A School for Brides (19 page)

Mr. Rasmussen soon called, eager to be introduced to the young ladies and to discuss the scandal, which formed the sole subject of conversation in the neighborhood. While he had already made the acquaintance of the three headmistresses, he was unknown to several of the students. They cast curious glances in his direction, which then slid over to Miss Pffolliott, who sat in a corner, paying great attention to a pelisse she was engaged in altering.

Under the influence of these interested female eyes, Mr. Rasmussen expanded. He spoke of his estates, his travels, his friends in high places. He even, winking, hinted at conducting amours amongst the “ton,” the most fashionable set of people in England. Miss Winthrop and Miss Hopkins seemed willing to hear more, but Miss Quince soon quashed this subject of conversation, and so he reverted to the safer topic of well-known and well-born friends.

“Knew that fellow Baron Hardcastle, father of your young friend, Mr. Crabbe. Knew him well, in fact; I went to school with him. What a rascal!” And Mr. Rasmussen laughed uproariously and slapped his knee.

“Oh?” said Miss Quince in a chilly tone. “Then you are no doubt distressed at his current predicament.”

“Ah, well! It won't surprise anybody who ever met him that Hardcastle ended up in a deuced bad way. He always was a bit of a loose fish—no wonder then that he finds himself in hot water now! Pretty good, hey? Loose fish, hot water? What? What?” He laughed again. “And I expect the sons are no better than they should be either, hey? Personally, I shouldn't believe a word either of them said.” Here he paused to look around and judge the effect of his words. Never a man sensitive to nuance in human expressions, he continued, “Pair of rapscallions, I should think, and they've been found out now with a vengeance. No one will pay either of
them
any mind in the future.”

Miss Quince said, “No one, Mr. Rasmussen, save people of sense and observation, I suppose.
We
have been well impressed with
both
young gentlemen.”

Miss Franklin cleared her throat. “As to the character of Mr. Crabbe the elder, I have no complaint to make, other than to a certain levity and lack of serious thought. However, I do rather object to the behavior of Mr.
Rupert
Crabbe.”

The entire company regarded her with astonishment. Those who had thought about Miss Franklin and Mr. Rupert Crabbe at all had assumed that she, like Miss Asquith, must be in a state of deepest mourning at their absence.

Miss Hopkins, suspecting that revelations of an indelicate nature were about to be divulged, made an attempt to head Miss Franklin off. “You shall tell us about that presently, my dear,” she said. “But I wish we could change the subject for now . . . What say you to, er . . . telling us about the calculations you have been working on . . . Oh! I suppose we shall have to send Mr. Rupert Crabbe's telescope after him, shan't we, and then you will lose the use of it. How unfortunate for you!” Miss Hopkins, who considered Miss Franklin's calculations and her work with the telescope to be a monumental waste of time, was being less than honest here, but would much rather talk of the gentleman's telescope than of any failings of the gentleman himself.

“I am unable to refer to my calculations, or even to duplicate them using Mr. Rupert Crabbe's telescope,” Miss Franklin said. “Apparently, in the moments after reading the letter from his father's lawyer, he made arrangements with one of the maids to have his telescope conveyed to him at Yellering Hall. And then he pocketed the notebooks filled with my work and took them away with him as well.”

“But . . . but why should he do that?” demanded a stupefied Miss Winthrop.

“I expect he wanted to take credit for my discoveries,” said Miss Franklin. “And now, if you don't mind, I believe that I, too, will retire to my room.”

MISS ASQUITH, UPON
rising from her bed on the morrow, was all indignation and outraged friendship when she heard the tale of the perfidious Rupert Crabbe. The sheer effrontery of his actions was such that she almost agreed with Mr. Rasmussen that the entire Crabbe family was a band of knaves and rapscallions—but no, she could not think poorly of the elder brother, however wicked his relatives might be.

Miss Hopkins and Miss Winthrop refused to believe that Mr. Rupert Crabbe's carrying off seven or eight little booklets of Miss Franklin's notations could be anything other than an error—perhaps he had mistaken them for his own work. Miss Asquith, however, required no proof from Miss Franklin that it was a deliberate act. Everyone knew those little books of hers; she had been chaffed about them often enough, and in Mr. Rupert Crabbe's presence. He must know, as everyone did, that they were her astronomical observations and deductions.

“Really, Miss Franklin, Miss Asquith, I am afraid that you both think rather too highly of the value of these little experiments,” scolded Miss Winthrop. “Why should a clever young man such as Mr. Rupert Crabbe wish to trouble himself with a few notations by Miss Franklin?”

“Because clever young Mr. Rupert Crabbe was quite intelligent enough to recognize genius when he saw it,” retorted Miss Asquith. Remembering that she was a well-behaved and dutiful young gentlewoman, she added, “That is, if you please, Miss Winthrop.” She bobbed a quick, mollifying curtsy, then remarked, “No doubt he hopes to write a monograph and present it to the Royal Society using Miss Franklin's discoveries, claiming they are his own.”

“Oh, tosh!” said Miss Winthrop angrily. “What nonsense!” Miss Quince looked grave, but offered no opinion.

Miss Franklin said calmly, “I ought to have kept a better watch on them. He had picked up one or two earlier and did not return them, so I should have known. I did not anticipate his abrupt departure, or that he would act so decisively.” Then she sat down and began to make up a new little notebook, laying out the papers, folding them, and sewing the spine with neat, precise stitches, as though losing weeks of work did not matter to her.

“At least we have taught her to sew a straight seam,” murmured Miss Winthrop to Miss Hopkins. “If you recall what a hodgepodge her needlework was when she came here!”

Miss Asquith waited until the conversation had drifted to other topics and she and Miss Franklin were alone and unobserved in their corner. Then she said, “I do not wish to tempt you into the ‘slough of despond,' dear Miss Franklin, but surely you must feel
something
in this matter! I know that you were uncertain about Mr. Rupert Crabbe's true intentions, and it appears you were in the right
there
, as I was wrong. But, even if your vanity and your heart are untouched, you must feel dreadful about losing the documentation of so much patient thought and observation. If you desire not to speak of it, I will respect your wishes, but if it would ease your mind or heart to unburden yourself to me, I am entirely at your command.”

Miss Franklin was silent a moment. “You are very kind,” she began, and then, turning to study her companion with her large dark eyes, went on to say, “Yes, you
are
very kind, aren't you? It is rather unfair of you to be kind to me, you know, Miss Asquith. The behavior of Mr. Rupert Crabbe had convinced me that I was right to turn my back upon any hope of love or trust in humanity. I have been sitting here congratulating myself upon becoming insentient—on growing a carapace as hard and impervious as that of a tortoise. And here you are, insisting upon acting as my friend, caring about my sorrows and disappointments.” She shook her head. “You are undoing all the good that Mr. Rupert Crabbe's betrayal has done me. Perhaps I shall not be able to
quite
wall myself off from human affections. I shall have to leave one small chink in my armor open, for your friendship.”

Uncertain whether to laugh or weep at this unexpected reproach, Miss Asquith begged her to at least give the assurance that her heart was not blighted. “For I feel most dreadfully guilty at having encouraged you to expect a declaration from him. I was wrong, and I regret it bitterly.”

“I do not think you were wrong, Miss Asquith—your name is Emily, is it not? May I call you by it? Mine is Rosalind, and I hope you will so address me.”

“Oh, pray do! But what do you mean, Rosalind?”

“I believe he
had
in fact decided to make me an offer. My fortune is ample, and I suppose he assumed I would make a useful assistant in his scientific studies, in between bearing his children, managing his congregation, and sewing his shirts. If I should manage to make any discoveries worthy of publishing, he could always write them up and claim the credit, as it would have been his legal right to do.

“It was the news of his father's crime that caused him to abandon that plan. He knew my mother would never consent to a marriage with the son of a notorious gambler who had killed a man in a brawl. No, not even tho' he
was
the son of a peer of the realm. Perhaps,” she said with a slight smile, “Mama might allow me to marry the
elder
of the Crabbe brothers, he who will be the baron one day, but never a younger son, a clergyman who is apt to lose his position after all this scandal.”

Miss Asquith's hands twisted in her lap. “But you of course—”

Miss Franklin laughed. “Fear not! Even if I had had it in mind to be so faithless a friend, Mr. Crabbe the elder has never once looked at another woman so long as you were in the room. No, Mr. Crabbe and I should be unsuited to each other. It was only Rupert Crabbe I ever thought of.”

She sighed. “I will own, Emily, that my vanity, if not my heart, was touched. I wondered if I could subjugate my will to a man's, in return for the comfort of being a natural, a
normal
woman, and living the life of a wife and mother. Yet, while I could tell that he was considering making me an offer, I could not decide if there was any real affection in the impulse, or merely calculation. He valued me, yes: I am young, attractive, with considerable mental attainments and a substantial dowry. But I could not tell whether or not he loved me. Being genuinely loved would have compensated for some sacrifice of independence on my part.

“And then one day I lost one of my little booklets of calculations. I returned to the room where I had left it to find no trace of it. I recollected seeing Mr. Rupert Crabbe pick something up off the floor as I left the room, but when I taxed him with it, he denied finding a notebook.

“After that, I wondered. Some days later, I left another completed booklet where he might find it, and observed him from a place of concealment. He took it up, looked long at the work inside, and then secreted it upon his person. Again, he denied knowledge of its whereabouts. Mr. Rupert Crabbe's behavior in absconding with my other material does not surprise me at all. I assumed that, when once he had proposed and I had rejected him, he would do precisely that.”

“Then—then you were determined to refuse him? Of course you were, since he could act in such a low and duplicitous manner! But how strange that he should purloin your work like that when he had hopes for your future together! I do not understand it at all.”

“I believe I do. He could not be certain of me, you see. I did not behave with the deference he thought due to his sex and position. And so he sought to—I believe the term is ‘hedge his bets.' If I agreed to marry him, all well and good: he would have access to my work, both present and future, as well as to my fortune and my person. If I did not agree, he would at least have my formulae upon which he could base a learned paper, and thereby win himself a name.”

Miss Asquith could not help but smile a little at Miss Franklin's serene assumption that any paper based upon her formulae would of course result in renown and respect for its author. However, the fact that Mr. Rupert Crabbe had put himself to the trouble of stealing it rather lent weight to the assumption.

“But since you knew he was stealing your notebooks . . . ! Pray forgive me, Rosalind, but why did you not better guard them? How often have I observed you leaving them in a small heap on a table in the parlor! Will this not be a dreadful loss to you?”

Miss Franklin picked up a fan from the table next to her, discarded by one of the other young ladies, and began to thresh it back and forth in front of her face, which had the effect of shielding her expression from Miss Asquith's gaze.

“I did indeed invest a great deal of time, thought, and effort in those notebooks,” she admitted. “However, I have decided that, since I do not have access to a telescope of my own, it will be best if I shift my explorations from astronomy to a science that does not require such expensive equipment—at least until I get some control of my own money, that is. I had thought of botany, which merely requires a garden. I am much interested in the variability of species, and I might be able to do something with fast-growing plants that could be selected for some specific trait, you know, which would—”

Miss Asquith reached out and seized hold of her hand. “Pray stop waving that fan about, Rosalind. I cannot see you properly, and it is not
that
hot in this room. What was in those notebooks that Mr. Rupert Crabbe stole?”

“Observations on the orbit of Uranus,” Miss Franklin responded, “and a theory that certain perturbations in that orbit might indicate the existence of another planet beyond it in our system. The equations and the observations used to expound the theory, all of which are reported in the notebooks, would appear to bear it out.” She gazed wide-eyed at Miss Asquith.

Miss Asquith studied her face. “You say ‘
a
theory.' And the equations ‘would
appear
to bear it out.'” She frowned in concentration and then went on, watching Miss Franklin carefully. “No, I do not believe it can be a tarradiddle, a nonsense you made up to impose upon him. He is far too intelligent and knowledgeable in the discipline to be gulled by some rubbish you invented. So I see that you are quite truthful in saying that you spent a great deal of time and effort on those booklets, ensuring that they were convincing to an informed and powerful intellect. Then, in fact you do
not
believe that there are any planets out past Uranus?”

“Certainly I do,” responded Miss Franklin. “And if only I had regular access to a good lens, somewhat
larger
than Mr. Rupert Crabbe's, I should prove it.”

“Ah, I see! You would prove it,
if only you were given the opportunity
. But, as you have not had the opportunity, your notebooks do not in reality prove any such thing?”

Miss Franklin looked down at the fan, resting inert in her lap, a small smile flickering across her face.

“Perhaps there might be some errors in the pages of those notebooks,” she conceded. “One who is anxious for fame in scientific circles, who is unwilling to do the lengthy work of checking my observations and deductions,
might
be misled into believing that I had proof. However, I am sure that Mr. Rupert Crabbe would never be so foolish as to take the unsupported word of a mere woman and simply attempt to publish my findings as his own without extensive review.”

Miss Asquith regarded her in silence for a moment.

“Do you know, I am often thought to be rather daring in my attitudes and my manner. But I must say, my dear Rosalind, you quite outdo me. You
are
rather a devil, aren't you?”

Miss Franklin smiled, but said nothing.

“Very well. I shall not wrack my feelings on your account. You have lost nothing of worth and are heart-whole. Now, if only we could resolve the matter of Miss le Strange's necklace as satisfactorily as that, I should be much relieved, and fully
two-thirds
along the road toward perfect happiness.”

“Do you know—I had quite forgot—there is something about Miss le Strange I meant to tell you. I probably ought not to speak of it, however.”