Christina Kline - The Exiles

Many evenings, down the hall from her room, she could hear the servants playing blackjack or hearts around the long table in the kitchen, their voices rising in a showy camaraderie that only made her loneliness more acute. On the few occasions when she ventured out, she’d stand awkwardly in the corner while they cheerfully avoided her. They considered her an odd duck, both an object of gossip for her eccentric habits (such as reading while eating), and a mystery they had little interest in solving. She spoke a vernacular that no doubt reminded them of their employers, and they were clearly relieved when she went back to her room and shut the door.

Into this void came Cecil, three years older and infinitely more worldly. The brush of his fingertips against hers, a private wink over the heads of the children, the flat of his hand on the small of her back when no one was looking: in these small ways he telegraphed his intentions.

Over the weeks and months of their acquaintance, his ardor became more persuasive, his entreaties more endearing. “Dear Evangeline!” he whispered. “Even your name is picturesque.” He’d studied Chaucer at Cambridge for the sole purpose, he told her, of memorizing lines to whisper in her ear:

She was fair as is the rose in May.

And:

What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.

Everything about him awed her. This man had sat in cafés in Paris at midnight, traversed Venetian canals by gondola, swum in the ice-blue waters of the Mediterranean. And then there was the matter of that brown tendril of hair that feathered against his neck, those rangy shoulders under a crisp linen shirt, the aquiline nose and lush red lips . . .

“You captivate me,” he said, tugging at the strings of her bodice.

“You are the only woman for me,” he breathed into her hair.

“But what about—what about . . .”

“I adore you. I want to spend every hour of every day with you.”

“It is . . . immoral.”

“It is moral to us. Why should we concern ourselves with the chiding of provincial bores?”

In the same way that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the brutal cold of winter on a hot summer day, Evangeline basked in the heat of Cecil’s affection with little thought of its ending. He promised just enough to persuade her that he shared the emotions she felt so deeply.

It was surprisingly easy to keep their rendezvous secret. Evangeline’s small room was set apart from the other servants’ bedrooms, down a narrow hallway past the kitchen. Because she was on a different schedule than most of the staff, nobody paid much attention to her comings and goings. The proximity to London was its own alibi. Coming back to her room between lessons, she’d find notes slipped under her door— Half six, corner of Cavendish and Circus . . . Gloucester Gate, 7 p.m. . . . Dorset Square at noon —and hide them under her mattress. She told the cook she was going for a stroll, to see the lights on the Thames at dusk, to explore Regent’s Park on a Sunday, and she wasn’t even lying.

Cecil’s best friend from Harrow was an amiable lad named Charles Pepperton. Unlike Cecil, who was studying to be a barrister like his father, Charles wasn’t expected to pursue a vocation. He would inherit both the family estate and his father’s seat in the House of Lords; all he needed to do for the next few decades was cultivate the proper friends, marry an age-appropriate woman from a comparable family (a minor royal, if possible), and improve his fox-hunting skills at the family’s country estate in Dorset. He spent a lot of time in Dorset. His home in Mayfair was spacious, well-appointed, and almost always uninhabited.

The first time Cecil brought Evangeline to the house in Mayfair—early on a Saturday evening, when lessons were over and the Whitstones senior were at a party—she was shy and self-conscious in front of the servants. But soon enough she learned about the mechanisms in place designed to keep secrets, cover up indiscretions, and protect the upper classes from scandal. Cecil, well known to the staff, was treated with casual deference: a discreet lowering of the eyes, a careful coding of language. (“Will the lady be joining you for tea?”) As time went on, Evangeline became more comfortable, more brazenly open. When Cecil pulled her onto his lap in front of the butler, she no longer felt compelled to protest.

It was in the shadowy parlor of Charles’s town house that Cecil gave her the ring. “To remember me while I’m on holiday. And when I’m back . . .” He nuzzled her neck.

She pulled away, smiling uncertainly, trying to parse the meaning behind his words. “When you’re back?”

He put a finger to her lips. “You’ll wear it for me again.”

This was not, of course, the answer to the question she was asking. But it was the only answer he was prepared to give.

It wasn’t until much later that she realized she had built gossamer connections between his words, sticky as spider silk, filling in the phrases she wanted to hear.

Newgate Prison, London, 1840

There were some things she would never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw. The constant contact with other women, cheek to cheek, their sour breath on her face as she tried to sleep, their snoring in her ears. She learned to dim the noise: the clanging door at the end of the hall, the tapping spoons and wailing babies. The stink of the chamber pot, which had so sickened her when she’d first arrived, receded; she willed herself to ignore it.

Her relationship with Cecil had been so consuming that while she was at the Whitstones’ she’d barely had a moment to miss the life she’d led before. But now her life in Tunbridge Wells was what came to mind most often. She missed her father: his mild temperament and small kindnesses, how they’d chat for hours in the evening, watching the fire settle as rain pattered the roof tiles. She’d adjust the blanket on his legs and he’d read to her from Wordsworth or Shakespeare, lines she now mouthed to herself as she lay in the small space she’d carved out on the cell floor:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light . . .

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.

When she closed her eyes, Evangeline found comfort in recalling even the small routines she used to complain about: heating a kettle to wash dishes in the sink, scooping coal from the bin to keep the fire going in the stove, heading to the bakery with her shopping basket on a cold February morning. Ordinary pleasures now seemed unimaginable: black tea sweetened with sugar in the afternoon, with apricot cake and custard; her mattress at the rectory, stuffed with goose feathers and cotton; the soft muslin gown and cap she wore to sleep; calfskin gloves, dark brown, with mother-of-pearl buttons, molded to the shape of her hands through years of wear; her wool cape with its rabbit-fur collar. Watching her father at his writing desk as he worked on his weekly sermons, his tapered fingers holding a quill. The smell of the streets of Tunbridge Wells when it rained in the spring: wet roses and lavender, horse manure and hay. Standing in a meadow at dawn, watching a lemony sun rise in a wide-open sky.