Chapter 4
4
Within the week, Olivia had moved into the tower. The lad who’d been living there was apparently quite put out but was not in a position to argue. The head gardener, Mr Rowe, oversaw the transfer of the priceless collection of orchids to one of the conservatories at the back of the main house, although Olivia understood that Lady Fairchild was not enamoured of the plants and it was only the rarity of the collection and pleas of the head gardener that had persuaded her to keep them. Ruth was given the room on the ground floor, so that anyone wishing to call on Miss Davenport would have to get past her first; not exactly the dragon protector of fairy tales, but certainly someone capable of challenging visitors and keeping her safe.
Olivia had watched the young gardening lad from the nursery window as he’d moved his belongings out and found herself quite taken with him. He was a serious-faced individual, with green eyes, a suspicious gaze and unruly, black hair. She rather thought his looks suited those of a tragic romantic hero and so it became his furrowed brow that bent earnestly towards hers in her escapist fantasies, as he swept her onto his majestic black steed and galloped from the battlefield into the blazing sunset.
The change of bedroom marked a new start for Olivia and allowed her to move on from her grief. She could so easily have perished on the Titanic , even though as a child of first-class passengers, her probability of survival would have been high. But she felt lucky to have escaped the horror of it all, and decided forthwith to spread joy and live a life her parents would be proud of.
For days, she’d held on to the ridiculous hope that they’d swum to safety or been picked up by a passing fishing boat – a daring escapade worthy of her father’s books. But as she gleaned more about the unfathomable tragedy from the papers, and concerned adults gently nudged her towards the awful truth, she realised no one could survive more than a few minutes in the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, and it was simply not a place that smaller vessels would happen to be bobbing about. By the June, when their bodies were not amongst those recovered by the vessels contracted by the White Star Line to retrieve the dead – she’d finally accepted there would be no burial either.
One warm July afternoon, having packed her father’s old knapsack, and wearing a battered Homburg she’d found in the boot room, she took herself to a small copse near the boating lake and draped herself across the thick bough of a sycamore. She was on her stomach, with her eyes closed, when a voice jolted her from her daydreams.
‘Why are you sleeping up the tree?’
Olivia looked down to the ground, where the youngest Fairchild son was gazing up at her through a pair of thin wire spectacles, wearing a tweed jacket and knickerbockers, and clutching a leather satchel.
‘Benji?’ She heaved herself upright and swung her right leg over the wide branch, wrestling to straighten her skirts as she did so. ‘I didn’t know you were back from school.’
‘My term finishes before Howard’s. Mother said I wasn’t to bother you and that we had to be extra kind because…’ He didn’t need to finish the sentence and wisely chose not to, his cheeks colouring up as he realised his error, and his eyes drifting slowly to the ground as his words tailed off.
‘Girls don’t climb trees,’ he eventually said, to fill the silence.
‘I’m not a girl; I’m Sir Walter Raleigh, battle-weary and taking the opportunity to rest a while on top of this misty mountain.’
‘But it’s not a mountain; it’s a tree,’ he astutely pointed out. ‘And you’re not Raleigh.’
Olivia slid down the wide trunk and sighed. She didn’t particularly want to engage with this young boy, who she felt was somewhat of a baby compared to herself.
‘I can be anyone I want to be. Yesterday, I was Rapunzel, locked in a tower, letting down my hair for the handsome prince to climb up. Today, I am an intrepid explorer and charming privateer. Since six o’clock this morning, I have fought alongside the Huguenots and explored the Americas. This afternoon, I shall present Queen Elizabeth with tobacco and endeavour to discover the lost city of El Dorado. By nightfall, I’ll have been executed for treason.’
Benji narrowed his dark-blue eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘But not really, you’re not. It’s just pretend.’
‘That rather depends on how you decide what is real. The scenes I hold in my head are real for the moments I choose them to be. Our brains allow us to live many lives other than our physical existence. Ones we can’t control, like in our dreams, and ones we can, like our deliberate thoughts.’
The young boy looked up at her face in wonder.
‘Mother says you’re a strange one, but we shouldn’t draw attention to it because your parents are dead.’ He’d completely forgotten his earlier attempts to avoid the delicate subject. ‘And then I thought I’d be sad if my mother and father drowned at sea, so I decided you might like some company.’
‘That’s sweet but I’m quite happy on my own.’
‘Please let me play. I’m very good at swishing swords about. I have an old one of Howard’s made of wood. Only don’t tell my brothers when they return. They always rib me for being childish because they’re too big for play-acting now.’
But Olivia didn’t want to include Benji in her make-believe world, because you couldn’t explain all the wonderful things you saw in your mind’s eye to someone else and, if you tried, it took you out of the moment. The whole point of her escapism was that it was a solitary activity. If she wanted to scamper down a grassy hillside to attack a fierce Viking army one minute, but be running from a fire-breathing dragon towards the mounted figure of her would-be saviour the next, then she didn’t have to explain the change of game to anyone. She was certainly not prepared to let Benji come to her rescue, when she was planning on a green-eyed, dark-haired young man fulfilling that role. Her imaginary worlds were intensely personal and not to be shared with a curious nine-year-old.
‘What’s in your satchel?’ she asked, trying to be kind by angling the conversation towards him.
‘Just stuff.’ He shuffled from foot to foot and blinked several times.
She slid from the tree and collected her knapsack from the base of the trunk, swinging it up in the air. ‘I have all the essentials in my bag: a hearty lunch, a small telescope, a compass and a catapult. I’m a mean shot,’ she admitted. ‘My father taught me.’
‘I have pencils with me,’ he said, deciding he could trust her. ‘And paper. I like drawing things.’
She remembered Benji sitting quietly in the corner of the vast morning room when her family had visited back in December, contentedly scribbling in a sketchbook, whilst his brothers spent most of the day playing battledore and shuttlecock in the high-ceilinged entrance hall, with their mother continually apologising for the noise. The afternoon had ended with a broken chandelier and Clarence and Louis being reprimanded by a furious Sir Hugo. To see them with their heads bowed in front of their father was a reminder of what an important man the owner of Merriford Manor was.
Not long afterwards, Clarence had sauntered into the morning room, snatched up the pad and called his baby brother ‘our little Cubist’. This, she understood, was a slur on his artwork, although quite what he expected a nearly nine-year-old to be producing was anyone’s guess.
‘Come on. Let’s walk back to the Japanese gardens and you can sketch the dragon?’ Olivia said, recognising Benji was not going to leave her alone any time soon. Besides, she’d gone off the idea of being beheaded by an angry King James I.
* * *
The oriental gardens at Merriford Manor fascinated Olivia. The pond had a bright-red arched bridge at one end and, right in the centre, stood a five-foot-high stone dragon that continuously spewed water from its ferocious open mouth. There were screens of bamboo dotted about that made the space seem larger than it was, and the air was filled with the sweet, fruity scents of jasmine and honeysuckle.
Benji settled down with his sketchbook balanced on his knees, the tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration. Olivia lay back on the neatly clipped bank of grass and stared up at the bulbous clouds drifting by. She imagined boxing hares and jumping horses in the twisting shapes of the cumuli above her head, happy to lose herself in this whimsical activity and provide silent companionship to a lonely little boy for a while.
Their peace was disturbed by the rumble of a wooden barrow being wheeled over the bridge. Benji put down his pencils and stood up to wave.
‘Ahoy there, Tanner. I’m back.’
It was the emerald-eyed object of her romantic imaginings, and the young man grunted, his eyebrows heavy over his face, as he slipped on a pair of waders.
‘Afternoon, Master Benji,’ he begrudgingly acknowledged in a soft Norfolk accent. ‘How was school?’
‘Horrid. I don’t like the other boys in my dorm or any of the lessons. Numbers always confuse me and I get picked on because I’m small for my age.’
‘Be thankful for an education, young man. The learning you’re doing now will reap rewards when you get to my age. You won’t be slaving away all hours, undertaking back-breaking work, for the sake of a few shillings.’ He looked at Olivia, who had now seated herself upright, as he stepped into the water. She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand. ‘Young Miss Davenport, I assume?’ He nodded in deference, and then turned back to the barrow, reaching for the long handle of a wide pond net.
‘This is Tanner,’ Benji explained, belatedly realising the two had not been introduced, but then the worlds of a relatively wealthy orphan girl from the main house and an undergardener were quite removed. ‘He’s always been kind to me, and sometimes lets me help with deadheading the roses, or seed planting in the greenhouse. He can’t help being grumpy. That’s just his way.’ The young boy shrugged.
Olivia tried not to smile at his lack of tact, and Tanner raised his eyebrows at the candid description of him but didn’t comment. Perhaps he knew it was a fair assessment. Instead, he returned his focus to the task of skimming the blanket of bright-green duckweed from the surface of the water.
‘I’m sorry that you had to move from the tower.’ Olivia felt the need to apologise, but there was also a part of her that wanted to engage the young man in conversation. At a guess, he was perhaps six or seven years older than her – to her mind, the perfect age gap for any romantic couple.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t matter, miss.’ But the way he avoided her eye suggested it did.
‘Well, it was kind of you,’ she persevered and cleared her throat. ‘I, erm, found a small bone-handled penknife on the window ledge of my new bedroom – the right-hand room on the first floor. Shall I see that it is returned to you?’ she said.
‘That’s far more likely to belong to young Master Howard, who is always finding himself in places he shouldn’t be. I had the room on the left.’
He gave a nod and a half-smile, perhaps in an effort to dispel the accusation of grumpiness. There was no more to say, so he returned to the job in hand as she watched Benji shape and shade his mythical beast for a while.
A wasp buzzed around Tanner’s face but he swatted it, inadvertently shooting it towards himself. A moment later, he cursed, whipped off his shirt, and she could see the red welt forming where he’d been stung. Olivia’s mouth dropped open, unable to believe her luck at seeing a real-life man briefly naked from the waist up. Tanner swore under his breath again and dressed himself. How brave, she thought, as he carried on without a fuss until he’d completed his task and, with a barrowful of lime-coloured weed, climbed back onto the path.
‘Would you like to see my dragon, Tanner?’ Benji asked, scrunching up his eyes as he assessed his handiwork and twisting the paper from side to side. ‘I’m not sure it’s any good. It looks a bit like a snake with legs, or a very thin horse.’
He held up the sketchbook and the gardener walked over to them, taking the time to consider the young boy’s efforts. ‘That’s wholly splendid, young man. You’ve really captured the eyes. Very fierce. I certainly wouldn’t want to meet it on a dark night. Much better than I could do. You’ve a gift, and if you keep practising, I can see you becoming quite the expert.’
‘Clarence said I’m rubbish and that a blind chimpanzee could do better.’ Olivia noticed how he hung his head as he spoke.
‘Older brothers always pick on younger brothers. They’re scared that one day, you’ll be bigger and better than them. People who criticise others are often unhappy with their lot in life, and lashing out makes them feel better.’
The difference between this young man’s encouragement and Clarence’s scathing remarks did not escape Olivia. Benji sat up straight and suddenly looked more self-assured.
‘You not drawing, miss?’ Tanner asked. He was making an effort, she recognised, probably because Benji had called him out as grumpy.
‘Olivia doesn’t do drawing,’ Benji answered on her behalf. ‘Her pictures are in her head. She does play-acting and pretends she’s Sir Walter Raleigh fighting the Spanish, or Rapunzel locked up in a tower. And, for a girl, she’s absolutely top drawer at boy things, like climbing trees.’
Olivia suddenly felt hot and uncomfortable. She didn’t want Benji sharing this information with the gardener in case he thought of her as a child, and she wasn’t – not really. Yes, she still wore her hair down and her skirts were off the ground, but she was developing curves and had an awareness of herself as a young woman… and an eye for handsome young gardeners.
‘Ah, daydreams.’ Tanner walked back to the wheelbarrow. ‘You’ll grow out of them, miss. Being a grown-up is knowing that the only way to be happy is to accept the cards you’ve been dealt. There’s no point escaping into worlds that don’t exist or wishing life was different. We all have our sorrows to bear and pretending you’re someone else for a few minutes won’t make your troubles disappear.’
But she wasn’t having that. The lad was wrong. Her father had built his whole career on people escaping to other worlds. He had told her repeatedly that one of the best things about being an author was the knowledge that his stories brought joy to the ordinary man, allowing him to escape his dreary life, even if just for a few hours. If your existence was a monotonous round of work and sleep, then delving into a world of adventure, where the lowly triumphed, anyone could be a hero, and evil was punished, would lift your spirits. Books offered hope, as well as educating you, and possibly even inspiring an individual to greater things – assuming you could read, of course.
‘Isn’t that even more reason to lose yourself in a daydream?’ she said. ‘When life doesn’t turn out how you expect, you can at least imagine that it has.’
‘And what good does that do? Thinking about things you can’t have and places you’ll never visit? I’m fully aware of my lot in life. I don’t dream of being King of England because it won’t happen. Sum of my ambition is to keep working so that I have a roof to keep me dry and food on the table. I’ll keep my head down and do this job to the best of my ability until I can lift a spade no more.’
He doffed his woollen cap at them both, grabbed the handles of the barrow and headed for the little curved bridge.
‘I say,’ Benji said, when he’d disappeared from view, ‘don’t go getting him into trouble or anything, will you? He has always been awfully kind to me. I overheard two of the maids whispering about him once, and saying how his sweetheart, Annie, had run off with another man and that’s bound to make someone prickly. Although I generally find girls a nuisance – not you, of course,’ he added hastily, his cheeks tinged pink. ‘You don’t count… as a girl, I mean.’
‘Charming.’ Here she was, trying to navigate her way into womanhood, when Tanner clearly thought of her as a child, and Benji didn’t consider her sex at all. That was the problem with play-acting – she was always so many people that she wasn’t sure she even knew who she truly was.
Her cheeks, however, remained warm from her interchange with Tanner and her heart was beating slightly faster. He had done nothing to dispel her romantic notion of him as her knight in shining armour. In fact, quite the contrary, she had marvelled at his bravery with the wasp, and admired his strong, tanned forearms as he’d pushed the barrow of duckweed. When she crawled into her bed that night and closed her eyes, he would be by her side in her wild adventures – whether he liked it or not.