Виктория Холт - The Pride of the Peacock

“Not much better.”

They look like ordinary people. “

“Oh, Jessica, you are such a child! You don’t understand these things and therefore you would be wise to leave them to your elders, but now at least you know that we once lived in Oakland Hall and perhaps you will understand why we do not want you to go about staring like a peasant at the people you see coming from there. Now, it’s time for our algebra lesson and if you are going to have the slightest education you must pay more attention to your books.”

But how could one be interested in x plus y squared after such a discovery, and now I was desperately anxious to know something of the barbarians who had taken our house.

That was the beginning of discovery, and in my energetic -and as I thought subtle-way, I began to probe.

It seemed to me that I might have more success with the servants than the family so I tried Poor jar man who came for long days in the summer and short ones in the winter and kept the Dower House garden in good order under Mama’s supervision. Poor Jarman! He was kept poor, he told me, by Nature, who presented his wife with a new baby every year.

“It’s Nature what keeps me poor,” was a favourite saying of his, which I thought very unfair of Nature.

“Nature is the great provides,” I used to write out in best copperplate under Miriam’s guidance. She had evidently been too beneficent to Poor Jarman. It had made him very humble and he touched his forelock to almost everyone except me with great reverence. To me it would be:

“Keep off those dratted flowerbeds, Miss Jessica. If the mistress sees them trod down she’ll blame me.”

I followed him round for a week hoping to prise information from him.

I collected flowerpots, stacked them in the greenhouse, watched him prune and weed. He said: “You’re getting interested in agriculture all of a sudden. Miss Jessica.”

I smiled artfully, not telling him that it was the past I was probing.

"You used to work at Oakland Hall,” I said.

“Aye. Them was the days.”

“Better days, of course,” I commented.

Them lawns I’ he said ecstatically.

“All that grass. Best turf in the country. Just look at this St. John’s Wort. You only have to turn your back and it’s all over the place. It grows while you’re watching it’ ” Nature’s bounty,” I said.

“She’s as generous with St. John’s Wort as she is with you.”

He looked at me suspiciously, wondering what I was talking about.

“Why did you leave Oakland Hall?” I wanted to know.

“I came here with your mother. It seemed the faithful sort of thing, like.” He was looking back to the old days before Nature’s bounty had made him Poor Jarman. He leaned on his spade and his eyes were dreamy.

Them was good days. Funny thing. Never thought they’d end. Then suddenly . “

“Yes,” I prompted, ‘suddenly? “

“Mistress sent for me.

“Jarman,” she said, “we’ve sold the Hall. We’re going to the Dower House.” You could have knocked me down with a dove’s feather though some had said they’d seen it coming. I was took back though. She said: “If you come with us you could have the cottage on the bit of land we’re keeping. You could then marry.” That was the beginning. Before the year was out I was a father “You said there was talk…”

“Yes, talk. Them that knew it all was coming after it had happened .. they was talking. Gambling was in the family. Old Mr. Clavering had been very fond of it, and they said he’d lost quite a tidy sum. There was mortgages for this and that and that’s not good for a house, and what’s not good for a house ain’t good for them that works there.”

“So they sensed the gathering storm.”

“Well, we all knew there was money trouble, ‘cos sometimes wages wasn’t paid for two months. There’s some families as makes a habit of this, but Claverings wasn’t never that sort. Then this man came. He took the Hall. Miner, he’d been. Made a fortune out of something. Came from abroad."

” Why didn’t you stay and work for him? “

“I’d always been with gentry. Miss. Besides, there was this cottage.”

He had eleven children so it must have been about twelve years ago.

One could calculate the years by Jarman’s children, and people were never quite sure which was which so that it was like trying to remember which year something had happened.

“It all took place before I was born,” I went on, keeping his thoughts flowing in the right direction.

"Yes. Tis so. Must have been two years before that. “

So it was twelve years ago—a lifetime-mine anyway.

All I had learned from Jarman was that my father’s gambling had been responsible. No wonder Mama treated him with contempt. Now I understood the meaning behind her bitter remarks. Poor father, he stayed in his room and spent a lot of time playing patience-a solitary game in which he could not lose to an opponent who would have to be paid, yet at the same time preserving contact with the cards he still loved, although they had apparently been the cause of the family’s expulsion from the world of opulence.

Mrs. Cobb could tell me little. Like my family, she had been accustomed to Better Days. She had come to us when we went to the Dower House and was never tired of telling any who would listen that she had been used to parlour maids, kitchen maids, a butler, and two footmen.

It was, therefore, something of a come-down to work in a household like ours; but at least the family, like herself, had known Better Days, and it was not like working for people who had ‘never been used to nothing’.

My father, of course, playing his patience, reading, going for solitary walks, with the heavy weight of guilt on his shoulders, was definitely not the one to approach. He seemed scarcely aware of me in any case. When he did notice me, something of the same expression came into his face as that which I saw when my mother was reminding him that it was his weakness which had brought the family low. To me he was a sort of non-person, which was an odd way to feel about one’s own father, but as he expressed no interest in me, I found it hard to feel anything for him except pity when they reminded him, which they contrived to do on every occasion.

As for Mama, she was even more unapproachable. When I was very young and we sang in church :

“Can a mother’s tender care Cease towards the child she bear?” I had thought of a little female bear cub beloved by its mother bear, but when I had mentioned this to Miriam she had been very shocked and explained the real meaning. I then commented that my mother’s tender care towards me had never really ceased because it had never existed.

At this Miriam had grown very pink and told me that I was a most ungrateful child and should be thankful for the good home I had. I wondered then why for me it was a ‘good home’, though dearly despised by the others, but I put this down to the fact that they had seen those Better Days which I had missed.

My brother Xavier was a remote and romantic figure of whom I saw very little. He looked after the land we had been able to salvage from the Oakland estate and this contained one farm and several acres of pasture land. When I did see him he was kind to me in a vague sort of way, as though he recognized my right to be in the house but wasn’t sure how I’d got there and was too polite to ask. I had heard that he was in love with Lady Clara Donningham who lived some twenty miles away, but because he couldn’t afford her the luxury to which she was accustomed, he wouldn’t ask her to marry him. She apparently was very rich and we were living in what I had heard Mama so often call penury.

The fact was that he and Lady Clara remained apart although, according to Mrs. Cobb who had a link through the cook at the Manor, which was Lady Clara’s house, her ladyship would not have said no if Mr. Xavier had asked her. But as Xavier was too proud, and convention forbade Lady Clara to ask him, they remained apart. This gave Xavier a very romantic aura in my eyes. He was a chivalrous knight who went through life nursing a secret passion because decorum forbade him to speak. He certainly would tell me nothing.