A Fringe of Leaves (9 page)

The elder Mrs Roxburgh had not appeared at the wedding, which, conveniently, was ‘far too far’ a pity considering Aunt Triphena had insisted on standing by her niece to show that the girl came of a respectable, not to say substantial, family. The embarrassing question of whether to produce the father had been tactfully settled by nature when Dick was carried off by the drink. In fact, by giving Ellen a fright, it was more than anything Dick’s death which ensured that the ceremony would take place. Mr Roxburgh had caught her on the bounce, so to speak, after a renewal of their correspondence.

Aunt Tite had not been able to resist hinting at the bitter truth. Ellen, in her confusion, was ready to admit it, while none the less grateful to her pale, thin-legged stranger-lover descending from the coach, together with a second gentleman, his solicitor and friend, Mr Aubrey Daintrey. Mr Daintrey was the only member of the Roxburgh faction to attend the wedding and take stock of the background Mrs Tregaskis had provided. If he appreciated what he saw, he gave scarcely a formal sign. Mr Daintrey could not have been colder, steelier (steel with the slight tremor caused by inordinate tension) had he been acting as Mr Roxburgh’s second at a duel.

Aunt Tite, whose charity was only ever skin-deep, showed her generosity by choosing white satin and lace, with satin slippers and kid gloves, for her pauper niece. Hepzibah Tregaskis, as bridesmaid, wore rosebud pink which went with her pretty complexion. The bride, who had spent too much time in the fields, looked the swarthier for her white.

But Mr Roxburgh appeared enchanted. and Mr Daintrey the best man raised a few fairly unrestrained smiles.

Ellen hoped she would not cry. She would love her husband in accordance with what she was promising, and not only out of gratitude.

It was decided by Mr Roxburgh and his mother to defer the honeymoon, that the bride might be initiated without delay into the customs she was expected to adopt. So, from living isolated on a poor Cornish farm, Ellen Gluyas entered into temporary purdah in a Gloucestershire mansion, the family having moved from their original Winchester in the hopes that Mr Austin’s health might benefit by the mild climate and polite society at Cheltenham.

At least she rarely found herself alone: there was her gently admonishing mother-in-law; there were the servants. Most terrifying for Ellen Roxburgh was the maid who attended on her rising and her setting.

‘You should put yourself in her hands,’ old Mrs Roxburgh advised, with no more than an oblique glance at her newly acquired daughter-in-law. ‘Vetch will brush your hair, and help you to dress—and
un-dress
.’

‘But it is not what I’m used to,’ the younger Mrs Roxburgh protested. ‘And what shall I call her?
Vetch?
’

‘If that is her name, what else?’

‘But nothing more?’

The old woman preferred to ignore a question which embarrassed her by betraying ignorance of worldly manners in her son’s wife, or else a regrettable perversity, for old Mrs Roxburgh was not unaware that the girl’s mother had been Lady Ottering’s maid.

Vetch was a trim, sour, elderly person who performed her duties according to rule, perfectly no doubt, but with a coldness which disdained one who was imperfection itself.

Ellen Roxburgh learned to lean back and enjoy the hair-brushing; she allowed herself to be dressed and undressed; but on the first occasion when Vetch knelt to peel the stockings from her legs, she put out a hand to stay her.

‘Why, ma’am, I’m accustomed to do what any lady expects.’

‘But I do
not
expect it. I was never so inactive. And cannot bear anyone to touch my feet. They’re ticklish.’

Though she laughed to encourage her maid, Vetch failed to kindle; a lifetime of service seemed to have damped her responses to life.

Yes, her servants despised her, the young Mrs Roxburgh could tell; they suspected her of wanting them to re-admit her to a society she had forsworn without sufficient thought for the secrets she was taking with her.

Old Mrs Roxburgh, on the other hand, was convinced that this honest and appealing girl could never be admitted to hers except in theory, and her heart began to bleed for her. In an effort to make amends, the old woman relinquished a ruby necklace and a topaz collar. ‘Why should you not have and enjoy what will be yours eventually?’

These were the sweets; the gall was in the copybook, because the mother-in-law was of the opinion it were best to start at the beginning, ‘… considering that your hand is not what one would call cultivated.’

So she was put to forming pothooks and hangers, until coming upon her pupil without her knowledge, the old woman sensed from the tilt of the head and a hunched shoulder the indignity the girl was warding off. Accordingly, they skipped pothooks. She was promoted to simple copying, and invited to compile inventories of linen, plate, and furniture, in spite of the fact that there was no immediate call for such records.

Then there was the journal favoured by old Mrs Roxburgh as a source of self-knowledge and an instrument for self-correction.

20 Aug 1821

I will make a start today at writing in this clean book which I hope not to spoil because I owe it to Them. My life has become all starts in every quarter—and sometimes fits as well if I wld give way to them. I must not complane, I have evrything—a house excepting it is Theirs, his Mother lives in one wing but eats with us, she is very kind. I have cloathes aplenty, servants not all of them necessary or desirable, who do not speak unless spoken to and then not always. I have a Spanish jennet. Mr R. has presented me besides with a pair of finches in a cage, and my little pug Tip, she is merry as a cricket. I ride out in my green habit though not far, Mr R. will not allow it, or I drive my own pony car, or we are driven out Mrs R. and me in the carridge, or chaise if the weather is fair. Freinds greet us, most of Mrs R.’s age. We sometimes call at some grave house and are invited to take a glass of wine or dish of tay. Unless I am spoke to in strange houses I keep quiet for fear of what may jump out of my mouth. But will learn no doubt. They have give me books to read—Bishop Taylor’s
Sermons
and Miss Edgeworth, and the crib to the Latin poet that Mr R. most loves. Not being able to make much of any of it yet, I sit with my books more often than I read, and look at the toe of my shoe, or watch the wasps trying to get at the pears through the muslin bags, or my little pug to catch her tail. I wish I would dare go inside the kitchen to make some jam, I may yet, and read a book without my eyes ache …

She had been encouraged early to tell the truth, but found that truth did not always match what she was taught by precept or in church: it was both simpler and more complicated.

Her parents in the past, and now her husband and mother-in-law, expected more of her than they themselves were prepared or knew how to demonstrate. It had pained and puzzled her as a child, until as a girl she too began accepting that there are conventions in truth as in anything else. As a young wife and ‘lady’ she saw this as an expedient she must convert into permanence, and former critics were soon applauding her for observing the conventions they were accustomed to obey.

Moral approval is all very well. Ellen Roxburgh would have liked to shine, but in the circumstances, did so only fitfully. Once or twice on coming downstairs in ruby necklace or topaz collar, her hand accepting but languid guidance from the rail, she had sensed unwilling admiration in an apathetic, if not coolly hostile, servant. A housemaid dazzled out of her thoughts abandoned the scuttle she had brought to a neglected grate and fled behind the baize door. On another, more equivocal occasion, the butler looked up with what might have been interpreted as an expression of shock.

‘Did I startle you, Perkins?’ she asked with that mild indifference she had copied from those who knew how to use it better.

‘Not at all, ma’am. It struck me you were looking exceptionally well.’

Although triumphs of a kind, they were hardly salve for her worst wounds. A fashionable rout could become the scene of grievous torture where the truth was aimed when her back was turned. She was sometimes all but felled by what she overheard through an open doorway or under cover of an urn or column.

‘Mr Roxburgh is of excellent family, I am told.’ The lady visiting at Cheltenham might not have appeared to be fishing had her eyes not grown a glaze and the tips of her marabout plumes trembled in anticipation.

Mrs Daintrey the solicitor’s wife confirmed that Mr Roxburgh was ‘of an established and respected family’.

A gentleman had started making preparatory noises in his throat.

The visitor flicked her marabout afresh. ‘
Mrs
Roxburgh, I understand, is of quite humble origins.’

Mrs Daintrey moaned a little. ‘But is doing very nicely,’ she conceded out of friendship for her husband’s client.

‘In any case,’ the gentleman who had been preparing seized the opportunity, ‘the Roxburghs themselves were in trade a couple of generations ago.’

Stouter than ever in friendship, Mrs Daintrey cried, ‘But never behind the counter!’

‘And the brother?’

‘Ah, I cannot vouch for him.’ Mrs Daintrey sighed. ‘Very little is known—to me, at any rate—about Mr Garnet Roxburgh. Should we, perhaps, sample the ices?’

Mrs Roxburgh wrote in the journal which from being a virtue was becoming a vice:

… I would like to see my husband as perfect. I will not have him hurt. I am better able to endure wounds, and wld take them upon myself instead. Women on the whole are stronger because more knowing than men, for all the knowledge men lay claim to. We also learn to numb ourselves against suffering, whether of the body, or the mind …

To please and protect became Ellen Roxburgh’s constant aim; to be accepted by her husband’s friends and thus earn his approbation; to show the Roxburghs her gratitude in undemonstrative and undemeaning ways, because anything else embarrassed them. What she would not admit, or only half, was her desire to love her husband in a manner acceptable to them both.

Just as she was to learn that death was for Mr Roxburgh a ‘literary conceit’, so she found that his approach to passion had its formal limits. For her part, she longed to, but had never dared, storm those limits and carry him off instead of submitting to his hesitant though loving rectitude. ‘Tup’ was a word she remembered out of a past she had all but forgotten, in which her own passive ewes submitted, while bees flitted wilfully from thyme to furze, the curlew whistled at dusk, and night was filled with the badger’s chattered messages. She herself had only once responded with a natural ardour, but discovered on her husband’s face an expression of having tasted something bitter, or of looking too deep. So she replaced the mask which evidently she was expected to wear, and because he was an honourable as well as a pitiable man, she would refrain in future from tearing it off.

In the second year of their marriage she conceived.

… I am of course very happy and Mr R. is overjoyed. His brother Garnet has not got a child, and it is right that himself the elder brother shld pass on the name through a son and heir. (Provided it is this and not a disappointing
girl
!) The child will also
give a filip
, he says,
to our conversation
. I did not know we were in need of a go-between. But so it is!

Mrs Roxburgh miscarried after a fall from her Spanish jennet, and was forbidden to ride Dapple again; she must content herself with being driven. Even to those aware of the train of events, young Mrs Roxburgh did not look less handsome, if a trifle pale, in her violet silk, with the black, fringed pelerine. From carriage or chaise she returned her acquaintances’ greetings with no more than the degree of pleasure her situation called for; the plumes only slightly rippled in her great hat.

On days when she took little walks through the grounds her mother-in-law might accompany her. Grown infirm since the tragedy, old Mrs Roxburgh hung on her arm, trembled, and tottered. ‘I find it chilly, Ellen,’ she murmured. ‘Should we not go in?’

Alone, the younger woman sometimes roamed the house, discovering attics and cupboards hitherto unexplored, and which she doubted would ever be hers; she was to that extent bereft and restless. One evening as the light on the elms started to wane, she found herself scratching on an attic window with a diamond, as she had heard told it was possible to write. She printed on the glass
TINTAGEL
in bold, if irregular letters, and then was ashamed, or even afraid, for what she had done, though neither her husband nor her mother-in-law was likely to climb so high, and those who did would not connect the name with their mistress’s thoughts or any part of the real world.

Two years later Mrs Roxburgh again conceived, and this time bore a child, a perfect little boy, but who was with them so short a while, she did not even record his passing in her journal. By unexpressed agreement Mrs Roxburgh and her husband decided not to mention the incident again.

Nor did the grandmother dwell on it, unless obliquely. ‘Austin was the sickly child. Garnet was such a sturdy little fellow. I can see him in the firelight, sitting in front of that brass fender after Nurse had given him his bath. Brimful of life and health! Austin so pale. He developed a cough. I would not allow myself to think, because if I did, I would have believed he must die.’

On the table beside the old woman’s carved chair stood a miniature framed in a garland of gold leaves and pear-shaped pearls. ‘There, you see,’ she would invite her callers to admire more than once in the course of the same visit, ‘my two boys!’