The Shifting Fog

  ‘Is it true he was a goldminer?’ It seemed a suitably exciting profession. It was right somehow that the Hartford children should have an interesting father. My own had always been a disappointment: a faceless figure who vanished into thin air before I was born, rematerialising only in hot whispered exchanges between Mother and her sister.

  ‘For a time,’ Nancy said. ‘He’s turned his hand to that many things I’ve all but lost count. Never been much of a one for settling, our Mr Frederick. Never one to take to other folks. First there was the tea planting in Ceylon, then the gold prospecting in Canada. Then he decided he was going to make his fortune printing newspapers. Now it’s motor cars, God love him.’

  ‘Does he sell motor cars?’

  ‘He makes them, or those that work for him do. He’s bought a factory over Ipswich way.’

  ‘Ipswich. Is that where he lives? Him and his family?’ I said, nudging the conversation in direction of the children.

  She didn’t take the bait: was concentrated on her own thoughts. ‘With any luck he’ll make a go of this one. Heaven knows His Lordship would look gladly on a return for his investment.’

  I blinked, her meaning lost on me. Before I could ask what she meant, she had swept on. ‘Anyway, you’ll see him soon enough. He arrives next Tuesday, along with the Major and Lady Jemima.’ A rare smile, approval rather than pleasure. ‘There’s not an August bank holiday I can remember when the family didn’t all come together. There’s not one of them would dream of missing the midsummer dinner. It’s tradition for the folks in these parts.’

  ‘Like the recital,’ I said, daringly, avoiding her gaze.

  ‘So,’ Nancy raised a brow, ‘someone’s already blathered to you about the recital, have they?’

  I ignored her peevish note. Nancy was unaccustomed to being pipped at the rumour post. ‘Alfred said the servants were invited to see the recital,’ I said.

  ‘Footmen!’ Nancy shook her head haughtily. ‘Never listen to a footman if you want to hear the truth, my girl. Invited, indeed! Servants are permitted to see the recital, and very kind of the Master it is too. He knows how much the family mean to all of us downstairs, how we enjoy seeing the young ones growing up.’ She returned her attention momentarily to the vase in her lap and I held my breath, willing her to continue. After a moment that seemed an age, she did. ‘This’ll be the fourth year they’ve put on theatricals. Ever since Miss Hannah was ten and took it into her head she wanted to be a theatre director.’ Nancy nodded. ‘Aye, she’s a character is Miss Hannah. She and her father are as like as two eggs.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  Nancy paused, considering this. ‘There’s something of the wanderlust in each of them,’ she said finally. ‘Both full of wit and newfangled ideas, each as stubborn as the other.’ She spoke pointedly, accenting each description, a warning to me that such traits, while acceptable idiosyncrasies for them upstairs, would not be tolerated from the likes of me.

  I’d had such lectures all my life from Mother. I nodded sagely as she continued. ‘They get on famously most of the time, but when they don’t there’s not a soul don’t know it. There’s no one can rile Mr Frederick quite like Miss Hannah. Even as a wee girl she knew just how to set him off. She was a fierce little thing, full of tempers. One time, I remember, she was awful dark at him for one reason or another and took it into her head to give him a nasty fright.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Now let me think . . . Master David was out having riding instruction. That’s what started it all. Miss Hannah were none too happy to have been left out so she bundled up Miss Emmeline and gave Nanny Brown the slip. Found their way to the far estates, they did, right the way down where the farmers were harvesting apples.’ She shook her head. ‘Convinced Miss Emmeline to hide away in the barn, did our Miss Hannah. Wasn’t hard to do, I imagine; Miss Hannah can be very persuasive, and besides, Miss Emmeline was quite happy with all them fresh apples to feast on. Next minute, Miss Hannah arrived back at the house, puffing and panting like she’d run for her life, calling for Mr Frederick. I was laying for luncheon in the dining room at the time, and I heard Miss Hannah tell him that a couple of foreign men with dark skin had found them in the orchards. Said they’d commented on how pretty Miss Emmeline was and promised to take her on a long journey across the seas. Miss Hannah said she couldn’t be sure, but she believed them to be white slavers.’

  I gasped, shocked by Hannah’s daring. ‘What happened then?’

  Nancy, portentous with secrets, warmed to the telling. ‘Well, Mr Frederick’s always been wary of the white slavers, and his face went first white, then all red, and before you could count to three he scooped Miss Hannah into his arms and set off toward the orchards. Bertie Timmins, who was picking apples that day, said Mr Frederick arrived in a terrible state. He started yelling orders to form a search party, that Miss Emmeline had been kidnapped by two dark-skinned men. They searched high and low, spreading out in all directions, but no one had seen two dark-skinned men and a golden-haired child.’

  ‘How did they find her?’

  ‘They didn’t. In the end she found them. After an hour or so, Miss Emmeline, bored with hiding and sick from apples, came strolling from the barn wondering about all the fuss.

  Why Miss Hannah hadn’t come to get her . . .’

  ‘Was Mr Frederick very cross?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nancy said matter-of-factly, polishing fiercely. ‘Though not for long: never could stay dark with her for long. They’ve a bond, those two. She’d have to do more’n that to set him against her.’ She held aloft the glistening vase then placed it with the other polished items. Laid her cloth on the table and tilted her head, giving her thin neck a rub. ‘Anyways, as I hear it Mr Frederick was just getting a bit of his own medicine.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What did he do?’

  Nancy glanced toward the kitchen, satisfying herself that Katie was without earshot. There was a well-worn pecking order downstairs at Riverton, refined and ingrained by centuries of service. I may have been the lowest housemaid, subject to regular dressing-downs, worthy of only the lesser duties, but Katie, as scullery maid, was beneath contempt. I would like to be able to say this groundless inequity riled me; that I was, if not incensed, at least alert to its injustice. But to do so would be crediting my young self with empathy I did not possess. Rather, I relished what little privilege my place afforded me—Lord knows there were enough above me.

  ‘Gave his parents quite a time when he was a lad, did our Mr Frederick,’ she said through tight lips. ‘He was such a livewire Lord Ashbury sent him to Radley just so he couldn’t give his brother a bad name at Eton. Wouldn’t let him try for Sandhurst neither, when the time came, even though he was that set on joining the army.’

  I digested this information as Nancy continued. ‘Understandable, of course, with Major Jonathan doing so well in the forces. It doesn’t take much to stain a family’s good name. Wasn’t worth the risk.’ She left off rubbing her neck and seized a tarnished salt dish. ‘Anyway. All’s well that end’s well. He’s got his motor cars, and he’s got himself three fine children. You’ll see for yourself at the play.’

  ‘Will Major Jonathan’s children be performing in the play with Mr Frederick’s?’

  Nancy’s expression darkened and her voice lowered. ‘Whatever can you be thinking, girl?’

  The air bristled. I had said something wrong. Nancy glowered at me, forcing me to look away. The platter in my hands had been polished till it shone and in its surface I saw my cheeks growing redder.

  Nancy hissed, ‘The Major doesn’t have any children. Not any more.’ She snatched my cloth from me, long, thin fingers brushing mine. ‘Now, get on with you. I’m getting nought done with all your talk.’

  Nancy expected me to know what had happened to the Major’s children and there was nothing I could say or do to convince her that this wasn’t the case.

  It was often thus at Riverton. Because Mother had worked
at the house for many years before I was born, the other servants assumed I must be intimately acquainted with the family’s history. They saw me as her extension, I suppose; privy, as if by some strange process of osmosis, to all her knowledge. Of Riverton, and the Hartfords. Nancy, in particular, took my least show of ignorance as a personal affront. Of course I knew the Mistress required a warming pan no matter the season; that she preferred to dine in half-light during summer; that she always took her morning tea from the Limoges tea set . . .Was I being stupid? Or worse, cheeky?

  Over the next couple of weeks I avoided Nancy as best one person can avoid another with whom they live and work. At night, as she prepared for bed, I lay very still facing the wall, feigning sleep. It was a relief when she blew out the candle and the picture of the dying deer disappeared into the darkness. In the daytime, when we passed in the hall, Nancy would lift her nose disdainfully and I would study the ground, suitably chastened.

  Blessedly, there was plenty to keep us occupied preparing to receive Lord Ashbury’s adult guests. The east-wing guestrooms had to be opened and aired, the dust sheets removed and the furniture polished. The best linen had to be retrieved from enormous storage boxes in the attic, inspected for flaws, then laundered. The rain had set in and the clothes lines behind the house were of no use, so Nancy told me to drape the sheets over the clothes horses in the upstairs linen room.

  And that is where I learned more of The Game. For as the rain held, and Miss Prince determined to educate them on the finer points of Tennyson, the Hartford children sought hiding spots deeper and deeper within the house’s heart. The linen-room closet, tucked behind the chimney, was about as far from the library schoolroom as they could find. And thus they took up quarters.

  I never saw them play it, mind. Rule number one: The Game is secret. But I listened and I watched and, once or twice when temptation drove me and the coast was clear, I peeked inside the box. This is what I learned.

  The Game was old. They’d been playing it for years. No, not playing. That is the wrong verb. Living; they had been living The Game for years. For The Game was more than its name suggested. It was a complex fantasy, an alternate world into which they escaped.

  There were no costumes, no swords, no feathered headdresses. Nothing that would have marked it as a game. For that was its nature. It was secret. Its only accoutrement was the box. A black lacquered case brought back from China by one of their ancestors; one of the spoils from a spree of exploration and plunder. It was the size of a square hatbox—not too big and not too small—and its lid was inlaid with semiprecious gems to form a scene: a river with a bridge across it, a small temple on one bank, a willow weeping from the sloping shore. Three figures stood atop the bridge and above them a lone bird circled.

  They guarded the box jealously, filled as it was with everything material to The Game. For although The Game demanded a good deal of running and hiding and wrestling, its real pleasure was enjoyed elsewhere. Rule number two: all journeys, adventures, explorations and sightings must be recorded. They would rush inside, flushed with danger, to record their recent adventures: maps and diagrams, codes and drawings, plays and books.

  The books were miniature, bound with thread, writing so small and neat that one had to hold them close to decipher them. They had titles: Escape From Koshchei the Deathless; Encounter with Balam and his Bear; Journey to the Land of White Slavers. Some were written in code I couldn’t understand, though the legend, had I the time to look, would no doubt have been printed on parchment and filed within the box.

  The Game itself was simple. It was Hannah and David’s invention really, and as the oldest they were its chief instigators. They decided which location was ripe for exploration. The two of them had assembled a ministry of nine advisors—an eclectic group mingling eminent Victorians with ancient Egyptian kings. There were only ever nine advisors at any one time, and when history supplied a new figure too appealing to be denied inclusion an original member would die or be deposed. (Death was always in the line of duty, reported solemnly in one of the tiny books kept inside the box.)

  Alongside the advisors, each had their own character. Hannah was Nefertiti and David was Charles Darwin. Emmeline, only four when the governing laws were drawn up, had chosen Queen Victoria. A dull choice, Hannah and David agreed, understandable given Emmeline’s limited years but certainly not a suitable adventure mate. Victoria was nonetheless accommodated into The Game, most often cast as a kidnap victim whose capture was precipitant of a daring rescue. While the other two were writing up their accounts, Emmeline was allowed to decorate the diagrams and shade the maps: blue for the ocean, purple for the deep, green and yellow for land.

  Occasionally, David wasn’t available—the rain would subside for an hour and he would sneak out to play marbles with the other estate lads, or else he would occupy himself practising piano. Then Hannah would realign her loyalties with Emmeline. The pair would hide away in the linen closet with a stash of sugar cubes from Mrs Townsend’s dry store, and would invent special names in secret languages to describe the traitorous absconder. But no matter how much they wanted to, they never played The Game without him. To do so would have been unthinkable.

  Rule number three: only three may play. No more, no less. Three. A number favoured as much by art as by science: primary colours, points required to locate an object in space, notes to form a musical chord. Three points of a triangle, the first geometrical figure. Incontrovertible fact: two straight lines cannot enclose a space. The points of a triangle may move, shift allegiance, the distance between two disappear as they draw away from the third, but together they always define a triangle. Self-contained, real, complete.

  The Game’s rules I learned because I read them. Written in neat but childish handwriting on yellowing paper, stuck beneath the lid of the box. I will remember them forever. To these rules, each had put their name. By general agreement, this third day of April, 1908. David Hartford, Hannah Hartford, and finally, in larger, more abstract print, the initials EH. Rules are a serious business for children, and The Game required a sense of duty adults wouldn’t understand. Unless of course they were servants, in which case duty was something they knew a lot about.

  So there it is. It was just a children’s game. And not the only one they played. Eventually they outgrew it, forgot it, left it behind. Or thought they did. By the time I met them it was already on its last legs. History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape and adulthood were lurking, laughing, round the corner.

  Just a children’s game and yet . . . What happened in the end would surely not have come about without it?

  The day of the guests’ arrival dawned and I was given special permission, on condition my duties were complete, to watch from the first-floor balcony. As outside evening fell, I huddled by the banister, face pressed between two rails, eagerly awaiting the crunch of motor-car tyres on the gravel out front.

  First to arrive was Lady Clementine de Welton, a family friend with the grandeur and gloom of the late Queen, and her charge Miss Frances Dawkins (universally known as Fanny): a skinny, garrulous girl whose parents had gone down with the Titanic and who, at seventeen, was rumoured to be in energetic pursuit of a husband. According to Nancy, it was Lady Violet’s dearest wish that Fanny should make a match with the widowed Mr Frederick, though the latter remained entirely unconvinced.

  Mr Hamilton led them to the drawing room where Lord and Lady Ashbury were waiting, and announced their arrival with a flourish. I watched from behind as they disappeared into the room—Lady Clementine first, Fanny close behind—and was put in mind of Mr Hamilton’s salver of cocktail glasses on which the brandy balloons and champagne flutes jostled for space.

  Mr Hamilton returned to the entrance hall and was straightening his cuffs—a gesture that was habit with him—when the Major and his wife arrived. She was a small, plump, brown-haired woman whose face, though kindly, bore the cruel etchings of grief. It is hindsight, of course, that makes me describe
her thus, though even at the time I supposed her the victim of some misfortune. Nancy may not have been prepared to divulge the mystery of the Major’s children, but my young imagination, fed as it was on Gothic novels, was a fertile place. Besides, the nuances of attraction between a man and a woman were foreign to me then and I reasoned only tragedy could account for such a tall, handsome man as the Major being married to so plain a woman. She must once have been lovely, I supposed, until some fiendish hardship befell them and seized from her whatever youth or beauty she had once possessed.

  The Major, even sterner than his portrait allowed, asked customarily after Mr Hamilton’s health, cast a proprietorial glance over the entrance hall and led Jemima to the drawing room. As they disappeared behind the door I saw that his hand rested tenderly at the base of her spine, a gesture that somehow belied his severe physical bearing, and which I have never quite forgotten.

  My legs had grown stiff from crouching when finally Mr Frederick’s motor car crunched along the gravel of the driveway. Mr Hamilton glanced reprovingly at the hall clock then pulled open the front door.

  Mr Frederick was shorter than I expected, certainly not so tall as his brother, and I could make out no more of his features than the rim of a pair of glasses. For even when his hat was taken he did not raise his head. Merely ran his hand tentatively over the top to smooth his fair hair.

  Only when Mr Hamilton opened the drawing-room door and announced his arrival did Mr Frederick’s attention flicker from his purpose. His gaze skittered about the room, taking in the marble, the portraits, the home of his youth, before alighting finally on my balcony. And in the brief moment before he was swallowed by the noisy room, his face paled as if he’d seen a ghost.

  The week passed quickly. With so many extra people in the house I was kept busy making up rooms, carrying tea trays, laying out luncheons. This pleased me well as I was not shy of hard work—Mother had made sure of that. Besides, I longed for the weekend to arrive and with it the bank holiday play recital. For while the rest of the staff was focused on the midsummer dinner, all I could think of was the recital. I had barely seen the children since the adults arrived. The fog blew away as suddenly as it came, leaving in its place warm, clear skies too beautiful to waste indoors. Each day, as I rounded the corridor toward the nursery, I held my breath hopefully, but the fine weather was to hold and they were not to use the room again that year. They took their noise and their mischief and their Game outside.