Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (9 page)

“He’s not here,” he told her as she thrust open the door but she ran into every room calling, “My baby, my Daniel, my sweet boy.”

Nat stood in the familiar hallway as her desperate shouts filled the air. She will see no one’s suffering but her own, he thought. This is how I knew it would be.

She came back to him, her features all drawn to the point of her nose as he had seen her, eagle-like, in his mind’s eye. “Where is he? What happened? Why have you not brought him?”

“Let’s wait till my father comes. I need to drink.” He walked through to the kitchen where the water barrel was filled from the well every morning. Dan’s task. He lifted a pewter mug from its hook and took a long drink.

She stood in the doorway still draped in her black shawl. She had dragged off her hood and her dark red hair streaked with grey was all dishevelled. “Where is he?” she demanded again.

Nat heard his father’s measured footsteps. She didn’t look round even when he came up behind her, came past her holding out his arms, his eyes brilliant with tears and exclaiming, “Our Nat is home. God be praised.”

They were enfolded in each other’s arms, Nat utterly broken down and sobbing.

“And Daniel is dead,” she shrieked, trying to part them. “And he will not tell us how.”

“Take time,” his father murmured. “I knew it in my heart when I saw you alone but God gave me His service to finish and I found peace. Daniel is with Him. Whether it was with a musket bullet or a fever he is with the Lord. Come, let us sit down. You must eat, Nat. You look thin and gaunt.” He gently disengaged himself and turned to the hearth where he took up the bellows and revived the fire and set on the trivet a covered pan standing ready.

“Where is Jenny?” Nat asked.

“We have no servant now. When our debts are paid to the workmen who have repaired the windows here and in the church and other restorations about the place, Jenny may come back to us.”

“You answer him about
Jenny
and he has not answered my questions.” His mother was standing stiff with disbelief. “He eats nothing till he has told us all.”

They sat down at the scrubbed kitchen table and Nat, looking mainly at his father but with anxious darting looks at his mother, struggled to unfold the tale. Where should he start? At the doubts that had overwhelmed him of the rightness of the war? At his own disgust and Daniel’s horror at the training to use a pike? No that was a detail, a distraction.

“I was ill with a fever,” he began. “Daniel sought food and water for me.”

“The Scots took him?” his mother burst in. “Do they kill their captives now?”

“Peace, Anne,” said his father. “Let him tell the tale.”

Nat told it then in a rush, the bare, horrific facts. Daniel was caught as a thief and falsely accused of firing a stack, tried and hung before Nat knew anything of it.

His father did then bow his head over his hands and weep but his mother leapt up howling. She tore at her hair, she scraped her nails down her cheeks, then came round the table as if she would strangle Nat with her bare hands. He pushed away his chair and backed to the window. His father tried to hold her arms from behind but she broke away, spat into Nat’s face and rushed from the room and pounded up the stairs.

“Oh Father, have I sent her mad? Why did she ever let Daniel go for a soldier?”

His father shook his head. “It nearly broke her heart seeing you two march away with the troop and she has fretted herself out of her mind in your absence.”

“But why, then, why?”

They could hear her trampling overhead.

“She always feared you two would grow up as feeble in spirit as I. That was what she used to say. ‘They are nineteen now. They must be tried and tested as men. Nat is for ever at his books and Daniel is so sweet-natured he will let all men trample over him. They must be stiffened to face life.’ Those were her words and when the King’s standard was carried through the village and Daniel was so excited she said this was the chance. We had been raided by those Puritan devils as she called them and there was little food in the house. How were we to feed your healthy young appetites, I asked myself, and I didn’t oppose her as I should have done. She was bursting with pride that her Daniel would be a great warrior and come back heaped with honours for his valour.”

“I remember that too well. Oh Father I will tell you it all, every moment from when we left home, but God knows I would rather I had died than come back without my brother.”

His father raised his hand. “Hush! She is quiet. She may do herself harm.”

Nathaniel followed him upstairs and they could hear a low moaning coming from the chamber where the brothers had slept in one bed from boyhood.

She was lying on the bed, on the side where Daniel always slept and covering with tears and kisses the leather bound book in which he had written the alphabet and the few words he had learnt to spell.

Nat and his father crept away before she could hear them.

Downstairs they sat at the table and his father extracted the piece of boiled beef from the pan and insisted on cutting slice after slice for Nat. Once he had taken a mouthful he ate compulsively, having scarcely tasted meat since quitting the army. Then he answered all his father’s questions till the whole story was told.

“Where will they have buried him, I wonder,” his father mused, his cheeks still wet from the tears he had shed during the relation. He lifted his eyes to the room above. “She will need to go and see.”

Nat shook his head. “That has tormented me through all my journey home.”

His father nodded and rose to his feet. “I think I will go into the church for a while and pray for her, that this will not send her mad.” He said it softly and went softly out. It seemed to Nat that all his childhood his father had become more and more quiet with every outburst of his mother’s.

He took up the wooden trencher to clean it and then saw his mother standing in the doorway clutching Daniel’s book. The look she gave him was one of loathing.

“Oh Mother, do not be angry with
me
,” he cried out. “If you must be angry, be angry with those who put him to death. Be angry with the Horden family. Sir John and his son Robert. Let your anger rest on them. I would have died for Dan. Without him I
am
dead. Can you not forgive me?”

She marched over to the window, picking up the meat knife from the table. What was she going to do? She stood with her back to him. Then, using the sharp point she scored something into the bottom corner of the glass, making a harsh rasping noise. She turned and faced him. It read “Death to the Hordens.”

“That is your task, Nathaniel – or my anger will be heavy upon you for the rest of my days.”

CHAPTER 7

Some weeks later, Bel found to her surprise that the chapel was to be dismantled and she was to be moved back there next to Henrietta’s bedchamber. The room was really no more than a dressing-room to her sister’s larger one. The girls should have shared the one big bed but Henrietta, five years older, would never have anything to do with her.

While the room had been used for Mass its only furniture had been velvet covered stools for the tiny congregation, a small table for an altar, a cross and religious paintings and statues round the walls. The trapdoor that led to the priest’s room had been hidden by the rug before the altar. Now all this had been removed and the room was the same long bare rectangle Bel remembered when she had slept there as a small child. What she couldn’t remove was the memory of Father Patrick’s head appearing and the leer on his face when he reached his hand towards her.

“Why has this been done?” she demanded of her father when he took her there to watch two of the men-servants set up her bed over the trap-door which she was pleased to see had been screwed down.

“Father Patrick is going away from this neighbourhood to take up a position elsewhere and there is no other willing to come out here to say a Mass. It is too dangerous on the roads.”

Bel hugged herself with glee but all she said was, “But why do I have to move? I like my room at the back.”

“So you can escape from the window?”

“Not now you have had it barred. I don’t want to be next to Henrietta. She can come in when she wants through the communicating door.”

“Which she always keeps bolted so
you
can not disturb
her
things. Arabella, you are showing that rebellious spirit again. I thought you were making an effort to curb it.”

“I just like to understand the reasons for things.”

“Well, the reason is that I would like to keep you under my eye, supervise your reading, your prayers, your learning, your daily deportment.”

A thought struck her. “What will Mother and Henrietta do for Mass now?”

“There are houses in Newcastle where Mass is said. I prefer not to know where they are.”

This intrigued Bel but she knew from his clipped voice that he would answer no more questions.

“I will see your clothes’ chest brought in and your books. I trust this move will mark the turning over of a new leaf.”

He went out and she walked over to the tall pointed window and looked out at the open view of lawns and carriage way with, directly opposite her window, the rather crude statue of the first Baronet Horden, her great-grandfather who had bought the title in 1611 when King James was raising money by selling honours. The estate, her father occasionally warned Robert, had never fully recovered from his notions of grandeur. The statue had been sculpted at his orders in his lifetime and showed him on horseback, his right arm brandishing his sword as if to display the extent of his land. Bel always felt a little embarrassed when she looked at it. Here at the front of the house were no crowding woods into which she could escape. The window could not even be opened. It was as narrow as a church window and there was a lingering smell in the room that had hung about ever since Masses had been said there. She had heard it referred to as incense which was a thing out of favour with the national church. It was all very bewildering.

As she stood gazing out she asked herself aloud, “What if they are all wrong and there is no God at all? Could I be happy then? No God, no guilt?” She heard the click of a bolt and Henrietta stood in the connecting doorway from her room.

“
I
didn’t ask to have you here,” she announced.

“I didn’t ask to be here. The other room was bigger and it had that great oak chair. I could curl up in it.”

“That was made specially for the old housekeeper. It was the housekeeper’s room when I was little. I suppose there’ll be a housekeeper again, so they’ll need it.”

“Why will there be a housekeeper again?” Bel was pursuing this conversation with some amazement. Henrietta was
talking
to her. True she was still standing in the doorway and regarding her with supercilious eyes. She knew things which Bel didn’t know and despised her ignorance, but her superiority had put her in a good mood.

“When I go to France, Mother will come with me.” She said it casually, admiring a ring on her finger as she leant her hand on the door post.

Bel sat down on her bed and gazed up at a broken piece of plasterwork at the corner of the ceiling. “Oh, so you and Mother are going to France, are you?” Inside she was whooping with delight.

Henrietta stepped across and slapped her hard. “You unnatural little monster – pretending such indifference when you are bursting to know why. I am going to be married of course, something that will never ever happen to you, you ugly awkward thing.”

Bel wouldn’t lift a hand to rub her cheek. She continued to gaze at the ceiling. “
I
won’t be married off to someone I hardly know. I suppose it’s that French vicomte you were betrothed to in your cradle. Haven’t they been arguing about a settlement for years? I hear these things talked about, but I lost interest long ago.”

Henrietta slapped her again. “Well
you
are not coming to the wedding. You would utterly disgrace the whole ceremony. If I had had a sister I could be proud of she would have attended me. But I’d rather have a Barbary ape dressed up than you.”

Bel was working it all out. Had the French wedding been brought forward because Henrietta had an unhealthy passion for Father Patrick? Was that why the priest had gone and why she was to be moved here where Father could keep an eye on her? But was Mother coming back? If a housekeeper was to be engaged, was it for a short stay or a long one? She wanted to ask but kept her mouth firmly closed..

Henrietta moved back to the doorway and posed there. She was wearing a new gown of oyster silk. Perhaps she was trying on what she would be taking with her. “It will be so grand an occasion,” she said as if musing to herself. “Mother is related to half the French nobility. It was a terrible descent to be married to a mere baronet. Father was travelling in France when they met, you know. France is where my heart is. I have always felt I belonged there rather than this obscure English outpost. Father had to come back here with his bride, but France is where Mother belongs by right. I may be presented to the King and Queen.”