The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  “But at this juncture!”

  “My dear Tina, Cupid has a notorious contempt for other people’s convenience.”

  “You know very well that Cupid has nothing to do with it.”

  “I am afraid he has everything to do with it. Old hearts are the most susceptible.”

  “It is my fault. I know he disapproves of me.”

  “Come now, that is nonsense.”

  “It is not nonsense. I know perfectly well that for him I am a draper’s daughter.”

  “My dear child, contain yourself.”

  “It is for you I am so angry.”

  “Very well—then let me be angry on my own behalf.”

  There was silence then, which allows me to say that the conversation above took place in Aunt Tranter’s rear parlor. Charles stood at the window, his back to Ernestina, who had very recently cried, and who now sat twisting a lace handkerchief in a vindictive manner.

  “I know how much you love Winsyatt.”

  How Charles would have answered can only be conjectured, for the door opened at that moment and Aunt Tranter appeared, a pleased smile of welcome on her face.

  “You are back so soon!” It was half past nine of the same day we saw Charles driving up to Winsyatt House.

  Charles smiled thinly. “Our business was soon… finished.”

  “Something terrible and disgraceful has happened.” Aunt Tranter looked with alarm at the tragic and outraged face of her niece, who went on: “Charles had been disinherited.”

  “Disinherited!”

  “Ernestina exaggerates. It is simply that my uncle has decided to marry. If he should be so fortunate as to have a son and heir…”

  “Fortunate… !” Ernestina slipped Charles a scalding little glance. Aunt Tranter looked in consternation from one face to the other.

  “But… who is the lady?”

  “Her name is Mrs. Tomkins, Mrs. Tranter. A widow.”

  “And young enough to bear a dozen sons.”

  Charles smiled. “Hardly that. But young enough to bear sons.”

  “You know her?”

  Ernestina answered before Charles could, “That is what is so disgraceful. Only two months ago his uncle made fun of the woman to Charles in a letter. And now he is groveling at her feet.”

  “My dear Ernestina!”

  “I will not be calm! It is too much. After all these years…” Charles took a deep breath, and turned to Aunt Tranter. “I understand she has excellent connections. Her husband was colonel in the Fortieth Hussars and left her handsomely provided for. There is no suspicion of fortune hunting.” Ernestina’s smoldering look up at him showed plainly that in her mind there was every suspicion. “I am told she is a very attractive woman.”

  “No doubt she rides to hounds.”

  He smiled bleakly at Ernestina, who was referring to a black mark she had earlier gained in the monstrous uncle’s book. “No doubt. But that is not yet a crime.”

  Aunt Tranter plumped down on a chair and looked again from one young face to the other, searching, as ever in such situations, for some ray of hope.

  “But is he not too old to have children?”

  Charles managed a gentle smile for her innocence. “He is sixty-seven, Mrs. Tranter. That is not too old.”

  “Even though she is young enough to be his granddaughter.”

  “My dear Tina, all one has in such circumstances is one’s dignity. I must beg you for my sake not to be bitter. We must accept the event with as good a grace as possible.”

  She looked up and saw how nervously stern he was; that she must play a different role. She ran to him, and catching his hand, raised it to her lips. He drew her to him and kissed the top of her head, but he was not deceived. A shrew and a mouse may look the same; but they are not the same; and though he could not find a word to describe Ernestina’s reception of his shocking and unwelcome news, it was not far removed from “unladylike.” He had leaped straight from the trap bringing him back from Exeter into Aunt Tranter’s house; and expected a gentle sympathy, not a sharp rage, however flatteringly it was intended to resemble his own feelings. Perhaps that was it—that she had not divined that a gentleman could never reveal the anger she ascribed to him. But there seemed to him something only too reminiscent of the draper’s daughter in her during those first minutes; of one who had been worsted in a business deal, and who lacked a traditional imperturbability, that fine aristocratic refusal to allow the setbacks of life ever to ruffle one’s style.

  He handed Ernestina back to the sofa from which she had sprung. An essential reason for his call, a decision he had come to on his long return, he now perceived must be left for discussion on the morrow. He sought for some way to demonstrate the correct attitude; and could find none better than that of lightly changing the subject.

  “And what great happenings have taken place in Lyme today?”

  As if reminded, Ernestina turned to her aunt. “Did you get news of her?” And then, before Aunt Tranter could answer, she looked up at Charles, “There has been an event. Mrs. Poulteney has dismissed Miss Woodruff.”

  Charles felt his heart miss a beat. But any shock his face may have betrayed passed unnoticed in Aunt Tranter’s eagerness to tell her news: for that is why she had been absent when Charles arrived. The dismissal had apparently taken place the previous evening; the sinner had been allowed one last night under the roof of Marlborough House. Very early that same morning a porter had come to collect her box—and had been instructed to take it to the White Lion. Here Charles quite literally blanched, but Aunt Tranter allayed his fears in the very next sentence.

  “That is the depot for the coaches, you know.” The Dorchester to Exeter omnibuses did not descend the steep hill to Lyme, but had to be picked up at a crossroads some four miles inland on the main road to the west. “But Mrs. Hunnicott spoke to the man. He is most positive that Miss Woodruff was not there. The maid said she had left very early at dawn, and gave only the instructions as to her box.”

  “And since?”

  “Not a sign.”

  “You saw the vicar?”

  “No, but Miss Trimble assures me he went to Marlborough House this forenoon. He was told Mrs. Poulteney was unwell. He spoke to Mrs. Fairley. All she knew was that some disgraceful matter had come to Mrs. Poulteney’s knowledge, that she was deeply shocked and upset…” The good Mrs. Tranter broke off, apparently almost as distressed at her ignorance as at Sarah’s disappearance. She sought her niece’s and Charles’s eyes. “What can it be—what can it be?”

  “She ought never to have been employed at Marlborough House. It was like offering a lamb to a wolf.” Ernestina looked at Charles for confirmation of her opinion. Feeling far less calm than he looked, he turned to Aunt Tranter.

  “There is no danger of…”

  “That is what we all fear. The vicar has sent men to search along towards Charmouth. She walks there, on the cliffs.”

  “And they have…?”

  “Found nothing.”

  “Did you not say she once worked for—”

  “They have sent there. No word of her.”

  “Grogan—has he not been called to Marlborough House?” He skillfully made use of his introduction of the name, turning to Ernestina. “That evening when we took grog—he mentioned her. I know he is concerned for her situation.”

  “Miss Trimble saw him talking with the vicar at seven o’clock. She said he looked most agitated. Angry. That was her word.” Miss Trimble kept a ladies’ trinket shop at the bottom of Broad Street—and was therefore admirably placed to be the general information center of the town. Aunt Tranter’s gentle face achieved the impossible—and looked harshly severe. “I shall not call on Mrs. Poulteney, however ill she is.”

  Ernestina covered her face in her hands. “Oh, what a cruel day it’s been!”

  Charles stared down at the two ladies. “Perhaps I should call on Grogan.”

  “Oh Charles—what can you do? There are men enough to search
.”

  That, of course, had not been in Charles’s mind. He guessed that Sarah’s dismissal was not unconnected with her wanderings in the Undercliff—and his horror, of course, was that she might have been seen there with him. He stood in an agony of indecision. It became imperative to discover how much was publicly known about the reason for her dismissal. He suddenly found the atmosphere of the little sitting room claustrophobic. He had to be alone. He had to consider what to do. For if Sarah was still living—but who could tell what wild decision she might have made in her night of despair, while he was quietly sleeping in his Exeter hotel?—but if she still breathed, he guessed where she was; and it oppressed him like a shroud that he was the only person in Lyme to know. And yet dared not reveal his knowledge.

  A few minutes later he was striding down the hill to the White Lion. The air was mild, but the sky was overcast. Idle fingers of wet air brushed his cheeks. There was thunder in the offing, as in his heart.

  25

  O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine?

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  It was his immediate intention to send Sam with a message for the Irish doctor. He phrased it to himself as he walked—“Mrs. Tranter is deeply concerned”… “If any expense should be incurred in forming a search party”… or better, “If I can be of any assistance, financial or otherwise”—such sentences floated through his head. He called to the undeaf ostler as he entered the hotel to fetch Sam out of the taproom and send him upstairs. But he no sooner entered his sitting room when he received his third shock of that eventful day.

  A note lay on the round table. It was sealed with black wax. The writing was unfamiliar: Mr. Smithson, at the White Lion. He tore the folded sheet open. There was no heading, no signature.

  I beg you to see me one last time. I will wait this afternoon and tomorrow morning. If you do not come, I shall never trouble you again.

  Charles read the note twice, three times; then stared out at the dark air. He felt infuriated that she should so carelessly risk his reputation; relieved at this evidence that she was still alive; and outraged again at the threat implicit in that last sentence. Sam came into the room, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, an unsubtle hint that he had been interrupted at his supper. As his lunch had consisted of a bottle of ginger beer and three stale Abernethy biscuits, he may be forgiven. But he saw at a glance that his master was in no better a mood than he had been ever since leaving Winsyatt.

  “Go down and find out who left me this note.”

  “Yes, Mr. Charles.”

  Sam left, but he had not gone six steps before Charles was at the door. “Ask whoever took it in to come up.”

  “Yes, Mr. Charles.”

  The master went back into his room; and there entered his mind a brief image of that ancient disaster he had found recorded in the blue lias and brought back to Ernestina—the ammonites caught in some recession of water, a micro-catastrophe of ninety million years ago. In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality—history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.

  He turned as Sam came through the door with the same ostler Charles had just spoken to. A boy had brought the note. At ten o’clock that morning. The ostler knew the boy’s face, but not his name. No, he had not said who the sender was. Charles impatiently dismissed him; and then as impatiently asked Sam what he found to stare at.

  “Wasn’t starin’ at nuffin’, Mr. Charles.”

  “Very well. Tell them to send me up some supper. Anything, anything.”

  “Yes, Mr. Charles.”

  “And I do not want to be disturbed again. You may lay out my things now.”

  Sam went into the bedroom next to the sitting room, while Charles stood at the window. As he looked down, he saw in the light from the inn windows a small boy run up the far side of the street, then cross the cobbles below his own window and go out of sight. He nearly threw up the sash and called out, so sharp was his intuition that this was the messenger again. He stood in a fever of embarrassment. There was a long enough pause for him to begin to believe that he was wrong. Sam appeared from the bedroom and made his way to the door out. But then there was a knock. Sam opened the door.

  It was the ostler, with the idiot smile on his face of one who this time has made no mistake. In his hand was a note.

  “’Twas the same boy, sir. I asked ‘un, sir. ‘E sez ‘twas the same woman as before, sir, but ‘e doan’ know ‘er name. Us all calls ‘er the—”

  “Yes, yes. Give me the note.”

  Sam took it and passed it to Charles, but with a certain dumb insolence, a dry knowingness beneath his mask of manservitude. He flicked his thumb at the ostler and gave him a secret wink, and the ostler withdrew. Sam himself was about to follow, but Charles called him back. He paused, searching for a sufficiently delicate and plausible phrasing.

  “Sam, I have interested myself in an unfortunate woman’s case here. I wished… that is, I still wish to keep the matter from Mrs. Tranter. You understand?”

  “Perfeckly, Mr. Charles.”

  “I hope to establish the person in a situation more suited… to her abilities. Then of course I shall tell Mrs. Tranter. It is a little surprise. A little return for Mrs. Tranter’s hospitality. She is concerned for her.”

  Sam had assumed a demeanor that Charles termed to himself “Sam the footman”; a profoundly respectful obedience to his master’s behests. It was so remote from Sam’s real character that Charles was induced to flounder on.

  “So—though it is not important at all—you will speak of this to no one.”

  “O’ course not, Mr. Charles.” Sam looked as shocked as a curate accused of gambling.

  Charles turned away to the window, received unawares a look from Sam that gained its chief effect from a curious swift pursing of the mouth accompanied by a nod, and then opened the second note as the door closed on the servant.

  Je vous ai attendu toute la journee. Je vous prie—une femme a genoux vous supplie de l’aider dans son desespoir. Je passerai la nuit en prieres pour votre venue. Je serai des l’aube a la petite grange pres de la mer atteinte par le premier sentier a gauche apres la ferme.

  No doubt for lack of wax, this note was unsealed, which explained why it was couched in governess French. It was written, scribbled, in pencil, as if composed in haste at some cottage door or in the Undercliff—for Charles knew that that was where she must have fled. The boy no doubt was some poor fisherman’s child from the Cobb—a path from the Undercliff descended to it, obviating the necessity of passing through the town itself. But the folly of the procedure, the risk!

  The French! Varguennes!

  Charles crumpled the sheet of paper in his clenched hand. A distant flash of lightning announced the approach of the storm; and as he looked out of the window the first heavy, sullen drops splashed and streaked down the pane. He wondered where she was; and a vision of her running sodden through the lightning and rain momentarily distracted him from his own acute and self-directed anxiety. But it was too much! After such a day!

  I am overdoing the exclamation marks. But as Charles paced up and down, thoughts, reactions, reactions to reactions spurted up angrily thus in his mind. He made himself stop at the bay window and stare out over Broad Street; and promptly remembered what she had said about thorn trees walking therein. He span round and clutched his temples; then went into his bedroom and peered at his face in the mirror.

  But he knew only too well he was awake. He kept saying to himself, I must do something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness swept over him—a wild determination to make some gesture that would show he was more than an ammonite stranded in a drought,
that he could strike out against the dark clouds that enveloped him. He must talk to someone, he must lay bare his soul.

  He strode back into his sitting room and pulled the little chain that hung from the gasolier, turning the pale-green flame into a white incandescence, and then sharply tugged the bellcord by the door. And when the old waiter came, Charles sent him peremptorily off for a gill of the White Lion’s best cobbler, a velvety concoction of sherry and brandy that caused many a Victorian unloosing of the stays.

  Not much more than five minutes later, the astonished Sam, bearing the supper tray, was halted in midstairs by the sight of his master, with somewhat flushed cheeks, striding down to meet him in his Inverness cape. Charles halted a stair above him, lifted the cloth that covered the brown soup, the mutton and boiled potatoes, and then passed on down without a word.

  “Mr. Charles?”

  “Eat it yourself.”

  And the master was gone—in marked contrast to Sam, who stayed where he was, his tongue thrusting out his left cheek and his eyes fiercely fixed on the banister beside him.

  26

  Let me tell you, my friends, that the whole thing depends On an ancient manorial right.

  Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

  The effect of Mary on the young Cockney’s mind had indeed been ruminative. He loved Mary for herself, as any normal young man in his healthy physical senses would; but he also loved her for the part she played in his dreams—which was not at all the sort of part girls play in young men’s dreams in our own uninhibited, and unimaginative, age. Most often he saw her prettily caged behind the counter of a gentleman’s shop. From all over London, as if magnetized, distinguished male customers homed on that seductive face. The street outside was black with their top hats, deafened by the wheels of their carriages and hansoms. A kind of magical samovar, whose tap was administered by Mary, dispensed an endless flow of gloves, scarves, stocks, hats, gaiters, Oxonians (a kind of shoe then in vogue) and collars—Piccadilly’s, Shakespere’s, Dog-collar’s, Dux’s—Sam had a fixation on collars, I am not sure it wasn’t a fetish, for he certainly saw Mary putting them round her small white neck before each admiring duke and lord. During this charming scene Sam himself was at the till, the recipient of the return golden shower.