Catherine's Heart

by Lawana Blackwell

  “Oh, but I am,” she assured him. People who caused infants to become addicted to opium were among the lowest on earth, in her opinion.

  Awareness entered the dark eyes. “Forgive me, Sarah. You were speaking of moving, and I blazed on past you. You were serious?”

  “There’s nothing for us here anymore,” she said as they walked the shaded stone path. “As for Grandmother . . . as much as I loved her, she’s gone.”

  “And have you a specific place in mind?”

  Sarah took a quick breath. “Hampstead.”

  “Hampstead?”

  “Grandmother once wanted to move us there. Every time I visit Saint Matthew’s I fall in love with the countryside.”

  Saint Matthew’s Foundling Home for Girls was where Sarah had spent most of her childhood, only in those earlier days it was located in the slums of Drury Lane. Months before she died, Mrs. Blake donated a fine Hampstead mansion to the institution.

  “Then let’s move,” William said. “We can ask Mr. Mitchell to recommend a good architect. Or would you rather we hire a house agent to see what’s available now?”

  “We could move sooner if we didn’t have to have a house built,” Sarah replied, but a little uneasily. All that mental labor put to organizing and steeling her arguments, only to have him agree so readily?

  “But what about your work?” she asked. “It’s farther out.”

  “Not prohibitively so. I’ll simply leave earlier.”

  “We wouldn’t have a telephone.”

  “Just for a few months until the lines are extended.”

  “What if Father and Naomi don’t care for the idea? It was difficult enough to coax them to move here.”

  “You have only to ask them,” William said. “But I should think they’ll be agreeable. And a bigger house would allow each family more privacy. We’re practically bursting at the seams here.”

  “Yes, more privacy.”

  “And we’ll need more room for our own children one day.”

  She smiled at him. “Yes.”

  They passed the green wire arch that William had been painting when Sarah first set eyes upon him ten years ago. “Oh dear,” she said. “But what of the servants? Marie’s sisters are employed here in Mayfair, and—”

  “We’ll help those who want to stay find new positions.” He stopped at the edge of the terrace to study her face. “Are you certain you want this, Sarah?”

  In the space of Sarah’s hesitation, she realized it was fear of the unknown facing her now that the barrier of William’s protest had proved nonexistent. And she had to tell herself that fear was a silly reason for stagnating in one place. “Yes, William, I want this.”

  Father and Naomi did not protest when the subject was broached during supper, and indeed, Naomi wore an expression of quiet relief.

  “Are you sure you haven’t grown weary of our company?” Father asked. He wore his fifty-one years well, still having very little grey in his light brown hair, though his trim beard was liberally sprinkled with it.

  “Never,” Sarah replied, and William agreed.

  The following evening Sarah and William walked downstairs just as the servants were finishing supper. The hall just off the kitchen was as familiar to them as any other room in the house, for both had taken many meals there in their youth. All were present save the Russells, who took their meals in the apartment over the stables while Penny was still confined to bed with the infant Lottie.

  “Please, don’t get up,” William said, raising a hand as chairs started scraping against the wooden floor. To Trudy and Brenda, cook and kitchen maid, he said, “Those were outstanding cutlets.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Doyle,” Trudy said. She was a plump woman with coarse blond hair, several moles on clear cheeks, and eyes as brown and moist as a spaniel’s. She nodded toward a pedestal dish, where one slice of chocolate listed to the side amidst dark crumbs. “Would be a shame to waste that last slice . . .”

  “You know very well he had two upstairs, Trudy,” said Sarah, accompanying William to the head of the table.

  “Only two?” housekeeper Mrs. Bacon teased, her bespectacled eyes crinkling at the corners. Because almost everyone at the table could recall when William was a servant and Sarah just a spindly girl with her crippled hand and shorn hair, they treated both with a respect born more of maternal and paternal camaraderie than subjugation.

  “Now, you’ll leave Mr. Doyle to his chocolate,” Mr. Duffy said, turning his chair around to face them. Humor softened the gardener’s fierce countenance. “There’s worser vices a man could have.”

  Lady’s maid Marie let out an audible huff of breath. “I do not believe Monsieur and Madame are here to make talk over cake.”

  William nodded. “Yes, that’s so, Marie.” Without further preamble he announced the plans to leave Berkeley Square when an adequate house could be found. “We wanted to inform you as soon as possible so you can make plans.”

  Silence became thick in the room as questioning sets of eyes met each other across the table.

  “We would very much like you all to come with us,” Sarah hastened to assure them. “But if that’s not possible, we’ll help you find other positions.”

  That dissolved only some of the tension.

  “Have you questions?” William asked.

  “Leave my garden?” Mr. Duffy said in the tone of one who has been asked to abandon his children. “But the potatoes ain’t even in.”

  “I’m sure it’ll take us months to find the right place,” William told him. “And when we do, you’ll have a new garden to tend.”

  The gardener rubbed his grizzled cheek thoughtfully. “A bigger one, do you think?”

  “I should imagine. A bigger house usually means a larger garden.”

  “Meanin’ more room for my vegetable patch?”

  “The household is growing. We’ll need more vegetables.”

  Mr. Duffy raised eyebrows at his wife, parlormaid Claire, who smiled and nodded.

  “Then we’ll come along!” he said with a slap on his knee.

  Trudy had other concerns. “Four burners ain’t enough, with more people in the house to cook for now. But there ain’t room in this kitchen for another stove or even a bigger one. And we’ve been needin’ another maid down here, but there’s not room enough in the attic for one to board.”

  “We’ll look for a larger kitchen, too,” Sarah promised. “And more servants’ rooms.”

  “With a bigger hot water tank?” Brenda asked meekly. “So’s it don’t run out when I’m halfway through the dishes?”

  William nodded. “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Please check the fireplace flues before you buy any house” was Avis’s only request. “The rooms on the east side wouldn’t collect so much soot if the flues worked better.”

  “Yes, we’ll do that,” William agreed with the gentling of tone that every adult in the house used when addressing the parlormaid.

  She had been hurt, and no one wished to rub salt into the wounds. Spindly thin, with owlish grey eyes, Avis had expected to marry an army corporal with whom she had corresponded for several years, even sending him bits of her wages for tobacco. But it so happened that, once he was discharged, he married another woman with whom he had also corresponded. Avis never mentioned him in conversation anymore and devoted her spare time to her watercolors. Some were beginning to sell, mostly to servants from the neighborhood seeking gifts.

  Minutes later on the staircase, William said to Sarah with low voice, “Perhaps we should take them all house hunting with us.”

  “They were very good suggestions,” Sarah said, giving his arm a squeeze. “After all, their home is their workplace. But did you notice how quiet Marie was?”

  “Hmph! For how long?”

  And sure enough, the lady’s maid had obviously required some time to think this over, for she said while laying out Sarah’s bedclothes an hour later, “If I make this move with you, I shall be allowed to le
ave thirty minutes earlier on Thursdays, yes?”

  The voluptuous Frenchwoman had ceased plastering little curls across her forehead upon turning forty, in favor of drawing back her dark hair into a simple knot. For over a decade, she had spent her half day off on Thursday afternoons going on outings with her three sisters, two who worked in Mayfair and one who had married a milliner widower and lived over Beaufort’s Fine Hats and Bonnets on Bond Street.

  “Yes, of course,” Sarah told her.

  “And . . . will you pay cab fare for the extra distance?”

  Sarah pretended to think it over for a second or two, even though both knew that the request would be granted. And indeed, Marie showed no surprise, but gave her a knowing little smile, when Sarah replied, “Yes, we’ll pay extra.”

  Four

  The order of Girton’s days was a pleasant surprise for Catherine, who had feared high academic standards would mean a Spartan routine.

  Mornings were ushered in at seven o’clock with footsteps and the creaking of hinges, as college servants entered sitting rooms to lay fires. Soon afterward, yawning students in dressing gowns and slippers began drifting up the corridors. Queues were not a hardship, with only four or five sharing each bathroom. The eight o’clock bell signaled prayers in the morning room, led by Miss Bernard. Attendance was not required, but most of the sixty students took part, including Catherine and Peggy.

  Breakfast was laid out in the dining room from eight-fifteen until nine o’clock. Private or group study followed. Some of the classes were conducted by the four Girton graduates who were resident assistant lecturers. Catherine attended one morning lecture every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: Greek and Roman Society, taught by Miss Welsh, the vice-mistress.

  After lunch, some form of exercise was encouraged. When fields were dry, many students paired off for an hour’s rapid walk through hedge and ditch. They were warned to shut any gate they passed through, for part of Girton’s sixteen acres was leased to a farmer—a fact that amused Catherine greatly when recalling Sarah’s quip over her stepping off a farm. Lawn tennis was popular too, and sometimes even cricket matches were held. During inclement weather the girls dressed in blue Bloomer suits and assembled under the covered court to play “fives,” a game resembling tennis with a bat and ball.

  Afternoon lectures were conducted by professors from Cambridge colleges, men dedicated enough to the ideal of women’s higher education to extend their working days. Dr. Precor, of St. Catherine’s College, lectured Catherine in Latin I on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and in Age of the Scipios on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Tea was taken round by the servants at four o’clock, and the dinner bell rang at six.

  Various meetings followed dinner, depending on the day of the week—the Debating Society, Dramatic Society, Choral Society, Lawn Tennis Club, Chess Club, and even Fire Brigade, among others. Catherine signed up for the Lawn Tennis Club, and Peggy, the Girton Chamber Music Society and the Chess Club.

  There was also study in rooms until nine, after which dressing gowns were donned, tresses unpinned, and most of the evening amusements began. Maids brought around hot chocolate, students visited in friends’ parlors or gathered with a larger group in the reading room for poetry readings, charades, or singing around the piano. Half-past ten was the unofficial, but mostly observed, bedtime.

  Catherine got along splendidly with the majority of the students, though she spent most of her free time either studying alone or with Peggy. The one student with whom she had not formed even the most tenuous friendship was her neighbor on the bedroom side, Millicent Turner. Tall and slender and yet buxom and robust, Millicent had indigo-colored eyes and ash blond hair rippling to her narrow waist like the moon’s reflection upon water. She made the other girls feel like dusty house sparrows in the company of a swan, mud huts in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. All questions put to her were answered with an economy of words. Millicent joined no clubs or societies, dined alone at the end of a table with a book propped in front of her, and spent her free time in her apartment.

  Thus she became the object of speculation and gossip, especially among the freshers, who felt as a rule that she cast all of them in a bad light. Two weeks into term, the discussion among six girls seated at one end of the breakfast table revolved around how Millicent had snubbed Elizabeth Macleod from Nottinghamshire during a tennis match the previous afternoon.

  “I only asked her to play out of pity,” Elizabeth said, blue eyes wide as if she still could not believe yesterday’s turn of events.

  Catherine glanced over her shoulder. She felt no guilt for joining the gossip, for Millicent had brought it upon herself. But the thought of Millicent walking by and overhearing made her uneasy. The memory of the angry voices on that first day still caused her to wonder if her neighbor might have a reason for her standoffishness.

  Beatrice Lindsay, Peggy’s neighbor, shook her blond head. “I would have thought winning would have made her more sociable.”

  “Sociable?” Elizabeth snorted. “When I turned around after fetching the ball from out of bounds, she was walking away! ‘Congratulations!’ I called after her, and she merely sent me a backwards wave.”

  “How rude!” exclaimed Emily Perrin, a second-year student.

  “Rude,” Catherine agreed after another guilty glance about.

  That evening she had her first actual conversation with Millicent. It was not a cordial one.

  “Pardon me, but I neglected to copy our Latin assignment,” she said to Millicent’s impassive face after her knock on the sitting room door was answered. Raising the small paper bundle in her hand, she smiled and said, “And I brought you some macaroons for your trouble. My aunt bakes the best—”

  “No, thank you,” Millicent said before disappearing. But she had not closed the door. Upon her return she widened the opening only enough to allow Catherine to peer at an open notebook.

  Catherine slipped the bundle into the pocket of her dressing gown so that she could balance her own notebook upon her splayed hand. Regret oozed through her as she penciled the information. Mary Dereham, her neighbor on the sitting room side, took the same lectures and would not have left her standing in the corridor like an unwashed Sudra.

  What were you thinking? she asked herself. That Millicent would be so grateful for being needed, that they would at least be able to look each other in the eyes? That here was merely a troubled soul who needed someone to go the second mile and extend the hand of friendship?

  Still, she made one last effort, using self-effacing humor. While her hand moved the pencil, Catherine sighed and said, “You would think a college student would know better. I didn’t even realize my mind had left the room until everyone started rising from their chairs.”

  Smiling, she looked up.

  The indigo eyes staring back at her were flat with boredom. “Have you finished there?”

  Heat rose from Catherine’s collar and diffused through her cheeks. She scrawled the last two words, snapped her notebook shut, and murmured, “Thank—” The door clicked shut as she finished “you.”

  She paced her bedroom floor while her heart hammered as if trying to escape her chest. Sounds of moving about came from next door. Glaring at the wall as if her eyes could burn a hole in it, she muttered, “Very well, your Royal Highness. You can rot over there for all I care!”

  The anger turned inward as Catherine dropped into her cane chair. Brave words, she told herself, when said from the safety of her apartment. Like a small dog barking threateningly from behind a gate. Why did you just stand there and swallow such abuse?

  It was with great restraint that she did not relate the incident to those seated about her at the breakfast table the following morning. She would have certainly done so had Millicent not been within hearing range at the next table. But she poured out the whole scene in Peggy’s sitting room afterward.

  “Nothing I hear about her surprises me any more,” Peggy said, shaking her head. “But it’s her los
s, if she wishes to spend her time here friendless. Just don’t allow her behavior to distract you from what’s important.”

  On the study table before Catherine lay her open notebook and the Latin verbs she had painstakingly conjugated. Peggy, at her right, was balancing chemical equations. At length Peggy put down her pencil and said, “Now, read to me what you have there.”

  Catherine nodded, holding her notebook a little closer:

  “Mittere, ‘to send,’ ” she read aloud. “Mitto, ‘I send,’ mittes, ‘you send,’ mittor, ‘I am sent,’ mittuntur, ‘they are sent.’ Capere, ‘to seize,’ capio, ‘I seize,’ capis, ‘you seize,’ capior, ‘I am seized,’ capiuntur, ‘they are seized’ . . .”

  “Well done,” Peggy said ten minutes later when Catherine had finished.

  “Thank you.” Catherine lay down her notebook and brought up again the issue that troubled her more than Latin stems, tenses, and moods. “I could hardly sleep; I just berated myself over and over for not just turning on my heel and walking away. Why did I stand there prattling on like that?”

  “Anyone else would have done the same,” Peggy assured her.

  “You wouldn’t have.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said with a shrug. “A compensation for having older brothers. One learns to assert her rights. I’m just thankful you’re not like Millicent, or we should never have become friends.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine said, then gave her a curious look when the last statement sank in. “But why do you compare me with her?”

  “Well, you know . . .”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Peggy rolled her eyes. “I admire your modesty, Catherine, but you don’t have to be coy with me.”

  “Truly, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you how becoming you are?”

  “Becoming?” Catherine shook her head. “My parents never discuss appearances unless it’s to tell us to wash our faces or trim our fingernails. Jewel looks like an angel, but whenever I tell her so, Mother says ‘Beauty is vain, Catherine.’ They praise her more for her character than anything else.”