At that, I almost sat up in bed and declared that she was not alone, that she had me, and that I would gladly accompany her anywhere. But I restrained the impulse, and so it was my grandmother who assured my mother that she was not alone, that her parents loved her deeply and would gladly carry as many of her burdens as she allowed.
“Thank you, Mother,” she replied. “I am grateful, but I’m mourning the death of my marriage and of all the dreams and hopes of my youth.”
“Surely not all your hopes for the future are lost,” protested my grandmother. “You’re still very young, and you have Ada.”
In the silence that followed, I pictured my mother shaking her head. “My hold on Ada is tenuous at best, and it is challenged on all sides.”
“Challenged? By whom?”
“By Mrs. Grimes, for one, from what you’ve told me. Ada loves her.”
“Of course she does, as well she should. That doesn’t mean she loves you any less. No one can replace a mother in a child’s heart. Do you love me any less for loving your father too, for loving Ada?”
“Certainly not.” My mother inhaled deeply. “Of course you’re right. In Ada I find a great deal of hope and promise, if those Byronic branches and shoots can be pruned back. I don’t mean to wallow in melancholy. I’ll find a way forward, some noble endeavor to occupy my thoughts and fill my hours.”
They moved on, leaving me to ponder their unexpected exchange, for they rarely conversed so spontaneously and frankly. As my thoughts churned, my curiosity soon transformed into worry, but I eventually drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, I waited for Mrs. Grimes to come dress me. My tummy rumbled with hunger, and the day had quite begun, and I thought it very strange that she should be delayed. Then a terrible thought struck: Perhaps she had come down with the chicken pox. I threw back the covers, scrambled from my bed, and padded down the hall, not far, to my nurse’s little chamber. There I found her folding the contents of her wardrobe into neat piles upon her bed near a tapestry satchel. As I watched from the doorway, as silent as a shadow, she placed a bundle of stockings into the satchel, followed by a muslin petticoat.
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.
She gasped and whirled about to face me, a hand pressed to her heart. I noticed then that she was not attired in her customary uniform, but in the navy dress with mother-of-pearl buttons she wore on her days off. “Goodness, child,” she said, catching her breath. “You gave me quite a start. Did no one come to help you dress or take you down to breakfast?”
I stared at her, perplexed. Why should anyone else do the tasks that she performed every morning without fail? My gaze went to the satchel and from there to the piles of clothes on her comforter. “Are you going on a trip?”
Mrs. Grimes pressed her lips together and nodded.
“Where are you going?”
She smiled as she resumed packing, but her mouth trembled as if she had to struggle to keep in it place. “To my younger sister’s home in Manchester.”
“Can I come too?”
“I’m sorry, little lamb, but no. Your family would miss you too much.”
“When are you coming back?”
She regarded me sadly for a moment. “Perhaps you should go find your mother or grandmother and ask one of them to dress you for breakfast.”
My heart plummeted. “I’m not hungry.” Something was very, very wrong. “Will you dress me, please?”
I heard footsteps in the hall behind me, and I turned to discover my mother approaching. “Ada, darling, what are you doing out of bed?”
“It’s time to get up,” I replied, surprised. I had expected a reprimand for lying so long abed, but my mother seemed unaware of the broken rule. I was not about to enlighten her.
“Come, then.” She held out her hand. “Let’s get you dressed.”
Dubious, I glanced over my shoulder to Mrs. Grimes, and when she nodded, I seized my mother’s hand and tripped along happily beside her back to my bedroom. My mother almost never dressed me or took me down to breakfast, so this was quite a treat.
At the table, she sat adjacent to me while I ate porridge and bread with jam and butter, taking nothing herself but nodding absently while I chattered on about how much I would like to have a kitten, perhaps for my birthday, and if that was too soon then perhaps Christmas. Not once did she mention her disdain for pets, which I took as an encouraging sign. Afterward, she washed my face and hands and let me join her in the study, where I practiced making letters on scrap paper, which were little more than wavering, indecipherable marks with a pencil, though drawn with great effort and concentration. I enjoyed myself so immensely that it was not until I began to grow hungry for luncheon that I remembered Mrs. Grimes and her upcoming trip.
Certain that she would not have left without saying good-bye, I raced upstairs and burst into her room only to find her gone, the piles of clothes gone too, as well as the satchel and the few cherished possessions she had kept out of my reach on the top of her bureau—a small glass vase that she regularly replenished with fragrant blossoms, a prayer book that had belonged to her grandfather, a china teapot painted with bright scenes of the gardens at Windsor Castle, which she had won in a spelling contest as a schoolgirl.
I darted to the window and peered outside, but I did not see her. “Mrs. Grimes?” I called, and when no reply came I raced back downstairs to the front entrance, tugged the door open, ran outside a few paces, and looked wildly up and down the drive. There was no carriage to be found, not even a cloud of dust to show that one had recently departed.
A footman discovered me there and persuaded me to return inside and shut the door, and since I did not want to get either of us in trouble, I complied. My mother met me in the foyer, but before she could scold me, I demanded, “Has Mrs. Grimes left?”
“Yes, Ada, she has.”
“Well, she didn’t say good-bye to me before she went and that’s not very nice. I will scold her when she comes back.” I glared unhappily at my mother. “When is she coming back?”
“It is not your place to scold your nurse.”
“I won’t scold. I’ll just tell her.” I took a deep breath, fighting back tears. “When is she coming back?”
My mother inhaled deeply and extended a hand to me, but I would not be fooled twice in the same morning, and I did not take it. “Mrs. Grimes will no longer be your nurse,” she said, letting her hand fall to her side. “You shall have a new nurse beginning tomorrow. She is very nice, and kind and pretty, and I think you shall like her very much.”
“I shall hate her,” I shouted, balling my hands into fists. “I want Mrs. Grimes!”
At the time, Mrs. Grimes’s dismissal seemed to me a purely arbitrary decision, made in the moment, a blow struck from out of nowhere. What I did not learn until years later, when I discovered the letters my mother and grandmother had exchanged that summer, was that my mother had been planning to give Mrs. Grimes notice for months. From Scotland she had written to my grandmother complaining that Mrs. Grimes had “a selfish way of assuming authority directly opposite to my wishes” and had failed in her attempts “to regulate the Child’s temper.” She had already engaged another nurse who came very highly recommended, and she wanted my grandmother to break the news to Mrs. Grimes while she herself was traveling, so that she might avoid any unpleasantness. “Really, I hardly dare return till this matter is settled,” she added.
My grandmother objected to firing Mrs. Grimes, who had been promised a two-year engagement, and she was no more willing to level the blow than my mother was. “My dear daughter, if you wish Grimes discharged then you should do it yourself,” she had written in reply. “She has been an exemplary nurse and I hardly know what reason to give.”
“We need give no reason except that I am not satisfied with her service,” my mother countered. “Ada is too willful and disobedien
t; a better nurse would have rid her of those habits. Offer that as a reason if you must. I will write a good character for her and she shall be able to use that to find another post. Will that satisfy you?”
It did not, but my grandmother eventually capitulated to the inevitable. She still pled the case for retaining Mrs. Grimes, describing in fervent detail the nurse’s tireless ministrations to me on my sickbed. When that effort failed, she argued for softening the blow, and she even offered to pay Mrs. Grimes the entire sum of her wages for the two-year engagement she and my mother had agreed upon. My mother would have none of it, and since my grandmother refused to be the bearer of such bad and unjust news, they had reached an impasse.
“I am sorry that I must take the apparently harsh measure of dismissing the Nurse immediately on my return,” my mother wrote, her exasperation unmistakable. “I am deeply impressed with the painful and pernicious consequence of presenting myself to Ada in the role that I have too often been obliged to play to her, that of the Villain. It is a fact too well-known, and too bitterly felt by myself, that for a long time Ada never saw me without beginning to cry— No wonder when Mama was made the constant bugbear. It nearly made me mad—and would do so again. It is my fixed determination not to remain a week in the house with Grimes present.”
In that, my mother kept her word. She gave Mrs. Grimes only a day’s notice to leave the house, and she deliberately distracted me that morning to avoid a ghastly tearful parting scene.
I am older now than my mother was then, and I know her too well to believe that she was obliged to dismiss my beloved nurse because she had failed to carry out her duties, although I admit that it is possible my mother truly believed that. Mrs. Grimes was not let go because she failed to curb my willfulness, but because she had taught me to love her, and I could not be allowed to love anyone more than I loved my mother. It was a pattern that was to be repeated throughout my childhood: Whenever I became too fond of a nurse or a governess, that unlucky woman would be peremptorily shown to the exit.
But although I did not possess in childhood the evidence I would discover as a woman grown, I did learn one important lesson through these recurring heartbreaks: If I loved anyone too much, they would be taken from me.
Chapter Four
Smiles Form the Channel of a Future Tear
September 1817–July 1818
I resolved to hate my new nurse and to make her hate me, or at least to hate her situation so much that she would resign. Since I must have a nurse, if I drove this interloper away, my mother would have to invite Mrs. Grimes to return. And so I became a virtuoso of naughtiness, refusing to leave my bed unless dragged from it, fighting tooth and claw when the nurse tried to wash or dress me, kicking the rungs of my chair at mealtimes, refusing to eat, running away when it was time for lessons, hiding when it was time for bed, and just generally being an absolute terror to live with.
The new nurse resigned after a week. I went to bed happily that night, looking forward to welcoming Mrs. Grimes back to Kirkby Mallory the following day. But the next morning after breakfast, which I enjoyed with perfect manners, I was summoned to my mother’s study to meet a new nurse, a frowning matron who might as well have been named Mrs. No Nonsense, for that was all that she was about.
She lasted two days. I was not exaggerating when I called myself a virtuoso.
On the day after the frowning matron’s departure, I was ordered to spend the day alone in my room to contemplate my sins. I sulked, but quietly, hoping to earn a reprieve for good behavior, for the first snow of winter had draped a soft blanket of white over the estate, and I longed to go play in it before it melted. Shortly before luncheon, I was summoned downstairs to meet a dignified older woman with pale hair, pale skin, and pale eyes. Apparently she had once been a nurse in the household of a cousin of Queen Charlotte, and she wanted to meet me before consenting to take charge of me.
She lasted an hour.
That night my mother sent me to bed without supper, and as an even worse punishment, she departed for a week in London without bidding me good-bye. Angry, despondent, doubly abandoned, I strengthened my resolve and silently vowed that this battle, my mother would not win.
But I had overestimated the subtlety of my scheme, and after my mother had been gone two days, my grandmother drew me onto her lap, kissed me, and said, “I miss Mrs. Grimes too, and I am certain she misses you, but your mother has decided, and that is that, so you might as well stop terrorizing these poor nurses.”
It was then I realized that Great Britain was apparently inhabited by a vast multitude of unmarried women willing to nurse resentful, disobedient children who dwelt in fine houses, and I could not possibly exhaust the supply. Mrs. Grimes would not return to me.
When this inescapable truth finally sank in, some of the fire went out of my rebellion, and I became almost tolerable again. My mother remained with us at Kirkby Mallory most of the time, which helped lessen the pain of my mourning. Nurses came and went, old and young, cheerful and grim. Once I overheard my mother preparing one to meet me, or perhaps warning her what lay in store, saying, “Ada’s intellect is so far advanced beyond her age that she is already capable of receiving impressions that might influence her—to what extent I cannot say. Therefore you must take great care what you do and say in her presence.” The nurse stammered that she would be very careful to provide me with only the most wholesome influences, but she was sacked within a fortnight for offenses I no longer recall.
My second birthday arrived, and a few of my mother’s friends visited to celebrate the occasion, but no friends of mine came, for no such creatures existed. While I played with a wooden Noah’s ark full of cunning little carved animals I had received from my grandparents, I overheard my mother remark to a visiting friend, “Ada loves me as well as I wish, and better than I expected, for I had a strange prepossession that she never would be fond of me.” I could not protest that of course I loved her and always would, or I would have given away that I had been eavesdropping. Nor could I tell anyone how miserable I felt when she told another friend, “As she grows older, my heart uncloses to the kindly influence of her smiles.” I had never guessed that her heart had ever been closed to me, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least it was opening now.
About a week after my birthday, my mother received word that my father had sold his ancestral estate, Newstead Abbey, for the astonishing amount of ninety-four thousand five hundred pounds to Colonel Thomas Wildman, a former classmate of my father’s at Harrow. Although the mansion had fallen into near ruin, I’m sure my father regretted parting with it, but he also must have felt tremendous relief at being able to settle his debts and provide for his living expenses abroad. The estate would have passed from our immediate family anyway, since as a mere girl I could not inherit it and the Separation made it increasingly improbable that my father would ever have a legitimate male heir. Even so my mother felt the loss of Newstead Abbey keenly, more for the romantic ideal of what it had represented than for the property itself.
This regret compounded her unhappiness over the wretched turn her marriage had taken, but my indomitable mother refused to give in to despair. She had told my grandmother that she would escape melancholy by devoting herself to a noble endeavor, and she found it in a new ambition to educate the children of the working poor. During her travels in Scotland, she had visited the Infant School the socialist Robert Owen had established near Glasgow, as well as the school her friend Harriet Siddons had founded in Edinburgh. There, the old, outdated system that demanded learning by rote and humiliating a child in front of his classmates if he failed to learn a lesson had been jettisoned. Their new, progressive form of schooling emphasized “cheerfulness”—appealing to children’s natural curiosity about the world to inspire them to learn. Bright pictures of animals and specimens from fields and forests were displayed in the classroom; walks in the countryside were encouraged; music, art, dancing, and d
rawing as well as reading and writing were essential elements of the curriculum. No pupil was ever beaten or threatened, not in word and never in deed.
My mother agreed that through thoughtful education, the children of the working poor would improve their character, increase their competence, and benefit not only themselves, but society as a whole. She decided to establish an Infant School at Seaham, paying the expenses herself, dispensing with conventional lessons in favor of a pleasant, happy environment where learning was play and children grew to love it.
I was not to attend this school, of course; girls of my rank, if they were educated at all, were tutored at home, and though I was bright, I was still a trifle too young for formal schooling. I’m sure my mother’s evolving philosophy of education influenced her, however, in the ongoing struggle to find a suitable nurse for me. After a brief interim with no nurse at all—a dull yet welcome respite, to me—throughout which my mother lamented that she had already hired and fired the only suitable candidates within a hundred miles, she had found someone very promising indeed, thanks to a recommendation from her friend Selina Doyle. My mother sang Miss Clara Thorne’s praises at dinner the evening before her first day in our household, but I expected she would enjoy no greater success than her predecessors.
The following morning, I woke to a sense of impending doom, and when I was obliged to report downstairs to meet Miss Thorne, I was so unhappy that I could not even lift my head to cast an appraising look her way when my mother introduced us. Almost any nurse could survive a few days with a thoroughly unresponsive child, but eventually they all grew bored and either quit or did something not “cheerful” in an attempt to provoke me into action, earning my mother’s displeasure and a swift carriage ride away from Kirkby Mallory. Miss Thorne seemed more tolerant of dullness than most. Listless, I cooperated when she wanted to dress me, I ate my meals dutifully but in silence, and though I did not have the heart to pay attention when she read to me or invited me to sing with her, at least I did not throw tantrums.
Enchantress of Numbers Page 9
