Deception

by Joan Aiken

  “You will notice the sound of the river at night,” she remembered Isa saying.

  “You need not trouble to remain, Grace, Miss Emmy and I will tie each other’s ribbons. Isa may need you,” Meg said carelessly, and Grace looked surprised.

  “Are ye sure, Miss Meg, hinny? Very well, aa’ll gan to Miss Isa—that one’s always in a pickle.”

  “That was dreadful news about poor Annie’s baby,” Meg said slowly, and Grace gave her a quick, expressionless glance before pursing her lips together, frowningly shaking her head, and curtseying herself out of the room.

  Meg was a slow and finicky dresser. She fiddled with her sash, her ribbons, her shoe-strings, her curls; she made infinitesimal adjustments to her stockings, her tucker, and the hang of her gown. Alvey waited in patience, thinking how much she would have preferred to share quarters with Isa, who obviously never paid the least attention to her appearance—but Isa, being younger, occupied inferior space on the floor above. Alvey, soon ready, went on studying the room. As well as the two beds, and a faded but thick Turkey rug, there were slipper chairs covered in worn blue velvet, a pier glass, a roomy closet for their clothes, and shelves on either side of the fireplace which would accommodate Alvey’s books. A writing-table stood in the west-facing window; it contained two drawers with brass ring-handles.

  Oh, Wicked Lord Love, thought Alvey, you are going to be happy as a lark in this place; she looked gratefully at the comfortable chairs and the wide, chintz-covered window-seats and wondered if the room would be freezingly cold in midwinter, and whether the young ladies were allowed fires in their bedrooms. Then she had a pang of guilt at her selfish light-mindedness, because here she was, rejoicing in her undeservedly comfortable circumstances, while somewhere close at hand the wretched nurse-girl—what was her name? Annie, that was it—must be mourning her lost child. What would Annie do now? Could she possibly have the fortitude to go on suckling that other baby, Lady Winship’s youngest, who must—how extremely strange—must be the aunt of the drowned boy? Supposing that the story Annie had told was true—that her lover had been James Winship; but no one seemed to doubt that aspect of the matter. Why? wondered Alvey. Nothing I have heard so far about this James particularly suggested that he was a womanizer.

  Trying to ignore Meg, still absorbed and preoccupied in front of the glass, Alvey strolled across to the second window, and received another surprise. This window faced south, and instead of pasture a walled garden was revealed—but a most uncommon walled garden, of a long, narrow, and irregular shape, accommodating itself to the course of a rivulet which zigzagged down a little glen, doubtless joining the larger river below. Dusk was beginning to thicken, but Alvey could see all kinds of delights in the garden—clumps of tall flowers, bushes, spaces of lawn by the brook, a patch of rose-garden, rockeries and terraces above, miniature islands set with growing plants and little bridges leading to them; low walls overgrown with creeper.

  Among all this unexpected luxury of cultivation could be seen the shadowy shape of a person who stood motionless for a long period by the brook, then moved slowly away out of sight.

  “Oh, the poor creature!” exclaimed Alvey, caught for a moment by the notion that this tragic-looking figure must be the luckless Annie, out there, all alone.

  “What is it?” inquired Meg, her mouth full of hairpins.

  “Somebody wandering in that beautiful garden. I wondered if it could be Annie—”

  “Oh, good gracious, no! Servants are never allowed in Mamma’s garden—except Carey, of course. In fact nobody is very welcome there. If you see anyone, it is probably my mother herself; she is nearly always late for meals, because her eye has lit on a weed that needs pulling, or a shoot that needs pruning. Ten to one she has even forgotten to change her dress.”

  Feeling snubbed, Alvey sat on the window-seat and jotted down a few notes in a little leather-bound book.

  “I suppose you are always putting together stories in your head?” Meg inquired, after a minute or two, pushing a last hairpin into place to support the cluster of small late roses she had taken from the dressing-table vase and pinned into her ringlets.

  “Only one at a time. When that is finished, then I start another.”

  “How odd it must be! Do you never get bored, knowing what the end must be?”

  “No, why? If you are working on a piece of embroidery, or—or playing a sonata on the pianoforte—you are not bored by knowing how you plan to finish the work, or how the music comes to its end?”

  Meg looked a little put out. Doesn’t care for argument, thought Alvey, she’s like Louisa in that. Doesn’t accept that her own point of view is not the only one possible.

  “Shall we go down?” suggested Meg coldly, and dangled a shawl over her elbows.

  The two girls left the room and walked along the wide passage.

  Perched on a marble table at the head of the stairs, and gazing over the banister with lofty interest, was the largest cat Alvey had ever seen: a grey tabby, calm and dignified; it was almost as big as a small spaniel.

  “Oh, you fine fellow!” Alvey exclaimed softly, and stretched out a coaxing hand, which the cat first inspected with caution; then, displaying a flattering acceptance, it rose and graciously rubbed its ear and jaw against Alvey’s knuckles.

  “Eh! B’gor!” exclaimed the maid Grace, chancing to pass at that moment, and she was so transfixed with astonishment that she dropped the freshly goffred tucker she was carrying and stood with open mouth. “Ah niver see owd Maudge tek to no one like thot afore! Particular not ye, Miss Lou—tek thy thoomb off, more like, when thee wor yoonger.”

  “My sister has asked to be called Miss Emmy!” Meg said sharply. “And you have dropped Miss Isa’s tucker.”

  “Beg pardon, I’m sure, Miss Meg, Miss Emmy.” Grace seized the tucker and retreated.

  But as they moved on they heard the miserable wail of a baby, coming from the opposite direction, and a second maid, coming from the right-hand passage, cried,

  “Eh, Miss Meg! Can you step this way a minute? Tushie’s all of a do—and Missus not to be found—”

  “You go on down, Emmy,” said Meg. “I daresay you will find Parthie down there—I will join you in a moment”—and she turned to follow the second maid, a long-faced, dark-haired person who must, Alvey decided after a moment’s thought, be Ellen, Lady Winship’s maid.

  How am I ever going to keep afloat in these waters? she thought, continuing to descend the stairs rather slowly and reluctantly. Sooner or later I am bound to expose myself by some piece of ignorance or stupidity. Such as the cat! Fool that I was!

  At the foot of the stairs she halted, confronted by four doors, all closed. She knew what rooms they led to: Meg and Isa had drawn plans for her, she had studied and learned them with care. Behind those doors lay the library, breakfast-room, drawing-room, and dining-room; but the essential piece of information with which her tutors had neglected to furnish her was, in which room, at this time of day, did the family assemble, before the summons came to dinner?

  Your father is in his library, Lady Winship had said. That would be the first door on the right, at the foot of the stair. Ought she not—would not Louisa, that dutiful soul, so full of rectitude and propriety—would Louisa not consider it the correct course to go in, greet her parent, and condole with him on the day’s tragic event?

  Not now, Lady Winship had cautioned. Louisa, though, never allowed herself to be deterred from what she felt to be the right course . . .

  But I don’t know the man, Alvey argued internally with Louisa. And what could I possibly say that would help him, in such a case? But those considerations would cut little ice with Louisa, Louisa who was always perfectly convinced of her own ability to say the needful thing.

  I can’t! Alvey cried in despair, but the invisible, inexorable Louisa replied, You must; and, without in the least intending to do so, Alv
ey found herself walking forward and opening the library door.

  The room beyond was half in darkness, illuminated only by a pair of small lamps on the mantel and central table. For a moment Alvey, with surpassing relief, concluded no one was there; but then she saw the bowed figure in the armchair by the fireplace.

  “P—Papa?” she said timidly, all the carefully prepared equivocal phrases flying straight out of her head. He did not look up, and she tiptoed forward. “Papa?”

  A wholly novel feeling had taken possession of her: looking at this elderly man, so bowed, so bent, so racked with grief, she was seized by pity; her heart felt almost ready to break in pieces. Moving closer, she ventured to take his hand in one of hers, laying the other on his stooped head, on his bristly hair. He said nothing, but silently grasped her hand in both of his, clutching and wrenching it so tightly that she was obliged to bite her lip.

  Still neither of them said anything. What was there to say? Louisa, no doubt, would have had an appropriate morsel of religious consolation to offer; Alvey had nothing of the kind.

  By and by he murmured some name, indistinguishable—Mary, Maria? She could not make out what he said, and would not disrupt the closeness and peace of the moment by any inquiry. She continued to stand by him and to stroke his head until the silence was abruptly shattered by voices in the hall, and by the sudden arrival of three persons, one of them bearing a larger lamp which brightly illuminated the room.

  “Ah, there she is. And your Papa too. Ay, put the lamp on the stand, Amble—don’t tip it—see how it smokes! Now tell Slaley to make haste—I want my dinner. So there you are, Louisa! Well, let us have a look at you! Filled out, have you? Grown into a citified young lady, I dare say. Grown you certainly have—why, you must be half a head higher than Meg. You take after my side; the Armstrongs were always tall and rangy.”

  The old lady moved forward at a halting pace, scanning Alvey from head to foot with a pair of unnervingly bright dark eyes. Once she, too, had been tall, but was now stooped and shrunken; her face, narrow and paper-white, was dominated by a nose hooked like a peregrine’s beak. Alvey had read tales of border wives in bygone days urging out their husbands on forays against the Scots, laying a pair of spurs on the breakfast platter as a gentle hint that the larder wanted replenishing; it would be easy to imagine old Mrs Winship encouraging her menfolk on to battle in such a manner.

  Alvey herself, swift as any lover surprised in dalliance, had stepped hastily away from Sir Aydon’s chair, and now withstood old Grizel’s scrutiny with what calm she could muster. Curtseying, she said, “Good evening, Grandmamma. I hope I see you well?” She dared not glance in the direction of Sir Aydon, but heard him murmur in a puzzled voice, “Louisa? Louisa? I thought—I thought—”

  What had he thought? Whom had he thought?

  Alvey felt the blood sting in her cheeks as he stared up at her with what seemed astonished disappointment and dislike; but Amble was poking the fire, and a sudden bright blaze, throwing out heat, made it natural to step back even farther.

  “Well, girl, well? So you have agreed to come home at last?” the old lady was inquiring tartly. “And are we to conclude that you have entirely relinquished those mawkish unseemly notions you used to cherish—that bee in your bonnet about converting the heathen? Eh? Eh? Thought better of all that nonsense, have you?”

  How would Louisa reply to such a fusillade?

  “Converting the heathen is hardly to be regarded as nonsense, Grandmamma,” replied Alvey with chilly dignity. “But I am, of course, bound to consider—to accede to my parents’ wishes in the matter—”

  “Foo! Foo! You don’t impress me with your parliamentary language, girl. Prepared to consider! Very pretty talking! But are you prepared to match words with deeds—marry some decent neighbour and settle down as you ought? You have turned out a tolerable-looking gal—ay, ay, Meg won’t love me for saying so, but your looks bid fair to equal hers—and what’s more you give the appearance at least of having a brain or two in your head—”

  Disconcerted, Alvey was wondering how to counter this when, to her relief, the unattractive, lumpy girl behind old Mrs Winship—evidently dissatisfied with the lack of attention paid her—thrust herself forward and cried,

  “Well, sister? Do you know who I am? Do you remember me?”

  “Of course I do,” replied Alvey in as cool and snubbing a manner as Louisa would undoubtedly have employed. “You are Parthie. How do you do, sister?” And she kissed the girl’s pale cheek.

  “Don’t you think that I am grown a fine girl? Don’t you agree it is time I should let my skirts down? Mamma says not until I am sixteen.”

  “Certainly not,” said the old lady. “Schoolroom misses aping their elders is what I can’t abide. Hold your tongue, child, and mind your manners. Who wishes to hear about you?”

  Alvey felt deeply troubled because all this while the man in the armchair had neither moved nor spoken. Ignoring the arrival of his mother he had turned his head away and sat staring into the flames. That strange moment just now, Alvey thought, that moment of closeness and tenderness between us might never have taken place. In a way it did not. He took me for somebody else.

  For whom did he take me? thought Alvey, perplexed and embarrassed at her impulsive and blundering act, and for whom did I mistake him? Not for my own father, certainly! I would never have rushed to embrace or comfort him. What can have come over me?

  “Huts, tuts, Aydon,” said the old lady, with a kind of rough, reluctant compassion, “pull yourself together, man! The world is not going to end because one bairn has left it. Look at me! Four I lost, one after the other, all under a year, before you were born. Did I sit down and repine? Did I fall into a melancholy? The little fellow was bonny and forward, I’ll allow; but there will be others. Here’s your daughter Louisa, home and cured of her megrims, we hope—she’ll give you grandchildren—”

  “Quiet, can’t you! Leave me alone!” he burst out furiously. “Stop that infernal—complacent—gabble—”

  Here Amble the butler who had returned and, in an unobtrusive manner had been occupying himself about the room, trimming the lamps, adjusting the fire-irons, drawing the curtains further across, deftly intervened.

  “I beg pardon, ma’am—I believe I hear her ladyship calling you in the hall.” And, in an undertone, “Leave him to me, ma’am; he will come about in a little.”

  “Amble he must eat, he has taken nothing all day!”

  “I’ll see he takes something, ma’am; he will be better presently.”

  “Very well,” said Mrs Winship. “Come, Louisa, come Parthie.”

  Amble had spoken no more than the truth: out in the hall, looking perturbed and distracted, her high colour even higher than it had been earlier, Lady Winship stood with Meg and the maid Ellen.

  “Well, Charlotte? What’s to do now?” demanded her mother-in-law rather impatiently. “Have we not sustained enough drama for one day?”

  With a harassed, conspiratorial gesture, Lady Winship drew the older woman to the far side of the hall, much as, earlier, she had led the girls away from the house. Nodding, frowning in the direction of the library door, she laid a finger on her lips.

  “Well? Well? Why all this secrecy?”

  “The girl is missing now! She is not to be found! And poor little Katie upstairs hungry and crying her heart out!”

  “What girl—oh, bless my soul!” Disturbed, now, the old lady stared at her daughter-in-law. “You mean Annie H—?”

  “Hush! Yes! She must have risen and gone out—nobody has seen her—and it is more than time for little Katie to be fed—”

  “Well for pity’s sake!” exclaimed the old lady irritably. “That is no great matter! Give the child a feed of pap or milk-gruel—”

  “She will only suck, she is not used to be fed from a spoon!”

  “Then let her suck through
a piece of butter-muslin. Let Mrs Umfry be sent for, she will soon show one of the maids how it is managed. Lord bless us, do not make such a turmoil about a trifle, Charlotte! But where can the girl be? That, to be sure, is something to worry about, and my son had best not be told. Has one of the men been sent to find if she is at her father’s house?”

  “Yes, and she is not.”

  “Humph! Where else might she have wandered?”

  As the two women stood conferring, with Meg and Ellen in anxious attendance, and Parthie fidgeting restlessly about the draughty flagged hall, Alvey could not avoid the reflection that this drama, as the old lady called it, fell rather conveniently for her. The child’s death by drowning was a horrible occurrence—no wonder its poor mother was distraught; Alvey hoped that poor Annie would soon be located and cared for and comforted; but as she herself had met neither of them, she could have no personal feelings, only general ones; while the fact that the Winship family was so entirely concentrated on the tragedy made her own entry into the house pass off with much less attention than might otherwise have been the case.

  It fell out fortunately for me, Alvey thought, with a troubled feeling of apology towards the missing Annie; and she stood politely aside while the two older women conferred together. I now have a first-class opportunity to sink unobtrusively under the surface of family life.

  She glanced about the hall, thinking that, in spite of the present upset and trouble, this house breathed an unmistakable atmosphere of comfort and wellbeing. The furnishings, though not new, indeed somewhat shabby, were solid and of good quality; the air, though draughty, was warm; coal and wood must be cheap and plentiful in these parts, concluded Alvey, for the fire had been high-piled in the library, and another as bright could now be seen through the partly open dining-room door, casting gleams across a table spread with snowy linen, flashing cut-glass and heavy silverware; a pleasant scent of beeswax and dried petals hung in the air, besides that of woodsmoke, and, at a distance, the savour of roasting meat. Alvey swallowed, recalling that a good many hours had passed since that meal in the village ale-house. Servants came and went, elderly, unhurried, not rigged out in fancy livery or gold lace, but well and respectably dressed, clearly at ease in their duties and taking pride in their performance. It was all a great contrast with Mrs Camperdowne’s amiable, but some-what Spartan, establishment, or Cousin Hepzie’s bare and frugal little house.