The Youngest Miss Ward

by Joan Aiken

  ‘My little oddity‚’ Mrs Ward called him. ‘My little quiddity. But, lord bless me! the radishes he grows are twice the size of any that Martha brings home from the market.’ He was her favourite among the boys.

  But Ned had another recourse of which his family were wholly unaware.

  ‘Come and I’ll show you something, Hatty‚’ he said one Saturday afternoon when she had been residing in Lombard Street for some months, and his brothers were safely out of the house.

  He led his cousin across the walled flower garden behind the house, and through the door in the wall to the kitchen garden and orchard. Beyond the fruit trees rose a further wall, this one covered with espaliered plum and peach trees. These had been somewhat neglected, for the garden required more work than Mr Philip Ward was prepared to finance, and vegetables for the table were his prime requirement. Deakin the gardener could manage no more. Untrimmed currant and gooseberry bushes had grown into a jungle at the end of the plot, surrounding a large leaden water-tank supported on wooden beams, under the drooping branches of a mighty pear tree.

  ‘Look here‚’ said Ned and led the way along a narrow track among the currant bushes to the back of the water-tank where, half hidden among creepers, a door in the wall could just be seen. ‘This is my secret door‚’ said Ned; and, with some trouble, for the hinges were rusty and the ground piled deep with dead leaves and twigs, he pushed the door open a very little way. ‘There is just room to creep through. It is luck that you are not a chubby one, Cousin Hatty‚’ said Ned. ‘My brother Tom could never get by.’

  On the far side of this wall lay a small, derelict graveyard. It was triangular in shape. Six large yew trees and a great lime overshadowed the toppled, crooked, untended, lichened gravestones, and the grass and nettles grew waist-high, save where Ned had beaten out narrow runways.

  ‘What a strange, strange hidden place!’ breathed Hatty, looking all around her. For a moment she forgot her sorrow and home-sickness. ‘Why, Ned, it is like a secret kingdom, all of your own.’

  ‘Is it not!’ said Ned, pleased with her. ‘Now, look here!’ And he showed her his tree-house, a platform constructed of half-rotten logs and planks that he had piled up in the crotch of the great lime-tree. It was reached by a rope-ladder.

  Hatty was deeply impressed by all his arrangements, and even more so by the fact that he had kept the hiding-place a complete secret from his brothers.

  ‘How long have you been coming here, Ned?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. A long time‚’ he said vaguely.

  Even the traffic of Portsmouth seemed a great way off.

  Perched in the tree-house, sniffing at the sharp fragrance of a pale green lime-flower, Hatty said hesitantly, after long thought, ‘Cousin Ned, do you think that it hurts to die?’

  His answer was positive. ‘No. Not a bit. It is like falling asleep. I had an old spaniel, Rust, who died last year. I was by him at the time, he had been ill for weeks. He was asleep when it happened. He just stopped breathing . . .’

  After that another long peaceful silence fell between the two. Then Hatty said, ‘Ned, I have been puzzled by something in the last letter I had from Mama.’

  And she told him of her question about the twins, and her mother’s answer: ‘Try S.P.S’. ‘What do you think she can have meant?’

  ‘Why‚’ he said at once, ‘she must have meant Scissors Paper Stone.’

  ‘Of course she did!’ cried Hatty, suddenly illuminated. ‘How very slow-witted of me not to have thought of that for myself. Thank you, thank you, Ned! I will try it on the twins the next time that old dragon of a Burnaby lets me in to the nursery.’

  ‘I wonder that you should think the twins worth troubling yourself over‚’ said Ned. ‘They are a dismal little pair.’

  ‘But so would you have been, I daresay,’ Hatty pointed out, ‘if nobody had ever taken any pains with you.’

  ‘Oh well – perhaps. Hatty, you will never, ever tell any other person about my secret place, will you?’

  ‘Oh, no, Cousin Ned, you can trust me absolutely . . . If it were not a graveyard,’ said Hatty, ‘we could some day build a little house here, when we are grown, and have it just for our own. I should dearly, dearly like that – a little house of my very own.’

  ‘We had best go back now,’ said Ned. ‘I never stay in here for very long, in case people begin to wonder where I am gone.’

  After that, Hatty was an accepted visitor in the lime-tree sanctuary.

  Next week, having ascertained which was Burnaby’s afternoon off, Hatty determinedly made her way into the nursery. Sue, the under-housemaid was there, mending a torn curtain, indifferent to the twins who sat, immobilized as usual, in their high chairs, whining for they knew not what.

  ‘I’ll play with them for a while, Sue.’

  ‘Bless ye, miss, no play will cheer that pair,’ said Sue, but she departed, willingly enough, to the kitchen.

  Hatty planted herself on a stool between the two high chairs. The twins eyed her in a lachrymose, lacklustre manner. They were a plain pair, sallow, like their father, with scanty, straw-coloured hair, bulging foreheads and washed-out blue eyes. Their freckled faces were usually smeared with tears or snuffle. They had identical birth-marks.

  ‘Look,’ said Hatty, addressing them both, ‘this is a stone.’ She clenched her fist. ‘And this is a pair of scissors.’ She snapped her forefingers open and shut. ‘And this is a sheet of paper.’ She spread her hand flat. ‘So: do you understand? Make a stone, like mine.’ She clenched her hand again.

  One small grimy fist, that of Sophy, was slowly clenched. After a moment Eliza’s followed.

  ‘Good. Very good. Now make scissors – like this, snap-snap.’

  The small fingers snapped. Creases of concentration appeared on the bulging foreheads. For once, the twins had lost their look of apathetic woe.

  ‘Good. Now make the paper. Flat, like this.’

  Their hands were spread flat, short fingers curling upwards like grubby petals.

  ‘Now, attend: scissors can beat paper, because they can cut.’

  The creases on their brows deepened, as they followed this chain of reasoning.

  ‘Right? Scissors can cut paper. Snap, snap. Do you see?’

  They did not nod, but their eyes were fixed attentively on her face.

  ‘But paper can beat stone, because paper wraps round stone.’

  Hatty demonstrated, wrapping one hand round the other fist.

  The four staring eyes were now trained on Hatty’s hands.

  ‘You see? And now – stone can beat scissors, because stone can smash scissors. Like this – smash!’ Hatty drove her fist between two open fingers.

  ‘Smash!’ breathed both twins ecstatically. ‘Smash!’

  ‘So, now I play a game. First with Sophy. You shake your fist three times – like this: shake, shake, shake – then you do scissors. Or paper. Or stone. Which ever one you choose. And I do it too. And we see who beats. Are you ready? Shake, shake, shake – now!’

  Sophy did scissors. Hatty did paper.

  ‘You win, Sophy. Scissors beats paper, because scissors can cut paper.’

  Sophy let out a crow of total triumph. Eliza’s mouth was wide open with participation.

  ‘Right. Now Eliza’s turn.’

  Eliza did scissors. Hatty did stone.

  ‘I win that time. Now you do it with each other.’

  They played – scissors and stone – and Eliza won. She laughed with pure joy. Hatty wondered whether she had ever laughed in her life before. They played again, and this time Sophy won.

  ‘Now you can play with each other whenever you want,’ said Hatty. The twins ignored her. They were utterly concentrated on each other. Hatty sat watching them for half an hour. When Sue presently returned, with bowls of broth and biscuits, Hatty calculated that the
y must have played over a hundred and sixty games, and had each won about an equal number. Sometimes they would have long spells of both presenting the same object – two stones, two scissors – but this did not frustrate them, it made them chuckle.

  ‘Bless us, Miss Hatty!’ said Sue. ‘I’ve ne’er seen ‘em so quiet and biddable. Miss Burnaby should be pleased.’

  Predictably, Burnaby was not.

  The moment they had finished their meal, the twins recommenced playing and Hatty slipped away and wrote a letter to her mother.

  But whether her vivid account of the proposal’s triumphant success was ever read by its intended recipient, Hatty did not discover. She received no answer to her letter.

  And some months later, word came to Portsmouth of Mrs Ward’s death.

  ‘May I not go home for the funeral?’ Hatty asked her aunt Polly, who had considerately broken the sorrowful news to her niece in private, summoning her from lessons with Mr Haxworth.

  ‘My dear, your sister Agnes (who writes this letter) recommends that you do not make the journey. And your cousin Ursula Fowldes, who has returned temporarily to Bythorn Lodge (where, Agnes says, she has been a great help during the sad and trying months of your Mama’s decline), is strongly of the same opinion. And furthermore – I fear – your father expressly forbids it.’

  ‘But – but – then – may I not go home now? Altogether? Not just for the funeral – to live? I – I was s-sent away so as not to be a trouble to – to M-Mama – now she is gone, may I not return there?’ Hatty faltered.

  Mrs Ward’s gaze was not unsympathetic. She said, ‘My child, I know how forlorn you must feel. But consider. Your Mama is what you chiefly miss, and she will not be there. Ever again. Of what avail are empty rooms, if the person you wish to see does not dwell in them any more? Your father does not wish for you and would be no comfort to you. In my opinion a block of granite would be a great deal more use,’ she added as a corollary to this, but she spoke under her breath. ‘Your sister Agnes and cousin Ursula seem quite bent on preventing your return, so you would certainly receive no welcome from them.’

  ‘Will my sisters Fanny and Maria be at the funeral?’

  ‘Agnes does not say so in her letter. Doubtless it depends on Sir Thomas Bertram’s parliamentary duties as to whether he can escort them, if Fanny still remains at Mansfield. But, depend upon it, my dear, you do far better to stay with us here, where you have friends. (What you are achieving with those twins passes the bounds of belief.) No, my love, you and I will sit together on Wednesday and read the burial service, and then you may have the afternoon free from lessons and perhaps, if it is fine, walk round the ramparts with your crony Ned. Will not that be more consoling than travelling a day’s journey to a home where nobody wishes for you? I grieve to put it so harshly – but so it is.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Th-thank you, Aunt Polly,’ faltered Hatty, and crept away to weep her heart out in seclusion. One phrase of Mrs Ward’s rang in her ears. ‘Of what avail are empty rooms if the person you wish to see does not dwell in them?’

  Shall I ever, she wondered, shall I ever possess a house of my own? A roof and rooms where I shall lead my own life with the person I love?

  Embarrassed and nonplussed by their cousin’s bereavement the boys, in their different ways, did their best to show sympathy. Sydney, now aged sixteen and admitted to a junior post in his father’s legal office before commencing law studies in London, bought her a jet mourning brooch. Tom whittled her a top. ‘It will soothe you by its spinning,’ he said. Hatty was touched. Tom, fat, good-natured and slow-witted, was sometimes capable of giving one a surprise of this kind. Ned said: ‘Cousin Hatty, let us teach the twins to play chess. That will take your mind off your sadness.’

  Ned’s receipt for consolation turned out to be the best of the three. Teaching chess to the twins proved an arduous but rewarding task.

  ‘It is like climbing among brambles,’ gasped Hatty, after a particularly fractious half-hour.

  ‘Queen on her own colour,’ mumbled Sophy, planting a grimy, sticky white queen on the appropriate square.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Hatt, Master Ned, I’ll be obliged for the use of my nursery,’ snapped Burnaby, coming in, grim-faced, with a can of hot water and a jug of senna-pods. The twins set up wails of protest.

  ‘Pawn to King’s four!’ shouted Eliza and received from Burnaby a look which made her cower.

  Ned and Hatty, knowing there was nothing to be done, left the scene.

  ‘Next I am going to try to teach them to read,’ said Hatty, ‘with gingerbread letters.’

  ‘I think you will find it a mighty slow business.’

  ‘But at least they will have something to think about in bed. When I think what my poems have been to me . . . It is like a river running through one’s mind.’

  Ned stared at his cousin with affectionate incomprehension.

  III

  Two years after the death of Mrs Ward, the Portsmouth household received news of another, not of such immediate interest and concern to Hatty, but resulting in a family assembly at Portsmouth which was to have far-reaching consequences for her.

  The death was that of cousin Letty, Lady Pentecost, widow of Sir Solomon, Admiral Pentecost.

  Cousin Letty had been a connection of Lord Elstow. Her husband, the Admiral, had recently died on board his ship, the Linnet, not in battle, but from the smallpox, an epidemic of which had decimated his crew. The widow had brought her husband’s body back to Portsmouth for interment, and had then succumbed, not long after, to the same complaint.

  ‘Very inconvenient,’ grumbled Mr Ward. ‘Now I suppose we shall be expected to put up half the family in this house. And I doubt very much if Cousin Lettice has left us a farthing.’

  Hatty’s chief interest in this event, since she had never met Lady Pentecost, lay in the fact that her sister Frances would be coming to Portsmouth for the funeral.

  ‘Why only Frances, though? Why not Agnes, or Papa?’

  ‘Agnes, we are to understand, remains at home to take care of your father who recently sustained a broken collar-bone in the hunting field.’ (Humph! Mighty convenient for him! was his sister-in-law’s internal comment.) ‘Frances, it seems, travels here in the company of Lady Ursula, in one of the Fowldes carriages and escorted by two of their men-servants. But it means that we are obliged to invite Lady Ursula . . . Lord, though!’ Aunt Polly broke off her reading of Agnes’s letter to exclaim, ‘Here’s a fine how-d’ye-do! For Lord Camber is to attend the funeral as well – so your Uncle Philip tells me – and I daresay the pair have never met since the rupture. It is a mercy, at least, that Lord Camber puts up at the Crown – only imagine if we had him in this house, along with Lady Ursula! Though I have the highest regard for him, dear fellow, that would never do!’

  ‘Rupture, Aunt Polly? What rupture?’

  ‘Oh, bless me, my dear, did you not know about it? Well, no, for sure, why should you – ‘twas all over long before you might be expected to take an interest in such matters. Though to be sure your dear Mama was a close and loving friend of Lady Ursula, both before she married your Papa and for some time after – so, of course, she heard all about the affair – and so did I, for though by then I had ceased to be governess to Lady Susan and Lady Louisa, they still kept in touch with me and they, of course, knew all their elder brother’s affairs. And, may I say, they were decidedly critical of Lady Ursula’s part in the business!’

  ‘What happened, Aunt Polly?’

  ‘Oh, it all befell some eight or nine years ago when Lady Ursula, I suppose, would be twenty or thereabouts, and Harry – Lord Camber – a couple of years younger. He is the eldest son of the Duke of Dungeness (you have heard your uncle speak of him many times, he handles a deal of business both for Lord Camber and the Duke). Lord Camber is cousin to Lady Ursula and the two families grew up in each other’s pockets, as you might s
ay, the children were all friends together, my two dear young ladies with all the Fowldes girls. But then this friendship on the part of Lord Camber and Lady Ursula suddenly blossomed out into as fine a young romance as you could conceive, with promises and posies and vows and valentines . . . The parents had no particular objections, especially on the Fowldes side; it would be a great match for Lady Ursula, she’d become a duchess in the course of time, and the Fowldes had all those daughters and were never very well-breeched. Lady Ursula is the eldest, and it would be a fine thing for her younger sisters—’

  ‘And so, what happened, Aunt Polly?’ Hatty found it almost impossible to imagine Lady Ursula, that austere, superior, grey-granite pillar, ever being involved in a romance, with posies and sighs and promises. She wondered very much what kind of a man Lord Camber might be to conceive a regard, let alone a romantic devotion, for such a being.

  ‘Why then, Lord Camber brought his best friend home from Cambridge on a visit – he was always bringing his friends, Wandesleigh, and Kittridge the poet, and this Lord Francis Fordingbridge, and, bless me, if he did not fall flat in love with Lady Ursula too, so much that she was quite swept off her feet (as the circulating-library novels put it) and forgot all her vows of constancy to poor Harry, and was off with the new love. Gave Harry back his ring.’

  ‘Gracious, aunt! And what happened then?’

  ‘Oh, my dear, such sobbings and heart-searchings. Lady Louisa told me all about it. She is a most faithful correspondent. But everybody behaved very well. No duel, no meeting on Wimbledon Common at dawn, nothing at all of that nature, though gossip ran high, as you may well imagine. But Harry Camber, who has the best heart in the world – your dear Mama was used to say he is a veritable saint – and he was always a devoted elder brother to my dear girls – as near a perfect character as you are like to meet in this vale of tears. He made no complaint. He said if his friend and his sweetheart were happy together, then he was happy also; he was not about to stand in their way. And so, and so, off he went to the wars, or at least to the American Colonies, as then they were, and he came back from there only after those Colonists broke away from our king. But in the meantime, not to be outdone, Lord Francis had gone off too, enlisted and left for India, so that, as he said, Lady Ursula should have time and peace of mind to consider what she most wanted. And in India, what do you think, he was killed in the Mahratta Wars, and left a Will, bequeathing all he had in the world to Lady Ursula. (But that proved to be no great matter, only a thousand pounds or so, your uncle heard.) So there the lady was, high and dry, without either suitor.’