Rosie Thomas - All My Sins Remembered

He lifted her to her feet now so that she stood facing him. Nathaniel knelt down and took off her feathered satin slippers. Then he lifted up the hem of her nightgown to expose her blue-white legs. His beard tickled her skin as he laid his face against her thigh.

An hour later, Eleanor and Nathaniel fell asleep in each other’s arms. In all the dark house, Grace was the only one who lay awake. She held on to her pillow, and waited for the water and her fears to recede.

‘My mother was a Holborough, you know,’ Clio said.

Elizabeth did know. She also knew that Clio’s grandmother had been Miss Constance Earley, who had married Sir Hubert Holborough, Bt, of Holborough Hall, Leicestershire, in 1875. Her daughters had been born in April 1877.

Lady Holborough never fully recovered from the stress of the twin pregnancy and birth, and she lived the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. There were no more children. Blanche and Eleanor Holborough spent their childhood in rural isolation in Leicestershire, best friends as well as sisters.

Elizabeth knew all this, and more. She had the family diaries, letters, Bibles, copies of birth and death certificates, the biographer’s weight of bare facts and forgotten feelings from which to flesh out her people. She thought she knew more about the history of their antecedents than Clio had ever done, and Clio had forgotten so much. Clio could not even remember what they had talked about last time they met.

And yet Clio possessed rare pools of memory in which the water was so clear that she could stare down and see every detail of a single day, a day that had been submerged long ago by the flood of successive days pouring down upon it. Elizabeth wanted to lean over her shoulder and look into those pools too. That was why she came to sit in this room, with her miniature tape-recorder and her notebook, to look at reflections in still water.

‘A Holborough. Yes,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Mother used to tell me stories about when she was a little girl.’

When Blanche and Eleanor were girls, a hundred years ago.

‘What sort of stories?’

Clio gave her cunning look, to show that she was aware of the eagerness behind the question. ‘Stories …’ she said softly, on an expiring breath.

There was a silence, and then she began.

‘Holborough was a fine house. Not on the scale of Stretton, of course, but it was the first house in the neighbourhood. There was a maze in the gardens. Mother and Aunt Blanche used to lead new governesses into it and lose them. They knew every leaf and twig themselves. They would slip away and leave the poor creatures to wander all the afternoon. Then the gardeners would hear the pitiful cries, and come to the rescue.’

Elizabeth had visited Holborough Hall. After it had been sold in the Twenties it had been a preparatory school and then in wartime a training camp for Army Intelligence officers. After the war it had stood empty, and then seen service as a school again. Lately it had become a conference centre. The famous maze had survived, just. It looked very small and dusty, marooned in a wide sea of tarmac on which delegates parked their cars.

‘Can’t you imagine them?’ Clio was saying. ‘Identical little girls in pinafores, whisking gleefully and silently down the green alleys?’

Elizabeth smiled. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

‘They had to make their own amusements. There were no other children. It wasn’t like it was for me, living in the middle of Oxford, with brothers and cousins always there.’

But it had been a happy childhood, Clio knew that, because Eleanor and Blanche often spoke of it. There had been carriage drives and calls with their mother, when she was well enough. There had been outings in winter to follow the hunt, with their father’s groom. Sir Hubert was an expert horseman. There had even been visits to London, to shop and to visit Earley relatives. There had been nannies and governesses and the affairs of the estate and the village. But most importantly of all, there had been the private world that they had created between them.

It was a world governed only by their imaginations, a mutual creation that released them from the carpet-bedded gardens and the crowded mid-Victorian interiors of Holborough, and set them free. They made their own voyages, their own discoveries, even spoke their own language. The intimacy of it lasted them all their lives, even when the intricate games were long forgotten.

Their imaginary world of play was put aside, reluctantly, when the real world judged that it was time for them to be grown up. Blanche and Eleanor accepted the judgement obediently, because they had been brought up to do as they were told, but they kept within themselves a component that remained childlike, together.

Eleanor’s husband Nathaniel thought it was this buried streak of childishness that gave them their air of unconventionality buttoned within perfect propriety. He found it very alluring.

When the twins reached the age of seventeen, Sir Hubert and Lady Holborough decided that their daughters must do the Season. Constance had been presented at Court as a débutante, and in the same year she had been introduced to and then become engaged to Hubert. There had been little Society or London life for her in the years afterwards, because of her own ill-health and her husband’s addiction to field sports, but they were both agreed that there was no reason to deny their daughters their chances of a good marriage.

Constance was apprehensive, and her nervousness took the form of vague illness. But still, a house was taken in Town, and more robust and cosmopolitan Earley aunts were enlisted to launch their nieces into Society.

The twins brought few material or social advantages with them to London in 1895. Their father was a baronet of no particular distinction, except on the hunting field. Their mother came from an old family and had been a beauty in her day, but she had not been much seen for more than fifteen years. There was no great fortune on either side.

But still, against the odds, perhaps because they didn’t care whether they were or not, the Misses Holborough were a success.

They were not beautiful. They had tall foreheads and narrow, too-long noses, but they had handsome figures and large dark eyes and expressive mouths that often seemed to register private amusement. Nathaniel Hirsh was not the first man to be attracted by their obviously enjoyable unity in an exclusive company of two. They began to be invited, and then to be courted. Young men joked about declaring their love to a Miss Holborough on one evening, and then discovering on the next that they had fervently reiterated it to the wrong one.

The joke was more often Blanche and Eleanor’s own. It amused them to tease. From infancy they had used their likeness to play tricks on nannies and governesses, and it seemed natural to extend the game to their dancing partners. They wore one another’s gowns and exchanged their feathered headdresses, became the other for a night and then switched back again. They acquired a reputation for liveliness that added to their appeal.

One evening towards the end of the Season there was a ball at Norfolk House. Blanche and Eleanor had received their cards, and because Lady Holborough was unwell they were chaperoned by Aunt Frederica Earley. Sir Hubert escorted them, although he had no patience with either dancing or polite conversation. He was anxious for the tedium of parading his daughters through the marriage market to be over and done with, so he could return home to Leicestershire and his horses. He had already announced to his wife that he considered the whole affair to be a waste of his time and his money, since neither girl showed any inclination to choose a husband, or to do anything except whisper and giggle with her sister.