The Youngest Miss Ward

by Joan Aiken

  ‘No,’ Lord Camber answered in the same tone (Godwit had followed Dickon to the stable), ‘he has been dumb since his father was transported for poaching when he was a little lad of two or three. But his wits are bright enough.’

  ‘Poor child! Is it known what became of his father?’

  ‘Word came back that he had died on the transport ship. Many do,’ Lord Camber added briefly. ‘But come in, and warm your cold hands. From the fragrance indoors I conclude that Nanny Godwit has been making some of her pheasant soup.’

  During the next couple of days Hatty learned that housekeeping for a family of eight or nine in a large house with an ample staff of servants in kitchen and garden is a very different matter from undertaking all the work of the house oneself, making soups and stews, kneading bread-dough, fetching vegetables and coal from icy outhouses, plucking birds and washing soiled linen. Mrs Daizley and Mrs Godwit took her at her word and allowed her to help with everything they did.

  ‘I have learned more from you two,’ she said, panting over the heavy iron mangle, ‘than in six years at my aunt’s house – and yet Aunt Polly is an excellent housekeeper.’

  ‘Ah, ‘tis the doing it yourself that learns ye, dearie,’ agreed Mrs Godwit. ‘And the things that me and Jenny teach ye will stand ye in good stead for the rest of your life, I’ll lay.’

  ‘I shall always remember these days,’ Hatty said with certainty. ‘Now I know what real happiness is like.’

  When the essential household tasks were finished, Nanny Godwit taught her the craft of rug-making, which was done with rags of cloth (‘We gets their worn-out gowns from the ladies at Underwood Priors – there is always a-plenty’) threaded and knotted on to a coarse canvas foundation. Or, from Dickon, she learned to whittle clothes-pegs. Or how to lay mortar, from Godwit and Lord Camber, who were building an internal wall to partition off one end of the stable. Or how to make patchwork from Mrs Daizley. Or how to make corn-dolls from Dickon. When the sun shone, briefly, between snow-showers, Lord Camber took her out along his favourite rides through the woods, which covered a hilly rugged area including a small lake and a winding stream.

  In the evenings, when early winter dark had fallen, they sang. Lord Camber had a modest tenor voice, Mrs Daizley a firm contralto, and Mrs Godwit an aged, faint, true soprano. Godwit had no voice at all, he croaked like a raven and could not tell one note from another, but, to counterbalance that, he had in his memory a vast store of folk songs, ballads, rounds, glees, and catches, and beat time vigorously while he gave out the words. Hatty was able to add a few to this repertory from those she had sung with her mother. And, noticing Dickon’s interested eyes following the rhythm of their opening and shutting mouths and Godwit’s gestures, she had the notion of contriving him an instrument, halfway between a drum and a tambourine, made from canvas stretched over the mouth of a round basket. On this, while they sang, he happily thumped with a wooden mallet.

  ‘He keeps very precise time, too,’ said Lord Camber, watching attentively. ‘I believe you have discovered something, Miss Hatty.’

  ‘I am going to try to teach him to read,’ said Hatty, and cut a set of letters from a thin sheet of paste-board. With these she produced DISH, BREAD, PLATE, TABLE and could have no doubt of Dickon’s instant comprehension, as she matched the words and pointed out the appropriate objects.

  ‘I wish I could come over here from my father’s house and go on working with him,’ she said to Mrs Daizley. ‘But I’m afraid they will never allow me.’

  ‘We’ll keep on with him, never fear,’ said Mrs Godwit. ‘Next time you come this way I believe the lad will be reading all Master Harry’s books.’

  ‘I wish I need never leave here,’ sighed Hatty. ‘This is the sort of house I have always wanted to live in, all my life.’

  She drew a picture of a house among trees for Dickon and laid the letters HOUSE beside it. He nodded gravely and fitted in lines up and down the roof to represent thatch, so she added the letters THATCH.

  Lord Camber, descending the study stair, said, ‘I am sorry to interrupt your lesson – but the sun is out, had you noticed? And I believe it grows a little warmer.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow the young lady will be able to leave us,’ said Mrs Godwit.

  ‘I shall be very sorry to,’ said Hatty.

  Today, when they climbed Lord Camber’s Viewpoint hill, their snow-shoes slipped and sank in soft, moist snow, and a mild wind blew gently in their faces.

  ‘Yes, a thaw is coming,’ said Lord Camber, ‘you can feel it. Perhaps it will rain tonight and clear the roads.’

  Hatty did not confess how heavy-hearted this prospect made her. But her companion went on: ‘I shall miss our conversations when I am gone abroad, shall not you? What a great deal of ground we have covered, from our arguments as to whether sunlight or lamplight is more beautiful, and the best way to fry an egg, to discussions about poetry and moral questions. I do not believe there is a single question on which we agree!’

  ‘Except about the egg!’ said Hatty, laughing. But there is one thing we have never discussed, she thought.

  ‘I’ll write to you – shall I? – from Pennsylvania? To tell you about the ocean voyage, and what kind of employment I am fixed in?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Do, please! I should like that of all things. But will you have time? It seems so strange to think of you employed as a servant . . .’

  Privately she thought that, unless his employers were exceedingly autocratic and difficult, they would soon be on the easy comfortable terms with him that obtained in the Thatched Grotto, with no distinctions between different members of the household.

  ‘And you will answer my letters – from time to time – will you? And send me specimens of your newest verses?’

  ‘As soon as you let me have your address!’

  ‘Oh, you can always write to me in care of the Sophocratic Community at Amity Valley, and my friends Wandesleigh and Kittridge; they will make sure that letters are sent on to me. But where shall I direct my letters to you?’

  ‘Well – I suppose – at my father’s house, at Bythorn Lodge,’ Hatty said slowly. She wondered if her father would disapprove of her receiving letters from Lord Camber. Almost certainly he would, very strongly, remembering Uncle Philip. But then, she probably would not remain at Bythorn Lodge any longer than it took Mr Ward to find her some eligible situation as a governess; she felt certain that would be her immediate destiny.

  A faint hallooing and the sound of a horn came from below them to the east.

  ‘Oh, see! There are the hounds! Just as Godwit predicted!’

  Below them on the hillside a ribbon of black and white and tan poured out of the pines, circled around the hill, then vanished back into the trees again. Men in scarlet coats galloped after them on horseback and likewise disappeared into the trees.

  ‘A queer pursuit,’ said Camber. ‘When you think about it in a detached spirit.’

  ‘Did you never go a-hunting, sir?’

  ‘Oh, certainly, when I was a boy. And then, I found it very exciting. But it was the rush across country that I enjoyed, not the pitiful business of tearing the fox to pieces— Talk of the devil, there he goes!’

  A small brown creature, mouth lolling open as if he laughed, slipped between the heather tussocks, going in a contrary direction to the pursuers.

  ‘He has doubled back on them, clever little beast.’

  ‘Oh, let us hope that he has given them the slip. No, see, they are following the scent back again,’ Hatty said regretfully. She was always surprised at the smallness of a fox; it seemed a puny prey for a whole troop of large men on horseback with half a hundred dogs.

  The hounds once more poured over the hillside below, a good deal closer now to Lord Camber and Hatty, who stood on the summit by the snow-covered bench.

  ‘View halloo-oo, there he goes!’ shouted somebody, and
a clump of riders tore by them, splashing up great clots of the caked snow, which, in the sunshine, was beginning to thaw quite rapidly.

  ‘Did you see him? Where is he?’ one rider called back to Camber, who shook his head.

  In the distance the hounds yelled and pealed, sounding mad with excitement; a voice close beside Hatty and Camber suddenly said: ‘Good gad – it’s m’daughter!’ A red face under a black top hat turned to give them a disapproving glare, and then its owner, a tall, solidly built man on a massive bay horse went thundering off down the hill, kicking up a spray of melting snow with his rear hoofs. A moment later there came a terrible outburst of shouts, the triumphant cry of hounds, and more notes on the horn.

  ‘Come,’ said Camber, ‘let us not stay for the kill – ’ and he caught Hatty’s arm, urging her away down the steep track on the opposite side of the hill.

  Well, thought Hatty, at least now Papa knows that I am alive; not that the knowledge seemed to give him any pleasure.

  She felt a vague surprise that he had been able to recognize her, after a six-year absence, forgetting how much she was said to resemble her mother.

  ‘Would you wish to try to catch up with your father?’ Camber asked, loosing her hand at the foot of the hill. ‘It sounds to me as if they have gone into the wood looking for another fox. I daresay they are all regretting that they caught up with that one so early in the day.’

  ‘No, I am sure that would be a great mistake,’ said Hatty. ‘We might trudge over half the country and still never come up with him again. And he would hate to be interrupted in the middle of a run. Perhaps at the end of the day’s sport he may come round by your house – he recognized you, did he not?’

  ‘Oh yes, we have met each other on various occasions.’

  Camber did not pursue this. They made their way back to the cottage in silence. There Godwit met them with the information that the road from the Cross to Bythorn would be passable by the following morning, and he had succeeded in hiring a chaise to transport Hatty at that time from the Woodpecker Inn to Bythorn Lodge.

  Mrs Daizley and Mrs Godwit were touchingly grieved at the prospect of Hatty’s departure. ‘Like a ray of sunshine you’ve been,’ said Mrs Daizley, and wanted to load her with pots of blackberry jelly and strings of dried mushrooms. But these Hatty thought it best to decline in case Lady Ursula or her sister Agnes considered them a slur on the housekeeping at Bythorn Lodge. Lord Camber offered to accompany her on horseback, but this offer, too, she put by, though with considerable regret. She could not feel, though, that another meeting between Camber and Lady Ursula would be in any way desirable, or would be likely to ameliorate her homecoming.

  Camber himself, therefore, was to set off for Bristol at the same time. Godwit had heard, from a packman who had called at the Woodpecker, that the roads westward beyond Oxford were not so badly affected by snow.

  At this announcement Mrs Daizley broke down entirely.

  ‘Oh, Master Harry! When shall we see you again?’ she wept into her apron, and he laid an arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Should not you and Nanny like to come and join me at Amity Valley? When I am free of my indentures? I am sure the life there would suit you both very well.’

  ‘No, no, Master Harry dear, we are too old to shift as far as that and leave all our friends.’

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we must just think of each other kindly. We shall be sure to do that, shall we not?’

  ‘But you’ll be back some day – won’t ye? – For you will be obliged to when his Grace is no more?’

  ‘Well,’ he said laughing, ‘we shall see. Perhaps that task may be offloaded on to my brother’s shoulders.’

  ‘Colonel Wisbech? Never! All he thinks about are his guns and his waistcoats!’

  ‘We shall see,’ Lord Camber repeated.

  His farewell to Hatty, on the following morning, was brief. Characteristically, he was to set off on foot, with no luggage but a knapsack, to pick up the Oxford mailcoach at a west-lying crossroads.

  ‘Well, Miss Hatty –’ he grasped her hands, looking down at her with the smile that dispersed a hundred tiny creases from his eyes – ‘I shall not be likely to forget all the things we have said to one another. And I shall not lose your poems. I have them in my notebook.’ He patted a poacher’s pocket. ‘Some in my head, too. I shall expect to see them in reviews and periodicals before very long. And I shall hope that the sun shines on your path.’

  ‘Goodbye, Lord Camber,’ was all Hatty could find voice for.

  She turned away hastily to where Godwit and Dickon were waiting to escort her to the Woodpecker Inn.

  X

  Hatty’s uncle Philip had supplied her with a modest sum of money for travelling expenses; she feared that it would not extend to the cost of a private chaise from Wanmaulden Cross to Bythorn. In order to distract herself from this worry, and from the effect of parting from Lord Camber and the informal but congenial existence at the Thatched Grotto, she stared resolutely out of the chaise window at the snow-patched meadows bobbing past, and engaged her mind with a poem:

  Useless to put the question to the grass

  As to: he loves me or he loves me not;

  The nodding field’s indifferent, divided

  Exactly on the matter, which is what

  The law of averages made one fear.

  Daisies the same,

  One can’t believe a word

  Since each negates the last . . .

  I wonder what Lord Camber would think of that. I wonder if it is rather vulgar to have a rhyme at all? I wonder how far Lord Camber has travelled by now? Is he on the Oxford coach yet? I wonder how soon I can possibly expect a letter from him? Not for at least four months, I suppose. And then he may be too busy, too involved in new experiences, to find time for writing to such a chance acquaintance as myself. Or he may not have access to writing materials. Or he may have forgotten me entirely. Oh, parting is such pain . . .

  Very fortunately, when the chaise pulled up at Bythorn Lodge, the door was opened by Firle the footman, an old ally of Hatty’s.

  ‘Oh, Firle, I am so glad it is you. Can you please see that the driver is paid off?’

  He gaped at her in astonishment.

  ‘My word, miss, ye’ve come fast! Yes, I’ll get the money from Mrs Ayling – we’re all in a pucker here, as ye can imagine.’

  Indeed the house did show signs of unusual disorder: mud on the mat, Mr Ward’s hunting-hat and whip lying on the hall table amid a scatter of unopened letters. Jenny the housemaid, arriving as Firle returned with the chaise fare, cried out, ‘Oh, Miss Hatty! What a to-do! The poor master!’

  ‘Why, Jenny? What has happened?’

  ‘Didn’t ye know, then? He got throwed yesterday, a-hunting – fetched home on a hurdle. Mr Jones says it will be only a matter of hours now, if as long—’

  ‘Oh, good God!’ whispered Hatty. ‘Yesterday – when Papa was out hunting – then—’

  It must have happened not long after we saw him, she thought. How strange – how terribly strange. How awful.

  ‘’Twas on account of the melting snow,’ Jenny went on. ‘Very slushy it was, and Master’s horse, Fiddler, slipped as he was about to jump a gate at Hickley Wood, and threw the Master, and the poor gentleman fell on his head – the horse fell on him too – there was a-many falls yesterday, Mr Gridley said, the slush was that treacherous. Missus had begged the Master not to go out in the morning, but he would not listen, he said he’d been confined to the house three days, and that was quite long enough—’

  ‘And that is quite enough from you, Jenny,’ snapped a familiar voice from the stair; Hatty, looking up, saw her sister Agnes. The sight of Agnes – her sharp face, pursed-up mouth and disapproving, gimlet eyes, instantly recalled that former occasion, the calamitous fall, the ivory hairbrush, broken mirror, the shattered Venetian
flask. I bring bad luck wherever I go, thought Hatty in despair.

  ‘So, Harriet! You are come at last!’ pronounced Agnes sourly. ‘Too late for any farewell to our father, I fear. It is a pity that you delayed your return for so long.’

  ‘I came as soon as I could,’ Hatty protested. ‘Yesterday there was no chaise to be had.’

  ‘Well! I may say that Mr Norris and I made our way on horseback. Sir Thomas was so kind as to let us have two safe old hacks from the Park stable. We spare neither time nor trouble to do our duty in such a case. As soon as the news came to Mansfield about poor Papa – we must be off, my dear, directly, said I to Mr Norris; and he was quite of my mind and asked Sir Thomas for the horses directly; he is upstairs now, sitting with poor Papa, and with dear Lady Ursula, offering what solace and comfort he can; it is a most grievous mishap, and, what shocked me more than all, was that, while Papa was still able to speak last night, he told us that he had seen you walking with Lord Camber, carefree as you please on Coppice Hill. I have no doubt whatsoever that this encounter with you, in such disgracefully untoward circumstances rendered Papa somewhat careless in the control of his horse; for, all these years he has followed the hounds and such an accident never befell him before – or not very often—’

  Lady Ursula now came stalking down the stair, thin and pale as a spectre.

  ‘It is over,’ she reported briefly. ‘Mr Ward is no more.’

  ‘There, miss, you see!’ said Agnes. ‘You arrived too late to be at his bedside.’

  ‘I do not suppose that he would have been at all pleased to see me,’ pointed out Hatty forlornly.

  ‘That is hardly relevant – or respectful to the departed,’ snapped Lady Ursula. ‘And where, pray, have you been these past three days? Certainly it was unfortunate that the vehicle Mr Ward had ordered to meet you was unable to proceed – but could you not have despatched some message as to your whereabouts? Your father was quite concerned about you – so were we all – or would have been if we had known. Why did you not contrive to send word from the inn?’