She got none. Nowhere in the knot of people meeting their friends and relatives, and loafers who had nothing better to do than watch the midget train roll in, could she see Miss Tabard or Miss Mull. Nowhere among the drays and farm wagons stood a shiny new Packard touring car.
“Need a lift, Miss?” offered one of the wagoneers.
“No, thank you. Some people are supposed to meet me with an automobile. They must have had a breakdown,” she replied, not that it was any of his business but because she needed the relief of talking.
“Like as not. Never yet seen one that didn’t.”
He clucked to his horses and drove off. Gradually, all the others got sorted out and went away, even the loafers. Lavinia was left alone with her trunks, her hatbox, and her new valise, peering anxiously up and down the narrow dirt road that must be Dalby’s Main Street.
She kept looking at the little gold watch pinned to her bodice. Whatever could be taking them so long? The house was only a couple of miles outside the village. Even if the Packard had broken down, there must be somebody along the way who could give the ladies a lift, or at least carry a message to the depot. Zilpha was generally punctilious about such things.
After a full hour had gone by, Lavinia was forced to the conclusion that they simply hadn’t gotten her letter and were still planning to meet the six o’clock train. There was not a thing she could do but sit here and cool her heels until then.
Actually, she couldn’t even do that. The narrow platform, full in the afternoon sun, was beastly hot. She’d had nothing to eat or drink on the train because she couldn’t face meeting Abigail and Maude in the dining car. There seemed to be no place around here to get so much as a glass of water, nor anybody to ask. Even the station master had shut up shop and gone somewhere, presumably until next train time.
Lavinia did think of trying to hunt up a wagon driver and squander another of her dollars on the chance that he might know where Miss Tabard lived. But what if he got her lost? What if she did find the house and nobody was at home? Zilpha and Tetsy were great gadabouts. On such a fine day, they were bound to be off on some junket or other. They were probably planning to swing around by the depot on their way home from wherever they’d gone, and woe to her if they didn’t find her waiting.
It was odd about that letter. Lavinia had posted it herself a full week ago. She’d written three previous letters to the new address, and those had all arrived without a hitch. Why did this last one have to get lost?
Sighing, Lavinia got up from the trunk she’d been sitting on and turned to survey her luggage. She’d been carefully keeping her eyes averted because she knew in her bones that one box had been left behind. Sure enough, it had. She supposed she ought to be grateful that it was not one of the good trunks Zilpha had bought her, but only a wooden crate packed with art supplies, a few favorite books, and some other things she’d been counting on to make life in Dalby more bearable. She should have known better than to count on anything.
This was without doubt the dreariest place she’d ever been stuck in. Even Great-Uncle Arthur’s front parlor was almost cheerful by comparison. There was no comfort to be had, nothing to do but sit, no living creature to be seen except the flies crawling over the horse droppings in the road. Her throat was parched, her nostrils clogged so that she had to struggle for breath.
Etiquette decreed that while a lady might make discreet use of her handkerchief, she must never, never commit the vulgarity of blowing her nose. Lavinia took a dainty square of embroidered cambric from her valise, raised it to her face, and, for the first time in her life, blew. If she was ever going to assert her independence, she had to start somewhere.
CHAPTER TWO
Punctually at five minutes to six, a large black touring car came churning down the road, its erratic progress marked by a cloud of dust and the wild barking of village dogs. Lavinia straightened her hat, eased the cramps in her legs, beat the dust out of her skirt as best she could, and went to stand on the edge of the platform, waving her handkerchief.
“Why, Tetsy, there she is already!”
Zilpha’s high, sweet voice rang out above the dogs’ yapping. “Lavvy, dearest, however did you get here so fast? We’ve been racing the train all the way from Lake Truance. We were so sure we’d be well ahead.”
“I’ve been here since before two o’clock. Didn’t you get my letter?”
“But, Lavvy, we thought we had made it quite clear that you were to arrive on the later train.”
“You had, but Miss Plomm decided otherwise. I wrote back last Sunday, explaining the change of plans.”
“Oh, my dear, what a mix-up! I must say Miss Plomm might have had the courtesy to consult with us first, but of course we’d never have let you sit here alone all this time had we known. Tetsy, whatever do you suppose happened to that letter?”
“Went astray, I expect.”
Some nuance in Miss Mull’s tone gave Lavinia a pretty shrewd idea of how her letter had gotten lost. The companion always took care of Zilpha’s less important mail. They must have had something planned for this afternoon at Lake Truance, so she’d just said, “Humph,” and tossed it in the fire. What a filthy, spiteful thing to do! Now she was fussing about the luggage.
“Managed to do yourself proud, haven’t you, Lav? We’ll have to hire a drayman to handle all these trunks and boxes. Probably have to leave them overnight and pray they don’t get stolen.”
“I can manage,” said Lavinia. “I have all the essentials in my valise.” She made the mistake of showing off her new possession.
“Humph. Where did that come from?”
“Father sent it.”
“Must have backed the right horse for once.”
“Tetsy,” said Miss Tabard, “don’t you think we ought to get this child back to the Hollow as quickly as possible? Do go in and tell the station master to have someone take care of her boxes, and let us be on our way.”
“Yes, Zilpha,” said the companion meekly. “Is this all of it, Lav?”
“No,” she had to confess, “one smallish wooden crate seems to have gone astray. I’m afraid they forgot to take it off when I changed trains.”
“Why didn’t you watch the porter?”
“We were late for our connection, and everybody kept shouting at me to hurry.”
“You could have made them wait. I hope it was nothing valuable.”
“No, just books and things. Perhaps they’ll send it on tomorrow.”
“Which means an extra trip to pick it up,” grumbled Miss Mull. “I’ll tell the station master.”
“Do,” said Miss Tabard. “You’re always so good at getting things done. Lavvy, dearest, do get into the automobile and let Tetsy manage the trunks. I want to hear about your adventures, and most particularly about this peculiar decision of Miss Plomm’s.”
Lavinia managed to stow herself and her valise in the tonneau, and tried to explain why her guardian’s order had been contravened. Tetsy came out of the shabby wooden railroad station with a look of grim triumph on her square, red face, gave a mighty heave to the starting crank, leaped into the driver’s seat and pulled out the throttle.
Unhappily, she proved more adept at starting than at steering. They hadn’t gone half a mile before Tetsy slaughtered her first hen. Lavinia shuddered and tried not to look back at the mangled carcass.
Zilpha was in great form, pointing out Dalby’s scenic beauties, oblivious of the demised poultry they were strewing in their wake. The countryside really was lovely. In spite of her splitting head and empty stomach, Lavinia was able to respond to its charms. And the Hollow was pure enchantment.
“Now, Lavvy, do you understand why I absolutely had to have this place?” her guardian demanded as they began what looked to be an extremely precarious descent.
“Yes, Zilpha. It’s perfect.”
The rambling house of white clapboard and pale gray fieldstone was nestled into an emerald-green bowl, fringed around by stately pines and tape
ring spruce trees. Behind the house bubbled a tiny stream spanned by a quaint wooden footbridge that led to a picturesque though sadly dilapidated water mill. Dotted about the property were a few other outbuildings in various states of repair.
“Not perfect yet,” said Zilpha merrily. “An enormous lot of renovating and landscaping remains to be done. Workmen have been swarming like bees ever since we came up here, and it seems as though we’ve hardly made a dent. Which brings me to a sad bit of news. You, my dear, will have to occupy a tiny suite on the ground floor for the time being because, as of now, ours is the only habitable upstairs bedroom. You won’t be nervous down there by yourself?”
“No, Zilpha.”
Certainly she could be no more nervous than she was already. Tetsy was careening down the steep drive at breakneck speed, heading straight for an open barn. Lavinia braced herself for the crash. Zilpha, unheeding, tinkled on.
“You will have your own indoor facility, if you’ll forgive my mentioning such an indelicate subject. Our plumbing has aroused so much comment in these parts that we ourselves have become quite blasé about discussing it.”
“Had to get plumbers up from Boston to install the new bathroom on the second floor,” Tetsy put in. “Nobody around here would believe we actually wanted two in the same house.”
She steered the Packard accurately into the barn and stopped well short of the rear wall. Lavinia let out her breath slowly. She ought to have known Tetsy wouldn’t let harm come to anything that belonged to Zilpha.
“Would you mind going in by the back door?” said Miss Tabard. “We often do, it’s so much more convenient. Your room is down this little step, behind the kitchen. I suspect it was intended for the hired girl, but surely you won’t mind, just for a few months?”
“Not at all,” said Lavinia. “It looks delightful. You’ve taken a great deal of trouble getting it ready.”
The room was tiny and far from elegant, but its walls were freshly whitewashed. The simple cottage furniture shone with beeswax. A bright rag rug lay on the clean pine floor. Starched net curtains framed the windows. On the dresser was spread a luridly embroidered bureau scarf, setting off a pin tray and hair receiver patterned in garish pink roses. Surely Zilpha had never picked those out herself?
“Not to us be the credit for that bureau scarf,” said her guardian gaily. “It was Mrs. Smith who got your room ready. We’ve found a real jewel to come in by the day and, as she quaintly puts it, help out. I cannot imagine where she resurrected those remarkable bibelots, but I do beseech you to accept them in the spirit they were intended. We should never be able to manage without her. Now, Tetsy, shall we leave this poor orphan of the storm to freshen up while we do our stint in the kitchen?”
The two older ladies went out, shutting the door behind them. At long last, Lavinia was free to take off her sweltering basque, pry the glacé kid boots from her swollen feet, and attend to her most pressing personal needs. Mercifully, she had a clean shirtwaist and a pair of soft Morocco slippers in her valise. She was wondering whether she dared take down her hair and steal a short rest on that tempting bed to ease her pounding skull when she heard a wagon clattering down over the slope.
“Oh, bother!” Tetsy exclaimed from the kitchen. “Here’s that chap with Lav’s boxes already. I told him not to come until after dinner.”
“Dearest Tetsy,” came the light reply, “don’t you know these farmers eat their dinners at noon and supper as soon as they’ve tucked up the hens to roost? It you meant half-past eight, you should have said half-past eight.”
“Sorry, Zilpha.”
Lavinia could picture the heavy-set, middle-aged companion flushing at the rebuke, hanging her grizzled head like a guilty child.
“Never mind, dear,” Miss Tabard replied. “I daresay the man would have come when it pleased him, anyway. They’re all so independent up here. Tell him to leave the trunks in the barn, they can’t possibly fit into that tiny room. Lavvy will just have to do her unpacking out there, and carry things in by the armload. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, Zilpha,” Miss Mull answered meekly. Seconds later, she was bellowing orders at the drayman as though she never had to take any herself.
Lavinia dabbed cologne on her throbbing temples, fished the trunk keys out of her valise, and dragged herself out to the barn. She got little unpacking done, however. Before long, she was called to the dinner table, and by the time dessert was over, she was fighting a losing battle with the sandman.
“I do beg your pardon,” she apologized, trying to stifle her unladylike yawns. “Miss Axelrod had me up before dawn, and I’d barely slept as it was. I was so excited about—about everything.”
Her guardian nodded. “We understand, Lavvy. Traveling does exhaust one so. You must not stand on ceremony tonight. Don’t you think she deserves an early bedtime, Tetsy?”
Miss Mull nodded, pouring herself a glass of port from the cut glass decanter. It was her second, Lavinia noted with surprise. She was used to seeing Tetsy follow this mannish custom, but had never before noticed that she took more than one glass.
“You’re most indulgent, Zilpha,” she told her guardian, “but may I not first help with the washing-up?”
“Oh, my dear, we leave that to our jewel. Mrs. Smith comes down every evening at half-past eight on the dot to tidy us away. It’s a splendid arrangement, we think. She lives directly across the road, you see, so she can nip back and forth to suit our convenience.”
“Her husband doesn’t object?”
“She lives alone, with one son, a boy of about fourteen, I believe. She seems perfectly content to fall in with our odd schedule, since it gives her time between whiles to look after Peter. Mrs. Smith is rather a superior sort of person for her station in life, don’t you think, Tetsy? She happens to be a niece of the former owner of this house. My dear, if you cannot suppress those horrendous yawns in a more genteel manner, I suggest you go straight to bed this minute. Tetsy will find you a lamp.”
With infinite gratitude, Lavinia rose to obey. “Please don’t bother, Tetsy. It’s not even dark yet, and your jewel has left a nice, fat, new candle in the stick on my night stand. I can manage perfectly well by myself. Good night, ladies.”
CHAPTER THREE
When Lavinia woke, her headache was gone. Morning mist still lay along the grass, but the sun was sucking it up fast, and from somewhere nearby, a wood thrush was singing. The small brass traveling clock on her night stand said half-past seven. She knew from past experience that Zilpha and Tetsy never came down much before nine. It she hurried, she could steal a whole hour for herself.
Moving as quietly as she could, Lavinia visited the indoor convenience, sponged herself all over with cold water, and had a good rub on one of her guardian’s beautiful, monogrammed towels. Then she found a plain shirtwaist and an old golf skirt among the few garments she’d managed to unpack and put them on. This was starting out to be another scorcher. Thank Heaven she wouldn’t have to spend the hottest part of it roasting on a station platform. That had been a particularly vicious trick of Tetsy’s.
Well, she’d known before she came that three would be a crowd. Now that she’d had fair warning of what to expect, she’d just have to tread a fine line. She twisted her waist-long mane of light brown hair up into an enormous Psyche knot, anchored the mass with bone hairpins and a stiff-brimmed straw sailor hat, and slipped out that convenient back door.
Where should she go? That tumbledown mill so close by looked tempting, but this was too precious a time to spend indoors. Noticing a well-trodden path that led straight up to the road, she took that instead. This must be the way Mrs. Smith came and went.
Sure enough, as she topped the rise, she caught sight of a ramshackle wooden house, almost in an exact line with Zilpha’s new estate, but as unlike it as two human habitations could be. Here, the clapboards had been left paintless, shutters hung every which way, the front porch sagged like a dowager’s jowls. Zilpha would either have to subsidi
ze some repairs or else plant a very tall hedge before she invited anybody up to inspect her latest toy.
There probably wouldn’t be any house parties this summer. From here it was easy to see how much work on the house remained to be done. The front still needed paint. The new roof was unfinished. Piles of shingles and lumber lay about. Fresh-turned garden plots and shrubs with their roots balled in burlap showed that landscaping had barely gotten underway.
Perhaps Zilpha had dropped a hint to the jewel about making her place look a bit more respectable. Already she’d sent her son out to mow their weed-infested front yard. Lavinia slipped behind a clump of wiegelia to watch him swinging at the grass with a long-handled scythe. He looked big for fourteen and should be able to handle a task like this, but his movements were awkward and he didn’t seem to be making progress. A second later, she understood why. The scythe had no blade to it.
Strangely disquieted, she turned away, following a narrower, less-well-defined path that led through the shrubbery. She hadn’t gone more than twenty feet before she came upon a small building, open to the road but so well-hidden from the Hollow that she would never have known it was there. It had a short driveway with an exceptionally wide turnaround. This must be some sort of carriage shed, perhaps for use in the winter when teams would have a hard time negotiating that steep pitch down to the house.
The squarish, one-story structure had a great many more windows than any carriage house she’d ever seen before, though. They were filthy with dust from the road, yet the place didn’t give the impression of being deserted. Curious, Lavinia rubbed a clean spot on one of the panes and peeped in.
She could never have imagined what met her eyes. The building housed some kind of office. Smack in front of her was a desk with a typewriting machine on it, flanked by some untidy filing cabinets with dogeared papers sticking out of their not-quite-shut drawers. Along the far wall, a rack crudely built of raw lumber held long rolls of paper that looked like the architectural plans Zilpha was always poring over. Most prominent among the furnishings were two vast, slant-topped tables with high stools pulled up to them. On one of the stools, fortunately with his back to her, sat a man.
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