The Town House (48 page)

For the rest she was somewhat taller than Walter, and though delicately made, not without bone; thin square shoulders, bony wrists, long, clear-jointed fingers. No breasts yet; and as I stared, wondering at myself and seeking some reason for my interest and for feeling as I did, I suddenly bethought me of the carved and painted angels in the roof of the St. Mary Chapel in the Abbey. Her beauty, like theirs, was of angle and plane, not of curve, and, like theirs, it was sexless, and, despite what her grandfather had said about merriment, on the sombre side. I had always had a weakness for small, plump, smiling women.

She was noticeably ill-dressed in a gown that had been lengthened, not very skilfully, and was still too short, especially in the sleeves. Mistress Reed had every reason to start demanding where was this and that garment, recently despatched to Beauclaire. Maude said she had given the things away.

‘In Heaven’s name, why?’

‘I had sufficient without them.’

Mistress Reed gave her a look of intense exasperation and then asked, ‘What is that you have on your finger?’

‘A ring,’ the girl said, clipping her other hand over the ornament protectively.

‘Show me!’

She held out her hand unwillingly and withdrew it quickly. We had all seen the clumsy, ill-fashioned thing and the dark mark, like a bruise, which the base metal had left on her finger.

‘Tawdry rubbish. I should have thought that after three years at Beauclaire you would have known better than to wear such trash. Where did you get it? At a Fair?’

‘It is a keepsake; from a friend.’

Mistress Reed, through her delicate, high-bridged nose, gave a sort of snort, and said,

‘The things I sent you … good sound things, you gave away!’

‘Yes,’ Maude said.

They stood eyeing one another like wrestlers, each of whom has once thrown the other, and who now hesitate to try another fall. I saw that I had been wrong in thinking Mistress Reed devoted to both her children; she had no fondness for her daughter. And as Maude stood there, very straight, defiant and yet oddly vulnerable, I was conscious of a wish to take her part, to protect her. It was a feeling quite new to me. But after all, we have, every one of us, a weak point. The most hardened blasphemer has one name he holds holy and once, in Norwich, I heard a triple murderer on his way to the gallows call to someone in the crowd, ‘Look after my owd dog!’ Maude Reed was my weak point, the place where ordinary rules no longer held. I began to love her at that moment; but there should be another word for it; there should be several words to cover the widely diverse feelings for which we can only use the one word ‘love’. I loved myself; I loved my amiable, cuddlesome Bessie, I loved Maude. Three very different uses of the word.

Maude had been home only a few days before I had an opportunity to serve her, to please her, and to put myself into her favour. She chanced to say that Walter wrote a much better script than she did herself. It was at table, where generally I was content merely to look at her.

‘Who taught you?’ I asked.

‘One of Lady Astollon’s ladies.’ I saw her eyes change colour, the black centre expanding until the blue was a mere rim. I had noticed before that light-eyed people, however strictly they rule their expressions, betray themselves thus. ‘Her name was Melusine,’ she said, and looked down.

Now Melusine is an unusual name, the name of a character in a French romance. Just the name it seemed to me, to slip into the mind of a young girl who, for purposes of concealment, tells an unpremeditated lie. That could be thought over later. I said smoothly,

‘Ladies seldom have the advantage of being taught by a cloister-trained clerk. My teacher was a famous pen-man. If you like, demoiselle, I can show you, in a very short time, how to better your script.’

At my use of the word ‘demoiselle’ Mistress Reed and Master Reed both looked at me, the former with surprise and a touch of approval, the latter with one eyebrow cocked sardonically. It was a term of courtesy, used only towards young ladies of high birth, and not one to slip easily from the tongue of a clerk.

‘That would be very kind,’ Maude said gravely. Then she smiled and her whole face was transfigured.

Mistress Reed, who liked me very little, could not forbear saying, to me,

‘I should have thought you had enough to do, without taking on any more.’

And to Maude, ‘You would be better employed with your needle. You write as well as you will ever need to.’

‘Not if I go to Clevely,’ Maude said.

For the first time since she had entered the house her mother looked at her kindly, almost lovingly.

‘You wish to go to Clevely?’

Before Maude could answer Martin Reed brought his hand down on the table in a smack which made the platters jump.

‘We’ll have no talk of that,’ he said. ‘You’re only just home. There’s a whole long summer ahead. You stay here, learn to write, read if you want to, be a bit of company about the place. There’s Walter, always on the fidget. I want no more of it.’ As though fearing an argument he jumped up and limped away.

‘If you wish to go to Clevely you shall,’ Mistress Reed said, looking at Maude and then quickly away again in the way she had. ‘I shall support you.’

‘If you do you’re mad,’ Walter said. ‘Shut in, doing the same things, seeing the same people day after day. I’d rather be dead.’

‘Nobody’, said Mistress Reed, in the soft fond voice which she kept for her son, ‘is suggesting that you should go to Clevely, Walter. We’re talking about Maude.’

‘I came home to go to Clevely,’ Maude said. ‘It was all arranged, long ago, wasn’t it? When I was twelve they said. I thought it was settled.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Mistress Reed said hastily. ‘There was just the likelihood of your preferring to stay at Beauclaire. So the final negotiations were never … but it will be all right, I am sure.’

I saw then how those lines, so out of place on either side of a young mouth, had been made. The girl knew, as well as I did, that her mother wanted her out of the house. How far that knowledge had influenced her decision to go into a nunnery as a lay boarder – which was all she could be at her age – I did not know, but, with that curious extra sight which infatuation lends, I could see, with painful clarity that upon this matter of going to Clevely she was in two minds; half of her mind welcomed the idea, the other half rejected it.

I rejected it absolutely. I knew very well that dozens of girls every year went into convents as lay boarders; it was the fashion for girls of good birth to go and spend some time in the company of nuns most of whom were well-bred, educated, capable of inculcating good manners, a smattering of learning and a shrewd business sense in their charges. Most of the girls emerged, little or none the worse for their cloistered years; a few became novices. Of that few half – invariably well dowered – went on and took vows. An ordinary girl, going as a lay boarder would have a likelihood of, say, one in twenty of becoming a professed nun.

But I wanted Maude here, in the Old Vine, here with me, susceptible, malleable. There was something about her, a kind of other-worldliness that would make her very open to persuasion. I had been schooled by monks; I knew how insidious mere atmosphere could be. I knew also how greedy – not as individuals, but as a community – any professed religious body could be. Maude Reed’s dower would be a tempting bait. Especially to Clevely which was surely the poorest house in all England.

Walter had by this time given up even the pretence of taking lessons from me, so when, at the time arranged, Maude came to the schoolroom we were alone. I took a clean piece of parchment and across the top of it wrote the alphabet in small letters and in capitals.

‘There it is,’ I said, ‘and the secret is to make each letter sharp and clear, with points rather than sprawling, circular strokes. And with the capitals be sparing, write as though ink were gold – it is with gold that the great penman wrote, you know – not to be wasted. You see, economy, economy and clarity is the result. You try now.’

She was twice as teachable as Walter, though about writing he had been eager and good. In no time at all she had mastered the better style. Presently, looking up, she said in a defensive way,

‘You mustn’t judge the teacher by the pupil, you know, Master Freeman. Melusine wrote beautifully.’

Anxious to ingratiate myself, I said, ‘Of that I am sure.’ I then asked, as casually as I could, ‘You were fond of your teacher?’

For a moment I thought she was about to cry; but she set her mouth, deepening the lines each side of it, and merely nodded her head.

There sprang into my mind a complete and feasible theory. There had been a writing master at Beauclaire – I could see him, sly, meek and ingratiating – and although he would not dare aspire to the affections of one of the high-born young ladies, the woolmaster’s grand-daughter
would be within his range. Something had happened, discovery, scandal perhaps, and so she had come home, a trifle broken-hearted and ready, with girlish impetuosity to fling herself into a nunnery. Or again, he, in his cunning, might have suggested that, it being the safest place where a girl could wait a year or two. Was it his ring that she wore?

The coarse, cheap thing was prominent on her hand as she wrote and presently I ventured to say,

‘
I
think your ring is very pretty.’

With something of her grandfather’s bluntness, she said,

‘Oh no. Nobody could think that! But I like it.’ Once again she put her other hand over it and held it fast. At the same time her mouth took on such a tender look that I detected, beneath that carved wooden angel exterior, the possibility of great sensuousness. With a quickening of my own blood I thought – He kissed her when he gave her that trinket.

I bore him no ill-will; what has been done once is the more easily done again, even if it is falling in love with one’s writing master. She was very young; he was far away and I was here on the spot.

Then I remembered that she was going to Clevely.

I let her write for a while; then I said,

‘You read as well as you write, I imagine.’

‘Tolerably well.’

‘It is a pity then, that you will have small chance to practise either art at Clevely. It is a very poor house and the Ladies are few. They work in the fields and the dairy.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘We buy their few poor polls of wool – or did, until they lost their sheep from the tick fever. I’ve seen the Ladies, their habits hitched up, working like hinds.’

She said, dreamily, ‘I like to read and write; therefore Clevely will be all the more suitable for my purpose.’

‘Your purpose?’

‘Something I must do.’ As she spoke she reached out for the pen-rag and wiped the point of her quill clean; stood it in the stand; rose to her feet and after a few words of thanks to me for the lesson, walked away, very graceful and dignified.

I felt rebuffed, I tried to feel resentful, too, but the genuine feeling would not be evoked. For the first time in my life in connection with any female I was inclined to self blame. I should not have dared presume, on so slight an acquaintance, to question her.

Master Reed continued obstinate about Clevely. Once, through a half-open door, I heard Mistress Reed ask, in a quiet, cutting tone,

‘Is it that you grudge the five pounds a year for her lodging?’

‘You know better than that. I’m thinking of her happiness.’

‘It is her own choice.’

‘Of that I must make sure.’

The weather warmed, and one day Maude and her grandfather went out together. When they returned he had somehow convinced himself that her desire to go to the nuns was genuine. I could see by his glumness that he had been convinced against his will; nevertheless, without further protest, the preparations for her leaving began to go forward.

I now began to be concerned, for the first time in my life, for another person’s creature comfort. On my wool-buying visits to Clevely I had seen inside the house; the nuns had no Frater even, they ate at a table at one end of the kitchen, which had a floor made of trodden earth and walls of undressed stone, running with dampness. I had not seen the rest of their accommodation, but I imagined that it would be equally comfortless. For a professed nun, vowed to poverty and self-denial, such surroundings might be, ethically, more right than the ease and luxuries that some communities enjoyed; but I hated to think of Maude in such a place.

I was silly enough to make one last effort to dissuade her. It was not planned, would indeed have been impossible to plan, for since the writing lesson which had ended so abruptly there had been no chance and no reason for us to have speech in private.

On this evening, just after supper, I was in the office, doing an extra hour’s work. The weather had changed again and for the time of year it was bitterly cold, with a driving rain and a howling wind. Even for the sake of Bessie’s embraces I was not prepared to ride three miles out and back again on such a night.

The door opened and I looked up crossly, expecting to see Mistress Reed, who had the annoying habit of coming into the office now and again when she knew her father-in-law was not there. She’d turn things over and ask questions – some of them, I admit, shrewd ones; and sometimes she would make suggestions which I would ignore and then, in my own good time present as my own.

It was not Mistress Reed, however, it was Maude, who, from the threshold said,

‘I thought my grandfather was here.’

‘He’s gone to bed. In weather like this his leg troubles him.’

‘
We
trouble him too. I could see that at supper. So I thought …’

It was true that at the table Walter had once more referred to the time when he would travel the roads, playing his lute. Mistress Reed’s expression had changed from discontent to piteousness, and the old man had looked first at Walter, then at Maude, and heaved one of his tremendous sighs. Disappointed in both his grandchildren.

I heard myself saying, without any of the respect or the desire to please that formerly I had used towards her, saying, in fact quite roughly,