Rachel's Story

Chapter 18

Today's update is here, three hours early. It is my little gift to my poor sniffling Jazzeh...

CHAPTER 18

The Trevelyan sisters were extremely kind to Rachel in the following weeks. The first day was spent in trying to acclimatize to the house and its inhabitants, and the situation was novel enough to keep her attention. Though she was unstintingly polite and interested in everything around her, Rachel felt the loss of Andrew very keenly and it showed in her open face. Her immobility also restricted her from working round the clock which, as everyone knows, is the best antidote for the pangs of love.

Her hostesses could sense the despondency which enveloped Miss Warren and, while it was perfectly understandable after all that the child had suffered, it could not be allowed to continue beyond some time. The three women were dissimilar in looks, attitudes and demeanor; and yet, they tried to protect and cheer up their young guest in their own ways.

Miss Maud Trevelyan had been Andrew’s nurse, and the youngest of the sisters. Though well over sixty years, she still was a trim lady with her faculties as undiminished as her sharp eyesight. She was the most loving of the three women and mothered Rachel throughout her stay, cajoling her to drink numerous herbal drinks for her ankle and keeping her company through her enforced immobilization. She regaled Rachel with tale after tale of the children she had looked after; and even to a prejudiced listener like Rachel, it was clear that her favorite charges had been the Fairfax children. From her, Rachel got to know Andrew’s four siblings intimately – his elder brother Stephen who was now master of Silvermead Hall with a babe of his own, his two sisters Cecily and Clara who were ‘such delightful damsels’, and his youngest brother Gavin who had been Miss Maud’s last charge – now at Harrow and a ‘scallywag of the first order’. She heard about old Sir Anthony who was such a good landlord and how he became partly paralyzed after a fall from his horse while riding, and about Lady Fairfax’s dreamy nature and obsession with her multiple rose gardens. She was even given broad hints about a certain local landowner who was a family friend and ‘well on the way to being engaged to Miss Cecily’. The two women spent several hours happily swapping stories about families, students, the countryside, culinary recipes, Andrew…in short, everything under their sun.

Millicent Trevelyan, the eldest sister, was a soft butterball of a woman with a beautiful cooing voice, even though she was approaching seventy years of age. She was something of a leader in the village, and people often came to her for advice about sundry aspects of their lives. Miss Trevelyan also mediated between feuding families, bickering couples and so on. She was the shrewdest of the Trevelyan family and best stocked in common-sense – an ironical fact, since she was the one sister who had not stepped out of their village her entire life.

While Miss Maud had spent twenty-nine years as a children’s nurse in different parts of England and Miss Agnes had been housekeeper for the London house of a grand Duke for twenty-two years, Miss Trevelyan stayed back in their small cottage to keep house for their old father till he passed on. As she reminisced to Rachel one morning while crocheting, “He was the local blacksmith of Headley Down, and ‘twas one of his biggest regrets that he had no son to carry on his profession after him. Rightly so – though we would have done anything to continue our father’s legacy, working the smithy was of course out of the question. He had hoped for one of us to wed his successor, but the man who followed Pa was married. We were the most educated ladies of our village thanks to our Ma’s insistence on studies, but it never varied his opinions on our usefulness a jot. I took care of Pa unstintingly till the end; perhaps, I was determined to make him admit the benefits of having a daughter.” She chuckled, but it sounded hollow to Rachel’s ears. Her heart wrung with sudden sympathy for the elder woman.