Chapter 1
“You don’t think there’s anything suspicious in the hasty weddings of Jack Mayhew to that Beatrice Clement and Miriam Mayhew to Mr. Fulkard do you?” asked Mrs. Jinny Goodchild, as she wrapped a loaf of bread for Aggie Dinsdale.
“Suspicious? What do you mean, Jinny?” asked Mrs. Dinsdale.
“Well, there was that house party, and suddenly three of the women there get married. Well, we know what the old Earl Wroth was like, was they debauched by the new Wroth?”
“Now you stop that silly talk right there, Jinny!” said Aggie Dinsdale. “Dinsdale hears a lot about the gentry from Jem Butler, and the countess is the sweetest lady, like our own Mrs. Sanderville, and a connection of hers, too, and Captain Sanderville is a friend of the new Lord Wroth and he wouldn’t be friends with any loose fish! Anywise, there’s a perfectly good reason for vicar’s eldest two getting wed in a hurry.”
“Oh, what’s that?” asked Jinny, with salacious glee. The goings on of the gentry were always of interest.
“Well, it was because it was on their mother’s death bed, and she wanted to see them wed to their sweethearts,” said Aggie. “And I had that from the nurse, before she went back to Harrogate. There ain’t anything suspicious, and don’t you go accusing those Mayhew youngsters of anything untoward, a nicer family you wouldn’t find, for all that there are so many of them. And with Mrs. Sanderville taking those boys off their father’s hands, they won’t be getting into trouble, nowise.”
“Well, happen ‘twill be no more than they have already with the Rackham boys, and their mischief isn’t nasty,” said Jinny, indulgently, who had a soft spot for Eglamour, or Egg, Rackham.
“Yes, and I wager they are much relieved that their mother has shabbed off to Bath,” opined Aggie.
It has to be said that the inhabitants of Moorwick village were in general much relieved when the Widow Rackham left for Bath.
“Fancy her leaving them nice little boys!” said Jinny.
“Well, Mrs. Micklejohn was buying ham from Dinsdale for the Abbey for Christmas last, and she was holding forth about how Mrs. Celia Rackham goes on about how she dotes on the young masters, Sebastian, Philemon and Eglamour, and then she can’t bear to be in their company as it makes her head ache. And she’s downright nasty to Miss Lucy, aye, and her father, the captain, even though he pays his mother-in-law a handsome stipend. Mrs. Micklejohn says he lets her live on in the cottage rent free and gives her quite four hundred a year!”
“Only fancy that!” gasped Jinny, who thought she and her husband did well to make seventy pounds a year. “She lived at the Abbey with her children until after Christmas.”
“Yes, and she was so slighting that the captain threw her out, bag and baggage, and him the most even-tempered of men,” said Aggie, with relish. “She can’t keep a maid, my poor cousin Lizzie fled in tears when she had a chamberpot – full, mind – thrown at her. Anyway do you want to know what Mrs. Micklejohn told me last week?”
“Yes, do go on!” said Jinny, her nose twitching.
“Well, the captain got rid of her to Bath a-purpose, so that Miriam and her man could have the cottage, and he did it by declaring that she could ride over daily to Harrogate to take the waters and did not need to remove to a spa city, so of course, she was determined he should pay for her to go to the furthest and most prestigious.”
“Sithee, she’s a contrary piece,” said Jinny. “Well, good riddance to bad rubbidge, I say. So is Miriam still taking in sewing? She has I don’t know how many of her siblings with her. It’s a lot for a woman to take on.”
“Well, Mr. Fulkard has hired all sorts of servants; he paid for the nurse, too, so hap... I guess it must be a long term arrangement,” said Aggie, biting back the urge to use local vernacular, having been a ladies’ maid before she married Dinsdale the butcher, and considering herself a cut above the likes of Jinny Goodchild. “There’s five of them plus the baby Mrs. Mayhew birthed afore she died. But Miriam, Mrs. Fulkard, I should say, is only sewing for her particular friends, and making gowns for the gentry.”
“That new lady what took a cottage, happen she’s a lady fallen on hard times, she reckons Mi... Mrs. Fulkard... can’t sew fine clothes being just a country vicar’s daughter.”
“Her!” snorted Aggie. “That Miss Sneddon is an incomer, and she has no idea! Why, I’ve hear Mrs. Fulkard’s creations are reckoned equal to anything from London! Well, I must get on.”
Miriam made gowns for friends which did indeed rival those by any London modiste, let alone the nearest big town, Harrogate, and offered piano lessons to those who wanted to learn. She did not turn away the children of yeoman farmers whose parents had ambitions for their offspring, though she was quite brutally honest about the abilities of any of her pupils if she felt them to be wasting time and money.
Mrs. Fulkard was looked up to as Mrs. Rackham had never been. And an incomer like Miss Sneddon was bound to be treated with suspicion and resented, even when not trying to take business from one of their own.
Miss Sneddon was a lady in genteel poverty who was moving to a less expensive area, which had enough gentry present to, in her own estimation, make it worth her while. Miss Sneddon proclaimed herself a modiste and milliner, and set up shop.
The locals could not afford her prices, even if they had not looked down on her.
The gentry continued to buy their gowns from Miriam Fulkard.
Miss Sneddon managed to corner Ophelia Sanderville as she shopped. Ophelia wanted to let Dinsdale, the butcher, know that he was permitted certain pheasants to be delivered to him. Dinsdale was not averse to buying from poachers, and Luke Sanderville liked to let his poachers know that he knew how many birds they had taken. It kept them on their toes. Ophelia smiled serenely, and as Miss Sneddon was already in there, used the language of poaching, and said, demurely,
“I believe you may be offered three brace of owls, Mr. Dinsdale. The captain is amenable.”
Dinsdale blushed, but he had given up blustering or asking what Mrs. Sanderville meant.
“I’m obliged,” he muttered.
“Owls?” chirped Miss Sneddon. “Oh, Mrs. Sanderville, I cannot think it would be nice to eat owls!”
“Who said anything about eating them?” said Ophelia. “It was a private conversation, Miss Sneddon.”
Miss Sneddon laughed.
“Oh, but one could not help overhearing!” she declared. “I am so glad to have run into you, my dear, for I am sure that you are going to be wanting a new wardrobe for the autumn, and you won’t want to be turning to a provincial little mouse like Mrs. Fulkard. I am sure, I don’t know when she has time to sew, having all those children, and she scarcely looks old enough!”
“Well obviously she is not old enough to be the mother of her siblings,” said Ophelia. “Good grief, you are surely not accusing the Reverend Mayhew of incest, are you?” She took exception to her friend being insulted by an incomer.
“They ... they are her siblings? I ... I did not realise,” stuttered Miss Sneddon.
“Perhaps you should have asked,” said Ophelia. “We are rearing two of her other siblings at the Hall with my own brothers and stepdaughter. And I have to say I cannot think it ladylike to append an unflattering description on my friend.”
Miss Sneddon realised she had made a tactical error, and gave a little titter.
“Oh, no insult was intended, but you have to admit that Mrs. Fulkard is not well travelled. Her ability to envision the ... the dernier cri of fashion must surely be limited.”
“I doubt it; she takes more fashion magazines than you do, and she is extremely talented,” said Ophelia. “If I was you, I’d stick largely to millinery and taking in a bit of sewing. Miriam prefers not to mess about with hats and bonnets and only sews for her closest friends. I am sure you can make a good enough living out of providing us with headwear, and outfitting those for whom Miriam will not sew. Going behind her back in order to do her down, when she has lived here all her life, is not going to get you anything except losing those of us who might become your customers. I would go into Harrogate to avoid sly innuendo and spite. And forgive me for being plainly spoken, but if you attempt to undermine my friend, I will ask my husband to see if there is any clause on your tenancy agreement which you have violated, and at the very least to refuse to renew your rental after the next quarter day.”
Miss Sneddon paled. How was she to know that the red-haired chit was a friend of the lady of the manor?
“It is, of course, your choice,” she said, in a tone which implied that Ophelia was making a mistake.
“Why, yes, I believe it is,” said Ophelia.
Ophelia popped in to see Miriam.
“Hello, Miriam, how does married life suit you?” she asked.
“Oh, Ophelia, very well. Paul wishes me to take herbs until Rhoda is stouter, and thanks to you I know what to do. I don’t intend to die of exhaustion and leave a family without a mother! Thank you for sending your brothers and little Lucy to me for piano lessons, they are a delight to teach. Some of my pupils are not exactly a waste of time – I will not take them if they are – but they can be an upward struggle. Polly Smith, for example, who likes music well enough, is not finding it easy. But her brother, Tobias, is entering higher society than their parents; yeoman farmers, and if Polly can perform adequately in society, she has a better chance of marrying up.”
“There’s a harp and guitars in my music room at the Abbey; bring her up one day and see if she performs better on something different. I’ll loan you anything she is good at.”
“Oh, Ophelia, how kind you are!”
“I love to see people enjoy music,” said Ophelia. “I wouldn’t want the poor child suffering from it, if I can offer an alternative.”
“Thank you; I dare not consider reducing music lessons, there’s a new dressmaker in the village, and she as good as told me, when I met her in Dinsdale’s, that I was going to be finding my clientelle reducing, when Mrs. Dinsdale introduced us, because she’s more fashionable and skilled.” Tears stood in her eyes. “Just because Paul is well-off does not mean I can be profligate.”
“The cat!” cried Ophelia. “Well! I gave her a set-down just before I came here, because she isn’t more fashionable or skilled, not that your friends would abandon you anyway. You take more magazines than she does, and your creations are original, beautiful, and sought-after! Well, she spoke to you before I warned her this morning, so I won’t do anything if she heeds my warning. I told her to stick to millinery, as you hate it, and she would do very well. We shall see, But I did not like her manner, not at all.”
“She treated me like a village girl who had got above herself,” said Miriam, resentfully.
“Nasty,” said Ophelia. “Now, I grant you, her attitude might be a mask of excess gentility to hide that she fears failing to make a living because you are already in situ, and I can forgive her for thinking that you sew as a hobby, having a wealthy, dilettante husband, but as she sneered at you for having so many children ... she seemed to think you precocious enough to be their mother ... I cannot think she is aware that Paul is well off. I put her right about that, since if she said anything untoward, it could be taken that your father was as incestuous as Beatrice and Aurelia’s wicked father.”
“And even worse when it is a clergyman or someone in a position of trust,” said Miriam. “Thank you for taking up cudgels on my behalf. Paul is wealthy, but his allowance is not really enough to raise my siblings without a little extra, and it’s worth having the servants to enable me to make clothes for those of you who would rather buy a gown from me for thirty guineas than pay twice that in Harrogate.”
“And yours are better,” said Ophelia. “Now if Miss Sneddon had come to you and suggested combining efforts, so you could collaborate on headwear to match your gowns, and purchase in, between you, some haberdashery, it would have enriched you both. Now I am considering getting Luke to buy out a haberdashery, so you can have cloth at wholesale prices, and perhaps setting up someone deserving to sell cloth in the village at better prices than Harrogate, for not having such expensive rent and overheads, and for the convenience of villagers not wanting to go into town.”
“I wager my sister, Abigail, would have liked that, if she were a few years older,” said Miriam.
“Yes, at fourteen, she is too young,” said Ophelia. “But now Mr. Wickes’ school has Mrs. Wickes running a school for girls, one of them might suit; or a young lady of charity status from Mrs. Chorley’s school.”
“Tiffany and Selena might know,” said Miriam. “And I am fitting Jane Jefferson later in the week, as she is still at the school, as a parlour boarder.”
“Excellent, yes,” said Ophelia. “But not the ci-devant vicomte’s daughter, who was mean to Tiffany and Selena.”
“And to Jane, for being only a banker’s daughter,” said Miriam.
Ophelia chuckled.
“Tell Jane to remind her that another banker’s daughter is Sally, Countess of Jersey, who is a Patroness of Almack’s, not the sort of place to which an impoverished emigré and his family might aspire.”
Miriam laughed.
“I shall,” she said. She felt much lighter; her friends would stand by her, and the Sneddon female’s claims otherwise were nothing but spite.
“And I shall be wanting gowns to accommodate a pregnancy soon,” said Ophelia. “No, I do not plan to be permanently increasing; it was, as you might say, an accident, and a happy accident when there is only one other infant in the nursery, but one I shall endeavour not to repeat too often. By my count there will be almost two years between small Matthew and this one, which for the first two babies is perfectly reasonable.”
“You can, they say, reduce the chance of conception by feeding for yourself, not having a wetnurse,” said Miriam. “Along with taking other measures. Rhoda’s wetnurse wants her own baby, though, so she plans to wean her at six months, as Rhoda does not suck well anyway. I do not plan to give up any of my own to a wetnurse if I am able to feed them myself. But Rhoda being orphaned as soon as she was born, I have no choice. And I should like to have her back in my house.”
“Of course,” said Ophelia.
The tragic death of Mrs. Mayhew had far-reaching consequences.
