I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith Page B

taxi.”
    I said we were a little short of change.
    Rose flushed scarlet. He gave her a quick look, then said, “Wait a sec.”
    —and left us.
    He came back with four pounds.
    “Mr. Stevenage says you’re to have this,” he told us.
    “It’ll take care of your fares, taxi to Chelsea, taxi to get the stuff to the station, and a slap-up lunch. And you must nip back here with the key of the house and sign a receipt. See?”
    We said we saw, and went. Rose was furious that no one more important than a clerk had bothered to see us.
    “It’s not respectful to Aunt Millicent,” she said, indignantly.
    “Treating us like small fry!”
    I didn’t mind what kind of fry I was, with four pounds in hand.
    “Let’s find our way by ‘bus and save the taxi money,” I suggested.
    But she said she couldn’t stand being stared at any more.
    “We must be the only girls in London wearing white.” Just then a bus conductor said: “Hop on, snowdrops.” She haughtily hailed a taxi.
    The lily-pond was dry in Aunt Millicent’s little flagged garden. I hoped the goldfish had found good homes.
    We unlocked the front door. I was surprised to find the hall quite bare—I hadn’t realized that all the furniture had been taken away.
    “It does feel queer,” I said when the door was closed and the sunny day shut out.
    “It only feels cold,” said Rose.
    “I suppose the clothes’ll be in her bedroom. I wonder if she died there.”
    I thought it a tactless thing to wonder out loud.
    On our way up we looked in at the double drawing-room. The two tall windows stared across the Thames; it was dazzlingly light.
    The last time I had seen that room it had been lit by dozens of candles for a party. That was the night we first met Topaz.
    Macmorris’s portrait of her had just been exhibited and Aunt Millicent asked him to bring her with him. She wore the misty blue dress he painted her in and he had lent her the great jade necklace. I remember being astonished at the long, pale hair hanging down her back.
    And I remember Father talking to her all evening and Aunt Millicent, in her black velvet suit and lace stock, glaring at him.
    There was nothing in the big front bedroom, much to my relief;
    though I can’t say it felt as if anyone had died there, merely cold and empty. The clothes were in the little back dressing-room, lying in heaps on the floor, with two old black leather trunks for us to pack them in. There was very little light because the green venetian blind was down. The cord was broken so we couldn’t get it up, but we managed to tilt the slats a little. Aunt Millicent’s old black military cloak lay on top of one of the heaps. It used to frighten me when I was little; I suppose it made me think of witches. It was frightening yesterday, too, but in a different way-it seemed somehow to be part of a dead person.
    All the clothes did. I said:
    “Rose, I don’t think I can touch them.”
    “We’ve got to,” she said, and started to rummage through them.
    Perhaps if we had ever been fond of poor Aunt Millicent we might have felt a kindness for her clothes. Perhaps if they had been pretty and feminine it wouldn’t have been so horrible. But they were mostly heavy, dark coats and skirts and thick woollen underwear. And rows and rows of flat-heeled shoes on wooden trees, which upset me most of all— I kept thinking of them as dead feet.
    “There are dozens of linen handkerchiefs, that’s something,” said Rose. But I hated the handkerchiefs -and the gloves and the stockings; and a dreadful pair of broken-looking corsets.
    “People’s clothes ought to be buried with them,” I said.
    “They oughtn’t to be left behind to be despised.”
    “I’m not despising them,” said Rose.
    “Some of these suits are made of wonderful cloth.”
    But she was bundling them into the trunks in a somehow insulting way. I made myself take them out and fold them carefully, and had a mental picture of Aunt Millicent looking