Jane (5 page)

The Packard turned into the long manor drive and pulled up to our stately home—the Edlington-Porter manor house with its fine stonework and high arched windows. Now Father spoke in normal tones, filled with the warmth and familiar affection I so loved.

“Meanwhile, you’d best sneak upstairs and stick your head in a bucket of lemon juice before coming down to dinner. I’m afraid I’ll never hear the end of ‘our reeking daughter smelling of the dead.’”

The doorman came to my side and opened the Packard’s door. “Welcome back, Miss Jane.”

Then the hounds were there to greet me, setting up a fine racket, sniffing wildly at my new and enticing fragrance.

“Come on, boys,” I said, eager to get to the stables, “let’s go see if Leicester wants to have a ride”

Home

I woke to find my tabby cat licking my neck and the sound of crinkling paper at my feet.
Not good,
I thought.
Not at all good.
I opened my eyes and winced to see my Pekingese, Harry, sprawled on the silken coverlet gnawing wetly on the pages of the book I’d fallen asleep reading. No wonder I had dreamed of Africa again. It was Mary Kingsley’s magnificent account of her journey up the Ogowe River to collect fishes and fetishes, an expedition she—a woman!—had planned, led, and executed by her very own devices. I snatched the volume from Harry’s teeth and found the pages crumpled and soggy but largely intact.

I’d been forbidden by Mother to utter the name of Mary Kingsley aloud in the house, as any thought of her daughter traipsing off into the filthy, parasite-ridden jungle was entirely out of the question. At twenty I was already considered by most as a spinster, and my outrageous ideas, atheism, and radical education were every year diminishing my prospects for a good marriage, any marriage.

I sat up and gazed at the feather-decorated spear and elaborate Maasai tribal necklace that hung on either side of my overcrammed bookshelf. They were my proudest treasures, gifts from Father’s Kenyan expeditions. I rose and padded quietly across the floor, trying hard to avoid the squeaks in the old planks that would, inevitably, bring Constance, Mother’s lady’s maid, knocking on the door to inquire, as she did every morning, if Miss Jane wished assistance dressing. Every morning I firmly but politely declined assistance. It was mad that a grown woman with all her body parts intact would need help putting on her clothes.

I knew that the refusal was founded on my abhorrence to the idea of servants in the first place. But that was an argument, like the subject of Mary Kingsley (or myself ) traveling to Africa, that was simply unwinnable. Even Father, who was similarly uneasy with servants at his beck and call, had long ago given up trying to change Mother’s mind. The maids, butlers, cooks, gardeners, and stable hands were as integral to country life as the stove and mortar and wood beams of the manor house.

A floorboard squeaked under my toe, and barely a breath later came the inevitable tapping at my door.

“No thank you, Constance, I’m already dressed,” I lied before the question could be asked. I pulled my riding habit from the clothes cupboard and put the cinch-waist jacket on over a clean starched blouse and the hated corset. I glared at the ankle-length skirt as I did every morning I dressed for riding, furious that Mother was yet unmovable on the subject of the split skirt for the sport. How senseless it was to ride horse sidesaddle with petticoats and flounces hindering natural movement.

It brought to mind the ongoing bouts with Mother on the subject of swimming, an activity she thought most unbecoming for a lady. Father, bless his heart, had insisted on teaching his daughter “that manly art,” as my mother called it. What I remembered best was the feel of his strong warm arms enfolding me, bracing me against the slap of cold breakers. His laughter and mine mingled with the sounds of the seashore. “Are you ready, sweetheart? I’m going to let you go.” I’d splash doggy-style as he backed away, his long sopping hair clinging to his neck. “Swim to me, Jane!” And I would. Anything to please him. Facedown I’d slap arm over little arm, turning my head to gulp air the way he’d taught me. But something was dragging me down. Water filled my nose. I flailed, panicking.

He’d caught me up in his arms again. “Blasted weight!” Propping me on one arm, he raised the long skirt of my wool bathing dress and with the other hand ripped at its hem. The lead weights were thrown into the sea along with the flat-sole shoes. “Let’s try again.” Now when I swam I felt light as a bubble. I could hear his encouraging shouts above my slapping arms and the roar of the surf. He was proud of me, proud of his little girl. He’d carried me up and onto the beach past the demure ladies wading in the shallows. Past a horse-drawn bathing wagon filled with giggling girls in their princess dresses and bloomers being drawn into the waist-deep sea. Mother had been waiting for us in her three-sided tent, scowling at the sight of her wild-haired husband and shoeless daughter, the ragged, weightless hem of my dress. “Oh, the pair of you!” she’d cry. She was always exasperated with us.

As I’d grown older, I’d insisted on continuing “real swimming,” but she wouldn’t hear of my wearing a form-fitting French maillot—a sleeveless, body-hugging garment that covered only the upper thighs. This was another skirmish in which my father refused to engage.

“We need to choose our battles with your mother,” he reminded me frequently. He was right, of course. My refusal to “come out” at age sixteen to be presented at court in a fluffy white ball gown—its cost would have paid the wages of six servants for an entire year—had nearly brought the Edlington-Porter house down around our ears. My decision to attend college had sent Mother to bed for two weeks. But in both of those instances, Father, still very much the head of this household—even if not the holder of the family fortune—had prevailed.

Father’s insistence that I be allowed into his human dissection laboratory had been met with Mother’s unqualified horror. His spirited rebuttals had been at least in part selfishly motivated, as he depended on my help more and more in his home laboratory. None of the assistants he’d hired over the years had exhibited a fraction of my aptitude or enthusiasm. I suspected there was a sense of pride passing on his vast knowledge of morphology, anatomy, and evolutionary science.

Once fully outfitted in my riding habit, I drew out of a wooden trunk at the foot of my bed a pair of men’s trousers and pulled them on under my skirt. I’d sat up by candlelight for a week wielding a needle and thread—tools with which I was not on the friendliest terms—and hemmed the pant legs so that they wouldn’t show beneath my skirt. Satisfied that I looked sufficiently dignified and ladylike, I left my room, taking the stairs quickly.

My parents were already at the table, Father at the head, though his eggcup was still covered in its quilted cap, his buttered toast uneaten. He had his head stuck into his
New York Times
—one of a week’s worth that had arrived that morning, another luxury his wife’s money afforded him. “My guilty pleasure,” he called the weekly delivery of newspapers from America. Father prided himself on keeping up with current events “from the colonies,” as he called them—a playful dig to the Edlingtons, several of whose staunch ancestors had died in America’s revolution against Mad King George III.

Mother had not touched her kippers and tomatoes, and only a tiny nibble had been taken from her apricot scone, as she was busy jotting down notes for Cook for the evening’s dinner party.

At the sideboard, I filled my plate with kippers and toast, ignoring the sausage floating in grease, and pondered an egg, which I did take. I sat at Father’s left hand across from my mother. Neither looked up from their occupations, which was just fine with me. I could eat in peace or, rather, quickly so as to get on my horse as soon as humanly possible.

But it was not to be.

Mother put down the pen and regarded me with that beady eye of hers. I could see her nostrils fluttering in an attempt to discern any residual odors from the laboratory. She had strangely refrained from any arguments about the dissection class at the dinner table the night before. Now seemingly satisfied on the olfactory front, Mother examined my face with the discernment that Leonardo would his model for the
Mona Lisa.

“Your nose is covered in freckles, my dear. I suggest you wear a broader-brimmed hat when you ride. And Constance will bring you some of my bleaching salve. If you use it regularly, the freckles will fade.”

“And the skin on my nose will be burned by the caustic chemicals that the salve contains.”

“The burn is superficial and will heal. It’s a small price to pay for beauty.”

Choose your battles,
I repeated sternly and silently to myself and made a sandwich of my kippers and toast.

“Well, Roosevelt’s been inaugurated for a second term,” Father said without taking his head from the
Times.
“And it looks as though the Industrial Workers of the World are calling themselves ‘Wobblies.’”

Clearly Father had chosen to steer clear of this particular mother-daughter spat, so I cracked the top off my soft-boiled egg, spooned the contents onto my kipper sandwich, and began to devour it.

“Louisa Pomphrey-Bell tells me that all of Melanie’s right-hand blouse and dress sleeves have had to be let out.” Mother was speaking now of our neighbors’ pretty, very popular, and equally vapid sixteen-year-old daughter, the one for whom suitors were falling all over themselves, seeking her attention. “It seems that every one of those sleeves has become too tight from the constant tennis she plays.”

The statement was so utterly inane that neither Father nor I replied in any way. Melanie was one of the simpering, always-cheerful, and agreeable girls of Cambridge society whose lives were filled with trifles and, I was sure, had never drawn a single rebellious breath.

The silence from her husband and daughter must have come as an insult to Mother, for a moment later she erupted. “That is a disgusting habit, Jane!” She was glaring at the sandwich in my hand.

“What? Egg on my kippers? Mother, I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you’ve gone off your bean.”

“That
is
rude! Archie, will you put down your paper and speak to your daughter? She seems to have lost the last vestiges of good manners she was ever taught under this roof.”

Father folded his paper carefully and set it down next to his plate. He looked at me and then at Mother.

“Well, Jane, you do seem to have a few freckles on your nose. And Sammie”—this was a pet name he used only in the privacy of our small family gatherings—“you seem to have a problem that I suspect has to do less with Jane’s egg on kipper than bone saw on femur.” Mother’s face was set in stone. “So why don’t you just come out with it?” he finished.

“What good would it do? The two of you have already made up your minds. I have nothing to say about it. Besides, the damage is done. What decent man is going to want a woman—
a twenty-year-old woman
—who cuts up human bodies and smells like the basement of a charnel house?” She glared at Father. “I ask you!”

I thought I detected a glimmer of guilt on my father’s face. We all knew that no decent English gentleman would want a woman such as myself to become his wife and the mother of his children.

The thing was, I didn’t care.

“I’m going out for my ride,” I said, standing from my chair. “I apologize for my rudeness, Mother. I love you, and I wish I could make you happier. But boat races and domestic bliss make me want to scream. Do you have any respect for me at all, or know one
single
important thing about me?”

I looked at Father, then. There was nothing more to say. He wore an expression that bespoke both pride and remorse, the very sentiments warring in my own head. I took leave of the dining room. I heard a single, choked sob but, steeling myself from all further emotion, headed down the hall to the back door and out to the stables.

Peter, the stable boy whom I liked the most for his gentle way with the horses and whom I trusted with my little secret, came out to meet me, averting his eyes from my scowling face.

“It’s all right, Peter,” I said, trying to lighten my voice. “I’ll ride Leicester this morning.”

“Which saddle, miss?” Peter whispered, knowing that some days his outrageous mistress wore breeches beneath her skirts.

“Give me a man’s saddle today,” I told him. “And every day hereafter.”

“Yes, miss,” he said and turned back to the stable. “Very good, miss.”

I could see the boy was smiling.