Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [53]
"Need the girl sleep in her stays, your Ladyship? She heaves so alarmingly at night when I look in on her."
"As your Ladyship wishes."
Considering her governess's animated face bent over a letter, Margaret decided that here was one doll worth playing with. She knew how to do it. They always began stiff and proper but soon they went soft over you, and then every smile pulled their strings. Mostly they were lonely, and despised themselves for not being mothers. The Mademoiselle in her last boarding-school was the easiest. Watch for the first signs—vague laughter, fingers against your cheek, a fuzziness about the hairline—and seize on her weakness. Ask her to help you tie the last bow of ribbon on your stomacher. Take her arm in yours while walking, beg to sit next to her at supper, even bring her apples if the case requires it. Mademoiselle, the poor toad, had reached the stage of hiding pears in Margaret's desk.
By December, Mistress Mary was astonished at her power over this sweet little girl. The dreadful laugh had muted to a wheeze of merriment between wide lips. Margaret sat on a footstool below her governess's needle, and chanted French songs of which she understood half the words. At night, she had taken to pleading for Mistress Mary to come into her bedchamber; not Dot, nor any of the servingmaids, nor either of her sisters, only Mistress Mary might lift off the muslin cap and brush Margaret's long coarse hair. "My little friend," the woman called her, as a final favour, though when Margaret stood up she had a good inch over her governess. They shared a smile, then. Mistress Mary would have liked to be sure that they were smiling at the same thing.
Another thing the governess could not understand was why Margaret loved to read and hated to write.
Words were a treasure to be hoarded and never shared.
On Margaret's twelfth birthday two years before, an event marked only by one of her Ladyship's sudden visits to the schoolroom, she had been discovered sitting under a desk with a very blunt quill, writing "The History of the Quintumbly Family, The Third Chapter." Under interrogation in the parlour, Margaret could offer no reason for such an outlay of precious time. She licked the corner of her lips. Nor could she explain her knowledge of such an unsuitable family, who, it seemed, kept tame weasels and sailed down the Nile. Her Ladyship was disgusted at last to find that the Quintumblys were merely fanciful, a pretend family. The rest of the journal pleased her even less, being a daily account of Margaret's less filial thoughts and sentiments. Having read a sample of them aloud in a tone of wonder, her Ladyship picked the limp book up by one corner and held it out to her daughter. Margaret was halfway to the parlour fire before her mother's voice tightened around her: did she mean to smoke them out entirely? Dot was called for to carry the manuscript to the gardener's bonfire, where it would do no harm.
From that day on the girl would write no words of her own, only lists of French verbs and English wars. In the strongbox behind her eyes, she stacked volumes of stories about her pretend families. She sealed her lashes and reread the adventures only in bed before it was light, in case anyone might catch her lips moving. By day she stole other people's words: romances, newspapers, treatises, anything left beside an armchair or in an unlocked cabinet in the library. Margaret swallowed up the words and would give none back.
Laid low by one of her periodic fevers in January, the girl was starving for a story but could not concentrate enough to form the letters. What she did remember to do was to clamour for Mistress Mary to hold her hand. The governess flushed, and consented, after a little show of reluctance. Humouring the patient, she agreed to petty things, like brushing her own dark hair with Margaret's ivory brush. By suppertime, the girl was too worn out to think of anything endearing