Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (12 page)

When his thoughts reached this point he looked about him at the bowed student heads. So many new people about him and none of them Daniel. Despite the wonder of Cambridge and the relief of escaping from his mother’s anger a pang of home-sickness for his father’s steadfastness, for the shabby vicarage and the wide Yorkshire landscape gripped him.

I must not be afraid of this new life. If Daniel had not been taken away I would not be here, he thought. I can’t wipe out the past but I can overlay it with the joy of study and I must seek new companions.

He had been allotted a room shared with another sizar, a lad of sixteen called Benjamin Hutton. At their first meeting Nat had been glad to find that there were others as lowly as he. Above them were ranks of pensioners, then fellow-commoners and finally noblemen. Benjamin’s youth had also made Nat feel, at nineteen, old and experienced which compensated a little for his sense of awe and of his own insignificance in his new surroundings. But already he was aware of a seething rebellious spirit in Ben which had begun to make him feel uncomfortable.

“Will you endure this long?” Ben had demanded of him at the first dinner in College when they found that sizars had to wait till all the other students had eaten and then sit down to the left-overs.

Nat had responded as his father would have done. “Let us be thankful we are here. If we wait upon these noblemen’s sons we can purchase books and writing materials.”

“I can’t eat paper,” the boy grumbled. “And who are they that they should account themselves so much better than we?”

Nat had looked at him anxiously. Was he closeted with a revolutionary? All his life he had witnessed his father’s humility. Of late he had seen how his mother’s passion tore her apart. He had no wish now to be sucked into festering discontent with his lot. To be here at Cambridge University was almost a miracle.

Kneeling in the chapel he added a prayer for Benjamin Hutton, the opposite in every way from Daniel. Help me to see your purpose, Lord, in all this. This prickly youth may be the thorn I have to bear along with poverty and the loss of Daniel. Is this to be the test of my courage in a way my poor mother could never begin to understand?

Bel said a perfunctory goodbye to Robert as he left her at Cranmore House to proceed to York, where he said he would take a lodging for a night or two while “I deal with my father’s business” as he put it – as if Sir John was not her father too.

Tom had set her trunk down in a bare passage and lifted his hat to her. “Ay, well, I hope you find a new life here to your liking, my little lady,” and he turned to follow Robert out.

Compressing her lips to stop their trembling she watched him disappear. Then she sat down on her trunk, a parcel again that had been dumped here. The servant girl who had let them in had gone to fetch “the Mistress or someone” so she presumed something would happen soon. Meanwhile there was nothing here to look at but stone and the heavy oak door in front of her, now shut against the outside world. The walls and floor were all stone with slits of pointed windows so narrow that from her angle she could only see the thickness of the walls. Turning her head she saw that in the wall behind her were some low arched doorways, all closed. Total silence prevailed. How could this be a school? Where were the girls? It was exactly her idea of a nunnery, chill and Spartan.

Didn’t I wish I could run away to a nunnery but I knew they had all been abolished? Maybe God has saved this one as a punishment for the devil in me. Maybe there is no one here at all. That servant has vanished now I am inside. I will sit here and freeze to death. Worse! Father Patrick will come, gliding round that corner. Alone with her thoughts, she felt a rising sense of panic. The cold striking up from the stone floor seemed to be entering her soul.

She was on the point of leaping up to try and open the solid front door when she heard pattering feet and a diminutive female figure came running from the passage where the maid had retreated. She wore a grey wool dress with white collar and cuffs and a bonnet such as Bel had never seen before, with a brim coming over her forehead and flaps at both sides so her face in the dim light was quite obscured. But what was even more strange was that she was holding out both arms and exclaiming, “Oh my poor child, sitting here alone. Where are your family?” The voice though curiously indistinct was that of an elderly woman though she was no taller than Bel.

Bel stood up as she approached, not sure if she was a nurse or a lower servant. She tried to make out the face. There seemed to be something odd about it.

“Did not your father bring you? You
are
Arabella Horden? Where is Sir John?” Her blurred voice had trouble with the name Arabella.

Now the person was so close she could reach out and seize Bel’s hand; now Bel could look into her face despite the starched linen surrounding it. She recoiled in horror. There was almost no chin, the mouth was all twisted to one side and the face covered with blotches. All the horror of the hanged man’s face came back. This was alive but almost as revolting.

The woman was not disconcerted by her reaction. In fact a weird cackling noise came from her. “Oh my pretty, you will get used to Old Ursula. I wear this bonnet so I can run by quickly and not frighten strangers but all the household know me and you will soon. I was born with my funny curly mouth and no chin to speak of and getting the small pox made it no better.” The cackle came again and Bel, beginning to look with genuine curiosity, saw that the eyes were bright blue and twinkling with a fan of smiling lines at each corner. If she looked at them she need not notice the wreckage of the face below and something about them went straight to her inner cold. She felt the blood rush up her face and her eyes fill with tears.

The woman took her in her arms and hugged her tight. “My sweet precious, lonely little girl.” Then she held her at arms’ length and asked, “
Are
you Arabella Horden?” Again her lips had trouble framing the syllables.

“I like to be called Bel. Just B-E-L.”

“Well, and isn’t that a blessing for me! I can manage Bel.” She laughed so much at this that Bel started to laugh too.

They were in the midst of this when the inner door nearest to them opened and a tall angular woman stood in the opening. Behind her Bel glimpsed rows of girls’ heads lifted above desks and staring at her. It seemed unbelievable that they had all been there before in the silence.

“We are studying here and this noise is unseemly. I will deal with our new arrival, Ursula. She is the Horden young lady, I presume. Where is Sir John?”

Bel dropped a curtsey. “My brother brought me but he has gone on to York on urgent business.” She was sorry to see Ursula backing away and then scurrying off round the corner of the passage.

The new lady turned to her class and motioning Bel forward she announced, “Young ladies, this is Arabella Horden, from Northumberland.”

The girls rose, very straight-backed, at their desks, recited “Welcome, Arabella Horden,” and sat down again just like puppets on strings.

I will never, ever, be like that, Bel thought. No one can make me. But she was now following the Mistress who had closed the door on her class and was stalking along the stone passage in the opposite direction, Bel was sorry to see, to the way Ursula had gone. It was soon obvious that the single-storey building formed four sides of a square and the dormitories led off the passage on the far side. She wondered who would carry her trunk all this way round. The Mistress stopped beside a bed. One of the narrow pointed windows was next to it and Bel looked out onto a quadrangle bordered by a walkway marked with stone arches at intervals but no roof.

She was so used to blurting out questions whenever something curious struck her that she found herself demanding, “Isn’t that a cloister? Is this a nunnery?”

The Mistress opened her eyes very wide. They were a steely grey Bel noticed, not a sunny blue like Ursula’s. “Of course it is not,” the Mistress snapped. “You know perfectly well it is Cranmore House, an establishment for the education of young ladies. I am surprised that your father has not come with you. Did he give you the fee? It is customary to hand it over at the commencement of the year. I am unable to make any allowance for your late arrival.”

“Oh, Robert did give me something.” She drew a leather pouch from where she had stuffed it up her sleeve. One of the sovereigns dropped out so she picked it up and handed the pouch to the Mistress. She took it with apparent distaste but eagerly enough, Bel thought, and, turning her back, counted it out.

“There are only fifteen sovereigns here.” She inserted the money into a reticule on her arm and faced Bel with eyebrows drawn into a single grey line.

Bel felt up her sleeve and looked down at the floor but there was nothing else. Robert must have taken out ten pounds for his own purposes.

“I don’t know where it all is. What will you do, send me home again?” Now that she had seen Ursula she suddenly didn’t want that to happen.

“We will trust it is an oversight. Write to your father tonight. Writing materials are provided on that table for letters home.” She pointed to a long narrow table with benches each side down the middle of the dormitory. Bel had a vision of the girls sitting at it and all lifting their pens simultaneously, writing their letters, finishing at the same second and rising as one.

Patting her reticule the Mistress now looked at her with a more genial air. “I will have your box sent along. You have a cupboard there for your things. It was your mother who wrote to me, but I understand she was about to go to France for your sister’s wedding. I trust they have had a safe journey.”

“I suppose so. My father was expecting a letter soon.”

“He was not going himself to give his daughter away?”

“Oh one of my mother’s brothers was going to do that. It’s to be all the French family and a Roman Catholic wedding so my father said he would be a fish out of water. I think that was the phrase he used.”

The Mistress’s eyebrows now arched and all but disappeared under the low curls she wore on her forehead. “You talk pertly for a young child, but now I must say to you what your mother asked me to say.” She sat on the bed to be on Bel’s eyelevel and looked at her very searchingly. “We are not, as I said emphatically, a nunnery. The girls go in procession to the parish church every Sunday, but there are
some
– of which your mother hoped you might be one – who are given the privilege of a Mass according to the old religion privately in a small room which you may hear referred to as the chapel. We do not call it that. This is simply a school, teaching young ladies deportment, needlework, the rudiments of music and other subjects, but for the sake of the consciences of a few we allow Father Patrick to visit. Your mother thought you needed to make confession of – I am sorry to say – many misdemeanours and Father –”

Bel’s anger boiled over. Home was pursuing her and she would not stand it. “If that’s
our
Father Patrick no, I shan’t see him at all. He used to come to Horden Hall with his face hidden and creep about the place and hide in a hole if strangers were about who might report on us. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

The Mistress rose in shock and withdrew several paces from her as if she was a leper. “Control yourself, Arabella. Alas, I can see you are indeed going to be a troublesome child, as your mother feared.” She looked up as two girls struggled into the dormitory with Bel’s trunk. “I will speak to you later. Our evening meal is at five and there are two hours of Bible study and prayers before bed at eight o’clock for the younger girls. You may unfasten your box, but one of the teachers will come to inspect your things to see that nothing unsuitable has been brought in.” She lifted her head and swept out into the passage.

The girls set down Bel’s box and stared at her.

“How old are you?” one of them asked.

“Thirteen. How old are you?”

“Oh we are both fourteen.” They wore their own dresses not the pupil dress of blue serge she had seen on the younger children. One was plump and the other skinny.

The plump one said to the other, “What a pity she doesn’t want to see Father Patrick. He’s so be-yooo-tiful.”

“You were listening in the passage!” Bel shouted at them.

“Everybody does that here. It’s how we find out things. Did you have Father Patrick visiting your house? You must be Catholics.”

“My father and I are
not
Catholics. Are you?”

“Doesn’t she ask a lot of questions for a new girl?” the skinny one giggled. “No we’re not, but many girls are. We suspect the Mistress is, but if she admitted it the school would be closed down. Old Ursula is and she told us her great-grandmother was a nun here when King Henry’s men came and all the nuns were thrown out.”

Bel didn’t want the loving Ursula to be tainted with Popery but she was pleased to be vindicated. “I
knew
it was a nunnery, but how could her great-grandmother have been a nun when they’re not allowed to marry?”

“She was a novice, of course. She hadn’t taken her vows. I wish they’d let the priests marry. I’d have Father Patrick any day.”

“Is Ursula a teacher?” Bel asked. She had no wish to talk about Father Patrick.