Lady Catherine's Necklace (10 page)

‘It was a bad business, a dreadful business,' said the colonel uncomfortably.

‘Bad? It was atrocious!' Charlotte said sharply. ‘That poor, poor man – driven to do such a thing.'

‘You believe, then, that he did it on purpose?'

‘Walk into a blazing bonfire? How could it have been an accident?'

‘But he was blind.'

‘He had the use of his other senses. He was an independent man, a man of strong feelings. He
knew
what he was doing, Colonel! I was down there at his house three days ago, talking to him. He said to me, “How can I be such a charge upon Ambrose? He has the task of finding another house for us, a house where I can learn my blind way about. Here it would not be so bad; I know every step and corner of Wormwood End. But at my time of life I am too slow to learn, too set in my ways to make the adjustment. I shall be nothing but a weight around his neck. I deserve to be cast out, like all those old frames and stretchers that he is burning outside in the garden.' Finglow was a brave man, Colonel! I am only glad that Mr Collins was not here at the time,' she added, brushing an angry tear from her cheek.

‘Why?' he asked incautiously.

‘Mr Collins would have felt it his duty to be extremely dissaproving. As it was, I thought that Mr Lawson, in his funeral sermon, did very well. He was tactful, friendly and discreet.'

‘Lady Catherine was greatly surprised to hear what a large number of Mr Finglow's friends came from London, besides all the local people.'

‘Lady Catherine, perhaps, did well not to attend the funeral. And her absence, just now, will be no bad thing, until the matter has somewhat passed out of people's minds.'

‘Yes, I suppose so. Perhaps the Delavals will soon leave. I rather hope so.'

‘Oh? I thought they planned all sorts of surprises for Lady Catherine's return?'

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I am not in their confidence.'

They had now reached the parsonage. Charlotte, talking the umbrella from him, said, ‘Thank you for your escort, Colonel. Please say all that is friendly and condoling from me to Miss Anne. I shall come and see her soon, tell her.'

‘Yes, of course,' said the colonel. He went on uncomfortably, ‘I do not suppose—' caught Charlotte's indignant eye on him, muttered, ‘Thank you, Mrs Collins,' and walked off forlornly into the rain.

VI

‘A garden,' said Joss, ‘be like a person.'

‘What do you mean, Joss?'

‘Well, look upon it this way. You don't give care and help to someone, that body's a-going to turn agin you. Right?'

‘I suppose so,' said Anne, thinking of herself. Nobody has given me much care and help, she thought; except Joss, to be sure. And I am against everybody. That is true.

‘Leave your garden alone for two weeks,' pursued Joss, ‘and that'll turn angry. And I don't mean just the weeds'll come up and start to plague you; no, the whole plot 'ull have a bad feel agin you. It'll turn sour, ye'll have to pamper and coddle a bit afore it'll welcome ye back.'

‘Even a garden like this?' said Anne, looking across the shaven lawns. ‘Even a garden that doesn't belong to you?'

‘That don't make no manner of difference. Just to have your name writ on a bit o' paper, that's no business of plants or trees. Is it? A garden belongs to the chaps as does the digging and pruning.'

‘But Joss, don't you wish you had a garden of your own?'

‘Some day I shall,' said Joss without impatience. ‘I can wait. I'm planning. I've a flower book my ma left me. My garden'll have all the flowers that's in it. Bachelors' buttons, Canterbury bells, sweet william, forget-me-nots, wallflowers, snapdragons.'

‘Where is Pluto?' asked Anne, looking around and noticing the dog's absence for the first time.

‘Didn't ye know? Lady Catherine had him done away with.'

‘Done
away
with?
Pluto?
'

‘Aye.' Joss reached down and tweaked a buttercup root out from between two hyacinth bulbs. ‘Her eye lit on a pile of badger dung, out there on the grass, and she blamed Pluto. No use to tell her dogs 'on't eat hips and haws; she told Smirke to have him put down, and Smirke he told Muddle and Verity to see to it; so 'twas done. Time I was clearing out the lily pond; I allus shuts the dog in an empty stable stall those times, for he gets that excited in the water; you know how he is, Miss Anne—' Joss spoke simply and without rancour, as if Pluto were still in being.

‘What did they do?' Anne asked, trembling.

‘Tied a stone round's neck and chucked him in the millpond, reckon; I didn't ask. Done's done.'

‘I hate my mother.' Anne spoke with intense vigour. ‘I really hate her. I hope she drowns on the way to Great Morran.'

‘Now, Miss Anne! Ye must not feel so.'

‘But I do! How can I help it?'

‘What Lady Catherine does is her affair, not yours. And she will have to answer for it, surely. But your business, my deary, is to get quit of those viperous thoughts that's in ye, for they'll turn to gall and brimstone and eat away at ye and do ye all manner of harm. Look,' said Joss, and forked out another tussock of buttercup roots, ‘ye do some of this work, dirty your hands a bit, turn yourself to do something worthwhile, and that'll ease your mind, wash all that blackness and bile out of ye.'

‘I could pull up a whole meadow full of buttercups and I'd still hate my mother,' said Anne, nevertheless doing as he suggested.

‘Drop the weeds in the trug here,' Joss directed. ‘Don't scatter them abroad on the gravel-plat. I'll go to the tool shed and fetch a smaller fork for ye to use. That one there be a dandelion, ye have to go deep for him, his roots go down to Tartarus.'

‘Good heavens, Joss, where did you learn about Tartarus? Was that one of the things Sir Felix told you?'

‘Aye, he had a book about all they Greek gods and goddesses – ramshackle lot they were, simmingly,' said Joss, and went off whistling to the tool shed.

While he was gone, Smirke the head gardener came by, and paused to give Anne his toothy smile.

‘Deary me, Miss Anne, what in the world would her ladyship say to see ye so clarted up and mucky, doing the garden-boy's work? What
would
she say?'

‘Her ladyship is halfway to Exeter,' Anne said defiantly.

‘And what about the gentleman, Colonel FitzWilliam? I doubt he'd not be best pleased to see ye – and that was a snowdrop ye just dug up.'

‘I don't think the colonel would care in the least.'

Anne hastily thrust the snowdrop back into its earthy hole.

‘'Tis no fit occupation for a young lady.'

‘I like doing it.'

‘Well, well,' said Smirke indulgently, ‘we mun see what the colonel has to say. Don't let Miss Anne tire herself now,' he told Joss, who came back at that moment with another hand fork. ‘And you, boy, you see those lettuce seedlings are pricked out in the glasshouse afore this morning's past!'

‘'Tis a wonder he didn't send me off right away to cart muck,' said Joss, when Smirke had gone.

‘I think,' said Anne, ‘that Smirke encourages us to be friendly for – for reasons of his own.'

‘Aye?' said Joss. ‘What manner of reasons be those, do you think, Miss Anne?'

‘So that later on he can ask me for money, and threaten otherwise to make a scandal. About us,' Anne said hardily.

Joss burst out laughing.

*   *   *

‘“Are there no overgrown hedges,”' Mr Delaval read aloud from
The Gentleman's Magazine,
‘“that rob you of hundreds of yards of ground, that might be cut in, and converted into firewood, pea-sticks, or rubbish to burn into manure? What if the hedge were cut close in, the walks made few and straight, and no wider than three feet, and every inch of wall covered with something useful, or beautiful, or both?”'

‘I am tolerably sure that my Aunt Catherine has no lack of firewood or pea-sticks,' remarked Colonel FitzWilliam. ‘And I do not believe that she would wish her walks to be reduced to three feet wide.'

Priscilla twitched the magazine away from her brother and continued reading: ‘“I know from what I see, as I travel up and down the country, that there are few gardens, and especially those of the industrious classes, but might be made to produce double what they do, and everything of better quality!” But Ralph, you must admit that Lady Catherine's produce could hardly be bettered – those grapes and peaches equal anything that you might find in Mediterranean lands.'

‘Of course, my dear, of course. But just listen to this: ‘“Are there no old and useless trees, that shut out the best of the morning sun, and prevent you from cropping to advantage some of the best ground you have? Are not your fruit trees overgrown, and many of them occupying ground for which their annual crops are no equivalent?” How about that? How about those great overgrown Spanish chestnut trees? And that huge, gross oak? I dare swear it is as much as twenty feet round the perimeter, and who needs all those acorns? It is not as if Lady Catherine kept pigs.'

‘Sir Lewis de Bourgh was
particularly
fond of that tree,' Mrs Jenkinson put in timorously.

‘Let me understand you, Mr Delaval,' said the colonel. ‘Did my Aunt Catherine give you
carte blanche
to cut down and root up what you please of her timber and fruit trees? Is it such projects you had in mind when you promised her splendid surprises on her return?'

‘Her ladyship has approved most magnanimously all my suggestions up to this time,' Mr Delaval countered. ‘And her tastes in horticulture conform to mine in a highly gratifying degree.'

‘Well,' suggested FitzWilliam, ‘before you undertake the wholesale lopping of the timber in the park, or the uprooting of the knot-garden, or the felling of the apple orchard, I believe you should consult the feelings of my Uncle Luke, who was, after all, brought up in Hunsford Castle, which once occupied the site where this house now stands. He knew the garden from a boy – what gardens there were in those days. I think his opinion should be sought.'

‘Oh, certainly, that's of course,' said Mr Delaval, ‘but Lord Luke seems remarkably little interested in such matters.'

Coincidentally at that moment Lord Luke himself appeared, with dust on his cravat and his sparse grey locks somewhat disordered.

‘Ah, there you are, my boy. Ring for Frinton and have him bring up a bottle of sherry, will you? I am as dry as an oast house. Those attics! Catherine must have had every shred of cloth, every scrap of paper, every splinter of wood that was housed in the old castle carried up there. And the light under the roof is abominable. There are but two windows. I have had Muddle and Verity transfer as many boxes as possible to an area where their contents may be inspected, but I misdoubt me it is going to be a task that will take many days, if not weeks…'

He rubbed his hands as if this prospect, on the whole, was an inviting one.

‘But I need a helper.'

He looked hopefully at his four auditors, but their silence and expressions exhibited such a lack of intention to oblige him, that he sighed.

‘Muddle and Verity?' suggested Colonel FitzWilliam. ‘Having moved the boxes for you, would they not be the best—?'

‘Dear fellows, both of them, excellent in their way, most willing,' explained Lord Luke. ‘But neither of them can read.'

‘Perhaps my cousin Anne might be interested?'

Mrs Jenkinson looked scandalized.

‘Grubbing about in the attics?' she said faintly. ‘Surely no occupation for the Lady Anne?'

‘Since she seems to spend most of her time just now grubbing about in the flower borders with the garden-boy, I should have thought—'

‘The garden-boy!' Lord Luke exclaimed. ‘Can
he
read, I wonder?'

‘I really have no idea.'

‘You are sure you would not care to join me, Fitz? Who knows what treasures of history may not be found up there?'

‘My dear Uncle Luke, I would not for worlds deprive you of the pleasure of making such a dramatic historical discovery yourself.'

‘But how will you pass your time here – if the task should take me several weeks?'

‘What precisely is it that you are searching for, Uncle?'

‘Oh – old school exercises and papers from my childhood. They are of no intrinsic value or interest to anybody except myself,' Lord Luke explained with an air of great unconcern.

‘I see. Well, I shall be quite content strolling about the grounds, consulting with Mr Delaval about such improvements as he may think fit to put in hand – fishing in the lake, perhaps shooting a pigeon or two. Possibly Miss Delaval will honour me with her company from time to time in a game of croquet?'

‘I am so sorry, I should have enjoyed that. But, unfortunately, my ankle…'

‘Oh, of course. I had quite forgotten. Your ankle. And I imagine that will also prevent your furnishing any advice or assistance to Lord Luke in the attics?'

‘
Most
unfortunately, yes!' She responded to Colonel FitzWilliam's look of slightly ironic inquiry with a display of her dimples.

‘I believe I saw a harp up there?' Lord Luke pleaded. But he added fairly, ‘It had remarkably few strings.'

‘However many strings it had, I should have been unable to play it. My ankle…'

‘Yes, yes, of course. I wonder if that agreeable Miss Lucas could be persuaded to give me some assistance? She might be glad to escape, once in a while, from all the domesticity at the parsonage.'

‘Ask her by all means,' shrugged FitzWilliam.

Frinton came in with the sherry and told Lord Luke:

‘My lord, there are two persons here from London, who both claim to have authorization from Lady Catherine to clean her diamonds. Were you cognizant of her ladyship's intentions in the matter?'