by Peter McAra
The midwife took it upon herself to name Charlotte’s child Eliza, after a sister of the dead woman who had herself died of fever a few years before. The name was cheerfully embraced by Hannah, the youngest of Charlotte’s sisters, who volunteered to raise her little orphan niece. Hannah had married Joseph Hodgkins, the viscount’s head gamekeeper, some years before. Joseph, a man older than his bride by twenty years, occupied the solid, well maintained gamekeeper’s cottage in the grounds of the Great House.
Joseph’s fine cottage was a perquisite very visible to the young women of the village. Hannah had earned her place in it when, as a pert sixteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the Great House, she caught Joseph’s eye. It was the custom, when the viscount called him to discuss such weighty affairs as badger baiting and the breeding of hounds, for Joseph to wait below stairs. There he would be fussed over by Hannah until the master pulled the bellrope to summon his gamekeeper to the library. While Joseph was being thus entertained, he found his taciturnity thawed by the effervescent, pretty young woman who brought him cups of the special coffee kept only for the master.
Within two years of their wedding, Hannah had borne two children, a boy and a girl. When the infants were taken from her by a typhus epidemic, she plunged into a fit of melancholy no one seemed able to cure. Her rheumaticky husband Joseph, who might have been expected to give his bereaved wife more children to settle her grief, could not. Cook, who had lasting affection for her able little kitchenmaid, persuaded Hannah to return to the kitchen, giving her the duties of assistant cook when the viscount held his hunting parties.
But the bereaved Hannah had lost her art. The cakes she baked were hard and lumpy when she neglected to cream the butter to the right consistency. They might burn to a cinder while she sat in a daydream beside the oven. Hannah’s moping forced Cook to set her favourite to the job of pot scrubbing, the only activity she could be trusted to fulfil without disrupting the busy kitchen. After a few weeks, Hannah found even this task beyond her, and retired behind the walls of her cottage. It was remote enough from the village, and close enough to the intimidating bulk of the Great House, to discourage visits from her former friends.
Then, without notice, Eliza, an orphan not a day old, was thrust into her arms. The village folk murmured amongst themselves that the little orphan was a gift sent by God directly to Hannah — the only possible cure for her unremitting sickness of soul. They marvelled that she so soon roused herself from her melancholia and took to mothering. Mother she did, eager to pour her pent-up reservoir of maternal love onto the pretty child. Even when she was newborn, Eliza had a head of golden curls.
‘A beautiful child,’ Mother Turlington said when she bent to look into the carriage that Hannah paraded through the village. ‘But don’t expect her to take after her mother. I fancy her hair will darken soon. Why, my own hair was fair till I was three, and my sister’s too. And sad to say, I fear the curls will disappear too. Then she’ll look more like poor dead Silas, you’ll see.’
As Eliza grew into a winsome three-year-old, Martin Townsend was often seen engaging her in playful moments after Sunday morning chapel. Then he asked her foster-mother if the pair of them might pay regular visits to his library.
‘It be Vicar’s notion to teach you to read, Eliza,’ Hannah told her. It seems as he saw you peering into a bible after chapel. He took me aside. Told me as he thought you were very clever. So we will visit him, sit in his library with him, and have him teach you. Every Thursday afternoon.’
That weekly event became a central part of Eliza’s life. First, the vicar guided her burgeoning passion for learning. Village folk watched in some alarm as the scholarly young man, fresh from Oxford, spent hours with the village child who was rather too clever for her lowly station in life.
Then she began to devour the books that lined his library’s gloomy shelves. From fairytales she moved to stories of adventure — the voyages of discovery of Sir Francis Drake and his ilk. Then the history of war — the Medes and the Persians, the Crusades, the coming of William The Conqueror. The vicar encouraged her to take home the books she fancied, then return them the following Thursday. After a time, the village grapevine heard that poor Hannah Hodgkins disapproved of her foster-daughter’s doings. Of what use was such learning to a poor village child? It might lead to her undoing, give her fanciful notions above her station. She might think herself too grand to marry an honest village lad.
Then the vicar’s wife Hepzibah died after giving birth to her stillborn son. Her husband grieved sorely for a year. The enthusiasm he had manufactured for the care of his flock withered. His congregation began to fear for his sanity, watching him turn sere, like a tree losing its leaves in autumn. Then, as heads began to shake and fingers began to point, he announced his intention to leave for Botany Bay, a remote and primitive convict settlement half a world away. He told his flock God had called him to minister to the savages of that desert land.
‘Poor Vicar,’ Mother Turlington said as she took her daily constitutional in the marketplace. ‘His heart is broken. I fancy he wants to remove himself far away from his unhappiness.’
In the weeks before he left, Martin found himself riding out of his way to pass by the gamekeeper’s cottage where his natural daughter lived. Sometimes he saw her playing in the garden and marvelled at the way her shining hair caught the spring sunshine, as if she had just stood under a cascade of fine gold. Each time he watched her, a heavy weight bore down on his heart.
For her part, Eliza knew she would miss her weekly visits to the library of the kindly gentleman she knew as Vicar Townsend. She enjoyed his friendship, his witticisms whenever he halted his horse by her cottage and held conversation with her over the garden fence. Then, when Hannah took her to the village church on Sunday mornings, Eliza watched the man who had become her magical hero preaching wisdom and love from his high pulpit. And always, after service, he would take her hand, smile, and wish God’s blessings on her.
Then he breathed a sad farewell to her, left for Southampton and took ship to Botany Bay. In his heart he would always hold the daughter he and Charlotte had conceived in love.
Eliza grew into a happy child with a loveable character and a face so arrestingly beautiful that village folk said she was an angel come to visit. One day, her foster-mother noticed four-year-old Eliza playing with a collection of pebbles on the tiled floor of the cottage kitchen. As Hannah watched, the child arranged them in rows as neatly as her little hands could manage.
‘One, two, fwee,’ she counted, not knowing her mother was watching. Eliza had learned to count to ten when she was but two years old, and also to recognise the written numbers. As Hannah watched, Eliza continued to play with the pebbles.
‘Two-and-forty, fwee-and-forty,’ the child continued, still oblivious. When she had arranged ten rows of ten pebbles in a rough square, she stopped and contemplated the lopsided pattern she had made. Then she mouthed the numbers again.
‘Eight-and-ninety, nine-and-ninety, ten-and-ninety.’ Hannah realised that the child had recognised that there was a specialness about this symmetrical array of pebbles, though she could not know the word for a hundred. Eliza sat and counted the pebbles again. Then she moved herself to an adjacent side of the square and counted once more from this new position. Hannah watched in fascination until she must tear herself away. The dough was risen — she must build up the fire and set the loaf to bake. Then she must churn the cream before she took the pail and brought the cow in for the evening milking.
As Hannah stood in the scullery washing the pail before she sat down to milk, Eliza ran to her mother’s side, hands so full of pebbles that she could barely hold them.
‘Mother, two fives are ten. And six fours are four-and-twenty.’ Hannah hid her amazement.
‘Clever child. And how many is two four-and-twenties?
‘Eight-and-forty.’ Hannah was dumbfounded.
‘And six four-and-twenties?’ she laughed.
‘
Four-and-forteenty.’ Hannah trembled.
‘When we have ten tens, my clever little one, we call that one hundred. So we say that four four-and-twenties is one hundred and four-and-forty. Now, what is eight four-and-twenties?’
‘Two hundred, then eight-and-eighty. Ask me a hard one, Mother.’
Eliza took to asking questions all day long.
‘What does ‘provocation’ mean, Mother?
‘What is a ton, and a league, and Parliament?’
She hungered for knowledge about the world around her.
‘Why does night come, Mother?’
‘Because God wants his creatures to rest.’
‘Why does he want them to rest?’
‘Because everything rests.’
‘The stream doesn’t. I hear it whenever I wake in the dark. And cocks. I hear them crowing in the night.’
‘They must be different.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, child.’
‘How does God make it dark?’
‘He pushes the sun away.’
‘Where does he push it to? It must be day there. And the creatures there wouldn’t get their rest.’
After some months of Hannah’s preoccupation with her amazing child, she forgot her grief. The good news travelled to the Great House, and Hannah was sought out by Cook.
‘Come back to the kitchen, child. We miss you. There’s none as can make a jugged hare like you.’
‘But I’m a married woman. I have a child to rear. I have to — ’
‘What if Sir John were to order you back? You know how he always liked your jugged hare. The place is dull without you, Hannah. The housekeeper would pay you well. She knows your worth.’
‘Well, I must ask my Joseph.’
‘I’ll wager you’ll find him willing.’
‘How do you know? I’d have thought — ’
‘I know these things, child. I sees him day in, day out. I talks to him as he waits in the kitchen. I’ve known him since afore you were born, remember.’
‘And my little Eliza. She — ’
‘She’s welcome in my kitchen. She’s a good child. It will exercise her mind. I hear tell as she’s a clever one. She can sit by the fire and play with dolls. I’ll put my hands on some lovely dolls.’ Hannah smiled to herself. Eliza would more likely read a book from the viscount’s library than play with dolls.
Hannah considered Cook’s offer. As she recovered from her melancholy, she found herself missing the companionship of the women of the kitchen, the feeling of being close to the centre of village life. She thought often of the cavernous kitchen fireplaces with the smoke stains flaring upwards over the whitewashed brick facades, the piles of dead game thrown in a tiled corner waiting to be dressed, the junior kitchenmaid turning the spit with its burden of a side of beef, or a fat sucking pig with its golden skin scored, popping blisters of molten lard over the embers. She remembered the piles of earthy potatoes fresh dug and waiting peeling. In her memory she smelt the mounds of newly picked herbs, heard the bubbling pots, the flare and sputter of the fires.
Within a week of Joseph’s agreeing with Cook’s notion, and Hannah’s surprise that he had done so, she took her old place in the kitchen. Four-year-old Eliza became the darling of the kitchenmaids as she sat in a corner of the kitchen and read whatever books could be found for her while her mother peeled, stirred, spiced, shredded and basted. The servants whose duties took them above stairs were wont to talk about the golden-haired mite who ruled the kitchen.
Over following weeks Eliza infiltrated the gardens, the courtyards, and on occasion, even the long oak-panelled corridors of the Great House. She made these voyages of discovery holding the hand of Mrs Hawkins, the widowed and childless housekeeper who, it was said, loved the child as if it were her own. Many times the viscount’s children had strained to watch from their playroom window as the servants frolicked in the kitchen garden with the little maid.
One day not long before her fifth birthday, Hannah took Eliza to a sunny spot in the garden during a moment of leisure from her duties. Hannah had risen early and worked hard for a long week. In moments, she fell asleep. Eliza took hold of her opportunity. She saw a gate in the garden wall, ran to it, pushed it. It opened and she strolled into a grand courtyard in which a fountain played and a black-and-white spotted dog slept on a clipped lawn.
‘Who are you?’ She heard a voice and turned. A young boy had addressed her.
‘Eliza Downing,’ she said.
‘Are you from the village?’
‘No, I’m from Heaven.’ She had a mind to toy with the earnest boy who stood gaping at her. She’d been told of her heavenly origins by her mother every one of the hundreds of times she’d asked where she came from.
‘Heaven!’ the boy said. ‘Are you an angel?
‘Yes.’ She’d been told more times than she could remember that she was indeed an angel.
‘Can I touch your hair?’
‘Very well. Everyone wants to touch my hair.’ She pirouetted so that her ringlets swung out in a golden wheel which caught the sun. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ The young boy touched the hair, examined a single ringlet as he held it in his palm.
‘Thank you,’ he said as he let it go. Eliza smiled to herself. She could tell the boy liked her.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘I won’t tell you.’
‘I told you mine. So you should tell me yours. It’s fair.’
‘Very well. It’s Harry. I’m five. I’ll be six soon.
‘Oh. I’m almost five,’ she said. ‘But I’m very clever.’ He looked at her in puzzlement. ‘What can you count to, then?’
‘A million million, if I want to.’
‘How much is a million million?’
‘Lots and lots.’
‘More than all the stars?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much more?’
‘Millions of times more.’
‘Oh. I can only count to forty,’ he said. She hid her astonishment.
‘Come play with me, Harry. Come into the garden.’
‘I mustn’t. That’s the kitchen garden. We never go there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s the servants’ place.’
‘It’s lovely there. It’s sunny. Come and look.’ She took his hand and dragged him through the gate, led him to where Hannah lay sleeping.
‘That’s my mother,’ she said.
‘But she’s only a servant.’
‘No. She’s my mother.’
‘But she’s — ’
The conversation woke Hannah. She sat up and yawned. Then her eyes lit on the two children.
‘Oh! Master Harry. Oh dear! Eliza! Come here! Master Harry, sir. You must go back to your garden at once. Quickly now. If your father should find you here — ’
Harry headed for the gate at a trot. Just before he disappeared beyond the doorway, he turned for a last long look at Eliza.
‘Goodbye, Angel,’ he said.
CHAPTER 5
As John De Havilland approached fifty, he married his second wife, the unlovely daughter of a banker he met while attending to business in London. When she died in childbirth, he could not say in his heart that he missed her company. He chose not to take another wife. Instead, he decided to concentrate on managing his herd of fine dairy cattle. He had loved farming since boyhood, had bred a formidable herd of pedigrees in the thirty years since he inherited the estate from his father. Indeed, there had been times when he thought he preferred the conformation of a well bred Jersey cow to that of a blushing debutante.
His second wife left him with two children. Louisa was aged two when her younger brother Harry was born. De Havilland quickly decided he was too old a dog to learn the new tricks of fatherhood. He became downright frightened of Louisa and Harry when they grew old enough to talk with him after dinner. He took to summoning their nanny immediately the
table was cleared, and retiring to his study for a port to soothe the nerves overwrought by their boisterous chatter. As Louisa reached the age of eight, and Harry six, the viscount began to think of their future.
‘Be damned,’ he said over dinner to Samuel Hitchens, a landowner who lived a few miles away, and with whom he’d enjoyed hunting since they were young blades. ‘If my children are to grow up half sociable, they need company their own age. But there’s no child of respectable upbringing within a day’s ride of my house.’
‘You do well to be concerned,’ Hitchens said. ‘You’re a man who knows bloodstock. See it as a matter of breeding. If your children are seen as dull country clods, they will have to settle for the rejects of society when they seek a mate. Have you not noticed how a new bull with good bloodlines straightway seeks out the best looking cow in the field? Watch when he’s led through the gate to meet his new herd. He may well ignore those with less in the way of conformation until he has served all the others.’
‘Mmm. Well, I plan to send Harry to Oxford when he is sixteen or so.’
‘Sixteen?’ Hitchens laughed. ‘He’ll be a laughing stock. Those city bred boys will make sport of a country cousin. He’ll be marked for life. As the twig is bent, John... He’ll never acquire the social graces a young fellow needs — well, to win one of those delicious young debutantes disporting themselves during the Season. These days, a young man woos and wins by making ready conversation, flashing his wit, and talking of the latest extravaganza at the theatres. I tell you, if you send a young country boy to London to find himself a wife, he’ll make a fool of himself. Then he’ll come back to the country with his tail between his legs, and find consolation with someone not entirely suitable.’
De Havilland privately agreed. Hitchens had described his own life’s history exactly. Now he saw that this was why both his wives had been plain, spineless, uninteresting creatures who gave him no companionship.
‘Mrs Hawkins,’ the viscount asked of his housekeeper the next day. ‘I need your advice. I am concerned for my children’s education in, er, matters of conversation and the like. Louisa and Harry are earnest enough pupils, and their tutor an able enough scholar. But I am concerned. I fancy they will grow up dull fish if they cannot exercise their minds, practise their conversation with someone their own age. Give the matter some thought and see me when you have some ideas.’
