Jennie About to Be (2 page)

Last was a little drawstring bag of claret velvet. She unknotted the ties and poured out among the blanket folds thirty gold sovereigns. Each of the girls had received, through William, such a gift from their father, who had nothing else much that was tangible to leave them. There had been a note with each gift, every note different from the others, but the message was the same. The sovereigns were not to be frittered away on foolish luxuries, but were to be used for some great and urgent need of either the flesh or the spirit, and this need was to be soberly considered before money was spent on it.

Young Sophie's note had admonished her to wait until she was twenty-one, which gave her six years for turning over great and urgent needs and discarding them. Jennie had no idea what Sylvia would consider suitable; William was not badly off, or he'd never have been able to keep hunters. Whatever Ianthe did with her hoard, Jennie wasn't likely to know unless she used some of it to come home. She had gone to London with the repectable young widow, who then went mad over a great but immoral (and married) pianist, and now she had run off to Switzerland with him to bear his child. They had taken Ianthe and the other children along.

Sylvia had lamented, but William was pragmatic. “Ianthe, incorruptible herself, will exert a positive moral influence over those children, my dear. So she is necessary there, and besides, she'll be seeing a good bit of beautiful country. If anything should go very wrong, she now has money of her own; she won't be stranded in a penniless condition.”

Neither will I be
, Jennie thought now.
I am going to run away, and if that, dear Papa, isn't a great and urgent need, what is
?

She put the sovereigns back in the claret velvet bag, locked it in the keepsake chest, and put that away on top of the armoire. She tucked the key in the needle case and promised herself that whenever she arrived at her destination, she would untangle all the cottons and silks and keep her workbox incredibly neat for the rest of her life.

Then she went to her window and opened it to the damp, mild morning. The air was reasonably fresh because not too many fires had been lighted yet. She had to lean out a good way to see into the square; her room was on the side of a corner house, facing across a narrow street to a row of tall windows kept primly curtained at all times except when the maids did the rooms. All she knew of the people there was that the cook kept a cat. This large tabby now sat on the wall by the high gate that opened into the mews, and watched the sparrows that chattered and picked in the street. The blackbird went on singing overhead.

The square was empty in the misty sunrise until the baker's boy came to it as if to a stage that had been waiting for him; the blackbird provided the overture, and now the boy's whistle joined the bird's. Alone in the world as far as he was concerned, for this moment he was a free and happy soul.

Between him and the blackbird Jennie was jolted from composure, born of decision, into agony. Now she was frantic to escape; she suffered physically, her throat constricting, her lips parching. Her heart missed beats. She hadn't known that anything could be worse than her first homesickness last autumn and through the London winter, when the city seemed to crouch palpitating and helpless in an everlasting ranksmelling fog.

But to see that boy
free
out there, to hear the blackbird and know how the north looked on such a morning! It wouldn't be spring there yet; there could still be savage gales off the North Sea, and late snows, and the worry over the early lambs. But if it should be fair up there today, the sea would be cornflower blue to the horizon, the wet sands would be all a dazzle, and the sun laying a bloom of gold on the ancient bricks. You'd be looking for the first snowdrops in the orchard with old Nelson nudging you between the shoulder blades and trying to get his nose into your pockets. You'd be expecting the day when the swallows came and the hills first showed a green as transparently fine as silk gauze. The gulls sounded different these mornings, too. There was always at least one somewhere on the Grange rooftop.

That's where she was going when she found out where in London one took the stagecoach to the north. She and Aunt Higham had been delivered directly to Brunswick Square by the post chaise hired for the journey. Her ignorance about travel was the only obstacle. Once she knew where to go, she would have to decide how to get there and how to leave the house when everyone was otherwise engaged. She considered simply telling her aunt that she was going, and at the prospect a disturbance in her stomach compounded her other discomforts. She concentrated on the sight of Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, in the morning light; lying across the water like a part of Atlantis risen radiant from the sea, with the gulls crying welcome.

She wouldn't go to the Grange, of course, except later to visit, if she could bear that. William and Sylvia would welcome her. Her sovereigns would pay her way, and she could make herself useful to everyone until she could find a situation.

When it came to that, William might agree to helping her get to Switzerland, perhaps convoyed by some earnest young embryo clergyman escorting his mother to Geneva. Ianthe wrote that other musicians, poets, and artists occasionally came to stay, some with their wives and children, some with their mistresses and children. English or Scottish governesses were much desired, but they were inclined to depart without notice when improper approaches were made to them or—more commonly—their wages weren't paid for months. Ianthe's employer was conscientious about pay, her lover was faithful, and Ianthe was having the time of her life.

“If I could just be on the spot when one of those governesses left!” Jennie said. “Oh, Lord!”

S
HE COULDN'T
fault her aunt and uncle; they were doing what they considered their duty. Her young cousins liked her, and to lessen her sense of dependency she was teaching them, by her father's methods. Between lessons, and sometimes during, she entertained them with exhilarating tales of her growing up, which both nourished and alleviated her homesickness.

On the surface there was no reason why this state of affairs couldn't remain in balance for a time, her aunt taking her about in society while the children profited from her tutoring. But the tacit understanding was that she would be married, or at least betrothed, as soon as possible. If the Highams were doing their duty, her duty was also clear. Charlotte, for whom this room had been especially furnished, had no doubt whatever that she'd be in it by her seventeenth birthday, though she was a gentle child and didn't complain about being kept in the nursery now.

“I owe it to Lottie to go away,” said Jennie virtuously. She rose from her knees and shut the casement on both the boy's and the bird's whistling. “Uncle and Aunt Higham needn't reproach themselves with anything. They will have done their best. One cannot ask for more.”

She put away the old robe and slippers and got back into bed. Her body strained so hard to be gone that her heart raced as if she were running. She picked up her volume of Mr. Wordsworth's poems and began to read his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The eloquently simple lines gave dignity to her sadness.

From Aunt Higham's viewpoint the scheme should have been working well by now. The girl was educated, a disadvantage which might have been transcended if she'd had even a modest fortune, but she had only a pittance from her mother, just enough to keep her in hairpins and ribbons. However, she had good country manners, nothing artificial or simpering. She had fine, clean-cut features, she was naturally graceful without having attended deportment classes, and she liked to dance. She was thin but healthy. She had no monthly pains and vapors, a benefit which would cancel out the financial drawbacks if a man was looking for a strong young woman of good stock to give him heirs.

“You'll make a fine wife if you know enough when to hold your tongue,” her aunt told her. “You'll get nowhere with that saucy way of yours! You frighten a man, asking him what he thinks of this poet or that philosopher. George Vinton stares as if he can't believe his ears. ‘Does God exist?' I thought he'd strangle!”

“I asked him theological questions, suitable for a curate,” said Jennie. “He must have studied Emmanuel Kant at Cambridge.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said her aunt. “Anyone would think you were trying to drive him and the rest off. Save that bluestocking talk until you've married the man and the first one's on the way. Then he'll run from you only as far as Almack's or Newmarket, and he'll always come home again.”

“What sort of curate would go to Almack's or Newmarket?” Jennie pondered aloud.

“George Vinton will have some money when his mother goes, and he has the reversion of a very fine living when his uncle dies. You'd be the mistress of a bigger rectory than William's, and close to a cathedral town, too, with great chances of preferment for George.” It tasted good to Aunt Higham. “I will thank God if Charlotte has such a chance offered her.”

“I think George would be willing to wait for her,” Jennie suggested.

“Fustian!” her aunt snapped. “You're the one to be married off first. A woman like you could make George Vinton go far. He needs a strong hand. But you'll have to keep your heretical thoughts to yourself and not go questioning the existence of God in ecclesiastical circles.”

“I was only trying to stir George up,” Jennie explained. “He was sitting there looking quite torpid.”

“More like a bird hypnotized by a snake,” her aunt said dryly.

“Anyway, I don't question God's existence. Only His motives.”

“Oh, Lord!” Her aunt rolled her eyes toward the plaster wreaths on the ceiling. She shook her head. But her mouth twitched at one corner. “You're a good lass, Jennie, and you were always my favorite, for you look the most like my sister. You're an Everden far more than any of my children are. You have her way of holding yourself, the long neck and the tilt of the head. And of laughing. When I see you dancing, if it weren't for the difference in fashion I'd think it was Isabel.”

It was an astonishing speech to come from Aunt Higham, and she stood up quickly, as if she repented instantly this gush of emotion. Jennie stood, too, and her aunt gave her a hard pat on the shoulder. “There's more than George, you know, my girl, and the choice has to be yours. But don't be like the poor soul who went all the way through the woods looking for the right stick and had to pick up a crooked one at last.”

“And remember to keep my tongue behind my teeth.”

“Aye, remember that,” her aunt said. “
I
had to.”

Keeping one's mouth shut was not a Hawthorne trait. Free speech had been one of the few luxuries possible for the Hawthorne girls. Raising his daughters in an old house entailed on him without any money to go with it, their widowed and scholarly father had decided that about all he could do for his girls was to give them the best education possible and allow them to run what some called wild.

The elderly, unorthodox scholar had also found it cheap and practical to let them ride, roam the sands and marshes, and climb the hills in nankeen pantaloons, short jackets, and boys' boots until they were thirteen or so, saving their frocks and slippers for special occasions.

Thus they had had exceptional freedom. It was his gift to those whom society would cage soon enough. He thought it was a dreadful world which penalized a human being for being born a female, and his girls' condition as adults would not be bettered by their having been reared in ignorance and trained to a false and hobbling docility.

Therefore, Jenny had not the best training for being a demurely marriageable lass in her aunt's house. To her there was something degrading in being beautifully dressed and having one's hair done by a maid so that one could be paraded like a mare or a heifer at an auction.

Besides, she hadn't seen anyone yet with whom she could bear to think of sharing the marriage bed.

“It's rather wonderful with someone you love,” Sylvia had told her after a month of William. “It makes you understand John Donne better, too. But I'd abhor doing it with someone I
didn't
love.” She shuddered. “One might just as well be a light woman, except that she'd be paid for it, and a wife isn't.”

The parson adored Sylvia, and she was complacent in her own right. If you made a man fall in love with you, the advantage wasn't all to him. William said he had resented God's taking away his first wife but forgave Him when He sent Sylvia to him. Jennie forbore telling him that God had nothing to do with it; Sylvia had had her eye on him since she was fifteen, and even now Jennie couldn't be sure that when Sylvia had knelt beside her bed, looking as devout as Desdemona before Othello fell upon her with that pillow, she hadn't been praying for the parson's wife to be painlessly removed by the time Sylvia was old enough to marry him.

In spite of Papa's theories, Sylvia believed stubbornly in a gruff but benign Personage, someone like Papa, only more glorious, who inclined His ear unto her and heard her cry. This was a useful attribute for a parson's wife.

But if Sylvia knew what Jennie now knew, she would be hard put to make excuses for her God.

She knew now, for instance, that outside the pleasant crescents and squares, the parks where the Quality rode, the theaters and ballrooms, there lay the filthy warrens of a destitution and vice she hadn't believed could exist; she wouldn't have known now except for the little girl who used to light the fires and black the grates.

She'd hopelessly and helplessly wept at her chore one morning, blinded with the tears that wouldn't stop flowing from her swollen eyes, not able to keep her nose from running. Jennie caught her at it, dried the child's eyes, made her blow her nose on one of the new handkerchiefs, and heard in broad Cockney, made almost unintelligible by the hiccuping sobs, the story of the mother dying in childbirth after the father had beaten her, and of his attempts to violate his own daughter. Now she was terrified for fear-she wouldn't give satisfaction here and would be sent back; one of the maids had spoken sharply to her this morning.