me quite envious to see you writing away all day.’ There followed some vigorous stabbing at a shirtsleeve. ‘The truth is,’ she continued, ‘that when your cottage was given up and it was proposed that you should come to live with us, I told your brother: “Francis, my dear,” I said, “I am sure I shall do all that I can for your poor sisters, but I do not know how I shall manage – with all the business I have to attend to – I do not know how I shall manage with having a visitor constantly in my house.”’
It was too much. Reminded of her dependence, Dido bit her lip, set aside her pen – and reached for the workbasket.
Chapter Two
The room which Dido had been given possession of on the attic floor of her brother’s vicarage had not much to recommend it. It was small and cold and airless; it had no hearth, and its ceiling sloped so steeply that anyone lying in the narrow bed might, with ease, place a hand on the plaster. There was but one small window and it could be reached only by kneeling upon the bed. However, the apartment had, in Dido’s opinion, two material advantages: one was the very pleasant scent which crept into it from the apples stored in a neighbouring attic, and the other was the twisting narrowness of the stairs which led to it.
Margaret was not fond of climbing twisting, narrow stairs and only visited the attics when her constant dread of the housemaids stealing food became so great that she must make a search of their bedroom.
Tucked under the sloping roof, her icy feet wrapped in a counterpane, Dido felt herself beyond the reach of interference and was able to continue with her letter as well as her cold fingers would allow:
… Well, Eliza, I am sure that I have now sewn more linen than can possibly be required by two young gentlemen of twelve and ten, and I think that I may now go on with my story.
We had a fine sunny day for our walk to Madderstone yesterday – though with a sharp breeze blowing. And very glad I was to be able to go, for, besides the sewing, there is the bramble jelly to be made – and Rebecca began to pick the damsons yesterday. However, Margaret is as anxious as ever to show attention to Mrs Harman-Foote and, since she does not like to walk so far herself, I am her envoy.
We had a very pleasant walk through the fields and the park, but once we came into Madderstone’s pleasure grounds there was an end to all pleasure in walking! For Mr Harman-Foote is very busy at his ‘improving’ again and there was nothing but dirt and puddles and confusion all along the path which leads from the park gate to the abbey ruins. There are new terraces laid out and half a dozen great oaks and Spanish chestnuts taken down to ‘open up the vista’ and I fancy that the stream is to be turned into a cascade or have its consequence increased in some such way, because the lower pool – the one we have always thought to be the abbey’s fishpond – is drained. The old stone dam is breached below the overflow – and there was a great to-do, when we were there, over catching the carp in nets and putting them into pails.
And, by the by, I should be quite angry about the despoliation of such a fine old estate if I thought Mr Harman-Foote improved only for pride and show – but, knowing his character, I suspect it is rather to provide honest employment for his men after our bad harvest.
Well, it being still quite early in the day, we resolved upon paying our respects first to the Grey Nun and then walking on to the great house to call upon Mrs Harman-Foote. We made our way through the cloisters and came into the ruined nave. Penelope was delighted – for it seems that Madderstone is ‘so very much like a place in a book,’ and ‘one can imagine very horrid things happening in it.’
Dido was compelled to stop, for she was shivering too much to carry on. She unwound her feet from the counterpane, went to the room’s one small closet and took out the shawl which her sailor brother John had brought from the East Indies. Pulling it about her shoulders, she knelt upon the bed and looked out of the window.
The moon – almost full – rode high and very beautiful amid a flying wrack of cloud; its light silvered the meadows and reflected palely on the little stream dividing the glebe from the dark outline of woods.
‘Look to nature when you are troubled, my dear.’ That is what Dido’s governess, Miss Steerforth, had told her many years ago. ‘The beauty, the majesty, of God’s creation, will be sure to set your little worries at nought.’
Dido looked … But, tonight, all the serenity of nature could not soothe her. The moon, lovely and indifferent, had no power to make her forget that she was trapped here for an indefinite period as Margaret’s ‘visitor’, the dear home which she had shared with her sister, Eliza, given up in the cause of family economy. It was so very hard not to feel injured, or to suspect that an injustice had been done.
But she must not allow such thoughts to intrude. The failure of Charles’s bank had involved all her brothers in heavy losses. They had all been compelled to retrench: Edward’s hunters were sold and poor Francis, if Margaret prevailed, might be reduced to taking in pupils again – a practice he had given up with great pleasure when he was presented to the rectory of Badleigh five years ago. In the light of these sacrifices, it was only natural that her brothers should attempt to reduce the cost of their sisters’ maintenance. They had not wished it. They had been very kind and regretted the necessity very much.
Indeed they had regretted it so much that, for a while, everything had hung in the balance and the rent of Badleigh Cottage might have been paid for another quarter, had not Margaret just chanced to remark that, of course she knew nothing about the matter – and she did not regard the cost at all, for she was sure she would divide her last farthing with her dear sisters, but she could not help but say – since the matter was now under discussion – that she had never been quite easy about Dido and Eliza living alone in that house. It had such an odd look, when their brothers had all homes they might be invited to share, which, she must observe, would be a much more respectable arrangement. Though, of course, she did not care at all about the considerable expense of maintaining a separate establishment.
The balance had tipped; the lease had been surrendered at Michaelmas. And now Margaret …
But this would not do at all! Blame and resentment would only make her unhappy – as Eliza reminded her every time she wrote.
The surest escape from misery was mental exertion – that was a maxim of which Miss Steerforth herself would have approved. And Dido had discovered that the very best kind of mental exertion was the solving of a puzzle or mystery.
She tucked her feet under the counterpane again, took up her letter and resolutely turned her mind once more to the strange, inexplicable events in the abbey ruins.
* * *
… We rested a while upon the fallen stones in the shelter of the nave, but the girls were quite determined to climb the narrow old night stair into the haunted gallery.
So up we all went and, as we climbed, the wind whipped about us horribly and we were forced to hold hard to our bonnets. However, we gained the gallery in safety and Lucy began explaining how the Grey Nun appears there to ‘wail and wring her hands whenever there is trouble about to befall the people of Madderstone’, and how, ‘at this very moment’ she herself could scarcely stand for ‘the extraordinary emotions’ which the place aroused in her … And a great deal more of that kind.
And Penelope’s blue eyes grew wider and wider and she exclaimed that it was ‘All quite dreadful! And so delightful!’ And she wondered that anyone should ever have wanted to become a nun. For it must have been so very uncomfortable – and dull too, she did not wonder – for nuns never did anything but walk about with their hands folded in very nasty gowns, and tell their beads. And she did not know what it was that they told their beads – though she had always supposed that it must be their sins.
Meanwhile, Harriet and I stood beside the pillar at the top of the stairs and looked out through the great arch of the east window, across the ruined lawns, the workmen and the wheelbarrows, to the drained pool. After a time, Harriet observed that some gentlemen from the house were come down to see how the work went on; and then I was foolish enough to remark that Captain Laurence was among them. The girls caught at the name, and resolved immediately upon walking to meet him. I should perhaps have judged better, Eliza, and held my tongue, for, I suppose, the combination of narrow, crumbling stairs and eager passion is a rather dangerous one.
