Eden Falls (45 page)

‘And, of course,’ Anna was saying, ‘until her mother returns there can be no decisions made on Eliza’s behalf.’

‘Reverse your arms,
grand plié
, stretch side, two, three, four. Perhaps,’ said Mademoiselle Evangeline, ‘you might prefer to return when my class finishes?’

But there was no need to come back, Anna said. She merely wished to reassure the teacher that Eliza was quite as honoured and excited as she should be, but had simply not wanted to burden her stepfather with any of the details. This was why nothing had been said or done in the past few days.

‘He is … distracted,’ Anna said judiciously, ‘by his wife’s illness.’

Mademoiselle Evangeline made a sympathetic moue and shook her head sadly. ‘
Je comprends.
But what wonderful news for Madame MacLeod to return to! Fourth position girls,
demi
, and two, three, prepare,
demi,
two, three, four.’ She turned as she spoke and studied her little dancers. ‘Tummies in!’ she said. ‘Shoulders back! You look like
petits cochons
:
a line of little pink pigs.’ Ellen gave a small bark of laughter and Eliza shushed her, which always, with Ellen, had the reverse effect so that as they left the room she said, quite loudly, ‘It looks stupid, ballet.’ Her pugnacious little face dared Eliza to challenge her, but her sister only pirouetted past with a gracious smile, as if she pitied Ellen her resentfulness and was prepared to forgive.

‘Each to their own,’ Anna said. ‘If we all liked t’same things, life should be very dull.’

‘Why are there all these looms?’ Maya asked as they retraced their steps through the mill.

‘For t’weavers,’ Eliza said. ‘They made cloth ’ere once. There’s a ghost, we call ’er Dolly Treddle; she comes and works t’loom where she used to sit.’

‘Why?’ Maya was not scared in the least, only puzzled. ‘Does she miss the work?’

Eliza had never been asked this before. ‘She’s just ’aunting,’ she said and then, for authenticity, added, ‘They say that she died when t’bobbin shot off and hit ’er on t’temple.’

Ellen snorted. ‘That’s stupid too.’

‘Stupid is as stupid does,’ Maya said, quoting a line of Miss Cargill’s, without at all understanding what it meant. Ellen didn’t like the tone and stuck out her tongue. She felt cross and bored, and secondary in importance to Eliza, who – in Ellen’s view – was now all puffed up with pride. Maya stared at her with hostile eyes.

‘Let’s have a treat,’ Anna said. ‘I know just place.’

She took them to the Barnsley branch of Eve’s Puddings & Pies, where Ginger Timpson, the manageress, gave them such a warm welcome even Ellen began to thaw. Ginger had a mesmerising, louche glamour, a rarity in these parts. Her hair, which she always wore in a tousled bun, was a lavish shade of orange and she put rouge on her cheeks, and although she wore the same style of navy twill apron that all Eve’s employees were given, Ginger always belted it twice, tight, around her wasp’s waist and tied a bow at the front. Her bosom was arresting too: generous and well supported. Altogether she drew the eye, and although one might say all these attributes were wasted in a café on Market Hill, she was marvellous at her job. She had a word, a wink or a smile for every customer, and it was plain to see they were there for Ginger as much as for the produce. Anna and the girls sat at a sturdy scrubbed-pine table and Ginger brought them tea, dandelion and burdock, toasted teacakes and lemon-curd tarts. She sat with them while they ate, and told funny stories about the things people said. It was lovely, Eliza thought, but it was sad too, eating Mam’s food when Mam was so far away. She hid her sadness, though; it would spoil the treat for them all if she drifted into melancholy. She licked the lemon curd out of its pastry shell, and managed not to cry.

T
hree days after her release, Henrietta announced that she wished to recuperate at Netherwood Hall, not at Fulton House. For weeks now she had been longing for the specific comforts of her Yorkshire home, where the servants knew her best and where she had always been happiest. Word was sent north and Maudie, Henrietta’s maid, attended to the packing, which would take at least two days. Such a fuss, said Clarissa, with Cowes round the corner and everything to pack, once again, for that. She was genuinely puzzled; wasn’t one feather bed much the same as another? Wasn’t the company more stimulating in London? Plus, if Henry was in Belgravia, it was but a hop and a skip from Park Lane.

‘How will we visit you, if you’re all the way up there in Netherwood?’ the duchess asked in a plaintive voice; she included Isabella in her enquiry, as they had arrived together, each of them still sufficiently interested in the prodigal’s return to pay her a call.

‘I don’t suppose you
shall
visit,’ said Henrietta and then added brutally, ‘but as you didn’t visit me in prison either, I can’t imagine you’ll suffer too greatly as a result.’

She was lying on a daybed in the smaller of Fulton House’s two drawing rooms, wearing a mint-green tea gown that Isabella eyed covetously. She’d never seen it before, and she had thought she knew every item in her sister’s wardrobe. It made Henry look uncharacteristically wanton, Isabella thought, and resolved to add something similar to her trousseau when the time came. She imagined Uli’s face when he saw the hills and valleys of her body through the layers of chiffon; he would never look at another woman because she would be constantly alluring. This was her plan.

‘Well, if you’re going to be unpleasant,’ said Clarissa, rising, ‘Isabella and I will leave. Isabella?’

Her younger daughter looked at her with vague, glassy eyes, and then turned to Henrietta. ‘I do like your gown,’ she said. ‘Is it new?’

Henrietta laughed. ‘Izzy, please pay attention. You’re meant to be leaving in a huff after being insulted. Mama, I’m sorry I was so sharp with you, please do sit down; and no, it isn’t new at all, Izzy. In fact, I think it was probably once yours, Mama.’

Intrigued, and distracted from her pique, Clarissa gave the garment closer inspection and was able to confirm that yes, the tea gown had once been one of her own. Now she looked at Henrietta with new interest. ‘You must be very slender,’ she said, ‘to fit into anything of mine.’

‘The Holloway Prison reduction plan, Mama – it’s all the rage in fashionable circles,’ and Clarissa took a moment to consider whether her caustic daughter was being unkind or amusing. She had always found Henrietta impossible to read: even as a little girl she had been mercurial and contrary; occasionally quite unmanageable. Her father’s daughter, in many ways; she had his cleverness and his temperament. But dear Teddy had been softer-edged, and had known how to coax Clarissa from the tyranny of her own petulance, while Henrietta knew only how to provoke it.

‘I expect you’re teasing me,’ the duchess said now, ‘but I think you look all the better for your time away.’ This was such a patently facile point of view that there would certainly have ensued a spat, except that Henrietta found she hadn’t the will. She closed her eyes and swallowed experimentally. Each day that passed, the pain was less. Isabella, uncomfortable on a scroll-backed slipper chair, watched her uneasily and wondered how soon they might leave. She felt squeamish about the precise, medical details of what had been done to Henrietta; this fastidiousness, however, didn’t extend to the prison itself. This she found thrillingly, darkly fascinating.

‘Did you see the place where they have the hangings?’ she said with what Clarissa thought a lamentable lack of good taste. ‘Did you see the scaffold?’

Her mother shot Isabella a look of reproof, but Henrietta just said, ‘No, it’s all rather hidden away. Anyway, there aren’t very many hangings, you know. On the whole it’s a very dull, repetitive, drab life in there. Everyone looks the same: wrung out and grey-faced. I was immensely unhappy.’

Isabella’s large blue eyes filled with compassionate tears. She knew she hadn’t been at all kind; she knew she had been selfish.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come, Henry,’ she said, and just at that moment she was.

Henrietta, rather ungraciously Isabella thought, only nodded.

‘Are you still a suffragette?’ she asked, feeling rash. Henrietta glanced away, as if her feelings were hurt, but when she answered her voice was mild.

‘In spirit. From the sidelines, for the time being.’

Clarissa huffed.

‘I sincerely hope you’ve learned your lesson,’ she said. She was standing now, pulling on her kid gloves, stirring the still air of the drawing room with her sudden determination to be off.

‘I learned all sorts of lessons,’ Henrietta said significantly, ‘about all of us.’ She would not give her mother the satisfaction of drawing from her any promises about the future. Her feelings, in any case, were extremely confused. Yesterday Mary Dixon had left her card on the hall table, and a note containing passionate good wishes. She had signed it ‘Ever yours, in the sisterhood of the struggle’, and Henrietta had felt a flash of shame at having had her sent away. It was easy enough to convince any unwanted visitor that, following her ordeal, Henrietta needed peace and quiet. In fact, she felt she was gathering strength by the hour. But she simply couldn’t face her fellow combatants from the WPSU because, when she did, she would have to reveal herself as not so much a figurehead as a flop. In Yorkshire she would be safe, however, and free to be herself again; she would ride and review the estate with Jem Arkwright, and connect, once again, with the steady certainties of Netherwood Hall. The cause could manage without her for a while.

Isabella stooped over the daybed to kiss her sister, a perfunctory peck on the cheek. Henrietta thought she looked very pretty, in a dress of rose-pink shantung. ‘This is nice,’ she said, taking a pinch of the silk between finger and thumb. ‘In Holloway we all wore ugly frocks of grey ticking.’

Isabella’s eyes widened in sympathy. ‘Golly. How perfectly ghastly.’

‘There were worse things,’ Henrietta said drily, ‘but yes, it was pretty horrid. Mine was stained under the arms when it was given to me.’

Clarissa stamped her foot. ‘Enough!’ she said hotly, so that both her daughters flinched. ‘That is the very last detail I wish to hear on this odious subject. It is insufferably vulgar to discuss it in this casually prurient manner. The entire episode is one of which I am thoroughly ashamed, and I hope you know, Henrietta, that your darling papa would have felt exactly as I do. I only hope I live long enough to see your reputation restored and the incident consigned to obscurity.’

She seemed drained by her tirade, and sat down, again, on the Chesterfield. Her face was ashen except for two bright spots of red, high on her cheeks. She brought one hand to her heart and another to her forehead; she looked stricken.

‘Mama—’ Henrietta began, but her mother shook her head vehemently. ‘Not another word,’ Clarissa said. She looked at her elder daughter and her eyes were cold. ‘Not another word, even in apology. The subject is closed. Now, Isabella, we shall take our leave.’

Isabella, marooned on the Turkey carpet between her sister and her mother, looked glumly from one to the other. Now Mama was in a bate and would be difficult all day long, and the mention of Papa had upset all of them. Instinctively she reached for her lucky charm, the Hohenzollern diamond, and thought of Uli. She felt immediately cheered, and as she followed her mother from the drawing room she turned and blew Henrietta a kiss. Poor old Henry, she thought: what was the point of diaphanous chiffon when she had no one to love her?

Lady Henrietta’s arrival in Netherwood had been managed quietly and without fanfare. She was there to convalesce, Mrs Powell-Hughes told the assembled household on the morning she came. She needed peace, quiet and building up. To this end, the housekeeper had bought in three bottles of Parrish’s Chemical Food, and she watched Henrietta every morning at breakfast to be sure she took the requisite spoonful. Henrietta complained that it tasted of rusty nails, to which the housekeeper replied, ‘That’ll be the iron,’ in a manner that told Henrietta that she might be mistress of Netherwood Hall at the moment, but she must do as she was told in this regard.

As well as the Parrish’s, there was spinach with every meal and, three times a week, softly cooked liver in one form or another. Mrs Powell-Hughes had been shocked, she told Sarah Pickersgill, at the state Her Ladyship had come home in.

‘Shocked to the core,’ she said. ‘I never thought much of the London lot, but I’m afraid they’ve plumbed new depths. You only have to look at her to see she needs iron, and there was that Mrs Carmichael sending up milky puddings.’

Sarah had never met the Fulton House cook, but she saw no particular advantage in trying to be neutral. ‘Typical,’ she said. She was rubbing chicken livers through a sieve, for a parfait. It was strange, she thought, preparing fine food for only one person. Stranger still, the house hadn’t felt empty when none of the family was here, but with Lady Henrietta living alone on the upper floors suddenly they all seemed to be rattling around like peas in a drum. When dinner went up on a single silver tray Sarah felt a shiver of apprehension, as if Miss Havisham was waiting to receive it in her tattered wedding gown. There was no one below stairs with whom she could share this fanciful notion, however. Even Mrs Powell-Hughes, the closest Sarah had to a confidante, and something of a reader, wasn’t familiar with Dickens.

‘She’s doing well now, of course,’ Mrs Powell-Hughes said. ‘Filling out a bit. Lady Henrietta always liked her food, even as a tot.’

‘Mmm,’ said Sarah, trying to communicate a lack of interest. She hadn’t worked here long enough to know Her Ladyship’s childhood eating habits: they’d all been grown by the time she came, apart from Lady Isabella, of course, who was so much younger than the rest. Sarah was a meticulous diarist, so she knew it was eight years, two months and four days since she’d started here, and she remembered Lady Henrietta, in those early days of her employment, as a haughty figure with a bony profile, like a Roman centurion. Nice enough, but very grand. Personally, Sarah slightly resented her unscheduled arrival this week. Mr Parkinson and Mrs Powell-Hughes had been in raptures the day word arrived that Lady Henrietta was coming: you’d have thought it was their own long-lost child returning to them. When Atkins had fetched her from the train and swung the Daimler around the carriageway to the south front, the butler had broken into a little trot in his haste to get to the car door before the chauffeur. Sarah, standing dutifully on the steps, playing her part in the servants’ guard of honour, had half expected him to sweep Lady Henrietta into his arms and carry her. Instead he offered his arm and she took it, and they walked like Darby and Joan into the house, with Mrs Powell-Hughes flapping and fluttering behind them. ‘An honour,’ Mr Parkinson kept telling them all. ‘An honour, and the greatest of compliments.’