by Joan Aiken
‘Wh-where are we going, Miss Slighcarp?’ she presently ventured. Bonnie had such a vehement dislike of the governess that she would never address Miss Slighcarp unless obliged to do so.
‘To school.’
‘To school? But are you not then going to teach us, ma’am?’
‘I have not the leisure,’ Miss Slighcarp said sharply. ‘The estate affairs are in such a sad tangle that it will take me all my time to straighten them. You are to go to the school of a friend of mine in Blastburn.’
‘But Mamma and Papa would never agree to such a thing!’ Bonnie burst out indignantly.
‘Whether they would or whether they would not is of no importance, young lady.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Bonnie, filled with a nameless dread.
‘Because I had a message this afternoon to say that the Thessaly, the ship on which your mamma and papa set sail, has been sunk off the coast of Spain. You are an orphan, Miss Green, like your cousin, and from now on it is I who have the sole say in your affairs. I am your guardian.’
Bonnie gave one sharp cry – ‘Papa! Mamma!’ – and then sank down, trembling, on the sofa, burying her face in her hands.
Miss Slighcarp looked at her with a strange sort of triumph, and then left the room, carrying the valise, and bidding them both be ready in five minutes.
As soon as she was gone, Bonnie sprang upright again. ‘It is not true! It can’t be! She said it just to torment me! But oh,’ she cried, ‘what if it is true, Sylvia? Could it be true?’
How could poor Sylvia tell? She tried to comfort Bonnie, tried to assure her that it must be lies, but all the time a dreadful doubt and fear lay in her own heart. If Bonnie’s parents were no more, then their only protectors were gone. She thought with grief of cheerful, good-hearted Sir Willoughby and kind, gentle Lady Green. To whom, now, could they turn?
Before the five minutes were more than half gone Miss Slighcarp had come back to hasten them. With a vigilant eye she escorted them down the stairs and through a postern door to the stable-yard, where the carriage was waiting, with the horses harnessed and steaming in the frosty night air.
Sleepy and shivering, they hardly had strength to protest when Mr Grimshaw, who was there, hoisted each into the carriage, and then handed up Miss Slighcarp, who sat grimly between them.
‘Well, a pleasant journey, ma’am,’ he cried gaily. ‘Mind the wolves don’t get you, ha ha!’
‘I’d like to see the wolf that would tackle me,’ snapped Miss Slighcarp, and then, to James on the box, ‘You may start, sirrah!’ They rattled out of the yard and were soon crossing the dark and snowy expanses of the park.
They had gone about a mile when they spied the lights of another carriage coming towards them. It drew to a halt as it came abreast of them.
‘’Tis the doctor, ma’am,’ said James.
‘Young ladies!’ said Miss Slighcarp sharply. They caught sight of her face by the swaying carriage light; the look on it was so forbidding that it made them shiver. ‘One word from either of you, and you’ll have me to reckon with! Remember that you are now going to a place where Miss Green of Willoughby Chase is not of the slightest consequence. You can cry all day in a coal-cellar and no one will take notice of you, if I choose that it shall be so. Hold your tongues, therefore! Not a sound from you while I speak to the doctor.’
‘Is that Miss Slighcarp?’ the doctor called.
‘Dr Morne? What brings you out at this time of night?’ She spoke with false cordiality.
‘I received a strange message, ma’am – most strange, a blank sheet of paper, and an urgent summons to the Chase. Is everybody ill? Can nobody write?’
‘Oh Doctor,’ she said, sweet as syrup, ‘I’m afraid it must be some prank of those dreadful children. They are so naughty and high-spirited.’ (Here she gave both children a fierce pinch.) ‘There is nobody ill at the Chase, Doctor. I most deeply regret that you should have been called out for nothing. Let me give you ten guineas instead of your usual five.’
There was a chink of coins as she leaned out of the dim coach and obscured the doctor’s view of its interior.
He rumbled, dissatisfied. ‘Very odd, very. Can’t say it’s like Bonnie to do such a thing. Must be the other little minx. Don’t care for being called out on false errands. However, very kind of you, ma’am. Say no more about it.’
Still grumbling to himself, he turned his horses. Miss Slighcarp gave him a few minutes’ start and then told James to make all possible speed towards Blastburn.
The rest of the journey passed in silence. Both children were utterly cast down at this failure of their plan, and Bonnie was almost numb with grief and despair over the news about her parents. Try as she would to control herself, tear after tear slipped from under her eyelids, and the utmost that she could achieve was that she wept in silence. She was too proud to let Miss Slighcarp guess her misery. Sylvia guessed it, and longed to comfort her, but the bony bulk of the governess was between them.
Long before the end of the trip they were almost dead of cold, and their feet were like lumps of ice, for Miss Slighcarp had all the fur carriage rugs wrapped round herself, and the children had to make do without. They were too cold for sleep, and could almost have wished for an attack by wolves, but, save for an occasional distant howl, their passage was undisturbed. It seemed that Miss Slighcarp was right when she said that the wolves feared to attack her.
At last they drew near the great smoky lights and fearsome fiery glare of Blastburn, where the huge slag-heaps stood outlined like black pyramids against the red sky.
They clattered through a black and cobbled town where the people seemed to work all night, for the streets were thronged, although it was so late, and presently drew up in a dark street on the farthest outskirts.
Miss Slighcarp alighted first, and Sylvia had just time to breathe hurriedly to James, as he lifted her down, ‘You’ll tell Pattern where we are gone, James? She’ll be so worried,’ and to receive his nod, before the governess pushed them along a narrow gravel path towards the front door of a high, dark house.
She rang a bell whose echoes they heard far within, harsh and jangling. Almost at once the door flew open.
7
THE DOOR WAS opened by a thin, dirty child in a brown pinafore with one white front pocket on which was stitched a large number six. Bonnie and Sylvia were not certain if the child was a boy or a girl until Miss Slighcarp said, ‘It’s you, is it, Lucy? Where is Mrs Brisket?’
‘In here, please, miss,’ Lucy said with a frightened gasp, and opened a door on one side of the entrance hall. Miss Slighcarp swept through, turning her head to say to Bonnie and Sylvia, ‘Wait there. Don’t speak or fidget.’ Then they heard her voice beyond the door:
‘Gertrude. It is I. Our plans are going excellently.’ Somebody shut the door and they could hear nothing further. The little girl, Lucy, regarded the new arrivals for a moment, her finger in her mouth, before picking up a broom several inches taller than herself and beginning to sweep the floor.
‘Are you a pupil here?’ Bonnie asked her curiously.
The brown pinafore looked like some kind of uniform – but why was her hair cut so short, even shorter than a boy’s? And why was she doing housework?
‘Hush!’ whispered Lucy. Her eyes flicked in terror towards the closed door. ‘She’ll half kill me if she hears me speak!’
‘Who?’ breathed Bonnie.
‘Her. Mrs Brisket.’
Bonnie looked as if she was on the point of asking more questions, but Sylvia hushed her, not wishing to get Lucy into trouble, and Lucy herself resolutely turned her back and went on with her work, stirring up a cloud of dust in the dim and stuffy hall.
Suddenly Sylvia had the feeling that they were being watched. She raised her eyes and saw someone standing by the banister rail at the top of the ill-lit stairs, staring down at them. Meeting Sylvia’s eyes, this person slowly descended towards them.
She was a girl of about fifteen
, tall and thin, with a pale, handsome, sharp-featured face. She walked with a slouch, and was very richly dressed in velvet, with a band of fur round her jacket and several bracelets. She carried a pair of silver skates.
She walked up to Bonnie and Sylvia, surveying them coolly and insolently. She made no remark or friendly gesture of greeting; merely looked them up and down, and then, with a sudden quick movement, tugged off Sylvia’s white fur cap and tried it on herself. It was too small.
‘Hm,’ she said coldly. ‘What a nuisance you’re not bigger.’ She dropped the cap disdainfully on the floor. Sylvia’s lips parted in indignation; even she, mild and good-tempered as she was, would have protested had she not noticed Lucy’s face behind the girl’s elbow, grimacing at her in an agony of alarm, evidently warning her not to object to this treatment.
Wordlessly, she picked up the beautiful white cap, its fur dusty from the heap of sweepings on to which it had fallen, and stood stroking it while the girl said carelessly to Lucy:
‘Is my mother in there?’
‘Yes, Miss Diana. Talking to Miss Slighcarp.’
‘Oh, that old harridan.’ She pushed open the door and they heard her say, ‘Ma, I’m going out. There’s a fair, and all-night skating on the river. Give me five guineas.’ She reappeared in the doorway jingling coins in her hand, turned her head to say, ‘If either of the new girls is good at mending, make her sew up my satin petticoat. It’s split.’ Then she pushed haughtily past them and went out, slamming the front door.
Miss Slighcarp summoned Bonnie and Sylvia to be inspected by their new instructress. As soon as they saw her they recognized the lady whom they had seen driving her carriage near the boundaries of Willoughby Chase. She was a tall, massive, smartly-dressed woman, her big-knuckled hands loaded with rings flashing red and yellow, rubies and topazes. She glanced at the children irritably. Her eyes were yellow as the stones in her rings, yellow as the eyes of a tiger, and she looked as if she could be bad-tempered.
‘These are the children, Gertrude,’ Miss Slighcarp said. ‘That one’ – pointing to Sylvia – ‘is tractable enough, though lazy and whining and disposed to malinger. This one’ – indicating Bonnie – ‘is thoroughly insolent and ungovernable, and will need constant checking and keeping down.’
‘I’m not!’
‘She’s not!’ burst from Bonnie and Sylvia simultaneously, but Mrs Brisket checked them with a glare from her yellow eyes.
‘Speak before you’re spoken to in this house, young ladies, and you’ll get a touch of the strap and lose your supper. So let’s have no more of it.’
They were silent, but Bonnie’s eyes flashed dangerously.
‘Both, as you can see,’ continued Miss Slighcarp as if there had been no interruption, ‘have been grossly spoilt and over-indulged.’
‘They’ll soon have that nonsense knocked out of them here,’ said Mrs Brisket.
Miss Slighcarp rose. ‘I am leaving them in good hands, Gertrude,’ she said. ‘I am very busy just at present, as you know, but when next we meet I hope you will be coming to visit me. You have helped me in the past, Gertrude, and soon I shall be in a position to help you.’
She said this last very significantly. Bonnie’s and Sylvia’s eyes met. Was Miss Slighcarp intending to take complete possession of Willoughby Chase? Sylvia felt something like despair come over her, but Bonnie clenched her hands indomitably.
Mrs Brisket ushered Miss Slighcarp out and saw her to the carriage. When it had gone, with a clattering of hoofs and a flashing of lamps, she returned to the children.
‘We have no names here,’ she said sternly. ‘You,’ to Sylvia, ‘will be number ninety-eight, you number ninety-nine. Come, make haste, the others are in bed long ago except for the night-workers.’
She led them through the hall — where the little girl Lucy swept frenziedly as soon as Mrs Brisket appeared, though it was plain she was dropping with sleepiness — and up flight after flight of steep, uncarpeted stairs. On the fourth floor she pushed Bonnie through a doorway, hissing, ‘The bed near the door,’ and raised the candle she carried long enough to show a large, bare room, crammed with small iron cots, on which children lay sleeping, sometimes two to a cot. One bed, by the door, was still vacant.
Sylvia had just time to whisper ‘Good night!’ before she was hustled up to the floor above and thrust into a similar bedroom. She undressed in the pitch dark and fumbled her way into the bed, which was narrow, hard, and inadequately covered. ‘I’ll never get to sleep,’ she thought, as she lay shivering miserably, trying to summon up courage to thrust her feet into the chilly depths of the bed. She could hear the mill hooters wail, and iron wheels clang on the cobbles; somewhere a church clock struck midnight. The whole of her short stay among the riches and splendours of Willoughby Chase seemed like a dream.
‘Oh how I wish I was still with Aunt Jane,’ she thought unhappily. ‘But then I should not have met Bonnie, dear Bonnie!’ She turned over, hugging the too-thin, too-narrow blanket round her. Suddenly a hand touched her cheek and a voice whispered, ‘Sylvia, is that you?’
‘Bonnie!’
‘I had to come and make sure you were all right.’
Sylvia thought remorsefully how selfish she had been, lying and pitying herself while Bonnie had courageously dared the perils of the dark house to come and see her.
‘Yes, I’m all right, quite all right!’ she whispered. She reached out and hugged Bonnie. ‘Run back to bed quickly, someone may catch you!’ She felt sure that in this place the punishment for getting out of bed would be dire.
‘Just came to make sure,’ said Bonnie. ‘Don’t worry, Sylvia, we’ll keep each other company, it won’t be too bad. And if we don’t like it, well then we’ll run away.’
Though she said this so stoutly, her heart sank. Where could they run to, with Miss Slighcarp in occupation at Willoughby Chase?
‘See you in the morning!’
‘See you in the morning!’
With the memory of Bonnie’s comforting presence, Sylvia at last found the courage to push her feet down to the cold bottom of the bed and go to sleep. But Bonnie lay awake for hour after hour, hearing the city clocks strike, and the wail of the factory hooters, and the rumble of wheels.
‘What shall we do?’ she thought again and again. ‘What shall we do?’
In the morning they discovered why the beds near the door were the last to be occupied. While the sky outside was still black as midnight and the frosty stars still shone, a tall girl thrust a great bell through the door and clanged it deafeningly up and down until every shivering inmate of the room had thrown back her covers, jumped to the floor, and begun dressing.
Dazed and startled, Sylvia nearly fell out of bed.
‘Where do we wash?’ she whispered to the girl by the next bed.
‘Hush! You mustn’t speak,’ the girl said, and pointed.
Sylvia saw a tin basin in one corner of the room, with a bucket beneath it. The biggest girl in the room broke the ice in the basin by giving it a sharp crack with her hairbrush, then they all washed in order of size. Sylvia was last. When it came to her turn there was no more than a trickle of dirty, icy water left in the basin. She could not bring herself to touch it. She was about to start plaiting her hair when the big girl who had washed first said:
‘Wait, you! Julia, fetch the shears.’
‘Yes, Alice.’ The child who had told Sylvia not to talk ran from the room, and came back in a moment with an enormous pair of garden shears. Before Sylvia realized what was to happen, or had time to protest, Alice had seized hold of her pretty fair plaits and lopped them off, one after the other. Then she chopped the remainder of Sylvia’s hair off as short as possible, leaving it in a ragged, uneven hinge round her head. There was no mirror in the room, so Sylvia could not see quite how bad it looked.
‘What do you mean by cutting off my hair?’ she gasped.
‘Hush! It’s the rule. Mrs Brisket doesn’t allow long hair. Now get into line.’
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The other crop-haired, overalled children were in line already. Alice pushed Sylvia into place at the back, took up her own position at the front, and led them downstairs. Sylvia caught a glimpse of Bonnie at the end of another line which joined theirs. Bonnie’s hair, too, had been cut, and she, like Sylvia, had been given a brown overall to wear, with a number on the pocket. She looked almost unrecognizable, like a thin dark-haired boy. She gave Sylvia a wry grin.
The files had assembled round tables in a large, cold, stone-floored room. They stood waiting while three or four weary, grimy, exhausted-looking children, among whom was Lucy, brought round bowls which proved to contain thin, grey, steaming porridge. It was eaten without milk or sugar. After it they each had a small chunk of stale bread, with the merest scrape of dripping, and that was the end of breakfast.
At this moment Mrs Brisket entered the room, and the whole school stood up. Mrs Brisket said grace, and then looked sharply round.
‘Where are the new girls?’ she demanded. Bonnie and Sylvia were pushed forward from their places at different tables towards the rear of the room.
She scowled at them. ‘I am told that you left your beds and communicated last night. For that you will both miss your dinners.’
Who could have heard them, Sylvia wondered. Then she caught sight of the big girl, Alice, who had cut off her hair. On Alice’s rather lumpish, stupid face was a smug expression.
‘Sylvia didn’t do a thing! It was I who went to talk to her!’ Bonnie exclaimed.’
‘Silence, miss! I will not have this insolence! You can miss your tea too. Perhaps that will teach you respect.
‘Now, tasks. Number ninety-eight will work in the laundry. Eighteen, show her what to do. Ninety-nine, you will be in the kitchen, under cook. She will see that you don’t give any trouble.’