Cold Pastoral (9 page)

“He talked to her like an angel and held her in his arms until she went to sleep. I was as much use as an extra degree of fever. If she was older I'd say it was hearts and flowers for doctor.”

“If it is, it's his first crush. They say he's more in love with that old barracks of his—”

“It's not his barracks. It's Lady FitzHenry's.He gets it at her death.

They passed over the eldest son. He got a wad from a maiden aunt.”

“They're as poor as rats, since the war.”

“Well, I wouldn't mind being as poor as they are. She got a cold hundred thousand insurance, even though the business failed.”

“That's poor for the Place. They say the coal bill is a thousand a year. My father often speaks of their grand days when the gates were flung open to let her ride out. And now she walks.”

“But how she walks—shush, there's the bell….”

The whispers ceased. It sounded like a Cinderella story: coaches and horses, rags to riches. Was she Cinderella? She had no ugly sisters, but she had many ugly brothers. How pleasant it would be to live with men who had voices and hands like the man of last night.

A dim white figure stooped over her bed, and a nurse found herself staring into glazed yellow eyes.

“My dear, why didn't you call?” she said kindly. “I was only at the door.”

“Could I have a drink?” she whispered.

Ministrations helped her towards the morning. It seemed an infinity of time, an endlessness she'd never known before. The three days in the woods had been timeless, past weight or weariness in the light frost of her mind. Dozing fitfully, she woke to another face.

Outside the sun was shining and the world sounded very big. Once the unfamiliar noises would have wooed her to exploration, and she would have had to follow the richness of bells and blasts of whistles and horns.

“Are you awake, Mary?”

“Yes,” she said unhappily, opening her eyes on a girl with waved hair under a starched cap so far on the back of her head that it seemed to rest by the will of God.

“How do you keep your cap on?” she asked with faint interest.

The nurse was young with blue eyes, brown lashes and a plump face. When she smiled Mary Immaculate felt a little better.

“With a very little pin,” she whispered.

“It's very pretty.”

The nurse laughed and smoothed her patient's hair. “Now I'm going to make your bed, give you a bath and feed you like a little baby.”

“I was bathed yesterday,” she said politely.

There was a laugh, gay but not loud. “So you were, Mary, but here we do it every day and sometimes twice.”

Mary Immaculate felt shocked.

“You must be very dirty people.”

The laugh was louder, but it did not hurt her with its quality or vigour.

“You're in hospital, my dear, and hospitals are very clean places.”

With closed eyes she endured a hospital routine, and only opened them once to say reproachfully: “You do queer things to me.” It was the dismay of a body that had always been well. The nurse was soothing.

“Don't mind, Mary. Just relax and leave everything to me.”

“Where's Mom?” she asked without interest.

“At home and very glad, I expect, to think you're so well looked after. I know Dr. Fitz Henry will let her know how you are. You've got the youngest doctor in town.”

“Have I?” she asked, not sure of her blessings. “Is he the man with the barracks and the mother that's a Lady instead of a woman?”

“You'll find out in time, dear. Don't talk. I want you to save your strength.”

Later the room became filled with people, depleting her with their volume. First came a tall dark man, followed by two women in white and another bearing a tray stacked with packages. What were they going to do with her? Panic glazed her eyes and made her mouth dry as dust. The tall man made an easy approach to her bed and slipped his hand round one of her wrists. The four throbs in her body were centralised in her heart. Some motion sent the women away and made her own pretty nurse turn her back and gaze out of the window.

From a dark six-foot height Philip Fitz Henry smiled at his patient.

“How are you?” he asked in the voice of the previous night.

A dry tongue went over her lips.

“Sit down, please,” she whispered. “You're so big.”

His hair was shining and black and inclined to curl on the top of a neat head. His brow was high, white, making a shelf over thoughtful brown eyes. A chiselled nose made a classical profile, ending in nostrils arching in a decided curve. Underneath the nose, which was the feature of the face, a straight mouth defied its curves by shutting itself in a thin line. The chin held a cleft rather than a dimple.

“I know how you feel,” he said, watching his patient with cool brown eyes. “Because I'm tall and well you feel smaller and weaker.”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know? Do you always know how people feel inside?”

He shook his head, and she began to admire his face.

“I'm afraid not,” he said, gravely. “But I understand feelings from a professional standpoint.”

Habit was strong. “What's that?” she asked instantly.

“Being a doctor,” he explained, “and trying to find out what makes people miserable.”

“Oh,” she said, losing some of her throbs. “I've never had a doctor before.”

“Not even when you were born, I suppose?”

“Of course not. I was born in a boat, and those that weren't have Mrs. Whelan. She goes round with an axe and puts it under the bed to cut the pains in two.”

A very long hand went across the doctor's mouth.

“I see,” he said gravely. “Haven't you ever been ill yourself, Mary? I'd like to know how strong you are. Have you had measles, scarlet-fever—”

“I've had nothing,” she said, frowning over her inexperience. “Once I had a bit of whooping-cough, but Pop cured me. It went, overnight.”

“That was quick for whooping-cough,'' he smiled, as if he had all the time in the world. “What did your father do?”

The doctor knew she was calm again. She was looking at him with acute sight, and taking an interest in her story.

“Pop caught a little trout, alive, and brought him home in a bucket. Then he made me open my mouth wide, and he held the trout down my throat. That was all. Then he put the little trout back in the river, and it swam away with the whooping-cough.''

Her eyes explored the effect of her story as if doubting its efficacy in this world of bottles and bandages. There was a choke from the window. Her nurse was trying not to laugh.

“Did you like that cure, Mary?” asked the doctor. “It seems mean.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “It wasn't my fault. I often thought of the little trout whoopin' in the river.”

He leant towards her bed, and she noticed that his arched nostrils moved very slightly. He seemed to be saying some thing with his nose. Above, his eyes looked warm, as if he found her nice to look at. She wondered why she had been afraid.

“Mary…”

She was beginning to like the way he said it, and the long value of each syllable. Her name sounded nice in her own ears.

“Mary,” he asked, “may I have the nurses back now? We want to dress your hands and feet.”

“Oh, is that what they're for? Sure it takes a lot of them for such a little job.”

He laughed, making a sign to the nurse at the window.

The crowd would be back again.

“Doctor?” she asked hurriedly.

“Just a minute, Miss New.” The nurse came to rest by the door.

Mary Immaculate was frowning, looking at the lumps representing her hands. From them she looked at her doctor. Very gravely they stared into each other's eyes.

The child had listened all her life—to the wind, the sea, the waterfall and the lap of quiet ponds. By placing her ear to the ground she had heard the Little People. By easing into silence and darkness she could tell when they were friendly. By finding the mute voice of Molly Conway in her eyes she had earned a rescuer. Now she listened to the silence of Philip Fitz Henry. She could hear him—as trust, sense, protection, and a reassurance of every day.

In his turn he saw a regrettable depletion of life, a stripping of flesh revealing anatomical perfection, the dulling of hair and eyes that must shine golden in health. The child had been flung to him, like a frozen ghost, mute in her call for rehabilitation. She was the colour of a life he did not know, the beat of the natural earth and an unquenchable spirit surviving unusual ordeal. Not a word of fear had been uttered in memory of the white loneliness that must have been hers in the icy forests. Was she so much part of them that she could outstrip their hostility?

“What is it?” he asked encouragingly. “Anything I can do?…”

“Would you please write to my mother? Tell her…”

Her eyes explored him again.

“Yes?” he asked, taking a pad from his pocket and unscrewing the top of a fountain pen. “I'm to tell your mother—”

“Tell her,” she said, taking the plunge, “that I didn't make the ceremony at the door, and not to blame the Sacred Heart for my foolishness. Tell her the fairies came up to my feet and danced all round. Tell her the slice of bread was fine. Not one of them could get me.”

The doctor was frowning, but writing carefully.

“There were no fairies, of course, Mary. You were lightheaded from hunger.” His voice was conversational, but extinguished life in the fairies.

“The slice of bread saved me,” she contradicted flatly.

“Very well,” agreed the doctor. “Anything else?”

“Ask her to give something to Molly Conway. That's all.”

She closed her eyes, feeling as if she'd been to Confession.

“Quite enough,” said the doctor. “Will you obey me, and rest now, for the whole morning?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm that tired.”

The dressings were accepted with fortitude. All the time the doctor was tending her hands and feet she was wondering why anyone so nice did not believe in fairies. Something told her they might return when she felt well again.

“NO HOUSE WITHOUT MOUSE, NO THRONE WITHOUT THORN.”

T
he square of her window was blue, underlined with yellow. Through the raised sash the wind blew, warmed with sun. Pendent in the air, spring swung like a censer burning winter away. It was a morning when the mind jumped out of bed before the body.

Mary Immaculate woke with a bounce. For the first time since leaving the Cove she felt impelled to explore the outside world. With dangling legs she was held by the thought of her doctor. His voice demanded obedience and his hands suggested restraint. Could she heed him when her ears heard a challenge of daring? What was his world like? At least she could look. There was no one to stop her. The night nurse had been dismissed, and Miss New came with a rich peal of bells ringing eight o'clock. With bandaged feet skimming the floor she craned her neck for a view of the town. She could see it was tall, with four hill-drops to the sea, but which clump of trees concealed the doctor's barracks?

FitzHenry Place was old, in a town with hills barely parted to make an exit to the sea. It was a wooden city with little architectural beauty. Four times in a century fire had been a scourge. Newfoundland was a country where wind and fire could travel as one fury. Buildings kept rising from ashes, like a phoenix growing plainer with each revival. On the outskirts of the town the Place stood in two acres of ground, with its shabby paint screened by sprawling trees. Peering through, the outside world had its own way of ascertaining Fitz Henry fortunes. A great name in the history of the country, general prosperity could be estimated by the state of their paint.

The wealth of Newfoundland was subject to the caprice of weather and the varied richness of its waters. The wind could disperse the cod and seal and blow them together another year. Prosperity fluctuated. The sea and ice-fields could be fruitful, and fortune sure. Then the foreign markets might decline, leaving products rotting in their sheds. The country existed with its mind on the state of Spain, Greece, Portugal, the West Indies and South America.

It was 1931 when Mary Immaculate became the patient of Philip Fitz Henry. Then the paint of the Place was shabby, and Lady Fitz Henry lived inside blistered walls. Diminution of wealth was little compared to the desolation of her heart. Change had come with shattering death, and when her life was cut in half she became recluse from social life. The Place felt for her, knowing nothing but Fitz Henry joys and sorrows. It gave back the voices of its own, rich with the recollection of happier days. The trees bent over her, shadowing her sombre walk. When the wind blew its frequent melancholy she accepted it as the bite of her adopted country. Entwining herself in its roots, she lived to nurture the Place for her youngest son.

Reared to five stories in 1846, it was a tall house with a mansard roof. Discouraged by holocausts, people built without beauty. Barely completed, a fire razed all before it on its way to the Place. Dazed crowds left their ashes to see the largest sacrifice of all. Inside were the reputed treasures of wealth: mahogany imported on a sailing-vessel from England; carpets, pictures, china, crystal chandeliers: and the whole wonder of a Regency drawing-room transplanted from a London house. Flankers flew ahead to threaten all that, while heat blistered the new white paint. Destruction seemed inevitable, and the house was looted of everything light enough to carry away. When heat was scorching the young trees wind became capricious, distracting its mate over the hills. The Place stood its first assault. Later in the same year a gale tried to tear it up by its roots, but it endured with the loss of two chimneys, four windows and thirty-two trees. Years passed before its second fire-peril, coming a year after the last owner of Fitz Henry and Sons, shipowners and fish exporters, brought a bride out from England. She had been born in Quetta, of parents with Colonial experience. Accustomed to adaptation, the windswept Colony did not defeat her. In 1892 her first-born was delivered during the fourth holocaust of a century. Aloof in her bed she breathed smoke, seeing her room turn crimson. The faces of people around her were blood-red when she saw her son wriggle like a salamander in a core of heat. When the Place seemed doomed she permitted herself to be carried downstairs, preceded by her maid, making a witless exit with a pillow. With her son and her jewel-case beside her, Mrs. Fitz Henry lay as detached as an aristocrat in a tumbril, but when she passed the dining room she bade Hannah drop her pillow and fetch the tea service saved from the fire of '46. Arranging her salvage, she was carried to the farthest corner of the garden. As far as he could, her husband guarded her from intrusion, but crowds seethed round, lost to all sense of privacy. All held the spoil of snatching hands. She remembered women with washboards, men with flower-pots and one unforgettable boy holding a hen relentlessly to his side. Fitz Henry Place was looted again. Useless to protest. She lay supine while Hannah held wet clothes to her baby's nose. Once again the wind saved the Place, but it was in the imperviousness of her husband to a vanishing background that she began to understand his country better. From that day she became a one-minded woman nurturing a love fanned by fire. His interests became hers, embracing even the faint touch of flamboyance distinguishing him from any successful Englishman. During their frequent Atlantic crossings and in England she noticed his relaxation, but when they steamed in his own harbour he became taut as if bracing himself for bolder living. A great figure in the financial life of the country, he was knighted early in the new century, and his wife became Lady Fitz Henry with the ease of a woman who had always been gracious. It was inevitable she should develop a reputation for exclusiveness and local snobbery. Preoccupation with her family made her emerge merely for spacious events like the Navy, Government House or eminent visitors. Four sons were born to her, David, Arthur, John and, after an interval of five years, her youngest son, Philip.