A LETTER TO EMILY
From my Short Story Collection
Forms of Flight:Twenty Seven Stories (Click for Info.)
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rs. Hedgewick declared that as Lottie was so
very small she should sit with the children on their side of the carriage. This
meant that Lottie was squashed into the corner with baby Rupert on her knee.
Rupert was her favourite: six months old, plump and pliant, he smiled with
delight every time he saw her, even though it had only been a week since she
had joined the family.
From her corner of the
carriage Lottie watched as Mrs. Hedgewick spread her skirts wide and placed her
parasol before her, clasping its silver peacock head tightly to counterbalance
the rocking if the coach.
Young Sarah reached out her
hand and pinched her sister Julia, who howled and flailed out against her
sister’s hand, catapulting Sarah into Lottie’s shoulder and making Rupert cry. In
the seat by the window James folded his arms with their sharp razor elbows and
stuck out his chin. ‘Mother,’ he shouted above the din, ‘This is a madhouse. Do
make them stop.’
Mrs. Hedgewick turned her gaze
from the rolling Yorkshire countryside and
fixed Lottie with her mean, porcine stare. ‘Miss Lottie, the children!’ she
said grimly. ‘Despite the fact that, according to your father you have been a
little mother to your own sisters, I have seen little evidence of such
qualities in my house. See to your charges. Do!’
The screaming battle between
the girls s abated a little. Rupert stirred and whimpered on Lottie’s knee. The
eyes of the three older children locked eagerly onto Lottie’s face, displaying
the clinical interest that had chilled her from the first moment she’s met them
at Hedgefield House,
‘That’s enough, Julia! Sarah!’
Lottie said sharply, injecting her voice with all the firmness she could muster.
It was very hard to play the bully. Her
own little sisters could be cajoled with a jest, rewarded with a story or a
picture. She’d never had to raise her voice.
Sarah, sharp eyes on Lottie,
reached out and pinched Julia’s fat cheek. Julia shrieked and pulled Sarah’s
snaky curls. Exhaling a loud sigh Lottie stood up in the swaying coach and
thrust the baby onto his mother’s unwilling lap. Then she turned to pull the
brawling sisters apart, holding each one by the back of her dainty muslin frock.
‘Now James,’ she said grimly to their brother.’ You will move to the centre so
that you're between your sisters. You will be the constable, the peacemaker.’
The boy shrugged. ‘Perfectly
comfortable here, thank you miss,’ he said, smoothing the fine serge of his
knickerbockers with blunt, ill-shaped fingers.
Lottie met his gaze with a
look which always made her own sisters tremble. Into that look she forced all her
power – all her contempt for this boy and his ignorant, pig-faced family; all
her anger at being forced into this work for a miserable, grudgingly bestowed
pittance; all her despair at being parted from her dear sisters with their
gentle hands, their bright. knowing eyes, and their knife-sharp minds. ‘You
will move, James!’ she said, ‘Or I will know the reason why,’
Mumbling under his breath
James shuffled along the seat. Lottie thrust a girl either side of him,
straightening their shoulders and pulling their skirts into some semblance of
order. She squeezed in beside Sarah. She could smell the sweat that had
gathered in her hair under her bonnet and was starting to trickle down her
neck.
‘Miss Lottie! Do take Rupert.’
Mrs. Hedgewick thrust the whimpering Rupert towards her. ‘He is slavering so. And my dress will be
creased to high heaven. What Lady Gardam will think I can’t imagine. She will
take us for paupers.’ Mrs. Hadgewick pulled down the sleeves of her exquisite
dress, a vision in palest blue fine lawn, and patted the sausage curls drooping
onto her slab-like cheek.
As Lottie settled Rupert in
her own creased lap and stroked his face to stop the whimpering she considered
the vulgarity of Mrs. Hedgwick’s remark. On her lap sat baby Rupert, immaculate
in a diaphanous dress of trimmed organdie. The other children were also
pristine in showy clothes just brought up from London
She glanced out of the window,
already composing an amusing letter to her little sister Em. This one would describe
the Hedgehogs – as she referred to her employers in this sanity-saving
correspondence – making calls, as one does in the country,
Lottie put her face closer to
the thick glass of the carriage window. Through the trees she glimpsed a flash
of blue – a whole shelf of delphiniums, above which, stretching elegantly on a
long bank, sat a weathered brick house with high chimneys. Its wide double
doors were overshadowed by an extended portico, bracketed with great stone
buckets of flaring geranium.
‘This must be Colyer House,
Mrs. Hedgewick?’ she ventured.
Lottie’s employer nodded her
satisfaction, her second chin wobbling slightly. ‘Not one of the great houses my dear, but substantial. The
family has been here since the Norman Conquest and Sir Richard is a leading man
in the North. He and Mr. Sedgwick are most intimate friends. And Lady
Gertrude…’she paused. ‘So gracious.’
Lottie had written to her
sister that the she-Hedgehog had aspirations above the status of the
he-Hedgehog. He was modest enough
despite the fact that he was already a very successful farmer and man of
business. The she Hedgehog only seems
happy, dear Em, in the company of people who, with various degrees of subtlety,
patronise her and put her down. Poor she-Hedgehog generally fails even to
notice the slights, contenting herself with the opportunity to bask in the
glimmering, distant light of those whom she sees as ‘leading people’;
Now Lottie watched as the
house came into view, vanished behind the encircling tall trees and then back
again into view. Its windows winked and its warm brick glowed in the July sun.
She caught her breath. Mrs. Hedgewick was correct in saying this was not one of
the great houses. A curved, decorative roof had been rather clumsily added to
the pediment at the front, contrasting in a comical fashion with the
battlemented walls behind.
However, as they grew closer
and closer, the sight of the house moved Lottie so much that she felt the itch
of tears in the bones under her eyes. She felt she had seen this house
somewhere before, had known it. She searched the far corners of her memory,
turning over images like a woman sorting her laundry. At the back of her mind
an urgent sense of familiarity fought to claim recognition,
Then she smiled remembering a
day when she and her sisters had been sitting round the table in their little
parlour. She herself had been working on her small watercolour and Em had been
scribbling away in her notebook in her tiny script. Annie was embroidering a
flourishing P on a handkerchief for
their father, who was locked in his study wrestling with his God and his own
inability to write about pure faith.
Annie had stuck her needle in her cloth and
peered shortsightedly at Lottie’s painting. ‘That’s a fine house, Lottie. Such
a grand entrance. Who should we make to live there, do you think?’
Em had looked up from her painting,
blinking. ‘A tall man, dark I think,’ she said, joining in their old game.
’Somewhat severe.’
‘He has suffered in life,’
Annie put in her portion, ‘And that makes him snappy, like an injured dog.’
‘But his heart is true,’
concluded Lottie, applying her sable brush to some flowering sage which she
made to flower in profusion below the tall window.
‘Miss Lottie! Miss Lottie!’ She was dragged
back to the present by Mrs. Hedgewick’s voice, laced with her familiarly
dangerous wheedling tone. ‘You are again in one of your dazes, Wake up! Can you
not see we have arrived?’
The carriage had stopped
rocking and was still. A footman stood to attention beside the carved door of
the house. Lottie caught her breath as she saw the purple sage flowering in
profusion beneath one of the tall windows.
She struggled down from the
carriage, the sleeping Rupert now a dead weight on her aching arm. The other
children alighted and they all watched as Mrs. Hedgewick signalled the footman
to assist her in stepping down from the carriage,
When they were announced in Lady Gardam’s
drawing room she did not rise to welcome them. She merely patted the sofa
beside her. ‘How delightful to see you, Mrs. Hedgewick,’ she said in a dry
papery voice. ‘And you are en famille
I see.’
Mrs. Hedgewick presented James,
who bowed, and Sarah and Julia, who curtseyed, ‘And the baby is Rupert,’ she
said, proudly, not noticing her ladyship’s raised brows,
‘Clearly a fine child,’ said
Lady Gardam, without looking at Rupert. She raised her lizard eyes to Lottie,
who exchanged look for look, ‘And this is?’
‘This is Miss Branwell, Lady
Gardam, The children’s governess.’
‘Ah,’ said her ladyship.
‘Perhaps Miss Branwell will take her charges to the old nursery. There are
pastimes there, although alas our own children are long gone.’ Her wavering
gaze left Lottie and fixed on the hovering footman, ‘Conduct the children and
Miss Branwell to the nursery, Robert. Then tell cook to send milk and cakes up
to the nursery. Mrs. Hedgewick and I will take tea here,’
‘…Then,
Em I was hustled out of the door. Such contempt in her old voice. You should
have heard it. The children and I were definitely not invited; the she-Hedgehog
had definitely stepped over a line she never even knew was there. I wonder what
this wavery old wreck of an aristocrat wants with the she-Hedgehog. Something
to do the he-Hedgehog’s great wealth perhaps. That seems usually the case when
such people curry favour with the Hedgehogs of this world.'
The nursery was scruffy cluttered with objects
and smelled vaguely of sour milk. Sarah and Julia immediately set to, fighting
over a very big rocking horse. James pulled a box off a high shelf, and a whole
heap of lead soldiers fell with a clatter onto the bare wooden floor. He knelt on
the floor and started to put them in rows.
Lottie’s shoulders ached with
Rupert’s dead weight. The room smelled damp. She shivered,
‘I’ll light thee a fire if tha
wants.’ The footman’s voice raked her ear. ‘Fire’s allus layed in here,’
She turned to look at him for
the first time. He was stocky, no more than sixteen with thick wild hair and
beetling brows.
She nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she
said.
He took a flint box from the
mantle shelf and knelt down beside the fire, ‘Nay need for thanks,’ he grunted,
‘It’s onny a job, like.’
She looked at his averted
face; at his busy hands with their sprouting black hair. ‘Would there be
anywhere I could lie the baby down?’ she said, ‘He needs to sleep.’
‘Room next door, Night
nussery,’ he grunted. ‘Yeh’ll find a cot in there. Nay bairn in there for
years, but.’
In the night nursery she
hunted in a cupboard and found a blanket smelling of mothballs to put on the
bare cot mattress. She laid Rupert on the bumpy surface and his head fell back,
his baby mouth opening slightly like the inside of a fresh strawberry, She waited
until he was properly asleep and when she got back into the day nursery the
fire was blazing and the footman had gone. The little sisters had abandoned the
rocking horse and had opened a cupboard from which were tumbling enticing doll
figures and mechanicals. James was fighting the battle of Agincourt
on the nursery table.
Lottie subsided into the
fire-side chair and stared at the dancing flames. Her eyelids drooped. The
letter in her head continued. The
footman, dearest Em is the queerest
fellow; he has hair on the back of his hands and a gleam in his eye that speaks
clearly of revolt. There is this energy about him. And yet he is submissive
enough. But in that very submission there is a kind of menace. The children are
playing and the baby is asleep. Oh it’s so good to sit just a few moments and
do nothing. The she-Hedgehog has had me trotting to her porcine will every hour
since I arrived at the Hedgehoggery. And still, Em, I cannot please! I feel she
is at the point of dismissing me from minute to minute.
‘Miss Lottie! Miss Lottie!’ Her skirt was being
pulled. Young Julia was poking her little snout close to Lottie’s face.
‘Rupert’s gone, Miss Lottie. you were asleep and we heard a noise and when we
went in there, into that room, he was not there. Rupert’s gone, Miss Lottie,’
Lottie looked from child to child. James was rubbing a leaden infantryman on
his immaculate sleeve eyeing her dispassionately. Sara was pulling a dress onto
a naked cloth doll,
Lottie leapt to her feet and
raced into the night nursery, Rupert and his blanket were gone. In the filtered
light from the curtained window the surface of the lumpy mattress was as bare
as the moon. She turned round and raced back through the door. ‘Where have you
put him, you naughty girls?’ She shook Julia and Sarah by their plump
shoulders.
Julia’s twisted away, her lip
jutting out, ‘I told you, Miss Lottie,’ she wined. ‘We heard a noise and when
we came in here he was gone.’
Sarah started to cry.
Lottie looked across at James,
He put the leaden soldier in
his pocket and shrugged, ‘I didn’t hear any noise.’ Then he cocked his head.
‘There! That’s him crying. Didn’t you hear him? It came from somewhere
upstairs,’
She frowned at him,’ I hear no
noise.’
He looked at her steadily,
‘I’m telling you, I heard a noise upstairs,’
She raced out onto the
deserted landing then made her way along until she found a door to a staircase.
She clambered up the narrow staircase, her nose wrinkling at the smell of dust
and the rotting bodies of dead mice. She
ducked to save her head from a sloping roof joist and found herself in a narrow
corridor. She opened one door after another and peered into one ill-lit room
after another, making out the shabby detritus of the lives of female servants.
She ducked her head again and entered a doorway at the end of the corridor.
Now she was in a long room
with a straw palliasse in each corner covered in blankets. Fusty coats hung
drunkenly from hooks, curiously mimicking their owner’s male bodies. Polished
Sunday boots were to attention standing by the battered pillows, waiting for
their owners to enjoy their time off, to be themselves,
Lottie marched on to a door at
the far end of the room and found herself in a narrow room with a high window,
bare except for a bed on legs and a rusty narrow hip bath. The high window was
small and round. She stood on tip toes to peer through it, She could see the
edge of one of the old battlemented walls and beyond that the park and the rising
Yorkshire hills. In any other mood she would have gasped at the beauty and
reached for her paintbrushes,
But now she was angry, ‘Wild
goose chase,’ she muttered, striding back to the door whence she came. ‘Wild
goose chase!’ she shouted now in her frustration. She pushed at the door but it
would not open. She pushed harder and harder but it refused to open. She banged
on it with her fists. It clicked against a bolt or some other barrier on the
other side. She kicked it hard and recoiled as she jolted her toe. Then she
leaned her cheek against the door’s rough plank surface and rested for a
moment.
And
so, dear Em, I am locked in this dingy stinking attic. Children’s mischief of
course. One of the porcine monsters has locked the door behind me, I must
shout, get them to hear me. But I will sound gentle so they come.’
Lottie was a mild and gentle girl, but soon she
started to shout until her voice was hoarse. She went across and opened the
tiny window and shouted more, Then she took off her boots and threw them out of
the little window, only to hear them clatter one by one, on the leaden roof,
not, as she had hoped, on the ground far below where it might, have drawn the attention
of a passing gardener,
She went back to the door, leaned
against it and slid down into a crouch. She bit her lips to stop the hot tears
of frustration spilling down her cheeks. The crackling silence taunted her in
the dusty space. She started to shout again, banging the door every few
minutes. In time the outside dark crept into the room and closed its fist
around her. That was when she started to shout continuously, screaming and
moaning her deep distress, kicking away at the hard resistant door,
She must have slept because
she opened her eyes and it was dawn and through the window she could see the
rain falling on the battlement. She walked around the room and moaned and
cries. From time to time she dropped off to sleep with exhaustion. The light
was starting to fade again when she finally heard noises outside the door.
‘Let me out! Let me out!’ she
screamed. ‘You little monsters. Don’t think I don’t know your nasty little game.
Pig-monsters, I’ll murder you when you get out.’
The noise outside the door
ceased.
‘Let me out,’ she whispered.
‘Please let me out. Please!
Suddenly the heavy door was
yanked open and she stood blinking as the light of a lantern flooded into the
darkening attic. Holding the lantern was the young footman, Robert. He held a
heavy cudgel in his hand.
‘What is it? What’s oop in
here?’ He said as he raised the lantern and peered at her. Then the fear
drained from his voice, ‘Miss. Miss, can it be thee?’
Lottie put her dirty hands up to
tie back her loosened hair and then cast her eyes down to her dirty stockinged
feet,’ ‘The children,’ she said dully, ‘They locked me in. Wait till I get my
hands on them.’
‘Thee’ll need a long reach
miss. They, the children, left straight for home yesterday with their Ma. The
lad said you’d gone away, left them. Said you’d gone off away, left them to it.
We searched down to the far wall and through the woods. Ten men we had out
there. You weren’t there so they – that is her Ladyship – decided the lad was
right, that you’d run away.’
‘But Rupert, the baby? He was
lost. Did they find him?’
‘The babby? Not lost at all,
Housemaid brought milk up for t’bairns and she said you was asleep. Babby was
grizzling so she took him down to the kitchen to find him a titty-bottle,’
Lottie rubbed a dirty hand
across her brow, ‘But listen! I’ve been shouting and banging for hours. You
must have heard me.’ She scrabbled at her hair trying to put its snaky
straggles into better order.
‘Aye miss, we did hear ‘em,
them noises … right through the daytime and into the night too. But we hear
them regularly from time to time, day and night. Always a woman banging and
screaming they say – it’s an old tale in these parts. They say there was this
lass was locked in here for years by her husband. That’s what they say, like.
They say the lass had a babby and smothered it and was locked in here to keep
her out of the madhouse. In t’end, like the lass flung herself off the roof.’
So
now, Em I begin to get back my own soul And from the dark glint in his eye the
boy in relishing his doleful tale.
The boy went on. ‘The staff here’ve been scared
out of their wits at your shouting and wailing, miss. Her Ladyship, as usual,
tells us we were dreaming it. Deaf as a
post she can be. I was the only one dared come up here.’ He lifted the lantern
nearer to his face and in the darting light his black eyes sparked into hers. ‘What
happened to that lass was no worse than what happened to my own ma, who died
afore Ah was born, They say they pulled us from her like she was a dead pig,
They do say also that Ah roared uncommon lusty from the second Ah came out if
her,’
… and
that, dear Em, was when I fainted, When I came to young footman was carrying me
down the steep stairs like a baby. I blush to say it but the boy was nuzzling
my neck like a day old pup. And despite his fine livery he smelt of the byre,
They
sent for the she-Hedgehog of course but she did not blame the children. Instead
she gave me notice and a guinea for my trouble. But no reference, mark you!
This
is, as you will see, a great relief. I have decided now that I must come home.
I will be with you and dearest Annie tomorrow. Something is brewing in my head
about us earning our living in quite another way. Being a little mother to
brats is surely the short end of the stick. The perverse nature of this life
has convinced me there is a way we can all stay at home and flourish,
So
I will be home tomorrow, Em. Be sure to light the lamp on our favourite table,
won’t you?’
Love
to Annie
Your
loving sister Charlotte.
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