None So Pretty

by Margaret Irwin

  Alice’s envy encouraged Nan. She was to have Moll’s wedding-dress and a gold ring, she was to leave home, and take Nurse with her, for it was not fitting that she should go alone to a house where there were only two men beside the servants. The rectory at Cricketts had never been rebuilt since it was burnt down in the wars, and so the present rector lived at Cricketts Manor as its chaplain. And Nan was to be mistress of this house with two men to amuse her and only Nurse to check her.

  She was now seventeen, and still played and even fought sometimes with the village boys as though she were just the same as they; nor did they appear to notice any difference. But on the morning of her wedding, which Lady Ingleby had hurried on to take place in the early autumn, young Diggory the dairy boy, whom she had never noticed except to run races with him, suddenly kissed her. It was very early and the air still cold and misty, for they were all up and scurrying since before dawn, and every minute Lady Ingleby found that something had been forgotten or done in the wrong way. Nan had run into the dairy, and there she saw Diggory with a great bowl of cream in his hands and a flower in his smock and his round eyes staring at her. She laughed at his face for it looked so solemn and so well scrubbed for her wedding that it was even redder than usual; it grew still redder, he dropped the bowl, his arms were flung up and out like a windmill and then round her. At the same instant one of the maids outside started bawling to him for the cream, which was spreading over the stone floor in a thick pool. Lady Ingleby screamed when she saw it and set on Diggory with both fists, but Nan pulled her off him, though she had to stuff one hand into her mouth to keep from laughing, and said it was her fault, she had bumped into Diggory as she ran into the dairy to ask for the cream and had knocked it out of his hands. She could afford to be generous since she knew her mother would not dare give her so much as a box on the ear, lest she should show red eyes at her wedding.

  The wedding itself was disappointing. When Moll was married, they had had fiddlers from Rampton, and the dancing and junketings had been carried on till far into the night. All the girls had helped put Moll to bed, and when she had thrown the stocking, they had all scrambled for it with as much noise as a pack of hounds, and joked to each other about their gallants in a free and hearty way that made Nan wish she were old enough to have a gallant to joke about too.

  But Mr. Hambridge insisted on bringing his bride home that very same day, and Lady Ingleby was not sorry as it lessened the expense. She told people that he was bashful, as indeed he showed himself, that she thought it a very good thing in a husband, that for her part she had no liking for revelry at a wedding, for it was a solemn duty and should not be confounded with pleasure, let alone licence. She spoke sincerely, for deep in her mind was the belief that such jollities lessened woman’s importance; and even Nan, the youngest, wildest and flightiest of her daughters, should have honour as her representative. She had always longed to be taken seriously, to be reverenced. She would have been happy as the wife of a submissive Victorian husband, who would help her bear an equal number of children but would ignore all reference to the lusts of the flesh and speak only of the glory of womanhood.

  Whichever factor, purity or economy, was responsible, Nan drove away in the afternoon in the hired coach from Rampton with wheels newly painted yellow for the occasion, and Jake the driver flourishing a bunch of white ribbons on his whip. She held in her arms a very small rose-tree in a neatly fluted stone pot, which Mr. Wake had given her with injunctions to water it twice a day with good rain-water, and never with her tears, “for,” said he in his slow chanting voice, “a rheumy salt is bad for tender plants.”

  He had been recalled somewhat late from a more important occupation to conduct her wedding, and in mistake had given out Sir Philip Sidney’s hymn about “dead men’s undelightsome clay,” which upset Lady Ingleby but pleased Nan who liked the puns in the first verse.

  Her three younger brothers, Chris and Jamie and little Frank, had given her a kite they had made by themselves without telling her. She had always helped make their kites before. Alice had given her her pet kitten, and Eliza a ribbon she had bought from a pedlar, a buff one spotted with small fruits, cherries, strawberries or apples, Nan could not be sure which, but they were red and bright. This feminine gift from Eliza was surprising, but she showed no other sign of her good will and yawned unashamedly like a dog all through the wedding.

  They were all sleepy. Nan nodded over her rose-tree in the coach. The lumpy road and the unsprung seat jolted her up and down, nevertheless she fell into a drowsy dream that she was driving to London beside her father. She woke to see Nurse opposite, and beside her a big burly man who was otherwise not at all like her father, for he had not a word to say and looked out of the window away from her all the time, and when she once spoke to him, the back of his neck and as much of his cheek as she could see turned a rich pink. She had heard of a blushing bride but never of a blushing bridegroom, and it was the more perplexing as Mr. Hambridge had struck her as quite old, thirty at least.

  At last they drove through a village which must be Cricketts, for all the people were out in the road, cheering and tossing up their caps or their handkerchiefs. At this Mr. Hambridge showed sudden and surprising life, for he thrust his head out of the window and bawled back to them with a View Halloo as though he were urging on a hunt. Nan looked out of the other window, and saw them all laughing and running after the coach. Soon the runners dropped behind, the coach went along bare road again with flat marshland on either side, flatter than at home. It turned sharply through a pair of gates that stood open ready for it, but no one was there to hold them back or bob a curtsy or cheer, though Nan scarcely noticed this at the moment, so excited was she suddenly with her arrival at the house and wonder what it would be like.

  A slovenly cottage stood by the gates, and some ragged fowls ran squawking from before the coach. A large pale girl stood inside the doorway, staring out at them with stolid indifference. There were rings on the shapeless white hand which she held to her breast. The coach rattled past her, up a long straight drive of beech-trees, through which Nan could see the flat fields, lit by the slanting rays of the sun. It turned into a courtyard, drew up with a grind on the cobbles, and fluster and welcome began. The door was flung open, the grinning new faces of servants surrounded her. She stepped down and looked round at the fat white pigeons that strutted and fluttered about, and among them a very fine black cock with his scarlet comb; at the crack in the mounting block where ivy was growing in a dark streak; at the square stone house and round steps curving below the front door.

  Some old man was nudging Mr. Hambridge and reminding him that he ought to carry his bride over the threshold, but he pretended not to hear or understand, and Nan knew it was pretence because he looked so sheepish. She would not wait for him to do it, she ran up the steps and in through the doorway where she stood laughing as her husband came slowly after her. He looked at her like a dog who has been scolded, and muttered on a gruff, unhappy note, “Welcome to Cricketts. And now for God’s sake let’s to supper.”

  She was taken up into a strange bedroom and ran to the window. Here homesickness fell on her suddenly and stiflingly. Never again would she look out of a window with a broken shutter and crane her neck for a glimpse of the hollow thorn-tree; never again would she see that wild, familiar strip of common, jagging up and down against the evening sky; never again would she jump into bed with her brothers and sisters and lie telling stories in the dark.

  What she saw now was a lawn just below her, and a wall that went round it, shutting it into a square, and beyond it, marsh or common land and a winding path that showed faintly white in the shadow of the low hill up which it climbed.

  “Nurse,” she said in a choked voice, “do you remember the nights when the sky was red?”

  “Why yes, bud, we are none of us likely to forget that, and all we heard afterwards.”

  “Did they see it here too, from this window?”

  Nurse assured he
r that certainly that terrible light had been seen here too. For four nights it had glowed for fifty miles round London, so that the sky was like the top of a burning oven; some said the reflection had been seen as far as Scotland. A dreadful fate had befallen the city, it had been destroyed utterly by fire; some said it was the judgment of God on the modern Babylon, and Mr. Wake said that according to a learned London dean, the city had been reduced from a folio to a duodecimo.

  Soon the pedlars and packmen and then the children in the village were singing a new song:

  London is burning! London is burning!

  Look yonder! Look yonder!

  Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!

  Go fetch me some water!

  The light of its ruins had been all that Nan had ever seen of London; she had watched it with terror but also with joy. It consoled her now to think that it had been seen from here also; she was looking at a new place, but it had been there all this time though she had not known of it, and if she had been here a few years ago, she would still have seen London burning.

  As soon as Mr. Hambridge led Nan into the oak room he became boisterous and hearty, for there were the familiar faces of men he knew to give him confidence. Nurse was no longer with her, there were only menservants in the long, dark room, and the chaplain, Mr. Benjamin Cork, to whom Mr. Hambridge showed his bride, saying: “There she is and Tumpleton Park with her, so the bargain’s none so bad as you might think.”

  Nan stood very still; only her eyes moved fast round the room, up at the gamekeepers’ and hunters’ poles that rested against the dark panels, at the staring menservants in greasy doublets, at a leather hat full of pheasants’ eggs left on a shelf, at the chaplain’s grave face, so high up that it seemed to be looking down at her from the top of a pole.

  Mr. Cork was as tall and thin as Mr. Hambridge was square. Ambition, pride and disappointment had eaten away his flesh and now burned in his sunken eyes. Under their gaze, the bride’s wandering curiosity flickered and waned; she looked down, and with an unwonted bashfulness tugged at the white brocade which was slipping down over her thin shoulder. The full flowing style of the time did not suit her, and this dress was much too large, though it had been cut down twice over, first for Moll and then for her; it had had the stained parts cut out and the clean sewn together again and still it did not fit. She would have looked better in boy’s dress, and from her sudden movements when at last she came to the table, one might have thought her accustomed to wear it. Some such thought slipped in at one side of the chaplain’s mind and came out at the other as “unwomanly.”

  Like Nan’s dress, the heavy oak table was too large for its present purpose. For that reason, Nan, or Mrs. Anne as she now was, did not sit far away at the other end of it, but on Mr. Hambridge’s right hand, facing Mr. Cork. The sense of her husband’s remark had not penetrated her confused consciousness; from his tone she had supposed him to be making some appropriate jest such as the many she had heard at her wedding, and the sharp white teeth that were her only beauty had flashed into a propitiatory smile.

  “She is a fool,” thought the chaplain, but changed it as they seated themselves, to—“She is half asleep.”

  She woke up, however, at the sight of the pickled oysters. Mr. Hambridge roared to Giles, the old man who had spoken to him in the courtyard, to know if they had been gutted, for sure he ought to know that oysters the same as any other fish would stink if they were not gutted. He watched Nan in the tail of his eye to see if she laughed, but Nan was too ignorant of oysters to understand that it was a joke, though presently she saw old Giles grin and wag his jaw, and then as Mr. Hambridge shouted with laughter, all the serving-men laughed too.

  The three fed in silence after that, while the last ray of the sun slid from the rusty pike-heads against the walls and lit up the dust in the lower corners. The serving-men stumped in and out, breathing heavily. There were more of them than at home, but they were just as uncouth and shabby; they carried a quantity of fine silver dishes and some even of gold, but her mother would have remarked on their dullness. Even for a wedding they had not been well polished. Mr. Hambridge could never have melted down his plate to send to the King in exile as her father had, down to the Italian dish that King Harry had given his great-great-grandfather. No wonder Mr. Hambridge was so rich, yet everything here was as old and musty as at home, and certainly her mother would never have let the dogs fight over the bones under the table, but have saved the bones for soup.

  “And eggs in a hat,” she said to herself, reviving with food and wine, “what would she say to eggs in a hat?”

  She had to give some reason for the chuckle that had broken from her and directed Mr. Cork’s scrutiny upon her. She said: “This is the first time I have eaten today, there has been such a to-do,” and she began to laugh again from a sudden secret fund of enjoyment, for she had just remembered how Diggory had kissed her in the dairy and upset the cream. She stopped as suddenly, and looked so unnaturally solemn that Mr. Cork had an uneasy suspicion she might be mimicking him. Mr. Hambridge looked at her over his lowered tankard, but as she did not say what had caused her laughter, he avoided her eyes lest they should spy out occasions in him for ridicule. For a moment both the men were nervous of her, and sulky. She could feel the antagonism caused by their shyness, but did not know why it was. She was afraid they thought her a zany for laughing at nothing, but she could not tell them the reason. She tried to give others instead, to describe the bustle before the wedding, how everything had gone wrong and her mother had had a small fit of hysterics just before starting for church, because the forgetful Mr. Wake had been seen strolling down towards the river with his rod and line and basket at the moment when he should have been getting into his surplice.

  Mr. Hambridge said, “Yes, yes,” hurriedly as she spoke, and “Very fine, ha ha,” but not as though he were listening. Mr. Cork looked at her the most, though in a way that made her feel of less importance rather than more, especially when she spoke of her mother’s hysterics. Yet she felt obliged to look at him, but only when he was not looking, for there was something strange and secret about him which made her feel she had to be strange and secret too. It did not seem as though these two men would amuse her, or she them. The dusty sunbeam slipped out of the room, which now grew very dark though it was still light outside.

  “If I find no pleasure in marriage,” she thought, “I will dress up as a boy and run away to sea.” Women had done it, why not she?

  As soon as she could, she left the table, and Nurse, who was in the hall, took her up to her room.

  “Nurse,” she said, “what shall I do? My husband does not like me, and this house is duller than at home. I don’t believe anything could ever happen in it.”

  She had sat herself on the side of the great bed and was thumping her fists against it. “Look at those curtains,” she said, “they are tapestry and falling to pieces. Moll wrote that all the world in town are having the new-fashioned moiré silk hangings.”

  “It isn’t curtains with French names that will make your bed easy,” said Nurse. “But as your mother has made it, so you must lie on it.”

  “Look, Nurse, is that a tree in the pattern or a stag? No, it is a stag but it has branches growing out of its antlers. What is that story? Don’t you know?” Her voice dropped in disappointment but awakened again in pleasure at the discovery of round tawny fruits hanging from the leafy branches that surrounded the stag. She wondered if he had eaten enchanted fruit which had caused branches to grow from his horns. That the hangings were old-fashioned and dingy was now of no matter; her real disappointment had been that everything here was so like home, and she had expected marriage to be the first step into a new world. Still, she was mistress of her own house now, whatever it was like; she had Nurse with her and no one to scold or beat her except her husband, and he did not strike her as likely to do so. Remembering her new freedom, she began to jump up and down on the side of the bed, singing:

  My lady’s mother’
s made My bed,

  My lady’s mother’s made my bed,

  And since I’m none so pretty,

  Why then, it’s none so hard.

  Dissatisfied with her lack of a rhyme, she tried to find one,—“red,” “dead,” “Ned.”

  “Why then I’ll lie with Ned.

  But who is Ned? Isn’t the blacksmith Ned? Nurse, do you hear? The blacksmith is my bridegroom, and I’m sure he’s no worse than Mr. Hambridge who can’t drink without making a noise.”

  Nurse told her she was a mad thing and must stop that romping and caterwauling and let herself be undressed, for brides had to be abed early. And then, grumbling and stooping, as she pulled off a stocking or picked up a garter, Nurse began to drop bits of advice and warning, from which Nan gathered that her duty as a wife was always to be very loving to her husband and never to notice if her husband were not loving to her. “Many of the best marriages have begun no better,” said Nurse, “and look what the Queen herself had to put up with at first, our Bang, God bless him, thrusting his whore into her service, so that she used to sit alone weeping in her chamber all day on a bed that cost eight thousand pounds.”

  “If I was the Queen and all the Court round me, I’d not sit weeping alone on my bed whatever it cost.”

  “Don’t you take me up so, Mrs. Impudence. Well, they say they’re mighty loving now and he won’t put her away for all she’s borne him no children.”

  “He said he thought they had brought him a bat instead of a woman,” said Nan sadly, for she wondered if Mr. Hambridge had thought her like a bat. Nurse knew her well enough to read her thought.

  “Didn’t your father call you his Nancy Pretty and say you were the pick of the whole basket, and the Lord knows there are enough to choose from? You’re as brown as a berry but you’re as firm and sweet as a nut, and it’s a rotten tooth that would choose a shaking white jelly instead of such as you.” And Nurse banged the shoes together down on the floor and came and stood over Nan as she lay in bed, with her arms akimbo like the comic square figure of Henry VIII that Sir Roderick had once cut out of cardboard.