Lisa

by Joan Van Every Frost

  “I never noticed anyone trying very hard,” Mrs. Lewis said acidly. “I’ve said right along I’ve got no use for her, and I still don’t.”

  “Mrs. Lewis,” Lisa pleaded, “please make over her as long as she’s trying — and the rest of you, too. There isn’t one of us who doesn’t need encouragement sometimes, and the weaker you are, the more you need.”

  “Lisa, you persist in shaming us, don’t you?” Jarrell’s voice was almost affectionate.

  “You’re probably right, Lisa,” Mrs. Stephens chimed in unexpectedly. “I’m sure we’ll all do what we can to help. After all, Cynthia is part of the family.” She made a little face at Jarrell, who didn’t find it amusing at all.

  Mrs. Lewis hastily changed the subject. “May I send Toby in to Dunwiddleston with the cart several times a week in the mornings? Some of the Dunwiddleston folk grow vegetables and raise chickens, and we’ll do better to get meat directly from the farms around.”

  “What happened to Nelson’s delivery boy?” Jarrell asked.

  “The same thing that happened to the Nelsons and the housemaids and the gardener and the stable boy,” Mrs. Lewis answered.

  “I see.” Jarrell flicked a glance at Lisa, who sat with her head down looking at nobody. “Since we’ve been feeding Toby’s horse, we may as well get some use out of him. Of course he can go in to the village whenever he’s needed to.” He turned to Lisa. “Can Toby count and handle money?”

  “I know he can’t read, because I tried to teach him, but I’m sure he can count. I could teach him about money in a morning while I’m watching Cynthia. If you sent Annie with him the first few times, or you go yourself, Mrs. Lewis, I know he could do it. I’d go, only they might not even sell to me.”

  Jarrell drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. “I tell you what. I want to see if we can’t work on your memory, and we might as well get some fresh air while we’re doing it. You come riding with me this afternoon, and we’ll let Cynthia teach Toby about money and making change. It’ll give her something else to think about besides how miserable she is. You see, I’m entering into the spirit of the game.” He smiled wryly.

  “I’ll have to go with him at first anyway,” Mrs. Lewis said, “to find out where it’s best to obtain what. We’ll go tomorrow.”

  Lisa went down to the stables to ask Toby to saddle the horses and then present himself to Cynthia. He hung his head and shuffled his feet. “Ay no be knowing wat ter say ter ’er.”

  “You don’t have to know. She’ll do the talking. You do want to be useful here, don’t you? There’s no reason why you can’t learn to count money.”

  He finally agreed to go. Lisa had doubts about the whole project, since Cynthia’s enthusiasm for the undertaking was conspicuous by its absence. Lisa had finally coaxed her into it by saying untruthfully that Jarrell was against it because he didn’t think she could do it. Lisa sighed and went to change into the divided skirt.

  This time they went down the hill behind the stables to the bottom of the little valley she and Toby had crossed in the moonlight. Instead of crossing it, however, they headed up it, and when it gave out found themselves on a ridge that angled off up onto the moor, where there was another overgrown cart track that reminded her unhappily of the track she had been on with Eric. She smiled as she remembered the rabbits dancing. At last they came out on another ridge overlooking a series of hills covered solidly with heather.

  “The quarry was down there,” Jarrell said, pointing. “At one time there were a number of small quarries in this part of the country, many of them Roman. There is slate around here as well.”

  “Is that where the stone for Hartsite came from?”

  “Possibly. Or one just like it. They also were prone to use the stones from the old Roman roads and buildings. Though there are plenty of old quarries, there are almost no ruins left; they have been demolished stone by stone to build houses and walls. You knew that Hartsite was originally called Heart’s Delight?”

  “I’d heard that. I wonder how it got changed.”

  “I took an interest in local history for a while. The bride that Heart’s Delight was built for died of smallpox along with her unborn child some six months after they took up residence here. Later on a brother of the original lord moved in, but he was killed in the Civil War fighting against Cromwell. It stood empty for a while until the son of the slain brother moved in. He never married, and there seems more evidence from a journal of a local clergyman that he liked men better than women. Then it was bought by a rich merchant whose wife poisoned him for his money so that she could marry her lover. When found out, she killed herself — no one chronicled what happened to the lover, but nothing good, I’m sure. There was a long gap then, but we know that the people Matthew bought the place from had an only son die here of tuberculosis. This has been a house of ill fortune from the beginning. It should have been called Heart’s Hurt.”

  “Did Matthew Stephens know of its history when he bought it?”

  “No, but he said when I told him that if he had, he would have bought it anyway, that there was no evil fortune, including dying, that he had to fear after all that had already happened.”

  “And why did you but it?”

  “Mainly for Carrie’s sake. Matthew left very little. As for me, I had already had my evil fortune as well, as had we all. Only Cynthia has suffered since.”

  They stared out at the panorama before them, silent and lost in their separate thoughts.

  At last Jarrell said, “Well, have you remembered any more?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then let’s see if you can work on it a bit. I’ll help you if I can. To begin with, how much can you tell me now of your uncle’s unwelcome attentions?”

  She closed her eyes and sought through the blank corridors of her memory for the elusive vision of the attic room. The roof slanted so abruptly that the wall at its lower side was only about three feet high. There was a bed, little more than a cot, and a table. Yes, and there was a window that looked out on a cobbled street whose stones glistened in the rain ... Uncle Henry ... No, not Uncle, just Henry ... Gross, red-faced, with hands that hurt ... Blows to her face, his weight on her, the foul breath from his decayed teeth and the cheap wine he was drunk on ...

  “I think he raped me,” she said at last.

  “He couldn’t have been successful because Mrs. Lewis examined you and found you intact.”

  Lisa gasped. “Why did she do that?”

  “If you must know, to see if you had any sign of the pox. Remember, we didn’t know who you were then, Eric brought you home, and even he admitted finding you in the bawdy house district.”

  Absently she picked a piece of heather and squeezed it between her fingers, then held it against her nose. The sharp herbal scent conjured up the vision of a shop that had, besides fruits and vegetables and tools and utensils, bins of various spices and herbs. “Ergot is for labor and to abort a child,” she said slowly.

  “How do you know that?” Jarrell asked quickly.

  “I — I don’t know. I can see the shop now, but when I open the door to the back, there is nothing there.”

  “Is it dark?”

  “No, there is nothing there.” Try as she might, there was nothing behind that door.

  “Do you have any memory of getting to the bawdy house district?”

  “None.”

  He stood up. “I think we’ve done what we can today. Your memory is coming back a small bit at a time. My guess is that you had a wretched time while you were there and so have reason not to remember. You also may have been running from dear old Uncle Henry’s attentions when Eric ran you down.”

  They rode back off the upper moorland and cut across the lower slopes for several miles to where some small abandoned fields surrounded by fences made of woven heather formed what used to be sheep folds before the farm was given up.

  “Carrie tells me you like to jump. Let’s see what you and Dancer can do with these
.”

  Lisa wrapped the rein around her useless left hand and took a short grip with her right. She felt very self-conscious as he sat on Cleo watching her every move. Her unsureness communicated itself to Dancer, who at the last moment refused, coming to an abrupt halt. Lisa, however, was psychologically ready to take the jump, and she ignominiously went off his near shoulder and landed with ajar on the hard ground. She looked up at Dancer standing almost over her.

  I remember the hoofs! she thought excitedly, sitting up. I can see Christian coming at me, it was night, and I fell down. She got up and brushed herself off.

  “Now get back on and give him his head at the jump,” Jarrell said unfeelingly. “Dancer loves going over just about anything, but he wants to do it his way.”

  Though she jumped him the better part of an hour, growing bolder with each success, no more missing pieces came to her. Cleo was a clever jumper who came right up to the fence before popping over it, while Dancer started far out and jumped higher than he needed. They left the abandoned sheep folds then and rode further until they came to country that looked familiar. She looked down the slope and saw the familiar wall and stile bordering the Dunwiddleston road. Jarrell set the mare at the highest part of the wall and with knees and hands literally lifted her into the jump before she would have gone by herself. She seemed to float over the wall and landed lightly in the road. Lisa took the stile again, and this time Dancer jumped it easily.

  “When we’ve worked on that hand of yours, you should have more control. Where did you learn to ride, on the farm?”

  “Toby’s father raised draft horses, and Toby used to break them to ride as well as to pull. He would bring an extra colt for me to ride when he went out schooling them.”

  “So that’s how he learned to handle horses so well.”

  “It’s too bad you don’t need a horse trained. Toby is really uncanny at gentling them down.”

  When they returned, Toby was at the stables.

  “How did it go, Toby?” Lisa asked.

  He shrugged, grinning.

  “Can you handle money now?”

  He shrugged again.

  Lisa shook her head. “Very well, I’ll ask Mrs. Jarrell how you did.”

  He nodded, still grinning.

  They left the horses with him and walked slowly toward the house.

  “I haven’t had as good a time riding in years,” Jarrell said. “Thank you for coming with me.”

  “Where do you think Eric went?” she asked suddenly. “Don’t you know?” he replied.

  “To Burresford? To — where the accident happened?”

  “That’s right. Whenever he gets bored or angry or just plain out of sorts, that’s where he goes.”

  “How can he? What on earth can he see in going and buying a woman? I should think he’d be ashamed to have to buy his pleasure.” Lisa was bitter.

  “Lisa, men are different from women. Our society says that men are not supposed to give in to the demands of the flesh, in fact are not even supposed to feel the demands of the flesh, until they are married. It also says that under no circumstances is a man to seduce a nice girl until he has married her. Should he seduce her before marriage, she is no longer a nice girl. Because of all this hypocrisy, bawdy houses flourish. A man who isn’t married, or whose wife can’t or won’t satisfy him, has no other recourse than a prostitute except to ruin nice girls or break up marriages.”

  “Do you go to these women?”

  “No,” he said, “but I can take no moral credit for it. You might say that I’m spoiled for bought love, and often I wish to God I weren’t.”

  “So you just suffer?”

  “For a woman, you’re damned forthright. Yes, I suffer.” He smiled grimly.

  “And you would rather suffer than have the woman you married?”

  “The feeling is mutual, I assure you.”

  Lisa threw up her hands, “I’ve heard of people cutting off their noses to spite their faces, but you two are prizes.”

  “It’s the human condition, my dear. There are few of us who don’t engage in the sport, and I include you. Now you’d best see to your patient. Toby didn’t sound to me as if he’d gotten very far.”

  She found Cynthia sitting up in bed with a pen and paper and a book. “Nothing I like better than teaching a halfwit his numbers,” Cynthia remarked acidly.

  She was complaining in a way, but not whining for once, Lisa thought wonderingly. “What happened?” she asked out loud.

  “I don’t think we’re going to have much luck with marks on paper that are supposed to stand for numbers,” Cynthia said. “He just can’t seem to grasp it. But I’ve had what I think is a better idea. We’ll use real money. Tomorrow morning Mrs. Lewis can start him off by just showing him what she’s giving all these people. Then tomorrow afternoon I’ll work with him with real money here. Marks on paper aren’t real; even for a halfwit, money is. On this slip of paper I’ve listed the denominations I want to begin with. Would you get them from Mrs Lewis for me?”

  Cynthia had never made half as long a speech, and what speaking she did do all involved injuries being done her, Lisa realized. Whatever this did for Toby’s ability to count money, it had done wonders for Cynthia. And to think it was Jarrell who thought of it. If somehow she could just work it out so that Jarrell and Cynthia would cease despising each other ...

  Later that evening she had Priddy send up identical suppers for the two of them. Some meat, some cheese, and bread and apples. She told Priddy not to bother with dessert but to send along lots of tea as usual. After supper they both sat up in front of the fire while Cynthia taught her to play draughts. On the farm there had been no time for games, and Lisa had a suspicion that Uncle John and Aunt Sarah possibly even thought them immoral. Cynthia was a good teacher and a patient one, oddly enough. What a waste of a mind, to have been shut up in this bedroom for years, and before that locked into the gentile prison of what young ladies did and didn’t do. Having a mind was far down on the list of desirables.

  Strange, Lisa thought, but in some ways growing up on a farm poor was freer for women than where there was more money. The poor had to live by their wits, male and female alike, and there was a comradeship between the sexes not possible in the higher classes. She thought of the women in the market with their frank remarks and bawdy sense of humor. Further, all the children of whatever sex among the poor grew up together; they played together and worked together and even slept together. Consequently their thinking and ways of looking at things were far more similar than those of upper class boys and girls, who were separated almost at birth and certainly schooled differently.

  Toby’s and her relationship was indeed not a usual one, but he was the nearest thing she had to a brother. He had certainly not treated her any differently than he would have a brother, nor within the limits of her physical strength had Uncle John treated her much differently than he would have a son. She saw the rams with the ewes and later stayed up night after night to help with the lambing. No one thought anything about it when she helped Uncle John lead the two cows over to Tedford’s bull, and subjects like birth and breeding were common ones on any farm. She suspected that her talks with Jarrell and Eric too were more open than they would ever have had with a woman of their own class, certainly in this household, though Eric and his sister might have been an exception.

  She felt sorry for Cynthia, who had been too sheltered and pampered to stand up to the blow of an unfortunate marriage and the death of a child. In reality she was still a child herself, as Jarrell accused Eric of being. And both of them were childlike because no one had ever encouraged them to grow up. Eric’s mother had been indifferent and his father fastened on Mark. Cynthia’s parents had presumably cared for her, yet when she got in trouble they deserted her. Was it possible that being loved as a child was necessary to being able to grow up? And certainly necessary to being able to love. What were her own parents like? Had they loved her? Was she capable of love, or was her
feeling for Eric nothing but infatuation, as Jarrell implied? As she gave Cynthia her sleeping medicine and tucked her in for the night, she felt a sudden sense of desolation and loss. There were nine whole years of loving or not loving that she couldn’t even remember.

  She woke up much later on to hear a horse clattering up the drive. Heart thudding, she threw on a wrapper of Cynthia’s and went downstairs. She hadn’t long to wait before she heard the dining room door to the garden open. Even in the dim glow of the night light she could see that he was dirty and disheveled. White and drawn, he had dark rings under his eyes and a dark smudge of beard on his usually clean shaven face. How like him to be clean shaven when other men had beards or mustaches. He seemed to spend his life flaunting his differences in the face of society.

  “Lisa!” He looked horrorstruck.

  “How was your trip, Eric?” she asked evenly. “Did you find what you went for?”

  “Ah Lisa, you shouldn’t have struck me. One minute you were loving, and the next you were like ice. Men can’t take that, Lisa. You asked too much of me, of any man.”

  “I’ve been sorry for having hit you, Eric, but there has been no one here to tell how sorry I’ve been.”

  He swayed, and passed a hand over his forehead. “No, I didn’t find what I went for, if you must know. I drank too much, and the thought of you shook me to pieces. What are we doing to each other?”

  “You knew where we were going that day, Eric, and you knew what you hoped would happen. What would I have been to you afterward, tell me that?”

  “It would have made no difference, Lisa, surely you know that.” He sank down to a seat on one of the stairs.

  “No, I don’t know it. I look at a woman like Cynthia whose whole life was ruined because she gave in. She was forced to marry a man she detested who detested her. How would he have felt about her if she hadn’t given in?”

  “What do you know of Cynthia?” Eric demanded, his eyes blazing silver in his white face. “What has she told you?”