Inheritance Feud

Chapter 57

Chapter 57

She smiled; how fixed and bright her daily smile had be come! "Perhaps soon you will be able to walk again in the garden, Mama Bowes, when the weather is warm," she said, and this made the tears course weakly down Kitty's face. Whether the thought of feeling pleasure again was emotionally too much, or whether she had already convinced herself that she would never again walk in any garden, no one would ever know. Kitty had her own courage; each day, still, she made the attendant rouge her, and put a freshly curled bright wig over her own shaven, defeated, thin grey hair. The garish un likely gold made the painted, lop-sided mask beneath bizarre. But Kitty never looked clearly at herself; all mirrors had been taken from the room or left in shadow.

Hermione kissed her mother-in-law again, and felt the jewel led hands, like claws, clinging. "I shall be back again in a little while, Mama Bowes," she said gently, "only a little while." She reminded Kitty again that she was going down to the roses. It would not matter, she knew well, once she was be yond the door; Kitty would retreat then into a world of her own, a world of trifling annoyances, shutting out the recollec tion of Hermione's visits. Memory of long ago was sharper than more recent memory in the mind of the old, and Anna bel often wondered if Godfrey's mother remembered he was dead. If she did not, much the better, perhaps. How must it feel to be too weak to walk, too blind to look in a mirror, too confused to speak or remember clearly?

Hermione went down to the garden with her own resolution strong in her. She must devote her life to Kitty, to old Ellen, to Sam Aitken the groom who grew daily more ill and less active, and would have no physician. Later she would look in at the stable-quarters to visit Sam. That boy, she knew, might be again with him despite her orders, but no doubt he ran Sam's errands, and she'd turned a blind eye. She hadn't the heart to forbid Theon and Livia's son the premises when Sam, her childhood's friend and ally, relied on the black haired urchin almost solely. And Sam himself was not the only servant to disobey her.

Her mouth tightened a little as she bent at last over the roses. The housekeeper, only this week, had said she was leaving; they didn't, she assured Hermione, accord her proper respect any longer in the servants' hall. "I don't know who the half of them are nowadays, madam, or where they came from or what they think they're here for, and that's the truth," the woman had said respectfully. Her words aroused an inner, long recognised dread in Hermione; could it be that all the servants who came to Baron now had been sent, chosen deliberately by Theon who drove others out? Some times she thought it might be so... but such imaginings were idle, impossible. Even Theon wouldn't plan so meticulous and fiendish a siege against a lone woman, and yet... And she herself was helpless, almost as helpless as poor

Kitty. She hadn't tried to persuade the housekeeper to stay. All Godfrey's English servants had come here for his sake, and were anxious now to get back to the south where they belonged. She herself must interview new women for the situa tion, no doubt, and her heart failed her; would it not be better to withdraw to live in the tower, and close the main part of the house, and contrive with a maid or two for herself and Kitty? No one now came to Baron, and all the faces of the servants were closed and strange, for she had lately had to employ whom she could find, and at times it seemed that the place was becoming filled with strangers, faintly hostile, not making haste to carry out her orders, sometimes failing to obey these at all. Her dream of keeping Baron as it had been in Godfrey's day was fading; but here were the roses, and she would make a task of them for herself.

She snipped fading heads, placing these in a flat basket to dry out later with lavender and salt, for laying between the linen. The dying scents rose to her nostrils enhanced by the hint of frost and damp there had been; presently the sun came out, and she moved among the blossoms, busied among them, almost happy, immersed meantime in what she did; sometimes she would bend and sniff the varied scents. The shadows grew longer.

There was a place nearby the hedge where a climbing Dutch rose grew. Hermione spent some time in ordering the trusses, snipping here and there with her gloved hands where the petals, of an apricot colour with hearts of yellow gold, showed signs of fading and curling back; this flower was scentless. There were so many varieties Godfrey had imported from as far away as Persia, descended from the flowers among which kings' favourites had walked, and by contrast there were simpler native roses and the bizarre, almost foreign striped red-and-white of Lancaster-and-York. One could take pleasure in the very names and memories; one could bury oneself here, perhaps in a smaller garden. She would conserve, possibly allow certain parts to revert to wildness, and here, where roses grew, bring herself daily to find peace.

A shadow moved then. In the instant that it took her to know alarm she had no time even to cry out; a sack was flung over her head, she felt herself lifted bodily after a brief, useless, terrified struggle. Then darkness came, and a certainty that she could no longer breathe; her hands flailed helplessly, and were pinioned. She was aware that her senses were leav ing her, that she was powerless to stop their departure, to do anything to resist; she remembered nothing more except being still unable to breathe and falling, falling accordingly through red darkness, like the shaft she had lately failed to see, except in her own mind, below the tower of Baron where it led out at last to the caves and the limitless sea. By the time the pres sure of the hands against her mouth and nose slackened, easing the sack's muffling weight, she felt nothing; not the forced pouring, to make her too drunk either to resist or call out, of brandy down her throat, later reviving and then again sub merging her. It all took a very few minutes; men endured amputations on less than Hermione was forced to drink in that time. She became pliant, silenced; they might do with her now as they would.