Philippa Carr: Lament for a Lost Lover

Life seemed to have become unreal during the months that followed. Harriet was the only one who was content. She went about hugging her secret joy, and in the way I remembered so well she began to dominate the household.

She would get us all together to sing ballads in the evening—myself, Charlotte, Gregory Stevens and often Matthew Dollan, who was constantly riding over. Charlotte was aloof with him, as though she knew that I hoped they might be attracted and was determined to foil me.

Harriet would tell stories of her life as a player and her audience would be tense with excitement. She certainly was a true Scheherazade, for she had a trick of stopping at an exciting point and saying: “No more now. My voice is going. I have to protect it, you know.”

Edwin and Leigh would creep in and listen. They thought her enchanting and she made a special point of charming them. Even Priscilla would toddle up and watch her wonderingly while she sang or talked.

Anxious as I was about my relationship with Carleton, saddened by the fact that I was not the one who was expecting a child, I allowed myself to be drawn into her spell and I would find myself excited by her as the others were.

Through the winter months she grew larger but nonetheless beautiful. There was a wonderful serenity about her which added to her beauty.

Even Sally Nullens was excited by the prospect of a new baby in the nursery.

I said to her one day: “Sally, you’re longing for this baby, I know.”

“Oh I can never resist them,” she admitted. “There’s nothing as beautiful as a helpless little baby to my mind.”

“Even Harriet’s?” I said.

“Whatever else she is,” answered Sally, “she’s a mother.”

I had not noticed that Charlotte had come into the room. She was so self-effacing. She seemed to want not to be noticed.

“Do you think she will have an easy confinement?” I asked.

“Her!” cried Sally, her eyes flashing suddenly. “With her it will be like shelling peas. It is with her sort. …”

“Her sort …” I said.

“There’s something about her,” said Sally quietly. “I’ve always known it. They say witches have special powers.”

“Sally, you’re not suggesting Harriet is a witch?” murmured Charlotte.

Sally said: “I’m saying nothing.”

“You just have,” I reminded her.

“I can only say what I feel. There’s something … some special powers … I don’t know what it is. Some call it witchcraft. I don’t like it and I never will.”

“Oh, Sally, what nonsense. She’s just a healthy and attractive woman …”

“Who knows how to get what she wants.”

Charlotte and I exchanged glances which implied that we shouldn’t take old Sally too seriously.

It was February when Harriet gave birth to her child, and as Sally had predicted it was an easy birth. She had a son and I must admit I felt a twinge of envy.

It was a week or so after the birth of the child, whom she had christened Benjamin, when Carleton came home.

He embraced me warmly and I felt a sudden thrill of happiness. I determined that in time, when I had recovered from this lassitude which had been with me since my miscarriage, I also would have a son.

Carleton noticed at once. “You’re better,” he said. And swung me up and held me against him.

“I’m glad you are home,” I said.

We walked into the house arm in arm. I said to him: “We have an addition to the household. Harriet’s child has arrived.”

He was silent for a moment and I went on: “It’s a son. Trust Harriet to have a son.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “trust Harriet.”

I went with him to her room to see him. She was in bed; her Benjie was in his cradle and Sally hovered.

Harriet held out her hand to Carleton. He took it and it seemed to me that he held it for a long time.

She withdrew it and said: “Sally, give me Benjie. I want to show him off. I tell you this, Carleton, he is the most beautiful baby in the world. Sally will bear me out.”

She sat there. How beautiful she was, with her magnificent hair falling about her shoulders, her face serenely happy, her lovely eyes soft as I had rarely seen them.

I was deeply aware of Carleton. He was watching her intently. I thought again it was like one of those tableaux, full of meaning.

Benjie thrived. Sally said she had never seen a baby with a finer pair of lungs. When he bellowed, Priscilla watched him in wonder. He showed a determination to get what he wanted from his earliest days. He was beautiful with big blue eyes and dark tufts of hair. Priscilla liked to stand and watch Sally bathe him and to hand her the towels.

I had never seen Harriet so contented before. Her maternal instincts surprised me, but I told myself cynically that she loved her baby partly because he consolidated her position here. Of course as Toby’s widow she had a right to be in the house, but the fact that she had borne one of the heirs to lands and title made her position doubly assured.

But even so I was aware of growing tension all about me. I fancied that Harriet was alert, that she was engaged in some secret adventures. Perhaps it was my imagination, I told myself. Perhaps I could never really forget.

I sometimes wandered to the edge of the gardens to the arbour in which Edwin had died. It was such a gloomy place, and the shrubs about it were becoming more overgrown than ever. It looked eerie, ghostly, as the scene of a tragedy can become when people hate to go there and build up legends about it.

Chastity had let out that the servants said it was haunted. Haunted, I thought, by Edwin. Edwin who had been cut off suddenly with his sins upon him, caught in the act by Old Jethro the reformer. I wondered what Harriet felt when she went past it. She had participated in that death scene and must remember, but she never said anything when the arbour was mentioned. Harriet, I believed, was the sort of woman who in an adventuring life put unpleasant events right out of her memory.

For the last few months there had been complaints about the pigeons and the damage they were doing to the fabric of Eversleigh Court, and the grooms and menservants were constantly taking potshots at them. Ellen said that everyone in the neighbourhood was getting tired of pigeon pie and pigeon stews, or roast pigeon and pigeon cooked in pots.

“I tell them,” she said, “they should be glad of good food whatever it is.”

Carleton had said the boys might shoot at them. A moving target would give them good practice. I often heard them boasting together of the number they had shot. Then they would take them along to the cottage people.

It was one summer day. I was in the garden picking roses and I thought suddenly of another occasion when I had been similarly engaged and when Carleton had come upon me there and how we had talked and bantered and he had asked me to marry him.

The scene of the roses brought back memories of that day vividly and the excitement I felt even though I had pretended not to want him. Then I went on to think of our marriage and the sudden awakening of what was new and exciting in our relationship. What had happened to that now? Perhaps it was impossible to keep passion at such fever heat. Perhaps there had been nothing deeper than that. I kept comparing my relationship with Carleton to that which I had shared with Edwin. How romantic my first marriage had seemed, how perfect! And how foolish of me to think it was so! It has been a sham from the beginning. And yet I could not forget it. It had done something to me. People were affected by experiences, naturally. They became warped and suspicious. That was how I had become with Carleton.

The scent of roses, the heat of the sun on my hands, the buzzing of bees, and memories carried on the warm summer air … and then suddenly … it happened. I was not sure what it was. Except that I fell towards the rosebush and the sky began to recede further and further away. I had put my hand to my sleeve and touched something warm and sticky … I was aware of looking at my hands … They were as red as the roses in my basket. I was lying against the rosebush, slipping silently into the grass. It seemed to take a long time and then there was nothing.