Amy Snow (11 page)

•  •  •

Regent Street is like nothing I could ever have imagined. Glittering windows display a panoply of jewelry, birds, quills, statuary, and other items I simply cannot recognize or name. The Pantheon in Piccadilly is like something Aurelia might have dreamed up in one of her stories: a great glass arcade with fountains, statues and galleries, where finely dressed ladies and gentlemen stroll and preen.

I begin at once, inquiring in shops that might have any connection, however tenuous, to the world of books. Poorly dressed as I am, I meet a range of receptions from faintly condescending to a flat refusal to communicate with me. I welcome their disdain as evidence that I am where I intended to be and, therefore, relatively safe. Besides, I am used to it.

I pace from store to store but my search reveals nothing. No one has heard of a bookseller called Entwhistle. After exhausting Regent Street and Oxford Street both, I contemplate the size of London and the dismaying fact that Entwhistle's could be anywhere within it. It will be like searching for a needle in a haystack, a pea under a thousand mattresses. In fact, it will be exactly like searching for one of Aurelia's elaborate clues on the Hatville estate.

Do you remember, dear, when you were little, how I used to delight in creating treasure hunts for you . . . ?

How could I forget? They are amongst my happiest recollections. There is such magic for a child in knowing that secrets are hidden all about! (For a weary adult with no assured future it is less enchanting.)

Her clues might be riddles or verses, or even sketches of the location in question. We could spend a whole day on such an adventure—me screwing up my forehead, huffing through my heavy black fringe as I tried to unlock the mystery, Aurelia stifling laughter as she watched me draw a wrong conclusion and race off to a dead end. Sometimes she was too clever for me and I would find myself defeated, but she was always there to explain the puzzle. She is not here to help me now; I pray she has not overestimated me.

•  •  •

By three o'clock in the afternoon the crowds have more than doubled. I am eyed askance and swept past and jostled. I start walking farther afield, this time keeping a watchful eye on my surroundings. There are fewer people to ask here but their answers are the same.

I am about to draw today's hunt to a close when, in desperation, I inquire at a cobbler's.

“Not the foggiest, miss,” I am told, “but try old Manning, you know him? Second left off Parsley Street, that's by the inn with the contented swine on the sign. He's a stationer, and he knows everything, to boot. Boot! Ha!” The cobbler raises the boot he's holding and waves it around.

“
Definitely
my last inquiry today,” I promise myself. I am tired and footsore beyond imagining. Darkness is a whisper away.

“Entwhistle? Never heard of him,” says Mr. Manning, predictably, scratching a tufty head. “Entwhistle, you say? No, no idea.”

“Thank you anyway.” I find it impossible to smile.

“Stay, though, I have a directory here somewhere—all the booksellers in London. If you can wait, I shall look it up for you.”

The street outside is awash with shadows, but there is only one possible answer. A directory! This will save me weeks of searching! In a moment I will have an address, or at any rate one of the long, colorful, circumlocutory descriptions that I have learned today pass for addresses here in London. I may yet find the letter today!

“No, I'm sorry, miss, no such name.” Mr. Manning folds up his directory.

“I beg your pardon?” Sheer disbelief floors me. Of all the outcomes I had been imagining, this was not one of them.

“No Entwhistle. Not that it surprises me; it's rare I don't know of a fellow dealing in books.”

“You must be mistaken. Please look again!”

Mr. Manning looks irritated but humors me and shows me the relevant listings, even pronouncing them aloud with painstaking clarity as if he doubts I can read.

Sure enough, the list jumps straight from “Durrant” to “Everley” and there is nothing in between. I turn over the document, looking for a postscript or an addendum. There is nothing. I clutch it and read every single name on it, one by one, using a finger, in case it has been listed out of place. Mr. Manning watches me curiously. No Entwhistle.

“Was there something particular you wanted? A specialist item, perhaps? I could order it for you.”

“No, sir, there is nothing you can do. Thank you for looking.”

What a difference a mood can make. I return to my lodgings with the heaviest of hearts, utterly baffled. I barely notice the jouncing of the cab, the dingy streets.

I feel nothing but dread. For if there is no Entwhistle's, there can be no letter. And if there is no letter, then the trail is dead.

The argument raged for weeks. Proud Mrs. Bolton came to the house in her peacock colors, with entreaties, references, credentials. Correspondence flew between Hatville and other interested parties, namely Mrs. Bolton's connections, objects of the proposed visit. Dr. Jacobs was consulted. He gave the plan his blessing. A London consultant was summoned. He did not. Aurelia did not much credit his opinion, merely wondered how much it had cost her father.

While the future of this, her latest and wildest project, hung in the balance, Aurelia haunted the halls, white-faced and tense. The days became an exhausting sequence of dramas: private conversations between Aurelia and her parents behind tightly closed doors, doors slamming, footsteps storming and fits of angry weeping. I was a helpless, baffled onlooker. When I asked Aurelia what had been said, she would just look at me with desperate eyes and thin lips and shake her head. This was the same Aurelia who had told me every last thing she heard about Lord Kenworthy, about Lord Dunthorne, every scrap and scandal. She had never spared my girlish sensibilities before. In the eighteen months since her diagnosis I had grown used to our new closeness and now I felt horribly excluded.

I felt cross with her then, I did. I understood that she did not like to be thwarted, of course, but it was only a holiday! I told myself, in secret, dark moments I could not admit to anyone, that she was being hysterical. But one day I slipped into the library and found Aurelia seated in a wing-back chair by the window. She did not hear me—I had perfected the art of moving as unobtrusively as possible in order to cause the least offense. Her book had fallen to the ground—her face was buried in her hands. I knew then that her despair was real and I did not know what I could say, so I left her alone.

I could not understand. I was but thirteen. Her companionship was the greatest joy of my life and I wanted to hoard every precious moment remaining to us. Why did she not feel the same?

I did not like myself for leaving her in the library that day. It was the first time that I felt useless to her. I did not know how to talk to her anymore. I missed her even while I still saw her at Hatville every day. At first I would cry myself to sleep but I couldn't bear that, it felt too tragic—as if she had already gone, as if she had already died. I dared not let myself think ahead to
that
.

I was not to accompany her on her journey either. I was too young for the plans that had been laid. It would be tiresome for me. By going alone, she promised, she could return in the highest of spirits to share the highlights with me—she would entertain me for hours.

I did not want to endure three months at Hatville without her, not for any entertainment.

Yet she went. I knew that she would. Once an idea possessed her to that degree, she never, ever gave up on it.

•  •  •

The night before she left, we sat talking in front of her fire. I sat in a large chair with my knees drawn up to my chin and my arms hugging them close. I could hardly believe that after tomorrow morning I would not see her for three whole months. It seemed an intolerably long time to me then.

“I will miss you so much,” she murmured, to my infinite relief. “You know I will, don't you, little bird?”

Oh, there was so much I wanted to say to that!
Would
she really miss me? Would she still love me best? I craved reassurance, but the preceding weeks seemed to have robbed me of the habit of easy speech. I did not answer at first and when I spoke it felt inadequate.

“But you don't
have
to go,” I argued, knowing it was too late. Mrs. Bolton was to collect her early the next morning. Her trunks were packed—and mine were not. “And you don't have to leave me behind. What if . . .”

“What if . . . ?” she prompted gently, knowing what I was about to say.

“What if you
die
? What if you go away and I never see you again? Is it
so
important to you? So very important you would risk us never sitting together again?” My voice had risen and grown tearful, so I hugged my knees much tighter.

“Oh, little bird, never think that! Nothing would be worth that. But there
is
no such risk. I don't claim to know when I shall die, but I promise you the time is not near. I should feel it if it were and I should not go. I have to go.”

“But . . .
why
?”

She sighed and we both stared at the flames. I thought she would not answer me. When she finally turned to me, it was with the saddest expression. I had never seen her like this before. I was accustomed to compassion, obstinacy, a crusading spirit, but never this naked, defeated grief.

“Amy, I have never had control over my life. I have marched all over this small corner of the world as though I did, but it was pretence. Advantages I have, advantages aplenty, but control, no. I am not my own person.”

I rested my chin on my knees and gazed at her, listening. She hesitated again with a faraway look in her dark-blue eyes. She looked as if she were sorting through a great many things she would like to say in order to pick the ones she would, or could.

But when she spoke again, in a soft, considered voice, it was only to say things I had heard many times before.

“There are walls all around us, holding us in. At every moment one circumstance dictates the next. A neighbor pays a call and we politely receive them or politely pretend to be from home. One person decides to hold a dinner and someone else cooks it. Someone else cannot afford to eat, so they die. And no one questions it, at least, no one in
my
family. I have always known this, Amy, I have always seen it. But I have been able to go on with my life nonetheless. But lately, perhaps since we learned about my heart, I don't know, I cannot stop seeing it—I cannot turn off this awareness. It grows unbearable of late. The
stupidity
of it all, Amy, the conventions, the things we must do and the things we must not. The things that are respected and revered, like an advantageous marriage, when all it amounts to is selling a woman for money, like a horse! And the things that are frowned upon, when they are good and true things . . . it's all so nonsensical. And there in the middle of it all am I and what good does seeing all this actually
do
? I can win small wars. I can take food to the villagers, support the dear reverend's charitable projects; I can be kind to someone who has been disgraced, whether or not it scandalizes my mother. But these things do not change anyone's lives, not permanently.”

I nodded and did not trust myself to speak. I could not understand why she was talking to me as though I were a stranger who did not already know her every thought. I did not want social commentary, I wanted her to tell me that she loved me and could not be parted from me.

“Until now, dear, my greatest victory is you! I have kept you safe, here with me, I have educated you and given you a chance at a better life after I am gone. And that you are my greatest friend is the very happiest of outcomes. But even that is poisoned, Amy, for what has been the cost to you? I find myself questioning everything, of late. I am grateful every day that you are here with me. But I am not sure that I have done you such a very great favor. I have made you . . . a misfit! I should set you free, only it would break my heart to come back to find you gone.”

I was appalled. This had never occurred to me. Now, as well as worrying that I might be neglected, forgotten, I needed to worry that she would cast me out through some misguided notion that it would be better for me. “Aurelia, how can you say that? You've done everything for me! I would never leave you. Not ever!”

She raked her nails over her scalp until her hair stood up. Her cheeks burned and tears glowed in her eyes. “During my life I have fought passionately—over bonnets. I have stood my ground to defend my rights—to wear feathers. Everyone knows where I stand—with regard to ribbons. The concerns of a spoiled child.”

“Aurelia! No! You have fought for a great deal more than that! You
know
you have!”