The Last Garden in England(99)

? STELLA ?


Stella lay staring at the ceiling. Bobby was finally fast asleep in the cot next to her, exhausted from crying. He seemed fine during the day—quiet but dry-eyed—but as soon as she tucked the blankets around his chin at night, he would begin to weep.

At first she’d tried to comfort him. She’d laid a light hand on his chest. She’d tried singing and reading to him. She’d grown angry and stern. None of it seemed to stop the flood of hot tears that rolled down his face. One day she’d simply gotten up, announced that she had to finish her duties downstairs, and left. When she’d come back, she’d found Bobby asleep, curled around his slightly damp pillow.

She glanced down at him. His hair had fallen over his brow, and he looked peaceful. She knew that some instinct should probably have compelled her to reach forward and brush his hair back or tuck the covers a little closer around him, but she felt nothing except unadulterated fear. She’d barely been able to take care of him when he’d been just another boy, but now he’d lost his mother and father, and he’d seen his best friend die. Surely it was all too much for a child.

Stella pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, forcing starbursts to explode in the black. The truth had been pressing on her for months now. She’d tried to escape it but couldn’t.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered.

She opened her eyes and looked around the room. Her neat little magazine clippings and tear-outs from travel brochures seemed to mock her. Hawaiian beaches she would never see. Mountain peaks in the Alps she would never climb. She wouldn’t know the feeling of sultry air on her skin in South America, nor would she experience the dry, scorching heat of the Sahara Desert. She was going to be stuck here in Highbury for the rest of her life.

A sourness rose in her stomach, burning her throat. She pushed herself off her bed and went to the nearest wall. Rip! She tore Niagara Falls off the wall. Bobby snuffled and shifted in his sleep, but he didn’t wake.

Rip! Down came the pyramids of Egypt.

Rip! The Great Wall of China fell.

Rip! The sandy beaches of Tahiti washed away.

She worked methodically, piling the pages on top of her bed. When the walls were bare, she turned to her tiny desk and removed booklet after booklet from her correspondence courses. Onto the pile the guides to shorthand and typing went. She pulled out the magazine articles she’d saved about modern girls.

When her desk was cleared, she gathered up the mound of paper and walked out. Down, down, down the back stairs she went, descending into the basement of the house. A clock struck one in the morning. Good. No one would be in the kitchens.

For once, it was silent in the room where she spent most of her working hours. She dropped her papers on the wood worktop and went to the iron range. Heat radiated off it from when she’d banked the fire after supper. Stella opened the front hatch, stirred up the remains of the embers, and began to feed in little bits of wood until she saw flame. She wouldn’t need a big fire.

The correspondence coursework was on top, but she hesitated as she reached for it. How many hours had she hunched over her desk after her work was done, writing in her exercise books? She’d hung everything on those classes, scraping and saving to pay for them. She’d turned down trips to the cinema on her day off and went without new shoes one year. She’d been so focused on her plan, so sure that this would finally free her from Highbury once and for all.

She put the course materials aside and grabbed the Tahitian beach. When she fed it into the stove, the paper caught and curled with green and blue flame. In seconds, the image burned away. She pursed her lips and let out a long breath. Then she reached for an image of Switzerland.

“Miss Adderton, what are you doing up so late?”

Stella whipped around at the sound of Mrs. Symonds’s voice, banging her knee into the stove’s open door as she did. She cried out, grasping at her right leg. A firm set of hands gripped her by the shoulder, and she found herself half hopping to a chair.

“Do you need a compress?” Mrs. Symonds asked.

She bent her knee a couple of times, testing it. “No,” she managed.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” said Mrs. Symonds.

Stella looked up at the other woman from under her lashes. I’m sorry. It was so odd to hear those words from her employer.

“It’s nearly a quarter past one,” said Mrs. Symonds.

“I had some things I needed to take care of.”

She watched Mrs. Symonds’s gaze drift to the pile of papers on the worktop. “Are you burning these?”

“Yes,” she gritted out.

“Nice, San Sebastián, Cape Town, Bombay… Are these all places you dreamed of going?” Mrs. Symonds asked.

Shame suffused Stella’s body. “They were on the walls of my room. It was silly,” she said.

Mrs. Symonds sifted through the papers. “I’ve been to a few of these places—Paris, Rome—but you’re far more adventurous than I am. I didn’t know that you wanted to travel.”

Stella sat, lips firmly shut, watching her employer’s hand fall on the correspondence coursework.

“You’re taking shorthand dictation courses?” Mrs. Symonds asked.

“Another silly thing.” Another dashed plan.

“I didn’t realize that you wanted to do anything besides cook,” said Mrs. Symonds.