Miss Wilton's Waltz

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Miss Manch was looking at her with an expression of clear defiance, as though confirming that she’d won this match. The expression unstuck Lenora’s feet from the floor. She crossed to stand in front of Miss Manch with her hands on her hips, glad that in the girl’s seated position Lenora was taller. Miss Manch didn’t stop playing; she didn’t even stumble over a note.

  “Return to your seat, Miss Manch.”

  “Oh, I’m fine right here, thank you,” the girl said sweetly, still holding Lenora’s eyes as she played. Her fingers fairly flew across the keys.

  “You are never to touch an instrument without permission. Return to your seat.” How Lenora wished her heart was not racing and her mouth did not feel so dry. She could feel heat in her cheeks. She was being made to look like a fool before her students who were whispering from behind.

  Miss Manch switched mid-measure to the second part of Rondo Alla Turca, slamming the keys for the harsher chords.

  Lenora raised her voice to be heard over the music. “I will give you one more chance to do as I ask, Miss Manch. Return to your seat.”

  Miss Manch said nothing, her upper body assisting her in the playing. She missed a note and pulled her eyebrows together, focusing more intently on her hands.

  Lenora took hold of the girl’s upper arm. Everything changed in an instant.

  Miss Manch slammed her hands onto the keys, causing a discordant cacophony of notes, then screamed and threw herself off the bench. “She hurt me!” Miss Manch cried, holding her arm.

  Lenora stumbled back a few steps while the other students gasped in surprise. She stared at the girl writhing on the floor and felt her thoughts cracking like hard candy. The screaming continued. Seconds ticked by, and Lenora could do nothing but stare. Last night she’d reacted on instinct and done exactly what she’d needed to get away. Today she was unable to do anything at all.

  “Miss Wilton!”

  Mrs. Henry’s voice broke through her scrambled senses, and Lenora spun away from the drama in front of her to see the headmistress storming across the room. “What on earth is going on here?”

  “She threw me to the floor!” Miss Manch said, moving to a seated position on the floor but keeping hold of her arm.

  “I . . . I . . .” Lenora stammered. She needed time to align her thoughts so that she could explain. She needed the river. She had neither.

  “Gracious,” Mrs. Henry said as she stooped and helped the girl up.

  Miss Manch gave the headmistress a grateful look, her chin still quivering. There were no tears, Lenora noted, though Miss Manch sniffled and took gulping breaths. Mrs. Henry put a hand around Miss Manch’s back and escorted her to her seat where the girl curled into her chair, the perfect display of a wounded creature. The other girls were completely stunned. Lenora was certain that, like her, they had never seen such a scene before. Did they know Lenora had not thrown her to the floor? Could they tell the girl was putting on some sort of depraved show?

  Mrs. Henry turned her steel-gray eyes to Lenora, a hundred unasked questions showing in her expression. “You’ve ten minutes left in class, Miss Wilton. I shall stay to observe.”

  Lenora nodded dumbly and returned to the front of the room. She could not remember what she’d already said. Her heart was beating fast even though she’d done nothing to exert herself. She had been reduced to the Lenora of her youth—the nervous, protected, incapable girl whose thoughts were thick. The girl she thought she’d outgrown since coming to Bath.

  Thirteen faces looked up at her: eleven with various shades of uncertainty. Mrs. Henry’s expression was a mixture of anger and concern. Miss Manch maintained her beaten posture. Lenora did not look at her.

  She swallowed, and took hold of the first thing she could think of to say. “My hope is that within the f-first week you will know your solfège, which is primarily concerned with notes and pitch.” She’d said that already.

  One of the girls, not Miss Manch, twittered. At the back of the room Mrs. Henry stamped her foot, and the girl fell silent.

  “And b-by the end of the month you will know every note on the . . . pianoforte.”

  It went downhill from there.

  Twenty minutes later, Lenora was alone in the music room, her elbows on her desk and her face in her hands as she willed herself not to cry. After class had been dismissed, Lenora had tried to explain to Mrs. Henry what had happened, but it hadn’t come out right since Lenora’s thoughts were still skittering about. Tears of frustration filled her eyes and made her feel pathetic. She focused on her breathing in hopes of centering her thoughts. She had half a dozen small exercises she went through when she needed to overcome her nerves. Early on she’d had to center herself several times a day; now it was intermittent. At social events, usually, but seldom at school, which had been a safe place. Until now.

  Lenora finally asked if she and Mrs. Henry could talk about it later, once Lenora could line up her thoughts. The look the headmistress had given her showed concern. Why would a teacher need time to formulate the truth? But Lenora was not herself, or, rather, was not her Bath self. Her thoughts were scattered about like dried corn in the chicken yard.

  “Parents’ tea is starting in the company parlor, Miss Wilton.” Lenora looked up at Miss Carlyle, another third-year teacher, though a decade older. She taught needlework, something she’d become proficient at through her years of nursing her mother through ailing health. “Is everything all right, Miss Wilton?”

  Lenora smiled and smoothed her hair, hating that she might look as undone as she felt. “Yes, I’ll be there in a few moments.”

  “The first day of the new term is always daunting,” Miss Carlyle said with a smile that brought out the two dimples in her round face. “I’ll see you in the parlor.”

  Lenora spent two minutes taking deep breaths, trying to push away the extreme emotions of the last several hours. She needed to breathe and smile—as Cassie had taught her to do years ago when she was uncomfortable in company—and resume a confident demeanor for the parents of her students.

  She remembered another exercise she hadn’t used recently—find three things you can see, two things you can touch, and one thing you can smell. She looked at the clock, the window, and the door, then touched the desk and the chair, then inhaled the scent of the lemon oil used on the pianofortes. Her thoughts settled, and by the time Lenora reached the parlor, she felt more capable of managing the hour.

  The first familiar face she saw was Regina’s mother, Mrs. Cotswold, who was chatting with another teacher near the doorway. Mrs. Cotswold immediately invited Lenora to join their conversation. Lenora was grateful to be included, but wished she could hide behind the pianoforte instead of behind the mask she pulled out for social occasions such as this.

  She kept count of how many people were in the room—

  another calming exercise she hadn’t used for some time. Thirty-four to start, then two left, four came in, another one left, two more entered. She chatted a few minutes, listening mostly, moving from one group to another every few minutes as expected. If she spent an average of four minutes with each small group, she could finish the room by the end of the hour and escape.

  She was halfway around the room when a man entered and walked directly to Mrs. Henry, who was a few feet away from Lenora’s conversation with another set of parents. Lenora took note of the man’s limp but barely glanced his direction since she was listening to Lizzy Bradshaw’s parents discuss the Austrian piano tutor they had hired on for the summer.

  Lenora split her attention as she often did, keeping one ear on the conversation she was engaged in and the other tuned to the discussion taking place behind her while she also watched the door for more exits and entrances. She would likely end up in conversation with this man before the afternoon was out, and it would be wise to glean a bit of information that would make more comfortable conversation.

&nb
sp; “My apologies for my tardiness,” the man said in a low voice to Mrs. Henry.

  “I am glad you were able to attend, Mr. Asher. I would like to speak with you afterward. There was . . . an incident.”

  Lenora felt a fizz of anxiety move through her. Certainly there had not been two separate incidents on the first day of the term. But Mrs. Henry had called him Mr. Asher, not Mr. Manch. Lenora wondered if he could be Catherine’s stepfather. An uncle, perhaps? A guardian chosen by her parents when they realized their daughter was incorrigible?

  “I will stay after, then.” His words were clipped.

  “Very good,” Mrs. Henry said.

  As he moved toward the refreshment table, she turned to get a look. If she were going to be pulled into the private meeting Mrs. Henry had requested—teachers often were in order to testify of a student’s poor behavior—she wanted to know who she would be facing. Would she be able to explain what happened more clearly to him than she’d managed to explain it to Mrs. Henry? Blocks of anxiety stacked up in her chest at the imagined scene of facing a man with his hands on his hips and fury in his eyes. She blinked away the image and took the man’s measure as he walked away from her. He was tall with dark hair and broad shoulders and a definite limp—a war injury, perhaps? She watched him load his plate with the tarts and miniature sausages set out on the sideboard. Then he turned to face the room.

  Lenora nearly dropped her cup of tea. It was the man who had accosted her on the bank of the river. The man she’d attacked in exchange for her freedom. His eyes slid past her, looking over the other attendees, and she was able to breathe. He didn’t recognize me. He limped toward the punch bowl, and she remembered jamming the heel of her shoe on the top of his foot with all her weight and all her strength. He limped because of her!

  “Miss Wilton?”

  Lenora looked at the concerned expression on Mrs. Bradshaw’s face. “Are you all right? You look rather pale.”

  “Yes, thank you, but . . . No, actually, I think I need a bit of air.”

  Her companions shared their sympathies as she set her cup and saucer on the sideboard and moved toward the door. She risked a glance at Mr. Asher. Maybe she was wrong, and her mind was playing tricks after the anxieties of the day, but he glanced at her over the rim of his teacup. She couldn’t look away, and he held her eyes a moment before his eyebrows came together slightly. She disappeared through the doorway.

  Lenora was lying on her narrow bed, one arm thrown over her eyes, when she heard a rapping at the door. She sat up while inviting whoever was there to come in, thinking it was the upstairs maid with terrible timing. It was Mrs. Henry. Lenora stood quickly as the headmistress closed the door behind her.

  “You left the tea.”

  “I . . . I had a sudden headache.”

  “No one leaves the parents’ tea, Miss Wilton. I believe I have made this clear to all my teachers.”

  “Yes, you have, I’m sorry.” Lenora tried to smooth back the wayward strands of hair that had come loose. Her repose had not been nearly as effective in stilling her nerves as she’d needed it to be. Mrs. Henry seemed to be waiting for Lenora to say something, but Lenora had no words. She certainly couldn’t explain why she’d left—aside from the false headache she’d already cited.

  Mrs. Henry let out a breath. “I need to talk to you about Miss Manch.”

  “I did not hurt her, Mrs. Henry,” Lenora said as the words she had been searching for filled her mind. “I asked her three times to return to her seat. She would not do it, and so I took hold of her arm—not violently—so as to lead her from the piano stool. She threw herself to the floor and staged the display you came upon.” Why hadn’t she been able to explain it so concisely the first time she’d had the chance? Blast her addled nerves which led to an addled brain. She could not allow herself to fall back into that smallness, no matter how tempting. She would not be that girl!

  Mrs. Henry clasped her hands in front of her. “I was afraid of that.” She pulled her eyebrows together. “Miss Manch is a special case for us.” She walked to the small window that overlooked the shops of Chilton Road. It was not a view worth contemplating, except if you were trying to avoid someone’s eyes. “She’s had difficulties at other schools.”

  Lenora wasn’t surprised after what she’d seen today, but Mrs. Henry’s Female Institute was for upper-class young women preparing to make their debut, not troubled girls. “Her uncle is wealthy,” Mrs. Henry said when Lenora did not comment. Her words were followed with a sigh, long and drawn out and . . . ashamed?

  Uncle, Lenora repeated. Hence the differing last names. “With all due respect, Mrs. Henry, most of our students’ parents are wealthy.” Mrs. Henry had never spoken to her so casually, and she wanted to be careful in how she handled the conversation. Something about it felt fragile, and Lenora feared she was treading on thin ice.

  “Mr. Asher is very wealthy,” Mrs. Henry said, turning to face Lenora. “And very generous. He offered a sizable donation to the school in exchange for us overlooking his niece’s past behavior at other schools and enrolling her without the usual references. It was an offer I could not resist, Miss Wilton. The dormitories are in need of repair, the parlor furnishings need replacing, and the rugs in the teaching wing are nearly threadbare. I trust you will not judge me too harshly for my decision.”

  Lenora knew there had been past discussions regarding what repairs had to be made, and which ones could wait. Donations to the school were not uncommon, but usually made in ten- or twenty-pound increments. Based on what Mrs. Henry had said, Lenora imagined Mr. Asher had offered far more than that, which meant more could be done than mending a cracked windowpane or ordering a new mattress tick to replace a worn one. Then her focus latched onto something else—had Mrs. Henry said schools? Miss Manch had been kicked out of more than one? She was only twelve years old, an age when many girls experienced their first school away from their family.

  Mrs. Henry continued. “I had hoped—well, her uncle had hoped—that a new city and a new school would be a fresh start and put her on her best behavior.” She squared her shoulders. “I am still hopeful that her outburst today was brought on by the stress of a new place. She has not had the benefit of stability most of our girls can take for granted. Her parents are dead, and she spent years moving from one family member to another until her uncle took charge of her care. She needs routine and order, and we are a school devoted to those things.”

  Lenora said nothing. Miss Manch needed more than routine and order. She needed . . . what? Lenora didn’t know. It was impossible to believe that in a few years’ time, the girl would be fit to enter society when she could not sit through the first ten minutes of an introductory music class.

  Mrs. Henry let out a breath full of the burden of her responsibility. “I may have been hasty in allowing her to enroll, only her uncle seems so devoted to her. He’s taken a house near Laura Place for the year to support us however he can and to allow her to stay with him on weekends, but he is desperate for her to be successful here, and the school could use his donation.”

  “The other girls follow her,” Lenora said, testing the range of her comments. “If her behavior continues as it is now, we will lose the loyalty of other students.” To say nothing of the fact that Mr. Asher was the man she’d encountered at the river last night. Lenora wanted him and his niece as far from her world as possible. She felt selfish for her thoughts, which spurred her to say something nice about the girl. “Though, she is a gifted musician,” Lenora said, almost in defeat.

  Mrs. Henry pulled her eyebrows together, then shook her head as though confused.

  She didn’t know? “Easily as talented as my level-two students, perhaps as good as level three, though I would need to do a proper assessment to know for certain.”

  Mrs. Henry’s eyebrows remained stuck in the middle of her wrinkled forehead. “If that were true, she would have
requested the advanced music courses. Neither she nor her uncle said anything about her musical ability, and she seemed particularly put out to be required to take an introductory course.”

  “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t be forthcoming about her talent, but she is very good.” The musician side of Lenora wanted to explore the girl’s ability and add to what she’d already been taught, steering her toward a proficiency that would be possible with Miss Manch’s type of natural talent. Every other part of Lenora wanted nothing to do with this girl’s education.

  Mrs. Henry turned back to the window. “She was disruptive in other classes too,” she finally admitted, “but not to the extent of her behavior in yours. Yet I feel compelled to give her another chance, not only because of her uncle’s support but because I do not know of another school that would accept her.”

  Mrs. Henry glanced at the clock on Lenora’s wall. “We need to remove to my office; Mr. Asher is probably already waiting for us. I spoke with him at the parents’ tea and told him we would be meeting at precisely 4:30 to discuss the incident. I had wanted to give you a bit more information so you would understand my hope that we can give this girl another chance.”

  “Are you certain I should attend?” Lenora said as panic rose up like the River Avon after a storm. It wasn’t unusual for a teacher to be part of such a meeting, but this would be Lenora’s first parent’s council. And for it to be with the man from the river made it difficult for her to breathe. The butterflies in her stomach were strangling her.

  “I shall need your account of what happened, and your support. I would also like your opinion of Mr. Asher—if you think him as devoted to Miss Manch’s success as I do. Your opinion will be valuable to me in my assessment and my decision on how best to move forward.”

  As Lenora followed Mrs. Henry down the stairs, she tried to calm her nerves. She was going to be brought face-to-face with the man from last night, who was also the uncle of the worst student Lenora had ever had. She could not think of any person in the entire world she would like to see less. It took everything she had not to run back to her room. Cassie would face him, she told herself. But would she? She couldn’t imagine anyone in her position not feeling the horror she was feeling now.