Saraband for Two Sisters Read Free

She was wearing her dark red outer petticoats which we called safeguards and which we always wore for riding. I had put on my blue ones. Although we sometimes dressed alike we did not always wear identical clothes. There were occasions when we liked to because we took a mischievous delight in puzzling people. I could put on a good impersonation of Bersaba and she could of me. We used to practise sometimes, and one of the great jokes of our childhood had been to deceive people in this way. We would laugh until we were hysterical when someone said to her: ‘Now, Miss Angelet, it’s no use your pretending to be Miss Bersaba. I’d know you anywhere.’ It gave us a kind of power, as I pointed out to Bersaba. We could put it to good use on certain occasions. Well, on this day she wore her red so I wore my blue; our cloaks matched our safeguards and we each had brown soft boots. So there would be no danger in our being mistaken for each other on that journey. But when we were at Paling I knew we would wear identical clothes at times and enjoy deceiving them.
    We rode one on either side of our mother. She was a little pensive. No doubt she would be thinking of our father and wondering where he was at that moment. There was always anxiety in her mind because so many dangers lurked on the high seas and she could never be sure whether he would come back.
    Once I mentioned this to her, and she said that if she did not suffer these anxieties she could not be so happy when he did come home. We must always remember that life was made up of light and shadow and the light was the brighter because of the contrasting shadow. She was a philosopher, my mother; and she was always trying to teach us to understand and accept life as it was, because she felt such an attitude would be a cushion if ever misfortunes came to us.
    If my father and brother had been riding to Castle Paling with us she would have been completely happy. I loved her intensely as we rode along and I started to sing in sheer thankfulness to God who gave her to me:
    ‘And therefore take the present time With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny-no
    For love is crowned with the prime
    In spring time …’
    My mother smiled at me as though she shared my thoughts and she joined in the song and told the servants to do the same. Then we all took turns to sing the first line of a song of our choice and the rest of us would come in, but when it was Bersaba’s turn she sang alone because no one joined in with her. It was Ophelia’s song:
    ‘How should I your true love know From another one?
    By his cockle hat and staff
    And his sandal shoon
    He is dead and gone, lady
    He is dead and gone;
    At his head a grass green turf,
    At his heels a stone.’
    Bersaba had a strange haunting voice, and when she sang those words I imagined her lying in the stream with her long dark hair floating round her and her face white and dead. There was something strange about Bersaba, something I didn’t understand, for all that she was said to be part of me. She had that quiet personality which seems not to intrude and yet can change the mood of all those around her.
    She had made us forget the June morning, the sun, the flowers and the joys of living because she had reminded us of death. We stopped singing then and silently we rode on until the towers of the castle came into view.
    The sun picked out the sharp points in the granite and made them glisten like little diamonds. It was indeed an impressive sight which never failed to thrill me. Defiant, bold, arrogant, the castle always seemed like a living thing to me, and I never failed to feel proud to be connected with it. Our house was mellow in a way, although its stones might well be as old as those of the castle—or almost; but Trystan seemed gentle, homely, when compared with Castle Paling. Its four battlemented towers proclaimed it for what it was, a fortress which had remained impregnable for six hundred years, for it had been built in the days of