The Governess (2 page)

Confronted at almost the first instant of her arrival at highly respectable No 3 Northumberland Gardens in the post of governess with this reminder of her appallingly humble origins, Miss Unwin had for a moment wanted to repudiate the spectre that had risen up, red nosed, before her. But that had been for a moment only. She and Vilkins had been much too good friends in those first evil days of theirs for her not to welcome this altogether unexpected reunion.

Little had she thought then, however, that the day would come before very long when the presence in the house of one person she could trust through and through was to be perhaps all that saved her from disaster. But that was to be when a crime a great deal more serious than the theft of a sugar-mouse had taken place beneath the roof of No 3 Northumberland Gardens.

Other crimes, no more serious than that first small theft, were to be committed in the house before Miss Unwin was faced with the crumbling of all her cherished hopes of advancement. The first sugar-mouse to disappear so mysteriously was not the last.

The second occasion a mouse disappeared was two evenings later when Miss Unwin knew there were visitors for dinner and she had to tell Pelham that there could be no replacement brought up from the drawing-room.

‘You must learn to bear the disappointment, you know. We all have to accept those at times. Even when they are quite unjust.’

She believed what she had told the boy. The world, she well knew, by no means always rewarded merit or compensated for ill luck. Even the rich had to learn that. But she was to look back on these words of hers to Pelham with bitter irony before many days had passed. Injustice awaited her, sharper by far than the loss of a decapitated sugar-mouse.

But Pelham’s mouth had shaped itself into a wide O, ready to bawl.

‘No, Pelham. No tears. Show me how brave and sensible you can be, and tomorrow I will try to find out just what happened to your mouse tonight and see that it does not happen again.’

‘Yes, miss,’ Pelham said, swallowing hard. ‘I will be good, and tomorrow you’ll catch that beastly thief and then I’ll tell Grandpapa and he’ll be as angry as angry.’

‘Well, we’ll see about that when it happens. That will be the time to think about who we tell and who we don’t.’

So, allowing Pelham one extra game of his favourite Snakes and Ladders, Miss Unwin saw him safely through bath and prayers, drew the heavy curtains of his bedroom to shut out the still strong evening light, lit the tiny nightlight on his mantelpiece and left him on the point of sleep. Then she spent a little time thinking
how she might catch the sugar-mouse thief if next evening the same trick was tried.

She decided that all that would be necessary would be to leave the schoolroom door ajar, as it were by mistake, and to station herself somewhere inside the room where she could keep the table by the banisters outside cautiously under her eye.

But when it came to it the plan did not prove altogether easy to put into action. Wherever she placed herself in the schoolroom she was hardly able to see the sugar-mouse and she guessed that if she moved its table to a better position the thief would take warning. Nor was Pelham any help. After every other mouthful of his bread-and-milk there came a penetrating whisper.

‘Miss, are they there yet?’

‘No, Pelham. Now, you finish up your supper like a good boy.’

So, going to peer through the quarter-open door for a fifth or sixth time, Miss Unwin was not much surprised to find that once again Pelham’s treat had been whisked away.

She ran over to the stairs and peered down them hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the retreating thief. But she saw no one and heard only a muffled scurry of feet on the rich stair carpet below.

Once more, after Pelham had been put to bed soothed with promises that next evening she would produce a better plan, she gave herself over to trying to account for the mystery of the disappearing mice.

Of one thing she had made certain. The thief, whoever it was, must come from inside the house. No 3 Northumberland Gardens was a jealously guarded place. Mr Thackerton’s often repeated orders had seen to that. Every window on the ground floor was protected by thick iron bars, as was the window of the servants’ hall in the basement looking out on to the area below the front steps. The servants’ door down there was, too, never left unbolted by day or by night. Any servant returning from an outing or an errand had to mount the steps and ring there at the servants’ bell beneath that labelled ‘Visitors’. Then he or she had to go down the area steps and wait patiently for admission. The wide front door, too, was kept as carefully locked. Only Mr Thackerton himself and his son were permitted to have latch keys. Otherwise
any member of the family had to ring and wait for one of the household’s two footmen to come and let them in.

So, as she sat in the schoolroom eating her own modest supper which Mary, or Vilkins, had brought up to her, Miss Unwin reviewed in her mind what she knew of the servants in the house. That the sugar-mouse thief was one of the family was unthinkable.

But her review did not much help her. In the time she had been in the house she had not got to know any of the servants, except Vilkins, at all well. They distrusted her and did what they could to keep their distance. It was no more than she had expected, for all that this was her first post as a governess. But she had been warned by the lady in the country, to whose house she had gone long ago as a kitchen-maid and in whose service she had step by step mounted up, that a governess’s lot was not always an easy one. The servants in a house, although they were in duty bound to acknowledge a governess as a lady, knew always that she was a paid employee like themselves, often not much better paid, and they had many ways of showing how aware they were of this.

So even Hannah, the first housemaid, with whom Miss Unwin came into most contact, was still much of an unknown quantity. While Nancy, the scullery maid, was someone she hardly saw except across the dining-room at Morning Prayers, since she had few occasions to visit the kitchen with its great white-scrubbed table and its ever-glowing three-fire range nor the pantry beside it with its deep shelves piled with china and its heavy sink steamy with washing-up water, nor the larder next to that where as often as not there would be hanging a pair of hares – Mr Thackerton’s favourite rich dish – softly dripping blood for the full eight days needed to give them their gamiest taste.

Mrs Breakspear, the cook, who had charge of the hares and all the mighty piles of good things in the larder, was yet less well known to her. She had spoken to her a few times, a stout, cheerful person, but hardly more. Yet the thought of her creeping up the stairs and snatching a sugar-mouse from its resting place was ridiculous. Equally ridiculous, somehow, was the notion of the sole other maidservant doing the same thing, although Simmons,
old Mrs Thackerton’s lady’s-maid, was the very opposite of stout Mrs Breakspear, a thin, papery-faced individual, long in the family, who moved about the house always in particular silence.

Miss Unwin knew her rather better than any of the other maids except Vilkins since she came upon her most afternoons when, while Pelham was having his nap, it was her duty to go to Mrs Thackerton’s sitting-room to read to her, a task which it had taken her some weeks to feel comfortable about. Simmons would greet her then, giving her a smile, a sudden glimpse of long incurved yellowy teeth in her papery face. Yet they were smiles that seemed always to leave her feeling less cheerful than she had been before.

The men servants Miss Unwin felt she knew even less than the maids. There was old Mellings, the butler, distant and stately. There was Peters, Mr Thackerton’s valet, reserved and private. There was Henry, the first footman, distinguished only by being – to Miss Unwin’s eyes – no more than a six-foot tall clothes-horse for his imposing green plush uniform. There was Joseph, the second footman, rather less of a clothes-horse and rather worse at his duties. Last of all there was John, the page, almost as tall as Joseph, looking a little lubberly in his tight, button-decorated suit, and almost as much of a newcomer to the house as herself, a sign of yet another upward step for the thriving Thackertons. If she must suspect someone, Miss Unwin thought, John was the most likely one of them all to cast in the mould of sugar-mouse thief. She had seen him looking with envy at the dishes of sweets being carried into the dining-room to round off the eight-course dinners Mr Thackerton offered to his guests.

But suspicion, she told herself, was not enough. She must have proof.

‘Miss Unwin, have you thought?’ Pelham inquired of her as, next evening, they went up the broad, thickly carpeted stairs together, Pelham with his latest reward, its head taken off in one clean bite, dangling by its soft white string tail in his chubby little hand.

Miss Unwin had no difficulty in knowing what it was she was meant to have thought of.

‘Yes, Pelham,’ she said. ‘But wait until we get to the schoolroom. We don’t want any long ears to hear what our plan is, do we?’

Pelham tiptoed the rest of the way up the stairs.

In the schoolroom Miss Unwin took a reel of strong black thread from her work-basket, a farewell present from her protectress in the country given to mark her jump from being lady’-smaid to the daughter of the house there, now married, to the status of governess and lady herself. From Pelham’s little desk she took a couple of sheets of paper.

Then, watched by her charge in silent awe, she tied the thread to the end of the sugar-mouse’s tail, put the sparkling sweet in the customary place on the table by the banisters at the head of the stairs, hid the thread under the sheets of paper and led it, concealed by the landing rug into the schoolroom through the gap at the door hinges. To the end of the thread inside the room, so that neither of them should miss the faintest twitch on it, she tied a large bow of crumpled paper.

In a minute Mary brought up Pelham’s bowl of bread-and-milk.

‘Now, eat it up every drop,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘Or I’m sure nothing will happen.’

Pelham began to eat. But between each mouthful he gave the paper bow a long hard stare. Each time, however, it stayed as frozenly still as it had been when Miss Unwin had first put it down on the floor. At last the bread-and-milk was eaten to the last piece.

‘Miss,’ Pelham said, pointing with his spoon at the door.

Miss Unwin did not rebuke him for this lapse in manners. Instead, quietly as she could, she went over to the door and flung it suddenly open wide.

The sheets of paper lay on the table by the banisters exactly as she had placed them there. But the sparkling white sugar-mouse had disappeared.

Miss Unwin hurried across, Pelham scuttling after her. She lifted the piece of paper nearest the place where the mouse had been. The end of its tail had been neatly snipped off.

Little Pelham’s face went horrendously red with rage. Miss Unwin felt almost as furious. But her fury was at once followed
by a sharp inner sinking. If the thief succeeded in repeating his thefts again and again, her position in the house might well become intolerable. So far Mr Thackerton had not remembered to inquire into that first disappearance. But now Pelham might well say something to him, and then his anger could well be directed not so much against the actual perpetrator of the deed as against the person who had failed to protect his property.

But, almost as disquieting, there were the servants, too, to think about. Whichever one of them it was who had first stolen Pelham’s treat, in perhaps a moment of greed, was acting now from a very different motive. They were acting out of a desire to score over her. They might for a while keep silent about their repeated victories, but they would not stay silent in the servants’ hall for ever. Sooner or later they would begin to boast. And then her stock in the house, not very high at the best, would sink yet lower. Her orders and requests would be ignored, and that in turn would make her task as Pelham’s governess less and less easy to carry out.

The thought of dismissal entered her mind. And the ugly, charity-cold Home for Unemployed Governesses that would follow.

She had seen herself when she began her new duties as on the foot of a long, rising slope. She would become a more and more accomplished governess, learning from books and from experience. She would gradually accumulate some savings. One day she would open a school. Perhaps that school would grow in reputation. In her most secret dreams she had seen herself ending her days as a person honoured in society.

And now all that was in peril. Because of a stolen sugar-mouse.

She forced herself not to let tears come into her eyes.

‘Well, Pelham,’ she said with what briskness she could muster, ‘the thief has beaten us once more. But we’re not going to be beaten in the end, are we?’

‘No, we’re not. We’re jolly well not. And, when we’ve caught the person, Grandpapa will make it so hot for them they’ll roast and roast and roast.’

‘As to that, my lad,’ Miss Unwin said, mistress of herself once more, ‘we’ll see when the time comes. But it’s bed for you now,
bath and prayers and bed, and tomorrow we’ll see if I haven’t thought of a better trap than today’s.’

But she could not bring herself to rebuke Pelham when those prayers ended ‘And please God let Miss Unwin and me catch the thief and make Grandpapa roast him.’

So the next day when it came to that regular part of Pelham’s education called the Object Lesson – Pelham had enjoyed ‘How A Pin Is Made’ the week before so much that he had spoken about nothing else all the rest of the day – she told him that their new subject was to be ‘How We Make Toffee’.

‘Can I eat it when we’ve made it, Miss Unwin?’

‘Well, perhaps if you’re good you may have some. But most of it I shall need for another purpose altogether.’

Pelham looked disappointed.

‘For the purpose of trapping,’ Miss Unwin said.

Pelham’s eyes lit up. But before he could produce any more threats of roasting Miss Unwin rang for Vilkins – carefully addressed as Mary in Pelham’s presence – and got her to bring up from the kitchen a saucepan and sugar and to light a fire in the narrow schoolroom grate. Together then they manufactured a quantity of toffee nicely judged to be as sticky and glutinous as black road tar. Miss Unwin would have liked to complete her trap there and then, but to spend more time on it would have interfered too much with Pelham’s instruction, and she was determined that by the time he was nine, in something under two years more, he would be as ready to go to Eton and shine there as any boy in the land.