Time Squared, page 2
“As does my great friend Miss Catherine Mowbray, I’m sure,” Eleanor said. “It’s rather painful for us to be kept apart by a celestial waterfall.”
“Which one is she?” Mr. Denholm asked, walking back to the fire.
“My little mouse,” her brother replied, not a promising description for a potential suitor. Although, unfortunately, accurate.
“Catherine has rare talent,” Eleanor said. “I never know whether I like her portraits or her landscapes best. The joint portrait she did recently, Mr. Mowbray, of your younger sisters was a remarkable study in character. Harriet looking sporty, Fanny studious, Cassandra lost in her thoughts. I was particularly struck by Mary Ann watching the artist as the artist watched her. So observant. And Alicia was being . . . ” What was Alicia being? Eleanor tried to remember.
“There are rather a lot of them,” Mr. Denholm said.
“Although the eldest is very well married,” her aunt put in.
“Alicia being very pretty,” Eleanor finished firmly.
“It speaks well of your own powers of observation that you can make us see the portrait so clearly,” the captain said.
He stood, their call over.
“I’m sure you’ll be happy to return to your book,” Mr. Denholm said, following his brother toward the door. Eleanor wasn’t sure whether that was a barb or an invitation to lament the fact he was leaving.
“In fact, my niece has been helping me with the household accounts,” her aunt lied.
Eleanor hoped they would take her blushes as modesty rather than embarrassment that her aunt was so obviously parading her before a young man of means. She wanted to retract the claim but couldn’t think how.
“You were going to say, Miss Crosby?” Mr. Denholm asked, pausing at the door.
“My father instructed me, you know,” she said. “Of course, my aunt taught me the accounts, but my father instructed me in mathematics. Up to a point.”
She was back on her stool in her father’s study at the parsonage, with its amply filled bookcase. It was a happy well-lit room, and she always joined her father there for lessons. Her portly, kindly, witty father with his wild eyebrows and bulging lower lip would set her working on geography, French, even some Latin. Her favourites were the sums and problems he would write on her slate, until the day when she was perhaps fourteen and he looked over her answers, telling her, “More or less, more or less. But here I think we’ve reached our limit.”
“Are you tired, Papa?” she’d asked.
“No, but I’ve been waiting for this,” he said, leaning back in his chair and examining her keenly. “The critical point. I instructed my late sister Joan, you know, when she was a girl. She was clever as well, and it’s a pity you never knew her. But eventually I found she’d reached the end of her ability to grasp mathematical concepts, hard as we tried to surpass it. The female mind has its limit, my dear, and here it is.”
“I didn’t like hearing that,” Eleanor told the gentlemen, “and asked him to write me an equation beyond what we’d done, and beyond what he thought I could solve. And very fluently, he wrote a series of signs and figures on my slate that I could recognize individually. I could recognize most of them. But I couldn’t seem to fit them together, nor could I follow my father when he explained the concepts behind them. It was as if I’d turned the page on a perfectly readable novel and discovered a passage in Aramaic. I tried very hard to understand him, but had to give it up. Written before me were my female limitations, and I felt dreadfully cast down.”
Eleanor had been looking into the distance as she spoke, as if seeing her father again out the window, ambling toward the parsonage. When she looked back, she found the gentlemen smiling indulgently. Mr. Denholm wasn’t as tall as either his brother or Stansfield Mowbray—not much taller than she was—but all of them seemed to look down at her from a great height, like gods regarding a clever mortal.
“I don’t claim it’s my only limitation,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re being modest,” replied Mr. Denholm, who seemed inexplicably pleased with her.
“We’ll carry your compliments to Miss Catherine,” said the captain, and they bowed themselves out the door.
* * *
“That didn’t go very well,” Eleanor told her aunt, as male boots thundered downstairs. “At least not for your purposes.”
“You were sweet,” her aunt said. “You quite charmed Mr. Denholm, and I continue to hold out hopes of Mr. Mowbray.”
“The Denholms were more interesting than I would have predicted,” Eleanor said, settling back beside her aunt. “But I wish you’d give up on Stansfield.”
“So you did like Edward Denholm, my dear?”
Eleanor paused. “He’s certainly the heir, isn’t he? I found him rather intimidating, although I’d hate for him to know that. He continues to be far too pleased with himself. And I would say he’s restless and guess at unreliable—for your purposes, Aunt.”
“Not for yours?”
Eleanor remained silent.
“Unlike the captain?”
“I imagine the captain’s superiors find him reliable, which is more to the point. I speak with great confidence, of course, after a visit fifteen minutes long.”
“You speak with a good degree of penetration.”
Eleanor turned staunch. “Not that it has anything to do with me.”
“You really don’t want your own household, dear?” Her aunt pushed back Eleanor’s hair to look in her face. “Husbands are quite pleasant, if properly managed. Not that I want another one.”
“I suppose I want the usual thing,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know what else a young lady is supposed to want. But I dislike the manner of getting a husband. I prefer not to be artificial.”
“But of course we all are. It’s another word for educated.”
Her aunt pulled her hair lightly. She was only teasing, but Eleanor got an unpleasant picture of herself as a marionette—it flooded her mind—and she jerked awake that night panting from a nightmare of being manipulated by strings. The classical gods up on Mount Olympus were making her dance, and it wasn’t a pretty dance, but a rude Punch-and-Judy twitch and thrust inside a glass-fronted theatre. She was being pulled deep into a theatre that wasn’t much bigger than a box, sucked away from Goodwood even as she danced her witless dance, finding she had to struggle hard to pull herself out of, out of—she didn’t know what.
Eleanor sat up in bed, willing herself awake, and realized she’d had the same bad dream during her nap. Not the same, but she’d felt a similar sense of being pushed and pulled, an anxious urge to get to the party, get to the party, without knowing what that meant.
They needed her to get started. That sounded faintly ominous. Yet—settling back on her pillows—she supposed what had really started was a competition for the Denholm heir. Even before Mr. Denholm’s arrival, the Middleford ladies had reached the obvious conclusion that he was coming here to look for a wife, the parish being known for its marriageable young ladies. A number enjoyed a reputation for beauty, and there were two or three heiresses among them.
Mr. Denholm might believe that Eleanor was one of the heiresses, although she had no more idea what her aunt intended to do with Goodwood than anyone else. Nor did she know how to ask. In any case, she suspected that her aunt hadn’t yet made up her mind, waiting to see whether Henrietta Whittaker would give birth to a son, and if she would survive it.
Her aunt would give her something, Eleanor was sure of it, although she might drive an embarrassingly hard bargain with any possible suitor. Middleford had no idea, but Mrs. Crosby was an astute and ambitious merchant. The accounts she’d been balancing that morning involved the importation of her son-in-law Mr. Whittaker’s tea. Mrs. Crosby employed a man in London to oversee the warehouse, but she managed the affairs herself—while never, of course, being seen to engage in trade, which would have tainted the fine old Crosby name, and raised awkward questions about where she’d learned to do so.
Middleford wasn’t quite certain what Mrs. Crosby had been when she’d met her first husband, the Kentish gentleman with his modest estate. “I was very young when I married Mr. Preston,” was all she ever said, and somehow the subject got changed.
Yet during her first marriage, her aunt had acquired a copy of the scandalous Miss Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, signing it boldly, Clara Preston. Eleanor had stumbled on it in the Goodwood library last year. She’d read it outdoors over the course of the summer, hiding it from Mrs. Crosby for reasons she didn’t quite understand, and closing it with the disturbing sense that her aunt must have been a firebrand.
What was the role of a woman, of Woman? Her father had taught her that woman was the helpmeet of man, Eve to generations of Adams. Nor could Eleanor see any alternative, not for a lady. She couldn’t imagine herself as a governess. She’d known too many of them, poor threadbare females charged with educating Middleford girls to a middling standard. After being orphaned, Eleanor had been terrified of joining their ranks, and couldn’t have felt more grateful to her aunt for rescuing her. Now that Mrs. Crosby expected her to marry, and marry well, Eleanor knew she had to try.
But Miss Wollstonecraft wrote of women not being inferior to men, leaving Eleanor with a feeling, an intimation, that the world was changing, the role of women was changing; she had no idea how. A mystery, how her role might change over the course of her lifetime. In a small cool corner of her mind, Eleanor was interested in seeing how her fate would play out. Perhaps this was the real party ahead of her. She was being pushed forward into a changing world. Pulled back by her aunt’s ambitions.
What was a woman’s role? Perhaps that was her prevailing question.
It was enough to keep Eleanor awake for half the night.
2
The rain continued to fall heavily the next morning, distant thunder rumbling on the moors. Eleanor sat in a window seat watching puddles spread across the drive. She would rather have been anywhere else, but a walk was impossible, even in the garden.
A blinding flare of lightning . . .
And Eleanor was walking down a deserted London street. The city was empty, the passersby as silent as shadows, so that any one of them might have been Death out for a stroll. There were few carts and no sedan chairs, and she somehow knew that all the better sort had fled or locked themselves indoors. Eleanor found the silence stony and uncaring, and felt frightened by the number of vermin swaggering out in broad daylight. Turning the corner, she found a pair of rats fighting over slops in the middle of Threadneedle Street, shrieking like scraped metal . . .
“Would you like the carriage, my dear?” Mrs. Crosby asked.
Eleanor blinked, pulled back to Goodwood. How odd. Of course, they often went to London, but she couldn’t think when she’d wandered down such an uncanny street. Nor had she ever experienced so vivid a memory, a vision, almost a hallucination. Catherine would be intrigued to hear of it. But the Mowbrays’ dinner wasn’t until Friday, and Eleanor had no hope of seeing her until then.
“The carriage?” Mrs. Crosby prompted.
“Of course,” Eleanor said, trying to find her feet. “Would you like to go out? I’d love to see Kitty.”
“I’m perfectly happy here,” her aunt replied, holding up her sewing. “But you’re so actively bored, you’re a distraction. Take the carriage and bring Catherine back in time for an early supper, perhaps to stay the night. Tell Lady Anne you’ll have her home in the morning. I entertain hopes of the rain lifting.”
Glancing at the low clouds, Eleanor didn’t see why. But she wasn’t going to argue, and was turning from the window when a rattle and splash made her turn back.
“The Mowbray carriage!”
A brief silence from her aunt.
“Of course it is,” she replied. “I presume the gentlemen aren’t in it.”
Eleanor stood on her toes to look down. “Well, it’s crowded. But I think there’s just Kitty and her sisters. Except,” she said, “only Kitty is getting out. Perhaps the rest are going on to visit the Brownes.”
“More likely the Morelands,” Mrs. Crosby said. “Isn’t Alicia the one who’s close to the Browne girls? And I don’t imagine Alicia is with them.”
“I don’t think she is,” Eleanor said, coming fully back to herself as she understood what her aunt had been planning. She said in mock severity, “You were sending me to visit Mr. Denholm, not Kitty.”
“Was I, my dear?”
“And Lady Anne has sent all the girls but Alicia away from the Close.”
“While keeping you from visiting. Yes, I should imagine so.”
Alicia was the prettiest Mowbray left at home, Catherine’s next youngest sister, not quite seventeen but well grown and fair.
“You’re playing chess with Lady Anne,” Eleanor said, too amused to be annoyed. “The two of you! Moving your pawns around the chessboard.”
“One has to do something in such a settled rain.”
“Either pawns or puppets. I had a nightmare last night about being a puppet played by the gods. According to my dream, some sort of party is starting, and Mr. Denholm seems to be the honoured guest. Although,” Eleanor said, thinking it through, “I don’t think Alicia is clever enough to marry him.”
“Don’t you, my dear?” her aunt asked. “Remember there’s a difference between getting married to him and being married to him. However, I expect you’re right. You’d do far better with Mr. Denholm. We’ll send a message to Lady Anne to say that Kitty is staying the night, and you can take her home in the morning.”
“When the rain clears.”
“You can’t really think so, my dear.”
* * *
It was easy for Catherine Mowbray’s brother to call her a mouse: she was slight and shy in company. Yet Kitty’s masses of brown hair and pale powdery skin made her look soft and sweet to Eleanor’s eye, and she was certain her friend would have come off better if there hadn’t been so many beauties in Middleford.
Now they leaned toward each other from either side of the fire in Eleanor’s sitting room, caught up in discussing the visiting gentlemen. It bothered Eleanor slightly that they were having a gossip instead of discussing a more elevated subject. Her book, perhaps. The Lady of the Lake. But Eleanor hadn’t cared for it much, and Kitty seldom read poetry.
“Yesterday evening,” her friend said, “when we were called for dinner, I passed Mr. Denholm in the hallway. He was openly examining himself in a mirror.”
“I told you he was vain!”
“I was prepared to pass him by when he met my eyes in the mirror and said, ‘I’m not vain, you know. I don’t think all that highly of my looks, not with a brother like mine. But I aspire to harmony in dress, as in life.’”
“He aspires to harmony!” Eleanor cried. “And what did you say?”
“I said I understood,” I understand being one of Kitty’s frequent answers, which she always gave in such a resonant voice it was clear she understood deeply. “However, I also understood from the expression on his face that he thought my dress out of fashion.”
“No it wasn’t. It never is. I’m sure you looked quite perfect.”
When Kitty’s elder sister Elizabeth had married—very well, to the grandson of a duke—her dresses had been divided up among her sisters. Kitty had made the most of hers, Mrs. Crosby having taught her to sew at the same time she’d taught Eleanor.
“You’re right. He’s a dandy,” Kitty said. “I think he might even be a follower of Beau Brummell. It’s not just the trousers and cravat. He’s called for pails of hot water each morning for a bath, which looks to be a daily occurrence. He takes hours to dress, then comes downstairs late for breakfast, wanting a fresh chop.”
“Your mother must be furious.”
“Well . . . ten thousand a year. But given the expense of entertaining an heir, I think the tradesmen will have to wait a little longer than usual to be paid.”
Lady Anne was infamous for her overdue bills, even though the Mowbrays were rich. She was a tall, commanding lady, as forthright as Eleanor’s aunt was subtle, and as irritable as a mastiff. Of course, the two ladies were the greatest of friends and wouldn’t let three days pass without visiting, each intent on finding out what the other was up to.
“Maybe he would do for Alicia,” Eleanor said. “She’s remarkably indulgent.”
“I liked his honesty,” Kitty said, and smiled. “Just not what he was being honest about.”
“Kitty, have you ever met a man you truly admired?”
“I like his brother, although not in that way. The captain is a much more amiable gentleman. He’s not at all shy, but he only speaks when he’s got something to say.”
“A steady aim being more useful than sermons. Yes, we heard. Presumably he’s on leave from fighting Napoleon in the Peninsula.”
“I heard his brother say that Captain Denholm is aide-de-camp to a general who’s been terribly ill of a fever. The general has been home all winter, and Captain Denholm has been with him. But when the general returns to Spain—which will be soon—the captain goes with him.”
“And in the meantime he’s at loose ends,” Eleanor said. “A good time for a young lady to set her cap at him. Although I suppose that’s the captain’s task, to set his cap at an heiress. Then he can avoid going back to Spain.”
“I don’t think he wants to avoid it. He seems very brave, as well as being so handsome.”
So Kitty had met a man she admired. Eleanor raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
“Stop it!” her friend said, blushing her easy blush, and growing so earnest and alarmed as Eleanor kept her eyebrows raised—“You mustn’t, Nell, please”—that Eleanor allowed herself to be distracted by the rain.
