by E. J. Levy
I had hidden myself away to avoid flirtations, which were as regular a part of our recreation as whist, and I noticed that she seemed to shy from these as well. The next morning, I came on her reading in the shade of the garden while the others were off boating or gossiping in the drawing room over needlepoint. I was loath to disturb her, given my own dread of interruption, but as I began to withdraw, she spoke. Or rather she seemed to speak, although in truth she merely glanced up, saying nothing. Nor did I. I bowed and withdrew.
I was startled that evening to find that we were to be seated together at dinner.
Lord Basken commenced to introduce us when my companion said, “We have met.”
I raised an eyebrow at this. “I cannot imagine that I would forget our meeting.”
“In the garden. Do you not recall? We were introduced by the flowers. But Mr. Perry declined their entreaties; he seemed thoroughly immune to their charms.”
“But not yours, surely,” Lord Basken interjected.
“Surely not,” I said.
“You are the young Mr. Perry, am I correct?” she asked.
I bowed. She was introduced as Miss Erskine, the niece of Lord Basken.
“It is a pleasure,” I said, leaning over and kissing her hand.
“Why, your hands are as delicate as a girl’s, sir,” she said.
“Perhaps a girl’s are as strong as a man’s?”
“Do you suppose that women possess the strength of men?”
“I am confident they possess the wit.”
“And what, may I ask, inspires such confidence? Have you sisters?”
“One. And I know from experience that a woman’s intellect can be every bit the equal of a man’s, even greater.”
“Then how do you explain our lack of equal attainments?” she asked.
“It’s obvious, is it not? How can women equal men if they lack access to higher learning? There is not a woman known has studied in Edinburgh’s great medical school or dissection theaters.”
“Surely no woman would seek to do so. Women are interested in life, not death.”
“Would Lady Macbeth not argue to the contrary?”
“But she’s a fiction.”
“But Lucrezia Borgia is not, nor Queen Elizabeth, or Anne Boleyn. May not the fiction be women’s gentler nature? In Ireland, I recall seeing a peasant woman behead a chicken with an ax; she seemed utterly unencumbered by the gentle reputation of her sex.”
“And would I make a more fascinating figure with an ax in hand rather than a book?”
“I cannot conceive of anything that could make you more fascinating than you are.”
She smiled and blushed, averting her gaze, when dinner was announced and we went in.
It was thrilling to have such attention paid to me by a woman of rank, even as it terrified. I had feared women’s greater acumen, but discovered that, like men, they were blinded by vanity, if of another sort; women endeavored to treat every gentleman’s statements as wit, to refashion—with their laughter or a gentle touch of fingers on the sleeve—a comment about the weather into some astronomical insight or romantic double entendre.
And I understood for the first time the arrogance of men, the sense of self-importance that had blinded my brother to the possibility of failure and his own ignorance—it was a gift conferred by feminine attentions, the flattering admiration of women, who sought to see in men the mythic authority they pretended to possess.
I discovered that women of rank did not see through me, as I’d feared; even well-born women were so habituated to seek the attentions of men that they appeared hardly to notice those whose attentions they sought. Women flirted the way men sparred, to win prestige and secure their standing. As in hunting or a duel, the target was often largely irrelevant. What mattered was taking the shot.
“Is it true that you are a military man, Mr. Perry?” one of our company asked from across the table, a fashionable young man whose name I did not know.
“It is Mr. Perry’s intention to be an army surgeon,” replied Lord Basken.
“I would not have taken you for a soldier,” my graceful dinner companion said.
“Seems more likely to play the part of a poet,” said the nameless young man.
“I allow that I am taken by wanderlust. I should like to see Caracas, now that Venezuela is independent of Spain.” In truth, a military career would enable me to travel—allowing for a rapid rise in the more fluid society of the colonies—which I hoped might help me avoid detection. Even my stays at Dryburgh Abbey and at Dr. Anderson’s caused me concern; I felt too readily observed.
“And where is your home?” Miss Erskine asked.
I hesitated. It was a question that pained me, despite a practiced answer. A question I’d learned to dread, and not yet learned to answer easily. But looking into the expectant face of my interlocutor, I found a reply readily at hand:
“Whenever I am in the company of a beautiful woman,” I said, “I am perfectly at home.”
This brought a laugh and a change of conversation to the next day’s weather and the prospect of a shooting party.
Miss Erskine remained at Dryburgh Abbey, despite the return of her companions to London to prepare for the autumn season, despite their entreaties to return to town with them, and gradually we fell in together more and more on our walks through the melancholy ruins of the abbey or reading in the library in the afternoon. Between us, friendship grew like the roses in the conservatory greenhouse: out-of-season blossoms, lovelier for their unexpectedness.
“You do not like company,” I observed.
“I can find no fault in our company,” she replied.
“And yet you are often alone.”
She explained that she refreshed herself in solitude as others did in company, hearing their opinions echoed in another’s, whereas she needed silence in which to recognize her own.
Friendship arose between us gradually, simply, steadily, and I found with time that I could confide in her, if partially, my plans for the future, if not my past. In time we formed the habit of coming down to breakfast at the same hour and walking out after taking tea. We did not discuss these plans but seemed to arrive at them together, as often our minds ran on the same track, unbidden. “At dinner last night, you mentioned Sterne…” “I was just on the point of mentioning that myself…” We laughed at the coincidence. “I’ve been thinking…”
The more pleasant the days, the more unsettled my mind. I could not seek to attach her, but attachment seemed a thing inclined to happen of its own accord, like the changing of seasons, autumn giving way to the first cold hints of winter. When the winter term began, I welcomed the excuse to absent myself from Dryburgh Abbey, while Lord Basken’s niece was present, but when I heard that she had been called away to London, I was gripped by despair that I might not see her again. When I spoke to Jobson of my dilemma, he failed to see the problem in attracting the attentions of a beautiful woman with £5,000 a year. I could not say more. Receiving no word from Mirandus, I sank into gloom—which even Jobson’s relentless good cheer could not disperse.
Despite my social success, I felt the gap. I had become cultured, even learned, without ever attaining the ease that others possessed; I labored to achieve what remained out of reach, a sense of belonging, of a right to these rooms. I returned to my own room ill-tempered and studied harder to alleviate my discomfort, to calm my mind. If others mistook this effort for prodigious gifts, I did not correct them.
I discerned in my companions at Dryburgh Abbey, as in my classmates, something more important than wealth or formal education; I had the proper shirts, a fine coat and vest of green silk, beautiful shoes with buckles, books of my own to read by candlelight, but I lacked some more essential ingredient—authority, the sense of belonging not just there but anywhere in the world.
I understood then that this was what those conversations with General Mirandus had been about. Those questions that seemed pointless at the time, speculative games
at best, were all for this one end; in soliciting my opinion on books and art, on politics and history, he was not trying to ensure that I had been diligent in my reading, as I’d thought then.
He was teaching me to have opinions, or rather he was teaching me what my companions possessed without thought or conscious awareness of it, entitlement: he was teaching me to believe that my opinions mattered, that something—law or policy—might come of what I thought, that my arguments counted, that I could, that I would, like him, shape history. Girl that I was.
When I returned to Dryburgh Abbey the following spring to complete my dissertation, I was disappointed to find Miss Erskine absent—and I was relieved. I gave myself over to my studies, an impersonal refuge of the mind. I was hard at work by then on my thesis, “De merocele, vel hernia crurali,” a dissertation of femoral hernia, which I had begun at Dryburgh Abbey the prior autumn.
I walked out to clear my thoughts after a morning’s study, when I came on Miss Erskine returning from her own stroll among the ruins and eager to join in mine, having just that hour arrived. The next morning at breakfast, we seemed inevitably seated together.
I was delighted by her return, and we resumed our friendship as if no interruption had occurred. I was too glad of her company to be unsettled by our growing intimacy, which I should have recognized would be misconstrued. A fear quickly confirmed when one evening after dinner, Lord Basken approached me, as Miss Erskine played “Für Elise” for us, Beethoven’s recent composition, and said into my ear, “A man may not marry a woman for her wit, but one might do well to marry where there is both wit and beauty.”
And fortune, I thought, though neither of us said it.
In the days that followed, I grew concerned that Lord Basken might make inquiries into my background in expectation of an impending engagement to his niece and might thereby get word of what no one but General Mirandus and Dr. Fryer knew: my true name and nature.
When Lord Basken closeted me for a private conference a few days later, his uncharacteristic gravity gave me pause. He sat behind his desk, appearing pinched with concern, seemingly at a loss for how to begin.
“I have had a letter,” he said. “From Dr. Fryer.”
I felt my skin go cold.
“Indeed,” I said, feeling my face warm. “I trust the doctor is well.”
He nodded gravely. Studied his manicured hands. “His letter had but one subject: you.”
I felt sweat break out beneath my horse collar, pricking at the edges of my brow, where curls fell forward. “I cannot imagine that I am worthy of such attention.”
I had not repaid the money that I owed him, which I’d borrowed to send my mother abroad; I had no means to do so.
“It was a most urgent letter,” Lord Basken said.
“Indeed,” I said. “And may I know its content?”
Lord Basken looked up at me for the first time, nodded. “Look to your Latiny,” he said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“If you are to pass your exams, you must look to your Latiny, sir.”
“Ah,” I coughed in relief. “Yes. I will do so, thank you.”
My relief was so acute that I fairly stumbled into the foyer and out the doors into the open air with a joy I had not felt in months, not since before my mother’s death, and in my delight I unthinkingly embraced Miss Erskine, when I met her on the path, embraced her as I would have done my sister had she been there, only too late realizing my mistake.
“Mr. Perry,” she said, stepping back.
“Miss Erskine,” I said. “Forgive me. I forgot myself. You remind me of my sister.”
“Of whom you were fond?”
“Quite,” I said. “Quite fond.”
“Then I am glad to be a pleasant reminder. And where is your sister now?”
Her words recalled me to myself, dispelling the veil of giddy relief. “She is in Ireland,” I said, too frankly.
“You must miss her,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “Very much.”
I knew that I would miss Miss Erskine, too—miss our conversations and our silent walks—but I also knew that I could not return to Dryburgh Abbey after this visit. I could not risk affection.
Back in Edinburgh, as the time for the degree examination drew near, I closed myself off from all company, save for Jobson’s. Together with our fellow students, we applied to the University Senate for permission to sit for the examination. And then together we embarked on our frenzied, half-ecstatic preparations, the orgy of intellectual self-absorption that is among the chief pleasures of academic training; like athletes poised to run a race at Olympia, we primed ourselves to hold forth in an ancient tongue on the many ailments that might assail a human body.
We stayed up nights in a row in his rooms or mine, chewing charcoal biscuits and drinking coffee to keep our minds sharp, reading and rereading our notes and case studies and practicing our Latin. I had achieved that delicate state of suspension when I was composed almost entirely of others’ words, what I had studied, an almost ecstatic, quasi-religious state of self-transcendence brought on by lack of food and lack of sleep and almost constant study, when I got word that I would not after all be allowed to sit for the examination.
“There must be some mistake,” I protested to Jobson, when I received the letter refusing my request on account of my “extreme youth.” But no effort to petition our examiners seemed capable of altering their decision, and without the exam I was without a degree, without a vocation, without a profession, just a girl in young man’s garb, with a knowledge no one would allow me to apply. I’d have called on General Mirandus to assist me, but he was half a world away, inaccessible in some American tropic, so I turned to the only other source of help, fearing that I had forsaken his assistance in quitting his home so decisively: Lord Basken.
I waited in dread for his letter, or its lack. But within two days I had his answer, and better, I had him in person at Dr. Anderson’s door, with an offer to intervene on my behalf. He left for the university immediately and before nightfall had given a personal deposition to the senate, in which he argued that the university’s regulations had in fact no age requirement for degree candidates; by evening, he returned with word that I would be allowed to sit for the exam. After a celebratory dinner, I sat down and added an epigraph to my thesis, quoting the Greek dramatist Menander: “Do not consider whether what I say is a young man speaking, but whether my discussion with you is that of a man of understanding.” I hoped they’d like the joke.
When the day of the examination arrived, the faculty who would examine me assembled in the library of Dr. Monro’s home—Doctors Monro, Hamilton, and Gregory. I tried to focus my attention on the room itself, the titles on the bookshelves, but my eyes blurred, failing to focus on the words; my eyelid twitched; I held my hands knotted behind my back in an attempt to still (or at least hide) their trembling; I looked at my teachers, my examiners, and knew who stood with me, who against, a reflexive tally, as if I were weighing beans or butter in the grocery in Cork. It was too close to call.
When the examination began, I was asked to interpret two quotes from Hippocrates, then diagnose a case before I was to defend my thesis. As I rose from my seat, a strange sense of floating overtook me, as when I had stood on the cliffs over the sea at Ballycotton.
I heard someone clear his throat; then Monro blew his nose, and—as if it were the signal I’d awaited, the starter’s gun in a horse race—I began.
I spoke first of my gratitude for their consideration of my thesis on femoral hernia and of my credentials, then moved on to quote Menander, all of which I had practiced in case nothing more should come to mind. I feared that I would forget all I had learned. And for a moment my mind was blank, my ears rang. The sound of my own voice—assured, commanding, if perhaps too loud—came to me from far off and surprised me, as if it were not my own. But hearing my voice, unwavering, I felt possessed of a curious authority, an overwhelming sense of well-being, as if Gene
ral Mirandus were there and posing his questions affably, rather than the skeptical faculty. The words—in Latin—came to me as if whispered in my ear, as if I were merely the instrument through which others spoke. I seemed not to think at all, as I quoted Ovid and Galen, Astley Cooper’s studies, my professors’, and my own. The arguments came easily and well.
When I was done, a silence fell over the room and I feared that I had misjudged the situation; in my voluble ease, had I said too much? Had I been too critical, too hard on the work of some of those assembled? Had intended homage tipped into criticism, given offense?
The silence grew longer and I felt a blush rise along my neck, sweat between my bound breasts. The silence deepened before Dr. Hamilton stood and said, “Bravo.” Dr. Monro followed suit. I had expected disputation of my arguments, some questions. Perhaps some praise. Instead Dr. Hamilton came and stood beside me; he clapped me on the shoulder and complimented my cravat and shoes.
The message was clear: I was one of them now; we could relax into the trivial. He confirmed what I’d suspected for some time: that ours was an art of performance, a confidence game, a trick, in which looking the part was as essential as—perhaps more important than—knowledge.
Only Dr. Gregory sat silent in the aftermath of the examination, his cane held between his spread knees, hands clutching its top, as he leaned on it. I suspected that he had had some hand in the conspiracy against me, angered by my laughter and ready answers in the lecture hall. He seemed still angrier now that I had acquitted myself well on the exam, as if failure might have endeared me better to him. I failed to endear myself. Not for the first time, or last.
