by Mary Stewart
‘That’s up to you.’ The words were indifferent, but I felt myself relaxing, and the arm came round me again. ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘did you check the “disposable assets” between you after all? Great jumping beans!’ I sat up again, my hand to my mouth, regarding him wide-eyed in the dusk. ‘The T’ang horse? The jade?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ He was speaking quietly, straight to the almost invisible flagstones at his feet. ‘Bryony, they were ours. I promise you we only took them after your father’s death. This last week. I promise you. We badly needed a bit of ready cash, and Emory knew of a market, so . . .’
I listened to the tone, rather than to the words. I knew it well. James, led into something by Emory, loyal to his twin but knowing all the time that whatever they had done was, to say the least of it, dubious. Emory, I knew, was more than capable of playing rough, and James, playing with him, had sometimes suffered for it. But Twin had always been right.
I was aware of silence. He had run out of words. I heard myself asking, in a hard voice quite unlike my own: ‘Did you have to take the pictures from the schoolroom? You might argue that the other things were going to belong to your family anyway, but the pictures were my own, and I loved them.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I – It was a mistake. They were taken by mistake. They haven’t been sold. As a matter of fact, we planned to put them back, but there hasn’t been a chance today.’
‘Today?’
‘Yes, today. They were only taken yesterday. As soon as I found out, I said they must go back, but by that time you were at the Court, and you’d seen the T’ang horse was missing, and you had started asking about keys. It . . . well, it was awkward.’
‘I suppose it was.’ I felt a little dazed. ‘Just a minute, James. You said, “They were only taken yesterday”. Who took them, then? Emory wasn’t here, was he?’
‘No. Cat took them for us.’
‘What?’ A whirling pause, while I tried to assess it. ‘“For us”? You mean “for Emory”?’
‘If you like.’
‘I do like.’ My voice was sharp. ‘It makes a difference.’
‘Well, then, for Emory. Look, don’t worry, you’ll get them back. It was just—’
‘I’m not worrying about jade or pictures or anything else. I’m thinking about Cathy Underhill. You got that girl to steal for you.’
‘That’s a hard word.’
‘It’s a hard fact.’
‘Aren’t you making a bit too much of this? The things were ours.’
‘Perhaps I am. But not nearly as much as her parents would make of it, I’m sure of that. I thought at the time they seemed almost too upset for what had happened. It made me wonder.’
‘Her parents? For God’s sake, you’re not going to make a thing out of it, are you? Bryony—’
‘Wait a minute, James. This takes some getting used to. Let me alone for a bit.’
I got up abruptly and walked away from him, across the newly cut strip of lawn to the lakeside. There was a low wall there, a length of ancient stonework that had been left to edge the garden; its fissures were planted with wallflowers and toadflax and some trailing glaucous fern that looked silver in the dusk. I stood there with my back to my cousin, staring out over the dimming Pool, but without seeing that or anything. It was wrong, so wrong . . . Yet because it was James, I couldn’t give way to my first instinctive reaction; because it was James I must make myself stop and think . . . Be civilised, I told myself, this sort of shock recoil isn’t even instinctive, it’s a conditioned reaction to what you’ve been taught to call theft.
Well, all right, think. Was it theft? As soon as the legal formalities allowed, all these things would belong to Howard, and by the same token to his sons. James had said with perfect justice that the day was gone when the dead could help the living to watch over the property they had amassed and handed down in designs too vast for today to cope with. And it was my cousins who would have to cope, not I. The fact that Jon Ashley was now one of the dead ought to make no difference. My reaction was an emotional one, nothing more. James knew that; he had tried to spare me; but I had forced his hand by my actions at the Court today, so he had had to tell me now, raw though I still was from my father’s death.
I thought again, briefly, about Rob and the fishing cat . . . Yes, James was right here, too: the place, and the life it had represented, was falling to pieces. Even this cottage, the idyllic little cottage with the view of the lake, with its fruit trees, and the honeysuckle and the Fribourg rose, had woodworm and rising damp which I could not afford to combat. If I sold some of my mother’s Worcester porcelain to pay for it, that would be ethical. Why should not my cousins, the owners of Ashley, sell the pieces that were theirs? And why, if they were driven for time, should they not have done it this way?
It came back to the one answer: Cathy. And here I had even less right to judge. I had no idea of the strength of Emory’s feeling for her; nor had I stopped to question the circumstances under which she had ‘stolen’ the missing articles for my cousins. For Emory, that is. My father had long ago said that Howard would never take on Ashley or any part of its responsibility; it was squarely on Emory’s shoulders, and if Emory had chosen to jump the legal gun . . . Yes, it was to be laid at Emory’s door; I still did not believe that James was, in this, anything other than a follower, loyal as ever to whatever course his twin suggested.
I sat down on the wall, still facing the lake, forcing myself to calmness. I owed my cousins something better than this shocked recoil. I thought again of the quiet nights filled with my lover’s presence, of his support and warmth and love, of the strength he had given me. I thought, too, of the recent strange hesitancy, the impression of guilt and insecurity which, now, I thought I could understand. It had only showed itself since I had come back to England; it had begun last night, when I had seen James in the church vestry. Doing what? That, too, I had begun to guess. The object he had been carrying was large and flat, like a book, or a portfolio. He must just have picked up the Rackham pictures from some hiding-place; not the vestry itself – that would have been asking for discovery. But, except on church-cleaning days, there were a hundred places – under the seats in the side aisles, under the pulpit, behind the stacked hassocks near the font – any of these places would have made a cache, safe and dry, where Cathy could have hidden the objects she had abstracted from the Court.
So James had snatched a cassock from the choirmen’s pegs, had fled up the nave in front of me, switched off the mains, and, while I was approaching up the church, fumbled with and opened the catch of the vestry door. Whoever came into the church would only see the vanishing cassocked figure, and would come to the same conclusion as I had done . . .
Well, now I knew. And I understood my lover’s refusal to come into the open. It was because the affairs of daylight must be settled first. Before anything could be complete between us, we had to settle with the realities of a difficult situation, the hard economics of how and where to live, of Ashley Court and Daddy’s Will and the theft of the jade and pictures. What I had called to myself the facts of the daylight world. And the other world, the starlight one, where love was easy because it ran like poetry from mind to mind, that would have to wait. I knew now what he meant by his repeated, ‘not yet, not yet’; I had to come to terms with what he really was; the outer man, not just that other half of me whom I knew as well as I knew myself. We had reversed the norm, he and I. It had always seemed to me that the love we had, being fuller, must be easier than most; now I saw that it was harder. Nor was the outcome certain. It would depend on my handling of this uneasy and tangled affair, on my finding out what my father had meant and what he had wanted. I must do my job as Jon Ashley’s deputy, and then, when Ashley was accounted for, my lover and I could come to terms. This was what he had seen already. He knew me, and he knew that there were things about him which I might find it hard to accept. He could not be sure of me until I had seen the whole truth about him, and accept
ed it with love and understanding.
I do not think that at that moment I had any doubts about his identity. I stared at the water and opened my mind to him, the query forming in the dimming air. This is why we have to wait?
He came in. This is why.
But I understand now, and I accept it all. Won’t that do? You know I love you, you know that. I have to. That’s the point, isn’t it? Whatever you may have done. Whoever you are.
A flurry of love, as real as petals falling, and the little catch of amusement that I knew so well. I’ll hold you to that.
There really were petals falling. A spray of clematis, caught in the breeze of evening, shed its fading petals on the dim grass. I looked at my cousin at last, across the dusk-filled space. He was watching me steadily, saying nothing, just watching, patient and intent. Then he smiled, and something twisted inside me, like a cord stretched between us that had felt a sudden tug. Blood thicker than water, whatever that might mean; or creatures inhabiting the same pool, over whom the same wave breaks. There seemed no need to speak. There were the Ashley eyes, shadowed in the growing dusk, the fair hair, the casual pose that masked tension. The picture of the real man was blurring, almost as if the imagined picture of my lover was beginning to superimpose itself over the reality of the cousin who sat under the lilac tree and watched me. The outlines wouldn’t quite fit. Not yet. Not, I suppose, until I had accepted him whole, starlight and dreams and the harsh light of tomorrow.
A shadow moved along the lakeside. Something flew up from the reeds with a squawk and a splashing of water. Rob’s collie, hunting along the water’s edge, had disturbed a moorhen from her nest. As if it had broken a spell, I spoke aloud.
‘It’s all right, James. Please don’t worry about this any more. You’ve a perfect right to do what you think best about the stuff in the house . . . It’s yours, after all, and if you need it now instead of later, well, that’s your affair too. I suppose we’ll have to think what to say to the Underhills, but let’s leave it for tonight, shall we?’
‘I wasn’t worrying,’ he said, ‘not really. Blood’s thicker than water, whatever that may mean.’
I heard the smile in his voice. His easy assumption of my complicity (why did that hard word occur to me?) took me off balance again. I said nothing.
The flash of the smile then, and he got to his feet. He must after all have misinterpreted my silence. Almost before I knew he had moved, he had crossed the grass as silently as a cat, and putting out his hands, pulled me to my feet and into his arms. His mouth found mine, gently at first, then with quickly growing excitement.
‘Bryony. Bryony. It’s been so long.’
A thrush broke out of the lilac boughs and went skimming across the orchard wall with a cry of alarm. I put my hands against my cousin’s breast and held myself away from him. ‘James. But I thought—’
He kissed me again, stifling what I was trying to say. He said, against my mouth: ‘You’ve always known it was me, haven’t you?’
‘I – yes. I wasn’t sure. It used to seem so easy once, but – no, wait, please.’
‘Why?’ He pulled me close again, and when I moved my head away he began to kiss my hair, my cheekbones, my throat.
‘No, please, don’t make it any harder. I’ve just begun to understand. We’ve got to get all this business over first.’
He persisted for a little while, but, meeting with no response, finally let me go, and laid a gentle hand to my cheek. ‘All right, all right. This isn’t the time. But don’t let’s be too long about it. I’m so afraid you’ll get away from me again.’
‘I won’t do that. Let’s go in, shall we, James? Do you mind bringing the cups?’ He stooped and picked them up, then followed me back into the cottage. ‘Are you staying at the Court tonight?’ I asked him.
‘No. I’ll go back to Bristol.’ That heart-twisting smile again. ‘I may as well, since you’re turning me down.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ I tried for a light tone, but it came out edged. ‘Did you really expect me to ask you to stay here?’
‘Well, perhaps that would have been pushing it a bit. I’m a patient man.’ No overtone to suggest that there had been any other sort of conversation between us. ‘I’ll telephone Herr Gothard tonight, I think, to see if there’s any news. Have you got his number handy?’
‘Yes. I’ll write it down for you, shall I?’
I went to the bureau, and switched the lamp on. I found a pen and a used envelope, scribbled down the number, and handed it to him.
He glanced at it, and pocketed it. ‘Thanks. Oh, where did you find my pen? I dropped it somewhere, and I’ve been looking for it all over the place.’
‘Yours? Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. It’s mine all right. Look at the initials. Where on earth did you find it?’
‘In – in the churchyard. Beside the path.’
I thought he must have noticed my hesitation, but apparently he did not. ‘Oh. Yes. Well, thank you.’ He pocketed it, kissed me again, and went.
I stood for a long time beside the lamp, thinking of nothing, my mind closed, a gate slammed shut in sudden panic to keep him out.
Because I knew something, now, that I dared not let him guess at. He and Emory had done more than know my father was ill when they had come to Ashley to ‘check the disposable assets’. They had known he was dead.
The pen I had picked up, from among the small clutter of objects in the bureau, was the silver ballpoint pen with the initials J.A. It had been lying there, along with my father’s other effects that Herr Gothard had handed to me. I had not recognised it as Daddy’s, but there had seemed no doubt that it was his. It had been found, Herr Gothard had told me, beside his body, on that lonely country road in Bavaria.
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring, but without seeing it, at the lamp and the big grey moth which had blundered in through the open door behind me and was crazily beating itself to death against the light. My mind, like the moth, beat and fluttered against a truth so alien and so destructive that I could not, would not, believe it on the evidence of the facts.
Heaven knew I did not want to draw the conclusions that followed from it, but they had to be drawn. The first, which seemed now hardly to matter, and which followed from his easy acceptance of my lie about finding the pen in the churchyard, was that James had in fact been the prowler in the vestry. The second was one that mattered very much indeed. James must have been there, beside my father’s body. And he had neither helped the injured man, nor made his presence known.
I could see only one further conclusion to come to. James had driven the hit-and-run car that had knocked Daddy down. James had killed my father.
That night, lying wakeful in the quiet little bedroom, I watched the moonlight moving slowly across the floor and, with every ounce of effort I could summon, kept the doors slammed against my lover. So strongly insistent was his presence at times that, as on that night in Madeira, I could have sworn I saw his very shadow move across the floor. In my grief and loneliness I must have faltered, because I caught it, as clear as a whisper; just my name, insistent and appealing. Then I turned away and shut him out again, and listened, for the rest of the night, to the church clock chiming in the tower.
Ashley, 1835.
The candle guttered in a pool of wax. Beside him she stirred, and murmured something, then sank back into sleep. Light, cast by the mirror, slid over her bare shoulder and the curve of a breast. Light o’ love, he thought. It’s a beautiful phrase. She is my light of love.
He reached a hand and doused the small, fluttering flame.
12
. . . a divine, a ghostly confessor,
A sin-absolver, and my friend profess’d.
Romeo and Juliet, III, iii
Next morning, as soon as I could, I went to see the Vicar.
He was on his knees in the biggest of the ruinous greenhouses, contentedly rummaging about among the young tomato plants. The hothouse stood
against the twelve-foot wall of the old kitchen garden, and many of its panes were broken, and had been replaced by odd pieces of plywood or polythene sheeting. The heating system, of course, had long been out of use. The original staging, too, had long since rotted; Rob Granger had dragged it out and burned it, and rigged benches from old trestles and some planks from one of the derelict farm buildings. The sun was pouring in, reflecting warmly back from the white-washed wall, and the place smelled pleasantly of newly watered soil steaming in the warmth, and the musky scent of tomato leaves.
‘Hullo, my dear. Were you comfortable in the cottage last night?’
‘Very, thank you. What are you doing?’
‘Tying up the tomatoes. Rob strung all these canes last week, and now the plants are big enough to train. Excellent young plants, aren’t they? I don’t know what’s so fascinating about tomatoes, but they really are delightful to work with. So easy, and such a big return for such a small investment.’
I laughed. ‘That’s too worldly by half, Vicar. You should be drawing morals about it; tall oaks from little acorns grow, and something something fountains flow.’
‘So I should, so I should. Well, there’s a moral in it somewhere, I’m sure . . . Dear me, now I sound like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Did you want me for anything special?’
‘I wondered if I might talk to you,’ I said. ‘Some time when it’s convenient. There’s no rush.’
His hands, holding the furred leaves gently, paused. His eyes, distorted so grotesquely behind the thick glasses, searched my face. ‘It’s always convenient.’ He let go the plant, and began to get to his feet. ‘Here and now, or shall we go up to the Vicarage and make a cup of coffee?’