“We will discuss this another time, Beatrice,” she says tightly. She has obviously decided that the party is the priority at the moment, and that fact has earned me a reprieve. “The most important thing is to try to get you looking vaguely respectable.”
Her eyes travel over me with a look of exhausted despair and a shudder passes through her fine-boned body. I can only assume that the addition of a mud-splattered terrier has done little to improve my appearance but at least he has distracted her from the matter of the glow-worms. It’s important to look on the bright side in these situations.
“The guests will be here soon,” she continues, an edge of panic creeping into her voice. “Go and clean yourself up right now.”
“Of course,” I murmur obediently. I tuck Eustace under one arm and, while her back is turned, scoop up the jam jar, following her meekly inside.
“Evening, Hobbs,” I sing out to the stony-faced butler who stands looking creakingly proper in the great hallway. It is, I notice, looking slightly less shabby in here than usual. There are several large vases dotted around, full of blooms offered up by the garden, and hiding the worst of the peeling paint and mouldering woodwork.
“Good evening, Miss Beatrice,” he intones gloomily. Not by so much as a flicker of one winged white eyebrow does he register my dishevelled appearance.
“Did you adjust the seating plan, Hobbs?” Mother asks anxiously, and while they are both distracted I slip up the sweeping stone staircase, a wriggling Eustace still gripped firmly in my arms.
Langton Hall is my family’s ancestral home and you would be hard pressed to find a more crumblingly Gothic monstrosity in all of England. One particularly dissolute member of the family tree gambled away the Langton fortune a few hundred years ago and the following generations have survived on increasingly tight purse strings. This means that there are whole sections of the rambling old building that are completely uninhabitable – by humans anyway, although we’ve got our fair share of bats and mice. We also have the cobweb-filled hallways, glowering gargoyles, and ominously creaky floorboards that add up to make a storybook-worthy ghostly pile. As a matter of fact, the first time I read Northanger Abbey, I wondered if Jane Austen had ever been a guest at Langton Hall herself.
What we don’t have here is comfort or warmth, either literal or metaphorical. It may sound exciting, I daresay even romantic, to live in a decaying stately home, but let me tell you there’s nothing romantic about rotting windowsills, and freezing cold baths, and damp wallpaper. Even the most Byronic of brooding heroes would quake in the face of the groaning, ancient plumbing system. It’s less like having an actual home and more like living in a badly run museum.
Add to this the fact that the estate is about to run completely and utterly out of money and you’ll get a sense of the perpetual state of gloom that hangs all over the place like a fine morning mist. Unless our luck changes, and soon, we’ll have to sell everything when Father dies. As far as I can tell there are no practical solutions under consideration – my suggestions that we sell off land or that I get a job have been met with a level of horror that one might typically associate with Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.
I have a terrible suspicion that their hopes are pinned on my own matrimonial prospects. The fact that I am only seventeen and have no interest in getting married, settling down, or remaining at Langton once I do, doesn’t seem to be of much importance.
I, for one, would be more than happy to live somewhere where I could have a nice warm bath on demand, but Mother and Father see things quite differently. They understand their lives only in the context of this big, crumbling house and its acres of land. We’re not alone in this – what few family acquaintances we have seem to be in a similar situation, though, generally speaking, with a bit more money to throw at the problem.
All these grand, ancient names with draughty old houses to care for – it reminds me of the story of the King of Siam, who used to gift courtiers with white elephants. A white elephant was sacred and so, on the one hand, the gift represented an enormous honour, but on the other the extortionate expense of keeping the animal was enough to bankrupt a man. That’s what these houses seem like to me: great lumbering white elephants hunkered down into the land.
Don’t misunderstand me, I do sympathize with my parents. It’s been just the three of us and a few lingering and ancient retainers rattling around this big house like the last sad pennies in an old tin for my whole life. I think they rather assumed they would have a brood of like-minded sons to save the estate, rather than one wayward and slightly baffling daughter just as they had given up hope of having any children at all. As far as my parents are concerned, daughters aren’t a terribly useful asset. I’m not supposed to go out in the world and actually do things. They’d like me to be more … ornamental. I’m just too big, too loud, too clever – too much.
Upon reaching the bathroom I deposit Eustace in the ancient tub and do my best to wash him off despite his vigorous protests. (And really, who can blame him? Even in June the water in this house feels like it has been drawn from an Arctic glacier, and I shudder as I contemplate my own looming ablutions.) When Eustace is relatively clean and has had a good shake, spraying me with even more water, I let him flee downstairs where he will no doubt get in everyone’s way and try to pinch the food intended for the dinner table.
I put my Lampyris noctiluca specimen on the shelf I keep for my discoveries, alongside my fossil collection and the carefully mounted skeleton of a raven that I unearthed, wonderfully complete, in the garden a couple of weeks ago. Mother said she thought the thing was morbid, but I think one could say the same of the decaying family crest that we were standing beneath at the time. Anyway, I don’t think it’s morbid; I think it’s quite beautiful, and I have named it Edgar. My eyes stray once more to the jar of larvae and from there to the desk, buried under piles of scribbled notes.
A bell rings downstairs – a long, shrill ring, that somehow conveys a sense of panic. I sigh. Mother will be frantically summoning Hobbs to deal with some tremendous domestic emergency – a crooked dessert fork, perhaps. The bell rings again, with an increasingly hysterical urgency. Poor old Hobbs can’t move as fast as he used to.
There really is no time to begin my observations of the glow-worms now. Mother is already having palpitations over this dinner party and if I’m late it might well send her over the edge. I have learned the hard way that if I want to study in peace, it’s best to cultivate at least an appearance of interest in these social activities.
Catching sight of myself in the mirror I am forced to admit that the look of despair that I received earlier might have been warranted. My long, dark hair is bundled on top of my head in a style that most closely resembles the rooks’ nests that tangle in the treetops outside my window. The ends that have tumbled down from the hastily inserted hairpins are sodden, dripping on to the soft material of my dress – once a pale blue, but now a dirty grey, and streaked with grass stains, dark swathes of mud and several paw prints. The dress is old, like everything else in my wardrobe, and slightly too small for me, pulling tight across my chest and hips. Unlike my mother I am built on sturdy lines, more a reliable workhorse than a high-bred filly.
I turn away from my reflection and prepare to do battle with my appearance. I have less than thirty minutes before the guests are due to start arriving, and the thought is not a particularly inspiring one. At least this dinner party will be something different, I tell myself, aiming for optimism. At least it will actually involve other people. Perhaps it will be a resounding success and my parents will be so delighted by my model behaviour that I’ll avoid a further scolding over the glow-worms and the lake and the bare feet.