Saraband for Two Sisters

There were three girl cousins. Melder, the eldest, was twenty-six and disinclined to marry; she loved housekeeping and coped with Grandfather Casvellyn better than anyone else partly because she remained impassive when he swore and cursed her and everything round him, and quietly went on with what she had come to do. Then there was Rozen, aged nineteen, and Gwenifer seventeen.

As Aunt Melanie, my father’s sister, had married my mother’s brother Connell, there was a double relationship between us all. It seemed to bind us very closely together but perhaps that had come about because Aunt Melanie was the homemaking family-conscious type of woman-just as my mother was-and they believed in welding families together.

Bersaba had started to sketch Bastian.

“He’s not as handsome as that,” I protested.

She flushed and tore the paper in halves.

I thought to myself: She really loves Bastian. But the next moment I had forgotten it.

A week later we set out for Castle Paling, Bersaba and I, our mother, three grooms, and two maidservants. We really did not need servants, for there were plenty at Paling, but the roads were not altogether safe and the servants were a protection. My father had made my mother promise never to ride out without making sure that she was adequately guarded against attack, and although the roads between Trystan Priory and Castle Paling were well known to us she would never go against his wishes. Bersaba looked pretty on that morning. June is such a lovely month when the hedges are gay with wild roses and lacey chevril while great clumps of yellow gorse brighten the downs and the red sorrel shows itself in the fields. 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 practice 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 similar 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 nonino

For love is crowned with the prime

In springtime ...

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 May 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.