To Hear a Nightingale Page 9

  She went out by herself into the paddocks and whistled to Prince. Mary-Jo and she had spent hours teaching him to come to call, and now he trotted up obediently but still curiously every time they whistled him. Cassie sat on the rails and pulled Prince’s ears. The foal tried to chew her foot, but Cassie laughed and pushed his nose away. Prince rolled his top lip back and bared his teeth in a grin. Cassie sighed and pulled his ears some more, and at that moment determined that even if she didn’t win the pony on Saturday, one day she would have a beautiful horse all of her own.

  With that happy notion in her young head, she jumped off the fence and ran back to the house when she heard the bell being rung for breakfast. She ran all the way, like she and Mary-Jo always did, and she ran into the kitchen. But she stopped in her tracks when she saw what was lying on a plate in her place. She knew what it was even before she saw the spidery writing on the blue envelope. It was a letter from Grandmother.

  Chapter Four

  Cassie read the letter for a second time, just to make sure she had read it right the first time. All around her all the other children were laughing and chattering, as the excitement of the dance and fancy-dress competition had built up. All the others, that was, except Mary-Jo, who knew from Cassie’s eyes that something was the matter.

  Nudging her brother Dick out of the way, she sat down on the bench next to Cassie.

  ‘What’s wrong, Cassie?’ she asked. ‘You’ve gone all white.’

  ‘Grandmother’s ill,’ Cassie replied, putting the letter carefully back in the blue envelope. ‘I’m to go home at once.’

  ‘Not today?’ Mary-Jo protested. ‘You don’t have to go today?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Cassie said, getting up from the table. ‘I’m to catch the eleven o’clock train.’

  Mary-Jo ran after her to the barn.

  ‘But what about the dance?’ Mary-Jo said. ‘And the fancy-dress competition! Surely you could go back on Sunday?’

  ‘No I can’t, Mary-Jo,’ Cassie answered, climbing the stairs to the dormitory. ‘Grandmother wants me home now. She says I’ve outstayed my welcome as it is.’

  Cassie pulled out her suitcase from under the bunk and started to pack. Mary-Jo looked at her, then turned on her heel.

  ‘I’m going to tell Mamma,’ she announced. ‘I’ll try and get her to ring your grandmother and explain.’

  ‘It won’t do any good!’ Cassie called after her.

  But the fleet-footed Mary-Jo had gone.

  Cassie took off her jeans and blue check shirt, which she hadn’t been out of except for the times they had been washed since the day she arrived. She folded them carefully and neatly and put them on the foot of her bed. It wouldn’t do any good ringing Grandmother. She had said quite clearly that she had pains in her chest and a very bad cough, and that Cassie was to come home at once and help look after her, since Delta had quite enough to do keeping the house in order. Cassie went on folding her clothes almost ritualistically and putting them in her case. She thought of the wonderful time she had had with Mary-Jo and her family, and in order to stop the tears which were welling up behind her eyes from falling, she pinched the underneath of her arm so hard that the blood broke through the skin.

  Mrs Christiansen drove her to the station. In the car there was just Mary-Jo, Erasmus, Cassie and Mary-Jo’s mother. Everyone else was too sad to come with them, and when they had heard the news they had all silently disappeared to their various secret hiding places around the farm. Cassie had said goodbye to Prince, and Mary-Jo had given her a hair from his tail for luck. It had also started to rain, for the first time since she had arrived in Locksfield.

  ‘Mary-Jo,’ Cassie suddenly said, looking out of the rainswept front window. ‘Will you do something, please?

  ‘Sure,’ Mary-Jo answered. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Your little cousin Jeannie. I don’t think she ever made a costume for the competition. Do you think you could give her mine? Your mother knows where I put it.’

  Mrs Christiansen looked round at Cassie and smiled.

  ‘That’s real nice of you, Cassie,’ she said. ‘I meant to help little Jeannie, but I guess I never had the time.’

  ‘She should fit into it all right,’ Cassie told them. ‘We’re both rather small.’

  After that, nobody spoke much until they reached the station and had escorted Cassie on to the platform.

  ‘If your grandmother isn’t that ill,’ Mary-Jo said to Cassie, ‘why don’t you come back tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t think Grandmother would let me,’ Cassie replied. ‘I don’t think she could afford it.’

  ‘We’ll pay for your ticket!’ Mary-Jo exclaimed. ‘Won’t we, Mamma?’

  ‘Let’s just wait and see how Cassie’s grandmother is, shall we, Mary-Jo?’ Mrs Christiansen answered. ‘One thing at a time, dear.’

  Then she bent down and kissed Cassie, and pressed something into her hand. Cassie looked to see what it was. It was a folded ten-dollar bill. The train was whistling its approach to the station as Cassie looked back up at Mary-Jo’s mother, who shrugged in reply.

  ‘You never know when you might need it, honey,’ she said, and then she opened a carriage door for Cassie and helped her up and into the train.

  As the train approached Manchester Station, Cassie made one last effort to dry her eyes. She had managed not to cry until a good half an hour out of Locksfield, then she had quite suddenly and, to the old gentleman sitting beside her unaccountably, burst into tears. The old gentleman had tried to comfort her, but his kindness only made matters worse, so Cassie spent most of the rest of the long journey shut in the washroom.

  Now just five minutes from Manchester, she was back in the washroom, soaking her swollen eyes in cold water. She dried her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked simply dreadful. But then if Grandmother was really that ill, she could always say she’d been crying because the thought of her illness had upset her. She brushed her hair and tidied her dress, and then let herself out to go and collect her luggage.

  The station was very crowded and, being so small, Cassie found it difficult to see if Delta had arrived to collect her. When the crowd thinned, Cassie could see no sign of her anywhere. So she did as she always did when nobody was there to meet her from school, she waited by the bookstall.

  After half an hour, Cassie began to worry, and wonder what she should do. Perhaps Grandmother had been taken to hospital. Worse, perhaps she had died? She got up from her suitcase, upon which she had been sitting, and determined to go to the Station Master’s office. At that moment she saw a figure in black striding towards her and her heart stood still. Grandmother.

  ‘Your train must have been early,’ she said as she arrived by Cassie’s side. ‘Come along.’

  Cassie picked up her case and followed behind her grandmother to the cab which was waiting outside. It was the same driver, who doffed his cap to Grandmother, then winked at Cassie as he opened the rear door.

  They drove in silence all the way home, with Grandmother offering no explanation and Cassie not daring to ask. The silence was interrupted only once when the driver started to whistle. Grandmother soon put a stop to that.

  It wasn’t until Cassie had done her unpacking and had been allowed down for tea that she dared raise the subject.

  ‘How are you, Grandmother?’ she asked.

  ‘Perfectly all right, thank you, child,’ Grandmother replied. ‘Why?’

  Cassie frowned. She couldn’t have dreamed the letter.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Because you wrote to me saying you were seriously ill, and that I must come home at once.’

  ‘That was that foolish Dr Fossett,’ her grandmother announced. ‘All it was was a summer cold. Bronchitis indeed.’

  Grandmother stirred her tea and looked challengingly at Cassie. But this time Cassie refused to look down. For what seemed like minutes they just stared at each other, until Grandmother cleared her throat and Cassie looked away.

  The follow
ing Wednesday when Cassie was sent out in the rain to collect the mail, she found there was a letter for her from Locksfield, in Mary-Jo’s handwriting. She stood wet through and shivering in the porch while she read it. The dance had been a great success, the best ever, but they all missed her dreadfully. George Baxter from the neighbouring farm had danced all evening with Mary-Jo, Frank had got slightly tiddly on the punch, and all four judges had chosen Cousin Jeannie as the Straw Man as the outright winner of the fancy dress competition. The prize for the competition had been Rainbow.

  Cassie was now fourteen, and had been attending the convent for eight years. She now regarded it as her home, much more so than her grandmother’s house in Westboro Falls. Grandmother’s house wasn’t even a second home. Mary-Jo Christiansen’s huge and rambling farmstead in Pennsylvania was that. Cassie’s visits had become a regular feature. Grandmother viewed these vacational visits with undisguised displeasure, but she continued to allow Cassie to visit Mary-Jo, partly because it meant that Grandmother could spend a lot more time on herself, but more importantly because it saved Grandmother a considerable amount of money – money she preferred to spend on herself. Even so, despite this apparent indulgence, Cassie looked on the house in Westboro Falls very much as third best.

  Her grandmother was well aware, however, that Cassie was growing up, and that with the increased visits to her friend in Pennsylvania she was also growing away from her. On the long afternoons which she would often spend alone, Grandmother would brood upon the changes that were coming over Cassie, and weigh up the pros and cons of allowing the child so much time out of her own company. When she was home, Cassie would sometimes notice her grandmother staring down at her along the dining table during those silent mealtimes, or in the evening over her sewing as Cassie sat reading. And when Cassie went to bed, and gave her grandmother a dutiful kiss on the cheek, Cassie would notice that Grandmother turned away from her with a visibly scornful expression on her face, as if that was the best Cassie could do.

  Unfortunately it was. Cassie had tried very hard and dutifully to love her grandmother, but she had always found it difficult because her grandmother showed her absolutely no affection in return. Now Cassie was growing older, she was even more aware of the impossibility of loving someone who seemed quite openly to despise her. In order to compensate for the lack of love she felt in her heart, Cassie tried to do even better at school, in an effort to please Grandmother, and to behave even better at home in an effort not to aggravate her. She needn’t have bothered, because she was a little girl with healthy, high spirits, and little girls with healthy high spirits were anathema to her grandmother.

  Happily they weren’t to Mrs Roebuck. The moment her grandchildren came to stay with her she was across the road to invite Cassie over. Gina was growing prettier and prettier each day and was the most beautiful thirteen-year-old at the convent, and certainly, when she came to stay, in their neighbourhood. Cassie and Maria were still her devoted attendants, ready to indulge Gina’s every whim, happy to watch her trying on clothes or brushing her hair, or simply just gazing back at them gazing at her.

  Grandmother naturally thoroughly disliked and disapproved of Mrs Roebuck’s grandchildren. She considered quite publicly that Mrs Roebuck over-indulged them.

  ‘Anyone would think no one had ever had grandchildren before,’ she would complain to Cassie, ‘the way that silly woman carries on.’

  Cassie longed to beg to differ, but rather than incur the wrath of her grandmother through the defence of her friends, she would instead try to change the subject, usually to little avail. For once embarked on a subject, Grandmother never liked to let go of it until she had, like a dog with a rabbit, shaken it to death. She would go on and on about Gina and Maria’s failings and weaknesses, and Mrs Roebuck’s ridiculously indulgent ways. And the more she talked the subject over, the more satisfying it would become to her, because she would discover new and more pervasively dangerous influences that she imagined Gina and Maria and Mrs Roebuck to have over Cassie. Nothing in Mrs Roebuck’s house was free from Grandmother’s criticism. Why, it was a wonder that Cassie wasn’t dead from diphtheria, the way Mrs Roebuck allowed that dirty, filthy cat to sit upon her dresser.

  And then there was the matter of grace before meals. It had come to her attention that Mrs Roebuck and her granddaughters, and Cassie herself, often sat down to table without saying grace. This, to Grandmother, was the thin end of a very think wedge, and obvious precursor of a state of utter ungodliness. And wasn’t Mrs Roebuck always encouraging the children to help themselves to seconds as well? Wasn’t Greed one of the seven deadly sins? As for the unkempt state Cassie was in whenever she returned from her visits across the road . . . Little wonder, Grandmother told Cassie, that she was beginning to have serious doubts about such friendships.

  ‘You’re getting above yourself,’ she would admonish Cassie. ‘Always answering back or thinking you’ve the answer. Is that what those nuns teach you? To be smarter than your elders and betters?’

  Cassie would remain silent during these interminable harangues, and switch her mind to the days spent riding and playing on Mary-Jo’s farm.

  ‘Listen when I’m talking to you, child!’ Grandmother said sharply one evening when Cassie had returned from Mrs Roebuck’s. ‘I have to tell you, I don’t like the sort of child you’re turning into. No, I most certainly don’t.’

  Cassie at that moment was imagining trotting a pony called Paintbox up the track which led away from the farm, prior to breaking into her first canter of the day.

  ‘You’re learning more bad ways than good, I can tell you,’ Grandmother continued. ‘And I don’t like it. Not one little bit. Which is the reason I’ve decided to do something about it.’

  Cassie snapped out of her reverie. There was something very different in her grandmother’s tone of voice that evening, something considerably more determined. She frowned and looked up.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What have you decided to do about it?’

  ‘Don’t ask so many questions, child,’ Grandmother replied, rising from her chair and going to the door. ‘You’ll discover soon enough.’

  She went out of the room, leaving Cassie to wonder what new punishment was going to be inflicted upon her, for doing absolutely nothing worse than just being alive. Was Grandmother going to ban her from seeing Maria and Gina? Was she going to curtail her visits to Mary-Jo? Or what? It had to be one of these two things, because there were no other areas of any happiness and pleasure in her life. What was it going to be?

  Cassie agonised for the rest of the vacation, but the subject was never ever raised again. She was allowed to continue to play with Gina and Maria, and her visit to Mary-Jo in Locksfield, Pennsylvania remained on as scheduled.

  It wasn’t until Cassie returned to the convent that she discovered her grandmother’s revenge.

  It was Sister Joseph who broke the news. She stopped Cassie one morning at break and took her down the long polished corridor which led to her study. Cassie thought there was nothing unusual in this, since the nuns often took you aside to one of their studies to have what they called a little talk. It was never a talking-to, whatever your offence: just a good, sensible talk, to thrash the matter out. So Cassie walked quite happily with a spotlessly clear conscience, in step behind her favourite nun; and once in Sister Joseph’s study she sat happily in the chair the nun pulled up for her, the other side of the desk.

  Then Cassie saw the letter, and recognised the spidery handwriting. She went completely cold and all the happy thoughts which were in her head vanished. She knew it was bad news, from the way the envelope was lying so neatly on Sister Joseph’s desk, and from the way Sister Joseph was standing looking silently out of the window. If it had been good news, Sister Joseph would have given her the letter to read and sat smiling opposite her. But the letter lay there, while Sister Joseph stood at the window.

  ‘For some reason your grandmother intends to take you away from us,�
�� Sister Joseph finally said, very calmly and without a trace of emotion.

  Cassie didn’t move and she said nothing. She just continued to stare at the letter. Sister Josepth turned from the window and came and sat down not opposite Cassie, but beside her.

  ‘She thinks a change will be beneficial,’ Sister Joseph continued. ‘She considers that you have got everything you are going to get from here, and so you will leave at the end of this term and start at a new school in the fall.’

  It was as cut and dried as that. Sister Joseph didn’t even show her the contents of the letter. She just related her grandmother’s intentions, then fell silent.

  Cassie’s head started to throb violently. Moments went by as she struggled to control the throbbing and focus her attention on what was happening. But she couldn’t. She felt as if she was going mad. She imagined she could hear time passing, the very sound of time, from the time before she heard what Sister Joseph had to say, to the time now, and the time after. She wanted to stop it – to hold time back with her hand and push it away from her. But she couldn’t. Time was closing in a tidal wave over her head, half drowning her, before throwing her gasping on to the strand of the present.

  And then there was Sister Joseph, sitting beside her, unmoving, head erect, hands clasped. Cassie had loved Sister Joseph with all her heart, but now she hated her, because she had just sat there and told her what the letter said and was doing nothing about it. She wasn’t telling Grandmother what a wrong and terrible thing she was about to do. She was just sitting there, looking calmly at Cassie. She needn’t have done this, Cassie thought. She could have written back to Grandmother and told her how wrong she was, and persuaded her to change her mind. But she hadn’t. She had just accepted what Grandmother wanted to do, the way nuns always seemed to accept the terrible things which people did.