Eppie
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‘I do believe you have designs on Lord du Quesne. Do not refute it.’
‘I do not,’ Permelia replied. ‘He is most courteous, most handsome, but he is promised to another.’
‘To a girl raised in a poorhouse? A girl who once slaved in a seamstress’s garret? I think, my beloved sister, that you would have more claim on him if only he could be made to see the absurdity of holding on to his blinkered vision of this worthless creature.’
Genevieve was about to throw back the drapes, to argue in Rowan’s defence, when there came a rap at the door.
‘Enter,’ Hortence said in a superior manner, as though she herself were the Queen of Sheba.
‘If you please, ma’am,’ the butler said, ‘there is a gentleman who wishes to speak with you.’
‘Admit,’ Hortence said.
Genevieve sneaked a look. A well-dressed man, his thinning hair brushed over a bald patch, bowed over the hand of each daughter in turn. With his other hand he held his lock in place to stop it from slipping. ‘I come with admirable tidings. I have managed to take a lease on a house in Bath, ready for your mother and your good selves to move into straightaway.’
‘That is admirable news,’ Hortence answered. ‘I am tired of this hateful household. It is so quiet. We rarely have any visitors.’
Permelia was less keen to remove from Gabriel. ‘Doctor Burndread is adamant that mother should not be stirred. We must be patient a while longer I think, sister.’
‘Eppie!’ It was Martha shouting. ‘Where are you?’
Genevieve leapt from her place of concealment.
‘What a fright!’ Permelia exclaimed, embarrassed that Genevieve had overheard their scheming words about Gabriel. ‘You fair took the breath from my body. Huber-Percy, might I introduce Lady Genevieve du Quesne.’
Martha burst in. ‘There you are! Ella’s here!’
‘It is vulgar to appear in a hurry!’ Permelia cried as Genevieve fled the room.
‘And it is vulgar of you to shout!’ Genevieve yelled back.
In the carriage yard stood the brewery wagon, Dusty tethered behind.
Ella leapt from the wagon, and she and Genevieve fell into one another’s arms, laughing in delight at being together. ‘My family were overwhelmed to hear about your good fortune! I couldn’t miss this opportunity to come and see you.’
Hearing the rumpus, Gabriel strode out to greet the visitors.
Dusty’s thick felt ears twitched under Dick’s stroking hand. ‘You’re a fine-looking girl.’
Genevieve pressed her cheek against the donkey’s neck, revelling in the velvety softness of her fur. ‘I’ve missed you, Dusty.’
‘I went over to Mulberry Farm to fetch her back for you,’ Jonas said. ‘I had the same trouble with her as I’d had with Cross-Eyes; I couldn’t wean the barmy thing off the ale. While you were in Malstowe, George told me that he was happy for Dusty to live out her days on his farm, thinking you was never coming back.’
Ella blushed, seeing Dick smiling at her.
‘Dick, find a place for Dusty?’ Genevieve asked.
Dick touched his cap. ‘Will do, yer ladyship.’
‘Nice, isn’t he!’ Genevieve said, as she and Ella watched him lead Dusty away. ‘His name’s Dick Pebbleton.’ Enjoying the role of matchmaker she called after him, ‘Dick, show Ella around the stables? I’m sure she would like to see Dusty settled in.’
Ella grinned back at Genevieve as she followed Dick.
Another wagon trundled up. ‘Sam!’ Genevieve picked up her skirts and tore down the track to greet him. He looked the same as she remembered, though his hair, like Martha’s, was greying.
Sam had already paid a few calls to Tunnygrave Manor, on one occasion with his brother Lewis.
Directly upon his return from Malstowe, Gabriel had engaged a barrister on Sam’s behalf, the outcome of which was that he would not have to return to jail.
When Mr Grimley visited Sam and Lewis at their farmstead, Sam had recognised him as the mysterious gentleman whom he had seen in Squire Bulwar’s study on that fateful day when he had been arrested by the magistrate’s men.
One morning, whilst Genevieve and the others were taking tea in the drawing room, Mr Grimley said he’d guessed all along that Thurstan knew Rowan and Dawkin were the Bulwar’s great-grandchildren. That was the reason why Thurstan had made pretence that Dawkin had killed Squire Bulwar. It was an excuse to have him thrown into jail, and ultimately hung.
It was now Genevieve’s turn to rush around, shouting for Martha.
Smelling of coal-tar disinfectant, she emerged from the scullery, where she had been helping a maid scrub stone shelves. Nervously, she wrung her hands in her apron. By the look on Martha’s face, Genevieve knew that her heart turned over at the sight of Sam.
‘Do you recall that time at The Leaking Barrel when Dawkin walked in?’ Martha had asked Genevieve on the first day Sam visited the manor. ‘I was startled because I thought him so alike to Sam. Now I understand why.’
Sam slapped the basket-hamper in his cart. ‘Tis a grand mornin’, Mrs D. How’s about we spend some time by the river? Lottie, Betsy? You’re more than welcome, too. I’ve brought plenty to eat and a heap of blankets to sit upon.’
Martha patted her hair-bun into a state of tidiness. ‘I can’t think of anything we’d rather do on such a pleasant day.’
‘Eppie, are you coming?’ Sam asked.
Gabriel answered for her. ‘I’m afraid that Genevieve and I have promised to entertain the Wexcombes.’
‘I believe that mam loved Sam from the moment she set eyes on him,’ Genevieve said as she and Gabriel watched them drive off.
Together they wandered past the shuttered windows of the dairy, and stepped onto the lawn.
Attempting to catch a butterfly, Permelia dashed around bushes, wielding a net in a haphazard manner.
‘Doesn’t she know how cruel that is?’ Genevieve muttered crossly. ‘She’ll break its wings.’
‘I dare say it hasn’t occurred to her, or if it has she doesn’t care. Tell me, there’s something worrying you isn’t there?’
‘Whilst I was working at the mill I yearned to come home to Little Lubbock. Now I am here I find I cannot forget how intolerable life is for the poor. What is more, I do not want to forget. I feel driven to do something to help them. Added to that, I feel such a blunderer. Each day I wake with the good intention of not saying the wrong thing to the Wexcombes. I always tell myself to act in a way which will not offend them. It never works.’
‘It is me who should apologise. This situation is entirely of my own making. I should never have invited them here. But why should you have to put away who you truly are? Be yourself.’ He laughed fondly. ‘You must find your own way to happiness, my darling sister. I put nothing in your way.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
A DREARY AFTERNOON
‘Rain, rain, rain, that’s all we’ve had for days, almost non-stop.’ Genevieve gazed at a maple tree. Though a thrush flew to its branches, the closed drawing room windows muffled its song.
‘Reuben Shaw won’t be happy,’ Gabriel said. ‘When I met him in Litcombe last week he told me he’d bought a narrowboat and set up business for the carriage of goods. The towpath will be a morass of sticky clay, difficult for his horse to traverse.’
Clutching her embroidery, Hortence flounced in. She glanced disdainfully at Martha, who sat knitting gloves for Sam. ‘Entertaining the servants again, are we?’
Genevieve opened her mouth to answer back. Martha raised a finger to her lips, indicating that she should ignore Hortence’s bitter words.
Despite the rain it felt humid. Flies buzzed and bumped under the ceiling.
‘I’m sick of spending long hours in this room,’ Genevieve said, gazing at the sickly lime-green paper adorned with idealistic pastoral scenes. ‘There’s no air in here.’
‘Air?’ Lady Wexcombe said. ‘What a frightful idea! Who needs air? Whenever I step out of doors
the only air I smell arises from farmyard unmentionables.’ She turned to Gabriel, who was reading a newspaper. ‘My daughters and I are most grateful for your hospitality, sir, though I fear we must not trespass on your kindness any longer.’
‘I am delighted for you to stay as long as you desire.’ Almost as though he sensed Genevieve’s eyes fixed on him, he glanced at her, grimacing slightly from the untruth.
‘Besides, we must stay for the ball,’ Hortence reminded her mother. She poked a finger through the birdcage, trying to prod the forlorn linnet. ‘This pathetic bag of feathers still refuses to sing.’
‘He needs to be set free,’ Genevieve implored.
‘Such an idiotic notion,’ Hortence said. ‘Why would she choose to fly in this rain?’
Despairing at being unable to reason with Hortence, Genevieve took up her silks. It was tedious embroidering the fine shawl, but there wasn’t much else to do to pass the time.
‘What ugly hands you have,’ Permelia said. She added a touch more grey to her watercolour of storm clouds. ‘Many a beau has worshiped my slender hands.’
Genevieve had thought herself elegant in her grass-green frock embellished with red flowers. Now she felt sullied by Permelia’s throwaway comment.
Rain battered the windows.
‘How I yearn for a sunny morning, then I could ride out,’ Permelia said.
‘When the sun deems to show its face, why do you not accompany Permelia riding, sir?’ Lady Wexcombe asked. ‘I am sure my daughter would value your company.’
Hesitantly, Gabriel responded, ‘It would be an honour, my lady.’
Hortence turned to Genevieve. ‘I forgot to mention, this morning, whilst the girl was dressing my hair before the glass … ’
‘Folk shun’t spend too much time before a looking-glass,’ Betsy said, ‘lest they spy the devil ‘issen.’
Hortence frowned at this interruption. ‘… a mouse ran across my feet. In my consternation I dropped your mother’s silver hand-glass. It smashed on the floor.’
‘Thar portends the loss of a loved one in the house.’ Betsy rubbed a black snail over the wart on her nose. To complete the charm she impaled the snail on the point of a blackthorn twig.
‘I do believe, Mrs Psalter, that you are trying your utmost to enrage my daughters and I with your native paganism, your tedious omens,’ Lady Wexcombe said.
‘I am of faerie descent, so I knows a thing or three. I gave the same warning to Gillow when I got them corns on me feet, an’ I was proved right.’
‘And who might this Gillow be?’ Lady Wexcombe asked.
‘He was my …,’ Genevieve faltered, ‘someone close to me.’
‘He was my husband,’ Martha said. ‘He was shot by Eppie’s father.’
‘Shot? How so?’
‘There was an incident. My son and his lordship argued. Gillow was caught in the middle.’
‘Your husband was a fool to intervene.’
‘If he had not, my son would have died.’
‘By whom you mean that scoundrel who stole Lady Genevieve from her cradle? More is the pity that his lordship did not kill both of them with one bullet.’
A few days later the weather improved sufficiently for Gabriel and Permelia to ride out.
Genevieve had overheard Lady Wexcombe telling Permelia that, as she was such an attractive and amiable young woman, it would not be long before Gabriel took her for his wife. Though she knew Gabriel ventured out unwillingly, Genevieve feared that he might succumb to Permelia’s ardent advances.
To take her mind off her melancholic thoughts, she passed through the garden gate and headed into the woods. Birds hopped and played, a chorus of a hundred blended notes arising from every tree, shrub and briar thicket.
Settling beside Shivering Falls, she watched the waterfall and listened to it roaring over mossy stones, pounding rhythmically into the plunge pool.
Like a hidden hand, the beauty of nature caressed and eased her mind, drawing her back to her childhood memories. Never was she truly alone; always Talia was her companion, her ghostly form mingling with the stars of sunlight glittering on the cascade.
Content in her isolation beneath the shade of an alder tree, Genevieve took up her book, The Romance of the Forest.
Genevieve, Permelia and Lady Wexcombe sat around a green baize table in the salon, playing cards. Genevieve always kept a book open on her lap for the tiresome interludes.
‘Genevieve reads incessantly, firm in the belief that improvement to her mind will be accomplished by extensive reading,’ Permelia said patronisingly.
Seated before the pianoforte, Hortence restlessly flicked through sheet music. ‘I believe her mind to be in vast need of improvement.’
‘That was a bad move,’ Permelia told Genevieve.
‘I haven’t the heart to play no more.’ Genevieve was tired of the sisters speaking about her as though she were not in the room. Seeing Betsy draw her woollen shawl around her shoulders, she added a log to the fire to keep the chill from her old friend’s bones.
‘Surely the servants are capable of such mediocre tasks?’ Hortence chided.
‘Dawkin once told me about when he first went to work as a climbing-boy for Mr Crowe. He breathed in so much soot that it killed the worms in his stomach. After he retched them up he found one longer than the soot cellar.’
Spread upon the hearth was a dusting of soot. With her fingertip, she formed the letters DS. ‘I wonder where he is. What happened to him?’
‘I’ll do a spot of fire divination for you, if you like?’ Betsy offered.
‘You can foretell the future by seeing pictures in the fire?’ Genevieve asked, surprised.
‘Would anyone care for another game?’ Lady Wexcombe asked. ‘Gabriel, I am sure that you can drag yourself away from your chronicle, just this once.’
‘Tea and cakes?’ Genevieve asked Betsy.
‘Lovely, m’dear, t’ud slide down a treat.’
Genevieve tugged the ribbon beside the fire, and went to sit beside Martha on the settee. Soon, Duncan arrived carrying a tray laden with refreshments.
‘It’s heavenly to sup a decent cup of tea,’ Martha said. ‘Mr Loomp’s tea leaves had no flavour. I always suspected they’d been used before.’
Genevieve cast her mind back to the wreckers at the mill and thought of the truck store manager languishing in jail. ‘The only way that we could make our drinks look the colour of tea was by pouring hot water over the leaves and adding charcoal from burnt bread crusts.’
‘I never liked Mr Loomp’s bread,’ Martha reflected. ‘It always tasted gritty, as though it had sand in it.’
‘It probably did. It was awful when Fur fished out a dead newt from that pennyworth of Loomp’s mixed pickles.’
Martha shuddered at the thought. ‘I’m glad those days are behind us.’
To drown out Genevieve and Martha’s chatter, Hortence sang in a high-pitched voice, squawking like a crested cockatoo, rarely hitting the right notes.
‘It is your turn, I believe, Mrs Psalter,’ Lady Wexcombe prompted. ‘You are red.’ In between turn-taking she spoke to Betsy upon her pet topic, her wish for her daughter’s future happiness. ‘Permelia has many admirers. If the right gentleman came along I am sure that he would sweep her off her feet. Hortence, darling, your singing enthrals me immeasurably, but do stop. I have such a headache tonight.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Martha murmured.
Genevieve was tired of these nights of refined entertainments. Of Lady Wexcombe’s conniving to marry Permelia off to Gabriel, and Hortence’s vindictive words about Martha and Betsy. So she tried harder to agitate the Wexcombes, though, somehow, the fun had gone out of it. ‘Do you recall that terrible winter, when poor Mrs O’Ruarc died? The ground was so hard that it was impossible to dig fresh graves. Wakelin hung her body in a sack from the rafters to ward off the rats.’
‘Oh my!’ Lady Wexcombe fanned herself rapidly.
‘How dare you
aggravate my mother with your coarse words?’ Hortence cried. ‘In the asylums they chain the mentally insane to the walls. It is so enthralling. We really must pay another visit.’
‘Are you implying that Eppie is mad?’ Martha cried. ‘For if you are, I warn you … ’
‘It is of no consequence, Mam.’
Gabriel was taking the banter lightly. He prodded an interesting article in his newspaper. ‘It says here that, until home-grown grain reaches a minimum price of eighty shillings a quarter, the import of foreign grain is virtually banned from Britain.’
‘Not blue! Red! Red!’ Lady Wexcombe cried, frustrated by Betsy’s forgetfulness. ‘It is useless to continue.’
‘When I lived at Pear Tree Cottage I had a nice set of bone dominoes,’ Betsy said.
‘There’s a fine set in the breakfront,’ Gabriel said, indicating to a mahogany sideboard with brass swan-drop handles. Finishing off a roast chicken leg, he left the bones on a side table, whereupon Sovereign clawed eagerly across the floral rug and lost no time in alighting on them.
Beside a clutter of silver fox-head stirrup cups in a drawer, Genevieve found a carved ivory barrel. The engraving on the front showed two people sitting on a bench, playing dominoes. In the background was a tree. It reminded her of the jolly games that she and Betsy had had whilst seated beneath the mulberry tree.
Happy at last to play a game that she enjoyed, she flipped open the top of the barrel and tipped the ebony and bone tiles onto the table.
As the play went round the table, Betsy became irritated with Lady Wexcombe’s persistent slowness. ‘Hurry up, hurry up!’
Befuddled by Betsy’s insistence, Lady Wexcombe misplaced a domino.
Betsy pressed her face close to Lady Wexcombe’s, her nose and chin jutting c-shaped like the open beak of a sparrow. ‘If you can’t play you’ve got to draw a tile from the boneyard, you stupid haycum.’
Hortence sprang to her feet. ‘You wicked hag!’
‘Don’t you dare call Betsy names!’ Martha cried.
‘I’ll call her whatever I deem fit,’ Hortence retorted, ‘like I would call you a trollop, for throwing yourself at the first farmer that called on his lordship.’