Turning the Stones (9 page)

I pushed a wary finger towards the velvet. How could it be anything other than a snarl of ribbon? Feeling ashamed of my outburst, I bent over my stitches with a brow as stormy as Eliza’s. As I sewed on, by the light of a guttering flame, I wondered what Hester meant by the falling axe.

The Schoolroom and the Parlour
March, 1758

Eliza put on an habitual scowl as she set about trimming her nib. She loathes essay writing. We are always told that a young lady should present a serene aspect, but Eliza is not a person disposed to mask her feelings. I am far more proficient in that regard. She has the strength of character to be a plain-speaker, too. After minutes of the rowdy mouth-breathing that tends to indicate powerful concentration on her part, she flung away in disgust the goose quill she had successfully mutilated. A crescendo of hoof-beats rising from the driveway three storeys below brought her to her feet.

She cried, ‘That is Johnny. I know it!’

Miss Broadbent, who was at the window, answered that it was only Croft on an errand and ordered her to sit.

Eliza said, ‘I wish he would hurry and arrive. We are waiting for him to bring home bags of coin to salvage us, since Papa cannot. I heard Mama say so to Lady Broome.’

My ears pricked up at that and I thought of the master’s cargo that had fallen into the sea. How the economy worked at Sedge Court I did not know exactly, but I was old enough to grasp that money – the want of it and the need for it – was a powerful governor of actions and atmospheres. People hung from a gibbet for it and left their families behind for it – I am
thinking of Hester and Abby, for instance, and the herring girls, all of them exported from their homeland in return for their wages – and I had heard bankruptcy spoken of in the shops at Parkgate in the same tone of voice used to report a death or a sin.

Miss Broadbent said, ‘It is unkind to speak of your father so disrespectfully, Eliza, and you are indiscreet as well, which is almost worse.’

Eliza puffed out her cheeks with a noisy expulsion of air. She has a tendency to deploy a range of tics and gestures – huffing sighs, a jabbing finger, an eye rolled back in her head as if to preface a fit – as a point of emphasis or assertion. I do not mean to disparage her, although I admit I sometimes felt a twinge of pleasure when she made a gaffe in front of her mother. That had the potential to make me look more attractive to Mrs Waterland by comparison and reinforce the possibility that she might regard me as a de facto daughter, which was always my covert desire. At the same time I was troubled by such lapses in loyalty on my part towards Eliza. Regardless of the difference in our rank, she and I had a connection that I may call sisterly, and I cared for her as much as I cavilled about her.

Eliza said, ‘Do you know that Johnny once saved me from drowning?’

‘You might have told us such a story once or twice, my dear, or one very similar,’ Miss Broadbent replied, and returned her gaze to the window. She pressed her hands into a steeple and turned the steeple upside down and inside out. The vertical crease between her eyebrows seemed to deepen slightly.

‘I shall tell the story to Em, while she shaves me a nib.’

You see Eliza’s mettle? She ploughs on undeterred, although it requires dragging out a dog-eared tale that Miss Broadbent and I both had heard often before in several inconsistent versions. The gist of it was Eliza’s unexplained fall into a river followed by a heroic rescue by her brother. The story ends with Johnny wringing his hands with concern, while she hovers between life and death in his rooms in Cambridge, wrapped for comfort in the skin of a lion, or sometimes a tiger, that he happened to have ready for just such an occasion.

Eliza had a fund of preposterous accounts of things that never happened between her and Johnny. You were bound to feel sorry for her, because even a lugworm could see that her brother did not give a fig for her. By the time she was born he was gone away, at first to Charterhouse School and then up to Cambridge, and if he ever wrote an actual letter to her no one has laid eyes on it. She, however, sent him frequently her thoughts from the nursery, written in a blotchy hand. Whenever he sojourned at home we saw little of him except for a blur of blondness and lanky limbs striding by in a hurry, pockets jingling, while Eliza and I dropped our crooked curtsies. He was inclined to reckless driving and to going abroad in a blaring way with firearms and dogs, reports of which I had gleaned from the servants’ hall. It seemed unlikely that he had ever decided, ‘Let me leave off this jigger of gin and interest myself in the musings of my juvenile sister.’ He lived in Rotterdam at that time and what his undertaking was there I did not know and neither did Eliza, for all her pretence that Johnny was her zealous correspondent.

It would not surprise me if you found these observations to be somewhat tart in nature. I have to confess that my
compassion for Eliza, which is heartfelt, is at the same time flawed by a dark little seam of envy that runs through it, for she was born to the house and is entitled to the security that I lack. Perhaps I was so dismissive of Eliza’s fantasising because I saw in it something of my own woeful neediness.

She had a habit of wrapping her arms around herself and I can see her now in that self-embrace, complaining, ‘Bah! This fire gives out scarcely any heat. I wish I had Johnny’s lion skin now. Em, fetch my waistcoat!’ To which I am sure that Miss Broadbent would have replied something like, ‘Eliza, you may fetch your own waistcoat. Either that or sharpen your nibs. Em cannot undertake two tasks at once.’

Eliza must have gone into her dressing room then with a lot of groaning and sighing in order to convey the onerous nature of life, because I remember we heard her galloping across the floor as she used to do with her hobbyhorse, when she was little. She was a great one for bashing and crashing and games of skittles, hoops and diabolo.

As soon as we were alone, Miss Broadbent offered me one of her amiable, leaning-forward-to-help smiles and said, ‘You do not seem to be yourself this morning, child.’ I got up and joined her at the window. She liked to position herself on the margins of a room. She made a point, you know, of taking up very little space. There was hardly anything more to her than to the bundle of slender sticks and pleated silk that was Eliza’s folded-up kite. She had quite a knack for invisibility, in fact. Whenever she brought Eliza and me to perform for Mrs Waterland, she seemed able to disappear even while remaining in the room. I suppose that facility owed something to the gowns of drab linsey and light-sucking
bombazine that she wore, which blended easily into the background.

Her looks too were fugitive – hair not exactly brown and not exactly dark blonde, nose and mouth neither large nor small. What colour were her eyes, do I recall? Hazel, perhaps, or the grey of a drizzly sky. Yet the interior of Miss Broadbent was another prospect altogether. If you looked into her, you would find a bold panorama, and not even an English one, in my opinion. Her inner landscape had sweep – it extended halfway around the world, as far as I could see.

I told her about the altercation I had overheard the evening before, how the master wished I had never come to Sedge Court and believed that the sinking of his cargo was my fault, and that if it had not been for the intercession of the mistress, he would have had me evicted from the house.

‘Dear girl,’ Miss Broadbent said, ‘do not agitate yourself over things the master says at the minute. He has been dogged by bad luck and it has put him on edge. It is a great responsibility, you know, to have the burden of a large household on one’s shoulders.’

‘But why is everybody else on edge as well? Do not you feel it, Miss Broadbent? The house is laced through with anxiousness.’

‘That is what happens when people dwell at close quarters, Em. Mood is infectious, which is why we must guard against it.’

*

I am thinking of those shrewd covers on the chairs that flank the fireplace in the library at Sedge Court. Why do they stick in my mind? Certainly Mrs Waterland had worked them cleverly, raising the needlework above the linen ground to
resemble cut velvet. If the master were not at home, Miss Broadbent would sometimes bring us to the library for instruction. It seemed always to be chilly there and in winter the light was so dim it was like peering through a veil. Eliza and I would shiver in our quilted waistcoats while Miss Broadbent scurried on whispery feet to the chimney piece to light candles. We were surveilled by mounted antlers, turtle-shells and sombre Dutch paintings. The shadows cast by the antlers looked like branches so that it seemed we were crouched in a forest surrounding the dark green sward of the billiard table, and the forest in its turn was enclosed by the leathery palisades of books in their presses. There, if you can imagine it, is Miss Broadbent carrying the brass candelabrum to the map table. Beneath its jittery light, Eliza and I are hunched over an old map of Wirral looking for the inscription that says ‘Sedge Farm’.

The estate is still a farm. Beyond the woodland in the east there are three cottages in rather a sorry state of repair where the farm labourers live with their families. That is where the odd-job boy, Andy Croft, comes from and the laundress, Mrs Heswall. You see the labourers in the fields harvesting the corn with their sickles and the women raking it into rows ready to huddle up in sheaves. In the back-end of the year you might discover a man trimming a hedge or mending a fence and he will tip his hat and greet you with deference because you are from the house even though he knows you not, but otherwise the labourers go about unseen. The corn is cut, the cows milked and the pigs fed by the hand of spectres, it seems. Mr Otty says that when his father was a lad Sedge Court was little more than an overgrown farmhouse, but the master’s father crowned it with an additional storey, where Eliza’s apartment
and the servants’ garrets are now, and he built extensions at the back to form the commodious inner court, where a chaise may circle with ease, and garnished the facade with a perky little porte cochère. He planted the lawns and the copses, which screen the pastures for the milk-cows, and he aggrandised the name of the house.

Eliza said, ‘Why must we get cross-eyes over a map of the Dee, when we could drive to Parkgate and ogle the Dee itself? Surely that would be geography?’

‘No, young lady, that would be an excursion.’

Eliza squinted at Miss Broadbent. ‘When you were a girl, were you a Parliamentarian or one of the King’s men?’

Miss Broadbent tilted her head to one side, a finger to her chin, and said with an amused smile, ‘Do you know I can hardly remember. After all, the war
was
more than a hundred years ago. Fortunately, I still have my own hair and teeth in spite of my amazing age.’

‘Well, I am bad at dates,’ Eliza said sweetly. ‘Em remembers them for me.’

‘Perhaps you won’t always have Em as your proxy.’

‘Of course I will. She has nowhere else to go.’ Eliza’s truthtelling struck me a forcible blow as it so often does, but I kept my expression calm. She rested her chin on my shoulder, and said, ‘What is that broken line by the Welsh shore?’

I said I knew it to be a long trench called the New Cut and Miss Broadbent asked, ‘Why do you think such a trench was dug?’

‘To force an entry through the sand?’

‘Exactly, Em. Our Dee is a troublesome river, girls. It ebbs more than it flows, which causes its tides to create prodigious
shelves of sediment. Three hundred years ago mighty vessels of trade could sail all the way to Chester, can you imagine? But then the silt rose and blocked the passage of the ships and the only solution was to move the quay downriver to Shotwick.’

Eliza said, ‘Shotwick has no quay now.’

‘That’s right, poor old Shotwick gave way to sludge and salting as well and its quay was abandoned. There was nothing for it but to retreat further north to Great Neston. Of course the inevitable happened and the relentless sediment choked that port, too. Now ships may only advance as far as the anchorage at Parkgate.’

We stared down at the map. The banks of the Dee were shaded by thousands of tiny dots that gave the impression of mould. They represented the creeping silt that would shrink the river until it was reduced to little more than a trickle.

Eliza cried, ‘But what will happen to us and to Papa’s granary when the Dee bungs up Parkgate, too?’

Miss Broadbent spoke softly. ‘I dare say we will be stranded and no ship shall be able to reach us at all.’

*

Downes was waiting in the dressing room with what looked like a failed blancmange oozing over the crook of her arm. She turned her crimped face to us, mouth as thin as a crack in a piecrust, eyes like currants, small, black and unblinking. She said, ‘Smith, I haven’t got all day,’ and thrust the pale pink stuff at me. While Eliza fidgeted in her stays and shift, Downes fastened side-hoops to her waistband and adjusted them to sit evenly. I helped Eliza into a petticoat and stomacher and then she contended with the gown, which was not very lenient
across the back or in the arms. By way of encouragement I said, ‘The pink looks well against your complexion.’

Eliza said, ‘Oh, fiddle,’ and goggled her eyes at her reflection in the glass.

Downes showed me how to tie the muslin handkerchief on Eliza’s bosom without the knot bulging out like a frightful tumour, and when that was settled I went at Eliza’s limp hair with a brush. Where Mrs Waterland’s hair is silvery blonde, Eliza’s is ash, which is regarded as a misfortune by those who admire her mother. There is also only a faraway echo of Mrs Waterland’s slight figure in Eliza’s low stature and shortness of limb. But Eliza does not care. She is robust in her indifference to beauty.

I twisted her hair into a tail and bound it with ribbon. ‘It will have to do,’ Downes said. She swatted away my attempt to situate a lace cap on Eliza’s head. ‘You must perch it up so that it is high on the crown,’ she growled, manipulating the thing until it looked less like an object discarded from the sky by a passing bird. I retained my morning ensemble of a mouse-coloured gown, not very handsome, faced with a narrow ruffle.