She was now Connell’s nurse. After all, I trusted her more than I did anyone else; I knew too of her love for children. She was inclined to spoil the boy of course but I suppose we all were.
There she was clucking over him one day and chattering away to him and she said: “I reckon your father thinks the world of you, my little man. Oh, he does and all. And that’s clear to see. And you know it. Yes, you do.”
I smiled at them and I thought of her as a young woman when Jacko had been born and how she must have loved him.
Then she said: “Boys! They always want boys. The Captain was the same. Show him a boy and he was that pleased. Nothing too good for his boys. It’s the same with this master. It must have been a terrible disappointment to him …”
“What, Jennet?”
“Well, when he couldn’t get one with that first wife of his. Well, ’twasn’t for want of trying. Time after time he were disappointed.”
“You seem to know a great deal about the master’s affairs,” I said.
“’Tis common talk in the kitchens, Mistress.”
“What do they say down there, Jennet?”
“Oh, that she was a poor sick creature and the master wasn’t with her as he is with you.”
“They’re impertinent,” I said, but I couldn’t quite suppress the glow of triumph.
Jennet did not notice the reproof and I was glad. I thought: I may find out through Jennet and the servants more than I can from Colum. It was only natural that I should feel a great curiosity about my predecessor and I could see no harm in doing a little innocent ferreting.
Seeing my interest Jennet warmed to her subject. There was little she liked so much as gossip.
“Oh yes,” said Jennet, “a poor timid thing, she were. Frightened of her own shadow. The master, they say, do want someone as can stand up to him as you do, Mistress. They say you be just the one for him and he knows it. This poor lady, frightened she were, frightened of the castle and ghosts and things and most of all of him.”
“Poor child,” I said.
“Oh yes, Mistress, and the master he did want a son and it seemed she could not give him one. There was lots of tries, as you might say. She’d be so and then she’d lose it, and then so again. Only once did she stay her full time … and that was the last. Once she went seven months though. The others … they were all quick, as you might say.”
“She must have had a very uncomfortable time.”
“She did. And the master he were mad, like. Shouted he did … called her a useless stock. That’s what he called her. They’d hear him shouting and his rage was terrible. Woe betide any who went near him when he was in these rages. They used to be frightened that he’d do away with her. And she was afraid too. She told her maid … Mary Anne, it were. She’s with one of the Seaward men now and works over there. She told Mary Anne that sometimes she feared he’d do away with her.”
I felt I had had enough and wanted to hear no more. Of course I liked to have confirmation that he was content with our marriage and that he found his second wife more attractive than his first, but I could not bear this talk about his cruelty to her.
“All right, Jennet,” I said. “That’s enough. Servants exaggerate.”
“Not this time, Mistress, for Mary Anne did say she was real terrified. And when she was so again she was so frantic she did not know what to do. You see she believed she’d never have the child and she was so sick and ill every time. She thought she would die, and she told Mary Anne that she ought never to try for children. The doctor was against it. She ought never to have married because she knew it would kill her sooner or later. She said she had pleaded with him and he had said that if she could not give him children what good was she to him …”
“I don’t want to hear any more servant’s gossip, Jennet,” I said.
“No, Mistress, no more you do. But they did wonder why she didn’t run away and go home to her family. ’Twas not all that far.”
“Oh?” I said.
“I could scarce believe it when I heard,” said Jennet, “seeing that we’d been there, like, and was on terms with the family.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Mistress, the master’s first wife was the sister of the young gentleman we all thought you’d take. Her name before her marriage was Melanie Landor.”
I felt dizzy suddenly. In my mind I was transported back to Trystan Priory. I was in a small room looking at a picture of a fair young girl.
I could hear a voice saying: She was murdered.
That girl had been Colum’s first wife.
YSELLA’S TOWER
IT HAUNTED ME. I could not get her out of my mind. I could imagine her so clearly in this place, having seen her picture. It was strange how that had impressed itself on my mind. I could not forget the anguish in her mother’s eyes; I could hear the underlying hatred in the voice as she had said: “She was murdered.”
And Jennet: “Sometimes she feared he’d do away with her.”
Why had he married her in the first place? Had he been in love with her? A fair innocent young girl. He liked innocence. He had liked it in me. He took some savage delight in destroying that innocence as he had on that first night I had spent in Castle Paling.
I was thinking about him, this man who was the father of my child. What if I had failed as Melanie Landor had? I had delighted him only because I had given him what he wanted.
I could not get her out of my mind. I looked for signs of her about the place. When I walked the ramparts and looked out at the sea I thought of her standing there and the fear that would have hung over her. It was as though she walked beside me, appearing at odd moments, a shadowy presence to haunt me, to cast a shadow over my happiness. Poor frail Melanie who had failed to please him and who had died because of it!
No, not because of it. She had died in childbed. Many women did. A husband could not be blamed for that.
I kept hearing her mother’s fierce murmur: She was murdered. I must make allowances for a mother’s grief. And how strange that she should have been Fennimore’s sister. But was it? They were not distant neighbours. Marriages were arranged between people of their position.
What were the Landors thinking now? They would know that I, whom they had chosen to be Fennimore’s wife, was now married to the man who had been their daughter’s husband.
What had they thought? How strange that my mother who had seen them since my marriage had not mentioned this fact to me. It would have been so natural for her to do so.
I was betraying too much interest in my husband’s first wife. Jennet, quick to realize this, garnered knowledge for me.
“It were in the Red Room she died, Mistress,” she told me. And I must go to the Red Room.
How dark it was. How full of shadows, and there was the big four-poster bed. I went to the window and looked out to the stark drop to the sea. I could almost feel her then. It was as though a voice whispered: Yes, I thought often of throwing myself down. It would have been quick … anything better than my life with him.
Fancy, sheer fancy! What was the matter with me? It was the room with the dark red bed curtains—heavy, embroidered in red silk of a darker shade than the background. I pictured her shut in behind those curtains, waiting for him to come to her.
“Her room were the Red Room,” Jennet told me. “He would go to her there. She didn’t share a room with him, like. They did say he were with her only to get a son.”