The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

You remarked on Saturday that the Rani might have spared you a great deal of distress and disappointment if only she had earlier confided in you the truth that Lt Babcock was not your father. Further, you spoke of your determination to find out the record of the marriage between your mother and your father, whether at Gretna Green, or elsewhere. It is with the wish, then, of sparing you another fruitless search that I now write—for it is plain that no diligence can turn up any record of a marriage which never took place.

  What some people call the stain of illegitimate birth is, to my way of thinking, merely imaginary; but (as my India-born nieces and nephews know only too well) the world at large takes quite another view. I have never said anything of this matter to anyone but yourself, nor do I suppose that I ever shall.

  I remain, dear Constantia, your devoted friend,

  Catherine Fleming

  8

  SUCH A LETTER as that merited a treble seal.

  Lady Janet’s voice was ringing through the partition wall, her tone more didactic than usual. Mrs Chambers had gone up to town for the day to settle some matters relating to the furbishment of the Edinburgh house, leaving her children at Spring Gardens undefended; vulnerable to improvement. “‘Yet since I became a pilgrim, they have disowned me,’” declaimed Lady Janet’s reading voice, “‘as I also have rejected them; and therefore they were to me now no more than if they had never been of my lineage.’”

  Constantia pressed her hands against her ears. Until the age of nineteen, she had been Miss Constantia Babcock; had supposed herself the posthumous daughter of Lieutenant Babcock, an Englishman and a surveyor in the service of the East India Company—her mother’s “dear, dear Babcock,” dead of fever some weeks before Constantia’s birth. Had her mother intended to tell her, sometime, that dear, dear Babcock was not her real father; was merely her stepfather? Constantia had been ten years old when her mother died. When might her mother have intended to tell her? At twelve? At fourteen? Never?

  The Rani Anibaddh could have told her much sooner than she did. Why hadn’t she? “Why should I tell, if your mother never did?” she had said upon that dismal evening at the damp inn at Wivenhoe, when the tawdry truth had finally come to light. “Who ever suspected that Babcock was a cheat? He was kindness itself to your mother, you know—and I was in a good position to judge, because I was still your mother’s servant then, when the fever took him, not long after he’d married her—I mean, pretended to marry her. No, he made fools of us, me and your mother both. Who’d have guessed he had a wife living? But now—now that he’s proven a knave, a scoundrel!—I think you should know the truth: you are no bastard of his. No; your real father was your mother’s first husband, Mr Todd. Oh, yes; Babcock knew all about it. Your mother was well along with you when she married him, and she was no deceiver, whatever he may have been. How furious I am, to think that Babcock deceived us! Not the generous step-father willing to receive an unborn step-child; no! But a bigamous scoundrel, a liar, a cheater of women! Not only your poor mother, who thought she was truly married to him—oh yes, before witnesses, by the chaplain of his regiment; I was there myself!—but his real wife too, that dried-up old widow who spat at us today; and her dried-up spinster of a daughter. I’d spit in his face, if I could!”

  Constantia had begged the Rani to tell her everything, anything that could be remembered about this new father—this Mr Todd! What sort of man was he? Were they very happy together, this young couple who had sailed for India from Edinburgh, all those years ago? And how had he died so tragically, so soon?

  “Very much in the first transports of the, ah, joys of the married state, they seemed,” the Rani had said. She described Mr Todd as convivial, sociable, very fond of company and fun. Gently, she had told of the fatal incident in South Africa, during the voyage to Calcutta; he was buried at Cape Town, in the English cemetary.

  By telling her of Mr Todd, that evening three years ago, the Rani had redeemed Constantia from sudden illegitimacy.

  Now Mrs Fleming’s astonishing letter plunged Constantia once more into a new, second illegitimacy.

  Illegitimacy! What a word; what an idea! Fatherless. Nameless. Anonymous, in the most literal meaning of the word: unnamed, unclaimed, unowned. Ignominious.

  But after all, why did it matter? The misconduct of her parents had taken place long in the past, before she was born. This disgraceful fact had always been fact, even though she had not known of it. Here, now, unchanged by new knowledge of this old fact, was herself; equally unchanged was her daughter. Nothing was changed, nothing.

  “‘Yes, I met with Shame,’” rang Lady Janet’s voice through the partition, “‘but of all the men that I met with in my pilgrimage, he, I think, bears the wrong name. The others would take No for an answer, at least after some words of denial; but this bold-faced Shame would never have done.’”

  Still it rained. Though both babies were, for the moment, perfectly content in the night nursery with Hopey and the little boys, it was too wet for Constantia to escape to the garden. In hopes of muffling her disagreeable reflections—and the disagreeable voice from the next room—she took up the book which lay at hand: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Red cloth cover; no author’s name on the title page; anonymous. Look, here is the book itself. Judge that; do not trouble yourself over the question of who made it. That is no proper concern of yours.

  She tried to read. “Were we acquainted for the first time with the circumstances attending the production of an individual of our race,”—(oh! the tangling of limbs, in darkness! the panting! wetness! the force of it, the urgency!)—“we might equally think them degrading, and be eager to deny them, and exclude them from the admitted truths of nature.”

  What sort of a woman, then, can my mother have been? The most beautiful woman in any company, yes; tender and generous indeed—but was it only to Mr Todd and Lieutenant Babcock? What sort of man, then, was my father? And why, why had they not married?

  Of course my mother was not eager to explain to me that I was no child of Lieutenant Babcock’s.

  “She was very lovely, your mother,” Mrs Fleming had agreed.

  But why did it seem to matter?

  Constantia tried again to read, starting over at the top of the paragraph. “Is not this degrading? Degrading is a term expressive of a notion of the human mind, and the human mind is liable to prejudices which prevent its notions from being invariably correct.”

  Was she incorrect, then, in feeling degraded by the circumstances attending the production of herself?

  She turned back a page: Are we to draw back, asked the author of Vestiges, from our investigation of God’s works, “lest the knowledge of them should make us undervalue his greatness and forget his paternal character?”

  His paternal character!

  Her disagreeable thoughts only aggravated, she set the book firmly aside.

  By this time Lady Janet had finally gone downstairs, and now it was Nina’s voice that could be heard, continuously, through the partition. What was Constantia to do with this damning letter? If there had been a fire in her grate, she would have fed it to the fire—but the only fire in the house was in the kitchen. Instead, she tucked the letter safely alongside the Potamides in the pocket she wore under her skirt, and went to the doorway of the day nursery.

  Nina was reading aloud to her sisters while they worked. Each of the girls was silently hemming a handkerchief—cut out by Lady Janet from threadbare old sheets. (“I, for one, am perfectly content to wipe my nose on an unhemmed square of linen,” Jenny had told Lady Janet. “It is not for you, miss,” Lady Janet had replied tartly. “It is for the deserving poor. You might think of someone other than yourself. Do you ever see me sitting idle? No; there is always useful work to be done. But I shall leave The Pilgrim’s Progress here with you, and Miss Nina is to go on with reading it aloud to you girls as you work. You have had nothing but pleasure for many days now; it will do you no harm to devote a morning to the good of others.” And at
last she had gone downstairs to her cabinet, satisfied that the girls were now well provided with useful work to do, and an improving book to do it by.)

  Nina read aloud, “‘The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful as to your associates. There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman’s daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you.’”

  This was decidedly not The Pilgrim’s Progress—which lay discarded on the table beside Nina, handy to be snatched up quickly in case of Lady Janet’s coming upstairs again. Instead, for the improvement of her sisters’ minds, Nina had substituted Emma, and was reading from the first volume of that novel. Its other two volumes lay upon the low bookshelf beside the doorway. As Nina continued reading aloud, Constantia picked up the concluding volume. It fell open near the end, where her eye fell upon this: “The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.” She turned back to the title page. Emma was, of course, “By the author of Pride and Prejudice”—for here was an author, yet another, who chose to withhold her name, though it was no secret; who would not own the offspring of her own pen.

  Plenty of people would take pleasure in degrading you. A stain indeed.

  Constantia fetched her mantle (Parisian, prettily embroidered, and with two rows of deep fringing; but not quite as warm as one might wish when in Scotland, in late September) and plunged downstairs, across the glistening granite doorstep outside the library. She needed to be outdoors, despite the drizzle which still fell into the little walled paradise of Spring Gardens. She needed to be in the open air; to pace up and down the dripping-wet garden walks; to walk herself, if possible, into composure before the babies should require her again.

  THE CHAMBERS FAMILY had taken the house and grounds at Spring Gardens for the summer months, while their Edinburgh house at 1 Doune Terrace in the New Town underwent improvements and repairs. Unfortunately the Edinburgh builder had fallen behind (through no fault of his own, he stoutly asserted; he blamed the building-stone supplier and the treachery of the slaters) so that at Michaelmas, the 29th of September, the house in Edinburgh still was not habitable. It was agreed therefore between landlord and tenant to extend the family’s tenancy of Spring Gardens until the Scottish term day: Martinmas, on the 11th of November.

  There was only one difficulty: fires. Fires were not permitted by the terms of the Spring Gardens lease, as the chimneys had not been swept since no one knew when.

  In September, afternoon sunshine had still streamed warm and golden across the grass, though the nights grew very chilly; but early in October there came a day when white frost remained all day long in the blue shadows to the north of the house, and on the roof. Everyone complained and shivered in their summer clothes, and the children congregated in the warm kitchen, which annoyed the cook. “Mr Balderstone,” Mrs Chambers had declared to her husband early the next morning, “we must have fires. We cannot do without fires in the library and the day nursery, at least.”

  Mr Gunn in his bothy at the bottom of the garden had just downed his breakfast dram when there came a tap at the door. He folded away his newspaper and opened to the tenant who, with lidded hamper over his arm, was trailed by three of his lasses, each shivering with excitement, worry, and cold. “Good morning to you, Mr Gunn,” said Mr Chambers. “We have come to gather a few pigeons for a day’s outing. Not for the table, no; but for the carrying of a message. The birds are quite accustomed to you, I suppose? Aye; perhaps you will come out and advise us which ones to take, and help us to catch them.”

  “But how will they find their way, Daddy?” piped one of the lasses. “Will they not be lost?”

  “No, they will not be lost.”

  “And so a great distance, from Edinburgh to here!” cried another. “Can they fly so far as that?”

  “A mere matter of eight miles? That is nothing to pigeons, nothing at all,” their father assured them.

  At the door of the doocot, Mr Gunn had to knock loose its frosted bolt. Then, ducking under its low lintel, he led the others inside.

  “They can do far greater distances than that,” their father was saying. “Hundreds of miles; over mountains, across the sea. And cover the distance more rapidly than the swiftest horse, too. How else do you suppose, my lassies, that those Rothschilds on the London ’Change have managed to gather up such a fortune, these last ten years? By getting their intelligence first, you see—even before the express couriers could arrive from the Continent. Aye, they set up a pigeon express of their own across the Channel; and it answered very well indeed, until the general brokers banded together and refused to do any business until the papers—the second editions—should have come to hand, bringing the same news to all; and thus was pared away the advantage that the pigeon-men had held for a short time.”

  The stone-built walls of the round doocot tower rose some fifteen feet high, to open eaves where the pigeons passed in and out as they pleased, just beneath a slate roof. It was surprisingly warm inside, out of the sea breeze; and smelled of feathers, dung, and grain, rather ripe. There were shelves, perches, rails; but most of all, there were nest boxes lining the walls, all the way up and all the way around; dozens of pigeon-holes, like the inside of the post office. Scores of birds fixed their round bright eyes on the intruders; perhaps fifty or sixty birds, in every shade of iridescent blue, grey-blue, dove-grey, creamy-grey, all mottled and striped like mica or slate, and pure white, too. On some nests dwelt a patient complacent parent; its mate might be nearby, or out feeding itself. On ledges inside the open eaves were birds strutting, birds preening, ruffling, flapping, gossiping, courting, purling, chuckling, and flirting softly with one another. Some nests stood empty; some held pretty eggs by the pair; some held a pair of gawky half-fledged squabs.

  “Now, Mr Gunn,” said Mr Chambers, folding back the lid of his basket, “shed me a few braw birds, if you will be so good. Two or three sturdy cocks would do best, I suppose.”

  “Nay, but the sexes cannot be distinguished, one from the other,” said Gunn. “Not to look at. Sir.”

  “Those must be hens, though, sitting on their eggs,” said Mr Chambers.

  “Nay, they are quite unlike barnyard fowl,” said Mr Gunn. “Among pigeons, you know, the cocks and the hens sit alike, turn and turn about.”

  “Do they? Well, there is a doughty well-grown pair, quite equal to a day’s work, I should think,” proposed Mr Chambers, pointing to a nest rather overwhelmed by a plump complacent-looking couple of dull grey birds.

  “Those will never do,” said Mr Gunn. “Sir. For they were eggs not three weeks since. Though quite of a size now to have their necks wrung, and make their appearance on a dish at dinner. Aye, bigger, and heavier too, than full-fledged birds—for they do nothing but sit, all the long day, and devour the food proffered them by their hard-pressed parents. But they have never yet stirred from that nest, and cannot fly at all; not so far as the garden wall.”

  “What do you say, then, to that likely-looking bird? Already caught for us,” suggested Mr Chambers, of the lone pigeon confined to its separate pen in a small annex off the doocot.

  “Nor that,” said Mr Gunn. “That bird belongs to—to the wet nurse; ’tis not Spring Gardens–born, and would never return here; indeed, if it got the chance it would fly away instantly, to wherever it came from. That one is not to be let out on any account, poor creature.”

  “Well, Mr Gunn. Well. Perhaps you will be so good, then, as to select two or three eligible birds for us. Are there no idlers here with nothing better to do than lounge about and eat up the grain that should go by rights to honest birds bringing up families?”

  Quickly, Mr Gunn caught two sturdy birds for them: a stout dark one; and another, pale, with a frill to its hose. The birds scarcely struggled when Mr Gunn wrapped his quiet hands around their bodies, holding their wings. When he turned each bird over, s
o that one of the lasses could tie a short red ribbon around one of its legs, the birds lay quite still, only craning their necks around to keep their world upright. Once captured and flagged, they were popped into Mr Chambers’s hamper.

  “One more, for luck,” said the tenant; and Mr Gunn caught them a third, a slim purply-blue bird with iridescent black bands to its tail.

  “Now, Tuckie, my lass,” said Mr Chambers, “you and your sisters are to watch for the return of these messengers—each bearing its red pennant, to mark it out from all the others. I shall be sending a message for your mother later this morning.”

  “But the wives, or husbands, of these birds in your hamper—won’t they be wretched?” asked one of the lasses.

  “Not knowing what has become of their dear ones?” added another.

  “Ask Mr Gunn,” said their father.

  “Won’t they, Mr Gunn?”

  “Nay, lass,” replied Mr Gunn, “never fear. Your birds will be home again before their mates notice they are away. Pigeons are like the ewes at lambing, or the salmon at spawning. Or like your own dad. Pigeons always do find their way home, swifter and more faithful than Her Majesty’s penny post. And free besides.”

  “If the cost of their feeding is not reckoned into account,” said Mr Chambers. “Thank you, Mr Gunn.”

  Mr Gunn watched Mr Chambers, limping, lead his lasses back up the garden walk to the house. Mr Rhubarb with his lasses, thought Mr Gunn . . . for rhubarb was Rheum. It was familiar knowledge (throughout the Lothians, and beyond) that this Mr Chambers and his brother—now the respectable publishers of the extremely popular Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal—had raised themselves by their own fortitude, frugal self-denial, and honest industry from an early poverty full of hardship and humiliation to their present state of prosperity; of affluence and influence. Hadn’t this very Mr Robert Chambers formerly been—some twenty-five or thirty years ago—that thin, lame boy, Bob Chambers, living at nearby Joppa Pans? Thin, lame Bob Chambers, who walked every day (for there had been no tram, in those days) from here to Edinburgh, and back? In every weather, and limping all the way?