The Misbegotten

1808

It was during the last summer of Alice’s life that Starling discovered the lovers’ tree. She was out with Bridget, running errands in Bathampton on a warm, lazy sort of day in July; soft white clouds sat sedately in a powder-blue sky. The housekeeper was getting leaner and wirier with each season that passed; she carried her basket over an arm that was nothing but bone and sinew beneath freckled, weathered skin. There was more grey than brown in her hair, and her face had started to sink inwards, hollowing out between the bones of cheek and jaw. But this paring down only seemed to make Bridget tougher, and quicker. She walked with smart steps, and was terse with all the shopkeepers and craftsmen they dealt with, not stopping to gossip when Starling wanted to dawdle and look around her.

She especially wanted to dawdle around the butcher’s shop, in spite of the iron stink of blood and offal, because Pip Blayton, the butcher’s son, was just a year older than her at thirteen, and she found herself curious about him. Pip was tall for his age, and his shoulders were starting to widen. He looked like he’d been stretched; his body was long and clumsy, but his face was nice, in spite of the pimples that scattered his forehead. He had sandy hair that he hid behind whenever Starling looked at him, dipping his chin so that it fell over his forehead as heat torched his cheeks. Even though Starling was still small she had tiny, budding breasts and a slight curve in her hips that hadn’t been there before. Her face was still her face, but it was subtly different, changing in tiny ways that made it more of a woman’s face, less of a child’s. Starling liked to see Pip blush; she liked to watch him trying to ignore her. And when she smiled at him, Bridget gave her such a censorious look that it made her smile wider.

‘Who are you, Grinagog, the cat’s uncle? You mind where you flash that rantipole smile of yours, Starling. You’ll get yourself in trouble, soon enough,’ Bridget said, as they carried on away from the shop.

‘What kind of trouble?’ Starling was deeply curious about this.

‘Never you mind.’

‘If I knew what kind, maybe I would know how to stay out of it?’ she pointed out.

‘If you knew what kind, you’d rush into it ever the quicker. I know you too well, my girl,’ said Bridget, which only made Starling even more curious.

After five years with Alice and Bridget, there was a good deal Starling was curious about. The farmhouse and the village of Bathampton were her whole world, and however much she loved that world, it had begun to seem a little small. She often thought wistfully of Corsham, and the fair Jonathan had taken them to the year before. She wanted to feel that excitement again, that sense of belonging to a loud and colourful throng of people. Sometimes, Starling walked the other way along the canal – west, towards Bath. It was only two miles to the edge of the city. She walked until she could see its rooftops and crescents, and there she would stop and stare, watching ribbons of smoke rise from a thousand chimneys; seagulls wheeling around the markets and middens; church spires thrusting up towards heaven here and there; and the huge towers of the abbey. On days when a soft west wind was blowing, it carried the faint rattle of hooves and cartwheels on cobbled streets, and the yell of men’s voices along the wharf. The city seemed like a huge and wonderful mêlée after the sedate, ordered pace of things in Bathampton. It was almost frightening, but at the same time deeply compelling.

But when Starling asked Alice if they could go into Bath on a visit, Alice’s face always fell. She tried again, one spring day when they had both walked far to the west, along the river, and were gazing at the clustered buildings of the city together.

‘I should like to, Starling. But Lord Faukes says we should not,’ Alice said.

‘But… why not?’

‘I cannot say, dearest. He says he thinks it would be too great a strain on me. On my heart.’ Alice looked down at her hands, at her fingers, which were slowly shredding a posy of bluebells. ‘And that the city is no place for innocent young girls. So perhaps because it’s more that we would have no escort, no acquaintances…’

‘But… couldn’t he take us with him one day? Or Mr Alleyn?’

‘I have asked.’ For a moment impatience made her words clipped, but then Alice hung her head and her voice lowered to almost nothing. She looked ashamed. ‘But I’m afraid the answer is no.’ She took Starling’s hand and squeezed it apologetically, and Starling didn’t understand what Alice could possibly have to be ashamed of. They stood in silence for a while, and Starling thought hard about what she would say next.

‘Well, we need not tell them. It’s an easy enough distance to walk – it wouldn’t take long. We could go, you and I, and explore, and say nothing to Lord Faukes, or to Jonathan, though I’m sure Jonathan would not betray us.’ Alice smiled slightly, but then her face fell serious.

‘Of course Jonathan would not betray us. But you would have us deliberately disobey the man who keeps us? The man who let me take you in, when he had no cause to other than kind indulgence?’

‘But… we went to Corsham fair last year, and that we kept a secret from him. Wasn’t that disobedient too?’

‘Yes, perhaps it was, but he had never specifically said to me that I should not go to Corsham, as he has with Bath.’

‘But he would never hear of it, Alice-’

‘But we would have done it, nevertheless. We would be the betrayers, don’t you see? And we would always know it. And besides… the chickens always come home to roost, as our good Bridget would say. A lie will always come back to haunt you. If somebody should see us, and word of our disobedience reach Lord Faukes… well then, how kindly do you think he would feel towards us? We who owe him our home and our food and our well-being?’ She smiled faintly at the look of sullen disappointment on Starling’s face; leant over to kiss her forehead. ‘Don’t pull such a cross-patch face, Starling! What is there in Bath that we do not have here, in Bathampton?’

‘I don’t know! That’s why I want to go! Why must you always be so obedient to him? How can you not want to explore-’

‘I am obedient because I would have a roof over our heads – yours and mine!’ Alice said angrily. Starling blinked, stunned. It was the first time Alice had ever raised her voice to her. ‘Of course I want to explore – of course I want to go abroad, and go to dances, and make new friends! But I am told I may not, and I have no choice but to obey. Don’t you understand that?’

‘He would not be so very angry, would he?’ Starling mumbled.

‘Would you care to chance it?’ said Alice, fixing her with a warning gaze.

‘Maybe.’ Starling shrugged, half rebellious, half cowed.

‘Well, when you are older, and independent of us, you may go where you please,’ Alice said flatly, and Starling halted her argument at once, because this spoke of a time when she would not always be at Alice’s side, and she did not want to hear of such a time.

Starling kicked the heads off a few blameless dandelions by her feet, and could not look at her sister. She felt a horrible kind of embarrassment to be scolded in such a way, and searched for some way to make things normal again.

‘Alice… why is Lord Faukes your benefactor?’ she asked, as lightly as she could. ‘I mean, what happened to your real parents? Who were they?’ Alice turned her head to look north, across the river towards Box and Batheaston. A soft breeze blew wisps of her hair around her chin, and fluttered the blue ribbon of her hat.

‘I don’t know, Starling,’ she said, her voice soft and sad.

‘Haven’t you asked him?’

‘Of course I’ve asked him,’ she said, exasperated, and Starling sensed some hard kernel beneath Alice’s decorum for the first time; some hungry thing too long ignored. ‘He says my father was an old friend of his, a man he loved. My mother died and… in his grief my father would have given me away to strangers, and so Lord Faukes took me and kept me safe, and found Bridget to look after me. And then my father also died…’ She turned to look at Starling, wistfully. ‘Whoever they were, they are dead. Of that much I am sure. And I must have been a source of shame to my family, must I not, to be kept in ignorance even of my parents’ names, so that I may never try to find their kin? My kin.’

‘Are you a secret, then?’ said Starling, scowling in thought.

‘Of course I am. Have you only just realised?’ Alice smiled bitterly. ‘Jonathan is not even allowed to speak about me to his mother. Lord Faukes has forbidden it.’

‘But why would he, Alice?’

‘Don’t you see, Starling? The only person who could tell me is Lord Faukes, and he will not. And if I demand to know, I risk his displeasure. So I am trapped. I will never know, and I must endeavour to be content at that.’

‘Perhaps… perhaps when you come of age some bequest of your father’s will come into effect, and you will find it all out, and have a fortune and a great house.’

‘It is a pleasant enough story, dearest. But let us not pin our hopes too highly upon it.’

‘But when you are one and twenty, you will be free to leave his care anyway, won’t you?’

‘If I choose it, yes. But where would I go, Starling? What would I do? I have nothing. I know nobody outside of Bathampton.’

‘You have Jonathan,’ Starling pointed out, doggedly.

‘Yes. I have Jonathan. I have only Jonathan,’ Alice said quietly, and then they walked back to the farmhouse in silence.

In the darkness late that evening came footsteps and the glow of a candle flame around the bedroom door, and Starling was awoken, and padded silently towards it to listen. The floorboards were cold beneath her bed-warmed feet; she pulled her nightdress tight around her. On the landing were Bridget in her night cap and Alice with her hair tied up in rags. The candle was in Alice’s hand, held between them, lighting their faces from below so that their eyes looked hollow and unearthly.

‘Why does he keep me here, Bridget? Who am I to him?’ said Alice. Bridget’s mouth was a tight, flat line; at her sides her arms hung tense and uneasy.

‘You’re his ward, miss. You’re kept here in comfort, and in safety, and lucky for it.’

‘Safety from what? And why am I his ward, and kept secret? Who were my parents?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’

‘Cannot? Or will not?’ Alice pressed. Bridget said nothing, and Alice gazed at her with little hope or expectation. ‘Where does the name Beckwith come from? My father, or my mother? Or is it a fiction, like everything else? I have asked in the village, I have asked people passing through, for years and years. Nobody has heard of that name, here or anywhere else.’

‘It is your name. Be content with it.’

‘Be content?’ There was an incredulous pause. ‘Are you his, Bridget, or are you mine?’ Alice whispered.

‘I am both,’ said Bridget, and in her voice was some pent-up emotion, something that twisted in pain like a fish on a hook.

‘I think I’m like a bird kept in a silver cage. Something charming for him to look upon, and even to love. But something owned, that will never have its own destiny, or the freedom it was born with.’

‘Not all are born into freedom, Alice. Perhaps it is better to appreciate the silver cage, when others have a cage of mud and sticks.’

‘A cage is still a cage, Bridget,’ Alice said coldly. Starling held her breath, but they said nothing more. Alice went back downstairs, though it was bedtime, and Bridget stood for a long while, not knowing she was watched. Her mouth stayed in its tight, flat line, and her eyes gazed out through the wall of the house, into the far distance. Her face was as empty as a broken heart, and though Starling wanted to hold her, at the same time she knew she must never let on that she’d seen the older woman in a moment of such profound and terrible nakedness.

In the end, Alice’s twenty-first birthday came and went with no visits from lawyers or uncles or executors of hidden wills. Only Lord Faukes came, with gifts of white kid gloves and a beautiful evening gown of turquoise silk overlaid with the finest silver lace any of the three women had ever seen. A ball dress that Alice would have no occasion to wear. Lord Faukes bade her try it on, and she dutifully twirled and posed for him, and even danced with him a little on the parlour floor, though there was no music and he looked grotesque as her partner – too old, too fat. In his meaty hands Alice was doll-like, so fragile he might destroy her on a whim. Lord Faukes’s face shone with pleasure at seeing her in the dress. Alice smiled and said again and again how much she loved it, but Starling still noticed the look of bitter disappointment behind her eyes, and the way her smile fell at once from her face when her benefactor’s back was turned.

‘Perhaps they don’t know how to find you, and will come a little late with news?’ Starling whispered into the darkness of their bedroom that night, when she could tell Alice was not sleeping.

‘Nobody is trying to find me, Starling,’ Alice replied, and Starling didn’t argue because she thought it was probably true.

‘Then we are sisters more than ever, Alice, because we are both cut off from the people who had us as babes, and our pasts are secrets that we shan’t ever know about. But we are our own family, are we not?’

‘We are our own family,’ Alice agreed, but Starling could not tell from her voice what Alice was feeling.

On the sunny July day, a year after that, once Bridget had hustled Starling away from Pip Blayton at the butcher’s shop, the pair of them walked past the George Inn and along the lane that eventually crossed the river and went on to Batheaston.

‘We’ve to pay the miller for that flour he delivered on Monday. I didn’t have the coins about me when he called,’ said Bridget, when Starling asked.

‘I can do it, if you want. You don’t need to walk all the way with me,’ said Starling, who loved the freedom to dawdle. Bridget was flushed and breathing deeply, so she paused and gave Starling a shrewd look through screwed-up eyes.

‘You’ll give Miller Harris the money, and nobody else, and no going back to make calf eyes at Pip Blayton?’

‘Of course!’ said Starling, with an almost straight face. Bridget rolled her eyes and hefted her basket higher up her arm. She fished some coins from her pocket, handing them to Starling.

‘There, then. Go on and take it to him, and mind you hurry back. Good girl.’ She gave Starling a nod and a purse of her lips, which was as close as Bridget generally came to smiling. On light feet, Starling carried on alone.

The bridge marched across the wide span of the River Avon on hefty stone arches. The water was deep and clear; its bed was cloaked with vibrant green weeds which wafted in the current, sheltering trout and perch and other fish. On the far side, coming from Batheaston, there was a toll house where a man with a face full of grog-blossoms sat and sipped brandy all day long, collecting coins from those who wished to cross. Starling hung over the parapet and watched the mill’s huge wheel turning, throwing up jewels of sunlit water and a sodden, river-bottom smell of wood and minerals and muddy life. The slap and splash of it was hypnotic. Starling stared, the sun hot on the back of her head, until Miller Harris popped his head out and shouted at her. She paid him Bridget’s coins and sauntered back over the bridge, stopping on the home side, facing west, to look for fish and throw in a few pebbles from the dusty lane. She almost didn’t see Alice against the blinding brilliance of the sunlit water. Starling shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked again.

The figure was perhaps three hundred feet from the bridge, by the water’s edge where the bank dropped steeply from the meadow. In the dappled shade along the bank it was hard to see her, but Starling was sure it was Alice. Nobody else was so lathy slim, had hair so arrestingly pale, or wore a dress the colour of lavender. Alice was picking her way gingerly along the water line, using the gnarled tree roots as stepping stones and the low branches as handholds. She stopped when she reached one tree, a weeping willow which snagged the shining water with its silvery tendrils. As she stepped beneath its branches, Starling lost sight of her. She moved a little further along the bridge to find a better vantage point, but from no angle could she see through the willow’s draping leaves. Then, a moment later, she saw Alice emerge again, going back along the bank to the spot where she could climb up to the meadow. As she reached open ground, Alice looked around, as if to check for observers. Starling thought about waving to her but something stopped her, and instead she sank a little lower behind the stone parapet.

Starling knew she ought to go back to the farmhouse. Bridget would know she was dawdling, and would want help with the cleaning and their lunch. Alice had been heading that way; Starling could ask her what she’d been doing on the river-bank. A farm wagon pulled by heavy horses came rumbling over the bridge just then, so Starling had to move. But she didn’t go straight home; she climbed over the fence and picked her way down through the trees to the meadow-marsh. The bank dropped four feet straight down to the water’s edge but Starling was bolder and more nimble than Alice. She clambered down through the roots of the weeping willow, grasping at handfuls of snaking, whip-like branches, until her feet landed with a squelch in the mud where the water was lapping.

The tree’s trunk had split into two early in its life; the partition began just a foot or so above the ground. The two parts of it had wrapped around one another, twisting tight together. Its bark was rough but looked as supple as skin; the trunks locked like mighty arms in a perpetual, sinuous embrace. The drooping branches shielded Starling all around, and turned the light a fresh green; it felt private, magical, like a fairy dell. Just above her head, Starling saw a dark crack between the two trunks. Some animal or disease had caused a narrow opening to form, a slight gape between the loving arms. Then Starling saw the carving, just beneath the opening. It was not new; the bark had healed and swollen around the cuts, so that they sat deep in the wood. Six or seven years’ growth at least, Starling estimated, since the cuts were made. Before I was even here. When I was still… wherever I was before. It was a simple carving: two initials, J & A. The middle symbol had been carved with curving flourishes, so that it touched on both of the letters, joining them up. Starling’s heart quickened with some strange emotion. She reached up, and slid her hand into the hollow.

She groped around inside, flinching as she felt an insect hurry away from her intruding fingers. There was a square of folded paper inside, and with her heart bumping even harder, Starling drew it out and opened it. There, in Alice’s neat script, were the words: Sunday, after church, before noon. My love. Starling felt a jolt in her stomach, and there seemed to be a little hitch in the world, a little moment in which it stopped turning. She tried to swallow but her throat was dry. She folded the note back up, with fingers that shook, and then hesitated. She’d been about to put it back, but the same impulse that had stopped her waving to Alice now stopped her again. There were times, not many, when Jonathan came to visit the farmhouse with his grandfather; other times when he came to meet Alice and Starling somewhere, and Starling had always known that those meetings were to be kept secret from Bridget and Lord Faukes. Now it seemed that there were other visits, other meetings, of an even more secret kind. So secret that not even Starling could know of them. She sat down on a huge root protruding from the bank, noticing as she did so that the root had been worn smooth and clean by being sat upon many times before. Starling bit her lip in dismay, and with an angry little sound she started to cry.

She hated to cry; she almost never did. There was some latent memory in her, some buried knowledge of pain and fear so great that there had seemed nothing in the world worth crying over since then. But this betrayal cut with a poisoned blade. She wiped at her face and gulped and forced herself to stop. She had been included in their affair in so many ways – in their friendship, even in their letters, though Alice knew nothing of that; to find herself excluded from so much more was intolerable. Little cracks appeared in the very foundations of Starling’s world, and she was suddenly afraid, horribly afraid; as though the cracks might gape open, swallow her down and cast her back to that time before the farmhouse, before Alice. Fear, anger, hurt; they swelled to a crescendo in the few short minutes Starling sat on the root beneath the willow tree. When they receded she felt calmer, and had a strange new hardness in her heart. She stood, and cast the note into the river. The water carried it swiftly away, twirling it, spinning it about. Starling watched until it slid out of sight, then she climbed back out into the sunshine and walked home with no one thought coming clearly to her mind.

Back at the farmhouse, Bridget was putting stuffed apples into the oven, and hardly bothered to scold Starling for taking so long. A look was enough, weary and long-suffering.

‘I’ll fetch some angelica for the custard,’ said Starling.

Alice was in the kitchen garden, sitting on a metal bench surrounded by rosemary and lavender, thyme and bay. She had her legs tucked underneath her and was reading a cloth-bound book of poems. She looked up and smiled as Starling came out to sit with her.

‘And how are you, little sister?’ she said with a smile. The sun made her eyes shine like the river. Starling nodded, and stayed mute. She couldn’t seem to find any words to say. She sat on her hands on the edge of the bench, and kicked her legs back and forth, and could not look at Alice. ‘Starling, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Alice laid down her book and reached out one hand to touch Starling’s arm. For a second, Starling wavered, and felt treacherous tears prickling the top of her nose again. She wanted to demand to know why she had been excluded, not trusted, lied to. But then that new hardness seemed to get in the way. It sat at the top of her chest, like a plug, and stopped the words, the tears, from bubbling out. She glanced over and saw that Alice had kept one finger on the page she’d been reading. Marking it, ready to flip the book open and pick up again, as soon as Starling had stopped bothering her.

‘Nothing,’ she snapped, getting up from the bench. She bent, swiped up a handful of angelica flowers, and turned back to the kitchen door. ‘Bridget needs me.’

Come Sunday the weather turned, bringing a warm, grey drizzle, solid from heaven to horizon as though the clouds had simply lowered themselves to ground level. The three residents of the farmhouse joined the villagers of Bathampton for the Sunday service in the ancient church of St Nicolas, and as they walked back along the canal, Starling watched Alice carefully. There were pink spots in her cheeks, and her eyes were restless; she looked more animated than a person coming from an hour and a half in church should, but there was nothing else to give her away. Had Starling not known otherwise, she would never have guessed her sister had a secret, and this was another betrayal. This Alice seemed an entirely different person to the one in whom secrets fizzed uncontrollably, like the bubbles in beer.

‘Did you hear Mrs Littlewood, calling us the three birds from the hen house?’ she asked.

‘Pay her no mind, Starling. She’s a common scold, that one,’ said Bridget.

‘What does it mean, though?’ Starling pressed.

‘It means we haven’t a man about the place, and it means she envies us, for she has Mr Littlewood to deal with and we all know what type of man he is,’ Bridget muttered. Alice made no comment. The wet day made their hair and clothes hang limply. Alice had chosen a time when Starling and Bridget would be busy, preparing the Sunday meal. A time when she could slip away unnoticed, to walk or read, as she almost always did. How many of those times in the past, Starling thought now, had Alice in fact been keeping trysts with Jonathan?

As they returned to the house, unbuttoning coats and untying their hats, Alice paused.

‘I might keep mine on, and walk on for a little while,’ she said casually.

‘Oh, can I come? I need to stretch my legs after sitting through that boring service,’ said Starling.

‘For shame, show more respect,’ Bridget admonished her. ‘I think the vicar gave an admirable sermon today… mind how you speak on the Lord’s day.’

‘Yes, Bridget. So, can I go with you, Alice? Please?’ Starling looked her straight in the eye, until Alice had to look away.

‘Oh, but you hate the rain, dearest,’ she said vaguely. ‘And Bridget should not be all alone with so much work to be done.’

‘It’s not really raining… and you’re only going a little way, you said.’

‘I think…’ Alice paused, fiddled with the front of her coat. ‘I think you should be kind, and stay to help Bridget. I shan’t be long.’ She smiled sweetly enough at them, and then turned and wandered away without another word, pausing to wave from the gate.

‘Mind you don’t get soaked through, if the rain gets worse,’ Bridget called after her.

‘Or if it does, be sure to shelter under a tree!’ Starling added, and had the unhappy satisfaction of seeing Alice’s smile flicker.

Alice came back an hour later, damp, bedraggled and forlorn. Her hem was muddied and her face wore open disappointment, and at once Starling felt guilty to have made her sad. She thought of the little note, sailing heedlessly downstream towards Bath. ‘Didn’t you enjoy your walk?’ she asked, and though she tried to sound easy, her voice was tight and wobbled slightly. Alice looked at her strangely.

‘I enjoyed it well enough. The weather is perhaps… not the best,’ Alice replied. Bridget grunted.

‘Well, it weren’t the best when you set out, so there’s no shock in that,’ she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.

‘Indeed,’ said Alice, with a small, strained laugh.

‘Did you have to shelter under a tree?’ Starling asked, and again that tightness was in her voice. Alice walked to the far side of the room and beckoned Starling over while Bridget’s eyes were on the stove.

‘You left your footprints in the mud, dearest,’ she whispered, and Starling’s guilty heart jumped into her throat.

‘What do you mean? What mud? I never-’ She broke off under Alice’s steady, sad scrutiny.

‘He did not come. I shan’t see him now for weeks; he will be going to war soon and must stay with his company,’ she said. Starling squirmed away from her blue eyes, from the hurt look in them. ‘Starling, did you take my note?’ she whispered. Starling said nothing; she only hung her head, shamefaced. Alice took a deep, unsteady breath. ‘I know… I know why you might be angry with me,’ she went on. ‘I can explain why we had to keep everything secret, but not here, and not right now…’

‘I… I don’t know anything about a note.’

‘Starling, please. Don’t lie.’ Alice spoke so softly, so sweetly, that Starling could hardly bear it. She thought of the lies Alice had told to her – lies of omission, lies of secrecy; all the years that had passed since she and Jonathan had carved their initials into the tree; all the times they had met, and kept it from her. Had kept their love – a special, better love – only for each other. She was so angry, so ashamed, it caused a pressure to build in the hard place inside her, as if the plug would not hold, and something would force its way out.

‘It’s not me who’s the liar!’ she cried, and Alice blinked in shock. Bridget looked up from the far end of the room.

‘What’s that? What are you two conspiring over, eh?’ she called. Starling wheeled to face her, feeling off balance, almost frantic. She felt Alice’s hand on her arm.

‘Please, don’t say anything!’ Alice hissed. Her eyes were full of fear, and though Starling quailed, she could not stop herself.

‘Alice has been meeting with Jonathan in secret! They’re lovers! But he is engaged to Beatrice Fallonbrooke!’ she blurted out. In the corner of her eye she saw Alice’s hands fly to her mouth, her eyes going wide in horror. Bridget dropped her wooden spoon with a clatter, and stared at Alice with a terrible expression. Silence fell in the kitchen, and in it Starling was sure she could hear the cracks at her feet, the cracks in the world, opening even wider.