The Potter's Niece

by Randall, Rona

  He followed her outside. Cupping his hands to receive her foot, he lifted her easily into the saddle. The rain had ceased, but the night was black.

  ‘I’ll fetch a saddle lamp for you,’ he said, but she declined that. Corporal was surefooted and knew his way blindfold throughout the district, so she left the horse to choose the route while her thoughts roamed. Sweet indeed were the uses of adversity, she reflected happily. But for the cast shoe, she would have been cheated out of an hour which had obliterated all thought of Lionel and banished her ill humour.

  She had travelled no more than a few yards when Fletcher caught up with her, his saddle lamp casting a wide pool of light around them.

  ‘Did you imagine I’d let you ride alone at this hour?’

  She could make no answer, finding herself tongue-tied, and in this way — silently, side by side — they proceeded to Tremain Hall, and although she rarely passed Carrion House without wondering why Aunt Agatha had left it almost immediately after her husband’s funeral, and what had caused his sudden death, and why no one ever seemed willing to talk about it, she rode so blindly tonight that she was aware of nothing but the man accompanying her.

  Before parting, he surprised her by asking why she had left the festivities and why she had ridden so furiously that Corporal had cast a shoe. ‘Did something — or someone? — anger you during your cousin’s celebrations, which are still in full swing from the sound of things?’

  ‘Noise and heat drove me away.’

  ‘Good reasons, but why the anger?’

  How could she tell him that her cousin had tried to rape her? It sounded melodramatic. He might even dismiss the story as the neurotic fantasising of a frustrated spinster who yearned for it to be reality, and she could think of nothing more humiliating than that.

  Or, at best, he could say, ‘Why didn’t you send him packing, or summon servants?’ (As if any servant would dare to interfere with Master Lionel!) ‘Why go racing out into the night, hatless and ill-equipped for rain, only to present a sorry sight at my door, with your horse suffering because of your anger?’

  Even if he didn’t say all that, he could think it, so she merely thanked him for his help and then surprised herself by putting a question which had been puzzling her ever since she saw the interior of his home. But not the dominant question. That she dared not ask. ‘Why did a man like you become a farrier, Mr Fletcher?’

  ‘Necessity,’ he answered briefly.

  ‘Did you never want to follow in your father’s footsteps?’

  ‘I tutored for awhile, but not in this country.’

  ‘Then where and how did you become a farrier?’

  He turned in the saddle, and faced her.

  ‘In prison, Miss Freeman. An American one.’

  Without another word, he was gone.

  She should have known that an encounter with her mother would be unavoidable, even though she entered the house through the domestic quarters and thence to the heir’s wing via back stairs. And even though she carried her riding boots and ran in stockinged feet along the endless maze of corridors, she should have known that creaking floor boards would betray her. The minute she entered her room, closing the door quietly behind her, the communicating door opened.

  Not for the first time she wished their rooms were not connected, and that she could have escaped to her bed undetected, for by comparison with her mother’s elegance her own appearance was now appalling, but there stood Phoebe, still gowned for the ball, splendid in a long polonese with an overskirt and train, the front revealing shorter polonese petticoats below which her tiny feet and slender ankles were proudly displayed. When dancing, she would point a delicate toe and outstretch a graceful arm so that her train, dangling from a ribboned wrist-loop, swung elegantly from the side. Olivia had watched her doing this tonight, satin slippers matching the periwinkle blue of the polonese and with a wealth of frills and spangles and winsome bows bespattered over her entire ensemble, giving an illusion of youth which her rigid mask of make-up could only sustain effectively in candlelight and shadow.

  Tremain’s ballroom was obliging in this respect. The glow of hundreds of candles, in their crystal chandeliers, filtered a romantic light upon the dancers below. Within its sphere, Phoebe’s layers of enamel and paste skilfully hid the fact that the complexion beneath had coarsened with the years. Only once had Olivia seen her mother’s face prior to the ritual application of wash balls and pastes, and had been reprimanded sharply for the intrusion. ‘How dare you come into my boudoir without knocking?’ Phoebe had shrilled, hastily covering her pitted skin.

  Tonight her hair, also, bore its quota of adornment. Dressed in its lifelong style of clustered ringlets at each side of her face, which she would never abandon, she had nonetheless permitted ‘Monsieur Louis’ to pile the rest of it high over a wire frame to support a galaxy of flowers and feathers and myriad butterflies made of spun glass. The size of women’s head-dresses these days was mountainous compared with the snug hairdressing of the previous decade, and since few had sufficient hair of their own to comply with the fashion, false locks were added, stuffed with well concealed sheep’s wool. The whole was then greased With pomatum and heavily dusted with white or grey powder — but not for Phoebe. She would proudly boast that her ringlets were natural and that not for the world would she conceal her golden locks entirely.

  Sometimes Olivia wondered whether the growing tendency for men to reveal their natural hair, or at least to combine more and more of it with a diminishing wig, had spurred the perruquiers to create these over-elaborate head-dresses for women in order to keep themselves in employment. (Compared with other hair decorations tonight — bejewelled ships with glittering sails, flights of exotic birds, and every possible absurdity — Phoebe’s sparkling display was quite restrained, but even so her daughter marvelled that she could balance it so adroitly. Olivia had lost her own topknot of flowers and ribbons quite early in the dance.

  Everything about her mother’s appearance tonight would have been becoming to a girl in her teens, but Phoebe carried it off with panache because she had never known self-doubt or self-consciousness. Not for her the tortures of the insecure and the socially uncertain. She was Mistress Freeman, widow of the heir to Tremain Hall, whose death she still pretended to mourn, but which, her daughter knew, she rarely recalled now.

  Olivia suspected that her mother’s mind dwelt only on the future, on the day when her daughter would own this much coveted place, and that she resented anything blocking such an achievement — for Grandmother Charlotte’s marriage had annulled the heretrix provision. Once wed, it had been ordained that in the event of her having a son or sons, the inheritance would pass from her to the male line, but should her male offspring die the heretrix clause could be revived, which meant that there now had to be legal acceptance of Maxwell Freeman’s death before the entitlement could pass to his daughter. But his death had never been actually confirmed, though after all these years it was taken for granted and needed only official acknowledgement.

  ‘And once that’s obtained, the only thing needed is your grandmother’s signature on a document, but still she shirks it. “There is plenty of time, plenty of time!” she declares, refusing to acknowledge that she is now sixty-five, which is as good as one foot in the grave. Elderly people are so obstinate, so stupid! Pig-headed — that is Grandmother Charlotte.’

  Olivia had learned to turn a deaf ear to her mother’s rantings and, for her part, had little desire to inherit so vast a place. The responsibility was intimidating, and maternal assurances that Lionel would be an ever reliable source of help did nothing to encourage a wish to be its chatelaine, besides which Olivia knew too well what lay beneath its appearance of slumbering placidity.

  Set amidst vast acres, with its farms, its workers’ cottages, its stables, its carpenters’ and glaziers’ and blacksmiths’ workshops, its slaughterhouses where deer and game were hung — all killed within its own parklands, not for sport, but to feed t
he innumerable dependants on the estate — the Tremain kingdom was a world within a world, and a more demanding one than the one outside.

  Within its boundaries the owners’ responsibilities were unceasing. Apart from a platoon of indoor workers, all of whom were traditionally housed and supported, an even larger squadron of outdoor workers, with their families, were accorded the same privileges. The gardens alone demanded the attention of a vast team, for they surrounded the mansion like a sprawling ornamental carpet featuring rose gardens and rock gardens, sunken gardens and water gardens, kitchen gardens and herb gardens, not to mention miles of herbaceous borders, endless lawns and orchards, and hothouses containing tropical fruit and rare plants.

  In addition, the encircling miles of Tremain woods required a permanent forestry staff, all with equal claims to membership of this vast army of dependents. And as well as gamekeepers and foresters and gardeners, there were stablemen and coachmen and grooms, wardens and park-keepers and stewards. There was also a family chapel to be kept in good repair and a visiting priest retained on a permanent stipend.

  Then there was the mansion itself, with its spreading wings, its countless bedrooms, its banqueting hall and ballroom and chains of reception rooms; its sprawling kitchens and sculleries and servants’ quarters; its still room, laundry, dairy, brewery; its stone-floored larders and pantries; its wine cellars and store-rooms … all attended by a vast retinue of servants from whose families, as with the outdoor staff, vacancies were always filled by right of accession.

  In the midst of this grandeur members of the family lived their separate lives in enviable but somewhat isolated comfort; Charlotte and Ralph Freeman in the main part of the house; Olivia and her mother in the heir’s wing, to which Phoebe had come as a bride; Agatha and her son in the west wing where she was served by her own French cook, Pierre, whom she had insisted on retaining when she abandoned Carrion House and for whom she had installed a special kitchen.

  It was a well organised and luxurious way of life which the present chatelaine supervised with pride and diligence, but the prospect of stepping into her shoes daunted Olivia, even though Charlotte had initiated her, from childhood, into the duties required of a member of this family, and particularly from the heir’s only child. It was as well for her to learn something of the family heritage, the old lady insisted, and with that Olivia’s mother agreed, secretly chafing for Charlotte to take the final step which would make Olivia heretrix and, ultimately, owner of this imperious world — with her mother as the power behind the throne.

  Neither woman knew how little the girl desired such an inheritance. There was something in her nature that wanted a simpler life. Perhaps it was a trait from her Drayton side, though never would Phoebe admit that her own family stemmed from a line of unschooled peasants, making their pots from clay dug wherever they could find it, then peddling their wares around the countryside. Not until one of them arrived in Burslem in the year 1540, removed his primitive potter’s wheel from the cart he used as a stand on village greens and erected it in a dilapidated barn to which no one laid claim, did his itinerant family put down roots.

  This ancient turntable had been resurrected by Amelia from an outbuilding, to become the first and most prized item of her museum.

  It was a typical potter’s wheel of its day and age, needing two people to operate it. A leather belt ran from an immense wheel to the potter’s stand, and the potter’s wife and children had worked in shifts to revolve belt, wheel, and turntable by wielding a heavy iron handle. The father of this industrious family had at last found a permanent abode and a place not only in which to work, but to build his own oven instead of paying an established potter to fire his wares, and after that the ‘Draitone’ family roots flourished. The first Drayton birth, spelled as it sounded to the clerk who penned it, was entered in the parish registers the following year.

  So too was born the Drayton pot bank, the term applied to all potters’ worksheds until Joseph elevated Drayton’s to the title of ‘The Drayton Pottery’ after his marriage to the elder daughter from Tremain Hall, because Agatha disliked the idea of ranking on a par with people more lowly.

  Olivia knew all this because her uncle had told her the story of his distant and humble origins, and told it with pride. That was on a day when she visited the place unbeknown to her mother, who believed she was safely at Medlar Croft, having tea with Amelia. Her aunt enjoyed these visits as much as Olivia did and a conspiracy had grown between them to do all the things Phoebe expressly forbade, such as wading in the stream which carried away muddied water from the pot bank and talking to the workers’ children who were, of course, socially beneath them. Whenever Amelia asked what she would especially like to do, Olivia would demand a visit to the pottery and Amelia would make no demur, for the place absorbed her too.

  But that particular day had been memorable not only because she learned of the family origins, but because all kilns were firing. Throughout the cycle, life within the kiln could be watched by the removal of a single spy brick. Stripped to the waist, their hairy chests matted with sweat, their faces streaming, the firemen’s work was a non-stop process of feeding wood to the ravenous ovens and removing the spy bricks with calloused hands encased in rough leather gauntlets which they sometimes didn’t bother to wear until the heat was really building up.

  To the six-year-old Olivia this sequence of loading, stoking, firing, cooling, and finally unloading was a wholly fascinating programme, and as she grew older and she was allowed to ride without a groom she would head for the valley and, from the hill where Carrion House stood at the peak, she would judge, from the amount of smoke enveloping the works below, just what stage the various firings had reached, but on this particular day, the day she was first allowed to peep inside a blazing kiln, she had not yet learned the signs from which experienced potters assessed progress. Nor had she been totally won over to the life of a potter until that magic moment when her uncle, seeing her awe-struck face as a fireman glanced sideways through a glowing slit, picked her up and, holding her at a distance, said, ‘If you want to see what goes on inside the furnace, take a quick glance when I tell you. Count three the moment the brick is removed, then close your eyes.’

  ‘But I’ll see nothing in that time! I’ll count six, slowly, and take a good look.’

  ‘No. Three, quite quickly. You’ll see a blaze of light and think you see nothing else, but afterwards you’ll remember.’

  And so she did. Brilliant white shapes superimposed themselves on her mind in that flashing moment, a moment so wonderful that she was untroubled by the jet of escaping heat. She wished the fireman hadn’t replaced the brick so soon.

  ‘There are white things, Uncle! Shining white things in all that blazing red! Why are they white?’

  ‘Because they are candescent, little Livvy. That means white hot. The shine is the glaze. Glaze is made by fusing certain chemicals until a smooth coating of glass is formed. Put simply, that is what glaze is — melted glass.’

  But that wasn’t the only thing printed indelibly on her excited mind; more vivid still had been the furnace flames, leaping like dragons’ fiery tongues, crystallising the liquid glass. It was her baptism, her initiation into a world which was for ever to be symbolised in her mind by dragon fire of molten gold.

  She had been silent for a long time afterwards, until Amelia had said ‘A penny for them, darling — ?’ To that Olivia had smiled but answered nothing, for the enchantment was still upon her. She was marvelling that from such fire beauty could emerge, that dun coloured clay could be transformed by its miracle-working intensity, and vowing that some day she would create things for it to beautify and burnish.

  From that moment on, she wanted no other life than that of a potter. To master the craft as her uncle had done, to know the same satisfaction and contentment, attracted her more than any social success.

  She always felt that it was Martin Drayton’s innate simplicity which had attracted Amelia, the younger Freema
n daughter. People said she could have had any man she fancied, but from early girlhood it had been Martin Drayton — the shy, limping younger brother of the renowned Joseph — and no one else. So the two brothers had married the two sisters, and Phoebe had completed the marital trio by marrying their brother — Maxwell, the heir, the family black sheep. And because he had begat no son, Phoebe’s determination that the heretrix clause should be reinstated would, Olivia suspected, stop at nothing.

  Meanwhile, Grandmother Charlotte remained queen and Phoebe fretted because a few miles away, beyond the village of Cooperwell, a rival stately home had passed into the hands of people whom she considered ill-deserving. Ashburton, the late Sir Neville Armstrong’s place, was one of the most eminent houses in the county, and Olivia had long since learned never to revive old sores by referring to it, for the mistress of that rival establishment was none other than her mother’s twin sister, Jessica, of whom she disapproved.

  ‘Not only did she disgrace the name of Drayton, but she married beneath her. Shamefully, she had to. And the man was nothing but a common labourer, a canal digger, the bastard son of that Armstrong rake. In his senility, Sir Neville was obviously manipulated by the pair of them.’

  But now, facing her mother in all her finery and all too sadly aware of the sorry sight she made by comparison — cloak drenched, wet hair streaming, damp riding skirt hitched over one arm and mud-splashed riding boots carried beneath the other — Olivia knew that at this moment Phoebe was not fretting over old sores, but over current ones, and that she, her daughter, was the focus.

  She sensed trouble immediately.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Olivia, what a sight you look! Where have you been?’