Tyringham Park

by Rosemary McLoughlin

  Charlotte wouldn’t put on her uniform, and alternated between floppiness and rigidity while two servants tired themselves out dressing her. She refused to walk to the car. A male servant carried her in a fireman’s lift, and when he placed her on the back seat, she slid to the floor and he couldn’t lift her up again as her bulk filled the space and he couldn’t find any room for leverage.

  Confident that she would behave properly in front of strangers, Waldron accompanied her optimistically to the school, but she made no attempt to move from her prone position. He was forced to walk alone to greet the two women, shake their hands and explain that his daughter was unwell, in fact had fainted, so that it might be better to take her home for the time being. He was sorry to inconvenience them, but he would be in touch. The women exchanged looks of disappointment as he left.

  After an hour’s silence on the return journey Waldron said, “We’ll say nothing of this to your mother. She has enough on her plate. I have decided to hire a private tutor instead, and as it so happens I know just the man for the job.”

  Waldron was pleased with this decision that seemed to come out of nowhere and reminded himself that retreat was a legitimate form of attack.

  Waldron contacted ‘the man for the job’ as soon as they returned home, where Charlotte immediately recovered the use of her legs and ran into the house and up the stairs before anyone could speak to her. He didn’t want to face Edwina with the failed school-entrance attempt unless he had an alternative in place, an option that he favoured all along, he would say, on account of Charlotte’s inability to get along with other children.

  Waldron’s desperation to hire someone who would stay, and lack of interest in what happened after that, along with the knowledge that the atmosphere in the house would hardly tempt anyone to commit themselves, prompted him to make a princely offer to Cormac Delaney, a young Galway soldier from his regiment who had attracted his attention by admiring his military drawings and who had voiced a desire to become a professional painter after his army career had come to an end with the loss of part of his left hand.

  While Charlotte was in her room stuffing her school uniform under the bed, Waldron wrote to Cormac, offering generous terms for five hours of tuition five days a week for six years. The young man was to regard the townhouse as his home where he would be free to come and go as he pleased outside school hours. Furthermore, he could choose an empty room for his exclusive use as a studio to pursue his interest in the fine arts and an account would be opened for him in Wilkinsons, supplying him with as many canvases and paints as he required.

  The girl’s intractable, he reasoned as he wrote, so the terms have to be tempting.

  Cormac Delaney wrote back by return post to say he accepted the offer.

  Holly was pleased to be asked to supervise Charlotte together with Harcourt from two o’clock in the afternoon, the end of lessons, until bedtime. She thought it would be good for the sister and brother to get to know each other better and, in her kind-hearted way, wanted to make up to the lonely girl for the misfortunes she had suffered in her life so far. Until Lord Waldron asked her, Holly assumed and feared that Aunt Verity Blackshaw would be chosen for the task.

  When Cormac arrived, full of enthusiasm, he saw a fat little melancholiac tearing up her exercise books and flicking the paper onto the floor. Charlotte looked up at him with dull eyes when he spoke to her.

  I’ll have my work cut out, he thought.

  Only after he was installed did Waldron tell him about Charlotte’s expulsion from the English boarding school and her refusal at Vetchworth.

  “On the positive side, she draws well. Takes after me in that respect. Thought that might interest you. That’s all I can think of. Ask Nanny Holly if you want to know anything else. Can’t bother Lady Blackshaw about such things at the moment.” Waldron seemed to be glowing inwardly. “Good man. Good man. I knew I could count on you. I can now make arrangements to return to my regiment, or what’s left of it.”

  “Do what you like,” was Edwina’s reaction when Waldron, uncharacteristically effusive in his praise of the tutor he had hired, told her what he had decided.

  “He speaks French like a native,” said Waldron. “That’s enough to recommend him apart from anything else. Mutilated left hand put paid to professional army life. Lucky he has something to fall back on, and I don’t mean tutoring. He’s an artist in his spare time.”

  “Artist?”

  “Didn’t I mention that? He liked my drawings. That’s how I got to notice him.”

  A nurse came in to turn Edwina on to her left side. Waldron went out into the grounds to have a puff on his pipe.

  What’s all this about artists, and Blackshaws bringing them in to live with them? And hands? Either there was an irrepressible artistic strain running through both branches of the Blackshaw family that emerged every now and then and should be taken seriously, or else Edwina was going mad and past memories were coming back to torment her.

  That night in her dreams, visions of disembodied hands and faceless artists painting ugly sitters were so unsettling that for once she was relieved to be woken by the nurses’ chatter at the change of shifts.

  32

  Charlotte woke and looked across to see if Victoria was still asleep in her cot. Around the edges of the drawn curtains, only small strips of light entered the dark room. There was no cot. She sat up and stared at the wall opposite.

  No Victoria, no cot. She wanted to call out to Miss East in the next room. She wanted Miss East to rush in, wrap her in her arms and comfort her.

  She wanted to be back at Tyringham Park with Victoria asleep in her cot, Miss East next door and Mandrake down at the stables. She wanted Nurse Dixon to take back her curse.

  The energetic maid Queenie came in, bringing Charlotte back to the present moment. She said it was time to get up for her first day of lessons with the nice Mr Delaney, and wasn’t she looking forward to it?

  “No,” said Charlotte.

  “Are you poorly?”

  “No.”

  “Well, up you get, then. Rise and shine.”

  “No.”

  The maid hesitated for a minute, and left the room.

  The sound of the word ‘lesson’ was enough to plunge Charlotte into a state of agitation. The one term she had spent in boarding school exposed her to ridicule, as it was evident she was the only one in the class who couldn’t read or write. Declensions, fractions, long division, essays, clauses, punctuation and spelling were all incomprehensible to her. She had felt bewildered and frustrated on a daily basis.

  She would stay in bed.

  After Cormac heard part of Charlotte’s story from Holly, he thought the best plan for Charlotte’s education would be to start from scratch. To treat her as a five rather than a ten-year-old.

  From Waldron he gathered if Charlotte learned to read and write, add and subtract, speak a bit of French and do some watercolour landscapes, he would be more than happy. Latin and Greek would be wasted on her, being a girl. In fact, if Cormac wanted to play tiddlywinks for most of the day no one would chastise him.

  On his first day he arrived at the classroom to be met by Queenie the maid who informed him Charlotte was still in bed and refused to get up even though she wasn’t poorly.

  Cormac had been expecting some kind of resistance from his young charge. “If the pupil won’t come to the teacher, then the teacher will have to go to the pupil, so he will. Lead me to her.”

  Queenie hesitated. “I don’t know if that be allowed,” she said. “I’ll have to ask Miss Blackshaw.”

  “Don’t you worry. I have to follow Lord Waldron’s instructions. I’m here to teach, so I am, and I have to teach someone, or else I’m here under false pretences. You see my dilemma. So please show me the way and announce my arrival so I don’t put the heart across the poor child.”

  Cormac’s second time to see Charlotte disheartened him even more than the first. She lay curled in a ball as if all life had been
sucked out of her.

  His only option, he decided, was to tell stories. He would be fulfilling his side of the bargain by doing something, and she could continue to lie there passively with her eyes closed until she chose to show some interest. He could threaten to wait in the classroom until she was ready to be taught, but what if she took him at his word and never came up, where would he be then? If he didn’t give her an order she couldn’t disobey him. He badly needed the board and the materials included in his contract until he made a name for himself in the art world and could support himself. Starving in a freezing garret in Paris wouldn’t enhance his work in any way – he had already proved that. Besides, he wanted to do his best for the unhappy child and he didn’t want to force her into a situation where she would not be able to extricate herself without losing face and he was aware he couldn’t afford to lose face himself if he was to earn her respect.

  Stories were one thing he knew in abundance.

  Taking the chance that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Cinderella’ would not be considered babyish by her, he related them first, acting all the parts in an exaggerated fashion. For the first hour when Charlotte looked away he ran around the bed to intercept her gaze and when she turned over, he retraced his steps. When she looked up he loomed over her (that suited the part of the wolf) and when she looked down he knelt on the floor (coinciding nicely with Prince Charming fitting the glass slipper on Cinderella). By the time he began to describe the vain stepmother, jealous of Snow White’s beauty and bearing a poisoned apple to kill her off, Charlotte stopped trying to pretend she wasn’t interested.

  “Snow White, even though forbidden to, opened the front door . . .”

  Cormac flung open the bedroom door to find Aunt Verity Blackshaw with a glass to her ear, frozen in the leaning-over posture of an eavesdropper. He took the glass from her hand and held it up.

  “. . . to find the wicked stepmother in her disguise of an old woman offering Snow White the sweetest apple in all the kingdom and urging her to eat it. Now I’m afraid it’s time for lunch.” He had spotted Queenie coming along the corridor with a tray for Charlotte. “Would you like to join us later, Miss Blackshaw, to hear what happened to Snow White?”

  “Thank you, Mr Delaney, but I’m afraid I have my own duties to attend to. I don’t have the luxury of sitting around all day frittering away my time, listening to make-believe.” Her colour was still high after being caught in a compromising position. “Not my idea of an education. But then nobody ever consults me.”

  When Cormac returned after lunch he deliberately left the story of ‘Snow White’ unfinished, and launched straight into the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, describing in detail the various types of confectionery that decorated the walls of the gingerbread house, assuming from the size of Charlotte that food would be one of her main concerns. She still hadn’t spoken a word to him, though he could tell by the way she was reacting to each dramatic scene that she was captivated by the old tales she was hearing for the first time. He didn’t ask her any questions, as he didn’t want her to get the upper hand by refusing to answer.

  “The children of Lir were changed into swans by their jealous stepmother.”

  What’s going on here, Cormac wondered? He had just switched over to Celtic legends and there was that wicked stepmother character popping up again. This stepmother, Aoife, had the grace to feel enough remorse to limit the spell to nine hundred years – not much of a consolation for poor Fionnuala, Aed, Conor and Fiachra, who had to stay on water and were separated from their father and the land they loved, and when they were transformed back to themselves after nine hundred years weren’t children any more, but very old people ready to die. “Not very fair, was it?”

  Cormac was reading Charlotte’s expressions despite her best attempts to disguise them.

  As a change from all the gloom brought about by stepmothers, he introduced Setanta, the seven-year-old sportsman and warrior who could take on a hundred and fifty opponents at one time and vanquish them unaided. Charlotte’s eyebrows said, “Who are you trying to fool?” but she seemed to revel in the descriptions of Setanta’s battle frenzies and the amount of killing that resulted from them. His exploits, both as a boy and then as the renamed Cúchulainn, the hound of Ulster, took them up to two o’clock.

  “Must be off,” said Cormac, almost running from the room. His mind was teeming with ideas and his hand itching to pick up his favourite hogshair brush that he could already feel loaded with paint. He had eight hours’ work ahead of him. Setanta’s battle frenzy couldn’t be any more powerful than his fever to transfer the images now in his mind to the canvas.

  The next morning Charlotte became agitated when Cúchulainn, against the advice of his camp, took on the warrior Queen Maeve and her magic spells and ignored the omens and prophecies that were warning him not to fight. When the faithful horse, the Grey of Macha, began to weep dark tears of blood in sorrow at his master’s impending death, Charlotte’s lip and chin began to quiver.

  Cormac stopped abruptly, abandoning his storyteller’s stance. “Are you all right, Charlotte?” he asked, sitting beside her bed.

  Charlotte pulled the sheet over her head and broke into loud sobs, banging her heels on the mattress and kicking the brass bed-end.

  Cormac leant over to comfort her.

  Aunt Verity was on the spot within seconds. She didn’t ask what had happened – she must have been listening at the door again. Pushing Cormac aside, she forcibly pulled the sheet away from Charlotte’s face. Charlotte wailed more loudly and snatched back the sheet to cover her head.

  Cormac had a strong urge to lift Verity up, push her out the door and turn the lock on her but, controlling himself, rang for Queenie and asked her to fetch Holly. “And you look after Harcourt until Holly returns,” he said quietly.

  Queenie, taking in the thrashing figure in the bed and the intensifying howls, ignored the house regulation of sedate movement at all times and ran to the nursery as fast as she could.

  “Control yourself,” said Verity, slapping Charlotte’s arms in an effort to wrest the sheet from her. Charlotte held on and Verity slapped her harder. “Let go, you wicked girl! Let go, I tell you!”

  Holly arrived breathless.

  “Holly will take over now, Miss Blackshaw,” said Cormac, taking hold of Verity’s slapping arm with his good hand.

  “Take your hand off me, you uncouth lackey! I’m her aunt,” Verity protested, pulling away. “You are only a servant, in case you’d forgotten.”

  “Lord Waldron’s orders I’m afraid, Miss Blackshaw. You will have to take it up with him,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t. He guided her towards the door. “Thank you for your concern. We’ll call you if we need you but I’m sure Holly can manage. Good afternoon, Miss Blackshaw.”

  Verity, scarlet with temper, said loudly as she left, “You’ll never rid her of her wilful habits the way you keep pandering to her. Spare the rod and spoil the child – that’s what the Bible says and never were words more truly spoken. You haven’t heard the last of this.”

  When he turned back Charlotte was still sobbing loudly but had relinquished the sheet and was in Holly’s arms. Holly signalled to Cormac over Charlotte’s head that she would stay and Cormac was free to go.

  Cormac visited Holly that evening after the two children were in bed. He had been too distracted all afternoon to paint, thinking of Charlotte’s distress and wondering what he had said to cause it. Holly was able to fill him in on Charlotte’s past attachment to Mandrake and the awful events surrounding his death.

  “No more sad stories about horses then. Thank you for your intervention. All I could think of doing was strangling Aunt Verity. Lucky I have only one hand.” He moved off, chuckling to himself.

  “Where is she?” Cormac asked the next morning, finding no sign of Charlotte in the bedroom.

  “All dressed and ready and waiting for you in the schoolroom. Up like a lark this morning.” Queenie was smiling broadly.r />
  Cormac bounded up the stairs.

  Charlotte was sitting at her desk, trying to look nonchalant. Cormac entered the room as if her presence there were natural and expected. No more gloomy stories, he resolved. Where to begin?

  “Did Snow White eat the apple?” Charlotte asked shyly. This was the first time she had spoken in the eight days of their time together.

  “She did,” Cormac answered. He finished the story, grateful for the happy ending. “And I know where the house of the seven dwarfs is, the very one, so when you feel better we’ll go along to see it.”

  “I’d like to see it,” she smiled, while her eyebrows said, ‘Who’s he trying to fool?’

  They started to make reading charts. “I’ll do the letters and you do the pictures,” Cormac suggested, looking forward to seeing Charlotte’s drawing skills for himself. He took paper, pens, scissors and glue out of the presses.

  “What a grand little illustrator you are!” he said with pleasure, after Charlotte had drawn an apple, bat, cat, dog, elephant, fish and giraffe. When ‘h’ came up Charlotte said ‘horse’. Cormac said that might be a bit difficult and would she rather draw a hat, but she said she could manage.

  While she was adding the bridle to the accurate outline of a horse, she looked up and asked, “What happened to the Grey that cried the tears of blood?”

  Cormac hesitated. “Do you really want to know?”

  She nodded.

  He was tempted to change the ending, but having already mentioned the omens and prophecies, he knew Charlotte wouldn’t accept a false resolution.

  Charlotte continued to nod.

  By the end of the story they were both moved – Charlotte by the actions of the brave Grey of Macha who was mortally wounded trying to defend his master, and Cormac by the dramatic image of the raven sitting on the shoulder of the wounded hero who had strapped himself to a pillar so he could die upright facing his enemies.