Читать книгу John Harding 2-Book Gothic Collection - John Harding - Страница 23

In the morning, when Giles and I arrived downstairs for breakfast, the table in the breakfast room was once again set for three. As I sat down, I saw, through the open door to the kitchen, Mrs Grouse seated at the table there, over breakfast with Meg and Mary and John. When she heard me she wistfulled me such a look that I was near too guilty to eat. For all her faults, Mrs Grouse was at heart a kindly soul and also easy for a little finger twistery. Some part of me already knew Miss Taylor would not be at all like that.

Speaking of that devil (for such she was, as you shall see), at that moment she arrived. She good morninged Giles and me and walked to the kitchen door and good morninged all the servants and Mrs Grouse too. Meg and Mary flummoxed about, scraping their chairs to rise from their own meal and hithering and thithering to supply us with oatmeal and eggs and waffles and syrup. I wondered at this, for Miss Whitaker had been treated somewhat as a kind of servant, albeit on another level, along with Mrs Grouse. Miss Taylor occupied the same position and yet, already, by some force of will, had everyone behaving toward her as if she were royalty. How had that happened?

As we nervoused our food we did not speak and carefulled not to let a fork tinkle against a plate, and in the silent setting down of our milk glasses upon the table, for both Giles and I feared to draw attention to ourselves as if, by our very existence, we might somehow offend. It would have been a good time for pin droppery if you happened to have one you were having difficulty holding on to, because you would surely have heard it loud and clear. It was Miss Taylor who broke the silence. ‘Giles,’ she said, then took a swig of her coffee and set the cup back down, ‘Giles, we do not eat in that manner.’

Giles gulped. ‘What manner would that be, Miss Wh—, I mean, Miss Taylor?’

‘Why, taking all those bites without recourse to chewing or swallowing. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, after all.’ She beamed at me and I weaked her one back; it wasn’t a very good joke.

Giles got stuck into his waffle again, whereupon Miss Taylor’s hand shot out like a whipcrack and knocked it from his hand. ‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘Not like that.’

Giles’s eyes started to tear up. ‘I – I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t understand. Like what?’

‘Why, like this!’ She snatched up the waffle and began a frenetic biting of it, like some demented bird pecking at it, one bite after another, without pause to chew or swallow, until the whole thing had disappeared. There was a long silence while Giles and I open-mouthed her, for her cheeks were packed out like a hamster’s, and then she finally gulped the whole lot down and said, ‘That’s how you don’t eat, my boy. Now do you see?’

Giles’s cheeks glistened and he brushed away the tears with the back of his hand. I had rarely seen Giles cry and yet this wiping of the tears was such an unconscious and therefore, I presumed, familiar action I wondered how much crying had occurred while he was away at school. We silenced our way through the rest of our breakfast.

After it was over, when we left the dining room, Giles and I turned toward the stairs to go up to the schoolroom and I heartsank at the thought of spending my day over some pointless needlepoint when I yearned to be in the library, but before we could begin to ascend, Miss Taylor called out to us. ‘Not that way, children. Look, the sun is shining. I suggest that as it’s such a lovely day and my first one here too, why don’t you show me the grounds?’

Giles, suddenly unbound from Latin and history, as hateful to him as embroidery was to me, broke into a smile that instanted her forgiveness for the slapping of the waffle from his hand. And I, I too, thought that maybe this wasn’t so bad, that perhaps this was a woman with a sharp temper, but nevertheless good-willed beneath. I little knew.

In the grounds, Giles and I ran before her, dodging behind bushes and leaping out upon one another. At first we cautioned, for we had no idea what restrictions we might be under, but as she did nothing but smile fondly at our actions and nod approval of them at us, we bolded and all but became our old selves as though no new governess had come at all.

Miss Taylor surveyed the shrubbery where we hide-and-seeked most because it was so overgrown it offered the best concealment, and shook her head. ‘It is all sadly neglected and unkempt,’ she murmured. ‘Why have they let it get into such a state?’

I paused in my play, not realising she was talking to herself, and answered, ‘Well, you see, miss, there is only John to look after everything and he has all the jobs about the house, and the feeding and rubbing down and exercising of the horses, as well as all the grounds, and it is too much for one man, especially one who is not getting any younger.’

She shot me a look.

‘I mean, that’s what he says, miss, about not getting any younger.’

She distanted a smile and surveyed the shrubbery again and shook her head in a weary way. She walked on and we followed, tagging one another in her wake. Eventually we reached the lake.

‘Ah, the lake,’ she obvioused.

‘Yes, miss,’ I polited back.

She began to walk around it and we followed her, past the old wooden jetty and the boathouse, and we were about halfway round when she stopped, and stared out over the water. It shivered me that she should pick out this particular spot. Just at that moment I happened to look down at the water’s edge and saw the lilies were in bloom and all at once I remembered their scent on the unseen woman who had passed me in the night, their icy whiteness on Miss Whitaker’s coffin. And I thought now, as I had on the day of the funeral, of Shakespeare’s line, of how ‘lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, and it spinetingled me quite.

Before I had gotten hold of myself again I realised someone was speaking to me and then that it was Miss Taylor. ‘Pray tell me, where did it happen?’

I knew what she meant immediately. This after all was the very place. But I couldn’t say that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The accident, of course. Weren’t you in the boat with her? I understood that you were.’ She stared at Giles, who wriggled around as though his collar was suddenly too tight.

‘I – I –’ he stammered.

‘Not Giles,’ I said. ‘Just me. He was in the schoolroom.’

Giles nodded. ‘Yes, I was in the schoolroom.’

‘Miss Whitaker had set him some Latin sentences to write out. It was only she and I in the boat.’

‘And what exactly happened?’

I turned my back on her. ‘I would rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to think about that day.’

She didn’t reply, and when I decided it safed to face her again I found her not looking at me at all, even though I had felt sure of the weight of her eyes upon my back, but gazing out over the lake, at the very spot where the boat had been when poor Miss Whitaker was tragicked away.

Miss Taylor turned and shot me a knowing smile and then walked past me, back the way we had come, and at that moment a breeze got up and stirred the flimsy material of her blouse and there it was again, the death smell of lilies, but I did not know if it was from the actual lilies growing by the lake or the scent the new governess wore.

Afterward we wandered the grounds and rambled the woods and she would ask me questions about the place but not really listen to my replies, as if she already knew the answers or had no interest in them. It was only when we were in the woods and I explained that the footpath we were on led all the way to the Van Hoosier house, and that it was the way my special friend Theo took except when there was snow about, that her interest perked up and she questioned me some about him. I explained that with the summer nearly over he’d soon be going back to New York and school, at which she said, ‘Ah,’ as though that was all right, although then I added, ‘But with a bit of luck he’ll get ill again soon,’ which made her face a puzzle, so that I laughed and explained how Theo always came here when he had asthma and so I kind of hoped he’d have another bout before too long.

‘It’ll start turning cold and damp in a few weeks,’ I enthused, ‘and that’s really bad for his chest.’

It was past noon when we got back to the house, but she told us to wait outside and went into the house, where she asked Meg to set us up a picnic and Mary came and spread a big rug out on the lawn in back of the house and she and Meg brought our food out there, and afterward Miss Taylor sat with her back against a tree trunk and seemed to be dozing while Giles and I played tag, but whenever I looked at her it seemed she was watching us, her eyes strangely hooded, like a reptile’s, so I had this feeling she had swallowed a snake or a lizard, and that it was trapped inside her and had taken over her body and now gazed greedily out through her eyes.