Saraband for Two Sisters

by Philippa Carr

  Phoebe was beginning to look frightened.

  ‘I feel something awful be happening to me, Mistress Bersaba,’ she said. ‘Do ’ee think the Lord be punishing me for being wanton like?’

  ‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘If He’s going to punish people for being like that He shouldn’t have made them that way.’

  Phoebe looked frightened. I think she expected the wrath of Heaven to descend upon me to punish me for my blasphemy. It was to be expected. Hadn’t she been brought up in the smithy?

  In the afternoon it started to rain, great heavy drops that fell steadily down. At four o’clock I thought Phoebe looked ill and she said she was in pain, so I went down to the stables and told one of the grooms to ride over to the midwife and tell her to come without delay. She lived some two miles away in a little group of cottages just outside our estate.

  He went off and I went back to Phoebe. I made her go to bed and I stood at the window watching for the midwife.

  Phoebe looked very ill and I wasn’t sure whether it was the pain she was suffering or the fear which had returned now her time had come. For seventeen years she had listened to her father’s ranting about the vengeance of God, so it was small wonder that she was reminded of it now.

  I kept telling her that there was nothing to fear. A great many girls had been in her position and come happily through. I was almost on the point of telling her my own experiences just to comfort her, but I stopped short of that in time.

  I was at the window when I heard the sound of horses hoofs in the stables so, thinking it was the groom returned with the midwife, I ran down.

  It was the groom, but the midwife was not with him.

  ‘Where is Mother Gantry?’ I demanded.

  ‘Her couldn’t come, Mistress Bersaba.’

  ‘What do you mean she couldn’t come? I sent you for her.’

  ‘I hammered on her door but she wouldn’t answer. I said: “You’m wanted at the Priory. One of the maids is giving birth.” ’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She just come to the window and shook her head at me. Then she pulled down the blind and said, “Go away, or you’ll be sorry.” So I rode back to tell ’ee, mistress.’

  ‘You fool,’ I cried. ‘We need a midwife. Why do you think I sent you if it didn’t matter whether she came or not? Saddle my horse.’

  ‘Mistress Bersaba …’

  ‘Saddle my horse!’ I shouted, and trembling he obeyed.

  ‘Mistress Bersaba,’ he repeated, ‘I’ll go back …’

  I jumped on my horse and rode out. The rain was teeming down. I was not dressed for the saddle. There was nothing on my head and my hair was soon streaming down behind my back.

  I took a certain glory in what I was doing. I had saved Phoebe from her father; I had saved Carlotta from the mob—although I had done my best to throw her to them; and now I was continuing in my heroic role. I was going to arrive just in time with the midwife whom that fool of a groom had not brought back with him simply because the woman was too tired or too lazy to answer a summons for a mere maid.

  I came to her cottage. I banged on the door. I heard a feeble voice and I lifted a latch and went in. ‘Mistress Gantry …’ I began.

  She was lying back in a chair, and I went to her and shook her before I noticed that her face was fiery red, her eyes glassy.

  ‘Be gone,’ she cried. ‘Don’t ’ee come near me. Stay away, I tell ’ee.’

  ‘Mistress Gantry, a baby is about to be born.’

  ‘Get you gone, mistress,’ cried Mother Gantry. ‘I be sick of a pox.’

  I understood why she had not opened the door to the groom and that by coming in I had placed myself in acute danger.

  I went out of the cottage and mounted my horse.

  It seemed a long time before I got back to the Priory. I went into the stables, where the grooms stared at me. Then, wet and bedraggled as I was, I went up to Phoebe’s room.

  My mother was at the door.

  ‘Bersaba, wherever have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been to Mother Gantry. She can’t come … She’s sick … she says of a pox.’

  ‘You saw her …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I went into her cottage to get her to come to Phoebe.’

  ‘Oh, my child,’ said my mother. ‘You must get those things off.’

  ‘Phoebe’s baby?’

  ‘It is born … dead.’

  I stared at her. I could see her concern was all for me.

  ‘Phoebe?’ I began.

  ‘She is very ill but she has a chance of recovery. I want you to get those wet clothes off. Come with me.’

  She led me away.

  I was feeling limp, deflated and exhausted.

  ANGELET

  In Paul’s Walk

  I WAS SAD AS I rode along, for this would be the first time in my life that I had been parted from Bersaba. There was a terrible anxiety in my heart too, for this was a turning point in our lives and I instinctively knew that nothing would be the same again.

  I had longed to go to London; so often I had visualized the trip, and I had an uncanny feeling that my very longing had made it come about. Once a wise woman—I think she was certainly a white witch—had come to Castle Paling with her husband who was a kind of travelling pedlar. Aunt Melanie had given them shelter for the night and the woman had earned her lodging by telling fortunes, which amused us young ones. I always remember what she said to me. It was something like this: ‘If you want something badly believe you will get it, think of it, see yourself getting it. It is almost certain that if you do this your hopes will come true. But you may have to pay for it in a way you hadn’t expected—and that way may not be pleasant. In fact it could be that you might wish you had never asked for it.’

  That was how I felt now on the road to London. I was here because Bersaba was so ill. I had seen the fear in my mother’s eyes and that she wanted to make sure of my safety, for when Phoebe’s baby was born dead Bersaba had caught the smallpox from the midwife. We did not know this immediately, of course. Bersaba rode out to bring the midwife in the teeming rain and actually went in and shook the old woman before she noticed the terrible signs of illness on her face, and thus she had come into physical contact with her.

  When she came back and told us what had happened, my mother herself put her to bed and made her stay there. The next day, however, we heard that the midwife had died and that several people in the village were suffering from the smallpox.

  My mother—usually so meek—became like a general gathering her forces about her, going into the attack determined to defeat the enemy—in this case a disease which could kill.

  She sent for me and I was immediately aware of her purpose. ‘You will no longer sleep in Bersaba’s room,’ she told me. ‘Your things are being moved to a little room on the east side.’

  This room was about the farthest from the one I shared with Bersaba.

  ‘I don’t want you to see your sister until I say you may.’

  I was horrified. Not see Bersaba, I who had been with her almost every hour of my life! I felt as though part of myself was being taken away.

  ‘We must be sensible,’ said my mother the next day, very calm in spite of the anxiety she was suffering. ‘The fact is that Bersaba has been in contact with a woman who has the smallpox. She had a chill at the time so may well be in a receptive state. We shall know in a week or two at most whether she has contracted the disease. If she has, then I want you to go away.’

  ‘To go away … from Bersaba when she is ill!’

  ‘My dear child, this is a dangerous sickness which can result in death. We must be brave, and we shall not be that if we shut our eyes to the truth. I am going to send you to London … if this develops.’

  ‘To London … without Bersaba?’

  ‘I want you to be far away. This is going to be distressing, and if Bersaba really has contracted the disease we are going to need all our skills in nursing her.’
r />   ‘I should be here to help then.’

  ‘No. I would not let you run the risk.’

  ‘But what of you, Mother?’

  ‘I am her mother. You don’t think I would allow anyone else to nurse her?’

  ‘What if you caught it?’ My eyes were round with horror.

  ‘I shall not,’ she said confidently. ‘I must not, for I intend to nurse Bersaba. But as yet we are unsure. I want you to stay away from her. That is why I have changed your room. Promise me that you will not see her.’

  ‘But what will she think?’

  ‘Bersaba is sensible. She knows what has happened. She understands the danger. Therefore she will agree that we are right.’

  ‘Mother, how could I go to London when she may be ill?’

  ‘You can because I say you must. You are so close … so accustomed to being together, that I fear it might not be possible to keep you apart.’

  ‘But to go to London … without Bersaba!’

  ‘I have been awake all night thinking of the best course to take and I have come to the conclusion that this is it. If you were at Castle Paling you would be too near … and I think it would be good for you to have a change of scene. In London everything will be fresh for you. You won’t fret so much.’

  ‘Mother, you think she may die …’

  ‘She is going to live. But we have to face the facts, Angel. She is already weak. She has seemed in a highly strung state these last weeks … and then the chill. But I shall nurse her through it. I have sent a message to London telling Senara that in all probability you will be leaving in two weeks unless she hears to the contrary. Make your preparations. I’m afraid you will only be able to take what you have and there will be no time for making new garments. Be of good cheer, Angelet. It may not come to this.’

  I was bewildered. I had so longed to go to London, but I had never for a moment thought of doing so without Bersaba. I just could not visualize a life she did not share.

  Those two weeks passed somehow. Every morning I would look into my mother’s face to read what I dared not ask. The whole household seemed to be plunged into melancholy. Bersaba stayed in her room and only my mother went to her. She told me that Bersaba understood and realized that it must be so.

  Then came the morning when I read the terrible truth in my mother’s eyes. The first dread symptoms had shown themselves.

  That was why on that October morning I was travelling to London. I had Mab with me to act as my maid and six grooms to protect me and to look after the baggage. And as I rode along I was thinking of my sister and wondering whether I should ever see her again.

  I remember very little of the journey because all the time my thoughts were occupied with Bersaba. We stayed the first night at Castle Paling and that was a sombre occasion because everyone was so shocked by the thought of what might be happening at the Priory.

  I could see that they didn’t have much hope of Bersaba’s recovery, and their assurances that it would certainly be a mild attack and that she would have the best attention and that so much had been learned about the disease now that many people were cured, lacked conviction.

  The journey took two weeks. To me it seemed like going from inn to inn, then starting off almost as soon as it was light and going on till the horses needed a rest at midday, and then another inn and food before we started off again.

  We kept to the byways as much as possible, for the groom in charge believed that there was less likelihood of meeting road robbers that way. He said that highwaymen haunted the main roads because more travellers used them, and although there might be rich people on the byways, robbers might have to hang about in wait for a whole day and meet no one, so they preferred the more regular traffic on the highways.

  This seemed to me logical and I suppose we had our share of thrills, but nothing seemed to touch me because I wasn’t so much on the road as in that bedroom at Trystan Priory with my sister. When the rain teemed down I scarcely noticed it; when the roads were impassable and we had to retrace our way I accepted it stoically.

  Mab said to me: ‘You’m not here, Miss Angelet. That’s what ’tis.’

  And I answered: ‘I can’t be anywhere, Mab, but back at Trystan Priory with my sister.’

  And I kept blaming myself in a way because I had so wanted this and it had come about in this strange uncanny way, for I knew my mother would never have consented to our going to London together; she would have thought of all the dangers on the road her darlings would have to face, and perhaps too of other dangers in London society. But there was no danger as great as that which now threatened my sister Bersaba, and my mother would agree to anything that took me out of its path.

  So the journey progressed. We crossed the Tamar at Gunislake and travelled across Devon to Tavistock and thence to Somerset and to Wiltshire, where carved on the hillside I saw the strange white horse which was said to have been done in the era before Christianity came to England. As we came to Stonehenge, that impressive and most weird stone circle, I thought vaguely of the rites which were doubtless performed there long before the Romans came to Britain, and was reminded of the strange murmurs there had been about Carlotta and wondered whether she really had been a witch. It was very strange about the toad which had been found in her bed. My mother, who hated talk of witchcraft because she said people were so cruel to innocent old women and worked themselves into a frenzy through their imagination, pretended that there was no such thing. ‘It is in the minds of their accusers,’ she said. As for the toad, her explanation was that it had got into the house in some way, that was if Mab had really seen it. She may well have imagined the whole thing, said my mother, and the girl believed it because that was what she wanted to believe. At least she was allowing me to go to Senara and Carlotta, so she must have been sincere in her disbelief.

  And so Stonehenge and on through Basingstoke to Reading, when I found myself a little excited and being ashamed of it, hastily sending my thoughts back to that sickroom in Trystan Priory. I caught a glimpse of Windsor Castle through the trees.

  It looked magnificent with its grey towers and battlements and the Great Park which surrounded it; and I thought of history lessons in the Priory schoolroom where I had sat beside Bersaba and we had learned of how Edward the Third had picked up the lady’s garter there and created the motto ‘Evil be to him who evil thinks’—a story which we both loved to hear repeated; and how King John stayed there before signing the Magna Carta at Runnymede, and Henry VIII hunted in the forest. Seeing the very castle of which we had heard so much aroused my interest and excitement, but it was overshadowed by memories of my sister.

  I thought then: She will always be there. I shall never escape from Bersaba. It seemed strange to use the word ‘escape’, for that sounded as though I were in some sort of captivity from which I wanted to get away.

  We were drawing nearer and nearer to London and my thoughts were not: What is awaiting me in London, but any day there might be news of Bersaba.

  And so we came to Pondersby Hall, the residence of Sir Gervaise, which lay not far from the village of Richmond close to the river—the river on which craft of all sizes and shapes sailed in and out of the city of London.

  It was a magnificent house but I was accustomed to great mansions, having been brought up between my father’s priory and my grandfather’s castle, and there is nothing quite so inspiring as a castle with its grey battlemented towers and fortress-like exterior, dating back to the Norman era. But Pondersby Hall had a different personality from either the priory or the castle. It was haughty—if one can apply such a term to a house—but it was the word which occurred to me. It had a well-cared-for look which the houses of Cornwall lacked. I supposed that situated in the more cosy south east corner of England it escaped the gales to which we were subject, and the colder drier climate had not played such havoc with its walls. It was not old as houses go. It must have been built round about 1560, so it was less than a hundred years old and it had an air of mode
rnity which the castle certainly lacked.

  Perhaps this impression was strengthened by the fact that everything was in such good condition. The grass in the forecourt was neat and looked as though it had been freshly cut that morning. The grey walls looked clean as if they had just been washed—a silvery grey rather than the darker shade of Castle Paling. I was immediately aware of the ornamental scrolled gables with carved masked corbels at their bases. There was a projecting porch, and on the right of this an enormous window, mullioned and transomed, contained panes too numerous to count. The glass of those panes was of blue and red and green and very effective.

  I thought, as I was to think so often during the next weeks: I wonder what Bersaba would think of that.

  As we came into the forecourt a manservant appeared. He was in green and blue livery which I was soon to learn were the Pondersby colours.

  He presented himself to me and, bowing, said: ‘Good afternoon, m’am. We have been expecting you since yesterday. Orders are that you are to be welcomed and taken to your apartment. I will call the grooms and your servants shall be told where to go.’

  I thanked him and asked his name.

  ‘James, m’am. I am the major-domo. In any difficulty if you will acquaint me of it I will endeavour to remedy the fault.’

  I wanted to laugh and thought how amused Bersaba would have been by his dignity.

  I dismounted, stiff from so long in the saddle, and I immediately felt at a disadvantage. I had an idea that the impeccable James was inwardly raising his eyebrows and asking himself what this was which had arrived to sully his beautiful Hall.

  Mab dismounted and took her place behind me. The men followed the groom, I presumed to the quarters assigned to them.

  James led us up the two steps to the projecting porch with all the dignity of a man performing a most important ceremony; I was soon to realize that he brought that attitude to everything he did, for whatever it was it had to be shown to be worthy of the attention of James.

  We followed him into the hall, where the coloured glass threw a flattering light on to our faces, and I looked up at it admiringly, at the same time taking in the fine plaster ceiling decorated with scrolls, and the minstrels’ gallery at one end of the hall.