Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck

Author:Richard Peck [Peck, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101664377
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2012-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

AMANDA SPEAKS

7

I am Amanda Whitwell, and I have been intimidated by very little in my nineteen years. I shan’t begin by being cowed by a blank page. I shall write in this diary as I speak. I do not write for the eye of anyone now living. But in time, when all the chains that bind young women have fallen away, my book will find its proper reader. I shall head this, my first entry:

THE NEW YEAR, 1912

For it is in this newly born year that I mean to complete the plan for my life.

Miranda, as I call her—you see I named her myself—had dropped out of nowhere, really, and it was like a joke played by fate. She looked enough like me to be my twin. In all her boundless innocence, she had clearly been sent to solve my quite complicated problems. Problems caused by another servant, who had given me the only real joy I had ever known. I can’t think when I first fell in love with him. John Thorne is his name, and very handsome in his brutal way. I must have been a child, for John is ten years and more my senior.

We Whitwells belong to a dying class, as I notice from my mother’s meaningless gentility. There cannot be another generation like my mother’s. Not in this family. For I have no intention of dancing to Lady Eleanor’s stately minuet. I hear a wilder music in my mind.

Sometimes I suspect my mother thinks me mad. How little she knows me! Certainly she is anxious to tame me into marriage. And if I am a bit ill in the mornings, she either does not notice, or dares not.

My plan has a lovely shape, and nothing can stop it now. I have sent my fiancé, Gregory Forrest, back to America to await my arrival. I won’t remain suffocated in England, where I could never be sure of holding John Thorne forever. Sooner or later we would be discovered and pilloried upon the class system. But in wild, far-flung America, where a servant’s role is scarcely understood and I shall be a foreigner, John Thorne will be mine on my terms. And I shall have Gregory as well, to provide for me. For it is my plan that John, with his respectable wife, will join me and my husband as our chauffeur and maid.

How lovely it will be—the long drives through endless, golden afternoons. Once we are in a secluded spot, I shall rap on the window that divides us, and we shall enjoy an interlude in some hidden park. All the rest of my life will be a golden afternoon, while my husband will go about his tiresome business and John’s wife will attend to my more trivial needs.

It is quite dark now, and the hours drag on terribly. Where are they now, my lover and my maid, who have been married today? Will they spend their wedding night in some crossroads inn or return to the cottage?

I won’t torture myself with these thoughts.

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