It was a cold night, spitting rain. There were puddles everywhere, throwing the reflections of the streetlights in spangled circles on the cobblestones underneath. Mina Tarkington did not notice any of this as she stared blankly out of her window, blind to the weather, deaf to the happy voices floating up from downstairs, not feeling the cold even though goose bumps prickled on her bare arms. It was January 19 th , it was her thirteenth birthday, and it was the worst day of her life.
It hadn't started out as the worst day of her life, oh, no! It was a lovely day for London, the sky as blue as ever it would be over the city, a delicate crystalline arch that promised a pretty evening for her party. Mina had barely been able to eat her breakfast, she was so excited about the festivities to come – and lunch! Well, lunch was a lost cause entirely. She had been far too busy flitting about downstairs, helping Nancy arrange the flowers and dishes and make room for the half-dozen other little girls she had invited - to play, or to play at being grown-ups, as the fancy took them. When she wasn't supervising Nancy's every move through the transformed sitting-room, she was in the kitchen helping Cook with the scones and poppy-seed cakes and other small sweet things she meant to serve in plenitude to her fair guests.
It was all perfect, so gloriously perfect...as long as she didn't stop to think that her father wouldn't be there. As long as she turned her head aside when she walked by the study, so quiet, the door faintly open as if the room itself couldn't bear the emptiness. As long as she didn't savor the picture that flashed into her mind earlier when she dropped that whole tray of shortbread; his bright blue eyes twinkling but mouth determinedly serious underneath the cigar-scented whiskers as he bent to help her pick up the mess....Or, as he would have, had he been there. No, she wouldn't think about any of that. Her fingers crept up to the locket she wore on a ribbon around her throat and she unconsciously straightened her shoulders, as he did in his fine uniform, and lifted her chin in her resolution. So all day she kept her hands busy, in order to keep her mind quiet.
When the evening came, her guests began to arrive. She almost noticed the clouds gathering on the horizon, almost realized the unheralded and almost apologetic departure of the sun, just a few minutes too early even for this season – but she would not spare her mind for those details. She had guests to greet, dresses and ribbons to compliment, and sweets and gifts to share and to squeal over.
The blow came when they had tired themselves playing at little-girl games and were composing themselves in their best adult manner over tea, playing at being stately, making polite gossip (though all cheeks were flushed and hair disheveled from the rousing game of hide and seek that had just been finished). Anna Elliott meant no harm by it, really, but all the same a pall fell over the merry group when she breathed to her neighbor, with a carefully careless air she had copied from her haughty young mother, “So, Miss Winthrop, darling, do you think the regiment will ever come back into Town? The young men do look so handsome in their uniforms, don't you think?” Every small hand froze for a second that seemed agonizingly long to Mina. Every eye was trained downwards, studiously avoiding the face of the young hostess. Mina was grateful for this. She gradually became aware that her chest had fallen, and, after a pause, risen again. One breath. Then Cook came in with a heaping tray of tiny frosted cakes. In the ensuing uproar, Mina made her escape upstairs.
Solitude, however, could not protect her from her mind, which refused to be denied any longer. The locket with the picture of her father tucked inside burned her hands as she held it, staring out the window, sightless to the rain, the puddles, the reflections. She thought of her father, thought of how his whisker-kisses felt on her cheeks, how his smoking-jacket rustled against her embrace when she breached the sacrosanctness of the study to say goodnight. She thought of the last time she saw him, reaching up to her in the carriage seat, his hands on her hands, smiling at her – about to say something when the stentorian tones of the colonel rang out authoritatively behind him. He raised his eyebrows at her and shrugged just a little. Then, with a parting wink, he turned to the call. As he turned, in gait and carriage and obedience became – not her father, but a soldier that walked away.
And because she was thirteen now, and soon enough would be a lady, she came to herself with a start. She looked at the rain, she looked at the puddles. She looked at the reflections on the cobblestones, and shivered. She heard the voices downstairs. She looked at the locket in her hand. And as she looked, a small, cautious smile slowly curved her lips. When she drew up her shoulders and turned back to her duties as hostess, she did so not quite as a child, and not quite unlike a soldier. It was a cold and rainy January night. It was her thirteenth birthday.....and she knew it was not, indeed, the very worst day of her life, after all.