Seven for a Secret (4 page)

She was smiling and her face was tender.

I said: “You liked him, didn’t you?”

“Most people did. Of course, he was not very serious … ever.”

1 waited for her to go on, and as she did not, I said: “Do

2. you think he ought to be told? Or do you think he wouldn’t want to be reminded of us? ” ” It could be . uncomfortable. When people divorce they sometimes become enemies. He was the sort who didn’t like trouble . who turned away from it. No, dear, let’s forget all that. You’re coming back with me. ” } I was thoughtful, wondering about him. She laid her hand over mine.

“They say, ” Let sleeping dogs lie”,” sh<( said. j “I have heard that.” “Well, if you wake them up, there can be a lot of barking and perhaps unpleasantness. Let’s go back to Wiltshire.! See how you like it there. You’ll have to go to school or something. There is your education, isn’t there? These j things are important. You and I have a lot of decisions to come to. We don’t want to burden ourselves with what’ has gone before. We have to go marching on. That was your mother’s trouble. Looking back all the time. It’s no good, Freddie.

I’ve a notion you and I will do very well together. “

“Oh yes. Aunt Sophie. I don’t know what to say to you. You came here after all those years and you’ve made it all seem so much easier.”

“That’s the ticket. I must say, I feel pleased about acquiring a niece all to myself.”

“Dearest Aunt Sophie, I feel very happy to have my aunt.”

Then we kissed and clung together, and I felt a wonderful sense of security creeping over me.

A great deal happened in the next few weeks. There was an auction of the furniture which raised more than we had hoped for, for among it were some treasures which my mother had brought with her from Cedar Hall.

Meg and Amy left for Somerset and the house was up for sale.

My mother was taken to the nursing home in Devizes, which was not very far from Aunt Sophie’s house, so that we could visit her at least once a week. Aunt Sophie told me she had what was tantamount to her own carriage.

“No more than a dogcart really, and it belongs to old Joe Jobbings who does an hour or so a week in our garden, and he’ll take us wherever we want to go.”

Lavender House was up for sale. I took my last look at Cedar Hall with no regrets, as I blamed its proximity with its continual reminders of lost grandeur and ‘better days’ for my mother’s condition; and I left with Aunt Sophie for my new home in Wiltshire.

3i

St. Aubyn’s

I was very fortunate after such a tragic upheaval, not on! ) to have Aunt Sophie as my guardian but to be taken b-her to what must be one of the most fascinating count if in England.

There is a strange ambience about that part of th country of which I was immediately aware. When I mentioned it to Aunt Sophie she said:

“It’s the ancient relics You can’t help thinking of those people who lived here years and years ago, before history was recorded, and they’ve left their mark.”

There was the White Horse on the hillside. One had to be some distance from it to see it clearly and it was mysterious; but chiefly there were the stones which nobody could explain, though they guessed they had been put there long before the birth of Christ to make some place of worship.

The village of Harper’s Green itself was very similar to many other English villages. There was the old Norman church, which was constantly in need of restoration, the green, the duck pond the row of Tudor cottages facing it, and the manor house -in this case St. Aubyn’s Park, which;

had been erected round about the sixteenth century.

Aunt Sophie’s house was by no means large, but extremely comfortable.

There were always fires in the rooms during the cold weather. Lily, who came from Cornwall, told me she could not ‘abide the cold’. She and Aunt Sophie collected as much wood as they could throughout’ the year and there was always a store in the woodshed.

Lily had been at Cedar Hall. She had left her native Cornwall to go there, just as Meg had lett London; she was of course, well acquainted with Meg and it was a pleasure to talk of her to someone who knew my old friend.

“She went with Miss Caroline,” said Lily.

“I was the lucky one. I stayed with Miss Sophie.”

I had written to Meg but her efforts with the pen were somewhat laborious and so far I had heard little from her except that she hoped I was well as it found her at present and the house in Somerset was a bit of all right. That was comforting and I was glad I was able to write to her glowingly of my own circumstances; and if she found difficulty in reading it herself, I was sure there would be someone who could read it to her.

There were two houses of distinction in the neighbourhood. One was St. Aubyn’s Park and the other the red brick and gracious Bell House.

“It’s called that,” said Aunt Sophie, ‘because there’s a bell over the porch. It’s high up, nearly in the roof, and it has always been there.

Must have been a meeting house at some time. The Dorians live there.

There’s a girl about your age . orphan. Lost both parents. She’s Mrs. Dorian’s sister’s girl, I believe. Then, of course, there’s the family at St. Aubyn’s. “

“What are they like?”

“Oh, they’re the St. Aubyns … same name as the house. Been there ever since it was built. You can work it out. The house was built at the end of the sixteenth century and the Bell House was just over a hundred years later.”

“What about the St. Aubyn family?”

“There are two children … well, children! Master Crispin wouldn’t like to be called that! He’ll be twenty at least. Very haughty gentleman. Then there’s the girl, Tamarisk. Unusual name. It’s a tree.

Pretty feathery sort. Tamarisk is about your age. So you might get asked to tea. “

“We never had tea with the people who bought Cedar Hall.”

“That might have been due to your mother, dear.”

“She despised them because they had shops.”

“Poor Caroline. She always made a rod for her own back. Nobody cared that she hadn’t got what she once had … except herself. Well, the St. Aubyns are the important family. I suppose the Bell House people come next. Never worried me that I was brought up in Cedar Hall and now live in The Rowans.”

The Rowans was the name of our house, so called3 because it had two rowan trees in the front one on either! side of the porch. I loved to hear Aunt Sophie talk about the village. There was the Reverend Hetherington who was ‘past it’, and I whose sermons rambled on interminably, and Miss Maud’ Hetherington, who kept the household in order, and the] rest of us as well. “Very forceful lady,” commented Aunt Sophie, ‘and;

essential to the poor Rev. ” i I was fascinated by the group of stones which were a few miles from The Rowans. I first saw them when I rode by in Joe Jobbings’s dogcart with Aunt Sophie on the way to Salisbury to do some shopping which was unavailable in Harper’s Green.

“Could we stop here for a moment, Joe?” asked Aunt Sophie, and Joe obligingly did so.

When I stood among those ancient boulders I felt the past close in about me. I was excited and exhilarated, yet I was aware of a sense of dread.

Aunt Sophie told me a little about them.

“Nobody’s quite sure,” she told me.

“Some think they were put there by the Druids about seventeen hundred years before Christ lived. I don’t know much else, except that it was a sort of temple. They worshipped the heavens in those days. The stones are laid out to catch the rising and the setting of the sun, they say.”

1 took her arm and held it tightly. I was glad to be there with her, and 1 was very thoughtful as we got back into the dogcart and Joe Jobbings drove us home.

I was so happy to be in this place, particularly when I looked back to the Middlemore days in the shadow of Cedar Hall.

We went regularly to see my mother. She seemed comfortable but not quite sure what had happened to her or where she was.

I felt sad when I left her; and, watching Aunt Sophie, I could not help feeling that, if my mother had been like her, how much happier we might have been.

And Aunt Sophie was becoming dearer to me every day.

There were many practical details to be arranged my education foremost among them.

Aunt Sophie took a prominent part in the affairs of Harper’s Green.

She had unbounded energy, and liked to direct. She kept the church choir together, organized the annual fete and bazaar and, although she and Miss Hetherington were not always in agreement, they were both too wise not to recognize the talents of the other.

True, Aunt Sophie lived in a small house which could not be compared with St. Aubyn’s or the Bell House, but she had been brought up in a great house and knew the obligations of such and was well versed in the management of village life. I quickly realized that, though less affluent, we were in the same bracket as the gentry.

Before I met the people who were to play an important part in my life, 1 learned something of them through Aunt Sophie’s descriptions. I knew that old Thomas, who spent his days on the seat looking over the duck pond had been a gardener up at St. Aubyn’s until the rheumatics ‘got to his legs’ and put an end to that. He still had his little cottage on the St. Aubyn estate which he used to tell anyone who was sitting beside him he had ‘for the term of his natural

life’, which made it sound more like a prison sentence than the boon of which he was so proud. 1 was warned that I must say a quick good-day to Thomas when passing if I did not want to be drawn into reminiscences of the old days.

Then there was poor old Charlie, who had long ago said goodbye to any wits he might have had; and Major Cummings, who had served in India at the time of the Mutiny and spent his days recalling that important event.

Aunt Sophie referred to them as the “Old Men of the Green’. They assembled there each day when the weather permitted it and, said Aunt Sophie, their conversation was a mixed grill of Thomas’s cottage and rheumatism and the Indian Mutiny while poor Charlie sat there, nodding and listening with rapt attention as if it were all new to him.

They were the background figures the chorus, as it were. The people who interested me were those of my own age in particular the two girls from St. Aubyn’s Park and the Bell House.

Aunt Sophie explained: “There’s Tamarisk St. Aubyn. She’s a bit of a wild one. No wonder. The St. Aubyns mere and pere were wrapped up in themselves. Never much time for the youngsters. Of course, there were nurses and nannies … but a child needs special care from the right quarter.”

She looked at me almost wistfully. She knew that my mother would have been too obsessed by those lost ‘better days’ to have had time to try to give me some good ones.

“Merry pair, they were,” she went on.

“Parties … dancing. They had a riotous time. Up to London. Off to the Continent. You might say, what of it? They always had the nursemaids and governesses. Lily says it was unnatural.”

Tell me about the children. “

“There are Crispin and Tamarisk. Tamarisk is about your age.

Crispin’s quite a bit older ten years, I think. They had their son and I don’t think they wanted any more
although as soon as the little mites appeared they could be handed over to someone to be looked after. But there would be that period before they arrived. Very restricting. Very inconvenient for the sort of life Mrs. St. Aubyn liked to live For a long time it seemed there would only be Crispin. He did not interfere with the merry life at St. Aubyn’s. I think they hardly knew him. You can imagine the sort of thing brought down to be inspected now and then. He had a nurse who thought the world of him. He doesn’t forget her. I will say that for him. He’s always looked after them. There are two of them, sisters. Gone a bit odd, one of them. Poor Flora. They’ve always been together. Never married, either of them. They’ve got a little cottage on the estate. Crispin sees they’re all right. He remembers his nanny.

But you were asking about the young ones. Well, the father died. Too much riotous living, people say. But they do say things like that, don’t they? Late nights, too much gadding up to Town and abroad . too much alcohol. In any case, it was all too much for Jonathan St. Aubyn. She went to pieces after that. They say she’s still too fond of the bottle . but people will say anything. It was a mercy that Crispin was of a responsible age when his father died. He took over. I believe he’s a great one for taking over. “

“And he looks after the place very well, doesn’t he?”

“Very much the squire ” and don’t you forget it” kind. Most admit it is just what the old place needed, but there are some who haven’t got a good word to say for him. He’s got a fine opinion of himself to make up for that, though. That’s the son of the house now the Lord of the Manor.”

“Is there a Lady of the Manor?”

“I suppose you’d say there was Mrs. St. Aubyn, the mother. But she’s hardly ever out of the house. Gave up when her husband died and took to invalidism. They were devoted to each other. And she didn’t care for anything

but living the wild life with him. Crispin was married. “

Was? ” I asked.

“She ran away and left him. People said they weren’t surprised.”

“So he still has a wife?”

“No. She went to London and soon after there was an accident on the railway. She was killed.”

“How dreadful!”

“Some said it was just retribution for her sins. Pious old Josiah Dorian at the Bell House was sure of this. The more charitable said they could understand the poor girl wanted to get away from her husband.”

“It sounds very dramatic.”

“Well, dear, that depends on the way you look at it. We’ve got a mixed brew here, but you get that in any village. It all looks so peaceful and calm, but probe below the surface and you’re bound to find something you didn’t expect. It’s like turning over a stone to see what’s beneath. Ever done that? Try it one day and you’ll see what 1 mean.”

“So this Crispin, he’s married … and yet not.”

“It’s called being a widower. He’s rather young for that, but I suppose the poor girl couldn’t stand living with him. Perhaps it will warn others not to attempt it. Although, I must say that, with a grand place like St. Aubyn’s and he being master of it, it might be a temptation to some.”