I paused for breath, and Mr Paterson, to my outrage and disbelief, laughed again.
‘Bravo, Miss Grimes! You are a spirited woman as well as a beautiful one – if not perhaps as liberated as I first thought! I think you would make me an excellent wife – and one who would certainly raise an eyebrow or two in Bristol society. I can see you are not much taken with the idea just now, but don’t be in too much of a hurry to turn my proposal down. Old enough to be your father I may be, but marriage to me would not be without its advantages. Think about it, talk it over with your grandparents, and let me have your answer when you are ready. I have waited a good long while to replace my dear departed wife. I can wait a little longer.’
Before I could withdraw my hand, he took it and kissed it, his lips moist and fleshy on my skin.
‘I very much hope, Miss Grimes, that you will give my proposal your favourable consideration. Your grandfather is, I know, fully aware of the advantages such a move would afford you, as are your Great-Uncle Charles and Cousin Theo. Well, clearly so, since they brokered the arrangement. I hope you will come to see the advantages too when they have been fully explained to you. In the meantime…’ He kissed my hand again. ‘I shall have to content myself with fervent expectation and try to be patient.’
He left the room, and my grandfather went with him. I could hear the rise and fall of their voices in the hall, but the roaring in my ears prevented me from hearing exactly what was said.
I merely sat motionless, still in too great a state of shock to be capable of any coherent thought.
* * *
‘You could scarcely hope for a better match, Davina,’ my grandfather said.
And: ‘Your grandfather is right, my dear,’ my grandmother added.
I would not have expected her to say differently. She was a meek soul, who always agreed with every word he uttered, as if each and every one carried the same weight as the Bible texts he quoted from the pulpit at Sunday services.
‘Mr Paterson is a far better prospect than ever we could have hoped for,’ Grandfather went on. ‘You know that we cannot afford much by way of a dowry, but that is of scant importance to a gentleman of his means. It is company he seeks.’
‘And a wife young enough to improve his standing among his peers,’ I said, a little sharply, for I was still too shocked to think about guarding my tongue.
‘Do you want to remain a maiden lady forever?’ my grandmother asked. ‘It’s no life for a woman, Davina. Believe me, no life at all.’
‘I had hoped to marry for love,’ I protested.
My grandmother gave a small, strangled gasp, and my grandfather shook his head despairingly.
‘That was your mother’s ambition – and look where it led her! To a life of poverty and hardship and an early grave.’
I could scarcely argue. I knew nothing whatever of my mother beyond what they had chosen to tell me, and I felt sure there was a great deal they preferred to keep hidden. But it did not stop me from longing, deep down, for a match with a man who could make my heart beat faster; a love that, for all I knew, existed only in fairy tales.
‘How could you have taken things this far and never so much as mentioned it to me?’ I demanded of my grandfather. ‘Can you not imagine the shock it was to me to be suddenly brought face to face with a man I have never set eyes on before and to be inspected for marriage as if I were a prize heifer going to market?’
‘We thought it was for the best,’ my grandfather said stubbornly. ‘We thought that until Mr Paterson had seen, and approved of you, we should not raise your hopes.’
I laughed shortly. ‘Hopes! I would never hope for marriage with such a man!’
‘Davina, you are being foolish and shortsighted,’ my grandfather said. ‘As I explained earlier, Mr Paterson is a member of the Merchant Venturers of Bristol, highly respected in every way. It is very fortunate that Theo happened to hear that he was seeking a wife, and naturally he thought of you at once.’
‘Why naturally?’ I demanded. ‘I thought Theo and I were friends! Now, it seems, he thought of me as a stray puppy for whom it is necessary to find a home!’
‘What nonsense, Davina!’ Grandfather said. ‘He knew your grandmother and I had hopes of making a good marriage for you, that’s all.’ I pursed my lips, and he went on: ‘We want to see you secure and settled. You are twenty-one years old, Davina. You should have a home and a husband, not waste the best years of your life buried here in the countryside with only ourselves for company. That way lies trouble…’ He broke off, and I knew that once again he was thinking of my mother.
‘But we would only approve a marriage that was truly in your best interests,’ he went on after a moment. ‘And this… This truly is a wonderful opportunity. Mr Paterson has a fine house, well above the city and overlooking the gorge. Until recently he was a neighbour of Charles’ in Queen’s Square, but he has had this house built especially. The new trend, it seems, is to move away from the docks to where the air is much fresher and cleaner, and Mr Paterson blamed his first wife’s ill-health, and even her death, on the situation of his previous residence. Now, why, up on the Heights, you would think yourself still in the countryside.’
I said nothing. I could not imagine the air in an industrial port could ever smell as sweet as the breeze that blew, grass-scented, from the Cotswold Hills.
‘He is a wealthy man,’ my grandfather went on, ticking off Mr Paterson’s assets on his fingers as if he were praying with rosary beads. ‘He has a fleet of ships, a thriving business trading sugar and spirits and other marketable commodities. He has more money in the bank than most men could dream of, with ready access to credit should he ever need it. And as to his lifestyle… he has fine carriages and servants. He has connections in high places right up to ministers in government. Socially he mixes with the landed gentry, so you would be invited to grand balls and even, in the season, to London itself. You would want for nothing, Davina.’
I pressed my fingers to my temple where a little ache had begun, throbbing like a dull echo of the terrible, debilitating headaches that had consumed me in the months following my accident.
What of love? I wanted to say, but did not. I had already dared to mention love and seen how little my grandparents trusted such a naive aspiration.
‘I do not know,’ I said instead. ‘It’s such a huge step. To agree to be the wife of a man I scarcely know…’
I broke off, the enormity of what I would be entering into dawning on me in dizzying waves like the rush of an incoming tide. If I agreed to this match, which my grandparents were clearly so set upon, I would be setting the course for the whole of my life. There could be no turning back. Any hopes and dreams I had cherished must be set aside for ever. Duty and obedience would rule me – and, of course, Mr Paterson. He had seemed pleasant enough, and certainly it was true I would be well taken care of. I would have security. I would have my own home and my position in society. But could that ever compensate me for the things I would have to eschew? Could it ever be enough?
‘Davina.’ My grandmother caught my hand, holding it between her own small work-worn ones. ‘You are apprehensive, dear, of course you are. But truly, your grandfather and I think it is an opportunity you must not allow to pass you by. We worry about you so much. We are getting older, and we shall not always be here for you. Can’t you understand the sense of responsibility we feel?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘But I could take care of myself. I don’t want you to feel responsible for me.’
I sensed her withdrawal, and knew I had hurt her.
‘I’m grateful, of course – so grateful. If you had not taken me in, I don’t know where I would be now – the poorhouse, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘If you had survived at all,’ my grandfather said grimly. ‘When I think of the long hours your grandmother sat beside your bed, willing you to recover – and the prayers we said together. When I think of how she tended you – washed you, fed you as if you were a baby,
provided for your every need…’
‘I know.’ Love and gratitude washed over me in a warm flood tide, and with it a sense of guilt that I could scarcely explain, even to myself. ‘I do know. And I shall never be able to repay you adequately.’
‘We do not need repaying,’ my grandmother said. Her lip trembled. ‘It was as if Elizabeth had come back to us. As if we had been given a second chance…’
‘Oh, Grandmama…’ The guilt was sharper now; I knew then that I was bearing it for my mother, who had caused them so much pain. ‘What can I say?’
‘You can say you will wed Mr Paterson,’ my grandfather said grimly. ‘We shall know then that you, at least, are settled and set up for life. We shall be satisfied that at least we did not fail in our duty to you.’
‘It would set our minds at rest,’ my grandmother added softly. ‘We could sleep easy in our beds at night. And oh, Davina, we should be so proud of you!’
That, I supposed, was the crux of the matter. My mother had brought them nothing but shame and heartache and they were not only afraid that I would do the same, they also wanted to hold their heads high and feel pride.
I looked at them, sitting there in the fading light, and noticed for the first time how old they looked. Older by far than when I had first come here two years ago, and more frail. My grandfather might bluster and preach damnation, but the fire had gone from him. And my sweet grandmother looked so fragile and vulnerable, her bones no bigger than a bird’s, her little face creased into pouches and hollows, the hair beneath her cap snow-white and fine as threads of cobweb.
I had not known them at all until I was nineteen years old, so many years lost that could never be regained, but I had learned to love them. They had taken me in, cared for me, nursed me back to health. And now they were begging me to make them proud, where my mother had brought them only shame. Their peace of mind was in my hands now.
‘Very well,’ I heard myself say. ‘If you think it is the right thing…’
‘Oh Davina, we do!’
‘I can send word to Mr Paterson that your answer will be yes?’
I nodded.
But in my lap I clasped my hands together so tightly that my nails dug crescents into the skin, and a dark abyss seemed to be opening up before me, an abyss of trepidation and uncertainty, an unknown future as well hidden from me as my past.
* * *
I had no memory, you see, of the first nineteen years of my life. None whatsoever. For all I could remember, I might have drawn my first breath when I eventually regained consciousness in the cold little bedroom at the Cotswold rectory where I had, apparently, been taken following the accident.
I had, the physician said, suffered severe injury to my head as well as to my body, and though, with time and my grandmother’s tender care, my bruises had faded and my broken bones healed, the damage to my mind had been lasting. I could remember nothing of the accident itself, and that, I suppose, might be merciful. But it was distressing to me that neither did I have any memory of my previous life. No warm memories of childhood, no recollection of how I had spent my growing years, no joys, no sorrows, no friends, no enemies. Sometimes there came the briefest snatch of haunting recollection – a perfume that stirred some deeply buried joy or sadness, a glimpse of a face seen through a mist, a sensation I seemed to have experienced before, a place that felt vaguely familiar. But always it was gone like a fading dream before I could grasp hold of it, leaving me wondering if it was real or merely a figment of my imagination, and for the most part there was nothing. Nothing at all. My life, as I knew it, had begun and ended with my grandparents; all I knew about myself was what they had told me.
And they had, quite frankly, been unable – or unwilling – to tell me very much at all. It was painful for them, I knew, and beyond the bare facts they preferred not to talk about the great sadness, and shame, which my mother had brought on them.
They told me, because they had to, no doubt, how she had run off with a strolling player, who was, presumably, my father. He had, it seems, a wife already, so he was unable to make an honest woman of her, a fact which added to their shame. They claimed not even to know his name, though that may rather be something they preferred to forget. They knew of my existence, but had never seen me – either they had cut my mother off, or their obvious disapproval had so alienated her that she stayed away of her own volition, I was not clear which. However it had come about, our lives had run on quite separate courses until the fateful day of the terrible accident.
As with so much of the detail of my former life, my grandparents had been able to tell me little. All they knew, they said, was that the carriage in which my mother and I had been travelling had run off the road and rolled down a steep incline. My mother had been killed instantly, they said, and I had been found senseless and badly injured in the wreckage.
‘But how did you come to hear of it?’ I had asked. ‘How did you know that the injured girl was me – your granddaughter?’
They had answered vaguely – the accident had occurred not many miles from my grandfather’s parish, at Brocksbury Hill, and someone who had come upon it had recognized my mother. As soon as they heard of it, my grandparents had me brought home. But I sensed their discomfort talking of it, and it had crossed my mind to wonder if they were indeed telling me all they knew.
Pursuing the matter was useless, however. I simply ran up against the blank wall of their reluctance to discuss it, and I was left with many unanswered questions.
Since the accident had happened locally, was it possible my mother had been on her way to try to mend her bridges with her parents? Or had we already been to see them and been turned away? Who was my father – and where was he? Why had he not appeared on the scene to care for me and mourn my mother – bury her, even? Her grave was in a quiet corner of my grandfather’s churchyard – to my knowledge no one ever visited it but my grandparents and myself.
Sometimes I would go there to lay flowers and sit for a while in silence whilst the sun splintered through the branches of the tulip tree which overhung the grave, and the wild bees droned lazily in the long grass, and I would try to communicate with her, feel her presence, find some answers to the myriad questions regarding my former life.
But nothing came. Not even a sense of peace. The questions only plagued me more urgently, and the feeling of utter desolation was the greater. A name on a tombstone – that was all that was left to me of the mother who had given me life and raised me.
Elizabeth Grimes. Thirty-six years. Dear daughter of Winifred and the Revd Joseph Grimes.
So little. So very little! I could not even remember her face, though, from a likeness my grandparents had of her, painted when she was a young girl, I could see that I had taken after her, and now, two years later, when I pictured her, it seemed to me that I remembered her face as being very like the one that I saw when I looked into my mirror.
I had loved her, that much I knew, but had there been others whom I had loved too, and forgotten completely? There must have been, surely, but where were they now? Why had they abandoned me? The wondering was a pain in me that refused to go away, though I had learned to live with it.
As for me, I had no real sense of self, for, with no past, it is difficult to be whole in the present. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I was prepared to agree to the match my grandparents had arranged for me. How could I, with my impaired brain, be capable of deciding for myself? Easier to go along with the judgement of those who have a lifetime of experience upon which to draw.
But mostly, I knew, it was because of guilt and gratitude. I owed my grandparents everything; it was my duty to do as they wished and make up, in some small way, for the pain my mother had caused them. My debt was hers as well as my own. They wished me to marry Mr Paterson; to please them, I would do so.
Because the only love I had ever known was the love I bore for them.
Two
The moment I had signalled my agreement, it seemed, things were
set in motion with frightening speed. Whatever he might have said, Mr Paterson was not a patient man. Though I assumed he had to wait long months for his ships to return home from their voyages to Africa and the West Indies, in his personal life, once a decision had been reached, he believed in acting upon it.
‘There’s no point in shilly-shallying,’ he said with his customary bluntness when he next came to discuss arrangements. ‘I’m a man of action and I have always found it pays off. Take my new house – I bought the land on impulse, for I liked what I saw. Now everyone else of any note is following suit. The price of land has risen fourfold – they all want to live off Park Street or in Clifton. And it’s the same with marriage. I’ve no time for long engagements – and I don’t want to give Davina the chance to change her mind, now do I?’
He smiled slyly, patting my knee in a manner I found overfamiliar – and I noted that he had progressed very quickly to calling me by my given name too. He had even asked me to call him ‘John’, but it did not seem proper to me, and I could not believe I would ever be able to think of one so much older than myself as anything other than ‘Mr Paterson’. But I must, I supposed, just as I would have to accustom myself to other liberties, such as I preferred not to think about.
‘Davina will certainly not go back on her word,’ my grandfather said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘She has agreed to be your wife, and your wife she will be.’
‘Good. Good!’ Mr Paterson patted my knee again, and I managed to move towards the corner of the sofa, out of his reach, without, I hoped, it being too obvious.
Forgotten Destiny Page 2