by Joan Aiken
In consequence of which, or perhaps just from general misery, Alvey caught a shocking cold. For two days she continued to drag herself about with heavy, throbbing head, painful throat, and aching back and legs; then she took to her narrow bed and only wished that she might die in it.
“Ee, indeed, ‘tis a tirrible damp season,” Mrs Robson said philosophically, bringing Alvey a posset. (She pronounced “season” see-asson—it took Alvey a moment or two to grasp her meaning). “I don’t knaw when there’s bin sic a wet summer. An’ I rackon ye’re a yoong lady as is used te comfort, coming fra’ Birkland Hall.”
Tactfully, Mrs Robson had never inquired why Alvey had felt the need to quit such a stately residence and seek humble accommodation in Newcastle; she was a woman full of natural kindliness and delicacy. To nurse a lodger and bring her invalid fare lay well beyond the obligations of a landlady with her own business to run, and so Alvey hoarsely protested, but the good woman merely said—
“Nivvor trooble thaself, hinny. Maw sister Bessie’d nivvor forgive me if aw let ye dee in maw hoose. There, noo, sup down the dram, ‘tis winter caudle-cup, brimming wi’ limmons an’ oranges, an’ thur’s barley in, too, ‘twill slip easy down thi throat.”
Next day, however, Alvey declared that she was recovered. Doggedly she got up, dressed, fetched a broom and hot water from the kitchen, tidied her chamber, and would not permit the lame Mrs Robson to continue cooking for her, or to climb the steep stair with any further delicacies. But still, for longer than a month afterwards, the ill-effects of the malady lingered, leaving her thin, haggard, readily fatigued, imbuing her with a deadly lassitude and indifference. During the first week out of bed she could barely manage to drag herself beyond the corner of the street, and was frequently forced, at that point, to creep home again and lie down on her bed. There she passed long, dismal hours, gazing at the slope of the ceiling, deprived even of the will to take up a book and read, paralysed by a weight of depression and grief such as she had experienced only once before in her life.
She did not write to anybody at Birkland. What would be the purpose? Her life in that place was over. There would be no point in trying to explain, to justify, to apologize. A deep shame almost suffocated her when she tried to think about any individual members of the family; she could not endure the pain of their knowledge that she was a sordid impostor. In a note to Mrs Slaley, asking that her box of books be forwarded, she added: Please do not tell ANYBODY where I am. Her only wish was to be lost, hidden, forgotten.
Lying, without occupation, in this reduced state, she found that memories of that other time, ten years distant, when she had lost her home, came back in spasms of excruciating clarity. Especially at night, when the clangs and howls of industry abated, and only the sounds of human voices came from the street, drunken, joyful, or merely argumentative, keeping her awake hour after hour, Alvey would toss on her thin pallet, watching lights flicker over the wall, re-living those weeks in sharp detail: those weeks of pain and family division during which Paul and Sarah grimly detached themselves from friends, connections, livelihood, and, finally, from their own child, in order to depart for the distant community in Hartland County. Even the word Indiana still carried, for Alvey, an ominous ring, an evil vibration.
The decision had been neither easy nor simple. Paul, to be sure, had looked forward with hope to the new life at Unison; but Sarah had been far less confident as to the rightness of their plan. Paul had never cherished particularly warm feelings towards his daughter; the whole bent of his strong character had from youth onward been devoted to religion; he wasted no time on human relationships.—Whereas Sarah and her daughter had been bound by close affection. Only in belief did they differ: Alvey from her earliest days had been a humble sceptic, respecting the creeds of others, herself certain of nothing; but Sarah was a devout, straightforward Christian, therefore unquestioningly prepared to obey her husband, in whom she had thorough confidence. She respected his wide intelligence. But his contentious, difficult nature did trouble her; she had seen him quit, in turn, the Society of Friends, the Unitarians, and the splinter group founded by himself.
Sarah must, her daughter had felt dimly then, and with certainty now, have entertained a secret fear that Paul would, in the end, come to differ from the tenets of Herr Muller, and leave Unison as he had left the other sects. Thereby nullifying his wife’s sacrifice of herself and her child.
This doubt, deep if unuttered, had made Alvey’s mother more and more silent, withdrawn, and tremulous, as the weeks drew on and the day of departure came closer. Nothing was stated, but Alvey was acutely aware of her mother’s distress.
She was haunted by a particular sharp memory of short, slight Sarah, who, at thirty-five, had the drawn look of a woman twenty years older, her lips pressed hard together to prevent them from trembling, as she walked about the small empty New Bedford house for the last time, in a pretence of making sure that it was properly clean for the next comers; next, making a careful survey of the miniature yard, where she had grown parsley and lavender. Not a garden in Lady Winship’s sense of the word, thought Alvey, but she had loved it and taken a gentle pride in its neatness. Women so easily put down roots; it seems they can’t help it. Two young apple trees had been obtained, with the help of a Quaker friend coming out from England. That year for the first time, one of them had fruited, half a dozen tiny green apples; but they were nowhere near ripe on the day appointed for Paul and Sarah to leave. The month was August. Alvey saw her mother touch one apple with a careful finger, press her lips even harder together, and walk hurriedly back to the house.
Then, at the last, one tight, throttling embrace: “Goodbye, my precious child. Behave thyself well—but that, I know, thee will! We shall surely meet again—in a better world, if not in this—” and Paul had impatiently hustled his wife into the coach that was to take them on the first stage of their journey.
Partings are the worst pain in life, Alvey thought. Is it harder to be the one who leaves, or the one who remains behind? Now I begin to understand how Sarah must have felt, going away, relinquishing me to the care of someone who was almost a stranger. Now, for the very first time, I believe I feel a touch of the agony she must have gone through. And I thought that I was suffering at that leave-taking! What I felt then was not a fraction of what I feel now.—Yet, she thought (in honesty to that desolate ten-year-old) what I felt then was dreadful pain: home, family, my entire world snatched away—and all in the name of virtue and the worship of God!
Had Paul and Sarah ever left Unison? If they had done so, Alvey thought, Mother would have found some means to reach me; she must have been longing to know what I was doing to support myself, whether I had become a writer as I planned. She was so hopeful for me, so proud of my early essays . . . It was because of that ambition for me, I know, that she accepted my decision not to accompany them.
No, they must still be there. If Sarah is still alive. But, though so hard-working, she was far from robust. There would have been many privations, much physical labour, bleak winters, perhaps even hostile savages to contend with . . .
Alvey had little doubt, in fact, that her mother must have died years ago.
At least, she tried to comfort herself, Nish and Tot are not losing their home. Nothing of that kind. They have the hills, the Hungry Water, the house itself, all that natural beauty, which has more importance for them than human relations. All their accustomed haunts and habits.
But, said the accusing inner voice, the reason why humans had little importance for those children was because no one had ever troubled to befriend them. You had begun to supply part of what they needed. Therefore it was the height of heartless irresponsibility to abandon them without an explanation.
And what about Grandmother? What about Sir Aydon? What about his wretched wife? Having—in some sort—taken on the care of these people, was it the behaviour of a right-thinking adult to go off and leave them aga
in?
Father would say yes; that I suffer from conceit and vainglory in thinking they need me. He would say it is no part of anyone’s duty to be a prop to another, or point the way they should go; we are each single souls, and must stand alone in the presence of God. We should work towards our own salvation, and not arrogantly think we are capable of directing anybody else.
Louisa would certainly disagree with Father about that! And, for once, I find myself on the same side as Louisa. I think that Father’s views are priggish nonsense—and, very likely, just a cloak for his own selfishness.
Louisa. Will she not take charge of those children—help them, teach them? And—and perhaps talk reason to her mother, give Sir Aydon sensible advice about the estate, befriend the old lady?
You know perfectly well that she will do nothing of the kind. She will collect her jointure as soon as he can extract it from her father, and then be off to pursue her own ends. She will quit Birkland without a day’s delay or a second thought.
Well: at least she cannot bully or terrify the children any longer. They are too old to be afraid of her now. And I did play some part in that change.
With a deep, shuddering sigh, Alvey pulled herself off her bed, and moved on stiff legs to the window, where she lowered herself awkwardly to the floor and crouched, leaning her elbows on the wide sill, gazing out across the timberyard. The long hours of another night had crawled slowly past; the rain had abated and a watery sunrise gilded the chimneys; down below, men were taking off their jackets, hoisting a huge log into position so that it might be sawn into ships’ timbers.
As she had done for many days, Alvey watched the men with a feeling of dreamy unreality. Who is this I who is watching them roll that log? Do I exist? How did I come to be here in Newcastle, in this shadowy little room? Newcastle? Where is that city? Did I dream the life at Birkland Hall? Or the one in New Bedford? Which life was the illusion? Or is it all illusion together?
Mother would say: pull thyself together, child.
Caught unawares by a sudden shock of piled-up emotion, Alvey doubled over, as if she had a physical pain in her heart, laid her head down on her arms, and wept for her mother with the total abandon of a ten-year-old.
After a long while, she swallowed, scrubbed her eyes with a towel, dressed herself neatly, smoothed her hair, and went down to ask Mrs Robson if she might put up a card in the shop window, offering French tuition and piano lessons. And not before time; her funds saved from teaching at the Abbey School were almost exhausted. Pocket money given her by Sir Aydon she had felt proper to leave behind at Birkland. There would be a small amount of interest accruing to her, in New Bedford, from Cousin Hepzie’s modest legacy; soon she must find the energy to write to America about this.
“Ye look a bit better today, hinny,” said Mrs Robson. “I was beginnin’ to be troobled aboot ye. Have a hot bap; they’re nobbut fresh oot o’ the oven.”
The fresh bread was delicious; for the first time in weeks, Alvey felt a genuine pang of hunger.
Nish and Tot had gone to ground in the haybarn, as, these days, they frequently did. This summer the hay crop had been late and scanty, because of all the rain in June, but at last, in mid-August, it was cut and stooked and gathered. The children had their annual adventure of riding in from the hayfields, holding on to the chains of the flat, horse-drawn tilting bogies that carried in the big, slippery mounds of hay, one at a time; but the event’s enjoyment was deeply flawed by the absence of Alvey; so many times they had told her about it, and promised her that hay-making was the best fun of the summer.
Now the barn made a refuge for them, stacked as it was almost to the roof with the springy, sweet-scented crop; they could roll in it, leap from the cross-beams above, practise gymnastics, hide from each other, or just read and think. Lumley, of course, disapproved furiously of the children playing in the hay: “Spoils it for the beasts,” he said, “they’ll not fancy it after ye’ve moocked around in it,” and menaced them, when he found them, with the untimely end of Rab Artingstall, a shepherd boy of the last century who had taken refuge in a hay-shippen one stormy night and been killed by fumes from the half-rotten crop.
“That’s naught but an old wives’ tale,” Tot said scornfully. “And we have to have somewhere private from interference.”
Their problem these days was not Louisa, who took little notice of them, but Lieutenant Dunnifage, who persisted in hunting them out, whenever bad weather kept them in the house, boring them to excruciation with geography lessons—“Where’s Madagascar?” he would shout. “C—come on, now! You young ones have got to be quicker off the m—mark than that!” or, when the rain slackened, dragging them out to the paddock where he made them do physical jerks and something he called “Indian drill.” “I hate to see such a pair of l—listless, whey-faced young ones about the place,” he often said. “You’d n—never do for a midshipman about my ship, m—master Tot, I can tell you!”
“I wouldn’t wish to,” muttered Tot.
Lieutenant Dunnifage was heartily bored at Birkland. Why Louisa’s father couldn’t make up his mind and get down to naming a sum for the dowry, sort matters out Bristol-fashion and shipshape, why the old Put must make such a piece of work about it, and not just shell out the ready and have done, the Lieutenant simply could not comprehend; day after day the old fellow mumbled, “Yes, I’ll think about it tomorrow,” and then shut himself up in his library leaving orders that he was not to be disturbed. And, oddly enough, nobody, not a soul in the family or about the estate seemed to value Louisa’s husband as he deserved; indeed, sometimes he thought they hardly valued him at all. Sometimes he even found himself wishing for the astringent company of Captain Middlemass (who had not set a particularly high value on him either) but at least the Lieutenant had had his appointed place in the ship’s hierarchy and felt sure of it. But here he had no function except to harass the children.
Fortunately he had not yet discovered their lair in the hayloft. The hay was piled so high that the door leading into the stable-yard was totally blocked; the children’s means of ingress was to climb in at the loading-window, using fingers and toes to scrabble up the eight-foot wall, in which there were large, handy crevices between the stones. Once inside, they were safe enough, so long as they remembered to keep their voices down lest they be heard by people passing through the yard. A convenient niche in the wall held a few books, green apples, and a bottle of water, for the dust in the hay made them thirsty.
Nish had a secret fear that Surtees or Lumley would some day bolt the front window, not realizing that they were inside, imprisoning them; but Tot pointed out that they could always escape through a tiny slit window at the back, which gave on to the orchard; though it was true that would entail a drop of twenty feet, because the ground fell away sharply.
“You could get through, as you are smaller,” he said generously. “And then you could come round to the front and let me out.”
“Suppose I broke my leg?”
“Why should you suppose any such thing? Now be quiet, I’m reading Marmion.”
Nish had no objection to being quiet. She was writing a story about a lord’s wilful daughter who ran off to be a sailor, and rescued a prince who had been exiled on a desert island by a usurper. Her tale was heavily influenced by The Tempest, which was the last thing Alvey had been reading them before she left.
Every now and then Nish heaved a deep, frustrated sigh.
“Oh, I wish Emmy were here.”
“Well,” snapped her brother, “she’s not, so what’s the use of wishing?”
“I can see the end of my story, but the start is dull, and I can’t do the middle.”
“Write something else then,” he said unsympathetically.
“Emmy’s so good at helping when I’m stuck—”
“Emmy isn’t here!”
Incautiously, he raised his voice.
They heard the loud nasal tones of Lieutenant Dunnifage, outside in the stable-yard.
“Is that you young ‘uns? Did I hear your voices? I’m positive I did! Come along out—where are you I—lurking? C—come on—I’m sure I heard you!”
Nish and Tot cowered lower among the hay. They heard the Lieutenant move a few steps away, and his voice again.
“D—do you know where those children have got to, Surtees? It’s high t—time they did their exercises.”
Would Surtees give them away? No, he was saying woodenly, “Aa cuddn’t say, sir, aa’m sure; they might be joost anywhere—” but then came Louisa’s step, quick and clipped, along the cobbled path, and her impatient voice broke in: “They are almost certainly in the haybarn, Mr Dunnifage; my brother James used to spend hours in there, when he was their age—though why you should feel obliged to trouble yourself with them, I cannot conceive—”
Heavy footsteps began moving purposefully back in their direction.
There were a number of cards in Mrs Robson’s window, offering tuition on the flute, rooms for rent, or apprenticeships in dressmaking. The location, in this well-frequented shop, was an excellent one. In only five days after putting up her notice, Alvey was surprised, but relieved, to acquire four pupils: a young man who wished to learn the piano, an elderly lady who wanted French history read aloud to her, and two little girls, the daughters of an alderman, who required French conversation while being taken for walks. Their combined fees would pay the cost of Mrs Robson’s rooms and leave a small amount over for food and necessities; Alvey could, with relief, feel herself fairly self-supporting.
