by Cecily Ross
OCTOBER 11, 1818
Three years have passed, and despite the best of intentions my commitment to these pages has suffered grievous setbacks. Those days when I revelled with what now seems like childish delight in the harmless drama and carefree diversions of family life are gone. The interruption can be blamed in part on Eliza, who confiscated and destroyed more than a year’s worth of musings, but also on the fateful circumstances that have so cruelly and suddenly deprived us of our beloved Papa. In the aftermath of his passing, words seemed useless, almost an affront before the tidal wave of loss that assailed us all. But now, tentatively and in the hopes that my writing might provide some small consolation, I begin again.
Katie, Jane and I visited dear Papa’s grave this afternoon in order to ready the small plot for oncoming winter, only to find the yellow rose we planted early in the summer has bloomed anew with a determination and brilliance that should have made my heart glad. “Surely it is a sign of better times to come,” said Kate, clutching my hand in hers.
“A comforting thought,” I replied, though mine were filled with darkness.
Papa is buried in the churchyard at St. Margaret’s, and one or two of us have managed the short walk from Reydon Hall to pay our respects nearly every day since his passing last spring. How dearly we miss him! He will remain in our hearts forever, and his demise has plunged all of us into an orgy of sadness. This little pilgrimage to his grave constitutes one of the few outings we have to look forward to in these dark days. Ever since the failure of Papa’s affairs in Norwich—of which Katie and I knew nothing at the time, and which surely contributed to his untimely death—our household has declined both in substance and in spirit. The earth had barely settled on Papa’s grave when Mama gathered us all together in the small parlour and laid out the gravity of our situation. She told us Papa’s capital was gone, seized by the bank when a loan he guaranteed for his business partner was not repaid. All that was left is this draughty old house and a small pension from Mama’s late father, barely enough, she reported in a tight voice, to sustain one person, let alone a family of eight children. Her face, as she delivered this news, showed no emotion. Eliza and Agnes did not react, just nodded solemnly like a pair of twin crows in black crape. They had known for some time, of course. But it was news to the rest of us, who were so preoccupied with our sorrow and the unimaginable prospect of a life deprived of the spiritual nourishment of our beloved père that we had given no consideration as to how we were to come by the basic necessities of life now that he was gone. Up until his passing, my life was an idyll of sunshine and carefree days. How I took for granted those simple pleasures and childish joys, and how ashamed I was at that moment of my angry outbursts, my selfish disregard for the sacrifices made by my dear mother and father so that we, their children, could idle away our days, oblivious to the precariousness of all we held dear.
The air in the parlour seemed to shiver after Mama spoke. It was Jane who broke the silence. “But what are we to do?” Sarah, seated by the window, wept softly. I watched through the glass as the sun passed briefly behind the locust tree in the garden, causing it to blaze defiantly and give off a yellow light so thrilling that, for a moment, the tree’s brilliance lit up the room and our hearts. I glanced at Kate and, by the radiance in her face, I knew she too felt the presence of our father in this brief, bright explosion. Mama blinked and bowed her head, then raised her chin and fixed her gaze on the étagère in the corner. The light in the room dimmed again.
“We shall do as your father would have wished. We shall persevere.” Then she closed her eyes against her tears and whispered the words he had so often uttered: “God helps those who help themselves.”
And so we have no choice but to carry on. Though I am afraid (Kate’s unquestioning faith in Providence notwithstanding) that no matter how frugal and diligent we are, it will take more than the good Lord’s intercession to compensate for the nearly empty larder and the imminent onset of an English winter.
DECEMBER 6, 1818
Today is my fifteenth birthday. Only Kate remembered, presenting me with a simple sketch of the scalloped gables of our beloved Reydon Hall. Underneath were the lines “May the home of your childhood live on in your dreams / Wherever you wander, whatever your schemes.” I thought it very accomplished, but my sister blushed when I tore off the tissue paper. “I have no talent for drawing,” she said, “but I wanted you to have something. I’m not much of a poet either, I’m afraid.”
“It’s beautiful, Katie. I shall treasure it always.” I kissed her on the cheek, touched to the point of tears. Her gesture means more to me than silver and gold. I tell myself that riches are merely the physical trappings of rank and that true social status is more than an accumulation of goods. I consider Mama’s hand-wringing futile and unnecessary, because appearances are only the outward manifestations of respectability. As Susanna Strickland, youngest daughter of a distinguished and erudite, now sadly missed, gentleman, as a member of a family of exquisite sensibility and excellent education, I know where I stand in the natural order of things, and though my cuffs are frayed and my bonnet out of fashion, I can hold my head high, proud of the Strickland name and certain of our innate superiority.
I delivered a version of this speech to Agnes, who raised one jet-black eyebrow and shook her head. “I hope you’re right, Susanna, but rank and respectability will not pay the taxes or purchase coal.”
I hesitate to mention it, but my bleeding has begun, accompanied by excruciating pains in my lower abdomen and an overall feeling of dullness and nausea. When I told Kate, she turned quite pink and agreed that the situation is unfortunate but inevitable, and that at least the release of excess blood will make me less emotional. Excess blood? Surely there must be more to it than that. It seems inconceivable that God would allow such a disgusting and inconvenient state of affairs to exist for such a flimsy reason. Why endow women with too much blood in the first place? I know Eve caused a lot of trouble, but must all women atone for it for all time? There is no one to ask. I am beginning to realize that one of the most difficult things about growing up is learning acceptance.
It seems our first Christmas without Papa will be a meagre affair. The Daltons have kindly contributed a goose (though Mama is under the impression that the unfortunate bird wandered into the stable yard one day in answer to her prayers). We dare not tell her the truth; her pride is the only pillar supporting her as she watches her hard-won status crumble day by day. We are fattening the bird with table scraps and bowls of milk, which means watery, lumpy porridge for our own breakfast. The cats gather longingly to watch Her Grace the goose slurp the victuals that at one time would have been theirs to enjoy. Sarah says we shall be glad of the sacrifice when we slice into the golden roasted reward in a few weeks. I am ashamed to admit I can think of little else. Meat of any kind in our reduced circumstances is a treasure more valuable than all the pretty ribbons I once delighted in.
Who will dispatch the goose is another matter, not just because we have made such a pet of it, but also because the beheading has always fallen to one of the tenant farmers and they are gone since these past two months to take up positions at the cotton mills in Lancashire. Hungry as I am for crackling fat and moist goose flesh, I have no appetite for butchery. We will have to roast it ourselves as well since Cook and Lockwood were let go amid much wailing and anguished tears, though I rather think they were not truly sorry to leave such an unruly household. Fortunately, Sarah is confident she can produce the promised feast with the help of Georgia, who continues as housemaid, and Molly, the scullery maid, though Mama worries constantly about how she will pay them. The stables are empty too, but for a few chickens we keep for eggs, and, of course, Her Grace. Father’s fine carriage horses are sold and the carriage with them. The donkey cart remains, though no donkey. We are reduced to borrowing the Daltons’ ass for our infrequent excursions to Bungay, or to taking the public coach to Norwich (a mode of transport Mama adamantly insists is b
eneath her), where we still maintain a house so that the boys can continue to attend school there. Eliza is constantly grumbling about the expense and complaining that while we subsist on the turnips and onions that we have grown with our own toil, our young brothers enjoy fine cheeses and roasted meats daily for their lunch. (Surely she exaggerates.) Meanwhile, our education, once so important to dear Papa, languishes and, because we are girls, has become our own affair.
Mama seldom leaves her room, though how she can bear the cold is a mystery. Most of the second floor and the large reception rooms on the ground floor are closed off to save precious coal. We restrict our daily activities to the kitchen and scullery, and when the dampness and chill make it unbearable, we light a small fire in the library, which gives little heat and barely enough light to read by.
Nevertheless, reading has become our primary diversion during these dreary months, with Eliza and Agnes away during the week in Norwich, where they have been keeping house for the boys. On the weekdays, Katie, Jane, Sarah and I are kept busy with the endless mending and the preparation of a steady supply of dark bread and potage, bread and potage, bread and potage . . . until I think I might happily sell my soul (or at least my last quill) for a bit of cheese! Mama accepts the bland diet without complaint. Her central concern is with keeping up appearances and maintaining some semblance of our tenuous social standing—that and deciding what else can be sold to help finance our ongoing descent into genteel penury. General Wolfe’s desk is next, I fear. She laments, too, about the state of our wardrobes, which are not only threadbare but sadly out of fashion.
When I am not in the kitchen playing a common drudge or scribbling in these pages, I plunder the library looking for literary entertainment I may have overlooked. I confess that though I am surely better for having read Locke and Descartes, and Miss Wollstonecraft is indeed an inspiration to the fair sex, I find that the novels of Jane Austen thrill me more than any philosophical treatise ever has. Mama does not consider them appropriate for young women of our class, and Agnes claims to prefer the rigours of historical argument to the “fevered imaginings of an aging spinster.” (She seems oblivious to the hypocrisy contained in such a statement.) The other day, I happened upon a dog-eared copy of Clarissa tucked away on an upper shelf behind the Gibbons. I was barely two chapters on before Agnes seized it and made off to her room, where she remained into the night and for much of the next day. I have not seen it since.
Katie and I are obliged to wait until the ghouls have left for Norwich and Mama is taking her afternoon nap so that we can read aloud to one another from the forbidden texts. Our most recent passion is Northanger Abbey. Its observations on the institution of marriage have provided my sister and me with hours of fierce discussion on the predicament of being born female. When I came across Miss Austen’s comparison of marriage and dancing, the sad truth of it made me laugh out loud: “You will allow that in both,” she wrote, “man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal.” Like nearly everything in the relations between men and women, it does not seem fair.
DECEMBER 26, 1818
The goose was superb. Sam, the eldest male and now head of our diminished household, carved the bird with great perseverance. Then we paid heartfelt tribute to Her Grace before consuming every last morsel. Strangely, I felt nary a twinge of remorse as I devoured my share, my empathy for the poor creature having been thoroughly exhausted four days ago when Jane and Kate (the boys not yet home from Norwich) were compelled to carry out the necessary execution. Shall I describe the ghastly business here?
By mid-morning of December 22, the event had been postponed long enough. We huddled together in the cold drizzle and watched Her Grace slurp her last supper of bread crusts and milk, reaching out her sleek neck and throwing her head back to utter the greedy exclamations of a practised glutton.
“How disgusting she is,” I remarked in a small voice, Sam’s hatchet hanging by my side.
“Yes,” Jane agreed, hoping, like me, to harden her heart against the inevitable. “She is a vile creature. Her little eyes, her fat grey body, those ridiculous orange feet.”
At that moment, the goose spread her wings and ran, or rather waddled quickly, across the stable yard toward us, hissing angrily. She stopped at our feet, retracted her neck and, with a shrug of her feathers and a disdainful honk, turned and marched back to her trough. At that point, my nerve deserted me.
“There, Katie. You do it, then,” I said, shrinking from the attack. “I cannot kill a living thing, stupid or not. I think I would rather have mashed turnips for our Christmas supper than harm a single feather.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Katie began, grabbing the hatchet from my limp grasp. “How would you survive in the wilderness? We have to eat.”
There is a toughness to my sister’s character that is easily overlooked; underneath the sweetness beats the heart of a bloodthirsty butcher. She coaxed Grace into an empty stall, and while Jane used her body to pin the squirming, squawking bird to the ground, Katie removed its head with two swift and mighty hatchet blows. Believing the carnage was over, I opened my eyes, which had been tightly shut during the ordeal, and released the air from my lungs. Jane relinquished her hold on the bird’s warm body. (She later said she could see its heart still beating wildly in its breast, though it was dead as it could be—or so we thought.)
Then, to our horror, some spectral force propelled the headless carcass from its deathbed and out through the stable door into the muddy yard, where it flapped in frantic circles before staggering blindly up the path toward the house with Jane and Kate in squealing pursuit. The spectacle, though ghoulish in the extreme, is indelibly etched in my imagination, and once we recovered from the shock, Sarah and I were so overcome with hilarity that we could barely stand.
And yet, despite the comedy, the event has made me consider the mysteries of life—where it begins, where it ends. If that goose had a soul, when did it depart its poor murdered body and where did it go? Indeed, what is life? Is it merely a beating heart and blood flowing through our veins, or is there some other life force apart from the flesh? These thoughts kept me awake for much of the long night, though they had no impact on my enjoyment of Her Grace when she later appeared, crackling brown on a platter, decorated with sprigs of holly and sweetened with the last of Cook’s crabapple jelly.
Still, it was, being our first Christmas without Papa, a bittersweet affair. We exchanged modest gifts of needlework and pressed flowers. There were knitted socks for the boys, and after supper, Agnes and I read our poems aloud. It pains me to admit that hers are rather good.
DECEMBER 27, 1818
We had a visitor to Reydon Hall today, an event that lamentably occurs with less and less frequency as our circumstances decline. Lacking the basic necessities to properly entertain guests (the silver tea service and the pianoforte sold), we seldom do, the result being that we in turn receive fewer and fewer invitations. I, for one, do not care and question the value of friendships that depend more upon social conventions and appearances than on ordinary human kindness. But Mama talks constantly about our standing in the neighbourhood, and I fear she keenly misses the male companionship that our father, with his friendships and business relations, bestowed on our otherwise cloistered existence. Therefore, you can imagine her excitement (and discomfort) when Mr. Harral came to call.
A light snow had been falling since early morning, melting as it reached the ground but clinging prettily to the copper beeches lining the drive, when Jane and I, sitting by the kitchen window, she intent upon the sock she was mending and me composing a poem in my head, heard the faint laughter of harness bells, and the veil of snow parted to reveal a handsome black horse pulling a two-wheeled chaise. It was as though Father Christmas had appeared, late—but better that than never.
Mr. Thomas Harral, editor of The Suffolk Herald and an old friend of Papa’s, who shared his passion for fly-fishing and love of reading, often came to visit in happier times. He somet
imes brought his children, Anna Laura and Francis, to play with us while he accompanied our father to the river to spend the arc of a bright June morning casting for speckled trout. Later, over an early dinner (of sweet fried fish), our table would come alive with discussions of politics, scientific ideas and literature. Imagine the joy, then, with which we greeted his surprise visit!
Sam and Tom helped Mr. Harral settle his horse in the stable, even managing to offer it a few dusty oats, while Agnes fetched the key to the rosewood tea caddy and Sarah put the kettle on. Kate and I laid a hasty fire in the library, where Mama, amid much clucking and curtseying, showed Mr. Harral to the best chair by the hearth. Wearing a silk cravat and moleskin breeches, he struck a fine figure, and I was suddenly painfully aware of the meanness of our surroundings, the dampness, the mouse droppings in the corners and the sour smell of boiled cabbage. Mr. Harral was too well bred to appear to notice. Instead, he expressed interest in our writing projects, particularly turning his attentions to Kate, the former darling of those fishing expeditions.
“I have written a book,” she announced, casting aside all pretense at modesty.
A book? I thought. What book?
Our mother raised her eyebrows and murmured, “Now, dear . . .”
“A book?” said Mr. Harral, leaning forward in his chair and holding out his hand. A smile played on his lips. “What kind of book?”
Kate placed her fingers in his outstretched palm and blushed a pretty shade of pink. If I had not known Mr. Harral to be a gentleman (and a married one at that), I might have thought he was flirting with my sister, who, despite her slender bearing, is no longer a child.
“A novel. For children. About a Highland piper who is blind. He befriends a crippled collie, and together—”
Her words were like a slap in the face: a blind boy, a wounded dog, Alpine changed to Highland. She was describing our book. Our book. Curling papers no longer. I jumped up from where I was seated on the sofa. “Kate,” I began.