It was exhausting being so silly.
Harriet Jane Bates, aging spinster and oft-described flibbertigibbet, entered the modest rental home on the edge of the town of Highbury, where she and her aging mother had lived since the death of her father, eager for quiet.
No one in the tiny village of Highbury would think Hetty interested in anything even close to quiet, what for all the ways she chirped and chattered when out in the High Street, always finding something to say—about the crispness of the air, the green of the trees, the clatter of carriage wheels, the handsomeness of a frock, the gleam of a shop window.
Hetty often found herself carrying conversations—as the eldest daughter of the village’s third most recent vicar, she’d been raised to do just that, to be a listening ear, full of compassion and lacking in judgment. A kind ear. A sweet smile.
The conversations she’d been raised to have weren’t supposed to be silly, though, and there’d been a time when they hadn’t been. When they’d been just as she’d been raised. Soft, and sweet, and social. The kind of conversation that came with the tea and lemon-drizzle cakes vicars’ wives and daughters were to excel at.
She’d been raised for the conversation of the good citizen. The welcome friend. The wife.
But somewhere between learning her mother’s recipe for lemon cake and now, Hetty had made a mistake or two. Or a dozen. And with each one, what life wassupposed to have beenhad given way to what lifewas.
And so, Hetty Bates lived here, quietly, on the edge of the village, a now only child of an aging mother, pretending she’d chosen this life rather than fallen into it.
Hetty did a lot of pretending. Pretending to have a lovely time at events she was invited to, thanks to the condescending kindness of others. Pretending not to notice when others rolled their eyes as she approached. Pretending not to want to scream when she was asked for the forty-third time that morning how she was, and wasn’t she enjoying the lovely weather.
No one knew how to carry on a conversation with an aging spinster. Hetty imagined it was because they feared her affliction might be catching. An ague of the worst order, enough to send one to their bed. Alone. Forever.
Sometimes, she wondered if she could send a gaggle of young women scattering with a sneeze. Not that she would ever actually do it.
Instead, Hetty let them speak to her as though she was a child, with bright, false smiles and quick goodbyes and eye rolls kept at bay until backs were turned (mostly). After years of such treatment, Hetty stopped attempting to disabuse them of the idea. Instead, she let them think her a silly, featherbrained chatterbox.
Of course she was a chatterbox; noise was the only way Hetty knew to avoid silence.
Hetty had learned over the years that it was silence that carried the opinions of others. Opinions that came with a brutal sting. Things like disinterest. Or disdain. Or condescension. Or pity.
Or gratitude… for whatever ails anyone else in Highbury faced, at least they weren’t poor Miss Bates.
Indeed, if one were to describe Miss Bates, in the plain bonnet and tiny spectacles that often convinced the uninformed that shewas closer to sixty than her actual age of forty, they could have used something much worse than silly.
Sillywas the best descriptor Hetty could hope for, and so she did her best to keep everyone believing that she was a kindly, aging chatterbox. Better silly than the other things she’d been called over the years. Naive. Emptyheaded. Slow-witted.
Dull.
Yes, Hetty would take silly over the rest, because at least silly came with something that, if one squinted and tilted one’s head, could look something like fondness.
That is, she could pretend it was fondness.
Just like, most days, she could pretend it didn’t exhaust her to play the part of silly, poor Miss Bates, eldest, unmarried daughter of a forgotten vicar, a woman who required pity and compassion because, don’t you see, girls, but for the grace of the Lord, you might be her.
There’d been a time, though….
Hetty put the thought out of her mind and closed the door behind her with a quiet thump, setting her shopping basket down with the same—a bit of cheese, a loaf of yesterday’s bread, two yellow apples. She reached for the fraying ribbons at her chin and called out to her mother, the sound loud in her ears as it echoed around the house, floors too hard and furniture too threadbare to mute the sharp edges of the vowels and the rising lilt at the end of her “Mummy?”
She did not expect the aging Mrs. Bates to respond—Hetty’s mother had difficulty hearing without her horn and rarely had it nearby unless they had visitors. And yet—
“Hetty!” her mother called out from the front room.
Surprise flared, followed quickly by dread. Did they have visitors? She sucked in a breath and pasted a smile on her face,preparing to be silly once more, before stepping through the doorway to the front room.
Mrs. Bates was perched in the high-backed chair by the window that overlooked the High Street. The old woman squinted through the pince-nez at the bridge of her nose, staring down at a letter in her weathered hand. She was alone.
Relieved, Hetty raised her voice to a near bellow, “Is it from Jane?”
She crossed to her mother, eager for news of the newly married Jane Churchill, once Jane Fairfax, the only person who regularly wrote to the Bates women. There had been a time when Hetty had loved nothing more than doting upon young Jane, who’d been raised far from Highbury by Hetty’s younger sister and her husband before she was orphaned and returned, like a gift, to Hetty and her mother for five wonderful years.
Unfortunately, when Jane turned eight, it was agreed she would be best served by living with a family of means—people with more to give her than a spinster aunt and a widowed grandmother in a tiny home on the outskirts of nowhere. Jane had moved to London and grown with knowledge and natural talents, and Hetty proudly told all who would listen (and many who preferred not to listen) about her brilliant niece.
