Inheritance Feud

Chapter 49

Chapter 49

"What is your name?" she asked, as they'd done in the Fleece yard; but when he told her she closed her eyes, as if it hurt her, and turned white, as though she'd faint. She turned back to the house and didn't go out that day, though Aitken had got her mount all ready for her and had groomed it till its chestnut coat shone like satin. Next day she came again; but that time Aitken got William to make himself scarce, hiding him in the hay-loft till the two fine ladies had gone.

"She says you're not to come here, varmint," said Sam, who was English-trained. "But I've got used to havin' you, see? You can come here any time, provided they don't notice," and so William became an adept at hiding himself in time, and otherwise life went on as before. He was happy enough, like a small unthinking animal, and as time passed he grew wilder and more intractable, except for Aitken the groom. By the time Livia found out what was happening to her son it was too late to hope that he'd be the scholar, preacher or physician she and Abel had once planned for. But most of the plans she and Abel had made together had gone down the wind long ago; it seemed another life she'd led as the wife at the Fleece, and now she was a wanton again. She was well aware that the kirk folk, if they could have got hold of her, would have seen her whipped whipped William. Gipsies they were, the pair, no doubt, and a the mulatto had gipsy William was fast becoming, to remain that way to the end. He never again showed dependent affection for anyone after his mother had, so to speak, betrayed him with Theon; he would eat and generally sleep at the house, and Theon paid for the clothes he outgrew, and Aitken doused him sometimes under the pump in Baron yard, when the stable odour grew too pronounced about him.

This was, as it happened, how Hermione discovered the pre sence of Livia with Theon at the Mains. She had not hither to known, and nobody had told her.

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'c done her best, she said, as most of them had, but sh wouldn't go back with Abel for another term if there wer anywhere better to go; she wondered, hearing that Mrs Jud was now at the Mains, if she could maybe use a maid scrub? "You taught me floors yourself, m'm, and to make th chalk patterns." She smiled: there was no alteration in h manner now that her former mistress was a light woman an frowned on by the authorities. These things happened to fol

Livia hired Tib, and was glad she had done so, not or because Tib was a good worker and these were hard to fi or because she herself was now relieved of the rough wo and could keep the rest of the house as it should be do with the two of them and Samson's occasional help. T company was welcome, even though they talked toget seldom at first; but as the year went on, and Morve 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 Baron 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.

V

THERE was one member of the family at Baron in whom Theon Doon's appearance at Hermione's drawing-room on that fateful visit did not induce either contempt, pity or des pair; Clairette Bowes, Godfrey's young half-sister, conceived a passionate admiration for Theon. 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; Clairette 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 Clairette 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, Clairette would have been less disliked. The young ladies' parents could not know, for the young ladies themselves did not, that Clairette 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 Clairette. 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 Hermione, 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. Twice Clairette had a passionate involve ment with an assistant minister, and in each case the candidate in question had made off shortly to other parishes, leaving Clairette encumbered by much knitting to be finished for the poor and a list of visiting-rounds for jelly and soup. She had begun the visits gladly, in the days when, on initial journeys, Mr. Setoun or Mr. McIntyre might be beside her, steadying her arm and showing her the way; now, she could hardly give the patronage up. She might, accordingly, have shrunk un remembered into the average spinster of her unhappy kind, with the passions of hell broiling beneath an exterior unchang ing, calmly mittened, through half a lifetime. But before that, she saw Theon.

She had of course seen him before, notably the time he came to Baron on the first day they'd all arrived; his un altered appearance now gave him an elfin, magical quality for Clairette. Any blind man, moreover, was unfortunate; and how brave this blind man was! He'd dared, without assistance or guidance of any kind from the dark acolyte be hind him, the whole expanse of Hermione's Chinese carpet, peopled on every square with Hermione's critical, unkind county guests (they had often over the years snubbed Clairette also). Theon had held, despite the moneyed pomp and blue blooded certainty of the guests, the stage at its centre. While remote from the Noble Savage-Clairette these days had time for much reading-he maintained an air of breeding as well as tragedy, and Clairette's heart, as from one solitary to another, yearned towards his. By the time she discovered he kept a mistress it was of no lasting importance; in the fantasy Clairette already nourished in the narrow caverns of her half-instructed mind, Livia played no part. She went as soon as possible to call on Theon at the

Mains, riding her grey pony, and choosing a moment when she knew Hermione and her mother were separately occupied. Socially, she knew they would say, Theon Doon was not acceptable, and in any case it was not correct for Clairette, a young unmarried lady, to visit him. Such taboos hedged con ventional society about that it was more like living in a savage tribe than an informed Christian country, Clairette assured herself; and rode on.