An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (7 page)

For a moment Lizbeth was too aghast to speak and then she bent forward to kiss her sister’s white face.

“You are braver than I ever guessed you could be.”

The gentleness of her words brought tears to Phillida’s eyes.

“You understand!” she said, “and I never dreamed I would find anyone in this house who would understand.”

“I cannot pretend to understand your feelings,” Lizbeth answered, “but I admire you for doing what you wish to do. I thought that you had little interest in anything or anybody, which shows how mistaken one can be even in those one knows best.”

“I dare not confide in anyone,” Phillida said. “Besides, it would be wrong to involve you in my secrets.”

“To think that Mister Andrews was a Catholic and we never guessed it!”

“He was desperately afraid of being discovered,” Phillida said. “Just as I, too, am afraid that Father will find me out.”

“He will never guess unless you tell him,” Lizbeth said; “but he will think it strange if you refuse to be betrothed to Rodney.”

“I know he will,” Phillida replied. “With the others I was able to speak to them first and send them away before they spoke to Father. Master Hawkhurst asked for my hand the very first night he came here.”

“He wanted Father to give him money for his ship and he decided to offer for you even before he saw you, but when he did see you, he fell in love with you – that was what happened.”

“It makes no difference how it happened. I cannot marry him. Jesus have mercy! I cannot. I have written to Mister Andrews asking him to help me.”

“When did you send the letter?” Lizbeth asked.

“Only today,” Phillida replied. “I gave it to one of the servants to take into Hatfield. He was just leaving, so there was no chance of Father seeing it.”

“Or Catherine, I hope!” Lizbeth added. “Catherine is far more dangerous than Father when it comes to being suspicious of or suspecting us of doing anything that is reprehensible.”

“Yes, I know that. She merely despises me. She thinks I am a fool – a fool who cannot get herself a husband, but she is afraid and jealous of you.”

“For no reason,” Lizbeth said.

Phillida’s tired and miserable face suddenly lit with a smile.

“You are very attractive, little Lizbeth. I hope you will find someone who loves you and whom you can love in return.”

Lizbeth was silent, and Phillida went on,

“What looks God has given me have brought me nothing but unhappiness. If I had been born plain or deformed, no man would have wanted me. It would have been easy for them to slip away from the world and be forgotten; but as it is...”

She made a gesture with her hands.

“As it is, Father is proud of you,” Lizbeth said. “He likes to see you admired, he wants you to be married.”

“Yes, I know that,” Phillida said, “and he is ashamed to think I have remained single for so long. In some ways he thinks it is a reflection on himself. He is proud of his own charms and cannot credit that he has children who do not attract the opposite sex as readily as he does.”

“He has often talked about Sir Richard and Tom and wondered why they never came here any more. I wondered, too. Oh, Phillida! Are you sure that you would like to be shut away in a Convent?”

“I want it more than anything else in the whole world,” Phillida answered.

Her face lit up, her eyes were shining and there was a look of spiritual ecstasy in her face which Lizbeth had never seen there before. She gave a little sigh. She realised that Phillida was asking for the moon.

Nunneries no longer existed in England. They had been abolished by Henry VIII, reinstated by Mary and abolished again by Elizabeth. The latter had made a clean sweep of her sister’s efforts and the nuns had fled to Ireland and France, after which no one heard any more of them. If they communicated with their families it was kept a close secret.

Lizbeth knew there was not a chance of Phillida’s attaining her desire, but she was kind enough not to say so. Instead, she put out her hand towards her half-sister and for the moment the two girls looked at each other, linked together in the dark shadows of the curtained four-poster.

“If Father should discover what you are he would kill you – I think,” Lizbeth said in a low voice.

“Yes, I know that,” Phillida replied.

She spoke steadfastly with a strength which Lizbeth had never known she possessed. Then, as they sat there silent, one of the candles spluttered in its wick and went out. Lizbeth remembered Francis.

“I must leave you now so that you will go to sleep,” she said to Phillida. “Promise me that you will cry no more.”

“No more tonight. Thank you for comforting me, little Lizbeth. I somehow believe that things are not as hopeless as I thought they were earlier today. God will help me.”

“I pray that He will,” Lizbeth answered.

She bent to kiss Phillida, tucked her up and turned towards the door, blowing out the remaining candle.

“Good night,” she whispered, her hand on the latch.

“God bless you, Lizbeth,” Phillida replied.

Lizbeth crept back to her room. Her thoughts were chaotic and she wondered, as she slipped between the sheets, whether what she had learned was true or whether it had just been a strange dream which had come to her in the night. She could hardly credit that Phillida, the quiet, rather stupid sister of whom she had often felt slightly contemptuous, was really the same Phillida whom she had just left – a woman fraught with emotion, fighting a lone battle for the sake of her Faith.

Religious feelings ran high in the country and there was so much controversy that Lizbeth was content for it to mean little more to her than noisy, fiercely-contested arguments and lengthy, boring services every Sunday in the village church. There in the big family pew, with its high, oak sides screening them from the congregation, her father usually slept while her stepmother read from a book, Lizbeth could remember fidgeting endlessly as a child until, as the years passed, she managed to let her mind slip away to some imaginative place of her own so that she did not hear the long, laboured discourse which usually took the best part of two hours.

Yet now she wondered whether religion should have meant more to her. The prayers she had said as a child had seemed adequate enough, yet beside the flame which was driving Phillida into rebellion against her father and the life in which she had been brought up they seemed insignificant and paltry, like Francis’ poetry.

Was Francis’ interest in Elita love or the intrigue of religion? Lizbeth thought of her father’s face if he should suspect that two of his children were caught up in the toils and tangles of Popery, and even as she tried to conceive his horror, she heard a step outside her window. It was Francis returning, she was sure of that, and when she hurried across the room and pulled back the curtains, she saw that her assumption was right.

The clouds had cleared a little from the sky and the moon, pale and watery, was shedding its rays over the garden. The shadows were thick and dark and the silver light gleamed on the wet paving stones and the puddles in the drive. Francis was just below her now. She could see the darkness of his cloak and hat pulled low over his forehead. He was trying the door, which he had left unlocked. Though he twisted and turned the heavy circular handle it would not open.

With a sudden fear which for the moment made it impossible for her to move, Lizbeth guessed what had happened. After Francis had gone from the house, someone had closed and locked the door behind him. She felt a sudden constriction in her throat and her heart began to beat very fast. Someone, then, knew that Francis had gone out!

She heard Francis turn the handle again, saw him push with all his strength against the door, and then, as he stepped back, surprised and alarmed, Lizbeth gave a low whistle. He looked up quickly at her window. She knew that he could see her face in the moonlight, and she set her finger against her lips. He understood and pointed to the door.

She nodded her head and moving from the window, snatched up a warm shawl which lay over the chair and wrapped it round her shoulders. She opened the door of her room – the passage was in darkness save for the moonlight coming through the high, diamond-paned window on the stairway.

Swiftly, on tiptoe, Lizbeth ran along the passage, then, with her hand on the broad oak banister, she started to descend the stairs. The rushes in the hall tickled her feet, they rustled too, as she moved across them to the front door. As she anticipated, the heavy bolt had been drawn and the big iron key turned in the lock.

It took all her strength to move them, but when she had done so, the door was open and Francis stepped over the threshold, drawing his hat from his head.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Even though the words were hardly breathed, Lizbeth shushed him into silence. She closed the door and strove to shoot the bolt, but it was too heavy for her. She beckoned to Francis and he moved it into place, making a faint sound which caused Lizbeth to say again,

“Hush!”

He smiled at her. It was as if he scorned her fears. He bent to kiss her cheek as if in gratitude for what she had done for him. His lips were warm and she smelt the fumes of wine upon his breath. He had been drinking, she thought, not heavily, but enough to make him careless and not so fearful as he might be at other times.

The most dangerous part of their journey now lay before them. As they walked across the hall, Lizbeth looked down at Francis’ boots. Would it be best, she wondered, for him to remove them before he went up the stairs? And even as she considered whispering to him to do so, she saw Francis’ eyes widen as he looked towards the head of the stairs.

The expression on his face made her look up with a sudden sense of horror and what she saw made her draw in her breath with a sudden, audible gasp. The door of her father’s room was open and light was streaming forth from it on to the passage at the top of the stairs. For just one second Lizbeth watched it, fascinated. Then into the passage came first her stepmother holding a silver candlestick in her hand, and behind her Sir Harry with his night-cap on his head and also carrying a candle.

Catherine wore a
peignoir
of white silk over her nightgown and her hair was in two long plaits on either side of her face. Her eyes were dark and spiteful, her lips were smiling as if she was delighting in the scene that was about to take place. It was enough for Lizbeth to look at her to know who had bolted the door.

Sir Harry, despite the fact that he was wearing only a nightshirt, was awe-inspiring. He stood leaning against a heraldic newel at the head of the stairs, his candle in his hand, his face red with anger, his heavy eyebrows almost meeting across his forehead. He stared down into the hall at Lizbeth and Francis and then his voice rang out in a sudden roar.

“Come here, both of you!”

It seemed to Lizbeth that the stairs ascended endlessly. She felt as if she and Francis would never reach the top. As they walked up step by step, Francis’ boots making enough noise now to raise the whole house, Lizbeth could feel his courage and the elation and happiness of the mood in which he had returned home ebbing away from him slowly but surely.

He had never been able to stand up to his father. He had always been afraid of him since he was a little boy, and long before they reached the top Lizbeth knew that he was trembling and his lips were dry so that he must moisten them with his tongue, not once but continuously.

“Now, sir, perhaps you will explain to me where you have been,” Sir Harry said as Francis reached the top step.

Lizbeth could see her brother’s face in the light of the candles. He was pale now and his eyes were blinking as if they were dazzled and also as if he were ashamed. He looked stupid and insignificant and for a moment Lizbeth could understand what her father was feeling. Red-faced, pompous and overbearing, he was yet a man! In his youth he must have been good-looking, but that had not mattered beside the dash and courage he had shown, whether he was enjoying a fight or seducing a woman.

Lizbeth realised that, if Francis could say he had been to London to see some fair lady, or even avow he had been courting some village maiden, his father would forgive him and be proud of him. But it was not love which made him go to the Keens – it was something which she feared even as she knew their father was afraid of it.

“Well, speak up, where have you been?” Sir Harry asked again.

“ To – to – to Dr. Keen’s, sir.”

“God’s death! I knew it. I might have guessed that you would disobey my orders. I told you that I would not have you going there to listen to seditious talk, to be involved in some Papist plot. I forbade you the house, did I not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“ And yet you have defied me. You creep out when I am asleep, leaving and entering the house like a thief or a servant rather than as a gentleman. Well, I must teach you a lesson, for I cannot trust you, it seems. You will not go back to Oxford next term, but you will sail with Master Rodney Hawkhurst in his ship for which I have just subscribed a substantial sum of money. We will see if the sea can make a man of you.”

“No, I won’t go, I won’t!” Francis spoke passionately, but his protest lacked conviction. His voice rose shrilly, the voice of a boy, not a man.

“You will obey my orders,” Sir Harry replied harshly. “I shall send a letter to Master Hawkhurst to-morrow apprising him of your arrival. You will get your clothes together and start for Plymouth as soon as it can be arranged. In the meantime you are under orders not to leave this house. Do you understand, you are not to leave this house, nor will you have any communication with Dr. Keen or his daughter. That is my command. If you don’t obey me, I will have you locked in your bedroom, and if necessary, chained to your bedpost.”

Sir Harry turned as he finished speaking and walking with a dignity which was surprising considering the circumstances, withdrew into his bedroom. Catherine followed him. When she reached the door, she looked back. Her smile was a triumph of maliciousness.

Francis made no effort to move when his father and stepmother had gone. He stood staring at the floor, his hands hanging helplessly at his side, his fingers clenched, but limply as if he had not even the energy to square them.