by Debra Daley
The cards spurted from Eliza’s fingers and tumbled at the feet of the brooding Delft vases. ‘Confound it! Em, do pick those up, won’t you?’
With their pockets empty of blooms the vases looked glum and useless. I dropped to my knees before them and gathered the scattered cards as though impelled to restore the integrity of something that had burst.
Mrs Waterland said, ‘Do you understand the meaning, Eliza? Mr Barfield intimates that you might consider him.’
Surely the man could not be serious about asking leave to court Eliza. What could possibly be in it for him? In any case, wasn’t his mother titled? She would never agree to an approach. Eliza’s pedigree is paltry and her want of a fortune an insurmountable obstacle.
‘Consider Mr Barfield?’ Eliza turned down the corners of her mouth. ‘Why should I, when I would not consider Baron von Boxhagen, who is at least half handsome?’
A quiver seemed to pass through the parlour and the candle flames quailed. I noticed that the fringes on Mrs Waterland’s gown were trembling slightly. She raised her hand and I blinked at the flash of the brilliants in her rings. It was only as she pointed a finger of accusation at Eliza that I realised the throb in the room was caused by her fury. She fixed Eliza with an awful blue glare and spat, ‘You don’t consider the baron, do you? You illusionist! You stupid fool! The baron does not consider you!’
Eliza blanched and her mouth fell open.
‘You did not catch his eye!’ Mrs Waterland cried. ‘He rejects you!’ She pressed a hand against her gem-encrusted bosom and her mouth twisted as if in pain. Eliza added a glazed stare to her hanging jaw, which made her look doltish and supplied her mother with fresh ammunition. ‘It defies belief,’ Mrs Waterland hissed, ‘that you could turn out to be as addled as you are ill-favoured. My God, what have I done to deserve such an unprofitable child?’
Eliza rose to her feet. I stood up as well, the cards clutched in my hands. The clock chimed the half-hour. Its conceited bells sounded absurd in the violent atmosphere of the room, but Eliza seemed to take heart from the interruption. She thrust out her bottom lip and declared with defiance, ‘But I do not care to entertain Mr Barfield.’
Mrs Waterland smacked Eliza’s face hard. Eliza gasped and put her hand to her cheek.
Mrs Waterland’s voice was low but it trembled with anger, ‘Do you never think how the bread comes to your mouth or the gown to your closet? If you wish to live life as you please, you must make a match that gives you the means to do so. And you must do it soon. Let me inform you, Miss Waterland, since it seems you are too dull to see the truth in your looking glass: you have worn off your bloom, such as it was, and you are not in a position to discriminate.’
Eliza’s eyes began to brim, but her mother was relentless. She went on, ‘If Em were in your place, she could have her pick of swells. We should be celebrating a contract with the baron now … yes, I saw how he riveted his eye fast on you, Miss Smith.’ She directed at me a smile that had something sly in it and I felt a flash of unambiguous dislike that made me recoil. She turned back to Eliza and commanded her to retire to her apartment and write a letter of thanks to Mr Barfield.
‘Why doesn’t Em write it? After all, Barfield is another one who slavers over her.’ Eliza’s taunt shocked me. It made me feel that tawdry doings of mine had been exposed – and worse, Eliza looked at me with an accusing eye as though a shameful deed stood between us.
Mrs Waterland was very crisp then. She said, ‘In that case, perhaps Miss Smith will advise you how to detain Mr Barfield’s fancy.’
It was this remark that forced my hand. Many times I had wound myself up to the task of telling Mrs Waterland about Barfield, but I felt such a magnitude of shame I could not go through with it. However, I was filled with anger and revulsion at her view of me, even it were only a flippant one, as someone who might lure Barfield like a goat staked out in a clearing. When Eliza stomped out of the parlour with her cheek still glowing red from her mother’s slap, I did not follow at once.
Mrs Waterland sat down at her little secretary-desk and began flipping noisily through a catalogue as if she needed to absorb the energy released by the scene with Eliza. I took several steps nearer until I was quite close to her and waited in silence while she briskly turned the pages. She was still compensating at that time for the lack of a legacy from Sir Joseph Felling by ordering streams of goods from establishments all over the land.
‘Madam,’ I said, my voice tight with anxiety, ‘I have something to tell you about Tobias Barfield.’
She took her time turning to face me, and her expression was sceptical.
‘I beg you, do not permit him by any means to pay court to Eliza.’
Mrs Waterland said shortly, ‘I do not follow you.’
‘The man is a beast and she will not be safe with him.’
‘Those are strong words. What on earth are you talking about?’
Her impatient expression made me feel even more overwrought. I cried, ‘I can hardly bring myself to disclose what has happened!’ I remember I almost said confess instead of disclose, as though it were I who was at fault and in need of forgiveness. Mrs Waterland closed the catalogue and stared at me.
‘Well?’ she said coldly.
It came out then in a torrent – an account of the assaults in the orchard and at Weever Hall. The effort of the description taxed me dreadfully. I stammered through it in a bitter passion, swept by emotions of humiliation and inexplicable guilt. As I came to the end of my statement, Mrs Waterland pressed a hand to her temple and cried, ‘My God, you might have murdered him!’
I had expected that she would leap to a position of moral indignation on my behalf; instead, it was the vigour of my defence that appalled her.
‘You little idiot,’ she groaned. ‘Don’t you see how close you came to being arrested for assault yourself? You might have been hanged for that blow.’
‘But he treated me with such savagery! And he would try me again if he could seize his chance, I know he would – he has said so. I beg you to keep him away from us.’
The look on Mrs Waterland’s face was one of exasperation. She said, ‘Have you told anyone else of these events? Does Eliza know? Is that why she made such a fuss just now?’
‘No – no, I have told no one.’
She heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Thank heavens for that. I implore you not to say a word about this to another soul, especially not to Eliza.’ She went on, ‘You will only damage her chances if this is brought into the open. Perhaps you think me unsympathetic, but in any whiff of a scandal of this nature, it is you and, by extension, Eliza who will suffer. It is unjust, of course, but that is how it is.’
I bit my lip, wondering how I had come to be so defeated by a situation in which I hoped to find encouragement and concern. I was enormously crushed by Mrs Waterland’s failure to see my side. I tried another tack. ‘Do you not wonder, madam, why Barfield has never entertained Eliza before? I believe he may have done something so hateful that his people are unable to … to—’
‘To palm him off on anyone else?’ Mrs Waterland said evenly. ‘Well, I dare say you and I are agreed that Eliza is a poor catch. That makes it even more imperative to keep her opportunities open, few and far between as they are.’
My interview with Mrs Waterland seemed to me like a runaway horse, which I could not bring under control. How had the lumpen but innocent Eliza come to be a subject of slur, while Barfield escaped condemnation?
‘Madam,’ I pressed, ‘the devil is in this fellow. It truly is!’ My voice cracked with emotion.
‘Of course I take your feelings seriously,’ Mrs Waterland said with a distracted air. Silence fell and she seemed to drift into thought. I was reminded all at once of that milk crock and the jagged sound of its crash on the flagstones. Then Mrs Waterland said, with a gaze that looked past my shoulder, ‘Everyone has something odious in his past. But time passes on and one recovers.’
She stood up. ‘What a wretched
cold day it is. Mrs Edmunds might make a hot toddy, I think.’
I said in a low voice, ‘I will tell her.’
‘No need.’ Mrs Waterland bestowed a bright smile on me. ‘I will do it.’
As she went to the bell-pull, I noticed a letter that had been exposed by the closing of the catalogue. It bore the flashy mark of Hill & Vezey. I turned my head away, feeling that it was improper to stare at Mrs Waterland’s private papers. Perhaps I suspected that they held secrets, things that would shatter my faith in her. I was shocked by our exchange on the subject of Barfield, but I could not yet admit to myself that that faith had already been shattered. More terrifying still, I could not begin to look at a future where Barfield and Eliza would be married and I would be at his disposal by day and by night.
The Day Coach from Chester to London
April, 1766
Three months after that scene in Mrs Waterland’s parlour, Eliza and I were put into a fast day coach bound for London. The coach was called the Sprinter and it managed the journey in only four days, but it seemed never-ending to me. We had hardly got out of Chester before Eliza was taken by the gripes. I was obliged to hang out of the door window and beg the driver to throw on the drag. We slithered to a stop, the undergear groaning and Eliza purged the morning’s eggs and toast in a ditch. It was a beautiful day with rosebuds swelling in the hedgerows and fields of yellow rape that flowed towards the horizon and lapped against a bank of bunchy clouds. I recall a solitary labourer at a hedgerow gazing at the skid marks of the coach before he bent again to his badging-hook.
I came to Eliza’s side, handkerchief deployed, and swabbed at her riding habit, while the coach panted at our backs like a waiting mastiff. At length the coachman grew impatient and shouted, ‘Hie now, ladies! In with you and let us step on!’
I felt nauseated too, but it was not the fault of the pitching machine or the outrageous reek of our fellow travellers’ pomades. It was the fear of what I would find when we reached our destination. During the month in which arrangements were made for our journey south, I felt as though I were standing in a room divided by a curtain. I was aware by dint of muffled noises, a door opening and closing, that something was going on behind the hanging, but I could not make out what it was. I strained to put it all together. I even hazarded the possibility that a contract had been contrived backstage, as it were, between Eliza and Barfield, in spite of everything I had told Mrs Waterland. But I could not make that postulation stick. It was too outlandish. Even if her parents did not hold Eliza in very high regard, I could not imagine that they would throw her to that wolf.
As I mull over that journey, I recall how vexed Eliza seemed to be throughout. Was it just the discomfort of the road? She was very terse in Coventry, but then again, Coventry was a disagreeable, gloomy place with houses canted closely overhead, their foreheads almost touching, as though they were trying to hold one another up. There was a tumultuous yard at the Dolphin Inn, churning with horses, vehicles and travellers. I negotiated ineptly for a night’s accommodation, then fought off all comers for the remnants of a greasy bacon supper, which I conveyed to our damp-walled chamber. Eliza said little while we dined, or afterwards. Thoughts were thickening upon her, I could see.
She stood at the warped window with her back to me, her shoulders huffy. I sent down for a sixpenny pint of hock to cheer our spirits. Eliza settled on the bed with a magazine and made a show of reading while she sipped the acidy wine. I remarked the rot that was eating away a corner of the ceiling and she grunted in reply from behind the shield of her periodical.
I asked her then about Barfield. I said, ‘There is no plan to meet him in London, is there?’
She threw the magazine aside and said, ‘Will you stop mewling about Barfield, for heaven’s sake.’ She pulled the eiderdown up to her chin. ‘It has got cold. These walls are awfully flawed. Perhaps you might be able to do something about the fire.’ She flung herself on her side, again with her back to me.
I encouraged the fire with the few nuggets of coal remaining. As I was folding Eliza’s clothes, I unearthed from one of her pockets a familiar creased piece of paper, a note for two guineas to be drawn on the bank of Hill & Vezey. It had been a gift from Johnny, doubtless at the behest of their mother, on the occasion of Eliza’s sixteenth birthday. She had been carrying it around for years. How pitiful it was that this withered promissory was all that she really had of her brother.
As I climbed into bed, I was struck by the feeling that these scenes were preordained. There was a compelling sense of inevitability about the Dolphin Inn, the terrible wine, and Eliza’s turning away.
*
As we ground on, the highway altered for the worse. The wheels slipped under hissing rain as the Sprinter strained against a strong headwind that seemed to be trying to blow us back to Chester. One was left in the murk of the coach’s interior with one’s own thoughts.
I understood that the wellspring for Mrs Waterland’s outburst at Eliza was the state of the economy at Sedge Court. Anyone could tell that we were in an unsteady condition. I did not wish a new and unpredictable mistress in the house, but I could not comprehend why Johnny did not marry and save the estate. He had reached the age of thirty years without bothering to rake in a moneyed bride. Was not London awash in them? In fact there were many things I did not understand about our recession and the master’s inability to pay his debts. The mistress had told Baron von Boxhagen that Mr Waterland had invested in canals. They were being dug everywhere now. Surely something must come of such perceptive speculation. And what about the houses in Chester that Johnny had persuaded the master to buy? I had overheard Mrs Edmunds asking Mr Otty the same question and he had replied, ‘The Chester houses? Mayhappen they are mightily encumbered with mortgages or we would have seen them turned into brass by now.’ What had become of Johnny’s once bountiful schemes?
*
At each change of horses we managed a glimpse of sky before we were shut up again with a new intake of passengers. Most of them were zealous carpers. The miles unrolled to complaints about deficient friends and servants, perverse weather, shoddy harpsichords, bad butchery, and the perfidy of paper-stainers. Scraps of woodland rushed past the windows. Presently someone claimed to recognise parts of Buckinghamshire. Then we were tipped into the yard of another inn, and our used-up leaders taken away.
At the Highgate turnpike we were stuck for aeons in a traffic jam. Eliza wiped at the window and moaned, ‘Will we never arrive?’ The turnpike was mobbed by every kind of wheeled conveyance as well as travellers on foot and horseback, but once we were through, the congestion eased and we began a long descent to London down a dirty lane.
Presently hedgerows gave way to buildings closely clustered and an astonishing press of people. I expected our last dash to be made with an air of triumph, blasts of the horn trumpeting the Sprinter’s achievement – the scores of miles and dozens of horses vanquished. But so thick was the throng, our coach was only able to slouch towards its terminus, a bedraggled lumberer, drained of its sprinterness.
We alighted into a sea of nagging paupers – spare any change, madam, a penny, madam – who looked as if they would slit your throat for a farthing. The guard was obliged to dislodge a ball-faced boy from the hem of Eliza’s petticoat and he knocked aside a toothless crone who could no more lift a mist than the portmanteau she was scrabbling at. She was one of a horde fighting to carry our luggage. At my request the guard whistled up a lad with a lantern on a pole, who deployed it to get by the beggars and the yelping dogs as though he were hacking through undergrowth.
Five minutes later we were in a hackney carriage feeling its way on to the Oxford Road. The instant our driver paused to give way, a screaming bung-eyed baby reared up at one of the windows, assisted by some unseen agent, while at the other, a skeletal figure dragged shrieking fingernails on the glaze. In spite of these apparitions, I felt a rush of excitement, for I sensed the mighty engine of this great town turning on its gears and o
ne felt somehow joined to an epic enterprise simply by being there. This gust of energy lifted me up and away from the grubby little feeling of dread that had hung over me on the long journey down.
We arrived in a matter of minutes at a narrow street in Soho and halted before a townhouse, barely two windows wide, but very tall and haughty with a pinched air about it. Under the wavering light of a street lantern, I hammered on the door. It was opened by a footman who seemed pleased with himself. Flicking the sides of his frock away to reveal red plush breeches, he conveyed our luggage into an entrance hall whose outmoded wainscoting was slightly illuminated by a single candle in a sconce. To our right a cramped flight of stairs built around a narrow well ascended into darkness. My first impression was that Arthur Paine was not likely to run through Sir Joseph Felling’s fortune in a hurry. There was a sense of skimping about the house – and we had not even reached the parlour.
A butler leaning heavily on a walking stick made a delayed appearance, limping from the shadows behind the staircase, and led us in a time-consuming procession to the far reaches of the hall. After a struggle with the door handle, he at last breached his master’s study, as the chamber proved to be, and waved us in. Mr Paine rose bareheaded in a damask gown from behind a large table, looking startled to see us, and then, collecting himself, he came to take Eliza’s hand and offered me a bow. He apologised for his informality, explaining that he had scorched his best wig while studying close to a lamp. He ordered Samuels, the butler, to send up tea. With a disgruntled expression, Eliza assessed her surroundings. The dozens of prints infesting the walls and the muddle of papers and books gave to Mr Paine’s study an air of dogged profusion.
Eliza said with a pout, ‘The house does not look very commodious, Cousin. I hope we may be fitted in.’
Mr Paine grimaced. ‘I am sorry that Poland Street is not what it was. The address was fashionable when my late mother bought the place thirty or forty years ago, but now we have been rather left in the lurch. The quality has moved west, you see.’