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’d been forced almost immediately to come all the way up here to the edge of the civilized 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 civilized 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!
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’ 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’ rage had been horrible to behold.
"Wicked Girl! You have willfully 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 backside 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 shoveled 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 shoveling 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 math 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 realized that attack was the only form of defense 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 around 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 shoveling. 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.