I said yes to the doll; it was better to appear bought off, but her refusal to help me, far from discouraging me, opposited, and merely stubborned my resolve. Slowly, and with some difficulty, I taught myself to read. I lingered the kitchen and stole letters from John when he was reading the newspaper. I would point to an ‘s’ or a ‘b’ and ask him to tell me its sound. One day in the library I fortuned upon a child’s primer and from that and from here and there, I eventually broke the code.
So began the sneakery of my life. In those early days Giles and I were let wild; much of the day we could play as we liked. We had only two restrictions: one was to avoid the old well, although that was anyway covered up with planks and paving slabs too heavy for us to lift and so was just one of those things grown-ups like to worry themselves about and presented no danger to us at all; the other was to stay away from the lake, which was exceeding deep in parts, and perhaps might. How like grown-ups it is to see danger where there is none; to look for it in a lake or a well, which offer no harm in themselves without the agency of human malevolence or neglect. Yet these same cautious adults would be all unaware when the threat to us children actually came, for unlike us, for all their talk of the house being full of ghosts and ghouls, they had long ago ceased to hear unexplained footsteps in the dark.
Running apart, my brother Giles has not many talents, but one thing he is good at is keeping a secret. When I took him to the library, he little cared for the books, although he could be occupied by colour plates of birds or butterflies for an hour or two. He was happy enough scampering up and down the ladders and climbing the shelves or hiding behind the drapes, or else he would play outside; you could trust him, even at that early age, to avoid the lake, or Mrs Grouse’s prying eyes.
I, meanwhile, spent hour after hour reading, and because my absences, although unremarked during the daytime, would be noticed in the evenings, my bedroom became a smugglery of books. After Giles reached the age of eight and was sent away to school, of course, my life turned into an unheedery of anyone else. I could come and go as I liked; this part of the house was largely unvisited, and I grew so bold I scarce worried about anyone seeing me enter or leave the library, or disturbing the dust that lived there. In this way I absorbed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, the poetry of Longfellow, Whitman, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, they were all there. But one writer towered them all. Shakespeare, of course. I started with Romeo and Juliet, moved on to the histories, and soon made short work of the rest. I wept for King Lear, I feared Othello, and dreaded Macbeth; Hamlet I simply adored. The sonnets weeped me. Above all, I fell in love with the iambic pentameter, a strange passion for an eleven-year-old girl.
The thing I liked most about Shakespeare was his free and easy way with words. It seemed that if there wasn’t a word for what he wanted to say, he simply made one up. He barded the language. For making up words, he knocks any other writer dead. When I am grown and a writer myself, as I know I shall be, I intend to Shakespeare a few words of my own. I am already practising now.
It was always my greatest ambition to see Shakespeare on stage, but there is no theatre between here and New York City, hopelessing my wish. Last summer, not long before Giles was sent off to school, the people who have the estate next door, the Van Hoosiers, came calling; they had a son, Theodore, a couple of years older than me, an only child they wished to unbore. They lived in New York most of the year, travelling the hundred miles or so up here only in summer to escape the heat of the city, and the young man had no one to keep him amused and so he excited to find me. He sat and doe-eyed me all through tea.
Afterward Mrs Grouse suggested I show Theodore the lake. Now it misfortuned that Giles was ill in bed that day, confined by a severe headache. My brother is as sickly as I am well; he has illness enough for us both, while I have no time to be indisposed, having all the looking after and worrying to do. Giles’s absence now, when young Van Hoosier and I outdoorsed, gave my visitor free rein with me. He nuisanced me, obsessed as he was by my allowing him to give me a kiss. I had no fixed objection to this, being, as I was, not much younger than Juliet when she got herself romanced, but young Van Hoosier was no Romeo. He had a large head and eyes like balls that stood out from their sockets. He looked like a giant bug. Now, I am tall for my age, but Theodore was even taller, without half as much flesh; he beanpoled above me, which did not endear him to me, for I have never been one who could stand to be looked down upon.
We were side-by-siding on a stone bench beside the lake and I shifted myself to other-end from him, for I found his attentions annoying and was about ready to get up and leave, but then he let slip, no doubt at some mention of mine of Shakespeare, that he had seen Hamlet. I alerted and sat up straight and looked at him anew. Perhaps, after all, this boy might not be so unbooked as he succeeded so well in appearing; there were possibilities here, I sensed. I offered him a deal. I would allow him the kiss he so craved, if he would write a love poem for me.
Well, he pulled out a notebook and pencil and got right down to it there and then, and in no time at all was ripping out the page he’d written on and handing it to me, which impressed me quite, though I dare say you can guess what befell. Foolish girl, I wanted him to summer’s day me, I really thought he might. Instead, of course, he doggerelled me and, after he’d forced the kiss he claimed was his due, left me crying by the lake, not only roughly kissed but badly Longfellowed too. Here is how the Van Hoosier ode finished, so you’ll understand for yourself:
What fellow who has any sense
Would not want to kiss Florence?
Giles was sent away to school last fall when he was eight, which, although young, was in keeping with other boys of his class who lived in remote places such as Blithe, where there was no suitable local school. We horse-and-trapped him to the station, John and Mrs Grouse and I, to put him on the train to New York, where he was to be met by teachers from the school. We cried him there; at least Mrs Grouse and I did, while John losing-battled with a quivering lower lip. Giles himself was happy and laughing. He could not remember ever having been on a train and, in his simple, childlike way, futured no further than that. Once on board, he sat in his seat, windowing us with smiles and waves, and I bit my lip and did my best to smile him back, but it was a hard act and I was glad when at last the train began to move and he vanished in a cloud of steam.
I berefted my way home. All our lives, Giles and I had never been apart; it was as though I had lost a limb. How would he fare unprotected by me, who understood his shortcomings so well and loved him for them? Although I had no experience of boys apart from Giles and the silly Van Hoosier boy, I knew from my reading how they cruelled one another, especially at boarding schools. The idea of my little Giles being Flashmanned weeped me all over again when I had just gotten myself back under control. When we neared Blithe House and the trap turned off the road into the long drive, avenued by its mighty oaks rooked with nests, it heavied my heart; I did not know how my new, amputated life was to be borne.
Most girls my age and situation in life would long have been governessed, but I understood this was not for me. By careful quizzery of Mrs Grouse, and a hint or two dropped by John, and general eavesdroppery of servantile gossip, I piecemealed the reason why. My uncle, who had been handsome as a young man, as you could see in the picture in oils of him that hung at the turn of the main staircase, had at one time been married, or if not actually wed, then engaged to, or at least deeply in love with, a young woman, a state of affairs that lasted a number of years. The young lady was dazzlingly beautiful but not his equal in refinement and education, although at first that seemed not to matter. All futured well until she took it into her head (or rather had it put there by my uncle) that she beneathed him in intellectual and cultural things; their life together would be enriched, it was decided, if they could share not just love, but matters of the mind. The young lady