I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam

by Robin Kobayashi

He admitted defeat. ‘You are definitely a Fitzwilliam and so much like your father when he was a boy. Heaven help me!’

  Ever since that time, me and my avô, which is what I call my grandfather, have taken a great liking for one another, he teaching me how to blow soap bubbles with a pipe, I teaching him some Portuguese words and customs, such as when I kiss his hand and bless him – ‘a bênção meu avô’. My avô wished more than anything to protect me from Lady Matlock, who no doubt would cut me up; at least that’s what I heard him say. Would she use an adaga, a dagger, to cut me up? Surely papai would protect me from this bruxa, this Lady Matlock, and give me a magical amulet to ward off this witch.

  The unfortunate day arrived sooner than I wished when we received something called a ‘summons’ from Lady Matlock. Papai hired a post-chaise, which got us to Matlock. From there, we met Lady Matlock’s barouche and four, which conveyed us to papai’s ancestral home. No one greeted us except for the butler.

  I tugged at papai’s sleeve. ‘Where is my avô?’

  ‘Your avô is busy in the metropolis far away.’ Papai grimaced. ‘There is nothing for it then; we must face an inquisition on our own.’

  I wished to know what he meant, but he shushed me. We followed the butler into the stately entrance-hall, after which we climbed up-up-up a mountain of a staircase to a drawing room, where an ancient lady awaited us.

  ‘Pray, how old are you?’ Lady Matlock peered down her nose at me as I stood before her, she being seated in a high, throne-like chair.

  ‘I am four, which is nearly five, your ladyskiff,’ pronounced I in my best polished English. My papai whispered to me to say ‘your ladyship’ next time.

  ‘Not yet five? Impossible, you love brat.’

  ‘What’s a love brat, your ladyship?’

  ‘Why, it is you.’ Lady Matlock sniffed the air. ‘How dare you defile this ancient hall with your presence here.’

  ‘But you summoned me, your ladyship.’

  ‘O fie!’ Lady Matlock fluttered her handkerchief impatiently. ‘But now that you are here, pray tell me something that will amaze me, for I hear that you are uncommonly clever for someone so young.’

  I glanced at papai, who urged me on. ‘Well, ah, cousin Darcy’s dog can kill fifty rats in five minutes.’

  ‘Phoo! Phoo!’ Lady Matlock waved me off in disbelief.

  ‘Truly,’ I assured her, having seen Bixby the spotted terrier carry out this feat. ‘My papai bet on Bixby and made a cart-load of money.’

  Lady Matlock narrowed her eyes at me. ‘What exactly do you want from our noble family? Are you already so fond of money? Is that why you bedevil me? For shame!’

  ‘All I wish for is…a soap bubble pipe.’ I blew air bubbles at her.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘I wish then for…a frog.’ I placed my hands on my knees and jumped about most frog-like to impress her.

  ‘What nonsense.’ Lady Matlock rapped the floor with her walking-stick. ‘You, love brat, will be scorned by persons of rank for ever.’

  ‘Can I still have goose-grog?’

  ‘Do not be ridiculous. I shall degrade myself no longer to the natural daughter of a low creature.’

  I shrugged at papai, wondering what Lady Matlock meant.

  ‘You may kiss my hand before you go,’ commanded the grumpy Lady Matlock, her outstretched hand before me, her lips twisted to one side.

  How silly she looked. Grown-ups always look silly when they’re grumpy. So I did what any mischievous child would do. I grasped her hand to kiss it, and I blessed her with ‘a bênção minha boba’.

  Papai gave me a stern look as he tugged at his cravat. After he bowed over Lady Matlock’s hand to kiss it, we took our leave, my papai steering me with one hand atop my head.

  ‘You saucy girl, calling Lady Matlock a fool,’ he scolded me in a low voice as he led me out of doors. ‘As penance, you will be put on fatigue duty when we return home, and your chore this time will be…’

  ‘Look papai! It’s Sister Lisbet.’ I knew this would distract him, because he paled whenever I mentioned her as if he had seen a ghost. I made good my escape, running round the barouche and four while papai chased after me, and when I attempted on my own to clamber up the step, he tapped me on my shoulder with his glove.

  ‘Ahem…Sofia-Elisabete, you’re in a heap of trouble now,’ declared he, as he lifted me into the barouche.

  And so ended our visit with the snappish Lady Matlock and how I came to know that a love child I was. Later, as our post-chaise rumbled away from the town of Matlock, papai placed me on his lap, and he explained to me that he had made me out of love but had not been married to Marisa Soares Belles at the time I was born, and that she had abandoned me at a convent in Lisbon.

  This confused me. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She was a lindissima, a young beauty, I had met once when I was in Lisbon during the war.’ Papai bit his lip as he glanced out the carriage window.

  ‘Where did she go?’

  Papai assumed a grim look. ‘I believe ’twas Brazil or perhaps Spain.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Humph. She was in love with Don Rafael and wished to dance the bolero every night with him.’ His face darkened with fury of a sudden.

  ‘Papai, may I learn the bolero?’ I thought this would please him.

  ‘Permission denied,’ said he in sharp tone.

  ‘But papai…’ Hot tears filled in my eyes.

  ‘O, ho! I dare say you shall never dance the bolero.’ He shuddered at the thought and thereafter closed his eyes.

  After a few minutes had passed, I tugged at his coat sleeve. ‘Papai?’ whispered I, wondering if he was still cross with me and if he would tell me more about the mysterious Marisa Soares Belles. I thought he had fallen asleep when he didn’t respond, but then he muttered to himself that he shan’t apologise to anyone for having a love child nor will he ever give me up or send me back to the convent. Still, this touched me to the quick. With mingled feelings of gratitude and disquietude, I kissed my papai’s hand to bless him.

  Chapter Two

  Destiny

  MY FIRST MOTHER, thinks I, was she who gave birth to me, a bolero dancer by the name of Marisa Soares Belles. I dreamt of her often, this lindissima, she being a young beauty of eighteen years adorned with ribbons and spangles and a bright red flower in her dark hair. At the mid-night hour under a cold sleepy moon, she placed a baby girl in the roda – the foundling turnbox wheel at the convent – and she took her leave without a backward glance, snapping her castanets and dancing a spritely bolero under the beams of moonlight. ‘Olé!’ cried she, her arms raised in a graceful, defiant attitude. And here, at that very moment, my dream ended, but I dared not speak of it to papai out of fear he would become cross with me again.

  After we quit Matlock – and with little regret, as papai would tell me, for he so much disliked his mother – we journeyed to the city of York, where we rented private apartments at Mrs Beazley’s boarding house, a timber-framed dwelling on Blossom Street near the crumbling Micklegate Bar. Papai said this was our half-pay home, what with the war being over and he being on half-pay. Together we strolled the tree-lined New Walk along the River Ouse, where I observed many a mother and father promenading with their brood of children. A cloud of wistfulness enveloped me, when I seized upon a brilliant idea.

  ‘Papai, can we buy a new mamãe?’

  Papai laughed. ‘Where would we buy her?’

  ‘At the grocers.’

  ‘O, ho!’ Papai pointed his walking-stick at Mr and Mrs Hart, they being fellow worshippers at my chapel, as they strolled arm in arm in front of us. ‘You shan’t ever see me living in the Land of Henpeckism, ordered about by a wife. You see before you a manly man, unshackled and free, and in that state I shall remain until I die a fusty old bachelor.’

  The Harts must’ve heard papai’s speech, because they turned round, casting him a look of disdain, and when he tipped his hat to them, they acknowledged him no
t. Papai thought the whole thing a joke – he, a son of an earl, being given the cut by the ‘middling sort’. I wondered what a middle person was, and I recalled Lady Matlock having mentioned that I had sprung from a low creature.

  ‘Papai, am I a low or middle creature?’

  ‘Truthfully, you are neither because you are my creature.’ Papai winked at me.

  The day next, after papai reclaimed me at the convent school where I was a day-pupil, I begged him to take us to Tuke’s Grocers, a Quaker-run shop on Castlegate where we could buy Tuke’s Superior Rock Cocoa – pure cocoa and sugar shaped into cakes – which Cook would use to prepare chocolate for breakfast. My papai, being obliging most days for his sweetest little girl in the world, as he was wont to call me, hired a hackney and away we went.

  There, at Tuke’s, I stood before the display of chocolate, pretending to admire the superior rock cocoa, cocoa coffee and rich cocoa, the earthy-beefy-sweaty-honeyish aroma tickling my nose. Beside me, and far more interesting, stood Mr Tuke’s young niece, who busied herself with arranging the cakes of chocolate. I scrutinised this gentle Quakeress with her kind grey eyes.

  ‘Miss Tuke, how much are you?’

  She started at my question. ‘I beg your pardon, little miss?’

  ‘I wish to buy a new mamãe.’

  ‘Well, now, mammas can’t be bought.’

  I waved her off. ‘Papai bought a fresh, young thing once…’

  Miss Tuke gasped. ‘Bless me!’

  ‘…for six bob. I heard him say so.’

  ‘Poppet? There you are. Off we go…’ Papai grasped my hand. ‘Now, there’s an odd thing. I could swear the lovely Miss Tuke just gave me the cut.’

  On the ride back to Blossom Street, I observed the poor children begging on the streets.

  ‘Look papai.’ I pointed out the window of our hackney. ‘That girl has only one shoe. And that boy over there. And that little girl, too.’

  ‘Methinks that is the only shoe they’ve got.’ Papai patted my hand.

  This bewildered me. ‘Can they buy another shoe at whippa-whoppa-gate?’

  ‘Whipmawhopmagate? They are too poor to do so, my dear child.’

  I wiggled my toes inside the new leather shoes with ribbon rosettes that papai had bought for me the other day at Whipmawhopmagate, and I struggled with my conscience about giving up one of my pretty shoes and having to walk lopsided. In the end I decided that would not do. There must be a better way, given my destiny to be a nun like Sister Matilde, for I had resolved to join the sisterhood and ride a burrinho. Ai de mim! How I wished my destiny was chocolate instead. I imagined myself roaming the streets atop my piebald donkey, with my tin pail filled with the delicious chocolate that I would feed to the poor and hungry children who gathered round me, eager to fill their empty bellies. I congratulated myself on a brilliant plan, but how would I learn the secret of making chocolate?

  Enter Agnes Wharton.

  In mid-July, 1814, papai announced we would decamp to Scarborough, a seaside town on the Yorkshire coast, our travelling companions being the Bennet family and our cousin Georgiana Darcy, she being my papai’s ward, for he was joined in guardianship of her, this younger sister of cousin Darcy. I heard Mr Bennet joke with papai that we would lodge with Mrs Wharton, a really ancient and cripply widow who was nearly connected to the Bennets. When we arrived at a three-storey, red-brick house on Queen Street, no one stood outside the door to greet us. Just then, the door swung open, and a shadowy figure standing in the interior called out to us.

  ‘Why is everyone still dawdling on the street? Come in! Come in!’ beckoned the crusty old widow. ‘Symcox, where are you? Show them into the parlour.’

  An ancient, decrepit butler tottered his way to the vestibule, and he led us to a neatly-furnished parlour.

  Mrs Wharton seized his ear trumpet, and she held it to his ear. ‘I ought to dismiss you for making me answer my own door,’ she scolded him.

  The impertinent butler burst into a guffaw ere he shuffled his way out.

  Mrs Wharton gave a friendly laugh. ‘Ah, well, he never listens to me.’

  I gaped at Mrs Wharton, who, being an ancient forty years of age, was still a handsome woman with reddish brown hair and sparkling green eyes.

  Puzzled by this, I tugged at papai’s hand. ‘Is she the old tabby we come to see?’

  Papai coloured as he tried to hush me.

  ‘Old tabby?’ Mrs Wharton held up a quizzing glass to inspect papai up and down, he doing the same to her sans quizzing glass, because nothing could intimidate a British officer like him.

  ‘Papai, you looked at her bubbies.’ I giggled into my hand.

  Papai picked me up in his arms to give me a quick gooseberry kiss. ‘Your papai is an army man, and he cannot help himself,’ said he in a half-whisper.

  I discovered then that grown-ups often do not make any sense, and there was nothing for it but to ignore them when that happened. Later, at dinner, papai stole many a glance at Mrs Wharton, as if she had bewitched him. I know this to be true, because the next day, I owned that I overheard the two of them whispering about what a lovely time they had last night. Ere long papai began to do strange things, such as getting his hair dressed, bathing twice in one week and wearing sandalwood scent.

  ‘Papai, are you flirting?’

  ‘Flirting, you say?’ Papai coloured. ‘Where did you learn such a word?’

  ‘I heard Mrs Wharton say so.’

  ‘Well, now, you see before you a man who’s flirting with Mrs Wharton and proudly so.’

  On Sunday papai escorted me and Mrs Wharton to the Catholic chapel on Auborough Street where we celebrated Mass and where I thought I had a revelation. ‘Sister Lisbet, you came back for me,’ I embraced Mrs Wharton, who was all astonishment. Papai flinched at the mention of Sister Lisbet as he always does for some reason, and he turned so very pale. I had no sooner caused a scene during the middle of Mass, than Sister Lisbet appeared before me, and she begged me to hush. ‘Calai-vos,’ she whispered into my ear, and she promised to tell me a secret soon about Mrs Wharton.

  One evening, when we had joined a party of pleasure to the town of Whitby, something singular happened. Snug in the cradle of papai’s arm, I pretended to sleep while he and Mrs Wharton held hands, gazing at the Northern Lights, which only they and I could see. That same night of our Northern Lights, Sister Lisbet appeared in my dream, her red capa flowing about her, her red roses tumbling from her hands, and she told me the meaning of the Northern Lights, but I shan’t tell anyone what it is – what she said of papai’s and Mrs Wharton’s destinies being united. Besides, you would never believe it unless you have a strong faith like mine.

  Things being so, it bewildered me when papai announced in early August that we would decamp for Pemberley, thereby abandoning Mrs Wharton in Scarborough for ever. I made a fuss, but papai, with an officer-like coolness, remained firm and determined. ‘Adeus, Mrs Wharton.’ I sobbed in her arms, for I had to come to adore her. Adeus – that’s how we bid farewell to folks in Portugal. Then, a few weeks later, papai ordered me to pack my bags to decamp to York. All this decamping made my head spin like a teetotum, like a wooden top. Enough, I told myself. I bundled up my doll, and I ran away. ‘Adeus, papai, adeus!’ But Bixby picked up my scent, and he led papai to the stables where I had hidden myself under the straw next to Pie, my loyal donkey. Papai laughed as he pulled me out feet first.

  ‘Come here, you silly gooseberry.’

  ‘I a’n’t goin’,’ insisted I. ‘It i’n’t fair.’

  Papai cupped his right ear. ‘Did I hear you talk like a stable-boy?’

  ‘I talks like you.’ I sat with my arms folded, petulant as ever.

  ‘O fie! I a’n’t one to talks like a stable-boy.’

  When papai advised me of the real reason for our leave-taking, namely, to meet up with Mrs Wharton for York races, I threw a handful of straw up in the air with glee and cried out, ‘Adeus, Pie-O! I am for York.’ Now, having returned
to York, I decided ’twas time to give a broad hint to my papai, so I began to call Mrs Wharton my mamãe, and sure enough, papai proposed to her, not once, but twice. Ai de mim! She rejected him both times, telling him that he was not ready for marriage and that he suffered from fits of jealousy. Furthermore, his ‘honeyed’ words, ‘Oh, hang it, I love you, Aggie’, would not convince her otherwise.

  After mamãe returned to Scarborough without us, papai announced his need of French courage now that he was no longer cagg’d. I asked him what his cagg was, and he told me of a vow he had made of not getting drunk on brandy for six months. He shook his finger at me. ‘Don’t you know – my cagg is out?’ He sat in his bedchamber, singing a song in praise of the mighty roast beef of old England, and he swore again and again like a drunken soldier. ‘Ready. Present. Fire!’ And he would gulp down more of this stinking thing called French courage.

  The next morning, having witnessed and smelt the effects of the wicked liquor on my papai, I wrote two letters using my best penmanship: one to cousin Darcy, and one to mamãe. I begged them to help me, because my papai was a ‘stinkin human bean’. Our landlady sent the letters by the post, and thereafter I prayed. Several days later, when cousins Darcy and Georgiana arrived at our boarding house, they heard me howling like a monkey, but unbeknown to them, I had been stung by a bee, and papai had been sucking the venom out from my wound.

  ‘Unhand her, you foul fiend.’ Cousin Darcy snatched me from papai. I could hear him and my papai shouting at each other as Georgiana carried me away.

  ‘Now see here, Darcy,’ papai tried to reason with him.

  ‘You cannibal,’ thundered cousin Darcy. ‘How dare you hurt your own child.’

  ‘You are a dolt,’ retorted papai.

  ‘Did you spit on my bespoke waist-coat? Well, now, prepare yourself to die, cousin.’

  Ai! They had no sooner begun to fight at fisticuffs, than mamãe arrived at the boarding house. She tried to talk sense to them, but they much preferred to argue and wrestle. ‘Men!’ declared mamãe as she came down the stairs.

  Their bout finally at an end, cousin Darcy and papai joined us in the parlour, unashamed of the red marks on their faces from having knocked each other down. Mamãe insisted that papai stop drinking and gadding about with a miscreant named Mr O. P. Umm and that he speak to Father O’Shaughnessy, or Father O as we called him. But papai refused. ‘I shan’t speak with a priest,’ he stamped his foot. My heart sank to my toes. Mamãe rose to leave, and I began to weep, believing we would lose her for ever. She had not taken more than three steps, when papai grasped her hand, and he confessed that he had sinned, and sinned again, and again and again, and that he promised to speak to Father O.