She nodded, although she didn’t, not really. She couldn’t believe she was having a conversation with Father. She wanted it to go on for ever.
‘In the same way,’ he continued, ‘those carvings aren’t intended merely to portray God’s creatures. The frogs are symbols of wickedness. Do you know what a symbol is?’
‘Yes, Father,’ she said eagerly. ‘Like in the Book of Revelations: “I saw three unclean spirits like frogs”?’
His eyebrows rose. ‘How old are you, Maud?’
‘Eight and three-quarters. I shall be nine on the twenty-sixth of May.’
‘And do you enjoy reading your Bible?’
She nearly told the truth and said that she only read the Bible because she had nothing else and please please could she be allowed in the library? Out of caution, she simply nodded.
‘Your knowledge of Scripture is impressive, but you mustn’t show off. Intellectual conceit is unattractive, particularly in females.’
‘Yes, Father,’ she said happily. Impressive. He’d called her impressive.
Taking up his pen, he opened the red notebook. ‘You may go. You will write out one hundred times that it is wrong to look about you in church instead of attending to your prayers.’
‘Thank you, Father.’
She left the study floating on air. She’d escaped a thrashing and impressed Father. And another thing: it looked as if he’d written today’s date in his notebook. Was he keeping a diary, like Miss Broadstairs, whose journal had a beautiful little gilt lock?
Maud was desperate to know if he’d written anything about her.
MAUD once heard Lady Clevedon remark that as Maman’s people were Belgian and in trade, poor Dr Stearne had had to work miracles to teach her good taste. Maud had hated Lady Clevedon ever since.
Strangely, though, Maman seemed to agree. ‘Your father did a wonderful thing in marrying me,’ she told Maud. ‘I owe him everything. It’s my duty to make him proud.’
This meant looking beautiful all the time. When Maman’s middle was so swollen that she couldn’t wear stays, she wore the most gorgeous tea gowns. When she was well again, she spent her days changing her clothes: breakfast gown, walking dress, afternoon gown, evening gown.
She was ideally suited to the fashions of the time. Her bust never needed enhancing with hidden flounces, and her swan neck was perfect for boned collars reaching to her ears. Years later, Maud realised that Maman could only have achieved her hourglass figure by savage tight-lacing. She must have lived in almost constant pain.
Sometimes Maman came to the night nursery to kiss them when they were in bed. Maud would hear the rustle of her skirts and breathe the milky scent of her skin and the smell of the little sachets of violet powder sewn into the underarms of her gowns. ‘Dors bien, ma petite Mode,’ she would whisper, and they would exchange butterfly kisses with their eyelashes. Plain as Maud was, Maman really did seem to love her back.
Another part of making Father proud was obeying his every word. Maman never disturbed him by playing the piano, and she never kept any mementoes of the dead babies because he didn’t approve. He said it was right and proper to pray for them and engrave their names on the family monument, but mementoes were for Catholics, and it was better not to dwell on one’s loss.
It didn’t occur to Maud that her mother might disagree with him until one afternoon in April when he was away in London doing research.
Valerie was downstairs pressing a bodice for the evening and Maman was in the dressing-room, while Maud was in the bedroom, playing with her mother’s jewellery casket for a treat. In one of the little rosewood drawers, she found a small oval box that she hadn’t seen before. It was dark-blue enamel inlaid with silver roses, and inside were seven tiny locks of fine hair. Each was tied with a yellow ribbon minutely embroidered with tiny letters. Maud recognised the names of the dead brothers and sisters for whom she had to pray every night.
‘Promise you won’t tell Father,’ Maman said calmly from the doorway.
‘I promise,’ said Maud. ‘Or Richard or Nurse or anyone.’
‘There’s my good girl. Now put it back where you found it.’
Maud did as she was told. ‘But how did you get them?’ she breathed. Maman was never allowed to see the dead babies. Dr Grayson always had them taken away before her sleeping draught wore off.
‘That was easy,’ her mother said drily. ‘I bribed the monthly-nurse.’
‘But – doesn’t it make you sad? Being reminded, I mean.’
Maman made a little gesture of impatience. ‘Of course it does. But this isn’t something one can simply put out of one’s mind. Nor do I want to.’
Maud looked at her with new respect. She had disobeyed Father not once, but seven times.
A few days later, Maud and Maman were taking a drive on the Common when the carriage came to a halt and Maud was surprised to see Biddy Thrussel approach Maman’s window. Biddy was the village wisewoman, a large moon-faced cottager who kept one fingernail filed to a point to ‘break the waters’, whatever that meant. Maud watched her bob a curtsey, then hand Maman a small bottle of greenish liquid. Slipping it into her reticule, Maman pressed a shilling in Biddy’s palm and told Jessop to drive on.
Maud asked what was in the bottle.
Maman hesitated. ‘A herbal tonic.’
‘What’s a tonic?’
‘It keeps me well.’
‘Does it taste nice?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. But I thought I would.’
When they were nearly home, Maman said, ‘Your Father wouldn’t like me accepting things from Biddy, so we’ll say no more about it. Entendu, ma petite?’
‘Entendu, Maman.’
‘There’s my good girl.’
Maud forgot about the herbal tonic until after Easter, when Maman was ill again. This time it wasn’t a proper groaning, merely an indisposition that lasted a few days, and it ended in a bloody chamberpot.
But Maud didn’t begin to suspect that the question of babies might be more complicated than she’d been led to believe until she finally had a chance to read Father’s notebook.
It was early May and the damp weather was making washing week a trial. Lady Clevedon said Maman ought to ask Father for money to pay an outside laundress, but she never did. This meant that every six weeks the servants were bad-tempered and the house stank of bleach.
The smell had given Father a headache, and he’d gone to Ely to buy books. Dr Grayson was upstairs with Maman, and Nurse was with Richard, who had whooping-cough.
Maud was downstairs in the passage. Father’s study doors were open, as Sarah had just sprinkled the rug with damp tea-leaves and was sweeping them up. Maud was hanging about by the side-table. This was covered in an Indian shawl on which stood a glass dome full of stuffed bats. Her grandfather had caught them before she was born, and they’d lived on the side-table ever since. Maud liked them because they were the only animals allowed in the house.
At the end of the passage the green baize door opened and Daisy called Sarah to come and help with the mangle. When she’d gone, Maud peeped into the study. Father’s notebook was lying on his desk.
No no, she couldn’t.
Could she?
He’d only written a few paragraphs and his writing was so tiny she couldn’t make out much: ‘… the chancel arch is a disgrace, we must have it re-plastered… old Clevedon’s so damnably mean…’ Maud blinked. Father had written a rude word.
A few paragraphs down, she spotted her name. ‘Maud is much more intelligent than Richard. What a pity she isn’t a boy.’ She flushed with pleasure. She’d often thought the same thing.
Over the page the writing was slightly easier to read: ‘Grayson has been badgering me about steps to prevent conception. I told him such measures are revolting, unnatural and wrong. I doubt he’ll raise the matter again.’
At that moment, Maud heard a carriage in the drive. Her mind darted in panic. Father was back.
; Slamming the notebook shut, she sped to the doorway. Already she could hear him climbing the steps.
Steers hurried past her on his way to the front door. The instant before he opened it, Maud lifted the Indian shawl and shot under the side-table.
She heard Steers take Father’s hat, cane and gloves and help him off with his ulster. ‘No thank you, Steers, I’ll unwrap the books myself.’ The Indian shawl didn’t quite reach the floor: Maud could see the glossy tips of Father’s boots. Silently, she begged the bats to protect her.
Steers told Father that Dr Grayson was with Mrs Stearne, and Father headed for the stairs, while Steers returned to the back offices. Maud was about to flee when Sarah rustled past to set the study to rights.
Voices upstairs. Dr Grayson was leaving and Father was walking him to the door. In an agony of suspense, Maud heard them come downstairs and halt at her hiding place.
Dr Grayson was so close that she could hear him breathing through his whiskers. ‘Mrs Stearne needs rest,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Rest, that’s the ticket. So perhaps – not every night? Eh?’
‘Whatever can you mean,’ Father said coldly.
Maud could tell from Dr Grayson’s flustered apology that he’d made the most awful mistake.
Soon afterwards, she escaped to the day nursery. Dr Grayson was not seen at Wake’s End for several weeks.
The wet weather continued. In the churchyard the sexton had to remove pails of water when he dug a grave, and at Wake’s End the Lode began to creep across the lawn.
In the day nursery, Maud puzzled over what she’d read in Father’s notebook. Conception was when God gave a lady a baby, she’d read that in Isaiah: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’ Was that why Father was angry with Dr Grayson for suggesting how to prevent it?
Maud remembered a conversation she’d overheard between Nurse and Cook.
‘If he so much as sees Master Richard or Miss Maud I gets a warning,’ grumbled Nurse. ‘How’s it my fault if he don’t like his own childer?’
Cook sniggered. ‘He likes making en, though, don’t ee?’
Nurse snorted one of her rare laughs. ‘Gah! You terror!’
Maud felt uneasy and confused. Surely it was God who sent the babies. What did Father have to do with it?
SOON after Maud’s ninth birthday, Father took Maman to Brussels to visit her uncle – and amazingly, Richard and Maud went too.
At first Maud was beside herself with excitement. She’d never been further than Bury St Edmunds. But ‘abroad’ proved to be a huge disappointment. She didn’t see the sea at all as it was dark, and Brussels turned out to be the same as home, because Nurse and the rules came too.
Afterwards, three things stood out in her memory: Great-Uncle Bertrand, the dragonfly pendant and the porcelain wing.
Father said Great-Uncle Bertrand was vulgar. Maud liked him because he let Maman play the piano. It was the first music Maud had heard apart from hymns and she found it confusing. But she was extremely proud of her mother.
The dragonfly pendant was a late birthday present from Maman. It was blue enamel set with peridots, and Maud’s very first jewel. She was thrilled that Maman had remembered that she loved dragonflies.
Maud found the porcelain wing one afternoon when Father was away in a library reading about a lady named Alice Pyett, and Maman had taken Richard and Maud to a park where she had played when she was a little girl.
The park was a dusty expanse of hard brown grass, but next to it was a churchyard shaded by the most beautiful trees. While horrid Richard was throwing a tantrum and being fussed over by the grown-ups, Maud squeezed through a gap in the fence and explored.
She was entranced. This churchyard was nothing like St Guthlaf’s. Every headstone bore a dear little oval portrait of the person buried underneath, and the children’s graves were adorned with wreaths of lilies studded with small porcelain angels. Maud was enchanted by their wings. They were ruby, sapphire and emerald, like the butterflies in the drawing-room pictures at home.
Maud met a girl of about her own age and learned in broken French that her mother was tidying the family grave. Maud had never cared for dolls, but she was intrigued by the ones this girl had with her. Her mother couldn’t afford to buy her real dolls so she’d rescued some of the angels from the wreaths and knocked off their wings with a hammer.
Maud found a snapped-off wing in the grass. It was a glossy sky-blue with darker lines marking the feathers. It made her think of the geese flying over the fen.
She had just slipped it in her coat pocket when Nurse’s spongy red face loomed over her. ‘So that’s where you been!’
Maud was hustled back to Great-Uncle Bertrand’s in disgrace. Even Maman was displeased. ‘We won’t tell Father,’ she said sternly. ‘He’d be appalled if he knew you’d been playing in a Catholic cemetery.’
Maud was in despair. And Maman didn’t even know about the wing. Later when she was in bed, she laid the wing on her pillow, where Maman would see it.
Her mother glanced at the wing and then at Maud. ‘Do you want this very much?’
Maud nodded.
Maman smoothed back Maud’s hair from her forehead. ‘Then I didn’t see it,’ she whispered.
‘But I stole it,’ whispered Maud. ‘I found it in the—’
‘Don’t say it! Talking about things makes them real. I never saw this. We don’t speak of it. It never happened. Entendu?’
‘Entendu,’ Maud said doubtfully.
She was a thief. She had broken one of the Ten Commandments. But according to Maman, it hadn’t happened.
That night before she fell asleep, Maud wished on the wing that Father would remain in the library for the whole of next day.
Her wish was granted beyond her wildest dreams. Father decided to stay abroad for his research, and sent them home without him.
It got even better. Soon after they returned to Wake’s End, Richard fell ill with rheumatic fever. Within weeks he was out of danger, but he needed constant nursing. With Maman and Nurse fully occupied, all Maud had to do was keep out of their way.
It was the wildest, happiest time of her life. Maman wasn’t ill once, and as long as Maud did her ridiculously easy lessons and appeared promptly at meals, she was free.
Free.
She helped Cole in the garden and he taught her how to put four seeds in every hole: One for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.
She took to haunting the Lode at the edge of the grounds, and one memorable day she spied a bittern in the reeds. It stared at her with a baleful yellow eye, and she knew that she’d encountered the spirit of the fen.
She’d always loved how Wake’s End looked from outside. Its bumpy roofs were splashed with orange lichen and its dormer windows poking from the attics looked like eyebrows over its shaggy green ivy-clad face. The ivy kept Maud safe, and now she befriended the creatures that lived in it: wasps, spiders, whole families of sparrows. She would lie in bed watching the rustly green light filtering through the leaves and listening to magpies stomping about on the roof. The old house was home to thousands of wild creatures. Not even Father could evict them.
Spring turned to summer, and still he stayed away.
As the weather grew hotter, Maud passionately envied the village children who ran about barefoot. Dr Grayson said it was good for children to perspire, so she was always bundled up in a tight leather lung protector, two flannel petticoats, a worsted skirt, jumper, jacket, stockings, buttoned boots, and a black straw hat whose varnish went sticky and smelled.
One particularly hot day when she was out of sight of the house, she daringly removed her hat. When nothing happened, she unravelled her plaits and raked her fingers through her hair. The breeze cooled her scalp. Father and Dr Grayson would have been appalled.
The following day she unlaced her lung protector and stuffed it behind a bin in the harness-room. Henceforth she would wear it only for meals. Her stockings went next. The grass betwe
en her toes was the most delightful feeling she’d ever experienced.
A week later she started stealing fruit. She and Richard were never allowed much fruit as Dr Grayson said it was too acid for children. Now Maud raided the orchard and the kitchen garden. Apples, pears, currants… She especially loved the gooseberries’ taut skin and squidgy green insides. If Cole noticed any of this, he turned a blind eye.
Autumn went by in a flash. Even in winter, Maud haunted the grounds and watched the geese flying overhead. One day she found the wing-prints of an owl in the snow. She could see the pattern of its outstretched wings, every feather as sharp as a knife-cut. Cole said it was a tawny and that it had been hunting mice, but Maud knew that it was her owl, the white messenger of the fen.
Sure enough, that evening brought the stupendous news that Father would remain abroad until at least the following spring. This gave Maud the courage to do what she’d been longing to do for months. She ventured into the library. She didn’t dare touch Father’s books, but she found a shelf of volumes that had belonged to his father. She liked Audubon because of the pictures, and found Lyall on fossils difficult but fascinating. She was also astonished to read that thousands of years ago, the fen had been a forest, and that bog oak was the remains of ancient trees.
But the book she loved most was Robinson Crusoe. She read it again and again. She envied Robinson his parrot and dreamed of surviving on her own in the wild. Her favourite bit was when the dog jumped out of the shipwreck and swam after Robinson to be his faithful companion.
Even more than the books, what she loved was being alone. Until now she’d lived in the nursery with Richard and Nurse and she’d been lonely. In the library she was solitary and happy.
But it never occurred to her that she could live like this all the time. Not until the following year, when she met Jubal Rede.
MAUD still hadn’t ventured into the fen, but now that Richard slept in the day nursery and she had the night nursery to herself, she spent hours gazing at the forbidden realm.
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