by Joan Aiken
Over details of what befell after our arrival at the Hall, memory begins to fail me; I can recall that Squire Vexford was there, gruff and crusty: ‘I have brought our daughter home, Godric, as you see,’ says Lady Hariot. ‘Is she not exactly like the portrait of your aunt Tabitha at the head of the stair?’ And he: ‘Humph! It would be a deal better if she resembled my uncle Thomas.’ At which Lady Hariot sighed and bade me follow her to the nurseries, a set of rooms which looked down to the bay and had been equipped with every plaything that the heart of a child could desire. A smiling nurse-girl waited with a bundle of clothes on her arm.
‘There!’ said Lady Hariot, lovingly studying Triz who stared all about her in silent wonder. ‘There, my lambie, now you are at home and all this will be yours, all your own!’
And she showed her daughter a toy – I forget what it was, a wooden horse, perhaps. Never having possessed such an article, Triz was puzzled as to what to do with it, and I felt it not my part to show her, so Lady Hariot went down on her knees and demonstrated its use. Triz watched in silence, her eyes very wide and solemn.
‘I will leave you now, my lady,’ I said. ‘For sure, Triz will soon be happy in these fine rooms.’
But again, when I made to go, Triz wept and wept and clung to me and would not be comforted.
‘Massy me, dearie!’ cried the nursery maid. ‘Why you be in your own room now, with all your things about you. Never mind the lass, she’s from times gone by.’
But Triz evidently did not feel so.
‘Alize, Alize!’ she wept, stretching out her arms to me.
I stood silent, thinking of the strange contrast between most of the orphans in Byblow Bottom, who were never likely in their whole lives to inhabit such rooms, such furnishings, as these; and poor little Triz, who wanted none of it. I thought of my fan, my treasure, hidden away in the hollow oak; Lady Hariot probably possessed a dozen such; and so would Triz in the course of time.
I did not like to go and leave her crying so bitterly.
‘Listen, my darling,’ said Lady Hariot, soothing and fondling the little thing. ‘Your Liza, your Alize, do you call her? She shall come back tomorrow – how about that? And shall take you for a walk in the gardens, and you shall show her all your new toys. Will that content you?’
My heart leapt up as Triz thought about that for a while and then nodded, seriously, twice, knuckling the tears from her eyes.
‘She shall come in the morning – after you have had your breakfast.—Can you do that, child?’ Lady Hariot asked me.
‘If Dr Moultrie will give me leave – I study my lessons with him, you see, ma’am.’
‘Do you indeed? Well, I will see that he gives you leave.’
She nodded to me to slip away now, and I did so, for Triz had at last begun attentively studying the toy she held in her hands.
I ran back to the village, down the gravelled driveway, peering most eagerly all along the vistas of terraced garden, none of which were visible from road or footpath. I would have liked to loiter and gaze, but knew that this would not do. Never mind; I could explore the gardens tomorrow with Triz; and with luck the visit might be repeated. My feelings on the way home were a mix of triumph and deep apprehension. This last was well justified, for when I reached Hannah’s house she received me with a very black and stormy mien.
‘So, Miss: what have you been telling her? What did you tell Lady Hariot?’
‘Tell her? I didn’t tell her anything.’
‘A likely story! When you told those boys all about sitting on the cliff top and never seeing Biddy!’
Bother the boys, I thought. Why could they not have held their tongues? Since Triz was now safe at the Hall, I could see no gain in teazeling out the full story of what Biddy had done, or planned to do, or why she had done it. To me it seemed fairly plain that, taken by surprise when Lady Hariot suddenly returned and sent for her child, Biddy had been tempted to plant her own daughter in lifelong security, and meanwhile quickly get rid of the other child so that nobody should have a chance to query or make comparisons.
But by now the gypsies would be well away; there was no proof of what Biddy had done; people in the village might be puzzled by the fact that an apparently drowned child had turned up alive and well; still, such things did happen.
‘Well, I did sit on the cliff top yesterday,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t see Biddy. But I never told Lady Hariot that. Why should I? Lady Hariot was there, sitting on the cliff top, her own self, all yesterday afternoon. I saw her there. I didn’t know then who she was, but she spoke to me.’
Hannah stared at me, for once completely dumbstruck. Presently she went away to her daughter’s house, and what passed between them I never heard. But next day we suddenly discovered that Biddy was gone; gone silently and without a word to anybody.
At first the care of the deserted Charlotte, Charley and Frank devolved on Hannah, but she very soon farmed them out to neighbours.
‘Where do you suppose Biddy has gone?’ I asked Hoby, when it became plain that she was not coming back.
He replied enigmatically, ‘To ask sailors how they do for soap.’
‘And where would she do that?’
‘At Exeter or Plymouth, maybe. Or – perhaps – she has gone to try her luck in London town.’
‘Are there sailors in London town too?’
‘Fine gentlemen, if not sailors.’
‘Why would they want soap?’
He burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Liza, you are green! You don’t know anything! She has gone to be a whore, of course.’
‘Oh well, why didn’t you say so?’ I was affronted. ‘I know all about whores.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t.—What do you know about them?’
‘Fanny Huskisson told me.’ (She was a girl who had lodged for seven years with Mrs Pollard at the Green Man Inn. She had left last year.) ‘She told me they lie with men for money.’ Fanny, a jolly girl, had been in some sort my friend.
‘They don’t just lie with men. They fornicate.’
‘I know! And in spite of that they don’t bear children, because they swallow ergot of rye. I think it is a paltry way to make a living – to have to be with men all the time.’
I had a very poor opinion of men – except for Mr Sam and Mr Bill.
‘I could tell you a great deal more than that,’ said Hob.
‘Well I don’t wish to hear it.’
As a matter of fact I could have told him a great deal more. But I did not want to do that either.
Chapter 2
Hitherto I have recorded in detail some events of my early childhood, for they may have a bearing on what came to pass later; but I do not intend to proceed at such a leisurely pace over the following period of my life; that would be to tax the reader’s patience too highly.
Moreover I suffer sometimes from uncertainty. Did such an event really occur, I wonder, or did I imagine it? I know that I do, from time to time, envision whole episodes as if they were stories that befell me. And I reserve the right, when I so choose, to keep my own counsel over certain occurrences.
Triz, or Thérèse, as she was now called, soon settled contentedly enough with her own family up at Kinn Hall. Heaven knows she had not been particularly well used or had much affection bestowed on her while she was in residence with Biddy Wellcome; there were few reasons why she should object to the change. And now, among these new friends who continually talked and sang to her, asked her questions, played games with her, she rapidly learned to talk. But she continued very attached to me and would demand my company every few days. So by degrees I came to spend the greater part of my time up at the Hall, Whether, growing older, Triz had any recollection of that strange episode at the Michaelmas Fair – whether she remembered being handed over to the gypsies – I do not know; she never alluded to it. Perhaps it was sunk deep down in the mists that obst
ruct our recollections of infancy and early childhood. But my arrival and intervention on that occasion, whether consciously recalled or not, I believe must have played its part in her great devotion to me.
Some mothers might have been jealous of such an attachment to a stranger in their newly restored child. But Lady Hariot was not of that kind. Her nature was just and considerate, and because of her protracted illness she had had time to think long and deeply about matters which are, by most people, accorded little attention. Anything that brought comfort or interest to her child, she welcomed; and so she welcomed me. I may say that she was like a mother to me – certainly a better mother than Biddy Wellcome had ever been to her own little Polly (who was now relegated to her grandmother’s fitful and fluctuating care; if sober, Hannah treated the child kindly enough, but her sober periods were becoming more widely spaced. Very often, these days, she was to be found incapably drunk).
Lady Hariot, indeed, made the suggestion to me that I should come and live entirely at Kinn Hall. Nether Othery she thought to be a less than satisfactory haven for me. She even went so far as to write a letter to my guardian, Colonel Brandon, having obtained his address from Hannah in one of her lucid intervals, asking if he would have any objection to my removal to the Hall.
But after a long lapse of time a reply came back, not from Colonel Brandon himself, but from some lawyers in Dorchester, to the effect that Colonel Brandon had last year rejoined his regiment, the 33rd Foot, under the command of General Wellesley, and that he and Mrs Brandon also were now in Seringapatam, letters to and from which place must necessarily take many months. In his absence the lawyers were not empowered to permit such a change in my situation.
‘Never mind it, please, dear ma’am,’ I said to Lady Hariot. ‘It is kind in you, but we go on very well as we are.’
In fact I was myself in two minds about such a scheme.
‘Let us, you and I, be best friends always,’ Fanny Huskisson had once said to me urgently, before she left Byblow Bottom. But I could not give my agreement to this. Apart from the fact that Fanny was a stupid, foul-mouthed girl (though cheerful and very good-natured), I did not feel able to commit myself to such a promise. And by the same impediment in my own nature I had been held back when Hoby invited me to go to the fair; a desire to keep apart, not to be at anybody’s bidding, to move alone and freely, never to be bounded by the dealings of others. My fondness for Hoby did not blind me to the fact that he and his cronies had many ploys in which I did not at all wish to share. And though Fanny had always felt that she was my particular friend, I, for my part, felt that we had hardly anything in common.
So now it was the same with my life at Kinn Hall.
Firstly, I was at all times well aware that the Squire looked upon me with a sour and most unfavourable eye. Neither an affectionate father nor a loving husband, he never entered the nursery world and paid little heed to it; but the dullest intelligence could not but be aware that, beyond this indifference, he bore towards me an active dislike and, if he came across me in the grounds or garden, leading Triz’s pony or playing with her at bat and ball, would screw up his mouth in a bitter line and cast upon me a glance of evident repulsion. This dislike, I knew, was fostered by his man Willsworthy. If ever Triz and I fell into some minor misdoing, as children must at times, if there was a trampled flower-bed to be reported, or a broken rose bush, or a toy left forgotten in the rain to rust, be sure the tale would reach Mr Vexford as fast as Willsworthy could seek his ear. And I think Lady Hariot had her work cut out to defend my position.
But defend it she did.
Then also, though Lady Hariot was so kind towards me, so amazed at the quantity of learning that I had already contrived to acquire from Dr Moultrie, so desirous of assisting me to other attainments, to the end that, when little Triz began to have masters to teach her music and dancing and French and Italian, I must share all her lessons (and indeed that was a sovereign advantage to the poor little thing, for she was by nature a slow learner and many times found it easier to understand or to recall what she had been taught after I had gone over it with her) – yet, despite these benefits, I felt a constraint up at Kinn Hall which I was mortally glad to cast off when I ran home at evening-time, back to the squalor and freedom of Byblow Bottom. Pray do not mistake me. I perfectly understood what inestimable gifts I was daily receiving. Under the impartial, affectionate eye of Lady Hariot I was learning the way that high-born folk speak and move and comport themselves, and quite quickly, at will, I was able to discard the rustic airs of the village.
I soon came to realize that Lady Hariot’s birth and blood were superior to those of the Squire.
‘I married him, you see, because I had no other choice,’ she told me calmly one day, when we were watching Jeff Diswoody instruct Triz in the art of managing her pony.
A moment before the Squire had ridden by, scattering gloom and despondency about him as was his usual habit.
I watched him out of earshot and then said: ‘No choice, ma’am? How could that be, so kind and beautiful as you are?’
But, of course, I knew full well what she meant. How could I not?
‘I was one of five sisters,’ she explained. ‘And my father, though an earl, was not a wealthy man. He could not give us large portions. And no man in his right mind is going to offer for a girl with a squint like mine. Why, in many countries – just across the Channel, even now, in poor peasant communities – a cast such as I have would be sufficient to get me burned as a witch.’
‘Yes, I do understand, ma’am.’ And I did. I remembered the gypsies.
‘So, in fact, I was fortunate. The lot of an unmarried woman is bleak enough. To be a spinster aunt, a poor relation – that is bad, even without a physical handicap, causing one to be despised and sneered at. In consideration of my excellent connections, Mr Vexford was prepared to overlook my unsatisfactory appearance. But now, I fear, he reckons that he has made but a poor bargain.’
She sighed, watching the stocky, angry figure canter off down the driveway to join a meeting of otter-hounds at Folworthy. Such sports took him farther and farther afield.
‘This house is nothing but a nest of cripples and misfits!’ I had heard him shout furiously at his wife. ‘Damme, a man might as well live shut up in the Dunster Asylum. All I can do is get out!’
It was true that Lady Hariot had a large-hearted proclivity for selecting to serve her those who also suffered from some disadvantage and thus might otherwise have fared badly. Her maid, Prue, walked with a severe limp; Mrs Lundy the housekeeper stammered when she spoke; my own odd hands, I felt sure, played no inconsiderable part in the Squire’s dislike and Lady Hariot’s favour. Even Jeff Diswoody was deaf, due to a fall in infancy.
I think she had noticed my hands on that very first afternoon.
‘They are a most unusual feature, perhaps unique,’ she said sighing, when Triz and I commenced lessons on the pianoforte and the music master, Mr Godfinch, made some nervous and startled comment. ‘To have one hand so much larger than the other, and the sixth finger, I have never encountered anything so – so out of the common way. When playing the piano, I daresay it may be a decided advantage; but otherwise, my poor child, I imagine that it must have caused you some grief and abuse?’
‘Oh, bless you, yes, ma’am, all the children in Othery call me names, such as Liz Lug-fingers, and they used to sing: ‘Three six nine, the goose drank wine, six fingers on your hand, your mother came from mermaid-land.’ But I pay them no heed; some of them are frightened of me and think I could put a spell on ’em, but the rest are friendly enough.’
With the hard knowledge of experience though, I was well aware that no man was likely to take me to wife; indeed, Hoby and the rest had often said so. Who in the world wants a girl with odd hands? Or children probably cursed with a similar blemish? Even if the girl were as beautiful as Venus? For which reason, when Dr Moultrie told me about t
he Roman gods and goddesses, Venus was never my prime favourite. I guessed that the Goddess of Love and Beauty would never look favourably on me. Rather, for my patron, I chose Athene, the Wise Lady, and asked for her help in any new enterprise. And she had often given it.
However my extra-large right hand and surplus finger did, as Mr Godfinch had suggested, serve me well in playing the piano; stretching an octave was no problem at all, whereas the fairylike hands and fingers of little Triz were Mr Godfinch’s despair, and her singing voice was but a faint thread of sound like the sigh of a kettle.—Here again, my voice proved a surprise to Lady Hariot and the music master.
‘Five octaves! It is unparalleled!’ he cried out in astonishment. ‘The voice itself, I grant, is of no particular merit, though strong and clear and of good pitch – but what a range! We should make an opera singer of the child, Lady Hariot, she is wasted otherwise.’
But to this suggestion Lady Hariot was utterly opposed. Opera singers, she held, were little better than whores; no proper person would commit a decent girl to such a life. And I came, after all, of gentle stock; Colonel Brandon, my guardian, was a gentleman greatly esteemed by all who knew him, both in Dorset and in London. He had married a Miss Marianne Dashwood, a young lady of excellent family (though not wealthy) from Sussex; Colonel Brandon himself was a most upright character, owner of a comfortable property, Delaford, in Dorset . . . No, no, it was quite out of the question that I should become an opera singer. What my precise connection with the Colonel was, no clue had revealed; but simply the fact that there was such a connection must serve to guard me from any such disreputable future.
– Nevertheless Mr Godfinch trained my voice painstakingly and thoroughly; he was a zealous and practical little fellow who taught dancing also, in Exeter and Taunton; he had a great red birthmark, poor devil, right across one cheek; I reckon he rated my prospects of matrimony quite as low as I did myself, and concluded that he had best supply me with a practical means of earning a living.