Amelia was soon devoted to me. Each day she bounded into the schoolroom, all eagerness and cheerfulness. With such a dedicated pupil, I became more confident and more imaginative in the lessons I set her. She particularly loved tracing maps, and could do this for hours. While she drew, I daydreamed, feeing like a foolish schoolgirl. I dreamed of little things: running my fingers through Grace’s hair, kissing her, feeling her breasts against mine... I constantly thought about purity, wondering how it had eluded me, how from the beginning my feelings had been impure and unwholesome. I had imagined myself to be a fairly pure and wholesome person, and I had always congratulated myself on not falling in love, not being tempted to sin with another person. But a member of my own sex! How could I possibly...
Even at school, I had never experienced the adolescent crushes or “pashes” that the older girls often seemed to inspire in the younger ones. There had been friendships, but for some reason—perhaps because I had felt nervous about bringing friends home to the depressing atmosphere of our house—they had never reached the “special” stage that the other girls sometimes whispered about. And I had wondered what that intensity would be like, but had been resigned not to experience it; I had thought of myself as rather plain and cold, unlikely to create feelings of attraction in another.
So I had never expected to be seriously tempted. I had always assumed that nothing I would ever want to do would seriously transgress the moral codes of my middle-class upbringing, even though I believed that there was a higher code than the one I had been taught in school and at home, a higher allegiance one owed to oneself and one’s own feelings. But then one could go very wrong, couldn’t one? I asked myself. One could behave scandalously, be completely immoral . . . and lose one’s reputation, the respect of friends and family.
But I’m alone. The thought came into my mind for once as a delicious relief. I’m accountable to no one...
Many times in the first few weeks after my arrival at Thornley, as I stood in front of Amelia’s glossy, bowed head and watched her lips pressing together in concentration, I had thought that what would save me was the fact that Grace would want nothing to do with me in that way. At the most she would want a friend. And I should be grateful for that. But naturally she was an innocent girl who would never even have dreamed of the things I had been contemplating. Maybe she had a young man back in Dublin and she simply had not mentioned him; why should she? We were still practically strangers!
Lately, though, as my feelings for Grace had deepened and come to feel more natural to me, I had questioned why I was being so hard on myself. Wasn’t I allowed to love? When men and women were involved outside marriage it was called “living in sin,” but often women lived together and it was seen as deep friendship. Could Grace and I ever live together? Surely she would never want to. I did not dare to ask her whether she saw a future for herself as some man’s wife; yet it did strike me as odd that she never mentioned the possibility, never gossiped about men. They seemed to hold no fascination for her.
As if she had her own doubts about my precarious moral state, Lady Wilcox brought up the question of church with chilly promptness the day after the garden party. I was to attend service with the family at St. Barnabas’s in Drogheda, while the servants, I soon learned, all went to the local Catholic church. There was no chance for me to meet Grace on those Sundays in town. We seemed to have come to a silent agreement that it would attract too much attention. I reluctantly renewed my acquaintance with Vera Lee, and on those dull Sunday afternoons in Drogheda we would sit in a tea-shop and I would tell her about London (she expressed an interest in the Royal Family) or visit the windows of a millinery so she could look at hats. On the second Sunday that we spent together, I managed to slip into a shop and buy a box of paints, some brushes, and an easel. It cost nearly all the money I had brought to Ireland with me, but it was worth it. I wanted to paint a portrait of Grace from the drawing I had done.
Vera was most curious about my purchase. “You’re going to paint for your own amusement? How odd. Sometimes I do think you’re quite the bohemian, Caroline.” She gave a brittle little laugh.
“I want to do some studies of the house and grounds,” I told her. It was not exactly a lie: I planned to paint a whole series of pictures at Thornley—I would certainly have the time, and it would be much-needed practice. I had excelled in art at school, but of course I had to think of money, and Miss Peabody, the headmistress, had gently discouraged me from applying to an art school. “Girls from good families are doing it now,” she had admitted, “but it’s not exactly practical, is it, Caroline? I know your poor mother’s situation. And besides, you have a gift for teaching.”
She had seen me as a younger version of herself, I always thought, a learned and virtuous lady dedicated to the instruction of others. But being with Vera brought out a different side of me: rebellious, tomboyish, artistic, unconventional. I wished I had had a more shocking life, so I could tell her wicked tales of my past, but I had to be content with casually mentioning French novels that she had barely heard of but that she knew were “immoral.” Sometimes I would luridly sketch the plots of these books, with Ralph had surreptitiously supplied me with during his university days, while Vera went into little squeaks of protest at the tea-table.
“I don’t wish to hear about these fallen women, Caroline,” she would say priggishly. “I have enough of that to worry about when Bridget, the servant girl, comes in after an evening with her young man. She insists on telling me the most revolting details. I’m sure one of these days that girl will get in the family way.”
She said this with self-righteous satisfaction, pursing her thin lips. I could imagine her pumping poor Bridget for stories late at night, seeming sympathetic and open-minded. Sometimes I had the suspicion that she was trying to lead me on to greater and greater indiscretions, but I dismissed this as being too far-fetched. Still, I was very careful never to speak about Grace. I tried not to discuss Lady Wilcox, either, much as Vera seemed to want me to; I found I could not speak about her without a tone of bitterness and dislike creeping into my voice. “At least she leaves you alone,” Vera said enviously. “Mrs. Greene is always breathing down my neck. And Lady Wilcox is a real lady.”
Soon it would be too cold for Grace and me to go for walks. I treasured the brief days, and it seemed she did too, for she took every opportunity to see me. September passed into October, and the leaves began falling from the trees.
Grace often came to my room in the evenings now. She would watch me paint by the light of the flickering candelabra. As I painted she would talk, curled up on my bed. She told me about her poverty-stricken childhood in Dublin, her brief schooling, how her father’s chronic unemployment and fondness for drink had marked her family, how she hated the contemptuous way she had always been treated by the upper classes—how Lady Wilcox had grilled her about her morals at their first meeting, for example, and had seemed unwilling to believe a word she said. We discussed the fact that we had never had close female friends. Grace said that only having brothers might have made it more difficult for her. She said she’d always been criticized for being too much of a tomboy; that before she developed she had a boyish figure. We laughed at that.
“And I still do,” I said.
“I like that,” she said. She was watching the progress of the painting, which was slow—I wanted to do it just right. “What are you going to call it?”
“Grace Reclining on Bed,” I said. We giggled.
“What about Grace Reclining on the Artist’s Bed?” she suggested playfully.
“Even more accurate,” I said, blushing. She seemed to like catching me off guard; but, as ambiguous as her words sometimes were, I did not feel confident enough to act on their seductiveness. And what would I do anyway? I liked the thrill her words produced in me, but I felt nervousness too. I swallowed, and continued to paint. The girl in the painting was looking down shyly, away from the viewer. An enigmatic smile played on her face.
Another evening Grace seemed very tired, so to cheer her up I told her something that I had blurted out to Vera the previous Sunday after church.
“I told her I was a suffragette,” I said rather proudly. “Did you know that, Grace? I went to a public meeting, three years ago, where women were throwing stones at the War Office and smashing windows on Oxford Street.”
“And what did Miss Vera Lee think of that?” Grace inquired in a sarcastic tone. She didn’t seem to like Vera or approve of my association with her.
“Oh, she was horrified. She said that over here in Ireland those ideas aren’t half as popular, that Irish women aren’t militant and aggressive. And I have to admit that she’s probably right.”
“Mmm,” Grace said with a grimace. “Well, that just shows how much Miss Vera knows. ’Course, she’s a good little Protestant from Greystones, so she doesn’t know a bloody thing.”
I paused in shock at her tone, paint dripping onto the floor. Hurriedly, I rinsed the brush. It unnerved me that she would criticize Vera so blatantly, even though I was not particularly fond of Vera.
“There’s a woman in Dublin everybody’s heard of—except West Britons like your friend Vera—called Countess Markievicz. People call her ‘Madame.’ She married a Polish count, but before that she came from gentry folk in Sligo—her maiden name was Constance Gore-Booth. She doesn’t hide any of that. But about six years ago, when I was thirteen or so and my brother Jack was twelve, she started a youth group called the Fianna Eireann. That means ‘warriors of Ireland’ in Gaelic, something else your friend wouldn’t know. Anyway, she taught Jack and all the young Dublin lads to shoot. She’s a great shot.”
“So she’s your hero, is she?” I said. I couldn’t help a note of sourness from coming into my voice.
“Everyone loves her. She’s a socialist and a republican. She’s so committed to the struggle. She has the Fianna going down the street, whistling rebel tunes at the policemen, these big beefy fellas swinging batons.” Grace laughed, remembering. “Jack had so many stories. They’d train every week—in uniforms that were thrown together from any old thing, and caps that thy robbed off Baden-Powell’s boy scouts!”
My brother had been one of the first Boy Scouts, but I did not say so. “And now?” I asked.
“Oh, Jack’s in the Citizen Army now. It’s mostly made up of working men, and some women too. It’s tiny compared to the Irish Volunteers, which has thousands of men from all over the country. We’re Dublin only. The Countess is one of the leaders of it; James Connolly, the trade unionist, is the president. There’s a place called Liberty Hall, on the quays—beside the river, you know—where they train. A big banner hung outside says, ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.’ The police are always comin’ by and rippin’ it down.”
I noticed for the first time that when Grace became impassioned, she dropped her final g’s. Perhaps I had been too much with Vera lately, for it grated on me.
“Why don’t the authorities suppress these organizations?” I asked. What she was describing seemed so strange, almost comic, but with an air of the sinister.
“They don’t dare!” Grace said with satisfaction. “And they don’t believe we mean what we say. We’re doin’ it all right under their noses.”
I rinsed and wiped my brushes with linseed oil. I was unable to work when I herd this troubling tone in her voice—a tone of defiance that seemed to exclude me. This was her world, then. I listened to what she was saying, but I could not find a common ground between our childhoods—hers so rough, deprived, and shot through with a strange undertone of degradation. It was poverty that did it, I thought, the same poverty that had been all around us in Camden Town. But my genteel mother had kept us safe from the worst of it: there had been food, heat, a servant girl to help out when I was younger, books and music.
“I’m surprised you’re working here,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “If you feel so strongly...”
“There’s no work in Dublin. That’s the reality of it. I’m keeping the whole family going with my wages. Did you know that, Caroline?”
I shook my head.
“It’s the one thing my ma can count on. Da will never work again—he’s too far gone with the drink—and my brothers work here and there, but there’s no steady work; they’re sacked as often as not. Catholics get the shite jobs, if you pardon the expression.”
I sat down on a chair opposite her. I had the unsettling feeling of coming down to earth. So this was it, this was the real thing. The other stuff, the painting and sipping champagne, the flirting, had just been play. She was tense and overwrought, looking at me with a frown. It was a side of her I had not fully glimpsed before: an alien Grace whom I did not quite understand or even like, if I was honest. Perhaps I just don’t want to know, I thought, because my people have caused this suffering. And that’s the one thing she truly believes. So how can she care about me, seek out my company the way she does? Why does it seem that, despite the fact that I have more in common with Vera, I don’t like Vera, and despite the fact that I have almost nothing in common with Grace, I want so much from her?
I forced myself to question her about the Countess, this obviously fanatical woman with whom Grace seemed so besotted. I was troubled by the jealousy that her words had stirred up inside me. Could she see it?
“How old is the Countess Markievicz?” I asked curiously.
“Oh, she’s an older lady, she’d be in her forties by now. She’s tall and thin and wears little spectacles. But she looks lovely in uniform. They wear dark-green uniforms, the Citizen Army.”
I found myself breathing easier, despite the uniform comment. I had imagined her to be a beautiful young woman.
“She’s so brave!” Grace went on. “She’s been beaten up by the police more than once. Whenever there’s a rally in Dublin, you know, the police come out in force and crack heads.” She sounded wistful, and I imagined her sadness at missing all the drama and excitement that was apparently going on in Dublin under the surface.
“So she comes from a landowning family,” I mused. I was not trying to bait her, but this discrepancy had troubled me.
“She was even born in England. But that doesn’t matter.” Grace was airy.
“So as long as people believe the right things, the accent doesn’t matter, or anything?”
“Nobody cares about that, because she has a good heart. She even goes into the slum tenements and does the washing for people and plants flowers outside... She used to be an artist when she was young, went to art school in Paris.” I raised my eyebrows. Grace’s tone was dreamy. “I know all about her. I even found out about her sister, Eva—not many people know this...”
I waited.
“She lives with another lady in England,” Grace said, blushing. “In Manchester. They’re suffragettes.”
“That’s where my uncle lives,” I said, for want of something better to say.
Grace got up to go, smoothing down her uniform as she stood in front of me. We were silent for a moment. Then I murmured, “Do you think it’s wrong, two women living together like that?”
“No,” she said flatly. “Why would it be wrong?”
“Well, if they . . . if they were more than friends. I’m not suggesting that about those two. I mean, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” Grace said, smiling. “We’d have to ask the Countess, and maybe even she couldn’t tell us.”
“Or wouldn’t,” I joked, desperately relieved at the way my words had been received. I got up, and we stood facing each other.
“Can I have a candle?” Grace asked.
I pulled one of my candles out of the candelabra and gave it to her. Our hands lingered around the exchange. It reminded me of the first night, when she had lit my candles with her lamp.
“Good night, Caroline,” Grace said.
October was passing into November. Grace did not have much time at the weekends, as I did, so I took Lady Wilcox’s suggestion and buried myself in Sir John’s library. I could sit by the fire there and escape into a book. Besides the volumes of military history, there were some unexpected gems: a volume of W.B. Yeats’s lyric poetry, for example. In Yeats’s yearning for his aloof beloved, I found traces of my own longing and confusion. I was still not sure what I wanted to do, or what Grace wanted from me.
Even after all this time, I had not met Sir John, but Grace told me one morning he would be here the next day.
“He’s an advisor to Augustine Birrell, the Secretary for Ireland,” she said. She was sitting and watching me fix my hair. Glancing at myself in the mirror, I saw her looking at me with an odd intensity, but when I turned around quickly, I thought that I was wrong. Her face was relaxed, if solemn.
“I don’t know much about Irish politics,” I said. It was my way of trying to ask her not to talk about them, but she invariably did these days. I saw that she was obsessed with the current political situation, caught up in it in a way that I could not truly understand. Even after all she had told me, I still found it strange that she should not feel, as I did, that momentous events were outside her control. I had stopped reading about the War, for example. Nothing had come from Captain Philpott and I did not want to ask Lady Wilcox about it.
“You don’t want to know,” Grace said thoughtfully. She seemed disappointed in me. I could feel it.
I shrugged. “It’s not my country, Grace.”
“But you’re living here.”
“Yes, but nothing important is going to happen, is it? It’s all talk. I suppose at the end of the War they’ll have to figure out what to do about Ireland. Until then it seems idle to speculate.” I bit my lip, realizing how arrogant I must have sounded.
Grace looked at me, her eyes cold suddenly. “You’ve no stake in what happens, no interest, but I do! My brother sends me letters all the time. I tell you the rising its on its way, and he’s committed to fighting. When we go back to Dublin for the winter, I’m going to be in the thick of all of that. I’m just telling you now.”
I did not know what to say. I felt as if she was drifting away from me. My greatest fear was that she would no longer want to associate with me. I had made clear my disinterest in the country’s struggle for independence, which I could not take seriously anyway. The Ireland I had experienced in my short time here was far too stable and comfortable under the British crown for a rebellion! I came and sat down on the bed my face turned away from her, pale and miserable, angry at myself for feeling such a presentiment of loss. I sighed.
I felt her sit down beside me on the bed; and then, to my astonishment, she leaned against me, drawing my head down onto her breast. She held me in her arms and pressed her head against mine. I felt her warm breath on my face. I closed my eyes. If only I did not have to get up and go to Amelia, if only she did not have to return downstairs... We could be caught now, and the scandal would be enormous. But I didn’t care. And neither, it seemed, did Grace.
“I want us to stay friends,” she murmured.
“But do you think we really can?” I said. “It has meant so much to me . . . it’s meant everything.”
“I know,” she said softly. She released me, and I drew back. We looked at each other, not understanding, perhaps, how to resolve this impasse.
A sharp knock on the door sent Grace flying off the bed. I stood up, frightened. She opened the door and Johnson the butler was outside, looking at us sardonically.
“Are you finished with Grace, Miss? She’s needed downstairs. As you may know, the master comes back tomorrow and it’s all hands on deck.” His voice was loud, and his politeness seemed false and rather threatening.
“Yes . . . she was helping me fix my hair,” I said breathlessly.
He pulled a watch out of his pocket. “Weren’t Miss Amelia’s lessons supposed to begin at ten?”
“I’ll go up there straightaway.”
As he closed the door I heard him say in sharp, nasty tones, “You’ll pay for this later! I’ve had enough of your dawdling and wasting time. I don’t know what you do for her, but it must be something good.”
I sat down on the bed again, staring blankly at the window. How symbolic it was that the view looked out onto an enclosed courtyard. This will end soon, I thought suddenly. “And when it does, you’ll want to have something real and concrete to remember. You’ll want to know whether she really cared. Otherwise, none of this pain will have been worth it.
Grace had been set some punishment that evening and did not appear at dinner. I ate sparingly, wondering if it was just my imagination or if the stares of the other servants were stonier than usual. A plump blonde scullery maid and her friend, a spiteful-looking brunette, sat near me and conversed in low tones, punctuated with brief bursts of laughter. My interest was piqued by the sound of Grace’s name, and I listened carefully.
“So he’s still mad for her—well, everyone knows it, and she leads him on something terrible. Even goes so far as to become fast friends with her uppers; maybe she thinks that’ll help her keep her position. Well, I have it for a fact that he’s going to give a report to Lady Wilcox that’ll send her packing. He’ll say she’s been stealing, trying to fill our heads with her nationalist ideas—well, you know the way she talks sometimes...”
The blonde snorted with laughter. “She puts on airs, thinks too much of herself. Thinks she’s royalty, does she? I mean, my uncle knows her da and says he’s a common drunkard, and if it’s not drink it’s loose women, if you now what I’m sayin’.”
“Oh, I do. Worst of it is, she may be staying on. Johnson says he’ll make sure she either gets the sack or gives him what he’s been waiting for all this time. And she’s the type that would do it, she’s no saint. Just thinks she’s too good for him.”
“...Always gets his way,” the blonde put in knowingly.
“Heard he’s not half bad; at least he knows what he’s doin’, unlike some here...”
More giggles, and they passed on to something else.
I felt sick. The color had drained from my face. They were all against us. Surely Grace would not surrender to Johnson out of fear of losing her job. It would not be worth her honor, would it? The very idea of having to give herself to that man to buy more time was sickening. But no—I was assuming far too much. What was clear was that our little idyll was coming to an end.
I pushed my plate aside. A walk would do me good. As I opened the heavy front door of Thornley Hall, the bleakness I felt inside was so icy that I welcomed the sudden gust of cold air. I buttoned my coat and pulled on my gloves. I would walk and walk. This time, I would go through the woods. I had waited for Grace to take me there, but she had never wanted to. I wondered about that now. Perhaps she feared being seen with me there, feared that people would gossip...
As I walked quickly down the drive, I cursed the Wilcoxes. Perhaps serving the rich could bring nothing but unhappiness. Of course, I loved Amelia and recognized her genuine sweetness. But she would be brought up to be a “great lady” like her mother, to distance herself from all lower forms of human beings.
Grace had been right. Six weeks of eating rich food had put weight on me. I felt larger, stronger. I had probably never been so healthy in my life. I had also never been quite so unhappy. I had begun to miss London, foolish as that seemed. Perhaps I only remembered the good things, I mused: having tea and cakes with my mother and Ralph in a café for a special treat; going to see a moving picture—a cowboys-and-Indians western—and having Ralph tell me approvingly afterwards that I was the kind of girl who could enjoy these adventurous things, that I wasn’t prim and proper and vain, constantly primping and crimping, like the girls who showed interest in him. He had never loved a girl. How sad, I thought, as tears finally gushed out of my eyes. I had turned off into the woods, and I leaned against a stately elm tree and sobbed like a baby.
She would return to Dublin and perhaps she too would die; and it would all be for nothing. And if she survived it, she would hate me for being one of the English, even though I had few patriotic feelings and was not part of the governing class. They would put down any rebellion easily. I did not understand why Grace felt so hopeful. Perhaps determined rather than hopeful... I rested my face against the rough, ridged bark of the old tree. I felt so powerless.