by Joan Aiken
Lady Catherine was amazingly grand, in crocus-coloured satin and a headdress at least two feet in height, adorned with ostrich feathers. But what made her costume outstanding was the profusion of diamonds that she had hung about her person: a triple-strand necklace, ear-bobs, innumerable brooches and a kind of coronet wound about her turban. Many were the compliments she received upon her garniture, but I happened to hear Miss Delaval remark privily to Lady Towers that since the diamonds were so fine, it was a great shame that they had been allowed to grow so dirty. Lady C. also chanced to overhear this, and was mightily displeased, and I noticed her several times afterwards observing herself narrowly, in one of the long glasses which alternate with the blue-and-gold panelling. Next, she asked Sir Marmaduke Towers if he could recommend a good diamond-cleaning establishment and he, without the least hesitation, suggested Gray’s, at 41 Sackville Street, but now Mr Delaval, approaching, contradicted him and said no, Rundell & Bridge were more reliable, and, furthermore, would send a man to the country who would perform the task of cleaning the diamonds on the premises, thus avoiding the expense and risk of transporting the stones to London. Lady C. took heed of all this, but what decision she came to regarding the jewellery I do not know.
Miss Anne de Bourgh was greatly out of spirits throughout the whole evening, and more than once I heard her being reprimanded by her mother for her downcast looks and mumchance manner. ‘How can you expect me to be otherwise,’ said Miss Anne, ‘when poor Mr Finglow lies so ill, and it is all because of what you did.’ ‘How dare you speak to your parent in such a manner,’ replied Lady C. in a passion. ‘Let me hear no more of this!’ ‘If my father were still alive—’ said Miss Anne, but Lady C., with a terrible look, said, ‘Hold your tongue, miss!’ and swept away.
The cause of this dissension is that the two painting gentlemen (I mentioned them in a previous letter) who live in a cottage by the lake have been given notice to quit, so that their house may be pulled down and some elegant folly or grotto erected in place of it, which will more suitably enhance the distant prospect from Rosings House. They had occupied their cottage for such a long time that this was a severe blow to them, and the elder of the two men, Mr Desmond Finglow, already in poor health, suffered at that time from a palsy-stroke which has left him blind and helpless. It is very sad to see him. Charlotte and I have been several times to the house with fruits and jellies, but Mr Willis the surgeon holds out no real hope that the gentleman will recover. A further pity is that the portrait which Mr Finglow was painting of Miss Anne was so nearly finished, but he can no longer see it, nor would have the strength to complete it. Meanwhile his friend Mr Ambrose has been looking about for another house to which they might remove, but this is no easy task, as you may imagine, and he has little heart for it, with his friend so ill. I believe he appealed to Lord Luke and asked him if Lady C. might not be prepared to revoke her edict, but Lord L. is a queer, unaccountable character. He seems amiable enough, but will not bestir himself for any other person. And he said (probably with truth) that he has no influence with his sister – as indeed who has, unless the advice chimes with her own wishes? Her answer was merely that when she returns from the island of Great Morran she hopes to find the cottage vacated and the process of demolition begun.
Meanwhile, turning to a more cheerful topic, my niece and nephew, little Lucy and Sam, have returned home as their foster mother, Mrs Hobden, has gone to nurse poor Mr Finglow. They are a dear pair of children, and you will be happy to hear that I am teaching them to play on your beautiful piano, which they take to most readily, and they are also happy to caper about for ever while I play them country dances. The twin babes thrive, and my sister Charlotte is quite restored to her normal busy self. I should be thinking of my return into Hertfordshire, but Charlotte begs me to continue here so long as Mr Collins is from home, and indeed I am happy to do so.
I have been trying to befriend poor Miss Anne, who, I think, has a sad life of it, and sees little good ahead in her future, but she responds only very slowly to my overtures. Her chief friend seems to be Joss, the garden-boy, who was brought up in London by a gypsy mother but returned to Hunsford, his birthplace, after her death. He seems to have had a most varied life: at one time he worked for Sir Felix Ravenstone, the President of the Royal Society; at another, he told me, he trained as a pickpocket! And his dog, Pluto, was also trained to the trade! I hope he was funning. He is an entertaining boy, with a quiet wit. At all events, there are few pockets to pick in rural Kent.
Your sincere friend,
Maria Lucas
‘The earliest hangman whose name survives was called Bull. Is not that interesting?’ said Lord Luke. ‘One asks oneself if it is because of him that the English have adopted John Bull as their national figure. The most famous hangman, of course, was Jack Ketch, who executed Lord Russell and the Duke of Monmouth.’
‘Will you please quit this disagreeable topic, Lucius,’ snapped Lady Catherine. ‘Heaven knows that I have enough to concern my mind without your—’
‘A hangman’s wage,’ her brother pursued, wholly ignoring Lady Catherine’s interruption, ‘was thirteen pence and a halfpenny – with another three halfpence for the rope. I daresay it is considerably more nowadays. Nobles, of course, were expected to remunerate the executioner with seven or ten pounds for cutting off their heads. That, to me, seems unfair. Why should I be expected to lay out such a sum for such a dismal service?’
‘I daresay you would be glad enough to do so when it came to the point, Uncle Luke,’ said Anne de Bourgh, rousing herself from a gloomy abstraction. ‘Hanging seems to be such a chancy process.’
‘Anne! Pray be silent if you have nothing better to say!’
Mr Delaval came hastily to the rescue of this unfortunate conversation.
‘Shall I write to Rundell and Bridge, Lady Catherine, and invite them to send their diamond expert down so that he may be burnishing up your necklace while you are on your travels? Then what a joy when you come back, to see you and the stones complementing each other in perfection! I trust you will give a party for the whole neighbourhood after your safe return?’
‘Yes indeed,’ chimed in his sister. ‘And my brother will have all manner of happy surprises prepared for you then. But mum is the word! I must not reveal his secrets until that joyful day!’
‘Humph,’ said her ladyship. ‘I have not yet made up my mind about the necklace. Sir Marmaduke recommended Gray’s of Sackville Street – he said they did an excellent piece of work for him on the hilt of the sword that Charles I gave his ancestor. Myself, I incline to Gray’s. Pronkum could take the jewels up to London.’
‘Pronkum!’ cried Sir Luke in outrage. ‘You would entrust your diamonds to that skinny creature?’
‘She has served me faithfully for twenty years. I place my complete trust in her.’
‘I’d put more trust in a scarecrow. And a scarecrow would be better company.’
‘Mr Ambrose Mynges is here, my lady,’ said Frinton the butler, entering, ‘and begs the honour of a few words with you.’
‘I cannot see him at this present,’ said Lady Catherine shortly. ‘Tell him that I am too occupied. I have a great many affairs to attend to. Lucius, why do not you see him? Frinton, tell the man that Lord Luke will see him.’
‘What good will that do, Catherine?’ said Lord Luke fretfully. But Lady Catherine had already left the breakfast parlour.
Anne went out and walked unhappily towards the pleasure gardens. She could not bear the thought of her friends being rebuffed.
A stretch of lawn, dotted with a few trees, lay between the rear of the house and the pleasure gardens. Here the boy Joss was to be seen, equipped with a broom and a shovel, carefully inspecting the verdure. His dog Pluto followed him as usual.
‘What in the world are you doing, Joss?’ Anne asked, as she came up with him. ‘It is not the season for dead leaves. Or mushrooms.’
‘No, missie,’ said Joss with a broad grin. ‘’Tis b
adger fewmets I be looking for.’
‘Badger fewmets? What are they?’
‘Droppings, miss. Turds. Owd Mester Brock, he be a-coming this way, of a night, every night just now, and doing his business out on the grassy lawn. Like, maybe, ’tis to claim the ground as hisn, warn off other badgers.’ His eye spotted a pile of the material in question, and he neatly swept it on to the shovel with the broom and then dropped it into a bucket.
‘What do you do with them?’
‘Put them on the rose-bed, missie. Powerful good for the roses, they do be.’
‘How do you know it is a badger and not just a dog?’ Anne said, looking sceptically at Pluto. ‘The droppings look much the same size to me.’
‘Oh, no, missie. Badgers’ fewmets be full o’ nuts and berries – holly berries, yew berries, rose-hips – a dog, he won’t never nibble such stuff, will ’ee, Pluto?’
Pluto looked up and wagged his tail.
‘But ’tis a right nuisance, that it be,’ Joss acknowledged, ‘and the sooner Mester Brock finds hisself another privy for to leave his leavings in, the better I’ll be pleased. Mester Smirke, he’s worried her ladyship’ll walk this way some morning afore I’ve tidied all up, and then the fur’d fly, surely!’
‘It certainly would!’
Sighing, Anne walked on past the shrubbery, and came to the bridge over the ha-ha. From here there was a clear view down to the house that her friends had soon to quit. She stood wretchedly on the bridge, wishing that she could go down and comfort them, aware that she could do nothing, enraged at her own helplessness.
A thick column of smoke rose from beside the cottage. Sometimes a leaping flame could be seen.
Smirke walked past Anne, wheeling a barrow full of hedge clippings. He greeted Anne very respectfully, then, following the direction of her gaze, said with a knowing grin:
‘’Tis like the gentry down there be a-clearing up and a-tidying out. Her ladyship ’on’t want any of their clutter left behind when they do go.’
‘But how can they go when poor Mr Finglow is so unwell?’ she said angrily.
‘That be their affair, bean’t it?’
He wheeled his load away to where a bonfire of his own, beside the glasshouses, piled high with greenstuff, was sending a thick, lazy plume of grey smoke into the still air.
Lady Catherine could be seen emerging from the house, accompanied by the Delavals. Anne hastily turned and fled off into the shrubbery.
* * *
The day of Lady Catherine’s departure for the island of Great Morran was wet and thundery, a circumstance that effectually prevented any prolonged ceremony of leave-taking. There were two coaches, a baggage coach and the lady’s own chaise, in which she rode, escorted by Hoskins, the deputy lady’s maid, with a hot brick for her feet wrapped in sheepskin, flasks of hot soup wrapped in felt containers, a cloak bag, umbrellas, a basket of provisions, several volumes of sermons, smelling salts and pills for seasickness.
The horses stood stamping and steaming in the downpour.
Lady Catherine herself was imposingly attired in a plum-coloured pelisse buttoned up to the throat, a huge sable muff and a long sable cloak around her shoulders. Her hat was adorned with egret feathers so long and flexible that they swept the ceiling of the carriage.
Hoskins threw a triumphant glance at the rejected Pronkum, who stood glaring balefully on the steps. There, too, among a group of people getting wet, was Mr Gregory Stillbrass the lawyer, a thin, worried, grey-headed man who did not at all approve of his employer’s departure over land and sea on such a hazardous mission.
‘But this course is incumbent upon me, do you not see,’ Lady Catherine repeated for the last time as she left him. ‘I should never forgive myself if, for lack of effort on my part, such a sum of money were allowed to pass out of the family.’
‘But could not Lord Luke, or even I myself—?’ he wrung his hands.
‘Fiddlesticks, man! Neither of you would be the slightest use. But I am not nobody, I believe.’
‘No, indeed, your ladyship is not nobody—’
‘And I hope I shall be able to prevail upon my sister-in-law to dispose of that fortune in a rational manner. Where is Anne?’ said her ladyship, looking round.
Mrs Jenkinson fluttered forward.
‘I am afraid poor Miss Anne is still wholly prostrated—’
‘Oh humph. All I can say is that it was all most unfortunate. Most…’
‘Your ladyship,’ called the coachman, ‘we should be on our way or we shall never reach Salisbury by dinner-time.’
‘Oh, very well. Very well.’
She climbed into the carriage with the assistance of FitzWilliam, and said to him, ‘I look to you and Delaval, both men of some sense, to have an eye to all matters about the house while I am gone. My brother is quite useless. And Anne will not come out of her sulks, I suppose, for some considerable time. Mrs Collins! Pray inform your husband that if he is not back at Hunsford before my return, I shall be most seriously displeased.’
‘Yes, your ladyship.’
‘Yes, Aunt Catherine,’ Colonel FitzWilliam and Mrs Collins said simultaneously, and gave each other nervous smiles. The door slammed, the whip cracked and the two coaches rolled away, while the damp farewell party retreated with some relief into the shelter of the house – all except Mrs Collins, who, reopening her umbrella, prepared to return to the parsonage.
Colonel FitzWilliam volunteered to accompany her, and took charge of the umbrella. ‘How is Miss Lucas?’ he inquired, after they had walked some yards in silence.
Charlotte gave him a chilly glance.
‘She and Mr Lawson are down at Wormwood End cottage, trying to comfort poor Mr Mynges. I had invited him to come and stay at the parsonage, but he would not. He said his place was with his friend – or where his friend had been – as long as it was possible for him to remain there. I believe there are still two days remaining before the expiry of his notice to quit,’ she added drily.
‘It was a bad business, a dreadful business,’ said the colonel uncomfortably.
‘Bad? It was atrocious!’ Charlotte said sharply. ‘That poor, poor man – driven to do such a thing.’
‘You believe, then, that he did it on purpose?’
‘Walk into a blazing bonfire? How could it have been an accident?’
‘But he was blind.’
‘He had the use of his other senses. He was an independent man, a man of strong feelings. He knew what he was doing, Colonel! I was down there at his house three days ago, talking to him. He said to me, “How can I be such a charge upon Ambrose? He has the task of finding another house for us, a house where I can learn my blind way about. Here it would not be so bad; I know every step and corner of Wormwood End. But at my time of life I am too slow to learn, too set in my ways to make the adjustment. I shall be nothing but a weight around his neck. I deserve to be cast out, like all those old frames and stretchers that he is burning outside in the garden.’ Finglow was a brave man, Colonel! I am only glad that Mr Collins was not here at the time,’ she added, brushing an angry tear from her cheek.
‘Why?’ he asked incautiously.
‘Mr Collins would have felt it his duty to be extremely dissaproving. As it was, I thought that Mr Lawson, in his funeral sermon, did very well. He was tactful, friendly and discreet.’
‘Lady Catherine was greatly surprised to hear what a large number of Mr Finglow’s friends came from London, besides all the local people.’
‘Lady Catherine, perhaps, did well not to attend the funeral. And her absence, just now, will be no bad thing, until the matter has somewhat passed out of people’s minds.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Perhaps the Delavals will soon leave. I rather hope so.’
‘Oh? I thought they planned all sorts of surprises for Lady Catherine’s return?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I am not in their confidence.’
They had now reached the parsonage. Charlotte, talking the umbrella from
him, said, ‘Thank you for your escort, Colonel. Please say all that is friendly and condoling from me to Miss Anne. I shall come and see her soon, tell her.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said the colonel. He went on uncomfortably, ‘I do not suppose—’ caught Charlotte’s indignant eye on him, muttered, ‘Thank you, Mrs Collins,’ and walked off forlornly into the rain.
VI
‘A garden,’ said Joss, ‘be like a person.’
‘What do you mean, Joss?’
‘Well, look upon it this way. You don’t give care and help to someone, that body’s a-going to turn agin you. Right?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Anne, thinking of herself. Nobody has given me much care and help, she thought; except Joss, to be sure. And I am against everybody. That is true.
‘Leave your garden alone for two weeks,’ pursued Joss, ‘and that’ll turn angry. And I don’t mean just the weeds’ll come up and start to plague you; no, the whole plot ’ull have a bad feel agin you. It’ll turn sour, ye’ll have to pamper and coddle a bit afore it’ll welcome ye back.’
‘Even a garden like this?’ said Anne, looking across the shaven lawns. ‘Even a garden that doesn’t belong to you?’
‘That don’t make no manner of difference. Just to have your name writ on a bit o’ paper, that’s no business of plants or trees. Is it? A garden belongs to the chaps as does the digging and pruning.’
