Page 126 of The Mistress of Ashmore Castle

Perhaps in real life it was not like the stories. But if ‘love’ meant wanting to be with someone all the time, feeling utterly content just to be near him, treasuring every aspect of him, his physical self, his character, his abilities and habits and speech . . . If it meant seeing in magnified detail the brush of his eyelashes on his cheek as he bent over a piece of work, the slanting sunshine lighting the golden hairs on his arms . . . If the scent of his skin was like an old memory that filled you with longing . . . If you yearned to trace with your finger the shape of his lips . . . If the word ‘home’ with all its connotations of comfort and belonging had come to mean him and where he was . . .

Two days ago, kept indoors by the relentless rain, she had stared at her reflection in the mirror in her bedroom, and said aloud, ‘I love him. I love Axe Brandom.’ And though she had been suspecting it for a long time, the words spoken had made everything coalesce. She was not in the habit of looking at herself. If she stood before the glass while pinning on her hat it was the hat she saw, not her face. She had no strong mental image of her appearance. But now, suddenly, Alice became a real, solid, flesh-and-blood person, and she looked, and despaired. She loved Axe, in the way that she supposed grown-ups loved each other when they declared love and married each other lovingly. But she could not and must not love him. She must not even let him know how she felt, because he would be horrified and embarrassed and would probably tell her not to come any more. And she ought not to go. But one glimpse of her life without him in it was enough. She had to see him. But she must somehow continue to act like the pony-mad little girl he had been comfortable with, suppress the longings, behave normally around him and everyone else. She must keep an iron control over herself.

In bed, alone, at night, she could let go. She had her drawings of him – dozens of them now. She could pore over them, gaze her fill, think about him as freely as she liked. And cry. Crying was a luxury. Best to do it at night, so that her eyes and face would have returned to normal by the morning.

Now, after an absence of many days, she was going to visit him. In a few minutes, she would see him, and he would smile, and talk to her, and she would feel his hands on her waist as he jumped her down from the saddle. These were her treasures, to keep her alive until the next time. Pharaoh, catching her gladness as they neared the cottage, danced a little, tossing his head; then he caught the scent of the place, and let out one of his devastating whinnies, bracing his sides and shaking her in the saddle.

Alerted by the sound, Axe was waiting in his yard when she rode in, and her heart leaped with joy as his face lit in a welcoming smile.

‘You’d better not ever try and sneak up on someone,’ he said, coming to Pharaoh’s head. The chestnut butted him hard in the chest, then stuck his nose into Axe’s ear and fluttered his hair with nostrils and lips.

Alice said, ‘He’s glad to see you.’ She leaned towards him to be jumped down and felt his big, strong hands take her without hesitation – licensed to touch her in this intimate way by long custom.

‘And what about you, Lady Alice?’ he said. Her feet were on the ground, but just for an instant he did not release her. ‘Are you glad to see me?’

Her heart was beating like a caged bird. If only those words meant something! ‘Of course I am, or I wouldn’t have come,’ she said, and heard with amazement how ordinary and prosaic she sounded. I should have been an actress, she thought.

He let her go and was attending to the horse, and Alice’s attention was demanded by his terrier, Dolly, who came bustling up for her share of caresses, and then by a half-grown Cyprian cat, who leaned against her legs and stuck his tail straight up like a poker. ‘Is that one of the kittens?’ she marvelled.

‘They grow up quick,’ he said from under the saddle flap, where he was loosening the girth.

‘Oh, you have ducks!’ she exclaimed, straightening up as a flotilla of five white Aylesburys came waddling from round the side of the house to investigate, heads imperiously high, making sarcastic remarks to each other from the sides of their beaks.

‘Our Seth’s Mary put a clutch under a broody hen for me. I’m partial to a duck’s egg. Long as I can keep the foxes off ’em. Building ’em a house next to the cart shed. Have to shut ’em in the scullery at night until it’s ready.’

‘That must be messy.’

‘’Tis. But better that than heads and feathers all over everywhere and no eggs.’

‘Nature is cruel,’ Alice said, following him as he led Pharaoh over to the stable and tied him to a ring.

He looked at her. ‘Nature is natural. Cruelty doesn’t come into it. It’s humans that are cruel. Humans’ve a choice to behave otherwise.’ She nodded, bathing in his blue eyes. ‘Was just about to have a cup of tea and a bite. Want to join me?’

‘Yes, please,’ she said. She might have been saying ‘yes’ to the Cup of Life. He gave her a curious look, head tilted, then turned away to the cottage. Be more careful, she told herself.

She sat at the table, with the cat on her lap purring like an engine, watching him set out bread and cheese and make the tea.

‘How are you getting on with Great Expectations?’ she asked.

‘Getting along. That Miss Havisham, she’s a queer one. I reckon she couldn’t have been right in the head even before the wedding. Shutting herself up like that’s not a reasonable way to behave, even with a broken heart.’

‘Don’t you think so? If you loved someone so very much? And you were all alone. Being alone is very hard.’

‘But she’s not alone, is she? She’s got the young lass, and Pip to visit, and the lawyer fellow, and I dare say there’ll be servants in the house. She’s not alone like, say, old Miss Oadsby down at the Carr. She’s got no-one at all, never sees a soul from one day to the next. Never married because she had to take care of her mother, and when her mother died – what? must be fifteen year since – she was left all alone. Just her in a damp cottage. No, I don’t reckon Miss Havisham has got much to complain about. She could buck up if she put her mind to it.’

‘Funny, I was thinking the same,’ Alice said. ‘Self-indulgent, that’s what I thought. She’s watching herself being tragic, like watching a play.’

He smiled. ‘But here we’re talking about her as if she was a real person. So that Dickens has done a powerful job of inventing her. I can see all the people in the story in my mind’s eye, just as if they were real. That makes him a good writer, doesn’t it?’

‘I’d say so. I love being able to step into a story, like stepping into a house, and just seeing it all around you. If you like Dickens, I’ll bring you another one when you finish. He wrote loads.’

‘As long as you don’t get yourself into trouble, taking them.’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘Big goings-on up at the Castle,’ he said.

‘Which ones?’ she said.