The Old House at Railes: A heartwarming rags to riches Victorian family saga

by Mary E. Pearce

  ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  ‘Speak to any of them, did you?’

  ‘Just one, that’s all.’

  ‘And did you get on all right with him?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  Rufus, on hearing Martin’s account of his meeting with Sidney Hurne, was gravely displeased.

  ‘I didn’t let you go to that party just for you to make enemies there. It isn’t no concern of yours what children the Hurnes employ in their mill, and telling them they’re breaking the law is just about the most foolish thing I’ve heard in all my born days. We’ve done work for them in the past, but I doubt if we’ll get the chance again, due to your foolishness. It’s your job, with people like that, to make yourself agreeable, not go falling out with them.’

  ‘Even when they make it plain that they’re looking down their noses at me?’

  ‘You don’t need to fret about that. You just stay mum and bide your time.’ Rufus paused, his gaze still severe. ‘I hope you didn’t have words amiss with nobody else you met there.’

  ‘No,’ Martin said, sullenly; and, seeking to distract his father’s attention, he repeated what Hugh Tarrant had told him concerning Charles Yuart’s ambitions and plans. ‘It seems he’s got some idea for extending Hainault Mill and installing the new power-looms there. He thinks the woollen trade will pick up if modern methods are introduced.’

  ‘Extending, eh?’ Rufus was all ears at once. ‘He will need stone for that. ‒ Unless he intends using brick!’

  ‘I don’t know what he intends. It’s only so much talk as yet. And it seems old Mr Yuart himself is against any such scheme to expand.’

  ‘Ah, but he’s sick,’ Rufus said, with a pounce. ‘I heard that myself just recently. He’s had a seizure, poor old man, and chances are he won’t last long. Young Mr Yuart’s the only son. ‒ Only child, too, I believe. ‒ And he’ll have a free hand when his father’s gone. That means work for builders, my boy, and that in turn means more work for us.’ He patted Martin on the back. ‘I’ve always said our time would come and now it may not be all that far off.’

  Often during the days that followed Martin wished he had never repeated what he had heard about Charles Yuart and his plans for extending Hainault Mill, for his father fastened on it in such a way that it became an obsession with him. He talked of it as a settled thing that ‘the new looms’ were coming to the Cullen Valley, and that this meant prosperity for the whole district and for Scurr Quarry especially.

  ‘Have you seen young Mr Yuart again, to find out what he’s got in mind?’ he would ask, whenever Martin had been to Railes.

  ‘No, I only saw him that once, on the evening of the party. And I never spoke to him even then, so there’s no question anyway of asking him about his plans.’

  ‘What about the Tarrants, then? Don’t they never talk of him?’

  ‘No. They do not.’

  In saying this Martin lied, for the twins in fact had mentioned the young man recently, though not in connection with the new looms. What they had told him was that Charles Yuart had sought, and been given, their father’s permission to pay his addresses to Katharine and that already there was an ‘understanding’ between them.

  ‘They are as good as engaged,’ Ginny had said. ‘But it can’t be made public at present because of old Mr Yuart being so ill.’

  This having been told him in confidence, he would not betray it for worlds. He had not even told his sister Nan but she, by chance and perhaps intuition, had somehow divined it for herself simply because, recently, she had seen Miss Katharine in Chardwell one day, driving with her sister in the governess-cart, around the crowded market square.

  ‘Did you tell me, after the party, that Miss Katharine had a suitor?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I did. But I was speaking out of turn and we must keep it to ourselves. Miss Katharine is more or less engaged but no announcement has been made because old Mr Yuart has taken a turn for the worse.’

  ‘Oh, dear. How sad for them all.’

  ‘What made you ask about it now?’

  ‘There was something about her … some look in her face … Oh, I can’t explain it exactly, but it made me remember what you’d said about her dancing with Mr Yuart and what Master Hugh had told you about there being an attachment between them. Somehow, as soon as I saw her, I thought to myself, “She is engaged”.’

  ‘And how come you know about such things?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just do, that’s all. She and Miss Ginny passed us quite close. There was a terrible crush in the square ‒ you know what it’s like on market day ‒ and they had to drive very slowly, which meant I had a good view of them. How very attractive they both are, and yet so different from each other. The one so dark, the other so fair, you would never think they were sisters at all.’

  ‘They’re not only different in looks,’ Martin said. ‘They’re different in every possible way.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know that, because you’ve told me so much about them. But even those deeper differences can be seen in their faces, don’t you think? I mean, you can see what they’re like underneath … what manner of people they really are … just by the way they hold themselves and the way they look at other folk.’ Nan paused, still seeking to define what she meant about the two Tarrant sisters, neither of whom she had ever met. ‘The difference is this ‒ Miss Ginny is pretty and knows it,’ she said, ‘but Miss Katharine is beautiful and doesn’t know it.’

  Increasingly, during that summer, Ginny was growing restless. The schoolroom had become irksome to her. She felt it was time to spread her wings. In September she would be going to London to spend three months, perhaps even longer, with some old friends of the family, who had a house in Belman Square. This it was that made her impatient with ordinary lessons. ‒ The only things worth learning now were those that would be useful to her while enjoying the London season.

  She practised her music assiduously, and was always sending to Metzler’s for the latest piano pieces and songs. She studied ladies’ fashion journals and worried whether her new gowns, being made for her in Sharveston, would prove smart enough for London wear. At sixteen she felt herself to be fully a woman. At the same time she recognized that she was still too excitable and, longing for her sister’s poise, she read books of advice on deportment and walked everywhere, indoors and out, with a carefully studied grace, much to her family’s amusement.

  The visit to London filled her mind. She could talk of little else but the parties the Wilsons had promised her and the conquests she expected to make.

  ‘Who knows?’ she said once. ‘I may even come back engaged!’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ her father said, ‘for I should want to see the young man and to know a great deal about him before you committed yourself to him.’

  ‘Oh, Papa! I should not engage myself to a man unless he was suitable in every way, especially with regard to his income.’

  ‘Are you as mercenary as you sound, my child?’

  ‘Now that is a very confusing thing to say, bearing in mind that you’ve always told us that we must be sure to marry well.’

  ‘Marry well, most certainly, but there are other considerations, my dear, besides the pecuniary one. And I do most sincerely hope you will marry a man you can really love.’

  ‘Oh, I shall love him, be sure of that! ‒ So long as he is rich enough!’

  While Ginny wished the time away, Martin wanted to slow it down. For him the summer was going too fast. ‘Only ten more weeks,’ Ginny would say. ‘Only nine.’ ‘Only eight.’ And for him, a sinking of the heart, because not only would his lessons end, but all further contact with Newton Railes. The future lay in wait for him: bleak, empty, colourless; though he said nothing of this to the Tarrants, even when, as happened sometimes, they spoke as though his friendship with them would continue indefinitely.

  ‘You’ll come and see us, of course,’ Ginny said. ‘When I’ve come back from London and Hugh is back from the Conti
nent ‒’

  ‘I hope you’ll come before that,’ Miss Katharine put in. ‘My father and I shall be at home and we should so like to see you and hear how you are getting on.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Katharine. You’re very kind.’

  But he knew he would not visit them. He had already made up his mind about that. They had been very good to him and he would be grateful all his life. But he would not be a hanger-on ‒ the thought of it was hateful to him. Probably, in a year or two, he and his father would be called in to carry out repairs on the house, but that was a different matter entirely. It lay in the unseen future and by then time and chance would have re-opened the natural gap that divided him from the family at Railes.

  Meanwhile, with an ache in his heart, he made the most of the time that was left. He was at Railes only one day a week now ‒ his father considered that quite enough ‒ and every moment of that one day had to be savoured to the full. Lessons on the paved terrace, followed by a stroll through the gardens with Hugh; the jokes, the discussions, the fellowship: would he ever know anything like it again?

  Afternoon sunlight on the garden; the old house, half in the shade, cool and quiet among its trees; the two girls on the rose parterre, Katharine in white, Ginny in pink, bending over the rose bushes, snipping the blooms, ‒ which, also, were white and pink, ‒ and placing them in the shallow basket that Katharine carried on her arm.

  ‘Why are you looking at us like that?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘May not a cat look at a queen?’

  ‘And which of us is the queen, pray?’

  ‘Which of me is the cat?’ he quipped.

  She was flirting with him quite openly these days, and her family often teased her about it. She was full of high spirits, especially during these last few weeks, and, eschewing elegant deportment and poise, she lived like a swallow on the wing. One day she took it into her head that they should all enact certain scenes, which she had selected, from Much Ado About Nothing.

  ‘I shall play Beatrice and Martin will play Benedick.’

  ‘Naturally,’ murmured Hugh.

  ‘Kate will be Hero, of course, and you will be Claudio. Also Don Pedro and Leonato.’

  ‘And shall I be pleached arbour, too?’

  ‘No. We shall enact the scenes in the Tudor garden. It will serve most beautifully for the arbour scene, and Benedick will be hidden behind the mulberry tree.’

  But Ginny’s venture into dramatics was spoilt by a sudden thunderstorm, which brought down such a torrent of rain that the players were obliged to flee, out of the walled Tudor garden, along the green walk, and into the shelter of the summer-house. They burst in, the four of them, breathless, laughing, and very wet, and stood looking at one another, trying to shake the worst of the rain from their hair and their clothes. Ginny had suffered much the worst for she, as befitted an actress, had reddened her cheeks and lips with rouge, and now, with the streaming rain, the colour had run down her face and throat and onto her pale yellow frock. The frock itself, being of light organdie, had become utterly soaked with the rain and clung to her body in limp, sodden folds. Her fair hair had escaped from its ribbon and hung, a mass of corkscrew curls, dangling about her red-streaked face.

  ‘What, my lady Disdain, is it you?’ Martin said, and made a great show, Benedick-fashion, of peering, astonished, into her face. ‘Are you living yet?’

  For a moment Ginny glared at him, her mortification made worse by the way her brother and sister applauded the scene; and during that moment she was, like a child, suspended between temper and tears. But then good humour intervened; her lips twitched; and she flew at him in a laughing fury, pounding his chest with her clenched fists.

  ‘Oh, you! You! You!’ she exclaimed, gritting her small white teeth at him. ‘You are a brute! I could kill you sometimes!’

  Laughing, she pounded and pummelled him: short, sharp blows with the edge of each fist; while he, partly-in self defence, partly in response to her closeness, flung his arms around her and held her tight, thus impeding the force of her blows. Briefly, she was his prisoner, enclosed in the circle of his arms, and he felt the slim young shape of her, warm through the folds of her wet clinging frock. He felt the curve of her waist and hips and, as she turned within his grasp, the soft but firm shape of her breasts lightly touching his wet-shirted chest.

  He loosened his hold and she escaped, to go dancing all round the summer-house, holding up her wet skirts so that they flared and made a ‘cheese’. She appeared self-absorbed, and hummed a tune, but the deep bright glance she threw at him was full of mischievous awareness; of delight in her own feminine powers; and conveyed, too, without shyness or shame her own sweetly sensual response.

  Katharine and Hugh were looking on. They had grown accustomed, recently, to their sister’s displays of coquetry, and they merely watched, indulgent, amused. But later that day, when they were all indoors, having dried themselves and changed their clothes, there came a moment when Hugh and Martin were alone together in the schoolroom, the two girls being next door, practising piano duets. And Hugh spoke, casually yet pointedly, of his twin sister’s behaviour.

  ‘Ginny’s a thorough baggage these days. She’s flirting madly with everyone. It’s all this excitement at going to London. It’s scattered her wits to the four winds. She takes no account of the harm she might do and my father says she will break a good many fellows’ hearts before she finally sobers down.’

  The two youths regarded each other. There was a good understanding between them.

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ Martin said. ‘She shall not break mine, I promise you.’

  In August there were more thunderstorms, bringing the summer to an end. September came in dull and cold but on Martin’s last day at Railes a fitful sun brought some warmth. The Tarrants saw him off at the door and he shook hands with each of them, thanking them for all they had done, and Miss Katharine especially.

  ‘You will come and see us, won’t you, Martin?’

  ‘Of course he will,’ Tarrant said. ‘There’s work for him and his father here, as soon as I can see some chance of finding the money to pay for it.’

  ‘ “A gentleman”,’ Hugh quoted, ‘ “is a man who can afford not to pay his bills”.’ He looked at Martin with a slow, gentle smile. ‘Do you remember? The first day you came? That is what you said to us.’

  ‘Yes, I remember only too well, but I wish you did not,’ Martin said.

  Ginny would not shake hands with him. Instead she slipped her arm into his.

  ‘I’ll come with you part of the way and say my adieu in private,’ she said.

  They walked together through the gardens, with the two dogs, Tessa and Sam, lolloping ahead of them.

  ‘Will you miss me?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I shall miss you all.’

  ‘You’ll think of me, then, while I’m away?’

  ‘I daresay I shall ‒ now and then.’

  ‘Is that all? Only now and then?’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Will you think of me?’

  ‘Of course I shall!’ She squeezed his arm. ‘But I’ll be most terribly busy, you know, what with all the parties and concerts and things, and going to see the sights of the town.’

  ‘Whilst I shall have nothing to do,’ he said drily, ‘except earn my living, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a sudden frown. ‘Such hard, heavy work it is, too, handling stone all day long. I wish you did not have to do such work. You are worth something better than that. And that horrid mean old father of yours doesn’t even pay you a wage. You ought to speak to him about that. You ought to stand up for yourself.’

  ‘I have tried once or twice but it hasn’t done much good so far.’

  ‘Then you must try again and again until you get him to see some sense. You are not just a boy now. You’re a grown man, more or less, and it’s time he began to treat you like one. You may tell him I said so if you like.’

  Still arm-in-arm, t
alking together, they strolled along the green walk, down the steps past the summer-house, and along the path by the round pool, until they came to the wicket gate leading out into the park.

  ‘This is where we must say goodbye.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ she said. ‘I didn’t walk with you all this way just to shake hands with you. I could have done that back at the house.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I want you to kiss me, of course.’

  ‘Ah. I thought it might be that.’

  ‘Of course you did. You knew all the time.’

  They looked at each other steadily, she frankly provocative, he half responding, half holding back; enjoying a certain masculine scorn; quite deliberately teasing her, to show that he would not be teased.

  When she came close to him, however, his arms went round her immediately, and when his lips touched hers there was no question of holding back, nor any question of masculine scorn. Ginny’s mouth was gentle but firm and she kissed him, not in a teasing way, but with honest enjoyment, letting him know by her delicate sigh and the movement of her lips against his that the kiss was as sweet to her as to him.

  She drew back at last, breathless and flushed, and touched his lips with her finger-tips, as though putting her seal on them.

  ‘You’re the first man I’ve ever kissed. In that particular way, I mean.’

  ‘I doubt if I shall be the last. In fact, by the time you come back from London, I shall probably be just one of many.’

  ‘So that is what you think of me?’ She tilted her face, laughing at him. ‘Anyway, it won’t alter the fact that you were the first, ‒ the very first. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  Martin took time to consider this.

  ‘Decide what it means to you,’ he said, ‘and by that you’ll know what it means to me.’

  ‘Such deviousness does not become you, Signor Benedick,’ she said. ‘But now it really is goodbye.’

  Again she reached up to him, to kiss him lightly on the cheek. Then, with a last vivid blue glance, she turned and hurried blithely away, half walking, half running, along the path, pausing just once and waving to him before the shrubbery hid her from view.