by Rumer Godden
The wedding is in London – Eustace and Adza seem to be like pigeons on a chalk line. Eliza refuses to be bridesmaid so that the only sister who attends Damaris up the aisle is Anne in pale-blue silk with cream cords and a fashionable Watteau hat of blue, pink, and cream flowers. She walks back down the aisle with Harry St Omer, who is best man, while Jared, an usher, has the first of the two child bridesmaids, a beautiful little second cousin of Mr King Lee’s from a branch of his only relations in England, the Loftus Kennedys. The small bridesmaid is just thirteen, brought over from Clonfert in Ireland for the wedding; this is her first visit to London and she is wild with excitement. Under the pale-blue tilted hat, a miniature copy of Anne’s with its insipid pink and cream-coloured wreath, a pair of golden-brown eyes steal such long and meaningful glances up at Jared that he is first amused, then intrigued.
‘I’m glad you were intrigued because there was nothing amusing about it,’ she tells him afterward, and she says with dignity, ‘I may have been only thirteen, but I had fallen in love.’ She seems to Jared not a child as much as an exquisite little belle, fallen into the rather dull wedding. She has a waist, the beginnings, quite clearly, of high small breasts and, when she smiles, beguiling dimples. Her name is Lady Mary Teresa Claire Brandan and she is only allowed to be at the wedding because her father, the tenth earl of Clonfert, has business deals in the newly expanding Western States with Mr King Lee. ‘Money can do anything,’ says Eliza when they hear that, as the Clonferts are Roman Catholics, a dispensation has to be granted to allow the little Lady Mary to be a bridesmaid. All this makes the Quins look at her as if she were a curiosity, though Adza is inclined to be offended. ‘A dispensation to attend our church!’ Damaris, who is now a second cousin, is too overawed to speak to any Clonfert or Loftus Kennedy, but Jared teases Lady Mary and calls her Lady Patrick.
It is a strange wedding for a Quin; they are all, except Jared, out of their element, ‘but if we had had it at St Probus,’ says Eustace, ‘Damaris might have jumped out of the church window and run away on the moor.’
He says it in joke, but a year later, Mr King Lee sends them a little package. ‘She always carried it in her purse,’ he writes. Inside are some sprigs of dried heather, wrapped in paper and falling to bits, a feather, and a small granite pebble.
Adza does not recover. She becomes what she calls ‘a little unwell’. This is an understatement; she has cancer and it is now that Eliza takes over the housekeeping.
‘If I am to be the housekeeper,’ says Eliza, ‘I ought to be paid.’
Eustace has never heard of such a thing. ‘Pay my own daughter, in her own home!’
‘Yes,’ says Eliza.
‘But why?’ He is a little put out.
‘Because I need money.’
‘For what?’ but now Eustace is tickled. ‘A proper Quin,’ he tells Mr Fitzgibbon and, ‘Don’t I give you enough dresses and fallals?’ he demands, but with an indulgent twinkle. ‘I give you money at Christmas and Easter.’
‘And threepence to put in the plate on Sundays,’ says Eliza.
Eustace ceases to be tickled and indulgent. ‘Yes, I do,’ he says, ‘I give you everything. What else do you want?’
‘Money that I have earned,’ says Eliza and then – ‘Yes, like a chip off the old block,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon when he hears – she makes Eustace an offer: ‘A housekeeper would cost you at least sixty pounds a year. I will do it for you, for fifty.’
If Jared had said this Eustace would have been amused and cheered, but Jared is unlikely to say any such thing – ‘a young prodigal if ever I saw one,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. Coming from a daughter, it profoundly displeases Eustace. ‘You will do it when I tell you, miss, and mend your manners.’
To Eustace a daughter is an appendage, not a person, but on reflection he gives Eliza a pocket allowance of ten pounds a year. He never gives Adza an allowance and it makes him feel up to date, almost daringly modern, but, ‘Ten pounds!’ says Eliza to Jeremy Baxter in despair.
She has marked Tarrant’s catalogue for him to see:
‘Tarrant’s of Exeter. Dealers in fine and antique books.
‘The Opera omnia of Erasmus, ten volumes in eleven, folio, Leyden, 1703–06, calf, (rather shabby).
‘Johnson (Samuel) A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, First Edition, contemporary calf 8vo, 1775.
‘Byron’s Waltz, published under the name of Horace Hornem, Esq.
‘Congreve (William) The Works, 3 vols., portrait, 5 plates, contemporary red morocco, spines gilt, yellow edges, 8vo, Birmingham, Baskerville, 1761.’
Jeremy Baxter’s eyebrows push his spectacles farther up on his forehead – he has always to push his spectacles up when he wishes to look at anyone. ‘These are books with high prices. You haven’t the money, Miss Eliza. You must put such things quite out of your mind.’
‘I shall, for the present,’ and a look comes on Eliza’s face that is quite new there, the look, with narrowed scheming eyes, of a cat that has marked a bird; in the days to come it will often be on Eliza’s face, and will sometimes give way to the look of a cat that has been at the cream. Eliza is quite as astute as Eustace.
‘I shouldn’t buy them at Tarrant’s,’ says Eliza, ‘but I like to know they are there; that they are obtainable,’ she says dreamily.
‘This will grow on you,’ prophesies Jeremy Baxter. ‘One gets like a miser.’
‘I think misers must be very happy people,’ says Eliza and, as always when Jeremy Baxter is pleased, he grows crabbed.
‘The Johnson alone would cost you …’
‘I shall get it.’
‘How?’ He says it sharply, but there is a gleam in his eyes.
‘Somehow.’ There is also a gleam in Eliza’s, and it is from then that she begins her ‘practices’, as Jared calls them, flabbergasted when he finds out. ‘I should never have believed it,’ says Jared, ‘not even of Eliza.’
Eliza keeps house for Eustace for the ten pounds pocket allowance; she will not do that for Jared when he is master of the house. ‘But Liz, you must,’ says Jared.
Jared brings his Lady Patrick home in 1875, the happiest of happy brides; a bare three years later she hands him the household keys. ‘I will live in your house,’ she says, ‘because of Borowis.’
‘And because of the new baby, Pat,’ pleads Jared.
‘The new baby,’ says Lady Patrick with disgust. ‘Because I can’t help it,’ and she says, her head held high, ‘I don’t want them to grow up under a scandal, and I can’t go home.’ She is very young still, only twenty-one, and a quiver breaks her voice. Jared steps forward but she turns on him and says like a lash, ‘Although I’m their mother I’m no longer your wife, nor will I be, in any way,’ and she gives him back the keys.
It is earlier in that third year that she engages a second housemaid to help Hester, who has so much to do. ‘Will you see the young person in here, milady?’ Pringle asks at the morning-room door.
Lady Patrick is standing at the window to watch Jared go down the drive and she ignores Pringle. Had the parlourmaid been a minute earlier she would have seen her mistress kissing her hand to him – ‘Yes, I was as silly as that,’ says Lady Patrick scornfully – but, as usual to Lady Patrick, a servant is so much furniture and she would not have cared. Now without answering she looks again down the drive where she can see a tall back in a tobacco-brown coat going through the gate, two setters loping after; one is new, bought to train, and she can hear Jared whistling to it as he goes up the lane. He is on his way to put in an appearance at the quarry, ‘for once,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon.
Poor Jared! He does so hate it, but I suppose he must go in, thinks Lady Patrick, and reluctantly comes back to the morning room. ‘Well, Pringle?’
‘The young person, where will you see her, milady?’
‘In here, with Hester. Tell them to come in.’
When they are standing in front of her, Lady Patrick cannot help looking doubtfully at the new girl; even to her
inexperienced eyes she does not look at all like a servant of the kind to whom Lady Patrick is accustomed, and this makes Lady Patrick notice the fussy, cut-about brown dress with its dusty black braid, its over-frilled underskirt and too large bow, and Lady Patrick’s eyes go immediately to Hester’s immaculate sprigged gingham, with its collar band of white and her clean bibbed apron. Lady Patrick looks, too, at the curled hair under a bonnet of tattered feathers and flowers, and then at Hester’s centre parting and modest chignon under the white cap, shaped like a jelly bag – only Lady Patrick has never seen a jelly bag. There is a smell of cheap scent – servants’ scent, thinks Lady Patrick wrinkling her nose distastefully – and the girl has a pair of black eyes that even now, when she is trying to keep them expressionless, seem bold while her cheeks are – brassy, thinks Lady Patrick. Can cheeks be brassy when they are red? Lady Patrick decides they can and at once thinks she is unfair; just because the girl’s colour is high, she thinks, and turns resolutely to the household books that Eliza has made over to her – and rewritten, though Lady Patrick does not know that – an account book and Adza’s book of recipes and a thick tome, her Book of Household Management.
Until she marries, Lady Patrick barely knows that household books or household management exist. ‘You shouldn’t know,’ Jared declares. ‘We shall have a housekeeper,’ but, much as she loves him, Lady Patrick knows by now that they cannot have all he grandiloquently promises, not even with her mother’s money to come. ‘And that is all you will have,’ her father says when she runs away with ‘this Tom,’ as he calls Jared. ‘You have married him, now you can live on him. You won’t have a penny of mine.’
She defiantly says she does not want a penny. ‘I shall manage.’ Then she corrects herself. ‘We shall manage,’ but, ‘No more idea than a babe unborn,’ says Cook and, ‘A change from Miss Eliza, I must say,’ says Pringle.
It is a change from everything: China Court is made over again, its furnishings, its habits, its friends. It becomes suddenly fashionable, ‘county’ says Eliza, mocking now because this that she has longed for has come, for her, too late; county and expensive. Lady Patrick does not understand Mr Fitzgibbon’s warnings. She knows no other way to live and sincerely believes she is practising strict economy. ‘But we have only one groom to two horses,’ she says, opening her brown eyes wide at Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘My father would never have dreamed of such a thing. I have no personal maid. We haven’t even a butler. I only go to London now and then.’
‘Mrs Eustace never went at all,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon.
Butler or no, the staff mysteriously grows bigger. ‘Why? The house is the same size as before?’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. It is the same house, but it seems doubled in position and importance, and now the new London cook needs help in the kitchen and Hester cannot manage upstairs.
‘All nonsense,’ says Polly. ‘The mistress would never have allowed it.’ To Polly, Adza is always ‘the mistress’. ‘And we were nine in family then,’ says Polly.
‘But you didn’t have the company,’ says Pringle condescendingly.
A girl is engaged to come daily from the village to help Cook, and Hester has produced this girl – a relation got into trouble? wonders Lady Patrick. ‘Do you want to do this work?’ she asks her. She cannot imagine that anyone could want to. “‘Her first duty, after the fire is lighted,’” Lady Patrick reads out from Household Management, where she has marked the relevant pages, “‘is to sweep and clean kitchen and offices.’” Where, and what, are offices? wonders Lady Patrick. “‘The stone steps at the entrance, and all the passages leading to the kitchen, must be thoroughly washed and scrubbed,’” she reads out impressively, and then knits her beautiful brows over: “‘Scrubbing out of shelves – cupboards, kitchen tables, scullery boards’” – what is a scullery board? – “‘nursery and servants’ dinner; prepare fish, poultry, vegetables.” That seems a great deal for one person to do?’ she asks Hester frowning.
‘No, milady, it is as it should be but I think you have the kitchen maid, milady,’ says Hester in reproof.
Lady Patrick closes Household Management and, to recoup her dignity, begins to ask the sort of questions she thinks Eliza would ask.
‘What is your name?’
‘Ann, ma’am. Ann Sly. I’m twenty-six.’
Older than I am, thinks Lady Patrick. She has a feeling Ann Sly guesses this, which seems to her impertinent, and she becomes very cold.
‘Hester will tell you what your duties are.’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘Milady,’ Hester prompts.
‘Yes, milady.’
The girl is respectful and yet Lady Patrick knows that those black eyes have explored everything in the room with an inquisitiveness that is an intrusion. She is sure, for instance, that Ann Sly has made an inventory of everything she, Lady Patrick, is wearing: her morning dress with its lapels, cascading lace jabot, and wide satin ribbon trimming, her ring with its diamond and she has a curious instinct to cover the ring with her hand; it is her engagement ring and Jared paid too much for it. ‘I couldn’t give you anything less,’ says Jared.
‘The wages are fourteen pounds,’ she says, as instructed by Eliza and to close the interview, ‘fourteen pounds a year.’
‘With sugar, milady, tea, and beer,’ Hester reminds her.
Fourteen pounds a year. The diamond must have cost perhaps four hundred, but it never occurs to Lady Patrick that this is too much of a contrast and she is happy, too happy to be wary. She has not told Jared yet there will be another baby: It isn’t till autumn, thinks Lady Patrick, no need to tell him yet. She wants the new baby, of course, as she wanted Borowis, a dozen of Jared’s sons, but there is no need to interrupt – anything, thinks Lady Patrick: sleeping together in the big bed, their private world and warmth, turning, when the lamp is put out, into Jared’s arms and now, forgetting Ann Sly and Hester, Lady Patrick falls into a dream, her chin on her hand, her fingers curving against her cheek, while her other hand plays with her ring, forgetting she wanted to cover it. Then Hester gives a cough and Lady Patrick wakes.
‘Hester will show you the different rooms.’
‘Yes, milady.’
‘Your master is particular,’ which is not true, for Jared never notices anything about the house. Lady Patrick says it because it is what she likes to say, but the girl does not hear it; the black eyes, that have been looking so respectfully at Lady Patrick, have lifted. Ann Sly has heard what Lady Patrick for once has missed: a step in the hall.
Jared steps lightly because he is a little ashamed of what he has decided to do: give up the quarry for today and take out the new young dog. ‘He will be ruined if he isn’t trained. It won’t be very long,’ says Jared, ‘or if it is, I can go in tomorrow.’ He has come back for the check lead and the crop that he left in the morning room. Very quietly he opens the door.
Lady Patrick is talking, sitting with her back to him. Her back is slender and straight – she always sits as if she were on a horse, he tells her teasingly; the curls that have escaped from her hair shine on her neck as the light catches them, but Jared is not looking at his wife. His eyes have gone straight to the girl standing before her, a prize of a girl, thinks Jared, with cheeks like red apples, black eyes, large curves, ripe; Jared looks at the brown bodice strained too tightly over big soft mounds and his hand goes up to play with his narrow tie. Then, over Lady Patrick’s head, his eyes and the black eyes meet.
‘Pat will come round,’ Jared tells Eliza. ‘She must come round,’ but he still does not know the Clonfert pride. ‘I don’t compromise,’ she tells Father Blackwell, chaplain at Dozemary Abbey and her confessor, whom Jared has begged to ride over and talk to her. ‘We never compromise,’ says Lady Patrick, once again Lady Mary Teresa Claire Brandan.
‘You say that as if it were a virtue,’ says Father Blackwell. ‘It isn’t. It’s pride.’
‘Very well, it’s pride,’ says Lady Patrick.
‘Pride and impetuosity. That’s a diff
icult mixture,’ says Father Blackwell thoughtfully.
‘I didn’t ask you to bother with it, Father,’ says Lady Patrick.
‘I meant difficult for you, not for me,’ says Father Blackwell. At that she gets up and rings the bell for Pringle to show him out and then gives orders that when Father Blackwell calls she is not at home. ‘He would make her forgive Jared, and forgive – with them – means forgive,’ says Polly. Lady Patrick refuses to see the father, she stops going to mass and Borowis is not, as promised, brought up as a Catholic. ‘She is afraid the father would work on her through the child,’ says Polly. As Lady Patrick shuts her heart to love, she shuts it too on faith – and on hope, Father Blackwell would have told her but, ‘I won’t compromise,’ says Lady Patrick. That shows in small things as well as big. Hester, for instance, learns it bitterly.
When Ann Sly comes Hester is promoted to upper housemaid and attends Lady Patrick – until the day of the scent and the summer dressing gown.
She calls it a dressing gown, but to Lady Patrick it is a negligee, a remainder of the London Season she never finishes. It is a luxurious clinging gown in cream lace and chiffon with blue ribbons and she wears it to rest in, sometimes for breakfast and sometimes slips into it on the nights when she sleeps without a nightgown – though Hester does not know that.
The day begins badly: Lady Patrick has breakfast in bed and after it Hester comes in to dress her and, as she kneels meekly by the bed to put on her mistress’s slippers for her, Lady Patrick draws sharply back. ‘Hester, you are wearing scent.’
Hester lifts a startled face. ‘Oh no, milady!’
‘Don’t lie.’ Lady Patrick stands up, still drawing herself away. ‘Go and wash yourself and change,’ and she says coldly, ‘Get my bath ready and go.’
Hester turns to proffer the summer dressing gown, but, ‘Don’t touch it,’ commands Lady Patrick and, picking up her afghan, winds it around her and takes herself to the bathroom.