Norton, Andre - Novel 39 (2 page)

 
          
 
She began to write on a sheet of foolscap,
using her best choice of word and phrase to compose a letter to the editor of
The British Lady. When she had finished she put it aside for a second and later
reading.

 
          
 
She tapped her penholder against her teeth and
again reread the news clipping. She had never heard what had brought her father
from
England
to the
northern province
of the west. All the days she had known him
he had never referred to his past. Why, she had never even known his age! His
narrow face, its graying skin so seldom touched by sunlight, had not seemed to
add a single year as time passed.

 
          
 
Once more she turned to the front of her
ledger and read: "Father is silent always concerning the past. He never
consorts with anyone directly from
England
. When the new vicar came to call last year
he was so chill and distant of manner that the poor man must have been speedily
frozen. We have never had even a tea party."

 
          
 
She sniffed and hunted hurriedly for a
handkerchief. Surely she was not going to have a cold now! That would give Mrs.
Carruthers further chance to set her out on the street—or would it?

 
          
 
Hester, her head tilted a little to one side
in thought, considered the advantages of taking to her bed and demanding
comfort and nursing. Someone small and appealing—such as Hazel would probably
be in another five years or so—could carry that off readily, but a big gawk of
a woman such as herself—no.

 
          
 
Instead she gave a last sniff and returned to
her reading. Even the one small essay into the wide world of these past two
months had impressed deeply upon her the singularity of her own house—one could
not really, she decided bleakly, have called it a home.

 
          
 
Of her mother she had the vaguest of
memories—there had been a quick-moving lady with a wide spill of curls that
persisted in seeking freedom from a net to fall to her shoulders or dangle
about her cheeks. Then that presence had vanished without explanation from her
narrow circle of life and all she could remember. Shades had been pulled down
to turn rooms into dull and frightening caves; her father wore a dark band on
his coat sleeve for a season. It was then they had moved out of
Montreal
to a small town near the American border.
The servants she had always known
left,
and the
wrinkled-faced woman who had been hired as a governess stayed on as housekeeper.
But this arrangement had not worked and Hester, in her early teens, had taken
charge of the household.

 
          
 
During those years she and her father had been
almost totally isolated from others of their own kind. A day pupil at the
Sisters' for a time, she had been strictly forbidden to take part in any
unnecessary activity. Nor did she have any friends. She had turned early to her
books and her own scribbling for relaxation from her father's lessons, which
were hard and sharp, meant to make of her a reliable aide for his own labors.
Occasionally letters arrived that she was forbidden to open, and these were
subsequently burned, still unopened, in the fireplace.

 
          
 
Now the memory of those unread screeds somehow
became joined in her mind with the cutting from the
Montreal
paper. The mystery surrounding that
clipping was in truth her only legacy from her father. Though they had
subsisted comfortably while he lived, his death meant utter poverty for his
daughter.

 
          
 
She still thought that she had been very lucky
to be introduced to Major Ames when her plight was fully realized. To escort
Hazel Ames
overseas,
and there act as her governess
for at least six months, seemed the perfect answer to her problems. For, with
that natural resilience common to youth, she was sure that something fitting
her talents would turn up in the future. The most common answer was, of course,
marriage.

 
          
 
Hester frowned in a way that erased any small
claim to attractiveness she might possess. The few men she had met under her
father's roof had all been elderly and solemn, most of them ignoring her as if
she were the statue of Truth that adorned the end of the stair rail. In
addition, her father's constant disregard for any thought or desire of her own,
his demand for her constant attention, had made her strongly disinclined to
meet others. To allow some man complete dominance over her again was what she
shrank from the most.

 
          
 
She reached again for the ledger and flipped
over page after page, realizing that this last thought bore the ring of
truth—she had looked upon her father's death as a release from a burden that
was fast becoming intolerable.
Hardhearted, unnatural
daughter?
She had in truth played a role, without realizing it, ever
since she had gone through the house marking down the lists to be handed to the
auctioneer. She had busied herself finding positions for the two elderly maids
upon whose shoulders most of the keeping of the house had depended. It was
Hester who had been left with no future but what she could carve out for herself.

 
          
 
She smoothed out the letter she had written
earlier because she knew now she dared not overlook the slightest aid to a
fruitful future. She read word by word—in the most restrained and formal way.
Surely she could concoct a suitable letter for Mr. Guest.

 
          
 
Having taken the measure of Mrs. Carruthers,
Hester had no desire to leave her two missives to await a tardy visit to the
pillar-box on the part of the pinched-face maid. Fog or no fog, she could at
least mail her own letters. Once more she leafed through the book—such a dull
account and so drearily presented!

 
          
 
It was the latter pages that held her now.
Though she had known very little about the care of children when she met Hazel,
she had been struck by the child's shyness and began to wonder if they had not
a bond in their dislike for people and situations that made them feel unhappy
and miserable. Her own answer—books—came immediately to mind and she put firmly
into the bottom of Hazel's "on-board" satchel some others beside the
school texts. She produced the few that she had kept because, first her
mother's name was within, and, secondly, she had come to feast herself upon
their livelier prose years ago. Hester made Hazel aware of the works of Miss Austen
and Jane Eyre, though she was certain that Lady Ames would not have found the
misfortunes of poor Jane, the governess, suitable for Hazel's reading at all.

 
          
 
Her eyes found another entry in her record.
"Hazel has asked me a question concerning the 'horrid' mysteries as
mentioned in Northanger Abbey. I have never read one (what would Father have
done with Mrs. Radcliffe's volumes— thrown them straightaway into the fire?),
but I told Hazel that they were a kind of ghost story intended to set shivering
the adult reader who professed that only in their extreme youth long ago had
they known such childish tastes. I think she believed me.

 
          
 
"Still, it struck me odd that our
entrance into this country was not unlike the general atmosphere of the
'horrids.' We came ashore on a damp, dark day of which there are so many here.
A hard-faced woman clad in creased black, with a footman, met us. Hazel took
one look at the woman and, straightaway, her manners became once again those of
the timid and fearful child. I could not guess then to what extent this woman's
influence reached. She had a voice as harsh as her face as she introduced
herself as Mrs. Riggs, Lady Ames's personal maid.

           
 
"So we were ushered through the town to
the house of the
Ames
family and informed, in one of Mrs. Riggs's clipped speeches, that the
lady was suffering from an attack of nerves and would see us at teatime but not
before.

 
          
 
"Hazel kept tight hold of a fold of my
skirt drapery as we went into a suite clearly furnished for a lady of at least
twice her years. She asked, in the very low, trembling voice she had lost
during the time spent in my company, where I was to stay.

 
          
 
"Riggs sniffed and looked down a thin
sliver of nose that bore a hairy nob on one side, answering that Lady Ames
would decide that upon seeing me. Nor was she quite out of the room before
Hazel, clinging still to me, began to cry. Between sobs she said she did not
like this place and would I not please take her home again.

 
          
 
"'I—I know that Mama is gone,' she
whimpered
. '
But Papa would not make me stay where I
was afraid. You know he would not, dear Hester!'

 
          
 
"'You are tired, cold, and hungry,' I
said, trying to reassure her. Perhaps I could have made my own voice more
emphatic had I not inwardly been daunted by our reception, too. Stooping, I put
my arms about her.

 
          
 
"'Come. Come now,' snapped Riggs a half
hour later when I had gotten Hazel calm and had suggested to her this was
something of an adventure if she would only look upon it as such. Riggs
stretched her long neck like a crow I had once seen harassing a cardinal,
peering at us both as if we were succulent morsels tamely awaiting attack.
"Best you get young miss here ready for tea. Her Ladyship always wants
what she wants to be delivered as soon as she orders.'

 
          
 
"I saw an expression of obstinacy begin
to stiffen Hazel's small face and I hastened to shut the door through which
Riggs had disappeared. Then I turned to my charge with the best advice I could
at the moment summon.

 
          
 
"'Come, Hazel, you must not let your
grandmother think that you have in the least taken a dislike to your situation
here. Remember you are the daughter of a brave soldier.

           
 
Stand up straight, and report as would one of
the scouts of your father—answer fully any questions that your grandmother may
ask.'

 
          
 
"She stood docilely enough while I combed
her long, strikingly pale, silver curls, and allowed me to bring her a pair of
soft slippers to change for her damp boots. The dismal color of her mourning
dress threw her hair and the sun-creamed hue of her skin into almost startling
relief. Looking at her with approval and, yes, love, I was sure she would find
a place in Lady Ames's life—and, God willing, her heart.

 
          
 
"Our introduction to Lady Ames was a
complete failure. Me she ignored after a nod of the head that dispatched me to
a stiff-backed chair at the far end of her very feminine room, where stout,
hard cushions, worked in silk flowers of quite violent colors, could make even
a most comfortable chair a seat of growing torment.

 
          
 
"She pounced upon poor Hazel with a
series of questions—several of which suggested to me that she strove to
discover some dispute or dislike between the child's parents! Her son had apparently
married a countrywoman of mine and Lady Ames far from liked that. There was
plainly an abundance of spite in her voice and no grandmother's kindness at
all.

 
          
 
"Hazel was again on the verge of crying.
I could stand it no longer and, quite forgetting my own lowly place in the eyes
of this household, I came forward hastily and waited for a chance to speak.

 
          
 
" 'My
lady,
Hazel is very tired and her breakfast was only milk and bread. Could you not
wait until she is rested to question her about family affairs?'

 
          
 
"Lady Ames leaned forward. Her naturally
high-colored countenance took on a quite alarming shade of red and her eyes
appeared to protrude from their cushions of flesh in order to favor me with a
most daunting inspection.

 
          
 
"'Very well.'
She drawled her words, but there was a bite in her tone, which was now an
octave higher than the one that had greeted us.
'Riggs!'
She did not reach for the small silver bell buried in the litter of things on
the table. But Martha Riggs appeared almost instantly in the doorway, as if she
were indeed some eerie creature able to project her person from one room to
another through the very walls.