It was a cruel trick, she thought, to be trapped in a land that seemed so high and wild and free.
With prim deliberation she gathered up her wrap and skirts and continued on. She rounded the swell of the hillside and found herself above a flock of sheep, quite a large flock, overseen by two squat calico dogs. They ranged all down the slope and into the finger of a green stream valley. To Margaret, walking along to the tune of their thin bell-notes, they looked like a spray of blackthorn blossom flung across the fell’s slope. Quaint and picturesque, pastoral, uninhibited by the torments and cares of the young woman poised above them, they went on grazing—and would go on grazing, she thought with a pang of strange longing, time out of mind as they had always done, no matter who sat at Marenové House.
And suddenly, from somewhere high in the folds of the fell’s flank, high up above the flock of sheep that was like the blowy white blossom-fleece of a blackthorn, high and clear there came to Margaret the sound of a panpipe playing. The sound stopped her in her tracks, frozen like a bird, and she listened to that sound as she had never listened to a sound before: and it seemed to her, as she listened, to be the very calling of a soul. It spoke across the dale, silver and thin, but full-bodied like wine, crying and self-satisfied, alien and remote. A pianoforte and its notes, a harp and its notes, were all separate things, but to Margaret the panpipe and its song were living and eerie, as though it were, not the voice of an instrument a man had made, but the soul’s-voice of the fell itself.
Just as quickly as the song had come, she ached as she had not let herself ache in weeks. It was not for home, it was not for her family. She did not know what it was for. She only knew that she had to get away from that free, melancholy voice among the fells—which was the very voice of the fells themselves—before it crushed her.
The music of the panpipe came after her for a distance until, with a struggle between the wind’s upward rushing, it gave way to the intermittent gurgle of a plover. Without haste, but without hesitation, Margaret moved into the face of the wind, fighting for each step downward. She was glad for the fight: it gave her something to occupy her mind with and it lessened, a little, the ache that had sprung up like a candle’s flame beneath her breastbone. It was with relief that she finally came down the last stretch of slope and saw the alder-hanger and the thorn hedge, though it was not with relief that she saw the looming bulk of the House.
She stopped inside the gap and looked around, feeling oddly more out of place than ever. Hobden must have finished his work: there was no sound of axe barking on wood. The plover still gurgled somewhere on the fellside; from the thickest tangle of alder a chiffchaff was singing
Ode to Joy
and, from farther off, a blackcap was shrieking something about freedom. She cast a baleful glance backward and began up the garden, keeping to the rear path.
It would be the dinner hour soon, and Rupert would be returning. Beyond the thorn hedge she left her walk of freedom; ahead she anticipated Rupert’s questions. Was her walk refreshing? Did she enjoy herself? And all the while as she strode up the path she could just see the faint mockery that flickered in the backs of Rupert’s eyes. But what appalled her most was that she could find no answer. Her walk abroad beyond the home-meads, where things went on with the rhythm of the land, had pained her almost as much as the familiar routine of a manor house.
She stopped by a massive rose-bush, bereft of buds but still adorned in green-flame leaves. As she knew it would, the inexplicable pang returned as soon as she ceased motion, but this time she understood its meaning. It was not for home, it was not for family—it was for belonging. The thought lay in her mind like a feather lying in her palm, quivering, anticipating with every heartbeat a wind to come whisk it away.
The only belonging she had was her own entrenched determination. She gave a little gesture, as if to toss away the thought, and moved on. There was no other belonging for her to be had anywhere save, by a mocking twist of providence, in the company of one wrinkled old labourer, and even then Margaret could not fool herself into believing that was anything like belonging.
She was roused from her thoughts as she rounded the kitchen wing by a sudden splash of colour against the shadows. In the narrow darkness was growing a straggling but defiant little broom bush, its limbs petrified by the night colds, but still holding, even at this late quarter of the year, a handful of golden sparks in bloom. They seemed to call out to Margaret, not with the crushing beauty of the panpipe, nor the distant homeliness of Rupert’s old Manor, but with a small warmth like a fire. Instinctively she went over to it, pulling her wrap close as she bent into the shadow by the building, and looked intently at the blossoms.
They were quite old, and rather browned, clinging to their mother plant only because it grew in a sheltered part of the grounds where the wind could not rattle it. Even the week’s storm had not managed to denude the bush of its early summer flowers.
I know how you feel
, she thought pityingly, straightening once more.
But at least
you
have shelter. We may cling to ourselves, but I am always in the wind here
.
With a delicate finger she touched one outstretched blossom of crumpled, browned, flaming saffron-colour, and watched as a single petal broke off and floated down on a soft gust of wind.
“Oh!” she said, starting as if stung. With a complaint of fabric she strode forward and crouched down, putting one hand out to the object on which the broom-petal had fallen.
She had missed it in the shadows, for it was almost the exact colour of the shadows themselves. A little ashen heap the smudged colour of a titmouse, ringed in scorched grass, lay at her feet, broken up only by the single thumbnail of yellow petal and, where a touch of light came in, the glitter of what looked like lettering. Curious, Margaret shoved up her sleeves and, gently replacing the petal on the grass, eased and levered the charred object out of the pile. Ash fell away, hissing upward and spiralling outward like imitation smoke; she got her hands horribly dirty carefully brushing off the flat face of the object.
It was the back cover of a volume, illustrated in simple design by a gold Chi-Rho; its spine was still attached, but frayed and burnt beyond repair. She put it down and began questing for the front. Her resting heart-rate was strangely low at this moment: she felt the numbness and at once the sharpened awareness of being in a dream. She found two other backs and handfuls of burnt book-leaves which were ruined, too, beyond repair. At last, near the heart of the pile, she unearthed a front piece that, though it had been divorced by fire from the rest of its body, was legible and otherwise intact.
She had a strange sensation, kneeling there, staring at it, that she had been there and stared at it before.
In neat gold print, as gold as the broom-petal, she read off the author and title: Songmartin’s
Commentaries
, Philippians, Volume XI. She held the thing lightly so that it would not break, but her hands had gone suddenly tense. As keenly as she could hear his laughter, as keenly as she could see his mocking glance, in her mind’s eye Margaret heard Rupert’s words to his cousin, low and regretful.
“I’m afraid I have misplaced that particular collection.”
Misplaced…Misplaced! She stared with a sense of horror at the burnt bodies of the ecclesiastical books and felt the sharp blade of rage cutting open all her veins inside. She saw broken images, scraps of words—the war-banner of her tartan cloak, the blackcap singing, the sullen scarlet of leaves on a garden plot, Skander’s voice saying, “For the love of heaven!”—little things: little things that somehow mattered.
Gently she laid the book back down among its dead fellows and rose, turning to the broom bush. With one hand cupped beneath, one hand running tightly up the branches, she shaved off curls of bright yellow bloom until her hand was full of them. With all the silence of ceremony she stood over the ash pile and let them fall, scattering in a sidewise cascade of flower-sparks. The last petal fell, drifting clockwise, spinning like a top, and rested on the Chi-Rho. For a moment Margaret expected it to catch and leap alight, and for the whole thing to burn up into nothing.
Her heart had forgotten to beat. She was not sure how she lived without the blood-thrum of it going through her. Detached but determined, she followed the porphyry gravel path to the rear door and let herself in. With the clearness of one walking in a dream, she was glad her heart was not beating: she might not have been able to walk so knowingly into the throat of the dragon otherwise—a dragon that, python-like, had its coils round and round Marenové House and was quietly cutting off the life of it. But Marenové knew, and Hobden knew, and now, with a clarity that hurt, Margaret knew.
One of the chamber maids met her at the stairs and came forward to take her wrap away, saying something about dinner being laid and what had she done to her hands? Brow arched, body numb and spirit detached from everything, Margaret stared at the girl coldly, blankly. Whatever the maid saw in her mistress’s face made her own go pale, and with a deferential bob the girl murmured something and turned away.
With measured step Margaret climbed the stair. The silence, which she always felt was about to scream, the stillness, which she always felt was about to break into a storm, both seemed suffocating now. She moved through them, still with the numbness and intensity of feeling as in a dream. Even in her room she knew there was no sanctuary—was there sanctuary to be found anywhere?—but at least there she might cut off the dark flow of Rupert’s genius so that she might sit and think.
Once within her room, quite alone save for the little maid who was sweeping out the fireplace, she pulled her armchair close to the window and sat in the pale cold sunlight, her chin in her hand, staring out unseeingly across the lawn.
There was not much to think. The first blaze of rage had died out into a low firedrake smoulder. It was the only thing that kept back the sense of wickedness that haunted the halls of this House. When Margaret had thought she was an ambassador for Earth, she had not realized that she was representing her to Hell.
A sharp wind blew outside—the hollow echo of it hummed inside the room—and the movement of the damson trees drew the young woman’s attention. And suddenly it seemed to her that she could have been standing at the west window of her house in Aylesward, looking outward and upward at her familiar Cumbrian fells. As far back as she could remember there had always been the stark rise of the fells around her, tawny in summer and ribbed with snow and cold like the sides of some great animal in winter. Had she ever not lived here?
Had she ever not lived in Hell?
Margaret had not been aware of the maid leaving until suddenly she returned, bobbing respectfully and said, in a low, ginger murmur, “The master is waiting for you at dinner, my lady…”
Margaret tore her eyes and thoughts from the damson trees. “Yes, thank you…Send my regrets, and say that I overtaxed myself in my walks this morning. I will see Rupert at supper.”
“Very good, my lady,” said the maid in a tone that belied her doubts that it was. She bowed again and withdrew, and as Margaret took her eyes from the door they slid across the upright figure of her ball gown in the corner. For a moment she stared at it, little sparks of anger hissing just behind her heart, and wishing she could have the satisfaction of taking the hateful thing in her hands and tearing it, tearing it long and slowly in two from top to bottom as God must have had the satisfaction of tearing the temple veil.
She was afraid that Rupert would come for her and that she would have to face him before she was ready. But he did not come, and as the hours dragged by in agony she almost wished he had, so that the ordeal would have been finished. She felt like a prisoner waiting for her execution, trapped within her own room, going over and over again the words that she meant to say. She had been right, there was a third option, another way out.
She stopped once before the mirror.
Never mind, Margaret. You were never pretty anyhow—never very witty, never much, hardly missed.
The hours crawled by. She could not bring herself to read, to sleep, to do anything of worth. Her only companions were the screaming sense, the storming sense, that lay over the whole house, and the sputtering, smouldering fire of her own determination.
Yet it was with an odd calm that she heard the clock downstairs chime six. She rose, put off her frock and replaced it with her black taffeta, and stepped out onto the landing.
The evenings were coming swift now. The glass dome of the atrium was darkened to bluestone and flint, speckled with stars. The lights in their sconces were lit; she moved through the tendrils of their smoke and the pools of their glow, quite alone, as alone as she had ever felt before. They were beautiful, the lights: they looked each like broom-blossoms to Margaret, perfect and saffron, burning away against the gloom.
The Rupert that Margaret found waiting for her in the dining room was the same cool, mocking thing she remembered. But her senses, sharpened by her dream-like horror of him, made him stand out doubly real against the shadowy dark panelling of the room. Tall, powerful, wrought out of iron, he turned toward her as she entered and she felt a shudder of despair go through her body.
“Margaret, my sweet,” he purred, and, going over to her, took her hand but did not kiss it, only showed her to her chair. She could feel his eyes on her, peeling back her skin. “Sioned told me you were unwell this afternoon. Did you rest well?”
“I kept to my room,” said Margaret, unwilling to lie. “It is quiet there.”
It was uncanny how he kept an eye on her all throughout the meal. She ate mechanically, though with perfect poise, but was preoccupied both with his constant gaze and how she was to tell him…
At last she could stand the silence no longer. With an introductory sniff, raising her eyes from her plate, she asked in a half-interested, detached tone, “Your letter said you went north this morning. How was the ride?”