A Great Deliverance (9 page)

“Just one American couple. You’ll see them at breakfast. You know the sort. Polyester and showy gold chains. God-awful diamond ring on the man’s little finger. Kept me howlingly entertained last night with a discourse on dentistry. Wanted me to have my teeth sealed, it seems. The very latest thing.” Mrs. Burton-Thomas shuddered and downed another drink. “Bit Egyptian-sounding. Something for posterity, you know. Or was it to prevent cavities?” She shrugged with grand indifference. “Haven’t the slightest. What
is
this fixation Americans all have with their teeth, I ask you? All straight and shiny. Well, God! Crooked teeth give a face a bit of
dash
, I say.” She poked ineffectually at the fire, sending a shower of sparks out onto the rug, then stomped on these with terrific energy. “Well, delighted
you’re
here, is all I can say. Not that Grandpapa isn’t still doing flip-flops in the grave at my opening the place up to the tourist trade. But it was that or the bleeding National Trust.” She winked at them over the rim of her glass. “And pardon me for saying so, but this sort of life is ever so roaringly more amusing.”

There was a clearing of the throat from the direction of the doorway, where a boy stood awkwardly in plaid flannel pyjamas, an antique smoking jacket several sizes too large belted clumsily round his slender waist. It gave his appearance an anachronistic panache. He carried a pair of crutches in his hands.

“What is it, Eddie?” Mrs. Burton-Thomas asked impatiently. “You’ve done the luggage, haven’t you?”

“These’re in the boot, Auntie,” he responded. “Shall I do ‘em as well?”

“Of course, you ninny!” He turned and scurried from her sight. She shook her head darkly. “I’m a martyr to my family. An absolute religious martyr. Well, come now, little ones, let me show you to your room. You must be dropping with fatigue. No, no, bring the brandy with you.”

They followed her back through the dining room to the stone hall and from there through another doorway that took them to the stairway. Polished, uncarpeted oak stairs led to the upper regions of the house, swathed in deep shadows. “Baronial stairway,” Mrs. Burton-Thomas informed them, slapping her hand on its thick wood railing. “Don’t even
make
these dandies anymore. Come, it’s just this way.”

In the upper hall she led them down a dimly lit corridor in which ancestral portraits battled with three Flemish tapestries. Mrs. Burton-Thomas nodded moodily towards the latter. “Simply must move them. God knows they’ve been hanging there since 1822, but no one could ever convince Great-grandmama that these things look better from a bit of a distance. Tradition. You understand. I battle it everywhere. Here we are, little ones.” She threw open a door. “I shall leave you here. All the mod cons. But you’ll find them, no doubt.” With that she was gone, dressing gown flapping round her ankles, slippers slapping comfortingly upon the floor.

A tumble of coals upon the hearth welcomed them into the bedroom. It was, Deborah thought as she entered, the most beautiful room she had ever seen. Oak panelled, with the beguiling faces of two Gainsborough women smiling down from either end, it embraced them with centuries’ old welcome and grace. Small table lamps with rose shades put forth a diffused radiance that burnished the mahogany of the enormous four-poster. A looming wardrobe cast an elongated shadow against one wall, and a dressing table held an array of crystal atomisers and silver-backed brushes. At one of the windows stood a cabriole-legged table on which an arrangement of lilies had been placed. Deborah walked to this and touched her fingers to the fluted edge of one ivory flower.

“There’s a card,” she said, pulled it off and read it. Her eyes filled with tears. She turned to her husband. He had gone to the hearth and lowered himself into an overstuffed chair that sat to one side of it. He was watching her as he so often did, with that familiar reserve, the only communication coming from his eyes. “Thank you, Simon,” she whispered. She tucked the card back into the flowers, swallowed an emotion she couldn’t define, and forced herself to speak lightly. “How did you ever find this place?”

“Do you like it?” he asked in answer.

“You couldn’t possibly have chosen anything more wonderful. And you know it, don’t you?”

He didn’t reply. A knock at the door, and he looked at her, a smile dancing round the corners of his mouth, his expression plainly saying:
What’s next?
“Come in,” he called.

It was the girl, Danny, a pile of blankets in her arms. “Sorry. Forgot these. There’s an eiderdown already, but Auntie thinks the world’s as cold as herself.” She walked into the room with an air of friendly proprietorship. “Eddie get your things in?” she asked, opening the wardrobe and plopping the blankets unceremoniously inside. “He’s just a
bit
thick, you know. Got to excuse him.” She studied herself in the wavy mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door, fingered a few wandering hairs just a bit more out of place than they’d been before, and caught them watching her. “Now you’d best beware of the baby’s cry,” she pronounced solemnly. It was as if she’d spoken exactly on cue. The hounds would surely howl next.

“The baby’s cry? Have the Americans a child with them?” Deborah asked.

Danny’s dark eyes widened. She looked from woman to man. “You don’t know? Has no one ever told you?”

Deborah saw from the girl’s behaviour that they were soon to be enlightened, for Danny wiped her hands prefatorily down the sides of her dress, glanced from one end of the room to the other for unwanted listeners, and walked to the window. In spite of the cold, she unfastened the latch and swung it open. “Has no one told you about
that?”
she asked dramatically, gesturing out into the night.

There was nothing for it but to see what “that” was. Deborah and St. James joined Danny at the window, where, in the distance, the skeletal walls of a ruined building rose through the fog.

“Keldale Abbey,” Danny intoned and settled right in next to the fire for a confidential chat. “That’s where the cry of the baby comes from, not from here.”

St. James pulled the window closed, drew across the heavy curtains, and led Deborah back to the fire. She curled up on the floor next to his chair, warming herself, allowing the fire to tingle against her skin.

“A ghost baby, I take it?” she said to Danny.

“An absolute one that I heard myself. You’ll hear it as well. Wait and see.”

“Ghosts always have legends attached,” St. James noted.

Glad you asked, Danny’s posture replied as she wriggled back into her chair. “As does this,” she said solemnly. “Keldale was Royalist, you know, during the war.” She spoke as though the late seventeenth century were only a week removed. “Loyal t’ the last man of ’em t’ the King. The village of Keldale, down the road a mile. You’ve seen it?”

St. James chuckled. “We should have, but I’m afraid we came in from a … different direction.”

“The scenic route,” Deborah added.

Danny chose to ignore the diversion. “Well,” she went on, “was towards the end of t’ war. And old blackguard devil Cromwell”—obviously Danny had learned her history at her auntie’s knee—“got word that the Lords o’ the North were planning an uprising. So he swept through the dales one last, grand time, taking manor houses, ruining castles, destroying Royalist villages. Keldale’s well hidden.”

“So we discovered,” St. James put in.

The girl nodded earnestly. “But days in advance the village got word that the murd’rous Roundheads was coming. ‘Twasn’t the
village
that old Cromwell wanted, but the villagers themselves, all o’ them that was loyal t’ King Charlie.”

“To kill them, of course,” Deborah prompted as the girl paused in her story to catch her breath.

“T’ kill every last one!” she declared. “When word came that Cromwell was looking for the Kel, the village got a plan together. They’d move every stick, every stitch, every soul t’ the grounds o’ the abbey. So when the Roundheads arrived there’d be Keldale, all right, but not a soul in her.”

“Rather an ambitious plan,” St. James remarked.

“An’ it worked!” Danny replied proudly. Her pretty eyes danced above rosy cheeks, but she lowered her voice. “‘Cept for the baby!” She inched forward in her chair; obviously they had reached the climax of the tale. “The Roundheads arrived. ’Twas just as the villagers hoped. ’Twas deserted, and silent with a heavy fog. And throughout all the village, not a soul, not a stitch, not a living creature. And then”—Danny’s swift glance made certain her audience was with her—“a baby began t’ cry in the abbey where all the villagers were. Ah God!” She clutched her lovely bosom. “The terror! For they’d escaped Cromwell only t’ be betrayed by a babe! The mother hushed the baby by offering her breast. But ’twas no good. The wee baby cried and cried. They were desperate in terror that the dogs from the village would begin t’ howl with the noise and Cromwell would find them. So they hushed the poor child. An’ they
smothered
it!”

“Good heavens!” Deborah murmured. She edged closer to her husband’s chair. “Just the sort of story one longs to hear on a wedding night, isn’t it?”

“Ah, but you
must
know.” Danny’s expression was fervent. “For the sound of the babe is
terrible
luck ‘less you know what t’ do.”

“Wear garlic?” St. James asked. “Sleep with a crucifix clutched in one’s hand?”

Deborah punched him lightly on the knee. “J want to know. I insist upon knowing. Shall I have my life blighted because I’ve married a cynic? Tell me what to do, Danny, should I hear the baby.”

Gravely, Danny nodded. “’Tis always a’ night when the baby cries from the abbey grounds. You must sleep on your right side, your husband on his left. An’ you must hold on t’ one another close till the wailing stops.”

“That’s interesting,” St. James acknowledged. “Sort of an animated amulet. May we hope that this baby cries often?”

“Not terrible often. But I…” She swallowed, and suddenly they saw that this was no amusing legend for lovestruck honeymooners, for to her the fear and the story were real. “But I heard i’ myself some three years back! ‘Tis not something I’ll soon forget!” She got to her feet. “You’ll remember what t’ do? You’ll not forget?”

“We’ll not forget,” Deborah reassured the girl as she vanished from the room.

They were quiet at her departure. Deborah rested her head against St. James’s knee. His long, thin fingers moved gently through her hair, smoothing the curly mass back from her face. She looked up at him.

“I’m afraid, Simon. I didn’t think I would be, not once this last year, but I am.” She saw in his eyes that he understood. Of
course
he did. Had she ever truly doubted that he would?

“So am I,” he replied. “Every moment today I felt just a little bit mad with terror. I never wanted to lose myself, not to you, not to anyone in fact. But there it is. It happened.” He smiled. “You invaded my heart with a little Cromwellian force of your own that I couldn’t resist, Deborah, and I find now that rather than lose myself, the true terror is that I might somehow lose you.” He touched the pendant he’d given her that morning, nestling in the hollow of her throat. It was a small gold swan, so long between them a symbol of commitment: choosing once, choosing for life. His eyes moved from it back to her own. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered gently.

“Make love to me then.”

“With great pleasure.”

Jimmy Havers had little pig’s eyes that darted round the room when he was nervous. He might feel as if he were putting on the bravura performance of a lifetime, lying his way grandly out of everything from an accusation of petty larceny to being caught in flagrante delicto, but the reality was that his eyes betrayed him every time, as they were doing now.

“Didn’t know if you’d be home in time to get your mum the Greece stuff, so Jim went out himself, girl.” It was his habit to speak of himself in the third person. It allowed him to evade responsibility for virtually any unpleasantness that cropped up in his life. Like this one now.
No, I didn’t go to the turf accountant. Didn’t pick up snuff, either. If it was done at all, was Jimmy that done it, not me.

Barbara watched her father’s eyes dance their way round the sitting room. God, what a grim little death pit it was: a ten-by-fifteen-foot room whose windows were permanently sealed shut by years of filth and grime, crammed with that wonderful three-piece suite so essential to delicate living, but this one a creation that had billed itself as “artificial horsehair” thirty-five years ago when even real horsehair was a hideous concept of comfort. The walls were papered with a maddening design of interlocking rosebuds that simpered their way to the ceiling. Racing magazines overflowed from tables onto the floor and argued there with the fifteen simulated leather albums that assiduously documented every inch, every mile of her mother’s breakdown. And through it all Tony smiled and smiled and smiled.

A corner of the room held his shrine. The last picture of him before his illness—a distorted, unfocused little boy kicking a football into a temporary goal net set up in a garden that had once leapt with flowers—was enlarged to beyond life-size proportions. On either side, suitably framed in mock oak, hung every school report he had ever done, every note of praise from every teacher he’d had, and—God have mercy on us all—given pride of place, the certificate of his death. Beneath this, an arrangement of plastic flowers did obeisance, a rather dusty obeisance considering the state of the room itself.

The television blared, as it always did, from the opposite corner, placed there “so Tony can watch it as well.” His favourite shows still played regularly to him, frozen in time, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. While the windows and doors were closed and locked, chained and barred to hold out the truth of that August afternoon and the Uxbridge Road.

Barbara strode across the room and switched off the set.

“Hey, girl, Jim was watching that!” her father protested.

She faced him. My God, he was a pig. When was the last time he’d had a bath? She could smell him from here—the sweat; the body oils that collected in his hair, on his neck, behind the creases of his ears; the unwashed clothing.