Amy Snow (13 page)

I considered the variables now as best I could through my own ill-equipped, congested brain. I had assumed that because Aurelia told me to find a bookshop called Entwhistle's I would find one. Perhaps this was a premature assumption. Perhaps all assumptions are premature when it comes to Aurelia.

If it is not called Entwhistle's, then what might it be called? Was I to work my way through the entirety of Mr. Manning's directory, visiting bookshop after bookshop and scouring each in turn, floor to ceiling, for a hidden letter? Or perhaps Entwhistle's was not a bookshop at all! I could imagine my inquiries now:

“Where might I find Entwhistle's, if you please?”

“What is Entwhistle's?”

“I do not know.”

“A shop, a solicitor, a bank, perhaps?”

“I do not know.”

“A tavern, a tailor, a hot chestnut vendor?”

“I have not the slightest idea.”

Impossible! Utterly impossible.

What of the other variables . . . the city? Is there a bookshop called Entwhistle's somewhere else? The prospect of expanding my search to the entire British Isles does not cheer me. What if the clue is a trick? Is there some secret code embedded in her words? Years ago, whenever she wrote my clues in code, she would always draw a little shovel in the corner of the page, to symbolize that I would need to dig deep. There is no shovel on this letter.

It is not in code, it's just maddening. I shall be stuck here in Jessop Walk until my small fortune is spent and my sanity gone.

I screw the paper into a ball and hurl it across the room. It bounces off the wall to rest beneath the smug shepherdess. My poor, buzzing brain is quite exhausted by these fruitless cycles of anger and remorse and renewed dedication. I should quite like to stay angry and have done with it. If only loving someone were that simple.

I hobble from bed once more to beg myself a second rum toddy.

Aurelia stayed true to her promise and sent me regular letters, which I devoured at once and reread often. They contained little souvenirs and sketches—trifles to bring her travels alive for me, nothing so valuable as to provoke the risk of confiscation.

June. The horse chestnut trees were thick and spreading and the smooth lawns hummed with bees. Those were days of blue and gold and blazing flowers; days in which I believed that my ordeal was nearing an end. Beside myself with happiness, I counted down the final days of Aurelia's journey and planned her welcome home.

Letters came, to me and to her parents respectively, explaining that she was extending her trip.

London and Twickenham had been delightful, but now she had been invited to Derby! Derby was a fascinating town by all accounts—she simply must accept and see the famed countryside while she was there. She would return in August, not in June as planned. Disappointment struck me like lightning. I felt disorientated. I wanted to trust that this delay would be a singular occurrence, but I did not.

She warned me that Derby would mean a break in our correspondence:

The journey will be a long one, little dove, and there is a great deal to prepare: shopping and packing, endless good-byes, etc. So it will likely be a few days before I can put nib to paper to write to you (or, indeed, draw a breath!). Please do not be alarmed at this delay. I look forward to embracing you and hearing every detail of your summer when I come home in August.

When the anxiously awaited letter came, three weeks later, it was full of apologies and exclamation marks. Already it did not sound like Aurelia. Flamboyant she had always been, and vain and excitable. But now all she seemed to write about was the social whirl of Derby—of balls and walking parties and handsome young men. In short, she sounded like the daughter the Vennaways had always longed for.

Amy dearest, Meyrick Flintham told me that I was the greatest beauty in the kingdom! (His is an educated opinion. If the rumors are to be believed, he has made conquests of half of them.) Of course,
I
am not to be won with a few pretty words. I merely tossed my head and spun off on the arm of David Gresham, who has forty thousand a year.

I continued my new existence with an ever-waning spirit. Her letters grew fewer and further between.

•  •  •

August. Endless scorching sun and the stream dried up to a snakeskin of stony earth. Only two events of note.

The first was the kitchen maid Dora's wedding. Lord and Lady Vennaway did not attend. The rest of us crowded into the little church to perspire our way through the vows. The hymns met no competition from the birds outside—likely holding feeble wings to their little feathered brows and languishing in shady nests.

Thus, Dora left us forever. She was sharp-tongued and impatient, but her husband gazed at her with an adoration and pride that were evident to all. I confess to a moment of envy, wondering what it was about her that had brought about this circumstance while I had no one—
no one
—of my own.

The second event was another postponement from Aurelia. From Derby she wrote of an opportunity to see the industrial North, the wonder of factories and cotton mills—progress made manifest in bricks and iron! We should expect her in time for Christmas. I could not help myself. That letter went straight on the fire.

•  •  •

September. Mist swirled over the lawns in the mornings and I recalled Aurelia teaching me to dance in the ballroom when I was small. I had no one to laugh with me now and, despite my anger, I missed her. Rain began to spot the windows.

In Dora's absence, Cook began depending upon me as an unofficial, unpaid kitchen maid. She thought it best to hide the fact from her employer—Lady Vennaway was in favor of nothing that might help me feel more at home. We had several nerve-jangling almost encounters that resulted in my being bundled out of the side door or, on one memorable occasion, being tucked into the pantry alongside the jugs of milk.

It was not a comfortable experience (I refer to working in the kitchen, not hiding in the pantry). My close friendship with the young mistress, my spacious bedroom next to hers, and my education made the other indoor staff, as ever, suspicious of me. Aside from Cook, Jesketh, and Rosy, there was no one who had worked inside the house when I was a child and knew how my life had unfolded. But at least there were people around me every day and I slept better for having regular occupation.

Aurelia's letters were irregular and few. Worse, they somehow always missed the mark.

Amy, I knew you would manage
perfectly
well without me, you see! How busy you all sound there. Marvelous. You are good to keep writing to me so devotedly. As for me, the whirl continues, my dear! This afternoon I shall go riding with a young Italian count with an enormous mustache . . .

Perhaps my yearning for her friendship—my raison d'être—made it impossible for any letter now to satisfy. It had become clear that she no longer longed for my letters as I did for hers. Her words were distracted; I could not imagine her watching for the post, snatching up an envelope, and poring over the contents.

Sometimes she asked after someone in Enderby when I had just, two weeks earlier, told her all about them. It was apparent she had not read my words properly. Local news was exceeding small, and I felt duller than ever; my letters must have seemed so dreary.

She did exhort me to keep up my studies; she set me targets, recommended books or poems we might discuss on her return. But during those months it was hard to believe she would
ever
return. She had hurt me and it was my small rebellion to cast aside the interests we had always shared.

I did, however, learn to make soups, roast game, and roll a tolerable pastry.

•  •  •

Christmas: rain and sleet. No gifts, no friends, and no idea of when Aurelia might come home. Cold nights shivering with moonlight and bitter questions.
How
could she discard me like this, and with so little reassurance? Her treatment was especially painful given that I had famously been abandoned once before. I remembered her words, the last time we had talked: “Sometimes, the people you love are
bad
.”

My long-cherished image of Aurelia as the bright angel who had saved me from the snow and who would always love me shivered and faded like a rainbow. I had earnestly tried to understand her need to escape for a time. I had worked conscientiously to accept that different things mattered to us. But I found myself wondering if she had ever given half so much thought to understanding me.

January dragged round. Aurelia was in Bath, where, apparently, she was deeply fascinated by a certain Frederic Meredith. It was months since there had been talk of her return.

Rain. Pounding, drumming rain batters the city mercilessly as if trying to rinse the answer from my head.

I enjoyed an unexpectedly pleasant sleep after three toddies, and it is now my third day in London. Inspiration for how to continue my quest is still entirely lacking. The frustration at being trapped inside, spending my money and achieving nothing, is gargantuan.

My cold is somewhat better today, whether from the rest or Mrs. Woodrow's medicinal rum I cannot say. As a result I am pacing up and down, worrying away at the problem. I consider the possibility of solving Aurelia's mystery from an entirely different angle. If I admit defeat and abandon Entwhistle's, surely there are other ways? There may be others in whom she confided. Frederic Meredith, perhaps?

Back in those dark wintry days of my adolescence, the name Frederic Meredith came to fill me with dread. Aurelia stopped mentioning other men around the time she met him. She wrote of him in the most glowing terms; they filled me with disgust. “His fine, gentlemanly features,” “his commanding figure,” “his quick intelligence and keen sensibilities” all made me wish that Frederic Meredith might be dispatched with all possible haste. She described such a paragon of manhood that he might have stepped straight from the pages of a novel. I wished she might rediscover her own once-keen sensibilities and remember the foundling child she had promised to keep always at her side.

I have long presumed a love affair between them, although she dismissed it afterwards and seemed surprisingly uninterested in discussing him, given that she had written of little else for months. I wondered if perhaps he had let her down, unimaginable though that was. Either way,
I
harbored no wish to hear more of him.

Now I wonder if an affair
is
the secret, though why she would go to quite such pains to disguise the fact now that she is gone I cannot imagine. But if it
is
so, why not go straight to the heart of the matter? I could go to Bath, make inquiries, find Mr. Meredith and . . . my wild plans falter. What if I am wrong? What if the secret must be kept from him too?

For the first time in the four days since I received Aurelia's first letter I have leisure to ponder what the great secret might be. I confess I am wild with curiosity. Did she leave a sum of money to a charity of which her parents would not approve, one of Mr. Dickens's reform houses for ladies of easy virtue, perhaps? Might she have disgraced herself in polite society, offended some leading lights, spoken indiscreetly of her family . . . These are all weak and utterly implausible explanations.

I think of Mrs. Bolton. She visited Aurelia once or twice after their great journey together, then went traveling in Europe as intended and never came back. Her modest house in Enderby was closed up. From time to time Aurelia received a letter from France or Italy or Portugal, but if they contained any exciting news she never told me.

“Mrs. Bolton asks after you, dear,” she would say fondly, looking up from the page. Or, “Mrs. Bolton requests me to pass on her warmest wishes to you.”

Mrs. Bolton and I enjoyed a more cordial acquaintance from separate continents than ever we did when we lived in the same village.

What if Mrs. Bolton is also to be kept in the dark? Aurelia's fervent, some might say excessive, insistence on silence ties my hands and hobbles my steps. The only way I can be sure of
not
betraying her is to follow her instructions to the letter. Letter by letter. But there is no Entwhistle's . . . Lord, what a wretched state of affairs.