by Dominic Luke
Daisy was right, for Cow Street was now empty again and silent.
It seemed to Eliza as she looked up and down that there was something rather sinister about the emptiness and the silence. A sense of dread crept over her. It put her in mind of the feeling she had experienced on the day of the eclipse over a year ago. There was no sign or portent this time. The sun was shining, the day was bright and clear, she was in Lawham: sleepy, dreary, ordinary Lawham. Yet somehow this made the feeling worse, more frightening. She was sure that something unspeakable was about to happen, or maybe was happening already, unseen, unsuspected but inexorable, inescapable. She was, for a moment, paralyzed with fear.
Daisy, wrapped up in her own excitement, didn’t notice anything amiss. Eliza was relieved. She felt incapable of describing what it was that had engulfed her. As the first shock of it faded a little, Eliza was able to follow Daisy along the street, to drag herself across Market Place, to climb into the motor. Here she sat curled up on the back seat while Daisy went to root out Jeff Smith from the Peacock or the Lion and Lamb (he was not interested in seeing ‘no boring king or queen,’ he’d insisted, striking a pose).
Eliza, cocooned in the motor, looked out at Market Place and the wide High Street trailing away between terraced buildings. Sunshine glinted on the shop windows. There was a scattering of people going about their business. A horse and cart made leisurely progress. A dog with its tail in the air zigzagged across the road. Here in Lawham on Market Place a little over a year ago she’d poured her heart out to Kolya. How long ago it seemed now!
She saw out of the window Daisy walking towards her with Jeff at her side. Daisy, who wouldn’t normally have given Jeff Smith the time of day, was talking nineteen to the dozen and waving her arms about, reliving the moment when she’d seen the King and Queen. But Eliza was no longer interested in the King and Queen. She thought longingly of home and lunch and the sanctuary of the nursery.
Eliza leaned out of her bedroom window. The day was breezy and overcast. There was an autumnal feel to it. Spots of rain were in the air.
From her high vantage point, she watched as the motor came into view, the sound of its engine fading in and out as the wind gusted in the trees. The motor circled the cedar tree and drew up by the front steps. After a week in Scarborough that had turned into a stay of three months, Mama was home at last.
Jeff Smith jumped down and ran to open the door. Mama got out of the motor smoothly, majestically. She was wearing a large hat with a green bow; she held onto it as the wind caught the wide brim and made it flap up and down. Foreshortened from Eliza’s perspective, elegant in her long coat, Mama paused at the bottom of the steps to look up at the house as if to remind herself what it was like. Eliza held her breath. Would Mama see her? Her heart swelled with – was it pride, was it love: what was it?
The moment passed. Mama climbed the steps and entered the house. Jeff got back into the motor and drove it round to the stable block.
The breeze gusted. Dead leaves swirled on the gravel.
The expected summons came. Eliza made her way slowly, reluctantly to the parlour. Now she must begin to pay the price for all her weeks of liberty.
Mama was seated on the stool by her bureau, her face impassive. Eliza felt clumsy and awkward by comparison. Her hands moved of their own accord, twitching and picking at the lace decoration on her dress.
Mama sighed. ‘Where to begin. As if I hadn’t enough to do, with the accounts behindhand and so much waste and inefficiency. The maids will use too many cloths and dusters. One needs eyes in the back of one’s head.’ She sighed again: an ominous sign. ‘I am most displeased, Elizabeth. To come back to reports of your running wild – frolicking in the fields. Frolicking was the word used. Mrs Bourne tells me you were extraordinarily rude to her and—’
‘Oh, Mrs Bourne!’ said Eliza dismissively.
‘Mrs Bourne does a difficult job with considerable ability. We couldn’t manage without her. You might remember that in future.’ Mama pursed her lips, patted her coiffure. ‘It’s my own fault, of course. I stayed away far too long. I don’t know what I was thinking. But Mrs Varney was so very hospitable, and Colonel Harding—’
‘Colonel Harding was there? Colonel Harding was in Scarborough?’
‘Yes, he was there for a time. He was visiting his daughter. He is quite entitled to visit his daughter. But that is neither here nor there. We are not talking about Colonel Harding. We are talking about you and your . . . behaviour. If I’d had the slightest idea of what was going on. . . . But I thought Roderick would be here. I was relying on Roderick. I am really quite cross with him. I have no idea where he is. He seems hardly to have been at home all summer.’
But Roderick wouldn’t get summoned to the parlour, thought Eliza; he wouldn’t have to pay for his liberty. Roderick would always be forgiven.
‘Do stop fidgeting, Elizabeth! Now, what is all this about your being overfamiliar with the groom, Turner? You were seen talking to him on more than one occasion. You were seen – if one can believe it – with his arm around you.’
‘But he had to put his arm around me! I was so frightened I nearly fainted! A tramp chased me through the Spinney and—’ She stopped abruptly, gulped back the rest of her words. The look on Mama’s face was enough to silence anyone.
After a pause, Mama said, ‘Well, the matter is closed. I have spoken to Turner and—’
‘But that’s not fair! It wasn’t his fault!’
‘The matter is closed, Elizabeth. Really, this has to stop! All this running about, all these flights of fancy. You are old enough to know better. It is time you started acting your age. You will begin by apologizing to Mrs Bourne—’
‘Apologize to the Dreadnought? I won’t, I shan’t, she’s a tyrant!’
‘Enough! You will do as you are told! You will apologize to Mrs Bourne. You will, in future, not be rude to any of the servants. You will, in fact, not speak to the servants at all. It is beneath one’s dignity to keep company with servants.’
‘But Doro—’
‘Dorothea was different. Dorothea was a special case. She had her own way of doing things. But at least one could say of Dorothea that she never made herself look ridiculous. You need taking in hand, Elizabeth: that is patently obvious. Since it has proved impossible to find you a suitable governess, I have decided to send you to school. Viola Somersby has mentioned a good boarding school. Or there is an academy for young ladies in Northampton: you could go there as a day girl.’
Go to school? Roderick had mentioned the possibility. Eliza had not taken him seriously. But now the moment had come. It would be terrible. A disaster. She would turn into one of those lumpy girls whose parties she had attended. It was all part of a plot: Mama wanted to punish her; Mrs Bourne wanted revenge.
‘We will start as we mean to go on,’ Mama continued. ‘Arthur Camborne is coming to dinner tomorrow. It will be just the three of us, a chance for you to behave like a proper young lady.’
There was no arguing with Mama. Eliza bowed to the inevitable: dinner with Dr Camborne and then school. She didn’t like to think what would become of her.
Eliza did her best to behave at dinner. She did her best to acquit herself like a lady. But before she’d even finished her soup, her hair had come loose; then she dipped her sleeve in the oyster sauce; and when Basford poured her some wine by mistake, she gulped it back so quickly – before Mama could notice – that it made her feel quite funny. Her hand shook as she put the empty glass down. Dr Camborne, in full flow as usual, glanced at her across the table and smiled, as if he knew everything she was doing and thinking. His smile made her skin crawl. He was so ugly with his bald head, his parchment skin, the attenuated wrinkles. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
She looked at her plate instead, pushing the salmi of duck aside so she could see the design, blue on white. There were strange-looking birds with their heads thrown back and their beaks open; there were patterns like knotted ropes or rows of fis
hes’ scales; there were plants with many leaves and massive, drooping flowers. It was exotic, extraordinary, like looking through a window into another world, a world in which—
Eliza stopped herself just in time. What was it Mama had said about flights of fancy? Hurriedly she covered up the pictures with her uneaten food and put her knife and fork down.
The doctor was still working his way through a large helping of the salmi. ‘Such wonderful food, this. So clever of you, Eloise, to find a good cook and to keep her. Good cooks are a dying breed. I was at the Grange last Tuesday and the beef, quite frankly, was inedible. Lady Fitzwilliam used to be so meticulous, too, when it came to her victuals. It is really rather sad. But I suppose, under the circumstances. . . .’
‘Circumstances?’ said Mama enquiringly.
‘But of course, you won’t have heard, you’ve been away.’ Dr Camborne perked up, having news to impart. ‘It’s been the talk of the neighbourhood. Lady Fitzwilliam’s son, young Henry, crashed his motor car in some sort of race. Sport, they call it. Dicing with death, I say.’
‘Was he very much hurt?’
‘Eh? What?’ The doctor had his mouth full, intent on doing justice to the duck.
‘Henry Fitzwilliam: was he hurt?’ Mama prompted.
‘Oh, yes, yes. I’m afraid he was. Got rather smashed up. Broke his back. He’ll never walk again. I’ve examined him myself, there can be no doubt about it.’ Dr Camborne pointed to his plate with his knife. ‘I must say, this is a very fine salmi of duck, very fine indeed.’
Eliza, the portentous words never walk again echoing in her head, burst out, ‘I knew it, I felt it: I could tell that something terrible was going to happen!’
There was a sudden silence at the table. Mama and Dr Camborne stopped eating, stared at her in astonishment. Going bright red, Eliza gabbled, ‘I went to Lawham with Daisy Turner, we saw the King and Queen, they passed us in a motor, they waved, then the street was empty and . . . it was like there was something waiting, something dreadful—’ She broke off, staring with wide eyes, the fear she had felt in Cow Street coming back to her.
Dr Camborne regarded her with interest. ‘Prescience?’ he suggested.
‘Hysteria,’ said Mama firmly, bursting the doctor’s bubble. ‘Elizabeth has a rather vivid imagination, I’m afraid. This, you see, is what we mothers have to put up with. But poor Alice! How is Henry now?’
‘Oh, the boy’s bearing up. Bearing up. Nihil cuiquam accidit ad quod ferendum natura non sit comparatus.’
Eliza wrinkled her nose. The ‘boy’ Henry Fitzwilliam must be well into his thirties. Perhaps that seemed young to a man as old as Dr Camborne. How old was he, exactly? He never seemed to change. He was ageless. Roderick called him ‘the wrinkled gnome’. Roderick also derided the doctor’s habit of quoting Latin. What did it mean, nihil cuiquam wotsit wotsit? Eliza bit her tongue, determined not to give the doctor the satisfaction of being asked to translate.
Dr Camborne swallowed the last of his salmi and put his knife and fork down with a self-satisfied air. ‘I am very much afraid that misadventures such as young Fitzwilliam’s are only to be expected if one starts messing about with modern machinery. A case in point. I was called out a few weeks ago to an emergency in the fields. Boy from the village, one of the Carters it was, Edmund, just a child really. Got his arm caught in a harvesting contraption. Tore his hand right off at the wrist.’
For Eliza, this was too much. After the wine, after the news that Henry Fitzwilliam would never walk again, the sudden, vivid image of Edmund Carter’s severed hand was more than she could take. Everything grew fuzzy one moment, went entirely black the next. She fainted across the table.
Dr Camborne prescribed an early night. Too much excitement, he said, was not good for young girls. Their constitutions could not cope. They got overwrought. The weaker vessel required wrapping in cotton wool.
But Eliza could not settle in bed. She got up and went into the day room, sat in the chair by the empty fireplace in the soft glow of the table lamp. The nursery was silent, Polly asleep, the rest of the house remote. Eliza felt forlorn and forgotten.
She had disgraced herself again. She had tried so hard but it had all come to nothing. Why was it so impossible to get things right?
The severed hand had been her downfall. She couldn’t get it out of her head. Had it been sliced off cleanly the way Mr Lines the village butcher cut meat with his cleaver? Or had it been mangled in the machine? It made her feel queasy to think of it. Poor Edmund! Edmund, the doctor had called him, one of the younger brothers of Dorothea’s friend Nibs Carter. In the village he was known as Ned. He was only sixteen.
Eliza drew her feet up, huddled in her chair. Ned and his hand, Henry Fitzwilliam and his paralyzed legs; Captain Scott in the snow, the sunken liner in the cold Atlantic. The world was fraught with danger. She wondered that she’d ever found the courage to venture out of the nursery. It made her blood run cold now to think of all the days and weeks and months when Mama had been away. She’d wandered by herself in the woods and fields and byways without a thought as to what might be lurking in wait. She’d gone out in the dark, she’d walked all the way to the canal in the moonlight. What if it hadn’t been Kolya she’d met but the turnpike sailor – or someone worse? What if she’d fallen (or been pushed) into the canal and drowned? She wished that Clifton was a castle. She wished it had cyclopean walls and a drawbridge. But would she be safe even then? No one was safe from God.
God is love, the vicar said. But Eliza in the gloom of the nursery pictured God as a Colonel Harding figure, blotchy-faced and bombastic, enthroned in high heaven, the world spread at his feet. On a whim, God with one vindictive finger could reach down and inflict any number of calamities: Captain Scott perished, thousands drowned, Ned Carter lost his hand.
There was no defence against God.
She went in search of Billy Turner despite Mama’s strictures. She felt it her duty to beg his pardon as it was her fault he’d got into trouble. But Billy seemed quite unconcerned as if being spoken to by Mama was neither here nor there. ‘It’s in one ear and out the other with me: that’s what our ma says, any road.’
To be quite sure there were no hard feelings, Eliza insisted on shaking hands. Billy’s hand was much larger than hers. It was brown and calloused with big stubby fingers and dirt ingrained. Eliza wondered what Ned Carter’s hand had been like. Billy, of course, knew all about Ned’s accident, for the Turners and Carters lived almost opposite each other and although Billy mostly slept in the stable block at night, barely a day went by when he wasn’t in the village at one point or another. He did not seem to think there was any use in weeping and wailing over Ned’s misfortune. What was done was done, he said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. All Ned could do now was make the best of it. Ned must learn to cope with one hand instead of two: his left hand, not his right.
Eliza wished she could shrug things off the way Billy did. But no one, not even Billy, could save her from school. Mama had finally decided on the academy for young ladies in Northampton. It was better than being sent away – but not much better. However, Roderick had survived school and so must she: she could not be found wanting.
Lady Fitzwilliam had once been a frequent visitor at Clifton, often accompanied by her son Henry, but when she called towards the end of October, alone, it occurred to Eliza that such visits were now few and far between.
It was a Saturday. Eliza did not go to the academy on Saturdays. During the reign of the pinch-faced governess she would have been expected in the drawing room to play the piano or recite poetry or in some other way show off her accomplishments. Thankfully those days were gone. She could sit quiet and still, watching and listening.
Mama raised the subject of Henry. Eliza would not have dared. Mama was fearless.
Henry, Lady Fitzwilliam reported, was as well as could be expected. There were days when he was a little despondent but it soon passed: he’d always been an optimistic sort of boy (Lady Fit
zwilliam, like Dr Camborne, called Henry a boy). People were kind. So many took the trouble to call. Only the other day, Giles Milton had stopped by: Giles and his wife and their two little boys, the younger of whom was Henry’s godson. Henry and Giles, of course, had been friends for years, united by a shared obsession with motor cars. They had often raced together. These days one saw less of Giles at the Grange. He had given up racing and was kept busy running the BFS showroom in London.
‘If Henry had only given up too. But racing was his passion.’ Lady Fitzwilliam shuddered. ‘I don’t like to talk about motors since Henry’s accident. I don’t like to think about them. I refuse to get in one. I use the old brougham instead. It needed some work – the floor had fallen out – but it’s almost as good as new now.’
Lady Fitzwilliam at first sight looked and sounded the same as ever but Eliza on closer inspection wondered if perhaps her hair was a little greyer, if there weren’t perhaps a few more wrinkles. She was thinner, too, and her eyes had lost some of their old sparkle. Despite Mama’s best efforts, the conversation lagged at times. This would never have happened in the old days. Lady Fitzwilliam had been almost as adept in the drawing room as Mama.
Eliza noted that although several different subjects were essayed, the talk always came round in the end to Henry. He had been getting a little stout of late, Lady Fitzwilliam said, apropos of nothing: he would get stouter still now that he was confined to a wheelchair. Then again, he was thirty-six next February: putting on a little weight was to be expected at that age.
‘Thirty-six! Imagine!’ Lady Fitzwilliam gazed wistfully out of the French windows. She was not looking at the view. ‘It seems only yesterday he was a babe in arms. Do you remember, Eloise, when he was born? There was all that agitation for war at the time. Everyone was for the Turks and against the Russians. There were demonstrations in Hyde Park. Joseph still had his seat in those days. He was often in the House until late. He was very anti-Russian. “If we let the Russians get their hands on Constantinople,” he said, “there will be no stopping them! It will be India next!” It’s all changed these days. We are friends with the Russians now, or so I’m given to understand. Not that I’ve ever met a Russian or even a Turk for that matter – although now I come to think about it, there was that friend of Roderick’s: wasn’t he a Russian? A most peculiar boy. Very earnest. He’d got eyes that looked right through you. What became of him, that boy? Have you seen him lately?’