China Court

by Rumer Godden

  Then she draws off the slips and, in front of each person, sets a dessert plate on which is a fine gauze doily, pen-painted long ago by Anne with Scottish mountain scenes; on the doily is a green glass finger bowl holding warmed water and a flower petal or two; fruit and nuts, dishes of ginger and a few sweets are put on; for special occasions there is crystallized fruit as well, and Chinese figs or Carlsbad plums. The Madeira and port decanters are set in front of Jared, the decanters in Sheffield-plate coasters scalloped at the edges and wooden-bottomed. Then Pringle comes out, but holds the door open. ‘You can go in now,’ she calls to the children on the stairs.

  When Isabel is there she wears for these evenings white embroidered muslin dresses with sashes in blue or old-rose silk ending in fringes so rich and long they touch the backs of her knees. Her hair, released from its daytime pigtails, is brushed until it floats; Ripsie’s hair is cropped disgracefully because she catches ringworm in the village school to which she is sent for a time. It makes her feel like a little shorn black lamb.

  While the others go down she stands looking proudly out of the landing window, over the garden which, at this time, seems to swim in the sunset light, or perhaps it is the curiously hot shine in her own eyes. The light lies on the lawn, and on the rooks’ wings as they peck for insects; a scent of roses and cut grass comes in at the window. It is a peaceful happy scene, but when the dining-room door closes, Ripsie sits down on the top step of the stairs and sinks her face on her knees. Now and then, defying Isabel, she goes down a step or two ready to wriggle back if Polly or Isabel’s Fräulein should appear, but no, they are too busy talking in the nursery at the end of the passage.

  Before the others come back, Ripsie goes. If the boys had been alone she would have waited; John Henry never fails to bring her something, but, even if he brought her that prize of prizes, a bit of red crystallized pear, not even if Borowis brought it would she have taken it in front of Isabel.

  The boys are taught to take their wine, starting at ten years old with a little in water. Under Jared and Lady Patrick, the cellar becomes more sophisticated; theirs is the peak. Now there are clarets: Lafite, Château La Tour, St Julien, Pauillac; and burgundies: Beaune, Chambertin; there are hocks and sauternes, for Lady Patrick who likes a sweet wine. Jared lays down a pipe of port for Borowis; Borowis never drinks it and at last John Henry sells it and at a handsome profit. When Lady Patrick grows so thin after John Henry’s birth, the doctor advises porter, which she does not take, then egg-flips beaten with brandy and two glasses of claret at dinner. Lady Patrick disregards them all; she does not care if she is thin.

  With John Henry and Mrs Quin in charge, the cellar falls off again; wine is out of fashion; the dining room goes back to cider, perry, and beer and John Henry begins to like a whisky and soda before he goes to bed or when he comes in tired from work. Nobody quite remembers when drinks before dinner are started; first it is sherry, then cocktails. It is Barbara who mixes the first martini; there is a silver cocktail shaker that she leaves behind. After Tracy goes there is little drink in the house except brandy for accidents, and South African sherry kept in the sideboard. ‘I can’t drink alone,’ says Mrs Quin.

  She can remember the time when the cellar seems an awesome place to her. It has a grating level with the garden, not unlike the grating over the zeal by the gate, but on this one Ripsie can lie full length and look in. In the cellar are only stillness, gloom, cobwebs, with a gleam where the light catches a bottle, but one day, as Ripsie looks in, Miss Quin, Eliza, comes down the steps with a candle and Ripsie flattens herself on the grating and hardly dares to breathe. Eliza lifts her full skirts a little from the floor with one hand. She is wearing a shawl and an apron and behind her comes Pringle with a basket. Now the candle has been brought in, Ripsie can see flagstone, barrels, a long-bristled broom, a stool, and all along the walls, racks of bottles. Eliza holds the candle to the racks, passing along them, looking, and then, carefully, she takes out a bottle of wine here and there, and hands it to Pringle, who, holding it with care too, dusts it and sets it upright in the basket.

  ‘That will do I think, Pringle,’ says Eliza when they have six or seven. ‘Take them up while I enter them,’ and she goes to a book with mottled covers hanging from a peg on the wall; but instead of writing, the moment Pringle is gone, Eliza sets down the candle and, undoing her cuff, from her sleeve she pulls out some pieces of material – not handkerchiefs, they look too large and thick to be handkerchiefs, they are flannel, decides Ripsie – and, so quickly that Ripsie can hardly believe what she sees, from a separate rack Eliza takes two bottles more and wraps them in the flannel, so that they won’t chink, thinks Ripsie instantly. She has been trained in piracy by Borowis, yet she catches her breath and nearly chokes with amazement at what she sees next: Eliza whips up her skirt and there, underneath, are two bags; swiftly she opens first one, then the other, sliding the bottles in, draws the strings, and drops her skirt. A moment later, with the candle, she goes up the steps and walks out, calm, efficient Miss Eliza. ‘Great Jehoshaphat!’ says Ripsie.

  She does not tell the boys in the letters, one or two a term, that she manages to write; such momentous news is kept for Borowis when he comes home, but he is not as scandalized as she hopes. ‘Poor old Aunt Liz,’ he says. ‘She doesn’t have much and I don’t suppose she got away with much either,’ but he underestimates his aunt, as Mr Alabaster might have told him if he could have spoken down the years.

  Mr Alabaster had opened the brass-clasped case Tracy had brought him; now he sat at his table with the three small books he had taken out of it. They were account books, as Tracy had found, but very strange ones, thought Mr Alabaster. ‘Eliza Adza Quin. Private,’ was written in a firm hand at the beginning of each. The entries began in 1872 with a hiatus for the years from 1875 until April 1878. Eliza had headed the left-hand pages ‘per’ – for credits, thought Mr Alabaster – the right-hand ones ‘to’, but both the entries were of equal oddness: ‘per Christmas boxes, halved, £1.1.0.’ Mr Alabaster could make nothing of that.

  At Christmas the tradesmen call formally on their customers; Mr Theobald, the butcher, for instance, wears his straw hat, Cutler and Barr’s traveller a frock coat and lavender gloves. They are asked into the servants’ sitting room, where Adza herself brings them a glass of port, while their delivery boys, all the days of Christmas, can draw themselves a pint of beer from the barrel that is set up on trestles outside the back door and, on Boxing Day, for every boy there is a florin. Eliza stops the beer, though she still charges Jared for it, halves the florins, and asks the tradesmen into the office where, when he leaves, she inherits Jeremy Baxter’s desk. They get their glass of port, ‘and do we pay for it!’ says Mr Theobald. ‘We get away with our skins, just,’ says Cutler and Barr’s traveller, and not only at Christmas; the entries run all through the year:

  per Theobald, quarterly bill £1.10.0

  Cutler and Barr £5. 0.0

  Farm eggs and milk 10% 14.0

  The tradesmen paying her? Mr Alabaster was growing more and more mystified. That he was in the correct column was shown by the yearly entry: ‘From Father, allowance £10:’ – ‘(mean)’ Eliza had written in brackets after it. Mr Alabaster thought so too. There was no allowance for the years 1875 until 1878 and then it appeared again but, Mr Alabaster was glad to see, it had risen: ‘per Jared’, ‘allowance’ was crossed out and corrected to ‘salary’, ‘(quarter) £17.10.0.’ She was getting seventy pounds a year, better, thought Mr Alabaster, but he puzzled again over those recurring entries: ‘per Theobald, £2.13.0’, ‘£3.0.0’, ‘£1.4.0’.

  ‘Theobald,’ says Eliza every quarter. ‘My brother would like me to pay your bill. You delivered a saddle of mutton on the twelfth of November,’ and she reads: “‘Two pounds best rump steak.” “Breast of veal, three pounds four ounces.” “Saddle of mutton, ten pounds.” It was nine pounds, six ounces,’ says Eliza.

  ‘Miss Eliza, it—’

  ‘I weighed it.’
Eliza cuts the butcher short. ‘On November the twentieth, “twelve chops”. There were eleven, and you can hand me the difference,’ says Eliza.

  Every month too there was a list of names and figures:

  per Cook £0.10.0

  Pringle

  £0. 5.0

  1st Housemd

  2.6

  2nd Housemd

  1.6

  – right down to ‘kn.by’ – knife-boy? wondered Mr Alabaster – ‘kn.by – 5d’. She took a percentage of their wages, thought Mr Alabaster, but ‘kn.by – 5d’! ‘This is becoming a mania,’ said Mr Alabaster severely. It was so real to him that he said it aloud. Recurring all the way through was a pair of initials, ‘J.H.’, followed by: ‘2 @ 4/6 = 9/-’. ‘Two at four shillings and sixpence, nine shillings?’ Mr Alabaster did not dream that in Eliza’s day the best Scotch whisky sells at sixty shillings a dozen. Eliza lets Jacob Hinty have it at sixpence under cost.

  ‘But what did she do with the money?’ asks Jared when Eliza dies. ‘She has practically nothing in the bank, no jewellery or clothes worth a penny. She certainly did not give it away. It must be hidden in the house.’ They cannot find it, but he is right.

  The second little book was an account book too, but an account of – ‘Books?’ asked Mr Alabaster, puzzled. Most of the entries were on the right-hand page: ‘To Lot 52 at Witcombe Rectory sale £2.0.0.’ and in brackets ‘(Worthless. Disposed).’ ‘To Parr’s Book Shop, Truro: Goldsmith (Oliver) The Vicar of Wakefield, 2 vol, First Edition, 12mo, Printed at Salisbury, 1766 £21.0.0’ and ‘(had to bargain)’ was written after it. ‘To Lot 5, nine books. Pierce and Peltzer, auction, Penzance, including Johnson (Samuel) A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, First Edition, 12 line errata, calf, covers slightly scratched, 23/-.’ ‘To Hailey’s Auction Rooms, Plymouth. In lot of five books, Spenser (Edmund) The Faerie Queene, vol. 1, First Edition, 1590, 8/-.’ ‘Eight shillings!’ Mr Alabaster could not help exclaiming that aloud, and dated nine years later he found another entry for The Faerie Queene but for vol. 2. This time the price was forty pounds – must have attracted someone else’s attention, thought Mr Alabaster, but if it really is the first edition … And she waited nine years for it, he thought. Something of Eliza’s determination seemed to reach him; forty pounds was a big sum to set beside the others, those careful shillings, and nearly double that other large flutter up to twenty-one pounds for The Vicar of Wakefield. She had courage, thought Mr Alabaster. Courage, in fact, was in every line of those account books; courage to face tradesmen at their own game – and she did that, even if she had meannesses, thought Mr Alabaster; courage to travel – and how she travelled! he thought, looking at the entries: Penzance, Liskeard, Exeter, and in all seasons, thought Mr Alabaster, looking at the dates, in all weathers and he remembered the moor wind, even now in summer, as he had walked down that morning from the village; the day was suddenly cold and blowy as it could be in a Cornish summer and he had thought then of what it must be like in winter.

  Eliza driving the tubcart to the station is a familiar sight. ‘Nobody cares what I do,’ she complains once to Jeremy Baxter and, ‘Then you are lucky,’ he answers. ‘You are free.’ Quite free to get up in the dark and make herself a breakfast of bread and milk in the empty kitchen, to put on her old brown cloak and ludicrously old-fashioned bonnet – both becoming familiar in the sale rooms – to take a lantern to the stables, harness Kitty, and, as the first light breaks, drive over the moor – that bleakest of moors – with her purse tucked in her muff and a feed for Kitty under her feet. There is no station at St Probus, she has to drive to Canverisk or Bodmin Road, put up the pony at an inn and give the ostler sixpence to rub her down and feed her, while she, Eliza, catches her train. She has in her muff, too, a piece of cold pie or pudding; Eliza does not spend money on her own food.

  On her way home she stops mysteriously at Jacob Hinty’s; sometimes Kitty is kept standing outside his derelict shop and cottage for an hour or more; sometimes she is even put up beside the bony white horse he keeps for his carrier’s cart. Eliza uses the room behind the shop – Jacob’s junk room – as a clearing house. It pays the old man to have her; if people had watched what Jacob did they would have been amazed at the strange old books he peddles, selling them on market days or from door to door at anything from a penny to a shilling. He keeps those with the brightest covers and gets a good profit; the rest he uses as fuel. It is only what she calls her ‘prizes’, and the books that are worth her own selling, that Eliza takes home.

  It is often dark when she comes in. Sometimes the servants are having their nine-o’clock supper, sometimes it is even too late for that. If Jared is at home a light will be burning in the morning room; another light is in the drawing room where Lady Patrick, alone too, sits with her embroidery frame, stitching, her needle making an even small plock-plock sound as it goes through the silk. At ten o’clock she will cover the frame and go to bed – alone. Sometimes, everyone has gone to bed and Eliza lets herself into a sleeping house, takes the soup or stew Cook has left for her on the range, and goes upstairs.

  If it has been a blank day she blows out her candle at once, but if she has found something then, sitting up in bed, her red shawl huddled around her, the light of the candle throwing her shadow huge onto the walls, she will read and brood until the early hours of the morning. “‘Too late have I loved thee, O Thou beauty of ancient days …’” croons Eliza or “‘Man is a reed, but a thinking reed,’” or “‘I have seen the thorn frown all winter long; bears yet in spring a rosebud on its top,’” or, because she is, as all single women are, deeply romantic,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night …

  – and, as she grows older, what truly comes to pass, “‘My mind to me a Kingdom is …’”

  She keeps these lines and many others in her mind all day, remembering them as if they were a nosegay and every now and then she could sniff their fragrance. No one seeing her going about the house, in her brown house frock and apron, silent or tart, fault-finding, would have guessed what – beauty was in her mind. ‘Poor old Aunt Liz. She doesn’t have much,’ and Mr Alabaster opened the last book.

  It was not an account book but a catalogue of books: ‘The Permanent Collection of E.A.Q.’ Each book was carefully – lovingly, thought Mr Alabaster – listed with its description and the circumstances in which it was found, each entry separated by a ruled red line from the next. There was a footnote on the first page: a neat asterisk, ‘to signify of value to me’, had written Eliza, while two asterisks meant ‘of worth’.

  To Mr Alabaster that quiet understatement was typical of the Eliza he was beginning to know.

  Among the two-asterisk entries were:

  The Book of Hawking, Hunting and Biasing of Arms, known as the Book of St Albans, attributed to Dame Juliana Berners or Barnes, folio, printed at St Albans by the so-called Schoolmaster Printer in 1486. First Edition, lacking 23 leaves.

  Meres (Francis) Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, small 8vo, 1598.

  Richardson (Samuel) Pamela, 4 vols., First Edition, 8vo, 1741–42.

  His eyebrows rose as he read. Was she imagining this? – these, he felt sure, were old rare books – but there were the two ledgers to support it, the accounts, the twenty years of hoarding, saving, travelling, and suddenly Mr Alabaster’s gaze went to the deep bookcase behind him, filled with books covered in brown paper. He got up and opened the glass doors. The shelves were deep in dust and when he pulled a book out, the brown paper split and he could shred it off; there were books behind these books, two deep, thought Mr Alabaster. He put his hand in farther and pulled out one of the back books and ‘Cessolis (Jacobus) The Game and Playe of the Chesse, translated by William Caxton, folio. Printed at Westminster by William Caxton about 1483, second edition,’ read Mr Alabaster. He took out the two next to it and his hands trembled as he took them both back
to the table. The first edition of The Faerie Queene and, as far as he could see, complete and almost unblemished. What can they be worth? thought Mr Alabaster. He had no real idea but, Surely a great deal, he thought giddily. Next to them in the bookcase was a smaller, thinner book, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’. He found it in the catalogue: ‘First Edition, small 8vo, 1642’, with the note, ‘bought by Father with the books in bookcase.’

  ‘This is quite beyond my scope,’ Mr Alabaster began to mutter, ‘quite beyond my scope.’ He kept on saying that aloud, but still he could not keep from reading Eliza’s catalogue, going to the bookcase, coming back to the catalogue. He found he was sweating with excitement and haste and getting so covered in dust that he took off his coat, hung it on the chair, and rolled up his sleeves. Then, coming back to the catalogue, he had begun to read again when he stopped, his finger on a page.

  ‘Are we to wait for them any longer?’ asked Bella.

  Cecily had brought in tea; they were all gathered in the drawing room and Mr Prendergast had arrived. ‘What can they be doing?’ asked Bella.

  ‘They must have a great deal to talk about,’ said the youngest Grace in fairness to Tracy and Peter.

  ‘They should talk about it afterward, not now, at tea-time.’

  ‘They have to persuade Peter.’

  ‘He won’t need much persuading.’ Bella was beginning to recover from the letter. ‘It’s inconsiderate. Mr Prendergast hasn’t the whole afternoon.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry,’ said Mr Prendergast.

  ‘And they are coming,’ said the youngest Grace who had not ceased to watch from the window. ‘Yes, here they come with Walter. What a good couple they make!’

  ‘No need to get sentimental,’ said Bella. ‘This is a marriage of pure convenience. Look at them!’ Bella had come to the window too, and now the sight of Peter provoked her afresh. ‘Look at them coming up to take possession of our house.’