The Misbegotten (28 page)

It was during the last summer of Alice’s life that Starling discovered the lovers’ tree. She was out with Bridget, running errands in Bathampton on a warm, lazy sort of day in July; soft white clouds sat sedately in a powder-blue sky. The housekeeper was getting leaner and wirier with each season that passed; she carried her basket over an arm that was nothing but bone and sinew beneath freckled, weathered skin. There was more grey than brown in her hair, and her face had started to sink inwards, hollowing out between the bones of cheek and jaw. But this paring down only seemed to make Bridget tougher, and quicker. She walked with smart steps, and was terse with all the shopkeepers and craftsmen they dealt with, not stopping to gossip when Starling wanted to dawdle and look around her.

She especially wanted to dawdle around the butcher’s shop, in spite of the iron stink of blood and offal, because Pip Blayton, the butcher’s son, was just a year older than her at thirteen, and she found herself curious about him. Pip was tall for his age, and his shoulders were starting to widen. He looked like he’d been stretched; his body was long and clumsy, but his face was nice, in spite of the pimples that scattered his forehead. He had sandy hair that he hid behind whenever Starling looked at him, dipping his chin so that it fell over his forehead as heat torched his cheeks. Even though Starling was still small she had tiny, budding breasts and a slight curve in her hips that hadn’t been there before. Her face was still her face, but it was subtly different, changing in tiny ways that made it more of a woman’s face, less of a child’s. Starling liked to see Pip blush; she liked to watch him trying to ignore her. And when she smiled at him, Bridget gave her such a censorious look that it made her smile wider.

‘Who are you, Grinagog, the cat’s uncle? You mind where you flash that rantipole smile of yours, Starling. You’ll get yourself in trouble, soon enough,’ Bridget said, as they carried on away from the shop.

‘What kind of trouble?’ Starling was deeply curious about this.

‘Never you mind.’

‘If I knew what kind, maybe I would know how to stay out of it?’ she pointed out.

‘If you knew what kind, you’d rush into it ever the quicker. I know you too well, my girl,’ said Bridget, which only made Starling even more curious.

After five years with Alice and Bridget, there was a good deal Starling was curious about. The farmhouse and the village of Bathampton were her whole world, and however much she loved that world, it had begun to seem a little small. She often thought wistfully of Corsham, and the fair Jonathan had taken them to the year before. She wanted to feel that excitement again, that sense of belonging to a loud and colourful throng of people. Sometimes, Starling walked the other way along the canal – west, towards Bath. It was only two miles to the edge of the city. She walked until she could see its rooftops and crescents, and there she would stop and stare, watching ribbons of smoke rise from a thousand chimneys; seagulls wheeling around the markets and middens; church spires thrusting up towards heaven here and there; and the huge towers of the abbey. On days when a soft west wind was blowing, it carried the faint rattle of hooves and cartwheels on cobbled streets, and the yell of men’s voices along the wharf. The city seemed like a huge and wonderful mêlée after the sedate, ordered pace of things in Bathampton. It was almost frightening, but at the same time deeply compelling.

But when Starling asked Alice if they could go into Bath on a visit, Alice’s face always fell. She tried again, one spring day when they had both walked far to the west, along the river, and were gazing at the clustered buildings of the city together.

‘I should like to, Starling. But Lord Faukes says we should not,’ Alice said.

‘But . . . why not?’

‘I cannot say, dearest. He says he thinks it would be too great a strain on me. On my heart.’ Alice looked down at her hands, at her fingers, which were slowly shredding a posy of bluebells. ‘And that the city is no place for innocent young girls. So perhaps because it’s more that we would have no escort, no acquaintances . . .’

‘But . . . couldn’t he take us with him one day? Or Mr Alleyn?’

‘I have asked.’ For a moment impatience made her words clipped, but then Alice hung her head and her voice lowered to almost nothing. She looked ashamed. ‘But I’m afraid the answer is no.’ She took Starling’s hand and squeezed it apologetically, and Starling didn’t understand what Alice could possibly have to be ashamed of. They stood in silence for a while, and Starling thought hard about what she would say next.

‘Well, we need not tell them. It’s an easy enough distance to walk – it wouldn’t take long. We could go, you and I, and explore, and say nothing to Lord Faukes, or to Jonathan, though I’m sure Jonathan would not betray us.’ Alice smiled slightly, but then her face fell serious.

‘Of course Jonathan would not betray us. But you would have us deliberately disobey the man who keeps us? The man who let me take you in, when he had no cause to other than kind indulgence?’

‘But . . . we went to Corsham fair last year, and that we kept a secret from him. Wasn’t that disobedient too?’

‘Yes, perhaps it was, but he had never specifically said to me that I should not go to Corsham, as he has with Bath.’

‘But he would never hear of it, Alice—’

‘But we would have done it, nevertheless. We would be the betrayers, don’t you see? And we would always know it. And besides . . . the chickens always come home to roost, as our good Bridget would say. A lie will always come back to haunt you. If somebody should see us, and word of our disobedience reach Lord Faukes . . . well then, how kindly do you think he would feel towards us? We who owe him our home and our food and our well-being?’ She smiled faintly at the look of sullen disappointment on Starling’s face; leant over to kiss her forehead. ‘Don’t pull such a cross-patch face, Starling! What is there in Bath that we do not have here, in Bathampton?’

‘I don’t know! That’s why I want to go! Why must you always be so obedient to him? How can you not want to explore—’

‘I am obedient because I would have a roof over our heads – yours and mine!’ Alice said angrily. Starling blinked, stunned. It was the first time Alice had ever raised her voice to her. ‘Of course I want to explore – of course I want to go abroad, and go to dances, and make new friends! But I am told I may not, and I have no choice but to obey. Don’t you understand that?’

‘He would not be so very angry, would he?’ Starling mumbled.

‘Would you care to chance it?’ said Alice, fixing her with a warning gaze.

‘Maybe.’ Starling shrugged, half rebellious, half cowed.

‘Well, when you are older, and independent of us, you may go where you please,’ Alice said flatly, and Starling halted her argument at once, because this spoke of a time when she would not always be at Alice’s side, and she did not want to hear of such a time.

Starling kicked the heads off a few blameless dandelions by her feet, and could not look at her sister. She felt a horrible kind of embarrassment to be scolded in such a way, and searched for some way to make things normal again.

‘Alice . . . why is Lord Faukes your benefactor?’ she asked, as lightly as she could. ‘I mean, what happened to your real parents? Who were they?’ Alice turned her head to look north, across the river towards Box and Batheaston. A soft breeze blew wisps of her hair around her chin, and fluttered the blue ribbon of her hat.

‘I don’t know, Starling,’ she said, her voice soft and sad.

‘Haven’t you asked him?’

‘Of
course
I’ve asked him,’ she said, exasperated, and Starling sensed some hard kernel beneath Alice’s decorum for the first time; some hungry thing too long ignored. ‘He says my father was an old friend of his, a man he loved. My mother died and . . . in his grief my father would have given me away to strangers, and so Lord Faukes took me and kept me safe, and found Bridget to look after me. And then my father also died . . .’ She turned to look at Starling, wistfully. ‘Whoever they were, they are dead. Of that much I am sure. And I must have been a source of shame to my family, must I not, to be kept in ignorance even of my parents’ names, so that I may never try to find their kin? My kin.’

‘Are you a secret, then?’ said Starling, scowling in thought.

‘Of course I am. Have you only just realised?’ Alice smiled bitterly. ‘Jonathan is not even allowed to speak about me to his mother. Lord Faukes has forbidden it.’

‘But why would he, Alice?’

‘Don’t you see, Starling? The only person who could tell me is Lord Faukes, and he will not. And if I demand to know, I risk his displeasure. So I am trapped. I will never know, and I must endeavour to be content at that.’

‘Perhaps . . . perhaps when you come of age some bequest of your father’s will come into effect, and you will find it all out, and have a fortune and a great house.’

‘It is a pleasant enough story, dearest. But let us not pin our hopes too highly upon it.’

‘But when you are one and twenty, you will be free to leave his care anyway, won’t you?’

‘If I choose it, yes. But where would I go, Starling? What would I do? I have nothing. I know nobody outside of Bathampton.’

‘You have Jonathan,’ Starling pointed out, doggedly.

‘Yes. I have Jonathan. I have only Jonathan,’ Alice said quietly, and then they walked back to the farmhouse in silence.

In the darkness late that evening came footsteps and the glow of a candle flame around the bedroom door, and Starling was awoken, and padded silently towards it to listen. The floorboards were cold beneath her bed-warmed feet; she pulled her nightdress tight around her. On the landing were Bridget in her night cap and Alice with her hair tied up in rags. The candle was in Alice’s hand, held between them, lighting their faces from below so that their eyes looked hollow and unearthly.

‘Why does he keep me here, Bridget? Who am I to him?’ said Alice. Bridget’s mouth was a tight, flat line; at her sides her arms hung tense and uneasy.

‘You’re his ward, miss. You’re kept here in comfort, and in safety, and lucky for it.’

‘Safety from what? And why am I his ward, and kept secret? Who were my parents?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’

‘Cannot? Or will not?’ Alice pressed. Bridget said nothing, and Alice gazed at her with little hope or expectation. ‘Where does the name Beckwith come from? My father, or my mother? Or is it a fiction, like everything else? I have asked in the village, I have asked people passing through, for years and years. Nobody has heard of that name, here or anywhere else.’

‘It is your name. Be content with it.’

‘Be content?’ There was an incredulous pause. ‘Are you his, Bridget, or are you mine?’ Alice whispered.

‘I am both,’ said Bridget, and in her voice was some pent-up emotion, something that twisted in pain like a fish on a hook.

‘I think I’m like a bird kept in a silver cage. Something charming for him to look upon, and even to love. But something owned, that will never have its own destiny, or the freedom it was born with.’

‘Not all are born into freedom, Alice. Perhaps it is better to appreciate the silver cage, when others have a cage of mud and sticks.’

‘A cage is still a cage, Bridget,’ Alice said coldly. Starling held her breath, but they said nothing more. Alice went back downstairs, though it was bedtime, and Bridget stood for a long while, not knowing she was watched. Her mouth stayed in its tight, flat line, and her eyes gazed out through the wall of the house, into the far distance. Her face was as empty as a broken heart, and though Starling wanted to hold her, at the same time she knew she must never let on that she’d seen the older woman in a moment of such profound and terrible nakedness.

In the end, Alice’s twenty-first birthday came and went with no visits from lawyers or uncles or executors of hidden wills. Only Lord Faukes came, with gifts of white kid gloves and a beautiful evening gown of turquoise silk overlaid with the finest silver lace any of the three women had ever seen. A ball dress that Alice would have no occasion to wear. Lord Faukes bade her try it on, and she dutifully twirled and posed for him, and even danced with him a little on the parlour floor, though there was no music and he looked grotesque as her partner – too old, too fat. In his meaty hands Alice was doll-like, so fragile he might destroy her on a whim. Lord Faukes’s face shone with pleasure at seeing her in the dress. Alice smiled and said again and again how much she loved it, but Starling still noticed the look of bitter disappointment behind her eyes, and the way her smile fell at once from her face when her benefactor’s back was turned.

‘Perhaps they don’t know how to find you, and will come a little late with news?’ Starling whispered into the darkness of their bedroom that night, when she could tell Alice was not sleeping.

‘Nobody is trying to find me, Starling,’ Alice replied, and Starling didn’t argue because she thought it was probably true.

‘Then we are sisters more than ever, Alice, because we are both cut off from the people who had us as babes, and our pasts are secrets that we shan’t ever know about. But we are our own family, are we not?’

‘We are our own family,’ Alice agreed, but Starling could not tell from her voice what Alice was feeling.

On the sunny July day, a year after that, once Bridget had hustled Starling away from Pip Blayton at the butcher’s shop, the pair of them walked past the George Inn and along the lane that eventually crossed the river and went on to Batheaston.

‘We’ve to pay the miller for that flour he delivered on Monday. I didn’t have the coins about me when he called,’ said Bridget, when Starling asked.

‘I can do it, if you want. You don’t need to walk all the way with me,’ said Starling, who loved the freedom to dawdle. Bridget was flushed and breathing deeply, so she paused and gave Starling a shrewd look through screwed-up eyes.

‘You’ll give Miller Harris the money, and nobody else, and no going back to make calf eyes at Pip Blayton?’

‘Of course!’ said Starling, with an almost straight face. Bridget rolled her eyes and hefted her basket higher up her arm. She fished some coins from her pocket, handing them to Starling.