Grace told Hope and me at great length about this Masque, just after it happened. We sat over tea in Grace’s rose-silk-hung sitting room. Her tea service was very fine, and she presided over the silver urn like a grand and gracious hostess, handing round her favourite cups to her beloved sisters as if we too were grand ladies, I put mine down hastily; after years of taking tea with my sisters, I still eyed the little porcelain cups askance, and preferred to wait until I could return to my study and ring for my maid to bring me a proper big mug of tea, and some biscuits.
Hope looked vague and dreamy; I was the only one who saw any humour in Grace’s story—although I could appreciate that it had not been amusing for the principals—but then, I was the only one who read poetry for pleasure. Grace blushed when she mentioned the baby, and admitted that while Robbie was right, of course, she was a weak woman and wished—oh, just the littlest bit!—that they might have been married before he left. She was even more beautiful when she blushed. Her sitting room set her high colour off admirably.
Those first months after Robbie set sail must have been very long ones for her. She who had been the toast of the town now went to parties very seldom; when Hope and Father protested that there was no need of her living like a nun, she smiled seraphically and said she truly didn’t wish to go out and mix with a great many people anymore. She spent most of her time “setting her linen in order” as she put it; she sewed very prettily—I don’t believe she had set a crooked stitch since she hemmed her first sheet at the age of five—and she already had a trousseau that might have been the envy of any three girls.
So Hope went out alone, with our chaperone, the last of our outgrown governesses, or sponsored by one of the many elderly ladies who thought she was just delightful. But after two years or so, it was observed chat the incomparable Hope also began to neglect many fashionable gatherings; an incomprehensible development, since no banns had been published and no mysterious wasting diseases were whispered about. It was made comprehensible to me one night when she crept into my bedroom, weeping.
I was up late, translating Sophocles. She explained to me that she had to tell someone, but she couldn’t be so selfish as to bother Grace when she was preoccupied with Robbie’s safety—“Yes, I understand,” I said patiently, although I privately thought Grace would be the better for the distraction of someone else’s problems—but she, Hope, had fallen in love with Gervain Woodhouse, and was therefore miserable. I sorted out this curious statement eventually.
Gervain was an estimable young man in every way—but he was also an ironworker in Father’s shipyard. His family were good and honest people, but not at all grand, and his prospects were no more than modest. He had some ideas about the ballasting of ships, which Father admired, and had been invited to the house several times to discuss them, and then stayed on to tea or supper. I supposed that this was how he and my sister had met. I didn’t follow Hope’s account of their subsequent romance very well, and didn’t at all recognize her anguished lover as the reserved and polite young man that Father entertained. At any rate, Hope concluded, she knew Father expected her to make a great match, or at least a good one, but her heart was given.
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “Father only wants you to be happy. He’s delighted with the prospect of Robbie as a son-in-law, you know, and Grace might have had an earl.”
Hope’s dimples showed. “An elderly earl.”
“An earl is an earl,” I said severely. “Better than your count, who turned out to have a wife in the attic. If you think you’ll be happiest scrubbing tar out of burlap aprons, Father won’t say nay. And,” I added thoughtfully, “he will probably buy you several maids to do the scrubbing.”
Hope sighed. “You are not the slightest bit romantic.”
“You knew that already,” I said. “But I do remind you that Father is not an ogre, as you know very well if you’d only calm down and think about it. He himself started as a shipwright; and you know that still tells against us in some circles. Only Mother was real society. Father hasn’t forgotten. And he likes Gervain.”
“Oh, Beauty,” Hope said; “but that’s not all, Ger only stays in the city for love of me; he doesn’t really like it here, nor ships and the sea. He was born and raised north of here, far inland. He misses the forests. He wants to go back, and be a blacksmith again.”
I thought about this. It seemed like the waste of a first-class ironworker, I was also, for all my scholarship, not entirely free of the city-bred belief that the north was a land rather overpopulated by goblins and magicians, who went striding about the countryside muttering wild charms. In the city magic was more discreetly contained, in little old men and women with bright eyes, who made up love potions and cures for warts in return for modest sums. But if this didn’t bother Hope, there was no reason it should bother me.
I said at last: “Well, we’ll miss you. I hope you won’t settle too far away—but it’s still not an insurmountable obstacle. Look here: Stop wringing your hands and listen to me. Would you like me to talk to Father about it first, since you’re so timid?”
“Oh, that would be wonderful of you,” my bright-eyed sister said eagerly. “I’ve made Gervain promise not to say anything yet, and he feels that our continued silence is not right.” It was a tradition in the family that I could “get around” Father best: I was the baby, and so on. This was another of my sisters’ tactful attempts at recompense for the way I looked, but there was some truth to it Father would do anything for any of us, but my sisters were both a little in awe of him.
“Umm, yes,” I said, looking longingly at my books. “I’ll talk to Father—but give me a week or so, will you please, since you’ve waited this long. Father’s got business troubles, as you may have noticed, and I’d like to pick my time.”
Hope nodded, cheerful again, called me a darling girl, kissed me, and slipped out of the room. I went back to Sophocles. But to my surprise, I couldn’t concentrate; stories I’d heard of the northland crept in and disrupted the Greek choruses. And there was also the fact that Ger, safe and sensible Ger, found our local witches amusing; it was not that he laughed when they were mentioned, but that he became very still. In my role of tiresome little ii sister, I had harassed him about this, till he told me a little.’’ Where I come from, any old wife can mix a poultice to take off warts; it’s something she learns from her mother with how to hem a shirt and how to make gingerbread. Or if she can’t, she certainly has a neighbour who can, just as her husband probably has a good useful spell or two to stuff into his scarecrow with the straw, to make it do its work a little better.” He saw that he had his audience’s fixed attention, so he grinned at me, and added: “There are even a few dragons left up north, you know. I saw one once, when I was a boy, but they don’t come that far south very often.” Even I knew that dragons could do all sorts of marvelous things, although only a great magician could master one.
* * *
My opportunity to discuss Hope’s future with Father never arrived. The crash came only a few days after my sister’s and my midnight conversation. The little fleet of merchant ships Father owned had hit a streak of bad luck; indeed, since Robert Tucker had set sail in the White Raven three years ago, with the Windfleet, the Stalwart, and the Fortune’s Chance to bear her company, nothing had gone right. Shipments were canceled, crops were poor, revolutions disturbed regular commerce; Father’s ships were sunk in storms, or captured by pirates; many of his warehouses were destroyed, and the clerks disappeared or returned home penniless.