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Authors: Kate Williams

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‘You certainly shall see an English party,’ said Verena, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘If I get these lists completed in time.’

‘I do wish you would stop fussing, Mother,’ Emmeline said, stretching out her skirts so her shiny boots protruded, her delicate calves almost on show, taking care to look away from Jonathan. ‘Every year you get in such a turvy over it all.’

Verena shook her head fondly. ‘Dear. You young people think great events arise from nowhere.’ She patted her bodice and returned to her lists. Verena had wanted to be a ballerina when she was a child, but grew too quickly, she said, even though they all knew that no girl of her family would have been allowed to flutter her way across a hot stage in front of people of the town. Sometimes, when Celia saw her mother presiding over plans, she tried to think of her as a dancer, directed by a gentleman in a suit, but could not. Everything about Verena was stiff, restrained, as if she were a peg doll grown tall and watchful. ‘I have much to do. Especially with Mrs Bell away.’ Their housekeeper had gone to visit a niece, whose children had promptly fallen ill with measles. The doctor had told her she must remain with them for at least two weeks.

‘Mama, my wedding is more important than a party for the village. Those children throw stones, and their parents only come to pocket as much food as they can.’

Verena did not reply.

‘You care more about those children than your own daughter’s wedding.’ Emmeline tossed her hair. Celia wished she could throw a paper aeroplane at her. For Emmeline, every party list inched her further away from her ideal self, resplendent in ivory silk from Worth, intricate beading billowing out from her tiny waist, a glassy tiara propped over her veil, glimmering with the beautiful future ahead of her.

‘It is our duty to entertain the village,’ said Rudolf from beneath his hat, the consonants catching on his words.

‘Mama! Are you listening to me?’

‘Emmeline, your wedding is not for another three months. There is plenty of time.’ Verena did not look up. The dark brooch on her lace-covered bosom glinted in the light.

‘But you haven’t ordered the decorations. I asked you to.’ Celia had heard every detail, she thought, a hundred thousand times: the flowers for the church, the tents they would erect across the lawns, the menu of lobster, beef and more ornate cakes than King George V’s. For the last six months, Celia had watched Emmeline complain, slam doors and cry about bridesmaids, lace and not having the reception at Claridges. She pinched Michael’s knee and he rolled his eyes. Emmeline had threatened that if Arthur didn’t come back from Paris, she would go there herself and get him.
Try to be patient, Celia,
Verena sighed when she complained.

Soon, Celia told herself, Emmeline would put on the mauve going-away suit ordered by Verena and take the train to Dover, in order to honeymoon in Paris and the Italian Lakes. She would be Lady Bradshaw and Celia would be free.

‘As I said, there is plenty of time.’

‘Time I greatly require to save for the expense,’ snorted Rudolf from under his hat. They all turned to look at him. ‘Celia. Might you go and ask Tom to join us here for tea?’

Verena’s voice cooled. ‘Dear. Marks needs him in the stables. He is without a second groom.’

‘Oh, poor Tom has surely worked sufficiently by now. It is so warm today. Celia, go and ask him.’ Celia watched her parents. Tom had come up for tea before, but only when Verena was inside with a headache. She looked at her mother, then her father. She felt their wants tussling over her head. Then her mother sat back and looked at her lists once more. ‘Go on, Celia,’ said Rudolf.

‘You humour her,’ said Emmeline. ‘She’s too old to be playing with the servants.’

Michael propped himself up on his arm. ‘Better play with lords, you mean?’ His voice caught around the first word. When he was a child, he had had a heavy stutter and Verena and the governesses had practised correct speech with him, over and over again. Still,
Celia heard him reciting at night, bs, rs, ps, stopping and starting for hours.

Emmeline turned to Verena. ‘Next thing Father will be inviting Tom Cotton and all his family to sit in the front pew at my wedding.’

‘Lord Snootypants might like that,’ Celia said, jumping to the side so her sister could not reach her.

Emmeline swung out her hand for Celia’s skirts. ‘Papa! Did you hear what she said?’

‘Oh, leave her be,’ said Michael, dropping back to the grass. ‘She’s right. Sir Hugh detests the fact that he needs our German money, our
canned meat
money, to patch up his precious old pile of a house.’

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of canned meat,’ said Rudolf. ‘We’ve got a new range in next week, straight from Alsace. Sir Hugh should try some.’

‘It might do his pinch nose some good.’

Emmeline struggled to her feet through her tangled skirts. ‘You’re hateful! Well, when I’m married and living at Callerton Manor, I shall only invite Mama. And if you think I’m going to find a husband for her’ – she gestured at Celia – ‘you are quite wrong. Just look at her hair! And all that grime under her nails. I would rather die than introduce her to Sir Hugh’s friends.’

‘Never mind, Emmy,’ said Michael. ‘We could all turn up as organ grinders and do a German spot at your ball. Crown you the Canned Meat Queen.’

Jonathan spat out a laugh.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said Emmeline, her hand on her pink silk hip. ‘You can all stay and mock. I’m the only one in this family actually
doing
something.
You
spend more time at Cambridge playing cards than anything else, and heaven only knows what Arthur is doing in France, and Celia looks like a tramp, and nobody cares! Well, I give up on you all!’ She turned and hurried up the lawn, stumbling into her skirts.

‘Oh, let her go,’ said Rudolf to his wife, who was beginning to follow. ‘She will cry it out, then Miss Wilton will arrange her
hair and it will all be better.’ Verena inclined her head, sat down again. Celia watched her sister hurry up towards the house, her shoulders dipped, the thick curl of hair behind her head bobbing in time with her feet. She looked too big for Stoneythorpe already. She could preside over whole ballrooms at Callerton, smiling graciously at queues of Sir Hugh’s hunting friends.

‘May I go to find Tom now?’

‘If you must,’ said Verena at the same time as Rudolf smiled and said, ‘Right this minute!’

Celia leapt up and hurried away. She could hear Michael shouting that Sir Hugh wanted to wring them dry, declaring that lords and ladies would be nothing in the future. Verena was trying to calm him, Rudolf shrugging it off, Jonathan making some joke about rich Americans.

Secretly, alone, hoping that God could not read her thoughts, Celia sometimes imagined Sir Hugh changing his mind about Emmeline. Then things would go back to how they used to be, and Michael and her father wouldn’t be arguing all the time. Then she chastised herself for being cruel to her sister. All Emmeline had ever wanted was to be a society bride.

‘The future is a ham in a can!’ sang Celia to herself, softly. She had never tasted a de Witt ham. Verena said they were for the poor, and young ladies and gentlemen should never eat them. But Celia followed what her father said about his products and felt a swell of pride every time they used to pass the large advertisement on the boards near the church in Hampstead. ‘De Witt, de Witt, keeps you fit,’ she sang as she ran.

TWO

Celia ran across the garden, hurried out through the hedge at the side of the lawn, down the dry grass by the willows and cut past the edge of the forest to the stables. She heard the horses first, kicking and whinnying in the heat. She could just see Silver through the door, nuzzling the hay bale. Marks was speaking loudly. A hand hit a flank and she crept closer to the door.

‘You staying here, hanging around this lot, wasting yourself.’

‘And you’d know.’ Tom’s voice was high and angry. He’d worked in the stables during his holidays from school for as long as Celia could remember. It was a special school founded by a lord for boys without much money; it took Tom an hour to walk there every morning. In the holidays, he worked at Stoneythorpe to earn the money for his books.

‘Your loyalty is old-fashioned, Cotton. You can do better than this.’

‘Why should I care what you think?’

She could hear Tom walking towards the door, so she leapt forward and knocked.

‘Tom!’ she said, entering, seeing both their faces redden. Marks dipped his sunburnt face towards the side of Moonlight, Emmeline’s brown mare. Each of the children had their own horse: Moonlight for Emmeline, Red for Arthur, Arrow for Michael, and Celia had Silver. She had ridden Silver for three years now, since she’d been allowed to have a proper-sized horse. She walked over to her stall and held her close. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ she said. She had ridden her out yesterday, escorted by Tom. Last summer, she and Tom had spent almost every day together after she returned from the Black Forest, when he was not working in the stables. Yesterday morning, he had taken her out into the fields outside
Stoneythorpe, where there had been no one but them. She’d spurred Silver into a gallop and he’d followed her on Red, Arthur’s stallion, who needed exercise now his owner was away.

She’d thought the pair of them speeding through the bare grass could be the standard-bearers for a medieval king, hurrying forward to check the land so the soldiers behind could move forward and conquer. She’d hoped, afterwards, that he might have been free so they could go to the pond and look for frogspawn. Last summer they had found piles of the stuff and dropped it into the old stone trough by the back kitchen door. She’d planned out the afternoon, thinking they might beg scraps from Mrs Rolls for a picnic and sit under the trees behind the stables. But he said he had to go back to the horses, and she’d had to wander back to the house alone. This summer, she thought, things were different: she could not always think of what to say to him. Sometimes, words she had thought quite ordinary would make him turn angry and quiet, his eyes smaller, as if they were focusing on arrows sent from far away.

‘Did you want a ride, miss?’ said Marks, his tone not as polite as his words.

She held Silver tighter. ‘No, I’m coming with a message. Tom, Father asks if you can join us for tea.’

‘Like this?’ He looked down at his dirty breeches. ‘I can’t.’ Marks sniggered.

‘I’m sure it won’t matter.’ Tom always looked smart, the material of his clothes undarned, his shoes without holes. Silver. The horse nuzzled her cheek and Celia wondered if it was possible to love anything more than she did Silver. Papa had taken her to choose a horse at the farm. The minute she’d seen Silver, grey, dappled, she knew she was the one. She had gone to stroke her nose and the horse had shuffled up to be nearer, closed her eyes as if to say
I’m your friend.

‘Better obey the master,’ said Marks slyly behind Tom, his bad eye flickering. Celia wished she could push him hard, send his cold smile away.

Tom’s mouth twisted. Then he straightened. ‘Well, I shall come then. Mrs Rolls will let me wash my hands in her kitchen.’

‘Enjoy your silver forks, my lad,’ said Marks. ‘And you too, my lady.’

Celia kissed Silver’s nose. ‘I will come and ride you tomorrow,’ she whispered, then turned away from Marks and out of the door. A few moments later, Tom came to join her.

‘I don’t know why Father keeps Marks on,’ she said.

‘Good with the horses,’ he shrugged, looking ahead. His eyes were so pale, they seemed to reflect the air in front of them. When he had arrived, she had been the same height as him. Now he was almost as tall as Michael, able to look down on her. He had grown up in so many other ways. He was sixteen to her fifteen. His skin had lost the spots that had sprouted the previous year, and his face had grown thinner. Tom’s great feature was his nose, everyone said that. It wasn’t snub like Celia’s or too big like Michael’s (and Emmeline’s, even though she would never admit it). It was what the art history teacher, Miss Quinn, would call a Roman nose. She might want to paint him.

‘The horses like you more than Marks. Silver does.’

‘I must obey him,’ he replied. ‘Like you have to obey your father.’

‘Emmeline is being terrible about her wedding,’ she declared. The forest loomed above them. She never went in there, forbidden by Rudolf. Arthur used to, took two friends from school there years ago; they all came back screaming that they’d seen a ghost.

‘You’ll be bridesmaid,’ he said, smiling.

The sun beamed into her eyes and she covered her forehead. ‘I have to.’

‘You’ll wear orange blossom in your hair and a fancy dress.’ He drew his hands to his head, as if there were flowers there.

‘The dress is awful.’

‘What a pretty girl you’ll be. Sir Hugh’s friends will think you
quite
the young lady.’

‘Stop that!’

She stretched out for him, laughing. He jumped to the side. ‘So
ladylike.’
He danced away from her towards the pond. ‘Pretty
Celia!’ He started to run and she picked up her skirts and hurtled after him. He ran around the tree, laughing, and then into the shrubbery, shouting out all the time. She hurried after him, past the old trees, over the grass, and when they were both breathless he let her catch him and they fell to the ground, laughing. ‘Pretty,’ he called out one last time. The willow tree over them touched their faces.

‘Why don’t you write to me when I’m at school?’ she said, when they were both lying on the ground.

The leaves cast shapes on his cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t know what to write.’

‘Don’t say that. Anything you wrote would interest me. You don’t know what it’s like there. Day after day of the same thing. It’s terrible.’ Winterbourne was full of people. Girls, teachers, even gardeners, all of them, everywhere: behind trees, doors, the cupboards of books, all the places she tried to hide.

He turned on to his back, looking up at the sky. ‘Those school-marms wouldn’t have it, me writing to you.’

‘No one would know.’ Her voice came out weak. She wouldn’t tell the girls at Winterbourne that she was writing to him. She’d once tried to tell Gwen King about him, only for her to laugh that Celia was friends with a
servant.
She wished she could say:
Your father might have died early and then you might be poor too!
But she knew that even if Rudolf died, there would be money for them. She quashed the thought, horrified that she had even considered the idea of his death.

‘They’d all know I was writing.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘I hate it there. I don’t want to go back.’

‘Plenty of people wouldn’t mind having a good education like that.’ Celia blushed. It would be Tom’s last year at school and then, he said, he had no idea what he might do; he couldn’t go to university. Celia secretly hoped he might work at Stoneythorpe, but she knew that was selfish.

Tom shook his head. ‘You’re dreaming, miss.’ His voice was all sarcasm.

‘Don’t call me miss.’ They’d agreed between them that he would
only call her that when there were others around. ‘Anyway, it’s not the books I mind. It’s the girls, the whole place. It smells of fish.’ The boarding house was tiny and always dusty, and it was so hard to sleep with the sound of the other girls snuffling and crying around her. Without the English teacher, Miss Lowen, who lent Celia books meant for the sixth formers, Celia thought she might go mad.

‘What else do you want? Stay here and have Mr Janus teach you instead?’

‘No thank
you
! Mr Janus is dull, he says the same things every day. All he really wants to do is moon after Emmeline.’ Palehaired Mr Janus walked over from Helmingham, the next town. He had been a master at the boys’ school there until he had caught a virus that meant he could not get out of bed for weeks. Working with Celia was his steps towards recovery, as Verena put it. He was Celia’s first tutor, and she preferred him to the governesses who had gone before – until, that is, he had started following Emmeline around with his eyes.

‘Don’t let your mother hear you say that. She won’t let him back if she thinks he is being disrespectful to the future Lady Hugh.’

‘I know, I know.’

Tom got to his feet. ‘Well now. In a few years, you can marry like Miss Emmeline herself and then you’ll never have to go to school again.’

Celia hit her hand on the grass. ‘It is a chain, just like those lady demonstrators say. If you are married, you are your husband’s thing; that’s why he votes for you.’

‘You don’t know a thing about politics, Celia.’

‘I do! Well, I could if I wanted to.’

‘I think your father would be pretty cross if you started burning down tea rooms in Kew Gardens. Or cutting up the paintings in the National Gallery.’

‘Well, the King should let ladies vote then.’ The women had stepped up their campaign recently, wrapping up bricks in paper, arrested and re-arrested by the police.

‘Your father will make you marry, you know that. You’re his pet.
He’ll have you dressed up in white and being presented by your sister to the Queen before you know it. You’ll be deb of the year, like in those magazines.’

‘Stop it. You’re beastly sometimes, Tom.’

His face clouded. ‘Celia, you have to marry. Women must.’

‘Women only need husbands if they have babies,’ she said stoutly. Marriage, if you asked her, didn’t seem to do much that was good. The King and Queen, of course, were very happy, and her parents, but not many other people seemed to be so content. Mrs Cotton was married, and the few times Celia saw her, she saw only unhappiness.

Tom nodded. The sun dropped through the branches on to his face. He hardly ever talked of his mother – and never of his father. She thought: if only I knew the right question, he might tell me. ‘Anyway, it was not your mother’s fault that your father ran away and deserted her. He was a man of little moral worth, obviously. She married him properly.’

He flushed. ‘Yes. Come, your father is expecting us.’

She stood up and squeezed his arm. ‘One day he’ll come back from far-off lands and you’ll be a family again.’

‘Celia, let’s talk of something else.’

She dusted down her dress, not that it did much good, forced herself to put the subject out of her mind. ‘Will you take me riding tomorrow?’

‘If Marks says I can.’ The rose garden in front of them was hysterical with colour, so much that you’d think it had been daubed all over by a child equipped with a new paintbox. It was a great pond of pinks, yellows and reds. The flowers were curling at the edges, Celia knew. The summer was too hot for them, made them thin, brown, thirsty.

‘Life is about improvement,’ her father often said. ‘The human race must go forward.’ When they’d arrived, Verena had applied herself to the grounds, appointing Mr Camlett from London to regulate the overgrown wilderness behind the house with an open array of flowers and ornamental hedges. But even Verena could not turn the grounds of Stoneythorpe into the fantasy of a
Versailles-like eighteenth-century garden, with strips of paving, neat flower beds and rectangles of grass. It was too old, the shrubs were too dug down and Rudolf said he would not disturb the historic plants at the back. Verena had to confine Mr Camlett and his men to the first hundred metres, planting grass and making out paths of small pale stones. Instead of Versailles, a gentle slope led to a perfect lawn, shrubs cut into neat rounds standing like toy soldiers next to the paths, a stone fountain in the middle, fed by a tiny canal coming from the pond behind the trees. Celia thought you could imagine Marie Antoinette walking around it, never even needing to lift up the silk material of her gown. She jumped over the strip of grass that was to her the channel, the break between her garden – overgrown roses, willows and old ponds – and the ornamental perfection of her mother’s.

‘I’ll ask Marks if I can go with you.’ Soon, she supposed, she would have to ride side-saddle like a proper lady. Verena was already talking about letting down her skirts. She could not bear the thought of it, the heavy material down to her feet, making it impossible to walk or run or do anything, ever. She wouldn’t be able to catch tadpoles with Tom then.

Tom walked ahead. ‘No. Celia, don’t. He won’t like it.’

She shrugged. ‘If you say so.’ She would ask Rudolf to ask Marks. Then Tom would be allowed.

He smiled at her. ‘Are you looking forward to the party?’

‘Mama is fussing. I don’t know why. It’s the same thing every year. Mrs Rolls does it all.’

‘You enjoy it. You’ll do it yourself when you’re a grand madam in charge of a house like this.’ They edged past one of Verena’s ornamental flower beds. Tom drew his hand lightly over the fountain. ‘Even this stone’s hot,’ he said, absently.

She nudged him. ‘I shall go to live in Paris and read books. I told you.’ On their last shopping trip to London, she’d bought a copy of a book on dreams by Sigmund Freud by hiding it under a copy of
The Water-Babies.
Some of it did not seem very clear to her, but she was determined to reach the end. ‘I shall take an apartment by the river and discuss ideas.’ She would find her own
Professor Punter, who would tell her clever things. What was the point of sending her to Winterbourne and hiring Mr Janus (and his predecessors every summer before) if they really only wanted her to get married?

‘You’d have to make your own tea if you lived in Paris.’

‘I can make tea, thank you.’ Although really, she had to admit to herself, she rather hoped that she would be the type of rich lady intellectual who would have everything done for her, so she could think only of books.

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