Unfortunately he’d reckoned without Miss Amelia Pettie.
She was taking tea with Nan and Annie when he and Jericho arrived in Angel Square, and the sight of him put her into an immediate and voluble flutter.
‘Now here’s Mr Leigh,’ she said, patting her ringlets. ‘He will tell you, my dear, I’m sure on it. Won’t you, Mr Leigh?’
He gave her his most charming smile. ‘Indeed I will, Miss Pettie, if you tell me what ’tis.’
‘Should Annie attend this ball, think ’ee?’ Nan said, laughing at her neighbour’s confusion.
It was plain that they’d all made up their minds about it, so he agreed at once. ‘What could be better? Then I shall have three pretty ladies to escort.’ At which Miss Pettie went quite pink and clutched at both sets of false curls at once, and Annie smiled and ducked her head in shyness.
But it was a confounded nuisance, for it meant that Nan spent the next three days supervising the making of her daughter’s ‘very first ball gown’ and hardly had any time to speak to him at all, even in bed, for she sat up so late there was barely time to kiss her before she fell asleep. And Miss Pettie was in and out of the house every minute of the day chattering and giggling and gossiping and getting in the way. ‘She will be the belle of the ball, will she not, Mr Leigh?’ she asked, at least three times a day. ‘And who knows, she might make a match.’
And he would agree and smile until his jaws ached, wishing she would go away. But at least the atmosphere was good and Nan was happy and that was a good omen.
And the ball was a great success. He bought flowers for all three women, daisies for the old lady, red roses for Nan, and forget-me-nots for Annie, ‘to match your pretty eyes, my dear’. And even though part of his mind was busy and watchful waiting for the opportunity to propose to his elusive Nan, he was touched by Annie, who looked shy and pretty in her simple white gown and wore his blue flowers in her hair. There was such a wistful air about her, as if she were yearning for a partner who wasn’t there. It made him feel positively paternal to watch her. He made sure that she was introduced to plenty of partners and took care to dance with her himself whenever her card was unmarked.
But Nan was impossible, being partnered by so many unnecessary gentlemen she hardly had a dance left on her card for him. ‘Who are all these people?’ he asked tetchily, when she returned to him after the supper interval. ‘You surround yourself with strangers.’
‘They en’t strangers to me,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘They’re my neighbours and my customers. All good for trade, my dear.’
But impossible for romance. However, he stayed cheerful and smiling and quick on his feet, handsome in his brown coat and his yellow waistcoat and his fine white breeches, encouraged because he knew he was being admired by several young ladies in the hall, even if Nan wasn’t paying him enough attention. When we are home in our bedroom alone, then, he thought …
But even then he was thwarted, although in the most appetizing way. For Nan was in splendidly amorous mood and had no intention of talking, and when they had loved to their mutual satisfaction she turned on her side and slept almost at once, pausing only to tell him sleepily that he’d had been ‘uncommon kind to Annie’. And when he woke in the morning she was already up and dressed and gone. He couldn’t believe such bad fortune. He’d been in the house for four days and he hadn’t found one single suitable moment. If that wretched Miss Pettie comes round to talk about the ball, he thought, I swear I’ll throttle her.
But she did and he didn’t. Instead he smiled and made polite conversation and watched the clock steadily revolving towards the time when he would have to leave. And it was such a perfect day too. Angel Hill was golden brown in the sunshine.
Miss Pettie took her leave after Thiss had been sent to collect Jericho from the stables. I have fifteen minutes, Calverley thought. It was desperately little time.
‘We will take a turn about the square while we wait,’ Nan said, when she’d waved goodbye to her everlasting neighbour.
‘Must we?’ he said, heart sinking.
‘Indeed we must. On a day like this ’twould be a waste to be within doors.’
So as he didn’t dare to annoy her by argument, they stepped out of the house and took a brief walk about the square. After a few moments Annie joined them, demure in her straw bonnet and her long-fringed shawl, and walked with them as far as the Abbey gardens, where she spent most of her afternoons these days.
They watched her as she disappeared through the medieval gateway.
‘I shall walk on to Mr Turnbull’s shop once you are gone,’ Nan said. ‘I’ve a mind to build a summer-house in the garden. What do ’ee think of that?’
‘I’ve a mind to make changes myself,’ he said.
‘Then you shall speak to Mr Turnbull too.’
The idea of proposing to the builder made him laugh out loud. ‘Mr Turnbull ain’t the one to be told the sort of changes I have in mind.
‘Then who is, pray?’ she asked, intrigued.
‘Why you are, my charmer.’
She stood quite still with one gloved hand resting on his arm. ‘That sounds uncommon serious. You’d best tell me.’
It wasn’t the right moment and he knew it, but it was too opportune to miss. ‘I will tell ’ee,’ he said, ‘I have been giving serious thought to my life. I begin to wonder if I ain’t the marrying man, after all.’
She threw back her head and roared with laughter, showing her teeth. ‘Oh, you foolish creature,’ she said. ‘If this don’t beat cock-fighting. You en’t the marrying kind. You said so many and many’s the time.’
‘Mayn’t a man change?’
‘Aye. With good reason.’ But her eyes were mocking him.
This was all going wrong, setting off the wrong emotions, using the wrong words. He decided to try another track. ‘I have loved you all these years,’ he pleaded, ‘and now I talk of marriage you laugh.’
‘And so I should think,’ she said dusting her gloved hands against each other, swish, swish, and gave him a grin. ‘Here’s Thiss with your horse.’
Damn Thiss, he thought. Couldn’t he have taken a little longer? Oh, she’s an infuriating woman! I’ll wager she ain’t paid the slightest attention to what I was trying to say. And he rode out of the square quite cast down with disappointment.
But he was wrong. The next morning when the sunshine was still balmy and Bury placid and peaceful beneath it, Nan was considering what he’d said. She had taken it as a joke, but perhaps he meant it. Had he spoken so to test her? To discover what she thought of the idea perhaps? And what did she think of the idea? She wasn’t at all sure. If he’d asked me years ago, when we were first lovers I should have said yes, without another thought. Now …
She put on her bonnet and shawl and took a promenade through the town to consider the matter, and by the time she returned to Angel Hill she had come to a decision. The first thing she ought to do would be to broach the subject with her children. With subtlety, of course, and simply, so as to test their opinion. And as the boys were still in Chelsea she would have to start with Annie.
‘We will take tea in the garden,’ she said to Bessie that afternoon. Her back garden was shaded and private and would be a good place for such a conversation.
Even so they had both taken two dishes of tea and Annie had eaten one of the cook’s famous wafer-cakes before Nan could pluck up courage to begin. Delicate conversations were always difficult and this one was almost impossible.
Eventually she began to talk about surprises, telling her daughter how very surprised she had been when she saw Miss Pettie at the ball in her new wig. ‘Have you ever been surprised so?’ she asked hopefully.
‘No,’ Annie said blandly, sipping her tea.
‘Now, as to that,’ her mother said, forcing the conversation on, ‘would it surprise you to know that I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there wasn’t a wedding in our family some day soon.’
Annie’s response was immediate an
d extraordinary. She put down her cup and clapped her hands together. ‘Why Mama, how did you know of it? Has he spoken to you?’
‘Not in so many words,’ Nan admitted, rather stunned. ‘Things have been said, you understand, in passing, in a manner of some delicacy, as you’ll appreciate. To tell the truth, I cannot say I am exactly hopeful of a proposal but on the other hand ’twould be no great surprise.’
‘Oh, Mama!’ Annie said, and her cheeks were quite pink. ‘How should you answer were he to suggest it?’
‘Well now, as to that,’ Nan said, choosing her words with care, ‘’twould depend, in part, upon your opinion on the matter.’
‘How can you doubt my opinion, my own dear, darling Mama?’
She knew that Annie liked Calverley but such extreme enthusiasm was really rather extraordinary. ‘You would say yes to it?’
‘Oh, indeed I would. Yes, yes, a thousand times! He is such a dear kind man.’
This seemed a little extravagant too but Nan agreed to it.
‘He may not be handsome,’ Annie bubbled on. ‘That I’ll agree, and he may stoop a little …’
‘Stoop?’ her mother said. ‘The very idea! He does not stoop. And ’tis my opinion he is exceedingly handsome. Particularly on horseback.’
‘I do not recall ever having seen him on horseback,’ Annie faltered.
‘Oh, come now,’ Nan said. ‘You’ve seen him many’s the time, here and in London.’
‘As far as I know, Mama, Mr Hopkins has never been to London.’
‘Mr Hopkins?’
‘That is who we talk of, is it not?’ Annie said but she was beginning to look rather anxious about it.
‘Mr Hopkins the curate?’ She’d seen him several times in church on Sundays, and a pale, stooping, insignificant creature he was.
‘Yes, Mama.’
There was a long, ominous pause while Nan stared at her daughter and Annie’s bottom lip began to tremble.
‘Have you been a-telling me you expect to marry a curate?’ Nan said at last.
‘Oh yes, indeed Mama.’
It was such a surprise Nan spoke without thought. ‘Oh, what squit!’ she said. ‘I never heard such squit in all my life!’ she shouted. ‘You en’t a-marrying no curate. You can do better than that in all conscience.’ But the minute the words were out of her mouth she regretted them, for she could see from the expression on her daughter’s face that this was a serious matter.
Annie stood her ground, pale-faced and trembling. ‘I am sorry you should learn of it like this, Mama,’ she said, ‘but I tell ’ee true, I mean to marry Mr Hopkins, with or without your permission.’ Then she burst into tears and ran into the house, missing Bessie by inches as she ran.
‘Why, whatever is the matter, my lamb?’ Bessie said, but the girl was gone. They could hear her running into the house and up the stairs, weeping loudly, and after a while her bedroom door was slammed and locked.
‘What is it, mum?’ Bessie asked.
‘She wants to marry the curate,’ Nan explained, running into the house.
‘Now come, Annie,’ she said, when she’d reached the bedroom door. ‘This won’t do. Come out and we will talk on it.’ She was speaking in the most reasoning tone she could manage, but it was no good.
‘Go away!’ Annie sobbed. ‘I won’t talk to you. I won’t. You have broken my heart. Go away!’
And there she stayed, refusing to come out, or to talk to anyone except Bessie, or to eat anything except bread and water. Quiet, sensible Annie, behaving like a girl bewitched.
Miss Pettie called to see if she could help, and crept up the stairs and spoke softly at the door. Her words had no effect at all but she came down to the drawing-room twittering with excitement.
‘’Tis just like a novel, Mrs Easter,’ she said, patting her curls. ‘A heroine dying of love. The romance of it, my dear! Poor Annie!’
Her mother was not impressed by such talk. ‘Humph!’ she snorted. ‘That’s as maybe. Howsomever, one thing is for certain. She can’t go on living like a novel for ever. She’ll come out by and by, like her brother does.’
But she went on for three more days, and still showed no signs of coming out of the room or into her senses. By then, Nan was beginning to worry.
‘Can’t you coax her?’ she said to Bessie. ‘Make her eat something at the very least.’
‘She means to marry the gentleman or die, so she says,’ Bessie worried.
‘She can’t go on like this,’ Nan said. ‘She will make herself ill.’
‘Perhaps Mr Leigh could get ’er ter see sense,’ Bessie said. ‘She’s quite beyond me, mum.’
So Nan wrote to Calverley, who would surely be back in Chelsea by this time. ‘Annie has taken leave of her senses. She says she will marry a curate or die, if you ever heard such squit. I can do nothing with her. Come you home do, for we are all at our wits’ end with her caterwauling.’
He arrived late the next morning.
‘She is in her bedroom still and won’t come out,’ Nan said without preliminary.
To his credit he went upstairs at once, and Nan and Bessie, listening in the hall, heard him knock. ‘’Tis Mr Leigh, my dear,’ and Annie’s answer. ‘Pray wait a little, sir, and I will let you in.’
‘How now, my pretty?’ he said when the lock had been drawn for him.
‘Oh, Mr Leigh,’ Annie sobbed. ‘I mean to marry Mr Hopkins and Mama says I must not. How am I to live? I love him with all my heart.’
He sat her down upon the chaise-longue, and drew up a chair to sit before her.
‘Tell me all about it,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-five
Everard Emmanuel Hopkins much prefered to be called James. He felt like a James, and on the rare occasions when he checked his appearance in the modest hall mirror of the modest lodging-house where he had two modest rooms, he was reassured to see that he looked like a James, a quiet, unobtrusive young man with mouse-brown hair, mouse-brown eyes, a snub nose and rather crooked teeth. He walked with a slight stoop and his head was usually slightly bowed, so that his vision was restricted to the solid ground beneath his feet and he had to look up to almost any person who spoke to him. A James without a doubt.
Everard Emmanuel had been his father’s choice, and it hadn’t surprised anybody. For his father was Bishop Hopkins, no less, and Bishop Hopkins had always known exactly where he was going in the world. So naturally he knew exactly what path his infant son would tread, and he knew it from the moment the child was born. Into the church, of course, and thence steadily upwards by easy preferment until he too reached a bishopric. So he named him accordingly.
It was a bitter disappointment to him that the boy grew up without any ambition at all. He went into the Church obediently enough, but having got there he discovered that what he really wanted was to serve the poor.
‘I would be happy to be a curate all my life, Father,’ he told his infuriated parent with disarming gentleness. ‘Doing Christ’s work, you know.’
‘The boy is a fool,’ the Bishop said to his wife over dinner that evening. ‘Wants to waste his talents on the poor, if you ever heard of such a thing. However, if he wishes to be a curate all his life, he might as well go to St James in Bury. At least he will mix with a better class of parishioner.’
‘He needs a good wife,’ his mother said. ‘Someone to make him see sense and keep him on line. We must pray for a good wife for him.’
So they prayed, directly to God of course, as befitted their high status.
And later that summer, Everard Emmanuel who preferred to be James met Annie Easter in the Abbey gardens in Bury St Edmunds.
It was a purely accidental meeting, of course, for neither of them would ever have dared to plan a rendezvouz with a member of the opposite sex. James had gone for a brief constitutional stroll before his modest dinner, partly because he hoped it would give him the appetite to do justice to his landlady’s very dull food and partly because he felt it politic to keep out of
her way while it was cooking, as the process always seemed to make her short-tempered.
He was walking quietly around the ornamental flowerbeds, watching the gravel in his usual quiet way, when a ball of white wool rolled into his line of vision. He stooped to retrieve it, thinking no further than that he would return it to its owner, but as he straightened, he found himself staring into the eyes of a charming girl. She had stooped to retrieve the wool too and now, seeing it already in the curate’s hands, was moving away from the confusion of a collision. When they eyes met, their faces were little more than six inches apart.
‘My dear lady!’ James said breathlessly. ‘I trust I did not alarm you. I had no idea you were there, upon my life I did not.’ What pretty blue eyes she had, staring at him in alarm, and her forehead as round as a baby’s.
‘Pray do not apologize, sir,’ she said politely, dropping her eyelids in the most delightfully modest way, and stepping backwards away from him towards the seat on which she’d been sitting until that foolish wool rolled away from her. ‘It was entirely my fault for being so careless.’
He was still holding the ball of wool and as she picked up the white stocking she had been knitting, the thread tightened between them, holding them together. The sight of it sent poor James into a tremble of alarm.
‘Ah! Dear me! Yes!’ he said. ‘Allow me to return your wool. Yes!’ And he thrust it at her so clumsily that it fell through her fingers and rolled off into the wallflowers as though it had a life of its own.
His embarrassment was increasing by the minute. ‘I am so very sorry,’ he stuttered, and this time he went down onto his black knees and crawled into the flowerbed to effect a proper retrieval. Which made matters worse than ever, for by the time the wool was found and carried back to the seat it was tangled and twisted and had acquired half a spider’s web and rather a lot of leafmould.
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