Cake was offered to us by Cready and by Brigid. It was not my place in the drawing-room to check the manners of George Arthur, but they do leave much to he desired. Old Miss Larvey, who was my predecessor and governess to all four children, had clearly become slack before her death. I smiled a little at George Arthur, and was unable to resist moving my fingers slightly in his direction, a gesture to indicate that a more delicate consuming of the cake would not be amiss. He pretended, mischievously, not to notice.
‘Will the road go round Bright Purple Hill?’ Emily inquired. ‘It would be beautiful if it did.’
It could be made to do so, her father agreed. Yes, certainly it could go round the northern slopes at least. He would speak to Erskine.
‘Now, what could be nicer,’ he resumed, ‘than a picnic of lunch by the lake, then a drive through the silver birches, another pause by the abbey, continuing by the river for a mile, and home by Bright Purple Hill? This road, Miss Heddoe, has become my pride.’
I smiled and nodded, acknowledging this attention in silence. I knew that there was more to the road than that: its construction was an act of charity, a way of employing the men for miles around, since the failure of their potato crops had again reduced them to poverty and idleness. In years to come the road would stand as a memorial to this awful time, and Mr Pulvertaft’s magnanimity would be recalled with gratitude.
‘Might copper beech trees mark the route?’ suggested Adelaide, her dumpling countenance freshened by the excitement this thought induced. Her eyes bulged behind her spectacles and I noticed that her mother, in glancing at her, resisted the impulse to sigh.
‘Beech trees indeed! Quite splendid!’ enthused Mr Pulvertaft. ‘And in future Pulvertaft generations they shall arch a roof, shading our road when need be. Yes, indeed there must be copper beech trees.’
The maids had left the drawing-room and returned now with lamps. They fastened the shutters and drew the curtains over. The velvets and silks changed colour in the lamplight, the faces of the portraits became as they truly were, the faces of ghosts.
A silence gathered after the talk of beech trees, and I found myself surprised at no one mentioning the wonder Fogarty had told me of, the marks of Christ on a peasant child. It seemed so strange and so remarkable, an occurrence of such import and magnitude, that I would hardly have believed it possible that any conversation could take place in the house without some astonished reference to it. Yet none had been made, and the faces and the voices in the drawing-room seemed as untouched by this visitation of the miraculous as they had been by Adelaide’s labouring on the piano. In the silence I excused myself and left, taking George Arthur with me, for my time to do so had come.
October 23rd, 1847. I am homesick, I make no bones about it. I cannot help dwelling on all that I have left behind, on familiar sounds and places. First thing when I awake I still imagine I am in England: reality comes most harshly then.
While I write, Emily and George Arthur are conversing in a corner of the nursery. She has come here, as she does from time to time, to persuade him against a military career. I wish she would not do so in this manner, wandering in and standing by the window to await the end of a lesson. It is distracting for George Arthur, and after all this is my domain.
‘What I mean, George Arthur, is that it is an uncomfortable life in a general sort of way.’
‘Captain Coleborne does not seem uncomfortable. When you look at him he doesn’t give that impression in the least.’
‘Captain Coleborne hasn’t lived in a barracks in India. That leaves a mark, so people say.’
‘I should not mind a barracks. And India I should love.’
‘I doubt it, actually. Flies carry disease in India, the water you drink is putrid. And you would mind a barracks because they’re rough and ready places.’
‘You’d drink something else if the water was putrid. You’d keep well away from the flies.’
‘You cannot in India. No, George Arthur, I assure you you enjoy your creature comforts. You’d find the uniform rough on your skin and the food unappetizing. Besides, you have a family duty here.’
The nursery is a long, low-ceilinged room, with a fire at one end, close to which I sit as I write, for the weather has turned bitter. The big, square lessons-table occupies the centre of the room, and when Fogarty brings my tray he places it on the smaller table at which I’m writing now. There are pictures on the walls which I must say I find drab: one, in shades of brown, of St George and the Dragon; another of a tower; others of farmyard scenes. The nursery’s two armchairs, occupied now by George Arthur and Emily, are at the other end with a rug between them. The floor is otherwise of polished board.
‘Well, the truth is, George Arthur, I cannot bear the thought of your being killed.’
With that, Emily left the nursery. She smiled in her graceful manner at me, her head a little to one side, her dark, coiled hair gleaming for a moment in a shaft of afternoon sun. I had not thought a governess’s position was difficult in a household, but somehow I am finding it so. I belong neither with the family nor the servants. Fogarty, in spite of calling me ‘miss’, addresses me more casually than he does the Pulvertafts; his sister is scarcely civil.
‘Do they eat their babies, like in the South Seas?’ George Arthur startled me by asking. He had crossed to where I sat and in a manner reminiscent of his father stood with his back to the fire, thereby blocking its warmth from me.
‘Do who eat their babies, George Arthur?’
‘The poor people.’
‘Of course they don’t.’
‘But they are hungry. They have been hungry for ever so long. My mother and sisters give out soup at the back gate-lodge.’
‘Hungry people do not eat their babies. And I think, you know, it’s enemies, not babies, who are eaten in the South Seas.’
‘But suppose a family’s baby did die and suppose the family was hungry–’
‘No, George Arthur, you must not talk like that.’
‘Fogarty says he would not be surprised.’
‘Well, she has settled down, I think,’ Mrs Pulvertaft remarks to her husband in their bedroom, and when he asks her whom she refers to she says the governess.
‘Pleasant enough, she seems,’ he replies. ‘I do prefer, you know, an English governess.’
‘Oh yes, indeed.’
George Arthur’s sisters have developed no thoughts about Miss Heddoe. They neither like nor dislike her; they do not know her; their days of assessing governesses are over.
But George Arthur’s aren’t. She is not as pretty as Emily or Charlotte, George Arthur considers, and she is very serious. When she smiles her smile is serious. The way she eats her food is serious, carefully cutting everything, carefully and slowly chewing. Often he comes into the nursery to find her eating from the tray that Fogarty carries up the back staircase for her, sitting all alone on one side of the fireplace, seeming very serious indeed. Miss Larvey had been different somehow, although she’d eaten her meals in much the same position, seated at the very same table, by the fire. Miss Larvey was untidy, her grey hair often working loose from its coils, her whole face untidy sometimes, her tray untidily left.
‘Now it is transcription time,’ Miss Heddoe says, interrupting these reflections. ‘Carefully and slowly, please.’
Fogarty thinks about the governess, but hides such thoughts from his sister. Miss Heddoe will surely make a scene, exclaiming and protesting, saying to the Pulvertafts all the things a butler cannot. She will stand in the drawing-room or the hall, smacking out the truth at them, putting in a nutshell all that must be said. She will bring up the matter of the stigmata found on the child, and the useless folly of the road, and the wisdom of old Hugh Pulvertaft. She will be the voice of reason. Fogarty dwells upon these thoughts while conversing with his sister, adept at dividing his mind. His faith is in the governess.