by James Wilson
We moved from one house to another, living a year here and a few months there, until, when I was ten, my father took Hallaton Hall in Leicestershire. The place meant little to him, I think, beyond good hunting and ample stabling for his horses; but I fell in love with it at once. It stood at the edge of an enchanting village, full of quaint old cottages and queer little alleys, and paths that led you through sloping meadows up into the woods. Though I had no inkling of it at the time, I later came to think that the cruellest trick Fate played on me was to make me give my girlish heart to Hallaton.
What deepened my attachment to the countryside was the ever-increasing dominance of my step-mother and her brood within the house itself. I already had three little half-brothers by the time we settled in Hallaton; and shortly afterwards she produced a fourth. Her own children were not only the centre of her world; as they became bigger, she was more and more successful in making them the centre of my father’s, too. And, of course, they soon came to realize the superiority of their position; and, being boys, and enjoying nothing more than torturing creatures weaker than themselves, took every opportunity they could to make our lives a misery.
My brothers, Edward and Henry Malden, accepted the endless injustices against them, and their banishment to the shadows of family life, meekly enough, as if they knew they could not win, and had decided to give up even before the race was run. But I and my elder sister Henrietta (God, how it pains me now to write that name again) were made of sterner stuff. Henrietta used every feminine wile she could to retain our father’s affection, and her power over him, making much of him, and calling him her darlingest papa, when he let her have her way; and sulking when he crossed her; and running to him for protection when our half-brothers tormented her.
I took another course: to make the hills and the trees and the fields my friends, and to look for solace in their company. I would ride for miles along the narrow, overgrown lanes; or climb into the woods and run until I was exhausted – not returning until late in the evening, looking like a gypsy, with mud on my boots and thorns in my cloak and burs sticking to my dress, to find my father half mad with worry, and getting ready to send out a party of grooms and stable-boys armed with lanterns to look for me.
There is an old custom in Hallaton, called the annual hare-pie scrambling and bottle-kicking contest, which takes place every Easter Monday. It is a frantic rough-and-tumble, more like a drunken brawl than a game, in which all the men join together to fight the men of a neighbouring village for possession of a cask of ale. My father considered it an unsuitable spectacle for girls; and for the first few years we were there he kept Henrietta and me indoors while it was going on, though the boys were allowed to watch from the safety of the grounds – after which, of course, they would invariably drive us to distraction by refusing to report what they had seen, saying it was too horrible to tell us. So one Easter, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I made up my mind to find out what happened for myself, and slipped out of the house and into the village without anyone noticing. I found a vantage-point in a little side-street, where I thought I should be protected from the mêlée; but after half an hour or so, as if it had been caught by a sudden squall, the crowd abruptly changed direction and started rushing towards me.
I had only two alternatives: to be knocked to the ground and trampled underfoot, or to be swept up and carried along. I chose to be carried along. It was terrifying, but thrilling, too, like finding oneself, all at once, on an enormous horse – only a horse that would pay not the slightest heed to reins or crop or spurs, but simply went its own wild way, rearing and plunging, willy-nilly. I shut my eyes for a moment, feeling the energy surging through the press of bodies around me, and imagining that when I looked again I should discover I had been borne away to another place entirely, where I could be free. In the event, needless to say, it turned out I had been taken nowhere more exotic than Hallaton high street. But in that instant, I vowed that one day I should find a means to get away.
The same idea, I think, must have occurred to Henrietta; and soon afterwards, the opportunity for her to escape presented itself. In 1867, a young doctor called Albert Crane came to live in the village. In so small a place, it was almost inevitable that we should see a good deal of him, and he quickly became a regular visitor at the Hall. He was always particularly animated with my sister; and after a few months, he began to make love to her. It might appear strange, given the difference in their positions, that my father did not whip him for his impudence, thereby averting the disaster that would all but destroy the Studd family. But Dr. Crane had a kind of lazy insolence – as unconscious as a lion’s as it pads round its cage at the zoo – that somehow conveyed that it was he who was bestowing the favour by deigning to take an interest in us. And my father, having spent almost his entire life in India, had little understanding of the niceties of English social distinction. My step-mother might have enlightened him; but the truth was that it suited her well enough if Henrietta made a poor match, because that meant her own children would shine all the more brilliantly by comparison. I think she would have had us all packed off to the workhouse, if she could.
I cannot bring myself to give you a physical description of Dr. Crane. Imagine a sleek animal, that happened to speak, and walk upright, and wear clothes, and smoke cigars, and you have enough. Even his hair had a pelt-like sheen, so that when he bent down to pet a favourite gun-dog you could not tell where dog ended and man began. He was a fine horseman, and gained quite a reputation for his exploits on the hunting-field. ‘Damn me’, my father would say admiringly, ‘if Crane ain’t the pluckiest man alive. Or the luckiest. He took a hedge as though the furies were after him, and by rights should have fallen and broken his neck; but he kept his seat, deuce knows how, and was across the field before the rest of us were over the gate.’
If I could go back in time and change only one thing, I should make sure that hedge knew its business better.
Henrietta was little more than a girl, and – it is obvious now, though I was too young myself to see it then – a foolish girl, at that. The only grown man she had ever known intimately was our father; and to find another, who gave her his attention freely, without her having to compete for it, and who was self-evidently accomplished enough to command the grudging respect even of our half-brothers, was hugely flattering to her. When he asked her to be his wife, she accepted him at once; and, though she was not yet of age, she soon persuaded my father to give his consent. She and Dr. Crane were married in 1868, in Hallaton church; and began their life together in a handsome old house near the centre of the village called the Grange.
I shall not tire myself needlessly with a detailed account of the next few years, but merely give you the one fact pertinent to my story: in 1871, wanting a larger place, with provision for a race-course and a racing stable, my father decided to leave Hallaton Hall and take Tedworth House, in Wiltshire, instead. It was a blow for me to leave my sister – whose jealous and spiteful nature I was yet too innocent to suspect, and to whom I still felt closer than anyone in the world, except our father – and to lose my brothers, who were sent back to India to manage the plantation. But there was one consolation: my elder half-brothers were now away at school; and when they came home for the holidays they were – if not kinder to me – at least more civil, in a distant, off-hand way. So I bore the move as best I could, and bided my time, imagining that among the young men who came to stay at the house, or whom I might meet at dances and dinner parties and at homes when we went to London, I should at last find one carrying a glass slipper who would deliver me from my misery.
It was an innocent enough dream, I think you will agree. Certainly countless thousands of other young women have shared it, without provoking Fate to punish them for it – and some have even had the good fortune to see it come true. But not I. Just as a real prospect of happiness was finally starting to open up before me, life abruptly closed it off again.
To do so, it resorted to the most snivelling t
rick of them all: a pair of pious American busybodies called Moody and Sankey. Perhaps you have heard of them: they were much talked about in the 1870s and 1880s, when they came to England to ‘convert’ us – as if we were a nation of heathens, and their own country were not Christian at all only because ours had been first. They held public meetings in theatres, where they sold religion as if it were a patent medicine – exhorting their listeners to test its efficacy there and then, by kneeling down and praying, after which some of the more credulous got up noisily declaring themselves to be ‘saved’. One of the noisiest, unfortunately, was a friend of my father’s called Vincent, who – determined that he should be ‘converted’, too – insisted on taking him to one of the meetings. My father sat at the front, just under Moody’s nose, and was mesmerized by the man. A few weeks later, he followed Vincent’s example, and became ‘a Christian’.
Our lives changed almost overnight. My father withdrew from the Turf, and – after giving a race-horse to each of the older boys as a hunter – sold his racing stable. He filled the hall at Tedworth with chairs and benches, and invited preachers down from London to hold meetings there. There were no more dinner parties, no more dances. The only young men who entered my world now were pale, earnest fellows with prominent Adam’s apples, armed with bibles rather than glass slippers, and interested – if they were interested in me at all – exclusively in the state of my soul.
And the contagion soon spread. Within a year, my three eldest half-brothers, now all at Eton, had ‘converted’ too. Our house in town became more like a chapel than a home, full of hymn-singing, and bible-reading, and jocular, back-slapping good-fellowship. At night, I would lie in bed, dreading the tramp of my father’s footsteps on the stairs, because when he reached the landing he would invariably hammer loudly on my door, and call: ‘Are you saved yet?’
I endured this purgatory, for my father’s sake, for as long as he was alive; but when he died in 1877 I could stand it no more. The last connection with my own family had gone, and I was entirely at the mercy of my step-mother and her children, who no longer made the least effort to conceal their contempt for me, and took every opportunity to vaunt their supposed superiority – which seemed, now, to their eyes, to have been confirmed by God Himself, Who had chosen to save them, and not me. I had no suitor to marry me, and – after years of social isolation – no possibility of meeting one. In desperation, I decided to flee to the one place where I thought I could still be sure of finding a welcome: my sister’s house in Hallaton.
It was a bitter return. When I had left the village, five years before, it had been in the confident expectation that I should soon have a husband of my own – and not a country doctor, either, but a man closer to my station in life, who, if he lived in Hallaton at all, would inevitably have taken the Hall as my father had done, so allowing me (I cannot deny that I dreamed of this sometimes) to make a triumphant reappearance as mistress of my girlhood home. Instead, I found myself little better than a pensioner at the Grange, where it was agreed I should contribute £250 a year towards the household expenses. I did not begrudge the money – my father had left both Henrietta and me comfortably provided for; what I resented was how even this, the one relationship to which I should naturally have been able to look for uncalculating love and consolation, was reduced to a squalid commercial transaction. And I could not help noticing the way the villagers glanced at me as I went about the place, and guessing what was passing through their minds: why had the woman who had left the Hall as Miss Studd now, still as Miss Studd, come back to the Grange?
This is proving harder than I had imagined. I wrote what you have just read in a great rush, in twenty-four hours; but the effort and anguish of doing it, and the dread of relating what comes next, made me ill, and for two days I could barely move from my bed. I got better by telling myself I should not have to go on, if I did not want to. But I knew it was a lie, even as I said it; and so here I am, back at my desk, determined to finish, whatever the cost.
My sister had five children by now, the youngest no more than a few months old. There was a nurse, of course; but Henrietta was one of those mothers for whom the baby in its cot is the centre of the world, and she could not bear to be away from it for more than a few minutes before creeping back to gaze on its face in wonder. Her infatuation was so overpowering that for days at a time she seemed barely to notice either me or her husband – and when she did, it was usually to express irritation at some trifling thing that one of us had done, or failed to do.
It was inevitable, in these circumstances, that Albert and I should find ourselves thrown together more than would have usually been the case. And – where before he had shown only polite indifference to me, and I had considered him, if anything, faintly repellent – the effect of our common exclusion from my sister’s affections was to start to forge a fragile bond between us – just as, when we were children, our common exclusion from our step-mother’s affections had forged a bond between Henrietta and me. Sometimes, when she had been particularly impatient with him, he would try to lessen his humiliation by making light of it, rolling his eyes and smiling at me, in a way that invited me to share his exasperation at her unreasonableness – and, more out of awkwardness than anything else, I would find myself smiling back.
After dinner, Albert and I began playing cards together in the drawing-room, or – on fine evenings – walking out in the garden, to admire the view of the hills rising up behind it. I never felt any impropriety in what we were doing, although I did occasionally wonder whether the sight of us sauntering arm in arm back to the house could cause Henrietta some unease. But so much the better if it did, I thought, because then she might be less inclined to take her husband’s and her sister’s love for her for granted, and try a little harder to deserve it.
But it soon became clear that that was a vain hope – at least so far as her husband was concerned. One morning, I came out of my room on to the landing, to catch the end of a conversation between my brother-in-law and my sister in the hall below. He was speaking too softly for me to make out what he was saying; but I think he must have been proposing that she should go out riding with him, because she angrily replied:
‘I’ve far too much to do here. Why don’t you ask Emily to go? She likes to be out of doors – and she has no household to manage, and no children to attend to.’
I did not want to embarrass them by letting them know I had overheard this outburst; so I crept back in to my bedroom and closed the door. When I finally came downstairs, five minutes later, I found Albert standing in the dining-room, smoking a cigar.
‘Ah, Emily,’ he muttered carelessly, his eyes on the window. ‘I was just wondering whether you’d care to come riding with me today?’
And so began our long expeditions together, roaming the countryside I remembered so vividly. I felt no compunction about them on Henrietta’s account: not only had she herself encouraged Albert to take me with him in the first place, but – after the third or fourth time – her attitude towards me started to grow noticeably warmer. When she saw me, now, I was rewarded with a smile, and even kisses and caresses. One evening, after we had got back, and my brother-in-law had gone into his study to consult his books about a case that was troubling him, she drew me aside and, blushing, said:
‘You have no idea how grateful I am to you, darling, for taking Albert off my hands like this. One never imagines … before one’s married … just how insistent men’s needs are. One may feel as dull and wrung-out as an old dish-cloth, it makes not the slightest difference to them. Sometimes I quite dread going to bed at night. But when he has been out with you, I know I am quite safe, because he is too tired to … to make demands on me.’
But even though our jaunts together had Henrietta’s blessing, I could not help wondering what other people would suppose when they observed the doctor venturing out, time after time, with his sister-in-law at his side rather than his wife. One morning, as we were turning into the high street, I tenta
tively suggested that in future it might perhaps be better if we left the house separately, and met again later, a little outside the village. He immediately stopped his horse, and – in full view of a group of urchins playing on the green – said:
‘What, are you ashamed to be seen with me, then?’
‘No,’ I stammered, stung, ‘of course not. I’m only thinking of your reputation, and Henrietta’s.’
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘don’t. I don’t concern myself with other people’s affairs, except when I’m paid to; and they’ve no business concerning themselves with mine.’
As we grew bolder, I began sometimes to accompany him even on his professional visits, going as far as the gate with him, and then waiting outside with the horses. When he came out again, he would invariably divert me by describing the patients he had seen – always in the most contemptuous terms, as if they were animals rather than people, and he a vet rather than a doctor. ‘What an evil-smelling old dog,’ he would say. Or: ‘I don’t like to leave that fat sow alone with her litter. I’m afraid when I go back again I shall find she’s eaten the lot of them.’ There was something wearying about his relentless unpleasantness; and yet I have to admit I found the comical turns of phrase he used amusing. And it was exhilarating, too, for a young woman who had always lived at the margins of other people’s lives to find herself admitted to his confidence, which seemed to make us conspirators in a secret compact against the folly of the world.