“Nay, that she will not. Dost think I will allow my children to run the risk of catching it?”
“She may be ill.”
“You would have heard had she been.”
“I must go to her.”
“You shall stay here.”
“But if she is in danger?”
“I doubt she is ill. But she is near the sickness and it spreads like wildfire. You must stay apart.”
“I want to see her so much,” I said.
“You talk like a peevish child. You have your home to think of. Know this. She shall not come here nor shall you go to her, I’ll not have danger brought to the castle.”
I was worried about my mother, but letters came. The sweat was taking toll of many people in the neighbourhood, she wrote. She did not go into the town. She had feared that Damask was sickening, but it turned out to be only a return of the fever she had had earlier.
She wrote that she thought it unwise of her to come to see me or me to go to her.
“I shall write often, my dearest child,” she said. “And until this terrible thing passes, we must be content with our letters.”
She sent me a pair of stockings such as I had never seen before. The art of weaving had been introduced by a gentleman of Cambridge. He was the Rev. Mr. Lee and my mother wanted to know if I had ever seen such stockings.
See how they mould themselves to the leg as stocking never did before (she wrote). I have heard from your grandmother in London that they are always worn by the quality and she says that soon there will be no other kind. I have more news from London. A Mr. Jansen who has been making spectacles has invented an instrument which makes things far off seem close. It is called a telescope. What will happen next, I wonder. What times we live in. I would instead they could find some means of preventing this terrible sickness breaking out every few years—and a cure for it when it comes.
To read her letters offered me some comfort; but I wanted so much to talk to her. I wanted to tell her of the strange atmosphere which was slowly creeping into the castle.
That it had something to do with Maria I was certain; and Colum was involved in it.
Are they lovers? I wondered. If they were, that would explain so much.
It was Hallowe’en again. Now the weather had changed. There was rain—a light drizzle which was little more than a mist.
Jennet’s eyes were dark with her thoughts. I wondered what she knew.
“’Tis a year,” she said, “since she came here. ’T’as been a long year … a long strange year.”
So Jennet had felt it too.
“And little Senara is ten months old.”
“A proper little miss,” said Jennet, her eyes softening and the mysterious look going out of them. “It does me good to see young Tamsie with her. Proper little mother. And Senara, she knows her too. Screams for her. I swear she said ‘Tamsie’ the other day. Mark my words, that’ll be the first word that one says.”
I was glad that my daughter was kind to the baby. It showed a pleasant trait in her character that there was no jealousy, for I knew that Jennet spoiled Senara. How far away that nursery world seemed from what was going on in the rest of the castle!
Hallowe’en was with us. A dark and gloomy day—quite windless; the mist hanging over the castle, shrouding the turrets and penetrating into the rooms. The coastline merged into a bank of mist. It would be hard for any ships who were near our coasts in this. They would not need the lights from Colum’s donkeys to deceive them. They would not be able to see anything through the mist.
It was a silent world—chill and dark. I thought of the raging storm of last year. I wondered whether Maria was remembering too.
There was no bonfire that night.
I asked Jennet why.
“Weather bain’t fit,” she told me.
But I didn’t think it was only the weather. Many of the servants believed there was a witch among us and it might have been that they feared to offend her.
So the night of Hallowe’en passed quietly.
But in the morning we discovered that Maria was missing. The bed in the Red Room had not been slept in. All that day we thought she would come back. But she did not. And as the days began to pass, we began to realize that she had disappeared.
She had left us Senara as a memento of that night a year ago, but she herself had gone as suddenly as she had come.
CHRISTMAS NIGHT IN THE CASTLE
WHAT A STRANGE TIME that was. Christmas came and passed. My mother did not visit us because of the threat of the sweat. Silence had settled on the house; the servants whispering together. None of them would go to the Red Room.
Every day I waited for something to happen. Sometimes I would go to that room and quietly open the door, expecting to find her returned. The room was empty, silent; yet I sensed a presence there. Was it Melanie or did some mysterious aura of Maria remain?
The servants were convinced that she was a witch. She had come and gone on Hallowe’en. I could imagine that that was some wry joke of Maria’s; for I had often had the feeling that she was laughing at us in a contemptuous kind of way.
I thought during the first days that she would be back. In the first hours I had thought she might have eloped with James Madden. That was soon dispelled when he arrived at the castle. The news had reached him that she had gone and he had to discover for himself. I had rarely seen a man so stricken. At least it proved the theory wrong that she had gone to him.
A month later he had killed himself. He was found hanging in his bedchamber.
When we heard the news at the castle the servants were horrified. They were certain then that she had been a witch.
I myself wondered if this were true. Once I spoke to Colum about it. He did not seem disturbed by her departure. In fact, at times I thought he seemed relieved that she had gone. He had been attracted by her without doubt, and when I think of that incomparable and rather strange beauty, I was not surprised. I knew it must have been irresistible. I warmed towards Colum. It was amazing how easily I could. I believed that he had been attracted against his will and that now temptation had been removed he was glad.
With each day I felt myself growing away from the horror the first revelation of his way of life had brought to me. Could one grow accustomed to such things? My mother had. Was I the same?
I suppose in fact we were women with deep physical needs. There was nothing of the retiring female in either of us. Physical contact brought us that pleasure which is said to be somewhat repulsive to women of refinement. I knew from my mother’s revelations that she was of a similar nature. Colum could give me complete physical satisfaction as I knew I did to him. It was as though my relationship with him was on two levels. But for this physical relationship I should have been horrified by what he did—and indeed I was—and yet he was my husband, I could not leave him for he would not allow it, and even had I found a way of doing so it would have meant losing my children. Perhaps I was weak in suppressing my revulsion. I was certainly not happy and it haunted my life. On the other hand I could not leave him.
As that year progressed we settled into a way of life which did not change much. There were one or two wrecks but I tried not to think about them. While the storm raged I would lie in my bed, the curtains drawn and try to shut out of my mind the thought of what was happening outside the castle. There were one or two facts which forced themselves on my attention. I knew that Colum had agents in various foreign shipping ports—and English ones too—who informed him when cargo ships were leaving. He would know what route they would take and if they were likely to come near to our coast. Then he would watch for them. His men would be out on the coast and if the weather favoured him he would attempt to bring the ship on to the Devil’s Teeth.