Chapter 2
The invitation was accepted. Jane wrote to Mrs Ashworth on Monday and by Wednesday Catherine had been to the dressmaker twice.
Jane attended the second visit herself. Left alone, Catherine would order something lovely and useless, and Jane would spend the winter wearing it.
“It suits me,” Jane said.
“It suits a wall,” Catherine said, holding a bolt of apricot muslin against her throat and raising her brows at Jane.
“If you’re cold, I shall not pity you.”
“You never pity anyone. That is hardly the point of pity.” But she set the muslin aside and chose a deeper amber instead, which was the right decision and which Jane knew Catherine had known all along.
There were other preparations. The school’s chalk was nearly gone, so Jane ordered enough to carry them through June, left instructions with the stationer’s on the account, and wrote to the society about the summer grant.
She went through the household accounts and settled what could be settled before they left. At her father’s direction she wrote to Hutchins to request further particulars on the Kensley matter and received in return a brief note saying he expected to have more to tell her by the end of the month.
On Friday evening Catherine asked whether she was looking forward to it.
“I expect it will be pleasant,” Jane said.
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
Catherine studied her a moment, then left it alone. Jane was not looking forward to it. She was preparing for it as she prepared for everything difficult: methodically, without sentiment.
* * *
On her last morning, she arrived early.
The room was cold when she unlocked it. The fire had not been laid and her breath showed pale in the air. She knelt, built the fire herself, and had it going before Mary arrived at half past seven.
Jane had written Mary three pages of instructions. Mary read them, folded them, and put them into her pocket without comment. This was exactly right.
“The Fletcher boy,” Jane said, once the children were seated.
“I know about the Fletcher boy,” Mary said.
“He will stop trying if you let him.”
“I won’t.”
“And the primer pages—”
“Jane.” Mary said it softly, but it stopped her as surely as a hand raised. “I will manage.”
Jane looked over the room. All eighteen children were there today, every bench filled.
Jane paused beside her.
“What is your name?”
“Bess,” the girl said. “Bess Hardy.”
“Can you write your name, Bess Hardy?”
A pause.
“Not yet.”
“You will,” Jane said. “Sit with Margaret.”
She taught the morning as she always did: moving from bench to bench, stopping where she was needed, asking questions when the answers felt like a performance and listening harder when they didn’t.
At noon she told them she would be gone a fortnight.
The room went still. A collective pause, each of them deciding whether this was good or bad.
Then William Fitch asked, “Will you come back?”
“Of course.”
“Mrs Davies left and didn’t.”
“I am not Mrs Davies,” Jane said. “I will be back before the month is out.”
She meant it fully, as she meant everything she said, without accounting for circumstances she had not yet met.
Afterward, while the others gathered coats and scarves, Thomas Fletcher came to her holding a folded paper.
She took it.
Inside was a drawing, careful and heavy-handed: the schoolhouse, recognisable by the windows, and two figures outside it.
“That’s you,” Thomas said, tapping the taller figure.
“I see.”
She folded it again, along the same lines he had made, and slipped it into her pocket.
She did not look at Mary when she left. If she had, Mary might have seen too much.
* * *
The Ashworth estate lay twelve miles off. They reached it in under two hours, Catherine filling most of the journey with conversation and Jane offering the quarter of her attention that could be spared without Catherine noticing.
Ashworth Park was larger than Claverton and displayed the fact openly. The house had been added to by three generations, each with slightly different ideas about what was impressive, and the effect was substantial rather than coherent.
The Ashworths had been watching.
Mrs Ashworth came forward at once, small and lively. She greeted them warmly and had them measured, Jane thought, before she had finished.
The house was full. Jane counted it almost without trying: voices from three rooms, coats hung thick along the pegs, a travelling box not yet claimed on the stair.
They were shown upstairs to adjoining rooms and told tea was waiting below whenever they pleased. Jane washed, repinned her hair, and went down.
The drawing room had the restless energy of country company gathered for amusement: familiar faces mixed with strangers, conversation rearranging itself as people moved between groups.
Catherine had already found conversation and laughter. Her amber dress caught the candlelight exactly as amber was meant to catch candlelight.
She was discussing the roads with Mrs Mercer when she heard French from across the room.
Not schoolroom French, pieced together from memory. Real French, quick and fluid, entirely at home.
She did not turn at once. She finished what she was saying to Mrs Mercer.
Then she looked.
He stood half-turned away, one hand moving as he mapped out the story in the air. Fair hair, curling at the collar. Blue eyes, catching hers for a moment, bright and quick.
It passed over her and moved on.
“A Frenchman,” Mrs Mercer said beside her, in the tone of passing along household weather. “A cousin’s acquaintance of Mrs Ashworth’s cousin, who is here with three others.”
“Yes,” Jane said.
She turned back to Mrs Mercer, and they resumed speaking of the roads.
* * *
Dinner numbered eighteen and more candlelight than seemed necessary.
Jane was seated between Colonel Pethwick, deaf in one ear and compensating badly by offering the other to the room, and Mr Dalton, who turned out to have very settled views on drainage.
Frédéric sat four places down on the opposite side, between Mrs Ashworth and the Ashworths’ daughter, who was seventeen and making conversation carefully.
He ate and talked easily. Nothing about it seemed cultivated. When he spoke to Mrs Ashworth, he gave her his full attention; when he answered the Ashworths’ daughter, he was considerate without condescension.
Between the first and second courses, something shifted at his end of the table. The man beside him attempted French, hesitated, recovered into English. Frédéric responded in English without making an event of it.
Jane realised she had lost Mr Dalton’s last three figures on drainage.
“The Beauvais region,” Frédéric was saying now in English, for the benefit of the whole table, “is flat, agricultural, and very proud of both. If you tell a man from Beauvais his country is beautiful, he will correct you: no, it is productive. They are a practical people.”
The table laughed.
“You are from Normandy?” someone asked.
“My family is. Though I myself have not stayed in one place long enough to claim it.”
“You travel a great deal?”
“I have a habit of leaving.”
“And arriving,” Mrs Ashworth said.
“Yes,” he said. “Arriving is always the better half.”
Catherine, Jane noticed, was watching him from further down the table, interested and not yet willing to admit it.
After dinner the party removed to the drawing room and the women arranged themselves around the fire while the men took port.
“Well,” Catherine said, dropping into the chair beside Jane. “He’s very handsome.”
“Who?” said Leonora.
“You know perfectly well who.”
Leonora’s expression did not change. “Handsome is not a fixed quantity. It depends entirely on what else there is.”
“There’s also charming, apparently.”
“Charm is the first thing a person presents and the last thing they are.”
Jane said nothing. Catherine looked at her.
“You haven’t said anything.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“You were watching him at dinner.”
“I was sitting across the table from him. There was limited visual alternative.”
Catherine smiled, a quick smile she produced when she suspected Jane was lying to herself and had decided not to press it.
The men came through. The room rearranged itself. Jane picked up a book from the side table, left there half-read by someone, and found a chair near the window.
Across the room, Frédéric was talking to Mr Ashworth. He said something and Mr Ashworth laughed. Then he looked up, only briefly, glancing across the room.
This time they stopped.
Not long. A second, perhaps two. Then Mr Ashworth said something and he turned back, and the moment closed.
Jane looked down at her book. The page was about something. She read a sentence and it meant nothing to her. She read it again and still did not take it in.