The Sweet Far Thing

Page 55

“What did you say? I should like to hear it.”
“I should too,” Martha says.
“Oh, Cecily, really. Do leave her alone, won’t you?” Felicity says.
“I’ve a right to hear what is said behind my back,” Cecily declares. “Go on, Ann Bradshaw. Repeat it. I demand that you tell me!”
“I s-said, you’ll be sor-sorry someday,” Ann whispers.
Cecily laughs. “I’ll be sorry? And what, pray, will you do to me, Ann Bradshaw? What could you possibly ever do to me?”
Ann stares at the stones. She moves the brush up and down in the same spot.
“I thought not. In a month’s time, you shall take your rightful place as a servant. That’s all you were meant to be. It’s high time you accepted that.”
Our work finished, we empty the disgusting water from the pails and trudge toward Spence, exhausted and filthy. Talk has turned to the masked ball and what costumes we shall wear. Cecily and Elizabeth want to be princesses. They’ll have their pick of silks and satins from which to fashion pretty dresses. Fee insists she will go as a Valkyrie. I say I should like to go as Miss Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, but Felicity tells me it is the dullest costume in the history of costumes and no one should know who I was, besides.
“I should have told Cecily to jump in the lake,” Ann mutters.
“Why didn’t you?” I ask.
“What if she told Mrs. Nightwing I painted the stones? What if Mrs. Nightwing believed her?”
“What if, what if,” Felicity says with an irritated sigh. “What if you stood up to her for once?”
“They hold all the power,” Ann complains.
“Because you give it to them!”
Ann turns away from Felicity, wounded. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“No, you’re right. I shan’t ever understand your willingness to lie down and die,” Felicity barks. “If you won’t at least try to fight, I have no sympathy for you.”
The day is as regimented as a soldier’s. French is followed by music, which is followed by a joyless luncheon of boiled cod. The afternoon is taken up with dance. We learn the quadrille and the waltz. As it is wash day, we are sent to the laundry to give our linens and clothing to the washerwoman, along with a shilling for her work. We copy sentences from Mr. Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, perfecting our penmanship. Mrs. Nightwing strides between the neat rows of our desks, scrutinizing our form, criticizing the loops and the flourishes she feels fall short of the mark. If we have an inkblot upon the page—and with our leaky nibs and weary fingers, it is nearly impossible not to—then we must start the whole page over again. When she calls time, my eyes have begun to cross and my hand will surely never be rid of its ghastly cramp.
By the time the evening rolls around, we’re exhausted. I’ve never been so grateful to see my bed. I pull the thin blanket up to my chin, and as my head dents the pillow, I fall into dreams as intricate as mazes.
The lady in lavender beckons to me from her cloak of London fog. I follow her into a bookseller’s. She pulls books furiously from the shelves, searching until she finds the one she wants. She lays it open and begins to draw, covering the page in strange lines and markings that put me in mind of a map. She inks the page as quickly as possible, but we are interrupted by the sound of horses. The lady’s eyes grow wide with fear. The window crackles with frost. Cold fog creeps around the cracks in the door. It blows open suddenly. A wretched monster in a tattered cape sniffs the air—a Winterlands tracker.
“The sacrifice…,” he growls.
I wake with a start to find I’ve pulled every one of my books from the shelf. They lie in a heap upon the floor.
Ann calls to me in a sleep-soaked voice. “Gemma, why are you making such a racket?”
“I…I had a nightmare. Sorry.”
She rolls over and returns to her dreams. Heart still beating fast, I go about putting my books away. A Study in Scarlet has only a few bent pages but Jane Eyre has a wretched tear in it. I mourn the injury done to it as if I, myself, have been cut, and not Miss Eyre. Mr. Kipling’s The Jungle Book is mangled. Miss Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is wounded but still intact. In fact, the only book to escape without a scratch is A History of Secret Societies, and I suppose I should be grateful something has survived my midnight rampage.
I place them all neatly on the shelf, spines out, except for Pride and Prejudice, for I have need of the comfort of an old friend. Miss Austen keeps me company by lamplight until well into the morning, when I fall asleep dreaming only of Mr. Darcy, which is as good a dream as a girl may reasonably hope for.