A Wax Doll

Monday, July 8, 1816

“She can’t get out,” Pip said. “I’ve got the key.”

She stood with her back against the still-room door and both hands behind her. On the other side of the oak, somebody very small was roaring.

Linnea had been across the passage for ten minutes with Mrs. Hobday and the week’s books. She had left the still-room door wide and Tabitha on the floor inside it, pulling the heads off chamomile into a basket. The walls in this part of the castle were three feet thick, and she had heard nothing until she opened the housekeeper’s door.

“Give it to me, Pip.”

“She likes it in there. She likes it with you.” Pip’s face was red and set. “She sat on your knee at breakfast. She doesn’t even remember whose chair that was. She’s four. She forgets everything, and you let her.”

“The key.”

Linnea held out her hand and kept it there. She did not raise her voice. After a moment a fist came round from behind the brown frock, and the key was put into her palm, warm and damp.

Tabitha came out like a cork from a bottle. She had the rag doll by one leg and her face was wet from brow to chin. She ran straight into Linnea’s skirts and held on.

“There. You are out, and nothing is hurt.” Linnea felt her over quickly. There was nothing worse than fright and chamomile. “Mrs. Hobday, will you take her up to Mercy? Pip and I will stay here a moment.”

The housekeeper carried the child away without a word. Linnea went into the still-room and waited until Pip followed. She left the door standing open.

“I drank your salt,” she said. “I said nothing about my brush. Those were done to me, and I am grown, and I could choose how to take them. This was done to a child half your size who cannot reach a latch. I shall not pass over it.”

Pip stared at the drying racks.

“You will beg Tabitha’s pardon. I mean hers, since I have never asked for mine. You will take your dinner at the small table. And you will not come to the glasshouse today.”

The first two went past like weather. The third went in. Linnea saw the black brows flinch.

“I don’t care.”

“I think you do. That is why I chose it.” She put the key in her apron pocket. “And you are right about one thing. Tabitha will forget a great deal. That is what being four is. So she needs a sister who remembers for her and tells her, and you cannot tell her anything through a locked door.”

Pip’s mouth worked. She said nothing at all, and went out with her chin up.
***
By noon Linnea was at her bench with a sticky Cape heath called Erica massoni and the pencil work of plate sixty-six. Gideon was at the bridge. He had been there most mornings since the masons began. On Tuesday last he had ridden up to Upper Hope and eaten bacon cut as thick as a plank.

She was thinking of him as Gideon now. She had said the name once, on a broken parapet, and it would not go back where she had kept it. In front of the household they were still Duke and Duchess, and she found she liked that too.

Mrs. Hobday came down the path between the heaths at a pace that was nearly a run.

“A post-chaise from the Angel at Ludlow, Your Grace. Mr. and Mrs. Pargeter, to see their nephew and nieces. No note, no groom sent ahead.” Her voice was perfectly even, and her opinion showed through it all the same. “I have put them in the drawing room, old curtains and all, and sent Jem to the bridge for His Grace.”

Linnea put down her pencil. She looked at her hands. There was carmine round three nails and a grey shine of lead on the side of her palm.

She could go up and change and scrub, and leave a corn-factor twenty minutes alone to look about him. Or she could go as she was.

“Ask Mercy to bring the children down in a quarter of an hour, with clean faces. All three.” She untied her apron. “I told the Duke he would have a duchess with paint on her hands. Mr. Pargeter may as well have her too.”
***
She had expected to dislike his face, and she could not.

Rupert Pargeter was a sandy, comfortable man of about forty, with a fresh skin and light lashes and a smile that reached his eyes. He bowed over her stained hand without a glance at it.

“Your Grace must forgive two country cousins. We came up from Clifton on Saturday, and I said to Dorothea, we shall not write and put a great house to trouble. We shall drive over and ask at the door like honest people. If we are sent away, we shall go.”

“You are not sent away, sir. The children will be down directly.”

“You are very good. The lawyers have made us sound like enemies, you know. It is their trade. I told Mr. Skrine, I am the children’s uncle, and I shall see them as an uncle.”

His wife had not sat down. She was a thin woman of six and thirty in a good brown pelisse, and she stood by the sofa with a pasteboard box held against her chest. She curtsied to Linnea and looked past her at the door.

It opened. Mercy brought them in, Crispin first, then Tabitha by the hand. Pip came last and sat down at once on the stool by the fender, as far off as the room allowed.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pargeter. It was hardly a word.

She was on her knees on the carpet before anybody could present anyone. She got the lid off the box with fingers that shook. Inside lay a wax doll in a muslin frock, with blue glass eyes and real yellow hair.

“I brought her for you, Tabby. All the way from Bristol on my lap. She has a petticoat, look, and shoes that come off.”

Tabitha looked at the wax doll. She looked at the rag one under her arm. She took two steps, and then two more.

Mrs. Pargeter gathered her up, doll and all, and sat down on the sofa with her. She put her face down into the fair curls and shut her eyes. Her arms went round the child as a cold person’s go round a shawl. Tabitha, who would bear very little holding from strangers, was too busy with a wax shoe to object.

Linnea watched it and felt her own breath go short. She had made ready for a greedy woman or a silly one. This woman was starving, and what she starved for was sitting on her knee.

“I have a room ready,” Mrs. Pargeter said, to nobody. “It looks on the Down. I have had it ready since March.”

“My dear,” said her husband gently.

There were boots in the hall. Gideon came in as he had come from the bridge, with stone dust on his sleeve and mud to the ankle. He stopped inside the door and faced the room square.

“Mr. Pargeter. Mrs. Pargeter.”

“Your Grace.” Pargeter bowed. As he came up from it his eyes went to the black silk and travelled down the scar to the mouth. They stayed there one beat longer than a bow required. Then he smiled. “We passed your bridge. Thirty men on it, I counted them, and the ostler at the Angel tells me they have eighteen pence a day. That is handsome.”

“It is what the work is worth.”

“Oh, and they will need it, with wheat where it is going. Eighty shillings at Bristol on Thursday, and rising nicely.” He rubbed his hands a little, as a man does at a good fire. “I hear Your Grace holds some. Four hundred quarters, bought at Ludlow. That was shrewd. You will see ninety for it by Christmas.”

“I do not mean to sell it,” Gideon said. “I mean to see it eaten.”

“To be sure.” Pargeter’s smile did not change. He turned to the boy, who had been standing very straight beside Mercy. “And here is Crispin, grown two inches. Come here, my boy. You may tell your uncle Rupert anything, you know.”

Crispin came. Pargeter laid a kind hand on his shoulder and lowered his voice. In that quiet room it carried to every wall.

“Tell me truly, now.” His eyes went once more to Gideon’s face, and stayed. “Does your uncle frighten you?”

Linnea saw Gideon’s hand close on the back of a chair. He did not speak. She understood that he would not answer for the boy, and what it cost him not to.

Crispin frowned. He gave the question the same care he gave a column of figures.

“My uncle dines with us every day at two, sir,” he said. He looked at the clock on the mantel. “It is ten minutes to two now.”

Pargeter took his hand away.

“Does he, indeed,” he said pleasantly. “Well, that is a change, and I am glad of it. There have been a good many changes at Brackenhope.” He turned the smile on Linnea. “We were all astonishment in Bristol, Your Grace. A courtship of under three weeks. One does not meet with that outside a novel.”

“I was so glad when Rupert told me,” Mrs. Pargeter said, over the curls. Her thin face was quite sincere. “I said, then there is love in the house, whatever becomes of the lawsuit. Children always know when there is love in a house.”

“A true romance,” said her husband.

Linnea opened her mouth to give him a plain answer. She was not quick enough.

“It wasn’t a romance.”

Pip was on her feet by the fender. She had been in disgrace since half past nine, she had been called a child who frightened babies, and she had been kept from the one warm place she had. Now two grown people were telling a pretty story in her mother’s drawing room.

“Uncle Gideon bought her with a glasshouse,” Pip said. Her voice shook and went on. “They made a bargain. I heard them.”

Nobody moved. The fire ticked.

Mrs. Pargeter looked up, bewildered. Crispin had gone white.

Pargeter smiled. It was the same kind, sandy smile he had worn since he came in, and it stayed on his face while he looked from the child to Linnea’s stained hands and then to the Duke.

“Mr. Pargeter,” Gideon said quietly. “The visit is over.”

He did not raise his voice, and he did not explain. He crossed the room and pulled the bell.

“Why, of course. We have tired the little ones.” Pargeter picked up his hat. “We are at the Angel until Wednesday, if the children should like to see us again.”

“You may apply to Mr. Quince.”

Mrs. Pargeter did not want to open her arms. Linnea watched her make herself do it. Tabitha slid down with the wax doll held tight, and went to Mercy.

“She may keep it?” the thin woman asked. She asked it of Linnea, humbly.

“Of course she may. It was kindly thought of.”

Mrs. Pargeter looked back at the child twice on her way to the door.
***
The chaise went down the drive between the wet limes. Linnea stood at the top of the steps until it turned at the lodge. Then she went back into the hall.

Pip was standing in the middle of the flagstones under the old Duke’s portrait. Mercy had taken the others up. The child had her arms stiff at her sides and her eyes on Linnea’s face, and she was hardly breathing. She had the look of somebody who has seen the whip taken down from its nail.

“He smiled,” Pip said.

“Yes. He did.”

“I made him.”

Linnea came across the hall and stopped in front of her. She did not touch her. Pip would not have borne it.

“It was the truth, Pip. Nobody in this house is going to punish you for telling the truth. Your uncle told it to you himself, on the schoolroom hearthrug.”

Pip waited. She plainly did not believe that was all.

“But the truth is not finished yet,” Linnea said. “You told Mr. Pargeter how it began. You heard that part under my staging, on the ninth of May. It is July now, and there is more of it than there was. You have not heard that part, and neither has he.”

“What part?”

“I am still finding it out myself.”

The dark eyes searched her. Then Pip’s face shut up tight. She turned and ran for the east stair, and they heard her boots all the way to the top.

Gideon had not moved from the foot of the steps. His face was the colour of the stone dust on his sleeve. The scar stood out in it like a chalk line.

“She only said what I arranged,” he said.

“Gideon.”

“I drew the terms. I said them aloud in a room made of glass, as I might read an order, with a child of seven under the bench. I told all three of them that they would be given no love story.” He was looking at the door the Pargeters had gone out by. “She has said nothing that I did not put into her mouth. If it loses them, it will not be her doing.”

“I signed those terms. I added four of my own.”

“You were asked. I did the asking.”

She wanted to tell him he was wrong, and she knew he would not hear it today. So she stayed where she was beside him, on his left, and kept quiet.

The stable clock began to strike two.

He drew a breath that she could see. “I shall write to Quince tonight,” he said. “It is two o’clock.”

He went up the east stair to the schoolroom, white as he was, and she went with him.
***
Pip ate nothing at the small table. At half past eight Mercy came to the yellow sitting room with her cap crooked.

“Her bed’s not been lain in, Your Grace. I’ve tried the stables and the linen room. I didn’t like to go to His Grace, not after today.”

“You need not go to anyone. I think I know.”

It was dusk in the walled garden, grey and dripping. She had taken a candle from the mantel and a tinderbox. The glasshouse door was shut, as she had taught three children to shut it.

It was warm inside, and it smelled of peat and wet brick. The stove ticked. Linnea stood still and let her eyes grow used to the dimness. The heaths were dark shapes on their tiers. At the far end, the tall blades of the Strelitzia stood up against the last of the light.

Under the staging beside the tub, where the flue came in and the floor was warmest, there was the sole of a small half-boot. It drew back half an inch as she looked at it.

Linnea did not go any nearer. She struck a light and lit the candle, and stood it in its stick on the end of her bench, well clear of the paper.

“I said not today,” she told the glasshouse in general. “It is very nearly tomorrow, and I have never been strict about the clock. The top lights are open an inch, so it will be cool by midnight. The brick by the tub stays warm till morning.”

Nothing answered. The boot did not move again.

“The door is not locked,” Linnea said. “I do not lock people in.”

She went out and latched it softly. She told Mercy where to bring a blanket in an hour, and to bring it without a word.

From the window of the yellow bedchamber she could see down into the garden. It was full dark now. One small light burned behind the glass. It showed clearest through a single pane, the new one that had no green in it, in bay F, in the fourth row.
***