The Trespass (12 page)

‘Don’t, Angy,’ said Edward quietly. ‘We all understand.’

‘Stop!’ hissed Augusta in despair, and it seemed that she was going to burst into tears completely at this mortifying invasion of her privacy but somehow with a supreme effort she regained her composure. The card game continued all this time and the older people went on congratulating themselves on the success of the wedding.

Edward said suddenly, ‘It is not quite dark. Will you all come outside with me. I want to show you something.’ The three women, surprised, obediently got up from the table, picked up their shawls from the back of the chairs.

‘Are you going to bed already, my dears?’ said Lucretia.

‘No, Mamma. We are just going to get a breath of air,’ called Edward as he led the three women outside. Lucretia’s voice echoed after them, ‘
Such
a success, such a
success!
’

Edward led them, slowly so that Mary could keep pace, past the summerhouse and into the further fields. The chill in the air was notable now and the girls pulled their shawls tightly around them.

‘Autumn. It is really autumn,’ said Mary, gazing about her in wonder at the difference from London. All the wheat was harvested now; the neat sheaves leaned against each other, strange embracing patterns in the dusk, and a bright full moon shone down, lighted their way. They had to cross a stile; Edward helped Mary who stumbled against the step, the other girls lifted all their petticoats and climbed over and into another field.

‘Here we are then,’ said Edward. In one corner of the field a clearing had been made. A small, strange edifice stood before them. They all stared.

‘It’s a bit dark,’ said Edward, ‘but you can get the idea. What do you think?’

‘It looks like a room, with a roof on,’ said Augusta dubiously.

‘Bravo, Augy! It
is
a room with a roof on! Look, you can walk in,’ and he took them round to the other side where a door swung open.

‘But what
is
it?’ asked Harriet. Mary, who was still breathing heavily from her exertions over the stile and was leaning on her sister’s arm, said, ‘Have you built yourself a house, Edward?’

‘Yes! Look, look!’ Inside the house was a candle which he lit and they saw he’d made a small bed and a table, but at that moment a fieldmouse, disturbed, scurried under their feet and the girls screamed. Edward seemed exasperated at their silliness. ‘No, but
look!
’ He led them outside again: they held their petticoats and looked for more mice. Edward had acquired an old kettle, it stood on some iron bars with small pieces of wood underneath. Edward cleared his throat proudly. ‘I made everything myself.’

He made them come and sit inside the room. The three girls sat very uncomfortably together on the wooden bed, squashing against one another in their wedding gowns. Edward sat on the table beside the candle, shadows flickered across his face. With the best will in the world none of the three girls quite knew what to say. They couldn’t imagine what Edward meant by showing them this. The candlelight threw strange shapes on to the roof.

‘Are you leaving home, Edward?’ enquired Harriet finally.

‘Yes!’
cried Edward.

‘But Eddie, that is ridiculous, why
on earth
would you want to live here?’ Augusta looked around her disbelievingly. ‘You are so comfortable at home.’ She pulled her shawl more firmly about her, looked around again.

‘No, no, I won’t live here! I’ve just been practising. I’m going to Canada.’

Harriet’s head snapped round to regard him. ‘Why is everyone going to Canada?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘There’s no
work
for us,’ said Edward.

‘But – you have the farm,’ said Augusta and her voice sounded suddenly fearful.

‘John has the farm. You and Asobel need income from the farm. None of us has got a proper job of work, none of my friends. It’s all right for Richard and Walter,’ naming Harriet’s and Mary’s brothers, ‘Uncle Charles has got them positions with the Water Boards, because he is an influential man. But it’s London where everything happens, not here.’

‘Perhaps Father could get you a position also,’ said Mary.

‘I don’t want to work for the Water Boards. What ever would I do? I would require them to clean the Thames, for a start. I considered going to California where the gold has appeared but I fear it is a dangerous, reckless life and I am not, perhaps, a very reckless person. But I know about land, and working the land, a little anyway, and these colonies are promising good land to people like us, they want us there. That’s why I’m going to London tomorrow, to visit the Canada Company, and the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, see if they’ll have me. And so—’ and he gestured towards the walls and the roof of his little building, ‘I thought I would teach myself to build a house, in case I have to later. Some of the lads in the village do building work. They gave me advice. About how to join bits together. See?’ And he took up the candle and showed where the roof met one of the walls. ‘I came down here this morning after the rain stopped and it was almost completely dry in here.’ And in the candlelight they saw a big smile on his face as he studied his handiwork.

‘Well?’ he said, turning back to them at last.

‘Yes!’ said Harriet and Mary almost simultaneously.

‘But Edward. I will miss you so and I will never see you again.’ And Augusta burst into the tears that had lain behind her eyes all day. She sobbed and sobbed, apologising. Mary put her arm around her on the small cramped bed.

‘Don’t cry, Augusta. It was a lovely day. It will come for you too. And Canada isn’t so far away these days, lots of people are going there and making a new start.’

And Edward said: ‘You could come to Canada too, Augy.’

Augusta’s sobs hiccoughed at last to a surprised halt. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘There must be hundreds of men like me travelling to somewhere else to get away from here. They won’t be the boring chaps, the settled chaps, like Alice has acquired. They’ll be more like me.’

Augusta gave a half-laugh.

‘But it’s
true,
Augy. I was thinking about it in the church today. Lots of men like me. Full of energy and plans.’ He waved his arms about in enthusiasm, throwing more strange shadows on the walls. ‘And when we have established ourselves, bought our land, built our houses, we shall all want wives, shan’t we? Lots and lots of energetic and extremely handsome chaps like me,’ and all three girls laughed. Edward had so many good qualities but he was not, exactly, handsome.

‘Does Papa know? Will he give you money?’

‘To start me off? Of course. He wants to help me.’ And Harriet at once remembered the look at the dinner table that she’d seen pass between father and son. ‘He remembers the trouble he and Uncle Charles had about the farm before Uncle Charles got married.’ It was Uncle William who had told the girls the story when they came to stay three years ago: their father, Charles, was the younger son and there were some dreadful months – after the war, after Napoleon had been trounced at last by the Iron Duke, before he met his future wife and her fortune – when it seemed as if the dashing, still uniformed Charles Cooper might have to become a clergyman.

‘I need money to start off,’ Edward went on, ‘it would be too difficult otherwise.’ (And Harriet thought of John Bowker and Seamus and Rosie and the pig that represented their savings.) ‘Father knows I am going to London about all this tomorrow. I was just waiting until Alice was safely married. And who knows? I may make my fortune and all the family could join me.’

‘Harriet! Edward! Where are you?’ Cousin John’s voice called them from far across the fields.

‘Well. You have seen it now anyway,’ said Edward proudly. ‘We had better go back.’ The girls stood up from their cramped seat. Edward saw them safely into the field and then blew out the candle and shut the door of his little house behind him.

They all adjusted their eyes to the night; the moon shone brightly. Edward took Mary’s arm and helped her back over the stile.

‘Harriet! Edward!’ John’s voice sounded angry, and in the distance they saw the light of a lantern moving in the darkness.

Augusta giggled. ‘He has his eye on you, Harriet. He thinks you’re in the summerhouse with Edward!’

‘I am his cousin!’ said Harriet angrily. ‘Both of you.’ She sounded upset, her sister caught her tone.

‘Come,’ said Mary. ‘Let the four of us link arms, if you do not mind going slowly, and we will present a united front.’ And as the four young people strolled across the last, ploughed field before the house and the garden Mary said to Edward, ‘I think it is a wonderful idea. A whole new country,’ and Augusta said, ‘Did you mean it, Eddie, about me coming – but Mamma and Papa would never allow me to go.’

‘One step at a time,’ said Edward.

And Harriet remembered for the rest of her life her sister Mary, who could not dance, suddenly half-waltzing with her crippled foot as she held the arms of the others. She sang
one step at a time
and the others joined in. So that Cousin John’s jealous lantern heard them before he saw the shadows of all four of them come into view. They sang
one step at a time
to the tune of Johann Strauss’s ‘The Loreley Waltz’ that was all the rage, that summer of the cholera.

*   *   *

In their bedroom, Harriet again took Mary’s foot in her hand. It was ugly, but Harriet did not ever think it so: it was her sister’s foot, that was all. ‘Your foot is so swollen, Mary.’

‘Never mind, darling. It was worth it. Oh – it was a lovely day, everything. The family are right to be so pleased. And imagine, we walked to Edward’s little house in the moonlight, it was like going to Canada already! We can never walk like that in the night in London, it would not be safe, of course.’

Harriet held the twisted foot that had tried to waltz, rubbed it gently.

‘It is so strange to me, to see a family,’ she said slowly, almost dreamily, ‘where people talk to each other and like each other and do things together. Were we
ever
like that?’ And then with a great effort she said, ‘Were you like that when you were young, before I was born – like a happy family – you and Walter and Richard and Mother and – Father?’

Mary did not answer for a long time and in the darkness they heard the rooster crowing. The dogs barked briefly in reply and in the distance some sheep called at the full, bright moon.

At last Mary said, ‘A little, I think. We had lots of wonderful times with Mother, of course … Mother and all her sisters,’ and Mary gave a small sigh, ‘well, I have told you about that, so often. I suppose in a way I am not surprised Father would not see the sisters afterwards. They were too much like her. For so long I asked for them, I missed them so, but they never came. He would not allow it. But when Mother and Father were together it was – it was always pleasant, Mother made everything pleasant, but – but it was never like it is here at Rusholme.’ Mary chose her words carefully. ‘I think Father was always – a difficult man.’

Harriet seemed to look down at the foot in her hand but she did not see it. Very abruptly she said, ‘Why did she marry him?’

‘Harriet, how can we know those things? She never, never spoke of it. She spoke to me of many things even though I was so young, but never that. She never criticised him. Perhaps her parents arranged the match because he seemed so – energetic, he must have seemed to be a new and coming man, all that energy and ambition. Perhaps – perhaps she loved him.’

Harriet’s voice was suddenly so low Mary hardly heard her. ‘Do you suppose, ever, ever, we could go?’

‘Go?’

‘To Canada. Or one of the new colonies. Start a new life. Start all over again.’

Mary too spoke in a low voice, as if their father was somehow near, although they knew he could not be. ‘You know he would never agree to your leaving.’

Harriet was silent for a moment and then the words burst out of her. ‘But what is my life to
be?
I must get away from him.’

‘How can we? Without Father we cannot even get to Kent, let alone across the world.’ Mary pulled her shawl around her shoulders. ‘Without Father’s permission we cannot do anything. I did not write about it but – Mr Dawson, the bookseller, told me something extraordinary. A Ladies’ College has been opened.’

‘A Ladies’ College?’

‘Yes. And I decided that more than anything in the world I would like the chance to go there, and study, and solve some of those questions that you and I could never answer.’

Harriet gasped. ‘Learn in a real school with real teachers?’

Mary nodded.

‘Now, when you are already old?’

Mary laughed a little at her sister’s words. ‘I know. But Harriet, you were educated in an Academy for Young Ladies and you told me that the biggest lesson you learnt was to, at all times,
smile.
I do not care how old I am, if only I could be educated properly! Do you know what they teach in Harley Street? English Literature, Theology, Natural Philosophy, Maths, Ancient and Modern Languages.’ Harriet could not miss the longing, and the pain, in Mary’s voice.

‘Would Father allow you to go?’

‘I am thirty years old. I should be able to take some decisions for myself. But I cannot get any financial independence from Father. And he would never agree, of course, to my going. So no, I cannot go.’ And she repeated their fate: ‘Without Father’s permission we cannot do anything.’

In the silence they heard an owl hoot out of the darkness, and then the rooster crowed again.

Finally Mary, recovering, choosing her words carefully, said, ‘Harriet darling, all the social calls and the Ladies’ Academy, and Aunt Lydia’s connections, they are all because you will be, eventually at least – and surely Father would not prevent you – expected to marry…’

‘Why do you prescribe for me what you should loathe yourself!’ Harriet’s voice flashed across the bed.

‘Cannot have myself,’ her sister answered wryly.

‘I will not get married,’ said Harriet and her voice was low and cold. ‘Nobody can make me, not Father, not even you. And tell me, Mary, who would marry me, if they knew our life?’ She breathed in and out and tried to calm herself. And she began to half-sing, as if a nursery rhyme she had learnt long ago had come into her head.