I smiled at her blandly. “Do you know, Mrs. Willoughby, I really do not think that I will.”
She stalked out with as much dignity as one can muster when dripping egg yolk and crunching broken egg shells—which in her case, to do her fair justice again, actually resulted in a not inconsiderable degree of stateliness to her exit. The front door slammed behind her with a bang that rattled the window casings.
I turned to Eliza—and found her shaking with silent laughter. The first time that I have ever seen her really laugh, that I can recall. “Do you know,” she said, gasping, “it was almost worth the woman’s visit, just to have witnessed that. Thank you, Miss Dashwood.”
“You are most welcome—though I seem to have made quite a mess of your floor,” I added, glancing down at the broken eggs. “You must let me help you clean it up.”
Eliza shook her head, her lips still twitching with remembered amusement. “Believe me when I say that I consider it well worth it. And don’t trouble yourself about the mess. I’ll just fetch a bucket and rags from the kitchen.”
Later
I had to stop writing earlier and go down to supper; the bell rang while I was in the midst of writing that last sentence. I would have pleaded fatigue—I am certainly tired enough after today—and asked for a tray to be sent up to my room, but it seemed unkind to leave Marianne alone with the Palmers. And besides, it is more important than ever that I behave to all eyes—Marianne’s in particular—as though nothing at all is wrong.
So I was forced to endure an entire meal accompanied by Mr. Palmer’s sardonic commentary on everything from the news in the papers to the size of the vegetable marrows from the garden, Mrs. Palmer’s laughter and exclamations of delight—and Marianne’s puzzled, speculative gaze.
But I am back in my own room, now. The housemaid has already been in to turn down the bed and bank the fire for the night, so I can be reasonably certain of not being interrupted. Which means that I can set down the second half of the day’s events—Mrs. Willoughby’s visit to Eliza having been only the first.
Eliza left me in the front room to fetch the bucket and rags. She was gone several minutes—longer than I would have thought such an errand would take—and when she came back, her face was paper white. Whiter even than it had been during Mrs. Willoughby’s explanatory speech.
“Eliza? What is it?” I asked.
“Joanna.” Eliza groped for the back of a chair and gripped it as though without its support she would have been unable to stand. “It’s Joanna. She has run away.”
I was not in that first moment unduly worried. Joanna is constantly running off in order to avoid doing her lessons—or to avoid a scolding for not having done her lessons. She goes off and spends a day in climbing trees or picking berries and returns home in the evening very dirty but otherwise unharmed.
Eliza shook her head, though, when I said as much. “No—you do not understand. She left a note.” Her hand shook as she held out a torn scrap of paper to me. “She told …”—Eliza’s throat worked—“she told Maggie to give it to me. And then she left.”
I took the note. It was not long, hideously misspelled and written in Joanna’s unformed, childish hand.
I herd what the laydee said about me being a des discrace. But I don’t want to go and liv with her. So I am runing away. Good-bye.
“That—” Eliza swallowed again. “That odious woman said that since Joanna’s existence was a disgrace—proof of my lack of virtue, she called it—I would surely be glad to be rid of her. I had thought—I sent Joanna up to her room, so that she would not hear anything that was said. I might have known she would only creep back down again and listen at the door. I have been so careful, always—never to speak of her father, never to let her know anything about the irregularity of her birth. And now—” Eliza’s voice caught on the last words. “Now she thinks that I do not want her.”
I set the note down. “She cannot think that—not really. She may be angry and upset and confused now. But you have shown her your love in a thousand ways every day of her life. Joanna has far better sense than to be persuaded so easily that you would be glad to have her off your hands. And besides, she cannot have got very far. We will find her and bring her home—and you will tell her that Mrs. Willoughby is an ogress and a witch, and that if she should ever appear here again, Joanna can feel free to throw eggs at her, too. She will like that.”
Eliza smiled—if wanly—and agreed that she should run back to the mansion house and enlist the help of the menservants in mounting a search, while I began looking for Joanna in her usual haunts.
I was worried, though—more worried than I allowed to show for Eliza’s sake. And I grew more so after we parted and I began to search—and to call Joanna’s name—without any result.
Sensible Joanna may be, in her sturdy, determined way—but she is also an expert at hiding, and I was not at all sure of our ability to find her if she did not wish to be found. At least it was summer, so it was not as though she was in danger of freezing, even if she stayed out all night. But there was the turnpike road close by, with post carriages and mail coaches speeding past at all hours of the day. If she should happen to wander into the road, she might easily be struck and killed by accident.
Besides which, though the Delaford woods at least do not harbour bears or wolves, there might still be wandering vagrants.
After I had hunted in all the likely spots within a short radius of the cottage, I found myself on the path to Jamie’s encampment—so I quickened my pace and headed there. I intended only to ask Jamie whether he had seen any sign of Joanna. But when I found him, he listened to my breathless exclamation with a slight frown on his brow and then said, “Right. I’ll help you search.”
I gave him a dubious look. Jamie seemed a bit better—well enough at least to have heated water over the fire, which he was using to shave the several days’ growth of beard from his jaw. But his eyes still looked over-bright with fever, and his movements had a controlled stiffness to them, as though he were constantly tensed against some inner pain.
He insisted he was well enough to come, though—and indeed, he kept up with me fairly well, as we headed uphill along the rise in land that backs Colonel Brandon’s estate. It was only when we had covered perhaps the better part of a mile that I noticed he had dropped behind—and looking back, I saw that he was leaning with his back against a tree trunk, his eyes closed and his breathing coming in harsh gasps.
“Jamie!”
His eyes snapped open at the sound of my voice, and he said, automatically, “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine—you look terrible!” His face was a sickly greyish-pale, and his shirt was damp with patches of sweat—though the day was not terribly warm, and especially beneath the canopy of trees over our heads the air felt almost cool.
“All right, that’s more or less how I feel, too—so at least I’m consistent even if I’m not exactly fine.” His brief smile faded, though, as he straightened and pushed off from the tree. “I mean it—I’m all right to go on.” His eyes scanned the shaded path up ahead—a narrow, overgrown track that looked as though it were more suitable for deer than humans. “A child shouldn’t—there could be danger to the child out here, unless she’s found.”
I thought there was an odd intensity in the way he spoke the words, in the lines of strain that bracketed the edges of his mouth. As though his thoughts were following some private inner track—and he had knowledge of some danger to Joanna far apart from the ordinary ones I had thought of already.
Before I could ask any questions, though, Jamie stooped down, pointed to the broken stem of a fern at the edge of the path, and said, “Look here. Someone’s passed along this way, and not long ago. Could be an animal, of course. But it could be worth following.”
I thought he seemed more than usually alert, too, as we continued to move uphill—his eyes continually scanning the woods around us. And he seemed to know where he was going, too, which was more than I
could say; every patch of forest through which we walked seemed identical to the last.
Finally, though, we crested a fresh rise and came to look down at a small clearing that lay in the hollow of a slight depression in the land. And there was Joanna.
Looking more closely, I saw that the clearing was in fact framed by a ring of stones—seven massive grey stone slabs that must have once stood in a circle, though they were toppled over now, lying at odd angles among the shadow-dappled dead leaves. Joanna was sitting with her face turned away from us, her back against a massive boulder that sat at the very centre of the clearing. My heart contracted—though not with relief at the sight of her. It was more a momentary impression that I would have to revise my opinion that there were no wolves in the Delaford woods—because Joanna seemed to have taken one for a companion: a massive, shaggy beast that lay on the ground beside her, its head on its paws. Though as we approached, I saw that it was not a wolf after all—just a huge, bedraggled dog with hair so matted with dirt that it looked grey.
Both the dog and Joanna pricked up their ears at the sound of our footsteps. Or rather, the dog pricked up its ears, and Joanna’s head whipped around to face us.
She had plainly been crying. Her eyes looked swollen, and there were clean streaks where the tears had washed away the grime that smeared her face. But she jumped up at the sight of me, her small body quivering, poised for flight. “I’m not going back to live with that nasty woman! You can’t make me!”
The dog lumbered to its feet—and apparently thinking that Joanna must be under some threat, drew back its lips and growled low in its throat.
“Of course not.” I held up my hands—thinking that only Joanna could have managed to find and form a friendship with a massive, feral-looking dog in the bare half-day since she had run away from her mother’s cottage. “Of course you shan’t live with Mrs. Willoughby. Your mother would never give you up. She sent me to find you so that you can come back home. You cannot imagine how worried she is about you.”
Joanna’s eyes narrowed as she studied me, plainly trying to determine whether I was telling the truth or not. But then her breath caught in a gasp and she looked past me, and she cried sharply, “Who’s that?”
Jamie had hung back—meaning, I suppose, not to frighten either the dog or Joanna by bursting onto the scene. But now he stepped out from the shadows of the trees.
I said quickly, “It’s all right, Joanna. He’s a friend. He’s my friend. He helped me to find you.”
And then I stopped. Joanna was still eyeing Jamie warily—I suppose he did look rather frightening, even shaved as he was, with his long hair and tattered clothes. “Are you a ghost?” she demanded.
Jamie looked slightly startled. But he answered, gravely, “No. Or at least, I was not the last time I looked. Why?”
Joanna shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. I just thought you might be.”
I saw a hint of a smile crinkle the edges of Jamie’s eyes. But he said, with equal gravity, “It’s always best to be sure about these things. Here—maybe I ought to try walking through a tree, just to be certain.” He took a step towards the nearest oak tree, then reeled comically backwards when he struck against the trunk. “No, I seem to be flesh and blood after all.”
Joanna giggled. And the big dog at her side pricked up its ears again—and then abruptly bounded forward across the clearing to Jamie.
My heart lurched again momentarily—thinking the animal had decided to attack. But this was no attack; the dog was whining an ecstatic greeting, its tail flailing wildly as it leaped up, trying to lick Jamie’s face.
“You have not lost your gift with animals, at any rate,” I said with a breath of relief.
That had always been part of Jamie’s particular magic when we were young. It was not only horses he could tame and charm, but animals of all kinds. At Norland one summer, he had made friends with a squirrel—trained it to perch on his shoulder and take walnuts from his hand.
Joanna watched the performance closely, and then she asked, “Is he your dog, sir?”
Jamie’s face had gone a shade paler, I thought. But he put a calming hand on the dog’s shaggy ruff, using his other arm to wipe the evidence of the animal’s greeting from his face with the cuff of his sleeve. “No, he’s not mine.” I thought there was an odd note in Jamie’s voice, as well—but then he cleared his throat and said, with a smile at Joanna, “But he seems to like me—which you have to admit is a point in my favour, as well as my not being a ghost. Do you think you would let Miss Margaret here and me take you back home to your mother?”
Joanna gave me another narrow look. “Mother really doesn’t want me to go away and live with that lady? You are not lying just to make me come back with you?”
“Joanna,” I said. I crouched down so that my eyes were on a level with her tear-reddened ones. “Remember when King was ill—and I said that I thought I could make him better, but that I wouldn’t promise, because that might be telling a lie in case it turned out that I couldn’t?”
Joanna nodded.
“Well, I’m not lying now, either. Your mother would never, ever wish to give you up—not in a hundred years. She will tell you herself if you’ll come home to her.”
Joanna studied me again, her head on one side. Then she nodded. “All right. I was getting dreadfully hungry, anyway. Though Mother probably will not let me have any pudding for dinner,” she added in a gloomy voice. “If she still wants to keep on being my mother, that means she’s bound to be cross with me for running away. Even crosser than she was last week, when I used the ink in the inkwell to draw cat’s whiskers on my face instead of for practising my letters.”
I managed—though I nearly choked with the effort—to suppress a laugh. “She will be much too happy to have you back again to be cross. I promise,” I said. I held out my hand, and Joanna, after another moment’s consideration, linked her small, grubby fingers with mine. “Come along, then,” I said. “It’s a long walk back.”
“Wait a moment.” Jamie was still standing with one hand on the dog’s neck—though his eyes were continuing to flick round the clearing. Which seemed strange, since we had already found Joanna. “Pi— I mean, your friend here.” He ruffled the dog’s ears. “Where did you find him, Joanna?”
Joanna at least seemed to find nothing curious about the question. “Right here. He was already here when I came. He was digging like that when I found him, too,” she added, as the dog, leaving Jamie’s side, trotted over to the side of the boulder and started to dig at the base. Joanna shrugged. “I think he must be looking for something.”
Jamie’s mouth turned a shade grimmer, it seemed to me, as he watched the dog scrabbling with its forepaws at the base of the giant rock. But then he pursed his lips in a whistle that made the dog reluctantly abandon digging and trot back to his side. He grinned again at Joanna and winked. “Maybe he thinks there’s a pirate’s treasure buried somewhere about here.”
Joanna giggled. “Pirates bury their treasures on the beach.” She spoke with authority. “Not in the middle of the woods.” She gave Jamie a speculative look. “If he’s not your dog, do you think I might keep him?”
“I think that one dog is enough for your cottage,” I said. “Besides, what would poor King think if you brought home another dog? He might think that you didn’t love him anymore.”
Joanna did not look at all convinced by that reasoning. But she gave way—and allowed us to start back towards her home.
I kept close watch on Jamie as we made our way back through the forest. But he seemed all right—or at least, no worse than he had been. And when Joanna complained that she was getting tired, Jamie swung her up onto his shoulders, which made her giggle again.
He stopped, though, when we were within sight of the cottage. He set Joanna down and said in an undertone, “I’ll wait here.”
“Why?” I began. “Eliza will surely want to thank you, as well—”
“Better not.” Ja
mie stopped me, flashing a brief smile. “Her mother’s already had fright enough—and I’m not sure she would be as ready as Joanna there to take a dog’s good opinion as evidence of my sterling character.”
“All right,” I said. It was later than I had realised; late afternoon shadows were lengthening across the cottage walls. “But wait here for me, will you promise?” I did not want him to leave before I could ask him more questions than I could with Joanna listening. “I will be back as soon as I see Joanna home.”
Jamie looked as though he were about to argue—but then gave way and nodded. He dropped down to sit on the trunk of a fallen log, and the dog came to butt its massive head against his hand. “All right. I’ll be here.”
Eliza was—of course—overjoyed to see Joanna returned, safe and sound. Actually ‘overjoyed’ seems a very pale and anaemic word to describe the expression on her face. But then I am not sure that I can think of a word that would fully describe how Eliza looked as she swept her grubby and exhausted daughter up into her arms. She cried—I had never seen Eliza cry before—and I felt tears come into my own eyes and an odd, hollow ache pool about my heart. Though I could not say exactly why—save that it was something to do with seeing how perfectly and purely Joanna and Eliza fit together, how much they belong, one to the other.
But their reunion—though a happy ending to Joanna’s part, at least, of the day’s alarms—is not actually the reason that I am forcing myself to stay awake long enough to write this all down.
I found Jamie sitting exactly where I had left him, leaning against the half-rotted log beneath the grove of trees at the back of Eliza’s cottage. His eyes were closed, his booted feet stretched out in front of him, and the huge stray dog lay sprawled out in the leaves beside him in a rather comical echo of Jamie’s pose.
I looked critically down at the pair of them. “If your looks are still consistent with the way you feel, I imagine you must be feeling ready for the undertaker to measure you for a coffin about now.”
Margaret Dashwood's Diary Page 9
