Grace Hardie

by Anne Melville

  Grace liked the name Pepper. ‘But it wasn’t Pepper who made me sneeze,’ she said anxiously, afraid that if her new pet were blamed he would be taken away again.

  For the same reason, she did her best not to let her father see that she was needing to gasp for breath. This kind of gasping was often followed by the wheezing and gurgling and whistling noises in her chest and throat which Grace herself didn’t mind too much but which always made Nanny frown and send for the doctor.

  Luckily everyone was more interested in Mama and the new baby today than in Grace. She was left alone to catch and play with her kitten. For the first time in her life, too, she was expected to go to sleep by herself when it was bedtime. Nanny tucked her up as usual, and Milly popped her head into the nursery every few minutes to see if she was still awake. But neither of them, it seemed, had been told about Pepper, who had hidden under the bed while all the washing and undressing went on but was now tucked up under the blankets – at first fidgety, but soon confidingly asleep.

  Next morning Grace was ill. Even if she had wanted to conceal the fact that she was wheezing more noisily than ever before, she would not have known how to do it. Every breath was painful: she gulped for air, but there was never enough. The doctor, called in after he had visited Mrs Hardie and the new baby, took her temperature and murmured about autumn mists. Half an hour later Nanny Crocker bustled into the nursery to announce a treat.

  ‘Baby Jay’s got a nurse of his own for his first month,’ she said. ‘So we’re going off to the new house today, just you and me. Milly’ll bring us up our meals, but we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. You’ll like that, won’t you?’

  ‘Can Pepper come too?’ Grace needed to gasp for breath between every word.

  ‘Who’s Pepper?’

  ‘My kitten.’

  ‘So that’s where that puddle in the corner came from. I should have been told.’ But Nanny did not seem cross as she told Milly to give the kitten some milk and put it into a carrying basket. Grace herself was given a dose of medicine. It made her so sleepy that she was hardly aware either of the journey to the new house or of her first night there. But the next morning she awoke breathing as easily as if she had never been ill.

  ‘Where’s Pepper?’

  ‘Let’s get you dressed first; then we’ll see. How d’you like your new room, then?’

  ‘It’s lovely.’ Grace climbed on to a chair to look out of a window. From her high vantage point she could see into a walled garden, although nothing was yet growing there. Nearer to the house the earth had been dug and raked level, ready for lawns and flower beds; an avenue of small trees had been planted along a newly gravelled drive which wound down the hill towards a lodge cottage and gateway. So high was the tower that she could look right over the garden area and see the wood, with the grassy slope just above it. It was a lot of space. ‘Pepper will get lost,’ she said anxiously.

  ‘We’ll put some butter on his paws.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come here and let me dress you. Well, we butter his paws and leave him to explore the rooms that are to be his home. Then he licks his paws – all little kittens do that, to clean themselves – and he tastes the dust which has stuck to the butter. That teaches him where he lives. After that, he’ll never go too far away, and he’ll always find his way back.’

  To Grace, who was expected to wash her hands before touching any food, it seemed a dirty way of learning a lesson, but she held Pepper still, gently stroking the black and white stripes of his stomach, whilst Nanny applied the butter.

  ‘Now you stay here with him. I’ve other things to see to. Keep the door closed. He’s not to be let out for at least an hour. After that, we’ll give him another dab of butter and let him down the stairs to find his way in and out. All right?’

  Grace nodded, pleased to be given the responsibility. She watched as Pepper explored, sniffing curiously at all the smells of new wood and paint and linoleum, and chasing with enthusiasm a ball which his mistress made for him out of crumpled paper. Then, as Nanny had promised, he sat down on the floor with one leg pointing upwards, and began to lick and clean himself.

  Later that day, after a meal which was a kind of picnic, brought up from her old home in a wicker basket, Grace was put back to bed for an afternoon rest, because she had been so ill the day before. But after tea she was allowed to explore the whole of the new house. Leaving Pepper asleep in a basket lined with pieces of old blanket, she held Nanny Crocker’s hand as they walked along wide corridors and opened heavy doors, making guesses about what they would find inside.

  Each of the rooms intended for the boys had a name painted on the outside, so that there should be no disputes. Beneath that row of bedrooms were three long, bright rooms which Nanny knew were to be the schoolroom, the day nursery and the children’s dining room. Grace thought of the battered furniture and scuffed walls in their old house and wondered how long the new rooms would continue to look so clean.

  Round a corner they came to two large rooms flooded with the late afternoon sun. One was already furnished as a dining room. The other, Nanny told her, was waiting for the drawing room furniture to arrive from their old house. Already there were long curtains hanging at the windows and a new carpet on the floor, giving a feeling of warmth and homeliness.

  But in the third side of the house was a room which was bare. It was twice as tall as any other, and the only windows were high up along one wall, so that no one could possibly see out of them. Grace, overawed by the size and height of the room, tried to imagine what could possibly go inside it. Ordinary furniture would look quite wrong. There would have to be something very tall – something which had a winding feeling to it, like a creeper twining round a tree. She could almost see the shape in her mind.

  ‘It’s a studio,’ said Nanny Crocker. ‘Your mama will come here to paint her pictures. Now then, can you show me the way back to your tower room?’

  Grace tried and failed, ending up on the staircase which led from the kitchen to the servants’ quarters. The house was too big for her to remember all its turnings. It was a worry, for Nanny might not always be there to help. Later that evening, after she had been tucked up and had pretended to be asleep, Grace cautiously opened her eyes to check by the flame of the night candle that she and Pepper were alone. She slid out of bed and dabbed butter on Pepper’s paws once more, to make certain that he would never run away. Then, biting her lower lip with concentration, she smeared the rest of the butter on the soles of her own feet and began to walk round the room, her fingers outstretched to run along the surface of the wall.

  Round and round the green linoleum she went, marking out a magic circle. Pepper padded silently behind her, occasionally darting forward to tap at her heels with a soft paw. Licking the bottoms of her feet proved difficult, but she managed to suck her big toes; perhaps that would be enough. By the time she climbed back into her new big bed she was shivering with satisfaction as well as with cold. Now she was safe in her new house. She would never get lost in it: would never run away.

  Part Two

  Death at Greystones 1903

  Chapter One

  Where were the boys? Six-year-old Grace wandered disconsolately through the grounds, calling her brothers. It was the first day of the holidays and she had been looking forward to it for weeks. The twins had joined Frank and Philip at school just before their ninth birthdays, so that with Jay still in the nursery, Grace now had all her lessons alone with her governess. Even Miss Sefton, who was often bad-tempered and too particular about small mistakes, had understood how much Grace wanted to share the first day of their freedom with her elder brothers. She was allowed to leave the schoolroom as soon as she had written her daily spelling list and repeated her five times table without a mistake. But what good did it do to have a free morning if there was no one to play with?

  She pushed open the door of the walled garden. After breakfast the boys had dashed off to search for their bows and arrows. If th
ey were going to play Robin Hood, they would need their only sister to be Maid Marian. But perhaps they had decided to go hunting instead.

  Frith, the head gardener, lived in a perpetual state of war with rabbits, squirrels, mice, pigeons, crows, blackbirds, tits – indeed, almost anything which could be suspected of making a meal from his lettuces or peas or fruit. In the Easter holiday he had offered a farthing for any corpse which could be strung from a pole as a warning. Grace had earned one of the farthings, although the dead mouse she took to him had really been killed by Pepper, not by herself; and Frank, who had been given a gun for his twelfth birthday, killed two squirrels and a rabbit. Perhaps the offer had been repeated for the summer.

  The furry and feathered thieves would not be in much danger today. Frank was only allowed to use his gun in his father’s company, and with bow and arrow neither he nor his three brothers had ever managed to hit anything which moved. They would be useful only as bird-scarers.

  The walled garden was peaceful; the only sound that of the purposeful humming of bees. Frith was earthing up the celery, but he straightened himself and tipped his hat, leaning on his spade as Grace told him her trouble.

  ‘Lost your brothers, have you? Your father’s looking for them as well. Sent young Andy off to see where they’d got to. If you hold on here, Andy will be back to say where he tracked them down. I could spare a raspberry or two while you’re waiting. The red ones, not the yellow. Look out for the wasps as you pick them.’

  It was quite a long time before Andy, the gardener’s son, returned – time enough for Grace to have stained her mouth with raspberries and her fingers with strawberries and to be sitting down with a lapful of pea pods. When he came at last he was panting.

  ‘They were in the wood,’ he reported to his father. ‘When I told Mr Hardie, he said I was to take the little ‘un down and tell Master Frank to look after him while Nanny Crocker and Milly was wanted somewhere else. So then I had to go down to the wood again, and back up.’

  Andy was a sturdy, wide-cheeked boy with curly red hair and freckles all over his face and arms. Although almost exactly the same age as David and Kenneth, he had nothing in common with them, being neither clever like David, nor impulsive like Kenneth. Mostly he took things slowly – but when, in the Easter holidays, Frank had suggested – in words conveying an order rather than an invitation – that he should come down to the lower meadow to give them batting practice, Andy had accepted his father’s nod of permission and proved to be a useful fast bowler.

  As a rule, though, he spent his holidays helping in the garden. Frith had an under-gardener, two journeymen and a boy to help him with the fruit and vegetables and the pleasure gardens, but was glad to accept his nine-year-old son as a temporary apprentice. It was taken for granted that Andy would become one of his father’s assistants as soon as he was old enough to leave school. Jay, who liked to pretend that everyone was somebody else, had nicknamed him Jack-and-the-beanstalk because of his habit of producing seeds from his pocket and sowing them in unlikely places. A giant sunflower, to everyone’s surprise except Andy’s, was at this moment in full bloom outside the schoolroom; and three runner bean plants had climbed the wisteria and were groping with curious fingers through the open nursery window.

  ‘Miss Grace has been wondering where her brothers have got to,’ his father said now. ‘Take her down and see if you can find them again for her.’

  Grace popped the last podful of peas into her mouth and followed Andy out of the walled garden. She liked him, because he was kind and patient, never running so fast that she could not keep up. As her elder brothers in turn started school, they had become secretive, refusing to talk to her about things which they claimed she would not understand. They didn’t always invite her to share their games and, because they had become rough and noisy, she less often wanted to do so. But that was something which she only remembered after they had been at home for a few days. On this first morning of the holidays she was sure that they would enjoy each other’s company.

  Andy, unlike her brothers, was willing to share his secrets. ‘Would you like to see my forest?’ he asked.

  Grace didn’t know what he meant, but nodded all the same. Instead of plunging into the wood, he helped her across a ditch and led her to a corner of the meadow where a small patch of turf had been cut away. Proudly he pointed to a miniature grove of seedlings, two or three inches tall.

  ‘Those are oak trees,’ he told her. ‘And those are chestnuts. And over there I’ve got sycamores and beeches. I don’t know what this one is, but I’ll be able to tell when it gets some more leaves. And I planted an acorn near the tower as well. Specially for you.’ Andy’s freckled skin flushed, and he kept his eyes on the ground as he went on speaking. ‘It’ll grow real high, so you won’t have to lean out of a window and make a ladder out of your long golden hair for people to climb up, like in the story.’

  ‘I haven’t got long golden hair.’

  ‘Well, the princess in the story had. Rapunzel. Anyway, with an oak tree there, that can be the ladder.’

  What was he talking about? There was no oak tree near to her tower. With a puzzled face she stared down at the seedlings which he had described as beeches. There was a beech tree just below the house, but it looked nothing like this. It was almost as tall as the roof and its leaves spread so thickly and widely that she and her brothers often used the space beneath as an outdoor playroom. ‘They’re not big enough,’ she said.

  ‘They’ll grow. I planted just acorns and conkers and sycamore wings and beech nuts and they’ve grown already. Just like babies. Getting taller every year.’

  ‘We’re going to have another baby.’ Grace was not much interested in the trees, but was proud that she had news to tell. None of the Hardie children had known in advance about Jay’s arrival in the family, but this time they had been entrusted with the secret. ‘It’s coming in September.’

  ‘Sooner than that,’ said Andy, and Grace pouted a little because he did not seem surprised.

  ‘No, September,’ she repeated. ‘Mama told me.’

  ‘Reckon she got tired of waiting, then. I heard Mr Hardie talking in the stable yard when I went to tell him about your brothers. He was sending a message down to Dr Sidley’s place. “Ask the doctor to come at once to deliver the baby,” he said.’

  Grace considered the message with interest. Ever since she had heard the news from her mother, she had wondered how the new baby was going to arrive. She had asked Nanny Crocker, who talked about gooseberry bushes; and she had asked Miss Sefton, who told a different story, something about a stork. She asked her father as well; but he would only say ‘Aha!’ – not the triumphant Aha with which he was accustomed to greet some new discovery or achievement, but a mysterious, secret-keeping Aha. As for her mother, she only smiled and would not say anything at all.

  Grace had even asked Jay, who after all had been a baby himself more recently than anyone else in the family. But Jay was three years old by now and had forgotten how it felt to be born. He pretended to remember, acting out a vigorous demonstration of how he had bounced into the nursery like a ball before unwinding his head and arms and legs and fingers and toes one at a time, but Grace didn’t believe him. Ever since Jay had learned to talk he had practised his new accomplishment non-stop, making no distinction between the true facts of everyday life and the more interesting products of his imagination. Grace enjoyed his pretendings; but had learned that it was not safe to believe them.

  This new idea, though, made more sense. It was reasonable that the doctor should deliver new babies to his customers, just as the fishmonger delivered the weekly fish order. And that would explain why Mama had said that although she had ordered a girl baby this time, she could not be sure that she would get one. Grace knew that the fishmonger’s basket quite often arrived at the kitchen door with a note on the top saying, ‘Sorry no sole, have sent plaice instead’, or something of that sort.

  Everyone in the family took it
for granted that Grace was hoping for a baby sister instead of another brother – and they were right, but not for the reason they thought. It wasn’t that she wanted to play girls’ games with a companion. Instead, she hoped that if there was another girl in the family, she herself would be allowed to become one of the boys. The new little girl could be the one to be dressed in frilly clothes and told to keep clean and forced to have her hair tied in rags to make ringlets. Grace felt sure that the reason why her brothers didn’t play with her nowadays was only because they thought that a six-year-old was too young to join in their games. But she was growing older and bigger all the time. Soon she would be able to climb trees and catch balls as well as they could. Anyone who wanted to fuss over a girl could have the new baby instead.

  For the moment, though, she decided to go back to the house. Watching the arrival of the new baby would be more exciting even than playing with her brothers. But as she scrambled to her feet she was frozen into stillness by a sound which she had never heard before.

  It was a snarling, hissing, spitting sound: the sound of a wild animal preparing to defend itself by attack. There were other noises as well – the trampling of feet through the undergrowth of the wood. If one of the boys was coming this way, he might be in danger from whatever beast was lurking in the shadows. Grace knew that she ought to call and warn him; but instead she clutched Andy’s hand, unable to move.

  ‘No!’ It was Frank’s voice which shouted the single word, from a long way away. The sound of moving feet had already stopped, so that for a fraction of a second the wood was silent, as if everyone in it were holding his breath. Then the air was filled with a sound more terrible than anything Grace had ever heard in the six years of her life: a high-pitched wail of agony, followed by a growling, choking sound which seemed to go on for ever. Grace flung herself into Andy’s arms with her hands pressed over her ears.