I often think of her and wonder what she is doing. We had been so close, we had always done everything together … well, not everything. She had known nothing of my affair with Bastian—and now we were miles apart—separated by distance and all the experiences she must be having in her new life.
I have taken to riding each day. The first time I sat in the saddle since my illness I felt like a novice, terrified that I was going to fall, but that soon passed and my mother agreed that I should ride a little each day. Sometimes she accompanied me and often I went with the grooms.
I am very conscious of the marks on my face.
‘They are nothing,’ said my mother. ‘In fact no one would notice them. You must wear a fringe on your forehead, which I hear from Angelet’s letters is most fashionable.’
Phoebe cut my fringe and curled it, but whenever I looked at myself in a mirror my eyes went to the scars. I used to get angry sometimes and think of Angelet who had had an exciting adventure ending in marriage while her skin remained as smooth and fresh as mine used to be.
It was as though she were constantly with me. I used to read her letters again and again. She described Far Flamstead with its quaint Folly to me so that I could see it clearly, and when she wrote of her husband I sensed that she thought him wonderful. Yet at the same time there was something which she held back. I couldn’t help thinking of them together … as Bastian and I had been, and I was filled with a bitter envy.
Soon after my eighteenth birthday my father’s ship returned. That was a day of great rejoicing in our household. My lassitude dropped from me then, for not only had my father returned but my brother Fennimore and Bastian with him.
When the news came that the ship had been sighted, there was the bustle of excitement and preparation which I remembered so well. My mother shone with an inner radiance and the whole household seemed to come alive. Only at such times would she allow herself to contemplate the hazards of the journey. That must have been a very happy trait to possess.
We rode down to the coast to greet them as they came ashore.
My father embraced my mother first as though he was never going to let her go again, and then he looked round for his daughters. It was difficult explaining so much in a few breathless sentences, and my mother had evidently practised how she would tell him, so that he should suffer no unnecessary anxieties even for a few moments.
‘We are all well and happy, Fenn. But so much has happened since you have been away. Our darling Angelet has married … most happily … and Bersaba has been ill but is now quite recovered. It is too much to tell now.’
My brother Fennimore embraced me and so did Bastian. I felt myself flushing with bitter anger, wondering how much of the change he noticed.
‘Let us get back to the house,’ said my mother. ‘I can only think that you are back … safe and well.’
So we rode back to Trystan Priory—myself between Fennimore and Bastian.
I told them as briefly as I could. I contracted smallpox; Angelet was sent away to stay with Carlotta and there had met her husband. We had recently had the news that she had married and everyone seemed pleased with the match.
‘Bersaba,’ cried my brother Fennimore. ‘You have had smallpox. But it is a miracle!’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘The miracle of love, I suppose. You can imagine what Mother did for me. And there was Phoebe to help her. The blacksmith’s daughter, you know. Her father turned her out and I brought her to the Priory. She seems to think that makes her my slave for life.’
Bastian said nothing, but I could sense his emotion and I felt elated. It was at this moment that I started to come alive again.
There was the well-remembered atmosphere of festivity about the Priory. My father was delighted to be back, so concerned about what had happened in his absence. As we came into the house he had me on one side of him, my mother on the other, and he kept pressing my arm against him and I knew how thankful he was that I had survived.
Everything had to be told him in detail. Angelet’s letters had to be produced. He wanted to hear how I had gone to the midwife and how my mother had nursed me. He sent for Phoebe and thanked her for what she had done, and she said it was nothing to what I had done for her and she’d give her life for me.
There were sentimental tears in their eyes and I felt like an outside observer looking on at the scene; and all the time I was conscious of Bastian.
We supped in the hall that night and it was like long ago days, for the servants were at the table too. The only thing that was missing was the massive old salt cellar which a hundred years ago used to stand in the centre of the table, dividing the members of the household and their guests from the menials. It now stood in the kitchen as a sort of ornament and memento of other days. My father sat at the head of the table and Mother beside him, with Fennimore on my mother’s left hand and I on my father’s right. Bastian sat next to me.
Everyone was happy, for the servants loved my father and regarded him as the best of masters. I once remarked to Angelet that their regard for him was due in part to the fact that they saw him rarely, and it is so much easier to love someone who is not always there to irritate and inspire something less than loving. I remember how horrified she was and how we argued about our father and the servants and our different characters, hers and mine. ‘You’re a sentimentalist, Angelet.’ I clinched the discussion with that remark—for I invariably had had the last word. ‘And I am a realist.’ I could always nonplus her with words, but now of course she had escaped from me. She was the one who had had the fine adventure; she was the one who had made the good marriage.
So that was a merry meal except for the fact that my father regretted the absence of my sister. He would have liked to have had her living a few miles away and to be here with her new husband on this occasion.
I asked Bastian how he had liked voyaging and he replied that it had been a great adventure but he was not sure that he wished to go again.
He looked at me earnestly and said: ‘I want to stay here. There is so much to keep me.’
I wondered if he noticed those hideous pockmarks. My hair hid them on my brow where they were at their worst and I kept my left cheek turned away from him.
He said: ‘To think that you were so ill, Bersaba, and I knew nothing of it! You might have died.’
‘It is considered a miracle that I did not,’ I answered.
My mother said that she supposed he would like to go soon to his family and he replied that he would be very happy to stay at the Priory for a few days if she would allow it.
She reproached him warmly for asking, for she hoped he regarded the Priory as his second home.
My father said there were business matters in progress and he would want to discuss them with my mother, Fennimore and Bastian.
Bastian looked contented and I knew that he was watching me.
The next morning he asked me to ride with him and we went out together.
It was a beautiful morning, or perhaps it seemed especially so to me because I was regaining an interest in life. I was beginning to feel well again perhaps, or it might have been because Bastian was here and clearly in love with me that I noticed afresh the beauties of the countryside to which for so long I had been oblivious. I was struck by the bright yellow flowers of the vetch, which we called lady’s fingers and which grew on the hillside, and the pale blue of the skull-cap close to the streams. There also grew the woody nightshade—yellow and purple—the flower which always seemed to me to be of special interest because it could look so pretty and yet could be deadly. We were always warned not to touch it and we called it bittersweet.