The Weeping Ash (6 page)

“Do not be dawdling in there all night, Frances! Candles cost money too, remember!”

Fanny would not have minded taking her bath in the dark; outside the window a great orange-colored autumn moon could be seen through the branches of a leafy tree that swayed and swung and danced in the rising wind, casting a series of sliding shadows over the bedroom wall.

“Draw the curtains closer to, Frances,” ordered Thomas.

Even so, after she had come to bed and he had blown out the candle, the whole room seemed filled with the sighing and the presence of the tree outside, as if its restless boughs came thrusting right through the wall.

“And
there's
a case of female stupidity for you, if ever I saw one!” grumbled Thomas. “Imagine planting a tree so close to the house—it cannot be more than four or five yards from the wall. Bound to cause damp and cut off the light. I'll have it chopped down first thing tomorrow.”

Fanny made a small sound of protest, as he moved and grasped her arm with an ungentle hand; she hardly knew if she appealed against the tree's fate or her own.

“
Now
what is the matter, Frances? Why do you lie on the edge of the bed? Come here.”

He rolled over and seized hold of her.

* * *

The click of the latch woke Fanny next morning; slowly, reluctantly, she opened her eyes to discover that the fire had been newly kindled and burned cheerfully, the curtains were partly drawn back, and a ewer of hot water stood steaming upon the chest. Beyond the curtain shone a clear blue sky; a brilliant morning had succeeded the stormy night, and from where she lay Fanny could discern the tops of several stately trees, their autumnal color gilded by the early sun. This agreeable prospect, however, did little to disperse her wretchedness, and she lay wondering, almost in despair, how her new life was to be borne. Why, she demanded of herself for the hundredth time, how could she have been such a fool as to imagine that marriage, any marriage, no matter to whom, would be preferable to enduring the pangs of unrequited love at home, under the sharp scrutiny of her sisters, and being subjected to the sad and troubling spectacle of her father's failing health? Now she had only herself to blame, she was justly served; she could have refused Captain Paget's offer, Papa had told her that he would not constrain her in any way (though she knew he had been greatly relieved when she accepted).

Beside her, Thomas, on his back, arms flung wide, occupying two thirds of the bed, still snored gustily in heavy slumber. As well he might, Fanny thought with a shudder; for half the night his savage, repeated, insatiable onslaughts had hurt, shocked, and bewildered her; he had used her, not like a human being at all, but like some rag doll, a pliable, boneless object, incapable of feeling, or dignity, or response. She had heard the church clock strike two, strike three, strike four… She was covered in bruises, and her lips were sore and swollen where, again and again, she had fastened her teeth on them in a struggle not to cry out. Bet, she was only too well aware, slept in a small room next door; and Fanny could not bear the idea that anybody—let alone her eldest stepdaughter—should guess what she was going through, how she was humiliated. Bad enough that it should happen, intolerable that anybody should know about it.

Terrified that Thomas might suddenly wake and make yet more demands on her, she wriggled carefully out of the bed and, with a silence and speed acquired during sixteen years' of sharing a small room with two older sisters, she washed in a cupful of hot water (fearful of her husband's anger should she use too much), hastily combed out her hazel-brown hair and put it up in its knot, then pulled on a soft blue wool dress, long-sleeved and high in the neck. It was an old dress, not fashionable, for nobody wore wool any more, but it would cover the worst of her bruises. Then, softly as a ghost, she slipped from the chamber. Her well-justified apprehension at the thought of Thomas's ire when he woke and found that she had given him the slip was quite outweighed by the desperation of her need to be alone, if only for a short while. It was yet early; she had heard the church clock strike seven not long before she got up, and she knew the family breakfast was not served until eight; she would have at least half an hour to herself.

On the ground floor sounds of domestic activity could be heard in other rooms: a brush wielded on a mat, the scrape of a shovel in ash, a knife being sharpened down below in the basement kitchen. Anxious to avoid encounter with any of the servants, Fanny picked up the gray shawl Bet had procured for her the evening before, which had been left on a chair in the hall; thus equipped, she found a glass-paned door leading into the garden, unlocked it, and slipped quietly through and out into the crisp autumn morning, huddling the shawl tightly around her slender arms and shoulders.

The door gave onto a flagged path which skirted the house. The first thing that met Fanny's eye, as she stepped out, was the tree that had so excited Thomas's wrath on the previous night.

It was a graceful young ash, perhaps thirty years old, tall, well shaped, its topmost boughs reaching already as high as the roof of the house. The smooth silver-gray trunk was still no thicker man a ship's mast, but the upper branches were already beginning to spread wide. The fingerlike, pinnate leaves, which in the windy night had swung and signed and shaken so wildly, now hung calm in the morning light, their color, already nipped by the first frosts, a delicate, radiant pale gold; the branches that had groaned and wailed like the strings of some giant's harp now held their elegant position unmoving against the cool sky.
Yggdrasil
, thought Fanny—for among the Rev. Mr. Herriard's theological library there had also been many books on mythology and Fanny had read them all—Yggdrasil, Odin's ash tree, the sacred stem, the axis that holds earth and sky together; and her heart lifted, in acknowledgment of the tree's peaceful gold-and-silver beauty.

Beyond it lay a drift of mist, beyond that a hillside shouldered up on the far side of a small, deep valley. No houses were to be seen.

Fanny carefully tiptoed the length of the house on the flagged path, then took a diagonal across a dewy lawn to reach the edge of the garden, which, she now saw, occupied an extensive, wedge-shaped terrace of land. Beyond the boundary wall the ground appeared to drop away steeply.

Descending a short, shallow flight of steps, Fanny found herself on a lower level, a long, grassy walk which ran the entire length of the garden on its valley side. The walk was screened from the house by a yew hedge; on its far side a low wall gave onto the valley; beyond this wall the drop was quite steep—from ten to twelve feet—so that the garden seemed bounded by a rampart.

Fanny caught her breath at the beauty of the prospect over the wall: in the bottom of the valley, visible here and there between drifts of mist, a clear brook meandered, its course marked out, from curve to curve, by an occasional oak or clump of osiers; beyond the brook meadows ran up steeply to the top of a small hill crowned with a spinney; and beyond this hill a higher, darker mass of woodland stretched away into the distance. To the north of the ridge the country flattened out into a blue expanse of weald—plowland, pasture, and small patches of copse extending far away to a distant line of blue hills on the horizon, possibly thirty or forty miles off. Perhaps London lies there, thought Fanny, whose notion of distance was very inexact; and she strained her eyes, searching for smoke or the hint of a city on the misty plain. Barnaby had gone to London to be with his regiment until it sailed for India; perhaps he was there still…

Fanny did not know how long she stood absorbed, the morning sun warm on her cheek, drinking in the beauty of this landscape. As long as I can come here, she told herself; as long as I can see this—even if only once a day—I shall be able to bear
anything
.

Having formed even this small plan comforted Fanny a little; she felt as if she had been able to make
some
effort to regulate her new life. Then, recalling to mind that the breakfast hour must be fast approaching, she turned to ascend the steps and retrace her way to the house.

She had, overnight, wholly abandoned any notion that she might ever find it possible to love Thomas Paget. Try as she would, she could discover in him no quality that she could admire, or even like; he might conduct himself with rectitude in his professional sphere, no doubt he did, but at home he was churlish, parsimonious, unloving to his daughters, and apparently so completely lacking in delicacy or sensitivity that he neither knew nor cared if he subjected his wife to severe physical suffering.—He was unlovable, that was all there was to it.—Obey him, though, Fanny must and would; she would take pains to carry out his will in domestic matters and do her best to ensure that day-to-day life in the Hermitage ran smoothly. This she resolved, and hastened toward the garden door so that her lateness for breakfast on the first morning should not be an immediate cause for his displeasure.

Reaching the flagged path, she hurried along it; but the flags were smooth, slippery with dew that was almost frost, and she slid on one of them and would have fallen, had not a hand grasped her arm from behind. A voice exclaimed solicitously:

“Careful, ma'am! They stones be main gliddery, yet!”

“Oh, thank you!” Fanny gasped, recovering her balance with an effort.

Turning, she found herself looking up into the dark blue eyes of a tall young man who had jumped forward to catch her, dropping the lawn scythe he had been carrying; he wore a gardener's hessian apron, and his curly black hair was tied back with a piece of bast; his face and hands were brown as those of a gypsy. Long, and strongly boned, his face looked as if it wore a habitually serious expression, but now it broke into a smile, with a flash of very white teeth, as he released her arm, and she stood up straight, shaking her blue dress to rights.

“Eh, it would never do for the new mistress of the Hermitage to slip and break her ankle, first morning out! That'd be a bad omen for sure, that would!”

“But one which you have luckily averted!” Fanny said, smiling too. “Thank you—no harm is done. I am much obliged to you for your quickness. You must be the gardener; but I am afraid that, as yet, I do not know your name.”

“It is Andrew Talgarth, ma'am.”

“Did—are you—” Are you one of the servants that my husband brought with him? Fanny wanted to ask, but the phrase, somehow, seemed inapplicable to the tall, black-haired young man who stood so easily beside her holding the scythe which he had picked up again. “Do you belong to Petworth, or did you come here with my husband?” she finally said.

“I was working here as gardener, ma'am, before you came, for Madame Reynard, the French lady, and then for Miss Juliana—but I dunna belong to Petworth. I come from Breconshire, from the Black Mountains; Lord Egremont fetched my father an' me here, a long time since, to work in the Petworth House gardens and park; and then he asked me to help lay out the garden here, for Madame Reynard, when he had this house built for her, sixteen, seventeen year agone.”

“So long ago as that?” asked Fanny, surprised. “You hardly look old enough!”

“I'm thirty-two, ma'am, but I've been a gardener's boy ever since I was weaned, as you might say,” he answered, smiling. “Born with a trowel in my hand. My da was used to work for a mort of different gentry, all over the country, laying out their pleasure grounds—afore he settled down with Lord Egremont, up at Petworth House yonder.”

Talgarth gestured toward the western end of the garden where, Fanny now noticed, beyond a stone barn, a high wall, and a pair of coach houses, there rose the red-tiled roofs of the town. Beyond them, higher still, severely rectangular, the stone portico and slate roof of an impressively large mansion could be seen. It seemed almost as big as a castle.

“Dear me, is that Petworth House? I had no notion that it was so close. Or so large! Does your father still work for Lord Egremont?”

“Nay, he's retired now, ma'am; Lord Egremont builded him a liddle house, up in the dilly woods yonder”—Talgarth gestured across the valley—“where he has his bean plot and his gillyflowers an' his pipe an' 'baccy, an' plays his fiddle; but he still danders over to the big house, now an' now, just to make sure all's well wi' the garden. Lord Egremont, he do set great store by my da's opinion; anything new that's to be done, he likes my da to come and talk it over. Tending a garden, ma'am, be like to rearing a child, I reckon. You do grow mortal attached. Seems you're bound up, forevermore, to a plot where you've once set your spade in the marl—like as if you been tethered to it with bass bark—and you can't noways forget it.”

In demonstration of his point, he pulled a hank of bast from the pocket of his apron and wound a twist of it around two of his fingers.

“I can quite understand that,” said Fanny. “You have made a very beautiful place out of this one, indeed.”

She looked about it with simple pleasure. On the level area between the house and the long yew hedge there was a formal garden, flower beds intersected by narrow brick paths. Although it was late in the season, the beds, between small clipped box hedges, blazed with color and were beginning, now the sun grew warmer, to give off sweet, aromatic odors. Beyond the formal garden beds the turning leaves of two small sturdy cherry trees growing in the lawn made splashes of red-gold; a shrubbery of lilac bushes and evergreens lay between the house and the stone barn; fruit trees were carefully pleached against a distant high wall; climbing roses grew up the side of the house and against two small summerhouses at either end of the yew-tree walk, their tendrils still smothered with late blossoms. Bees hummed in a lavender hedge, which had been clipped once and was flowering again. Although it was no great estate, the garden, perhaps half an acre, had been carefully planned so as to give the greatest possible variety and to seem larger than it was.