by Mary Stewart
Ashley, 1835.
It was cold. Shivering, he dragged his clothes on, and flung the fur-lined cloak round himself. His hands were shaking again. Defiance ebbed. He tried to recall his earlier mood of courage, but the cold hour before daylight was not the time for bravery. This was the hour when men were executed; the hour when they were least resistant, cared less. He supposed there was some mercy in it; but for the condemned, as for lovers, dawn always came too soon.
17
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Romeo and Juliet, III, v
Next morning I was up early, so early that the dew was still thick on the fruit blossom, and the orchard grass shone and glittered as if newly hosed down.
I sang as I got my breakfast ready. When I opened the back door I found a milk bottle standing on the step, and propped against it a package wrapped in brown paper. I knew the neat, slightly over-careful writing. And I guessed what I would find in the package; the books about New Zealand. I carried them into the kitchen and propped them against the milk jug and read them with my breakfast.
It already seemed as if the idea of New Zealand had been in my mind for a very long time; I wondered if, all unknowing, I had been sharing Rob’s thoughts about it. Certainly, as I turned the pages, I found here and there pictures which seemed familiar, and names which came like echoes of something already spoken. Already I had accepted the idea of going there; of leaving Ashley, perhaps not exactly without a backward look, but without any of the heart-tearing that until yesterday I would have thought inevitable. I suppose that I was so much a part and product of this old, old place that I had never really envisaged life outside it, but now it seemed as if this had always been a foregone conclusion. My feeling was one of release rather than of loss. If this escape from old ties was what my lover had in mind, then by definition so did I . . . A shared mind – and how well I knew this – was a shared desire.
I could see clearly, now that I knew him, the reasons for his doubts and hesitations, and for his long-drawn-out refusal to reveal himself. Perhaps he would not, even now, have nerved himself to come into the open, had it not been for my father’s death. That had left me homeless and alone; it had also left me, perhaps no worse off than I had been before, but without Ashley itself at my back. It had, so to speak, brought me into Rob’s orbit.
So much became clear, and with it the whole pattern of my lover’s actions. The night I had come home to Ashley church, it had been Rob, waiting and watching for me, whose thoughts had come to meet me; and the mixture of exhilaration and nervousness, which I had misconstrued as guilt, was now explained. Later, the curtness which I had ascribed to his hurt hand, could well have been because he had been held a pent and helpless witness to my scene with James. Rob could never have doubted ‘what we had together’, but I could see that he might well have doubted the outcome. And what he had feared most of all – I could see it now – had been my first reaction to the discovery that my beloved secret friend was only Rob, the boy from the home farm.
But now it was done, and here we were, and this bright morning with its dew and day-song could not dispel one stranded cobweb of last night’s spell. ‘Tomorrow’, he had said, and now tomorrow was ‘today’, and it did not feel a day too soon.
Rob, where are you?
The signals were perceptibly fainter, like batteries beginning to fade. I stepped the query up and got the answer. He was in the greenhouses.
As I approached I saw him through the glass. He was up on a tall step-ladder, mending the hinge of one of the ventilators. He saw me coming, gave me a smile and a sideways lift of the head, and went unhurriedly on with the job. He looked just the same as ever, his movements as he fitted the screwdriver to the thread and began to turn it, quite deliberate and relaxed. If I had not been receiving from him a current of excitement something akin to a burst of a thousand volts or so, I would have thought him unmoved. Nor did I have to ask him what the Vicar had said; I had known, roughly since breakfast time, that this was really and truly my wedding day.
I sat down on the stool beside the water tank and watched him in silence. In silence? The air was fizzing like champagne. The sunmotes sifting down through the tangle of white jasmine stung like sparks along the skin. Rob hadn’t even looked at me again. He laid the screwdriver down and reached in a pocket for a fresh screw. Then, still with those steady, unhurried movements, he tackled the other hinge. He might have been alone.
I thought it was time to calm things down into words. ‘Thank you for the picture books.’
‘Don’t mention it. Like them?’
‘Love them.’
‘So when do we start?’
‘Any time you like. For our honeymoon, perhaps?’
He gave the screw a last twist. ‘I reckon our honeymoon will take care of itself.’
‘I reckon it will. Rob, how long have you had this New Zealand dream?’
‘Years now. There was something on the telly a long time ago – colour it was; I saw it down at the Bull. It got me, I don’t know why. It seemed right for me, somehow. Ever since then I’ve read about it, off and on. Happen you never knew, but some folks of mine went out there, years back, and they’ve done well farming up in the North Island. Jerseys, mainly. Mum used to keep up with them, writing at Christmas, you know how it is. Then after she died I wrote to New Zealand House in London, and asked about emigrating. It seems there’s no problem for a farm worker. I wouldn’t need a sponsor, either; the Makepeaces – my folks out there – laid a welcome on the mat for me.’
‘But you didn’t go.’
‘How could I? I was waiting for you.’ He said it quite simply, moving the creaking hinge experimentally as he talked. ‘It’s true, you know that. After Mum died there wasn’t anything much to keep me here. I liked your Dad, but if it hadn’t been for you I’d have gone, all that time back.’
‘I wondered why you stayed here. There didn’t seem much future for you. Rob—’
‘Mm?’
‘Would you have asked me, if my father had still been alive?’
The mended hinge seemed to satisfy him. He picked an oil can up off the top step of the ladder and began to trickle a few drops through into the rusty joint. ‘I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that. Maybe I’d have talked to him first. I don’t know.’
‘If you had, he might have told you what he told the Vicar.’
‘He might,’ said Rob. ‘I still don’t really understand that.’
‘Don’t you?’ I smiled to myself. He didn’t look down, but he caught it, and a little current of affection ran between us, as settled and placid as if we had been married for years. The champagne sparkle had subsided slowly from the air; the place was a deep, still well of contentment. I laced my fingers round an upraised knee and tilted my head to him. ‘So you see you needn’t have worried, after all.’
‘Maybe not. But I wasn’t to know that. The way I saw it, it’d have been a queer enough thing anyway, a man like me and a girl like you, let alone having this link between us as well . . . That would have taken some explaining, wouldn’t it?’
‘He’d have understood.’
He gave a slow nod. ‘I think so, too. I used to tell myself that. It didn’t help much. There was always the moment when I was going to have to say, “Mr Ashley, sir, I want to marry Miss Bryony.”’
‘I meant I think he’d have understood because he had something of the same gift.’ He looked, not surprised, but inquiring. I nodded. ‘He never said so, but I think he did.’
‘How d’you make that out?’
‘Oh, one or two things that happened. There was a time once when I was hurt at school, and he knew without being told. That kind of thing. And I think that when he was dying he tried to get to me, and couldn’t, but he had enough of a link with Ashley to get here. And you were here, and you got the signal and sent it on to me.’
‘A sort of Telstar?’
‘Sort of, I suppose. Yes. It worked, anyway. The news came
from you, not from him.’
‘It was a bad night, that.’ He propped the ventilator open, pocketed his tools, then leaned his elbows on the top step of the ladder, chin on fist, looking away from me to the creepers that festooned the rafters. ‘I’d been asleep, and I came awake, all very sudden, as if someone had kicked me in the head. It ached like that, too, I remember. First of all I thought I must be sickening for something, then after a bit I got there. And I didn’t like what I got. Then somehow, like I always did, I began to think of you, and I knew what I was telling you. I suppose if boiling water or something flows through a pipe, the pipe gets scalded. That’s what it felt like.’
‘Poor Rob. But you helped. Oh, my God, you did. If he hadn’t been able to get to you . . . And that’s another thing. This – this gift we share. I’m sure now that neither Emory nor James has it. James did tell me once that they could “read each other’s thoughts”, but I’m certain that – if it was true – he was just talking about the sort of link a lot of twins have with each other, a kind of sixth sense – intuition, really. Not what we have.’
‘And ours is the seventh, maybe?’
‘Well, isn’t it?’ I tilted my head to smile at him. ‘That’s how I think of it, anyway. Special and magic . . . I’m certain the twins don’t have anything of the same sort. If they had, this last few days would have been even more difficult than they have. It was so awful having to shut you out.’
He reached out a hand and began absently to guide the jasmine tendrils to their curled grip on the wires. ‘I once saw a picture,’ he said reminiscently, ‘called “Love Locked Out”. It struck me at the time he shouldn’t have been drooping there propped against the door-post. He should have been hammering the bloody door down.’
‘You didn’t. Not quite, anyway.’
‘Not for lack of wanting to.’
‘I suppose it was just as hard for you as it was for me. Harder, really.’ A spray of jasmine, too sharply jerked, loosed a tiny flight of fading flowers. They drifted past me, some of them to float on the water of the tank. I reached an idle finger to rescue the nearest. ‘Rob, there’s something I still can’t understand. It’s what’s been setting me wrong all this time about you, even though I know I must really have wanted it to be you. I thought it had to be an Ashley. So I never looked beyond my cousins, though heaven knows, since I grew up, I’ve never really felt anything about them at all. Not this way. It’s really had me coming and going. But in that case, where do you fit in?’
He smiled. ‘Didn’t you know? Straight down the wrong side of the blanket ever since donkey’s years back. Makepeace, she was called, Ellen Makepeace. That ought to tell you that my stock’s just as bad as yours, Miss Bryony Ashley.’
‘Ellen Makepeace? That was the girl Nick Ashley was shot for, surely. Her brothers shot him.’
‘That’s the one. And they got on the next ship to Australia, and ended up in New Zealand.’ He started down the ladder. ‘And as for Ellen, a nice decent village lad called Granger married her, and they had a baby nearly nine months later. She said it was a Granger baby, and so did he, and everyone took it that way, it being easier. Our family certainly took it so. But now you and I know better, don’t we? It must have been Nick’s baby, and the Ashley thing – this mind-talking – came down with it, right to me.’ He stood over me, smiling. ‘What is it? Why are you staring? Can’t stomach the idea of me being part Ashley, too?’
‘I was wondering why I hadn’t seen that, either. You’ve even got the looks. Oh, not what they call the Ashley looks, but you’ve got Bess Ashley’s hair and eyes.’
‘The gipsy look. Aye.’ He laughed. ‘I could see it myself, once I knew where to look.’
‘Well, but if you knew, then all the Grangers must have known . . . Your father and mother—’
‘No, why should they? It’s only this mind-talking that made me even begin to guess at it. Oh, everyone knew the story about Nick Ashley, of course they did, but I never heard it told any other way except that the Granger boy made an honest woman of Ellen, and it was his own baby. It’s a long time ago; why should anyone bother? But then this started, this between you and me. When I was a kid I thought nothing about it, but since I’ve got older, and thought a bit more, that’s the only explanation I can see. I’m the only one who guessed it, because no one else knew the way you and I can talk.’
‘Did you find it harder this morning?’
‘Yes. And I reckon this might be why . . .’ His arms went round me, and we closed again, mouth to mouth, body to body. Two creatures becoming one, lost and oblivious, glassed in from the world in our own quiet well of content. ‘As good as last night?’ he asked at length.
‘Better, except there’s no nightingale.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The nightingale last night, singing in the pear tree. Didn’t you hear it?’
‘There was nothing in the pear tree.’
‘There was a bird singing. It must have been a nightingale. Heavens, Rob—’
‘You were imagining it. If that’s what kissing me does for you—’
‘I was not imagining it, and if kissing me stops up all your faculties—’
‘Not all. Some it starts going.’
‘About the wedding, Rob—’
‘Yes?’
‘The licence was all right? It really is today?’
‘Eleven this morning. It’s all arranged.’
‘It is?’ I got my breath. ‘Look, isn’t that perhaps rushing it just a bit—?’
‘Who was rushing it last night?’
‘I didn’t mean that way. I meant it’s after half past nine now, and—’
‘Great jumping beans, so it is, and I haven’t fed the hens yet!’ said the man who hadn’t heard the nightingale. He kissed me hurriedly again, for good measure, then let me go and picked up the step-ladder. On the way to the greenhouse door he hesitated, and turned. I got it again, the love and the longing and the uncertainty which, now, I understood. ‘Bryony, honey, am I rushing it? I thought when you said last night – I thought you wanted—’
‘You thought right.’ I went to him, and put the palm of my hand gently against his still rough cheek. ‘Oddly enough, my darling Rob, you read my very thoughts . . . And now go and feed your hens, while I find something to wear for my wedding. See you in church.’
Mr and Mrs Henderson were the witnesses, and Mr Bryanston, gently beaming, took the service. Rob even produced a ring, which fitted. The church was full of the smell of lilac, and the flowers massed by the chancel steps still had the dew on them. He must have picked them at first light. The church door stood open, and the churchyard scents came in, elderflowers and dewy grasses and the violets that grew by the porch, along with a faint smoky spice from the avenue where the yew burned its lamps of peace. For me no longer. I would lie forlorn no more.
The Vicar flattened a hand on the pages of the register, and Rob signed it. Not ‘farmer’ or ‘gardener’, but ‘man of all work’. I liked that. It sounded proud, somehow, coming from him. When he put the pen in my hand I signed against my own name, ‘unemployed’. I saw him watching over my shoulder, and the corners of his mouth deepened in a smile that did something severely clinical to the base of my spine.
‘By the way,’ said the Vicar, ‘I almost forgot to tell you. The missing register is back, and I think quite unharmed.’
‘Which goes without saying’ – this, unexpectedly, from Mrs Henderson – ‘seeing as where I found it.’
‘You brought it back?’ asked the Vicar in surprise.
‘I did. I’m sorry you’ve been worrying yourself, Vicar, because there was no call. It’s been in my house since Sunday, safe and sound, and to tell you the truth I clean forgot about it.’
‘Well, I must say, I’m very glad to have it back.’ There was some restraint apparent in the Vicar’s voice. ‘Though, my dear Mrs Henderson, I wish you had told me. If you wanted to consult it—’
‘Me consult it? Why, V
icar, what would I want with those old books?’
‘Well, then –’ began the Vicar, but I had seen Mrs Henderson’s sidelong look at me.
‘Where did you find it, Mrs H.?’ I asked her.
‘In your cottage, Miss Bryony. I found it when I tidied up ready for you to come home, and I took it home with me, meaning to take it straight to the Vicar, but then Martha Gray came up, wanting a bite of tea, and we got talking, and I clean forgot. I won’t pretend I’m not at fault, because I am. When your Dad left he asked me most particular to take it back for him, him having been too ill to see to everything, and there, if I didn’t forget it again till this very morning!’
‘Talking about our wedding she was, and it put her in mind.’ Mr Henderson made his first and last contribution to the conversation. It was hard to tell whether the dry sound of his voice was the result of long disuse, or of some disillusion provoked by the memory of that earlier wedding.
As ever, he was ignored. The Vicar, indeed, began to say something, but Mrs Henderson was still looking at me, and I raised my brows at her. ‘I’d no idea it was there. Just whereabouts did you find it?’
‘In your Dad’s room, it was. I wouldn’t be likely to have mentioned it to you, Miss Bryony, not wanting to remind you of things, and I thought nothing of it, seeing as I expected Mr Ashley would have told the Vicar he had the book. If,’ said Mrs Henderson, showing signs of taking umbrage, ‘the Vicar had seen fit to mention to Henderson or me that it was missing—’
‘I should have, I should have. The fault was mine. Indeed, now I come to think of it, I believe Mr Ashley did mention his interest . . . Now, why did I not think of that? Of course no one blames you, Mrs Henderson; indeed, we are most grateful to you for bringing the book back. And now perhaps, this morning, on this very happy occasion . . .’
As the Vicar, soothing with long practice, trotted competently into the breach, Rob moved quietly past me to the table, and began to leaf through the pages of ‘One Ash: 1780–1837’ which lay there.
I looked over his shoulder. The pages were all numbered, in beautiful copperplate, and they were all there. But Rob turned each one, looking, I knew, for some other paper which might have been hidden between the leaves. The paper. The letter. My father must have been studying this register, along with the family books, just before he had succumbed to the last attack that had banished him to Bad Tölz.