Dreadful Sorry (12 page)

"Yes."

She smoothed Molly's temples. "And along the sides of the tunnel are doors, Molly. Behind these doors are memories of all the things you have experienced in your long, long life. In your many lives. I want you to go to the door that has the girl in your dream behind it. The girl with the name you heard people call you. Clementine Horn. You will open the door and see Clementine Horn, whoever Clementine is. When you open the door, you will know her story, and you will be able to tell it. You will not be frightened, Molly. You will see scenes almost as if they were a film." Paulette paused again, but her hands kept rubbing Molly's head. "You will not be frightened," she repeated.

Now Molly could see the tunnel in the candle flame behind her closed eyes. But when she tried to visualize the doors, she saw instead a. large round box, with her hand holding down the pulsing lid. She knew this box. When she heard Paulette's voice telling her to open the door, Molly imagined herself lifting the lid off this box. Was it the hatbox? Was it Pandora's box, from which all the evils of the world would escape? She listened to Paulette's reassurances: "You will not be frightened." Then softly, slowly,
as if only background music, the humming began. It merged with Paulette's voice and expanded in Molly's mind until her head pulsed relentlessly with the tune.

And Molly knew suddenly that, frightened or not, what she had to do now was open that box. It seemed she had been waiting all her life to release its contents. And so she did.

After her chores were done Clementine left the big house by the kitchen door and hurried across the headland toward the sea. She tried to keep well hidden by the double line of washing flapping in the brisk wind, holding up her long skirts and running between the twin walls of sheets, then walking swiftly through the scrub and tall reed grass toward the cliff.

She had cut the children's lessons short and taken them down to the kitchen, where Janie would give them a snack. They'd be eating it now, giving her perhaps a half hour of privacy. Nonetheless, she glanced back over her shoulder to make sure Abner, the one who clung to her like a barnacle, was not following. She saw the many windows of the house winking in the sunlight. They watched her, she felt, like the watchful eyes of her uncle and aunt.

She hurried through the thick screen of reed grass to her favorite spot right at the edge of the cliff. From there she liked to watch the water roll into the cove. The semicircle formed by the walls of the cliff made the cove into a churning caldron. Sometimes seals sunned themselves atop the rocks, and she never stopped marveling that they could swim in water that always looked at the boil.

When she was younger and had first come to her uncle and aunt's house, Clementine used to take her doll out to the cliff and pretend she was a giant, cooking soup for supper. She'd pull up fists full of pebbles and fling them down into the pot, then twist off stalks of the reed grass and hurl them down, too. "Now just a little pinch of salt," she'd bellow in a giant's huge voice, and kick dirt over the cliff wall into the boiling broth. "Time to eat, dear Mollydolly," she would shout, staring down into the froth of foam against the rocks.

At the cliff's edge she would set up a rock table for Mollydolly. The doll could drink her soup from a curved leaf. But Clementine could just lean forward and suck her soup right out of the cove. Giants were powerful. They didn't need to bother with table manners. They didn't even need a table.

Once Clementine had carelessly knocked Mollydolly over the cliff. She had feared there would be no chance of recovering her beloved doll, one of the few links left to her home and parents. She had lain on her stomach to peer over the edge down into the spray. And luck was with her. There was Mollydolly, resting only six or seven feet down the side of the cliff on a wide shelf of rock.

Clementine had taken off her shiny button shoes and black woolen stockings. Then, scooting backward over the edge, grasping great handfuls of the tufted grass that grew from the cracks between the rocks, she eased herself over the cliff. The rock face bulged out slightly so the drop wasn't sheer, and there were footholds enough so that she was able to drop safely onto the rock shelf. She grabbed up the little doll and hugged her. She then saw to her surprise that the shelf she stood on was actually a little natural front porch to a cave house. She crept inside and found herself in a low-ceilinged room just big enough for one or two children to sit in. She sat down, holding Mollydolly in her lap.

What a perfect hiding place. Her aunt and uncle would never find her here. She could have all the privacy she needed. If only climbing back up were as easy as climbing down had been, she could come as often as she liked, and no one would ever be the wiser.

She stuffed the little doll down the front of her dress. Feeling for footholds and reaching up to grab the cliff plants, she then shimmied back up the rock face. She reached the top, exhilarated. The deadly drop into the cove should her feet slip didn't worry her at all. Her need for a place where the children couldn't find her made her brave.

But games of giants and secret caves belonged to childhood. Now when Clementine came to the cliff's edge, she came alone, and not to play. There were no hiding places anymore. Even the little cave offered no sanctuary ever since little Abner trailed her to the cliff a few months back and hid in the grass. He had watched her lower herself down to the ledge, then peered over the edge and called to her, exultant that he'd found her, demanding she let him come down and see. He scurried over the cliff's edge so fast she had to reach up and catch him. Then there was nothing she could do but show him the safe handholds of tufted grass, the best footholds in the rock. She made him promise it would be their secret, but since then the cave held no magic for her.

Still, she came out to the cliff whenever she could to escape from the many children who were her responsibility every afternoon. Soon—if Aunt Ethel and Uncle Wallace had their way—the children would be her responsibility every morning as well. Morning, afternoon, and evening, Clementine was to be in charge of all her cousins. She had had her seventeenth birthday a month ago, in May, and the very day after, Uncle Wallace gave notice to the children's governess. When the school term finished, he said, they would no longer need her because Clementine would be stepping into her place. Now Miss Finch was upstairs packing her trunks, readying herself to move out in a few days' time.

A terrible anger had come over Clementine the day after her seventeenth birthday and settled in her bones like a sickness. She hated to be leaving the little school in the village. She wasn't ready! She was thirsty for more knowledge and longed to go on to college. More and more girls were continuing their education these days. Clementine was sure her own mother and father would have encouraged her to learn as much as she could. But Aunt Ethel and Uncle Wallace were adamant: her place was home with her family.

Clementine stared rebelliously down at the water in the cove, her resentment surging with the waves. Into the cove, then out again, then in again to be dashed against the rocks. There was no escape for the water. Its function was to fill the cove and slap the cliff walls, then recede in a froth of white, then rush back in again. But for her?

She must get away from here! There were several colleges and ladies' seminaries of higher learning down east. Why shouldn't she be allowed to go? She had tried again the other day to make Uncle Wallace see reason, but he had just laughed.

Clementine hurled a rock over the side of the cliff and watched it disappear into the water, as completely and quietly as she herself would disappear. She had come up with a strategy. A plan. She would run away after school was out for the summer. She had no money and wasn't sure yet where she would go, but those were mere details. They would be worked out. College would cost a lot, she knew, and her uncle wouldn't be giving her a penny of his considerable wealth if she ran away. But she could work, certainly she could—and hard, too. If she could be an unpaid governess for her many young cousins, surely she could be a governess for someone else's children for a tidy salary. Not in Hibben, of course, but somewhere where her uncle wouldn't be able to find her. And if she saved her money, why shouldn't that cover the cost of her tuition at an academy of higher learning? She would talk to Miss Kent at school tomorrow and ask her advice about which school to apply to, and where she might advertise her services as a governess.

School had always been a source of joy and a place of refuge for Clementine. When she'd first come to live with her aunt and uncle, a tragic little ten-year-old still numb with grief over the loss of her parents, the school had comforted her where her uncle's family could not. Her uncle's children took their lessons in the nursery schoolroom with Miss Finch until they were ten years old. Then they went off to boarding school in Bangor or Boston. But Uncle Wallace and Aunt Ethel had felt that boarding school wasn't necessary for Clementine. The village school would be good enough for her.

Aunt Ethel and Uncle Wallace were very proud of their station in life. They lived in the biggest house in Hibben, built high on the headland above the village a generation earlier by Uncle Wallace's father. The Holloway family owned the fishing fleet that sailed out every day, manned by village fishermen. They kept themselves separate from the villagers. It wouldn't do for their children to mix with village children, but Clementine, after all, wasn't really their own. She wasn't a Holloway but a Horn. She settled in at the village school, mixing easily enough with the rough fishermen's children. Blood will tell, thought Uncle Wallace.

Clementine had become a model student at the village school, outshining even the older pupils with her accomplishments. Her favorite subject was geography, and she took pride in knowing the names and locations of all the states and territories. She had enjoyed the daily walk down into the town, right along Main Street to the stone schoolhouse next to the whitewashed wooden church. She loved the smell of powdery chalk, the smooth black surface of the slates, the crisp pages of books, the pads of lined writing paper, the ink pots, and sharp pens. She loved catching whiffs of Miss Kent's faint perfume whenever her teacher walked by her desk. The heady exhilaration of coming in first in the math contest, of being the top student in geography, of writing the best essay or performing flawlessly in recitation—all these triumphs made life without her parents bearable.

Clementine had a mind like a trap. It captured and retained all information that came her way. She was much smarter than her cousins, she knew, but when she had asked Uncle Wallace to please let her join the older girls at the boarding school in Bangor, Uncle Wallace said boarding school was out of the question for Clementine. They needed her at home to help with all the babies.

There had been two children away at boarding school when Clementine first came to live with them, and three younger ones at home. Now there were three away at boarding school or college—Arnold, Avery, and Alex. Anastasia had married last year and lived in Boston. There were seven still at home—
Anne, Andrew, Amity, Aaron, Abner, Alice, and Augustus. They slept two to a room, with Clementine sharing the nursery with baby Augustus so that she might answer his cries in the night. She had assisted at most of their births and helped her aunt through labor and delivery more than once when the doctor didn't arrive in time. And Clementine was very good with the children—"a natural," Miss Finch once said approvingly. She had the knack.

But having a
knack,
Clementine often fumed, was not the same as having a
calling.
And now there was only one week of school left, and the six senior students would be leaving forever.

Clementine stared down over the cliff now, brooding. The only other senior girl, Jilly Peters, was eager for babies. She and Richard Wallings planned to marry at Christmastime, and Jilly wanted a baby by the end of summer. Richard had left the school a year earlier and was working on his father's fishing schooner. That was what most of the boys in the village did when they finished school—many left school at sixteen to get a head start working on the vessels that would provide their livelihood. Three of the four boys in the senior class—Hob Wilkins, Sam Sawyer, and Gilbert Hanks—all planned to work with their fathers on the boats. The fourth boy, Earl Wallings, Richard's younger brother, had decided he would go south to work in a papermaking factory in Lewiston. The end of school was a dream come true for the other seniors. Only for Clementine was it a nightmare, for it meant she would become fulltime nursemaid to all her young cousins. Her spirit rebelled against a life taken over by babies with sticky fingers, games of hide-and-seek, and rhymes from Mother Goose.

It was a nightmare she intended to escape. She watched the churning water another few minutes, her resolution firm. Then she turned to walk back to the house, sighing as she heard the laughter of the children and saw them running toward her across the lawn.

"There you are, Clemmy!" they cried. "We were looking all over!"

Little Alice took her hand. Abner grabbed her other hand. Aaron and Amity and Andrew jostled each other and made sighing, fainting sounds. "You look like you're about to swoon, Clementine!" Amity said. "Have you started wearing stays?"

"You'd better start soon," said Anne, "or else you'll end up fat and no man will want you." Anne, who was ten, would be the next Holloway girl to leave home for boarding school in Bangor. She was eager to put her hair up, lower her skirts, and take her place in a world that didn't include babies and toddlers. Clementine was horribly jealous.

Abner tugged her arm till she bent down to his height. "Can we go down to the you-know-where, Clemmy?" he whispered, his sweet breath hot in her ear.

"Not now," she said. Abner was the most persistent of the children, always dogging her footsteps. She took him to the cave only when the other children were napping or busy elsewhere, and she was driven to distraction by his begging. He was always needing kisses and hugs and reassurances of her love. He needed mothering more than all the other children put together, thought Clementine. Even more than baby Augustus.