* * *

  We learned to be nymphs and goddesses, Gothic abbesses and devout pilgrims, Persian empresses and desert potentates. We plundered the legends of Greece and Rome.

  When we went to bals masqués, we also had to unmask, at one certain point in the proceedings. Then we were ourselves again: but not entirely so. It was stranger than the masks, seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar guises, aspiring to be somehow larger than life, with grander emotions to dispose of.

  * * *

  I was still being paired with W’m: on walks or at meals, over cards or playing music or at the dance. I wasn’t sure how to deal with him.

  There was the matter of our proximity; he was taller than my father or Arthur, taller than Moses, with an actor’s archetypal good looks, and an actor’s way of both positioning himself in profile and – in company – declaiming rather than speaking, yet doing neither with any hint of awkwardness.

  More than this physical closeness, though, I felt uncertain about his way of thinking. He didn’t seem aware of things like the weather, or atmospherics, as I and his sisters were, which made me think our concerns must be trivial in comparison. His had a broader sweep – classical history, his colleagues’ reputations (or lack thereof), politics, the cost of property, philosophy, ketching, the price of a Smollett translation of Don Quixote he’d seen for sale in Cambridge market.

  He never put me down. He assumed that my learning would cease once I was married, but in the meantime he knew not to discourage me. He wasn’t adversely critical, as I felt Moses was, and he left me to get on with my own studies; it didn’t occur to him that I might need the sort of help which Moses, in his clumsy way, offered me.

  * * *

  The trick was to shift my eyes away before he could catch me looking at him, which was difficult.

  If we danced together, I held a fan or handkerchief to my chest, so that he shouldn’t see the colour he brought to the surface.

  I hadn’t come across anyone who comported himself de profil like that, and who simultaneously scanned a room so exhaustively. I thought that it must be done for effect – until I discovered, firstly that he was quite short-sighted but wouldn’t consider spectacles or a lens, and subsequently that it galled him if he failed to acknowledge someone whom his mother had warned him deserved to be recognised.

  * * *

  If we were ever alone together, I immediately sensed his unease.

  It was a simple matter of etiquette, of course. But without others around us, it was as if he started to lose his nerve.

  At breakfast. In the book-lined passageway that constituted the house’s library. Or in the summerhouse.

  ‘Oh, Miss Havisham…’ (No conversable, free-and-easy ‘Catherine’ now.) ‘… have I disturbed you? If I’m disturbing you…’

  ‘Not at all,’ I would say.

  In extremis he made an immediate getaway. ‘Actually, I’ve just remembered … you must excuse me if I…’

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  Sheba and Mouse were loyal admirers. ‘You do like him, Catherine?’ they were eager to know.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Not as much as we do, of course!’

  ‘But almost,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘We’ve noticed, naturally. We’ve been watching.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And he likes you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Very much. We’re both quite sure of that.’

  * * *

  I could tell my father was impressed by my progress. I had snatches of Italian and (less confidently) German to complement my French. I could quote lines from Horace and Sallust. Even when he couldn’t understand, he was very taken by the sounds, by the false conviction of my delivery. He could already put a value on returns from his investment.

  ‘Another six months and you’ll be up to the best hereabouts. The best, and no mistaking.’

  Satis House smelt old and stale to me, as if history had been stacked up in the rooms behind the closed doors. At Durley Chase sunlight swilled about the rooms, and they sweetly smelt of beeswax polish and the scented bulbs and flowers distributed in bowls. My home oppressed me with its sombre fumed-oak panelling and the shadows of the glass-leading on the windows which barred and squared the dark uneven floors.

  * * *

  Arthur would brush against me, shoulder against shoulder, and push ahead of me leaving a room. It exasperated me.

  ‘What do they teach you at that school of yours?’

  ‘Not to go about with our noses stuck up in the air.’

  ‘Not good manners, anyhow.’

  ‘You know all about those, do you? Living with that rout.’

  ‘Don’t call them that.’

  ‘I don’t know why you bother yourself with them.’

  Because I have a brother like you. Because he says things like that. Because he’s not able to work it out for himself.

  ‘Well…?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters, or you wouldn’t go chasing after them like you do.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, about having to explain anything to you.’

  ‘Because you can’t.’

  ‘Because I’m tired of listening to you.’

  ‘Can’t you move all your stuff there?’

  ‘And leave you with the run of this place? That’s what you want, of course.’

  ‘What do you know about what I want?’

  ‘Precious little. Or care to.’

  * * *

  I gave Sally some of the clothes I no longer wore. They had to be lengthened a little; but since she was thinner in proportion to her height than I was, they didn’t need taking out. The fashions had dated slightly, but Sally wore them with such panache that it didn’t matter.

  ‘They might have been made for you.’

  ‘I suppose they were. Now that I’m wearing them!’

  She had a natural grace, which I envied, because I’d had to concentrate on choreographing my movements with the Chadwycks’; I worked hard to look so languorous. Sally was unaffected and simple, and never gauche. How was it done? I could have taken her into, say, an Assembly Room and passed her off as my cousin – my red-haired cousin – and no one would have suspected. I suggested it once or twice, but Sally declined, politely but quite firmly.

  ‘Then what use will the dresses be?’ I asked her.

  ‘I do wear them. I promise you.’

  ‘When? Tell me.’

  She didn’t say.

  ‘You don’t wear them,’ I teased her.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘When I wish to do my passable imitation of Miss Catherine Havisham.’

  ‘I haven’t seen that.’

  ‘No, of course not. We never recognise ourselves.’

  We ended up laughing.

  ‘This is silliness, Sally.’

  ‘You started it.’

  I reached out for her wrists. As I held them, her arms stiffened.

  ‘But you’ll take more dresses?’

  ‘Any dress you want to give me.’

  ‘Let me think.’

  I continued to hold her wrists. She smiled again, but over her shoulder at the window, out into the yard. My captive.

  TEN

  The Cam River had frozen over.

  The life beneath was trapped under frosted glass: a wintry half-life. Slow-motion fish and the solidified tendrils of riverweed. A pike, caught by its iced tail, fitfully thrashing; other pike gnawing at it.

  A punt was boxed in beside a wall. The funnel of a green bottle stood upright, in magical suspension.

  * * *

  We sat on by the fire. The men talked. Or rather, they debated, symposium fashion.

  On one side, by the fire-irons, W’m was arguing for rational, scientific thought: pure reason, the Greeks’ crystalline dianoia. Everything in the universe could be explained.

  ‘Except people’s behaviour,’ another student said.

  ‘That too. Cause and effect.’

  Moses, perched on the fender, was warming to the subject. He took the opposite tack, claiming that the world was quite unreasonable. Think of what lies beyond where the stars end; do they end? (I felt light-headed suddenly, just trying to imagine.) Life is an enigma. We have to approach it not scientifically but poetically.

  ‘Piffle!’ W’m said.

  ‘Why have we been given souls? To elevate us above substance.’

  I sat between the two of them. I inclined first one way and then the other, and back again. To and fro.

  Outside, dusk drew on. A red blush rose in the sky, outlining towers and spires and cupolas. A red glow fell on to one wall of the room, and we all seemed to turn instinctively towards it.

  ‘There’s a perfectly cogent explanation’, W’m said, ‘for what we see.’

  ‘We’re not looking to understand why,’ Moses responded. ‘We’re thinking of God. Or of a memory of some other time, a place. Or it’s like life before we were born; swimming in the womb.’

  W’m shook his head.

  ‘Light and how it falls is a sequence of connected circumstances. Nothing more.’

  ‘There’s always something behind what we see,’ retorted Moses. ‘An image. A renaissance, or an ideal. Reality has a fourth dimension.’

  W’m tapped his head. Sheba, who had said little, gave vent to some good-humoured laughter. Mouse sighed at the conundrum.

  And for myself, I jumped when a coal in the hearth split, and sparks went whistling up the chimney into the dark.

  * * *

  Wine, heated and honeyed, was served to us from a silver chafing-dish embossed with the college’s coat of arms.

  Sitting there I had a sense of completeness, even though the argument hadn’t been won by either party. There was a fitness, an appropriateness, about everything: whether conspiring to this end, or accidentally achieved. I felt I belonged here, in this set of rooms at the top of a flight of old worn wooden stairs, with these people, on this particular evening with the redness in the sky flaring to indigo and the sweet marsala wine in my old fluted glass sparkling against the firelight.

  * * *

  A door was unlocked, a bolt drawn back, and then we were admitted to a long colonnaded gallery furnished with stone heads, torsos, dislodged limbs. There were several dozen fragments of Greek and Roman statues, each of them many times larger than life. Our footsteps echoed in the skylit gloom – as did our exclamations of astonishment.

  Muscular shoulders. The spine’s runnel on a goddess’s back. Smooth buttocks, inviting a hand’s touch. Assorted parties intimes, with or without sculpted vegetation for cover.

  I didn’t want to catch anyone’s eye, so I stood behind the others to glean their reactions. Mouse contriving to be studious; Sheba, slowing by the goddesses and naiads to take note of the classical dimensions of beauty; W’m, with a reminiscent air, fascinated by first a hand and then a foot; and Moses, poor Moses, so horribly embarrassed, and making one believe – because he looked the opposite way – that the intimate parts on display were far below his high-minded regard.

  It was Moses who later rounded up the other four of us and our two companions, older women friends of Sheba, and urged us to leave.

  ‘Aren’t you cold? I feel I’m turning to marble myself –’

  I waited a while longer, to prove that I wouldn’t be rushed, but I felt my eyes were out of my control, either swivelling about or waterily staring.

  It was cold in here. More than that, though, it was airless, quite airless. I fanned myself with a pamphlet, as I might have done in the heat of high summer, and when I became a little dizzy I had to lean against a pillar. I closed my eyes. I felt a strong grip on my arm, my elbow, someone was holding me up. My eyes, still closed, saw W’m’s face, but when I opened them he was at the door, and protecting me was Moses. I took back my arm.

  ‘Thank you. I – I’ll be fine.’

  That long face of angles, with all its sensibleness intact, the redoubtable decency.

  I hurried away. I didn’t know why he had this effect on me, or why I was making so light of his kindness, even punishing him for it.

  ELEVEN

  Lady Elizabeth Gray was a favourite subject for tableaux. We took our inspiration from a couple of engravings. Valentine Green’s for ‘Lady Elizabeth Gray at the Feet of Edward the Fourth, Soliciting the Restoration of her late Husband’s forfeited lands, 1465’. John Downman’s later work caused us to enact ‘Edward the Fourth on a visit to the Duchess of Bedford is Enamoured of Lady Elizabeth Gray’.

  We portrayed the death of Lady Jane Grey, as Green devised it in our essential text, Acta Historica Reginarum Anglia. There was the Marriage of King Henry VIII with Ann Bullen. And – marking my preferment to the centre of stage, where I had expected to be a grieving lady-in-waiting – Mary Queen of Scots, about to be executed.

  Look at me!

  I’m dressed in black satin and velvet, with a high white ruff. I wear two crucifixes and a rosary. I have walked, quite composed, into the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle. I have instructed my trusty servant, Melville, to take word to my son James, the King of Scotland, that I have always sought the unification of the two kingdoms, Scotland and England. I have listened as the execution warrant was read aloud to me, telling me I am about to be put to death like some ordinary felon. I have prayed in a voice that might carry to the nearly two hundred spectators gathered here, for blessings on the English Church, for my son James and for the agent of my doom, Elizabeth of England. I have given solace to my sorrowing attendants, I have – strangely – spoken with no little wit to the men who will put me to death, my killers. I have stretched out on the floor and laid my neck on the block, placing myself in the hands of God. My ladies weep. The axe is raised. I am on the point of speaking those words which will be my last. ‘Sweet Jesus.’ Secreted beneath my gown but visible is the little Skye terrier, true now as ever to his mistress, offering me my final comfort.

  The tableau has been given the motto Mary embroidered herself on her cloth of state, which is placed beside the block. ‘In my end is my beginning.’

  Look at me!

  Awaiting the death blow.

  I have laid my head sideways, so that the audience can see my face and I can see theirs. Just out of my sight – I’m thankful about it – is the executioner’s blade, which has to be held quite still for the two minutes it takes as the commentary is delivered from the side of the stage.

  Only the wee terrier moves, but even he might be conscious of the solemnity of the grand event being depicted.

  Some in the audience take handkerchiefs to their eyes. There’s a good deal of troubled wriggling in chairs. I feel chastened myself, and sad.

  But this is Catherine Havisham’s dignification, even though I’m wearing a red wig – hair as red as Sally’s – and have my face heavily powdered. (There’s a little drift of the stuff on the block, on the black velvet of my gown.)

  I feel I’m at the centre of everyone’s attention: or at any rate, the figure I represent is the focus of every pair of eyes in the room (the dog’s apart). I shall never feel more essential to the Chadwycks and their friends and their friends’ friends than I do at this supreme moment – actually two, extending to nearly three minutes – until the blade starts to wobble, and the dog (snuffling) wanders off, and the most pious in the audience need to excuse themselves for air, and one of my genteel ladies threatens to faint, and the dog barks.

  Curtains are drawn across our stage. The actors all relax, and make for the side tormentors. For some reason no one thinks of assisting me to my feet. But what of it, I am only a pretend queen, and a queen done to death, as if the ritual of human sacrifice was still being practised in the year of grace, anno domini 1587.

  * * *

  We were also attending Assemblies, in the towns of fashion in the South. We accompanied Lady Charlotte to Cheltenham. And thence to Bath, where we bathed with her in our caps and shifts. There too we were drawn to the lights and music, like moths.

  * * *

  A personable stranger’s face meeting mine. The same pair of hands crossing with mine several dances apart, then for a couple in succession.

  ‘You don’t recall?’

  ‘“Recall” … Should I?’

  ‘The theatricals. At Chartridge. I saw your Mary Stuart. Splendid. I shed a tear or two.’

  I was carrying my fan and a woollen shawl Mouse had lent me, since she knew about the Bath draughts.

  In my embarrassment I let go of the fan. My interlocutor picked it up for me.

  ‘A famous trick, that one.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A lady dropping her fan.’

  He laughed. I was puzzling how to respond when I felt a hand on the small of my back and I was very swiftly propelled from the spot. I hadn’t time to do more than look over my shoulder, not even apologetically.

  ‘It was someone who…’

  ‘What, Catherine? Did I interrupt you?’

  Sheba turned and looked back, in the wrong direction.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Over there.’

  But he had gone: and perhaps – quite possibly – Sheba hadn’t even meant to look towards where he had been standing.

  * * *

  We repeated our success with the Queen of Scots. As I lay with my head on the block, I could see him. My fan-recoverer. I hadn’t meant to notice anyone, but …

  He was in one of the front seats, not at all secretive about his presence. I tried not to notice him after that. I concentrated on Mary instead, on her struggle to see nothing of what was happening to her, not to feel, not to think back or to think forward either, in case she screamed out with terror, but to give up her Catholic soul gladly to her Maker.