Chapter One #2
The seal she used was her father’s. She carried the letter to the village herself the next morning, and Mr Tipps at the post office weighed it in his hand, observed that Yorkshire was a very long way off, and she agreed that it was.
Then she went home and waited, which is the hardest of all tasks a person can be set, and one women in her situation are set rather more often than most.
Her uncle Reginald arrived on the seventh day, well before any reply could have come, in the brisk manner of a man who had arranged her future to suit himself a good while before he troubled to come down and acquaint her with it.
He came in a hired chaise, with a case of papers and the general air of a man much inconvenienced by other people’s failure to die solvent; drank her tea; and declined the sugar, remarking that one ought to be sparing with what one could not easily replace, which she understood to be aimed at her and declined to feel.
“I have had a conversation with Mr Pettigrew,” he said.
“I do not believe I have the pleasure of knowing Mr Pettigrew.”
“You will. He is a gentleman of Hampshire, of comfortable means, with an estate near Salisbury and a settled wish to marry. He has agreed to look at you at Christmas.”
“To look at me.” She set down her cup with a care that cost her more than she allowed him to see. “As one looks at a horse.”
“As one looks at a prospective wife, Cordelia, which is a great deal more than a girl in your position has any business expecting. I will thank you to be sensible about it.”
“How old is Mr Pettigrew?”
“Six and fifty.”
She kept her face still over the small cold lurch the number gave her, and let a moment pass before she trusted her voice with the next question.
“And how many wives has he buried?”
Her uncle paused. She watched him weigh a lie, and then watched him conclude that she would discover the truth regardless. “Three, though the third was not widely announced,” he admitted, “and he would take it as a courtesy were the matter not raised.”
“I am sure he would.”
“He is respectable. He is willing to take you with the very little your father left and the still less your mother added to it, and he asks remarkably few questions about either, which, in your circumstances, you might learn to regard as a virtue rather than an insult. Think of him, Cordelia, as generosity wearing a somewhat elderly face.”
“And if I would rather not be looked at by Mr Pettigrew, at Christmas or in any other season?”
“Then you are at perfect liberty to support yourself,” her uncle said, rising and gathering up his case with the satisfaction of a man who has concluded a piece of business to his own advantage, “and I wish you joy of the attempt. The arrangement stands. He comes at Christmas. I advise you to be civil to him, grateful to me, and silent in general; three accomplishments your mother unaccountably neglected to cultivate in you.”
He left in the morning. Cordelia stood in the cold hall and listened to the chaise wheels die away down the lane, and thought about being looked at by a man of six and fifty who had buried three wives and preferred the third not be mentioned.
Then she went upstairs to read over a letter that no one had yet troubled to answer.
She walked to the village every morning after that.
Mr Tipps came to dread the sight of her, she could tell, though it was no fault of hers that he did.
He was a kind man with nothing to give her, and there is a particular wretchedness in being kind and empty-handed at the same moment.
Each morning, he searched his bag with rather more care than the bag required; each morning, he shook his head; and each morning, she thanked him as though he had done her a great service, which, in a manner of speaking, he had.
On the fourteenth morning, he left the bag shut.
“There is nothing, Miss Marchmont,” he said, very gently. “I am sorry. There is nothing, and I do not think now that there is going to be.”
“No,” she said. “I do not think there is going to be either.”
She had known for some days what she must do, and Mr Tipps’s gentleness only carried the knowledge from one room of her mind into another.
A letter could be ignored, lost, burnt, set aside by a secretary, never put before the man at all.
A woman on a doorstep was harder to overlook, and if Cordelia had any gift whatever, it was for being difficult to overlook.
That afternoon, she sold her mother’s garnet brooch at the inn for three pounds and seven shillings, which was a great deal less than twenty-six years of Sunday wearing had made it worth, and precisely the price of one inside seat on the northbound coach.
That night, she packed two gowns, her father’s Don Quixote, her mother’s drawstring pouch, the contract, the letters, and the half-pound of dried apricots she had been hoarding against Christmas.
She wrote to Henry at school to say she had gone north on family business, that he was not to worry, and that he was on no account to mention her absence to their uncle.
For Mrs Birling, she left a note saying she had gone to York, and that anyone who asked was to be told Mrs Birling did not know where, which had at least the merit of being true.
The coach left at six, in the dark, and she was on it: in the grey wool that was her best gown, the old pearl ring on its chain beneath her high collar, and three pounds and a few shillings standing between her and whatever Yorkshire turned out to be.
She watched Marchmont slide past the window until the village was behind her.
Then she put her hand to the chain at her throat, kept her eyes on the road, and spent no part of her remaining composure on a backward look.