The Witch from the Sea (52 page)

‘We add different herbs from time to time,’ said Melanie. ‘We try to improve on it.’

‘It was always too good to be improved,’ said Senara. ‘And see how impatient Tamsyn is. She is really chiding us for talking of soup when there is so much to tell.’

My mother said: ‘Eat, Senara. You must be famished. There is plenty of time to talk afterwards.’

They ate heartily of the soup, which was followed by lamby pie, and then there were strawberries with clouted cream.

‘I have indeed come home,’ said Senara. ‘Is it not exactly as I told you it would be, Carlotta?’

Carlotta replied: ‘Madre, you have talked of nothing else but Castle Paling and your sister Tamsyn ever since you made up your mind to come here.’

We were all waiting eagerly for the last of the strawberries to be consumed, and when the servants had removed the platters Senara said: ‘Now you are impatient to hear what happened. I shall give you a rough outline, for I cannot explain all the little happenings that made up a lifetime over a dinner table. But you will learn in due time. You young people may have heard of me. There was a great talk hereabouts when I was here … but that was long ago and when faces are no longer around they are forgotten. Yet my mother was different … She came mysteriously, thrown up from the sea. She was a noble lady, the wife of a count and bearing his child … which was myself. I was born here … in the Red Room. Is the Red Room still here?’

‘Why, it’s the haunted room,’ cried Rozen.

‘That’s right,’ went on Senara. ‘The haunted room. But it was haunted before my mother came to it. Colum Casvellyn’s first wife died there bearing a stillborn child. That was before he married Tamsyn’s mother. Yes, it was haunted then and my mother added another ghost to the Red Room.’

‘The servants won’t go there after dark,’ said Gwenifer excitedly.

‘It’s nonsense,’ retorted Melanie. ‘The room is not haunted. One of these days I intend to change all the furnishings.’

‘Several had that idea,’ said Senara. ‘Wasn’t it odd that no one ever did?’

‘Please go on,’ pleaded Bersaba.

‘My mother came and I was born and then she went away, but I grew up with Tamsyn and when her mother died, my mother came back and she married Colum Casvellyn. We were always together, weren’t we, Tamsyn? I used to shock you, but you thought of me as your sister.’

‘Always,’ said my mother.

‘Then came the day when my mother went away again and Colum Casvellyn had had his accident and was in his chair. The witch-hunters came for my mother and they were ready to take me in her place, so Tamsyn and Connell here got me out of the castle. I was very friendly with my old music master who had become a Puritan and was living in Leyden Hall. You know it of course.’

‘The Lamptons live there now,’ said Rozen. ‘We know them well.’

‘They bought it after the Deemsters left,’ added Aunt Melanie.

‘I fled there,’ went on Senara, ‘and the Deemsters took me in. I was married in the simple Puritan fashion to Richard Gravel—Dickon, my old music master—and we went to Holland together. Amsterdam was the refuge then for those who wished to worship as they pleased, so it was believed; but we began to discover that that freedom was to worship only in a manner approved by the Puritans. I was never really a Puritan at heart. I just changed when I met Dickon. I had brought with me some pieces of jewellery and to wear jewellery in our sect was considered sinful. At first I wore it in secret and Dickon was so besotted with me that he daren’t offend me by forbidding me to wear it.’

‘I never thought you could be a Puritan, Senara,’ said my mother with an affectionate smile.

‘You knew me well,’ answered Senara. ‘We left Amsterdam for Leyden, after which city the Deemsters had named their home. And here we spent eleven years while we made our plans to leave for America. Eleven years! How did I endure them!’

‘You had your love for Dickon.’

Senara laughed. ‘My dear Tamsyn,’ she replied, ‘you think we are all like you … good faithful docile wives. Far from it. I was soon out of love with Dickon and out of love with religion. There was little that was holy about me. All through those eleven years I longed to be back at Paling. I wanted to be young again. I knew that I had wanted Dickon mainly because he was forbidden to me. I knew that I had been wrong to marry a Puritan … not that he was always a Puritan. He could forget his religion on occasions.’

‘They provided an escape for you when you were in danger,’ my mother reminded her.

‘That’s true,’ agreed Senara. ‘But for them I might have had nowhere to go when I was in danger and that could have been an end to me.’ She grimaced. ‘All those years ago I might have been a corpse on that tree in Hangman’s Lane where they used to hang witches. Remember, Tamsyn?’

My mother looked uncomfortable.

‘They still hang witches there,’ said Rozen.

‘Are they searching them out as madly as they were when I left?’

‘Every now and then there is a revival,’ said my mother. ‘Thank God, we have heard nothing for these last few years. I won’t have the servants speaking of witches. It revives interest and that is bad. Why, a poor old woman has only to stoop or develop a mole on her cheek or have some spot which can be said to have been made by the Devil and they will take her to Hangman’s Lane. Many an innocent woman has been treated thus and I want to see it stopped.’

‘There will always be witches,’ said Uncle Connell, ‘and ’tis well that they should be dispatched to their masters,’

‘I shall always do all I can to save the innocent,’ said my mother, fierce when there was someone who needed her protection. ‘And,’ she added, ‘I should like to know more of witches and what made them give their souls to the Devil in the first place.’

‘Don’t attempt to dabble in witchcraft, sister,’ warned Uncle Connell.

‘Dabble!’ cried my mother. ‘I only want to know.’

‘That’s what many would say. They only wanted to know.’

‘Tamsyn, you are just the same,’ cried Senara. ‘You always wanted to look after anyone if you thought they needed your care.’

‘Do tell us what happened when you reached Holland,’ begged Bersaba.

‘Well, for those eleven years I lived as a Puritan. I would attend their meetings and listen to their plans. They were going to return to England and sail to America from there. I knew they had bought a ship called the
Speedwell
which they sent to Delftshaven. It was to go to America by way of Southampton. I did not relish the long sea voyage. Months on the ocean … prayers … endless prayers. My knees grew rough with kneeling. I hated the plain grey gowns I was expected to wear. I learned very quickly that I was not meant to be a Puritan.’

‘Did you and Dickon have no children?’

‘Yes, I had a boy. I called him Richard after his father. He grew up to be a little Puritan. From the age of five he was watching me to curb my vanities. I was stifled. I couldn’t endure it. Sometimes I thought that Dickon wouldn’t either. I used to think it was a sham, but he was deeper in his Puritanism than I knew. It might have been that he could have escaped at first, but it was like an octopus which twined its tentacles about him. When they left for England I did not go with them.’

‘You let your son go?’ cried my mother.

‘He was more Dickon’s son than mine. He had been brought up in the Puritan manner; he was burning with enthusiasm for the new life in America.’

‘So you were alone.’

‘I heard later that Dickon died before they sailed. He was in a tavern in Southampton and there he fell into an argument with sailors about religion. He defended the Puritans and was stabbed. He died of his wounds.’

‘What a terrible thing to have happened,’ cried Melanie.

‘Yes, I wished I’d stayed with him. Had I known it would be but a few weeks more … I was fond of Dickon. It was just his fanatical beliefs which came between us. They had alienated the boy, who stayed with them after his father died. And then I was alone.’

‘Alone in Holland!’ cried my mother. ‘You should have come home then.’

‘I had friends. One of these was a Spaniard. He took me with him to Madrid and I lived there for some years in fine style. When I lost him I set out to look for my mother because I knew that she was there. I found her. She was married to a gentleman of high nobility, a friend of King Philip … You remember him, Tamsyn. He was here as Lord Cartonel. You thought he came courting me.’

‘I remember him well,’ said my mother soberly.

‘My mother had never been what you would call maternal. She never wanted me. I was an embarrassment … no, not even an embarrassment … an encumbrance, shall we say, right from the first. I should never have been born. It was a miracle that I was and that was due to your mother, Tamsyn, who found mine on the shore half dead and to her own detriment brought us both into this castle.’

‘It was long ago,’ said my mother, ‘and you were brought up here as my sister, Senara. There are unbreakable ties between us and I am glad that you have come back to us.’

‘Do tell us what happened,’ begged Rozen.

‘I went to Court. I married a gentleman of rank. We had a child, Carlotta. I had always wanted to see you, but of late the urge became irresistible. I must see you and Castle Paling before I was too old to travel. My husband agreed that I should pay a visit. He could not accompany us. He has a post at Court. So we set out. We arrived in London … and we travelled here by stages. That is all and now we are here and right glad to see you.’

‘You will stay with us for a long while, I hope,’ said my mother.

‘I have a feeling that I shall not be eager to leave this place. I must go back to Spain in due course, but to me Castle Paling is what I think of when I say home.’

My mother was deeply moved; so was Aunt Melanie.

Uncle Connell said that we must all drink to the return of Senara with her daughter and she must regard Castle Paling as her home for as long as she wished to, to which my mother replied with some firmness: ‘Senara was my sister. There is a home for her at Trystan Priory if she so wishes it.’

Senara held out one hand to my mother and one to Aunt Melanie.

‘God’s blessings on you both,’ she cried, ‘and right glad I am to be here. I long to be once more in the Castle, but when I lived here Tamsyn was my sister. We shared a bedroom at one time, do you remember, Tamsyn?’

‘Until you went to the Red Room.’

Senara closed her eyes and laughed, and I knew that she and Mother exchanged some memory.

‘You were my sister and it was to be with you that I came here. Yet the castle was my home … all the time I lived here. I will go with you, Tamsyn, for a while and then I will come back and stay at Castle Paling. How’s that? Of course it may well be that you will not want me here …’

‘Not want you!’ cried Melanie. ‘Why, it was your home.’

‘We change in … how many years is it, Tamsyn? Nearly thirty. What time has done to us. You do not look the age I know you must be. You live again in these delightful twins.’

‘As you do in your Carlotta. Women stay young when they think young and feel young and look young,’ said my mother.

Senara touched her plentiful black hair in which there did not appear to be one grey strand. ‘I have always cared what I look like. As did my mother. She has many secrets.’

‘She lives still?’ asked my mother.

‘In Madrid in grand style. It is how she always wanted to live. She resented it here.’

‘And she has remained young and beautiful?’

‘Not young—even she could not manage that. But she still is beautiful. She rules her household like a queen and it is said that she is more royal than royalty.’

‘Yes, I can believe it. What did she think of your coming to England?’

‘She scarcely gave the matter a thought. Perhaps she considered me a little mad. But she knew that I had been brought up by your mother and your influence was strong with me. You had made me sentimental, affectionate … a little like yourselves … Therefore I had these odd notions.’

Uncle Connell said: ‘I have a very special black cherry brandy. I shall send to the wine cellars for it. We will all drink to celebrate your return.’

‘You are good to me, Connell,’ said Senara. ‘Never shall I forget how you helped me escape from this house.’

‘Do you think I would have allowed the mob to lay hands on you?’

‘You became master of the castle on that night. Everyone knew then that though the old master lay crippled in his chair there was a new one as strong to take his place.’

I was fascinated. As they talked I was trying to piece the story together. One day I should read it all in the diaries of my mother and her mother Linnet, who had been the one who had rescued the witch from the sea, that witch who was this Senara’s mother.

We sat at the table. No one wished to move. They went on talking and we of the younger generation listened avidly, and as they talked a storm began to rise. The sky grew dark and we could hear the wind rousing the sea.

Melanie called for more candles to be lighted and the servants tiptoed around lighting them while the storm outside seemed to be increasing.

Still we sat on. It was as though no one wanted to leave that table; and Aunt Melanie, my mother, Senara and Uncle Connell talked of the old days and the picture of their lives began to take shape.

Then suddenly the door was flung open. We heard the roar of a voice which there was no mistaking. It belonged to Grandfather Casvellyn.

He propelled himself into the hall, his eyes looking wilder than ever as they raked the table and came to rest on Senara.

Melanie had risen to her feet.

‘Father … how did you come here? How did you leave the Seaward Tower?’

He glared at her. ‘No matter,’ he shouted. ‘I did. They brought me down. They carried me and brought me here. I insisted. If I want to come into any part of my castle I’ll do so. She’s here, they tell me. She’s come again … as they did all those years ago … the witch’s girl.’

‘Father,’ said Connell, ‘it’s Senara. Your own wife’s daughter.’

‘I know who it is. I was told and I knew they dared not lie to me. What do you want here?’ he demanded, glaring at Senara.