“....Mr. Macefield,”
Cecily said, keeping her eyes on the smudged handle of her tea-cup and wishing
she were anywhere but in the dining room with this…this author. She refrained from labeling him a malaprop, though this
entire ordeal was his fault. “I think I
had better take the children up to bed now.” She waited not for his reply, but
summoned the children with a regal gesture of her white hands. The trio of
twins rose amid the clattering of the tea-things, and followed her out of the
dining room and up the marble staircase. Up the children went, then mounted the
banister to begin their usual process of going to bed.
“What are you
doing?” Miss Woodruff asked, hands on her hips.
“We are going to
bed,” Darby said, waving at her from his vantage-point of the ornate
landing-newel.
“How so, Master
Darby? On the banister? I would think that would make a hard sleeping-place.”
The children had
never before questioned their manner of going to bed. It was always up the
stairs, down the banister, up the stairs again, and a rollicking tramp through
the halls before descending upon Mum with over-earnest kisses. So it was a new
thought to wonder what the normal manner of going to bed was.
“How d’you go to
bed, Mith Woodruff?” Fergus asked, banging her lightly on the head with a
balled up fist. He swung his legs and kicked the balusters, as at home on the
hand-rail as a cat is on a ridge-pole.
Miss Woodruff
caught the belligerent fist in her hand and patted it. “I walk up the stairs
and then I go calmly to my bed like everyone else.”
Bertram coughed
and put his head to one side, chewing his lip. “I s’pose ‘everyone else’ is a
relative term, Miss Woodruff. We’ve never watched anyone go to bed but
ourselves—how are we supposed to know how people do it?”
Cecily Woodruff
laughed and the children felt warm all over. “Go on then and slide down. Just
once, mind you, and tomorrow I will show you the proper way to go about it.”
There was a
scuffle and a sliding noise like half-a-dozen little penguins sledding down an
embankment, then a rush and a dreadful clatter of shoes-on-marble as the
children came up the stairs. Darby and Charlotte each grabbed one of Cecily’s
hands and the whole mob of children and nanny proceeded up the stairs and into
the hall. Cecily withdrew her hand and put a finger to her lips.
“We must be quiet,
for your Mama has a headache,” she said.
The children were
so far acquainted with their new nanny at this point, that they thought
absolutely nothing of her knowing about their mother, and they only crept down
the hall and assembled at the door in silence. Cecily put a hand to the knob
and eased the door in, and strange to say, it did not hush at them as usual but
glided open without a sound.
“Children? Is that
you?” Mrs. Macefield’s querulous voice warbled from the shadows of her canopied
bed.
“Yes, Mum,”
Bertram said in a low voice. “We’ve brought our new nanny too.”
“A new nanny?” Mrs.
Macefield asked in accusing tones, as if it were far more probable they had
brought a giraffe or a baboon to perform tricks for her. “What do you mean by
teasing me so?”
“But we aren’t,
Mum. Her name is Cecily Woodruff, and she’s come to look after us.” Bertram
took hold of one of Cecily’s hands and tugged her forward. Cecily stepped into
the uncertain light of the bedside gas-lamp, and curtsied. It was the most
regal curtsey Bertram had ever seen, for
Miss Woodruff did not bow her head, but sank down, long lashes sweeping her
cheeks, and rose again with courtly poise. He could almost imagine she was not
a nanny at all, but a fine lady at a dress-ball—only the clothes were wrong,
and the room was wrong, and there was no music.
Mrs. Macefield
fluttered in her bed, clutching at her blanket with discontent fingers and
sighing. “I regret I am not able to leave my bed, Miss Woodruff,” she said,
casting her eyes at the said person and sighing again.
“Regrettable
indeed, Mrs. Macefield. But rest assured, the children and I are getting along
very well already.”
Mrs. Macefield
laughed bitterly, but it was so very unlike Cecily’s musical laughter that it
jarred Bertram’s ears and he drew away from his mother.
“Doubtless you
will find out, Miss Woodruff, that the children are not all they seem. Or
perhaps, they are more than they seem. Either way, they ran the last nanny off
after only a month.”
Cecily inclined
her head with a respectful gesture, but by the set of her red lips, Bertram
knew she was not pleased. He felt unsettled and torn inside, like he’d eaten
too many muffins at teatime, and one of them had been full of pencil shavings.
Cecily—nay, Miss Woodruff was so wonderful he couldn’t help but side with her.
But then Mum wasn’t a bad sort, and she was ill—so perhaps his allegiance
belonged to her?
Bertram did not
like such problems—they couldn’t be solved with logic, and therefore they
oughtn’t to exist. He scuffed at a beige rose in the carpet and wondered what
would happen next. Something had to happen, for they were all standing here dull
as powder in a sort of unspoken check-mate.
As Bertram felt
his collar tighten and his ears getting hot, and he wondered if the awkwardness
would ever wear off, Miss Woodruff finally cleared her throat. It had an “I’ll
handle this” sort of sound to it, and Bertram let his breath out in a relieved
whistle.
“Mrs. Macefield, I
have not had much experience in life yet—”
“No,” Mrs.
Macefield said. It was a very decided no, and Bertram bit his lip at the
sarcasm shaking through its tones. Miss Woodruff only smiled, and under the
influence of her smile, Mrs. Macefield’s manner relaxed an increment. “No, you
have not. But I interrupted you—go on, pray.”
Miss Woodruff
clasped her hands before her, and the gas-light shone on her hair till it
glowed like polished pine-wood. “I believe it is a rule with people that the
moment we think we know everything about a person, we find out we are very much
wrong. Goodnight, Mrs. Macefield.”
Cecily Woodruff
stepped back into the shadows and pushed the children forward with a gentle but
firm hand. They dropped heartfelt, though timid kisses on Mrs. Macefield’s
sallow cheeks, then tip-toed out of the room, feeling that something had gone
wrong and been set right all in a moment back there.
Once in the
nursery, Cecily sighed, and swept the children with a bright gaze. “We shall
have to see about cheering your Mama up,” she said.
Adelaide poked her head through the opening
of her night-gown and wriggled her arms through the sleeves. “Oh, Mum is always
ill. There’s no use trying to cheer her
up.”
Cecily pulled Adelaide to her side and
fastened the buttons up the back with her lithe, tapering fingers. “But think
how much worse her illness would be if you didn’t try your very best to make
her feel better.”
Adelaide gave a side-ways smile and tugged
her curls into a loose braid. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met, Miss
Woodruff.”
“Oh? How so?”
Adelaide
jumped in bed beside Charlotte
and pulled the covers to her chin. “I don’t know exactly—but you’re better and
prettier somehow than anyone in real life. It’s almost as if you were a fairy
princess come out of a story to take care of us.”
“Yes, Miss
Woodruff,” Charlotte
said. Her voice came sleepily from the depths of the feather-pillows.
Darby and Bertram
scrambled into their beds and burrowed beneath the counterpanes like a pair of
dozy caterpillars. The babies toddled over to Cecily as she seated herself in
the rocking chair near the fireplace. She lifted them into her lap, and Eugenie
laid a curly head against Cecily’s breast. Fergus regarded her with a
thoughtful expression on his baby-face.
Darby sat up and
scratched his nose. “Where are you
from, Miss Woodruff?”
A queer smile
quirked at the corners of Cecily’s mouth as she answered, “I may or may not be
from somewhere very far away.”
And if felt then,
as Adelaide later described it, as if her words made the world seem very large,
like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It was such a strange,
broadening sensation, and not at all like a Just Before Bed thought, that the
children were more than happy to whisper goodnights to each other and go to
sleep directly. And nothing, save the moon out the nursery window, saw the
starry tear slip down Cecily’s cheek and land on Eugenie’s nightgown as she
rocked the child to sleep.
3 comments:
Oh, pray do tells us more!! I want to know more about this amazing story!! Pray continue posting more!
Please! i second her request. we loved being "bored" by your work its so delightful.
Good job! Not in the least boring! I felt as if I was in that world.
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