A School for Brides (7 page)

“Oh, Miss le Strange! I cannot bear it!”

“Perhaps you think so, Jane, but you must,” said Miss le Strange, smiling. “I know best. Now run along. Wave hard!”

Weeping, little Miss Crump crept up the winding iron stairs of the tower, clinging to the wall to stave off the giddiness that always plagued her in high places. At last she reached the summit of the stairs. Pausing a moment to gather her courage, she took a deep breath and pushed open the wooden door and stepped out onto the roof. It was covered with slippery black slates, and the only protection from a fall was the low parapet that rimmed it.

She closed her eyes, then opened them and inched forward to the parapet. Miss le Strange was far, far down below, her face lifted to watch, red hair and white dress and bonnet standing out against the green lawn and the clipped hedges.

“Very good, Jane!” she called. “Come closer. Closer! That's right. Now, I want you to step up onto the parapet. Go carefully! We don't want you to fall!”

“Oh, Miss le Strange!”

“Do as I tell you, Jane! Do it now.”

The sleeping Miss Crump whimpered again. Her limbs twitched a little as, in the dream, she obeyed her governess's command.

“Oh, hurrah, Jane! Very, very good! Wave to me!”

Miss Crump's hand uncurled, lifted an inch, and then lowered. Her entire frame was rigid against the horror of the drop.

“Let me think,” mused the tiny Miss le Strange below on the lawn. “What shall I have her do now? Perhaps . . . I think a pirouette. Jane, I want you to do a—”

“Miss? Excuse me, Miss,” said a voice. Mrs. Barclay, the housekeeper, had approached, and was standing behind the governess, her face expressionless. “Cook wishes to speak with you about the dinner, Miss.”

Miss le Strange frowned. “Now, Mrs. Barclay? As you can see, I am at a rather delicate stage of Miss Crump's training. Cannot you attend to the matter?”

“No, Miss,” said Mrs. Barclay, staring at the ground rather than up at the terrified child outlined against the sky. “I think you should come, Miss.”

“Oh, very well, if you insist.” She called up toward the parapet. “Jane, come down, and
do
try not to be clumsy, I beg of you! Now, what is this nonsense, Mrs. Barclay?”

The dreaming Miss Crump, relieved of the prospect of doing a pirouette on the narrow ledge, woke panting, her brow and palms cold and clammy.

The servants had always done their best for the young mistress, but there was little they
could
do to protect her against the iron whims of Miss le Strange. Viscount Baggeshotte, awed by her lineage, which was of fabulous antiquity and intertwined with the ruling houses of three European nations, had granted her a magnificent salary and free rein over his daughter and the entire estate as well. Having entrusted Jane's care to her, he had fled the harsh winters on the North Sea for his house in Bath. He only visited for a month every summer, during which time he vaguely applauded her efforts to embolden the small, sad mouse who was his daughter.

“Quite right, quite right! Can't have the little beggar afraid of her own shadow! I'm certain you've got the right idea, m'dear. There's good blood in you, Miss le Strange, and good blood will always tell. Glad you've undertaken the care of my girl, poor motherless child!”

“I am pleased to be of assistance, my Lord,” Miss le Strange would reply, lifting the corners of her mouth into a small, satisfied smile.

When the Viscount had departed again, Miss le Strange would immerse herself anew in plans for her charge; perhaps she would mount the timorous girl on the evil-tempered, skittish mare in the Baggeshotte stables, a bad purchase that had thrown the last three of its riders. For surely, an English gentlewoman ought to be a fearless and accomplished equestrienne.

Or perhaps she would have Miss Crump enact some of the martyrdoms of the saints. Several might be quite amusing—amusing to Miss le Strange, at any rate, and no doubt morally instructive to Miss Crump.

Really, it was difficult to choose . . .

Had she been asked, Miss le Strange would certainly have asserted that she set these tasks for the betterment of her young charge. She might even have believed this. In fact, she was furious with her current situation in life.

Miss le Strange was of Norman descent; the blood of kings and queens ran in her veins. It was only by sheer bad luck, gender, and birth order that she possessed no title of honor. Her elder sister had married an impoverished Italian
principe
with a run-down palazzo in Venice—that was the closest the family had come to greatness in a hundred years. But their lineage was without fault or stain, stretching back into the dim past.

The peerage of Viscount Baggeshotte was of a much more recent creation; a hundred years ago, her family would have scorned to exchange words with the upstart Crumps. And now she had been hired (
hired! like a common servant!
) to raise this female Crump. Very well. It was her duty to mold this most unpromising material into a young lady of whom the British Empire might be proud. If, in the process, the little Crump girl should suffer any distress, well, that was a sort of compensation for her own humiliation.

However, the years were passing, and with them the opportunity for the brilliant marriage she must make in order to secure the position she deserved. Viscount Baggeshotte's title might be of a sadly modern creation, but it came backed by many acres of fertile farmland, properties in London and Bath, and a solid income. Miss le Strange made up her mind to marry her employer.

Perhaps aware of this decision, and alarmed by the steady gaze focused upon him, Lord Baggeshotte canceled his usual summer visit to his home. Miss le Strange, not to be foiled, countered by dispatching Miss Crump to school and pursuing him to Bath in order, as she said, to settle certain points in the young lady's future.

The letter Miss Crump had received that day, read and reread many times, was to say that Miss le Strange would be journeying back to Yorkshire to resume the care of her charge. No explanations were given; none were expected.

Miss Crump shrank down under the covers and curled into an even tighter knot of misery.

IN THE FOLLOWING
days, life at the school began to fall into a pattern. The gentlemen might have come calling and stayed from morning through night had Miss Quince not placed a restriction upon the hours of social interaction.

“This is an educational institution, and some learning had best take place, or we shall be guilty of misrepresentation,” she said in gentle reproof, shooing the young men out into the open air.

A wall of silent opposition greeted this remark, since, after all, the primary purpose of the school was to help the students into advantageous marriages, and a group of highly eligible young men actually on the spot seemed more to the point than learning geography or painting on ivory. Several of the young ladies rather enjoyed learning for its own sake, but at heart they knew it was an irrelevance to the accepted and avowed purpose of their lives: marriage, motherhood, and the management of a household. Being also subject to the usual human frailties, they welcomed the break in their studies, for they were disinclined to work hard on skills that nobody—not even themselves—ever believed they would put to practical use.

One who agreed with Miss Quince, however, was Miss Rosalind Franklin. Miss Franklin was clever—a great deal cleverer than an eighteen-year-old girl from a respectable family had any need to be, in fact. She expressed opinions on the nature of ether, that mysterious substance in which all of creation was believed to be suspended, and had been known to wax passionate about the composition of light; she had thought deeply upon atoms and elements, and had read Sir Isaac Newton's
Principia
in the original Latin when she was only fourteen.

Neither Miss Hopkins nor Miss Winthrop could understand more than one word in ten that issued from her lips. Both were rather afraid of her, but consoled themselves with the thought that
decent
women did not give a fig about the precise arrangement of the solar system. Indeed, Miss Winthrop on occasion braved Miss Franklin's scornful eye by venturing the opinion that it only stood to reason that the Earth was the unmoving center of the universe.

“Anyone with a particle of sense can plainly see that
we
stand still whilst everything else revolves around
us
,” she was wont to say. “And that is precisely as it should be. Now let us hear no more on the subject.”

Even Miss Quince, who was rather better informed than her co-headmistresses on the laws of physics and the Earth's place in the universe, sometimes felt a bit daunted at the prospect of attempting to teach Miss Franklin anything, as she appeared to know nearly everything about everything already. That is to say, she possessed exhaustive information on volcanoes and glaciers, the various types of cloud formations, and the movements of the tides and of the heavenly spheres. However, while she could tell you the proper taxonomy of every plant in the garden, her floral arrangements were a perfect disgrace—a hodgepodge of broken stems, some with and some without blooms, jabbed all anyhow into a jam jar—and while she could describe in detail the workings of the new Jacquard looms, her embroidery was a snarl of broken threads and knots of which a five-year-old child might reasonably have been ashamed.

“Oh, what can it possibly matter!” she would exclaim when her skills at painting a fire screen or picking out a tune on the spinet were found lacking. “Fire screens require no decoration to enable them to perform their function, and music only distracts the mind from rational thought.” In vain did anyone protest that these things gave pleasure—and might be an intellectual discipline in themselves. Hers was a mind formed for infinite space and the grandest designs of Nature.

Miss Franklin had pleaded with her mother to send her to school in Oxford or Cambridge, where, although she would not be admitted to the lecture halls of either university, she might be able to attend the meetings of learned societies and take notes upon their discussions. However, Mrs. Franklin had no notion of allowing her daughter to become even more of a bluestocking than she already was, and instead determined to send her as far away from modern scientific thought as she could manage—hence the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy in Lesser Hoo, Yorkshire.

“Never mind, my dear,” said that lady comfortably as her daughter raged. “I am only thinking of your health. You know, the best physicians say that you'll do yourself a mischief overworking your brain like that. Girls ought not to think on difficult subjects; it's well known to make you barren, and I shouldn't wonder but what you'll contract brain fever and go mad. Worse, you will die an old maid.” She went on to quote Mr. Thomas Broadhurst, the eminent educator, on the subject: “‘Of all the objects that are disagreeable to the other sex, a pedantic female, I believe, is the most confessedly so.'” Miss Franklin's mama was herself singularly ill-read, but over the years she had picked up a few useful references in her long battle with an inconveniently brilliant daughter.

“A pox on the other sex,” Miss Franklin muttered. “May the entirety of the other sex—always excepting those who are engaged in important scientific research—fall into the sea and choke itself.”

“What's that, dear?”

“I do not intend to marry, Mama,” she said more loudly, in what she hoped sounded like a composed and resolute tone of voice.

“Fie, what nonsense! When a woman says that it is because she is not pretty enough, or because she has no dowry. Of what use is a woman who does not marry? She is fit for nothing but to care for other people's children as a governess or a teacher in a school. And look at you! You are no beauty, perhaps, but perfectly presentable, with a tidy fortune. For all you are so clever, Rosalind, you are a fool. Go and tell your maid to pack your clothing. And mind you bring a warm shawl—I'm told that the coast of Yorkshire is deathly cold in the winter months.”

The school was all the punishment for female intellect that Mrs. Franklin could have asked for, and more. No one cared for the life of the mind, or for any of the subjects that moved or interested Miss Franklin. The young ladies were a decent enough lot, but mentally negligible, and so she had dismissed them and any friendship they might have offered. And the teachers! Miss Winthrop and Miss Hopkins were, in Miss Franklin's opinion, unqualified to instruct a new-laid egg. Miss Quince she disdained as being no more than their underling, never noticing that lady's intelligent gray eyes watching her.

When first Mr. Arbuthnot and then his friends arrived, Miss Franklin had for the most part held her tongue and sat quiet in her corner, irritably stabbing at her wretched needlework with an embroidery stiletto. Feeling herself out of sympathy with everyone at the school, she did not even try to take an interest in these men, none of whom appeared to care for anything beyond hunting and shooting and flirting with the young ladies. As their visit to Lesser Hoo stretched from days into weeks, however, she was from time to time drawn into conversation with one or the other of them.

Now Mr. Crabbe, observing her assault on her needlework, could not help but wince in sympathy for the unoffending square of muslin.

“Miss Franklin, you quite terrify me,” he said. “I feel that you are sitting in judgment upon our frivolity, and I must beg you to leave off tormenting that bit of cloth. May I see it?” When Miss Franklin handed over the fabric, he examined it dubiously. “Is it . . . Is it meant to be a squid from the briny deeps? Or perhaps the head of the mythological gorgon Medusa? No, no, pardon me, what can I be thinking? Of course it is a flower! And a very pretty one, too.”

Miss Franklin regarded him in stony silence.

“Miss Franklin does not care for the decorative arts,” whispered Miss Asquith in his ear. “You will not win her favor by pretending to admire her embroidery. Engage her instead on the subject of astronomy or chemistry. Better yet,” went on Miss Asquith with an innocent smile, “
explain
something to her. Tell her everything you know about comets; I believe she has long desired greater information on the subject. Such things are quite beyond
my
comprehension, of course, but you, Mr. Crabbe, who are so clever, no doubt will be able to make the matter as clear as day.”

In Miss Asquith's opinion, Mr. Crabbe had far too high an opinion of his own wits; he could bear to be humbled a trifle.

Mr. Crabbe blanched. However, he was a man of some intellect, and above all, he was a man who had been asked to display his mastery of a subject by a pretty and vivacious young woman. He rallied. “Comets!” he said. “Miss Franklin, Miss Asquith tells me you suffer from a great longing to know about comets.” Here he paused, no doubt hoping to hear her disavow any such interest.

However, after Mr. Crabbe's nonsensical comments upon her embroidery, Miss Franklin had no particular desire to spare him.

“My mind
has
been dwelling on comets a good deal of late, Mr. Crabbe,” she admitted.

“Comets are . . . Comets are balls of a mysterious fiery substance that pass through our heavens at unpredictable intervals.” He paused, searching for some other scrap of information to augment this admittedly paltry dissertation. “I believe that they occasion a good deal of disquiet when they appear out of nowhere in that unnerving manner. However,
you
must not be frightened by them. I promise that they mean us no harm, and are all too anxious to return to the eternal darkness whence they come as quickly as possible. Does that suffice to answer your questions?” He smiled upon her in a kindly fashion.

“Actually, sir,” replied Miss Franklin, “it is the ‘least squares' method for calculating the orbits of recurrent comets proposed by the mathematician Legendre that has captured my interest rather than any superstitious fears. Although I must say I find your opinion unwarrantably optimistic—we know so little about comets that I could not, myself, speak with such assurance about their harmless and retiring nature. I should think that if one were to collide with the Earth we would find the result quite disagreeable. However, I do not mean to frighten
you
, so pray disregard my more somber view.”

“Ah! Hum,” said Mr. Crabbe, and soon discovered a pressing need to decamp to the opposite side of the room and the company of less knowledgeable ladies.

Miss Franklin and Miss Asquith shared a little smile; Miss Franklin's was perhaps a bit frosty, but so rarely had she ever smiled at one of her own sex—or, indeed, at anyone—that it was something of an event.

“I believe my mother is correct, after all,” she observed, “in saying that there are few things so disagreeable to a man as a woman who knows more than he does.”

Miss Asquith laughed. “I am so sorry—I ought not to have done that, but he is a little too fond of himself for my taste.”

Miss Franklin lifted her eyebrows and looked at the flushed and lovely face before her in silence. She had spent little of her life guessing at romances and discovering partialities, but she rather wondered if she was looking at one now. Hesitantly, like a waterbird venturing out onto hostile seas, she said at last, “He will be expected to marry a title, I suppose.”

“Oh no, not a title. The family needs money more than prestige. But he will be expected to marry an heiress of a prominent family, certainly. Not,” she said as Miss Franklin darted a glance in her direction, “
not
the daughter of a gin distiller—that goes without saying. If I were the daughter of a brewer I might have passed muster, but, while gentlemen do drink beer, it is the poor who drink gin. So,” Miss Asquith sat up a little straighter in her chair, “I have nothing whatever to lose by teaching him a more becoming modesty.”

“I see,” said Miss Franklin, who was beginning for the first time in her life to feel a faint interest in affairs in the sphere of human relationships. “Yes, I see. These distinctions are curious and apparently quite trivial, but the consequences may be heavy for the individuals involved.”