Might she lay out my clothes?

  Yes, of course.

  She worked very quietly, but it wasn’t a petulant silence as Biddy’s sometimes was at home. It was as if she were trying to shade into my surroundings, and often I did forget she was there, and was startled when she took her leave of me, as if one of the pieces of furniture had mysteriously come to life.

  Once she’d gone I sat for a while by the window.

  There was dew on the grass, and fox trails. Swifts swooped low, criss-crossing. The trees gathered serenity into themselves.

  At home I would already have been hearing the first bustle out in the yard. There I could never be quite alone with my thoughts. Here stillness reigned, with only the rustle of coals in the grate and the tiny scrabbling of a mouse behind the wainscot to momentarily interfere, and hardly even that.

  * * *

  Out of term time Moses helped me with my Virgil translation.

  We were tackling Book IV. Dido, Queen of Carthage, is consumed with love for the adventurer Aeneas, but he rejects her.

  I didn’t look for assistance, but Moses was always ready with it.

  How simple he could make it seem.

  ‘Dido, fetter’d in the chains of love,

  Hot with the venom which her veins inflam’d,

  And by no sense of shame to be restrain’d…’

  He had me read aloud the original first, before I construed. Then he would demonstrate how.

  ‘Dido shall come in a black sulph’ry flame,

  When death has once dissolv’d her mortal frame.’

  He put me right about my pronunciation, and the stress I placed on words, and helped me correct my errors; then we moved on.

  I didn’t know why he gave up his time to me. Sometimes I thought I caught a smile on his lips, especially when the back of his hand was raised to his mouth, as if to conceal it.

  ‘Are you mocking me?’

  His face was all shock.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘weren’t you smiling?’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘I’m amusing to you? Or my inability is?’

  ‘Not at all. If I was smiling, then it was involuntary.’

  ‘So you may have been smiling after all?’

  ‘At your achievement,’ he said. ‘To hear you conquer the text.’

  ‘Oh, Dido! I wish we could be done with her.’

  ‘She fascinates me, though.’

  His craggy face, which put me in mind of his Northumberland provenance, lightened. His I found a stilted, rather saturnine kind of levity – as if the features of his face were a little too stiff for ready smiles, even at my expense.

  ‘Because she’s weak?’ I said.

  ‘Not at all. Quite the reverse. All that guilt she has.’

  ‘Doesn’t a clergyman-to-be regard guilt as a failing?’

  ‘It can be an inspiration too.’

  ‘Isn’t Dido mad? “I rave, I rave!”’

  ‘She sees that everything will be a falling away, inevitably. So she consecrates herself to a greater cause – the happiness she knew with Aeneas – she refuses to let that die.’

  ‘But she has to die herself.’

  ‘A minor detail.’

  ‘Throwing herself on to a pyre?’

  He was smiling again.

  ‘You care for empresses and queens?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. For tragic heroines.’

  ‘Why them?’

  ‘Suffering and courageous women who deserve their own immortality.’

  * * *

  We were all talking about the beauty of music. Mozart, Bach. And Purcell, who was their favourite.

  Moses said, ‘It’s almost perfect.’

  ‘You could write better?’ W’m ribbed him.

  ‘I mean … It intimates the perfect, the ideal. It takes us to just a hair’s breadth away.’

  At that Sheba groaned and W’m winked at Mouse. But I found myself listening more attentively.

  ‘It’s never absolutely perfect,’ Moses continued. ‘Because then we would have heard everything. The apotheosis.’

  ‘Heaven on earth?’ Sheba said.

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘“The music of the morning stars –”’ Mouse sang the words softly. ‘“– Here in their hearts did sound.”’

  ‘The utterly sublime is impossible,’ Moses said. ‘Until we reach the Godhead. Only God, and our absorption, is immaculately perfect.’

  General hilarity. Moses caught me sober-faced, and because I didn’t want him beholden to me I smiled quickly, then widened the smile unapologetically.

  * * *

  I had a way with the reels, particularly when I was dancing with W’m.

  He would often choose me in preference to the other candidates in a crowded room. I guessed they were just as worthy, and I sensed his mother’s impatience sometimes, that he ignored the choice she was making with a discreetly indicating closed fan.

  Handsome, lively W’m – how could he not inspire me to my best?

  My feet would turn the nimblest little skip-step of them all.

  In the dance I felt impossibly light. Cotillion or quadrille or double-time galop. I had air beneath my feet.

  * * *

  The Chadwycks had friends who had ballrooms in their homes. And public spaces that linked together, a succession of galleries allowing you to admire the company and price it. Outside, there might be a knot-garden or a temple.

  Those friends would have a farm to supply them with milk and whey and cheese; they reared and killed and cured their own meat. Provisions would be sent up to London, to their residence there.

  Those friends had friends who had a ballroom in each or all of their homes, who could make a party last across several counties, when a moon was clear to journey by. Their farms vied with one another to supply the best foods; every farm was separated from the next by a forest. So vast were the estates, I heard, that they contained space to erect alternative fantasy worlds: a jousting field, a galleon (or two) on a lake, a private version of old Rome, or St Petersburg, or Nile Egypt, to whatever scale the owners’ ingenuity and means could take it.

  * * *

  The thoughtless day, the easy night,

  The spirits pure, the slumbers light,

  That fly th’ approach of morn.

  * * *

  I accompany them across the fields to the chapel. The mist is still lifting. Further off it hangs like tattered banners, like dreams of glory fading. The cattle are like the ghosts of cattle. The grass is silvered with dew.

  We follow a path of dried, hard mud. Sheba walks, as always, with an exquisite grace I cannot match; she is an example to us all.

  The church bells carry, a soft peal. I hear them inviting us, not admonishing us.

  * * *

  ‘I think’, Moses said one Sunday, walking closer beside me on our return, ‘everyone is two individuals.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There’s the person here and now, the local person. And there’s the self that watches, from outside, looking down. The transcendental person.’

  Why was he telling me this? Was Moses quite right in the head?

  ‘The local person works towards the other.’

  ‘“The other”?’

  ‘Towards conscience, I believe.’

  I smiled, vaguely. Was there anything else I could do?

  ‘We’re lagging behind,’ I said, nodding to the others ahead.

  ‘Are we?’

  I moved away from him, and without looking round I started running to catch up.

  I realised it had been a ruse of sorts. The beasts of the field – that field – didn’t appreciate it was a Sunday, and Moses had wanted me not to notice they were at their rutting. A transcendental topic, and all to preserve my maidenly modesty.

  NINE

  Five miles away from home, I could start to smell the marshes. Mud, weed, iodine, salt. Sour and nippy. Watery, then vegetal. I was being sucked back to the place.

  The mudbanks. The drowned fields of spargrass. The fast secret tides running beneath the old slow river-water on top. The calls of the godwits and plovers, ‘tu-li’, ‘wicka-wicka’, the different cries, of the birds flying free and those caught in snares.

  Chimes blown from church towers further down the estuary. The hellish shudder of a frigate being unmasted at the dockyards. The sombre boom of cannon fire from the hulks sited downstream.

  Was I returning to the spot? Or was it reaching out its tentacles on the salty breezes to envelop me?

  * * *

  ‘So, the reek of hops is not to your fancy, Miss Havisham?’

  My father said it with a smile. But the smile, lopsided, was pulled back over a top incisor, so I knew to be careful.

  ‘It is a strong odour,’ I told him.

  ‘Hops are a serious business.’

  ‘But the smell gets everywhere.’

  ‘Surely that is a small inconvenience to you. Given the benefits they bring this residence of ours.’

  He waved his hand to indicate the many silent rooms of Satis House. The volume and shadowy grandeur of our surroundings, as he believed.

  Even with the temporary absence of Arthur, Satis House wasn’t Durley Chase, though. My father seemed to see what I was thinking.

  ‘Hops have fed and clothed you these seventeen years.’

  I turned my head, glanced away into a corner, fixed on a little framed view of a people-less street in some trim unvisited town.

  I could hear my father catch his breath.

  ‘The Havisham name isn’t good enough for you, is that it?’

  Why was he so irritable, unless he was also trying to justify his life to himself? Had I touched a bared nerve?

  ‘What would you be known as?’

  ‘The Havisham name suits me very well,’ I heard myself telling him.

  I was acquiring the honed vowels and clipped delivery which he did not have; I could be brittle and sharp and speak as if the remark was only an aside. It kept the colour from rising to my face. I was a little in awe of my own composure.

  And so, I realised, was my father. But he had cause for satisfaction too, of an ambivalent sort, because this was what he was paying good money for, to raise me from hops, in elegant company.

  * * *

  The carriage bowled out of Durley village, and when we’d swung round the last corner the water-meads came into view. The purple haze of the wych elms; the blue flash of a kingfisher’s wings; the statuesque rightness of the milch cows in that green place chomping on the rich flood-grass.

  ‘Un gentilhomme,’ Lady Chadwyck said of my father, after enquiring of his health.

  She fluttered some pastry crumbs from her fingers. The tea party was in my honour, to welcome me back.

  I smiled politely, but sat straighter in my chair, bearing my grandmother in mind, not wanting to let any of them suppose I was a complete ingenue.

  Lady Chadwyck had had me sit beside her. She had invited neighbours, in the men’s absence, and was in a mood for gaiety. Her face shone. She had that girlish, slightly simpering sort of prettiness which has a degree of pathos to it, because it comes dangerously close to being comic.

  I had previously observed a girlish enthusiasm also; she would decide on a course of action in a moment, rising quite suddenly from her chair, dragooning us into a party to go off to … The obverse was – something she preferred us not to see – an equally impromptu retreat from high spirits, which her children were used to; this torpor confined her to her own quarters and left her merely watching us from a window.

  All was well today, however.

  ‘And now we have you back with us, Catherine!’

  There was a new mint silver service, reflecting us where we sat in our chairs. The silver gleamed, and all the more so against the fine but sun-faded furniture, the once expensive but threadbare rugs.

  ‘I am very glad to be back,’ I told her, in all honesty.

  Glad and relieved.

  * * *

  I had brought my box of books back with me, and my sketching pads which I’d been working on in the Cherry Garden at home, and my dancing pumps, in which I’d been practising in my bedroom above my father’s office, and half a dozen new dresses. And two hatboxes.

  They were the tools, the emblems, of an education, although I couldn’t yet judge for what end – other than a veneer of accomplishment – I was being prepared.

  * * *

  We dressed three times a day. For morning; for riding; and for dinner.

  In the mornings, where I used to have cotton or linen for my gowns, my negligees now were tabby, dimity, Canterbury muslin. Away from Durley, our promenades called for pattens and parasols, a new Camperdown bonnet.

  For riding, to match the others, a habit of pompadour broadcloth (a shameless guinea per yard); white dimity waistcoat (with lapels, like the habit); a habit skirt of long lawn; habit gloves; a hat with a trailing feather. I acquired a vast greatcoat, and knotted a white handkerchief round my throat. We resembled strolling Gypsies.

  In the evenings, after most of an hour’s dishbill (Sheba’s favourite neologism from Fanny Burney), we emerged like butterflies from our chrysalides. A clouded French satin gown, or rich-toned taffety. An otter-fur tippet for walking out, and a brown silk pelisse, which was the newest thing in greatcoats.

  * * *

  Is it me, that person?

  My father dutifully settled all accounts. (£7 4s 0d for a riding habit? Very well.) He didn’t demur whenever I felt I had to be in a smarter fashion, because we would be bound to meet even more exalted types soon: that black beaver hat with purple cockade and band. And I had been given the name of a simply divine mantua-maker, a Miss Williams of Tonbridge; everyone – absolutely everyone – swore by her.

  * * *

  I’m not beautiful, not by a long chalk.

  I’m not plain either.

  My appearance is … distinctive. People suppose they can read my character from it.

  My eyelids are the heavy Arab sort, and that makes my hazel eyes seem secretive, and possibly supercilious.

  My mouth is straight, and is judged to indicate personal severity.

  My nose is Roman, but that is not a hook.

  I have clear facial bones, and a tidy oval chin.

  My face is narrow; so is my forehead, but I also have a high brow, so I’m said to have more intelligence than I care to admit to. (I don’t quibble with that, although I wish it were true.)

  But I’m not just a face, or a body. I’m a Havisham. My appearance is wrapped around with an aura of wealth (provincial, not metropolitan; but money is money) and high living (vulgar rather than sophisticated; but time, between one generation and the next, is the best civiliser).

  I don’t need to be a beauty. Yet no one, except some person ignorant of my name, would consider me less than handsome.

  * * *

  W’m and Moses returned at the term’s end.

  Other than my father, I had never been as close physically to a man as I found I now was to W’m.

  At his own instigation, I felt sure.

  Sharing the table in the small study where I did my preparations and he his. Seated next to him at the dining table. Passing him in the corridors. Having my hand taken by him on the inclines of lawn, or at a stile. Letting him place my walking cloak around my shoulders.

  Whenever Moses stepped in to do any of these things, it wasn’t the same. He was self-conscious where W’m seemed natural and unaffected. I felt that Moses was looking at me every time so that I would register my approval of the deed; which was the reason for my feigning inadvertence.

  * * *

  I asked W’m questions about my schoolroom work. I asked him to explain, several times, Plato’s theory of the ‘idea’ of things: a reality that doesn’t alter despite the changing appearance, which – beyond mere sensations’ reach – reason alone proves.

  All the while I feasted my eyes on him: his sweep of fair hair, and white teeth, and golden eyes, and Greek profile.

  I remembered to nod my head, as if I were really capable of understanding.

  Moses would tell W’m to slow down a bit, to explain more clearly, and I was irritated. It was as if he assumed I was too stupid. But he had also seen that I truly made very little sense of it all. What right did he think he had to expose me like this?

  I ignored Moses as much as I could, and gave my attention – I made a show of giving my attention – to W’m. But W’m wasn’t always aware of it, and that was my true vexation.

  * * *

  They had two passions: performing tableaux vivants and attending masquerades. They read up about masques in the newspapers. Sheba kept illustrations: the Duchess of Bolton in a man’s domino, and then wearing the costume she’d had on underneath, ‘the most brilliant Sultana that ever was seen, covered with pearls and diamonds’.

  Lady Chadwyck had opened an account at Jackson’s Habit-Warehouse in Covent Garden, so I knew that it was a serious pursuit. For the first masque we went as ‘Bohemians & Tziganes’, in brown stuff jackets and blue stuff petticoats, with straw hats fastened beneath the chin; and red cloaks, in silk instead of rustic wool. Sheba had equipped herself with a crook and live lambs. Our hostess was in peasant wear, as she understood it; a fine pink-and-white dress in her wardrobe had been cut down, but it was judged a sacrifice worth making.

  The theme of the second bal masqué was ‘Van Dyck’. We didn’t have time to seek novel inspiration in the paintings, but had to take what was left in stock that was ruffed and lacy. Once we were decked out, as Charles I or Henrietta Maria or Stuart notables, we had to try to appear – aided or hindered by a hired monkey or spaniel or greyhound – as if we had just walked out of our frames.

  Dressing up and acting out was one aspect of my Durley life – the theatrical one. The other was the academic: studying my text books, completing exercises, memorising high-minded and high-flown verse. Somewhere between was the business of singing, playing the keyboard, and drawing and painting: all of which, it seemed to me, involved not just doing the task in hand but taking up such a pose and attitude that it was incontrovertibly clear that that was what you were about – delivering a Purcell song with an Amazonian bearing, using the arms like pistons while playing my keyboard preludes and sonatas, musing with crayon or camelhair brush held hovering over the drawing pad or easel.