Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  For long months she appeared at first resigned to and then glad at the prospect of marriage to this or that candidate—always a candidate chosen by her parents. But each came to grief. To end every courtship she contrived a blistering row that sent the fellow off, gasping with relief at the luck of his escape. No one could then be more heartbroken, more vulnerable, more clinging to her mother than Abigail. Nor more certain of her vocation as a religious.

  Of course Nora saw through it; yet she felt powerless to act in any very positive way. In the first place she was not sure just how conscious Abigail was of all she was doing. From the moment the girl could talk she had been able to mesmerize herself, so that attitudes, wishes, tantrums, angers—any wilful thought or act (though it began quite deliberately and consciously)—very soon possessed her to a degree that was far beyond her own power to unsay or unthink or unfeel. Then any attempt to argue or laugh or punish her out of that possession was futile—indeed worse, for Abigail seemed only to gain strength from such resistance.

  Moreover Abigail was no underendowed middle-class miss who had to take whatever husband offered first. With her income and connections, she could still marry well at thirty.

  “God forbid it should come to that!” Nora said when she made the point to John. “But she could stay single till then. And no harm done. She’s not an extravagant girl to keep. Far from it! But if we continue pushing her into these unwilling matches, with these same results, she’ll get a nasty name as a filly for refusals—and that could hurt her chances.”

  John saw the truth of it. “Not only that,” he said, for he knew Abigail every bit as well as Nora, “if she gets the idea people are talking about her that way, she could set herself to trump us all by taking this nun business absolutely seriously.”

  And so they agreed between them to push her gently, if at all. And Abigail responded by going alternately to the brink of marriage and to the brink of a vocation, but never taking either plunge. And so, imperceptibly, it passed over. The nearer she came to her twenty-first birthday, the more she felt herself to be mistress of her own destiny and the closer she returned to being what those nearest her thought of as her true self.

  Ironically enough Abigail’s faith was finally tempered with skepticism through the efforts of a fellow believer who aimed to reassure her—the Reverend Paine, rector of Tewin parish, at whose Sunday school Abigail had taught so assiduously for the best part of two years.

  One Saturday when young Mr. Melpomenus, the curate, was down with a heavy cold, the Reverend Paine had called in his place to take tea and discuss tomorrow’s Sunday school. They met in her father’s business room, since a clergyman, not being in Society, would be ill at ease in the Countess’ drawing room. When their discussion was finished and the tea nearly gone, he relaxed, looked around as if refreshing his memory, and said, “It is rare indeed that I am called to this house.”

  For a wild moment she fancied he was fishing for an invitation; but it was merely his somewhat clumsy preamble to his next remark: “Yet there is one occasion I shall never forget. Can you, Lady Abigail, guess when that was?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot, Reverend.”

  “You of all people should be able to guess. It was one terrible night, the Christmas of 1846.”

  “When I was born!”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were sent for?”

  “Yes. They despaired of Mrs. Stevenson (as she was then)…they despaired of her life, you see. Bless me! That’s nearly twenty-one years ago. And now here you are, the very pillar of our church. And young Nicholas was only seven then. Or six? I forget. And now here he is designing such a great house for your brother. Dear me! Such changes!”

  “You have every right to be proud of your grandson, Reverend. My brother says he will be one of the great architects of the age.” (But, she thought, if Steamer had a goose, he’d call it a swan. He’d automatically promote any architect he employed. It would be unthinkable for the man to be less than “the greatest of the age.”)

  “I feel proud of you all, my dear. Especially of you.”

  She cringed at his confidence. “Oh, Reverend Paine,” she blurted out, “if you could only see within, you would see how insecure my faith truly is.”

  He sat up and looked around him—at her, at the windows—in jerks that reminded her of a turkey, or of some automaton set going at the push of a button. “Really?” he said. “There is no need for that. It is true we live in a skeptical age, but everything can be explained, you know. I expect it’s the miracles, what? It usually is.”

  He peered intently at her, and she was too astonished to say that, no, it was not the miracles.

  “Don’t you think,” he went on, “that if you were eating and simultaneously listening to a very distinguished speaker, and were utterly absorbed in what he was saying, don’t you think you might chew on one mouthful for many minutes—and end up believing you had taken a whole meal?”

  She stared at him in bewilderment, not yet having caught his drift at all. And he, mistaking her gaze, plunged on: “Or take Galilee. I’ve been there, you know. I have fished in the same waters where Our Lord and his disciples went fishing. And I assure you, the wind and the light play the strangest tricks. The winds can descend out of the hills with a fury that is astounding in its suddenness—and the storm can be stilled just as swiftly. A man who knew the signs could say ‘Peace, be still’ at just the right moment, and the elements would give every appearance of obeying him.”

  Now she wanted to cry out in dismay. Here was her pastor explaining how her Saviour was really just some kind of mountebank who had a gift for words.

  “And there are parts of Galilee, you know,” he was saying, “where the sandbanks lie only inches below the surface. Yet if the light falls on them in a certain way, it looks for all the world like deep water. I have seen, with these very eyes, I have seen men walking on the water, but it was merely…”

  She thanked him for setting her thinking straight on the matter of miracles and made obvious preparations to rise.

  He was startled out of his monologue. “Ah…one more thing, Lady Abigail. One more matter.” He breathed heavily a few times, gathering his wits. “It is, ah, something I have meant to say for quite some time, ah. It concerns young Mr. Melpomenus. Ah, Mr. Melpomenus is very dear to us all. A good curate. Ah. The best. The very best. But, ah, I fear he is a, a, a, a born curate, d’ye see? Yes.”

  “You mean his calling is most sincere, Reverend?”

  “Yes. And, and, and more. Of course, sincere, but…ah. I mean, he is unlikely to rise. Yes. To rise, d’ye see? Unlikely. I mean he is not a born bishop. He is in the same case as myself: no family connections.”

  “I doubt that worries him.”

  “No. No. To be sure, of course not. But…ah…it worries your mother. And your father,” he finally blurted out.

  At last Abigail saw where he was leading. The notion was so comic that she burst into laughter. “You mean they are afraid that Melpomenus and I…” She laughed again. “Oh, Reverend, I assure you, no such attachment has even crossed my mind. Nor his, I am sure.”

  The relief in his face was huge. Surely, she thought, he is exaggerating. But suppose he were not! Melpomenus was such a compliant, biddable little puppy, his natural manner could easily keep gallons of adoration concealed from her. But the Reverend Paine would have noticed. He would have seen how eagerly the curate went off to Maran Hill for his Saturday teas with Lady Abigail; he would have observed how readily Melpomenus adopted his sandals and his monklike habit at Lady Abigail’s suggestion—and it had been no more than the merest suggestion on her part. Suddenly even she saw, in this light, how ridiculous it was. Oh, the poor creature! She was moved for him without being the slightest bit more inclined toward him. The Reverend Paine’s next words jolted her out of this somewhat abstract compassion.

  “But young R
everend Cater at Essendon, now—the Honourable and Reverend Ralph Cater—has the very best…ah…as of course you know…ah.”

  She knew. The Hon. and Rev. Ralph never missed a hunt. A jolly, hearty, mindless snob who had passed plain Mrs. Stevenson, nose in air, for years and who now fawned like a spaniel over the Countess of Wharfedale. Yes! A match with one of the Earl’s younger daughters would suit that ninny (only someone as old as Reverend Paine would call him “young”) very well.

  She rose and rang the bell. “Indeed I do know,” she said. “Ralph Cater has squired me, I should think, over every hedge in Lord Salisbury’s country. He is a pleasant enough gentleman and a good companion to hunt with. But you may tell…er, anyone who you think may be interested that I am most unlikely to form any deeper attachment or desire any closer acquaintance than is at present the case.”

  The moment the Reverend Paine had gone, Abigail ran to her mother and told her, most vehemently, that she had no inclination to marry Ralph Cater—or any other clergyman.

  The moment Abigail had gone, Nora gave three light skips of joy, heaved one great sigh of relief, then went down on her knees and thanked God that her prayers were being answered.

  Chapter 8

  Though Nora had sensed the end of Abigail’s “religious phase” that summer after the meeting with the Reverend Paine, no one could be sure of it until Christmas, when the whole family went down to the great opening of Falconwood. It was also Abigail’s twenty-first birthday and there was to be a grand double-celebration ball on Boxing Day, when the whole county and half London Society were invited.

  Caspar and Linny had moved in from the old house in October, and Linny had needed every intervening minute to prepare for this first grand occasion. Even so, the last of the workmen, a team of French polishers, were paid off only the week before Christmas. It barely left time for the photographer from Stroud to take his pictures—shaking his head at the dim lighting and fretting anxiously through ten- and fifteen-minute exposures. The following day the Stevensons and Sherringhams began to arrive.

  Winifred and Abigail were first, at Abigail’s insistence. She wanted to catch the house poised, as it were, between its private and its public life. All she had seen of it until then were the foundations, the piles of stone, sand, and gravel, the site huts, the lime burners’ pits, and the hole for the hydraulic cellar.

  The two girls travelled down to Stroud together and then out to the new house in Caspar’s coach. The day sparkled with the cold. On every twig a rime of hoar frost mimicked the white Christmas that weather sages had promised for weeks. No wind disturbed its frozen stillness; no cloud marred the cerulean sky. At several places they made the coachman halt while they admired some especially fine and frosted view. From here and there in the valley came the irregular thwack of the woodsplitter’s axe; it was a time to look to the woodstore and to remember how swift a cheery blaze devours the logs.

  From the hillcrest they looked back into the glacial pool of the shaded valley and watched the blue smoke rise in smooth, unbroken shafts, as if in glass tubes, until stray eddies far above stirred them into lazy dispersion. Upon the tops of the Cotswolds a light, powdery snow had drifted against the weather side of the hedgerows and ridges. It was no place to linger; the two carriage horses trotted briskly over the gravelled lanes, making the iron tyres sing almost as sweet as the metal-on-metal of the railway. Soon they breasted the rise on whose southern slopes stood Falconwood.

  “Gothic!” Abigail cried in surprise. Only the belltower broke the skyline as yet.

  “Of course,” Winifred said. “I thought you knew at least that.”

  “No. I heard them discussing it.” She laughed. “I thought it so funny, you know. There was this vast palace, planned to the very last closet, and…”

  “Not to mention newspaper-ironing room.”

  “Oh?” Abigail asked innocently. “Have they one of those?”

  Winifred smiled with thin-lipped sarcasm. “Nick told me. You almost gave him an apoplexy; he doesn’t know how you managed it with such a straight face.”

  Abigail was pleased at the tribute but annoyed that anyone had seen through her joke. “Well, they deserved it,” she said. “I know we Stevensons are supposed to be the nouveaux riches and the Sherringhams have all the blue blood in Wales, but Caroline seems much more of a tuft-hunter than any of us. If anyone deserves a newspaper-ironing room, it’s her. And Steamer’s as bad.” She resumed her former brightness. “Anyway, I was saying—here was this palace, planned to the last little window, and there was Nick, saying ‘we really must make up our minds soon what style we’re going to build in’. And then all the arguments. Graeco-Roman was more solid and reliable. It suggested an ancient and patrician lineage. Gothic was more spiritual, nobler, more respectable…It went on a whole Friday-to-Monday.” She looked again at the house, now visible from the first floor upward, and becoming almost frighteningly large. “So the final vote was for spirituality. Well—if the purpose of opposites is to show off each other, gothic spirituality will show off Steamer and Linny to perfection!”

  “In that case,” Winifred said, “I look forward to visiting you in your own home—which will be built, no doubt, entirely of sugar and humble pie.”

  But Abigail, for once, was too overawed to reply. Her description, “palace,” intended as sarcasm, was the only word for the place.

  The public approach was from the north, where a long and high brick wall denied the visitor any view of the house as a whole until the carriage drove beneath a quaintly romantic gatelodge and burst in upon two acres of gravel and formal garden. The house itself was L-shaped; the longer wing ran east-west and comprised the main building. Its western end was encased in a miniature Crystal Palace, so that the winter drawing room (on the ground floor) and the balconies of the principal guest rooms (on the upper floors) opened out, not to the elements, but to the tropical and perfumed confines of a palm-filled winter garden. The shorter wing, which ran north-south, held the kitchens, stores, furnaces, servants’ hall, wine cellars, and female servants’ rooms. (The male servants were dormitoried in the attics of the main house, reached by a four-storey spiral stair with access only to the ground and attic floors. The females’ staircase was near the housekeeper’s quarters. There were thus 362 mostly vertical paces between the nearest beds of the two sexes.)

  Wedged at the junction of the two wings were all the rooms of intermediate status—the day and night nurseries, the chef’s suite, the butler’s pantry, the under-butler’s room (with silver safe let into one of its walls), quarters for the nursemaids and the visiting ladies’ maids, the sanitarium, and—to be sure—the newspaper-ironing room.

  Subtle differences of architectural style—a meanness of window glass, a narrowness in the stone banding, a steepness of slope in the staircase lights—made the difference between the two wings instantly apparent even to the least observant visitor. The servants’ wing could be admired for its unobtrusive quietness and then could be forgotten. But the main wing could be appraised with profit for hours. It was grand without opulence, majestic without hauteur, sublime without the least ostentation. It looked centuries old; it could not have been built even ten years earlier.

  The carriage drew into a covered court, lined on most of three sides by a red-brick arcade in the Venetian style. Destined eventually to house Caspar’s future collection of sculpture, it presently displayed casts in ciment-fondu of the Venus de Milo, the Discus Thrower, and the Elgin Marbles (works that would later be distributed on plinths and in little pavilions and gazebos about the grounds).

  Caspar, to Caroline’s annoyance, welcomed his sisters in person. “Oh, come,” he chided. “We are en famille until the nonfamily people come. I’ll give them a warmer hello than any valet-du-jour.” And he did.

  While they were still hugging each other their luggage was being whisked aloft in hydraulic silence on the platform of the lift.
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  “Was it worth the waiting?” he asked Abigail.

  And she, still overawed, said, “Oh, Steamer, it’s breathtaking.”

  “It’s a machine.” He laughed, waving his hands around and gesturing them up the steps. “A machine for living in.”

  The entrance hall was a great picture gallery, rising three floors through the heart of the house to a roof of glass. A glazed arcade on each side gave light to the passages on the next two floors above. Cathedral-like columns of granite and Purbeck marble rose two floors to flattened gothic arches. The top floor was arcaded in massive piers of carved oak that bent over, the fluting unbroken, to form shallow collarbeams. The infill was of plain and coloured glass.

  “Still no pictures,” Winifred said.

  “There’s a Rubens down there. And a Canaletto. But we decided in the end to leave the paintings-by-the-yard business to Sir Georgius Midas and his kind. Every time you come there will be some new treasure to look forward to.”

  We decided! Abigail thought. That would be Linny. “What’s that great wrought-iron bridge for?” she asked.

  The grand stone stairway swept from the centre of the far end of the hall to a broad half-landing that housed a display of armour and medieval weapons; from there, still preserving the unbroken sweep of the balustrade, two stairs continued, one each side, to arrive at an open gallery spanning the end of the hall at first-floor level. From the middle of this gallery, down the centre of the hall, soared an elegant wrought-iron bridge, supported only at its ends.

  Caspar chuckled. “It is the neatest solution to our greatest puzzle,” he said. “You will see.”

  He showed them first the rooms to the north of the great hall: the all-male rooms—business and deed rooms, gun room, smoking and billiard rooms. Solid, chunky rooms, full of oak panelling and muscular stone. “And here, you see, is the bachelors’ stair. So convenient. Come on up.”