by Abigail Agar
‘Are these the men who visited you last Saturday?’ said Vera. ‘You have been quite out of sorts since those visitors turned up. I do wish you would either get them gone from your company, or else find some way to reconcile. You do all shout so terribly.’
The terribleness or otherwise of the discussions of her father was hard for Vera to gauge. Although her mother had brought her up with excellent French and German, and a fluency in the language of the Old Country, Vera’s father’s numerous foreign associates discussed most of their issues in Latin, which as educated men was the one language they could all speak to some degree, and occasionally at moments of passion the men would burst into a flurry of words she could recognise as Russian punctuated by quotations and quite explicit diatribes in French. As a result, this mélange of languages was only understandable to her in its least informative moments; most of the discussion was simply Greek to her.
Her father’s foul mood had begun after a particularly agitated meeting held not in the study but out in the old barn, which had been converted by a lumbering crew of navvies into a printing press to reproduce pamphlets explaining the importance of a unified Poland to those Members of the British Parliament to whom the issue had not come up. In short, all of them.
Vera found this political foible of his amusing, but when his meetings with other agitators upset him, she became worried about his failing health. Already Doctor Severn had been by twice to deal with palpitations of the heart or some such trouble, and the attacks seemed to grow more serious each time they came.
Vera saw in every raised voice or impassioned speech, the spectre of a heart attack, and so she sought very carefully to follow the advice of Doctor Severn, taking down notes during every visitation and referring to them whenever her father’s behaviour seemed to run counter to his best interests.
The visitors who did speak in English were mostly of common stock. Sporting workman’s weeds and the type of flat cap and field boots which were common among the Somerset peasantry.
Their jackets showed frayed seams on the collar and were made of a rough cloth. They came to speak about forming unions of land-workers or petitioning parliament for control of rents and adding tariffs on foreign corn.
However, it was the foreigners who took up most of Papa’s time. The small group of political movers who seemed to be headed up by an elegantly dressed man in a black tasselled greatcoat.
Simple, military cut, in an old European style. On his shoulders were faded gold epaulettes from which hung two scarlet knots.
Atop his head was a well-worn silk top hat that appeared almost as old as its owner – an owner old enough that from beneath the top hat curved two magnificent, perfectly white sideburns which were long enough to seem to merge with his high-collar and silk cravat.
After his first visit almost a year ago, Mama had sought Vera out in the little window seat she favoured for a reading spot.
She was reading the ominous descriptions from Frankenstein that she would look back on with a sense of foreboding in the months that followed:
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
‘Did you see the coach they pulled up in?’ asked Mama.
‘No,’ said Vera.
‘It was quite remarkable. It looked like the kind of carriages from my youth, the long-distance ones. I thought for a moment I was in one of your novels about highwaymen or roving Jacobites.’
‘And what ludicrous plumage it was decked up in. Some sort of silk or cloth hanging coming off every bridle, bit, and strap on the horses and a coachman in a powdered wig. Why he looked like my grandfather used to when he attended a funeral.’
Vera had yet to see the men herself. In all the past year of their visits, they would arrive late at odd hours. This unusual funereal friend – if that was the word – of her father’s, was something of a night owl.
She would see the grooves of the heavy coach carved into the courtyard gravel in the morning. Occasionally, there would be one of the black feathers from the coach’s paraphernalia. On still nights, or when the wind blew across from the barn which Papa had converted to a printing press, she could hear the familiar tones of the man in the silk top hat speaking Latin with her father.
But something had changed on the previous Saturday; he had sweated more, paced more, and seemed to watch the clock like a man awaiting his execution.
Today though, she felt she had more pressing work to do than to worry about father’s heart. It was the lieutenant’s that was on her mind now. Having made such a mess of his recent visit, she felt it incumbent on her to fix her mistake. So she set about writing him a letter apologising and requesting a further meeting.
Perhaps she could mend the rift caused by her foolishness with the musket, which had quite ruined that afternoon.
It took her several drafts to get the letter to say what she felt. Or at least what she had convinced herself that she should feel. It would not be easy to marry a man she did not love, but for the family, for the trouble they were in, for that she would do anything, anything at all. She hoped to see her father smile easily and her mother cease her hand-wringing.
The words were set down with great care. It was important to give neither too much hope, nor to signal outright rejection. For the poor lieutenant had, after all, been so kind to her that afternoon, listened to all those little stories she told, and taught her to shoot. Even if he had almost assisted in the manslaughter of poor Mrs Miniver.
The inkwell into which she dipped the pen was a pretty little novelty blown in the shape of a boat’s hull so that the ink formed a sort of waterline around its waist and the pen when dipped formed a mast without the sails.
Her grandfather had used it as a reminder of how he had scrimped and worked buying by the boatload and selling by the cartload (with a modest increase in price to pay for his time, of course), and in time, he turned his small percentage cut into enough to buy his own boats and carts. Eventually using his capital to put down roots into English soil when he bought this small run-down farm.
On the table beside the letter were sketches her father had drawn, in his highly detailed style, of the first cottage he was planning to build on one corner of the land.
The hope was that eventually the farm would be handed over entirely to tenant farmers who would pay their rent to Papa in retirement.
The landed equivalent of grandfather’s buying by the boatload, selling by the cartload, thought Vera.
She turned back to the letter she was writing. Its three old drafts sat in a pile covered in blots and with large paragraphs struck through and rewritten. To pour out a heart’s worth of emotions from a heart that felt nothing was near impossible.
Her father continued to read quietly in the armchair to her back, answering questions on the composition of the letter as she asked them.
The sun had warmed the room, distorted into the many colours of the rainbow in places by the uneven thickness of the glass. It was marvellous, wasn’t it? she pondered. That one man could blow glass so delicately as to make it a bottle shaped like a boat, while another had only to make a sheet but could barely make that even.
How many types of person are there? And where is the one for me? What would Charity Forsythe write to Benjamin Miller?
Yes, that is the way to do it.
She would cast her mind into the pool of another’s feelings. Just as writers must do when they write up their romances.
She glanced over at her father’s bookshelves, the heavy printed tomes he read. The titles were in a half doz
en languages; the ones she could read were all scientific. He was entranced by the discovery of the world, by the great Romantic sweep of history.
When she was younger, he would sit her on his lap and explain the diagrams of shapes and objects that existed only in the mind of mathematicians or far above them, visible only down a telescope far more powerful than the microscope he used to draw his own diagrams of the differences between the ticks that infested his cattle and his sheep.
Her own books told her stories closer to her heart. Of marriages for love, a prospect that even as she tried to create it in the letter, seemed so truthful and believable on the page but alien and unimaginable for her in real life.
Did Mama get to marry for love? Of course not, yet she is quite happy with Papa. So it shall be with me and –
But his name remained forgotten so she wrote – “My Dearest Lieutenant …” at the top of yet another clean page, brought the blotter down on it, and rolled the soft paper over the words which shone a little, still wet but with beautifully clean edges.
Once she had finished, she read the letter through, and finally, four drafts in, gave up for the day. There was too much to do, and she wanted to call on a few school friends in town before it got too dark.
Leaving her scribblings beside the image of a future cottage, she set about finding her favourite bonnet, the dark grey one with a bright white ribbon. Such work to keep clean, but such a pretty result.
In the end, she couldn’t find it and made her way into town with her second favourite cap which her mother had chosen for a Christmas present.
Chapter 3
The visitors in the plumed coach did not come that evening. Father said something kept them away; instead, they visited again a few weeks later, and this time Vera saw them.
She didn’t know they were coming until she saw the old-fashioned carriage pull up near where she was pumping water with Mishka in the shadow of one of the barns that made up three of the walls of the farm’s courtyard.
The fourth wall was made by the back of the farmhouse itself, with its small garden on the other side and acres of cattle grazing all this side of the main road which ran to Bathcombe.
The coach was large enough to be mistaken for a public stage and was drawn by four horses which wore long black feathers hanging in long rows from their tackle – just as mother had described.
Even the blinders and the bits in the horses’ mouths dripped plumes in the same crepuscular colours, black and grey. It gave the impression that these were not horses but some sort of feathered steed from out of Greek mythology.
The effect was to make the stage appear both celebratory – such was the excess of decoration – and also as if it were in mourning, so complete was the blackness of the colour scheme.
‘It’s terribly morbid,’ Vera suggested to Mishka.
‘I do not like it either, Miss,’ answered Mishka, barely looking up. ‘It doesn’t please me at all. With those feathers, I think it might fly away.’
‘You know I can just imagine that.’ Vera laughed. ‘Yes, like a demonic mirror image to Ezekiel’s burning chariot.’
‘Shhh, now, Miss. Don’t go invoking the Bible in vain. You’ll set trouble on us.’ Mishka said this with perfect earnestness. Vera was careful not to laugh at the maid’s superstition. She knew that Mishka would spend some of her wages each month to consult a professed wizard who lived as a hermit in the nearby woods, and the servant put great stock in the appearance of black roosters and stillborn cattle.
From the carriage stepped two men, who Vera watched as Mishka continued to work the water pump. The man with the white sideburns was the first out. He wore the same shabby top hat and greatcoat that mother had described.
He had a serious limp but refused the walking stick offered him by his companion. He looked tired, brow furrowed beneath deep and concerning thought. Neither of the men seemed to spot the women working in the corner of the square, so Vera could take the time to study these men closely.
On inspection, the gentrified air of the man fell away. The uncombed sideburns thrust in all directions as if ruffled by a gale. Tufts of his hair seemed to have pulled free and stuck to the rim of the hat in scattered places.
His single associate was well over six feet tall with a face that was divided into a haphazard patchwork by dozens of bright white scars which stood out against his dark, sun and coal browned skin.
Vera had the cold iron handle of the water pump in one hand and the slowly filling wooden bucket in her other. On seeing her father rushing out to meet the men and usher them into the printing barn, she set the bucket down and left Mishka to finish the task.
‘Don’t you go snooping,’ was Mishka’s whispered suggestion.
But where’s the fun in that?, thought Vera, slipping away.
Treading carefully on the crunchy gravel of the courtyard, Vera slipped in to approach the hay barn which allowed her to avoid the line of sight from the print room’s windows as she made her way around the edge of the square.
Her heart beat heavily in her throat as she took in the warm, rich smell of the drying grass. How lovely it would be to lie down among the bundles.
Then a rat stirred scuttling from one hayrick to the next in the gloom of the barn; it reminded her that soft as it looked, the hay piles would be thick with vermin. She changed her mind about lying down.
The door that opened up by the print shop’s southern wall was heavy and gave only with the greatest reluctance, as if something on the other side were pushing back at her trying to keep her from completing her investigations.
She had to be careful while forcing it, not to make a sound with the squeaking hinges. While the scraping of the hinges might alert the visitors, Vera was far more worried about the effect of her inquisitive behaviour on her father’s good opinion of her.
His warnings about the visitors echoed in her ears. But rather than driving her away from the heavy door and back to the pump, the warnings seemed to pull her forward to the door.
The handle transmitted the warmth from outside to her hand as she struggled with it one more time, hearing the scrape and click of the catch, and then with infinite patience, she slowly drew the door open.
She wore a simple empire waist dress, in an unobtrusive grey, perfect for easy and quiet movement. She felt confident she could make it to the window without giving herself away through the unnecessary noise.
Her concerns were further allayed when she heard coming from the print barn the sound of raised voices, shouting across each other in a mix of Russian and Latin.
When she sidled up to the windows, she found her caution misplaced. The window was shut from the inside, the glassless windows of the printing barn stoppered up by hefty wooden shutters. No one inside would have been able to see her approach even if she had brazenly walked right up to them.
Suddenly, her blood ran cold. For a moment, she felt sure she must have misheard what her father said. It was not just the word though that sent the chill rushing through her veins and raised her hackles right down her spine. It was the tone of the word, the desperate pleading in his voice.
Then he repeated it, and she was running towards the door of the print shop.
‘Please,’ he had screamed. ‘Please don’t.’
She threw the door open and saw her father kneeling in the rushes that covered the floor of the building to absorb any spilt ink. The scarred man had a flintlock pistol pressed to Papa’s head while the man in the top hat had his back to the whole scene, hands clasped behind him with the air of an admiral on his flagship’s deck.
She tried to scream, but like in a dream she found her throat dry and stopped. The tall man was looking to the eminent white-haired gent, who with a casual wave of the hand seemed to indicate something to his lackey.