Amanda/Miranda

by Richard Peck

  * * *

  Early in December of 1911 we returned to the island I had never thought to leave. But the events begun in London swept away all thoughts of a quiet winter there. Miss Amanda wore an enormous square-cut diamond ring, and she and Lady Eleanor began to plan an engagement party. We’d left Mr. Forrest behind in London, and my mind was free of frivolous thoughts of him, though under my collar I wore the new chain with the old coin fixed on it.

  The servants’ hall gave me a watchful welcome. Betty was nowhere about, and I hadn’t the courage to ask after her. I feared the worst.

  From the first hour my young mistress kept me so busy that Mrs. Creeth herself forced a fortifying cup of tea on me late that night. “That young miss’ll work you to death,” she said in all kindness. “Here, drink this.”

  When Mrs. Creeth went off to her bed, I settled by the kitchen hearth with the cup in my hand. And I thought of John Thorne. What would I have done if I’d known that at that very moment he was standing in Miss Amanda’s room while she held out to him the hand that bore Mr. Forrest’s engagement ring?

  Then I heard a sound from the door, and Willie Salter slipped in from the cold. “Whatever brings you here at this hour, Willie?” I asked, startled.

  “A word from Betty,” he said. “She’d have written except she don’t know how. She’s living with us now and says to come to the home farm on your first half day.”

  I remembered Winifred Salter from the night of the Ventnor ball and was astonished that she’d taken Betty in. I promised Willie that I’d come to see Betty at my first opportunity, and he vanished into the night.

  Whitwell Hall was drawing in these days against the gray winter. As Miss Amanda’s engagement party drew nearer, she kept me too busy to think, even of John Thorne, and I scarcely saw him. But I managed half an afternoon to visit the home farm.

  Winifred Salter herself opened the door to greet me and offered me tea later before she disappeared. When Betty entered the Salters’ sitting room, no dressmaking could now disguise her condition. “Ooo!” she cried. “You been gone a donkey’s years!”

  And there on Betty’s hand was a narrow gold wedding band. She grinned impishly. “That’s right. I’m Mrs. Hubert Sampson!”

  “But if you are, why are you here?”

  “Oh, orl right, if you must know everythin’ at once,” she said. “It orl started wiv me tryin’ to dazzle Hubert at the Ventnor ball. Miss Salter didn’t approve of that, but she took an interest in my situation. Once you were orf to London, she turned up at the Hall for a private word with Mr. Finley himself. Then he told me to pack up and follow Miss Salter home and do as she said.”

  Betty’s eyes grew round. “Well, Miss Salter sent her brother to fetch Hubert. She went straight to the point with him, saying I’d make a good wife, and dutiful too! She told him he’d been a loving son to his mother, but if he didn’t take steps soon, he’d have no one when his mother was dead.

  “Then she made it clear I was in a particular situation. She said that Hubert could make up for lost time by marrying a ready-made family, in a manner of speaking. I thought this would run him orf for sure. But Miss Salter asked him if he thought he could do better. That clinched things. We was married in the registry office at Shanklin.

  “It’s orl very hush-hush, you see. Miss Salter wouldn’t hear of me coming up against Hubert’s old ma now. When the baby’s born, then we’ll tell her we’re married.”

  “But won’t she be angry that you’ve been going behind her back?” I asked.

  “Very likely, but what can she do? She’ll have to knuckle under if she expects Hubert to provide a roof over her head.”

  “And Hubert. Doesn’t he mind at all about the baby?”

  “Mind? Why, he talks about it like it was his own.” Betty beamed. And I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  * * *

  During the week of the engagement party, I found a reason to visit Smuggler’s Cottage. The Hall was filling with houseguests, and Mr. Finley was snappish. My excuse for a stolen hour with Granny Thorne was a new tablecloth that needed hemming.

  Her welcome was as warm as her hearth, and she was a keen audience for my news from the Hall. At midnight, following the family celebrations of the engagement, there was to be a bonfire on the hill, and fireworks.

  She listened with all her ears, but said, “I’ll keep to the hearth that night, but I’ll raise a glass of my own wine to Miss Amanda and her young man.”

  Her eyes had flickered to a spot above my head. I didn’t know that John Thorne had come home for his tea and was standing silently behind me. “Yes,” Granny said. “I am better off in my own cottage. I need but one thing to put my mind at rest.”

  Granny’s old eyes glowed brightly. “Miranda, all I need to die happy is to see you in this cottage as one of my own family.” Then John announced himself with a scrape of his boot, and I knew he had heard her words.

  Granny and I prepared a tea for ourselves and John in the little kitchen. As I was slicing a loaf, her voice piped, “It’s said there’s never room for two women at one hearthside. But that’s a load of old rubbish. There’ll be room for you here, and more room later, as I won’t live forever.”

  “Gran, you’re saying too much,” John’s voice boomed from the other room, and both Granny and I jumped.

  When we carried in the tray, I found myself at a family tea, as if all were decided. And when the afternoon ended, John walked me back to the Hall through the lowering twilight.

  Deep in the grove, he muttered, “Gran’s old. But still strong. She may live a long time yet. We’ll not be spending the whole of our married life under her roof.”

  Something stirred within me. I was ready for love, and John spoke as if it were all decided between us. The evening wind seemed to blow less cold. “We’ll start out with her,” he said, “but there’s other opportunities elsewhere.”

  “But where shall we go?”

  “The century’s young, like us, and it’s a big world.” Words forsook him, but somehow I saw what he wanted me to see. A world of steam and speed and chances, even for us. It was a dream of underlings. I thought I saw freedom for us.

  “There’s America,” he said, but that was too distant to draw me. Now in the kitchen yard, light from Miss Amanda’s window fell upon us, and he was fumbling in a pocket. He withdrew a gold ring, worn to a thread, with a single stone, a ruby like a drop of blood. “It was Gran’s and then my mother’s. Now it’s yours.”

  The ring fit my finger perfectly. It gave me the courage to ask. “But when—”

  “Soon now. There’s no reason to wait longer.”

  * * *

  How little I remember of the night of the engagement party. My mind was on my own concerns. If Miss Amanda, radiant in her silver gown, noticed my ring, she made no sign. Of course she saw! If my engagement hadn’t been her own plan, she’d have put a stop to it.

  I worked through the evening under Mr. Finley’s snapping fingers until midnight. Then the villagers set alight the bonfire, and the guests assembled on the Hall steps. Champagne was handed around. The staff were free for a few moments to watch the bonfire and the first fireworks.

  From somewhere John stepped up beside me, taking my hand with his ring upon it. We stood there, undeniably together now. Then after distant thunder, the night sky blossomed with white fire.

  I married John Thorne in the first week of the new year, 1912.

  Miss Amanda made no reference to my plans, but in the last days before the wedding she had given me my afternoons off, to make my meager preparations. I was to wear a practical costume cast off by Miss Amanda, a dark jacket and skirt. They fit me like a glove.

  On the day John and I were to be married, Miss Amanda broke her silence. Even after all these years, I’m angry with myself for remembering her words more clearly than the clergyman’s. But perhaps that’s fitting, for what was in her mind cast a longer shadow than my wedding vows that bound me to John Thorne for
so brief a time.

  I had taken in her breakfast tray to find her looking ill. Her hair was damp against the pillow, and a faint sour smell hung in the room. “Shall I call Dr. Post, Miss Amanda?” I asked.

  “I am no more ill than I should be, nor is this the first morning.” Then she said even more abruptly, “You are to marry Thorne today. I wish you well, Miranda. It could not suit me better. I should have been glad to see you marry sooner, but there were reasons why—it is never wise to rush into anything so terribly permanent.”

  “If you say so, miss,” I replied. Then she fell silent. I left her presence, and she did not see me again until I was a married woman. But in this I had not drawn farther from her, but nearer.

  AMANDA SPEAKS

  7

  I am Amanda Whitwell, and I have been intimidated by very little in my nineteen years. I shan’t begin by being cowed by a blank page. I shall write in this diary as I speak. I do not write for the eye of anyone now living. But in time, when all the chains that bind young women have fallen away, my book will find its proper reader. I shall head this, my first entry:

  THE NEW YEAR, 1912

  For it is in this newly born year that I mean to complete the plan for my life.

  Miranda, as I call her—you see I named her myself—had dropped out of nowhere, really, and it was like a joke played by fate. She looked enough like me to be my twin. In all her boundless innocence, she had clearly been sent to solve my quite complicated problems. Problems caused by another servant, who had given me the only real joy I had ever known. I can’t think when I first fell in love with him. John Thorne is his name, and very handsome in his brutal way. I must have been a child, for John is ten years and more my senior.

  We Whitwells belong to a dying class, as I notice from my mother’s meaningless gentility. There cannot be another generation like my mother’s. Not in this family. For I have no intention of dancing to Lady Eleanor’s stately minuet. I hear a wilder music in my mind.

  Sometimes I suspect my mother thinks me mad. How little she knows me! Certainly she is anxious to tame me into marriage. And if I am a bit ill in the mornings, she either does not notice, or dares not.

  My plan has a lovely shape, and nothing can stop it now. I have sent my fiancé, Gregory Forrest, back to America to await my arrival. I won’t remain suffocated in England, where I could never be sure of holding John Thorne forever. Sooner or later we would be discovered and pilloried upon the class system. But in wild, far-flung America, where a servant’s role is scarcely understood and I shall be a foreigner, John Thorne will be mine on my terms. And I shall have Gregory as well, to provide for me. For it is my plan that John, with his respectable wife, will join me and my husband as our chauffeur and maid.

  How lovely it will be—the long drives through endless, golden afternoons. Once we are in a secluded spot, I shall rap on the window that divides us, and we shall enjoy an interlude in some hidden park. All the rest of my life will be a golden afternoon, while my husband will go about his tiresome business and John’s wife will attend to my more trivial needs.

  It is quite dark now, and the hours drag on terribly. Where are they now, my lover and my maid, who have been married today? Will they spend their wedding night in some crossroads inn or return to the cottage?

  I won’t torture myself with these thoughts. After all, it’s my plan, and Miranda lacks the spark to ignite the fires within John Thorne. Only I can do that. And I’m not really alone. I am carrying John Thorne’s child, and he knows. I wanted his child to bind us together, to bring him to his knees finally.

  The middle of April seems just the time for my marriage to Gregory. All will look well at first. And later—poor Gregory will be called a rake by his New York friends when they learn how scandalously soon his little English bride presents him with an heir. But Gregory is the least of my concerns. It’s the price he must pay for the wife he desires so much more than she desires him. Without this child, John and I might drift apart. And that must never be.

  JANUARY 15, 1912

  The sickness of the mornings has passed, and I’m feeling fit and still willow-slim. I do a little dance of triumph around my room even on these cold mornings. But Miranda is at the door now, and I must compose myself. Her dignity mounts daily, and her voice grows steadily more like an echo of my own.

  There are letters from New York on my breakfast tray, and I wonder that Gregory Forrest can build his houses and still write so much. My delay makes him restless. He includes two steamship tickets—for Miss Whitwell and her maid for an April tenth sailing from Southampton. And if that were not enough, a brochure from the White Star Line about its new liner.

  Yes, I shall sail on the maiden voyage of that ship.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1912

  A sign from heaven that my plan is meant to be! Dear, bumbling Father has revealed his generous wedding gift—a Rolls-Royce automobile! A limousine, and that of course requires a British chauffeur. Poor Father hadn’t realized that I could hardly take Miranda to America as my maid without Thorne. Once reminded of this, he offered me the pair of them, rather like a pair of Ming vases that it would be a great pity to split up!

  Father was closeted in his study with Miranda and Thorne and Finley for a long time. Such a bother, when the whole thing was really decided by me ages ago. Their meeting went on so long that I began to suspect Miranda of making difficulties. When she came into my room later, her face was indeed wet with tears.

  “Whatever is the matter?” I asked her, and it all came out. It was nothing to do with New York at all. Poor, drab Betty, who had married her draper in haste, had gone through a normal pregnancy only to lose the child. And soon after, she’d died herself.

  What a relief that Miranda was not disturbed at the thought of going to New York. That would have been awkward.

  MARCH 5, 1912

  Last night John Thorne came to my room. It seems that nothing can hurry the Rolls-Royce people, and the limousine will not be ready to ship until early summer. So Thorne must stay behind and accompany the auto on a ship to New York when it’s ready.

  How angry this makes me! But John convinced me that it will look much better all around if Miranda and I arrive in New York alone.

  APRIL 7, 1912

  I might have known! Everything was going too well. And now a last-minute complication just as I was counting the hours.

  John Thorne and I have been discovered.

  It is all because I was overtired and growing careless. Though of course it was not really my fault. It only happened because Mother and Father would give a tiresome bon voyage party for me on my last Saturday.

  After the party John came to my room. It was nearly the last moment we could be together. Surely I deserved something after enduring that wretched party. Later I fell asleep without sending him away. I awoke at eight o’clock, and there was John, still heavily asleep beside me. I shook him, and he awoke suddenly. How was I to get him out of a house already astir? And in that moment Miranda opened the door to bring my early-morning tea.

  All my plans seemed threatened. It was all too, too unfair. Thorne drew away from me as if I were some loathsome beast. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, turned away from us both, his head in his hands.

  Miranda stood in the doorway, rigid as a statue, looking in on this absurd scene. No one spoke. John was incapable of doing anything. He sat there, his great naked back casting a long shadow across my bed.

  Perhaps it is as well she knows. She was bound to know one day, however blind she chose to be. But I shall never let myself be caught again, never.

  I heard my voice saying, “I should think, all things considered, that we shall need another cup for morning tea. Go and fetch it at once, Miranda.”

  I even managed to meet her gaze. Her eyes had gone quite dark. From violet to near black. She looked quite changed. Quite thoroughly changed.

  MIRANDA SPEAKS

  8

  Early on Wednesday, April 10
, 1912, I, Miranda Cooke Thorne, stood again on the platform of Waterloo Station in London. But I was not the same young girl who had gaped at that scene the previous autumn. For I’d lost everything in my world. My husband was neither his own man nor mine, and our marriage was a mockery. He had stirred the beginnings of my passion but had touched me nowhere else. When I found him in another woman’s bed, I was through with lying to myself. The last of my innocence was driven out, and I expect it showed.

  I’d said nothing to John Thorne that morning. I stared at his naked back while she struggled to cover herself. I spoke not a word to him in the half week before I left for London. At Smuggler’s Cottage I packed my few belongings into a satchel while John Thorne wavered in the doorway, searching, perhaps, for words that would have changed nothing. I walked out past him without a backward look.

  I said little more to the servants at Whitwell Hall, for I couldn’t be sure what they knew. On the day I left, I’d have walked straight past even Mrs. Creeth if she hadn’t reached out quickly to embrace me. “It’s hard to be going off to strange parts,” she said. “And harder still to leave behind your friend in a fresh grave. I know you was a true friend to Betty.”

  My eyes swam with tears. “I shall remember Betty as a friend in a friendless world,” I half whispered. “And I shall remember your kindness in this last moment. There’s nothing more I’ll want to remember.”

  At Waterloo I waited on the platform. The hand luggage had already been put on the boat train. I carried only Miss Amanda’s jewel case—a gift from Mr. Forrest—and a bag that contained the leather book she wrote in occasionally. I longed to be off, even though I must go with the person I hated most in the world. I never thought of escape from her. I had nowhere to go. And I was a married woman in the eyes of the law. That was another chain that bound me.

  Miss Amanda stood apart from me with her mother and some London friends. There’d been another farewell party, at Charles Street, and faithful Miss Ward-Benedict had stayed on to see us away. Miss Amanda was dressed in a spring coat and short whipcord skirt. Her coat was loosely belted, for she was not the willow wand she’d been. From the time I’d found her ill, so much like Betty, I knew she was carrying a child, and now I knew who the father was.