‘No, don’t.’
Miss Bryant turned, and Mary saw the iron anger flash in her eyes, to be instantly replaced with cool politeness. She tasted metal in her mouth. ‘I’m wanting to have things ready before teatime, Miss Mary.’
‘She’s in the garden with Mr Rawnsley, Miss Bryant. Father would rather she wasn’t disturbed. I’ll tell her – I’ll tell her to come to you. She knows not to be late.’
They never knew, because they never asked their father, where Nurse Bryant came from. When she was very old, Liddy sometimes wondered if she had been Welsh, for in her nightmares she heard her voice still and it had a Celtic lilt to it. But Mary maintained she was a Cockney, even if she didn’t speak like one.
What horror had happened in her own childhood to turn her into the person she was they never knew either. When she arrived Liddy was not quite seven. On her second day in the house she beat Liddy with a hairbrush, and thence twenty times every occasion Liddy didn’t come to her room for tea when called. Ten times on the bottom, ten on the head, so frequently that afterwards Liddy had headaches which blinded her, though Miss Bryant knew never to bruise her face. Because Mary had been ill she didn’t hit her, not at first. And then, later, Mary somehow wasn’t in trouble the way Liddy was. Her skirts were never torn, her smock dirty, her hair unkempt. Liddy’s were.
Now, as Miss Bryant turned and quietly, smoothly left, Mary stepped into the garden, clutching the skirts of her dress so tightly her knuckles were white, and trying to calm herself. Liddy would have accepted Highworth Rawnsley, she’d be married by All Hallow’s Eve and gone away from here by Christmas, and Bryant would have to leave. And I’ll still see you, Pertwee, and I shall visit you and Highworth and Mrs Rawnsley every few months, she’d told Liddy. We shall write to each other every day, and I will look after Pertwee and Father, and all will be well!
As she turned the corner she came upon a most unlikely scene – Dalbeattie and her brother, walking upon the rim of the fountain, arms outstretched to maintain balance, and her sister, in between Highworth Rawnsley and Ned Horner, engaged in most serious discussion. Liddy caught sight of her sister’s grey skirt, and looked up, a great smile on her face. Behind her, Mr Rawnsley was pulling at the tip of his beard at something Mr Horner was saying. Mary thought with a sinking heart that he did not look like a newly engaged lover.
‘Oh Mary, dearest!’ Liddy exclaimed, catching hold of Mary’s hands. Her fingers were ice-cold, her hands shaking. ‘Such wonderful news, I can hardly wait to tell you!’
‘What is it, my love?’ she answered, trying to draw her sister away, to calm her down. Ned Horner, besider her, patted Rawnsley’s shoulder, drawing him into conversation.
Liddy’s soft hair fell about her shoulders, the curls so painfully acquired now entirely absent. She chewed at one nail. ‘Mr Rawnsley – he and I have had such a good conversation about women and art. I told him about the picture I had seen at the Summer Exhibition by Elizabeth Thompson – do you remember it, Mary my dear? It was of the Crimean War. In fact I feel if our talk had not been cut short we –’
Mary sank down on to a bench, overcome. Liddy crouched beside her.
‘Dearest Mary, are you ill? May I fetch some water?’
‘So he did not offer for you?’
Liddy shook her head.
Mary swallowed. ‘Miss Bryant, my love – when you are free she wants you to go to your room, to try on the tea-gown, the dressmakers have sent it back.’
Liddy’s face clouded. Then: ‘Oh, hang her,’ she said, gritting her teeth. ‘I shan’t.’
‘You must,’ Mary whispered. ‘Darling, of course you must.’
‘No.’ And Liddy stood up.
‘Miss Dysart,’ said Ned Horner, suddenly, and when the sisters turned they saw he was watching them both. His eyes fixed on Liddy, intently. ‘Will you settle an argument for us?’
‘Of course.’
Highworth Rawnsley cleared his throat. ‘Mr Horner is under a misapprehension,’ he said, and he pursed his lips, briefly. ‘Now I, who have known you from a babe in arms, know this to be true, but you may disabuse him yourself, my dear. You too, Miss Mary. Is it not true, as you yourself have owned, that the disabilities of your sex preclude you from a full appreciation of art?’
‘Oh!’ said Liddy, and she bobbed up on her feet and down again, and then was very still.
‘For myself,’ said Mary, after a pause, ‘I should not place credence in such an idea and it grieves me that you should, Mr Rawnsley.’
‘My dear,’ said Highworth Rawnsley, smiling thinly, his hooded gaze watchful, and he pushed his glasses up his fine Roman nose. ‘I trade in facts, not in figures like your wily old father. It is accepted fact that a constitutional weakness in the female form prevents full dexterity with finer brushes. Besides which, the idea of woman as Great Artist is so abhorrent when one thinks of what her role should be. One thinks fondly of Patmore’s The Angel in the House.’ He rocked on his feet, pleased with himself. ‘“Man must be pleased, but him to please is woman’s pleasure.” Hm? On my previous visit your sister and I discussed this very subject and she and I agreed—’
‘Indeed, sir, no, for you misunderstood me then, and you do now!’ Liddy said, hotly. ‘Elizabeth Thompson’s paintings are as fine as any others in the exhibition. Finer, to my mind, for she brings a subtler understanding of the human condition.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Tell me, sir, this constitutional weakness from which we suffer, is it a physical one, or a mental one?’
Her little hands clenched and unclenched themselves into fists: beside her stood Ned Horner, watching her in astonishment.
‘She’s right, Rawnsley. How do you answer?’
‘I’m with Highworth,’ said Pertwee, carelessly. ‘Don’t care how you say it, women don’t have the stamina to paint. Charming watercolours all very well, but ’snot possible for them to attempt the great subjects. War. Love. Heroism.’
He sat down suddenly on the side of the fountain, and wiped his nose on his sleeve, before, catastrophically, expelling a quantity of air from his mouth, loudly. Highworth Rawnsley looked at him with cold disgust.
Dalbeattie muttered: ‘Oh Pertwee, you absolute—’
‘Miss Dysart, perhaps you and your brother forget yourself,’ said Rawnsley, as Mary placed a cooling hand on Lydia’s arm, and suddenly her sister’s anger subsided.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said, after a short while, and she gave a small, resigned shrug. As though she could see the inevitable.
Then, from nowhere, a tiny piped voice began singing.
‘Oh Rawnsley, Oh Highworth, Oh Highworth it is so,
Oh Rawnsworth, Oh Highley, Oh Fol-di-rol-lo!’
Highworth Rawnsley spun around.
‘Who’s that! Who sings that nonsense! Rupert! Is that you, sir?’
‘This is the surname and this be the first!
But to say both together, I’d laugh fit to burst!
Oh Rawnsley, Oh Highworth, Oh Highworth ’tis so . . .’
‘Hi!’ Highworth Rawnsley called, his voice thick with fury, the tip of his nose entirely white. ‘Stay there,’ he said to Liddy, pointing at her, abruptly. ‘I will return, momentarily, to clarify with you a subject about which I came to call.’ Mary saw the cold fury of the look he gave her, the dismissive way he turned from her. He doesn’t mean to marry. He never did. He is an old woman, not a husband. Father must have known this. He marched off towards the back of the garden, where to her horror Mary saw two figures, Pertwee and Dalbeattie, climbing over the back wall, on to the lane which led into the cemetery.
‘Bad, awful, awful boys,’ Liddy muttered. ‘Oh . . . oh dear . . .’
But she was smiling, just very slightly.
Mary turned to her. ‘Please go and see what Nurse Bryant wants, darling.’
‘Yes, I should, shouldn’t I? Come with me.’ Liddy set off towards the house, pulling her sister’s arm through her own. As they approached the french windows they heard feet t
hundering behind them and Ned Horner was beside them.
‘I say, Miss Dysart,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘May I call upon you again?’
Liddy turned to him.
‘You’re a boy,’ she said, almost scornfully. ‘Pertwee is a boy too, and an idiot, and Mary and I suffer because of his dissipation. Do not seek to please me, sir, by embroiling yourself with him.’
‘But he is a good boy. He is my friend. He suffers—’
She turned away from him, wearily. ‘Good day, Mr Horner.’
‘Miss Dysart. Please allow me—’
‘No,’ she said, sharply, and there was a note of hysteria in her voice Mary had never heard before. ‘If he was your true friend, yours and Dalbeattie’s, with all your fine talk of utopias and friendships, you’d stop his drinking, find him a way out, a way he can leave this place and help his sisters. But you don’t care for that. You or Dalbeattie. Mary and I must look after ourselves.’
Ned nodded, teeth gritted, hair falling in his eyes. In a low voice he said, ‘I swear to you we will help him. From this moment I swear it.’
Liddy did not react. She said blankly, ‘I wish that you meant it.’
‘I do. You have my word. I – I will act for Rupert. I know he suffers. But he is a dear fellow to me. Lydia – you must allow me to tell you – to help you – I have wanted to say, since our meeting –’ His eyes were hollow, his voice hoarse. ‘Here—’
And from his shabby coat pocket he took a piece of carved wood, and handed it to her.
‘I saw you the day you visited the Academy again with your brother,’ he whispered, and he folded a kiss into the palm that held the small figure, as Liddy gasped. Mary took a few steps back from them, watching. ‘You were in brown watered silk with a cream gathered skirt. We discussed painting. Your eyes were dull, you had a bruise on your arm, I saw it. Pertwee told me in his cups what she does to you. I’ve thought of you every day. I made this for you.’ His hand tightened. ‘I want – you.’
He was staring at Liddy with a bright, feverish gaze; Mary turned away, uncomfortably stirred by this display of private passion. Liddy stood straight-backed and silent.
‘I know you understand me. I – I want to take you away. To make you beautiful things. A house. People to go in it. Please. Please let me show you I can.’ His eyes searched hers for a reaction. ‘Please!’
She nodded, mutely, and put one hand over his.
For the rest of her life, Mary would always think of them in that moment. Framed by the formal lines of box and the red brick of the wall behind them, clutching hands, as if a pact had been made. An undertaking.
And then he was gone, running down the path towards the back wall, and he had climbed it in a trice, and disappeared out of view, as the sisters stood on the step, astonished, and the voice of Miss Bryant could clearly be heard calling with fury to her charge. Liddy opened her hand again and resting on her palm was a girl, half turning as if to catch a sound, in a swirling dress whose skirt rippled as though it were water, not wood, and a smile upon her face, and she was the living image of Liddy, a tiny replica.
Chapter Nine
Pardon me, dear sir! Pardon me –
For I am but a foolish maid
And foolish maids, unlike thy sex
Their hearts oft feel betrayed –
Dear sir! Allow me one small gift
A crumb dare I present to you
Were I to love – ah – to give mine heart –’twould be you
But alas, ’tis not, and I must say – adieu.
Liddy watched as her sister put the verse gently down on the writing-desk. ‘And?’ she said, without much enthusiasm.
Mary hesitated. ‘Well, dearest, it’s very – feeling. I feel the writer is sincere.’
‘I’m the writer, Mary. You know I am.’ Liddy checked a lock of hair that had escaped from her bun.
‘Yes.’
‘So what did you think of it? As a poem? As a – a work.’
Liddy followed her gaze as Mary looked politely away, out over the gathering autumn afternoon, at the ruffled citrus-coloured treetops of South Grove. A carriage drew up outside the Flask Inn, opposite the house; the nearest horse was old, dead tired, saddle sores blooming on his side, his mane matted with mud. Liddy’s nose twitched; she blinked, and turned away from the sight, drumming her fingers on the wall.
‘Oh, Mary. I used to want to paint, before Pertwee took it on, and I am sure he is better than I would have been. And I had such plans of opening the hat shop, too, do you remember?’
‘And of writing music. Those songs. Very good they were.’
‘Oh, they were not. I want to do something. To be something.’ They were both silent, contemplating the futility of this dream. Then Liddy sighed sadly. ‘I do not think I shall ever be a poet. At least,’ she corrected herself, with a glimmer of humour. ‘Not a good one.’
‘You must be honest.’ Mary stood up, pushing her chair away from the table, and gathered up her embroidery work-bag. ‘That is all. With yourself and with the reader.’
Liddy would not return her gaze. After a moment she muttered,
‘Highworth is gone today, off to Scotland, did you know?’
‘Yes. Yes I did. And your plans must be delayed again.’
‘I asked to go with him and for you to accompany me.’ Liddy rolled her pen between her fingertips. ‘But his mother felt it would be unseemly, before he had even asked for my hand in marriage.’ Her voice was high, almost shrill with tension. ‘Oh, I wish he’d declare himself, instead of this delay!’
‘If he did offer for you, would you still want to marry him?
Liddy said: ‘Yes, to have it done with. I – There is no other way. I see that.’
After that spring afternoon several months ago, Highworth had written to Liddy.
. . . behaviour unbecoming in one so young and in my future wife . . . standard of decorum expected . . . grace and poise absent. It is clear that I shall have to reconsider my position, and shall also be required to prepare you most diligently for married life if our union is to be sanctioned by me, and gain the approval of your father, and God Almighty, Maker of All Things . . .
Pertwee had been severely punished by his father, his allowance docked, his final year at the Royal Academy School cancelled, and he had been banned from seeing Ned Horner and Lucius Dalbeattie, simply for being intoxicated and causing high jinks. The sisters felt for him most acutely. Pertwee was now left without the one activity that gave him release and distraction from his other vices, and since painting was the only occupation for which he had ever shown any aptitude, his sisters felt this to be extremely foolish of their father, but there was no hope of changing his mind. Their father was like a clam when he did not like something: he simply closed up.
Dalbeattie had gone to the Continent, having completed his apprenticeship as an architect; his family’s hopes rested on him, and it had been understood for many years now that he was expected to earn a living as soon as may be before his marriage. Ned Horner had not been mentioned since that day, nor had he been back to the house.
At the doorway Mary paused. ‘Did you have it in mind to attend the lecture at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution this afternoon, dearest?’
‘No. Mary . . .’ And Liddy hesitated for a moment too long. ‘I don’t care for the subject today. I shall work a little longer then perhaps persuade Pertwee to get out of bed and take a turn upon the Heath with me. Do you go?’
‘Miss Madison is attending, as she has a keen interest in the supernatural. I have said I will meet her there.’ Mary put her head on one side, her eyes bright, and swallowed, as if she were controlling herself tightly. ‘Take – take care, dearest.’
Liddy nodded at her sister, her lips pressed together, and picked up her pen, but as the door closed she laid it gently down again, and ran to the window. You must be honest. The carriage was gone, the horses watered. ‘Though what relief that will give them and for how long,�
�� she said aloud, her voice shaking with scorn.
Fingers trembling, Liddy put on her small-brimmed teal velvet hat trimmed with the single egret feather, a much prized birthday present from Aunt Charlotte, and quickly donned her dull-grey woollen cloak – for October was cold this year, with a wet chill that sank into the bones. She glanced in the mirror, pinching her cheeks, then moved swiftly about the room, gathering up her little reticule, taking out her own embroidery sampler, hiding the sheets of poetry, setting out a letter she had previously half written in the expansive, untidy scrawl which had so often earned her the opprobrium of both her father and Miss Bryant. When she had finished, she looked around. It was, to all intents and purposes, the room of a young lady who had stepped out of the room for a couple of minutes in search of – what, exactly? Another silken thread, a lost glove, a book.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs – Liddy started and, creeping into Mary’s room through the connecting door, she made her way down via the back stairs. Her father was in his study. Hannah was out: it was her afternoon off. Mrs Lydgate was at the butcher’s, Mary gone to the lecture, Pertwee asleep in his room, snoring loudly. And Miss Bryant was nowhere to be seen in that moment and that was all that mattered.
In less than a minute she was crossing the road, the sweet, thick scent of woodsmoke mingling with coal, and manure, and the mulch of the autumn leaves. She made her way towards the hackney carriage that she had earlier seen pull up outside the public house. It was waiting for her.
Liddy stroked the horses’ shivering flanks, then climbed up into the cab, averting her gaze, biting her lip, for the treachery of it, the betrayal of all her fervently held beliefs! Miserably, she settled on to the back seat of the cab.
‘Cold day, ain’t it? Where to, miss?’ said the lantern-jawed driver, arranging a rug over her knees, but she flung his hand from her lap, frantic to be off, not to be seen, to be away.
‘Blackfriars – oh, hurry, please, Blackfriars Bridge. As before, sir.’
‘Aye, if you please, miss,’ he said, and he sucked his breath in grimly, as though he’d like to say more on the subject. One of the horses whinnied in a pathetic fashion, he set about them with a whip, and they were off, Liddy in the back, a pear-shaped tear rolling down her cheek, for she hated it, every time, though she could no more have stayed away than stopped breathing.
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 12