by Joan Aiken
He had scanned Miss Stornoway with a doubtful expression, but what he saw appeared to reassure him.
‘I am going to my room now, Glastonbury,’ she said. ‘I will see you there.’
‘Yes, miss. I will be with you as soon as I can, Miss Stornoway.’
‘Goodbye, my dear.’ To Hatty’s surprise, Miss Stornoway planted an awkward, glancing kiss on her cheek. ‘I wish ye all the good luck in the world. And I fear ye will need it!’
XI
Back in Lady Elstow’s room, Hatty saw that two girls had arrived and were sitting on a sopha in attitudes of exaggerated indifference at some distance from their mother. Hatty would have liked to study them, but her attention was claimed by the Countess who demanded at once: ‘Well? Did you give that dismal woman her marching orders? Have you sent her to the rightabout?’
‘Miss Stornoway understands, ma’am, that she is to leave your employment,’ Hatty said loudly and coldly.
‘You made sure she knew that she is to go today – without loss of time?’
Hatty merely bowed her head. The Countess studied her sharply through a lorgnette.
‘Very well. Now, these are my daughters, the Lady Barbara and the Lady Drusilla. Come here, girls.’
With seeming reluctance the girls slowly approached. Lady Elstow eyed them with a total lack of enthusiasm.
‘Well, girls, this is your new preceptress, Miss Ward. She is the step-daughter of your sister Ursula. And her mother was a Wisbech. Bear that in mind.’
The girls curtsied stiffly and favoured Hatty with a cool appraisal which she, now that she had licence to do so, returned with considerable interest. Lady Ursula’s two youngest sisters were of very different heights and complexions. Barbara, aged perhaps fifteen or sixteen, was tall and massive, resembling her mother in build. She had a shock of untamed frizzy black hair, thick wrists and ankles, a large, not unhandsome face with a rough skin, bright complexion, alert dark eyes, a wide mouth and an expression of sullen ferocity. Drusilla, the younger, was completely different in build: much smaller, with spindly limbs, a pale skin, thin protruding lips and bulging ophthalmic, brilliant, positively glittering blue eyes. Blond hair draggled forward over her forehead in a sparse fringe and was gathered behind her head into a knot. Both girls were untidily dressed in ill-fitting clothes that did not suit them. Drusilla – perhaps about twelve, Hatty thought – eyed her new governess with less absolute hostility than did her sister, but with a look of cool contempt. Barbara’s baleful stare was made even more belligerent and sinister, Hatty realized, because the poor girl suffered from a severe cast in her left eye; while one eye was fixed on her new governess, the other one stared off into a distant corner of the room as if it were focussed on some subversive concern of its own.
‘You may leave me now,’ said Lady Elstow impatiently. ‘Be gone! Glastonbury –’ for he had remained by the door – ‘bring me my eggnog.’
‘Yes, my Lady.’
‘At once.’
‘Yes, my Lady.’
The two girls left the room without troubling to look round and see if Hatty followed them. She did so, feeling all the awkwardness of her situation. To her relief they went to the schoolroom, where they stood on either side of the meagre fire, eyeing her in a combative manner.
‘Well!’ said Barbara. ‘What are you going to teach us?’
‘Yes!’ echoed her younger sister. ‘What are you going to teach us?’
Drusilla had, Hatty noticed, a slight impediment in her speech; not exactly a lisp, but a kind of hesitation. Her eyes were really extraordinary: so brilliantly blue, they ought to have been beautiful, but they seemed like the eyes of some bird, lacking in any warmth or recognizable human expression.
‘What did Miss Stornoway teach you?’ Hatty countered.
‘Oh – sad stuff! The principal rivers in Russia and the dates of the kings of England with the principal events of their reigns and the Roman Emperors . . .’
‘As low as Severus . . .’
‘And the Heathen Mythology . . .’
‘And all the metals, semi-metals, planets and distinguished philosophers.’
‘A well-educated pair of young ladies,’ remarked Hatty calmly.
They stared at her in astonishment.
‘Was that intended as a joke?’ demanded Barbara. She had a harsh, carrying voice, very like that of her mother.
‘Not at all. I merely wondered how such a random assortment of information would be likely to help you through life.’
‘My good Miss Ward,’ said Barbara coldly, ‘we need no help of that kind. We are to have no life. We shall remain in this house until, in our nineties, we die the death of desiccated spinsters.’
Hatty did not ask why this should be so. She could see that marriage, the only escape for either of these girls, was hardly to be considered as an option, secluded as they lived, and that with their disabilities, they had no such hope. Even the prospect of earning their own living was denied them; the daughters of an earl could not seek employment. Although they were looking at her with a dislike that almost amounted to enmity, she bore no particular ill-feeling towards them, but only considerable pity.
‘You could not go and live with your married sisters?’ she suggested. ‘Lady Mary? Lady Anne?’
‘Hah!’ A single derisive syllable disposed of that possibility.
Hatty stared about the comfortless room. Had Miss Stornoway already packed up her belongings, had Glastonbury arranged for a conveyance to take her to Lord Camber’s house? What, she wondered, would Lord Camber prescribe for this doleful pair? She thought longingly of Camber’s small establishment with all its resources of literature, philosophy, music and outdoor pursuits.
Walking over to the piano, Hatty ran her hand down its keys. They were disgracefully out of tune. ‘First of all this must be put in order,’ she said. ‘And the harp mended.’
‘A man from Bedford has to do that,’ said Drusilla, as if that put it out of the question.
‘Then he must be sent for. I can tune the piano.’
‘You can?’ Barbara demanded in a tone of flat disbelief.
‘I am lucky enough to possess absolute pitch. Then – has this house a library?’
‘Yes, there is Papa’s library.’
‘Is he here now? Does he object to your using it?’
‘Papa?’ The girls bestowed scornful smiles on their new governess. ‘Papa is not in the house. He is hardly ever here. He is in London, at the house in Grosvenor Place.’
‘With his friends,’ added Barbara in a sour undertone.
Hatty chose to ignore this.
‘Then he will not object if we make use of his books?’
‘I – I suppose not,’ said Barbara doubtfully. ‘Very likely he will never know.’
‘Let us go there directly. I can see there is nothing useful in this room.’
The two girls looked at one another, scowling and wary. They were not natural allies, or even particularly fond of each other, Hatty could see at a glance; only force of circumstances obliged them to side together against a common enemy.
Indeed as they took their way downstairs, with Barbara striding ahead, Drusilla, sidling along close to Hatty in the wide hallway at the stairhead, murmured, in her shrill, faulty voice, ‘You will have to keep a careful watch on my sister Barbara, Miss Ward! She will do you any harm she can – tell lies, report on your conduct to Mama, put you in a false position—’
‘Indeed?’ said Hatty, startled out of caution. ‘Why should she do that?’
‘Why? It is her nature. Like the scorpion that stung the horse. She enjoys making trouble. She likes to make people enemies to one another. Like our sister Ursula.’
Hatty was surprised at the spite with which these words were poured out by the blue-eyed angelic-looking little creature at her side.
When they reached the library, a long, dank, unheated chamber on the ground floor, its windows overlooking a dense untrimmed shrubbery, Drusilla danced off into the gloom, exclaiming, ‘Wait there! I will ring for Hathill to bring more candles.’ She tugged a bell rope at the far end of the room.
Barbara stood still until Hatty was near her, and then said sharply, ‘Do not place too much belief in anything that my sister Drusilla tells you, Miss Ward! She is quite lacking in any moral sense.’
Before Hatty could make any response, Drusilla came skipping back, chirping, ‘Hathill will attend to the lights. He was my sister’s very first love, Miss Ward! He is quite her ideal of manly beauty. Just wait until you see him!’
‘Behave yourself!’ Lady Barbara hissed at her younger sister.
A snub-nosed, fair-haired footman came along the room, cast a startled look at Hatty, and began lighting the wall sconces. He was not particularly handsome, and Barbara showed not the least interest in him. Either she was an excellent actress, or her juvenile partiality had long since died away. Or, her younger sister was a troublemaker. Hatty decided to reserve her judgement on these questions. Meanwhile she told the footman to kindle a fire.
‘A fire? In here, miss?’ he said, astonished.
‘Yes! At once, if you please. It is as cold as a barn in this room,’ Hatty replied absently, casting a covetous eye over the tooled and gilt leather-bound contents of the shelves which ran all along the rear wall of the room facing the windows, with added bays here and there. Molière, she saw, Racine, Plato, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Virgil, Catullus . . . There would be enough here to keep the girls occupied for many a day. And herself as well.
‘Mama wishes us to study Italian,’ Barbara informed her. ‘Miss Stornoway could not teach it for she did not speak it.’
‘No more do I,’ Hatty remarked. ‘Do you think your Mama will send me packing on that account? We shall have to find Dante, or some Italian poetry, and read it with a translation alongside. I can offer Greek, Latin and French, however.’
Barbara seemed a trifle nonplussed.
‘Oh,’ she said blankly. ‘Latin and Greek. What use would they be to us?’
‘Some very entertaining stories are written in those languages,’ suggested Hatty, wondering what use it was to learn lists of Roman Emperors and Heathen myths while remaining in a state of complete ignorance about their lives and contents. She glanced longingly at the volumes of poetry: Crabbe’s The Village, Collins, Goldsmith, she saw and promised herself a later visit to the library in her free time, if she was allowed free time in this strange household. Many of the volumes on the shelves showed signs of damp, decay and old age, but new ones had been added here and there, and the books were ranged in an orderly manner.
‘Have you a librarian?’ she asked.
‘There was Cousin Septimus Wisbech, but he died last year. As Papa spends most of his time in town he has not troubled to provide a replacement.’
‘So you do not think he will object to our using the books?’
‘Oh, la, no! Why should he?’ Barbara said disdainfully.
‘What books did you read with Miss Stornoway?’ Hatty wished there had been time to consult and compare with that lady. She picked out a volume of The Idler. ‘Did she ever read you these pieces?’
‘I do not recall.’ Barbara peered at the volume distastefully.
‘Well, you sit here at this table – it is quite warm now that the fire has burned up – and make a list of any familiar titles you find.’
‘And if there are none?’
‘Then put down any ideas that may occur to you arising from the text.’
‘The ink here is all dried up.’
‘Then use a pencil.’
Drusilla, during this exchange, was eyeing Hatty with the horrified fascination shown by a wild animal which sees a trainer approaching with whip and club. You cannot do anything like this to me! said her expression. Hatty had found on the shelf handsomely illustrated collections of Aesop’s Fables and those of La Fontaine. She opened Aesop at the fable of the fox and the grapes.
‘Here,’ she said to Drusilla. ‘Let me hear how well you can read that tale. It is not very long. And then you can copy the picture of the fox looking up at that tempting bunch of grapes.’
Drusilla gaped vacantly at Hatty, then at the page. She remained completely silent and motionless.
‘You don’t like that one? Well, then, here is another: here it is, also, in French with the fox and the crow. “Maitre Corbeau, sur un arbre perché” Did Miss Stornoway never read it to you?’
Barbara, on the other side of the table, had made no attempt to perform the task set her, but was watching the scene with ironic brows raised. Now she shrugged and said, ‘You’ll get no good of my sister that way, Miss Ward. She does not read, so she is incapable of learning by rote.’
‘She does not read? At her age?’
‘No, she has never been able to do so. Nobody has managed to teach her. You will be quite wasting your time, I promise you.’
Good heavens, thought Hatty. Why, even the twins . . . But that path of memory was too painful, so she said instead: ‘Well, can you draw me a picture, Drusilla? Draw me the crow with the lump of cheese in his beak.’
Even such a simple task appeared beyond Drusilla’s capacity. Furnished with a sheet of paper and a pencil, she scratched a few random lines, some of which met, it seemed accidentally, in a rough triangle.
‘Is that the crow? Very well, black it in with your pencil.’
The child began to do so, slowly and reluctantly; then, becoming impatient, crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw it into the fire. The sight of the burning paper pleased her; she would have proceeded to burn all the rest of the sheets had not Hatty removed them out of reach.
‘Listen, then, I will read you the story of the crow and the fox.’
But, as she read aloud to the frowning Drusilla, Hatty’s heart sank; how was she ever going to find ways of filling this vacancy? Now she remembered her cousin Sydney saying, ‘They are maniacs, or malefactors or something; I wish you joy of them.’
‘Did Miss Stornoway teach you French?’ she asked Barbara.
‘Yes, she read us history in French. La Guerre des Deux Roses. We had just got as far as the murder of the Princes in the Tower.’
‘Oh. Well, I shall see if I cannot find something more entertaining from these shelves while you finish the task I have set you.’
Scowling, Barbara looked down at The Idler, and her blank paper.
Hatty strolled away from the sisters, partly to give herself a moment’s respite, at a distance, from the miasma they exuded: hostility, resentment and lack of the least intention to cooperate. At the end of the library clusters of sconces dangled on each side of a large picture. As she came closer, Hatty saw that it was a portrait of two people standing under a tree in a garden. She began to think that the pair looked familiar – then, standing below the canvas, attentively studying it, she felt almost certain that she knew them. But so young, so beautiful! Radiant, confident, they laughed out of the summery, flowery landscape into a future that must have seemed as idyllic as the verdure that surrounded them.
Returning to the sisters, who sat each doing nothing, gazing at vacancy, one at the table, one on a stool by the hearth, Hatty asked, ‘Of whom is that portrait at the far end of the room – the two people under the tree?’
‘Why,’ said Barbara, yawning, ‘it is our sister Ursula and our cousin Harry Camber. It was done years ago by a painter that Papa thought well of at the time. Ursula and Harry were great friends then. He would often ride over here from Bythorn Chase. They were going to marry. But then they had a quarrel, so Harry stopped coming.’
‘I remember the quarrel,’ said Drusilla, lifting her intense blue eyes from the paper she was mechanically teari
ng to shreds. ‘It was about us.’
‘You? You could not possibly remember. You were only an infant.’
‘I remember,’ Drusilla said with a fey chuckle. ‘Harry made Ursula promise to stay and look after us. She did not wish to, but he made her, and in the end she promised.’
‘Oh, what nonsense! The quarrel was about something quite different.’
‘Whatever it was,’ Hatty pronounced, ‘it was their own affair and no possible business of ours. I think we should now return to the schoolroom. I have picked out some books to read with you, and I have found some of Dante’s poetry with an English translation, so that should satisfy your Mama’s wish for you to study Italian.’
Barbara made a grimace. ‘Must we move? Just when it was growing quite warm and pleasant here? I think we should ask Mama if we may study in the library.’
‘By all means, if you wish to. But for now, since we don’t have permission, let us return upstairs and I will tune the piano.’
Privately, she was anxious to remove Drusilla, who had now helped herself to a whole quire of paper, from close proximity to the fire. But at the magic word piano the latter jumped up, scattering paper like confetti.
‘Oh, yes! You will play us a tune and we shall dance and sing. Come, Barbara!’
Hatty followed the sisters, thinking with something like anguish of that pair of lovers, so young, so hopeful, so radiant, so lost.
How could he ever pay any heed to me when he has a memory like that in his heart?
Following the girls along the damp dim passages and up the creaking stair, she wondered about the child Drusilla. Plainly there was something radically amiss with the girl’s learning capacity and yet in conversation she seemed normal and quick-witted enough – indeed rather unusually so for her age. And though several of her remarks were of a spiteful nature, there was something undeniably taking about her pale-skinned, little, lively pointed face with the prominent lips and those remarkable eyes.
Barbara too, though she was very evidently bent on resistance and antagonism to her new teacher at every turn, seemed not wholly dislikeable; and although almost entirely deficient in a sense of humour, Hatty imagined that she could be genial enough if she so chose; the lack of humour no doubt was inherited from her mother who appeared utterly devoid of any such attribute.