Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  When the cistern was full it was drained by a spigot into buckets and the juice carried to the brew-house, where it was emptied into open barrels to ferment. Starlings nested in the roof of the brew-house, but it was reckoned that the odd bird-dropping or piece of nest-litter – even a fallen fledgling or two, or an inquisitive mouse – helped the fermentation along and gave the final result ‘a bit of body.’ When the fermentation was finished, the liquid was strained through muslin into clean barrels and plugged, and that provided drink for the household for about six months. The ‘rack’ – what was caught in the muslin – was fed to the pigs, along with the used grain left after the brewing process. Morland Place made about half of its own ale, as well as wines from fruit and flowers. Elderflower wine was much prized, and the servants regarded plum brandy as a sovereign remedy for toothache, influenza, green-sickness, rheumatism, palpitations – indeed, almost anything except the gout and the stone.

  Sabina had always overseen the wine-making, following the receipts from the Household Book, vast and leather-bound, which was added to and handed down by every mistress of Morland Place. This year, Jemmy supposed that the housekeeper would see to it, for it was mortal sure that Mary would not do so, and Sabina was dead. She had died in February, in the depth of the coldest part of winter, while a blizzard blew around Morland Place, soughing in the chimneys and blowing gusts of snow down them to fizzle abruptly against the glowing logs. Jemmy missed her, far more even than he had expected to. She had been the spirit of the house, and without her there seemed a lack of something, no sense of community within the household; for what she had provided, Matt would not and Mary could not. Father Andrews had spoken her funeral mass, she had been buried in the crypt, and Jemmy had worn mourning for her for three months, and that was that.

  He had been still in mourning when Mary had given birth to her baby, two days before her birthday. Jemmy always thought about it as her baby, rather than his, or theirs. Since the child’s conception, he had had little to do with his wife. Sometimes he shared a bed with her, but only in the formal sense. Quite often he slept in the dressing room or in the bachelor wing, taking advantage of her frequent headaches, which he was sure were politic. They met at mealtimes, and in the evenings after dark, and spoke, when they had to, with great politeness to each other. Often they did not even spend the evening in each other’s company, for she retired early to her bedchamber, like a mediaeval lady, to work there, and he often sat at night in the steward’s room, either working, or pretending to. At first Jemmy had been puzzled by her attitude, and angry at her rejection of him; now he had become so used to it that he did not think of it at all. He avoided her automatically, like a man stepping round a known and permanent hazard.

  The baby had been born, he gathered, without undue difficulties, and was a boy, and was healthy and bonny. Mary had named it Thomas, after her brother the Duke, and Jemmy had written to the Duke to that effect, and had asked him to be Godfather. The other Godparents were Maurice, Sir John Vanbrugh, John Bourchier, the squire of Beningbrough, and Annunciata, Countess of Chelmsford. Mary had looked disapproving of this last choice, but had not spoken against it. The baby had been given a grand Christening, with all its Godparents present, as well as the best society of York and all the Morland tenantry; a banquet and ball had followed, with a whole roast ox and country dancing on the lawns for the servants and tenants. Then the baby had disappeared into the nursery and the care of nurses, and though Mary was very fond of it and apparently spent a great deal of time in the nursery, Jemmy forgot for most of the time that he had become a father.

  Matt, oddly enough for one who had been so notoriously careless a father, had been delighted to become a grandfather at last, and had smiled more and spoken more at the Christening celebrations than Jemmy could ever remember.

  When everyone was retiring to bed after the ball, moreover, he had asked Jemmy to come with him to the steward’s room, and there he had given Jemmy a glass of wine and made him drink the child’s health once again, and then had said, ‘I could not feel easy while the inheritance hung by the thread of a single life. Now there are two generations. But you must not be complacent either. You must not rest until there are three or four. I know well the problems attaching to being the sole heir. All my childhood, I bore the weight alone. Well, I have done what I can. Now it is your responsibility.’

  Jemmy had thought afterwards that it was a distinctly odd speech, but had put it down to his father’s state of health, which had been bad for some years. After the baby was born, Matt seemed to get rapidly worse, as if he had been holding back the tide of dissolution in anticipation of that very event. Almost from the following day, he had seemed to shrink and grow feebler, and it was plain to everyone that he was suffering from some wasting disease, though used as he was to autocracy, he refused to consult anyone of the medical profession, or to take any remedies other than simple herbal mixtures to relieve certain of his symptoms. Jemmy had gradually to take over more and more of his father’s duties, but that was no more than a speeding-up of the process that had been going on for years, and was certainly no hardship.

  The men were unwinding the wooden screw of the press now, the first pressing being finished, and removing the flattened straw-and-apple cake.

  ‘You two can take that down to the dairy,’ Cradoc directed, nodding to the men who had lifted it off. Jemmy had a thought.

  ‘How are the pigs coming along?’ he asked. ‘I wonder should it be given to them? It lacks but three weeks to the killing. Only three weeks left to fatten them up.’

  Cradoc nodded. ‘They are well enough, sir, but they’ll always eat more if they’re given it. You know pigs. But it’s as you please, sir.’

  ‘I’ll come down now and look at them,’ Jemmy said. ‘They’re on the fallow by the windmill, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll walk down with you. Carry on here, you men.’

  Jemmy and the bailiff had not gone more than fifty yards, however, when there was an outcry behind them that halted them, and they turned to see one of the house servants running clumsily towards them over the uneven turf.

  ‘Master, master, wait!’

  The man reached them and stood panting, one hand to the stitch in his side, the other waving in the effort to communicate before he had breath to do so.

  ‘Take your breath, man, be easy,’ Jemmy said, wondering what minor crisis demanded his presence this time: with Sabina gone, everything seemed to get referred to him. ‘No news is worth choking for.’

  But the man waved his hand again in distress, and his face was white with strain. ‘Master,’ he panted, ‘you must come quick. It’s your father, sir – he’s been taken very bad.’

  Jemmy stood beside his father’s bed in the West Bedroom, staring down at the shrunken figure that lay propped against the mound of pillows. Clement had got him to bed and sent a servant for the doctor and another to fetch Jemmy, and he had kept watch by the bedside, along with Man’s new body-servant, a young boy named Pask, who was a distant cousin of Clement’s, until Jemmy arrived.

  Matt’s face was dark and suffused with blood, and his breathing was laboured and rattled distressfully in his chest. His hands, resting on the counterpane, twitched, as did the skin of his face, and his eyes moved about under his eyelids as if he were trying to see through them. Jemmy was aware of how bare and fleshless his father’s face looked without the frame of his usual wig. The nose looked sharp and pinched, the teeth shewed faintly through the lips and the cheekbones were too prominent, as if the face were rehearsing its final appearance. Clement, in his haste, had put on the nightcap crookedly, and Jemmy reached out to straighten it, for the clownish angle was grotesque in conjunction with the cadaverous aspect.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Jemmy asked quietly. Clement looked at Pask, but the boy was wringing his hands, evidently too upset to speak, and the older man finally answered for him.

  ‘It was quite sudden, sir. Master hadn’t long been downstai
rs. Pask dressed him, and then he went up to the nursery, sir, and—’

  ‘The nursery?’ Jemmy interrupted sharply. Clement nodded, unsurprised.

  ‘Master went up to the nursery every day, sir. He didn’t stay long. Then he came downstairs, and he’d just got to the hall when he suddenly cried out and fell down. Pask called for me right away.’

  ‘Had he eaten? Had he taken anything?’ Jemmy asked. Pask looked frightened – in cases of sudden illness, talk of poison was commonplace.

  ‘Only what he usually had, master,’ Pask whispered. ‘Bread and small beer. I brought it before I dressed him.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it could have been that, then,’ Jemmy shook his head. Pask began to cry, but silently, and Clement murmured to him to fold up the master’s clothes, in order to keep him occupied. Jemmy took the flask of wine from the bedside and, with his fingertips, wet his father’s lips and tongue with wine. Matt seemed to feel it. He frowned and muttered, and his hands jerked as if he wanted to touch his face. Jemmy trickled a few more drops of wine between his lips, and then bathed his father’s face with the cloth and water Clement had had brought up.

  After a moment or two, Matt’s eyes began to flicker open, and he stared up at Jemmy, frowning.

  Jemmy leaned forward and said gently, ‘Father? It’s me, Jemmy. How do you feel?’ His father did not answer, frowning as if in thought. ‘You are in bed, in your own room, father. You fell ill. We have sent for the doctor, and he should be here soon. Is there anything you want?’

  His father’s lips moved, though he made no sound, and he closed his eyes again. Jemmy caught Clement’s eye, and between them they propped up Matt’s head and put the wine cup to his lips. The wine spilled over, running down his chin and staining the sheets like blood, but Jemmy thought he had swallowed a little too. They laid him back down on the pillows, and Jemmy took his father’s hand and held it between his own, not knowing what else to do.

  Suddenly Matt’s eyes opened again, and he looked at Jemmy with recognition. His lips moved again. Jemmy leaned closer, and Man’s hand clenched suddenly and painfully. Jemmy could feel the whisper of Man’s breath on his face, hear it rattle as it was dragged in and out with such effort, but the words were hard to distinguish.

  ‘Jemmy – promise me—’

  ‘Yes, father,’ Jemmy encouraged him. ‘Anything, anything I can.’ The hand gripped his tighter. For a long time there was only the gasp of laboured breathing.

  ‘Promise – me—’ A long pause. Don’t – break – up—’

  But the rest was indistinguishable. Jemmy waited, but the fingers gripping his began to relax, and when he drew his head back a little, he saw his father’s eyes were closed again.

  There was no more. His father did not again shew signs of consciousness. A while later Man gave a convulsive jerk and gasp, as though he had been struck heavily in the back ; drew one short breath; and one more; and then there was silence. Jemmy stared, pressing the hand he still held. Surely that could not be all? He looked up at Clement, who shook his head, but Jemmy could not believe it, and stared into his father’s face, willing him to breathe again. He could not be gone, not just like that, so simply between one second and another, leaving without saying goodbye. But Pask and Clement had slipped down onto their knees, and Jemmy felt a terrible sense of loss and abandonment wash over him. I am Master now, he thought, and the idea was grief and loneliness. His father was gone, and Jemmy was the ultimate authority, and he wished passionately that he could tell his father that he understood now. It was too late ever to make up to Man for all the love he had never given him.

  A little while later the doctor arrived, and then Father Andrews, who unluckily had been visiting a sick weaver in the village. The priest laid a hand on Jemmy’s shoulder and spoke to him comfortingly.

  ‘It’s all right. I have heard his confession daily, and I can give him the last rites now, while his spirit is still hovering near. It will be all right, don’t worry.’ He busied himself with his impedimenta, and Jemmy, feeling suddenly in the way, wandered out into the corridor. A number of servants were gathered there, their faces sombre, and at the sight of Jemmy’s face they crossed themselves, and one or two sank to their knees to pray for Matt’s soul. And then Mary arrived in a flurry of skirts from the nursery wing. Her face was white, her eyes wide.

  ‘They have just told me your father is ill,’ she cried before she took in the scene, and came to a halt, her hands rising to clasp each other at her breast. Through the open bedroom door she saw the priest bending over the bed, saw Clement and Pask still kneeling in prayer, and then her eyes came back to Jemmy. ‘He’s dead?’ Jemmy nodded. She stared for a moment, and then her face hardened. Why didn’t you send for me?’ she cried. Jemmy shook his head vaguely.

  ‘I – didn’t think,’ he muttered. ‘There wasn’t time.’ She stared for a moment longer, and then whirled around and ran back the way she had come.

  There was a great deal to be done. The women who had laid out Sabina so recently came to do their work, to wash and bind and dress the Master, and the estate carpenter and his mate hastily knocked together a temporary coffin and a trestle on which to stand it in the chapel. The black cloth, embroidered with the Morland arms, was got out to cover the bier, and by dusk James Matthias Morland was lying in state in the chapel with candles burning all around him and the first of the watchers kneeling in prayer at his head and foot.

  Jemmy spent the rest of the day giving orders and writing letters. People had to be told, friends, family and tenants; mourning had to be arranged – fortunately, if one could use such a word at such a time, the mourning livery made for Sabina’s death could be used again, and the lower servants only needed weepers. Dark drapes for the windows, black hangings for the beds. Arrangements for the funeral, the feast, the procession, the doles, the flags, the guests to be asked, Pobgee, the lawyer, sent for. There was no dinner that day, for Jacob the cook was so grief-stricken that he let the fire go out, and Jemmy did not go into the dining room for supper – what there was of it. Clement brought him bread and cold meat and wine, in the steward’s room, and he stared at it in amazement, and said he could eat nothing. But he was thirsty, and drank the wine, a little watered, and then found he was savagely hungry, and cleared the tray. The household routine was going on, albeit a little dazedly. Fires and candles were lit, and the house bell was rung to signal that the outer gates were about to be shut. And like an echo came back the sound of Great Paul, the tenor bell of St Stephen’s in the village, ringing the nine tailors for the passing of a man, and then forty-one single strokes, one for each year of Matt’s life. Jemmy thought again about that one, slender, unremarkable second that had divided the forty-one years from the rest of eternity. Time to go to the chapel: instead of the normal evening prayers, there would be prayers for the dead, and tonight there would be no absentees.

  As was only right, Jemmy took the first watch, from eight until midnight, and Charles asked to take it with him. When they were relieved, Jemmy was so exhausted he hardly said goodnight before dragging himself up the chapel stairs, the short way to the bedchamber. To his surprise, he found the candle still burning, and Mary sitting up reading, evidently waiting for him.

  He had not seen her all day, since that one moment outside his father’s room; seeing her now reminded him of that moment, and he relived the reality of his father’s death, and the loneliness. He was glad she had waited up for him. His heart suddenly warmed to her for understanding that he would need comforting. They had not been close of late, but perhaps now they might make a new start, now that they were Master and Mistress of Morland Place, and would need each other all the more.

  ‘Mary,’ he said gently, ‘you waited up for me—’

  She turned to look at him, and he saw that her eyes were red with weeping, but also that they were angry.

  ‘There did not seem to be any other way that I could get to speak to you,’ she said harshly. ‘I have sometimes wondered whethe
r it would not be better for me to write you a letter from time to time. It might be quicker to trust to the post boy than to hope to pass you in the house somewhere.’

  Jemmy frowned, puzzled. What was it she was saying? Was she angry with him? What had he done? ‘I have been busy all day, you must know that. There were so many things to be done—’

  ‘Things which, of course, only you could do,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes – I could hardly leave them to a servant,’ Jemmy said. Mary’s mouth set in a grimmer line.

  ‘And it did not occur to you to trust any of them to your wife,’ she said sarcastically. Jemmy’s mouth opened but she did not wait for him to speak. ‘But of course, you find it very difficult to remember that you have a wife, don’t you? If anyone had challenged you to say what I was wearing today, would you have been able to answer?’

  ‘Mary, on such a day—’

  ‘On any day! I wonder if you would even be able to describe what I look like? After all, you never see me. On some days I do not speak one word to you – no, not one word, not even, “Good-day, Master Morland”, “Good-day, Mrs Morland”.’ She performed a parody of a bow and curtsey. ‘No, it’s all too easy for you to forget that you are married. Or that you have a child. When did you last see the baby? I’ll wager you cannot remember.’

  ‘I can,’ Jemmy said, stung. ‘It was – it was yesterday.’

  ‘It was not yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. It was on Monday, when the nurse brought him down to the drawing room and you happened to look in because you had forgot your pen-knife. Nurse presented him to you, and you looked at him and gave him back very quickly, as if he were a snake.’

  ‘As I remember, he began to cry as soon as I came near him—’ Jemmy said in self-justification. Mary reddened.

  ‘Of course he did! You are a stranger to him. Do you know, when your father picks him up he smiles—’ She stopped abruptly as she realized what tense she had used of the verb. Tears filled her eyes. ‘Your father loved him. He never cried when your father was near.’