A World Apart

by Peter McAra

  Hannah had always inundated her foster-daughter with motherly love. Now, sensing Eliza’s need, she acted. One evening as Eliza stepped into the cottage, weary after her day at the village school, Hannah greeted her with a strangely bright smile.

  ‘Look as who’s come to sup with us, Eliza.’

  Eliza peered into the dark kitchen. There, leaning forward, elbows on the table, sat Will Hardy, eyes following her every move. So her aunt had acted on her suggestion of a few nights before. She had decided it was time for her daughter to consider Will as a husband. As Eliza put down her satchel, the young man stood, bowed, fidgeted with his neckcloth. His smile faltered at the look of weary coldness she couldn’t hide from him.

  She looked into his face and smiled politely. At the least, she should treat him with good manners. He was a head shorter than Harry, and despite his youth, already a little stooped. His mop of tousled brown hair, his patchy beard, looked as if they’d been scrubbed clean with a broom for the occasion. His workman’s hands clenched and unclenched as he groped for words. His humble clothes were doubtless his Sunday best. At least his neckcloth was clean, free of the sweat stains that seemed an essential part of a workman’s dress. He had made an effort. For her aunt’s sake, Eliza must be pleasant.

  ‘Good evening, Will.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’m delighted you’ve taken the time to pay us a visit,’ she said. ‘Now what’s your — ?’

  ‘Your mother, she says as we should take a walk round your garden. Afore supper.’ He stepped towards her, shy but eager. A picture of Harry, smiling, standing tall in his riding boots, flashed into Eliza’s awareness. She pushed it away.

  ‘Off you go now, you two,’ her mother said, thumbs tucked into her apron pocket. ‘I have to get the jugged hare on the hob. Peel some carrots. Get my poor tired husband from his bed. His back be right sore after a day’s ploughing.’

  Eliza would try to set Will at ease.

  ‘Mother tells me you’re a carpenter these days,’ she said. Soon Hannah would call them for supper and Eliza could hand the burden of his entertainment to her parents. The novel she had borrowed from the schoolmaster, with plans to read it that night, would have to wait until Will had departed.

  ‘Aye, that I be.’ Will beamed at Eliza’s apparent approval of his choice of career. ‘And a fine life it be too.’

  ‘Er, tell me. What are you building these days?’

  ‘Why, a new privy for the vicar’s house. Then a hay barn for Farmer Barnaby.’

  ‘How…interesting.’

  ‘Aye, it be very interesting. A man can barely sleep nights for the things going round in his head.’ Eliza wondered how the construction of a privy could invade Will’s mind into the small hours. She smiled sweetly, kept her silence.

  ‘The hay barn — we’re set to make trusses for the roof.’ Now that Will had returned to his home ground, he was shedding his shyness fast. Perhaps too fast. ‘The biggest trusses a man’s yet seen. T’will be a right special day when we heave those trusses up.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Eliza would not press for details.

  ‘And like as not, my master will send me across the purlins to make the trusses fast to each other. That be dangerous work.’ His voice betrayed his pride. ‘But they says I has a way with fastening trusses,’ he continued. ‘And I…I ain’t so frighted by heights now as I were before, when I were but a prentice.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And you, Eliza. I hear tell as you be a teacher nowadays.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This teaching. Is it a mite…tiresome for you?’

  ‘Indeed, it can be.’

  ‘But you’re a right clever one. Everyone in the village says so.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Aye. I’ve heard tell you can cipher as fast as greased lightning. And read a whole book in a day.’

  ‘Thank you. And you, Will, do you not read sometimes? Cipher a little? For your work?’

  ‘Nay, Eliza. Reading and ciphering’s for fops, not men as works with their hands.’ He raised his arms, flexed his wrists.

  ‘And in the evenings, Will. How do you occupy your time then?’

  ‘Why, I goes to the inn. It be jolly company there. Cards, darts. Or sometimes I might sit by the fire in the cottage. Drink a pint of ale with my old father.’

  At a loss to engage him in further conversation, Eliza led Will to the post-and-rail fence at the bottom of the garden. Both silent, they stared over the fence towards the forested hills now dim in the approaching dusk.

  ‘Eliza.’ His voice showed his unease. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘One day I’ll build a fine cottage. I be planning it these evenings. As I sit by the fire. I have paper and pencil, you know. And I draw likenesses of my cottage.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘I plan t’will have two bedrooms. One for me and my…wife. The other for, er, the babes. T’will be a big bedroom.’ He grinned. ‘I hopes as my wife will have many babes. As will grow up to be fine upstanding people. I been thinking about that a lot, Eliza. About the family I means to have.’ Eliza hoped he would pause soon. Instead, he continued, like a cantering horse that threatens to break into a gallop in the next moment.

  ‘The boys to work with me, learn my trade,’ he smiled. ‘The girls, who knows, to be lady’s maids in a fine house somewheres.’ He turned to her. She stared at the distant hills with new intenseness, resting her hands on the fence rail. The silence lengthened. Suddenly, he put his hand on hers. She shivered. His work-roughened palm grated unpleasantly on her skin. Gently, she slid her hand away, looked down.

  ‘Eliza.’ His voice had dropped to a husky whisper.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you…be my…sweetheart?’ Eliza was trapped. She must escape without giving offence to the earnest young man who now bared his heart to her. She laughed, a sweet, kindly giggle.

  ‘Oh, Will. I…there are other girls in the village. Far prettier girls than me.’

  ‘It’s you as I fancies, Eliza. Only you.’

  ‘Amy, the baker’s daughter.’ Eliza clutched at a straw. ‘She’s comely, dainty. Her smile; it’s magic. I hear tell all the village folk have loved her since she was a babe in arms. And they say she fancies you. Not that she puts it about, you understand. We girls have our secrets. But I know that she — ’

  ‘It’s you as I fancies, Eliza.’ He reached for her arm as she stood with her hands at her sides. She stepped away. ‘Else why would I come to sup at your cottage? Your mother, she asked me. She says you’ll likely take a husband soon. That you have a mind to wed. Have children.’

  ‘Did she indeed?’

  ‘Why, yes.’

  ‘I can’t believe she said that,’ Eliza breathed. He stared at her, lost for words. She would consolidate her advantage. ‘I’m far too young, too flighty to wed. Not for many years. I cannot even imagine being a wife. Not to a man so…earnest, so decent and upstanding as you, Will. You must aim higher. Now Amy would — ’

  ‘I only fancies you, Eliza. No other girl in the village. In the world even. Only you.’

  ‘We should go back to the cottage.’ She turned and began to walk. ‘My mother likes to serve her jugged hare when it’s fresh off the hob. Hot and tasty. And I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry, Will?’

  ‘Only for you, Eliza.’ They walked the few yards in chilly silence. As they neared the cottage door, he cleared his throat. ‘Will you think on it. Eliza?’

  ‘I have thought on it, Will. Really, Amy would be so much better. Why, she has what women call child-bearing hips. She’ll give you fine babies. Far finer than I ever could.’ She opened the kitchen door.

  ‘Hello mother. We could smell the hare cooking. I’ll warrant Will is near to starving for a taste of it.’

  As she sat at the table, she felt herself overwhelmed by two emotions: relief that her time with Will was over, and the familiar, aching, overpowering sadness at her loss of the man she would always love.


  CHAPTER 9

  A year passed, then another. Eliza turned eighteen on a bleak April day which showed no promise of spring. She woke on her birthday morn deciding to give the day over to mourning her fate. In the last few months, she had grown taller. Men turned their heads to watch her as she walked home from the school, but she made a point of ignoring them. In her heart, she still yearned for Harry to return, telling herself that she loved him, had always loved him, that the stars had ordained their love. But in the end, her common sense usually won the battle over her naïve heart…

  She had read perhaps a hundred novels on the subject of love, and told herself she knew much of its nuances. Whenever a picture of Harry flashed into her mind, she would curl her fingers into the palm of her hand and remember the stickiness of their mingled blood. She had conjectured, then hoped, then fervently believed, that some impossible obstacle had blocked Harry from returning to her, at least for the time being. Against all reason she began to believe that he would return. She hid the single letter he had sent her in a secret place. On the nights she found her need for love overwhelming, she took it out and put it under her pillow, drawing comfort from it in the dark of her room. Village gossip confirmed that that Harry had begun his evidently unhappy courting of Agatha when he came home from Oxford for term holidays.

  Eliza had no wish to continue to work at teaching school until she was old. She had laboured at the village school for too long, trading her talent for schoolmaster Watson’s genuine if amateurish attempts to explain his craft to her. The secret of imparting learning was the one item from his store of knowledge she could not acquire. Her intellect was differently fashioned from that of her pupils. She could never understand why they repeated the mistakes she had corrected a dozen times, or cried when she begged them to add a column of numbers or to read a book.

  ‘Mother, I’m sick to death of teaching and school and Mr Watson and the pupils,’ she said to Hannah as they breakfasted on the morning of her birthday. ‘I feel ill when I think of going there each day. Sometimes I think I’ll scream for an hour if one more child weeps and tells me she cannot add three numbers together.’

  ‘But angel,’ Hannah said. ‘What else would you wish to do?’

  ‘I’d like to become a milkmaid, like my mother, and her mother before her.

  ‘But my dear, my beautiful little Eliza. You must never — ’ Eliza saw that Hannah tried to hide the panic in her voice. ‘The work is hard and dirty. And — ’

  ‘Anything but that accursed school,’ Eliza said. ‘And a milkmaid’s pay is good, Mother. I want to repay you for bringing up a poor orphan child. Now I’m almost grown, I can do it. I’m eighteen. I can work hard, bring money to the household.’

  ‘But child — ’

  ‘Father is growing old. He has rheumaticky knees. It hurts him to walk. He must stop working soon. Then there’ll be less money coming in.’

  ‘Money? We don’t need it, child. We have our cow and our hens and our garden.’

  ‘Mother. You are old and I am young. I need to make my way in the world.’

  ‘My beautiful child, that dairy is hell on earth,’ Hannah said. ‘The milkmaids rise before dawn. They must go out, rain or sleet, knee deep in mud, to tend to the cows. They carry heavy buckets on the yokes till their guts is set to fall out. They work summer and winter. There’s no respite for when they have the curse, or when they’re sick with ague. By the time a milkmaid is five-and-twenty, she has a bent back, her legs is knotty with veins, her hands is covered with cow pox, and her mind is turned to mouldy cheese. And I hear tell as when them as has been milkmaids has their babies, it’s precious hard for them on account of their backs is bad and their insides is torn. Your own mother died having you, remember?’ She held out her hands, palms upwards, shook her head.

  ‘And milkmaids is forever tired and out of sorts because they has to work from dawn till the cheese is set and the butter churned and the dairy scrubbed and the cows fed and watered. In the winter, that be long after dark. Then they fall into bed like corpses, till it all begins again at break of day. And old Harriet as is the head milkmaid, she’s a thorn in their side into the bargain. If they looks at her sideways, she sets them to carrying water to the animals’ drinking troughs. That be men’s work, but she takes no mind of that. If their work don’t knock the spirit out of ‘em, old Harriet does.’ Hannah watched her foster-daughter’s face fall. ‘I won’t let you do it, my dear. You were made for a finer purpose.’

  ‘Yes, but…’ Eliza struggled for words to express what was in her heart. Hannah was desperate. She could not accommodate the notion of her beautiful child working herself into a scullion, ugly, broken in body and dead in spirit, before she was twenty five.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Mother Turlington, child,’ Hannah said. ‘She knows the answer to every question. Tomorrow is market day in the village. I have eggs to sell. I’ll see her then.’

  Next afternoon Hannah returned from the market and called her daughter.

  ‘You are to visit Mrs Thurber, Eliza. Her daughter Agatha is in need of a companion.’ Eliza was lost for words. Everyone knew Agatha’s parents had set their sights on Harry as a bridegroom for their daughter.

  ‘But Mother, Agatha is a woman. She’s one-and-twenty, at least. Perhaps three years older than me. Why should she want me for a companion?’

  ‘Don’t belittle yourself, child. Mrs Thurber has heard as you’re very clever. That you teach the village children to read and cipher. That you’ve read all the books in the vicar’s library. T’is said that her daughter is sick unto death of doing embroidery and practising her pianoforte.’ Hannah paused, looked into her daughter’s face. ‘Mother Turlington thinks Mrs Thurber wants Agatha to marry soon. She thinks a little book learning will make her daughter a better match.’

  Eliza sighed. If she didn’t find another occupation soon, she must surely go into a decline. But to ready Agatha to become a fitting bride for Harry? By next morning she had decided. Harry had a sense of honour. He had told Eliza he loved her, had shown his love in a thousand ways. But as a member of the landed gentry, he had certain obligations. As her mother would doubtless tell her, the die was cast.

  The following afternoon, Eliza walked from the village to the Thurber’s mansion. As she stepped through the iron gates, now set with the gold-coated Thurber crest, she was transported in fantasy to a time in the future.

  The bridal couple stands in the church doorway, showered with rose petals. From her hiding place behind a grove of trees, Eliza recognises Harry as he smiles down at Agatha in her bridal gown. His bride glows with joy. They step into the fine barouche which will take them on their honeymoon. Then the marriage bed, set in the pale light of an ornate, finely-curtained chamber. Naked, eyes aglow, Harry slides into the sheets. Agatha looks up at him, her face pale, near fainting at the prospect of the love to come.

  Years pass. Now Eliza has come to Thurber’s mansion to teach a family of small children — Harry and Agatha’s children. Each step towards the wide marble staircase fires shafts of pain through her body. Her throat dries as if to choke her.

  Eliza could not bear to remain in this excruciating trance for another second. Summoning the last shreds of her will, she knocked at the ornate front door of the new-built mansion. A maid took her to an extravagantly furnished drawing room. As she stood staring through the transparent lace curtains, Eliza took in the newly planted gardens. A pair of peacocks strolled across a lawn. Then, with a strident cry, one of them fluttered up onto the rim of a Grecian urn. The peacock cried again and spread his tail. The play of rainbow colours caught the sun, creating a dazzling display of male pride.

  ‘Come.’ The maid’s voice dragged Eliza back to reality. ‘The ladies will see you now.’

  Eliza turned to face her hosts. Mrs Thurber and her daughter sat beside a coffee table, elegant in fashionable silk gowns. The short, stout woman, her thin, sad-faced daughter at her side, pointed to a chair. Eliza felt Agatha’
s eyes taking in the last detail of her face, her dress, her boots, her reticule. She winced at the implications of that scrutiny. Though Eliza’s dress was old, Hannah, a talented seamstress, had washed it carefully and stitched up the little snags and tears that came with wear.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Thurber, Miss Agatha.’ Eliza took care to use the polished accent she’d absorbed from her years with Mr Harcourt. The maid curtseyed and disappeared. Eliza took her seat. She was by no means desperate to work for Mrs Thurber. She’d developed a curiosity about the meeting, wondering why they would seek her help, what they envisaged as her duties. But now, in the sterile silence, the room enveloped her in a palpable chill.

  ‘We have heard that you spent time teaching at the village school,’ the matronly woman said.

  ‘Indeed, ma’am. For some years I’ve taught the village children to read and cipher.’

  ‘And tell me. What could you teach my daughter?’

  ‘I have…learned much over the years.’ Eliza must give a fair account of herself, but without the least hint of braggadocio. ‘You will have heard that I spent time in the schoolroom of the Great House with Sir John De Havilland’s children. We were taught by Mr Harcourt, a most scholarly man.’ The middle-aged matron’s face remained impassive. Drawing a breath, Eliza continued.

  ‘Mr Harcourt is a knowledgeable man. An Oxford don with a passion for the classics, for mathematics, history — why, even the geography of Europe and indeed, of the whole world.’ She hesitated, uncomfortable as Agatha’s eyes continued to bore into her. Many times Eliza had seen the young woman, from a distance as she shopped in the village. Now, at close quarters, she seemed aloof, ill at ease, as she sat in a stylishly striped half-dress, her long straight hair arranged in a tight chignon. Her frown had not melted since her guest had arrived. Eliza would try to thaw the situation, show her hosts that she was capable of playing the pleasant, agreeable companion.

  ‘May I suggest that we should discuss Miss Agatha’s own interests and passions?’ she said. ‘Before we — ’