Goldcrest

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Another indication of the way things were going came from Tib Willock, the serving-maid who had used to work for Abel and Livia at the Fleece. One day that winter she came to the back door of the Mains, and asked to see Mistress Judd; Livia, by then having grown used to the treatment meted out to her by the housewives of Grattan, went un willingly. But Tib was as usual, if a trifle more subdued; the master, she said, was drinking heavily, and few of the other servants had renewed their term of service.

 "He doesn't get violent, m'm, or noisy, or lay hands on any of us; he just sits lookin' in front of him, and that's more than flesh and blood can stand, when he mostly don't answer, or eat his food; as for the customers, they can come or go for all he cares." She'd done her best, she said, as most of them had, but she wouldn't go back with Abel for another term if there were anywhere better to go; she wondered, hearing that Mrs Judd was now at the Mains, if she could maybe use a maid to scrub? "You taught me floors yourself, m'm, and to make the chalk patterns." She smiled: there was no alteration in her manner now that her former mistress was a light woman and frowned on by the authorities. These things happened to folk.

Livia hired Tib, and was glad she had done so, not only because Tib was a good worker and these were hard to find, or because she herself was now relieved of the rough work, and could keep the rest of the house as it should be done, with the two of them and Samson's occasional help. 

Tib's company was welcome, even though they talked together seldom at first; but as the year went on, and Si Kasparian's business already begun with the men who carried bales in creased, so that he was often most of the night conferring with them down by Malvie cave, and said little of what they'd all been at and Livia never asked as the year went on she was increasingly alone, and it wouldn't have been pleasant listen ing to the wind outside, and thinking of what she'd done to Abel, by herself; often by winter she would make her way down to the kitchen where Tib sat, and they'd brew a posset together, and talk of old times at the inn. Samson seldom joined them; he kept himself to himself, and although, Tib said, she'd been chaffed by some of the other girls, who'd hired themselves out on the nearby farms, about her black swain, there was naught of that; she'd not be one to fancy a blackamoor atop her. 

It was Tib, also, who told Livia where William now spent his days, for the maid had been in charge of the little boy a good deal while they all lived at the inn: but it was too late to retrieve or alter William now.

THERE was one member of the family at Malvie in whom Si Kasparian Doon's appearance at Tessa's drawing-room on that fateful visit did not induce either contempt, pity or des pair; Miriam Bowes, Godfrey's young half-sister, conceived a passionate admiration for Si Kasparian. This brought him no pleasure.

Miss Bowes was given to enthusiasms. From the begin nings, almost, of her conception in humbrum course, the Bowes couple living at that time prudently in France, she had been a storm-centre and bone of contention, or object of embarrassment, whichever way one cared to look at it. She had arrived prematurely, when Kitty was in a carriage be tween Dijon and Paris, after having caused the latter every imaginable ill in course of pregnancy. She was not an attrac tive baby: poor Kitty, sickened by that time with her new marriage, never loved her as she had loved Godfrey or even Cecily, the placid earlier result of those hot, illicit couplings in Bloomsbury with Mr Bowes, then newly Kitty's lover. 

His excesses by now had donated to his younger offspring, as well as his wife, permanent ill-health; Miriam was always ailing, and grew up subject to chest-colds, perhaps for a time even phthisical. This gave her a narrow rib-cage, a depressed stoop, and a snivel, manifest as permanent by the time she was sent away to school. She also, unfortunately, had a strong body odour which neither civet and musk, ambergris, nor any other medicament, could quell. Kitty saw her off to boarding-school with vague relief, and hoped for invitations from the young ladies' parents, in course, to Miriam for the holidays. 

But these were not forthcoming; she made no friends, less on ac count of the odour-it was, alas, not uncommon even in second-best circles, which described the school and other schools well enough-but because, in some way, unpleasant ness was suspected in the child. 

This had never been made openly evident; perhaps if it had, Miriam would ve been less disliked. The young ladies' parents could not know, for the young ladies themselves did not, that Miriam early be came, with the clashing inheritance in her own blood, a prey to furtive desire for s****l enlightenment.

This was not, in course of the upbringing accorded to polite young females of the day, easily forthcoming; the girls were constantly chaperoned at school, met no young gentlemen dur ing the term, and in any case these would doubtfully have been attracted to Miss Miriam. 

She burned in deprivation, therefore, all through her teens, furtively assessing Cecily's betrothal and the probable doings on the bridal-night, but coming no nearer direct information. Her brother's marriage, on the other hand, baffled her totally. She was unable to be come intimate with Tessa, and as a result, out of a kind of personal vengeance, evolved a theory that Sybilla could not possibly be Godfrey's daughter; she folded the suggestion away for future contemplation.

The years passed.