Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
It was indeed dusk by the time the familiar wooded hill of Winchelsea came into view. Madelaine had been leaning forward in her seat for some time, looking past the bobbing postillion to the road ahead, hands braced on the seat either side of her legs.
There was the church, squat and ancient. Her heart gave a strange leap, both forwards and back, up and down, as though it tried to split itself in two.
Or perhaps that was just the hours of the coach’s swaying travel. She was glad to tap on the glass window, drop it down, and call to the postillion to stop.
She would walk up the hill, she told him, getting out stiffly.
It would spare the horses. He gave her an odd look, eyes flicking to the weight of the coach, to her luggage strapped aboard it, as though wondering what difference it would make.
But gentry folk were gentry folk, so he touched his cap and urged the horses on to walk, straining, up the hill.
Madelaine paused, letting them get ahead.
She would probably overtake them, knowing a shortcut, a footpath that wound up the steeper flank of the hill, through rabbit-bitten grass and humped tussocks, the cupped valley at her back holding the setting sun like a vase of amber. She hitched her skirts and began.
The parsonage was at the back of town anyway, the brown curve of the river cupping the rise to her left.
She couldn’t see the sea from here on the northern slope.
And it was a mile or so to the shore, the marshes starting at the bottom of the cliff on which Winchelsea stood.
She could picture it, though. The light of the sea mellowed at this hour, sprinkled with bronze wave crests, the blinding mirror of liquid lead dimming as the sun moved over to light up a distant sea… a Caribbean sea…
She passed a copse of spindly pines. They did better here on the leeward side of the hill, protected somewhat from the fierce shore breezes.
It was all softer here, domestic, really, compared to the wild marsh.
Brambles were growing, green and vigorous, soon to be starred with white blossom.
Their cousins, the wild roses, sprawled higher, prettier, reaching for the sun.
Moss grew in the old flint walls of the first houses she passed.
She turned right, onto the lane, hearing the coach some distance behind her, still straining up the hill.
Her thigh muscles burned. She had climbed quickly. Now she breathed hard, touching the trunk of an old oak as she passed, knowing every tree and branch that canopied the lane. And there…there was the turning on the right, her home at the end of it.
There were three houses here, their walls half shingled in tile, patterns of diamonds, pretty gardens in the front, the spring flowers just past their past.
The first house was Alfred’s…she passed it, eyes down, hardly breathing, refusing to think…
She couldn’t…not yet…there was too much to feel, too much weight pressing…
old stones and ancient trees, and maybe even the sea breeze wouldn’t be able to clear it, maybe the sea breeze only fed it, kept it pressing on, onwards and onwards and—
There were footsteps on the path. A stone skipped away from someone’s foot. Her head jerked up and she stopped dead, seeing ghosts.
No. No, it couldn’t be…
A dark-haired boy walked towards her, kicking stones. He looked about fourteen. He was…
“Alfred?”
The boy stopped, looked up. Her vision swam. It was him. And it wasn’t him. A girl ran up behind him, her hair lighter, about the same age as the boy. “Nicholas—” But she stopped, seeing Madelaine, seeing the strange way she stared.
He wasn’t Alfred. His eyes were grey. His face was different. But for a moment…oh, for a moment… Her legs trembled. She put out a hand to the wall at her hip, the sharp edges of the knapped flint scratching against her palm. She gripped it harder, grateful for the bite of pain.
“Ma’am,” the boy said politely. His face was pale, very serious for a boy his age.
“I’m…I’m sorry. For a moment I thought you were someone else.”
“Alfred?” The boy glanced at the girl. They must be brother and sister. Their faces were so alike. “We don’t know an Alfred, do we?”
“Only our cousin.”
“Yes, but…” He gave Madelaine an apologetic glance. “We had a cousin called Alfred is what my sister means. He died a long time ago.”
“I see.”
She ought to say more. She was staring. They were strangers to her. And it wasn’t often she saw a face she didn’t know here. It was a very small town, no more than a village, really. For the first time, she realised both the boy and girl were dressed in black mourning.
“I…I don’t suppose his name was Ardingly. Alfred Ardingly?”
The boy nodded gravely. The girl, smiling, piped up, “That’s right!”
When Madelaine didn’t reply, the girl, bright and friendly, continued, “We’re new here. Well…we arrived a week ago. I’m Grace Shilstone, and this is my brother, Nicholas.” She grinned. “We’re twins!”
Yes. She could see that now. Their faces were so similar. Their ages, their heights. Though their colouring was different, and their manner.
The boy, Nicholas, frowned at his sister’s forwardness, but politely mumbled, “Pleased to meet you, ma'am.” He made as though to doff his hat, then realised he wasn’t wearing one.
His sister, heedless, continued, “Are you new too? We haven’t seen you yet, and our aunt has been very good, introducing us to everyone. ”
“Mrs Ardingly,” Madelaine said numbly, meaning Alfred’s mother.
“Yes. We’ve come to live with her and my uncle. Now that…now that…” The girl’s sunny smile disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by pain. Sudden tears sprang to her eyes.
“Our parents died,” her brother continued for her, his serious voice level and unflinching. “Our aunt and uncle have been so good as to take us in. Our younger brother too. William.”
“He’s nine,” said Grace, giving a fierce sniff, her eyes shining with determination now. “But he has a cold, so he’s staying indoors today.”
“Well, then,” said Madelaine, trying to match the girl’s bravery and give her best attempt at a smile.
“We are neighbours. I live just down the lane there, at the parsonage.” She skipped past the platitudes, the I’m sorry for your losses.
They did no good. “Mr and Mrs Ardingly are the best of people. Have you met my brothers? Daniel and Joseph are around your age.”
They nodded, the boy’s grave eyes on her as he reached the realisation before his sister. “Then you are…you are Mrs Ardingly too?”
“That’s right.” Her smile was almost convincing. “I suppose I’m your cousin too.”
The parlour was so cosy. She always thought that.
It struck her anew every evening of her life, as though there was always a part of her seeing it for the first time: the ancient rug that had once been red but was now all shades of autumn brown, the dark green paper above the wainscotting, the brasses and dried flowers hanging from the black beams. It was too small for her family. It was the heart of her home.
They all assembled there after dinner, her mother and father, her brothers, the fire lit though it was spring.
A cold wind was coming in off the sea. They were still burning wood from the oak that had been brought down in January’s storms, but she could smell apple wood in the smoke, gnarled branches from the orchard’s vigorous pruning a few months ago.
Her brother Daniel sat in the window seat, the drapes drawn against the breeze, the heavy sun-faded russet like a knight’s mantle around his broadening shoulders.
He was almost sixteen. He’d blushed when Grace Shilstone was mentioned at dinner.
Now he sat whittling a knotted lump of the pruned apple wood.
It was hard, difficult wood to work, no longer green, the fibres dense and snarled—he’d complained about it often enough for her to know—but he persevered, frowning in concentration, attempting to make a dragon’s face, or a lion, or whatever beast lived in the active mind his quiet exterior hid.
Her brother Joseph lay on his belly on the rug, flicking through a tattered copy of The Sporting Magazine.
The squire up at the big house sent down a tied bundle of them once or twice a year for the boys to pore over.
Joseph was thirteen. When their new neighbours had been discussed at dinner, he’d only wondered, plaintive as always, whether the boy, Nicholas, might be any good at cricket.
“We need to field a much better team this summer. We cannot be beaten by Rye again.”
Her father sat in a corner near the bookshelf, a brace of candles perched somewhat precariously on a stack of old papers yellowing atop the cabinet at his side.
His glasses were on the end of his nose.
He pushed them up with his index finger every few minutes, never breaking his concentration on the text preoccupying him.
The things he muttered to himself never made him pause either.
He only looked up when Madelaine’s mother walked into the room, smiling absently as she came over to the fire and took her usual seat in the winged armchair opposite Madelaine’s by the hearth.
She picked up her bag of mending before she’d even settled into the seat, barely needing to look as she pulled out a mitten and began to darn it.
How many hundreds of such holes had she mended over the years?
Maybe it was thousands. A similar bag of mending waited, tucked at the side of Madelaine’s chair.
But she sat cradling her cup of tea between her palms, staring at the flames. Despite the fire, she was cold.
She’d seen a ghost.
“It’ll be hard, but it’ll do them good,” said her mother, continuing a conversation the end of dinner had temporarily paused. They’d been telling Madelaine all about her new neighbours. Her new cousins.
Their mother had been the youngest sister of Alfred’s mother.
There had been four sisters in all, but the other two had houses already full of children, or even grandchildren, and little space or money to take on three more.
The Ardinglys, of course, had no children at all.
It made sense they would take the orphans in.
“They’re a little old now, especially to be running around after the youngest, William,” her mother continued, eyes on the rapid looping of her darning needle, “but we will help, of course. The whole town will help. As we always do.”
“Yes,” Madelaine agreed.
Her mother looked up, her sympathy deep but probing.
They hadn’t spoken of why Madelaine had returned so abruptly.
She didn’t know what her aunt had written of events in town, but surely in a month’s worth of correspondence there had been occasional mentions of a Lord Cotereigh this and a Lord Cotereigh that, so entangled had their lives been.
A Lord Cotereigh who had perhaps been conspicuously absent from her own letters home.
What had there been to say of him? Nothing she could write without it feeling half a lie.
Lord Cotereigh invited us to dinner…Lord Cotereigh danced with me at a ball…
Lord Cotereigh has almost adopted the street boy, Tom…
Lord Cotereigh haunts my dreams…Lord Cotereigh’s gaze is black as sin…
Lord Cotereigh’s closeness makes it hard to breathe…
Lord Cotereigh…Lord Cotereigh is the worst man alive.
The tea trembled in her cup.
“Sophie admitted the reservations she had,” her mother continued, talking of Alfred’s mother.
“How much pain old memories would stir. It’s inevitable, having children in the house again, having to be a mother again, having to…
having to find new space in the parts of her heart she’s long since shuttered…
” She paused, her sigh heavy with sympathy.
She was a brusque, practical woman, Madelaine’s mother.
Still handsome and energetic though her hair was greying and her face worn by care as much as age.
Her fingers, the skin shiny and a little wrinkled, her knuckles strong and knobbly, continued their work even as she paused her speech.
“But I said…I said, Sophie, a heart is an infinite thing. There’s always new love to be found.
Didn’t it amaze me with every new baby I held in my arms that I could love them all as much as the first?
Seven of you I was blessed with, and I never ran out of room. ”
“Mother…” Madelaine’s voice was unsteady.
Her mother smiled, amused by her own sentimentality.
“Your brother George, now he’d tell you the heart is a muscle.
Just a red lump in our chests. But muscles are flexible, aren’t they?
They bend and stretch, and they get stronger the more you use them.
” Her needle looped, the pull of the thread audible even over the fire and the scrape of Daniel’s knife, though he’d slowed his work, listening.
“So, yes, she might be sore at first, but she’ll get used to it and be better for it.
It’s past time they had something to do, the two of them in that house and him halfway retired.
Those children will shake things up nicely.
If there’s any silver lining to be found in the pain of what’s happened to them and their poor parents, then perhaps it’s that. ”
Daniel met Madelaine’s eyes for a moment.
He’d been five when she’d been widowed. He didn’t remember it, not really, and it was probably Grace Shilstone he was thinking of; it was the pretty smiling girl and her grief that caused the shadow in his eyes, but Madelaine shared a small smile with him.
Their mother’s brisk optimism was a perpetual source of amusement for her children.
If they scraped their knee, no matter how badly, she’d only tut and tell them to be glad they hadn’t lost the leg.
Then she’d clean it, ignoring their cries of pain, and bind it with gentle hands, and somehow, no matter how much it still stung, they knew it’d be all right.
But that magic didn’t work when you grew up.