The Summer Before the War (19 page)

“Miss Lucy has such enthusiasm for recruiting that Lord Kitchener should put her entreating eyes on a poster,” said Hugh. “Out of loyalty and affection, I suppose I must allow her to claim me as her recruit.” He gazed across the lawn at the Professor and Celeste. “But in truth, it was going to the docks yesterday that changed my mind; the dozens of refugees, the wounded, the chaos…” His voice trailed away, and she could see in his eyes that he was replaying pictures of the scene.

“I imagine it was very difficult,” said Beatrice. But as she spoke, she knew she could not imagine. The exhaustion, dirty clothes, and pungent smell of the few refugees crowded into the Town Hall had been overwhelming enough.

“Grandmothers with bleeding feet from walking for days in wooden clogs,” he said, his voice brimming with emotion. “Babies thrust into the arms of complete strangers just to get them to safety, women desperate for news of detained husbands pinning their information to every fence.” He paused and then shook his head as if to clear the images from his mind. “All other considerations melted away and I knew I had to go where I can be at least useful.”

“No one who knows you would doubt that duty is uppermost in your mind,” said Beatrice. “They will all be proud of you.”

“Thank you for your kindness,” he said. He held out his hand, and she gave him hers to clasp. “I know you always speak your mind, Miss Nash, and therefore I value your kind words all the more. I hope I have not offended you with my descriptions?”

“I appreciate your frankness,” she said. She looked over to the tea table, where Agatha was laughing at some remark of Daniel's. She knew the pain Hugh's news would bring. “When will you tell your aunt?” she asked.

“No sooner than I have to,” he said.

Two letters arrived on
Beatrice's breakfast tray, one from Lady Marbely's solicitors and one from her father's publisher, Mr. Caraway. She set them aside on the small table while she ate in order to prolong the pleasing sense of anticipation that all her worries, both financial and aspirational, might be laid to rest. A week or so after Celeste's arrival, she had written to Aunt Marbely with a polite request that she be allowed to draw a slightly larger monthly allowance from her trust now that she was participating, in a modest way, in the war relief efforts of the town. With much chewing of her pen over the need to combine modesty with selflessness, she had described the recent taking in of her young refugee, and all the patriotic teas, committees, and events which they would be expected to attend, at some considerable increase in her personal expenses. She enlarged shamelessly upon the famous Mr. Tillingham's gratitude, embroidered upon Lady Emily's continuing patronage, and made sure to mention in passing that Agatha Kent's husband was intimately connected to the highest echelons of government. Describing a life of almost missionary simplicity, yet one in which an increase in dress allowance was vital to maintaining a suitable reputation, the finished document was so satisfyingly manipulative that she was forced to bargain with her pricking conscience, promising to make up for such amorality at a later date.

As she ate her porridge and sliced green apple, she tried to concentrate her excitement on the envelope from the publisher, which was too thin to contain a returned manuscript and therefore promised an answer to her literary dreams. But she was distracted by the fat one from the solicitors, which might contain a bank draft. Setting aside literature, she spent a pleasant moment choosing between purchasing a straw hat of Agatha Kent quality and buying a three-volume set of the works of Jane Austen, bound in dark blue morocco and hand-tooled gilt, which she coveted at the local bookshop. She was grinning in rueful self-awareness that the books would always win against personal adornment as she ripped open the heavy envelope.

The letter and enclosed agreement were thick with legal terms, and yet even as she struggled to decipher the words with accuracy, she understood enough to feel a flush of rage in her cheeks. It appeared that, upon Lady Marbely's suggestion, the executors felt it necessary to maintain a paternal watch over a woman of such tender years. There was language as to the limited feminine capacity for financial matters and to the loyalty to family honor—the upshot of which seemed to be that, in order to provide an increase in her allowance, they intended to engage a local solicitor to oversee her financial life and that she would be expected to deposit her salary with them as well as submit all accounts and seek advance approval for any expense above usual weekly necessities. To add the last note of humiliation, it seemed that her trust would be responsible for the expenses of maintaining such oversight. The enclosed agreement required her signature—her agreement to pay for her own jailers—and the letter closed with assurance that upon its signing and presentation, the local solicitor would make available an immediate draft of ten pounds.

The suggestion that she might be bought for ten pounds made her eyes water with humiliation. The small parlor, so recently scrubbed and furnished for her independence, blurred and became insubstantial. She blinked hard and, crumpling the letter in her fist, tried to focus on finding it amusing that a woman who had run her father's household accounts on several continents should need supervision of all purchases other than ribbons and tea cakes. She bade a silent farewell to the new books as the envelope contained no drafts and the letter indicated that she would have to wait to hear from whatever local solicitor was provisionally engaged.

Turning to the thin envelope, she now wished she had asked for an advance and wondered whether it would have occurred to Mr. Caraway to offer one of his own volition. Her father had always complained of the man's tightfisted ways, so she had little cause to expect it. As she opened the letter, she reminded herself that it was more important to the writer to have work than money.

The letter from her father's publisher was scarcely less disappointing than the missive from her Aunt Marbely's solicitor. Mr. Caraway was pleased to remember her, and sent warm thoughts and a cheerful anecdote about her father. But on the subject of her volume of her father's letters, he wrote to tell her that her father's archive having been left to the family trust, he had been contracted by the family to find a suitable editor and to publish an official volume.

…I hope you will be pleased to hear that, at the suggestion of your father's family, we are in negotiations with an illustrious writer of the greatest possible reputation to undertake the editing and the introduction to such a volume. You will agree that your father's reputation will be immeasurably enhanced by a work of this scholarly nature and that his legacy demands an editor of international renown. As you seem to have some correspondence not in your father's archive, and your own introduction contains one or two charming insights, we have taken the liberty of forwarding your manuscript as a valuable piece of research. Lady Marbely assures us that the project will meet with your approval and that you will be glad to send us, by return post, any original letters missing from the official archive. I remain yours faithfully…

Beatrice's fury buzzed in her temples, and she could feel the vibration of blood in her fingertips. Her work had been her only refuge and consolation during the dark year of mourning, and every fresh insight had been a moment of closeness to her father. The small volume would have been not just a solid first work from which to build a modest reputation as a writer but a direct connection from her father to her own future. Though she could see the undeniable benefit of the larger project to her father's public memory, the publisher's casual dismissal of her work as mere research, and his suggestion that she had removed letters from her father's archive, made her despair. She buried her face in her hands and allowed herself a single hollow groan, for her lost father, and for the impossibility of her own wants.

Recovering her composure by pouring a last cup of tea from the teapot, Beatrice tried to think about her situation in a more objective way. It was a trick her father had taught her as a child when she was sad or angry. To analyze the problem in a larger, more empirical way would, he always said, improve her mood and her intellect at the same time. Though she now thought it possibly a very unsuitable response to a crying child, she often found herself rearranging her problems as if planning to present them in a small treatise.

She had never been concerned with money, its acquisition or its excesses, and yet now that she had very little, and her dreams of remuneration through publication were to be dashed, she could appreciate at last how money had always been comfortably accessible. Her father had been proud of what he considered their modest housekeeping, and their ability to keep well within his annual private income. Yet they had been comfortable enough that when he had a yearning for partridge, or a desire to lay in a few cases of obscure but highly fragrant claret, she had simply arranged the matter and then paid the bill with a swift signature and a smile. She had considered it a virtue to sit down every month and see to the prompt payment of accounts, but she could see now that it had been in fact a matter of pride—and that pride was a sin for which she was now perhaps to be punished.

The solicitor offered ten pounds—she removed a small black accounts book from the nearest of Agatha Kent's charming Georgian bookcases and opened it to go over her finances one more time. In stark figures she could see that her small stock of accumulated money had mostly been spent in getting herself to Rye and in paying for her first two months of room and board. Her job, when it began, would pay Mrs. Turber with only a small amount left over—enough for sundry small daily needs, a modest donation to the Sunday church plate, and a few shillings put by for emergencies. She would no longer be able to afford books by subscription and she was not sure how she was to afford new clothing when the time came. If she was to write, she would also have to buy paper and ink, new pens, and stamps for the mailing of manuscripts—such things had seemed inconsequential in the past, but now she would be reduced to counting coins at the stationer's and at the Post Office, like the old widows with their fumbling hands and threadbare gloves.

Gloves were of immediate concern. She had offered two pairs to Celeste and now only retained three cotton summer pairs and two pairs of silk evening gloves. She had not remembered that one of her remaining cotton pairs had a sizable ink stain on the cuff. She was not willing to go about in the sort of cheap gloves that shop assistants wore on Sundays, and yet to buy another pair of quality would take a week's extra money. She smiled to herself as she put away the accounts book. She understood now why some people—housekeepers, governesses, Mrs. Turber—might appear conservative and limited in their outlook. She had secretly thought it some character flaw to be disdained but now saw with rueful clarity that it might be the acute need to avoid any exuberance resulting in the spoiling of gloves or the ruining of shoes. For the first time, as her tea grew cold in the cup and her porridge gelled in its bowl, she saw what it meant to be of limited income. It was a noble concept for the church sermon or the pages of an improving novel, but a chilling prospect on a sunny Sussex morning.

Celeste came down to breakfast in an atrocious pink silk dress donated by Mrs. Turber. It swamped her small frame and threw a blush into her cheek that looked like paint. Beatrice could not restrain a slight start of shock.

“I am wishing to 'ave a needle and some scissors,” said Celeste, fingering a large ruffle of linen cabbage roses at the waist. “If it is
d'accord
to make
quelques changements
?”

“I think you might need garden shears, not scissors,” said Beatrice. “Have some breakfast, and then Abigail and I will help you do some trimming.” She rang a small brass bell, and Abigail, who brought more hot water and some toast, gave an openmouthed stare at the dress and said that Mrs. Saunders should be summoned.

“Oh no, I must not agree,” said Celeste, a blush of her own adding to the glow from her bodice. “I must make my own repair and I am content.”

“Mrs. Saunders will be glad to help,” said Beatrice. “It makes us all happy to contribute.”

“I have already, how you say, accept too much pity?” said Celeste. She pressed her lips together and her fingers fumbled at the tiny gold crucifix around her neck. “This kind lady, she washed my lace and I cannot pay. I will not presume to demand her to make fashionable a dress.”

Beatrice perceived a desperate pride, and she felt ashamed that not ten minutes earlier she, Beatrice, had been poring over her accounts with all the pride of a miser. She had regretted a simple gift of gloves to a girl with nothing but the ruined clothes on her back. She had not thought what it must be to have no linen, no shoes, not so much as a bar of soap or a tin of tooth powder to one's name and to have to accept the sort of charity which girls of their background were used to giving out.

“I am sorry,” she said. “We will manage together and make some small improvements.”

“I would like to fix it this morning,” said Celeste. “I am expected next door this afternoon.”

“Best chop it in half, miss,” said Abigail. “Happen we can make a walking skirt and a pair of window curtains from the lower half.”

Beatrice abandoned another morning's writing, and Abigail her morning tasks, so that they might all three cut, gather, and sew the dress into something more fitting. Beatrice and Abigail labored at the long plain seams, while Celeste proved swift and dainty with the needle, stitching some of Beatrice's gray grosgrain ribbon into neat loops down the bodice and in a flat band around the hem. By midday the pink silk was tamed into a slender, quiet afternoon dress, and Mrs. Turber, who came screeching about dinner not being made, was so mollified to see how well her dress looked on Celeste that she only huffed about it being far too fine to wear for an ordinary afternoon helping refugees. Celeste merely pressed her hand and told her, in her most charming broken English, how kind she was, and Mrs. Turber was forced to retreat before the language barrier.