by Edith Layton
“Tibbet’s not gone after you, ’as ’e? I’ll sort ’im,” Alfie growled, thinking of the butler he’d already decided was no match for himself.
The first laughter she’d felt in hours tickled at Victoria’s throat as she thought of the bony, lofty Tibbet unbending so much as to touch another being, though perhaps, she thought, with gloves, he might. And when she told this to Alfie, he laughed as well, as much in relief for seeing her own amusement as for the jest, for unlike Victoria, Alfie was familiar with the baser ways of mankind in general, and had no difficulty picturing anyone touching anyone else.
“You’ve got the sullens, Miss Victoria,” he said shrewdly, “but I’ve a thing ’ere that’s a cure for them. Just cast your eye over this ’ere I brought for you, and then tell me you’re feeling ‘weary.’ C’mon, read ’er, they ’ad me bring ’er so’s no one else could see it. Since I tole ’em they never tole you Mrs. Haverford came to call on you, they don’t trust nothing to the post, and that’s only sensible. ’Ere, read ’er now, so’s I can bring an answer, like I’m s’posed to do.”
Victoria had grave doubts when she saw the letter Alfie thrust at her, for she’d had enough to do with those outwardly innocent pieces of paper for one day, or for one year, for that matter, but Alfie was not to be denied, so she took it from him. He watched carefully as she unfolded it and began to read. He saw her eyes widen as she scanned the lines; then he saw her read it again, and then once more, though it was a simple enough message, and he’d committed it to his gratified heart the moment he’d stood and peered over a broad shoulder, watching it being set to paper.
“Miss Dawkins,” it said, in the same impatient hand that she’d seen before, “we find we must ask a favor of you. My mother’s companion, Miss Comfort, has taken it into her head to visit with some near relatives. That being the case, and being new to this area, we discover ourselves about to be bereft of a companion for my mama, as well as for a tutor for the Johnson children. I know you are well established at the Manor, and can only ask you to come to us as a personal favor with the assurance that as the only governess-companion in residence, there should be no gossip about your presence here to disturb you, and with the promise that I will meet and surpass whatever wages you are presently receiving.”
The word “No” was on Victoria’s tongue, for weeks of maltreatment and mockery from the Ludlows were preferable to one more moment of embarrassment in front of the earl, and the simple syllable was almost out when Alfie said, “There’s more, there at the very bottom, see?” and she read the hasty postscript: “Not only do I now ask you to come to live at my home, Miss Dawkins, I ask it as a personal favor to me.”
“Well?” said Alfie. “You’ll be ready to go in the morning?”
“Since I suppose I must pack and sleep first, yes,” she said at once.
*
None of the Ludlows turned out to see Miss Dawkins leave in the morning, but all of them, save for the squire, who slept the sleep of the entirely castaway, wondered if they ought. It presented a neat social problem they were incapable of solving. It was true that Miss Dawkins was only an upper servant, which was precisely why no one but the housekeeper and the butler were supposed to be there to see her off, as was customary, to make certain no silverplate had been slipped into her baggage. But she was going to High Wyvern Hall and the Earl of Clune’s carriage had been sent to take her on that short journey. It was also true, if the gentleman’s story were to be believed, that she really was a friend of the noble family, which was why Mrs. Ludlow and her daughters watched her departure from behind their curtained windows, wondering at whether they ought to at least lift a hand in farewell. But then again, she’d left without proper notice given, which was reason enough to shun her entirely, if not to stone her through the gates, and yet again, she’d left upon the request of their neighbor, who was not only an earl but also entirely attractive, wealthy, and unwed, and so must be allowed his peccadilloes. His predecessors, after all, had been permitted far more.
The Ludlows weren’t the only ones to be suffering from an admixture of feelings this morning. While the squire’s family pondered their insoluble social dilemma, Victoria sat back in the carriage and tried to deal with her own excitement and fear so that Alfie, who’d come along to oversee her remove, would see neither. But he was too busy telling her about how thrilled the other children were at the idea of her return to notice her state of mind. Or, Victoria, thought on a little smile, perhaps that was precisely why he was so busily entertaining her with stories about them as the coach left the Old Manor behind.
She was beyond delighted to see the last of the Ludlows, far more than thrilled to be going to High Wyvern Hall, and thoroughly terrified as well. But it was never the rumored specters in the Hall she was going to that haunted her thoughts, for half a hundred ghosts could sail up over the carriage as she came up the drive and she thought it would not faze her half so much as the sight of the earl would.
It was difficult enough knowing how to behave at any new post; she’d always found that one of the hardest things to become accustomed to in her brief career. It was never easy to come into people’s homes, get to know them intimately, all the while remembering to keep a distance and a cool professional attitude. It wasn’t only failure to get along with the strangers that employed her that she feared when she began a new job. She often worried about what would happen should the reverse be true and she found that she suited a position well enough to remain permanently.
Dwelling for years among people she might grow to know as well and perhaps care for as much as her own family would present problems too. Because she knew that all the while, for all those years, she’d have to remind herself constantly that however dear to her they became, they were neither kin nor friends, but always and only her employers. Living that way for decades, she wondered, wouldn’t-part of her heart wither away for lack of use?
A paid servant could never forget her position so much as to show an excess of affection to her employers or he’d give offense and be considered presumptuous. And she could never expect a similar show of love in return, or she’d be considered addled. This constant girdling of the spirit, Victoria often thought, must eventually cripple it, and so she’d almost been glad that in her short career she’d never been with a family long enough to care enough, and so be hurt by them.
Now she was going to work for the earl, to tend to the children, whom she already loved far too well, and to companion Mrs. Haverford, whom she’d begun to feel a great fondness toward. And she’d be sharing a home, however huge, with a man she suspected she could come to care for far too well, far too soon, and for no good reason at all.
Would she have been better off, she’d wondered as she’d dressed this morning, if she’d taken on the position as his mistress immediately? She scarcely knew him, but couldn’t deny how attracted she was to him; the mere thought of seeing him again had kept her up half the night with racing heart, alternating between delight and fright, despite all the stern lectures she’d given herself. There well might not be gossip about her presence in his home if Miss Comfort were gone, just as he’d promised. But of course he couldn’t promise that his new foolish employee would cease to respond to the very sight of him. So if she were going to be hurt in any event, as she strongly suspected she would be, simply by constantly being near to him, then wouldn’t a gentleman’s mistress know him more intimately and thus more satisfyingly than a mere governess-companion in his household ever could?
When she thought of the things a mistress would come to know about a gentleman, and there were a great many things she could think of, since her father had insisted on an enlightened household, her grandmother had been forthright, and she’d observed a great deal in her weeks in Mrs. Rogers’ lodgings, then she believed she ought simply to have said “Yes” to him that day, and been done with it.
But then too, she thought, if a governess loyal to a family for twenty years still had to conceal her heart’s
pleasure in that family, then a mistress, who she knew seldom received the opportunity to turn in twenty months, much less twenty years of servitude, might also have to disguise any real devotion she might come to feel for her employer. And, she’d realized, a mistress might also be expected to have some skill in her field, even as a governess did. Although she’d been schooled in many disciplines, she’d only been kissed a few times (and most often on the run, at that) by various gentlemen who oughtn’t to have tried to take advantage of a female on her own in the first place. These errant males had ranged variously from a schoolmate’s brother who’d been whacked by his papa for it, to an employer who’d caused her to give in her notice, to the earl, who’d only turned her world upside down and made her think, even for a second, that solid bourgeois little Miss Dawkins could ever sprawl, all in satin on a recamier, playing siren or mistress to an earl, and not be entirely ludicrous.
“But o’ course,” Alfie said a bit louder now, “if you been struck mute, then I’ll just tell the coachman to turn round, since I don’t think a deaf female is what they’re after hiring today.”
“I have been thinking,” Victoria said self-righteously, since she couldn’t come up with a better defense for her total and unflattering abstraction.
“Been worrying,” Alfie corrected her, and when she turned a smoothly innocent face to him, he went on smugly, “and for no reason at all. Everything will be fine now. Just think! There’s over two dozen indoor servants at the Hall, now it’s been opened, and not only does Mrs. Haverford know every first name of everyone of ’em, but there’s not so much as one passage in one wall for them to creep into,” but here he paused, looking momentarily regretful, before he continued on a note of triumph. “No, and they wouldn’t need to, nobody has to face the wall like a lumpkin when ’is lordship passes. Why, if they did, they’d be sent off to be quacked before they could spit, for they’d be thought foaming mad, they would. If it’s ghosts that’s worrying you,” he said consolingly, “might as well put that away as well, for there’s not been a sniff of one about, and I prowled the place one night till I gave the footmen a turn, but nary a sight of ’em did I get. Between us, Miss Victoria, I s’pect it’s all a hum the old earl started to keep relatives away. More haunts whipping about in the Tower in London every night, the earl says, and I believe him.”
“Thank you,” Victoria replied pleasantly. “Now I shall sleep tonight.”
“’Course you will. You don’t have to worry about any other visitors in your bed neither, Miss Victoria,” Alfie said blandly, “’cause as for the earl ’isself, whatever ‘’e’s thinking, ’e’s a real gent, and ’e’ll never do a thing with his mama and us about the place.”
Victoria turned to her guide with an expression of shock, but before she could go through the embarrassing charade of denying that which she felt no small boy ought to think of, much less know so well, she caught sight of the towers of High Wyvern Hall in the window behind him, and so completely forgot all she was about to say.
“It is something, ain’t it?” Alfie said as proudly as if the great house were his own, as he saw her stare.
It was, she felt, a good deal more than that, but at that moment she hadn’t the words to express it, and indeed, it had taken learned men centuries to find the precise words for the ancient building. She’d read of its beginnings in the book about the Manor, whose chroniclers never forgot to detail its more famous neighbor, since the Ludlows, both quick and dead, knew very well that all their home’s fame lay in the fact that it lay in the shadow of the enormous Hall.
Once, it was said, primitive men had built a fortress on the highest hill that overlooked the surrounding meadows. A Roman dignitary had built himself a home for a life of ease on the ruins of that, and when his house crumbled after his empire did, gentler souls, religious men, came and built a place to worship. But gentle men were not destined to command the hill, and when their world was toppled by quarrels of kings and princes of the Church, the first Earl of Clune, a most ungentle man, came to build himself a home.
He took an idea from each of the others who had failed before him. He planned to build a fortress, he would construct a luxurious home, and he decided to erect a great house of veneration. But all in one, and all for himself. And he would build one that would last the ages.
Ages had not passed since he’d set the first stone upon stone, but Victoria could think of nothing less than the Apocalypse which could topple his structure now. It stood on top of a hill in a leveled-off court, and it grew from the earth to reach toward the sky, and wrapped around the top of the rise to dominate the scene. Its highest windows could look out far beyond the landscaped grounds to the west, and to the east, to a ribbon of blue that was the estuary, and on a clear day to a further shining silver horizon that was the wide sea itself.
The first earl had begun the structure with stones stolen from all his predecessors, and wrenched the rest from the surrounding countryside. His descendants had added to it in the same spirit and material, and so the Hall was the color of red earth with salmon and gold tones intermixed. Because each successive architect had honored the first earl’s concept, the building had kept to a form and so kept to its dignity and spoke in its every well-shaped line of strength, not mere weight, and of power, not simple size.
Victoria remained silent as the carriage went round the long drive, past trees and hedges, through hollows and over rises, losing and then catching sight of the Hall again in a mischievous game of discovery, just as Capability Brown had intended when he designed its approach for the fifth Earl of Clune. When the coach finally stopped in front of the house, Victoria stepped down in a daze, all the while keeping her neck craned back and her eyes on the most magnificent home she’d ever seen, and then found herself halted by a flurry of warmth and noise in the region of her knees.
“Miss Victoria!” Sally cried, hugging her legs. “Oh, Miss Victoria,” Bobby said hoarsely, trying to remain as cool as his brother would wish, while yearning to be as spontaneous as his sister had been, and so succeeding only in becoming quite red in the face as Miss Dawkins swept him up as well in her perfumed embrace.
When the laughter had stopped and the few errant tears been mopped up surreptitiously by all concerned, Victoria discovered Mrs. Haverford to be standing on the front steps with her hand outstretched in welcome, just as though she were greeting a Personage, and not just a governess-companion. It was then a while before Victoria could trust herself to speak.
So it was just as fortunate that she did not have to. The children wanted her to see their new home at once, if not sooner, and laughing, Mrs. Haverford agreed. They wouldn’t be able to utter a sensible word with the children bursting with impatience anyway, she opined, since she told Victoria she’d discovered that even silent little Johnsons had the habit of shifting from foot to foot and looking so imperative you feared they might pop if you touched them when they had something they felt was important to disclose. The children, she decided, would take their new governess through the house while a maid unpacked for her. They would all meet afterward in the rose sitting room, for, as Mrs. Haverford said sensibly, it was quite a long jaunt, and as she added with a quirked grin that reminded Victoria of her son for one painful-pleasant moment, she’d already seen the place.
It was indeed a long journey of discovery that the children led Miss Dawkins upon. There were so many rooms that they passed through, looked in on, and remained in for a space to wonder at, that it was difficult to remember the whole of it even minutes after she had done with the tour. There were lavish rooms and exquisite ones, tasteful ones and some that delighted the children but caused Miss Dawkins to blink. There were rooms for dining and sleeping, rooms for playing and rooms for praying, rooms for reclining, rooms for tranquilizing oneself, rooms for entertaining others, glassed-in rooms for growing things, bricked-up rooms for storing things, rooms in which to paint or play instruments or act out plays or write them, rooms for gloating over amassed treas
ures, rooms in which to read about how to acquire more, there was even a room somewhere, she didn’t doubt, for thinking about adding on more rooms.
Everywhere there were servants, and everywhere, unlike at the Old Manor, they smiled or bowed or curtsied as if it gave them pleasure to greet visitors, and never as though they simply feared giving offense if they did not. And they never seemed to mind, Victoria thought in glad bewilderment, that the visitors were merely children accompanied by a new servant. Cook gave the children bits of cakes and tastes of puddings and then scolded them lightly for ruining their appetites for dinner; the housemaids dipped their little curtsies like dropped giggles; the footmen grinned; even the butler, however imperceptibly, definitely smiled upon them.
There were some in the house that Victoria noted especially, for they looked so pleasant she wondered if she might not make some friends in her stay here. There was a hearty elderly fellow who had recently been hired on, he said happily, to restore the library, which had fallen upon hard times under the stewardships of the sixth and seventh earls; there was a charming couple who were similarly attending to the picture gallery, engaged to clean and document it; there was a merry-looking little female near her own age, niece and apprentice to the housekeeper; and there was another young woman Victoria spied drifting through the music room, an ethereally beautiful fair-haired creature who smiled tenderly when she saw the children excitedly leading their new governess about, before she wafted into an alcove and was gone from sight.
Then, high in the house, in the southern wing, they met Nurse, grateful to be summoned from retirement in the village to tend to Baby, who, while always a good child, as though he’d always known he lived on tolerance, now outdid himself. For he sat in her ample lap in the old nursery as quietly and placidly as though he quite understood how he was honored here, and feared to give one gurgle that might upset his new and beautiful applecart. Then they met with Miss Comfort. She was busy packing her bags, but spared a moment for them. The country air hadn’t seemed to agree with her. Seeing her again, Victoria felt ashamed of some of her own dark and private reasonings about precisely why the earl had summoned her to the Hall. Because it was clear that Miss Comfort really needed this sudden vacation she was taking. There was no doubt that the old woman had somehow aged even further, and even more unsettling was the fact that she was uncharacteristically subdued. She seemed a shadow of the acerbic and opinionated person she’d been. And just as when one hears that a noisy neighbor one’s been complaining of has died, Victoria thought guiltily, in this case the absence of a nuisance was more unsettling than it was satisfying. Miss Comfort’s new state was as depressing as she herself was obviously depressed. Since Victoria had seen her last, her face had grown more lines and become grayer and her movements were stiff and awkward. But she smiled at the children, and stroked Sally’s fair hair with one thin hand, and even had a brief word and a small smile and a wish for success for Miss Dawkins, her replacement.