The Seventh Miss Hatfield

To the young man in the gray suit at Blackwell’s, without whom there would be no Henley.

A young woman adjusted the veil of her hat to make sure it covered her face. She watched as the item she’d been waiting so long to possess was introduced. It was a portrait of a woman, the frame’s gold leaf peeling with age. The woman in the painting was seated in an armchair, its royal blue a dramatic contrast to her crimson dress, the thick fabric of the dress even more vivid next to her olive complexion and dark hair. But it was the remarkable expression she wore that made the painting so special. Her almost-black eyes pierced the viewer with their gaze.

The veiled young woman at the back of the room narrowed her own eyes. She’d been caught up in the thrill of the auction house just from watching others bid in a flurry around her. She took a deep breath as the auctioneer brought in the final piece from the estate.

‘You may not recognize this next oil-based picture, but that only adds to the aura of intrigue surrounding its story. Painted in the early 1500s, this portrait of an unknown Spanish lady was said to have been stolen sometime around 1515 from a ship docked in Spain. How the late Mr Hewett came to add this piece to his prestigious collection we don’t know, but what we do know is that he had a discerning eye and we’re starting the bidding at forty dollars.’ The auctioneer winked from his spot on the stage at the chuckling audience below him.

The young woman raised her gloved hand, hoping to catch his eye.

‘Yes, the young lady at the back,’ he boomed. ‘That’ll be forty to you, miss.’

An older man up front lifted his walking stick in so slight a motion that it would never have caught anyone’s attention had they not been looking for it, but the auctioneer’s experienced eye took note. He barked out his next price, looking to the young lady at the back to see if she’d rise to the challenge. He saw her nod at him once and raised the price accordingly.

His eyes snapped back and forth, left and right, trying to keep track of the flying bids. The action was only between the man with the walking stick in the leftmost seat of the first row and the mysterious woman at the back. No one else appeared to be interested. As the auctioneer thundered another price, the man turned around, hoping to see who was bidding against him. Though a room full of people stared back at him, the woman at the back was not one of them. She’d hidden behind a pillar when she caught sight of his head turning. Having no choice, the man raised the price again. The auctioneer’s eyes widened. At last the whirlwind stopped, the man’s final bid hanging in the air.

‘Going once,’ the auctioneer announced as he looked to the woman at the back to see if she would bid again. ‘Going twice …’ The woman shook her head once in a small gesture. ‘Sold!’ he declared as his gavel hit the block.

The man with the walking stick ambled up to a table at the side of the stage, along with the rest of the day’s winners. All save one of the unsuccessful bidders slowly filed out of the room. The gentleman left his address with the clerk, adding strict instructions to come through the servants’ entrance when delivering the painting. He strolled up the aisle between rows of now-empty chairs. Without knowing it, the man passed the young woman he’d just been bidding against and started his walk home.

The young woman was still seated in the same position she’d been in when the auctioneer was on the stage. She lifted her head in a cool manner, pulling the large brim of her hat down, and watched the man exit the auction house through the double doors before rising and following him out.

Always remaining no more than a few steps behind her quarry, the young woman took great care in concealing the sound of her footsteps. She followed him, turning familiar corners until they came to an opulent city house. It was one of those unmissable buildings with an elegant flight of steps leading up to a grand doorway, and she knew that the door itself only hinted at the impressive magnificence of the interior. Concealed in shadows, the young woman watched the elderly gentleman slowly climb the stairs. The front door was swung open by the butler, who came rushing out to help his master up the last couple of steps.

Light from the open door illuminated a single tear that slipped down the side of the woman’s face, a tear that betrayed her momentary weakness. But as quickly as the door was opened, it soon swung closed again, and the woman was left in near darkness. A face in an upper window watched as her hand flew up to wipe the tear away, replacing it with a small smile on her thin lips. A low laugh escaped her then, lit only by the dim glow of the street lamps, whose flickering gas-flames cast a false sense of warmth upon the curious scene.

Charlotte was always firm in her ways. I’d ask her questions again and again, but her answers were always the same. Her words never changed and neither did she.

I used to move her plastic arms into various poses and swap her dress to one of a different colour, but that never changed her. She was always Charlotte – for good and for bad.

Gran had Charlotte before me. She said she always remembered the Christmas she got her, how happy she was then. She also said that from that day on they were inseparable, but Gran isn’t here any more, and Charlotte is.

Charlotte retained her eternal good looks while Gran’s hair turned white and wrinkles cloaked her eyes, making them look permanently happy. Charlotte’s hair was still a light golden colour, like the stitched-in thread on Mother’s best dress. Her eyes remained a clear, piercing blue; nothing like what I remembered of Gran’s watery eyes.

‘Cynthia?’ Mother peeked her head out from behind the front door. ‘Do play somewhere safer than the front steps,’ she chided. Upon seeing me sitting guiltily on the steps with Charlotte in one hand and one of Mother’s pink tulips dangling from the other, she let out a long sigh. ‘And stay out of the flowerpots,’ she added.

I nodded. I hadn’t meant to make Mother sad. Charlotte had told me that the tulip would go well with her dress, so I’d picked it for her. I hadn’t really thought about what I was doing.

‘So are you eating at Judy’s tonight and then staying over?’ Mother asked.

I nodded again, mumbling agreement.

‘I’ll pick you up in the morning, then. Or will Judy’s mother drop you off? Or you could walk. After all, it’s only a block away and you are eleven years old,’ she said. As she disappeared back into the house, I heard her mumble, ‘Where did you come from? When I was your age, I certainly wasn’t playing with dolls.’

‘I’m bringing Charlotte,’ I said to no one, and my voice carried on the breeze.

The mailman’s white truck drove up in front of our house. He only got out briefly to place a package at the foot of the steps before getting into his truck again and driving away. He didn’t stop to notice me or Charlotte, but that was normal.

I hopped down the steps with Charlotte swinging from my arms, wondering what Mother had bought this time. Was it one of those pretty dresses she loved so much – the ones that made her look so beautiful?

When I picked up the package, I realized it was addressed to one of the houses on the other side of the street, not our house at all. It was the house across from ours, and I set the package down for Mother to deliver later.

Then I remembered how mad Mother had looked when she saw in my hand the tulip Charlotte had told me to pick. I grabbed the package again – it was only across the street and I was eleven already. All I had to do was ring the doorbell and put the package down. I could be a grown-up like Mother. Maybe then she would forget about the tulip.

I placed Charlotte down on the bottom step with care so she sat looking out towards the house on the other side of the street; I wanted her to be able to see me, and know that I’d be coming right back. I took a deep breath before bravely making my way across the street with the package. I placed it in front of the door and raised my hand to ring the doorbell, but before I could press the button, the door swung open.

A petite young woman stood framed at the threshold. She wasn’t as young as my friend Judy’s older sister, but she didn’t look as old as my mother. She was wearing a cream-coloured sundress; her dark hair was pinned up, and it contrasted with her light dress in a way that made me gasp. I thought she looked like the angel from the postcard my mother kept taped on our refrigerator in the kitchen.

We both took our time examining every inch of each other while waiting for one of us to break the silence.

‘Well.’ The woman sighed as she finally picked up the package. ‘What have we here?’ Her voice was hushed for someone who looked so young and vibrant. Not frail, but as though she restrained it on purpose.

Her words put me on the spot and my breath caught in my throat. The lady looked down at me with kind eyes, trying to break my silence as she stated the obvious. ‘So you brought me a package?’

I nodded, still not trusting my voice.

‘You live across the street, don’t you?’ she asked, pointing to my house. I nodded again. ‘Well, I just moved in a few weeks ago and still don’t have many friends.’ She sent a comforting smile in my direction.

I remembered the day she moved in. Mother was talking to her friends on the phone about our new neighbour. She baked a lemon pound cake that morning as a welcome gift, and took it with her when she went with her friends to greet our new neighbour. I watched from the window while they rang the doorbell and waited for a reply. They must have waited at least fifteen minutes, ringing several times but receiving no answer. Finally they gave up and left the pound cake by the door. When they came back in, they talked about how she must not have been home. But we’d all seen her enter the house that morning, and none of us had seen her leave.

‘That Miss Hatfield … she doesn’t appear to be the social type, does she?’ I overheard my mother saying once over the phone. Yet here the young woman stood, looking anything but antisocial.

‘Won’t you come in?’ Miss Hatfield asked. ‘I just made some fresh lemonade,’ she added when I hesitated.

Given her friendly tone, I couldn’t bring myself to say no. Mother always told me not to talk to strangers, except when she introduced me to them. Then it was a different matter altogether and I needed to talk more, or else they might think I wasn’t brought up properly. I knew I should be heading to Judy’s house soon, but told myself this wouldn’t take long.

I followed the lady through the doorway and into her home. I passed a grand old staircase that looked out of place in her untidy house. The banister wound up to the next floor and was draped with dust covers.

‘I’m sorry my house is in such disarray – there’s so much still to do!’ she apologized. I looked at the mess around me and couldn’t have agreed more, but kept my thoughts to myself.

She led me into a room she called the parlour and told me to have a seat while she fetched the lemonade and some cookies. I chose to settle into an old oversized couch while wondering if its atrocious colour was pea-green or cooked-celery-green. I decided that it most resembled the colour of the overcooked peas Mother served on Sundays, but all thoughts vanished when I actually sat down and realized that the couch looked far more comfortable than it actually was.

The other furniture in the room didn’t appear to match the couch at all. Every piece was a different colour and texture, but the one thing they had in common was that all the pieces were what Mother would call ‘outdated’. I supposed that was just a grown-up way of saying old, but I felt the word fit the room well. All the objects in the room, including the furniture, looked as if they’d been placed rather randomly in an antique store.

The walls were covered with maroon paisley wallpaper, which was peeling off in chunks. In some areas the colour was faded; in others it was stained with a harsh yellow that seemed to have bloomed with age. The coffee table in front of the couch where I was seated was actually an old steamer trunk made of dark aged leather – nothing like the couch or the wallpaper at all. It appeared to be from a much later time, and looked more modern than all the other objects and decorations in the room, despite the fact that it had obviously been well used. The trunk was a strange height; too short to eat from, yet too tall to have a conversation over once you were sitting down. Two chairs stood opposite the bright couch. One was covered with red velvet, but the other was stern-looking, made of a light-coloured wood with nothing to decorate it. The wall I was facing was dotted with ancient black-and-white photographs and dusty miniature paintings of people dressed in funny outfits. There was a photo of a stout man in a black bowler hat with his arm around a horse’s neck; another portrait showed a woman with her hair piled up elaborately on top of her head. She was wearing a high-collared dress and appeared to be staring directly at me. All the other walls were empty.

The photos and paintings gave off an eerie feeling that made me uneasy. There was something wrong about all of those faces looking at me, but I just couldn’t place my finger on why they made me feel so uncomfortable.

My thoughts were disrupted by a loud crash that sounded like glass shattering. The noise shocked me, and I involuntarily jerked up to a standing position. My head whipped towards the heart of the house, where the sound appeared to have come from.

I crept out of the mismatched parlour and walked deeper into the house. I felt like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to. When I exited the parlour, I found myself in a hallway cluttered with boxes, no doubt from Miss Hatfield’s recent move. Two doors stood on each side of me and one large looming door ahead. No paintings or photographs decorated this hallway, unlike that one odd wall in the parlour. Of course, Miss Hatfield hadn’t had time to unpack everything yet.

Hearing someone humming, I chose the door to my left, hoping to find Miss Hatfield. It opened into a room that only just resembled a kitchen. Like the hallway, it was buried beneath packing boxes with half-unwrapped plates and Christmas ornaments spilling out of them, as well as a good deal of additional mismatched furniture. But there was a stove and refrigerator in the corner.

Miss Hatfield was indeed there and, as I’d expected, she was the source of the humming.

‘I–I heard something break,’ I started. ‘Uh, I hope everything’s okay.’ I had no idea what I was supposed to say. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing here but had no choice except to stay, at least until after I’d shared some of her lemonade. It was only polite to do so, after having been invited into someone’s house … at least, that’s what Mother always told me.

‘Oh, everything’s fine. I was just warming up a batch of cookies I made this morning.’ She smiled at me, looking up just briefly enough to wipe a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. Then she stepped over the remnants of a broken plate and reached into the outdated orange refrigerator for a pitcher of lemonade, which she set on the counter. ‘Why wouldn’t everything be all right?’ I detected an underlying tone of hardness in her voice and shivered, but perhaps I only imagined it. ‘I hope you like chocolate chip cookies, but in case you don’t, I warmed some oatmeal ones, too.’

‘Oh, I love chocolate chip.’

‘They’re my favourite too.’ Miss Hatfield smiled. ‘I can tell we’ll be good friends. Why don’t you help me bring the cookies and lemonade to the table?’ She paused. ‘There’s no need to be formal. We can just eat in the kitchen if that’s fine with you.’

I watched her place the cookies on a large plate decorated with big pink flowers. They were nothing like my mother’s prize-winning peonies, which always took second place at the county fair, unmatched save for Mrs Blackwell’s chrysanthemums. I didn’t recognize these flowers. They had large centres that engulfed their petals, and their buds and blossoms were entwined, circling and looping around like vines. Each tried to outdo the other in beauty, and when they failed at that, they tried to do so in strength. It looked to me as if each bloom was trying to suffocate its neighbour before it became the one that was suffocated.

‘Of course, Miss Hatfield.’ The young woman froze and turned to look at me. She set the plate of cookies on the table, and took a few steps closer to me. I stood my ground, but every muscle in my body was telling me to flee.

‘You know my name?’ she asked, stretching her words out to form elongated syllables. It was all I could do to wordlessly nod, but then I got a grip on myself.

‘M–my mother mentioned it when she came to visit you …’ I said, my voice cracking and making my words sound like a question.

‘Ah, yes,’ Miss Hatfield whispered, putting me a bit more at ease. She sat in front of me. ‘With her friends, am I right?’

I nodded again. I found it strange that she knew my mother had come with her friends. After all, she hadn’t answered the door or even acknowledged their visit. How did she know?

‘Such a silly group of girls,’ she went on to say, though my mother and her society friends were far older than Miss Hatfield. ‘They think they’re so important just because they claim to be.’

‘You know them?’ I said, finding my voice again.

‘Know them? I—’ Miss Hatfield stopped, although I thought she was about to add something more.

‘Miss Hatfield?’

‘Miss Hatfield! Let’s dispense with that right away. Please, call me Rebecca. I look over my shoulder for someone else when people call me Miss Hatfield.’

‘Rebecca,’ I corrected myself. I felt strange calling an adult – much less a stranger – by her first name. ‘What do you know of my mother and her friends?’ For some reason, I was curious to find out what she’d been about to say but didn’t.

‘I know enough of them,’ she said cryptically.

I thought her evasive answer was odd, but didn’t go overboard worrying about it. I reasoned it was probably just the kind of person she was. Most likely she didn’t have anything to hide – why would she?