Daughter of Satan (26 page)

‘I thought,' said Humility, ‘that you were as eager for this project as I. You talk of risks. Here we risk our lives. We never know when we shall be sent to prison and left to die there. Continually we break the laws of this land. We need only an informer among us, and disaster would be upon us. In the strange land we might find other dangers, but we would hold our heads high and fear none.'

Tamar was swayed. ‘That is so,' she agreed. ‘Richard, there is much to be said for freedom, even if it brings other troubles with it.'

But Richard would not be convinced.

‘Consider this matter,' he said. ‘You would have me sell my lands, equip a ship and take with us all our wealth to this new land. Think! First we must make a perilous journey. We must face storm and tempest. Worse still, this ocean we must cross is infested with pirates of all nationalities. Such a ship as ours would be an easy victim. There would be money aboard . . . goods; and pirates would know this. We should have to face death . . . horrible death . . . perhaps worse than horrible death. There may be Spaniards who would hand us over to the Inquisition; Turks who would take us down to the Barbary coast and make slaves of us. As Humility would say, that might be the will of God. But I would not wish such things to happen to myself or Tamar or the children. Dick is three years old; Rowan a baby. Let them grow older. Wait. Let us discover more of this land before we leave the evils we know for those we can only conjecture.'

‘Just think!' said Tamar. ‘If you would equip a ship we could begin preparing tomorrow.'

‘That is why I feel we must give this matter the deepest thought. There is always safety in waiting.'

So they waited and the uneventful life continued.

They heard that the little Princess had died at Gravesend just as she was about to return to her native land. She had been unable to endure the damp air of England.

Richard said then that he had been right to oppose the venture.

‘Their climate might have the same effect on us,' he said. ‘Men and women are like plants. They cannot easily be uprooted.'

Then Tamar knew that she was to have another child, and temporarily she lost all desire to wander.

Tamar nearly lost her life when Lorea was born. She lay in bed only half conscious of time and place. For days she remained thus, and in the weeks that followed a listlessness settled upon her.

She heard the voices of those about her without hearing their words: Annis' high-pitched and full of tears; Richard's solemn and full of sorrow; Humility's sad, yet resigned; then Dick aged five and Rowan three, were frightened and bewildered.

She had never been inactive for so long, and inactivity gave her time for thought. She was most unhappily and unsuitably married. How could she ever have been so foolish as to imagine she could have lived a quiet life, that she could have been the meek, submissive Puritan wife of a man like Humility? Often she felt sorry on his account for having married him, and determined to do her best to hide her revulsion.

They had three children now; Humility would not feel he had justified his marrying until they had twelve. Nine more ordeals such as this one she had just passed through! She sighed. Well, it was her. duty, and she was committed to it.

Dick and Rowan were
her
children, with rosy cheeks and bright black eyes and dark hair – high-spirited wild young things. She wondered about the new child, little Lorea, born small and puny, not like her brother and sister, who, almost from their birth, had amazed everybody, so that people like Annis and Mistress Alton thought that some devil's power had been used by their mother to make them stronger, more bright and beautiful than others of their age.

When she rose from her bed after the passing of weeks, her mirror showed her how pale and thin she had become. She would sit in her room, deep in thought. Humility was delighted with her. He had returned to her room, as it was time, he said, to get themselves another child.

The memory of the ordeal was still very vividly with her, but she submitted.

Humility went down on his knees and praised God.

‘I thank Thee, Lord, for showing this woman Thy ways at last . . .'

Dick and Rowan were bewildered by the change in her; she was too tired to play the games she had once played. They accepted the change, as children will, more readily than the grown-ups. They had lost their bright, gay and exciting mother; and in her place was a quiet stranger.

Little Lorea was a sickly child, over whom all shook their heads. Her poor, pathetic face looked out from the swaddling clothes, and she never smiled; she hardly ever cried.

Humility would sigh, looking at her; he would murmur: ‘If this be the will of God, then must we bear it.'

He turned stern eyes on his two elder children. Violence was something he could never employ, but he saw clearly the need of correction where those two were concerned. Dick, for his sins, was often shut into a dark cupboard, because that, Humility had discovered, was what he feared more than aught else. Rowan, who was always hungry, was sent fasting to bed.

A change had come over the household.

The Devil is in chains! thought Humility.

The summer came, and in the long, hot days Tamar sat out of doors. Then the colour returned to her face and she was aware of a deep delight in the smells of the sun-baked earth and the scent of the flowers. The smell of earth reminded her always of Bartle; she remembered it so well from the day when he had tripped her up and forced her down – and, ever after that, the smell of earth was a smell which excited her; and after those days out of doors, she would feel a little resentful towards Humility. She could not help it if she dreamed of a passionate lover who came to her, most dishonourably it was
true, but with what passion, because he desired her, not children!

Then came a day when Dick and Rowan were lost.

They had been caught laughing during prayers that morning and had been called to their father and told to repeat the Lord's Prayer. Humility shared the current belief that inability to say the Lord's Prayer was in itself a confession of wickedness, for there was some magical quality about the words, so that they would not come fluently through impure mouths. When the children faltered, Humility, in deep sorrow, talked to them of the hell which awaited all sinners. Dick, for instance, would be perpetually in the dark, unable to see anything but the eyes of devils who would torment him and pull out his flesh with hot pincers while he burned eternally. Rowan, who was greedy in the extreme, would be sat at a table containing all the food she loved best, and every time she reached out a hand to take some of it, it would be snatched from her. She would starve, but not to death, for she too would suffer the pains of burning for ever.

The thought of burning eternally did not greatly worry the children; they had never been burned. But the thought of being shut in a dark cupboard with devils terrified Dick. Rowan, more sturdily practical than her brother, could imagine no greater torment than going hungry.

In the days before Lorea's birth they might have gone to their mother for comfort, but they sensed, with the quick perception of children, that their mother had changed, and that their father now ruled their lives.

Hell and the supposed horrors devised by their Heavenly Father were in the far distant future; but right before them were the punishments of their earthly one. The dark was not to be faced; and if Rowan was going without her usual food she might as well do it out of doors where there were berries and nuts and plants which were good to eat.

So they ran away.

Tamar was with Annis when the news was brought to her. She had been standing by the basket in which lay her youngest child. Every day Lorea's face took on a more deathly hue. How many weeks of life were left to the child? she wondered.

Annis looked up from some garment she was stitching, and her eyes betrayed the sudden fear which had come to her.

‘What ails you, Annis?' asked Tamar.

Annis hesitated, but Tamar insisted that she tell, and at last it came. ‘I thought, mistress, that you was back with the Devil. I thought you were going to work out one of your spells to save the child.'

Tamar's eyes gleamed, but just at that moment Moll Swann came in to say that the children were not to be found. Moll had searched everywhere in the house and grounds. Moll was afraid they were lost.

Then in a moment Tamar threw off the inertia of months as though she were tossing aside a garment.

‘Let everyone search,' she said. ‘They must be found at once.'

‘Where be you going, mistress?' asked Annis.

‘To find them,' answered Tamar. ‘Go to the stables and tell them to saddle my horse.'

She was in her habit and away in a few minutes, her hair blown loose in the wind as of old. Hundreds of thoughts filled her mind as she rode on. Her children had been frightened because they had missed the mother they had once known; and they had been unable to endure their life at Pennicomquick as the children of Humility Brown. She understood that, and she was to blame.

She rode hard and straight to the spot where the children were – there would be some who would say there was witchcraft in that. Was there? she wondered. Or was it that she herself had taken them there so many times? It was a small grassy plateau on the cliffs, from which it was possible to see, in all its beauty and promise of adventure, that shining expanse of channel. Here she had often told them stories of the sea; and the stories she had told had been those Bartle had told her.

When they saw her coming with her hair flying and the colour in her cheeks, they gave shouts of joy and ran to her.

Dick said: ‘Rowan, she's come! She's come!'

Tamar held them fiercely against her and she knew that they also meant that she had come back to them. The mother they had once known had returned.

They were delighted to have been found. The dark of the night would have been as frightening as the dark of a cupboard; and starvationin the open air as bad as starvation at home.

She set them on her horse and they went slowly back; but the journey did not seem long to them, for they were all so happy to be reunited.

The children had lost their fears, for their real mother was back and she would protect them from their Puritan father.

The household was in a turmoil when they arrived. Richard saw the trio entering the stable yard, and knew what had happened. Tamar's health had returned, and with it the true Tamar. The period of submission had been due to her decline in health after the birth of Lorea; just as her conversion had taken place after some deep mental disturbance. He watched the meeting between the returning party and Humility.

Humility had been anxious. He was fond of his children, Richard knew; perhaps he was proud of their fine looks and healthy bodies; but because he was proud of them he considered it necessary to be the sterner with them. Now, though, he had to face their mother, and she stood before him like a tigress with her young.

‘Praise be to God!' cried Humility. ‘The children are safe.'

Tamar did not answer. She lifted the children to the ground and called to the gaping Ned Swann to take the horse.

‘Dick,' said Humility, ‘Rowan, I can see that you are ashamed of what you have done. That is well. But do not think this can go unpunished.'

Tamar said: ‘They have been sufficiently punished and shall be punished no more.'

‘Wife,' he said, his eyes on her flushed face and wild hair, ‘you have brought them home. Now you will leave them to me.'

‘No,' she answered, ‘
you
will leave them to
me
.'

She felt the children's hands in hers, clinging hot and tight.

‘Annis!' she cried. ‘Annis, food for the children . . . quickly.'

Glances were exchanged among the watching servants. Moll whispered to Jane: ‘The mistress be back, then.' Mistress
Alton gave one fearful look at Tamar and began to mutter the Lord's Prayer; and Tamar, watching them, laughed inwardly. They were thinking that the Devil had been in chains, but he had broken free.

Well, at least Dick and Rowan were happy.

‘Come, my darlings,' she said. ‘And promise you will never leave your mother again, for she will never leave you.'

And they kept their tight grip on her hands as they went past their father, but they could not help throwing triumphant glances at Humility as they did so.

Tamar made them eat in her room instead of in their nursery. As they ate, they told her how frightened they had been, and how they hoped that no one but their mother would find them.

Annis, standing by the baby's basket, shook her head.
She
knew how it was that their mother had been able to go straight to the place where they had been. Annis thought: It is good to have the children home safe, though the Devil is back!

Tamar, reading her thoughts, went over to the basket, and as she stood beside Annis, looking down at the sickly baby, wild thoughts came to her, and with them all the old belief in her powers. She
knew
that she could snatch this child from death.

She picked up Lorea. ‘Annis,' she said quietly, ‘bring me warm water quickly. Waste no time.'

Annis muttered fearfully: ‘What be you going to do, mistress?'

‘Do as I say!'

When Annis returned, Tamar had cut the swaddling clothes from the baby who lay in her lap, her poor, cramped limbs caked and foul with the muck of months.

Annis shrieked; the children stopped eating. ‘Mistress, you will hasten her to her grave.'

‘Nay,' said Tamar. ‘I will snatch her from it.'

Tenderly and carefully she washed the baby while Annis, standing by, handing her what she asked for, heard the strange words she muttered as she patted and dried the skin which had a look of bad cheese. Then she wrapped the baby in a shawl and held it against her, crooning over it. Annis
swore afterwards that from that moment the colour of the baby's face began to change.