CHAPTER THREE
An outgrown pair of Kellan’s boots solved the problem of shoes, though it was three days before Damaris’ sore and swollen feet would fit into anything at all. The wrought iron bench in Aunt Elspeth’s garden was cushioned with pillows for her the first day, but then the weather turned rainy and she and her cousins spent the time in Uncle Russell’s study, building towns and fortresses and palaces with his books and the boys’ set of wooden blocks that Nevin and Kellan resurrected from an abandoned toy chest to amuse their cousin – and themselves, if they would have admitted it.
Nevin was a little too grown to lose himself in the game, though he was the best at structuring books into improbable towers; and twice he was called away to manor work with his father, a reminder that he was growing into other duties. But Kellan willingly let loose what dignity his fourteen years might have had. When Damaris protested – because the edge of the study carpet was the shore, the bare stone floor the gray sea – “You can’t put a secret passage there. It’ll be under the harbor. They’ll drown,” Kellan easily answered, “They won’t. The tunnel is stone, beautifully mortared and sealed with magic against the sea coming in.”
“But you can’t build under the water.”
“They drained the harbor, built the secret passage, and let the water back in.”
“You can’t drain a harbor! There’s a whole ocean outside of it!”
Kellan brooded over his creation briefly, then answered cheerfully, “They drain acres and acres of ocean out of Holland all the time. It was like that. Only here they let the water come back in. To hide the tunnel.”
He always had an answer that made sense, if she insisted on it, and their game went on, through the rise and fall of kingdoms and natural disasters – earthquakes were particularly satisfying, bringing all the book-built towers down in tumbled chaos – but on the fourth day after her first adventuring out beyond the safety of Thornoak’s walls, both the weather and Damaris’ feet were well, freeing her to go out into the plans her cousins had for her, and under the dark edge of her parents’ deaths, the summer turned to gold for her. Never once did Aunt Elspeth protest at her coming home torn or muddied or tired after hours of roaming with her cousins on foot and even more often on horseback, because Uncle Russell gave her a horse of her own, a pretty bay mare named Fansome, and gave her her first lessons in riding.
Agnes was heard to grumble, “First, she was forever under foot and now I can never find her except by the trail of dirt she leaves coming in.”
Aunt Elspeth only laughed at that, nor did Agnes truly mind. As Agnes herself told Damaris, she simply enjoyed a good grumble.
There were still rainy days, but Damaris soon learned only the worst weather was reason to stay in. A mere “thickening” of the air with misty rain soft against the face, or a chancy day, when rain and sun chased each other down the dale so fast it was a waste of time to heed them, were treated much the same as sunny days, so she was out and about in all manner of weathers. Down by the river they cheered stick boats past shoals and brushfalls or tried for trout that rarely cooperated with being caught. On the moors they followed the sheep-tracks under the huge sky. Along uncounted farm lanes and through the village, they met folk who all knew the boys and were cheerfully introduced to Damaris, with Nevin and Kellan adding comments on everyone they met when safely away from being overheard.
“Old Biggins, yes, don’t mind that he frowned at you. He’s the sort who complains when the sun shines because it makes everything so bright.”
“And gripes when it rains because it makes everything so wet.”
Or – “There’s Mrs. Thwaite of Laver Meadow Farm. She always wants to feed us whenever we go past her place.”
“And we let her because we don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“And because she bakes to a faretheewell. Even her bread is better than bread.”
They were not left completely to themselves. There were frequent days when their father claimed both boys. Then Damaris would return to Aunt Elspeth, but now the gardens and the house were no longer her hiding place. When her aunt went out about her visiting and nursing, Damaris as often as not went with her and learned of the dale folk in a different way from her cousins’, coming to know something of their sicknesses and hurts and sorrows, because her aunt seemed to administer to sad hearts as much as hurt bodies – Damaris’ own among them, though Damaris hardly knew it at the time.
What Damaris did realize was that Virna was not pleased with the change. Though there was nothing out of place in anything that Virna said or did around her, and though Aunt Elspeth seemed to notice nothing, Damaris was as sure of Virna’s anger at her as if Virna had slapped her face. She felt it without understanding it and kept away from Virna as much as might be. Aunt Elspeth seemed not to notice that, either, but Virna did and was pleased; Damaris felt her mocking pleasure as clearly as her covered anger and took care to avoid her even more.
In late autumn, at harvest’s end, the boys went grudgingly back to school, leaving Thornoak vastly empty without them. A few weeks later the first snowstorm swirled through the dale, and that night Damaris roused from sleep with one of her old nightmares. Sobbing, she made her way through the darkened house to her aunt’s and uncle’s bedroom, where Aunt Elspeth answered her uncertain tap at the door with, “Come, Damaris,” and Damaris ran to her, choking on fears and tears. Aunt Elspeth held up the covers for Damaris to scramble into bed beside her, tucked Damaris close to her and the blankets over them both, and held her, stroking her hair, until Damaris wore from her crying back into sleep again.
In the morning, Damaris tried to say how sorry she was, both for crying and for disturbing her aunt’s and uncle’s sleep, but Aunt Elspeth said kindly to her, “The grief will never go away. You’ll weep with it more than once, no matter how old you grow. All I can promise you is that the hurt lessens with time, but never deny yourself tears when you need them, or be ashamed of them. Tears wash wounds clean.”
“And I can be woken in the night without taking offence,” Uncle Russell said lightly. “So long as I don’t have to get out of my warm bed.”
As he meant her to do, Damaris laughed a little at that and felt better; and not that snowy morning but the next, Uncle Russell set her behind him on his own tall horse and took her with him as he rode out about his business around the manor, so that the snow became only snow instead of a curtain opening on memories raw with pain, and in a while she slept in her own room again with no more nightmares.
The year went around, and her cousins came home from school for summer again. Last year, closed in by her fears and grieving, Damaris had mostly missed the spring and early summer, but this year, with the dale in a glory of green and the days streaked with sunlight and rain-shadows and winds off the moors, she and Nevin and Kellan were out and about together as much as might be.
For Nevin, that was not as often, his father wanting more and more of his time. “It’s all right, though,” he told Damaris one morning as they crossed the stableyard together, he to fetch a ledger for his father from the stables, Damaris to go riding. “It’s called growing up and I have to do it.” He had indeed gone on growing up while at school and now took advantage of his height to smile loftily down at her as he added, “I suppose you’ll grow up someday, too, for all you’re such a crayfish of a little girl now.”
That was an old teasing between them, and Damaris, only pretending offence, said back at him, her nose in the air, “I’ll grow up when I’m good and ready and not before,” and went her way to Fansome’s stall, leaving him to collect the ledger and go back to the house. Her mother had let her be friends with only a few other little girls because one caught colds and worse things from other children, even girls, so Damaris felt no lack in having only her cousins for companions and never wondered if they did. Surely they never seemed to. They talked sometimes of the Ashbriggs at the next manor down the dale, but Lauran, the son there, was just enough older he had gone off to university two years ago, and his widowed mother had promptly taken the chance to travel abroad with Lauran’s young sister Irene in tow and still no word of when they might be home.
“For Irene to see the world while she’s young enough to enjoy it. That’s what Mistress Ashbrigg said,” Nevin had explained one time.
“Whether Irene wanted to go or not,” Kellan had said. “And she didn’t, because she knew what her mother really wanted was to shop and gossip in new circles with hapless relations who can’t refuse her guest-room.”
“But Lauran will finish with university this year,” Nevin had said. “That means that come next summer they’ll likely all be home again.”
But this summer they were not, and because Nevin was so much with his father, Damaris mostly kept company with only Kellan when she was not with her aunt, until she caught a summer’s rheum that wanted to settle to her chest. Despite her protests, she was put to bed and kept there, with Agnes grumbling up the stairs to keep an eye on her and Aunt Elspeth bringing various potions to ease her cough and running nose. It seemed the only amusement she had, besides reading, was guessing what herbs were in the various drinks that came, and being told by Aunt Elspeth how right or wrong she had guessed.
By the third morning of her imprisonment she was mortally bored as well as rheum-ridden and greeted even Kellan with a scowl when he thumped up the stairs, shoved her door open, and came in with an armload of folded papers and a deal board that he dumped down on the edge of her bed with great satisfaction.
Ignoring all of that, Damaris declared with all the ill-temper she presently harbored against everyone not kept in bed the way she was, “I want out of here. I hate taking medicines and I hate being fussed over. I want out.”
“Maps,” said Kellan cheerfully, sorting through what he had brought, scattering them across her bed. “Here. You’ll like this.” He laid the deal board across her lap and spread one of the maps open on it.
“I won’t,” Damaris said for form’s sake but was already bending forward to peer at the myriad lines and tiny writing.
“It’s Glavedale,” Kellan explained. “Look. Here’s Thornoak. And here’s Ashbrigg House. Did you hear they’re coming home soon, instead of next year? Lauran has been shoved out of his college for reasons we probably will never be told, and his mother has sent orders to the servants to open the house and ready it for when they arrive. Whenever that will be. He’s gone to meet them somewhere on the continent. Italy, I think. Or Germany.”
That caught Damaris’ interest more than the map did. “Irene is my age, isn’t she? Will we be friends, do you think?”
“If you can bear her chatter,” Kellan said callously. He pointed at something on the map. “Now here–”
“And Lauran. Will I like him?”
“You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Now look here. Ashbrigg House is new, hardly a hundred years old or so. See the way its name is written? But Thornoak is old, built in the 1500s on the foundations of a house that was here before it for no one knows how long. And this–” he pointed to a spidery gothic script that said ‘St. Cedd’s Chapel, ruined’, “–is really old. Maybe almost as old as whatever house was here before. And here.” He pointed at a crossroads that was marked in the same fine script as having an ancient cross. “This is really old, too. And this.” He pointed to the word `tumulus’ marked in the middle of what was probably someone’s pasture.
“Well, a tumulus would have to be old,” Damaris said, indignant he thought she might not know that. “Nobody has buried anyone in mounds for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Tumuluses have to be old.”
“Exactly. So that’s what you have to look for. Things that have been where they are for hundreds and hundreds of years. Now look here.” Kellan rummaged a ruler from under the maps and laid it on the map across her lap. The ruler’s straight edge ran neatly through the tumulus, the ancient cross at the crossroads, and St. Cedd’s ruined chapel. “See how they all line up with each other?”
“And so do that and that.” Damaris pointed to a farm and another crossroads lying along the ruler’s edge.
“Exactly!” Kellan said with great approval. “Good. That’s what you’re supposed to see. But mind you, any old place on a line you think you’ve found has to be in sight of the other old places to either side of it. They have to be close enough together you can see from one to the next one. Otherwise it doesn’t count.”
“Doesn’t count? What doesn’t count? Why?”
“Because these are supposed to be markers on Old Ways. Those are ancient paths across the countryside marked by special places. It’s no good having markers if you can’t see from one marker to the next.”
“But why not just make a road? Or a path. That would be easier to follow than places. And you wouldn’t have to worry about hills in the way.” Damaris stared at the map, seeing the difficulties. “In fact a Way going straight across country is going to make an awful lot of trouble for itself.”
“So what do you think that means?” Kellan asked in the tone he used when he was challenging her to think her way out of something.
Damaris liked these challenges from him and sometimes gave him ones in return, so she took the trouble to think and finally said, “It means, I suppose, that if these are real and not just something you’ve made up, they were meant to be something more than just a road to travel on.”
He nodded and said, “That’s right. Only they were made so long ago we don’t know the why of them any more. But they’re there. It’s a game, you see. Finding them. I’m supposed to be at the stables now, but see what you can find before I come back. But keep it our secret, all right?”
Damaris did not mind keeping secrets. The two of them and Nevin had had some good ones among themselves now and again, and she answered his grin with her own. He left her to it, and she spent a happy day with the maps. True to her promise, whenever Agnes came to see how she did and when lunch was brought and again when Aunt Elspeth came to see how she did at supper time, she hid the ruler and the scraps of paper she had begun to scribble notes on under the blankets, but she supposed the maps did not matter. She left them out, and Aunt Elspeth said, seeing them all over the bed, “Kellan said he’d find something for you to do. How clever of him.”
Damaris was allowed downstairs the next day. Her aunt’s firm ruling that she stay indoors and quiet was no trouble. The day was chill and uninviting with rain, but Uncle Russell’s study was warm with a fire on the hearth, and Damaris settled there happily, searching through his books for anything they could tell her about the places she had found on the maps. She did not always find answers, but was led on to other things that led her on to other books and others beyond those, until her mind was full of legends and old tales and ancient places; and when Kellan came in the late afternoon to see how she did, she looked up at him from where she sat on the study carpet surrounded by open books and demanded he take her out to follow Old Ways across the countryside.
Kellan pushed a large volume out of his way, making room for him to sit on the carpet near the fire. “I don’t think so,” he said easily. “You found them on the maps. Let it go at that.”
“Don’t you want to see if they can really be followed, see if they’re real and really there?” she protested, not believing for a moment he would not go with her.
But he said flatly, cheerfully, “No. I don’t.”
“Yes, you do!” Damaris grabbed his arm in her two hands and squeezed hard, twisting while she did. “You do, too!”
“Stop it!” Kellan protested. “I don’t!”
From the doorway Nevin said, “If you bruise him, you’ll have to explain it to Mother.” He nodded at Damaris’ piles of books. “What have you been doing?”
Forgetting it was supposed to be a secret between her and Kellan – secrets had always included the three of them, never just two – Damaris said, “I want to follow some of the Old Ways I found on the maps. I want to see if they’re really there, and I want him to come with me. And you, too.”
The laughter went out of Nevin before she had finished. “You idiot,” he said at Kellan.
As if he had actually done something wrong, Kellan answered uneasily, “It was a game to keep her quiet in bed with her cold. I just gave her the maps and showed her the game. That’s all.”
Not understanding what was the matter, Damaris put in, “That’s all he did. Really. He gave me the maps and showed me what to look for and I did and now I want to see some of the places.”
Nevin looked from one to the other of them, grave doubt harbored in his face. “That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” Kellan said. Damaris nodded emphatic agreement.
“It better be.” Nevin shook off his annoyance with a visible effort and grinned. “It’s geography for idiots. That’s why Kellan likes it. We can find better things to do. Want us to help you put these books away?”
As easily as that, he shoved the matter aside and, because of the look on Kellan’s face, Damaris let it go. But she remembered.
And a long while later, when it was too late, she understood.
But that summer all she understood was that Kellan and Nevin did not want to play the Old Ways game and she did, and if they would not go with her, she would go by herself. She still had her scraps of notes, one of them listing an aligning of places slantwise across Glavedale, from the church at Gillingthwaite not far down the dale from Thornoak, through a ford for crossing cattle below the bridge, then along a straight stretch of road – very few stretches of road were straight in Glavedale – to a crossroad that might be where the Old Way ended, because beyond there Lady Hill blocked the way. Or Lady Hill itself might have the next sighting place.
Damaris could see the long, high hump of Lady Hill across the dale from her bedroom window, stretching along the rising side of the valley just where the slope gathered itself and steepened to the moors, and Damaris thought that if she actually went there and indeed found that somehow the Old Way ran further, then she could crow to Kellan about having had an adventure without him. She kept her plan to herself of course and, declared well from her rheum, set out the first pleasant afternoon that came, having let Aunt Elspeth think she was going somewhere with Nevin and Kellan but knowing they were busy on some boy-concern of their own.
In the stable while she saddled Fansome, Albert, who saw to Thornoak’s horses and drove her aunt’s carriage when there was need, leaned on the stall wall to watch her and asked, as he was bound to do, “Where do you mean to be going today?”
He asked the same question of the boys and Uncle Russell when any of them rode out alone, to give him some idea of which way to set the search if they did not come back. Damaris had even heard him ask it when Nevin and Kellan rode out together, as if he had doubts about their good sense altogether. So she was ready and answered, “Toward Gillingthwaite, I think.”
“Not up to the moors then?” Albert asked.
“No. Just the dale today,” she said, and Albert nodded, satisfied with her answer – which at least had the virtue of being true – and she rode away from the manor so pleased with herself, and with the day that was so green and fair with summer, that she sang with quiet pleasure to herself and Fansome as she rode along the two miles of road to Gillingthwaite church. There Reverend Gedney was walking up the path to the church door as she passed the churchyard gate. He was an elderly gentleman who had been at St. Cuthbert’s Church since before her mother’s time, as he had told her when they were first introduced after the morning service one Sunday.
“And I’m very pleased to see her daughter here,” he had added, shaking her hand.
Damaris liked him, but there was little society between him and Thornoak so it was easy enough only to wave to him as she rode past. He waved back with a friendly smile and went on into the church. Damaris rode on, to bring Fansome to a stop at the corner of the churchyard wall. She had no map. They had all disappeared back to wherever Kellan had found them, and although someone would probably have told her where they were if she had asked, Nevin’s displeasure at them had made her wary, so all she had with her was her memory and a final, careful reading of her scrap-paper notes. But her memory was good, and if she was right, she should be able to see the ford across the Glave from this corner of the churchyard.
She found that she could. Even if she had not been on horseback, she could have seen over the low wall that surrounded the churchyard and its graves to the fields beyond and the gap in the trees along the river that told where the ford was. Better yet, she could see in the far churchyard wall the gap of a stile leading to a field path that ran, straight as could be from the church toward the ford. And now she found it might have been better to come on foot rather than horseback because she could not ride along that narrow way, could not even come to it except on foot. So she had to circle around to a farm track that went down to the river and follow it to the ford. There, looking back toward the church, she saw that the path and stile were lined up straight to the church’s short tower. With great delight at her success, she faced the other way. How much further could she follow her clues?
When she had ridden across the ford and up the farther bank, she found that the farm track continued as straight as the field path had, though it sliced two fields into strange angles by doing so. Damaris rode along the track, to find that what she had thought from the map was a crossroad was simply the place where the farm track came out on a road… and ended. There was nothing beyond it but a copse of trees along a field wall. Perhaps it had gone farther when the map was made; it did not now.
Disappointed but stubborn, she dismounted and climbed over the wall and pushed her way through the trees to their other side, trying to keep the farm track directly at her back. On the copse’s other side, she was rewarded with a clear view of Lady Hill across the fields. She briefly wondered about its name. It was the width of the dale away from the Lady Stone on its high moor, so they could hardly have anything to do with one another. Long and green, it ran lengthwise with the dale, perhaps two hundred yards long. Beyond it, the daleside rose steeply to another moor, but the Lady Hill itself was smooth with rich pasture grass, never plowed or planted, fringed along its lower edge with ash trees, and, from this side anyway, looking much like a woman stretched out on her side or back, with the high-swelling center of the hill as her hip or belly. Perhaps that was the why of its name.
But excitement pushed curiosity about the name out of her mind. “Even if there’s nothing to see beyond it, the top will be worth reaching,” she said aloud. Of everywhere she and her cousins had gone in the dale, somehow they had never gone there. She hoped Kellan would be envious when he found out that she had.
Since no track or even a field path led on from where she was to Lady Hill, she had to ride around by way of the road until she found a track that went the way she wanted to go. It was not straight, though, instead curved on up through the trees and the slope to only finally bring her to the crest. To her surprise three men were there, unloading dry branches from a cart onto a tall pile of other branches at the center of the clearing. They looked at her with the same surprise she felt, and then one of them came toward her, touching the brim of his hat respectfully. Damaris recognized him as one of the Thwaite sons from Laver Meadow Farm and asked, “What are you doing, Jim?” It seemed a long way and an odd place for carting brush.
“Making the Midsummer Eve bonfire, miss. Like always.”
“Like always?”
“Like every Midsummer, miss. Bonfires at May Day and Midsummer and Lammas–”
“Jim,” one of the other men called, “don’t you be jawing her ear off. We’ve work here.”
A momentary confusion crossed Jim’s face. Disconcerted, he touched his hat again and said, embarrassed, “If you’ll be excusing me, miss.”
Damaris nodded. She knew better than to come between men and their work and turned Fansome toward home, the Old Way momentarily forgotten. What Midsummer Eve bonfire?
At her other home – and when had she begun to think of Thornoak as home, too? – there had been bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ Day in the autumn, but her mother had always been frightened of so many people crowding together and of the fireworks, and so Damaris had never had a chance to go. Now there was going to be a bonfire here and she had not even heard of it. Or of the other bonfires Jim had mentioned. That was odd, she thought. But she had heard of them now and Midsummer Eve was only two days away, and as soon as she was in the house, she sought out Agnes and asked her about it all. Agnes gave her a sharp look and asked back, “Now where were you hearing that?”, but went on without waiting for answer, saying, “Still, you were bound to, I suppose. It’s just a bonfire, an old idea folk haven’t let go. Folk go and there’s dancing and foolishness late into the night and that’s the end of it. Put it out of your head.”
“But I want to go!”
“That’s for your aunt to say.”
“Do Nevin and Kellan go?” And why didn’t she remember this from last summer?
“They’re older than you,” Agnes said as if that finished it.
It did not. Going in search of her cousins, Damaris found them washing up for supper.
“There’s going to be a bonfire on Lady Hill,” she said. “I saw them building it. I want to go.”
Kellan and Nevin looked at each other. Then Kellan said, “You’re the older,” and walked away.
Not looking at all happy, Nevin said in his turn, “You’d best ask Mother, Damaris,” sounding so much like Agnes that Damaris let him walk away, too, without asking him again.
Nor did she ask at supper, only waited for someone to say something about the bonfire, but no one did, not then or through the evening afterwards. She could have asked again, the way Nevin had said she should, but he and Kellan and Agnes had been so odd about her asking that something held her back. The next afternoon, though, after Aunt Elspeth set her and Virna to gathering a basket of vervain and motherwort from the garden and then joined them in weaving the herbs into head-wreaths, with Aunt Elspeth and Virna sitting on the garden bench and Damaris on the grass in front of them, Aunt Elspeth said as they worked, “These are for the bonfire tomorrow.”
Damaris did not look up from her work. She guessed that Nevin, Kellan, or Agnes had told she had asked about the bonfire, and now her aunt was willing to speak of it. Did that mean she was free to ask if she could go? Shy of being rebuffed, she waited a while before saying without looking up, trying to keep her voice light, “May I weave cornflowers into my wreath? I’d like to wear cornflowers to the bonfire.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Virna’s hand, reached out to lay a finished wreath into the basket between them, pause. Damaris glanced at her face in time to catch a look of mockery or challenge in the other girl’s glance at Aunt Elspeth, but Aunt Elspeth did not see it and it was gone on the instant as Virna went on to lay the wreath quite carefully into the basket and Aunt Elspeth said gently, “You may make yourself a wreath if you like, Damaris, and put cornflowers in it, too. But I’m afraid you aren’t going to the bonfire. You’re staying home with Agnes.”
Damaris lifted her head and stared at her aunt, her thoughts racing from disbelief to indignation. “Are Nevin and Kellan going?”
“They’re older than you.”
“I’m old enough!”
“You’ll stay with Agnes,” Aunt Elspeth said with the cool, complete certainty of being obeyed.
Damaris retreated into hurt silence, too aware of Virna to bring herself to argue more. She hoped, too, that if Aunt Elspeth saw she was old enough not to pester she would realize she was old enough to go where Nevin and Kellan did.
But she went to bed that night with nothing more said, and the next morning she helped Aunt Elspeth and Virna gather handfuls of fennel, rue, thyme, camomile, and geranium from the garden into a covered basket. Leaving that in the stillroom, they went with a smaller basket out the stableyard gate, taking the back lane to the east pasture, through the stile there, and by the field path to the woods where pennyroyal grew spreading across the soft ground along the stream.
As they set to gathering it, Aunt Elspeth said, “Pennyroyal loosens phlegm if taken mixed with honey and salt. Taken in mingled water and vinegar, it curbs vomiting. A compress of it warms the body. Because it’s a mint that spreads like holy war if given the chance, I gather it here rather than grow it in the garden.”
Damaris, still keeping a now-hurt silence, moved away to gather it alone but repeated its virtues to herself, to set them in her mind. She did not notice where Virna was until suddenly they were gathering side by side. To Damaris’ wary sideways look, Virna smiled peaceably and said in a low voice not likely to carry to Aunt Elspeth a good few yards away, “You know what all these herbs are for, don’t you?”
There was a jeer in the words that warned Damaris not to answer. Not that it mattered. Virna went on anyway. “They’re to throw into the fire tonight. When the bonfire has been lighted and begun to grow, the pennyroyal and all the rest will be thrown into the flames.”
She waited, but when Damaris said nothing, refusing to ask anything of her, Virna leaned nearer and whispered, “It’s for magic.”
“It’s for custom,” Aunt Elspeth said behind them suddenly, her voice clear and commonsense. Both Damaris and Virna started. Not seeming to notice, Aunt Elspeth went on, “It’s a custom that goes back so many generations we don’t know where it came from and don’t care to stop it. I think we have enough now, don’t you?”
Smiling, Virna easily agreed with her. But at the house, when Aunt Elspeth went ahead into the stillroom, Virna turned suddenly around on the outside doorstep, blocking Damaris’ way and leaned close to her to say with great, gloating pleasure, “You won’t be at the bonfire tonight. I will. I’m going to dance with Nevin all night, and maybe with Kellan, too. All night, right through to dawn. And you won’t be there.”
Virna clearly meant some special hurt by that, but Damaris did not know what and only said, bewildered, “Oh?” doubting either Nevin or Kellan had any such plan.
Virna stared at her a moment longer, as if willing her to say more, then made a disgusted sound and said, “You’re so stupid you don’t even know you don’t know,” and spun away from her to follow Aunt Elspeth.
Damaris did not follow her, instead went on along the passage, and up to her room. If Aunt Elspeth thought she was sulking it was too bad, but Damaris could not bear to be close to Virna anymore. The day passed and until the very last Damaris hoped someone’s mind would change. But when supper was done and they all rose from the table, Agnes was waiting in the dining room doorway for her. Seeing her, Damaris stayed holding to the back of her chair, head down. Aunt Elspeth in passing kissed the top of her head. Nevin patted her shoulder in silent sympathy as he passed, and Kellan gently poked her in the back. No one said anything, although she wanted to say to both her cousins, “Don’t dance with Virna tonight!”
Then they were gone, Betty came in to clear the table, and there was nothing for it but to follow Agnes upstairs. It was early for bed, but there seemed no point to staying up. If she could not go to the bonfire, bed was as good a place as any to be, she supposed.
“There’s a treat for you in your room,” Agnes said as they went up the last stairs.
Refusing to be comforted by anything as childish as a treat, Damaris said nothing until, goaded by the thought that they thought they could bribe her to be happy, she demanded, “Why does even Virna get to go to the bonfire when I don’t?”
“Virna is neither here nor there. Don’t you go minding Virna one way or the other.”
“Why does Aunt Elspeth like her?”
“I’d not say your aunt likes her at all. Nor would I say she doesn’t. Best say your aunt sees something in the girl that I don’t or she’d not spend the time on her that she does. Probably hopes to make her better than Virna is and that’s all we have to know about it. Can you guess your treat?” Agnes prodded.
“No,” Damaris said and did not mind she sounded as hurt as she felt. Nonetheless, sight of one of her aunt’s best crystal goblets set on a lace doily on her bedside table momentarily diverted her with unwilling delight.
“It’s lemonade,” Agnes said. “Your aunt made it for you special.”
“But where did she get lemons?” Damaris asked. Sometimes in Hull there had been lemons at the greengrocer, but they had almost always been too costly for her mother to buy.
“They came with yesterday’s order from town. When you’ve readied for bed, you shall have it.”
Torn between being wronged by being left home and the undeniable pleasure of the treat, Damaris obeyed and soon – in her nightgown and curled on her window seat with the lovely goblet in her hands – she almost felt better. But twilight had gathered outside, and from her open window she could see, far off in the blue darkness, the first small brightness of the bonfire. It was barely more than a red star’s glimmer at first but as she watched it grew, spreading through that heap of wood she had seen, until it was a single great flame, towering in the darkness.
Damaris tried to make out the shapes of people silhouetted against flames, but it was all too distant. Beside her, Agnes said, “Drink your lemonade now and come to bed.”
Damaris sipped the lemonade. It was sweet and sharp and good, and she did not hurry it. She had made up her mind that she was not going to sleep until everyone came home. Then they would know she could have gone with them and they’d be sorry, but she had barely finished the lemonade when her bed seemed after all a very good place to be. As Agnes took the goblet from her hand and set it aside, Damaris tried to murmur, “I’m not sleepy,” and yet did not resist as Agnes tucked her in, and then there were only dreams until morning.
Continue with Chapter 4 tomorrow!
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