Chapter 10
Ten
There had been no snowfall yet this winter.
In the darkness, Arabella wrapped her woolen shawl around her shoulders tightly and walked the few yards between her small cottage and the slightly larger cottage that housed the school.
She would light the turf fire in the large undivided schoolroom so it might be warm if any of the girls braved the cold and dark.
Then she would return to her own cottage for her breakfast. This far north, this early in the year, the sun would not rise until after half past eight.
Maggie Gunn, her only servant, often told her that she, Miss Lovelock, should not be doing lighting the fire in the schoolhouse. Maggie would tend to it.
“Your job, Maggie, is the cottage and me. My job is the school and my pupils. I have learned how to set and light the fire, and I will do just that.”
Maggie, a stout thirty-year-old widow whose husband had died in the Napoleonic Wars as part of the 79th Regiment of the Foot, went back to stirring her pot of groats, shaking her head.
Arabella had been in the village of Dunburn for two years. When she had fled London, she had first gone to Edinburgh and then Glasgow, where she decided to send the Middlewich carriage back to London. The coachman had begged her to tell him her plans.
“Your father will have my head,” he said.
“He’s not my father. Tell the duke I will write to my sisters.”
She laid some intentional misdirection for anyone who might follow her to Glasgow.
A ticket bought in a conspicuous manner for a ship going to Liverpool, a main point of departure for ships going to America and Canada.
Then she had taken an overcrowded mail coach from Glasgow to Inverness.
She had been very lucky to have escaped with no insult to her person or her property.
Finally, a privately hired coach farther north, up into the county of Caithness. The Highlands. Where Bailebrae lay.
She told herself it was a coincidence. That she was trying to go as far north as she could. To get as far away from London as she could. That she had gotten out of the coach with her two trunks because she had liked the look of the place and she was tired of traveling.
She had chosen to settle—no, not in Bailebrae, the home village of a certain red-haired doctor—but in the larger village of Dunburn, nestled by the mouth of the river. But Bailebrae was not far away.
She visited Bailebrae during her first weeks in the area. She asked a few questions of some older residents of the village, hoping she did not betray the intensity of her interest.
Aye, there had been a quiet redheaded boy Alasdair Andrews from these parts, twenty years back, raised by his aunt and uncle, both long dead now. Nae, Alasdair had still been a boy when he had gone off to some city after the aunt and uncle had died—was it Edinburgh?—and had nae been back since.
That settled it. He had not been back in twenty years. This place had no hold on him. She would never see him here.
The little flame of longing she had kept burning for a year and a half was snuffed out. Completely. She put all thoughts of Alasdair Andrews aside.
Except she saw and heard him everywhere. In the red-haired girls who came to her school. In the green eyes. In the burrs. In the height of the men of the village, Highlanders all. He was all around her, and, maddeningly, he was not there at all.
And now she had not seen him in over three and a half years, and she could not really remember what he looked like. Not even a little bit, she told herself.
Her money was her own. That had been part of her father’s will.
As long as she did not marry, she could use it as she wished.
And she had wished to use a part of it to make her school.
The building of the school already existed; it was the twin of the sandstone cottage she lived in.
She bought both cottages and the land they sat on, just outside Dunburn on the main road.
She had the downstairs of one cottage fitted out as a school room.
For the last year, it had been a school for girls.
Such a thing had never been heard of. Not in this part of the world.
Arabella found a surprising ally in Boyd Cormack, the minister of the church in Dunburn. He stood up to the elders of the church, saying girls had as much need to read the word of God as boys.
“In fact, more,” he said. “Are there nae more women than men in the kirk on Sundays? Let the women read the texts themselves, and they will bring His word into their own cottages. We will be the better for it.”
Arabella did not tell Mr. Cormack her purpose was not to teach the girls to read the Bible. She wanted something more for them. But she didn’t know what it was.
At first, she imagined the school as a place where she would teach the girls what she herself had learned from her governesses—reading, yes, but also reciting, writing in a pretty hand, French, geography and history, arithmetic, drawing, singing.
There was no pianoforte to be had, but it didn’t matter.
Arabella had never had her sister Mary’s skill and would find it difficult now to play even a simple piece.
And how would one teach a schoolroom of girls on one instrument?
But then Arabella had been faced with the question of what might the girls do with such knowledge. Geography and drawing were near to useless unless they became governesses themselves. But who would hire Highland girls as governesses?
All her students spoke Gaelic, and most spoke some English.
Since her Gaelic was rudimentary and she taught in English, very quickly all the girls became proficient in English.
Yes, there was work on letters and numbers in the schoolroom.
Some singing and drawing. Some attempt to bring a larger world to this small place, including stories from myths and history.
But, in truth, Arabella spent much of her teaching time on cleanliness and manners.
Because the girls were young, achingly young, with none older than ten years and most under seven. She wondered out loud to Maggie where the older girls might be, and Maggie told her they needed to be of use in the cottages and farms.
Sometimes Arabella would see older girls passing on the road on market days, and she thought she saw some longing in their faces when they looked at the school.
One blustery spring afternoon, Mr. Cormack stopped in her cottage and caught her with her needlework in front of the fire.
She rarely embroidered these days, but this had been an afternoon when she had longed to sit and take up the small needle and thread and let her mind wander while she sewed something sweet and delicate.
“Ye should teach the girls this,” he said in his blunt way, tracing the fine white-on-white pattern with his clean finger. “They might be able to make some money and keep the wolf from the door. The girls could work on it of an evening.”
So she had.
At first, the girls’ pieces were filled with coarse stitches and mistakes and bits of grime.
She bought some of the earliest work done and now had a trunk full of these beginners’ pieces.
But she taught the girls to wash their hands before taking up the muslin.
She showed them not to use knots to fasten their threads but instead to catch the ends under stitches so the pattern would lay flat and be almost as smooth and pretty on one side as it was on the other.
She was patient, and, in time, they became patient with themselves and the thread and the needle and the patterns.
And, after some months, the pieces—napkins, christening gowns, tablecloths—were good enough to send to Inverness and then to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and some money flowed from these cities up north to the families of her girls.
Because, of course, the money went to their families, to their fathers.
She had wondered if there might be some way she could do for the girls what her father had done for her, give them some degree of liberty by having their own money.
But she came up against law and tradition.
She only hoped their fathers were using the money to benefit the whole family, including the girls.
She wrote once a month to Mary and to Harry.
She did not tell her sisters where she was but told them to write to her in care of a bookseller in Inverness.
And although she did not write to her mother, her mother wrote to her, surely having gotten the name of the bookseller from one of Arabella’s sisters.
Tell me where you are, dearest. I long to see you, Catherine wrote. Someday, you will have your own daughter or son, and you will know how cruel it is to keep a mother from a child, no matter how old that child is.
Her mother was wrong. Arabella would never have a child. Never. She was apart from that now. She would never marry. No one would want her. And she had nothing to give a child. Nothing but her own bad blood, the same blood her mother had given her.
She knew she had ruined herself. It was a mistake to think someone else had done it to her. Giles had lied and used her cruelly, yes. But she had been stupid and swayed by the throb between her legs. Her sisters would not have done what she had. It was her fault.
But even as she told herself that she needed to shoulder all the blame, she knew she did not write to Catherine because she also blamed her mother.
It was her mother who had made her so reckless. So easily tempted and led by her desire. Arabella had inherited Catherine’s strong passions, her wanton behavior, her lust. And then Catherine had sheltered Arabella, treated her as a child for far too long.
Her mother had done everything wrong.
Arabella should have been taught she would need to restrain herself. But no. She had been allowed to think her desire was infallible and that she would want the right man.
Her mother had failed her. And, therefore, she should be punished.