draperies were not as old as the red damask walls, but they were old enough to carry the smell of ancient dust. I need not put my face to them to feel the tickle of remembered sneezes in my nose. I did not need to go close to see that they were worn and mended, as much of Athmore was worn threadbare.

  We all stood close together at one end of the big room, herded there by Miss Davis, and I looked about at the individual members of this group I had joined, realizing what a mixed lot we were. There was a red-faced man whom I had put down as a butcher, though for all I knew he might be a judge. There was a wizened little Englishwoman in her seventies, who seemed to be absorbing her surroundings as though they were indeed sustaining meat and drink to her. There was a middle-class mother-and-father, son-and-daughter group, well-to-do and bent on putting their best foot forward. In fact, Sonny was nudged now and then by his mother to make certain of this.

  Behind me someone came into the room, and I forgot my itemizing and turned uneasily. Justin would not come to tea, I knew. Not with me present—if he ever came. But the person whose name flashed into my mind was Marc. Marc would regard such tours as cause for high amusement, though he would play the role of gracious host to the hilt, so that hardly anyone would suspect him of mockery. But it was Maggie who had reappeared, and I breathed again. The man who came in with her I did not immediately recognize.

  They had tactfully appeared before anyone was
sitting down, so there need be no awkward jumping up again, and I watched as Maggie went gracefully from visitor to visitor, learning names with real interest, saying a few words to each, asking questions, inviting everyone to find a chair—turning the whole affair from a paid-for tour to a social occasion, with herself the more than gracious hostess, and ourselves her most welcome guests. It was make-believe, of course, but done with kindness and genuine interest.

  I hadn’t expected her to come to me, but she was suddenly at my side, holding out her hand, her brown eyes challenging me.

  “And your name, young lady? I don’t believe you’ve told me.”

  I mumbled something a bit wildly, and she accepted the mumble with a kind nod and saw that I was seated next to the elderly Englishwoman who was so enjoying this experience. I could feel comfortable there, and I let her tell me how many of the great houses of England she had visited, and how, as an American, I must value an experience that was surely not possible in my own country. When she paused for breath I asked a question.

  “When you visited the chapel ruins did you happen to see an old man there?”

  Her attention focused on me shrewdly. “Why, yes, we did. Odd that you should mention it. He was quite old—a bit doddering, I should say. Miss Davis told us he was the gardener. She had to stop him from interrupting the tour. Somehow I had the impression that he was upset about something, even frightened. But when we left he stayed behind. How did you know?”

  “I saw him too,” I said vaguely, and did not explain. Fortunately, she lost interest and turned to speak to the man on her right.

  I sipped strong English tea and thought about Old Daniel. If he had been frightened—what was the cause? And why had he hung about those ruins? But there was no one I could easily ask, so I gave myself to nibbling at wafer-thin biscuits, tiny sandwiches, and little frosted cakes brought in on an old-fashioned tiered silver tea tray. I remembered the tray, as I remembered the honey flavor of the cakes, undoubtedly made by the same cook who had ruled the kitchen when I had lived at Athmore. For the moment I forgot about Old Daniel.