The Weeping Ash (2 page)

When sixteen-year-old Fanny Herriard became, through the instrumentality of her father the Rev. Theophilus and with his full consent and approval, betrothed to forty-eight-year-old Thomas Paget, the regulating officer of Gosport, she was under no illusion as to the romance of the match. She did not make any attempt to convince herself that Mr. Paget was a heroic or dashing character—despite the fact that he preferred to be called
Captain
Paget: in point of fact, as she knew, a regulating officer was hardly to be distinguished from a civilian—and besides, Papa said that Mr. Paget only carried the rank of lieutenant. Moreover the prospective bridegroom was a widower, with two daughters already older than Fanny herself, and one younger, and until this year he had possessed little more than his pay of one pound a day and additional ten shillings subsistence money. (His previous wife, it was to be inferred, had been able to bring him some money of her own).

Recently, however, Captain Paget had benefited by a stroke of good fortune which, quite unexpectedly, enabled him to contemplate a second marriage, one this time for pleasure rather than for convenience. A distant cousin of his, whom he had never even met, having herself succeeded to an immense—and quite unanticipated—legacy, just as she had contracted an alliance with a wealthy man of rank, had the happy and liberal notion of seeking out the more impoverished members of her family and sharing her good fortune with them. The astonished Thomas, therefore, found himself not only endowed, out of the blue, with a handsome competence, enough to enable him to buy a thriving business, but also possessed for an indefinite period of a larger and much more comfortable house than his own, at a very reasonable rental.

The reason for this additional piece of luck was the devoted attachment of his generous cousin Juliana to her new-wedded husband, a Dutch nobleman who, up to the time of his marriage, had served as an equerry and intelligence agent in the entourage of the Prince of Wales. However, during the previous year, 1796, Count van Welcker had been delighted to find himself repossessed of some family estates in Demerara, upon the recapture of that region for the British by Laforey and Whyte. In consequence of this, the count was obliged to take leave of absence from the prince's service and make a journey which might be of some years' duration. His bride, unable to contemplate the prospect of such a long separation, had elected to accompany him, and she therefore obligingly offered Thomas Paget her own house in Petworth until the (doubtless far distant) date of her return.

With all these advantages, it could not be said that Captain Paget was particularly handsome or interesting in his person: he was a plain, square, dry-looking man, with sandy hair, rather thin lips, pale blue eyes, two fingers missing on one hand, discolored teeth, and a curt, short manner of speaking; but still it was to be hoped that having been the recipient of such generosity would release in him hitherto suppressed qualities of kindness and liberality; and in any case several of Fanny's unmarried sisters (she was the youngest of eight) thought, and said, that Fanny had done very well for herself, very well
indeed
, considering that Papa could afford to give his daughters only
£
200 apiece as dowry. The Rev. Theophilus Herriard was a hardworking Church of England rector, long since widowed, and his daughters might think themselves lucky to catch husbands at all.

Only Fanny, a shy, sensitive girl with a considerable reserve of delicate pride, knew the full measure of her own luck: that she was enabled, by this marriage, to get away from home before her sharp-eyed siblings could discover the intensity of the anguish that she was going through on account of her rejection by Barnaby Ferrars, the squire's happy-go-lucky son.

“
Marriage?
” he had said, laughing heartily. “You thought we might be
married
? Why, goosey, my father would never allow it! No, no, my dear little sweetheart, we must be like two butterflies, that flutter and dance and kiss in midair—so!—and then flit on to other meetings; you will find some good, kind, wormy fellow who will cosset and spoil you all the days of your life; and I—I shall never forget you, dear little wild rose, and the happy haymaking we passed together, when I am married to some dull lady of fortune who will help repair the inroads that my father's gambling has made on his estates. Gold—gold I must be sold for gold, my angel”—and he had tickled her chin with a buttercup. For their flirtation—innocent enough, heaven knew—had taken place during a warm and beautiful June, when the whole village—schoolchildren, grandparents, squire's sons, and rector's girls—had all helped in the meadows to get in the splendid crop of hay. But then Barnaby's father, Squire Ferrars, had fulfilled his promise to buy his son a commission in the Hussars. Fortunately by the day, some weeks later, when Barnaby came whistling along to inform the Herriard family, assembled for evening tea drinking, of his imminent departure to join his regiment, Fanny, too, had been able to gather the shreds of her pride and dignity around her—it was that little air of self-possession and reserve which, did she but know it, had attracted his notice to her in the first place—and could tell him, with cool decorum masking a breaking heart, that her own betrothal had been arranged; that she would be marrying Captain Paget, a school acquaintance of her father's, in September.

“Why, that's famous! Dear little wild rose, I'm delighted to hear it. Good luck to you both,” said Barnaby, not very interested; and after he had informed the Herriards that his regiment was ordered out to India to keep a sharp eye on Tippoo Sahib, he bade them all a carefree good-bye and swung happily off into the dusk.

“Barnaby's very pleased with himself,” said Harriet.

“You'd think the squire would wish him to marry and get an heir before he goes off abroad,” said Maria.

“Maria, such thoughts are unbecoming to you and, in any case, no concern of ours,” reproved her father.

“At
one
time I quite thought that Barnaby had an eye to our Fanny,” said Kitty with a spiteful sidelong glance at her youngest sister. But Fanny said nothing, merely bent her head lower over her stitching—they were all hemming sheets for her bride linen—and was immensely relieved when the rector said, “Enough chatter, children; it is time for evening prayers.”

By September the hot, haymaking weeks were a thing of the past, long forgotten, and it was in weeping gray autumn weather that Captain Paget assisted his youthful bride into the carriage which, after the simple wedding ceremony had been performed by her father, was to take them from Sway, in the New Forest, where Fanny had spent the whole of her life up till now, off to the new home in Sussex.

It was a cold and dismal journey. Rain penetrated the cracks of the ancient hired conveyance, turned the roads to quagmire, and reduced the stubble fields on either side of the turnpike to an uninviting dun color, but nevertheless Fanny, who had never traveled in her life, was prepared to find interest in all that she saw. Although she did not feel it likely that she would ever come to
love
her taciturn bridegroom, she was exceedingly grateful to him for taking her away from her sharp-eyed sisters and a home which had come to be associated with excruciating unhappiness; she fully intended to be friendly, affectionate, and biddable, to do as much as lay in her power to make her marriage a success.

However she soon found that her polite questions and comments about the villages they passed through met with but a brusque reception; the necessities of Captain Paget's rather dismal profession took him traveling about the country for large parts of every week, on horseback or by coach; landscape was of no interest to him, and his only present wish was to reach home and inaugurate the new period of connubial comfort with as little delay as possible; sharply, ignoring Fanny's polite remarks, he ordered the coachman to flog up his brutes of horses and get them to Petworth before the rain turned to a deluge.

Fanny prudently resolved to keep silent; but after a few moments a wish to learn something about the house toward which they were bound made her forget her resolution, and she inquired wistfully:

“Will your cousin Juliana be there to greet us, sir, when we arrive?”

A cousin, such a kindly, well-disposed cousin, would, she thought, be more inclined to be friendly than those three rather daunting unknown figures, her stepdaughters, whose presence their father had not considered necessary at his wedding.

“Juliana? No, no, she is halfway across the Atlantic already, she and that fancy Dutch husband of hers.”

Considering the benefactions that Countess van Welcker had heaped upon him, Mr. Paget's tone did not sound particularly cordial, Fanny thought; it is much harder to receive gracefully than to give, and perhaps he was already discovering that to be the recipient of such generosity posed its own problems.

“What is the name of your cousin's house, sir?”

“It is called the Hermitage,” he replied shortly, his tone suggesting that he considered this name far too fanciful and would, if it lay within his power, change it to something plainer. He added, “I believe there was once some monastic foundation upon the site; no doubt the name derives from that.”

“The Hermitage!” Fanny shivered; to her the name had a chill and dreary sound. She pulled the carriage rug more closely around her shoulders. “And what is the house like, sir?”

“Like?
Like?
Why, it is just a house.”

“No, but I mean, is it old or new? Does it lie within the town of Petworth or in the country outside?”

Captain Paget replied briefly that the house was a new one built within the last twenty years, he understood, and that it lay on the edge of the town, which numbered about three thousand inhabitants.

“It will be very strange to live in a town,” murmured Fanny, and added in what she hoped was a cheerful and lively manner, “I greatly look forward to seeing the shops and warehouses and the stalls in the market place.”

“I trust your recourse to them will be infrequent. A good housewife contrives all that she may without quitting her own home,” was her husband's somewhat discouraging rejoinder.

Fanny had learned already that there were to be four servants in her new home: a cook, a housemaid, a knife- and bootboy, and an outside man who would sleep over the stable and attend to the garden and the horses; she found the prospect of responsibility for ordering such a large establishment an alarming one and said timidly:

“And shall you continue in your profession, sir, now that you have bought the mill?” For she had been told that, with part of his cousin's gift, Captain Paget had been able to acquire a small flour mill at Haslingbourne, a mile outside the town of Petworth, the revenues from which would make a comfortable addition to his income.

“Continue in my profession? Certainly I shall!” he said sharply. “What can have given you the notion that I should not?”

“I did not—I had not meant—” Fanny knew that she must never, at any cost, betray how odious she thought her husband's calling; she faltered out something about regretting that it required him to be so much from home.

Thomas Paget glanced impatiently out of the carriage window—they were slowly descending a steep hill and the driver had been obliged to put on the drag, or the vehicle would have rattled away faster and faster, out of control. Fanny, looking out in the other direction, over a wide prospect of blue-gray, misty weald without a house in sight, battled desperately with the onset of tears. Her throat felt tight and choking; she swallowed and clenched her hands together. For the thousandth time she remembered an afternoon during haymaking—the peak and pinnacle of her flirtation with Barnaby, as it turned out, though at the time she had thought it but a prelude to greater and greater happiness. He had encountered her behind a new-made rick and rained a shower of light, laughing, impudent kisses on her face and neck, until the voices of two other approaching haymakers made them fly guiltily apart. Dizzy with joy, her blood sparkling in her veins like home-brewed cider, she had believed during that moment that a life containing unimaginable radiance and bliss lay stretched ahead of her.

And it had all ended so soon!

Peeping around the corner of the carriage rug at her grizzled bridegroom, Fanny thought,
Could
I ever feel like that about
him
?

Captain Paget had kissed her only once—a brief, formal touch of the lips after the marriage ceremony. He is a cold man, Fanny thought in some relief; well, he is
old
, after all, probably no longer interested in kissing and fondling. Which is just as well, on the whole, for I'm sure I don't want it. At least, not from him.

Bred up in conventual ignorance with her sisters in the rector's household, Fanny had only the vaguest, most rudimentary notion of what husbands and wives did together. Her mother had died shortly after her birth, and the Herriard girls were discouraged by their father from gossiping with servants, who, in that busy, straitened household, were, in any case, too hard worked to have time for telling tales to the young ladies. Upon her engagement her father had held a short, reluctant conversation with her, during which he had informed her that she and her husband would be one flesh—an obscurely repugnant phrase—and that she must bear herself wifely and dutiful to him in all that he might demand of her. Well, she had promised, and would do so, Fanny resolved; gulping, she tried to put away the recollection of Barnaby's firm young lips at the base of her throat; but she did fervently hope that wifely duties would prove not to entail too
much
. Perhaps Mr. Paget, who, after all, had three children already, would just hug and cuddle her, as a father might, as her own had never had time to do. That would be pleasant and comforting, Fanny thought hopefully, and if he did so she might easily come to love him, in a friendly, daughterly way.