Nell (8 page)

She faltered to a stop. Heavens, what a ninny she had become! To be so tongue-tied was wholly uncharacteristic. The gathering frown impelled her to continue—to say anything, as long as it broke the dreadful impasse. Inspiration came.

‘I was thinking of your ancestors. However inconvenient this place may be now, it must once have spelled security. I should doubt if the most determined siege could have succeeded against it.’ There was no mistaking the puzzlement at his brow. Nell blundered on. ‘I had
looked for signs of a moat. Surely the entrance must once have held a drawbridge?’

Jarrow responded automatically, his attention not at all upon what he said. ‘There never was a moat.’ What in the world possessed the girl to bring up such a subject? Was she trying to dissipate the constraint that had arisen this afternoon, when he had been about to confide in her more than he should, and then stopped? He spoke almost at random.

‘The height of Hog Hill and the surrounding forest afforded protection enough. I believe there was at one time a heavy wooden gate, however.’ She was regarding him with an expression of interest. Spurious, surely? She could not truly wish for information upon such a subject.

‘There used at one time to be ramparts around the hill. But little remains of their ruins today. You may glimpse broken walls here and there among the gaps in the trees.’

Contrary to her expectation, the beat of Nell’s pulses had increased. She felt the conversation to be absurd, but he was talking. Was there a diminution of the tightness in his features?

‘How old is the castle?’

‘It was built in the eleventh century. It has lasted this long only because it has continued to be lived in.’

Nell became abruptly interested. ‘Always?’

Jarrow nodded, surprised to be affected by the spark of real question. ‘There have been Jarrows here continuously. Only during Queen Anne’s day did the fellow who held the title leave here. But he allowed his relative—a cousin, I think it was—to live in the place in his stead.’

‘Where did he go?’

He answered with constraint. Of course it had to lead
to that question! ‘Collier Row. He built a house near there. Padnall Place.’

The name rang an immediate bell. ‘We passed it on the way here. I am sure Detling pointed it out to me. I wondered why he did so.’ Her tongue was too quick for her mind. ‘Why in the world do you not remove there?’

Too late, Nell saw the blackness enter Lord Jarrow’s face. Heavens, what a fool! The answer was obvious. And now she had alienated him again. In a bid to avert the inevitable, she tried to retract. ‘I should not have asked. I must suppose it to have been sold long since.’

Without surprise, but with a sinking at her stomach, she heard the bitterness return to his voice. ‘No, I do own it. Only I cannot afford to live in it.’ His eyes were bleak. ‘The curse of the Jarrows, Miss Faraday, is bad judgement—to be ever on the wrong side. In King Stephen’s day, we sided with Matilda. In Elizabeth’s, we supported Essex. And Charles II could not be expected to reward one of Cromwell’s fellows. The Jarrows, therefore, lacked preferment. We have no riches, and our peerage is yet a barony.’

Nell could not bear his self-disgust. ‘I should rather call it unlucky than bad judgement, sir. Has there been no possibility of restoring your fortunes?’

The question proved disastrous. Lord Jarrow fingered his wine glass and his lips curled in a travesty of a smile.

‘There is always a circumspect marriage. Many a Jarrow tried that path, but the luck, as I have said, is never with us.’

‘Is that what you did?’

His eyes blazed as he looked across at her. Nell could have cursed herself. What had possessed her to say that?

‘Oh, my wretched tongue! Forget I said it, my lord, if you please.’

A mirthless laugh escaped him, an ugly sound. ‘Forget? If only I could!’

He lifted his glass and tossed off the wine. Setting it down, he grasped the decanter. Nell watched him with a feeling of hopelessness. She could feel the depths of his unhappiness. He began to pour and then paused, the decanter poised over his glass. He looked up and their eyes met.

‘No, Miss Faraday, my marriage was neither circumspect nor fortuitous. I was too much of a deluded fool to be choosing for the sake of a fortune.’

Within a week, much against her expectation, a pattern had begun to form in Nell’s days. Within two, she had established an almost invariable routine, broken only on mornings when Henrietta unaccountably arrived in the schoolroom yawning and distrait. On being questioned, Duggan said only that the child was a bad sleeper, and the change of routine was the cause. By the time May arrived, bringing with it a spell of weather unusually warm for the time of year, the child appeared to have settled down. Contrary to Mr Beresford’s information, there had been no sudden screaming in the night, and she had seen no evidence of either tantrums or dementia.

Lord Jarrow, when she mentioned this, had reiterated that it was early days.

‘It is likely that the novelty of what you are doing with her is holding her interest. Experience leads me to warn you not to let yourself be lulled into thinking that it will last.’

Nell had felt both irritated and disappointed. She had dared to believe that the regime upon which she had embarked was having an effect, and her life here had begun to take on an aspect of normality. Each morning
she rose betimes, and went immediately up to the turret schoolroom to get ready for the day’s lessons. By nine, she knew that Mrs Whyte had likely completed preparing breakfast, and Keston would be serving the gentlemen in the dining-parlour. Nell then repaired to the kitchen, where the housekeeper, anticipating her arrival, would be setting out her meal. Mrs Whyte broke her fast along with the rest of the staff a good deal earlier, but she nevertheless sat with Nell and enjoyed a cup of coffee.

It amused Nell that the good woman, having readily taken to the habit, found it necessary to give herself the justification of an excuse.

‘It does a body good to have a little break now and then. Besides, I’d not wish you to eat alone, Miss Faraday.’

Mrs Whyte’s little break conveniently lasted until the governess had finished and it was time for her to meet her charge in the schoolroom. Nell had no fault to find with this arrangement, for the housekeeper’s company afforded her a welcome period of rare relaxation, and it helped to discuss her daily progress. Her regime was not arduous, although it taxed her ingenuity to make headway with Henrietta. There had been no outbursts in her presence, nothing unnatural beyond the child’s odd unblinking stare.

On the other hand, there was a tension in the household that was almost tangible. Nell could not sit at the dinner table with either one or both of the gentlemen—for Mr Beresford had been several times absent—without feeling the brooding undercurrents that surrounded the unknown secrets of Lord Jarrow’s past and his present fears.

Added to this, the arrogance—and sometimes outright insolence!—of the nurse Duggan was an incessant thorn.
Nell had come off triumphant in a battle to have the child more suitably dressed. A threat to inform his lordship if her wishes remained unregarded had resulted in Henrietta’s appearance thereafter in a round gown of blue dimity with a white cotton apron atop. But the nurse was unforgiving of this change.

She was more often present than not during Hetty’s lessons, and Nell was at all times conscious of her supercilious eye in the background. She tried not to allow it to weigh with her, and it was an irritant that she did not succeed. Yet it was increasingly evident that, whatever her mental state, Henrietta was possessed of a sharp intelligence that only needed channelling.

Nell had opted to use the scheme involving fairy tales to interest her charge, Mr Perrault’s rendering of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ proving by experiment to be Hetty’s favourite. Nell took immediate advantage in discovering the letters of the alphabet within the story. The princess most fortuitously rejoiced in the name Aurora, which gave Nell the opportunity to begin. By dint of writing the letter A upon the blackboard, and showing Hetty where it appeared in printed form on the written page, she scored an instant victory. Henrietta even consented to try to recreate the figure.

But she astonished Nell by recognising the smaller ‘a’ at the end of Aurora’s name the moment Nell wrote it on the board.

‘Yes, that is exactly right, Hetty. How clever you are!’

The child beamed. Nell was about to encourage her to write the small letter when a daring thought occurred to her. Instead she returned to the board.

‘This one follows A, Hetty.’ She wrote B on the blackboard. ‘Can you see a letter like that in the story?’

Interested, Henrietta pored over the text. With a squeal
of triumph, she suddenly pointed to the B for Beauty in the title. Nell’s heart quickened with excitement, but she curbed it. Could it be that the child had already learned the alphabet?

‘Do you know how to find a C, Hetty?’

The dark brows drew closer together, and the red lips pouted. She kicked in a petulant way at the footrest of her desk.

‘There we go,’ muttered the nurse in the background.

‘We’ll be throwing things in a minute, miss, if you ain’t careful.’

Nell hastily retracted. ‘Never mind, my dear. It doesn’t matter in the least.’ She pointed at the board again. ‘Come, let us try to write this B for Beauty.’

‘
Sleeping
Beauty,’ corrected the child, brightening again.

Clearly she had not yet grasped that the B belonged only to the one word. Yet her ability to pick out the letter was remarkable. It became a simple task to devise a game where Nell wrote the next letter, in both capitals and small, and waited for Hetty to find them. The child became absorbed in the hunt, and by this means they had so far arrived as far as F for Prince Florimond.

It was another matter getting the pupil to copy the letters more than a couple of times. Nell was obliged to make it a point of competition to write all the letters they had learned so far before she would introduce another one. The list, which Nell kept permanently on the blackboard, was growing steadily, and she felt she had reason to feel pleased with Henrietta’s progress.

She was chagrined to find that Duggan greeted each failure with the smugness of one who had foretold exactly how it would be, and each success with prognostications that it would not last. Worse, these were ad
dressed directly to the child, in that hateful manner of possession.

‘All new to us, ain’t it, Miss Hetty?’ she said of the alphabet letters. ‘Which is why we’re keeping our temper. But we know how it’ll be the moment we get bored. We won’t never make it to the letter Z without screaming, I’ll warrant!’

It was true that letters palled quickly. Once the child became bored, there was no keeping her attention on the dull work of copying. Wisely, Nell made no attempt to do so, and instead put together a timetable that covered a variety of subjects each day. Nor did she try to make the child give up her doll, which Henrietta was prone to take out of the desk at any time that suited her.

Counting was accomplished with the girl’s own wooden bricks—when she could be persuaded to leave off building to find out how many she had used.

‘There now,’ said the nurse when three requests had been ignored one day. ‘We’re deaf and blind when we want to be, ain’t we? Oh, when we don’t want to learn nothing, there ain’t nobody going to make us, is there, Miss Hetty?’

Nell could have slapped her. Not that Henrietta paid the woman the slightest heed. It seemed that she was indeed deaf and blind to Duggan’s little digs. Or perhaps she was so used to the woman’s nagging words that she had become adept at ignoring them. Nell elected to follow the child’s lead, refusing to become discomposed by Duggan’s frequent interruptions.

A set of toy soldiers that had belonged to Henrietta’s father in his childhood were found to be another means of counting, together with learning to sing. Nell made the soldiers march to the song, so that Hetty began to copy her. She used the doll to introduce the child to
dance, and had recently taken the little girl on to the roof walkway to try out some steps for herself. Mrs Whyte had found, upon request, some braid and ribbons, with which Nell began Hetty upon the art of weaving as a preliminary to sewing and knotting a fringe.

When all else failed, Nell read to the little girl from Mr Perrault’s collection of fairy tales, and found that Henrietta knew all the stories so well that she would frequently interrupt in order to interpolate the next bit. Wondering who had read to her in the past, and reluctant to ask anything at all of Duggan, Nell questioned the housekeeper.

‘Is it Duggan?’

Mrs Whyte set down her teacup. ‘Joyce? Bless you, no, ma’am! Why, she can’t read, not with any great fluency. She’s a country girl is Joyce. No, no, Miss Faraday. She might tell the child a story or two, but she wouldn’t think to read one.’

Not altogether surprised, Nell tried not to be satisfied by this intelligence. ‘Then it must have been Lady Jarrow.’

The housekeeper looked dubious. ‘I suppose she might. Though it weren’t my notion that her ladyship took time nor trouble with the babe.’

‘But she must have given her some attention. She could not have ignored her own daughter.’

Mrs Whyte became distressed and, to Nell’s eye a little uncomfortable. ‘She weren’t in a state of mind to think of anyone but herself, ma’am.’

Nell’s instinct was to probe, but she withheld it. She would not put the housekeeper in the unhappy position of betraying what she had rather not. Yet those few hints that had been thrown out could not but pique her interest, particularly in light of Lord Jarrow’s troubled words. It
was clear that his marriage had been disappointing, if not downright unhappy, but nothing more concrete had been revealed in the period since Nell’s arrival.

Only one circumstance had given her further evidence of the deep-seated rancour that drove him. The first Sunday had arrived with no mention of prayers or church, and Nell—brought up to correct Christian conduct at the Seminary—had been forced to enquire about it.