Free Voices in a Haunted Room by Philippa Carr

study after the meal. When I went upstairs I heard them talking quietly there.
    My mother came to my bedroom. She sat on my bed and looked at me sorrowfully.
    “How did all this come about?” she asked.
    I told her how they had talked and become so absorbed in their plotting that the rest of us did not seem to exist for them.
    “It was Charlot who started it, I think,” I said.
    “Charlot was always a patriot. He is his father’s son. It is a pity he and Dickon cannot get on.”
    “I don’t think they ever would. They have a natural antipathy.”
    She sighed and I smiled at her.
    “Dearest Maman,” I said, “you cannot have everything in life, can you? And you have so much.”
    “Yes,” she agreed. “I have, and Claudine, remember this when you grow older: one of the best things in life is to have your happiness when you are mature enough to enjoy it.”
    “Well, that is the way you have had it.”
    She nodded. “Don’t worry about these foolish young men. They’ll realize their folly. Dickon will make them see it.”
    But he did not.
    They went off secretly the next day and nobody thought anything about them until evening when they did not return.
    We spent an uneasy night and the next morning a letter arrived for Dickon from Jonathan.
    They had arranged their passage in a boat calling at the Belgian coast and by the time Dickon received the note, they should be about to land.

A Wedding at Eversleigh
    O UR HOUSEHOLD WAS DISRUPTED . Dickon raged and my mother was plunged into melancholy. Although she had never been so close to Charlot as to me, and they had grown farther apart since her marriage to Dickon, he was her son, and I realized during the weeks which followed how his flight saddened her. She knew Charlot had never really wanted to stay in England, and she felt a certain guilt because she understood how frustrated he must have felt. He had come for a holiday—as we all had—and to have been forced to stay in England had angered him.
    I had often heard him say that he wished he had gone back that time with my mother. He would never have come away if he had. He would have stayed behind to fight. David said: “You would not have been there long to fight. You would have been just another in the long march to the guillotine.”
    One remembered these conversations now; one remembered so much. Rides had lost their savour. There was no fear, no hope, of Jonathan’s springing out on me. He had gone. What if he never came back?
    My mother mourned secretly; she did not want to upset Dickon more than he already was. After a while he ceased to show a great deal of distress even though Jonathan, his son, had gone away and into danger so acute that it was hard for any who had not experienced it to imagine. I supposed that Dickon was not very emotionally involved with either of his sons; but they were his heirs, and like most men he had wanted sons. I wondered whether he considered the possibility of Jonathan’s not coming back. Perhaps he consoled himself that he still had David.
    During the first weeks we looked out for them. I would find myself at the top of the house, watching the road; and sometimes my mother would creep up to watch with me. Then she would grip my hand and I knew that she was seeing herself once more in the mairie with the mob below her. Such experiences are never forgotten; and at times such as this, naturally they became more vivid.
    Once she broke down and cried: “This terrible revolution. What good can it possibly bring compared with the evil it has wrought! My father lost his only son. Just think of it! He went out one day and he only came back all that time after when my father was dead. You wouldn’t have known him, Claudine.”
    I pressed her hand; then I kissed it.
    “Thank God I have you,” she said.
    “I will always be near you.”
    “Bless you, dearest child. I believe you will.”
    I would have done anything at that moment to bring her comfort.
    I think what Dickon felt