The Honeymoon (5 page)

“Here, you can thread the worms,” he said.

“But it’ll hurt it!”

“They don’t feel anything. Don’t be a baby, Polly,” he said. And gingerly, she pierced the slimy little thing with the hook, trying not to squash it to death between her fingers.

“Hold the line,” he commanded, “while I go and look for more. Think you can do that, Polly?”

“Of course,” she said. She sat dead still on the bank, afraid to scare away the fish from biting, holding the line rigid with both hands, staring fixedly at the glassy water while he disappeared among the willows.

All was quiet, but for the rustling of the trees and the reeds and the dripping sound as the fish rose and fell. Presently Isaac appeared again, carrying the basket.

Just then, the line began to tug violently. She sat back and gripped the rod with all her might. He saw what was happening and ran to her.

“You caught something, Polly! Good girl, Polly! Your first fish!” He took the rod from her and reeled it in.

It was a silver perch. Isaac pulled the hook from its mouth and it flopped about on the bank until finally it lay still on the grass, its mouth gaping, and the warmth of Isaac’s praise flushed through her body.

After the twins died, they sent Chrissey away to Miss Lathom’s first. Then Isaac was sent to the Foleshill School in Coventry. Before he left, Isaac put Marian in charge of his rabbits. “Don’t forget to feed ’em, Polly, promise?”

“I promise I won’t!”

As the gig rode away, there was an awful silence in the barnyard, the birds chirping and flying about, oblivious to her, someone so small. Beyond the barnyard, the fields
stretched out beyond her. She was alone. There was no one to play with now, her mother was ill, and horrible Aunt Mary was beyond in the house.

She batted about the grounds, tried to play house with her dolls under the yew, but without Isaac the game was incomplete, there was no “father,” no “family.” She missed him unbearably and lolled about, dreaming of him, counting the days till he would return for the weekend.

“What’s the matter with you, child?” Aunt Mary said.

“I’m bored.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Go and look at those books of yours. Do something useful.”

But what was “useful” when you were five years old?

The first time he came home, she ran to meet him, her face full of joy.

He alighted from the gig, bent down to receive her kiss, then he ran past her, to the barn to see his rabbits.

Suddenly, she remembered. Her chest jumped to her mouth. She went after him to stop him going in there. But by the time she reached the barn door, he’d disappeared inside. She hung back outside, afraid to go in, paralyzed.

A minute later he came storming out, his face red. “They’re all dead!” he cried. “They’re dead! What did you do, Polly? You didn’t look after them! You didn’t feed them. You let them starve!”

He ran into the house to tell their father. “Look what she did, Papa! Look what Polly did! She killed my rabbits.”

She’d forgotten to feed them. Standing there in the barnyard, she imagined the rabbits weakening, getting thinner
and thinner by the day, starving and dragging themselves around the floor of the hutch. She was awful, awful, a murderer! She could never be a mother, she was too forgetful, too irresponsible.

Her father came out of the house. “Bad gel, Polly!” he said. “Them rabbits is good for a stew now!”

“No, Papa!” Isaac cried. “Don’t say that. No!”

And for the rest of the holiday, Isaac refused to speak to her.

They bought him a piebald pony. He got up on it, trotted off, and he was gone all day in the fields, coming in only for his meals, gobbling down his food and barely answering her, only wanting to go out again. She had lost her one friend in the world. It was never again the same between them.

After that, they sent her to join Chrissey at Miss Lathom’s.

One day, during the holidays, Mrs. Perry, their neighbor, lent Chrissey a copy of
Waverly —
Chrissey didn’t touch it, so Marian took it up to the attic to read herself. Cleveland was in love with the enchanting Minna.
“She extricated herself from his grasp, (for he still endeavored to retain her), making an imperative sign to him to forbear from following her —”
But Mrs. Perry took the book back before she finished it. So she wrote her own ending to it.
“Clevelan got don on his hans and nees and beg Minna to marry him … she sayd yes and they livd hapili ever after …”

When she was nine and Chrissey was fourteen, her father took them out of Miss Lathom’s and put them in Mrs. Wallington’s school in Nuneaton, a mile away. But again, the homesickness and the loneliness overtook her. The first morning after breakfast, before lessons started, with the day looming before her, she went back to the dormitory and
just cried. Suddenly, she felt a pair of arms around her. She looked up and there was one of the teachers, Miss Lewis, a plump young woman with an ugly squint.

“Poor wee thing,” Miss Lewis said in her thick Irish brogue. “What ere’s the matter wid yew? Come on now,” and she raised Marian up and held her against her big, soft breasts. “Here, here, donna yew cry,” she said. “All right now.”

Miss Lewis took her under her wing and became like a mother to her. She was always there ready to hold her against her warm body — she smelled of yeast — to offer consolation, to soften her loneliness and soothe her sensitive nature.

She was an Evangelist. Theirs was a simpler, more personal worship than the formal rituals of the Church of England. The Evangelists emphasized helping the poor, proselytizing, spreading the gospel.

She made Marian pray with her. She knelt and pulled Marian down beside her.
“I have heard thy prayer,”
she said,
“I have seen thy tears.”

Every night now, before lights out, Marian prayed passionately, for her mother and father, and for Chrissey and Isaac, and that God would make her be a good girl. She prayed that she would be loved: “Please God … Please make people love me … Make Mama love me, and Papa and Isaac love me …” As she prayed, she dug her knees into the stone floor as if somehow the pain of it would earn her an answer to her prayers.

Miss Lewis had nowhere to go for the holidays, so Marian pleaded with her mother and father to let her come home to Griff, and they allowed her to, though she urged Miss Lewis to be a little gentle with her Evangelism, as Mr. Evans had no tolerance for Evangelists or for Dissenters in general. He
disdained “enthusiasms,” and he was on a campaign against the Evangelical reforms that the new curate at the Chilvers Coton church, the Reverend Gwyther, was trying to institute. For one thing, the Reverend Gwyther favored Meeting House tunes, humble hymns sung without music over the grand old Sternhold and Hopkins Psalms accompanied by bugles and bassoon that everyone loved to sing.

The Reverend Gwyther was very ordinary-looking, always sniffing as if he had perpetual hay fever or a cold. “The man has no majesty,” her father said, as they drove away from Sunday services.

There was also gossip in the village that the Reverend Gwyther had befriended a woman who called herself a countess and who was always in the company of a man she said was her father but was actually her lover. It was said that the Reverend Gwyther had become too close to the countess, even while his wife was pregnant.

Marian’s father was a conservative through and through, ever loyal to the Tory Newdigates who’d given him his rise in the world. But all around her, amid the peaceable realms of Griff, she saw pockets of misery, the laborers’ and miners’ hovels, barely shelters, tiny structures of broken stone and wood, and their children so thin and dirty. And when she went with her father to the Abbey Street market in Nuneaton, there were the weavers with their pale, worn faces and their soot-covered cottages, the air filled with the rattle of their looms.

Now the workers and miners were demanding a better lot for themselves. In most places, people couldn’t vote unless they owned land, and they wanted the franchise. There was a Reform Bill just introduced in Parliament
which would give more people the vote, but the Tories opposed it. Her father sided with the Tories, of course. Uneducated workingmen were incapable of choosing for themselves, he said, and he held a breakfast for all the Newdigate tenants to try to persuade them to vote Tory in the coming election.

On election day, in December, she drove with him into the town. But at the entrance to Nuneaton, they came upon a mob of drunken navvies and pitmen rioting outside the Benefits Club, throwing raw potatoes and turnips at the Tory sympathizers and breaking windows. There was the stink of ale in the air. She saw a man staggering about holding his head, blood dripping from it, and a crowd jeering at him, “Bloomin’ Tory bastard!” There were constables and magistrates on horseback riding through the crowd trying to quell them. The supporters of the Radical candidate had taken over the polls, and they wouldn’t allow the followers of the Tory candidates to vote.

She’d never seen fighting like this before, men enraged, out of control. She shrank against her father and buried her face in his shoulder. “Are they going to hurt us?” she cried.

“Hold tight, there,” he said grimly, and he clicked at the horse and turned the gig back toward Griff.

After a few minutes they were clear of the violence and on the road to home. “Scoundrels!” her father said. “If they can’t read or write, how can they vote? They don’t even know what they want, they’re just parroting what other people tell them to say.”

Later, the newspaper said that the rioters had beaten one of the Newdigates and the magistrates had called in the Scots Greys. The Greys had ridden through the mob,
trampling on people. The next day, there was more violence, a crowd of laborers had set upon the Tories again. A man was killed, and two Scots Greys were beaten and stripped naked. The violence frightened her so much that she was terrified to go into Nuneaton again for months.

That year, Mrs. Wallington told her father that she was too intelligent a girl to remain at the school, the teachers had taught her all they could. She suggested he send her to the Misses Franklin’s school in Coventry, the best in the area, where she could learn French and music and arithmetic. But it was expensive.

Coming into the house one afternoon, she heard her mother and father in the kitchen debating the matter. “She’s got a poor chance a’ marryin’, tha’ one,” her father said. “It’s worth it. She’ll go into service, be a governess. The French will help her.” They didn’t know she was there, near the door, listening. But it was a death sentence, for everything her father said was always right. She was too plain and awkward ever to marry. No man would ever want her.

Chrissey was eighteen and finished with school now, at home and helping their mother. She’d grown more lovely and was, as always, sweet, helpful, and obedient. She was being courted by a young man, Edward Clarke, from Leicestershire. Edward was tall, thin, and boyish-looking, quiet, studying to be a doctor. He said he wanted to help the poor and be a doctor in a workhouse.

Meanwhile, Isaac was struggling at the Foleshill School. He wasn’t nearly as good at his letters as Marian was. “He shoulda had the little wench’s brains,” her father said. “They
shoulda swapped places, the two of them.” He wanted Isaac to take over his job as manager of the Arbury Estate one day, and he announced he was removing him from the Foleshill School and sending him to Mr. Docker in Birmingham, who would “get him straight with his letters and give him a good High Church education.”