promised___’ She jumped to her feet, spilling the beads,
which fell in a little tinkling shower. ‘Plenty of lawyers,” she cried in a rising voice—‘about, I mean; plenty of lawyers about. My money, all my money and my will. I wish to make my will. Everything to Damask, Damask Greenway….’
‘Now please, please, my dear madam, don’t upset yourself … I am not trying to cross you. I only say that such a matter … you see, in your case everything is a considerable bequest, very considerable. I think it should be discussed calmly.’
‘Calmly. Calmly.” Miss Parsons Repeated the word as though she had never heard it before. Then her face took on an expression of immense cunning. ‘She didn’t say that. I only say what she says. That is the safest way. You see, I’m very forgetful; very forgetful indeed.’ She looked about vaguely and presently saw all the tiny beads, pink and blue and green and silver, scattered on the floor. ‘Now you’ve made me drop my beads,’ she said, her face crumpling like a child’s. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ She began to cry, loudly and complainingly, like a child.
‘Now please, please,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘Look, I’ll collect…’ He dropped, with a cracking sound as though twigs were breaking, to his knees and began to gather up the little beads with fingers which were suddenly ten times their usual size. Miss Parsons, crying more and more loudly, stood stock still so that he was grovelling almost under her skirts and he had a sudden memory of the first time he had ever been in this house … fifty years or so ago, with his father, just after the Captain’s death and she’d been … and he’d been … Dear, dear, the damage
the years did___
He was conscious of nothing but relief when the girl came hurrying through the french window again.
She took the old lady by the arm and said, ‘I told you not to upset yourself. Just over some spilled beads. Please, Mr Turnbull … I can pick them all up in a moment. There now. Everything is all right. There, there.”
She had Miss Parsons in her chair again. Mr Turnbull got stiffly to his feet. Their eyes met.
‘I wish to make my will,’ Miss Parsons said with all the vigour and freshness of someone making a statement for the first time.
Mr Turnbull remembered that the one thing he dreaded was an apoplectic fit, and never, so far, had he been so dangerously near it.
‘Darling, you don’t need to make a will,’ the girl said. ‘You have one nice will already.’
Mr Turnbull made his escape with those ridiculous words ringing in his ears. Nothing, no protests, no attestations on oath, could have so firmly established in his mind the conviction of the young woman’s complete integrity. ‘You have one nice will already!’ And she’d been there when he mentioned that that will was five years old…. She was no fool, she must know what that meant. And her one thought had been to comfort the poor demented old woman. It seemed unbelievable, but there it was; he had seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears. Completely disinterested. And why, in the name of God, should the Guildhall Feoffees, who had never done anything for, never even heard of Miss Parsons, benefit from her estate instead of that truly remarkable, selfless creature Damask Greenway? And after all, with every bit of mind and will left to her, his client had expressed her feelings. Should they not be respected?
Before he retired on that lovely June evening Mr Turnbull mad a short simple draft of the new will by which Amelia Caroline Parsons bequeathed her whole estate to Damask Greenway.
He then went to bed and slept well and waked to the burst of song with which the birds were greeting the dawn. He felt restored and refreshed by the sound sleep he had enjoyed, and remembered, with amusement, his feeling of threatening stroke on the previous afternoon. Absolute nonsense; it just showed what tricks one’s mind could play one. And then, suddenly, quite irrelevantly, when he was thinking so rationally about Miss Parsons and her will, he remembered a performing dog which he had seen at Baildon Fair, long ago when he was young enough to take interest in that event. The sore point of the performance was that the dog did exactly the Opposite of what its master commanded. Extremely easy to train a dog that way, dogs not being aware of the difference between ‘stand’ and ‘sit’, ‘come’ and ‘go’; but it would surely not be easy, would in fact be impossible, fantastically impossible, to train an old lady, however feeble of mind, to the point where when you said ‘Don’t bother’ she began to bother madly, and when you said ‘You are making it pretty’ she took that as a cue to say, ‘I wish to make my will.’ Really, thought Mr Turnbull, that I should dream of that comparison shows that my mind is not what it was … or that I am still half asleep. He plumped up his pillow, and then, the birds having exhausted their first exuberance, went back to sleep again. But in the morning he handed the rough draft of the new will to his clerk, who would make a fair copy.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The harvest ripened and was gathered. For all with corn to reap that was a fortunate year. Labour was very cheap. Out from the Waste Cottages, now besieged between the new fences and the sterile highroad, came every being who could totter on its young legs or stagger on its old ones; so the price of labour went down and down. But the price of the garnered corn stayed, on account of the war, at its peak.
That year even Captain Rout, that inefficient farmer, had his rent money ready for Michaelmas, and was also able to increase his order for smuggled brandy brought in by the gang who operated from Bywater. He was, moreover, able to buy his wife a fine new dress, the first she had had for years. That meant that when, just before All-Hallows’ E’en, Mrs Fred Clopton of Flocky Hall invited them both to a party—as she had done in previous years —Mrs Rout was able to accept. Similar invitations she had refused, scornfully, concealing her true reason, which was that it was unbecoming for the wife of a gentleman who had, when all was said and done, borne the king’s commission to appear at any gathering where she could not outshine a farmer’s wife, however up and coming that farmer might be. Mrs Clopton had attributed the refusals to sheer snobbishness, for which she had at once admired and hated Mrs Rout, and had persisted with her invitations. When the final acceptance arrived she said to Fred, ‘Ah. I knew the time would come when she was sick of her own company! And I’m glad it’s this year, when Mrs Thurlow Lamb is coming with her airs and graces. It’ll
show her.’ An obscure statement, but perfectly lucid to Fred, who understood his wife’s social aspirations and indeed shared them so far as his daughters were concerned. He agreed that there was no point in sending the girls to the Female Academy at Baildon and having them taught French and the pianoforte, and drilled on the backboard, if they were then to come home and revert to mere farmers’ daughters, as their mother assured him they would unless some exertion were made. Money, which he was making ‘hand over fist’, wasn’t enough; social advancement was needed as well.
The Harvest Horkey that year was a particularly lavish affair, as well it might be, the Squire having done so well out of the enclosure. Going home, replete and exhausted, the villagers remarked less upon what there was to eat and drink, and upon the wonderful fiddling of the little hunchback who had come to supplement Jim Lantern’s playing, than upon the peculiar game which the Squire’s friend, Mr Mundford, had played with some of the girls. There was no point in it, no prize, no result. He just went round offering one girl after another a bit of pale pinkish stone like a pebble. ‘Will you be good enough to hold this in your hand while I count ten? Thank you, that will do.’ Daft like, wasn’t it?
Even Richard, when they were drinking together late in the library, mustered curiosity enough to ask, ‘What were you up to all evening, Alec?’
‘Reconnoitring,’ said Mr Mundford simply. ‘You may be grieved, if not surprised, to learn that of your village girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty not one is a virgin.’ He took the stone from his pocket and fingered it.
That tallies with the rector’s theory that no man will ask for the banns to be put up until he’s well and truly caught,’ Richard said. Then he added curiously, ‘But how can you tell… there wasn’t time…’