Brides of Aberdar Read Free

faith with him?’
    ‘He has coerced her,’ cried Richard. ‘Bullied her!’
    ‘Better tell the truth, girl,’ said her father. As she remained silent, cowering, he spoke for her. ‘Already there was a firm understanding when she went to the court. There her head was turned by your fashionable nonsense. She came home, moped two days, confessed all to her mother. She is now formally betrothed. But for this sudden descent upon us, you would have been informed and the matter ended.’
    They seemed hardly to hear him. Lenora cried out, ‘You have betrayed him!’ and Richard, ‘Isabella, speak to me, tell me in your own words, I’ll believe no other. You repent? It is ended? It was all a—nothingness?’ As she remained silent, his sister burst out again, and with unlovely oaths. Isabella said sullenly, ‘Don’t dare to call me such names!’
    ‘Names! I’ll call down worse than names upon you! Liar, false betrayer, I’ll call down my curse upon you, I’ll see you shrivel and die—’
    ‘Come away, Isabella,’ said her mother, trembling at her daughter’s shoulder. To Lenora, standing like a fury in her rage and pain, she cried back: ‘It is you who have been the betrayers—a young, innocent girl, tricked with fair words and false pretences…’
    ‘For God’s sake! Is this what you have told them, you unclean bitch? That he tricked you, cheated you? He couldn’t trick a child. I’ve told you, the Queen herself had said it, “the heart that knows no guile”. But to excuse yourself to your precious lover here at home, your gross, land-grubbing bumpkin…’
    ‘Lenora, no, no!’ Richard cried out in pain. ‘Poor innocent—!’
    Isabella, dry-eyed, stealing sly glances at her father’s face. ‘Oh, Richard, yes, I was too young and foolish! It was all so seductive, the sighs and pleadings, the dancing in the great hall and the games, the old harridan clapping her speckled hands to see the antics of her pretty Diccon with his latest love—’
    ‘Isabella, you were my only love. You said I was your only love—’
    Her father cut him off short. ‘That will do. She is the one that has done the cozening, boy, and now seeks to excuse herself by betraying you.’ He said to her mother: ‘Take her out of my sight,’ and to the young man, standing there, ashen, white-lipped, staring after the closing door: ‘Why would you press me? You could have placed the fault on me and so kept your illusions. But no, you must insist and now you know all the truth. You are not wanted here, cousin, neither by her parents nor by the girl herself. You have used the right word. It was all a nothingness.’
    Did he sleep, did he dream?—the Squire of Aberdar, in the year of 1840, lying back in the great chair, broken, exhausted, late back from the funeral of his young wife!—dreaming of that hour, here in this very room two hundred and fifty years ago. This room, despite the bright firelight, grown cold and dark as death: oak-panelled, beautiful as a Rembrandt painting with its glow of colour, of satin and velvet, its glimmer of jewels in the flickering of the flames—Lenora, eyes flashing black fury as bright as the jewels themselves. The pretty dagger hung in its sheath at the young man’s thigh, a deadly toy which yet must be commonly carried in those perilous days. He put his hand to the hilt, the white hand heavy with rings, diamond and emerald, ruby and pearl. Stammering, stumbling…‘This is your word? We shall never..? We are parted..?’
    ‘It is her word, boy. You heard her for yourself. You had better—’ But the Squire broke off, cried out: ‘Put away that knife!’, and leapt forward trying to wrest it from the upraised hand. He fell back, helpless. ‘Oh, my dear God! Sweet Jesus—!’
    An age of high romance in the sway of a virgin queen, of chivalry, of danger, of too-ready death, when a kiss might banish a woman to oblivion, a man to the block—an age when dark spirits were abroad, when the