Mad Miss Mimic

by Sarah Henstra

  We turned about and drove on until the road dwindled to a pair of wet ribbons in the grass. The parson grumbled loudly and tirelessly about his many duties at the school, and being asked to oblige the fanciful requests of certain gentlemen from town, and what might the muddy conditions do to his new boots. At last we stopped at a rail fence where two men in oilskins leaned against a cart with their shovels propped beside them. They were eating apples, and when Daniel greeted them they tossed the cores in soaring arcs swallowed by the rain.

  My hair had escaped its pins as I slept, and I felt it clinging to my neck as Daniel handed me down onto the soggy turf. I angled my umbrella until it shielded me from the bold stares of the gravediggers. We made a rather ragtag party straggling across the field, wading through sodden yellow straw and skirting cowpats and dead thistles. Spring had barely touched this land. The sparse new shoots lay flat under the heavy pewter sky. Here and there were planted makeshift crosses, some painted white, some no more than two twigs tied with twine.

  My brother-in-law steered the rector, Tom was engaged with the shovelmen, and so I found myself lagging behind alone, reluctant to approach the dark hole and the plain wooden box beside it. By the time I drew level with the graveside I was shivering, though more with nerves than with the damp.

  The parson’s oration was even briefer than Daniel had warned me it would be. A few inaudible lines mumbled from the prayer book, and, “May the Lord smile upon this lass in death as He never did in her poor, short life and give her His peace. Amen.” He clapped his hands once, swung about, and staggered back toward the carriage.

  The rest of us looked at one another, somewhat at a loss for what to do next. My brother-in-law nodded to the gravediggers, who took up the coffin straps and, on a count of three, swung the box down into the hole. The wood thumped dully as the first great shovelfuls of mud were dropped upon it.

  “Stop! Please, wait,” Tom said. He pulled his satchel from his shoulder and took out a battered straw hat with a posy of dried flowers. Crouching in the muck he turned the bonnet between his hands a moment and then dropped it gently into the grave.

  As the men went back to work I stared into the hole where Hattie’s body would be covered over forever. The steep walls of earth would buckle and slide soon enough in this rain, even if the grave weren’t being filled in by human hands. This sullen, hungry muck held the mothers who had birthed us. It had swallowed our beloved fathers’ bones. If I lived to a hundred, still this muck would someday claim my body, too. My throat went raw at the thought, and my chest was vised in an icy grip. I shivered harder and sniffled, feeling small and adrift in this ocean of unfeeling grass.

  “Why are you here, milady?” Tom was next to me, his voice quiet in my ear. I lifted my umbrella to offer him shelter but he stepped back, out of its circle. “Did you know Hattie very well?”

  I looked up at him, his delicate face smooth and severe as marble, his eyes the same dark, leaden grey as the sky behind him. Rainwater coursed down the spirals of his hair and dripped onto his cheekbones. Tom knew that Hattie and I couldn’t have been friends. I sensed an accusation and felt ashamed without knowing why.

  “Are you not curious, at all, about how she died?” he continued.

  I frowned. “I had not c-considered—”

  “No, of course you hadn’t.” His expression suddenly darkened into the same disdain I’d seen in the parlour that day when Hattie had collapsed.

  “Are you angry?”

  “Yes!” he snapped. “Yes,” he repeated more softly, when Daniel’s head lifted from his conversation with the gravediggers. “The girl’s death was needless and cruel, and I’m angry that you should pretend to have known her, when you know nothing.”

  I stared at him. “I know n-n-nothing of m-m—” I could not manage medicine, but I persisted. “I’m no d-doctor. Of course I do not know.”

  Tom’s lips made a straight line.

  “Why don’t you t-tell me, then,” I said.

  He stared out across the field.

  “Tell me.”

  He sucked in a breath, blew out the air in a rush, and shook his head. “Forgive me, Miss Somerville. Your words, when Hattie died … they made me wonder if you did know, somehow. But it isn’t my place to chide you, and it isn’t yours to know the business of Dr. Dewhurst.

  “Only, milady”—he ducked his head to see me more clearly in the umbrella’s shadow, and an almost desperate note entered his voice—“why come, in all this horrid weather, to this sorry excuse for a funeral?”

  My parents died, I wanted to say. I know how it feels to lose someone. And I wanted to tell him that death demands that we stop and think. It asks us to stop, and to look at one another, and to think about what we are doing. Death doesn’t let us carry on as if nothing has changed.

  I watched the water drip from the tip of his nose, from his earlobes. He looked so wretched and forlorn that I wanted to hold my umbrella over him whether he should like it or not.

  It dawned on me that I didn’t know anything at all about Tom Rampling. Not even who his parents were, or if they were still alive. How had he come to Hastings? And where did he go at the end of each day when his work at the surgery was done? Tom was right: I knew nothing. And I found that, yes, I was curious—very curious indeed.

  Even if I could have found a way to ask, though, I had no time; Daniel was ready to go home. He took my arm and passed my umbrella to Tom, holding his own, larger one over me as we crossed back to the carriage. The ride was awkward and heavy with unspoken questions. Tom was seated next to me this time, but he pressed himself so close to his side of the carriage that even Daniel could have fit between us. He spoke only to the doctor and only when Daniel asked him a direct question. I couldn’t see a way to return to our graveside conversation. I couldn’t even turn to look straight at Tom. Finally I unsnapped the rain cover and busied myself with gazing out the window, ignoring the fact that my dress grew soggier by the minute. This time it was my brother-in-law who eventually slept, his chins spilling onto his chest, his clasped hands over his belly rising and falling with his snores. And still Tom Rampling stayed silent.

  SEVEN

  Hastings House was always deadly sombre in between social occasions, with icy stone floors and damp, smoky rooms due to the tricky fireplaces and unreliable gas supply. The incessant rain had encouraged moss on the drive, and all day water chuckled noisily through the eaves.

  Kept indoors the Dewhurst children grew irritable, and when their nurse took to bed with a cold they began to plague the rest of the household with their tantrums and whining. “They give me such headaches,” Christabel moaned, and she declared her sitting room off limits to anyone underage.

  In an effort to make up for displeasing my sister at the card party I took it upon myself to entertain my nephews. I asked Bess to hang a sheet for shadow puppets. Bertie— named Albert for my father but given the nickname almost at birth—kept dodging around the sheet to see what I was doing, so the game became flapping our arms to make baby Alexander giggle at the wild shapes. Next we played with Bertie’s trains. His “jumpit car” was his favourite engine, a tin windup toy with a habit of leaping off its track and somersaulting through the air, sending both boys into fits of laughter. Curious about the malfunction I turned the toy over and found that it had been modified with gears and a set of tiny springs.

  “Tom fixed it,” Bertie told me. “It got stuck, so Tom fixed it better than ever.”

  When Alexander started to yawn I turned him over to Bess, found Bertie a sweater, and brought the boy downstairs in an effort to keep things quiet for the others. The cook had gone out, so I took the opportunity to make a cup of chocolate for my nephew. We perched on stools at the big work table with the copper pots hanging over our heads and watched the kitchen maid, her arms coated in flour to the elbows, roll out dough for pork pies. We watched her, that is, and she watched me—Sally had the same furtive, fascinated face all the servants at Hastings House wore in
my presence, like a visitor to Bedlam waiting for the inmates to riot. Whatever might Mad Miss Mimic do next? What glimmer of insanity might I reveal to her, that she could tell about it later for the amusement of the servants’ table?

  I kept silent and bore the scrutiny as best I could, for Bertie’s sake. His shoulders barely cleared the table, but for a three-year-old he looked very proud and grown-up in his sailor suit, spreading jam on his biscuit with the little knife I gave him and drinking his chocolate from an adult-sized teacup.

  At last I convinced him to come away, and we set to exploring the hallways round the storerooms and servants’ quarters. Bertie found a hat by the side door that had fallen from a hook on the wall. “Put on it,” he commanded me, reaching for it with his fat little arms. I plunked it onto his head and laughed at the way it hid his eyes, but he tore it off again and stomped his foot. “Put on it, Leo!” he shouted.

  “Shh, don’t b-boss,” I said, and I took the hat. Its swooping, unfashionable shape looked familiar—it was Mrs. Fayerweather’s, from our card party. The old lady must have left it behind by mistake, and the relentless rains had discouraged any of her servants from coming to claim it.

  “Please put on it, Leo?” said Bertie, sweet as treacle.

  So I donned the ridiculous bonnet and struck a haughty pose for him. “N-now then,” I began—and Mimic stepped in, chirping hoarsely in perfect memory of Mrs. Fayerweather’s voice: “Now then, young man, what lessons shall we learn today?”

  Bertie’s eyes widened. “Rhymes!” he said.

  “Shall we learn a rhyme? Very well, then.” I paced the hall, striking my heels against the stones. “Are you ready, Master Albert?”

  “Yes, Lady!” Bertie stood at attention.

  “I shall recite it first in full, and then you shall repeat it until you are fluent,” I ordered.

  Learn well your grammar,

  And never stammer,

  Write well and neatly,

  And sing most sweetly.

  Line by line we repeated Lewis Carroll’s droll little lesson until Bertie was marching behind me, up and down the chilly hallways, shouting the lines without a single mistake:

  Drink tea, not coffee;

  Never eat toffy.

  Eat bread with butter.

  Once more, don’t stutter.

  This was my favourite of the poems Aunt Emma had taught me as a child at Kew, especially after she told me that Mr. Carroll, who also wrote my favourite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, had wished for a career in the church but been held back by his severe stammer.

  “‘Drink tea, not coffee! Never eat toffy! Eat bread with butter!’” we chanted. I don’t care if Sally should hear it, I thought, or Mrs. Nussey, or any of them. Mimic’s voice sang out of my throat like a rowdy aria, defiant in the face of the silences and stares of Hastings House.

  Rounding a corner I nearly collided with a broadly grinning Tom Rampling.

  “‘Once more, don’t stutter!’” Bertie’s momentum drove his little body full-force into the backs of my knees, and Tom grabbed my arms to steady me. Flushing, I tipped Mrs. Fayerweather’s hat into my hands.

  “Please,” Tom said, “don’t stop on my account. Only, why mayn’t I eat toffee?”

  Bertie squeezed between us. “Halloa, Tom!”

  “Hello, Master Albert. Fine day, isn’t it?”

  Bertie shook his head so vigorously that his hair stood up like milkweed fluff. “’Tisn’t. ’Tis raining manimals.”

  I was mystified, but Tom understood him at once: “Animals. Like cats and dogs, do you mean?”

  “Yes!” Bertie beamed up at him.

  “Well. I’d better make use of this, then.” Tom took an umbrella from the hook. He bent to retrieve a crate of apothecary bottles and a spool of copper wire from the floor and tucked them under his arm. “Good day, Miss Somerville.”

  My voice—Mimic’s, Mrs. Fayerweather’s—had fled. But the amusement lighting those grey eyes and the warmth under his words flooded me not with embarrassment but relief. Tom Rampling did not despise me! Well, he may think me very silly, I amended. But he didn’t bear me a grudge, at least. I supposed I was still conscience-stricken over Mimic’s use of Hattie, or it would not matter so much what Tom Rampling thought.

  “Good day, Tom!” Bertie yelled out the door as the slim figure was swallowed by the rain.

  When the weather finally cleared the next day, and Bess mentioned she had errands near Covent Garden, I leapt at the opportunity to escape the prison of Hastings House. My sister fretted at me about the Black Glove—hadn’t it been two weeks since the last attack, and wouldn’t the criminal gang decide that today was a fine day to bomb the markets— but Christa was going out too, to High Street with her lady friends, so she could hardly refuse me the same pleasure.

  Each time Bess entered a shop I stayed outside under the awning or just beside the door and watched the lively bustle of workaday London. Oh, the city was a foul, noisy place! We’d travelled only ten minutes by carriage from the handsome streets surrounding Hastings, only a couple of dozen blocks, but we’d entered a different universe. Here the clatter of hooves and wooden wheels forced everyone to shout his business. The rain had turned all the horse muck to soup, so that clouds of flies gathered at the curbs. The red-jacketed boys dodging among traffic with pan and brush could not keep up with the filth and were coated in it to the thighs.

  But the sun was shining, raising a steam of vapours from the damp buildings. A barrel-organ player had drawn a crowd. He had a green parrot tied to a perch, and when he turned the handle and the machine wheezed its tune, the bird flapped its wings and shrieked.

  There are things I cannot say in any voice, not even with Mimic’s help. A blue dream of sky. White clouds like lace being tatted at one end and unravelled at the other. The clouds called out to the birds on the sills, and with whistles of rapture they took flight, hundreds and thousands of black wings hurled skyward. They flocked over the rooftops, now a fine, long line, now full as billowing sails. Freedom! Freedom! their cries promised, and for a moment I almost felt I could leap up into their midst with my skirts supporting me like a kite.

  A well-dressed young couple stopped to hear the hurdy-gurdy, and I watched as the gentleman, laughing, used his walking stick to scrape something from the heel of his lady’s boot. Cabbage, I guessed, for wilted and rotten cabbages dotted the street where a produce cart had tipped. The lady, not much older than I, balanced against her husband with a gloved hand spread on his chest.

  Freedom and protection! The two great gifts that only a husband of good standing could bring. Over these past days I’d tried not to dwell on my failure with Mr. Thornfax. In my weekly letter to my aunt Emma I hadn’t even mentioned it, though normally I hid nothing from her. Too good to be true, I told myself over and over, like a charm against undue disappointment. He was too good to be true. And I’d done my best to ignore the inner voice that added, You mean too good for you.

  Now, though, I could not resist imagining Mr. Thornfax here on the street with me—tall, golden-haired, smiling. Perhaps he’d wear a beaver-lined overcoat like the gentleman across the street. When I closed my eyes to add detail to the daydream, however, I saw only Mr. Thornfax’s look of puzzlement at Mimic’s behaviour at the sight of poor Hattie lying on the floor. He hadn’t been frightened and upset with me, like Tom Rampling—but then, he had never known Hattie while she was alive, so Hattie’s voice from my mouth would have been not eerie, but only bizarre. Mad Miss Mimic.

  I’d been able to discover very little about the girl’s death. A few days after her funeral I’d braved my brother-in-law’s study, but Daniel had offered no real answers. “Best not to dwell on our failures, little sister,” was all he would say.

  “W-as it the fault of T-Tom Rampling, as he said on the night Hattie d-died?” I’d persisted.

  Daniel shook his head. “To men of science, there can be no question of fault. Rampling is a good boy, and very clever in
his way, but I’m afraid he has impractical notions. ‘Progress depends on practicality,’ I always need remind him. To assign fault only muddles the matter.”

  The gentleman at the barrel organ was patting his jacket pockets and searching the curb. His young wife lifted her skirts to assist him. He turned about him with an accusing air,

  then took her arm and moved rapidly off.

  As I watched, another gentleman on my side of the street, about to climb into a carriage seat, suddenly jumped back with a shout.

  “Thief! Hi!” he called to his driver, who leapt down and ran in pursuit of a small boy. I glimpsed bare, mud-splashed legs and a woollen cap. As the child dodged across the street I saw that it was the young boy from Daniel’s surgery, the one who had wailed so loudly and had to be dragged upstairs by Tom Rampling when Hattie died—Will, his name was. The shock of recognition and the oddness of the coincidence spurred me to leave my post and step into the street for a better look.

  Caught by the collar, young Will had the presence of mind to drop the stolen pocket watch, and as the driver bent to retrieve it, he delivered the man a sharp kick to the shin and twisted free of his grip. With a series of curses the driver gave up and went to return the watch to his master. Will wove and darted this way and that among the shuffle of fruit stands and sidewalk-sellers. I managed to keep him in sight by walking fast and staying a distance back so as not to alert him to my presence. I sidestepped garbage and horse-piles, twisting to avoid the parasols and packages of shoppers, keeping always before my eyes the little brown cap and the flash of bare white knees.