Rich Girl, Poor Girl Page 3

  ‘I really can’t see that his being black is relevant, Mother, and if Annie is part of the family in Scotland, then surely Amos and his family are part of our family here. Besides, I was merely enquiring about his health. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been away from home so much, but he doesn’t seem quite himself. It’s odd, Father, but his skin looks a little paler and there’s a clammy feel . . .’

  ‘Lucille, I have had quite enough of this unhealthy interest in Amos . . . good heavens, do you realize the man doesn’t even have a surname?’

  Lucy looked at her mother. How was it possible to love someone and be so annoyed and exasperated by them at the same time? She kissed her parents and went to bed. She would check up on Amos, quietly, in the morning.

  The morning brought a posy of flowers from Max du Pay and a magnificent bouquet from the count. Perhaps even more exciting than the flowers was the note that accompanied the posy:

  Should you care to ride in the hunt, Miss Graham, I should be delighted to provide a mount suitable for a thinking woman.

  He was teasing; he had remembered their conversation but had conveniently forgotten that she had admitted to being both intelligent and poor. Sir John could not provide his daughter with a riding horse. But Max du Pay’s horses . . . Lucy rushed to her mother’s bedroom. Lady Graham was sitting up in bed looking delightful and quite young in a froth of pink silk as Lucy handed her the posy and the note.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely, Mother? I shall keep them in my bedroom.’ She looked at her mother, who was smiling complacently as she read Max’s note. ‘There’s a disgustingly vulgar bouquet from the count too.’ Ah, that shot had gone home.

  ‘Flowers from Count Fyodorov, Lucy. How very sweet.’

  ‘A hothouse full of them. These are in such innate good taste, wouldn’t you say, and I may accept the senator’s offer, Mother. The horses must belong to him. Max is only a boy after all . . .’

  She stopped at the look of consternation on her mother’s face.

  ‘A riding-habit, Lucy? We must get you a new riding-habit.’ Lady Graham slipped from the bed, hurried across to her voluminous French wardrobe and began to rifle through the contents.

  ‘Here, darling. We can get this altered.’ She handed a dark blue velvet riding-dress to her daughter and looked at her carefully. ‘Oh, Lucy, when are you ever going to . . . fill out?’ she finished delicately.

  ‘I’ll look better in this than in the ball-gown Petal is making,’ said Lucy as she held up the dress in front of her. Yes, dark blue was a very good colour.

  ‘Petal should be working on the dresses now. Run upstairs and beg her to get this finished for Thanksgiving . . . only two days . . . and then you may write Max a note of acceptance, and change your dress. It’s possible the count will call.’

  Lucy picked up her posy and rushed upstairs to the attics where Petal, Lady Graham’s dressmaker, was doing wonders with yards of pale green silk – not such a good colour as the blue, but better than insipid white. She had hardly had time to make her request when Female followed her upstairs to say that a gentleman had called. Amos usually announced visitors, but Lucy was too excited by flowers and gowns and, oh, yes, a magnificent horse ‘suitable for a thinking woman’, to wonder why he had not.

  The next two days passed in a whirl.

  ‘Why am I so happy?’ Lucy asked herself several times a day as she stood in her petticoat while Petal tried somehow to make her look more girl than boy. The riding-habit suited her slim figure. Max would notice. ‘I don’t care if he notices. I haven’t ridden in two years. I am excited by the thought of such horses and galloping, galloping, free of restrictions.’ She lowered the green silk over her head.

  ‘A dark Venus rising from the waves,’ was Sir John’s comment.

  ‘Petal has worked wonders,’ agreed Lady Graham, ‘and only just in time.’ She looked at her watch. It was already Thanksgiving morning. ‘We’ll have Amos make up a basket for her to take home, and you must find a bonus, John.’

  ‘The others are surely in bed, Elizabeth, and Petal must stay the night. She can’t walk through the streets at this time of the morning. Come along, Cinderella, take off that beautiful gown and get some sleep or you’ll be too tired to dance away tomorrow evening.’ Sir John looked at his daughter, but Lucy was not listening to his banter. She stood, head poised like a deer who senses danger.

  ‘I hear Female,’ she said. ‘Something’s wrong, Father.’

  She opened the door. Although it was so late all the lamps were still lit. ‘You see,’ she said triumphantly, ‘Amos is still awake. He never goes to bed before we do.’

  But it was Female who stood on the stairs, her voluminous nightgown disguising the bulge at her waistline. It was obvious that she had been crying.

  ‘Ah so sorry not to be dressed, ladyship, colonel, sir. Ah been in bed, but Mammy says Pappy jist can’t git moving although he sure done tried.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Female?’ asked Lucy. ‘We must go to their quarters and see, Mother.’

  Lady Graham was furious. ‘Female! How dare you walk around the public part of the house in your nightwear? Go downstairs and send your mother up here at once.’

  Female burst into loud sobs and turned and ran for the servants’ stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lucy,’ said Lady Graham, looking at her daughter’s angry face, ‘but we must maintain standards. Please go to bed. Father and I will find out what’s wrong and send for a doctor if need be.’

  ‘I’d rather wait, Mother.’

  Abra was a tall, slender woman, as neat at two in the morning as she would be at two in the afternoon. She came upstairs quickly.

  ‘Amos has taken some kind of a turn, ma’am, Sir John. I’m sorry Female was in a state of undress. There ain’t a brain in that girl’s head.’

  ‘What kind of turn . . . ?’ began Lucy, but her mother was in charge.

  ‘I will come to see Amos, Abra.’

  She swept from the room and Lucy and her father sat down. They did not have long to wait, and one look at her mother’s face told Lucy that Amos was seriously ill.

  ‘I’ve sent Female next door to wake John-Joseph. He will bring some of their own people with a cart to take Amos to Freedmen’s. I’m afraid he’s seriously ill.’

  ‘Surely we can do something. Get Professor Archibald . . . something?’

  Professor Archibald was a close neighbour who was also on the staff at the nearby Columbia Hospital, a hospital established for the wives and widows of Union soldiers and sailors.

  ‘At this hour of the morning, Thanksgiving morning, for a negro! You are so young, Lucy,’ said her mother disparagingly.

  Lucy refused to go to bed and sat in the drawing room and listened for the next-door servants to arrive. She did not notice how cold the room grew around her without the heavy diet of logs with which Amos fed the fire’s insatiable appetite. She heard her father’s voice and he went out – to do what, she did not know. It was only later that she learned that he had roused the coachman at the stables used by the Grahams, that he had driven to Freedmen’s hospital and had sat, one white face in a frame of black ones, while Amos gave up the battle against his exhausted heart.

  Sir John had found her in the drawing room, still in her sea green ball gown. He had shaken her awake gently and told her the news, only half expecting the terrible outpouring of grief.

  ‘But Amos was only a servant, Lucy,’ he had hazarded, in an attempt to understand. ‘You hardly know . . . knew him.’

  ‘I couldn’t help him; I knew nothing, Father.’ She lifted her ravaged face to him. ‘It could have been you.’

  And that, Lucy confessed to herself later when she was safely and anonymously back at Smith, one student among so many, was the real cause of her distress. Had it been her beloved father who had continued to function with the weakness in his arms, the clammy skin, the alternate hot and cool skin, and eventually on that last morning the tightness in
his chest –’ not a pain, Miss Lucy, he said he didn’t have no pain’ – she would have thought that perhaps he had eaten something that had disagreed with him, or that he had over-indulged. She would have sent at last for a doctor, one who would perhaps have come at two o’clock in the morning because Sir John was a fairly important part of the British Legation, and Sir John would have been taken to Georgetown Hospital, and perhaps . . . perhaps, he would have recovered.

  ‘I will not give up the Thanksgiving Hunt at the du Pays for a servant,’ said Lady Graham, who had kindly given Amos’s family paid leave to bury husband and father, and who would willingly have accepted the hospital costs as one of the necessary expenses incurred by looking after good and valued servants.

  There was no need for a family disagreement, however, for when the members of the family finally managed to get to sleep, they slept soundly through the hours of Thanksgiving morning and, in the afternoon, could find little for which to be wholeheartedly thankful.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, I just can’t go to a ball.’

  ‘I don’t feel much like dancing either,’ agreed Lady Graham.

  ‘Next year,’ said Sir John.

  But next year saw Lucille Graham in Edinburgh, Scotland, and there were so many beautiful and talented girls at the du Pays Thanksgiving Ball that hardly anyone missed her, hardly anyone.

  2

  Dundee, 1888

  ROSIE SAT SHELLING peas and whistling. The whistling did not help her work but it kept Ma happy. If Rosie was whistling, she couldn’t be eating the peas; or so Ma thought. Rosie actually had the eating of fresh young peas while keeping up a piercing chorus of whatever was playing at the Playhouse that week, off to a fine art. Mind you, she had to hold them lodged in her jaw for quite a while before she could take a breath and then swallow them all at once. That rather spoiled the pleasure of eating but it increased the pleasure of winning, and that, for Rosie, was the greater pleasure. Rosie liked to win.

  There was a much more important battle on the horizon and Rosie was concentrating on that while her strong young fingers automatically prised open the pods and released the peas. If only it had been done before . . .

  If it had been done before, she could talk about it and ask how it had been done. Then, armed with all that information, she could go to Ma and say, say what? Say, ‘Ma, I’m not following every other member of this family into the mills, I’m going to get an education: I’m going to be a doctor so that no more bairns up this closie will die because we’re poor and we cannae afford the doctor or the medicines.’ But doctoring was for men, and universities were for men, and even though some lassies, and especially Rosie Nesbitt, were cleverer far than any laddie in the class, nobody would teach you Latin and Mathematics for those subjects were suitable only for men, and whoever had come up with a braw notion like that hadn’t the sense he was born with. Rosie Nesbitt could read, write, spell, and add, better than any boy in her class. She had won a bursary at the age of ten that allowed her to attend the Harris Academy with all the nice, well-brought-up, well-dressed lassies from the West End of Dundee. One ancient teacher had even been heard to say that he had never come across a brain as gimp as Rosie Nesbitt’s. But the powers that be – and all of them, wouldn’t you know it, male – would not allow her a real education. Mind you, Scotland, that thought very highly of itself in terms of education, still barred women from its universities, but Rosie did not allow that small point to worry her. Something would happen: for Rosie Nesbitt something always did.

  The idea came so suddenly and was so right, so sensible, that Rosie stopped whistling and nearly choked to death on her accumulation of peas. Old Wishy! She thought of the Classics master at the Harris, a bit like a hoodie craw – the children laughed at him in his threadbare old gown – but with a face that didnae fricht a child. At least, not Rosie Nesbitt. She had smiled at him that first day as she passed him on the stair, so pleased was she at being there in that old building, a bona fide pupil among all the toffs frae the West End. He had smiled back at her, a smile of genuine liking and approval, and had said, ‘Welcome, my wee lass,’ in that nice voice that wasn’t a toff’s voice but wasn’t the sound of Dundee either. It sounded of education. Rosie almost hugged herself with joy at her brilliance. Why hadn’t she thought of him before? She would pay him to teach her Latin.

  There were plenty of ways of earning a few pence; she would just have to think of a few of them.

  Rosie finished the peas and, quiet as the proverbial lamb, went in to help Ma with the rest of the dinner. Some dinner. Potatoes, mostly. Occasionally a bit of minced beef; sometimes fish, if the boys caught it.

  ‘You’re awfie quiet, Rosie.’ Ma was tuned in to the moods of all her children and perhaps especially to those of this strange child, this cuckoo in the nest. ‘Did ye eat too many peas?’

  Rosie bristled; there was no way Ma could know. ‘Did I stop whistling?’ she demanded rashly.

  Elsie smiled, a smile that wiped years and strain from her face. ‘It’s yer grannie thinks that’s foolproof. Why did ye think she worked that out? Was it no me that ate peas years afore you were born, Rosie? Noo, whit’s on yer mind, lassie?’

  Rosie looked at her mother. How old was Elsie Nesbitt? Well, Frazer was near twenty and so she had to be at least thirty-five. Could you birth a bairn afore the age of fifteen? Elsie, Ma, had to be between thirty-five and forty years of age. She couldnae be more than forty even if she looked, what, fifty? It was too late for Elsie. Rosie’s turn. Better just to tell her right out. ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

  Elsie Nesbitt sat down hard in a chair and looked almost in awe at her fifth child. It had to be blood. The others weren’t like this. Rosie’s dad had not been one of her regulars; Rosie had resulted as the outcome of a chance meeting at the docks – a lad who spoke differently, who’d given her a rose instead of the two shillings he had promised. Now here was Rosie, already too big for her boots with a school uniform and a real schoolbag, talking about . . . oh dear God, what kind of a nonsense?

  ‘It’s not nonsense, Ma,’ said Rosie as if she could read her mother’s thoughts. ‘Why should I no be a doctor? I’m clever. I like taking care of folk and I’m good at it. You aye said I was better wi’ Grampa than onybody.’

  ‘Och, lassie, that’s a long way from getting all the book learning that makes a doctor.’ Elsie had no real knowledge of higher education but she knew, as well as she knew the face of the girl in front of her, that the fulfilment of such a dream would take years . . . and money. Where could she ever get the money that was needed? By some strokes of divine providence, Rosie had aye managed to pay her way, and to see her stepping out of the door in the morning with her face washed and her hair brushed and a schoolbag full of exciting books in her hand did her mother’s heart good – but doctoring!

  ‘Here, Rosie. Take a penny-halfpenny oot the jar and run doon for a bowl of potted meat; it’ll go nice with the peas.’ She had meant the money for two nice girdle scones from the bakery at the bottom of the stairs – sometimes the smells rolling up the closie on the wind were almost too good to be borne – but the meat was probably a better buy, more nourishing.

  Rosie was already half-way down the stairs. Buying anything from a shop was an adventure. ‘Ma’s thinking on it,’ she told herself. When Elsie changed the subject, it usually meant she was thinking.

  She took her place in the queue outside the butcher’s and waited, ignoring the other customers, her two sisters playing with their skipping-rope in the middle of the street, and the slabs of raw red meat. They held no interest for her; she had never tasted anything other than mince or boiling beef and her salivary glands agreed with Elsie – ‘What you’ve never had, you’ll never miss.’

  No need to wrap up the wee bowl for the run back up the stairs. Rosie’s mind kept pace with her steps. ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it.’ Nothing was settled; nothing had been won; but she had brought her great dream out into the open and now it co
uld grow. After all, it was only when flowers faced the sun that they really began to flourish.

  Ma was still in the front room; she had not moved. Was she merely enjoying the unaccustomed peace of an empty room or was she still awed by the pronouncement from her third daughter? She turned from the window as Rosie catapulted into the room.

  ‘I’ve been thinking on your plan, Rosie.’ She moved to the huge oak dresser her grandfather had carved thirty years before and took out a patched but clean tablecloth which she threw over the scratched table top. ‘Here, help me set the table; they’ll all be in afore we know it – but I’ve been thinking that there’s nae harm in trying for it. I heard a verse frae the pulpit once and it stuck in my mind. “Without vision the people perish.” Well, I aye thought it meant a vision of angels and such, but it doesn’t. You’ve got the vision all right, lassie, and we’ll have to see aboot it. If I only kent where tae start.’

  ‘With Latin, Ma. I need Latin, and I’ll ask old Wishy tae teach me after school.’

  ‘And whit would a bonnie lassie like you need with the Latin?’

  With shrieks of joy Rosie and her mother rushed to throw themselves at the tall, windbeaten young man standing in the doorway. Frazer Nesbitt was Elsie’s oldest son, and he had been gone over six months on a whaling expedition.

  ‘I must have kent you were coming, laddie. Have I no just sent Rosie for potted meat?’ Elsie was laughing and crying as she pulled her first-born into the room and forced him into the one good chair by the fire.

  ‘And fresh peas, Frazer,’ cried Rosie, who was now perched on her brother’s knees.

  ‘Aye, there’s whit madam’s no eaten. I’ll make you a cup of tea, laddie. How long can you stay? You didnae get hurted in ony way, did you?’ Elsie’s questions rained down on the boy’s head like the snows he had been glad to leave in the far north but, good-naturedly, he tried to answer all of them.

  Rosie’s grandiose plans sat and simmered like the soup on the back of the fire while Frazer talked and ate and talked again. Such places he’d seen; such people he’d met.