The Weeping Ash (15 page)

Scylla would have torn it open, but the little servant, Therbah, forestalled her. “A moment, missy sahib,” he said, and, taking it from her, pulled from his belt a ferocious-looking curved kukri, or Afghan knife, and neatly slit it around the edges, handing it back to her with a polite salaam.

About to read it, Scylla bethought herself of her only half-eaten picnic.

“I have some chicken and fruit here,” she said. “While I read this, would you care—?”

“Would we care, ma'am? You see before you two famished men!”

So while she read they demolished the rest of the birthday feast.

My Dear Cousins:

Having, through no Merit of my own, succeeded recently to your Late Father's Fortune, I am anxious to rectify this Sad Injustice, in so far as lies within my Power. Colonel Cameron has been so obliging as to undertake to seek you out when he returns to India. If this letter does indeed reach you, pray write to me and send me your Direction, so that I may share with you the competence which should, by rights, have been entirely yours. And if you should consider coming to England (which I sincerely hope may be the case, so that I may have the Pleasure of meeting two unknown Cousins) pray consider my house to be your Home for as long as you may wish to remain under its roof. I myself have known the discomfort of arriving unfriended and with but limited Resources in a Foreign Land, and it is my earnest wish to help you avoid such a Disagreeable Experience.

Your sincere well-wisher and Cousin,

Juliana Paget van Welcker

Scylla read this epistle once, and then again, with the utmost astonishment.

“Good heavens! Who is this Juliana? Have you met her, sir? Are you aware of the contents of this letter?”

“Yes, I have met the countess,” he replied, negligently flinging a leg over his diminutive mount. “But—forgive me—I think we should now press on, for darkness comes so swiftly here. You may, after all, question me as we ride.”

“You are very right.—But who is Juliana? Where did you meet her?” Scylla wanted to know.

“I met her at Almack's Assembly Rooms in London, ma'am.”

“Almack's!” breathed Scylla on a sigh of envy. “The very place of all others that I wish to visit! Oh, how lucky you are!”

“To have been at Almack's?” He glanced at her in surprise. “Why, it is the most insipid place in the world—nothing but lemonade and orgeat to drink, dismal, rigid propriety prevailing throughout, and the rooms crowded to the doors by young misses with not an idea in their heads, save that of catching a husband.”

“Then why, sir, were
you
there?”

“I consider it necessary to see any place
once
,” he briefly replied. “In fact, I was passing through London on my way to Scotland. Lady Jersey introduced me to the Countess van Welcker, as she had done with many others coming from the Indian continent, for the countess was attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of her missing cousins. When I told her that I would, in due course, be traveling east again, she ran into the cardroom, borrowed her husband's tablets, and wrote this letter for me to give you, in the event that I should encounter you.”

“But how—”

“I had chanced to mention that I knew the Mussons, who are my compatriots—it seemed that a Dr. Musson had been mentioned to the countess as being one of those who might conceivably know of your whereabouts, since he and his sister had befriended your mother while General Paget still remained in India. Now, is the chain of connection clear?”

“Yes, I believe so,” said Scylla after some thought. “But who, precisely, is this Juliana Paget—you say she is a
countess
?”

“At the time when I met her she had recently married a Dutch nobleman—a Count van Welcker who was in the service of the Prince of Wales. Miss Paget was, I understand, the granddaughter of your father's elder brother.”

“Our cousin once removed. I see. And she says that our father left her all his fortune. But I thought you said that he was in straitened circumstances through gambling debts? How can he have had any fortune to leave?”

“When General Paget left India his fortunes were at low ebb. But it seems that he had saved the life of an Indian prince who, after a period of time had elapsed, rewarded him with considerable munificence; the money arrived when General Paget was on his deathbed, however, and, to spite his brother, with whom he had quarreled, he left the whole to that brother's son, the father of this Juliana.”

“Why should that spite his brother?” asked Scylla, puzzled.

“Because the brother—yet another General Paget—had quite cast off his son, who would not follow in his father's profession and go into the army. You appear to belong to a combative and contentious family, ma'am,” said Colonel Cameron with some amusement. It struck him as noteworthy that this member of it did not choose to repine over the neglectful behavior of her father—who, after all, having come into a fortune, might reasonably have been expected to make
some
provision for his abandoned children. Her interest was all in this newly discovered relation.

“What was she like—my cousin Juliana? What age is she?”

“I should judge, about your age, perhaps nineteen or twenty—very pretty, with a brown complexion, sparkling dark eyes, and dusky curls; very much attached to her husband, who seemed some ten or twelve years older.”

“I should dearly like to meet her,” was Scylla's reflection.

“Well—now you will be able to, ma'am,” remarked Colonel Cameron dryly. “You have but to accept her invitation.”

Scylla frowned, thinking this over.

“Alas! It is by no means so simple! I have my brother and Miss Musson to consider. But I will certainly write to my cousin.—Oh!” she exclaimed in an irrepressible burst of pleasure. “It will be so
wonderful
to have a correspondent in England. She can tell me about the fashions—and the Prince—and Mr. Fox—”

Then something struck her. She looked at Colonel Cameron in puzzlement. Dusk was falling rapidly now, and she could distinguish little more than the craggy outline of his profile.

“You said the Mussons were your compatriots, sir?”

“Why yes, I, as they did, hail from America. But from a different region. They are Bostonians—New Englanders; whereas I was born in the Huron Mountains, on the shores of Lake Superior.”

“But you must surely be of Scots descent?”

Scylla smiled privately in the dusk, thinking of the tartan turban.

“Oh yes; my grandfather left Scotland as a young man, at the time of the 1715 rising, and founded a town in his name on the Red Cedar River, about a hundred miles to the south of where I was born. And then, many years later, I had a curiosity to visit the land of my ancestors. Which is one of the reasons that took me to Britain.”

“Did you find any of your family, sir?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed rather impatiently. “Who's to tell? I found Camerons in plenty, and many a tale of lads who had left in haste when the Stuart rising was put down, but which of the many Donald Camerons might have been my grandfather it was beyond my power to fathom.”

She guessed that the visit had been a disappointment to him and asked instead about his childhood. He said:

“Well, I was born with a roving foot, ma'am, and that's the truth of it. Perhaps it was the sight of the Red Indians coming down to our village to trade with the boats that plied along the lake—so proud and free, they stepped, in their grand feathers and leggings; they used to sell their furs and skins, then away, back to the mountains; no petty shopkeeping life for them, or digging the same patch of soil, year in, year out. My father was a doctor and wanted me to follow his calling, but I knew I could never stay in one town all my life. By the age of seventeen I was away. I have worked my passage on schooners and feluccas and dhows; I have been a camel driver in desert caravans; I have fought in other men's battles from Kashmir to Baghdad; and all so that I might catch a sight of some new part of the globe. And yet there still remains so much to see!”

Scylla did not immediately reply, but her deep sigh suggested how much she envied Colonel Cameron. After a while she exclaimed:

“
Why
may not women travel so? It is unfair!”

“Well, my dear,” replied the colonel in a tone of some amusement, “you have only yourselves to blame, you know! If you will all be so pretty and beguiling, is it to be wondered at that, as soon as you poke your charming little noses outside the front door—or the town wall—some brigand will pounce down on you and carry you off to his mountain castle? Why, I have seen a beautiful slave sold for twenty or even thirty thousand rupees—we value your sex too highly, you see, to let you go roaming around by yourselves!”

Ignoring this pleasantry, she persisted, “It is unfair. I wish I could dress up as a boy and travel to all the places you have seen.”

“And yet many an English young lady, I daresay, would give the pearls around her neck to see India and the citadel of Ziatur. And here I find you riding unescorted through the jungle—neither an English nor an Indian lady may do
that
.—Which reminds me,” Colonel Cameron added, dropping his bantering tone for a serious one, “is the Rani Sada still in the ascendant? Can she still twine the Maharajah around her little finger? The last thing he did before I left was to give her a necklace of pearls the size of cherries.”

“No, it is different now,” Scylla said, thinking of her interview with Mahtab Kour. “The Maharajah has no favorite at present, I believe—or if he has, it is a very closely guarded secret; and he is ill, very despondent in his spirits; but it is said that Sada has—has become friendly with Mihal Shahzada.”

Colonel Cameron let out a long, concerned whistle.

“No, has she indeed! And still has her head on her shoulders? The Maharajah
must
be in a bad skin—or is the real government now in the hands of Mihal?”

“I would say,” remarked Scylla after considering his question, “that matters are just about to come to a crisis.”

“It is always the way!” he exclaimed rather aggrievedly. “And should be a lesson to me never to return to a place for a second visit. If I do so, it is invariably to find that it has become a regular hornets' nest! But I had promised the Maharajah to come back one day with some carbines, and, fool that I am, I kept my promise.”

“Well,
I
certainly have cause to be grateful to you,” Scylla remarked, noticing with relief that the lights of Ziatur now sparkled like a tiny diadem far away across the dark plain. “I am deeply grateful to you, sir, for keeping your other promise, to Countess van Welcker. It is my birthday today; thanks to you, I find I have a new cousin as a present.”

“And a new friend,” said Colonel Cameron chivalrously. “If, as I hope, ma'am, you will allow me that honor?”

About four months after the newly married Fanny Paget had arrived at the Hermitage an unprecedented thing happened: Thomas announced that he was going to London for a few days and intended to take his wife with him. From the astonishment of his daughters, it was plain that a trip to London, for Thomas, was hardly more to be expected than a pilgrimage to Mecca; and for her own part, Fanny was dismally aware that her inclusion in the program was by no means to be regarded as a treat or mark of favor; on the contrary. Ever since her unplanned encounter with Lord Egremont, Thomas's attitude toward her had been compounded of total lack of faith in her judgement, suspicion of her motives, and a plain intention not to let her be on her own at any time. She was never out of the company of her stepdaughters unless Thomas was with her. Fanny, homesick and dejected, wondered bemusedly if all men were so. Or if it was her misfortune to have married a man who had a singularly, an inordinately jealous and mistrustful nature. In the circumstances, although naturally she had always wished to visit London, a trip to the capital with Thomas could offer no prospect of enjoyment but was more likely to be a penance, and she would very much have preferred to remain at home, enjoying the unaccustomed tranquillity of her husband's absence.

Another reason for this preference was that she felt particularly unwell nowadays; queasiness, headache, and languor afflicted her all day, but especially in the morning; her back and legs ached, her ankles swelled up, and she found herself only just able to struggle through her household duties. At first she thought, with a certain resignation, that perhaps she had fallen into a consumption and would presently die; then she would be happily reunited with her father, of whom she had dismaying tidings in her sisters' very infrequent letters. But as to her own state, the rector's wife presently enlightened her.

That comfortable lady had come calling a few days after Fanny's arrival at the Hermitage, and since Thomas could think of no rational excuse to forbid Fanny's returning the call—though he did stipulate that she must always be accompanied to the Rectory by one of her stepdaughters—a friendship had grown up between the households. The Rev. Martin Socket was a gentle, unpretentious man, generally to be found absorbed in some scientific experiment, with stains on his fingers and acid holes in his waistcoat; his wife, plump, untidy, and friendly, was the devoted mother of three small boys who spent the principal part of their free time enjoying the delights of Petworth House and all its miscellaneous company; both the rector and his wife were strongly attached to Lord Egremont and could not speak too highly of his lordship, who had indeed sent Mr. Socket (previously the tutor of Egremont's sons) to the University of Oxford and paid for his tuition there, so that he might acquire the necessary qualifications to become rector of Petworth. The fact that, in consequence, it had been necessary for Egremont's youngest boy, Charles, to accompany his tutor to the university, so that his lessons might continue, was regarded by the Sockets as nothing out of the common.

Mrs. Socket instantly diagnosed what was the matter with Fanny.

“Why, child, you are as pale as a whiting,” she said one morning when they were sorting clothes for the poor in the Rectory drawing room. And to Bet, who was with them, she added, “My dear, will you be so good as to step into the garden, where I see Nurse hanging out the boys' washing, and ask her to make up one of her brandy possets for your stepmama.”

After Bet had somewhat reluctantly obeyed this order, Mrs. Socket turned to Fanny and inquired:

“My dear, are you increasing?” And as Fanny looked her incomprehension of the query, she added more explicitly, “Do you think you are with child?”

At the girl's expression of shocked, wide-eyed amazement, she went on, smiling, “It is very often the way, you know, with young wives!”

A little more questioning soon proved that this was the case, and also revealed the great depths of Fanny's ignorance on the matter.

“My dear, where can you have been all your life? Did your mother not tell you—?”

“She died, ma'am, when I was born.”

“Ah, I see, you poor child. Well, I will put you in touch directly with an excellent midwife, Mrs. Damer, and ask Dr. Chilgrove to step around and have a talk with you; we shall soon have you in a more comfortable way, I promise you!”

The kindness and concern thus exhibited quite unmanned Fanny and she broke down in a burst of tears and sobbed out some of her anxieties and troubles. Mrs. Socket listened with a slight crease marring the normal placidity of her brow.

“If only Mr. Paget—did not seem so distrustful of me! He never lets me be alone—never! I must always be with one of the girls—or the housemaid, or Kate—if I so much as step outside the door to throw a handful of bread to the birds he is
so
angry. And—oh, ma'am! If only someone—if perhaps you—could persuade him not to take me to the mill any more—truly I find it so fatiguing that sometimes I think I am likely to die!”

Twice a week, in between his press gang duties, Thomas found time to pay a visit of inspection to his mill at Haslingbourne. There were two approaches to the mill for vehicles, either through the village of Byworth or along a cartway called Grove Lane, but usually, to spare his horses, Thomas went on foot, by a path which wound for about a mile along the bottom of the Shimmings Valley below his house. Moreover, by thus arriving on foot, he could be sure of taking his men unawares; it was his belief that if they were in constant expectation of a surprise visit they would be less given to idleness and loitering.

From the first, Thomas had expected Fanny to accompany him on these visits. And indeed in October and November she had greatly enjoyed the walk, which crossed and recrossed the brook in the winding valley by a number of small footbridges and passed below a picturesque series of hanging woods along the valley sides. But latterly she had felt so ill and tired, and the path was so slippery with ice and mud—for an early and bitterly cold winter had the whole country in its grip—that she had come to dread these excursions. Her hands and feet frozen, she had much ado to keep up with Thomas, who strode on ahead, wrapped in his own uncongenial thoughts, without troubling to see how she managed, apart from an impatient call of “Hurry up, Frances. Make haste! We cannot be dawdling about all day,” if she fell too far behind.

The hour or so spent at the mill was always purgatory to Fanny. It was a high-roomed, freezing, drafty place, vibrating always to the roar and grind of the mill machinery; there was nowhere to sit down, and wherever she stood, she inevitably felt herself in the way, some man wheeling a barrowload of sacks would be obliged to call, “Mind yerself, missus!” Also she could not help being aware that her husband's visits were extremely unpopular with the men, who scowled at him behind his back and received his suggestions for more efficient organization with unconcealed hostility and contempt; she had caught their nickname for him, “clung-headed ol' regulator,” and felt herself included in their scorn and dislike. By the time the visit was over Fanny was always exhausted and miserably cold, her ankles swollen with standing about; then there was the half hour's walk back along the valley to be faced, with the biting north wind full in their faces, an excessively steep climb up the slippery valley side at the finish, and Thomas in a bad temper because of all the opposition and ill will that he had encountered.

Some of this distress Fanny managed to convey, to Mrs. Socket, who said, “Well, my dear, in the general way I would say that it did nothing but good for a girl in your situation to take regular exercise on foot—Lord, when I was expecting Johnnie and Frederick I used to go out riding every day with Mr. Socket and never thought anything of it!—but I can see that you are not quite the thing at present, and I will speak to your husband on the matter.”

That she had done so was evidenced by Thomas's extreme annoyance and displeasure. “Who told that busybody to come prying into my affairs? I am the proper person to decide what is best for you, and I say that a healthful walk down the valley twice a week is better than dawdling inside the house all day long!” Thomas flatly refused to permit Fanny to discontinue her visits to the mill, nor did he allow the attendance of the midwife, Mrs. Damer—“
I
will engage to procure such a person when it is necessary, which at present it is not!”

However a couple of weeks later, after an exceptionally severe frost, Fanny slipped on a patch of ice when returning home up the steep wooded track, known as the Glebe Path, that led to the back gate of the garden. She fell and bruised herself so severely that for a few days a miscarriage was apprehended; Dr. Chilgrove, who had to be summoned, insisted that she stay in bed for at least a week, and forbade the resumption of walks to the mill for another six weeks, in spite of Thomas's furious expostulations.

“A woman who is always indoors coddling herself will never produce a healthy child. I wish my son to be a strong-limbed and active boy—not a puling milksop!” And he shook his three-fingered fist in the doctor's face.

“Very true,” said Chilgrove. “But,” he added bluntly, “you are going the best way to ensure that your son is born
dead
, sir, rather than healthy and active. Let your wife take outside exercise, to be sure, but let it be of a more moderate nature, in the garden, where she may walk to and fro and then return indoors when she is tired. Mrs. Paget is young, sir, and on the frail side; she may live to bear you many more children, but only if she is looked after carefully at the present time.”

None of which speech pleased Thomas; he strongly disliked being obliged to take orders from someone else and was enraged at the thought that, in spite of his care in picking Fanny, he might have saddled himself with yet another bad bargain, a sickly, unhealthy wife who would not be able to give him the heir he so passionately wanted. However he found himself forced to take notice of the doctor's warning, and the unwonted luxury of a week in bed did Fanny so much good that after the end of that period she was able to get up and resume her household occupations.

Taking exercise, as prescribed by the doctor, with Bet or Martha in the garden, she had occasion to regret the exchange of the pleasant, friendly Talgarth for Goble, the older gardener who had replaced him. Goble was a gloomy, taciturn man who never had anything to say unless asked a direct question; he went silently about his work, digging, potting, and pruning; occasionally he could be heard muttering some biblical quotation, generally of an ominous and condemnatory nature; the look on his face was sour, withdrawn, and forbade any approaches.

One day, however, shortly after her regime of garden exercise had commenced, Fanny was impelled to speak to Goble when she found him at work on the ash tree with a ladder and a bundle of wires and leather thongs.

“Oh, what are you doing, Goble?” she exclaimed in distress and astonishment, for, balanced on the ladder, he was slashing the bark on the upper sides of the boughs, bending them, and tying them pointing downward, binding them tightly to the trunk of the tree, which was also tightly strapped around with leather thongs and hempen cords.

“Master's orders,” he grunted shortly, and then, as she persisted, “But why? What are you doing that for?” he explained.

“Master want 'er made into a weeping tree, so 'er won't cut off so much light from the 'ouse. That's why I'm a-tying of 'er branches and binding up the trunk, so 'er won't grow no 'igher.”

And he took a pot of tar and began slapping brushfuls of it over the gashes he had made in the bark, so that the tree's silvery elegance was marred with great black spots.

Fanny was aghast. By now she knew that it was useless—indeed, would do nothing but harm—for her to remonstrate or argue with Thomas. She felt quite certain that, unable to fell the tree, he had thus vented his spite and frustration by crippling it. Every time she passed the bare bole after that, and saw its naked boughs tied down and constricted by those punitive bonds, the ugly splashes of tar on its bark, she felt as if it were her own body that had been so cramped and humiliated.

Thomas himself took considerable satisfaction in the spectacle.

“If I can't cut it down, at least I can
train
it,” he was wont to say, rubbing his hands. “Next summer, when the leaves are on, we shall see what a difference that makes!”

Fanny tried to appease her own indignation and make atonement to the tree by planting daffodil bulbs around the tree, but Goble told her gloomily that it was too late in the year and they would never flower.

And Thomas's relatively good mood caused by the coercion of the tree was due to be short-lived, for two events occurred to put an end to it.

The first, in January, was the arrival of a letter.

“Lord, Stepmama!” cried Martha, running into the parlor one day (she had recently adopted this mode of address, usually spoken with such a satirical drawl that Fanny suspected she used it out of malice, rather than any increase of friendly feelings). “Lord, there's a letter come addressed to our cousin Juliana, and with
such
a foreign-looking cover—I dare swear it's from those twin cousins I told you of, out there in the East Indies!”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Fanny. “How very unfortunate! They do not know, I suppose, that your cousin was obliged to leave England. I wonder how this letter may be sent on to her? Perhaps Thomas may enclose it in one of his own, next time he has occasion to write to Countess van Welcker.”

Fanny herself had not yet achieved her intention of writing to her cousin by marriage; every time she suggested it to Thomas he had replied that it was not necessary, he himself had said everything that was proper, a letter from Fanny would add too much extra weight to the packet of business communications that he was dispatching.