Olivia

by Joan Smith

  “A good question. First I must discover what it is you already know,” I answered.

  “Alice knows everything,” she informed me, then snickered into her fingers in a way that called to mind Doris. Seeing my brow darken, she withdrew the fingers.

  “How nice for Miss Crowell," I said, with a slightly chilly smile meant to indicate my surprise at this singular accomplishment in one so young. “It is she who ought to be the instructress, is it not?”

  “She is no longer in the schoolroom is all I meant,” Dorothy explained.

  “We are not running a schoolroom precisely,” I said, knowing well a young lady would strongly resent being put back behind a desk when she thought she had left it forever. Her presence told me Lady Synge intended to maximize her yield on the investment by including Alice as much as possible.

  “What do you mean?” Miss Crowell asked, with a faint dawning of interest.

  “Why, I am sure ladies of your age (ladies under twenty are so happy to be thought older!) are more than familiar with French, geography and needlework—the work of young girls. We shall push on to give you a little knowledge that will set you apart from the common run.”

  “I hope you are not going to teach us Latin!” Miss Dorothy said. "Uncle Philmot said you would be trying to teach us Latin and Greek.”

  “How odd! I cannot recall having discussed your curriculum with your Uncle Philmot in the least. Is he a clairvoyant?”

  “I don’t think so. He is only an earl,” Dorothy told me.

  There had thus far been no indication Miss Crowell knew a thing after leaving the schoolroom, but she knew I was making a joke at least, and told her sister so. I endeavored to talk to the pair in a serious fashion for some fifteen minutes, but could not make heads or tails of what they had been studying.

  This I did learn. They could not discourse for two sentences in French on the most mundane of matters. They did not recognize a mention of the Bard of Avon to refer to William Shakespeare. They were unaware the Eternal City referred to Rome, and were none too sure whether our Prime Minister was Lord Liverpool or Lord Castlereagh. That was the depth to which the education of the very flower of Albion’s womanhood had sunk.

  Miss Crowell, in an effort to redeem herself, said a word in praise of Monk Lewis’s foolish novel, The Monk, and offered to lend it to me after she was finished. This was the tome she perused so keenly when I entered. I told her I had so many important and really worthwhile books to read that I could not spare the time for mere amusement.

  “Uncle Philmot recommended it,” she told me.

  In order to discover just how ignorant the pair were, I decided to give them a little test of what might be considered the basic knowledge of an adult. There brows pleated in consternation at the prospect. Must they swot up for it? No indeed, its purpose was to see what they knew without swotting. This cheered them immensely, but I was beginning to form the idea neither of them must pass my test. It was my hope to make them perfectly aware they were savages, to increase (say initiate) a hunger for learning.

  I took a polite leave, wishing Miss Crowell pleasure of her novel, and dropping Miss Dorothy a hint I had mistaken her for a servant when I had entered to see her sprawling like a slattern. Peeping over my shoulder as I pulled the door closed, I was happy to see Dorothy sitting up and straightening her skirts, while Alice frowned at the cover of her book, then put it aside.

  Thence to my own chambers, to see laid out for my delectation two back issues of La Belle Assemblée and a box of bonbons. I slid both into the trash bin and busied myself setting up those books I intended using for the girls. Till dinner time I was not disturbed, except for a servant who came to unpack my trunks, Lady Synge come to see if I were comfortable, a man servant sent to enquire whether I would be wanting my carriage that afternoon, and Miss Dorothy (sent by her mama) to ask whether I would care for a cup of tea or a glass of wine.

  Despite these few interruptions I was able to set up my test to illustrate to the young ladies, including Miss Crowell, that she was not quite ready to graduate from my classroom.

  It was not my intention to throw in a free education for Lady Synge, though she was certainly in need of one. When we dined en famille that evening with no company at all, it was revealed to me that what thoughts I got into the pates of my charges were the only intelligent ones they were likely to contain. From neither the ostrich nor the jay were they likely to hear anything like an original idea.

  What was called conversation in the household was nothing else but gossip, and a discussion of future plans for entertainment. One would have no way of knowing that in that year of our Lord, 1817, hundreds of young girls and boys were starving in the gutters. No, what we heard was that Prinney had served a dinner with thirty-six entrées, and four each of soups, fish and contre-flancs. No such important matters as the suspension of habeas corpus, the meeting of a select committee to discuss the wretched state of lawlessness in the city and country, nor any of the riots taking place ever arose.

  The great dissension in their world was understood to be Beau Brummell's falling out with the Prince Regent. That vied for top honors with Princess Charlotte’s being possibly enceinte as the important doing of the day. Any mention of the riots occurring in the textile industry was turned into a tirade on the botched work of the laundress in washing Dorothy’s best mulled jaconet gown, and so it went through two courses and three removes, an unconscionable amount of food, considering the starving masses.

  After dinner, Lord and Lady Synge took Miss Crowell to a small rout party, while I remained behind to make a second copy of my test, and to set my room to rights. There is such a deal to do after the convulsion of moving. All one’s bits and pieces to be relocated, to find the right spot for the favourite ginger pot, to arrange the desk and lamps to best advantage, to try to locate the letter that requires early answering. These and similar chores took up my evening. I did not entirely neglect Dorothy either. I invited her in to join me after I had achieved some semblance of order, and let her rattle on to give me a better idea what was in her head.

  She was an open, artless young thing, likable in spite of her shocking ignorance. She was also a fund of useful background material. From her I learned Alice was "Head over heels” in love with Captain Tierney, an officer in the dragoons. Mama disliked the connection, and had in her eye a certain Lord Harmsworth, whom the sisters agreed was “a stick.” Dorothy had not yet succumbed to a passion for anyone in particular. She liked older, dashing bucks, but preferred dogs and horses to men in general.

  A certain pooch named Toddles in honor of his hobbling gait also joined us. He chewed his way through the toe of one of my blue slippers during the course of the evening, for which stunt he received a slap no harder than a love pat, and a tolerant “Bad doggie!”. I paid a guinea for those slippers, but there was no mention of replacing them.

  The next morning after breakfast, I herded my two uneager charges into the morning parlor (declining the schoolroom to lend an adult air of playing games to the test). I confess unblushing I could not have passed that test myself without recourse to an encyclopedia. One thinks she knows the longest river, the highest mountain, the most populous city in the country, and a host of other things we all ought to know, but in fact unless we are much inclined to statistics, these useless pieces of trivia elude us. I could see them squirming as they bothered the ends of their pens.

  If this sounds a nasty stunt to play a couple of harmless girls, I agree with you. It was, but it was done, as I mentioned, to make them aware of their ignorance. Miss Crowell got a score of six out of fifty; Miss Dorothy obtained seven, but when in doubt she guessed, whereas her more cautious sister left a multitude of blanks. They were suitably chastened, and sat without a word of protest after this to discover the forty-four and forty-three answers respectively they had not known.

  It was while they were setting to this chore, turned loose in their papa’s library to discover its secrets, that Lady Synge cam
e to pester me for the second time that morning. She had already bothered us once during the test, but I put her off.

  “All done testing my girls, Miss Fenwick?” she asked, sticking her nose in, and trying pretty hard to follow with her toe.

  "Not yet, I’m afraid,” I replied firmly, guarding the door.

  “I shall tell Lady Bartlett they are busy then,” she said, fairly agreeably. When neither of my girls showed the least sorrow at missing out on Lady Bartlett’s call, I felt this dame was no favorite with them.

  Not more than fifteen minutes passed before she was back a third time, to announce their uncle wished to see them. It was rapidly becoming clear I must establish ground rules, or we would never get a thing accomplished. I suggested that the young ladies limit their visiting hours to the afternoon, if we were to complete the agenda I had set out for the day, which was no more than discovering the answers to the test.

  “But it is their Uncle Philmot,” she insisted, a little more forcibly than before.

  “Has he come a great distance to see them?” I asked, knowing it was not the case. This was undoubtedly Uncle Philmot, the clairvoyant, who had forecast my teaching Latin and Greek.

  Dorothy snickered. “All the way from Hanover Square,” she answered.

  “One dislikes to leave Lord Philmot waiting,” the mama essayed. "He would like to meet you as well, Miss Fenwick.”

  I had no objection to keeping him waiting a millennium, but the truth is, I was wearied to death, and foresaw a glass of wine or a cup of tea, along with an opportunity of informing Lord Philmot his crystal ball must have developed a crack, for his reading of my curriculum was out.

  “Let us go then, but in future we must be quite firm about the girls’ schedule not being interrupted every few minutes,” I said severely.

  Miss Crowell and her sister were not slow to take advantage of the reprieve. They would have dashed before us to the saloon, had I not got a hand on their elbows and mentioned that age preceded beauty, to give them the lesson in an inoffensive way.

  It was Lady Synge and myself who entered the saloon first, with her age in advance of whatever remnants of beauty I possessed. Deduction led me to conclude the tall, elegant gentleman standing in a slouching attitude with his elbow on the mantelpiece was Lord Philmot.

  There was that in his countenance that set one’s back up before he said a word. I knew the words, when he spoke, would not be pleasant. He had what would be called in a boy tow-colored hair, though the texture was not at all coarse like the broken flax. It was sleekly groomed.

  Sleek is as good a word as any to describe his whole appearance: a very well-tailored jacket, immaculate cravat, striped waistcoat. He was elegantly thin with lean cheeks, a narrow nose, long graceful fingers and a weary, bored expression on his face that one ought not to assume when he goes calling. At least I have been taught one ought to put herself out to be pleasant when in company, and have never been told there existed a different rule for gentlemen.

  “Ah here you are, Sis,” he said, in a languid way, but his eyes were on myself, and they were full of mischief. The voice I recognized at once as belonging to the blue shoulder that had sat in the dining room at the hotel. That long ago he had been casting slurs on my abilities.

  We were made acquainted, the words acknowledged by a bow on his lordship’s part, and a minimal curtsey on my own, to match his stiff deportment. Without so much as a word exchanged between us, he turned his attention to his nieces.

  "Well, well,” he said in a mocking way, “are you girls so full of punctilio already, after one day in Miss Fenwick’s care, that you do not greet me with your customary exuberance? What a blessing! I shall be eternally grateful to you, Ma’am, for curbing their enthusiasm. I am usually greeted with wild whoops and a demand for sugarplums. If the toes of my boots escape untrammeled I count myself fortunate.”

  Still, I felt he disliked the lack of enthusiasm in their greeting. They did no more than curtsey and say good morning, then we were all seated. It was unfortunate Lady Synge immediately took into her head to be again extolling my virtues, including my dislike of being interrupted by callers. “For she is testing the girls, Philmot, just like a college. You would not credit the hard questions she has set up for them.”

  “Thinking of entering Christ Church next season, are you, Dottie?” he asked, with a sardonic smile.

  “They’d never let her in. She only got seven right out of fifty,” Miss Crowell told him, with of course a retaliation on the younger girl’s part of Alice’s mark.

  “You pose difficult questions, Ma’am,” he told me. “Just what is it you have in mind schooling the ladies for? It is news to me if their mama has other plans for them than marriage, in a year or two.”

  “Do you not feel it incumbent on a gentleman’s wife to have a good education?” I asked, trying to smile politely.

  “Good in the sense of being pertinent, certainly,” he allowed. “What are these abstruse matters of which you know only twelve percent, Alice?”

  “All kinds of things. I had no notion I was so uneducated. I bet you don’t know half of them either, Uncle Phil.”

  “Do you indeed? Are your charges allowed to place a wager, Miss Fenwick?” he asked, with such a supercilious curl to his lip I longed to have his ignorance displayed.

  "I see no harm in a family wager, if their mother does not object.”

  “Fire away,” he said to the girls.

  “What is the biggest river in England?” Dottie asked.

  As this was the first question, she would have had the answer looked up long since.

  “Do you speak of biggest in drainage-basin and volume discharged, or longest, or widest?”

  Dottie looked a question at me. "I meant the longest, naturally,” I answered quickly.

  “Odd you did not say so. Is accuracy considered of no importance in your lessons? Actually, of course, it is an utterly pointless question, the way you meant it. The tributaries must be taken into account as well, and in so many cases the tributary stream itself is another river. I think we must admit that question to be unanswerable. What else, Dottie?”

  “The largest island off Britain,” she said.

  “The largest in land mass, Lord Philmot,” I said, with a tinge of sarcasm to show what I thought of his nit-picking. “Not in height or weight or population.”

  He acknowledged my thrust with a slight inclination of the head. “One of the Outer Hebrides, I should think.”

  “You’re wrong!” Alice crowed. “It is the Isle of Man.”

  I saw my error at once, but it was too late to rectify it.

  “Surely the question said off Britain, not England?” he asked, scarcely able to contain his glee. “Unless Miss Fenwick has unilaterally annulled the treaty of 1707 which legislated the union of England and Scotland to form Great Britain, I must take exception to your answer, Alice."

  “You may be sure Miss Fenwick said England in her test, Phil,” his sister said. “These girls are as ignorant as swans. I don’t know where they get it, but she will cure them.”

  “It seems pointless to continue with these questions,” he said in a dismissing way to the girls. “Is that what your lessons consist of, memorizing useless bits of disconnected facts by rote?”

  “The lessons have not yet begun,” I answered coolly. “This was no more than a little examination to discover what points in the girls' backgrounds want strengthening.”

  “Make sure you do not omit to teach them the importance of accuracy,” he suggested.

  After a few such barbed comments, the wine was brought out, and Philmot turned his shoulder on me rather pointedly, to speak to his nieces. "I have a surprise for you,” he announced.

  Clamorous shouts, very loud, very unladylike, poured forth. He was the playful sort of uncle who had to tease them for five minutes before revealing the great treat. “I have decided to take you to Richmond Hill tomorrow,” he told them.

  This, I must say, did not
sound like much of a treat to me. The view from the hill of seven counties and Windsor Castle is a fine prospect certainly, but it cannot have been an entirely novel one for ladies who spent considerable time in London each year. There had to be more to the treat than this. It was from the exuberant Dottie that I got an inkling of it. “You have got our mounts sent up!” she exclaimed.

  It turned out he had been training a pair of hacks for his nieces at his estate, and they were to be sent to town, arriving that same day. I do not ride much, and never could get excited about that unpleasant form of exercise, though it is close to a national mania. If one has a short distance to traverse, one’s legs are good enough; if long, a carriage is better. After a deal of excited babble, I said, “It will be a pleasant jaunt for you, after your morning at studies.”

  “We plan to leave in the morning and make a day of it,” Lord Philmot said, with a challenging look at me. His sister had been at pains to inform him the mornings were to be uninterrupted. He did it on purpose to vex me. I could not understand why he had taken such a violent dislike to me, even in advance of having met me.

  The three Synge ladies looked to me, Lady Synge quite simply frightened, Miss Crowell uncertain but not unhopeful, Dorothy pleading with her puppy eyes. “It is not a great distance. You can go and return in an afternoon,” I pointed out in a reasonable manner.

  “I have planned a picnic. Even now my cook is roasting fowl and preparing food for it,” he replied. After staring hard at me, he looked to his sister, "Well, Sis, what do you say? Can the girls come?” he asked.

  It was all arranged the mornings were mine, and to avoid coming to cuffs with me, Lady Synge said, “That is up to Miss Fenwick,” in an effort to dump the problem in my lap.

  “Have you abrogated your parentship of your daughters, entrusting it entirely to a stranger?” he asked in a thin voice. “You are their mother. It is for you to decide what they may do.”

  “But Miss Fenwick…” she began, looking at me with eyes that pleaded for help.