05|
Emily was in the games room, which at this time of day lay deserted; and while she was in fact hiding, it wasn't because she was desperately trying to avoid Sholto. Her gorgeous beyond-her-reach cousin—and currently the one person she felt too embarrassed to ever be facing again in her entire life—had already returned to his regiment the night before.
His mother Edith, who was a late riser, had not yet made her appearance this morning. She was, however, the reason for Emily to keep a low profile, hoping that, by the time Edith came downstairs ready to deal with all the bigger and smaller problems of her large household, something significant enough would have occurred to deflect her attention away from the announced visit to the basement.
In the distance Vivienne could be heard practicing the piano. Starting to play at four years old, she had already had the advantage of a number of excellent London masters, and now, at fourteen, she was quite proficient. Her nasal voice sadly kept her from being an equally gifted singer. This was generally considered a drawback, as singing was a valuable accomplishment in a young lady, moreover in one who—although not exactly plain—was nowhere near as striking in looks as her elder sister Isabella.
To Emily's way of thinking her cousin's vocal deficiencies were rather a bonus; not being musical herself she found singing a tedious pastime. But listening to Vivienne play the piano was one of the few things Emily genuinely enjoyed about the other girl's company. However, there was nothing much to enjoy about the endless repetitions of practice pieces that floated to her ear at present, and she tried to ignore it as best she could by immersing herself into her reading.
Her current reading matter was still Origins, and still in the guise of a collection of Rossetti's poems. Her diary lay on the armrest of the chair she was curled up in, and every now and then she jotted down a quick observation.
'All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking...'
Take the Lennox siblings; all five of them blond, most of them extremely attractive—once again Emily winced at the thought of how she had so miserably failed to impress handsome Sholto Lennox the night before—and all resembling their mother so very closely that one wondered how Captain Lennox came into the equation. Unless character was another inherited trait... because Cousin Edith frequently sighed about her children being 'so very like their father, it truly exasperates me'.
She—Emily—on the other hand, was very much a mix of both her parents in looks. Her height and colouring were her father's, along with the elfin ears; but her features were entirely her mother's; and the resemblance had got more pronounced in recent months. She knew because she had photographic proof of it: A picture of Margaret Thornton at the age of one-and-twenty, taken some weeks after their wedding—and Emily's most prized possession. Sitting at her vanity she had often compared the photograph with her mirror image. Her own face was, perhaps, a little narrower, but the form of the eyes and nose, and the generous mouth—so unlike the currently fashionable tiny pout—were most definitely the same. She wondered what other, less tangible, things she had inherited.
'What mechanism is in place to determine what we inherit to which extend from either of our parents? And how much of who we are as a person can be laid at nature's door, as opposed to nurture?'
(Excerpt from the diary of Emily Thornton)
Edith had bidden her time until the girls' French lesson was finished and 'Mademoiselle' was once again looking after the younger Lennox siblings. Emily wasn't in general expected to participate in Vivienne's lessons, except for French because her father believed that the additional practice might come in handy on their travels and, furthermore, once she was to enter finishing school in the francophone part of Switzerland.
But now Edith stood there before her, gently reminding Emily that there was a duty to perform...
"Poor Dixon has been sadly losing her faculties of late," she explained. "Therefore she may not realise who you actually are, but you do look so much like your dear mother—and as Dixon mostly lives in the past these days—that it may give her pleasure just to see that face of yours."
Reluctantly Emily rose from her chair, resigned to the inevitable. She followed Edith down the back stairs to the servants' common room. Once, when she was younger, the basement had been Emily's favourite haunt during her visits at Harley Street, a warm busy refuge filled with the delicious smells of fresh baking and with people ready to slip her the odd sweet or two. But since she had outgrown such indulgences, she never went there.
The common room adjacent to the light well at the front of the building was exactly how she remembered it. It was dominated by the large table where the servants took their meals and rested in between their duties; and it was here that they found Dixon, seated by one of the windows and busy with needle and a coarse sock—but whether the needlework resulted in any actual mending was anyone's guess.
Her stout body swathed in tidy servants' garb was testimony of the fact that the Lennox household took the task of keeping her in her dotage serious. Her face bore but a few lines, perhaps from being so plump, but her eyes were unfocussed and rheumy. She slowly raised her head when she saw them approach.
"How are you today, Dixon?" Edith said in a kindly voice.
"Pah!" the old woman huffed and then was quiet again; until her eyes caught sight of Emily. "Have you been out taking baskets, miss?"
Emily looked at her cousin for guidance. "Taking baskets of food to the poor, she means... Your mamma was in the habit of doing so," Edith explained in a whisper. "I just knew seeing you would bring back some memories."
"What am I to say?" Emily asked just as softly.
"No need to lie, but don't try to correct her overmuch. It would only agitate her."
"Well... um," Emily started addressing Dixon, "I spent the morning reading, but I may go out later in the day."
"Mind not to go by Millers Lane, Miss Margaret. The path is boggy after the rain and will ruin your petticoats."
Emily cast another questioning sideways look.
"Helstone, I suppose," Edith supplied. "The place where your mother grew up."
After a few more exchanges in the same vein, Edith eventually took pity of her charge. "Time for your meal soon, Dixon. I saw Cook prepare gooseberry tart on our way in. After your own recipe... You do like gooseberries, don't...?"
Dixon brusquely interrupted her, reaching out a hand to stop Emily from moving away. "Don't go to the black man!" Her voice was urgent. "He will do you no good."
"I... I won't," Emily stammered, taken aback by Dixon's sudden fierceness. She gave her cousin another look, but Edith only shook her head in bemusement.
Dixon struggled out of her chair. "Wait, miss," she said. "I've got something for you... It's yours... You'll have it back now—" She shuffled out of the room.
"Sorry for that, Emily," Edith said. "Not all days are the same; some are quite a lot better. We seem to have caught her at one of the worse ones."
"Can we go now, please?" Emily pleaded.
"Just a moment, dear. Let's wait and see if she's really only gone to fetch something... If she wanders further afield, I might have to alert one of the maids to go look for her."
Emily nodded, looking miserable. Having hardly ever encountered sickness and decline within her circle of family and friends—she wouldn't call Aunt Frances's fancied ailments an actual 'sickness'—the present situation was rather more affecting her than she should have imagined beforehand. The last time she had seen Dixon, the old maid had been fussy and just a little muddled, but still well aware of who she was: Emily, her former mistress's daughter.
A heavy tread along the corridor announced Dixon's return. "There you go, Miss Margaret," she puffed, pressing a small volume bound in tan calf leather into her hands. "'Tis yours... Don't show it to the black man!"
"I won't," Emily said again, trying to sound reassuring. "I'll keep it secret from him."
"Secret... Yes. A secret... good." She shooed Emily towards the door. "Off you go, miss. I must attend the mistress now."
Grateful for the dismissal Emily rushed along the corridor to the back stairs. On the first landing she waited for Edith to catch up with her. She held up the book. "What am I to do with this?"
"By the look of it, this may very well have belonged to your mother at some point," Edith said, flicking it open. It was a notebook, but the scrawl didn't look like a lady's cursive. "I'm afraid, Dixon used it for her 'lists'... She won't have any need of it any longer, poor dear. You might as well keep it."
Emily was about to decline, unwilling to have the outpourings of a failing mind in her possession, but eventually the fact that the book itself might have belonged to her mother won out.
Back in the relative quiet of the morning room—one of the maids was laying the table for lunch in the neighbouring dining room—Emily had a closer look at the notebook. It started out sensibly enough with a list of names and addresses of doctors, tradesmen, and various suppliers of millinery. But a few pages into it, the lists became more erratic and were spread all over the book, with empty pages in between. Emily found entries such as 'Kippers: fish, they stink' until they were no real lists at all any more, just lines upon lines of squiggles and scrawls of 'pretend lists', the likes of which young children drew up when they were playing 'school'.
It was thoroughly disheartening. Dejectedly, Emily snapped shut the book, went to her bedroom, and buried it in the depths of her wardrobe.
For more than a week Meret didn't find the time to go to Ashley Library during their opening hours. Besides the regular samples that needed testing, she had to go through the motions again with an earlier batch, after an assessment of results was found inconclusive and the risk of procedural errors needed to be eliminated. All of which resulted in her repeatedly working late hours.
Finally, on Thursday, the second week after her tour of Marlborough Mills, she managed to take time off in lieu after lunch and, going by bike as usual, headed off to the library. It was a pleasant ride on a former towpath along the canal that lead directly to a half commercial, half residential suburb.
Ashley Library turned out to be an uninspiring municipal building typical of the late 1970s on the outside, and the interior—mud-brown carpeting and fluorescent tubes for lighting—was equally dated. It was quite large and busy, though, even at this time of day, so Meret was happy that the reception staff managed to track down Sebastian's schoolmate Jackie—no surname given—for her with just a couple of calls. "She's going to come and pick you up," they told her.
A few minutes later a cheery voice called out to her, "It's Meret, right?"
"And you must be Jackie! Actually, I was expecting a bun and reading glasses," Meret said with a grin. "I thought they were the requisite outfit for librarians."
Jackie—lanky, dark-skinned, and with an ethnic hairstyle of braids and beads—laughed. "Sorry to disappoint. I'd better go get my pearls and twinset, I suppose." She was, in fact, wearing a fashionable dark trouser suit.
"Pleased to meet you," Meret said, extending a hand. "Sebastian's said to say hello."
"Ah... northern ways!" Jackie exclaimed, shaking hands. "Since I knew that you would turn up sooner or later, all Marlborough Mills documents jumped the queue and were catalogued by me in the meantime. So, what are you looking for exactly?"
"Anything concerning Emily Thornton, born in 1853 as daughter of John Thornton. In fact anything concerning her life prior to her marriage in Denmark at the age of thirty-seven... I know that her mother had died young, but I don't know of any siblings, or half-siblings... and who inherited the mill after John Thornton. Anything of a personal nature would be of particular interest."
"Well, she never held the deed of Marlborough Mills, so much's for sure... I would've come across the name, otherwise. And I can check for siblings with the records, if you like," Jackie suggested. "The rest's up to you, though. See, we don't do any research here; we just catalogue, so that the researchers can go on with their job... I wouldn't know what the heck's inside those documents."
"Can I get access to the Marlborough Mills papers?"
"Sure. After you've been issued a library pass—and paid the fee, that is... And you're not to take them out of the building, of course. So, if you're serious about it, we're going to see quite a bit of each other round here."
"Sounds good to me," Meret said. "When can I get started?"
By coming into work early every day, Meret managed to free up an hour in the afternoon she could spend at the library until their closing time.
The life of a person born 150 years before her own time didn't come in neat files, unless they were a person of interest—or a man, at the very least—she quickly realised. The catalogue didn't list any private correspondence, just business papers; and in the professional world of the Victorian age women were almost nonexistent. Although not entirely, as Meret learnt rather to her amazement.
Looking at the documents of ownership of Marlborough Mills, she found that, for a short time in 1852, one Margaret Hale had held the deed as the successor of Mr Adam Bell, of Oxford. It was the very Margaret Hale who, at the end of the same year, became Mrs John Thornton. Emily's mother.
Another intriguing find was a contract of tenancy for Marlborough Mills, issued in 1846, and naming John Thornton as the leaseholder. It was bundled up with some other documents, one of them a renewal of the aforementioned contract, dating from June 1852. And then there was a letter from a bank, notifying a Mr J. Thornton that the rates for a loan of £2,200 were in arrears, and that, barring immediate measures, the loan was to default by the end of the month, 30th September 1852.
Returning the documents to Jackie for the day, she said, "Seems like Mr John Thornton MP was quite the have-not—until he married some serious money."