‘It’s a hat,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘We’re crossing one side of the courtyard to the other – it would take more time to put the bloody pins in!’
‘Is this what this place is teaching you? Vulgarities, lack of decorum and heaven knows what else! Well, run off and fetch it. Your aunt has tea and cake waiting and I intend to have words with her about the decline in your behaviour.’
My aunt had clearly omitted to mention that I was never home in the daytime, no matter what was waiting.
I gritted my teeth. ‘Mother, I have lectures all day. Every day.’
‘They can hardly expect you to study when your mother is visiting! Tell them; I’m sure they’ll understand.’
I briefly imagined explaining to Merchiston – or worse, Professor Williamson, whose opinion of us was already mere inches from the gutter – that I couldn’t attend today’s lecture because my mama was visiting. It was not a reassuring image.
‘If you lassies are finished having afternoon tea on the lawn or whatever the bloody hell it is you’re doing—’
Oh God. Oh no.
Merchiston trailed off as my mother turned, slowly and deliberately, like a warship facing the enemy, and locked her gaze on his.
‘Forgive me, madam, I was unaware that we had a guest.’
‘Professor, this is my mother. Mother, this is Professor Merchiston.’
He bowed, oozing charm I had never seen him bestow on anyone. It was an unsettling experience.
‘Mrs Gilchrist, a pleasure to meet you.’
‘Do you normally curse in front of ladies, Professor Mitchum?’
He didn’t bother to correct her. Sensible man – where my mother was concerned, one should always pick one’s battles.
‘Forgive me. A momentary error. Your daughter is a fine student, Mrs Gilchrist.’
‘My daughter is headstrong.’
He laughed ‘Aye, I’ll not argue with that.’
She gave a long, searching look around the quad. ‘So you really think that this is a woman’s place?’
‘If I did not, I wouldnae be teaching a dozen of them.’ He smiled, showing all of his teeth.
It would take more than his wolfish, dangerous charm to make my mother back down, however, and she continued her litany of criticism.
‘Professor, are you not teaching your students how to comport themselves in public? There are enough doubts about the efficacy of women as physicians without introducing a hoyden to your patients.’
‘Young people can be high-spirited. Rest assured, we’ll have their youthful enthusiasm crushed in no time.’
He was making a joke. My mother didn’t believe in jokes; she thought humour was the eighth deadly sin and that it rarely if ever had a place in polite conversation.
‘Sarah, get your things. We’re leaving.’
‘I’m afraid I simply cannot allow that. Miss Gilchrist, lecture hall. Now. The rest of you stop lollygagging and gawping as though you were at the fairground. Scram, or I’ll tell the porters you volunteered to scrub the dissection room floors!’
The onlookers dispersed, and Merchiston left us alone in what I supposed he thought was a gesture of tact. I had to bite my lip not to plead with him to stay.
I thought I would bear the brunt of her rage without an audience, but to my surprise, my mother’s voice softened. ‘Please, Sarah. I haven’t seen you in so long.’
‘You threw me out of the house! You practically had me committed, never visited me once and I was home less than a day before you had my bags packed and my train fare to Edinburgh paid. I’m sorry if you missed me, Mother, but you’ve had an entire year without me. You can manage until dinner.’
I had never seen my mother look so out of place before. I saw a woman at odds with the new world she found herself in, one where her rules did not apply
Even worse, I saw myself. Mrs Miles Greene, visiting her old friends, soaking up knowledge by proxy, calcified by domesticity and convention. The men might look on me with approval, an unruly woman restored to her rightful place, but the women would pity me. The one who couldn’t escape, too weak to struggle free and dragged down by society to tedium and tea parties. I would be a cautionary tale for all the brilliant, independent women, and the men would take it as proof that we would always be slaves to our feminine natures.
She opened her mouth to speak. ‘Don’t make a scene, Mother.’ I spat the words back at her that she had used a year ago, when I had left the party where I had my ill-fated encounter with Paul Beresford in near hysteria. I turned on my heel and went inside, leaving her standing there alone.
Chapter 9
If I stood three steps down from the top of the stairs, I could hear every word being spoken in the parlour without anyone seeing me. I had learned this trick in the first week of being under my aunt’s roof, when I had overheard more synonyms for ‘whore’ than I knew existed. Eventually I had stopped listening. If my uncle had revised his opinion of me in the seven months I had been here, I didn’t know about it.
‘. . . positively surrounded by men whose origins I certainly don’t know! Did you enquire after the characters of the male students, Emily, or did you simply blithely send my daughter off to cavort with reprobates and ne’er-do-wells?’
‘Her friends are all from good families – two of them are from our circle and one of them even has a title!’
‘That Thornhill girl? You can’t buy breeding, not even with a fortune that size. No wonder she runs around introducing herself as Miss instead of Lady!’
Alison was aristocracy? I wasn’t surprised she kept that secret – I couldn’t imagine that Moira would ever let her hear the end of it, and poor Carstairs would probably try and curtsey every time she saw her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given up my habit of eavesdropping after all – what other nuggets of information about my classmates had I missed?
I felt the tension between the two women crackle throughout the house; it had been years, I realised, since I had seen the two of them in a room together. I was so used to thinking of Aunt Emily as indomitable, unbending, that to see her back down in the face of her older sister’s disapproval was unsettling. I hoped that Gertie and I would never enjoy such a fractious relationship – assuming, of course, that my sister still wanted anything to do with me.
I remembered with a jolt that she had written to me; my first contact with her for a year. My mother had left the letter on my bureau. But with the desire to eavesdrop on the argument overwhelming, it had completely slipped my mind. Hang whatever complaints my mother had – I would spend the evening with a family member who actually cared for me.
My little sister’s penmanship was perfect, although the letter itself was horribly misspelled, so full of digressions it was hard to follow and containing rather more exclamation points than I suspected her finishing school would have approved of. She wanted to be a bridesmaid and hoped she could visit me in my new home; she missed me terribly. She was sorry I was too busy to attend her birthday party – I had not been invited – but hoped I had had a nice Christmas and did they celebrate it differently in Scotland? It all but begged for a reply, and I wondered if any of the countless letters I had written to her in the past year had ever made it to their intended recipient. There was no mention of my studies, and I wondered if Mother had taken it upon herself to announce I was dropping them. I would be lucky if she didn’t walk directly to the faculty offices and withdraw me from lectures herself.
It was so characteristically Gertie that my heart ached, but something in the slant of her pen and the flourish of her signature had changed since I last saw her. The paper smelled faintly of lilacs – was Mother permitting her to wear scent now? Childhood innocence lingered around the letter like wisps of morning fog, but already it was beginning to lift and in its place was the beginnings of a young woman I did not know. Would I be as strange to her? Did the woman in practical skirts and sensible boots, her fingers stained with ink and ammonia and her head in a textbook, hiding the dark circles u
nder her eyes, resemble her happy, rebellious sister at all?
I no longer missed the girl I was. My mind was brimming over with new knowledge.
When I came to Edinburgh, I was weak and wasted, still unable to sleep peacefully through the night unless I was drugged. Now, I could trace the beginnings of muscles in my arms. If I ran my hands over my calves, I could feel the tautness from dashing from lecture theatre to tutorial to dissection room. Mother would have called it unladylike, but how could it be when I was more aware of my body than I had ever been in my life? She was the one who had taught me how to use it to send all those subtle messages that let our social circle know what we were thinking – the ocular calisthenics required to catch a gentleman’s eye or cut him dead, the correct way to raise one’s hand to acknowledge an acquaintance you didn’t wish to speak to and wanted them to know you didn’t. I had seen her reduce an entire dinner table to silence simply from the way she tilted her head. She had turned her body into a weapon long before I had.
At least my appetite had returned with a vengeance – Alison had relented and given me half her tongue and piccalilli sandwich the other day after I made eyes at it over my own plate of crumbs – and the colour was back in my cheeks, but whatever softness I had possessed in those months before Paul Beresford had attacked me was gone for good. In its place was something new – a confidence I had never before possessed, the kind only earned by having everything one loved ripped away. It felt like armour.
I heard footsteps ascending the stairs and quickly picked up the ring from my dressing table and slipped it back onto my finger.
There. The life I should have had, pieced back together so you could hardly see the join.
‘I’ve spoken to your aunt, and we’ll meet the Greenes this week. I’ll call on Aurora tomorrow – we’ve exchanged letters, of course, but I’d like to see her in person. And then on Friday, they’ll host a proper engagement party. I want everyone to know that my daughter is marrying into a good family.’ She looked sternly at me. ‘And you will marry, Sarah. I know you, I know that you’re calculating a hundred and one ways to embarrass me and call it off, but for once you will do as you’re told. It’s for your own good, you know that.’
‘I never wanted this,’ I said softly. ‘You wanted it for me. I’m going to be a doctor, Mother. I’m going to make my own living, my own life. Maybe I’ll marry, but if I do, it will be a man of my choosing, someone who supports me in my profession.’
She snorted. ‘What man will take a woman like that? A woman who wastes her marriageable years studying, who breaks off an engagement! Who isn’t even—’
‘A virgin?’
Mother flinched. ‘There’s no need to be vulgar, Sarah. Do you realise how lucky you are to have a man willing to overlook your flaws?’
I stood up straight. ‘I’m not flawed.’
‘Tell that to half of London. They still talk about you, you know. You’re quite the cautionary tale. “Be careful how you comport yourself or you’ll end up just like that dreadful Gilchrist girl, having to find a job because she can’t find a husband.” Well, this is our chance to prove them wrong.’
‘I won’t give up my studies. I won’t do it!’
‘Your father and I indulged this . . . this whim because we thought you’d come to your senses. It was never meant to be a permanent solution.’
‘I don’t love him.’
‘You’ll learn to. You’re learning Latin and chemistry and God knows what at this ghastly institution; why should making a home and a family be any different?’
I didn’t despise Miles. I didn’t even dislike him. The more we talked, the kinder and gentler he seemed to be – there was a sense of humour buried beneath his awkward facade and I enjoyed his company, if not the reason for it. But marriage?
I thought of that first flush of desire for Paul, before he ruined everything. The way my skin prickled, hot and strange, at Gregory Merchiston’s touch. The way Elisabeth and Randall looked at each other, all soft and full of longing. Even Julia and Edith had something in that odd, wild kiss I had witnessed that spoke of so much more than duty.
‘Do you really mean to tell me that you never want to get married? That you want to stay alone for ever?’
‘I want everything.’ The words spilled out of me. ‘But I can’t have it, can I? I can’t have a family, you made damn sure of that.’
She flinched. So that was my mother’s Achilles heel – the fact that her elder daughter would never make her a grandmama. ‘The doctors said it would be best. To calm your nerves and ensure that you would have no cause to regret any future . . . mistakes. We could never have foreseen—’
‘I was never supposed to marry. Never supposed to resurface in society and find a ring on my finger and a man desperate to turn me into his brood mare. You’re not angry with me – you’re angry that your gamble didn’t pay off and you’re selling the Greenes a faulty bill of goods. Or are you just resentful that Aunt Emily has brought me closer to the altar than you ever did? A torn hymen, a barren womb and the first term of a medical degree under my belt and she still managed to find me a husband. Maybe it’s not me who’s the family failure after all.’
I had seen my mother laughing, angry, gracious. I had never seen her hurt.
‘I’ve built a life for myself, one where I can be useful,’ I said softly.
‘You aren’t required to be useful, Sarah! You’re a young lady of good breeding, even if that rarely shows these days. The only person who need have use of you is your husband.’
‘If you visited the clinic where I used to volunteer, then maybe you’d understand.’
‘The falling-down cathouse in a slum? Oh, your uncle has told me all about it. Colonel Greene doesn’t want a daughter-in-law who spends her time ministering to sluts and pick-pockets.’
‘Well I don’t want him for a father-in-law, so at least we agree on something!’
I heard the crack of hand against cheek before I felt the pain.
‘Ask yourself if an empty stomach and fine principles are quite the substitute for a home and a family you think they are.’
In the mirror, I saw her reflection slam the door behind her and I looked down at the diamond sparkling on my left hand. It had been formed through centuries of pressure, and even if I stamped on the blasted thing with all my might, I knew it wouldn’t shatter. Well then, there was my answer.
I would shine just as brightly and be just as impossible to crush.
Chapter 10
The next morning, I stood blankly in front of my wardrobe, wondering if I owned a single dress that would meet with my mother’s approval. If I chose something too plain then she’d accuse me of looking dowdy; too pretty and she’d assume I was trying to catch a man’s eye. A traitorous voice in my head wondered if marriage to Miles Greene would really be worse than this.
It was cold and rainy, I was somehow in the middle of a murder investigation for the second time in my life, and if I had to stick to a palette like the Highlands in November, all grey and faded green and brown, I was going to scream. Julia might have scoffed at the idea of a sensible, intellectual woman taking pleasure in clothes, but I noticed that however mannish the cut of her jacket and skirt, they were also expertly tailored. In the end, I had Agnes dress me in a damson wool skirt and jacket with a crisp white blouse. I fastened the silver brooch Elisabeth had given me for Christmas at my throat and the maid brushed my hair until it shone before twisting it into a chignon.
My engagement ring sat on my dressing table and I sighed before putting it on. Let Mother think I was playing to her rules. In two weeks she would be gone and I would have found some way to talk Miles into breaking things off. I wondered if I could introduce him to someone else – would Alison’s cheerful manner and easy way appeal? Or perhaps he and Caroline Carstairs could find companionship in stilted conversations and awkward silences. Women married men they didn’t care about every day – there must be someone of acceptable breeding who wo
uld overlook sweaty palms and shyness to claim a share of the Greene family fortune.
I was turning into Aunt Emily, I thought with a grimace, trying to matchmake at every turn. No, my best hope was that he would just see sense and call things off and weather his father’s inevitable fury. Was that cruel of me? Miles was visibly terrified of the man – it hadn’t escaped my attention, as we were forced closer, that he was considerably more relaxed when out of his company. But that was his affair, I told myself sternly. Mother and Aunt Emily would be no less pleased; even my own father might be moved to write a letter chiding me for my inability to keep even the blandest of men.
I didn’t want to wait around for breakfast just in case Mother decided to join us for once, although I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had seen her awake this early, but Aunt Emily coaxed me into taking some tea and toast, to which I added bacon and sausages – if I was going to have breakfast I might as well make it a good one – and gave me a look I had come to know well.
‘I have to go to lectures. I can’t just stop it all because my mama won’t let me. I’m not a child.’
‘Until you’re married, you’re under your parents’ protection and mine. To all intents and purposes, Sarah, a child is exactly what you are.’
I gulped down the last of my tea and gathered my things.
‘Then it’s a good job I left before you had a chance to stop me, isn’t it?’ As retorts went, it might have been more effective if not delivered through a mouthful of Cumberland sausage, but she sighed and waved me off.
‘Shut the door quietly on your way out.’
I was rather liking this new, permissive side of Aunt Emily. Apparently all it took to turn her into an ally was the introduction of an older sister who was even more disapproving of my habits.
I made it to my first lecture with time to spare, and nearly ran smack into Professor Merchiston.
‘Miss Gilchrist. I wasn’t sure we’d see you today.’
‘My mother normally sleeps late. I didn’t see the need to wake her.’
The Unquiet Heart Page 8