Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady!”
Piping out into the vast kitchen, her thin, small voice was hardly strong enough to reach the bleak, high ceiling overhead, but it helped her to scrub. “Falling down,” sang Emily, at the same time suiting the action to the words. Down, brush! Down, brush! Even though the nursery rhyme soon lost all semblance of a tune, sung over and over as it was, it carried Emily across the floor to the stove on the far side of the kitchen. Then suddenly she stopped singing and scrubbing. At that moment, the loudest sound in the room was the thumping of her heart. She sensed that someone had entered the kitchen and was staring at her. Slowly, carefully, she turned her head to peer over her shoulder.
In the doorway stood an ordinary young boy in a well-worn, navy-blue wool jacket, and a somewhat disreputable green-and-white-striped muffler. He had materialized without either ringing a bell or knocking, bringing into the kitchen with him a newspaper-wrapped parcel, and an overpowering smell of fish as well.
But what made the boy not quite so ordinary after all was his ownership of the brightest head of curly red hair Emily had ever seen in her life. It shone like a patch of marigolds in the dreary grey kitchen. As for the rest of him, he was sturdy-looking, with a snub nose blanketed in freckles, eyes the color of the blue sea when the sun is on it, and cheeks so ruddy they seemed to be in competition with his hair to see which was the cheeriest. Bright red hair, a cheerful look, not to mention an overpowering smell of fish—it would be difficult to miss such a boy no matter where he was. Can’t miss seeing him! Wasn’t that what Tilly had said about a fishmonger’s boy named Kipper?
The boy continued to dart curious looks at Emily over his shoulder as he set his parcel on a table, and then pulled off his coat and muffler. He hung both on a nail by the door as if the nail had his name on it. Then, pretending indifference, he picked up the parcel and strolled to the sink, whistling.
Emily felt strangely shy. She quickly returned to scrubbing the floor. Down, brush! Down, brush! She tried to keep her mind on her chore, but at last curiosity won out, and she stole a quick peek toward the sink. If she had been a little closer, she could have fallen right into the two big pools of blue that were the boy’s eyes staring at her. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
Her only consolation was that the boy’s cheeks appeared to do the same. “My name’s Kipper,” he mumbled. “What’s yours?”
“Emily.”
“Emily? Then ain’t you Mrs. Luccock’s niece what was coming here?”
Emily nodded.
Then, with the stiff, self-conscious look he might have worn had he just been told to look into a camera, Kipper said, “Well, howdy do, in which case.”
Emily scrambled up from the floor and dropped a curtsy. “How do you do, Kipper.”
In an instant, the frozen look on Kipper’s face dissolved into a wide grin. “Dingus! Ain’t anybody ever curtsied to me before, me not exactly being the King o’ England. Pa would like it, curtsying and all that, even from someone what looks like a chimney sweep!”
Kipper’s pleasure over the curtsy was so genuine that Emily couldn’t even feel offended over this honest description of her appearance. Besides, she felt she must look worse than a chimney sweep with coal dust streaked from her chin to the tips of her once-white shoes, dirty water sloshed all over her silk dress, and the hem of her skirt black from dragging across the floor.
“You get here yesterday?” Kipper asked.
“Last night,” replied Emily.
“And Tilly got you doing floors already, as well as carrying coal? Wheeoo!” Kipper whistled his sympathy.
“I scrub pots and pans, too,” said Emily. “Tilly says we have to be equals.”
“Well, you best be careful, or you’ll end up more equal ’n Tilly, if you get my meaning.” Kipper raised his eyebrows at Emily. “Anyways, speaking o’ Tilly, you best get back to your ‘London Bridge’ whilst I tend to this fish.” He started to unwrap the newspaper parcel. “Most times I just dump this in the icebox when Tilly’s not here, nor your aunt, but today I got something special.” He held up by the tail two huge, grey-speckled fish with dead, staring eyes.
Despite herself, Emily shuddered and crinkled her nose at the sight and the smell of these unattractive specimens.
Kipper shrugged ruefully. “They ain’t the best-smelling things, I got to admit, being two or three days ’long in age. But Pa always sends ’em when he’s got ’em left over, so the old ones can have something more than fish heads for their stew.”
Fish head stew! What next? Emily was made speechless by the thought of those eyes staring dolefully up at her from her soup bowl. Whistling a tuneless tune, Kipper pulled a stout knife from his trousers pocket and began to scrape the fish. Fish scales flew out from the sink like a flurry of tiny silver coins. But suddenly, the hand wielding the knife froze in midair, and Kipper stood absolutely still, listening. Then he twisted his head with a jerk and stared at the dining room door. A moment later, Mrs. Meeching glided through the doorway as silently as day becoming night.
She crossed the kitchen, her small, cruel, unblinking eyes looking neither to right nor left. The fish scaler and small floor scrubber might very well have been tree stumps for all the attention she paid to them. But Emily knew that her eyes were watching them as much as if she had been staring right into them. She disappeared through the door leading below, and soon her footsteps were shrouded in silence.
“Whooee!” breathed Kipper. “Where’s she going? To the pokey to get someone out?”
“Do you mean the Remembrance Room?” asked Emily.
“No other.”
“I think so. Tilly said this is when—when it should come out.”
“Well, Tilly ought to know,” Kipper said matter of factly. “She’s up on all them things.” Then he lapsed into silence, absently scraping his knife across a fish.
A cloud seemed to have settled over the kitchen. Emily went back to her scrubbing. In any event, it was only a few minutes before Mrs. Meeching returned to the kitchen, and this time she was not alone.
Shuffling slowly behind her was an old, shriveled, white-haired little woman, as bent as a hairpin. Her trembling hands seemed no larger than bird claws, and her ankles were as thin as twigs. All told, she was hardly much bigger than Emily! With a mixture of horror and wonder, Emily watched this sad little parade pass into the dining room.
“Dingus, Emily!” Kipper exclaimed softly. “That’s little Mrs. Poovey! If I never seen it with my own peepers, I wouldn’t o’ believed it. You know, none o’ them says much, but that Mrs. Poovey, she ain’t opened her mouth once what I know of. And most o’ them cry, at first leastways, but she never even done that.”
Kipper scratched his red curls with a finger still liberally coated with fish scales. “Well, I’ll be a whale’s tail, as Pa always says. Mrs. Poovey taking a peppermint! O’ course, don’t know if that’s what she done, but like I said, if Tilly thinks so, ain’t anyone got better credentuals for ferreting out news. Wonder how ’twas found out?”
From the eyes and ears in the walls, thought Emily. But she was suddenly frightened by the curious, sharp look in Kipper’s eyes, too frightened to speak. She dipped her brush in the bucket and swept it intently across the floor. Then Kipper simply turned back to the sink and began to scrape his fish. Soon there was only the sound of scraping and brushing in the kitchen.
“Say, why ain’t you back to singing your ‘London Bridge’?” Kipper asked lightly.
“Because I only know one verse,” Emily replied. “I just say it over and over.”
“If you’ll pardon my saying so, that ain’t very exciting. I make up my own!” Kipper said proudly. “Would you like to hear some?”
Emily sat back on her heels, and nodded eagerly.
Then Kipper raised his knife and began waving it in the air like a conductor’s baton as he started to sing.
�
��When I was young I went to sea,
Went to sea, went to sea,
The name of my ship was the Fiddle Dee Dee
My fair lady!
“Up came a storm and blew us all ’round,
Blew us all ’round, blew us all ’round,
Next I knew we was upside down,
My fair lady!
“Then right to the bottom went the Fiddle Dee Dee,
Fiddle Dee Dee, Fiddle Dee Dee,
But everyone was saved excepting me,
My fair lady!”
At this unexpected turn in the song, Emily began to giggle. Kipper grinned, and then dropping his voice so low it could have gone right through the floor to the cellar, he sang slowly and sonorously,
“Now bones is all that’s left of me,
Left of me, left of me,
It’s just me and the sea and the Fiddle Dee Dee,
My fair lady!”
By now Emily was giggling uncontrollably.
Kipper beamed. “Would you like me sing it again?”
Emily had no sooner nodded, however, than he said suddenly, “Whoops! No more o’ that.” He grimaced at her. “Morning, Tilly!”
Tilly had appeared before an angrily swinging dining room door, her hands planted on her hips. “What’s this all ’bout?” she said, glowering at Kipper.
Kipper threw her a dazzling smile. “Don’t be cross at us, Tilly!” he said in a wheedling voice. “I was just singing Emily a verse or two o’ my ‘London Bridge’ whilst she was scrubbing and I was scraping. See, look here, Tilly, two whole fish from Pa! And I know you don’t like cleaning ’em, so I was doing ’em for you.” Kipper held up one half-cleaned fish for Tilly to inspect. “Don’t smell so bad as usual, neither. Only three days old, Til!”
Tilly’s flat face moved, in only a few moments, from anger to bewilderment to a pleased kind of dazed look at having this unpleasant task done for her. “Well, you goes right on with it,” she said pleasantly to Kipper. But when she looked at Emily, she gave a disgusted sniff. “Hmmmph! Y’r a mess, ain’t you? And that ain’t ’zactly the best looking floor job I ever seen.”
“Yes, and looky here, Til!” Kipper interrupted.
Then, to Emily’s horror, he quickly ground under his heel a bit of fishy newspaper that had fallen to the floor. He lifted it up to reveal an ugly black stain on the linoleum. “She ain’t going to be much help ’round here,” he said almost gleefully. “Look what she missed!”
It was clear that Tilly had seen this whole act from first to last, but she rewarded Kipper with a brazen smile of approval. Then she turned to Emily with a look that could have soured milk. “You gets to do that when you comes back. Right now you has to come with me and learn ’bout doing ’round upstairs. You puts y’r stuff ’way, and be quick ’bout it. Us ain’t got all day!”
Emily took her brush and pail to a corner of the kitchen and followed Tilly to the door without even a backward look at Kipper. She would not for all the world allow him to see the tears of rage that had sprung to her eyes. She had been taken in by his cheerful look and his good humor, but he was nothing but a liar and a cheat. Such as Tilly was, she at least had never really pretended one thing and turned out another.
But what was even deeper than Emily’s anger was her despair at losing this one sudden bright hope for a trusted friend. Kipper had joined the ranks of all the other “eyes and ears” of Sugar Hill Hall. Emily was all alone and on her own again, and she felt as if her heart had turned to lead as she trailed after Tilly.
SIX
A Sad Arrival
“You starts with Mrs. Poovey’s room, ’cause that’s how far I done,” Tilly said, stumping into the parlor. “After you sweeps, you makes up a bed, ’cause there’s another old one coming in. When you finishes Mrs. Poovey, you moves along to Mr. Bottle and Mr. Dobbs. After that …”
As Tilly droned on, Emily’s thoughts wandered to the cobwebs and cracked cupids on the ceiling, the tarnished gilt and decaying plaster, the fog creeping past the windows, and the shadows creeping in the parlor. A few of the old people were already stationed in their chairs, staring vacantly ahead and occupied only in waiting for their day to end. Would the time ever come when she would be used to the grim sight of what this room had become? Emily wondered.
Tilly stopped suddenly at the foot of the stairs by the bowl of glistening peppermints. “Well, you already knows what you ain’t ’lowed to touch, so now you learns where you ain’t ’lowed to go, and that’s one place.” She pointed a threatening finger toward a closed door at the far end of the parlor. “It’s Mrs. M.’s and Mrs. P.’s dining room, which you was so rudely gawping into after dinner last night. ’Cross from it’s Mrs. M.’s room. You ’specially ain’t ’lowed in that one. You gets that?”
“Yes, Tilly,” replied Emily, who had as much desire to walk into Mrs. Meeching’s room as to enter a pit of snakes. “Am I allowed to go into the ballroom?”
“Ballroom?” said Tilly suspiciously. “What ballroom? Ain’t no ballroom in this house.” Then she snickered. “You thinks you come to a castle?”
“There was one when I was here long ago,” Emily said, remembering the beautiful ball Aunt and Uncle Twice had held for Mama and Papa in the grand room across from the dining room. “It was right—it was right —but the doors aren’t there any more!” Instead of two elegant, gilded doors, Emily had found herself pointing at a blank wall with two dreary pictures hanging from it.
“ ’Course not, stoopid! Ain’t no ballroom and ain’t never been no doors. Y’r brains must be melting ’way from no eating. Anyone what’s so picky-picky ’bout the food—” Glaring at Emily, Tilly started up the stairs.
A whole ballroom had disappeared! Stunned by still another question, another mystery, Emily skirted the dangerous peppermint bowl and scurried after Tilly.
“That’s Mrs. P.’s room,” said Tilly shortly, pointing to another closed door at the head of the stairs. “Them other doors goes to rooms what ain’t occupied. Howsumever, they has to be done up ’cause Mrs. M. shows ’em to perspective customers. Most times y’r aunt ’lows me to take care o’ them!” Tilly added proudly as she turned to start up another stairway.
This one was enclosed and led to an ordinary hallway also lined with doors. “These ain’t yours neither,” said Tilly, and started up still another set of stairs. These were very narrow and steep, and Emily’s legs ached by the time they arrived at their final destination, a narrow, dark hallway pungent with the smell of dust and old wood peculiar to attics. Outside a half-open door, a broom and mop leaned wearily against a bucket filled with sponges, soap, and rags. A feather duster poked from the bucket like a rooster’s tail.
Without knocking, Tilly stumped through the doorway into a room as sparsely furnished and almost as uninviting as Emily’s underground cell. Tilly began at once to instruct her on how to clean the room, completely ignoring a little woman in a frayed black wool shawl sitting beside her cot with tiny, bird-sized hands folded quietly in her lap.
Tilly directed a finger at an unmade cot beneath the curtainless window. “First you makes this up f’r the new party coming. Then you sloshes out the wash basin and empties it into the slop jar. When y’r done with that, and done proper, you sweeps and dusts.” As she spoke, Tilly pulled from a narrow wardrobe two sheets, a worn blanket, and a lumpy pillow and dumped them unceremoniously on the bare mattress.
Emily tried to keep her mind on Tilly’s lecture, but it kept wandering to the little old woman, who sat staring out the bare window with empty eyes, as if Emily and Tilly were not even there. This was the tiny, helpless creature who had dared to take the peppermints and been locked in the Remembrance Room. This was Mrs. Poovey!
“Emily, ain’t you paying no ’tention?” Tilly said crossly.
“Oh yes, Tilly!” Emily quickly picked up a sheet and began clumsily to spread it over the thin hair mattress.
“Hmmmph!” snorted Tilly. “Well, minds you doesn’t dawdle.” She stum
ped fiercely from the room, marching back down the stairs with heavy, accusing footsteps.
Emily went on wrestling with the difficult problem of getting the sheet straight on the cot. From time to time she looked shyly over her shoulder at Mrs. Poovey. For all the attention she paid her new young housekeeper, however, Mrs. Poovey might well have been made of wax.
The sheets and blanket finally conquered, Emily went to work trying to put life into the hopeless pillow. Thump! Thump! Thump! The sound echoed hollowly against the bare walls and floor. Then the room fell dismally still and silent again. Suppose, Emily wondered, someone spoke directly to Mrs. Poovey. Wouldn’t she have to reply? Emily tightened her arms around the pillow and drew a deep breath.
“It—it’s a dreadfully foggy day, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Poovey didn’t even blink.
Emily swallowed hard. “It might be sunnier tomorrow, don’t you think?”
If Mrs. Poovey thought that, she gave no sign of it. With a soft sigh, Emily set the pillow on the cot. Now there seemed nothing left to do but go on with her work. She sloshed out the basin and emptied it into the slop jar as Tilly had directed. Then Emily whisked the feather duster over the furnishings and finally began to sweep. She had entirely given up the idea of any conversation with Mrs. Poovey, so to fill the lonely, uncomfortable stillness, she began to hum under her breath. Soon the hum became words.
“London Bridge is falling down,” sang Emily. Whoosh! went the broom.
“Falling down.” Whoosh! “Falling down.” Whoosh!
Suddenly, almost without her knowing it, the words began to change.
“I’ll get braver by and by,
By and by, by and by,
All I have to do is try,
My fair lady!
“I will never groan and sigh,
Groan and sigh, groan and sigh,
Mrs. M. can’t make me cry,
My fair lady!”
Flustered by what she had done, Emily looked shyly at Mrs. Poovey. Was that a spark in her eyes? Emily’s heart leaped. But when she looked again, the spark was gone. In any event, her work in that room was done, so she picked up her broom and mop and bucket. But as she turned to leave, she remembered something else. Despite the way Tilly behaved, Mrs. Poovey was not a chair or a table. She was a person. Emily dropped a curtsy.
Peppermints in the Parlor Page 5