Abigail by Malcolm Macdonald

matters rest.
    “Also,” Caspar went on, “I’d be grateful if you’d do all you can—you and Winnie—to help her make a success of this first big occasion. You are both very self-assured young ladies and very at ease with people. You could do a great deal, you know—more perhaps than even you think.”
    “Of course!” Abigail almost shouted the assurance. Her brother seemed so vulnerable in his appeal, she would have done anything to restore his usual ebullience.
    “I know we Stevensons are supposed to be the new arrivals and the Sherringhams are the old guard, but in some curious way Linny craves to be accepted by us. And especially by you and Winnie.”
    Abigail was astounded at this news; the thought had never occurred to her. Linny was such a patrician sort of person most of the time.
    “I’d be more than grateful, Abbie,” Caspar said.
    The sun, hugely red yet heatless, flattened as it sank toward the mists above the skyline. The valley was already dark. The frozen lakes along its bottom gleamed like vast, dull stones. As the cart followed the winding driveway up the far side, it seemed they climbed into a second dawning.
    Abigail deliberately did not look at Falconwood until the cart drew up near a small pavilion and Caspar said, “Now.”
    They had timed it perfectly. The sun laid a majestic fire across the red brick of the house. It caught each projection and moulding and lined it with gold. The still untarnished copper spire on the clock tower burned against the violet of advancing night. The orange glow of gaslights flickered through the black windows. And in front of the house gleamed the pale marble of the terrace and steps, colder than the frosted lawns or the ice-sheeted waters.
    It was so exactly what Caspar had wanted that she laughed. She wanted to stand up and jump and clap her hands, like a child. “Oh, Steamer!” she said rapturously. “Just think, if God had been as rich as us, He could have done the whole world like that!”
    When the blasphemy of her words—an utterly unintended blasphemy—struck her, she turned to him and gripped his arm. “I mean…”
    But Caspar was already laughing hugely—a laughter that seemed to carry more relief than humour. “Oh,” he said as he grew calm again, “I told the mater not to worry. Wait till I tell her this!”
    “No. Please! I didn’t mean it in that way.”
    He looked at her, disbelieving, then a little worried. “Really?”
    She thought back. Had she meant it? Had some part of her, just behind her immediate thoughts, actually meant it? She smiled. “Perhaps just a little bit,” she said. “I meant to be funny—say something absurd. But not blasphemous.”
    Life was getting so complicated lately. Until very recently she would never have questioned what lay beyond her immediate consciousness; that would have seemed a kind of blasphemy.
    Then, for the first time in two years, she felt an urge to be writing. Her long-abandoned children’s tale surfaced in her mind just as, in childhood days, thoughts of iced orangeade and pantomimes had surfaced. Pop!
    Caspar, grinning again, stretched an arm about her and squeezed. “Let’s go home,” he said.
    She looked back at Falconwood, knowing that however many times she would see it in years to come, from whatever angles and in whatever moods, it would never again look as lovely as it did now, newborn and waiting to begin its life.
    On their way down into the dark of the vale he turned to her. “That—what you said. I wouldn’t repeat it to Linny. She is very conventional that way.”
    As they breasted the farther slope and emerged again into the last of the twilight he stopped and headed the pony across the drive so that they could look once more at the valley. As night slipped up from the east the brightest stars were already twinkling out of the purple. The colours of the park and woodland had sunk to the darkest resonance of their daylight splendour—a dull mightiness of jostling