Unnatural Issue Page 9

  Then again, Susanne didn’t have a “best” gown. Her “best” skirt, a good five years old, had gotten irretrievably stained this winter after a fall into mud. There might be some old gowns still in the attic that could be cut up and made into a new one, but what with the spring cleaning and all, no one had gotten a chance to look. And it wasn’t as if she needed good clothing all that badly; the only time she wore it was when she went to church on Sunday, and by her reckoning, if God didn’t care that she was more than half pagan, He wasn’t going to care that she didn’t have a “good” skirt and waist to wear to His house.

  So all she had were the things she worked in, the most presentable of which was a severely simple thing that probably made her look as shapeless as a tree trunk. There was only so much they could do, piecing together whatever fabric they could out of things that had been stored in the attic for decades.

  Before Susanne could say anything, Agatha took the worn old brush from her, and brushed her hair and bound it into a twisted knot at the nape of her neck so tight it almost made Susanne’s eyes water. “Haven’t even got a bit of ribbon,” Agatha fretted. “Well! At least he’ll be seeing what a pretty pass he’s put his own daughter to, and Prudence with better gowns than tha’ has!”

  Susanne tried to put on an apron as well; Agatha snatched the garment out of her hand. “Nay! Tha’ bain’t a servant! Tha’rt th’ daughter of the house!” And flinging the apron aside, Agatha herded her out of her room, out of the kitchen, past the servants’ sitting room, into the best parlor, then up the stairs to the forbidden floor, fussing and clucking the entire time. Her father’s rooms were down the hall on the right, but all the rest of the rooms on this floor were closed up too, so that the gloomy hall presented a vista of closed doors all the way to the end.

  But once they reached the door that Susanne had never seen open, Agatha stopped and stepped back, nervously.

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” Susanne whispered.

  “Nay! ’Tis not my place!” Agatha replied, aghast. “Go! Tha’rt wanted, asked for!”

  The hallway was very gloomy, the stairs behind them more so. The only light came from a single window at the end of the hall, and the entirety was floored and paneled in dark wood. Nervously, Susanne put her hand on the door handle; the door moved at her touch.

  She wanted to hesitate, delay—but she had the feeling that if she didn’t move, and soon, Agatha was going to shove her from behind. So she pushed the door open completely and walked slowly into the room beyond.

  It was almost as gloomy as the hall; all the windows were heavily curtained: velvet outer curtains, gauzy inner ones. The velvet curtains were pulled slightly aside. The man who lived in these rooms was nothing more than a man-shaped silhouette against the white of the inner curtains. Susanne swallowed hard.

  She expected the room to smell musty. It didn’t, though it did have a peculiar scent to it. Heavy perfume with more than a hint of smoke; it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it wasn’t particularly pleasing, either.

  The door closed behind her, leaving her alone in the room with this strange man. Her father. A father she had never even seen and who could only have seen her from these windows. A father she still couldn’t see.

  Slowly the shadow-shape turned away from the windows and toward her. “Susanne,” her father said. His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it much; a little hoarse and rough. But it wasn’t the thin, querulous, peevish sound she had expected; it wasn’t an old man’s voice. This was a strong, low tenor, with the inflection of a man who expects to be obeyed and has every means he cared to use to assert his authority. She shivered a little. “You would be . . . my daughter, then.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, forcing herself to speak in normal tones and not in a whisper.

  “My daughter, Susanne.”

  “Yes, sir,” she repeated.

  “And I have left you all these years to be treated as a servant. How you must hate me.” He paused, gauging her reaction.

  “I don’t know you to love or hate you, sir,” she replied, with blunt Yorkshire honesty.

  “Well, that would fairly well sum it up, wouldn’t it?” he replied. “Come. Sit down. At least we can begin to rectify that.”

  Nervously she moved farther into the room and took a seat, sitting bolt upright, feet and knees pressed together, hands folded in her lap.

  She still couldn’t see him. He kept his back to the window, with her facing it and him. All she could see was a shape. Despite the promise of his first words, he spent the next hour or so questioning her. Not that she would have had the temerity to put questions to him, but he gave her no chance to. The questions seemed to come at random, too. First he quizzed her like a schoolmaster on the subject of her education. Who had taught her? What books had she read? She could do sums, but did she know geometry? She burned with humiliation as she unveiled her ignorance. If only he’d questioned her about magic! She could hold her own, there. But he didn’t. In fact, if he even realized that she was an Earth Master, he gave no sign of it.

  What about geography? He questioned her ruthlessly on that subject; she was only able to vaguely indentify other countries as being off to the east, somewhere, or the west, and then only because she’d read stories about them in the papers or had occasionally seen a map.

  What about history, then? There she was on slightly firmer ground as long as it was nothing to do with anything outside the shores of England. And books, she knew, so long as they were in the part of the library that she and the servants had access to.

  “Can you embroider?” he asked. She shook her head dumbly. “Sing? Play the piano or the harp? Play tennis? Ride? Any skill at archery?” Again, she shook her head, wondering at him. When would she ever have had the time or the teachers for such things? But these were all the accomplishments of young women of her class—she knew this, because of what she read in the papers.

  “Well. What do you do?” he asked, finally.

  “Plain sewing, sir,” she replied promptly. “Plain cooking. Washing, ironing, mending. Cleaning up. Milking, making butter and cheese. Laundry—”

  She was about to say “and work the Earth Magic for this land” when he interrupted her. “Enough,” he ordered, holding up his hand. “There will be no more of that. You are my daughter, and the daughter of the house does not scrub pots. You will be a lady now. I sent my solicitor a note; there will be a new wardrobe arriving for you as soon as he can procure it in York. There will be a better one coming later, when you can be fitted for it.”

  She looked down at her lap to hide her frown. A new wardrobe? Well, that would be fine, and in her heart of hearts she had often wished she had a pretty gown or two—not the sort of thing she saw in the newspapers, of course, but something that hadn’t been cobbled together out of whatever she and Agatha could find in the attic. Something of new fabric, something made by someone whose idea of style was somewhere in this century. And perhaps . . . a hat. She had never owned a hat that wasn’t made of straw she braided herself. A real hat of felt, with a ribbon and some feathers. And a pretty white gown with lace. Even Prudence had one of those for summer. But surely Mrs. Pennyfair down in the village was perfectly capable of—

  “—and then in a school for young ladies,” he was saying, as she realized he was still speaking. “You’ll learn French, music, dancing, all the things a girl of your station should know. That should take about two years. That will give me time to reopen acquaintance with the rest of the neighborhood and shake off the habits of a hermit. Then we can introduce you to those you should have known all these years.”

  She forced herself not to look up in shock. Sent away to a school for young ladies? But—if I am off elsewhere, how can I possibly tend the land?

  Then, with a start, she realized that she wouldn’t have to. Her father would see to it. He had been an Earth Master for longer than she had been alive. And if he was going to do all these other things, then—

  Then it fol
lowed that he was going to take up his duties again.

  This should all have been very good news indeed. Her father was going to come out of his self-imposed isolation, and, after all, this was exactly what he should have been doing. The blight on the Manor would be lifted at long last. She wouldn’t have to keep the rest of the land walled off from what he was doing, and that was more than half the work she was put to. She was going to experience a complete reversal of fortune. New clothing, new lessons—no more servants’ work—lying abed to eight of a morning if she chose. An entire new life.

  A father; something she had never known . . .

  And she still had not seen his face.

  With his next words, he confirmed that this had been deliberate.

  “It will take me some time to accustom myself to this,” he said from the window, where he still stood. “So I will beg your indulgence, but this probably will be the last time you are in these rooms for some time. I am not used to the company of my fellow humans, and less accustomed to the idea of having a daughter. I know what I should do in abstract, of course, but . . . truly, the mere sight of you fills me with trepidation. It will take me a goodly while before I can face strangers with equanimity, and we are both strangers to one another. So, you may go now. I will see to it that your every need is taken care of, as I should have been doing. The housekeeper has been opening up the suite of rooms that should have been yours.”

  The shadow reached out and tugged on something. A bell rang, muffled by walls and distance; she recognized it as the one hanging in the kitchen that he rarely used to summon Agatha.

  “My solicitor will be arriving with Miss Susanne’s new wardrobe this afternoon,” he said without preamble when Agatha appeared at the door. “Take her to the rooms I had you open for her. Assign one of the maids to act as her lady’s maid for now. Susanne, in an hour or so, Agatha will bring you your first assignments; I think I can remember enough from my own school days to set you lessons for a while.” He chuckled dryly. “You have a great deal of catching up to do, and the sooner you start, the better.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, since that seemed to be a dismissal. She got up and followed Agatha out; the moment that the door closed, she turned to her old protector and mentor, with an attempt at a joke hovering at her lips.

  But before she could say anything, Agatha spoke. “Come right this way, Miss,” she said, quite as if she had never nursed Susanne through scraped knees and burned hands and taught her everything from letters to laundry. “I’ve got your new rooms all aired out and lovely. I hope you’ll like them.”

  The formality of it knocked the breath right out of her, and with the feeling that the bottom had dropped right out of the world, she followed Agatha to the end of the hall, to commence what was beginning to feel like an exile.

  6

  THERE was a white dress with lace—in fact, there were several. These seemed to be the sort of thing that the solicitor thought a young lady should wear in the summer. There were three summer skirts and three winter skirts and boxes of shirtwaists and all manner of undergarments that bewildered both her and Agatha, never mind Prudence, who couldn’t imagine wearing all that clothing at once. For that matter, neither could Susanne, and in the end she did without most of them.

  She wished she could have done without the corsets, but none of the skirts and only half of the shirtwaists would fit until she had her middle squeezed in one. For some reason, the white dresses had been cut on more generous lines, so those were what she was wearing until she could alter some of the other things. The solicitor had been uncertain of her size, so two of the skirts were too long. That meant she could alter from the top and enlarge the waistband. She had never worn a corset before this. And at the moment, she was in total sympathy with the Rational Dress movement.

  She was working on one of the skirts now, while puzzling her way through a child’s French lesson book. Despite not having anything she would have called “real” work to do—though certainly altering her clothing was work—her last two days had been very, very full.

  It had begun shortly after she’d been shown her new rooms—two rooms and a closet as large as the place she was using as a bedroom now. The windows had been wide open, the room dusted, and the bed stripped and remade with fresh linen. She had stared around, dumbfounded and feeling very much as if she should have had a dustpan and a broom in her hand. These couldn’t be hers . . .

  The very first thing that Agatha had insisted on was that she take a bath—a bath in a huge cast-iron tub that Agatha and the others had laboriously filled with hot water lugged up from the kitchen, not a bath in a basin or under the yard pump while all the men were shooed away and the females took it in turns to bathe or guard. Her hair had been washed, and she was glad that she took scissors to it on a regular basis, for at least it hadn’t taken all day to dry. The new clothing turned up while she was bathing, and when she emerged, pink and tingling, it was to find a bewildering choice laid out in the bedroom.

  It was only today, with the aid of advertisements in the newspapers and occasional magazine that found its way here, that Susanne had managed to puzzle out everything that she was expected to wear. And clearly, the solicitor had just gone into a shop and told a clerk to completely outfit a young lady.

  The first layer was a chemise. This was something even the poorest wore, and most of the poor used it as a nightgown too. Then came an article to which the stockings were clipped. Silk stockings, not limp cotton or heavy wool. Susanne wasn’t quite certain what other girls and women wore, but she never wore stockings in the summer, and in the winter, she wore wool ones she had knitted herself and she tied them up to a band of fabric around her waist. Nothing like this elegant thing.

  Then came the wretched corset, which fitted under the breast, then hip pads, to make the waist look even smaller, objects which had given her no end of confusion. She hadn’t been certain if they were to go on the bum, like a bustle, or be stuffed into the front of the chemise to augment her bosom!

  Then came a pair of drawers and then a corset cover, which made the instrument of torture look pretty and dainty. Then one or more petticoats. Then, finally, the outer garments. Small wonder that Prudence, who knew only of a chemise and a pair of drawers, had been confused by them all. “Town women,” except for very poor ones, wore corsets, but Susanne suspected that Prudence and Patience had never seen one. She certainly had not until now, except in advertisements.

  And certainly Prudence had had no idea you were supposed to wear all that, and Susanne had decided that she simply wasn’t going to do so. If she got sent to this school, well, she could do it then, but not now. There was no reason to; who would see her and know? She certainly didn’t need to impress anyone here at the Manor.

  That first day, with Agatha and Prudence both puzzled by all of the clothing, she had adopted that measure, much to their relief. Agatha knew what the corset was all about, of course—in fact, she probably wore one herself, since she was several cuts above a plain little Yorkshire farm lass who ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten a place at the Manor years ago, much less been pressed into service as a lady’s maid. But Agatha was extremely reluctant to lace Susanne into the thing, and poor Prudence hadn’t the least notion how.

  They tried, of course, but the results were unsatisfactory at best and excruciating at worst, and Susanne asserted her rank for the first time, ever, and said she wasn’t wearing the wretched thing. And that was that. The other two gave up with visible relief.

  By then, it was suppertime, and before she could even get out of the door of her rooms to go down to the kitchen and join the others, Patience appeared with a tray, which she put down on a little table in the sitting-room. The others vanished, leaving her staring at it glumly.

  She ate her supper of course, every last crumb. She couldn’t possibly be annoyed with them; after all, it wasn’t their fault that there were rules about how the gentry were to be treated, and it wasn’t their fault that her fath
er would probably fly into a rage and dismiss anyone he suspected of treating her with anything less than servile respect. So she couldn’t be annoyed and she couldn’t blame them, and even though this was enough to make her spirits sink very low indeed, she wasn’t going to insult Cook by not eating it all.

  She was just grateful that it didn’t occur to anyone that Prudence should come up here and help her get undressed. Since she hadn’t been corseted to immobility, she was perfectly capable of doing that for herself.

  Her first morning as “the daughter of the house” had begun strangely. She’d slept long, but not well, with uneasy dreams she couldn’t remember. She woke when Prudence arrived with yet another tray. It seemed that since her father wasn’t going to take meals with her, and she couldn’t take them with mere servants, she was going to be fed in isolation.

  She had begun picking out the first of the too-small garments to alter when Patience appeared, laden down with books and a handful of notepaper covered in careful script. Her father hadn’t forgotten those promised lessons....

  She felt more than a little appalled when she looked the books and notes over. Grammar, penmanship, French, and perspective drawing in the morning; geography, history, literature, and arithmetic in the afternoon. It is probably too late for you to learn to play the harp or piano, he had written, so you might as well master some smattering of plays and poetry so you may hold your own in conversation.

  There were exercises, which she was expected to send back to him via Agatha. She could only stare at it all in disbelief.

  But there was nothing for it; her father expected her to learn all this. So learn it she would. He would just have to be patient with her.