Freedom's Banner

by Freedom's Banner (retail) (epub)

  As she turned she caught a glimpse of Cousin Constance’s face, a picture that might under other circumstances have afforded her amusement, before allowing her arm to be taken by a portly gentleman in black broadcloth and a canary yellow waistcoat. ‘Cheer up, my dear,’ he said, the words kindly meant. ‘It’s dinner time – and dear Mrs Johnstone does keep a wonderful board.’

  Dear Mrs Johnstone did indeed. As soup was succeeded by three kinds of fish, a joint of mutton and a joint of beef, a choice of duck, quail or chicken and a mountain of sweet things that must, Mattie thought, have stripped some far island of its year’s crop of sugar, she sat smiling emptily and nodding, toying with her food and speaking inanities whilst attempting not to remember the awful things she had said to Johnny Sherwood; and for the first time in her life she found herself close to some accord with Cousin Constance. ‘Do try not to think quite so much, Mattie. And never – never! – answer back. It doesn’t go down well with the gentlemen, you know.’ Well now, she supposed, she did know. The worst of the matter was that, again for the first time in her life, she cared. And there was nothing she could do about it. No amount of wishing could take back the words she had spoken, the offence she had obviously given. She accepted yet another titbit from her portly escort, smiled politely and gave herself up to a sudden and overwhelming misery. A misery, however, that held within it an intransigent core of resistance. She had been right, surely she had? She had been, perhaps, too vehement, too provoking. But for all Johnny Sherwood’s well-argued rebuttals, that did not make her wrong. She just wished she could forget the whole stupid, miserable episode. But she could not. Because, beneath the acutely embarrassing memory of the quarrel lay another memory; of intent dark eyes, and a soft voice: ‘What are all these kissin’s worth, If thou kiss not me?’

  * * *

  Cousin Constance would not – could not, Mattie thought, tiredly – let the incident drop. All the way back to their lodgings in Great Pulteney Street, where the Barlowe children had been left in the charge of Kate, the young nursery maid, she scolded and chattered like a bad-tempered sparrow.

  ‘– Truly, Mattie, if you will not think of yourself, then you might at least have the grace to think of others! Why, I thought I might die of embarrassment! How could you? First to monopolize Mr Sherwood for so long – quite noticeably long I might add! – and then so to have offended him that he left the gathering, and with such a black face! Lord knows what you might have said to him to create such temper!’

  ‘Connie, it was neither my fault nor my doing that Mr Sherwood chose to spend time with me. I’m sure he regrets it now, and won’t make the same mistake again, so you can rest easily on that score at least. As to the other –’ Mattie stopped.

  Constance glanced up at her, waiting, blatant curiosity in her pale eyes.

  ‘As to the other, it really is no-one’s business but ours. We had a disagreement. I spoke perhaps a little too forcibly.’ She ignored Constance’s sharply clicking tongue. ‘The thing is done. There’s no use going over it.’

  ‘Well, I must say I wish you realized how very awkward it has made things for me –’

  ‘I can’t see why.’ Mattie’s temper was getting shorter and shorter.

  ‘With dear Mrs Johnstone, of course! Oh, Mattie, you are so very thoughtless! We go to the Pump Room with her and with Anna tomorrow. And then there’s Thursday’s soiree – Mattie, for goodness’ sake, do slow down a little – you know I can’t keep up with you when you stride away so! I declare you walk like an Amazon! It really is most unladylike!’

  ‘I don’t think I shall go to the soiree on Thursday.’

  ‘Nonsense. Of course you must go. Mrs Johnstone told me she was quite relying upon you to play the piano.’

  ‘Anna can play the piano.’

  ‘Not as well as you can, dear. And anyway –’ Constance stopped.

  And anyway, Anna must be left free to circulate, to hand around the cordial, to simper and to pretend to be the empty-headed fool that Mattie knew perfectly well she was not. Anna must not be tied to the piano stool all afternoon. ‘I’m sorry, Constance, but no. I’ll not be going on Thursday. I’ll take the children on the river. I’ve been promising them for weeks.’ It had been at one of Mrs Johnstone’s musical afternoons that Mattie had first met Johnny Sherwood. He had sung, very pleasantly, a duet with Anna, and had, with his impeccable courtesy, congratulated Mattie on her playing.

  Infuriatingly Constance chose that very moment to produce one of the few perceptive remarks Mattie had ever heard her make. ‘Well,’ she said, lifting her vast, swaying skirts as she negotiated a broken paving slab, ‘I have thought you many things, Mattie Henderson, and have made no bones of it, as you know – but I must say that I never thought you a coward.’

  They finished the walk to the house in a somewhat dangerous silence. Once there, and having rescued poor Kate from a screaming Nicholas, a bad-tempered Elizabeth and an eight- year-old Edward who indignantly denied being the cause of both, Mattie set about organizing bath and bedtime, Constance as usual having produced a sudden and convenient ‘head’.

  ‘– and Master Edward threw Miss Elizabeth’s best doll from top to bottom of the stairs – and she stamped and screamed so I really thought she’d have a fit, and fret herself into a fever, that I did – and that’s what woke the baby, you see, and you know what the mite is like once he’s started –’

  Mattie did indeed. ‘It’s all right, Kate. Come, give Nicholas to me – you go down for the children’s milk.’

  ‘Master Edward says he won’t go to bed. He says his Mama told him he could stay up as late as he wished, and Miss Elizabeth says if he’s staying up then so’s she. I tell you, Miss Mattie, I couldn’t do a thing with them –’

  ‘Leave them to me, Kate.’ Mattie’s tone was grim. ‘I’ll have them in bed in the shake of a lamb’s tail.’

  The girl left, trailing down the stairs, muttering aggrievedly. Mattie sent up a small, heartfelt prayer that she would not give in her notice with the milk. She was the third nursemaid in as many months and Mattie had no inclination to get used to a new one.

  It was later, after she had retired thankfully to her own small room at the back of the house, that she realized that she had, in the confusion of the afternoon, left her father’s Shelley at Mrs Johnstone’s house. She shook out the hair that so offended Constance – thick, straight as black rain, almost to her waist – and picked up her brush. Stopped, watching herself in the mirror. Her thin face was sharp and pale, the too-long mouth set. ‘Drat the thing,’ she muttered, and then, a little louder, ‘and drat Johnny Sherwood with it!’ And felt, after such childishness, a little better. The book was safe enough. She’d pick it up next time she was at the house.

  Constance’s words came back, clear and sharp. ‘I have thought you many things, Mattie Henderson, and have made no bones of it, as you know – but I must say that I never thought you a coward.’

  Mattie outfaced her own reflection for a moment, scowling. Very well. If childishness was to be the order of the day, she’d well and truly give in to it. And she’d pick up the wretched book on Thursday afternoon, when she went to play the piano at the ghastly Mrs Johnstone’s ghastly party.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Mattie Henderson, for goodness’ own sake! Whatever is that you’re wearing?’ Constance, standing in the hall resplendent in turquoise silk and a muslin cap with peacock ribbons that could not quite bring themselves to match the dress, eyed her cousin in scandalized disbelief. ‘Why, it’s surely the dress you wore for the spring cleaning? And in the garden when you helped Taylor clear out the pond? You cannot – you cannot – seriously mean to wear it to Emma Johnstone’s this afternoon? Please, dear, go and change, quickly. We’re quite late enough as it is.’

  Mattie firmly reached for her own bonnet and jammed it on her head. ‘I’m going to play the piano, Constance, not to an audience with the Queen. I don’t need to get dressed up for that.’

  ‘But �
�� you look like a – a governess! Or a shop girl! And with your hair scragged back like that! Mattie – please! I have to insist!’ From the nursery upstairs came an ill-tempered roar and a childish screech of rage. Constance cast uneasy eyes upwards. ‘Hurry, Mattie, do.’

  ‘Constance, I am quite happy with my appearance, thank you. As happy as anyone afflicted with my shortcomings can be, that is, of course.’

  Irony was not one of Constance’s strong points. With one ear still nervously upon the growing pandemonium upstairs she tapped her parasol sharply upon the polished floor. ‘But, Mattie!’

  ‘I come as I am or I stay behind.’ Mattie’s mouth was stubborn. ‘A crinoline makes it quite impossible to sit comfortably at the piano. This will do. It’s decent and it’s clean. What else should one require of one’s clothes?’ She knew she was being childish, but there seemed to be nothing she could do about it. She had spent the past few days trying to erase from her memory the disastrous and ill-tempered exchange with Johnny Sherwood. Finding that impossible, she had attempted instead to rationalize it; they were two strangers who held differing opinions on a thorny issue. What did it matter what he thought of her, her opinions, or the way she expressed them? But there was the rub. It did matter. However much she tried to deny it, she did care what he thought. And upon that rock her sensible ship foundered and she resorted to miserable anger; anger at herself, and at Johnny Sherwood; anger at the world that trivialized great issues and magnified small ones until one doubted one’s own judgement of which was which; at a world that had, above all, so arbitrarily taken her father from her – her stay and prop in time of trouble. He would have known what to do, how to handle this absurd situation; a little frighteningly, she had found some of her fury levelled even at him. What business had he to leave her to face alone a world for which he had never prepared her? Every ounce of obdurate recalcitrance that she possessed – and that, even her indulgent father had been heard to admit, was a considerable amount – had asserted itself. She did not need Johnny Sherwood’s approval, nor Constance’s, nor Emma Johnstone’s, nor the world’s. And to prove it, absurdly, she had donned her dullest and most out-of-fashion dress – a poor washed-out thing of greys and blues and tired thread – thus, she well knew, with spectacular success cutting off her nose to spite her own face. She would have died, however, before she would have changed it for the lemon silk, or indeed for anything half-way becoming. She planted herself foursquare in front of Constance and defied her to try to make her.

  Constance had all but lost interest. Upstairs full-scale war had broken out. Kate could be heard, clearly in tears, calling on Jesus, Mary and Joseph to restore order to the battlefield. If they did not leave now they never would. Constance could see her gossip, her cordial and cakes, her comfortable niche in the detestable Emma Johnstone’s coterie of chosen intimates being snatched away by elves of misfortune anxious to substitute an afternoon of motherly responsibility for three fractious and uncontrollable children. Mattie’s appearance rapidly lost anyof importance. She turned and scurried through the door, leaving Mattie to follow and close it behind them.

  The first thing that Mattie realized as they made their way, late, through the chattering crowd in Emma Johnstone’s over-warm and over-furnished parlour, was that all her fine and silly defiance had been for nothing. Johnny Sherwood was not there.

  ‘So here you are, you naughty pair!’ Mrs Johnstone bore down on them like a galleon under full sail. She eyed Mattie’s less than impressive toilette with a bemused but by no means affronted glance. ‘My dear, how very neat you look. Anna – see – here’s Mattie to play the piano. Fetch your music, my love. And dear Mr Allen – would you consent to sing for us first?’

  It was a very long afternoon. Mr Allen rendered one insipid romantic ballad after another; Anna contributed a little more life with her spirited rendering of ‘A Soldier’s Dream’. The company, some more in tune than others, afterwards joined in a variety of choruses. Mattie was at last left to herself for a while, and lost herself, as best as she could, in a sonata, newly discovered, by the young Johannes Brahms before being called to order by half a dozen young people who were demanding the newest Strauss waltz. It was then she saw Johnny, dancing with Anna Johnstone, smiling down into her laughing face as she instructed him in the dipping, graceful ways of the dance. There could be no doubt about it; they made the most handsome and well-matched pair imaginable. Stiff-fingered Mattie increased the rhythmic, mesmerizing pace of the music. Laughing, the couples twirled, cannoning into one another and into the furniture, clasping each other in an embrace that would under any other circumstances have been totally unacceptable. Indeed, many a matron looked on with disapproving eyes; so much so that when the dance finally ended, despite the eager clamour for more, Emma Johnstone shook her head and firmly drew Johnny forward, patting his hand in a maternally proprietorial way that for some reason grated on Mattie’s nerves like sharp chalk on a slate.

  ‘Mr Sherwood has consented to entertain us again with some of his fellow-countryman Mr Foster’s songs. Mattie, you have the music?’ Mattie sat like a statue as Johnny leaned above her, arranging the sheet music upon the holder. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Johnny Sherwood with “Old Folks at Home”.’

  He had an extremely pleasing voice, a light tenor with a clear, precise tone, and his timing was better than most. He went on to ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, and had the most disapproving chaperones beating time and singing along with ‘Oh Susannah’. But it was with a rousing song called ‘Dixie’, which none of them had heard before, that he raised the roof. Mattie, struggling a little with the unaccustomed, martial accompaniment, glanced at Johnny’s face above her and sharply wished she had not; the clear and fierce pride that lit it would fuel still further, she knew, those dreams against which she had set her mind and was struggling to set her heart. She sat, hands perfectly still on her lap, as the applause filled the room. Sensed his movements beside her as he spoke.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said warmly, the excitement and emotion of the song still upon him. ‘Thank you for your kind applause. Thank you for the support and friendship which I know you and your countrymen bear us and upon which in the future we in the South may well come to depend.’

  ‘Sing us something else, Mr Sherwood. Please do.’

  ‘A duet,’ Mrs Johnstone said, positively. ‘Come, Anna – a duet with Mr Sherwood.’

  Anna came forward. Once again Johnny Sherwood leaned across Mattie, murmuring an unsmiling and impersonal apology as he did so. Mattie was aware of small, knowing glances. There was no-one in the room who would not be remembering the scene in the garden; no-one who would not be noting her fall from grace. Colour mounted in her cheeks. She stiffened her backbone and rested her hands upon the keys. ‘Oh, no,’ she heard Anna say, easily, ‘I can’t manage that one, I’m afraid. Mattie can, though. I’ve heard her. Mattie – come – sing with Mr Sherwood.’ There was mischief in the bright eyes, innocence in the voice. For a fierce and frightening moment Mattie could have struck her dead where she stood.

  ‘Miss Henderson? Would you mind?’ Johnny Sherwood’s voice was cool and quiet above her. She looked not at him but blindly at the music he had placed in front of her, and laid her fingers once more to the keys.

  Small ripples of music filled the suddenly quiet room. ‘Oh, for the wings, for the wings of a dove…’ The gentle song had always been one of her favourites. ‘Far away, far away would I rove.’

  Beside her he had picked up the tune and was humming, his voice harmonizing with hers.

  ‘In the wilderness build me a nest…’ How many times had she sung this for her father, and watched him smile? ‘And remain there forever at rest…’ She lost herself in the song, aware of Johnny’s voice in perfect accord with her own, a sweet partnership that left an empty, aching void as it died with the last notes of the piano. Through the patter of applause she could not look at him; by the time she lifted her head to do so he was gone, with polite and quiet thanks, mo
ving through the smiling audience to where Anna Johnstone awaited him with an eager look, a glass of cordial and a plate of cakes.

  Mattie went back to Brahms.

  She found her father’s copy of Shelley’s poems waiting for her on the hall table as she left. Her thanks to Mrs Johnstone were dismissed. ‘If you left it in the garden, it must have been the gardener who found it, or one of the staff. Anna probably recognized it – oh, goodbye, dear Mrs Brittan – Sally – thank you so much for coming.’

  There were a couple of rose petals caught in the leaves of the book. Mattie opened it to the page that they marked. Her eyes automatically scanned the words she knew so well, registering them before she snapped the little volume sharply shut.

  ‘My soul is an enchanted boat,

  Which like a sleeping song doth float,

  Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing…’

  She let the petals flutter down upon Mrs Johnstone’s fresh-brushed carpet, pushed the book into her pocket and followed Cousin Constance out into the summer evening.

  Perhaps it was Johnny Sherwood who had found the book, she found herself thinking acidly. Perhaps he was memorizing yet another poem. For the delectation and entertainment, no doubt, of Anna Johnstone.

  ‘Mattie,’ Cousin Constance said crossly, ‘I keep telling you – I simply can’t keep up with you when you walk at such a pace –’

  * * *

  Mattie, try as she might, could not bring herself to enjoy – as Constance so determinedly enjoyed – those mornings so essential to the social round of the summer visitors to the city spent gossiping and taking the waters in the Pump Room. Always the place was too hot and too crowded. Always the small, down-at-heel orchestra struggled with admirable if misplaced optimism to be heard above the carelessly raised voices, the chink of china and glass and the clatter of cutlery. Mattie, sipping her spa water with a grimace of distaste, felt truly sorry for them; most especially for the harassed-looking second violin, a portly, middle-aged man who appeared to be wearing someone else’s suit. Perhaps he was also playing someone else’s instrument; he certainly wasn’t playing it very well – ‘I’m sorry?’ she murmured, unable to hide her abstraction.