Hearts and Diamonds (4 page)

4) I must be helpful to Mama and try to bear the small privations of our life with fortitude.

5) If all else fails, I must find work.

Oh, how the last one dispirits me, but it may well come to pass. Father looked so sober and so whey-faced when he tried to wish us a Happy New Year that I feel sure the end is close for his business affairs. And then what shall become of us? Useless and idle to speculate. I will hold to my resolutions and, between them and God and my new husband, I will find a course through these times.

Jenna put the book down and thought about what she had read. In the space of one page, she had formed an impression of the book’s author. A young woman of a romantic turn of mind, perhaps a little spoiled, certainly middle-class at the very least and well educated, but not serious-minded. Jenna already wished her well and hoped her family’s money troubles might not be too severe. As for the prediction that she would meet a husband within the next few months – well, it was intriguing enough to make her want to read on immediately, to see if the prophecy was borne out.

January 2nd, What a hateful day. We have had to dispense with Rose, for we can no longer afford to retain her services. Mary and I have cried all day long, for we have known her since babyhood and we love her as a comfortable aunt and confidante. I asked her if she had a situation to go to; she was very brave and did not weep or cuss but said she should be happy to spend the rest of the winter with her brother, until a position should be found. Imagine, we none of us knew that she even had a brother!

Mary is much consoled by this for the foolish girl had pictured poor Rose at the steps of the workhouse. She has much too lurid an imagination for a child of her age. We attempted to cheer ourselves with music and the reading of poems, but it was a dull sort of evening.

January 3rd had apparently had few attractions and the page was largely blank but for a large blot which Jenna thought might be the result of a tear falling on the opposite leaf.

Turning the page, January 4th held dire tidings.

The evil hour has come and I must apply for a position. I found some advertisements in the
Nottingham Post
and sent away for a great many of them with a heavy heart. Father would not even come down for dinner, so ashamed is he of the ‘disgrace’ of having a daughter who must work for a living. He is much depressed in spirits. Mama does her best to maintain a cheerful disposition, but she is sorely tried. Mary does not help by crying the day away and declaring that she will die of loneliness without me, now that Rose is gone.

Now there is nothing to be done but to wait. But where shall I go and what shall I do and to whom shall I be tied? I cannot think of any single outcome that will be favourable to my disposition. Mary suggests that I will be like Jane Eyre and meet my Mr Rochester, but of course she is speaking nonsense.

A few entries of a desultory nature followed, describing the weather and discussing a book she had read. Then, on January 12th, there was something to make Jenna sit up and feel her hackles rise.

I have the offer of a post. It is in a place called Bledburn, which I do not know and have never visited, but is only half a day’s drive hence. I believe they live by coal mining in that region. The employer’s name is Harville and the situation is at Harville Hall. I am to be governess to Lord David Harville’s two daughters.

Jenna put the book aside. If Lawrence was to be believed, Fairy Fay was the short-lived first wife of a Lord Harville. Clearly, the Lord Harville of 1886 was already married, or at the very least, widowed, to have children in need of education. She considered flicking ahead, but resisted the desire. She wanted the story to unfold naturally, at Frances’s pace. Besides, these old family myths were often a bit garbled or inaccurate. It could well be that Lawrence had misunderstood or been told half the story. She took the book back up.

The girls are eight and eleven – imagine, Mary’s age! I should feel relief or gratitude, but at this time I can feel nothing but terror. I cannot even think of the name Harville or Bledburn without the rising of my gorge. Mama tries to instil courage by calling me the saviour of our family and the one who will put bread in Mary’s mouth, but I cannot see this in a happy light. Mary says perhaps I will meet my husband in Bledburn, but I should not wish to marry a miner!

Jenna prickled with irritation at Frances’s attitude, but tried to quell it. For a middle-class Victorian girl, marriage to a working man would have been unthinkable and shameful. Frances was no more than a girl of her time.

Oh, what will become of me? For the first time, I doubt the gypsy’s word. No man of quality will marry a governess and I shall shrivel and grow old in this Harville Hall. The years stretch ahead of me, arid and unyielding. Alas. Where is he? When will he come and take my burden from me?

Jenna snorted. ‘Don’t go relying on a man, love,’ she said out loud. As soon as she spoke the words, she cast an eye up towards the attic where Jason was painting away. Perhaps a little unfair to lump him in with the great mass of mankind. She was still a little bitter over what had happened with Deano, clearly. She should perhaps try a little harder to put all that behind her.

And for Frances, marriage represented escape, paradoxical as it might seem to regard being yoked together to a man for life as escape. There was a qualitative difference in the forms of captivity, though: a married woman could expect to be treated with respect and courtesy. The same was sadly not true of a spinster, and financial security was as important then as it was now. A married woman simply stood a much better chance of living well and happily than an unmarried one. Of course, she would have to hope that she didn’t marry a brute. But that was no different today.

However, something told Jenna that Frances’s rosy dreams of love might not come true in the way she expected at Harville Hall. She wished she didn’t have to read on with this feeling of misgiving and approaching nastiness in her mind. Maybe the bones were nothing to do with Frances. Perhaps nothing untoward would occur and all the updates would relate to work well done and perhaps a respectable courtship and subsequent happy marriage.

But Jenna’s heart didn’t seem to think so. She took the book back up, finding January 15th to be the next entry.

I cannot bear it. I have packed my trunk and it is fuller of tears than of clothes and belongings, I am sure, for I wept so much into it before it was shut and locked. Mary has given me her own beloved Loopy Doll. I refused, but she insisted and pressed it upon me so mournfully that I had no alternative but to take it. I wonder what will become of Mary without me? She is not a strong child and she has such strange fancies. I wish I could bring her with me and she might make a friend to the Misses Harville, but of course I cannot possibly make such a request. It would be quite mad.

Mama has given me likewise her cameo brooch of Grandmama’s profile. I am to look at it when I feel homesick and remember that I am a Manning and I do what I do for the love and good of my family. Mama has never been demonstrative, but this evening at her needlework, she broke into such a rush of tears that we were all taken aback and some moments passed before Mary remembered to find the sal volatile bottle and we moved to comfort her.

Papa, alas, is as remote as he has been ever since the genesis of this crisis. He went out, nobody knows where, and did not return until we were all abed. Mama fears that he is falling into low company, but she tries not to speak such fears out loud, out of kindness to me, I think. She knows that I will worry.

But I am not to, for I will be sending money home every week, and it will make the difference between gentility and savagery.

This is what she tells me. But how can I know what will pass when I am not there to see it? I have such fears, and I cannot even look forward, for when I get to Harville Hall, I will be thinking always of what might be happening here.

It is too hard.

Yes, thought Jenna, it was too hard. But not as hard as life was for her own forebears back in the days of Bledburn’s mining glory. She thought of her father and her grandfather and her great grandfather, all tramping off to the pit with their snapboxes day after day after day, taking their lives in their hands with each trip down in the rickety lift to the dark, shining bowels of the earth. None of them were killed in mining disasters, but one of her grandfathers and an uncle had died of lung complications from breathing in the thick coal-dusty air. Her father was still alive but she wondered how much of that was due to the closure of the pit before his thirtieth birthday.

And during the strike, she remembered the youth club being used as a giant soup kitchen, the miners’ wives in their pinnies boiling up vast vats of stew with ingredients donated by well-wishers. Those communal meals had been exciting and vivid to her as a child, but looking back, it must have been so hard for those women, to know that they faced a choice between losing their husbands’ livelihoods or carrying on like this, towards starvation. It had been no choice at all in the end. They couldn’t have won. But at least they’d fought. At least they could tell their children they did what they could.

This Frances, on the other hand, thought sitting in a grand house teaching spoilt children where to find India on a globe constituted a hard life. Jenna sniffed. She knew nothing of the sheer graft and determination needed to make a mark in this world. But she shouldn’t think ungenerously of the poor girl. After all, who knew what tribulations lay ahead of her?

She read on.

January 16th

And now I am here, at Harville Hall. I suppose I should draw a sketch and reflect upon my first impressions of the town, the house and its residents, so that is what I shall do.

Oh, this gloomy town! It is both as I expected, and worse. Coming nigh on the train, all one could see was the great pit head with its black wheel spinning at its apex. It was like a giant, bestriding the landscape Colossus-wise. Beneath it trembled a little town, all ramshackle and poor. A sacrifice to the malevolent Coal God, or so it seemed to me. The very air seemed dark and choked with the pit dust which, mixed with the smuts from the engine steam, made for a very unpleasant atmosphere. I was glad indeed that I was wearing a dark gown and shawl, and my white gloves were packed away for special occasions.

I did not have to wait long after alighting at the station. A fly awaited me, driven by a very taciturn old fellow, but he was obliging enough and I did not have to struggle with my trunk at all.

And then – the Hall. What shall I say of it? It is impressive without overwhelming one; a handsome building of fairly recent construction. Function is not sacrificed to aesthetics, but nor is the converse true. It stands in pleasant old grounds, stark enough at this time of the year, but in summer I should imagine it is quite beautiful. To me, however, it looked mournful. I suppose my own mood made it seem so, but there was a sadness in the windows and a kind of droop in the ivy that hung about them.

I was shown into the front hall by a maid and left there while she went to find the master. It was so quiet in there that I wondered if everyone had gone out, but it was the hour before supper and so it seemed rather unlikely. All the same, I felt that it was unnatural, thinking of our own home with its boisterous cheer. At least, there had been boisterous cheer before Papa’s troubles.

In this house, only the ticking of the beautiful grandfather clock by the stairs disturbed a peace that seemed made of years and decades and centuries. An unfathomable stillness. It was broken at last by the opening of a green baize door at the back and rushing housemaids, hurrying to put cutlery on the dining table. They looked at me curiously as they raced by, then lowered their eyes again as if the sight of me had burned them.

I heard the clatter of knives and forks and the whisper of conversation in the room beyond and I strained my ears to catch it, but in vain. I had tiptoed a little closer when a heavy tread on the stairs disturbed me.

‘Miss Manning?’

I had no immediate impression of him beyond his impeccable dress and his aristocratic bearing.

‘Do I have the honour of addressing Lord Harville?’ I asked.

He came down and stood level with me, seeming pleased by my phrasing.

‘I’m not sure it’s much of an honour,’ he said, ‘but yes, you do.’ He held out a hand and I thought he would shake mine, so I took it, but he did not shake my hand, merely held it for a moment or two, looking me up and down in a manner that made me feel cold and then hot.

He took me into the drawing room and explained to me that his wife was dead and his daughters had found it difficult to settle with any governess since then. I remarked that this was perhaps not so surprising and he agreed with me, but warned me that I was to be the last of these experiments. Should I fail to engage their attention, then they were to be sent away to school.

I felt for them then, thinking of how Mary might bear up if she were to be sent away to some strange place full of rules and routines. I do not think she would take to it, especially in grief.

It had been three years since his wife’s death, he said, and that did astonish me, for I had imagined it to have been more recent. Nonetheless, Susannah and Maria continued to hold her memory close and dear, and I was to expect them to treat me with suspicion, even downright hostility. But I was to report all such incidences to him, and he would do his best to deal with it.

I asked if I could meet the girls but he told me they were abed. So soon? It was not yet seven o’clock and Susannah, I believed, was eleven years old.

He told me that he never allowed them downstairs after five or before ten in the morning. I wonder if he ever sees them. It seems such a strange and unhappy state of affairs that I am almost tempted to hand in my notice here and now and return home. I will take in mending, laundry, anything
. . .