The Youngest Miss Ward

by Joan Aiken

  Aunt Polly who, were she close at hand, would have been consoling and supportive, had moved off to the far end of the room where chaperons were seated. Here – to Hatty’s even greater dismay – she saw Lady Ursula suddenly appear, doubtless to discover whether her counsel had been followed. She and Aunt Polly were in conference together, observing the dancers; they smiled as Ned and Nancy Price pranced past, followed by Tom, doing his best with the yellow-haired girl . . . Lady Ursula glanced across the room, saw Hatty, and her face tightened.

  Hatty longed for the floor to open up and swallow her. She felt very wretched. And then, from behind, to her utter astonishment, she heard a familiar friendly voice. ‘Good God, what an unbridled scene of dissipation! I come back to the Crown, hoping for a quiet dinner after a long day’s business in the country, and what do I find? Wild caperings, as if the whole city had been afflicted by St Vitus’ Dance! And only my friend Miss Hatty not participating. But why is this? Have you taken a vow against dancing?’

  With a sense of inexpressible warmth and comfort, Hatty turned to Lord Camber. He stood behind her, arms akimbo, surveying the scene with a broad characteristic smile on his face. As on their first meeting, he wore old, untidy clothes. He carried his hat in his hand, as well as a large bundle of papers.

  ‘But why are you not dancing, my friend?’ he inquired again.

  ‘Oh, it was just – just that there was no partner,’ she stammered.

  ‘We can soon remedy that. Here, my good Barker—’ he turned to a waiter who had followed him with a glass of wine on a tray. ‘Take these to the parlour – with this.’ He thrust the papers and the hat into the man’s free hand. ‘Now then, my dear – I beg you will do me the honour of a quick turn up and down the set,’ and without further ado, he led her out on to the floor. It soon became apparent to Hatty that, whatever fault Lady Ursula might have to find with his appearance, Lord Camber was an adept on the ballroom floor, lively, nimble and confident.

  When Monsieur Lamartine claimed the next dance with Hatty, and they waited for the music to recommence, Hatty, facing her partner, noticed out of the corner of her eye that Lord Camber had quietly moved along the wall until he stood close to Lady Ursula. Mrs Ward had stepped away to greet acquaintances, and Lady Ursula was at present standing alone, conspicuous because of her unusual height, morosely surveying the animated scene. She was dressed, as was her invariable custom, in close-fitting grey cambric, with a small severe grey velvet bonnet like a helmet on her head; Hatty fancifully thought that she resembled some female warrior, Joan of Arc perhaps; and, to her own surprise, felt a sudden, a most unexpected prick of sympathy – could it be sympathy? – for the older woman who looked so solitary and in some indefinable way unresolved; rather, Hatty thought, like a piece of jetsam that has been washed up by the tide on a reef and now lies waiting for the next wave to float it back into the swell again. Then Hatty caught some words of Lord Camber’s as he spoke to the lady – his manner was low and confidential, but all the remarks he had addressed to Hatty herself in the last few days had impressed her so very deeply that she had become extra sensitive to the tones of his voice and felt that she would have been able to pick out his speech cadences amid the uproar of a great crowd or even the howl of a hurricane.

  ‘Ursie!’ he addressed her softly. ‘Ursie, my dear – can we not remember that we were used to be such friends? I would be grieved indeed – deeply, deeply grieved – to be obliged to forego even that memory?’

  She turned sharply and gave him a cold angry stare.

  ‘Some of us,’ she snapped, ‘some of us in this world, Camber, are not so stupid as to believe that a few cajoling words can re-make a whole time that is lost and gone. What you seem to suggest is laughable. Only look at you! How can you be so outrageous as to stand there – presenting such an appearance – how dare you be making any kind of overture – to me! What value, in any case, can there be in any thing you say when I know – when I know now full well – what your intentions are – when I know that your overtures have no more value than – than that feather!’ And she fiercely poked with her toe at a plume from some girl’s fan that came drifting their way across the polished boards of the floor.

  Lord Camber stooped and picked it up and turned it thoughtfully between his fingers.

  ‘There was a time,’ he suggested, ‘when such considerations did not trouble you. When you would have ventured—’

  ‘Ventured! Hah! Perhaps! If so that time is vanished. Now I would not venture across a duck-pond under your escort. I wonder at your effrontery, Camber, I do indeed! Do you expect me to embark on a career as a lady’s maid, as a sewing-woman?’

  Madame Lamartine began playing a spirited gig on the piano and the dancing recommenced. Hatty heard no more of the words that passed between the two – if any did; soon she saw Lord Camber walk slowly towards the entrance with bent head, still absently twirling the feather between his finger and thumb. Lady Ursula took a few hasty steps in the opposite direction, then was lost to view behind the line of dancers bounding back and forth.

  At the end of the dance Ned made his way through the crowd to Hatty’s side. He was pink, panting and smiling.

  ‘Lord, what fun! I say, it is not so bad here, after all, is it, Cousin Hatty?’ he said. ‘And that Miss Nancy Price is a capital dancer. Is she not? And she tells me she has a white parrot at home! And I may come to the house and see it, if Papa gives me leave. And she says she will ask her brother James to show me over the Thessaly!’

  As they walked homewards after the dancing lesson, the emotions felt by different members of the Ward family varied greatly, from excited anticipation, through moderate satisfaction, to a kind of sorrowful wonder.

  Aunt Polly seemed unusually fatigued, and walked slowly, with her hand pressed to her side. But her sons paid no heed to this.

  And, that night, Hatty tossed and turned on her pillow, teased out of sleep by two unanswered questions: what is amiss between those two? What happened once that cannot now be mended?

  Lines came into her head:

  The moon is upside down. What power uncanny

  Can toss it, like a pancake, like a penny

  Down into dark?

  Next day Lady Ursula took her departure, returning to Huntingdonshire; and Frances was allowed to remove herself to the domicile of the Price family.

  ‘Poor Lady Ursula!’ sighed Aunt Polly. ‘She is a queer, harsh, unaccountable creature! Was she really hoping, I wonder, that Camber might renew his addresses? After all this time? Can that have been why she came all this way to Letty Pentecost’s funeral?’

  ‘But she seemed so hostile and displeased when she did see Lord Camber,’ Hatty said.

  ‘Ay well – there’s no denying that he is an oddity too, a wayward fellow enough. And – I suppose – if she had been harbouring any schemes of a matrimonial kind – she may have decided to abandon them when she found out that he plans to sail to the Americas as an indentured servant. Such a footing would hardly suit her notions of consequence.’

  ‘What, Aunt?’ exclaimed Hatty, her mouth wide, her face pale with shock.

  ‘Why yes, he is going quite soon, did you not know? Lord Camber has told your uncle all his plans. He has, it seems, this Quixotic scheme for travelling across the ocean as a common labourer. You know how they do it – the cost of his trip is borne by an employer on condition that he engages himself (he is going as a carpenter, I believe) for a term of years equivalent to the passage money. He must serve any master who will have him on the other side. He says he wishes to ascertain the usage and plight of such poor emigrants. They take children, too, from Houses of Correction. He intends to observe the character of the sea-captains – some of them, it is said, exceedingly venal – and then proposes to write a book describing his experiences after he has established himself in this community that he and his friends are setting up, on the banks of the Susquehan
na river.’

  ‘I did not think it was so very definite,’ said Hatty forlornly. ‘Or would take place so soon.’

  ‘Indeed yes, my dear, within the next few months, I understand. He is selling off some of his estates in this part of the country to raise money for the Society of Sophocrats – your uncle handles the business for him. Of course his family are vastly angry with him about the matter and have all but cast him off, I believe; for he is the eldest son of the Duke, you know, Lady Ursula’s uncle, that is; Camber inherits the Dungeness title when the Duke dies, so it is a great scandal for them that he goes gadding abroad in this untoward manner. But Lord Camber himself has said that he is entirely ready to renounce the title in favour of his younger brother, Colonel Wisbech – only it seems that cannot be done, so easily. It would require an Act of Parliament, or some such thing.’

  For several nights after this conversation Hatty had agitating dreams, in which Lord Camber was engulfed by waves pouring over his capsized ship, or attacked by wild redskin savages, or pursued by lions and bears through impenetrable forests. The distress and anxiety brought on by these dreams was somewhat allayed by the untroubled appearance of Lord Camber himself, who had occasion at various times during the ensuing months – the date of his departure needed, it seemed, to be continually deferred – to visit Mr Ward on business, and chose, for his own reasons, to wait on the lawyer at his residence rather than in his office. More often than not he might be encountered about the house, and would pause, if he met Hatty, for a friendly word.

  ‘He is so affable and informal,’ sighed Aunt Polly. ‘I was almost startled to death when I came face to face with him on the stairs – and I in my calico apron and cotton gloves about to polish the lustres of the chandelier because I cannot trust Rebecca not to drop them on the brick floor of the pantry – but his manners are always so engaging and friendly. If I were Lady Ursula I’d have had him – red hair, gamekeeper’s gaiters, and all!’

  ‘But if it meant sailing across the Atlantic as a servant, aunt!’

  ‘Oh, I dare swear he’d soon enough give up any undertaking of that kind if she were to re-engage herself to him,’ Aunt Polly said with cheerful confidence.

  Hatty did not feel so certain.

  ‘I believe he has a great deal of resolution, Aunt Polly. And perhaps he did not go so far as to mention marriage, when they met this time.’ She thought of the words she had heard in the ballroom. ‘Can we not remember that we used to be friends?’ was all he had said. ‘But what puzzles me most of all, Aunt Polly, is, what can he see in her? Or ever have seen? She is so fierce! And – and grim! Was she always thus?’

  ‘Oh, no‚ my dear! You can hardly conceive the change that has come over her in the last seven or eight years. You would not recognize her for the same person! No, she was used to be – in her good moods – quite amazingly lively and light-hearted – flashing and handsome and overflowing with brilliance and wit—’

  ‘Truly, aunt?’

  Hatty found a brilliant, flashing, witty Lady Ursula very hard to picture.

  ‘I think Lady Ursula is one, Hatty, who needs the encouragement of another person’s unstinted love to bring out the best in her – and her best could be something remarkable, I promise you!’

  ‘Another person’s unstinted love!’ sighed Hatty. ‘Do we not all need that, Aunt Polly?’

  ‘Yes, child, and the only way to make your path easy through life is to learn to manage without it,’ said Aunt Polly, whose comments now and then had a bedrock of common sense which Hatty found very sustaining. But as Mrs Ward said the words, she sighed, and wiped her forehead with a handkerchief as if, at times, she found her own philosophy hard to practise.

  ‘Well, I do not believe that Lady Ursula will ever learn that lesson,’ said Hatty.

  A month or so after this conversation Hatty met Lord Camber on the stairway as she carefully carried a tray, loaded with gingerbread letters and apples, up to the nursery.

  ‘Good day to you, Miss Hatty!’

  ‘Good day, sir. I cannot shake hands, or I would spill these letters.’

  His frowning, smiling gaze rested on the things she carried.

  ‘Now, let me guess! You are going to feed a learned parrot?’

  ‘No, sir. Not a parrot.’ Hatty sighed a little, thinking of Ned’s ever-increasing devotion and numerous visits to the Price household. ‘Not a parrot. My cousins, the twins. It is Burnaby’s afternoon off.’

  ‘The twins? I was not even aware that there were twin children in Mr Ward’s family? And who, pray, is Burnaby?’

  ‘She is – she is – the person who has charge of the twins.’

  ‘They are infants? Why have I never made their acquaintance, I wonder?’

  ‘No, sir, they are not infants – but they very, very seldom go out of doors.’

  ‘And you teach them their letters on Burnaby’s free afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. Well – I try.’

  ‘May I be introduced to these unknown cousins? Would there be any objection? What are their names?’

  ‘They are Sophy and Eliza – and, no, I do not believe that my aunt would have any objection. She is lying down at present – I do not like to disturb her. She has been very fatigued and out of sorts lately.’

  Hatty did not say in so many words that, since the exertions and unusual social stresses and demands attendant on Lady Pentecost’s funeral, Aunt Polly had seemed progressively lower in spirits, anxious and depressed. Or perhaps she worried about Ned?

  Hatty repeated, ‘I do not believe that my aunt would object to your visiting the twins, if you wish it, sir,’ and led the way upstairs to the nursery where the twins spent the greater part of their life. It was a reasonably large apartment but, since it faced north and never received any sun, always remained somewhat lightless and gloomy.

  The twins were now eight. Emancipated, at last, from their high chairs, they were permitted to sit side by side at a table, under the supervisory eye of Rebecca the maid. But they appeared forlorn and listless, with no occupation, staring at nothing, waiting for nothing in particular. When they beheld Hatty, however, their dull eyes brightened; they did not smile, but breathed a word in unison: ‘Hatt.’

  ‘Well, my dears,’ she said cheerfully, ‘I have brought you some things for your reading lesson. (Thank you, Becky, you may run along.) But I have also brought you a gentleman visitor. Here is Lord Camber. Can you say good day to him?’

  ‘Goo’ day,’ they murmured, rather indistinctly, scanning Lord Camber with their pale, unfocussed eyes.

  Lord Camber beamed at them, as if greeting old friends after a long absence.

  ‘Miss Sophie! And Miss Eliza!’ he said. ‘I am very happy to make your acquaintance. And now I am going to watch your reading lesson – which looks to me also like a very fine picnic – and then I hope I may be allowed to teach you a splendid game of cat’s cradle. I always carry a length of twine in my pocket for just such a need.’

  He perched himself easily on the window-seat and watched while Hatty peeled the apple, cut it into quarters, and made an A from the discarded rind.

  ‘A is for Apple.’

  ‘Apple,’ they murmured acquiescently, munching pieces of fruit.

  ‘And B is for Bread.’ Hatty laid a gingerbread letter in front of each twin. These vanished even faster than the slices of apple. ‘And C is for Cake. And now I hope you are going to make me some A’s and B’s and C’s with your pencils and paper.’

  Slowly, earnestly and laboriously, they did so.

  ‘Good, clever girls. And a few more . . .’

  ‘They will never be able to learn even the basic rudiments of education,’ their father had said once, furiously, in Hatty’s hearing. ‘In my opinion it is useless, a waste of time, to attempt to teach them anything.’

  When the twins had endured as much of the lesson as their e
nergy and capacities would admit, Hatty said, ‘And now Lord Camber is going to show you his game.’

  Their eyes brightened at the sight of the string. Lord Camber’s game of cat’s-cradle was an unqualified success. He knew many elaborate variations, and it was remarkable how quickly the twins were able to pick these up, one observing while the other played, and then reversing roles. After that they showed him Scissors-Paper-Stone, which still and always remained their favourite pastime, and then there was time only for half a game of chess before Burnaby returned. Both twins played in partnership against Lord Camber, discussing their moves, it seemed to Hatty, not so much by speech as by some mental process that passed between them without the need for language. Studying them across the board, Camber nodded appreciatively as each move was made, until Burnaby marched into the room with her invariable: ‘Now I’d like my nursery to myself, if you please, Miss Hatty!’

  Lord Camber bowed to the twins.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Eliza, Miss Sophy! That was a very excellent and interesting game. I trust that I may be permitted to come back and resume it some time.’