It is a matter of some consternation when a lady’s fiancé is drowned. If I am adopting an air of faint indifference to the destruction of an entire world in saying so, please do not believe that I cannot appreciate its import. It must merely be remarked that one’s own world is thrown into disarray. How neat and rail straight was that path laid out in front of us, whether by choice or arrangement, between here and the far horizon. But with an impulse over which we have no control, we are pushed off that road, led back into that very jungle that we thought, or at least hoped, we had left forever. That jungle is a garden of myriad forking paths, but I fear those tigers that I have heard lurk unseen down the dead-ended branches.
The tiger of circumstance that consumed my own fiancé laired in Weymouth Bay. We had chosen an ill-omened day to promenade around the broad sweep of the beach, for bruise-yellow clouds had rolled in from the ocean and threatened to break upon our heads at any moment. But they rolled onwards as we walked, until at last the clear yellow sun shone down upon us directly. It was a moment of elemental purification, near religious in its assurance of the basic benevolence of nature.
I was contented to enjoy this moment by resting for a time upon the sand, but my fiancé, ever eager to indulge his own athletic impulses, elected to embrace it by bathing in the sea. Naturally, I cannot attribute this entirely to the fortunate change in weather – a pressing vanity on his part may well have inculcated a desire to remove his breeches in front of me. We had at least reached a sufficiently secluded part of the bay that the risk of observation was slim. Nevertheless I maintained an aspect of scandalised surprise, lest some passer-by should appear and misjudge my character. I do not believe he noticed.
His exercise was playful, bringing up stony fragments of fossilised shells that had been hacked off the surrounding cliffs by storms and smashed upon the seabed. After each submersion he would return to me on the shore, adding to the pile by my side. With the benefit of consideration tempered by time, I think it likely that his training as an army captain had bred in him a certain recklessness towards the concept of his own mortality, but in truth, the sea seemed too calm to be a threat. Even as his distance from the shore increased, I held no suspicion that he might be in any danger. But after one particularly distant dive, he failed to return to me. There was no external sign of struggle; he merely failed to resurface. After two minutes, I was concerned. After two hours, I was convinced. I turned around and walked back in the gathering dusklight, alone with the wind.
In the weeks before, the thought of his death had occurred to me during the darker hours of the night. I had imagined that the event would grow like a vast and sac-like organ in a hidden recess of my body, filling with blood and unshed tears before bursting with grotesque force some several years hence. And yet when the time actually came, I found it filled with nothing more than paper, references to the rituals and literature of grief. To my surprise, I found that I had not loved him as much as I thought I should. My sentiments were academic where they should have been organic.
Still, the realization at least assured me that I knew how I should respond so as to appear appropriately stricken by the death. At once I returned home to Herrington, to the home that I had thought would be no longer mine, the Grange.
My return was at that busy time of year when the orchards and fields of the estate grow sweet with produce, and the tenant farmers spend their days gathering in the fruits of their labours, and argue at some length with their fellows which labours were theirs to gather. The harvest was not new to me, having become an essential marker in the passage of the year, and yet in my recently changed circumstances I found myself peculiarly sensitized towards such disruption. One morning following my return I awoke to shouting. Not directed at me, you understand, but the accusatory tone resonated with my half-sleeping state in such a way that I could not help but feel as though it were. That feeling cut through my dozing comfort, and left me so shaken that a return to sleep seemed an impossibility. Instead, I arose and descended to the breakfast room.
There she sat, rigid-backed and stolid, my mother, proud and imperious hive-queen of our home. We had exchanged some few words since my return, but nothing more than the surface pleasantries. It was not that there was nothing to say, but rather that I feared the directions any deeper conversation might turn toward.
‘Good morning, mother,’ I said, sitting down beside her so as to look out over the Eastern terrace rather than herself.
‘Good morning, Catherine,’ she replied. She gave me a sideways look as I began to arrange matters for my breakfast. ‘And how are you this morning?’
‘Very well, thank you,’ I replied, not altogether untruthfully. ‘A little tired still, perhaps. Our tenants are not the most considerate workers.’
‘Very good. I am glad to hear it.’ She paused for a moment, before adding, ‘I know that we have not spoken much since your return.’
A troubling little phrase. It boded poorly for the coming conversation. ‘Indeed not, mother,’ I said.
‘I hope that you know that I have always wanted the very best for you. Do you think of me as someone whom you can confide in?’
Though I wished to believe that my mother was truly attempting to say something of importance to me, I could not help but feel that it was part of some broader stratagem. ‘In truth,’ I replied cautiously after a while. ‘I have not always believed that you would understand the positions I might take. It seems undeniable that we have had our differences.’
‘But you agree, I trust, that I have your best interests at heart.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘And you also agree, I am sure, that I can best serve those interests (which, I would emphasize, are so deeply important to me) if I understand the intentions of others towards you.’
‘I suppose so, mother.’
‘Excellent.’ She removed an envelope from her lap and placed it upon the table. ‘This arrived for you earlier today. Under the present circumstances, I think it appropriate that I understand the reasons for the arrival of mysterious messages addressed to you. I wish to know the contents.’
I took the envelope from her, but hesitated to open it. ‘This may very well be private, mother. Might I not summarise it for you once I have read it for myself?’
‘Do you recognize the post mark? The handwriting? Do you believe that the author is anyone you know?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Then how could it possibly be private?’ She poured herself a cup of tea with an affected elegance, pressing on the lid of the teapot with her index finger and splaying the rest skywards. ’I must insist that I know its contents before you leave this room.’
The moral satisfaction of my mother is bound by iron rules, but rules that she has always found quite easy to circumvent. Direct interception of someone else’s information would have been unthinkable, but the mere domination of their will was entirely acceptable; matters had been arranged such that she would know everything about the letter as surely as if she simply opened it upon its arrival and read it for herself, and all without the inconvenience of a troubled mind. I was reminded as to why I had avoided substantial conversations with her since my return. As commanded, I removed the letter and began to read aloud.
‘”To my dear Miss Bottersley,
It is with the greatest sorrow that I have heard of your beloved captain’s death. When I heard the news, my heart grew cold and heavy with grim grief, as though my very veins had been filled with chilled brine. By all accounts, the captain was a fine man, kind in action and noble in aspect. His passing from this world has made it a far darker place.”’
‘Yes, yes, very good,’ interrupted my mother. ‘Would you be so kind as to tell me who is writing? I wish to decide if I should invest the time to listen to the rest of these vacuous sentiments.’
I turned to the rearmost page. ‘Lord Sandford,’ I read. The letter was signed with a streak of ink. If it really was Lord Sandford who had written, I could only assume that it had been dictated to the discreet ears of some secretary, but it spoke well of his estimation of myself that the author had taken the time to apply his own personal touch as well.
‘Lord Sandford!’ my mother said with delighted surprise. ‘I can scarcely credit it! Did he know the captain?’
‘I think it unlikely, mother. They hardly moved in the same circles.’
‘Well, perhaps the mystery shall be resolved in the rest of his writings. Do carry on, dear daughter! My ears ache with anticipation.’
I continued. ‘”Though I do not know if they will be of any comfort to you, I wish to share my own reflections on the subject: A man’s soul is like a darting silver fish. It flits about the glowing corals of the shallows of his life at perfect ease. True, there is the abyss further out to sea, but-“‘
(‘An amateur metaphysician?’ remarked my mother. ‘His lordship is full of surprises! But do carry on, dear daughter. My fingers itch with curiosity.’)
‘”True, there is the abyss further out to sea, but the abyss is far enough away that we think that it can be safely forgotten, safely left to the interests of other souls, braver or more unwise than ourselves.
‘”One day, some chance current sweeps us up and brings us to the brink. We teeter on the edge. Our minds are filled with its intoxicating blackness, its mystery. If we sank into it, we feel we should never to return to those sun-lit coral seas, and yet our curiosity impels us to enter. What secrets are held beyond the darkening veil, beyond which we cannot see? But most do not voluntarily discover them. We do all we can to swim back from that edge. Our curiosity is not so great as to risk losing the Sun.
‘”Someday we all must go beyond that precipice. Some force themselves down, some strain to climb back out, but all must sink in the end. For those who are left behind, the temptation is to gather there in the dark and contemplate the blackness for far too long. I implore you – if you are there, draw back! The time allotted to us in the shallows is too brief to waste it on meditations of the melancholic depths. If that leaves your thoughts shallow, so be it. Better shallow light than deep darkness.
‘”It is my intention to come to Herrington at the turn of October. If by then you have managed to take my advice and have swum out from the benthic pressures of this grief, it would be my honour to offer my condolences in person. I shall be staying at the home of Lady Grantham, should you wish to contact me.
‘”Yours in the most sympathetic terms,
‘”Lord Sandford”’
I replaced it onto the table. ‘I think he writes very well,’ I said, ’though it is perhaps a little overwrought. And given the circumstances of his writing, his choice of metaphor seems perhaps a shade devoid of tact.’
‘While I appreciate that you tend towards a more unconsidered approach in the writing of letters, I nevertheless think it inadvisable to criticise a person for writing with talent.’ My mother arched an eyebrow. ‘Besides, he makes his point quite clearly. At least he is saddened by the captain’s death.’
‘Mother,’ I replied, selecting a hard-boiled egg from their bone-china bowl. ‘I resent the implication of your low estimate of my sensitivity. I am deeply saddened. I merely see no reason to force the full feeling of my grief upon everyone I happen to speak to.’ In the light of my unfeeling circumstances, I can hardly claim that this statement was true. However, it was an explanation that seemed to be included in my catalogue of grief, and it had the added advantage of allowing myself to take on a certain air of selflessness. It was therefore the best kind of untruth, one that would go unchallenged.
I had opened the top of my egg, and scooped a little of its greyish-yellow contents into my mouth. ‘Grief can be a spreading sort of sickness, you know,’ I said between chews. ‘I should not wish to bring misery to you or Stephen or anybody else for that matter, simply to fulfil the expectation that I do so.’
My mother looked sceptically at me, but let the matter stand. She herself had seemed curiously unconcerned by the loss of her future son-in-law. Either she had independently arrived at the same philosophy and accepted it as the decorous response to her own grief, or else she felt as little I did and desperately sought to avoid drawing attention to the fact. In any case, if she took any exception to my explanation she paused too long to successfully express it, for at this point my brother entered the room.
‘It seems a remarkably early hour for you to grace us with your presence, dear brother,’ I said as he crossed the threshold.
‘Under the circumstances,’ he replied, ‘I thought that I should try to be of some comfort to my poor, heartbroken sister. Besides, I could scarcely sleep with our esteemed and, some might say, tediously early-rising tenants enjoying such stimulating discourse just outside my window.’ He picked up an apple and lounged in his now customary seat at the head of the table. ‘Who’s been writing?’ he asked, gesturing towards the letter.
My mother answered for me. ‘Lord Sandford has been kind enough to enquire after Catherine’s health. We are fortunate to receive the attentions of a gentleman of such generous manners in these trying times.’
Turning to me, my brother asked of the letter’s purpose. ‘The old monster’s hoping to sink his teeth into you, is he?’ He bit into the apple for the purposes of illustration, the juice running obscenely down his chin.
‘Stephen!’ cried my mother. ‘You are not helping.’
‘I don’t think you need worry yourself, brother. Libertice would not be so inelegant as to pursue a more cordial relationship between the two of us so soon after the captain’s death.’
‘Still, Catherine,’ said my mother thoughtfully. ‘We must not be too hasty in rejecting the possibility before it has even arisen. When I dined with her Wednesday last, Lady Grantham speculated that Hardiwick Hall was worth some ten thousand a year! And to think that I thought the captain should make a good husband. You may very well find that our present misfortune can yet be turned to your own advantage.’
‘Yes mother,’ I sighed, ‘I am perfectly aware of the material attractions of Lord Sandford. But you must concede that there are certain aspects of his character that make the prospect of such a match undesirable, to say the least.’
‘I should not need to tell you that you can hardly afford to be picky, Catherine. Your brother will come of age within the year and, I imagine, will marry soon after. Unless she is so filled with religious ecstasy as to value charity over comfort, I do not think that the new Mrs Bottersley will wish to have her shrivelled old spinster of a sister-in-law stalking the grounds of her new home like a wasting spectre.’
My brother leaned in my direction. ‘I shouldn’t worry yourself about that, sister. You know my plans. I shall join the navy, be given command of an exploratory vessel, sail to the antipodes and be eaten by savages on an island lost to the sight of both God and man. At which point, assuming the admiralty does not claim it as a fitting memorial to my own heroism, you shall be perfectly free to take over sole management of The Grange. I shall make out my will entirely in your favour.’
‘Oh Stephen, don’t joke about such things,’ I said. He slumped back into his chair with a grin.
‘I do wish you would not indulge yourself in these absurd fantasies,’ said my mother to my brother. ‘They may have been amusing when you were still enough of a child to act them out on the pond, but they are dreadfully unbecoming in a young man about to come into his inheritance.’
‘Perhaps you would prefer me to develop a sense of gravitas, like father? “It is not the path of the mature man to experience the world,” he would have said, “but rather to stay at home, develop his viewpoint through study and read about the adventures of the unwise in the periodicals”.’ My brother started to butter a piece of bread. ‘How overjoyed he must have been when he suddenly found his home in a grave! Now he can think to a depth of six feet and not act at all. He must be mature as a ripe lump of stilton.’
‘Be quiet, Stephen! You know not what you say.’
‘I know perfectly well what I say. I say father was a bore.’
If my brother could have done more to insult the dead than he had already, he had no opportunity to show it. An interruption by the maid, a Miss Eleanor Smith, permitted him the final word. My mother, accustomed (at least in her imagination) to verbally beating all heterodoxy from the both of us could now only silently fume. Those responses that she thought up in this post-confrontational frustration were, I suspect, far more glittering than any she could have presented in the heat of the moment, but they were still-born. The moment of their purpose had passed – now they could only echo uselessly through the empty chambers of her mind.
‘Good morning, ma’am, young sir, miss’ said Miss Smith to each of us in turn, poking her head through the doorway and bobbing it in each of our directions. ‘Are you all finished breaking your fasts?’
‘Yes, thank you Nell,’ said my mother tersely.
It is a curious fact that those internal words gestated following an argument unwon do little to relieve the agitation caused by the loss. They do not serve to assure us that our position was the best after all, that we should have won if we had only had sufficient opportunity. Instead, they serve to wind up our springs of irritation; having gone unsaid, the energy of their creating passion must inevitably be dissipated internally. I could only interpret my mother’s clipped response in this light, and fearing the conflict she might well inflict upon the breakfast table to relive her strains, I hurriedly diverted the flow of the conversation.
‘Nell,’ I said. ‘There is a matter of some interest under discussion that you may be able to help us with. It is not, perhaps, your place to have had intimate contact with many of the landed families of this nation. Still, I think it possible that you could have an opinion of a certain Lord Sandford, of Hardiwick Hall. He has just written to me, and has invited me to call on him when he visits Herrington for a few days. I wonder if I should make his acquaintance.’
‘Ooh, I should not wish to speak poorly of my betters, miss,’ she replied. (‘At least someone in this household is appropriately respectful of their superiors,’ muttered my mother, though not so boldly that my brother felt obliged to reply). ‘He is as fine a gentleman as any, I’m sure.’
‘Now Nell,’ I said. ‘You can hardly say a thing like that and hope to remain silent on the subject. If you have an opinion that is less than positive, please give it freely. I am certain that nobody around this table will think the worse of you for it.’ My mother raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Brooding still, I took it. At least it was in silence.
‘Well, miss,’ said the maid slowly. ‘I ‘ave ‘eard talk of queer goings on at ‘is lordship’s estate. It’s come down through the family grapevine a bit, but me second cousin ‘ad a job as a cook oop at ‘ardiwick and told ‘er Mam of some right weird dealings. She says that all the staff are stopped from going into the sea by the master of the ‘ouse, even in the ‘ottest Summer ‘eat. And when one of the pastry cooks did so, a navy man in ‘is youth, mind, ‘e never came back. All they found was ‘is shoe, washed up a few miles oopshore.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as she leaned over the table to talk to me directly. ‘They say ‘is lordship was abroad that day, and refused ‘is dinner when ‘e returned.’
‘I shall not stand to hear any more of this ridiculous implied slander against his lordship!’ thundered my mother. ‘If the servile classes have become foolish enough to reject good advice and weak enough to drown, they should not seek to excuse their failings by impugning the character of their betters! Tell your cousin that she should listen to the warnings of someone who knows better, rather than trust her own delusions. No doubt the currents around Hardiwick are stronger than this potwash accounted for.’ She shook her head and sat back in her chair with her arms folded. ‘Navy man indeed.’
Despite this rebuttal, it seemed as though the conversation had moved against Lord Sandford to a greater extent than it had done up to this point. I added my own contribution, a recollection that had been slowly dawning. ‘And yet even if we are to regard the received opinion of our second Miss Smith as simple delusion or mere hearsay, it must yet be conceded that you yourself have been dismissive of the prospects of Lord Sandford’s kind. Do I not recall you dismissing the chances of the bishop of Carlisle gaining his throne, on simple account of his being a Whalesman?’
‘Lord Sandford does not appreciate the term whale,’ said my mother sniffily. ‘When dining at Hardiwick hall last, lady Grantham and the rest of her party received a stern lecture on the subject of his lordship’s genealogy.’ She issued a small chuckle. ‘It is perhaps a matter of wishful thinking on his part to associate himself with the now tragically decapitated French elite, but, nevertheless, he has some reason in doing so. He is seeking to bring the appellation “dolphin” back into use, and I would recommend you use the same when speaking of him. I certainly consider myself to have been thoroughly re-educated on that front.’
‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ said Nell, ‘but a butcher could call himself the earl of Buckingham and still come home every day covered in blood. So I’ll go on calling him a whale if it’s all the same to you, ma’am.’
‘Miss Smith!’ exclaimed my mother. ‘In this household we take care of the titles we use for our betters! He shall be known as a killer dolphin, or he shall not be known at all.’
‘As you say ma’am.’
‘At least he considers the title “killer” acceptable,’ I remarked to my brother.
‘Well of course it is,’ my mother inserted heatedly. ‘Nor should he be ashamed of it. Your great-grandfather was one of the finest killers of Scots this country has ever seen, and he received his Earldom as thanks from an appropriately grateful nation. But Lord Sandford is, empirically, a dolphin, and I will not stand to hear his name so purposefully maligned within my own home.’
‘It shall be my home soon enough, mother,’ said Stephen, ‘and when it is, you may call the king himself an orang-utan for all I care.’ He rose and wiped his mouth with a serviette. ‘Thank you both for an enjoyable breakfast. But as I suspect that such continued enjoyment could soon quite unaccountably provide me with the urge to gouge out my own eyes, I think I shall go and see if I can scrounge something from the pear pickers.’ And he walked out of the room.
Miss Smith continued clearing the plates from the table as my mother pointedly refused to make eye contact with her. Eventually she too left without another word, the tray of plates and uneaten breakfast foods balanced on her hip. I made to resume the conversation with my mother, when she burst into a sudden flood of unexpected tears.
What to do? I had never seen my mother cry before. There did not appear to be any action which I could undertake which could avoid frank mortification on her behalf, so I chose to stare blankly at the empty candelabra on the table until the soft wet noises beside me had at last returned to speech.
‘Oh, Catherine,’ she said, snuffling still. ‘I wish you would be willing to see matters from my perspective. It is not only you who is affected by your choices. Every year my torture is compounded. How long must I endure? Shall you be twenty-seven years of age? Twenty-nine? Thirty? Shall I be the only lady in Warwickshire with an unwed daughter? Shall you someday be standing at my funeral, alone and childless, the last bare branch of my grandfather’s root?’
‘Mother,’ I said woodenly, still staring at the candelabra. ‘It is not through a desire to hurt you that I do not wish to meet Libertice. I simply feel that he is not someone whom I wish to have any intimate knowledge of.’
‘And yet, I wondered if you might not be willing to at least call on him, if only in the spirit of friendship. I am sure that is entirely the spirit in which the invitation was extended, in any case.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘For my sake?’ she asked.
There was a long pause. ‘Very well,’ I said at last.
‘Good, good.’ My mother blew her nose, but she had a small smile on her face again, at least. ‘I thought you might also wear that marvellous dress you got last year, the one with the splendid hound’s-tooth pattern in silver brocade.’
‘I would really rather not, mother. I do not like that dress. It makes me look like a sardine.’
Immediately my mother began to wail again. ‘Yes, yes mother, I shall do as you ask.’
‘Oh, how very good of you, Catherine.’ She blew her nose. ‘You know that the audience of a dress is not the wearer but the beholder, and I think lord Sandford shall be most pleased with your choice of garment. They do say that the route to a man’s heart is through his stomach, after all,’ she added enigmatically.
That was two weeks ago. Tomorrow, all being well, I shall present myself at Deepdene, home of lady Grantham, and listen to the whirrs and clicks of Sandford’s speech. Perhaps I shall gain an understanding of his intentions in his writing to me. In truth, despite my initial reticence to countenance any closer association with him, I have found myself becoming more amenable to the clear schemes of my mother. For if he shall return me to the confines of the narrowing path whose embrace I so dearly miss, he may have me, flesh and all.