The Weeping Ash

by Joan Aiken

  The doctor was obliged to acknowledge the force of this argument and hoped, verbally (although his private expectations were not so sanguine), that the interest of caring for the old lady, and her company, would have a beneficial effect upon Fanny’s low spirits.

  Thomas was delighted to have a good pretext for getting rid of Kate, who had shown, of late weeks, a somewhat defiant and partisan spirit, tending to side with her mistress over trifling matters. She was, accordingly, given her notice and turned off; a Mrs. Strudwick, a widow who lived in Petworth, was hired to come in daily and take care of the housekeeping; thus, at one stroke, Thomas was rid of a potential troublemaker and also satisfactorily reduced his household expenditure; for a daily woman need not be paid so much as one who lived in. And the arrival of his mother, though tiresome, would, financially, be a positive gain, for he would derive the benefit of her annuity, plus the proceeds from the sale of her cottage.

  He assumed that his mother’s annuity must perish with her own demise, but in the meantime he would have the administration of it, so it was quite in his interest to preserve her alive for a while; and when she did die, he felt sure that she must have some savings, for her second husband had been a well-to-do coach maker—and there might be a few trinkets, which would come in handy for the girls.

  Quite cheered by these reflections, he was in an unusually benign mood and prepared to listen indulgently, for once, to a request from his daughter Martha.

  “Papa, will you not let me take lessons upon the harp? You would not in Gosport because it would have meant the use of the carriage to take me quite across the town, but here there is a lady living very close, in East Street, who gives harp lessons—only two shillings an hour—and it is but five minutes’ walk from our house, Tess says—please, Papa?—Unless indeed you would buy a harp so that we could practice at home—Jem bootboy told me of one he saw advertised in Midhurst, only twenty pounds—”

  “Twenty pounds? Are you out of your mind, miss?” exploded her father.

  But cunning Martha had phrased her request that way around on purpose, knowing that, in comparison with a twenty-pound harp in Midhurst, two-shilling harp lessons just around the corner appeared an economy; and permission for the lessons was duly given, provided that Bet accompany her sister to the lessons and they were escorted to and from the house of the instructress—a Mrs. Dawtry—by Tess or the new housekeeper.

  Thomas had in fact of late been feeling a certain dissatisfaction with his daughters. Tiresome though Fanny was—obstinate, secretive, willful—he could not help seeing that, in her gentle manners, her education, all her small graces, elegancies, and friendly, solicitous ways, she was far superior in charm and appeal to his girls, and had begun dimly to wonder how much chance they had of catching husbands. He had relied upon Fanny’s example to instill in them some idea of how to comport themselves, but nothing like that seemed to be happening; and he most certainly did not wish them to be left upon his hands unwed all their lives, eating far too much butter on their bread, constantly wanting new ribbons, and needing a fire in the parlor every night. If lessons on the harp would advance their chances of matrimony—and since the lessons only cost two shillings an hour—lessons would be sanctioned. Bet could doubtless pick up a few hints while watching Martha.

  Accordingly the following week saw two major changes in the household at the Hermitage; Bet and Martha went off, two mornings a week, to Mrs. Dawtry’s house, whence harp notes could be heard emanating, somewhat discordantly, from an upper window; and the old lady arrived with her attendant from Ryde.

  A third event was that Fanny came out of her chamber.

  This occurrence might not have passed off with so little remark had not Thomas been greatly preoccupied, at that time, with press gang affairs.

  Although merchant-navy seamen and fishermen were, theoretically, exempt from impressment, as were harvesters and “navvies,” workers on roads and canals, this exemption was by no means total. Sailors were often taken from privateer ships, even though these were supposed to be protected by their letters of marque, and fishermen were impressed so frequently that, some years before, the entire fishing community of the town of Worthing had banded together and purchased a term of immunity in return for a contribution of five men, who self-sacrificingly volunteered, and a cash payment of forty pounds. At the time, the neighboring village of Brighthelmstone, or Brighton, had expressed great scorn over this pusillanimous and servile behavior; its fishermen had declared that they would never so demean themselves as to “pay off the scurvy gangers.” No, the free fishermen of Brighton were not going to submit to that! In consequence, their defiance of the press gang, over the years, had reached such a pass that the inhabitants had now put up a placard declaring that the whole male population of the place considered themselves immune; and this act of what practically amounted to treason was regarded very seriously indeed by the regulating officers of the local press gangs.

  Brighton did not properly come within Thomas’s province—the town had a gang and regulating officer of its own, Captain Pankhurst, but as his gang, numbering only fourteen men, was by no means large enough to deal with the situation, he had sought help from the neighboring impress officers. A sudden surprise attack on the town was planned, and the regulating officers were obliged to hold many meetings, at much inconvenience to themselves, and loss of local revenue, in order to arrive at a time both suitable to all of them and strategically satisfactory. Times and tides therefore had to be taken into account, and also strict secrecy had to be observed; it was a knotty business altogether and kept Thomas much from home at this time. He greatly begrudged the day required to bring his mother back from Chichester harbor and settle her into the Hermitage; and, having wasted as little time as possible on the latter process, he was off at dawn the next day to collogue with his brother regulating officers at the town of Shoreham, giving his household a terse intimation that he could not say when he would be back.

  The new housekeeper at the Hermitage, Mrs. Strudwick, did not seem an accommodating woman. She was a widow, stiff, upright, with a knot of gray hair, a whaleboned torso, and a glacial eye; which factors had served to recommend her to Thomas.

  However when she presently marched into Fanny’s chamber with a basin of toast gruel and the rehearsed announcement that she “would not be able to keep on this running up- and downstairs with basins on trays now the old lady was come,” she was startled to find her mistress already out of bed, weakly but resolutely tying her petticoat strings.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Strudwick; you may leave the gruel. I will drink it up here and be downstairs very soon,” young Mrs. Paget said with gentle dignity. Her pregnancy was very visible by now; only a couple more months to go, Mrs. Strudwick judged with expert eye; and she looked drawn and fagged, her wrists as thin as angelica stalks, but quite composed in herself, as she pulled the cambric petticoat about her.

  “If you would be so kind as to send Tess to me, in about ten minutes, to help me with my hair, I should be obliged,” Fanny added, as the housekeeper stood somewhat taken aback, “with the wind taken out of her sails” as she would have expressed it herself, and she found herself replying:

  “That’s right, ma’am, you shouldn’t be lifting your arms overmuch, not while you’re expecting,” in quite a friendly tone.

  “Is my husband’s mother quite comfortable?” Fanny inquired.

  “As to comfortable, ma’am, I’m sure I can’t say; she’s a rum ’un and no mistake. You can’t get much sense out of her. And as for that one that’s supposed to be looking after her—” Mrs. Strudwick cast her eyes to heaven expressively.

  Fanny, however, showing no disposition to listen to gossip, said, “Thank you, Mrs. Strudwick. That will be all, then,” in so soft but positive a tone that Mrs. Strudwick found herself outside the door before she hardly knew how she had got there. She consoled herself for this oddity, however, by thinking, Well, she
’s in store for a shock when she sees what’s come to the house, that’s one thing certain.

  Fanny, left alone, threw a calico wrapper over her petticoat and walked to the window, holding the bowl of hot toast gruel. There was a semicircular seat inside the bow; she sat there, with one foot curled under her, enjoying the warmth of the morning sun on her aching back, and looked out at the garden. She could hear the birds, bursting with song, and see buds on the trees; a splash of yellow showed where daffodils bloomed in front of Thomas’s garden house; and a couple of cherry trees were in tender transition from coral-colored buds to the full fountain of white blossom. Beyond, the green angelic hill soared upward, the blue plain stretched off into the distance.

  April will be here in a few days, Fanny thought, her heart lifting; and she remembered how young and untroubled the April of last year had found her. What a gulf of experience stretched between then and now! But daffodils and cherry blossom remained forever the same, and she murmured (for she had read immense quantities of poetry in her father’s library and had a fund of it by heart):

  “Fair daffodils, we weep to see

  You haste away so soon;

  As yet the early-rising sun

  Has not attained his noon…”

  And then, as had so often happened at her childhood home, or in the walks and fields of Sway and the New Forest, notes of music danced, unsummoned, into Fanny’s head and supplied an accompaniment for the lines she had just spoken. They sang themselves to her, words and tune knitting indissolubly together into a little spring of refreshment that seemed to come straight from something exterior to herself—the house, perhaps, she fancifully thought; perhaps this strain of music was the method the house found to communicate its feeling of good will. For she still—despite many periods of utter, black unhappiness—had this abiding impression that the house was her friend—it had something to say to her, a message of warmth, of reassurance. We are here for each other; my time, too, is short, but while I am here I will enfold and cherish you, as you cherish and care for me. Something of this nature the house imparted to her, and Fanny, listening, did take comfort.

  A tap sounded at the door: Tess, to help with her hair.

  “Come in!” Fanny called.

  The little maid crept into the room, and Fanny turned in quick concern.

  “Why, Tess, what is the matter? You look dreadful.”

  Tess Goodger, the underservant, was a pale, gaunt little fourteen-year-old who looked hardly more than ten or eleven. Her thin, sharp features were half concealed by her cap; mostly she went about her work in the quiet apathy of timidity and undernourishment. It was plain that something was very wrong, for her drawn cheeks were the color of whey and there were great purple hollows under her eyes; the hands that combed out her mistress’s ringlets were shaking uncontrollably.

  “It’s n-nothing, ma’am; I don’t wish to worrit ye.”

  “But indeed I am worried, Tess; are you sick? You look so weary.”

  “No, I bean’t sick, ma’am, but—b-but—”

  Tess burst into tears, and the story came out.

  Her household duties began at five, when she had to get up and light the Rumford stove in the kitchen for the servants’ breakfast, sweep and scrub the kitchen, heat water for the housekeeper and menservants to wash, lay the kitchen table, rake out the ashes in all the downstairs fireplaces, and prepare the servants’ breakfast of bread and porridge. Kate, the previous housekeeper, had owned a small clock which she had allowed Tess to take to her room every night (if room it could be called; Tess slept in the loft at the top of the house, reached by a ladder) so as to ensure that she woke in time.

  “Just having the clock by me bed, ma’am—I set it up on a pair o’ bricks—helped me so’s I never did overlie. But Kate, she took her clock with her when she was turned off—an’ I ast Missus Strudwick but she won’t loan me her clock acos she live at home—an’ it is so hard to know when five o’clock come—I worrit about it all night long. Ten, fifteen times o’night I slips down the stair to look at the grandfather clock in the hall; once or twice I has just set down there, say from ’alf three to five, for I dassn’t go back up, ’case I oversleep. I did, once or twice, and Missus Strudwick was that angry—”

  “But this is ridiculous! Why can you not take the kitchen clock upstairs to bed?”

  “There bain’t no kitchen clock, ma’am. It got busted in the move, simmingly, an’ master said ’twasn’t worth getting another, for we can see the church clock do we step out into the garden.”

  This was true, Fanny knew; there was just a little more justification than usual for Thomas’s parsimony.

  “Can you not hear the church clock strike during the night, Tess?” she asked gently. “I have heard it myself, many and many a time.” She shivered a little.

  “No, ma’am. There bain’t no window, see, where I sleep; an’ to tell truth,” Tess said nervously, glancing at her mistress past the strand of hair she was gently combing out, “to tell truth, I’m a bit deef; I believe it was on account of my auntie useter belt me over the ear’ole with a rolling pin if I riled her—”

  “I see.” That accounted, of course, for the occasions when Thomas, irritated, had shouted at Tess for not obeying him more promptly; doubtless the poor child had not heard his order the first tune.

  “Well, you must certainly have a clock,” Fanny resolved. “Here, now—let me see—”

  During her illness, Thomas had abandoned his former practice of giving Fanny a small sum of housekeeping money daily; instead this had been handed, first to Kate, latterly to Mrs. Strudwick. She, when applied to, said she had no cash to spare for a clock; master had given her only enough to buy the meat, candles, green baize, and soda that were immediately required. Her expression indicated very fully that the purchase of a clock was the most wasteful, indulgent, frivolous notion that she had ever heard in her entire life.

  Then Fanny was visited by a hopeful notion.

  “Perhaps the old lady, Thomas’s mother, will have a clock. She after all had a whole houseful of furniture; she must have brought some of her belongings with her. In any case it is certainly my duty to wait on her and find how she goes on.”

  Accordingly, Fanny made her slow and cumbrous way up the flight of stairs that led to the top floor and the two attic bedrooms where Thomas’s mother and her attendant had been housed.

  This had seemed to Fanny most unsuitable quarters for an invalid; it meant that food, slops, coals, and laundry all had to be carried up and down two flights of stairs, many times daily; and how was the poor old lady ever to be conveyed down, when she recovered from her journey enough to wish to go out of doors and take the air? Thomas, however, did not concern himself with the fatigue of domestics and did not anticipate that his mother would ever need to leave the house; indeed he thought it better that she should not, for exercise could only wear out shoe leather and increase her appetite. At present, in any case, there was no question of such a thing, for yesterday’s removal had greatly exhausted the old lady and she lay in her bed, hardly able to move.

  Inconvenient the attic may have been, but the view from its window was certainly superior; it faced southeast, down the valley, and commanded a prospect of the long, gradually ascending road that came into the town from Byworth and the newer gentlemen’s residences which were building along the valleyside beyond the Angel Inn. Close at hand were some young apple trees, planted by the Countess van Welcker, but their tops were far below the level of the window, and the only tree that gave any promise of ever reaching to such a height was the weeping ash, now so severely constrained, which grew directly outside.

  The other garden trees, the hedge of young yews, and the oaks and willows in the valley were all gaily tossing their branches in a March wind; only the ash, like a prisoner with arms tied to his sides, remained motionless. To Fanny’s impressionable mind the tree appeared to b
e brooding darkly on its wrongs: hunched, silent, immobile, it seemed to be sending vibrations of ill will toward the house. It was not the first time she had thought this.

  However her business was not with trees, and she moved past the window toward the bed with its recumbent figure. Thomas’s mother had been housed in the smaller of the two attics, because it was the one that possessed a fireplace (in which a very meager fire now burned); there was exceedingly little space in the room; an armchair, a washstand, a tiny table, and the bed almost completely filled it; the old lady’s clothes had apparently to be accommodated in the nurse’s chamber. Fanny, glancing about, could see no clock; the appointments here were sparse indeed: a clean cloth on the washstand, a hairbrush, comb, and washing utensils; nothing more.

  Nobody had answered her knock, and Thomas had, in fact, warned her that his mother was somewhat hard of hearing, so she walked up to the bed and said in her clear, pretty voice:

  “Good morning, ma’am! I hope that you find yourself recovered from your journey? Welcome to the Hermitage!” in a somewhat louder tone than she would normally have employed.

  “Eh? Eh, what’s that? What did you say?” came in a faint quaver—nervous, weak, mistrustful—from the bunched-up figure on the bed; and the old lady, who had been lying with her face to the wall, slowly turned over to peer at her visitor.

  “I am sorry, ma’am, that I was indisposed and not able to greet you yesterday, on your arrival. I have not been very well,” Fanny explained apologetically. A pair of pale blue, bewildered eyes surveyed her, and she held out a hand, saying with a friendly smile, “I daresay you may have guessed by now that I am your new daughter-in-law: Thomas’s wife, Fanny.”