The mention of the Easter cousins and Frederick Brougham’s aristocratic connections appeased them and, Nan hoped, would appease their daughter too. ’Tis all snobbery with this family, she thought, so that is what I shall work upon. I will dress young Harriet in the latest style, and persuade Mr Brougham to make much of her and then we shall see. It was high time Matilda saw sense and her two foolish sons settled their unnecessary differences.
But her plans were wrecked, and by Annie of all people.
‘We would dearly love to come to London and attend the rout,’ she wrote, ‘but we have promised to care for Mr Abbott’s children until the end of the month, which takes a deal of work as you can understand, which being so, we could hardly leave them for poor Mrs Chiddum, when she has such very bad rheumatics. Harriet begs to be excused too and I would be loathe to urge her to attend since she is uncommon helpful in a house so full of children. Please give my kind regards to Cousin Thomasina and Cousin Evelina and pray tell them we look forward to seeing them at Johnnie’s wedding.
‘With fondest love to you and Billy and Johnnie.’
It was uncommon aggravating, particularly as all her other guests had accepted her invitation almost by return of post, and the two Miss Callbecks had written to say they would be most happy to attend.
‘People are uncommon difficult,’ she complained to Frederick as they set out to the Theatre Royal that evening.
‘Indeed they are, I am very glad to say,’ he said, handing her into his carriage, ‘since the practice of law depends upon it.’
‘You will come to my party, will you not?’
‘I give you my word. When do your cousins arrive?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Then I wish you success in your endeavours,’ he said, ‘although I could wish that you had fewer people in your house to demand your time and attention.’
Nan was surprised by how much the two Miss Callbecks had aged in the six years since Annie’s wedding. They looked like little old ladies, in their old-fashioned faded gowns and those odd day-caps they would wear, and very worried ladies at that. But she made them welcome and settled them into their rooms and assured them that she had found a solution to their present troubles and would tell them of it when everything was arranged and that in the meantime they were to forget Sir Osmond and simply enjoy the party, which they promised they would do.
And despite his uncompromising view of the Easter family, John was actually quite kind to them. In fact at breakfast the next morning, when Thomasina took a pair of spectacles from her reticule in order to read Annie’s letter, Nan caught him looking at his aunt with a transparent, almost tender, pity. And no bad thing, she thought, for pity brought out the best side of his character.
So the first evening’s dinner went well, even without Annie and James and Harriet. The aunts made a good meal and Frederick Brougham made an excellent host; Ebenezer Millhouse cracked jokes for the table and walnuts for Mrs Fuseli; John sat as far away from Lizzie Moffat as he could and Jerry Ottenshaw as close to Maria; and Billy and Matilda seemed to be in high good humour and spent the meal slapping one another and laughing at everything and everybody.
But it hadn’t solved the problem it had been organized to deal with.
‘Daughters-in-law,’ Nan said to Sophie as they walked slowly upstairs to the drawing room after the meal, ‘are a deal more bother than they’re worth. How am I to bring my two together when one won’t see reason and the other won’t travel?’
‘The two you should bring together, my dear,’ Sophie said sagely, ‘are Matilda and Billy, for if ever I saw a couple starved for love …’
‘You think that too?’ Nan said, giving her old friend a shrewd look.
‘They are lovers already, if I am any judge,’ Sophie said, ‘and they lack opportunity. All eyes and hands, my dear. She slaps him for every other word, and that’s a sure sign of desire thwarted.’
‘So I should play pander?’ Nan laughed. ‘Is that what you suggest? Shame upon you, Sophie!
‘’Twould do no harm,’ Sophie said easily, ‘discreetly done.’
‘Times change,’ Nan said. ‘Folk don’t take lovers so free as they did when we were young.’
‘Aye,’ Sophie said. ‘We grow Puritanical, more’s the pity. How is that charming Mr Brougham of yours?’
‘I will consider what you say,’ Nan said, grinning at her friend as they reached the drawing room door.
‘In which case, pray?’
‘Ah! That would be telling.’
It was easily done, for the pretty Miss Honeywood had a bedroom to herself and only needed a key to achieve complete privacy. It was delivered later that evening as Matilda’s maid was preparing her young mistress for bed.
‘With a house so full of people,’ Nan said casually as she handed it over, ‘you may find the need to be alone from time to time.’
Matilda’s grey eyes widened in amazement. ‘Why, thank ’ee, Mrs Easter ma’am,’ she said. ‘’Tis uncommon kind.’
Nan grinned at her. ‘The Misses Callbeck tell me they mean to lock ’emselves away and sleep for an hour or two every afternoon, that being their custom. I have promised they will not be disturbed, for I like my guests to be comfortable. Good night to ’ee, my dear. Sleep well.’
And she went off to her own room at once, well pleased with her manoeuvre.
‘Do ’ee think she meant for us to spend the night together?’ Matilda asked when she’d dismissed her maid and she and Billy had come tiptoeing back to her room.
‘I daresay,’ he said amorously, between kisses.
‘Mama would take a fit if she knew of it.’
‘Why are we talking?’
Why indeed. ‘Oh!’ she asked. ‘Kiss me, do. I starve for kisses.’
And so the house party continued and was adjudged a great success by all the participants, even though Frederick declined Nan’s invitation to stay the night, saying that he would not wish to embarrass her before her guests. John and Billy went off to work in the small hours as usual, but they both made a point of returning for breakfast, which rapidly became a noisy family meal. By the fifth and penultimate morning the two Miss Callbecks were declaring that they hadn’t spent such a happy time in anybody’s company for years and years.
‘Not that there is ever very much company at Ippark,’ Evelina said. ‘We tend to be rather – well – lonely there.’
‘I mean to travel to Bury on Saturday,’ John told them, ‘to see my future wife, who is staying with Annie and Mr Hopkins.’ And he added unexpectedly, ‘Perhaps you would care to accompany me, there being no need for you to return to Ippark just yet awhile?’
Well, well, well, Nan thought. What acquaintance can achieve! But she shot a quick look in Billy’s direction, just in case the news had annoyed him. He was happily feeding Matilda with the choicest cuts of steak from his own plate, and to his mother’s delight he offered no resistance or comment. And what was more, and better, neither did Matilda.
‘A capital idea,’ Nan said to John.
‘Is it not?’ Evelina said. ‘I would so like to meet your young lady, John my dear. We both would, now that we have met our dear Matilda, whose wedding is to be in June so she tells us. Is that not so, Matilda?’
And it appeared that it was. Praise love for it!
‘Then we must find a home for you as soon as we can,’ Nan said. ‘Johnnie favours a house in Fitzroy Square, I know. Where would you prefer, my dear?’
‘There are some capital houses a-being built in a brand new square just north of here,’ Matilda said happily. ‘’Tis to be called Torrington Square I believe, ain’t it, Billy?’
Billy agreed that it was and seemed amiably content to live there.
‘We will inspect them this very afternoon,’ Nan said.
‘I have achieved a great deal in a short time,’ Nan said to Frederick Brougham during one of the less raucous moments of the rout.
‘Are all your troubles over?’ he asked, sides
tepping away from a swirling couple.
‘I would never make so bold as to claim that,’ she laughed. ‘Howsomever we move in the right direction. The weddings are arranged and the invitations sent, and I shall take out a lease on a house in Fitzroy Square for Johnnie and Harriet, and Billy and Matilda are to chose one of the new houses in Torrington Square, providing ’tis built in time for the wedding, and Johnnie is to find a property in Bury for the cousins, so that they can earn their keep a-taking in lodgers, which they’ve agreed to do. We move in the right direction.’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ he said, ‘for perhaps when your children are all married and settled you will have a little time for me.’
‘Fie upon you!’ she teased, taking his arm. ‘When I have danced three whole measures with you this very evening.’
‘Ah, indeed you have. I am greatly honoured. Notwithstanding that, we must spend another night apart, must we not?’
‘I fear so,’ she said. ‘Would it were otherwise. But we are busy people, you and I. ’Twill be all the sweeter for waiting.’
‘Do you promise me?’ he teased.
‘Indeed I do.’
‘I have to be in Aylesbury on Thursday. How if you were to accompany me there?
‘’Tis an uncommon good idea, so ’tis, I could start negotiations for a shop and reading-room.’
He laughed aloud. ‘And I was fool enough to think that the pleasure of my company would be sufficient to tempt you to the town. Hey ho!’
Chapter Eighteen
John was none too pleased when he heard that his mother had gone haring off to Aylesbury to open a shop and a reading-room. He’d been planning to open up all the routes to Birmingham as soon as he’d finished work on the Oxford road, and now he would have to take time away from what he was doing to organize delivery to this solitary venture of hers.
‘’Twill mean a special run,’ he said to her, rather crossly. ‘There ain’t another shop on the route.’
‘Something you’ll amend before long, I daresay,’ she said unabashed, dusting the palms of her hands against each other in that infuriating way of hers. ‘I’m off home, my dear. Shall I see you at dinner?’
’Tis all very well for her, John thought, as she swished out of his office. She don’t have the job of arranging deliveries to all these unconnected shops she will keep buying.
Nevertheless, despite his mother’s unpredictability and Matilda’s snobbery and Billy’s occasional and incomprehensible bad temper, John Henry Easter was happier than he’d ever been. For the first time in his life he had found another human being with whom he felt perfectly at ease. Physically it was tantalizing, of course, painfully tantalizing sometimes, that had to be admitted, but there were such rewards: the pleasure of her quiet company on Sundays, the secret delights they shared whenever they were alone, her daily letters when he was in London, but best of all, oh much the best of all, the knowledge that he was loved, and loved without reservation. Not providing he worked well, and said the right things and behaved himself and hid his deeper feelings, but totally and openly, just as he was. It was the sort of love he had ached for all his life and now, just when he’d least expected it and he wasn’t trying to earn it, it was being given to him freely and in abundance. The old, insecure, teased Johnnie was gone. Now he was Harriet’s John and full of confidence.
‘You are so good, dear John!’ Harriet would say, every time they parted. ‘So good and so kind. You cannot imagine how much it means to me to be loved by you.’
And he would answer, ‘Oh I can. I can. It is the same for me, my own dearest girl.’
They were blessed. That was how it was. Miraculously and abundantly blessed, so that difficulties could be weathered like the trival matters they were, and everything else could be turned to their advantage. Even the fact that they were courting in winter.
From that very first morning in the church, the new responsible John Easter had made it quite clear both to her, and more importantly to himself, that his courtship would be completely proper. They would walk arm in well-clothed arm, and hold gloved hands, and from time to time, when passion was running very strongly, they would kiss, but he would go no further until they were man and wife. It was a difficult promise to keep, for the more frequently he saw her the more ardent his desire for her became, but on his third visit to Rattlesden he found a teasing game that made their self-imposed abstinence not only possible but rewarding.
They had walked out to the six cottages, well wrapped against the chill of the wind, he in beaver hat, greatcoat and muffler, she in heavy bonnet, pelisse and long black cloak. Despite the cold, they continued their walk along the track until they were out of sight of the rectory and the village and had reached a thick holm oak where they stopped to kiss and murmur.
‘If we were married,’ he said longingly, ‘do you know what I would do?’
‘No, John dear, what would you do?’
‘I would unfasten the top three buttons on your pelisse and kiss your throat.’
To hear such a thing made her breathless with anticipated pleasure.
‘Would you?’
‘I would. I would.’
‘Oh how I wish we were married!’
‘So do I!’ he said, emboldened by her tremulous response, ‘And then I would unfasten the next button and kiss you here.’ Touching her breast most delicately with the tip of one finger. ‘Would you allow it?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said breathlessly, ‘for ’twould not be a sin, would it, dear John, not if we were married.’
‘No, my dearest. Nothing that married people do is ever a sin. We shall be snug and warm in our own bed and may do as we please. Oh if only April weren’t quite so far away.’
But in the meantime they could at least imagine their forbidden pleasures, and imagine them they did, in greater and more lingering detail, sometimes from the mouth down and sometimes from the ankle up, but always until they were aching with desire. It was a delicious game, a ‘way round’ that Harriet understood and entirely approved of, marvellously pleasurable and yet without risk, and with an opening gambit that either of them could use whenever they wished and had the privacy for it. ‘If we were married what would you do?’ It sustained them all through the long, dark months of the winter, when they ‘walked out’ in sleet and hail, and biting wind, and the occasional flurry of snow. And the cold was their guardian angel, putting several very necessary layers of cloth between their ardent bodies and making it quite impossible for any of it to be removed.
In the middle of December the lease of their house in Fitzroy Square was finally purchased and the place was vacated and ready for their inspection and possession. Nan sent a letter to Harriet telling her all about it, and inviting her to Bedford Square for Christmas.
‘I will inspect the house on Wednesday next,’ she wrote, ‘and then you and John shall see it so soon as you arrive. After Christmas we will choose carpets and curtains and suchlike. ’Tis an uncommon fine house.’
Harriet didn’t doubt it, and the thought that she was going to choose ‘carpets and curtains and suchlike’ thrilled her but alarmed her a little too. It would be marvellous to be able to furnish a house entirely to her liking, but what if she chose the wrong things? And how was she going to run a large London house? She knew nothing about such matters. Still at least she would be travelling to the capital for the first time with Annie and Pollyanna and the children, and Annie would be sure to help her.
It was a long cold journey and London was every bit as noisy and crowded as she’d imagined, with its narrow streets thronged with carts and cabs and coaches and pungent with trodden horse-dung, and people rushing about and running between the wheels, or standing weighed down with baskets and trays, or lurking behind rickety stalls and trestles selling things – combs and dog-collars and nutmeg graters, oysters and spices and baked potatoes, tracts and pamphlets and song-sheets –and huddled at every corner hordes of the most tattered and evil-smelling beggars shivering and sho
uting. Her heart contracted with pity for them. How dreadful it must be to be so poor and so terribly needy. But before she could find a coin to give them, Annie had hired a cab and they were all climbing into it.
‘Travel is always wearisome,’ Annie said comfortingly when they were settled. ‘But we are nearly there.’
And how impressive ‘there’ was. The Easter house in Bury was a fine building, but this one in Bedford Square was like a palace, with its fluted columns and that imposing pediment and rows and rows of tall windows facing the public gardens. It made Harriet feel gauche and awkward simply to step inside. There were so many rooms and all of them sumptuously carpeted and furnished in the latest style and warmed by great coal fires, and so many servants to carry their luggage and bring them hot water and warm towels and scented soap so that they could wash after their journey, and pervading everything the most mouthwatering smell of roast beef and roast potatoes drifting up from the kitchens. She was overwhelmed by it.
‘I had not realized such houses existed,’ she whispered to John when she had washed and tidied, and had crept downstairs to tiptoe shyly into the front parlour where he was waiting for her. ‘Is our house to be as big as this? I do hope not.’
‘Our house,’ he said, ‘is modest and proper, just like us.’ He couldn’t wait for her to see it. Their own home. Their very own home. ‘The carriage is ordered for ten o’clock tomorrow morning, as soon as I get back from the stamping.’
‘But tomorrow is Christmas Eve.’
‘Yes,’ he said happily.
‘Do you work on Christmas Eve?’
‘I work virtually every day of the year,’ he said proudly, ‘since papers are printed virtually every day of the year. Our honeymoon week will be the longest I have stayed away from work since I first began and that was more than ten years ago, when I was thirteen. Oh yes, I work every day of the year.’
‘But not on Sundays,’ she said. ‘You are in Rattlesden on Sundays. You do not work then.’
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