Broken Music Page 2

  Even in her own pain over the loss of her daughter, Eleanor could find room to pity Francis’s obvious agony, but all the same, she thought, lips tightening…a delicate mother, four children already! In the first place, William’s difficult birth had nearly cost his mother her life, and a strained three years had followed, during which Eleanor had prayed that he would be their only child, but then another two babies, first the peaceful Marianne, then lively, energetic little Nella, appeared in quick succession, and later Amy, none of them easy births. That should certainly have been the end of it. But when it came down to it, Francis, despite his splendid appearance in the pulpit, the eloquent sermons, delivered with such conviction in his mellifluous voice and listened to with such respect, hadn’t shown much sense, either. He, a man of the cloth, a man of high principles, should surely have shown some restraint. And surely knew it.

  After Dorothea died, Eleanor decided she had better stay on with the family to help out, not only from a sense of duty and because she was in any case lonely in her recent widowhood and needed something to fill her life, but because she loved her now motherless grandchildren, and there was little prospect of their father, wrapped up in his own troubles, offering the guidance they needed.

  They were to leave Worcester and the cathedral, and their house, their school, their friends, everything they had previously known. Only Florrie would go with them, for she was to be four-year-old Amy’s nurse. She was far too sensible a young woman to remain a parlourmaid, said Grandmama Villiers, their dear Grandy, who would be giving up her own house to come and live with them when they moved.

  ‘But I don’t want to go away!’ declared Nella passionately, stamping her foot. ‘I won’t go if we can’t take Queenie!’

  ‘Now, now, Fenella, don’t be silly!’ Grandy spoke severely. ‘Of course Queenie will be coming with us; she’s a country dog, you know. She’ll love it at Broughton Underhill. And so will you when you get there.’

  Nella was absolutely determined she would hate it. It was all going to be quite horrid, strange and new; only for lucky William would it make little difference. His life was now centred on his prep school twenty miles away, and they said he could just as easily make the journey from there in the holidays (and later from Rugby, where he was to go when he was old enough) to their new home, which would be the rectory at Broughton Underhill.

  ‘Does that mean, Father,’ William asked, when they were summoned into Papa’s study some two weeks after the funeral, ‘that you’ll be rector there?’

  No, Francis told them. He would not be the rector. In fact, he would no longer be practising as a clergyman at all.

  So that was why he was wearing a stiff collar and a tie, instead of his clerical dog collar. The children had absorbed, if not fully understood, through scraps of conversation picked up, and hints given by their mother, the belief that their father was settled here as a member of the cathedral chapter until one day he would be appointed dean, or archdeacon, or possibly bishop. This last they could well believe, their father being such a God-like creature. But what they had just heard was a puzzle, unmapped territory. Nella looked at her sister but Marianne, almost as though she hadn’t heard, was far away as usual, dreamily watching a robin on the window sill outside who seemed intent on attacking his own reflection in the glass. Nella was still feeling mutinous about the move, though she had been somewhat reassured by hearing that at least their grandmother would continue to be with them. So much had changed and become alarming lately, but Grandy was always the same: kind – though quite strict, and sometimes rather sad since Grandpapa, and now Mama, had died.

  ‘Father…’ William began, then hesitated. Twelve years old and already big for his age, muscular and athletic, untidy, his hair flopping over his forehead, he stood rigid and pale, the freckles on his nose standing out. He was growing up fast and had sensed things in the atmosphere, was nothing if not courageous – and had learnt more from the boys at his prep school than not to call his father the babyish ‘Papa’ any longer.

  ‘What is it, William?’

  ‘Oh, nothing…it doesn’t matter…it’s nothing, not really, sir.’

  ‘William, you know me better than to believe that will serve as an answer.’

  William went from white to red. Shuffled his feet. ‘Is there…? Have you…?’ He stopped and then came out with it in an embarrassed rush: ‘Is there…anything wrong, sir?’ There was only one reason, William had discovered, why clergymen parted company with the Church. Disgrace. And the whispers, like the ones that had followed the tutor at his school who had disappeared one day, never to return.

  Francis’s deep, dark gaze was bent on him. ‘Not in the eyes of the world, if that is what you are trying to say. It is entirely my own choice, and what is wrong is a matter between me and God.’ His frown, and his tone, remote and far away, forbade any further questions.

  Nella held on to Marianne’s hand, as much to reassure Marianne as herself, for she often felt as though it was she who was the elder sister. William stood straight as a ramrod. They looked at their father, speechless, not understanding, their eyes begging for an explanation which Francis struggled for but was not able to give, since he barely understood what was happening himself. He turned his back and in his turn looked out of the window, then said in a curious, hoarse voice, without turning round, ‘That’s all, children. You may go.’

  Papa had never been a very jolly sort of father, not the sort who picked you up and gave you rides on his shoulder, made jokes or played French cricket with you in the garden, like other people’s fathers did, though he sometimes smiled and patted you on the head. He was never unkind, or even very stern. But he was not the sort you could talk to, and his authority and rightness were not to be questioned. Outside the family, people spoke of him with a little awe, although everyone said he was not only the best-looking, but the most looked-up-to clergyman on the cathedral staff as he strode round the close with his quick, impatient stride, heels ringing, the skirts of his cassock flying.

  But after Mama died, he had shut himself away for days in his study, and when he emerged he had become a different and rather frightening man. He hardly smiled at all, spoke rarely, and when he did he sometimes offended people.

  He was, in fact, so rude to Nanny Rudd that she upped and left – or was sent packing, according to Marianne. Although she went about with her head in the clouds, as Nanny so often accused her, Marianne always remembered everything she heard – or overheard. This time it was what Nanny had said to Florrie (who wasn’t Florrie then but still Greenwood, the parlourmaid), and though Marianne didn’t really understand it, she knew it had made Grandy very angry. ‘Well, I don’t care, I’m sure, Florrie!’ Nanny had said. ‘I can’t live in the same house as that man a minute longer, anyway! Wouldn’t even look at his own baby, poor mite – can you believe that? It wasn’t the child’s fault she died,’ she had finished, inexplicably. ‘He’s a man, after all, and we all know—’

  ‘That’s quite enough, Nanny,’ Grandy had said sharply, entering the room just in time to hear this last.

  So Nanny departed, and Nella had declared, ‘I don’t care that she’s gone,’ using the absolutely forbidden phrase (‘don’t care is made to care, miss!’) since Nanny herself had used it. ‘She’s a beast! And you’re not to scold me for saying that, either, Marianne!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Marianne mildly. ‘I agree with you, she is.’

  Nanny Rudd hadn’t been comfortable or kind, not like the nanny of their friends the Collins girls. She was strict and sharp and had strong fingers that dug into their scalps when she washed their hair, and pulled it back painfully when she tied their black bows. She saw to it that everything they wore was starched: their pinafores, handkerchiefs and even their drawers. Itchy britches, Nella named them. She was only nice to William, even when he was cheeky or disobedient. But then, nearly everybody was.

  Broughton Underhill turned out to be a small, straggling community of so
me three hundred souls, a village situated in a valley between two ridges of hills and dominated by the largest of them, Broughton Hill, known simply as the Hill. The brisk climb to the top was strenuous, but the view from the top was worth it. On the one side the green Worcestershire countryside rolling towards the distant Welsh mountains. On the other, half a dozen miles away and spreading outwards as far as the eye could see towards Birmingham, began the industrial sprawl of the Black Country, which William, home from school and full of the history he’d learnt there, informed Nella had once been a great forest, the hunting preserve of kings. Land which was now despoiled, riven by canals and railways, punctuated with smoke stacks and great glass-work cones, its trees cut down years ago for fuel, its rich ores mined to feed blast furnaces and steel mills.

  Sometimes, the more restless young men left the village to seek work in the nail and chain shops, the iron foundries of Cradley Heath, Halesowen or Blackheath, the glass works in Stourbridge and Brierley Hill, or they went in the other direction, to the carpet factories in Kidderminster, looking for betterment, or purely from a sense of adventure. But mostly people stayed: there was usually enough work on the Oaklands Park estate and the farms, up at the gravel pits or the brickworks, and if you worked for the estate, they looked after you for life. Apart from that, there was nothing much else in Broughton: some small houses and cottages, the schoolhouse and the Greville Arms, the smithy next door, the church of St Ethelfleda and the gloomy rectory where the Wentworth family were to live. And of course, the Big House itself, Oaklands Park.

  Amy had only the vaguest recollections of the family’s first arrival in Broughton. Nella laughed and declared she could have had no recollections at all, since she was only four years old at the time; she only thought she had, from the stories she’d heard so often of that day when they had all arrived there. But she must have remembered some things, since she could hear in her mind, quite vividly, Grandy’s shocked exclamation at her first sight of the rectory, dark and forbidding, its tall, dilapidated chimneys vying with the square church tower for height, looking as though it were being pulled back into the clutches of what seemed like a forest of ancient and forbidding dark yews behind it, planted too near the house. It was a huge barn of a place, built at a time when rectors regularly had families of ten, eleven or more. Missing slates, peeling paintwork, collapsed guttering…

  Inside it was worse. Dusty, moth-eaten curtains; dark wallpaper, stained and discoloured by damp; old furniture from earlier decades, most of it no doubt the unwanted property of previous incumbents, since the huge pieces were all but immovable, left stranded about the place like beached whales. It was piercingly cold.

  Worst of all was the big stained-glass staircase window which increased the gloom of the high, cavernous hall rather than lighting it. Mrs Villiers speculated on the nature of the rector who had chosen such a highly unsuitable subject for a window in a rectory. Susannah and the Elders. Who wanted to be faced every day when they came down the stairs with two lecherous old men spying on a young woman bathing in her garden? The girls giggled when they saw it, but fortunately the window was so dark and gloomy, and further obscured by the huge yews outside, that the subject could only be discerned properly on close inspection.

  This unprepossessing house had become their new home entirely due to the elderly incumbent of St Ethelfleda’s, the Reverend Wilfred Dorkings, having endured a particularly bad bout that year of his annual bronchitis, after which he had no option but to give up the struggle and live with his niece, the village schoolmistress, while still continuing as rector. Father Dorkings was a saintly bachelor who cared nothing for luxury (unless it was candles and incense in his High Church) and had lived mainly in the kitchen and his study, where he also slept, not even noticing the depredations which time, damp and neglect had wrought. Since he made no complaints to Lady Sybil, in whose gift the rectory and the living of St Ethelfleda were, the state of the house had gone unnoticed, and when she received the letter from Francis Wentworth (who had been a significant presence in her life since she was a child, her cousin Dorothea’s husband, and a frequent visitor to Oaklands) telling her of his abrupt and astonishing abandonment of the ministry, and his having nowhere to live, she had made the offer of the now empty house.

  On their arrival Eleanor Villiers, having summed up the situation in one look, set her lips in a firm line. ‘Very well!’

  The next day, in a violet silk gown trimmed with ecru lace, her many-tailed furs dripping over her shoulders and clasped together over her bosom with the beady-eyed mask of the unfortunate little animal who had provided them, her best towering grey velvet and moiré hat skewered firmly to her hair with an outsize pearl hatpin, her first action was to have old Strudwick, the verger and sexton, harness the pony into the trap and drive up to Oaklands Park, taking the reins herself. She had known Sybil since she was a baby and, outraged at the dirt and discomfort they were expected to be grateful for, had no compunction in giving her a piece of her mind.

  What had she been thinking of, she demanded, sitting very upright in the comfort of Lady Sybil’s warm, flower-scented drawing room, sipping Earl Grey from delicate Crown Derby china balanced in her hand, what could have possessed Sybil to offer such a backhanded gift – nothing more than a hovel, when it came down to it, she added, exaggerating for good measure – to a bereaved, motherless, penniless family? This last was a further exaggeration. Francis was not, in fact, entirely penniless: he had a private income, though only just about adequate to cover William’s school fees and the day-to-day expenses of looking after his family – and there was in fact nothing backhanded about Sybil’s offer, though it had indeed crossed Eleanor’s mind to wonder about the mixed motives which had caused her to offer the house, and Francis to accept.

  Sybil was mortified. ‘Really? As bad as that, is it? I must confess I haven’t had occasion to visit the rectory for years. I will certainly see that something is done at once.’

  For all the fashionable clothes, the society manners, she hasn’t really changed, Eleanor thought, she is still the same generous, impulsive, careless girl she always has been – in fact, she has turned out better than ever anyone would have expected, considering the circumstances of her upbringing. Sybil’s mother had died when she was a young child, and her profligate and unheeding father, John Greville, Earl of Broughton, as careless of his only child’s welfare as he was of his inheritance, had left her in the care of a succession of indifferent nurses and governesses who turned a blind eye to her roaming the countryside, wild as a deer, with the gamekeeper’s son, until this state of affairs became no longer tenable even to her father. She was sent to live in London with his sister to be transformed from a hoyden into a young lady, relieving him of responsibility for her while he pursued his gambling and, under a mountain of debts, let the house slide into shabby and disgraceful ruin. The estate itself remained in better case, the earl having his reputation of being one of the best shots in England to keep up. Although he had found it necessary to sell land off piecemeal to stave off his debtors, the woods and coverts remained well managed and maintained.

  Despite her protests, Sybil’s eventual debut into society was a success, if measured by the whirl of her activities, the friends she made. She was never a beauty, her features were too strong for that, but she was lively and popular and learnt how to dress well. It would have amazed no one if she had sold up and never returned to the dereliction that was Oaklands on her father’s death, but in fact she had confounded everyone by marrying a rich industrialist much older than herself, whose money enabled her to restore the house to its former glory. Arthur Foley was a self-made man and something of a rough diamond, but he had a kind heart and Mrs Villiers wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t had something to do with Sybil’s offer of the rectory.

  She was wrong in this. Sybil was, in fact, taken aback by a situation she hadn’t truly known to exist, and aghast at how her neglect of her rector must have appeared. Moreover, the pic
ture painted by Mrs Villiers had brought back to her what it was like to live in a run-down house – a hateful memory never far from her mind – and she promised to make amends, by way of despatching workmen to repair the roof, to paint and paper, hang new curtains and do anything else that needed to be done. Incapable of doing anything by halves, she went on to suggest that the two eldest girls, Marianne and Nella, might be allowed to share her daughter’s governess for their lessons. Miss Osgood only had Eunice to teach, her brother, Greville, being away at school, of course.

  Much mollified by all this, Mrs Villiers forgave. She thanked Sybil warmly, and added that she thought Francis might well agree to this solution to the girls’ education, something he appeared not to have taken into account.

  Her visit to Oaklands had in fact been most satisfactory, she decided as she drove the pony trap back and into the stable behind the rectory, but even so, she could not imagine how they were ever going to make this house into anything resembling a comfortable – even a warm – home.

  But she and Florrie (who was already beginning to take on the indispensable role she was soon to occupy: nanny, housekeeper, cook, and dispenser of comfort, brisk advice and support) set themselves the task of creating order out of chaos and, as women do, quite enjoyed it if the truth be told.

  There wasn’t much they could do about the cold. The bedrooms were worst of all, stifling in summer but so icy in winter that the flowery patterns of hoar frost, actually inside the windows when the children woke, were sometimes still there when they went to bed at night.

  Lady Sybil, however, had crowned her generosity with one hitherto unimaginable luxury: a bathroom was installed, with hot water provided by the kitchen boiler and stored in a huge copper cylinder that loomed like a leviathan in one corner of the bathroom, a great comfort on which all three girls, despite being expressly forbidden to do so, would perch in winter while Marianne told them stories she had made up, huddled together like birds on a chimney pot to get warm before diving between the icy sheets and curling up into a ball to conserve any warmth they’d managed to gain.