Eliza’s Daughter (11 page)

Mrs Haslam, the founder of the school, had long since ceased to play any active part in its functioning. She appeared at daily prayers, a vague old creature, nodding and bemused, pink and powdered, much swathed in shawls. After that she was seen no more. The real administration of the establishment lay in the hands of her deputy, Miss Orrincourt, who interviewed me upon my first arrival there. She was a thin, dry, bracket-faced woman, who walked lame with a stick, and wore an enormous garnet brooch, holding together a great many folds of lace.

She scrutinized me with half-closed eyes, and said, ‘All the young ladies in this seminary, Miss FitzWilliam, are very
genteel
young ladies. I could never accept or keep here any that were not. The tone of my establishment is particularly high, and it is my intention to preserve this. Your hand – let me see it; ah; most unfortunate . . .'

Annoyance spurred me to retort: ‘I was born so, ma'am.'

‘I did not invite you to speak, Miss FitzWilliam.' Each time she pronounced my name she laid a heavy accent on the
Fitz,
as if to remind me of its inauthenticity. ‘Ah – you appear to have been well educated in – ah –
bookish
concerns. We have now to see if you can adjust yourself to the ways of polite society – ah – gentlefolk.'

I said that I would try to do my best.

‘Scholastically – ah – you appear to be on a level with the top class. But they – ah – being, all of them, considerably older than you, that – ah – would not be satisfactory. You may therefore, for the moment, take your place with the young ladies of the middle group, under the authority of Miss Bush. Yes. Hmn. Miss Bush will tell you how to go on. The room at the end of the hallway. I wish you good-day, Miss FitzWilliam.'

As I was curtseying, about to leave, she called me back. ‘Your – ah – aunt, Mrs Montford Jebb – she is well?'

I said yes.

‘And your – ah – guardian, Colonel Brandon?'

I said that he was at present on his way back from India; I was not informed concerning his state of health.

‘Ah – yes. In this establishment, Miss FitzWilliam, it is not considered at all polite to – ah – discuss – or allude to – the connections of other students. To gossip is
wholly
unladylike.'

Later, I was to ponder this piece of direction. For in fact the case was exactly the converse. At any moment of liberty, when the girls were in the garden, or walking two by two to concerts, or between classes, or on the stairs, or in the hallways, the prime, the
only
topic of conversation was people's family connections. Whose uncle the Duke was arriving to stay at the White Hart; whose aunt the Countess had rented a house in Paragon; whose parents were coming to take their daughter driving to Wells; whose dashing brother was betrothed to a West Indian heiress. So I supposed that what Miss Orrincourt really meant was that
I
should not talk about
my
connections.

Not that I had any intention of doing so.

My first encounter with Nell Ferrars was not propitious.

Mrs Jebb had told me that for its day pupils Mrs Haslam's establishment did not supply luncheon and I must therefore take care to provide myself with my own noontide refreshment each day (from which I understood she did not wish to see me back in New King Street for this meal). On my first day Mrs Rachel the cook had furnished me with a pear and a piece of bread-and-butter, and I had betaken myself to the school garden, a largish pleasant area with a few flower-beds and some trampled gravel paths at the rear of the house. Here I had perched myself on a low wall bordering a rose-bed, while I munched my pear and sighed for the peace of Growly Head, when I was approached by a pair of young ladies. One of them, large, long-faced, fair and plain, I instantly guessed to be the daughter of Edward Ferrars; she was remarkably like him, but the features that made his countenance open and authoritative were too large and pronounced in hers, and gave her a heavy, overbearing aspect. She was tall, like her mother, but had none of Cousin Elinor's fine, worn distinction, evident always despite her shabby attire. Nell was far better dressed than her mother; I could guess at what cost to the latter.

‘You must be the new Pillihen – are you not? Eliza FitzWilliam,' she announced, and then both she and her companion (a slender, elegantly dressed girl with very narrow hands and feet) exchanged a number of tittering, low-voiced witticisms concerned with my choice of site for a picnic. I answered yes, composedly, to her question, finished my pear and wiped my fingers on the square of butter-muslin in which Mrs Rachel had wrapped my luncheon. Then, standing up, I walked away to rinse my fingers in a small fountain beyond the rose-bed. This (I heard later) greatly disconcerted Miss Ferrars, who had expected me to ask some questions in return, which would have given her the satisfaction of snubbing me, by informing me that new pupils must not speak unless invited to do so.

Thereafter Nell took pains (when it lay within her power) to hold me up to ridicule among her cronies; my ignorance of dancing, of fine needlework, of most card games, of London gossip, of fashion, of nearly all the common topics of talk among my fellow-pupils, each in turn was sneered at and made fun of; and I passed several irksome and tedious months before acquiring sufficient proficiency in these areas for the mockery to die down.

Needless to say, this contemptuous usage spurred me on to exert myself, so as to pick up the necessary knowledge as speedily as I could. Furthermore, it soon became plain to me that Miss Ferrars was herself obliged to work hard – exceedingly hard – to curry favour with the set of well-to-do young ladies to whose company she aspired; being less well furnished than they in departments such as clothes, school materials, work-box, dancing shoes and the like, she must continually run errands for them, contrive to be in attendance at all times, and supply a regular feast of tattle, jokes and gossip.

I never grew to like Nell; she was too earnest a self-seeker to be likeable; but in the end I grew to feel sorry for her, since her great wish for popularity seemed to receive so scant a reward, and all these matters appeared so desperately important to her. I myself had few friends at Mrs Haslam's, but this never dismayed me, because I so mightily preferred my own company to most that was offered.

– Some young ladies, by degrees, despite my odd hands and my dubious origins, made overtures; but compared with the friends of my past, Mr Bill and Mr Sam, Hoby, Triz and Lady Hariot, they seemed of little importance, and while not rejecting their company I never went out of my way to solicit it. This attitude of independence did me no harm; indeed I believe that by the end of my sojourn at the school I was reasonably well-liked.

The teaching was tolerably good – for those who cared to apply themselves; and, especially in music and singing, I could feel that my time was being usefully employed. But to what end? I still had not the least intention of becoming a music teacher, and I feared that my physical abnormality would preclude any operatic or stage work.

Of course I had looked about the school for Nell's aunt, Mrs Ferrars' younger sister Margaret, and was not a little disappointed by my first encounter with her, which occurred a week or so after I had entered the establishment.

Miss Dashwood taught literature to the senior girls, and one morning – my own class had, for some reason, terminated early, and I was on my way to eat my nuncheon in the garden, as remained my habit until it grew too cold – passing the half-open door of the senior classroom, I was thunderstruck to hear the girls all together chanting familiar lines:

The Ice was here, the Ice was there

The Ice was all around

It crack'd and growl'd and roar'd and howl'd –

Like noises of a swound.

I stood spellbound in the doorway of the classroom until the teacher, espying me, exclaimed, ‘Heyday, who have we here?'

‘That is the new young lady, Miss Dashwood,' somebody said. ‘Miss FitzWilliam.'

‘Well? And do you like our poem so much, child?' Miss Dashwood asked.

‘Oh yes, ma'am, thank you – but I know it already.'

‘You do? But how can that be?'

Just then the clangour of a great bell drowned my reply, but later on Miss Dashwood had the curiosity to seek me out in the garden, and to interrogate me. I told her of my acquaintance with Mr Bill and Mr Sam.

‘You lucky, lucky little thing! What a great piece of good fortune for you to have been acquainted with such a pair! Their works have now been published in a volume,' she told me. ‘It is called
Lyrical Ballads.
Would you like to read it?'

‘Oh indeed, ma'am, I should.'

Miss Dashwood was a dark, intense-looking lady of, I suppose, twenty-seven years; her features were too lumpy and irregular for her ever to have been considered handsome, which, I supposed, was why, unlike her sisters she had never married, though she appeared good-natured enough. However there was something whimsical, freakish, over-emotional about her, which made me slightly mistrust her; I thought she looked unreliable. I would never entrust a secret to her. But at least she in no way resembled her niece. I believe there was little affection between them; Nell, as was her habit, made fun of her old-maid aunt.

Miss Dashwood asked me for descriptions of Mr Sam and Mr Bill and listened with keen attention to all I had to relate, interjecting, at frequent intervals, cries of astonishment at my good fortune and eulogies of these men.

‘A pair of poets such as this country has not seen in many years!' Then, impulsively, she exclaimed, ‘Poor child! And you have never met your own father, I conclude? For he was a wonderful man also – a wonderful, wonderful man!'

‘Good heavens, ma'am!' I was utterly astounded by this declaration, coming so unexpectedly. ‘
You have met my father?
You
knew
him?'

‘Oh, indeed yes, child! At one time he was a great, great friend of my elder sister, Marianne.'

Then, suddenly recollecting herself, she clapped a hand across her mouth and stared at me over it with huge eyes. ‘Oh, good God! Mercy on me! What have I done? I was instructed never, ever to mention a word of the matter.'

‘By whom, ma'am?' I quickly asked.

‘By my brother-in-law, Mr Edward Ferrars. A most right-thinking, sensible man. He said – he wrote – Oh, how dreadfully unfortunate! Pray, pray, forget what I said, my dear. I had no business to be saying it – none,
none.
It was wholly improper in me. I am a fool – I blurt things out. Excuse me – I must make haste to seek out Cecilia Castleforth and hear her recitation.'

She went off at blundering speed, fairly running away from me, and took with her, to my great chagrin, the volume of poems I had so eagerly looked forward to reading. Thereafter she sedulously avoided me outside of classes and, it seemed to me, took pains to leave a room if I should chance to enter it. The next I heard of Miss Dashwood was that she had temporarily quitted the school, in the company of Miss Helen Smythe-Burghley, who had left the senior class in order to commence her first London season, and whose parents, urged by their daughter, had requested the services of dear Miss Dashwood to act as
dame de compagnie
to Miss Helen during the succeeding months, for which function she would doubtless be paid a great deal more than she received as a teacher at Mrs Haslam's. It was believed that she might return in due course (presumably if Helen received a proposal) but nobody expected that would be very soon.

It may well be imagined how utterly transfixed I was by this brief and tantalizing exchange. Had Miss Dashwood actually quitted the school for fear of inadvertently letting out more information to me, and incurring her brother-in-law's wrath? Or was it sheer misfortune that had taken her away just then?

Ever since I commanded the power of coherent thought I had, very naturally, wondered from time to time about my father, what kind of a man he might have been; but as I grew older and more sceptical, and accepted the usages and standards of Byblow Bottom, I had grown also to accept that a man who would deflower and then abandon a young girl of seventeen was no kind of character to look up to with admiration or affection; on the contrary, he must be the most despicable scoundrel, and it would afford me no pleasure or benefit ever to meet him. If, indeed, he had not long ago perished in some affray, or died in a debtors' prison, or been transported to Botany Bay. So – although curiosity pricked me every now and then – I had devoted no serious thought to him for years past.

But now – how was this long-established, half-consciously formed portrait of my father as a dissolute, callous, feckless ne'er-do-well to be conjoined with Miss Dashwood's description – ‘a wonderful, wonderful man'? And ‘a great, great friend of my sister Marianne'? All my previous suspicions boiled up again; was I, in truth, the daughter of the said Marianne, now Mrs Colonel Brandon, in India? (Or wherever the Colonel and his lady presently were, halfway back to England, presumably.) Could this be the fact at the bottom of all this secrecy, the things that must never be mentioned, the haste to get me away from Delaford, the interdict on Margaret Dashwood telling me what she knew?

What had Edward Ferrars said: ‘
He
might come to hear'?
Who
might come to hear? My father? They spoke of my likeness to somebody – to whom? There was a miniature hanging in the parlour at Delaford Rectory – ‘my sister,' Mrs Ferrars had said when I admired it. It depicted a beauty, brown-skinned, with brilliant dark eyes and raven ringlets. A charitable friend (if I had one) might describe the colour of my red-brown hair as auburn, and the colour of my eyes as grey; but the youthful denizens of Byblow Bottom, when not addressing me as Lizzie Lug-fist, commonly called me Copperknob, or simply Ginger; and it seemed to me highly improbable that I could be the daughter of that dazzling brunette. But – it was true – our features, the shape of our faces, did show a considerable similarity. I had noticed it.