Feral Park (54 page)

“There is a clue, though, Anna.”

“The shipwreck!”

“Aye!”

“Think, sister: whose husband it was who died in a shipwreck other than our mother’s?”

Gemma’s eyes grew large. Anna suspected that her own orbs had expanded to equal size.

“Can it be true, Anna, that our malicious, vindictive, nefarious, odoriferous Aunt Quarrels could have taken her own deformed child to Stornaway and left him there to perish?”

“Oh, Gemma, that surely would make her a prime candidate for the most scorching apartment in hell.”

“Depend on it.”

“We should ask her when she returns from holiday.But then,to what purpose?”

“To save the Misses Henshawe and their beleaguered mother.”

Anna scratched her nose for a moment as she thought. “But how would such intelligence effect in the end a rescue of the Henshawes? For we have no proof that the deed was ever done. More likely than not, there exists not even a registry of the child’s birth. It was no doubt decided upon the moment of his existence that he was to be got quickly rid of, and he was, and there is no evidence save a father’s spoken confession of how he was to be disposed of. Our aunt, Gemma, would only throw back her head and croak with obscene laughter.”

“But there
must
be someone who remembers the boy from the asylum— who can say that he was there.”

“Miss Pints was there. We can ask
her
. And Mrs. Epping was employed there for a time as a maid-of-all-work.”

Anna and Gemma went at that very instant to the room shared by her aunt and her aunt’s companion. They found the two playing Beggar My Neighbor with the cards, and Miss Pints winning and bouncing up and down in her chair with glee.

Aunt Drone was the first to notice the two at the door. Her smile changed to an expression of concern, seeing as she did that the faces of her two visitors were pinched in consternation. “My dear girls—what is it?”

“We seek to learn something of great importance from Miss Pints. Miss Pints, when you were an inmate of the Stornaway Asylum, do you recall a baby boy who was left there at any time—a baby boy who was ill-formed in some sad way?”

Miss Pints considered the question whilst chewing her lip and then went to her sheep and petted it and thought some more. “I heard that there was a baby boy. I did not see him,” said Miss Pints through her cleft. “It was ere I left the place for all time with Miss Drone and so I do not know what became of him. I am sorry. Pet Mr. Hodges and he will make you feel better.”

Neither Anna nor Gemma deigned to pet the sheep.

As Anna was locking the cabinet, she stopt her hand in its business, and gave Gemma a quizzical look. “We did learn some things from my father’s secret holdings, Gemma.”

Gemma nodded.

“Yet still I did not discover what it is that you know and I do not.” “I was wondering when this fact would come to you.”

“So there was something inside, which is no longer there.”

Gemma nodded. “Confirmation of something our mother and I know

about your father. But it has been removed.”

“Then you must simply tell me.”

“I cannot.”

“Gemma, you are an ogre and a troll.”

“Words will not compel me to violate my promise to our mother. I had

hoped that you would discover the thing on your own, but it was not meant to be. Now, have we time to go to Grantley Court and speak to Mrs. Epping about the boy?”

Anna shook her head. “It is much too late now. We will go tomorrow. And you are still a troll.”

Gemma ignored the unkind remark and arranged with her sister to drive the next day to Grantley Court and speak with its mistress Mrs. Lucy Epping, formerly Miss Lucy Squab, ward of Mr. Elwood Epping. They would take their mother with them, for she wished to see her daughter May, who was stopping there, and speak to her about her impending marriage to Mr. Shyman. Much had happened with May over the course of the last three days, most of it not very good. May had received a communication from Shyman that if consent for the marriage could not be obtained from her mother, the two would simply go to Gretna Green to tie the marital knot without the consent of anyone. Word of this plan did not sit well with Anna’s mother and she raised objections in a very loud voice and May was forced to raise her voice as well, and the house rocked with accusations of familial inconstancy, and there was hysteria and other forms of ill behaviour. “It was the worst I have ever seen it between our mother and our sister,” said Gemma to Anna, as she sought to explain all that had happened which had compelled May to remove herself to Grantley Court in acceptance of Mrs. Epping’s offer of temporary harbourage.

Mrs. Dray was miserable to think that her daughter sat at Grantley Court and waited for her future husband to take her away, perhaps never to be seen again. But her anger had cooled and she was now ready to approach May in a conciliatory manner. Although she still could not condone a marriage of her Christian daughter to a Jewish instructor of the pianoforte, she would at least allow that daughter to depart without raging animosity, for estrangement was not the thing that was sought by either mother
or
daughter, nor by Anna and her sister Gemma, who would, amongst other things, miss May’s playing.

Payton Parish
was reposited into the cabinet along with every thing else that had been removed, except for an emerald ring that had caught Anna’s eye and which she imagined must have belonged to one of her ancestors. She fancied the colour. It shimmered in the dimming light from the dying sun and it was green…like absinthe. The key was returned to the boy from Mr. Scourby’s law offices and Anna and Gemma sat down to dinner with everyone at the Feral Park mansion-house except for Mr. Peppercorn, who arrived during dessert to say that the Dalrymple Quartet had agreed to play at the ball and then to ask what his grandmother’s ring was doing on Anna’s finger.

Anna had no recourse but to tell the truth about going into the cabinet. Her father, in turn, had no recourse but to be so incensed that he could not speak. Later that night she found him in his library, sitting in a chair and looking at the cabinet with a solemn face. Anna sat down next to him and said nothing for a long while. Finally she could bear the sullen silence no longer and offered her father a deep and heartfelt apology.

“I will not accept it,” said Mr. Peppercorn.

“But you are not allowed to refuse an apology when someone makes it. That is the rule.”

“It is a rule I do not follow. One should not be permitted to do whatever one wishes, knowing that when all is done, there will be a convenient pardon to sponge the slate.”

“But is that not what some Christians do, Papa—premeditate on their anticipated contrition, and thus fix an absolution for the crime even before it is done?”

“Yes, daughter, some Christians do this, and I have never approved of such a design. And I approve it least of all in my own child.”

“For your information, Papa, I am
not
that sort of Christian, for it was
never
my purpose to go into your cabinet and then to solicit your forgiveness after the fact. It was my
intent
, if truth be told, to never breathe the fact of my trespass to you at all!”

“I commend, at least, your honesty in this avowal.”

“Thank you, Papa.”

“And did you, in the end, like what you discovered? Did you learn things that now will allow you to die with a happy, well-informed smile upon your face?”

“Do not be silly, Papa. I learnt very little that had not already been told to me by Gemma herself.”

“Gemma knows what is inside my private cabinet?”

Anna nodded.

With this admission Henry Peppercorn bounded up from his chair, the unread newspaper that had lain in his lap fluttering to the floor. “Who else in the parish has been into my cabinet? The ashman and the lorimer’s pop-eyed daughter?”

“No one else, Papa. Please sit down. Your pique is frightening me.”

“Perhaps you
should
be more frightened from time to time. Do you not know that they still have not found Miss Henshawe? Not even her body. There are far more important things with which to concern ourselves in this parish than what secrets are contained within your father’s library cabinet.”

“Please, Papa, understand that only good has come from my opening that latch. I have confirmation of your generosity to the Drays and have learnt from the first pages of your book that your heart is even larger than I had previously thought it to be. I have no doubt that you wept strong tears of sympathy as you wrote the words about the baby boy left abandoned by my Aunt and Uncle Quarrels.”

“How do you know that it was they who abandoned him? I did not give the names.”

“Gemma and I figured it out, Papa.
You
figure things yourself and so do we. We should—all three of us—move to London and join the detecting Bow Street Runners!”

“Do not be clever.” Anna now noticed that there was a letter in her father’s hand. He turned it over absently as he spoke. “I cannot abide it.”

“Perhaps it is not only the fact that I have pried into your cabinet which has agitated you this evening, Papa, but also, and perhaps even more so, the contents of that letter which you hold in your hand.”

“This? It is not even for me. It is for Mrs. Taptoe.”

“Then why have you not given it to her? You sat next to her all throughout dinner.”

“Because it is from her son. Because she will read that he has arrived in Southampton this morning and she will jump up and down and act the fool. Then I will have to take her there or send her down in the carriage to fetch him back to the house when his quarantine is done, for there was some illness brought by the ship.”

“And how is this such a bad thing that your face should scrunch as if someone has blithely farted in the room?”

“Good mercy, daughter! It appears that you have been spending far too much time in the company of coarse and boorish fugitive-felons to produce such a vulgarity merely from looking at your father’s sour face.”

“Forgive the crude observation, Papa, but you must still tell me why the letter from Mrs. Taptoe’s son agitates you so. Why can you not even think of him without becoming unwell?”

“My business with Maurice Taptoe is the last thing that
I
know that
you
do not. I will therefore keep it to myself as a vestigial reminder of my former cherished privacy.”

Mr. Peppercorn started from the room and then stopt to turn and say, “I am going to check on Miss Younge. She was feeling a little peaked at dinner and I should like to know that she is better before I retire. She said that she slept not a wink at the Super House. She said that no one does. Feral Park is become a laughingstock—the teaze and titter of the entire parish. Henry Peppercorn is the one who opens his home to every needful creature upon the downs. Come one, come all and tread upon the magnanimity of the ‘Dupe of Hampshire County!’”

“You are
not
a dupe, Papa! You are a kind and caring man, and things will get better; I am sure that they will. After the ball, we will have quiet again, as everything will return to the way it was.”

“You mean, daughter, that ball to which every unsightly man and woman within the parish will come with their warts and pits and porker noses and rooster ribs?”

“Rooster ribs. I do not know what is meant by that.”

“There is a young man in the parish whose ribcage protrudes in the manner of a rooster. No doubt, he was the very first to receive your invitation. We are now—after all that already discommends us to those who exercise staid propriety and civilized complacence in our neighbourhood—to have a heelkicking barnyard party!” Mr. Peppercorn concluded his say by putting his hand to his face as if he were ready to cry but must not shew it.

A moment later Anna’s father removed his hand, collected himself, and then said soberly and without tears, “I am sorry, daughter. These are all good things that we are doing. I just happen to be in a vexatious state at present, and you must forgive me. I miss the quiet. I miss the solitude. I miss the days when it was only you and me, and I would read my books and you would read
your
books and knit something for me to wear, and you would drink your tea and I would have my twist, and so quiet it would be that one could hear the jugging of a nightingale a mile away! There was no clatter and confusion then, and no meals to be taken by turns upon makeshift tables and no conies to be removed from bookshelves. Take that one there off the shelf, daughter, and carry it outside if you will. I am going up to bed.”

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“I will try harder not to disappoint you, I promise.”

“You disappoint me no more than anyone else, Anna, and I acquit you, moreover, because I love you. I am weary and that is all. Now take the rabbit outside before he leaves poo-pellets upon my shelf.”

Anna carried the rabbit outside and placed it in the middle of a large drove that had congregated upon the back lawn. She stood under the dark canopy of clouds, which again threatened rain, and wondered how her father’s life and her own had become so very complicated. Her world was now a tangled net of strings and threads, which trailed hither and thither with little knots and big ones, each of which could only be untied with time and patience—two things which Anna did not presently possess. Every now and then she would accomplish a feat of some importance, such as bringing Lieutenant Alford and Nancy Henshawe together or taking Miss Godby to the Pickler House to have the alcohol drained from her veins, but more often than not Anna was helpless to do any thing but react to events that were becoming ever the more entangled, beneath dark clouds that quickly gathered and amongst rabbits which gnawed at every thing that did not gnaw back. Anna stood looking up into the night sky for a star—one star for her to make a wish upon. When it appeared briefly between two breaking clouds she asked from fate the following: that all the knots would suddenly disappear and the threads separate and return themselves to their tidy spools and that there would be a happily-ever-after for her when peace had returned.