Elizabeth and Zenobia

by Jessica Miller

  ‘Please sit,’ said Father when I entered, and I did. He put down his pen and turned to look at me. ‘Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I haven’t been as attentive as I should have been since—well—since everything happened.’

  Since Mother left, he meant.

  ‘You’re lonely,’ he continued. ‘And it’s not unusual for a lonely child to imagine herself somehow less lonely. Zenobia. The gardener. I understand why you imagine them, why it might be comforting for you to think they exist.’

  ‘I’ve explained to you,’ I said in a hard voice, ‘that Zenobia is not imaginary.’

  ‘But I’ve indulged these imaginings long enough,’ he said, as if I’d not spoken at all. ‘I have engaged a governess. She’ll take your lessons in hand—they’ve been neglected since we arrived at Withering House. And she’ll be a companion for you.’

  ‘I don’t want a companion.’

  ‘She’ll help you forget about Zenobia.’

  ‘I’m not going to forget about Zenobia.’

  He held up his hand to show I should stop talking.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ he said.

  He turned back to his book. This meant the conversation was over. There was nothing left for me to do but walk slowly back down the hall.

  Two days later Miss Clemency arrived, with a small travelling case, a large hatbox and a glowing letter of recommendation from the Mrs Aurelia Smythe School for Superior Governesses held out in one of her primly gloved hands.

  She was shown around the crumbling house and the dead garden and, after the tour, she pronounced them both ‘charming’.

  She complimented Mrs Purswell on her cooking and drew a rare smile from Father at the dinner table with an anecdote about her time at the Mrs Aurelia Smythe School for Superior Governesses that involved a spilled inkwell, an escaped milking goat and a Pillar of Society.

  And when the plates were cleared, she insisted on taking the dust sheet off the piano, declaring, ‘Music is beneficial to the digestion.’ She filled the cold empty ballroom with a song that, at my request, used only the white keys. Father turned the pages for her. Even Mrs Purswell, in the corner of the room, moved her head in time to the music.

  Zenobia hated her immediately.

  6

  MISS CLEMENCY

  My lessons with Miss Clemency began the next day. The music room was converted to a schoolroom. Miss Clemency’s desk was in front of the blackboard. Mine was by the window. Zenobia perched on the windowsill.

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Clemency, a stick of chalk poised in her fingers, ‘we’ll begin with geometry. After all, the sooner we start it, the sooner we’ll finish it!’

  ‘Why does she insist on baring her teeth at us?’ Zenobia asked.

  ‘She’s smiling,’ I whispered.

  ‘Are you sure she’s smiling? Are you sure she’s not snarling?’

  Miss Clemency drew a series of triangles on the board. ‘Now,’ she said brightly. ‘What do you know about the Greek mathematician Pythagoras?’

  ‘He was stoned to death by an angry mob,’ said Zenobia.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, loudly and hurriedly. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Clemency, ‘he invented a very charming rule for measuring my favourite shape, the triangle.’

  I whispered the rule under my breath as I worked the problems Miss Clemency set for me. ‘The square of the hypotenuse,’ I chanted to myself, ‘is equal to the squares of the other two sides combined. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides combined.’

  Zenobia smiled in a satisfied way when Miss Clemency took up my book to check it. I knew at once she had worked some mischief in it. Miss Clemency returned the book to my desk without saying a word. There, on the page opposite my triangles, was a drawing of Miss Clemency. Zenobia had made her eyes round like saucers and turned her pupils cross-eyed. Her mouth was wide and full of teeth, like a shark’s.

  ‘It was Zenobia!’ The words jumped out before I could stop them. I clamped a hand over my lips.

  ‘Your father told me about Zenobia,’ said Miss Clemency, ‘and I can see she is quite a talented artist. Perhaps you and I and Zenobia will have a drawing lesson after lunch.’

  I secretly narrowed my eyes at Zenobia. ‘That sounds wonderful,’ I said, making my smile sparkle the same way Miss Clemency’s did.

  ‘We have to get rid of her.’ Zenobia sat on the blue bedspread in the blue bedroom. ‘The question is, how?’

  I was unfurling the sketches I had made that afternoon, spreading them on the blue carpet—a hedgehog, a clump of ferns, a grasshopper. I had drawn the grasshopper lopsided, I saw now, but I was still proud of the way I had done its antennae.

  ‘I don’t want to get rid of her,’ I answered, though my voice rose at the end of the sentence so it seemed more like a question.

  Zenobia slowly lifted her left eyebrow. I felt the room turn cold and I pulled the fabric of my nightdress close around me.

  ‘I like her,’ I said, and this time I kept my voice firm.

  The cold in the room grew sharper and a wind picked up out of nowhere. It whipped my hair across my face and into my mouth and tore the windows open. The drawings on the carpet lifted up and hovered in the air.

  ‘Zenobia!’ I sprang to my feet and tried to snatch them, but each time I came close to one of the pictures it flew out of my reach. The wind grew stronger still and I watched as, one by one, the drawings floated higher and then higher again and then out of the open windows and into the night.

  The wind calmed.

  The room lost its chill.

  The windows closed.

  ‘That was uncalled for,’ I said in a tight voice.

  ‘They weren’t very good, anyway,’ said Zenobia. ‘That grasshopper was lopsided, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  She drew back the blue bedspread and opened The World Beyond. She pretended to be absorbed in Chapter Seven: ‘Spirit Rapping, Psychography and Basic Necromancy’. She pretended not to hear me when I said goodnight.

  Zenobia’s campaign to scare away Miss Clemency started out small. Things happened in lessons that Miss Clemency could easily blame on the wind or on her own absent-mindedness. Like the books whose pages ruffled back and forth whenever she found the passage she wanted to read from. Or the paintings on the walls that came free from their hooks and suddenly fell to the floor. Or the time she took off her hat and later couldn’t find it anywhere, not in the drawers of her desk or the hook by the door, until Mrs Purswell came in wanting to know why Miss Clemency had left her hat beside the hams in the pantry.

  And, for the first time in forever, Zenobia and I weren’t talking. Or, rather, we were talking, but our conversations were guarded and never turned to the topic of Miss Clemency.

  I couldn’t prove, then, that any of these incidents were Zenobia’s doing, but I had my suspicions. And these were confirmed during one drawing lesson when Miss Clemency opened her paint box to find all the tubes of paint gone, and in their place, very smelly and very stiff, a dead mouse.

  As Miss Clemency opened the box, Zenobia leaned in close, with a smile starting on her lips, to see what she would do. But Miss Clemency merely removed the mouse and said, ‘On second thought, we will work with charcoals today.’

  I turned my back to Zenobia while I sketched. My fingers turned grey and then black with the charcoal.

  ‘That wasn’t funny,’ I told her after the lesson.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t meant to be funny.’ She flounced off.

  ‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ I called after her. ‘And I don’t like it at all.’

  When Miss Clemency fell into step beside me, I realised she must have heard me calling out—calling into thin air as far as she knew. I put my hands over my cheeks so she wouldn’t see the redness spreading over them and said, ‘I was just telling Zenobia not to—well, the dead mouse. That was her. I didn’t have anything to do with that.’

  ‘I never
thought for a moment you did.’

  I looked up at her. ‘You won’t leave will you?’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘Because of the—’

  ‘Because of the mouse?’ Her laugh pealed like a bell. ‘I covered rodents, dead and alive, as well as arachnids, insects and amphibians, on my very first morning of classes at the School for Superior Governesses. It takes much more than a dead mouse to scare me.’

  And, true to her word, she didn’t bat an eyelid when the top drawer of her desk filled with soil and squirming earthworms. Or when the African continent disappeared altogether from the pages of her atlas. Or when she went to walk to the blackboard but found her shoes would only take her to the window.

  I started to think Miss Clemency, with her placid manner and her twinkling smile, might prove to be Zenobia’s match.

  Zenobia’s pranks grew more and more desperate—but it seemed there was nothing she could do to ruffle Miss Clemency’s calm.

  Until one rainy Thursday morning.

  It was time for my history lesson. Miss Clemency stood at the blackboard. Zenobia stared straight at Miss Clemency. Her eyes, I saw, were brightly focused. I should have known she was plotting something far beyond her usual mischief.

  ‘Today is a special day’—Miss Clemency drew a stick of chalk from its box—‘because today we are going to learn about one of the most remarkable persons ever to have lived.’

  She wrote on the board, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’. As she dotted the last ‘i’ the blackboard shivered and shook against the wall. Miss Clemency steadied it.

  ‘Now,’ she asked, ‘what do you already know about Signor da Vinci?’

  I remembered a painting from a book of a half-smiling lady with her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘He was an artist,’ I said.

  ‘Well done, Elizabeth!’ Miss Clemency glowed. I could feel myself glowing in return.

  ‘He was an artist,’ she said. ‘His most famous painting is, of course, the Mona Lisa. But he was much more besides.’

  The blackboard rattled against the wall. Miss Clemency clicked her tongue. ‘This wind,’ she said, and she pulled the window shut.

  ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ she continued, ‘was also an engineer. A scientist. An inventor. An inventor of large things.’

  On the blackboard she drew a strange contraption. It looked like a mechanical bird.

  ‘Da Vinci’s famous flying machine,’ she explained. ‘Centuries before those clever Wright Brothers, Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up an aeroplane of his own.’

  The blackboard banged heavily against the wall. A fine rain of chalk dust turned Miss Clemency’s hair a ghostly white.

  ‘Da Vinci,’ she continued, ‘was an inventor of small things, too. Like this.’

  The blackboard rattled and banged so violently Miss Clemency could hardly write on it. She steadied it with one hand and wrote with the other.

  I turned to Zenobia. Her hands were balled into fists. Her lips moved around silent words. Her eyes never left the blackboard.

  There was a sharp creaking sound.

  A crack appeared at the top of the blackboard.

  ‘Miss Clemency!’ I cried. My desk clattered to the floor. I grabbed Miss Clemency by the elbow and pulled her backwards, just as the blackboard cracked in two. The right half was left hanging askew on the wall. The left half fell with a bang to the floor—over the very place where Miss Clemency had been standing.

  Miss Clemency gasped. Zenobia was slumped, pale and exhausted, in her chair, but her face was split with a triumphant grin.

  And then Miss Clemency collected herself. She pushed the left half of the blackboard up against the wall.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘where were we? Ah yes—another of Da Vinci’s inventions. It’s a secret code of sorts. Do you think you can decode it, Elizabeth?’

  I glanced back at Zenobia on my way to the board. Her grin had fallen away. Her pleased expression had curdled. She looked defeated. I could have almost felt sorry for Zenobia just then. Almost, but not quite. I turned my back firmly to her when I reached the board.

  I studied the script Miss Clemency had drawn on the blackboard. Its letters looked nearly like letters I knew, but I couldn’t decipher them.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I told her.

  ‘Have you ever noticed a very charming thing about mirrors—namely, that a mirror will always show the reverse of what stands before it? So what appears rightwise in real life will be leftwise in a mirror. And what, in real life, is leftwise—’

  ‘A mirror will show rightwise,’ I finished.

  ‘Very good,’ she said. She pulled a mirrored compact from her pocket, flicked it open, and handed it to me. ‘See if you can decode it now.’

  I held the compact up to the script. In the mirror, the letters spelled two words: Mirror Writing.

  ‘Da Vinci used mirror writing in all of his notebooks,’ said Miss Clemency. ‘Wasn’t that cunning?’

  Zenobia let her chair fall to the floor with a bang. She stomped across the room. As loud as thunder, she slammed the door behind her.

  ‘That was Zenobia, just now,’ I said. ‘The door. The blackboard. She doesn’t mean to be so awful—or she does, but she wouldn’t if she only knew how nice you were.’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Clemency. ‘It’s nice of you to think I’m nice, Elizabeth. Whatever Zenobia’s opinion of me may be.’

  Zenobia didn’t appear for lunch that day. Mrs Purswell still set a plate for her beside me.

  Looking at Zenobia’s empty plate and her empty chair, I wasn’t sure if I felt angry or sad.

  I remembered the loud way the blackboard had cracked in half and how it had fallen inches from Miss Clemency’s head.

  I decided I felt angry.

  ‘That was a cruel trick,’ I told her that night in the blue bedroom. ‘And dangerous, too.’

  Zenobia looked up from The World Beyond by Famed and Celebrated Clairvoyant Madame Lucent.

  ‘You could have badly hurt Miss Clemency,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t have badly hurt her, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Just scared her enough to make her leave Witheringe House and never come back.’

  ‘Why do you dislike her so much?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you like her so much?’ she spat.

  ‘It’s because I like her, isn’t it?’ I buttoned my nightgown. ‘You dislike her because I like her.’

  ‘I hardly think so,’ said Zenobia in an icy tone.

  The room turned suddenly cold. I shivered, and my fingers trembled as I did up my last button.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to stop liking her on your account,’ I said through chattering teeth.

  The chill in the room sharpened. Silently, I took another blanket down from the wardrobe and wrapped it around me. In bed, I turned away from Zenobia.

  I went to sleep trembling from the cold. Next morning when I woke, I was trembling still.

  ‘Zenobia has decided not to come to class again,’ I told Miss Clemency the next day. ‘She said conventional lessons were tedious for someone of her elevated interests and abilities, and that they distract her from her true purpose at Witheringe House.’

  ‘I see,’ said Miss Clemency. ‘And do you mind me asking, what is Zenobia’s true purpose at Witheringe House?’

  I moved close to Miss Clemency and made my voice into a whisper. ‘She thinks there’s a ghost here,’ I explained. ‘Only she says we shouldn’t use the word ghost, that the correct nomenclature is Spirit Presence. She has sensed a Spirit Presence and she wants to commune—that is, talk—with it.’

  ‘Do you believe there is a ghost—or a Spirit Presence, I should say?’ asked Miss Clemency.

  ‘Father says there’s no such thing as ghosts.’

  ‘And do you agree?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I’m scared of them,’ I said, ‘if that’s the same as believing in them. Father says you can’t believe in something you can’t see. But no one else can see Zenobia and I k
now she’s real. Do you believe in Zenobia, Miss Clemency?’

  It was her turn to think. ‘I believe you are an honest girl, Elizabeth,’ she said after a while. ‘And I believe you wouldn’t tell me, or your father, or anyone else for that matter, an untruth. So it follows that…that yes, I do believe in Zenobia.’

  If I hadn’t felt so shy about it, I would have hugged Miss Clemency. Instead, I took one of her gloved hands in both of my own and I squeezed it tight.

  Zenobia didn’t appear for lunch this day either. I was still angry when I looked at her empty plate. But there was something else, something uncomfortable, behind the anger: the feeling that some small but vital part of me was missing, and that I could never feel whole without it.

  I pushed the feeling away. I concentrated on my turnip stew, instead.

  The days after that one fell into a kind of routine. Father worked, spending each morning in the fields and each afternoon in his study, and the house was soon filled with flowers: in the library, in the drawing room, even some, in specimen jars, on Miss Clemency’s desk, where she took pleasure in rearranging them and brushing her fingers across their petals during breaks in my lessons.

  After lunch each day, Miss Clemency took me for drawing lessons, and once, leaning over a self-portrait still missing its left ear, she said I was becoming ‘quite a skilled artist’.

  Zenobia kept on in her quest to commune with the Spirit Presence, pointedly leaving me out of all her efforts in this direction. I was glad for the reprieve, though the haunted feeling I’d had in the nursery still lingered darkly at the edges of my mind.

  ‘Still enjoying your lessons?’ she asked one evening in the blue guest bedroom.

  ‘Still poking about in the East Wing trying to find your ghost?’ I shot back.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, with some dignity, ‘my search for the Spirit Presence has led me further afield.’