Inheritance Feud

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Afterwards, when he'd met Peter and his father coming in with the carriage to church, he asked them of it. There was a part of Emmett's foundation which was a separate correction house, they told him, for those who had strayed in their first assignments outside to domestic service, when they were re called and disciplined for such time as it should take to cure the fault. Theon grinned; there was only one cure for that kind, as far as he knew. He said so to Peter Melrose; that golden-haired young archangel looked grave.

"Their lot is not an enviable one," he said thoughtfully. "Who are we to say that we in like case would do better? It reminds me of the stone cast at the adulteress; who was fit to throw it? You'll come back after church, Theon? There's cold mutton and bread and cheese for supper, as the servants stay on for the second sermon."

He hadn't asked for news of Hermione; but his father, glooming in the rear seat of the carriage, wouldn't encourage that, Theon thought: the old man had other plans for Peter. The lad was in any case too good for this world, Theon decided; he and Hermione together would have made a pair of saints, begetting cherubs. It had been as well to separate them.

FOUR of five months after these happenings, the young woman with grey eyes, whose name was Livia Millarch but who, for good reasons, called herself Mary Reid at present, jolted and swayed in the post-coach along the uneven highway into town.

The coach was hardly full; they were near the end of the journey and the driver, looking forward to a draught of ale at the Fleece, let his horses have their heads for the last mile. Livia looked dully out at the road, with everything beyond nipped black and bare by frost; she was going to her first situation, and the prospect seemed as bleak as the landscape. This Mrs. Galadriel lived miles from anywhere, and it would be necessary, for the final stage of her journey, to walk. It was unlikely anyone had troubled to come and meet her. She clutched the modest hamper which contained her few belong ings, and drew her grey cloak round her against the cold. The coach drew to a halt at an inn; she could see its lights and open door across a square cobbled yard, but did not intend to go in.

She alighted with the other passengers and, having enquired the direction of the departing driver, set forth with her long, easy stride. Before long she heard running footsteps and, turn ing, saw the young mother with her child who had occupied the opposite seat in the coach; she beckoned Livia. "You goin' to Baron? Like a place in the cart?"

The farm cart was welcome, though open to the cold and frost; she huddled in the back, watching the young woman's husband, and agricultural worker, settle his wife in and hoist the little boy, who was delighted with all of it, up by him near the great, patient shire-horse. Livia watched them, a certain bitterness in her expression softening and almost fading as she did so; but it returned when the young woman turned and asked her where she was bound.

"The Mains, to Mrs. Galadriel." Her voice was deeper than most women's, and did not hold the slurred a's and lazy consonants of the region. It was difficult to know where she might have come from. The farmworker's wife clucked her tongue.

"In service there? They never stay. She's a terror, mean as they're made; she'll see you work the skin off your hands." Her eyes goggled pleasurably, ready for further exchanges as regarded Mrs. Galadriel. But the young woman in the grey cloak said little more, only adding shortly that she didn't mind work; so the other was disappointed, and turned back to watching her little boy with his father, to see he didn't fall off the cart; one never knew with restless children. The horse jogged on and they soon left town behind, taking the path that led by a steep fall westwards to the shore and a sight of Man.

The sudden revelation of the glittering view made Livia draw breath. She had never before seen the sea. The sun sparkled on it as though it were molten silver; forgotten were the bare, black fields and her own cold heart. What lay be yond the width of the horizon she did not know; did anyone know what lay beyond for them? But she took comfort from the sight of the sea. If this Mrs. Galadriel was a terror, she could always take a minute off now and then and go and look out at it. In any case, it couldn't be worse than what she'd come from.

Her mind ran back over the only life she could remember, and this, in turn, as always, ended in blankness, the dark, a time she knew she ought to remember but could not; a time which had made her as she was and would always be, no matter what befell. In her blood coursed a strangeness she could not understand, a quality which had kept her, always from the beginning, separate and different from Alice and Milly and the rest; separate from Mary Reid. For all those, one day would be like the next, the next like the last; with no blank left in the memory, no warm sudden racing invitation in the veins that made gladness out of nothing, even the light of the sun on the sea.

She should have no gladness left in her; they'd tried to beat it out. She was a bad girl; they all said so. Matron and Mrs. Park at Emmett's had said so, time after time since Livia first was sent there as a stubborn black-haired little creature of seven years old, brought in by old farmer Ransome's kin. Old Ransome himself wouldn't have parted with her. But of late his mind had begun to wander and his limbs had grown too stiff for him to get about the farm, and those who came resented her because she wasn't Ransome's own. Why should he trouble with a gipsy's get? It wasn't as though she was his. And Livia partook heartily of the good farm fare, the por ridge and cream and curded cheeses, and the small-ale and home-baked bread and stored russet apples. It was time, accordingly, old Ransome's kin said, that she went; to Em mett's, where there was provision made for such folk. There hadn't been farm fare at Emmett's, or anything like

it.

Livia's mind shied away from recent memory, jerking back like a wilful foal to what must have happened before she could remember. While she had still lived with old Ransome in his house, while they would sit together by his fire of an evening, he would tell her of the early things. There had been a woman with loose black hair, he said, lying in the straw of the byre one winter's night seven or eight years gone; he'd heard moaning, and had gone out with a lantern in the end to see if it was one of the beasts. Bitter cold it was, so that time silvered the roofs of the house and shed, and made the cattle stamp in their stalls. The woman was in labour, too far gone for Ransome to carry her back again into his house; the child was born there in the straw. Afterwards he'd gone to fetch a blanket and hot posset for the poor mother to sup, but by the time he got back with the bowl, being even then a bit slow, she was dying; he could tell by the fallen-in quality of her face, and the great sunken eyes surveying him impersonally in the light of the lantern. "She'd have been pretty once," he would say reflectively. She must have come a long way.

He had bent over her and asked her name, when he saw she was going. "Livia," she told him, adding proudly, "It's a queen's name."

"You'd want the bairn called after ye?" "Ay."

Her eyes had closed then and he could find out nothing further. Later, after she was dead and they'd buried her, far mer Ransome busied himself with trying to find out one or two things more. The times were troublous, and she'd been a gipsy woman, and not much could ever be found out for certain, in any case, about those folk. The fact that she'd left her tribe gave him a lead; and the stir then over Jacobite fugitives in the north country. Some were still hiding in the heather, others making all sail to France if they could find a ship, still others, all of that same year, trapped and shot or hanged or drowned without trial. There was a tale, and far mer Ransome was to hand it on to the child Livia for what it was worth, about a fugitive from the north parts who had been a great lord's son, and who had gone out against his father's wishes for the Prince when he came over in the pre vious summer. Later, after Culloden, the lord's son took up with a gipsy woman, who hid him and left her own kin to follow him. He was a fine, handsome fellow, they said, with a head of long curling hair. The redcoats found him at last and took him from her, and tied him up by his long hair to a horse's tail, and dragged him by that towards the next town. When they got there he was dead, and the woman who had followed, wailing, made off then alone, to have her child. It was impossible, in the confusion of the times, to be more certain of anything than that. The man's name, the officer in command of the detachment told farmer Ransome later, had been Millarch. It needn't have been his real name.

The old farmer had christened the baby and brought her up himself, weaning her from ewe's milk as though she were an orphan lamb. She thrived well enough, and diverted him in the evenings, when the day's work was done. There was, in those days, an old woman who came up from the village to clean for Ransome, and she helped with Livia; but she died in the third spring.