Bar Sinister (6 page)

"Well, I'll write him at once in any case. And Peggy, in future I shall rely on you to tell
me what's on Amy's mind."

"I ought to told you yesterday straight off when it come to me. The thing is I wasn't sure
of meself," Peggy said frankly. "Ye're a kind lady, missus, but 'twas such a mad notion ye might've
laughed at me."

"Oh, Peggy."

Peggy flushed but stuck by her guns. "Sure and I know I ain't a proper nursemaid for a
house like this. I do me best and I'm willing to learn, but it's hard sometimes when I'm homesick
for the ould divil in Portugal."

"Do you want to go back?" Emily asked gently. "You may stay here as long as you
choose, but I don't like to be keeping a wife from her husband."

Peggy's face cleared. "Whisht, missus, if I went back McGrath'd kill me for sure." It
transpired that her husband was ambitious to open a publick house in Cork on their joint savings.
Peggy would have elaborated on this scheme, which seemed to have her allegiance, but at that point
Tommy was found to be chewing through his gift from his papa. When he had been given the coral
the packet contained for proper, approved chewing, Amy was discovered halfway to the rocking
horse, determined to give Doña Inez a little outing. Matt protested, Amy gave him glare for
glare, and everyone waxed very merry.

When Sir Henry arrived that afternoon Emily felt almost equal to dealing with him. He
huffed a bit. Emily explained. As he was a sentimental man at heart and thoroughly approved
daughters who were attached to their fathers, he was soon thinking of Amy as a prodigy of
sensibility, a miniature heroine tragically abandoned by her callous parent. As this fiction was
clearly preferable to his looking upon Amy as a damnable nuisance, Emily did not correct it.

Sir Henry insisted upon being shown up to the nursery, where he regaled Matt by finding
sugarplums in the boy's hair, performed the same enchantment for the wide-eyed Amy, and
concluded his visit with Captain Falk's daughter on his knee. He even bestowed a pat on Tommy's
petticoats, though it was clear to Emily that the baby's foreign looks still rankled. Tommy,
unmoved by Sir Henry's opinions, chewed on his coral and drooled.

That evening Emily wrote Captain Falk a full account of Amy's ordeal. Within the month
she received the first installment of the phantastical adventures of Doña Inez. The story was
penned in a neat, almost clerklike hand, together with a civil greeting for Miss Mayne, which
delighted Aunt Fan, and an equally civil thank you to Emily for writing, which from its very
restraint caused Emily to feel shame that she had not sent him a report of his children sooner. She
vowed to write once a month.

It was baffling to step into the saga of Doña Inez
in medias res,
and, of
course, the problem of telling the tale through Peggy McGrath complicated the narration. Emily
took to reading the stories through at least once in English after the labourious translation process,
and it proved a good way to teach Amy English sentences. The child picked up English vocabulary
as a magnet does pins. By the end of the next year Peggy's offices were more ceremonial than
necessary. Amy received the stories with uncomplicated delight, and indeed, they were delightful,
if a trifle odd.

Doña Inez was a very young Spanish lady who lived in the Sierra Morena with a
group of bandit cousins. She rode astride in a black habit with cherry-coloured ribbons and she fell
into all kinds of perils from which she always escaped, triumphant, through the courage of her
spirited pony, Eustachio, and her own boundless ingenuity.

Everywhere Doña Inez went, however, she was accompanied by a dogged,
bewildered, middle-aged duenna, Doña Barbara by name. Doña Barbara rode an
anonymous mule, wrung her hands a great deal, and always, no matter how dire the straits to
which she and the heroine were reduced, found upon her person the means of making a nice cup of
chocolate.

It was not long before Emily caught Matt eavesdropping on these phantasies. Each
episode, of course, had to be repeated several times a week with embellishments until the new
installment arrived. Emily invited her son to listen.

"It's girls' stuff." He looked down his snub nose. "Silly."

Emily did not wish to encourage him in toploftiness. "Very well, Matt. Go away."

He went.

She soon caught him at it again, however. "Captain Falk writ the story," she ventured,
cautious. "He is a soldier. I shall tell him you said his story was silly."

"Mama!"

"Well, perhaps I won't if you'll listen politely instead of sulking."

So Matt sat at the big nursery table with Amy and Peggy and Emily whenever Captain
Falk's letters arrived, and he and Amy were soon playing at Doña Inez and the Bandits for
hours in the nursery, and later, as the weather improved, in the stables. Matt played all the bandits
at once.

In an early letter to Portugal Emily ventured to hint that the inclusion of at least one male
character by name would be wholly acceptable to her son. That was how Doña Inez acquired
a cousin, Don Julio, who appeared from time to time in an heroick light. It was Doña Inez's
story, however. Even Matt accepted that.

As for herself, Emily grew very fond of the duenna, Doña Barbara. Fellow feeling,
no doubt. She finally expressed her preference to Captain Falk. He obliged with a crisp little
episode featuring Doña Barbara as a baffled heroine which had Emily in stitches. Amy and
Matt regarded this departure from the plot line with amazed scorn. Middle-aged duennas were not
supposed to be heroines, it seemed, so Emily wrote her employer that he had best return to old
ways. She thanked him, however.

By October, when Captain Falk sent Amy a plumpish black-clad doll named Doña
Barbara for her fourth birthday, Emily had begun to entertain much friendlier feelings for her
employer. Although their letters had come, insensibly, to contain more than quixotic fictions and
accounts of Tommy's teething, an invisible boundary of reserve remained and Captain Falk never
crossed it. Perhaps that was just as well. It is comparatively easy to be witty, even friendly, on
paper. In the flesh Emily had not found the man agreeable, nor did she moon over him now. Not
moon, exactly. Merely, she allowed herself to wish him well.

That she took to reading the war news in her father's London newspaper with greater
interest than she had heretofore felt was perfectly reasonable. She asked to borrow the papers with
some self-consciousness, but no one commented on her sudden patriotism, not even Aunt Fan,
who had always read the war news.

It had been necessary, for example, after Emily had carefully perused the casualty lists, to
require Captain Falk to send an account of the Battle of Vitoria for Aunt's edification. His reply
came quicker than its predecessors. The advance of the army into northern Spain had opened the
northern ports to English shipping, and one could now almost count on three weeks, or with luck a
fortnight, between letters.

The account Captain Falk sent of King Joseph's captured baggage was very funny, though
Peggy McGrath was dismayed to have missed the prime chance for plunder of the entire war. She
spent several days lamenting the cruelty of her fate to Emily's unexpressed shock. Though she had
grown fond of Peggy, Emily knew she would never wholly understand the woman.

Emily did not understand Captain Falk, either. It took her several days to realise that she
knew little more of the battle after reading the Vitoria letter than she had known before. Other
officers wrote letters, some of which were published in the newspapers, with excellent accounts of
the fighting. Captain Falk's was vague and prosaic. Emily did not, she wrote him, expect the
real-life equivalent of Doña Inez but rather more detail would be welcome to Aunt Fan and to his
obliged servant, Emily Foster. This time the reply was slow in coming.

She had received the account of Vitoria in early July and fired off an immediate reply,
which she calculated ought to have been in his hands well before the first of August. With luck she
could expect something by the fifteenth. She sat back happily to await a fuller account.

On the third, however, the first word came of Soult's counterattack through the epic Pass
of Roncesvalles. The Army of the Pyrenees were hotly engaged over a wide front. Aunt Fan read
the daily dispatches eagerly, Emily with dread.

She had made a very stupid mistake. If Captain Falk were killed now she must not only
deal with Amy's baffled grief but also with Matt's. As for her own feelings, her mind shied away
from examining them. It would be quite dreadful to have no more of Doña Inez and
Doña Barbara.

At the end of the week she was relieved to find an amiable answer to her request for
more detail of Vitoria. Captain Falk pointed out that he had spent the first part of the battle pinned
down behind a hedge with his company and the latter part in dogged pursuit of the retreating
French, so his field of vision had been limited, and oughtn't Emily to consult the newspapers? They
were never accurate, but journalists quite often saw more than ten yards on either side. That was
prosaic. Unfortunately it also made good sense.

Smiling at her own disappointment Emily started to turn the page to peruse Doña
Inez's latest adventure when the date on the first page caught her eye--23 July 1813. The day
before
the French attacked. What good was that!

Ten days elapsed with no word from Spain. It was true that the newspaper accounts did
not list Captain Falk among the casualties. It was also true, as Aunt Fan pointed out with
unconscious cruelty, that the returns were scattered and incomplete. The fighting had dragged on
for a week, and it had been fierce.

Matt and Amy drank in the latest episode of Doña Inez with oblivious glee. Indeed
they demanded its retelling so often Emily grew downright snappish. That baffled them.
Guiltstruck, Emily forced herself to read the tale again
con brio.

When the letter came at last it contained no apology for the delay--indeed, Emily realised
ruefully, it showed no consciousness that there had been delay. It was briefer than usual, and rather
hard to decipher, being composed, as the author pointed out, in a tent during a downpour.
Doña Inez's adventure was a lackluster affair. The children heard it with their usual hopeful
enthusiasm. No taste.

Emily did not ask for any details of the Battle of the Pyrenees. A week before Amy's
October birthday the newspapers reported that the Duke of Wellington had crossed the Bidassoa
into France.

Amy received Doña Barbara the doll with complaisance. There were other gifts.
Sir Henry gave her a handsome English doll, a milkmaid blonde with a fetching straw bonnet who
entered into a complex three-way relationship with the black-clad Spanish ladies. Emily allowed the
little girl to use one of the window seats in the nursery as a doll parlour. When Matt came the
superior male, as he still sometimes did, Amy would turn her back on him and retreat to the
company of her ladies, with whom she carried on long discussions in Spinglish.

For the most part Amy and Matt squabbled amiably. They even worked out a system for
sharing the rocking horse. It began to look jaded from too much galloping over the plains of La
Mancha.

Emily felt some satisfaction that her reasons for taking up baby-farming were proving out
so well. She ought to have been pleased that Sir Henry now accepted her curious household--he
even boasted about it to his friends--but her feelings were not so simple. She had grown thoroughly
entwined in the lives of the Falk children. She triumphed at Tommy's first step--March--rejoiced
when Amy finally learned to count in English--April--and flinched when Tommy's first word was
Mama
--May.

The trouble was, she foresaw only unhappiness for herself and the children whether
Captain Falk lived or were killed. If he lived, and, as now seemed possible, the war ended, he
would take the children away to some garrison town--or even, God forbid, India. If he were
killed...

Unfortunately for Emily's sanity, the Duke of Wellington seemed determined to give her
no respite. The army had not gone into winter quarters as usual. In stately succession followed the
battles of the Nive and Orthez. Glorious, said Aunt Fan. Emily had never been so out of sympathy
with her aunt's sentiments.

To complicate matters, the winds in the Bay of Biscay waxed surly. The army had
invested Toulouse before Emily received word that Captain Falk had got his majority by brevet--the
Nive--and been slightly injured in a fall from his horse--Orthez. "Just a scratch," he wrote, with
what she considered unnecessary malice.

As the bells of Mellings Parva announced Bonaparte's abdication and the subsequent
costly victory of Toulouse, Emily received a curt note,
sans
Spanish romance, to the
effect that Captain Falk, now Major Falk, was coming home.

That was her first interpretation of his letter. Rereading after her initial flurry of relief
subsided, she was forced to another version. Owing to his rise in rank he was compelled to
exchange into a new regiment, and that regiment were bound for North America where the former
colonists were still in arms. He meant first to escort a wounded friend to England. Time pressed. If
she had questions that required his response perhaps she had best write his solicitor. In short he was
not "coming home" to Wellfield House.

That infuriated Emily. Surely he owed his children as much consideration as he owed a
mere friend. She wrote a scathing letter and posted it, fuming, to Toulouse. She placed no reliance
on his sense of parental duty, however, so she did not tell the children that their father would soon
be in England. Thus, when Peggy's black-avised husband rode up one fine May evening leading a
fat, intelligent looking pony, Matt and Amy were galvanised with joy.

"Eustachio!" they cried with one voice.