Author: Anya Seton
Category: Literature
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“No fear,” he said gently. “You can do it, and your money will help.”
Already she had grown used to his frankness about material things, but she bit her underlip and frowned. “Are you sure that isn’t all you want me for?”
Richard laughed. “You know bloody well it’s not. I’ve met plenty of willing heiresses, Greek, American, Venezuelan. But never wished to fall in love.”
His rejoinder made her happy, and any doubts that she might have had were dispelled by Lily.
The marriage took place in a registry office. Richard said that he had no use for churches and flummery. Celia instantly agreed. Nor did Lily, who was normally a great upholder of forms and traditions, object for long, though she was disappointed.
“It’s practical, I suppose,” she said. “Sir Charles so sick, of course, and men do hate fuss. My dear child, do you realize how lucky you are! You’re madly in love, and it’s the sort of marriage I’ve always prayed you’d find.”
Celia was struck by this because Lily’s prayers were often answered. Small pains, illnesses, a lawsuit when Amos Taylor’s will was contested by a disgruntled cousin, all had vanished before Lily’s serene philosophy. “We must have faith, and everything will come right.”
Yet, thought Celia, a year later at the luncheon party in the Manor’s garden room, she doesn’t guess how wrong my marriage is going now.
“Yes, indeed,” said Celia brightly to Sir Harry, “I do so agree with you.” She searched for a clue, since she hadn’t heard the question. Not the shocking assassination of Robert Kennedy last week, they already had touched on that. So was it still the Labour Government? The Common Market? The punishing taxes and predicted devaluation of the pound?
“ . . . and, alas, we can no longer say ‘Empire’ but rather the Commonwealth . . . then you do agree, Lady Marsdon?”
“New Zealand, I hear, is most attractive,” Celia murmured. It was enough to divert Harry, who had once flown there.
“Marvelous country, mountains, waterfalls, and a masculine challenge like Australia—we can’t find that here any more.”
Celia maintained a receptive smile and looked down the table to Richard. Myra was now a trifle tight and displaying all her blandishments. The inviting gaze beneath mascaraed lashes, the quick meaningful touches on Richard’s hand.
Richard quietly removed his hand. He raised his voice and addressed his wife. “What about this afternoon, Celia? Shall we make a set of tennis? Or some bridge perhaps, it looks like rain. Have you any plans for our guests?”
Before she could answer, Lily spoke. “Couldn’t we all rest a while, and then an expedition!”
Celia saw her husband’s mouth tighten, and knew that he was annoyed at her mother’s taking over. She herself was relieved. She had made no special plans for the afternoon. She had failed Richard again. He liked everything to be structured and punctual. Besides, Lily so often took over, not aggressively but from habit.
It’s wonderful to be sure of things, Celia thought. I used to be, wasn’t I? In the polite pause which followed Lily’s suggestion, Myra spoke up languidly. “What expedition, Mrs. Taylor? I certainly don’t want to gape at a ‘Stately Home,’ or to go and see if the bluebells are out in somebody’s copse.”
Igor giggled, Sir Harry and George Simpson looked alarmed. Only little Sue was always eager for anything. Richard, Akananda and Edna Simpson showed no expressions.
“Oh, no, Duchess,” Lily said, “not the sort of thing you mean. It’s to see a very picturesque place in Kent, about an hour from here. Nobody lives in it except ghosts. Some of them six hundred years old! I have some friends who know the owner, an American who spends most of his time in the States or traveling; they say one might get in by appointment. I’ve the phone number.”
Richard made a sharp movement which knocked over his wineglass. “Do you by any chance mean Ightham Mote?” He addressed Lily in so cold and dry a tone that she gaped at her son-in-law while she nodded.
Myra raised her eyebrows, the other guests were suddenly aware of tension, as was Celia, who managed to laugh and say, “Good Lord, what an odd name! What kind of a moat? What are you talking about, Mother?”
Dr. Akananda looked at her. “No,” he said involuntarily. “Please do not pursue this.” But nobody heard him.
Richard transferred his dark gaze from Lily to Celia. “She is speaking of an old manor house which I visited when I was twelve, and found exceptionally unattractive, oppressive.” He stood up and said to Dodge, who was deftly covering the wine stain, “No doubt her ladyship would like coffee served by the pool, since it’s still sunny.”
Myra lifted her chin. “But Richard darling,” she protested, at once reversing her position and glad to annoy Richard, whom she was finding tiresomely unresponsive, “Mrs. Taylor’s expedition sounds divine. I mean positively creepy. I simply adored the ghost we had at Drewton Castle. Some sort of lady in white in the north wing. Not that I ever saw her, though Drewton claimed he often did. Once I think I heard her gibber, or whatever they do.”
There being no particular answer to this, they all went to the pool for coffee.
Celia poured the coffee; when Richard had drunk his, he glanced at his wrist watch and said that he had suddenly remembered an appointment with his tenant farmer which might take some time. He excused himself with impersonal courtesy.
Celia watched him as he strode into the house. He kept his black hair cropped short, shorter than the other men did, except for George Simpson who was bald, but Richard’s features needed no softening. Beneath the tanned skin and the shadow of a well-shaven beard lay a bone structure worthy of Greek sculpture; no, not Greek, more a Renaissance type, with his long, rather aquiline nose, full lips and deep eyesockets under the straight black bars of eyebrows.
“Mine host seems a bit put out,” remarked Myra, shrugging. “Quite the most mysterious man I know. Very polite lord-of-the-manor, but one feels there’s a positively smoldering Heathcliffe somewhere. Or am I wrong, my sweet?” She addressed Celia, while voluptuously stroking sun lotion on her long, slightly freckled legs.
“Of course Richard’s not annoyed,” Celia retorted. “He simply forgot that he had to see Hawkins today. They’re building a new pigsty at the farm.”
Myra yawned. “How dreary. I should think even ghosts would be preferable. Mrs. Taylor, what time would you like to start your ‘expedition’? I’ll drive my car and take Harry.” She nodded towards that gratified knight, whose prominent brown eyes glistened expectantly. “And will you come with us, Mrs. Taylor?” Myra added, giving a little purring laugh at Harry’s change of expression.
After eight years of boredom, spent mostly at the Duke’s principal seat in Warwickshire, Myra was enjoying her widowhood. She enjoyed playing amorous games, she enjoyed conquests, and though she had been a faithful wife to her old arthritic Duke, she had no more moral scruples than the wild Border-lords from whom she descended. Her hedonism and mischief-making were, however, tempered by a careless good nature, and an inborn sense of responsibility. Many a tenant near her father’s Cumberland castle, or later at Drewton, spoke of her with warm gratitude.
Lily, having received Myra’s sanction, forgot Richard’s odd behavior and enthusiastically outlined the afternoon plans. “If you don’t mind, dear?” she asked belatedly of her daughter.
Celia knew that she should say, “Yes, I do, since Richard is not pleased,” but she smiled acquiescence.
Oh, what is the matter with Richard, she thought. Why did he speak so crossly to Mother? What a fuss about nothing! These weekend parties had become a strain anyway. Yet Richard wanted them. He wanted people around. He wanted, and she faced it fleetingly, not to be alone with her.
Edna Simpson lumbered up from the edge of the lounge chair where she had uncomfortably seated herself. Her square bulldog face was red, her thick lips compressed. Nobody had consulted her preferences. Rude, brazen American women! (The Duchess was exempt from Edna’s indignation.) Lily receive
d a hostile glare, then the spectacles flashed as they turned towards Celia. Stupid little thing, not even pretty. The outsider, the intruder. Disliked her on sight, I did. And my impressions are never wrong. He’ll soon tire of her, if he hasn’t already.
“It’s hot,” Edna announced. “My headache’s returning. I’ll rest this afternoon, if it is quaite convenient to have tea sent up?”
“Of course,” Celia murmured, and was startled by a malevolent stare. This impression seemed so ridiculous that Celia dismissed it.
They all drifted into the house, and Celia went to find Richard. He had already changed and was not in his dressing room, but Nanny Cameron, his old nurse, was there. She was laying out Richard’s dinner clothes on the small divan where he had taken to sleeping lately.
Her wrinkled, purple-veined hands patted the black tie, the starched white shirt. “Ther-re,” she said lovingly, and saw Celia standing in the door. “He’ll not be here, m’lady.” Her quick voice with its Scottish lilt could be cutting when it rebuked a lazy housemaid, it could even be disciplinary towards Richard at times, but for Celia, ever since she’d first curtsied to the bride in the entrance hall at Medfield, there had been a gentleness, an understanding; though Celia seldom saw Nanny, who kept to herself in the nursery wing, and emerged only for certain specified duties, such as checking the laundry and valeting Richard, a task she allowed nobody to share.
“In the study, do you think?” asked Celia. “Or has he gone down to the farm already?”
Nanny cocked her robin-head, her bright eyes considered. “I doot it, m’lady. Ye might try the library. ’Tis in this mood he at times consults that great ponderous book o’ the Marsdons.”
“What book?” said Celia, sighing. “Oh, Nanny . . .” Her pleading eyes showed her trouble, and the old woman made a soft sound in her throat.
“Aye, puir lady, there’s a deal he keeps to himself, always has—even as a wee bairn. I mind the day I came her-re to tend him. ’Tis a week after the first Lady Marsdon died and Maister Dick but two years old. I never nursed so solemn and quiet a weanling.”
“Did he mind when his father married again?” About Sir Charles’s second marriage Celia knew very little. The old baronet had remarried when Richard was twelve. The second Lady Marsdon had been killed in an automobile crash while Richard was still at Eton. Richard had given Celia these facts, dryly, reluctantly, as one who had a right to hear them, though they were distasteful.
“To be sur-re the young maister minded, when the old maister went so daft over that minx that he wed her. My puir lad shut himself up for days, and times I heard him weeping i’ the night, and then . . .” She checked herself abruptly, and added in a subdued voice, “Starved for love that lad was, and not a body to gi’e it to him but me.”
“His stepmother . . .?” Celia asked softly, and Nanny snorted.
“A flibberty-gibberty hussy, nae mor-re heart than a weasel. She properly diddled the old baronet, who should’ve blessed the day that lorry smashed into her. Though he took it har-rd, the shock and all.”
Celia was not interested in Sir Charles, who had been a shrunken, mindless gnome the one time she had seen him in the nursing home just before his death.
“I must find Richard,” she said, half to herself, then smiled uncertainly at Nanny and went downstairs.
The library was very large and paneled in fumed oak, as the Victorian baronet had left it. Between the stacks light filtered through garish stained glass, supposed to represent episodes from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The room smelt musty, unaired.
Celia found Richard standing in an alcove, by a lectern. The window above him showed Mordred leering evilly at Guinevere and Lancelot. Mordred’s pea-green robe cast a jaundiced light over the large open book on the lectern. Richard was frowning down at the book, and from the fixity of his gaze, seemed to be staring at only one word or sentence.
“What are you reading, darling?” Celia asked softly. Her husband jumped. He slammed the book shut, and a puff of dust spurted towards the window.
“I thought you’d gone,” he said, “with the others to Ightham Mote.” As he straightened, the murky blue of Lancelot’s helmet shone on Richard’s face giving it a sickly pallor, and a strange defenselessness.
“Not yet,” she said. “And I won’t go if you don’t want me to, though I don’t see . . . Oh, my dearest, if you’d only explain.”
“Nothing to explain. Do as you like. I’m off to the farm.”
She stiffened, her heart began to give its erratic thumps. She glanced at the book. It was huge, bound in thick yellowed vellum; a cockatrice—the Marsdon crest—was embossed in tarnished gold on the cover.
“Could I see the book?” she asked. “See what interests you so?”
For an instant she thought he was going to refuse, then he laughed curtly. “By all means. It’s the Marsdon Chronicle, covers over five hundred years of family history.” He made a gesture and stood back.
She opened the book at random and peered with dismay at a page of crabbed antique writing, a maze of hen-scratching and curlicues; here and there a blot. The faded ink alone was hard to see in the wavering, colored light.
“I can’t read this,” she said squinting at what might be a date. It appeared to be “viij jun.”
“I didn’t think you could.” He shut the book and placed it high on a shelf next to a row of squat parchment volumes.
“But you can.” She put her hand on his. “Richard, is there something in that family chronicle which you feel gives the past a bearing on the future?”
There was a silent second, she wasn’t sure of his expression, but she thought his pupils widened, then he shrugged.
“It would be rather silly if I did, wouldn’t it? Isn’t the past finished forever?” He glanced down at her hand on his arm; at the gold wedding band and the heavy Marsdon ring, and though he did not move, she felt a chill, a withdrawal.
“Richard, for God’s sake, what is wrong? We were so happy in Portugal. So close. And even here when we got back—even after your father died. Life with you was fun. It was heaven. What’s happened? I don’t think it’s another woman, but then wives often are fooled.”
Richard’s shoulders twitched as though to shake off a burden. His eyes softened and he spoke with the teasing tenderness she had not heard in all these months. “No, poppet, no other woman. One’s quite enough. You’ve married a bloody-tempered bloke is all. Nor does he understand himself.” He kissed her hard and quickly, in the old way, his hand gently cupping her left breast. “Go put some clothes on, you’re scandalizing this library.”
She looked down and realized that her gold lounging robe was open, exposing her turquoise bikini and a good deal of slim, tanned nakedness.
“Sorry,” she said, laughing with a wild note of relief. She snatched the robe together.
“I’m off,” said Richard. “By the bye, is it the Bent-Warners for dinner tonight?”
“Yes, you suggested them. Will they fit?”
“Nobody,” said Richard smiling, “would fit this extraordinary house party. The Simpson woman is a disaster, and probably a secret toper as well, according to the horrified Dodge, who had it from the new housemaid.”
“Heavens,” said Celia, “I suppose that explains her baleful glares. Poor woman.”
“You’re a nice child,” said Richard. “Charity for all, but I feel that the female is sinister.”
Celia scarcely noted the rather startling adjective, under the rush of hope. She looked up at the Marsdon Chronicle, high on the top shelf in the gloom, and made a face at it.
She ran blithely upstairs to her room, humming “La Vie en Rose.”
Two
CELIA AND MOST of the Marsdon house party set out for Kent at half-past three.
Edna and George Simpson did not go. Edna had her headache, and she gave George his orders privately.
“You’ll stay here, too, of course. Sir Richard might want to discuss business with you when he g
ets back from the farm, and anyway, we don’t have to cater to those American women’s every whim.”
George sighed. He had been looking forward to the jaunt, but he knew better than to oppose her when her face was flushed, her eyes glittering, and she smelled strongly of peppermint. “Lady Marsdon seems very pleasant,” he said. “I can see you don’t like her, though can’t see why, and a young bride’s bound to influence her husband. ’Twould be a pity to threaten the Marsdon business, it’s been with Simpson’s since eighteen-eighty.”
Edna snorted, and lying down on the bed shut her eyes. “You’re a spineless worm, George, allus have been. I troost I know how to behave civilly, but I’ll not toady to vulgar Yanks for anybody, and mind you don’t go to that Ightham Mote. I don’t laike the sound of it.”
As George went out, shutting the door softly behind him, Edna’s annoyance shifted to puzzled questioning. She was aware that there was no reason to dislike the very name of a place she had never heard of before lunchtime. She also disliked the name “Celia,” let alone the young woman herself. But then, she thought, I’ve a right to my fancies, should be pampered during the “change,” and George knows it. She reached for the tincture which stood on her bedside table, poured out a quarter cupful, drank it and drifted rapidly into snorting sleep.
Myra led the way towards Kent, Lily sat beside her with a map; Harry sat on the back seat smoking his pipe and watching Myra’s auburn head. The long hair was now arranged into a gleaming Psyche knot which nicely balanced her long-nosed but beautiful profile. From time to time she turned to give him a small enigmatic smile over her shoulder. There was promise, surely, in those green glances, and Harry grew hopeful again.
Maybe tonight? He had noted the thoughtful bedroom assignments, and blessed Celia Marsdon who must have heard rumors. I wish they were true, he thought, haven’t felt like this about a woman since Denise de Caron, ten, no twelve years ago. The others’ve been too easy. No sport. Which diverted him into wishing it were the hunting season—a good run with the hounds. He puffed on his pipe and resumed watching Myra, though it occurred to him that Mrs. Taylor was not unattractive herself. A bit long in the tooth—about his own age, actually—yet still pretty in a plump, blond way, but no spark, no sex appeal; something like his ex-wife, Peggy, a cosy little woman. She had divorced him without rancor, and still wrote friendly notes to him from their daughter’s home in Cornwall.