tamcranver (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tamcranver) wrote2006-05-28 09:23 pm
tamcranver) wrote2006-05-28 09:23 pm
Entry tags:
The End of the Rain
Summary: Colin isn't at all pleased with Misselthwaite's visitors. A crossover between The Secret Garden and A Little Princess
It was raining again. It had been raining for weeks, and Mary, Dickon, and Colin were beginning to feel the stirring of spring in their blood, which meant Mrs. Medlock was ready to tear her hair out. They’d grown a bit old for games of hide-and-seek, but Misselthwaite Manor was such a splendid place for it, and for chasing each other about when the weather was too grim even for Dickon to venture out in.
“Will you stop running about?” said Mr. Craven sharply. “Good God, one would think you were still children. Isn’t it about time we sent you off to school, Mary?”
“Oh, Uncle,” Mary said for the thousandth time, “why should I go to school when you have every book I could ever want right here? Colin’s tutor is quite enough for me. Besides, I couldn’t leave now. Spring’s coming.” Of course, after spring would come summer, which was holidays anyway, and in fall the household needed help preparing for winter, and in winter the roads were too muddy by far to make the trip from Misselthwaite to anyplace with a respectable girls’ school. Archibald could never bear to send his niece away, anyway.
He shook his head. “I’ve failed utterly in raising you.” This, too, was a common complaint. “But—see here, Colin, Mary, I actually have got something to say to you.”
Colin stopped chasing his cousin, and Dickon, who’d been on his heels, crashed into him, throwing both boys to the ground.
“Hello, Dickon,” Mr. Craven said. “I trust your parents are well?”
“Quite well, sir,” said Dickon, jumping to his feet and brushing himself off. He bent to help Colin up.
“I’m not crippled anymore,” Colin grumbled, but there was no real irritation in his voice, and Dickon grinned at him.
Mr. Craven harrumphed in his throat. “As I was saying,” he said, “we’re going to be having visitors.”
This stopped the three young people in their tracks. Visitors? Why, Misselthwaite hardly ever had visitors, now that Colin didn’t need the doctor anymore, and when there were visitors, Mr. Craven certainly never announced them. They just went into his study and left without ever talking to Mary or Colin besides an occasional greeting.
“Who are they?” Colin asked, frowning. He and Dickon and Mary had plans. With spring coming, they were gathering all the tools and seeds they would need to work on the garden after the first rains, bringing it to the absolute splendour it had the potential to be. The garden might not be a secret anymore, but he certainly didn’t want some strangers wandering about in it, and he was never terribly happy about having his plans disrupted.
“An old friend of mine from Cambridge,” Mr. Craven said. “Mr. Carrisford. And his ward, Miss Sara Crewe, and her lady’s maid.”
Mary’s face grew a bit sharper at the word ward. “Miss Sara Crewe?”
“You heard me, Mary,” Mr. Craven said. He was almost testy, but his temper was muted some by amusement. “Miss Crewe, too, has spent some time in India, and I suspect the two of you shall find much to talk about.”
Mary raised one yellow eyebrow. “I suppose we shall,” she said, sounding as if she supposed nothing of the sort. Colin grinned; he knew well how much Mary had hated her time in India.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Craven, as if he hadn’t noticed Mary’s tone. “Since Mr. Stevens is leaving in a week to visit his mother--” Colin’s smile brightened at the prospect of not having any lessons, and he clapped Dickon on the back. “I thought the two of you—and Dickon, of course—might have time to entertain Miss Crewe while she’s here.”
That night in bed Mary sighed irritably into Dickon’s shoulder. “How horrid. I suppose I shall have to have tea and make pleasant conversation and all sorts of rubbish. Ugh. And the girls in India were all awful.”
“How would you know?” asked Colin, poking her. “You’ve said it yourself—you never talked to them!”
“Because I knew it would be awful.” Mary scowled.
Dickon chuckled and said, “Oh, Mistress Mary, quite contrary.” He kissed her hair; despite her irritation at the nickname, she smiled and kissed him back. He ran one rough hand up and down her bare arm reassuringly. “Tha’ might well like her--Miss Crewe, that is. She is Mister Craven’s friend and all.”
“She isn’t either,” said Colin, who didn’t like to be ignored. “She’s my father’s friend’s ward. It’s not the same.”
“Still and all,” Dickon said, reaching a hand over Mary to tangle his fingers in Colin’s hair, “’tisn’t fair to judge the girl before we’ve met her.”
“Oh, let’s not talk about it anymore!” Mary cried. “I’m sick of thinking about Miss Sara Crewe.”
Colin and Dickon were happy enough to oblige; there are more things than talking that can be done in a bed of a winter’s night.
Mister Carrisford, Miss Crewe, her maid Becky and a huge Indian man named Ram Dass arrived a fortnight later. Mr. Carrisford was a withered, sallow little man in a wheelchair, and Colin thought with a touch of guilty cruelty that he was the perfect friend for Colin’s hunchbacked father. Miss Crewe was a slim, dark-haired kittenish thing and her maid looked like a faded dishrag. Mary scowled as she shook hands with Miss Crewe, but she didn’t seem to notice. She pressed Mary’s hand with gloved fingers, smiled, and said, “Call me Sara.”
From then on, Colin started to really dislike her.
He really didn’t have any reason to. None at all. She wasn’t a pretty sort of girl, but then, neither was Mary, who was the most beautiful woman in the world as far as Colin was concerned. She wasn’t stupid—on the contrary, she was most remarkably clever, more well-read than either Mary or Dickon and almost as well-read as Colin himself. Most surprising and important of all, she was kind, kind to everyone from Colin and his father down to the littlest Sowerbury. She was polite to Dickon, not coldly polite but really quite friendly, as if she knew him quite well.
Perhaps that was part of why he disliked her, because one of the few things in life of which he was certain was that Dickon was a mystery only for Mary and him to unravel. And that was another part—he didn’t like how much time Miss Crewe spent with Mary.
Mary might have been unhappy about the prospect of Sara Crewe, but in the flesh she seemed to have rapidly developed a love for the girl. She had been passing all of her afternoons in tea-times with Miss Crewe, or walking with Miss Crewe, or doing some mysterious girl things with Miss Crewe. He mentioned this to Mary on one occasion.
“Oh, leave off!” Mary said crossly. “She’s only visiting, can’t you spare me for as long as that?”
He didn’t like to spare Mary at all, but he knew as well as anyone that when Mary wanted something, no force on Earth could stop her. Apparently Mary wanted to spend time with Miss Crewe.
He complained to Dickon, who was damnably cheerful and calm about it all. “Tha’ goose!” he said, kissing Colin’s head fondly. “A girl likes to have other girls to talk to, doesn’t she? And Miss Mary’s had nought but you and me and sometimes Martha. Leave her be. At night she’ll come back to us.”
And she did; when Miss Crewe had been sent off to the guest quarters for the night Mary found her place once again between Colin and Dickon in Colin’s big bed. But even then she kept talking about Miss Sara Damned Crewe.
“Sara learned quite a lot of stories in India,” she said, running her fingers lightly across Dickon’s freckled chest. “Of course, I heard stories, too, but I never really got to love them as she does. I swear, it’s almost as if she lived in a story.”
“Oh?” Colin asked tightly.
“Do stop being so sour, Colin, and I’ll tell you.”
Colin didn’t have any particular desire to hear Miss Sara Crewe’s stories. Frankly, he’d just as soon forget her existence. But Dickon, damn him, said, “Tell us then, Mary,” and Mary spun some absurd story about how Miss Crewe had been terribly mistreated by some evil schoolmistress after her father died, which made Colin more sure than ever that he was never letting his father make Mary go off to school. He couldn’t help a snort when Mary got to the part about the Lascar who worked for Carrisford sneaking into Miss Crewe’s room in the night, bringing coverlets and muffins and things. Mary turned to glare at him, and said, “Of all the people in the world, I never thought that you would laugh at magic!” She didn’t listen to his apologies, and he fell asleep with the memory of her angry silence and Dickon’s chiding eyes burned into his mind.
The next day, Martha brought word from the Sowerburys that Jane, their sister, was ill, so Dickon went off to the cottage, trudging cheerily through the rain and waving brightly at Colin and Mary before vanishing from sight. Mary still was only speaking to Colin in cold, pinched tones that reminded Colin just why she was called “Mistress Mary, quite contrary” to begin with. After breakfast every day, she vanished in a huff, presumably to find more pleasant company in Miss Crewe and Ram Dass.
By the third day of Dickon’s absence, Mary’s abandonment was quite spoiling Colin’s temper, and Mr. Craven had begun giving him exasperated looks at meals. In what Martha and Dickon would call “one of his sulks,” Colin went to the library after breakfast, kicking at the floor the whole way. He could never stand being parted from either Mary or Dickon, and to be bereft of both of them, for no real fault of his own, struck him as terribly unfair.
He had hoped to have the library to himself, but Mr. Carrisford was there, reading a huge book of his father’s about French poetry or something of the sort. Mr. Carrisford lifted his head as Colin entered, looking much more cheerful than Colin would have expected from a man as sickly as Mr. Carrisford seemed.
“Well, you’re a studious lad, aren’t you,” Mr. Carrisford said, not looking as if he really expected an answer.
Feeling surly, Colin said, “Not particularly. I’m trying to get away from the girls.”
“Get away from them? Seems like a lad your age ought to seek them out.” Mr. Carrisford looked confused for a moment, and then his face smoothed into a grin that irritated Colin enormously. ““Eh, well, perhaps in a year or two.”
“Don’t mind me at all,” said Colin, hoping to make the man shut up. “I’m just going to sit over here.”
He sat in an armchair, staring gloomily out the window. He could hear giggling girls’ voices from the sitting room, Miss Crewe’s rising above the laughter to say, “Oh, that is wonderful, Mary!”
“I told you!” Then Colin heard a soft scraping noise that reminded him uncomfortably of when Dickon shifted in the night or when Colin and Mary hid behind the curtains to play quieter games than hide-and-seek. Mary’s voice rose again, saying, “I am glad you’ve come, Sara!”
“I am happy that Sara and Mary get on so well,” Mr. Carrisford remarked. “Sara has such a lot of friends, but, well, none of them have so much as been out of England, much less to India. She and Mary seem practically attached at the hip, eh?”
Colin couldn’t stand to listen anymore. Bidding Mr. Carrisford a terse farewell, he went outside to sit in one of the gardens—not their garden, because that might only make him angrier. The cold rain suited his mood perfectly.
That night, he and Mary fought most dreadfully.
It began when Mary came into Colin’s room that night, tight-lipped and sour-looking. Sometimes, without the buffer of Dickon between them, Mary was like that with Colin. Of course, now that she had Sara Crewe, Colin didn’t know what she was doing in his room anyway, and said as much.
Her scowl grew more pronounced. “Don’t be stupid. Your bed’s nicer.”
“I’ll wager the one in the guest suite’s much nicer than mine,” Colin said, feeling he was probably being too reckless but unwilling to curb his tongue.
Mary had begun taking off her dressing-gown, but at Colin’s words she stopped and stared at him. “What are you saying, Colin?”
“You know perfectly well what I’m saying!” said Colin, feeling foolish and petulant. “You’ve left me all alone to prance about like a ninny with her, every single day, and I heard you in the sitting room!”
“You heard what in the sitting room?” Mary said, her voice low with anger.
“You two! You did say you wouldn’t do such things with anyone but Dickon and me, but I suppose now that Miss Sara Crewe is here, you haven’t any need for us anymore!”
Mary drew her dressing-gown tightly back around herself with a jerk. “You insufferable prig!” she hissed. “Sara and I are friends, that’s all, but no reason you should see that—it’s not as if you’ve ever had a friend, you sour beast! It should serve you right if I never came back here at all!” She flounced out of the room, and Colin pounded his pillow in frustration, wanting to cry out as he had in the old days but knowing his father would never have it.
Dickon was back the next evening, tired but happy. Jane was still weak, he told Mary and Colin, but she’d be well soon enough, and the spring sunshine that must come soon would make her all the better. Mary’s smile was warm as she told Dickon how happy she was, but she didn’t look at Colin, and after embracing Dickon she and Sara and Sara’s maid went exploring in one of the little-used wings of Misselthwaite.
Dickon looked at Colin, his expression weary, and said, “What’s gone wrong between the two of thee?”
Colin told him, about hearing Sara and Mary in the sitting room and the fight that had followed. Dickon sighed deeply. “Oh, Colin,” he said. “Why’d tha’ say that? You know our Mary wouldn’t do anything like that.” And he was right; Colin had known even as he’d accused her that Mary hadn’t done anything of the sort with Sara Crewe. She could be a foul-tempered girl at times, but she wouldn’t hurt Colin and Dickon that way. Or at least not Dickon. The sounds in the sitting room had given his jealousy a new face, but he didn’t believe for a second that Mary had given to Sara what she had promised to keep between the three of them. “What made you think it?” Dickon asked, fiddling unhappily with the brim of his hat in his lap.
“I don’t know,” Colin admitted sullenly. “I only want her to leave off with that Sara, so it can be the three of us again.”
Dickon shook his head and said, “Well, she’s angry and no mistake.”
“I know,” said Colin unhappily. “I have made a dreadful mess of things, haven’t I?”
The lines around Dickon’s mouth lightened ever so slightly, and he grabbed Colin’s hand in his own callused one, squeezing for a moment. “I shouldn’t think so, Master Colin. She’s got a quick temper, our Miss Mary, but she don’t hold a grudge. I’m off to find Martha. Mayhap she’ll know what’s to be done.”
But from the tired way he looked at Colin, Colin knew what Dickon thought should be done. He wouldn’t come out and tell Colin to apologize to Mary, because that had a tendency to spark Colin’s temper, but when Dickon was wrong, he always owned up to it truthfully, and that was always his first suggestion when Colin asked for advice of that sort. Colin felt like a cad for making Dickon unhappy and for accusing Mary and for sulking about it, and after Dickon left Colin went off to find Mary and make amends.
They’d gone off towards some of the best hide-and-seek rooms, the ones that were rarely cleaned and that the servants told ghost stories about. The rooms seemed cold and empty, knowing that neither Dickon nor Mary were waiting for him, and the queer lonely feeling that thought gave him made Colin stride more purposefully through the dusty hallways. His life had been nothing before them, nothing but discomfort and boredom and misery. Without them, the house was just a frightening, dusty old mess, and he was nothing but a rich man’s spoiled son. But Mary would forgive him, eventually, wouldn’t she?
He stopped in front of what he and Mary called “The Raja’s Room.” It had been decorated rather haphazardly with costly trinkets sent from India, doubtless from Mary’s parents, giving it a rather tasteless and extravagant feel. It was Mary’s favorite hiding-spot.
He stuck his head hesitantly in the door. He was about to call Mary’s name when he saw Sara Crewe and her nondescript little maid on the ivory couch. They were—well, he didn’t quite have the words to say what they were doing. The maid’s head had vanished under Sara’s skirts, buried in a place that Colin knew quite well on Mary’s body. Sara was making odd little panting noises, every so often saying “Oh, Becky!—Oh!—Yes, yes!”
The maid pulled her head out from under the skirts, with a pleased flush to her face. Colin was somewhat surprised to see that, with her face glowing and her hair mussed, she didn’t look at all like a faded dishrag. In fact, she even looked a little like Mary after a day running about the moor. “Oh, miss!” the maid cried softly, falling upon Sara’s neck and face with kisses. “Sara!”
Colin knew he should leave, give them their privacy and go find Mary. But he couldn’t help standing there, shocked and relieved. It wasn’t Mary in Sara Crewe’s bed after all—it never had been! Of course it hadn’t. Mary always came back to him in the nights, just as Dickon had said, and Sara had someone of her own to go back to in the guest quarters. How could he have been so foolish!
The laugh he felt bubbling up in his chest must have somehow escaped him, because the maid jerked her head around in a sharp, frightened motion. But Sara merely drew the maid’s head down to rest on her bosom and said calmly, “Colin.”
“Sara,” he said, giving her perhaps the first smile he’d found for her since she’d arrived. “Where’s Mary?”
Sara smiled, a knowing, wise little smile, and said, “She’s in the study at the end of the hall, looking through your relatives’ correspondance.” Her face lost a little of its certainty, and she said, “You won’t tell Mr. Carrisford, will you? He’s a dear man, the best of friends, but I’m not certain he’d understand. Just as….” She stopped here, as if frightened to go further.
“Just as my father wouldn’t understand about Mary and Dickon and me,” Colin said, a smile still pleasantly stretching his face. “I won’t tell.”
Sara nodded, and kissed the side of her maid’s face. Colin dashed to the end of the hall, not caring anymore how much noise he made.
Mary whirled about as he threw open the door to the study, yellowed letters in her hands. When she saw it was Colin, her mouth tightened and she turned back around. “What are you doing here?” she asked in her Mistress Mary Quite Contrary voice.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” he said, endeavouring to put every bit of what he was feeling into his voice. “I am, really. I shouldn’t ever have said those things, and really I don’t mind Sara Crewe so much. I’m a brat, I know, but please don’t be angry anymore. I love you, and I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”
Mary stared at him for a moment, mouth drawn into a perplexed frown. Finally she said, “My word, Colin, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you apologize so in my life! I suppose I’m not angry anymore, and of course I don’t hate you, only don’t be so awful ever again. I can have friends, you know, and still love you. It’s not as if I stopped loving you just because I wasn’t spending every second of every day with you.”
“I know,” said Colin. “It’s only when Dickon’s gone I get so lonely, and it makes me cross.”
Mary chewed her lower lip, as if thinking about something, and finally she said, “I’m taking Sara out into the gardens tomorrow, as it’s finally stopped raining. I’m asking Dickon along, too, since he knows ever so much more about plants than I do. Would you like to come?”
And maybe Colin still felt a little resentful, because the gardens were something special, but then, perhaps meeting a new friend was something special, too. It didn’t happen very often, and he had a feeling that you didn’t meet a girl like Sara Crewe—or like her maid, for that matter—every day. And more than anything, having Mary look at him with tenderness in her eyes was something beautiful and special that Colin wanted every day of his life, and so he smiled and said, “Yes.”
It was raining again. It had been raining for weeks, and Mary, Dickon, and Colin were beginning to feel the stirring of spring in their blood, which meant Mrs. Medlock was ready to tear her hair out. They’d grown a bit old for games of hide-and-seek, but Misselthwaite Manor was such a splendid place for it, and for chasing each other about when the weather was too grim even for Dickon to venture out in.
“Will you stop running about?” said Mr. Craven sharply. “Good God, one would think you were still children. Isn’t it about time we sent you off to school, Mary?”
“Oh, Uncle,” Mary said for the thousandth time, “why should I go to school when you have every book I could ever want right here? Colin’s tutor is quite enough for me. Besides, I couldn’t leave now. Spring’s coming.” Of course, after spring would come summer, which was holidays anyway, and in fall the household needed help preparing for winter, and in winter the roads were too muddy by far to make the trip from Misselthwaite to anyplace with a respectable girls’ school. Archibald could never bear to send his niece away, anyway.
He shook his head. “I’ve failed utterly in raising you.” This, too, was a common complaint. “But—see here, Colin, Mary, I actually have got something to say to you.”
Colin stopped chasing his cousin, and Dickon, who’d been on his heels, crashed into him, throwing both boys to the ground.
“Hello, Dickon,” Mr. Craven said. “I trust your parents are well?”
“Quite well, sir,” said Dickon, jumping to his feet and brushing himself off. He bent to help Colin up.
“I’m not crippled anymore,” Colin grumbled, but there was no real irritation in his voice, and Dickon grinned at him.
Mr. Craven harrumphed in his throat. “As I was saying,” he said, “we’re going to be having visitors.”
This stopped the three young people in their tracks. Visitors? Why, Misselthwaite hardly ever had visitors, now that Colin didn’t need the doctor anymore, and when there were visitors, Mr. Craven certainly never announced them. They just went into his study and left without ever talking to Mary or Colin besides an occasional greeting.
“Who are they?” Colin asked, frowning. He and Dickon and Mary had plans. With spring coming, they were gathering all the tools and seeds they would need to work on the garden after the first rains, bringing it to the absolute splendour it had the potential to be. The garden might not be a secret anymore, but he certainly didn’t want some strangers wandering about in it, and he was never terribly happy about having his plans disrupted.
“An old friend of mine from Cambridge,” Mr. Craven said. “Mr. Carrisford. And his ward, Miss Sara Crewe, and her lady’s maid.”
Mary’s face grew a bit sharper at the word ward. “Miss Sara Crewe?”
“You heard me, Mary,” Mr. Craven said. He was almost testy, but his temper was muted some by amusement. “Miss Crewe, too, has spent some time in India, and I suspect the two of you shall find much to talk about.”
Mary raised one yellow eyebrow. “I suppose we shall,” she said, sounding as if she supposed nothing of the sort. Colin grinned; he knew well how much Mary had hated her time in India.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Craven, as if he hadn’t noticed Mary’s tone. “Since Mr. Stevens is leaving in a week to visit his mother--” Colin’s smile brightened at the prospect of not having any lessons, and he clapped Dickon on the back. “I thought the two of you—and Dickon, of course—might have time to entertain Miss Crewe while she’s here.”
That night in bed Mary sighed irritably into Dickon’s shoulder. “How horrid. I suppose I shall have to have tea and make pleasant conversation and all sorts of rubbish. Ugh. And the girls in India were all awful.”
“How would you know?” asked Colin, poking her. “You’ve said it yourself—you never talked to them!”
“Because I knew it would be awful.” Mary scowled.
Dickon chuckled and said, “Oh, Mistress Mary, quite contrary.” He kissed her hair; despite her irritation at the nickname, she smiled and kissed him back. He ran one rough hand up and down her bare arm reassuringly. “Tha’ might well like her--Miss Crewe, that is. She is Mister Craven’s friend and all.”
“She isn’t either,” said Colin, who didn’t like to be ignored. “She’s my father’s friend’s ward. It’s not the same.”
“Still and all,” Dickon said, reaching a hand over Mary to tangle his fingers in Colin’s hair, “’tisn’t fair to judge the girl before we’ve met her.”
“Oh, let’s not talk about it anymore!” Mary cried. “I’m sick of thinking about Miss Sara Crewe.”
Colin and Dickon were happy enough to oblige; there are more things than talking that can be done in a bed of a winter’s night.
Mister Carrisford, Miss Crewe, her maid Becky and a huge Indian man named Ram Dass arrived a fortnight later. Mr. Carrisford was a withered, sallow little man in a wheelchair, and Colin thought with a touch of guilty cruelty that he was the perfect friend for Colin’s hunchbacked father. Miss Crewe was a slim, dark-haired kittenish thing and her maid looked like a faded dishrag. Mary scowled as she shook hands with Miss Crewe, but she didn’t seem to notice. She pressed Mary’s hand with gloved fingers, smiled, and said, “Call me Sara.”
From then on, Colin started to really dislike her.
He really didn’t have any reason to. None at all. She wasn’t a pretty sort of girl, but then, neither was Mary, who was the most beautiful woman in the world as far as Colin was concerned. She wasn’t stupid—on the contrary, she was most remarkably clever, more well-read than either Mary or Dickon and almost as well-read as Colin himself. Most surprising and important of all, she was kind, kind to everyone from Colin and his father down to the littlest Sowerbury. She was polite to Dickon, not coldly polite but really quite friendly, as if she knew him quite well.
Perhaps that was part of why he disliked her, because one of the few things in life of which he was certain was that Dickon was a mystery only for Mary and him to unravel. And that was another part—he didn’t like how much time Miss Crewe spent with Mary.
Mary might have been unhappy about the prospect of Sara Crewe, but in the flesh she seemed to have rapidly developed a love for the girl. She had been passing all of her afternoons in tea-times with Miss Crewe, or walking with Miss Crewe, or doing some mysterious girl things with Miss Crewe. He mentioned this to Mary on one occasion.
“Oh, leave off!” Mary said crossly. “She’s only visiting, can’t you spare me for as long as that?”
He didn’t like to spare Mary at all, but he knew as well as anyone that when Mary wanted something, no force on Earth could stop her. Apparently Mary wanted to spend time with Miss Crewe.
He complained to Dickon, who was damnably cheerful and calm about it all. “Tha’ goose!” he said, kissing Colin’s head fondly. “A girl likes to have other girls to talk to, doesn’t she? And Miss Mary’s had nought but you and me and sometimes Martha. Leave her be. At night she’ll come back to us.”
And she did; when Miss Crewe had been sent off to the guest quarters for the night Mary found her place once again between Colin and Dickon in Colin’s big bed. But even then she kept talking about Miss Sara Damned Crewe.
“Sara learned quite a lot of stories in India,” she said, running her fingers lightly across Dickon’s freckled chest. “Of course, I heard stories, too, but I never really got to love them as she does. I swear, it’s almost as if she lived in a story.”
“Oh?” Colin asked tightly.
“Do stop being so sour, Colin, and I’ll tell you.”
Colin didn’t have any particular desire to hear Miss Sara Crewe’s stories. Frankly, he’d just as soon forget her existence. But Dickon, damn him, said, “Tell us then, Mary,” and Mary spun some absurd story about how Miss Crewe had been terribly mistreated by some evil schoolmistress after her father died, which made Colin more sure than ever that he was never letting his father make Mary go off to school. He couldn’t help a snort when Mary got to the part about the Lascar who worked for Carrisford sneaking into Miss Crewe’s room in the night, bringing coverlets and muffins and things. Mary turned to glare at him, and said, “Of all the people in the world, I never thought that you would laugh at magic!” She didn’t listen to his apologies, and he fell asleep with the memory of her angry silence and Dickon’s chiding eyes burned into his mind.
The next day, Martha brought word from the Sowerburys that Jane, their sister, was ill, so Dickon went off to the cottage, trudging cheerily through the rain and waving brightly at Colin and Mary before vanishing from sight. Mary still was only speaking to Colin in cold, pinched tones that reminded Colin just why she was called “Mistress Mary, quite contrary” to begin with. After breakfast every day, she vanished in a huff, presumably to find more pleasant company in Miss Crewe and Ram Dass.
By the third day of Dickon’s absence, Mary’s abandonment was quite spoiling Colin’s temper, and Mr. Craven had begun giving him exasperated looks at meals. In what Martha and Dickon would call “one of his sulks,” Colin went to the library after breakfast, kicking at the floor the whole way. He could never stand being parted from either Mary or Dickon, and to be bereft of both of them, for no real fault of his own, struck him as terribly unfair.
He had hoped to have the library to himself, but Mr. Carrisford was there, reading a huge book of his father’s about French poetry or something of the sort. Mr. Carrisford lifted his head as Colin entered, looking much more cheerful than Colin would have expected from a man as sickly as Mr. Carrisford seemed.
“Well, you’re a studious lad, aren’t you,” Mr. Carrisford said, not looking as if he really expected an answer.
Feeling surly, Colin said, “Not particularly. I’m trying to get away from the girls.”
“Get away from them? Seems like a lad your age ought to seek them out.” Mr. Carrisford looked confused for a moment, and then his face smoothed into a grin that irritated Colin enormously. ““Eh, well, perhaps in a year or two.”
“Don’t mind me at all,” said Colin, hoping to make the man shut up. “I’m just going to sit over here.”
He sat in an armchair, staring gloomily out the window. He could hear giggling girls’ voices from the sitting room, Miss Crewe’s rising above the laughter to say, “Oh, that is wonderful, Mary!”
“I told you!” Then Colin heard a soft scraping noise that reminded him uncomfortably of when Dickon shifted in the night or when Colin and Mary hid behind the curtains to play quieter games than hide-and-seek. Mary’s voice rose again, saying, “I am glad you’ve come, Sara!”
“I am happy that Sara and Mary get on so well,” Mr. Carrisford remarked. “Sara has such a lot of friends, but, well, none of them have so much as been out of England, much less to India. She and Mary seem practically attached at the hip, eh?”
Colin couldn’t stand to listen anymore. Bidding Mr. Carrisford a terse farewell, he went outside to sit in one of the gardens—not their garden, because that might only make him angrier. The cold rain suited his mood perfectly.
That night, he and Mary fought most dreadfully.
It began when Mary came into Colin’s room that night, tight-lipped and sour-looking. Sometimes, without the buffer of Dickon between them, Mary was like that with Colin. Of course, now that she had Sara Crewe, Colin didn’t know what she was doing in his room anyway, and said as much.
Her scowl grew more pronounced. “Don’t be stupid. Your bed’s nicer.”
“I’ll wager the one in the guest suite’s much nicer than mine,” Colin said, feeling he was probably being too reckless but unwilling to curb his tongue.
Mary had begun taking off her dressing-gown, but at Colin’s words she stopped and stared at him. “What are you saying, Colin?”
“You know perfectly well what I’m saying!” said Colin, feeling foolish and petulant. “You’ve left me all alone to prance about like a ninny with her, every single day, and I heard you in the sitting room!”
“You heard what in the sitting room?” Mary said, her voice low with anger.
“You two! You did say you wouldn’t do such things with anyone but Dickon and me, but I suppose now that Miss Sara Crewe is here, you haven’t any need for us anymore!”
Mary drew her dressing-gown tightly back around herself with a jerk. “You insufferable prig!” she hissed. “Sara and I are friends, that’s all, but no reason you should see that—it’s not as if you’ve ever had a friend, you sour beast! It should serve you right if I never came back here at all!” She flounced out of the room, and Colin pounded his pillow in frustration, wanting to cry out as he had in the old days but knowing his father would never have it.
Dickon was back the next evening, tired but happy. Jane was still weak, he told Mary and Colin, but she’d be well soon enough, and the spring sunshine that must come soon would make her all the better. Mary’s smile was warm as she told Dickon how happy she was, but she didn’t look at Colin, and after embracing Dickon she and Sara and Sara’s maid went exploring in one of the little-used wings of Misselthwaite.
Dickon looked at Colin, his expression weary, and said, “What’s gone wrong between the two of thee?”
Colin told him, about hearing Sara and Mary in the sitting room and the fight that had followed. Dickon sighed deeply. “Oh, Colin,” he said. “Why’d tha’ say that? You know our Mary wouldn’t do anything like that.” And he was right; Colin had known even as he’d accused her that Mary hadn’t done anything of the sort with Sara Crewe. She could be a foul-tempered girl at times, but she wouldn’t hurt Colin and Dickon that way. Or at least not Dickon. The sounds in the sitting room had given his jealousy a new face, but he didn’t believe for a second that Mary had given to Sara what she had promised to keep between the three of them. “What made you think it?” Dickon asked, fiddling unhappily with the brim of his hat in his lap.
“I don’t know,” Colin admitted sullenly. “I only want her to leave off with that Sara, so it can be the three of us again.”
Dickon shook his head and said, “Well, she’s angry and no mistake.”
“I know,” said Colin unhappily. “I have made a dreadful mess of things, haven’t I?”
The lines around Dickon’s mouth lightened ever so slightly, and he grabbed Colin’s hand in his own callused one, squeezing for a moment. “I shouldn’t think so, Master Colin. She’s got a quick temper, our Miss Mary, but she don’t hold a grudge. I’m off to find Martha. Mayhap she’ll know what’s to be done.”
But from the tired way he looked at Colin, Colin knew what Dickon thought should be done. He wouldn’t come out and tell Colin to apologize to Mary, because that had a tendency to spark Colin’s temper, but when Dickon was wrong, he always owned up to it truthfully, and that was always his first suggestion when Colin asked for advice of that sort. Colin felt like a cad for making Dickon unhappy and for accusing Mary and for sulking about it, and after Dickon left Colin went off to find Mary and make amends.
They’d gone off towards some of the best hide-and-seek rooms, the ones that were rarely cleaned and that the servants told ghost stories about. The rooms seemed cold and empty, knowing that neither Dickon nor Mary were waiting for him, and the queer lonely feeling that thought gave him made Colin stride more purposefully through the dusty hallways. His life had been nothing before them, nothing but discomfort and boredom and misery. Without them, the house was just a frightening, dusty old mess, and he was nothing but a rich man’s spoiled son. But Mary would forgive him, eventually, wouldn’t she?
He stopped in front of what he and Mary called “The Raja’s Room.” It had been decorated rather haphazardly with costly trinkets sent from India, doubtless from Mary’s parents, giving it a rather tasteless and extravagant feel. It was Mary’s favorite hiding-spot.
He stuck his head hesitantly in the door. He was about to call Mary’s name when he saw Sara Crewe and her nondescript little maid on the ivory couch. They were—well, he didn’t quite have the words to say what they were doing. The maid’s head had vanished under Sara’s skirts, buried in a place that Colin knew quite well on Mary’s body. Sara was making odd little panting noises, every so often saying “Oh, Becky!—Oh!—Yes, yes!”
The maid pulled her head out from under the skirts, with a pleased flush to her face. Colin was somewhat surprised to see that, with her face glowing and her hair mussed, she didn’t look at all like a faded dishrag. In fact, she even looked a little like Mary after a day running about the moor. “Oh, miss!” the maid cried softly, falling upon Sara’s neck and face with kisses. “Sara!”
Colin knew he should leave, give them their privacy and go find Mary. But he couldn’t help standing there, shocked and relieved. It wasn’t Mary in Sara Crewe’s bed after all—it never had been! Of course it hadn’t. Mary always came back to him in the nights, just as Dickon had said, and Sara had someone of her own to go back to in the guest quarters. How could he have been so foolish!
The laugh he felt bubbling up in his chest must have somehow escaped him, because the maid jerked her head around in a sharp, frightened motion. But Sara merely drew the maid’s head down to rest on her bosom and said calmly, “Colin.”
“Sara,” he said, giving her perhaps the first smile he’d found for her since she’d arrived. “Where’s Mary?”
Sara smiled, a knowing, wise little smile, and said, “She’s in the study at the end of the hall, looking through your relatives’ correspondance.” Her face lost a little of its certainty, and she said, “You won’t tell Mr. Carrisford, will you? He’s a dear man, the best of friends, but I’m not certain he’d understand. Just as….” She stopped here, as if frightened to go further.
“Just as my father wouldn’t understand about Mary and Dickon and me,” Colin said, a smile still pleasantly stretching his face. “I won’t tell.”
Sara nodded, and kissed the side of her maid’s face. Colin dashed to the end of the hall, not caring anymore how much noise he made.
Mary whirled about as he threw open the door to the study, yellowed letters in her hands. When she saw it was Colin, her mouth tightened and she turned back around. “What are you doing here?” she asked in her Mistress Mary Quite Contrary voice.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” he said, endeavouring to put every bit of what he was feeling into his voice. “I am, really. I shouldn’t ever have said those things, and really I don’t mind Sara Crewe so much. I’m a brat, I know, but please don’t be angry anymore. I love you, and I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”
Mary stared at him for a moment, mouth drawn into a perplexed frown. Finally she said, “My word, Colin, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you apologize so in my life! I suppose I’m not angry anymore, and of course I don’t hate you, only don’t be so awful ever again. I can have friends, you know, and still love you. It’s not as if I stopped loving you just because I wasn’t spending every second of every day with you.”
“I know,” said Colin. “It’s only when Dickon’s gone I get so lonely, and it makes me cross.”
Mary chewed her lower lip, as if thinking about something, and finally she said, “I’m taking Sara out into the gardens tomorrow, as it’s finally stopped raining. I’m asking Dickon along, too, since he knows ever so much more about plants than I do. Would you like to come?”
And maybe Colin still felt a little resentful, because the gardens were something special, but then, perhaps meeting a new friend was something special, too. It didn’t happen very often, and he had a feeling that you didn’t meet a girl like Sara Crewe—or like her maid, for that matter—every day. And more than anything, having Mary look at him with tenderness in her eyes was something beautiful and special that Colin wanted every day of his life, and so he smiled and said, “Yes.”
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