Louisa Elliott

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Louisa thought her a saint and said so; regrettably, she did not think herself the stuff of which saints were made, hating the smell of the clothes she kept for such visits, and hating even more the carbolic baths they were forced to take afterwards. She never felt clean, was always afraid, as she climbed into bed each night, of something lingering. Letty said she would grow used to it: Louisa knew she never would. Robert, meanwhile, complained of what he called the ‘eau de carbolic’ and bought her bottles of expensive French scent to disguise it.

  Beset by the unchanging routines of the regiment, Robert had problems of his own, largely concerned with his men’s welfare. Conditions at the Barracks were hardly any better, he said, than the stews of Patrick Street. In the midst of a running battle with the military authorities, he had little inclination to listen to similar complaints during his time off. Quite simply, he was happy to have Louisa under his own roof, and while they were together he wanted all unpleasantness shut out. She did her best to comply, but, suppressed as it was, her home-sickness increased. She missed York and its comfortable familiarity like an amputated limb; and Dublin, full of strangers only Robert knew, was no substitute.

  The painful contrast between the Patrick Street afternoons and the false, forced, cosy at-homes, made everything worse. The regimental wives were rank-conscious to a point Letty found laughable; their unwritten codes hard to follow, their snobbery unbearable. It soon became clear that Mrs Kelly was by far the kindest of her peers, and not even her attempts to smooth a way for Louisa would ensure acceptance in that very tight clique.

  Letty’s reciprocal afternoons were attended only by that august lady and her daughter, by Tommy’s empty-headed little widow and a very junior wife who seemed to find herself there by mistake. Amelia Loy called from politeness, and invited them back as a matter of form; but while Letty managed to listen intelligently to the society gossip, Louisa was quite beyond her depth. She understood little of hunting’s finer points, and less about the Irish gentry. They were foreigners to her, every one of them, full of prurient, un-English curiosity about each other, and open contempt for their cousins who ruled from across the water. Louisa found it shocking. What they thought about her, she had no idea. Probably not very much, she told herself sternly: most of the time, by the women at least, her presence was ignored.

  Gradually, her resilience wore thin; what she had summoned quite easily in August became by December an increasingly threadbare mantle she donned every evening as she changed for dinner. And, with masculine myopia, Robert seemed not to notice.

  He was very busy up to Christmas, and although when he was at home he always slept with her, they did not often make love. This was something of a relief to Louisa, whose fatigue seemed unconquerable, despite the number of hours she slept. She imagined, on the occasions when he kissed her tenderly and then turned away, that he was as tired as she was herself. It was a surprise therefore that he pressed his attentions one night, and then lost his temper at her halfhearted acquiescence. After some harsh words, in which oaths and York and home-sickness were liberally mingled, he left to sleep in his own room.

  She was too miserable to weep, and too aware of his absence to relax. She dozed and dreamed, and the dreams were nightmare distortions of her everyday life: crippled beggars leering and touching; red, laughing military faces; a sneering Irish voice saying over and over: ‘The goods are bought and paid for – bought and paid for – bought and paid for...’ and a hand dragging her backwards, back to some nameless terror...

  She woke in tears, with Robert leaning across the bed and shaking her. ‘Come on, now, wake up, it’s only a dream.’ It was dark, but he was fully-dressed, she could feel the prickly serge of his working dress against her face as he held her close. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I crept in looking for my watch-chain. Then you were crying and shouting,’ he said, sounding amused. ‘I thought you’d wake the whole house.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered against his shoulder.

  ‘There’s no need — you couldn’t help it.’

  ‘I mean about last night.’

  There was a momentary tension in the hands that held her. ‘Ah, yes. Well, so am I. I was more tired than I realised,’ he admitted with a sigh, ‘which is probably why I lost my temper. However, I didn’t sleep very well.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ Louisa murmured. Reaching up, she touched his face, feeling its freshly-shaved smoothness beneath her fingers. ‘I do love you, Robert, really I do.’

  A muscle in his jaw tightened. With a short little laugh, he said: ‘Can I have that in writing, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, Robert, don’t. I wish I could explain – I don’t understand it myself...’ She broke off, unable to continue.

  For a second, his fingers bit deep into her shoulder; she heard a tremulous indrawn breath and its sudden release. ‘Darling, I have to go. I wish I could stay, but Harris is waiting. We’ll have to talk later.’

  With a brief kiss he released her, and Louisa leaned back against the pillows, watching him search for the missing watch-chain amongst the items on her bedside table. There won’t be time, she thought with sick frustration: there never is. And in a house full of people, no privacy either.

  At lunchtime, while she was rinsing hands and face of chalk-dust from the schoolroom, Moira came into her room with the noon post. ‘A nice fat letter from Mr Edward, ma’am.’

  With a cool murmur of thanks, Louisa took the envelope. ‘You know, Moira, it’s very irritating to be told who my correspondent is before I’ve had a chance to open the envelope myself. I wish you wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, ma’am. It was only that I thought it would cheer you...’

  Awaiting a reply while Louisa slit the envelope with a slim ivory paperknife, she earned herself a chillier dismissal. In high dudgeon she took herself off, closing the door behind her with rather too much force.

  Ignoring the girl, Louisa withdrew the pages of the letter and sat down, instantly warmed by the sight of that familiar writing and comforted by the amount.

  ‘My Dear Louisa,’ she read, ‘it was good to have your long letter after weeks without news. The regular notes addressed to your mother assured me you were in reasonable health, but I was beginning to fear Christmas would come and go without a more personal word.

  ‘Having read your dozen pages several times, I do understand why you felt unable to write before, and am most sincerely sorry for all the drama and anxiety you have suffered of late. A difficult situation; but, my dear one, at the risk of sounding hard and unfeeling, may I say that you should have expected it. Well, something like it, anyway.

  ‘As to that poor young woman, his wife — what can I say? That others fare worse? In his way, I’m sure the Captain does his best, and after all, she is not locked away in some lunatic asylum and conveniently forgotten.

  ‘Regarding the financial side, I don’t know his income, and nor do you. Perhaps you might ask? An indelicate subject for you, I know, but rather that embarrassment than all this worry, which might well be needless.

  ‘Other than that, I cannot advise you. If you are indeed as unhappy as your letter suggests—and only you know the truth of that—then perhaps the time has come to consider your choices. You don’t have to stay, you know. Home is still here, and we all miss you very much…’

  Below, the letter continued in different ink, a resume of work and home in Edward’s usual flowing, graphic style. She could see the fussiness of his customers as he described them, hear her mother’s voice and Bessie’s as he related comments and occurrences; with a sigh she turned back to the beginning and read the first two pages again.

  His ruthless fairness to all concerned, particularly Robert, was hurtful. And the phrase: ‘we all miss you very much’ reduced her to such fury that she crumpled the letter and let it fall. A hot storm of self-pity swept through her, and for several minutes, not knowing the number of pages discarded, the torment her letter and its reply had caused him, she raged a
gainst Edward, demanding of herself why he could not say: ‘I miss you – I need you — I want you to come home.’

  She did not know, for Edward could not say, that his replies to her letters were tailored for the benefit of eyes other than hers; that he had no way of knowing whether her letters were read by Robert; and his inclusion of one small endearment was simply to soften the apparent harshness of his comments.

  The sound of the gong jerked Louisa to her feet, and she hurried down to luncheon; immediately afterwards, it being a Patrick Street afternoon, she returned to change into one of the old, plain skirts she kept for such visits. Like everything else, it was sponged and aired regularly, but the smell lingered, taking her mind off everything but the dread of what was to come.

  Robert had had a particularly frustrating morning. It was pouring with rain, the drill ground was awash, and none of the people he intended to see were available. After an hour spent kicking his heels in the Adjutant’s office, a miserable lunch in the Mess broke what remained of his patience; consigning all to perdition, he shouted for Harris and told him they were going home.

  Thoughts of dry clothes and a warm fire consoled him throughout the wet, two-mile ride from Islandbridge to Fitzwilliam Square. He would have a good hot bath, followed by tea in the study with Louisa. Just the two of them; and they would talk things out which was essential. Afterwards, he would take her out to dinner, again just the two of them, and after that...

  As Harris took his cloak in the hall, Robert told him to get to the kitchen for a hot drink. ‘You can collect my things later,’ he said as he mounted the stairs. ‘Find some dry clothes yourself, first.’

  Shaking his head at that abrupt change of mood, Harris almost smiled. Filthy temper first thing, he thought, getting worse by the hour; then suddenly all sweetness and light. It was beyond him, and he did not dwell on the matter. In the kitchen, however, Moira gave him cause to ponder afresh. Elbows on table, nursing a pot of tea, she was deep in conversation with the cook. At sight of Harris she set the tea down and adjusted herself to a more ladylike pose, while Cook automatically reached another pot from the dresser.

  He stood by the fire, warming himself, stealing surreptitious glances at the girl. He felt awkward in this household of largely female servants, and although he liked Moira Hanrahan, he was never quite sure how to show it. She had the kind of face he wanted to look at all the time, because her expression was always changing, never the same for two minutes together. She could be mad, sad, glad, according to what she was saying, and it fascinated him, who had spent a lifetime keeping all feelings strictly to himself. Even in a city of pretty girls, she was pretty; and he liked her smile, too, which was never cruel, even when she teased him, which was often. At the moment, however, she was too put out even to tease.

  ‘So after that, didn’t I change my mind, and I thought — why should I go out an afternoon like this, with it raining cats and dogs? If they want to go there and catch their deaths and worse down Patrick Street, well that’s up to them. But I don’t have to – it is my afternoon off, after all.’

  Sympathizing, Cook said she would not give up her time off for anything at all, and certainly not to serve pigs’ trotters and cabbage soup to those dregs from the Liberties.

  ‘Something upset you?’ Harris asked gruffly as Cook disappeared into the pantry.

  ‘Not upset me,’ Moira said with a toss of her head, ‘made me mad. Tore me off a strip, she did, just because I gave her a letter and told her who it was from. She’s such an old misery these days, and no mistake. Sure, if I’d known that, I’d have stayed at home. And there’s me,’ she added crossly, ‘thinking the letter’d cheer her up.’

  Feeling sorry for the girl, Harris pondered. As a rule, he never commented on his master’s moods, but after all, this was not the regiment, and tomorrow was Christmas Eve. A moment later, he said sympathetically: ‘He’s been the same – like a bear with a sore head this morning. Probably had a bit of a row last night. They’ll be right as rain tomorrow, just you wait and see.’

  Arriving home at five, the two women deposited umbrellas and galoshes in the hall, while McMahon removed their cloaks as though with tongs, and took them away to some secret storage place. As always, his expression of severe distaste brought a rueful smile to Letty’s face.

  ‘And now, the bath,’ she said as they mounted the stairs. ‘I can’t wait – my head itches. I envy you your short crop, Louisa, believe me, I do!’

  ‘Short hair wouldn’t suit you, Letty,’ Louisa said with a tired grin.

  ‘No, but it must be so much easier to wash!’ Scratching comically, she disappeared into her room.

  In the bathroom she shared with Robert, Louisa stripped off every item of clothing into a wicker basket, and, pouring carbolic solution into the bath, stepped in for a quick but thorough wash. Draining the water, she ran more, this time to soak with scented bath-salts and a bar of expensive soap.

  With her hair washed twice, Louisa wrapped herself in her robe and her hair in a towel, and with a contented sigh went through into the bedroom, where she knew a tray of tea and biscuits would be waiting.

  Robert was also waiting. Fully-dressed, with a half-smoked cigar, he lay at ease on Louisa’s bed, viewing her unsmilingly beneath half-closed lids. On the table beside him, the table where he had searched for his watch-chain early that morning, were the smoothed-out pages of Edward’s letter.

  ‘So,’ he remarked tersely, ‘have you considered your choices, my dear one? Have you decided whether to stay or go?’

  Half an hour later they were still locked in heated argument, accusing each other of secrecy, defending points, still circling the points at issue. Louisa’s hair was dry, but she was not dressed, and the tea stood untouched on the tray.

  ‘I’ll tell you again,’ Robert said angrily, ‘that I do not read your personal mail. I know where your letters are — in that drawer in the dressing-table — and I haven’t the slightest desire to read their contents. I would not have read this, except that I wondered what it was, lying crumpled beneath the chair. I’d scanned the first page before I realized.’

  ‘And so you read the rest,’ she said, with virtuous contempt.

  ‘Yes, I damn well did, hoping to discover what he was talking about. You still haven’t explained why my personal affairs should be of interest to him, and I think I’ve every right to demand an explanation.’

  Wearily, Louisa acknowledged the truth of that; she sat down, watching his angry pacing, and finally begged him to be still. ‘I had a lot on my mind,’ she said, as he leaned against the mantelpiece, ‘and I wish you could appreciate that. Things happened at White Leigh — things I didn’t want to tell you about – didn’t want to worry you with. I couldn’t discuss them with anyone here, nor did I want to worry them at home. But it got worse, Robert, so bad, I couldn’t think clearly any more. You thought I was just home-sick, but it was more than that, I needed advice. So, eventually, I wrote to Edward. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do,’ she acknowledged bitterly, ‘but as you can see from his letter, he is fair – scrupulously so – and doesn’t leap to silly conclusions.’

  ‘Tell me what happened at White Leigh,’ he demanded, ignoring the gauntlet of her last comment; and as he listened to the carefully restrained account of Anne Duncannon’s self-righteous attack, his mind leapt ahead, deducing, before Louisa said so, that she had been goaded into visiting Charlotte. With a single, half-smothered oath, he swung away to the window, looking out into darkness.

  With many halts and hesitations, Louisa finished the tale; she could see Robert’s face reflected in the glass, and it mirrored her own wretchedness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it. ‘I shouldn’t have gone. I gave your sister-in-law her victory, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did indeed,’ he murmured. ‘But at least you know I spoke the truth.’ Making for the door, he said: ‘I think I’d better leave you to dress — it’s almost time for dinner. Oh, and by the way,’ he added, without loo
king at her, ‘I’d like you to know that this house was not renovated purely for your benefit, nor is it run solely for you. I needed somewhere to live, other than White Leigh, and it was time I provided a home for my daughter.’

  Robert said, after dinner, that he had work to do in his study. Pleading a headache, Louisa bade Letty an early goodnight and went to her room, mortified by self-accusation and the hair-shirt of failure. With the spectre of that afternoon’s experiences before her, she refused to lapse into self-pity, and instead picked up Edward’s letter, reading the first two pages through again.

  If you are indeed as unhappy as your letter suggests — was she? — then perhaps the time has come to consider your choices. You don’t have to stay. Perhaps not. But had she come too far?

  In the cooler light of detachment, it seemed to Louisa that she had expected too much; or, rather, not knowing the waters into which she plunged, had foreseen different dangers. Dreading untold depths, she had found the pain of sharp rocks in the shallows; and was now caught wondering which way to turn. Was it easier to plunge on into deeper water and trust that she could swim; or to suffer the greater pain of returning to a safe and familiar shore?

  Only you know the truth of that, Edward said.

  But I’m still not sure, she silently answered. Smoothing the letter, folding it, she returned it to the envelope. With her anger gone, she stood by the dressing-table, looking into the drawer where her other letters lay, and was suddenly thankful for their lack of endearment. Edward was Edward: calm, detached and fastidiously fair; not understanding that, Robert would always be jealous.

  Sighing, she closed the drawer, and loneliness descended like a leaden weight. Christmas, she thought, and sighed again; it was too late to make decisions, and she was far too tired. On a resolution to be bright and cheerful over the festive season, she rang the bell for Moira; afterwards, she thought, she would talk to Robert calmly, tell him how she felt, and between them they would decide whether she should return to York.