Mistress of Mellyn

Afterwards

This is the story I tell my great-grandchildren. They have heard it many times, but there is always a first time for some. They ask for it again and again. They play in the park and in the woods; they bring me flowers from the south gardens, a tribute to the old lady who can always charm them with the story of how she married their great-grandfather.

To me it is as dear as though it happened yesterday. Vividly I remember my arrival at the house and all that preceded those terrifying hours I spent in the dark with dead Alice.

The years which followed with Connan have often been stormy ones.

Connan and I were both too strong-willed, I suppose, to live in perpetual peace; but they were years in which I felt I had lived life richly, and what more could one ask than that?

Now he is old, as I am, and three more Connans have been born since that day we married our son, grandson and great-grandson. I was glad I was able to give Connan children. We had five sons and five daughters, and they in their turn were fruitful.

When the children hear the story they like to check up all the details. They want every incident explained.

Why was it believed that the woman who died in the train was Alice?

Because of the locket she wore. But it was Celestine who identified the locket as one which, she said, she had given Alice, but which, of course, she had never seen before in her life.

She had been eager that I should accept Jacinth when Peter had first offered the mare to me I suppose because she feared it was just possible that Connan might be interested in me and therefore she was ready to encourage the friendship between myself and Peter; and it was she who later, discovering the loosened boulder on the cliff, had lain in wait for me and attempted to kill or maim me.

She was the sender of the anonymous letters to Lady Treslyn and the public prosecutor, commenting on the suspicious circumstances of Sir Thomas’s death. She had believed that if there was a big enough scandal, marriage between” Connan and Lady Treslyn would have been impossible for years. She had reckoned without Connan’s feelings for me; thus when she knew that I was engaged to marry him, she immediately planned to remove me. She failed to do this on the cliff path; therefore I was to join Alice; the fact that Peter was leaving for Australia on that day must have made her decide -on this method. The whole household knew that Peter’s attitude to me had been a flirtatious one, and it would appear that I had run away with him.

It was Celestine who had put the diamond bracelet in Miss Jansen’s room because the governess was learning too much about the house and the knowledge would inevitably lead her to the lepers’ squint and Alice. She had worked on Lady Treslyn’s jealousy of the pretty young governess for she had known Lady Treslyn to be a vindictive woman who, given the opportunity, would bring all her malice to bear on Miss Jansen.

She was in love passionately in love with Mount Mellyn and she wanted to marry Connan only because thus she would be Mistress of the house.

So in the first place, discovering the secret of the squint she had kept it to herself, and had chosen her opportunity to murder Alice.

She knew of the love affair between Alice and her brother Geoffry; she knew that Alvean was his child. It worked out so easily because she had waited for her opportunity. If it had not been possible to make Alice’s death appear to have occurred in the train accident she would have found some other way of. disposing of her as she had intended to dispose of me through Jacinth.

But she had reckoned without Gilly. Who would have thought that a poor simple child should play such a big part in this diabolical plan? But Gilly had loved Alice as later she was to love me. Gilly had known Alice was in the house for Alice had made a habit of coming to say good night to her when she did the same to Alvean; she had always done it before she went out to a dinner party. Because she had never forgotten, Gilly did not believe she had forgotten this time. Gilly therefore continued to believe that Alice had never left (he house, and had gone on looking for her. It was Gilly’s face which I had seen at the peep. Gilly knew all the peeps in the house and used them frequently, because she was always watching for Alice.

Thus she had seen Celestine and myself enter the hall from the solarium. I imagined her crossing the room and looking through the peep on the other side of the room so that she saw us enter the chapel. We crossed to the squint, but that side of the chapel could not easily be seen from the solarium peep, and so Gilly sped along to Miss Jansen’s room, where from that peep she could have a good view of the squint. She was just in time to see us disappearing through the door, and waited for us to come out. She waited and waited, for Celestine naturally left by the door to the courtyard and slipped away so that, since she believed that no one had seen her come into the house except myself, she could let it appear that she had not been there at all.

Thus, while I lived through that period of horror in Alice’s death-chamber, Gilly was standing on her stool in Miss Jansen’s room, watching the door to the lepers’ squint.

Connan returned at eleven and expected the household to give him a welcome.

Mrs. Polgrey received him. ” Go and tell Miss Leigh that I am here,” he said. He must have been a little piqued because he was—and still is—the sort of man who demands the utmost affection and attention, and the fact that I could be sleeping when he came home was inconceivable to him.

I pictured the scene: Mrs. Polgrey reporting that I was not in my room, the search for me, that terrible moment when Connan believed what Celestine had intended he should believe.

” Mr. Nansellock came over this afternoon to say goodbye. He caught the ten o’clock from St. Germans….”

I have wondered often how long it would have been before they discovered that I had not run away with Peter. I could imagine what might have happened. Connan’s losing that belief in life which I believed I was beginning to bring back to him, perhaps continuing his affdire with Linda Treslyn. But it would not have led to marriage, Celestine would have seen to that. And in time she would have found some way of making herself mistress of Mount Mellyn; insidiously she would have made herself necessary to Alvean and to him.

How strange, I thought, that all this might have come to pass and the only two who could have told the truth would have been two skeletons behind the walls of the lepers’ squint. Who would have believed that even at this day the story of Alice and Martha would never have been known, had not a simple child, born in sorrow, living in shadow, led the way to the truth.

Connan told me often of the uproar in the house when I was missing. He told me of the child, who came and stood patiently beside him, waiting to be heard; how she tugged at his coat and sought for the words to explain.

” God forgive us,” he says, ” it was some time before we would listen to her, and so we delayed bringing you out of that hellish place.”

But she bad led them there . through the door into the lepers’ squint.

She had seen us, she said.

And for a moment Connan had thought that Peter and I had left the house together, slipping out that way so that we should not be noticed.

It was dusty in the squint—for no one had entered it since Alice had gone there with her murderer; but in the dust on the wall was the mark of a hand, and when Connan saw it he began to take Gilly seriously.

It was not easy to find the secret spring in the door even if it had been known that it was there. There was an agonising search of ten minutes while Connan was ready to tear the walls down.

But they found it and they found me. The found Alice too.

They took Celestine to Bodmin where she was eventually to be tried for the murder of Alice. But before the trial could take place she was a raving lunatic. At first I believed that this was yet another scheme of hers. It may have started that way, but she did not die until twenty years after, and all that time she spent locked away from the world.

Alice’s remains were buried in the vault where those of an unknown woman lay. Connan and I were married three months after he had brought me out of the darkness. That experience had affected me even more than I realised at the time, and I suffered from nightmares for a year or more. It was a great shock to have been buried alive even though one’s tomb was opened before life was extinguished.

Phillida came to my wedding with William and the children. She was delighted. So was Aunt Adelaide, who insisted that the wedding take place from her town house. Thus Connan and I had a smart London wedding. Not that we cared, but it pleased Aunt Adelaide who, for some reason, seemed to have the idea in her head that it was all her doing.

And so we honeymooned, as we had originally intended, in Italy and then we came home to Mount Mellyn.

I dream over the past when I have told the story to the children. I think of Alvean happily married to a Devonshire squire. As for Gilly, she never left me. She is with me now. At any moment she will appear on the lawn with the eleven o’clock coffee which on warm days we take in that arbour in the south gardens where I first saw Lady Treslyn and Connan together.

I must confess that Lady Treslyn continued to plague me during the first years of my married life. I discovered that I could be a jealous woman and a passionate one. Sometimes I think Connan liked to tease me, in repayment, he said, for the jealousy he had felt of Peter Nansellock.

But she went to London after a few years, and we heard she married there.

Peter came back some fifteen years after he left. He had acquired a wife and two children but no fortune; he was, however, as gay and full of vitality as ever. In the meantime Mount Widden had been sold; and later one of my daughters married the owner, so the place has become almost as much home to me as Mount Mellyn.

Connan said he was glad when Peter came back, and I laughed at the thought of his ever feeling he needed to be jealous. When I told him this, he replied: ” You’re even more foolish about Linda Treslyn.”

That was one of those moments when we both knew that there was no one for us but each other.

And so the years passed and now, as I sit here thinking of it all, Connan is coming down the path from the gardens. In a moment I shall hear his voice.

Because we are alone he will say: ” Ah, my dear Miss Leigh …” as he often does in his most tender moments.

That is to remind me that he does not forget those early days; and there will be a smile on his lips which tells me that he is seeing me, not as I am now, but as I was then, the governess somewhat resentful of her fate, desperately dinging to her pride and her dignity falling in love in spite of herself his dear Miss Leigh.

Then we shall sit in the warm sunshine, thankful for all the good things which life has brought us.

Here he comes and Gilly is behind him . still a little different from other people, still speaking rarely, singing as she works, in the off-key voice that makes us think she is a little out of this world.

As I watch her I can see so clearly the child she once was, and I think of the story of Jennifer, the mother who one day walked into the sea, and how that story was part of my story, and how delicately and intricately our lives were woven together.

Nothing remains, I thought, but the earth and the sea which are here just as they were on the day Gilly was conceived, on the day Alice walked unheeding into her tomb, on the day I felt Connan’s arms about me and I knew he had brought me back to life.

We are born, we suffer, we love, we die, but the waves continue to beat upon the rocks; the seed time and the harvest come and go, but the earth remains.