Ashenden (19 page)

“Yes.”

“I thought Florence was a very fine girl.”

Philip hesitated at the doorway, tempted for a moment to pursue the conversation in this new direction, then thought better of it.

*  *  *

It was going to rain again. The cool evening smelled moist.

“Puss?” Mrs. Trimble called into the twilight. “Puss?”

The cat had got out somehow when she hadn’t been looking. Another train was due. It would frighten him.

She pulled her shawl closer against the air, and her fingers found the smooth hollows of the leaf pin. The man who’d sold it to her outside the asylum gates where her husband was shut away had said it was silver, but it wasn’t silver. They let some of them sell things they made, the ones who were no danger to themselves or others. It gave them a bit of income. The man had been chained to an iron ring. He said he wandered in his wits, which was why they didn’t let him wander very far. The day she bought the pin was the first and only time she ever visited Richard. Afterwards there were always good reasons not to. Then one April morning he had hanged himself.

Asylum meant refuge, and there was none of it within those stout howling walls. “Puss?” Tears stood in her eyes. They were not for the cat, nor for Richard, but for her own deliverance.

Six years ago last June and that wretched fool Georgiana More had not seen her children from that day onwards. You might take a penniless scribbler as a lover, but you mustn’t take a tradesman or an artisan, or whatever a painter was. Society closed its doors on her until the day of her death, which had come soon enough. After
the divorce, More sued Delgado for the money his wife had lent him, with no success. The whole family was bad with money one way or another.

These past years Mrs. Trimble had come to see her dismissal as a form of retribution. Richard had died alone, by his own hand, and she had gone on working. She had visited once, put him out of her mind, and gone on working, working, working. When the working stopped, and she had stopped, there had been time to think about that.

She called the cat.

A train roared past and she realized how seriously she had been entertaining the idea of throwing herself under one. Beyond the blotted ink of the apple branches, the ground cut away to the track. Along the line, the cinders were dying to ash and taking their light with them.

A soft shape whirred against her skirts. “Where have you been?” she said, bending down, the cat’s tail a knobbly rope through her fingers. Then she went indoors, pinching the bridge of her nose, wondering how she was going to turn an outbuilding into a school.

I
n the house a deep familiarity settles over the rooms. Stretch out a hand and you touch a brown-and-white pottery cow you have known since your childhood half a century before and your grandchildren now play with. Walk down the hallways and memories come to greet you, the same inconsequential thoughts every day, nothing momentous.

There are improvements, of course, and upkeep, necessary renewals and repairs. But on the whole things remain as they are, year to year.

Above stairs, it’s an ordered life, all the more pleasant for being predictable. Below works an army to keep it that way, lighting fires, blacking grates, winding clocks, cooking meals, washing laundry, sweeping floors, and dusting every nook and cranny. Thirty labor in the gardens alone. It’s so long since the house has known hardship, it has forgotten what it is.

*  *  *

The tree was almost twelve feet tall. Its sharp pine scent filled the staircase hall; sometimes you could catch a hint of it along a corridor when you were least expecting to.

“It’s a good one this year, isn’t it?” said Florence Henderson, turning to her husband. “Well proportioned. They aren’t always. Sometimes they’re a trifle lopsided or have bare patches.” She reached
out to grasp one of the lower branches, ran its needles through her hand, and made the baubles jingle.

“A fine specimen,” said Philip, nodding. “Very handsome.”

“Do you remember the first? It must have been twenty years ago. Everyone thought we were mad.”

“We were mad,” said Philip. “We nearly burned the place down. That candle . . .”

They both stared up at the Christmas tree, each gravely considering fire buckets, and whether there were enough of them, and then went through to the library, where they had fallen into the habit of spending the latter part of the morning. Today there were the arrangements for the holidays to discuss.

“I thought we might put Rowena up in her old room,” said Florence, sitting to one side of the hearth, where crackling logs sent showers of sparks gusting up the chimney. Rowena was due to arrive from London the next day. “She won’t mind, will she?”

“Of course not. Why should she?” Philip propped his stick against his desk.

“It’s simply that I meant to replace the wallpaper when we were redecorating that side last year and somehow never got round to it. She will find it rather shabby.”

“She hates a fuss.” Philip eased himself into the chair facing hers.

“A cushion for your back?”

He accepted the cushion.

Florence consulted a list she had made, ticking off items with a gold mechanical pencil Philip had bought her in Paris. “Then Adelaide and William can have the east suite, which leaves the red bedroom for James and Matilda. It’s going to be rather a squeeze in the nursery with the little ones, but it can’t be helped. Just as well Constance and Flora have decided to spend the holidays in town or we should have been truly overrun.”

Philip smiled at the woman he had loved for forty-five years. She had kept him waiting a long time before accepting his proposal of marriage, a day he still counted as the happiest of his life. Four children they’d had—Constance, Flora, Adelaide, and James, in that
order, James the youngest by far. Eleven grandchildren now and one on the way.

“I think it’s a pity Constance and Flora aren’t coming.”

“I knew you’d say that.” Florence squinted at the page in front of her, holding it at arm’s length. “Time for them to make their own family traditions. It’s what we did.”

“That’s true.”

“I’ve given instructions to Mrs. Burgoyne regarding Matilda’s condition. Christmas fare can be indigestible at the best of times.” Mrs. Burgoyne was their cook, and Matilda’s condition was one she shared with many young married women.

“Fatherhood,” said Philip, “I hope it settles James down. When I was his age . . .”

“You were a very intense young man. It rather alarmed me.”

“You got over it.”

“And I’m very glad that I did. I think Matilda will make James an excellent wife.”

Philip was not entirely sure about that. Or rather, he was not sure that James would make an excellent husband.

A maid came into the room to replenish the log basket. Coal they had for most of the rooms, but a wood fire was company as much as it was heat.

“Mary,” said Florence, “I find I need my spectacles.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll fetch them for you directly.”

“And Mary?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You haven’t done your skirt up properly.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll see to it.” The girl bobbed her head and left the room.

“Oh, I love Christmas,” said Florence, stretching her hands to the flames.

*  *  *

By the following week all the family had arrived and the house was busy again: more bedrooms to make up, fires to light, and children
to tend to, along with the seasonal preparations. It was a great deal of work. However, the Hendersons were always generous with their Christmas boxes, which was something to look forward to when the fuss was over.

On the Thursday Dulcie was rushed from pillar to post, answering one ringing bell after another, fetching and clearing this and that. One of the children upset a basin in the nursery and there was a puddle to mop and a rug to dry. By late evening she was tired to the death and should have been in bed like the other housemaids. Instead she was trudging through the woods to the old estate cottage where her great-uncle lived.

A light wavering at the upper window answered her lantern. Bare branches crackled and creaked; stars were fierce pinpricks in the night sky. In the cold, dead heart of the year all the creatures were asleep in their burrows or stiff under hedgerows. She lifted the latch, let herself in, and stamped feeling back into her feet.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Dulcie.”

The cottage had a stale smell of mice and old men. She went up the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door.

The old woman sitting in the chair was a crazy bundle of shawls and coverlets. Mrs. Jakes blinked in the glare of the lantern, knitting needles ticking over of their own accord. “You got away, then.”

“I did.” Dulcie Godwin rubbed her hands. “My goodness, it’s freezing in here. There’s frost on the flags downstairs.”

“Mr. Hastings was never a one for home comforts.”

Her great-uncle Hastings, the former steward of Ashenden, lay in the high iron bed. Age was sucking the life out of him, breath by breath. His dark eyes were sunk under the nutshells of their lids and his nose was a prow. Only the large bony hands were restless, plucking at nothing and each other.

“Won’t be long now. He’ll be gone before daybreak. Pass in his sleep, I expect.”

No one laid out a corpse as beautifully as Mrs. Jakes. In any case,
you couldn’t shake her off the end of a life if you tried. She liked to keep her ear pressed to the keyhole of death’s door.

Dulcie put out her lantern and sat at the bottom of the bed. It was either that or the floor. Something stirred with a yelp, which shot her upright again.

“No need to take on, it’s only the dog.” A whiskery snout poked out from under the bedclothes, growled, and disappeared again. “Bless him. He’ll be nice and warm in there.”

The dog was called Fly and he was mostly terrier, a snapper at heels. She had never known her great-uncle to be without a dog, and Fly would be the one who survived him. Ninety-six was a long life whether you measured it in dogs or years.

“They do say the good die young,” said Mrs. Jakes. “Mr. Hastings always had that much vinegar in him, it’s no surprise he’s lasted all this while. Mind you, Nan Turner, she was eighty-two when she went and she never had a bad word to say about no one.” The knitting needles clicked away. “Cold enough to snow tonight.”

It didn’t smell as if it were going to snow. Snow had a smell, like iron. You could taste it at the back of your tongue.

“Gravedigger’s going to have a hard burying. Still, it would be nice to have a white Christmas.” The candle spat and hissed on the ledge. “Family arrive safe?”

“Yes, they’re all there now, Mrs. Jakes. Those that are coming.”

“You have your hands full, I expect.”

“We do.”

“The happy times that house has seen,” said Mrs. Jakes, with a heavy sigh that suggested the house had seen the very opposite. She ran her crooked fingers down the shapeless length of her knitting. “How’s that fellow of yours, Dulcie?”

“Well enough. Jack’s out with the singers, the waits, tonight.”

“I thought we’d have seen the pair of you in the church by now.”

“You know how it is.”

“You don’t want to be wasting your good years, Dulcie. Take it from me, there’s precious few of them. You’re not getting any younger.”

Dulcie was not yet twenty. At home she’d shared a bed with her sisters until the oldest got married at sixteen, by which time her youngest brother had shifted out of their parents’ room to fill the gap. In most families round about it was the same. The infants went in drawers or were tucked up with their parents, and the older ones were three or four or five a bed. What one caught, you all caught, itching and sweating and coughing through childhood, sleeping with an elbow in your back, or a knee, never knowing whose dream you were dreaming. At the maids’ quarters up at the house it was no better: there was temper, crying fits, and sulks. Marriage, of itself, was no answer. Her sister had three children by now and she was still cramped under the roof of her in-laws.

“We mean to set up on a good footing in our own place.” She wondered at the even tone of her voice and what a lie it told.

“Then let’s hope it’s true what they say and your old uncle’s got money put by. Lord knows he never spent any.” Mrs. Jakes wheezed a laugh. “You’ve been that good to him these last months, why shouldn’t you have expectations? I’d be the same in your shoes.”

Dulcie pinched her leg through the thick wool layers of her skirts to stop words tumbling out. A blush scalded her face. How could your body make so much heat on a cold night? Where did it come from? She was glad it was dark.

When she was a little girl and her mother had taken her to visit the cottage deep in the woods, her great-uncle had frightened her. He had a shock of white hair and a sour, downturned mouth meant for complaining, and there was always a dog that sniffed her in private places and decided it didn’t like her. “I know what you’re about,” her uncle would say to her mother as she sat in the chimney corner darning his clothes or knelt to rake out his hearth. “I’m no fool. You might save yourself the trouble. I’m not about to remember you in my will. Climb up here, little missy, and I’ll show you my pocket watch.” Then Dulcie would have to climb on the old man’s lap and be shown the watch and be told how it was a token of long years of service and was very precious on that
account. “Got your nose!” he would say at the end, snapping the watch shut in her face and laughing when she cried. Her mother said he wasn’t used to children.

Soon after she and Jack had begun to walk out, her mother had suggested she call by the cottage whenever she could find the time. “You never know,” said her mother, with a tilt of her head that stood in for whatever she couldn’t bring herself to say. So Dulcie went along on her half days. The new dog, Fly, didn’t like her any better than the old, dead dogs had done, but her uncle let her tidy and clean and straighten, mumbling and shifting in his creaking ladder-back chair, his wet eyes following her as she lined the pantry shelves with new paper or cleared up the mouse droppings, her Jack cooling his heels outside, impatient for her to come back and rebuff his kisses. You can’t be frightened of a harmless old man, she told herself. Then afterwards she would come out into the sunshine or the rain or whatever weather it was and she would feel like she’d left a shadow or a weight behind.