The Weeping Ash (5 page)

While the two sisters were disputing this, Bet declaring that Martha would have to do as her father bade her, and Martha stoutly affirming that she would not, Fanny seized the opportunity to slip upstairs and fetch the rush basket in which she kept her needlework. She had hemmed a set of handkerchiefs and was embroidering them with Thomas's initials; such a gift, it had been decided by her family, would constitute a suitable offering from bride to groom.

When she returned to the parlor, the girls seemed to have shifted their ground; they were now arguing about the merits of Petworth as a place of residence.

“I say it's none so bad,” Bet said shortly. “I saw a pretty-enough-looking haberdasher's shop as we came through—and a tailor—and a deal of shoe shops. And at least, as it's such a small place, perhaps Pa won't object to our walking out on our own; at all events, there's no sailors here.”

“Well, I know
Pa
don't like the town,” said Martha, “for I heard him say, if it weren't for getting Cousin Juliana's house at such a low rent, there's no town in the kingdom where he wouldn't sooner set up house.”

“How strange! I wonder why?” remarked Fanny involuntarily.

Bet said, “Oh, I daresay it's because it is such a muddy, poky little hole, where he's not likely to take many men for his impress.”

“No,” contradicted her sister, “it's because he don't care above half for Lord Egremont, up at Petworth House.”

“La! Why ever not?” demanded Bet.

Martha glanced toward the door and said in a lower tone, “Lord Egremont has only mistresses, not a proper wife! And I believe one of them lived in
this very house
, at one time, before our cousin had it. She was a French lady, and Lord Egremont built the house for her, and she died of a putrid fever.”

“Who told you that?”

“Kate. She heard it from the chimney sweep.”

“But anyway,” objected Bet, “what's Lord Egremont to Pa? He hardly ever mixes with the gentry, wherever we are. Nobody wants to meet an impress officer.”

Both sisters fell into a silence of depression, considering this unpalatable truth. But then Martha said stoutly:

“But still, our cousin Juliana was a friend of Lord Egremont, so perhaps he
will
come to call.”

“I daresay Pa won't allow us to see him.”

To turn the conversation, Fanny inquired, “Tell me about your cousin Juliana. Did you know her well?”

“La, no! She's gone abroad. We never met her,” Bet replied in her flat way. But Martha cried out:

“She was a monstrous pretty girl, though! That's her miniature, over the pianoforte. And she had all manner of adventures in the French Revolution—they were going to cut off her head, but she floated over to England in an air balloon—and she married a Dutch count—and was left a whole heap of money by a rich old nabob uncle in India who was no better than he should be. So that was why she wrote to Pa—”

“The uncle was not in India, Martha—he had come back and died in England.”

“Well, what does it matter where he died? Pray don't be so particular!” exclaimed Martha impatiently. “Then Cousin Juliana was given this house by the French lady who died—so she offered it to Pa to live in while she was abroad—”

“Did she share her fortune with any other relations?” inquired Fanny, fascinated by this prodigal generosity which (she was obliged to admit to herself) seemed a characteristic wholly lacking in Juliana Paget's cousin Thomas.

“Yes, I believe she writ to an old lady cousin in Bath—but she had already died, falling from a carriage—and two more cousins out in India.”

“Pa was rare put about when he learned she'd done
that
,” commented Bet sourly.

“Why? Who are the cousins in India?”

“They are twins—by-blows of the old nabob,” Martha began, and received a very quelling look from her sister. “Well—why shouldn't I tell it, Bet? She”—with a meaningful glance at Fanny—“she's a married lady now; no harm in her knowing it.”

Fanny eased her aching spine against the hard upright back of her Windsor chair and wondered rather dismally what the state of being married had to do with the story of the twins out in India.

“'Tisn't a proper tale for you to tell,” Bet said primly, and pressed her pale lips together.

“Oh, stuff! Anyway, Miss Fox told me, and
she
wasn't married! It was this way, you see, Fanny. The old nabob in India—General Henry Paget, that is, who left his fortune to Cousin Juliana—had a pair of love children by a lady who was half a Portugee and half a heathen Hindoo—”

“
Martha! Will
you mind your tongue! What would Papa say?”

“What could he say? It is no more than the truth, and that is why he was so put out when he heard that Cousin Juliana had writ to the twins as well as to us. They call themselves Paget, though I daresay they've no claim to, since their mother was never married to the nabob, or not that anybody knows—”

“But if he was so rich,
surely
he left his children provided for?” said Fanny, puzzled. “Even if they were not born in wedlock?”

“No,
that
he didn't. It seems, when he came back to England, he had the intention to send the Portugee lady some money, but when he wrote to where he left her, she was gone, nobody knew where. And so then he said, ‘Devil fly away with her, she's gone off with somebody else. I wash my hands of her and the twins—'”

“But there might have been a dozen reasons why she was not where he had left her,” objected Fanny, distressed at this seeming injustice.

“Oh, ay, well, I daresay he was in the right of it. He knew her, after all,” replied Martha. “Anyway, after he had left all the money to Cousin Juliana she met with some army officer who had been in north India, and he said he had heard tell that the Portugee lady had died, but he thought he knew the direction where the twins might be found. So Cousin Juliana wrote to them. But 'tis all Zanzibar to a nutmeg that the letter never reached them,” said Martha reflectively. “Or we'd have heard by this time. I think it's a sad shame.”

Bet, who had been listening with a self-righteously disapproving look, said dryly:

“Oh yes, for sure you'd clap your hands for joy if they was to come walking in the door now!” She broke off her thread with a sharp twist.

“Why—did Cousin Juliana invite them
here
?” Fanny asked in astonishment.

“Ay, that was the one thing that stuck in Pa's craw. ‘Use my house, and welcome,' says Cousin Juliana to him, ‘for I shan't be needing it myself while I'm off with my dear Count van Welcker in Demerara, and I'd be lief to think there was a happy family living here.'” She rolled up her eyes with a derisive grimace and so missed her sister's expression. Bet's pale, sardonic eye moved around the room and then fixed on Martha with a look so strange, so bleak, that Fanny felt a curious cold shiver move between her shoulder blades.

“‘All I ask is,'” continued Martha with histrionic relish, “‘all I ask,' says Cousin Juliana, ‘is that, if ever Great-Uncle Henry's children should come to England, you give them houseroom in the Hermitage, and a kind welcome—'”

Here Bet sniffed to herself, taking little picking stitches in the square of canvas she was embroidering.

“‘For after all,'” finished Martha, “'tis
his
money we're all living on.' Which Pa could not deny.”

“They'll never turn up,” said Bet with finality, biting off her thread.

“'Tis certain Pa hopes not,” said Martha.

“How old are they? The twins?” Fanny imagined a pair of tiny golden-haired children—the only twins she had ever seen were those of flaxen-headed Ned Woodley, the carpenter at Sway—wandering forlornly hand in hand down the gangplank of a huge ship.

“Who's to say? 'Tis four, five years since old Great-Uncle Henry Paget died. They'll be in their teens, maybe,” Martha said carelessly. “If they did come, it would be somebody else to talk to, at least.”

She gave a great yawn, hardly bothering to cover her teeth, which were white and even, much better than those of her sister. Bet's, in keeping with her clumsy nose and undershot jaw, were happy and yellow as a bad ear of corn.

“Lord,” Martha went on, walking restlessly over to kneel on the window seat and look out of the black window, “Lord, it feels as if we had been in Petworth an age already. I declare, I almost wish that Miss Fox had come with us!”

“Who is Miss Fox?” Fanny inquired and learned from Martha that this lady had been the Paget girls' governess until the remove to Petworth.

“But then Pa gave her her marching orders. He said he reckoned I was too old for a governess—and Bet is, that's of course!—and he was pleased as Punch to get rid of her. Now he can save her wages and you will teach Patty for nothing. Poor Foxy—how she did weep and wail and take on, when Pa told her she was to go.”

Martha gave a sudden chuckle at the recollection, and Fanny thought she noticed another swift, significant look between the sisters.

“How long had Miss Fox been with you?” she inquired—not that she was particularly interested in the ex-governess, but she felt more at ease while there was a trickle of conversation to attend to, while her own thoughts could be kept at bay. Here she was, trapped in this house, with these two dull girls, in whom she did not think it would ever be possible to confide or invest any affection, and their father… But it was best hot to think about
him
. Also she could not conceal from herself that there seemed to be strange undercurrents in this family, curious elements of hostility and tension, and not only relating to herself. What did the girls feel toward each other, toward their father? She had come into an unhappy household, Fanny thought.

“Miss Fox?” replied Bet, careless. “Oh dear, she was with us an age—since long before Mama began to fail in her health—ten, twelve years, I daresay.”

“She's old now—thirty at least; on the shelf,” agreed Martha. “Though, in any case, who would marry a governess? However, at one time, I believe she quite hoped she'd nabble Pa, when she was in her twenties.”

The sisters laughed quietly together.

Fanny said, “She must have been very young, then, when she first became your governess?” deciding that, although Bet appeared to behave with more hostility toward her personally, Martha seemed the more spiteful-natured of the pair.

“It was a fine position for her,” Bet said sharply. “She'd only been a nursery governess before that. In those days, Mama used to teach us.”

“But then Mama began to fail in her wits,” explained Martha, and earned an irritable glance from her elder sister.

“Oh dear—I did not know that about your mother,” Fanny said faintly.

Bet raised pale eyes from the needle she was threading. “How should you? It was not generally known.”

But Martha went on irrepressibly—from a desire, Fanny suspected, to annoy her sister:

“Lord, yes, our mama was crazy-mad any time these ten years past, and whatever you may say, Bet, it did get about; I am sure that is why none of the beaux in Gosport would offer for us, and why we were glad to move here, for I daresay they all thought we might take after Mama. Though I believed what Dr. Plornish told us; he always did say it was not true madness and that we need not fear we would grow like her, but that, being of delicate health to begin with, too much lying-in had turned her wits.”

“Martha! Mind your tongue!”

“Oh, la, Bet, how you do fuss on—our stepmama is a married lady, ain't she? Twelve babies in thirteen years,” went on Martha significantly, with her eyes all the time fixed on Fanny's face, “and all but three born dead; wouldn't you think that might be enough to turn anybody's wits,
Mrs. Paget
?”

Fanny felt the heat of the fire burn in her cheeks; there was a fierce throbbing in her temples and a dry sourness on her tongue. Her back ached and her feet were frozen with cold. Dizzily, she thrust her work into the rush basket and, standing up, said:

“I am very weary from traveling, I think I had best go upstairs.”

She felt that she could not bear to remain in the room with these girls another moment.

Bet said, “Pa won't be pleased if you miss evening prayers.”

However the front door slammed at that moment and Mr. Paget, putting his head into the room, remarked:

“It is too late now for tea. I found a great deal of work awaiting me. We had best go to prayers directly.”

The servants had already assembled in the dining room for this ceremony. Mr. Paget read the prayers from a book, and afterward, with Jem and Kate, went around the house making sure that all doors were locked and the windows closed and shuttered. Then the family and servants retired to bed, Jem to sleep in a small basement cubbyhole, the maids in one of the attics, Martha in a room that she shared with Patty, while Bet had a small room to herself. Thomas and his bride retired again to the master bedroom which, Fanny was relieved to find, had been set in order during the course of the evening; the bed had been remade with clean sheets, her clothes put away, and a hip bath of hot water brought up.

This stood steaming behind a screen, and Thomas made use of it first.

“Females can't stand water so hot as a man,” he said. “No use in heating up two baths. Coals and firing cost money, as I trust you will bear in mind.”

He spent some time in the bath, splashing and grunting; then it was Fanny's turn. She, though far from eager to go to bed, found no inducement to loiter; the water was no more than lukewarm by now, besides being somewhat thick and scummy from her husband's ablutions. He, already in bed, soon became impatient.