by Joan Aiken
“High principles,” murmured Alvey.
“So high that they perch everyone else on most uncomfortable pinnacles. She will do very well in Serampore, I don’t doubt. It was certainly a piece of unexampled good fortune for her—your arrival at the Abbey School; your needs dovetailing so well with hers.”
“My venality,” murmured Alvey.
“Oh, fiddlestick! Louisa, of course, attributes the whole course of events to the direct intervention of Providence. I wish that my self-regard allowed me to believe that Providence would interest itself to such a degree in my affairs.”
“Were your parents not surprised when they received Louisa’s letter, informing them that they might expect to see her at the end of the school year, that they would hear no more about her wish to become a missionary?”
“No, not in the least. Neither of them ever took her wishes seriously. Mamma takes no interest in anybody’s ambitions; and my father, of course, had thought all along that it was nothing but a foolish female whim, which would come to naught if treated firmly and ignored.—By the bye, that was a very cleverly worded letter; not a single untruth in it from first to last. I conclude that you composed it? Louisa could never be so ingenious.”
“I composed it; I even wrote it,” admitted Alvey. “Luckily Mrs Camperdowne is so strict about ladylike penmanship that our handwriting is almost indistinguishable.”
“And you really plan to become an author? Write novels? That is a grand ambition! But now I am coming to know you a little, I begin to think that you will succeed in it; you seem to be so observant, to have yourself so well in hand. Have you written a great deal already?”
“Nothing of any great length. I had little time at the Abbey School because I was teaching as well as learning; some poems, some stories and compositions—the kind of things that girls do write.”
“Not in the Winship family,” said Isa with a chuckle.
“Would your parents be very shocked if they discovered? Will it be as bad as Louisa’s urge to convert the heathen?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. Ladies, after all, are known to write novels. There is Madame de Genlis, Miss Owenson, Miss Sykes, Hannah More—Miss Waskerley used to read a great quantity of novels from the Hexham circulating library—Miseries of an Heiress, The Black Robber, The Mysterious Baron, The Chamber of Death, The German Sorceress, The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey—and though Mamma did not read such things herself, and indeed dismissed them as frippery rubbish, she did not interdict us from reading them if we chose to waste our time so.”
Alvey did not find herself encouraged by this; though she did feel a comfortable certainty that her own partially completed work was on a far superior level to any of Miss Waskerley’s reading matter.
“But you do not think, if I had a novel accepted for publication, that your parents would be too greatly distressed and displeased?”
“Well,” said Isa cautiously, “as to that I cannot say. To tell you the truth, such an idea, in our family, is so unheard-of, that I find it impossible to predict how they would react. But of course you would be publishing your book under a nom-de-plume, would you not? So that no disgrace need attach to the Winship family?”
“Oh, of course,” said Alvey laughing. “If I ever succeed in finding a publisher, that is.”
“Thinking more about it,” Isa went on, “I do not see why the fact need even become known to them. You could conduct your correspondence through Mr Allgood at the library in Hexham—he has always been a friend to us, and indeed taught me more about good reading than Miss Waskerley ever did. Louisa sent letters to me and Meg in his care.—But Alvey, here have I been telling you so much about the Winship family, boring on, and I know nothing at all about you! Do, pray, tell me your history—I am sure it must be most exciting compared with our humdrum country life on the northern border. Louisa said that you came from New Bedford in Massachusetts. Have you always lived there? Is it a handsome town?”
Alvey thought of the little town on the hillside, the grassy streets, the wooden houses, some tarred, some simply left to weather, the tangle of masts in the harbour below. Even the biggest and finest dwelling there seemed small and plain compared with the English style of architecture, the houses of stone or brick, moss-grown and creeper-hung, snugly settled in the landscape for hundreds of years. She thought of the winding English roads, zig-zagging between small, odd-shaped fields taking their shape from some series of ancient rights probably dating back to Saxon times, and the roadside banks rising six or ten feet high as the tracks sank deeper and deeper under the trudging feet of successive generations. “Why are your lanes dug so deep in the ground?” she had asked a fellow-pupil when she first came to the English school, and at first she could hardly believe the explanation. “They are not dug, they have been worn that way.” American corduroy roads were straight, flat, lay over the landscape like rules.
How to begin to describe the difference between old England and New England?
But Isa was going on: “And tell me about your parents? At what age did you lose them? Louisa told us that you had been brought up by a guardian who sent you to the Abbey School—was that a relation? Or a friend of your family?”
“I—I lost my parents at the age of ten.” Alvey felt grateful that Isa’s choice of words could dictate the form of her answer. This was a painful topic that she never discussed if she could avoid doing so.
“But you remember them clearly?”
“Certainly. They were—they were very austere. Very devout. They had been members of the Society of Friends, then Unitarians, then joined a sect known as the Universarians.”
“A Christian sect?” Isa’s tone was a little anxious.
“Oh, of course. They were deeply religious. Very gentle, unselfish people.” Alvey paused and thought about this, then added, “But with that tremendous inner strength which comes from faith in one’s own principles.”
“Like Louisa,” said Isa with a chuckle. “Which no doubt helped you to understand her character.”
“Yes, I suppose that is true. It had not occurred to me.”
No wonder Louisa had seemed in some way familiar. Yet Mother and Father—or, as they wanted her to call them, Sarah and Paul—had much more true feeling, true piety in them than Louisa, whose nature had always seemed to Alvey both shallow and selfish. How deeply, desperately troubled they were—or, at least, Mother had been—when—
“But I expect life in a missionary station will soon be teaching Louisa to modify her principles a trifle when necessity dictates,” Isa went on cheerfully. “I imagine she will be in for some surprises out there in Serampore. Now tell me about your guardian, Alvey?”
“She was my cousin Hepzibah Babcock, a remote connection; both my parents were only children and their parents died young, so I have very few relatives. The Clements, my father’s family, came from Devon—an ancestor was that John Clement who was a protégé of Sir Thomas More; he became President of the Royal College of Physicians and later escaped into exile at Louvain, taking with him treatises and letters by Sir Thomas—A Comfort Against Tribulation was one; he died in exile.”
“An impressive ancestor! No wonder your parents were devout.”
“My mother’s family, the Alveys, came from Lincolnshire. But of them I know nothing.”
“And your cousin Hepzibah?”
“A formidable lady.” Alvey smiled a little, remembering the icy climate of disapproval in which she had grown up. It had taken her three years to understand that the disapproval was directed, not at herself, but at her parents. “But she meant very well by me; she spared no pains to ensure that I had an excellent education.”
“She was wealthy?”
“By no means. Her husband had been a feckless man who migrated to the New World with great expectations, and squandered all his capital on ill-fated ventures. When they were nearly destitute my aunt in
vested the small remnant of their savings on a load of chandlers’ stores which she sold from their house; my great-uncle was bitterly mortified and died of the shame, but Cousin Hepzie prospered, and it was on the proceeds of the store that she sent me to school. ‘Never put pride before learning, Sarah,’ she used to tell me.”
“Is she still alive?”
“No, she died two years after I came to the Abbey School. But my fees were paid until the end of the year. And Mrs Camperdowne was so good as to say that I might remain there if I chose and earn my place by teaching the younger ones.”
“So you never saw your Cousin Hepzie again,” said Isa reflectively.
“No. And I was sorry for that. By the time I left for England we had grown to be on very comfortable terms.”
Alvey thought with sadness of that farewell; the indomitable old lady, upright amid driving snow among the untidy casks and coils of rope on the New Bedford quayside, frail but erect in rusty black, protected by nothing but her old umbrella, her blue eyes blazing as she called, “Mind thee learns enough so thee can be an independent woman, Sarah!” before turning and trudging off into the blizzard. A dock lad shouted something impertinent after her and she flashed back such a withering reply that he turned scarlet and stood gaping after her, open-mouthed; Alvey wished she knew what Cousin Hepzie’s words had been.
She gave a long sigh, which turned to a shiver.
Isa said, “It grows cold; I believe we must go down to that odiously stuffy cabin. We do not reach Tynemouth until after midnight.”
“What do we do then?”
“Mrs Girvan spends the rest of the night at the Dean Gate Hotel before travelling on to Morpeth. So, I suppose, will we, if Papa has not sent Archie with the coach to meet us. Papa does not always remember details like that, when they relate only to us girls.”
But Sir Aydon had remembered. When the passengers of the Bethia had been rowed ashore, stiff, yawning, and half frozen (for the shoals at the mouth of the Tyne were so dangerous that ships must anchor in mid-channel; goods and passengers were ferried to land in flat-bottomed barges) Meg, who was longer-sighted than Isa, cried out, “There’s Archie, I see him! Archie, Archie, here we are with Miss Louisa and a whole coach-load of luggage. Make haste, we are half dead of cold!”
A figure shrouded in great-coats stumped over to them and let loose on Meg a torrent of grumbling admonition, not one word of which could Alvey understand.
Mercy! she thought, if the servants all talk like that, how shall I ever manage to communicate with them, or know what they are saying? I never anticipated such a stumbling-block. But what a dialect! It is unlike any language I ever heard in my life.
Meg and Isa appeared to understand Archie’s exhortations perfectly well, and to take little heed of them.
“He says he has been obliged to wait five hours; but after all, it is not our fault the ship was delayed. And he has not been wasting his time; he reeks of porter. Don’t scold, Archie! Those are all our things, over there. Come and get in the coach Alv—Emmy, you must be half perished.”
“What about Mrs Girvan?”
“Oh, she is well enough; her manservant has found her a hackney coach. Thank Heaven we have seen the last of the old misery. Meg will write a polite note of thanks to her when we are home, and we will all sign it. Quick, wrap yourself in this sheepskin; Archie will take care of the bags.”
“How shall I ever understand what he says?”
Isa laughed.
“I forgot that little difficulty. They say it took the Devil himself so long to learn Tyneside that he gave up in despair. You will have to explain that your years in the south have caused you to forget it. But you will soon pick it up. In any case, most of the servants don’t talk so broad as Archie.”
After a long and tedious interval, while the boxes were found and stowed, Archie climbed on to his seat, cracked the whip, and they were off, rumbling over cobbles. Alvey formed little impression of the city of Newcastle, save a black bulk of buildings, unlit at this bleak and early hour. They were soon away from the town, travelling between dark and silent fields. The air that penetrated, despite closed carriage windows, was biting cold, far colder than it had been in the South; Alvey was thankful for the thick sheepskin rug round her. Meg, in the far corner, seemed asleep, but Isa, in the middle, sat bolt upright and peered eagerly ahead into the darkness.
“I am so happy to be coming home!” she confessed. “How Louisa could bear to remain away all those years—and then travel to the Orient without ever seeing Birkland again—! I could not endure to live anywhere but in Northumberland.”
“Is it so very special? In what way?”
“Oh, you will see. In every possible way. The air, the trees, the landscape. Down there in the south,” said Isa distastefully, “the landscape seems so woolly and shapeless. And the air is so dull and stuffy—as if it had been breathed already, a thousand times over. Whereas here in the North—But you are a writer, you will be able to describe the differences much better than I can, when you write about it. I shall look forward so eagerly to seeing it through your eyes, as you describe it. And our family—I suppose you will be making portraits of them all? That will amuse me very much. Shall you write stories about us?”
“Indeed I shall not!” returned Alvey, smiling inwardly at such simplicity. Ordinary people never seemed to understand that writers did not behave like jackdaws, picking up what was to hand, setting it whole and without embellishment into a story. How explain, without offence to Isa, that the delicious, funny, romantic narrative already shaped in her mind was, must be, wholly separate and different from any of the commonplace (though doubtless of great interest to themselves) activities of the Winship clan?
“Think how dangerous it would be if I were to describe you all so that you could be easily recognized,” she added. “Then your parents would certainly have cause for grievance.”
“But if not about us,” said Isa, surprised, “what in the world will you write about?”
“Oh, I have plenty of ideas in my head . . .” Alvey thought affectionately of her hero, Wicked Lord Love. Her words ended in a yawn, and she leaned back in her corner, lulled by the sway of the coach and the steady plod of the horses’ hoofs on the stony road. But Isa continued to sit upright, gazing eagerly forward, as behind them the eastern sky began slowly to pale and lighten, and a bony angular landscape revealed itself ahead.
Archie turned, as daylight grew, and flung back some grumbling, guttural morsel of information, like a bone to a trio of undeserving dogs.
“What does he say?” whispered Alvey.
Meg, without answering, gave a cross grunt and recomposed herself for sleep.
“Meg does not care; they always quarrelled. But I think it wonderful news!” exclaimed Isa in a joyful whisper, and she called through the open panel, “Is it really true, Archie? You wouldn’t tease?”
“Noa, noa, hevvn’t the measter a letter in his aan writing?”
“When does he come, Archie?”
“Saturday’s a week.”
“So soon! Oh, how happy I am!”
“Who is coming?” inquired Alvey.
“Of course you will have to pretend to dislike him, because he and Louisa were always at loggerheads. It would never do to be too friendly—everyone would think it most strange—and so, for that matter, would he—and he and my father are so close, I think he had best not be party to the deception. It would be too hard on him—”
“Who?”
“Our brother James. Half-brother, in fact—his own mother died giving birth to him, and Papa married Mamma the following year, in order to provide a mother for him—but she has never been very fond of James.”
“She preferred her own children?”
“She just is not interested in children at all, except when they are newborn, very tiny. And I suppose James was never that for
her.”
Ahead of them now, the landscape, viewed in full daylight, curved up into a series of wedge-shaped escarpments, like waves of hillside, rising gradually then falling abruptly. The heights were crowned with spinneys of twisted, wind-battered trees, already denuded of leaves, and from hill-crest to crest ran a high stone fortification, a palisade of crumbling grey granite, dropping behind each summit, then seen again, climbing at a crazy angle up almost sheer slopes.
“What in the world is that?” demanded Alvey.
“Hush! You must train yourself not to be so unguarded in your comments,” Isa reproved her, gesturing towards the back of Archie’s head.
“Oh, good God—so I must. And I thought myself so circumspect,” murmured Alvey, pink with mortification.
“It’s of no consequence! Archie is deaf as a post.”
“But what is that astonishing structure?”
“Oh, it is the Roman Wall. Built, you know, by the Emperor Hadrian to keep out the Picts and Scots. It has been there for the past two thousand years.”
Chapter III.
Nish and Tot always woke early, but on the morning of the day when their sister Louisa was expected, they woke even earlier than usual, long before it was light.
Nish opened her eyes first and lay listening to the water of the Hungry Burn, always audible from Birkland Hall at night, when other sounds were stilled: a continuous hushing murmur, a never-ending natural harmony. Today it was extra loud, from rain in the night; the water would be up around the roots of the willows and alders, thought Nish, and all our islands will be half drowned; we shall have to build them up again. The water will be dark brown, darker than tea, and it will have brought down all kinds of branches and floating bits, and maybe a drowned sheep. And the grass along the banks of the Little Burn will be streaming sideways, and the stepping stones will have only their tops above water.