Myra’s expression darkened and her voice lowered. ‘Whatever can you be thinking, girl?’
The air bristled. I had said something wrong. Myra glowered at me, forcing me to look away. The platter in my hands had been polished till it shone and in its surface I saw my cheeks growing redder.
Myra hissed, ‘The Major doesn’t have any children. Not any more.’ She snatched my cloth from me, long thin fingers brushing mine. ‘Now, get on with you. I’m getting nought done with all your talk.’
One of the most challenging aspects of starting below stairs at Riverton was this assumption that I should be automatically and intimately au fait with the comings and goings, ins and outs, of the house and family. This, I knew, was partly due to Mother having worked there before I was born. Mr Hamilton, Mrs Townsend and Myra presumed (groundlessly) that she must already have imparted to me all knowledge of Riverton and the Hartfords, and they had the ability to make me feel stupid if I dared suggest otherwise. Myra, in particular (when it didn’t suit her purpose to explain), would become quite scornful, insisting that of course I knew the Mistress required a warming pan no matter the season; I must simply have forgotten or, worse, was being deliberately obtuse.
Myra expected me to know what had happened to the Major’s children and there was nothing I could say or do to convince her that this wasn’t the case. Thus, over the next couple of weeks I avoided her as best one person can avoid another with whom they live and work. At night, as Myra prepared for bed, I lay very still facing the wall, feigning sleep. It was a relief when Myra blew out the candle and the picture of the dying deer disappeared into the darkness. In the daytime, when we passed in the hall, Myra would lift her nose disdainfully and I would study the ground, suitably chastened.
Blessedly, there was plenty to keep us occupied preparing to receive Lord Ashbury’s adult guests. The east-wing guestrooms had to be opened and aired, the dust sheets removed and the furniture polished. The best linen had to be retrieved from enormous storage boxes in the attic, mended where the moths had been, then laundered in great copper pots. The rain had set in and the clothes lines behind the house were of no use, so the linen had to be hung in the winter drying room: high up in the attic near the female servants’ bedrooms, where the kitchen chimney, always warm, ran up the wall, through the ceiling and onto the roof.
And that is where I learned more of The Game. For as the rain held, and Miss Prince determined to educate them on the finer points of Tennyson, the Hartford children sought hiding spots deeper and deeper within the house’s heart. The drying-room closet, tucked behind the chimney, was about as far from the library schoolroom as they could find. And thus they took up quarters.
I never saw them play it, mind. Rule number one: The Game is secret. But I listened, and I watched and, once or twice when temptation drove me and the coast was clear, I peeked inside the box. This is what I learned.
The Game was old. They’d been playing it for years. No, not playing. That is the wrong verb. Living; they had been living The Game for years. For The Game was more than its name suggested. It was a complex fantasy, an alternate world into which they escaped.
There were no costumes, no swords, no feathered headdresses. Nothing that would have marked it as a game. For that was its nature. It was secret. Its only accoutrement was the box. A black lacquered case brought back from China by one of their ancestors; one of the spoils from a spree of exploration and plunder. It was the size of a square hatbox-not too big and not too small-and its lid was inlaid with semiprecious gems to form a scene: a river with a bridge across it, a small temple on one bank, a willow weeping from the sloping shore. Three figures stood atop the bridge and above them a lone bird circled.
The box they guarded jealously, filled as it was with everything material to The Game. For although The Game demanded a good deal of running and hiding and wrestling, its real pleasure was enjoyed elsewhere. Rule number two: all journeys, adventures, explorations and sightings must be recorded. They would rush inside, flushed with danger, to record their recent adventures: maps and diagrams, codes and drawings, plays and books.
The books were miniature, bound with thread, writing so small and neat that one had to hold them close to decipher them. They had titles:
The Game itself was simple. It was Hannah and David’s invention really, and as the oldest they were the chief instigators of adventure. They decided which location was ripe for exploration. The two of them had assembled a ministry of nine advisors-an eclectic group mingling eminent Victorians with ancient Egyptian kings. There were only ever nine advisors at any one time, and when history supplied a new figure too appealing to be denied inclusion an original member would die or be deposed. (Death was always in the line of duty, reported solemnly in one of the tiny books kept inside the box.)
Alongside the advisors, each had their own character. Hannah was Nefertiti and David became Charles Darwin. Emmeline, only four when the governing laws were drawn up, had chosen Queen Victoria. A dull choice, Hannah and David agreed, understandable given Emmeline’s limited years but certainly not a suitable adventure mate. Victoria was nonetheless accommodated into The Game, most often cast as a kidnap victim whose capture was precipitant of a daring rescue. While the other two were writing up their accounts, Emmeline was allowed to decorate the diagrams and shade the maps: blue for the ocean, purple for the deep, green and yellow for land.
Occasionally, David wasn’t available-the rain would subside for an hour and he would sneak out to play marbles with the other estate lads, or else he would occupy himself practising piano. Then Hannah would realign her loyalties with Emmeline. The pair would hide away in the linen closet with a store of sugar cubes from Mrs Townsend’s dry store, and would invent special names in secret languages to describe the traitorous absconder. But no matter how much they wanted to, they never played The Game without him. To do so would have been unthinkable.
Rule number three: only three may play. No more, no less. Three. A number favoured as much by art as by science: primary colours, points required to locate an object in space, notes to form a musical chord. Three points of a triangle, the first geometrical figure. Incontrovertible fact: two straight lines cannot enclose a space. The points of a triangle may move, shift allegiance, the distance between two disappear as they draw away from the third, but together they always define a triangle. Self-contained, real, complete.
The Game’s rules I learned because I read them. Written in neat but childish handwriting on yellowing paper, stuck beneath the lid of the box. I will remember them forever. To these rules, each had put their name.
So there it is. It was just a children’s game. And not the only one they played. Eventually they outgrew it, forgot it, left it behind. Or thought they did. By the time I met them, it was already on its last legs. History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape, adulthood, was lurking, laughing, round the corner.
Just a children’s game and yet… What happened in the end would surely not have come about without it?
The day of the guests’ arrival dawned and I was given special permission, on condition my duties were complete, to watch from the first-floor balcony. As outside evening fell, I huddled by the banister, face pressed between two rails, eagerly awaiting the crunch of motor-car tyres on the gravel out front.
First to arrive was Lady Clementine de Welton, a family friend with the grandeur and gloom of the late Queen, and her charge Miss Frances Dawkins (universally known as Fanny): a skinny, garrulous girl, whose parents had gone down with the
