My dearest Jane,
“Tomorrow I am traveling down to the New Forest. I have an interview at a place called Roland’s Croft. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Sylvester Milner is in need of a housekeeper. It is a large establishment I gather and although my condition of accepting the post has not exactly been agreed to, I have stated it and am still asked to attend for the interview. I shall write to you to tell you the result. If I am accepted my remuneration should be enough to keep you at Cluntons’, for I shall need little, as I shall have bed and board provided, as you will during the holidays. It will be an admirable solution. All I have to do is convince them that they must employ me.
I imagined her setting off resolutely for the interview, ready to fight for her place in the sun—not so much for herself as for me. She was a very small woman. I was going to be tall for I took after my father and was already several inches higher than my mother. She had rosy cheeks and thick hair, almost black with a touch of blue, the sort of color one sees in a bird’s wing. I had the same kind of hair but my skin was pale like my father’s, and instead of her small twinkling brown eyes I had my father’s large deep-set grey ones. We were not in the least alike—my mother and I—except in our determination to sweep aside all barriers which prevented our reaching the goal we had set ourselves. In this case, particularly when so much depended on the outcome, I felt she would have good hopes of success.
I was right, for a few days later I heard that she was settling into her new post at Roland’s Croft, and when the term ended I went to join her there.
I traveled down to London with a party of girls from Cluntons’ and there I was taken to the train which would carry me to Hampshire. When I reached Lyndhurst I was to board a local train. My mother had written the instructions very carefully. At the halt of Rolandsmere I would be “met” and if her duties prevented her from coming in the trap, she would see me as soon as I arrived at the house.
I could scarcely wait to get there. It seemed so strange to be going to a new place. My mother had said nothing about Mr. Sylvester Milner. I wondered why. She was not usually reticent. She had said very little about the house except that it was big and set in grounds of some twenty acres. “You will find it very different from our little house,” she wrote unnecessarily really, because I certainly should. Oddly enough she left it at that and my imagination was busy.
Roland’s Croft! Who was Roland and why a croft? Names usually meant something. And why did she say nothing of Mr. Sylvester Milner, her employer?
I began to build fantasies around him. He was young and handsome. No, he wasn’t, he was middle-aged and had a large family. He was a bachelor who shunned society. He was tired of the world and cynical; he shut himself away at Roland’s Croft to keep from it. No, he was a monster whom no one ever saw. They talked about him in whispers. There were strange sounds in the house at night. “You take no notice of them,” I would be told. “That is just Mr. Sylvester Milner walking.”
My father used to say I should curb my imagination, for at times it was too vivid. My mother said it ran away with me. And as it was accompanied by an insatiable curiosity about the world I lived in and the people who inhabited it, these made a dangerous combination.
I was therefore in a state of high expectancy when I reached the little haunt of Rolandsmere. It was December and there was a faint mist in the air which obscured the wintry sun and gave an aura of mystery to the little station with its name worked in plants on the platform. There were very few of us to alight and I was seen immediately by a big man in top hat and a coat frogged with gold braid.
He strode along the platform with such an air of authority that as he came to me I said: “Are you Mr. Sylvester Milner?”
He paused as though with wonder at the thought and let out a roar of laughter. “Nay, miss,” he cried. “I be the coachman.” Then he muttered to himself, “Mr. Sylvester Milner. That be a good one. Well,” he continued, “these be your bags. Just from school, are you? Let’s get to the trap then.” He surveyed me from head to foot. “Ain’t like your mother,” was his comment. “Wouldn’t have known you for hers.”
Then with a sharp nod he turned and shouted to a man who was lounging against the wall of the little booking office. “Here, Harry then.” And Harry picked up my bags and we made a procession, myself behind the coachman who walked with a swaggering gait as though to indicate that he was a very important gentleman indeed.
We went to a trap and my bags were put in. I scrambled up and the coachman took the reins with an air of disdain.
“Tain’t like me to drive these little things but to oblige your ma…”
“Thank you,” I said. “Mr. er…”
“Jeffers,” he said. “Jeffers is the name.” And we were off.
We drove through leafy lanes that edged the forest where the trees looked darkly mysterious. It was very different country from our mountainous one. This, I reminded myself, was the forest in which William the Conqueror had hunted and his son William Rufus had met his mysterious death.
I said: “It’s odd to call it the New Forest.”
“Eh?” replied Jeffers. “What’s that?”
“The New Forest when it’s been there for eight hundred years.”
“Reckon it were new once like most things,” answered Jeffers.
“They say it was built on the blood of men.”
“You got funny ideas, miss.”
“It’s not my idea. Men were turned out of their homes to make that forest and if anyone trapped a deer or a wild boar his hands were cut off or his eyes put out or he might have been hanged on a tree.”
“There’s no wild boar in there now, miss. And I never heard such talk about the forest.”
“Well, I did. In fact we’re doing Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman invasion at school.”
He nodded gravely. “And you’re spending the holiday with us. Surprised I was when that was allowed. But your mother stuck her foot down and it had to be. Mr. Milner gave way on that, which surprised me.”
“Why did it surprise you?”
“He’s not one to want children in the house.”
“What sort of one is he?”
“Now that is a question, that is. I reckon there’s no one knows what sort of man Mr. Sylvester Milner is.”
“Is he young?”
He looked at me. “Compared with me… he’s not so very old but compared with you he’d be a very old gentleman indeed.”
“Without comparing him with anyone how old would he be?”
“Bless you, miss. You’re one for questions. How would I be knowing how old Mr. Sylvester Milner be.”
“You could guess.”
“’Twouldn’t do to start guessing where he were concerned. You’d sure as eggs come up with the wrong answer.”
I could see that I should get little information about Mr. Sylvester Milner through him, so I studied the countryside.
Dusk of a December afternoon and a forest which my imagination told me must surely be haunted by those whom the Norman kings had dispossessed and tortured! By the time we had reached Roland’s Croft I was in a state of great anticipation.
We turned into a drive on either side of which grew conifers. The drive must have been half a mile in length and it seemed a long time before we reached the lawn beyond which was the house. It was imposing and elegant and must have been built round about the time of the early Georges. It struck me at once as being aloof and austere. Perhaps this was because I had been imagining a castle-like dwelling with battlements, turrets, and oriel windows. These windows were symmetrical, short on the ground floor, tall on the first floor, a little less tall on the next and square on the top. The effect was characteristic of eighteenth-century elegance removed as far as possible from the baroque and gothic of earlier generations. There was a beautiful fanlight over the Adam doorway and two columns supported a portico. Later I was to admire the Greek honeysuckle pattern on these but at the time my attention was caught by the two Chinese stone dogs at the foot of the columns. They looked fierce and alien in comparison with so much which was English.