Sofia-Elisabete, the illegitimate child of Colonel Fitzwilliam (from P&P), is a little firecracker with a true heart and an irrepressible spirit. Last year, we learned a bit about her mysterious beginnings as a foundling in Portugal and the strange goings on in the tangled-up world of her troubled father who adores her. She runs away from home, lured by the mysterious Doña Marisa, to search for the perfect world in the moon, which she believes will cure her ailing father. What happens to her after that is related in her story, I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam: A Perfect World in the Moon.

In this novella, Twelfth-Night Cake & the Rosings Ghost, Sofia-Elisabete, the narrator, is thirteen years old, and she’s recollecting something that happened to her at Rosings when she was eight. What happens when she and Lady Catherine clash? Who is the naughty ghost that plagues our little girl? How does Colonel Fitzwilliam help his daughter navigate the prejudices of this world?

Part One begins…

*******

Twelfth-Night Cake & the Rosings Ghost
A Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam Tale

FIVE YEARS AGO, when I was a mere child of eight years, I was plagued by a naughty ghost. It happened when papai and I sojourned in the land of Kent during the Christmas of 1818-19. There, my cousin Anne de Bourgh lived with her mother, Lady Catherine, on an estate called Rosings, its manor-house boasting over a hundred glazed windows, its grounds bedecked with parterres and curiously clipt hedges.

‘I suppose you’re looking forward to hoydening with our crazy country cousin again,’ papai spoke between jolts of the carriage.

‘Oh, papai, she’s not crazy,’ I shook my finger at him.

Cousin Annie was my first true friend. Once upon a time, she had escaped to – or rather, run away to – Scarborough, the place I call home and where I live with my parents and my pug-dog. It was then that my older cousin taught me, a tiny and fearless girl, how to turn a somersault, how to stand on my head and how to cross my toes. Together we did many a hoydenish thing, much to papai’s despair.

‘Don’t you remember how she goaded me to madness with her puppets?’

‘Oh yes, papai, and you strangled her puppet.’

‘And with good reason…’

I shrugged. ‘I think Annie is warm-hearted and eccentric.’

This gave him a start. ‘Who taught you the word “eccentric”?’

‘Mamãe did.’

Papai’s countenance turned sad, for he always pined for my step-mother whenever they were separated. ‘Well, now, your mamãe is all politeness and goodness.’

‘Mamãe says I must needs practise my etiquette at Rosings, as do you.’

‘O, ho! You see before you a true gentleman, honourable and manly, and wholly devoted to his ancient aunt, Lady Catherine.’

I wrinkled my brow. ‘You said your aunt was an old tabby. I heard you say so once.’

Papai’s short horse-laugh turned into a fit of coughing. He drew from his pocket a silver flask, whereupon he took a manly gulp of French courage.

‘Papai, what of your cagg?’ He had promised not to touch a drop of brandy for six months.

‘Don’t you know – I, being a colonel on half-pay, am excused from my cagg during visits to Rosings?’ He indulged in another manly gulp of brandy.

I kept a watchful eye on him as I always do, the truth being that I worried he would get ill and that I might lose him again, just like I did several years ago when I took a freak in my head to run away from home, far away from home, to search for the perfect world in the moon. I wished for this moon world to cure what ailed him, but it turned out to be a fanciful world, a dazzling lie. Papai must have sensed my anxiety. He patted my hand as if to say, ‘I’m still here, my girl.’ Soon, he closed his eyes to doze, but after a minute or two, he squinted at me to determine if I still watched him, which I did and earnestly so.

Papai sighed, and he lifted me to his knee to console me. There, perched on his lap, I observed him closely, because I’m a big observer of people – a real gazer I am – most particularly of my handsome papai. I often imagine what he looked like as a mischievous boy, what he looked like as a brave officer commanding a battalion and what he might look like as a grumpy old man. Sometimes I imagine his waking dreams when he’s thinking those great thoughts of his while he sits beneath our Scots pine in the garden, listening to his wind music. He is the most fascinating person on earth; for, no one is so well-informed, so devoted to instructing me when he is at home, so best beloved and so amusingly disagreeable ever and anon.

Our carriage rumbled through the market-town of Westerham ere it entered ‘no man’s land’, or what papai called the miserable country road that stretched for two long miles. ‘The dickens take that rut!’ thundered papai, whenever we hit the cruellest of ruts. The drought this past summer had left deep ruts everywhere, and the rains for the last two months had turned those ruts into muddy ones, making the road treacherous indeed. Once, when I nearly fell from the seat, papai seized me by the back of my lucky scarlet cloak to save me from injury. Thereafter, I clung to him with all my might, taking comfort in his familiar scent of cloves and cinnamon and heavy dew and bark and musty earth.

Ere long, the ruts ended, as did papai’s droll curses, for he would often substitute bad words with silly ones to protect my tender ears – ‘Oh, figs and fritters!’ being my favourite. By and by, we reached the village of Hunsford. As we drove past the parsonage, the rector waved his hat at us, while his wife stood obediently by his side, cradling a chubby-faced baby with a single curl sprouting at its crown, which brought to mind a turnip, a really bland turnip. We stared with curiosity at the baby. ‘Zounds,’ muttered papai. Very soon after, we came upon a tract of park with dark fir-trees, which place papai called Rosings Park, and he inclined his head towards mine, speaking to me in a confidential tone.

‘My dear child, you shall be introduced to Lady Catherine, and a grand lady she is. You must be polite and respectful, no matter what she says to you.’

I considered this for a moment, having recalled a visit or two with my grumpy grand-mamma. ‘Is she cross and peppery like Lady Matlock?’

‘To be sure she is.’

‘Will she cut me up and call me a love brat?’

‘Let us hope not.’ Papai bit his lip. ‘You must be a brave little soldier-girl.’

Having sensed a skirmish ahead, I became seized with a real fit of the fidgets, tug-tug-tugging at my irksome white frock with its silly pantalettes underneath.

‘Papai, methinks I could be much braver if I wore my breeches and jacket.’

Papai humphed because he never could understand my desire to dress as a boy whenever I wished to romp about, playing and pranking. I dare say he has never tried to climb over a stile or swing from a tree branch or slide down a haystack wearing a white frock with pinafore.

‘I shan’t forget your promise, you know.’

‘What promise?’ the imp in me asked.

Papai looked upon me with a suspicious eye. ‘Why, you promised to be a proper young lady, one that’s dressed in girl’s clothes. That’s how you and your mamãe cozened me into taking you to Rosings.’

I waved him off. ‘Oh, stuff and nonsense.’

‘Oh, stuff?’ Papai arched a brow at me. ‘It’s ridiculous stuff is it, to wear girl’s clothes and act proper-like?’

‘Papai, I was funning you about your being cozened.’ To cheer him, I placed my arms round his neck and planted a big, wet gooseberry kiss on his cheek – hoooooooonk.

‘Silly gooseberry,’ cried papai, and he teased me by rubbing his cold nose with mine.

We alighted at the entrance of a great and stately manor-house. Pierce, he being the butler, led us into a marble hall and from there to a red drawing room, where he announced us to Lady Catherine. Mother and daughter sat at the tea-table near a bright coal fire. With her sharp, long nose, her ladyship sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring.

‘Fitzwilliam, you have come at last, have you?’ Her ladyship held out her pale, ghostly hand.

Papai gave a refined laugh. ‘My dearest aunt, how do you do?’ He bowed most gentleman-like, kissing her hand.

‘I am quite put out of humour, nephew.’ Her ladyship began to arrange the tea-things. ‘How late you are.’

Papai, with a devious twinkle in his eye, kissed Annie’s outstretched hand. ‘Ah, my dearest cousin Anne – you’re in good looks to-day. Surely this sudden rosiness of complexion is not a trick of the candlelight?’

Annie growled out, ‘How kind you are, cousin Fizzy.’

Papai twisted his lips, for vex him she did by calling him Fizzy. I know this to be true, that my papai hated to be called Fizzy, and he would say so again and again to Annie but to no purpose. It seemed to me, though, that papai loved to tease his cousin and that she, in turn, loved to tease and torment him. While those two were funning each other, Lady Catherine turned to me clearly annoyed, making a kind of smack with her mouth, as if I were a common house fly which she must needs devour.

‘Is she the little brown one, the erstwhile foundling from Portugal?’

‘This is my daughter, Sofia-Elisabete.’ Papai nodded at me.

I wished to behave well. Mustering up my courage, I curtseyed to her ladyship all proper-like and respectful.

‘Yes, yes – but who is her real mother? Who are her people?’ Lady Catherine eyed me with disdain.

‘My real mother was born at Lisbon,’ explained I, for I was a bold child who spoke her mind. ‘She married Don Rafael, a wealthy Span—’

Her ladyship silenced me with a toss of her lace handkerchief. ‘Speaks English, does she? Why, she bears a shocking resemblance to Lady Matlock, a very brown version of Lady Matlock. I have often said Lady Matlock was a beauty as a youth, but this one here, with her brown skin, is no great shakes in looks. She must use Warren’s Milk of Roses. Only then will her complexion improve.’

I examined my hands, wondering why she called me brown. They didn’t seem all that brown to me. Truthfully, I had never thought of myself being an actual colour. This piece of news both pleased me and disturbed me for some reason, and I wished to question my papai about my sudden brown-ness.

Papai cleared his throat. ‘‘Tis true. She resembles my dear mamma, and a beauty she will become someday, blooming into an English-Portuguese rose.’

I shot a glance at papai, wondering what he was about, because he so much disliked his mother. He, however, avoided my gaze. He cast down his eyes as he sipped his milky, sugary tea, which I knew he disliked as well. ‘Très bon, très bon,’ papai lied about the tea to please his hostess.

When we had done drinking our milky tea and eating cakes, Lady Catherine rang the bell. She advised papai that I would stay in the nursery and that if I behaved I could walk out with the maid-servant Betsy for half-an-hour every morning and every afternoon, and I could join everyone for breakfast and tea, and come Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I could dine at table with the grown-ups.

‘She will not be in anyone’s way shut up in the attic, in the old nursery…’

‘Mamma,’ Annie interrupted her. ‘Sofia-Elisabete shall be my bedfellow.’

‘What folly is this?’

‘I am determined in this, mamma. Besides, she’ll be the best of companions to me while Mrs Jenkinson visits her relations for the Christmas season.’

‘The best of companions? At your age? What nonsense. A child belongs in a nursery,’ declared she.

‘I shall sleep with cousin Annie,’ announced I, because an attic-dweller I didn’t wish to be.

‘Saucy girl!’ Lady Catherine rapped the floor with her walking-stick. ‘Nephew, I will not abide this child giving Anne some foul, foreign disease or infesting her room with fleas. Did you not say that Mrs Fitzwilliam contracted disease from her?’

Papai assured her ladyship that I removed from Portugal to England five years ago, that I was free of disease and fleas and that his wife, out of an abundance of care, had lately quarantined herself after visiting her girls school in Hackness where a pupil had been laid low with a suspicious fever. And that is why my mamãe could not come with us and pay her respects to her ladyship. She arranged for me to travel with papai to Rosings and thereby keep me and everyone else safe from fever. Many years ago, she lost her only son to illness, and the sorrow of it made her doubly anxious about me.

While the all-knowing grown-ups debated the state of my health, Annie made a sign to me to join her, and thus we stole out of the drawing room. Her eyes sparkling with mischief, she cried out, ‘One – two – three – fire!’ We shot the length of the passage at a mad pace, making a great deal of noise with our squeals and giggles, then up-up-up the stairs we climbed, our destination being her bedchamber, where she claimed victory by tossing herself onto the bed. We hoydens had no sooner caught our breath, than papai knocked at the half-opened door.

‘I dare say your introduction to Lady Catherine went very well.’ Papai winked at me. ‘My dear girl, you shall soon overtake me as her ladyship’s second most favourite relation.’

I scratched my head. ‘Who’s her first favourite relation?’

‘Well, now, that would be your cousin Darcy.’

‘Guuhhhh,’ Annie uttered a low, monstrous groan. Methinks she wasn’t fond of cousin Darcy, and I wondered why.

‘Papai, why are you second best when everyone says you’re a first-rate officer and gentleman?’ My papai, being a second son of an earl, would often remind me of his second-ness.

Papai gave a hearty laugh. ‘That’s what I wish to know.’

Sofia-Elisabete, the illegitimate child of Colonel Fitzwilliam, is a little firecracker with a true heart and an irrepressible spirit. In this novella, Twelfth-Night Cake & the Rosings Ghost, Sofia-Elisabete recollects her visit to Rosings when she was eight years old. What happens when she and Lady Catherine clash? Who is the naughty ghost that plagues our little girl? How does Colonel Fitzwilliam help his daughter navigate the prejudices of this world?

In Part Two, Sofia-Elisabete’s troubles begin…

*******

–ooooo–

Papai once said that there’s nothing worse than human suffering. But what troubled him are those people who don’t honestly feel any sympathy for the downtrodden or those in need or those brought low in spirit. He explained to me that there are people who simply deny that sadness exists. There are people who simply don’t want to be bothered with misery. And there are people who blame others for things that are out of their control, such as the weather.

No thanks to the severe drought during the summer, the bad harvests of wheat, barley, oats, hops, peas and beans made the country-folk here desperate. Papai had gone out again with the land agent to inspect more tenant farms, and he would not return until night-fall ‘deuced tired’, as he would say, and in a sombre mood, muttering to himself, ‘Lady Catherine would starve a saint.’ But he turned gentleman whenever he spoke with his ancient aunt. He reminded her of the violent bread riots two years ago, appealing to her Christian goodness and generosity to purchase quarten-loaves of wheaten bread to divide up amongst the tenants so that they wouldn’t suffer this winter, and only then would her ladyship reluctantly agree to his plan, which he wisely described to her as an investment in her farmlands.

How proud I am of my dear papai and his big, first-rate heart. You see, I know how it feels to starve, and what it means to cry when the pangs of hunger gnaw at your belly. During my foundling days in Portugal, we children would take turns eating – one day I would be fed, the next day I would be made to fast. Only then could the nuns stretch out the meagre supply of food on hand at the convent. Alas, every month a poor child or two, or three, died from starvation or disease. We placed the dead in an open shell and adorned them with wild jonquils ere the sexton buried them in a common grave. Even now, with my belly full of tea and cakes and all sorts of good things, the ghosts of those children still haunt me.

One afternoon, under a cold, cloudless sky, Annie and I drove to Hunsford in her low phaeton pulled by two pied ponies, the plan being to call at the parsonage to deliver up a pot of bone soup that Lady Catherine had condescended to give to the poor. Annie explained to me her rules. Rule No. 1: She never alighted from the phaeton, unless, of course, the rector was from home, calling on his parishioners to torture them with his stupid speeches. Rule No. 2: If she had the great misfortune to visit while he was at home, she never spoke to him for more than exactly five minutes. Those were her rules, and deviate from those rules we must not, or we shall suffer the consequences dearly, ever so dearly.

‘Why would we suffer, Annie?’

‘Why?’ Annie gave a shudder. ‘Because everything the rector says is stuff and nonsense. The man is a stuffmonger. I pray he is gone out.’

But it was not to be. The rector had not left his wife at home alone. On the approach to the parsonage, we espied the rector standing guard near the garden-gate, wildly waving a birch rod at two little boys dressed in threadbare clothes that had been patched a dozen times. ‘Away with you urchins,’ thundered he. ‘What an ungodly sight you are.’ Upon seeing us, his angry countenance turned very pale, and he summoned up a fawning smile. I sighed inwardly, because now we couldn’t visit Mrs Collins and her baby. Those were the rules.

‘Good morning, Mr Collins.’

‘How do you do, Miss de Bourgh? How healthy you look to-day, the way the sunbeam lights up your complexion…’

Annie thrust the pot of bone soup into his hands. ‘Mr Collins, I have come on an important mission to help the poor.’

‘Oh yes, let us help the poor. How noble, how kind, how good you are.’ He laid the pot on the ground without another thought.

Annie motioned to me. ‘Mr Collins, this is my cousin, Sofia-Elisabete Fitzwilliam.’

He turned to me with a grave, sour look, as if I were a big brown bug that he must needs squash.

I gave a slight nod to the rector, not knowing how much to say to him, given Annie’s strict rules, but I had this feeling that no matter what I said, he would pay me no heed.

‘Miss Fitzwilliam, is it then?’ He drew up to his full height with his nose turned up, giving himself airs. ‘I shall see you and your father in church on Christmas Day. How shocked was I when I learnt of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s conversion upon his marriage to a Papist. And he, a second son of an earl. Impossible, says I. Papists you may be, but not for long. I shall set you to rights by shining a light on the true Church of Christ…’

‘I love God,’ remarked I, willing myself not to clench my fists. ‘“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”’

‘Mr Collins, you must include that passage from the Bible in your sermon. Her ladyship would be pleased.’ Annie cracked her whip, and away we went.

Annie mentioned that we should spend some time with her mamma, who seemed out of sorts to-day. She suspected that her ladyship was greatly annoyed that her daughter had a new, young companion, making her ladyship feel ancient and discarded. ‘Cruel youth!’ Lady Catherine would call after us whenever we cousins sneaked away to do a bit of hoydening instead of attending to her.

We tiptoed into the blue sitting room where Lady Catherine sat slumped in her chair, snoring in a most peculiar fashion. After each snore, she would blow a puff of air as if she were a sleep bubble machine. I giggled into my hand, when, of a sudden, her ladyship gave a loud snort, and she flapped her lips like an old cart-horse. Now, half-awake, she fixed her big glassy eyes upon us.

‘Daughter, you have come home at last,’ muttered she.

Annie grasped her ladyship’s outstretched hand. ‘Yes, mamma.’

‘Oh, how I suffer from head-ache. Do bring my mint drops.’

‘Yes, mamma,’ replied the dutiful daughter.

I followed Annie below stairs to the pastry-room where glass-boxes containing tiny white pebbles sat in a cupboard. She explained that Les Anis de Flavigny – citron, rose, violet, mint, anis – came from France. These white pebbles took six months to make, they being coated many times with sugar syrup, each coat needing to dry before another coat could be added. ‘Mint relieves head-ache,’ advised she, and she placed a mint pebble onto my tongue. Mmm! How sweet it was. As soon as she looked away, I eagerly thrust my tiny hand into each of the glass-boxes one by one, and I hid the sugary booty in my pinafore pocket. O, ho! Robin Hood I would be, giving out candies to the poor and hungry children.

At tea-time, papai joined us, which pleased her ladyship, because he always entertained her with many a lively tale in exchange for a cup of milky, sugary tea, which he hated, and seed cake, which he loved. While he gobbled up another slice of cake, the stout housekeeper, Mrs Buxton, appeared, and she whispered something urgent to her mistress. Papai gave me a curious look. I swallowed hard, for no doubt he and everyone else saw the letters G-U-I-L-T-Y branded on my forehead. Methinks Robin Hood would run for it. Alas, I was stuck in my chair, weighed down with a sense of doom.

‘Heaven and earth!’ Lady Catherine turned a deep crimson. ‘Someone has plundered my medicinal drops. Mrs Buxton has interrogated the staff, and none have confessed the crime.’

Annie gaped at her ladyship. ‘The Les Anis de Flavigny drops have gone missing, mamma?’

‘Ay, ay! The last two people seen in the pastry-room were you and your little brown companion.’

‘Oh, mamma, how could you accuse us of such a thing?’

Papai cleared his throat. ‘Sofia-Elisabete, did you take the medicinal drops?

‘No, papai.’ Would God forgive my lie since it was for a noble cause? In my secret soul, I knew He would not, and thus I became seized with a fit of hiccups.

‘No? What’s that in your pinafore pocket?’

I shrugged.

‘Empty your pocket,’ papai commanded me.

I reluctantly did as I was told. I piled the white pebbles on the tea-table.

‘Well, I never!’ Lady Catherine rapped the floor with her walking-stick.

Annie gasped. ‘Bless me!’

‘Are those not the medicinal drops?’ Papai cast me a stern look.

I shook my head and twisted my hands together. ‘I do believe it’s candy (hiccup), papai.’

‘Deceitful girl!’ cried Lady Catherine.

Papai was beside himself with vexation. ‘What have you done, child?’

‘I’m going to be (hiccup) Robin Hood and give the candy to the hungry children (hiccup),’ explained I.

‘Oh, thief! You are nothing but a common outlaw.’ Her ladyship glowered at me. ‘And now these drops are spoilt and not fit to consume. You have soiled them with your nasty fingers. I should have known better than to let my Anne associate with a miscreant like you.’

Hot tears filled my eyes, and so I took to my heels. I had not gone more than five steps, than I spun round. With a foolish, childish resolve, I marched back to the tea-table. I scooped up the precious candy pebbles, and I tossed them into my pocket, it having occurred to me that if they were spoilt, well, then, seeing how they were mine now, I should give them to the poor children as planned.

‘Shameless girl!’ Her ladyship’s fury knew no bounds.

Papai grumbled, he having lost his patience with me. ‘To the nursery you go, where you’ll stay for ever.’

‘But papai…’

‘Now go and do my bidding,’ ordered he in a severe tone.

I took to my heels once more, bound for the dreaded nursery in the attic, which turned out to be a storage room with a closet where a bed had been made up. I shut myself up in my closet, and there I wept, and when I was not bemoaning my bad luck in being found out, I feasted on some of the white pebble candy in defiance of Lady Catherine. Unkind, unfeeling woman! She would starve a saint. She would deny a sugar treat to a poor, hungry child. Oh, how I wished my mamãe could save me from this ogress, this Lady Catherine. But mamãe was far, far away in Scarborough.

Having heard papai’s step in the nursery, I gulped down the candy in my mouth. The door of the closet burst open, and there stood papai with a grim face. His countenance softened at the sight of my face bathed in tears, until he caught me trying to hide the candy in my hand. ‘I see you’ve supped already,’ he drily observed. He confiscated what remained of my loot, wrapping it up in his pocket-handkerchief.

‘Tomorrow, you shall apologise to Lady Catherine,’ commanded he.

‘I’m not sorry for it,’ declared I, stubborn as ever. ‘I shan’t apologise to her, I shan’t.’

‘If you don’t apologise, she will summon the rector, Mr Collins, and you shall spend hours and hours praying on your knees in Rosings chapel, and the two of us shall be forced to read anti-Catholic tracts with that dolt of a man.’ Papai tugged at his cravat, and I realised then how bad things were for him because of what I had done.

‘What a double dunce!’

‘I’ve heard it said that Mr Collins prides himself on having the best, the biggest birch rod in the parish.’ Papai arched his brow at me. ‘What will it be then? Lady Catherine or Mr Collins and his birch rod?’

‘Her ladyship,’ mumbled I, admitting defeat.

‘In the morning, we shall seek an audience with our benevolent and noble lady. She will undoubtedly give us a tract to read about the pernicious effects of drinking, but we shall hide ourselves in the study and read aloud a more enlightened tract by Father O instead, understand?’

I nodded in reply. Father O’Shaughnessy, or Father O as we affectionately called him, conducted the Catholic service each month in Scarborough, and my papai had a great regard for this religious man who was known for his wisdom and quick wit. Oh, how I missed Father O and how he always called me Soofia-Eee in the Irish way and how no one could sing or play a fife better than him. In Scarborough, our beloved town, the people worshipped peacefully, whether they be Baptist or Quaker or Roman Catholic, &c.

‘Papai, why do you like Lady Catherine when she’s a grumpy old lady?’

‘Well, an age ago,’ began he, ‘when I was a young rascal, I got into a heap of trouble. How so very lost I was in those days. My father came to London where I ran riot, his intent being to cast me off, and thus I sought shelter at Rosings. Lady Catherine persuaded my father to purchase a commission for me in the army. She thought it would be the making of me, and it was. And if I had not fought the French in Portugal, I would never have created you, and you would not have been born.’

I knew not what to say; for, in my mind, a heroine Lady Catherine was not. So I blessed papai in Portuguese, kissing his hand. ‘A bênção meu papai.’ He, in turn, kissed my forehead and bid me good-night.

I thought about my being born and how I had no choice in the matter. No one asked me if I wished to be born. No one asked me if I wished to be abandoned in the foundling turnbox wheel when my natural mother didn’t want me as a bebê. Why, then, should I thank the snappish Lady Catherine for helping me to be born to poverty and misery and loneliness? It took me nearly four years to find my real father – my best beloved papai.

I closed my eyes, my thoughts tumbling to nothing. The dustman had no sooner come for me, than something cold and prickly brushed against my cheek. I awoke, quite startled. I clutched at the bed-clothes, my eyes as round as saucers. A ghostly shadow slid side to side on the wall near me, and I shuddered to think that Rosings was haunted. Surely my mind played tricks when I heard its ghostly moan, but little did I know then a shadow had been cast of something to come. That night, at the moonlight hour, my belly ached from the candy I had eaten.

In Part Three, Sofia-Elisabete is punished, but that doesn’t stop our girl from her mischievous ways…

*******

–ooooo–

‘I believe in the benevolence of the world, I believe in benevolence of the world,’ I chanted to myself the next morning, hoping that Lady Catherine’s humour had improved. ‘Dear God, I promise to go rightly in this world. Truly, I do.’ Alas, a new misfortune awaited me in the breakfast room.

‘My lady, I’m a naughty wicked girl. I’ve prayed to God for His guidance.’ Just then, my belly erupted in a loud rumble.

Lady Catherine humphed. ‘Ill, are you?’

I gripped my painful belly.

‘It must be from the candy she supped on last night.’ Papai smirked at me.

‘Greedy girl! It serves you right.’ Her ladyship signalled to the butler. ‘A basin of gruel for the child.’

‘Gruel?’ I twisted my face in disgust. Papai cast me a look of disdain, and so I sat, but not without a pout.

‘Gruel is better than physic.’ Her ladyship raised her chin at me. ‘You shall eat bland gruel for three days until you are better.’

‘Surely I can have treacle and currants with it?’ pleaded I.

‘Absolutely not. Plain is best. Whenever my Anne is brought low, a week’s worth of watery, tasteless gruel always puts her to rights. Is that not so, Anne?’

‘Oh yes, mamma. The more tasteless, the better.’ Annie smiled behind her hand, and I wondered at her treachery.

I suffered through breakfast, spooning up the watery, tasteless gruel. Just when I thought my misery was at an end, papai steered me to the study, where he lectured me for a whole fifteen minutes on my bad habit of lying, and he told me how the army flogged thieves with the cat-o-nine tails and confined them to bread and water diet and oftentimes put them to death as punishment.

‘I once caught a soldier stealing a joint of meat…’

‘Papai,’ I interrupted him, having heard these cat-o-nine-tails stories a million times. ‘I thought we were going to read a tract by Father O?’

‘O, ho! And we shall. Down on your knees and pray, saucy girl, while I read aloud a tract, a very long tract, by Father O, the most prolific writer I know.’

I stamped my foot in protest.

‘Shall we make that two very long tracts this morning?’

I hastily dropped to my knees, mumbling to myself, ‘I believe in the benevolence of the world, I believe in the benevolence of the world.’

Papai read aloud the very long tract – something to do with selfish people who wanted to get to heaven but didn’t give a fig about the rest of mankind – and whenever I sat on my haunches from boredom and crossed my eyes, he would tap me on my seat of honour with his walking-stick and make me stand on my knees again. Soon I swayed to and fro with weariness. ‘Papai, I’m deuced tired,’ complained I, but to no purpose.

Finally, when I couldn’t bear the pain in my legs and arms any longer, I determined that a well-feigned swoon would do. I’m the champion of well-feigned swooners. One must land with a loud thud on one’s side; that’s the trick, you know, if you wish to fool people or your little pet dog. Unfortunately for me, papai prodded me with his walking-stick, tickling me underneath my armpit and making me laugh. ‘On your knees, girl,’ ordered he. It wasn’t until the hot tears formed in my eyes, and I whimpered from the pain, did papai relent and allow me to sit down, now that I felt the whole weight of my penance.

When he had done reading the tract, papai said I would accompany him to call on Mr Pennyman, one of the tenant farmers. Poor farmer Pennyman had injured his leg and was laid up in bed for a week, which meant he couldn’t provide for his family. We would deliver up a sack of coals and a sack of potatoes to them, these things being generously provided by Lady Catherine. And so we saddled up mules for the one-mile journey. It struck me as odd, though, that papai wore his hunting coat and a double-barrelled rifle-gun slung over his shoulder, and he brought with him a pole.

Mrs Pennyman, with four small children clinging to her apron, greeted us at the door of their humble abode. Her toil-worn countenance pierced my heart. ‘Oh, bless m’lady,’ cried the farmer’s wife, as she thanked her ladyship for the coals and potatoes. I cringed with an inward sense of shame, because the sack of potatoes was not enough for this large, hungry family, and I wondered at Lady Catherine’s sense of generosity when we, the fortunate inmates of Rosings, feasted like kings and queens every day.

‘Me! Me! Me!’ the Pennyman children clamoured for a potato. Their mother shushed them, having only so much energy to pay them heed. I thought about my being an only child and how papai loved me first and best and how I didn’t have to fight with a brother and three sisters over scraps of love or food. When the youngest Pennyman began to cry from hunger, papai gifted him with an apple, which he shared with his sisters, they each of them taking a bite of it. I promised myself I would never complain again about my watery gruel. But like many a vow made in a moment of sincerity, I soon forgot about it when next I dined on that ghastly stuff.

Papai said to me, ‘Let us walk out to shoot hare.’ We set off then for the edge of the farm field, here and there bedecked with clumps of frost-crystals. He taught me how to look out for an island of brush-wood in the glistening field and how to beat up and down with the pole to make the hares stir. My pole duties now done for the moment, I stood very quiet and still. Once papai spotted the perfect circle of a hare’s black eye, he moved ever so slowly, and then he paused for the longest time to unnerve the hare. Quicker than a thought, the panic-stricken hare darted from the brush. Papai took aim with his rifle and…booffft! My papai is a most excellent marksman, and ere long he shot four brown hares.

‘Huzzah! Papai for ever,’ cheered I, proud of my first-rate hero.

‘That’s why they call me lucky Fitzer,’ remarked he as he tied up the hind legs of the hares.

We gave the two brace of hares to the farmer’s grateful wife. To my surprise, papai dug into the saddle-bag on his mule, removing a bunch of onions, along with bacon wrapped in paper and a pouch of spices, which the farmer’s wife could use to make a tasty pot of hare-stew for her family. And I wonder now if papai had pilfered those things from the larders at Rosings, just like Robin Hood might’ve done?

Papai turned grave as a judge. ‘Methinks those bits of candy you stole wouldn’t taste good with hare-stew, nor soothe the hungry bellies of the Pennyman children.’

I hung my head. ‘Papai, if someone isn’t kind, and they do things to make it seem as if they are so that they can go to heaven when they die, do they still get into heaven?’

My question must have surprised him, because he paused to think.

‘Everyone is preoccupied about going to heaven. I ask you, where’s the humanity in that?’ Papai drew me to his side. ‘A true manly man takes care of his family, and he strives to make them happy on earth. A wise poet wrote: “To make a happy fireside clime, To weans and wife, That’s the true pathos and sublime, Of human life.”’

That evening I began a letter to my mamãe, telling her about my thievery and how I accomplished my penance with papai’s help. I mentioned the big new words I learnt to-day, such as ‘humanity’, and how I hoped she wasn’t too concerned about going to heaven, because she was the most kind, the most benevolent being on earth and naturally so.

I sat at breakfast the next morning, my head bent over my basin of tasteless gruel, willing myself to eat this dreadful stuff. The grown-ups’ idle talk bored me, that is, until I caught the words ‘twelfth cake’. Annie declared her intent to make a twelfth cake for each of the farm tenants for Twelfth Night celebration on the eve of Epiphany, and inside the cake there would be a really grand surprise.

‘How ridiculous, Anne,’ Lady Catherine chided her. ‘A dried bean and a dried pea inside the cake will do. The man finding the bean is crowned King of the Revels for the night, and the woman finding the pea is crowned Queen, with the power to command all to do her bidding for the night.’

‘Some folks place a penny inside the cake instead. I propose a new Rosings tradition, mamma. In addition to the bean and pea, there shall be a crown hidden inside the cake, and this coin, this charm, shall symbolise luck and prosperity for the year ahead.’

Lady Catherine gasped. ‘A whole crown? Have you taken leave of your senses? This will set a dangerous precedent, indeed. A penny is quite enough for farm-folk.’

‘I am resolved to help the tenants this Christmas season, mamma.’

‘I dare say this rebel idea of hiding a crown in a twelfth cake comes from your little friend Robin Hood.’ Lady Catherine glared at me. ‘You seem to value this bold outlaw’s opinion more than your own mamma’s.’

Papai cleared his throat. ‘I shall donate five crowns for your project, Anne.’

‘Hurrah!’ cheered I. ‘My papai is the best of men.’

‘Connivers!’ Lady Catherine sulked.

Papai grinned at her. ‘Come, come, dearest aunt. What say you? Will you not match my five crowns?’

‘Humph.’ Lady Catherine scowled. ‘I shall match your five crowns, nephew, but this is always your trick, to make it seem as if I cared not one whit for my tenants, as if I took pleasure in seeing them suffer.’

Annie kissed her mother, who pretended to be annoyed at her daughter’s display of affection. You see, once upon a time, Annie rebelled against her mother, who never let her do anything amusing or meaningful until, as I mentioned before, our Annie, with cunning and dare, ran away to Scarborough to stay with us on Queen Street. She eventually returned home to Rosings, when her mother promised to change, for a lonely widow her mother was. And that is why her ladyship held her tongue or simply gave up whenever Annie became intractable, because the thought of losing her only daughter broke her heart; at least that’s what I’ve come to believe.

I finished my letter to mamãe, telling her about the good luck charm that Annie planned to hide inside each of the twelfth cakes and how it would be a grand surprise for the suffering tenants this Christmas season. I ended my letter with ‘Mamãe, I believe in the benevolence of the world.’ Mamãe wrote back to me (a week later) that Annie had a charitable heart, and she was glad of it, and that I had the best of cousins there at Rosings to teach me a true Christian goodness.

On my third and final day of eating cruel gruel, which is how I dubbed it, I got it into my brain that my own suffering would no longer do. Breakfast over, and no one attending to me, I seized Annie’s cup of chocolate and, quick, quick, quick, I slurped up what remained in it. Now, most mornings after breakfast, Annie would hie to the stable to call on her beloved ponies, Sylvester and Macdougal, and she, being an eccentric, would kiss them and slobber them and talk like a stable boy to them and rub them down with fresh straw. I hear you cry, ‘Surely you are funning?’ I own that I had spied on her the other day. Having burst into a fit of giggles at her silliness and stable-boy talk, I was found out and banished from the stable.

Feeling emboldened by my chocolate caper to-day, I sneaked into the stable where I eavesdropped on Annie’s conversation with her ponies. She told them how naughty I had been. She growled like a dog at my ‘gggrruel dilemma’ – a wit she is not – and how I needed to be taught a lesson for having done a bad thing, a very bad thing by stealing Lady Catherine’s medicinal drops. ‘She be a bad ‘un. A’n’t I right, Sylvester? You knows I am.’ She fed a carrot to her pony. Well, I never! I waited until Annie quit the stable, whereupon I pilfered her prized driving-whip. One of the ponies stamped his hoof in protest. ‘Shush, Macdougal,’ warned I, shaking my finger at him.

The sun in a cloudless sky had begun to melt the thin layer of frost on the ground. I sallied forth to the garden; from there, I bounded down the sloping lawn to reach the meadow land, my very own secret meadow. I pranced about, cracking the long whip – crac crac – again and again and again. I imagined myself atop a gleaming barouche, driving four-in-hand, my team of chocolate unicorns galloping to the great beyond. ‘Gee up! Awhi! Awhi!’ shouted I, mimicking a driver. Unbeknown to me, papai had sighted me from a window at the manor-house. What a strange scene I must have presented to the servants, leaping about and crac-crac-ing my whip and taking a tumble now and then on the slippery ground. But papai was used to my peculiar ways. He strode out across the brown meadow to join me.

Having heard papai’s approach, I spun round to face him, my countenance flushed with exercise. ‘Papai, I’m driving a barouche and four with chocolate unicorns.’ He slowed his step, serving me with a quizzical stare. ‘Come here, silly gooseberry,’ ordered he with an outstretched hand. But I sensed a trace of trouble on his face. Would he lecture me about my hoydenish ways? I stepped back. With mingled feelings of childish panic and impish glee, I darted off like a hare, zig-zagging through the meadow. ‘Ha! Ha!’ I, the prey, taunted the hunter. But I was no match for a keen sportsman like my papai, who seized me by the back of my unlucky scarlet cloak and thereafter confiscated the driving-whip, scolding me that it wasn’t a toy and that I could hurt myself or someone or something.

‘Egads!’ he drew back. ‘What’s that big brown stain on the front of your pinafore?’

‘Methinks it’s mud.’ I felt my soiled pinafore.

Papai sniffed. ‘It smells chocolate-y. I wonder how it got there?’

‘I do believe…’ I puzzled my wits together for inspiration, ‘the chocolate unicorn nudged me with his magical horn.’

Papai cast a sceptical look at me. ‘I dare say you’re lying. Did you sneak about and drink chocolate at breakfast?’

It has long been a maxim with imps like me that one must always answer a question with another question to get oneself out of a scrape. And if one is very lucky, the all-knowing grown-up will have forgotten his question by then.

‘Papai, am I as brown as chocolate?’ I peered up at him with the saddest eyes I could muster.

He started at my question. ‘Nay. Your skin is a…lovely, light brown colour – very milky, with a bit of chocolate in it.’

‘Like your milky tea?’

‘Ye-e-e-s,’ faltered he.

‘But you hate milky tea.’

Papai gave a slight grimace, his eyelids crinkling. ‘True. That’s why I sweeten it with sugar.’

‘Am I your sweet little girl?’

‘Quite so.’ Papai tugged at his cravat. ‘You’re my sweet little girl, the colour of very milky tea.’

I sensed his relief, he having summoned up a grin for me. I wondered why my milky tea-ness caused him to fidget. Did my brown-ness vex people for some reason? I thought about people colours – the milky-white young ladies, the scarlet-faced old men, the nut-brown farmers. My wee brain couldn’t make sense of why that sort of thing mattered.

Papai strode through the meadow, his hands clasped behind his back, thinking many a deep thought, for a prodigious thinker he is. I ran alongside him, trying to keep pace with his manly stride. I clasped my hands behind my back likewise to summon up some deep thoughts of my own, as mine were always coming and going whenever they pleased. ‘Papai, I feel a deep thought coming round finally,’ said I with pride. And he laughed at me, wearing those sad, crinkling eyes of his.

In Part Four, it’s Christmas. I know it’s a bit odd to celebrate Christmas when summer is just beginning for us, but Sofia-Elisabete is determined to tell us her story, and it’s going to be a doozy, just you wait and see…

*******

–ooooo–

Christmas Eve having arrived, the manor-house was bedecked in evergreens, a cheerful blaze crackled and whistled in the chimney-nook of the drawing room and a yule candle of monstrous size sat on the dining table. On this special night, Lady Catherine permitted me to sit up to supper with the grown-ups, our only guests being the Collinses. The rector never spoke to me, which suited me, but nor did he allow his wife to, which bewildered me, although she would give me a warm smile whenever her husband did not attend to her.

The grown-ups toasted each other with spiced-wine, and we ate roast beef and brawn. Lady Catherine goggled at her slice of brawn before she devoured it like a horse. Methinks she loved that horrid jellied stuff, as did Mr Collins, who called himself the ‘biggest brawn eater within miles’. I, who had never eaten brawn before, found this meaty-jelly thing not to my liking, and hide it I did under the mound of potatoes on my plate. In the course of the evening, when we had retired to the drawing room, Mr Collins sang a Christmas ditty about boar’s head and brawn to torture us:

The Boar is dead,
Lo, here is his head:
What man could have done more
Than his head off to strike,
Meleager like,
And bring it as I do before?

He living spoiled
Where good men toiled,
Which made kind Ceres sorry;
But now, dead and drawn,
Is very good brawn,
And we have brought it for ye…

Lady Catherine cried ‘Enough!’ She claimed the rector’s ponderous singing had given her indigestion, and thus she ordered the carriage to take the Collinses home. One wonders, though, if the great quantity of jellied pig’s head and trotters she had consumed during dinner caused her illness.

‘Let us sit round the Christmas fire,’ suggested papai, ‘and I shall tell you a ghost story.’

‘Papai, is there a Rosings ghost?’

Lady Catherine and Annie exchanged a quick glance, and I wondered why.

‘Pooh, nonsense,’ exclaimed her ladyship. ‘Nephew, I wish to retire now.’

Papai held out his arm for her to take, and he escorted her upstairs.

Once her ladyship had gone to bed in ill-humour and ill-health, the ‘real festivities’ began; at least that’s how Annie described them. The two of us sneaked below stairs to the Servants’ Hall. There, mingling with the servants, we played bob apple, hot cockles and steal the white loaf, and we danced to the merry tune of fiddles. Oh, to be a young child again. I romped with Annie, like the hoyden I am, in the highest of spirits and lost in the enchantment of rustic revelry.

Of a sudden, a roar of chanting and clapping erupted, the reason being that papai, who had come looking for me, stood under the mistletoe, and near him stood the shy maid Betsy. You see, my papai was a great favourite with the staff, because he knew all of their names and treated them with civility. And so he obliged everyone by giving a quick kiss to the maid, who blushed to her eyes and who touched her flaming cheek where papai had kissed her. With a broad grin, papai plucked a white berry from the mistletoe as if he had won a big prize. I quick-marched to the scene, my ire heightened. ‘I shall tell mamãe you kissed Betsy,’ threatened I. Everyone laughed as if I had told a good joke.

Pierce stepped forward to the centre of the hall, where, with much urging by Mrs Buxton, he commenced to sing in a theatrical deep bass:

Come bring with a noise,
My merry, merry boys,
The Christmas log to the firing,
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all be free,
And drink to your heart’s desiring…

When the butler had done singing the ancient Christmas song, and to much applause, papai toasted everyone with a glass of ale: ‘Here’s to ye, and here’s to thee. And here’s to them that’s far away.’ I knew he pined for mamãe – she, who was far away in Scarborough. He had read to me a letter that he had written to her, begging her to reconsider and to join us at Rosings. He assured her that I would not take ill. He told her, ‘Are not life’s tempests unpredictable? But one mustn’t live his life in fear. You and I should be as one this Christmas-tide and not miles and miles apart. I beg you, Aggie. This cruel separation has crushed my heart into a million pieces, and only you can cure me and put me together again.’ He wondered if this simple, heartfelt message would change mamãe’s mind; for, she could be as headstrong as any man. I gave an inward shrug, because I doubted it would.

–ooooo–

Papai lay in bed snoring and stinking of the wicked liquor. He must have played at whist o’er liquors brisk until mid-night. Gwquaaakkkkk sk-sk k k K. Papai awoke with an abrupt start as if he had sensed my presence.

‘Good heavens! Why are you staring at me, child?’

I huffed. ‘I’m been waiting ever so long for you to wake up.’

‘Whatever for?’ Papai rubbed his sleepy eyes.

‘It’s Christmas-day.’ I leapt with joy.

‘So it is. So it is. Away with you now.’ Papai tossed the bed-clothes over his head.

‘But papai, Lady Catherine said everyone must pray at Rosings chapel before breakfast.’

Papai groaned. ‘Go and wait at the entrance of the chapel gallery. I’ll be there quicker than a hundred thoughts.’

And I waited and I waited, gathering a heap of thoughts, but papai never did come. Worried that he would be late for morning prayer and that we would be punished and made to read tracts, I bounded down the stairs to search for Annie. Once I had explained my dilemma to her, she quickly disappeared below stairs to retrieve two pots and spoons. Armed with these kitchen things, we paraded up and down the length of the passage near papai’s bedchamber, banging our pots and creating a great noise. Papai’s door flew open. He really did look like a madman with his hair standing on end.

‘Your infernal hullabaloo has given me a sudden head-ache, I thank you not!’ He slammed the door with a bang, uttering a dreadful oath and something about ‘Oh, my head, my he-e-a-a-ad.’

In Rosings chapel, we sat in the gallery, listening to Lady Catherine read prayers, while the servants sat below us, hidden from view. But I knew that some of the footmen felt poorly, as poorly as papai did, they each of them suffering from severe head-ache. I had seen them earlier this morning, looking white as ghosts. Surely they would be made to eat gruel.

Later, at breakfast, the butler set a basin of ghastly gruel before papai, who pretended to spoon it into his mouth, for he never did swallow any of it. I know this to be true, because I watched papai ever so closely and committed his devious technique to memory. I giggled into my hand when, after a few minutes, papai’s eyes closed and his head drooped forward, and whenever I pushed his head upright, it would droop again. To be sure, my childish mirth-making vexed her ladyship.

‘Fitzwilliam,’ thundered she.

Papai nearly fell from his chair. ‘Madam?’

‘You are very dull this morning.’

Papai began to stammer, willing his eyes to remain opened. ‘Yes…yes I am. You see, I…I…’

Lady Catherine rose from her chair, cutting him off. ‘Pray let us go to Christmas service.’

We obediently followed her ladyship out of doors, where papai handed his aunt into the carriage, and Annie next. He was about to hand me in, when Lady Catherine blocked my way with her walking-stick.

‘The child must sit on the box with the driver.’

Papai hesitated. ‘My lady, I fear she might catch cold and…’

‘Nephew, you must stop coddling the child,’ commanded she.

Papai sighed, and he shut the carriage door. He lifted me atop the box and thereafter mounted the box himself instead of sitting within. He placed me on his lap, wrapping me up in his great coat. ‘Quick, driver!’ he ordered the coachman. Oh, how the frosty air made me shiver. By the time we reached the church, which stood a half mile distant, I couldn’t feel my toes or my fingers. Whilst we sat in Lady Catherine’s pew, papai blew on my hands to warm them up, and Annie gave me her charcoal foot warmer. These attentions paid to me by Annie certainly didn’t go unnoticed by Lady Catherine, who cast a severe look at us.

Now, be it known, my mamãe had taught me church etiquette, particularly when I am obliged to attend service at the Church of England. I must never speak or giggle or yawn. I must never tap my feet or swing my legs while seated in the pew. I must never knit my brows or cross my eyes or twist my lips whenever I disagreed with something being said. I must pray and kneel and sing whenever everyone else did, and so forth and so be it. And that is why, when the rector, Mr Collins, ascended his pulpit where he railed against the evils of revelry and excessive drinking on Christmas eve, I sat in respectful silence, although inwardly I prayed that the rector would get on with it and finish his sermon. A hymn-singer I wished to be.

An hour had passed when a great catastrophe occurred, all because of a snore. First, it began as a low murmur – sk sk sk k k k – but then it increased to a monstrous snore. Mr Collins, with fire in his eyes, signalled for the sluggard-waker to give papai a smart rap on the head. ‘Papai,’ I whispered in his ear. I shook, I pinched, I elbowed him, but to no purpose. The sluggard-waker, being a rheumatic old man, tottered towards us, waving his long staff with brass knob in a menacing fashion. There’s nothing more frightening than a sluggard-waker, believe you me. Struck with panic, I stood before papai, determined to save him from harm, and so I stamped on his foot, using all my might. ‘Yow!’ cried he, furious at being roused from his slumber until he recalled his whereabouts.

I had no sooner caused a scene during Christmas service, than a great clamour ensued, as if the noise had escaped from a corked bottle. Babies screamed and cried, boys played and pranked, old folks hacked and blew their noses, dogs barked and howled. Apparently, some of the four-legged miscreants in the village had sneaked into the church on this holy day. The sluggard-waker, who also served as dog-whipper, lunged here and there, frightening the dogs with a stout lash, but he never did catch any of the quadrupeds, they each of them bounding away to safety.

The sluggard-waker turned his attention to the restless boys. To restore order, he tapped each naughty boy on the head using the foxtail at the other end of his long staff. Once he had silenced the two-legged miscreants, he bustled up to me – the No. 1 Miscreant – with his staff. ‘I think not,’ papai objected in his stern, officer-like manner, and he drew me to his breast to protect me. To be sure, this heightened her ladyship’s ire – she, who objected to my being coddled.

The service now concluded, her ladyship departed in a huff, and she and Annie were handed into the carriage by their footman. Mr Collins ran after them the entire way to the manor-house.

‘Papai, why is Mr Collins running?’

‘Don’t you know – the rector favours running as a form of daily exercise?’ Papai gave me a lopsided grin. ‘One can often see the rector running back and forth between the parsonage and Rosings. Why, I once won a wager that Mr Collins could beat her ladyship’s carriage to the manor-house, the rector having done so by three seconds.’

While the rector got his daily exercise, papai and I sought shelter inside the cold church to escape the drizzling rain. Mrs Collins, who took pity on us, invited us to the parsonage where we sat near a bright coal fire, drinking tea and eating gingerbread. I discovered then the goodness and kindness of Mrs Collins. She never questioned our Catholic faith. Nor did she comment on my foreign-ness or brown-ness. I got to visit her plump baby, who, on closer inspection, was a fine, jolly boy who never shed a tear, even when papai lifted him high up in the air.

The drizzle having stopped, papai and I sallied forth hand-in-hand to the manor-house. Papai, whose eyes beamed with mischief, declared it one of the best Sunday services he could remember, much better than the Sunday service when, as a boy, his pet frog, Hubbub-it, escaped from his pocket and, oh, how the ladies shrieked with terror, their powdered wigs gone askew when they had jumped in fright. I admit to being all astonishment at his remarks, having prepared myself to be punished to-day.

I squinted at him. ‘Even with the noise we made on this holy day?’

‘Oh yes. ‘Twas a first-rate hullabaloo.’

I hung my head. ‘I’m going to apologise to God for it.’

‘Well and good, but only if you’re sincere. There’s no sense in it otherwise.’ Papai squeezed my hand. ‘Ah, here comes the champion of apologisers and an insincere one at that. There’s nothing good to be said for a civility that comes so unwillingly and unnaturally.’

As we rounded a bend in the path, we came across Mr Collins, mumbling to himself. He glanced at us with a stormy brow. He thereafter nodded to papai in a gruff manner but didn’t stop to talk. Poor Mrs Collins, who awaited the return of her disagreeable husband. I wondered if the hullabaloo in church to-day would ruin her Christmas dinner. Now that I think on it, I’m sure that it did, and I’ll always feel sorry for it.

In Rosings chapel, I knelt to pray, and I gave a thousand apologies to God for being the No. 1 Miscreant at to-day’s Christmas service. ‘Dear God, I should’ve held my tongue and sat quietly, thinks I. And I should’ve let the sluggard-waker rap papai on the head for snoring, thinks I. It’s not the first time papai has fallen asleep during a sermon, believe you me. Oh, and since I know that you know, what I know, I shouldn’t have crossed my eyes three times during the sermon, thinks I.’

I felt a presence near me, the presence of another troubled soul. I turned round, hoping to find a penitent papai, when, to my surprise, I observed Lady Catherine with bowed head.

‘I pray to God to forgive us for such a scandalous Christmas service,’ uttered she in a doleful tone.

‘Mr Collins’s sermon was a very bad one,’ returned I, recalling the rector’s rant about the wild revelry on Christmas eve.

‘Impudent girl! I do not speak of the sermon, which, by-the-bye, I wrote.’

I covered my gaping mouth with my hands. ‘Oh, blunder,’ I whispered to myself.

She shook her head at me. ‘Did you not learn anything to-day about the evils of excessive drinking? Did you not witness the pernicious consequences of spirituous liquor?’

With an inward cringe, I shrugged.

She rapped the floor impatiently with her walking-stick. ‘ You must stop your father from excessive drinking.’

‘But…your ladyship…I’m still a tender child, only eight years old.’

She humphed. ‘What nonsense. Why, when I was a tender eight-year-old, my dear mother had been dead for over a year, and I looked after the younger children and made them behave. Coddle them I did not.’

I opened my mouth to protest, when papai announced his presence and his wish to give me a Christmas gift. He held out his arm to his ancient aunt.

‘I suppose there is no stopping you when it comes to pampering your only child,’ grumbled she.

Papai grinned at her, and he patted her hand. He didn’t say a word and neither did she. That’s when I learnt papai’s secret and the virtue of silence that comes from holding one’s tongue. Unfortunately for me, it’s not an easy thing to learn. I fear it takes many years of practise to get it right. Papai told me afterwards that civility is the mark of a true gentleman and that no provocation whatsoever could justify any man in not being civil to every woman, rich or poor, even if she were the most despicable, the most beastly woman in the world. I have come to believe that if someone like me were a man, I would be reckoned a brute.

In Part Five, it’s Christmas Day, an emotional time for a little girl who misses her beloved step-mother. I guess you could say that Lady Catherine’s criticism about Sofia-Elisabete’s looks got under her skin this time.

*******

–ooooo–

Inside the silver locket that papai had given me for Christmas were tiny portraits: one of mamãe, she with her reddish-brown hair and sparkling green eyes, and one of papai, he with his lopsided grin and dark blue eyes. Hot tears formed in my own dark blues, and I wondered how mamãe would celebrate Christmas dinner with her girls at Bunberry school. Would she even think of me and papai? Would she save me a piece of her most excellent gingerbread? Would she remember to give my pug Tin-Key a tasty bone for Christmas dinner?

‘Tears on Christmas Day are bad luck,’ Lady Catherine reproached me. With a sigh, she handed me a small bottle of Milk of Roses. ‘No young lady can bear the burden of bad looks. “What a fright,” people will say. But with any luck, you might become almost tolerable with Milk of Roses.’

Her censure cut me to the quick. I began to sob, bewildered by the brown-ness of my skin. I was cursed – the curse of brown skin! And now I would turn into a fright. Oh, woe is me. Papai wiped my tears with his pocket-handkerchief, telling me only a silly gooseberry would cry and fret, and didn’t I know what a lovely child I was. But I didn’t believe him.

Upstairs in the nursery, I dabbed the Milk of Roses onto my face, and I scrubbed my face with it as hard as I could, the result of which turned me bright red instead of milk-white. Ay me! I sat there in a pout, staring at my reddened face in the looking-glass, wondering what to do, when I formed a brilliant idea to fix my brown-ness. I seized the bell-pull to summon the maid Betsy, and I told her to make haste and bring me a basin of gruel and to be sure to add a heap of milk in it instead of water and, oh yes, bring me a paint brush as well.

So it was that I painted my face with the milky gruel paste, and once I had made sure that none of my brown-ness showed, I fanned my work of art to make it dry nice and crusty. ‘I have done you at last, Miss Brown-ness,’ I shook my finger at my reflection in the looking-glass. Pleased with myself, I skipped merrily down the passage, and I hop-hop-hopped down two flights of stairs, eager to show myself off to those awaiting me in the drawing room.

‘Bless me!’ Annie placed a hand at her heart.

Papai gaped at me. ‘Good heavens! What have you done to your face?’

I grinned at everyone, proud that they had noticed my milk-white complexion.

‘I knew how it would be,’ Lady Catherine nodded her approval. ‘Her complexion has already improved with Milk of Roses.’

‘Oh, mamma,’ exclaimed Annie. ‘Put on your spectacles for once.’

The butler appeared just then to announce the imminent arrival of Lady Catherine’s dinner guests.

‘Guests?’ Annie’s countenance turned crimson. ‘Pray tell me you haven’t invited that blockhead Sir Wiggleby for Christmas dinner. I shan’t be trotted out for an old widower like him. I shall be ill, deathly ill, if you make me attend him, mamma.’

Her ladyship expressed shock. ‘My dear Anne, I do have an acquaintance or two whom I do not pay to attend me.’

The butler announced Lord Matlock, a most handsome elderly gentleman with white hair and lively blue eyes. They called him the White Lion, but I called him avô, for he was my grand-papa. As soon as he swept into the drawing room, the air in the room changed. I know not how to describe it, but it felt as if the air became different somehow – lighter and happier – and we, his charmed audience, stood in awe at the magic of it and his superhuman energy and glow. To be sure, I was all agog to rush into his arms. I hadn't seen my avô in many months.

‘My dear Catty, how do you do?’ Lord Matlock kissed her ladyship’s cheek.

‘Brother, you have come at last, have you?’ Lady Catherine chided him affectionately.

Lord Matlock’s travelling companions included Mr Remy, a true dandy attired in the height of fashion, and La Baronessa, a beautiful, young opera singer dressed in a profusion of rich lace and sparkling jewels. I could not help but goggle at La Baronessa, whose face brought to mind a painting I had seen of Venus in a state of nature. She, in turn, seemed highly amused with my milky face, as did Mr Remy, who eyed me with his lorgnette.

Once the proper introductions were made – which, in my mind, took for ever, because if there’s one thing grown-ups love to do, is to stand and gawk at each other and to determine who outranks who and who’s wearing what – Lord Matlock beckoned me with outstretched hands. With a squeal, I leapt towards him like the hoyden I am.

‘Meu avô! Meu avô!’ cried I with happiness.

‘A merry Christmas to you!’ He made a sour face when he kissed me on the cheek. ‘My dear girl, why do you have gruel on your face?’

‘It’s gruel mixed with Milk of Roses to turn my phiz white,’ explained I. ‘Her ladyship said Milk of Roses would improve my complexion. I don’t want to be a fright, you know, when I grow up.’

Lord Matlock humphed. ‘What colour, would you say, La Baronessa is?’

I admired the opera singer’s velvety complexion. ‘Light brown?’

‘Quite so. Is she not the loveliest lady you have ever seen?’

I nodded in reply.

‘May I?’ He held out his pocket-handkerchief, and, like magic, the butler appeared with a small silver bowl filled with soap suds.

I made a silly face while Lord Matlock wiped away my gruel mask.

‘Hold, hold, child.’ He paused with concern, his eyes fixed on my cheek. ‘There’s something very peculiar underneath the gruel crust…’

‘What is it? Meu avô, what is it?’ I trembled, worried that I had already turned into a fright.

‘Why, it’s your lovely brown skin.’ And he smiled.

‘Oh, avô,’ I chided him for funning me.

‘Now you are you again – our dear Sofia-Elisabete,’ he tapped my nose. ‘Someday, if you are good, you shall be as beautiful as La Baronessa.’

Soon we sat at table, eager for the Christmas feast to begin. But to my ten-fold dismay, the dreaded brawn from last night made its reappearance. Lord Matlock praised the cook, the French cook he had sent to Rosings, and he helped her ladyship twice to the brawn; for, like I said, she was a prodigious lover of meaty-jelly stuff. Oh, how I prayed that everyone would eat a slice of it so there would be no more. As if she had guessed my thoughts, her ladyship placed her guests under enchantment, encouraging them to eat brawn, whereupon Mr Remy, who sought to please his hostess, ate a second slice of brawn, and then a third. He praised her ladyship’s brawn, saying it was the best brawn he had ever tasted in good old England.

‘Lady Catherine, how mortified am I,’ cried Mr Remy, fluttering his lace handkerchief about. ‘I dare say I have eaten one more slice of your delicious brawn than you did. What must you think of me and my poor table manners? Oh, dear. Oh, dear.’

‘Mr Remy, do not trouble yourself,’ replied her ladyship. ‘We have five rolls of brawn all pickled up, sitting in the larder. We at Rosings shall be eating brawn for months.’

‘Oh, lovely,’ muttered Annie, with a grim countenance.

Armed with his two-tined guard fork and sharp knife, papai carved up the monstrous pig’s head bedecked with bays and rosemary, but I refused to eat any of the roasted pig. You see, when I was four years old, I used to cry whenever the servant brought in the platter with the pig’s head – its mouth stuffed with a red apple, sitting there between its tusks – until papai said I would never be truly English if I insisted on blubbering whenever he manfully carved up a pig’s head.

‘Daughter, do you not wish for a pig’s ear?’ With a waggish grin, papai held up something fleshy and foul on the guard fork. I replied I did not. Oh, how I wished to cover my eyes with my hands. According to my mamãe, one must look down at her plate or look the other way and not make choking noises – gak gaaak gak – while everyone feasts on pig’s head. Those are the rules, you know, of dining etiquette and sitting up for supper with grown-ups.

Lady Catherine nodded with approval at her guest. ‘Mr Remy, you have taken a grand tour on the continent. Would you not agree that we English surpass all others in the roasting of meat?’

‘Oh, certainly, your ladyship,’ returned he. ‘Tender! So tender! A roasted pig’s head – and an English one it must be – always transports me.’

With a sudden gleam in his eye, papai sat erect, ready to carve again, his guard fork raised with anticipation. ‘May I serve you more of the snout, Mr Remy?’

‘I thank you, yes, Colonel Fitzwilliam,’ said he. ‘So kind! So kind!’

Upon retiring to the drawing room, we ladies sat and chatted while we waited for the men, who had remained in the dining room doing manly things, such as drinking wicked liquor and cracking a thousand stale jokes and showing off with their sallies and mocking bad punsters and cursing now and then whenever they spoke of boring things, such as acts of parliament, corn prices and horseflesh. I know these things to be true because I used to eavesdrop on the men whenever I wasn’t allowed to sit up to supper. Once the men turned themselves into proper gentlemen and deigned to join us, tea was served up, after which Lady Catherine requested La Baronessa to honour us with a song.

The Italian soprano swept forward to the centre of the room, whilst Mr Remy sat at the pianoforte, pulling his fingers to crack his knuckles – crac crac crac – and when he had done cracking his last finger, he twirled his fingers, two of which were adorned with monstrous diamond rings. I giggled into my hand, until papai shushed me. With a grand flourish, Mr Remy began to play the instrument, his fingers flying over the keys, his head bobbing up and down with the swell of the melody.

In the midst of this showy spectacle, La Baronessa commenced to sing a song in Italian, and my attention became drawn to her, but I heard not a word she sang. Whenever she took a deep breath, the large diamond on her necklace, which hung suspended at her breast, would flash like lightning. It certainly dazzled me, as it did most everyone there except Lady Catherine, who closed her eyes in a dreamy state. ‘Mon Dieu,’ papai uttered in a low tone, his eyes fixed on La Baronessa’s blazing diamond. When La Baronessa concluded her song, Lord Matlock kissed her hand, and he led her to a settee. But instead of joining her there, he sat near her ladyship as was her due.

‘Catty, I have brought London to you since you refuse to come to London to see me.’

‘Humph. London, indeed.’ As if she felt sorry for having scorned his Christmas surprise for her, she turned to Lord Matlock in earnest, grasping his hand with tenderness. ‘Do you remember the time papa took us to the opera in London, and he introduced us to the French soprano, Sophie Arnould?’

He nodded to her, and the two of them shared a secretive smile.

‘She could have been a princess or a countess,’ declared her ladyship. ‘Her talent was so great.’

‘So they said.’ He patted her hand, whereupon he turned to me and Annie. ‘Well, now, La Baronessa and Mr Remy have entertained us in grand fashion. What say you to a winter’s tale? I’m a first-rate story-teller. Shall I tell you the one about the Rosings Ghost?’

‘Ay, do,’ urged Annie.

‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear,’ fretted Mr Remy, tugging at one of his crisp curls.

‘Hurrah! A ghost story.’ I clapped my hands. Little did I know then that this ghost story would change everything for me that Christmas-tide.

In Part Six, the story of the Rosings Ghost is revealed…

*******

–ooooo–

With a solemnity of countenance, Lord Matlock spoke in hushed tones to Pierce, who thereafter dutifully removed the footmen, closing the doors behind them. Lord Matlock stood with his back to the great fireplace, his hands held behind him, his head bowed, while we, his eager audience, sat in silence, afraid to utter a word. I gazed at him in expectation, my heart thump-thumping, unable to bear the silence any longer. He lifted his head ever so slowly, his eyes gleaming in the candlelight, his lips curved in a wicked grin as if he had been touched with madness; at least I thought so.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ queried he. ‘I never have done, until I learnt the tale of the Rosings Ghost, and for one moment I might have done. It began one day, when Anne’s father, Sir Lewis de Bourgh, chanced upon a tattered old journal, which was buried in an ancient chest, which was hidden behind a false wall, which had been constructed in the bowels of the manor-house, which had been built by his ancestor Sir Hubert de Bourgh nearly two centuries ago. In this journal, Sir Hubert spoke of the Rosings Ghost, a ghost that appeared during Christmas-tide, haunting this ancient hall and doing evil and vexatious things to ruin the twelve days of Christmas for Sir Hubert and his honoured guests, including the king one year, making Sir Hubert look rather foolish.

‘Be it said that Sir Hubert had done many evil things during his lifetime, such as killing his rivals with poisoned wassail and plundering their castles during the revelry that occurs on Twelfth Night. One Christmas Day, he discovered the Rosings Ghost’s sinister secret – why the ghost bedevilled Rosings during Christmas-tide – he having suspected the truth of the matter, given his own evil doings. The angry ghost threatened that a curse would befall Sir Hubert if he revealed the secret to another. Sir Hubert never told a soul, but he outwitted the ghost by revealing the secret in a journal and by entombing the journal behind a false wall. And the ghost was got rid of that way, never to return to plague Sir Hubert during his lifetime.

‘A great many years later, Sir Lewis undertook to expand his prized wine cellar, and while the workmen were knocking down what they thought was a wall, they discovered a false wall and a secret chamber behind it. That’s how Sir Lewis discovered the journal and the secret of the Rosings Ghost. He claimed he had unwittingly released the ghost from its musty tomb. He wished he had never found the journal and, in a fit of rage, he burnt it, but he swore the ghost lived on, plaguing him for the rest of his life during the twelve days of Christmas. Whenever anything bad or peculiar happened at Rosings during Christmas-tide, he would blame a servant, pointing his finger at the unlucky soul for the strange goings on under his roof.’

Annie gasped, horror struck. ‘I remember one time that papa claimed a footman put out the Christmas candle, and the footman, whom I thought innocent, was dismissed. Another time, papa tumbled down some steps on the great staircase, and he blamed the maid for leaving a branch of holly there, but I never saw the holly. The maid disappeared, never to return to Rosings.’

Lord Matlock nodded at her. ‘One Christmas eve, when it was just the two of us gentlemen – you and your mother having removed to London for the Christmas season – Sir Lewis begged to tell me the truth behind the mystery of the ghost, but I must promise never to reveal it to another person, or I, too, would be cursed to the end of my days. Sir Lewis claimed he was in a dying state – the man always fancied himself ill – and thus he no longer cared about being cursed himself. And so to humour him, I agreed to hear his winter’s tale.’

I scratched my head. ‘But if you tell us, then you shall be cursed.’

‘Pooh! Pooh!’ cried he. ‘I’m not afraid of a curse.’

I sought the safety and warmth of my papai’s arms, my heart thump-thumping with fear and excitement and curiosity and I don’t know what else.

‘Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness,’ muttered Mr Remy, twisting a diamond ring on his trembling finger.

Lord Matlock returned to his story. ‘Sir Lewis and I tossed off a fourth bottle of burgundy as we sat in this very room, before a bright blaze. I thought Sir Lewis was funning me with his eerie ghost story. And that’s how I learnt the sordid secret of the Rosings Ghost, and a chilling secret it was. What a macabre tale! Feeling tipsy, I tottered up the stairs to my bedchamber. Along the way, as I passed through the dark gallery, a rush of cold wind hit me, extinguishing my candle. Of a sudden, a deep, husky growl, like Satan’s own voice, called out to me.’

I blurted out, ‘What did it say?’

As if he were possessed by a supernatural being, Lord Matlock’s countenance turned sinister, and he uttered in a loud, measured tone, ‘Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.’

I shuddered with fear. ‘What did you do?’

Lord Matlock stood defiant, with folded arms. ‘Pooh! Pooh! says I to the strange voice. I’m not afraid of you and your deuced holes.’

My eyes became round as saucers, wondering how my avô could be so brave.

‘Boom! My right foot crashed through the wooden floor, startling me at first.’ Lord Matlock held onto his right leg. ‘I lifted my foot out of the hole, telling myself that the old wood floor must be rotten with age.’

‘The ghost did it,’ I half-whispered with terror.

Lord Matlock waved me off. ‘I never told Sir Lewis about my nocturnal visit with the strange, evil voice. When I passed through the gallery in the morning, nothing was amiss. A ha! says I. I had imagined it in my drunken state. At Christmas dinner, Sir Lewis and I imbibed ever so many glasses of tokay, for he had the best wine cellar in Kent. After I bid him good-night, I climbed up the stairs in my tipsy state, and as I passed through the dark gallery, the strange, evil voice spoke to me again in a loud, measured tone. “Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.” I convulsed with drunken laughter. Pooh! Pooh! says I. I’m not afraid of you and your deuced holes. And nothing happened to me, until…the next morning at breakfast, I discovered that my newspaper had holes in it. Can you believe that someone got a pair of scissors and cut out holes in the very articles I wished to read? What insolence!’

‘The ghost cut the holes,’ suggested I.

‘Nay,’ replied Lord Matlock. ‘But I daren’t tell Sir Lewis about my mutilated newspaper. Poor Pierce would’ve been dismissed. When the footman served me my egg, and I cracked the shell, I discovered a yolk-less egg, as if the golden goodness had been scooped out of it. A hole inside my egg? How could that be? But I daren’t complain about it and have the footman dismissed. I then placed a slice of buttered toast on my plate. What the deuce! I held up the toast, peeping through the hole in it. Surely someone was playing wild tricks.’

I jumped from my papai’s lap. ‘The ghost played you tricks.’

Lord Matlock shook his head at me. ‘That evening, when we dined, everything I ate had a small hole in it: my roast beef, my brawn, my mince pie. What could be nibbling at my food? A huge rat? But drunk as I was on Sir Lewis’s excellent port, I didn’t care a jot about the holes in my food. I bid Sir Lewis good-night, and as I stumbled my way into the dark gallery to reach my bedchamber, the strange, evil voice greeted me yet again. “Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.” Pooh! Pooh! says I. I’m not afraid of you and your deuced holes. On the succeeding days of Christmas-tide, I ate hole-y food and got drunk on wine. And each night, the strange, evil voice greeted me in the dark gallery. “Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.”’

‘Oh, my. Oh, my,’ muttered Mr Remy, crac-crac-ing his knuckles.

‘One day,’ Lord Matlock continued, ‘it being a fine day for sport, I set out in my hunting-coat and with a rifle-gun. I crossed the meadow, ready to shoot hare, when suddenly my foot sank into a muddy hare hole, and I fell on my seat of honour, ruining my new sporting dress. Oh, hang it! I’ll blow you to atoms, Mr Hare, says I. It took two men to pull me and my muddy boot out of the hare hole – what an odd thing it was, and how silly I looked, covered in mud.’

‘The ghost put the hare hole there,’ reasoned I.

‘On Twelfth Night, what do you think happened?’ Lord Matlock peered at me, but I shrugged at him. ‘The miscreant who had carved out holes in my food had the audacity to dig a big hole in the centre of our monstrous twelfth cake, a cake that weighed over one hundred pounds. It looked as if a hare had burrowed in there. Can you believe? But being in liquor, I cared not if Cook were dismissed. The revelry of Twelfth Night having ended after mid-night, I tottered through the dark gallery when the strange, evil voice called out to me. “Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.” Pooh! Pooh! says I. I’m not afraid of you and your deuced holes. And I went to bed. That night I dreamt of Satan sticking his pitchfork into the twelfth cake.’

‘Mamma,’ cried Anne. ‘Remember when papa flew into a rage one Christmas season, and he threw our twelfth cake against the wall. He said the cake was the work of Satan. Oh, how I wept, and you sent me to the nursery. I wonder now if the cake had been ruined by the ghost, and papa wished to conceal it from us.’

‘How ridiculous, Anne.’ Lady Catherine rapped her walking-stick on the floor. ‘Sir Lewis had a bad temper and not because of a ghost. He was for ever destroying things or ridding us of servants or stumbling about in a state of drunken madness.’

Lord Matlock snapped his fingers. ‘Drunken madness, indeed. I took my leave of Rosings. How glad was I to be on the road to London where a man can get food without freakish holes. But on the way my carriage hit a monstrous hole in the road, and the wheel tore off. I almost died in this horrible accident when the carriage overturned; I know one of my footmen did. I woke up in my bed several days later, bruised and broken and suffering from wild deliriums. Night after night, on doses of Laudanum, I dreamt of the Rosings Ghost, and I blamed it for my misfortune. “Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES,” the ghost would chant in my troubled sleep. Little did I know then in my feverish, grotesque state, that Sir Lewis had died. A month later, when my brain was set to rights, I thought on the ghost and whether it really existed. Nonsense, says I, having concluded yet again that it was purely drunken madness. Surely there is no Rosings Ghost.’

‘Of course there is no ghost,’ remarked Lady Catherine.

Lord Matlock chuckled. ‘Oh, but I see the doubt in the rest of your countenances. To prove to you that there’s no ghost, I shall reveal the secret of the ghost to one person in this room, and then you shall see this notion of a curse is ridiculous. Come here, Pierce.’ He motioned to the doomed butler.

‘Please, my lord, I beg you not to tell me the ghost’s secret.’ The butler grimaced but obey his lordship he did.

Lord Matlock took hold of the reluctant butler, and he whispered to him, while I, overcome with curiosity, wished more than anything to know the dark secret. Dare I ask about it? I changed my mind, however, on seeing the butler turn as white as a ghost upon learning what must have been a terrifying secret.

‘Heaven help me!’ The butler crossed himself ere he sank into a chair, burying his head into his lap, his hands atop his head. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

‘Be it said, the curse turns the person’s hair snow-white.’ Lord Matlock tugged at the white hair on his head.

‘My papa’s hair was white to the end,’ exclaimed Annie.

‘Be it said, the curse makes the person’s eyes cross now and then.’ His lordship’s eyes crossed, and he shook his head to put himself to rights.

‘My papa’s eyes crossed on his deathbed. I thought it the queerest thing,’ Annie half-whispered in a tremulous voice.

‘Oh, mother. Save me! Save me!’ muttered Mr Remy, who forthwith began to drink down a goodly amount of water.

‘Be it said, the curse attacks the person with gout now and then.’ Lord Matlock limped to and fro as if he were in great pain.

‘Bless me!’ Annie wrung her handkerchief. ‘My papa suffered from gout before he died.’

‘Be it said, the curse pinks its victim with a mark on the palm of his hand.’

Annie wrinkled her brow. ‘Papa didn’t have a marked hand when he died.’

‘A ha!’ Lord Matlock raised his finger in the air. ‘My hair has turned white – so be it; my hair is old. I get cross eyes when I least expect it – so be it; my eyes are old. I get an attack of gout now and then – so be it; my feet are old, and poor man’s plaister always cures me. And the marked palm? How absurd. No one shall ever pink me. Mwahahahaaaa!’

He raised his arms in defiance of the curse, his crazy laugh ringing in our ears, and there, on the palm of his left hand, the mark of an ‘X’ dripped a few drops of blood onto the cuff of his white sleeve. Seized with terror, Mr Remy let loose a shrill scream that shattered the water glass in his hand. Whereupon Annie screamed, as did I. How my blood turned cold with dread! How my body shuddered so violently! And how I wished for my papai to save me from the curse! I buried my head into papai’s chest, quaking with fear, but my papai shook with laughter, which bewildered me.

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ complained Lady Catherine, rubbing her sore ears. ‘Brother, you are frightening my guests with your ludicrous story.’

‘Ludicrous?’ Lord Matlock scoffed at her, pointing to his marked palm. ‘I’m cursed for the rest of my days. The mark shall come and go. Some days it’ll disappear; other days, I’ll need to wear a glove to hide it. I beg you not to worry, my sister. I shan’t reveal the ghost’s secret to anyone else, nor should Pierce ever utter a word. But you need to take care.’

Lady Catherine humphed.

Lord Matlock’s countenance turned sinister, and he uttered in a loud, measured tone, ‘Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES, and the return of the Rosings Ghost.’

‘Pooh! Pooh!’ cried she.

–ooooo–

Snug in bed, I gazed at my hero, astonished at his pluck whenever the ghost had tried to frighten him.

‘Meu avô, you were brave to tell the ghost’s secret to the butler. Are you sad that you’re cursed?’

‘Nay. A mark on the palm of my hand doesn’t bother me. Look! It has faded away, perhaps to return when I least expect it.’ He showed me his reddish palm, where the mark had been rubbed off.

‘I’m cursed with brown skin.’ I frowned at my hands. ‘I can’t rub the brown-ness away.’

‘You must wear your brown-ness with pride,’ advised he, ‘just like I’ll wear this mark on my palm with pride, because I had the courage to face the ghost, and I didn’t let it dictate how I should live my life.’

‘Meu avô, I think Lady Catherine and the rector Mr Collins are vexed by my brown-ness.’

He humphed. ‘It takes a brave person and a liberality of mind to accept people as they are.’

‘You’re brave.’

‘Oh ay!’ He winked at me.

‘My papai and my mamãe and my puggy and my cousin Annie, and oh yes, Mrs Collins, are brave then,’ remarked I.

He arched his brow. ‘What will you say now, whenever you meet someone who isn’t brave about your brown-ness?’

I shook my finger at him. ‘Pooh! Pooh! I’m not afraid of you.’

My avô laughed, and he patted my cheek.

‘I don’t think Lady Catherine is brave.’

‘Tut, tut. You must promise me never to judge someone when you haven’t tried to understand them first.’

‘I promise. But why does she hate me?’

‘Listen to me, child. Lady Catherine is struggling to learn how to love you, just as I did when I first met you four years ago. There’s a tug-of-war going on in her brain.’

‘Tug-of-war?’

My avô held out his fists, each tugging at the same imaginary rope. ‘One side is love, and the other side is fear.’

‘Fear?’

‘You are everything she doesn’t understand, everything that challenges her own beliefs.’

I paused to consider this. ‘She needs to understand me.’

‘Indeed. So which side of her tug-o-war will win? You must help her love win by being a good and respectful child.’

‘I’ll try to behave well.’ I squinted at him, for a new thought had come into my head. ‘Was Sir Lewis bad?’

My avô paused. ‘Well, he wasn’t always honourable. My child, it’s time for me to take my leave. My travelling companions and I shall be gone at daybreak, and so I must bid you farewell now.’

‘I’ll bet you a ha’penny that I’ll be up at daybreak. If you look up to my window, avô, I’ll wave good-bye.’

‘Done! I’ll take your bet.’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘Well, then, good-night to you.’

‘A bênção meu avô.’ I kissed his hand to bless him.

And he sprinkled magic dust into my eyes to make me fall asleep.

In Part Seven, it’s the return of the Rosings Ghost…

*******

–ooooo–

The trouble began on St. Stephen’s Day, the day after Christmas, when the Rosings Ghost made its triumphant return. First, it attacked an innocent roll of pickled-up brawn sitting in the larder.

‘What did you say?’ Lady Catherine gaped at her eccentric French cook. ‘The brawn has been shot?’

‘Shot, ma foi!’ A dark cloud rose on Monsieur Le Claire’s brow. ‘Someone has murdered the brawn.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ replied her ladyship.

Le Claire flapped his hand at the footman, who presented a platter of shot brawn. It surely did look shot, what with a gaping hole blasted in the centre of it.

Annie twisted the serviette in her hands. ‘It must be the Ro—’

‘Silence!’ ordered her ladyship. She dismissed Le Claire and the footman, because they, being servants, were superstitious; at least that’s what she said when they were gone. Only the trusty butler, Pierce, remained with us in the breakfast room.

‘Mamma,’ Annie half-whispered in a tremulous tone, ‘the Rosings Ghost has returned.’

‘How ridiculous. I dare say it’s a trick, and who better to play tricks than this little brown one.’ Lady Catherine glared at me. ‘Naughty girl! How dare you play ghost and murder my brawn.’

Papai scrutinised me. ‘Sofia-Elisabete, did you play us tricks?’

‘No, papai.’ I begged him to believe me with my silent eyes.

‘Madam, she says she didn’t.’

Her ladyship huffed. ‘Fitzwilliam, you would believe everything she says?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he, ‘but I do believe she’s telling the truth.’

Just then, I became seized with a nervous fit of hiccups. With an inward groan, I quickly covered my mouth with my hands.

‘There, now,’ cried her ladyship. ‘She is guilty. This bold outlaw must have raided the larder to give some of my brawn to the poor.’

I shook my head violently. ‘Não, não, não!’ I often reverted to Portuguese whenever I became angry or upset. Unfortunately, my foreign tongue and manners raised her estimation of my guilt even further.

‘Get you gone,’ commanded she in a cold, angry tone, her fierce eyes bulging in their sockets. Whereupon she banished me to the nursery for the remainder of the day.

Shut up in the attic again, I paced about and ranted. Ora essa! Well, I never!

At tea-time, papai tap-tapped at my door. He had pilfered a piece of plum cake for me and had brought me a cup of milky tea.

I wept at the sight of him. ‘Papai, please say you believe me.’

‘I believe you.’ He wiped away my tears.

I stamped my foot with a passion. ‘It’s the Rosings Ghost, and I’ll prove it.’

‘Indeed? How will you do that?’

I clenched my fists. ‘I’m a-going to the gallery tonight. That ghost is a regular bad ‘un, and I knows its tricks. I’ll give it a sound drubbin’ if it don’t behave.’

Papai cupped his right ear. ‘Did I hear you talk like a stable-boy?’

‘Oh, papai.’

‘Your cousin is a very bad influence.’

Papai turned serious, and he objected to my crazy plan as he called it. I mustered up my sad eyes, determined to have my own way. He reluctantly agreed then to take me to the gallery, after he had dined with Lady Catherine and Annie, because otherwise, I would get into mischief on my own.

That evening, I seized upon a brilliant idea to dress as a boy in my nankeen breeches and cambric shirt and red jacket, all of which I had sneaked into my travelling trunk before we departed Scarborough. Papai grunted his disapproval upon seeing me in my new set of boy’s clothes which mamãe had secretly made for me and which I sometimes wore when I played in the woods near her girls’ school.

‘One doesn’t wrestle with a naughty ghost wearing a silly frock and pantalettes,’ declared I. ‘Mind you, this is a very serious business. Mamãe would be most displeased if I tore my new frock.’

Papai sighed. ‘Off we go, Miss Hoyden.’

We sallied forth hand in hand to the cold and dark gallery. Of a sudden, papai’s candle went out, and we were left in the dark. A profound fear gripped me – I, the fearless girl – and I clung to papai, my heart thump-thumping.

An eerie voice rang out, in a low, measured tone. ‘Holes. Holes. Holes. BEWARE OF HOLES.’

The deep bass of the ghost’s voice sounded familiar to me for some reason, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Papai tapped my arm. ‘Say something to the ghost.’

‘Pooh! Pooh!’ my voice quavered. ‘I’m not afraid you and your deuced holes.’

‘Go on. Speak up,’ urged papai.

I summoned up my courage. ‘Let us alone or I’ll smash you to atoms, you naughty ghost!’

We stood there in the dark for another minute, but the ghost never replied.

‘Well done, Sofia-Elisabete,’ papai hugged me. ‘I do believe the ghost has quitted Rosings.’

Tucked up in bed, I spent a cursed night, sleepless at first, thinking on the ghost, which I knew still haunted Rosings. And when I finally did find a bit of sleep, it turned into a nightmare about the ghost, who bullied me and punished me and berated me for my brown-ness.

–ooooo–

Papai assured her ladyship that the Rosings Ghost would no longer pester us, now that the ghost had received a severe wigging from me last night.

Lady Catherine humphed. ‘I shall know how to act if another roll of my innocent brawn is murdered. The culprit shall be apprehended and brought to justice by the magistrate. I shall demand it.’

On this, a fair winter’s day, papai suggested an airing for her ladyship, so stroll they did in the Rosings garden, while Annie and I enjoyed a game of romps. Whenever we flew by Lady Catherine, too close for her liking, she shouted at us, ‘Cruel ruffians!’ Annie turned to me with her eyes crossed, which made me burst into a fit of giggles. This certainly didn’t please her ladyship, and she demanded to be returned within where she would spy on us from on high at the window of her sitting room.

On the ensuing days Annie and I revelled in our cousinness. We exchanged confidences. We discovered more of our similarities. We traded anecdotes of our near relations, which is how I discovered she knew many things about my papai, including his sad lot to suffer from childhood whenever his spiteful mother shunned him in favour of her eldest son and heir to Matlock. No wonder papai disliked his mother and got into trouble at school and ran riot in London. My poor, poor papai! Did Lady Matlock feed him watery, tasteless gruel and make him sleep in the nursery attic? Did she berate him for not being pretty like his older brother? I locked these secrets about him in my heart where they would remain safe.

One morning early, when I had been sneaking about in the servants’ stairs, I heard a rapid fire of French oaths in the kitchen. I bounded up to the breakfast room, curious to know what had happened. The French cook stormed into the room. He presented to her ladyship a twelfth night pie to be eaten to-day, it being one of the twelve mince pies that must be eaten every day for the twelve days of Christmas. These twelve pies had been offered by Mrs Collins to ensure good luck for the twelve months in the new year. We had eaten nearly half of them when the Rosings Ghost struck again.

‘O ciel! Someone has murdered the mince pie.’ Le Claire pointed emphatically to the centre of the mince pie with its suspicious-looking perfectly shaped hole.

‘Could a rat have done it?’ inquired Mrs Buxton, the anxious housekeeper.

‘I think not,’ replied Le Claire. ‘Mon Dieu! Quelle malchance!’

‘Oh, dear!’ Mrs Buxton wrung her hands. ‘A murdered twelfth night pie portends bad luck.’

Lady Catherine rapped her walking-stick on the floor. ‘There is nothing for it then. We must inform Mrs Collins and prevail upon her to send us another mince pie if possible.’

After the housekeeper and cook departed, Lady Catherine narrowed her eyes at me.

‘Mischievous girl!’

I shook my head. ‘The ghost did it.’

‘Mamma, surely it’s the ghost playing tricks,’ pleaded Annie.

Her ladyship scoffed at her. ‘This naughty child sneaked down the servants’ stairs early this morning and, she, being a greedy girl, ate the pie with a spoon. I know she favours those mince pies over my rolls of brawn. She is always hankering for pies but never for my pickled-up brawn.’

Papai lowered the newspaper he was reading.

‘Sofia-Elisabete, have you discovered the false door near the nursery?’ inquired he, his eyes intently fixed on me.

I bit my lip. ‘I have, papai.’

‘And have you ever used the servants’ stairs from the attic to the kitchen?’

‘Yes, papai.’ I hung my head. I had promised papai not to use the servants’ stairs to sneak about the house.

‘I believe you shall stay in the nursery to-day,’ declared he, with an officer-like coolness.

‘But papai, Annie and I want to call on…’

Papai cleared his throat, and, looking upon his newspaper, he resumed his reading of it. There is nothing worse than when your own papai doesn’t believe you and doesn’t seem to care about you. I trudged up the stairs, for a miserable and sad attic-dweller I had become.

With mingled feelings of hurt and indignation, I determined to write a letter to mamãe. She must come to save me. She must! To persuade her, I used a good deal of vivid language since the truth can be hum-da-dum-drum without it. And being the prodigious fabulist that I am, I wrote the best, the most convincing, the most chilling tale I could think of, while the imp in me shocked her with many a misspelled word. It went something like this:

‘My dear Mamãe, I’m in a heap of trubble! Papai turned traitor. Can you believe? Woe is me. The grumpy lumpy rector beat me with the berch rod. Such monstriss pain! He will convirt me before Twelfth Night, says he. He makes me pray on my knees. So red red red they are. I was seezed with a fainting fit. Lady C. locks me in the nurserry. She feeds me moaldy bread & watery grooel. I have no coal fire & I will surely die frum fever. Please come before I die a thoussand deaths. I remain your ever loving child, Sofia-Elisabete. P.S. I hope you saved me a hugiss peece of gingerbread. I’m monstrissly hungry.’

–ooooo–

By and by, Le Claire prepared the pastry-room to make the first batch of twelfth cakes for the tenants. Annie and I went nearly wild with excitement. Lady Catherine admonished us for bothering her French cook. ‘A kitchen is no place for ladies,’ she called out. Annie marched back to the sitting room, and so did I.

‘Mamma, I need your five crowns. Sofia-Elisabete has got her coins.’

I held out my hands to show her ladyship the five crowns papai had given me.

‘What folly!’ Her ladyship shook her head. ‘A crown is too much for farm-folk.’

‘But you promised, mamma.’

As she often did, her ladyship looked on me with a sour countenance.

Below stairs in the pastry-room, we observed Le Claire at his labours, making a well of flour in the centre of a bowl and adding to it the yeast with warm milk. As soon as the yeast became frothy, he mixed the flour with butter, sugar, currants, spices and candied oranges, using a bit of warm milk. An hour or so later, when the sponge had risen, he poured the batter into a papered and buttered hoop, thrusting the pea on the left side, the bean on the right side, and the coin in the centre.

Thereafter, he baked the cakes. Once the cakes became cold, he iced them with a goodly amount of sugary white paste. With utmost care, he placed two crown ornaments atop each cake. ‘C’est magnifique! Magnifique!’ boasted he. Le Claire said that if the cakes were kept in a cool, dry place, they could last for a very long time. Methinks the poor tenants would gobble up the lovely cakes within a day or two. How could they not when these white cakes looked like magic clouds baked by the angels in heaven?

Annie strutted some turns about the sitting room, showing off a noble twelfth cake.

‘A’n’t it the greatest thing?’ bragged she, heedless of her ladyship’s displeasure.

Lady Catherine huffed. ‘Renegade daughter!’

Her ladyship’s ferocious frown didn’t escape me. I wonder now if Annie took a childish delight in goading her own mamma to madness, as if her mamma were a baited bear, for theirs was a strange relationship.

Just when I thought all would be right in our world again, the plaguy ghost played us tricks on New Year’s Day. The night before, Annie and I had celebrated New Year’s Eve at the parsonage, we being the special guests of Mrs Collins, while Lady Catherine had stayed home quiet, in the company of papai, who read from the Bible to her.

Le Claire pitched his cap to the floor. ‘Quelle horreur!’

Annie gasped. ‘There’s a hole in this twelfth cake.’

Mrs Buxton examined the size of the hole at the top of the cake. ‘Your ladyship, it appears that someone stuck the cake with his thumb. Fortunately, the crown inside was not stolen.’

Lady Catherine sighed impatiently. ‘There is nothing for it then but to fill the hole with icing. Away! Away with you now.’

When the housekeeper and the grumbling cook were gone, Lady Catherine cast a severe look at me.

‘While you gadders celebrated New Year’s Eve at the parsonage, it appears that your accomplice attacked the cake. Was it Betsy?’

‘No, your ladyship.’ I gulped. ‘Please don’t dismiss Betsy.’

‘Humph. I shall send an urgent message for Mr Collins to come and talk with…’

‘I shan’t speak to him.’ I crossed my arms to make my point.

‘Impudent girl! You shall hold your tongue.’

I tossed my head. ‘I shan’t hold my tongue. I shan’t!’

‘Enough,’ cried papai. ‘We shall visit the parsonage after breakfast.’

I gasped at his treachery. I saw how it was. My own papai had, indeed, turned against me. I determined then to run for it, but papai caught me by the arm, as if he had sensed my wicked plan. So it was that I sat at table in ill-humour. Tea and toast never tasted so bitter to me.

Breakfast now done, we departed for the parsonage. With a clouded brow, papai steered me with one hand atop my head as he led me in a forced march down the gravelled path. And every time I tried to turn my head left or right, he would tighten his grip on me. Being the imp that I am, though, I did what papai calls my saucy step, raising my chin, swinging my arms and lifting my knees high. ‘Halt!’ ordered he. We came to an abrupt stop at the entrance of Rosings Park, where I awaited my court-martial.

‘You have greatly disappointed me,’ papai paced to and fro. ‘You, who promised to be polite and respectful, no matter what Lady Catherine said to you.’

‘But papai…’

‘You have made a bad job of it,’ said he in a sharp tone.

His reprimand stung me to the quick, but then my courage rose.

‘Papai, I didn’t stick the cake with my thumb.’

‘Well, of course you didn’t; your thumb is too small. But that’s not the point.’

‘It isn’t?’ I scratched my head. ‘What’s the point then?’

Papai growled out, ‘The point is you’ve been rude and disrespectful to our hostess. Do not you understand?’

‘Yes, papai,’ replied I, although I couldn’t help but feel that our conversation was going round in circles, and I would never really get the point of it, me being a mere child of eight years with a wee brain. How could I not defend myself when wrongly accused of something so naughty?

‘Excellent,’ replied he, tugging at his cravat.

Just then, I seized upon a clever plan. ‘Papai, I’m determined to catch the ghost tonight. I’m hiding in the pastry-room, where I’ll wait for that rascal. I’ll pounce on it mighty like.’

‘Silly gooseberry, you shall do no such thing, sneaking about alone in the middle of the night and pouncing on ghosts.’

‘But papai…’

‘I being the manly man shall come with you and do the pouncing.’ Papai glanced at his pocket-watch. ‘Now it so happens that if we make haste, we can call on Mrs Collins while the rector works on his sermon. He never quits his study in the morning when he’s thinking those great thoughts of his. Come – let’s get on.’

The parsonage had become a sort of refuge house for me and papai, and I was glad for it. Mrs Collins made the best gingerbread – almost as tasty as my mamãe’s – and her jolly baby chirped and gurgled and cooed at us, and never did he shed a tear. My papai, being the best of papais, has an affectionate affinity for babies, whom he calls little goosegogs, and if there’s one thing he dearly loves to do, is to play with these little goosegogs and cuddle them and tease them, which always amuses the ladies since he’s a manly colonel.

That night I eagerly awaited papai to come and fetch me. Dressed in my breeches and jacket, I practised pouncing on the pillow of my bed. ‘You rascally ghost!’ cried I, walloping the ghost pillow. Unfortunately, papai caught me thumping my pillow like the pugilist I am, and this raised his ire; for, he would never forget the time I battled with a rude little French boy and got a black eye. Papai chided me, telling me I could never mingle in polite society if I acted like a hoyden. He made me promise again that I would let him do the pouncing and pummelling; otherwise, he would lock me inside the nursery. ‘Agora sim,’ said I. My response of ‘to be sure’ appeased him for the moment. We would catch the ghost this time and put a stop to its tricks.

And now, the exciting conclusion of the tale of the Rosings Ghost. If you like the character of Sofia-Elisabete and want to know her history and how she found and lost her father, Colonel Fitzwilliam, while searching for Utopia in a post-Napoleonic Europe, see I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam: A Perfect World in the Moon.

In Part Eight, our hero, Sofia-Elisabete, takes matters into her hands…

*******

–ooooo–

Have you ever roamed inside a manor-house at night? In the dark? With a ghost set loose in it? Well, now, I don’t recommend it. I could swear that a thousand ghosts and goblins lodged in the nooks or hid in the corners and shadows, ready to pounce on unsuspecting and unwelcomed visitors and tender eight-year-olds. By the dim light of a candle, papai and I crept down the great staircase. Having made our way below stairs to the kitchen, papai came to an abrupt halt – I, crashing into him, for I had been following him too closely.

‘A ha!’ cried papai. ‘I see it all now. The renegade daughter is the real culprit, the Rosings Ghost.’

Annie, who sat in a high-backed oaken settle near the kitchen hearth, calmly puffed on a pipe. ‘What a blockhead you are, cousin Fizzy (puff).’

‘Stop calling me Fizzy. You’re a pitiful, meddlesome ghost and rude to boot,’ said he in an angry tone.

‘I’ve heard it said that civility towards a lady is the mark of a true gentleman.’

Papai humphed. ‘The maxim doesn’t apply to eccentrics like you.’

Annie took the pipe out of her mouth, and she knocked out the ashes. ‘Well, then, I might as well repeat myself: What a blockhead you are, cousin Fizzy.’

‘Do you deny it then?’

With a defiant air, Annie rose from the settle. ‘Stand out of my way, you idiot. I’m waiting for the ghost in the pastry-room where I’ve already set a trap, and then I’m going to pounce on it.’

‘You’ll do no such thing. I’ll do the manly pouncing here. You women are weak, delicate creatures.’

Annie scoffed at him. ‘Weak and delicate? Mrs Fitzwilliam will be quite displeased to hear this when I write her next.’

‘You daren’t write such a thing to her,’ threatened papai.

Of a sudden, Annie’s eyes bulged. ‘Shush, someone is coming.’

Seconds later, a big, lumpy shadowy figure tiptoed into the kitchen. Papai crept up to it, and he pounced on it in a manly fashion just as he said he would.

‘I have you!’ Papai seized the startled man by the scruff of his neck.

‘Colonel Fitzwilliam? Oh, my goodness.’ Pierce clutched at his heart, breathing heavily.

‘Why, you old sneak. Is this my father’s doing? Come, come, out with it, then.’

‘I confess I murdered the brawn under his lordship’s orders, but I swear to you, Colonel, I didn’t touch the mince pie or the twelfth cake. The Rosings Ghost did it.’

Annie groaned with disgust. ‘You stupid men!’

This confused me. ‘My avô is the ghost?’

Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

Annie held up her hand. ‘Shush, I hear someone on the stairs.’

Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The ghost had a wooden leg – I was sure of it.

We hastened to the pastry-room, bumping into each other as we had only one lit candle to guide us there. Oh, how my hands turned to ice in my panic and excitement! We hid on the yonder side of a cupboard, waiting-waiting-waiting for ever, while that awful noise terrorised us. Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

The raps came closer and closer, louder and louder. Click. CLACK. Click. CLACK. With mingled feelings of dread and anger, I clung to papai. I shuddered to think what the ghost’s sinister secret could be and why it had lost a leg. Would the ghost hurt us by making us fall into holes? Would it blast us with holes using a rifle-gun? But I didn’t want to live my life in terror, all because of a bully like the Rosings Ghost. My ire heightened just thinking on it.

Click. CLACK. Click. CLACK. I held my breath. At the exact moment when I felt my lungs and my brain and my heart would explode into a million pieces, a ghostly figure draped in white from head to toe shuffled rather clumsily into the pastry-room, rapping the floor with a rifle-gun, ready to blast us. Why, oh, why hadn’t papai brought a rifle-gun to protect us? There was nothing for it but to charge at the Rosings Ghost. I willed myself to move, yet I could not, when papai held onto me with an iron grip.

Then, ever so slowly, the ghost lifted its white veil, thereby revealing itself. What a fright! Papai covered my gaping mouth with his hand, and it was fortunate he did, because my audible gasp might have frightened the ghost away.

‘A sleep-walker,’ uttered he in astonishment.

‘Good heavens,’ Annie half-whispered.

The sleep-walker approached the wood table, where three of the twelfth cakes had been set down as a trap to lure the ghost. By the light of a candle on the table, we could see our sleep-walker lick her fingers and thumbs. She stuck the first cake, plunging her thumb into the centre of it. What a shock! She licked her fingers again, and she stuck the second cake and then the third, each time giving us a violent start. But the queerest thing she did, was to smear the cake icing onto her face. The sleep-walker turned round, and she shuffled away, her walking-stick clattering on the floor.

Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

Papai turned to us with a grave look. ‘I shall follow my aunt in case she stumbles on the stairs.’

Meanwhile, Pierce set about to clean up the mess her ladyship had made with the three cakes.

I peered at my cousin, wholly bewildered. ‘Annie, why are you crying?’

‘My mamma is getting very old, and I fear she’s unwell and she’ll be taken from me.’ Two big tears tumbled down her cheeks.

This touched me to the quick, having never known Annie to cry much. My very best friend in the world was suffering, and I didn’t know enough etiquette and the properest thing to do. And so I wept along with her as any young child would have done in such a state of sadness and confusion. Hand in hand, we cousins slowly climbed the staircase. Papai, on seeing Annie’s fragile state, escorted her to her bedchamber, where he bid her good-night. She nodded silently, and once she withdrew into her bedchamber, she sobbed aloud. It was an awful moment.

Papai said not a word and neither did I as he led me up to the nursery. Tucked up in bed now, I pondered the meaning of this, the great tangle of it all, but my wee brain disappointed me, and no answers were forthcoming. I passed the night in a dreamless sleep, a big nothing of a dream landscape. But then, at the break of dawn, I awoke with a start. I suffered the uneasy sensation that my troubled waking dream last night had blended – nay, collided – with my nightmare about the Rosings Ghost.

–ooooo–

Each day I remind myself to go rightly in this world. Yes, yes – my degree of success is quite low given that I’m a hoyden and impudent to boot. Truly, though, I cannot help myself. But on this particular morning, I dare say I surprised everyone, including myself.

My resolve unbroken, I marched straight into the breakfast room, with my chin raised and my arms swinging. Papai cast me a stern look, whereupon I stumbled to a halt. With a deep breath, I mustered up these things known as modest comportment and gracious countenance, and I curtseyed proper-like to Lady Catherine. I grasped her hand to kiss it and to bless her in the Portuguese way.

‘A bênção minha Senhora.’

My foreign pleasantries rendered her speechless.

‘I beg you a million pardons, your ladyship. I’m a sleep-walker, and ’twas me that stuck my thumb into the twelfth cakes. I woke up this morning with cake-y stuff on my fingers and face. Will you forgive me?’

I hear you cry, ‘You bold girl! Why did you take the blame on yourself?’

Don’t you know – it doesn’t always feel good to be in the right? The glow that comes from vindication doesn’t last long. And there’s the rub. I said to myself, enough was enough, and I’m going to help my cousin Annie, whom I liked hugeously, so that she needn’t worry about her mamma becoming ill. The truth is, a part of me really didn’t want Lady Catherine to feel sad about being old and, oh yes, a bit crazy. I may not know much about etiquette stuff like my mamãe and being noble and honourable like my papai, but I do know something about kindness. I cared not a jot if her ladyship blamed me for having stuck the cakes. Why not confess, then, before the all-knowing grown-ups began to bawl and argue and get upset, and they never resolved anything?

Her ladyship appeared thunderstruck. ‘Indeed? A…a…sleep-walker?’

‘Oh yes,’ I nodded.

Her lips quivered, whereupon she touched her face. Had she seen herself in the looking-glass this morning, her cheeks besmeared with cake icing?

‘My lady, I am prepared for my court martial.’

Papai crossed his arms and groaned.

‘Your court martial?’ Her ladyship gasped in shock.

‘Oh yes, and my bread-and-water solitary confinement.’

Lady Catherine scowled at papai. ‘Nephew, how dare you punish your own child that way.’

‘Madam, I assure you I have not.’

‘Savage man!’

‘Huuu, huuu, huu-huu,’ Annie sobbed into her serviette.

‘Tears for breakfast? Anne, do you wish me to suffer head-ache?’ Her ladyship shook her head disapprovingly. ‘Listen to me, one and all of you. I’ve already spoken to Mrs Buxton, who calmed down Le Claire this morning. There shall be no more cake attacks at Rosings. Agreed?’

‘Oh yes,’ we replied together.

‘And be it said, there is no Rosings Ghost.’

‘Nothing of the sort. Absolutely no ghost. Nothing doing here at Rosings,’ we talked all at once.

Her ladyship cast a half-suspicious, half-concerned look at me. ‘I dare say you shall eat gruel for breakfast, given your…your…nocturnal rambling and eating habits.’

With an inward groan, I sank into my chair.

‘But seeing how I am well known in these parts as a benevolent lady, I shall allow you treacle and currants with it this time.’

‘Hurrah!’ cheered I.

Her ladyship motioned to the butler. ‘Pierce, a basin of gruel for Sofia-Elisabete.’

It was the first time this grand lady had called me by my name, pronouncing it correctly in Portuguese. Pierce winked at me while he spooned a goodly amount of treacle onto my gruel. To be sure, never did a basin of gruel taste better than on that bright winter’s morning at Rosings.

–ooooo–

Be it said, Annie’s twelfth cakes created a sensation with the tenants, and it became a new Rosings tradition. The children of the tenants were wild for the sugary well – the hole filled with the white sugar paste – in the centre of the cake, while the grown-ups were wild for the lucky coin hidden at the bottom of this well.

The eve of Epiphany having arrived, something singular happened. After we supped, the tenant farmers came round to Rosings to wish health and happiness to their benevolent landlady, the lady of the manor. Farmer Pennyman surprised us by singing the verses of ‘Twelfth Night’ accompanied by fife and tambourine. I’ve committed the verses to memory because they’re about twelfth cake; at least I thought so. Papai assured me that when I got older, I would understand them better.

Now the jovial girls and boys,
Struggling for the cake and plumbs,
Testify their eager joys,
And lick their fingers and their thumbs.

Statesmen like, they struggle still,
Scarcely hands kept out of dishes,
And yet, when they have had their fill,
Still anxious for the loaves and fishes.

Kings and Queens, in petty state,
Now their sovereign will declare,
But other sovereigns’ plans they hate,
Full fond of peace—detesting war.

One moral from this tale appears,
Worth notice when a world’s at stake;
That all our hopes and all our fears,
Are but a struggling for the Cake.

Lady Catherine had condescended to greet her tenants at the entrance of the manor-house, her arm linked with papai’s, while the footmen stood like sentries on the balustraded steps, they each of them holding a lantern. Her ladyship stood erect, her chin raised, her countenance cool, but I detected something different, something odd in her phiz. Hold, hold – could those actually be tears in her shiny eyes, or was it a trick of the lantern light? I suppose I’ll never really know. I was just a mere child of eight years then.

Papai once said that happiness divided is double happiness, and someone who seizes happiness for himself and doesn’t share it with others must be a lonely and pitiful creature. On Twelfth Night I thought we would burst from happiness quadrupled, because Annie and her mamma were happy, and papai and I were happy. Would it be too greedy to want happiness quintupled?

In the Servants’ Hall that evening, I romped with the other Twelfth Night revellers, having disguised myself as a unicorn because that’s what I wanted to be and no one could change my mind. How smartly unicorn-ish I looked! I wore a gold paper horn atop my head since papai wouldn’t let me wear a real horn, although he did let me wear my nankeen breeches and red jacket. Having gobbled down another hugeous slice of twelfth cake, I set off on a trot, teasing everyone with my silly neighs and nickers, when my brain began to tingle.

There, on the yonder side of the hall, standing near the wassail bowl, papai was drinking down a monstrous amount of lamb’s-wool. He had disguised himself as a nobleman, a Duke Orsino. Of a sudden, papai flung his cloak from him, as if he had been placed under enchantment. He embraced a moustachioed page boy, and they began to kiss in the romantick-y way.

I shook my finger at him. ‘Olha maroto! You rogue! I shall tell mamãe about this.’

Papai laughed at me. ‘My Viola already knows about it.’

‘Viola?’

The page with the girlish name turned round to grin at me.

I goggled at him, or rather, her.

‘Mamãe! You have come at last.’ I rushed towards her, blubbering and slobbering like a namby-pamby baby, because the weight of our separation during the Christmas season had been cruel and unbearable at times, and oh, how I sorely missed her. I thought I had been a brave little soldier-girl in her absence, but now, for some reason, my courage sank to my toes, and I couldn’t hold out anymore. I collapsed into her arms, a heap of childish mess, for I had been too long from home.

‘You poor thing!’ Mamãe kissed me, one cheek after another.

Smothered in her arms, I wept a thousand – nay, a million – hot tears. I knew not how long it took her to soothe me. When, finally, she set me to rights and wiped away my tears, she called me her courageous girl, and she awarded me her moustache to wear for the remainder of the evening. I whinnied my gratitude, which made her laugh, and thus I resumed my happy romping, all show-off as a moustachioed unicorn. Nevertheless, I kept a watchful eye on her out of fear that the magic of the evening would end and she, my beloved Fairy Queen, would disappear.

Oh, to be at home once more in Scarbro’. ‘I wish for home, I wish for home,’ I chanted the next morning. Alas, it was not to be. Mamãe insisted on a stay until Thursday sennight to make her point. I’m not sure what the point was since she and Lady Catherine spent a great deal of their time staring at each other and uttering not a word. One afternoon, while we ladies sat in the blue sitting room, I saw papai come to the doorway, where he made a hasty about-face, and go off like a flash he did, he having observed the silent war going on within.

Be it said that every little girl needs a strong mother to protect her and love her and guide her, and oh yes, to coddle her. Mamãe insisted that I eat a proper breakfast instead of thin, watery gruel. Mamãe insisted that I be allowed to drink chocolate at breakfast (hurrah!). Mamãe insisted that a lump-less bed be placed in the nursery for me. Mamãe insisted that I be allowed to sit up to supper (hurrah!).

All of mamãe’s insisting gave Lady Catherine head-ache. When we took our leave of Rosings, her ladyship, with a melancholy Annie by her side, stood like a queen outside the entrance, insisting we go; at least that was how it seemed to me, for her ladyship’s eyes shone with happiness that we intruders would finally quit Rosings.

Lady Catherine cleared her throat. ‘Well, nephew, I have no doubt that she will be the making of you.’

Papai rolled his lovey-dovey eyes at mamãe. ‘Madam, I do believe you’re right, and I’m certain Mrs Fitzwilliam thanks you for the compliment.’

‘Waggish man,’ grumbled her ladyship.

Papai grinned at his aunt as if he had said something clever.

This bewildered me. I assumed that Lady Catherine had praised my mamãe, who could reason with and encourage and influence my best beloved papai. I wonder now if her ladyship meant me instead? Pooh, nonsense. How could I, an insignificant little girl, inspire my papai? How could I make a difference in this world?

When I think on it, her ladyship never bid me good-bye, nor did she tell me I was a charming and clever child, nor did she say any mawkish stuff as grown-ups are wont to do when taking leave of each other. Her last words to me, before papai handed me into the carriage, were, ‘I suppose you would like to visit Rosings again, now that you’re not afraid of a ghost?’ I peered into her bright eyes ere I replied, ‘Would I!’, as though I had a won a prize. I hear you cry, ‘Why on earth would you do that?’ To be sure, it has the makings of another good tale. But papai doesn’t approve of my writing in my journal so much when I should be studying and getting myself educated.