Funny. I could follow the train of the conversation better when I wasn’t meant to be listening, now I was under no pressure to perform. There were even a couple of questions I would have asked my former bespectacled conversation partner had he been lecturing me.
But then Sir Edward’s voice cut across the heated debate. “Gentlemen,” he said. I imagined he was raising his glass (as large as those we’d had earlier but now filled with bloodstain-purple port). “You have not told me what you all think of my Mrs. Robinson.”
My veins turned to ice.
“She is a very fine woman,” said one. Could it be he who was too nervous before to take my hand without stuttering? “For her age,” he added.
This solicited a collective laugh.
“And keen, no doubt.” This surely was the European traveler. “You know what they say about widows!”
More laughter, this time accompanied by the arrhythmic drumming of several pairs of hands on the table. The splashes of red would dot the freshly laundered tablecloth.
“Are her daughters as lively?” said one. “Is her hair all hers?” asked another. But those questions went unanswered.
“What I want to know, Scott,” said the nervous man, buoyed no doubt by his earlier success, “is what is it like?”
“What is what like?” asked Sir Edward, all mirth gone from his voice.
Was this the limit, then? Had the guest overstepped?
“Why, what it’s like having two wives?” The man crescendoed as he delivered his punch line.
Guffawing.
“Now, now, Theodore, that’s enough,” said the master of the house, through a low chuckle.
I stumbled to my feet, my joints aching from my unnatural position and the cold, but not before I had heard another man compliment Sir Edward on his “veritable harem.”
No good comes to those who eavesdrop, I’d told Lydia when she was a small, inquisitive child. I had only myself to blame for ignoring my own lesson today.
I didn’t have a lamp or candle and so had to feel my way up the winding, uneven stairs. Great Barr Hall, of course, was Gothic to a tee, inside as well as out, and difficult to navigate in the dark. The corridors were deserted. The servants must have anticipated a night of drinking, finished their duties, and gone to bed, registering the timbre of the evening before me.
I had to breathe, resist the urge to fly back in there to berate the men or to pack my bags, write accusing letters, weep with abandon until Sir Edward came to calm me.
However good you were, there would be men who thought you a whore or spoke of you as such in your absence. But that didn’t mean, as I’d thought for a time, that all men fell into both camps or that you had to prove them right. Sir Edward might speak of me like this to his friends, but he also kept a respectful distance from me, for now. He hadn’t repeated his overtures from that day on the lawn. Instead he deferred to my power—the power the woman ought to hold until a couple’s wedding day.
I stumbled back into my room. There now. My anger had passed.
I’d seen a sketch once, in a book of natural wonders, of a sort of lizard—a chameleon—that could melt into the foliage behind it. Yet he could also change himself to match the desert, the bark, even the sky. People like that were life’s survivors. Those who, like Branwell Brontë, clung to a fixed vision, a dream, of themselves or of others, were doomed to disappointment, hoist by their own petard.
27th January 1848
York
Lydia,
I swear you are trying to hound me, an old woman, to my grave.
First, you thrust those daughters of yours on me, and just before Christmas, when servants, without a care in the world for their mistresses’ inconvenience, insist on taking holidays. (Bessy’s table manners are appalling, by the way. However did you raise her?)
And, next, my home is set upon by a woman who claims to know me. An upstart young farmer’s wife in a dress more fashionable than it was warm or, for that matter, decent. She arrived in a fury, but at last I managed to wring from her who she was. I’ve already forgotten her name but that matters not. Prior to her marriage, and its attendant frippery, she went by “Sewell.”
Sewell, I thought. It does have a familiar ring. And then it came to me. This Harpy was once my poor lost son’s housekeeper.
No sooner had she won access to me than this woman dissolved into unconvincing tears. She confirmed who she was, simpering when she mentioned her marriage and holding out her hand to show me her little brass ring. Did she expect this to impress me?
When I advised her to state the purpose of her visit before I had her removed, she got to it. She had come to protest the dismissal of her “poor brother” at your hands. He’d received your letter a few days before and was distraught, she said, to be so ill used when he had been such a dutiful steward to my son. She evoked Edmund’s memory, expressed her condolences, and begged me to petition you on her brother’s behalf.
She understands nothing of my grief. She has not even carried a child inside her, let alone buried two. Yet my heart softened a little as she spoke of my Edmund and his goodness and how you, and you alone, had poisoned his home.
Listen here, Lydia. I need hardly tell you what I made of my visitor. But we can’t have disgruntled servants running off to new positions throughout the county, reporting your sins to all and sundry. What were you thinking in dismissing Sewell? Have you no sense? His sister may be a piece of work, but the man is unobjectionable. Didn’t I hire him myself while you were bedridden by a mere pregnancy?
I insist you write to him at once and undo his dismissal.
Ever hopeful of a change in you for the better,
I remain, your mother, in law only,
Elizabeth Robinson
29th January 1848
Great Barr Hall
Mr. Sewell,
I hereby retract my previous letter. You may keep your post as steward for as long as you like, as long as you and your insufferable sister leave my family in peace.
I remain, sir, yours very truly,
Lydia Robinson
3rd February 1848
York
Mama,
Mary and I want to come back. May we rejoin you at Great Barr Hall?
Do write to us and say that we may.
Grandmama is dreadful, perhaps worse than before.
She quite ambushed me yesterday. I went downstairs for breakfast and (horror of horrors!) Will Milner was in our apartments waiting for me. She had let him in!
He held fast my hand and argued his case, although it has been a year since I last saw him. And he would not leave until I cried.
Once he was gone, Grandmama accused me of being a flirt, screamed that I was “my mother’s daughter,” and told me I was to go without pudding for a week.
I swear I would have gone into hysterics, were Mary not there to comfort me.
Send for us, please. Or say we can go to Auntie and Uncle at Allestree Hall.
Your loving daughter,
Bessy
6th February 1848
Great Barr Hall
My dear daughters,
I am sorry to report that Lady Scott’s health has deteriorated. Sir Edward is quite unable to accommodate any more visitors at present.
You expressed a desire to leave me, and so I sent you to your grandmother. Now you appear to dislike your grandmother as much as you do me. I cannot deal with such capriciousness.