Dark Angel by Sally Beauman

and smaller as the weeks passed. I tried not to eat, but whether I ate or not, I seemed to grow taller and taller. When Christmas came Jenna let it out again, and we both began to hope: Surely I would be able to wear it at Christmas? Aunt Maud was coming for Christmas. I tried it on again, on Christmas Eve; the hooks and eyes would not fasten; I went down to Christmas luncheon as I always did, in sensible Viyella.
    Aunt Maud had forgotten the dress by then, I think. On Boxing Day, I tackled her on another matter.
    “Aunt Maud,” I said, waylaying her in her room, “can you make freckles go away? Can you get rid of them?”
    Aunt Maud raised her lorgnette and inspected my face closely. “Of course you can,” she pronounced. “Fuller’s earth. It whitens the skin. I’ve used it for years. It’s unbeatable.”
    We tried. Aunt Maud took me into her bathroom and mixed up a grayish paste. She rubbed this paste over my nose and cheekbones, then sat me down in a chair and read to me from one of her novels while the paste dried. The novel was called The Crossroads of the Heart. It took place on an ocean liner. There were always what she called Good Bits in Aunt Maud’s novels, and she read me one of the best of the Good Bits, toward the end; it was a tender scene, on the stern deck, by moonlight, and it ended with a most interesting description of an embrace. If my mother had heard it, I think she might have put her foot down, but it moved Aunt Maud a great deal, so much so that she started on one of her own stories about Winterscombe and the parties there used to be there in the old days, when my American grandmother Gwen was alive.
    “I remember once,” she said, “there was a party for a comet. Halley’s comet, you know. We were all to have supper and then gather outside, to watch the comet go over….”
    I sat very still. I liked these stories but my nose was beginning to itch; I wondered if it would be rude to interrupt and mention it.
    “I wore my emeralds. Or was it my sapphires? No, the sapphires, I think, because I remember my dress was blue, and Monty—oh!” She gave a shriek. “The Fuller’s earth, Vicky! Quickly!”
    I was rushed back into the bathroom, and my face was scrubbed with Aunt Maud’s special French soap.
    “May I look now, Aunt Maud?”
    Aunt Maud was staring at my face in a dubious way; with some reluctance, she handed me a mirror. I held it close to my nose and inspected. My nose was red; my whole face was a fiery red; the freckles winked. There seemed more of them than ever.
    “I don’t think it’s quite worked, Aunt Maud,” I began, and Aunt Maud snatched the mirror away.
    “Well, of course it doesn’t work in one go! Quick-smart, just like that! Il faut souffrir pour étre belle! You must persevere, Vicky. Now, if I were to leave you a little packet, and you were to apply it every week …”
    I took the packet of Fuller’s earth. I tried it once a week for four weeks. When it was all used up and the freckles were still there, I acknowledged the truth. I loved Aunt Maud very much, but she had been wrong about three things: wrong about the dress size, wrong about the Fuller’s earth, and wrong about my possibilities. I had no possibilities. My faith in Aunt Maud, though still strong, was dented.
    Aunt Maud was one of the pillars of my life; she defined its boundaries. There were other pillars, too: There were my father and my mother; there was my godfather, Steenie’s friend the poet Wexton; there was Jenna; there were my uncles; and finally there was William, who was called the butler but who did all sorts of things around the house that other people’s butlers never seemed to do, including cleaning the boots and shoes—on which subject Charlotte (on that day she came to tea) was very scathing.
    “The butler cleans your shoes?” she said.
    It was winter, and we had just returned with muddy lace-ups from a walk in the grounds.
    “Don’t you have a bootboy?”
    “Well,