Rondo Allegro (53 page)

“Eleanor, little girls do not put themselves forward.” Emily
appeared, her voice smooth as always, but Eleanor flushed and dropped her gaze.
“Forgive me, Lady Northcote,” Emily said to Anna, “but I do not wish my
daughter to develop pert manners. Nothing can be more fatal.”

She stretched out her hand to ring the bell. Nurse, who must
have been waiting in the hall, instantly appeared.

In the general motion as the child made her curtseys and the
tea things were in passing, Harriet came up to Anna and muttered, “As if she
didn’t racket all over the countryside with Henry when she was not much older.
I
remember, though I was Justina’s age.
They think I don’t, but I
do
.”

Anna said, “Do you think it would be inappropriate to offer
Eleanor a lesson? I would go to the nursery, that no one would be disturbed,
and the child could not be thought to be putting herself forward.”

Harriet did not care one way or another about music, but she
loved the idea of circumventing Emily, who she felt ignored those girls
shamefully. “I think you ought to.”

With this assurance, the next day, Anna found her way to the
nursery wing. She could not help looking about with interest. Here the captain
must have spent a good deal of his childhood; there were battered toys,
demonstrably old, a shelf packed with books, and a low table with scissors,
paper, chalk, and all the accoutrements of childhood. The smell of chalk dealt
Anna an unexpected blow, bringing back her time with her mother, so precious;
she had resented the hours her mother had to spend among the royal children,
until she was old enough to be included among them for lessons, where she could
be relied upon to know her place.

Nurse looked up in surprise at this unexpected invasion of
her domain. She was a plump woman somewhere between fifty and sixty whose light
hair was going gray. Her voice was mild as she said, “Make your curtseys like
young ladies.”

Justina resembled her sister in her spindly limbs, but her
hair was a light brown. The baby lay in a bassinet, sleeping, as the little
girls copied out their letters.

“I came to ask if Eleanor wishes to learn to sing,” Anna
said, and her reward was the flashing up of Eleanor’s eyelids, so that the
firelight reflected in her wide eyes.

Nurse said apologetically, “I have started them on their
letters, but music, well, I can find out some notes, but I never put myself
forward for governess duties.”

Anna said, “As it happens, I had many singing lessons when I
was small, but I have never taught, so this would be an experiment for us both.
If Miss Eleanor has the interest.”

“Oh,
yes
, Lady
Northcote,” the child said, bridling. And before Anna could say anything, she
launched into “Robin Adair” in a high, quick voice, mimicking her mother’s
studied gestures as she sang.

Anna waited a verse through, and then walked over to the
battered spinet in the far corner. She pressed a couple of chords, shuddered
and lifted her hand. No wonder the child sang flat. The spinet was hopelessly
out of tune.

She said, “Try this.” Softly, so softly, she dropped her
jaw, rounded her lips and sang a C.

Eleanor sang it back. It was close enough that Anna smiled
and said, “Good! Now try it here.” She touched her ribs. “Not here.” A touch to
the throat.

Eleanor sang it exactly the same, though she stuck out her
middle.

Anna said, “Listen to the difference.” She touched her own
throat, squeezed up and sang a shrill note. Then she opened her throat, her
hands at her middle to show how deep she breathed, and sang it again, low and
pure.

Eleanor’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s
pretty.
I want to do that.”

Anna smiled back, patiently instructed the girl a little
longer, until she had the main idea, and then promised to return again if
Eleanor practiced.

That evening, Eleanor did not appear after dinner, on the
orders of her mother.

I must now beg the reader’s indulgence, well aware that
however few of us enjoy the polite duty of formal calls, still fewer want to
hear about someone else’s.

Still, following Anna on her first round of Barford Magna’s
principal families—or those whom Lady Emily Northcote considered to be first—will
demonstrate, in contrasts, the characters of the three ladies who pulled on
hats, gloves, and pelisses that frosty morning.

Anna’s only emotion was curiosity to see how English people
lived.

Harriet had learned to cordially loathe formal calls before
the year’s respite required by mourning. That is, she had hated her status as
schoolgirl, which Emily, whose sense of delicacy dictated a submissive and
above all silent demeanor for girls yet to be introduced to society, had
encouraged.

Unfortunately, in recent years, only the two had performed
this strictly regulated duty that Emily, as principal woman in the parish, felt
she owed the neighbors. As the dowager’s eyesight had dimmed, so had her
willingness to careen blindly over the countryside. She preferred to visit her
friends singly, for as long as conversation lasted, and those friends accepted
this gentle idiosyncrasy.

Now that she was no longer principal lady of the parish,
Emily had to find sufficient motivation in showing her replacement the way. For
there was certainly no pleasure in the tedium of visiting on dull country
people. Emily longed to be in London again, among clever people of fashion and
rank; there, the strict fifteen minutes was a necessity due to the numbers. One
must not accidentally neglect anyone, or the next brilliant ball, or
talked-about soiree, might pass with one only hearing about it after the fact.

Buried in Barford Magna as she was, she was aware of every
dull ticking of the clock.

At least, Harriet thought privately as they climbed into the
impressive carriage with the Northcote arms painted on the side, the worst
would be got over first. That, and she had a spanking new gown to show off, for
the first time in her life, and Polly had learnt that French way of doing up
her hair.

The Elstead family lived at the Groves, closest to the
Manor. Squire Elstead was a stout man with large side-whiskers, his bulging
waistcoat well-dusted with snuff. He seldom spoke. When he did, he invariably
prefaced each remark with a self-deprecating, rattling chuckle, to which his
wife listened apparently unmoved. Anna could not help wondering what it might
be like to spend one’s life hearing that noise.

“And when shall we see Henry return among us?” the squire’s
wife asked.

“I hope very soon,” Anna replied, trying not to hear
insinuation in the lady’s tone. Nature might have given her an irritating
voice. Anna would assume nothing more.

“I am certain it cannot seem too soon for some, naming no
names,” Mrs. Squire Elstead said archly. “And I, for one, look forward to his
account of the last glorious day of our dear Nelson . . .”

Mrs. Squire Elstead was very much the queen of her
overheated drawing room. Her youngest daughter Cecily, a fair-haired girl a
little younger than Harriet, and newly returned from a select school in York,
sat mumchance by her mother with some fine sewing on her lap.

Harriet chose a chair on the other side of Cecily. The two
girls exchanged a brief whispered greeting until a quelling glance by her
mother silenced Cicely. Mrs. Squire Elstead talked steadily, touching on the
coming memorial for the Glorious Admiral Lord Nelson, and repeating in lengthy
superlatives what the newspapers had said.

Anna’s attention showed a lamentable tendency to wander. The
room was filled with a great deal of fine furniture. One end of the room was
dominated by a full length portrait of Emily, which had to have been done when
she was about the age of Harriet. She wore a gown with a long train in the
Grecian style, with the heraldic appurtenances of a barony as part of the
background. It was clear that Emily, or at least her marriage, was the pride of
the house.

The other end of the room was dominated by an extremely
handsome long case clock with a white dial. When the clock bonged the quarter
hour, Anna rose with alacrity. No wonder Frederick and Mary Elstead came so
often to dine at the manor!

They proceeded next to a fine house south of town, where
dwelt Mr. and Mrs. Rackham.

Mr. Rackham, a genial gentleman with snuff dusting his
sleeve, greeted them on his way to his book room, asking mildly, “I trust we
shall see Henry back among us soon?”

Here we find the greatest contrasts. Anna was struck by the
differing tones between Mrs. Squire Elstead and this gentleman, though the
question was essentially the same: this man listened with an air of pleasure
unlike the squire’s wife’s smile of suppressed bitterness.

Outwardly, that is, perceivable only to us, there existed a
contrast between the two Lady Northcotes: there was Emily’s contempt for fat
Mrs. Rackham, gorgeously dressed in the silk and lace of ten years previous,
when she could very well afford to keep the fashion; against that existed
Anna’s sense of comfort as her hostess presided easily over an old-fashioned
parlor with its striped paper, and delicate furnishings covered in pale blue
satin, rather worn but kept painstakingly clean.

On the other side of the room sat their son Thomas, a tall,
thin young man just turned twenty, whose shirt points required him to stare
straight ahead. His short-sighted sister Jane peered at the visitors, smiling
when Harriet sat down by her.

Thomas murmured, “Did you hear that Robert Colby is back?”

“No!” Harriet exclaimed, and she put her head together with
her old friends, talking in low voices as their mother carried over them with
tranquil habit, commenting on the weather, the coming holidays, and Admiral
Lord Nelson’s expected memorial.

It was Emily who summarily cut short this pleasant
conversation.

Harriet smothered a sigh, reflecting that they were certain
to drive to the Colbys next. She had not seen her old playmate for nearly four years.
She was all the more curious now that he was come down from Oxford, after
having spent a protracted time in London, and then with grand friends during
the shooting season.

Anna looked out at a sizable house of mellow Tudor brick at
the end of a winding avenue of poplars, where lived the widowed baronet Sir
Robert Colby. He appeared, made his bows in form—asked about Henry, “who I
suppose I ought rightly to call Lord Northcote, though I knew him as a boy in
short coats, ever talking of the sea”—then vanished, leaving them to his
sister, a faded spinster who only became animated when the conversation touched
on her many nephews and her young niece Georgiana.

Emily suppressed yawns, Anna struggled to hear Miss Colby’s
faint voice, and Harriet sat scowling, feeling a sense of personal insult that
Robert had gone out riding instead of waiting to greet them.

Well! She knew how to address
that
.

After the requisite fifteen minutes, every second of which
all three callers felt they had counted three times over, they proceeded to the
north of town, where lay an enormous house built in the Tudor fashion, half of
which appeared to be shut up.

Here dwelt the Aubigny family, the only progeny still living
at home consisting of two very lively boys in short coats, who were brought in
by their nurse to make their bows, then straightaway taken out again. Anna
could hear them hallooing and laughing as they escaped, reminding her of the
midshipmen aboard the
Aglaea
. So
strange—she had spent comparatively little time aboard the ship, compared to
her life in Spain. And yet so many memories would intrude, costing her
heart-pangs.

But the visit took a turn for the better when Mrs. Aubigny,
correctly interpreting the strain in her caller’s eyes, switched to the French
she had learnt as a girl sent to a convent-school in Paris, before the
destruction of the Revolution. She also asked after Henry, and reminisced about
what a fine young man he was, and how proudly she had read of his doings in the
great world.

Now Harriet was bored, as the other three conversed about
the new empire of France. The fifteen minutes ticked by, then Harriet jumped to
her feet. In the general leave-taking, Harriet muttered to Anna that this would
be an end, most probably; Anna would meet the others at some other time. Her
glance over her shoulder, and roll of the eyes, adding meaning that Anna could
not guess at.

The carriage took them last to the parsonage, a rambling
house built in an L, for a much larger family. Inside was cheer, the smell of
baked apples, and warmth. After many hours of cold jolting over the roads, and
sitting stiffly on chairs, it was a relief. The housekeeper, Mrs. Eccles,
stayed to chat in a way that made it clear she knew everyone in the parish.

As the carriage returned them to the Manor, Anna tried to
capture and hold the idea that these might be the people she was expected to
spend the rest of her life among.

If . . . if.

They all anticipated the return of Lord Northcote, though
none as strongly as his wife.

‘Lady Northcote!’ It still seemed to denote someone else.
Had been
someone else. There were three
Lady Northcotes living under that roof, one whose family had grown, the other
who retained the title in courtesy but not the authority, though she betrayed
by little signs that she would recover it if she could.

Anna had noted during the calls that people had been careful
to say ‘Lady
Emily
Northcote’ with a
slight emphasis, which Emily accepted with that marble expression and politely
modulated voice.

o0o

On Saturday, when Mary and Frederick Elstead once again
joined them, Mary surprised them by offering to play at the harp. She had
resumed practice, and offered them three Scottish airs.