Brides of Aberdar by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

a-blow. And she, herself…
    He said: ‘Why do you touch your face like that?’
    ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘A—memory. As though a little breeze, a chill breeze, blew against my cheek. I have felt that sensation once before. And felt the cold.’
    ‘When you first set eyes upon these children. And upon this old house. I think that at that moment you felt some kind of fear?’
    She recollected. ‘And you too?’ she said. ‘The children say—they say that you were afraid. Afraid of me ?’
    He turned away his head and made no reply.

CHAPTER 4
    T O ARRANGE A WORD of private consultation with the Squire was no easy matter. Madame watched like a hawk over the comings and goings of Mees. That, having given his undertaking, Sir Edward would ever dislodge Tante Louise from the home he had offered her, should have been to her unthinkable; but life had taught the poor woman some bitter lessons and there was little room in her heart for simple trust. In any event, she had no wish to remain there as second fiddle to a new wife, and he seemed less repelled than she herself was, or at any rate professed to be, by the terrible scar. Moreover, all her life unloved and unloving, she was too realistic not to recognise herself as also unlovable. She knew that, dazed by the imminent death of his wife after years of whatever strange difficulties there had been, he had reached out blindly for succour and lit upon herself, perhaps faute de mieux , but at any rate without very much investigation; and had found his choice to have been an unhappy one. But by then, the poor Anne had died and it had been too late.
    An odd business: it had all been a very odd business, thought Tante Louise. No diagnosis of the poor young woman’s malady had ever been advanced, she had been nursed by two old and devoted servants who had proved remarkably tight-lipped as to all that concerned their charge and, the moment it was over, disappeared into retirement. Other servants meanwhile had supplanted the old and by the time she, Madame Devalle, had appeared upon the scene, almost all the staff were new, the sickroom closed to all but immediate attendants, no information whatsoever forthcoming. That the lady of the house had been—well, funny like—had for some years kept largely to her own apartments and there at last had languished into premature death, was as much as her most searching enquiries could elicit. Always sweet and kind—and so pretty, the children just like her, but she’d been odd, not a doubt of it, shut away more and more in her own rooms and talking to herself—you could hear her now and again through the door, not raving or any of that, just chatting away, laughing sometimes, as you might to anyone. But there had been no one in there.
    And then they’d heard she’d died and the nurses had gone and everyone else except Tomos and Menna, the cook; but Menna had been with the family from a girl, she’d never give anything away, nor Tomos either. Edward Hilbourne was adamant in refusing any discussion of his wife’s condition or of allowing her name to be mentioned in the presence of the little girls, he had taken upon himself the task of all such explanation and comfort as they received at her death. Not that they could have been personally deeply affected: brief visits, supervised by himself, had been all that within Tante Louise’s experience, they had been permitted.
    So Madame had had to be satisfied with that, and now kept a wary eye upon the upstart governess; nor did she lose any opportunity of a subtle belittling. ‘Certainly she is well enough, Edouard, with the children.’ (A little too much so, in fact. Though Lyneth, in sufficiently innocent self-interest, might keep up what by now was largely a pretence of loving Tante Louise, Christine was too totally honest to do more than recognise that one must try to; and it was irksome to see how they hung about Mees, doting upon every word she spoke, all the fun and laughter