Fair Fight (13 page)

He patted the seat beside him and I went to him. I was experiencing an ache about my throat. My old friend wished only to be the first object of my heart. I had regained Perry’s trust, by proving myself low and untrustworthy to his sister.

Dinner was a strange event. Perry was merrier than I had seen him for years. I did not speak much to Miss Sinclair but nor did I need to; Granville and Perry quite dominated the conversation. Although Granville did not speak to Miss Sinclair I saw him smile upon her, and I began to feel that perhaps I was doing her a service. God knew the man was rich enough to give her anything she desired – if he could be persuaded to spend any of it.

When dinner was over and Miss Sinclair withdrew, Perry took Granville off to the library for port and pipes, and bid me go to her.

‘Wait long enough that Granville and I can discuss a few minor details, and then send her up to me,’ he said, as though I were a footman. ‘If you feel obliged to make her any apology, George, now is the moment for it.’

He took my hand and pressed it. When he turned to go I felt suddenly bereft. I wanted to cling to him; I wanted him to cradle my head against his chest.

In the event I could not make Miss Sinclair the apology I owed her. Though I knew that I could never satisfy her wishes, though I knew that I would make her an inconstant husband, still it was a difficult prospect, to go into the drawing room that night. I spent the ten minutes in the hall, knowing myself to be about to discharge a very unpleasant duty indeed.

When, too soon, the time came, I only managed it by refusing to meet her eye, and so denied myself the last opportunity I would have to look upon her as Miss Sinclair, who loved me. The next morning I left Aubyn and stayed away until Miss Sinclair and Granville were safely married. After that, of course, everything was different.

PART THREE

Charlotte

7

I
t is easy enough, in looking back on our lives, to say here is where the road took a turn, and here, and here. At the moment we are turning it feels not at all like it; revolution may be upon us and we will be fretting over the breadth of our noses, or wondering whether the missing hairpins have been stolen by the chambermaid.

I was twelve when my brother and sister, Arthur and Louisa, were taken by pox. Miss Gale, our governess, said, ‘It is always the good ones are lost to us soonest.’

She spooned me soup, for my hands were still bandaged. They were bandaged not because they were blistered, although they were, but because I could not help but scratch. My fingers were wrapped tight enough that they ached. The rest of me they bandaged more gently. I was left helpless as an infant, in the bed I had used to share with Louisa, though they had taken her pillow. I had a fear of allowing my limbs to stray toward Louisa’s side of the bed.

‘It is always the good ones are lost to us soonest. You must be as good as you can, Miss Charlotte,’ Miss Gale said, as she brushed my hair that was still bright, though the rest of me was made plain. She said the two things together so often that it seemed to me that she must wish me dead.

Louisa had always been good, where I was naughty. She was so good that I had used to hate her for it. She was gone and still I envied that she was mourned more than I thought I would have been. And yet, if I could have had the chance again, I would never pull her hair or jog her arm as she sewed so that she pricked her finger. But perhaps it was too late for me to be good.

My brother Perry had been safe at school when the pox found us; he had never been good.

He was brought home from school as soon as the doctor declared the house safe. He arrived back full of curses and secret kicks below the table. He was furious to be at home, to find himself the eldest child. Perry and I had always tormented each other and grief did not serve to bring us together.

We ate dinner at our parents’ table but we still breakfasted in the nursery. Perry took up a spoonful of his flommery and tipped the spoon so that it slowly slid back into the bowl. He smirked at me.

‘Eat your breakfast, Master Perry,’ Miss Gale said.

‘Shall I eat it, Charlotte? Or shall I dip my face into it to be the match of you?’ This was said quietly, so that Miss Gale should not hear.

‘If I am flommery, you are bacon,’ I said, for his face tended to flush, which I knew well enough he was ashamed of. I stuck my tongue out at him and that Miss Gale saw, and scolded me for it.

Perry waited until she had done and whispered, ‘Were you showing me the only part of you left unpoxed?’

Perry had a host of new insults to call me, though which of them he had dreamt up and which he had learnt at school I could not guess. He called me cribbage-faced and corny-faced. He called me chicken-breasted and crowdy.

I set out to vex him. When he borrowed a book from our papa I took it and hid it just to watch him hunting. When he found it – for it was only underneath one of the cushions – he looked at me triumphantly.
Very well
, I thought, and when he received a letter from his schoolfriend, George Bowden – a letter that he took up quickly and held to his breast – I took the first opportunity to cast it into the fire. I took the poker and pushed it under the coals so that he should not see it.

‘I know you have it, you dumb-glutton scut,’ he said. His eyes darted about the room as if he did not like to search in front of me, but could not help but look.

‘It is you who is the dumb-glutton,’ I said, but he only laughed and shook his head.

My ignorance of the meaning of the words and Perry’s laughter brought me to rage. I reached out to pinch or slap and he skipped away, making retching sounds within his throat and laughing still. I leapt upon him and began to pull his hair.

‘Get it off me,’ he cried. ‘A beast! A scutty monster!’

Then he grew tired of our play and pushed me roughly onto the floor. I landed on the base of my spine and the jolt of pain surprised me into tears.

Miss Gale chose that moment to enter and looked at us sadly. She was leaving us for a new place and could not bring herself much to anger any more.

Perry reached out his hand to help me up and I took it.

‘We were dancing, until Lottie tripped on her gown,’ he said.

I stood and wiped my face.

She sighed. ‘You must learn to be graceful, Miss Charlotte. A good posture can do wonders for a plain girl.’

Once she would have made me wear a wooden busk and walk about, trying not to breathe, until my shoulders ached from holding them so stiff. Now she only sighed again and walked from the room.

Perry said, ‘Your hand feels like a bag of lead-shot.’

He held his own hand out from his body as though he had soiled it by helping me stand.

I tried to slap him, but he skipped backwards. At the last I showed him my back and walked off, though I had nowhere to go and nothing at all to do.

‘What nice posture you have,’ Perry said as I reached the door. ‘I have quite forgotten that you have skin like a toad.’

‘I need not strike you,’ I said. ‘Your cheek is as red as a smacked bottom already.’

I skipped out of the room quickly, so as to keep the last word.

I went to the little parlour, where I had begun to sit often, always alone. I was stitching a little scene, trees over water, which was meant to be the stream that ran through the Aubyn estate. When Perry came to ask if I would play at cards with him – for we did play together, as often as we antagonised one another – I only poked my tongue out at him again, and would not agree to be friends. He called me a ‘scut’ once more.

Once the door closed behind him, I found myself pulling out the blue silks from the embroidered river and threading my needle with red. A river of blood.
Perhaps
, I thought,
I will sew scenes of all the biblical plagues
. I imagined showing Mama the one called ‘death of the first-born’. Then I had to stick myself with the needle until real blood sprang to my finger. I pressed it to the red silk. I sat and sewed blood into the river.

‘Dumb-glutton,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Scut.’

I knew I could not really embroider the biblical plagues, or at least that I should not. Instead I drew them with soft pencil and burnt them in the hearth. I used good, heavy paper meant for painting with water-colours – far too expensive and nice to burn. It burnt so fast and so brightly that the moment it had turned to soft ash I wished only to burn more. I found scraps trimmed from my paintings, and upon these I wrote terrible things. I wrote ‘Perry will die’, and ‘I will never be married’. Then I burnt them.

I walked about the gardens, as slowly as a young lady should. When I was out of sight of the house I picked flowers that I knew I should not touch without permission. I sat on the grass, took off my gloves and crushed them until my ugly fingers were stained green. When I found beetles upon them – shiny brown beetles, like seeds with legs – I crushed those too. I buried them all in the flower bed. I stood over my beetle-and-flower grave and whispered ‘Dumb-glutton scut,’ for a prayer. I thought, with a savage satisfaction, that God would punish me.

On my way back into the house I went to the bush that I knew to affect Perry badly, and I took a handful of its flowers to shake upon his pillow. I was not sure that anything would come of it, but in the morning Perry was not at breakfast. Upon visiting his room – although I had not permission to do so – I found that his face had swollen like pudding. He could scarce open his eyes, so puffy had they grown, and they streamed as though he wept.

Miss Gale, who sat beside him, sent me from the room the moment I opened the door. Perry was kept indoors, complaining, and having his fingers slapped when he rubbed at his eyes.

I walked about the garden, feeling great waves of remorse, and then of satisfaction. I had never exacted such perfect revenge before, but perhaps it had been too much – I must be kinder to Perry – but, oh, who was made ugly now!

At last the remorse came out the victor. I went to sit beside Perry’s bed and read to him from his favourite books. He never knew that it was I who had sent him there.

Miss Gale wept when she left to go to her new family, and pressed me to her flat bosom. I thought her tears a sham. If I had known how dreary it would be to be a young lady, I might have wept myself.

The maid I was given was barely older than I was and even quieter than I had been taught to be. Her name was Mary and she looked like a dairymaid in a book, fair and pink and soft. She was so shy when first she came that she could not look me in the eye, but only whispered, ‘Yes, miss,’ to her shoes.

Perry, recovered by then, thought it a great joke.

‘Look what Mama has sent you,’ he said, very low, when first he saw Mary. ‘Look how perfect her skin. In the usual case it is the maid who must aspire to be like the mistress.’

I hated having her about me. Not because her cheek was smooth but because I had grown used to being alone. Whereas a governess will leave her charge whenever the fancy takes her, a lady’s maid is employed to be company. Mary’s company meant that I must be sweet again. I could not draw pictures of terrible things. I could not whisper ‘scut’ under my breath. I could not pick at the scars upon my arms until they bled.

I tried sending her away to tidy my things and walked about the gardens by myself. Mama, who could not bear to have me about her, actually moved herself enough to send for me. Her face, always pale, was almost grey. I remembered, when I was very young, looking at her as we sat at the tea table and thinking that my mama was the most handsome lady in all the world; now she looked as though she were covered in a fine layer of dust.

‘Charlotte,’ she said, ‘must you pain me so? Do you seek to hurt me?’

‘No, Mama,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you think I have not provided you all I should.’

‘No, Mama.’

‘It is no doubt hard for you to be here and kept so quietly. Next year, perhaps, I will take you into society. Shall you like that?’ Mama’s gloved hand moved as though she meant to stroke my cheek but at the last she let it drop without touching me.

‘Yes, Mama.’ I had no clear notion of what society would be like, beyond the drawing room tea-parties Mama had held before the pox came.

‘Then you must endeavour to be a lady in all the ways left to you, or you won’t be fit to be seen. You must practise your singing and your drawing. You must think more upon your dress. And you must have a maid, Charlotte. You cannot any longer go walking alone.’

And so I grew up, and to look at me you would have thought I grew as quiet and still as Miss Gale had hoped. Mama developed very sensitive nerves; she grew fitful and often kept to her bed. We still went to Bristol in the winter and then Papa’s sister, Mrs Rayleigh, and my young lady cousins would call upon us. They thought me a very poor creature, to live so dull and left with such a face.

‘Charlotte’s hair is so fair, it is almost a waste,’ I heard my aunt say, once.

I found myself as quiet as my maid in their company. They were full of shrill laughter and whispers about their gentlemen acquaintance.

I had my hair pinned up and my gowns made over, but I never did make a debut into society in the way that most young ladies did. It was not that I never thought of such things as balls or gentlemen, only that I could not imagine myself amongst them. The only young gentlemen I knew were Perry’s schoolfriends and though they were polite enough, I could not imagine that they would have singled me out at a ball. They would have talked to a girl with an unmarked complexion and something charming to say. I never found that I could think of anything much to say in company. All the same, I felt safe at the house at Queen Square. Mama and Papa had been there when the pox came and had been saved from harm. Louisa, Arthur and I had never cried out in fever in that house as we had at Aubyn.

When we were children we had used to go there in the first week of September every year. The house would be full of the bustle of maids and, as if in response, the city of Bristol would be full of the bustle of the fair. Even from so far away as Queen Square we could hear the noise of it; the docks behind the house were full of a great many ships and all of them gay with flags. The Square would be alive with the cries of barrowmen and flowergirls, who were not usually permitted to flock there in any great number. This alone was exciting and lasted the whole fortnight long. If we minded all she said, after the first two days had passed – when Miss Gale said there were too many horse-dealers at the fair ‘to allow for decency’ – we might go to the fair itself, and that was best of all.

Louisa was afraid of the fair and Miss Gale behaved as though she were chaperoning us through a den of beasts, which was perhaps why I loved it.

‘Don’t look, Miss Charlotte, Miss Louisa,’ she would say, as we passed a group of rough sailors passing about a bottle, their arms about each other’s necks, or a pair of dancing ladies, lifting their skirts to show their ankles turning. Since Miss Gale would put her hand to her own eyes, I was left free to peek. How powerful a draw is prohibition! I should never have been tempted to gaze at a soldier relieving himself against a tree unless I had been told that I must not.

As to the other diversions of the fair, express petitions were required for each entertainment that we wished to sample, and we could not hope to be always successful. It was easy enough to beg for a sugared apple, or the penny entrance to see the tumblers, for Papa would give Miss Gale a generous enough sum for the purpose. But let us try to argue for the giants and dwarfs, or the fortune tellers, and she would cry, ‘Oh goodness, no! What heathenish foolery. Not fit for gentle children.’

Arthur and Perry, of course, were allowed to do as they would. They might even be permitted to leave us and wander off in complete liberty, if only they promised to be back at the carriage at the appointed hour. How envious I was to see them ride upon the round-about, waving their hats, as the urchin boys turned the wheel ever faster.