“Let’s see if you can’t take a bit of this nice jelly.”
But conversation did not seem appropriate. The doctor had no interest in her; he had made no introduction: His courtesy was no more than rudimentary. She could not, though, fault his manner to the patient, which was clearly exemplary. He was trying now to feed her as she turned her head to the wall.
“What is it that ails her?” Cassandra inquired quietly.
“What ails her?” The doctor sat back on his haunches and looked round. “Naught I can cure, sadly, though I wish as I could. Poverty. Misfortune. A system as treats those like ’er without any fairness.” He gave an apologetic smile—“Forgive me, m’m, if you find me sounding too political”—and then a shrug: “You did ask.”
“Indeed. Though I knew the answer already,” Cassandra replied. “Our views are not wildly divergent. Thank you for ministering to her.”
“I’ll not let her go.”
He turned back to his treatment. Cassandra watched him for a while—impressed by this man’s dedication; moved by his kindness—then quietly retreated. She made her way back, emerging into the street in the sunshine directly in front of the Plasterers’ Arms. Was it not in its back room that Elizabeth Fowle ran her nursery? Then here was today’s opportunity to be useful. She had been meaning to visit her.
She crossed and took the alley to the side of the inn. The yard at the back was piled high with old barrels and broken boxes, but there was a small path through it. Pyramus of course knew where to go. Cassandra picked her way along behind him, toward the swelling noise of infants in varying states of extreme emotion, and found the door.
“Miss Austen!” Isabella’s sister, Elizabeth Fowle, stood with a child on each hip. “Look, children, we have a visitor.” The only light in the crowded, dim room seemed to come from her radiance. “Now”—she stroked a few heads and wiped a few tears—“we must remember our manners. What is it we say when people are so kind as to call on us?” She appeared, to Cassandra, as a saint in stained glass: aglow, blessed, redeemed.
A small girl toddled forward and wobbled a curtsy; a baby was placed in Cassandra’s arms and studied her with interest. Pyramus lay down, accepting that he must now be a plaything, and a few older children obliged. The rest—how many were in here? Cassandra counted at least ten—carried on with their day.
“Elizabeth, my dear.” Cassandra moved forward, and the two women kissed. “So this is where you have been hiding yourself.”
“Indeed. And what a pleasure it is for me to be able to show it to you. I am sorry I am never at home now. My days are so busy here, I can never find the time.”
Elizabeth found Cassandra a chair and asked a helper to make tea for them. “My charges arrive from five in the morning, you see. That is when their mothers have to get to the whiting works or the mill, and the women have to do such long hours.” She reached for a hard biscuit and put it into a small hand. “By the time they have all left, I have no energy to do much but crawl up there to bed.” She gestured to a ladder that led to a loft. “Before dawn it all starts again!” The rigor of it all seemed to delight her.
Cassandra listened. She could not help but be impressed, and as a consequence was forced to revise a long-held opinion—a process she never found pleasant. But credit must be given where credit was due, and this previously meek and quiet daughter of the vicarage must be credited for transforming herself so.
“Come now.” Elizabeth picked up a crying baby.
These were not her offspring, and the room was mean and chaotic, yet she appeared now to Cassandra just like any good mother in her own nursery: She had the same patience and devotion, and that infinite well of maternal sympathy.
“There, there, my precious one.”
Somehow, and one had to admire it, Elizabeth had found the solution to the problem that was her situation. She had used her own spinsterhood as an opportunity and put it to public advantage. Her reward was long days filled with purpose—and even love, apparently. Here was living proof of the lesson that Cassandra wanted to teach Isabella: Happy endings are there for us somewhere, woven into the mix of life’s fabric. We just have to search the detail, follow the pattern, to find the one that should be our own.
The thought reminded her why she had come. “I would love to talk to you about Isabella and her future, if you can spare me the time?”
“Ah, of course,” Elizabeth replied, setting clean napkins out on the table. “The great conversation about Isabella and her future that never seems to come to an end. I cannot stop what I am doing, but I can offer at least one of my ears.” She started to strip down a baby.
Cassandra was astonished by her tone. “Then this is something the family has already often discussed?”
“I try to keep myself out of it.” Elizabeth smiled through a pin. “The great pleasure of my own grand establishment”—she gestured around the nursery—“is that it is a haven from Fowle family politics. And indeed, there once was a time when they spoke of little else.”
“What—even before the matter of it became so urgent? But—I do not understand—why in such a straightforward matter would there be so much to say?”
Elizabeth looked at her. “I think I have already made plain: I dislike being involved and am resolved never to be so. All I shall tell you”—she turned back to the napkin and a bare little bottom—“is that there were, indeed still are, a few characters in my family who are known to be very persuasive. And my sister, of whom I am otherwise very fond, has the fault of being far too persuadable for her own good. Beyond that”—she stood up straight, nestling the baby into her neck—“I will not go.”
Cassandra, baffled, tried to make sense of this sphinxlike pronouncement, but had never been one for the riddle. She gave up at once, and instead thought to revise her brand-new opinion: While one must admire a woman who looked after herself, one could never condone neglect of the family.
She resolved to say that which she had already planned. It had been weighing on her, and she must unload it: “Well, I cannot stand by and watch Isabella suffer from the insecurity of her current position. I must—”
“Why?” Elizabeth tilted her head to one side and looked quizzical. “Why should it concern you?”
Cassandra was quite taken aback.
“Forgive me. Please do not think me rude. Mine is a genuine inquiry. You must know that we are not a family that would condemn a sister to the workhouse. Our father has left us each a little money. Isabella cannot look forward to much, but she is in no explicit danger. I suppose it is better put this way—why are you quite so concerned?”
That was, asked thus, indeed a reasonable question. Cassandra was forced to reflect on her own position. Was she being an interfering old woman? Oh, the horror if that were so! There was an invisible line between usefulness and intrusion and she well knew the perils of crossing it. She paused for a moment of routine self-examination until, satisfied with her own findings, she began her report: “You, Elizabeth, are unusual and, perhaps, unusually fortunate in being happy in your work and indifferent to your home. Isabella is, as I saw at once when I arrived here, a woman for whom domestic stability is a prerequisite for function. It is breaking her heart to leave the vicarage; it is fracturing her soul not knowing what is to become of her.”