A School for Brides (2 page)

TO MY MOTHER, Catherine Q. Kindl, with love

“I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself; but I do not think there
are
many very disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humored man with a comfortable income.”

—
The Watsons
, Jane Austen

CHARACTER LIST

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS AT THE WINTHROP HOPKINS FEMALE ACADEMY

Miss Eudora Quince, teacher and headmistress

Miss Clara Hopkins, teacher and headmistress

Miss Prudence Winthrop, teacher and headmistress

Miss Ariadne Evans, age 19

Miss Emily Asquith, age 18

Miss Rosalind Franklin, age 18

The Honorable Miss Jane Crump, age 17

Miss Millicent Pffolliott, age 17

Miss Cecily Mainwaring, age 16

Miss Alice Briggs, age 15

Miss Violet Victor, age 12

SERVANTS AT THE SCHOOL

Robert, the footman

Mrs. Grebe, the housekeeper

Annie, a chambermaid

Jim, a groom

Cuthbert, the head gardener

Cook, the cook

VISITORS TO LESSER HOO

Mr. George Arbuthnot, an injured gentleman

Mr. Arthur Hadley, his friend

The Honorable Mr. Henry Crabbe, his friend

The Honorable Reverend Mr. Rupert Crabbe, younger brother to Mr. Crabbe

Mr. Gideon Rasmussen, a stranger at the inn

Miss le Strange, a lady governess

Maggie, her maid

THOSE LIVING IN AND AROUND LESSER HOO

The Frederickses of Crooked Castle

Lord and Lady Boring of Gudgeon Park

The Honorable Mrs. Westing, Lord Boring's mother, of the dower house, Gudgeon Park

Sir Quentin and Lady Throstletwist of Yellering Hall

Mr. Godalming, a local landowner and the district magistrate

Mr. Bold, the vicar

Dr. Haxhamptonshire, a physician

Mrs. Hodges, the postmistress

Mr. Lomax, a shepherd

Wolfie, a sheepdog

SERVANTS AT CROOKED CASTLE

Greengages, the butler

Agnes, a nurserymaid

Gladys, a maidservant

Tom, a kitchen boy

“MARK MY WORDS.
If something drastic is not done,
none
of us shall ever marry. We are doomed to die old maids, banished to the seat farthest from the fire, served with the toughest cuts of meat and the weakest cups of tea, objects of pity and scorn to all we meet.
That
shall be our fate, so long as we remain in Lesser Hoo,” said Miss Asquith.

Extravagant as Miss Asquith's mode of expression was, her fellow scholars at the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy could not help but feel that she had a point. They nodded in solemn agreement, and Miss Victor, who was only twelve, began to cry.

The other young ladies frowned and attempted to turn and regard Miss Victor with disapproval at her outburst. This was rendered difficult by the fact that all eight were bound to backboards, wooden devices that forced their necks and spines into an erect posture. The backboards required them to rotate their entire upper bodies when they wished merely to turn their heads.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, Miss Evans,” said Miss Asquith. “I am afraid I struck you with my crosspiece.”

“Not at all,” responded Miss Evans, and then pivoted, mindful of
her
crosspiece, to regard Miss Victor with some severity. “Control yourself, Miss Victor, and do not wail so when your elders are conversing.”

“Yes, Miss Evans,” said Miss Victor. The backboard prevented her from using her handkerchief, and her tears therefore continued to flow unchecked, albeit in silence.

The young ladies, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, had planned to while away their daily hour of posture training with a chapter from
The Castle of Otranto
. However, by a minor mishap, Miss Asquith, who had been reading it out loud, had lost her grip on the novel and it had slipped out of her reach. Although the book remained on her lap, her attempt to recapture it was frustrated by the fact that the backboard pinned her elbows to her waist.

Cautiously, Miss Asquith had leaned forward and read all the way down to the bottom of the right-hand page, arriving at the passage at which the virtuous Isabella attempts to repulse her amorous father-in-law:

“Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!”

“Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs,” said Manfred, advancing to seize the princess.

Here Miss Asquith halted. She was obliged to leave off at this tantalizing moment, being unable to turn the page. After some moments spent speculating on the events likely to occur after such a fearsome line, they began thus to discuss their future:

“Perhaps one of us should consider marrying Mr. Cruikshank,” mused Miss Asquith. “He reminds me of a dear little leopard frog dressed in green and black. He leaps about so, you know, when he is teaching us to dance. And I
believe
he is a single man.”

Her fellow scholars erupted into nervous laughter. “Really, Miss Asquith,” said Miss Evans. “I know you speak in jest, but I certainly hope that no one here would so forget what we owe our families as to consider bestowing our hand on a music master.”

“Quite right, Miss Evans,” replied Miss Asquith. “I had much, much rather bestow my hand on Robert the footman.”

Here, several of the ladies erupted into
very
unladylike shrieks. Unable to cover their mouths with their hands, they struggled to suppress their merriment. Even Miss Evans allowed a brief smile to cross her face. Robert the footman was a
very
handsome young man.

“Ladies! May I ask what is occasioning such a noise?” Miss Winthrop, one of the founders of the Winthrop Hopkins Academy, had appeared in the doorway of the library, drawn by the sound.

“Good afternoon, Miss Winthrop,” the young women chorused. “Nothing, Miss Winthrop.”

“No doubt Miss Asquith was entertaining you,
as usual
,” said Miss Winthrop austerely. Miss Asquith's father owned a distillery; he was therefore obliged to pay a rather larger sum than anyone else to ensure that his daughter be educated with ladies the likes of the Honorable Miss Jane Crump, daughter of a viscount, and the other girls, whose families may not have been particularly distinguished, but who were at least not intimately associated with gin.

“Dear Miss Winthrop,
do
say that you have come to tell us that our time on the backboards is up,” replied Miss Asquith, smiling in an attempt to draw Miss Winthrop's attention away from the book teetering on her knees.

“No, indeed, Miss Asquith,” said Miss Winthrop. “On the contrary, you have another half an hour left. Do not sigh, I beg you; I am aware of schools at which young ladies are required to wear a backboard
and
a metal collar both day and night. I wonder if we are too lax with you; good posture is
so
important.” Miss Winthrop was quite proud of the backboards, which she had had specially made. As they were much more complicated and uncomfortable to wear than the commoner sort, she considered them vastly improved.

Miss Asquith gave an involuntary shudder at the thought of being permanently tied to a backboard with a metal collar, and as a result
The Castle of Otranto
slid onto the floor, coming to rest at Miss Winthrop's feet. That lady bent and picked it up, looking at the title on the spine.

“Reading novels, I see! And such a novel! I do not think this is at all appropriate for young girls. I will fetch my copy of Doctor Barrow's
Sermons
. I think you will find it far more
spiritually
improving than this sort of sensational literature. We must ever keep in mind the impermanence of life and the imminence of the hereafter.”

“Yes, Miss Winthrop,” the girls chorused again, and watched sadly as
The Castle of Otranto
was borne away.

The Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy had come into being at least partly because Miss Prudence Winthrop, a lady of a certain age in possession of an income that never seemed to stretch quite far enough to suit her needs, had decided that living with her newly married stepsister was less congenial than she had anticipated. Coincidentally, her stepsister and brother-in-law had come to a similar conclusion.

At the breakfast table one morning several weeks after the wedding, the aggrieved bridegroom had taken a stand: “Either she leaves this household or I do,” he said, fixing his bride with a stern eye. His complaint was that his new sister-in-law had pilfered his entire stock of handkerchiefs in order to embroider them with some of the more judgmental verses from the Bible.

“It is all very well for you to find it so amusing,” said he to his wife, who was attempting to maintain her composure at the sight of the newly adorned linens, “but she has grown quite intolerable. She requires an occupation to absorb some of that crusading zeal. Why cannot she nurse lepers or something of the sort? Surely she could go and harass the deserving poor, instead of lecturing
me
.”

“You know quite well that Miss Winthrop of Crooked Castle could never stoop to consorting with the poor, whether deserving or otherwise,” his wife objected. “However, perhaps something will turn up. . . .”

Happily, word soon arrived that the house of one Miss Eudora Quince, resident of York, had burnt to the ground. Miss Quince, who operated a small academy for young ladies, was cousin to Miss Clara Hopkins, the dear friend of Miss Winthrop. Miss Quince needed a large house with ample grounds for her school, and Miss Hopkins possessed such a house, as well as a desire for an additional source of revenue in order to maintain it. Miss Winthrop descended upon the pair with a great deal of advice and opinions and the offer of a modest investment of money. Within a short time, she had wrested command from Miss Hopkins, whose house it was, and Miss Quince, whose school it had been, and had changed her own residence from the Castle to the school, with the result that at last the newlywed couple was left in peace.

Poor Miss Quince! The name of the new school did not even mention her, for all she was the only one with any experience of instruction or credentials to offer. However, in Miss Winthrop's opinion, having had the carelessness to allow her house to burn down, she could expect nothing better.

The purpose of the school was the “finishing” of young ladies in preparation for marriage. That is, in addition to the rudiments of a practical education, it offered instruction in the womanly arts necessary to catch a husband. Undisciplined posture was corrected by backboards, undisciplined behavior by etiquette classes. Students danced, gave dramatic readings, wore their fingers to stubs on the pianoforte, drew and painted, netted purses, and decorated lamp shades from dawn till dusk.

Despite the horror with which all decent English people regarded the French—the armies of that madman Napoleon were currently rampaging about the world unchecked—the young ladies also labored to learn how to speak the language of the enemy with a Parisian accent, braid their hair in the French manner, supervise a French chef, and choose French wallpapers and French wines for their dining rooms. The entire Gallic nation might be composed of bloodthirsty, frog-eating barbarians, but one could not deny that they possessed a certain
je ne sais quoi
.

The students at the school were in some ways a misfortunate lot. Each young lady had lost either one or both parents, and her remaining relatives had not troubled themselves much beyond paying the modest fees demanded by the school in return for assuming her care. Within a few weeks, the students discovered that all had experienced loss, and most had known a solitary childhood, tended by servants and little loved by anybody.

Clearly, marriage was their duty, thereby relieving their guardians of the necessity of bothering about them even to the extent of sending a bank draft for school expenses and dress money four times a year. Unfortunately, so little interest had been taken in their fate that no one seemed to notice they had been sent to acquire a husband in a remote corner of England with almost no eligible young men. The small village of Lesser Hoo had no obvious excuse for existence other than the fact that it always
had
existed. The inhabitants were yeoman farmers, with a few shopkeepers clustered around the green; hardly anyone for a gentleman's daughter to marry lived for miles around.

The reality of their situation had not, however, escaped the young ladies themselves. Miss Victor, at age twelve, and Miss Briggs, at age fifteen, were still too young, and studious Miss Franklin had declared herself to be resolved against matrimony. The other five—being of marriageable age and well-disposed toward the wedded state—were beginning to look about themselves and feel a little anxious.

“Miss Mainwaring ought to have married a maharajah whilst she had the chance,” Miss Asquith said. Miss Mainwaring, the niece of Mr. Fredericks at Crooked Castle, had been sent to Yorkshire from India several months earlier, after the death of her parents from cholera. “Imagine! He could have given you ropes of pearls and a ruby diadem for a wedding present.”

“The only maharajah I ever saw was quite elderly and already had five wives,” Miss Mainwaring objected. A pretty girl of sixteen, her eyes and her manner were still shadowed with grief and her own close brush with death.

The Honorable Miss Crump, whose overpowering shyness demanded that she wear both indoors and out an enormous poke bonnet shaped like a funnel, said in her habitual whisper, “
Five wives?
Surely that can't be legal.”

“It is if you are a maharajah,” Miss Mainwaring said.

“That is what
we
shall be reduced to,” said Miss Asquith, returning to her plaint. “We shall have to marry Mr. Godalming, all eight of us.”

Miss Victor burst into tears once again.

“Oh, do hush, Miss Victor!” said Miss Evans. “You need not marry Mr. Godalming if you don't want to. Now look what you've done, Miss Asquith! Poor little Victor is terrified.”

The only unmarried gentleman of fortune in the neighborhood, Mr. Godalming was known to be looking for a wife, and the students of the Winthrop Hopkins Academy were resigned to the idea that one of them would someday become Mrs. Godalming; it was but a question of
which one
.