Saraband for Two Sisters

The journey took two weeks. To me it seemed like going from inn to inn, then starting off almost as soon as it was light and going on till the horses needed a rest at midday and then another inn and food before we started off again. We kept to the byways as much as possible, for the groom in charge believed that there was less likelihood of meeting road robbers that way. He said that highwaymen haunted the main roads because more travelers used them and although there might be rich people on the byways robbers might have to hang about in wait for a whole day and meet no one, so they preferred the more regular traffic on the highways. This seemed to me logical and I suppose we had our share of thrills, but nothing seemed to touch me because I wasn’t so much on the road as in that bedroom at Trystan Priory with my sister. When the rain teemed down I scarcely noticed it; when the roads were impassable and we had to retrace our way I accepted it stoically. Mab said to me, “You’m not here, Miss Angelet. That’s what ‘tis.”

And I answered, “I can’t be anywhere, Mab, but back at Trystan Priory with my sister.” And I kept blaming myself in a way because I had so wanted this and it had come about in this strange uncanny way, for I knew my mother would never have consented to our going to London together; she would have thought of all the dangers on the road her darlings would have to face, and perhaps too of other dangers in London society. But there was no danger as great as that which now threatened my sister Bersaba and my mother would agree to anything that took me out of its path.

So the journey progressed. We crossed the Tamar at Gunislake and traveled across Devon to Tavistock and thence to Somerset and to Wiltshire, where carved on the hillside I saw the strange white horse which was said to have been done in the era before Christianity came to England. As we came to Stonehenge, that impressive and most weird stone circle, I thought vaguely of the rites which were doubtless performed there long before the Romans came to Britain and was reminded of the strange murmurs there had been about Carlotta and wondered whether she really had been a witch.

And so Stonehenge and on through Basingstoke to Reading, when I found myself a little excited and being ashamed of it, hastily sending my thoughts back to that sickroom in Trystan Priory. I caught a glimpse of Windsor Castle through the trees. It looked magnificent with its gray towers and battlements and the Great Park which surrounded it; and I thought of history lessons in the Priory schoolroom where I had sat heside Bersaba and we had learned of how Edward the Third had picked up the lady’s garter there and created the motto: “Evil be to him who evil thinks”-a story which we both loved to hear repeated; and how King John stayed there before signing the Magna Carta at Runnymede, and Henry VIII hunted in the forest. Seeing the very castle of which we had heard so much aroused my interest and excitement, but it was overshadowed by memories of my sister.

I thought then, “She will always be there. I shall never escape from Bersaba.” It seemed strange to use the word “escape,” for that sounded as though I were in some sort of captivity from which I wanted to get away.

We were drawing nearer and nearer to London and my thoughts were not: What is awaiting me in London, but any day there might be news of Bersaba. And so we came to Pondersby Hall, the residence of Sir Gervaise, which lay not far from the village of Richmond close to the river-the river on which craft of all sizes and shapes sailed in and out of the city of London.