An Oxford Tragedy

by Norman Russell

  ‘Oh, Tim, Tim,’ she whispered, ‘what have you done? And what am I to do? Oh, Mama, Mama! How I wish you were here!’

  Removing the letter, she locked the desk, and stumbled in tears from her husband’s study.

  4

  A Visitor to Makin House

  Frances Fowler stood at the window of her study, and looked out at the wide expanse of common land known as Port Meadow. A few horses were grazing some fifty yards away from the rear wall of the house: freemen still had the right to graze their animals without cost there, a privilege granted to them in the tenth century. It was a very warm summer’s day, with not the slightest hint of a breeze, and she could see people walking their dogs far away to the south, where the suburb of Jericho petered out, and the untamed sheep-nibbled grass of the common began.

  She was waiting for the arrival of Mr Harkness, the landlord of the house and its two acres of gardens, and had ordered coffee to be brought as soon as he was announced. Harkness, a plump, balding man whose suits seemed almost comically tight, was a decent fellow enough, but he knew the value of money, and constantly asserted that ‘times are hard, Miss.’

  She agreed with him. The first quarter’s rent had been due in March, and she had still not been able to pay him. In a couple of weeks’ time, the second quarter would be due. Mr Harkness could not be expected to wait any longer, and had declared his intention of calling on her that Monday morning to ask what she proposed to do about the matter. Well, he would have his answer.

  Frances Fowler had gone up to King’s College, London University, in 1887, when she was eighteen. She had worked fiendishly hard, and had graduated with First Class Honours in Modern Languages in 1890. Then, when only twenty-three, she had founded Makin House School. Her father had reluctantly given her two hundred pounds to help her secure the tenancy of what had then been called Sevastopol Lodge, and she had opened her school. There were three other young women tutors, and together they covered all the entrance requirements for the University of Oxford.

  Father had been quite unable to conceal his amusement at the whole venture, but had been content to let her have her way. She remembered calling at St Michael’s to receive his cheque, and hearing him say to her brother Timothy, who had been visiting the Lodgings, ‘I’m content to lose the money in this romantic venture, Tim, because it will give the girl time to realize how fatuous the whole idea is. When it fails, she’ll see that her future lies with making a good marriage, and giving me some lusty grandchildren!’

  Well, there would be no ‘lusty grandchildren’, and she would no longer have to endure the brief company of any more of Father’s ‘eligible young men’ whom he had persisted in procuring for her. There had only ever been one young man in her life, a fellow student at King’s, who had cynically used her for his own manly pleasure, and then abandoned her. Desperate, she had endured a secret pregnancy while pursuing her studies, and then had suffered a miscarriage, brought on by a fall in the street, which had freed her from her almost unendurable torment. No one had ever known or even suspected what had happened to her, and when her father had thrown a coming-out dance for her in London, she had put up with the attentions of her chosen ‘escort’ for her father’s sake. But she had sworn to herself that none of these predators would ever again seek to enslave her and diminish her integrity.

  And her school had not failed. She had started with five girls from sympathetic families, and two of them had already secured places at Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College respectively. Word of Makin House had come to the ears of other fathers of academically able daughters, and she now had twenty-three pupils.

  It would soon be imperative to engage two more tutors, and contemplate building an extension to the old sandstone house, put up in the Gothic style in the forties, and full of quirky little staircases and closets. Everyone, tutors and pupils alike, loved the house, and its ‘great hall’, a long drawing-room with tables for four and a miniature high table for the tutors; it looked for all the world like one of the genteel cafés that you found in High Street or the Cornmarket.

  A knock on the door heralded the arrival of Mr Harkness, preceded by Trixie, the maid, who brought in a tray containing a jug of coffee and some currant biscuits. The visitor lowered himself into a chair, cleared his throat, and began to speak.

  ‘You must agree with me, Miss Fowler,’ he said, ‘that times are hard… .’

  ‘Oh, I do agree with you, Mr Harkness!’ Frances replied. ‘Will you have some coffee? That’s right. How are you? And how are Mrs Harkness and the boys?’

  ‘They’re well, they’re flourishing, Miss. But times are hard, and money is tight. So I very much regret that I have to ask you to pay me my due now. Otherwise, I shall have to – well, turn you out, Miss, that’s the long and short of it.’

  He managed a deprecating smile, but she could see from the hard glint in his eyes that he meant it. She sat down at her desk, and removed a slip of paper from under the blotter.

  ‘There you are, Mr Harkness,’ she said, her heart beating rapidly with a kind of triumphant joy, ‘there’s a cheque to cover the entire rent till the end of the year. It was very good of you to wait so long, and to be so forbearing.’

  She saw him visibly relax, though his face still showed incredulity. Poor man! No doubt he had urgent creditors of his own badgering him for money.

  ‘Well, Miss,’ he said, carefully putting the cheque into his wallet, ‘I’m very pleased that there’s been no need for unpleasantness. This coffee is very good. Very good indeed.’

  ‘Let me pour you some more, Mr Harkness,’ said Frances. ‘Now, I have a proposition to put to you. This is a very pleasant house, even though gas hasn’t yet been laid on. A very pleasant house. What would you take for it?’

  ‘Take for it? Why, Miss Fowler, whatever do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, would you sell it to me, together with the two acres of ground? And the lease? What would you take?’

  ‘Well, let me see… . I should want four hundred pound for the house, and two hundred and fifty for the two acres of land. As for the lease… . That’s a very valuable commodity, and something that I’d be unwilling to part with. I couldn’t let it go for under two hundred. So altogether, Miss, you’d have to part with four, and two-fifty, and two, that’s eight hundred and fifty pounds. It’s a lot of money. A fortune, really.’

  ‘It is a fortune, I agree,’ said Frances, ‘but if you’ll make it a round eight-hundred, I’ll buy it immediately. You can see my solicitor, or send yours to him, or whatever it is you do, but yes, I’ll buy it all.’

  ‘Well, Miss, I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to say. Eight hundred will be quite all right. And I hope it won’t be out of order if I offer you my sympathy for the death of Sir Montague Fowler. A wonderful gentleman. And I, for one, Miss, don’t believe a word of these rumours that are going around. No, indeed. So I’ll bid you good morning, and God speed!’

  When Harkness had gone, clearly delighted and profuse in his thanks, Frances sat down at her desk and thought. How money talked! If Father hadn’t died when he did, she would have lost the house, lost the school, and entered the pathetic pool of young women in their mid-twenties looking for a man with sufficient money to keep them in some kind of genteel domesticity.

  And she would have lost something else, something infinitely precious, a special friendship that was now to be hers again. She opened a drawer in her desk, and withdrew the letter that had come that very morning. The envelope was plain and businesslike, but the sheet of notepaper inside it was pale mauve and perfumed.

  Dearest Child,

  How wonderful it was to receive your cheque for the entire amount of the loan, and for your current subscription! How wonderful, too, to receive your assurances of undying love! I return that love, and ask your pardon for any brusqueness in previous letters to you. Come soon, and you will see how much my love for you has endured. Would that you would bind yourself more closely to us by yielding to Rosalie’s
desire to photograph you for the albums! That would be the perfection of trust on your part.

  With all my love, I remain always

  Your Swan.

  She would visit the house in Old Bond Street as soon as was possible. And as for Rosalie’s desire to take pictures of her – well, why not? It was the last leap that would take her into a world that she had already more than half entered. In any case, if she wished to build up a school that was to last and endure into the next century, she would have to remain single. She saw no difficulties about that.

  Francis opened the glazed door of a bookcase and extracted an ancient, scuffed volume bound in calf. The spine-label was missing, and the joints had sprung, but she handled the book with a special kind of reverence. Placing it carefully on her desk, she opened it at the title page.

  An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen

  By Mrs Bathsua Makin

  London: Privately Printed

  1673

  She had named her school Makin House, after this erudite, pioneering woman, who had lived from 1600 to 1676. Brought up in her father’s school, she had produced a volume of Greek and Latin verse at the age of 16, and had later founded schools of her own for both boys and girls. In the 1640s she had been appointed tutor to Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. A ‘dutiful’ wife, she had produced twelve children of her own. Who had even heard of her now?

  Frances turned over the pages of the book, until she came to a passage that she had underlined in pencil. It was one of Bathsua’s especially mordant comments, and a favourite with Frances.

  ‘Had God intended Women only as a finer sort of Cattle, he would not have made them reasonable… . Monkeys (which the Indians use, to do many Offices) might have better fitted some men’s Lust, Pride, and Pleasure.’

  Smiling to herself, she closed the book and returned it to the bookcase. It would not do, she mused, to let her brother Timothy read the forthright views of Mrs Bathsua Makin.

  Poor Timothy… . Did he know that his silly little wife Kate was incapable of keeping his secrets? Frances had that very morning received a hysterical letter from her sister-in-law, a letter containing information that she had been mad to commit to paper. Kate was a dear girl, very pretty, but dangerously immature, and totally dependent on Timothy in the sense that his views were hers, his opinions were hers; she no longer had any individual life of her own. Mrs Makin would not have approved.

  Frances had written a reply, telling Kate to keep her own counsel and to show more trust in her husband. There was, she was quite sure, a simple explanation. It would be foolish to mention the matter to Timothy, and ‘undutiful’ to speak of it to anyone else. What a wealth of hypocrisy lay in that word!

  Kate might well get her letter in the evening’s post; if not, she would certainly receive it tomorrow. She would not be at Father’s funeral, because Timothy deemed her to be too ‘delicate’ to attend. What a fool he was! And yet, she went in such awe of him that she had never been able to summon up sufficient courage to tell him that there was nothing wrong with Kate other than youth and inexperience. That particular delicate flower would, no doubt, survive all kinds of inclement weather, and outlive them all.

  Frances left her study, and descended the main staircase. She could hear the subdued murmurs of staff and pupils coming from the various classrooms. Each room was different, carrying its own charm. In the days when it had been Sevastopol Lodge, the five classrooms had been two sitting rooms, a morning room, the owner’s study, and a sewing room. In the hallway, she had caused a trophy case to be hung, and a long honours board, which already contained the names of those girls who had won entry to Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville.

  The hall had been bathed in morning sunlight coming through the tall stained-glass window at the head of the stairs, but now a cloud passed over the sun, and the light fled down the passageway towards the kitchen quarters. Frances shuddered. She had nearly lost all this, because Father would never have come to her rescue. He would have sympathized, metaphorically patting her head, and urging her to come back home to the Lodgings until he had found her a suitable husband.

  Now, his death had made her a wealthy woman, free to turn her many dreams into reality. Matrimony, however, was not one of those dreams. Her father had held her life and her future entirely in his hands. No other man, she swore, would be allowed to do that.

  Frances Fowler and her brother John walked back from St Mary’s church at Lynham Hill, and passed through the wicket-gate that opened into the gardens of Forest Park. It was a warm, sunny day, with one of those grey, leaden skies that betoken the coming of a hot night, possibly culminating in surly thunder and the flickering of distant lightning.

  The service in the church had been brief: the vicar had presided, and Timothy had read a lesson from Scripture. John had delivered a brief address, and the committal at the family tomb had soon been over. The vicar had declined their invitation to take refreshments with them, pleading a prior engagement.

  Frances had experienced a brief pang of nostalgia on seeing the neat Regency mansion again, the house where she had spent her happy childhood. She and her brothers had been devoted to their mother, who ruled them – and their father – with firm good humour and common sense. She had always been successful in curbing Father’s airy ambitions to expand the house, or to invest his capital in the latest financial craze. It was Mother who had brought Forest Park to the marriage: she came from a family of gentlefolk. Father was of what biographers liked to call ‘obscure origin.’ His father had been a country schoolmaster in Essex.

  ‘Will you keep the house, John?’ Frances asked her brother as they walked side by side on the path that ran diagonally across the lawn.

  ‘No, Fanny, I don’t think so. I’ve lived in London so long that this particularly obscure corner of Wiltshire holds no appeal for me any longer. I’ll put it up for sale.’

  ‘We had some good times here,’ said Frances. ‘When we were children, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, we did, but that was mainly while Mother was alive. Things became rather tenuous after we lost her. Incidentally, what’s happened to Timothy? I thought he was following us from the churchyard.’

  ‘He was, but he saw old Dr Hooper in the congregation, and stayed to have a word with him. Dr Hooper! He must be over eighty by now.’

  They went together into the house, where two elderly servants from the old days had come out of retirement to wait upon them. In the faded drawing-room, the traditional seed cake and port wine had been laid out. Frances and John sat down by the fireplace, where a cheerful fire was burning. They still retained their outer clothing, because they both felt that they were strangers now in Forest Park. It held some part of their past, but nothing of their future.

  ‘Fanny,’ said John Fowler to his sister, ‘I didn’t want to mention it while Timothy was here, but Father’s legacy came just in time to save me from disaster. All’s well, now, and will be in the future; but it was a near thing.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I borrowed a large sum of money to secure our firm’s exclusive right to broker a massive discount on the paper of one of the railway cartels. It was perfectly legal, you understand, but perhaps not entirely ethical… .’

  ‘A bribe.’ Really! She was quite fond of John, but he was a hypocrite.

  ‘Be that as it may, Fanny, the man I borrowed it from suddenly wanted it back, and became very nasty when I demurred. He’d found himself in a hole, too. And I had gambling debts, and was being threatened in the streets by the loan-shark’s thugs. So when Father’s legacy was confirmed, I was able to pay the man back. We’re the best of friends, now.’

  ‘How much did you borrow from this man?’

  ‘Twenty-six thousand pounds, at six per cent.’

  Frances was silent for a while. John crossed to the table, and brought her a glass of port and a piece of seed cake. Helping himself, he resumed his seat by the fire. Really, thought Frances, what a
weak fool he was! His amiable manner masked a shifty and dishonest dealer, and as for his gambling, he would never cure himself of that. How long would his new fortune last?

  His wife, Margaret, had cried off at the last moment, and had joined her children at her mother’s London house. Perhaps it was fitting that just the three children of Sir Montague Fowler had come to see him join their mother in the family vault.

  ‘I met a man in town yesterday,’ said John, ‘who told me that tongues were beginning to wag about Father’s death. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t ignore what he was saying.’

  ‘What kind of a man was he?’

  ‘He was an analytical chemist, who has a practice in a lane near Lincoln’s Inn. Not a pharmacist, you know, but a man who analyzes samples of various goods for lawyers preparing cases of malpractice. I asked him what he meant, and he told me that he’d been at a meeting earlier this week at Apothecaries’ Hall, and had met a man from St Michael’s who told him about the rumours going round.’

  Frances thought of her sister-in-law’s hysterical letter, and felt a sudden coldness clutch at her heart. What had Kate written?

  Oh, dear Fanny, I have found a packet of poison in Tim’s desk, and I am frantic with worry. It had mercuric chloride written upon it. Surely that is a poison? Oh, dear Fanny, what am I to do?

  ‘This man from St Michael’s. Did your chemist give him a name?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Now, what was it? Templar. Yes, that’s right. Perhaps, when you go back to Oxford tomorrow, Fanny, you could find out something about him.’

  ‘There are rumours circulating already in Oxford,’ said Frances. ‘Only yesterday, I had a visit from my landlord, who told me that he for one didn’t believe all the rumours going round about Sir Montague Fowler’s death. He said that partly because I’d just paid him the large debt that I owed him. I said nothing, but I noted what he said.’