by Richard Peck
After tea we made our way back as slowly as we dared. The last shop in the town was a photographer’s studio, where we lingered at the window, looking at the pictures of brides.
Then Betty was plucking my sleeve, and somehow we were inside the place. Before I knew it, she’d driven a bargain with the photographer, and we had our picture made for a shilling. In the photograph, Betty’s hat dominates everything. Neither of us thought to smile, and I stare out upon the world with Miss Amanda’s eyes. When I found the picture after many years, I was again unable to smile. I wept instead.
We were nearly back at the Hall before Betty said, “Mr. Sampson—Hubert’s not the father-to-be. It was one of the cowboys from the Wild West Show this summer at Ventnor, though he wasn’t a real one. Only a Cornishman who could ride. I slipped out night after night to meet him. I slipped out once too often, if the truth be told.”
We reached the gates of Whitwell Hall with Betty’s future hanging in the balance.
* * *
Later I was to wonder how early in our time together Miss Amanda had conceived the plan for my future, and her own. When I brought up her breakfast each morning, her eyes glittered thoughtfully at me. But I attributed this to the plans she had for filling my days with duties, and occupying my half days as well.
She changed her clothes three times a day and left her former attire scattered about the room. Miss Ward-Benedict, during her stay, was often underfoot too, and so my duties were complicated by two young ladies who sat gossiping and learning to smoke cigarettes while I endeavored to make ready my mistress’s next outfit.
There was little real sympathy between Miss Amanda and her friend, whose concerns were horses and racing meets. Miss Ward-Benedict was soon off, followed by Mr. Forrest, who was persuaded back to his studies in London.
I was expected to attend to my young lady and then to serve in the dining room under Mr. Finley. It was two jobs, but I enjoyed being in touch with the servants’ hall. The talk there by mid-October was all about the fox-hunting season. I knew nothing of foxes, and I was much surprised at the enthusiasm Miss Amanda showed. I must have supposed that Miss Ward-Benedict’s talk of hunting had given her a new interest. It dawned on me only later that she had quite a different reason.
On the night before the hunt she sent me in search of her walking boots and outdoor clothes. Then she said, “But, Miranda, we haven’t thought what you will wear.”
“I, Miss Amanda?” I had no idea that I’d be attending her at a fox hunt, but she began digging through the cupboards herself. In time she assembled a mustard-yellow jumper, a heather tweed coat and skirt, boots, and a hat. Then, when she’d had me put them on, she drew me over to a looking glass. We were both startled. In her clothes, I was Miss Amanda’s double. She caught her breath and gazed at me, until I turned away.
On the day of the hunt we gathered on the front steps of the Hall to wait for the motorcars. Of a hunt I knew only that some rode horses and others followed on foot. Lady Eleanor wore a russet wool outfit that was hardly practical enough for anything more than standing in a dry porch.
Shortly a small motorcar driven by Mr. George Salter, the estate agent, drew up and Sir Timothy climbed in. Then came the Lanchester with John Thorne at the wheel. Thorne stepped down from the driver’s seat to hand Lady Eleanor and Miss Amanda up into the rear seat.
The automobile seemed immense to me as it throbbed all over to the rhythm of the engine. I stood rooted to the spot until Miss Amanda leaned down and called, “Come along, Miranda! You’re to go up front with . . . Thorne.” I hitched my skirts and feared for my life and climbed up.
John Thorne, his cap pulled down to his eyes, gave me only a sidelong glance and perhaps a bit of a smile at my nervousness as we rolled forward behind Mr. Salter. But I was soon carried away by the adventure and the sensation of speed. At last we drew near where the hunt was assembling.
Miss Amanda slipped down from the automobile before John Thorne could come around to assist her. She was to join a group of young people to follow the hunt on foot until the going got rough, then finish the day with a claret cup at one of the great houses in the neighborhood.
“Now, Miranda,” she said, “Mother expects to join Lady Orton in a picnic lunch. And I shall not need you at all. You’re to go with Thorne, who will explain—whatever there is to explain about the hunt. Won’t you, Thorne? And then you can call for me in the motor when it’s over.”
“Yes, miss,” John Thorne said, giving her a very direct look. Then he took my elbow in a familiar way and led me off, saying, “The great thing at a hunt is to have the drink they offer first.”
Taking mugs of ale from trays nearby, we edged through the mob toward the hounds, which were straining at their leads, a great choppy mass of wagging tails and howling mouths and steaming breaths.
When the hounds heard the huntsman’s horn, they surged off, suddenly free. I’d have been trampled by the oncoming horses if John Thorne hadn’t drawn me aside. We waited while the horses and the foot followers had cleared the stone wall. Then he half lifted me over it, and we made off across the field after the others.
Instead of a mad dash, it was all leisurely with more wait than hurry-up. The fine horses cavorted and stamped in the distance while the horsewomen arranged and rearranged their skirts. The hounds grouped and regrouped, darted away and returned. The horsemen reined up behind them. Those on foot stood around in groups. Some, seeing a dry patch, sprawled about on the ground. My heart sang with the beauty of it.
There was a need growing within me to grasp at such moments as these. I’d been raised to expect nothing for myself. Yet expectation was rising in me.
Then suddenly we were running. The hounds had set off through a thicket with a purposeful cry. On the far side was pastureland. As John and I pounded across the field, his hand slipped down my arm to grasp my hand, and I could feel the warmth of it.
In the next cover I thought we were sure to find a nest of foxes. But if they’d been near before, they were farther off now. The day sped along in bursts of excitement until John and I sat down to rest inside the gate of a small stone church. We dropped down upon one of the ancient tombs that stood like a great marble table. I stole a glance at him. His profile was very fine, I thought. Strong and with the jutting chin of a quiet man. I seemed to grow at ease beside him until he broke the silence abruptly. “You’re settling in up at the Hall?”
“I am that,” I said.
“They’ve made you the young miss’s own lady’s maid?”
“They have.”
“And how do you like her, then?”
“It’s not for me to say, I’m sure,” I said, primly.
He fixed me with eyes the color of the overcast sky. “Come now, Miranda, you must bend a bit or you’ll be broken by the gale.” The autumn leaves swirled across the graves as if to prove his warning.
I gazed at John Thorne, trying to see into him. Was there poetry and sentiment in his heart, or merely cynicism? Why was he not exactly what he was, like the rest of the servants?
“Why is it,” he said, “when such as we can get away from our work for a rare bit of peace and quiet, we can think of nothing to talk of but our betters?”
“What else have we?” I asked, truly wanting to know.
“Only what we can take.”
A distant huntsman’s horn sounded a long blast and then another. “Gone to ground,” John said. “The foxes have got clean away. I’m glad when they do. It sets the day in a proper perspective.”
He rose then and offered me both his hands. Then he kissed me lightly on the cheek. It took me by surprise, the suddenness and the gentleness. We strolled off then, arm and arm, as if something had been decided between us.
* * *
Miss Amanda seemed to know before I did that John Thorne and I were courting in a quiet way. Before, it had seemed sensible to spend my life in service, keeping to myself. Now it seemed just as sensible to enjoy the company of a man who att
racted me strongly. I was drawn to John half against my will. But that only added what Betty might call a bit of spice. And so I went about a trifle weak in the knees.
It’s said that young girls are transformed by love. It was to be so with me, though not in the usual way. Without quite noticing it myself, I began to copy Miss Amanda’s ways. Those that I admired, at any rate. The rough edges from my country speech fell away. I simply watched and listened to Miss Amanda and began to be a part of her. After all, she had Gregory Forrest eating from her hand, and that gave me an idea or two of my own.
I see now that Miss Amanda was too obliging by half. She’d dressed me in her clothes for the hunt, and from then on she seemed more and more determined to turn me into a mirror of herself, passing along quite new clothes she’d hardly worn. It was impossible to refuse them.
We began preparing for the London month, which was nearly upon us. A dressmaker from Ventnor, Miss Semple, came every day to see to the fittings for both Lady Eleanor and Miss Amanda. But soon Miss Amanda grew impatient, and I became her stand-in.
Miss Semple, bristling with pins, talked long about “ball gowns for galas.” And when she gossiped about the annual tradesmen’s dance and supper party to be held soon in Ventnor, it gave me an idea. “Are you making a ball gown for Mrs. Sampson? Hubert Sampson’s mother?”
“Well, as you ask, no. Mrs. Sampson’s dancing days are over.”
Betty was more woebegone than ever. On her half days she’d linger outside Sampson & Son, Drapers. But not since the day we’d gone there together had Hubert Sampson acknowledged her presence. Betty was inclined to think that Hubert’s mother had talked him out of seeing her. I was inclined to agree.
I was so preoccupied with Betty that when Miss Amanda demanded to know what was on my mind, I blurted it out. Miss Amanda showed the liveliest interest in Betty’s case, and between us, we devised a plan.
Every year Sir Timothy bought a pair of tickets to the Ventnor Tradesmen’s Ball and passed them along to the estate agent, Mr. Salter, and his sister, Winifred. Miss Amanda was to ask her father for another pair of tickets, while I was to get Mr. Sampson to the ball, where Betty would be waiting, as alluring as Miss Amanda and I could make her.
I was soon armed with the tickets, and on a half day Miss Amanda granted me for the purpose, I went to Sampson & Son, Drapers. Hubert remembered me and asked me up to see his mother. She already knew that I was Miss Amanda’s own maid. Clearly, Miss Semple was a bearer of tales.
Murmuring that Miss Whitwell had given me two tickets to the ball, I asked Mrs. Sampson’s advice regarding the propriety of the event. Her eyes narrowed. She saw my position at the Hall as somewhat exalted, nearer the gentry than she was herself, in a manner of speaking. Assuring me that only the best people went to the ball, she said, “Perhaps you’ll allow my son to take you in. You’ll have to find your own way there. But I daresay Hubert could give you his arm for the first set and into the supper room.”
Hubert Sampson beamed like a much younger man. And his mother was beaming too, or near enough. She’d managed to dispel Betty by means of me. And her look clearly said that she’d deal with me later, if need be. Each of us was suffused with a different triumph, and I was urged to stay for tea.
* * *
Later Miss Amanda advanced the plan by her own scheming. “Of course, Betty will need a suitable frock,” she said. “But what will you wear, Miranda?”
After deliberation, it was decided that I was to have a new dress, made by Miss Semple. White, with bands of purple velvet to outline a deep, square neckline. “And purple velvet violets at the shoulder,” Miss Amanda said, sketching it all out on a pad. “Quite simple, though the skirt must be ample for dancing.”
“But, Miss Amanda, I don’t know how to dance.” I planned to slip away at the first opportunity.
“You will manage perfectly well among the village clodhoppers,” she said. Then she ordered me to bring Betty to her.
The idea of the ball awed Betty. But Miss Amanda told her, “Mind you, you must snare this Sampson man on your own. We can do no more than put a winning card or two into your hand.”
Betty’s dress was one of Miss Amanda’s castoffs. Pink silk, with rosettes on the skirt. Granny Thorne did the fitting for Betty’s more ample figure. And suddenly the evening of the Ventnor Tradesmen’s Ball arrived.
Miss Amanda helped me dress and even saw me down to the drive, where Mr. Salter and his sister, Winifred, waited for me. John Thorne was to see Betty to the ball a little later. On the way I huddled on the backseat of George Salter’s motorcar. The howling wind made conversation impossible, and I was thankful. All I knew of Miss Salter, a plain woman, was that she kept house for her widowed brother and looked after his son Willie in a large cottage on the grounds of the home farm. If she knew the game that Betty and I were playing at, she gave no sign. She said only, “My brother and I keep farmers’ hours. Will it suit you to leave the dance early?” I told her it would suit me very well.
The ballroom was ablaze with light, and magnolia leaves and paper garlands hung from the chandeliers. As I entered with the Salters, an unknown voice from the crowd said quite clearly, “Just look, it’s Miss Amanda Whitwell!”
But then Mr. Hubert Sampson, in black evening clothes and a tight collar, was there, breathless at my elbow. “Oh I say, Miss Cooke!” he gasped, bowing. Then, just as he asked me if I “cared to essay a waltz,” an arresting couple stepped into the ballroom. Betty had arrived, clinging to John Thorne’s arm.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he would see her into the ballroom, nor that he’d be dressed for the occasion in a dark suit and a high collar. I could scarcely tear my eyes away from his blond hair and the set of his chin.
Mr. Sampson was riveted on Betty—a delicious version of herself. A pink bandeau was wrapped around her brow in the manner of a tiara, and the gown was an almost alarming fit. “Could that be—Miss Prowse?” he breathed.
Of the four of us, only he was confused. In a kind of dance step, we were all in a knot and then paired off differently. Betty was leading Mr. Sampson onto the floor, and I was standing beside John Thorne.
When I declined to dance, he seemed relieved. Buoyed by the music, we moved out into the shadows of the terrace. We lingered there, looking out on the quicksilver sea under a harvest moon. Again, as on hunt day, we were thrown together by unlikely circumstances. I took it all as a sign from heaven.
John Thorne slipped his arm around my waist. Then I was in his arms, being kissed with all the roughness of that first dark night. But now I returned his kisses. Everything that had ever happened to me seemed to be pointing to this moment. If I thought of anything, it was of the Wisewoman’s words that I would die and live again. I thought this must be the moment she’d foreseen.
Later, we walked down into the garden. He pressed me close, touching the curve of my ear with his lips, asking when we would be together.
When? Now I knew the passion that must have overcome Betty. It must only be marriage, I thought, as millions of girls had thought before me. I was willing to mingle my fate with this stranger’s. Aren’t two people always strangers until they are one?
“We’ll be married, then,” John said, reading my thoughts. The gruff sound of his voice became the throbbing of my heart.
“But will they allow it?” I whispered. “Miss Amanda—”
“Miss Amanda will allow it,” John said. That she had willed it was beyond my imaginings.
John was looking through me with his gray eyes, and I saw in them a message I couldn’t read. And so we parted at the door to the terrace with nothing more said.
I made my way across the room. A flash of pink silk proclaimed Betty’s untiring presence on the dance floor with Hubert. Winifred Salter and her brother stood at the mirrored main doors, preparing to leave. As I drew near, I saw Winifred glance toward the whirling dancers and freeze. She seemed so shaken that I stepped up behind her to see what she was seeing. Then I caught a g
limpse of two phantoms.
It seemed as if I’d never left the ballroom. It seemed I’d learned to dance and was dancing now with John. My heart hammered. For there I was on the dance floor in my new white gown banded in purple velvet. I was in John Thorne’s arms, and he towered over me, and we were swirling like autumn leaves in the music. I thought I must be mad.
Winifred Salter turned, startled to find me behind her. She took my arm and marched me to the door, as if I were a sheltered child she wanted to shield from something obscene. I knew I had to go back to the ballroom, for it was John Thorne on the dance floor with—
Miss Salter felt me slipping from her grasp. “Don’t let them make a fool of you!” she rasped at me. Then we were hurrying down the drive behind George Salter.
Betty returned from the ball at dawn, tireless and triumphant, bursting into song at odd moments all the next day. I was in the preoccupied state of a young girl who knows already what she’s unwilling to admit. My mind hummed with unthinkable thoughts. I was exhausted by them when I took up Miss Amanda’s breakfast tray.
In her room I found the dress hanging from her wardrobe door. A white dress banded in purple, with a skirt ample enough for dancing. A dress exactly like my own.
* * *
London. The name of that magical place rumbled like distant thunder. We’d spent the week in packing. Now the upper reaches of Whitwell Hall stood empty. I was more than vexed with Miss Amanda. I thought she’d lowered herself to play a silly trick on me. Deigning to dance in a dress like mine, on the arm of her own chauffeur, might have amused her, or anyone of her class. But my new longing for John Thorne made me feel mocked. In her presence I was as cold and starchy as I dared be. But it went unnoticed. She seemed so happy at the prospect of London that I thought she was longing to see Gregory Forrest again.
