Aunt Basil was the next to arrive and remind me I had always thought my rooms were so near the kitchens that the smell of aged grease overcame the spices in the clothes press. I suggested she tell Sibylla, who would no doubt change her mind about wanting my rooms. Beloved and I had another giggle over that.
Aunt Lovage came to promise me (or rather Beloved, since by that time we’d changed clothes and were being each other) a bottle of a very special vintage and a picnic on the sward. Beloved suggested we have the bottle and the picnic anyway. This was not a particularly clever rejoinder. Beloved and I look exactly alike, but I am much cleverer. I tried to teach Beloved to read and write, but she isn’t interested. She doesn’t even care. She sometimes watches me reading and studying, and she says it is a dreadful burden being clever and well-schooled, and she is glad she does not have to carry it.
Aunt Marjoram promised to make me a new cloak, but Beloved told her my old one will last years yet. It will, though it is already faded. Perhaps I will make myself a new one.
And finally, Aunt Lavender promised to play a new song for me, one she had learned from a traveling minstrel. I was being myself by then since it was late afternoon and Beloved had gone home. Since I had spent more time with the minstrel than aunt had and already knew all his songs, I declined.
I had thought they might appeal to Aunt Sister Mary Elizabeth and Aunt Sister Mary George, but Papa gave them no time for that. In the afternoon Papa sent a servant to bring me to the small room where he does business with his bailiff, and there he told me to get myself moved by dark or he’d send me to Alderbury to join my two eldest aunts as a nun.
I would move, I said gayly. I would move happily. I had always felt my rooms were rather too close to the kitchens. What had given Papa the idea I was reluctant to move? I dimpled and curtsied, then rounded up three serving maids, including my old friend Doll, and made a clean sweep of it before Sibylla or her mama could say a paternoster, being sure that everyone heard me chirping happily away about the whole thing.
There were no rooms left except the ones in Papa’s wing, including the suite we had intended for Sibylla. All the rooms there were huge. The corridor was obviously one used frequently by Papa’s … friends, whom I did not want to meet going and coming. I sat on my baskets and told Doll that was the last place I wanted to go, feeling quite put out now that my little drama had been played and Sibylla had been installed where I had lately been, in my cosy rooms beside the garden, with my carpet and my bed curtains.
“There’s the room your mama used sometimes,” said Doll. Doll is older than most of the other servants, and she was present when my mama was still in residence. “Up in the dove tower,” she said, raising her eyebrows up under her hair and jerking her head back. Doll is stout and red-cheeked and has more energy than any five other women. She stood there, looking at me intently, hands on hips.
The dove tower is slender and tall, the tallest of all the castle towers, its top decorated with spiky finials and a long pole for flying banners. Around it the white doves make a constant cloud of wings and a liquid tumult like water falling into a fountain.
“Up in the dove tower, then,” I agreed, and we all went back through the hall and wound ourselves here and there through little side passages until we came to the tower door. It screamed when we opened it, like a goose being killed, and the dust on the stairs puffed under our feet as we crept up, round and round and round until we were dizzy. The door at the top hung loose with great nails sticking out of it, and the room itself was filthy with bits of bird nest and veils of spider web. Doll sent a girl to ask Martin to come up and fix the shutters and the door, and he did that while one of his boys unstuffed the chimney and two of the women scrubbed the floor and walls and another one swept the mess down the stairs. Martin threw the carpet down into the yard, for it was eaten to rags by moth and mouse. The doves from the cote below had made somewhat free with the space, but under the dirty coverlet the bed was all right, and so were the bed curtains we found in the carved armoire, once they’d been shaken free of dust and well brushed and hung. I cleaned out the armoire myself (finding something interesting in the process) and put my clothes in it. Then I sat on the chair and felt important. It has arms! Only Papa and Aunt Terror have chairs with arms. Everyone else sits on benches or stools. While I sat there, I examined the thing I’d found in the armoire, but there wasn’t time really to figure out what it was, so after a time, I put it under the chair seat, which lifts up to make
