Chapter Four Chapter Four I WAS, AS FAR AS THE GIRLS OF BISHOP SPENCER KNEW, NO MORE “out of bounds” than before, though I felt that, for the teachers of Spencer, I as good as lived in outer darkness, a student known to have done something Miss Emilee considered unspeakable who was allowed to remain only because, by expelling her, they would run the risk that she would tell everyone about her prank and thereby smear the school.
My conversation with her had left me feeling desolate. Her never-voiced but all too obviously grim view of my future prospects weighed upon my mind and spirit. She had all but said that I was by nature unsuited for happiness, an innately perverse young woman hopelessly inclined to waste her intelligence on subversive mischief. I could have told her that I did not share this view, but that would have involved explaining myself to her, which I was loath to do, loath to tell her that I wanted to be taken out of the running for the “prize” about whose value the other girls had not the slightest doubt. The girls who seemed unable even to conceive of another sort of life than the one for which Spencer was preparing them, a life for which I was all too happy to admit I was unsuitable.
The problem was that I could only vaguely conceive of alternatives, vague versions of the lives for which our brother school, Bishop Feild, was preparing its students, the potent, effectual, dynamic lives of men. But even the sort of life that might be led by a graduate of Bishop Feild did not appeal to me. I somehow knew that, even as a boy, I would be disaffected, disdainful of my single-minded peers, inclined to opt out but having no idea what to do instead. I could clearly see what sort of man I would have made—one begrudgingly enlisted in a life that I disdained, an ineffectual crank who would become even more bitter as he aged, a figure of amusement to the captains of the world.
I could not have told Miss Emilee that I had acted out of reckless desperation with no real end but notoriety in mind, notoriety from which I hoped that, somehow, something matching my notion of good would come.
My motives, several years later, for beginning to associate with the boys of Bishop Feild were just as unclear.
Spencer and the Feild bordered on each other, separated only by a tall iron fence between whose bars the smaller or skinnier of the students from either side could have squeezed, though it was only the boys who did so and only then to retrieve a wayward cricket ball.
The girls of Spencer pretended not to notice the balls or the mock pleas of the boys to throw them back. It was an endless game between the students of the two schools, the boys overthrowing their balls on purpose, then standing at the fence and holding the bars jail-cell fashion while peering between them and shouting out the names of the more attractive and audacious girls.
Occasionally, one of the girls, in what was considered an act of brazenness and daring, picked up the errant cricket ball and threw it with all her might over the fence, as far from the nearest boy as she could, which always drew a cheer from the boys, none of whom wanted to be the one appointed to chase down a ball thrown back in such a fashion by a girl. If no girl threw back the ball, the captain of the Feild ordered one of the boys to retrieve it, a boy who, by his ability to fit through the fence or willingness to scale it, won for himself a kind of fame that, though not to be taken seriously, at least saved him from the obscurity that would otherwise have been his fate.
It had always been my practice to stay far clear of the fence, lest my conspicuous size and solitude make me a target of the boys. I was certainly not unknown to them—I had sometimes heard taunting shouts of “Fielding” from a distance, my name drawn out to “Fieeelllding,” but had always pretended not to hear it, and the girls of Spencer were too terrified of me to draw my attention to it, let alone join in the teasing.
But one day I walked back and forth, looking through the fence at No Girls’ Land, looking, I imagined, because of my size and carriage, like one of the teachers of Spencer whose duty it was to patrol the fence each day. On the third day of my patrol, a group of boys gathered at the fence, at first conferring in whispers among themselves, until one of them spoke up.
“It must be hard,” he said, “finding clothes to fit you.” The boys with him laughed, but I kept walking back and forth. “It’s not as though you can wear your mother’s hand-me-downs, now is it?” They laughed again and were joined by other boys until the fence was a crammed phalanx of blue-blazered boys, the sight of which drew the girls of Spencer who formed a line behind me. The boys and girls stood like two opposing armies, while I walked up and down between them. “I think I saw you last year at the circus,” another of the boys said to more laughter, though the girls looked on in silence.
I stopped walking and, facing the boys, pointed my purely ornamental cane at them, moved it slowly from left to right. “Behold,” I said loudly. “The Lilies of the Feild.” The girls of Spencer all at once burst out laughing and I heard them repeating to each other what I realized with a mixture of glee and dread would be an enduring nickname. I had not expected the other girls to gather round, let alone to laugh at something I said at the expense of the boys who had for so long adored them from a distance.
“Fielding,” shouted one of the tallest boys. “They say that you are never to be found without your cane. They even say you take it with you when you go to bed.” In addition to the somewhat forced laughter of the boys, there was a chorus of gasps and half-suppressed giggles from the girls behind me.
“You have very small hands for a boy your size,” I said. “Or, rather, for a boy your height. I’m sure that, for a boy your size, one of them will do.”
Behind me there were more gasps and less laughter than before.
“My name is Prowse, Miss Fielding,” said the boy, who stood almost opposite me, his hands behind his back in the manner of a man out with his wife and children for an evening stroll. “My father was once headmaster here. I am the captain of the school.”
“Whereas I, Mr. Prowse,” I said, “am merely the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.”
“William Ernest Henley,” Prowse said.
It was hardly an obscure couplet, but I was suitably impressed with Prowse in spite of his affectatious manner. He might have been a gentleman introducing himself formally to a woman held universally in high regard. He did look manly, sporting beneath his blazer a blue vest that was not part of the official school uniform and so signalled some sort of exemption or special status. He was almost absurdly attractive, standing there with his feet planted far apart as if to say that he would, calmly and unostentatiously, hold his ground no matter what. His blond hair was parted down the middle and brushed back so that the whole of his strong but small-browed forehead was shown to best effect. I could see, even from this distance, that his eyes were bright blue. A boy, almost a man, such as I could never hope to have. Yet he had addressed me without condescension or scorn, addressed me in a manner that had disarmed everyone, myself included.
The boys on either side of him, among them the boys who had taunted me, regarded me somewhat differently now, their expressions begrudgingly noncommittal. I wondered if they were thinking that, though Prowse had accorded me more respect than they believed I deserved, it was still possible that he would change his tone, that he was disarming me as a prelude to repaying my Lilies of the Feild remark.
“Miss Fielding is formidable,” he said, “though not, we may dare to hope, our opponent at heart.” He nodded with the same exaggerated formality with which he spoke. “Good day to you, Miss Fielding,” he said. As he turned away, the other boys did likewise. He ambled, hands still behind his back, across the playing field, the boys he clearly thought of as his boys surrounding him. He might have been some visiting dignitary whom the boys had been asked to show about the school, looking this way and that, as if he had never seen the grounds before, nodding, smiling at their efforts to impress him.
Seventeen years old at most, I thought. A mere boy. Absurd in his pretentiousness. Though no more so, perhaps, than I was in mine. I hoped I did not convey the sort of impression Prowse did. Yet how deftly he had brought the confrontation to an end, minimizing the damage to the Feild, yet at the same time seeming to intervene on my behalf, as well as on that of Bishop Spencer, preserving an as-yet never-interrupted peace between the two schools, and somehow even suggesting that, were it necessary, were he forced to stoop to my sort of tactics, he could have cut me down to size.
I stopped patrolling the fence. The way my encounter with Prowse had ended, it seemed out of the question to go back to baiting the other boys into making fun of me. That I had routed the boys with one line did nothing to alter or elevate my standing at Spencer. I had thought that day, especially as Prowse had addressed me so directly and with such deference, that something would come of it. But Prowse stayed as far from the fence as he always had. I saw him—even from a distance he was conspicuous both by his carriage and by the knot of boys by whom he was constantly surrounded—standing near the front entrance to the Feild, seemingly looking my way, though from that distance, it was hard to tell.
One day I followed the fence all the way to where it ended at Bond Street, walked around the iron post and stepped onto the other side, the Feild side, something that, in my time at Spencer, no other girl had been known to do. Seeing that none of the masters was about, I made my way across the playing field, bringing to a silent halt a football game whose participants gawked at me.
I walked straight through them, leaving it to them to step out of my way, focusing my eyes on the distant Prowse whose full attention I was now sure I had, for he and his delegation had begun to walk towards me. We met near the fringe of the playing field, still on the grass.
“Hello, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said. “Or is it true that people merely call you Fielding?”
“At Spencer they just call me Fielding,” I said. “I prefer it.”
“Then Fielding it will be,” he said.
I noted the future tense. Further visits would be welcome. Or merely expected?
“I will call you whatever the boys call you,” I said.
“They call me Prowse.”
“Then Prowse it will be.”
“Is that what you want to be, Fielding, one of the boys?” Prowse said. His tone had changed. Derision? No. A mere lapse into informality?
“Boys will be boys,” I said.
“One of the men, then?” he said.
“Men also will be boys,” I said. “I have merely come to visit.”
“But look at the stir you’ve caused,” Prowse said, pointing across the Feild towards Spencer, where the girls had gathered at the fence, gripping and peering through the bars. “What will Miss Stirling think?”
I shrugged.
“Are you not concerned,” he said, “about your reputation?”
“My visits,” I said, “will do more harm to your reputation than to mine.”
Prowse laughed. “You plan to come back? What if Miss Stirling forbids it? What if Headmaster Reeves forbids it?”
“Then I will have to think of something else,” I said.
But my visits were not forbidden, by either Miss Emilee or Headmaster Reeves. I think she spoke to him about me, perhaps told him that, as my purpose was to agitate, the best thing to do was ignore me.
I went almost every day to the Feild, following the fence to Bond Street, walking round to the other side. When I did not go, it was because I could see no sign of Prowse, by whose bland perfection I was captivated, mesmerized. Who with such ease controlled the other boys. I suspected that, were I to visit in his absence, the whole thing might deteriorate into mere name-calling.
I noticed, but didn’t mind, that Prowse’s manner with me soon began to change. Less deferential, less polite. I felt, I knew, I was being called on to perform, my being both willing and able to do so with a crowd of boys hilarious because of my gender and my enrolment at such a haven of propriety as Bishop Spencer. Prowse always led me to “perform” at what he encouraged the other boys to think of as their, and his, mock expense, for he did not spare himself when provoking me.
“So, Fielding,” he said. “Here you are. You’re like a stray cat who, because she was fed once, keeps coming back.”
“And is there not a mouse among you who will try to bell the cat?” I said. “Or, rather, is there no one among you who has heard of that expression?”
“What cat could resist so many Feild mice?”
“To me, to the girls, to most of St. John’s, you will always be the lilies of the Feild.”
“You exaggerate your fame.”
“You underrate my infamy.”
“Do you know what the lily symbolizes, Fielding? Purity. Chastity. Innocence. In which case you have paid us a compliment.”
“Yes. The one of assuming that you had a sense of irony. Behold, the lilies of the Feild. They do not reap. Neither do they sow. Their fathers do that for them.”
It went on like that for a while, but the exchanges became increasingly risque, Prowse trying to draw me into a boyish display of ribaldry.
“We have practice this afternoon, Fielding. Would you be willing to retrieve our balls?”
“I’m sure there are plenty of boys who would be willing to retrieve your balls. And what a shame it is that your team keeps losing. I’m sure your balls will go farther when your bats get bigger.” I knew that this was just the sort of thing they wanted me to say. And it was difficult to answer such lewdness with real wit. But, though they laughed, they were terrified of me. I could see, in the eyes of most of them, that they wished I would go back to keeping to my side of the fence.
“Fielding,” I heard one day as I was walking home from school to my house on Circular Road, behind the grounds of Government House. It was Prowse, standing in the doorway of one of the finer houses of the city, a late-Victorian mansion built after the fire of 1892. Perhaps ten houses removed from mine. I knew it to be his grandfather’s house, but I had never seen Prowse on Circular Road before. He looked furtively up and down the street.
“Would you like to meet my grandfather?” he said. Prowse’s grandfather. The eminent D.W. A retired judge famous for having written the authoritative history of Newfoundland, a book that he was once quoted as saying was “owned by almost everyone and read by next to none.” I had not read it, though my father had a copy in his study, a massive volume as pristine-looking as the ones around it.
I thought of declining Prowse’s invitation on some pretence, wondering why he wanted me to meet his grandfather. The thought of making polite conversation with the aging judge whose book I hadn’t read and with whomever else was in the house did not appeal to me. But I could think of no way of declining that would not seem clumsily churlish and by which Prowse would not gain over me some sort of advantage, the redoubtable Fielding so eager to hurry home to her famously empty house.
Why do you want me to meet him? I felt like saying. Blood rushed to my face as I imagined Prowse “declaring” himself or making some sort of pledge.
“Come in,” Prowse said. “Come in. I’ve told him all about you. He would love to meet you.”
“All right,” I said. “But I can’t stay long because—”
“He’ll be happy just to shake your hand.”
I crossed the street and, ascending the steps, walked past Prowse as he held the door open for me, my shoulder slightly brushing his waistcoat. I let slip some hybrid of “thank you” and “excuse me,” which I hoped he didn’t hear. Once inside, I stopped, waiting for him to lead the way to the front room where I assumed his grandfather, and others perhaps, were waiting.
“Straight upstairs,” Prowse said and began to make his way up them two at a time.
I followed at a normal pace, wondering if the house might be empty except for him and me. When he reached the first landing, he walked out of sight, though I could hear his footsteps in the hallway above. As I reached the second floor, I saw him leaning against a door jamb, peering inside a room with a smile on his face. He silently motioned me forward with his hand as if it was a sleeping baby he was looking at and wanted me to see. Puzzled, I all but tiptoed down the hall.
“Look,” Prowse said.
I looked inside and saw a figure hunched over a desk, a long-bearded man with white hair that looked as if it had not been attended to in years, his face resting to one side on a mass of maps and charts, his eyes closed, his hands flanking his head, slightly curled up in a way that instantly made me feel sorry for him.
“Grandfather,” Prowse said loudly before I could protest. The old man’s eyes opened slowly, then closed again. “Grandfather,” Prowse shouted, and this time the old judge sat up, blinking rapidly as though he was not yet aware of his surroundings or the time of day. He looked at us in the doorway and smiled. “My dear,” he said, and held out his arms to me as if he had known me all his life. I stepped forward and, unsure of what else to do, took his hands in mine. “How tall you’ve grown,” he said. “A grown woman. A lovely young woman.” The smile faded from his face and was replaced by a look of distress, almost panic. I instinctively, and hoped reassuringly, tightened my grip on his hands.
“This is Miss Fielding, Grandfather,” said Prowse, who was still leaning, arms folded, against the door jamb. “She is a student at Bishop Spencer.”
The smile returned. “Of course, of course, Miss Fielding. How are you today, my dear? That’s a different dress than you wore before, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is. It’s new.”
“Well, it’s lovely. You’re looking lovely.”
“Come on, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said behind me. “Let’s let Grandfather get back to his work.”
“We’ll meet again, soon, my dear,” the old man said. “It is always such a pleasure.”
“For me as well, Judge Prowse,” I said. I removed my hands from his, turned and, ignoring Prowse as emphatically as I could, walked past him and out into the hallway along which I walked rapidly this time and began to make my way downstairs. Prowse caught up with me at the bottom.
“I know what you think,” he said.
“If you did, you would not have come downstairs.”
“You think I humiliated my grandfather and played a trick on you.”
“He is an old man in his dotage—”
“A lonely old man. That’s why I bring him visitors. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. He would never see another soul if not for me. My father and his other sons avoid him. So do his daughters. Because he insists on remaining in this house. He had a stroke a while ago. Everyone’s ashamed of him except for me. They want to shut him away where he can’t embarrass them. But he stays here. I’m practically all he has. I bring him food. I come by to make sure that he hasn’t hurt himself.”
I looked at Prowse. I thought of the judge’s unkempt appearance. The house resembled a ransacked library. Books that looked like they’d been flung about lay everywhere; bookless covers; coverless books whose first pages were missing. The judge’s small study had been even worse, the floor rug invisible beneath footprint-bearing maps and charts. The one window piled so high with books that only creases of light showed through. Hunting trophies that must once have adorned the walls piled in a heap in one corner—elk’s antlers, a black bear skin, a stuffed lynx with gleaming yellow eyes, photographs of the younger judge holding by its mouth a salmon more than half his size.
“You should have told me what to expect,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Prowse said. “I just wanted you to meet him. It seemed very important to me.”
I looked away from him. “Well,” I said. “I’m glad to have met him. But now I have to leave.”
“Will you come again?” Prowse said. “I think it would mean a great deal to him. Especially if you stayed longer.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll see. I don’t think he would remember me.”
“If he thinks he remembers you, it’s the same, isn’t it? For him, I mean.”
“I suppose,” I said. “All right then. I’ll come back.”
And I did go back, several times over the following months.
Prowse would often leave me alone with the judge, who, though he seemed not to recognize me from one visit to the next, was very fond of me, prone to pouring out to me the sea of self-doubt that his mind became in his most lucid moments.
“The whole thing is a failure,” the judge told me one day as he sat in his chair beside the desk, I in a chair that I had pulled up close to his so that our knees were nearly touching. He weighed his book in his hands as if thereby to gauge the extent of its failure. “It’s a great book,” I said, feeling as though I was assuring this old man who was near the end of his life that he was not unloved. “I can’t help thinking of the book that might have been. Well, I have always had more ambition than ability. I knew the destination but could never find the way.”
“You have written a great book,” I firmly said. “A great book,” over and over, hoping his mind might incorporate the words “great book,” that they might give rise to a new, more comforting illusion. Delusion. What did it matter now if what he thought was true was not, as long as he was happy? I tried to comfort him. After I left the judge, I went downstairs where Prowse always waited for me, standing in the late-afternoon gloom before a fire he had lit.
“I don’t know what would have happened to him if I had not kept coming to visit him. There is a woman who prepares his food. I think she comes by when it suits her. My father has not seen the judge in months. Nor have any of my aunts and uncles. He sees only me and the few people who accept my invitations. His friends stopped coming after the stroke when they realized he had no idea who they were. Your visits are doing wonders for him.”
“Really?” I said. “I always have to pretend we’re meeting for the first time. It’s very strange. Very sad.”
“Not for him,” Prowse said. “That’s what you must remember. For him, having you come visit—it’s as if a young, adoring reader of his book had sought him out. It may not be so bad, I think, having everything remain so new.”
I first met the old man in September, but all the visits now seem like a succession of November afternoons. While I sat on the sofa, Prowse stood, hands behind his back, staring into the fire as if in contemplation of the judge’s life and fate.
I walked down Circular Road on those autumn afternoons, a gale of wind at my back if the sky was clear and one straight in my face if it was not. Impelled by the wind in the same direction as the leaves that clattered past me, I often used my cane to keep from falling forward, my free hand on my hat that would otherwise have blown away too fast for me to catch it. When the wind was against me, it was often raining, the rain driven slantwise so that even when my umbrella was not blown inside out, it was useless. I looked down the street at the house that appeared to be unoccupied, the windows reflecting daylight, still opaque though the sun had nearly set. It was possible to see inside the bright front rooms of other houses in which I assumed normal life was taking place, children running about, grown-ups smoking and conversing.
Horses pulling carriages and passengers went by, and the drivers, without fail, tipped their hats, mistaking me for a grown woman out to take the air in that interval between last light and evening. The twilight that in everyone else inspired comradeship seemed to me as if it would never end. And, still looking at that melancholy house, I pictured the old man in his study on the second floor, his grandson in the front room by the fire as though keeping watch, waiting for the judge to call his name. I thought of my own house to which my father might not return until after midnight when he ran out of rounds to make, when the last family made it clear that, grateful though they were, it was time for him to leave and he had no choice but to climb into his carriage and, falling asleep, trust his horse to take him home. I looked at the sky before entering the judge’s house, the last light showing in the gaps between the clouds and above the ridge beyond the lake that I could just see through the trees. Breathing deeply I smelled the chill of a season soon to change, woodsmoke in the air. The grass was yellow and the trees had lost their leaves.
My hands red with cold I knocked on the door and Prowse let me in and brought me upstairs, returning to the fire almost instantly. I felt like a nurse come to pay my customary visit to the judge. I paused on the landing of the second floor, wondering if I would find the judge asleep and, if so, if I should wake him. Prowse told me I should never let him sleep or else, as though he were a baby, he would not sleep at night.
An old man in irreversible decline, but he always brightened at the sight of me. When I shook him gently, he woke up in bewilderment until he saw my face, at which he smiled and sat up slowly, turning on his swivel chair to face me. Who he mistook me for each day I didn’t know. All he ever called me after that first day was “my dear,” because of which I had no idea what to call him, what delusion of his I ought to be indulging. I may, each day, have been someone different, or every day the same young woman whose previous visit, however recent, was beyond recall. I pulled my chair up close to his and took his hands.
“How good it is to see you after all this time,” he said one day when I found him writing in a frenzy.
“I would have come sooner,” I said. “But it seems there is always some unavoidable delay.”
“Of course, of course. It is much the same with me. My family and friends are forever telling me that I should consult the calendar more often. Or even my watch.”
“Is your work going well?” I said.
He smiled and, as though in amazement, shook his head. “I have never seen more clearly how it should be done. How I should proceed. Should have been proceeding all along. I have thrown it all aside and begun again. Everything. All of it. Everything was wrong. I would feel a great discouragement if, along with this realization, it had not dawned on me how the whole thing might be fixed.”
I had never seen him so animated. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”
He dismissed me with a casual wave. “I do not labour in service of myself, my dear.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Yes, it is wonderful to see so clearly after all these years. After so much doubt, so much discouragement and disappointment.”
Abruptly, covering his face with his hands, he began to cry. I could think of nothing to say. I stood up and kissed him on his forehead. He lowered his hands, tears streaming down his face. I had never seen a grown-up cry before. I extended him my handkerchief, but he slapped my hand away.
“Tell me, Miss Fielding,” he said, “is it your belief that I have lost my mind?”
To hear him say my name again so startled me I gasped.
“No. Of course not,” I said. “You had a stroke some years ago, but your mind is—”
“And what have I accomplished since that stroke? What have I been doing?”
“You’ve—you’ve been revising your book,” I said.
“NO,” he shouted, thumping the desk with his fist. “What have I been doing, Miss Fielding?”
I heard Prowse running up the stairs.
“WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“YOU DO KNOW. I HAVE BEEN DOING NOTHING. Scribbling like a child aping its elders. Not one intelligible word in thousands of pages. And you, you and that boy and all the others, you let me go on thinking I am sane. Indulging me as if I were an infant.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I thought that, as long as you were happy—”
I felt Prowse’s hand on my arm.
“GET OUT,” the judge said, standing, the first time I had ever seen him do so. “GET OUT, THE BOTH OF YOU.”
Prowse all but dragged me from the room. I was sobbing.
“All this time,” I said, “he knew—”
“No,” Prowse said, “he didn’t know. In a few hours, even less, he’ll have forgotten what he said to you.”
“He said my name—”
“And will probably never remember it again. This is not the first time this has happened. Sometimes, the worst times, he is almost himself. But it doesn’t last.”
I let Prowse lead me down the stairs. He guided me to the sofa and sat beside me. I was no longer sobbing, but I covered my face with my hands just as the judge had done. “I didn’t mean to upset him,” I said. “I think he suddenly remembered everything. Understood everything. What he is now compared to what he used to be. It must have been awful. To wake up like that from a foolish dream you’ve been having for years.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Prowse said. “You’ve done him a great deal of good, you really have.”
“Sometimes, when I sit there, listening to him, I think of my father. In some ways they’re alike. So self-absorbed. Your grandfather because of an illness. My father—I could say because of my mother. But other men have lost their wives. Other girls have been abandoned by their mothers.”
Prowse drew me close to him and kissed my forehead. “You’re upset,” he said. “I can feel your heartbeat through your back.”
But I was no longer upset. I was enjoying the feel, the warmth of his arms around me. The embrace of another person. When I had last been more than perfunctorily embraced I could not remember. Prowse, with the back of his forefinger, tipped my chin up and kissed me on the lips. He touched one of my breasts with his free hand. I gasped as though it hurt, suddenly inhaling because the pleasure of it took me by surprise. We kissed longer; his hand moved down. He worked it up beneath my dress until I felt it warm between my legs, touching me where no one ever had. He tipped me back until he was lying on top of me on the sofa. He suddenly seemed frantic as if he feared that I would change my mind.
“I want to,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He didn’t speak or look at me. I wrapped my arms around his back. He breathed as though he could not catch his breath, as though in the wake of a race in which he had run well past exhaustion. I felt him push inside me. At no time did it hurt. At no time did he have to force himself. His mouth, wide open, wet, pressed against my neck. He didn’t move once he was inside except to shudder several times as though from fright.
He so quickly moved away from me that the cold raised goose-bumps on my skin. The fire had burned down to mere coals. In what little light there was, I could see my breath. I sat up, rearranged my dress. He was sitting too, but when I reached out and touched his neck, he stood up abruptly and, facing away from me, adjusted his clothing. He cleared his throat, smoothed his hair back with both hands.
“I think it would be wise for you to leave,” he said. “In case the judge—”
“Yes. Of course,” I said. I did not consider the implications of his words. What words or actions were appropriate or usual I didn’t know.
“You must not feel ashamed,” I said, and he seemed to laugh or cough. I thought of telling him I loved him, had loved him since we had first fenced on the playground. Telling him I admired him for spending so much time with his grandfather whom so many others had disowned, ignored for years. Better not to say so, now, I thought, while he stands there with his back to me and I cannot guess what is going through his mind, what this mannish boy’s heart feels. I left hurriedly, pausing only to say goodbye and smile, though in the darkness I could not see his face.
“Goodbye,” he said, tenderly I thought.
I stepped outside and closed the door. It was night now, cold and calm. In the row of houses along the street only a few lights still burned on the upper floors. The sky was clear. It seemed there had never been so many stars. Never before. How strange. The touch of his hand between my thighs. How wonderful. My legs were quivering. How wonderfully unlike what I had expected. It seemed that, after that, the rest of it had been for him. I had done even less than he had. Perhaps there were things I should have done but didn’t. How abashed he seemed after we had pulled apart. What will happen, I wondered, now that this has taken place? But I didn’t feel afraid.
The next day, I searched from the Spencer side of the playing field for Prowse but could not find him among the other boys. The day after it was the same. But on the third day, there he was, standing in that manner of his, hands behind his back and feet spread wide apart. A military man surveying the leisure activities of soldiers he would soon lead into battle. I almost shouted “PROWSE.”
I followed the fence to Bond Street, then crossed over to the Feild. He addressed me long before I reached him.
“Hello, Fielding,” he said loudly. Something in his voice made even the boys who never took part in the Fielding/Feild summits to stop what they were doing and look at us.
“Hello, Prowse,” I said, taking his loud greeting to be cautionary, a coded reminder to me that I should act the same as always, lest the other boys detect something and become suspicious. Yet that, it seemed, was precisely what the volume of his voice had done.
“I was beginning to think you had gone off to war,” I said. “But then, if you had, our side would have won by now, wouldn’t it?”
“I have better things to do, Fielding, than to spar with Spencer girls.”
“Such as?” I said, thinking this to be an invitation to spar with him as usual.
“Such as anything, Fielding. Absolutely anything is better than being bored to death by you.”
I hesitated. There was nothing in his voice but animosity. The boys, as if he were at long last treating me in the manner I deserved, pressed in around us, grinning, whispering. Hemmed in by sky-blue blazers as I had been many times before, I felt a spurt of fear. Not fear of the boys, exactly, or even of Prowse—but fear that everyone but me had somehow known from the day of my first visit how all of it would end. I looked Prowse in the eye, searching for some acknowledgement of what had happened at the judge’s house, some hint that only by speaking to me this way could he mask his affection, some sign that we would meet again that day after school. But I saw nothing. Anyone who knew what they were searching for in my eyes would have found it. How difficult it was to remain composed, not to plead with him to tell me what was wrong.
“Well, Captain Prowse,” I said. “It seems—”
“That it is time for you to leave,” said Prowse. “We have had our fun with you. Giving a girl from Spencer the freedom of the Feild. What was I thinking?”
“That you were afraid of me, perhaps?” I said. “That it was safer to be civil with me than to have me as an enemy.”
“Do I sound as though I am afraid of you?” said Prowse.
“As afraid of me as you are of everything.”
“Go, Fielding,” he said. “Or you will soon see how afraid of you I am.” The boys laughed and several of them took up Prowse’s warning tone, shouting, “GO.”
I looked about at them.
They started chanting. “GO, FIELDING, GO.”
Tears I had been holding back came pouring from me, stinging my eyes, cooling quickly on my face. Through a blur I saw them dropping from my chin and falling like the bright beads of a broken necklace to the ground.
Wielding my cane like a sword I slashed my way through all those boys who lunged at me like dogs. I did not return that day to Bishop Spencer, nor for several days afterwards.
“Dear Father,” I wrote about six weeks later on a note that I left for him on the kitchen table before I went upstairs to bed. “I believe that I am pregnant.”
I managed to sleep, knowing he would not find the note until morning. I got up very early, dressed, made my bed and sat, waiting, on the edge of it. In the event that he didn’t see the note, I planned to remove it from the table before the housekeeper came. He had slept downstairs as usual. When I heard him stir about, I stood up and began to pace the floor.
“GALOOT OF A GIRL,” I heard him roar.
As if this was his customary way of letting me know that he was up, I walked slowly down the stairs.
“GALOOT OF A GIRL,” he roared again.
I went to the kitchen, where I found him standing with his closed fists on the table, on either side of the note, staring at the paper, fully dressed in his overcoat and hat, the hat, I suspected, being the only thing he had removed before falling asleep on the sofa the night before. He looked up when he heard me.
“What in God’s name have you done?” he said, clutching the note and shaking it at me, as if my crime was the note itself and not the information it contained.
“It should be obvious to you what I have done,” I said.
“Are you certain of this?” he said.
“It is my belief that I am pregnant. I was hoping you could tell me how I might be certain.”
“This can be made right,” he said. “If you are—what you say you are—it is not too late. You are not showing yet. I assume that he is at least the sort of young man who will take responsibility.”
“By asking me to marry him, you mean?”
“By doing what I tell him to,” he said.
“I would say that he is not that sort of boy.”
“A boy, a boy. My God. You stupid galoot of a girl. I don’t have much except my name. I will not have it ruined by that woman’s daughter.”
“I have only that woman’s word for that. All a man ever has is a woman’s word. You are no child of mine. My name, my name—”
“Will still be Fielding after mine has changed.”
“To what? Who is the boy?”
I said nothing.
“Tell me,” he said. “I will find out somehow. There must be someone else who knows.”
“And how do you plan to go about investigating his identity? Will you stop people in the street and say, ‘Excuse me, but I wonder, could you tell me who it is who has made my daughter pregnant?’”
“Galoot of a girl. I have friends in whom I can confide. If there are rumours, and there are bound to be, I will hear about them.”
“And on the basis of a rumour, you would—what? Confront the boy?”
“The father of the boy first. Then the boy.”
“How sure of his guilt would you have to be before you gave away our secret?”
“Do not try to sidetrack me with words. She was always doing that.”
“But then she gave up on words and sidetracked you with divorce.”
“Who is the boy? Tell me his name—”
“You are preoccupied with names—”
“His name!”
I had deliberated for days about how to answer this question. I knew that if I gave him no answer, there was a good chance that he would act foolishly, ask what he thought were subtle questions and give himself, and me, away. Or confide in someone, make inquiries of someone he imagined was his friend. There was even a chance, however small, that he would guess that it was Prowse. He would only have to be told by the neighbours or someone they had gossiped to of my visits to the judge’s house. It would be proof of nothing, not for anyone but him, but I could well imagine him confronting Prowse’s father. I did not want to marry Prowse or anyone else. I wanted to keep my pregnancy a secret. I would therefore have to supply my father with a name.
“Smallwood,” he said. “Smallwood. The son of the man who owns the shoe store and factory. The ‘boot man,’ they call him. A merchant. He has money and a name. So his son is the father. Well, it could be worse.”
“You are thinking of Fred Smallwood,” I said. “The boy’s father is Charlie Smallwood. Fred’s brother. Fred is the uncle who paid for Joe to go to Bishop Feild. No, the boy’s father is Charlie. I believe that you have heard of him.”
“My God. He is one of my charity patients. Charity Charlie they call him. He is indigent. A drunkard. He hasn’t a penny to his name. He is laughed at on the waterfront by stevedores. He has, I think, ten children. Why in God’s name would you consort with the son of such a man?”
“Do you mean that I should, following your example, have consorted with my social equal?”
“This must not get out. It mustn’t. You pregnant by the son of Charlie Smallwood. My good name would be destroyed. All that remains of my reputation would be lost.”
“Whereas I would go on to a life of prosperity and happiness.”
“Why would?—Smallwood. What would possess you?”
“He did.”
“Mockery. Mockery. And this is what it leads to. This is what, all these years, I have been warning you against. Mockery.”
“Lechery. His and mine.”
“Not another word like that. The size of you. You could fight off any boy, any man—”
“If I wanted to.”
“Not another word. You will have nothing more to do with him. You may think you are in love with him.”
“I was. But not now.”
“I wish to hear nothing of love, or elopements, or marriage.”
“I could just go away for good. Easier for you if I simply disappeared. I could pass for a woman of thirty, change my name.”
“You will do as I say. I can’t have you trying to run off and making a mess of things.”
“And there is the matter of how much you would miss me.”
“Smallwood. I have seen that scarecrow of a boy. That worthless wretch. Skin and bones. A crow’s nose. Skulking about like a thief. Wears the same thing every day. A boy like that at Bishop Feild … His father’s son. Pure scruff. Scruff bred from scruff. Why on earth?—a boy like that.”
“You asked me not to speak of love.”
“How could you love a boy like that? And even then, how could you—why would you—?”
“You cannot even bring yourself to use a euphemism.”
“What man could, even if he knew he was your father? What proper word is there for such degenerate behaviour? I can think of many euphemisms, but you would not want to hear them. A mere girl, well brought up, sent to the best of schools. Where on earth could such a thing have taken place?”
“It’s not as if we would have had to sneak about this house, is it? Given how rarely you are here—”
“In my own house—”
“I can see no point in providing you with details.”
“My God. What has happened to you? You sound as though you were brought up like that boy. The words that I hear coming from your mouth.”
“Well. It has been a long time since we spoke.”
“Do not even think of blaming me for this disgrace. Your mother—”
“May I think of blaming her for this disgrace?”
“I blame you both. I have done my best. As much as any man could do in such circumstances. You, girl—you. I once expected so much more from you. So much better.”
“Perhaps you should have said so.”
“Yes. I can see that you will blame me. And her. Everyone except yourself.”
“I blame no one but myself. Not even him.”
“Did you ever visit this boy’s house?”
“No. Never. I could not tell you where it is.”
“I have been inside such houses. Perhaps if you had been. I do not understand it. Are there no supervisors at these schools? Headmaster Reeves, Miss Stirling, they both have much to answer for. Yet I cannot speak a word against them. And my so-called housekeeper—”
“Is not to blame. Like all the others we have had, she does what I tell her to and then goes home. What I tell her you told me she should do.”
“How could so much have been going on without my knowledge?”
“The world has been going on for years without your knowledge.”
“You know nothing of the world, girl. I see the world every day. Illness, misery, unhappiness, poverty. And ignorance. I have pledged myself against these things. Do you think, child, that you are worldly because of what you did with that Smallwood boy? Because you are old enough to reproduce?”
“No. You are right. I have yet to see the world. But I would like to.”
“Well, you will see it soon. Like mother, like daughter. This confirms my suspicions. You are no child of mine. You must tell no one of this. No one. Once I am certain of your condition, I will take—the necessary measures.”
“Such as?”
“I will need to think about it. There are things that can be done. I know of certain cases. Will you give me your word that you will not abominate this child? You would never commit such a crime, would you? Against God. Unforgivable.”
Abominate. The first three letters were the same. I had considered this possibility as well. But I had no idea how to go about it. No one to confide in who might help me and whose discretion was assured. And I was afraid for myself. I had heard rumours of women who had died or who afterwards were barren. I had given little thought, as yet, to the child itself. I knew only that I wanted to be rid of it. It seems harsh to say so. But I had no idea what “to be rid of it” would mean. All I knew of childbirth was what I had seen and read in The Vile, which terrified me now even more than before.
“I will not, as you say, abominate this child. But neither will I raise it as my own.”
“That, too, is out of the question. Of course. I will take the necessary measures.”
I suspected that he had no more idea than I did what he meant by the necessary measures. I felt sick at the likelihood that he would somehow let slip our secret, that the whole thing, left to him, would end in a welter of scandal, confusion, accusations.
“When you are considering ‘the necessary measures,’ would you keep in mind that I am your daughter? I am sorry for the trouble I have caused you.”
“Galoot of a girl. The horse has bolted. Apologies are like barn doors. My father told me that. Too late to bar the door. Were you thinking of whose daughter you supposedly were when you let that boy? Were you thinking of whose life you might destroy?”
“I was thinking neither of destroying nor creating life.”
“Well, I dare say you are thinking of it now. You are to have nothing more to do with Smallwood, you understand. You must not, above all else, tell him that he made you pregnant.”
“Of course not. It would come as a great surprise to him.”
“I would tell him some things if I could. Idiot boy. This is how he repays his uncle’s kindness. But what would one expect. A boy from a family like that. With a father like that. And a mother. The two of them breeding like a pair of animals.”
“He is not the sort of boy you think he is,” I said.
My father examined me to make sure I was pregnant. I had no doubt that I was. I was more than a month late. Queasy every morning, sometimes all day long. He told me that his having to examine me was itself “an abomination, a humiliation that I will spare you, though not myself, by conducting it while you are under ether.”
One evening at his surgery, after all his patients had left, he had me lie, fully clothed, on his examination table. I saw, in one corner of the room, an apparatus whose purpose I divined from the two metal stirrups that descended from it. He tied a cloth mask over my mouth and nose, instructed me to close my eyes. My heart raced. I smelled what I thought was alcohol. An instant later, unaware of having been “under,” I opened my eyes. My head ached, pounded with each pulse. In my mouth a strange, medicinal taste that made me want to gag. The mask he had tied around my face was gone. There was something wet and cold between my legs.
“Humiliating,” my father said. “My own daughter. No man should have to. Unforgivable.”
By nearly a month later, my father had still not told me what “measures” would be taken. In fact, he had, in all that time, not spoken a single word to me. I was going to Spencer each day, sitting as usual among my classmates, feigning attentiveness as best I could.
One day, in history class, Miss Emilee said she wished to see me in her office after school. My first thought was that she somehow knew I was pregnant. That my father, in whatever “measures” he was taking, had included her. Or that she was somehow able to “see” I was pregnant, so acute was her perception when it came to girls. Or that my father, in any one of a million possible ways, had blundered and our so-called secret was now common knowledge. I sat at her desk as before in that sparely furnished, almost empty room.
“Something has happened at Bishop Feild,” Miss Emilee said. “I am accusing you of nothing. If you are responsible for what has happened, you will need no further explanation. Are you responsible, Miss Fielding?”
“I have no idea what you mean, Miss Stirling,” I said.
“You must understand, Miss Fielding, that should I discover that you were responsible, you will be expelled.”
“I still have no idea what you mean.”
“Very well,” she said. “I have no choice but to accept your word.”
Something has happened at Bishop Feild. Why, if it happened there, had Miss Emilee questioned me about it? I decided to ask one of the boys of the Feild what had happened, one of the boys so in awe of Prowse he would never presume to speak to him. I waited just off Bond Street after school until almost all the boys had gone by. Then I saw just the sort of lower-form straggler I had in mind. I stepped out in front of him and laid my cane on his shoulder.
“If you try to run away, I’ll catch you,” I said. “If you start to cry, I’ll crack you on the backside with this cane.”
“Fielding,” he said, looking up at me, eyes and mouth wide open. “I never made fun of you. I never laughed at you. I swear.”
“Yes,” I said. “Big, bad Fielding. Tell me or I’ll send you home wearing nothing but your blazer. What is going on at Bishop Feild? What is all the fuss about?”
“One of the ’Tories,” he said. “One of the dormitory boys.”
“Yes? Something happened to him?”
“No. He did something.”
“Who is he and what did he do?”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“A letter. To the Morning Post. About how awful things are in the dormitory. That’s where the boys from around the bay live. A pack of lies, Reeves said. At night, it says in the letter, it’s too cold and there’s not enough to eat. And the masters keep their spending money for themselves. And other stuff. There was no one’s name on it.”
“Did you think there would be?”
“What?”
“This letter. It was in the Morning Post?”
“No. Someone at the Morning Post sent it back to Reeves. It’s supposed to be a secret, but all the boys have heard about it.”
“Who is being blamed? Can’t they find out from the writing who it is?”
“It was made with cut-out words and letters.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What else do you know?”
He shrugged.
“Get out of my sight,” I said. “And don’t tell anyone I spoke to you or I’ll drag you into Spencer by your ears.”
And Miss Emilee had suspected me. She must have heard of my supposed humiliation at the hands of Prowse and Smallwood and the others. And thought the letter was revenge.
A few days later, my father came home shortly after dark. I was in the front room, reading by the light of a single lamp beside the fire that he stared into after he sat down.
“Arrangements have been made,” he said.
I closed my book.
“I wrote to her. I thought she might not bother writing back, but she did. And signed her letter Mrs. Susan Breen. My letter had no salutation. Except at the end. I signed myself ‘Your husband.’ I couldn’t bear, after all these years, to write her name. Or mine. Who else could I ask for help? I could think of no one. I knew I could count on her discretion. She, too, has her reputation. What remains of it. I did not expect her to reply the way she did. I asked only for her help, you see. I told her it was her fault. Hers and yours. That here was a way to make amends. And spare my reputation that, by divorcing me, she had smeared, given it what could have been a fatal blow.”
I knew that in a letter asking her assistance he would not have said any such thing.
“New York is so much bigger than St. John’s. You could, with their help, have it there or somewhere even farther from St. John’s. Where no one who knows us would find out. It might be adopted or grow up in some orphanage, I said. Her letter reached me yesterday. I cancelled my appointments. I read it in my surgery. It began, like mine, without a salutation. How strange to hear from her. For so long I was certain I would never see or hear from her again. For her, too, I dare say it was strange. Stranger. She was not expecting it. Out of the blue. What must she have wondered when she saw it?”
“You said arrangements had been made.”
“I found it hard to believe what I was reading. I thought I might decline her—offer. But I could think of no alternatives. And we have so little time.”
“What sort of offer?”
“She said they would like to raise the child themselves. As their own. Pass it off as their own.”
“You are suggesting that I give my child to the mother who abandoned me, the woman who when I was six years old abandoned us. My own child is to take my place. Have as its mother the mother who would not have me?”
“As I said, I, too, thought I might decline her offer. And that of a man who took from me the woman I still think of as my wife. Who in the eyes of God is still my wife.”
“Father, no man took her from you. She met her husband in New York—”
“But then I reconsidered. What choice did I have but to accept her offer? Do you think I will just stand by while you shame me? Where in this country could you go to have this child without word getting out that you were Dr. Fielding’s daughter?”
“I thought—I thought you were going to send me to some convent, one in America or Canada.”
“There is too much risk involved. Don’t you see? One slip, one mistake. This Dr. Breen is a very wealthy man. She says they can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to chance. It is not unusual in such cases for the girl’s mother to pretend the child is hers.”
“I will not let that woman have my child.”
“What do you propose? That you simply stay here in this house and have the child? I would disown you first. I would send you away to fend for yourself. I would buy space in the papers and declare that you were not my child. Who would disbelieve me?”
“Oh, you are such a fool, Father, such a fool—”
“She is capable of anything—”
“Yet you want her to raise my child—”
“Which may not be my grandchild, as you may not be my daughter—”
“Oh, stop it. You sound like you are mad. I cannot believe that there was no one else that you could turn to. Have you no family or friends that you could trust?”
“Thank God this boy of yours has no sense of honour. Thank God he has not come forward and declared himself. I have no one I can trust. Not even you.”
They can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing is left to chance. But they could not provide the people of St. John’s with an explanation as to why my father would take me out of Bishop Spencer halfway through the school year and send me away for months. How many rumours would that give rise to?
It was a problem that was solved in a manner stranger than any of the events that had led to its creation.
One afternoon, after school, just a day before my father was to have informed Miss Emilee that I would soon be leaving Bishop Spencer, I was lying on the sofa in my father’s study, staring at the volumes on his shelves. I noticed that some of the books had been rearranged, ones that, before now, had not been touched in years. There were even some that were not fully pushed into place, their spines extending beyond the edges of the shelves. And there were fingerprints in the dust on the shelves that I did not think were mine. For so long, no hands but mine had disturbed the shelves. But now, everywhere, were what could only have been my father’s fingerprints. I got up to investigate.
Showing signs of having been recently disturbed were books of philosophy, history, literature, biology, medicine, mathematics, classical mythology. I began flipping the pages of the books until, from one of them, from Newton’s Principia Mathematic, a piece of paper fell and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and saw, newly written on it, in my father’s handwriting, the following:
“Susan: Perhaps only you can understand how loath I am to confess that I have desperate need of your assistance. How sweet to me you once were. How suddenly you changed. Too sudden for its cause to have been some deficiency in me that you discovered. I can think of nothing that would so suddenly incline you against me other than wayward affections. So many years have passed since these events transpired that, were you to tell me the truth now, I would not blame you for leaving no matter what the cause. The question of my daughter’s patrimony has long been a matter of torment to me. You could put an end to my uncertainty with a few mere words. I would think no less of her were you to confirm what I have long known. Fickleness in matters of romance is, regrettably, a commonplace. You were young. I have no wish to know who the man might be. No wish to confront him. Nor any intention of chastising you. I merely wish to know. I stare at every tall, large-framed man of my age that I see, wondering, searching for that resemblance that there is no trace of in myself. I know of half a dozen men who might be her father. It is all I can do to keep from asking them. But there is no one but you who can say for certain what I need to know.” The letter ended there. I found another one.
“Sir: My daughter is with child and the father is your son. Your son. You may think this will do no harm to your reputation, nor to his. You may be able to think of nothing that would harm your reputation since one need do nothing but speak your name to set men laughing. No doubt you will deny this accusation as publicly as possible merely to associate your name with mine, your son’s name with my daughter’s. But even a man as low as you can be brought down and you will soon see how. You have marched roaring drunk into my waiting room and demanded to be seen ahead of others who were there before you, causing such a scene that I had no choice but to see you first despite their protests. You sent, by way of one of your children, a note saying that I must come to what you called your premises as you were too ill to come to mine. Thank God I ignored it. Thank God I did not see the squalor in which the boy was raised who, against her will, defiled my daughter. But know this, sir: I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge. As it is through my daughter that I have been disgraced, so will your disgrace come through your son. My only regret is that not even your complete ruination would sufficiently repay your debt to me.”
I wondered if he had written these letters merely in the hope of some catharsis, or if he planned to send them and thereby bring about the very catastrophe, the very scandal and disgrace that he so feared. His state of mind worsening day by day until he could focus on nothing but the most reckless and self-destroying manner of revenge.
I picked up his copy of Judge Prowse’s History of Newfoundland and, leafing through it, saw that letters and words had been cut from the pages, cut so as to leave the pages intact but perforated, as though he had made his excisions with a scalpel. The implications of the missing letters and words did not occur to me at first. I stared through the holes in the pages, mystified, until I recalled the words of the boy I had questioned after Miss Emilee called me to her office. “It was made with cut-out words and letters.” I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge.
My father had sent that anonymous letter to the Morning Post. How close to catastrophe we had come. How close to it we might still be, for there was no telling what else, in his present state of agitation, he might do. But I could think of no way that anyone could trace the forged letter back to him. And no one at the school had really suffered from it.
The next day, at Bishop Spencer, Miss Emilee again summoned me to her office.
“It seems that I owe you an apology, Miss Fielding,” she said. “Headmaster Reeves has discovered who sent the letter.”
“Who was it?” I asked, thinking that she was about to name my father.
“I would not tell you if I thought you would not find out from someone else. Someone who might be less than fully informed. It was the Smallwood boy.”
I was so startled I all but stood up.
“What is the matter?” said Miss Emilee.
“No. No, I’m sure it wasn’t him,” I said.
“How can you be sure?”
“How do they know he wrote the letter?”
“It seems that he was not so clever as he thought. Headmaster Reeves determined that the letter had to have been written by one of the dormitory boys. It contains information about dormitory life that only they would know. Of course, there are many dorm boys. But on the date that it was postmarked all of them had gone home for Christmas. Only one dorm boy, this Smallwood, was in St. John’s over Christmas.”
I was as much responsible for Smallwood’s predicament as my father was. More so. I should have lied more vaguely than I had, should never have named anyone as the father of my child. Should have done what I was ashamed to do. Confessed to a casual liaison with some man whose name I didn’t know and of whom I could give nothing but a vague description. But I could not, partly because the thought of the revulsion and contempt with which my father would regard me was unbearable, and partly because of my memory of that afternoon in the judge’s house. I had been terrified of what might happen to my father if I refused to give him any name. Never to know the name of my father or the father of my baby. I feared he would at last suffer the breakdown it seemed he had been staving off for years and start hurling accusations in public about my patrimony and my child’s. And so I had chosen as a surrogate for Prowse the hapless Smallwood, with results for which I was responsible, however impossible to anticipate they had been. Even my father, I was certain, had not written the letter to the Morning Post in order to get revenge on Smallwood in particular. The letter had been a general lashing out, against Bishop Feild, against Headmaster Reeves for having admitted such a student as Smallwood in the first place. Against the reputation of the school, among whose boys, he probably believed, were my “true” father’s son or sons, boys who two people, my mother and my father’s “rival,” knew were my half-brothers. I had no doubt that, given his state of mind, my father believed the letter would be published, and that it was only by sheer fluke that the finger of blame seemed to point at Smallwood. He would have had no way of knowing that the postmark on the letter would implicate Smallwood.
I decided to confess to writing the letter. It seemed to me that I had little to lose by doing so. I would be expelled, but that would merely provide me with the excuse I needed for leaving school just months short of graduation. My father’s reputation, having survived divorce, would survive this.
There was the question of how he would react if I confessed to doing something he had done. But I knew that my father would never sacrifice himself for me, never own up to his bit of mischief for my sake. Or for Smallwood’s. The certainty that he would allow me to be blamed for his crime made me queasy with sadness.
I all but ran from Spencer to the Feild, where I planned to seek out Headmaster Reeves and tell him that Smallwood was innocent, that I was the writer of the letter. School was out for the day, the playing field deserted, but I could see a light in what Prowse had once pointed out to me as Reeves’ office. A snowstorm that I sensed would soon get much worse had started. The wind was at my back, gusting so hard from the east that I twice fell forward onto my hands, despite my cane. New snow sifting on top of the old was already forming small dunelike drifts that I waded through without bothering to hike my dress. I ran up the steps to the main door that I feared might be locked but that gave way so easily that in my haste I fell forward again, this time onto the floor wet with melted snow. I picked myself up and made my way through the dark and unfamiliar hallways, doubling back several times until at last I saw a closed door with a frosted window and a light inside.
I knocked but did not wait for an answer, opening the door to find Headmaster Reeves standing at the window behind his desk, his hands behind his back. He turned to face me.
“What do you mean, barging in like this?” he said. “Spencer girls are not permitted in my school. I know you. I have seen you out there, on the grounds, talking with the boys. You’re the one they all call Fielding.”
“I’ve come about the letter,” I said. “Smallwood didn’t write it. I did.”
“Who told you Smallwood wrote it?”
“It doesn’t matter. I wrote it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said and turned back to the window as if to resume his brooding contemplation of the storm.
“I wrote it,” I said. “To get back at Smallwood. He made a fool of me one day by spreading rumours about my mother.”
“It is you who made a fool of yourself in front of all the boys. Not once but many times.”
“Then you and I have at least one thing in common.”
He turned to face me again.
“You impudent thing.” Prowse appeared to have modelled his appearance after Headmaster Reeves. Hair parted down the middle and brushed back. A paisley vest inside his longcoat. But also a florid black moustache and tufted eyebrows left untrimmed in the hope of achieving some inscrutable effect. His face, his neck, even his hands and wrists were red with indignation.
“I am confessing to writing the letter. That, I am willing to wager, is something Smallwood has not done.”
“That, in his case, would be the honourable thing. In yours, an obscurely motivated lie. Get out of my office this instant.”
“I will tell everyone I wrote the letter. And then this injustice will be common knowledge.”
“While I cannot say with absolute certainty that Smallwood wrote that letter, there is more evidence that tends to that conclusion than to any other. What evidence do you have that you wrote it?”
I thought of the book back home in my father’s study with its perforated pages, all the missing words and characters that comprised the letter to the Morning Post.
I can show you the book, I almost said, from which I cut with one of my father’s scalpels every word of that letter to the Morning Post. My father’s scalpel. My father’s book. Suspicion might still fall on him.
“I am confessing,” I said. “Surely that is all the proof you need.”
“I know of those two books you left in her library where anyone could find them. I believe, Miss Fielding, that you are no more than a mischief-maker. A trouble-maker who makes trouble not only for others but for herself. Perhaps the answer to your behaviour lies in the way you were raised. The example set for you at an early age. One of recklessness and irresponsibility.”
“And where, Headmaster, does the answer to your behaviour lie?”
“Why you—if you were—”
“What? Half your size?”
“If you were not a girl, I would teach you a lesson.”
“I would hate to have my gender get in the way of benefitting from your tutelage.”
“Many a boy in this school has learned from me the hard way.”
“I’m sure they have. I would be honoured if you set about my education as you would were I a boy.”
“I can see nothing in your future, Miss Fielding, but perdition. You cannot flout authority or regard the whole of society with complete contempt and expect to prosper. You will drop into the dregs, mark my words. You are halfway there already. The great pity of all this is that your poor father—”
“Was once married to a woman who, since leaving him and me, has prospered in New York.”
“You may be interested to know that, at this moment, in the manual training centre, Smallwood is learning the hard way from the boys of Bishop Feild.”
They were not yet in the manual training centre by the time I got outdoors. The centre was behind the main hall and it was for this reason that I hadn’t seen the boys while I was on my way to Reeves. There were about fifteen of them crowded around Smallwood, who was holding together at the throat and chest his ragged jacket as if he believed the others meant to steal it from him. His glasses were rimed with snow, the lenses all but obscured, as if he dared not drop his guard long enough to clean them. His peaked cap lay nearby in the snow.
“Look, Smallwood,” I heard Prowse say, “I don’t know if you did it, but Reeves says we’ve got to blame someone or none of us will graduate.”
“I did it,” I shouted. “I sent the letter.”
“Go away, Fielding,” Prowse said.
“I did it,” I said, “to get back at Smallwood.”
“For what?”
“He insulted me. Said things about my mother.”
“Then why do you care what happens to him now?” Prowse said.
I was both surprised and pleased to hear a hint of envy in his voice.
“Because I do. I’ve changed my mind.”
I paid little attention to what they said after that. They took me into the manual training centre and bent me over a wooden sawhorse with the apparent intention of flogging me with my cane. I heard Prowse say that Smallwood should have “first go.”
“I don’t want to,” Smallwood said.
There was laughter and Prowse said something that I couldn’t hear, after which they left, laughing and shouting.
I straightened up from the sawhorse. I thought I was alone until Smallwood spoke.
“Why? I never said a word about your mother.”
“Put the cane on the floor and leave,” I said. I heard the cane hit the floor, then Smallwood’s departing footsteps. As if he, as if all of them, were still there, I did not turn around. My face was hot with spite, shame, humiliation.
When I left the centre, it was dark outside. Sleet-flecked snow stung my face as I began my way across the field. I cleared a path with my cane, beating my way through waist-deep snowdrifts as the wind roared high above me in the treetops.
That night, I lay awake, fully clothed, on my bed, waiting for my father to come home.
He did so earlier than usual because of the storm. I heard him move about for a few minutes. Then, with a loud squeaking of his chair, he settled down. I got up and went downstairs to the front room, where a layer of coal he had just put in the fireplace was blazing. He was in his chair, staring at the fire.
“You’re home early,” I said. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Why are you up?” he said. “You need your sleep.”
“A woman in my condition.”
“A girl.”
“Tomorrow, Father, I will be expelled from Bishop Spencer.”
He yawned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Expelled,” I said. “Tomorrow, Miss Emilee is going to expel me.”
“You didn’t tell her—”
“About my condition? No. Something else.”
“What?” he said, looking hard at me.
“Did you hear about the letter that was written to the Morning Post?” I said.
“What—what letter?”
“An anonymous letter. Made with words cut out from books. A letter about the dorm at Bishop Feild. About how bad things are. No coal for heat. Rats. Not enough food. The masters keeping school fees for themselves.”
“I haven’t heard a thing about it.”
“I confessed to writing it. Today. I told Headmaster Reeves.”
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“Reeves was blaming Smallwood for it.”
“Then Smallwood is to blame.”
“Do you think so?”
“Why did you confess, girl—?”
“Because Smallwood is the father of my child. I can’t help feeling something for him—”
“This is ridiculous, girl. Ridiculous. Absurd.”
“I have to leave school, anyway. Besides, why do you assume that I didn’t write it?”
“Of course you didn’t. I mean, why would you?”
“Why would Smallwood?”
“Because he is low-born.”
