Year of Folly Page 5

  “I would like that very much,” Emma admitted.

  They walked companionably down the High Street, while other pedestrians and shoppers stepped around them. Many of the men touched their hat brims at Helen Campbell and she smiled back. Their gazes flickered curiously toward Emma.

  “I am well known in Inverness,” Helen said, when Emma glanced at her after yet another man murmured a greeting in thick Gaelic. “My husband was the captain of the Cinnrígmonaid. It is the largest ship running out of Inverness, plying the continental routes. He employed only local men, so there is that, too.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Emma said awkwardly.

  “I’m not,” Helen Campbell said, her smile bright. She squeezed Emma’s arm. “Oh, I will miss my husband, every day. Only, life has been ever so much easier since he passed on. I am the head of my own domain and can come and go as I please. The Cinnrígmonaid was willed to the first mate, Dougal McBain. He pays my husband’s share of every cargo promptly on the first of the month, which provides me with a living.”

  Emma was startled. Most of the widows in society wrapped themselves in black bombazine and veils and wept whenever they were forced into public and beat their chests over their plight. She had never met a woman who found widowhood to be a positive thing, before.

  She glanced at Helen Campbell’s dark gray tweed suit, and the touch of white lace at her sleeves and collar. She did not seem to be wilting in the slightest for lack of a man to care for her.

  Helen steered them into a side street and up the hill to the crest, where a small but well-appointed house stood behind a picket fence. A garden full of flowers soaked up the rain, dripping water from leaf tips and petals.

  “The peonies will bloom after this rain, ye wait and see,” Helen said as she moved up the path to the steps up to the front door. She took a big iron key out of her pocket and unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Come in!”

  Emma shook off her umbrella and stepped inside to look around curiously. The house was small yet seemed to have more room inside than appeared from the outside. The stairs ran straight up from just inside the door, and there was no grand entrance foyer.

  “Mrs. Hudson!” Helen called.

  From the back of the house, a reply came in thick Gaelic.

  “In here,” Helen said, moving over to one of the front rooms and pushing the door aside.

  It was a morning room. Or perhaps it was a front parlor? If there was no man in the house, then perhaps there was no need for a morning room for the lady. Emma frowned. Many of the arrangements of a typical household would not apply to this one.

  She decided to call the room a sitting room for now, for there was a comfortable sofa and a ladies’ sized wing chair pulled up to the fireplace. A small table sat beside the wing chair, and a large table was pushed up against the back wall of the room. Lining the wall with the door was three massive library cases, filled with books and knickknacks—bits and pieces from a busy life which had accumulated there over time. Match boxes, a hair ribbon, a pair of books stacked on their sides. Candles, folded newspapers. A tall jar of Turkish Delight, the pink confections gleaming behind the glass.

  Not just the bookcases were being used for purposes other than intended. The table pushed against the wall acted as a sideboard, holding trays with decanters and glasses, cups and saucers, and a cake dome.

  The table beside the wing chair, which might have held a book and a glass, instead was laid for dinner for one, with a knife and fork and napkin, and a tall white taper.

  The sofa held books. Dozens of them. They laid open and closed, stacked and not. Some had fallen between the cushions and others were in danger of sliding off altogether.

  The arm of the sofa closest to the wing chair had one book lying over it, face down, with the pages spread. The sofa was being used as a bookmark.

  The mantle shelf over the fireplace held no candles or matches, for they were on the bookshelves in front of the books still being stored there. There was a clock, though—a handsome carriage clock, the spinning pendulum glinting as it turned. Beside it was a different sort of clock, which Emma only recognized because she had seen something similar at Innesford, the home of a sailing family. “That is a bar….” She frowned.

  “Barometer,” Helen finished. “It was my husband’s. He kept it aboard the Cinnrígmonaid. It helps predict the weather. I find it rather useful. I’m not sure why every household in England does not have one.” She moved over to the barometer and peered at the face. “Pressure is rising. The rain will stop in a few hours and the sun will come out.”

  A large woman with a tightly laced dress and a double chin sailed into the room.

  “Ah, Mrs. Hudson,” Helen said. “Emma, Miss Wardell, this is my housekeeper and companion, Mrs. Ernestine Hudson. Another widow.” She smiled.

  So did Mrs. Hudson.

  “This is my friend, Miss Emma Wardell, Mrs. Hudson. She is Lord Rothmere’s sister. We met at the dinner party last week. She will be attending Miss Becker’s lecture tomorrow night, too.”

  “‘tis a pleasure to meet ye, Miss Wardell,” Mrs. Hudson said, in a thick brogue. “Tea, deary?” The last was directed at Helen.

  “Yes, indeed,” Helen said. “Are there any scones left?”

  “I made oat cakes.”

  “Even better!”

  Mrs. Hudson moved out of the room once more. The room seemed much larger once she was gone.

  “My goodness…” Emma breathed.

  “Mrs. Hudson is a godsend,” Helen admitted. “I think she might be the largest women I have ever met, too. We get along quite well. She would be destitute if she was not here, so we support each other. It is a beneficial arrangement.”

  As she spoke, she removed books from the sofa, clearing one end of it. The books were dumped upon the shelves. Helen patted the sofa cushion and Emma sat. Then the widow cleared the little table of its dinner setting, which she put on the other table. She lifted the table and moved it so it sat between Emma and the wing chair.

  Helen settled on the wing chair with a smile. “That’s better. I don’t have guests very often. I’m afraid it shows.”

  Emma’s gaze was caught by the cover of the book which still laid facedown upon the arm of the sofa. It wasn’t really a book. It seemed to be a bound essay, for there was no spine. The cover was the same paper as the rest of the booklet. “The Subjection of Women,” Emma read aloud.

  “Oh, have you read it?” Helen asked. She leaned over the table to pluck the booklet from the arm. She glanced around her, with a tiny frown. “Of course I can never find my bookmark. It is probably buried in the middle of another book somewhere.”

  “You don’t read one book at a time?”

  “Good lord, no!” Helen turned the corner of the page down and closed the booklet.

  Emma smothered her protest. If Catrin or Cian had seen Helen do that, they would have screamed.

  Helen held the abused booklet out to her. “Here, you must borrow it and read it. It will open your eyes.”

  Emma accepted the booklet and read the simple cover again. The Subjection of Women. John Stuart Mill. “This is…political?”

  “He concerns himself only with the economics of inequality,” Helen said. “Yet he is thorough and convincing.”

  Emma put the book to one side as Mrs. Hudson moved into the room, bearing a large tray. Mrs. Hudson placed the tray on the table between them. “The cakes are still warm. Watch your mouths and fingers.”

  “Is that your strawberry jam, Mrs. Hudson?”

  “‘tis, yes.”

  “Marvelous!” Helen said with a sigh. “Mrs. Hudson grows the strawberries herself. So many of them—she spends three days making jam every few weeks when there is a fresh crop.”

  “Don’t let the tea grow cold,” Mrs. Hudson said. “I have damp washing to rehang.”

  She left and shut the door behind her.

  Helen got to her feet once more. “Would ye like to pour, Miss Warde
ll?”

  “I…er…yes, of course.” Emma had never been asked to pour the tea before. She was always the least important woman in any room.

  Helen moved over to the table against the wall, while Emma concentrated on the simple act of pouring two cups of tea without spilling a drop. Other ladies made it seem very simple.

  Glass clinked. She heard liquid pour.

  Helen returned and placed two heavy based crystal glasses on the tray, one beside each teacup, and sat down once more. “A dram will help warm us on such a damp day,” she said, with a mischievous smile. Her smile faded a touch. “Ye do drink, yes?”

  “I do,” Emma admitted. “I don’t recognize the color, though. What is it?”

  “Why, ‘tis Scotch, my dear.” Helen gave a soft laugh. “Ye’ve been here nearly a fortnight and ye’ve not yet tasted Scotch?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “I can see we have some catching up to do, then,” Helen said. She picked up her glass.

  Emma put the teapot down and quickly picked up her own. “What shall we drink to?”

  Helen considered. “To friendship,” she decided.

  “Yes,” Emma agreed.

  Helen lifted her glass a little. “Slàinte.”

  Emma hesitated.

  “It means, hm… Good health, or cheers. Drink well. Enjoy. All of it. Now, you say it.”

  Emma tried repeating the word.

  “Very flat and English,” Helen declared. She said it again, a little slower this time.

  Emma tried to imitate the way Helen said it, with the movement of her tongue and lips. The sound that emerged was not quite the same, yet much better than her first attempt.

  “We’ll let it pass for now,” Helen said and drank.

  Emma followed Helen’s lead and took a deep mouthful of the golden liquid. It was a different flavor. A mellow one. She let it settle on her tongue, then swallowed. The aftertaste was pleasant, she decided.

  “Good, yes?” Helen said, smiling.

  “Very good indeed.”

  “‘tis a local drop. Us Scots know a thing or two about whisky, ye see.”

  “I do, now,” Emma admitted. She took another mouthful.

  Helen put her glass down and plucked one of the still warm oat cakes from the cake stand and dropped it onto a bread plate with a murmur of happiness. “Eat,” she urged Emma. “Tell me if this is not the best strawberry jam ye’ve ever tasted.”

  Emma ate.

  EMMA STAYED ON THE SOFA for several hours, during which the rain went away as promised, and the sun came out. They ate and drank and above all, they talked.

  Emma had never had a conversation so interesting, before, except when speaking with family members. Helen was extremely well read and had time to think about matters few ladies of the ton would even dare consider.

  “I have such a pleasant life, now,” Helen said at one point, as she refilled the Scotch glasses. “It seems unfair I should be so content when other women suffer daily deprivations and limitations, simply because they are married. Marriage is supposed to be a sublime state for ladies, yet it chokes the life out of most women and snares them in virtual slavery.”

  Helen’s observations and opinions were alarmingly controversial, yet everything she claimed, she could support with facts she had gleaned from her reading. Often, she would bounce to her feet and reach for a book, or perhaps two at a time. She would flip to certain pages and turn the books for Emma to read excerpts and paragraphs. Thomas Robert Malthus and Thomas Henry Huxley settled on top of Mr. Mill’s essay, for Emma to take home with her.

  Balanced on top of the small pile were four editions of Lydia Becker’s magazine, the Women’s Suffrage Journal.

  “Best not let too many people see ye reading it,” Helen warned as she placed the magazines upon the pile. “Lest till yer ready to hold yer own in defense of yer reading.”

  “Why should I hide what I read?” Emma asked curiously. “My family encourage wide reading, of all subject matters. It broadens the mind.”

  Helen’s smile faded. “I think ye’ll find the subject of women’s rights will divide even yer wonderful family,” she said soberly. “‘tis natural for men to defend what’s theirs, and they’ve considered themselves superior to women for…well, forever. Yes, even the men of yer family. It takes a rare breed of man to consider women their equal without a brush of fear running up their spines.”

  “Women are not equal,” Emma pointed out, then finished her glass of Scotch. “They are weak and emotional and inclined to hysterics. They have no head for…for…”

  “For running weaving mills and opening ladies’ colleges, and rushing to Africa to rescue their men?” Helen asked softly.

  Emma looked down at the empty glass, her thoughts reeling. All the women of her family did do such manly things, and no one, not even the men, had ever said they were unfeminine because of it. Will seemed to adore Bridget’s business sense with as much fervor as her fashion sense.

  “The problem with ye, my dear,” Helen said gently, “is that ye’ve taken aboard all the beliefs of society and not ever questioned them.”

  “One doesn’t, on the ton,” Emma admitted. “My position in society is already so precarious…” She gnawed at her bottom lip.

  Helen refilled the glasses once more. “Better to blindly agree than risk repudiation?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Emma said, relief touching her. Helen understood. “Only matrons with completely secure ranks can afford to oppose the popular opinions of society, and even if they do it too often, people cut them off.”

  “While a man can air whatever silly notion he wants,” Helen added.

  “I suppose…yes,” Emma said slowly. “Although even the men in society must fall in with the majority or be seen as too radical. You haven’t attended a Season, Helen, so you cannot possibly understand how they will close ranks and defend tradition and custom.”

  “The status quo at all costs,” Helen murmured.

  “The what?”

  Helen lifted a brow. “The existing state of affairs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even when it keeps women gagged and helpless,” Helen added softly. “That is why I will never marry again.”

  Helen also added a Gaelic dictionary to the top of the pile of books. While they were speaking, Helen used Gaelic here and there, so Emma could grasp the meaning of the word by context. “Ye should use Gaelic as often as ye can, if ye want to learn it quickly,” she explained. “Listen to everyone speaking it—really listen.”

  “It all blends together, though. I cannot distinguish single words at all.”

  “It will come,” Helen assured her. “I remember feeling that way about English. It was all harsh, hard sounds blended together. People here will be pleased if ye merely try to speak to them, and will help ye out when ye stumble, which ye will.”

  It was mid-afternoon when Emma considered returning to Kirkaldy. Would anyone have noticed her absence, yet? She did not want to worry anyone. Although this day had been such an unexpectedly pleasant one and she wanted to linger, to enjoy it a little longer.

  While Helen went back to the kitchen to speak to Mrs. Hudson about another pot of tea and to return the tray of sandwiches which had been their lunch, Emma moved over to the big window at the front of the room.

  The view from here was breath-taking. As the house sat at the crest of the river valley, and faced north west, the view extended across the entire town of Inverness. The spire of St. Andrews, on the other side of the river, and the turrets of Inverness castle stood like twin sentinels.

  The two tributaries of the river Ness wound like silver necklaces through the town, to open upon the sea. The tall masts of ships at anchor by the wharves explained why Helen’s husband had chosen this house and this view.

  Bank Street, which they had walked along to reach this street, ran along the edge of the river. Bank Street became the main road to Edinburgh, a little farther along. It was also the road to Kirkal
dy, to the south east.

  Just as Helen and Emma had done, there were other strollers moving along the street now the sun was out. Most of them were taking their time, enjoying the light and the pleasant day after days of rain. One figure, though, strode quickly, drawing Emma’s eye.

  She frowned.

  “Isn’t that yer cousin, Morgan?” Helen asked, from beside her. She had returned quietly.

  “Yes it is he,” Emma said. From here, Morgan was a tiny figure, yet his height distinguished him. So did the formal jacket and precise detailing of his clothes. Besides, he was the only man Emma knew who wore a fedora style hat in Inverness. Fedoras had been all the rage in London this Season among the younger men, while the older generation remain partial to their bowlers and top hats.

  As they watched, he glanced over his shoulder, scanning the road behind him.

  “It seems your cousin is being secretive,” Helen murmured, her glance sliding to Emma.

  Emma laughed. “About what? He is the most staid man I know. He clings to his routine like a monk.”

  “Not today,” Helen said. She glanced at Emma, her smile mischievous once more. “Ye should follow him. See, he is about to pass this road. If ye hurry, ye’ll be just far enough behind him to keep him in sight, yet not alert him to your presence.”

  “That seems improper.”

  “Then ye don’t wish to know where he goes which requires stealing away from Kirkaldy?”

  “That is odd,” Emma admitted.

  Helen turned on one heel so she was looking at Emma directly. “Ye did say Morgan controls your allowance, yes?”

  “Will does not care for dealing with money. Morgan handles all the household accounts.”

  “Then, as ye have allowed the man to control your money, should ye not assure yerself that he is reliable and trustworthy?”

  “Of course he is! He is Morgan.”

  “Yet he is stealing through Inverness at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon—and walking so no one, not even yer drivers, knows where he goes.”

  Morgan passed the intersection where the road this house was on opened upon Bank Street, still moving fast.