The Twelfth Enchantment: A Novel (2 page)

Mrs. Quince now adjusted Lucy’s posture in the mirror and took a step back and examined what she saw, placing a finger to the corner of her mouth in a pose of thoughtful scrutiny. “I feared you would look the whore, as can often happen in these cases. Happily, I was, in the main, mistaken.”

Being the sort of man who held punctuality as a cardinal virtue, Mr. Olson arrived at the appointed hour and, upon entering the parlor,
bowed stiffly to Lucy. He then turned to Mrs. Quince, as if to say something, and then decided against it. He could make no sense of Mrs. Quince’s standing within the household and so found it convenient to ignore her entirely. During this awkward moment, his eyes lingered for a second or two on Lucy, particularly, she believed, in the area of her neckline. Once he had taken note of her, his eyes did not return to take pleasure in what must soon be his. There was little to be gained in reevaluating merchandise whose quality he had already established.

Like his manners, his dress was plain and without affect. He wore a brown jacket of a somewhat antiquated cut, though he showed his fashion sense by wearing trousers rather than breeches, and a fine blue ascot hung clumsily round his neck. His limp brown hair hung slightly long and had been brushed forward in the front, as was the fashion. There was something intense in his sunken eyes that some women found arresting, but Lucy was inclined to find unnerving.

Upon invitation, Mr. Olson sat down in a chair across from her, his posture exceedingly upright. Lucy found her attention to be unusually sharp. It was as though she were seeing Mr. Olson clearly for the very first time. His rigid manner, his mechanical gait, his hooded, appraising gaze, and—at five-and-thirty—his extreme age. There was a faint, and not entirely unpleasant, scent of sawdust and tobacco about him. She had many times told herself that being married to him would not be so very bad, but though she recalled believing this, she could not take hold of the belief now.

To distract herself, Lucy did her best to make amiable conversation. She inquired how he did, and Mr. Olson assured her that he did well. She asked how the work at his mill proceeded, and so discovered that it proceeded apace. She asked after the health of his mother, and he reminded Lucy that his mother had been dead for several years. Perhaps, he speculated, she thought of his Aunt Olson. Lucy, who had not been aware that Mr. Olson had an aunt, conceded that he was quite right.

Theirs had been a cool courtship, with more awkward silences than bright exchanges, so it was perhaps unsurprising that there was so little to discuss now. They had traded a few stiff words and danced at various
social events about town over the preceding year. After asking her to dance three times at the assembly last month, Mr. Olson had contacted Lucy’s Uncle Lowell and proposed the marriage to him. Uncle Lowell accepted on her behalf, and, in turn, passed the intelligence along to Mrs. Quince, who related to Lucy the happy news. So it was that without ever having been asked, or having accepted, Lucy was now engaged to marry a man to whom she had little to say. It was therefore much to Lucy’s relief when Uncle Lowell made his entrance into the room, and in her current mood, the irony of these feelings were not lost on her. What wisdom could there be in marrying a man whose conversation was so awkward that the arrival of her uncle must be regarded as an improvement?

Uncle Lowell was a relation by marriage, not blood—the widower of Lucy’s mother’s sister—and demonstrated perhaps more than the inevitable resentment toward an orphaned niece come to live with him. In his middle fifties, Uncle Lowell was a lean man, tall with an unyielding posture. He had some, though by no means much, of his hair, and that which remained was very white and cut short so that it rose up in a comical way at odds with his dour affect. The long, bulbous shape of his nose made his dark eyes appear deeper than their already considerable natural depth. His suit was of the same brown color as Mr. Olson’s, but of a more antiquated cut, with breeches and stockings, and its heavy material gave the impression that any jostling might well liberate a voluminous cloud of dust. Lucy thought that if one but disregarded his quintessentially English attire, her uncle looked remarkably like a picture of a mummified corpse from the Americas she had seen drawn in one of the monthly magazines.

“Yes, yes, you are come, Olson. I’ve kept you waiting, but what of it?” Uncle Lowell demanded, daring Mr. Olson to object. “These affairs of mine could not be put off. A man of business like you will understand.”

What these pressing affairs could be Lucy could not guess, for her uncle had been long disengaged from all serious business. If there was one thing Uncle Lowell prized above money it was quiet, and so having
made a fine fortune in the Levant trade, he had retired ten years earlier to his ancestral home in Nottingham. The house on Pepper Street was then in a state of disrepair, the Lowell family having not the means it once possessed. Mr. Lowell had altered the family means, but not the family home, and the building remained much decayed from neglect. The very room they sat in testified to that with its uncomfortable chairs, its scratched tables, its dusty, faded pictures, and a Turkey rug so stained, torn, and bleached with sun and age that the original pattern could scarce be divined.

Mr. Olson rose to take Uncle Lowell’s hand with the brave determination of a schoolboy who knows his master’s critical eye is upon him. “A pleasure, sir,” said Mr. Olson, who appeared to derive no pleasure at all.

“The pleasure is mine,” said Uncle Lowell, whose puckered mouth suggested that he derived even less.

“You know Quince, my woman,” he continued, with a blunt jab of his middle finger. “She is my niece’s companion, and will act here in the capacity of my late brother’s wife.”

Her mother had died when Lucy was little more than an infant, and she remembered nothing of her, but she nevertheless resented the comparison. Whatever her mother had been like, she had surely borne no similarity to Mrs. Quince.

Once they were all seated, Mrs. Quince wasted no time in cutting to the heart of the matter. “Mr. Olson, have you discussed with Lucy a date for your wedding?” This was a disingenuous question, as she knew he had not raised the question at all. He had not so much as sent Lucy a note expressing joy at their upcoming union. “I cannot but think the sooner a date is set, the greater will be your happiness,” Mrs. Quince added.

Mr. Olson turned to the serving woman as though the effort strained his neck, but then addressed his answer to Uncle Lowell. “It is not convenient to set a date. The establishment of my mill consumes my time. The machines are new and the workers unaccustomed to their use.”

“Quite right,” said Uncle Lowell. “A man who does not put his business
first is a buffoon. And yet,” added he who so wished his niece gone from his home, “I wonder if your efforts would not be aided by the acquisition of a wife to manage your household. You might then freely fix your mind upon matters of business.”

“You and I think very much alike,” said Mr. Olson. “I should be surprised to find you had considered an option that had eluded me entirely. I conclude the disadvantages of the scheme you suggest most certainly outweigh the benefits. A new wife must bring with her demands and distractions and difficulties to be resolved.”

“Yes, yes, and I suppose you have your hands full with these”—Uncle Lowell waved his hand about the air, a gesture he often reserved for discussions of people he thought contemptible—“
Luddites
, as they style themselves. You must worry that they will set themselves against your mill.”

“The Luddites are malcontents and brutes,” said Mr. Olson, who now smiled for the first time since his arrival. “They are like children who complain a game is unfair because they have lost. I make twenty pieces of hose at a labor cost that would previously have produced but one, but they say that I take away their employment. It is their own fault for not being so efficient as I.”

Lucy knew of these debates. Everyone in Nottingham did, for Nottinghamshire was the heart of this uprising of laboring men who set out to destroy the machines that had deprived them of their work and, as a result, beggared them. Now the army was in town to stop the Luddites, but everyone said there had been no abatement in the destruction. Not a week went by without a hosiery mill burned or fired upon or broken open and its machinery smashed.

Lucy’s father had always been against these mills, had spoken of them as a curse upon both nature and labor. Once she had stood with him looking upon a pottery mill not far from their home, and he had shaken his head with disgust. “Behold one possible future, Lucy, and a terrible one. These mills strip their laborers of their humanity, and soon enough they may strip it from the rest of us.” Lucy felt herself inclined to side with her late father over her future husband. Indeed, the growing
poverty in the county over the past few years only made her more inclined to sympathize with the Luddites. Their wild rhetoric—with talk of their fictional General Ludd—and certainly their violent acts disquieted her, but given the shortages of food that had struck Nottingham, the weakened trade caused by the ongoing war with France, and the general decline in opportunities to earn wages, perhaps wild rhetoric was appropriate.

Though used to keeping such opinions to herself, Lucy now thought she ought to voice what had been her father’s opinions in these matters. “But men lose their livelihood to machines like yours, and the wages you pay can hardly support a family. It is what I read in the newspaper.” Both the man who currently paid her way in the world, as well as the one who proposed to take upon himself that responsibility, stared at her. In response to this silence, Lucy pressed on, affecting a light cheer in her voice. “Do not their grievances have some merit?”

Mr. Olson cleared his throat, perhaps to signal that he would bear the burden of addressing this question, but then paused for many agonizing seconds. At last, after indulging in a leisurely gaze upon his intended bride with an expression of something like surprise, or perhaps with a pinch of distaste, he offered his response to her inquiry. “It is a silly question.”

All her life she had been dismissed as foolish. Emily had ever been the clever one, and Martha the bookish. She, the youngest, was but a silly girl, and her great mistake when she was sixteen had only confirmed to the world that she was an empty-headed thing, incapable of making sound decisions. Perhaps she had been silly once, but are not all children? She was now twenty years of age and did not like for her opinion to be of so little account.

“I find it distressing,” said Uncle Lowell, “that you sympathize with these layabouts over your future husband. Let them open their own mills if they like. Mr. Olson cannot refuse to profit because doing so might cost another man his income.”

Mr. Olson turned to Lucy, his expression an awkward attempt at softness. “I am certain Miss Derrick is only showing the goodness of
spirit for which we hold her sex in such esteem. It is, however, my belief that one comment such as hers, while charming, is sufficient. Such a refrain soon becomes shrill.”

“Just so,” said Uncle Lowell. “My late wife always stayed away from my affairs. Lucy, I trust you will do the same.”

Lucy knew her part. It ought to have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that of course they were correct, that she could not hope to understand the complexities of Mr. Olson’s business. In truth she did not, and though she felt compassion for the men she daily saw in want of food, she did not believe she comprehended either the cause or the solution to the changes that affected the hosiery trade. Yet that she was now being asked to rebuke herself, to promise never again to offer an opinion, infuriated her.

The heavy silence dragged on while the clock ticked and Uncle Lowell attempted to clear something from his throat and Mrs. Quince shot daggers from her eyes.

Lucy was saved from having to speak further by a violent pounding upon the door and the muffled sound of shouting from without. This noise continued for some time, for, other than Mrs. Quince and the cook, Uncle Lowell employed a single servant, the same he had employed for near forty years. This was a stooped old fellow called Ungston who was distressingly slow in his movement, owing to arthritic joints. Lucy, who had grown accustomed to the sounds of the house, noted the distinctive shuffling noise as the aged serving man approached the front door.

“Rather a ruckus,” said Uncle Lowell.

It seemed to Lucy someone ought to have gone to help the old man, but all remained seated, with ears cocked, better to hear whatever there was to be heard—which consisted of Ungston muttering while he unbolted the lock and then the creak of the heavy door.

After that came more shouting, which encouraged them to rise.

“Lucy Derrick!” an unknown man called. His voice was hoarse and ragged, but frighteningly powerful, and yet shrill, like a dog’s howl. “I will speak to Lucy Derrick!”

The voice sent through Lucy a wave of confusion and guilt. She must
have done
something
to cause a man to come to her uncle’s home and cry out her name, but she could not think what that might have been nor to whom she might have done it. Like any young lady, she indulged in mild flirtations, and she enjoyed dancing at the monthly assemblies, but she had made no secretive connections. No one made love to her with serious intent, and she had neither teased nor spurned any man since her arrival in Nottinghamshire. She might be a gentleman’s daughter with some personal charms, but her situation made her an uncertain match.