Black Spring Read online

  For all the unhappiness it caused, the death of my father did not seriously affect our circumstances: my mother and I were protected because we worked at the Red House, and the master’s family was immune from vendetta. We were not in danger, as others were, of losing our home and our livelihood. But my father was scarcely cold in his grave when disaster struck, and our lives changed for ever.

  XVII

  As is so often the case, it was a small chance that exerted the greatest leverage upon our existences. One evening in the late spring, the master saddled up Ruby, the impetuous chestnut mare, since he intended to ride to the manse to conduct some business. Normally my father would have performed this task, and since he was no longer with us we were a little short-handed in the stables. Had my father been there, he would have advised the master to choose another mount: Ruby had in the past few days developed a tiny sore on her ribs, which chafed against the saddle-girth. She was fiery at the best of times – one of the reasons the master liked to ride her – but the abrasion made her irritable. The master had ridden less than half a mile before Ruby threw him. His head hit a stone when he fell, and he lay unconscious on the path for hours before the alarm was raised. The men set out from the Red House with lamps when he failed to return, and found him at midnight. Ruby was grazing peacefully near by with her leg through one of the reins.

  He was laid across his horse and brought home, as if he were already a corpse. In truth he was barely alive. He was near dead from exposure alone – he was drenched through with the dewfall – and although the head injury had not broken the skin, it showed an ugly bruise across his temple.

  Lina was waiting up for him, curiously calm in the midst of the hubbub, and when she saw her father coming home through the rising mist she didn’t move or make a cry. She watched, her eyes dark and luminous in the lamplight, as he was brought in and made comfortable in his bed while the doctor was sent for. Only her paleness – she had turned absolutely white when she saw the horse – and the small drop of blood on her lip where she had bitten it, betrayed her bitter anxiety. I confess that I was mightily relieved: had she behaved in her usual manner and had hysterics, I don’t know how we would have coped. Instead she pulled a chair close to the bed and sat next to the master, holding his hand and stroking his brow. Damek stood uncertainly by the doorway, impeding everyone who wanted to enter or leave the chamber. He reminded me of a swan I saw once, whose mate had been fatally injured by a gunshot: it stayed day and night beside the wounded one, uselessly starving itself, unable to help and equally unable to leave.

  The doctor arrived within the hour, and we were all banished from the chamber. It was the same doctor who tended your dog bite, sir, although he is much older now; a city-educated man, as you know, who possesses a store of something that cannot be taught: ordinary human compassion. Lina waited wordlessly with the rest of us outside the room, her head bowed, her hands twisting nervously together; and when the doctor at last emerged, her eyes sought out his with a silent plea of such ferocity and passion I saw him sway with the force of it.

  For a moment it seemed he would pass by without making any comment, but then he changed his mind. He sighed, and taking Lina’s hand in both of his, he met her gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “My condolences.”

  Lina drew in her breath sharply, but said nothing.

  “He is dead, then?” said Damek quickly, from behind Lina.

  “Nay,” the good man answered. “I fear he will die before the dawn. I should be very surprised if he should wake before then.”

  Lina threw aside the doctor’s hands, flung open the bedchamber door and scrambled to her father’s side. Snatching up his hand, she cried, with a piteous desolation, “Papa! Papa! Wake up!” When she saw no answering change on her father’s face, a violent storm of grief possessed her; she let go of his hand and threw herself to the floor in an attitude of the deepest despair.

  My mother, who looked as if she wanted to slap Lina, began to push past us into the room, but the doctor stopped her. “Let her weep,” he said. “It will make no difference to him, and may help her.”

  “You don’t know her, sir,” said my mother. “She will make herself ill with it. I never saw one for such wailings over the smallest things.”

  “The death of her father is no small thing,” he answered, and he looked sternly at my mother, who quailed before his expression. “I’ll give her a draught to bring sleep later; I’ll not leave the house until the lord’s life is over. For the moment, leave her to mourn.”

  “But the master—”

  “There is nothing further I can do for him. He is not in pain, and if he does not regain consciousness, as I believe he will not, he will not suffer. He is comfortable and warm in his bed; but it is his deathbed, I fear.”

  When the first violence of Lina’s grief passed, she sat unspeaking by her father, her eyes fixed on his pallid face, where the darkening bruise slowly spread down from his temple along his jawline. She clutched his hand with such force that her knuckles were white.

  Soon afterwards, against my protestations, my mother sent me to my bed, but neither she nor the doctor had any success in moving Lina. The doctor was correct: the master died in the small watches of the night without emerging from his coma. Lying sleepless and restless in my narrow cot, I knew the exact moment of his death. Lina’s shriek of lamentation echoed through the silent house; and I felt as if a knife had entered my own heart.

  XVIII

  In his will, the master left his estate to Lina, who was then but thirteen years old. A will in these parts is a serious matter, which involves much affixing of seals and at least seven signatures by men of importance. The Lord Kadar was, as I have said, a man ever careless of detail, and he had failed to find two of the seven witnesses the law requires. No doubt he thought he had time, since he was a man of robust health and could have reasonably expected to live for many years; but it was not to be. His oversight proved disastrous. As the master partook of the royal revenue, his will needed to be approved by the king, and to our horror, the king ruled it invalid and claimed that the properties of the Lord Kadar reverted to his own estates, to apportion as he saw fit.

  There was a long correspondence which took the best part of a year. The master’s notary made a compassionate appeal, invoking the master’s professed intentions, for the rights of Lina to inherit the estate; but he may as well have held his breath. The king, in his wisdom and malice, awarded the estate in trust to a royal dependant, one Emerek Masko. Masko was one of the palace hangers-on, a sycophant of sufficient distance from the royal bloodlines to partake minimally of its rewards; indeed, at the palace it was said his rights to claim royal blood were so minimal as to be non-existent. For all that, after the months of negotiation were settled, he lost no time in taking up his good fortune.

  His entrance into the village square was, as he clearly intended, spectacular. Masko had instantly availed himself of his new-found wealth by buying a second-hand carriage, a britzka which he had painted with the royal coat of arms and which was drawn by two showy but impractical hacks. He reclined in the back in an ostentatious frock coat of green velvet, with turquoise frogging and a froth of lace at the throat, and the coat of arms embroidered upon its breast and lapels. It was a badly cut copy of city fashion hastily turned by some back-street northern tailor, and its cheap gilt buttons strained across his ample stomach. The effect was not as kingly as he imagined: more than anything he looked like an absurd bullfrog.

  Behind the britzka came a wagon that bore his possessions. This was driven by a surly farmhand dressed, as his groom was, in an improbable livery of emerald and turquoise, which unhappily failed exactly to match Masko’s own costume. As the procession wound its way to the Red House, Masko attracted all the notice he desired, but behind his back there was a lot of sly sniggering.

  At the Red House, we were lined up in the entrance hall to greet him. When we had learned the hour of his arrival through a letter sent post-haste
, Lina had initially refused to greet him, but somehow we had prevailed upon her to be present; to snub thus the king’s chosen heir would have been perilous indeed. As the daughter of the late master, she stood first in line to greet the new lord. She was dressed in deep mourning, but out of courtesy she had her veil drawn back from her face. Grief had if anything heightened her dramatic beauty: she was yet young, and rather than darkening her face in shadow, sorrow set her cheekbones and eyes in relief, and enhanced the superb pallor of her skin. Damek, as the next of royal blood, stood behind her, and behind Damek were my mother, myself and the other servants of the household.

  Masko was preceded by his groom, who threw open the door, bowed clumsily and announced his lordship. We were taken aback by this unexpected formality, and when Masko himself entered, stepping like a peacock, he was greeted with a dead silence. In our innocence, we had never seen such a sartorial exhibition as he then presented: for a fatal moment, out of surprise and embarrassment, not one of us could think of anything to say.

  I felt my mother stir, feeling it was her duty, if Lina remained silent, to welcome the new lord to his home. But she was forestalled by Lina. Lina, whom all of us had thought would never laugh again, couldn’t contain herself: her snort of amusement spilt over into helpless giggles and then became a long peal of laughter. We all stared at her, horrified, as she doubled over, her eyes streaming; it was soon clear that she couldn’t control herself, and that there was indeed something hysterical in it. Damek had the sense to usher her hurriedly out of sight, and at last my mother stepped forward and said the polite words.

  Masko flushed, pretending to ignore what had just occurred, although Lina’s awful mirth, now beginning to dissolve into wrenching sobs, was still audible from the back of the house. He bowed icily in response to my mother’s greeting, but didn’t grant the rest of us even a nod. He snatched the inventory from my mother’s hand and demanded to be shown the drawing room, where he would be served a glass of wine. We hurried to see to his orders, and in doing so I accidentally caught his eye. In that moment, I saw that this man was more than a graceless fool: in a flash of intuition I perceived the depths of his capacity for cruelty and petty resentment. I turned cold: almost as cold as when I had caught the attention of the Wizard Ezra. Although this man had not the powers of a wizard, he was now lord over all of us, and our lives lay in his palm, to do with as he would. It boded very ill that Lina’s first act in his presence had been so gravely to wound his vanity.

  The first order he gave in our household, after he had consumed his refreshment, was that Lina must be thrashed for her impertinence. When my mother pointed out – with an unusual temerity – the unseemliness of thus punishing the former master’s daughter, he answered that her blood made it all the more imperative that she learn some manners. Since his household servants were unwilling to carry out his order, he said, in a voice that rose to a scream, his groom would do the job.

  This groom, a man called Kush, remains one of the most ill-favoured men I have ever met. You might remember him; he serves yet in our household, and is now Damek’s chief manservant at the manse. Then age had not twisted him, and he still had the strength of his hale manhood. He took Lina’s arm roughly, but she tore herself away and ran to her chamber, where she locked herself in. It was to no avail: Kush shouldered down the door and dragged her out, kicking and screaming, by her hair. He flung her over his shoulder and carried her outside, and flogged her with a switch until the blood seeped through her dress onto the ground and she fainted from the pain.

  Masko watched the while, a smile on his lips, standing a little apart from the rest of the horrified, silent witnesses. When Lina fainted, I think he was afraid for a moment that she had been killed: for all the dislike the king showed to the master’s family, it would not have been politic for him to have killed the heir whom he had supplanted on the day of his arrival. He hurriedly bade his servant to cease the beating, and had her brought inside. Nor did he gainsay my mother when later that day she requested that the doctor be brought to salve Lina’s wounds, although it would make his savage treatment of Lina widely known.

  Lina was abed for two weeks after the thrashing, with Damek her constant nurse, and I attendant every moment that other tasks did not demand me. She didn’t speak for three days. On the fourth she sat up in bed, despite the anguish it caused her to do so, and she cursed Masko with every fibre of her being. She summoned boils for his skin and cankers for his mouth and eyes and anus; she swore that he would eat ash and drink dust; she said he would bear neither sons nor daughters and would never find satisfaction in bed or out of it; she called the Devil to haunt his nights and days with such anguish and sorrow as she now suffered, but multiplied a thousandfold, as salt in his wounds and acid in his soul; and she swore his death would be early, and slow, and agonizing, and ugly, but that none alive would pity him. It was a terrible curse that echoed through the house so it could be heard even in the drawing room where Masko sat downstairs, drinking his porter.

  My soul chilled as I listened, but I didn’t dare to interrupt her. When she had finished, she turned to me, panting with exertion and pain. I don’t know how to describe her in that moment. Her hair was tumbled wildly all down her back and breast, her face was as white as a corpse, and her eyes blazed with a hatred the like I had then never seen in another human being. But that wasn’t what made my heart stop. I knew then that she was really a witch, and that the curse she had uttered was no empty threat. I almost felt sorry for the man.

  “He’ll have you beaten again for that,” I said at last, my mouth dry.

  “He wouldn’t dare,” said Lina.

  I watched Masko closely over the next few days, but to my disappointment the curse seemed to have no immediate effect. He ate as much as he ever did, and slept as soundly. However, it was true that he did not beat her – perhaps the doctor had made his displeasure known – and when Lina rose at last from her sickbed, he chose to ignore her, although I sometimes caught him covertly studying her through narrowed eyes.

  He did take other steps, however. The day after the beating, he let Mr Herodias know that his services were no longer required. Mr Herodias received this news with his usual ironic coolness; he read us a short lecture on the continual improvement of our minds by constant reading, gave us a parting gift of a book each, packed his bags and rode off to the city, presumably to find himself another position. I think in truth he was relieved to go: he wasn’t a man of the north, and the unvarying society here had wearied him.

  This was bad enough, but Masko’s next action was much worse. He couldn’t send Damek from the house, since he had been appointed there by the king himself, but he had noted my devotion to Lina’s welfare in her sickness. He therefore sent me from the house as a gift to the king, to serve as a maid in the palace. Neither my mother’s protests nor Lina’s pleading – for she lowered herself so far as to beg him to let me stay – made any impression upon his decision; I think rather it hardened him in his determination, for in this way he could at once isolate and hurt her. And so it was, less than three months after the master’s death, that I was forced to pack up all my belongings, leave behind everything and everyone I had known, and make the three-day journey to the King’s Palace.

  Fortunately it was high summer, and the weather remained fine, else my journey might have been more miserable. Masko’s thoughtfulness for my comfort extended to an open dray; I was sore from head to foot with its jolting by the time I arrived, but at least I was dry. I was young and frightened and lonely, but I was fortunate enough to meet with kindness; my story after I reached the palace is not so sad.

  In the years I spent in the king’s employ, I lost touch with the doings of the Red House. I sent letters home every month, but I heard little back: my mother couldn’t write, and Lina only sent me one brief missive. This didn’t hurt me as much as it might have, since I heard from Damek that Lina was forbidden correspondence.

  Damek wrote an occasional letter, u
ntil his correspondence broke off entirely. Many years later, I found a short diary that Lina had hidden in her room, in a hole underneath a loose floorboard where we kept our childish treasures. It records some incidents that occurred before she moved to live in the manse. Even if it is sadly disordered, for Lina wrote irregularly and never bothered with dates, and although it sometimes seems to have been written by the Devil himself, it throws a little light on the events that occurred in my absence.

  III: LINA

  FRIDAY

  I have never been more unhappy in my life! For the past hour I have been sitting on my bed holding the red cord on my dressing-gown, but I haven’t had the courage to loop it around the beam and hang myself. Finally I threw the cord away – I kept thinking of how it would hurt me, how that red line would cut into my neck, and how my face would turn blue & ugly, and I could feel the awful dread of being unable to breathe even though my body was writhing with the need for air – and I just couldn’t do it. I despise myself: I am such a coward in my heart. Yet – perhaps I am not so craven after all: it is not my end that fills me with most fear. I think of Damek – I couldn’t endure to so sever myself from him, not for a minute, not for a day, let alone for the empty wasteland of eternity! – For I would go to hell if I killed myself, and he would not, because he is a shining soul who will himself fly to heaven and be with the angels, and we would never ever meet again. – I cannot bear even the thought of that. I would even suffer such despite as I live in now rather than that.

  So, I’ve dragged this old schoolbook out from underneath my bed, as I have to talk to someone, & I am all alone. I don’t need the book any more, since Mr Herodias left for the south, so I might as well complain to this paper as to the wall. – It is quieter, anyhow, and no one will threaten me and tell me to be silent. How I wish I could have gone away with Mr Herodias! He never liked me much, but when I threw myself on the floor and begged him to take me & Damek south, he didn’t treat me as contemptuously as I expected. He even looked a little sorry. That was the most I was ever going to get from him and his niminy-piminy mouth. I suppose he didn’t like me because I didn’t like him, but it’s strange how much I miss him. I miss everything and everyone. I miss Papa and I miss Anna and I miss how things were, I miss them so badly that it hurts me in every part of my body. If Damek weren’t here in the house this minute I think I would die from sorrow.