Thornyhold

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Romance; General Fiction

Synopsis

Gilly Ramsey's lonely childhood was brightened only by visits to her godmother until her death, when the grown-up Gilly inherits the family cottage, “ Thornyhold.” Set deep in a wild wood, with its magical and peaceful strength and its sovereign defenses against evil, Thornyhold is like something out of a fairy tale. The old house strikes an end to Gilly's bleak future, offering more than just a new home. It presents a chance to start over— despite its reputation for magic, history of witchcraft, and a resident black cat. This Gothic romance features sparkling prose, delightful characters, and classic intrigue.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 288

Sample

I suppose that my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out. She dwindled from a potential Morgan le Fay into an English vicar’s wife, and ran the parish, as one could in those days – more than half a century ago – with an iron hand disguised by no glove at all. She retained her dominance, her vivid personality, a hint of cruelty in her complete lack of sympathy for weakness or incompetence. I had, I think, a hard upbringing. And so, I believe, must she have had. I remember a photograph of my grandmother, her mother, whom I never met, but whose picture terrified me through my childhood; scraped-back hair, piercing eyes and a lipless mouth. She had lived in the wilds of New Zealand and had shown all the tough virtues of the pioneers of her day; she was a notable nurse and healer, who would have been classed in an earlier day as a wise woman or even a witch. She looked it. My mother, a handsomer version of her, had the same abilities. Merciless to the healthy, disliking all other women as a matter of principle, indifferent to children and animals, she was nevertheless endlessly patient with small babies, and was a splendid nurse to the sick. A couple of generations earlier she would have been carrying jellies and soups to the ailing and deserving poor in the parish, but those times were past, and instead she presided over village working-parties and made jams and jellies which she sold (‘We need the money, and besides, they don’t value anything they get for nothing’) and when there was an accident at the pit she was there, along with my father and the doctor, and as useful as either.

We lived in a bleak, ugly colliery village in the north of England. Our house was well built, but hideous, far too big, and very cold. The water was limestone-hard, and always icy; my mother had never in her youth known hot water laid on, and she saw no reason to waste money by using the damper at the back of the vast, extravagant Eagle range. If we needed hot water for washing, we boiled it in pans on top of the range. Baths were allowed once a week, two inches of warmish, hard water. Coal was expensive at a pound a ton, but the vicarage and church got their electricity free, so in my small, arctic room at the top of the house I was sometimes allowed a single-bar electric fire to keep the cold at bay. I never remember having hands or feet free from chilblains; this did not count as an ailment, but merely as weakness, and was ignored.

The vicarage lay at one end of the village, isolated beyond the church in its own large garden, where my father, aided by the old sexton (‘I’m a powerful digger; I has to be’) spent every hour he could spare from his parish duties. On one side of our grounds ran the main road; on the other three sides were graveyards. ‘Quiet neighbours,’ we used to say, and they were. I never remember being troubled by the thought of all the bodies buried so near at hand, and our normal short cut to the village lay through the oldest field of graves. But it was a grim place for a solitary child, and I suppose my childhood was as bleak, as comfortless, and even lonelier than the Brontës’ cold upbringing at Haworth. It had not always been so. I had my own small Golden Age to look back on; my brief span of dream days that made the real days of childhood bearable.

Until I was seven years old we had lived in a small village of two hundred souls or thereabouts. It was an unimportant little parish, and we were very poor, but the place was lovely, my father’s work was easy, and the house was compact and comfortable. That vicarage was ancient, low and white, with a white rose rambling over the porch, and ivied walls with beds of sweet violets beneath. There was a summer-house set in a lilac grove, and a tennis court carefully kept by my father, where occasionally neighbours would come to play. The parish consisted mainly of farmland, farms scattered through a few square miles, with only one ‘main’ road through it. Cars were rare; one walked, or went by pony-trap. There were no buses, and the railway station was two miles away.

Only seven years. But even now, after a lifetime ten times as long, some memories are printed, still vivid and exact through the overall smudging of times gone by and best forgotten.

The village green with its grazing goats and donkeys, and the grey church at its centre. Huge trees everywhere, on the green, in the cottage gardens, studding the circling meadows, shading the dusty road. The road itself, with the deep triple ruts made by wheels and hoofs, winding between its thick borders of hedgerow flowers. Sunshine hot on the paving-stones of our backyard, where hens strutted and the cat lay dozing. The ringing of the smith’s hammer from the forge next door, and the sharp smell of singeing hoofs as he shod the farmers’ horses. The vicarage garden with its paeonies and violas and the columbines like doves roosting. The clouds of lilac, the hops climbing over the door of the schoolhouse at the foot of the garden, and the double yellow roses by the steps that led to the tennis lawn.

But no people. Those golden memories, I suppose significantly, hold no single person. Except one. There is no smudging of the picture on the day when I first met my mother’s cousin Geillis.

She was my godmother, so presumably I had encountered her at the font, but the first time that I recall talking with her was on a summer’s day when I was six years old.

It cannot have been my birthday, because that is in September, but it was some sort of special day, an occasion to which I had looked forward with all the starved longing of a lonely childhood, and which, when it came, was just like any other day. Which meant that I spent it alone, because my father was out on his parish visits, my mother was too busy to bother with me, and of course I was not allowed to play with the village children.

I doubt if I was allowed to leave the garden, either, but I had done so. At the bottom of our vegetable garden, behind the schoolhouse, was my own private gap in the fence. Beyond it stretched a long slope of meadow-land, studded like a park with groups of great trees, and at the foot of the slope, backed by a little wood, lay a pond. For no reason, except that its bright mirror made a point to aim for, I wandered downhill to the water’s edge, and sat down in the grass.

I believe that I remember every moment of that afternoon, though at first it was only a blur, a richness of colour like something in an impressionist painting. There was a confusion of sound, birdsong from the wood beyond the hedgerow and grasshoppers fiddling in the long grass near at hand. It was hot, and the smell of the earth, of the crushed grasses, of the slightly stagnant pond-water drugged the sleepy day. I sat dreaming, eyes wide open, focused on the glimmer of the pool where the lazy stream fed it.

Something happened. Did the sun move? What I seem to remember is a sudden flash from the pool as if a fish had leaped and scattered the light. The dreamy haze of colour sharpened. Everything, suddenly, seemed outlined in light. The dog-daisies, white and gold, and taller than I was, stirred and swayed above my head as if combed through by a strong breeze. In its wake the air stilled again, thick with scents. The birds had stopped singing, the grasshoppers were silent. I sat there, as still as a snail on the stem, in the middle of a full and living world, and saw it for the first time, and for the first time knew myself to be a part of it.

I looked up, and Cousin Geillis was standing there.

She cannot have been much more than forty, but to me, of course, she seemed old, as my parents, in their thirties, were old. She had something of my mother’s look, the proud mouth and nose, the piercing grey-green eyes, the erect carriage. But where my mother’s hair was golden-red, Cousin Geillis’s was dark, clouds of it, swirled and swathed up with tortoiseshell pins. I don’t remember what she wore, except that it was dark and voluminous.

She sank down beside me on the grass. She seemed to manage it without disturbing the dog-daisies. She ran a forefinger up the stem of one daisy, and a ladybird came off it onto the finger and clung there.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Quickly. Count the spots.’

Young children take the strangest things for granted, a double-edged innocence that can be totally misunderstood by the adult using the guidelines of maturity. I saw nothing odd about Cousin Geillis’s sudden appearance, or her greeting. It was part of the child’s world of magical appearances and vanishings, timed inevitably as they are for the child’s need.

I counted. ‘Seven.’

‘Seven-spot Coccinella,’ agreed Cousin Geillis. ‘Now, hadn’t you better warn her?’

Instantly, the need seemed urgent. I sang obediently:

‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,

Your house is on fire, your children all gone,

All but one, and her name is Jill,

And she’s quite safe on the window-sill.’

The ladybird flew. I said, anxiously: ‘It’s only a song, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. She’s a very clever little beetle, and she lives in the meadows, and gets all her babies out and flying before anyone can burn the stubble or cut the hay. Do you know who I am, Jilly?’

‘You’re Mummy’s cousin Jilly. She has a photo of you.’

‘So she has. What were you doing down here?’

I must have looked apprehensive. Quite apart from the forbidden adventure outside the garden, I was not supposed to waste time dreaming. But, fixed by Cousin Geillis’s straight gaze, I told the truth. ‘Just thinking.’

‘What about?’ Miraculously, she sounded not only unruffled, but interested.

I looked round me. The illuminated missal of grass and flowers was dissolving again into a formless, impressionist blur.

‘I don’t know. Things.’

It was the kind of answer that usually brought a sharp rebuke. Cousin Geillis nodded as if she had just taken in every word of my detailed explanation. ‘Whether there are tadpoles in the pond, for instance?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes! Are there?’

‘Probably. Why don’t we look?’

We looked, and there were. Minnows, too, and a couple of sticklebacks; and then Cousin Geillis pointed to where, at the foot of a tall reed, the surface of the water bulged suddenly, rounded to a bubble, then broke to let a brown, grub-like creature emerge. Slowly, laboriously, testing the strange element, the ugly creature inched its way up the stem till, parting with its reflection, it clung clear of the water, exposed to the drying sun.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s called a nymph. Watch now, Jilly. Just watch.’

The creature moved. The ugly head went back, as if in pain. I did not see what happened, but all at once there were two bodies there on the stem, the split shell that had been the nymph, and, climbing from the empty helmet of the head, another body, newly born, supple and alive, a slimmer, bigger version of the first. It clung there, above the wrinkled discard of its muddy skin, while the sunlight stroked it, plumped it with liquid life, drew the crumpled silk of the wings out of its humped shoulders and slowly pulled them straight, taut and shining and webbed with veins as delicate as hairs, while from somewhere, it seemed from the air itself, colour pulsed into the drab body till it glimmered blue as a splinter of sky. The wings stretched, feeling the air. The insect’s body lifted, straightened. Then into the light, like light, it was gone.

‘It was a dragonfly, wasn’t it?’ I found myself whispering.

‘It was. Aeshna Caerulea. Say it.’

‘Aeshna Caerulea. But how? You said it was an imp, but was there a dragonfly inside?’

‘Yes. The nymph – not “imp” – lives at the bottom of the pond in the dark, and feeds on whatever it can get, till one day it finds it can climb out into the light, and grow its wings, and fly. What you’ve just watched,’ finished Cousin Geillis cheerfully, ‘is a perfectly ordinary miracle.’

‘You mean magic? Did you make it happen?’

‘Not that, no. Some things I can make happen, but not that, apt though it was. Some day, if I’m right, something very like that miracle will be needed. Another nymph, another way, another day.’ A quick, bright glance. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘No. But you can make things happen? Are you really a witch, then, Cousin Jilly?’

‘What makes you ask that? Have they said anything at home?’

‘No. Mummy just said you might be coming to stay and Daddy said you weren’t very desirable.’

She laughed, rose, and pulled me up after her. ‘Spiritually, I hope, rather than physically? No, never mind, child, we’d better get you home, hadn’t we? Come.’

But the afternoon was not over yet. We went slowly back through the meadow, and it seemed natural that we should come across a hedgehog with her four young ones, rustling busily through the grass, rootling with long, shining snouts. ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle,’ I breathed, and this time Cousin Geillis laughed, and did not correct me. One of them found a snail, and ate it with a cheerful crunching. They went close by us, totally without fear, then moved off. Afterwards, on the way back, Cousin Geillis picked one flower after another, and told me about them, so that by the time we reached the vicarage I knew the names and habits of some twenty plants. And somehow, though I should have been punished for climbing out of the garden, my mother said nothing, and all was well.

Cousin Geillis stayed for a few days. Most of them, I believe, she spent with me. It was halcyon weather, as always in those far-away summers, and we were out all day. And during our day-long picnic walks, as I see now, the foundation of my life was laid. When she left, the light went out of the fields and woods, but what she had kindled in me remained.

It was the last of the lovely summers. The following spring my father was moved by his bishop to a new parish, a big ugly mining parish, where the pit heap and the smoke and the blaze of the coke ovens and the noise of shunting engines filled the days and nights, and we settled into the cold discomfort of the house among the graveyards.

There were no dragonflies, no wild flower meadows, and no hedgehogs. I begged for a pet, an animal of any kind, even a white mouse, but although, like all vicarages of that date, the place boasted a stable with stall and loose box and outhouses in plenty, I was allowed nothing. Occasionally, when the cat caught a bird, or even a mouse, I tried to nurse the victim back to health, but without success. The cat herself resisted all overtures, preferring a semi-wild life in the out-houses. Then one day I was given a rabbit by the curate, who bred them. It was an unresponsive pet, but I loved it dearly, until within weeks my mother insisted that it be given back. Next morning, when the curate called, as he did daily to talk with my father, he brought my rabbit back, skinned and jointed, and ready for the pot. I ran upstairs and was sick, while my father tried gently to explain to the astonished and offended curate, and my mother, for once warmly sympathetic, followed me and mopped up. By the time grief and horror had subsided the curate, rabbit and all, had gone. The incident was never mentioned again.

They say that the mind makes its own defences. Looking back now down the years, I can recall very little about this part of my childhood. The occasional treat – trips by bus with my father, walking with him round the parish, the kindness of some of the miners’ wives who called me ‘Jilly’ and treated me with the same sort of fond respect they accorded my father, and then looked sideways and asked, with a different kind of respect, after my mother. And the hours spent alone in my cold bedroom, drawing and painting – always animals or flowers – or standing looking out of the window over the graveyards and the sycamore trees, at the red dusty sunset beyond the pit heap, and wishing – wishing what? I never knew.

Then one day, without warning, she came again. Cousin Geillis, paying what she called a farewell visit, before leaving on a trip to see her and my mother’s family in New Zealand. She would, she said, take messages or gifts, and she would be gone for some time. In those days, before air travel, such a journey took months, and a year was hardly too long to reckon on for a trip which would take the traveller right round the world. There were so many places, she said, that she wanted to see. The names went by over my head; Angkor Wat, Cairo, Delhi, the Philippines, Peru … She would come back when she had seen them all, and meanwhile …

Meanwhile she had brought a dog for me to keep.

It was a collie, black and white, thin and eager and loving. A lost dog that she had taken in, and would not leave to chance and man’s unkindness.

‘Here is the licence. It is Geillis’s dog. She needs—’ I thought she was going to say ‘something to love’, and went cold, but she finished merely, ‘companionship. Someone to go walks with.’

‘What’s his name?’ I was down on the cold flags of the kitchen floor with the dog. It was too good to be true. I dared not look at my mother.

‘That’s for you to give him. He’s yours.’

‘I shall call him Rover,’ I said, into the dog’s fur. He licked my face.

‘Un peu banal,’ said my cousin Geillis, ‘but he’s not proud. Goodbye.’

She did not kiss me when she went. I never saw her kiss anyone. She walked out of the house, and a moment later the bus came along and she climbed aboard.

‘That’s strange,’ said my father, ‘it must be an extra. The regular bus went ten minutes ago. I saw it.’

My mother smiled. Then the smile vanished as her eye fell on the dog, and on me, down beside him with both arms round him. ‘Get up at once. And if you are going to keep that dog, he will have to be tied up. What on earth Geillis was thinking of, saddling us with a dog when there will be nobody here to look after him I do not know.’

‘I’ll look after him! I can easily—’

‘You won’t be here.’

I gaped at her. I waited. One did not question my mother. What she wanted to tell, she told.

She set her mouth till it looked very like the one in my grandmother’s portrait.

‘You are to go away to school. Cousin Geillis is right. You need companionship, and to be brought out of yourself and made less of a dreamer. And since she—’

‘Don’t look so stricken, darling.’ This was my father, gently. ‘You’ll like it. You will, really. And you do need companionship and friends. It’s such a chance for us, we couldn’t possibly afford it ourselves, but Cousin Geillis has offered to pay the major part of your fees. As your godmother—’

‘She prefers to be called a sponsor,’ said my mother, a little sharply.

My father looked grieved. ‘Yes, I know. Poor Geillis. But since she is so kindly helping us, we must seize the chance. You do see, don’t you, Jill. . .