Emily Hudson

by Melissa Jones

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART TWO

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  PART THREE

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © Melissa Jones, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Published in Great Britain as The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Jones, Melissa.

  [Hidden heart of Emily Hudson]

  Emily Hudson : a novel / Melissa Jones.

  p. cm.

  Originally published as: The hidden heart of Emily Hudson. London : Sphere, 2010.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44264-7

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Cousins—Fiction. 3. Americans—Great Britain—Fiction. 4. New England—History—19th

  century—Fiction. 5. London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6060.O554H53 2010

  823.914—dc22

  2010012931

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Neil, Ed and Tom

  This novel was inspired by the book A Private Life

  of Henry James: Two Women and His Art, by

  Lyndall Gordon

  It is so hard for one soul to know another, under all the necessary and unnecessary disguises that keep them apart.

  —MINNY TEMPLE, 1869

  PROLOGUE

  LONDON LATE SUMMER, 1863

  Before daybreak on a rainy August morning a young gentleman, stooped, respectably dressed, was seen to alight from a cab at the Westminster bank of the Thames. He was accompanied by a servant; together, in silence, they carried a substantial bundle of materials of different kinds to a waiting boatman, who loaded them on to his vessel.

  In the increasingly heavy rain, mingling with the river mist, an observer could be forgiven for thinking these were rags, perhaps curtains discarded or faded bedclothes. But by the light of the lamp the boatman carried the materials gleamed with some beauty of decoration, luster and detail, and the rags revealed themselves to be dresses in bright fashionable colors. Each item, from day dress to evening, was exquisitely made, heavy with laces, velvets and embellishments of the highest quality.

  With difficulty they were loaded onto the barge, followed by the gentleman, who made his way toward the bows. The servant was turned away. Rocking in the filthy slime of the shallows, the gentleman looked as if he might fall, but then sat down in the boat with the dresses heaped about him. The craft was rowed out into the swift part of the river, where it was kept steady only by the kindness of the wind.

  Once the vessel was still, and at a nod from the boatman, the gentleman began methodically to throw each dress into the moving filth, attempting to submerge them with an oar. But their voluminous skirts filled with air and the movement of the tide, and they floated, like so many bodies, away.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  MR. WILLIAM CORNFORD

  CORNFORD HOUSE

  BOSTON, MASS

  HIGH TREES SCHOOL

  ROCHESTER, NY

  March 10th, 1861

  Dear Mr. Cornford,

  It is with regret that I begin the task of writing to you about your niece, Emily. Her recent behavior, which I have outlined to you in previous letters—most specifically her unfortunate, extravagant friendship with a fellow pupil, Augusta Dean, and its unsettling effect on the other pupils, all girls entrusted to my care and to whom I owe a great duty—compels me to request that she be formally removed from the school and returned to your care with immediate effect. It is a sad request. I am aware that it comes before the completion of the school year, but we all believe that any shock felt by her abrupt departure would be less than that felt by her remaining.

  For your consideration, her many faults are as follows: she is too vigorous, too quick to question, and her temper is variable. You will not find any consistency in her behavior. She is by turns bewildered, goodhumored, angered, merry, pained and aloof. She always says what comes into her head, as if she has a right to her peculiar thoughts. She laughs loudly. She is untidy. She almost expects to make an impression. She suffers from a lack of meekness, a lack of decorum, a lack of discipline. It is as if she is surprised that there are rules by which she must be controlled.

  Yet for all her abundant defiant life, she can often be extremely solitary and remote. She can spend hours in drawing, if ever she is given an opportunity. On nature walks, she is always trailing behind the other girls, gathering keepsakes and talking to herself and the trees; at streams kneeling and plunging her fingers into the water, even when there is ice and the sky is dark and obscure and threatening rain and we really should be hurrying, going, turning for home.

  And when she is laid up in bed shivering and burning—her health is never robust despite her ways—one or other of the servants will always take pity on her and come with beef tea or gruel and a hot brick and tell one another how she is the only one of the girls who will always say thank you and never complains.

  During the holidays when she
has remained at school, she has been notably self-contained, befriending the cat and looking out for its every comfort. She rambles in the woods for hours a day, returning to school with her thin hands sunburned because she swears she has not worn a bonnet in the glare. All these things she will not wear: gloves in summer—how many pairs dropped by the side of the road?—shawls, wraps, coats, hats. She has even boasted of taking her shoes off and paddling in the streams but I can neither countenance nor believe it. When questioned she looked right at me and asked directly if she were being accused of lying.

  As a consequence of my affection for her, I admit that I may have been indulgent toward her these two years. But now my duty has been made especially clear to me because of this business with Augusta. Augusta is a girl of good family, one of the best families in the school. She has an acute understanding but a somewhat impressionable disposition, and it is this that I fear could influence her prospects. She and Emily became inseparable immediately after she arrived and in a thousand ways. At first, I welcomed her influence. In her society, Emily became calmer, and Augusta, homesick to begin with and fretting, was devoted to her, steady as a sister. But as one term has passed and now another is nearly at its close, the girls have proved that together they are anything but steady.

  The passion of their friendship—exclusive, possessive, overweening—is clearly developing into something that could become unhealthy. I take daily notes on conduct and I am afraid to inform you that your niece and Miss Dean have now accrued several black marks against their names. But it is not so much what they have done as how they are. Discipline has suffered; the very spirit of the school is being challenged; their studies have been compromised: I have no other choice but to take this course.

  The reason I write to you at such length is so that you may attempt to understand the girl, having not seen her for two years. I should like to impress upon you that she is by no means a bad creature by nature, but that the death of her family, and the immediate separation she then suffered from the place of her birth and all that she held dear, I am convinced, has contributed largely to the formation of her character.

  As I trust you are aware, we are all deeply fond of Emily. On reflection I remain convinced that she would own that she has not been mistreated in any way—quite the opposite—although I imagine she might claim to have been misunderstood. Our task, which has been to show her that the world need not trouble to understand her, but that she should be at pains to understand the world, is one at which I fear we have failed, and I must admit my part in that. Perhaps a change of society, to be amongst thinking people of her own family in a home such as yours, could well be to her advantage; if her wildness continues, none of us can predict the consequences.

  We shall miss her. We entrust her to your care with affection and regret.

  Yours truly,

  Miss Margaret Alice Miller

  MISS AUGUSTA DEAN

  HIGH TREES SCHOOL

  ROCHESTER, NY

  A TRAIN CARRIAGE

  SOMEWHERE IN UPSTATE NY

  March 12th, 1861

  My dearest Augusta,

  No journey has ever been so painful or felt so long. Here I am quite alone in this carriage, my paper lit only by the breaking of the day. It appears that I was warned and did ignore the warnings and so as a consequence my departure must needs be abrupt, almost nocturnal, and surrounded by the aura of disgrace. But not to be given the opportunity to say good-bye! I have taken it very hard, even though I believe Miss Miller to consider herself to be acting for the best.

  Indeed my interview with the lady only this morning would have been comical if it had not been so scrambled and brief and clumsy—if it had not been such a painful and so acute a shock. I think she was embarrassed, or having made up her mind to despatch me, wanted it done as soon as possible. She promises that my uncle is expecting me.

  I will not cry. I will write to you instead. I have to tell you—despite the noise and speed of this carriage—that I love you now and always. You are my dearest girl, and I intend to keep the memory of you alive. As you know full well, so many of the people I have loved exist now only in my mind. I believe I am developing a peculiar talent for it. I will not wish for the parting we have been denied, but I will treasure these memories of you and hold them in my heart until we meet again, wherever and whenever that may be.

  A pause while I lean my head against the window and recollect.

  Item one: you sharing that immense plum cake your father sent you with me, housing it under your bed to supplement our meager rations. It was not the cake (which was very good) but your generosity I loved you for.

  Item two: you and I stamping in those puddles as they began to thaw in the woods, jumping with all our energy and slipping and sliding and falling and hurting our backs and soaking our clothes and making our hands all red and raw, even inside those foolish gloves. That tremendous snapping, to know we would hear running water again soon and the birds rejoicing with us and that there would be leaves on the interminable trees in another month or so because we had been fortunate enough to discover a bud. (I think to live in a clearing in the woods as we have for so long must be bad for the soul. The times I have dreamed of hacking my way through those trees, of wide rivers and pastures and slopes and flowers and sky.)

  Next item: drawing you during that tedious Mathematics lesson—could it be only three days ago?—when you leaned your chin on your hand and your hair fell heavy and your eyes gazed in concentration at the slate. If it had been me at the sum I would not have seen the chalk marks at all but some other thing entirely under my fingers; but you were thinking, that was the loveliness in your eyes. I love that drawing and wish they had not taken it away.

  What were our other crimes? Let me think. Oh yes—laughing at prayers. I know that was very wrong, but it was such a bright morning and telling you all about my brother Charlie at breakfast had made your smile so irrepressible, and there was your beauty and then the frivolous, idle speculation that if he had lived you might have married him one day, and the children you might have had, and when I caught your eye as I thought of it again at prayers, you smiled and I laughed and you laughed too. It was not malicious, schoolgirl impious laughter; there was no mockery of people or of God. They did not understand that. The fact remains that we were meant to be praying and we were not, we were meant to be thoughtful but we were not, and our heads should have been bowed and they were not.

  We deserved the scolding and the lines in our books, and perhaps even the hundred other petty slender separations, so harshly felt, but now, by comparison, so tiny and inconsequential. But this unnatural and sudden wrench, it seems unjust, very cruel. And to be going to my uncle, to a remote place I do not know, to a family I have not seen for several years—from my memory and my mother’s tales I do not anticipate a single sympathetic soul. A very grave and serious thought.

  I fear I will survive only in your letters.

  Write to me soon.

  Affectionately,

  Emily

  MISS AUGUSTA DEAN

  HIGH TREES SCHOOL

  ROCHESTER, NY

  BLUFF HOUSE

  NEWPORT BEACH

  March 13th, 1861

  My darling Augusta,

  Foolish to begin a new letter to you when I have yet to despatch the first, but I simply cannot blow out my candle without telling you that I am arrived.

  Mrs. Bradley, the housekeeper, met me at the station in a hired conveyance. It appears the family does not keep a carriage here, as it is only a summer house. The lady was rather reserved—doubtless not relishing being out on a dark night, or is it better to say early morning, to meet a wayward orphan from so obscure a branch of the family—but she was civil enough.

  I could not help feeling the most enormous excitement as we left the little town behind and I could smell the ocean breeze, feel the largeness of it before me—and the stars as big as lanterns in the sky.

  I could not see very much of the hous
e but it is clapboard, a seaside house, right on the beach, and so I must love it already. All the family were abed. I will meet them in the morning: father, son and mother. The other brothers are at training for the war, and my cousin Mary is at present visiting in New York. It will be awkward as we were always so completely estranged from every member of my mother’s family, and they were not even present at the funerals. The first and last I remember of them is my brief stay with my uncle and my aunt in Boston before he took me to school. All I can do is attempt to quell my nerves, remember my good manners and good grace, and that they are, after all, my flesh and blood.

  I must try to sleep now. It will be time to wake again soon! I have already been to the window but it does not face the ocean.

  Good night, my darling,

  Your devoted,

  Emily

  TWO

  Come.”

  Her uncle had chosen to receive Emily in his study as a visitor, even though he had greeted her formally at breakfast and pleasantries about the journey had been observed. Her cousin William had been working in his room. It was the same massive desk she remembered from the Boston house he lived in but this room held more dark and shiny furniture than she had ever seen and all its brightness had been dimmed: she could not make out the sea from the shrouded window.

  “Uncle.”

  He motioned for her to sit opposite him. She was not afraid. Indeed she did not want him to see how unafraid she was. The large dome of his forehead, the delicate spectacles, the roughness of his beard, the fineness of the manicure of his hands, all absorbed her.