Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [69]
‘Miss Lock, my trees simply will not come right. Do look.’
She said it loudly enough for anybody in the room to hear and had brought her sketchbook with her. Stephen stayed where he was, but gave me a glance and a nod of approval. We bent over the sketch on one of the pie-crust tables, heads together. Her hair smelled of lily-of-the-valley and I was aware that mine was sticky and dusty.
‘Will you be in the schoolroom later?’ she said, under her breath.
‘When?’
‘Around midnight. Will Betty have gone to bed by then?’
‘Yes, usually.’
‘I’ve thought of a way, only … You see, they look like cabbages and I promise you I’ve tried so hard.’
This for the benefit of Mrs Beedle, who was coming over to look. The three of us pored over Celia’s mediocre landscape until it was time for the family to go into dinner. Betty was tired and went to bed early. I waited in the schoolroom with Gallic Wars and a single candle, listening to the stable clock striking the hours. Celia arrived soon after midnight, dragging a blanket-wrapped bundle.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Some things to make you invisible.’
‘Are you setting up as an enchantress?’
‘Not of that kind. Open it.’
When I undid the blanket a tangle of clothes flopped out: plain brown jacket, tweed cap, coarse cotton shirt, red neckcloth, corduroy breeches, gaiters and a pair of that hybrid form of footwear known as high-lows, too high for a shoe and too low for a boot. They were all clean but had obviously been worn before.
‘Men’s clothes?’
‘Boy’s. It’s the next best thing to being invisible. Boys go everywhere and nobody gives them a second glance.’
‘I can’t wear these. It’s not decent.’
‘Why not? Women in Shakespeare are always dressing up as boys – Viola and what-was-her-name in the forest – and they all of them end up marrying dukes and things.’
‘Then why don’t you do it?’
For a moment, in my confusion, I’d forgotten I had my own risks to run.
‘Of course I can’t. Imagine if I were caught.’
‘And what if I were caught?’
‘You won’t be. In any case, you’ll make a much better boy than I should. I’d never fit into the unmentionables.’
I picked up the breeches carefully.
‘They’re clean,’ she said. ‘I saw to that.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘My grandmother collects old clothes from the household for the vicar to give to the poor. She was pleased when I offered to help her. Do the high-lows fit?’
I slipped my feet into them. They did, more or less. Somehow the touch of the leather against my stockings made the idea more thinkable, as if the clothes brought a different identity.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll try it.’
She put her arms round me and kissed me on the forehead.
‘Oh, you brave darling. You’re saving my life, you know that?’
I turned away and picked up the neckcloth, not wanting to encourage her dramatics.
‘You’ll go tomorrow morning, early?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’ll be a reply for me, I know. Leave a flower on the bench again when you get back, and I’ll find an occasion for you to give the letter to me. I must go now. Fanny will notice if I have bags under my eyes in the morning.’
Luckily there was nobody to notice my eyes when I got up at four in the morning because I hadn’t slept at all. The boy’s clothes were piled on the chair beside my bed and I puzzled my way into them by the first grey light of the day, not daring to light a candle in case the light or smell of it penetrated to the maids’ rooms downstairs. It took time because my fingers were shaking, but I managed at last to work out the buttons and to pin my hair up under the cap so tightly that it dragged at my scalp. I slid my arms into the sleeves of the brown jacket and put my latest report to Blackstone into a pocket. The lack of a mirror to show me what I looked like was one mercy at least.
I went barefoot down the stairs carrying the high-lows and sat down on the edge of the pump trough in the back courtyard to put them on. Though the household would soon be stirring, I hoped the servants would be too bleary-eyed