Amy Snow (6 page)

Then she stood, dragged me to the door, and slammed it behind me.

I stood shaking in the corridor, fairly sure I'd been dismissed but too confused to know whether I could leave or stay. No one had ever treated me thus. Her ladyship did not emerge, however, and in time I dragged myself off.

I found myself to be quite lost. We had turned a corner or two after I fell and I could not retrace my steps. All the passages here, all the doorways, looked the same. I soon found myself at the foot of a grand staircase we had not passed, a broad and lofty spiral, curved and cream like the shell of a monstrous snail. Above were galleries and soaring walls—all silent, cream expanses. I dared not climb it but feared to retrace my steps and perhaps meet the mistress again.

I had hoped that her inspection of me might mean that I was to become a proper servant who did not have to stay hidden but, little as I knew about it, I did not think staring and spitting could be the usual way these interviews were conducted.

Anger and curiosity propelled me in another direction. Through an open door I glimpsed an enormous chamber and was instantly lost in wonder. The walls were painted icy blue and a chandelier as big as a host of angels swooped and sparkled from the ceiling. Long, sage-green curtains swept from tall windows to the ground, and a gleaming wooden floor reflected the light. I had somehow strayed into a strange, wintry world.

“Amy Snow!” thundered a voice, and I flinched. “What on
earth
are you doing here?”

It was Jesketh, furious but familiar. I had never been so glad to see him.

I spend my last hour at the Rose and Crown neatly repacking my bag, still all a-tumble after my hasty flight from Hatville. My clothes are creasing by the minute. I have nothing of any loveliness, yet I shall try not to look worse than I must.

It is a reflective occupation. It unnerves me to see pieces of my old world here, where I am all at sea.

I pull everything out and put them back in neatly. I pack the heaviest things first: my only other footwear, a pair of flat gray pumps for indoors or the summer, and my books. I have brought five. It was a great heartbreak to choose so few, but I knew I had a long way to walk and no one to carry them but me. I have brought my Bible, the illustrated book of fairy tales that Aurelia used to read to me when I was small,
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott, and of course two works by Mr. Dickens. The very sight of them evokes memories of Aurelia, so helpless with laughter she was unable to read, clutching my arm.

Next goes in the sketchbook that Aurelia bequeathed me. I cannot look at that either.

Then my small toilette, containing hairbrush, hand mirror, linen washcloth, and a small pot of Cook's homemade camphorated dentifrice . . . and one hundred pounds.

Next my heavier garments: a heavy wool dress, identical to the one I am wearing, only made up in gray instead of black. A spare woolen shawl. Dark, inoffensive colors. Then my brown summer dress. Aurelia's green stole, now folded tidily. And finally, a packet of old letters, tied together with gold ribbon and all addressed to Amy Snow.

These are from Aurelia, from the time she went away from Hatville for a while. It is not a time I care to remember and the letters were a mixed blessing when they came, yet I have brought them with me because I could not bear to leave them behind.

It is not much to show for seventeen years on this earth
,
I consider, as I press the clasp shut. And somewhere in there, I fancy, folded up tight amongst the shoes and dresses shabby from overuse, are my dreams, equally tatty from neglect.

Aurelia always had an abundance of dreams and spoke of them often. They always included me. She longed to come into her fortune and leave Hatville forever, to travel, to fall in love a great many times—to change the world. My fate was bound up in hers—she had saved my life, after all—so she always assumed I would go wherever she went, and for the first years of my life I held the same assumption. But in the deepest corners of my heart tarried other wishes.

I did not want to be always on the road, as Aurelia did, sweeping up and down the kingdom like the queen before her. I wanted a home, but not a home like Hatville with its iron bars of heritage and pride. Sometimes, in quiet, private moments, lying in my scullery bed or dreaming in the stables, I saw a cottage, small and square, in the center of a green lawn kept from rampancy by a greedy pony. A laughing husband who would keep me safe from insult. Children who would get into scrapes and make me enthusiastic gifts from paper and paste; children to whom I would give love and security—all the things I had never had. But I never told Aurelia, for they would seem very poor dreams indeed compared with changing the world. Besides, who would ever want me? Never given voice, my dreams dwindled.

Those dreams seem very simple to me now, a crude, crayon-drawn picture by a wistful child. But the beauty of impossible dreams is that they are impossible—the hows and whens don't really matter. I suppose the true longing was not after all the outline of the image but the feelings beneath its surface. I wanted peace, a sense of belonging, and love.

I startle when Tom, Mr. Carlton's boy, comes to escort me to the station. I have not thought of that cottage, that husband, those children for many years. And peace and security seem more remote than ever.

•  •  •

It is a very small branch at Ladywell, I am told, yet to me it is overwhelming. To see finally the railway tracks of which I have heard so much but only seen illustrated! The black, greedy arms that snake across our country, dividing it up into slices. The newspapermen tell us that they link here with there and A with B until distance is annihilated altogether and anyone can go anywhere, any time they want!

There is no station building but a platform open to the elements; a bitter wind blows straight through. It hums with people already, although we are in good time.

Tom takes the coin I proffer and purchases my ticket for me. Second class. I cannot be seen to travel first class so close to Enderby, yet I cannot find the courage for third. I stow it, naturally, in my left glove.

He leads me onto the platform and positions me in a very particular spot.

“You'll be next to a door here, miss. Be able to jump straight on. I'll wait and help you with your bag, o'course. Now, have you looked around and decided which passengers might be the conversational types?”

I can't say that I have, but Tom points out an energetic-looking family as examples of the sort of traveler to whom I might confidently address any inquiries, and two men in caps and dark jackets, as being “ones for avoidin'.”

I am too scared not to take every last piece of advice that comes my way, yet I find it hard to concentrate. I am leaving Ladywell. I am leaving Ladywell. I am leaving Ladywell. I have only ever been here two or three times before, yet it feels familiar compared with whatever lies ahead.

The train, when it comes, is a great, black, blowing monster, and I am in equal parts thrilled and terrified to see it. The doors are flung open with a racket as though devils are shaking the iron gates of Hell; great towers of steam fill the air.

I am a traveler in the Railway Age. I am a young woman of the world. I have important business to conduct. But why, oh,
why
is Aurelia not here to share this adventure with me?

Before my arrival, Aurelia was exceptionally lonely. As she told me when we were yet very young, her mother kept losing all her babies so there was no one for her to play with. And that was why, she believed, God had sent her to find me, knowing she would not be so careless as her mother. I was exceedingly glad that He had.

Although Aurelia had cousins aplenty she found no kindred spirit amongst them. To start with, I was her pet, like the broken birds and trapped animals she kept rescuing and housing in unlikely constructions—a field mouse in a dolls' house, a snake in a bathtub. Robin always abetted these missions of mercy. He showed her how to set a bird's wing, how to make a simple salve of dock leaves. But he was a quiet boy, and the animals had still less to say, and Aurelia had a great many thoughts tumbling inside her.

She had always wanted someone with whom she could share her ideas, someone to help her understand the things that made her laugh and the things that made her want to scream. At six, seven, eight years of age, I was still no equal for her, but I was the next best thing: a willing pupil.

I was not stupid myself, it transpired, nor lacking in curiosity. She taught me to read and write and count, to draw and ride. I was not the only servant at Hatville who could do any of these things, but it did not make me popular.

Aurelia did have a grown-up friend, of whom I sometimes felt jealous. Mrs. Bolton was a slender woman of around thirty, with a world-weary air, a selection of rakish bonnets, and a jaw squarer than Robin's. She always dressed in peacock colors: navy or dark green, with flashes of gold and amber. She did not suffer fools, Aurelia always said admiringly, which made me worry that she thought
me
a fool—Mrs. Bolton was certainly scant in the attention she offered me. She and Aurelia held intense discussions about the State of the World, and the Lot of Women, which made me feel every bit as young and small as I really was. But I never seriously doubted Aurelia's affection for me, and I was comforted that Lord and Lady Vennaway didn't approve of bold Mrs. Bolton either.

•  •  •

A long while had passed (it seemed to me) since my first encounter with Lady Vennaway. The memory of that day did not come back to me often, but it was there, like an invisible fence. Aurelia and I had the run of the grounds, so long as we avoided the croquet lawn, the terrace, the rose garden—anywhere we might encounter civilized folk. Robin always warned us if we strayed too close and we would dash away like elves to the farthest reaches of the grounds. Nor would Cook allow me to accompany Aurelia when she walked into Enderby to do what she called her “Lady Bountifuls.” From her stories of the cramped homes of many of the villagers, I knew I had much to be thankful for, yet it is the nature of bright, curious children to forget the fact.

It was inevitable that the time would come when Aurelia would want to share her indoor kingdom with me. And inevitable too that when she did we would be caught. Once, learning to play the piano, I was hauled from the stool midscale by Mrs. Last, the then housekeeper. I was dragged back to the kitchen and pushed through the door with a wallop.

On another occasion, Aurelia had me trying on one of her gowns. We had always been dressed differently: Aurelia in lustrous fabrics with sashes and ribbons, and frilly white bloomers peeping out beneath full skirts, I in the plainest of work garments, flat shoes, and a simple white cap. How she envied me.

It was one of the maids, Peggy, who spotted us this time.

My gray serge was in a puddle around my feet, the blue satin was halfway over my head. I was shivering in my white cotton shift in between when the door banged open.

Peggy had been most eager to share intelligence of my whereabouts: Lady Vennaway had come. Her shriek rings in my ears to this day. You would have thought me a rat upon her dinner table.

I was blinded by petticoats and the dress was snatched from me with such force that I heard the satin rip. This time Lady Vennaway herself manhandled me to the kitchen before I could properly fasten my dress, her fingers digging into my flesh.

She threw me, actually
threw
me, inside. I staggered against the stove and burned my arm, though glancingly. I had two far greater concerns, however.

Amidst all the confusion, I had heard one thing clearly; Lady Vennaway had absolutely, in the clearest possible language and with a host of accompanying threats, forbidden Aurelia to see me again. And now I watched Cook's ever-ruddy face drain of color as Lady Vennaway gave her such a castigation as I had never heard.

That night I cried myself to sleep for only the third time in my life. The first time I had eaten too many strawberry tarts and my stomach pains were fierce. The second had been over the travails of Oliver Twist.