Sext

Qui témperas rerum vices, splendóre mane illûminas,

et ignibus meridiem …

WHO DOST CHOOSE THE COURSE ALL THINGS SHALL RUN, DECK THE MORNING WITH BEAUTY BRIGHT AND NOON WITH THE BLAZING SUN.

HYMN FOR SEXT FROM MRS QUIN’S Day Hours

The Adoration of the Magi The scene takes place in the stable. The Virgin is seated and holds the Child on her lap. He stretches forth one of His hands toward the gift which the first Magus is offering and is crowing with delight (this expression on the Child’s face has been caught in a masterly manner by the artist). The two other Magi stand behind the first, waiting to present their gifts. Joseph stands behind the Virgin in an attitude of protection. A man (possibly the original owner) is watching the scene through a window at the side of the stable.

Full border of conventional flowers and ivy leaves, painted in colours and heightened with gold. In the right-hand border the arms of the Bonnefoy family.

MINIATURE FACING THE OPENING OF SEXT IN THE HORAE BEATAE VIRGINIS MARIAE, FROM THE HOURS OF ROBERT BONNEFOY

Mrs Quin was buried at eleven o’clock the next morning, simply, and as quietly as the village would allow. ‘Buried?’ Bella had asked in dismay.

‘That was her direction,’ said young Mr Prendergast, who was not young – quite as old as Aunt Bella, thought Tracy, to whom a middle-aged person was old – but had to be distinguished from his father, old Mr Prendergast. What Mrs Quin had really said was, ‘Don’t let the girls have me cremated,’ but young Mr Prendergast did not tell Bella that. Prendergast and Holtby had been the Quin solicitors since the time of Eustace and young Mr Prendergast remembered Bella from children’s parties. She used to boss all the games, thought Mr Prendergast, and made us play even when we didn’t want to. ‘You shall not be cremated,’ he had told Mrs Quin and had taken it upon himself to give clear directions to Mr Hoskins and had driven over to see the family as soon as they arrived.

‘Who wants to be buried nowadays?’ They were still talking of it after the funeral when they had come back to the house. They don’t let things go, thought Mr Prendergast. ‘Who wants to be buried?’ asked Bella.

‘I do.’ It was that mouse of a niece who spoke as if it were jerked out of her. So this was the grandchild Mrs Quin had loved, thought Mr Prendergast, loved and sent for again and who had arrived too late. Pity, thought Mr Prendergast watching her. Tracy shrank back in her corner as soon as she had spoken but did not escape. Attention was riveted on her. ‘You do?’

‘My dear Tracy!’

‘I thought in America—’

‘But why?’

Tracy blushed, but held her ground and, Not such a mouse when she blushes, thought Mr Prendergast.

‘Why?’ asked Tracy. ‘Because I thought Gran’s funeral was beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’

‘Yes. It was homely.’ As she said that the child seemed to light up, thought Mr Prendergast. ‘Homely. Oh, not as we use that word,’ said American-reared Tracy, ‘but as you do; being at home and carried up the village s-street where she had so often walked.’ The stutter was overtaking her, but she made herself go on. ‘Past c-cottages where she knew every person, and then in the ch-church where she was married,’ said Tracy, ‘and the churchyard where the f-family were. It wasn’t like going away, it was a joining,’ said Tracy in a rush.

It is a joining; the family dead are up in the windy graveyard, a wide plot of grassed land, filled with wild daffodils in spring and only walled from the moor by piled grey stones; heather and bracken push through the chinks and sometimes wild ponies spring over. ‘I’m glad they brought Damaris back and let her lie there.’ Mrs Quin says that often. Damaris, whose story comes down through Polly, who tells it to Borowis and John Henry, particularly appeals to Mrs Quin. ‘I’m glad she is here.’ There is the same strength of granite as in the house, but the church is far older. ‘Norman,’ says Mrs Quin. Its square tower rises above the churchyard, but the vicarage elms, counterparts of the elms at China Court down the hill, at the opposite end of the village, are higher still.

Though Bella and the Graces would hardly have believed it, cremation is still rare in St Probus and most of the village dead are here too, with the same names recurring over and over again: Quins, Neots, Tremaynes, and Minvers. The villagers come here often because, contrary to most modern belief, there is comfort in a grave; it can be a quiet place to sit by for a visit, with its ordered grass and still stones, and it brings a sense of nearness. Indeed, a grave can be almost a companion, a visit to it a pilgrimage back to love; but there are some graves in the churchyard with no one to care for them – Jeremy Baxter’s for instance. No one remembers now who put up the granite head-stone, plain but fine, and the inscription: IMMORTALIA NE SPERES, MONET ANNUS ET ALMUM QUAE RAPIT HORA DIEM,* the only Latin in the churchyard. It is cut in the Quin quarry and the entry for payment is simply ‘Miss X.’

The family grave of the China Court Quins is a little apart, as fits those who have come from outside: EUSTACE QUIN AND ADZA HIS WIFE – with two hands clasped together and the words: WE SHALL MEET AGAIN. Theirs are the largest-cut names, but the earliest dates are Little Eustace’s, who dies at thirteen, and two others of the Brood who scarcely live at all: Lucy, three weeks old, and Marion aged one year, both dying in the same diphtheria epidemic. Damaris’s inscription is the next: ALSO OF DAMARIS KING LEE, YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE, AGED EIGHTEEN. Anne is not here, but Eliza is, and Jared and Lady Patrick with their dates, 1897 and 1904. Borowis is not here either, but John Henry’s date is 1930. Stace’s grave is in Italy, but his name is here: STACE. 1944.

On one side of the big polished granite headstone is a single name, POLLY. In death as in life she is mingled with the family but when she dies and her certificate has to be made out, ‘What the devil was her surname?’ asks Jared.

Jared and Lady Patrick go through her possessions, but no one can discover her name. She has not, it appears, had any letters, or if she had she destroys them. There is only a shabby little prayer book with, written on the flyleaf, ‘To my god-daughter, Mary Ann, from her Aunt, A. Parsons, 1831.’ But A. Parsons is long ago forgotten and certainly dead before her niece. ‘Polly must have been nearly ninety,’ and in the end the inscription has to be: ‘Polly, for fifty-four years faithful nurse and friend of the Quin family.’

Tracy’s own little nursemaid Alice once designs a tombstone for her, Tracy. “‘Here lies a little girl, Tracy, daughter of Eustace—’”

‘His name was Stace,’ interrupts Tracy, ‘and he hasn’t a tombstone, but a wooden cross. I have seen it in a photograph with Mother, in a whole school of little crosses. They are in a place in Italy.’

‘Eustace,’ says Alice firmly. ‘He must have all he’s names on a grave. “Of Eustace and Barbara Quin. Aged seven years.’”

‘And five months,’ says Tracy jealously.

‘Seven years and five months. “And a little child shall lead them.” Ow! I likes that!’ says Alice and now Tracy said, ‘I liked the funeral. I didn’t expect to. I had dreaded it, but it was yes, a joining, not a going away; and all the people came.’

‘Sheer impertinence, when they weren’t asked,’ said Bella.

‘Impertinence!’ cried Tracy, carried away. ‘But it wasn’t.’

‘Really, Tracy. Do you have to contradict like that?’

‘B-but it wasn’t impertinence,’ stammered Tracy. ‘D-don’t you see; it didn’t occur to them they would n-need to be asked. They t-took it for granted they should come. No one thought of not coming and I thought that was b-beautiful,’ said Tracy.

‘I’m sure Mother would much have preferred it private,’ said a Grace.

‘She would, but she would have seen it couldn’t be.’

‘You were with Mother, how long?’ asked Bella, amused and nettled together.

‘Three years,’ muttered Tracy, her head hanging.

‘Three years, when you were a child, and you think you know her better than we do?’

Tracy was silent, but her silence seemed to say she was quite sure she did. ‘Well, really!’ said Bella.

‘You have come from America,’ began the third Grace, who was prettier and more gentle than her sisters, ‘you don’t quite understand—’ But she was interrupted by the older second Grace. ‘Americans always set an inordinate value on fusty old customs.’

‘But it wasn’t fusty.’ Tracy could not help herself. Her head came up and she forgot to stammer. ‘Fusty means not used and out of date. This was used, all the time; it was everyday, quiet, homely and that is how I should like mine to be,’ she flung at them.

‘Dear me! I didn’t know any young people thought like that.’

‘They don’t,’ said the second Grace.

‘Certainly most of them seem to have no use for homely things,’ said Tom or Harry – Tracy was not sure which.

‘Or for home either.’

‘Young people over here seem to spend all their time in coffee bars,’ a Grace explained to Tracy.

‘Coffee is the new vice.’

‘You are behind the times, my child.’

‘We shall have to show you some life.’

‘We have coffee bars in Rome,’ said Tracy patiently. ‘It’s where they came from, as a matter of fact and, anyway, I’m too old for them,’ and she said with what seemed to her aunts a calm rudeness, ‘Old people are all the same. They read books and newspapers and then think they know all about young ones. You read in the papers about the few interesting ones, what about all the uninteresting ones?’ said Tracy. ‘Why, there are millions of us.’ She became aware that she was laying down the law and stopped, but she was so much in earnest that she had to try again. ‘Wouldn’t everybody want that f-friendliness? I would. People who had known me, wanting to c-come, p-praying for me,’ said Tracy blushing again. ‘Caring, bringing flowers.’

‘Oh, Tracy. All those dreadful wreaths!’

It is like the pendulum of the grandfather clock, swinging from side to side. Adza is comforted after Little Eustace’s death by a beautiful funeral. ‘There must have been a hundred bunches of flowers.’

‘Why need we be buried?’ asks Eliza after Adza’s funeral. ‘Why can’t we be burned like the Hindus? It’s far more civilized.’

‘Don’t let the girls have me cremated,’ says Mrs Quin, and now Tracy was back to Adza again. ‘They weren’t dreadful wreaths. S-some of them were very beautiful and even those that weren’t, were,’ said Tracy getting tangled, ‘were because they were meant. It wasn’t a shop funeral. You couldn’t b-buy it,’ and a thought struck her. ‘You have to earn it,’ said Tracy, but they were not listening.

They were talking again – And is their talk always criticizing? wondered Tracy. Now it was criticism of Peter St Omer.

‘You would have thought he could have come in a suit.’

‘Probably pawned it,’ said the second Grace, whose tongue was even sharper than Bella’s.

‘We are only Quins. Why should he bother to dress properly?’ said the first sarcastically.

‘If he thinks because he’s a St Omer—’

‘Always was a casual young blighter,’ said Walter and even the third Grace said, ‘I thought he would have had more respect.’

‘Respect is it?’ Cecily was in the middle of them, her eyes snapping with temper. ‘Peter hasn’t a suit. He hasn’t spent a penny on himself these last four years.’

‘Why not?’ asked Bella.

‘Because he hasn’t had it to spend,’ said Cecily. ‘Because everything he made went straight back into the farm he was trying to pull out of the mess your gentleman had left it in, Mr Walter.’

‘He must have had suits before that,’ said Bella.

‘So he had,’ said Cecily warmly, ‘and better ones than any of yours, only he is twice as broad now as when he came. Respect!’ said Cecily and she flashed, ‘You wouldn’t have said that, Grace, if you had seen what I did when I went up to tell him about the milk. He was ironing the shirt he had washed himself, and his tie and his coat were hung up, pressed by him with his old flatiron. How many of you,’ she asked rounding on Walter and Tom, Dick, and Harry, ‘How many of you would do that before you came?’

‘It won’t do him any good,’ said Walter, stretching. ‘He needn’t think he will get anything out of us. That young man has finished getting things out of this family.’

Cecily was so taken aback that she was silent; then she seemed to swell with anger. ‘If there’s a mean thought, you will have it,’ said Cecily and her voice was shaking. ‘If there’s a mean thing to do, you will do it.’

‘Cecily!’ cried Bella. ‘You are speaking to Mr Walter.’

‘So I know,’ said Cecily. ‘I shall speak as I choose, to Walter and all of you. I may have cooked and cleaned here, but I didn’t do it for you. I did it for Mrs Quin and I shall thank you to remember, I’m not your servant,’ said Cecily and slammed the door as she went out.

For a moment they were nonplussed, then they began to cover it up, thought Tracy. ‘Cecily gets more and more impossible.’

‘Of course. Mother spoiled her abominably.’

‘She has been cock of the walk here far too long.’

‘Oh, Cecily was always like that,’ said Bella. ‘She always did flare up about nothing. Half the time one didn’t know what was the matter.’

You wouldn’t know, thought Tracy. If one threw a stone at Aunt Bella it wouldn’t cut, she thought, it would bounce back, and she had to speak. ‘The matter is that C-Cecily loved G-Gran,’ she said far too loudly, her voice stuttering and trembling. ‘And sh-she knows P—Mr St Omer, l-loved her too, and so did I, while you all s-seem—’ but she choked and had to run out of the room and upstairs.

Tracy did not go into her own, the White Room; she had the feeling that one of her aunts, the third Grace perhaps, might come after her there; instead she took refuge where she had not been since she came back, in the old day nursery.

As soon as she pushed open the door, she had again the sense of life that came to her when she saw Mrs Quin’s basket standing on the garden path, of life going on – never having stopped, thought Tracy. She ran her hand up and down a pyramid of painted Russian rings that stood on the windowsill, then leaned her hot forehead against the window bars and instantly remembered the feel of those bars, their coolness and the rough places where the white paint had worn on the iron; and the way too that her hair, as limp a gold-brown then as now, caught on them as it caught now. She used to stand here and look past the elms, out across the valley to Penbarrow, only Pet—Mr St Omer, she corrected herself – didn’t live there then, she thought. Remembering the scene downstairs, she tightened her hand on the pyramid of rings and again that sense of steadiness came to comfort her.

If the kitchen is the hub of the house, the nursery is its heart. No other room is like the day nursery with its gently hissing fire where, on a trivet, Polly, McCann, and Alice heat milk and warm irons while, on the high fender, socks and vests are hung to dry.

The varnished yellow wallpaper has never been changed; its pattern of dancing fiddling mice can still be faintly discerned. The armchair has a pattern of flowers on scarlet chintz; the table is oak, stained by generations of paint-water; the chairs have battered legs, and one is a highchair with a tray.

The elms are on this side of the house and the rooks sound clearly. Their sound is bound up, for the little Quins, with going to bed on summer evenings, rook caws and a good-night hymn: ‘Now the Day Is Over’. ‘But it isn’t, not nearly,’ protests Eliza, and Borowis makes the same objection. It is not always that hymn. ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away’ and ‘Fight the Good Fight’ are both oddly connected in the children’s minds with perfect peace, mugs of milk, and the smell of new-mown hay.

On the bookcase was a certain small brassbound case that Tracy remembered too. It was leather over wood and studded with cat’s-eyes set in brass and it held three small leatherbound notebooks; it shut with a brass clasp that locked. The child Tracy has often seen it in the White Room and one day, with her usual curiosity – ‘I was like a little monkey’ said Tracy – she finds its key in the davenport. She fits it into the case and then takes it to Mrs Quin to ask if she may have it.

‘It was Aunt Eliza’s, John Henry’s Aunt Eliza’s,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘but I suppose you may.’

When the key is turned the clasp springs up. It is a curious small case and, I must show it to Mr Alabaster, thought Tracy now. She had thought, she remembered now, of making a secret tombstone book, like Alice’s, but the notebooks were full with figures and writing, and she had put them back and locked the case again and left it here, on the bookcase – And no one has moved it since, except to dust now and then, not all these twelve years, thought Tracy marvelling, but twelve years is hardly more than a breath for a house.

Children’s voices still seem to be here. In those lonely years after Tracy is taken away, Mrs Quin comes to understand how legends have arisen around toys, for the old toys in the nursery seem to be possessed by a life of their own: the rocking horse is ‘one of milady’s notions,’ says Polly when Lady Patrick has it sent down from London for the small Borowis. Other children have painted rocking horses, dapple grey with red nostrils, but this one, which Borowis calls Banbury Cross, is of real cow skin, skewbald, with a leather saddle and bridle that can be unbuckled. ‘Cost more than ten pounds!’ says Polly. The rocking horse and the pyramid of Russian rings are still here, a donkey with a tuft for a tail and the old Noah’s Ark, while, on the wall, a painting of a faraway little girl, Mary Bazon – destined to be Great-Uncle Mcleod’s wife and give her name to one of his clippers – looks down from her gilded frame, her cheeks as firmly stuffed as the little rocking-horse’s rump. Now, though there was dust on everything, and the armchair was sheeted, and when she patted Banbury Cross a moth came up, Tracy again felt the nursery as living.

China Court has always been a halcyon place for children, but the only one of them who realizes this is Ripsie, because she is shut out.

‘Don’t let the boys play with her, milady,’ Polly cautions Lady Patrick.

‘Do you think they will get an accent?’ asks Lady Patrick. Ripsie can talk like any St Probus villager but, though Borowis and John Henry tease her to do it, she never will at China Court, yet still, to the end of her life, it sometimes slips out and she will say ‘daid’ for ‘dead’, ‘braid’ for ‘bread’, ‘knaw’ for ‘know’. ‘Well, I was Cornish born,’ says Mrs Quin.

It is not the accent that worries Polly. ‘Better have tears now than later,’ she says wisely and does not think of their being Ripsie’s tears. It is strange that Mrs Quin, mistress of China Court, known and respected through the whole county, was once that outcast child.

‘Are your father and mother married?’ asks Borowis suspiciously.

‘What father?’ asks Ripsie.

‘Your father. You have a father, haven’t you, juggins?’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Ripsie.

‘Then you are a bastard,’ says John Henry. It is a word he has learned at school, but it conveys nothing to Ripsie and she agrees equably that she is a bastard.

She knows she is different. Her mother never stands at the gate of their cottage gossiping like other village women. When she goes into the village shop a silence falls. The cottage mothers call their children away if Ripsie speaks to them; the children, little imitators, will not play with her. ‘But I don’t want to play with them,’ says Ripsie. The only place she wants to play is China Court.

‘We can’t let girls in,’ says that conservative John Henry.

‘We can let girls in,’ says Borowis.

‘Who says so?’

‘I say so.’

Why Borowis decides to take Ripsie under his protection he does not know; perhaps it is because she amuses him with her smallness and the courage with which she goes about the hostile village. She is quite self-contained and un-self-pitying in her tatterdemalion old blue coat, the shoes with holes in them – in summer she goes barefoot – and, like a badge of defiance, that scarlet tam-o’-shanter. Perhaps it is the pleading compulsion of her eyes, overbig in her bony small face, or perhaps even then she is attractive; his little blackberry girl he calls her. He takes her under his wing and, as he is the one person who can wheedle Lady Patrick, Ripsie is allowed to stay, but only on sufferance; she is not allowed in the front of the house – Pringle orders her out if she sets foot even in the hall – nor can she play in the front garden, and she has to use the back stairs. She accepts this without resentment – unless Isabel comes to stay.

Isabel is an important little girl. Her father, Borowis’s godfather, is Brigadier the Honourable Charles Loftus Kennedy and she will have, Polly says, ‘Ten thousand a year in her own right.’

‘Ten thousand what?’ asks the ignorant Ripsie.

Isabel has long gold hair like a princess in a fairy tale; the fact that she also has a high nose and pair of merciless grey eyes escapes most people. ‘You have a hole in your stocking,’ she says the first time she meets Ripsie, who does not answer glibly and saucily as she would have done with any child in the village, but tries to twist her foot out of sight. ‘And another in your shoe!’ says Isabel loudly.

She believes in keeping Ripsie in her place. ‘That’s as far as you may come,’ she commands at the head of the stairs and ‘You can’t use the front door, go around to the back,’ but Isabel only visits now and then; usually Borowis, John Henry, and Ripsie are three, banded together – bonded together, thinks Mrs Quin – and their domain goes far beyond China Court itself, over the wall to the valley where there are no restrictions because Borowis says it is his.

‘It’s Lord St Omer’s,’ says John Henry.

‘Jod, I have licensed it,’ says Borowis with dignity. He means ‘leased’, which of course he has not, but gullible John Henry believes him and from that day is sure he is not trespassing and that the valley is Borowis’s.

It does belong to the St Omers, but none of them ever comes there and it is given over to the beech-woods and the river, the bluebell copse on the island that is not really an island but a peninsula cut off by the stream; given over too to the marshfields and the herons and the clapper bridge that is six or seven hundred years old.

Ripsie is most useful to the boys. When they build a raft and launch it in the river, they put her on it to see if it will float; it will not and she is very nearly drowned, swept down and only just fished out like a kitten by the scruff of her neck in time. Because she is little and light, they send her up trees higher than they can go, to get birds’ eggs. When they concoct a yellow dye, they dip her skimpy linsey-woolsey petticoat in it, and when they brew charms in an old saucepan over a fire between two stones, they make her take their horrible concoctions to see if they have an effect. They do have an effect; once at least she is miserably ill, but she never tells anyone the reason.

In the valley Borowis has his cache for catching otters – he never sees an otter; he has a raft and a harbour built of stones and mud in long hours of toiling in the river – mostly by Ripsie and John Henry – and an armoury stocked with food in a hollow tree, though the air gun must not be left there at night; Ripsie carries the air gun. He keeps his egg collection there too; he is an enthusiastic egg collector.

‘I put you in charge,’ he says to Ripsie when these enchanted years are ended by his and John Henry’s being sent away to school. ‘Instead of having lessons with Snoddy,’ says Borowis contemptuously. Mr Snodgrass is the last of a line of resented tutors. ‘Tutors! They treat us like children!’ says Borowis.

He should have gone to school long ago, for he is quite out of hand. It begins in small ways when he is not more than nine and breaks into the larder and steals the fruit out of the cherry pie, putting the crust back so that it is innocently carried in to Jared in the dining room. Jared’s temper, with the servants, is short these days, and the whole house is upset. This is the first of many stealings and when Jared at last comes upstairs after dinner to beat them, he beats John Henry, but Borowis has wound himself in all the sheets so that by the time Jared has unwound him, they are helpless with laughing and even Jared cannot whip. Borowis and John Henry have perpetual battles with the village boys in which both sides get hurt; they poach with the boy poacher, Jim Neot, trespass and play truant, and the tutors leave almost as soon as they have come.

‘You will have to make up your mind to let the boys go to school,’ Jared tells Lady Patrick.

‘And stay here alone with you?’ But Jared, humbly, has his way, for it is obvious there is nothing else to be done, and Borowis goes to Rugby, John Henry to a preparatory school for a year before joining him. Borowis is heartlessly pleased, but to shy John Henry, it is agony. On the last night they have dinner downstairs and there is roast duck, Borowis’s choice. Ripsie, of course, knows all about it and rejoices, though she will have no chance of eating the duck. John Henry does not eat it either; he chokes on the first mouthful and, slowly, his head sinks down and down until it is on the tablecloth. Jared and Lady Patrick take no notice; she goes on talking – in front of the boys she keeps up appearances – while Borowis kicks John Henry under the table. ‘Jod, don’t be an ass,’ but for once John Henry does not respond.

‘I put you in charge,’ Borowis tells Ripsie. ‘Take great care of the egg collection and don’t let anyone touch the heron eggs. They are probably worth ten shillings each!’ Ripsie lifts and dusts them as if they were worth ten pounds.

‘It will be the most valuable collection in England, when I get a chough’s egg,’ boasts Borowis.

‘I shall get one for you.’ Ripsie says that quickly before John Henry can. ‘I shall get you a chough’s egg.’

‘Don’t be silly. You are a girl,’ says Borowis. ‘It’s terribly dangerous. They nest high on the cliffs and you have to hunt because you hardly ever find one. I knew a chap who broke his neck, didn’t I, Jod?’

‘Yes,’ says John Henry faintly.

‘Both you and John Henry are forbidden near the cliffs,’ orders Borowis. ‘I shall get one for myself in the hols,’ but Ripsie sets her lips.

John Henry often tells the story, known throughout the village, of how Ripsie got the chough’s egg. ‘Jim Neot told it to me. He said he wouldn’t have believed it of such a little tacker.’ Mrs Quin never mentions it.

‘First she had to get to the seaside, miles,’ John Henry tells, ‘and remember this was before there were motor cars. She knew where the choughs were supposed to nest, at Pentyre Head, and she got up at four in the morning and walked, and begged a lift in a carrier’s cart. All the breakfast she had was some slices of bread; Pentyre Head is almost sheer up from the beach and at high tide the sea comes boiling in; the noise is enough to frighten anyone, let alone the dizziness – and choughs are quite big birds, you know, bigger than crows and she was a bit of a thing …’

‘I was twelve,’ says Mrs Quin coldly, for this is not until the next summer when the boys have been at school a year.

‘You were still tiny,’ says John Henry, and goes on. ‘When Jerry Paul, the coast-guard, spotted her, there she was up on the ledge.’

‘Well, I couldn’t get down,’ says Mrs Quin.

‘Jim Neot says you might have starved there, or turned dizzy and fallen two hundred feet. She was soaked and bleeding,’ says John Henry, ‘her fingers and knees half raw. They had to lower a man on a rope to reach her.’

‘And a good scolding I got,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘From all the Pauls and from my mother when I got home. The doctor from Polzeath brought me in his trap.’

‘But she had the chough’s egg,’ says John Henry.

The second day of the summer holidays is Borowis’s birthday. Birthdays at China Court follow a ritual, of presents after breakfast and, in the afternoon, tea on the dining-room table which is decorated with flowers and has in the centre a cake with candles. The cake is on a plate that, when it is lifted, plays a tune. Ripsie knows all this as well as any Quin child, though she, of course, has no birthday kept. Later Mrs Quin continues the ritual for her own children, then for Tracy; she cannot imagine changing it and on this July day of 1891, Ripsie is completely unaware that the boys have outgrown it.

Two days before, Jared goes up to meet the boys in town; it does not occur to Ripsie that ‘town’ is London – the only town she knows is Bodmin. He has taken them, she hears, to ‘Lords’, which she supposes is a home of the St Omers. Borowis has had his first suit made to order at Rowes – ‘no more reach-me-downs,’ says Borowis – and they are to go to the Haymarket – which she sees as the open-air market at Bodmin, but filled with stooks of hay. They dine at the Criterion and come home next day.

As soon as she judges their breakfast is over, Ripsie is ready, standing at the gate.

She stands there in the lane, waiting for John Henry to remember and fetch her in; her small bare feet feel over the stones; occasionally she scratches the back of her calf with the other foot, but her hands never move; they are holding the chough’s egg.

She has blown it, as Borowis taught her, keeping down her disgust with the fishy raw slime she draws out, and has kept the shell in cotton wool in a fuller’s-earth box, until the boys come home, ‘until Boro’s birthday,’ breathes Ripsie.

She always knows when he is coming though he does not write. In all her years of loving Borowis, she never has a letter from him. ‘No, I had no love letters,’ Mrs Quin tells Barbara. With something of Borowis’s cruelty, she does not count the gentle shy love letters John Henry writes to her all through his life. ‘You were abominable to John Henry,’ says Barbara, but she sounds amused. ‘Abominable.’

‘I wasn’t,’ says Mrs Quin and immediately contradicts herself. ‘Yes, I was.’ Then in her harshest voice she says, ‘He shouldn’t have touched what didn’t belong to him.’

Once again Barbara is quick to understand. ‘Yes. It was you and Borowis all the time,’ she says.

‘All the time,’ says Mrs Quin.

Every holiday Ripsie gets the harbour and raft ready and stocks the armoury in the tree, carrying the precious air gun there every morning, taking it home every night. Everything is kept ready, but somehow the holidays seem to be gone and Borowis has not been even to look. He means to – Borowis always means well – but he does not, and the biscuits go mouldy and the bull’s-eyes consolidate into a sticky lump, the sherbet dries up. John Henry would have eaten them, but Ripsie will not let him. ‘They are for Boro,’ she says sternly.

Now the chough’s egg, in all its cream-green and flecked beauty, has been taken out and polished and laid in a small nest she has found and decorated with moss and flowers. ‘What? You got it!’ Borowis, she knows, will say little more than that, but Ripsie is not used to feeling proud and she expects no more, though it is possible, ‘just possible,’ whispers Ripsie aloud, that he may give a whistle which will show his astonishment and say, ‘Jolly good,’ or, ‘Good for you.’ ‘It will be the most valuable collection in England now, won’t it?’ Ripsie will say in sublime faith, and she hovers, hoping that John Henry may even fetch her in time to see, through a crack in the door, the birthday presents.

The hope fades as time goes on; endless time, it seems to Ripsie. She begins to wonder what is happening. Breakfast must be over long ago; if she had been less intent she would have heard a commotion around the house; she cannot see through the rhododendrons to the front door, but she could have heard sounds, yet it is as a complete surprise that she sees John Henry and Lady Patrick coming.

First John Henry appears, running to open the gate; then Lady Patrick riding her Reynard. Lady Patrick never looks as hard as when she is riding, nor as beautiful; her black habit fits as if she were cased in it, its low lapels, satin-faced, open to show her wide folded stock, and she gleams, from the tip of her boot which just shows under her heavy skirt, to the bun of her hair in its net under her bowler with its narrow curled brim.

Like the kitchens and what Mr Alabaster called the ‘offices’, the stables are too big for the house, ‘and so much more better,’ as Minna says in surprise when Groundsel takes her over them. In his time there are only two ponies left; the little girls share them and, for a while, there is Stace’s hunter. Then the ponies are given away, Stace’s hunter is sold, and a solitary Welsh pony is kept for the tubcart; then that is given up and there are none. In 1892 a pair of loose-boxes are turned into a garage for John Henry’s first motorcar, a six-and-a-half-horsepower Humberette with one c. gear and three speeds. Greatly daring, he pays one hundred and fifty-seven pounds, ten shillings, for it, and the quarrymen build a cement hut on the edge of the orchard for the petrol, which is delivered in twenty-gallon drums.

In Lady Patrick’s younger days the stables are a world in themselves. It is she who floors them with brick, enlarges them by four loose-boxes, makes a new harness room, a flat over them for the coachman and head groom, and adds the gilded weathercock so that all the village can look down and catch its extravagant glitter. There are plenty of horses then: Maxim, Jared’s hunter, and Jezebel, his hack, used also for the dogcart; Lady Patrick’s Irish hunters, Reynard and Sorrel, her pair of greys for the carriage, Sugar and Spice; a cob for the grooms to ride and, up to now, Basket, the boys’ pony. There is a carriage, the dogcart and the tubcart and a large stable staff, coachman, head groom, two underlings from the village, and a boy. ‘No wonder her mother’s money all went,’ says Mrs Quin.

Now as Lady Patrick rides down the drive, looking over her shoulder and reining Reynard to one side, Borowis comes into view around the rhododendrons and Ripsie catches her breath; he is riding a little roan-coloured mare, so deep a roan that her coat shines almost blue. She tittups and circles, making a tattoo on the drive with her hoofs as if she were dancing and, ‘He had her for his birthday,’ carols John Henry to Ripsie. ‘She’s a real hunter. Her name is Mirabelle. That means beautiful little plum!’

‘They are turning that boy into a young pasha,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon when he hears. ‘Bringing a hunter over from Ireland, and he only fifteen,’ and in John Henry, though he sounds happy and excited now, the memory of Mirabelle always stings: ‘I never had a hunter,’ he says it again when Stace is given Mrs Moonlight. Borowis and Stace – John Henry seems caught between them: Mirabelle and Mrs Moonlight, dark roan and grey dapple. They gradually seem one and the same little mare to Mrs Quin.

‘Bring her along, Boro.’ Lady Patrick’s voice is curt, but even Ripsie can hear the pride in it. Borowis, in his riding clothes, the checked coat and shallow brown bowler, is always a stranger to Ripsie, gone to a world where she cannot follow him; now his face is white under his freckles, and as hard as Lady Patrick’s, his eyes a blaze of excitement. Ripsie should have seen he has no scrap of thought to spare for anything but the new mare, but, when he comes to the gate, she cannot help it, she holds up the nest.

The mare plunges and, as if he did not recognize her from any village child, he says curtly, ‘Get out of the way.’

‘Boro, she has got something for you. It’s – it’s—’ and John Henry peers nearer. ‘Gosh, it’s – yes it is! Boro, it’s a chough’s egg. A chough’s! Bet you she got it herself.’ John Henry knows at once what is at stake and he tries hard to catch his brother’s attention. ‘A chough’s egg for your birthday.’

Borowis is not graceless; he tries to pay attention, but Lady Patrick has ridden up the lane and the new mare fidgets and strains. ‘For my birthday?’ Borowis manages to say, but he is watching and feeling the quickness of Mirabelle.

‘For your egg collection,’ Ripsie says it stiffly. She will die rather than show that either he or she is personally involved. ‘For the egg collection,’ and she looks far up and over his head, but by now Borowis has remembered. The egg collection in the hollow tree in the valley; it belongs with his armoury, an air gun, a harbour – but that is ages ago, thinks Borowis. Collecting eggs? Bird’s-nesting? That is for John Henry; for children. He, Borowis, has Mirabelle now and Jared has said he can practise with the .22 rifle and Lord St Omer has promised to lend him a shotgun and take him in his butt when pheasant-shooting begins. Borowis has to drag his mind a long long way back to birds’ eggs; his mind does not want to be dragged, but even at this distance it can recognize what it means to get a chough’s egg and, ‘Good for you,’ says Borowis. They are the words Ripsie longed for, but there is something absent-minded in the way he says it and she is not deceived.

For a moment Borowis sees her standing there in the lane in her bare feet and faded cotton frock, holding the carefully flowered nest; for a moment he understands, but Mirabelle tosses her head, her fetlocks dance and he has no more time to see, or even to think and, bending down, he says generously what he thinks will be the best possible thing – only he is not thinking. ‘Rip, you can have my egg collection,’ says Borowis.

He has not ridden a yard up the lane when something hits him in the back. It is the nest with the chough’s egg.

Jared does not come out riding with them even though it is Borowis’s birthday. Maxim and Jezebel stay in the stable. Jared and Lady Patrick still drive to meets together and he puts her up in the saddle – he will not let the groom do it – but they keep apart. He rides out on business, and she often orders a horse out and hacks across the moor, but they never ride together. He will not be at the birthday tea, and will be silent and taciturn at dinner, ‘if he isn’t drunk,’ says Lady Patrick. She is not silent when the boys are home, she keeps up a pretence, but the more simple Jared finds it difficult to remember. Pringle, who waits on them, has known him go through the whole of dinner without speaking a word. It is fifteen years ago today that Jared begins to hate himself.

A spiral of smoke goes up from the China Court nursery chimney, a spiral that is instantly seen in the village. The nursery fire has been lit.

A stillness is over the house and garden. Its familiars come and go, but quietly; everyone is doing what they have to do, but every now and then they stop and listen, except Cook, who is nervous and has alternate attacks of temper and hysterics. She is, for one thing, upset about the nun who has come over from Ireland. ‘Why not a good monthly nurse I ask you?’ says Cook belligerently.

‘Sister Priscilla is a kind of monthly nurse,’ says the more broadminded Pringle. ‘She were there when her ladyship were born. Poor lorn thing, it’s nice for her to have someone from her own family,’ but Cook is not to be mollified.

‘Nasty creeping things, they rattle.’ She means Sister Priscilla’s beads that click as she walks. ‘Never thought I should find meself in the same house as papists,’ says Cook darkly.

‘We will bear with you, Cook, if you will try and bear with us,’ says Sister Priscilla’s calm voice behind them. ‘May I have some hot water, please?’ She has dared to come into the kitchen herself and Cook is so affronted that she lets an oven ring fall with a loud clang on the stove. It knocks over the kettle which falls in the fender and narrowly escapes scalding the kitchen maid, who screams. Jared shouts, ‘Stop that infernal clatter in the kitchen,’ and Cook goes into hysterics again.

One person is working steadily. Polly is radiant as she remembers things afresh, things she has laid by for a long time, laid by but not forgotten, though she is slow. It is as if she had to find her way back, ‘twenty-three years to Damaris,’ says Polly. ‘Damaris was the last.’

She moves steadily about the nursery: pieces of muslin are boiled in a bowl ‘for the eyes and nose’ says Polly; olive oil is warming; an apron of old soft towelling, cotton wool for wiping are ready; the bath of white enamel is on its iron stand. China Court babies have new bassinets and baskets, frilled and muslined; Adza, for Damaris, embroiders a whole new set on white over pink, with rosebuds and green leaves, but the bath is always the same. ‘Vaseline,’ says Polly, ‘scissors; needle and cotton, for stitching the binder.’ Polly never uses a safety pin; they are not safety in her day. Towelling squares and clothes are airing on the fender, the layers of clothes that Polly does not question a baby should wear: binder and diaper, a long wrapover flannel petticoat, a white lawn petticoat, then a robe and short crocheted jacket. When Polly carries one of her babies, the robe falls to the hem of her own dress. ‘All that weight on those poor little legs,’ exclaims Barbara when she is shown the baby clothes. ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t grow up crooked.’

‘They didn’t,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘The Quins have always had straight legs.’

Each garment is stitched with minute even stitches – ‘like a row of tiny pearls,’ says Adza teaching small Mary, Eliza, and Anne to sew: hemming, herringbone, feather-stitching, buttons so small that fingers can hardly fasten them, smaller loops, infinitesimal tucks, bindings of white silk.

There is an outdoor pelisse of stiff white serge, braided and lined with silk; to match it, is a cap for a boy, a bonnet for a girl. Over these goes a veil and, round and round the baby, like a cocoon, a wide shawl. ‘If a baby won’t stop crying,’ Polly teaches, ‘wrap it tightly round in a shawl, and it often will.’

There is not one of her charges whom Polly does not know through and through and, ‘You must behave yourself,’ she says to Jared this morning, as she says when he is six years old. ‘Behave.’ But she knows he will not. ‘Cocks can’t quack,’ is one of Polly’s maxims. Jared paces through the hall into the drawing room and back through the hall into the dining room and out onto the terrace, then backward and forward over its stones. ‘I suppose I must stay here,’ he says. For his little Patrick’s sake – and for decency’s sake – he knows he must, but he would give worlds to have a horse out and gallop fast up on the moor; or go potting at rabbits – there is nothing else to shoot in July – but speed would be better, or to take out a ferret, anything to get out of the way. ‘I suppose I can’t,’ says Jared like a rebellious small boy.

He does not like the stillness, and he does not like the sympathy, it makes him feel irritable; nor the expectancy, it makes him feel trapped. I ought to be pleased, but I don’t want to settle down yet, thinks Jared. Not start a family. I want to get away with Pat sometimes to town, not rot here. He does not like himself for thinking this, but it is true and he cannot help it and he has a feeling of being throttled by his young wife. ‘I didn’t ask to be loved like this,’ says Jared to himself and kicks the scraper outside the french doors.

Above all he cannot bear the joy in Lady Patrick’s face, joy at being hurt like this, thinks Jared shrinking. Lady Patrick is tall, but she is slender, narrow-hipped, and she has ridden a great deal and in 1876 an old-fashioned doctor does not believe in too much chloroform. Like many big men Jared cannot bear pain; like many thoughtless men he is appalled when he sees pain naked: I did this to her! and his whole being recoils.

‘I’m glad you did,’ pants Lady Patrick. ‘Be glad.’

Glad! Jared sees the sweat break out on her face as her eyes widen in an effort to hold back the screams; he did not know she could look ugly. ‘Glad,’ she pants with that dreadful distorted face, the body he has loved spread and swollen on the bed, making curious movements of itself, thinks Jared stunned. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she cries, ‘help me,’ but Jared cannot bear it and, as Sister Priscilla’s hands come to her back and hold her, he tears himself loose and stumbles out of the room, ‘and out of the house,’ says Polly, as from the landing window she watches him go. She stands for a minute, considering, her hands under her apron, then she goes in to Lady Patrick. ‘I have sent him away,’ says Polly.

‘Sent him away! How dared you!’ It is the imperious Lady Patrick speaking. No one else must know Jared, thinks Polly silently, but at least the young ladyship has been saved from knowing that he has deserted, thinks Polly, though he should never have been asked to stay. My goodness, the mistress would never … thinks Polly.

Adza is the one she admires. ‘Send a message to Mr Quin,’ says Adza on each occasion. ‘Tell him I shall not be down for breakfast – dinner – supper – to make him his tea.’ When Jared is born, she is in the middle of making marmalade.

‘I think you should come upstairs now, ma’am.’

‘Not just yet, Polly. I think we can finish this batch,’ and, ‘He was nearly born in the kitchen,’ says Polly; but, as Lady Patrick excels Adza in beauty, she excels her in feeling too, ‘more feeling than sense,’ says Polly.

Polly would have given Jared a rap: ‘Grow up. You are married now,’ but he is gone. From the terrace he goes, stepping lightly by back paths, to reach the drive and disappears toward the stables.

The grandfather clock strikes twelve; the other clocks follow, and Polly runs out on the landing again. ‘A boy.’ Her cheeks are pink, her eyes look like a girl’s, and she throws her arms around Eliza, who happens to have come upstairs. There is under Eliza’s cloak a sharp-edged parcel, but Polly is too elated to feel it.

Eliza stands listening to a cry that fills the landing, a sound like sparrows chirping or an engine starting up, while below Pringle scurries to the kitchen with the news: ‘A boy. A boy.’

‘A boy! and both safe and well, thank God,’ says Polly. ‘Thank Dr Smollett, I should say,’ says Eliza crisply, but Polly is not having that behaviour. ‘Certainly thank Dr Smollett, but none of your talk now, Eliza. You can go and find Jared and tell him. Tell him he can come now,’ says Polly.

‘Jared.’ Eliza stands on the terrace and calls, ‘Jared.’ No answer. She looks around the garden, then goes down the drive and calls again toward the stables. ‘Surely not gone out?’ says Eliza, and goes down to the stables to see.

‘Gone out?’ Lady Patrick’s eyes that have looked so eagerly at the opening door cloud with bewilderment. ‘Are you sure?’

Eliza has none of Polly’s mercy. ‘Quite sure. Trust Jared!’ she says.

‘We must expect gentlemen to go out and in,’ says Sister Priscilla.

‘He will be back in a few minutes,’ says Polly, but these are only bandage words, covering up a cut that bleeds through. Lady Patrick will not, as they desire, go to sleep or drink her beef tea. ‘Something must have happened to him,’ she insists. It is only toward evening, and then only if they let her hold the baby that, worn out with pain and fretting, she falls into a sleep.

It is both of them asleep that Jared sees, his wife and son, when he comes home late, ‘with his tail between his legs,’ says Polly.

‘And where have you been?’ she asks.

Jared never lies to Polly. It would, in any case, be no good; Polly knows him through and through. ‘Meant to go for a quick ride,’ he says sullenly, ‘but I met Harry St Omer.’

‘And?’ says Polly, not letting him off.

‘We found a fair, and fooled around.’ Polly knows his fooling and she asks no more, but drives him sharply into the bedroom.

He stands by the bed, ashamed and miserable, looking at the two heads against the pillow: Lady Patrick’s almost child face, still stained by tears and white with tiredness, and the other head, no bigger than a doll’s beside her. He stares at that round dark head lying so confidently where no head was before and, as he looks, comprehension of what has been going on here dawns on his mind: While I was fooling with Harry, thinks Jared. I could kick myself! He groans and goes down on his knees by the bed. Even now she is not properly asleep – every few minutes she has wakened fretting, and she wakes now. ‘Jared!’

‘Little Pat. My love, I—’ The words choke him. ‘How could I—’

‘No Jeremiahs.’ Polly’s voice comes from behind him and he stops, but kisses Lady Patrick’s hand, keeping it against his face, covering it with kisses. ‘Sweetheart.’

Polly does not like these endearments: ‘Darling’, ‘sweetheart’ seem to her extravagant. They won’t weather, thinks Polly. The most she ever hears Adza or Eustace allow themselves is ‘my dear’, now and again ‘my love’. Nor does Polly think it wise that Lady Patrick says not one word of reproach. ‘Jared needs bringing up,’ Polly could have told her, but Lady Patrick only draws her hand gently away from him and turns the blanket back. ‘Not me – him,’ she whispers.

Jared’s face as he looks at his baby is so comical that Polly and Sister Priscilla have to turn their faces away, but Lady Patrick draws Jared down to her. ‘Do you know what his name is?’ she whispers.

‘His name?’ asks Jared stupidly. He has not really taken it in that this is his son, a person.

‘He has to have a name,’ says Lady Patrick and laughs. Jared is so relieved she can laugh that he can almost manage a smile. ‘What name, my darling?’

‘The dearest name in the world,’ she whispers. ‘Your name, Jared.’

‘No!’ cries Jared, stung.

‘Why no?’ but he is not prepared to confess and he says lamely, ‘I want him to have another name.’ ‘What name?’ asks Lady Patrick. The only name that comes into Jared’s mind is the name of the tightrope walker at that ridiculous fair that afternoon. He and Harry St Omer have seen a good deal of the tightrope walker for he has a partner, a taking little brunette with plump legs in black mesh stockings. Before he can stop himself, to his horror Jared has said the tightrope walker’s name: ‘Borowis.’

‘Borowis?’

He tries to take it back. ‘No, it’s too queer.’ Borowis, the Russian Tightrope Wonder, but, ‘I like it,’ says Lady Patrick. ‘Borowis,’ she says to the baby.

She is weak and very tired; Sister Priscilla carries away the baby and, with Jared’s hand in hers, Lady Patrick has settled down. Polly puts her finger to her lips. ‘Dear, dear love,’ murmurs Lady Patrick and is asleep.

Jared kneels there and, in spite of cramp, does not move his hand, ‘for almost twenty minutes,’ says Polly.

‘Miss Quin, Miss Damaris Quin for luncheon.’

‘They mean Eliza and Anne,’ says Damaris. ‘They must mean Eliza and Anne.’

‘Then they wouldn’t say “Damaris”,’ snaps Eliza and turns on her sister. ‘Don’t pretend Harry St Omer doesn’t know your name.’

‘Then why only two of us?’ asks Damaris bewildered.

‘Because they don’t know there are three,’ says Eliza, ‘don’t know or care.’

It is the day after the gale, a day, in the way Cornish weather can change, of sun and calmness, and the note comes soon after breakfast, brought by a groom on horseback, the groom in the buff-and-maroon livery that, though familiar to everyone in St Probus, has never, so far, been seen at China Court.

In those early days of the house there are not many visitors. The doctor visits, of course, first Dr Stone and then Dr Smollett; very often in those days, the stable boy walks Dr Stone’s horse up and down while the doctor is inside with Adza. Dr Smollett’s assistant, courting Mary, comes often; Mrs Smollett now and then, and there is, of course, the vicar – many vicars, for they change; sometimes there is a vicar’s wife, sometimes, as with Miss Preedy, a vicar’s sister. There used to be school friends of Mary’s or Anne’s – Eliza, as has been told, has not the knack of making friends – and presently there will be several of Jared’s from Rugby and Oxford – ’too young for us,’ says Eliza – but on the whole, the family lives to itself. ‘That happens with a big family,’ says Polly.

‘But how do people ever meet people?’ asks Eliza in despair, which means, ‘How do girls ever marry?’

Now the chance is here. The note, borne respectfully on a salver, is brought in to Adza in the morning room. She takes it uncertainly, but Eliza is already trembling, half with eagerness, half with suspicion. Adza reads the note, her lips moving in the way that always irritates Eliza – like a school child, thinks Eliza – and, ‘She writes as if she knows us,’ says Adza, puzzled.

‘Lady St Omer?’ asks Eliza.

‘Yes,’ and Adza reads aloud: “‘Dear Mrs Quin, Harry tells me the girls are home …’”

‘Home for eight years,’ says Eliza.

“‘… so pleased if they may come to an early luncheon with our young people. If you say ‘yes’ as I hope you will, Harry and his friend will drive over – Harry should pay his formal call on you—’”

‘When has he ever?’ asks Eliza.

‘“—and, if they may, the young men will drive them back, cordially, Jane St Omer.”’

‘Cordially! He must be very rich,’ says Eliza.

‘Who?’

‘This man, Harry’s friend, who wants to see Damaris again.’

‘He doesn’t,’ cries Damaris, crimson, but Adza looks at the note more thoughtfully still. ‘There is a postscript: “I hope you do not object to their driving in a dogcart. I allow Helena.”’

‘If Helena does, we can!’ says Eliza acridly. She longs for Adza to say no, that she certainly cannot allow her girls … but that might seem narrow and provincial. She longs for Adza to refuse the whole invitation and yet … It is gratifying to have the St Omers asking us, thinks Eliza. ‘A horridly condescending letter,’ says Eliza aloud to relieve her feelings, but it is not condescending, it is friendly, even if absent-minded. Why is it so friendly? Adza is palpably asking herself that and sits staring at the letter for so long that Eliza loses patience and cries, ‘Mother, a note is meant to be answered! That groom won’t wait all day.’

When the answer is gone: ‘Dear Lady St Omer …’ written slowly, for Adza is not much accustomed to notes, she sits on silently at her desk. For once Adza is thinking deeply. ‘I wish your father were not at the quarry,’ she says. ‘I think I shall send for him,’ and she rings the bell. Meanwhile, behind her, an altercation is going on: ‘It says Miss Quin. You are Miss Quin, Liz. You must go,’ says Anne to Eliza.

‘Wild horses wouldn’t drag me,’ says Eliza.

‘But you are Miss Quin. They will think it odd.’

‘They won’t, because they don’t know – or care,’ says Eliza. ‘They only know that Damaris has a sister, or sisters. I’m not going in Damaris’s train.’

Anne does not want to go either. Her reasons are stronger than Eliza’s but she is biddable and gentle. ‘And Anne should go,’ says Eustace, summoned home. ‘It may put an end to this chapel nonsense.’ Anne does not answer, but bends her head over her work.

Two hours later there is the sound of wheels on the gravel, of horses’ hoofs, men’s voices. ‘They are here already!’ Damaris is pale.

‘You see, they knew we wouldn’t refuse,’ says Eliza.

Eustace goes out to meet the young men – though Mr King Lee is not young, nearer middle age – and for a few minutes they stay talking on the step, Eustace admiring Harry’s horses. Then their voices sound nearer. Eustace is bringing them in and, ‘Liz, where are you going?’ cries Damaris in panic, but Eliza is gone, slipped out of the drawing room, where a fire has been lit at this unaccustomed hour and the family has gathered. Eliza runs swiftly out of sight down the passage as the men cross the hall to the drawing-room door, and Adza, Anne, and Damaris rise all together; a moment later, ‘How do you do,’ Damaris is saying unwillingly.

As soon as she has said it she knows that it is fatal, as fatal as the pink of her dress with its white cuffs and folded white muslin at the neck that shows off her skin and the sheen of her hair. ‘Can I help it having a sheen?’ she wants to ask. ‘I don’t brush it; it’s just health and the wind, soft water and air.’ Mr King Lee seems to know very well what it is. He looks at it – as if he would like to touch it, thinks Damaris, as frightened as a caught bird. ‘Don’t look at me, look at Anne,’ she wants to cry.

Harry St Omer’s loud voice, not quite at its ease, praises the room, the flowers, and Eustace’s sherry. Mr King Lee praises nothing but continues to look at Damaris, as if it were wonderful to him to find the Gypsy of yesterday morning turned into a young lady. Look at Anne, begs Damaris silently, but he will not look at Anne, so delicate in her summer dress, her skin so fair that the blue veins show, her hair brushed neatly into a pale-gold chignon. The girls’ dresses that year are made alike, and in the very newest style taken by Eliza from Paris fashions in the Illustrated London News, ‘though Miss Dawnay’s cut is not the same,’ says Eliza, discontentedly. The dresses are in toile-de-Chine, the upper skirts caught up at the side into panniers, the underskirts plain, but with tabliers, as Eliza calls them, trimmed with a series of flounces, each edged with bands of white muslin and lace. They are dainty and maidenly, with more white muslin and lace edging the neck and sleeves, but Damaris hates them. ‘Oh Mother, not those sickly sweet-pea colourings. I want scarlet,’ she has pleaded, ‘or amber.’

‘You can’t wear a scarlet dress!’ says dictatorial Eliza, and Damaris is forced to have the pale pink that matches Anne’s pale blue, Eliza’s lilac. She hates it, but it appears so to entrance Mr King Lee that she retreats into the conservatory; she has forgotten, she says, to water the plants. Mr King Lee follows her there.

Damaris waters Adza’s geraniums and begonias, taking extreme care not to knock or bruise the flowers. Although she is so careful, the spout of the small watering can trembles. Presently Mr King Lee takes it from her and puts it down. ‘The pots are overflowing,’ says Mr King Lee.

There is not a servant in the house who does not now know about Mr King Lee. Two dogcarts, with yellow wheels, each with a small attendant tiger in buff and maroon, are waiting on the drive. Shy Anne is unwillingly to drive with shyer Harry – ‘Only shy of girls of his own kind, I hear,’ says Eustace disapprovingly – but the servants’ network of communication is exact and no one wastes a glance on them. It is the sight of Miss Damaris being handed up by the American gentleman that brings all heads to the kitchen window: plain caps and streamers, Cook’s ginger hair puffed high with tortoiseshell combs, the kitchen maid, her cap crooked, humbly peeping in a corner. Miss Damaris, they all observe, has a blush. The cook is Cornish in Adza’s day and ‘Her ’ud look purty as a pi’ture in white satin,’ says Cook.

It is at the time of the kitchen dinner when, always, a peculiarly rich and appetizing smell hangs about the house, ‘much nicer than ours,’ declares Jared. China Court kitchen meals are always good; that day there is soup – ‘made with bones and trimmin’s,’ grumbles a housemaid – roast leg of mutton, vegetables, and cheese. ‘Wot? No pudden!’ says the knife-boy and gets his ears boxed. Cook sits at the head of the table, Abbie at the bottom; Polly’s dinner is carried up to her on a tray and the knife-boy takes his out to the scullery.

There is also, at this time, a smell of hot pasties which have been warmed up for the outside men.

Years later, Groundsel, coming in to fetch his pasty, lingers to catch a glimpse of Minna. One day in late autumn he makes up his mind to speak to her. She is, as is usual at this time, washing up in the scullery from the children’s early dinner.

The scullery then, too, has its inconveniently shallow big wooden sinks and an even bigger plate rack; cold water has to be pumped from the hand pump at the side of it but still, to Minna, washing up is a thing of beauty. Plates are scraped clean of scraps and stacked, the knives put aside for the boy to clean in the knife machine, a strange wheel with hollow spokes; spoons and forks are put to soak in a jug of hot water, and the glasses drained. Then Minna gets ready a bowl of soapy hot water, another of hotter water and soda, a third for rinsing, and her deft pink fingers get to work. First the glasses are dried and polished while they are still warm; next the forks and spoons washed, dried, and polished hot; then the small plates, last the large, are sluiced, put in the rack to drip, then carefully dried. Last of all washbowls and sink are emptied and swilled, the mop rinsed and hung by its stick to dry, the draining board scrubbed and dried too. Groundsel, who has seen the other maids throw everything higgledy-piggledy into the sink, is charmed. He stands in the doorway watching with, as it has been raining, his usual rainwear, a sack over his shoulders. Stealing a glance at him, Minna can see raindrops on his dark hair.

‘Minna.’

‘Please?’ But Minna feels dull, fatigued, heavy. Groundsel has left the door open so that the wind blows in, but to her the wind feels heavy too, with no life or tang of its own.

Groundsel clears his throat. ‘Are you liking it here?’

She pauses, her hands on the draining board, then, ‘No, I don’t like – at all,’ she says with energy.

‘Well, you must miss your country,’ says Groundsel reasonably. He comes cautiously closer. ‘They say it’s pretty there. People from this country go there for the snow.’

‘The snow.’ Minna looks out of the window to the browns and reds of the bare trees and the bracken on the slope of the field and suddenly she shakes her hands free of water, dries them on her apron and, backing away from Groundsel, runs out of the scullery and up the back stairs.

When Eliza makes her sudden retreat down the passage from Harry St Omer and his friend, she runs to the office and shuts herself in there, leaning against the door, her eyes closed, her hands clenched. She has no intention of crying, but tears roll out from under her lids. I’m perfectly calm, she tells herself, it’s simply that I do not care to meet Harry St Omer and – the man. Eliza has known from the first that it is the other who is ‘the man’. I’m not going to be one of the family laid out for him to see when any of the St Omers choose to lift a little finger, she thinks fiercely. Every girl – every woman, she corrects herself, for she is twenty-six – every woman is free to choose whom she will, or will not meet, but that, of course, is a lie. There isn’t any choice, cries Eliza. It seems as if she cried it out to the housetops, but she has not made a sound; even the door has shut with a small quiet click.

When the others have gone, in the dogcarts in which Helena is permitted to ride, what will she, Eliza, have to do? The same as any other day, thinks Eliza; read, of course – ‘Liz always has her nose in a book,’ say the family – but one novel is much like another, the few she loves she knows almost by heart before she is sixteen and she devours the magazines, when they come, in a day. What else? thinks Eliza: perhaps write a letter for Mother to Exeter, to complain about defective candles; another to Aunt Emily, Adza’s sister, to thank for a birthday present – a sachet I don’t want, thinks Eliza, for a birthday about which I don’t want to be reminded. Walk up to the village to post the letters; a servant could post them just as well, but I must walk somewhere. Perhaps take old Mrs Neot a milk jelly, though she must be sick of milk jellies; put a tuck in the right sleeve of my new blouse that Miss Dawnay has made uneven – that will take at least twenty minutes. Go over the pattern book with Mother … The pattern book is suddenly too much and, I can’t! I can’t! cries Eliza, but silently. If only there were something, she thinks, if the days were not like being a tame mouse or squirrel in a cage, with a wheel to tread round and round, going nowhere. If there were something to think about, to work for!

It isn’t that I wanted to go with the others or that I am jealous, cries Eliza passionately, though she does not make a sound. I know perfectly well that if Harry St Omer, yes, magnificent Harry St Omer, fell in love with me – and she almost has to laugh at the idea, she with her angularities and long nose and colourless hair – if he did I would be bored in a week. Or in an hour, thinks Eliza, if I had to sit through that luncheon. She despises them, but most of all she despises herself. Because I don’t run away, thinks Eliza. Don’t do anything. Because I let myself be this – emptiness. Yet how can she do anything else? She shuts her eyes and tears slide under her lids and trickle down her nose, tears like gall, thinks Eliza.

It is then that she is conscious of an even small murmur, as undisturbed by her emotion as a bee:

Quaenam discors foedera reum

Causa resoluit? Quis tanta Deus …

It is monotonous. At first she does not know where it comes from; then she traces it to the corner behind the old screen.

She has forgotten that Jeremy Baxter would be in the office, but the old clerk is so much part of its furniture, its muddle of papers and files, that she does not fly out indignantly as she would have done if anyone else had caught her in tears. Besides, he has not caught her; the murmur is steadily oblivious of her. She goes up to the screen and looks around it at his bent back, his face that is the colour of parchment and thin almost to emaciation, and at his long, wild-ended white hair.

Eliza knows that Eustace pays Jeremy Baxter twelve pounds a year, less than the wages of a housemaid, to work from eight in the morning until seven or eight at night. She sees nothing wrong with this, in fact she, like Eustace, thinks it a good bargain and now, instinctively, she frowns, for what Jeremy Baxter is engaged in doing is certainly nothing concerned with what he is paid to do – Eustace’s letters, accounts, and bills:

nunc membrorum condita nube

non in totum est oblita sui

summamque tenet, singula perdens.

Igitur quisquis uera requirit

neutro est habitu …

Is it Latin? Eliza has to ask herself that. It sounds like Latin, but she is not sure. Her ear is quick and her wits and she can remember the boys, Little Eustace for a while, and Mcleod and Jared, groaning over their Latin prose; but this, in the quiet room, sounds like poetry. ‘I thought Latin was battles’ – she hardly knows she has said it aloud – ‘Roman wars.’

‘This is Boethius,’ says Jeremy Baxter not lifting his eyes.

‘Both—?’

‘Boethius.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Boethius,’ says Jeremy Baxter and for a moment he looks up from his book. ‘Boethius?’ he says dreamily as if he likes to say it. ‘I should call him the interpreter of the ancient world and its wisdom; no one has ever superseded him. He goes beyond the Schools to the visionary poets. Yes, you will find his influence in the Romaunt of the Rose and in Dante.’

Eliza’s mouth opens a little. Then she asks: ‘What is the … romance …?’

‘Romaunt.’ He raps it out.

‘Romaunt.’ Eliza is surprised into meekness. ‘Romaunt of the Rose? and Dante?’

‘Surely even in this house you have heard of Dante.’

‘I know about Dante,’ says Eliza, nettled. ‘He was an Italian poet.’

‘Really?’ says Jeremy Baxter bitingly.

‘He was,’ says Eliza. ‘There’s a painting of him by that new painter in London, new to us,’ says Eliza, chafing, ‘because we never see anything until it’s ages old. The painter is called Dante too: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His people must have cared about things to have called him that. I saw the picture—’

‘In that abominable two-colour printing,’ says Jeremy Baxter.

‘Was it abominable? I thought it beautiful. Dante and – an angel?’ asks Eliza. ‘I think it was an angel. Dante bends down to look at a girl dead under a pall of flowers – Beatrice – or was it Francesca?’

‘You do not know about Dante,’ says Jeremy Baxter, and Eliza’s face, that has been sharp and clear with interest – is she not always the clever one of the family? – falls into sullenness and, How dare he when he isn’t much more than a servant? she thinks, but she has never heard anyone talk like this and she has to ask, ‘Did Dante write the Romaunt of the Rose?’

‘Good God, no!’ says Jeremy Baxter.

‘Well, how could I tell?’ asks Eliza resentfully. Then the resentment gives way to the complaint that corrodes her: ‘Why don’t I know anything?’

‘Because they sent you to school,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘A girls’ school,’ he says derisively.

‘I couldn’t have gone to a boys’ school,’ Eliza points out.

‘Then they shouldn’t have sent you at all. You didn’t learn anything there. Of course not.’

‘I did,’ says Eliza.

‘Not anything that is anything,’ says Jeremy Baxter, ‘and that’s a pity. I used to listen to you when you were small and thought you were more than likely.’

‘Did you?’ Eliza’s face is suffused with a blush of sheer pleasure.

‘Yes. In this country, at this time, there is only one way to educate a girl,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘Turn her loose with books, guide her, but let her read. I told your father that but, as he cannot read himself—’

‘He can.’ Eliza is indignant. ‘We all can.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘But I do.’ Eliza’s tears almost start again. ‘I read everything I can lay my hands on. Isn’t that something?’ she asks.

‘It depends what you lay your hands on,’ says Jeremy Baxter and Eliza blushes, remembering the trashy novels, as Eustace rightly calls them, that she has pored over: Sylvia by the author of Natalie – many of them are written anonymously – Drifted and Sifted by the author of Until the Shadows Flee Away; John by Mrs Oliphant – but she writes respectably, thinks Eliza – then has to blush more deeply still when she remembers On Credit by Lady Wood, of which one reviewer said: ‘A blunt and revolting narrative, filled with unnecessary details of married relations between husband and wife. We sincerely hope no husband or father will allow it to contaminate his house.’ ‘I shall send for it at once,’ Eliza says when she reads that, but she is glad now that Jeremy Baxter’s small gnat eyes, so sharp and suspicious, cannot see into her mind. ‘We take the Illustrated London News,’ she says defensively, ‘and Punch, and Mr Dickens’s All the Year Round, though that will stop now he has died. I have read his books and Mr Thackeray’s and—’

‘Very nice,’ says Jeremy Baxter, ‘but that is not reading. Don’t waste my time.’ He goes back to his book but, ‘Please, Mr Baxter,’ says Eliza and puts out a hand to touch another book that lies open on the table. He makes a quick movement as if he would close it and take it away but she is, after all, grown up – and a Miss Quin, thinks Eliza – and he restrains himself but cautions her. ‘That’s a rare book. Touch it carefully.’

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Among other things, the translation of what I’m reading.’

‘A translation? Can that be rare?’

‘It’s the 1532 Chaucer,’ says Jeremy Baxter dryly.

‘But I don’t understand,’ says Eliza. ‘Chaucer is an English poet. What has he to do with Boethius?’

‘He translated The Consolations of Philosophy from Latin into English.’

‘Was that the first translation?’

‘The first was by King Alfred.’

‘King Alfred!’ Eliza is almost dumb with surprise. But then could King Alfred read Latin? She has always thought of him as a far-off savage king, but she sees now that he must have been a scholar, and all I knew of him was that about the cakes!

‘I don’t understand Latin and I don’t understand English. I don’t even know our own history.’ In her despair Eliza pounds the page she has been reading.

‘How do you expect to know if you don’t study?’ He is quite unsympathetic. ‘Meanwhile, don’t do that to that fine book.’ Eliza looks at the Chaucer again, then back at the shelves with their rows of shut-away books, and Jeremy Baxter follows her look. ‘Yes. There are more there,’ he says. ‘For instance your father has a Religio Medici and Coryat’s Crudities.’

‘But are they all religious, serious books?’ asks Eliza.

‘By no means.’ The old clerk gets up stiffly and comes over to the bookcase. ‘Here is a novel,’ he says and, putting his hand in beyond the front row of books – the shelves are unexpectedly deep – brings out a book covered in brown paper, and carries it to the table. ‘Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe.’

‘But Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe.’

‘Does that mean he couldn’t write anything else?’ Jeremy Baxter can be acrid and she flushes. ‘It’s a first edition too,’ and he touches it tenderly. ‘Look at the date: 1722 – but you wouldn’t know.’ At that Eliza becomes haughty. ‘You needn’t despise us,’ she says. ‘Father paid a high price for these books. He knew they were good.’

‘But not how good,’ says Jeremy Baxter and chuckles. ‘I used to be something of an authority.’

‘Can you read Greek as well as Latin?’ she asks.

‘I specialized in Early Christian and Medieval Literature,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘For that you need Latin and Greek – and Anglo-Saxon and old French. I was a Fellow of Trinity,’ says Jeremy Baxter, but humbly. Eliza surveys him disbelievingly.

‘If you were – all that,’ she asks, ‘why are you here?’

‘I drink,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘You know that very well.’ Then his gnat eyes soften. ‘No, you are young, you might not dwell on that as most of them do. Perhaps’ – and he says it almost longingly – ‘perhaps you have a mind above scandal. You have a beautiful forehead.’

No one has ever called any part of Eliza beautiful and she is strangely touched, which makes her all the more severe. ‘You might have made a great name for yourself,’ she scolds. ‘Been successful.’

‘People don’t know the consolations of being unsuccessful,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.’

‘What time do you have now?’ retorts Eliza. ‘Papa is not a philanthropist.’

‘I take an hour,’ says Jeremy Baxter and she knows he is trusting her with a secret. ‘I allow myself that each morning and evening. He owes me that for treasuring his books. I make covers for them and dust them, though nobody knows. Sometimes I take a book home.’

‘But you bring it back,’ says Eliza, sharp at once.

‘I bring it back,’ says Jeremy Baxter regretfully, ‘though why I should when he doesn’t know …’

The Romaunt of the Rose; Dante; Boethius; visionary – the words seem to have fallen into Eliza and, as if she were fertile ground, they stir. ‘Mr Baxter.’ Her voice is hesitant, humble, eager, not at all like Eliza’s. ‘Mr Baxter.’

‘Yes?’ asks Jeremy Baxter absently, and though he is talking to his employer’s daughter, he keeps his finger in his place. Well, I would too, if I could read Latin and somebody interrupted me, thinks Eliza. She notices that his cuff is frayed and dirty though his manner is regal. ‘Yes?’ he says, but is obviously not prepared to let her waste his time. Eliza has never imagined that time could be precious and she gathers herself together to speak quickly and to the point. ‘Mr Baxter, would you do what you said should be done with girls – though I am not a girl now? Would you do what you said, guide me and turn me loose with books?’

‘Tracy! Tracy!’ It was Aunt Bella’s voice; she was upstairs, had opened the White Room door, found nobody there, and was searching, coming nearer. ‘Tracy, where are you? We are having a drink before luncheon. Dr Taft and the vicar are here and Mr Prendergast. You must come down. Tracy! Tracy!’

I can’t go down like this! Tracy hastily looked at herself in the mirror that hung over the toy cupboard; her eyes were red, her face marked from crying. Why did she cry? Because they criticized, thought Tracy, criticized Gran and me and everything, especially Peter – Mr St Omer. I suppose I’m too prickly, perhaps I was upset before, but it was suddenly too much, she thought, her eyes flooding again. She could not face them like this – and let them see that I mind, thought Tracy.

‘Tra-cy!’

Aunt Bella was coming nearer. Desperately Tracy looked around and her eyes fell on the brass-bound case that had belonged to Eliza. She snatched it up and went to the door. ‘Coming, Aunt Bella,’ she called down the passage. ‘J-just coming, but I promised to take something to show Mr Alabaster,’ and she ran down the back stairs.

* ‘That you hope for nothing to last forever is the lesson of the revolving year and the flight of time that snatches from us the sunny days.’ – HORACE