The Mistletoe Bride(24)
But now, as she forced herself to look on his beloved, lifeless face, she saw a kind of peace. Finally, Daphne understood. He had been unable to save himself, but he had saved her. She had blamed him for leaving her. Been angry with him. Now the time had come to grieve. She could miss him and mourn the loss of their shared life together, but then set her eyes to the future.
The tears began to fall.
They found her hours later, still dazed. Appearing, as Teddy put it later, like a wraith out of the mist. Cold, rather disorientated, but otherwise all right.
It turned out Daphne had been extremely lucky. There had been some kind of electrical short circuit in the south wing. The wiring in the top corridor had blown and the sparks had set fire to the doll’s house and taken hold. The old summer curtains and brocade stored on the wooden slatted shelves in the housekeeper’s room had caught next and burnt like paper and tinder, cutting off Daphne’s room from the rest of the house. She wouldn’t have stood a chance. She would have been overcome by smoke long before the fire had reached her.
The gardener had tried to get a ladder up to her window, but been beaten back by the flames. They’d called out and shouted, but when she hadn’t answered, they’d feared the worst. It was only as dawn broke and Daphne appeared from the direction of the park, they realised she hadn’t been in her room at all.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Teddy had said, ‘is what the hell you were doing out in the gardens in the middle of the night anyway.’
Daphne tried to explain how she had seen a light burning in the house on the hill, about the man she had followed away from the Hall, but Teddy shook his head. There was no other house on the estate – he had asked around – just workmen’s cottages, certainly nothing grand. As for the doll’s house, it had been bought by the current owners from a Belgian dealer. It wasn’t connected with Dean Hall at all.
And then he patted her hand and, though everyone smiled and said how lucky she’d been, Daphne could see they thought she was in shock. That she was imagining things. The pity in their eyes burned her and she fell silent and turned away.
But Daphne knew. She knew, now, what had happened.
Later, as she rested on the sofa in the Oak Hall – having accepted Teddy’s invitation to stay at Dean Hall as long as she liked, until she felt well enough to go back to London – Daphne began to plan. How she would leave Berwick Street and return to the little house in Chelsea she’d abandoned after Douglas’s death.
Now it was up to her.
Next year, would be better. It was time to begin again.
Author’s Note
This story was inspired by the West Dean Estate in Sussex, the former country home of Edward James. A great benefactor and patron of the arts – dance, sculpture and painting in particular – he was a significant supporter of the Surrealist artists; the original Dali lobster telephone and lips sofa started their life there. When James died, he left the house to be ‘an Eden for the arts’. The flint-faced mansion is still at the heart of the college and filled with many of James’s curios and oddities from his travels, from cases of stuffed birds to a giraffe’s head. A magnificent five-storey doll’s house, dating from the seventeenth century, is thought to be one of the oldest examples anywhere in the world.
A shorter version of the story was first published in Woman & Home magazine in 2009.
WHY THE YEW TREE LIVES SO LONG
Kingley Vale, West Sussex
The Past & Present
Why the Yew Tree Lives So Long
The Lives of Three Wattles, The Life of a Hound;
The Lives of Three Hounds, The Life of a Steed;
The Lives of Three Steeds, The Life of a Man;
The Lives of Three Men; The Life of an Eagle;
The Lives of Three Eagles, The Life of a Yew,
The Lives of Three Yews, The Length of an Age.
TRADITIONAL
Once, the Yew tree lived and died in the company of its friends, the blackthorn and the hawthorn, the birch, the spindle, the ash and the oak. The Yew did not envy the blighted elm or the vulnerable hazel, with their passing brief lives, but it had no ambition to live longer than any other tree in the forest. It was content with its allotted time, by the way of things that were always and forever so.
Neolithic man cleared the wildwood of Kingley Vale for grazing animals and crops, but the Yew on the lower slopes did not mind. Later, Bronze Age artisans constructed burial mounds on the chalky grasslands and limestone hills above the woods, the sleeping tombs of warriors long dead. Later and later still, on the summit of Bow Hill, came the Devil’s Humps and Goosehill Camp and a shabby temple to Roman Gods, and still the Yew did not object. As time walked its steady pace, beneath the dappled light and its ancient green shadow in the glade, Jutes and Britons and Angles breathed and lived and sighed and loved. These tribes were not the same, any more than the trees of the forest were the same. These tribes were not fashioned by the same rituals or traditions or superstitions, yet they lived side by side, in harmonious coexistence, as did the trees. Yew with birch with willow with conifer.