by John Harding
I froze. As luck would have it I was ensconced in a large wingbacked chair, its back to the door, invisibling me from any who stood there, providing, of course, they no-furthered into the room. My heart bounced in my chest. If I were discovered it would be my life’s end. No more books.
Then Meg’s voice, ‘She’s not here, you silly ninny. What would she be doing in here? The girl can’t read. She’s never been let to.’
I muttered a prayer that they wouldn’t notice the many books whose spines I had fingerprinted, my footsteps on the dusty floor.
‘Well, that’s as maybe,’ replied Mary, ‘but she’s got to be somewhere.’
The sound of the door closing.
The sound of Florence exhaling. I closed the book carefully and made sure to put it back in its place upon the shelf. I crept to the door, put my ear to it and listened. No sound. Quick and quiet as a mouse, I opened the door, outed, closed it behind me, and sped along the passage to put as much distance as possible between me and my sanctum before I was found. As I made my way to the kitchen I wondered what all the to-do was about. Obviously something had happened that required me at once.
I could hear voices in the drawing room as I tiptoed past and went into the kitchen, where I interrupted Meg and young Mary, who were having an animated chat. At the sound of the door they stopped talking and looked up at me in a mixture of surprise and relief.
‘Oh, thank goodness, there you are, Miss Florence,’ said Meg, deflouring her arm with a swishery of kitchen cloth. ‘Have you any idea what the time is, young lady?’ She nodded her head at the big clock that hangs on the wall opposite the stove and my eyes followed hers to gaze at its face. It claimed the hour as five after three.
‘B-but that’s impossible,’ I muttered. ‘The clock must be wrong. It cannot have gotten so late.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the clock, missy,’ snapped Meg. ‘Begging your pardon, miss, it’s you that’s wrong. You’re surely going to catch it from Mrs Grouse, you’ve had the whole household worried sick. Where on earth were you?’
Before I could answer I heard footsteps behind me and turned and face-to-faced with Mrs Grouse.
‘M-Mrs Grouse, I – I’m sorry…’ I stammered, and then stopped. Her face, rosy-cheeked with its Mississippi delta of broken veins and their tributaries, was arranged in a big smile.
‘Never mind that, now, my dear,’ she said kindly. ‘You have a visitor.’
She turned and went into the passage. I rooted to the spot. A visitor! Who could it possibly be? I didn’t know anyone. Except, of course, my uncle! I had never met him and knew little about him except that, according to his portrait, he was very handsome, the which would be endorsed by Miss Whitaker when she arrived.
Mrs Grouse paused in the passageway and turned back to me. ‘Well, come along, miss, you mustn’t keep him waiting.’
Him! So it was my uncle! Now perhaps I could ask him all the things I wanted to ask. About my parents, of whom Mrs Grouse claimed to know nothing, for she and all the servants had come to Blithe only after they had died. About my education. Perhaps when he saw me in the flesh, a real, living young lady rather than a name in a letter, he would relent and allow me a governess, or at least books. Perhaps I could charm him and make him see I wasn’t at all like her, the woman who had been cultured away.
Mrs Grouse stopped at the entrance to the drawing room and waved me ahead of her. I heard a cough from within. It made me want to cough myself. I entered nervously and stopped dead.
‘Theo Van Hoosier! What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘Asthma,’ he said, apologetically. Then triumphantly, ‘I have asthma!’
‘I – I don’t understand.’
He walked over to me and smiled. ‘I have asthma. I’ve been sent home from school. My mother has brought me up here to recuperate. She thinks I’ll be better off here in the country, with the clean air.’
Mrs Grouse bustled into the room. ‘Isn’t that just grand, Miss Florence. I knew you’d be pleased.’ She dropped a nod to Theo. ‘Not that you have asthma, of course, Mr Van Hoosier, but that you’ll be able to visit us. Miss Florence has been so miserable since Master Giles went off to school, moping around the house on her own. You’ll be company for one another.’
‘I can call on you every day,’ said Theo. ‘If you’ll permit me, of course.’
‘I – I’m not sure about that,’ I mumbled. ‘I may be…busy.’
‘Busy, Miss Florence,’ said Mrs Grouse. ‘Why, whatever have you to be busy with? You don’t even know how to sew.’
‘So does that mean I may, then?’ said Theo. He puppied me a smile. ‘May I call on you, please?’ He stood holding his hat in his hand, fiddling with the brim. I wanted to spit in his eye but that was out of the question.
I nodded. ‘I guess, but only after luncheon.’
‘That’s dandy!’ he said and immediately got himself into a coughing fit, which went on for some time until he pulled from his jacket pocket a little metal bottle with a rubber bulb attached, like a perfume spray. He pointed the top of the bottle at his face and squeezed the bulb, jetting a fine mist into his open mouth, which seemed to quieten the cough.
I curioused a glance at him and then at the bottle.
‘Tulsi and ma huang,’ he said. ‘It’s an invention of your Dr Bradley here.’
I puzzled him one.
‘The former is extracted from the leaves of the Holy Basil plant, the latter a Chinese herb long used to treat asthma. It is Dr Bradley’s great idea to put them together in liquid form and to spray them into the throat for quick absorption. He is experimenting with it and I am his first subject. It appears to work.’
There followed an awkward silence as Theo slowly absorbed that the subject had not the interest for me that it had for him. Then, in repocketing the bottle, he managed to drop his hat and as he and Mrs Grouse both went to pick it up they banged heads and that started him off coughing and wheezing all over again. Finally, when he had stopped coughing and had his hat to fiddle with once more, he gave me a weak smile and said, ‘May I visit with you now, then? After all, it is after luncheon.’
‘It may be after yours,’ I said, ‘but it ain’t after mine. I haven’t had my luncheon today.’ And I turned and swept from the room with as much poise as I could muster, hoping that in getting rid of Theo, I hadn’t jumped it back into Mrs Grouse’s mind about me going missing earlier on.
3
Suddenly my existence was uncosied. I was seriously problemed. First I had to make sure I didn’t fail to show up for a meal again, lest next time they went looking for me they find me, with all the repercussions that would involve. But the question was easier posed than solved. I had no timepiece. Then over a late luncheon, when Mrs Grouse was so full of Theo Van Hoosier she didn’t think to interrogate me as to my whereabouts earlier, I pictured me something about the library that might undifficulty me regarding my problem and, as soon as I’d finished eating, slipped off and made my way there.
Sure enough, tucked away in a dark corner, mute and unnoticed, was a grandfather clock. It was big, taller than I, though not nearly so tall as Theo Van Hoosier, the prospect of whose daily visits almost unthrilled me of the finding of the clock. Gingerly I opened the case, as I had seen John do with other clocks in the house, and felt about for the key. At first I thought I was to be unfortuned, but then as I empty-handed from the case there was a tinkle as my little finger touched something hanging from a tiny hook and there was the key. I inserted it in the hole in the face and began winding, being careful to stop when I met resistance, for John had warned me that overwinding had been the death of many a timepiece.
I had noted the time when leaving the kitchen and to be safe added fifteen minutes on to that to allow for my getting to the library and for the finding of the key. The clock had a satisfyingly loud tick and I thought how at last I would no longer feel alone here. There would be me, my books and something akin to another h
eartbeat, if only in its regularity. Something, moreover, that wasn’t Theo Van Hoosier.
Of course, no sooner did the starting of the clock end one problem than it began another. For if anyone should venture into the library its ticking was so loud they could not fail to notice it and so be set to wondering who had started it and kept it wound and then on to working out who had been here. I shrugged the threat away. So be it. I had to know the time during my sojourns here or I would be discovered anyway. Besides, no one else had ever been in here in all my librarying years, so it unlikelied anyone would now. Too bad if they did; it was a risk I had to take.
That afternoon it colded and our first snow of the fall fell. I watched it gleefully, hoping it would mean that Theo Van Hoosier would not be able to visit. Surely if his asthma was enough to keep him from school he should not be trudging through snow with it? I kept my fingers crossed and imagined him asthmaed up at home, consoling himself with a bad verse or two.
With this promise of salvation, though, the snow difficulted me in another way. Or rather the drop in temperature did. I had never wintered much in the library, because it had no fire and colded there, and because before I always had Giles to keep me amused elsewhere. Although I tried gamely, determined reader that I am, to carry on there, my fingers were so cold I could scarce hold my book or turn its pages, let alone keep my numbed mind on it. I slipped out of the room and by means of the back staircase made my way to the floor above. There I found a bedroom whose stripped bed was quilted only in dust, but footing it was an oak linen chest in which were three thick blankets. Of course, there was riskery in transporting these to the library, because if I encountered anyone en route I would be completely unexplained. And unlike a book, I could not simply slip a bulky blanket inside my dress.
Nevertheless, without the blankets I would not be able to read anyway, so it had to be done. I resolved to take all three at once since one would be just as hard to conceal as three and the fewer blanketed trips I made, the lower the risk. They were a heavy and awkward burden, the three together piled so high I could scarce see over them, but I outed the room and pulled the door shut after me with a skill of foot-flickery. I had halfwayed down the back stairs and was about to make the turn in them when I heard the unmistakable creak of a foot on the bottom step of the flight below. I near dropped my load. It was no good turning and running, one way or another I would be caught. There was nothing for it but to stand and await my fate. I held my breath, listening for another step below. It never came. Instead I heard Mary’s voice, talking to herself (ah, I thought, so I am not the only one who does that!). ‘Now where did I put the darned thing? I made sure it was in my pocket. Damnation, I shall have to go back for it.’
I heard a slight grateful groan as the stair released her foot and then angry footsteps hurrying along the corridor below. I waited a moment after their sound had faded away, then scurried down, tore along the passage and ducked through the library door.
There I pushed together two of the big leather wingbacked armchairs, toe to toe, and nested me in them with two of the blankets for a bed and the third stretched over the tops of the chair backs to make a canopy. I thought of it as my own four-poster, though of course it had nary a single one. When I left the room I pushed apart the chairs again, folded the blankets and hid them behind a chaise longue. It might offchance that someone entering the room would just not notice the clock, or attach the correct significance to it if they did, clocks being an ever present in many rooms and an often unnoticed background kind of thing. But they could not fail to see my nest and so it had to be constructed every day anew.
Thus began a new pattern to my days. The mornings I tick-tocked away in my nest, contenting me over my books until the clock struck the quarter hour before one, when I denested, slipped from the room and hurried to lunch. But soon as Theo Van Hoosier began to call, the afternoons problemed me anew. I had no way of knowing what time he might arrive and despite my best efforts to schedule him he proved as unreliable as he was tall. Sometimes he appeared directly after lunch; others he turned up as late as half past four. He excused himself on the grounds that he had a tutor and was dependent upon the whimmery of same.
Now, suppose I went to the library and young Van Hoosier came while I was there, it would be as bad as the time I missed lunch. They would search for me and either my secret would be discovered or later they would question it out of me. On the other hand, if I hung around in the drawing room or the kitchen waiting for Theo and he arrived late, I could waste hours of precious reading time.
That is what I was forced to do, the first few Van Hoosier days. I sat in a twiddlery of thumbs looking out the window at the snow or playing solitaire. The worst thing was my idleness attentioned me to Mrs Grouse and set her to wondering why she had not noticed it before; she didn’t guess how I had always out-of-sighted-out-of-minded me, and it started her talking about me doing something useful, such as learning to sew. She even sat me down one day and began to mystify me with stitchery. I thought I would lose my mind.
I have read somewhere that boredom mothers great ideas and so it was with me. Where I was going wrong was in my association of reading with the library, whereas in fact all I needed was somewhere I could private myself and from where I could keep an eye on the front drive to see the approach of Theo Van Hoosier. No sooner had I thought of this than I solutioned it. Blithe House had two towers, one at the end of either wing. They were mock gothic, all crenellations, like ancient fortresses, and neither was at all used any more. I suspect they were never made much of, since each had its own separate staircase, its upper floors reachable only from the ground, so that to go from the room on the second floor to one on the same floor in the neighbouring part of the house, you first had to descend the tower stairs to the first floor, go to one of the staircases leading to the rest of the house and then ascend again. But what the towers promised to offer was a commanding view of the drive. From the uppermost room, of either, I guessed, I would be able to see all its curvy length. The function of the towers had always been decorative rather than practical, and the one on the west wing had been out-of-bounded to Giles and me because it was in need of repair, which naturally, with my uncle’s tight pursery, never came. Therefore I could be sure that no one would ever go there. If I could get to it unobserved, I would be able to read whilst looking up from time to time to observe the drive. Moreover, the west tower had another great convenience: it was only a short corridor and a staircase away from the library, a necessary proximity, because I would have to carry books up there.
Consequently, the following afternoon, armed with a couple of books in readiness for an afternoon of reading and Van Hoosier spotting, I duly set off for the west tower, only to be met by the most awful hope-dashery at the foot of its stairs. In all my plotting there was something I had quite forgot. Placed across the bottom of the stairs, nailed to the newel post, were several thick boards, floorboards no less, completely blocking any ascent, put there, like the planks and stone slabs over the well, to prevent Giles and me from dreadful accidenting. I set down my books and tried to move the planks, but they were firmly fixed, so I only splintered a finger for my trouble; no budgery was to be had. I was in a weepery of frustration. I tried putting my feet on one board to clamber over, but there was no foothold for it, access was totally denied. Besides, I realised, even if I had been able to climb over, any entry so arduous and difficult would be so slow I’d be laying myself open to redhandery should anyone chance that way.
I picked up my books and had started to walk away, utterly disconsolate at the loss of my afternoons just when I thought to have recovered them, when I brained an idea. I dashed back, went around the side of the staircase, pushed my books through one of the gaps between the banisters, then hoisted myself up and found I could climb the stairs from the outside, by putting my feet in the gaps. In this way I was able to ascend past the barricade and then, thanks to my leg-lengthery, haul myself over the banister rail and onto th
e staircase. I stood and looked down with satisfaction at the barrier below and felt how safe and secure I would be in my new domain. I certained no one else would be able to follow me. I couldn’t imagine Mary or fat Meg or plump Mrs Grouse stretching a leg over the banister rail, even if they had been witted enough to think of it.
I made my way up to the second floor, then to the third and finally through a trapdoor to the fourth, the uppermost, from which I could look down upon not only the driveway but also the roof of the main building. The top of the tower consisted of a single room, windowed on all sides. I stood there now, mistress of all I surveyed, fairytaled in my tower, Rapunzelled above all my known world. I looked around my new kingdom. It was sparsely furnished and appeared to have been at one time a study. There was a chaise and a heavy leather-topped keyhole desk, the leather itself tooled with a fine layer of mould, and before the desk, a revolving captain’s chair. It was heads or tails whether the library or this room contained more dust and I would not have liked to wager upon it. The windows were leaded lights and a few of the small panes were missing, so a fine draught blew through the room and there were bird droppings on the dusty floor, showing that the wind was not the only thing that entered this way.
Still, it was all a wonder to me. The windows had drapes at the four corners but these were all tied back and I realised I would have to be careful and keep my head low so as not to be visible from below. No matter, if I sat at the desk, I could Van Hoosier the drive and so long as I did not move about excessively no one was likely to see me.
The ventilation of the missing panes meant the room would always be cold and my first task was to secure more blanketry. I set down my books and duly went scavenging. It tedioused having to go right down to the first floor and then up again to the second for my purloinery but there was no other way. I had emptied my old chest of blankets for the library and I did not fortune upon another such. However, I did find a couple of guest bedrooms that were kept in readiness should we ever have another guest and I to-the-winded my caution, stripped them of their quilts, stole two of the three blankets beneath and then replaced the quilts. I surveyed what I had done. I had skinnied the beds but I couldn’t imagine anyone would notice, and should a maid remake the bed she probably wouldn’t suspect. After all, who at Blithe – other than a shivering ghost – would steal a blanket?