London is the eye of the circle and the heart of the globe, and London would be the saving of me. I did not know then that Highgate House was a mere overnight journey’s away; neither did I know that Lowan Bridge School was even closer to its suburbs. What I did know was that if Aunt Patience looked at me for another second, I would scream.
“Perhaps I see too much of your mother staining you,” she husked. “But—”
“Aunt Patience,” I announced, “I want you to send me away to school with Mr. Munt.”
FIVE
Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the separation: that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace; as it was, I derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamour.
If the reader has ever prized solitude, you can imagine my revulsion when a vortex of attention formed in the wake of my desiring an education.
“Well, ye knows what’s best for yerself,” Agatha said doubtfully, laying out my supply of dresses, pinafores, and pantalettes. Her scrunched rabbit’s eyes had a wary cast to them, and a hurt one.
“Here there is no scope,” said I.
“Well, if that don’t beat everything,” Agatha muttered, rolling my hair ribbons and tucking them into a muslin bag. “Nature will out, though, sooner or later.”
“What do you mean, Nature will out?” I asked, thrilling with fear.
“Why, only that children can’t ’elp a-taking after their parents. And if innocent lasses pretend to need scope when meaner sorts are driving ’em away, ’arassing and pestering-like, then the world ain’t what it ought to be.”
I flung myself at Agatha, helpless to check the gush of feeling; my spindly form met her strong arms, and I held her tight. “No one is driving me off. I only . . . I can’t stand it any longer.”
Agatha pulled me away from her embrace, shifting her hands to my temples so that she could read me like one of her pudding receipts. I lapped up the attention, for when would anyone ever waste sentiment on the likes of me again?
“Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain’t there,” Agatha said softly. “Can ye tell me the difference afore ye leave your ’ome behind?”
“I’m not penned—I’m frightened.”
“Ye said that before, in front o’ the main house. Of what, lass?”
“Of myself.”
Agatha set about mending the worst of my stockings. She stole glances at my mother’s painting, however, the one like a sunset seen through tears. I easily divined her secret fear, but knew it to be rootless. Edwin Barbary was ugly in life, uglier still in death; but many lovely things died with him, and one was my desire to be exactly like my mother.
I could no longer afford to be like my mother; my heart must be carried not on my sleeve but deep in my breast, where the complete darkness might mask the fact it too was black as pitch.
• • •
The day before my departure, Edwin was placed beneath the grass and the buttercups before a very small assembly. Aunt Patience would have sobbed if she could, but only swayed, murmuring; she may have been addressing Edwin, or the droning minister, or the shovel in the gnarled hands of the gravedigger—who could say?
I stood in silence with my head bowed, wondering whom she would talk to at all without me left to hate.
This morose thought followed me home, where a cold meat supper awaited. Directly before sleep finally captured my twitching eyelids, I mused over whether Aunt Patience would rouse herself and march—froglike, determined, hateful, as she used to be—down to the gate and see me off.
She did not . . . only Agatha kissed my cheek as I was helped onto the rickety wooden step of the coach, with my trunk strapped above.
• • •
There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones