A Bridge in Time

by A Bridge in Time (retail) (epub)

  Emma Jane was surprised. ‘I’ve no foreign blood at all, I’m afraid. English as roast beef on both sides.’

  Madame Rachelle laughed. ‘Maybe it comes from the Norman Conquest, in that case. But first, what about the colour for your costume? Garnet red would suit, I think.’

  Emma Jane shook her head. ‘Oh no, I can’t wear red. I’m still in half-mourning for my brother.’

  ‘Full mourning from the looks of you,’ said Madame Rachelle disapprovingly. ‘But it’s more than a year since he was killed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but my mother is still wearing black.’

  ‘My dear, your mother will probably go on wearing black for the rest of her life but not you, I hope.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind if I wore grey,’ suggested Emma Jane, who had a picture in her mind of a discreet grey coat and skirt.

  Madame Rachelle shook her head. ‘Not at all. Grey is not your colour. You are too small – it would make you look like a sparrow. I won’t permit grey. Take off that bonnet and let me look at you properly. Stand over there in the light.’ While Emma Jane stood stock-still and stiff with embarrassment, the dressmaker prowled around her until at last she paused, snapped her fingers and said, ‘I know! I’ve just the colour for you. You will wear violet: it will be most flattering for your eyes. They are your most arresting feature.’ She dragged out the word ‘arresting’, rolling her r’s like a real Frenchwoman.

  Emma Jane stared. ‘My eyes?’ All her life she had been warned by her mother and her school-teachers against her tendency to look ‘stony’ or ‘hostile’, and so she had come to believe that her eyes were particularly unattractive.

  But Madame Rachelle was nodding her head enthusiastically and saying, ‘You have remarkable eyes, my dear – very arresting and a most unusual colour. They look golden in this light. You should emphasise them.’

  No one had ever talked flatteringly to Emma Jane about her appearance before, and now on the same morning she had been complimented by Haggerty and now Madame Rachelle. She felt confidence grow within her. How glad she was that she’d come to consult Madame Rachelle. The dressmaker was bustling around, giving orders to her girls, and one of them came running in with a swatch of material in her arms. Rachelle pulled at one end and held it against Emma Jane’s face. ‘That’s it, that’s your colour exactly. I’ll make you something lovely out of this.’

  Emma Jane gazed down at the soft cloth. It was the colour of Parma violets, flowers that she had always loved. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she sighed.

  Madame Rachelle was brisk. ‘Of course it is, and now for the style. Something military but feminine, I think. No crinoline, they’re outdated now. A flowing skirt. And you must have a hat, sitting forward on the front of your head. It will draw attention to your eyes as well.’

  ‘I don’t think I can afford a hat. Perhaps I can make do with one of my old bonnets?’ suggested Emma Jane but Madame Rachelle was outraged.

  ‘What! You’re going to spend your money on one of my lovely creations and top it with an old-fashioned bonnet like that thing you were wearing when you came in? That I will not permit. Emily, bring the Parisian purple hat out of the stockroom.’

  The girl called Emily ran off and came back with a cheeky little hat about the size of a saucer. It had a curling feather sticking up from the back and a tiny swathe of veil in front. Madame Rachelle perched it on Emma Jane’s head and then turned her round so that she could see herself in the mirror. ‘Can you look at yourself in that hat and not want to buy it?’ she asked.

  The girl who stared back from the glass was not Emma Jane Wylie but a stranger who looked confident and cheeky. A pair of large golden eyes gazed levelly out through the veil, and Madame Rachelle was right – they were arresting eyes. ‘I’ll buy it,’ said Emma Jane, without thinking about how much it cost.

  ‘It’s two pounds ten shillings,’ Madame Rachelle told her as she removed the long steel pins that held it in place on Emma Jane’s thick hair. ‘If you can’t afford it, you can pay me later – I’ll give you credit. I can tell that you’re honest. And remember, when people ask where you bought your outfit, you must always say Madame Rachelle of Newcastle. You’ll be an advertisement for me.’

  Haggerty was fidgeting and irritable when Emma Jane finally emerged from the salon. ‘You’ve been in there for two hours. Your poor mother will be frantic,’ he said accusingly.

  She looked surprised. ‘In that case, I’ll say I missed the train. All right, Haggerty, drive me home. I’ve done everything I want to do.’

  * * *

  Being back in Wyvern Villa was as bad as Emma Jane had feared. Her mother lay in bed all day, weeping and even more helpless and pathetic than she had been immediately after James’ death. When Amelia appeared she was grim-faced and resentful at the way her mother-in-law refused to accept or even discuss her remarriage. Both of them poured out their woes and justifications to Emma Jane, who often felt that her head would burst with the effort of listening to them and sympathising tactfully. Yet in spite of her efforts, Amelia stormed through the house like a thundercloud and Mrs Wylie continued to be completely unreasonable. Then the news came that Claud Cockburn had died. It fell to Emma Jane to write to her father with the bad news.

  When she went to bed at night she wished she was back at Camptounfoot, and remembered with regret how the sweet bedtime music of the Jessups used to soothe her into slumber.

  It took considerable guile to escape from Wyvern Villa for her fittings with Madame Rachelle, but she swore Haggerty to secrecy and managed to persuade her mother that she had developed a passion for visiting art galleries, something Mrs Wylie considered very suitable for an unmarried young lady.

  Emma Jane found the fittings traumatic because she hated looking at herself in Madame Rachelle’s long pier glass, for it seemed to emphasise all her worst points. The violet-coloured outfit was lovely, however, and she watched its emergence from the swatch of cloth with admiration and delight. At last it was delivered to Wyvern Villa in a striped box accompanied by the little hat nestling in a bed of tissue paper in a bandbox all of its own. These treasures were smuggled to Emma Jane’s room from the kitchen door by Mrs Haggerty, who was in on the secret of which she approved more than her husband. ‘Miss Emma’s quite right to buy herself a pretty dress. She hasn’t much fun in her life, poor little soul,’ she told him.

  Upstairs, Emma Jane untied the string around the boxes with a sinking heart. ‘What if they’re a disaster? What if I look terrible in them. I’ll have wasted my allowance for nothing,’ she told herself. The dress was in two parts, a bodice and a skirt. She put on the skirt first. It swept the floor with a wonderful fall and made her feel regal. Encouraged, she slipped on the bodice and did up the line of frogged fasteners which Madame Rachelle had said would give her the impression of being bigger-breasted than she actually was. It fitted perfectly and she pulled down the cuffs of the sleeves with even more satisfaction. Now only the hat remained. As she lifted it out of its packaging, she was struck by how frivolous it looked. She could already hear her mother’s voice saying, ‘Good heavens, what a ridiculous hat!’ Without looking at herself, she perched it unsteadily on her head but you can’t put on a hat without looking so she turned round and faced the glass. Though her hat was at the wrong angle, what she saw astonished her. The girl who looked back at her was not mousy Emma Jane Wylie, she was – she was what? She was arrresting, very arrrrrresting indeed.

  ‘How do you do?’ said the new Emma Jane to herself, and smiled a mysterious, challenging smile. She turned her head and admired her profile, she turned her back and looked over her shoulder at the elegant person in the glass. She held an animated conversation with this stranger about things she’d read in the newspaper, and laughed at her own wit. ‘I must be very characterless if clothes can make such a difference to me,’ she thought, but her worry disappeared when she realised that in her Madame Rachelle outfit she felt capable of coping with any people, any problem. It was as
if she had donned a mask which made it impossible for the outside world to recognise her, and she suddenly understood how it was that people in revels could act outrageously. They thought they could not be recognised.

  She slipped off her new finery and hung it carefully in her wardrobe before going back to care for her curious mother. Later that day she said casually, ‘I’ve bought a new gown to wear for the wedding, Mama.’

  ‘A new gown, Emma Jane? That’s good,’ said her mother listlessly. She refused to discuss anything to do with Amelia’s wedding so the existence of Emma Jane’s new dress was glossed over. This relieved her because she was afraid her mother would not like the purple dress and she did not want any criticism to mar her secret delight.

  Amelia went to Hexham a few days before her wedding, leaving Arbelle with the Wylies. The little girl was to be taken to Hexham by her aunt Emma Jane on the eve of the ceremony.

  When it was time for Haggerty to drive Emma Jane and her niece to the station, Arbelle burst into a flood of weeping and ran to her grandmother with her arms held out, crying, ‘Oh Grandmama, Grandmama, I don’t want to leave you! I don’t want to go to Hexham.’ They clung together sobbing and promising each other that their separation would only be a short one. In the end Emma Jane had to haul an hysterical Arbelle down the frontdoor steps and carry her into the carriage. Watching from the drawing-room window was her mother’s distraught face.

  All the way to the station Arbelle sobbed heartbreakingly, causing great upset to both Emma Jane and Haggerty, who wondered how they could be so cruel as to separate her from her beloved grandmother. Once the train had started, however, the child’s attitude changed completely and she dashed from side to side of the compartment, exclaiming about the view from the windows and the comfort of the seats. Her tears were completely forgotten and when she eventually arrived at Hexham, she ran up to her mother waiting on the platform, sank her face into Amelia’s skirt and cried out, ‘Oh Mama, how I’ve missed you. I never want you to leave me again, never!’ Emma Jane looked at her with amazement. ‘How can someone so young have learned such wiles and be able to act them out so well,’ she wondered, ‘when I’m so much older but as transparent as water?’

  Amelia looked blooming even though she was wearing her plainest clothes – a dark skirt, simple cotton blouse and a long shawl. Her head was bare and she had heavy walking shoes on her feet. She saw Emma Jane looking at them and laughed. ‘Quite a change from satin slippers, an’t they? But after tomorrow I won’t have much call for fancy clothes. Dan’s a working man and I’ll be a working man’s wife. Tomorrow’s my last day of finery.’ She took Emma Jane’s arm and led her out of the station to a cobbled yard where russet-faced Dan Peel was waiting with a flat cart drawn by a shaggy cob. ‘Climb on the back, Emma Jane, and hold on to Arbelle but don’t worry, you won’t fall off, Dan’ll drive very slow,’ instructed Amelia as she climbed on to the box beside the driver.

  Amelia’s family cottage crouched like an animal on the watch on an outcrop of rock near the ruins of the Roman wall. It was long and low and roofed in huge stone slabs that fitted closely one on top of the other. There were no thatches up here. They wouldn’t have withstood the gales that blew over those high bare moors. Inside, the cottage was warm and cheerful, full of people all a’bustle because of the preparations for the wedding. Everyone was given a job to do, even Arbelle who, after she’d been kissed by her other grandmother and several aunts, was given a bowl of peas and told to shell them. Amazingly she did it without protest.

  Emma Jane was overawed by the sight of a table in the kitchen piled high with food – legs of lamb, cooked chickens, enormous hams, bowls of eggs and pitchers of cream. ‘Are you expecting many guests? There’s such a lot of food,’ she said to Amelia, who laughed.

  ‘Well, we’re cooking for the dance as well,’ the young woman said teasingly. ‘There’s to be a dancing after the wedding, you know.’

  Emma Jane’s heart sank. She was always at her worst at dances, for she felt too awkward to act naturally and never knew what to say to any man who asked her on to the floor. Every time she’d been at a dance, she went home feeling like a social failure and a severe disappointment to her mother.

  ‘I didn’t know you were having a dance. I didn’t bring a ballgown with me,’ she lamented, but Amelia only chuckled again.

  ‘Bless you, we don’t wear ballgowns up here! I’ll lend you a frock of mine if you haven’t anything suitable, but we dance in plain dresses and if our shoes pinch, we take ’em off and dance barefoot. This won’t be one of your Newcastle dances, don’t worry about that.’

  When Emma Jane climbed into a big bed with a downy feather mattress in a room that also housed three of Amelia’s sisters, she was dog-tired and sank under the heavy quilt with a feeling of utter happiness. The house smelt of woodsmoke, apples and bread dough and, as everyone settled to sleep, the old floors creaked reassuringly while outside a wind rattled against the windows and sent clouds chasing each other across a clear night sky. ‘I’m so glad I took Father’s advice and came to ’Melia’s wedding,’ was Emma Jane’s last conscious thought.

  The ceremony was at noon next day and the morning was passed in a flurry of female excitement. The church was within walking distance and at a quarter to noon, the family all waited at the cottage door for Amelia who appeared at last, looking as beautiful as a fairy queen in a dress of pink voile and lace, rosebuds and ribbons, that set off her flaxen beauty to perfection. On her head was a flat straw hat with ribbons down each side and tied under her chin. It too was decorated with enormous silk roses.

  At the sight of her Emma Jane clapped her hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh ’Melia, you look lovely! What an exquisite hat.’

  ‘You look very well yourself. I hardly recognised you, Emma Jane. That’s a Madame Rachelle outfit, isn’t it? No one else in Newcastle makes hats like that.’

  When the newly-married pair stepped out of the church door an hour later, rain had begun to fall but no one cared. Kirtling up their skirts, the women splashed through puddles back to the cottage where the real fun of the day began.

  The feast was gargantuan. Dish after dish was borne in by Amelia’s two elder sisters Betty and Jen who both resembled their pretty sister but had the look of fading full roses instead of Amelia’s glorious high flowering. With the food they served demi-johns of home-made ale that had the miraculous power of releasing Emma Jane’s tongue and making her see the world around her in an entirely new light. Everything seemed bright and optimistic, everyone was witty and handsome, including Emma Jane herself. When Betty, in response to a compliment about the size of the cake that had been baked, said with a great laugh, ‘Oh well, anything that’ll keep can be stored for the christening. That won’t be long – six months, I reckon,’ Emma Jane felt not a twinge of disapproval or shock. ‘What was the use of waiting, eh?’ Betty asked with a knowing eye and Emma Jane found herself nodding in vigorous agreement. ‘No use at all,’ she said.

  When it was growing dark, the band arrived, two fiddlers and a man who played the small Northumbrian pipes which he tucked under his arm and blew at with a will. The moment the music struck up, the tables were shoved back and the guests began dancing, not ordered quadrilles or well-behaved polkas, but arm-raised twirlings and shoutings that filled everyone with a wild enthusiasm. They all danced, children and aged crones, men with walking sticks and even the dogs. Emma Jane plunged into the revelry, dancing first with one partner and then with another, laughing and joking and throwing back her head in complete unselfconsciousness.

  By ten o’clock she had acquired a swain, a fair-haired farmer who plied her with ale and, while they took a rest from the dancing, informed her that he had a fine house and £500 a year and was in search of a wife.

  ‘You’re a Newcastle lass, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am,’ she agreed and he leaned towards her.

  ‘Do you know the Wylies?’ he asked. ‘Amelia’s lucky to get away from them, if yo
u ask me. They say the old woman’s a terror and the daughter’s a poor little thing, a real old maid.’

  Emma Jane nodded solemnly. ‘Is she? Poor girl,’ she said, and hoped that no one told the unfortunate fellow who she was.

  To her surprise he took her hand and asked, ‘Are you in search of a husband?’

  She looked sympathetically at him. ‘Not at the moment, but perhaps soon,’ she said.

  ‘Then when you are, remember my name: Tom Featherstone of Hillslaphead. Remember – Featherstone, that’s me.’

  She laughed and pulled him to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s dance again. I’ll remember your name. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.’ After all, he had just given her the great compliment of her first proposal and he’d obviously thought it impossible for her to be the sour little spinster Miss Emma Jane Wylie.

  On the morning after the wedding, Emma Jane was up early and dressed in her plain travelling clothes for the trip back to Newcastle when Amelia popped her head round the bedroom door and said, ‘If you like, you can take Arbelle back with you. That would please your mother. I’ll collect her next week when Dan and I come down to take some of my things out of the cottage.’

  Emma Jane walked towards her sister-in-law and hugged her. ‘Amelia, I want to tell you how very sorry I am about the way Mother has behaved. She’s just so upset about James still she’s not thinking correctly. I hope you’ll forgive her.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Amelia reassured her, ‘but I don’t want her to think I’m being greedy in keeping the cottage. There’s a reason for that, Emma Jane.’