The Alington Inheritance (5 page)

Jenny moved cautiously. She had to get out of the room before Carter came and the children. Where was she to go? Where could she hide? The answer came bleak and plain. She mustn’t hide. She must be just as usual. She must be where she would be expected to be. In her own room? No. Because Mrs. Forbes might have opened the door and looked in on her way to the schoolroom. Where, then? The bathroom. You could lock yourself in. She could wash her face and tidy her hair, and be ready for supper with the children.

She felt better with the bathroom door securely locked, but when she looked in the glass her reflection shocked her. There was no colour in it, no colour at all. And she looked older. She sponged vigorously, and didn’t let herself think, and when she looked again she looked more as she usually did. Then as she stood there looking into the glass the colour faded and she was pale again.

She came out of the bathroom, and met Carter and the children.

“Oh, do you know, Jenny, Nurse has got a new kitten!” said Joyce.

“It’s sweet!” said Meg. “It really is! Its name is Patrick! Its fur is as long as this!” She showed the length with her fingers. “And it purred at me! It didn’t purr at Joyce! She didn’t hold it comfortably, and she kissed it! Kittens don’t like being kissed!”

“They do!” said Joyce. “They like it awfully!”

“Then why didn’t Patrick purr for you? Oh, Jenny, I want a kitten so badly! Do you think Mother would let me have one?”

Carter broke in.

“Now Meg and Joyce, you come along and get your things off quick. The mistress isn’t best pleased with us being so late as it is. And it’s not the time to ask about cats and suchlike, I can tell you that.”

She swept them into their bedroom and went on talking.

“They won’t want anything. Such teas as they ate I never saw! Anyone would think they’d been starved all the week! I’ll take my own things off if you’ll see them to bed. And hurry, you two, or your mother will be coming up.”

She vanished, and Jenny was left with the children, who under pressure from the last threat whisked them out of their clothes and into the bathroom and out again like mice running away from a particularly active cat. They were ready for bed, washed pink and spotless, by the time Mrs. Forbes came up the stairs. Jenny thought she looked a little disappointed, and she thought she knew why. She had had to swallow a bitter pill, and it would have been a relief to find a legitimate reason for anger. There was no reason at all. There were two little girls, miraculously clean and neat, kneeling one on either side of Jenny as she sat on the bed to hear their prayers.

“Please God, bless Mother, and Mac, and Alan, and make me a good girl.”

Joyce on the other side of Jenny repeated the same words,

“And make me a good girl.”

“And bless Nanny and Carter and everybody. And bless Jenny and Joyce. Amen.”

And Joyce repeating it,

“And bless Nanny and Carter and everybody. And bless Jenny and Meg. Amen.”

Jenny felt as if her heart was breaking. She had her back to the door, and when it opened she did not see who came. She thought it must be Carter. It was a shock to hear Mrs. Forbes’ voice, and to turn round and see her standing in the doorway waiting for the prayers to be over. She spoke with her usual briskness.

“Into bed with you both! Good-night, Meg—good-night, Joyce. Now, Jenny, you had better dine with us tonight. It will be company for the boys.”

Jenny didn’t know what she felt like. She couldn’t do it—she couldn’t. That was her first thought as Mrs. Forbes kissed the two little girls and left the room, putting out the light as she went.

Jenny stood for a moment in the darkened room. Then she kissed Meg and kissed Joyce and went out into the lighted passage, her mind full of the one thought. She couldn’t do it.

Mrs. Forbes had not waited for her. She had gone into her own room across the passage and shut the door.

Jenny went to her room. She couldn’t do it. But she must. She had got to get away. If they knew, they would stop her. She had got to get away. She couldn’t stay here and meet Mac—she simply couldn’t do it.

She had got to do it—just this once more. And then she would get away from them all and never see them again. The thought of the little girls tugged at her heart. They would forget her. She thought of the people she had known when she was their age. Not Garsty, because Garsty went on. Garsty would never become a shadow in a distant place. Garsty was for now and for always. She thought about old Mrs. Pennystone who had died when Jenny was Meg’s age. She remembered her as a very kind old lady, very fat. She had pressed peppermints on her when they met, and she had given her a wonderful doll for Christmas the year before she died. What was the good of thinking about Mrs. Pennystone, or about any of the other people she had known in the village, and who had died or gone away? They weren’t her own people, and the Forbeses were. That was the plain truth that you couldn’t get away from. Your family was your family. Mac and Alan were her cousins, and the little girls, too. She didn’t know of any other relations. If she went away she would have no one at all. She stopped and looked at that. It was better to have no one than to have people you couldn’t trust.

She wanted to get right away, and she wanted to get away at once, and to do that she must go down and play a part. Something in her said, “I can’t. I can’t—I can’t do it.” And something else said, “I must.” She listened to that voice.

When she came into the drawing-room Mac was there. He was reading the paper, but he looked up, smiled his charming smile, and said,

“Well, what have you been doing with yourself, Jenny my love?”

The colour whipped into Jenny’s face. She came up the long room to the hearth and stood there. She had put on a black lace dress which she had made for Christmas last year. It was too old for her, but when you have only one evening dress it is better to have a black one, and if it is lace you can do all sorts of things with it, so that it will go on for a long time. You have to think of those things when you are young and poor.

Jenny didn’t know it, but the black dress did something to her. It made her look older, and it was very, very becoming. She stooped forward over the fire and turned her head away from Mac. She couldn’t look at him.

She said, “Oh nothing,” in as careless a tone as she could manage. To her horror, she felt the colour run up to her face. It burned there and then slowly, slowly retreated.

Mac put down his paper and got up and came over to her.

“Why, Jenny,” he said in a laughing, teasing tone, “what was all the colour about? It was very becoming. I’m not complaining about it, but I do want to know why the flags.”

Jenny stood her ground. She laughed a little and said,

“What an imagination you have!”

“Have I?”

He laughed, too, and came to stand by the fireplace on the opposite side. He was so near that he could have touched her if he had stretched out his hand.

The feeling that he was so close came upon Jenny with an intolerable force. She had been so near, so near to loving him, and it was gone—it was all gone away for ever. How was she to endure having him so near?

She must, she must endure it. Just for this once. Until she could get away. For this one evening she must play her part. And then—oh, then she would be done with them all.

He was speaking now, looking down at her with the smile she had thought a loving one.

“You’re very fine tonight.”

“Am I? I don’t often dine with you, do I? This is the only evening dress I’ve got.”

“And very nice, too. A little old for you perhaps, but you’re young enough to take that as a compliment. It’s quite a sincere one.” He bent nearer. “Jenny, will you come for a walk with me tomorrow afternoon?”

She lifted her eyes to his face and said gravely,

“I don’t know.”

“I want you to. Just you and me. Please, Jenny.”

And with that the door opened and Mrs. Forbes came in. She was talking over her shoulder to Alan, who was behind her. When she straightened up and saw Mac and Jenny she came forward with a determined smile.

“Oh, there you are, you two! Well, Jenny, that’s a very pretty dress. Have I seen it before?”

“I had it last Christmas,” said Jenny. “Garsty had the stuff, and I made it up.”

“You made it very nicely.”

Mrs. Forbes was gracious with a deliberate graciousness that was hard to put up with. Jenny thought, “If I didn’t know that she hated me, and why she was putting up with me, should I have seen that?” And she knew that she wouldn’t. It would have been just Mrs. Forbes with her grand manner. She wouldn’t have thought anything about it.

They went in to dinner. It was a long evening, and for Jenny it went with intolerable slowness. Alan’s wretched look went to her heart. He was suffering, and so was she. And so was Mrs. Forbes. Jenny knew that. She could even admire in a sort of way the manner in which Mrs. Forbes was carrying the whole thing off. There was a part to be played, and she was playing it very well. She was playing it very well indeed. And Mac? She knew now that he didn’t love her. She even knew that he didn’t love anyone but himself. She wondered whether it would have been easier if she had found that he did love someone else. It was dreadful to know that he didn’t love anyone at all, that he was wholly set on his own advantage. She felt as if there was nothing left to love. She had not quite loved him, but she had come very near it. She had once had a dream in which she had been running lightly over a wide heathery space, and suddenly, quite suddenly, she had checked herself, and only just in time. Because the cliff ended. It ended right there before her feet. If she had taken one more step she would have been over the edge.

“Down among the dead men,

Down among the dead men,

Down among the dead men

Let him lie.”

Only it would have been, “Let her lie.” If she hadn’t slipped behind the curtain in the schoolroom she would have been over the edge. As it was, she had saved herself. No, she hadn’t planned to do it. She had been saved, and she wasn’t going down over the edge. She was going to escape.

She said good-night when the time came. It was the last good-night that she would ever say to these people in this room. If they were ever to meet again it would be different for them all. Perhaps they would never meet again. She didn’t know, and there was no one to tell her. She went slowly up to her room and shut her door. She thought about locking it. And then she thought, “I mustn’t do anything different—not tonight. I mustn’t do anything to make them say, ‘Why did she do it?’ ” So she left the door unlocked. It wouldn’t have made any difference, because nobody tried it to see whether it was locked or not.

After she had waited for a little she took off her dress and hung it up in the great gloomy cupboard which ran across all one side of the room. It looked very lonely there. Such a big cupboard and only that one little lace dress, her everyday skirt, and the dark grey coat and skirt which she wore on Sundays. There was room in it for a hundred dresses. She had pleased herself sometimes by imagining that they were hanging there—dresses for every possible occasion, grave and gay. But not tonight. Because tonight her mind was full of other things.

She hung up her black lace dress and considered. She would take the grey coat and skirt. It was new, and it would be useful. And she would wear a white silk shirt and take the other one with her. She set her mind to what she would take. Brush and comb. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Face-cloth. Soap and nailbrush. She had a little case which she had used for week-ends when she was at school. It would hold these things, and the silk shirt and her pyjamas and two pairs of stockings. It wouldn’t hold anything more. It wouldn’t hold a change of underclothes—it was no good trying. She could tuck half-a-dozen handkerchiefs round the edge, and that was all.

As she turned from the packed case she saw her mother’s little Bible on the pedestal by the bed. She couldn’t part with that. It was a small book, and it slipped in beneath the pyjamas and was hidden there. She shut the bag and laid it on the chair by the window.

Then she put on her black laced shoes. She would have to leave her other two pairs behind, the spare pair of outdoor shoes and the indoor ones. No, she must have an indoor pair. A vision of getting sopping wet and having nothing to change into rose uncomfortingly in her mind. She made a parcel of both pairs, and felt somehow safer. But even at that moment she had a horrid feeling about leaving the little black satin pair she had worn that evening. There was no sense in taking them—not the least atom of sense—and she wasn’t going to take them, and that was that. But they were the nicest shoes she had ever had, and she didn’t know whether she would ever see them again. She had got them from Heather Peterson, who had got them from a cousin in a fit of hopefulness and because they were so pretty, and then found that they were too small and unless she wanted to take the chance of being disabled by cramp she couldn’t wear them.

Jenny held the shoes in her hand and looked at them. They were so pretty, and they must have cost a lot. Heather Peterson’s cousin was rich, and she had bought these shoes in Paris. They were very cleverly cut, and they had a single brilliant very cunningly placed to make your foot look small. Jenny knew she was being foolish, and she was stern with herself. When you are running away you can’t afford to be sentimental about a pair of shoes, no matter how pretty they are, or how much you feel that you will never have anything like them again. She put them inside the big dark cupboard and shut the door on them resolutely.

Time passed slowly. She was all ready to go. She didn’t know where. She only knew that she must go, and she must get as long a start as possible. She waited until twelve o’clock. All the sounds in all the rooms came to an end. The house was still. The house was very still. It was an old house—early seventeenth century. Jenny’s thoughts went back to its beginnings—the handsome young man who had built the house and his lovely wife.

He was Richard Forbes, and she was Jane. Jenny always wondered if they had called her that, or if it had been, like her own name, turned into Jenny. She liked to fancy that it was. Only of course her name wasn’t from Jane, but from Jennifer. Still it did make a kind of link, and they were her own ancestors—her own lawful ancestors. Their portraits hung in a place of honour in the hall. Their son and his wife, painted half a century later, looked old after their radiant youth. There were portraits of them all, some by famous painters. Jenny’s heart leapt up as she realized that she wasn’t a foundling, an illegitimate child, but the real inheritor of all these other Forbeses. She would go, but something in her said, “I shall come again.” In that moment she knew that the inner voice spoke truly. She would come again.

She put out the light and sat down in the dark to wait. She must have fallen asleep, for she woke with a start and the air was colder. She put on the light and looked at her watch, the watch she didn’t wear openly because it was a family one given by her father to her mother, or so Garsty had said, though how she knew was more than Jenny could say. It had lain there among Garsty’s treasures until she died, and then Jenny had taken it. The astonishing thing was that after all these years of not being used it kept very good time. There was a long slender gold chain with it.

Jenny opened the bottom drawer and took out the things that she had put ready—gloves, a little black hat, the parcel with her two pairs of shoes. She put on the hat and put the gloves into the pocket of a dark prune coat which she took out of the cupboard. She was going to be too hot in it, and it was heavy, but at this time of year you didn’t know what the weather might be going to do. And it was a good coat, new last winter. She remembered getting it in the January sales with Garsty. It had cost more than she had planned for, but Garsty had said, “It will go on for years, and you will always look nice in it, my dear.”

She took her bag and considered the other things. There was the case which she had put under the counterpane on the chair by the window. Oh, she couldn’t leave the room like that—untidy! She must put the bedspread back. Then she took up her things, the parcel with the shoes slipped over the handle of the little case, and her left hand free for the handbag. She stood with the open door of the room in her hand and looked round. Everything was quite tidy. Now she must go.

She lifted the hand with the bag in it and switched off the light. With the door shut, no one would come near her until half past seven. She had seven and a half hours’ start on any search that might be made. She felt her way to the head of the stairs and began to go down.

It was like going down into deep waters. Deep, dark waters. The darkness wasn’t frightening. It felt very safe. And behind the darkness there were all the people of her blood and her name who had lived in this house since it was built. That made her feel very safe indeed. She didn’t know where she was going or what she was going to do, but she knew who she was. She wasn’t any longer a nameless come-by-chance brought up by charity. She was Jenny Forbes, and the house and the pictures were her own.

She was half way down the stairs, when the moon came from behind a cloud. The house faced south-east, and the moon was full. The moonlight shone in through the windows above the door and to either side of it. It was so bright that it made the portraits on which it fell look as if they were alive. Jenny thought, “They are saying good-bye to me. But I shall come again.” She stood still on the half-landing and looked at the pictures. Some of them hardly showed at all, some were just shadows. Then as she turned this way and that the brightness of the moon shone down the hall to the portrait which she liked best of all, Lady Georgina Forbes, painted by a famous artist in the year of the Crimean War. A hundred years ago and she was still beautiful without a mark of age or sorrow on her, painted in her wedding-dress with flowers in her hair, smiling. Jenny said under her breath, “Good-bye, great, great-grandmother. I’ll come back some day.”