Saraband for Two Sisters (47 page)

We talked a great deal after that of Richard and wondered where he was.

‘I would give a great deal to know,’ I said.

‘I would he could come home,’ answered Bersaba fervently.

But nothing happened. The weeks began to pass. The days were long and quiet, overshadowed always by menace.

My condition was beginning to show itself slightly and I rejoiced because I was half-way through my pregnancy. When I was stitching in the Castle Room I felt almost happy because it was so easy to forget the dangers all around and I could lull myself into the belief that I was an ordinary mother expecting her first child.

But it was hardly like that when I did not know from one day to another when the soldiers would come. This was a Royalist household, known as the home of one of the King’s most loyal generals, and it must go hard with us if Cromwell’s men ever came this way.

Everyone in the household was watching me more than ever. I would often find Mrs Cherry looking at me with an expression of greatest concern. Grace and Meg too. ‘Are you feeling all right, my lady?’

‘Yes, of course, don’t I look all right?’

‘Well, my lady, shouldn’t you rest a bit?’

I must escape those watchful eyes.

There was a strangeness about them all … even Bersaba. Sometimes she seemed cautious. She would not discuss the castle, and told me sharply that I must not think about it, Sometimes she wanted to talk about Richard and at others she would abruptly change the subject.

It was rather disquieting and more and more I sought the peace of the Castle Room.

The chapel began to exert a certain influence. I used to find myself wandering down to it. I liked to sit in the pew and think about all the Tolworthys who had worshipped there in happier times, and I wondered if Magdalen had come here often to pray for a safe delivery.

That was what I wanted to do now.

I went to the altar. The cloth had been made by several of the ladies of the household one hundred and fifty years ago, Richard had once told me. I touched the stitching reverently. It was so delicately worked and the colours were exquisite. One day, I thought, when my baby is older, I will make an altar cloth and I will find just such colours as these. That blue is so beautiful … blue for happiness … wasn’t that a saying? How neatly it was finished off. I wondered how they had done that … I had turned the cloth in my hands and as I did so I must have jerked it forward. There was a clatter as the chalice fell to the floor and in the next second I was hit by one of the vessels, the cloth came away in my hands, I was lying on the chapel floor, and at that moment I felt for the first time the movement of my child and I fainted.

Mrs Cherry was standing over me. Bersaba was there too. I noticed Mrs Cherry’s face was so pale that the network of red veins stood out on her cheeks. She was shaking.

Bersaba, kneeling beside me, was saying, ‘It’s all right. She’s better now.’ She was undoing the collar of my bodice. ‘All right, Angel. You fainted. It often happens at this stage.’ Her voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘Don’t move for a bit. Just stay here. You’ll feel all right in a moment. Then I’ll get you to your room. But it’s nothing. It happens.’

So I lay on the cold floor of the chapel and I remember feeling the life inside me, and I kept repeating Bersaba’s words: It often happens at this stage.

Bersaba said, ‘I should rest for an hour or so. It’s nothing. Women often faint the first time they feel the movement. Then you get used to it of course. You’ve probably got a lively child.’

It was pleasant lying there. She talked about how she had been with Arabella and how all these little things were a part of a woman’s life during pregnancy.

‘It’s fortunate for me that you have gone through it all before,’ I said.

‘And that I’m here to look after you.’

‘I hope you always will be,’ I answered.

‘Now you’ll have to look after me sometimes.’

I slept a little and she must have left me, for when I woke up it was to find Mrs Cherry coming into the room.

‘I just had to come in and assure myself you were all right, my lady.’

‘It was nothing, Mrs Cherry. Just a faint when the baby moved. My sister says it’s normal. It often happens the first time.’

‘It was the chapel what worried me,’ said Mrs Cherry.

‘I was looking at the altar cloth. It’s so beautifully worked and I must have pulled it off.’

‘And kneeling there at the altar, were you?’

‘Yes, I was.’

She frowned a little. ‘Well, my lady, I just wondered. We’re all anxious about you, you know.’

‘I do know it and I wish you wouldn’t be. Everything’s perfectly all right.’

‘Oh, I do hope so, my lady,’ she said vehemently.

And there I was … uneasy again.

I could not sleep. They say women have strange fancies when they are pregnant. I certainly had them that night. It began when I thought I heard stealthy footsteps creaking on the stairs. It’s nothing, I soothed myself. Just old boards and my fancy.

I remembered how often I had been afraid of the dark when I was a child and what a comfort it was to know that Bersaba was close. But there was something in the air that night, something that meant danger. But we lived in dangerous times.

Almost without thinking I rose from my bed and, putting on slippers and a robe, made my way to Bersaba’s room.

My heart leaped in fear, for she was not there. The bedclothes had been thrown back as though she had left hurriedly. Then I had heard footsteps on the stairs—Bersaba’s!

There was a full moon and the room was almost as light as day. I went to the window and looked out. I stood there for a few moments before I saw my sister. She was running across the grass as though her life depended on escape.

‘Bersaba!’ I cried out. ‘What …’ I stopped short, for I saw that she was pursued by something—a large, loping ungainly creature. It had a human shape and yet I was not sure that it was a man.

I started to shout: ‘The soldiers are here!’ as I ran from the room and sped down the stairs. My one thought was to save my sister.

‘Bersaba!’ I cried again. The creature stopped, halted by the sound of my voice. It turned uncertainly and came lumbering towards me. I could not see its face—perhaps that was fortunate—but I knew that I was in the presence of something not quite natural—something baleful, evil—and that I was in acute danger.

I heard Bersaba scream: ‘Run, Angel …’

Then almost immediately there was the sound of a gun’s being fired. The figure swayed and I saw its huge arms rise as it staggered and fell on to the grass.

Bersaba was beside me. She had her arms about me, holding me tightly.

‘You’re all right, Angel,’ she murmured soothingly. ‘It’s all right now. I thought I saw Richard down here … so I came … and it was
that.
He saw me and …’

Mr and Mrs Cherry were running out of the house, and as she came to the figure on the grass Mrs Cherry did a strange thing. She knelt beside it and laid her face on the fallen body.

It was like a nightmare: the coldness of the night and Bersaba and I standing there clinging together as though one feared she would lose the other; the body lying on the grass and Mrs Cherry rocking back and forth on her heels incoherently murmuring in obvious uncontrollable grief.

Grace and Meg came out with Jesson, and Grace knelt down and said: ‘He’s dead.’

Mrs Cherry wailed, ‘Cherry shot him. He shot our son …’

Cherry laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and tried to comfort her.

‘We ought to get him into the house,’ said Jesson.

The sight of the blood sickened me. Bersaba put her arm about me. ‘You should go back to bed, Angelet,’ she said. I ignored her. I had to know what was happening.

They put him in the weapons room and as he lay there on the floor I caught a glimpse of his face. It was strange and terrifying. Thick and wiry hair grew low on the brow; hair covered the lower part of his face, but there was something evil about that face which had not been put there by death.

Grace took Mrs Cherry away and we were left with Cherry and Jesson in the hall. I said: ‘What does this mean? Who is this man? You shot him, Cherry?’

Cherry said: ‘Yes, I shot him. You heard Mrs Cherry. It’s true. He is our son.’

‘Where did he come from?’ asked Bersaba. ‘How is it that he has appeared here suddenly?’

‘He escaped, my lady. He escaped once before. It has been a great trial to us. He was in a madhouse … He has the strength of two men … and he was dangerous. I couldn’t have him in the house. He caused such damage before. There didn’t seem nothing else to do … I knew I’d have to … if ever he came back.’

Bersaba took control of the situation. She went to the kitchen and brought something from Mrs Cherry’s cupboard, poured it into a goblet and made Cherry drink it.

‘You must control yourself,’ she said. ‘What you did you believed to be for the best.’

‘’Twas a terrible trial to us … all these years … for we never knew when he might break out again.’

‘There’s nothing you can do now,’ said Bersaba. ‘He is dead. Tomorrow you must take him out of the house and bury him.’

Cherry nodded.

‘Jesson shall take you to bed.’

‘I did it to save you, my lady. I did it to save the house. There’s no knowing what he would have done. He goes mad, see. He would have burnt the place down. I had to do it. I had to. Mrs Cherry must see it. But he’s her son and …’

Bersaba turned to Jesson. ‘Take him to his room, Jesson,’ she said. ‘Stay with him and Mrs Cherry, I’ll look after my sister.’

She led me to my room and she stayed with me. We talked for a long time.

‘He did right,’ she said. ‘You could see that he was mad … even as he lay there on the grass. If he had got into the house he might have murdered us all. Cherry must have known how desperate he was.’

‘To shoot his own son …’ I began.

‘He is better dead.’

Though the children had slept peacefully through the disturbance, there was no sleep for any of the adults in the house that night. In the morning Cherry and Jesson took the body away and buried it on the edge of the paddock, and they put a stone these on which Cherry engraved the words ‘Joseph Cherry’ and the date.

He talked to us afterwards more calmly than he had on the previous night. Bersaba was wonderful, for she made him realize that in sacrificing his son he had saved us all, for the story Cherry had to tell was horrifying. His son had been born abnormal; during his childhood he had become violent. As a boy he had found a special delight in torturing and killing animals and later he had had an uncontrollable urge to do the same to human beings. He had had to be taken into a madhouse and chained. He had escaped once before and some instinct had brought him to his parents. So he had come to Far Flamstead. Then his presence had only been discovered when he had entered the house. He was stopped in time before he had set it on fire. Then his father had shot him through the leg. That was what he had aimed to do on this occasion, but the shot had entered his heart.

‘You are a brave man, Cherry,’ said Bersaba, ‘and I think everyone in this house should be grateful to you today!’

Of course the incident had changed the household. Before we had been on the alert for soldiers who might destroy our home and kill us. Now we had been brought face to face with an equally terrifying situation. Both Bersaba and I trembled at the thought of what might have happened if that madman had entered the room in which the sleeping children lay, and we couldn’t be grateful enough to Cherry.

Mrs Cherry had changed. Her grief possessed her; she made a wreath of leaves and laid it on her son’s grave. I was glad that she bore no resentment against her husband, for she seemed so lost and bewildered that she might well have done.

Her colour had changed; the network of veins was more visible. She was more silent than she had been. I thought how strange it was that people harboured secrets of which we were unaware. I couldn’t forget her round rosy face which seemed to match her name, and to discover that all the time she was nursing this bitter secret made me see her in a new light.

As the weeks passed we returned to the wartime pattern. We were alert as ever for approaching enemies, but we were all aware that the most ardent Parliamentary soldiers could not have been more terrifying than the madman who could so easily have entered the house while we slept.

It was November—a month of mists and bare trees, green berries on the ivy and spiders’ webs festooning the hedges.

My baby was due to be born in three months’ time, and I longed for February and the first jasmine and snowdrops. It seemed long in coming.

It was during this month that the terrible conviction came to me that someone was trying to kill me.

There were times when I laughed at my fancies, and I could not bring myself to talk of them … even to Bersaba. I kept telling myself: Women have strange fancies, don’t they, when they are in this condition? They are said to be irrational, crave strange things, imagine things are what they are not.

And here was this fancy within me, an eerie conviction that I was being watched and followed. When I went into the quieter places of the house—the Castle Room, the chapel on the spiral stairs with its steps which were so narrow on one side—I would be aware of danger. ‘Be careful of that staircase,’ said Bersaba. ‘It could be dangerous. If you tripped on that … it could be disastrous for the child.’

Once when it was dusk and I was coming down the staircase I had the feeling that someone was watching me from behind. I fancied I could almost hear the sound of breathing.

I stopped short and said: ‘Is anyone there?’ and I thought I heard a quick intake of breath and then the faint rustle of clothing. I hurried down, though taking care with every step, and went to my room to lie on the bed to recover. I felt my child move within me then and I laid my hands on it reassuringly. I was going to make sure that all was well with it.

Later I admonished myself. What was I thinking of? I believed I knew what had happened to me. The memory of that madman creeping up to the house had unnerved me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind—how could I, when Mrs Cherry looked so sad and poor Cherry behaved as though he carried a load of sin on his shoulders? My imagination kept presenting me with pictures of what might have happened. I could imagine myself waking up to find him in my room. I pictured his creeping into the children’s room and looking down on those innocent little faces.