Air and Angels (6 page)

‘Kitty?’

She looks over, towards
the courts.

‘They have so much energy!’

The girls do not play well but they play with tremendous enthusiasm, flinging themselves about in every direction after the most hopeless of balls, to shrieks and peals of laughter.

‘You have not been watching as carefully as I have.’

Eleanor Moorehead follows her companion’s gaze, to where one of the handsomest of the young officers is standing, viewing
the game.

‘He has been all eyes for Kitty.’

‘What nonsense!’

‘Well, I shouldn’t dismiss him, he is very highly thought of. His name is Penderly and he is a viscount.’

‘And Kitty is a child. No young man should be looking at her at all.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, my dear, Kitty has not noticed.’

‘I should hope not. If he does not turn away soon, I shall have to go over and speak to him.’

But as
she says it, several more young men arrive, and he does move, to join them.

‘There – not so much as a backward glance. So that is that.’

‘Well, she will have plenty of rivals after tomorrow. The Fishing Fleet is due.’

‘Oh, that is such a vulgar expression.’

‘Accurate, nevertheless.’

The women smile. Marjorie Marchmont has only sons, and so is blessedly free of the problems of finding eligible
young men for daughters to marry. For that is the purpose of the return of the Fishing Fleet of young women, come out from England for the winter to visit their parents, and in the hopes of making a good catch.

‘Of course, there is no harm in having a girl marry and settle rather young.’

‘Now here they are, all hot and excited, and you are to stop this talk.’

I am being teased, thinks Eleanor,
and I cannot take it, not about Kitty. And looking at her as she comes up, flushed and with her hair all anyhow says, oh, but she is quite beautiful. And her heart almost stops.

‘Child, child, now sit down quietly and have some tea, you are steaming like a pony and it is not at all becoming.’

Kitty laughs and sits down at her mother’s feet in a cloud of white muslin and shining hair.

‘It is
all so much
fun
for you girls nowadays.’

Kitty stares at Mrs Marchmont. But says politely after a moment, ‘Oh yes, of course, it is great fun.’ Yet the life seems suddenly to have gone out of her and her eyes are far away.

In the notebook that lies beside her, Miss Hartshorn has written:

Poems referring to Childhood

Poems founded on the Affections

Poems of the Imagination

The Period of …

Here, she has laid her pen down. It is quiet. There is only the soothing play of the fountain, some distance away. She feels more relaxed and more accepting of this place and of her own being here than ever before. She supposes it has to do with her decision. (For she is to leave, though neither Sir Lewis and Lady Moorehead, nor Kitty, yet know it. She has only written of it to her friend in Warwickshire.)

She has almost fallen asleep. From the kitchens, a gentle, rhythmic crooning, like an ayah’s lullaby for a baby. But there is no ayah and no baby, it is the cook’s old, blind grandmother, who sits outside all day, rocking herself and alternately dozing and singing.

And the singing weaves itself into the half-dream Amelia Hartshorn is having and is aware that she is having, and gradually, even
the continual alarm bell that has gone on ringing deep within her without pause ever since she arrived in India is, if not stilled, at least grown so muffled and faint that she feels safe enough to pay it no attention.

Then there is something. The slightest sound. A shadow falling across the grass. She opens her eyes. And it is as though she has been turned to ice or stone, with fear.

The syce
stands a yard or two away from her. He has come up, barefooted, soft as a panther.

Her mouth and throat are paralysed.

All of her horror and loathing of India, her revulsion from its sights and sounds and smells, and everything she has ever heard and believed about it, every rumour, whisper, story, superstition, rises up within her like a terrible bile. Only, because she is paralysed, it sticks
in her gullet and cannot be vomited out.

His eyes are upon her intently; and yet somehow, not quite upon her. She sees a glaze over them, and a wildness in them. She remembers the times she has spoken to him sharply, imperiously even. Though it has only been in brave imitation of those around her, as she has tried desperately to behave in the proper way, even while knowing that it will never
be natural to her. For she, too, is in the position of a servant, and the servants know it.

The garden is silent. The singing has stopped.

The man stands absolutely still, and now, she sees that he has something in his hand, a stick or a club. She stares in fascination at his long, brown, naked foot, which is slightly raised, as though he is about to step forward, wonders, in a strangely tranquil
way, if this is to be her last sight on earth, this one man’s foot, on the grass of Calcutta. For surely he means to kill her. His body quivers with intent.

Yet they are in the open, outside the house, and it is broad daylight.

But there is no one about, and the shutters are closed. She imagines hidden eyes, gleaming between the chinks. Perhaps they know. Perhaps it has been long planned.

All this goes through her head in the frozen instant before the syce leaps, lunges, his arm raised, and brings the wooden club hard down. She hears the slight swish through the air.

Behind her head, the snake drops from the verandah, stone dead onto the grass.

The man grins, a great, white grin of triumph, and pleasure.

FOR MORE than a week it had rained, the river was swollen and running fast, the Backs and the towpaths became flooded.

So that it was quite easy for the girl to wade into the water and drown, a little before midnight.

The body was found at dawn, by a ferryman. It was caught by the dress in the waters below the mill, and washed to and fro, and the dress clung close to the girl when the grappling
hooks dragged her to shore, and clung, too, to the swelling of the child that was within her.

She had been the daughter of a drayman, living in a yard at the back of Silver Street, as the local newspaper, to Mrs Gray’s edification, reported.

Georgiana and Florence were in the breakfast room writing appeal letters, the whole table had been cleared and given over to it.

But Alice had brought
a tray of tea and buttered biscuits, and the evening paper, which made an excuse for a respite.

And so, reading the paragraph over Georgiana’s shoulder, Florence reached out and tapped it with her finger.

‘It is for
that
,’ she said with passion, ‘it is so that poor, wretched girls do not have to do that in their desperation.
That
is why we are here, and why we must raise the money.’

For the
general response of the Committee to the house in the country, had been rather negative. And now they themselves were growing weary of writing the ingratiating letters, with the endless rain pattering on the windows. The room was stale, it did not seem to have come fully light all day.

Georgiana asked, ‘How is Mrs Gray?’

‘Oh, Mother has gone to visit some poor old woman in the cottage hospital.
She is dying I think. Her husband was one of the college butlers, in their day. And then she is to pay a call on some newlyweds, just returned from their honeymoon tour – Vita Phipps’s daughter. She will enjoy that. She will
scrutinise
them!’

‘Then you will stay for supper?’

They looked at one another, and the glance held for a moment.

But Florence only said, ‘Thank you’ very smoothly. ‘That
would be pleasant.’

‘Well, it would mean no need for any more interruptions. We can go on with the letters until just before.’

‘Yes,’ Florence said. ‘So we can.’

But she stared out of the window and made no move to sit down at the table once more.

They had been watching the Painted Bunting, which had head fathers of a clear and most exquisite blue. It had come forward to sit on a branch very
close to them.

But now, Florence had left the conservatory and was standing again in the study.

‘But it is here,’ she said softly, gesturing around her, at the frames of drawings, one below the other, on the walls, ‘that your real love lies.’

Thomas stood in the doorway. ‘The sea-birds. Yes.’

‘And is your catalogue near to completion?’

‘Oh, no. It will take me years, it is a life’s work.
Especially as, of course, it is
not
my life’s work, properly speaking.’

‘Only that of your heart.’

He smiled.

‘It is the names,’ she said. ‘They have such beautiful names.’

And went along, reading them out aloud in her strong voice.

‘Fulmar. Shearwater. Cormorant. Avocet. Turnstone. Kittiwake.’

‘But then, of course, “spoonbill, gannet, shoveler, scaup and loon”.’

She inclined her head,
smiling.

Thomas crossed the room, and opened one of the chests.

‘Look at these. They are new to me, they came from London quite recently.’

The portfolio, tied with black tape at all four corners, contained several dozen water-colours, of the whole sea-bird placed centrally, and sketched in around it, details of wing and beak, nest and egg and individual feather, together with a silhouette of
the bird in flight. They were delicate, painstaking, opalescent in the beauty of the pale colours and fragile pencil lines.

Georgiana, stepping into the room, saw the two of them, framed together, heads bent, beside the lamp, and would have turned away again, leaving them alone. But seeing her, Thomas stepped back and gestured to her to come, and so the picture was broken.

She said, ‘You have
never shown these to me.’

‘No.’

And she saw him as a boy again, sailing out with Collum O’Cool, the sea-birds soaring and swooping overhead around the boat, saw her brother looking up at them, the joy open on his face.

Coming in that evening, he had joined them at dinner without demur, and been more than civil. The talk had grown quite lively. Florence always listening to him with careful attention,
before startling him by some remark.

But he respects her now, Georgiana thought.

He went to the bookshelf, and took out his copy of John Clare’s notebooks, and now he read aloud from them, as they stood looking at him, his voice soft with pleasure.

The bittern, called here around the butter bump, from the loud noise resembling that word, haunts Whittlesea Mere, lays in the reed shaws. About
the size of the heron. Flyes up right into the sky morning and evening, and hides all day.

‘It is all very fine to play the scientific scholar.’ He looked down in reverence at the book. ‘John Clare was not a scholar. But I would give my arm to set it down as he does. And yet it is clear.’ He tapped the page. ‘The observations are exact. It is all here.’

Passion, Florence thought, hearing him.
It is simply that. And at that moment, completely understood and respected him, and recognised the truth about him, too.

LEWIS AND Eleanor, late at night.

‘She says she had been planning to leave in any case. She had intended to tell us quite soon, but now, of course, she wants to go at once. By the next available boat.’

‘That is the shock. I daresay she will see things differently in a day or so.’

‘You really must take it seriously, Lewis. She is quite adamant.’

‘But these things happen in India every day.
And after all, she is perfectly all right. Sadu saved her life.’

‘She knows that. But she says that she has hated it – India – everything about it and the life here, from the very beginning. She says she is terrified.’

‘Shock. Shock and hysteria.’

‘We cannot oblige her to stay. Oh, it is all very difficult. She has really tried so hard with Kitty, tried to find things to interest and stimulate
her. She says Kitty is far cleverer than she knows.’

‘Perhaps …’

‘Yes?’

‘If things had been different. If Kitty had stayed at school in England … But it is too late to repine about that now.’

‘Oh, it was my fault, I know that.’

‘My dear, I am not saying so. You know I have never blamed you.’

‘I was the one who couldn’t bear to be parted from her, who took her all the way Home and brought
her straight back again.’

Kitty had been eight years old. They had stayed in a quiet house on the Sussex coast for three months, and looked at school after school until, at last, one had seemed to suit. Eleanor had quite made up her mind. Only to realise, the day before Kitty’s first term was to have begun, and when she herself was packed ready to return, that she could not possibly leave the
child there. Nor could she herself have stayed. Other women did that, chose the children and abandoned their husbands, to a bleak life of work, the club, polo, for years upon end.

But Eleanor had cared too much about her marriage. And too much about her child, and so, had chosen them both. She and Kitty had travelled back to India joyfully together, and shortly afterwards, the procession of governesses
had begun.

‘There is no question of anyone’s being to blame. You did what you felt was right.’

‘And you?’

‘If it had been a son … but Kitty has done very well, and I adore having her with us, you know that.’

‘But now?’

‘Now … I imagine she will have outgrown a governess altogether before very long, so perhaps it does not greatly matter. Her mind will be full of other things.’

‘Yes. Tennis
parties and gymkhanas and … and
chat
. But we have always agreed that we wanted more for her.’

‘Well, I am not sure that I want a bluestocking for a daughter.’

‘And
I
do not want a butterfly.’

‘Well, I imagine if Miss Hartshorn seriously intends to leave and you think it best, we will find a replacement.’

‘Yes. Perhaps that is the answer.’

‘Have you something else in mind?’