Page 12 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

When Alice had gone to be shown around in advance of starting at the Blackwood School, she had been met in the entrance hall by a tall young woman with a large-featured, handsome face, and a mass of curly dark hair as harsh as a pony’s mane.

Her eyes were dark brown like a pony’s, too, and since Alice loved horses, she was instantly prepared to like her.

‘Miss Tallant? I’m Miss Strachan. Mrs Brightwell asked me to show you everything.’ She grinned infectiously. ‘I’ve only just learned my own way around so I suppose she thinks it’ll be fresh in my mind.’

‘Are you a new girl?’ Alice asked.

‘Yes, I came last week. New to London, too – but I’m told you live here?’

‘I’m staying with my aunt in Berkeley Square, but I really live down in the country, in Buckinghamshire.’

‘Shropshire, me. I’m staying with friends of my parents. London quite took my breath away for the first few days. I’m so glad you’re a country girl. All the others seem to be Town bred, and look down their noses if you’re not, but they wouldn’t last long where I come from.’

‘My aunt had a maid once who didn’t know that milk came from cows,’ Alice said. ‘She was so horrified when I told her, she wouldn’t serve drawing-room tea if it meant she had to touch a milk jug.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She left to work in a haberdasher’s. My aunt was quite cross with me because otherwise she was a good maid.’

The tall young woman surveyed Alice with satisfaction. ‘D’you know, Miss Tallant, I think we’re going to be friends.’

‘Oh, please, won’t you call me Alice?’ She had decided with Richard that she would not mention being Lady Alice in case it set her apart from the other girls.

‘And you must call me Bron,’ said Miss Strachan.

‘Bron?’

‘It’s short for Bronte. My mother insisted on naming me Emily Bronte Strachan.

I didn’t like the name Emily, so I’ve always used the Bronte part.

Wuthering Heights is Ma’s favourite book.

If I’d been a boy she was going to call me Heathcliff, so I suppose I came off lightly. Do you have any brothers and sisters?’

‘Two of each, all older than me. What about you?’

‘Two step-brothers, much younger. My pa died when I was little and my mother remarried.’

‘My papa died too, three years ago. My mother married again and lives abroad now.’

‘How amazing! We have so much in common.’

There was only one important question left for Alice to ask. ‘Do you like horses? Do you ride?’

‘Never out of the saddle at home. I do miss my darling Bayard.’

‘I miss Pharaoh.’

‘And my dog Bundle. He’s a Jack Russell.’

‘Oh,’ Alice began, about to mention Axe’s dog Dolly, but checked herself in time. And felt sad because that was one thing she couldn’t share with her new friend. Bron was waiting for her to finish the sentence, so she said, ‘Oh, I’d love to have a dog. Is he a ratter?’

‘A champion.’ Bron grinned again. ‘Better not let the other girls hear us talking like this! They’d think we were very strange.’

Alice had always hated the idea of the typical debutante’s life: to be paraded about, to make pointless conversation in drawing-rooms and ballrooms!

The constant fitting of clothes, and changing of clothes, and thinking about clothes!

The endless shopping for gloves and hats and pins and Poland water and stockings!

And all for the getting of a husband, the ultimate prize.

School, by contrast, was everything she had dreamed of.

It was wonderful to have a structure to her life, work to do, an opportunity to learn.

It was so fulfilling that she didn’t mind devoting other times to her kind aunt, who had her on her conscience.

Aunt Caroline had been perplexed by Alice’s wardrobe of sensible skirts and shirts, but was wise enough not to fuss too much.

She contented herself with buying her one or two ready-made outfits and having the seams and hems gone over by hand.

Alice showed her gratitude by fitting in cheerfully with Aunt Caroline’s plans.

The Season had not yet started, and there were no balls, but there were enough families who lived in London all year for there to be card evenings, teas and informal dinners.

Alice had not had a proper debut and it was moot whether she was really ‘out’ or not.

It was enough, Aunt Caroline felt, to help her niece to acquire a little drawing-room polish, in case Maud should change her mind and bring her out after all.

She had to admit that Alice was not awkward or shy.

She seemed at ease in the company of older people – indeed, she was quite a hit with a certain sort of old gentleman who liked her pretty ways and were flattered by the attentive way in which she listened to their stories.

Meanwhile at the Blackwood, Alice was learning.

The first term was given over to architectural drawing – no-one seemed to be able to tell her why this was the case, but it was traditional.

She liked the fact that it required precision and care: she was better at it than Bron, who was inclined to be slapdash.

‘I’m not going to be an engineer and build bridges!

I can’t see the point!’ Bron would cry, when a wobbly line or a missed ‘twiddle’ condemned her work.

But Alice thought it might be rather wonderful to design something in which intricacy and grace combined with huge strength.

She daydreamed about submitting a plan for the likes of a Crystal Palace or Tower Bridge, and drew fanciful public buildings on the backs of her papers.

They did a great deal of copying, and had the drawings of Brunel, Gilbert Scott, Charles Barry, Bazalgette and Horace Jones put before them. One day they were escorted outside to draw the facade of Burlington House, the home of the Royal Academy.

‘It’s different drawing a building from life instead of copying a design,’ she remarked to Bron.

‘You can’t call it “life” when it’s nothing but a heap of stone and brick,’ Bron objected.

‘Oh, but buildings are alive in a sort of way,’ Alice said ‘They absorb life from the people using them.’

Mr Ffolliot, the old gentleman who taught this part of the course, happened to pass behind her at that moment, and said, ‘You are quite right, Miss Tallant. I think you have a feeling for this sort of work.’

Alice blushed with pleasure, and Bron whispered, ‘Next term we’ll start botanical drawing with Miss Palgrave, and I’ll come into my own. You’ll see!’

Being busy kept her mind from home, and from missing Axe, and she tried honourably to keep it that way.

But in bed at night, just before falling asleep, it tended to drift back to him.

To indulge herself just with those few minutes, she decided, was perhaps allowed.

There was no-one to harm by it but herself.

* * *

The two girls hurried up the steps and into the hall out of the sleet, and stood on the doormat, shaking themselves like dogs and laughing. Mrs Platt, the secretary, came out of the school office and gave them a severe look.

The school was very strict about decorum.

They were required to behave in a seemly manner even when they were not in school.

‘Wherever you are, you are ambassadors for the Blackwood!’ they were told.

They must never be seen without a hat and gloves, with untidy hair or unpolished shoes.

Dress must be plain and modest. During the school day they wore what was called ‘the overall’, a cross between a pinafore and a smock in black glazed cotton, which protected their clothes and conferred a sort of uniform tidiness on them.

They had to buy them from an outfitter in the Burlington Arcade.

‘One would think we were novices in a convent,’ Bron had complained to Alice once.

Now Mrs Platt surveyed them disapprovingly and said, ‘Conduct, young ladies! Conduct! And you are dripping on the tiles. The servants have enough to do without making extra work for them. Go and get changed quickly.’

They suppressed their laughter until they were inside the cloakroom. ‘Conduct, Miss Tallant, conduct!’ Bron mocked.

They hung up their coats and hats and tied each other’s overalls at the back. ‘The school bow must be exactly six inches wide, Miss Strachan,’ Alice intoned. ‘Neither more nor less.’

‘Both your eyes should be worn on the same side of the nose, Miss Tallant, not straddling the proboscis in that untidy way.’

‘Oh, hush!’ Alice gurgled. ‘I’ve got a stitch!’

They stepped out of the cloakroom into the hall, and had to jump backwards as they were almost run into by someone clattering very fast down the stairs.

He stopped dead and looked down at them.

He seemed to be in his late thirties, dressed in a light-grey suit with an ochre waistcoat, soft collar and a flowing sort of tie in a loose bow.

His hair was very dark, wavy, and also flowing, just over his collar at the back; his features were finely cut, and his eyes were an astonishing pale, bright blue.

‘Young ladies?’ he said, on a slightly questioning note. Bron flushed slightly, shifting her eyes away, but Alice forgot to look down and, staring at his face, was thinking how much she would like to draw him. ‘Well, you’ll know me again, won’t you?’ he said, addressing her. ‘Miss . . .’

‘Tallant,’ she replied automatically, then managed to drag her eyes away. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry? You have an excellent name, don’t apologise for it. We all desire talent.’

She glanced at him and saw he was staring at her in something of the way she had stared at him – as if to remember her features.

‘I don’t know you. First-year students?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bron managed to answer.