We Five (2 page)

Who
was
the fairest of the five? Perhaps it was the circle's youngest member, Molly Osborne, whose flaxen hair set her apart from her dark-tressed circle-sisters. Molly of the long lashes and wispy brows and oh-so-not-very-English softly rounded chin, indented with a dainty, almost capricious cleft. Molly of the arresting milk-blue eyes and the enchaining smile, which curled the plump lips with every glad thought or in response to even the smallest demonstration of spontaneous kindness, or whenever she found herself tickled by the wand of mischievous delight. (For Molly had an impish streak, which drew humour from circumstances not always conducive to the production of jocularity.) Molly, who turned the head of every young mill-working lad in the town of Tulleford and captured the eye of all their fathers as well (the men giving themselves license to partake in a furtive glance, which did little harm and which tended, in the main, to uplift the soul for some time thereafter). Molly was a chatterer and Molly was the one least shorn of her girlhood, and the coquettish nature that sometimes presented itself was nothing more, in fact, than the flit and flutter of a girl not yet molded fully into womanhood, though everything about her look and carriage might argue to the contrary.

Carrie Hale was the musical one, skilled at playing on both the pianoforte and violin, and blessed with an angel's voice. Carrie's face was music of a different sort, composed of full bright lips and cheeks, crimsoned by nature's rouge, and set with hazel eyes that trilled their own song through glimmer and sparkle. There was drama and mystery in these eyes, as well, just as there was drama and mystery in the heart and soul of this lyrical creature, who was Carrie to everyone but her mother, for whom Carrie would always be Caroline (“singer of carols”—or at least this was the derivation assumed by Sylvia Hale, who knew little of the name's monarchial pedigree).

Ruth Thrasher, by contrast, was quiet and retiring, save for those occasions when, in the company of her friends, she animated herself with clever observations and opinions. Ruth was a little plump (and had been at times quite a bit plumper), possessed of a pillowy frame and doughy cheeks, and a face that might give openness and light in one moment and the adumbrative appearance of brooding introspection in the very next. Whenever there was a matter to be decided, Ruth kept her own counsel until such point as it became necessary to break a tie, and then what Ruth said would rule the day, and that was the way she liked it, for keeping herself in detachment and studying a matter from every aspect was the best way for her to maintain her habit of feeding her intellect (alongside her equally insistent alimentary tract).

Ruth, unlike her circle-sisters, had been an orphan from birth. She was the daughter of an unmarried cook, employed by two maiden sisters of advanced age and truculent disposition. (The identity of Ruth's father was never discovered.) When Ruth's mother expired upon the parturition bed, the sisters allowed the baby Ruth to remain in their house, to be nursed with only the greatest of reluctance and to be fed sparingly. To compensate for this act of self-sacrificial Christian charity, Ruth was put into service at a very early age. The two women who superintended her youth were coarse and cruel and overworked her in Cinderella-stepmother fashion. At the age of fourteen, having had her fill of back-breaking chores and lumpy gruel and living in a house without a mote of love to be found within, Ruth ran away and became maid-of-all-work for a Dissenting minister and his sister on the other side of town, who subsequently taught her to read and to respect herself and to love God and do His will, and to sew. The minister and his sister, seeing the need to rescue their maid from a long, dull life of washing linens and scouring floors, sent her to the dressmaker and milliner, for whom she now worked in the company of her four circle-sisters. It was Ruth herself who, in response to Mrs. Colthurst's promptings, invited her four childhood friends to join her in employment there. (Mrs. Colthurst, you see, had worked in Manchester as an assistant to a successful modiste until she was disfigured in a terrible carriage accident and was no longer able to model the gowns her employeress designed. Having saved a few guineas over the years, the enterprising dressmaker ventured out under her own industry and opened a dress shop in neighbouring Tulleford.)

And what of Maggie Barton? She was passionate and smart and decisive and often precipitant, her manner bold (sometimes when boldness was hardly required). There was something enviably admirable in her determinate stubbornness and her steadfast unwillingness to admit to even the occasional miscalculation. But even for those who may see such wilfulness as a deficiency of character, the flames of her incandescent nature were seldom caustic, and one could scarcely look into her dark smoldering eyes, or take in the contemplative expression of serious purpose, or attend the eruption of mirth from her laughing lips that found ridiculousness in everything not overshadowed by death and illness and the other misfortunes of life, without falling helplessly subservient to her galvanic temperament. Maggie Barton wasn't beautiful, her face having been pocked (though, fortunately, not deeply so) by a childhood bout with the scourge of smallpox. But there was voluptuous heat and pulchritudinous passion in her soul, and if Molly was the one who turned the male head and put a fluttering butterfly kiss upon the male heart, then it was Maggie Barton who, to put it indecorously, inflamed the male loins.

“Maggie? Maggie, dear, is that you?” The voice, which belonged to Maggie's widowed mother, was more robust than usual, though it emanated from the bed of an intermittent invalid.

“Can it be anyone else?” returned Maggie, her own voice raised in volume. Maggie, having just shut the front door behind her, was now standing at the foot of the narrow staircase that led to the two companion bedchambers of the diminutive family cottage.

“Have you returned from the market?”

“No, Mamma. I'm still there. Oh, Lor, how my words do carry!”

Maggie chuckled. She set her bundle of greens upon the vestibule chair and mounted the stairs. As she stepped into her mother's tiny apartment, she found the drapes opened wide and the room flooded with radiant early morning sunshine. (It was clear to Maggie that her mamma had previously risen to welcome the day, and then promptly retreated to her bed, slipping indulgently beneath the cool sheets.)

“Don't you look pretty this morning? Tell me how long I may have you before you dash off to spend the balance of the day with Mrs. Colthurst.”

“Scarcely any time at all, Mamma. And it's all Mrs. Lumley's fault, if you must blame someone. She detained me with a most long-winded story about her son—the one who serves in the Royal Navy, not the one who mends umbrellas and chases dogs. Mrs. Lumley still fancies that one day Henry and I will wed and I'll give her eight sturdy grandchildren, all of whom, she has no doubt, will look exactly like
him.
How are you feeling this morning, Mamma? Mrs. Forrest said she'd be happy to look in on you later. What should I tell her?”

“You may tell that meddlesome woman she needn't come at all,” bolted out Mrs. Barton as Maggie descended languidly onto the bed, taking care to spread out her skirts with both hands to keep them unruffled. “I feel quite myself this morning,” Mrs. Barton went on, “and have it in mind to spend most of this beautiful summer's day
out
of bed
.
I may even pay a visit to the tittle-tattling
Mrs. Forrest
for a change.”

“She'll be most surprised to see you,” laughed Maggie. “Only last week she summoned me to her doorstep to tell me in a most grave and despairing tone that in her studied estimation you are living on borrowed time.”

“What a deliciously morose woman!” exclaimed Mrs. Barton, who signed her desire for a morning embrace from her only child by extending her arms and twiddling her fingers.

Maggie obliged. The two held themselves thusly across the bed until Maggie felt pinioned and succeeded in wriggling herself free and then popping up from the bed like the little clown sprung from the box. Mrs. Barton took this opportunity to give her daughter a good looking-over. “Tut, tut, tut. You're much too pretty to spend your day in the back of that woman's dreary dress shop, stitching away with those other girls like prisoners in a women's gaol.”

“You mustn't speak so unkindly of Mrs. Colthurst. She's a good woman and a generous and thoughtful taskmistress. Only last week she rewarded us with yet another twenty-minute interval in the fresh air and fortifying sunshine; we are now permitted
three
opportunities during the workday to leave that windowless workroom and take a bit of a stretch.”

“Permit me, then, to disparage her for the
opposite
reason. I shall mark the very odd stripe of liberality to her character.”

“Do as you wish, Mamma, but I believe Mrs. Colthurst's kindness devolves from her great fondness for us. And in my mind, there is not a thing odd or
wrong
about it.”

“Then I shall confine myself to my feelings about your daily absence from this house. Surely, I cannot be singular in pining away for a missing daughter. Doesn't Carrie's mother feel similarly deprived?”

“I suspect, Mamma, that it isn't my
society
you are missing so much as my lack of attendance to your every hourly need. Which distinguishes you from Mrs. Hale. Carrie's mother doesn't lie abed all day as you are wont to do, with sufficient opportunity for indulging in troubling contemplations. She occupies herself in her solitary hours with industrious and conscientious endeavours. She plays upon the harp. She bakes muffins for the poor. Then in the evening, when Carrie returns, the two are pleasantly restored to the company of one another, but neither will have considered the separation as any sort of trial. To be quite honest, Mamma, I've never seen such
sensible
affection demonstrated betwixt a mother and daughter.”

Mrs. Barton's eyes flashed; her nostrils dilated. It was a look half put up and half sincere. “I noted three, perhaps four, things in that last peroration which pricked this particular mother's soul—the last being the most distressing. Have we
nothing
between us which remotely resembles the affection shown by Carrie and Sylvia Hale for one another?”

“I've seen little evidence of it.”

Mrs. Barton flung a palm to her chest and gasped.

“Hold, Mamma. Let me finish. We haven't the same affection because its character bears no similarity to our own. Carrie and her mother are in some ways more like friends than relations.
We
are different. You are the mother and I am the daughter, and we know our rôles and we do credit to them.” Maggie cleared her throat. “After a fashion.”

Mrs. Barton's frown transformed into a fully blown pout. “I think that I should like to be
your
friend someday.”

“And yet, with all candour, Mamma, I would not choose you for a friend. I simply would not.”

Clara Barton rose from her bed and then promptly put herself down upon the edge. Her hands made themselves into little fists that bunched and clutched the folds of the counterpane with straitened vexation. “Such a thing to say to one you love! Or
do
you love me?”

Maggie sate down next to her mother. She took one of Clara's hands and laid it within the cradle of her own unturned palms. “Stuff! Of course I love you. I simply mean that as much as I esteem Carrie, I could never
be
Carrie, and as much as, I'm certain, you esteem Mrs. Hale, you could never
be
Mrs. Hale. The idea, for example, of spending the entirety of one's evening reading aloud to one's mother would be the death of me. You know I can scarcely hold myself still long enough to read a book.”

“No, but do you not, my daughter, keep yourself still and staid to stitch and baste all the day long?”

“I do not
always
sit as I sew, Mamma. Sometimes I pace, if you must know. As for books, we haven't money to buy a single one.”

“Nonsense! We could buy a book if we wanted. Mrs. Colthurst gives you a good wage. And the annuity your late uncle left us provides a bit of quarterly interest. We are not paupers.”

Downstairs the clock on the hearth mantel had begun to chime the time: seven thirty (or very nearly seven thirty, for the clock ran fast). Maggie sprang from the bed. “Now I am late.” She reached down and kissed her mother on the cheek and then pivoted on her heel to face the door, poised for swift retreat. Just as suddenly she bethought herself of that thing which often troubled her. “Oh. The palpitations that came again last night—have they now suspended?”

Mrs. Barton nodded, smiling pleasantly. “This morning, my dear daughter, I am ticking as regularly as a newly wound clock. My vision is restored as well. It was so cloudy yesterday, but now it is clear.”

“Was it the drops Dr. Osborne gave you?”

“Most assuredly! Molly's father is a veritable wonder. How fortunate for
me
that you and Molly are such good friends or I should never have known him—so skilled he is, and so kind and considerate. And I shouldn't even mention how very little he charges.”

Maggie shook her head intemperately. “Dr. Osborne cannot charge much above what he does, Mamma, or word would get out that he is practising the medical arts without proper training or proper credentials. In truth, you and I both know he's a dentist-surgeon. He pulls teeth. Whatever facility he purports to have for healing the sick—and I shall be charitable—has been gained in a most haphazard and piecemeal fashion.”

Mrs. Barton bristled. “
However
the gift has come to him, he is the best I have ever had, and I am quite on my way to a full recovery.”

“And he drinks.”

“I thought you were late.”

“I should simply like to remind you that
Doctor
Osborne, as you have chosen to denominate him, drinks. He drinks gin. More gin than is prudent, according to Molly, who, I fancy, frets about him daily. If you are setting your cap for this doctor, who is not, in fact, a doctor in any proper
legal
sense, I would rather you not.”