CASTLE 09
Miss Parradine
settled her old mother back in to bed, after helping her to the toilet.
How she hated this - wiping an old woman‘s bottom - she, a professional
woman! But it was all for the best, of course. The old lady was very
wealthy and the greedy Archivist had no wish to be cut out of the Will
for being an undutiful daughter!
Angela Parradine, Miss Parradine’s sister usually tended to the
severely disabled (OK then - “differently abled!”) old lady, lovingly
and caringly - not because of any thought of future gain, but because
she adored her mother and would not desire to be other than at her side
to soothe her way and comfort her during her final years. It made
Angela very happy to repay, with interest, the love she had
been shown during childhood. But Angela had been taken very ill and
would not be able to resume her duties for some months after a serious
operation and lengthy convalescence. So Miss Parradine had been
obliged to apply for indefinite Compassionate Leave and come up here to
the Western Isles where it seemed to rain and blow a gale all
day. What with the wind howling and moaning about the ancient
house’s windows and the old lady’s constant need for attention, she was
having a very unpleasant time indeed!
All thoughts of trying to decode the writing on the paper had to be put
on the back-burner for the time being. She had got hold of a few books
on the subject of ciphers and their decrypting but, as yet, had barely
begun to make sense of it all. When the bombshell of her sister’s
sudden illness had exploded she had been forced almost
immediately to come all the way up here to the edge of the civilised
world to look after this old fool of a mother, whom she had never much
liked, anyway.
Come to think of it, Amelia Parradine had never much liked any of her
family. From as far back as she could remember, they had all of them,
without exception, jeered at her for her bookishness . Her sister
had played tennis and swum for her country, her brothers had excelled
at cricket and played for Middlesex and England and her mother had swum
the Channel before she was twenty. Amelia, though, had never been
athletic. At school and at home she had suffered torment after torment
for her failure to conform to the lofty ideal of “ Mens sanis in
copore sano”.
It had been with immense relief that she had escaped from a world of
cold showers, fresh air and hearty breakfasts to bury herself in
the dusty reassurances of the documentary past. Now she was being
forced back to the bosom of her family. Was there no justice in this
cruel world? It did not occur to the selfish woman that her
willing, if minor, part in the miseries being routinely and
increasingly inflicted on the Girl might have brought this misfortune
upon her, and that these misfortunes were as nothing compared to the
daily agony of the Girl‘s existence.
She had brought a copy of the document with her, but saw that she would
have precious few chances to study it before Angela returned in the
late Spring of next year - if she was lucky. She turned on the
television, to experience some feeling of not being irrevocably
detached from the civilised world, and saw that her own part of the
country had just endured the first snowfall of the Winter in a freak
cold snap that had, as usual, brought the entire South of England to a
grinding halt!
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The Girl came downstairs early one morning and saw that the gardens
were covered in snow, which was still falling, though not heavily. How
amazing to have snow before Christmas, she thought. It was certainly a
mercy that the Mistress had relented in the matter of the heater in her
room. Without it she would surely have perished by this time. The
previous ten days had been terribly cold.
The Mistress was very anxious to impress upon the Girl that her
instructions as to the limited time the heater could be turned on, were
not to be disregarded without impunity. One such demonstration of the
Mistress’s parsimony had caused her much grief. A week ago Dorothy had
burst into the Girl’s tiny room at one minute past Five and the heater
was still on! No matter that the dutiful and obedient Girl was
kneeling beside it in the very act of switching it off, the Mistress’s
rage had been horrible to behold.
“Wicked Girl! You have wilfully disobeyed me and will be punished.”
“I am sorry, Mistress. I WAS just switching it off, though!”
The Mistress hit the Girl a stinging blow on the face, causing her
mouth to bleed. She took up the heater.
“For that insolence I am removing this for two days. We shall see how
you like that! Maybe when I return it to you, you will be more
attentive to my instructions.”
The Girl certainly had been more careful once those two torturous
unheated nights were over. She had been pinched and blue with cold all
night long, shivering convulsively and thinking that the sound of
her chattering teeth must be audible down in the town below. The
consequent lack of night-time sleep had caused her to doze off a
couple of times when doing her kitchen chores, in the blessed heat of
that room, thereby earning herself the usual reward for such
dereliction of duty. When the heater had been finally brought
back, she had been giving a vicious and lengthy strapping by the
ruthless Huskisson to remind her not to be so careless again.
As she went to sleep on her first reasonably warm night for three days,
her back-side on fire, she thought wistfully of all the ways she would
like to be revenged on her three tormentors! Then she counted off
the time she had been here already - just over four months - it seemed
more like a thousand years!
The Girl had not been into the garden for more than a few minutes at a
time, for a couple of weeks, now and it had been so cold that she had
been gasping for breath when she had got back inside, to the obvious
amusement of Jenkins and Huskisson, who on one occasion had further
entertained themselves by locking the door against her and making her
wait outside for a few more ghastly minutes, hopping up and down and
flailing her arms to keep from freezing. Luckily, there was
little do be done, now, until the Spring; and the leaves were few
and far between by this time. Today the Girl would obviously not be
going outside at all, or so she thought.
No sooner had she lit all the fires and made a start on the breakfast
preparations than the loathsome Huskisson, accompanied by the Mistress
came into the kitchen. Both were muffled from head to toe in furs. She
thought they reminded her of two particularly unprepossessing gorillas
she had seen in Africa, where her parents had once taken her for
a never-to-be-forgotten holiday as a little girl.
With a sense of something unpleasant in store for her, she saw
that Huskisson was carrying a heavy shovel and the spitefully grinning
Mistress a broom.
“You, even stupid you, will have doubtless seen that we have had a bit
of snow overnight, Girl! I want the path cleared all the way down to
the main gate. When you have shovelled it off the path, I want
ALL the remainder swept clear and salt applied. If I or anyone else
slip as a result of your famous lack of attention to detail, you will
be soundly whipped. I know Fitch stole the one in the garden shed, but
I found a real beauty for you the other day, down in the cellars.
Now get out there and get to work. We will come and see how you are
getting on!”
“B-but. Mistress. I can’t possibly go out there like this. Please ….
..”
The words died in her throat and her pleading and horrified expression
changed to one of resigned acceptance. “ OK, Mistress! Of course I’ll
do as I am ordered.”
“Now why has she given in so easily?” pondered Dorothy Bottomley as she
saw the Girl meekly take the shovel from the Huskisson and the broom
from her.
“I know where plenty of salt is, Mistress. In the garden shed.”
With these words she went out into the Arctic weather and began
shovelling the snow from off the wide pathway down to the main gate.
The two heavily clad women went out as well and watched the Girl for a
few minutes before beating a hasty retreat back inside, where Huskisson
made for the kitchen and a swift and substantial tot of rum and the
Mistress to her favourite parlour and the comfort of the recently lit
and cheerfully roaring fire. Mrs Bottomley stood by the window and
watched as the girl rapidly cleared away the snow, casting great
heaps of the white stuff first to one side and then the other and
moving with quite astonishing speed away from the castle and towards
the gate along the curving pathway.
The Girl’s lithe body was bright red with the combined effects of
cold and exertion. She never paused in her efforts, the snow flying
from her rapidly moving shovel as she attacked her hideous task in a
seeming frenzy. The Mistress was impressed, despite herself. That was
one tough little Girl and no mistake.
“I wonder how it feels to be out there like she is? Pretty painful by
this time, I should think.” She chuckled malevolently, remembering
being in an unheated schoolroom many years before and feeling her toes
cry out in increasing agony as the maths lesson went its boring way.
And she had been well shod , with thick woolly socks on, and well
muffled up after a good hot breakfast. That Girl was hardly human the
way she was coping! As Huskisson had often observed to her, where
there is no sense there is no feeling!
While the other three were going about their business in the warmth of
the castle, whose fires she had lit for them before coming out here to
this white hell, the Girl strove to keep the cold from invading and
overwhelming her body, naked as ever and open to the bitter wind
and sub-zero chill. She quickly realised that attack was the only form
of defence and went at the task as if demented, performing prodigies of
work as she cast the snow across the garden and away from the path. She
kept her feet stamping up and down at the same time in order to force
the blood to keep flowing and stop frostbite from causing her sweet
little toes to drop off, as she had long ago read happening to Polar
explorers.
As long as she felt pain in her hands and feet, excruciating and
unbelievable as it was, she knew that she was safe. Numbness was what
she had to dread - then the battle against the elements would have been
lost.
By the time she had gone around the bend in the path and reached the
gate, she was screened by a clump of trees and out of sight of
the Castle and the watching eyes of Mrs Bottomley, who could only
speculate how the Girl was faring. Truth to tell, that lady was
beginning to be anxious, although not from any humanitarian impulse.
The Girl was a fantastically hard worker, despite the never-ending
insults she directed at her, and she knew a substitute would be hard to
come by. She was on the point of going out to tell the Girl to come in
for a while in order to recover before going out again, when she
re-appeared round the bend, seemingly none the worse, as yet, for her
ordeal. Dorothy sighed in a relieved sort of way and decided to let the
Girl continue with no respite. It would be instructive to see just how
far her remarkable endurance would carry her.
If the shovel and the broom had possessed metal handles, the Girl knew
that she would never have been able to keep her grip on them. As it
was, she felt her grasp dangerously weakening by the time she had
finished with the shovelling. Her fingers were starting to disobey her
and she finished this first stage not a moment too soon. Before going
back for the broom to start sweeping up the remainder of the snow, she
went into Fitch’s former domain, the garden shed, and got out of the
wind for a few minutes. There, she busied herself unpacking the rock
salt from its container and putting sufficient of it into a large
sieve, from which she hoped she could sprinkle it over the
cleared surface when the time came.
After that, she concentrated on rubbing her blue little feet and hands
and flailing her arms and slapping her body to keep her faltering
circulation going. The job was not half done, after all, and she knew
there would be no mercy from the cruel Mistress until she had completed
her task..
All the while the Girl knew that the Mistress had been deadly serious
about her threat of what she would do in the event of anyone slipping
on their way along the cleared pathway. It was far too early in her
time here for her to be whipped on her bare back - once that started
she knew it would never stop; Mrs Bottomley would be like a child with
a new toy once she used that whip for the first time. Unhappily,
though, the Girl knew with sick dread that this horror would need
to be faced at some time before her work in the Castle was done - it
had been written long ago and nothing would save her from it, something
she had known and accepted from the very beginning of this
enterprise. She must concentrate hard on doing a thorough job
despite the awful, ever increasing pain that this wicked cold was
causing that tender young body of hers.
And then, the gate swung open as the grocer’s boy came through. On a
bicycle! The grocer’s van must have broken down in the cold.
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