Spider Light(10)
After some thought Thomasina decided to invite Maud to Sunday lunch at Quire House. When they had eaten she would ask Maud to play some music for her–there was a piano in Quire’s music room–and surely she could get through an hour or so of listening to some stuffy sonata.
The invitation would not be very remarkable, in fact it would be entirely in keeping with the Forrester tradition. Josiah Forrester had believed in showing consideration towards the people who worked for him, and he had taught his daughter to have the same sense of responsibility. Paternalism they called it nowadays, he had said, but it was still plain old-fashioned consideration for dependants. Thomasina smiled as she remembered her father had always been especially considerate to George Lincoln who had run the mill profitably and efficiently for so many years. The Miller of Twygrist, he used to say. Good faithful George. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps, of course, married money and learned how to be a gentleman as he went along but none the worse for that.
After lunch on Sunday, Thomasina would take the miller’s daughter for a walk in Quire’s park, and then accompany Maud to her home. It would all be entirely chaste and perfectly respectable, although there would be a secret pleasure in walking close to Maud along the dark lanes, and slipping an arm around her waist to make sure she did not turn her ankle on an uneven piece of ground.
It was unfortunate that the lane leading to the Lincolns’ house lay alongside Latchkill–she frowned briefly over that–but they could hurry past the gates.
When Maud was small, her mamma used to take her for walks along the lanes around their house, and the walks nearly always took them past Latchkill. You could not actually see Latchkill over the high walls surrounding it, but you could see the little lodge at the side of the big iron gates. If you looked through the bars of the gates you could see along the carriageway to where Latchkill itself stood, squat and dark and frowning on its upward-sloping ground. Maud was always frightened that one day the gates would be open and mamma would go inside and Maud would have to go inside as well. It would be the most frightening thing in the world to hear the iron gates clanging shut behind you, shutting you in.
One afternoon, as they went past Latchkill, mamma said in a voice that made Maud feel cold and fearful, ‘It’s almost spiderlight, isn’t it? So we’d better walk straight past Latchkill today. You must never be caught near Latchkill when it’s spider light time. That’s when the bad things can happen.’
‘Spider light?’ said Maud nervously.
‘Spider light’s the in-between time. It’s the light that spiders like best of all–the time when it isn’t quite day or night: early morning, when the day hasn’t quite started; or evening, when the daylight’s beginning to fade.’ She paused, and then in a faraway voice, said, ‘All those grey winter mornings when you go downstairs from your bed in the dark and open the curtains to find a huge black spider crouching in the half-light. It’s been there all night, that huge black spider–perhaps it’s been watching you and waiting for you, only you didn’t know it was there…
‘That’s the dangerous thing about spider light, Maud: it hides things–things you never knew existed in the world. But once you have seen those things, you can never afterwards forget them.’
Maud had never forgotten about spider light, and even when she was grown up, if she had to walk past Latchkill she always did so quickly, determinedly not glancing in through the gates. There were bad things inside Latchkill: there was spider light, and there were huge heavy doors that shut in things you had not known existed…When she was small, Maud used to dream about the black iron doors that would be inside Latchkill–doors that would be there to shut something terrible away from the world and must never be opened. Sometimes she had woken up crying because of the nightmare. Father always came into her bedroom if she cried, and he seemed to understand about the nightmare. He told her everyone had nightmares, and he would always keep her safe.
After lunch at Quire House, Maud and Miss Thomasina had walked past Latchkill. It had been nice of Miss Thomasina to invite her to lunch, Maud thought, although parts of the afternoon had been a little strange. Miss Thomasina had kissed her very warmly on her arrival which Maud had not expected, and said she had a present for Maud; she loved giving people presents.
The present, laid out on Thomasina’s own bed, was a set of underwear: a chemise, an under-bodice, little silk drawers and stockings to match. At first Maud did not know where to look for embarrassment; underwear was not something you were supposed to discuss, never mind spreading it out on a bed.
‘There was a rose pink set as well,’ Thomasina was saying. ‘But I thought blue matched your eyes. I hope I got the size right. Perhaps we ought to make sure it all fits. Let’s try them on you. I’ll help you out of your things. How slender you are–an eighteen-inch waist, I expect? Yes, I thought so.’
Of course, it was perfectly all right to be undressing like this in Miss Forrester’s bedroom. It was not as if there was a man watching. Even so, Maud felt awkward and a bit shivery, and she felt even more awkward and even more shivery when the chemise was dropped deftly over her head. It probably did not matter that her breasts were touched in the process. Thomasina did not seem to think it mattered; she said Maud had pretty breasts, and dear goodness, there was no need to be blushing so rosily! She had intended a compliment. Had Maud a beau, at all? She was so pretty, there was surely a gentleman interested in her.