– Some young ladies, by degrees, despite my odd hands and my dubious origins, made overtures; but compared with the friends of my past, Mr Bill and Mr Sam, Hoby, Triz and Lady Hariot, they seemed of little importance, and while not rejecting their company I never went out of my way to solicit it. This attitude of independence did me no harm; indeed I believe that by the end of my sojourn at the school I was reasonably well-liked.
The teaching was tolerably good – for those who cared to apply themselves; and, especially in music and singing, I could feel that my time was being usefully employed. But to what end? I still had not the least intention of becoming a music teacher, and I feared that my physical abnormality would preclude any operatic or stage work.
Of course I had looked about the school for Nell’s aunt, Mrs Ferrars’ younger sister Margaret, and was not a little disappointed by my first encounter with her, which occurred a week or so after I had entered the establishment.
Miss Dashwood taught literature to the senior girls, and one morning – my own class had, for some reason, terminated early, and I was on my way to eat my nuncheon in the garden, as remained my habit until it grew too cold – passing the half-open door of the senior classroom, I was thunderstruck to hear the girls all together chanting familiar lines:
The Ice was here, the Ice was there
The Ice was all around
It crack’d and growl’d and roar’d and howl’d –
Like noises of a swound.
I stood spellbound in the doorway of the classroom until the teacher, espying me, exclaimed, ‘Heyday, who have we here?’
‘That is the new young lady, Miss Dashwood,’ somebody said. ‘Miss FitzWilliam.’
‘Well? And do you like our poem so much, child?’ Miss Dashwood asked.
‘Oh yes, ma’am, thank you – but I know it already.’
‘You do? But how can that be?’
Just then the clangour of a great bell drowned my reply, but later on Miss Dashwood had the curiosity to seek me out in the garden, and to interrogate me. I told her of my acquaintance with Mr Bill and Mr Sam.
‘You lucky, lucky little thing! What a great piece of good fortune for you to have been acquainted with such a pair! Their works have now been published in a volume,’ she told me. ‘It is called Lyrical Ballads. Would you like to read it?’
‘Oh indeed, ma’am, I should.’
Miss Dashwood was a dark, intense-looking lady of, I suppose, twenty-seven years; her features were too lumpy and irregular for her ever to have been considered handsome, which, I supposed, was why, unlike her sisters she had never married, though she appeared good-natured enough. However there was something whimsical, freakish, over-emotional about her, which made me slightly mistrust her; I thought she looked unreliable. I would never entrust a secret to her. But at least she in no way resembled her niece. I believe there was little affection between them; Nell, as was her habit, made fun of her old-maid aunt.
Miss Dashwood asked me for descriptions of Mr Sam and Mr Bill and listened with keen attention to all I had to relate, interjecting, at frequent intervals, cries of astonishment at my good fortune and eulogies of these men.
‘A pair of poets such as this country has not seen in many years!’ Then, impulsively, she exclaimed, ‘Poor child! And you have never met your own father, I conclude? For he was a wonderful man also – a wonderful, wonderful man!’
‘Good heavens, ma’am!’ I was utterly astounded by this declaration, coming so unexpectedly. ‘You have met my father? You knew him?’
‘Oh, indeed yes, child! At one time he was a great, great friend of my elder sister, Marianne.’
Then, suddenly recollecting herself, she clapped a hand across her mouth and stared at me over it with huge eyes. ‘Oh, good God! Mercy on me! What have I done? I was instructed never, ever to mention a word of the matter.’
‘By whom, ma’am?’ I quickly asked.
‘By my brother-in-law, Mr Edward Ferrars. A most right-thinking, sensible man. He said – he wrote – Oh, how dreadfully unfortunate! Pray, pray, forget what I said, my dear. I had no business to be saying it – none, none. It was wholly improper in me. I am a fool – I blurt things out. Excuse me – I must make haste to seek out Cecilia Castleforth and hear her recitation.’
She went off at blundering speed, fairly running away from me, and took with her, to my great chagrin, the volume of poems I had so eagerly looked forward to reading. Thereafter she sedulously avoided me outside of classes and, it seemed to me, took pains to leave a room if I should chance to enter it. The next I heard of Miss Dashwood was that she had temporarily quitted the school, in the company of Miss Helen Smythe-Burghley, who had left the senior class in order to commence her first London season, and whose parents, urged by their daughter, had requested the services of dear Miss Dashwood to act as dame de compagnie to Miss Helen during the succeeding months, for which function she would doubtless be paid a great deal more than she received as a teacher at Mrs Haslam’s. It was believed that she might return in due course (presumably if Helen received a proposal) but nobody expected that would be very soon.
It may well be imagined how utterly transfixed I was by this brief and tantalizing exchange. Had Miss Dashwood actually quitted the school for fear of inadvertently letting out more information to me, and incurring her brother-in-law’s wrath? Or was it sheer misfortune that had taken her away just then?
Ever since I commanded the power of coherent thought I had, very naturally, wondered from time to time about my father, what kind of a man he might have been; but as I grew older and more sceptical, and accepted the usages and standards of Byblow Bottom, I had grown also to accept that a man who would deflower and then abandon a young girl of seventeen was no kind of character to look up to with admiration or affection; on the contrary, he must be the most despicable scoundrel, and it would afford me no pleasure or benefit ever to meet him. If, indeed, he had not long ago perished in some affray, or died in a debtors’ prison, or been transported to Botany Bay. So – although curiosity pricked me every now and then – I had devoted no serious thought to him for years past.
But now – how was this long-established, half-consciously formed portrait of my father as a dissolute, callous, feckless ne’er-do-well to be conjoined with Miss Dashwood’s description – ‘a wonderful, wonderful man’? And ‘a great, great friend of my sister Marianne’? All my previous suspicions boiled up again; was I, in truth, the daughter of the said Marianne, now Mrs Colonel Brandon, in India? (Or wherever the Colonel and his lady presently were, halfway back to England, presumably.) Could this be the fact at the bottom of all this secrecy, the things that must never be mentioned, the haste to get me away from Delaford, the interdict on Margaret Dashwood telling me what she knew?
What had Edward Ferrars said: ‘He might come to hear’? Who might come to hear? My father? They spoke of my likeness to somebody – to whom? There was a miniature hanging in the parlour at Delaford Rectory – ‘my sister,’ Mrs Ferrars had said when I admired it. It depicted a beauty, brown-skinned, with brilliant dark eyes and raven ringlets. A charitable friend (if I had one) might describe the colour of my red-brown hair as auburn, and the colour of my eyes as grey; but the youthful denizens of Byblow Bottom, when not addressing me as Lizzie Lug-fist, commonly called me Copperknob, or simply Ginger; and it seemed to me highly improbable that I could be the daughter of that dazzling brunette. But – it was true – our features, the shape of our faces, did show a considerable similarity. I had noticed it.
While staying in the village of Delaford I had made cautious inquiries about my guardian Colonel Brandon and his helpmeet, the lord and lady of the Manor. Everybody agreed that he was a fine, excellent landlord, serious and grave in aspect but considerate and benevolent; and she was a lovely young lady, only eighteen at the time she wed the Colonel, less than half the age of her bridegroom, but wonderfully devoted to him, a
nd, though very different in character – for she was as lively, spirited and talkative as he was sober and silent – yet they got on so well together that their mutual fondness was the admiration of the whole country. And when he rejoined his regiment, nothing would serve but she must pack up and accompany him to India, despite the wicked climate, and the ferocity of the natives, despite the warnings of her friends, and the fact that she had seemed very happy at Delaford; and she had thrown herself with vigour and enthusiasm into many schemes for the welfare of the villagers. And although it was a pity that she did not show any signs of conceiving – yet it was early days still, she only just out of her twenties, and just as well she should not bear a child while off in foreign parts.
Could she have borne me before she married the Colonel?
But no – for she could hardly have married the Colonel so soon after I was born. It had been told me that my mother was only seventeen when she gave birth to me. That only a few months later she had become Brandon’s bride seemed in the highest degree improbable.
So my mother must have been somebody else – but who?
Nell Ferrars had no information about my parentage, of this I was certain, for if she had any clue as to my origins she would indubitably have made use of it to tease and taunt me. She always addressed me as Miss FitzWilliam with satirical emphasis, as if she entirely questioned my right to use that name; but she could never have withheld a real fact, if she had been armed with one, any more than she could have addressed an inferior person with civility, or a superior without sycophancy.
Mrs Jebb, I suspected, knew somewhat more than she communicated; but there was no prying information from Mrs Jebb; one might as well put questions to the statues of Peter and Paul on the Abbey front.
If I were ever to discover anything about my parentage – and dearly did I wish to – it must be by my own unaided efforts.
***
The years of my attendance at Mrs Haslam’s school crept by – slowly enough – marked only by the dogged, painstaking acquisition of more knowledge and more musical proficiency; until another accidental encounter placed further information within my grasp.
But I anticipate.
Previous to my first Christmas in Bath, on learning that the school closed for a week, I had wondered if there was any possibility of my being invited to pass the holiday at Delaford Rectory. I knew that Nell expected to return home. But I was soon disabused of such a notion.
‘Taking all the circumstances into consideration,’ wrote Elinor Ferrars in a letter delivered by the carrier; ‘my mother’s precarious state of health, the inclemency of the weather, the expense of the journey, the bad condition of the roads, and the value set by Aunt Jebb upon your company, we think it best you remain in Bath over the Christmas holiday.’
Most of this was news to me. That the weather was inclement and the roads bad, I thought, need form no greater impediment to my visiting Delaford than it did for Nell; and that Mrs Jebb set such particular store by my company I took leave to doubt, though we got on comfortably enough. But still, on the whole, I was quite content to remain in New King Street. A whole week in close proximity to Nell’s hostility would be no treat, even with the opportunity to walk in green fields and breathe country air.
‘Please convey our warm seasonal greetings to Mrs Jebb,’ continued Cousin Elinor’s spiky writing, ‘along with this pincushion which I made her. It is stuffed with coffee grounds, sovereign against rust. If you can inform me of any other small token that would be acceptable to her – thread-cases or card-racks – or any hand-knitted garment that would be of use to her, which I could make, I should be obliged to you for the information. And I hope, my dear Eliza, that you yourself have been able to procure some small but appropriate seasonable gift in acknowledgement of your obligations to her . . .’
Obligation be blowed, thought I, reverting to the usage of Byblow Bottom; Mrs Jebb gets paid for my lodgement, does she not? And further to that, I walk Pug for her twice a day, I read aloud the paper and the works of Mrs Edgeworth, I sing to her, I play the harp to her snuffy friends four evenings out of five, I write and deliver her notes, I buy her cakes at Sally Lunn’s shop and fetch her novels from the circulating library, besides trimming her black satin cap with new feathers and hemming her a great square muslin shawl. In fact I might, if I were Miss Margaret Dashwood, expect to be paid a substantial wage for my services as dame de compagnie.
(And pray that this will not be your occupation for the rest of your life, said an inner voice.)
When I presented the tatting-trimmed pincushion ‘with the compliments of Cousin Elinor Ferrars’ Mrs Jebb looked at me very sharply and shrewdly over the rims of her spectacles.
‘Humph, gel! So they employ you as a messenger? To enlist my goodwill, hey?’
I said mildly that it was the season of goodwill.
‘Ho! But I notice they do not invite you back to spend the holiday with whey-faced Miss Nell?’
‘I am happy to remain in Bath, ma’am.’
‘So I should think! The only night I passed in that parsonage I was nearly brought to my terminus by lumbago and spasmodic bile – I never entered so cold a house in my life and do not intend ever to do so again. So: I know how it is; the poor creatures are expecting to come in for something handsome in my will. And – if at any time they should ask you (though I daresay they are too genteel to come flat out with it) – you may inform them that you have no information as to my testamentary intentions. But they may as well know they can have no claims on my future consideration. Nor, my child, can you – supposing they should have encouraged you to entertain any such notion.’ Another sharp look over her glasses.
‘No, ma’am, that they never have. Nor, indeed, would I dream of such a thing.’
Though Nell had, in fact, oftentimes hinted about ‘expectations.’
‘I am happy to hear it,’ she rejoined drily. ‘So all you do is done for love, eh?’
‘No,’ I said calmly, ‘not for love. But from – from friendship, and because you are kind enough, ma’am, to supply me with a comfortable, respectable home.’
. . . Which was true enough. I did feel a sober regard, a tolerant comradeship for the stoic, gritty quality which I recognized in the old lady. And, though I could not say that I felt a warm welcome when I entered the door of Number Two New King Street, I had come to understand that a place had been established there for me as part of the household.
If Mrs Jebb wished to be alone with her whist-playing cronies, I retired to my bedroom with its view of far-away hills; or I descended to the kitchen. Here Pullett and Mrs Rachel the cook were always ready to tell fortunes with cards and tea-leaves.
– ‘Shall I ever find my father?’ was always my first question at these sessions. But that was a question Mrs Rachel was never able to answer satisfactorily.
‘There’s two figures here, dearie – an old king and an old queen. Neither of ’em’s going to bring ye much in the way of fortune. But there’s a building. And there’s a little tiny child – like a dwarf – and here’s a fellow looks like as he’s had the pox – never did I see such a pitted front, maybe he’s a coal-miner – and a whole heap of money sliding about – like water on a ship’s deck. That man have it in his power to do ye a plenty good or a plenty harm, best keep the right side of him, dearie –’
‘If I knew who he is.’
‘All in good time ye’ll find that out. Hark! There’s Mistress’s bell a-ringing. Tom, go see what she wants . . .’
***
‘So!’ said Mrs Jebb, scowling at me as was her way when she wished to conceal any deeper feeling. ‘I know as well as any what it means to be isolated and have no refuge in the festive season.—Now run along, child, and take Pug with you, or he will make water on the Turkish rug.’
So on Christmas Day I accompanied Mrs Jebb twice to Divine Service, and then was given my libe
rty to amuse myself and escort Pug into the Sydney Gardens. It was a damp, misty freezing day, not a soul stirring in Bath except myself.
Later I ate beef and Christmas pudding solemnly with Mrs Jebb, and remembered how little attention had been paid to the festival in Byblow Bottom. Seldom did Hannah serve any meal at all, by noontide she would be incapably drunk, half of her condition left over from celebrations the previous night.
Stealing up to my cold bedroom I wrote a couple of long letters, one to Lady Hariot and Triz at Lisbon, in care of Lady Anna Ffoliot. I had heard from them once or twice, briefly, I knew they were there. But now there was talk that Bonaparte had sent Junot with an army into Portugal, as he had already spread his armies over Europe. Portugal was our ally, but such a small, helpless country. Would my friends be safe there? Would they return to England?
Then, without much more confidence, I wrote a letter to Hoby. (A girl in my class at school, Tilly Percival, had a brother at Eton; she had furnished me with the address.) I asked Hoby how he was, and told what I thought might interest him of my own doings . . .
Then I sat, dejected, for an hour longer, listening to the pat of rain on the casement, until summoned downstairs to sing ballads to the old ladies.
Chapter 5
In my fourth year at Mrs Haslam’s school I began giving music lessons to some of the younger pupils. And in my fifth year the lessons were extended to pupils of my own age, and singing was added. This was an occasion of considerable spiteful comment on the part of Miss Nell Ferrars, who had never become my friend; indeed as we grew older our mutual dislike increased. Nell made it her business to propagate the story that my advancement in the school was due solely to the partiality of Mr Tregarron the music master, a handsome and melancholy-looking man. This, in fact, was not so, though he and I were excellent friends and I was to some degree in his confidence. When I was seventeen he became involved in an affair of honour which terminated in a duel; Mr Tregarron was shot in the thigh, inflammation ensued, and for some time his life was despaired of; and even when that anxiety was allayed, it was still considered needful that his leg must be sacrificed.