A Brief History of Montmaray (8 page)

SIMON LEFT AFTER DAWN this morning, a thick letter for Toby tucked into his jacket and the Fabergé egg rolled up inside a spare pair of socks. George and Rebecca rowed him out to the ship, a Portuguese steamer on its way north. (There are quite a few ships that will take passengers – we put a flag up above the gatehouse to signal them and eventually one stops.) Now the castle feels quiet and empty, which is odd because Simon is not a particularly loud or large person. One wouldn’t think he would leave such a gap.

Rebecca is now sunk in gloom. Today she wore her black dress, and her greying hair was scraped back so severely that her cheekbones showed sharp enough to cut. It’s hard to believe that she was once thought a very handsome woman, but apparently it’s true. Mary told me. She said that Rebecca could’ve had any of the village men, but none of them was good enough for her. Eventually they all married or went away from the island and the only one left was Phillip Chester, who was fifteen years older and a widower, so she had to marry him. I’m sure there’s more to this story, but Alice came in at that point, scolded Mary for gossiping and sent her out to check the lobster pots, and I never heard anything else on the topic after that.

Phillip was killed a few years later in the Great War, so I should feel sorry for Rebecca and be nicer to her, but it is very difficult. She’s so horrid to Veronica, for a start – worse than she is to anyone else. She orders the rest of us around and swipes at Henry, but it’s Veronica who ends up with the worst tasks when Rebecca supervises the cleaning or when we’re out in the kitchen garden. And she’s always stabbing away at Veronica with her knife-like tongue, taking aim at anything she thinks might be a soft spot, from Veronica’s habit of gnawing at her bottom lip to Veronica’s runaway mother (as though that’s
Veronica’s
fault!). Then when this fails to get a reaction, Rebecca resorts to muttering under her breath about how Veronica is plain, clumsy or (most ridiculous of all) lazy.

For I realised afresh this morning – Veronica runs this place. Rebecca is officially the housekeeper, but she’s too busy fawning over Uncle John to do much more than supervise the cleaning and take care of some of the cooking. It’s Veronica who keeps track of the bills and handles the correspondence with our solicitor, Veronica who orders the supplies and remembers the villagers’ birthdays and fixes the plumbing. Even the animals seem to recognise her as head of the household – the little black cat is constantly presenting her with choice specimens of freshly killed prey, to every one’s disgust. Veronica’s only a year and a half older than me, too – it makes me uncomfortable when I think of how little I do in comparison. And even then, it’s usually what I’ve been
asked
to do – when it’s figuring out what needs to be done that’s the difficult, grown-up job.

So today I shooed Veronica away from chores after breakfast and sent her straight to the library to work on her
Brief History.
I tidied the upstairs bedrooms and did the washing and hung it on the line. I made Henry help. We even managed a mathematics lesson at the same time, calculating the quantities of soap shavings and pegs needed.

Then I attempted to make a spinach and cheese pie for lunch, while Henry sat at the kitchen table. She propped the old atlas against the teapot and we played ‘Guess which is closer?’. I tried to be practical (
Which is closer – London or Paris?
), but Henry always goes for the most bizarre names she can find
(Which is closer – Timbuktu or Vladivostok?).
I suppose at least it gives her some reading practice. The answers, by the way, are that Montmaray is closer to London than to Paris but only by thirty miles, and that Timbuktu is closer to us than Vladivostok is by about half a globe. It always amazes me, the size of Russia – I mean, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or whatever they’re calling themselves this year. It is absolutely enormous. If the Tsar had lived for a thousand years, he couldn’t have visited all his subjects. And not knowing the individual people he ruled over, it would be so much easier to be unfair to them. (Not that I’m turning into a Communist or anything.)

Sadly, my pie wasn’t very successful – the crust got burnt on one side when Vulcan flared up and there was too much salt in that last batch of cheese (I shall have to find a tactful way to inform Mary, who is a bit too fond of experimenting with her cheese-making). Also, isn’t housework
unrewarding?
One spends all that time stirring sheets around in the boiler and feeding them through the wringer and pegging them on the line and taking them down and folding them, knowing one will have to do the same thing all over again in a fortnight. Dusting and sweeping are even worse – it seemed I’d just finished one room when a breeze blew in and I turned round to find everything covered in salt and sand again.

After lunch, I took up the scarf I’ve been knitting for George – I’m determined to finish it by Christmas, although it’s not looking hopeful. Two months of work and it’s barely a foot long, because I keep having to unpick rows. Either I find myself winding the wool so tightly that I can barely prise the loops off the needle, or else I gallop along and drop stitches all over the place.

A short while later, I gave up, stuck the needles back into the snarl of wool and came up here to the gatehouse to brood about Simon. It really is rather dull now he’s gone. Although I must say, remembering my encounters with him is far more enjoyable than the actual encounters, possibly because I do an awful lot of editing. In my memories, my clothes are new and they fit perfectly, despite my somehow having grown bigger in the bust and longer in the legs. My hair is always a shiny, sweet-smelling gold and it never slips free of its pins. I never trip over pigeons in the courtyard, I never catch my sleeve on that loose nail on the kitchen door latch and I’m never at a loss for words.

I wonder when he’ll be back. No – I don’t. I don’t care in the slightest. Hopefully it won’t be for months and months, by which time I will have grown sensible and sane and will have trained myself out of blushing...

It’s very late now and I can barely keep my eyes open, but I feel I must set down at least a little of this afternoon’s events (especially after what Veronica said about my journal writing). Today has been like something out of a Brontë novel – strangers having staggered across the hostile moors to collapse upon our doorstep, begging for shelter and the means to repair their conveyance. Except it wasn’t moors but ocean, and they didn’t exactly beg for shelter, and they’re not truly strangers. But their arrival was certainly dramatic. Let me see if I can recall it in order, the way a proper chronicler would.

I was in the gatehouse at the time, curled up in a very dim patch of afternoon sunlight and daydreaming about Simon, when I first heard the faint buzzing. A bee, I thought, looking around warily, or a wasp, but I couldn’t see anything. Just as I was about to start panicking in earnest, I realised what it was. I scrambled to my feet and rushed to the window, just in time to see an aeroplane swoop overhead, its wings dipping as though in salute. I stared upwards, astonished. We see aeroplanes occasionally (even an airship, once), but never so close. I tried to determine whether it was in distress – not that I could have done anything to help if it had been – but as I watched, the wings straightened and the aeroplane flew on across the island. Henry and Jimmy burst out of the kitchen and raced over the drawbridge after it, Carlos barking at their heels. Veronica leant out the library tower, book in hand, and Rebecca did the same out the kitchen window, only without the book. The aeroplane soared towards South Head, then suddenly banked in a sharp curve. The buzzing became a spluttering. The aeroplane seemed to hesitate in midair, as if contemplating the view. Then it turned its nose down at the ground and plummeted, engine screaming.

‘It’s headed for the Green,’ shouted Veronica, dashing into the courtyard. ‘Come on!’

I was already sliding down the ladder and together we ran across the drawbridge and up the hill. The Green’s more than a mile distant, almost at the end of the island. By the time Veronica and I reached it, I was panting and over-heated and had a dreadful stitch. But the aeroplane was apparently unharmed. It had come to rest at the near end of the Green, sitting back on its haunches, nose pointing at the sky. Henry and Jimmy were already clambering in and out of the cockpit and having a shouted conversation with one of the pilots, while the other knelt beneath the propeller, fending off the friendly attentions of Carlos.

‘Are you all right?’ I gasped. The person talking to Henry turned, halfway through peeling off a leather helmet, and I was surprised to see that it was a woman, a very pretty one with arched eyebrows and scarlet lips.

‘Oh, my dears!’ she cried. But before she could say anything else, Henry hurled herself to the ground and rushed over to us.

‘This is Rupert’s sister!’ shouted Henry. ‘Toby’s school friend Rupert! This is Julia! And her fiancé! And they’re on their way to Madrid!’

Veronica then introduced us all properly, ordered Jimmy out of the aeroplane and grabbed hold of Henry, who looked ready to combust with excitement. The man under the propeller stood up and bowed politely, but was too oil-smeared to shake hands.

‘This is Anthony,’ said Julia, waving a beautifully manicured hand at him. ‘We’re so
dreadfully
sorry for dropping in unannounced like this, but with that dratted engine – Ant was getting
quite
fed up with it, weren’t you, darling? – and even if we’d turned round and managed to make it to Brest in one piece, who
knows
how the gendarme would have reacted, some of them are terribly Fascist, but Toby has told us so much about Montmaray and there you were,
right
below us with this lovely flat landing strip...’

All this was said very rapidly as Julia unwound her scarf, shrugged out of her brown leather jacket, and retrieved a carpet bag from the cockpit.

‘You’re most welcome,’ said Veronica. ‘We’re very pleased to have the opportunity to return your hospitality, after your family’s great kindness to Toby over the years.’ She managed to seem the very image of regal graciousness, despite her torn trousers (a very old pair of Toby’s) and the smear of ink along her cheek.

At that point, Alice, Mary and George appeared, puffing a bit after a rapid climb from the village, and there were more introductions all round. Anthony pointed out bits of the engine to George, who nodded knowledgeably, then took Anthony off to the village to look for something to replace the split what’s-its-name. George said he had the very thing, left over from when they installed the new water pump. Alice and Mary rounded up Jimmy and followed them, promising to walk Anthony up to the castle before nightfall. Then the rest of us headed off towards the castle ourselves, Julia still talking non-stop, apparently drawing breath through her ears.

‘Absolutely
wonderful
views from here, exactly as Toby described, and what are all those – oh,
cottages,
yes, I do see that now! Heavens, there must have been hundreds of people living here at one stage – and
look
at that magnificent castle! How
unfair,
we just have an Elizabethan pile falling to bits – and my dears, the
taxes,
you’ve no idea. Oh, a
drawbridge,
how divine...’

Veronica explained that Montmaray was, strictly speaking, a fortified house rather than a true castle, having been built in the sixteenth century rather than in mediaeval times. She also pointed out where Napoleon’s cannons had shot an enormous hole in our curtain wall in response to King John the Fifth’s threats. No one has ever got round to repairing it (as we walked past, another few bits of wall crumbled into the ocean), nor to rebuilding the East Wing, which burnt down in Edward de Quincy FitzOsborne’s time (the ‘Crimson Conflagration’, as he termed it, inspired yet another of his epic poems).

None of this deterred Julia. She exclaimed over everything with delight, from the royal standard flapping above the gatehouse (‘What a heavenly shade of blue!’) to the hens trailing after Spartacus (‘I
adore
hens, especially those little fluffy ones, and look at the colours on that one ... Oh, it’s a pigeon – good Lord, is it one of Rupert’s? I expect he’s got Toby involved in all that pigeon fancying now...’).

The only time the flow of chatter ceased was when we entered the kitchen. By unlucky coincidence, Uncle John had just emerged from one of his rare baths. He was wearing his usual tattered robe (the ermine trimming black where it trailed upon the floor), and his hair hung around his face in wet ropes. Catching sight of us, his head jerked back in alarm. Henry and I turned to Veronica. She took a deep breath and gestured at our visitor.

‘May I,’ she said, ‘present the Honourable Julia Stanley-Ross–’

He growled and twitched and stumbled backwards into his room, slamming the door shut.

Julia blinked.

Veronica looked at the door. ‘His Majesty, King John the Seventh of Montmaray,’ she said.