White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  Miss Hedges cut her off. ‘Oh, yes, I knew her, may she rest in peace.’ She smiled with limited affection. ‘Incorrigible old suffragette. You know her great-niece, Sybil Destouches, is here?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Eva said, surprised, ‘but I’ve met her.’

  The memory was all too sharp. Census Day, Sunday, 2 April 1911. The headiness of that glorious and endless summer, stretching from then to mid-October almost without a break. Just at the end of March, Eva had been out on a shopping trip with Catherine and Grace and had seen a young woman in the centre of Trafalgar Square in a navy corduroy skirt, waving her placard: ‘Convicts, Lunatics, Women! All Three Have No Votes!’ Her hoarse whisper of invitation in Eva’s ear, while Catherine was trying to pull them away: ‘History is happening here. Do you want to be part of it, or do you want to be a bystander all your life?’

  Eva had persuaded Imelda, in spite of her rattling, lingering cough, to sneak out with her that evening on a clandestine journey to Richmond Park, eleven miles and several changes on the Tube away from their home, to take part in a mass suffragette protest to evade the Census. They gathered across the road on Wimbledon Common to hear the woman from Trafalgar Square make a speech. Illuminated by lanterns suspended from a tent roof, she looked gaunt in the cheek, as if she lived off nothing but her own burning fervour. As Eva cheered with the crowd, stamping her feet and raising her arms to applaud, she felt as if she was on the edge of something new and exciting, something that would lift her out of the life she had known.

  And then there had been the chance meeting that night with Lady Elizabeth Jenkins, that most singular of aged suffragettes, as Miss Hedges had already noted. Although she hardly knew Eva Downey from a hole in the ground, she had put her claw-like hand on Eva’s shoulder and declared her in need of finishing, forthwith. ‘There is something missing in you, an absence. It bothers me,’ she had said. ‘I’ll see to it.’ And then she had grumbled about how she could not get anyone to contribute to her suffragist magazine, not even one little article about skipping the Census. She looked disapprovingly over at her great-niece … Yes, that had been Sybil.

  Once supper was over, the headmistress brought Eva on a tour around the buildings, pointing out the classrooms, common room, sewing and music rooms and concluding at Eva’s new dormitory. This contained six beds: as the newest pupil, Eva would have to sleep in the bed closest to the door. Even though the girls had not yet arrived, all their beds had been ‘taken’.

  Miss Hedges waited while Daisy, the maid, brought up Eva’s case, then she handed her a mimeographed timetable and bade her goodnight.

  For a moment, all was quiet except for creaks in the walls and floorboards. Then, ‘Halloo!’ A voice rising up the stairs, then a sudden rush of footsteps, the door opening, the corridor light spilling in. The smell of cigarette smoke. The culprit leaning against the door jamb: a tall, handsome girl of about Eva’s own age, not in uniform, instead wearing a long, patterned, drop-waist dress. No sooner had their eyes met than the girl fished another cigarette out of her purse and bent close with the lighter. The flame caught her profile, then died out. The indoor light could not entirely dull the shade of the girl’s hair, a far deeper and more magnificent red than Miss Hedges’. Eva recognised her immediately.

  The smell of fresh smoke filled the room, pleasant for a few seconds before the inevitable staleness that followed. Sybil – for it was she – looked up, anxious. ‘You’re not going to tell on me, are you? I’ll jolly well have to open the window or I’ll get into ferocious trouble—’

  Eva smiled. ‘You don’t remember me?’

  Sybil took another drag and puffed out some smoke. ‘Hold on. Oh, gosh, yes, I do! Richmond Park! My great-aunt took a shine to you, didn’t she? Left you a bit in her will, I heard. Didn’t leave me a bean, but she was generous enough to me when she was alive, God bless her. Besides, I didn’t write naughty stories for her paper, and you did. Jolly good show.’

  ‘I wanted to,’ Eva said shyly.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Sybil said, sounding somewhat doubtful. ‘What’s your name anyway, Evelyn, was it? I have a memory like a sieve.’

  ‘Eva. Eva Downey.’

  Sybil sat down on her bed, wrinkling her nose in some confusion. ‘Downey … Downey … I’m sorry, who are your people?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know them. They came over from Ireland – that is to say, my father did, quite recently, and brought us with him.’ Eva could feel her cheeks grow warm. Had Grace been right? Was it starting already?

  ‘Ireland?’ Sybil said. ‘You have no trace of an accent at all.’ She could not quite manage to keep her tone free of praise.

  ‘I was not seven years old when we left Cork for good, so I would have very little of it left.’ And I work hard at suppressing the remnants.

  Sybil must have picked up the defensiveness in Eva’s answer, because she shrugged and pulled on her cigarette again. ‘I’m being cheeky, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘I only meant to be curious. I like different backgrounds, you know. I get so tired of people harping on about ancestors and titles and all that nonsense. I mean, look at me. My blood is bluer than a field of cornflowers. We’ve been around, since, my goodness, Edward the First? Though, as far as I can remember, I think our entire lineage was only granted legitimacy because they offed the Duke of York and stuck his head on a pike. When was that, do you remember?’

  Eva had no idea, but Sybil continued, ‘And the worst part of it all is that everyone thinks we’re French because I’m unlucky enough to be saddled with the last name “Destouches”. It never occurs to them that my family go back far enough that everyone had French names. As it happens, I hate the French. They’re so arrogant. Why, we were cycling around the Loire valley, and we stopped for a sandwich in the middle of the afternoon, and everything was shut. I could see the back of the kitchen, all the ingredients there, some bread, the most beautiful-looking goat’s cheese. I said, “I’ll make it myself, for Heaven’s sake”, but it was all, Non, non, c’est fermé. Oh, I do hate the French!’ She stretched herself out the length of the bed, letting her booted feet dangle over the end, cigarette ash falling on the linoleum, just as footsteps and voices began to echo from the bottom of the stairs. ‘You mustn’t mind me,’ she added, ‘I do go on so. Mama says it gives her quite a headache.’

  Eva let Sybil rattle on as she sat down on her own bed and pushed her suitcase underneath it. A bell clamoured down the corridor as the other girls joined them. They expressed a cursory interest in Eva before returning to their conversations. Another girl, in a uniform, walked up and down outside, the heavy bell in her hands. They would stand for prayer, then it would be lights out, according to the timetable.

  Eva undressed carefully. The process of removing dress, corset, petticoat, flannel undershirt, stockings, combinations and finally underwear was tricky enough when done in private, and ten times worse in public. It seemed to take for ever, the fiddling, hooking, unhooking, secreting away the used linen. Finally, she donned a nightdress, which fell over her body like a billowing curtain. Usually Eva undressed in the dark, with only Imelda there, and she didn’t have to worry about being seen, unlike now.

  When they were all in their nightdresses, the girls all stood by their beds, leaving the door open to listen to the bell-ringer read a verse from The Book of Common Prayer. Then the thin curtains were drawn, the light turned out, and they got into bed. Eva rested her head on the thin pillow and looked at the faint light through the windows while the others settled into rhythmic breathing or light snores. It took her some time to follow them into sleep.

  This is a new adventure, she thought, and I must trust where it leads me.

  But during the night she had the old dream, the aftermath of that Census Day in 1911. The ‘disgraceful behaviour’. The foul-tasting, mottled ink of Lady Elizabeth’s New Feminist got on her fingers, and the headline, ‘A Jolly Night Out Hiding from the Census Man – by Miss E.M. Downey’ turned into rivulets of black blood running do
wn the paper and obscuring everything. Close by, her mother Angela, long dead, hummed lula-bye-byes, until Eva tried to look at her, come to her arms for safety – and then she fell into nothingness, blackest inky dark. The void roared, first a growl, low and indecipherable as a gale-force wind between buildings, then words: Yehbitchyehbitchyehbitch! Bitseach! Everything snapped into white, and in the midst of it was Grace, standing in a doorway, lips a precise, cranberry red, eyebrows arched with reproachful dismay. She was saying, ‘Mama—’

  Eva woke up in a thresh of sweat. Immediately the unfamiliar walls and windows of the dormitory crowded in on her, the sounds of the girls in slumber. She had to clap her hand to her mouth and bite her palm not to cry out. She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. They were wet.

  What had started that up again? It must have been Sybil, she concluded. Sybil, now lying on her back several feet away, sending light snores up to the ceiling. Meeting her must have raked over the coals.

  She blinked and swallowed and waited for sleep. She would not weaken. She would not let them win.

  2

  The morning bell rang at six. From then on, the entire day’s routine was mapped out: stripping the sheets and making one’s bed, attending breakfast in a large room with a terracotta tiled floor and three long tables holding fifteen girls each as well as Miss Hedges and Miss Dunn, one of the teachers who lived in. Then Assembly, classes, lunch, more classes, followed by a brief pause in the afternoon, before study period and supper. Eva’s first breakfast was a watery porridge with prunes; her lunch fatty beef and white, crumbly overboiled potatoes; at mid-afternoon, she had a cup of strong, stewed tea and sweetened bread. All the days were like this, bookmarked and bookended by bells.

  The classes included such subjects as domestic economy (how to control servants and balance books), posture and deportment, needlework, private music lessons for those who had requested them (inept chromatic piano scales, the thin soup of notes scraped on the wrong end of a violin bow and English sea-shanties shrieking from treble recorders echoed around the corridors most of the school day), English language and literature, French and, to Eva’s initial alarm, equitation etiquette. This last was supervised by Miss Alethea Walton with the help of Mr Duncan, a rotund, taciturn man who wore belt, braces and a wide-brimmed hat. Mr Duncan also taught the much-vaunted mathematics and tended to look down at the ground when talking to women. Much to Eva’s relief, she was not introduced to any actual horses, nor made to ride side-saddle. She was quite sure she would have fallen off.

  It also became clear that for all Miss Hedges’ emancipated principles, some of the forty-five girls under her care were treated with a more gloved hand than others. Eva herself suffered no penalty for having attained her place by gift rather than birthright, but then again she would never have taken the risks some of her higher-born fellow pupils seemed to run with impunity. She guessed that a spinster, even one as comfortably off as Miss Hedges, probably needed the business.

  Since her arrival, she had been writing to Imelda at least once a week. Nothing had been done for her sister, no further education, not even some sort of training in case she didn’t marry. Imelda had a weak constitution, so was left to languish at home. That she was Angela’s daughter and not Catherine’s did not help her cause. Eva burned with rage inside but could not write what she wanted; the letters were all examined before being passed on.

  ‘I try to be Helen Burns,’ Imelda wrote to her, a fortnight after Eva’s arrival at The Links, ‘given my general health. I find it helps to maintain that higher viewpoint, to trust in God and ignore more everyday inconveniences.’

  ‘You would be better off as Jane Eyre,’ Eva replied in brutal panic. ‘Remember what happened to Helen.’

  Both knew that Catherine would not understand the reference.

  *

  ‘Is French the only language on the curriculum?’ Eva asked Miss Hedges a few weeks later when Assembly was over and students were invited to ‘freely ask any questions’.

  ‘Would you like to learn another language, Miss Downey?’ Miss Hedges replied, pleasantly enough. ‘Latin?’

  Rhona Lewis, chiefly known as the daughter of Sir Evelyn Lewis, Marquess of Onslow, who had gone out to the Sylhet tea plantations in 1889 and had come back with a fortune which he had wasted no time in wasting on his daughter, arched her eyebrows to the fringe of her bob. ‘French is the language of commerce and etiquette. It is useful and attractive to the ear. You’re hardly suggesting we learn Irish?’ That sort of question would have earned Eva a clip round the ear from her father, but Miss Hedges did not appear to be unduly disturbed by Rhona’s insolence. The question was barbed enough; rumours of Eva’s background had already begun to circulate. Sometimes, when she got excited, her accent would slip, the vowels becoming broader, the ‘t’s softer. Grace had had a point.

  ‘I was thinking of German, actually.’

  The room fell silent.

  ‘Really?’ Miss Hedges said, in a less sympathetic tone.

  ‘The language of Goethe, Heine, Beethoven? I cannot imagine I am the only one who should like to learn it.’ Eva’s voice sounded odd, too high-pitched. Trying too hard not to sound Irish was strangling her.

  ‘You’re forgetting that nobody likes to learn anything in this place except you, you strange little person,’ muttered Sybil.

  ‘Well,’ Miss Hedges said, after a long moment, ‘I must admire your studious spirit, Miss Downey. Of course we always seek to retain friendly relations with the Kaiser’s country. Miss Hautbois, in addition to being a native French speaker, is also fluent in German. I shall speak to her about taking you for classes twice a week during the four o’clock break.’

  Rhona sniggered at the idea of losing a free period. It did not occur to her that Eva was perfectly happy to not spend her spare time in the company of the other girls.

  Sybil was not convinced either. ‘What’s with all this learning German malarkey?’ she asked Eva later, when they were taking a walk around the front lawn. It was forbidden for students to walk there during the evening, a rule Sybil strictly honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

  ‘I just thought it would be a nice idea. My mother had sheet music of Schubert’s Lieder before it got … lost.’ ‘Lost’ was one way of putting it. Eva knew all too well what had happened to the music; it had long ago met the same fate as everything else that had belonged to her mother. Including the piano. She would never forget seeing the gap in their once warm, friendly sitting room in Cork all those years ago after it had been taken away, barely a week after her mother’s death.

  ‘I don’t read the newspapers, because it’s all too depressing,’ Sybil continued, ‘but even I know there’s a lot of tension with Germany. That’s why we’ve to hurry up and bag the rich men, you see, before they all get called up.’

  ‘I don’t think there’ll be a war,’ Eva said.

  ‘Well,’ Sybil said, ‘War or no war, I dare say your father is hoping you’ll find yourself a rich man and get out of his hair.’

  ‘I don’t know any rich men.’

  ‘I could help you meet some. Before it all kicks off.’

  ‘Don’t say there’ll be a war.’ Eva knotted her fingers and looked off down the path. She could see pear trees in the distance, the still-green pears hanging on the branches, ready for harvesting.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sybil said. ‘I’m rather looking forward to one myself. There’s nothing nicer than a man in uniform, don’t you think? And somebody has to stop those Huns. They’re building ships like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘They’re entitled to defend themselves.’

  ‘They’ll be well defended at the rate they’re going,’ Sybil said caustically. ‘My uncle Ferdy is prospecting out near Nairobi, and he isn’t happy about it at all. He’s written to my mother about it, and she insists on reading me the letters down the blower. He reckons they want to grab more of Africa. But we’ll show ’em. We’re building dreadnoughts t
o beat the band! Oh, cave!’

  This last injunction was caused by the appearance of Miss Dunn, their religious instructor, a thickset woman with small eyes and greying mousy hair in a blunt cut. She waddled exasperatedly down the path, on the qui vive for anyone who might be out of bounds. Eva heeded Sybil’s warning and followed her behind a laurel bush. She had suffered too often Miss Dunn’s particular trick of flicking a leather bookmark on a girl’s cheek. A minor assault, but it stung awhile. Sybil said that Miss Hedges used Miss Dunn to keep the girls in line because she couldn’t bear not to be popular.

  They completed their circuit by heading down to the netball courts. Sybil made it a point of honour never to play if she could help it. When she did, she always managed to be near the net, where she would allow through as many shots as possible, in spite of the shouts of protest from the games mistress. This made all the girls cheer. Half the class, it would appear, had a crush on Sybil – and the other half wanted to be her. Eva decided to cultivate her friendship. In a place like this, it would not hurt to have an ally.

  Of all her classes, Eva’s favourite was the twice-weekly ‘English Literature’. The teacher, Mr Shandlin, was borrowed from the boys’ preparatory five miles up the road. He was a slender and rather unkempt man, with a high, domed forehead and fine, flyaway dark hair, who fidgeted endlessly. He was possessed of a brusque manner and could be sarcastic, coming out with remarks like, ‘I’m sure many of you think you are the Faerie Queene; my question was has anyone read it?’ Sybil once declared to Eva that he must have owned no more than two suits and that she had never had occasion to see the second.

  Eva had not read The Faerie Queene, but something mocking in his question provoked her, and she borrowed a copy from the library. Much of it dragged, but she could not help but be endeared by Britomart the female knight, who fought for Artegall and liberated him. Then she read a little bit about Edmund Spenser, its author, and was disappointed. He appeared a sneering, contemptuous sort, who believed that Ireland would never be pacified until its language and culture were destroyed. A long-suppressed loyalty sprang up in Eva’s heart, and she mentioned it in class without prompting. ‘Mr Shandlin, this poem – The Faerie Queene.’