by Joan Aiken
“She—she asked me to give you her dear love,” said Ellen slowly.
“Oh.” Luke was silent for a while. His long, hollow-eyed face stared over Ellen’s shoulder; out of the window behind her, to an immense distance. Then he brought his gaze back to demand, “What else did she say?”
“Papa—I am sorry. It was a private letter—advising me how—how to direct my life. I cannot divulge any more of the contents.”
“What?” Luke’s wrath was sudden and violent as a lightning flash. “You say that to me? You defy me? You actually refuse to show me—your own father—a letter written to you by your mother—my wife?”
“Eh, dear, dear,” said Mrs. Pike interestedly. “Fancy that!” She shook her head commiseratingly.
Gerard gazed at his sister in fascinated alarm. Prepared whenever possible to circumvent his father by subterfuge, he never mustered the courage for direct disobedience.
“I am sorry, Papa,” said Ellen steadily. “The letter was written by Mama for me alone; it would be betraying her intention—disloyal to her—if I were to show it to anybody else—even to you.” Particularly to you, she thought. But she could not help pitying him; poor man, he did so long to get a sight of that letter! And he was not used to being thwarted.
“Disloyal? What about your loyalty to me, pray? I have a right to oversee your correspondence.”
“Please, Papa, do not make an issue of this. You would—I assure you—be going against Mama’s wishes in the matter.”
“What could she have to say to you that I might not read?”
“I cannot answer that, Papa.”
He stared at her, fulminating, for a moment’s silence. Then he said, “Leave the room. You have not heard the end of this.”
“I will leave the room,” agreed Ellen, “but only because I have finished my dinner. You cannot force me to show you the letter, Papa; I am of age now, and not subject to you.”
“You certainly are, miss! So long as you are under my roof and I provide for you.”
“I have savings. I can pay for my own board.”
“Hoity-toity!” said Mrs. Pike.
“And,” continued Ellen, ignoring the housekeeper, “if necessary, I shall ask the advice of Mr. Wheelbird. He said he would be glad to counsel me over any legal action that might arise from the letter.”
After which broadside she went out, and gently closed the door behind her. But she was far from happy as she climbed the stair to her room and stood gazing out over the orchard to the red-tiled roofs in Angel Street. This was a most wretched outcome of her mother’s request that she should learn to love Luke—the last thing Mattie would have wished, or intended.
Plague take that Mrs. Pike!
After a moment, Ellen’s eyes fell on her mother’s letter, which she had left on her little bureau. She sat down and read it again—slowly, calmly, carefully. Then, with a heavy heart, she lit a candle and burned it in the flame. Certain slight rearrangements of objects and papers in her drawers from day to day had already convinced her that some alien hand made free with them. Sue, an old and faithful servant, was above suspicion; Cook and the kitchenmaid never came upstairs; Vicky had no opportunity and Gerard would not be interested. All indications pointed to Mrs. Pike. That woman shan’t read it and report to Papa on its contents, vowed Ellen—or what she chooses to suggest as its contents; this way it will be safe.
For some days after this scene Luke’s manner to Ellen was lowering and charged with gloomy disapproval. But—to her considerable surprise—he did not allude to the letter again. Perhaps Mrs. Pike had told him of the ashes in the bedroom candlestick. Or perhaps he had decided that he could only lose dignity in pursuing the matter.
Twelve
During the next few weeks Ellen sometimes found herself wondering who, precisely, she might be. Her own personality seemed to be overlaid by those of her two parents. Besides being herself—solitary, sad, hungry for the companionship, the cheerful sounds, the talkative voices of Paris—she seemed to feel with the senses of Luke and Matilda, to hear with their ears.
The Hermitage was a silent house. Separated from the town on two sides by orchards, overlooking the peaceful valley, it received no sound of traffic or human activity; furthermore, Luke Paget detested noise and had trained his household to respect this idiosyncrasy. The inmates were the reverse of convivial. Gerard, for some undivulged reason, had become much more withdrawn lately; taciturn and somber, he worked hard with his tutor at law and Latin all day, then disappeared on his own ploys in the evening. Vicky, under threat of retribution from Mrs. Pike, was hesitant about displaying too much friendliness to Ellen. The servants went glumly about their business; and Mrs. Pike seemed to watch and wait.
Living in this silence, Ellen came to remember her mother more and more vividly. Every tree in the garden, every corner of each room had its message. In the parlor, for instance, there still stood a little ottoman, on which, before she took to her bed, Mattie had been wont to rest, tucking a small hard bolster behind her spine.
“Are you weary, Mama?”
“No, not weary, my love, but I have a little chill in my back. Read me The Castaway, and it will be better directly.”
During the four years before Ellen went to school, her mother had been much afflicted by toothache, and had been obliged to pay numerous visits to a surgeon in Midhurst, from which trips she would return white, exhausted, and trembling, obliged often to retire to bed. But she was always up and about again next day.
How little of her suffering, thought Ellen, I, in my childish self-absorption, ever noticed or troubled my head about. But why did not Papa take more thought for her? I do not remember his ever asking her how she did.
Luke was then, Ellen supposed, in the full current and turmoil of his political aspirations; traveling in the constituency, canvassing as prospecting candidate for Chichester; he must have been too busy to observe his wife’s ill health; or it had seemed of secondary importance.
His daughter now pondered about him a great deal. She could see that he was in continual pain from his mended hip. He limped; sometimes he uttered an exclamation when rising or sitting down. Ellen wondered how he spent his time. Long hours were passed in his study, or garden room; he received and read all the London papers, besides parcels of books from Mudie’s; he made notes, for sometimes when Ellen slipped into the garden room to play the piano after dinner, the table would be littered with index cards and slips of paper and padlocked files of manuscript. Perhaps he was engaged on some political treatise?
“Do you think I should offer to assist him?” Ellen asked Fanny.
“I should wait, my love, until he himself requests your services. We place a low value on what is freely offered; sad but true; and Luke is given to undervaluing other people as it is. Nor has he acquired the humility that comes from being valued by others.”
“Mama valued him, Aunt Fanny!”
“Yes, but Luke is an arrogant man; he did not rate her esteem as he should. He felt it was his right. Mattie told me that once he had hoped—indeed, fully expected—that he would rise high in politics, achieve Cabinet office, even become Prime Minister. When he was a young man, he was both strikingly handsome and had a remarkable presence. He seemed highly gifted to many people of importance; Lord Castlereagh heard him speak and prophesied that he would go far; he did brilliantly in his Bar examinations; and then all this somehow petered out into nothing.
“Of course, most of us, not only your father, start out with high opinions of themselves—for a child thinks he is the most important person in the world! What gives us a truer notion is not failure, but our first successes, however trifling. When other people begin to show they value us, then, by discovering our real worth, rather than our imagined one, we learn humility.”
Ellen, recalling her early blunders and small victories in the rue St. Pierre, and how, during those da
ys, mild self-respect began to replace touchy, anxious self-assertion, realized that what Fanny said was true.
“But somehow your father has never been given the chance to measure himself against the esteem of others. He fell so far short of what he intended that his early, inflated image of himself is still the only one he possesses.”
“He can’t see himself as we do? No,” Ellen said, answering her own question, “of course he cannot.”
* * *
Discharging her own duties about the house, Ellen was hauntingly aware of her father’s personality; it hung like a heavy cloud. His feeling of not having received his just due, a jealousy of any happiness that excluded him, a bitter anxiety about the future, and a ravenous insistence on his rights—or what he took to be his rights—all these emotions made themselves felt as if they had been printed on the air; also his feverish ambition for Gerard. The pain from his injured hip he viewed as an intolerable imposition, since he was accustomed to enjoy health as a matter of course. To have his sleep broken night after night and wake to discomfort—this was not to be borne, it could not go on! And yet it did go on. Added to this were vexations over some new and ill-chosen associations of Gerard’s—not to mention the uninvited return of his daughter—was it any wonder, Luke felt, that he was often almost beside himself with irritation?
Indeed Mrs. Pike was the only member of his household who did not afford any aggravation; she was so invariably solicitous for his comfort that the very thought of her was a cordial. When he woke in the night, his mind would at once range fretfully over its causes for discontent: there was talk of a French invasion, the Volunteer troops were drilling; besides this, there were rumors of impending civil conflict in America; Luke, whose first wife had brought as her dowry holdings in a Lancashire cotton manufactory, was concerned at the loss of income such a dispute would mean. Then there were Kitty and Eugenia, always hoping for gifts of money, if not asking for it…and Gerard, with his unsuitable acquaintance… From all these ills—and others, deeper, unexpressed even to himself, but much more afflicting—Luke would turn to the thought of Mrs. Pike with relief, as the one positive in a world of negatives. There she was, handsome, cordial, always on his side, and certain to have ordered him an excellent breakfast.
Ellen, observing all this, as well as Mrs. Pike’s growing complacency, began to feel that her sisters had better resign themselves to the inevitable. It seemed almost certain that Luke would presently propose marriage to the housekeeper, if only to secure her services permanently. And unpaid, too, thought Ellen, with a cynicism acquired in Paris. She said as much to Eugenia.
Her eldest sister, anxious to learn how the land lay, had arranged for Ellen to spend a night at Valdoe Court. “It is so long since we saw you,” she wrote in a letter delivered by the penny post. “Eustace may fetch you—he is to attend a sale of yearling heifers at North Chapel. And you may return to Petworth next day by the public coach. Papa can spare you, I daresay—and Vicky will not suffer from the loss of a day’s lessons!”
Luke sanctioned the arrangement (with some grumbles as to gadding about) and Mrs. Pike gave it the seal of her approval by entrusting to Ellen various commissions in Chichester.
Ellen was pleased to ride over the Downs with Eustace Valdoe in his wagonette, loaded with sacks of seed and agricultural implements. It was a delight to see through frosty dusk the beeches and spindle trees flaming out in their autumn colors. Luke thought Eustace a fumbling, ineffectual, hopeless fellow, but Ellen, little though she knew him, liked him very well.
They talked little on the road; Eustace was not an articulate man and felt shy of his smart young Parisian sister-in-law; but the minute Ellen had been set down among the decayed grandeurs and shabby comforts of Valdoe Court, Eugenia pounced on her.
“Well? How goes it between Papa and that woman?…Oh, do run away!” she snapped irritably at a small pinafored girl and two pale little boys who were hanging about her skirts. “Go to Nurse and tell her to fetch Baby and keep you all with her.” She turned with a martyred sigh to Ellen. “You do not know your good fortune in not being married! I have so little help, sometimes I do not know how I contrive! Look at those curtains—faded and worn beyond repair. Sometimes my trials seem beyond endurance.” She evinced no curiosity about her sister’s experiences in Paris, but went on, “Does there seem to be an attachment growing—does Papa treat that woman—speak to her—look at her—with much particularity?”
Ellen gave it as her opinion that, within the limits of his unforthcoming nature, he did so, and she saw little to be done about it. Eugenia threw up her hands and turned to her husband, who entered the room just then, having changed for dinner into a tailcoat of ancient cut.
“Eustace! What are we to do? Ellen confirms that the Pike woman is setting her cap at Papa and he is becoming infatuated! If he marries her and settles Mama’s money on her—our children will die paupers!”
“Oh, come, come, Eugenia! Matters are not at quite such a pass. After all—even if your father does not remarry—he is a strong healthy man, we have no reason to assume that he may not live for many years yet. You should not be placing a dependence—”
“Fiddle! Men of his age are carried off every day. There might be another cholera epidemic.”
The conversation was terminated by the arrival of Lady Blanche and the Bishop, who had been invited to dinner. Eugenia had warned Ellen not to discuss Mrs. Pike in front of them, since Lady Blanche had selected Mrs. Pike, and plumed herself on her sagacity in having supplied Luke with such a treasure. Talk became general, and adverted to the possibility of an invasion by Napoleon III. Ellen, speaking with an authority she certainly would never have been permitted at the Hermitage, said she was sure the French Emperor had no such intention. “His cousin in Paris said that his main ambition is to develop the French overseas empire in Africa.”
When the men had drunk their port, the Bishop brought his coffee cup and came to sit by Ellen.
“You appear to have grown into a young lady with a mind of her own,” he said, beaming at her.
Ellen had always felt a fondness for the Bishop, who, at the wedding of her father to Lady Adelaide, when she was feeling very miserable, had patted her head, talked to her with great kindness, and promised her a pony, which she had been unable to accept, since she had been on the point of returning to school in Brussels. Now he reminded her of this promise. “And I have the very fellow for you in the Palace stables, eating his head off, since my daughter Grizel was married. I shall have him sent over next week.”
“Oh, sir! You are too kind! Indeed you should not.”
“Indeed I should. But tell me, how does your papa go on? Would you say, my dear, that he is laboring under some nervous affliction? He writes me such very strange letters.”
“Does he, sir?” Ellen was startled to hear that her father wrote to the Bishop at all.
“That he does! About the Doom Stone, you know, which he is so set upon finding. He appears to attach such importance to it that, I confess, I have been wondering if that sad affair sent him a little astray, you know—” And the Bishop tapped his temple.
“He seems quite rational in all his household dealings,” Ellen said slowly. “Very much so.”
“Ay, well, it can be so. A man can be as sane as may be, save in the one particular. Look at that fellow in the novel by Mr. Dickens. Mr. Dick—King Charles’s head, you know? Capital book that. Perhaps your father is in the same way over the Doom Stone. Most improbable that we shall find it now, since it has not turned up in the fabric of the Cathedral. Found some beautiful Purbeck panels, which Mr. Slater believes to date from 1000 AD—but no Doom Stone! Pity, but there! Knocked to pieces long ago, I fear. If only we could convince your father of that.”
Lady Blanche then came in her stately way to commend Ellen for showing proper daughterly feeling in returning to keep her father company.
“You di
d very right, my dear; a young gel is best at home. Indeed I do not at all approve of young ladies staying abroad. You do much better to employ yourself with Vicky’s education. I am extremely pleased with you.” Some considerable proportion of Lady Blanche’s approval was also due to the termination of a tiresome guilty feeling that she ought to take some action regarding her sister’s small orphaned daughter; now that anxiety was allayed, so she smiled benignly at Ellen and patted her hand.
Ellen had never cared greatly for the Bishop’s lady, who reminded her of her unloving stepmother, Lady Adelaide. She therefore turned the subject, and asked, “How did you learn about Mrs. Pike, Lady Blanche? I understand we have you to thank for supplying Papa with such a capable housekeeper?”
“Is she not a paragon? Did I not furnish your papa with a treasure?”
“Usually such persons are bespoken years in advance,” said Ellen, feeling a hypocrite. “How was Mrs. Pike free to come to the Hermitage at such very short notice?”
“She had been housekeeping for old Canon Fothergill and his simpleminded niece. When he died there was not enough money left to continue paying Mrs. Pike’s wages, so a place was found for Miss Fothergill in St. Mary’s Hospital, where, poor soul, they care for her very well.”
“Miss Fothergill—I remember her,” said Ellen. “Mama used to visit her and teach her embroidery.”
“Very likely, child. Your mother was often lavishing time and energy on hopeless causes. Come, Bishop; it is time our carriage was spoken for.”
* * *
After breakfast next day Eustace drove Ellen into Chichester to execute her shopping commissions. He had various business to attend to himself, and arranged to meet her by the Butter Cross at noon.
Ellen went to the apothecary’s for the oil of almonds, essence of bitter aloe, gum tragacanth, and other requirements on Mrs. Pike’s list.
She was explaining to the pharmacist that the oil of almonds was a superior one, much esteemed by Mrs. Pike and kept in stock for her especially, when a little old woman who was deliberating over a display of soaps on a table by the door, catching the name Pike, glanced up and eyed Ellen with curiosity. Then she sidled over.
