Amanda/Miranda

by Richard Peck

  “I’m willing to wait, Lady Eleanor,” Mr. Forrest said.

  “Few men have your patience. I think you’re right to return to London now. You have your studies, and to speak plainly, your presence may be prolonging Amanda’s tiresomeness. But we shall see you when we come up to London in November.”

  Miranda heard the great double front doors open. “Here’s Thorne now to collect your things,” Lady Eleanor was saying. Then the flurry of good-byes, and finally the sound of silk subsiding into stillness.

  Easing open the door in the paneling, Miranda hurried across to her duties in the morning room. Had she looked out a front window, she would have seen the two men who were both miserably in love with Amanda Whitwell. Gregory Forrest settling into the rear seat of Sir Timothy’s shuddering new Lanchester motorcar, and John Thorne strapping the suitcases onto the running board.

  Thorne swung himself up into the driver’s seat, and the Lanchester lurched, then glided off between the Italian pines toward the distant gate.

  * * *

  In the days that followed, Hannah and Hilda gawped without envy at the amount of work Miranda could get through with a quiet efficiency. On the Friday evening of her first week, there was a mildly festive air around the table in the servants’ hall. At the end of a hurried meal, Mr. Finley rose and withdrew a handful of brown envelopes from his breast pocket. He cleared his throat importantly. “For the benefit of one among us who has not yet learned our ways, I will just touch briefly upon the manner of financial—ah—remuneration traditional at Whitwell Hall. On the second Friday of every month wages are distributed. As you know . . .”

  Mr. Finley flowed on until each in turn received an envelope. Miranda was awed that in her first week she was worth thirty shillings, including Mrs. Glaslough’s colossal tip.

  But at that moment came a thunderous pounding at the door. “Who in the world at this hour?” Mrs. Creeth started in her chair. “See who it is, Hannah, but take care!”

  Hannah’s reluctant hand drew back the bolt. A familiar voice on the other side seemed to give her assurance. She pulled open the door, and a tide of wet leaves blew in, carried on a rain-laden night wind.

  A boy of fourteen staggered inside. Miranda, fearful of the night that settled on this house, stared at him. The swinging lamps threw shadows across his white face. His eyes were enormous. He put down a storm lantern while Hannah threw her considerable weight against the door.

  “It’s that cheeky monkey, Willie Salter, the estate agent’s son!” Mrs. Creeth said, on her feet now with hands planted on hips. “Frightening the wits out of us!”

  “Speak up, boy!” Mr. Finley said. “What brings you here?”

  “Why, he’s wet through!” Mrs. Buckle said. “Come to the fire, Willie.”

  In a breaking voice he said, “I came up to the stables—the garages—for John Thorne. But I didn’t find him. It’s old Gran.” His wet face began to crumple. “She’s been set on and half strangled with a length of wire. It’ll be the old madman’s work—her own son. It’ll be Bart Thorne. Oh, sir, Gran needs help bad!”

  The butler reached the boy in two strides. “Are you babbling, Willie?”

  “It’s God’s truth, Mr. Finley. I went down Smuggler’s Cottage way to see if John Thorne might let me look at his automobile books. The cottage door was half off its hinges, and inside, Granny Thorne was on the hearth rug. She—she—” Willie began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Hannah!” Mr. Finley said, galvanized into action. “Set out with a storm lantern and find John Thorne! Send him on the run to the cottage.”

  “With the ole madman runnin’ amok, Mr. Finley?” Hannah quaked.

  “We know nothing for certain. But take Hilda with you, and a carving knife if it will give you courage!

  “Mrs. Buckle,” he said in a quieter tone. “Inform Her Ladyship that Granny Thorne is poorly and needs Dr. Post from Ventnor. We can only hope the wind hasn’t taken the telephone line down.” To Mrs. Creeth he said, “Get the wet things off that boy.” And to Betty, “You are to make a circuit of the house, girl, securing the doors and windows. Then return to assist Mrs. Creeth in preparing some hot food to stand ready.”

  Betty stared, her active imagination running rampant among the horrors of a howling wind. She scuttled off, green with fear.

  “And, Miranda.” Mr. Finley turned to her. “You will accompany me to Granny Thorne’s cottage, where you will be much needed. Have you the stomach for it, my girl?”

  Miranda could only nod.

  * * *

  Now Miranda was stumbling behind Mr. Finley’s bobbing lamp in a pair of borrowed boots and a streaming black rubber raincoat thrown over her head.

  “It will be heavy going along the path around the mere,” he shouted over the screaming wind. Past the outbuildings they crossed the rolled lawn, then rougher ground, and there ahead Miranda could see the thrashing darkness of a grove of trees. Lightning stabbed the sky as they made their way along the snaking path. It was another ten minutes’ hard traveling before a yellow light in a clearing brought them to the cottage.

  The shattered door hung by a hinge. This wasn’t the work of the wind. A lamp in the middle of the room drew them inside. Finley shrugged out of his rubber coat. Miranda kept at his heels, her heart thumping.

  An old woman sprawled on the hearth rug like a broken doll. Her head at an angle lay perilously near the glowing embers in the grate. Long strands of gray hair fell around her face, fanning out on the floor. A length of stout baling wire was looped around her neck. It had been loosened, undoubtedly by the boy, Willie, but it remained coiled above her wrinkled throat.

  Mr. Finley dropped to one knee and took up a thin arm. At once the old woman drew a deep, shuddering breath. “She’s alive,” he said quietly, drawing the gleaming wire away from the fragile neck.

  Miranda was certain she’d seen this old woman before. But now Mr. Finley said, “We must get the poor soul up to her bed.” Miranda took the lantern and made for the narrow stairs that led up under the eaves.

  “Miranda, perhaps I should have a look around upstairs first,” Mr. Finley said. But there was nothing ominous in the two tiny rooms above. The one at the back belonging to John Thorne couldn’t conceal a cat. The butler lit the wick of a lamp in Granny Thorne’s bedroom, and soon she was resting in her own bed. Mr. Finley and Miranda kept watch from a pair of chairs on either side of the bed.

  In the quiet, the butler chanced a bit of conversation. “She’s near ninety. The story is that Granny’s husband had been a smuggler before he came ashore and turned farmer. Very likely only folklore, but this place has always been called Smuggler’s Cottage. The Thornes lived in this land long before Sir Timothy bought the estate in 1894. In the old days the place ran to a thousand acres and paid its way. The men worked the land and their women served in the Hall.”

  Caught up in memories, Finley grew expansive. “It was bitter for the tenants when most of the farms were sold off and the Hall became a country place for a gentleman in trade. The land they’d rented was up for sale and no money to buy it. There were some new opportunities—gardeners’ work—but few people had the wit to grasp them. Granny Thorne’s grandson, John, though, is of a new breed. Sees himself as a twentieth-century man, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Mr. Finley sniffed with disapproval. “Young Thorne’s motor-mad. He’s broken with the old ways, though I will say he’s good to his old grandmother. But there’s a streak of madness in this family.” He paused and seemed to think better of saying more.

  In the long silence Miranda realized the storm had abated. Mr. Finley dozed, and she slept soundly in the chair. A bird’s trilling woke her in gray morning light. She hoped Mr. Finley hadn’t noticed her asleep at her post. Then she saw the hand resting heavily on the coverlet beside the old woman’s slight form. A powerful brown hand with grease-blackened fingernails. It was far from being Mr. Finley’s.

  Glancing up in fear, Miranda stared into the eyes of the m
an sitting where Mr. Finley had been. Daylight played across his craggy face and his tumble of blond hair. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms firmly muscled and covered with golden hair. It was John Thorne, impassively gazing at her with eyes the color of dawn.

  She knew him in the first moment. And more. She’d been caught up in those thick arms, mauled by those hands. But she’d never seen the cool gray eyes or the set of the chin. She sat mesmerized. His was the kind of strength she’d always feared, though she’d suffered at no other man’s hands but his.

  At last, she looked aside. In the far corner of the room, leaning against the wall, was the old woman’s walking stick, a shiny black malacca cane. Like a puzzle piece falling into place, the cane seemed to complete Miranda’s understanding about these people. The cane told her the apparition she’d seen in the moonlit garden had been Granny Thorne. And her grandson was the man who’d assailed Miranda with such confident familiarity on that first night. These two creatures of darkness were ordinary mortals after all. Miranda wondered why her fear of them didn’t ebb at once.

  * * *

  Hilda and Hannah had encountered John Thorne on the home farm path. Their hysteria and the brandished carving knife, their gasped “madman” and “Granny Thorne,” had sent him on the run to Smuggler’s Cottage. If a maniac from the Newport lunatic asylum was loose on the grounds, he knew well who it was. But he couldn’t have known how near he’d come to him. For under a slab of rock beside the mere, the madman—his father, Bart Thorne—was lying, covered in slime.

  The madman’s disordered mind had registered the sound of footsteps on the path: the headlong stumbling of the two kitchen maids, the heavy footfalls of John Thorne. Bart lay as still as death until the sounds were lost in the moaning wind.

  It was in the darkest part of night when John Thorne found Finley and the slumbering Miranda at his grandmother’s bedside. He and the butler murmured together, Finley saying, “The Ventnor police, Thorne. We had better get through to them.”

  “What’s the point?” John muttered back. “He’d make straight for this place and nowhere else. His mind’s ruled by this plot of earth. He’ll keep coming back as long as he’s able. And he knows every twig and turning. I’m the only one who could track him down.”

  “The family,” Finley said, working his hands in anguish. “Sir Timothy and Lady Eleanor. We must not disturb the family with this terrible business.”

  The butler hurried back to the Hall while John Thorne sat down to keep watch. Granny would survive this, he hoped, for she’d survived much else. And he spared a thought for his father as well. He longed to see the old maniac under lock and key again—safe from a world he could no longer live in.

  Thorne’s eye drifted across to Miranda and lingered. He’d cursed himself for a week for accosting this girl outside Amanda’s door. Indeed, if he’d inherited any insanity from his family, he decided it had surfaced the day Amanda Whitwell had beclouded his brain. She’d held him in her grasp from the first moment he’d locked her in his arms, though they could have no future together. He feared in his heart that Amanda was claiming his soul. John Thorne returned with relief to contemplate the girl across from him, the girl who could be Amanda’s double, but hardly her match.

  He found himself keeping watch over her sleeping form. His eye followed the shadowed line of her temple, the damp ringlets that had escaped the severe restraint of her cap. Something stirred in him and yearned toward her—only her. He jerked himself back from such idiocy. To be inflamed by one woman—so unattainable and so available—and to be drawn to another might be proof of madness outright.

  * * *

  John Thorne had been born in this bed. His mother had died giving him life some twelve years before the estate was divided and the earth shifted beneath his family’s feet.

  If his raising had been left to Granny Thorne, he might have roamed these fields at will. But his bullnecked father recognized none of the rights of boyhood. Embittered at the loss of his wife, who’d died to replace her useful self with this lawless brat, Bart Thorne had turned himself into a beast of burden. The land he worked became his obsession, and he came to believe it belonged to him. He had only contempt for his own mother, Granny Thorne, who took an innocent pleasure in sometimes “helping out” up at the Hall.

  John Thorne’s first memories were of the sky-blue days when he’d scaled the tallest tree in the grove. Its topmost branch became his conning tower. From this swaying perch sixty feet above ground he could survey Whitwell Hall, the roofs of Ventnor, and the green-gold sea stretching away to the hazy horizon. His dreams took him across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons, sleek liners, even balloons. There at the top of the tree, John fell in love with freedom.

  But the moment was shattered by his father’s enraged roar when he saw his only potential unpaid farmhand hanging between life and death on a branch far above.

  The thundering voice brought the boy scrambling down, leaving half his skin on the rough bark. Bart Thorne flayed John further, without mercy. He said little at the best of times. In anger, a leather strap spoke for him.

  That was the last day of John’s boyhood. Harnessed in tandem with the plow horse, he followed the furrows as the disc turned the unyielding soil. The marginal land had never produced quite enough. In many a lean winter the only money the household saw was what Granny’s sewing and mending at the Hall brought in. Every penny of this meager sum became a taunt to Bart Thorne’s darkening mind.

  John came to see his father as a man clinging to the final shreds of an unworkable way of life. A man without imagination who stood frozen between two generations—a salty, long-dead smuggler and a young son who would chart an unknown course.

  Bart Thorne spiraled downward—days befuddled by brute labor, nights by drink. He took to sleeping in the barn like an animal. On the night John turned seventeen, his father set fire to a small outbuilding. The flames threw mad shadows into the grove. John found Bart standing beyond the ring of firelight, mouth slavering.

  Sir Timothy as new master at the Hall sent for the asylum authorities, and Granny signed the papers for her son’s committal.

  But now he was back to attack the old woman at her own hearthside.

  4

  The blond and bronzed man sitting across from her seemed lost in thought. But his eyes were upon her, bidding her to speak. At last she said, “I shouldn’t have slept.”

  “Even the voice is the same,” John Thorne muttered. “Do you know me?”

  “I know you,” she said quietly. “They call me—”

  “I know what they call you. As soon as someone comes to sit with Gran, I’ll see you safely back.”

  “I’d sooner go now,” Miranda said, stirring.

  “I’d sooner you didn’t.” And so they sat, Miranda trapped a second time by the will of this man.

  Granny Thorne opened her eyes and turned toward Miranda. “Why, Miss Amanda, you oughtn’t to have troubled yourself.”

  “It’s not Miss Amanda, Granny,” Thorne said sharply. “It’s a maid from the Hall.”

  “John?” She turned toward him. “Oh, John, he’s back. Whatever shall we do?”

  Her withered hand closed around John’s wrist. “He didn’t know me, John. Not properly. He took me for a wicked spirit that had stolen his land. Then with a nasty bit of wire he—” She gave way to weeping, drawing her grandson closer to hide her face in his shoulder.

  He was gentle with the old woman, Miranda noticed. She thought he’d been right to let her talk. Thorne returned his gaze to Miranda, who met it with a feeling of sympathy shared.

  In another moment, the room filled with intruders. Dr. Post, looking brisk and put-upon, swung his black bag on the bed and looked inquiringly at John Thorne. Then Mrs. Creeth bore in a cloth-covered basket, followed by a towering, moonfaced man. It was George Salter, father of Willie and estate agent for the Whitwells.

  “Well now, old woman,” the doctor said to Granny Thorne, “I s
ee the reports of your death are much magnified. What is it? Have you taken one of your turns?”

  “Turns! I don’t have turns, as you’d know if you were a proper doctor.”

  That startled Miranda, but then she saw there was an old bond between these two.

  “Let’s have a look at you anyway.” Dr. Post found the angry red line encircling her throat. “Good Lord! Will somebody tell me what’s going on around here?”

  “Send out the rest and I’ll put you in the picture, Dr. Post,” Granny piped from her bed.

  “Not a bad idea, though it does come from you, Granny,” he said, and sent the others off down the stairs. Mrs. Creeth ordered Miranda back to the kitchens, then looked dubious when she saw that John Thorne meant to see her safely there. Her gaze followed the young people out of the cottage.

  The path through the grove was narrow, and Miranda’s sleeve brushed John’s. With the sun up, it was a morning to remind her of the day she’d met the Wisewoman. A day as warm as this one promised to be, with the hint of autumn ahead. In the pleasure of this temporary freedom, she almost forgot to fear her companion.

  As they neared the misty waters of the mere, John said, “It’s my old dad causing all this, if you haven’t guessed. He’s the madman that set on Granny—his own mother. The land drove him to it. I was just seventeen when they had to lock him away. And I was off to the wars the next day. South Africa. I knew I’d find no discipline in the whole of the British Army to rival my dad’s.”

  Now they’d come to the mere, lying like a vast saucer beside the path. On the far shore near a great rock where two paths diverged was a kind of Grecian temple. A tight circle of columns supported a stone dome.

  Miranda lingered, caught up in the serene beauty of the circular mere and the perfect temple rising above it. This rain-washed vista made her heart yearn and sing.