Agnes Or The Art 0f Friendship

by Catherine Bowness

  “Oh! How very kind!” her ladyship said weakly. “Have you seen the cottage?”

  “No; I understand there is a choice of several, and she promises to have whichever one you choose redecorated just as you like before you move in.”

  “How very kind!” Lady Armitage repeated hopelessly.

  “Miss Newbolt is a decided young woman,” Mrs Lewis, who had been silent for longer than usual, said. “I fetched Miss Helman from her house yesterday and met her for the first time. Her father is a businessman who spends most of his time in London but I got the impression that Louisa prefers to live in the country.”

  “Indeed? How very unusual for a young person. Is there a Mrs Newbolt?”

  “Yes, indeed. She was not there yesterday, being in London with her husband. The two young women were on their own – in a manner of speaking.”

  “I suppose,” Lady Armitage said, “that, if I were to decide that the idea of a cottage on your friend’s estate appeals, you would be able to see something of your friend if you accepted the position?”

  “I think that is Louisa’s hope,” Agnes agreed. “But, if I were to be your companion, my lady, I would not expect to see her frequently.”

  The older woman smiled at this. “I am neither particularly gone in years nor, at least at present, in the slightest degree infirm so that I do not anticipate that your presence will be required at my side all the time. It sounds, from what you say, as though the arrangement may suit us both very well. Would you convey my gratitude to your friend and let her know that I would be interested in seeing one or two of the cottages available.”

  And so it was that, when Agnes returned – without Lady Armitage – to Louisa’s house, she was able to tell her friend that her suggestion of letting them have a cottage on the estate for a modest rent had found favour with her new employer.

  Louisa pronounced herself delighted at this news.

  “Oh, that is wonderful indeed!” she exclaimed. “Now we shall be able to spend a great deal of time in each other’s company. I will write to her at once and suggest she pays us a visit so that we can look at some cottages and get the redecoration underway.”

  “Do you think you should clear it with your papa first?” Agnes asked mildly.

  “I will write to him too,” Louisa promised.

  Lady Armitage arrived a week later. Louisa had caused a guest room to be made ready for the widow and greeted her with a gratifying degree of warmth.

  Her ladyship, making an assessment of the young woman as well as her circumstances, thought it a pity her elder son was so far away for it seemed to her that the heiress would make him an excellent wife.

  The three women spent the next few days looking at cottages. They all seemed rather poky to a woman accustomed to living in a large and rambling manor but she knew that she was in no position to complain and should be grateful that such an opportunity had presented itself so soon after her decision to move.

  During the course of the time the trio spent together Lady Armitage, while grateful for Miss Newbolt’s generous offer and excellent qualities as a hostess, began to be relieved that she had not engaged to share the tiny space of her new abode with such a lively young woman. She did not think that she would have been able to call her soul her own if she had been obliged to submit to Miss Newbolt’s certainties on almost any subject which arose. Feeling thus did not, however, prevent her from dreaming of the heiress’s one day becoming her daughter-in-law.

  The other young woman, Miss Helman, seemed a trifle insipid but Lady Armitage judged that an advantage since her presence was less likely to be irritating in a restricted space. Agnes did not talk a lot but had a sweet smile and a charming, thoughtful way about her, which her ladyship supposed she had learned at her father’s side.

  Lady Armitage chose one of the larger cottages – there were after all the servants to accommodate as well as herself and her companion – although it was still an exceedingly humble dwelling; it had also the advantage of a charming garden. Autumn was approaching and there were no longer many flowers to be seen but the rapidly changing colour of the leaves was ravishing and there was a delightful piece of trimmed grass next to a rose bed where it might be agreeable to sit on a warm day.

  Having chosen the house, which was named Rose Cottage with a noticeable lack of originality, she was prevailed upon to remain at Newbolt House while the decorations and soft furnishings were chosen.

  “I can bring some of my furniture with me,” her ladyship suggested when Louisa insisted that new sofas and chairs must be purchased.

  “But will it not be too big to fit into such a small space?” Louisa asked. “Also, unless you are letting your house unfurnished, I am persuaded your new tenants would not like there to be large gaps in the furnishings.”

  “They will not know what was there before,” her ladyship pointed out with a fleeting smile.

  “No one is suggesting that she bring the whole lot,” Agnes reminded her friend. “I am persuaded there must be some smaller pieces which you would like to have around you,” she added to her new employer.

  “Very well, we will leave the furniture for the time being,” Louisa agreed generously, “but you must choose the colour of the walls and I will obtain some pattern books so that we can have some curtains made up.”

  The next few days were spent by all three in happy study of the pattern books. Lady Armitage had never had new curtains. When she had married, more than thirty years ago, she had been brought to Armitage Hall by her new husband. He had been devoted to his wife but it had not occurred to him that she might wish to change anything in his ancestral home; he was quite content with what was there and, since none of the curtains or carpets had large holes, he saw no reason to replace them. She, when she first arrived, had not dared to suggest anything so dramatic as a change in the soft furnishings and so she had lived for thirty years with the old ones. They were somewhat faded in places now and a few holes had appeared, which she had darned.

  The pattern books were full of the most exciting, vividly coloured swatches of material and she found looking at them and visualising them in her new little house such an exciting exercise that she could hardly prevent herself from constantly returning to them.

  Newbolt House had only been completed about five years previously so that everything about it, from its architecture to its soft furnishings, was almost brand new. At first Lady Armitage had found it a little brash – too bright – and had looked down her nose at the newness of it, thinking that the Newbolts, their fortune being self-made, were vulgar persons and that having a house stuffed full of the most up-to-date furniture and decorated in modern colours would make for uncomfortable living. She found, however, that the design of the windows – large and extraordinarily well balanced with the size of the rooms – gave a pleasing effect and allowed the sun to shine in at all times of the day, even as the nights began to draw in. The colour of the walls, with a preponderance of clear yellow and limpid blue, added to this feeling of openness and optimism.

  She began, as a consequence of this growing enthusiasm for the house in which she was presently staying, to believe that Louisa’s ideas for her own little cottage should be heeded more than she had thought at first.

  “Oh, no,” Louisa said at once. “It is my mama who has chosen the colours and materials. She loves doing that sort of thing. We had another house before this one and she only wanted to move in order to be able to do it all over again. But you must make allowances for the difference in size of the two houses. If you were to choose curtains with such large roses upon them, for instance, I am afraid they might look overpowering in the smaller rooms of the cottage. What do you think, Agnes?”

  Chapter 4

  Agnes, who could see that Lady Armitage’s vacillation would easily be overridden by Louisa’s certainty, said thoughtfully, “I think you should consider the pieces of furniture you wish to bring with you, my lady, and endeavour to choose curtains which will match them.�
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  “That is an excellent idea,” her ladyship agreed warmly, clearly relieved to be given permission to hang on to some of her shabby, but much-loved, pieces, “except that most of my furniture is so very old and faded that I do not think any of these bright colours will match them.”

  “All the more reason to have new ones!” Louisa concluded brightly.

  “Dear Louisa,” Lady Armitage said – she had grown quite fond of the young woman, her forcefulness coming as something of a relief to a person who had, since the death of her husband, felt somewhat crushed by the number and complexity of the decisions she was required to make. “Do not forget that I am moving because my resources are, not to put too fine a point upon it, exiguous; I do not think I can afford to buy a great many new items.”

  “No, but I can – or rather Papa can – and I am persuaded he will not mind in the least. If we do that, we can choose pieces which will fit perfectly into both the new colours and the size of the rooms.”

  “Will he feel it necessary to raise the cost of the rent if the cottage comes with all its furniture?” Lady Armitage asked tentatively.

  “No, of course he will not; he has already given permission for me to arrange for the redecoration; in my opinion, a few sofas and chairs are merely an extension of that. Why do we not go tomorrow to look at a warehouse where they sell all sorts of things – from tables to beds? When you see what you can get – and for what modest prices they sell – you can decide.”

  So it was that Lady Armitage allowed herself to be persuaded to look at furniture. A few pieces were ordered and afterwards the colour of the walls was chosen along with the material for the curtains. Once all this had been decided upon, Lady Armitage returned to her own home to oversee the packing up of her personal belongings. Agnes went with her.

  There was a lot to do so that Agnes had very little time to herself. She helped her new employer to sort her goods into those she wished to bring with her, those she intended to store in an attic and those which she decided to discard, either to the poor – poorer than she was herself – or straight into the dustbin. This was necessarily an upsetting time for her ladyship.

  “It feels,” she said despondently, “as though I am throwing away a portion of my life. I am persuaded it is very shallow of me to care so much for ‘things’ but I cannot help remembering happier times as I look upon them.”

  “I am sure it is not to be wondered at,” Agnes said gently. “Every one of one’s belongings is associated with a memory. I believe the best way forward, ma’am, is to remind yourself that throwing away a worn-out shawl or even a mouldering book is not the same thing as discarding the memory itself.”

  “No, but I am afraid I shall afterwards – in the future – wish that I had not, for example, got rid of that old shawl. I have loved it so much – indeed, the fact that it has so many holes proves how frequently I have wrapped it around my shoulders on a cold evening. Sir James suggested I throw it away years ago – on account of the holes – but I could not bear to do so. And what am I to do with his clothes? I suppose I must give them to the poor, must I not?”

  “I believe you must,” Agnes told her. “They are of no use to him any longer and, unlike your own garments, cannot be of any use to you either except to remind you of his absence.”

  “Did you give away all of your papa’s clothes when he died?”

  “Yes – and I can assure you it was a terrible wrench. I have not given away all his books,” she added with a little tilt of her head. “I could not.”

  “Oh, you do understand!” her ladyship exclaimed.

  “I am not sure that I do – altogether,” Agnes admitted. “It is a different sort of loss; in the case of one’s father, one has known all one’s adult life – from the moment one understood about death – that the time would come when one would lose a beloved parent. To lose a husband – that must be very hard indeed.”

  “And yet that too happens to many of us – either we lose a husband or a wife. Will you, dear Agnes, pack up his clothes for me? As you say, he does not need them where he is but there is bound to be someone who could do with them. Will you deal with it and give them to whomever you think may benefit?”

  “Of course, if that is what you want.”

  And so it was Agnes who sorted through the previous Baronet’s effects and, as she did so, she gained a deeper knowledge of the man. His clothes were mostly old, none of them was fashionable and many were darned. She did not, of course, know how much money Sir James and his wife had given to their profligate son but she thought that it must either have been an excessively large amount over a long period or the Armitage estate had not been well managed for a considerable time.

  Once she had disposed of the deceased’s clothes, she asked her employer what should be done about the other personal effects in the library, the room in which Sir James had spent most of his time.

  “Well, I suppose we must leave the majority of the books where they are,” his widow said. “We will take the ones of which we are particularly fond and leave the others for the tenants to read. Indeed, my dear, that is something else you should do: go through the shelves and choose any which you would like and we will pack them up and take them with us. As for all the letters and papers – and I am afraid Sir James was not an organised man, I think he kept everything for fear of throwing the wrong thing away - they had better be gone through, I suppose. I will ask the estate manager to look at those because you cannot be expected to know what is important and what is not.”

  “No,” Agnes said doubtfully. “But are there not likely to be personal letters too – ones which do not relate to the estate and which you would perhaps prefer the manager not to have the reading of?”

  “I suppose there may be,” Lady Armitage said with a frown. “Would you mind very much looking through them? You do not have to read them all but I daresay it will not be too difficult to make a judgment as to whether they are personal or – or – business. You had better do the same as with the clothes: divide them into three piles – one for the estate manager, one to be kept by me, if you think I will ever be able to face reading them, and one to be burned.”

  This plea was hard to refuse because it was clear that Lady Armitage felt a strong reluctance to look in her husband’s desk at all so, although Agnes was uncomfortable with sorting out an old man’s correspondence, she reminded herself that her purpose in the house was to assist the widow.

  She rose early one morning, tied her hair in a scarf – for there was a good deal of dust in the room – and set herself to her task.

  It turned out that every drawer was stuffed with correspondence, some of it dating back twenty or more years. If Lady Armitage found it difficult to throw away a moth-eaten scarf, it soon became clear that Sir James had been averse to discarding almost anything.

  She found a number of letters from the elder son begging for funds to settle his debts. It seemed that the man had no luck with either cards or dice-box and Agnes found herself wondering why on earth he had continued to play when the odds appeared to be stacked against him. The begging letters often mentioned the extraordinary run of ill luck he had suffered – as though it were unexpected which, surely, after years of losing large sums, it no longer could be. Sometimes they hinted at dark deeds on the part of others which had led to a particularly heavy loss.

  Agnes’s opinion of both father and son diminished the more she read: the father was weak – of course she did not see the letters he had written for they either remained in the possession of the son or had been destroyed by him. She doubted if the son felt the same degree of attachment to his father’s correspondence; she suspected that he had simply sighed with relief and taken himself to the bank to withdraw the money.

  She decided in the end, after much soul-searching, to retain some of these letters because, if the son were to continue his trajectory towards ruin when he returned from Africa, she rather thought that, although it might be upsetting, it would be her duty t
o remind her ladyship of the reason why she found herself forced to abandon her home and take up residence in a tiny cottage. She could not allow Lady Armitage to beggar herself any further to satisfy the spendthrift habits of a dissipated man.

  Accordingly, she made a pile of these together with other personal letters and documents which she thought it would be both unwise and unhelpful to draw the widow’s attention to just at present. Indeed, the more drawers she opened and the more crumpled papers she withdrew, the more she found herself behaving in a similar fashion to both Sir James and his wife: reluctant to dispose of correspondence which, to her mind, constituted some sort of evidence which might later be useful.

  The letters which concerned the running of the estate were easy to distinguish from the more personal ones since they mostly related to things like fences or stock; some concerned tenants who rented cottages – much as poor Lady Armitage was to be forced to do elsewhere.

  The closing-up of the house took more than a month and might have continued even longer if an unexceptionable tenant had not been found. Not wishing to lose him by making him wait too long to move in – and the cottage having been decorated, the curtains hung and the new furniture delivered, Agnes and her ladyship left Armitage Hall. They took with them one of the undercooks and a housemaid together with the head groom, who was long in both years and loyalty and expressed a strong desire to accompany his mistress to her new home. They left the rest of the servants, including the butler - who could perform no useful purpose in a cottage - to serve the new tenant who, fortunately, had expressed a desire to continue to employ them. Lady Armitage could see no point in taking her personal maid – a woman of immense snobbery who would disapprove strongly of living in a cottage – and sent her into retirement with a sum of money she could ill afford but which she felt she owed the poor creature whose age made it unlikely she would be able to find employment anywhere else.