Rose Rivers Read online

  When I reached Kensington High Street I calmed down a little because a few ladies were staring at me, and one fierce soul in black bombazine caught hold of me and asked if I was running away from my nurse.

  ‘I am too old to have a nurse,’ I said, and wriggled away from her.

  After that I walked more decorously, not wanting to draw further attention. I enjoyed looking in the shop windows, though I didn’t care for any of the clothes on display. I hate the way ladies’ costumes are so rigid. If I stay as thin and flat as I am now, perhaps I won’t need to wear a corset and all those other hideous underpinnings. I’ll wear a loose dress of some beautiful soft patterned silk – maybe a kimono? Papa very much admires Oriental art and has a fine set of Japanese prints in his studio.

  Perhaps, if I sketch assiduously every day, I can become a great lady artist and have my own studio. When I’m painting I will wear a voluminous smock and wipe my brushes on it as I fancy. Papa is frequently paint-stained, and his hands are either rainbow coloured with chalk or black with charcoal. Perhaps that’s why Mama cringes when he puts his arms around her.

  I walked on and at long, long last, reached Hyde Park. I flopped down beside Rotten Row and started drawing men on horseback. I couldn’t be bothered with the fine ladies because they looked so lopsided riding side-saddle, and no lady ever fought in a military battle anyway, as far as I was aware.

  I sketched brown horses, black horses and grey horses – magnificent sleek beasts which looked like a different species to the milkman’s old nag or the coalman’s massive carthorse. I learned how their necks arched and which way their knees bent. And yet they still didn’t look right.

  I tried hard, but eventually I had to give up. Besides, I soon grew very cold and cramped sitting on the damp grass. I wasn’t too sure of the time either. I had to get back or there might be trouble when I returned home.

  There was trouble. Apparently I’d been missing for a full hour after Nurse and the children arrived back from their afternoon stroll. Time for the servants to scour the house for me, for Nurse to tell Mama, and for Maggie to be sent off to fetch a policeman because they thought I might have been kidnapped!

  I stood squirming in the drawing room while Mama lectured me. She spoke lying down, a scented handkerchief on her forehead, because my disappearance had given her another sick headache.

  ‘Shame on you, Miss Rose,’ said Edie. ‘How could you be so thoughtless! Your poor mama’s been beside herself.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to worry you so. I simply thought I’d take a little stroll by myself,’ I said.

  She reacted as if I’d taken it into my head to march around Kensington like Lady Godiva, clothed only in my hair.

  ‘You must surely understand that children of thirteen do not wander around London by themselves!’

  ‘Rupert does, quite often,’ I retorted. ‘Don’t you remember the day he spent his pocket money on a cab to Buckingham Palace so that he could see the soldiers in their scarlet uniform?’

  ‘I do indeed, the little scamp!’ said Mama, shaking her head fondly. Rupert can do no wrong in her eyes. ‘Rupert is a young man with a very independent spirit. He is able to look after himself. Boys aren’t subject to the sort of dangers girls are. There are all sorts of evil men who prey upon young girls!’

  She hissed the last sentence dramatically, as if she believed a thousand crazed cut-throats lurked in the sleepy streets of Kensington, ready to attack any young girl who came skipping past. I smirked at the idea, which infuriated her.

  ‘How dare you snigger like that, you insolent girl! You seem to think you know best!’

  I felt I did know better than Mama, but I knew it would be fatal to say so. I stayed silent, staring at my feet. My white satin indoor shoes looked a little the worse for wear after their long walk. I thought of the thrilling fairy story of the red shoes. Perhaps I would never remove my white satin shoes now. They would take me further and further away, until I’d danced the length and breadth of Britain, and I’d end up dying of exhaustion climbing a Scottish mountain or tumbling down some Welsh waterfall. (My geography was too hazy to name specific places.)

  ‘Rose! Don’t ignore me!’ Mama said sharply. ‘Where did you go? Tell me at once!’

  ‘I went to Hyde Park,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ Mama warned.

  ‘I did, Mama, truly. You can ask Nurse. I begged her to take us there, but she said it was too far for the little ones.’

  ‘Of course it is. So why did you want to go to Hyde Park? Children go to Kensington Gardens,’ said Mama.

  ‘I didn’t want to look at children. I see enough of them at home. I wanted to go and look at the riders in Rotten Row.’

  ‘You’re interested in riding?’ Mama asked. She sounded a little less hostile. ‘Well, why on earth didn’t you say so before?’

  I DID MY best to tell Mama that I didn’t want to ride. When I was little I didn’t even want a rocking horse. Mounting a huge creature with flaring nostrils, sharp teeth, steel-capped hoofs and an unpredictable nature seemed a terrible idea. Mama spoke about her friend Mrs Feynsham-Jones, whose daughters were all magnificent horsewomen. She wondered if they might allow me to ride with them.

  ‘I don’t want to ride, Mama,’ I said yet again. ‘And I can’t bear those Feynsham-Jones girls. They’re ghastly, all three of them.’

  ‘Don’t be so difficult, Rose! The Feynsham-Jones girls are lovely young ladies,’ Mama declared.

  They aren’t official Ladies, but Mama feels that double-barrelled names are the next best thing, and with the middle Feynsham-Jones girl you got two for the price of one. Lucinda-May is my age, and the dullest creature ever, even worse than her silly big sister, Pamela, and her whining younger sister, Cecily. They came to tea this summer and it wasn’t a success.

  Mama made Nurse keep Beth upstairs in the nursery with baby Phoebe so that she shouldn’t disgrace us. She insisted that Clarrie and I wear our best organdie party frocks, and Sebastian and Algie had to wear their cream summer suits. Rupert chose to wear his striped boating blazer and cricketing flannels instead, but looked so charming that Mama let him get away with it.

  He was the only one who didn’t end up in disgrace. He played an elaborate game of Charming Pamela, sitting next to her and asking her questions as if he really wanted to know the answer, then plying her with cups of tea and little raspberry sponge cakes in a wondrous parody of gentlemanly behaviour. She simpered and tossed her long curls and giggled at his jokes, her pale face turning as pink as the icing on her cake. She thought Rupert was really smitten with her, the silly girl, though whenever she bent her head over cake or cup he rolled his eyes at me or openly yawned. It was hard not to snort with laughter.

  I was supposed to be entertaining Lucinda-May, but it was an uphill task. I don’t know how to make small talk or indeed any kind of talk. I asked her what games she liked, and she said she had just learned to play Bezique and was very fond of it. She offered to show me, and asked me to fetch two packs of cards. It turned out that Bezique was an incredibly boring card game. I had meant a real game of Pirates or Savages or Damsels in Distress, the sort of games I used to play with Rupert – but when I explained she looked appalled.

  ‘I don’t play those sorts of rough, childish games any more,’ she said, looking at me as if I were very strange indeed.

  So then I asked her which books she enjoyed, thinking this safe territory.

  ‘I don’t really care to read much nowadays, though I used to like fairy stories,’ she said.

  How can she bear not to read? I read when I wake up, when I go to bed, when I have my bath, when I have nursery tea, when I’m sent out into the garden for fresh air, and I read for hours and hours and hours whenever I sit on the window seat halfway up the stairs.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t have any very exciting books,’ I said. ‘You could borrow some of mine, if you like. I read anything I fancy – all kinds of grown-up novels, thou