Dance of the Years Read online

  MARGERY ALLINGHAM

  Dance of the Years

  THIS BOOK

  IS FOR

  MRS. EMILY JANE HUGHES

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  When Mr. Galantry (the one who was called “Will” or “Squire”) first saw the gypsy, she was wooding in the spinney behind the Home Farm where Jason lived. She was bent after the sticks, and there was an attractive ellipse of olive back between her bodice and her short skirt.

  She was at the sapling stage then, as fine-drawn as she ever was in her life, only just formed, very strong and yet soft and warm-looking, and the hollows under one of her knees were exposed as she grovelled among the wiry grass.

  Old Galantry, who was a widower, and completely alone now that his children were grown and gone, had very few illusions left about himself at that time. He knew that in twenty years he would be dead, or better dead, for he had no desire to go on living after the four-score.

  The era to which he belonged was very nearly dead already. Its final pains had been upon it for the best part of his life, and to him the very smell of the world was cold and acrid with foreboding of the winter to come. He had reached the age when a man has glimpsed the end of the twisting and surprising path of his life, and has faced and recognized, if only for a minute or two in the night, either the darkness and the cold, or the sharp agony which precedes the rebirth.

  Old Will Galantry saw the dark and felt the cold, and whilst it did not frighten him particularly, it made him melancholy.

  He kissed the girl casually, as he had every right, just as he had a right to caress or chastise any other creature on the estate. She did not scuttle away, but stayed close to him for a moment, which both surprised and rather pleased him. He walked on for a bit, and was amused at himself for remembering that he had an old coat on. Gypsies were abominably dirty.

  The dapling yellow light spilt through the leaves on to them, making a romantic picture, which made him wish again that he had built one of those little sham-classical ruins he had always promised himself since his return from the grand tour nearly thirty-five years before.

  A great many people had them now, indeed they were positively common, but the idea was a charming conceit he thought, and could, if combined with the right kind of rock and fern garden, be very elegant and fitting. This kind of encounter would be dignified and romanticized by one anyhow.

  The girl was walking easily and with perfect balance, a peculiarity of the wild animal and the well-bred one, he reflected, not to be found in the middle. Some of the country girls could hardly keep on their feet, they were so clumsy.

  This was a very wild little thing. He could feel the life in her pouring into him almost painfully, and although it was a phenomenon with which he was not unacquainted since he had been a countryman dealing with living things nearly all his time, he noted it with particular interest because it was so strong.

  She left him when they reached the end of the woodland and he felt an old man again as he went on alone. The whole thing was the most trivial of incidents; no more extraordinary than an encounter with a tame doe or an unexpectedly kind foal, of which last, to be honest, she vaguely reminded him. But he harked back to it several times as he walked back to the Hall, and at night when he sat by the fire with his bottle and his Virgil, he thought of it again.

  Two or three years later (which was the time when most of them heard about it) Galantry’s amused friends and infuriated relations could only suppose that the old man went a little mad that evening, but that was not true.

  Galantry had no particularly remarkable brain, but what he had served him very well, and his behaviour, if inconsiderate from an outside point of view, was not illogical. Strictly from his own standpoint, it had in it a certain amount of cold, self-preservative sense. The thing so few people remembered afterwards was the recklessness of that peculiar hour.

  Among the landed gentry, the conviction that the country was on the decline had been growing for some time. Galantry was not a wealthy member of the caste, but he certainly belonged to it. He had an estate worth three to four thousand a year, if no very distinguished connections save through his wife; but she was dead and her relatives not congenial to him. He was essentially a countryman, at heart a bookman, and as he sat there alone in the small library in which he had dined, he feared that the Island’s glory was dying, and not very slowly.

  Politically, the situation was horrific. The turn of the century had found the country at war and alone, the sole European Power still upon its feet in the path of a military genius who ranked with Alexander. While on its throne sat a German king of pronounced and unexpectedly successful despotic tendencies, who was so convincingly, so unquestionably and publicly insane, that every now and again his subjects, albeit respectfully, put him under restraint.

  Meanwhile, Pitt was seriously ill, and the French Emperor’s grand army encamped on the cliffs of Boulogne was looking across the Channel consideringly.

  Like many Englishmen before and since, old Galantry sat placidly in his own house, by his own fire, quite alone and quite calm, and wondered with a sort of proud exasperation, why on earth everybody else in the country was not panic-stricken and rioting. The prospect was hopeless from Galantry’s point of view, enemies at the gate and God knew what inside it.

  He had never considered the gradual rise of industry, which had been going on all his life-time, as a revolution, but he could not very well miss that something tremendous was happening there; the changes which had been creeping over the land secretly for years had now received such an impetus from the never-ending French wars, that their progress was visible to the most determinedly blind, which he was not. The world was changing under his nose, between green shoot and stubble. The old order was going and the new one was rolling into place, gasping so painfully, retching and suffering so wretchedly in its agonizing birth-pangs, that he might well be excused for mistaking them for death convulsions.

  Galantry could do little about it. He knew that as certainly as that he was getting old. He was a cold, shy man. He was prudent; his children thought him mean. He was lazy. His servants thought him easy-going. He was a romantic, and, long ago, something of a poet. He loved books better than men now, and as a reward sat in his library alone with only the dark shelves and softly flaming candles to keep him company.

  In spite of the difficult times, there was no starvation on the Groats Hall estate; he could see to that, and did so in a well-meaning if somewhat haphazard fashion. And there was life there too, of a sort.

  Jason’s breeding boxes were full of the new light horses, which were replacing the heavy pack animals now
that the roads were no longer mere cart-tracks needing the plough every spring. But horses do not need the amount of men which the arable land demands, and the vast open tracts of grazing at Groats asked little care.

  Old Will Galantry was not a great sporting man, nor was he any great power in the district, being inclined to forget his magisterial duties. The fact was, he was finishing; he was coming quietly and he hoped decently to an end. When he died Groats would be sold. Young Will did not want it; that young man had his work cut out being a son to his wife’s father far away in the West Country where three thousand acres were maturing under his prudent eye. Jack and Ben were at sea, neither of them could hope to buy the other out; while Lucius the youngest, with his practice at the Bar, was elbowing his way against the cleverer sons of poorer men, and was not likely to aspire to a country seat.

  The estate was not so valuable now, either. Five daughters had taken five portions. The Yarrow Farms and the two hundred acres on the Frating side had gone over to a new farmer who was working them as though he meant to get the very life out of the earth. It had to be faced, there was no future for Groats as far as the Galantrys were concerned. The end would come quietly in ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years hence, providing always, of course, that the country squeezed and shuffled through its present difficulties.

  Twenty years did not seem a long time to Galantry. Twenty miracles of the aconites bursting yellow and wet through the barren earth; twenty apple harvests; twenty short, sweet, hot summers; twenty Christmases; twenty, only twenty; and each solid pleasure in life growing fainter as his own powers failed, and then, nothing.

  This was the general background to his mind at that time, but the peculiar and particular virtue of that actual moment, the essence of its sudden youth and headstrong impulsiveness, lay in something else.

  Just now, and for a little while, the country was in physical danger, and was reacting to the phenomenon in its own oddly exalted way. This was the hour of freedom. This was the psychological moment when the very stones cried out; that magical, dangerous, instinctive time when land and people, dead earth and quick earth, seemed to fuse and stand solid, age, possessions, degrees and prudence, all forgotten in one glorious, unanimous bellow of exuberant defiance.

  Galantry felt this deep national exultation. He approved it and thanked God for it with that kind of wondering satisfaction with which cold people warm their hands at an unexpected fire on their own heart’s hearth. But he felt the heat through an insulating glove; having had unlimited time for thought all his life, he had done a little thinking and he saw now that the flame was emotional and probably ephemeral. All the same the phenomenon had an effect upon him. The effect which the ‘days of power’ had on Galantry was to make him feel released from something. His responsibilities at first felt less heavy, and then began most dangerously to look downright silly.

  So, stripped of what was after all the fairly light harness of the conventional worries and repressions of a comfortable and still eighteenth-century life, he saw himself briefly for what he was inside—a cold, rightly deserted old man, with a strong vein of sensuousness, and a thin vein of poetry in him. And twenty declining years with which to do whatever he liked in a crumbling world.

  He had taken a length of dead branch out of the wood box during these considerings. It was still damp, he noticed, and the lichen on the bark was still green. As he thrust it among the red castles and valleys in the fire, he thought seriously about the gypsy and her rare, revitalizing warmth. The trouble was, of course, she would run away.…

  It is probable that in normal conditions the staggering notion of marrying her would never have occurred to him, but just then, just in those few weeks of power, when everybody in the land was thinking in terms of what could, rather than what ought to be done, it did not seem any more absurd than many of the other practical but unconventional shifts which were being put into practice all over the place.

  Old Galantry knew a little about the gypsies and their mysterious ways. At one time he had considered them a romantic tribe, but that was a delusion from which he had recovered on making their acquaintance. He knew that if the girl was one of the Smith tribe, as he thought she was, she would find no refuge among her own people if she deserted a lawfully wedded husband, especially if he were a man of authority. Moreover, the law of the land still gave a man pretty nearly absolute powers over his wife. Once he married her there would be no humiliating running away.

  That, as near as can be set down on paper, is the truth of what happened to Galantry, and how he came to do what he did, and why the child was so dark. It made a tremendous amount of trouble from the beginning.

  The gypsies were not only considered by the entire countryside to be unfit for civilized society, but some of them were; and when Jason remarked that “the old fellow might as well have married a pig,” he spoke with that awful reasonableness and complete disregard for anybody or anything but his own honest opinion, which the East Country folk have always possessed.

  Shulie (everybody knew what that was short for and it did not help, although it made old Galantry laugh) never took kindly to the house, and was sullen and dirty in it, but she was given to sudden fits of exalted happiness when in the open air, and would sometimes stand in the wind with her arms thrown out, her full breasts bursting at her bodice, and her dark hair, which was oily and curling, blowing out behind her. She was very young and some people were half sorry for her at those times, but their pity did not last because, although docile, she really was abominably uncouth. Also, of course, the ‘days of power’ passed.

  At the time, Galantry told nobody outside his own household, and managed the thing very quietly. He had no near neighbours that winter, while the country folk were so deeply and completely shocked that they kept the story comparatively dark, fearing it might somehow reflect disgrace on the very district. In self-defence they altered the facts a little, too, and spoke primly of ‘a young country person.’ Thus, quite unconsciously, giving the impression that Galantry had gone soft in old age, and had married one of his own maidservants. This was a jolly story, but better than the truth, which struck nobody as funny.

  Shulie was thrust into a decent stuff dress, which came down to the slippers she would keep discarding. In the end they kept her out of sight as much as possible, but by the time the first family had even heard of the marriage, and came rushing down in panic to find it legal and unalterable, she was seven months with child; while old Galantry, although in undisputable possession of his senses, was delighted and tremendously amused and proud of himself.

  Chapter Two

  It was six years now since the first Mrs. Galantry had been carried down the hill to the churchyard, and ever since that day Dorothy Holding, who was a maid at five pounds a year and all found, had been the actual mistress of Groats. In a sense, she had held the office before then, but nobody ever suggested that she did not know her place.

  The fact was that the first Mrs. Galantry had been a charming little woman with about as much sense at fifty as she had possessed at fourteen. She had had china-blue eyes, a lovely shape, no energy whatever, great obstinacy, and a totally erroneous theory that was she a natural blue-stocking. Her main affectation, this pretention to a rare, God-given appreciation of letters, persisted all her life. She confused it with an accomplishment and treated it as if it had been a neat way with a song, or a knack of doing her hair.

  In fact, she flourished it prettily. She brought it out in the evening before guests, taught her children to imagine it was far more mysterious and important than it could ever have been if genuine, and generally played the goat with it in a way which amused her husband in his youth, embarrassed him in his middle age, and later on filled him with fury.

  However, quite apart from her intellectual pretensions, the good lady was no housekeeper, and did not even pretend to be one, which was at least original in her, for at that time the attribute was not only fashionable, but essential, if a woman was to be mistress in
her own house.

  In the wilds surrounding Groats, every winter was a time of siege. The parishes round about had not done their duty by the roads, and as yet the very new macadaming had come nowhere near them. When the first heavy rains turned the clay to a quagmire, Groats was practically cut off from wheeled traffic. Somebody had to keep the machinery of civilized living going, and gradually Dorothy Holding, who had begun work in the dairy when she was seven, and had risen slowly to be housekeeper, took more and more responsibility for the general comfort. When the first Mrs. Galantry died, she took it all.

  Dorothy was born for it. She was one of those women who remain unaltered by any change in the social life of the century. In Saxon hall, Caroline still-room, or the manager’s room in the latest block of service flats, wherever or whenever a large household has had to be fed, cleaned, bedded and controlled, one of the Dorothy Holdings of the world has bustled there, secret, single-minded, and quite extraordinarily powerful.

  In the end, whatever the theories of civilized living, the answer lies in them. Fly to the secret parts of the earth and they are there, looking out casually and with preoccupied eyes from the doorways of the largest huts; come back to the newest communal feeding centre and they are there again, selfless, untiring, thinking of something else. They are the ultimate bosses whenever man pauses for a moment in his hag-ridden experimenting to enjoy the earth.

  Old Galantry was always saying this sort of thing to Dorothy, making fun of her cautiously, as intellectual men do of practical women of whom they are more than half terrified. His favourite remark was that when the world ended, and all the dead arose prodigiously hungry no doubt, since their humanity was to be restored to them, some helpful person would be certain to set about directing a fair and orderly distribution of the loaves and fishes, and that that person, as sure as God made little apples, would be Dorothy Holding.

  She never responded to this in any way, and her silence used to disconcert him. He would try to re-establish his superiority by marvelling to himself at her stupidity, but he was never quite sure how much of a fool she was.