02 - Down the Garden Path Read online

  “That pong’ll bring ‘er round,” said Fred comfortingly, and some of Bertie’s guilt at not having scrambled to the rescue began to fade. He was almost beginning to enjoy himself. The girl’s eyelids quivered open and she was staring about her in a frightened way.

  “Where am I?” she whispered.

  Bertie’s question was, Who was she? Flaxby Meade being no longer than a clothesline in any direction, stood to reason there was no one living there he didn’t know. Same went for Leather Jacket. He weren’t Flaxby.

  Miss Tramwell carefully replaced the lid on the pickled onions and set them down. She was now wafting her lavender shawl before the girl’s face. “Shock is what you are suffering from, my dear. Men! And people continue to feel sorry for the old maid! I expect we will find your assailant has a bicycle fetish and cannot control himself.”

  Bertie swore enthusiastically under his breath. “Cor blimey! Fiddle-assing around! Why can’t the old girl ‘op on that there bike and chase the man down?”

  “Come off it,” said Fred, always Bertie’s voice of reason, “ ‘ow’s she going to nail a motorbike? Ain’t as though she could ‘ave nicked a look at the licence plate. Know what, Bertie? We should ‘ave crept down and tried to get a quick dekko. But then ... Aunt Maude would ‘ave worried if we’d bin late ‘ome for supper.”

  Fred was great that way. Bertie felt a lot more cheerful knowing that their failure to act the heroes was based in some measure on consideration for Aunt Maude and her mutton pie.

  The girl inched slowly upwards into a sitting position. She was now rubbing her forehead. “Oh, please, please! Where am I?” She gazed wistfully up at Miss Tramwell through thick dark-gold lashes. “And who are you?”

  Miss Tramwell breathed a tremulous sigh of relief and bent to wrap her shawl about the girl’s shoulders. “My dear, words cannot express ... I really was not sure the onions would work. No one faints these days. It’s quite out of fashion ... but all’s well that ends well. Dear me, I must not go rambling on. My sister Hyacinth is always remonstrating with me. We may be a fidgety pair of spinsters, she says, but there is no need to keep giving the game away. I know you will like Hyacinth. She is older than me, but really she does a remarkable job of keeping herself up. I am sure very few people notice that she dyes her hair. Now, my dear, if you will let me help you to your feet. There we are. Now we may be on our way.”

  “Our way?” breathed the girl.

  “To Cloisters, naturally. The home of the Tramwells for four hundred and twenty-four years. Now, as you will see”—she patted the string bag on her arm—”I was on my way to pay a sick call on Dr. Mallard. He has his thirty-second cold this year. The man’s a hypochondriac, so I will just catch him when he is laid up again, in a fortnight or so.”

  “Oh, Gawd!” muttered Bertie. “She’s a bloody record.” But just when he began to wonder if old Celery Legs was intentionally prolonging the agony, she ran out of wind. The girl stood up, wide expressionless eyes fixed on Miss Tramwell’s face.

  “I don’t know who I am,” she murmured dreamily. “So sorry ... I seem to have gone all funny from that faint. You said I fainted, didn’t you? Why am I here in this wood? I don’t know anything!”

  “Weird!” sighed Bertie ecstatically, shifting as noiselessly as possible in his tree.

  The girl was sinking into a kneeling position on the ground, arms cradling her body as if to protect it from the outside world. “Who am I?” she demanded angrily, as though the information had been stolen from her.

  “Dear me,” sighed Primrose. “We seem to find ourselves in even more of a pickle than first supposed. Whatever is one to do?” she fluttered. “Even if old Quack-Quack—Dr. Mallard, that is—weren’t indisposed, he knows nothing about the inner workings of the mind. Most people hereabouts think he’s been out of his for years. Hyacinth and I put more stock in the old folk remedies than in modern medicine. Come to think of it, only last week we were reading an article about amnesia in one of those do-it-yourself health magazines, and I remember particularly the author suggesting that a judicious thwack with a blunt instrument on the back of the head is worth months of arduous psychotherapy.”

  The girl gave a violent start.

  “Remember anything? Oh dear; paltry of me ... but I really don’t believe I have the fortitude to pick up a tree branch and slug you. Best to go and talk matters over with Hyacinth, I dare say.”

  “I—I don’t want to impose.” The drooping girl straightened. Eyes wild, she twisted around as though searching for a means of escape. (Bertie did not think the bicycle would be much help. It, too, looked as though it had been attacked.) “And I am sure I don’t need medical attention. In a few minutes ...”

  “I understand completely. The last thing you need to see right now is a man. And doctors do have a nasty tendency to be male.... Good gracious, how very foolish not to have thought of her before ... our visiting nurse, Maude Krumpet.”

  “Aunt Maude,” said Bertie and Fred as one.

  “Yes, your Aunt Maude!” Miss Tramwell stopped brushing leaves and twigs from the skirt of her dress and looked up into the boughs. “Come down from that tree, Bertie Krumpet, and run home as fast as your sneaky legs will carry you. If Nurse is in, tell her she is needed at Cloisters. Otherwise, look until you find her.”

  Old Celery Legs was a witch. How had she known they was up that tree? Old women like her was supposed to be deaf as doorposts and blind as teddy bears. Bertie sidled down the trunk, scraping his knees and angry that Fred would not come with him. He glowered up at Miss Tram-well through his fringe of spiky ginger hair. The beautiful forgetful miss must be thinking him a real sop. He wished he was thin and tall, like Fred, instead of short and pudgy with a face all over freckles. Miserable old Celery Legs. Fred might not come back for days.

  “Be off with you, Bertie!” Miss Tramwell flapped her hands at him. “And no skipping stones in the brook, mind.”

  Bertie went. He was so miffed that he did not give Miss Tramwell even grudging admiration for not only having caught him out but remembering his name. It was the other one who had caught him in the garden at Cloisters and warned him that she had counted all the apples on the big tree so she’d know if one was missing.

  “How did you know he was there?” the girl asked as Bertie vanished.

  “My dear child.” Primrose Tramwell patted her prim silver curls and adjusted a couple of invisible hairpins. “When you are as old as I, and have spent as many nights quaking in your bed, listening for a burglar’s footsteps on the stairs, you will discover your hearing is remarkably acute—when necessary. At other times it is quite as useful to be a little hard of hearing. Dear me, there I go rambling again; this is nothing to you, is it, poor child! How white you look. Are you ready to go? I know you will feel so much better when we reach Cloisters and have a nice hot cup of tea—with lots of brandy.”

  Yes, indeed, thought Tessa. A stiff dose of medicinal brandy is exactly what I need. This may not be quite as easy as you and I planned, Harry, wherever you are. Perhaps even more of a challenge, especially if Hyacinth turns out to be anything like her saccharine-sweet sister. Still, if things get sticky, I can always feign a swift return to my faculties and make a getaway. But, oh, Harry, I hope it doesn’t come to that! This is so important to me. We plotted everything so well—the parts we were to play. Except that rehearsals are never quite the real thing, are they? Coming at me like that—you scared me, Harry, you really did....

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  Our housekeeper, Mrs. Ferguson, always blamed my wicked ways on my origins. Don’t get me wrong: Fergy wasn’t referring to Dad’s being your typical gentle, absent-minded clergyman or to the fact that Mum—dear cosy redheaded Mum, with her wonderfully appalling taste in clothes and equally wonderful taste in what little girls like to eat, play with, and have read to them on rainy afternoons—had died when I was ten. Neither was Fergy referring to my being an only child, our living at Kings Ransome, a s
mall nondescript village near Warwick, or that I had always had pets, had gone to boarding school at the age of eleven, and had never learned to ride a bicycle.

  When she spoke of my origins, which she did often with immense relish, Fergy spoke from a literal interpretation of the dictionary. How I was Begot. Tradesmen and lost souls seeking guidance to the local pub became her captive audiences, but her greatest source of pleasure was any newcomer to the village who joined her group, the Joyful Sounds or, in plainer terms, the Ladies’ Choir. These ladies, mostly charwomen or housewives escaping from punitive children, held their meetings every Tuesday afternoon in the vicarage kitchen. This may not sound very grandiose, but you have to realize that they all wore hats like the Queen Mum and did not remove their gloves while partaking of sherry cake and China tea. The sherry was always Harvey’s Bristol Cream and the tea was always poured by Fergy from the silver teapot. And why not? Dad preferred his from the earthenware one. He had no objections to Fergy keeping the silver “primed,” as she called it.

  After Mum died, the only ladies entertained at the vicarage were the Joyful Sounds. Dad was too shy to be social, except in the pulpit where somehow he became impassioned and magnificent like Laurence Olivier. Fergy had stressed upon him that a widowed clergyman brought out the animal in most women. “Just won’t leave poor Vicar alone.”

  And I had to agree that Fergy might be right. Phone calls in the middle of the night. Distraught females taken suddenly bad with terrible attacks of conscience that could only be assuaged by immediate confession. Fergy’s answer was to tell the twerps to turn R.C. and hang up on them. But one of Dad’s special talents was for listening.

  And it must be admitted there were some advantages to his clerical allure. Our larder was always “proper bursting” at the seams with gifts of appreciation. Pork pies, crabapple and quince jellies, green tomato chutney, gingerbread, and brandied peaches were handed through the kitchen door into a very uppish Fergy’s often floury and always ungrateful hands. What did some people think she was doing draped over the cooker all morning, drying her hair? Her lack of appreciation may have been the reason some of the offerings were left in wicker baskets, covered with tea towels, small notes attached, on the back doorstep. Which brings us, very clearly I must say, right back to how I was Begot—for it was in a wicker basket that I was discovered on the vicarage doorstep. Only in my case the note was pinned to a white hand-knitted blanket.

  Such were my origins. Heaven only knew where or what I had come from! Of course Mum had told me the story from the time I was very small and I had never tired of her relating how she had come out for the milk and found me, and how she had rocked me all that day, scared that someone would come and take me away. I loved to tell the story myself until one of the girls at school screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue, jeering, “Why, that’s even more stupider than the stork in Wellington boots fib. You need to buy your mummy a book on where babies really do come from.”

  That incident occurred shortly before Mum died. She was ill at the time but I remember lying on her bed, feeling her thin arms around me, and her telling me that not only did she and my father love me, but that the woman who had given birth to me had also loved me. “She had her reasons for bringing you to us,” Mum said. “Sometimes when I am half asleep I almost remember: I see this face—we’re sitting side by side talking like friends. Nice, nice face, but then it’s gone, I’m looking out a window and it’s raining—all dark and blurry.” I stayed with Mum for a long time after she fell asleep. The wind was gusting outside, battering against the grey stone walls of the house, but I was always safe and warm wherever she was.

  About a month after Mum’s funeral the Tuesday meetings of the Joyful Sounds resumed. With one week of the summer holidays still remaining, I was at home, not only unhappy but bored. My dog, Slobber, was at the vet’s being treated for some minor ailment and I could not bring myself to play with my other old companion—my doll, Agatha Slouch. Mum had made Agatha for me, and it hurt every time I looked at those crooked embroidered eyebrows and the button nose with four nostrils instead of two.

  So there I was sitting cross-legged in the wash house, peering through a crack in the kitchen doorway listening with all my might. Fergy’s conversations were always stimulating, running the gamut from who had to get married that month to who had been caught shoplifting at Boots. The ladies were all seated royally around the cloth-covered kitchen table, and I spotted a newcomer in their midst. A thin woman with a chin like a shoehorn and eyebrows like poor Agatha.

  “A right treat this is an’ all, your joining us, Mrs. Stark.” Fergy was pouring tea in a thin golden stream into fluted china cups from the sitting room cabinet. “Hope you an’ yours will have nothing but happiness in Kings Ransome. Not but you won’t find it a proper dead-in-alive-hole if ever there was one. Nothing happens here. Never has. Excepting for the business of our Tessa. You’ll have heard about that, I’m sure.”

  Mrs. Stark opened her mouth but Fergy rode right on. “Talk about give a woman a fit! There she was right next to the milk bottles, not more’n four or five days old, doctor reckoned. The prettiest baby I’ve ever laid me eyes on. Dressed up like for a christening, she was.”

  Fergy poured a cup for herself, stirred in three lumps of sugar, and blew on it. “Bless me, if I didn’t die of shock! Not what the doctor orders for a woman with my weak heart, let me tell you! I couldn’t as much as lift a feather duster all day. As for the Missus, she was carrying on like it was the virgin birth. Doctor had told her, you see, after she had her ‘overalls’ took away, that she was finished as far as all that was concerned. “

  Mrs. Stark was trying to arrange her spoon in her saucer so it wouldn’t fall off with an uncouth clatter. “Turned out all right, has she? Never stops being grateful like, I suppose, for being tooken in and given a good ‘ome.”

  “Not on your life!” Fergy gave a royal snort. “Proper little madam she is; as a rule, that is, a bit off form at the moment what with the Missus being taken. But if she don’t grow up to rob Buckingham Palace, I don’t know knickers from a fur coat. Like to see a photo of her, would you, Mrs. Stark? Can’t fetch her down to meet you—the rules is against children at the meetings, but won’t take me a sec to tootle up and fetch one of the snapshots off me dressing table.”

  At the closing of the kitchen door a heavy silence settled on the room for exactly three seconds. “What I says”—this from Mrs. Baker, the bank manager’s char, wearing the red satin toque—”and I don’t care who ‘ears me—it’s all right, she’ll be ‘alfway up the stairs by now—if I’d bin Vicar nor ‘is Missus I’d ‘ave been a mite more cautious about taking something off the street like that! Why, you all know me, I won’t buy floor polish door to door. And as for a mongrel pup off market—you couldn’t pay me! When I got my Corgi I forked out four quid, would ‘ave bin ten but for ‘im only ‘aving one ear, but I got papers. That way I knew what I was bloody well getting.”

  “ ‘Course you did.” Mrs. Salmon, a woman with four chins and a face as red and scaley as her name, nodded. “Stands to reason, don’t it?”

  “Correct me if I should haippan to be wrong,” wheezed posh Mrs. Smythe. (Her husband’s name was Smith.) “But from what I haive overheard by way of the grapevine, so to speak, the little girl is worse than plain naughty. There’s something not quite right there, if you asks me. Mentally, I mean! Let Jimmy Edwards’s butterfly out of the jar he was carrying to school, she did. Said she would report him to the RSPCA.”

  Mrs. Stark gave an unassuming little cough as she gripped her spoon in both hands. “I know as ‘ow I shouldn’t say nothing, being a new member and Mrs. Ferguson so gracious in ‘er ‘ospitality, but did any of you ladies see that film years ago, called The Bad Seed”? Ever so frightenin’ it was. The nicest couple you’d ever wish to meet adopted this pretty little girl and ...”

  “Sad, really.” The bank manager’s char had a cautious eye on the door as she spoke. “Her own
mother not wanting her and now this one gone. Still, I suppose it ain’t the same really. Couldn’t be. As I always says, if you don’t suffer to ‘ave the little blighters you can’t love ‘em.”

  “Oh, how true.” Mrs. Smythe nodded as the kitchen door creaked open and Fergy came in with her snapshot.

  Hands clasping her ample middle, Fergy watched complacently as the photo made its round of the table to “Oohs” and “In’t she lovely—should be on telly or in one of them Pears’ adverts.”

  “Well, I never,” said Mrs. Stark. “What my Bill wouldn’t give for some of that ‘air. Sort of like an ‘alo, in’t it?”

  “A halo? On our Tessa? That’ll be the day!” Fergy took the frame back and wiped the glass with her apron. “Worse than a gnat bite she is—enough to drive you right up the wall. Still, between you, me, and my dead Uncle Harry, I always says the goody-goodies either need their tonsils out or a good dose of salts.”

  * * * *

  My conviction that Fergy would be a lot better pleased if I grew up to be a striptease dancer than a doctor or Member of Parliament could not take the sting out of the other women’s comments. At several points I had been tempted to get up off the cold stone floor of the wash house and rush into the kitchen to beat them up. But wouldn’t that only prove to them how wicked I was? A bad seed. I stayed put and thought about my mother. Not Mum, but the woman who had brought me into this horrible, critical world. Why had she given me away? It could not be because she had not liked me, surely—because Fergy had said I was a pretty baby. And if my wicked tendencies came from my biological mother, she could not be expected to object to them.

  Any thoughts I gave to my birth father at that time were fleeting. The male role in reproduction was still what Fergy termed “mercifully vague,” so to me this man—whoever he might be—was very much a bit player in the drama of my existence. Later I dabbled with him a bit—tacked on a black moustache and a French accent, or rendered him a hopeless invalid—to suit whatever story I was weaving about my mother. But he was never real to me because, I think, Dad was real. I could touch Dad. I could hold on to him. He would climb a ladder, even though he was afraid of heights, when my budgie flew out the window and the other birds pecked at it from the top branches of the copper beech.