CHAPTER TWO #2
“You’re quite right. That’s an excellent point. Shall I add a note to the map?”
Viola nodded, the barest movement of her head, and then slipped out the door to join her sisters. But she was smiling, barely, just enough.
Progress, Mel thought, came in many forms. With Anna, it came through responsibility. With Viola, it came through patience and space. With Thistle…
With Thistle, progress came through chaos management.
The first window escape happened on day four.
Mel had been in the middle of explaining long division when she looked up to find Thistle’s chair empty and the nursery window standing open, curtains billowing in the afternoon breeze.
By the time she reached the sill and looked out, Thistle was already halfway down the trellis, Brutus clutched in one hand, her small feet finding purchase on every rung as though she had practiced this climb a thousand times.
“Thistle.”
The child looked up, braids swinging.
“Yes, Miss Grace?”
“Where are you going?”
“Brutus needed fresh air. You said he needed afternoon constitutionals.”
“I meant supervised afternoon constitutionals, through the door.”
Thistle considered this. “The door is boring.”
“The door is safe. The trellis is not.”
“I’ve climbed it lots of times.”
“And one day you will fall. And then we shall all be very sorry, particularly Brutus, who will have no one to carry him in a pocket.” Mel kept her voice calm, conversational, as though discussing the weather rather than imminent plummeting.
“Please climb back up.”
“Can I climb back up through the window?”
“You may climb back up through the window this once. Tomorrow, we shall use the door.”
Thistle ascended the trellis with considerably more enthusiasm than she had descended it, and Mel made a mental note to speak with the groundskeeper about removing it before the next escape attempt.
The second window escape happened on day six, from a different window, down a different route. By day eight, Mel had identified and blocked every possible climbing exit from the nursery and schoolroom, and Thistle had moved on to other forms of chaos.
The kitchen incident occurred on day nine.
Mrs. Kemp’s screams could, according to the cook, be heard in the village. Certainly they could be heard in the schoolroom, where Mel was attempting to teach Anna and Viola about the reigns of the Tudor monarchs while Thistle was supposedly napping.
Thistle was not, as it transpired, napping.
Thistle had liberated Brutus from his terrarium, carried him downstairs via the servants’ stairs, and released him into the kitchen during the preparation of the evening’s soup.
The toad, finding himself unexpectedly at large in a warm room full of interesting and deliciously prepared meals, had done what any sensible toad would do and hopped directly onto Mrs. Kemp’s foot.
The resulting chaos involved two dropped saucepans, a scattered bin of flour, the cook’s assistant fainting into the root vegetables, and language from Mrs. Kemp that Mel would not have believed the proper housekeeper capable of producing.
By the time Mel arrived in the kitchen, Thistle was standing in the doorway with an expression of pure, bewildered innocence.
“I only wanted to show him where the flies are,” she said. “There are lots of flies in the kitchen. He would have liked it.”
“He would have liked it,” Mel agreed, “But Mrs. Kemp would not. And the kitchen is Mrs. Kemp’s domain, just as the schoolroom is mine.”
“Brutus doesn’t understand domains.”
“Then you must understand them for him. That is the responsibility of a toad’s guardian.”
The cat incident happened two days later.
Mr. Whiskers was an elderly tabby of considerable girth and very little patience, who had survived the childhoods of the three girls through a combination of strategic hiding and impressive speed when cornered.
He spent most of his days in the sunny spot by the library window, conserving his energy for the important work of ignoring everyone who attempted to pet him.
Thistle, for reasons that remained impervious to everyone including herself, had decided that Mr. Whiskers would make an excellent steed.
The attempt had lasted approximately three seconds before Mr. Whiskers, demonstrating a vigour that belied his advanced years, had twisted, scratched, and bolted for the safety of the kitchen stove, where he had wedged himself into the space between the warm metal and the wall and refused to emerge for the rest of the day.
Mel found Thistle sitting at the bottom of the stairs, examining the scratch on her forearm with more curiosity than distress.
“Thistle,” Mel said, settling onto the step beside her, “What did you expect to happen?”
“I expected it to work.”
“And what did happen?”
“Mr. Whiskers scratched my arm and hid under the stove.”
“What have we learned?”
Thistle’s brow furrowed. She was clearly running through possible responses, discarding the ones that might get her in trouble, searching for the answer that would satisfy her governess’s peculiar approach to discipline.
“That Mr. Whiskers is a coward,” she said finally.
Mel paused. It was not the answer she had expected, but it was, in its way, logical.
“What else have we learned?”
Thistle thought harder, her small face scrunched in concentration. Brutus shifted in her pocket, a small amphibian readjustment that seemed to provide moral support.
“That cats don’t like being ridden?”
“Progress,” Mel said, and meant it.
By the second week, the resistance began to thaw.
It was not a dramatic change, nothing that could be pointed to and named. It was more like the gradual warming of a room after the fire had been lit, a slow suffusion of heat that one didn’t notice until suddenly the chill had gone.
The girls began looking for Mel instead of avoiding her.
Anna appeared at her desk before breakfast on the tenth day, attendance register in hand, to report that Viola had woken early and Thistle had lost a sock.
“I found the sock,” Anna added. “Brutus was sitting on it.”
“Thank you for the report. That is exactly the sort of information a governess needs.”
Anna beamed and made a note in her register.
Viola began leaving drawings on Mel’s desk.
They appeared without explanation, small pieces of paper weighted with whatever object was nearest, bearing meticulous pencil sketches of flowers and toads and, on one occasion, a remarkably accurate portrait of Mr. Whiskers glaring from beneath the stove.
Mel collected them without comment, but she arranged them in a small stack on her windowsill where the morning light could illuminate them, and she noticed that Viola noticed, and that the drawings continued.
Thistle presented her with a beetle.
It was a large beetle, iridescent and green, with impressive mandibles and an air of profound dignity despite its current circumstances, which involved being cradled in the palm of a five-year-old’s grubby hand.
“It’s the best one I’ve ever found,” Thistle said solemnly.
“You can keep it.”
Mel regarded the beetle with appropriate seriousness. It regarded her back with the impassive patience of an insect that had seen many things and been impressed by none of them.
“I’m honoured.”
“His name is Wellington. Because he’s a general.”
“An excellent name.” Mel considered the beetle’s options. A life in a governess’s pocket seemed unlikely to suit a creature of such obvious ambition.
“Perhaps he would be happier in the garden? Generals prefer to command their own territory.”
Thistle’s face flickered with something that might have been disappointment, or might have been the beginning of a negotiation. “He would be happier with you.”
“I think,” Mel said carefully, “that he would be happier knowing we set him free to pursue his campaigns. But we could release him together. In the rose bushes. That seems a fitting territory for a general.”
Thistle considered this in silence. Then she nodded, once, with the gravity of someone making a significant concession.
They walked to the garden together, through the kitchen door and past the cook’s suspicious gaze, along the gravel path to where the rose bushes stood in their late-summer fullness.
The blooms were just beginning to fade, their petals loosening and falling in the afternoon breeze, but the leaves were still thick and green and promised excellent cover for a beetle with military ambitions.
Thistle knelt by the largest bush and opened her hand. Wellington, showing no particular urgency, ambled from her palm onto a branch and disappeared into the shadows of the leaves.
“Goodbye, Wellington,” Thistle said. “Command wisely.”
“A noble farewell,” Mel said.
Thistle stood and, without any apparent premeditation, reached up and took Mel’s hand.
Her fingers were small and still slightly grubby despite the morning’s washing, and they curled around Mel’s with the unconscious trust of a child who had decided, without deliberation or hesitation, that this adult was safe.
They walked back to the house hand in hand, neither speaking, and Mel thought: this is dangerous. This is exactly the sort of attachment I cannot afford to make.
But she did not let go.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Kemp watched them pass through the door and into the corridor beyond. When they were gone, she turned to the cook, who was kneading bread with the rhythmic violence of a woman who had strong opinions about children and their toads.
“She’s not like the others,” Mrs. Kemp said. “She actually likes them.”
“Mad, then,” Cook said, without looking up from her dough.
“Perhaps.” Mrs. Kemp wiped her hands on her apron and thought of the drawings on the windowsill, the attendance register filled with careful notes, the beetle released into the roses with ceremonial gravity. “But the good kind of mad.”