Margaret Dashwood's Diary

by Elliott, Anna

  In Weymouth—which is the nearest port town to Delaford, though we are farther inland, here—the smuggling has reached new and more dangerous heights. Some of the gangs have begun instituting their own reign of terror—brutally punishing and even murdering any of the townsfolk who threaten to reveal the secrets of the trade to the king’s agents. And—I think I mentioned it before—three revenue officers were ambushed and murdered last month.

  Colonel Brandon was asked by an old army friend who now serves the Revenue Office to replace one of the officers who was killed. He hesitated to leave Marianne, with the birth of the baby drawing near. But she insisted that he not feel tied down, and said that he ought to go—that there was no one else who could execute the duty so well as he.

  So he has spent the last three months in Weymouth, coming home to Delaford for a day or two whenever he can.

  I have written all this down because of the very strange encounter I had at Eliza Williams’s cottage today.

  Marianne had asked me to take some of the mulberries from the Delaford trees over to Eliza and Joanna, so I called there again on my way back from my daily—so far futile—visit to Star.

  I thought Eliza looked slightly pale and tired, with a strained look about her mouth and shadows under her eyes—which made me think that perhaps she was more upset over the news of Willoughby than had showed before. Or perhaps it is merely that I have John Willoughby on the brain, since I have spent so much time debating whether to tell Marianne that she was seen coming home the other night and ask where she had gone and whom she was meeting. Eliza thanked me very politely for the mulberries, though. And then Joanna towed me into the kitchen again so that I might perform another inspection of King.

  King, her little spaniel puppy, was suffering from worms when I arrived. I dosed him with sulphur—that was what old Hodgins, our gamekeeper, used to give my father’s foxhounds when I was small—and he is now recovering well.

  At any rate, King was sharing the kitchen with Maggie Harmon, the maid-of-all-work who helps Eliza with the cleaning and cooking and boiling of laundry. I am sure that Colonel Brandon would provide Eliza with more in the way of household help, if she wished. But I think Eliza prefers doing the work herself to having a bevy of servants who might gossip about Joanna’s parentage and make talk in the village. And she is completely safe—or as near to completely safe as she can be from that sort of thing—with Maggie.

  Maggie is the daughter of the village blacksmith. She is built rather like a smith herself, being tall and broad shouldered. But with her it has run into stoutness rather than muscular strength, so that her figure is billowy with rolls of fat. She is very good natured and kind—and a hard worker, as well. But completely simple. Her face is broad and freckled beneath a frizz of coppery red hair, and her eyes are a faded, washed-out blue. She suffers from adenoids, I think, for she breathes heavily through her mouth—and she speaks in a slow, ponderous way. Not that she stammers, exactly—it is more that one has the impression, always, that it is causing her tremendous effort to select each word.

  After I had pronounced King to be well on the mend, Joanna raced over to Maggie and hopped up and down, begging to lick the scrapings from the bowl of the currant cake Maggie was making.

  Maggie shook her head. “You’ll spoil your supper, Miss Joanna.” The words were more spaced out than I’ve written them; it came out more like: You’ll. Spoil your. Supper.

  Joanna hopped from one foot to the other. “No I won’t. It’s ages until suppertime. Please, Maggie?”

  Maggie shook her head again. But she smiled and gave Joanna the spoon and bowl to lick all the same. And then, when Joanna was happily settled at the table, Maggie turned to me and said, “Have you … that is, have you heard from Colonel Brandon lately, Miss?”

  I was surprised—Maggie has always been polite with me, but shy. I think making conversation is such an effort for her that she does not do it unless it is strictly necessary. Certainly I had never known her to start a conversation or express curiosity before. But it seemed to me that it was not just curiosity that had made her ask. There was a line of worry on her broad, freckled brow, and I thought her eyes were slightly anxious, as well.

  “I think my sister had a letter from him a day or two ago,” I said. “Why?”

  Maggie ignored the question—or perhaps did not notice it. I had the impression that she had laid out in her head what she wanted to say, and was determined to push on until she reached the end. “They do say down in the village that he’s gone to … to catch them as bring in goods from France. Smugglers.” She stumbled a little over the word.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Why?”

  To my surprise, the look of alarm in Maggie’s eyes deepened. She ducked her head and said, stammering in earnest now, “N-n-no reason, miss. Just—” And then she looked up at me again, and I would have sworn there was an expression of something almost like appeal in her pale blue eyes. “Just if you ever get the chance, tell him he’s missed round about these parts.”

  She took up a basket, then, and went out to gather the eggs from the henhouse without saying anything more than, “Good morning to you, miss,” as she went out.

  It was very strange. Maidservants do sometimes fall in love with their employers—and are seduced and ruined by them, too. Such happenings are not just favourite devices in popular fiction; three of the village girls who served at the larger estates around Barton were got ‘into trouble’ that way, if rumour is to be believed. But it is beyond unlikely that Colonel Brandon should have turned a seductive eye on anyone, much less poor Maggie Harmon. I have never seen him so much as look at another woman besides Marianne since their marriage, and he is far too honourable, besides, to misbehave with his own staff. Could Maggie have developed some sort of hopeless affection for him? That seems unlikely, as well—but I suppose it is possible.

  Joanna distracted me from thinking about it for too long, though. She bounced up from her chair—she now had cake batter smeared all around her mouth—started hopping from one foot to the other again, and began to tell me that she was convinced that the patch of woods at the back of their house was haunted. Apparently she has looked out of her window at night, after her mother thinks she has gone to sleep, and seen a pale, ghostly figure gliding through the trees.

  I was at least tactful enough not to ask whether she was sure she was not dreaming. And Joanna went on, “I think he must be a terribly sad ghost, Miss Dashwood,” she said. “For I heard him groaning, most pitifully.” She gave another hop, her curly dark head tilted to one side in thought and then said, with decision, “If I ever see him again, I shall climb out my window and see whether I can comfort him, poor fellow.”

  I extracted a promise from Joanna that she would not actually climb out of her window and go off chasing ghosts into the woods. Though I do not deceive myself into thinking that it will do very much good; as determined as Joanna is by nature, if she takes it into her head to cheer up a melancholy ghost, I doubt anything I or her mother or anyone else can say will sway her resolve.

  Friday 11 June 1802

  If I have not mentioned Jamie in the last two days, it is because there has been no change in his illness—at any rate, none that I can see. He is not, strictly speaking, any worse, I do not think. But neither can I persuade myself that he is any better. I have been to see him each day in the morning—and in the evening, if I can get away. Twice he has been asleep when I have come; the second time he was more hallucinating than asleep, lost in some nightmare that made him thrash and cry out unintelligibly. And on the occasions—two of them—when he was awake and sensible, he made an effort to sit up and to speak with me. But he was still too ill for any real conversation. And besides, even apart from weakness and fever, I could see his mind was not on what we said.

  His face has grown still leaner with the fever, his cheekbones standing out more sharply and his long-lashed dark eyes ringed by shadows. But there is a bleak, bruised look about his gaz
e, too. And though I can see that he has to force down each bite of the food I bring, he does it with a kind of grim determination. As though he has some private but vital reason for needing to regain his strength as soon as he possibly can.

  Tonight he did seem a little better to me. The bread and ham I had brought in the morning was half gone, and his cheeks looked less hectically flushed.

  He was lying close to the mouth of the tent, and pulled himself up into a sitting position at the sight of me. I saw him wince at the movement, his lips whitening as though he had pressed them together to hold back an exclamation of pain.

  “What is it? Are you hurt?” I asked quickly. I was growing worried about Jamie’s condition—or rather, more worried still. I wondered whether I should defy his wishes and fetch an apothecary or physician after all. Though there was still the question of how I might persuade either to attend a patient in the middle of the woods.

  Jamie brushed aside the question, though, shaking his head and taking a swallow from the fresh jug of milk that I had brought. “It’s nothing.” He set the jug down and looked at me. “Are you going to get into trouble for bringing food to me this way?”

  I shook my head. “No. Even if Marianne finds out, she would not be angry—surprised, perhaps, but there would be no trouble.”

  “Marianne? Your sister, do you mean?”

  “Yes. She is married to Colonel Brandon, who owns Delaford. Did you not know?”

  Jamie shook his head, tearing off a chunk of the loaf of cottage bread. “I’d heard that the Colonel had got married. I didn’t know his new lady was your sister. So that’s how you came to be staying at Delaford.”

  “That’s right,” I said. And then—since I did not especially want to invite any questions about the particular reasons for my stay—I asked, “Do you know Colonel Brandon, then?”

  I had asked the question idly. But I thought there was a moment’s—what? A kind of stillness about Jamie, for just the barest half-second. A check in his breathing, in the motion of his hands as he ripped off another chunk of bread. Then his lashes came down, veiling his eyes, and he said, easily, “Know of him, that’s all. Everyone does in these parts. Thanks for the food,” he added.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I owe you—for not laughing at me, the time Marianne decided to try cutting my hair.”

  For a week or two, Marianne took it into her head to play at being a hair dresser when she was thirteen—the sort of elegant maid who travels to grand houses and arranges hair for the ladies of the house when they are to attend a particularly important ball. But she could not find anyone willing to serve as her clientele—not until she persuaded me to let her try out her fine arts on my hair.

  At nine, I did not even particularly care about my hair, save that it stay out of my face when I wanted to ride—but I still cannot think of the end results without a shudder.

  Jamie’s mouth curved at the memory. “Well, I might have smiled a bit.”

  “True. But you knocked Sam down when he told me I looked like a hedgehog dragged through a prickle-bush backwards.”

  Jamie laughed—though I thought his face clouded, slightly, at the mention of his brother’s name. He set the bread down and said, “Margaret? Can I ask you to do something else for me?”

  “Of course.”

  Jamie started to move towards the back of the tent, but winced again, his breath going out in a muffled grunt of pain. “Sorry. Can you fetch the fiddle case?” He gestured. “It’s at the back, there.”

  I had not noticed the fiddle case before; it was at the far back of the tent, half hidden by the travelling pack. I pulled it out and asked, “Do you still play?”

  When we were young, Jamie had little time for practising the violin—and of course had no formal musical training, beyond the occasional lessons his old grandmother gave him. But I used to love to watch him play: he handled the fiddle with the same sure, gentle confidence with which he handled the horses he trained. His long, strong fingers—callused, but graceful, still—could coax his family’s battered violin into all manner of tunes: wild, rollicking dancing songs, and mournful ones that quavered like tears.

  Jamie shrugged. “Not often. Now and again.”

  He took the case from me and flipped it open, drawing out a creased and dirty envelope from the worn lining behind the instrument. “Can you see this letter’s posted for me?”

  The address on the letter was one in Weymouth—but the name meant nothing to me. Though of course, there was no reason why it should.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” Jamie said.

  I said, automatically, “Of course.” I turned the letter over in my hands. Jamie said nothing else—and I could not think of a way of asking him what was so urgent about the letter or what it contained without being both prying and abominably rude. I may not entirely have got over the besetting sin of curiosity my mother chided me with—but I can at least be polite.

  Besides, holding the letter, it came home to me that however easy it is to fall into our old, easy familiarity, I actually knew very little about the man-version of Jamie who sat before me at that moment. I was suddenly aware of just how many years it had been since I had last seen him—and how much must have happened to him during those years that I knew nothing about. The Jamie I knew could do complicated sums in his head, and rapidly, too. He would work out payments and profits and calculate what each month’s supply of grain for the horses would cost far more quickly than I ever could have done.

  But he could not read or write. None of his family could. And yet here was this letter, addressed in a hand that looked educated, if slightly spiky.

  He has changed—and so of course have I.

  “Of course,” I said again. I slid the letter through the slit in my skirt and into my pocket. “I can see that it is posted the next time I am in the village.”

  I took the violin case, intending to return it to its place inside the tent. But as I went to close it, something else fell out—and when I bent to retrieve it, I saw that it was a round silver medal. An army medal—like the ones Colonel Brandon wears on his coat when he attends a formal occasion. “Is that—it’s not yours, is it?” I asked in astonishment.

  I thought another flicker of the dark, shadowed look crossed Jamie’s gaze, and his shoulders twitched—as though he were trying to physically shake off a memory. But he let out his breath and nodded. “Yes, it’s mine. I got it last year—in Egypt.”

  “You are in the army?” I was too much surprised to stop myself from asking questions that time.

  I am not sure Jamie wished to answer—in fact, I am fairly sure he did not. But he took the medal from me, running a thumb round its rim. The sun was sinking lower, the air filling with the purple shadows of dusk, draining his face of colour and making his eyes look darker still.

  “I was. Ever since I was fifteen. Just got out a couple of months ago.” He flipped the medal back into the violin case and snapped it closed. Then he looked up at me with a resigned expression on his face, let out his breath, and said, “It’s all right—go ahead. You can ask.”

  “I did not say anything!” I protested. “Not one single word.”

  “I know.” The edges of Jamie’s mouth twitched briefly upwards again. “If you’d been any louder about not saying anything, I reckon I might have gone deaf.” He stretched out his legs, crossing his booted feet. “What do you want to know?”

  “It’s just—” I stopped, biting my lip.

  The gypsy clans are very close-knit, and very secretive and suspicious of all outsiders. They willingly share scarcely anything—their true names, their language or customs—with anyone not of gypsy blood. The encampment Jamie’s family made—the tents and the painted covered wagons, the fire pits and the gypsy women with their long earrings and patterned shawls—was like magic to me.

  Jamie’s grandmother—her name was Analetta Cooper—was the matriarch of the clan, and an utterly awe-inspiring figure to me as a child.
She was tall and very thin, with intense dark eyes and hair done in a multitude of braids that looped over her ears. She wore a red cloak and made money by telling fortunes to the Norland parlourmaids. I used to sneak away and visit every chance that I got, though I never quite got up the courage to ask Analetta to read my fortune for me.

  But I was always still an outsider, as well—the daughter of the manor house, despite my friendship with Jamie. Certainly no one with whom family secrets could be shared.

  Still, I saw enough. Probably more than Jamie wanted. More in fact than I really understood at the time, as a child of eight or nine. But I remember understanding quite clearly that Sam with his high spirits and feckless nature and his eagerness to shirk all hard work was very much the favourite of Elijah Cooper’s two sons. Jamie’s father never looked at Jamie directly if he could help it, certainly never gave him a kind word.

  Of course, Elijah Cooper was not exactly a man to spare kind words for anyone. But I remember him saying once—one afternoon when he came reeling unsteadily back to camp, smelling strongly of what I now know was cheap drink—that Jamie had been the death of all he held dear and was—

  I cannot remember what the Romany word he used was, now. But it was plainly something terrible.

  Afterwards, my eyes still smarting in sympathy from the venom in Elijah’s voice, I asked Jamie what his father had said. That, unfortunately, was another of my besetting sins: being unable to stop myself from asking a question, even when I knew quite well that I was going to wish that I had never heard the answer.