The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [269]
‘I remember the excitement in London, back in forty-five,’ he would say, ‘when the Scots tried to march south under Bonnie Prince Charlie.’ Every victory of the British on the high seas or out in India seemed to have a story to go with it, and when she was a child he used to relate these to her vividly, so that, without knowing it, she had learned much of the history of her times from him.
She was sad to see his decline, but glad that she was there to be at his side in these final years.
‘Perhaps’ – her Aunt Adelaide’s voice broke into the silence, now – ‘you will meet a handsome beau at Oxford.’
‘Perhaps.’ Fanny laughed. ‘Mr Gilpin told me today I should fall in love with a poor professor.’
‘I don’t think that’s what a Miss Albion would do, is it, Fanny?’
‘No, Aunt Adelaide, I don’t think it is.’
She loved her aunt’s aristocratic old face. She hoped she would look like that one day too. It seemed to her that Adelaide could not have had a very happy life, but she never complained. If Mrs Pride ran the house in the practical sense, her aunt Adelaide was still its family guardian – the guardian angel, really.
It was evenings like this, when her father was dozing or had retired to bed, and she and Adelaide were sitting quietly together, that Fanny treasured most. The old house so silent; the shadows, like familiar ghosts, always in the same places on the panelling in the candlelight – at such times, her aunt would begin to talk. And she started to do so now.
Fanny smiled. Her aunt told the same stories over again, yet she was always happy to hear them. It was probably because, although her father’s stories were interesting, they concerned only his own life; whereas Adelaide spoke about a more distant past – her mother Betty, her grandmother Alice, the story of the Albion inheritance going back centuries. Fanny’s own inheritance. Yet the wonderful thing was that when her aunt Adelaide told it, all these things seemed to have happened only yesterday.
‘My mother was born just after the Restoration of King Charles II,’ Adelaide could say. That was more than a hundred and thirty years ago. Yet Betty Lisle was a living memory. Adelaide had shared this house with her for forty years. ‘That’s her favourite chair, where you sit now,’ her aunt would say. Or, one afternoon in the garden: ‘I remember the day my mother planted that rose tree. It was sunny, just like this …’ The very house itself seemed to become like a living person too. ‘The brick skin of the house was put on when grandmother was a girl by her father. But he left the timbers and this old panelling’, she would add, with a nod to the wall, ‘just as it was in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Of course’ – and here followed a vivid personal description of the terrifying figure in red and black – ‘it was from this room, on a night like this, that old Lady Albion went out to try to raise the county to join the Spanish Armada.’
How could anyone fail to love such family history? But – here was the real difference between her aunt’s and her father’s stories – Adelaide’s were told with such feeling for the people she spoke about. She would tell Fanny how this one had known hardship, or that one lost a child and grieved, so that the ghostly figures peopling the house became like friends whose joys and sadnesses one shared and whom, were such a thing possible, one wanted to sustain and comfort.
‘I try to keep things as they were for my dear mother and father,’ Adelaide liked to say. And even if I do decide to add some Gothic features, thought Fanny, I too will continue as loyal guardian of the family shrine.
There was only one story, though, which used to move Aunt Adelaide to tears and that was the tale of her grandmother, Alice Lisle.
It was ironic, really, that Monmouth’s rebellion and the execution of Alice Lisle should have come when they did. For within three years of Monmouth’s attempt to seize the throne for the Protestant cause, King James II had so infuriated the English Parliament with his promotion of Roman Catholicism