The Baroness of Auchengray
XX
On the fourth morning, Elizabeth put on her coat and boots and went to see the village for herself, because she could not bear another day of being the only voice in a tower.
It was called Craighead — a mile south of the house along the coast road, a collection of fisher cottages and a chandler’s, a kirk and a factor’s office and an inn where the ale was reportedly good and the company was not. She had all of it from Mrs MacLeod over breakfast.
Falstaff came. He had not yet understood that he was not invited everywhere, and she had not yet had the heart to explain it to him.
The road was uneven and cold. The wind came off the sea with the flat indifference she was beginning to recognise as just this coast — not hostile, not welcoming, just air that bit no matter the season.
Falstaff disappeared into the gorse three times and returned twice muddy and once with something in his mouth that he declined to identify.
The village appeared around the headland’s shoulder all at once — low stone buildings the same grey as the cliffs, smoke from the chimneys, a boat pulled up on the shingle.
She bought thread at the chandler’s. She had no need of thread. She had gone into the chandler’s because she needed to go somewhere, to do something ordinary, to be a person who did things rather than a person who sat in a library waiting for dark.
The woman behind the counter was perhaps fifty, with a curious look that she deployed without apology. “You’ll be the new lady up at Auchengray,” she said.
“I will,” Elizabeth said.
“Mrs Fraser,” the woman said, as if it were information Elizabeth ought already to have had. “We’ve wondered when we’d see you. The laird doesnae come down himself.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “He is in mourning. He does not like company.”
Mrs Fraser nodded as though this explained everything, which it apparently did, because she moved on to the price of thread and the weather and the matter of Falstaff, who had wedged himself behind a display of rope and was regarding the cat on the windowsill with a hopefulness the cat was not reciprocating.
When Elizabeth stepped back into the road, another woman hailed her from across it — broad-shouldered, shawl pinned tight, basket on her arm.
“Mrs Carlisle? I’m Mrs Garrow. My sister’s girl comes up on wash-days. She said I’d know ye by the dog.”
Elizabeth looked down at Falstaff, who was attempting to eat a piece of seaweed. “He does make identification easier.”
Mrs Garrow laughed. “If the laird’s keeping tae himself, folk will look tae you. That’s the way of it.”
The remark was plain enough to pass for casual, but Elizabeth carried it home and considered it all afternoon.
If she was seen, if she answered questions, if she sat in the hall and received the people who had business with Auchengray, then her husband’s seclusion ceased to look odd and became merely temperament.
He had brought a wife into the house, and a wife in the house made the whole arrangement seem more natural. So he had told himself, perhaps. It was not a foolish calculation, and it answered at least one of the questions she had as to why.
The factor came the following week and introduced himself as Mr MacAulay, a careful man somewhere in his sixties, long enough in his post that the change in tenancy still sat slightly uneasy on him.
“The laird is well, I hope,” Mr MacAulay said, taking the chair Mrs MacLeod indicated and keeping his hat very straight upon his knee.
“He keeps to himself,” Elizabeth said. “He has had a difficult year. He does not receive visitors.”
“Of course, of course.” Mr MacAulay accepted the tea Mrs MacLeod brought without looking at it. “Mrs Carlisle, if I may — there are one or two matters of the estate that will require the baron’s attention before the quarter. The Inverurie timber, and the matter of the east field drainage—”
“Send me the documents,” Elizabeth said. “I will see that they reach him.”
Mr MacAulay looked at her and revised an assumption. “You take an interest in the estate, then?”
“I take an interest in not making your work harder than it already is.”
That won her the smallest shift in his face — not respect, precisely, but the beginning of regard. He drank his tea, set out the particulars with greater directness than before, and left apparently satisfied.
She had just managed her husband’s affairs. She did not know who her husband was.
Two days later, the minister called. Reverend Innes was a lean man with a long, patient face and the air of having spent twenty years persuading fishermen not to quarrel over doctrine.
He stayed half an hour, discovered that she could speak of books and parish collections and the weather without disgracing anybody, and left with the promise that Mrs Garrow would call again and that Mrs Fraser’s niece might be usefully directed towards service if ever an additional maid were wanted.
By the time he was gone Elizabeth had, without any deliberate effort, acquired three names, one small history of the village, and the first faint outline of a life in it.
Jane had had a brief letter from her two days after her arrival — in her own hand, saying she was safely at Auchengray, the journey uneventful, more to follow when there was more to say.
Elizabeth had written it sitting in her bedchamber in the afternoon with Falstaff across her feet.
It had been everything that could be fitted on a single sheet and nothing she had wanted to say.
Now, with nearly a fortnight behind her, she sat down to give her sister the fuller account she had promised.
Dear Jane,
You will have had my first note by now. The house, as I said, is extraordinary, but extraordinary wants particulars, and you shall have them.
Auchengray is a tower house, a real one, four hundred years old.
Mrs MacLeod tells me that the laird who built it rode with Robert the Bruce, but I have learned the tales around here can be as tall as the towers.
Regardless, it is quite imposing, with walls that make our sitting-room walls at Longbourn look apologetic, and hidden passages in them, and the sea directly below the headland.
The whole is built from grey stone that has no interest in me, or in anyone who has ever been here, or in anyone who ever will be.
I cannot decide whether that is comforting or terrible so I have decided it is both.
The weather is not what I was promised. There has not yet been the relentless wet grey Aunt warned me to expect. The days have been cold and bright and impossibly windy, and I have begun to respect rather than resent the wind off the sea. I do not go out without a proper coat any longer.
Jane, I have a library. All my own. Three walls of it, floor to ceiling, and a fourth of windows facing the sea.
I sat down and counted the shelves the afternoon of my third day because I did not know what else to do with myself, and stopped at three hundred and twenty volumes on the east wall alone.
I decided I did not wish to know the whole total because that somehow ruins the thrill of discovery.
I fancy I shall have time enough to read them all.
I have been reading for days and have not yet made a significant impression on it.
Papa would have wept. Under the sea-facing windows, there is a seat broad enough to stretch out on, which is where I spend my mornings.
I have a dog. His name is Falstaff, which you will understand immediately.
He is five months old and roughly the size of a small horse, and has clearly decided he was born for me specifically and will brook no argument on the point.
He knocked Mrs MacLeod’s bread off the table on his second day, and she has not yet entirely forgiven him, but she feeds him from the kitchen regardless, which tells you everything you need to know about Mrs MacLeod.
She speaks to me as little as the duties of her position permit, and does not speak to me at all on the subject of the master.
I am, to her, a question not yet answered.
I do not mind. She is the kind of woman who lets tea appear without comment and leaves me alone, and after everything that has happened, that is more than I had hoped for.
The household is very small. Mrs MacLeod is housekeeper, cook, and judge in most matters.
Her husband Angus is steward, valet, stablehand, and anything else that requires a man.
There is a girl called Isa who comes up from the village on wash-days and speaks to me in single-syllable Gaelic on principle.
I understand a quarter of it and reply in whole English sentences on principle of my own.
We have arrived at a friendliness that does not depend on either of us being understood.
Yesterday, I attended the kirk. Reverend Innes preached forty-three minutes on the subject of patience, which was exactly as many as I could bear, and half the congregation turned and inspected me with the same frank attention I had in the chandler’s and the baker’s and every other shop I have visited.
I think I passed. They stood for me when I came in and when I left, and Mrs Garrow gripped my elbow at the door and told me I would do.
I have not enjoyed being taken in hand so much since Aunt Gardiner.
The food is the strangest part. I have eaten more smoked fish in a fortnight than I had eaten in my life.
I have learned to like oatcakes. The chicken is good when there is some.
Beef is rare. Game comes in when Angus shoots it, and I have given up any expectation of asparagus until the spring.
I had one Yorkshire pudding on my first night, ordered specially, I was told, by my husband.
You will recognise that as a kindness. You may also recognise it as the kind of thing that gives me pause.
I walk every day. I could not have told you a year ago what walking meant until I had tried it on this coast. The headland runs north for miles, and Falstaff and I have gone further along it every morning.
Two miles at first, now closer to four, and the plan is to walk the whole way to the next village before the weather turns.
The wind makes my ears ache. I come back having felt more awake than I did at any point in the last three months, and I think this is because at Longbourn and at Gracechurch Street, I was never alone and was never quiet long enough to search out the shards of grief.
Here I am alone for most of the day. I am beginning to find that I have opinions about how I want to spend my hours.
And now, because I know you have been waiting for me to come to him, my husband.
Jane, you were frightened for me when I took this offer, and you were right to be.
I was frightened for me too, under everything.
I cannot tell you how much of the fear I had prepared myself for turned out to be needed and how much did not.
What I can tell you is that he asks nothing of me that I have not agreed to.
He does not come to my bed. He does not raise his voice.
He does not, so far as I can see, lie. There are things he will not tell me, and he says so, and we have both agreed that I may ask whatever I wish and he will answer what he can.
Whether I believe everything he has told me is a different question, and one I am still working on.
He keeps to the upper rooms. I have never seen his face, nor heard his proper voice, because he speaks only in whispers and our conversations happen in the dark.
I know this will be harder for you to read than I wish it were.
Please trust me, Jane: I am not locked in with a monster.
I am married to a very careful man who has been made so by something he has not yet told me about, and who has given me considerably more liberty than the terms of our arrangement required him to give.
He who comes down each evening to ask me how my day has been and listens to the answer as though my answer were the only question he had asked all day.
He is not unkind. He has given me more than I asked for and asked for less than he was owed, and I believe him when he tells me he means me no harm. You were not wrong to let me do this. I think you may sleep tonight, knowing that.
Give my love to Mama and to Kitty and Lydia. Tell Mary her book of sermons arrived safely with my trunk, and I will read them when I can. And Jane, did Blackwood accept the broken engagement without incident? I am asking you directly, so that you cannot evade it by pretending I had not.
Write soon. I am very far away.
Lizzy
She sealed the letter. Below her, somewhere in the walls, a door she could not see opened and closed, and she set the pen down and stayed where she was, listening for him on the stair, which was not a thing she had told Jane either.