by Peter McAra
‘I repeat. What can you do for Agatha?
‘Why, ma’am. I’ve always loved learning. And books. I should hope I can help Agatha to grow such a love. That she will find pleasure in reading. And thereby become a more witty, informed companion so that her social life takes on a new warmth.’
‘What do you read?’
‘Why, novels, plays, anthologies. But any book will do. I read everything, from books about the wild beasts of Africa to the stately homes of England and the Continent. About Greek philosophers, Roman history, and the botany of the Americas. But I shouldn’t expect everyone’s tastes to be like mine.’
‘I wish to make conversation.’ Agatha spoke in a tired, dry voice. ‘When I visit London for the Season. So that the ton will take me for an amusing, educated woman.’ Eliza drew an easy breath. So Agatha had not yet set her sights on Harry alone.
‘Agatha has always been shy,’ her mother added. ‘Too shy for her own good. Each year she returns from the Season, tells me the gentlemen have passed her over, yet again, for those empty-headed young things who giggle and flick their fans, and parrot silly nothings as they simper and grin at the gentlemen.’
‘Indeed,’ Eliza replied, battling her nervousness. ‘But would it be wise to be seen as a bluestocking by the gentlemen of the ton?’
‘There are gentlemen of quality who would find a bluestocking very much to their taste,’ Mrs Thurber said. Agatha’s face reflected her growing discomfort.
‘Excuse me, Mother,’ she said. ‘I feel…not myself. I’ll return in a moment.’ Without a glance in Eliza’s direction, Agatha stood and left the drawing room.
‘I’m glad Agatha has gone,’ Mrs Thurber whispered. ‘Now we can get to the heart of the matter.’ She cleared her throat. ‘My poor daughter. All her life, she’s been a round peg in a square hole. In company, she’s shy. At home, she’s given to fits of melancholy. She needs to be taken out of herself. And I look to you to attend to that duty, Miss Downing.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. I should like to help where I can. But why me?’
‘I have been led to believe that you are intelligent. Highly so. And learned to boot. Yet you are a young woman, close to Agatha’s age. With perhaps her understanding of the world. Am I not right?’
‘Thank you, ma’am. You will know that I am but a poor girl from the village. Ignorant in the ways of the gentry.’
‘Yet I hear from…certain of my friends that you excel at feats of the intellect. Mathematics, logic, even philosophy.’
‘I do love ideas.’ Eliza allowed herself to glow. She had been recognised for at least something. ‘I used to enjoy mock debates with Mr Harcourt,’ she continued. ‘Oftentimes he encouraged me.’ The woman aimed a manufactured smile at Eliza.
‘Well, then. I trust you will be able to instil a love for those games of the mind into Agatha’s brain. I sometimes think she is, perhaps, a little slow up here.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘And the young gentlemen of the ton have been quick to notice. They’ve abandoned her for those fluffy young empty-heads who seem to attract men like yesterday’s dirty dinner plates attract flies.’
The drawing room door opened. Mrs Thurber fired a meaningful glance at Eliza, then smiled at her morose daughter as she sidled back into the room.
‘Take Miss Downing to your chambers, Agatha. Explain your tastes to her. Perhaps play a little pianoforte for her.’
Without the least ghost of a polite smile, Agatha turned to exit the drawing room. Silently, Eliza followed her. She led the way upstairs, down a long hall. At the end of the hall, she opened a door which led to a suite of rooms, each with a splendid view of the elaborate gardens. Wordless, Agatha slumped onto a sofa and looked away. Eliza took a chair opposite.
‘I’m glad Mother is not here.’ Suddenly, the girl’s face thawed. ‘The way she orders me about when we have company. She always makes me feel awkward, dull.’
‘Mmm. My own mother is rather…particular too.’ Eliza said. ‘But now we have some privacy. I should like to hear things, from your heart.’
‘Very well.’ Agatha rose and walked to the window, gesturing Eliza to follow. She pointed to the spreading grey slate roof, perhaps a mile away, that showed through the canopy of the garden’s ornamental trees. ‘That is The Great House, as you surely know.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And you know Mr Harry.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well then.’ Agatha turned to look full into Eliza’s face. ‘I’m…in love with him.’
Eliza froze. She must, must not reveal her horror. In the silence, she stared at the downcast girl, gritting her teeth; anything to hold back her shocked sobs. Until that moment silent and stony-faced, Agatha now began to pour out her emotions like a river in flood.
‘We used to play together as children when our parents met for croquet,’ she said. ‘Harry was a year younger than me. A happy boy, playing little games, running, jumping, hitting the ball with his bat. Waving his wooden sword, pretending he was St George slaying the dragon. Then when we were older, he took me riding when we visited. He kept an old bay mare for me. Josephine, she was called. Whenever I did the London Season, I missed him so. I was sad for every minute I stayed away. Now I come home and I find he is gone to Oxford.’
Still Eliza struggled to block the explosion of emotions boiling in her mind. Did Harry know that his neighbour, the sad-faced little girl who had joined him in his garden when her parents visited, now loved him?
Eliza looked away. Agatha was gentle born. Eliza was an orphan, the child of peasant parents, one nameless sheep grazing the hillside among the thousands of others in the flock. Eliza was as likely to marry Harry as a shooting star was likely to land on her head. On the other hand, the Thurbers had been neighbours of the De Havillands for most of their children’s lives. Everyone knew that Silas Thurber planned to acquire part of the estate of Morton-Somersby. Too often, Eliza had heard the village gossip that both neighbours favoured the match between the son and the daughter.
‘My mother and father want us to marry,’ Agatha continued, innocently confirming Eliza’s fears, plunging the knife deeper into her heart. ‘And Sir John De Havilland favours it too, if the servants’ gossip is to be believed.’ She smiled at Eliza. Now her face glowed. She had revealed her love to someone who might become her best friend. In the village of Marley, best friends for young gentlewomen were as rare as diamonds.
‘So, Miss Downing — may I call you Eliza, as friends do?’ Eliza nodded, still swallowing her sobs, not trusting herself to speak. ‘My question is simple. Can you teach me things that will make Harry love me?’ She smiled again, a smile that told Eliza she rejoiced in telling her new friend her most precious secret. ‘When he returns from Oxford?’
‘I, er...’ Eliza gave vent to a choking cough. Why had Fate decreed that she would groom this downcast, lovesick girl to win the man she, Eliza, loved with all her heart? It was the cruellest blow a person of the aristocracy could land on a lowborn peasant girl. And it hurt the more because it had been so innocently delivered by a naïve young woman who had been raised in the shelter of a rural mansion.
‘I, I’m sure we can explore the classics,’ Eliza choked. ‘Then perhaps Shakespeare. Most young gentlemen love Shakespeare — the gallant young hero wooing the beautiful woman. During the Season, many young people go to Shakespeare plays, so I’ve read.’
‘Wonderful! When can we start?’ The magically transformed Agatha beamed as she spoke.
‘Perhaps we should discuss that with your mother.’
So began string of bittersweet days for Eliza. On Tuesday and Friday afternoons she visited Thurber Hall. Each romantic line of The Odyssey they read felt to Eliza like a rapier slicing between her ribs. Each time they parted, Agatha thanked her companion for her inspiration, and declared that when Harry returned, she would bedazzle him with her growing passion for the adventures of Ulysses. Indeed, with Eliza’s every visit the shy young woman changed, grew out of her mel
ancholy like a garden plant budding with blossoms for the coming spring. Soon the classics were put aside and Shakespeare took over.
Inevitably, Agatha began to ask her companion questions about men — what they liked and disliked, how to charm them, how to get one’s way with them. Eliza winced at the turn their afternoons had taken, confessing her utter lack of experience, telling Agatha that everything she knew on the subject she’d gained from her reading. They took to discussing popular books of the moment, with their hints about fashion, manners, advice on which behaviours were chic, and which were not. Week by week, Agatha transformed. Soon Eliza realised that she could teach her charge no more. The shy little oyster had truly come out of its shell.
‘I must tell you, my dear Agatha,’ she said at the end of one afternoon, ‘that you have become a new person. Indeed, there is little more I can teach you. You will fairly dazzle the young gentlemen of the ton next Season.’ She avoided the mention of Harry. ‘Men have a saying. “Faint heart never won fair lady.” And I suspect you have taken to heart the women’s version of that saying.’
‘Indeed I have,’ the newly assertive Agatha answered. ‘And I must thank you for it, Eliza. It’s all your doing. You’ve been the makings of the new me. Indeed, you are my fairy godmother. You waved your magic wand and I was transformed. But pray don’t leave me now.’ The smile she aimed at Eliza was sweet, open. ‘I should so love us to stay good friends. Indeed, you are my only friend, Eliza. You must see that I’ve changed my ways to be worthy of you. But on no account tell Mother what you just told me. She is happy to pay for your services, and she is very pleased with the results.’ She giggled, waved a hand towards Eliza. ‘Indeed, she expects to see a ring on this finger very soon.’
Eliza saw that she had created a monster, then let it out of its box. Her success in transforming the once-shy girl could all too soon lead to Agatha’s winning Harry’s heart. Eliza left Thurber Hall that afternoon wishing she could die.
CHAPTER 10
As Eliza grew older, the village folk often came to her with questions that only she, as the learned one, could answer for them. Farm labourers would ask her to reckon how many pounds of corn they might need to sow a certain field, or the number of rails required to fence it. Tradesmen brought their complaints about payment to her, wanting to know if they had been treated fairly.
It was a time of change in the county, indeed in the whole of England. Traditional agreements between labourers and masters, unspoken for hundreds of years and hallowed by usage, were being called into question. The rural workforce depended utterly on the landowners for their subsistence. The ancient cottages they lived in, the small plots where they cultivated vegetables for their tables, the food they bought with their wages, all flowed from the enterprise of the landowner. Labourers expected subsistence, no more, no less. In bad seasons, they followed the wisdom handed down by their forebears. The burden fell first on those closest to the soil. In their turn, the landowners poured a finely judged portion into the cup of benevolence. To exceed or to diminish this quantum would be to invite unrest among their tenants and disapprobation from their peers.
One Sunday Eliza noticed that conversation after church was infected with unease. Four farm labourers from Tolpuddle, a village not ten miles away, had been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay. Their crime had been to plot against the King and their master, it was said. One of Marley’s parishioners was related to two of the luckless men.
‘And right God fearing men they be too,’ he told his peers. ‘A body cannot see it that they was plotting — not those men. I hear tell it was them as asked for their pay to be made up to nine shillings again.’
‘Nine shillings? But that’s barely enough to keep body and soul together.’
‘I knows it. But the poor men of Tolpuddle was cut to eight shillings, then to seven shillings.’
‘Seven shillings?’
‘Aye. Little wonder they said they would rather starve than work for seven shillings. So they formed a society. The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, they called it. And the men of that society vowed to keep together and support one another, like soldiers in battle. Then, when they said they would down their tools and starve, their master accused them of plotting against the King.’
‘Aye. These be sorry times. I hear tell the men in the North are put out of work by steam engines. And the lacemakers, they be starving on the streets. All without work since their jobs were taken over by the flying shuttle. Where it will end, I do not know.’
There was also disquiet in the gentry’s smoking rooms.
‘Dammit! The village folk are stepping beyond themselves. Did you hear tell of those rogues from Tolpuddle? Downed tools and told their master they’d rather starve than work for seven shillings. And they did too. Poor fellow must have been frantic. Couldn’t get his harvest in while the good weather lasted. There’s been little enough dry weather this summer in any event.’
‘Indeed. That would have made for three bad harvests in a row. Deuced weather. As if we need yet another pestilence.’
‘Damned rogues! If any man of mine tried that, I’d horsewhip him to within an inch of his life. We have to take a stand, by God!’
Then the Tolpuddle landowners had used their influence to have members of the society arrested and charged with administering unlawful oaths. The Tolpuddle Four were held up as an example. It became well known that soon after their appearance in court they were put in irons and transported to Botany Bay never to set eyes on England again, for all they knew.
In the days that followed the news of the troubles at Tolpuddle, Eliza was sought out by several of her fellows, perhaps after church, or as she walked from the kitchen of the Great House to her parents’ cottage. One night just before bed, she heard a tapping on the cottage wall. Alarmed, she stepped outside to see what was happening. Rufus Hunter, a labourer from the village, was hitting the stone wall gently with a stick.
‘Ah. Thank ’ee, lass,’ the man said, touching his cap. ‘I needs to talk to ’ee, quiet like.’ Silently, she escorted him inside. ‘This talk of shorting our wages,’ the man began nervously. ‘Is it the King as gets the shilling we’ve lost? How can us keep body and soul together on eight shillings? Must I put my Jane into service, and her but seven years old, and sickly? Else how can I feed my other children?’
Eliza thought before she spoke. She did not know the details of this latest move by the local aristocracy, and poor Rufus in his anguish and fear could not be relied upon to talk objectively. She must not give him cause to think that she was a militant sympathiser with the labourers’ plight. If Rufus’s neighbours were to call on her, someone at the Great House must eventually see one or more of them in discussion with her. And like as not they would put the wrong complexion on it.
‘Those men came from another parish, Rufus,’ she said. ‘And our master is a kindly gentleman at heart. And certainly, the King cannot take your money.’ The man looked at her with reverence in his lowered eyes. She saw that even for her eighteen years against his forty, he looked up to her. It was strange that her knowledge had earned her such awe in the little community.
‘Go back to your wife and children, Rufus. I can say only what I see, and I see no harm coming to you.’ She let him out. She would read for a few minutes before bed. The brightness of the stars told her it would be a frosty night. She changed into her nightdress and pulled the covers over herself, determined to put Rufus out of her mind. She was not to know that his visit had been observed. The eavesdropper behind the cottage’s garden wall waited till she blew out her candle, then stole towards the Great House.
Crash! Eliza was woken by a battering noise. In the dark, she sprang out of bed and ran to the door.
‘There she is, lads! Take her!’ A flash of light from a lantern dazzled her for a moment. Two big men pushed the door off its hinges so it fell flat on the floor, then burst inside. She felt herself seized, one arm by each man, and dragged outside. As the m
en bundled her into a cart and she drew her nightdress about her, she saw Hannah come to the door.
‘Eliza! What — ?’ Hannah screamed. Then her words were drowned by a whipcrack and the thudding hoofbeats of a pair of horses urged into a wild gallop. Eliza lurched onto the floor of the cart, terrified.
CHAPTER 11
‘Sir John will deal with you in the morning, milady.’ As the cart bounced its way to the stables, one of the men who’d seized her snarled at her in the dark. ‘Then we’ll see how traitors gets what’s coming to ‘em.’ Eliza lay hunched, dumbfounded. As she framed questions to ask her captors, the cart stopped at the stables. The men dragged her from the cart and flung her into the tack room. She heard the door thud shut and the bolts scrape home.
‘Sleep well, little traitor,’ she heard one man call. ‘Sir John will be pleased to find we’ve caught you.’ Eliza huddled in her nightdress in a corner, wrapped in a saddlecloth she’d found by groping her way round the room in the dark. She sat, miserable with cold, revolted by the smell, gaunt with fright, until daylight came. If only Harry still lived in the Great House… She imagined him coming to the stables, comforting her, ordering her captors away, holding her close until her tears dried. And all the while she dreamed of him, she knew it was not to be. Harry was far away in Oxford, and for all she knew, he had forgotten her, their vow, and their oft-shared murmurings of love for each other.
‘Sit, girl.’
Sir John rose after the two burly constables had escorted her to his study next morning. She looked up into his face. Since she had last seen him at close quarters, his hair and beard had grown white. His paunch, sitting oddly with his otherwise tall angular frame, signalled that he had continued his life of genteel indulgence. Eliza could tell from his thin smile that he had made an effort to gild his accustomed coldness. From the chaise longue on which he rested his gouty leg, he motioned to a nearby chair. His arm rested on a low table on which stood a glass and a port decanter. A smock had been sent to Eliza as she sat imprisoned in the tack room, doubtless at the urging of Mrs Hawkins. She gathered the garment about her and sat, barelegged and barefoot, on the carved chair which had been placed too close to the chaise longue for her comfort.