A Place of Secrets (21 page)

Suddenly, below, I heard the entire household roused into uproar. Mrs Godstone screeched for Susan; Mr Corbett, the butler, bade a footman: ‘Fetch in the luggage sharp now, will you, man?’ I crept out of the nursery, sly as a cockroach, and no doubt as welcome as one, to my hiding place near the top of the stairs. Downstairs, doors flew open and slammed shut, hobnails cracked on marble and a snarling female voice resounded through the marble atrium: ‘Take me at once to my brother. And make up the fire in my usual room, will you?’ My father’s sister had arrived.

She had visited before, of course, but rarely for more than a day or two. On this occasion, Alicia Pilkington, second wife to Adolphus Pilkington esquire, gentleman farmer of Lincolnshire, brought their meek eleven-year-old son, Augustus, whom she referred to publickly as my father’s heir. They stayed for the longest week I ever remember. And during that time they brought the household of Starbrough Hall to its rheumaticky knees.

Her bachelor brother, Alicia insisted with undisguised contempt, knew nothing of running a great house, and so it was her sisterly duty, she announced to Mrs Godstone, to investigate the systems, to audit the household accounts and to measure the thickness of the dust under the bed in her room, the room which she’d inhabited as a child and which must thus always be kept in readiness. With a precision the king’s generals would admire in their quartermasters, she inspected the linen cupboards, the larder, the attics, the boot room, the cellars, the privies—but not Mr Corbett’s pantry, the door of which he defended like a wild boar at bay. She passed judgement on every least aspect of the housekeeping from preserves to chamber pots—and it was not long before that basilisk’s eye searched out me.

‘Why does this child infest the family nursery?’ she asked Susan while I loitered unhappily by. ‘Can she not sleep with you and Betsy like any other serving brat?’

‘The master does not think of her as a servant, my lady,’ Susan burst out, bobbing hastily to lend deference to the remark. ‘More as a … a connection.’

‘A connection? In what sense a connection? They say she’s some pauper’s bastard. Why he doesn’t give her up to the care of the parish I can never fathom.’ This fresh view of my origins, and the accompanying look she gave me, which implied he should best have kicked me into a ditch to die, caused the blood to slow in my veins. ‘Don’t gawp at me so, you saucy imp,’ she shrieked. ‘I tell you, Susan, you’ll do well to take her to your own bed. And teach her some manners, for the sake of God’s angels.’

And so I slept a night on a thin pallet between Susan and Betsy in their room under the eaves, and I say slept, but shivered would be the better word, though Susan did her best to warm me with the thin blanket she could spare. ‘Is it true?’ I asked her. ‘Was I really a pauper’s bastard?’ But she denied it heartily, telling me as before that Anthony Wickham must be my father. He had brought me home one summer’s night and declared I be treated as his own. I saw through that right away; it might mean I was in truth his daughter, or it might not. ‘I knew you to be well born,’ she added, tucking the blanket round me, ‘for though you were dirty and clothed in rags, your skin was as delicate as a petal and those rags were of silk.’ I pondered this mystery as I tried to warm myself enough to fall asleep. Perhaps I was a princess after all, but I still longed for Anthony to be my father. In the morning, Susan pressed her lips together like two halves of a muffin and went to apprise my father of how his sister had treated me.

The next night I was returned to the nursery, but Father would have done well to have awaited his sister’s departure, for it was then she first saw me as an obstacle to her ambitions, and though she would not dare touch me, she struck Susan across the face for flaunting her authority. And that proved her worst mistake with me for I could not forgive any who hurt my Susan. Thereafter Alicia Pilkington and I were bitterest enemies. That week I played tricks on her so subtle, so clever, she could not prove her misfortune was ever anything but accident, though she must have had her suspicions.

I laid green sticks in her fire so it smoked and made her clothes reek; I fed seeds of an herb Sam once told me caused dreadful itching through a hole in her mattress so she complained her skin was covered in bug bites. Most unkind of all, may God forgive me, was my treatment of poor Augustus.

Thin, pale Gussie added to the troubles of the household by falling into a fever on the third day of their visit. The weather was so bitter that Jack Frost nightly decorated the inside of my window and in the mornings I must break the ice in my ewer to wash, but in Augustus’s room the fire was stoked up all night until the sweat ran down his face and soaked his bedding. Two nights crept by thus and the crisis passed, and since his mother returned to bullying the staff, it was I whom she deputed to amuse the invalid and this I did by telling him stories. Ghoulish tales about the burial ground on the hill, the horrific spectres that walked the woods and even, I assured him, ventured into the park. ‘On any moonlit night I dare not look from my window,’ I’d whisper, rolling my eyes, ‘for fear of sights of such great terror I’d turn to stone.’ Augustus would stare at me, his mouth a dark O in a face already white from illness. He refused to sleep alone and, to my chagrin, I was ordered to share his room. At every strange sound—the tremor of the glass in the window frame, or the creak of a floorboard, he’d sit up and clutch the sheets with his long girlish fingers. And in time I softened. My intentions towards him had been villainous—to get back at his mother—but gradually we became friends, and he confided to me his mother’s expectations, that he inherit the Hall from his Uncle Anthony, since his father, Adolphus, had an elder son who was to inherit the Lincolnshire lands. I thought nothing of this at the time. He is a harmless sort of boy, my adoptive cousin, more like to his studious uncle than to his termagant mother or the portly country squire papa whom I met on a later occasion.

Apart from his intervention on my behalf, my father fastened his door to the turmoil of that week, keeping to his room or his workshop, his meals delivered by Betsy on a tray. It was too cold even for him to venture out to the folly, though the stars I saw from my window on those ice-bound nights must have tempted him; huge, they seemed, and glowing with their true colours, Arcturus creamy and Betelgeuse pinky red. For yes, I had been schooling myself about the night sky from a book I had found in the withdrawing room.

Two days after Aunt Pilkington’s departure, Susan burst into my room, bright-eyed and breathless, gasping that I should make uncommon haste, for my father required my presence that very moment. She smoothed my hair and straightened my collar, then led me downstairs and out to his workshop near the stables, where she pushed me through the doorway and left me.

Father was there, sitting at a table busily polishing a large silver disk like to a salver. This, he told me without looking at me, was a mirror for a new spyglass and must be burnished this way with oxide of tin for many hours until it proved worthy to reflect the very images of the celestial gods. He had summoned me to assist in these endeavours, and I gladly set to, fetching materials as he ordered, placing by him a dish of tea Betsy had lately brought, all the while stuttering answers to his manyfold questions about what I learned at the school and studied in books. Then he instructed that I read a passage to him from a volume lying open near his elbow.

I did so in a quavering voice. The book offered a queer postulation: that the whole universe might contain many stars like to our sun, and many planets, too, all inhabited by strange beings of God’s creation such as we’d never yet encountered. I stumbled over the unfamiliar words and soon, not unkindly, he bid me cease, instead asking what I thought as to the ideas therein. Why, there are strange wild beasts on earth I’ve never seen, I told him, not sure what answer he required of me. ‘There are some who believe a strange race inhabits the moon,’ he said gravely, and I nodded, for I’d gazed at the moon many nights and believed I saw buildings and forests upon its surface. ‘If so,’ he added, ‘what other planets might lie out there beyond our sight, and what manner of creatures might live there?’

Later, when he’d finished his polishing, he took me to his library and traced the paths of the planets of our solar system on an ingenious structure he’d had made after the great Lord Boyle’s, named an orrery, which put me in mind of the game we’d played at school. Saturn was the strangest to me with its rings.

‘Six planets circle our sun,’ he told me, ‘but some say there might be more.’

‘I should like to find another planet,’ I replied, my shyness quite gone. ‘That shall be my ambition.’ He was a quiet-spoken man, my father, often silent, alone in his thoughts. I liked it when he spoke with me for though he called me child he asked me questions as if I were his equal and never laughed at my answers or dismissed them as infantile. He needed to have someone to talk to of his interests, and, I like to think, found me useful in my limited way.

After that day, my life changed, and his, too, I believe. I still attended school and slept in the nursery and ate with Susan and the other servants, but sometimes the order would come down and Susan dispatched me to his workshop or his study. It was I who steadied his new spyglass as he coaxed the mirror and the eyepiece into alignment in its long wooden case, and I was present on the warm September evening that the men installed it in the folly, my task being to carry my father’s notebooks then to wait quietly in the tower room listening to his impatient instructions as they laboured to fix it on the platform above. The task complete, he and I spent the precious hours until darkness fell poring over the star charts he’d drawn as he tutored me in his theories about the paths of planets, the nature of stars and comets, until moths came fluttering down through the skylight, drawn by the light of our lantern, and we saw the stars were coming out. It was time to mount the ladder and watch the skies through his new glass.

At first I could see little. ‘Practice is the key,’ my father said, laughing, seeing my moue of frustration, and after this night he brought me with him to the folly from time to time, though Susan complained at my irregular hours. ‘The child is too tired to attend school, sir,’ she scolded him, and because he trusted her with me he concurred and took me more rarely, for all my begging him.

The new spyglass was a marvel, revealing the skies to be filled with stars he’d not dreamed of before. My father became more absorbed in his work, often sleeping long into the day after a full night’s viewing, so in a week of clear skies I might hardly be summoned at all to his presence. But then there would be periods of cloud, and the following year a winter so cold that birds fell frozen from the skies, and he’d invite me to his study where we huddled by the fire and he taught me mathematics, philosophy, and how to record my observations—all tools, he explained, to aid astronomy.

The mathematical symbols made little sense to me at first, nor did they for some long while, but I caught his passion to unlock the secrets of the heavens and persevered. By his teaching also I learned much about the fabulous monsters and tragic children of the gods commemorated by the ancients in the night sky. From there it was but a step to teaching me Greek and Latin, so I might read the old charts, and something of the wondrous new knowledge of opticks and the secret properties of light.

And so the pattern of our new life together became set. My eleventh birthday came, and I remember it well because the gardener’s cat had had kittens, and he brought me a black and white one all to myself, which I named Thomas.

Sometimes, at little notice, my father would summon the carriage and dispatch himself with bags and boxes to Norwich or London, where I daresay he would meet with other stargazers or visit merchants of optickal instruments, for he would oft return nursing a crate packed with delicate lenses or mirrors and then he’d shut himself in his workshop for days at a time, experimenting and polishing.

It was on one of these occasions, in the late autumn of 1773, when he had been away nigh a week, that a pedlar woman came to the kitchen door one afternoon selling pegs and ribbons and the like. Betsy was much taken with a lace cap, which she bargained for, and Susan pleaded with Mrs Godstone to buy me some ribbons. I hung back, clutching my little cat Thomas, yet fascinated by the young woman’s sun-baked skin and her fine foreign eyes and the lively movement of her strong lean body as she crouched to search her basket for the particular sky blue Susan demanded for my fair hair. And when Susan summoned me forward to try the colours, the woman seemed wary, studying me curiously as she waited for Susan to make her choice. When she bid us farewell, her eyes rested on me last of all as though she would commit me to memory, and this alarmed me.

Afterwards I sat in the servants’ room as Susan hemmed my new ribbons, and listened to them gossip.

‘Farmer said they were back,’ Mr Corbett announced briefly as he built up the fire. ‘He’s setting up a watch at nights till they’re gone.’

‘Reckon it was they vagabonds took his birds last time, not the Romanies,’ Mrs Godstone said. ‘I chased them out of the tatty bed, remember?’

‘Aye, well he’s not taking chances.’