‘How poor Mrs. Helliwell manages is a wonder,’ Blair agreed, coming suddenly upright. He straightened his wig and round hat. ‘Shall we go on?’
They arrived in good time at the manse, which was just as well as Kennedy would not leave the little lane between kirkyard and manse until his thin shoes were free of the remotest hint that they had been any nearer the countryside than a well-stocked jardinière. Blair fidgeted, picking moss off the sheltered stone walls, while Murray stood at ease, looking back down the path and allowing himself to ponder again what had brought the pauper woman to that spot on Friday morning. Kennedy examined the mossy wall, glanced at his perfect gloves, and leaned instead on the cane as he used some leaves to brush at his left shoe. Then he changed sides and lifted his right foot, and with a brisk crack the cane snapped.
‘Feeble thing!’ he said, catching his balance. He made to throw the two halves into the kirkyard, but Murray snatched them, speechless.
Kennedy, however, seemed impervious, and at last, with a good-humoured grin, he declared himself to be presentable, and the gentlemen turned the corner and approached the front gate of the manse. Murray came last, stroking the broken ends of the cane gently as if they were part of his injured father, glaring at Kennedy’s back.
The Fairlies, as it happened, were just arriving from the opposite direction, and in the confusion of precedence and the greetings from the Helliwells catching sight of them from the hall and the practicalities of managing the larger members of each party through the small front door, they had all met for some minutes before the niceties of introduction were reached. As Blair was an old acquaintance of Letho society there was no call to introduce him to anyone but Miss Mary Fairlie, who had come out since Blair’s last visit: though he was accustomed to seeing her as a little girl about the village and at the kirk, he was now obliged to recognise her as a young lady, and accordingly made her a very fine bow. She blushed very properly as she curtseyed, but spoiled the effect of dignity by giggling loudly at his solemnity. Everyone but her mother laughed at this: her mother sighed dramatically and shook a finger at her. Then Mrs. Helliwell presented her son Gilbert to Mr. Kennedy, noting as she did so that Gilbert had omitted to brush the back of his hair, thought the front was smooth enough, and that his feet were still in boots instead of the shoes she had pointedly suggested. As a consequence, Mr. Kennedy’s bow, though lacking in formality, was markedly more elegant than her son’s self-conscious effort. She hoped, but without much conviction, that Miss Mary Fairlie would improve him.
The drawing room was pretty in a haphazard way, and overlooked the front garden which was full of blossom. The informal arrangement of the room was due not to Mrs. Helliwell’s sensibility for elegance, for her preference was for order, so much as to the necessity of covering some of the worst cracks and damp patches with the larger pieces of furniture. The Fairlie girls, who were trying very hard to cultivate a fashionable taste for the rustic and ruinous, found it quite charming. Mrs. Helliwell, on the other hand, hoped that the eyes of her guests would be distracted by a pretty shawl inexpertly tossed over the sofa, and a tall bowl of scarlet tulips on the windowsill. Blair went to admire the flowers.
‘They are so regal,’ he remarked to her when she came to join him. ‘They were a very great favourite of my late wife.’
‘They have done well this year.’ Mrs. Helliwell, like all good gardeners, gave the credit to the plants.
There was another bowl of tulips, yellow this time, downstairs on the dining room table. As she entered the room Mrs. Helliwell gave a little sigh: the flowers had looked quite well when she had last checked the table, but now they had rearranged themselves, it seemed. She had to admit that her only artistic talent lay in gardening.
‘And how are Mr. Hugh Fairlie and Mr. John Fairlie?’ Murray asked when they were all settled with their soup. Mrs. Fairlie beamed.
‘They are quite well, I believe, though Hugh of course is terribly busy. They are up in Edinburgh making the final arrangements for the wedding, for John is to be groom’s man.’
‘Very wise to marry in the summer,’ remarked Blair, grating nutmeg on to his soup from a silver tube he kept in his pocket. ‘So many couples become acquainted in the autumn and form an attachment over the winter, and marry in February, and it is only in the spring that they finally see one another without benefit of candlelight.’
There was a pause while the company digested this, then Murray said,
‘I do not believe I have met Miss Lyall.’
‘She is a sweet girl, and very pretty,’ said Mrs. Fairlie. ‘And as to the time of year, I am only glad that it is not May, for it nearly was, and that is so unlucky, but Miss Lyall’s brother is to go to join his regiment in the Peninsula, but he has been allowed another month.’
‘In which regiment does he serve?’ asked Murray. ‘As you perhaps know, my brother George is there now with the Royal Regiment.’
‘Indeed I do not know,’ said Mrs. Fairlie, surprised at her own ignorance. ‘The regiment is, I hear –’
‘He is with the Forty-Second, I believe, my dear,’ interrupted her husband. She blinked at him as if interpreting the statement into her own language, then turned back to Murray as her principal audience.
‘I should have liked Hugh to marry into a family we knew better, for as you know, better to marry over the midden than over the muir, not that there was any question of him marrying over the midden! But as I say, she is a pleasant girl, not too clever like some of these town misses. Oh, she has had schooling, but not enough to spoil her. For they say, you know, choose thy wife among the virtuous, and thy friend among the wise.’
Kennedy, turning innocently to Miss Mary Fairlie beside him, said conversationally,
‘And are you wise, Miss Fairlie?’
She giggled, and caught her sister’s eye across the table.
‘Oh, never, sir! But I am very sensible of feelings,’ she reminded herself sternly, and tried to grow more solemn. ‘That poor woman who was buried yesterday, how she must have suffered!’ She and her sister sniffed in unison, and Louisa, the elder, batted her little eyelids as though to hold back tears.
‘Indeed,’ said Mrs. Helliwell, slightly puzzled, ‘she made a very peaceful end.’ There was a sharp sigh from her husband at the other end of the table, and she knew she had displeased him. ‘And after all,’ she went on regardless, ‘I believe that once the cold takes you, you feel little pain.’
Blair, after an instant of panicking hands, gave a tremendous sneeze, which, since he had averted his nose from the table, blew him back hard into Kennedy beside him, who in turn involuntarily nudged Miss Mary Fairlie. During the fuss over Blair that followed, only Gilbert Helliwell and Murray noticed the tender way in which Kennedy begged Miss Mary’s pardon and attended to the little spot of soup on her sleeve. Gilbert appeared to mutter something under his breath at which Louisa Fairlie beside him gave a shocked giggle. Blair declared himself to be quite recovered, and the dinner resumed, as the tulip petals fell one by one like gold bezants on to the walnut table.
Once returned upstairs to the drawing room, Miss Mary Fairlie settled at the box piano to play a number of sad German songs which she and her sister sang as soulful duets. They hoped that the doors were thin enough for the sound to carry down to the gentlemen still in the dining room. Mrs. Helliwell sat by Mrs. Fairlie and raised her voice to be heard above the music.
‘If you are at leisure some afternoon this week, Mrs. Fairlie,’ she began, ‘there is a service we could render.’
‘Well, I am not sure,’ said Mrs. Fairlie. Mrs. Helliwell had a tendency to be efficient and energetic, which were qualities Mrs. Fairlie felt could best be admired from a distance.
‘I have not called on old Mrs. Kirk for some days,’ said Mrs. Helliwell, ‘but I feel that now would be an opportune time. I hear that she has two young nieces staying with her, unmarried sisters, and the poor girls must be terribly lonely cut off at Cullessie with no acquaintance in the
neighbourhood. I thought if we could bring your daughters with us, all four might benefit from the company.’
‘Oh, an excellent idea, Mrs. Helliwell,’ agreed Mrs. Fairlie, much relieved that so little was being asked of her. ‘But indeed I do not believe that we are not engaged until Friday, for –’
‘Friday would suit me very well.’ Mrs. Helliwell had no wish to sit through a list of Mrs. Fairlie’s engagements, which was unlikely to be entertaining or useful. ‘Perhaps you would come past the manse when you are ready, and we can take the path over the hill.’
‘Oh, no! Not on Friday in particular!’ said Mrs. Fairlie, looking shocked. ‘It was only last Friday that poor girl was found there. No, come past our house and we shall go by the road, I beg you, Mrs. Helliwell. Mrs. Kirk will indeed be delighted to see us.’
At that, the gentlemen reappeared, and talk turned to other things.
X
Only her keen sense of neighbourliness and charity prevented Mrs. Helliwell from regretting the planned expedition to Cullessie House on Friday afternoon before she had even reached the main road. Mrs. Fairlie, a woman who lacked sense to an alarming degree at the best of times, seemed to have been rendered positively primitive by the prospects of her eldest son’s approaching nuptials. Every movement, every syllable made by the bride or bridegroom or their immediate family was transformed into an omen for good or ill, and like an over-enthusiastic haruspex Mrs. Fairlie, metaphorical sacrificial knife in hand, poked around in the entrails of the least significant event and foresaw wonders. Mrs. Helliwell was happy to admit that the mother of any beloved bridegroom had almost an obligation in society to talk of little else in the weeks adjacent to the ceremony. Mrs. Fairlie, however, armed with her ready knowledge of signs and portents, could find her way to the subject from any conversational starting point given to her within three sentences. By the time they had passed the smithy, which had so many possible omens associated with it that Mrs. Fairlie was driven to a positive frenzy of forecasting, Mrs. Helliwell had come to regard their conversation as a kind of one-sided parlour game, and began to enjoy it. Miss Fairlie and Miss Mary walked behind, fortunately uninvolved, and as far as Mrs. Helliwell could hear were practising being properly appreciative of the occasional ruined tree or tumbled stone wall. Mrs. Helliwell, by contrast, noted the damage to report to Mrs. Kirk’s manservant. The Misses Fairlie, though they had briefly been to school in Edinburgh, rarely went anywhere more fashionable than the market town of Cupar, and consequently were a little behind the times with the ton. While the fair Miss Lyall in Edinburgh, no doubt, had washed off the turgid sensibility of emotions for the Age of Reason, the Misses Fairlie, when they remembered, drew it on like a sodden cloak. It was the more unfortunate in that such romantic feeling ill-suited them: they were both plump, jolly girls, and occasionally Mary, at least, suspected that her friends found her more attractive when she forgot to try to be so sensitive.
A gusty wind seemed always to be in their faces even when they turned into the apparent shelter of Cullessie’s dog-leg driveway and crossed back over the river. It billowed their gowns back and forth, showing the clean polish of the Fairlies’ boots and the garden-muddiness of Mrs. Helliwell’s, and it caught the tail of Miss Mary’s muslin neckerchief and attached it to the straw of her bonnet, leading her mother to fuss and tut over her inadequate state of dress. The four ladies arrived at the front door looking not at all aesthetic to Miss Fairlie’s way of thinking, but breathless, rosy and bright-eyed, bonnet ribbons drawn tight under their chins.
Mrs. Kirk, an elderly widow, normally lived alone, attended by a number of servants whose general laziness was rarely tempered by the housekeeper’s sense of her own importance. In the absence of a strong-minded mistress she ruled with erratic competence, and Mrs. Helliwell wondered what the two nieces, reportedly new from the elegance of Bath, would have made of the somewhat haphazard domestic arrangements at Cullessie. No local servant of any worth would work there: those who left either eagerly applied to work for the Georges or Mr. Murray, or, of too low a standard even for Cullessie, vanished from the parish without trace. Mrs. Helliwell was quite certain that her mysterious woman was not one of these unfortunate incompetents: she would never have obtained fashionable clothes at Cullessie.
Mrs. Kirk’s nieces, now introduced to them in the parlour, were the daughters of Mrs. Kirk’s only, late, brother-in-law. She lived in Cullessie in liferent by permission first of him, then of his son, who had lately escorted the girls to the house. As the elder, Miss Virginia, lapsed again into the sagging curve of a chaise longue, the younger, Miss Parnell, explained that her brother Leopold had had to leave on Wednesday to rejoin his ship.
‘He is in the Navy, then? I am sorry to have missed him,’ said Mrs. Fairlie, managing not to glance at her daughters. She contrived to hope simultaneously that the Kirk girls would not stay long in the parish, for there were few enough eligible men to go round, and that the Kirk girls would stay long enough to bring their brother back again. If he were a naval officer, and the owner of Cullessie (which could certainly benefit from the vigour of a young family, and was the third largest house in the parish), and if he were to resemble, in a manly way, of course, his two sisters, he would be a catch pleasing to both mother and daughter, and then they should have another wedding, and had she not seen four magpies in the garden that very morning, to signify the approach of a young man? To be sure, at the time she had interpreted the omen as an indication that Hugh’s first child would be male, but when she thought of it the birds had flown very near to Louisa ...
Mrs. Helliwell was asking Mrs. Kirk how she did. The old lady frequently gave the appearance of immobility, but it was chiefly a condition of the mind, and not of the body. Mrs. Kirk smiled sweetly at her visitors, and made a reasonable show of knowing who they were. She enquired after their children, though not by name, and received for her pains the inevitable description of the approaching wedding, which allowed her for some time to make no contribution to the conversation other than to nod occasionally. Mrs. Helliwell turned to the girls, and wondered where to start. She noticed that Miss Virginia was wearing three shawls, and asked her what differences – perhaps in climate? – she must have found in moving from Bath.
‘It is extraordinary,’ said Miss Virginia slowly, ‘how two such different places could exist on the same island. Can we expect a summer this year, do you think?’
‘We had it last week, I believe,’ remarked Mary Fairlie, helpfully, then remembered that a sense of humour was not always elegant. ‘I am sorry if you do not find Fife to be to your liking.’
‘We are very fond of it,’ added Miss Fairlie, ‘although we have travelled a little about and of course find the Highlands very romantic. Few, I think, who had the proper feelings could ignore the profound emotions they inspire.’ She gave a little sigh, and glanced at her sister for approval.
‘It sounds quite alarming,’ said Miss Parnell with an over-bright smile. ‘And are you often in Edinburgh?’
‘We went to school there,’ said Mary. ‘The Castle is quite charming, and the crags at sunset are –’
‘And is the society entertaining?’ asked Miss Parnell, who had had quite enough of scenery.
‘We saw but little of it, Miss Kirk, for we were still at school,’ explained Louisa.
‘I am afraid you may find the society here a little dull,’ said Mrs. Helliwell, partly to rescue Mary and Louisa who were looking confused. ‘There are few young people in the village, but the long summer evenings will soon make travelling a distance to a dinner or a ball a more bearable prospect.’ She ignored Miss Virginia’s involuntary shudder. ‘In the parish there are the Fairlies here, and their two brothers, and at Dures House there is Mr. George and his sister – but your aunt will have told you all of this.’
‘Not quite,’ said Miss Parnell, ‘for she forgets names, and the ones she remembers are from twenty years ago.’
‘Mm. My son Gilbert is the only child at the man
se who is old enough yet to be at dances. Then of course there is Letho House, which is owned by Mr. Murray, and Mr. Blair and Mr. Kennedy are at present his guests.’
‘What sort of gentleman is Mr. Murray?’ asked Miss Parnell quickly, glancing at her sister.
‘He is but four and twenty, but runs his estate well. Fine to look at, and with eight thousand a year.’ Mrs. Helliwell listed Murray’s merits with a trace of irony. Sometimes she felt young people should walk about with labels on. ‘Mr. Kennedy is the same age, and was at university with Mr. Murray at St. Andrews. Mr. Blair was a friend of Mr. Murray’s late father, and is a widower with a daughter.’
Talk passed on to the society potential of more distant neighbours, but although the Misses Fairlie became more animated, Miss Parnell seemed distracted. Mrs. Helliwell eventually looked about at Mrs. Fairlie, who was still in full flow towards Mrs. Kirk. The old lady had developed a blank and slightly frightened half-smile.
‘I think we must leave now, Miss Kirk,’ said Mrs. Helliwell to the elder sister. ‘We are tiring your aunt. Mrs. Fairlie?’ She rose encouragingly. Mrs. Fairlie came across to her.
‘Please do call on us at your own convenience,’ she urged the girls. ‘We are in the North Street, you know, just ask and anyone will point you there. But if it is the week after next, you know, we shall be in Edinburgh for the marriage of my eldest son to Miss Lyall, a very pleasant young miss ...’
By degrees, Mrs. Helliwell propelled Mrs. Fairlie from the house, and breathed a sigh of relief at duty done and done painlessly. She had reservations about both of the Kirk girls, but closed up with the aunt at Cullessie they were probably not seen to their best advantage. She would not condemn them entirely on the first view.
An Abandoned Woman (Murray of Letho Book 4) Page 6