The switch three novels, p.44
Fire of Spring: the captivating story of two very different sisters and the men they love (The Historical Romance Collection), page 44
Fire of Spring
Netta Muskett
Copyright © The Estate of Netta Muskett
First published in Great Britain in 1946 by Hutchinson & Company (Publishers) Ltd
This edition first published 2025 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
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The Historical Romance Collection
by Netta Muskett
from Wyndham Books
Love in Amber
Light from One Star
The High Fence
Love and Deborah
Flowers from the Rock
The Weir House
Give Back Yesterday
Philippa
Candle in the Sun
Golden Harvest
A Daughter for Julia
The Gilded Hoop
Today is Ours
Fire of Spring
Tamarisk
Middle Mist
House of Many Windows
Cloudbreak
Through Many Waters
Read more about
Netta Muskett and her novels:
www.wyndhambooks.com/netta-muskett
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
Preview: Tamarisk by Netta Muskett
FOR PETER, MY SON.
IN
SPRINGTIME
Chapter One
They were amongst her earliest memories, petals of pink and white drifting down from the orchard trees and always eluding the longing grasp of her small, ineffectual hands ‒ beauty never to be caught and held.
Her mother used to let her lie and kick on an old striped rug in the open before it had become a fetish to give babies freedom. The Reverend Gabriel Seaborn had not been quite sure that it was right for his daughters so to expose their chubby pink knees to the public gaze, and he always turned his eyes away from the possible sight of them, but he did not in those early days interfere with what Marie thought right for her babies.
The Reverend Gabriel was a scholar who hoarded learning as a miser his gold, choosing to become a clergyman because the only alternative to a man of his type was to become a schoolmaster. The strange, stern, inhibited soul of Gabriel Seaborn had shrunk from the prospect of parting with his treasured hoard, from not merely yielding it up to others but being obliged to force it on them, to thrust it into their unwilling hands and down their regurgitant throats.
The head master of his school had recommended him for the church and helped him to get there and it was through him that Gabriel as an earnest young man had been given his first curacy from which in due course he had migrated to the great, rambling, disproportionate vicarage of St. Jude’s, Little Pelling, in Hampshire.
He had been a Good Boy, learning his lessons because he loved learning and shunning mischievous companions and pursuits because they held no attraction for him; in due course he became a Good Young Man because he had felt no temptation to be otherwise; and again in due course he became a Good Man, in so far as he had no known vices, did his duty to the uttermost and never strayed from the narrow path on which his feet were set.
He had never ceased to be amazed that he had married a wife. Marie was half French and wholly charming and neither she nor anybody else could have said what had attracted her to the earnest young curate whose head was perpetually in the clouds. It was Gabriel’s mother, widowed and gentle and anxious and soon, she knew, to die who had opened his eyes to the frightening fact that Marie Tenby was in love with him.
‘But ‒ she can’t be! She mustn’t be!’ he said frantically. ‘It means she’ll want to marry me!’
‘Well, you will have to marry, Gabriel, or you will be at the mercy of all kinds of designing women whereas all you want is a good woman who will look after you and your home. Servants are not to be trusted and they come and go. When I am gone, you will need a wife.’
So she encouraged Marie, who was young and good to look at, was quite alone in the world and a good cook and housekeeper. She was engaged as such at the doctor’s big house, her position there as one of the family being in no way derogatory to the vicar’s future wife.
Marie, who had from the first intended to occupy that position, took instant advantage of his mother’s death to bring about the desired result, and was installed in the great, gloomy, cold vicarage within a month of the event which had shown him how lost and helpless he was and how irritating would be the running of a home without a mistress.
And, strangely enough, he loved Marie in his inhibited fashion and she knew it, loving him faithfully and well and understanding him better than anyone else had ever done, perhaps better than he understood himself.
At first she had been afraid that the whole thing had been a colossal blunder for him. The stern asceticism which was like solid rock through his nature stood appalled at what was expected of him in marriage, and at the weakness of his flesh which had brought to his bed this loving, strongly tender woman. He fought against this weakness for long hours in prayer and finally sought his bishop, who sent him back to Marie.
Yet each time a child was born, he felt debased and humiliated in the sight of God and man, and Marie had need of a great patience and understanding and was passionately grateful for her children since loving this strange, cold man left her chilled and hungry.
Marie Ella came first, and though they intended to call her Mariella, the name became Marla and Marla she remained. She was a thin, dark-haired scrap, a creature made of wires with electric sparks running through them. Even before she could walk, she was conscious of a passionate appreciation of her own sensations. If she were hungry, she shrieked herself into a frenzy, and, satisfied, lay in a state of beatitude. Colour and sound and movement enchanted her. She seemed as if she would gather into her small person everything that life held. Marie, watching her, grew afraid for her. She seemed to have been singled out by the gods to extract all their gifts from them, but they, relentlessly, would exact from her the uttermost payment in return.
When Gail came, it was a relief to her mother. She was a round, placid child with fair hair and blue eyes and small hands that lay quietly or played with anything within reach. Gail never screamed because the petals of the apple blossom eluded her. She made do with those that fell on the cot cover. Gail would be no problem child.
It was with the birth of Dennis that Marla’s family came to an end, to her own sorrow but to Gabriel’s relief. The boy nearly cost his mother her life, and held on to his own in feeble delicacy. It was soon apparent that he would never walk other than draggingly and in pain, and the Reverend Gabriel saw in the boy the ultimate punishment for what he still saw as the degradation of his soul through the lusts of the flesh. Twice had God warned him through those frightful bouts of self-shame which had kept him on his knees, sleepless, night after night during the coming of his two daughters. The third time God had struck, not at him but through the defenceless body of his son. It was a strange God to whom this man had raised an altar.
He could not bear to look at his own son, his tormented imagination seeing an accusing finger pointed at him through the sad dark eyes of the child. Yet deliberately he laid his body down on the spikes, walked through the fire, flayed himself with whips, by making the boy his constant companion, carrying the frail body in his arms or, as Dennis grew older, pushing him about the village in the wheeled chair which the doctors had at length recomme nded. It was a familiar sight to the villagers to see their vicar, a tall, thin figure in his long black cassock, pushing the chair in which his son lay in unresentful acquiescence.
‘Such devotion!’ they said admiringly. ‘How many men would do as much for a child, even their own? What a father!’ and the legend of Gabriel Seaborn as a devoted and selfless father helped to fill the little church where, Sunday by Sunday, he offered to the sleepy villagers in their pitch-pine pews sermons which went right over their heads, scholarly, erudite, comfortless ‒ but who cared? Nobody, not even Marie, listened after the first two or three sentences.
Marla hated going to church until her restless mind devised a source of entertainment in changing, in her imagination, the status and position of the people in the pews and the choir stalls and even the pulpit. She would take Mrs. Foster’s neat little girls away, for instance, and give her instead two of the choir boys, dressing Eddie Marlow and Johnny Bates in the white muslin frocks and flower-trimmed hats of Dora and Florrie Foster, with effect so ludicrous that she had to give a hasty cough into her best handkerchief to hide the sudden gust of laughter that swept her. She put old Miss Lang’s bonnet on the peroxide head of Mrs. Leslie, the organist’s wife, and deposited that lady’s gay little hat at a saucy angle on Miss Lang’s sparse smooth locks. It was when she saw, as plainly as if it were really there, Daphne Brown’s pink muslin bonnet on her father’s head of thinning hair, the pink satin strings tied in a bow beneath his chin as he thrust forward in the pulpit to cry: ‘These are the vanities leading the world to the brink of hell!’ ‒ it was then that she disgraced herself and the vicar’s pew by a burst of laughter. It was checked as soon as uttered, Marla shrinking down beside her mother to hide her red-faced, dishonoured head, but nothing could undo the utterance of that high, loud giggle in the middle of the sermon.
Afterwards her father, with a suitable preface as to the heinous nature of her offence, gave her a severe thrashing.
‘It grieves and wounds me beyond measure to have to do this to you,’ he said ‒ but Marla saw the look in his eyes and knew that he lied.
She could have forgiven him for the thrashing; she never forgave that look in his eyes.
She never laughed again in church, and instead of mentally dressing her father in a pink bonnet, she amused herself and made indelible marks on her maturing mind by devising all sorts of penalties and tortures for him. Only when her mother, possibly divining in some way that something was wrong with this beloved child, would touch her hand with her own, would those imaginings cease. She would curl her fingers round those comforting ones and look instead at the stained glass window which shed, in the sunshine, such glowing loveliness on the white surplices of the choirboys and which even in its beneficence touched her father too.
Inside her she smirked with satisfaction in having been made to sit next to her mother, a position which Marie had known she coveted but which, in compassion, had hitherto been awarded to Denny with his special arrangement of cushions and hassocks. Denny was always good in church, on his thin face already that look of other-worldliness which brought a lump to his mother’s throat, and neat, plump Gail was too anxious not to crease her Sunday frock by fidgeting, and too conscious of the admiring looks of the choir-boys to demean herself by twisting this way and that. Calm and stolid, she sat demurely through the sermon, to be rewarded at dinner time by a choice little titbit of the joint or a second helping of a sweet that had only just been made to go round.
Marla, child though she was, was careful never to let her father suspect that it was a reward rather than a punishment to be moved along the pew to sit next to her mother, and Marie never gave her away by look or gesture. Though Gabriel was changing with the years and becoming increasingly hard to understand, she was too loyal to him to let sharp-witted Marla guess what was in her thoughts.
Apart from the undeviating love she bore her mother, the great passion of Marla’s life at that time was Denny upon whom she lavished the wealth of her maternal instinct. Nothing was too wearisome for her to do for him, and though it taxed her too quickly growing body to the limit to push the spinal chair up the hill to the vicarage, she cherished it as her right and refused Gail’s half-hearted offer of assistance.
As the elder daughter of the vicar, she was expected to show an interest in parochial affairs and Marie, anxious that the children should please their father, used to take Marla with her when she went to visit the aged or the sick or the blind.
Her behaviour was exemplary. She would sit on the edge of a chair, her legs neatly together, her feet on the floor, her face serious, her dark eyes fixed on the face of the person they were visiting, her ears missing nothing of the long tales of sickness, of ‘when I had my operation’ and even of deaths and of ‘laying out,’ this last process a source of vast interest not unmixed with fear for the imaginative child.
It was when Marla began to suffer from all sorts of strange ills, with symptoms which she explained accurately to the doctor whilst his probing and sounding could find nothing to justify them, that Marie sensibly decided not to take the child any more into the houses of the sick and dying or just morbid.
Gabriel protested.
‘The people expect it, my dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘and it does the child no harm to see that there is something more in life than the frittering away of time on objectless games.’
‘Gabriel, she’s still a child, only thirteen. Games are her natural outlet.’
‘Nonsense. At thirteen I was reading Gibbons’ Decline and Fall, not these rubbishy things Mariella reads. The Wind in the Willows! Sheer nonsense.’
‘I think we’re lucky that at thirteen she still likes to read The Wind in the Willows, Gabriel,’ said Marie with a little smile. ‘However, I’ll see what Dr. Mason says, but I really cannot have the children laying out their dolls according to Mrs. Retley’s description, or have Marla so convinced that she needs an operation that in the end she’ll have to have one.’
Since Dr. Mason was fully in agreement, Gabriel as usual gave way on such matters to his wife, and Marie went alone to such cottages as were likely to produce harrowing details of sickness, operations and death, and Marla returned to her usual state of rude health and became a rather rowdy little girl again instead of drooping about the house with a look of divine resignation on her face.
For a time she was merely restless and rather naughty, throwing herself into her mother’s arms in a passion of remorse after she had been punished, and thereby causing the sensible Marie a good deal more anxiety than the original naughtiness had done. Marla enjoyed her self-immolation too much and obviously revelled in the welter of emotion aroused by such scenes of forgiveness.
And then, at fourteen, came more than a merely physical change, for the vicar succumbed to influenza and was really ill, and a locum had to be found in the person of a young man, the Rev. Thomas Taylor very newly ordained, and Marla, in common with a good many of the village girls of her own age, Found God.
They found Him by way of confirmation classes held by the young locum in the school-room attached to St. Jude’s, and on Friday evenings the bevy of giggling girls strove to calm their spirits and become suitably decorous under the earnest and quite innocent instructions of the Rev. Thomas Taylor.
Marie, extremely doubtful of Marla’s sincerity but anxious to believe in it, was glad that the young man was so earnest and devout, and as the weeks went by and the time of the confirmation drew near, it really seemed as if her turbulent child had found something outside the world to which to cling. Marla had become thoughtful and quiet, helpful without the often showy display of service in which she delighted. She let small services pass unnoticed, and Marla did not call attention to them.
Not to be outdone, Gail had decided that she would like to be confirmed as well, but her younger daughter caused Marie no anxiety. Gail would take her religion as she took everything else, with a calm acceptance of what she was told and an unwavering belief in her own integrity. When Marla, at this period, admitted in church that she had done those things that she ought not to have done and left undone those things that she ought to have done, she confessed it with a desperate remorse, declaring passionately and bitterly that there was no health in her; Gail, on the other hand, was polite and ladylike about it, and Marie knew quite well that in her heart Gail had no sense of commission or omission, but felt there was considerable health in her.
