Mad Miss Mimic

by Sarah Henstra

  “I presume the Lady Hastings had in mind your feelings,” he spurred me gently. “Would you share them with me?”

  “I … I f-feel—” I stopped. Happy was not precisely the word Mr. Thornfax would expect, nor was hopeful quite right.

  He was asking what I felt about him, toward him, as a person. It occurred to me that I’d never honestly considered what I thought of Mr. Thornfax as a person. I’d been too preoccu-pied with not frightening him away.

  I saw Mr. Thornfax hesitate and draw back from me, squaring his shoulders in case my answer wasn’t what he was hoping. I might disappoint him yet, I thought, panic seizing me.

  “Surely you’ve heard the old proverb,” Mimic improvised, raising my face to his. “A man might know the possibility of a woman but never her sum.” They were my aunt Emma’s words, but I had uttered them in the husky, sensual voice of the actress who played Salomé last June at the Royal Theatre.

  A sudden, bright light from the surgery lit Mr. Thornfax’s confused expression before the thwack of the door closing threw us back into darkness. A beat of silence followed. Then a solid weight slammed into my side and knocked me clear off my feet.

  Mr. Thornfax swore in surprise. He managed to catch me round the waist only just in time to stop my fall.

  Tom Rampling stumbled at the impact too, and he grabbed my arm, hopping awkwardly to steady himself. “I’m so sorry, sir! I am—” Hatless, barefoot, with his shirt cuffs rolled past his elbows, he broke off and stared when he saw it was me he’d run down. “Milady. Oh, no! You should go inside at once!”

  “What’s the m-matter?” I asked him.

  He gasped, “The doctor!” Then he wheeled and continued at a full run toward the house.

  “Rampling!” Mr. Thornfax shouted after him but got no response. “Are you injured, Miss Somerville? That was a poor apology from the boy indeed. I shall speak to him about it.”

  “No, p-p-please don’t.” I caught myself: Why should I defend Tom Rampling? “One of Dr. D-Dewhurst’s patients, no doubt, is in need of m-medical attention.”

  Mr. Thornfax picked up his coat, which had been knocked to the ground, and smoothed it back over my shoulders. “Your brother-in-law keeps a great many of his patients here about the house, doesn’t he?” he said. He led me deeper into the tree’s shadowy wreath. Lifting my hand and turning it palm up, he traced my bare forearm with his fingers. “And you, Miss Somerville? Are you one of his experimental subjects? Have you too benefited from his findings?”

  “I d-don’t know what you m-mean.” Mr. Thornfax’s touch was gentle as could be, his tone teasing, yet I quaked with uncertainty and sudden, unaccountable shame. When I first came to Hastings House, Daniel had suggested a daily dose of morphine for my stammering. My aunt had overruled him, citing the various opiate treatments I’d already undergone, without good results, as a child. But I sensed that morphine therapy was not exactly the “findings” Mr. Thornfax meant.

  He held my chin and tipped my face up to his. I could not make out the expression in his eyes. “No, I see that you don’t know what I mean.” He turned my hand over again and touched his lips to my gloved knuckles. “I am glad of it. I want you kept out”—another swift, light kiss—“kept pure. I made that clear to him.”

  The black net of plum branches expanded overhead, and it seemed to my confused senses that it threatened to ensnare us. I pressed a hand to the tree trunk for support, but its surface pulsed and tilted under my touch. Evidently I had not recovered from Tom’s collision with me.

  “… not five minutes after you left, sir. I swear to you, I tried everything in my power to revive her. You should not have left her!” Tom’s words from just beyond the shadows were breathless, frantic.

  “Lower your voice, boy!” my brother-in-law huffed, trying to keep pace. Light poured into the courtyard once again from the surgery door flung open. Just beyond the threshold someone—a girl—lay unmoving on the floor.

  Mr. Thornfax and I hurried across the yard to see what was wrong.

  Kneeling over the fallen girl, Daniel took his stethoscope from Tom and pressed it to her chest. I ducked inside the door and saw that it was Hattie lying there, her face white as chalk, her legs splayed under her skirts.

  After a minute of tense silence Daniel shook his head.

  Startled by a sudden, high-pitched wail I looked up to see the small boy from the courtyard cowering behind the spiral staircase. Tom’s woollen cap was perched backward over the boy’s forehead, and his wan face was streaked with tears.

  “Be quiet, Will,” Daniel told him, but the wailing only got louder. “Take him upstairs, Rampling; he’ll raise the neighbourhood.” Daniel turned and saw us in the doorway. “Oh, good, Thornfax. Here—help me move the body.”

  Mr. Thornfax stepped past me to assist the doctor. He took hold of Hattie’s wrists, and Daniel grasped her ankles.

  “Sorry, mum! I’m so sorry!” Hattie’s voice—or rather, Mimic’s voice, speaking as Hattie—rang out, freezing Tom on the stairs and cutting off young Will mid-sob. “It’s just as I’m so poorly, I haven’t near the strength to stand!”

  All heads swivelled my way. Mr. Thornfax dropped Hattie’s arms and shot to my side. I watched Tom start back down the stairs, too, his knuckles white on the railing and his eyes fixed on me.

  Mimic warmed to the role, infusing a weary, regretful note into Hattie’s voice: “I don’t want another dose, I swear it to you. But as soon as I’m past the hour I gets so sick!”

  “Miss Somerville, what ails you?” Mr. Thornfax looked from me to Daniel. “Is this one of her fits, Dewhurst?”

  I tried not to look down at Hattie again, but I couldn’t help myself. In death the girl’s face had become almost pretty, the features softening and the lashes of the closed eyes sweeping a delicate shadow above each cheekbone. The peace that passeth all understanding be upon you. My father’s weekly blessing from the pulpit was perverse given the cold tiled floor and the indignity of Hattie’s sprawled position. I bit my lips but could not stop talking. “Have mercy, mum!” Mimic-as-Hattie moaned. “Only hold me here till Tom arrives. I promised him. He’s ’elping me.”

  Tom stood before me, and I was startled to see tears on his ashen cheeks. “Forgive me, Hattie,” he quavered. “It was my fault, not yours!” His hands came up to clasp my shoulders.

  Dr. Dewhurst spun him round by the arm. “Be quiet, Thomas. For pity’s sake, that’s not your dead girl!”

  “It’s Hattie haunting her, sir. I’m sure of it!”

  “Nonsense. Miss Somerville mimics those she hears in this life, not in the next. Leonora, leave it off at once! Go on now. Go up to bed at once.”

  “Dear Tom,” I said. “My dear, dear Tom.” Then I turned and fled for the house.

  I heard Tom shout my name, and his muffled footfalls on the stones behind me, and my brother-in-law calling him back. I didn’t stop running until I’d reached my bedroom and barred the door.

  SIX

  So there it is, my secret, my scandal: Mad Miss Mimic. The name is apt enough, for it comes on me like a madness at times, so that I say things I don’t truly understand, or would never say if I could stop myself. But here is another secret, even more scandalous: Mimic is my secret joy. She emerges like a bubble bursting in the head, a glimmering behind the eyes. She floats up from the belly to the tongue. She is a latch opening in my heart. The words pour out of me freely without the slightest thought or effort. The shame comes only afterward—when I realize whom I have hurt or frightened, who has been shocked or disgusted by my performance. Who will never look at me the same way again.

  My sister may have hoped to cure me of Mimic or to banish her forever, but the truth is that she has been a part of me as long as I can remember, and I truly don’t believe she can be stopped. I have been aping the voices of other people from my earliest struggles with speech. My aunt Emmaline claims to be the first person to have noticed my capacity for imitation, one day at Kew Gardens about a yea
r before my mother died of the scarlet fever. I was only four years old and already a stutterer. As Aunt Emma tells the tale, I was sitting on a bench beside her eating an ice lolly. We were watching two little German girls in matching white hoopskirts chase a black rooster round and round the lawn. I was far too shy to join in their game, but I imitated their gay laughter and the foreign words they were using to call the bird. The moment my aunt asked me to repeat the performance I reverted to my own faltering, broken speech—but after that, Aunt Emma says, she listened carefully and marked the moments when my tongue would suddenly break free in someone else’s voice.

  I began elocution lessons at the age of five, once it became clear the stuttering was more than a passing phase. Over the following years numerous tutors were hired, various methods were employed, and one experimental therapy after another was tested and discarded. Stern, scholarly diction-men with their monocles and alphabet charts. Flamboyant singing instructors with their scales and metronomes. Scientists with their phonographic reels and electrical-pulse devices. Mimic would emerge whenever I was most pressed and badgered by these practitioners, and once she had revealed herself nothing could deter them from trying to draw her out again and again.

  How did I achieve such accurate impersonations of other voices, even voices of persons much older than myself and even, occasionally, of the opposite sex? What trick of my memory could produce a near-perfect reproduction of statements whose meaning I didn’t even comprehend? And—most fascinating of all to my doctors, therapists, and coaches— why were my imitations free of the stammer that plagued my everyday speech? Scientific curiosity brought many an expert to my father’s door, and many of them offered to treat me for free. But curiosity also tempted several of them past the bounds of their usual methods. It was during this period that I was dosed with various experimental medicines, including opium and morphine preparations. I spent whole days in and out of sleep, raving, terrified by fever dreams. My father, busy with his sermons and parish visits, was slow to notice how I suffered.

  By seven I was having nightmares even when I wasn’t drugged, and was often found sleepwalking far from my bed. During these episodes Mimic took free rein of my tongue— much to the distress of our servants, some of whom assumed, as Tom Rampling had done, that I was haunted. Christabel’s beloved governess Rachel left our household after I wandered up to her garret one night and terrorized her with a particularly vivid and drawn-out impression of the livery boy who’d fallen from the carriage-house roof earlier that week and broken his leg. It was about that time that my sister fixed on the name “Mimic” for this precocious but unmanageable aspect of my condition. Mimic came to stand for everything Christabel hated most about me: the public embarrassment, the disruption of peaceful routine, and most of all, the unequal demand on Father’s attention.

  Christa was relieved when I began to spend longer and longer periods with Aunt Emmaline at her estate at Kew, a forty-five-mile journey from Holybourne. It was discovered that my nighttime disturbances waned when I stayed at Kew, that my appetite and colour improved, and that in general I was happier and quieter. My father supposed it was mothering I craved, and I knew this conclusion saddened him and made him mourn the loss of his wife all over again. I confess I never corrected him, though he was wrong. I couldn’t risk his calling me home permanently if he were to discover that it wasn’t the lack of a female role model that afflicted me.

  The truth was much simpler: my aunt Emma banned all the medicines and therapies. Perhaps even more important was that she left Mimic alone. Oh, she found my impres-sions amusing enough—she would laugh, or lean forward in fascination and egg Mimic on with questions and conversation—but she didn’t much care when and where Mimic would manifest, and she didn’t mind my stuttering either. She always said that she was more interested in what I had to say than in how I said it.

  When I heard that Hattie’s body would be buried in the potter’s field behind Saint John’s School in Hampstead, I had Bess search the wardrobes for the black dress I wore to Father’s funeral. That morning I entered the breakfast room and laid my black straw bonnet on the sideboard. My sister glanced up at me and promptly overturned the bowl of boiled eggs. “Are you deliberately trying to be ridiculous, Leonora?” she sputtered.

  I snatched up two of the eggs before they cleared the table’s edge. Then I squared my shoulders and took my seat, nodding what I hoped was a nonchalant good morning to Daniel.

  “We shall not be attending the funeral of a tweeny maid!” shrilled Christa. “’Tis bad enough Dr. Dewhurst insists on arranging it all himself instead of leaving it for Beadall.”

  “’Tisn’t a funeral, in any case,” said my brother-in-law. “The parson will pray, perhaps, if he’s not too far into his cups already. And we’ll be lucky if the gravediggers show up in all this weather.”

  “You heard him, Leo,” my sister said. “And anyhow, haven’t you played out your share of spectacle recently enough? Do go and take off that costume at once.”

  I hung my head at Christa’s reference to the card party. These last few days at Hastings had been torture. Concealing our maid’s death from the party guests was hard enough on my sister, who’d had to retire earlier than she would have liked and turn down several invitations for the next day, when Daniel needed things quiet to make his arrangements. Worse still was Christabel’s conclusion, after Daniel had told her everything, that I must have scared Mr. Thornfax off for good. She’d received a note of thanks from him, of course, but it was brief and businesslike enough to convince her he meant to pursue no further contact with us. There was no mention in the note of my name. “No doubt,” Christa had said, “he couldn’t see a way to touch on the subject without sounding impolite.”

  I appealed now to Daniel: “Please. I saw her d-dead. I must see her at rest.”

  Christabel snorted and then squawked in outrage as Daniel shrugged his assent.

  “It won’t be comfortable,” he warned. “The rain has made a disaster of the roads. And do bring your own umbrella. There isn’t room for Bess in the carriage.”

  In fact there was scarcely room in the carriage for anyone once Beadall finished loading the six enormous baskets Daniel had ordered our cook to prepare for the schoolchildren of Saint John’s. I wedged myself between the containers with a hand on each stack to hold it steady. My brother-in-law heaved himself up onto the seat opposite me, scattering raindrops into my lap.

  I looked up from tucking my skirts to see Tom Rampling in the door. He hovered, one foot in and one foot out, clearly surprised to see me. “Shall I ride up top, Doctor?” he said.

  “Nonsense, you’d be soaked through. Squeeze in here beside me.”

  The sight of Tom’s slim frame pressed shoulder to shoulder with Daniel’s girth might have been amusing, if I’d been able to lift my eyes from the floor. But my cheeks were burning with the memory of my last parting from Tom.

  “Are you well, Miss Somerville?” he said politely, when we were under way.

  That deep, calm voice of his, still as a forest pool! He’d sounded so frantic and undone in the surgery, confronted with my performance. I had fled. Mimic had stolen the voice of a dead girl, a girl Tom Rampling had obviously cared for, and then I had run away without explanation or apology.

  “I—I am—” My tongue seized. I swallowed and tried again, but the words would not come. I glanced up: Tom’s solemn grey eyes were steady on mine but guarded—wary, no doubt, of further hysterics from me. Defeated, I sighed and resumed my scrutiny of the floor.

  To ease my discomfort Daniel addressed Tom on the subject of a patient they planned to visit later that evening, a man who had been badly bitten by a dog. Tom was to swab carbolic acid on all the furniture, even the bedposts, Daniel told him, in hopes of preventing infection.

  “I’ll have to be subtle about it,” Tom said, “or risk offending old Mrs. Cobb. She fancies herself the finest housekeeper in Cheapside.”

  The change in subject had loose
ned my throat. Fearful of missing my chance I interrupted their conversation: “I am sorry a-b-bout Hattie. And for my b-b-b”—I changed tack, abandoning behaviour—“my foolish w-words.”

  “’Twas the shock,” Daniel stated before Tom could reply. “Say no more of it, Miss Somerville.”

  And so I said no more, and they returned to their medical matters as the carriage left the streets of Paddington and St. John’s Wood and began to jolt and splash its way over the pitted roads of Hampstead. I could hear that Tom Rampling was intelligent and curious, with a ready understanding of the scientific terminology my brother-in-law had taught him. Except for Tom’s working-class speech—a burr on certain consonants, a flatness to the vowels—the two men sounded more like colleagues than master and assistant. At times I felt Tom’s eyes on me, but each time I braved a glance he looked away.

  The steady drizzle made our shared space damp and close. I smelled the pipe tobacco in my brother-in-law’s pocket, the still-warm bread in the basket beside me, and also a soap-fresh scent that I thought might be Tom’s. I felt my lids growing heavy, my head drooping on the arm I’d braced against the baskets.

  I woke when the carriage stopped at the low brick building on Frognall Rise that housed the two classrooms of the Saint John’s Parish School for Indigent Children. Daniel had begun doctoring the school’s pupils several years ago, just after the Education Act was passed and Saint John’s, like all of the city’s ragged schools, was suddenly filled to bursting with filthy, malnourished street children. Hattie had attended the school for a brief time before her illness forced her to stay at Hastings House, close to Daniel’s surgery for her treatment, and she began to work for us as a maid.

  Tom reached beside me and passed the baskets out to the caretaker. Two skinny boys squinted through the rain for a closer look into the carriage and burst into giggles when I leaned forward and waved to them. With Tom’s assistance they carried the baskets into the school. A black-robed man with wild white eyebrows and a crimson nose returned with Tom and collapsed onto the seat beside me before we could be introduced. Daniel grimaced at me in sympathy as the smell of gin overpowered the carriage.