Jewel of the Thames (A Portia Adams Adventure) (3 page)

“All done, then, m’dear?” she enquired, turning to me.

“
Indeed,” I answered with finality, turning my back on the only home I had ever known.

Chapter Two

“
W
hat an odious man,” Mrs. Jones declared almost as soon as we turned the corner, her hazel eyes flashing with anger. “I will never understand why your mother married that beast.”

I shrugged, remembering all the arguments my mother and I had over him and resolving never to think of him again. “He was a waste of my mother’s time, and I warrant would be a waste of yours should you spend any thought on his existence, ma’am.”

She looked surprised at my bile, but approving, and her mouth slowly quirked up, the pink lipstick she wore a perfect shade for her skin color.

“
Well, at least that makes your decision a little easier, Portia Adams,” she prompted, reaching into her purse to pull out a small hand mirror and adjusting her hair, which had not moved at all as far I could tell.

“
My decision, ma’am?” I asked, suddenly wondering where the cab was taking us. “I don’t understand.”

“
You will come with me to London, as soon as it can be arranged,” she answered, her eyes still on her mirror as she smiled, checking her teeth, and finding all as it should be, snapping the silver compact closed.

I looked down at my hands, nodding slowly. “There is nothing for me here, it is true, but … London? I’ve never been there. I know no one there.”

She tilted her head. “Who is it you know here?”

I flushed, aware of my solitude and for the first time in my life embarrassed by it.

“And you know me now,” she continued, placing her gloved hand on my knee and leaning toward me. “I know you don’t really need a guardian. Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see you are a most capable woman. But I can help you. Think of me as more of a benefactor than a guardian — someone who has interest in your success.”

My lack of skill in social niceties also meant that I had trouble trusting new people, but looking at this regal old woman, I felt no animosity emanating from her. Also, my mother had obviously trusted her enough to leave me in her care, even if I did not need it.

“So … London,” I said, sitting back, my eyes still on this stranger, running through her possible motivations: Indebtedness to my family? Interest in this house in London?

“
London,” she agreed with a sigh as she sat back.

We spent the night at a hotel, paid for by my new guardian despite my objections. I knew that I had no right to be so proud; I had so little money to spend that any help she could offer should be accepted with thanks and grace.

At some point that first evening over an extravagant supper in our rooms, I managed to express my thanks. In the depths of my grief and then shock, it struck me that I had yet to do that. The meal consisted of warm beef stew and two kinds of buttered breads along with salads, cheeses and fruits. I took my cue from Mrs. Jones. Rarely had such an array been laid out before me, and I copied the order of foods she chose and the different cutlery she used to ingest them.

She smiled, recognizing my watchful mimicry before saying, “I owe your mother far more than money or support, and I owe your grandmother more than I could ever repay for her friendship when I most needed it. We need not speak of this again, but know I can not only comfortably afford to be your guardian, but it is my honor and pleasure to repay your family in this way for all they have given me.”

“I have to ask, what is it that you owe my mother?” I said. “And surely the friendship of my grandmother was paid in full by your friendship in return?”

Mrs. Jones shook her head adamantly. “No, you can’t possibly understand the significance of your grandmother in my life. And even were it not so, my respect for the woman demands that I do everything I can to make sure her granddaughter is well-established and happy.”

Aside from more expressions of thanks for the friendship she had enjoyed with the first Constance Adams, I could get nothing further from Mrs. Jones. I must admit that I was overwhelmed by this amount of social interaction and was thankful for the longer periods of silence I was granted over the next few days to come to terms with my new circumstances.

The first night I woke sweaty and soaked in tears, clutching my pillow like a vise, and it took several hours to fall back asleep. In the morning I woke late to the sound of a person brushing her teeth in the bathroom, and I painfully swallowed down the knowledge that it could not be my mother. She was dead. How strange to me.

Whatever her motivations, Mrs. Jones had a strange insight into what other people in my life — teachers, friends of my mother — had called my ‘moods’. At first it appeared she shared my solitary predilections, but watching her interact with the staff at the hotel and the various socialites who would stop by our table when we were eating and taking note of her daily routine, I decided that wasn’t it at all.

“
I don’t really like being around crowds of people,” I blurted out one afternoon as we bought tickets for our train trip down to New York, where we would board an ocean liner to take us the rest of the way to England.

My guardian looked at me quizzically with the small smile I was becoming accustomed to. “Why, yes dear, I know.”

“And I like time to think. Every day. In quiet reflection,” I continued, watching her reaction, which was minimal except to nod slowly, the smile still in place.

It was my turn to look quizzical. “But how is it you know? Was my grandmother the same? If so, my mother never mentioned it to me.”

To my surprise, that question elicited a chuckle from the older lady, who deftly scooped up our tickets and tucked them into her fashionable purse before turning my way and taking my elbow. “Lord no, your grandmother was a terror on the social scene. She had a laugh you could hear from four tables over, and loved balls and parties more than anything else in life. She would plan for them for months, and I would have to drag her out of those events at all hours of the morning!”

I shook my head, never having known these details, but believing nonetheless in the picture Mrs. Jones painted of my namesake. It was in these brief moments when curiosity overtook despair that I allowed myself to think of my future rather than dwell in my present.

I took to reading a page in my mother’s journal in the evenings, running my hands over the handwriting, trying to smile through my tears at the memories she had preserved here. Most of the journal was about me. That in itself made me cry because I really had felt like the center of her world, and she obviously agreed. Each entry was only about a paragraph and described anecdotes of daily activities that she found amusing or worrying or just wanted to remember. My first steps were described(skinned my knees because I was determined to have my first walk on gravel). The pride was evident in her account of my being promoted from grade one to three, though her next entry was a worried one centered on my lack of friends. She was right in that I had very few friends in school, but wrong to take on the guilt that her allowing me to move up a grade early was the cause. I was the cause. I was far more interested in education than the children around me.

My prospects in Toronto had been limited by circumstance, having reached the pinnacle of academic success against all odds, much to the embarrassment of my former stepfather. He took great pleasure in reminding me that my schooling was to come to an undramatic end on my twentieth birthday, when he intended to marry me off. How my mother had afforded tutors and lessons for almost two decades I had never known, but I took to learning with the zeal of a long-serving inmate finally granted his freedom.

We had booked an overnight compartment for our train trip south, so I watched the sun set over Toronto as we pulled out of the station, saying a silent goodbye to my home of so many years. My companion quickly fell asleep with her book lying over her chest, so I closed it and pulled a small blanket out of the overhead cabinet to cover her with. It took me a few hours to fall asleep. Even the rocking motion of the train did not soothe my churning brain. So it was, as we pulled up into the station in New York, that I raised with my new guardian the subject of continuing education.

“
Well, it just so happens that I have written ahead to a friend, well, let’s call her a friend for now … and applied for your admission to Somerville College,” she offered, a sparkle in her eye.

“
That is most kind of you, Mrs. Jones,” I answered, my heart beating wildly at the opportunity, “but surely the tuition—”

“
The cost is not your concern, my dear. I can afford it,” she interrupted. “Does studying at the college appeal to you?”

“
Very much so,” I replied, shaking off the guilt as best I could, and only partially succeeding. My brain seemed to want to linger on the life I had enjoyed with my mother, and my heart seemed to want me to feel bad for anything else.

Mrs. Jones broached the subject quite unprompted the morning after arriving in New York, in the downstairs lobby of the hotel, asking what my mother’s plans had been for me.

“For if I am to stand in as your guardian, I should know what your mother wanted for you,” she explained.

I looked down at the scone that had until moments ago smelled heavenly of blueberries and butter. Now it might as well have been a finely formed rock; that’s how my appetite changed at the mere mention of my past life.

“She worked so hard to make sure I had the best education, that I wanted for nothing,” I started to say, my eyes still on my plate, “I…”

“
You miss her,” Mrs. Jones finished, reaching across the table to cover my hand. I nodded, not looking up.

“
You will miss her,” she continued. “You will miss her every single day for a long time.”

The melancholy in her voice made me raise my eyes to meet hers, the trembling of her lower lip underscoring just how deeply she sympathized with my situation. I guessed that she had lost someone important to her, perhaps recently, and I was grateful for her experience.

“And then you’ll miss her a tiny bit less, and a tiny bit less,” she continued, tilting her head to the side as she spoke, the low tremor in her voice still apparent, “but if you think you are doing her memory justice by feeling guilty about pursuing a path she would have chosen…” Mrs. Jones shrugged daintily, allowing me to finish the logical argument she had made without any words at all.

“
Who is it you have lost, Mrs. Jones?” I asked, swallowing down the lump in my throat.

She jerked away from me at the question, her eyes on her lap as she struggled to regain her composure.

“I can only assume that your advice comes from experience,” I explained, watching her take a deep breath.

“
Yes, well, my dear girl, when you get to my advanced age,” she answered finally, carefully taking up her teacup, “a great many of your friends and family will have passed. And it is sad every single time.”

I still believed her to be talking about a specific loss, but in a moment of sensitivity that I usually ignored, I let it pass.

Our conversations on that long trip grew when we boarded the ocean liner that would take us across the Atlantic. I had never traveled by ship before and was understandably excited by every aspect of this new adventure. Mrs. Jones had booked us into first-class suites along the outside of the ship, so that my small porthole looked out over beautiful views no matter what time of day. Not that I spent much time in my suite, preferring to walk the decks and explore everything from bow to stern. Waiters followed first-class passengers everywhere, an aspect of the journey my guardian enjoyed more than I. I became quite impatient with being continually asked about my comfort but found that if I explored below decks, in the second- and third-class areas of the ship, I was left to my own devices. I also had to admit (if only to myself) that I felt more comfortable amongst these folks, with their simple chipped teacups and sandwich-dominated meals, than at the extravagance of the buffet table in the first class dining room.

I discovered early on that Mrs. Jones had a remarkable singing voice, which she carefully managed, not over-stressing it and gargling every night with salt water. She had spent some time on stage, that much was clear from her regal bearing, the way she projected her voice and even the professional way she applied her makeup.

The details of her relationship with my grandmother were still rather unexplained, a situation that annoyed me to no end, though I did manage to glean a most interesting fact: she had also known my grandfather! He was a source of great mystery in my family, especially to my late mother, who had grown up without him. The circumstances of my mother’s birth were, it seemed, a closely guarded secret — so much so that my grandmother had refused to speak of them, saying only that “he” was gone.

When my own father died in the war, my mother confessed that she had expected my grandmother to finally share her own loss of a husband, if only to comfort her daughter. But she was wrong; no clarity was ever given to my poor mother as to her filial heritage.

“But then you knew my grandfather, really?” I repeated to Mrs. Jones as the sea pitched beneath us.

“
Oh, heavens, yes, I knew your grandfather,” she chuckled, puffing on a tiny clay pipe, an affectation that seemed wholly out of place in so dignified and feminine a person.