“Well, if I must for my beloved sister, I must go to her aid,” said Emma with painfully faked reluctance.
At Hillfield House the butler invited them into the foyer.
“I have an invitation I wish to give to Sir Benjamin,” Amy told the butler.
“If you will place it on the tray,” said the butler lifting a silver tray from a nearby table and holding out to her, “I will take it to Sir Benjamin.”
She reluctantly placed it on the tray, and the butler started to leave.
“I would like to talk to Sir Benjamin,” Amy called after the butler as he left on his errand.
Amy had in truth snooped around Hillfield House when it was not occupied although she was disinclined to admit it, but this was the first time she had been inside and it being Ben’s residence added a little thrill to seeing it.
The butler regally returned very shortly and Amy looked at him expectantly. She had expected Ben and wondered why he hadn’t come to see her.
“I am sorry, milady, but Sir Benjamin is unable to see you at this time. He sends his regrets, and he asked me to convey his deepest apologies. He does not want you to feel he is being rude but it is impossible for him to come at this time.”
“We can wait until he is available,” she proffered.
“It will be a long time until he is finished with his task. You may wish to return at another time milady.”
Amy interpreted the butler’s words as meaning go away, which annoyed her. She felt like she was being snubbed. What could Ben possibly be doing that he couldn’t set it aside for a few minutes as any gentleman would do if a lady requested to see him?
“Very well,” she said with an unaccustomed snippiness. And added coldly, “Thank you. Please give our greetings to Sir Benjamin. We will not bother him further.”
Outside Emma climbed back into the trap. Amy was about to join her sister when her curiosity got the better of her.
“Wait here Emma. I’m going to take a quick look around the house.”
From previous snooping, which had generally been justified by some tortured excuse, she knew that at the back of the house was a walled garden. This was unusual for a country house where it seemed quite unnecessary unlike its city companions.
As she sneaked towards the wall at the back end of the house she heard the sound of digging. Peeking through the broad slit between the wall and the edge of the solid gate she could see a garden that had not been well tended. This was likely because the house had been closed for a while and was just recently being occupied again.
When she moved sideways her narrow vertical view of the garden changed. Suddenly she saw three men. Two were standing beside what appeared to be an open trench. One of the men was dressed in clothing similar to that of a clerk. The other man standing next to the trench was wearing rough clothing such as a gardener might wear. The man digging in the trench, who was bent over as he shoveled dirt out of the trench, was also wearing peasant clothing.
She had hoped at first that Ben might be there because that would explain why he was not available to respond to her request, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then she realized as she studied the trio that the man digging in the trench was Ben.
She was deeply puzzled why Sir Benjamin Anstruther, Baronet, would be digging dirt while a clerk and even the gardener looked on. It just didn’t make sense. And what was the trench. It looked for all the world like a grave. After watching the proceedings for about ten minutes she tiptoed away from the gate as if to hide her footsteps that no one would hear anyway since the soft soil was cushioning her steps.
As they headed home in the trap she told Emma what she saw. Thoughts were whirling around in her head but they weren’t coming in for a landing because she could think of no possible explanation for what she had just witnessed.
“Sorry for leaving you in the trap for so long,” apologized Amy, “but it was a really puzzling scene.”
“Don’t be concerned,” Emma reassured her. “Anyway, you surely don’t think I would sit here twiddling my thumbs while you were snooping... I mean investigating mysterious goings on at Hillfield House. While you had your nose stuck in the gate I looked around myself.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing much. I looked through the side window but couldn’t see anything because of the lace curtain. There was a little table under the window and what looked like an artist’s sketchbook. As far as I could make out there was a sketch of a horse, but that’s all I could see. So I gave up and went back to the trap. I didn’t want to go around the other side. I thought I better wait in the trap in case you had to make a quick escape.”
“Emma, you make it sound like I was engaged in some kind of a furtive activity.”
“Weren’t you?”
Emma frowned and wrinkled he nose.
“Are you sure it was Ben who was digging the grave.”
“He was digging a trench. I didn’t say he was digging a grave. I said it looked like a grave.”
“This seems like something out of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Emma eagerly.
“No it is not,” said Amy firmly. “Anyway how do you even know about Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels? For that matter, how do you even know about Ann Radcliffe? Do you pay someone to smuggle in contraband? I saw you earlier reading that broadsheet that you tried to hide from me.”
“No, that’s absurd. It’s not contraband.”
“To mother, it most assuredly is.”
“If you have to know, snoopy, the paper I was reading is called Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which is a perfectly respectable journal to read.”
“Not to mother, because you-are-a-girl.”
Amy dragged out the last four words semi-mockingly.
“Anyway, where did you get it Emma?”
“It was lying on father’s desk. Lord Ramsay left it yesterday. After all, he’s a member of the Royal Society.”
“You stole it from your poor father?”
“No I didn’t steal it. I asked father for it.”
“He said yes?”
“He said something. I took it that he meant yes.”
“You’re a disgrace Emma. It will disgrace the entire family when you end up on the gallows. And what about Mrs. Radcliffe’s gothic novels? Where did you find out about Ann Radcliffe’s novels? Please tell me you don’t have one of her novels. Emma!”
“No, I don’t have one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels.”
Amy studied her sister as Pansy pulled the trap into the drive of their house. Then she pointed an accusing finger at Emma.
“But you’ve read one of her novels, haven’t you? Don’t dissemble. I can read your mind.”
“No you can’t. I know that for sure,” said Emma menacingly. “Because if you could read my mind you would go stark-raving-mad. They would cart you off to Bedlam and throw you into a cell where you would scream and bang your head against the padded walls until you sank into insensibility.”
Sometimes Emma was a little dramatic.
That night Amy couldn’t sleep. She watched the line of moonlight that shone through the slit in the curtains slowly make its way along her wall crossing the frame of her door and creeping towards where she lay. Its companion was the old clock in the hall downstairs that sounded out the quarter hour, the half hour, and then announced each hour. The sound traveled upstairs, along the hall, and through her closed door. It reached her softly but still reminded her of how long she’d lain awake.
What was Ben up to? Why was he digging what looked like a grave? Did it have to do with that dark coach that flew by her and Emma two nights ago? She desperately tried to make sense of everything. Ben in peasant clothes digging in the ground. Ben who refused to see her. He probably didn’t want her to see him in his peasant’s clothes. But why? You don’t dig in the garden in all your finery. Why wouldn’t he want her to see him in rustic clothes?
Then a thought came into her head. A most disturbing thought. Emma said she ha
d seen a sketchbook with a drawing of a horse. Amy had recently encountered a young man in rustic clothes, holding a sketch book while Turpin, who no one could deny was a horse, rudely and unceremoniously deposited her in the River Arne.
Amy bounced out of her bed and out of her room in almost one leap. She stomped down the hall. Emma’s door was unlocked. Emma was sleeping peacefully in her bed while a wide swath of moonlight flooded in through a wide gap in her curtains and bathed the sleeping girl’s face and hair in its silver glow. She looked so peaceful and angelic.
Amy shook her awake.
“Was the drawing you saw through the window at Hillfield House a picture of Turpin?”
“Huh,” said a groggy Emma. “It was a horse. Turpin is a horse. I don’t know.”
Any didn’t have to ask. She already knew the answer. She stomped out of Emma’s room, shutting the door behind her with a bang.
“I’m going to have to start locking my door,” Emma softly moaned as she slid back into the arms of sleep.
Back in her room, Amy threw herself violently on her bed. If she had been awake before, she was really wide awake now.
“Ohhhh!” She pounded her fists on her bed.
Ben was the one that had seen her thrown by Turpin. Ben was the one that had mocked her in her time of calamity. And Ben had been mocking her all along, the scoundrel. He’d smirked while dancing with her at Brewminster Hall. He was making fun of her when they rode down to the River Arne yesterday.
“You will regret your treatment of me,” she muttered under her breath. “I will repay you Sir-Benjamin-Anstruther. I will not rest easy until you come crawling to me on your hands and knees pleading for mercy. Revenge is my only goal from now until doomsday. You have gone too far. Now is the time for me to plan your demise.”
Amy was not unlike her sister Emma in some respects, especially when it came to excessive dramatics. She fell asleep and did not wake until late the next morning.
Chapter 7
Amy awoke the next morning—late the next morning—to a light tapping. Effie the maid was timidly trying to wake her.
“Miss. Miss. Your mother sent me to awake you.”
Effie was a locally recruited maid who had never been schooled in all the niceties of being a maid, so she called everyone either Miss or Sir. Her failure to use their proper titles did not matter to Amy. And it did not matter to her mother, who despite holding a few strongly held opinions, they did not extend to the proper formalities of the gentry whom for reasons hard to fathom she felt were inferior her and her family.
The Sibbridge household, while not anywhere close to being impoverished, was not especially affluent either. While a great household would have many servants, they had only a few. In fact, it is likely they would have been a source of pity to many of the gentry they associated with in London or Bath. But they had sufficient funds to keep up appearances during the curtailed season they spent in those splendid places.
At least in the countryside you never starve even if you are poor because there is always food available. It would have shocked many a fine lady in London or Bath, but Amy ate breakfast that morning at the kitchen table while she conversed with Mrs. Pemberton, the cook, and Effie the house’s only maid and cook’s assistant.
Sleeping late had melted away her anger of the night before. It was only after she took her leave of Mrs. Pemberton and Effie and was once again alone that thoughts of the night came back to her. Even then, evidently emotionally drained by her outrage and indignation, it took her a considerable effort to resurrect her fury. Since she believed it was the proper thing to do, and by working hard at it, she was finally able to rekindle some of the fire that inflamed her during the night.
She found that pacing up and down in the front hall helped quite a bit. Her mother passed through at one point and for some reason asked about her health, but didn’t stop to hear the answer, which was probably just as well. Amy proffered that her health was fine but someone else’s might not be shortly. By that last part her mother was thankfully out of earshot.
Deciding that she had worked up enough motivation she headed upstairs to Emma’s study room. Emma was looking disgusted and working on some arithmetic. Mrs. Parkhurst was sitting in her usual chair and appeared to be dozing.
“I need you to come with me,” whispered Amy while grabbing Emma by the arm and dragging her out of her room.
As they left, Mrs. Parkhurst sounded like she was waking up. Amy couldn’t be sure but decided it was best not to find out. True, it would be nice to let her know why Emma was missing, but then again it was not unusual for her to discover that Emma was no longer at her desk.
Dragging a mystified Emma downstairs, she led her out of the house and in the direction of the stable.
“Are my studies no longer of importance to you?” asked Emma. “Do you not want to see me educated? Is it of no concern to you that I might grow up illiterate?
Ignoring her sister’s sarcasm, Amy led her over to old Hubert who was weeding the same flower bed that he’d been working on for what seemed a month.
“I need to use the trap, Hubert,” she told him and then continued to the stables.
Knowing that it would probably be more time than she was willing to wait for old Hubert to arise from the marigolds, which were evidently so afflicted by weeds, and reach the stable, she tracked down Daniel, who was not the smartest of the family’s servants but had finally learned to ready the trap.
They were leaving by the time old Hubert rounded the corner to the stable, looked at them with disgust, mumbled something, and turned back to presumably go to the rescue of the weed-threatened marigolds.
“Let me guess,” said Emma touching a finger to her temple, “we are headed to Ben’s place.”
At Ben’s place, his butler startled by her loud pounding on the front door, holding his nose as high as he could in the air, informed her that Ben—Sir Benjamin—was in back at the stables.
Having brooded long enough to rebuild her outrage of the night, she was fully ready when she encountered Ben. He was startled to see her and even more startled at her withering verbal attack. Her coherence was somewhat chopped up by the sword of her rage, but he gathered, in bits and pieces, that she was accusing him of making fun of her...continuing to derive amusement at her expense...and...and why was he digging a grave?
That took a minute to sink in.
“What?” he blurted out. “Digging a grave? What are you talking about?”
Without acknowledging his puzzled question, she continued because she was on a roll like a runaway wagon heading downhill: “I saw you digging a grave yesterday. If you were burying someone why didn’t you bury them at the church?”
Ben was recovering from his amazement, and his face was darkening.
“Maybe they aren’t Christian,” she hurled the accusation at him. “Is that it? If they are not Christian they wouldn’t want to be buried in a Christian churchyard...”
She hesitated because she was beginning to run out of steam.
“If you are finished, young lady,” Ben intoned through clenched teeth, “I am busy. You have to go home.”
As he turned and walked into the stable, she yelled after him: “That is what I intend to do. Good day!”
On the way back to the trap she wondered if she had maybe been a little too emphatic in what she had said. While it had given her satisfaction to get it off her mind she now felt a little deflated and even somewhat apprehensive.
Emma was not in the trap when she got back to it. When she noticed that the gate to the walled garden was open she decided to go in search of Emma.
She found her in the garden talking to the man dressed in the clothes of a clerk whom Amy had seen the previous day overseeing the digging of the grave. Emma was smiling and looked up as Amy approached.
“Look at these, Amy.”
She was drawing Amy’s attention to three small bushes.
“Aren’t the flowers on the bushes so delicate and be
autiful? Mr. Worthington tells me that Sir Benjamin’s father sent them from India. They’re called Rhododendrons and they come all the way from the slopes of the Himalayas.”
“Come, Emma,” she said with a forced smile after greeting Mr. Worthington and being greeted in return.
A grim faced Amy led her sister back to the trap.
“The place where the Rhododendrons are planted,” said Emma with a clearly fake innocence, “isn’t that where Ben was digging the grave?”
When the Saturday of the picnic came around, the family gathered atop Old Camp Hill. The unprepossessing hill got its name from a local legend that it had been a Roman camp back in Roman times. Except for a few large boulders that might form a circle if one looks at them the right way there was not much evidence that the sight had any past.
One advantage of the putative Roman camp was it always proved to be a good place for a picnic. Another advantage was it gave a splendid view of the surrounding countryside. To the south, Hillfield House could be seen, and to the west, the River Arne peeked out here and there through the trees. While Sibbridge House remained hidden in the trees, the smoke from its chimneys was highly visible, and to the north the spire of the Stockley-on-Arne village church stood out in the distance.
With the use of both the trap and the wagon, the family gathered for the picnic which the servants were setting up. To the disappointment of Amy’s mother for one reason or another only the family was present. The invitees had given various apologetic excuses and no one else was there.
“Oh dear,” said Lady Sibbridge, “if only Lord and Lady Brewminster could have come. And the others we invited.”
“But mother, everyone was anxious to go and see Prince Frederic during his visit to Cambridge now that he has been promoted to be to be a full general and is leaving for Flanders to fight the French.”
“If only I had known about his visit. We could have arranged the picnic next Saturday.”
“Mother, it was in the London papers. Remember Emma mentioned it.”
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