The Changeling (49 page)

“So much for her Christian charity,” murmured Benedict.

“You must not judge her harshly,” said Leah. “She thought she was right. It came out when she talked to me … she was so upset … the secret somehow escaped. She had had a very hard time. She called herself Mrs. Polhenny, but she had never been married. Something similar had happened to her. When she was sixteen she was seduced by the squire of the village in which she lived. There was a child … me. Her parents were shocked and sent her away to an aunt where she pretended she was a widow. The aunt was a midwife and she learned her profession … and in time she came to the Poldoreys and practiced it. I was about five years old then. What had happened was on her mind to such an extent that she became fanatically religious. She thought she was saved and she saw sin in everything and everyone. I could understand her horror … and I was very sad that I had brought more sorrow to her.

“She kept me locked up in the cottage. She said I had gone to stay with an aunt in St. Ives. There was no aunt in St. Ives.”

“I thought I saw you once at the window,” I said. “Just a shadow … you were there … and gone.”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw you. I was terrified. I did not know what I should have done if I had been seen and my condition discovered. Then she had this plan. “She said she could never hold up her head in the towns again if it were known that her own daughter was a slut. She would do anything … anything … to stop it’s being known. So she had this idea. Jenny Stubbs had gone about believing she was pregnant for a long time. She longed for a child. Being a midwife, my mother would be able to put her plan into action. Jenny had had a child once before. My mother would examine her and tell everyone that Jenny was indeed pregnant. She would attend her and let it be known that Jenny had her child. That child would be mine. The more she thought of it the better it seemed. She could get rid of my child, and my virtue, at least outwardly, would be retained.”

“So …” I cried, “Lucie is your child.”

“It didn’t turn out like that. Your mother had her child at this time. She died and not much attention was given to the child at first. She was a sickly little girl. My mother believed she could not live more than a few days … weeks at most. She was always fond of children and it was only when they began to grow up that she saw them as imps of mischief. Then she did this thing. She took Mrs. Lansdon’s sickly baby and gave her to Jenny and my child she put in the nurseries here. Mine was a strong and healthy child and it seemed the best thing to do. My child would have the advantages Jenny Stubbs could not give her … and my mother was, after all, her grandmother. She thought she had settled everything in the best way. We did not know that Lucie would grow stronger and live.”

I looked at Benedict. He was as shocked as I was.

Tom Marner said: “So you see … Belinda is Leah’s own child.”

“And that means,” said Benedict, “that Lucie is mine.”

There was a long silence. I believe everyone was too bewildered by what we had heard to say anything just yet.

It was Tom Marner who spoke first. “Leah told me all this and I persuaded her that she must tell you. We are all concerned and we have to work out what is to be done. You can understand how Leah feels.”

“You are right,” said Benedict. “But this is a great shock to us all.”

“I’ll tell you what we want,” went on Tom. “Leah and I want to take Belinda with us to Australia.”

That evening we sat together in the drawing room—Benedict, Tom Marner, Celeste and I. After her confession, Leah was too upset to join us.

“I still find it hard to credit this story,” said Benedict. “Who would have believed that the midwife had such a devious mind?”

“I would,” I said. “But she did have it on her conscience at the end. I know now why she was so anxious to see my grandmother when she was dying. She was going to confess to her. If she had we should have known of this long ago.”

“Leah can’t be parted from her child,” said Celeste.

“That’s for sure,” added Tom.

“I always felt drawn towards Lucie,” put in Benedict, as though talking to himself. “Perhaps there is something in this relationship between a parent and child even when they are unaware of that relationship.”

“I am very fond of Lucie too,” said Celeste.

We talked for a long time … well into the night. Tom Marner was passionately persuasive. He wanted to take Leah back with him and he wanted Belinda too. “She’s a strange one,” he said. “She needs special handling.” He was smiling to himself. He would know how to do the handling and, having seen the comradeship between him and Belinda, I believed him. Moreover Belinda would never be happy if they left without her. I had thought she showed signs of fondness for me. I believed she did care for me … a little. But Leah was first with her and I guessed that place could be shared with Tom before long.

I think we were all beginning to realize that when Leah and Tom went to Australia, Belinda, that strange changeling child, would go with her mother and the stepfather she would have chosen for herself.

The wedding followed very soon. There was no point—nor time—for delay, Tom said. Belinda and Lucie were bridesmaids.

Belinda was brimming over with excitement. She talked continually of Australia and the perfections of her new father.

It was a little churlish perhaps to those of us who had cared for her all these years, but she was genuinely happy and so excited that she could not hide her feelings. We all understood.

After the church ceremony we went to Manor Grange for the reception.

As I came into the hall one of the maids called to me. Her eyes were shining and she said in a high-pitched voice, “There’s someone called to see you, Miss Rebecca. He’s in the little room.”

I went into that room where Benedict listened to the complaints and suggestions of his constituents. A man was standing there, his back to the window. He looked different. The sun had tanned his skin to a light bronze and he seemed older.

“Pedrek!” I cried.

And then we ran to each other.

The embrace was breathtaking. I managed to say, “You have come home then. I have been so longing for news.”

“I thought it better to come myself.”

“At last! It’s been so long.”

“Never mind. It’s now that counts. I’ve loved you through it all, Rebecca.”

“And I you.”

“Never doubt again.”

“Never … never … never,” I said.

There was so much to be told … so much to plan for.

Leah, Tom and Belinda were to leave soon after the wedding and there came that moment when we had to say goodbye.

Belinda was like a wild-eyed sprite. She could not stand still.

“We’ll come back to see you,” she said. “And you can come out to see us. My father says so …”

She jumped up and put her arms round my neck.

“I do love you, Rebecca,” she said a little ruefully, as though apologizing for her enthusiasm. “I will come back and see you.” She hugged me more tightly. “And now you can marry that boring old Pedrek.”

“Thank you. I shall,” I told her.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Daughters of England series

W
E WERE AT BREAKFAST
—my stepmother and I—when the letter came. Briggs, the butler, brought it in with the usual ceremony. It lay on the shining silver tray in which Belinda and I used to watch our grotesquely distorted faces leering back at us, while we grew hysterical with laughter.

My stepmother looked at the letter nervously. She was a very nervous woman. It was due I always thought to living with my father who was rather a terrifying man to some people. I could understand her feelings, although his relationship with me was quite different from that which he had with anyone else.

For a few seconds the letter lay on the table unopened while I waited expectantly.

Celeste, my stepmother, looked at me fearfully. She said, “It’s from Australia.”

I had realized that.

“It looks like Leah’s writing.”

I could see that, too.

“I wonder what …”

I was very fond of Celeste. She had been a good, kind stepmother to me, but she did exasperate me sometimes.

“Why don’t you open it and see?” I suggested.

She picked it up gingerly. Celeste was one of those people who spend their lives in fear that something awful is going to happen. It had on occasions, but that was no reason for living in perpetual fear. She started to read, and as she did so, her face grew pink.

“Tom Marner is dead,” she said.

Tom Marner! The big hearty Australian who years ago had taken over the gold mine from my father, who had come to this very house and carried off Leah, our nurse, and Belinda with her, making it necessary to uncover long-buried secrets which could have remained hidden forever, and so changed the entire course of our lives. And now Tom Marner was dead.

“What else?” I asked.

“Leah herself is ailing. She is clearly worried about Belinda. If anything should happen to her …”

“You mean if she died. Is she going to die, too?”

“She hints that it’s possible. There’s clearly something wrong with her health. The gold mine has been failing for some years. Tom lost a lot of money bolstering it up. I can see what she wants. She reminds me that I am Belinda’s aunt.”

“She wants Belinda to come back here then?”

“I shall have to speak to your father. Tom Marner had an attack. It was sudden. She is a widow now. She thinks the attack was brought on by anxiety.”

“How sad! She was so happy when she married him. I had never seen Leah happy before. And at the same time she was very worried about Belinda … and all that. But once it was settled, she was quite different, wasn’t she? And now he’s dead. Poor Leah!”

“
And
she is ill.”

Celeste picked up the letter and read it out to me:

“‘What will happen to Belinda? If I could get her back to England, I’d be so relieved. You see, here … there are no relations. You, Mrs. Lansdon, are her nearest, I suppose. There is her father, of course … but I don’t know about him. But you … you were always so kind to her … to both of the children … even before you knew the truth. Belinda is impulsive. …’” Celeste stopped reading and looked at me helplessly.

“She will have to come back,” I said.

I felt excited, but I was not sure whether I was pleased or dismayed. Belinda had been so much a part of my childhood and she had had a great influence on my life. She had tormented me persistently, but when she had gone I had missed her very much. But that was more than six years ago … nearer seven, I supposed.

“I will speak to your father when he comes home,” said Celeste.

“It was a late sitting last night,” I said. “He would have stayed at the Greenhams.”

She nodded. “Perhaps you could mention it,” she said.

“I will.”

She passed the letter to me and I read it.

What memories it brought back! I could clearly recall dear patient Leah, our good nurse, who had been kind and gentle to me, the outsider, as everyone—except Leah—had thought then, though it had always been obvious that I came second to Belinda with Leah. She could not help her feelings for her own child; and when the truth was revealed, that all became clear.

And now there was a possibility that Belinda would return. What was she like now, I wondered? I knew exactly how old she would be because we had been born on the same day. We were now nearly seventeen years old. I had changed a lot since our last meeting. What of Belinda after those years in an Australian mining township? Something told me that, whatever way of life had been hers, nothing would change the old Belinda.

During the morning I kept thinking of all that had happened.

Ours was a strange story and difficult to believe unless one knew all the people concerned in it.

Right at the center of it was the scheming Cornish midwife, who had brought both Belinda and me into the world. Mrs. Polhenny, self-righteous and fanatically religious, had had a daughter Leah, and Leah, while working for the family of French émigrés to which Celeste and her brother Jean Pascal belonged, had become pregnant … as it turned out later by Jean Pascal. Mrs. Polhenny was understandably horrified that, after all her preaching in the neighborhood, this should happen to her own daughter. So she made a devious plan. There was in the neighborhood a crazy woman named Jenny Stubbs who had once had a child who had died, and ever after Jenny suffered from the delusion of thinking she was about to have another. Mrs. Polhenny planned to take Jenny into her home at the time of Leah’s confinement and, when Leah’s child was born, pretend that it was Jenny’s.

She was greatly aided in this by circumstances. Indeed she would not have been able to carry it out, nor would it have occurred to her to do so, if the scene had not been set for her.

Meanwhile my mother was about to give birth to me at Cador, the big house of the neighborhood, and Mrs. Polhenny was to act as midwife.

My mother died and, as I was not expected to live, it then occurred to Mrs. Polhenny that it would be sensible to put me with Jenny and have Leah’s child take my place at Cador, thus giving Leah’s daughter opportunities which she would not otherwise have.