by Mary Stewart
As we reached the crest of the hill we saw Agnes, bumping at great speed along the field path that led from the quarry to the farm. Bent low, scarlet in the face, her skirt billowing as she pumped away at the pedals, she was no longer a figure of menace, but of bucolic comedy. She did not, mercifully, see Christopher John. All her attention was on the obstruction that lay between her and the farm gate.
Farmer Yelland’s sheep, all hundred and sixty-four of them, milling and bleating and bobbing around like froth awash on a millrace, with a couple of collies weaving and dodging to hold them together right across Agnes’s path. They flowed round the bicycle and stopped it. There was one with a ragged fleece that got tangled with one of the pedals, and stuck there, complaining bitterly and very loudly.
Agnes was calling out, but nothing, above the earth-shaking, earsplitting full orchestra of the flock, could be heard. She was not shouting at us. Four-square and thigh deep in his flock, standing stock still and staring at her as if he had never seen her before, was a big man holding a crook. He was chewing.
Agnes dropped her bicycle. It vanished under the tide of sheep. Eddy Masson’s crook came down and hauled a lively gimmer out of the way. He waded towards Agnes through the flood of sheep.
‘Oh, my God,’ I said shakily. ‘It works. It really works. And she had some, too.’
‘What?’ He turned, leaning close to me. ‘What did you say? I can’t hear a thing in all that racket.’
I smiled at him. The sun was on his hair, showing up the grey. There were wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, and heart-stopping hollows under the cheekbones. I had never seen anyone … never felt … Here, out of the whole world, was the only man …
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was wrong about the sweets. There was nothing in them to hurt. Nothing at all.’
But I still wonder what would have happened if the taxi had come along that road in front of Christopher John.
Bucolic, yes, but an eclogue, a gentle pastoral. The sheep were moving off now, away from the house. Agnes and Mr Masson walked slowly after them, heads close, talking. Neither glanced back. As the car slid up to the Boscobel gate I saw the shepherd’s arm go round her.
Christopher John braked, and I got out of the car to open the gate. As he drove through and round to the side of the house William came running from the back yard. He had not seen me. He ran straight to the car.
‘Dad! Dad! That pigeon you brought over this morning—’
Christopher John, getting out of the car, caught hold of his son and steadied him. ‘Hang on a minute. Did Eddy Masson give you any of those sweets I gave him?’
‘What? Not a bite, the greedy pig. Why? But Dad, the pigeon! Mrs Yates put it in the study, but Rags got in and upset the box and it got away. It’ll have gone over to Gilly’s by now, and you never put the message on it!’
Here Rags, hurtling round the side of the house in William’s wake, caught sight of me and came running. William, turning, saw me there. A hand went to his mouth.
Christopher John put an arm out and pulled his son against him. ‘It’s all right, she’s a witch, didn’t you know? She knows it all already.’
‘Do you?’ This, wide-eyed, to me.
‘Almost all of it,’ I said, smiling. ‘But I’d like to see the message, if I may?’
Without a word, Christopher John slipped a hand into his breast pocket and took out a tiny, folded piece of paper. I opened and read it. Like the first message, it was in my cousin’s hand.
Love is foreseen from the beginning, and outlasts the end. Goodbye, my dears.
After a while I looked up. ‘Of course you know what it says.’
‘Yes. She showed me both the messages when she left them with me and told me when to send them. It was her way of blessing you – both of us.’ He saw the question in my eyes and nodded. ‘Yes, she told me, long before you came here, what would happen. She was comforting me for Cecily’s death. She told me that William and I would be healed, and from Thornyhold. As we have been.’
Here William, as Rags leaped to lick his face, caught and held him close. The three of them stood there in the sunlight, hopeful, smiling. Rags’s smile was easily the broadest of the three.
It was not possible, standing there facing them, to take it all in, but the paper in my hand made one thing plain. Made fact out of fairytale, and put magic in its place as a natural part of my ‘sane and daylight world’. Cousin Geillis had foreseen this long ago, and seen, perhaps, on that day by the River Eden, how her own death would be linked with my coming to life, with the climb of that shy pond-creature out of the dark into the sunlight. It might be that my vision of the doves in the crystal had given her the idea of using her adopted waifs to carry her blessing back to me, and incidentally forge the first bond between Christopher John and myself. The touch of fantasy was typical of the fairy-godmother relationship that she had had with me. Typical, too, was the way I had been left – forced – to choose my own path through the enchanted woods, where she must have known I would be led to venture.
Christopher John was speaking, something about what had happened at Black Cocks this morning.
‘I’d asked Eddy Masson to bring another of the Thornyhold pigeons over to the farm, and I’d just put the box in my car when I saw your bicycle there. That confounded bird was making all sorts of noises, so I drove straight off home with it, and then I had to go to St Thorn to pick up a parcel there. Where were you? I hope you didn’t see me running away?’
I shook my head, not in denial, but because I still found it difficult to speak.
‘I was planning, in any case, to drive over to Thornyhold tonight,’ he said, ‘and then send that second message over later on … Her blessing, and envoi. I was only afraid that I might be assuming rather too much, and a great deal too soon, but I – well, I rather trusted to our talk this evening to put that right.’
Too soon? And I had been afraid it might be too late. Still slightly bemused, I fastened on one phrase he had used. ‘That second message, you said? She only left two? But this one today makes three. So where did the other one come from?’
That heart-shaking smile again. ‘A blessing from the air. You said so yourself.’ He held out his free arm and gathered me to him, with William and Rags still held close to his other side. ‘When William rushed home that first day and told me all about you, and later, after I’d met you and talked to you myself … Well, I could see that Miss Saxon was perfectly right about the fate I was headed for, but I couldn’t let her make all the running, could I?’
I laughed, reached up and kissed him. ‘Give William some credit, too! You must know quite well that I’d take anything on just to get him and Silkworm to come and live with me.’
‘That’s what I was counting on,’ said Christopher John.
There is not much more to tell.
We are still at Thornyhold, though our children, William and the two girls, left home long since. None of their families live very far away, so we see them often.
Agnes married Eddy Masson, and went to live at Tidworth. She was, so said the jungle drums, devoted to her husband, and happily occupied her time waging war with the Widow Marget. At any rate, she never tried to come into our lives again, but remained a distant and pleasant neighbour. Gran died soon after the move, peacefully in her sleep, and Jessamy, to everyone’s surprise, married a young woman whose good sense and kindness soon pulled him out of his slough of stupidity, and they produced three children who were all healthy, dirty, and perfectly sane, and crowded happily into the two lodges at the Thornyhold gate.
So the witch-story turned into comedy, and the midnight enchantments faded, as they usually do, into the light of common day. The only reason I have told it is because a little while ago I overheard one of my grandchildren, turning the pages of my first illustrated herbal, say to her sister:
‘You know, Jill, I sometimes think that Grandmother could have been a witch if she had wanted to.’
Now read on for a taste
of Mary Stewart’s next tale
of adventure and suspense.
STORMY PETREL
1
I must begin with a coincidence which I would not dare to recount if this were a work of fiction. Coincidences happen daily in ‘real life’ which would be condemned in a mere story, so writers tend to avoid them. But they happen. Daily, they happen. And on this particular day they – or rather it – happened twice.
I was working in my room, when a knock at the door heralded the entry of four second-year students. Usually I welcome them. They are my job. As English tutor at Haworth College in Cambridge I deal with them every day. But on this sunny afternoon in May, as it happened, I would not have welcomed any intruder, even the gyp with a Recorded Delivery letter announcing a big win on Ernie. I was writing a poem.
They say that after the age of thirty, or marriage, whichever comes first, one can write no more poetry. It is true that after the age of thirty certain poets seem to be incapable of writing much that is worth reading; there are notable exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule. Actually, I believe that the marriage rule applies only to women, which says something for what marriage is supposed to do for them, but on that sunny Tuesday afternoon neither of the disqualifying conditions applied to me. I was twenty-seven, unmarried, heart-whole for the time being, and totally immersed in my work.
Which is why I should have welcomed the students who wanted to talk to me about the poetry of George Darley, which a misguided colleague of mine had included in a series of lectures on the early nineteenth century, and in so doing had worried the more discerning of my students, who were failing to see any merit there. But I had been visited that morning by what was usually at this state of the term a rare inspiration, and was writing a poem of my own. More important than George Darley? At any rate better, which would not be difficult. As a struggling poet in the late twentieth century, I often thought that some early poets achieved publication very easily. But I did not say so to my students. Let them now praise famous men. They do it so rarely that it is good for them.
I said ‘Come in,’ sat them down, listened and then talked and finally got rid of them and went back to my poem. It had gone. The first stanza lay there on my desk, but the idea, the vision had fled like the dream dispelled by Coleridge’s ill-starred person from Porlock. I re-read what I had written, wrestled with the fading vision for a few sweating minutes, then gave up, swore, crumpled the page up, pitched it into the empty fireplace, and said, aloud: ‘What I really need is a good old-fashioned ivory tower.’
I pushed my chair back, then crossed to the open window and looked out. The lime trees were glorious in their young green, and, in default of the immemorial elms, the doves were moaning away in them like mad. Birds were singing their heads off everywhere, and from the clematis beside the window came the scent of honey and the murmur of innumerable bees. Tennyson; now there, I thought, was one of the really honourable exceptions to the rule, never failing, never fading even in old age, while I, at twenty-seven, could not even finish a lyric that had seemed, only a short while ago, to be moving inevitably towards the final tonic chord.
Well, so I was not Tennyson. I was probably, come to that, not even George Darley. I laughed at myself, felt better, and settled down on the window-seat in the sun to enjoy what was left of the afternoon. The Times, half-read and then abandoned, lay on the seat beside me. As I picked it up to throw it aside a line of small print caught my eye: ‘Ivory tower for long or short let. Isolated cottage on small Hebridean island off the coast of Mull. Ideal for writer or artist in search of peace. Most relatively mod cons.’ And a box number.
I said, aloud: ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What don’t you believe, Dr Fenemore?’
One of my students had come back, and was hesitating in the open doorway. It was Megan Lloyd, who was the daughter of a Welsh farm worker from somewhere in Dyfed, and who had earned her place in College with a brilliant scholarship. Short, rather thickset, with dark curling hair, dark eyes, and freckles, she looked as if she would be most at home with dogs and horses, or with bared arms scrubbing a dairy down, and perhaps she was, but she was also very intelligent, highly imaginative, and easily my best student. Some day, with average luck, she would be a good writer. I remembered that I had promised to she her about some poems she had written and had nervously asked me to read. She looked nervous still, but half amused with it, as she added: ‘Surely, The Times? It’s not supposed to get things wrong, is it?’
‘Oh, Megan, come in. Sorry, was I talking to myself? It’s nothing, I was off on a track of my own for a moment. Yes, I’ve got your file here, and yes, I’ve read them.’ I went back to my desk, picked the folder up, and gestured her to a chair. She looked back at me with no expression at all in her face, but her eyes were twice as big as usual, and I could see the tension in every muscle. I knew how she felt. Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
So I went straight to it. ‘I liked them. Some of them very much. And of course some not so much …’ I talked on about the poems, while she slowly relaxed and began to look happy, and even, in the end, cheerfully argumentative, which, with Megan, was par for the course. At length I closed the folder.
‘Well, there you are, as far as I’m able to judge. Whether some of the more, shall I say, advanced judgments of the day will concur is something I can’t guess at, but if you want to try and publish, go ahead and good luck to you. Whatever happens, you must go on writing. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
She swallowed, cleared her throat, then nodded without speaking.
I handed her the folder. ‘I won’t say anything more here and now. I’ve written fairly detailed notes about some of them. I think it would be better – and we would both find it easier – if you looked at those in your own time? And of course if there’s anything you don’t understand, or want to argue about, please feel free. All right?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for all the trouble. It was just that I – that one doesn’t know oneself—’
‘Yes, I know.’
She smiled, her face lighted suddenly from within. ‘Of course you do. And in return, am I allowed to give you some advice?’
‘Such as what?’ I asked, surprised.
She glanced down at the empty hearth, where the crumpled page had fallen and partly unfurled. It would be obvious even from where she sat that the sheet contained lines of an unfinished poem, disfigured with scoring and the scribbles of frustration.
She repeated, with a fair imitation of my voice, but with a smile that robbed the echo of any sting of impertinence: ‘“Whatever happens, you must go on writing.”’ Then suddenly, earnestly: ‘I can’t read it from here, but I’m sure you shouldn’t throw it away. Give it another go, won’t you, Dr Fenemore? I loved that last one of yours in the Journal. Please.’
After a pause that seemed endless, I said, rather awkwardly: ‘Well, thank you. But in term time … One can’t choose one’s times, you see.’
‘Can one ever?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’ Suddenly embarrassed, she gathered her things together and started to get to her feet. ‘None of my business, but I couldn’t help seeing. Sorry.’
More to put her at her ease again than for any other reason I picked up The Times and showed it to her.
‘I was trying, you see. A Hebridean island – it does sound like a place where one could work in peace, and they have actually called it an “ivory tower”. There, I’ve ringed it.’
She read the advertisement aloud, then looked up, bright-eyed. ‘Mull? An island off Mull? You’ve answered this?’
‘I was thinking of it.’
‘Well, isn’t that something? Ann Tracy and I are going to Mull this summer. Two weeks. She’s fixing it up, I’ve never been, but her people used to spend holidays up there, and she says it can be fabulous, weather
and midges permitting. What a coincidence! It sounds just the thing – like fate, really, after what you were saying. You will answer it, won’t you?’
‘It looks as if I’d better, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘I’ll write this very evening.’
But fate had not quite finished with me. That evening my brother Crispin telephoned me.
Crispin is a doctor, a partner in a four-man practice in Petersfield in Hampshire. He is six years older than I am, married, with two children away at school. He would have preferred, I knew, to keep them at home, but Ruth, his wife, had overruled him in that, as she did in quite a few other matters. Not that Crispin was a weak man, but he was a very busy one, and had to be content to leave the management of their joint lives largely to his highly capable wife. They were tolerably happy together, as marriages seem to go, a happiness achieved partly by agreeing to differ.
One thing they different about was holidays. Ruth loved travel, cities, shops, theatres, beach resorts. Crispin, when on leave from his demanding routine, craved for peace and open spaces. He, like me, loved Scotland, and made for it whenever he got the chance. There he walked and fished and took photographs which later, when he found time, he processed himself in a friend’s darkroom. Over the years he had acquired real skill in his hobby, and had exhibited some of his studies of Scottish scenery and wildlife; his real passion was bird photography, and through the years he had amassed a remarkable collection of pictures. Some of these had been published in periodicals like Country Life and the wildlife journals, but the best had never been shown. I knew he had a private hope that some day he might make a book with them. When our vacations coincided, we often holidayed together, content in our respective solitudes.
So when he rang up that evening to tell me he was taking a fortnight’s leave towards the end of June and what about a trip north as soon as term ended, I did feel as if the fates themselves had taken a hand.
‘I’d been planning that very thing.’ I told him about the advertisement, and he was enthusiastic. I let him talk on about harriers and divers and skuas and all the rare and marvellous birds that would no doubt be waiting around to be photographed, and then put in the usual cautious query: ‘And Ruth?’