Dorothy Eden (51 page)

No, no, that was a sick unbalanced thought. The family was not evil now. That particular type of badness had died with Captain Phillip. From generation to generation they had grown more respectable. They had amassed money and respectability in equal quantities. Finally, great-grandfather Andrew had been decorated by Queen Victoria and with that royal gesture the family had arrived. All its inherited vice and cruelty now ran deeply and was glimpsed only by the sharp-eyed or the unfortunate.

Even Fergus agreed that her family was highly respectable. He said he adored Uncle Saunders with his quaint elderly jokes, and that Aunt Annabel was a poppet. And of course Guy, being Brigit’s brother, was above reproach.

But Brigit knew what Fergus really thought. He despised them all, Uncle Saunders for his miserliness, Aunt Annabel because she was a silly old lady who let her husband bully her, and Guy because he was weak. How then could he love her, she whose veins were full of Templar blood?

Especially now…

Brigit flung her head away from the cruelly staring moon. A stab of pain went through her. Life—was it life? She moved her legs and watched intently the moon-blanched coverlet of the bed. The two mounds that were her feet stayed motionless. Tears filled her eyes. She was so sure that she had moved. But they said one still felt one’s legs even when they had been amputated. Hers, useless as they were, at least remained attached to her body. Her physical condition was improving. With that back to normal this curious paralysis would leave her. It was merely a matter of shock to the nerve centres. Such a thing sometimes took time to mend. The important thing was not to worry.

No one else was worrying. Fergus certainly wasn’t. Neither were the children. They were as happy as sandboys with Prissie, who was a treasure. Aunt Annabel and Uncle Saunders were not worrying either. They liked company, even if it was a sick woman and a couple of children. The house had been gloomy lately with only Aunt Annabel’s everlasting cats. And Nurse Ellen was not worrying. She was expecting daily that Brigit, like the young man in the Bible, would take up her bed and walk. It was almost a game with her.

‘And how many tootsies will wiggle this morning? Not one of them? Well, we’ll have to try playing “This little pig went to market”. Never mind, ducky, wait till tomorrow.’

Brigit didn’t really mind being called ducky and talked to like a child. It was only for such a short time. They all kept telling her so.

‘Darling, darling Brigit, I love your silly legs.’ That was the memory of Fergus’s voice in her ears. ‘I always knew they had a will of their own and one day they would say they were having a rest. Which is not surprising, the way you’ve run them up and downstairs and over hill and dale. Let them have their rest. We won’t fuss about them.’ And then Fergus’s kiss first gently dried the tears in her eyes and then lingered on her mouth. ‘Nor the baby either,’ he whispered.

But remembering that made the tears come back. Not because Fergus was being so heart-breakingly kind and sweet, but because the old nagging doubts were in her mind. He hadn’t really wanted the baby, he hadn’t really wanted Nicky and Sarah, but when they had come he had been as sweet about them as he was now about her silly useless legs.

Perhaps it was a good thing about the baby. Because she, too, secretly hadn’t wanted it…

Brigit moved her head again restlessly. The pillow had got clotted into uncomfortable bumps beneath her neck. She tried to straighten it, but her efforts only made it worse. The clock, with its glow-worm light, showed only half past three. The night and that moon caught like a blazing moth in the spider-web of the tree were going on for ever. For ever… For ever… The clock with its small busy tick was laughing at her, gaily tripping over itself with laughter.

‘You’ll lie there for ever… you’ll never walk again…’

With the moon and the dead tree and the blanched sky watching her… She would gradually rot away until she was as thin and dry and twisted as the mulberry boughs that once had borne delicious fruit. Fruit for Fergus, who loved to hold her, burying his face in her shoulder, stroking her with a hand that trembled…

‘You’ll never walk again…’

That wasn’t the tick of the clock, or her own mind seeming to speak aloud. Those words were actually being spoken in a hoarse secret voice that came from the direction of the fireplace.

Brigit turned her head sharply. There was a curious sibilant noise in the room. Someone was breathing deeply and heavily.

‘You’ll never walk…’

Frantically, on the half-finished sentence, Brigit felt for the bell on the night table and rang it. She kept her finger on it long after the clangor had filled the room.

A bundly shape in the corner moved and sprang to life. A light went on. Nurse Ellen, blinking and full of alarm, rushed to the bedside.

‘I fell asleep. What’s the matter, Mrs Gaye? Are you feeling sick?’

Brigit, breathless and weak, sank back in the pillows. The sibilant noise had been Nurse Ellen snoring. She had forgotten that Nurse Ellen sat up with her. Fergus had insisted on that although the need for a night nurse was past. Perhaps because he thought she would be lonely for his arms. Oh God, she was. So lonely…

Still, she mustn’t get neurotic, too, waking Nurse Ellen up because the poor girl snored.

But the voice, the cruel insistent words…

‘Nurse, look in the passage quickly. I heard something.’

‘Of course you did. This house is full of sounds. I never heard such a noisy house in my life.’ Nurse Ellen went to the door and peered out. ‘No one here,’ she said. She switched on a light. ‘Unless it’s one of Mrs Hatchett’s ghosts, and that wouldn’t make a noise, or so I’m told, ghosts losing their speaking faculties with their clothes. What was it you heard, dear?’

‘A—sort of voice,’ Brigit said, half ashamedly.

‘I think you were having a bad dream, ducky. What about a nice cup of tea to put you off to sleep again. Oh, there it is, the thing you heard.’

Brigit’s head shot up.

‘One of those damn cats,’ Nurse Ellen said cheerfully. ‘Begging your pardon, Mrs Gaye. You probably heard it miauling. One thing I can’t stand in the dead of night is a cat miauling. Well, there are all sorts of places, aren’t there? But I must say I’ve never been in one with cats and ghosts quite so plentiful.’

‘And voices,’ thought Brigit silently. But she said no more. What she had heard had not been one of Aunt Annabel’s cats.

But had she heard anything? Had it not been just in her own mind? Her subconscious growing voluble, speaking the fear that her tongue dared not.

‘You’ll never walk again…’

Oh, Nicky, oh, Sarah, oh, Fergus, Fergus, darling…

‘No wonder you woke up,’ said Nurse Ellen, ‘with that piece of gold plate staring you in the face.’

Gold plate… That was what Captain Phillip Templar had brought home from the Spanish main…

It was almost the first thing Fergus had noticed when she had brought him to the house in Montpelier Square. He had whispered, ‘Do you actually eat off it?’ and she had begun to giggle, so that she could scarcely perform the introductions with decorum.

From the first Fergus and her family had disliked one another, she knew that. Although Fergus was sweet to Aunt Annabel, who was being deliberately vague and slightly idiot as only Aunt Annabel could be, polite to Uncle Saunders, who plainly showed his disapproval of Brigit’s choice and made loud challenging comments about the manner in which Brigit was accustomed to being kept, and even creditably decent to Guy who at that time was going through a revolting stage of insolent superiority, he had had difficulty at first in concealing his dismay at the prospect of her family.

‘Now why, with all that money of their own,’ he had said afterwards, ‘should they expect you to marry money?’ Fergus himself was the son of a hard-working, honest, highly intelligent but poor country solicitor. His family could boast of little but their integrity, their sense of humour, and their appreciation of pleasant things. It was not the sort of background that would impress a Templar, and when Brigit, meeting Fergus at an Air Force ball, began to grow more than a little interested in him, Uncle Saunders had made no secret of his disapproval and disappointment.

Brigit had tried to answer Fergus’s question honestly and fairly.

‘They have been used to it for so long. They’ve got into the habit of thinking it’s one of the major virtues.’

‘It isn’t, you know.’

‘I do know. And I haven’t got any, darling. Guy and I have been completely dependent on Uncle Saunders since our parents were killed in an air crash. My mother was disinherited when she married.’

Fergus had suddenly looked hopeful.

‘I hope the same will happen to you.’

‘Oh, so do I. I hate the Templar money. It was stolen to begin with, and it’s gone on being amassed in horrid ways.’

‘Has it got blood on it?’ Fergus inquired interestedly.

‘Yes, it has! Fergus, I hate my family. It’s an awful thing to say, but even my mother never got over being disinherited. She was bitter and arrogant and made life quite impossible for Daddy. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak for days. We were all afraid of her. Oh, darling, I’m so glad you haven’t got any money.’

‘Enough for a cottage in the country and a new dress for my wife every Christmas.’

Brigit was crying a little for happiness.

‘Fergus, are you sure you still want to marry me, now you’ve met my family?’

‘Curse of the Templars and all,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Try to stop me.’

Later, much later, when the elaborate wedding was over, the cottage, picturesque and charming, had materialized, also a daily help, a dog, and a cat, Brigit said to Fergus:

‘Great-great-great-great-grandfather Phillip murdered and plundered for his wealth. He was a pirate, so that it made it more or less lawful. Great-great-great-grandfather Thomas was a slave trader and enjoyed it. Great-great-grandfather Silas was more respectable. He merely starved his employees and killed his wife by subtle cruelty. Great-grandfather Andrew was decorated by Queen Victoria for his contribution to industry. He was the most notorious exploiter of child labour in England. Grandfather Ernest was a spendthrift and a bad loser. He cheated at cards and had so many shameful affairs with women that he became a social outcast. Even he couldn’t quite run through the family fortune, but he was very glad to have the opportunity of disinheriting my mother when she married my father. It saved him a marriage settlement. During all my childhood I listened to her hating him and planning to get even with him. I was frightened of my mother. She was so bitter and unforgiving. Can you imagine that, Fergus? Being frightened of one’s own mother?’

It was late at night and they were in the pleasant bedroom with its sloping timbered ceiling and daffodil printed chintzes. Moonlight was shining softly on the window and an owl was calling with a drowsy country sound.

Fergus’s arm tightened round Brigit.

‘And what, may I ask, is this song of hate in aid of?’

‘Fergus, we’re going to have a baby.’

The bleakness of her voice must have startled him, for his arm went tighter still, hurting her, and not taking time to express surprise and pleasure at her news he said almost angrily:

‘It will be our baby, won’t it?’

‘Fergus—I have the Templar blood, the blood of robbers and murderers and child exploiters and misers and—’

His fingers on her lips stopped her desolate recital. He switched on the bedside light and then flung back the blankets and looked at her gravely and appraisingly.

‘You’re clean and sweet and lovely,’ he said. ‘You make me think of apple blossom, or a rose just before it opens, tender and full of fragrance. I want to hold you and smell you and stroke you and listen to you laughing, and have you for ever.’

All the familiar laughter was gone from his eyes. They were full of gravity and tenderness such as she hadn’t before been aware of.

‘It will be our baby,’ he said. ‘The start of a new line, a new dynasty if you like, but ours, the Gaye dynasty.’

He kissed her long and deeply. Then the laughter was dancing in his eyes again and he was saying:

‘Just forget that blood-and-thunder stuff, will you? I’m sorry to be so lacking in melodrama, but honestly your ancestors were probably painted larger than life. Uncle Saunders is absolutely harmless—I think he stores nuts for the winter like a squirrel. Anyway, our baby will probably have wings. And did I say,’ he went on, leaping up, ‘how clever we are, anyway! This calls for a celebration.’

So they sipped champagne in the pale moonlight and then Brigit, dissolving in laughter, made Fergus hide the bottle so that Mrs Smythe, the daily help, wouldn’t find it in the bedroom in the morning. And the owl went on calling, and a plane on a night flight droned overhead, and Brigit thought of Fergus leaving early in the morning because he, too, flew planes, and now her arms tightened round him and Nicky was forgotten… Nicky who was born seven months later without wings, but fair and sweet and innocent and even more like Fergus than Brigit had dared to hope.

She almost lost her apprehension before Sarah’s birth three years later. How could she keep it when Fergus reduced her terrible ancestors to mere comic opera villains by thumbing his nose at all the portraits on the stairs in the big house in Montpelier Square, and treating Aunt Annabel and Uncle Saunders in a careless friendly way as if they were a stuffy but harmless old couple. Guy, the budding stockbroker, who looked as if he might have the Templar cold, almost inhuman ruthlessness, Fergus looked on as a slightly irritating and silly younger brother.

When Sarah, too, was fair, sweet, and innocent it looked as if the dominating Templar characteristics might really have been subdued at last.

The third baby, Brigit had almost looked forward to with a timorous pleasure.

But that was so short a time ago. It might have been a dream from which she would still awake.

She had been so happy that day. It was her birthday and they were having a party. It had to start without Fergus who was at present a pilot on the London to Rome flight, and would not be home until late in the afternoon. But everyone else was there, Aunt Annabel and Uncle Saunders, Guy down early from the city, and some small friends of Nicky’s and Sarah’s.