“How old?”
Not a sound. I expect he hunched his shoulders. Mulliner was a shoulder-huncher.
“Who the devil can she be?”
“Anybody . . . governess’ frock . . . silk petticoats . . . probably lying, if the truth were known.” I was breathing so hard I could hardly keep my seat. In fact, I couldn’t. I jumped up and shook my fist at the door, but the louder voice spoke again.
“What, in some kind of trouble you mean?” As if losing one’s memory were not trouble enough!
“Determined she won’t be found . . . no move to find . . . McCurdles offered . . .”
“Oh Christ, John, that pair of harpies!” I began to like Sir Ludwig.
“You could always use . . . help you with paperwork . . . maid . . .” But how I loathed Mulliner more with every word he uttered.
“A governess is what I need.”
“Oh governess! She can’t add two and two!” That he would say good and loud, pest of a man. “. . . seems well enough read . . .”
“Speak French?”
Mumbles that sound negative.
‘Mais oui! Je parle français courramment!
Oh, why had no one asked me that? I could speak French. I was hard pressed to keep from bolting into that study.
“Just the finishing touches. A little French, some drawing lessons, pianoforte. I can get her out of your hair for the time being at least.” Delightful phrase! I sounded like a bat. “Poor Wickey must be sleeping in the cheese room. Bring the girl in.” My beginning to like Sir Ludwig had been premature. Bring her in—for inspection, like a filly or a heifer. Without wasting a second I dashed up the stairs two at a time. If Sir Ludwig wished to inspect me, he would send word to my room, and I would keep him waiting at
least
five minutes.
Word was brought on the instant. As the servant girl chose to use the phrase ‘right away,’ Sir Ludwig cooled his heels for ten minutes, not five. When I was good and ready, actually when I could contain my own curiosity no longer, I arose and tripped down the stairs. In his eagerness for a look at me, Sir Ludwig had removed to the hallway, to the very bottom of the staircase, where he stood with one hand on the newel post, the other on his hip, straining his neck up to see me. He had a monocle stuck in one eye, and on his face there rested an expression of the greatest curiosity. It was natural I suppose, yet I had come to resent prying eyes, the curious half smile that accompanied the first examination of me. That look, as though one were for the first time getting a glimpse of a tigress, or an exotic bird from some faraway land.
“So this is your stranger,” Sir Ludwig said, turning to Mulliner, after he had stared his fill of me. And this was the great Sir Ludwig—a mannerless country squire despite the many-collared coat. A big, bulky man with all the graces of a hound.
Not even a how do you do, but an offhand comment
about
me, as if I were not present, or not a creature to be acknowledged as an equal. The frustrations of the past days welled up into one giant explosion inside my chest. “Sorry I couldn’t provide you with two heads, or five or six legs, to have made your trip worthwhile,” I heard myself say.
I had the pleasure of seeing Sir Ludwig’s monocle drop out of his eye with the shock of my gall. Still it was an evil genie who compelled me to be rude to this man, after tolerating the impertinent questions of so many others. Humankind can bear only so much; my own breaking point is a monocle. A quizzing glass already sets my hackles up, but it at least can be attributed to a love of fashion. There is nothing fashionable about a monocle, and unless a person has impaired vision, in which case he ought to purchase a pair of spectacles, I can see no requirement for a monocle. It is my firm belief it is used for the purpose of intimidation. Very likely some unhappy experience from my forgotten past is responsible for this quirk, but I am stuck with it, and with an utter revulsion for a monocle.
Our visitor’s astonishment was rapidly giving way to offense. His black slashes of brows rose, his chin went up, as he first glared at me, then turned a demanding eye to Mulliner, who hunched his shoulders. ‘This is what I have had to put up with,’ his wounded face implied. “This is the young lady I spoke of,” is what he actually said. “We are calling her Miss Smith for the moment.”
“Does your friend also have a name, for the time being, Mr. Mulliner?” I asked, to give Kessler a taste of being talked about in his own presence.
“Sir Ludwig Kessler,” Mulliner replied, as though he were announcing His Majesty George III, at the very least. Only the blare of trumpets was lacking.
I curtsied, not low, and said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sir Ludwig. A German name, I take it? You do not look German.” I had pictured him a stout, red-faced, blue-eyed Teuton. He more closely resembled a Spaniard grown tall. But it could be the darker coloring of the Alpine Germans with the taller build of the Teutonic branch. The head was long and flat enough, not the short, broad head of the southern Germans. The cheekbones were high, the long nose large but well-sculpted.
He did not bow, offer a hand, or smile. He looked, with his black brows raised to an unnaturally high level over dark eyes, whose shade was indistinguishable in the darkish hallway. After a long examination of my face he replied, “Neither do you.”
The remark baffled me, but eventually I assumed he meant I, too, looked un-German. “There is not the least reason to assume I am of German extraction,” I pointed out.
“No, she’s English all right,” he said to Mulliner, then turned back to continue his perusal of me. The gown now, or the figure. The figure, in fact. A man’s eyes do not linger so long over navy bombazine of an uninteresting cut. No sign of approval escaped his eyes or lips. Just so would a man assess an animal he was considering purchasing. “Do you speak French?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Fluently.” I posed him a nice, long, difficult question in French having to do with Goethe. He blinked, without attempting a reply.
“Play the pianoforte?” he fired off next.
“I don’t know. There is no instrument here for me to try. Till I try a thing, I don’t seem to know whether I can do it.”
“Do you sketch, paint?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve tried that, then?”
“No.” I frowned as the contrariety of this answer struck me. “But I have been missing my brushes,” I said, and it was true. Now I realized what it was that had made the days drag so. I hadn’t painted since coming here, and I missed it. I could almost feel a brush between my fingers, smell the pigments, see the canvas stretched white and pristine on its frame.
“Never mentioned it,” Mulliner said accusingly.
“I didn’t realize it till now.”
“Can’t have been missing it much, then.”
“I guess she’ll do,” Sir Ludwig said over his shoulder to Mulliner. Another phrase to make the blood boil. Oh I must be better than a governess! I could not become accustomed to this manner of being put down.
“You’re coming to Granhurst with me,” Sir Ludwig said. “You have no objection, Miss—ah, Smith?” he asked, as he intercepted a flash of anger from me.
“I am in no position to object to anything. The house, I take it, is chaperoned? Your wife is there?”
“Really!” Mulliner exploded in a fine huff. “Upon my word, you must forgive her, Sir Ludwig.”
“It is a reasonable question. You will be chaperoned,” Sir Ludwig told me.
“You might take it as understood when
I
give my agreement to the proposal that there is nothing amiss in it,” Mulliner chided me.
“Are we going now?” I asked the caller, enjoying the rudeness of ignoring Mulliner.
“Yes, it will save another trip to town tomorrow.” Sir Ludwig took up his curled beaver from a table in the hall, and his gloves.
“I’ll say goodbye to Miss Wickey then, and get my wrap.” I whisked upstairs to do this.
Before saying goodbye to my one friend, I asked her for an assurance as to what sort of a gentleman Sir Ludwig might be. “He’s all right. Don’t be forward with him. Just do as he says and you’ll rub along well enough. He’ll be wanting you to look after his little sister, Abigail, I fancy. Not so little; she’s fifteen, and a minx. Her governess got married last Halloween, and she’s been without anyone to see to her lessons. The McCurdles told me he was looking about for a woman while he was in London, but he must have been out in his luck. In any case, it won’t be for long, Miss Smith. Dr. Fell feels any day . . .”
“Yes, so he has been saying for ten days. Goodbye, Miss Wickey. I’ll call when I’m in the village, if I can. I’ll miss you.” I gave her a hasty hug, thanked her as she stuffed one of her own little nightgowns and some lingerie into a bag, and I was off, carrying my sole earthly possessions on my back, and my borrowed ones in a brown paper bag that didn’t weigh two pounds. This was traveling light!
Chapter Three
Sir Ludwig looked surprised when I handed my bag to him to carry. I had been surprised he hadn’t reached out for it. In any case, he accepted it.
“Is this all? You travel light,” he said. Original! We took our leave of Mulliner and were out into the cold night, with the snow still on the ground. It reminded me of that other night, the night I had come to Wickey, except that it was not snowing now. There was a carriage and four horses waiting. Job horses, from the looks of them. They did not do justice to the smart carriage.
“My nags will be forwarded from Guildford,” he said, as he caught me out examining the team. “I’m on my way home from London. I heard about your strange story at the inn where I stopped for dinner. In fact, I heard an intimation of it even as far away as Alton. Odd no one has come for you, when the tale is pretty broadly circulated. One assumes it has traveled in circles, and not only eastwards.”
“Yes, the whole affair is very odd,” I answered curtly, and entered the door, to pull a fur rug over my knees and feel the welcome warmth of heated bricks.
“No idea at all how this might have come about?” he asked, in a spirit of civil conversation.
“None. I should not have stayed where I was if I had had a better place to go.”
“You came to cuffs with Mulliner, I take it?”
“His housekeeper is very kind.”
“Wickey’s a darling. Did she tell you anything about me?”
“She said you have a sister who requires a governess. I doubt I’ll prove a satisfactory one.”
“I consider it a very temporary arrangement only. There isn’t room at the rectory for a guest. Actually I had half decided to send Abbie to a ladies’ seminary to put the final bit of polish on her before her coming out, but as you are so accomplished in French, you might make yourself useful in that area while you are with us.”
“I shall be happy to,” I answered, smothering down all my anger at ‘making myself useful’ to a set of rude country bumpkins.
“She will be happy to brush you up on your ciphering, a sphere in which I understand your own skills are lacking,” he went on. “Abbie has a very German head on her shoulders. Keen on the sciences and mathematics. And she
looks
more German than myself, Miss Smith. My great-grandfather—as you appeared curious in my bearing a German name I mention it—was from Germany. He married an Englishwoman, however, and settled here a hundred or so years ago. All that remains of Germany is the name.”
“I think something of the manner lingers,” I disagreed politely. I don’t know what he understood by the remark, but I meant to infer there was a Prussian abruptness and love of authority still in evidence.
“Quite possibly,” he answered, unfazed.
We fell silent till we approached that area where I had been reborn, like Paul on the way to Damascus. “This must be where it happened,” I mentioned, to break the heavy silence.
He pulled down the window, hollered to his coachman, and the horses jingled to a halt. “Right here?” he asked.
“I believe that is the bunch of trees I remember going around in circles above me. There are none for some distance except these. This must be the spot.”
“What, you were actually lying on the ground?”
“Yes, in that ditch over there.”
He descended to view the place, and I too got out, unaided. “Were you hurt?”
“I had a bump on the head. I thought perhaps a branch hit me.”
There was no sign of a large branch fallen, but it could have been picked up to use as firewood by a poor farmer. I had often seen them do it at home. I could even see the fustian jacket of a nameless phantom, on a nameless road somewhere in the foggy landscape of my past. Odd, useless bits of this sort surfaced regularly, but never anything of the least use. I mentioned the stage’s passing at an appropriate hour, and the theory that I had asked to be put down from it.
“Why the devil would you do that? There’s nothing within half a mile of here but Gwynne’s place. Half a mile onwards, Theodore Gwynne’s home. The name mean anything to you?”
“No, who is he?”
“A retired merchant from the city. A bachelor. We’ll call on him and see if any bells ring. In fact, I want him to have a look at a painting I picked up at Sotheby’s in London. It is called, optimistically I fear, a Vermeer. My father was used to do a spot of collecting. I usually pick up a clinker myself, but at the price this one was going for, I risked it.”
“I should like to see it.”
“You’re interested in art?”
“Very much so, but not the Dutch genre school in particular.”
“You remember all that, do you?” he asked, frowning.
“I remember irrelevant things.”
“Who is to say they are irrelevant? You mentioned liking painting, missing your brushes you said as well. You alit here, and Gwynne is a fanatic on the subject of art. There must be some connection. We’ll call on him tomorrow. Why, it begins to look as though we’ve solved your case already, Miss Smith. Odd no one thought of Gwynne living so close by.”
“I was headed in the other direction. I mean—I decided to go that way. I don’t actually know where I was on my way to.”
“No one in Wickey seemed to know a thing about you, or to have been expecting you. You were likely headed to Gwynne’s, all right. If you are known in artistic circles at all, Theo will know all about you. Come, we’ll get back in the carriage. You have been ill.”