SHE COULDN’T fault her aunt and uncle; they were doing what they considered their duty. Her young cousins liked her, and to lessen her sense of dependency she was teaching them, by her father’s methods. Between lessons, and sometimes during, she entertained them with exhilarating tales of her growing up, which both nourished and alleviated her homesickness.
On the surface there was no reason why this state of affairs couldn’t remain in balance for a time, her aunt taking her about in society while the children profited from her tutoring. But the tacit understanding was that she would be married, or at least betrothed, as soon as possible. If the Highams were doing their duty, her duty was also clear. Charlotte, for whom this room had been especially furnished, had no doubt whatever that she’d be in it by her seventeenth birthday, though she was a gentle child and didn’t complain about being kept in the nursery now.
“I owe it to Lottie to go away,” said Jennie virtuously. She rose from her knees and shut the casement on both the boy’s and the bird’s whistling. “Uncle and Aunt Higham needn’t reproach themselves with anything. They will have done their best. One cannot ask for more.”
She put away the old robe and slippers and got back into bed. Her body strained so hard to be gone that her heart raced as if she were running. She picked up her volume of Mr. Wordsworth’s poems and began to read his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The eloquently simple lines gave dignity to her sadness.
From Aunt Higham’s viewpoint the scheme should have been working well by now. The girl was educated, a disadvantage which might have been transcended if she’d had even a modest fortune, but she had only a pittance from her mother, just enough to keep her in hairpins and ribbons. However, she had good country manners, nothing artificial or simpering. She had fine, clean-cut features, she was naturally graceful without having attended deportment classes, and she liked to dance. She was thin but healthy. She had no monthly pains and vapors, a benefit which would cancel out the financial drawbacks if a man was looking for a strong young woman of good stock to give him heirs.
“You’ll make a fine wife if you know enough when to hold your tongue,” her aunt told her. “You’ll get nowhere with that saucy way of yours! You frighten a man, asking him what he thinks of this poet or that philosopher. George Vinton stares as if he can’t believe his ears. ‘Does God exist?’ I thought he’d strangle!”
“I asked him theological questions, suitable for a curate,” said Jennie. “He must have studied Emmanuel Kant at Cambridge.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said her aunt. “Anyone would think you were trying to drive him and the rest off. Save that bluestocking talk until you’ve married the man and the first one’s on the way. Then he’ll run from you only as far as Almack’s or Newmarket, and he’ll always come home again.”
“What sort of curate would go to Almack’s or Newmarket?” Jennie pondered aloud.
“George Vinton will have some money when his mother goes, and he has the reversion of a very fine living when his uncle dies. You’d be the mistress of a bigger rectory than William’s, and close to a cathedral town, too, with great chances of preferment for George.” It tasted good to Aunt Higham. “I will thank God if Charlotte has such a chance offered her.”
“I think George would be willing to wait for her,” Jennie suggested.
“Fustian!” her aunt snapped. “You’re the one to be married off first. A woman like you could make George Vinton go far. He needs a strong hand. But you’ll have to keep your heretical thoughts to yourself and not go questioning the existence of God in ecclesiastical circles.”
“I was only trying to stir George up,” Jennie explained. “He was sitting there looking quite torpid.”
“More like a bird hypnotized by a snake,” her aunt said dryly.
“Anyway, I don’t question God’s existence. Only His motives.”
“Oh, Lord!” Her aunt rolled her eyes toward the plaster wreaths on the ceiling. She shook her head. But her mouth twitched at one corner. “You’re a good lass, Jennie, and you were always my favorite, for you look the most like my sister. You’re an Everden far more than any of my children are. You have her way of holding yourself, the long neck and the tilt of the head. And of laughing. When I see you dancing, if it weren’t for the difference in fashion I’d think it was Isabel.”
It was an astonishing speech to come from Aunt Higham, and she stood up quickly, as if she repented instantly this gush of emotion. Jennie stood, too, and her aunt gave her a hard pat on the shoulder. “There’s more than George, you know, my girl, and the choice has to be yours. But don’t be like the poor soul who went all the way through the woods looking for the right stick and had to pick up a crooked one at last.”
“And remember to keep my tongue behind my teeth.”
“Aye, remember that,” her aunt said. “I had to.”
Keeping one’s mouth shut was not a Hawthorne trait. Free speech had been one of the few luxuries possible for the Hawthorne girls. Raising his daughters in an old house entailed on him without any money to go with it, their widowed and scholarly father had decided that about all he could do for his girls was to give them the best education possible and allow them to run what some called wild.
The elderly, unorthodox scholar had also found it cheap and practical to let them ride, roam the sands and marshes, and climb the hills in nankeen pantaloons, short jackets, and boys’ boots until they were thirteen or so, saving their frocks and slippers for special occasions.
Thus they had had exceptional freedom. It was his gift to those whom society would cage soon enough. He thought it was a dreadful world which penalized a human being for being born a female, and his girls’ condition as adults would not be bettered by their having been reared in ignorance and trained to a false and hobbling docility.
Therefore, Jenny had not the best training for being a demurely marriageable lass in her aunt’s house. To her there was something degrading in being beautifully dressed and having one’s hair done by a maid so that one could be paraded like a mare or a heifer at an auction.
Besides, she hadn’t seen anyone yet with whom she could bear to think of sharing the marriage bed.
“It’s rather wonderful with someone you love,” Sylvia had told her after a month of William. “It makes you understand John Donne better, too. But I’d abhor doing it with someone I didn’t love.” She shuddered. “One might just as well be a light woman, except that she’d be paid for it, and a wife isn’t.”
The parson adored Sylvia, and she was complacent in her own right. If you made a man fall in love with you, the advantage wasn’t all to him. William said he had resented God’s taking away his first wife but forgave Him when He sent Sylvia to him. Jennie forbore telling him that God had nothing to do with it; Sylvia had had her eye on him since she was fifteen, and even now Jennie couldn’t be sure that when Sylvia had knelt beside her bed, looking as devout as Desdemona before Othello fell upon her with that pillow, she hadn’t been praying for the parson’s wife to be painlessly removed by the time Sylvia was old enough to marry him.
In spite of Papa’s theories, Sylvia believed stubbornly in a gruff but benign Personage, someone like Papa, only more glorious, who inclined His ear unto her and heard her cry. This was a useful attribute for a parson’s wife.
But if Sylvia knew what Jennie now knew, she would be hard put to make excuses for her God.
She knew now, for instance, that outside the pleasant crescents and squares, the parks where the Quality rode, the theaters and ballrooms, there lay the filthy warrens of a destitution and vice she hadn’t believed could exist; she wouldn’t have known now except for the little girl who used to light the fires and black the grates.
She’d hopelessly and helplessly wept at her chore one morning, blinded with the tears that wouldn’t stop flowing from her swollen eyes, not able to keep her nose from running. Jennie caught her at it, dried the child’s eyes, made her blow her nose on one of the new handkerchiefs, and heard in broad Cockney, made almost unintelligible by the hiccuping sobs, the story of the mother dying in childbirth after the father had beaten her, and of his attempts to violate his own daughter. Now she was terrified for fear-she wouldn’t give satisfaction here and would be sent back; one of the maids had spoken sharply to her this morning.
Jennie was sickened and appalled by the child’s terror. She learned then what put girls on the streets or in the river. At home, when one heard of any sort of abuse, there was something to do at once; she could have gone to her father or to Sylvia’s parson or to one of the eccentric old ladies who were part of the country’s flora and fauna. Someone would have said, and enforced it, “That child shall never go back to that man again.”
Even if there were no way of punishing the man, the girl would have grown up safe belowstairs in some country house, the father or uncle or brother forbidden the premises.
Jennie’s homesickness was now compounded by bitter frustration. She didn’t know Aunt and Uncle Higham well enough; they could very well put the girl out after hearing her story, as if she were a plague carrier. As for the London variety of eccentric old ladies, any of the bejeweled and beplumed specimens Jennie had met didn’t look as if kindness toward the lower orders extended past being sure that the horses weren’t chilled. The rector of the church which the Highams attended was so grand in the pulpit on Sundays and such a bon vivant on weekdays that one couldn’t imagine approaching him. George Vinton was so green, for all his dandified airs, that he’d have strangled with horrified embarrassment if he hadn’t burned to death with his blushes.
When she wasn’t being homesick that winter in London, she was suffering for Tamsin and murderous toward the father. Tamsin never overflowed to her again; she was afraid of being caught at it. The fear of losing her place was contagious; it was a constant pain gnawing at Jennie’s stomach. She lived a double life, as a grateful niece trying to live up to her obligations and as a prisoner of her passions. She could not even write it all out to Sylvia, who could have done nothing to help.
Tamsin died as quietly and humbly as she had lived, of a fever which was survived by the stronger, better-nourished girls. She died in a clean bed in her garret room at Brunswick Square, tended by the girls and women of whom she had been so unnecessarily afraid. She died unravished by her father, and she would never have to go on the streets, where she would have died a far different death after long miseries.
Uncle Higham had seen that she was decently buried. There was no more need to be anxious for her now, so one reason for the pain in Jennie’s stomach was gone. But for the rest of her life she would remember Tamsin with the depressing ache of an old injury.
William and Sylvia were snug in the rectory, thinking God had made a gift of each to the other. They were good people; they acted swiftly when they saw distress. But she condescended wearily to their innocence. When she reached the north again, she would tell them what London was really like.
With thirty gold sovereigns, she thought on this morning of the duet by the blackbird and the baker’s boy, I could even go to America, if I knew how to get started. She put down her book and lay watching the light brightening on the ceiling, and let herself go in a fantasy about taking a ship for America. With the addition of an inexpensive wedding ring, she could call herself a widow, because a widow could move about more freely than an unmarried girl. She’d say she was going to relatives there, traveling alone because at the last moment her maid had become ill, or had refused to go across three thousand miles of ocean, or had eloped with the coachman.
Jennie passed lightly over the possibilities of storms or shipwreck. She smiled with gracious sadness on the officers and other passengers. There were some who would have courted her if they had not respected her grief. The delightful fantasy ended when the ship docked because she could imagine neither what she would see nor what she could do there.
No. Home to the north first, and then, if nothing presented itself by summer, on to Switzerland. It was a pity she couldn’t simply say to her aunt, “I would like to go home. Not to Pippin Grange, of course, but William and Sylvia will have me until I situate myself.”
If only her aunt and uncle would give in gracefully. (This was the purest fantasy.) She could depart with their blessings, and George Vinton would still come calling, she thought dreamily. He might be saved for Charlotte after all, though Jennie was sure her young cousin’s romantic ideal was something rather different.
“George Vinton!” Jennie said it aloud, and shot up like a jack-in-the-box. “He’s the way!”
She needed only to know where to go to take a northbound coach, and how to get there, and if she couldn’t find this out from George Vinton without arousing his suspicions, she was a fool and deserved to be caught out.
There was a tap at the door, and Tamsin’s successor, a brawny, good-natured girl, brought in her hot water.