Inheritance Feud

Chapter 4

Chapter Four

The latter was in all of Theon's awareness, waking and sleep: the pull of the tider. the deep-running currents back and forth to Man, had been in his ars since birth; ay, his first conscious knowledge must have been of the sea, sounding below the great Flodden tower of Malvin, where his mother had borne him! She'd chosen he knew, to make her lying in there in the brief time she'd been with them, as though the raw cold stones resembled more nearly her fastness in the Highland north than the tame house below would ever do, with its panelled walls and carpets already a trifle threadbare. So she'd borne him, Theon, up there, and then died, as though in resentment that his pending birth had prevented her from following his fugitive father, Richard Doon, into the heather after Culloden, and later to France.

Theon Doon had never seen his father, but he knew him, or felt sure he did. Uncle Philip had nourished his orphaned nephew on legends of the glorious elder twin he himself had all his youth copied and admired. Good, inadequate Uncle Philip, turning in the end to the slight solace of an evening's wine, everything else had been a little unreal; his own emula tion of Richard, even to marrying the latter's erstwhile be trothed in the end, from a sense of duty no doubt, had pro duced only a daughter, then solitude. 

Theon could remember his aunt Grace well enough before she faded, in gentle apology, out of life when Hermione would be about five: the mother had never seemed to live, breathe and feel like other women. They said, and it was whispered long after her mar riage to Philip Doon, that her heart was buried with his brother who had died in France; that she had never recovered from the earlier news of Richard's impulsive wedding, in the north, in the flush of triumph which had begun the "Forty-five, to a Highland woman.

Love and heartache... he himself had never felt it, per haps never would. He stated between the trees now and thought, not for the first time, that no worgan would ever mean to him what Baron did, his house of Baron. 

His house. despite what the government of the day had done in forfeiting all the possessions of his exiled father. His house, not Uncle Philip's to whom it had been, after lawsuits, allotted. His house, not young Hermione's who had happened to be born of that prudent, later marriage of his uncle's and the woman who should have been his own mother. He'd have been fashioned of a different stuff, no doubt, had his dam been Grace Mel rose and not Helen Colquhoun; gentler, more acquiescent, more like Hermione.

And, now, they wouldn't let him marry Hermione. They wouldn't even let him see her; and they'd trained her, like a little horse, with whip and bridle, not to come when he called, not to turn her head to his whistle.

Well... they'd all see. He turned again to Baron, surveying it with the lids half closed over his strange, light, catlike eyes, which could be the colour of cold water or else could shine with inward achieve ment. He'd achieved nothing of late, since losing Baron. 

The house had furnished the stuff of his dreams since ever he could remember; each evening, in the old days, riding home alone or with Uncle Philip, he'd been used to draw rein and look across at the golden lichen covering the stones, so that roof, pediment and tower seemed made of gold, an elfin blessing. Gold! Theon's thin face grew bitter. There was little left of the real commodity; after Philip's death, the law yers had come and burrowed like beetles, then there had been aunt Galadriel's small indomitable figure standing on Mains threshold, forbidding him the house; and Baron was closed up.

"You must find your own way in the world, nephew Mor ven; you're a man now." He remembered her tight, compla cent smile, and Sir Sandor Melrose, dead Grace's brother, fidgeting behind her. Sir Sandor had, no doubt, been ashamed of the treatment of Richard Doon's son by Richard and Philip's own sister; he tried to give Theon a sovereign as he left, and the boy had flung it back at him on the path. He could still hear the ringing of the gold, and see the swift, pre datory movement with which aunt Galadriel had bent at once and scooped it up.

"I can find my own, never fear; to hell with you all." And he'd turned and gone, not knowing yet where to, and in the end he'd gone down to the shore as usual and the near caves, and brooded there till Bart's boat came, and gone out in it. Bart was the blacksmith's son and after-it was fishing that day, no more they'd beached the craft and gone up together to old Aaron's cottage for supper, to cook the catch; and somehow he'd stayed on with Aaron. 

That had been three years ago and everyone said-everyone' being the genteel county, remembered from the time when Philip's tolerant affection enveloped Theon and he met them daily as equals everyone said he had gone to waste, was wasting his life, should be in the army or studying law. To hell with that too, Theon thought; he could make more on the rum-lay over from Man that ever he'd make in a scrivener's stuffy office in Edinburgh, or following the drum. And he had his freedom; and he could, day and night, be near Baron.

He watched the house constantly, seeing it now as something in a dream; it hardly seemed possible he had spent his boy hood there. He had a way of entry, not easy and not by the door; it hadn't been needed nor had he entered the house again since aunt Galadriel and Sir Sandor had turned the great key of Baron, three years ago now.

 He didn't need to go in. But as day followed day and time passed, he would evolve one scheme after another for growing rich, purchasing the house back or else marrying Hermione; he didn't care which, provided Baron ended in his own possession. Hermione herself was another matter; he was used to her, she'd never touched his heart. To rob a mail-coach, and get away undetected with the loot... to hide away a small fortune made from rum and gin... to pick pockets; some made a fortune at that in the London play-houses. But to go to London would mean leaving Baron alone in daylight and dark, Baron remote and lonely already behind its gold. He must stay here; Bart's lay seemed the only answer.