The New Girl at Uskweirs Manor

a pastoral romance by Miriam Robern

Three London Addresses

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London, June 1813

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“Miss Wright, welcome to Catherwood House,” intoned the butler at the door.  He looked past her to the hackney cab waiting at the end of the townhouse’s steps.  Jut beyond it flowed the noisy bustle of Mayfair street traffic.  “Shall I send a boy out for your luggage?”

“Please,” she nodded and stepped inside out of the sweltering London air.  “There’s just a single trunk, I shan’t stay long.”

“Because you have to get back to your gainful employment as the governess of your own heirs,” came the arch but still bemused voice of the Countess Catherwood.  The lady strode down the stairs into the hall, as immaculately dressed as she ever was, today in buttery yellow silk.  “Your recklessness is seconded only by your audacity, girl.  You should see the letters Enid sends me.  She cannot make heads or tails of you.”

Amelia crossed the room to embrace the woman.  “She was very put out when I told her I was leaving for a week.”

“It’s not exactly in keeping with your purported profession,” she observed with an elevated eyebrow.  The arch look might have looked judgemental if she did not then cackle immediately thereafter.  She turned and led Amelia deeper into the townhouse; a footman was setting out tea service in the parlour.

“I did explain that my contract affords me generous leave, and that I am fetching teaching materials for the boys, but that wasn’t enough,” said Amelia, lips twitching. “She only relented when I told her I was staying with you.  You’ll safeguard my reputation, won’t you, CeeCee?”

“Safeguard her reputation, more like,” the lady chuckled, rolling her eyes, and sat.  “Tea or punch, my dear?  And how are you for your equine constitutional?”

Amelia settled into a couch that was leagues more comfortable than either the coach she’d spent the last two days in or the cab that had brought her the last leg of her journey.  Her body seemed to root itself into the cushions.  “I did hold off this afternoon in the hopes that you’d have ice,” she admitted with a sigh.  “But punch as well, please.  I am parched.”

“Of course,” the lady answered, waving a footman out the side door and then bending over to pour, herself. The decanter dripped condensation as it spilled out its pink contents into two snifters.  “You do realize I must grill you for all the details that Enid left out of her letters, either through propriety or ignorance.”

Amelia accepted her glass gratefully.  “Am I to earn my keep with gossip?”

“That’s how society works, my dear,” CeeCee laughed, lifting her own glass.  “You do know Enid is quite aware of how you and Miss Chesterley made use of your adjoining rooms.”

Amelia nearly spat out her punch, both at the lady’s revelation as well as the surprisingly potent tang of alcohol in her drink.  “Is she?”

“Not her first lesbian houseguests,” the lady shrugged, swilling her boozy punch as if it were just fruit juice.  “Although I think she’s more accustomed to bored married women with terrible husbands.”

“I do admit to some curiousity on her opinion of Theresa,” Amelia admitted.  “She has a… signature character the likes of which I can’t imagine Mother approving.”

But CeeCee waved a hand.  “Bluestockings are old hat for your elders, Amelia.  Enid was, though, amusingly voluable about Miss Chesterley’s sartorial choices.  Not so much in the ‘how dare she’ vein but more in the sense of ‘she’s too round for breeches.’”

Despite her disappointment at her mother’s pettier judgment, Amelia wasn’t terribly surprised, either.  “And your opinion?”

“Chesterley is delightfully round,” the lady answered readily, “in ways your mother is not constitutionally equipped to appreciate.”

Amelia couldn’t help but laugh.  “I did actually mean your broader opinion on her character.”  She steeled herself; CeeCee would not hold back.

“Theresa Chesterley has always struck me as a dour woman,” Catherwood opined readily, “so full of purpose she is almost a boor.  I am surprised at your pairing, but that’s not to say it doesn’t work.  You might be good for her yet.”

If Theresa Chesterley ever consented to see Amelia again, that is; not that CeeCee seemed to know about the woman’s abrupt departure.  But Amelia was still curious:“And she for me?”

“That remains to be seen,” she replied, voice dry and lips twisted in amusement.  “Although I can see the obvious appeal.”  She refilled both their glasses and pointed accusingly at Amelia.  “But the flow of gossip thus far is the reverse of what it should be.  You need to tell me what you’ve done to anger Iris Sommerset.”  She then tipped her head to the side.  “Not that she needs much to set her off.”

Amelia rolled her eyes.  “She thinks I’m blackmailing her, which I am not.  But her fantasy of being blackmailed bears little difference from actually being blackmailed, at least in terms of her fears and resentment.”  She winced slightly; she hadn’t meant to divulge all that.  She blamed the punch for loosening her tongue, and concluded that she might as well explain the situation, at least in selective detail.  “I had already told her that I would keep a secret of hers, because it was harmless.  When I encouraged her to keep another secret—of a third party—she concluded that my silence was conditioned on hers.”

“Her secret being that she’s sleeping with the new coachman?” CeeCee asked, eyebrow lifted.

Despite her best efforts, a tiny surprised sound escaped Amelia’s lips.  Luckily that very moment, a footman arrived with a tall amber glass on a tray, and she used the interruption of his laying it out for her and then thanking him for doing so to regain her equilibrium.  “I didn’t think Mother knew.”

“She doesn’t,” CeeCee shrugged.  “As far as I know, at least.  But Enid tends to tell me everything she uncovers.”

Amelia took a deep breath and started knocking back her virus amantis equae in not-particularly-ladylike gulps.  CeeCee would understand.

“I rather like her, actually,” the lady confessed while Amelia alternated between breaths and downing the remaining contents of her glass.  “Iris, that is.  Crossed paths with her a few times, mostly at your father’s Glorious Twelfth events.  Sad, in retrospect, that you always had to go hunting and could not have stayed back to gossip with the rest of the girls, my dear.”  She shot Amelia an apologetic look that she barely caught between gulps.  The lady continued. “She was a terrible match for Eustance, of course.  The late Eustace, I suppose we should call him, now.  Eustace the Elder.  Whichever.  He needed someone to ground him, manage a tight household budget while the Duke kept him on a short leash, not let him go gallivanting off on that ridiculous canal scheme.  But that was not Iris.”

“I am finding it hard to appreciate her appeal when she  insists on staring daggers at me whenever Mother isn’t looking,” Amelia sighed.  She set aside her empty glass and took up her punch to banish the aftertaste lingering in her mouth.

“She has an artistic soul,” Catherwood sighed, half-heartedly defending the lady.  “Insightful, creative, passionate, devilish sense of humour… none of which helped her in the life she chose.  I wish I could have seen what she’d have become without marrying your brother.  Or—forgive the morbid thought, my dear—if your father’s passing and your brother’s subsequent inheritance had come earlier.”

“As a housemate, she is snappish and hostile, and as a mother, she is… inconsistent,” the girl groused, pushing herself back into her seat.  “She lies to the boys.”

CeeCee clucked her tongue, not at absent Iris, but at Amelia.  “All mothers lie to their children on occasion.  Sometimes it’s necessary for the children’s well-being.  Sometimes it’s necessary for the mother’s sanity.”  She put up a hand before Amelia could reply.  “I’m sure she’s made missteps.  But the path she’s had to take has not been easy, either.  Your job as governess is a sprint; hers as a mother is a marathon.”

Amelia dug herself into the cushions a little more.  “Point taken.”

“You are fetching teaching materials for the boys,” her host changed the subject, “and no doubt meeting Miss Chesterley as the real purpose of your London visit.  Anything else?”

“I will call on Miss Chesterley, but she is not the focus of my visit,” Amelia protested weakly, even though she was grateful for the conversational shift.  “I am also visiting Miss Marianne Woods at the grammar school where she is teaching now.  I hope her advice will steer me towards better finds in the bookstores for the boys.”

CeeCee studied her for a moment.  Amelia steeled herself for the countess to tell her she wasn’t very subtle.  But instead she said: “Miss Chesterley is not expecting you?”

“My first errand is to the printer’s, to pick up my new calling cards,” Amelia explained, and could feel her cheeks flushing.  She was a little embarrassed at how excited she was to see her new calling cards, with her proper name on them.  “I’ll use them at Theresa’s if she’s not in residence.”

“I don’t think she keeps any help,” the countess warned.  “You might be pushing your calling card through the mail slot rather than handing it off to a dutiful servant.”

“I’m not entirely unworldly, CeeCee,” the girl laughed.  “I have called on people outside high society before.”

---

Theresa Chesterley’s address was more than a little outside of high society.  The Shadwell address was close enough to Mayfair and Piccadilly, Amelia surmised, to allow Theresa access to her society connections, while also sitting far enough away (and close enough to the docks) to make rent affordable on the woman’s modest stipend.

Amelia watched from the window of the rickety hackney she’d hired as the streets narrowed, the buildings grew thin, the doors and porches shrank.  She began to worry that the progression—or degression—of the neighbourhoods would continue until she found herself in some dark, squalid slum she dared not step foot in.  So she breathed a sigh of relief when the cab lurched to a halt outside a narrow building on a relatively clean street.  Respectable—if only just.

The hackney driver agreed to wait a few minutes while she walked up the three steps to the door and, finding no bell, knocked.  Only silence greeted her.

With a short sigh of disappointment, Amelia withdrew her reticule and from it the little case of freshly-printed calling cards.  She’d already annotated the top three with CeeCee’s address for while she was in town.  This she slid through the mail slot.

The moment the card dropped from her fingers, however, the tromp of approaching footsteps sounded through the door.  Amelia stepped back just in time for the portal to be wrenched open.

The woman who had opened it was not Theresa Chesterley.  She was lean, blonde, and young, wearing little more than a shift and a knitted housecoat which looked to have been tossed on top.  She folded her arms underneath her breasts and scowled softly at Amelia.  “Wot?”

“My apologies for intruding,” she answered reflexively.  “I was looking for the home of Theresa Chesterley?”

“You found it,” the woman replied, leaning on the doorjamb.  “She’s not in right now.”

“A pity.  Do you know when she might return?” Amelia asked hopefully.  “Does she take visitors at certain hours?”

The woman twisted her lips together in amusement.  “We don’t often entertain here.  Theresa goes out to visit.”

“I see.”  She gestured down at the woman’s bare feet.  “Just before you opened the door, I slipped my card through the slot.  Can you see that she gets it?”

“Sure,” the woman answered without even looking down to spot where the card had fallen.

Amelia nodded, as if nodding would bring the exchange back into alignment with her expectations and things would start making sense again.  It didn’t work.  “Well.  Good day.”

The woman nodded curtly and shut the door.

At least the hackney driver had waited.  Amelia boarded again and gave him her next address.

---

“If it’s all the same to you, miss,” drawled the driver as he opened the carriage door for her a half hour later, “I’ll walk you to this door.”  He scowled suspiciously up and down the street, which was as dark and dirty as Amelia had feared Theresa’s neighborhood might be.

The door to the school was not even ten feet from the hackney, but the driver walked protectively behind her the whole distance.  She rapped on the door and fished out her fare, plus a generous tip.  “Thank you, sir.  Your gallantry is appreciated.”

The man scoffed good-naturedly at her language and doffed his cap as he accepted the coins.  When the door behind Amelia opened, he took one step back but no more, waiting to make sure it was opened by someone she recognized or trusted.

It was Marianne Woods, looking a little worn around the edges, but still capable of summoning up a bright smile.  “Miss Wright.  So good to see you.  Won’t you come in?”

With a final grateful nod to the cabbie, she did so.  “I’m not interrupting?” she asked the woman leading her deeper into the building.  The poorly-lit foyer gave way to a dingy hall, but the next room was wide and bright, full of long tables with benches along one side.

“No, the morning class is gone and the evening class won’t be here until six.”  Marianne kicked a bench out from its table and sat down with a huff, leaving enough room for Amelia at the end.  “Start showing at six, that is.  They don’t exactly come from households with clocks on the mantels.”

“A markedly different clientele than your last school.”

“Quite,” Marianne nodded, and then looked around the room with a tender look.  “Sometimes it seems strange to be teaching girls to read English rather than French.  But they are good girls, mostly, and eager to learn.  When they’re allowed.”

Amelia lifted an eyebrow.  “Who’s stopping them?”

“Parents, grandparents, the odd uncle, their employers, since most of them have some sort of job,” the teacher sighed.  “If anyone needs anything—tend to your sick aunt, do this laundry that didn’t get done yesterday, watch the baby while Mother tries to find work—it falls on the young women of the household.  I never know who’ll be attending any given class.”

“How many do you typically have at once?”

The teacher shrugged.  “Anywhere from ten to thirty.  When we’re full to bursting, it’s quite the cacophony in here.”

“I can only imagine,” she answered, and her mind’s eye filled the room with charmingly dirty little girls shouting excitedly, ready to learn.  For a moment, she placed herself into the scene, and thought about coming here, or someplace like it, once Gregory was off to school.  Perhaps she could do some good, here.  “I hope it is more challenging than overwhelming.”

“Depends on the day” Marianne laughed, and then scoffed, “Day before last—”  But then a cloud passed over her features.  

“What is it?”

“Not all the stories are pretty or funny,” she warned. Amelia nodded encouragingly, and the teacher steeled her nerves to continue.  When she did, her voice came soft and quiet.  “Day before last, one of the girls asked what ‘rape’ was.”  She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe her own story.  “And of course I told her, and the rest of the class, because… well, I don’t believe that such things should be kept from them, and honestly it’s not like there’s anyone who will get me in trouble for speaking of taboo subjects.  But still.  Not what I was expecting when we opened our grammar books.”

Amelia reached forward to squeeze the lady’s knee.  “And here I thought my two were a handful.”

“I’m sure they are,” Marianne commiserated, shaking her head to clear it of her own complaints.  “Educating children raised in luxury has its own challenges.  These girls are no strangers to hard work, and they know that learning is worth the effort.  By contrast, I’ve had high-class students who had never exerted themselves at all.  Who frankly didn’t even know how.”

Amelia thought of Eustace on his worst days, when it seemed no inducement could rouse him to putting in an honest effort, and nodded softly.  “And the solution, then?”

Marianne smiled wanly.  “Find the prize that they care about, which is, I’m afraid, idiosyncratic to every child.  For some, it’s time alone; for others, it’s access to books or art supplies.”  Her face crumpled a little as she added, “And for some it’s a kind word and a smile, which I’ve always found simultaneously validating for my own prowess and heartbreaking when I consider what their home lives must lack.”

Amelia nodded.  “My boys have had a hard time of it with their parents, and with their grandmother, for that matter.”  She shook her head.  “The pressures of rank and society can inflict brutal demands, and there’s little left over for the children.  You would think that adults would put the children first, but…”

“Not when the adults are essentially children, themselves,” Marianne sighed.  “We’ve had our share of those.”

“At the seminary?”

Marianne scoffed.  “Yes, but also here.  Possibly more so, here.”  She gestured around the room, as if to indicate the whole school.  “All of this depends on the charitable donations of…” There she faltered, smirked, and finished with “generous ladies of strong moral convictions.”

Amelia snorted.  “What were you about to call them?”

Marianne looked left and right as if to check that they would not be overheard.  “In private, we call them the charity mavens,” she giggled.  “They swoop in to visit with no notice, and they always have opinions.  Sometimes they also come with bank notes, which is appreciated, but they always come with opinions.”

When Amelia raised her eyebrow, Marianne elaborated: “Last week, a worthy lady of considerable means informed me that the girls would learn better if they were better dressed, and suggested we devote some of our class time to learning to mend and sew.”  She snorted delicately.  “Half the girls do piecework or weave ribbon for pay; they’re no strangers to needle and thread.  Chances are good that some part of the lady’s own wardrobe was made by some of my girls.  But she saw a few tatters and concluded the problem was ignorance, not poverty.”

“Did you dissuade her?” Amelia wanted to know.

“I estimated the cost of fabric and thread to clothe the whole class… and may have pretended to believe she was offering to supply it,” Marianne laughed.  “She dropped the subject soon thereafter.”

“Money is no object until it is,” Amelia observed drily.

Marianne sniffed.  “Money is how we encode what matters to us, as has recently been made clear to me.”

Amelia winced.  “I’m sorry, sore subject?”

“It is, and it will be for some time, so I might as well build up a tolerance for it,” the teacher sighed.  “Jane and I thought we had solved all our problems when we won the suit, but it’s like the verdict tied the money to Lady Cumming Gordon admitting she was wrong.  If she never pays the money, she never has to admit wrongdoing.  So therefore she’ll use every ounce of leverage and connection she has to forestall both payment and admission of guilt.”

“How is Jane?” she asked, hoping it might be a change of subject.

It was not.  “Living on a pittance with her aunt in Edinburgh, and not doing at all well.”  She gestured helplessly to what might have been north.  “We write.  She’s despondent.  She worries that she is being punished by the Almighty.”

“It must be difficult being so far apart,” Amelia sighed, forcing herself not to think of her own, far more petty, separation.

Marianne nodded, tears beading in the corners of her eyes.  “We said it was temporary, but I… sometimes I worry that… that I’ll never see her again.”  And then the floodgates opened and the woman broke down into sobs.

Amelia rushed forward to wrap arms around Marianne, who collapsed into her embrace.  They sat there on the school bench, Amelia making soft placating noises and Marianne alternating between sobs and sniffles, for some time.

Eventually the latter woman roused herself, reminded that Amelia had come for guidance on teaching materials, and the conversation shifted to more pragmatic concerns.  But as Amelia bid her farewell, she found herself more grateful that she had been there to comfort Marianne than for book recommendations, no matter how useful they’d be.  She gave the woman a fond smile, and resolved herself to find some way to better the situation of the two estranged and struggling lovers.

---

It was later than Amelia expected when she stepped outside, and darker, too.  Only a narrow strip of sky was visible between the soot-stained building fronts, and along it roiled a mottle of dark clouds limned by the sun.  Little light made it down to the street where Amelia had to hail a cab.

The school had once been a factory, and the road it was on had once been a thoroughfare, but time had strangled the business out of the first and traffic out of the latter.  A few delivery wagons and the stray rider came clattering down the cobbles, but there were no hackneys to hail among them.  With a sigh, Amelia adjusted her skirts and resolved to walk to the high street, which she was relatively sure was a few blocks up the road in this direction, and try her luck there.

She didn’t get far.

A man came teetering down the road toward her, one hand outstretched to trail along the wall beside him.  By his drunken stagger, he needed the wall for support as much as guidance.

Amelia stalled her steps at the sight of his approach, and an involuntary “oh” escaped her lips.

The drunk raised his eyes at the sound, took in Amelia and her bright frock, and then looked past her to the door of the school.  Then his gaze settled back on her as a leer smeared across his lips.  “You’re that teacher-lady.”

Amelia took a step back.  Could she make a mad dash for the door?  “I think you mean Miss Marianne Woods,” she said.  “I’m not—”

But the man leveled a crooked, dirty finger at her.  “You’re the teacher-lady who fed lies to my daughter,” he insisted.

“No, I—” Amelia stammered, and tried to flee.  But no sooner had she turned, than the man was on her, shoving her back against the wall, his face inches from hers.

His breath washed rancid over Amelia as he shouted at her: “My daughter’s no better’n me, even with her letters!  But you tell her lies, you tell her that her pa’s a criminal, you turn her ‘gainst me.”

Amelia kicked, the thin heel of her boot scraping up his shin.  His balanced faltered and she twisted to the left, out of his grip, scrambling along the wall.  She ran, stumblingly, half-ducking half-falling into an alleyway, pumping her legs to put as much distance as she could between herself and the drunk.

He howled in frustration more than pain, then charged down the alley after her.  When his panting turned to laughter, she knew he was gaining on her, and then she was shoved against the dripping wall.  She tried to twist around and run, but it was no use.  His balled his hands into the front of her jacket, pinning her in place.

“A man has a right to his wife’s body,” he wheezed at her.  “But I reckon you dun know how any of that works, do you?  Prissy old maid, never felt the touch of a man.”

 This time when she made to move, he shoved his elbow up, knocking her head back against the bricks.  She saw stars, and then his forearm was jammed up against her throat.

With his other hand, he produced a knife.  “Maybe I’ll give you a little prick, enh?” he sneered, running the tip down her side.  “Teach you a lesson, teacher-lady.  I’d enjoy that!”

This is where I die, Amelia concluded, heart hammering.  She couldn’t move, and nothing she could say would placate the drunk.  Either he simply stabbed her to death in the alley, or he tried to rape her and in that assault discovered details about her that would incite him to stab her to death, anyway.

But then a shout sounded from the mouth of the alley, and the man’s balance shifted as he turned towards the noise.  Amelia shoved him back again, turned to flee—

—and his grip bashed her back into the bricks.  A lance of pain skewered into her upper thigh, trailed up to her hip.  Her leg went out from under her, and she fell.  The man made no move to catch her, flinging himself away and dashing further down the alleyway.

Other footfalls came rushing in from the street.  Amelia’s vision swam; her fingers slapped uselessly against the bricks and cobbles, trying and failing to steady herself.  The insides of her thighs were wet, hot, and sticky.

Gentle hands guided her down to lie flat on the ground.  The strength of her body, the scene around her, the whole world seemed to be spiralling away from her, and in seeped a soft, quiet blackness, replacing all of everything.  The last words she heard were: “Don’t worry, miss.  I’m a doctor.  I’m afraid I’ll have to lift your skirts to examine the wound…”

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