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The cowman looked up from Martha’s stomach and grinned a hello at me, baring a set of toothless gums. He and Martha, along with his three other Guernsey cows, a dozen chickens and one cockerel, inhabited the end of the cul-de-sac that was Abel Yard. Mr Colley, his wife, daughter, daughter’s baby and daughter’s bone-idle husband lived above the cow barn. If I woke early enough, I could look out of the window and see Mr Colley leading his first cow of the day out by lamplight on the start of his milk round. He sometimes took the cows to graze on the long grass of the burying ground behind Grosvenor Chapel round the corner near the workhouse. The authorities tried to stop him and it was a frequent sight to see Mr Colley sprinting along the mews, a cow trotting beside him and the parish beadle uttering threats as he puffed along behind.
The other business in Abel Yard was a carriage mender’s. The owner, Mr Grindley, made a reasonable living repairing the springs and other metal parts of carriages in his workshop, which took up two brick-built coach houses on either side of the entrance, with living quarters above. Our two rooms were over the one on the right-hand side as you came in.
Mrs Martley was standing inside our door, watching to see that Mr Colley was giving good measure. She wore a white cotton apron over her usual dress of navy-blue wool, her faded brown and grey hair firmly pinned under a starched white cap, her face reddened from stirring saucepans over the fire. My riding habit made her frown. She didn’t approve of my morning rides, or very much about me at all for that matter, but I was the one who paid the rent, so she couldn’t do anything about it. Until quite recently, Mrs Martley had been earning her blameless living as a midwife; then that same hurricane had picked her up and plumped her down beside me like a ruffled hen. With the help of my father’s and my dear friend, Daniel Suter, I’d rescued her from kidnap and imprisonment and was now saddled with her, like the man in the fable who saves somebody from drowning and has to support him for the rest of his life.
It was Daniel Suter who had looked after us when I was too dazed to do anything. I strongly suspected that it was Daniel, too, who’d found some money for me. Soon after Mrs Martley and I moved in to Abel Yard a messenger delivered a banker’s order for fifty pounds, made out to Miss Liberty Lane; he wouldn’t say who’d sent it. It was a large amount, as much as a labourer might earn in a year. As a hard-working musician and composer, Daniel could never have spared such a sum himself, but he might have got up a collection among my father’s friends. He’d denied any knowledge of it and put on a good show of being puzzled, but I couldn’t think of any other possible source.
When Daniel told me he’d heard of a place that might do for Mrs Martley and me near Hyde Park, I’d wondered how we could possibly afford such an expensive neighbourhood. I had forgotten that expensive neighbourhoods must have people and animals to support them: grooms and horses, sweeps and grocers, chickens to lay their eggs, terriers to kill their rats, and men to cart away their rubbish. So while the great houses showed their fine fronts to the park, a whole community of us lived in the mews and streets behind, like birds and squirrels in mighty oak trees. Four shillings a week bought us the use of a parlour with its own fireplace and an attic bedroom. It was no more than a temporary refuge, for the landlord had other plans; but since everything else in my life seemed to be temporary, that was the least of my worries.
Mr Colley squeezed out the last creamy drops from Martha’s udder and Mrs Martley bent with a sigh to pick up the jug. Maybe I should have offered to carry it upstairs for her, but I didn’t want to spoil my only good pair of black gloves. I went ahead up the stairs and opened the door to the parlour.
‘There’s a letter come for you,’ she said. ‘It’s a foreign one.’
My heart bounded. The only person likely to be writing to me from abroad was my brother Tom – or Thomas Fraternity Lane, to give him his full name. He was two years my junior and, since our father’s death, my only close relation. It was the grief of my life that we hadn’t seen each other for four years and weren’t likely to do so until we were old. Since my father could provide no fortune or proper profession for him, Tom was sent away to India when he was sixteen years old to work for the East India Company.
The letter was lying on the table, I picked it up and thought I caught a whiff of salt from its long sea voyage, and an even fainter one of spices.
‘It came yesterday,’ Mrs Martley said, ‘only the boy delivered it to the coach house by mistake.’
By then I was halfway up the stairs. A letter from Tom was precious and I wanted to gloat over it on my own. I pushed aside the curtain that divided my share of the attic room from Mrs Martley’s and sat down on my narrow bed by the window to read.
The first part of it was entirely satisfactory. He was still, like me, trying to recover from the shock of our father’s murder, but life in Bombay was a wonderful distraction. He was working hard, learning the language, living in a fine house with three other fellows, each of them with his own servant to stand behind his chair at mealtimes. His chief was pleased with him and hinting at promotion.
Then, on the turn of the page, he had to spoil it with a passage that flung me into that state of fist-clenched fury to which only your nearest and dearest can reduce you, wanting to yell at him over those of thousands of miles of ocean as I’d once yelled across the nursery floor: How dare you tell me what to do? Service with the Company might be doing wonders for his prospects, but it was evidently making him pompous.
As to your own domestic arrangements, I understand what you say about their complete propriety but I am very concerned to hear that you have chosen to live on your own in London. Is this Mrs Martley you mention a house-keeper, or what is her status? In any case, it will hardly do. You mention that you frequently see Daniel Suter, and that he has been helpful to you. I should have expected no other from one of our father’s dearest friends and know I can rely totally on his sense of honour and your own. Still, we live in a world in which people are all too ready to impute their own bad instincts to even the most virtuous. If Daniel were to make you an offer of marriage, you would have my complete support and approval in accepting it. In the circumstances, I don’t think you need wait until the year of mourning for our father ends in June. If Daniel wrote to me asking for your hand, I should give it most whole-heartedly, knowing Father would have approved. I have written to Suter to hint as much.
That letter made up my mind for me, although not in the way my brother might have hoped. The day had hardly begun, and already two men had tried to tell me what to do.
As the world would see it, my brother’s instructions were entirely reasonable. Of all the men on earth, Daniel Suter was the one I liked best. He was ten years older than I was, but young in heart, blessed with great musical talent, and part of our family circle for as long as I could remember. Nothing could be more suitable. And yet there was something stubborn in me that made me rebel against what was merely suitable. Tom and I had been brought up to question everything. My very name, Liberty, was a token of my parents’ belief in a world where women as well as men could make their own decisions. Here I was, healthy and well educated, in the greatest city in the world. I was mistress – for the while, at least – of my rackety two-room household. I had money in my purse – albeit diminishing fast. The events of the past few months had given me unusual freedom for my age and sex, and it seemed to me that it would be ungrateful to waste it.
Mr Disraeli’s suggestion – unlike my brother’s – was entirely unsuitable, and yet the mystery and unexpectedness of it made my heart lift and tickled my curiosity. I wanted to know more about this Columbine and how she could possibly be a threat to people in Disraeli’s comfortable rank of society. Later that day, as I walked down Piccadilly heading for the theatre district adjoining Covent Garden, I felt as if I’d accepted a challenge.
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