The Tale of Castle Cottage (19 page)

Outside, she took a deep breath, looking around, finding pleasure in the untidy tumble of flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Unkempt and unattended, the garden hadn’t amounted to much when Beatrix bought Hill Top, but she had worked on it over the seasons, turning it into a lovely, informal cottage garden. She had hired quarrymen to build flagstone walks and stone walls between the garden and the Tower Bank Arms (her next-door neighbor). The wall nearest the house sheltered a wooden beehive, and another was a “warm wall”—a westfacing wall of stone and brick along which she had planted a grape vine. She’d only got three bunches of grapes (the climate was really too cold, this far north), but the kitchen garden provided vegetables and herbs, the apple orchard yielded plenty of apples, and flowers bloomed everywhere.

As for plants, they had come from many generous people: a bundle of lavender slips and some violets from an old lady on the other side of the lake, some saxifrage and moss roses from Mrs. Taylor at the corner cottage, phlox from a man who lived on the road to the ferry, and honesty from the village rubbish heap—as well as lilacs, rhododendrons, and fuchsia from a plant nursery in Windermere, and black currants and gooseberries and strawberries. She loved them all dearly, every plant, each one. If ever she and Will had a garden at Castle Cottage, she thought, she would divide many of these wonderful plants and move them there, or take seeds and plant them. If ever, if ever—

With a bitter ache of longing in her throat, Beatrix pushed the thought away. Really, there was no point in planning a garden at Castle Cottage or even in wishing for one. If the house could somehow be magically finished and ready for someone to live in it, she’d have to find a new tenant. As long as her mother and father had their way, there would be no wedding. No wedding, and no garden. Viciously, she shoved a trowel into the earth and began to dig.

A half hour later, Beatrix was leaning over the lettuces, tugging on a stubborn weed, when she heard footsteps behind her. “Hullo, Bea,” a man’s voice said, and she straightened and turned, thinking for an instant that it might be Will.

But it wasn’t. A slender, handsome man with a thin dark moustache stood at the garden gate. A little taller than she, he was dressed in a neat dark suit and vest, a red tie, and a tweed cap. He pulled the cap off his dark hair and held it in his hands, giving her his usual charming smile.

“How is my favorite sister?”

“Bertram!” Beatrix exclaimed happily. “Why, what a wonderful surprise! I had no idea you were coming. Have you been at Lindeth Howe with Mama and Papa?”

Her brother gave an exasperated chuckle. “For the past three days. I wanted to come over and see you yesterday, but the parents kept finding things they wanted me to do, or subjects they thought we should talk about. You know how they are.” He glanced at the weeds she held in one hand. “I’m interrupting your work.”

“No matter,” Beatrix said with a warm smile, dropping the plants onto the pile beside the path. “Weeds can wait. I’m delighted to see you. Let’s go put the kettle on, and I’ll make tea.” She stripped off her gloves, thinking that she hadn’t seen Bertram since the Christmas holidays in London. And he hadn’t been here at Hill Top for over a year. She was very glad that he had come.

“First this,” Bertram said, and unexpectedly folded her in his arms.

She leaned against him for a moment, enjoying the strength of his embrace. Their mother and father had never been fond of “demonstrations,” as Mrs. Potter called them. They preferred cool handshakes and restrained formal greetings. They almost never indulged in a warm hug—in fact, they rarely even touched. And Beatrix and Bertram had lived apart for years, Bertram at his little farm in the south of Scotland, Beatrix with their parents in South Kensington. They shared some important interests in common, but they rarely saw one another and their lives were very different. Beatrix often felt as if she barely knew her brother.

But Bertram is not a minor character in our story. In fact, while I don’t yet know all the details, or exactly what is likely to happen, I understand that he is going to play a very large—and completely unexpected—role in the course of future events. I think we shall have to get better acquainted with him, so we won’t be completely taken by surprise by the way things turn out in the end.

Beatrix was six years old when her baby brother was born, and she had always looked out for him. This was especially important for both of them, because these two very Victorian children did not see as much of their mother as modern children do. In fact, if the Potters were like other families in their social class, the children saw their parents for an hour at teatime and another brief while at bedtime, and that was all.

But Beatrix and Bertram had each other. They lived in the same third-floor nursery, were cared for by the same nursemaid and nanny, and had their lessons in the same schoolroom from the same governess, Miss Hammond. As privileged upper-class children living in London, they didn’t go outside to play, the way country village children did, and they had no playmates or friends.

But their lives were never boring—oh, no! Beatrix’s journal from her growing-up years is full of visits to the British Museum (where she was fascinated by a fine collection of illuminated manuscripts), the Kew Gardens, and all the many London art galleries, where she saw exhibits of the best painters, as well as the classics. In Oxford, she went to the Bodeleian. On the way to Edinburgh, she saw the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. They visited Brighton, Edinburgh, Manchester, Falmouth, Portsmouth, Torquay, Wales, and the Lakes, as well as a great many other places.

And every August, when the London streets began to sizzle, the Potters packed up their children, the butler, the cook, the maids, the governess, the coachman, the coach,
and
the horses and went on holiday until October. In those early years, they went to Dalguise House in Perthshire, in the Scottish Highlands. There, the children could roam through what seemed like enchanted woodlands along the River Tay, identifying wild birds and searching out their nests, catching rabbits and hedgehogs and voles and bats to take back to London to live in the nursery with them, and sketching birds and animals and trees. They studied everything from leaves to lizards and sketched and painted and drew all that they saw. And as it turned out, they both had an unusual gift for drawing.

For children of their social class, art was a hobby to be encouraged, but Beatrix and Bertram seemed never to have thought of their art as a hobby. Both of them took their art seriously, and both became serious professional artists. As an adult, Bertram painted large landscapes of dark and rather gloomy wildernesses topped by dark skies and tinged with a decidedly Romantic melancholy. (When you visit Hill Top Farm, you will see several of Bertram’s paintings, framed in gilt and hanging in the upstairs rooms.) Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to interest buyers in his art.

Beatrix, on the other hand, was an accomplished miniaturist, painting plants and the small animals she loved to collect—rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, frogs, and even beetles and tiny insects—as well as fossils, fungi, and lichen. And when Peter Rabbit became popular, she was able to earn quite a respectable sum of money from her art.

But while Beatrix mostly thought of herself as a happy child and young woman, Bertram did not have the same experience. Beatrix was educated at home by a governess. But boys of the Potters’ social class were always sent away to school, so Bertram was packed off to The Grange, at Eastbourne, and three years later, to Charterhouse, in Surrey. A slight, delicate child, he had a woeful time of it. He was taunted by bullies, he couldn’t make friends, and he wasn’t very good at his studies. He would rather paint than do anything else. The headmaster’s reports made Mr. Potter scowl and mutter under his breath, while Mrs. Potter dabbed her handkerchief to her eyes and complained that no one understood her dear son, who would surely do better if he just had another chance. It’s not clear how many chances he got. But he came home without taking his exams (Beatrix mentions some sort of dreadful disgrace in her journal but doesn’t elaborate) and was then sent back to Eastbourne to prepare for Oxford.

But Oxford was as big a disappointment as Charterhouse had been, for Bertram, a good-looking boy with a certain shy charm, clearly preferred his social life to his studies. Beatrix worried about her brother, for there was a streak of alcoholism in the family, and she feared—with good reason, it turns out—that Bertram had inherited it. But perhaps drinking was the only way the young man could rebel against the father whom he could never please and the mother who eternally hoped that he would improve. Always intensely attuned to the emotional climate in the family and continually hoping that everyone would be happy, Beatrix did what she could to shield her brother from the worst of their parents’ displeasure. She got into the habit of being in the middle, and that’s where she stayed.

After his failure at Oxford, Bertram left home. First, he went abroad, as did many other young men. When he came back, he began taking long sketching trips to the Scottish border country where he and Beatrix had spent so many happy months as children. About the same time that the little books became popular and Beatrix began escaping into her new career as an author and illustrator, Bertram escaped, too, but more literally than she did. He bought a small farm called Ashyburn near Ancrum, a pretty village in the south of Scotland, and began spending all his time there, painting.

He was painting, yes. And he (like his sister a few years later) was farming.

But most important of all, Bertram Potter was hiding a secret, a calamitous, truly momentous secret. For in 1902, this only son of the wealthy, socially conscious Rupert and Helen Potter had secretly married a pretty, penniless young woman named Mary, whose background and family connections, it is fair to say, were not those that the Potters would have chosen. In fact, Mary Potter had worked in the textile mills and as a maid in her aunt’s boarding house. Her father was a wine merchant.

Now, you and I are used to working for our livings, so the idea of having a job in a textile mill or a boarding house presents no special problem. In fact, it may seem quite admirable to us that Mary was able to look out for herself instead of depending upon her family. But the Potters, who saw themselves as creatures of a different order altogether, did not share this view. Bertram knew that his father would be apoplectic at the very idea of his throwing away his life on such a marriage, and his mother would suffer one of her attacks and have to be put to bed for a week. Or more.

I think you can see where this is going. Lacking the courage to tell his parents what he had done, Bertram simply pretended he hadn’t done it. Nothing could be simpler, actually. He saw his parents as little as possible, coming to join them for a few days during their annual country holiday and taking the train up to London once or twice a year. Of course, he never invited them to his farm—and one wonders what he would have done with his wife if they had turned up there unexpectedly.

But then, he and Mary were probably pretty safe. Mrs. Potter never visited her son’s farm, for the same reason she refused to come to Hill Top: Ashyburn was too remote, too primitive, and too dull for her refined taste. It was a very good thing that Bertram and Mary Potter had no children. A child—especially a boy—would have been an enormous complication.

Well. This is a sorry business, as I’m sure you will agree. Parents who attempt to control their adult children’s lives. A daughter who is forbidden to marry the man she loves because he is too common. A son who runs off and marries the woman he loves, no matter that she
is
common, but hides the whole business from his parents as if it were a sordid, backstreet affair—and drinks too much, to boot.

In our day, the Potter family would be labeled highly dysfunctional, and long-term individual and group therapy would be recommended. In Beatrix’s day, it would merely have been said, as Tolstoy famously wrote at the beginning of
Anna Karenina
, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Beatrix had known about Bertram’s marriage for some time, and even though she was horrified by the thought that he had hidden something so important from their parents, she had faithfully kept his scandalous secret to herself. She cared very much for her brother and would never find fault with him for choosing to marry the woman he loved: people ought to have that freedom.

But Beatrix was a straightforward person who was deeply troubled by lies and deceit and tried to practice truthfulness in her own life, whatever the cost. She hated the idea that Bertram was living a lie, and while she told herself that she wasn’t bitter about what he had done, I’m sure her feelings were terribly complicated. Her brother was leading the life he had chosen—and if he had been honest with his parents, perhaps her own situation would have been different. But he hadn’t, and it wasn’t. If there was some secret bitterness in the recesses of Beatrix’s heart, I for one am not going to blame her for it.

Now you know as much as I do about Bertram Potter and his marriage, which he has kept a secret for over ten years now. With this in mind, let us follow Beatrix and her brother into the house, where they are going for their tea.

While Bertram looked over the drawings for her new book, Beatrix got out jam and bread and cheese and poured tea. Then they sat down to eat, enjoying each other’s company just as they had enjoyed their nursery teas so many years before.

Bertram glanced around with a puzzled look. “It’s very peaceful here. And quite lovely, Bea. But I don’t see any construction. Papa said you were rebuilding something or another. Adding on new rooms.”

“Up the hill, at Castle Cottage,” Beatrix replied, cutting a slice of cheese. “It’s the farm I bought several years ago—another twenty acres. A house, a barn, and some muchneeded pasture for the sheep. I’m enlarging the house.” She met Bertram’s eyes and spoke her heart. “Mr. Heelis and I would like to live there someday. In the present circumstance, that hardly seems feasible, but we can hope.”