Two shadows fell over the Miller household, of which Agatha was dimly aware: anxiety about illness and about money. By the time she was five, Frederick’s business affairs had fallen into a sorry state, and it was then that the mishandling of Nathaniel’s trust obliged the Millers to economise by letting Ashfield and spending a year abroad. On their return they found matters no better. Money that had been invested in leasehold property in New York City brought little or no income, being mostly swallowed up in repairs or taxation. One of the trustees, who wrote Frederick encouraging but baffling letters, eventually shot himself. Frederick took himself to New York to try to sort matters out but had no success; in any case, as Agatha wrote later, he was a trusting man whom it was easy to swindle. On one occasion, after the Millers’ return from France, Agatha overheard her parents discussing their financial difficulties, which she not unnaturally compared to the catastrophes befalling the families described in the books she read. (Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers were two, with the father wrongfully arrested in the first story and losing all his money in the second.) She straightway announced to Marie that they were ruined. When this reached Clara’s ears, she reproached Agatha and quickly dispelled her melodramatic visions, explaining that they were simply badly off and would have to economise. This was disappointing because it was unsensational; it was also not entirely reassuring.
Where money came from and why it came at all were in any case mysteries to Agatha. As her father did not go off each day to any sort of business, her notion of the connection between the expenditure of effort and the earning of money was vague. The amount of her own pocket money fluctuated from day to day; it was not computed according to any obvious principle – so much for each year of her age, or whatever – but consisted of what copper coins Frederick turned out of his pockets. ‘I would visit him in his dressing-room, say good morning, and then turn to the dressing table to see what Fate had decreed for me … Two-pence? Fivepence? Once a whole elevenpence! Some days, no coppers at all. The uncertainty made it rather exciting.’ Prosperity or penury, then, depended largely on ‘Fate’. This was the theme of some of Agatha’s own early inventions, like the story of Mrs Benson and the Kittens, precipitated into direst poverty when the Captain went down at sea but, with his reappearance, restored to vast wealth ‘just when things had become quite desperate’. As money arrived in some inexplicable fashion, so it could vanish away. Now Agatha could see that her parents were worried and that these anxieties were making her father ill.
Frederick had first felt seedy while the family was in France, where he had seen a couple of doctors, one of whom diagnosed kidney disease. His own doctor in Torquay disagreed and other diagnoses were then made by different specialists. He suffered from attacks of pain and breathlessness, exacerbated, it seemed, by worry about his financial affairs. None of the treatments prescribed – rest, a diet of hot water and hot minced beef, and so forth – produced any improvement. Clara, a keen reader of The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, found the variations in diagnosis and prescription extremely trying, but she continued to encourage Frederick by telling him how much better he looked.
Frederick, however, was very unwell. He methodically kept a list of ‘Heart Attacks’ – fifteen bouts between April 1899 and June 1901 and another thirty, mostly late at night, between June and September. He continued to seek treatment; in late October he stayed with his stepmother in Ealing and went again to see one of the most respected specialists. A letter to Clara from his Club shows how desperately they had been searching for remedies:
My darling Clara, I saw Sansom this morning & he told me very much the same thing as last time. He insisted that my trouble has more to do with the nerves of the heart than anything else and recommends very much the same thing as before – viz. plenty of fresh air, distilled water, milk after meals & later perhaps cod liver oil (emulsion) or Extract of Malt and moderate exercise. He says most positively that my heart is not dilated and is of normal size & there is nothing valvular wrong but that it is weak & irregular.… He does not think the lying up system advisable but would compromise by having me lie on a sofa a part of the day with the window open & fresh air blowing over me. I have felt wonderfully better the last two days – better in fact than I have for 3 weeks – scarcely any breathlessness & splendid nights. I don’t know whether this is owing to a prescription of Taylor’s with digitalin in it or to my doing much less walking … I have decided to return on Wednesday next 30th if all goes well. I should much prefer – between ourselves, coming down now but Mother is so kind and good that I cannot bear to disappoint her. I can’t tell you how nice she has been to me & I know she was greatly worried in the early part of the week. I didn’t tell Sansom that I had been under homeopathy.…
Ill though he was, Frederick never seemed to Agatha to become cross or irritable and, as far as he could, he lived much as before. One letter to Clara reported that he had lunched at the Naval and Military ‘with the best appetite I have had for weeks – roast beef & spinach & rice pudding’ and that his stepmother had taken him to The Silver Slipper – ‘very pretty music and fairly amusing’. That letter ended cheerfully: ‘I am now, please God, done with Doctors, & hope I may get better soon. Love to my dear ones. I hope Agatha is better today [she had a cold]. The weather is again vile today. I hope this letter will make you feel happier & I think you will see by its tone that I certainly am. God bless you, my darling.’ Less than a month later, Frederick returned to Ealing, to see friends in London who might help him to find some sort of job. He caught a chill, which turned to double pneumonia; Clara and, eventually, Madge and Agatha, were summoned. On November 26th, at the age of fifty-five, he died.
Agatha, who was eleven, fixed that moment as the end of her childhood. Her world was vulnerable; for the first time she felt responsible for someone else: Clara. Her parents’ marriage had been a good one. Hannah, the cook at Ealing, who took Agatha into the kitchen on the pretext that she needed help mixing the pastry, told her again and again, ‘They were very devoted.’ The rest of the household crept about and whispered, sighing over Clara’s prostration. She was devastated by Frederick’s death. In her Autobiography Agatha spoke of Frederick’s last letter to her mother: ‘You have made all the difference in my life. No man ever had a wife like you. Every year I have been married to you I love you more.’ With it Clara kept the notebooks she had embroidered for him, the order of service from his funeral, some beech leaves from Ealing Cemetery, the little account book in which he recorded his expenditure, with a few of his fine, pale brown hairs pressed between the pages, and the piece of Pears soap he had last used. On a card placed with this collection was written: ‘There are four things that come not back to man or woman: 1. The Spoken Word. 2. The Sped Arrow. 3. The Past Life. 4. The Neglected Opportunity.’
After three weeks in France with Madge, Clara returned to Ashfield, where Agatha was waiting alone. Monty was now abroad with his regiment. He had worked in a shipyard on the Dart in Devon and afterwards in Lincolnshire but had failed in his efforts to become an engineer. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 settled his choice of career. He volunteered for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Regiment and, at the end of the War in 1902, obtained a commission with the East Surreys and proceeded to India. Madge and James lived in the North, at Cheadle, near James’s parents. Clara and Agatha were left together at Ashfield; as Agatha put it, ‘We were no longer the Millers – a family. We were now two people living together, a middle-aged woman and an untried, naïve girl.’ Her description of herself is illuminating: she was, after all, only eleven. Though written years later, it is a reminder of how vulnerable and responsible she suddenly felt. There was little money. Auguste Montant, Frederick’s executor, explained to Clara that most of Nathaniel’s estate had disappeared. H.B. Chaflin & Co., of which Nathaniel had been a partner, would continue to provide an income for his widow, Margaret, and a small income for Clara, while the three children, Agatha, Madge and Monty, would