Another Heartbeat in the House (18 page)

‘You must earn the advance the publishers paid you.'

He slumped back in his chair. ‘It was a paltry sum,' he said, running a hand over his hair, ‘and it is spent already.'

I had no idea of how much a writer might earn, and was curious to know. ‘May I ask how much?'

‘A hundred and twenty pounds.'

That was less than Mr O'Dowd's gold watch had fetched.

‘How much might it earn for you when it is published?'

‘I stand to make around four hundred pounds.'

‘How many copies would you need to sell?'

‘Over a thousand.'

I did some calculations. It struck me that four hundred pounds was unlikely to cover Isabella's medical expenses for a year. ‘Your publishers distribute Mr Dickens's books?'

‘They do.'

‘How much does he earn?'

‘I dare not speculate, for it would make me mad with envy. In one month he sold twenty thousand copies of
The Pickwick Papers
.'

‘
Twenty thousand!
So literature has become a lucrative profession?'

‘For those who succeed at it.'

‘What does it take to succeed?'

‘A commission for a serialized novel, to start off with. Readers are avid for them.'

A serialized novel … I thought of the journal I had kept intermittently over the years, its pages packed with tidbits of gossip. At Miss Pinkerton's my hand had been as pretty and fashionable as ever was found in the best finishing schools, but when I wrote in my journals, my thoughts ran so fast that my pen could scarcely keep up with them. There were notes and footnotes and scribbled marginalia on every quarter-inch of paper, scandalous goings-on recounted in detail, and the names on the memorandum page were catalogued in a code that only I could decipher, for they were those of the illustrious rogues who had frequented Soho to carouse with my father and his cronies, happy to pay for the privilege of drinking wine, smoking on narghiles and ogling beautiful models in artistic surroundings.

‘You narrow your eyes,' observed William. ‘What are you thinking?'

‘I am thinking that I could become a writer. Miss Austen made a name for herself. Why shouldn't I?'

‘Miss Austen did not have to keep herself.'

‘No. But I would rather make my own way in the world than be dependent on the charity of my family, as she was. I could be a good woman if I had a thousand pounds a year.'

William laughed. ‘A thousand pounds would set most people up very well for life. How much do you expect to earn in Lord Doneraile's establishment?'

I knew that poor Brodie was paid fourteen pounds a year to manage Isabella and her two children. Her board and lodging were
compris
of course, but as companion to Lady Charlotte I might earn two to three times that.

‘A good deal less than His Lordship spends on his horses. I wonder what it is to be a country gentleman's wife?'

‘I don't imagine you would find that to your taste, any more than you would living
en famille
as a spinster aunt.'

‘I could dawdle about in the greenhouse, and count the apricots on the wall.'

‘You could pick off dead leaves from the geraniums.'

‘I could ask old women about their rheumatisms, and order half a crown's worth of soup for the poor. I could go to church and sleep behind my veil.'

We looked at each other and smiled.

‘We would do well together, you and I,' said William.

Still we looked.

‘Will you write to me, Eliza?'

‘Yes.'

He leaned towards me, and just then Maria came hurtling back into the room.

‘Help!' she cried. ‘Charlotte's dog is after being scrawbed by the cat!'

The pug's eyes were so protuberant they looked as though they might pop out of its head, and beads of ruby blood were plopping onto the floor.

So we daubed its scratches with lint soaked in rose water, and rubbed brandy on its lips to calm it down, and then Eilish came with the beer and I gave another presentation of ‘Sir Silas Sillery, Bart., Dancing the Allemand' for William's delectation.

WHEN EDIE WENT
to take Milo for his constitutional that evening, she remembered Eliza's counsel to Lady Charlotte:
A companion is as vital a necessity to a lady of fashion as is her reticule, or her lapdog
…

‘A lapdog, Milo! Is that what you are? You're small enough to be one, but I'm not sure you have the temperament. I've been thinking, you know,' she continued, as she watched him pootle around the stable yard, ‘that sometimes, when I read Eliza's …
what
is it, Milo? It's not a journal, and “chronicle” doesn't sound right. And I can scarcely call it a memoir since I don't know for certain that it's a record of events that really happened. But then, I don't know if it's fiction, either. Isn't it funny? Sometimes I feel as if I've heard her voice before, or seen something in a book that sounds as though she might have said it. I could swear I've read about counting apricots on the wall and going to sleep behind a veil in church – I used to envy my grandmother because she was able to do just that.'

Milo snuffled off to investigate a patch of dandelions, and Edie followed him.

‘Listen to me, rattling on! What would I do, if I didn't have you to talk to, little doggie? I should have to talk to myself, and then I'd be afraid that I might be going mad. But then, I guess I am a little spooked. I know I don't believe in ghosts and I know it's silly to even think of them, and I know that if Hilly were a ghost she'd be an awfully benign one. I mean, she'd never try to frighten me or anything. And the story that the girl in Doneraile Stores told was just stupid and pointless. But what if people really did die here? They must have done.'

Edie looked up at the moon. It was a little leaner than it had been on her first night at Prospect House, but the stars compensated for the attenuation, glittering up there in their millions.

‘A million stars,' she said, ‘a million dead, and a million gone overseas … Those poor people. How bloody, bloody wretched. It's just horrible to think that all that happened less than a hundred years ago. Just utterly horrible.'

Milo was looking at her winningly, ready to go back inside. She was glad they hadn't gone near the perimeter of the woods tonight. She knew that if they had, her eyes would have sought out shapes in the bosky shadows, and that most of them would have looked like the picture she had seen that morning in the cutting from the
Illustrated London News
of 1847, of a mother and her children, haggard and clad in rags.

‘Edie?' said Milo.

‘What's up?'

‘If you had to choose between kissing a gorilla and kissing a camel, which would you do?'

‘What kind of a question's that?'

‘I'm only trying to distract you,' said Milo. ‘If you
had
to choose …'

But instead of allowing Milo to distract her with absurd hypotheses, Edie distracted herself by taking a hot-water bottle, a mug of cocoa and another chunk of the manuscript to bed with her.

The elegant chimneys poking up above copses of oak, beech and sycamore alerted me to the profusion of stately homes around the pretty town of Doneraile. Maria had been right: this was a rich person's haunt, and Lord Doneraile owned most of it.

Her Ladyship had been most instructive throughout our journey. She had commented on every landmark we passed (had William been with us she would have made an invaluable consultant for his guidebook), and as we rumbled through the massive gates that opened onto the estate she told me – nodding her head graciously at the ancient who staggered out of the gate-lodge to kowtow to her – that this was the ‘triumphal archway' built in 1820 to commemorate the coronation of George IV.

‘Splendid hunting in these parts, you won't be surprised to know,' guffed Lord Doneraile.

We were bowling along an avenue flanked by parkland where sheep and cattle ruminated, and deer paused to gaze at us with startled eyes before springing away to take cover in the woods.

‘See over there?' His Lordship indicated with the silver knob of his cane a stone wall surmounted by a hedge, with a deep ditch on the far side. ‘Fellow cleared that last month, but came off two strides later and broke his neck.'

Because he looked as if this heroic failure deserved some kind of endorsement, I gave a bright smile to show how impressed I was.

A contingent of flunkeys awaited us on the steps of the perron. They looked as if they had been put in place by a giant hand, ranged against the imposing backdrop of Doneraile Court like painted characters in a pasteboard theatre. The great house comprised three storeys over a sunken basement, the entrance flanked by Ionic columns. The façade was elegantly proportioned and genuinely gracious – unlike that of the O'Dowds' parody of a Palladian mansion – with the St Leger coat of arms carved in Portland stone above the entrance.

‘I think you will be quite comfortable here, Miss Drury,' pronounced Her Ladyship as a footman divested us of our travelling accoutrements. ‘A maid will unpack for you. Dinner is at seven. Until then you are at liberty to roam wherever you please. You will find books aplenty in the library – we try to keep up with all the new novels – and there is a fine pianoforte in the music room. Do you play?'

‘Yes.'

‘You may entertain us after dinner.'

‘Thank you. It is delightful to be at Doneraile Court. I could not have hoped for a more felicitous situation than here as companion to Your Ladyship.'

Lady Charlotte bestowed a gracious smile upon me.

‘I shall be glad of your company, Miss Drury, especially in the winter, when the evenings are so long. Lord Doneraile spends all his time in London then, for he sits in the House.'

A bird – a thrush, I suppose, or a blackbird; I was not an expert on birdsong – was perched on the manicured tip of a box tree, trilling away.

‘As it is such a beautiful evening,' I remarked, ‘I think I shall take a stroll in the garden.'

‘Do. The flower beds are not at their best at this time of the year, but our gardeners do what they can, and there is much to admire. Take Sooty with you. She needs exercise after being cooped up in the brougham.' Lady Charlotte thrust her pug at me and sailed off.

Sooty still smelt of the rose water Maria had daubed on her bloody nose. Together we stood for some minutes at the top of the steps, looking over the thousands of acres of parkland that belonged, by accident of ancestry, to one person. All this! Every blade of grass that grew on every sod of turf that comprised every hectare of countryside that had been tamed and prettified and planted with rare shrubs by generations of St Legers, or turned into arable or pastureland for their fat cattle to graze on: it all belonged to the spindle-shanked old man with whom I had driven here today. Every drop of water in the rivers and the fountains and the picturesquely cascading waterfalls and the man-made canals and the fish ponds that, Lady Charlotte had told me, were teeming with pike and trout, were his. Every stone that had been hewn to build gate-lodge and stables and outhouses and ornamental bridges and pavilions and gazebos and pleasure gardens, and the great Palladian mansion itself; every neighbouring townland through which the carriage had transported us – Ballyellis, Ballyandrew, Castlepook, Kilbrack, Carkerbeg, Ardgillibert, Ardadam, Carrigine – all, all belonged to Hayes St Leger, Viscount Doneraile.

How could this be right?

That evening after dinner I played and sang some new Schumann
lieder
for Lady Charlotte in the drawing room. She thought the songs were by Schubert, who had been dead for over ten years, but I did not presume to enlighten her. We talked a little of music and art and literature. Her favourite composer was Haydn (‘because his music is so gladsome' – as good a reason as any, I suppose, to like a composer), her favourite artist was Sir Joshua Reynolds (he had done a portrait of some old ancestor of hers), and Sir Walter Scott (whose work I despised) was her favourite writer. She was, she told me, delighted at last to have a kindred spirit with whom to talk of culture and fashion and novels, and when I told her that my mother had composed for the opera, she declared that she would take pleasure in introducing me to her friends tomorrow at church.