What Louisa dreaded, with an anxiety which often kept her awake at night, was her introduction into Irish society, an introduction which Robert often referred to, but as yet had had no time to implement. ‘This winter,’ he kept saying, ‘when the troubles have died down and we’re back in Dublin on a permanent basis, we’ll get out and about and have a great old time, I promise you. And White Leigh — you must see White Leigh.’
White Leigh, she thought, her spirits plummeting to new depths: White Leigh in all its grandeur, with Sir William and Lady Anne viewing her disparagingly; and in the background somewhere, like a malignant, doom-laden ghost, Charlotte Duncannon, Robert’s true and legal wife.
‘Oh, Edward,’ she whispered to the letter spread so innocently across her dressing-table, ‘what have I done?’
Two
Despite the warmth of the invitation which came from Lincolnshire, Edward’s journey in the third week of October was not without trepidation. Walking down to the village from the little halt, he hardly noticed that August’s wreckage had disappeared under the golden veil of autumn. Orange rosehips and dark red haws, lush blackberries nestling in hedgerows of yellowing willow and purple elder, all were lost to the rehearsal of his opening words. Beneath that anxious framing, his poet’s eye was dulled, missing brown earth and bleached fallow fields, the gleaming bronze and gold of distant woodlands. A young rabbit scuttled noisily into the hedge as he passed, but Edward’s eyes were on those great iron gates at the bend in the road, his thoughts once again on the family which had given him life.
As before, he went straight to the inn to register his arrival and leave his things. Recalling their visitor from the previous occasion, the landlord greeted Edward like an old friend, pulling a pint of ale and setting down a plate of cheese and pickles before him. Even his wife was friendlier, informing Edward that there would be roast mutton for supper, and steamed apple pudding to follow. The landlord was so voluble, Edward began to fear he would never get away.
Eventually, feigning reluctance, he pulled out his pocket watch and sighed heavily at the time. ‘I shall have to go, I’m afraid — I have an appointment to keep.’
‘Ah,’ the older man murmured knowingly. ‘With the Vicar, I expect. Come to see them monuments again, have you?’
Edward smiled with relief. ‘Indeed I have. Didn’t get chance to discuss them last time. I’m hoping the Vicar will be able to give me the benefit of his knowledge today.’
‘Oh, he’ll do that all right. Likes nothing better, don’t the old Vicar. Does him good to have somebody to talk to – he’s a bachelor, see, and family don’t bother him much. There’s just him and his housekeeper, Mrs Pepperdine. Good woman, she is, but it’s not the same as having a wife, is it, sir?’
‘No,’ Edward agreed, ‘I’m sure it’s not.’
And as he left the little snug, he thought: Will that be me, one day? In thirty years’ time, when my hair is thinning like my conversation, and what remains of my family is scattered and gone, will that be me?
His footsteps crunched on the gravel drive leading to the Vicarage, and ahead of him the mellow Jacobean house seemed to sleep in the autumn sun. Red Virginia creeper covered the south and east walls, fallen leaves making a jeweled carpet beneath. Awaiting an answer to his summons, Edward had a boyish desire to walk through those glorious leaves, kicking as he went. Instead, he picked one up and smoothed it between the pages of a small notebook, replacing it in his pocket as the door was opened.
A small, stout, elderly lady asked him inside as he gave his name. He was expected, she said, she led him across the enormous hall to an oak-panelled door. His heart was hammering as she announced him, and then she was standing back, and somehow Edward’s legs took him forward into a book-lined study. A log fire was crackling and sunlight streaming through mullioned windows; from an old leather armchair a slight figure in clerical black rose and came towards him.
Edward’s finely-wrought phrases deserted him. Like a tongue-tried schoolboy he shook hands and accepted the proffered seat, his mind a blank. In response to civilities regarding the weather and his journey down from York, Edward managed adequate replies. Before he had truly recovered his composure, it dawned on him that he was being questioned, gently, but quite directly, about himself.
‘I know York well,’ George Gregory said. ‘Through church business mainly, although I have made personal visits. My interest is mainly medieval architecture, and York is well-blessed, as you know. Yes, a beautiful city, although, like Lincoln, many of its churches are in a sad state of repair nowadays. And too many threatened with quite the wrong kind of restoration!’
Edward was bound to agree, relating the tale of two supposedly crumbling examples, one replaced by a soulless modern building, the other so well-founded it was still in the process of being demolished a year later.
For a while they each lamented modern trends, and lauded one or two of York’s finer restorations, but then the older man brought the subject back to Edward. Had he lived in York long? Was his father also in the bookbinding business?
It was a seemingly casual question, but as Edward glanced up into those pale grey eyes he thought he saw more than ordinary curiosity, more than a simple need to place him in the social scale. Indeed, it seemed to Edward that the older man hung quite anxiously on his reply, exuding the kind of sympathetic encouragement any father might extend to his son.
Swallowing hard, he said: ‘Sadly, sir, I never knew my father.’
‘Sad indeed,’ was the softly-phrased comment. ‘He died, I presume... before you were born?’
‘He may have done,’ Edward managed to say, ‘but I’m not aware of it. In fact, sir, in all honesty, I know nothing whatsoever about my father. My mother never spoke of him — ever.’
So afraid was he to break the silence which followed, Edward scarcely even breathed. He could feel the anxious throbbing of his pulse, and even the air between them, lit by a beam of sun, seemed tangible and taut.
As George Gregory dropped the hand which had shielded his face, Edward thought the thin face seemed thinner, the grey eyes infinitely sadder and darker. ‘I’m exceedingly sorry to hear that. Every man should know his father – for good or ill.’
‘I’ve always thought so. Unfortunately, my mother thought otherwise.’
‘May I ask her name?’
‘Elizabeth Elliott.’ Again the sudden flinch, a lengthy silence. ‘She was born,’ Edward went on, ‘not too many miles from here, in Blankney. She had four brothers and a younger sister — ‘
‘Blankney, you say? I thought it was…’ Frowning, he asked: ‘Are you sure it was Blankney?’
‘They moved to Metheringham later, when my mother was about ten years old, I believe.’
‘I knew someone — by that name — who came from Metheringham…’
‘Perhaps it was my mother,’ Edward said gently, drawing a small carte de visite from his inside breast pocket.
He rose and passed it across. The photograph showed a young, unsmiling woman in a plain dark crinoline; she had light eyes and dark hair, centre-parted and caught up in the ringlets fashionable at the time. Her features were regular, possessing the well-shaped generous mouth common to most of the Elliotts. Had she been smiling, Edward felt, she would have been pretty; but the photograph showed that slight downturn of the lips, a feature which was well-pronounced by the end of his mother’s life.
‘Ah, yes. Elizabeth.’ The name was no more than a breath, but such feeling was in its softness that Edward paused, arrested in speech and movement by that almost palpable emotion. ‘I loved her, you know – but then she went away.’ For a moment the older man gripped his hand. He seemed moved beyond words. ‘My fault,’ he said gruffly, ‘not hers.’
Clearing his throat, he polished his spectacles, then rose and tugged sharply at the bell-pull. ‘I think we’ll have tea,’ he said briskly. ‘Then you must tell me all about her – what she did, where she went, what happened to the pair of you. You’v
e kept me waiting a long time, young man,’ he added with mock severity, ‘and now you are here, you must tell me everything.’
Edward related the bare facts, as he knew them, of his mother’s life and death: a knowledge so pathetically small, it shamed him to realize how lacking his interest in her had been. Perhaps because of her refusal to divulge the only facts which were important to him, he had paid little attention to what else she might have offered. And what Edward had wanted was his father’s story.
Before he would tell it, however, he wanted Edward’s life, and that was a tale more difficult to relate, punctuated by many halts and hesitations. Enveloped in a blanket of silent sympathy, there were moments when he had to move about the room in order to control his wayward emotions. He found the elderly cleric an excellent listener, his questions shrewd yet tactful.
Skimming his adult years, and determined above all things to reveal nothing of the circumstances, Edward simply said that his aunt had given him the family name, and from there he had pursued his own research. While he was speaking, it suddenly occurred to Edward that he had been accepted; that this man knew Edward was his son just as surely as Edward had known his identity that very first day.
Breaking off, he said: ‘Tell me, sir — did you know? That day in the church, did you know who I was?’
‘I didn’t know,’ George Gregory said slowly. ‘That’s the wrong word. But the name, you see, gave me a shock. It’s not common in these parts, and simply to hear it uttered brought Elizabeth immediately to mind. And then, of course, there was something about you, something familiar. Enough, at least, to make me seek further conversation. It was really quite frustrating to be denied that opportunity.
‘I hoped for a while that you’d return, but didn’t really expect it. And then I had your letter. Don’t ask me why, but I had the strongest feeling that you were connected with her, and through Elizabeth, with me. I suddenly recalled something — something I’d seen for a fleeting second as we shook hands that morning — your recognition of me.’
‘And so you knew?’
‘No, I hoped. But now I know.’ With a keen glance, George Gregory said: ‘I can see her in you – cheekbones, brow – and something of my own father, I think, about the eyes. Yes,’ he nodded, ‘you have a look of the Gregorys too… ‘
For several moments, without constraint or embarrassment, the two men simply looked at one another, weighing and assessing, finding balance on either side, sensing the easeful warmth of fellow-feeling and knowing the liking went beyond that of mere blood.
Overcome by a sudden surge of gratitude and affection, Edward felt his throat tighten; bereft of words he could only smile.
Rather gruffly, his father offered him more tea, noisily shifting cups and plates, complaining at the lack of hot water. He rang the bell again, and with its arrival was once more himself. Almost casually, as though speaking to an old and trusted friend, he began to talk about his early life.
Originally, he said, there had been no thought of entering the Church. Up at Cambridge, reading Law, he was, he said, a typical undergraduate home for the Easter recess, determined, after a largely misspent three years, to cram for those all-important final exams. Along with most of his friends he had spent too much time drinking and running up to town, reading Shelley and Byron in preference to dull legal tomes, and generally imagining himself a wild degenerate of the first water. ‘Whereas in reality I was — we all were – so terribly innocent.’
It was his sister’s infatuation with the son of family friends which led to his meeting with Elizabeth. Bored, leaving his sister to her own devices, George had wandered away after luncheon for a walk in the grounds; and it was there he met Elizabeth.
Sitting beneath a tree in the spring sunshine, book in hand and beautifully attired, he assumed she was either a guest of the house or a local inhabitant allowed to make free with the park. Nodding to her as he passed, he stopped to speak on the way back, asking from a polite distance what book it was that so held her attention.
‘It was a book of poetry; and the poem she was reading was Thomas Gray’s famous ‘Elegy’. Wanting to impress,’ George Gregory went on dryly, ‘I began a discourse, sadly somewhat woolly and sentimental, stopping only as I noticed the change in her expression. From polite interest, she evidenced considerable disdain.
‘At this point – as my words dried in my throat, this lady told me quite brutally that I knew nothing of the subject. She demolished my gems of literary and stylistic appreciation in a few short, pithy sentences. Her appreciation of the poem’s true meaning left me speechless with admiration – stunned in fact. I could hardly believe that beauty such as hers should be matched by a degree of intellect superior to my own.
‘Of course, she was mature – and I was just a youth who thought he knew everything. Clearly, I did not – and that impressed me even more. It did not occur to me that her arguments, so articulately expressed, were rooted in personal experience. Or,’ he added, ‘that she was in fact both more and less than she seemed…
‘I have to admit to an early and unforgiveable blindness – a blindness I have spent the rest of my life correcting. But in those early years I knew little of servants – as far as I knew they were largely illiterate. I could not imagine a maidservant knowing much more than her name, so it was incredible that one would be intelligent, educated, and so very attractive.
‘Despite my attempts to elicit information, Elizabeth kept her identity a secret. In fact she made rather a game of it, which added piquancy to our subsequent meetings. I suspected she was playing with me, but the situation was far too pleasurable to relinquish…’
The years seemed to roll away as his father talked; Edward could see the lively, animated young man he must have been, imagine the attractive, witty, teasing young lady by his side. But that image, preserved by the older man for almost forty years, did not match his own experience; at least not until he remembered the difference in their ages. Elizabeth Elliott was a clever woman, years older than the immature and impressionable student she was leading on.
It pained him to see how that deception still held, for he liked George Gregory, feeling a natural affinity with him which had never existed between his mother and himself. He did not wish to disillusion him. In a curious way, however, that insight helped the separate pictures come together; he knew then that they were talking about the same woman.
Back at Cambridge, George succeeded even less with his studies, living only for the end of term when he could see his beloved Elizabeth again. He even extracted an invitation to stay at the house for a week, and it was during that time, he murmured sadly, that he had discovered her identity. On the second day of his visit he came face to face with her in the drawing room.
The shock was shattering. To see her there, so unexpectedly, was one thing; to realize she was a servant, albeit a very superior one, was another. Worst of all, however, was to hear her addressed by surname only, like some faceless, characterless being who existed rather than lived.
‘This may sound childish, but it was her blank expression – it actually frightened me. She looked what she was supposed to be, and that was not the Elizabeth I knew. But to see my own dear love, with all her wit and sensitivity, labouring in virtual bondage to a dull, plodding woman who wouldn’t have known a sonnet from a sow’s ear — it was abominable! I wanted to shout and protest, tell them it was all some dreadful mistake. But I said nothing. I think I spilled a cup of tea.’
In the hours that passed between that tea-time and their next meeting, the young George Gregory set foot on the road to understanding. Elizabeth’s fine clothes were expertly remade cast-offs from her mistress’s wardrobe, a perquisite, like the free afternoons, of her privileged position; a position she had achieved simply because of the education and natural refinement which had fooled George in the first place.
He told Edward that when Elizabeth eventually arrived at their usual meeting-place the next day, she was contrite and pale-face
d, full of apology and ready to flee; but after all that had happened, to him at least, he was not prepared to let her go. Bit by bit he elicited her story, and was so moved by what he saw as the tragedy of wealth and position reduced in a single stroke to numbing poverty that he loved her even more. He proposed marriage, swore on his own life to redress the wrongs she had suffered, never dreaming how utterly impossible that would prove to be.
‘It was a very emotional afternoon,’ he said succinctly; but Edward watched the youthfulness disappear. Once more he was a man in his sixties, his age accentuated by the dress of his calling.
Edward understood, and in the silence which followed he thought of his mother and her lifelong bitterness at a promise broken; considered his own existence, which should never have been, except for the heightened emotions of a solitary afternoon. And he thought of Louisa, in Ireland with Robert Duncannon.
Distracted by his own private tragedy, for a moment Edward lost the thread of what the older man was saying. Something about the fury of his father at the failure in those final exams, and drastic cuts in his allowance.
‘Just in time,’ he said, ‘I managed to stop myself from blurting out my true intentions. With a vast reduction in finance, I knew I could not afford to marry Elizabeth just then – so with promises to my father that I would work like a slave for the next two terms, I knew I must ask Elizabeth to wait.’
Louisa Elliott Page 44