Mad Miss Mimic Read online

  RAZORBILL

  MAD MISS MIMIC

  SARAH HENSTRA is a professor of English at Ryerson University, where she teaches courses in gothic literature, fairy tales and fantasy, and women in fiction. Some of her best story ideas come from classroom discussions. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two sons (one teen, one tween), and a poodle named Nora. Mad Miss Mimic is her first novel.

  SARAH HENSTRA

  ONE

  There are things I cannot say in any voice.

  I was born Leonora Emmaline Somerville, but I am not at all sure that is still who I am.

  Oh, I could tell you the facts as you will find them in The Examiner and The Times and the Morning Post. I could tell you which Illustrated London News artist depicted the burning masts most faithfully, which Royal Academy painter best captured the hurricane of light reflected on black water. But I could not tell you where to find me in their pictures, or even which of the facts are reliable when it comes to me.

  “Miss Somerville,” they called me to my face at Hastings House, and “Mad Miss Mimic” when they thought I could not hear. Which is the more accurate name for me? My sister always said that one’s station determines who one is. Certainly she believed it her life’s noblest task to secure my station through a good marriage. She did believe it, and she did try—I must grant her that at least.

  My aunt Emmaline says that your story decides who you are. But what about the chapters I did not write? Those scenes in which I stood by, watching in horror, but found nothing to say? Those moments when my tongue froze, and I tasted ashes and could not produce a single word?

  If I am not visible in the pictures of the Thames disaster, it must be because I am still under water. I’ve long given up thrashing for the surface and fighting for breath. The current turns me in its bed like an efficient nurse, shifting my limbs and nudging me and whispering me to sleep. Sweeping me down, down, out to sea.

  Oh Aunt Emma, how can you ask me to recover the traces of my story from the wreckage? I am still in the river, caught here in the undertow of grief.

  Spilled slops, and a housemaid’s illness. A lowly beginning for a tale to be sure! But looking back I think that must be when it really began for me. A morning in early March—a cold morning between winter and spring, the kind with dull grey light outside the window and rain hissing down the chimney onto the coal-grate. The kind of morning that asks you to linger in bed instead of rising to greet the day.

  I was only half-dressed when Hattie’s accident happened. My lady’s maid, Bess, had gone to fetch my hairbrush from my sister’s room. A sharp clang of metal on wood echoed from the service stairs, followed by a feminine cry of distress. Afraid that Bess had fallen I ran down the hall to assist her but discovered Hattie instead. The servant girl was stopped halfway down the narrow staircase, struggling to right a copper bucket and gather the hearth brush and tray she’d dropped. I hadn’t seen Hattie often in my eighteen months at Hastings House. The lower servants kept their own schedules and stayed in separate quarters. Hastings is large for a city home: a cold, cavernous maze of a house with thirteen bedrooms, a greater and a lesser hall, and two libraries in addition to the usual parlours, eating rooms, nurseries, and kitchens. The regular staff of eleven grew to sixteen or twenty when my sister planned one of her parties. So I knew nothing of Hattie’s background or character—to me she was only a shy housemaid, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old.

  The spreading stench told me the contents of the tipped bucket: the girl must have just finished emptying the family’s chamber pots. I shivered in my chemise and would have turned back to avoid embarrassing her, but I was surprised by the violence of Hattie’s trembling and the whiteness of her knuckles as she gripped the banister for support. The slops pail slid farther from its precarious balance against her knee. It looked like she might fall. Hastening to Hattie’s side I steadied the pail and seized her round the waist. She was so thin that I could feel all her ribs.

  “Sorry, mum,” Hattie gasped, and then she paled even further: “Oh, I ain’t to be seen by the family carryin’ slops, mum! I beg you, mum, please leave me.”

  “Shh,” I soothed her. “Shh, now.” I was composing a joke about my baby nephew’s soiled diaper, which had rolled nearly to the landing, and I might even have attempted to tell the joke for Hattie’s sake, but we were interrupted by the appearance of Mrs. Nussey through the door below us.

  “Hattie! What is the meaning of this?” The housekeeper hiked her skirts and lumbered up the stairs.

  I smiled at the woman, about to tell her that I wasn’t the least bit upset, that the poor housegirl was near to fainting from shame and fear.

  But Mrs. Nussey was gaping in open-mouthed horror at my feet. “Miss Somerville! Your slippers are ruined. Do remove them at once!”

  “S-sorry m-m-m …” I stammered. “I only m-meant …” But my tongue had fixed itself like a bar of lead in my mouth. I sat down right there on the stairs and tore off my urinestained slippers.

  “Whatever are you doing, wandering about undressed?”

  I kept my head down so that my hair would fall and screen the flush on my cheek.

  Concern sharpened the housekeeper’s voice: “Miss Somerville, are you quite well? Shall I call for Dr. Dewhurst?”

  I shook my head and, so that she would not fetch my brother-in-law, I forced myself to meet Mrs. Nussey’s eyes. And there it was, plain as day: that expression I knew so well but still cringed every time to witness. The eyes darting all over my face, the mouth tight with anticipation. Wary but fascinated. Waiting.

  What was I to do? I knew that if I did not speak for her Hattie would be punished—unfairly, since she was obviously ill—but my embarrassment and fear of self-exposure made me creep, barefoot and shamefaced, back up the stairs. I winced when I heard the housekeeper’s slap and Hattie’s suppressed cry, but I did not turn around.

  TWO

  This small episode, awkward and distressing as it was for both the servant girl and me, might have passed from my mind altogether if Hattie’s illness had not overcome her again only a short week later. Thinking back on it I am amazed that the poor girl managed to postpone her collapse long enough for Christabel and her friends to finish their luncheon and depart for Mayfair Street.

  The visiting ladies had been discussing my case. “She does very well today,” fat Mrs. Cauldhame observed, turning her heavy-lidded gaze my way. “So lovely in that yellow frock. Is that the fabric from the shop in Broad Street?”

  “Special order, from Frankfurt,” my sister said. “The shade brings out the shine in her hair, does it not?” Christabel put a hand to her own hair, which was finer and blonder than mine. My sister was six years older than I but, at twenty-three, Christa was still childlike in her looks: wide-eyed, smooth-skinned, pretty. The softness of her figure after two children, rather than making her matronly, only added to the impression of girlish charm.

  “Beadall! More sherry for Mrs. Greer.” Christa had spied the butler through the parlour door. “And do check with the housekeeper and all the maids again,” she called after him. “I shall be furious with you if Mr. Thornfax’s card has arrived unnoticed.”

  My sister may have appeared soft, but five years as Mrs. Daniel Dewhurst, mistress of Hastings House, had not taught Christabel to be soft, at least not with servants. Maybe it was because the Dewhursts didn’t own the house—it belonged to our widowed aunt, the Countess of Hastings, whose preferred residence was her summer estate in Kew or, when she came to London, her smaller house in Gordon Square— but whatever the reason, my sister played her role to the hilt. Her idea of a ladies’ lunch saw everyone in the house scurrying from kitchen to parlour like a parade of ants with her endless demands. The tea wasn’t hot enough. Anoth
er log on the fire at once: it was positively freezing in the parlour. A clean serviette for Mrs. Cauldhame, who’d smeared gravy on hers, and hadn’t Christa specifically asked for white rolls with the ham? Where was that little portrait of the collie we used to keep at Holybourne, and wasn’t there any blackberry sauce for the pudding?

  With every glass of lemon cordial the ladies’ cheeks had pinked brighter and they’d laughed harder at their own jokes. Mrs. Greer had dropped her spoon on the rug and nearly tipped out of her chair trying to retrieve it.

  “Yes, she does very well today. Silent as the Sphinx.” Mrs. Cauldhame’s chins bulged as her tongue darted out to lick sugar from the corner of her mouth. I thought of the cane toad in the hothouse at Kew Gardens and felt a shiver ladder up my spine.

  “Well, but, she must have some conversation, mustn’t she?” said Mrs. Greer. “Such silence could be taken as … unnatural, could it not?”

  I straightened in my chair to stop my corset pinching my ribs. Christabel would dismiss me soon, I thought. It was important for me to be seen, she believed, and not be always tucked away in back rooms like a nasty secret. But she didn’t like for me to be noticed too directly.

  I was certainly being noticed now. Mrs. Greer said, “Miss Somerville, let us practice, my dear.”

  Mrs. Cauldhame croaked her approval. “Yes, let us practice with her! Miss Somerville, say after me: ‘What light through yonder window breaks?’”

  Christabel glared a warning at me. “That will not help,” she told them.

  “No, I have it,” said Mrs. Greer. “Say, ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’”

  “Leonora doesn’t parrot the words of others,” my sister said.

  “Mimicry. That is her affliction, is it not?” Mrs. Cauldhame leaned forward so that the vast swaths of her bodice buckled and rolled along her lap. I recognized the look on her face, the same expression I’d seen on the housekeeper’s last week: polite concern barely masking curiosity, fascination, and anticipation.

  Christa was pale. “Not precisely, Mrs. Cauldhame.”

  “She stammers, except when she copies after another person’s speech,” insisted Mrs. Cauldhame. “I had it from Dr. Dewhurst himself, you know, at the Spauldings’ dinner last month.”

  “N-no. I don’t p-p-p”—I couldn’t manage parrot and had to switch to Mrs. Cauldhame’s word—“c-copy, not word for w-word.”

  The woman was partway correct. I did stammer. From earliest memory, in fact, I have suffered from a severe dysfluency of speech. My stuttering was a constant worry to my poor father, whose career in the church was, after all, built upon his skills in public speaking. When I moved to London after his death last winter to be introduced to society, Christabel had had one condition: I was not, under any circumstances, to speak to guests. “Better a wallflower than a crippletongue!” she was ever fond of declaring.

  Now my sister stood, turned, and gripped the back of her chair. Her skirts swirled round her legs like water sucked down a drain. For the briefest of moments I imagined she would lift the chair and hurl it, cushion and all, at Mrs. Cauldhame. Or at me.

  The butler’s return brought us relief just in time. Christa snatched the card from his tray and read it while the ladies watched. Then she ballooned back into her chair, fanned the card at her chest, and sighed.

  Beadall tipped the decanter to Mrs. Greer’s glass and was dismissed.

  “Well?” said Mrs. Greer. “Tell us! Is it as we hoped?”

  “Mr. Thornfax is coming to the party,” my sister affirmed. “And he sends his regards especially to Miss Somerville, whom he sincerely hopes will be well enough to attend!”

  Mrs. Cauldhame snapped her fingers once, twice, thrice, until Christa passed the card to her. She read it and chortled. “Oh, dear Leonora, and in his own hand, too! Mr. Thornfax could mean very good news for you indeed, I think.”

  Mrs. Greer emitted a little moan. “That man is an Adonis! I confess, I daren’t stand next to him for fear of a swoon.”

  “Look here, in yesterday’s Examiner. His profile is featured in the society pages.” Too impatient to call Beadall back, Christa bustled to the sideboard herself and swept the newspaper into Mrs. Greer’s lap.

  Mr. Francis Thornfax was a new business partner of my brother-in-law, Daniel—not a fellow physician but a merchant seaman, returned to London just six months ago from the Orient. He was the only son of a politician of some distinction, the Lord Rosbury, and he was said to have amassed a great fortune importing goods from India and China. Over the last twelve weeks or so Mr. Thornfax had come to dinner at Hastings House twice to dine with the Dewhursts, but had more often visited us casually when he called on Daniel to discuss pharmaceutical supplies for his surgery or details of the new venture they were undertaking.

  I was, of course, never allowed to speak to Mr. Thornfax on these occasions. But whenever she’d been given sufficient warning Christa would have me gowned and beribboned and positioned somewhere along the man’s sightlines as he traversed the house. And then, at breakfast two days ago, Daniel announced that Mr. Thornfax had asked after me.

  “And what did you tell him?” Christa demanded. “Not all, I hope!”

  “He wondered why she wasn’t engaged,” Daniel said, “so I gave him the broad outlines of the thing, yes.”

  “Dr. Dewhurst! You never did!”

  “Thornfax has seen the world, Mrs. Dewhurst. He knows that if a girl as pretty as Leonora sits on the shelf after a whole season in town”—here he patted my hand in apology—“something must be amiss. And he’s been home long enough to have heard tales.”

  My sister groaned. “All my work is ruined. Undone again, as ever.”

  “I wouldn’t give up just yet,” Daniel reassured her. “In fact the man was entirely unfazed. Said something along the lines of not giving a fig for society’s opinion. He is a lionheart, Francis Thornfax. He might just take her, if only we can get him to stay ashore long enough.”

  And now Mr. Thornfax had sent his card and would be coming to our party next week.

  Mrs. Greer’s lips moved silently as she read the newspaper profile. Then she gasped. “Only hark this, Miss Somerville: ‘After years of business at sea and abroad, the gentleman is now poised for adventure of a different kind. Mr. Thornfax declares himself intent on settling back in England and raising a family.’”

  “Better and better,” Mrs. Cauldhame declared. “Just look at the girl! Those rosy cheeks, those wide eyes, that exquisite bosom—she needn’t say a word, only smile at him and present her lips to be kissed.”

  “I would present my lips to him in a heartbeat, if only Mr. Greer would look the other way,” Mrs. Greer said, driving her companions into seizures of laughter.

  THREE

  Yes, it was a humiliation to be discussed in such a manner, as if I weren’t even in the room, as if I were deaf as well as silent. I’d lived through one social season in London already, so I was well used to humiliations of this kind, but I could not claim complete immunity. And so, hot with embarrassment and clutching my shawl over my exquisite bosom, I declined the offer to brave the spring chill and ride up and down Mayfair with the ladies in Mrs. Greer’s sociable-carriage. Instead I did my best to hasten the assembly of hats, handbags, rugs, and furs, fetching Christa’s shawl from where I’d spied it earlier in the dining room to save her maid Emily another trip upstairs.

  Then I loitered by the parlour window, watching in a kind of exhausted relief as the carriage with its pair of high-stepping horses finally circled the drive and disappeared through the front gates. The discarded newspaper lay on the sill, and my eye fell on the name of my maternal cousin Archibald Mavety. Archie was a journalist, I knew—but surely he would never stoop to writing for the society pages! No, the paper had been folded out of order, and I was looking at an ordinary news column:

  Archie had a tendency to get round to his subject very slowly. My eye skipped farther down the column:

  My reading was
interrupted by the drumroll of a china plate clattering across the floor and settling, miraculously unbroken, at my feet. I turned to find the housegirl Hattie spread-eagled on the rug.

  I called for help but no one answered.

  I dropped to my knees beside the girl’s head and touched her cheek. “H-Hattie?” I tried. Shadows ringed her closed eyes, and her lips were pale and cracked. I bent my head and waited, my heart thumping, until I was certain I felt her breath on my cheek. She smelled of stale straw and ammonia, a barnyard odour that sent me straight back to the village of Holybourne where I used to play with the other parish children. I took Hattie’s hand between my own. The odd thought struck me that she too could have come from such a village, could even have been one of my playmates in the hedgerows and cow-barns.

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until Hattie’s eyelids fluttered, and I gasped with relief. “Hattie, you’ve fainted. A-are you h-hurt?”

  The girl moaned, coughed a little, and said, “I don’ want another dose. I swear it to you, mum. But as soon as I pass my hour I gets so poorly, I haven’t strength near to stand.”

  “I sh-shall find Dr. D-Dewhurst for you,” I said.

  Her eyes flew open. “No, mum, please! Only hold me here till Tom arrives,” she said, and clutched my hand.

  “Tom. The d-doctor’s boy?” Daniel employed a young man from London’s East End named Tom Rampling, two or three years older than myself, who fetched and messaged for him, repaired equipment, and assisted with chemical experiments—but I hadn’t realized that Tom treated the patients, too.

  “Yes’m. I promised him. He’s helping me to … not to—” Hattie broke off in a fit of coughing and shivering. Sweat shone over her face.

  “I’ll f-fetch him at once,” I told her.

  I found Tom Rampling in the kitchen emptying an armload of kindling into the bin under the stove. He must have cleaned the stove just before refuelling it, because coal dust had soiled his shirt and dulled the dark hair that curled over his collar.