The Daughters of Mrs Peacock

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘Ah, Miss Julia,’ said Mrs Bateson at parting, ‘it’ll be a lucky gentleman as gets you, my dear.’

  As she made her way home the words echoed for a moment in her mind, but she dismissed them with a smile that was only half a sigh. No gentleman, so far, had manifested more than a friendly interest in her; and it did not enter into her scheme of things, or into Mama’s, that anyone should. Her destiny seemed to be already fixed and foreseeable. Not so Sarah’s. Not so Catherine’s. Being neither of them Mama’s favourite daughter and right-hand man, anything dangerous and exciting might in time happen to them. Catherine indeed was too young to be the subject of prediction, but already it was tacitly assumed, though perhaps not by Sarah herself, that Sarah, the comparatively plain one, would some day marry a gentleman-farmer, of whom there were several likely specimens in the county. She was being diligently trained to that end. Nor, whatever her secret intentions, did she resist the process. The life of the fields, the energy of growth, the sowing and reaping, the changing moods of the sky, all were congenial to something deep and inarticulate in her nature. She was genuinely interested, too, in the work of the dairy, this morning her allotted sphere, taking pleasure not only in the process of buttermaking or cheesemaking but in the very tools she must handle, their shapes and functions: the milk-sieve, the skimmer, the butter-scoop, the butter-worker, and not least the churn itself, agent of that sublime moment when to a quick ear, or some other more mysterious sense, it becomes apparent that the butter has ‘come’.

  Mrs Peacock, too, was alive to the homely drama of that moment, and she enjoyed Sarah’s enjoyment of it: in this work together they achieved an unspoken harmony of companionship that was sometimes lacking between them. It was perhaps as much for that, as for the training in a marriage-marketable skill, that she continued week after week to command Sarah’s attendance in the dairy, where Julia, having served her apprenticeship in past years, was no longer needed, and to which Catherine was not yet promoted. She would never admit to herself that she did not quite understand this unpredictable and sometimes disconcerting daughter, with her odd smile, as at some secret joke, and her habit of urbane impudence: such a suggestion would have seemed to her preposterous. To understand and control, to mould and guide, was as inevitably the prerogative of a mother as was implicit obedience the duty of children. All she could allow, even in the privacy of her mind, was that Sarah had certain faults from which Julia, dear girl, was blessedly free, and which Catherine, she rather feared, was in process of acquiring by force of imitation: an unseemly degree of independence, a cool yet stubborn adherence to her own opinions, a disposition to pertness. It could all be summed up in one sad word, conceit. Where did she get it? Not from her parents, that was certain. Dear Edmund was a clever man but no one could call him conceited or self-willed: he was always ready, in matters outside his own sphere, to defer to his wife’s better judgment. As for herself, conceit had no part in her. She was always willing to learn from anyone capable of teaching her, and took no credit to herself for the inescapable fact that in her maternal capacity she was always and necessarily right.

  ‘I think it’s come, Mama,’ said Sarah, at the churn. She wrinkled up her nose in a pleased, triumphant smile. ‘Shall you look and see?’ It was a diplomatic question: she had no doubts. But Mama liked to be consulted and liked to instruct.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Peacock, having looked. ‘There’s a clever girl. Now a pint or two of cold water, to harden the grains, and a few gentle turns. Then we’ll draw off the butter-milk and wash the butter in the churn till the water comes clear.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ said Sarah, betraying no consciousness of having heard it all a dozen times before. Though amused she was an affectionate girl, not unduly impatient, and found the ritual repetition endearing. Old people were like that.

  ‘I’m pleased with you, my dear. You’re picking it up very nicely. Not that you won’t have maids to do it for you, if you marry well. But it’s good to know how.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ assented Sarah. ‘Besides it’s rather fun.’ She poured water into the churn and set it gently in motion. ‘And since I can’t be ornamental I must learn to be useful, mustn’t I?’ she said with deceptive meekness. ‘Do you think Mr Pardew would have me, Mama, if I asked him? I could write his sermons for him as well as make his butter. It would be a splendid match.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly again,’ sighed Mrs Peacock. ‘Why must you spoil yourself, my dear child? I know it’s a joke,’ she added quickly, lest lack of humour should be imputed to her, ‘but not a very sensible one. Marriage is a serious business.’

  ‘Is it Mama? Then perhaps I’m not cut out for it. But it wouldn’t be serious with Mr Pardew. It would be comical. He’s so exactly like a curate.’

  ‘What can you mean, child? He is a curate.’

  ‘Yes, Mama. So he is. Look, the water’s coming pretty clear already. But I’ll give it two or three more rinsings, shall I, to make sure?’

  While the butter-making was in progress, and Julia on her way to visit Mrs Bateson, Catherine, well wrapped up against the north-east wind, was engaged in conversation with Harry Dawkins in the stable-yard, a slow-speaking, weatherbeaten, rubicund old man of sixteen, whose duty it was to look after the horses, clean out the pigsties, water the bull, fetch the cows in from grass, limewash the fruit-trees, kill the rats in the granary, chivvy the hens to bed as dusk fell, lend a hand with the milking, and when not otherwise occupied be at the beck and call of Old Piggott, the gardener. It was a perennial joke among the girls, and a mystery, that though all these multifarious jobs somehow got done, and by Harry, he was rarely, if ever, detected in the act. To hurry was alien to his nature: neither urgency nor threat could persuade him to it. He was nearly always elsewhere when wanted, and when at last run to earth he gave the impression—maddening or soothing, according to one’s mood—of having an infinity of leisure and of being mildly astonished that anyone should require action of him. The world is a pleasant place, he seemed to say: why not sit quiet and enjoy it?

  It was therefore no surprise to Catherine to find him doing just that: sitting on an upturned bucket, his eyes half-shut, his back against the stable half-door.

  ‘Good morning, Harry,’ she said. His eyes opened wider. ‘Had a nice sleep?’

  ‘Morning, miss.’ He shambled slowly to his feet, touched his forelock in mechanical salute, and stood, a looselimbed overgrown lad, awaiting her pleasure. ‘It’s a good un, too,’ he drawled, ‘though a sharp little wind.’

  ‘Now listen,’ said Catherine. ‘Are you sure you’re awake?’

  He grinned vaguely, puzzled but unresentful. ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘My mother says you’re to drive me into Newtonbury.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Harry. The idea sank slowly in. ‘When, miss? Smorning?’

  ‘This very morning. This very minute. Now.’

  ‘That’ll be old Judy and the trap, I reckon?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Catherine. ‘Come along. Let’s go and say good morning to her.’

  ‘She’s a good little pony for her age,’ said Harry, as they entered the shadowy warm-smelling stable together. ‘Spanks along like one o’clock, yet quiet as a mouse. Kimmup, Judy. Kimmup, old girl.’

  With her arm round Judy’s neck, and her cheek resting lightly, caressingly, on the smooth mane, Catherine fed her with lumps of sugar stolen from the breakfast-table. ‘We’re going for a drive, Judy. Won’t that be nice?’

  Unhurrying, yet without losing time, Harry did his part. The pony was harnessed, gently backed between the shafts of the trap, and all made secure, Catherine herself, with a murmur of reassurance to this old friend of her childhood, buckling the last straps. While she was so engaged a new and audacious idea blossomed into decision.

  ‘I shan’t need you, Harry, after all,’ she said. ‘I shall drive myself.’ Harry hesitating, bewildered by the change of plan, she took the reins from him and sprang into the trap: whereupon Judy at once plunged
forward, to be restrained by Harry’s hand on her bridle. ‘Let her go,’ Catherine commanded. Her tone was impatient, imperious. With a shrug he obeyed her, spreading his hands in a gesture of humorous resignation. ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ she called over her shoulder, ‘unless you have to.’

  The yard gate, luckily, stood open; and unless Alice or Jenny should chance to be staring out of an upper window her exodus would not be seen from the house. Away they went, she and Judy, at a smart trot, along chalky white lanes, between hedgerows full of young green, uender a sky so vast and bright, so all-embracing, no hills intervening, that the roundness of the green globe, magically suspended in space, was no theory but a sensible fact. To Catherine’s exalted sense the trotting hooves and turning wheels seemed scarcely to touch the ground: she had the sensation of flying or floating through the intoxicating golden air. To be driving was no novelty, she handled the reins with all the ease and assurance of second nature; but to be alone, and free, made the outing a delirious adventure.

  Some forty or fifty minutes later, arriving in East Street, Newtonbury, she was confronted by a question to which she had given no thought: what to do with Judy and the trap while she went to see Mr Crabbe in his office; for that Judy would wait patiently for her return was more than she could be quite sure of. As she sat considering the matter, five yards from the elegant Georgian building whose door bore the legend Peacock and Crabbe, a small tow-headed child, who was gazing in rapt contemplation at a glass marble cupped in his hands, got up from his seat on the pavement and transferred his open-mouthed philosophical stare to Catherine.

  ‘Hullo, Tommy,’ said Catherine.

  The stare did not waver, nor the lips utter speech.

  ‘Would you like to earn sixpence?’ An immense sum, but her mood was reckless.

  ‘Yessum.’

  ‘Can you hold the pony’s head for five minutes? See that she doesn’t run away?’

  ‘Yessum.’

  ‘You’re not very big, are you? Are you sure you know how?’

  A faint smile, scornfully confident, added ten years to the child’s apparent age. Without troubling to answer he stepped to the pony’s head and attached himself to her bridle. Catherine, alighting, said: ‘That’s right. I shan’t be long.’ To make sure of his loyalty she showed him the sixpence. ‘Only five minutes, Tommy. There’s a good boy.’

  Mr Crabbe, in his dark little room that smelt of leather and mahogany and black-japanned deed-boxes, greeted her quietly, concealing his surprise.

  ‘Good morning, Catherine. This is an unexpected pleasure.’

  ‘I’ve brought you a note from Papa, Mr Crabbe. He’s rather poorly this morning. My mother is keeping him in bed.’

  ‘Dear me! Nothing serious, I hope?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Just a little chill.’

  ‘Ah, yes. This treacherous weather. Never cast a clout, you know, till May is out. Though I must say it seems to agree with you, Catherine. You’re the picture of health.’ And of beauty, his glance added. Over the years he had seen her mysteriously change from a leggy and romping schoolgirl into a demure and dazzling young woman.

  Robert Crabbe was a tall clean-shaven man, very neat in his dress and very precise in his movements, with a long straight nose, alert grey eyes, a rather severe mouth except when he smiled, and brown hair that was already beginning to go grey at the temples, above the two inches of side-whisker. He looked, in fact, far more the solicitor than her father did. Though it was Mrs Peacock’s habit to refer to him as ‘young Robert Crabbe’, perhaps by way of emphasizing his junior status in the firm, he was not young in Catherine’s estimation, for he would never see thirty-five again. She did not however hold his age against him; if anything it enhanced her interest in him, by stimulating her curiosity. Here was a man who had lived and suffered, who had known marriage and bereavement. His allusion to the weather and its treachery gave her a moment’s wonder; for it was in just such an April as this, three years ago, that pneumonia had carried off, as they said, his beautiful young wife. She remembered vividly the doleful faces and shocked voices of that tragic week, when to be specially kind to poor Mr Crabbe had been everyone’s ruling thought.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Crabbe, having read his letter. ‘I see. Give your father my warm regards and my hopes for a speedy recovery. Everything is in hand, tell him. No need to hurry or worry. And thank you, my dear Catherine, for coming.’

  She offered her hand in farewell. He took it, bent over it, and ceremoniously kissed the finger-tips.

  ‘Good-bye, Mr Crabbe.’ Surprised into blushing slightly, she turned quickly away; but he accompanied her to the street door and bowed her out. ‘I think it will rain before nightfall,’ she said, for the sake of saying something. There was not a cloud in the sky.

  ‘Perhaps, when the wind drops,’ he conceded politely. ‘Good-bye.’

  Judy and the trap were waiting for her. The child she called Tommy was still at his post. She remembered, just in time, to give him the sixpence, still puzzling over Mr Crabbe’s odd behaviour.

  As she drove into the yard she was met by Harry Dawkins, fully awake for once, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Mrs Peacock disappearing into the house.

  ‘You’m got me into trouble, miss,’ said Harry, ruefully grinning. ‘She’s in a rare taking, the missus.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Catherine. It was an idle question, and she did not wait for an answer. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said loftily. ‘I’ll put it right for you. It was none of your business.’

  ‘No, miss. I didn’t tell on you, miss,’ he explained eagerly, ‘not till she caught me unexpected. “What are you a-doing of here,” she says, “and where’s Miss Catherine?” And then, don’t you see, the fat was in the fire, as the saying is.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ said Catherine. ‘Judy behaved splendidly.’

  Though inwardly trembling, she held herself proudly, a disdainful smile on her young lips. The long habit of subservience could not be shaken off in a moment: hidden within her was a small scared child, detected in a misdemeanour. But it would never do to let Harry Dawkins see that, or Mama either. There was a battle ahead, and she braced herself for it. If she was in disgrace she was resolved not to seem aware of the fact, a resolution reinforced by a sense of the indignity of having been discussed, in terms of disapproval and apology, by an irate woman and a stable-boy.

  Leaving pony and trap to be disposed of by Harry, she sauntered into the house, where, though she did not encounter Mrs Peacock, signs of an impending storm were not wanting. Julia, with a sad reproachful look, murmured: ‘Oh Catherine, you’ve made Mama angry.’ Catherine answered, with a toss of the head: ‘Dear me! What a pity!’—and exchanged a bold wink with Sarah.

  ‘These children!’ said Sarah, in her mother’s manner. ‘What a trial they are, to be sure! … Did you have fun, Kitty?’

  As the girls foresaw, it was not until they were all assembled at the luncheon table, Papa alone being absent, that Mrs Peacock opened the attack.

  ‘Catherine, I am displeased with you.’

  ‘Are you, Mama?’ Her heart beat furiously. Her mouth was dry. ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Ask your conscience.’

  ‘Very well, Mama.’

  ‘Well?’ said Mrs Peacock sharply. Catherine did not reply. ‘Answer me, child.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sarah suggested, ‘Kitty’s conscience has nothing to say.’

  ‘Be quiet, Sarah. Let your sister speak for herself.’

  ‘Gladly, Mama, if she wishes to.’

  ‘What did I tell you this morning, Catherine? What were my instructions?’

  ‘To go to Newtonbury, Mama, with a message for Mr Crabbe from my father.’

  ‘Don’t equivocate. I don’t want a sly daughter. I told you to get Harry Dawkins to drive you in. My words were quite plain. And you deliberately disobeyed me.’

  ‘Oh no, Mama!’

  ‘Don’t contradict. Never before have you gone so fa
r, and into a busy town, by yourself. You know that perfectly well.’

  ‘There must always be a first time, mustn’t there? And, as you see, I came to no harm.’

  ‘That is beside the point. The point is that your behaviour was improper.’

  Improper? This was strong language indeed. Unladylike would have been bad enough, but improper was by many degrees worse. Even Julia was startled by the word, which to her suggested unimaginable depths of infamy. Catherine continued to face her mother with a look of stubborn, faintly smiling incomprehension; but suddenly remembering Mr Crabbe’s impetuous gesture she felt herself beginning to blush. There was no logic in her sense of guilt: Mama could not have intended that Harry Dawkins should chaperon her at that interview, nor could even she, whom so little escaped, possibly know what had happened. It was less than nothing anyhow, the girl told herself: the merest, meaningless civility. Yet its memory momentarily confused her and tied her tongue.

  ‘But why, Mama?’ pleaded Sarah, coming to the rescue. ‘We know it must be so if you say so. But do please explain. It’s so important that we should know what is and what isn’t proper. Do you mean that a strange man might have spoken to her? But he couldn’t have without stopping the trap. And if he’d tried to do that she’d have run over him. Wouldn’t you, Kitty? Or beaten him off with the whip,’ she added irrepressibly. ‘Young girl defends her honour.’

  ‘Have you finished, Sarah? Thank you. Then perhaps you will allow your mother to speak. The impropriety, as you ought to know, was in the disobedience. That is the long and the short of the matter. You and Julia have reached years of discretion, or so I like to think. What is right for you to do is not necessarily right for your little sister. If Catherine had asked my permission I should very likely have said Yes, young though she is. But no, she preferred to deceive me. She preferred to go behind my back. And I forbid you, Sarah, to try and make a joke of it.’