She paused, remembering that her mother didn’t know of the girl’s little trip to Camp Hill and Hillfield House.
“...the old sailor approached Hubert, and Hubert seeing how scruffily he was dressed didn’t think we would want him in the house so he sent him to Mrs. Pemberton.”
“Good for Hubert,” said Amy’s mother, “he may be old, but he really is a jewel. I don’t know how we would get along without him.”
“He left this pouch with Mrs. Pemberton. He said he was supposed to give it to me in person. But when he couldn’t, he made them promise they would make sure it was put into my hand.”
“Why didn’t Mrs. Pemberton just send for you?”
“He had a coach to catch. Anyway, there were three items in the pouch, and I want to ask you about them,” continued Amy.
She opened the pouch and took out the newspaper, the locket, and the letter. Setting the pouch on the small table next to her mother, an act that her mother clearly disapproved of, she gave her mother a quick introduction to the three items.
“These all date from when I was a baby. Do they have any meaning to you?”
Her mother seemed uneasy as they were displayed to her.
“Oh dear. They don’t mean anything. I don’t think they have anything to do with you. The old sailor must have left them at the wrong place.”
Emma was watching her mother with curiosity but said nothing.
“But the pouch has my name on it,” Amy pointed out to her mother, holding the pouch so her mother could see. Lady Sibbridge tried to avoid looking at it.
“Obviously, the old sailor asked someone in the village if they knew where an Amaryllis lived and they told him to go to our house. The old man was probably drunk and got off the coach at the wrong town.”
It seemed as if all of a sudden Lady Sibbridge found her chair uncomfortable. She set down her embroidery.
“Look at this,” said Amy, “does it have any meaning to you. Does the city of Bristol have any meaning?”
“No dear, I don’t see why it would.”
“What about this letter?”
Mildred Sibbridge glanced at the letter and made excuses not to read it, so Amy read it to her.
“What about this locket. Have you ever seen it before?”
Lady Sibbridge, struggled out of her chair, picked up her embroidery, and complained, “Oh dear, that chair has become uncomfortable. They do that at times when you sit too long in the one place. I have to go to my room and lie down. I...I feel a little faint.”
“Mother...” Amy stopped appealing to her mother. It obviously wasn’t going to be productive.
Emma just watched everything.
“Well what do you think, Emma? To me Mother acted a little queer.”
“A little queer? These items definitely mean something to her.”
“You think she has seen them in the past?”
“I don’t know about that, but they do mean something to her. The question I have is what do they mean? Mother is always nervous, so that makes it difficult to decide if they have any serious meaning. But they do mean something, and that is what we have to find out. I am now convinced more than ever that the old sailor brought the pouch to the right place and it was given into the right hands. You are Amaryllis, but I do not know what your secret is.”
As Amy was returning the three items to the pouch, Emma asked to look at the locket again. When she opened it she looked intently at the miniature. It was a tiny painting of a baby who appeared about one year old. Tiny as the painting was it was well detailed. The baby was not smiling and yet there could be seen a sparkle in her little blue eyes beneath a tiny swath of bright orange hair.
Emma looked up at Amy, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open.
“This baby is you, Amy Sibbridge.”
“That’s ridiculous, it can’t be.”
“Then come with me.”
Emma dragged her to Mr. Gainsborough’s painting of their family.
“Look at the painting. Look at you when you were eleven years old. Now look at the baby in the locket. The same expression. The same slight curl of the lips. It is you.”
“You cannot compare a baby with an older person. All babies look the same. They all have blue eyes and blonde or orange hair.”
Emma looked at her with disdain.
“All babies do not look the same. That is you whether you accept the fact or not. Now I have a telescope to work on, although I find your mystery worthwhile thinking about. I’ll have to develop a theory about it. Draw out the meaning to the items in your pouch. I’m beginning to think it must have something to do with pirates, or estranged lovers, or a hidden romance, or maybe all three.”
Emma stomped off with a frown on her face. It was not a frown of disapproval, but rather of a serious scholar challenged by an inscrutable mystery. Amy watched her sister leave and smiled. If anyone could solve her mystery it was sister Emma. Then she turned her attention back to the locket. She looked at the painting and then back at the baby in the miniature. It cannot be me.
Once again she did not rest easy that night.
Chapter 9
The next morning Amy went out into the garden right after breakfast and drew in the brisk air with deep breaths. She always loved the smell after a great rain when the storm had washed the whole countryside and left it clean and ready to be enjoyed.
Above her the sun was trying to break through the clouds and the clouds for their part were doing their best to prevent such an intrusion. They did not want the sun wiping the droplets off the leaves and flowers that they had gone to such effort to spread over the whole wide world.
And the poor marigolds had lost their protector. Old Hubert’s rheumatism was not quite up to kneeling on the cold damp ground. He could, of course, have knelt on a leather apron, but his absence was most likely caused by his sorrow that his golden children, who at this stage were little over six inches tall, had been beaten by the torrential downpour of the night and were lying on the muddy ground. In a few weeks they would be tall and beautiful but for now they sadly lay like little patients in their bed of mud.
As for old Hubert, Amy found him in the garden shed with his flower pots and trowels.
“Hubert, hitch Pansy to the trap.” She always tried to make it sound more like a request than an order, although they both knew he had to comply.
For some reason she always tried to avoid hurting Hubert’s feelings, and Hubert had an overabundance of fragile feelings.
“Ahhh, this is no day for Lady Amaryllis to go ariding, what with’n the muddy roads an all.”
Amy decided the best thing was to wander far enough away from old Hubert so she could no longer hear him, or to where he would think she couldn’t hear. This worked and eventually Hubert led Pansy out, pulling the trap.
“Ah don’t know why Lady Sibbridge would allow her family to go out in this here weather.”
In truth, no one knew that Amy was going for a drive. Amy hadn’t told her mother. She generally avoided telling her mother when she went out to ride, because that would just cause problems. She actually complimented herself for exercising enough caution to take the trap rather than ride when mud and pools of water were everywhere.
What was uncharacteristic was that she had not asked Emma to come with her because she did not see the need of a chaperone when she was not going to visit a young man.
This morning, the village of Stockley-on-Arne was what was of interest. And she did not want any chance of her expedition reaching her mother’s ears. Not that she didn’t have absolute confidence in Emma’s discretion, but by going alone she was less likely to be noticed when she slipped out of the house, and her absence was less likely to draw attention.
Mrs. Parkhurst noisily combing the house and everywhere else for her missing pupil would only draw attention to the absence of both Emma and Amy, and Amy did not need that. It would lead to questions that she did not want to address.
And it wasn’t only
the questions. They would be waiting for her return and she couldn’t just sneak back in the house, or as she considered it, reenter in a discrete manner. And the problem with returning in the full view of her mother, and someone would tell her mother if everyone had been searching for both her and Emma, was that she was not quite herself that morning.
In a way, it was not Lady Amaryllis Sibbridge that rode the trap into Stockley-on-Arne that blustery morning, instead it was little Amy the maid. Amy the faux maid didn’t quite fit the clothes belonging to Effie the real maid, but she tried to make it work. The real maid, Effie, had needed quite a bit of reassurance and also a little silver hadn’t hurt to agree to let Amy borrow her good going-to-church dress. Effie, who was always a little skittish, seemed to feel that Lady Sibbridge would consider it a hanging offence if she aided and abetted Amy in her surreptitious departure.
It didn’t help that she was forced to tell Effie she needed to borrow her dress to go to town and ask a few questions about the old sailor that had paid them a visit the previous afternoon. Effie, like many simple folk, seemed to feel it was wrong for Amy to sneak out on her mother, go where her mother wouldn’t want her to go, dress in clothing of the servant class, and deceive the townspeople into thinking she was someone she wasn’t by assuming a simple disguise.
To poor Effie, it all amounted to disobedience, lying, deceit, and trickery. Effie seemed to fear her helping Amy in this little deception might be taken into consideration by a higher power beyond this earthly realm and if it did not lead to her eternal damnation, could at least be a black mark against her. Amy, who deeply respected Effie’s innocence and holy writ as well, had a mystery to solve, and tried her best to reassure her reluctant co-conspirator. Amy was rather well versed in scripture and used her knowledge and power of reasoning to try and convince a rather doubtful Effie that not only was what she was doing acceptable to the heavenly powers, but that it was practically a holy obligation.
It got her the dress she needed, as she now crossed the old stone bridge into Stockley-on-Arne.
As she crossed the river Arne, Amy’s attention was redirected from the struggles of the journey to the complications awaiting her in Stockley. The struggles of the journey had involved the stinging of small but insistent raindrops which at times felt like little pins stinging her in the face and making some effort to blind her. It was an odd type of shower that only occasionally accosted the traveler. Usually raindrops, even the large ones, were soft, but on occasion tiny drops urged on by blustery breezes seemed to have the ability to turn themselves into a new form, what seemed to Amy to be sharp water.
Sharp or soft, both managed to soak clothing. Amy had tried to get the top to the trap up but had failed. Usually, if no one else accompanied her she still had Emma, and Emma seemed to be able to get the top up without difficulty. Amy considered herself every inch as dexterous and agile as other people and that included her sister but she reconciled herself that this wasn’t true with the roof of the trap. She did have to admit also that there were other things that Emma seemed very capable at handling as well as the raising of open carriage tops.
This had resulted in her making the journey from her home to the town, which was by no means a very long journey, in the open, which meant as she crossed the bridge over the river Arne that she was considerably damper, no, make that wetter, than she would like.
It also seemed that the zeal that drove her to come to town had dissolved in the wetness of the rain and turned into a runny mush. She even briefly thought of turning back, and only was able to force herself to go on by bringing up the courage of her ancestors, although hovering somewhere in the recesses of her consciousness was the realization that she didn’t really know if the ancestors she invoked were real or imaginary.
They did not flinch at Agincourt,
To face the might of France,
But challenged the iron knights,
To join them in a dance.
And to their foe in burnished steel
Our yeomen would not yield,
And when night had hushed the fray
Their hearts had won the field.
She could not remember who said that, but current challenges now intervened. She was in the middle of the town square and townsfolk were beginning to cast glances in her direction.
There are inherent problems in a young lady borrowing a household maid’s clothes to go to town and ask questions about an old sailor. Amy wished she had given this more thought before commencing her expedition. Maybe it would have been a good idea to discuss it with Emma. Emma might have had some useful suggestions that would have enhanced the success of her mission.
Her problems suddenly seemed manifold. For one thing, the townspeople might find it strange that a maid would ride in a gentlefolk’s trap rather than walking to town as household servants were wont to do, unless they had been authorized to take the farming wagon.
There was this too, the fact that Amy went to church with her family every Sunday and at Advent and sundry other important days. It was true there were three churches in town, the Established Church, the Catholic Church, and the church attended by the followers of Mr. Wesley.
She wasn’t sure how they divided the population of the town as far as the number of people attending each church, but she supposed that about a third of the people might attend each church. This would seem to mean that about a the third of the town might be able to recognize her even with her scullery maid’s bonnet pulled halfway down over her face, but there was one thing that gave her hope that she might escape recognition.
Most of the poorer people in town attended the church of the followers of Mr. Wesley because it devoted itself to the poor and the minister gave very colorful and animated sermons as the followers of Mr. Wesley were inclined to do. The congregation of the Catholic Church was made up of a mix of Irish workers and a minority of the landed gentry. The Established Church which Amy and her family attended was primarily the church of the nobility, the gentry, their servants, and the merchants and other more affluent members of the community.
Amy drew comfort in this for it meant, or so she reassured herself, that the only people that might possibly recognize her were the gentry who would all be out at their respective country residences, their servants who by this time would have completed their errands in town and already be back at the mansions of their masters or at least hurrying in that direction. The merchants would be hard at work at their business, and the lawyers, doctors, clerks, and such would be hard at work at their respective trades. She assured herself that at this time of the morning there would be no one out on the streets of the town who would recognize her.
“Mornin’ Lady Amaryllis.”
Who was that? She didn’t recognize him.
“Be seein’ you Sunday, milady.”
That was the one disadvantage of being one of the foremost local families. You occupied the front pews in church. The less affluent members of the congregation saw you from their pews in the rear of the church, but you didn’t see them, especially when your family, mostly your mother, had ingratiating conversations with the vicar while the poorer members of the congregation shuffled out of the church to make their way back to their humble abodes.
Amy had not been sure what she would accomplish by going into the village and inquiring about the old sailor. She had hoped that old sailors being scarce around Stockley-on-Arne that many would have noticed him and that she might gain some useful information, although she had no idea what that could be since he came to town on the stagecoach and left again the selfsame day.
Except that’s not quite what occurred. She had worked up enough courage and reignited a little of the old zeal that drove her into the village. While the flame of her zeal was much diminished yet it was enough to encourage to inquire of a number of townsfolk.
She was gratified that no one else recognized her, or if they did they didn’t make it known. Amy was frequently embarrassed that she had to ask her questions in
damp clothes and a bedraggled bonnet, but no one seemed to notice or if they noticed they didn’t make it known either. Maybe the people of Stockley-on-Arne were just a discrete bunch of villagers. And her investigation bore some fruit. As she hoped, quite a few had observed the old sailor, and what she found out was helpful—in a way.
The bringer of the bundled pouch did not come to town on the stagecoach, and he did not leave that way either. He walked. He had come by foot from wherever he had commenced his journey, and he had left Stockley-on-Arne the same way. And what was more significant to her was that he did not leave yesterday. Because of the lateness of the hour, with darkness impending, and perhaps because of the rain, he had bought himself a tankard of ale at the least of the village’s taverns and nursed it through the night.
Leaving at daylight the old sailor had headed south on the London Road. By now Amy estimated he would be eight or ten miles into his journey. It should be easy to catch up with him and then Amy would be able to get the answer to the questions that had nagged at her since yesterday.
As Amy was about to climb back into the trap, the coach from London arrived at the Tabard Inn. The inn had been named after its more famous and much more ancient counterpart. Amy had been told it was built just before she was born, and its proprietor an admirer of poets in general and Chaucer in particular had named it after the famed inn where the pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas à Becket had storied away their visit in the Canterbury Tales.
Amy looked down woefully at her bedraggled dress, and up at the travelers who were beginning to leave the coach. I have to ask them she sternly told herself even if I look as if I recently fell into a river.
To her disappointment none of the passengers had seen an old sailor on the road. The last passenger to leave the coach was a man of about forty. He leaned forward when she asked her question as if he was straining to hear. His clothing was not of the best.
“Non, mademoiselle,” he answered as he glanced at her clothes.
“Oh, you’re French.”
The Captain's Daughter Page 7