by Tracy Rees
A face shaped like a teardrop with pale skin and curtains of dusky hair. A thick fringe hanging into my eyes, parting a little in the centre to reveal a small frown between my eyebrows, though I was not aware of frowning. A wide mouth. Big eyes in a strange shade.
I sighed. I was very small, yes. My hair was too sooty, too heavy. My smile was too rare, and then too wide and lopsided when it came. I experimented now; the result was a grimace. Fit to scare the chickens, as Dora used to say.
I heard a shriek and the mistress appeared in the glass beside me like the wicked queen in the story books. The unguarded intimacy with myself made me jump all the more. Of course, her lovely mouth opened and the horrible words came pouring out and I was suddenly sick of it all.
‘I’ve done my work!’ I cried in fury, stamping my foot. ‘I’ve made it beautiful. I did it to help! Dolly’s in bed and if it weren’t for me there would be dust in your sausages.’
As if in a dream, I watched her long arm reach out and grab my hair, all of it, in one thick tress. By this rope she dragged me – to the kitchen, naturally, where Cook was dressing a pheasant. She looked up in shock as Lady Vennaway picked up a cleaver from the table.
With the deftest of movements, the mistress twisted my hair swiftly into a coil and sliced it all off at the neck. It took one clean cut.
‘Vanity is a sin,’ she shrieked, ‘and particularly laughable in you.’ Then she left.
Alone, Cook and I looked at each other. I could not explain. My hair lay on the floor, lengths and lengths of it, it seemed. I picked it up. There seemed to be even more of it than when it had been attached. I could feel the new short ends flying up around my face.
‘The dining room is clean,’ I said at last and took my hair out to throw on the rubbish heap.
I subsequently learned from novels and periodicals that every third orphan has her hair severed at some point. However, this in no way diminished the feeling of invasion and personal grief that I felt at the time. Nonetheless, in the longer term Lady Vennaway unwittingly did me a favour. Long, my hair refused to sit in any style and resisted every attempt at constraint. Short, it curled comfortably around the edges of a cap and saved me hours of brushing each week. Long, it had been good for nothing except tormenting Aurelia.
I smile as I remember Aurelia pretending fury every time we compared the length of our hair. No matter how she brushed or treated hers, mine was always longer. Even though my dull, sooty lengths were clearly no match for her bright, silky waves, she made a great display of being envious.
She devised a game whereby we would lean over the fence beside the stream and dangle our heads over the water, to see whose hair could touch its surface. It was an absurdity, of course, because it was not a measure of hair length at all – Aurelia always won simply because she was taller. But it made us laugh every time.
Inevitably, the first time, I fell in. I was so determined my hair should touch the stream that I tilted right over, feet in the air. I lost my grip and in I went. I was unharmed but wet, muddy and fearful of Dora’s ridicule.
After my hair was cut off, we went back to racing twigs instead.
*
Now, in London, I sit and think that perhaps I am not safe from the Vennaways after all. Perhaps a woman who could treat a child the way she treated me is a woman ever to be feared. Perhaps it is just as well that I am far away, a small, anonymous figure in a great, teeming city. It must be the best place in the world to get lost.
Something about my reminiscing has unsettled me; I feel restless. I want to walk in the hammering rain and breathe the cold, wet air. What is it that tugs at my thoughts? It is not the cutting of my hair.
Something else.
Aurelia and I playing at the stream. Missing her. Racing twigs. Dangling over the fence. Shrieks of laughter filling the air. Missing her. Falling in and the smell of mud. Aurelia in tears of mirth at the sight of my sorry, blackened figure. Missing her. Aurelia cheering me up by telling me a new story as we trudged back to the house. It was about two rabbits called Entwhistle and Crumm who opened a tailor’s shop in Hampstead. I adored that story, which ran to several instalments over a number of days.
Entwhistle wore a red waistcoat and Crumm wore a blue . . .
And all of a sudden it hits me like a blow to the head. The tide of memory has carried me, as surely as a twig on a current, to my answer.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the event, a full twelve months had passed before we saw Aurelia again. It was the following March before she returned to us, with spring winds in her hair and daffodils waving a greeting.
I was in the schoolroom – I cannot now recall why – lost in the sort of sad trance that had become my accustomed state of mind. Roused by a rattle of carriage wheels, I glanced through the window without much interest, presuming it to be one of Lady Vennaway’s callers. But something about the scene made my heart catch.
The carriage cut a fair dash along the gravel; stones flew up about it like droplets in a fountain and caught the pale sunshine. It rounded the chase at speed, leaning daringly to one side. Even the horses seemed to canter with a rakish air, as if their only pleasure was in showing off their strong legs and tall feathers, and pulling a carriage mattered not a whit. Thus I had a strong suspicion about who was inside it, even before it came close enough for me to recognize Mrs Bolton’s navy and silver phaeton.
I ran.
When Aurelia emerged from the carriage, Lady Vennaway caught her in the longest, tightest embrace I have ever seen. She wept and wept, and kissed her and wept, then refused to speak to her for a month. Lord Vennaway was his usual self, forbidding and taciturn, yet there was no mistaking the emotion in his gaze when he enfolded her, briefly, in his arms.
I felt a rush of love, immense joy and relief. Fear, of course, that I had lost the girl I had known so well. She looked impossibly glamorous and foreign to my sheltered eyes. Although one-and-twenty when she left, to me she had still been my girlhood friend. She returned undeniably a woman, composed and set apart – from all of us. I recognized none of the clothes she wore, nor the stylish parasol, nor the outlandish emerald-green gloves.
I quaked; what could a poor, stay-at-home child have to say that might interest such a creature as this? Sufficient and more, it transpired. Her poised, distant face broke into its familiar bright smile the moment she saw me. With a joyous laugh, she picked me up and whirled me round in the old way, then set me down for inspection.
Aurelia was equally struck by the change in me – a change I had not until then considered. I was past fourteen when she returned, a young woman myself. That long, lonely year had taken its toll. Little wonder I looked different – taller, thinner, older. I had grown up, and lost my childhood innocence. I no longer thought Aurelia perfect but, I discovered in a rush of joy, I loved her no less for that.
The weeks that followed were glorious! Our friendship was restored – her affection so tangible, so evident in her face and voice that I started to wonder why I had ever doubted it. Days of walking, talking, laughing with Aurelia, hanging onto every word she said. At last she sat before me again, and I told her fully and honestly my own small happenings, my fears and concerns. I had never spoken to her thus before, and my new candour seemed to bring us closer than ever. We talked at such length and in such depth that it never occurred to me to doubt that she was telling me everything.
*
And so began the final phase of my life with Aurelia: once again constant companions, both of us tempered in different ways by her absence.
Aurelia seemed to have found whatever it was that she had been seeking and appeared more settled at Hatville than ever before. I expected she would reminisce about the friends and places she had fought so hard to visit, but after the first excited flourish of stories, they drifted away like a dream.
Once or twice a letter arrived for her, addressed in unfamiliar handwriting. These, she spirited away and I never learned who had sent them. I assumed a con
tinued correspondence with Frederic Meredith, but when I told her I’d been afraid she would marry him and forget me, she laughed heartily until coughing took over.
*
Her health deteriorated rapidly after just a month at home. Where previously it had been hard to believe that Aurelia was ill, now it was impossible to forget the fact. Once so robust and lively, she grew weak and pale. She had staved off her decline for a long while, but when it came it was dramatic.
A wheeled chair was brought to Hatville and if she wished to see the rose garden or the stream, I would push her there. On a good day she could walk slowly, leaning hard on a cane. On a bad day – and they were frequent – she could not get out of bed. The Vennaways could not have married her off now if they’d still wanted to. It seemed that she had returned just in time to say goodbye, yet she clung onto life tenaciously and weeks turned into months, which turned into improbable years. In her refusal to succumb to probability, at least, she was quite unchanged.
Despite the heartbreak of watching her struggle, I was not unhappy. Strangely, it was the most peaceful time I can remember.
One sad change at Hatville was the departure of Robin, who had been offered a position as head gardener at the estate of an eminent Gloucestershire family. I admit I was shocked to see him go. It was not that I had underestimated his skill, it was simply that I had never considered it. He was so modest and quiet that I would never have noticed his talent with agapanthus, nor realized that Hatville was famed for its fruit yields, if his new appointment had not brought the matter to our attention.
‘He has a way with living things,’ Aurelia said quietly. I could understand her sadness. Plants burst to life beneath his fingers, but she was fading away.
Since her return, there was a new, more reflective quality about her. We spent less time playing and laughing, and more time strolling, when she was able, pondering the ways our pasts had shaped us. We sang and read aloud less but talked more deeply and sat in silence more. She was now less sparkle than gleam, less fire than deep, silent, shining water.
As for me, I had managed to endure the year apart armed with nothing but faith and my own strength. This knowledge gave me something I had not possessed before. I could not put a name to it but I felt it living within me nonetheless.
We both knew these days were gifts, given to us to enjoy to the best of our abilities and to use as wisely as we might.
We were granted nearly three beautiful years.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mr Manning the stationer’s face falls when he looks up and sees my dripping figure framed in his doorway. Professional courtesy visibly wrestles with dismay.
‘You are back,’ he observes.
‘Good day, Mr Manning, I hope you are well. I wonder if I could possibly trouble you for one final glance at your directory?’
‘I doubt any new names have appeared on it overnight, miss. We do not have brownies here who scribe away by moonlight.’
‘I am certain you do not, sir, but I wish to look for something else if it’s not too much trouble.’
He shrugs and stretches his neck in one direction and then the other before handing the directory to me.
‘Gloomy day,’ he mutters.
‘Extremely gloomy,’ I agree, unable to stop smiling. I leaf eagerly to the letter C. And there it is.
Crumm & Co. Waistcoat Lane. Next to the crooked courtyard behind St Angelus. Holborn.
The address erases any trace of doubt. Waistcoat Lane! No wonder Aurelia thought of our childhood story. I offer up a swift prayer that her future clues will not require quite such a lengthy and tangled trawl through my past.
I read the directions again and dash from the shop, throwing thanks over my shoulder as I go. My cab is waiting and there is a furious hurtle to Holborn, during which all my resentment towards Aurelia’s quest is forgotten. I can hardly breathe for anticipation.
‘Want me to wait again, miss?’ asks the driver when we pull to a splashing halt outside St Angelus.
I pay and send him away. After the delays and stagnation of the last days I shall not be leaving Mr Crumm’s establishment until I find the letter. If I am locked in overnight, so be it.
Holborn is deserted. Indeed, all of London is subdued on such a drudge of a day. My skirts drag with the weight of the water. The hammering torrents may very well have dented my bonnet. I do not care. Soon I will hear more from Aurelia.
There is the courtyard, crooked to be sure, shaped like a crumpled handkerchief. Beside it a narrow lane – I half expect to see two sartorial bunnies bounding ahead to show me the way. And here is the shop, painted burgundy, with a bulging mullioned window and the words Crumm & Co neatly painted in gold, above.
As I pause on the threshold, quivering with anticipation, the door flies open with a friendly jingling of bells and a tall gentleman in a vast overcoat nearly trips over me.
‘Pardon me, miss,’ he says in mannerly tones, and holds the door for me before going on his way.
A pleasantly lit interior greets me, thanks to candles and gas lamps both. It is welcome brightness on such a dark day.
‘Good day, madam.’ A contented-looking man of perhaps sixty looks up from a ledger and smiles. ‘May I assist you with anything?’
‘Good day, sir. I shall look around, thank you.’
‘Indeed, indeed.’
Go to the natural history section . . . Cast your thoughts around the book we discussed at length . . .
I step a little further into the shop. I decide I will most certainly not go to the natural history section. Now that I understand the tone of Aurelia’s clue, I believe this is another device to confound anyone but me. For although Mr Howden had talked of a great many books that night, desirous to show off his erudition, the book that we – Aurelia and I – shared was, of course, The Old Curiosity Shop.
‘In fact, sir, excuse me, could you direct me to the works of Mr Dickens?’
He emerges from behind his desk and shows me the relevant shelves. Then he appears to startle and look at me more closely, though he collects himself quickly.
‘Why! I wonder . . .’ he exclaims, then stops. ‘I wonder if there is anything else I might help you with, Miss . . .?’
‘Nothing else, thank you.’
But he is looking at me so carefully. Perhaps it is just the sight I present, bedraggled and pale, oozing rainwater. Perhaps it is the fact that I am in mourning – or unchaperoned. Whatever the reason, he has a pleasing, low voice and the sort of presence that prohibits offence.
‘I wonder, miss, if you have noticed our collection of early numbers over there? We are not a library, but I am a great devotee of the contemporary writers so I keep a copy of everything by Mr Dickens and two or three others. Periodicals and bound books alike are stored in this glass case. They are not for sale but I shall leave the key in the door in case you wish to peruse.’
He returns to his desk and leaves me in peace. I frown – more than usual. There was something odd about the whole interaction.
I find The Old Curiosity Shop on the bookshelves. I remove my wet gloves and rapidly feel around it – tops and undersides of the shelf. I know the letter will not be in a book, for the books are there to be sold. Nothing.
I feel behind the shelf, to see if it slides forward, to see if anything could be hidden there. Nothing.
I am already half certain of the outcome when I move to the glass case. I glance at Mr Crumm but he remains engrossed in his ledger. I unlock the case and find the long line of editions of Master Humphrey’s Clock, the magazine I remember so well from childhood. Here are the copies containing the closing chapters of Little Nell’s sad story and here is the very last, on the end of a shelf, against the wall.
I carefully remove the magazine, turn it over in my hands; nothing slides out. I riffle gently through the pages and find a place where two or three are stuck together lightly, perhaps a little binder’s glue gone astray. Or perhaps not.
I slide a fin
ger between the pages and it falls open exactly where I expected – the tragedy of a heroine who dies too young.
Between the pages lies a plain white envelope inscribed with just two initials: ‘AS’.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hands shaking, I unfasten my cloak, sink the letter into my dress pocket beside its predecessor and wrap myself up again. I restore the magazine, lock the cabinet and pause a moment to marvel. Here, in this city so far from Hatville, in an out-of-the-way alley, in a neighbourhood I never before visited in my life, waits a letter to me from my friend. I feel as though I have strayed into a novel myself.
I am in a fever to read the letter, yet I do not want to do so in a public place. Nor do I wish to return to the room where I have been so recently confined. Also, I wonder if there might be further answers in this shop that Aurelia’s letter cannot supply. Did this gentleman know her? He seems to know me.
I drift back to the books for sale and decide to purchase Oliver Twist. It was hard to leave Oliver behind at Hatville. The bookseller inspects my choice with interest.
‘A fine novel. Strange to say, I had imagined you would choose something else . . . The Old Curiosity Shop perhaps?’
I have not imagined it. He knows something. ‘That is my favourite, sir, but I already have it.’
‘I see. Then have you found everything you need today?’
‘I have indeed. Thank you, Mr Crumm, is it?’
‘Albert Crumm at your service, Miss . . .?’
‘I am Amy Snow.’
‘Of course you are, my dear, of course you are. Oh!’ He emerges from behind his desk again and clasps my hand in a hearty shake. ‘I am so very glad to meet you at last, although . . . I suppose this means that Miss Vennaway is no longer with us.’
‘I am sorry to tell you that she died, sir, but a week since. She was a friend of yours?’
‘I am honoured to have made her most cordial acquaintance, yes. And through her, I feel I know a little of you, Miss Snow, if that is not a presumption. My sincerest condolences.’