The Land of Summer Page 8

  ‘Please, let us continue with the same line of conversation, Miss Nesbitt. What exactly might it explain?’ Julius repeated.

  Emmaline felt chilled. As old Mary back at home would have said, ‘Someone’s walking over your grave, Miss Emmaline.’

  ‘It might, it seemed to me, explain your – your reticence towards me since I arrived in England, that is all,’ she said, bowing her head to stare down at her plate. ‘As well as your somewhat unusual behaviour. I imagined you might have suffered a very recent loss, prior to my arrival.’

  ‘I see.’ Julius pushed his plate to one side and rang the bell on the table to call the maids to remove the dishes. ‘Do you know, I was really rather enjoying my luncheon up until this moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Aubrey. I truly didn’t wish to upset you.’

  ‘Very well, since you obviously will not be satisfied until you have an answer,’ Julius continued, ‘you shall have one. Yes, as you surmised, Miss Nesbitt, there has been a loss, but in England we do not talk about our losses. We carry on. That is what we do.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Julius,’ Emmaline said. ‘I thought it might be so.’

  ‘These things happen, as you may have noticed, in life,’ Julius went on. ‘It is the way of the world and of the life we have been given in this world.’

  Wilkinson reappeared with two of the maids. As the maids cleared the table, the butler took the dishes off the sideboard and disappeared once more through the service door.

  ‘Where were we?’ Julius wondered, folding his table napkin carefully into a square before unfolding it again. ‘I simply have no idea.’

  ‘We were discussing the matter of your loss,’ Emmaline prompted him. ‘Was it – was it perhaps your father?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps it was my father.’ Julius folded his napkin back into a square once more, smoothing it down with one hand. ‘Yes, my father is indeed dead and gone.’

  ‘I see,’ Emmaline replied with a thoughtful frown. ‘And only recently.’

  ‘So it would seem – but what is recent when it comes to death, Miss Nesbitt?’

  ‘What is past is past is what you are saying?’ Emmaline stared at him, wondering suddenly at his lack of mourning bands. ‘To have lost someone so close to you, someone with whom you were in business, must indeed be a tragedy.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Julius sighed. ‘My father began life as an artist, before starting the business that I now run. Anything else you would like to know, Miss Nesbitt?’

  Emmaline at last felt brave enough to look down the table at her fiancé, who she found was looking steadily back at her, without expression.

  ‘Forgive me, Julius,’ she said slowly. ‘But you see I really know very little about you – about you or your family. Coming into such an interesting family, it is only natural to want to know more, surely?’

  ‘I have no family that could be of any possible interest to you,’ Julius interrupted quickly. ‘So it follows that there really is very little to know, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘You have no brothers or sisters?’

  Julius glanced down the table at her before returning to the folding of his napkin. ‘I have a sister who is married and now lives in Canada.’

  ‘And she is called …’

  ‘Does it matter? You’re not going to meet her. She never comes to England.’

  ‘I should still like to know her name.’

  ‘Her name is Eleanor, if it is of any interest.’

  ‘Does she have any children?’

  ‘Yes, she has a boy and a girl and they’re called William and Margaret. Is there anything else you wish to know?’

  ‘Yes, since you ask, I would so like to visit your business with you,’ Emmaline replied with utter sincerity. ‘I really would very much enjoy—’

  ‘No,’ Julius interrupted firmly.

  ‘No? No as to quite what, Mr Aubrey? No that I would not enjoy seeing your company at work? Or no—’

  ‘No you may not visit the works,’ Julius finished for her. ‘That is not possible. The works is a place of trade, only tradespeople go there. Is that understood?’

  ‘No.’ Emmaline clasped her hands tightly together, well out of sight below the line of the table as the maids continued to remove all the condiments and plates and other items. ‘I am afraid it is not understood at all. Why am I never to visit the business? It is something in which I really am interested.’

  ‘Because it is not your place, Emmaline, that is why. It is not – your place.’

  ‘I see.’ If it had not been for the presence of the maids Emmaline felt she would have given way to shaming tears. ‘My place, as I understand it, therefore, is here, I imagine that is what you are saying?’

  ‘You imagine quite correctly, I am happy to say. I think I am done here now. Tell Cook, thank you, but we need no more removes. I will forgo the rest of luncheon,’ he added as he rose. ‘I will, instead, go for a walk.’

  Emmaline did not rise from her place. ‘You wish to go alone?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Julius replied, leaving the room. ‘Quite alone,’ he announced, seemingly to no one in particular. ‘Quite, quite alone.’

  Going upstairs to dress for dinner at her lodgings before returning to Park House, Emmaline discovered that Agnes, the young girl who had been assigned to her as her personal maid, was already waiting for her in her room, but that nothing was laid out in readiness on the bed or in the bathroom, or indeed anywhere else. It was most puzzling.

  ‘Have you not done anything like this before, Agnes?’ Emmaline asked, as she looked round the room.

  ‘No, miss,’ the sad-eyed girl replied. ‘Or should that be madam, miss?’

  ‘Madam only once I am married, Agnes, and I am not married, and perhaps may never be,’ she said, attempting a joke.

  Agnes looked horrified. ‘But you’ve come all this way, Miss Nesbitt. You gotta marry now, or you’ll have an awful long journey back.’

  ‘Yes, I will, won’t I?’ Emmaline agreed. ‘Now, are you telling me that you have no idea how to help a lady dress or undress?’

  ‘No, miss, I have no idea at all,’ Agnes answered with utter truth. ‘But I am willing to learn, and I learns quick, you’ll find, ’cos I want to learn, and that’s half the battle, i’n’t it, madam, if you want to learn quick?’

  But Emmaline was hardly listening; wondering instead at the strange ways of the English, what with maids who weren’t maids, and husbands-to-be who disappeared for hours if not days at a time.

  ‘Gracious, does no one ever train maids in the way of doing their work in England, Agnes? You are the second girl assigned to me since my arrival who has had no previous experience in being a personal maid. It is so hard on you all, truly it is. Ah well, never mind that now. I will train you, and we will then work together in happy unison, or else I shall have to return you double quick to the works, shan’t I?’

  Emmaline smiled encouragingly at Agnes, hoping to cheer her up, and guessing that she could only be in her early teens, so childlike were her features, and so undeveloped her body. To her horror, she saw almost at once that tears were threatening to form in Agnes’s large eyes.

  ‘I’m a good girl at the works, miss, or is it madam, or should it be miss? Truth is I’ve never been employed outside the works, truly I haven’t, and I am ignorant, so I am, I admit it. I think it should be madam, my ma said it should be, she was sure of it, but you said … Oh dear, never tell no one I don’t even know how to address you, madam. I’m a London girl only recently come to Somerset and they will laugh at me if they hear I was that ignorant.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Agnes, please. It doesn’t matter, truly it doesn’t, particularly since we are alone, but since you ask, and since Mr Aubrey and I are not yet married, please call me Miss Emmaline. That is how I was always addressed by our maids at home. So, now, let us start again. I gather you have never dressed a lady before?’

  ‘No, Miss Emmaline,’ Agnes replied, looking dejectedly at the floor. �
��Until I came here I was cutting fabrics at the works.’

  ‘I see.’ Emmaline nodded gravely, trying not to laugh at the idea that you could take a young girl who had been cutting fabrics one day and assign her to be a personal maid the next. Only a man, and a bachelor at that, could ever think that such a thing was possible. ‘And how long have you been in service at Park House?’

  ‘Just over a week, miss. Same as everyone else.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The force of what Emmaline had just said surprised even her.

  ‘You have only been there a week, and the rest of the servants too?’

  ‘Yes. I’m just the same as everyone else, miss. I ain’t no different, truly I ain’t.’ Agnes looked as though she was once more about to burst into tears at any moment.

  ‘The entire staff, you mean?’ Emmaline stared at the girl in disbelief. ‘Are you saying that none of the servants at Park House – that everyone has only been working there for a week?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Emmaline. The last staff, they were all – well, they all left just before we come, miss. We’re all new, though course most of them’s been in service before, unlike what I have been. I mean Cook, and Mrs Graham, and of course Mr Wilkinson and George and Alan, like. But Dolly and Helen and me, we was in the factory cutting fabrics a week ago. But all the rest of them they’ve come from all over England, quite new to here, and quite new to the house and the master too.’

  ‘So you have no idea of what is expected of you?’

  Agnes shrugged her shoulders, and then shook her head.

  ‘Mrs Graham said she’d soon lick us into shape. Said there was nothing to it really. Said she was trained herself, like, in two days, and now look at her, she said. Head of the household with charge of the keys, and all.’

  ‘Why?’ Emmaline wondered as she turned her back on Agnes preparatory to being undressed.

  ‘Beg your pardon, miss, but why what exactly?’

  ‘I was just wondering why the entire staff had to be changed all at once, Agnes. It just seems a little odd, that’s all. More than a little odd, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t know, miss. No one said anything to me and Helen and Dolly. We were just told to report up to Park House to start work as domestics beginning of last week. And Mother she was pleased because she said it was a leg-up for me, and less dangerous than the fabric cutting ’cos a lot of fabric cutters end up blind, what with bits in the eyes an’ all, worse than bookkeepers and clerks, she said, because all of them go blind.’

  ‘Very well, Agnes.’ Emmaline held up one hand, and after a moment of thought she continued, ‘We had best start from the beginning, then. First you must learn how to take a lady’s dress off, how to do up and undo stays properly, how to fix stockings and garters, and how to hold out the bodice of a day dress and fix the skirt. Most of all, how to be of assistance when helping me on with an evening gown. Over the head – always over the head, and preferably on hooks so we do not, I repeat do not, get any dirty finger or hand marks on fine materials. We are going to have to spend a great deal of time together, and I mean a great deal, so first we have to get it right, and then we have to get along. That is all-important. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Emmaline,’ Agnes whispered, looking as though she were just about to evaporate.

  ‘Oh, don’t look quite so abject, child!’ Emmaline laughed. ‘I’m not going to eat you, only teach you!’

  And as they stood there regarding each other, Agnes fearfully, Emmaline affectionately, Emmaline realised with surprise that this was the first time she had really smiled, let alone laughed, since she had set foot aboard the RMS Etruria. It was a shocking fact, but a true one.

  Chapter Five

  JULIUS AND EMMALINE were finally married six weeks later at a private service in St Mark’s Church, Bamford, conducted by the Reverend Archibald Welton. Henry Ralph acted as Julius’s best man, while in the glaring absence of any male relation, Emmaline was given away by Wilkinson, Julius’s butler, with Agnes in attendance. Her marriage was so unlike anything Emmaline had ever dreamed or imagined for her wedding day that the chief memory she took away from it was one of sheer originality, as she doubted that many young women of her upbringing and background were married with so little ceremony, let alone so few displays of affection, be it familial or marital. Whenever Emmaline had stolen a look at Julius from beneath her veil during the ceremony she had seen that his eyes were closed, and his mouth – normally one of his most attractive attributes – was pursed like that of a small boy. He stared ahead of him, past the rector, at the altar, as if he could see someone there, someone that no one but himself could see. Even as he took up the ring, and his gaze shifted from that far distance to Emmaline’s small elegant hand, even as he slipped the ring on her finger, and the words of the blessing rang out round the church, he did not look at Emmaline, they did not meet each other’s eyes. He could have been a ghost, she could have been a ghost, so little did they seem to register each other’s presence at the foot of the altar, so much did they appear as two people going through a ceremony of which they were barely aware.

  There were no more than half a dozen witnesses in the congregation, the only faces familiar to Emmaline being those of their housekeeper and Mrs Shannon, the kindly landlady from her lodging house. No arrangements for the wedding had been discussed by Julius with his bride-to-be, his only announcement being the date, upon which it seemed he had decided without consultation. As soon as Emmaline touched on the matter of guests, hoping for at least a small celebration afterwards, Julius had made his excuses and left the room. Emmaline was not even invited to choose her own wedding gown. Instead, once the date had been fixed, Agnes had simply arrived in Emmaline’s lodgings with a large cardboard box containing a bridal dress which was pretty enough, but since the box bore no sign of a shop name, both Emmaline and Agnes suspected was not new.

  ‘Do you think as I do, Agnes, that this gown has belonged to someone else?’

  Agnes had turned away, looking embarrassed. ‘I dunno, Miss Emmaline. I was just told by Mrs Graham to come round to your lodgings and bring this with me, that’s all I know.’

  ‘I think I will have to speak to Mr Aubrey in person about this,’ Emmaline told her. ‘I am not going to wear a dress of his choosing, and he must know that. He will know that.’

  Emmaline confronted Julius that evening when he called round to her lodgings, determined that if she were asked to wear a second-hand dress there would not only be no wearing of the dress, there would be no wedding.

  Julius shook his head, turning away. ‘I just thought – I just thought …’

  ‘No, Julius, this is not something with which you should concern yourself, just as you told me that I should not concern myself with your work. You may not know it, but I do know it. It is the custom for a bride …’ She took a deep breath and began again. ‘It is the custom not only for the bride to choose her own wedding gown, but also for the bridegroom not to see it until their wedding day.’

  ‘How quaint,’ Julius returned. ‘Almost medieval, I would say.’

  ‘You must be aware of such traditions, even you,’ Emmaline had replied, doing her best to control her temper. ‘And it is not medieval, as you call it. It is the way with weddings and wedding days, that most special of days for a young woman, the only day when she can guarantee that all eyes will be on her.’

  ‘Perhaps so, Miss Nesbitt—’

  ‘And please do not start your mock formality again, Julius. I really would rather not get married not only in a dress of someone else’s choosing, but in a dress in which someone else has perhaps already been married.’

  ‘Do you not like the dress, I wonder?’

  ‘Now who is sounding quaint, I wonder? It is neither here nor there whether or not I like the dress. I wish to get married in a dress that I have chosen myself.’

  ‘And that I have not seen?’ Julius had looked at her, frowning. ‘I must apologise. I see there are things w
hich are definitely not the subject for men.’

  ‘I shall see what can be done at such short notice. Mrs Shannon has already indicated that she will help me. Might we now discuss the day itself – and perhaps whom we may invite?’

  ‘There is nothing to discuss,’ Julius had replied, turning hurriedly to the door. ‘As far as I am concerned, the ceremony is a pure necessity to legalise our union. It is not a reason for an inordinate amount of money to be frittered away on a lot of people one hardly knows, if at all, most of whom one will never see again.’

  ‘It will not be your money being frittered away, as you so cruelly call it, Julius,’ Emmaline had argued, following Julius out into the hallway. ‘If you recall, it is the obligation of the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding, so perhaps you, or indeed we, ought to take that into some account.’

  ‘I have done so, Miss Nesbitt,’ Julius told her in a low voice, collecting his hat and coat. ‘Your father and I have corresponded on this matter, and since he will not be travelling over for your wedding he is only too happy to leave all the arrangements to me, and even happier to learn that it is to cost him nothing. Now, if you will perhaps excuse me?’

  ‘My father gave me money before I left America, and with some of it I shall at least purchase my own dress.’

  The following day, with Mrs Shannon and Agnes accompanying her, Emmaline found a beautiful cream dress and a Brussels lace veil which entirely filled the ideal of what a wedding dress should be, and in the opinion of her companions Emmaline also filled the ideal of what a bride should look like on her wedding day, slim, beautiful, and for that moment at least, standing in the shop in front of the dressing mirror with all eyes on her, happy.

  After the wedding service had been concluded, their carriage took the bride and groom back to Park House where they were received by Wilkinson and Mrs Graham, who had hurried back from the church ahead of the others. The rest of the staff lined up in the hallway to applaud the couple as they entered the house, earning themselves a grateful smile from Emmaline, although her bridegroom looked as if he found it faintly absurd to be greeted by his own servants.