The Ladies of Grace Adieu Page 2

  The handsome man in the middle of the room turned to her instantly. "Go on, go on," he cried. "We are all attending, I promise you. It is," and here he turned back to the other man and winked at him, "delightful. We are going to teach country dances to my little cousins. Fred is the best dancing master in the world. So you must play, you know."

  Wearily the young lady began again.

  The seated man, whose name it seemed was Fred, happened at this moment to notice Miss Tobias. He smiled pleasantly at her and begged her pardon.

  "Oh," cried the handsome man, "Miss Tobias will forgive us, Fred. Miss Tobias and I are old friends."

  "Good afternoon, Captain Winbright," said Miss Tobias.

  By now Mr and Mrs Strange were comfortably seated in Mr Woodhope's pleasant drawing room. Mrs Strange had been shewn all over Mr Woodhope's Rectory and had spoken to the housekeeper and the cook and the dairymaid and the other maid and the stableman and the gardener and the gardener's boy. Mr Woodhope had seemed most anxious to have a woman's opinion on everything and would scarcely allow Mrs Strange leave to sit down or take food or drink until she had approved the house, the servants and all the housekeeping arrangements. So, like a good, kind sister, she had looked at it all and smiled upon all the servants and racked her brains for easy questions to ask them and then declared herself delighted.

  "And I promise you, Henry," she said with a smile, "that Miss Parbringer will be equally pleased."

  "He is blushing," said Jonathan Strange, raising his eyes from his newspaper. "We have come, Henry, with the sole purpose of seeing Miss Parbringer (of whom you write so much) and when we have seen her, we will go away again."

  "Indeed? Well, I hope to invite Mrs Field and her niece to meet you at the earliest opportunity."

  "Oh, there is no need to trouble yourself," said Strange, "for we have brought telescopes. We will stand at bedroom windows and spy her out, as she goes about the village."

  Strange did indeed get up and go to the window as he spoke. "Henry," he said, "I like your church exceedingly. I like that little wall that goes around the building and the trees, and holds them all in tight. It makes the place look like a ship. If you ever get a good strong wind then church and trees will all sail off together to another place entirely."

  "Strange," said Henry Woodhope, "you are quite as ridiculous as ever."

  "Do not mind him, Henry," said Arabella Strange. "He has the mind of a magician. They are all a little mad." "Except Norrell," said Strange.

  "Strange, I would ask you, as a friend, to do no magic while you are here. We are a very quiet village."

  "My dear Henry," said Strange, "I am not a street conjuror with a booth and a yellow curtain. I do not intend to set up in a corner of the churchyard to catch trade. These days Admirals and Rear Admirals and Vice Admirals and all His Majesty's Ministers send me respectful letters requesting my services and (what is much more) pay me well for them. I very much doubt if there is any one in Grace Adieu who could afford me."

  "What room is this?" asked Captain Winbright.

  "This was old Mr Enderwhild's bedroom, sir," said Miss Tobias.

  "The magician?"

  "The magician.

  "And where did he keep all his hoard, Miss Tobias? You have been here long enough to winkle it out. There are sovereigns, I dare say, hidden away in all sorts of odd holes and corners."

  "I never heard so, sir."

  "Come, Miss Tobias, what do old men learn magic for, except to find each other's piles of gold? What else is magic good for?" A thought seemed to trouble him. "They shew no sign of inheriting the family genius, do they? The children, I mean. No, of course. Who ever heard of women doing magic?"

  "There have been two female magicians, sir. Both highly regarded. The Lady Catherine of Winchester, who taught Martin Pale, and Gregory Absalom's daughter, Maria, who was mistress of the Shadow House for more than a century."

  He did not seem greatly interested. "Shew me some other rooms," he said. They walked down another echoing corridor, which, like much of the great, dark house, had fallen into the possession of mice and spiders.

  "Are my cousins healthy children?"

  "Yes, sir."

  He was silent and then he said, "Well, of course, it may not last. There are so many childish illnesses, Miss Tobias. I myself, when only six or seven, almost died of the red spot. Have these children had the red spot?"

  "No, sir."

  "Indeed? Our grandparents understood these things better, I think. They would not permit themselves to get overfond of children until they had got past all childhood's trials and maladies. It is a good rule. Do not get overfond of children."

  He caught her eye and reddened. Then laughed. "Why, it is only a joke. How solemn you look. Ah, Miss Tobias, I see how it is. You have borne all the responsibility for this house and for my cousins, my rich little cousins, for far too long. Women should not have to bear such burdens alone. Their pretty white shoulders were not made for it. But, see, I am come to help you now. And Fred. Fred has a great mind to be a cousin too. Fred is very fond of children."

  "And the lady, Captain Winbright? Will she stay and be another cousin with you and the other gentleman?"

  He smiled confidingly at her. His eyes seemed such a bright, laughing blue and his smile so open and unaffected, that it took a woman of Miss Tobias's great composure not to smile with him.

  "Between ourselves she has been a little ill-used by a brother officer in the --shires. But I am such a soft-hearted fellow – the sight of a woman's tears can move me to almost any thing."

  So said Captain Winbright in the corridor, but when they entered the dining parlour again, the sight of a woman's tears (for the young lady was crying at that moment) moved him only to be rude to her. Upon her saying his name, gently and somewhat apprehensively, he turned upon her and cried, "Oh, why do you not go back to Brighton? You could you know, very easily. That would be the best thing for you."

  " Reigate," she said gently.

  He looked at her much irritated. "Aye, Reigate," he said.

  She had a sweet, timorous face, great dark eyes and a little rosebud mouth, for ever trembling on the brink of tears. But it was the kind of beauty that soon evaporates when any thing at all in the nature of suffering comes near it and she had, poor thing, been very unhappy of late. She reminded Miss Tobias of a child's rag doll, pretty enough at the beginning, but very sad and pitiful once its rag stuffing were gone. She looked up at Miss Tobias. "I never thought…" she said and lapsed into tears.

  Miss Tobias was silent a moment. "Well," she said at last, "perhaps you were not brought up to it."

  That evening Mr Field fell asleep in the parlour again. This had happened to him rather often recently.

  It happened like this. The servant came into the room with a note for Mrs Field and she began to read it. Then, as his wife read, Mr Field began to feel (as he expressed it to himself) "all cobwebby" with sleep. After a moment or two it seemed to him that he woke up and the evening continued in its normal course, with Cassandra and Mrs Field sitting one on either side of the fire. Indeed Mr Field spent a very pleasant evening – the kind of evening he loved to spend, attended to by the two ladies. That it was only the dream of such an evening (for the poor, silly man was indeed asleep) did not in any way detract from his enjoyment of it.

  While he slept, Mrs Field and Cassandra were hurrying along the lane to Winter's Realm.

  In the Rectory Henry Woodhope and Mrs Strange had said their goodnights but Mr Strange proposed to continue reading a while. His book was a Life of Martin Pale by Thaddeus Hickman. He had reached Chapter 26 where Hickman discussed some theories, which he attributed to Martin Pale, that sometimes magicians, in times of great need, might find themselves capable of much greater acts of magic than they had ever learnt or even heard of before.

  "Oh," said Strange with much irritation, "this is the most complete stuff and nonsense."

  "Goodnight, Jonathan," said Arabella and kissed him,
just above his frown.

  "Yes, yes," he muttered, not raising his eyes from the book.

  "And the young woman," whispered Mrs Field, "who is she?"

  Miss Tobias raised an eye-brow and said, "She says that she is Mrs Winbright. But Captain Winbright says that she is not. I had not supposed it to be a point capable of so wide an interpretation."

  "And if any thing were to happen… to the children, I mean," whispered Mrs Field, "then Captain Winbright might benefit in some way?"

  "Oh, he would certainly be a very rich man and whatever he has come here to escape – whether it be debts or scandal – would presumably hold no more fears for him."

  The three ladies were in the children's bedroom. Miss Tobias sat somewhere in the dark, wrapped in a shawl. Two candles bloomed in the vast dark room, one near to the children's bed and the other upon a little ricketty table by the door, so that any one entering the room would instantly be seen. Somewhere in the house, at the end of a great many long, dark corridors, could be heard the sound of a man singing and another laughing.

  From the bed Miss Flora anxiously inquired if there were any owls in the room.

  Miss Tobias assured her there were none.

  "Yet I think they may still come," said Miss Flora in a fright, "if you do not stay."

  Miss Tobias said that they would stay for a while. "Be quiet now," she said, "and Miss Parbringer will tell you a story, if you ask her."

  "What story shall I tell you?" asked Cassandra. "A story of the Raven King," said Miss Ursula. "Very well," said Cassandra.

  This then is the story which Cassandra told the children.

  "Before the Raven King was a king at all, but only a Raven Child, he lived in a very wonderful house with his uncle and his aunt. (These were not really his relations at all, but only a kind gentleman and lady who had taken him to live with them.) One day his uncle, who was reading books of magic in his great library, sent for the Raven Child and inquired politely how he did. The Raven Child replied that he did very well.

  "'Hmmph, well,' said Uncle Auberon, 'as I am your guardian and protector, little human child, I had better make sure of it. Shew me the dreams you had last night.' So the Raven Child took out his dreams and Uncle Auberon made a space for them on the library table. There were a hundred odd things on that table; books on unnatural history; a map shewing the relative positions of Masculine Duplicity and Feminine Integrity (and how to get from one to the other) and a set of beautiful brass instruments in a mahogany box, all very cunningly contrived to measure Ambition and Jealousy, Love and Self-sacrifice, Loyalty to the State and Dreams of Regicide and many other Vices and Virtues which it might be useful to know about. All these things Uncle Auberon put on the floor, for he was not a very tidy person and people were for ever scolding him about it. Then Uncle Auberon spread the Raven Child's dreams out on the table and peered at them through little wire spectacles.

  "'Why,' cried Uncle Auberon, 'here is a dream of a tall black tower in a dark wood in the snow. The tower is all in ruins, like broken teeth. Black, ragged birds fly round and round and you are inside that tower and cannot get out. Little human child, when you had this terrible dream, was you not afraid?'

  "'No, Uncle,' said the Raven Child, 'last night I dreamt of the tower where I was born and of the ravens who brought me water to drink when I was too young even to crawl. Why should I be afraid?'

  "So Uncle Auberon looked at the next dream and when he saw it he cried out loud. 'But here is a dream of cruel eyes a-glittering and wicked jaws a-slavering. Little human child, when you had this terrible dream, was you not afraid?'

  "'No, Uncle,' said the Raven Child, 'last night I dreamt of the wolves who suckled me and who lay down beside me and kept me warm when I was too young even to crawl. Why should I be afraid?'

  "So Uncle Auberon looked at the next dream and when he saw it he shivered and said, 'But this is a dream of a dark lake in a sad and rainy twilight. The woods are monstrous silent and a ghostly boat sails upon the water. The boatman is as thin and twisted as a hedge root and his face is all in shadow. Little human child, when you had this terrible dream, was you not afraid?'

  "Then the Raven Child banged his fist upon the table in his exasperation and stamped his foot upon the floor. 'Uncle Auberon!' he exclaimed, 'that is the fairy boat and the fairy boatman which you and Aunt Titania yourselves sent to fetch me and bring me to your house. Why should I be afraid?'

  "'Well!' said a third person, who had not spoken before, 'how the child boasts of his courage!' The person who spoke was Uncle Auberon's servant, who had been sitting high upon a shelf, disguised (until this moment) as a bust of Mr William Shakespeare. Uncle Auberon was quite startled by his sudden appearance, but the Raven Child had always known he was there.

  "Uncle Auberon's servant peered down from his high shelf at the Raven Child and the Raven Child looked up at him. 'There are all sorts of things in Heaven and Earth,' said Uncle Auberon's servant, 'that yearn to do you harm. There is fire that wants to burn you. There are swords that long to pierce you through and through and ropes that mean to bind you hard. There are a thousand, thousand things that you have never yet dreamt of: creatures that can steal your sleep from you, year after year, until you scarcely know yourself, and men yet unborn who will curse you and scheme against you. Little human child, the time has come to be afraid.'

  "But the Raven Child said, 'Robin Goodfellow, I knew all along that it was you that sent me those dreams. But I am a human child and therefore cleverer than you and when those wicked creatures come to do me harm I shall be cleverer than them. I am a human child and all the vast stony, rainy English earth belongs to me. I am an English child and all the wide grey English air, full of black wings beating and grey ghosts of rain sighing, belongs to me. This being so, Robin Goodfellow, tell me, why should I be afraid?' Then the Raven Child shook his head of raven hair and disappeared.

  "Mr Goodfellow glanced a little nervously at Uncle Auberon to see if he were at all displeased that Mr Goodfellow had spoken out so boldly to the human foster child, but Uncle Auberon (who was quite an old gentleman) had stopt listening to them both a while ago and had wandered off to resume his search for a book. It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it (though he had had it in his hand not a hundred years before). So Mr Goodfellow said nothing but quietly turned himself back into William Shakespeare."

  In the Rectory Mr Strange was still reading. He had reached Chapter 42 where Hickman relates how Maria Absalom defeated her enemies by shewing them the true reflections of their souls in the mirrors of the Shadow House and how the ugly sights which they saw there (and knew in their hearts to be true) so dismayed them that they could oppose her no more.

  There was, upon the back of Mr Strange's neck, a particularly tender spot and all his friends had heard him tell how, when ever there was any magic going on, it would begin to prickle and to itch. Without knowing that he did so, he now began to rub the place.

  So many dark corridors, thought Cassandra, how lucky it is that I know my way about them, for many people I think would soon be lost. Poor souls, they would soon take fright because the way is so long, but I know that I am now very near to the great staircase and will soon be able to slip out of the house and into the garden.

  It had been decided that Mrs Field should stay and watch the children for the remainder of the night and so Cassandra was making her way back to Mr Field's house quite alone.

  Except (she thought) I do not believe that that tall, moonshiny window should be there. It would suit me much better if it were behind me. Or perhaps on my left. For I am sure it was not there when I came in. Oh, I am lost! How very… And now the voices of those two wretches of men come echoing down this dark passageway and they are most manifestly drunk and do not know me. And I am here where I have no right to be.

  (Cassandra pulled her shawl closer round her.) "And
yet," she murmured, "why should I be afraid?"

  "Damn this house!" cried Winbright. "It is nothing but horrid black corridors. What do you see, Fred?"

  "Only an owl. A pretty white owl. What the devil is it doing inside the house?"

  "Fred," cried Winbright, slumping against the wall and sliding down a little, "fetch me my pistol, like a good fellow."

  "At once, Captain!" cried Fred. He saluted Captain Winbright and then promptly forgot all about it.

  Captain Winbright smiled. "And here," he said, "is Miss Tobias, running to meet us."

  "Sir," said Miss Tobias appearing suddenly out of the darkness, "what are you doing?"

  "There is a damned owl in the house. We are going to shoot it."