Amy Snow (14 page)

I lie on my bed and try to read a bit of
The Pickwick Papers
but I cannot concentrate. I keep fretting at the puzzle, I keep sinking back into the past.

“
So
much secrecy, Aurelia?” I demand aloud, “Need there really be
quite
so much difficulty?”

After all, whatever she has done, they cannot harm her now. And surely they would not pursue
me
now, simply for the joy of thwarting me?

•  •  •

Yet a memory surfaces. I was seven or eight, perhaps. Aurelia was gone for the day, visiting cousins. When she returned, they would come too, with assorted aunts, uncles, and infants in tow. There was a great deal to be done to prepare the house.

One of the housemaids was sick and Cook made the grave misjudgment of letting me help in her place. We thought Lady Vennaway was taking morning calls, as was usual on a Wednesday, so Mrs. Last set me to dusting and polishing the dining room. But the mistress had no callers that day, and took it upon herself to prowl the rooms checking for shoddy work.

I had worked hard and felt proud of the result. The furniture gleamed and the mirrors sparkled.

Oh, the mirrors. Thinking myself alone, I had taken the rare opportunity to look at myself. There was of course no such thing in the kitchen or scullery or stables, and my appearance was often commented upon, so I was naturally curious.

Dora had told me I was very plain indeed, a nasty-looking little thing. Rosy told her not to be unkind, it wasn't my fault. I had asked Cook if this were true, and she flapped a hand in exasperation and told me to stir the preserves. Then I asked Jesketh and he said handsome is as handsome does. Robin said I'd do. Aurelia said I was adorable. Everyone commented on my small size.

So Lady Vennaway caught me in a private and highly uncharacteristic moment of self-appraisal. This is what I saw:

A face shaped like a teardrop with pale skin and curtains of dusky hair. A thick fringe hanging into my eyes, parting a little in the center to reveal a small frown between my eyebrows, though I was not aware of frowning. A wide mouth. Big eyes in a strange shade.

I sighed. I was very small, yes. My hair was too sooty, too heavy. My smile was too rare, and then too wide and lopsided when it came. I experimented now; the result was a grimace. Fit to scare the chickens, as Dora used to say.

I heard a shriek and the mistress appeared in the glass beside me like the wicked queen in the storybooks. The unguarded intimacy with myself made me jump all the more. Of course, her lovely mouth opened and the horrible words came pouring out and I was suddenly sick of it all.

“I've done my work!” I cried in fury, stamping my foot. “I've made it beautiful. I did it to help! Dolly's in bed, and if it weren't for me there would be dust in your sausages.”

As if in a dream, I watched her long arm reach out and grab my hair, all of it, in one thick tress. By this rope she dragged me—to the kitchen, naturally, where Cook was dressing a pheasant. She looked up in shock as Lady Vennaway picked up a cleaver from the table.

With the deftest of movements, the mistress twisted my hair swiftly into a coil and sliced it all off at the neck. It took one clean cut.

“Vanity is a sin,” she shrieked, “and particularly laughable in
you
.” Then she left.

Alone, Cook and I looked at each other. I could not explain. My hair lay on the floor, lengths and lengths of it, it seemed. I picked it up. There seemed to be even more of it than when it had been attached. I could feel the new short ends flying up around my face.

“The dining room is clean,” I said at last, and took my hair out to throw on the rubbish heap.

I subsequently learned from novels and periodicals that every third orphan has her hair severed at some point. However, this in no way diminished the feeling of invasion and personal grief that I felt at the time. Nonetheless, in the longer term Lady Vennaway unwittingly did me a favor. Long, my hair refused to sit in any style and resisted every attempt at constraint. Short, it curled comfortably around the edges of a cap and saved me hours of brushing each week. Long, it had been good for nothing except tormenting Aurelia.

I smile as I remember Aurelia pretending fury every time we compared the length of our hair. No matter how she brushed or treated hers, mine was always longer. Even though my dull, sooty lengths were clearly no match for her bright, silky waves, she made a great display of being envious.

She devised a game whereby we would lean over the fence beside the stream and dangle our heads over the water, to see whose hair could touch its surface. It was an absurdity, of course, because it was not a measure of hair length at all—Aurelia always won simply because she was taller. But it made us laugh every time.

Inevitably, the first time, I fell in. I was so determined my hair should touch the stream that I tilted right over, feet in the air. I lost my grip and in I went. I was unharmed but wet, muddy, and fearful of Dora's ridicule.

After my hair was cut off, we went back to racing twigs instead.

•  •  •

Now, in London, I sit and think that perhaps I am not safe from the Vennaways after all. Perhaps a woman who could treat a child the way she treated me is a woman ever to be feared. Perhaps it is just as well that I am far away, a small, anonymous figure in a great, teeming city. It must be the best place in the world to get lost.

Something about my reminiscing has unsettled me; I feel restless. I want to walk in the hammering rain and breathe the cold, wet air. What is it that tugs at my thoughts? It is not the cutting of my hair.

Something else.

Aurelia and I playing at the stream. Missing her. Racing twigs. Dangling over the fence. Shrieks of laughter filling the air. Missing her. Falling in and the smell of mud. Aurelia in tears of mirth at the sight of my sorry, blackened figure. Missing her. Aurelia cheering me up by telling me a new story as we trudged back to the house. It was about two rabbits called Entwhistle and Crumm who opened a tailor's shop in Hampstead. I adored that story, which ran to several installments over a number of days.

Entwhistle wore a red waistcoat and Crumm wore a blue . . .

And all of a sudden it hits me like a blow to the head. The tide of memory has carried me, as surely as a twig on a current, to my answer.

In the event, a full twelve months had passed before we saw Aurelia again. It was the following March before she returned to us, with spring winds in her hair and daffodils waving a greeting.

I was in the schoolroom—I cannot now recall why—lost in the sort of sad trance that had become my accustomed state of mind. Roused by a rattle of carriage wheels, I glanced through the window without much interest, presuming it to be one of Lady Vennaway's callers. But something about the scene made my heart catch.

The carriage cut a fair dash along the gravel; stones flew up about it like droplets in a fountain and caught the pale sunshine. It rounded the chase at speed, leaning daringly to one side. Even the horses seemed to canter with a rakish air, as if their only pleasure was in showing off their strong legs and tall feathers, and pulling a carriage mattered not a whit. Thus, I had a strong suspicion about who was inside it, even before it came close enough for me to recognize Mrs. Bolton's navy and silver phaeton.

I ran.

When Aurelia emerged from the carriage, Lady Vennaway caught her in the longest, tightest embrace I have ever seen. She wept and wept, and kissed her and wept, then refused to speak to her for a month. Lord Vennaway was his usual self, forbidding and taciturn, yet there was no mistaking the emotion in his gaze when he enfolded her, briefly, in his arms.

I felt a rush of love, immense joy, and relief. Fear, of course, that I had lost the girl I had known so well. She looked impossibly glamorous and foreign to my sheltered eyes. Although one-and-twenty when she left, to me she had still been my girlhood friend. She returned undeniably a woman, composed and set apart—from all of us. I recognized none of the clothes she wore, nor the stylish parasol, nor the outlandish emerald-green gloves.

I quaked; what could a poor, stay-at-home child have to say that might interest such a creature as this? Sufficient and more, it transpired. Her poised, distant face broke into its familiar bright smile the moment she saw me. With a joyous laugh, she picked me up and whirled me round in the old way, then set me down for inspection.

Aurelia was equally struck by the change in me—a change I had not until then considered. I was past fourteen when she returned, a young woman myself. That long, lonely year had taken its toll. Little wonder I looked different—taller, thinner, older. I had grown up, and lost my childhood innocence. I no longer thought Aurelia perfect but, I discovered in a rush of joy, I loved her no less for that.

The weeks that followed were glorious! Our friendship was restored—her affection so tangible, so evident in her face and voice that I started to wonder why I had ever doubted it. Days of walking, talking, laughing with Aurelia, hanging on to every word she said. At last she sat before me again, and I told her fully and honestly my own small happenings, my fears and concerns. I had never spoken to her thus before, and my new candour seemed to bring us closer than ever. We talked at such length and in such depth that it never occurred to me to doubt that she was telling me everything.

•  •  •

And so began the final phase of my life with Aurelia: once again constant companions, both of us tempered in different ways by her absence.

Aurelia seemed to have found whatever it was that she had been seeking and appeared more settled at Hatville than ever before. I expected she would reminisce about the friends and places she had fought so hard to visit, but after the first excited flourish of stories, they drifted away like a dream.

Once or twice a letter arrived for her, addressed in unfamiliar handwriting. These, she spirited away and I never learned who had sent them. I assumed a continued correspondence with Frederic Meredith, but when I told her I'd been afraid she would marry him and forget me, she laughed heartily until coughing took over.

•  •  •

Her health deteriorated rapidly after just a month at home. Where previously it had been hard to believe that Aurelia was ill, now it was impossible to forget the fact. Once so robust and lively, she grew weak and pale. She had staved off her decline for a long while, but when it came it was dramatic.

A wheeled chair was brought to Hatville and if she wished to see the rose garden or the stream, I would push her there. On a good day she could walk slowly, leaning hard on a cane. On a bad day—and they were frequent—she could not get out of bed. The Vennaways could not have married her off now if they'd still wanted to. It seemed that she had returned just in time to say good-bye, yet she clung onto life tenaciously and weeks turned into months, which turned into improbable years. In her refusal to succumb to probability, at least, she was quite unchanged.

Despite the heartbreak of watching her struggle, I was not unhappy. Strangely, it was the most peaceful time I can remember.

One sad change at Hatville was the departure of Robin, who had been offered a position as head gardener at the estate of an eminent Gloucestershire family. I admit I was shocked to see him go. It was not that I had underestimated his skill, it was simply that I had never considered it. He was so modest and quiet that I would never have noticed his talent with agapanthus, nor realized that Hatville was famed for its fruit yields, if his new appointment had not brought the matter to our attention.

“He has a way with living things,” Aurelia said quietly. I could understand her sadness. Plants burst to life beneath his fingers, but she was fading away.

Since her return, there was a new, more reflective quality about her. We spent less time playing and laughing, and more time strolling, when she was able, pondering the ways our pasts had shaped us. We sang and read aloud less but talked more deeply and sat in silence more. She was now less sparkle than gleam, less fire than deep, silent, shining water.

As for me, I had managed to endure the year apart armed with nothing but faith and my own strength. This knowledge gave me something I had not possessed before. I could not put a name to it, but I felt it living within me nonetheless.

We both knew these days were gifts, given to us to enjoy to the best of our abilities and to use as wisely as we might.

We were granted nearly three beautiful years.