The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean Page 6

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lydia interrupted sharply.

  To be honest, she wasn’t sure, only that an idea had begun to form. ‘We could go together.’

  ‘Go together?’

  ‘If you’re going to escape. I could come too. You know, to Melbourne.’

  Lydia frowned. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re here to be looked after while your mother’s in the loony bin.’

  Emily heard herself gasp and tried to catch her breath. She wanted to shout at Lydia and tell her that she was lying, that it was a cruel joke, like staying till Easter and Eunice being her governess. But without breath she couldn’t speak and, at the same time, came the terrible realisation that it was true. That night before the train trip, her mother’s mad chanting, and her father’s desperate pleas. The hurried arrangements for Emily to stay at Mount Prospect. Her father’s refusal to bend when she didn’t want to go. All the clues were there, although the words loony bin had never been spoken.

  She stared straight ahead. Everything was blurred because of the tears filling her eyes, but she concentrated on the way Dapple’s haunches moved and the bobbing of his head. She began to count each step, determined not to look at Lydia, whom she could not forgive, even if her cruel words contained the truth.

  The whip flicked over Dapple’s haunches, jerking him into a clumsy canter across the paddock. She held on to the edge of the cart, her gaze focused on the horse and on the thought of Lydia begging for her forgiveness and being refused. When they arrived at the scrub, she got down from the cart in frosty silence and began to walk off.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lydia called.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Don’t be silly, I need you. There’s work to do. Emily …’

  There was a plaintive note in Lydia’s voice, and she felt a stab of satisfaction. Briefly she considered turning back, but the awful words loony bin pushed her forwards. She began to run and, when she heard Lydia call again, she urged herself to run faster.

  She didn’t stop until she found herself unexpectedly confronted by a dilapidated post-and-rail enclosure that she could not remember seeing on their outward journey. She looked around for the gate they’d gone through earlier. Where was the dirt lane? There was no sign of it; nothing but paddocks and trees and a mob of sheep clustered around a distant windmill. In her fury with Lydia, she must have run off in the wrong direction, and now, leaning against the fence, catching her breath, came the unnerving thought that she might be lost. The anger that had fuelled her flight drained away. She felt light-headed, confused by panicky thoughts about being lost and, worse, the humiliation of having to be found.

  It was only after some minutes had passed that she was able to take in her immediate surroundings: the lopsided marble headstones of the pioneers’ cemetery. Of course, the pioneers’ cemetery. She’d glimpsed it once with Uncle Cec and wanted to stop and explore, but Uncle Cec had sheep to feed and they’d rattled past in the truck.

  Buoyed by curiosity, her fears of being lost dwindled and she climbed over the rickety fence and jumped down inside the boundary of the graveyard. Some of the headstones had fallen over and lay like ancient relics, half hidden in the grass and thistles. She crouched down beside a capsized marble slab.

  Here lieth the mortal remains of Annie / The beloved daughter of George Bertram / Departed this life March 21st 1882 / Aged 17 years / Resurgam, she read.

  Despite the warmth of the late afternoon she felt a sudden chill. Annie was only three years older than her. How had she died? Why did the gravestone only mention Annie’s father? Was it because Annie’s mother was already dead?

  She whispered the word Resurgam. They were studying Latin at school, and her father had insisted she continue with it. He was a great believer in the power of the English language and had a special interest in etymology for which, he said, a knowledge of Latin was essential. He liked to set little tests for her, where the aim was to deduce the meaning of a word from its Latin root. Sometimes it turned out to be a Greek root, which was unfair. Ancient Greek was not on the school syllabus. Often they were led to consult the volumes of her father’s Oxford English Dictionary. She enjoyed his tests and was proud of his praise when she did well.

  She ran her fingers over Annie’s name, feeling the indentation of the words cut into the marble. Resurgam probably meant something like resurgent, which meant revive. She imagined lying under the marble slab, earth pressing down. There would be no reviving Annie.

  Everyone in this graveyard had died so young. Departed this life, the inscriptions read, as if the dead were going on a journey and would arrive at another life or, rather, as she corrected herself, an afterlife. Not that she believed in that. At least, she didn’t think so. Dust to dust was more likely. She felt guilty for not believing – it was a betrayal of her father. Once or twice she’d thought about raising it as part of their etymology discussions but had not wanted to upset him. He was often upset these days, mainly about her mother.

  Mother. The word dropped like a stone in a well, and she forgot to look where she was going. Before she knew it, her left leg had plunged through the sandy soil at the edge of a marble slab. Something crunched underfoot. The bones of a long-dead pioneer? She screamed, and a gust of wind blew dust in her face. All of a sudden, the graveyard was alive with malevolent ghosts. She heaved her leg from the hole, scrambled to her feet, vaulted over the fence with an ease that surprised even herself and kept going. Fifty yards on, her mind caught up with her body and she stopped, panting. Where exactly was she heading?

  In the distance was the line of trees that marked the start of the scrub where she’d left her aunt. Other than that, she had lost all sense of direction. Her only real option was to return to Lydia. But how could she? It was too mortifying, and she set off randomly, hoping to spot something familiar, only for her resolve to peter out after a few dozen steps. Her mouth was as dry as a chip, and the thought of the waterbag hanging on the back of the cart was more than she could resist.

  She began the trek towards the scrub, determined that when reunited with Lydia she would maintain a dignified yet punishing silence.

  On arriving, Emily found Dapple standing quietly in the shade of a tree where Lydia had left him tied by a rope to a low branch. She stumbled to the waterbag and unhooked it from the cart, sloshing water into her mouth and down her chin until the front of her blouse was soaked. She went on gulping, not caring how much was wasted, until she could drink no more. It was only then that something on the tray of the cart attracted her eye – her mother’s mink coat, crumpled in a heap. For a fleeting moment she half expected her mother to sit up, until reality took hold and the mink coat turned into a tangled pile of dead rabbits.

  Dropping the waterbag, she bolted into the scrub, where Mrs Flynn’s excited barking helped guide her towards her aunt. As Emily skirted a prickly clump of ti-tree, they came face to face. In one hand Lydia gripped a bundle of rabbits by their hind legs, while three more dangled from a wire contraption around her waist.

  ‘Fat lot of good you’ve been,’ Lydia said. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ Not waiting for an answer, she kept walking.

  At the cart, Lydia threw these last few rabbits onto the tray while Emily tried not to look at the growing lumpy mound. Instead she picked up the waterbag and spent the time making sure it was securely attached. She finished the task and turned to see Lydia observing her.

  ‘Home, James?’ Lydia asked, and swung up onto the folded grey blanket that served as a makeshift seat. She held out a hand to help Emily up. After the shock of trampling on pioneer bones, getting lost and nearly dying of thirst, then seeing a mink coat turn into rabbit corpses, she wanted nothing more than to accept Lydia’s hand, but she couldn’t betray her mother and hauled herself up onto the cart.

  They travelled without speaking. Lydia’s hand had been an olive branch and she was beginning to regret not accepting it. After all, her aunt had only spoken aloud what she herself had secret
ly known. Or almost known – and didn’t that come to the same thing in the end? The silence felt oppressive, but there seemed no way to break it without losing face. Once more, her mother’s words about petards and hoisting oneself came to her. Why couldn’t Lydia say something conciliatory? Life was so unfair.

  7

  TWICE A WEEK MR BEATTY, the postman, delivered the mail, leading to an anxious build-up of hope that there would be a letter from home. Almost two weeks had gone by, and in that time Emily had received only one short note from her father hoping she’d arrived safely and was doing her bit to help out. Your mother is progressing well, he’d written, and should be back home soon. He did not say where she was. She’d reread the letter over and over, searching for something more. But there was nothing more, and all she could think of were Lydia’s awful words and that they were true. Sitting on the garden seat under the Chinese elm, Emily had shed some secret tears.

  Today, however, was not a mail day, and Grandmother had announced at breakfast that Eunice was temporarily bedridden with a wheezy chest, at which news Emily had felt a spark of uncharitable joy. A day without the usual list of boring jobs. Or almost, as there was still the early morning task of feeding the chooks and collecting the eggs, a task that Della had off-loaded onto her. Not that she really minded. It didn’t take long and was usually followed by an hour of free time, coinciding as it did with Eunice’s daily piano practice. Sometimes she found Eunice’s playing impossible to resist and, standing outside the piano room, she’d become lost in the melodies. It was infuriating that Eunice could have such an effect, and she had to console herself with the idea that really it was not Eunice, it was Chopin.

  This morning, walking back to the house with a basket of freshly laid eggs, she couldn’t stop thinking about the books in the workshop. Who did they belong to and why were they there? The questions were still on her mind as she entered the courtyard to see Della sitting at the men’s dining table, dunking an oatmeal biscuit into her cup of tea. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t morning teatime, but Della took her breaks when she felt like it. She wasn’t a blinking navvy.

  Emily put the egg basket on the table and sat down casually. To get information from Della, she needed to play her cards right. It was important not to seem too interested or suspicions would be aroused. Information was power, and Della never gave it up willy-nilly.

  ‘Seven eggs this morning.’

  The cook dignified this revelation with an almost imperceptible rise of one eyebrow. She drained her cup and called to Florrie to bring out the teapot and a cup for the skinny malink too. It was an encouraging sign that she was in the mood for a chat.

  ‘I suppose nobody uses the old workshop anymore,’ Emily said, as if she couldn’t care less.

  ‘Not since William joined up.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Reckoned a writer has to have a place to write. Calls himself a poet.’ And then after a bit Della added, ‘It’s not normal.’

  ‘Why not?’ She had never heard poetry described as not normal, but her question confused Della and the conversation got stuck in a cul de sac of repeated whats and whys until eventually they sorted it out. Della hadn’t been referring to poetry after all, even though it was a useless sort of thing as far as she could see. Her comment had been aimed at William’s choice of workplace. There were plenty of rooms in the house for a desk.

  ‘Why would a person choose an old shed with a dirt floor? He’s a queer fish, make no mistake.’

  Emily felt a tremor of excitement at this description of William and was wondering how she might get Della to say more, when the cook continued under her own steam.

  ‘Poor bugger’ll need a hobby now, ’scuse the language. Where the dickens is that blinking Florrie? Florrie, we’re dying of thirst out here!’ Della yelled.

  ‘You mean while he recuperates?’ she asked, persevering.

  Della gave her an odd look that she could not interpret, before adding, ‘Ask no questions and be told no lies.’

  The uninterpretable look changed to one that Emily was all too familiar with: the brick wall. Even so, she couldn’t stop herself. ‘Why will he need a hobby?’

  Florrie emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two teacups and a fresh pot of tea. She plonked the tray on the table.

  ‘If you want gossip, you’ve come to the wrong place,’ Della said. ‘The words of a talebearer are as wounds. Proverbs, chapter 26, verse 22. Isn’t that right, Florrie?’

  Florrie seemed pleased to have been asked for her opinion. ‘We’re not s’posed to gossip. Your gran said,’ she added.

  Emily turned from one to the other. She could see there was no use trying to pry information from them. Perhaps if she got Florrie on her own, but with Della there it was out of the question. She picked up the teapot and poured tea for them all. It was best to bide her time. At least she had discovered something about the workshop and that the books belonged to William. She could not wait to return.

  And so she did, the very next morning, and the one after, while Eunice was still conveniently laid low. After collecting the eggs, she hurried down the path and into the workshop. She had discovered William’s writing desk in a corner of the room and a hurricane lamp that, once lit, provided her with enough light to explore the bookshelves on the far wall. It remained a dizzying sight. There was no particular system or order that she could discern – novels by Jack London sat alongside The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and Kim by Rudyard Kipling. A row of Encyclopaedia Britannica stretched the length of one shelf. Poetry by Byron, Blake, Keats, Browning and Shelley was scattered throughout. Fat tomes piled one on top of the other turned out to be the novels of Dickens. Where, she’d wondered, was Jane Eyre? But if she had failed to find Jane Eyre, there was still much pleasure to be gained from flicking through books at random. Yesterday she had read the whole of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It was quite terrifying, but she’d been unable to stop until the last page was turned – it was lucky that Eunice had still been bedridden.

  Today, feeling the need for something less ghoulish, she sat down at William’s desk with The Poems of John Keats. Time disappeared as the rich ripe words sang inside her. Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun. How wonderful it would be to write like that. Her mother liked poetry too. Her mother. She must write immediately and tell her about Keats. She put down the book and took a sheet of writing paper from the box in the top drawer. Wielding William’s black fountain pen, she began:

  Dear Mother, I expect you haven’t had time to write because of your convalescence, which I hope is going well. I am well.

  She stopped at the repetition of the word well. Her mother would notice it, but crossing it out would create an ugly blot. There was no option but to screw up the page and begin again. She remembered that Mr Beatty, the postman, was due to arrive later and he could take her letter. Perhaps today would also be the day a letter arrived from home? Holding on to that hope, she wrote the word Dear, intending to follow it with Mother, but to her amazement the word that appeared on the page was not Mother, but Dorothy. No amount of blinking changed it, and she was about to waste yet another piece of writing paper when a strange idea occurred: she could actually write a letter to Dorothy.

  Putting pen to paper soon unleashed a flow of words. Sentence followed sentence, until pausing to stretch her cramped writing fingers, she put down the pen and began to read through what she had written. It was a surprise to find how much of the letter was about Claudio. Admittedly, there were details here and there that didn’t quite accord with actual events. For example, she had not mentioned to Dorothy that she’d been running away the morning she and Claudio had first met. And perhaps it wasn’t exactly true that he was locked up at night in the shearer’s quarters to stop him from escaping. But she wanted Dorothy to know that she was not mouldering away in the country; that, on the contrary, things were exciting, even dangerous. And when Claudio had whirled her around the kitchen in a wil
d Italian dance, she wanted her nemesis to feel green with envy.

  She refilled William’s pen with ink, keen to continue.

  I suppose you are wondering what Claudio looks like. Everyone thinks that the Italians are short and swarthy, however Claudio is approximately five feet ten inches tall (a perfect height), and not at all swarthy. She paused, wishing she hadn’t opened up the issue of swarthiness. Claudio was in fact olive-skinned and those words had quite a different feeling from being swarthy. Crossing it out was not an option as that would mean rewriting the whole page. Better to continue. His hair is dark and curly, rather like Lord Byron’s, if you have ever seen his portrait. Another pause, as she glanced at the photograph of said portrait of Byron tacked to the wall above the desk. She was sure it had been cut out of a book – an act of vandalism she assumed William had committed and that she continued to find shocking.

  After the effortless manner in which whole paragraphs about her dramatic and exciting interactions with Claudio had found their way onto the page, she was discovering that the business of describing him was much more difficult. So far, perfunctory details about height and hair were all she had managed. It was only when she had almost given up and was letting her thoughts drift that Will Ladislaw’s smile came to her. Middlemarch. She was still labouring through the early chapters and Will Ladislaw had not yet made an appearance, but yesterday, sitting on the swinging seat, flicking over the pages in a desultory way and wondering if she’d ever get to the end, she’d found his name and read the statement: He had never been fond of Mr Casaubon. Anyone who disliked Mr Casaubon was worthy of her interest and she’d read on a little, to Dorothea’s description of Will’s smile. Something about a gush of inward light illuminating his eyes and a reference to Ariel. It made her own efforts seem quite pathetic. Perhaps she could … No, it did not feel right to steal George Eliot’s words.

  He has a merry smile and beautiful white teeth.