‘To go away … from Bersaba when she is ill!’
‘My dear child, this is a dangerous sickness which can result in death. We must be brave, and we shall not be that if we shut our eyes to the truth. I am going to send you to London … if this develops.’
‘To London … without Bersaba?’
‘I want you to be far away. This is going to be distressing, and if Bersaba really has contracted the disease we are going to need all our skills in nursing her.’
‘I should be here to help then.’
‘No. I would not let you run the risk.’
‘But what of you, Mother?’
‘I am her mother. You don’t think I would allow anyone else to nurse her?’
‘What if you caught it?’ My eyes were round with horror.
‘I shall not,’ she said confidently. ‘I must not, for I intend to nurse Bersaba. But as yet we are unsure. I want you to stay away from her. That is why I have changed your room. Promise me that you will not see her.’
‘But what will she think?’
‘Bersaba is sensible. She knows what has happened. She understands the danger. Therefore she will agree that we are right.’
‘Mother, how could I go to London when she may be ill?’
‘You can because I say you must. You are so close … so accustomed to being together, that I fear it might not be possible to keep you apart.’
‘But to go to London … without Bersaba!’
‘I have been awake all night thinking of the best course to take and I have come to the conclusion that this is it. If you were at Castle Paling you would be too near … and I think it would be good for you to have a change of scene. In London everything will be fresh for you. You won’t fret so much.’
‘Mother, you think she may die …’
‘She is going to live. But we have to face the facts, Angel. She is already weak. She has seemed in a highly strung state these last weeks … and then the chill. But I shall nurse her through it. I have sent a message to London telling Senara that in all probability you will be leaving in two weeks unless she hears to the contrary. Make your preparations. I’m afraid you will only be able to take what you have and there will be no time for making new garments. Be of good cheer, Angelet. It may not come to this.’
I was bewildered. I had so longed to go to London, but I had never for a moment thought of doing so without Bersaba. I just could not visualize a life she did not share.
Those two weeks passed somehow. Every morning I would look into my mother’s face to read what I dared not ask. The whole household seemed to be plunged into melancholy. Bersaba stayed in her room and only my mother went to her. She told me that Bersaba understood and realized that it must be so.
Then came the morning when I read the terrible truth in my mother’s eyes. The first dread symptoms had shown themselves.
That was why on that October morning I was travelling to London. I had Mab with me to act as my maid and six grooms to protect me and to look after the baggage. And as I rode along I was thinking of my sister and wondering whether I should ever see her again.
I remember very little of the journey because all the time my thoughts were occupied with Bersaba. We stayed the first night at Castle Paling and that was a sombre occasion because everyone was so shocked by the thought of what might be happening at the Priory.
I could see that they didn’t have much hope of Bersaba’s recovery, and their assurances that it would certainly be a mild attack and that she would have the best attention and that so much had been learned about the disease now that many people were cured, lacked conviction.
The journey took two weeks. To me it seemed like going from inn to inn, then starting off almost as soon as it was light and going on till the horses needed a rest at midday, and then another inn and food before we started off again.
We kept to the byways as much as possible, for the groom in charge believed that there was less likelihood of meeting road robbers that way. He said that highwaymen haunted the main roads because more travellers used them, and although there might be rich people on the byways, robbers might have to hang about in wait for a whole day and meet no one, so they preferred the more regular traffic on the highways.
This seemed to me logical and I suppose we had our share of thrills, but nothing seemed to touch me because I wasn’t so much on the road as in that bedroom at Trystan Priory with my sister. When the rain teemed down I scarcely noticed it; when the roads were impassable and we had to retrace our way I accepted it stoically.
Mab said to me: ‘You’m not here, Miss Angelet. That’s what ’tis.’
And I answered: ‘I can’t be anywhere, Mab, but back at Trystan Priory with my sister.’
And I kept blaming myself in a way because I had so wanted this and it had come about in this strange uncanny way, for I knew my mother would never have consented to our going to London together; she would have thought of all the dangers on the road her darlings would have to face, and perhaps too of other dangers in London society. But there was no danger as great as that which now threatened my sister Bersaba, and my mother would agree to anything that took me out of its path.
So the journey progressed. We crossed the Tamar at Gunislake and travelled across Devon to Tavistock and thence to Somerset and to Wiltshire, where carved on the hillside I saw the strange white horse which was said to have been done in the era before Christianity came to England. As we came to Stonehenge, that impressive and most weird stone circle, I thought vaguely of the rites which were doubtless performed there long before the Romans came to Britain, and was reminded of the strange murmurs there had been about Carlotta and wondered whether she really had been a witch. It was very strange about the toad which had been found in her bed. My mother, who hated talk of witchcraft because she said people were so cruel to innocent old women and worked themselves into a frenzy through their imagination, pretended that there was no such thing. ‘It is in the minds of their accusers,’ she said. As for the toad, her explanation was that it had got into the house in some way, that was if Mab had really seen it. She may well have imagined the whole thing, said my mother, and the girl believed it because that was what she wanted to believe. At least she was allowing me to go to Senara and Carlotta, so she must have been sincere in her disbelief.
And so Stonehenge and on through Basingstoke to Reading, when I found myself a little excited and being ashamed of it, hastily sending my thoughts back to that sickroom in Trystan Priory. I caught a glimpse of Windsor Castle through the trees.
It looked magnificent with its grey towers and battlements and the Great Park which surrounded it; and I thought of history lessons in the Priory schoolroom where I had sat beside Bersaba and we had learned of how Edward the Third had picked up the lady’s garter there and created the motto ‘Evil be to him who evil thinks’—a story which we both loved to hear repeated; and how King John stayed there before signing the Magna Carta at Runnymede, and Henry VIII hunted in the forest. Seeing the very castle of which we had heard so much aroused my interest and excitement, but it was overshadowed by memories of my sister.
I thought then: She will always be there. I shall never escape from Bersaba. It seemed strange to use the word ‘escape’, for that sounded as though I were in some sort of captivity from which I wanted to get away.
We were drawing nearer and nearer to London and my thoughts were not: What is awaiting me in London, but any day there might be news of Bersaba.
And so we came to Pondersby Hall, the residence of Sir Gervaise, which lay not far from the village of Richmond close to the river—the river on which craft of all sizes and shapes sailed in and out of the city of London.