The Potter's Niece

by Randall, Rona

  She considered Olivia’s mouth on the large side, too. ‘Try not to laugh so much, my dear. It emphasises the width of your mouth.’ She had even tried to make her purse it a little. ‘Like a rosebud, darling. Like mine.’

  Phoebe’s rosebud mouth was immortalised in a bridal portrait, and very lovely had she been when young. In the fashion of 1749 she wore a gown of silver-threaded damask embroidered with pearls and bugell beads, and on her head a sparkling pompon with a single curling feather. Her hand held a pearl-encrusted fan, over which she gazed with an expression which could only be interpreted as wide-eyed innocence. Had she assumed it at the command of a portrait-painter who deemed it becoming in a virgin bride — even though, by the time it was painted in the days following the wedding, she must have been familiar with the marriage bed?

  ‘I like the fan, Mamma,’ Olivia had commented. ‘Did you carry it for the ceremony?’

  ‘I carried a fan, yes.’

  ‘But not that one?’

  ‘Very similar.’

  ‘Then why wasn’t it used for the portrait?’

  ‘It was broken.’

  ‘At the wedding?’

  ‘In the carriage taking us from Tremain Chapel to the wedding breakfast at my dear brother’s house,’ her mother answered in a tone which forbade further questioning.

  Compared with Phoebe, Aunt Agatha’s portrait revealed a plain and buxom bride, but not so Aunt Amelia’s. Her engaging smile and wide frank eyes looked out from the canvas with typical warmth. Olivia liked to think that her own mouth was perhaps reminiscent of Amelia’s generous one, because of all her female relatives she liked her best.

  Pulling a gown at random from her closet, she reflected that bemoaning her lack of good looks was an infernal waste of time because wishing would never make them any better. All her mother’s attempts to improve them were equally wasted — as for tonight. The hairdresser she had summoned all the way from Stoke had done his best, crimping and curling and begging Olivia please to sit still and please not to venture outside when he had finished, or his creation would be ruined.

  ‘I suspect, Madame,’ said ‘Monsieur Louis’ in a broad Midland dialect which he strove to hide beneath a faked French accent, ‘I suspect as ‘ow your daughter be summat partial to fresh air.’ The reproof was meant to sound arch, but succeeded only in being comical. ‘So un’ealthy, chère Madame, an’ so unbecoming t’fair sex!’

  Thus Olivia was immediately branded as weather-beaten and undesirable, especially when her mother sighed and confessed that, alas, her dear child was indeed somewhat hoydenish.

  Another thing Phoebe deplored was Olivia’s penchant for riding, an exercise to which Amelia had introduced her when very small, picking her up and seating her in the saddle before her, safe within the curve of her arm. Later, she had sat the child on her first pony and given her first riding lesson, so that by the time Amelia left Tremain Hall to marry Martin Drayton, Olivia shared her aunt’s love of an early morning ride and now found it hard to believe that this practice had ultimately denied Amelia the ability to have children, as Phoebe declared.

  ‘Married all these years, and still childless! That is the result of her madcap love of horses. As a girl she would ride in all weathers, and even tried to persuade me to do the same when I came here as a bride. Naturally, I had more sense and a greater respect for my duties as a wife. I gave birth to you within the first year, and Agatha conceived Lionel within that time. Both of us dutiful and successful wives.’

  Olivia’s retort that Amelia’s marriage was obviously very successful, despite being childless, had earned a glance of displeasure, which was hardly surprising since the words somehow suggested a failure in her mother’s. Olivia knew nothing of her parents’ marriage, other than her father’s deplorable behaviour and her mother’s noble acceptance of it, but she did know that Amelia’s was happy. One had only to see the Martin Draytons together to sense the warmth of their love.

  But right now her mirror confirmed both the hairdresser’s comments and her mother’s criticism. Even Hannah’s attempts to beautify her had proved to no avail. ‘Make her look lily-white. Lily-white and rose-pink,’ Phoebe had commanded her maid, whose services she had been gracious enough to extend to Olivia on this one occasion. ‘I can’t have a daughter of mine looking like a raggle-taggle gypsy with a hideously tanned skin.’

  She had even granted the use of her own beauty aids, of which she had a large collection and all of the most expensive. No common wash-balls — made of whitening, tallow soap, coarse flour and rice of the cheapest quality — for her. White lead mixed with the finest ground rice and the purest flour made the best wash-balls, as did coloured ones mixed with carmine for the cheeks, some even tinted with costly vermilion. Phoebe would never have anything but the best.

  She also had a vast range of oils and perfumed liquors scented with orange and jessamine, Chinese pastes of varying hues, pearl powder for the neck, and black kohl for the eyebrows and eyelids — all hidden from envious Agatha, who frequently trespassed into the heir’s wing at a time when Phoebe was in her boudoir.

  ‘I know why she comes, pretending to seek my company! She imagines I don’t notice the way her eyes dart to my dressing-table. No amount of costly aids would improve my sister-in-law’s looks, but keep the door locked against her even so, Hannah. I refuse to be spied upon when at my toilette.’

  Self-adornment was a ritual in Phoebe’s life. Enduring two hours of it at patient Hannah’s hands had made Olivia wonder how her mother tolerated it, but Phoebe at her dressing-table was Phoebe at a shrine.

  Now Olivia saw, to her relief, that both her coiffure and her artificial complexion had been wrecked in the struggle with Lionel. All that was left was a tumbled mane of frizzed hair above bizarre, smudged cheeks, but it was satisfying to reflect that his fine satin and lace must bear betraying smears. Serve him right if men sniggered behind their hands and women giggled behind their fans when he returned to the ballroom.

  For herself, she decided happily that since Hannah’s endeavours had been wasted she could now wash away the lot, and since her hair was in such a mess she could cease worrying about it and do what she wanted to do — let the night air rush through it, and take the consequences.

  And so she did. And that was how she came to visit Damian Fletcher, not as a welcomed guest but as one he couldn’t decline to shelter. How could a farrier refuse to attend a horse that had cast a shoe only a hundred yards from his door, or oblige a female who wielded his knocker at an hour when all Burslem was abed — except for revellers up at the Hall — and especially a female drenched by sudden rain, who refused to make her limping horse further endanger its hoof by plodding home? Diplomacy alone would make him oblige a young lady who belonged to one of the most influential families in Staffordshire, whose horses he regularly attended. So there she stood, a sorry sight with long wet hair streaming down her back and all trace of a pink-and-white complexion washed from her face.

  Sitting beside his hastily banked fire while he re-shod Corporal in the adjoining smithy, she was aware that she presented an unappetising picture, a thin young woman with eyes which her grandfather called (though never unkindly) ‘too large for her face’, and with features unfashionably moulded according to current standards. Not even Lionel would have looked at her now.

  Nor did Damian Fletcher, though she could have offered little resistance had he been bent on seduction. She was wildly attracted to him, though scarcely knowing him. Rumour had it that despite his reserve and the obstinate way in which he had remained a bachelor since returning from the New World, he took his pleasures like any man, and well could she believe it for behind his quiet front she sensed that he was almost aggressively masculine.

  She had never been in his cottage before, so seized the opportunity to examine it. She had expected a somewhat stark place, one that cried out for a woman’s touch, but what she saw was a comfortable room lacking for nothing. There were well-upholstered wing chairs and
several fine old pieces of furniture, the like of which one would never expect to see in the home of a village farrier. Where book-lined walls allowed, there were rare prints and two or three good oil paintings and, on the flagged floor, rugs which she judged to be Persian. There was also some fine porcelain, but books were dominant; an amazing number in good, hand-tooled bindings. They were crammed onto shelves rising from floor to ceiling; they even overflowed onto tables or any other available space.

  Curiosity drew her, and surprise increased. Shakespeare and Addison; Bacon and John Donne; Robert Southwell, Thomas Sternhold, and Milton. Even Archimedes and Aristophanes looked out at her. To scan the whole collection was impossible, but it seemed that many of the classics were there, and much besides. She doubted whether the whole of Tremain Hall housed such volumes, for the family she had been born into had never bred scholars on either side, though she had learned from Amelia that Martin had longed for an academic education which, unhappily, had been denied him, and that his father, George Drayton, the grandfather who died before Olivia was born and even before her mother was wed, had been an avid reader whose love of books had perilously distracted him from his duties as a master potter.

  ‘Dear Joseph rescued the Drayton Pottery from ruin,’ Phoebe often repeated. ‘It was in a dire state of neglect when my father died. He was a dreamer, alas.’

  Was Damian Fletcher a dreamer, too? Olivia had never imagined so. Watching him at his anvil, hammering out a horse’s shoe, he had always appeared to be a man of action, down to earth, practical, but really she knew nothing about him, except that he was well set up and had the kind of features and the crisp kind of voice that appealed to her — also that he had spent a long time in the Colonies and then returned to his native Burslem, taking possession of a cottage his family had owned and setting up a smithy in an adjoining barn. Of his background she was totally ignorant. He was a lone man who kept himself to himself, a state which seemed unnatural in one with his looks and physique. But perhaps that was wishful thinking again; the nonsensical thinking of a young woman who wanted to know him better.

  Her glance roved once more, to be caught by something so small that it would have been overlooked had she not been unconsciously seeking for evidence of someone in his life. Surely he couldn’t be entirely alone in the world; he must have relatives — parents, brothers, sisters, cousins; even some woman who meant much to him, though she hoped not. Naive adoration allowed that he might dally with women when lonely, but it balked at the thought of one woman alone commanding his devotion, for that ruled out the possibility of his ever noticing herself.

  Then she saw it — a delicately painted miniature set on a small table beside the fire, close to a wing chair which was plainly one in which he relaxed. It was a portrait of a young woman, evidently important to him since he kept her picture so close at hand.

  The features were beautiful; the nose patrician, the eyes large and of a luminous blue. Allure was in those eyes, and again in the yielding mouth. Allure was in every aspect of her — in her expression, in the secret smile, in the small oval chin, in the creamy shoulders framed in a neckline so low that it displayed the gentle swell of her breasts and the soft valley between them. And the gracefully poised head was crowned with a high coiffure which, with instinctive good taste, missed the over-elaboration of these late seventeen-hundreds. Sweeping upward from a smooth forehead it bore no adornment, but was allowed to flow freely and then to cascade in natural waves over those enticing shoulders. And her hair was the shade which Titian had loved to paint, vivid as a flame.

  To hope that the young woman could be a sister or close relative was useless, for that fiery auburn hair confounded the very idea. No blackhaired man with high-bridged nose and square jaw could come of the same blood as this vivid creature.

  With the instinctive certainty of a woman in love, Olivia recognised a rival and, at the same time, wondered how she could ever have hoped that there would be no woman in the life of a man of Damian Fletcher’s years, which she judged to be in the mid-thirties, and especially one who attracted not only attention, but speculation, wherever he went.

  She knew that the gossips of Burslem discussed him. Even in select withdrawing rooms she had heard comments about the good looking farrier, who plainly couldn’t be all he seemed. ‘Still waters, my dear … ‘ Aunt Agatha’s close friend, starched Lady Moreton, had tapped the side of her hooked nose with a bony forefinger as she said it, hinting darkly about the depths to which still waters could run, and in return another high-pitched voice had piped, ‘But so attractive, do you not agree? There’s a kind of challenge about the man … the way he looks at one … if you know what I mean?’ to which Agatha had remarked that a man in his position had no right to look at women of their station, and particularly in such a way … ‘Unless, of course, you encourage him, dear Stephanie?’

  Olivia frankly wished he would look at herself in such a way, but he had never seen her as anything more than a member of the family at Tremain Hall, a young woman who wandered into the stables whenever he was there, even following him into the smithy where the Tremain horses were shod; a young woman who persisted in watching him as he worked and was forever trying to engage him in conversation, to which he gave only polite, monosyllabic answers.

  Sometimes these answers were accompanied by a glance of quizzical amusement whereupon, embarrassed, she would try to keep out of his way — until her tiresome emotions again held sway and she contrived to re-cross his path.

  But tonight he could suspect no such thing, for the cast shoe had been genuine and she was grateful for it.

  Replacing the miniature, she was forced to dismiss the hope that it portrayed his mother in her youth, for this was no old-fashioned portrait. It had a distinctly modern look — even a look which didn’t seem to belong to these parts, as if the sitter hailed from somewhere else in the world. There was an aura about her that suggested a differing sophistication from these islands’.

  Back at the bookshelves, Olivia chose a volume at random. It was Shakespeare, and she had scarcely opened the cover when she was startled by Fletcher’s voice from the door.

  ‘Do you read Shakespeare, Miss Freeman? Then cap this —

  “Sweet are the uses of adversity

  Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,

  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head … ”‘

  She capped it at once.

  ‘“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

  Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

  And the play — As You Like It. Does that answer your question, Mr Fletcher?’

  ‘Admirably, but surprisingly. I thought young society women had no thought for anything but pleasure.’

  ‘I find reading a pleasure, a taste perhaps inherited from a grandfather I never knew. Grandfather Drayton was a great reader.’

  ‘So my father used to tell me.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘He was a schoolmaster who had the good fortune to enjoy your grandfather’s library. Medlar Croft had a fine collection.’

  ‘I wonder what became of it — the library, I mean.’ For of course she knew what had happened to Medlar Croft, the Drayton home. After the tentacles of marriage linked the family to the Freemans, and Grandmother Emily Drayton died, her youngest son and his wife moved into it. Martin and Amelia lived there still and took a pride in the place. By contrast, Carrion House, once a splendid symbol of Joseph Drayton’s success, looked woefully neglected, for Agatha had abandoned it on her husband’s death, though she had never sold it. Successive tenants had occupied it, but never for long. That had been no surprise to the superstitious of Burslem, who whispered that there had always been something sinister about the place. ‘Summat wrong.’ Now neglect and decay were rapidly overtaking it, but still Agatha did nothing to restore it, a fact which Olivia’s mother considered shameful and lacking in respect to Joseph’s memory, f
or not only had he lived there, but died there. Suddenly.

  Olivia was surprised by Damian Fletcher’s reference to George Drayton’s library, for her mother had never mentioned it. Perhaps that was natural, since Phoebe had no interest in books. The only volume she ever picked up was a dull thing on social etiquette, to which she constantly referred.

  Olivia said now, ‘You have a fine library yourself, Mr Fletcher.’

  ‘Started by my father, and added to by me. I came to tell you that Corporal is ready. But first, some mulled wine before you face the wet night again.’

  It was more a command than an invitation, taking her acceptance for granted. She liked that and was glad he didn’t demean himself by offering the refreshment diffidently, or by calling her ‘Miss Olivia’ in the subservient way that servants had.

  She welcomed the chance to prolong her visit, but it proved to be a strain because she found herself unaccountably shy, whereas he was wholly at ease, his manner that of an amiable host toward a guest. There was also an underlying hint of amusement in his voice when he said, ‘At least your call tonight was of necessity, Miss Freeman,’ at which she felt herself colour.

  ‘I — don’t know what you mean — ‘

  ‘I mean that when you stroll into the Tremain stables I see through your curiosity. You wonder why your Grandfather employs me to shoe the Tremain horses, instead of his resident blacksmith. Perhaps I do a better job.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you do.’

  She was relieved because he had not guessed her true reason for watching him at work, but his discerning glance made her so self-conscious that she finished her wine almost at a gulp. At that, he smiled. ‘I see you are anxious to be gone.’ He picked up her discarded cloak, placed it about her shoulders and then, to her surprise, slowly tied it beneath her chin, his face inscrutable. She felt the touch of his fingers on her skin and to hide her confusion and her wild response, she turned to the door, bidding him goodnight.