A Season of Secrets (2 page)

They were outside the playroom door now, but Blanche didn’t open it. Until now she had never had any doubt that inviting Carrie to spend time with Thea and Olivia was, under the
circumstances, the right thing to do. It wasn’t as if Carrie was just any village child. As Gilbert’s nanny, Ivy Thornton had played an important part in his childhood and his affection
for her was deep. When he had outgrown the nursery, Ivy had become nanny to one of his young cousins and then, later, nanny to a whole string of his nieces and nephews. Now in her seventies and
comfortably pensioned off by him, she lived rent-free in one of Gorton’s tied cottages.

Knowing her husband as she did, Blanche was certain that, like her, he would have assumed any grandchild of Ivy’s would be reasonably well educated. Now, seeing how startled Carrie was by
the word ‘schoolroom’, she was no longer so sure.

‘Can you read and write, Carrie?’ she asked, trying not to let her concern show in her voice.

Carrie looked even more surprised at this.

‘Yes.’ She tried not to show how affronted she was by the question. ‘My granny taught me to read and write – and how to do numbers – long before I went to
school.’

Blanche breathed a sigh of relief. If Carrie could read and write, it made things easier. She would feel less awkward with Thea and Olivia and might even be able to join them in their lessons
when Miss Cumberbatch, their governess, returned from her summer leave.

Hoping that Thea and Olivia would be immediately friendly towards Carrie – especially as she had explained to them the manner in which Carrie had been orphaned – Blanche opened the
playroom door.

With butterflies dancing in her tummy, Carrie followed her into the room. What she had been expecting she didn’t quite know, but certainly it wasn’t the sight of Thea garbed in a
trailing cloak of gold-coloured velvet, a cardboard crown crammed on a waterfall of glossy chestnut ringlets.

‘I’m King Cophetua,’ she said, looking exceedingly cross. ‘Olivia is supposed to be the beggar-maid, only she refuses to take off her shoes and stockings and she
won’t wear anything raggedy out of the dressing-up box.’

Olivia, her marmalade-coloured hair held away from her face by a floppy brown bow, skipped up to them, unrepentant. ‘That’s because Thea always takes the grand parts and never lets
me wear the crown. Would you like to be the beggar-maid, Carrie? Or have we to play at being pirates instead?’

Blanche, grateful that Ivy Thornton wouldn’t now have to be told by Carrie that on her first day at Gorton she’d been asked to dress in rags, said, ‘Being pirates sounds far
more interesting than being King Cophetua and his beggar-maid.’

Thea, still trailing a river of gold-coloured velvet behind her, came over to stand next to Olivia. Blanche, aware that her daughters were patiently waiting for her to go, blew them a kiss and,
certain they would now take good care of Carrie, closed the door behind her.

Thea swept her late grandmother’s opera cloak up and over her shoulder, toga-like. ‘What is it like to be an orphan?’ she asked bluntly as the sound of her mother’s
footsteps receded. ‘Is it very hideous?’

‘Yes.’ Carrie felt it was a stupid question, but as she hadn’t yet got the measure of Thea, didn’t tell her so. ‘And I’m only an orphan because my father was
killed fighting in Flanders. How would you feel if it had been your father?’

Thea, who was a year older than Carrie and Olivia, regarded her with eyes that were very narrow, very green and very bright. She’d been happy at the thought of having Carrie as a temporary
playmate and was quite prepared to be condescendingly nice to her, but she wasn’t happy about a village girl being uppity with her.

As she tried to think of a suitably crushing retort, Olivia took hold of Carrie’s hand and began leading her towards a huge wicker hamper that was the dressing-up box. ‘Papa
isn’t going to be killed. Mama gave him a little silver crucifix that used to hang on one of her necklace chains, and he carries it with him all the time.’

There was such happy trust in Olivia’s voice that Carrie hadn’t the heart to express doubt as to whether the crucifix would stop bullets, bayonets and murderous shellfire.

‘Are you wearing a black pinafore dress because you’re in mourning?’ Olivia asked. ‘I saw you in a pretty red gingham dress once. We don’t have any gingham dresses.
All our dresses have pin-tucked bodices and big sashes that are always coming undone.’

‘Yes,’ Carrie said to the question. ‘And the red gingham is my Sunday-best dress. Granny made it.’

The flowered linen smocks Thea and Olivia were wearing now were far from being either pin-tucked or sashed and were not the kind of clothes Carrie had expected them to be wearing. Thea even had
a hole in one of her white stockings. That she was so obviously unembarrassed by it impressed Carrie. Aiming for self-confidence herself, she liked to see it in other people.

Thea, aware that the moment for saying something crushing to Carrie had passed, said impatiently, ‘If we’re going to be pirates, let’s find something pirate-like to
wear.’

Energetically she began rummaging in the hamper, tossing things in Olivia’s direction. Carrie didn’t help in the search. Instead she looked around her.

The room was large and packed with things she itched to take a closer look at. There was a huge rocking horse with flaring nostrils and a long swishy mane and tail in one corner. In another was
the largest doll’s house she had ever seen. There was a long shelf stacked higgledy-piggledy with books, including one she recognized because she had been given the same book,
The Wind in
the Willows
, as a present two Christmases ago. On other shelves there were jigsaw puzzles and board games and on the bottom shelf was a row of beautifully dressed dolls. Beneath the dolls was a
gaily painted wooden box crammed with toys. Spilling out of it were a train, a spinning top, a musical box and a monkey-up-a-stick.

Just as she was about to go and have a closer look at the monkey-up-a-stick, Thea said, ‘I think we have enough stuff now to be going on with, but as I could only find one pair of
breeches, you and Olivia will have to be lady pirates.’ She stuffed a pile of garments into Carrie’s arms. ‘There’s a red-spotted scarf you can tie around your head like a
bandana, a striped shirt, a fringed orange sash for tying round your waist and an eye-patch that belonged to Mama’s Uncle Walter.’

Olivia was already clambering into an outlandish selection of garments, and Carrie, beginning to get into the spirit of the thing, pulled the man’s shirt over her head, anchoring it around
her waist with the sash.

Olivia giggled. ‘You look first-rate, Carrie. All you need now is a big black moustache. There’s a stick of burnt cork somewhere. Let’s see if we can find it.’

‘So we drew moustaches on our faces with the burnt cork,’ she said to Hal, much later in the day. ‘And we had enormous fun jumping from the table onto a chair
and then onto other chairs, pretending the floor was the sea and that we would drown if we touched it.’

Hal made the kind of sound in his throat that he always made when he wasn’t impressed. ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a game ter me.’ He scowled so hard his eyebrows almost
met in the middle. He was herding his father’s cows in for their evening milking and bad-temperedly switched the rump of the animal nearest to him. ‘Aren’t you going to do
’owt else this summer but go ter Gorton? The vole pups were out this afternoon, but it weren’t much fun watching ’em all on me own.’

Carrie tried to feel sorry about not having been with him, but she’d enjoyed herself so much she couldn’t quite manage it.

‘Before I came home Lady Fenton introduced me to Mr Heaton,’ she said as the cows headed up the narrow tree-lined track towards the farm buildings and the summer sky now smoked to
dusk. ‘Mr Heaton is the butler. She told him I was Miss Caroline Thornton, that I was a guest of Miss Thea and Miss Olivia and that I would be at Gorton Hall every day until
mid-September.’

Instead of being impressed, Hal forgot about his bad mood and hooted with laughter.

Carrie punched his shoulder. ‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded hotly. ‘Mr Heaton was very nice to me.
Everyone
was very nice to me – apart from Thea, but that
was only in the beginning. And Lady Fenton is like the Good Queen in a fairy story. She’s . . .’ Carrie struggled to find words that would do Blanche Fenton justice. ‘She smells
of roses, and she talked to me as if I was a grown-up. Apart from Granny, I think she’s the most special person in the whole wide world.’

‘You’re barmy.’ Still chuckling, Hal fastened a rusting iron gate behind them so that if the cows decided to head back to the meadow they wouldn’t get very far.
‘And you’re not the only one. My Uncle Jim says Lady Fenton isn’t right in the head, and that her having you up at Gorton every day is proof of it. I know you don’t want to
go there, getting above yourself, because you told me you didn’t.’

It was true. She had. But that had been yesterday. It had been before she’d fallen under Lady Fenton’s spell, and before she’d known she was going to be best friends with
Olivia and possibly a friend of Thea’s, too. It had been before she’d sensed that, where the Fenton family was concerned, she had started on a long and very special journey.

‘I knew Lady Fenton would look after you,’ Ivy said, undoing Carrie’s plaits by candlelight. ‘She has a kind heart for such a young woman.’

Carrie, kneeling with her back to her, twisted her head around. ‘Don’t young women usually have kind hearts, Granny?’ She was wearing a nightdress that had been made out of one
of Ivy’s old ones, her hands cupped around a beaker of warm milk.

Realizing she had spoken without thinking and not wanting to give Carrie a gloomy view of human nature, Ivy said hastily, ‘I’m sure they do, pet lamb. It’s just more noticeable
when they are as high-born as Lady Fenton.’

‘You mean when they are a viscountess?’

Ivy began brushing Carrie’s hair. ‘Lady Fenton wasn’t born a viscountess, Carrie. Her father is the Earl of Shibden and so, where the hierarchy of the peerage is concerned, she
married beneath herself when she married a viscount.’

That anyone could be regarded as having married beneath them when marrying a viscount was beyond Carrie’s understanding.

Seeing her bewilderment, Ivy laid the brush down. ‘Let me explain, lovey. Top of the pile, after royalty, are dukes and duchesses – and there aren’t a lot of those. A degree
lower in rank are marquesses and marchionesses. A degree lower still are earls, and an earl’s wife is called a countess.’

‘And then there are viscounts and viscountesses?’

Ivy nodded. ‘All those ranks, including that of baron, who is a rank below viscount, are peers of the realm and sit in the House of Lords – or can if they wish. It’s something
you should know, if you are going to go into service – and I’d far prefer to see you in service with Lord and Lady Fenton than working in a Bradford woollen mill or,’ she added,
‘working on a farm.’

Carrie, sensing a slur on Hal, said defensively, ‘Hal is very clever, Granny. Even though he misses a lot of school when his dad needs him to help on the farm, he always makes up for the
time he’s missed, and he’s always top of his class. Miss Calvert has told him that if he works really hard he could win a scholarship to a grammar school.’

‘Has she indeed? If he went to a grammar school he’d have to speak a lot differently than he does now – and how would the Crosbys be able to kit him out with suitable
clothes?’

She spoke crossly and that was because she was cross, though not with Carrie, but with Miss Calvert. As far as she was concerned, putting an unobtainable idea into a child’s head was a
cruelty. Though Hal Crosby’s parents were a step up from being agricultural labourers, their tenant farm wasn’t the magnificent Home Farm, where all the fresh produce for Gorton came
from, but a three-field farm on the edge of the estate that was, in Ivy’s eyes, not much more than a glorified smallholding. Hal, a year older than Carrie, would in two or three years’
time be required by his dad to work alongside him from sun-up to sun-down. Going to a grammar school was, for Hal, as remote as pigs flying.

The next morning Jim Crosby called for Carrie in the pony-trap. It was a blisteringly hot day and although there were lots of things she wanted to play with in the playroom,
she hoped that today Thea and Olivia would want to play outside.

‘How’s tha getting on wi’ yon posh lassies?’ Jim asked as he clicked the reins and they trundled off down the lane in the direction of the road leading out of Outhwaite
towards Gorton. ‘Did you ’ave your tea wi’ ’em?’

‘Yes.’ Carrie only answered his second question, as she didn’t think the first one was anything to do with him and, if she had answered it, she knew her answer would have been
all round the village before the day was out.

Jim pushed a flat cap to the back of his head. He was still a young man and the hair that sprang free was as dark and as curly as Hal’s.

‘It’s a rum do, you goin’ every day, specially if you don’t tek tea in t’ kitchen. You can’t be a tweeny there when you’ve bin treated as a ruddy
guest!’