Poor Little Rich Girl (4 page)

Remembering her early years now, Hester thought that no childhood could have been happier or more strange. After her mother’s tragic death, she and Trevor Elliott had grown closer than ever. As a district officer, Mr Elliott had had to travel over a very wide area, and because he trusted no one to look after his daughter save himself, Hester had gone with him.

For Hester, those had been halcyon days. She had had her own small tent, pitched beside that of her father, and during the day the young son of one of his employees had been responsible for her welfare. She had been ten at the time of her mother’s death, and Sanjay only twelve, but he had spent his whole life in the jungles and forests of India and knew as much as any grown man of the perils and pleasures of such a life. Hester soon had implicit faith in his ability to take care of her. If he ran along a fallen tree, his bare, brown feet gripping the creeper-clad trunk, she would follow him, confident that it was safe to do so, but when he guided her round a thicket, telling her that some animal lurked within, she was careful to mimic his every move and to wait, still as a statue, until he gave the command to move on.

It was always hot in the jungle and most Europeans suffered from various forms of prickly heat, sores and sweat rashes, but Hester, wearing as little as possible, and following Sanjay into the coolest and shadiest spots when the sun was at its height, suffered scarcely at all.

This wonderful, free life had continued until she was fourteen, when Sanjay took up an official post
as a sort of forest ranger and was no longer available to be her playmate and guardian. By this time, Hester’s father had decided that her education had been ignored for long enough and had sent her to a first-rate boarding school in Paris, where the Sisters of Mercy had made her very happy during her time with them. It seemed that Hester had inherited her father’s quick brain for she speedily caught up with and then overtook her contemporaries. When she was sixteen, she returned to her father’s side once more, helping him with his work and typing out reports with two fingers on the battered old Remington machine he had always used. She had thought that this life would continue until her father’s retirement, but once more tragedy struck. They had been camping in a tiny village and Hester had taken herself off, with a bearer to carry for her, to a bazaar in the nearby town. Upon her return, she found the camp in turmoil; it appeared that her father had been sitting beneath a large tree, dealing with a queue of natives, when a snake had dropped from the branches, close by the bare feet of a small child who had been playing in the dust. Trevor Elliott had snatched the child out of harm’s way in one swift pounce but had not been quick enough to evade the cobra’s strike. Someone had killed the snake, a king cobra at least six feet long, and though they had hurried the sahib to the nearest hospital, they had been too late. By the time Hester had arrived there, Trevor Elliott was already dead.

So when Mr Hetherington-Smith had first suggested that Hester should take on responsibility for his motherless child, she had almost fainted with relief. Her father had died only a matter of weeks before and she had been living with the family of his friend and colleague, Alfred Browning. Mary
Browning was the mother of five children, ranging in age from ten years to six months, and though she was perfectly pleasant to the young woman who had been foisted upon her, it was clear that she had no idea what she was to do with the uninvited guest. Members of the Civil Service in India had all the servants they needed, so there was little that Hester could do to help her hostess. Mr Hetherington-Smith’s offer of work had, Hester felt, come in the nick of time and she accepted it gratefully.

What was more, it reminded her of the advice her mother had given her so many years ago. Kia had urged her daughter, almost with her last breath, to go back to England when she was grown up, if the chance ever arose. ‘You should marry one of your own kind. I know you are fond of Sanjay – he is an admirable person, your father values him highly – but believe me, my darling, such a marriage as that would not do. You would be no more acceptable to Sanjay’s people than he would be to yours. And great unhappiness would undoubtedly result. So please, little Hester, go Home when you are a young woman. Don’t try to stay in India for your father’s sake.’

‘But why not, Mummy?’ Hester had exclaimed plaintively. ‘After all, you and Daddy met in India. You’ve never been Home yourself; you’ve told me so many times. Why must I be different?’

Kia’s great dark eyes, burning with fever, had closed for a moment and then snapped open, as though she had suddenly been given some extra strength. ‘Your father is a man in a thousand,’ she had whispered. ‘I was a very lucky woman, but such a love match is rare. Go to England, little sweetheart, where you will meet a great many young men. One
of them will be the person with whom you choose to spend the rest of your life.’

Her voice had faded away and Hester’s
ayah
had hustled her from the room, saying that the memsahib needed rest. Very soon afterwards, Trevor Elliott had come to Hester in her bare little bedroom in the bungalow in the hills and had told her, with tears running down his face, that her mother was dead.

Now, ushering her charge across the wide, tiled hall, Hester reflected that things could have been a lot worse. She might not be an ideal governess but she would do her best to see that Lonnie was decently educated and turned into a little English lady instead of the spoilt, over-indulged child she had known in India.

Life on board the ship returning to England had been a revelation, and not a pleasant one. By the time they reached Liverpool, Hester had been eager to hand over the responsibility for Lonnie to her aunt, although she expected to be retained as a governess until Lonnie started school, as surely she would. When Miss Hetherington-Smith made it clear that Hester’s job as companion and governess to the child would continue indefinitely, she had been at first dumbfounded and then, as she realised how precarious her position was, almost relieved. She decided she would stay in Shaw Street until she had managed to obtain a decent position somewhere else, yet she knew in her heart that her task would not be easy. Lonnie was a little horror, although Hester had sense enough to realise that this was scarcely the child’s fault. Lonnie had been whisked away from all she held dear, dumped on an aunt who did not want her in a cold, northern city where even the language
was strange to her. It would have been a miracle had Lonnie taken to her new life, but at least, while Hester remained with her, the two of them could discuss the strangenesses around them and reminisce about the life – and country – that they had left.

For Hester herself was fighting a loneliness greater than any she had ever felt before. She knew nobody apart from the inhabitants of the Shaw Street house, and though the servants were friendly enough they kept her at a distance. Miss Hutchinson, Miss Hetherinton-Smith’s paid companion, who might have befriended Hester, was far too afraid of her employer to risk her annoyance should she disapprove of such a friendship. So though Hester was secure enough, she longed for an ally in whom she could confide, and thought wistfully of her old life in India.

It did not help either Hester or Lonnie that Miss Emmeline Hetherington-Smith neither liked nor understood children. On the day they had arrived, she had made it clear to Hester that she was only accepting Lonnie into her household because the big house in Shaw Street was not hers at all, but her brother’s. He liked to keep a home in Liverpool, the city from which his family had originated, and was quite happy for his spinster sister to live in the house whilst he himself paid all expenses. It seemed that he even made Miss Hetherington-Smith a generous quarterly allowance, so that the elderly woman felt she could not refuse a home to her niece. Accordingly, she had refurbished the nursery quarters at the top of the house which she, her sister Beatrice and the young Leonard Hetherington-Smith had occupied, and had installed Lonnie and Hester up there. The fact that she expected them to remain there, like prisoners, was due, Hester supposed, to a total lack of imagination,
for no child wants to spend its entire existence shut away from the rest of the house and missing out on the rich street life it can observe from the nursery windows.

Hester had felt it her duty to point this out to Miss Hetherington-Smith and had accordingly received grudging permission to take the child out once or twice a day, so that she might visit the parks, the shops and other places of interest. ‘She really should go to school,’ Hester had added, emboldened by the fact that Miss Hetherington-Smith had reluctantly agreed to such outings, but the older woman had fixed her with a beady eye and reminded her that: ‘You are employed as a governess, Miss Elliott, so a school is an unnecessary expense. The child never went to school in India, so why should she do so here?’

Hester had tried to explain the importance of Lonnie’s meeting children of her own age, but Miss Hetherington-Smith brushed this aside as irrelevant. ‘She will meet children in the park and very likely in the shops as well,’ she had said. ‘Please don’t suggest school again, Miss Elliott, or you may well find yourself joining the vast numbers of unemployed who haunt the Liverpool streets.’

Hester had folded her lips tightly against a sharp retort, but very soon after this she had begun to examine the advertisements in the office bureaux and employment agencies, and had realised that Miss Hetherington-Smith was right. Work was hard to come by and poorly paid and for the time being at least she had best hold her peace.

So Hester and Lonnie began to fall into a routine. During daylight hours, they spent as little time as possible in the nursery quarters at the top of the
house, although Hester made sure that Lonnie did her lessons regularly. They went for sedate walks in the park or strolled up and down the nearby streets, examining the wares in the shops with lively interest. Sometimes they hopped aboard a tram and visited the more sophisticated shops in the city centre and two or three times they had gone down to the Pier Head and walked along the waterfront, though the cold sea wind caused Lonnie to lament her lost India more fervently than ever.

If they met Miss Hetherington-Smith when they returned to the house, she always managed to look both astonished and outraged. Clearly, she felt that children – and their governesses – should be neither seen nor heard and did not allow for the fact that her niece could hardly be expected to enter the house by the back door or to reach the nursery via the servants’ stairs.

Right now, however, the two of them were stealing quietly across the hall towards the stairs when the drawing room door opened and Miss Hutchinson came into the hall. Hester privately considered her a poor fish, almost unable to think for herself and very plainly in considerable awe of her employer. She was a tall, thin woman in her fifties, with light-brown hair braided into two earphones on either side of her narrow head, vague pale-blue eyes and an ingratiating manner. She saw Hester and Lonnie and put a conspiratorial finger to her lips. ‘Hush,’ she breathed. ‘Miss Emmeline is interviewing the cook – we had a shockingly poor dinner last night – so I came out of the room because arguments bring on my palpitations and make me feel quite faint.’

As though her remark had triggered a response from
inside the room she had just left, Miss Hetherington-Smith’s voice rose sharply. Miss Hutchinson clapped a hand over her mouth and shot towards the back regions of the house, murmuring between her fingers that she must speak to Mimms, the gardener, since dear Miss Hetherington-Smith wanted fresh roses in the drawing room.

Hester watched her out of sight, thinking what a shame it was that Miss Hutchinson had so little courage. When she and Lonnie had first come to Shaw Street and she had found Miss Hetherington-Smith so set against her charge, she had tried to persuade Miss Hutchinson to intercede on the child’s behalf.

‘A little girl needs companionship, and I need advice. I’ve tried to persuade Miss Hetherington-Smith to let the child have dancing lessons, riding or some other similar pursuit. But it seems she expects me to arrange everything, forgetting I’m in a strange city – a strange land, come to that.’

She had managed to catch Miss Hutchinson on her way to bed and the older woman had flattened herself against her bedroom door, looking absolutely terrified, as though Hester had suggested that she jump into a pit of poisonous snakes, Hester thought crossly.

‘Oh, Miss Elliott, don’t even suggest it,’ the older woman had gasped, her pale face going even paler. ‘Miss Hetherington-Smith would be so very angry and I can’t bear dissension of any sort; it brings on my palpitations and the doctor says I must keep calm. Besides,’ she had added, ‘I know absolutely nothing about children or their requirements, so I can be of no use to you.’

At the time Hester had felt despair and anger mingling over the older woman’s unhelpfulness, but as
the days passed she realised that Miss Hutchinson’s position was a difficult one and ceased to expect any support at all from that particular source. Now she watched Miss Hutchinson disappear through the green baize door which led to the servants’ quarters and was about to continue crossing the hall when Lonnie tugged at her hand, pulling her to a halt, and jerked her head at the drawing room door, which had swung open a short way.

‘I think I have shown a good deal of patience, Jackson, considering that most of the food which has appeared on our table has been all but inedible,’ Miss Hetherington-Smith was saying in her harsh, commanding voice. ‘We have had mutton so under-cooked that I was surprised it did not baa when I stuck my carving knife into it and lamb chops over-cooked until the meat shrivels on the bone, puddings which have to be dug out of their dish by main force, vegetables either boiled to a mush or served half raw, and lumpy gravy! Ever since you joined my staff, Jackson, my companion and I have suffered the cruellest pangs of indigestion. As for the food bills … well, they beggar description! What happened to the sirloin steaks, the leg of lamb and the joint of ham for which I paid the butcher such an exorbitant sum last week? Since they did not appear on our table, I assume that the staff must have eaten them in the servants’ hall; unless, of course, they went up to the nursery, which I very much doubt.’