The Tale of Hill Top Farm (11 page)

9

Myrtle Crabbe Makes a Dreadful Discovery

Miss Crabbe herself was already on her way to school, hurrying a bit more than usual. She had just remembered that she had forgotten to put the envelope containing the School Roof Fund collection into her purse the night before and was anxious to retrieve it from the desk drawer where she had left it. She was walking quickly across the bridge over Wilfen Beck when she saw Bertha Stubbs just ahead.

Bertha had been the school’s caretaker for nearly as long as Miss Crabbe had been headmistress, which would soon be a full quarter-century, and, at sixty, she was getting a bit too old to be doing the hard work around the school. Miss Crabbe had pointed this out on occasion, and had recently spoken to the vicar about giving Bertha notice and hiring someone younger and less cantankerous. But the vicar had replied that Bertha still seemed capable of doing the work, which involved stoking the stoves several times daily during stove season, cleaning out the cinders every morning, hauling buckets of water twice a day, scrubbing the floors weekly, and washing the windows monthly. He had added, deferentially, that he hoped that Miss Crabbe would allow Bertha to keep the job as long as her performance was up to scratch.

Hearing footsteps on the gravel, Bertha turned and waited for Miss Crabbe to catch up to her. “Well, then!” she said in an amiable tone, “What dust tha think of our Miss Potter?”

Miss Crabbe frowned crossly. “I shall keep what I think to myself, and I advise you, Bertha, to do the same. It is not a good idea to gossip about one’s neighbors, especially if they are political.”

“Ain’t a neighbor yet,” Bertha remarked with an enigmatic lift of her eyebrows. “May not be, if Becky Jennings has her way.” She glanced up at the sky, sniffing. “Shouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get some rain. Could come down smartish by afternoon. Pity that roof ain’t got fixed yet.” She gave Miss Crabbe a toothy smile. “Guess we’ll need to put that rain-bucket on thi desk. Pity it makes such a racket. Plink-plinkety-
plink,
all afternoon. Enough to addle thi wits, I’d warrant.”

Miss Crabbe, who had the feeling that Bertha was baiting her, picked up her pace. It was true that the roof could not be repaired by the afternoon and that she should have to endure the maddening plinking, but she could certainly see to it that the work got underway immediately. She would send one of the older boys with a note to Joseph Skead, the sexton at St. Peter’s, who handled the major repairs to the school. Barring misfortune, the roof should be mended by next week, and that horrible rain-bucket would be a thing of the past.

Miss Crabbe set her mouth in a thin, hard line, thinking that if she had been successful in securing the Bournemouth position, she would not have had to deal with any of these difficulties. Bournemouth, where the sun shone brightly even in the winter, and where the warm southern breezes meant that there was a great deal less rain and hardly any snow. And where she could have had a small cottage to herself, without the clattering nuisance of her sisters, well-intentioned, both of them, but nuisances just the same. She and Pansy and Viola had lived together all their lives, but recently it had become more and more difficult to tolerate their silly meddling, always giving her this advice and that, as if she were a child instead of their older sister and due a proper deference and respect. If only she had got the Bournemouth position, she could have put all this behind her.

But Bournemouth was not to be. Despite her pleadings—really, she had lowered herself quite appallingly, to the point of shameless begging—Abigail Tolliver had refused to sign the letter of reference she had helpfully typed out for her signature. And why, Miss Crabbe simply hadn’t a clue. It had all been infuriating, really, to abase herself in such a way, when Abigail refused to tell her why she would not sign the letter, and even threatened to write and tell the school council that she was not suitable for the position! And as she had stood beside the flower-heaped coffin, listening to the vicar drone on and on about Abigail’s contributions to village life and how much she would be missed, Miss Crabbe had had to suppress a small, mean smile. She might not be going to Bournemouth, but Abigail Tolliver wasn’t going
anywhere
.

Miss Crabbe squared her narrow shoulders. She would have to put all that behind her, the small regret about Abigail Tolliver, the larger and more persistent bitterness about Bournemouth and the new beginnings that might have been. She would see to it that the roof repairs were completed as soon as possible, which would put that annoyance out of the way. Her sisters . . . well, they were another matter. She would have to think about how to deal with them.

But Miss Crabbe’s plan for the repair of the school roof was destined to be thwarted. For when she reached Sawrey School, went to her room, and opened the drawer of her desk, she saw to her horror that the envelope that Dimity Woodcock had given her—the envelope that contained one bright gold sovereign, two half-crowns, three florins, and nine shillings—was gone.

She was still standing at her desk, staring uncomprehendingly into the empty drawer, when Margaret Nash came into the room carrying a stack of song-sheets and a large box of drawing pencils.

“Why, Miss Crabbe!” Margaret exclaimed, seeing the look of consternation on her headmistress’s face. She set down the things she was carrying and went to the desk. “Whatever is the matter?”

“The School Roof Fund is gone,” Miss Crabbe whispered faintly, and dropped into her chair, as if her legs could no longer hold her. “It’s been stolen.” She buried her face in her hands.

“Stolen!” Margaret exclaimed, bewildered. “But how? All three of us—Bertha, you, and I—left at the same time yesterday afternoon. We locked the building behind us, and it was still locked this morning when I arrived.” She cast a quick look at the room’s windows. “None of the windows have been broken, and there’s no sign of a forced entry.”

“Of course there’s no sign of an entry.” Miss Crabbe’s voice was flinty, her face very white, her lips pressed into a thin, hard line. “There’s no sign because there was no break-in. That
boy
took it.”

“That boy?” Margaret asked blankly.

Miss Crabbe’s mouth twisted. “The child who was left alone here.”

“You can’t mean little Jeremy Crosfield!”

“What other boy was alone in this room yesterday?” Miss Crabbe demanded furiously. “I went out to the schoolyard to tend to his tormenter, you went to get some water and soap to wash his face, and he was here alone—with the money lying right there, in an envelope.” She pointed to a spot on the desk. “I can see it all now, as clear as a picture. I didn’t put the money into the drawer, after all. I left it on the desk, and he took it!”

“But Jeremy was still sitting in his seat when I—”

Miss Crabbe’s voice rose. “Are you prepared to swear that he didn’t have time to jump up and pocket that money? The Crosfields are poor as church mice. It would be a fortune to him.”

Margaret swallowed. “Well, no, of course I couldn’t swear. But how he could have known there was money in the envelope?” She took a deep breath. “Miss Crabbe, this is a very serious accusation. We don’t have any proof that Jeremy is a thief. We—”

“We have all the proof we need.” Miss Crabbe rose from the chair and stood, rigid with rage, rapping her knuckles in an irregular tattoo on the desk. “Go out to the gate and wait. I want the boy brought to me the instant he puts in an appearance. And don’t you defend him, Miss Nash! You are far too soft on these dirty little urchins. This child needs to be taught a lesson, and I am going to administer it!” Her voice became a half-hysterical quaver. “And when I am through, I intend to turn him over to Constable Braithwaite. He’ll see to it that we get the school’s money back.”

“But Miss Crabbe—”

“I will not tolerate impertinence!” Miss Crabbe cried, now completely beyond remonstrance. “Do what I tell you, you wretched creature, or I shall demand that the board terminate your contract.”

Gulping back sobs, Margaret almost ran from the room. As she closed the door behind her, she found herself face-to-face with Bertha Stubbs. Finding Bertha outside a door was not unusual, of course, since it was her habit to listen to as many conversations as she could. Usually, she was embarrassed by being caught; now, though, her face was red as a beet. She was plainly angry.

“I believes in speakin’ my mind, Miss Nash,” she said gruffly. “ ‘Speak t’ truth and shame t’ devil,’ is what I allus say. And that auld she-devil in there ought to be ashamed—”

“Hush, Mrs. Stubbs,” Margaret said, trying to pull herself together. She straightened her shoulders and managed to calm her voice. “Miss Crabbe is under a great deal of strain just now, and—”

“A girt deal o’ strain is purely reet,” Bertha Stubbs said grimly. “She’s strainin’ t’ rest of us to death, she is, with her unperdictamus tantrums. Week afore, it was t’ attendance book in t’ map locker—and her accusin’
me
of takin’ it! Now it’s t’ Roof Fund, and she’s blamin’ that poor little boy.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’re tha aimin’ to do?”

“Do?” Margaret asked, with a helpless shrug. “I’m going to wait at the gate for Jeremy, that’s what I’m going to do. Miss Crabbe may be wrong but she is, after all, my superior.”

“Well, she may be thi superior but she ain’t mine, not no more,” Bertha said with a dark significance. She jerked off her coverall apron and threw it on the floor. “I’m givin’ in my notice, is what
I’m
goin’ to do, and reet this verra minute, too. It’s a matter o’ principality!”

This was not a new threat, of course. Bertha threatened to give in her notice every few weeks, and usually with a loud declaration of principle. But this time, her words had the ring of conviction. Margaret shook her head wordlessly, feeling the weighty burden of daily buckets of coal and clinkers added to the burden of Miss Crabbe’s capricious wrath. Trying hastily to compose her face so that the children in the schoolyard would not glimpse her apprehension, she hurried out to the schoolyard gate to wait for Jeremy.

Miss Crabbe, however, was to be thwarted yet again. The yard filled with children from Far Sawrey and Near Sawrey and the surrounding cottages and farms. But although Margaret lingered until the last assembly bell had pealed across the yard, Jeremy Crosfield did not appear. Her feet dragging, she went inside, picked up Bertha Stubbs’s coverall apron from the floor where she had flung it, and told Miss Crabbe that their thief was now a truant, and that they would have to find someone else to look after the stoves and scrub the floors.

Then she pasted a falsely cheerful smile on her face and went to greet her children.

10

Miss Potter Faces Facts

As all this commotion was going on at Sawrey School, Beatrix was walking to Hill Top Farm with her sketch pad and a tape measure, intending to survey the area in front of the house, where she planned to put the new garden. She had never had much of a chance to garden, since her mother preferred that the care of the formal flower beds at Bolton Gardens be left to the once-weekly gardener. But she loved to sketch the gardens of the various country houses where her family spent their holidays. What she admired most were the little kitchen gardens, with flag-stone paths and glass-topped vegetable frames and wooden trellises and hives for the bees, and rows of cabbage and rhubarb and old-fashioned herbs—thyme and rosemary and lavender and mint—all growing in a tangle of blossoms and leaves against a wall or under a hedge.

Now, as Beatrix stood in front of Hill Top, she saw a space occupied by a weedy garden, enclosed on all four sides by low stone walls. She began to sketch a plan, deciding that she would keep two of the walls and put in a new iron gate. She would replace the third with a tall hedge and the fourth with a brick wall, against which she would plant fruit trees. The walks would be laid with the local blue-green slate, and a new gravel lane would redirect the carts and farm wagons through the farmyard, rather than past the house. These projects would take some time, of course—they would give her something interesting to look forward to when she came next.

“Would tha care to step in for a cup o’ tea, Miss Potter?”

Startled, Beatrix turned to see Mrs. Jennings standing in the porch, the ginger cat at her feet. “Oh, yes, thank you,” she said with real pleasure, for she had wanted badly to see the inside of the house, but had been timid about asking Mr. Jennings for a tour. She closed her sketchbook and tucked her pencil behind her ear. “I was just drawing out a plan for the garden,” she explained, coming up to the porch. “I would like to make it larger, and plant a hedge, and—”

“I doan’t have time t’ garden,” Mrs. Jennings said in a vexed tone, and turned to go inside. “Jennings does t’ milkin’ and I do all t’ dairy. Separatin’ t’ cream and churnin’ t’ butter takes more time than tha’d think. What with washin’ and cookin’ and cleanin’ t’ house, there’s not a minute left.”

Beatrix followed Mrs. Jennings into the house—
her
house now, she thought with a barely suppressed delight. She had not been in it for several years, since her parents had spent the holiday at Lakefield and boarded their coachman and his wife at Hill Top, and as her vision adjusted to the shadowed interior, she looked around with great curiosity.

They had entered a dark, narrow entrance hall, at the end of which was a staircase leading to a windowed landing and then up to the left, to the second story. On the right side of the entrance hall, a door opened into the Jennings’ bedroom, and on the left, another led into the main downstairs room of the house, which the family used for cooking and eating, for indoor work and relaxing.

This room, the largest in the house, had a slate floor, partly covered by a rag rug. It was somewhat brightened by a window and warmed by the iron range that had been installed in the fireplace alcove, which had panel-door cupboards on either side. As Beatrix glanced around, she decided that, as soon as she could, she would tear out the partition that created the narrow entrance hallway, so that the front door would open directly into the main room and bring in light and fresh air. The place could certainly do with an airing-out, for it was smoky and smelled of boiled cabbage and onions.

Mrs. Jennings, a thin, angular woman whose plain features were set in a unfriendly expression, did not invite her guest to tour the house. Instead, she poured tea from a china pot nestled in a crocheted wool cozy, and motioned Beatrix to a chair. The ginger cat leapt lightly onto the wide stone windowsill, where she raised one paw and delicately licked it, regarding Beatrix with bright, curious eyes.

Beatrix, glad to see a friendly creature, smiled at the cat. “Hello, Miss Frummety. I trust you are keeping well.”

“I am, thank you very much for asking,”
Felicia Frummety replied decorously
. “And yourself, Miss Potter?”

“Frummety.” Mrs. Jennings snorted. “Foolish name for an animal. If a cat has to have a name, it ought to be simple, like Puss.”

Miss Frummety sniffed distastefully
. “I’d rather have no name at all than be ‘Puss.’ ”

Beatrix felt rebuked, and her delight evaporated like a puff of smoke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jennings. I was only trying to make friends with your little girl and—”

Mrs. Jennings didn’t let her finish. “Jennings sez tha’re wantin’ us to stay on here and farm,” she said brusquely, and took a chair on the opposite side of the table.

“That’s my hope,” Beatrix replied, “if we can work out the living arrangements.” She stirred sugar into her tea. “I don’t think—”

“Tha has to face facts, Miss Potter,” Mrs. Jennings interrupted. “There’s nay room for all o’ us here at Hill Top. There’ll be five Jenningses come April. There’s nay room for visitin’ off-comers, even if they own t’ place.”

Miss Frummety scowled
. “Really, Mrs. J.!”
she exclaimed.
“I call that rude!”

Beatrix flushed. “I know it wouldn’t be convenient,” she said, “but I—”

“If we can’t live here,” Mrs. Jennings went on with a kind of grim satisfaction, “I doan’t see as how we can stay and work t’ farm. Which is just what I said to Jennings last night, when he told me what tha wanted. ‘We got to face facts,” sez I to him. ‘Fact is, Miss Potter means to live here when she visits from Lonnun, and who’s to blame her,’ I sez, ‘since it’s her house now, which she bought ’n’ paid good money for, more’n she should, mappen, though there’s no help for that now. But there’s nay place for us to live in t’ village, so I doan’t see how we’re to stay.’ That’s what I sez to Jennings, and that’s a fact.”

“What about Anvil Cottage?” Beatrix heard herself asking. When Mrs. Jennings stared at her, uncomprehending, she added, in a desperate tone she hardly recognized as her own: “Miss Tolliver’s cottage, I mean. It’s only a few steps away, and it’s every bit as large as this place. You could live there, couldn’t you?”

“Anvil Cottage?” Mrs. Jennings frowned. “Well, I s’pose we cud. But I doan’t see as how we could afford it.”

“Anvil Cottage?”
Felicia Frummety brightened.
“Plenty of mice there.”

“If I paid part of the rent?” Beatrix hazarded. “If it were available, I mean. If you thought it large enough.”
What was she saying?
She didn’t have the money, either in hand or in prospect, to buy the cottage. And the place wasn’t likely to be let, since Mr. Roberts intended to sell it as soon as his aunt’s will was read out.

There was a long silence, broken only by the hiss of the fire in the iron range. “I doan’t know about Anvil Cottage,” Mrs. Jennings said finally. “But we got to face facts somehow. I’ll talk to Jennings.”

“Please do,” Beatrix said. She hurriedly swallowed the last of her tea and rose, feeling that she had confronted quite as many facts as she could manage for the moment. “Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Jennings. I must go now.”

And with that, she escaped from the house and almost fled past the barn and down the long slope to the green bank of Esthwaite Water. Miss Felicia Frummety sat on the flagstone porch, watching her until she disappeared from sight.

If you should visit Esthwaite Water, you will find it to be a clear, stream-fed lake, some eighty acres in size, cupped in a green glacial valley just to the west of Lake Windermere. The word
thwaite,
which means “a clearing in a woodland,” reflects the Norse influence in this part of England, and many of the local customs, like the arval bread made of the best wheat flour that was given at Miss Tolliver’s funeral, were brought from Norway by the Vikings in the early Middle Ages. The old Norse market town of Hawkshead—a little gem of a town, with higgledy-piggledy streets, unexpected squares and gardens, and whitewashed dwellings—lies at the upper end of the lake, while the two Sawreys lie near the lower end. On the west side of the lake, you can still see the remains of the pits where wood was burned down to charcoal for the iron foundries and forges in the Furness Fells. On the Sawrey side, along the eastern bank, reeds and rushes flourish in the clear, shallow water, fished by kingfishers, herons, and great crested grebes. Esthwaite is much frequented by human fishers, as well, who pull brown and rainbow trout from its sparkling waters, and great numbers of pike and perch.

During her earlier holiday visits to the area, Beatrix had spent a great many hours foraging in the woods and along the lakeside, and not far from here she had found and painted some lovely mushrooms and toadstools, in which she was greatly interested. She was younger then, and firmly believed in fairies, and would have not been at all surprised to see one of the Wee Folk pop out from under a toadstool or behind an oak tree, with a clover blossom cap on his head and a bundle of wild thyme sprigs tucked under one arm. In those days, everything she discovered in the Westmoreland woods and meadows and ponds and ditches seemed wonderfully, imaginatively enchanted, a stark contrast to the formal, frozen life of Bolton Gardens.

Today, though, the fairies, real or not, were quite far from her mind. She had come to the lake to draw, and drawing would help to quiet the litany of Mrs. Jennings’ unpleasant facts echoing uncomfortably in her thoughts. So she walked along the bank, looking for possible subjects. Water hens, small black birds with bright red bills, were swimming close to the shore, almost within arm’s reach, their heads bobbing as they poked under the lily-pads for water snails. A half-dozen lapwings stood on one leg in the shallow water, napping, with their heads tucked under their wings, and a pair of great crested grebes, sorely threatened by the demand for their feathers for ladies’ muffs and hats, swam leisurely through the reeds. But although Beatrix walked for some distance, looking closely, she could find not a single frog—and a frog was what she needed, a cooperative frog who might be persuaded to sit for the drawings of Mr. Jeremy Fisher she planned to use in what she and Norman had laughingly called her “frog book.” Finally, she found a dry, sheltered spot, warmed by the sun, and sat down to sketch whatever she could see.

Beatrix’s early books had begun as picture letters, written to the children of her favorite governess, Annie Moore. A dozen years before, when she was on holiday with her parents at Dunkeld, on the banks of the Tay, she had written an illustrated letter about the adventures of a mischievous rabbit named Peter to Noel Moore, Annie’s oldest son. The very next day, she wrote to Noel’s brother Eric: “My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river. . . .”

Beatrix’s new book—the one she was supposed to be working on just now—would tell more about Jeremy Fisher, a gentleman frog who gets more than he bargains for when he puts on a mackintosh and galoshes and goes fishing. Jeremy is snapped up by a hungry trout, and saved only by the fact that the fish doesn’t like the taste of his mackintosh and spits him out. Norman had chuckled out loud at her preliminary sketches, and seeing the project through his eyes, she had looked forward to completing the twenty-five or so detailed watercolors that would make up the book.

But the memory of Norman settled over Beatrix like a sad, gray fog, and the sunshiny morning, already darkened by the gloomy Mrs. Jennings and her melancholy facts, grew even darker. Over the four years she and Norman had worked together, she had come to associate the happiness she felt in her drawings with his childlike delight in them, and she had always been inspired by his playful encouragement and gentle suggestions. In fact, as their relationship grew closer, she had begun to draw as much for
him
as for the children. And now that her most appreciative audience was gone, so was all her joy in her work. How could she draw without Norman’s smile and light-hearted chuckle of approval to confirm her sense of what was right about her drawings? How could she imagine a story without Norman’s exuberant imagination to inspire her?

Despairingly, Beatrix looked down at the sketches of reeds and lily pads and water hens and lapwings that she had made in the last hour. They had no spirit, no energy, not a spark of life. They looked exactly the way she felt, flat and gray and gloomy. She ripped the pages out of the sketch book and crumpled them into a ball. There wasn’t any point in going on with the book—with any of the other books she’d planned, for that matter—if all of her drawings were going to look so lifeless. But if she didn’t go on with the books, she couldn’t earn any money, and if there was no more money, she couldn’t do anything with the farm. There would be no repairs, no new walls around the garden, no cows, no sheep.

Beatrix wrapped her arms around her legs, propped her chin on her knees, and stared out across the water, her worries draped like a heavy shawl around her shoulders. Perhaps her parents were right. Perhaps she didn’t have any business trying to manage a farm, after all. What
was
she going to do about the Jenningses? If they stayed in the house, where was she to stay when she came from London? If she took the house, where were they to live? Mrs. Jennings may have been rude, but she was right. She had to face the facts, no matter how unpleasant.

Beatrix had endured some very dark days in her life. There had been times when she was dangerously ill with rheumatic fever and confined to bed for months and months, and times when she felt totally paralyzed by the confining limits imposed by her parents. And since Norman’s death, there had been many times when she despaired of escaping from the prison of Bolton Gardens to find freedom and happiness of her own in the world. But she could not remember a time when she had been confronted with more difficult questions, or when she had less confidence in her ability to find answers, or felt more in need of help.