ONE

Most people believe a little routine is a good thing. Babies thrive on a routine of milk, cuddle, sleep; milk, cuddle, sleep; milk, cuddle, sleep. Schools tend toward a shipshape routine of lining up, lessons, and play. A good routine, say certain people, gives you a sense of purpose and adds structure and order to the day.
   But the routine that Clara had to follow at Braithwaite Manor would send those very people half mad. Day in, day out, it was always the same.
   Get up, wash up (in the freezing bathroom, where icicles hung in winter), have breakfast alone in the drafty dining room. The dining room, as always, would be deadly quiet except for the solemn tick of the grandfather clock and Clara's chewing noises, which seemed extraordinarily loud.
   After breakfast came lessons, taught by a governess. The governesses changed almost on a monthly basis. "It's like life ground to a halt in the nineteenth century!" the last one had cried, grabbing her bag and click-clacking furiously down the hall to the door.
   Clara couldn't agree more.
   The house did, after all, look like something out of a Victorian gothic novel, crouching in the middle of the moors like an angry crow. A single dark turret rose up to stab the gloomy skies, and flinty little windows glittered meanly at anyone with the gumption to approach.
   The governesses had strict orders from Clara's uncle to teach her the most boring lessons known to man or woman. Clara knew full well they would have preferred to do fun projects, like making collages, putting on shows, and writing stories. But Uncle didn't have a fun bone in his body and preferred the traditional approach: endless times tables, fiendishly hard spelling tests, and complicated grammatical exercises that made both Clara's and the governesses' brains hurt.
   After lessons came lunch, and after lunch it was time for a walk in the scrubby grounds.
   Perhaps if the sun ever shone, the garden might have held a bit more promise. After all, as certain grown-ups will tell you, there are endless games to be played in the great outdoors.
   But at Braithwaite Manor, the sun rarely shone. Instead, the freezing wind whipped and whirled, and the rain spliced the air and grazed your face until it hurt.
   So while the governesses swaddled themselves in fur coats found in the upstairs wardrobes and huddled on the bench reading old copies of Vogue, Clara hung around and kicked her heels on the half-frozen ground. She never felt like playing with the moldy old dirt and stones on her own.
   After the walk came the dreariest part of all, the daily visit to Uncle. And here is the truth of it: Uncle was a cold man. Not a glimmer of warmth emanated from this sternest of beings. It is entirely possible that he had no real feelings at all. His eyes never twinkled. He rarely smiled. He didn't hug, or laugh, or cry, or do any of the things that warmer-blooded humans do. As far as Clara could see, the only things he liked were rules and routine.
   "Children should be seen and not heard" was his favorite saying. Clara was not to run in the house, but must always tiptoe quietly. He detested chatter, so Cook and Clara had to wait until he went out, which was rare. There was no television or radio, and he did not get a newspaper. For all intents and purposes, they were quite adrift from the outside world.
   Clara had wasted hour upon hour wondering why Uncle was so mean-spirited. One likely explanation was that he was permanently grief stricken. His parents had died suddenly when he was a very young man. His sister, Clara's mother, had died in childbirth, and Uncle had long ago made it clear that not one of the deceased was to be spoken about or referred to in any way. Clara knew she had a father somewhere out there in the great wide world, but she had stopped asking about him long ago.
   "He doesn't even know you exist," Uncle had told her meanly. "How many times do I have to tell you before it gets into that woolly head of yours?"
   The daily visits to Uncle followed a familiar pattern. There he would sit, deep in his armchair, in his cozy study in front of the one roaring fire, and gaze at Clara as though he wished she weren't there. Sometimes he would close his eyes, breathe deeply, and open them again in a kind of despair. It was at times like these that Clara couldn't help wondering if he would just prefer her to disappear.
   Then he would ask the questions. The same questions he asked every day.
   "How were your lessons today? What did you learn? Did you say your prayers?"
   Clara barely heard the questions now, so familiar was she with the mind-numbing tedium of it all. Anyhow, her answers were always the same.
   "Good, Uncle," "Many things, Uncle," and "Yes."
   The yes was a lie because Clara couldn't always be bothered to pray, just like she couldn't always be bothered to brush her teeth. Instead, she put her hands together, shut her eyes, and counted backward from ten.
   Clara knew that if she changed her answers Uncle wouldn't bat an eye. Once she had tried it just to see. She'd answered, "Boring," "Nothing at all," and "I never do."
   Then she'd squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath, waiting for Uncle to explode. Or at least to look at her and take notice. He did neither. It gave Clara a weird sinking feeling. At least now she was one hundred percent sure he didn't listen to her any more than she cared to listen to him.
   After the visit to Uncle, it was supper time.
   "What's for supper?" Clara would ask in the vain hope that Cook might say something interesting like coq au vin or beef Wellington or shrimp cocktail, some of the recipes she had read about in her governesses' magazines. But Uncle was a firm believer in plain meals--nothing fancy was allowed.
   Recently the answer was always "spreadables": three slices of bread and margarine and a variety of jars on the table. The jars were full of untempting things like fish paste, strangely crunchy honey, and gloopy jam.
   "Sorry," said Cook when Clara's face fell again. It wasn't Cook's fault. Clara knew that Uncle was terribly stingy with the housekeeping money. Last month he had halved Cook's budget, and two weeks later he had halved it again. Cook whispered to Clara that she was almost at her wits' end.
   When supper was finished, it was time for bed. And that was it: the exact same thing, over and over, day in, day out, forever and ever, amen.
   It was true that, occasionally, Uncle did disappear for a day or two. Then Clara, the governess of the month, and James, the butler, would join Cook in the kitchen for hot buttered toast and card games. If Clara was lucky, James would teach her some DIY skills. Now she knew how to saw wood, drill holes, and hammer in nails.
   In bed, Clara would read until she couldn't keep her eyes open. Besides a scrap of red ribbon tucked inside her shell box, books were the only things she had of her mother's: a battered collection of paperbacks with yellowing pages, the flyleaf of each inscribed in violet ink:
 
Property of Christobel Starling.
Return if found.
 
   Clara loved to hold the open books to her nose, inhaling the musty oldness. Her favorite was The Secret Garden, which she had read again and again. It was a shame there was nothing remotely resembling a secret garden at Braithwaite Manor. Just a patch of scrub, a tumbling-down stone wall, and beyond that, miles and miles of desolate moor.
   It was hard not to feel hopeless. But Clara tried her best to look on the bright side even though the days dragged interminably and there was no one to play with, nothing new to see.

---

Excerpted from The Secret Starling by Judith Eagle
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.