The Weeping Ash (55 page)

“Goble? It is he who keeps it neat? Why should—”

“Because he saw the ghost!” Andrew said, smiling. “It had a rare, sobering effect on old Goble, that phantom did, by all accounts! And I'm not saying I mightn't be the same. If
I
saw a spook, likely
I'd
take care to keep its resting place tidy.”

“Good heavens,” said Fanny faintly.

Now recalling that all this time she was keeping Lord Egremont's carriage waiting at the gate, she moved on, then, turning back, said impulsively to Andrew Talgarth:

“I was not able to thank you as I ought for the assistance yon rendered me that day in Petworth House gardens when I was being persecuted by that odious, odious man! I can hardly express to you how
deeply
grateful to you I was—how
immensely
relieved to see you come along that path—”

His face broke into its flashing smile again. “Ah, it was nothing, ma'am! I didn't like to see you so affrighted; I'd have been glad to throw the chap into a holly bush.—Though I daresay it was punishment enow for him to have me turn up when I did—the poor besotted fool!” He glanced aside, seemed to murmur something—could it have been “Who's to blame him?”—then, turning full to Fanny once more, said seriously, “Any way I can help you, ma'am, at any time, I shall be very happy. You can always call on Andrew Talgarth, I hope you know that?” The blue eyes met hers again, he gave a little bow, rather dignified, then turned and strode away up the slope toward a gate that led out onto the North Chapel road.

Feeling strangely peaceful, Fanny rode home in Lord Egremont's carriage.

This mood of calm lasted through that day and the next and helped her to bear with fortitude the miserable atmosphere in the house, compounded of the servants' nervous hostility under Thomas's threats, his air of black vindictiveness against the whole world, Patty's sulks, and Bet's uneasy excitement and envy of her sister's married state. Only little Thomas, the subject of all this upheaval, seemed unchanged; he slept a great deal of the time; roused to take nourishment; then slept again.

Thomas, to Fanny's infinite relief, now passed several nights in his garden house. Since Fanny had no wish for the distasteful presence of Mrs. Baggot in her bedchamber, she did not summon the nurse, but, as she had done while Thomas was in London, requested Tess at night and morning to help her put on and remove her corselet (rightly guessing that Thomas would instantly notice if she left off the repellent garment). She had been a little exercised in mind as to how to explain it to Tess, but in the end simply said that it had been recommended as an aid to posture, leaving Tess to draw her own conclusions.

Tess accepted this, merely remarking, “Geemany, ma'am, I dunno why
you
need sich a contraption, seeing as you allus holds yourself upright as an ellet-rod. If it had been Miss Bet, now!”

On the third morning after Thomas's accident, Tess appeared in a state of hardly suppressed excitement which burst out as she began the lacing up.

“Oh, ma'am, sich doings! That poor lady as you sent to lodge with my auntie Rapley—Missus Fox—”

“Yes? What of her?” Fanny asked with an instinctive tremor and sinking of the heart.

“She've been found, missus! Drownded! In the pool, down to Haslingbourne mill!”

“
What?
Oh, how dreadful! Who found her?”

“My cousin by marriage Charley Heather. He work down to Haslingbourne as a miller's man, an' when he went to open the sluice gate he see a bit of a feather, yaller, an', thinks he,
That
be no water bird, and he looks furder, an' sees the poor lady a-floating drownded among the mare's tails an' tussocks.”

“Oh, my God!” Fanny felt so sick and unstrung that she had to sit down on her bed.

“Hold up, ma'am! I shouldn't ha' told ye so sudden. I'll get ye a cup of water.”

“Thank you, Tess. Just leave me a moment and I—I will soon be better.”

“D'you think 'twas she, ma'am, as tried to drown poor little Mas'r Thomas, an' then got sad-like, an' dreesome, a-thinking of what she'd done, an' throwed herself in the mill pool?”

“I do not know, Tess” Fanny said faintly. “Perhaps so.”

But to herself she added, Perhaps that is what we were meant to think.

* * *

True or not, this, at any rate, was the explanation popularly held in the town for Miss Fox's untimely end. A coroner's inquest was held in the new town hall—much to the disgust of Thomas, who bitterly deplored and resented the unfortunate publicity of the whole affair; and it was decided that she must have made the attack on little Thomas while in an unbalanced state of mind, and had then drowned herself in a fit of remorse. Many people in the town came forward to say that they had seen the strange lady walking about wringing her hands or distressfully muttering to herself, “hackering an' stammering like she were only half baptized,” as the town constable put it; so this seemed a reasonable explanation for both occurrences. Goble was not present at the inquest; he was laid up in the loft over the shed where he slept with one of the putrid fevers so prevalent in the town that summer, and Mrs. Strudwick reported that he was feverish and rambling and talked no sense at all. Fanny would have visited him, but Thomas furiously forbade this, exclaiming:

“Are you mad, Frances? Do you wish to bring the contagion back to the whole family?”

Two days after Miss Fox's quiet funeral rites—she, also, was buried in the graveyard on the Billingshurst road, and a surprisingly large number of curious bystanders attended the ceremony, but the Paget family stayed away—Tess came to Fanny with a folded paper.

“The constables did come an' take all Miss Fox's things from my auntie's, ma'am—not that the poor lady had much—but they missed this, simmingly. I fund it under the mattress, time I ran up to give the room a turnout. An' I saw the name Paget on it, so I brung it to ye. 'Tis in some foreign language, though, I reckon; I couldn't read no more than the name.”

The short note was, in fact, written in French. “
Si quelqu'un, me trouvera, morte, je veux…
”

If I should be found dead, I wish it to be known that the man responsible for my sad end is Thomas Paget, my evil genius, who used me heartlessly and despitefully, made many promises that he did not intend to keep, unkindly threw me off, and at the last, deprived me of my poor life, as he had done previously to his wife Emma.

Maria Fox

The scrap of paper swam under Fanny's eyes.

“Thank you, Tess,” she said at length with difficulty. “I shall have—I shall have to think what is best to be done with this. You did right to bring it to me.”

Show it to Liz? was her first thought. To Lord Egremont? To Lady Mountague?

But, under such a direct accusation, Thomas must surely have the right to defend himself? He must have the right to see it first?

Papa would certainly say so.

Fanny walked swiftly out into the garden and across to Thomas's sanctum. He was there, she knew; she had seen him cross the grass after breakfast, although it was his usual day to visit the mill.

The weather was close, cloudy, and uneasy; a fidgety wind sighed in the branches of the ash tree and carried the chimney smoke over the garden in sudden blue gusts.

Fanny tapped at Thomas's door and walked firmly into the bare little room, controlling, as best she could, her inner dread.

He was there alone, sitting moodily hunched over a small wood fire. The garden room, with four outside walls and facing north, was damp and cold at all times except in the full sun.

“
Now
what is it, Frances?” he said harshly, turning to fix Fanny with an unwelcoming stare. She noticed that his eyes were bloodshot.

“Thomas…I think you ought to see this. It was found in Miss Fox's room.”

He read the paper, puzzling slowly through the French. He had learned the language, Fanny knew, during his spell in the navy, enough to understand conversation and, she imagined, the contents of this note. As indeed it proved. Reaching the end, he gave a grunt of rage, screwed up the paper, and, before Fanny could stop him, hurled it into the fire.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I did not mean—Do you think you ought to have done that?”

“Yes, I should! And why not, pray?” He turned on Fanny furiously. “When that madwoman was accusing me of—
Why not?
Do you mean to suggest that I—that your husband—?”

Flinching before the look in his eyes, she murmured something about the coroner's inquest.

Thomas took her hand in a punishing grip.

“Listen to me, Frances. You are to forget that you ever saw that mad, lying note. Do you understand me? If I ever hear you speak of it again—if I ever hear that any word about it has got out—I shall know who carried the report. I shall know that
you
are mad—to give credit to such tales about your husband. Do you understand me? You will suffer for it.”

He gripped her arm even tighter, until a cold sweat pearled her brow and she gave a stifled cry.

“I must do what I think is right, Thomas,” she said breathlessly.

“If you mention that note,” he told her, “I shall say that your wits are turned. That it was
you
who threw little Thomas down the well. I shall have you committed to Bedlam. Now go!”

Fanny stumbled out, so paralyzed by the hate and fury in his voice that the futility of his threat was no comfort to her. True, he could not accuse her of throwing her own baby down the well—she had been in Cowdray Park at the time—but she did not doubt that he would think of something just as bad. And would have no hesitation in doing it.

The town of Kabul was a handsome, prosperous, and friendly place with a great palace—built long ago by the Emperor Thaimur—on a hilltop looking north to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The city, lying to the west of a spacious plain, ensconced in the angle between two mountain ridges, was built mainly of baked clay—golden, flat-roofed houses, tier upon tier, leading up the hillside. Among the bazaars and caravanserais there were many beautiful fountains and painted arcades. Huge red-flowering trees gave shade at street corners, walnuts and plane trees adorned the public gardens. Despite the uneasy political situation since the death of Thaimur with at least twenty of his sons struggling to obtain mastery of the country, the atmosphere in Kabul was one of luxury, comfort, and frivolity. Dancing girls performed in public places to the music of lyre and tambourine. Innumerable stalls sold wine, food, and every kind of delicacy, particularly the candied fruits for which the town was famous—preserved mulberries and rhubarb, made into a delicious conserve with lime and grape juice, candied apples, pears, peaches, quinces, licorice, and watermelon. Raspberries were preserved in ice with rose water; ice, brought down in great blocks from the mountains during the winter and kept buried in pits wrapped with straw, lay within the purchasing power of any poor citizen, even in the hottest summer.

The females had to take all these delights on trust, however, (except the candied fruits, of which Cal brought them supplies every evening). Cameron was warned by a friend of his, a camel dealer in the Kashmir serai, that even here emissaries of Prince Mihal were on the lookout for a party of Kitabi, or Christians, carrying a baby with them. Also, as a known adherent of the imprisoned Mahmud, brother of the Shah Shuja', Cameron would be liable to arrest if he were recognized. He therefore thought it best to appear in the streets as little as possible, and then in careful disguise as an Arab horse dealer. He had accordingly hired a house for his party, where they must remain withdrawn from the public eye until a suitable westward-traveling caravan had been found, to which they could attach themselves.

The house consisted of two rooms, one for eating and one for sleeping. The main room had in it a sandali—a stone table built over a hole in the ground, in which a fire burned all winter long. Around this an Afghan family would sit cross-legged through the winter months—very often the legs of old persons and females were quite numb by the spring, Cameron told Miss Musson, who commented tartly that the Afghanis must be a set of idle good-for-nothings.

Miss Musson was very silent these days. Unless directly addressed, she seldom spoke. Very few of her dry shrewd comments, her brisk, pithy, ironic, yet good-natured observations were to be heard by her fellow travelers; ever since leaving the Holy Pir's mountain she seemed to have fallen into an abstraction. Because of this very uncharacteristic preoccupation and inattentiveness, she had apparently failed to remark the almost equally uncommunicative mood of her younger companions. It was, of course, not uncommon for Cal, when inspired with a poem, to be quiet and dreamy and rapt; his present behavior merely followed the usual pattern as he sat immobile, staring into space, or feverishly covered the stone table with sheets of scribbled manuscript. His long epic about the great stone horse, the Asp-i-Dheha, was well under way, and he raised no particular objections to Cameron's interdictions on the exploration of Kabul, only taking the air at dusk, disguised as an ash-smeared faqir, or a seller of shawls from Kashmir.

But for Cal's sister to be so quiet, so somber and reserved, for such a long period was far from customary, and Cameron occasionally gave her a thoughtful, troubled glance, when he could do so unobserved by herself or other members of the party. She did not appear to be ill or afflicted in any physical way that he could discover, merely sunk in a strange lethargy and lowness of spirit so profound that sometimes she had to be addressed three or four times before she heard what was said to her. She had odd flashes of anger too, though never at Miss Musson; but with the other two she frequently lost her patience in a way that was quite out of character. “Scylla's sulky as a bear these days, I can't imagine what's got into her,” Cal confided to the colonel. “As a rule, you know, she's the best company in the world, never out of sorts. What can ail her, do you suppose? I ask her, but she just turns me off, or snaps at me. Can she have formed an attachment for one of those warriors back at the Bai's castle?”

“Young ladies can be very chancy creatures,” Cameron answered cautiously, “though certainly your sister has up to now shown less signs of temperament than many members of her sex. I daresay she will come about if we leave her in peace.”

Accordingly Scylla was left mainly to her own reflections, and these were far from happy. She would sit for hours together, sometimes, with a stricken expression in her eyes, staring out of the small window, over the descending flat roofs of Kabul, to the faraway snow-covered peaks; and her face appeared almost as frozen and immobile as the distant mountains.

On the night when the glimmer of false dawn had shown her that it was Cal, not the colonel, who had come to her bed, she had been so appalled that her first instinct had been flight, and silence. With desperate, trembling speed, she had removed herself and her few belongings from the cave. Cal was sunk in a profound, swoonlike slumber; he had rolled off the bag of feathers onto the sandy floor of the cave, so she was able to carry the bed away with her. She withdrew herself and little Chet, who slept like a dormouse in his box of hay, to another chamber, and settled down as best she might to pass the rest of the night in a state not far removed from despair. At first her main concern had been for Cal. That he had been sleepwalking she was well aware; but suppose he had woken sufficiently to realize what he had done? His sister could only pray that was not so. Meanwhile she was left with the terrifying realization that his attachment to Sripana must have gone a great deal further than anybody had suspected; the thought of the danger they must all have been in had the Bai discovered this turned her sick with horror, also the thought of Cameron's reactions had he learned about it. Her own fault paled in comparison.

Why did I not know—not guess—that it was Cal? she asked herself over and over. Why had the mental sympathy failed, that had so often united them in thought, in feeling? And each time she came back to the conclusion that for once Cal, obsessed with his own hopeless passion, and she with hers, had been deaf to each other's thought patterns, absolved from reality—or perhaps, she thought, shivering, aware in a deeper, more basic way of the other's inextinguishable need.

Besides her distress about Cal, she was left with the full understanding of her own hopeless, comfortless case; she loved Cameron, bitterly and deeply; just
how
deeply she was now made well aware; and that there was no likelihood of his reciprocating her feeling she also perfectly well understood. His cool reply to Miss Musson had made that quite clear, when she had said:

“Suppose the poor girl were to fall in love with you?”

“Well then”—and a pause—“I suppose I could marry her.”

Every tone and nuance of that exchange, Scylla thought, would be stamped in her memory until the hour of her death. I might just as
well
be carried off by some amir and spend the rest of my life in his harem, she thought despairingly; I cannot imagine any other prospect that would be less wretched.

On the following day, however, her misery was mitigated by one degree. Cal slept long and late, as he often did after his epileptic seizures or during intensive, inspired spells of writing. When he finally woke and joined the outers, although his sister scanned his face with close, anxious, passionate attention, she could see absolutely no sign of consciousness or guilt; he behaved to her in precisely his normal good-humored casual brotherly fashion; it was plain that the episode, must have seemed to him like some fantastic, feverish dream, born out of the longing for his lost love. Thank God, Scylla thought with heartfelt sincerity, oh, thank God for that; he has been spared the guilt and horror that must otherwise haunt him all his life. And with this knowledge, her own agony of spirit was somewhat relieved. Now she had only herself to contend with. Eased in this way, she was now at liberty to reflect that she was still faced with a physical hazard. Girls in her situation—seduced girls—with a wry mouth she remembered another of the colonel's statements to Miss Musson—such girls became pregnant, such embraces were the means by which children were engendered. She knew all about this, theoretically, from her work at Miss Musson's hospital. Well—that was no matter either; with a kind of ironic inner shrug she recalled the bizarre interview with old Khalzada and Habiba in the Bai's castle. Perhaps Khalzada had intended to safeguard her against the Bai! At all events, if she did prove to be with child, she had the means to cope with the situation. Thank God again! Had Colonel Cameron known
that
, she thought with a wry chuckle, he might not have felt it needful to make his self-sacrificing proposal to Miss Musson.

* * *

It had been a huge relief to Scylla, who found the continued inactivity in the Holy Pir's cave hard to bear, that three days after these events a southward-traveling pilgrims' caravan passed by the mountain. It was in fact that same queens' procession of which the Bai had spoken to Cameron, suggesting they capture the royal ladies and hold them up to ransom. An elderly princess, the mother of one of the queens, had unfortunately died of exhaustion on the return journey from the shrine of Hazrat Imam, and the caravan had traveled around by way of the Holy Pir's mountain in order to ask if her body might be left in that sacred spot. Permission was given, and the funerary ceremonies occupied two days; after that it was a simple matter for Cameron to request that he and his companions might join the caravan. Since the mountains were known to be full of raiders, the escort of three extra men was welcomed, and the ladies were allowed to ride in the palanquin of the deceased princess. Scylla would have far preferred to ride and see the country they were passing through; but Cameron assured her that, in their present company, this was quite out of the question and she must just make the best of it. She was obliged to obey, but the long hours of traveling in stuffy semidarkness did not improve her spirits. Miss Musson talked very little during the journey; her mind seemed far away; and Scylla found the week spent on the road to Kabul by far the most miserable part of the trip so far.

During the journey they had hardly a sight of their male companions, who, at night, slept with the armed escort of fifty sowars. Cameron had put it about that his ladies were a pair of nuns from Debuje in the Himalayas, on a pilgrimage to various Middle Eastern shrines, including Mecca, and this was curiously accepted.

At first Scylla was relieved when, reaching Kabul, they parted from the caravan, which was continuing southward to the royal town of Kandahar. But the inactivity in the little house was even harder to bear than imprisonment in the palanquin. Consequently she was overjoyed, as Cameron had hoped, when, returning one evening, he announced that he had secured them places in a westbound caravan departing in two days' time.

“It will travel south, taking the longer route, along the Helmand River, so as to skirt the Koh-i-Baba range, and the Koh Siah, but we are lucky, since it is a horse caravan; it should take us no more than ten or twelve days to reach Herat. Unfortunately it goes no farther in our direction; but very likely we may pick up some other caravan there.”

“What will it cost?” inquired Miss Musson.

“Six sequins apiece, and we must provide our own food, naturally.”

Through his bazaar acquaintance, Cameron had disposed of some of the party's gold, and he now went out to procure supplies for the journey and arrange for the dispatch of their camels back to Mir Murad Beg.

Coming out of her own preoccupation somewhat at this news, Scylla noticed that Cameron seemed unusually downcast and taciturn—even more than commonly; later she learned from Cal that he had had a discouraging report of his friend and previous employer, the ex-Amir Mahmud.

“He is being kept imprisoned by his brother the Shah Shuja'; for a time he was in his own town of Herat, but Shuja' has now moved him to Kandahar, and rumor has it he is ill, as a result of his imprisonment; I believe Rob is afraid that he may die if he is not soon released.”

This news aroused in Scylla more compassionate and kindly feelings toward the Colonel than she had entertained of late.

“Poor Colonel Cameron; no wonder he looks so worried.” A thought struck her. “Now that he has arranged for us to join this caravan, I wonder that he does not leave us? He must be anxious to try and rescue his friend; he is probably wishing us all at Jericho.”

“Just what I said to Rob myself,” Cal agreed. “And I believe that, if the caravan had gone right through to Baghdad, he might have considered leaving us to make our own way; but since it does not, he thinks it his duty to accompany us.”

If Scylla had been a man she could have exclaimed, “Damn Colonel Cameron and what he thinks is his duty!” As it was, she gave a shrug and remarked, “Well, he must do as he thinks best; we certainly cannot influence his decision; one might as well order the Holy Pir's stone horse to break into a gallop.—How does your poem go, by the by?”

“It is nearly done—I will read it to you presently—may I? And I am happy it is nearly finished, for I have had a capital new idea—I find this life of travel and movement quite famous in that way—ideas seem to bubble up all along the road, and I feel that I am writing better and better every day. Even losing Sripana”—his voice shook a little—“even that seems to have opened a door in me—opened my mind in a new direction.”

Scylla was silent for some minutes; then, rousing herself, she said affectionately: