That night when she put them to bed she chose to read Portia and Edward a poem from a new book she had purchased on her trip to London. Both Portia and Edward always hated being put to bed by Nanny in the summertime when the sun was still a good two or three hours from setting, so the poem Aunt Tattie chose was singularly relevant:
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight
In summer, quite the other way—
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
‘What an excellent poem!’ Aunt Tattie exclaimed when she had finished. ‘There is such special suffering in seeing the curtains drawn over the sun whatever the clock is saying the time is.’
‘Yes,’ said Edward. ‘It’s purely beastly.’
‘Purely beastly?’ Aunt Tattie laughed in delight. ‘Edward dearest, you are so wonderfully quaint, so you are!’
‘I’ve been reading him Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Tattie,’ Portia explained, before crawling down her bed to pull back the curtains her aunt had just closed. ‘Look, Aunt Tattie. Look, it’s still really broad daylight and it does seem such an awful waste.’
‘A purely beastly one,’ Edward solemnly agreed.
‘I know, I do so agree.’ Aunt Tattie sighed and looked out on the lovely garden still bathed by the warm evening sun. ‘I would let you stay up until you were too tired to keep your eyes open, my dearests, but Nanny won’t hear of such a thing and we can’t have Nanny marching out on us now, can we? Not Family Nanny, that would never do.’
‘Couldn’t we just come down for perhaps half an hour tonight?’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps, dearest,’ Aunt Tattie said, tucking Portia back into her bed. ‘I’ll have a word with Nanny and see if we can’t get your bedtime moved till a little later. But anyway you couldn’t come down again tonight, dearests, because tonight is our monthly meeting of the Bannerwick Music and Literary Society, and I have this feeling they would all far prefer to read about children than to see them. Now off into your own bed, dearest boy,’ she told Edward, taking his hand and leading him across the room, then suddenly stopping short. ‘I nearly forgot!’ She breathed in, her nostrils flaring slightly. ‘What is my mind coming to?’ Returning to Portia’s bed, Edward’s hand still in hers, she sat down and with yet another of her long, silent intakes of breath began to twist her string of amber beads tightly around her neck with her free hand.
‘This is most exciting, children dear,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow – tomorrow Mr Swift starts with us, or rather he arrives here tomorrow and we are all, I think, going to be very happy with him.’
‘Who’s Mr Swift, Aunt Tattie?’ Portia asked, watching in fascination as her aunt wound her string of beads ever tighter around her neck. Sometimes she couldn’t help thinking that one day their aunt would get so carried away with the twisting of her beads that her eyes would pop out of her head the way Uncle Lampard had once described its happening to a poor little pekinese.
‘Yes,’ Edward agreed, his eyes dark with suspicion. ‘Who is Mr Swift?’
‘He is the tutor we have chosen. Nice Mr Swift is coming here as tutor to you, Edward, and a charming lady called Miss Collins is to start with us at the same time as governess to Portia. We interviewed a great many applicants but we finally chose Mr Swift and Miss Collins because they seemed by far the most sensitive as well as being entirely sympathetic to Mr Ruskin, the Arts and Crafts movement, and all that it stands for.’
Aunt Tattie smiled and to Portia’s relief finally relaxed her hold on her string of amber beads, getting up and leading Edward over to his own bed where she tucked him in and kissed him good night. Then, having done the same for Portia, she left them alone with their thoughts.
‘I don’t want a tutor,’ Edward announced in the twilight darkness of the nursery, rubbing off his aunt’s kisses onto his sheet once she was safely out of sight. ‘I want to go to school like other boys.’
‘If I were you I certainly wouldn’t,’ Portia replied. ‘I love Bannerwick and I should want to stay here always. Just as much as you would, Edward, if you had any sense.’
‘I still don’t want a tutor,’ Edward said. ‘I hate tutors.’
‘They’re better than going to school, really they are, Edward,’ Portia said in reproof, but Edward merely dived to the bottom of his bed and proceeded to make a tent around him with his head as a centre pole, which was a habit of his when he was feeling particularly frustrated.
For her part Portia turned to the hand-painted, highly decorated bookshelf where Aunt Tattie had replaced the book of poetry and took it down. Ever since she had been told that her mother was dead, sleep had never been easy for her so instead she liked to read in bed, lying back on her pillow while the shadows cast by their nightlights danced on the ceiling. These were the times when she would think of her beautiful mother, imagining her up above the clouds watching over both Edward and herself, and as she did so she would slowly and inevitably fall into a fast and safe sleep.
But this particular night sleep would not come as surely as it normally did, and as a consequence Portia lay in the glow of the setting sun wondering about the two strangers who were about to descend on their household and take charge of her and Edward’s life. For no good reason at all the thought of this Mr Swift and Miss Collins worried her, and even more so when the next thing she knew was that she was sitting up in bed wide awake in the darkness having just dreamed the most terrible nightmare.
A LITTLE LEARNING
When the trap arrived back from the station and set down Mr Swift in front of the house, the children who were watching from a room in the turret could see from their distant viewpoint that he was a tall man, towering over even Mr Louis, Uncle Lampard’s French butler. Seeing Edward’s face when they went further downstairs to sneak a closer look at the new arrival made Portia realize that the tutor was about to fulfil her brother’s worst forebodings. His whole appearance made him seem like a huge crow, particularly the black cloak which hung from his shoulders in voluminous folds, its dark colour accentuating the white unweathered skin of the tutor’s thin black-bearded face, large hooked nose and dark beady eyes which peered out from under a tall stovepipe hat which had gone grey with age at the edges.
‘Lawks!’ Portia said, doing a passable imitation of Evie, one of the maids. ‘Oh lawks, Master Edward, I don’t think ’e’s a tutor at all! I think ’e’s an undertaker, a-come to bury you.’
At which Edward not unnaturally burst into tears, and Aunt Tattie on her way up to them rushed at once to his aid, only to stop on seeing him sobbing so dreadfully and begin one of her frightening breath-holding acts.
It was always the same. Whenever something unusual occurred or her sensitivities were in the least offended Aunt Tattie became so overwrought that she began to hold her breath, the way small children do. On this occasion she began to falter even as she reached her nephew, her knees starting to buckle as she turned faint so that in turn Nanny, bristling with barely contained indignation, called for someone to fetch some burnt feathers or Lively Sarah immediately to wave under the nose of her old charge.
‘Starving yourself of oxygen, Miss Tattie, will not help anything,’ she said loudly as she sat Aunt Tattie down. ‘We’re really going to have to see someone about your fainting fits, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘I have always been a fainter, Nanny,’ Aunt Tattie replied with a sigh. ‘You know that. It is simply a part of who and what I am.’ Which indeed was true, for out on a ramble with the children just the sight of a dead bird could bring on, if not a complete faint, then certainly either a sudden dizzy spell or a bout of pa
lpitations, with the result that Portia would have to run round the back of her breathless aunt and try without avail to loosen some of her clothing.
Once and most famously of all when they had all been walking in the town Aunt Tattie had fainted in the street because she saw a man spit.
‘I do wish she wouldn’t do that,’ Edward had grumbled afterwards. ‘It makes everyone stare so.’
‘Nanny says Aunt Tattie’s not like the rest of the world,’ Portia had replied. ‘Nanny says she was born a skin too few.’
‘I still wish she wouldn’t faint where everyone can see,’ Edward had maintained.
Today Evie’s administration of some Lively Sarah beneath her mistress’s nose brought Aunt Tattie back to life within seconds, and Edward’s heartbreaking sobs soon ceased when she produced a barley sugar stick from her dress pocket, for which charitable act Edward even permitted his aunt to hug him, although not for very long.
It was soon all too apparent why Mr Swift had been chosen as Edward’s new tutor.
‘Mr Swift is so sensitive, so poetical, such a beauty lover,’ Aunt Tattie sighed after the new tutor had been in charge of Edward’s education for only a few days.
They were all having tea in the garden, while Mr Swift took a turn about the grounds, although Portia whispered to Edward that she doubted whether he would see anything of the estate since he walked with his head thrown right back and his long thin hands clasped tightly low down behind his back. ‘What a success, Lampard dearest, what a success!’ their aunt continued, sipping her camomile tea. ‘And after all our anxieties! We were so terribly anxious, were we not? That we should not have philistines influencing our dearest babies, yes? Yes?’
‘No philistines,’ Sir Lampard mumbled from the depths of his chair, opening one eye and then closing it again. ‘No philistines come what may.’
‘What’s a phistiline, Aunt Tattie?’ Edward enquired despite a mouth full of cucumber sandwich.
‘The definition of a philistine, dearest, is someone who tramples over souls,’ Aunt Tattie replied, closing her eyes before breathing in deeply against the very thought of such people and holding her breath. ‘Mercifully dear Mr Swift is of an altogether different disposition, being sensitive to all living things and to beauty and without a shred of worldliness – because it is particularly important for a boy to have a sensitive tutor and not a worldly one in any circumstances.’
Having all but run out of breath she opened her eyes again, and stared at Portia from underneath her hat with her beautiful mournful blue-grey eyes.
Portia held her aunt’s look steadily without dropping her gaze, while wondering with a sinking heart how best to tell Aunt Tattie that she didn’t understand Edward at all, for she simply did not seem to realize that what made her happy was making Edward extremely miserable, most particularly as far as his new tutor was concerned.
‘Oh, would you-ah look at that full moon, Edwarrrdddd!’ he had cried aloud to his embarrassed young charge on only the second evening after his arrival at Bannerwick. ‘Do you-ah not-ah think it behoves us to go outside and bow-ah to it at once, the beauty-ah of the moon-ah?’
The last thing Edward wanted to do was to rush outside and bow to the moon or do anything else Mr Swift was so insistent on doing. Edward wanted to do what other little boys his age did, namely play knights and damsels in distress with Portia, using the new wooden sword one of the gardeners had just made him.
‘Mr Swift is perfectly beastly,’ he said late one night when both he and Portia had been awoken by strange noises from the garden. Kneeling at their nursery window they spotted Mr Swift in his cloak standing in the middle of the moonlit lawn directly below them holding his hands aloft and reading aloud from a book. ‘I think he’s mad and beastly and he even makes beastly noises when he eats.’
Nanny volunteered the same opinion at nursery breakfast without even being asked.
‘He’s as daft as May butter. Let us only hope and pray that the new governess, young lady—’ she said, lifting Portia’s left arm off the table. ‘Let us hope and pray Miss Collins has her feet nearer the ground than this lunatic when she arrives. And when are there going to be lessons, may I ask? Where is the routine that goes with tutors? Where are the normal goings-on? Where indeed? Nowhere, that’s where.’
Nanny Tradescant glared at Evie and Portia as if to underline her opinion of the unfortunate man who had strayed into her territory, then leaned across to wipe some egg off Edward’s chin with one moistened index finger before continuing. ‘There’s been no proper lessons since his arrival. Nothing but poetry, and music and dancing. Dancing indeed. I really would appreciate someone telling me where dancing about in pointed shoes and banging a tambourine is going to get Master Edward here if he has to follow his father out to India? Where is dancing around in a yellow tunic banging a tambourine going to get him with the natives? Your grandfather old Sir Bartholomew would turn in his grave, young man, I do assure you, if he knew of such carrying-on, make no mistake about it. If there was anything he could stand less than what your aunt calls a beauty lover it was two beauty lovers, and don’t we have a pair of them at Bannerwick now? Don’t we just. Or rather we have three of them now that this bearded loon has arrived among us. If old Sir Bartholomew was alive he would turn in his grave, there is simply no denying it, you mark my words.’
While Edward stabbed the bottom of the shell of his boiled egg to stop the witches sailing across the Styx, Portia politely enquired what beauty lovers were exactly.
‘That is not the sort of question a young lady should be asking,’ Nanny Tradescant replied, bringing about a return of the giggles to Evie as a consequence of which she was ordered to clear the breakfast table forthwith. ‘Let it just be said that your father and your poor late mother were certainly not made of such stuff. Alas your aunt and uncle are, and I know of no reason why this should be so. Dear me, and when I think that the Tradescants used to be so very well thought of in this county, what with the famous Bannerwick lawn meets and two kinds of shooting. What do we have now? What we have now is looming and weaving and more foxes than chickens. I wouldn’t recognize this place for the proper house I came to as a nursemaid to Sir Bart all those years ago, I wouldn’t really, and I wrote as much to my sister only last week. Personally I think no good will come of anything such as has been happening at Bannerwick Park of late.’
Of course given such a forecast it was with great interest that Portia now awaited the arrival of her governess. The very moment she saw Miss Collins being helped down from the pony trap by Mr Plumb the coachman who had been sent to meet the train she felt a surge of satisfied excitement, for it was straight away obvious to everyone that from the tip of Miss Collins’s oddly pointed pixie-like boots to the large strangely painted brooch on her shapeless felt bonnet Portia’s new governess embodied everything Nanny Tradescant had dreaded and perhaps even a little bit more.
* * *
Miss Collins was as thin as Mr Swift and her face also bore a large nose, either side of which were set two brown eyes which might have been her best feature had they been straight which they were not, one of them looking quite the other way from the other as if disagreeing with everything its opposite number wanted to see. She wore her hair in strange grey corkscrew ringlets at the back of her head, while at the front she sported a crimped Romanesque fringe parted either side of her nose. It was as if her hair had been arranged for her when she was young by some elderly relative in what was even then an out-dated fashion and she, perhaps in some desperate homage to their memory, had continued with the same style.
Her initial outfit, however, much to Nanny Tradescant’s horror, Portia’s open amazement, Evie’s unalloyed mirth and Edward’s complete disgust was easily her most respectable. Once installed in her own wing and having absorbed the atmosphere of Bannerwick, Miss Collins obviously realized almost immediately that the mode of dress considered acceptable by the Tradescants was nothing if not liberal, although such would not have be
en the adjective used by Nanny. Nanny now preferred to describe how the family liked to make themselves appear as the barmy side of eccentricity.
Each evening the grown-ups assembled in the library before dinner in their finery, Aunt Tattie arranged in medieval velvets with gold wrought head ornaments, Sir Lampard in his father’s old evening clothes and Mr Swift with his very latest affectation, which was to appear dressed almost exactly like Lord Byron on his last recorded mission to Greece. Hardly surprising therefore that when the new governess found herself – most unusually for someone in her position – not only invited into such company, but amidst such sartorial variety, she felt it incumbent upon herself from the outset to take up the challenge.
‘Such a person should not be invited into the library for drinks,’ Nanny Tradescant stated quite categorically one night when putting her charges to bed. ‘That silly young woman will start getting airs and graces before you can say fifteen o’clock.’
‘Does everyone’s governess wear striped dresses and buckled shoes?’ Portia wondered, knowing perfectly well such was not the case. But while Portia thought it was funny Edward found the sight of Miss Collins altogether too much to bear and would turn bright red and crawl behind a sofa whenever she visited the nursery floor. Moreover Nanny Tradescant made her own feelings totally clear by refusing to reprimand Edward for his bad manners, instead allowing him to remain hidden until Miss Collins had departed.
‘I have seen many sights in my time, children,’ Nanny concluded as she finished tucking them into bed. ‘But none that I have seen have been quite as queer as her. I shall have words to say to Miss Tattie on the matter, make no mistake.’
‘Good,’ Edward said, preparing to disappear down his bed after Nanny had given them a whiskery kiss and retired. ‘I just hope they both fall down dead! Mr Swift and Miss Collins!’ he called out from the safety of his tent.
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