A School for Brides (27 page)

Then Miss Mainwaring stooped and picked up the necklace. Miss le Strange took a step forward, as though to snatch it back.

“He
didn't
give them to you, did he?” said Miss Mainwaring in a low voice, without looking at her. “He became ill and you simply took them, believing that, as his fiancée, you deserved to have them.”

“Of course I did,” Miss le Strange replied through gritted teeth. “How was I to know they belonged to that little milksop?” White with fury, she turned to face her former pupil. “How glad I am that I shall never know the humiliation of being your stepmother. Your cad of a father has chosen to go back on his word of honor. I will bid you farewell—you'll not see me again. I leave for Wales in the morning.” Her back as rigid as that of an offended cat, she stalked from the room, only saying to Mrs. Fredericks as she passed, “I require an escort back to the dower house.
Not
that dreadful Robert—I want another servant to see me safely there.”

Mr. Rasmussen, observing this drama openmouthed, hastened after her. “Do allow
me
, Miss le Strange! I say, you are a remarkable woman, a very remarkable woman indeed! What style, what
panache
! Oh, my heart!”

Miss le Strange lifted haughty eyebrows, but assented, and the two departed the Castle in a much more sedate and seemly manner than they had entered it.

Miss Mainwaring took her friend's arm and pulled her away from the tight knots of people discussing recent events.

“Here, my dear,” she said. “Let me help you put on your lovely necklace.” She gently removed the gauzy wraps around Miss Crump's head so that she could slip the blazing string of crimson stones around her neck. “Come and see how it looks.” She led Miss Crump to one of the mirrors that reflected and amplified the candlelight in the room. “You are magnificent!” she said. “Now, you must leave off the scarf—it quite spoils the effect of the necklace. You've never worn it before, have you?”

Miss Crump shook her head.

“Why, this is the perfect night to wear it for the first time. To toast the departure of Miss le Strange, and, of course”—here Miss Mainwaring could not stop her voice wobbling with emotion—“to celebrate your engagement.”

A large tear brimmed in Miss Crump's eye, reflecting the scarlet of the rubies. Slowly, it traced a course down her cheek and landed on the necklace.

“Now, now, you silly thing, you mustn't cry! Everything has turned out for the best,” Miss Mainwaring scolded.

“But—but I only said yes to Mr. Hadley in order to get away from Miss le Strange,” wailed Miss Crump. “Now that she is going to go away and I shall never see her again,
must
I marry him and go to live in his horrid house?”

Miss Mainwaring laughed and wrapped her arms around her little friend. Tears started up in her eyes as well.

“No, my dearest, you shall not, not if you do not want to. It is the lady's privilege to change her mind. Mr. Hadley could not, not without opening himself up to censure, but
you
may do so at any moment up until the ceremony. Come, I will help you. Do not fret; I feel certain I can explain it to him so that he will harbor no resentment toward you at all. You need say nothing—I will tell him you have reconsidered.”

And tugging an embarrassed and distressed Miss Crump behind her, she sought out Mr. Hadley. Judging by the expression on that gentleman's face as she talked, it would be possible to conclude that the news did not quite break his heart.

EVIDENTLY, MRS. FREDERICKS
was right: a young girl in love needs a ball like a flower needs the sun and the rain. By the conclusion of the Crooked Castle ball, four out of the eight students at the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy were engaged, either formally or informally.

Miss Evans, of course, being a sensible, level-headed young woman, had required no outside assistance to obtain her happiness. However, three proposals of marriage were issued and accepted during the festivities, and while none of these three couples could formally announce their plans until relatives could be contacted and made to take an interest in the lives of their daughters, there was much whispering and merriment in the students' bedrooms that night, and for many nights afterward.

A happy marriage confers a great advantage upon all members of the union: the wife, the husband, and any children in their care. It is not essential for fulfillment in life; both sexes may live singly and be well satisfied with their lot. And not every marriage is happy; many married people must seek their contentment elsewhere. Yet where a sturdy bond
does
grow up between a wedded pair it becomes a source of strength and joy their whole lives through. These four young women likely stood as good a chance at that happiness as any; they married not only for love or expediency, but also for liking and respect.

Miss Pffolliott still had cause to fret for the immediate future. At the end of Wolfie's mad dash across the country and into the ballroom, he lay down by her side and promptly fell into such a deep sleep that he could not be roused to go home. Miss Pffolliott spent an unsettled night alternating between rejoicing at the state of affairs between Mr. Godalming and herself and fearing for the life and well-being of her dog. Mrs. Fredericks, whose dog, Fido, was very dear to her and who therefore understood Miss Pffolliott's feelings, gave orders that the giant beast—who had, after all, rid the community of two pestilential characters—was to be left to slumber undisturbed in the midst of her great hall. The servants were thus forced to tiptoe around his massive body to clear away the chairs and tables and dirty crockery, whispering in order to avoid awakening him. Mr. Godalming called early the next morning at the Castle (far earlier, in fact, than the residents of the castle might have preferred after such a night), and was able to bring a revived Wolfie back to his mistress. He appeared to be none the worse for having had a good night's sleep, and no one ever guessed that Miss le Strange had meant to kill him.

The news Miss Pffolliott eventually received about her father was less favorable. Friends of Mr. Pffolliott expressed shock that his daughter was unaware that he had died several years before. His lawyer was assumed to have informed her, and to have settled her deceased parent's estate upon her. Upon investigation, it became clear that by now there was no estate to settle; it had been spent by the lawyer, who was discovered to be no lawyer at all.

However, as the fortune passed down to Miss Pffolliott by her grandparents was quite adequate and Mr. Godalming's income considerably more than adequate, and as Mr. Pffolliott had hardly been a doting father, she could not summon up much grief on his account. The excitement of inspecting her future home and the planning of her wedding pushed unpleasant thoughts from her mind.

Miss Mainwaring's happiness took a little longer to achieve. Mr. Hadley's father, while forced to accept that his son's proposal to the wealthy and well-born Miss Crump had met with no success, was still opposed to his marriage to a niece of Mr. Fredericks. After a good deal of prodding by Mrs. Fredericks, her husband managed to arrange a business deal that greatly benefited the senior Mr. Hadley. This produced a softening, and by the next spring, when Miss Mainwaring had achieved her seventeenth year, the young couple was able to join hands in matrimony, leaving after the ceremony to travel to the groom's home in the Lake District, that scenic, but decidedly damp, region in the west of England.

Miss Crump
was
coaxed into visiting them at Rowehaven. Her friend, now Mrs. Hadley, also managed to convince her that she could go bareheaded from time to time without any dire consequences. As Mrs. Fredericks had had the foresight to send a servant after Miss le Strange and Mr. Rasmussen the night of the ball to take possession of the rest of the Ramsbottom rubies, Miss Crump was sometimes also persuaded to wear the entire parure in their ballroom, to the amazement of her friends and connections. She gained in poise through her friendship with the couple and, while she would always be reserved, eventually reached a level of assurance enabling her to express a clear preference for either baked fish or fowl when interrogated by an unfamiliar footman at the dinner table.

The publication of a paper on the subject of
Perturbations of the Orbit of Uranus
by one Rupert Crabbe occasioned a little arid amusement on the part of Miss Franklin when a fundamental error in the calculations was pointed out. The paper was scathingly reviewed, and the Reverend Mr. Rupert Crabbe thereafter abandoned the writing of scientific papers in favor of composing sermons for his congregation promoting honesty and fair dealing.

Miss Franklin soon took over the entire care and direction of the school greenhouse, having proved to the satisfaction of Cuthbert the gardener that she could produce both scientific data
and
exceptionally large and succulent fruits and vegetables for the consumption of the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy. She began working on a theory of inherited traits as demonstrated in scarlet runner beans, and became so immersed in this study that she almost never looked up at the stars again, save occasionally on a frosty, clear night in winter.

Her prediction about the parental response to the Asquith-Crabbe engagement was accurate. Miss Asquith's father calculated that the personal habits of the current Baron Hardcastle made it unlikely he would live much longer, and after his death he and his crime would be forgotten. On the other hand, the idea that he, Angus Asquith, gin distiller, might someday be grandfather to a peer of the realm filled him with glee. He gave his consent without a murmur and congratulated his daughter on a remarkably clever coup.

Baron Hardcastle had flattered himself that he would have free play with his daughter-in-law's fortune soon after the wedding, but somehow or other he never seemed to receive more than just enough to enable him to live like a gentleman. How this could be he never knew, but it did not turn him against that young lady; she knew exactly how to amuse and cajole him so that he quite forgot his grievance. He always went contentedly home after a visit to his son's establishment.

Miss Asquith had proposed that Mr. Crabbe hire Robert, as she feared she would miss him dreadfully when she went away. However, Mr. Crabbe protested that the last thing he required in his household was an exceptionally handsome and saintly footman to whom his future wife was devoted. Robert therefore remained on at the school. He took on the role of a butler in time, and married Annie the chambermaid, who was an excellent cook and a fine woman.

The headmistresses of the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy now had a much diminished list of pupils. They applied to friends and relatives for referrals and, by spring, found themselves with six new pupils, for a total of
ten
young ladies, all of whom were to be equipped with some knowledge of geography, French, Italian, mathematics, and some decorative and artistic skills that would enable them to procure a husband.

Their relatives did not seem to have noticed they had sent them to a corner of England with almost
no
eligible bachelors. Even Mr. Godalming was no longer single, but married and looking forward to the birth of a son or daughter by midsummer.

“Mark my words,” said one Miss Susanna Billings to her fellow pupils one day, when the fact that most of the inhabitants of Lesser Hoo were married couples, maiden ladies, or farmers eking out a bare existence had finally sunk in. “If something drastic is not done,
none
of us shall ever marry!”

FIN

AUTHOR'S NOTE

THE BOOK FROM
which the opening quotation is taken (
The Watsons
, by Jane Austen) was never completed. It has five chapters, was begun in 1803, and was abandoned sometime in 1805.

The character of Miss Rosalind Franklin is named in tribute to the real Rosalind Franklin, who lived in the mid-twentieth century and was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer. Overcoming parental prejudices to become a scientist, she made major contributions in several areas of this almost exclusively masculine field before dying of cancer at the age of thirty-seven. Her X-ray photographs of DNA brought her very close to solving the mystery of its structure. While she was producing these images, Maurice Wilkins, a scientist working in the same lab on a different project, showed the photographs without her knowledge or permission to a rival team of scientists. They quickly used the information so gained to publish their own conclusions. The three men, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, later received the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Perhaps they might have eventually come to the same conclusion without her work, but on the other hand, she might have scooped them all—we'll never know. In any case, this is all too typical of the treatment women of intellect and accomplishment have received throughout history.

There
were
women working in the sciences in the nineteenth century, and they were not often granted the respect that they deserved. Mary Anning would have been close to the age of Miss Rosalind Franklin in
A School for Brides
. An uneducated child of the lower classes, she assisted her father in the collection of fossils to be sold to tourists in their seaside town of Lyme Regis. She was soon classifying her finds and offering many insights into the lives of these extinct animals. She discovered the first ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons, and the first English pterosaur. As a woman, she could not join the Geological Society and rarely received formal credit for her discoveries, although she was known worldwide in geological circles for the breadth and depth of her knowledge. The extreme danger of fossil collecting (the best time was in winter, when the unstable cliffs were subject to landslides) would have made it a nearly impossible career for an upper-class woman like my character Miss Franklin.

Miss Franklin was, of course, correct. There
is
another planet beyond Uranus. Neptune was discovered in 1846.