Rich Girl, Poor Girl Page 4

  It was only after the others had come home – Lindsay, Leslie, and Murray from Baxter’s jute works where they had started as half-timers and were now full time, and Donaldina and Granta, the wee ones, from their play in the street – and after they had all eaten and heard again and again the wonderful stories, and admired the strange carvings that Frazer had bought for a plug of tobacco from a man he called an Eskimo, that there was time to talk about Rosie again.

  ‘And now, whit’s this about Latin, Rosie? What would a wee lassie want with the Latin?’

  ‘I want tae be a doctor, Frazer.’

  Frazer did not laugh; neither did any of the other children. Elsie Nesbitt had always insisted that her children get as much education as circumstances would allow. Education was the way out of poverty; everybody knew that. Wasn’t there a fellow called Carnegie who had started near as poor as themselves and now had suitcases full of money?

  ‘And for doctoring you need Latin?’ asked Frazer.

  ‘Aye. I could easy win a bursary, when I’m big that is, but I need tae learn Latin and Mathematics and the Harris only teaches them tae boys.’

  ‘You’ll need private tuition, then,’ said Frazer quietly and in such a matter-of-fact fashion that his mother stared at him, almost in awe. It never occurred to Elsie Nesbitt that it was something in herself that made these children different from the other children in the closie. Frazer had lapped up the learning too in the few years he had had at the school but, unlike Rosie, he had never set himself against circumstances but had gone out, as soon as he was able, to set about earning a living for himself, his mother, and the other children.

  ‘I’ve a fortune saved, Ma,’ he smiled. ‘I aye fancied you in a smart new coat for the winter.’

  ‘Ach, Rosie’ll keep the hale gang of us in fur coats when she’s a doctor – will you no, Rosie?’

  Rosie stared at them both. She could say nothing. Words of gratitude were chasing one another around in her head but refused to find the way to her mouth.

  ‘You can take the money to Mr Wishart the morn efter the school, Ma.’

  But Elsie could not bring herself to confront a terrifying schoolteacher and, the next day, it was strong young Frazer who met Rosie as, almost sick with excitement, she left her last class.

  ‘Whit if he says no?’

  ‘I’ve ten pounds here in my poke,’ said Frazer. ‘That’s near a half-year’s wages for a teacher.’

  Rosie looked up at him, almost as if she could not understand why the weight of such a vast sum of money had not bent him double.

  ‘And after he says yes, Dr Nesbitt, there’s still enough money to take you and Ma and me out for a fish supper and a cup of tea.’

  Rosie clutched at his hand to steady herself. Latin tuition and a meal in a fisherman’s café! She could not take much more. She almost stumbled along the corridor to the classroom of the Classics teacher.

  Francis Wishart looked up from his marking when they answered his abrupt, ‘Come.’

  Whatever he had expected, it was not wee Rose Nesbitt and this tall weatherbeaten, old young man.

  ‘Come in, Rose,’ he said courteously. ‘And this must be . . .’

  ‘My brother, Frazer, Mr Wishart. He’s a whaler,’ finished Rose proudly. The teacher held out his hand to the whaler, who shook it in some surprise.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Nesbitt?’

  ‘It’s Rosie. She wants to be a doctor.’ Frazer looked into the older man’s face but there was no scorn or derision there, only interest. ‘She needs Latin.’ He put his hand in the pocket of his rough jacket and pulled out a salt-stained pouch. ‘I’ve saved my wages . . .’

  ‘It was for a coat for Ma,’ burst out Rosie and subsided quietly as Frazer looked at her in sudden anger.

  ‘And you want me to tutor Rose for the entrance examination?’

  Frazer looked at him in surprise. He was out of his depth now. ‘Entrance, tae what? . . . sir,’ he added.

  ‘There’s a medical school in Edinburgh for women.’

  Edinburgh. Rosie and Frazer looked at one another. It might as well be on the moon. Rosie shrugged. Something would come up.

  ‘Aye,’ said Rosie. ‘I mean, yes, Mr Wishart.’

  Wishart looked ahead to the years of commitment.

  ‘You understand what you are proposing, Rose? An hour of tuition one night a week and hours of private study . . . and for the next four years?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Four to five every Thursday. Other nights I have pupil teachers.’

  ‘That will be fine, Mr Wishart.’ Frazer gestured with the pouch.

  ‘I’ll give you the list of books your sister will need, and I’ll update it as required. Buy your mother a coat, lad. I’ll have free medical care from Dr Nesbitt when I’m in need of it.’ He picked up his pen and dipped it in the inkwell on his desk. Rose and Frazer looked down at his bowed head.

  ‘Till Thursday then,’ said Rosie. ‘Thank you, Mr Wishart.’

  Out in the corridor, she walked to the front door, reserved for teachers and visitors, with her head high as befitted one of Scotland’s first woman doctors. No one saw them leave and, rather to her regret, she went unchallenged out into the street.

  ‘He’s no going to charge, Frazer. Teachers must be rich.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Rosie. That one’s good.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Everybody’s says he’s the best Latin teacher; Greek too.’

  Frazer looked down at his young sister sadly and then shrugged. She was very young and had lots of growing-up to do. He wished that he could be around to help her do it.

  ‘Let’s get Ma and take her out for her tea. Tomorrow I’ll buy her a coat.’ He stopped walking and caught Rosie’s arm. ‘Work hard, Rosie, and never let him regret what he’s doing for you.’

  ‘Or you, Frazer. I’ll never let you down either.’

  ‘Good lassie.’ He gripped her tightly by the arms and stared down into her face as if he could see the woman behind the immature child. ‘Doctor Rose Nesbitt. God in heaven, lassie, you’ve signed your life away and I pray I’m here to see it.’

  ‘Ach, you will be. I’ll invite you months before the graduation. Heavens, you’ll be an auld man wi’ bairns. You can bring them all, but dinnae let them greet and disturb the ceremonies!’

  3

  Edinburgh, 1891

  IT WAS AS Lucy had expected. Father would force himself to be supportive. She realized, however, that not so deep down, just below the surface of his habitual control, he would have preferred that she follow the usual route of a young lady of her class. He took her side now, just as he had done three years before when she had stupidly lied to Max du Pay about her plans for going to college.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ he had told his wife as they argued and tried to discuss, rationally, the future of their only child. ‘Get all this nonsense out of her head. She’ll settle down, you’ll see.’

  She had not settled down, and then the sudden and tragic death of Amos had made it all worse.

  ‘It’s almost as if she blames us,’ said Lady Graham.

  ‘Worse, my dear. She blames herself.’

  ‘I was too interested in my new dress,’ she had cried, ‘and going to the hunt with Max du Pay. If I’d even looked at Amos, really looked at him, surely I would have known he was ill.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Lady Graham, who had a clear conscience. She had sent for help when her servants told her they needed it. She had not asked Amos to work when he was unwell; he was the one who had said he was just a little seedy.

  And here they were, two years later, listening to Lucy voicing this totally unacceptable idea.

  ‘I should have sent her to school in Bath. It was all those years studying with Kier.’

  Perhaps it was, although Lady Graham, of course, had no real knowledge of how intimately her daughter had involved herself in the care of her friend. Nor did she really know how Lucy had felt that nigh
t when Amos suffered his last massive heart attack.

  ‘Actually cost about the same as bringing you out, my dear,’ Sir John said when he finally believed that his daughter was serious. ‘So don’t worry about anything. Just as long as you’re really sure.’

  ‘Oh, I am. It’s been simmering away for years now.’

  ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous, John, and why you encourage your only child in such folly I can’t imagine.’ Lady Graham was not supportive. She tried again. ‘Lucy, have you any idea what our people will say? It’s totally unsuitable, so unladylike. You’ll be cut, Lucy, cut completely by the people who matter. Decent women don’t study medicine; everyone knows that. People will say you’re fast or . . . worse. Think, Lucy, think. Do you really wish to become so . . . intimate with the human body, with all its . . . unpleasant functions?’ Lady Graham could not find suitable words to clothe the horrors she felt sure were lined up waiting for her cherished, sheltered little girl. A girls’ college had been one thing but this, this! ‘And it’s not as if you need to earn your living. You’ll have grandmother’s money and everything Father and I have.’ Looking at the unhappy young face before her, she wanted to scoop up her child and run away with her to safety. She said the last thing she could think of in support of her position. ‘You should be thinking of marrying. Who would want to marry a female physician, a woman who knows so much of . . .  everything impure? Oh, child, please, before you find yourself completely ostracized. There’s Kier, or what about Max du Pay? When you’re here, he’s here. You do like him, don’t you?’

  Lucy thought of Max, his calm, deep voice like honey on warm toast, his humour so like her own.

  ‘I do like him. Of course I like him.’ A sigh of stifled agony surged upwards again. ‘He understood my feelings of inadequacy over Amos’s death but . . . I haven’t seen him very often lately.’ She did not add that whenever she had seen Maximilian du Pay he had seemed to be in the company of one of his own Southern belles, and that he was obviously perfectly happy.

  ‘You’ll meet him often this autumn. I know his father wants him to work in his office. Now, Lucy, let’s be sensible. We have delayed our furlough home so that you need not miss any of your classes at Smith, and I’m perfectly happy about the quality of education you have received there, but after graduation there must be an end to it. We will return to Scotland and you will be presented at Court.’

  ‘If you can arrange it during the summer, I will be happy to comply, but my mind is made up: I’m entering the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. Please be happy for me.’

  ‘Happy for you? Happy to see my only child spend her life amongst dirt and disease . . .’

  ‘Eradicating dirt and disease, I hope.’

  ‘You are underage. I refuse my permission.’

  Desperately Lucy looked at her father. Well she knew that he was happier confronting an enemy battalion than his wife or daughter, but he did not let her down.

  ‘She has my permission, Elizabeth,’ he said sadly. Lady Graham looked from one unhappy face to the other. ‘As usual, you have conspired together and now submit to me a fait acompli.’ She moved towards the door, her silk skirts rustling on the polished wooden floor. ‘But how am I to explain . . .’ She stopped as Lucy half rose. ‘No, Lucille, there is nothing more to say.’

  Sir John rose to follow his wife from the room. ‘Don’t fret, Lucy. Mother is a hardened campaigner. Now you feel guilty. Next, Petal and her army of dressmakers will be busy with all the new clothes for our furlough. Dresses to show Kier and sundry other men your charms; dresses to make you think that it might be very pleasant to spend your life ordering more dresses and – what was it you said to me once, “trying to decide how much cream is needed for so many peaches”.’

  ‘There are no peaches in Scotland.’

  ‘In the Anderson-Howard succession houses, there undoubtedly are. The next few months will possibly bring your hardest battles, child, and if you can defeat your mother without breaking her heart, then years of medical training should cause little difficulty.’ He stopped at the door. ‘But what of Kier?’ he asked.

  She had looked at the white door as it swung gently behind his departing figure. He had his way of campaigning too.

  Now, six months later, she was being asked almost the same question, and this time by her mother.

  ‘And Kier? You’ve been constantly in his company since we returned. What has he to say?’

  ‘I plan to tell him this afternoon. I’m riding over for tea.’

  ‘Let’s hope he puts some sense into your head. Please be back in time to dress for dinner.’

  Lady Graham stood up and left the room and Lucy longed to run after her. It would be so easy to capitulate, to throw her arms around her mother and to say, ‘I didn’t mean it. I’ll be a dutiful daughter and find a husband,’ but she could not do it.

  As always her father, now relaxed and happy in his almost disreputable old country tweeds, read her mind. ‘She’ll come round, Lucy . . .’

  ‘So you keep saying, Father.’

  ‘I know her. She’ll scold and fret and try to argue you from this chosen way, and you must admit it will be a hard life you’ve chosen, but she’ll fight for you and your reputation like a lion. She’ll be very proud of you once she’s managed to turn her mind around, away from bride clothes and . . . baby clothes,’ he finished softly.

  ‘I want those things too, Father, but not yet. I need to be a doctor; I don’t need to be a wife and mother . . . not yet. One day, some day.’

  ‘Go and tell Kier.’ Colonel Graham held her close for a moment. ‘I am so proud of you, Lucille Graham, BA. I always have been, always will be, no matter what you choose.’

  ‘Poor Father,’ thought Lucy as she rode slowly across fields not yet ploughed. ‘Deep down he’s hoping Kier will change my mind. Am I hoping that too?’

  As always she stopped at the rise of the hill to look down on Laverock Rising. Built and extended in the reigns of the Georges, it had been the centre of the huge estate on which the Grahams’ more modest house also stood. A hundred years had seen the estate farms sold one by one until now, at nearly the end of the century, less than a thousand acres of owned land surrounded the great house but it still stood, even more beautiful as it settled its foundations yet more firmly into the rich Fifeshire soil. Soft light spilled from its windows, for it was a dull day, and Lucy felt welcomed and quickened her pace.

  ‘You know where to find them, Lucy,’ Kier’s mother welcomed her, ‘and won’t I be grateful to you if you can prise them out!’

  Kier and his father were in the room always called the estate office, although now only three farms comprised the estate. The room smelled of wood-smoke, tobacco-smoke, dogs, and a further indefinable smell that Lucy put down to a mixture of men and old paper and spilled ink. She loved it.

  ‘How you ever find anything in this mess, I do not know,’ she said by way of greeting and since that was how she had announced herself at any time in ten years, Kier’s father answered as he always did. ‘Why, we know where everything important is. I’ll go and find your mother, lad.’

  Kier too had stood up as Lucy entered, and as he held the door for his father Lucy wondered aloud at one of the questions that had fascinated her for years.

  ‘You must be near a foot taller than your father, Kier. I wonder why that is.’

  ‘He’s pure Celt, Lucy,’ said Kier as he cleared a place for her to sit by the simple expedient of swiping several ledgers from an armchair. ‘I am a throwback to some rapacious Norseman. Come, sit down and tell me what’s bothering you.’

  Lucy sat as she was bid. How well he knew her, almost as well as she knew herself.

  ‘I’ve come to a decision and I wanted you to hear about it first. I’ve told my parents, of course, but . . . you are my oldest and dearest friend. . .  .’

  ‘Good heavens, Lucy! What’s wrong? You sound so formal and . . . ar
e you all right? You’re not ill or anything?’

  ‘I’ve never been better. It’s just that . . . I want to be a doctor, and I have already been accepted at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women.’

  She looked at him as he received the rather bald statement, and for the first time felt that she could not read the emotions that followed one another across his handsome face. University had changed him, changed both of them.

  ‘Rather you than me,’ he said at last. ‘God, Lucy, you scared me. I thought you were going to become a missionary or a nun or something. Well done! I didn’t know there were any women doctors.’

  ‘There aren’t many. Universities in Scotland don’t admit women. London admitted women to all degree courses three years ago, and there’s now a medical college for women in Edinburgh. Actually there was a British lady doctor as early as 1849, one Elizabeth Blackwell, but she had to qualify in the United States where educational ideas are more advanced. Thanks to this college, however, there will soon be seven female physicians who have qualified in Edinburgh.’

  ‘And you want to make it eight. Whatever for, Lucy? I always thought, well, one day . . . aren’t you for presentations at court, and ballgowns and parties and too much champagne and “Here comes the bride”, wedding trips to exotic places, and gummy little people dribbling all over one’s best shirt-front?’

  As he spoke Lucy saw it all, and she realized how different her experience was going to be, experiences instead of . . . no, no, before . . . I want it all, I want it all, her heart cried.

  ‘Of course I’m interested in all that,’ she said calmly and then added daringly, ‘especially the gummy litle people, if they have the right father . . . but not yet. There isn’t time for them yet.’

  Kier smiled at her and stood up. He held the door open. ‘Let’s tell the parents. God knows what Mother will think. Not very socially acceptable.’ He stopped. ‘Gosh, Lady Graham?’

  ‘Yes, her reaction was exactly as you picture it.’