Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith 2014

Cover illustration © Iain McIntosh 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Alexander McCall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007553884

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007553877

Version: 2019-03-01

Dedication

For my daughters, Lucy and Emily

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

Also by Alexander McCall Smith

About the Publisher

1

Emma Woodhouse’s father was brought into this world, blinking and confused, on one of those final nail-biting days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a time of sustained anxiety for anybody who read a newspaper or listened to the news on the radio, and that included his mother, Mrs Florence Woodhouse, who was anxious at the best of times and even more so at the worst. What was the point of continuing the human race when nuclear self-immolation seemed to be such a real and imminent possibility? That was the question that occurred to Florence as she was admitted to the delivery ward of a small country hospital in Norfolk. American air bases lay not far away, making that part of England a prime target; their bombers, she had heard, were on the runway, ready to take off on missions that would bring about an end that would be as swift as it was awful, a matter of sudden blinding light, of dust and of darkness. Quite understandably, though, she had other, more pressing concerns at the time, and did not come up with an answer to her own question. Or perhaps her response was the act of giving birth itself, and the embracing, through tears of joy, of the small bundle of humanity presented to her by the midwife.

There are plenty of theories – not all of them supported by evidence – that the mother’s state of mind during pregnancy may affect the personality of the infant. There are also those who believe that playing Mozart to unborn children will lead to greater musicality, or reciting poetry through the mother’s stomach will increase the chances of having linguistically gifted children. That anxiety may be transmitted from mother to unborn baby is an altogether more believable claim, and indeed Henry Woodhouse appeared to be proof of this. From an early age he showed himself to be a fretful child, unwilling to take the risks that other boys delighted in and always interested in the results when his mother took his temperature with the clinical thermometer given to her by the district nurse.

‘Is it normal?’ was one the first sentences he uttered after he had begun to speak.

‘Absolutely normal,’ his mother would reply. ‘Ninety-eight point four. See.’

This disappointed him, and he always showed satisfaction when a doubtful reading required the insertion of the mercury bulb under his tongue a second time.

In due course this anxiety took the form of dietary fads, one after another, involving the rejection of various common foodstuffs (wheat, dairy products, and so on) and the enthusiastic embracing of rather more esoteric fare (royal jelly and malt biscuits being early favourites). These fads tended not to last long; by the time he was eighteen and ready to go to university, he was prepared to eat a normal vegetarian diet, provided it was supplemented by a pharmacopoeia of vitamin pills, omega oils, and assorted enzymes.

‘My son’, said his mother with a certain pride, ‘is a valetudinarian.’

That sent her friends to the dictionary, which gave her additional satisfaction. To dispatch one’s friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one’s own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.

Henry Woodhouse – known to most as Mr Woodhouse – did not follow the career that had been expected of generations of young Woodhouses. While his father had assumed that his son would farm – in an entirely gentlemanly way – the six hundred acres that surrounded their house, Hartfield, the young man had other plans for himself.

‘I know what you expect,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve been here for the last four hundred years …’

‘Four hundred and eighteen,’ interjected his father.

‘Four hundred and eighteen, then. I know that. And I’m not saying that I want to go away altogether; it’s just that I want to do something else first. Then I can farm later on.’

His father sighed. ‘You would be a gentleman farmer,’ he said. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’

The young Woodhouse smiled. ‘I’ve never quite understood that concept. What exactly is the difference between a gentleman farmer and a farmer pure and simple?’

This question was a cause of some embarrassment to the older Woodhouse. ‘These matters shouldn’t need to be spelled out,’ he said. ‘Indeed, it’s not a question that one really likes to answer. And I’m surprised that you feel you need to ask it. A gentleman farmer …’ There was a pause, and then, ‘A gentleman farmer doesn’t actually farm, if you see what I mean. He doesn’t do the work himself. He usually has somebody else to do it for him, unless …’

‘Yes? Unless?’

‘Unless he doesn’t have the money. Then he has to do it himself.’

‘Like us? We don’t have the money, do we?’

‘No, we don’t. We did once, but not any more. And there’s nothing dishonourable about that. Having no money is perfectly honourable. In fact, having no money can often be a sign of good breeding.’

‘And a sign of poverty too?’

There was another sigh. ‘I feel we’re drawing this out somewhat. The point is that it would be a very fine thing if you chose to farm rather than to be … what was it you wanted to be?’

‘A design engineer.’

This was greeted with silence. ‘I see.’

‘It’s an important field. And we need to do more engineering design in this country or we’ll be even more thoroughly overtaken by the Germans.’ This, the young Woodhouse knew, was a fruitful line of argument to adopt with his father, who worried about the Germans and their twentieth-century lapses.

‘The Germans do a lot of that sort of thing?’

‘They do,’ he assured his father. ‘That’s why they’ve been so successful industrially. Their cars, you know, go on virtually forever, unlike so many of our own cars that I’m afraid won’t even start.’

‘Engineering design,’ muttered his father – and left it at that. But the argument had been won by the younger generation, and less than a year later Mr Woodhouse was enrolled as a student of his chosen subject, happy to be independent and away from home, doing what he had always wanted to do.

It proved to be a wise choice. After graduating, Mr Woodhouse joined a small firm in Norwich that specialised in the design of medical appliances. He enjoyed his work and was appreciated by his colleagues, even if they found him unduly anxious – some even said obsessive – when it came to risk assessment in the development of products. The work was interesting, but perhaps not challenging enough for the young engineer, and in his spare time he puzzled over various drawings and prototypes of his own invention, including a new and improved valve for the liquid-nitrogen cylinders used by dermatologists. This device was to prove suitable for other applications, and once he had patented it under his own name – rather to the annoyance of the firm, who mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge – he sold a production licence to a Dutch manufacturer. This provided him with financial security – with a fortune, in fact, with which he was able to renovate Hartfield, revitalise the farm and set up his increasingly infirm parents in the gatehouse. Their ill health unfortunately robbed them of a long retirement, and within a very short time Mr Woodhouse found himself the sole owner of Hartfield.

He had married by then, and in a way that surprised people. Everyone had assumed that the only person willing to take on this rather anxious and obsessed engineer would be either a woman of great charity – and there are plenty of women who seem prepared to marry a project husband – or a woman whose sole interest was financial. His wife was neither of these, being a warm and personable society beauty with a considerable private income of her own. Happily married, Mr Woodhouse enjoyed the existence of a country gentleman even if he continued with his engineering job for some years. A daughter was born in the year following their wedding – that was Isabella – and then another. This second daughter was Emma.

When Emma was five, Mrs Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.

Had he not had the immediate responsibility of looking after two young daughters unaided, Mr Woodhouse could well have lapsed into a state of depression. With the irrationality of grief, he blamed himself for the loss of his wife. She may have died of exposure to a virulent meningeal infection as random and undetectable as any virus may be, but he still reproached himself for failing to ensure that her immune system was not in better order. If only he had insisted – and he would have had to insist most firmly – that she had followed the same regime of vitamin supplements as he did, then he believed she might have shrugged off the virus in its first exploratory forays. After all, the two of them breathed much the same air and ate the same things, so surely when she encountered the virus there was every chance that he must have done the same. In his case, however, Vitamins C and D had done their job, and if only he had persuaded her that taking fourteen pills a day was no great hardship, if one washed them down, as he always did, with breakfast orange juice … If only he had shown her the article from the Sunday Times which referred to work done in the United States on the efficacy of that particular combination of vitamins in ensuring a good immunological response. She scoffed at some of his theories – he knew that, and took her gentle scepticism in good spirit – but one did not scoff at the Sunday Times. If only he had taken the whole matter more seriously then their poor little Isabella and Emma would still have their mother and he would not be a widower.

Such guilty thoughts commonly accompany grief and equally commonly disappear once the rawness of loss is assuaged. This happened with Mr Woodhouse at roughly the right stage of the grieving process; now he found himself thinking not so much of the past but of how he might cope with the future. In the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death he had been inundated with offers of help from friends. He was well liked in the county because he was always supportive of local events, even if he rarely attended them. He had given generously to the appeal to raise money for a new scout hall, uncomplainingly paid his share of the cost of restoring the church roof after a gang of metal thieves had stripped it of its lead, and had cheerfully increased the value of the prize money that went with the Woodhouse Cup, a trophy instituted by his grandfather for the best ram at the local agricultural show. He never went to the local pub, but this was not taken as a sign of the standoffishness that infected some of the grander families in the neighbourhood, but as a concomitant of the eccentricity that people thought quite appropriate for a man who had, after all, invented something.

‘He invented something,’ one local explained to newcomers to the village. ‘You don’t see him about all that much – but he invented something all right. Made a ton of money from it, but good luck to him. If you can invent something and make sure nobody pinches the idea, then you’re in the money, big time.’

He was surprised – and touched – by the generosity of neighbours during those first few months after his wife’s death. There was a woman from the village, Mrs Firhill, who had helped them in the house since they had returned to Hartfield, and she now took it upon herself to do the shopping for the groceries as well as to cook all the meals. But even if day-to-day requirements were met in this way, there was still a constant stream of women who called in with covered plates and casserole dishes. Every Aga within a twenty-mile radius, it seemed, was now doing its part to keep the Woodhouse family fed, and at times this led to an overcrowding of the household’s two large freezers.

‘It’s not food they need,’ remarked Mrs Firhill to a friend, ‘it’s somebody to tuck little Emma in at night. It’s somebody to take a look in his wardrobe and chuck out some of the old clothes. It’s a wife and mother, if you ask me.’

‘That will come,’ said the friend. ‘He’s only in his thirties. And he’s not bad-looking in the right light.’

But Mrs Firhill, and most others who knew him, disagreed. There was a premature sense of defeat in Mr Woodhouse’s demeanour – the attitude of one who had done what he wanted to do in the first fifteen years of adult life and was now destined to live out the rest of his days in quiet contemplation and worry. Besides, it would try the patience of anybody, people felt, to live with that constant talk of vitamins and preventative measures for this and that: high-cocoa-content chocolate for strokes, New Zealand green-lipped mussel oil for rheumatism, and so on. It would not be easy to live with that no matter what the attractions of Hartfield (eleven bedrooms) and the financial ease that went with marrying its owner.

And in this assessment people were right: Mr Woodhouse had no intention of remarrying and firmly but politely rejected the dinner-party invitations that started to arrive nine months after his wife’s death. Nine months was just the right interval, people felt: remarriage, it was generally agreed, should never occur within a year of losing one’s spouse, which meant that the nine-month anniversary was just the right time to start positioning one’s candidate for the vacancy. But what could anybody do if the man in question simply declined every invitation on the grounds that he had a prior engagement?

‘There’s no need to lie,’ one rebuffed hostess remarked. ‘There are plenty of diplomatic excuses that can be used without telling downright lies. Besides, everybody knows he has no other engagements – he never leaves that place.’

The fact that no new Mrs Woodhouse was in contemplation meant that something had to be done about arranging care for Isabella and Emma. With this in mind, he consulted a woman friend from Holt, who had a reputation for knowing where one could find whatever it was one needed, whether it was a plumber, a girl to work in the stables, a carpet layer, or even a priest.

‘There’s a magazine,’ she said. ‘It’s called The Lady, and it’s – how shall we put it? – a bit old-fashioned, in a very nice sort of way. It’s the place where housekeepers and nannies advertise for jobs. There are always plenty of them. You’ll find somebody.’

He took her advice, and ordered a copy of The Lady. And just as he had been told, at the back of the magazine there were several pages of advertisements placed by domestic staff seeking vacancies. Discreet butlers disclosed that they were available, together with full references and criminal-record checks; trained nannies offered to care for children of all ages; and understanding companions promised to keep loneliness at bay in return for self-contained accommodation and all the usual perks.

He wondered who would still possibly require, or afford, a butler, but the fact that butlers appeared to exist suggested that there was still a need for them somewhere. It was easier to imagine the role played by ‘an energetic, middle-aged couple, with clean driving licences and an interest in cooking’; they would have no difficulty in finding something, he thought, as would the ‘young man prepared to do a bit of gardening and house maintenance in return for accommodation while at agricultural college’. And then, at the foot of the second page of these advertisements, there was a ‘well-educated young woman (26) wishing to find a suitable situation looking after children. Prepared to travel. Non-smoker. Vegetarian.’

It was the last of these qualifications that attracted his attention. He thought it hardly necessary these days to mention that one was a non-smoker; it would be assumed that any smoking would be done discreetly and away from others, it now being such a furtive pastime. Far more significant was the vegetarianism, which indicated, in Mr Woodhouse’s view, a sensible interest in nutrition. And as his eye returned to the text of the advertisement he saw that even if it was included in a column in which it was the sole entry, that column was headed ‘Governesses’.

Governesses, he thought, were perhaps on the same list of endangered species as butlers. He did not know anybody who had had a governess, although he had recently read that in Korea and Japan, where ambitious families took the education of their children in such deadly earnest, the practice of hiring resident tutors to give young children a competitive edge in examinations was widespread. These people, if female, could be called governesses, and were probably no different from the governesses that British families used to inflict on their children in the past. Of course the word had a distinctly archaic ring to it, being redolent of strictness and severity, but that need not necessarily be the case. He recalled that Maria von Trapp, after all, was a governess – as well as being a former nun – and she had been anything but severe. Would this well-educated young woman (26) possibly have a guitar – just as Maria von Trapp had? He smiled at the thought. He did not think he would make a very convincing Captain von Trapp.

The advertisement referred to a box number at the offices of The Lady and he wrote that afternoon asking the advertiser to contact him by telephone. Two days later, she called and introduced herself. He noticed, with pleasure, her slight Scottish accent: a Scottish governess, like a Scottish doctor, inspired confidence.

‘My name is Anne Taylor,’ she said. ‘You asked me to phone about the position of governess.’

They arranged an interview. Miss Taylor was available to travel to Norfolk at any time that was convenient to him. ‘I am not currently in a situation,’ she said. ‘I am therefore very flexible. There are plenty of trains from Edinburgh.’

He thought for a moment before replying, reflecting on the rather formal expression not currently in a situation. There were plenty of people not currently in a situation, and he himself was one of them. Some were in this position because they had tried, but failed, to get a situation, and others because they had a situation but had lost it because … There were any number of reasons, he imagined, for losing one’s situation, ranging from blameless misfortune to gross misconduct. There were even those who lost their situation because the police had caught up with them and unmasked them as fugitives on the run, as confidence tricksters, even as murderers. Murderers. He imagined that there were non-smoking, vegetarian murderers, just as there were nicotine-addicted carnivorous murderers, although he assumed that as a general rule murderers were not regular readers of The Lady magazine. Murderers probably read one of the lower tabloids – if they read a newspaper at all. The lower tabloids liked to report murders and murder trials, and that, for murderers, would have been light entertainment, rather like the social columns for the rest of us.

Miss Taylor noticed the slight hesitation. She was not to know, of course, of his tendency to anxiety and the way in which this operated to set him off on a trail of worries about remote and unlikely possibilities, worrying about murderers advertising in The Lady being a typical example.

‘Mr Woodhouse?’

‘Yes, I’m still here. Sorry, I was thinking.’

‘I could come at any time. Just tell me when would suit you, and I shall be there.’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘I shall be there,’ she said, ‘once you have told me where there is.’

There was a delightful exactitude about the way in which she spoke, and he suspected, at that moment, that he and his daughters had found their governess.

2

It did not take Mr Woodhouse long to confirm his earlier suspicion that Anne Taylor would be exactly the right person for the job.

‘You seem to be entirely suitable,’ he said, a bare hour after her arrival for the interview. ‘All we need to do, I suppose, is to sort out when exactly you can start and, of course, the terms. I doubt if any of that will be problematic.’

Miss Taylor stared at him. She seemed surprised by what he had said, and for a moment Mr Woodhouse wondered whether he had unwittingly committed some solecism. He had been careful to call her Miss Taylor rather than Anne, even if that sounded rather formal – so it could not be that. Had he said anything else, then, to which she might have taken exception?

‘I have yet to indicate whether I shall accept,’ Miss Taylor said quietly. ‘One does not assume, surely, that the person whom one is interviewing wants the position until one’s asked her.’

‘But my dear Miss Taylor,’ exclaimed Mr Woodhouse, ‘how crassly insensitive of me. I was about to raise that very issue with you and—’

‘There is no need to resort to spin, Mr Woodhouse,’ interrupted Miss Taylor. ‘When one has said the wrong thing, I find that the best policy – beyond all doubt – is not to make things worse by claiming to be doing something one was not going to do.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you think?’

He was momentarily speechless. He had not imagined that the person he had invited for interview would end up lecturing him on how to behave, and for a moment he toyed with the idea of ending their meeting then and there. He might say: ‘Well, if that’s the sort of household you think you’re coming to …’ or, ‘My idea was that I should be employing somebody to teach the girls, not me.’ Or, simply, ‘If that’s the way you feel, then shall I run you back to the railway station?’

But he said none of this. The reality of the situation was that he had two young daughters to look after and he needed help. He could easily get some young woman from the village to take the job, but she would almost certainly feed them pizza out of a box and allow them to watch Australian soap operas on afternoon television. He knew that would happen, because that was what girls from the village did; he had seen it, or if he had not exactly seen it, Mrs Firhill had told him all about it. And even she was not above eating an occasional piece of pizza from a box; he had found an empty box a few weeks previously and it could only have come from her. This young woman, by contrast, was a graduate of the University of St Andrews, spoke French – as any self-respecting governess surely should do – and had a calm, self-assured manner that inspired utter confidence. He had to get her; he simply had to. So, after a minute or so of silence during which she continued to look at him unflinchingly, he mumbled an apology. ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right …’

To which she had replied, ‘Yes, I know.’

He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him short. ‘As it happens, I think this job would suit me very well. What I suggest is a three-month trial period during which you can decide whether you can bear me.’ And here she smiled; and he did too, nervously. ‘And whether I can bear you. Once that hurdle has been surmounted, we could take it from there.’ She paused. ‘I do like the girls, by the way.’

He showed his relief with a broad smile. ‘I’m sure that’s reciprocated,’ he said.

Mrs Firhill had been on hand to help with the encounter and had shepherded the girls into the playroom while this discussion with Miss Taylor took place. Mr Woodhouse could tell from his housekeeper’s demeanour that she approved of Miss Taylor, and in his mind that provided the final, clinching endorsement of the arrangement. Accepting Miss Taylor’s suggestion, he called the girls back into the room and explained to them, in Miss Taylor’s presence, that she would be coming to stay with them and that he was sure that they would all be very happy.

‘But we’re happy already,’ said Isabella, giving Miss Taylor a sideways glance.

‘Then you’ll be even happier,’ said Mr Woodhouse quickly. ‘But now, Miss Taylor, we must all have a cup of tea. I prefer camomile myself, but we can offer you ordinary tea if you prefer.’

‘Camomile has some very beneficial properties,’ said Miss Taylor.

Mr Woodhouse beamed with pleasure.

The briskness with which Miss Taylor moved into Hartfield surprised Mr Woodhouse – she arrived, with several suitcases of possessions, within a week of her interview – but it was as nothing to the speed with which she reorganised the lives of the two girls. In spite of her earlier enthusiasm for the appointment, Mrs Firhill took the view that she was moving too quickly: ‘Children don’t like change. They want things to remain the same – everybody knows that, except this woman, or so it seems.’ These were dark notes of caution, uttered with a toss of the head in the direction of the attic bedroom that Miss Taylor now occupied, but the housekeeper, too, was in for a surprise; neither Isabella nor Emma resisted Miss Taylor, and from the very beginning embraced the ways of their governess with enthusiasm. The new regime involved new and exotic academic subjects – French and handwriting were Miss Taylor’s intellectual priorities – as well as a programme of physical exercise and, most importantly, riotous, vaguely anarchic fun. A bolster bar was erected in the nursery, under which soft cushions were arranged. The girls were then invited to sit astride each end of this bar, armed with down-stuffed pillows. The game was to hit each other with these pillows until one of them was dislodged and fell on to a cushion or occasionally the bare floor below. In order to level the playing field that age tilted in Isabella’s favour, Emma was allowed to use two hands, while her sister was required to keep one behind her back. White feathers flew everywhere like snowflakes in a storm, and the shrieks of laughter penetrated even Mr Woodhouse’s study, where he sat engrossed in the latest crop of scientific papers in the dietary and nutritional journals to which he subscribed.

He was bemused by the changes that he saw about him, by the constant activity, by the new enthusiasms. He watched as scrapbooks filled with cuttings from magazines and papers; as cut-out dolls found their way on to every table; as rescued animals and birds took up residence in shoe-boxes lined up at the base of the warmth-dispensing Aga; as the current of life, which had grown so sluggish after the death of his wife, now began to course once more through the house. He welcomed all of this, even if it failed to relieve his own anxiety. It was all very well to be cheerful and optimistic when one was the girls’ age, but what if you were getting to the age – as he was – when life for the immune system became much more challenging? There were dangers all about, not least those identified by the medical statisticians, whose grim work it was to reveal just how likely it was that something could go wrong. And every time he contemplated the results of new research, there was the task of adjusting his regime to increase his level of exercise – or reduce it, depending on the balance of benefit between coronary health and wear and tear on the joints; to increase the number of supplements – or decrease it, depending on whether a novel product, attractive in itself, was likely to react badly with something that he was already taking. Such balancing was an almost full-time job, and left little time for other pursuits, such as the assessment of engineering risk – a task that he was well qualified to carry out but that could be inordinately demanding if one took it seriously, as Mr Woodhouse certainly did.

The purchase of a new lawnmower was an example of just how complicated this could be. Hartfield was surrounded by extensive lawns that gave way, to the east, to a large shrubbery, much loved by the girls for games of hide-and-seek. Those games themselves had been the cause of some anxiety, as it was always possible that hiding under a rhododendron bush might bring one into contact with spiders, for whom the shade and dryness of the sub-rhododendron environment might be irresistible. Spiders had to live somewhere, and under rhododendron bushes could be just the place for them.

Mr Woodhouse had heard people saying that there were no poisonous spiders in England. He knew this to be untrue, and had once or twice corrected those who made this false assertion. On one occasion he had gone to the length of ringing up during a local radio phone-in programme when a gardening expert had reassured a caller that there were no spiders to worry about in English gardens.

‘That’s unfortunately untrue,’ said Mr Woodhouse to the show’s host. ‘There are several species of spider in England that have a very painful bite. The raft spider, for instance, or the yard spider can both administer a toxic bite that will leave you in no doubt about having encountered something nasty.’

The host had listened with interest and then asked whether Mr Woodhouse had ever been bitten himself.

‘Not personally,’ came the answer.

‘Or known anybody who’s been bitten?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Well then,’ said the host, ‘I don’t think we need worry the listeners too much about what they might bump into in their gardens, do you?’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘A false sense of security is a very dangerous thing, let me assure you.’

His concern over spiders was fuelled by the information the Sydney funnel-web spider, known to be one of the most dangerous spiders in the world, had taken up residence in the London Docks and was apparently thriving in its new habitat. That did not surprise Mr Woodhouse at all, who had long thought that the ease with which goods and people could now be transported about the world was an invitation to every dangerous species to take up residence in places where they had previously been unknown. It was inevitable, he thought, that at least some travellers from Australia would bring in their luggage spiders that had taken refuge there while their suitcases were being packed. If bedbugs could do it – and they did – then why should spiders resist the temptation? He shook his head sadly; the green and pleasant land of Blake’s imagining would not be green and pleasant for long at that rate. And if spiders could do it, what about sharks, who had to swim no more than a few extra nautical miles to arrive at British beaches? Or snakes, who had only to slither into a bunch of bananas in Central America to arrive within days on the tables of people thousands of miles away? And what if they met, en route, an attractive snake of the opposite sex? Before you knew it you would have a deadly fer-de-lance population comfortably established in Norfolk. That would give those complacent gardening experts on the radio something to think about.

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Miss Taylor when he raised the issue of spiders under rhododendron bushes and queried whether the girls might not be banned from going into the shrubbery to play their games. ‘We cannot wrap ourselves in cotton wool; just imagine what we would look like. Moreover, girls and spiders have co-existed for thousands of years, as is established, I would have thought, by the continued survival of the two species: the British girl and the British spider. Cadit quaestio.’

The expression, cadit quaestio – the question falls away – was one that Miss Taylor often used when she wished to put an end to a discussion. It was virtually unanswerable, as it is difficult to persist with a question that has been declared no longer to exist – anybody doing so seems so unreasonable – and it was now being used by the girls themselves, even by Emma. She had difficulty getting her tongue round the Latin but had nonetheless recently answered ‘cadit quaestio’ when he had asked her whether she had taken her daily fish-oil supplement.

The size of the lawns around Hartfield meant that a mechanical lawnmower was required. For years Sid, who helped with the farm and with some of the tasks associated with the garden, had used an ancient petrol-driven lawnmower that he pushed before him on creaky and increasingly dangerous handles. Mr Woodhouse had decided to replace this, and had looked into the possibility of a small tractor under which was fitted a powerful rotary blade. This would enable Sid to sit on a well-sprung seat as he drove the lawnmower up and down the lawn, leaving behind him neat stripes of barbered grass.

The tractor brochure portrayed this scene as a rural idyll. A contented middle-aged man sat on his small tractor, a vast swathe of well-cut grass behind him. The sky above was blue and cloudless; in the distance, on the veranda of a summer house, an attractive wife – at least ten years younger than the man on the lawnmower – waited to dispense glasses of lemonade to her hard-working husband. But Mr Woodhouse was not so easily fooled. What if you put your foot just a few inches under the cover of the blade? What if you fell off the tractor because the ground was uneven – not everyone had even lawns – and your fingers, or even your whole hand, were to get in the way of the tractor and its vicious blade? Or what if a dog bounded up to greet its owner on the tractor and had its tail cut off? The woman dispensing lemonade so reassuringly would shriek and run out, only to slip under the lawnmower and be sliced like a salami in a delicatessen. It was all very well, he told himself, trying to avoid these possibilities and pretending that nothing like that would happen, but somebody had to think about them.

The enthusiasm that Isabella and Emma felt for Miss Taylor proved to be infectious. Although Mrs Firhill had misgivings about the governess and the pace with which she introduced her changes, she found it hard to disapprove of a woman who, in spite of a tendency to state her views as if they were beyond argument, was warm and generous in her dealings with others. The conviction that she was right – the firm disapproval of those she deemed to be slovenly in their intellectual or physical habits – was something that Mrs Firhill believed to be associated with her having come from Edinburgh.

‘They’re all like that,’ a friend said to her. ‘I’ve been up there – I know. They think the rest of us very sloppy. They are very judgemental people.’

‘I hope that it doesn’t rub off on the girls,’ said Mrs Firhill. ‘But I suppose it will. There’s Emma already saying cadit quaestio – and she’s only six.’

‘Oh, well,’ said the friend. ‘Perhaps it’s the best of both worlds – to be brought up Scottish but to live somewhere ever so slightly warmer.’

Mrs Firhill nodded – and thought. There was already something about Emma that worried her even if she was unable to put her finger on what it was. Was it headstrongness – a trait that you found in certain children who simply would not be told and who insisted on doing things their way? Her cousin Else’s son had been like that, and was always getting into trouble at school – unnecessarily so, she thought. Or was it something rather different – something to do with the desire to control? There were some children who were, to put it simply, bossy, and little girls tended to be rather more prone to this than little boys – or so Mrs Firhill believed. Yes, she thought, that was it. Emma was a controller, and it was perfectly possible that Miss Taylor’s influence would make it worse: if you were brought up to believe that there was a very clear right way and wrong way of doing things, then you might well try to make other people do things your way rather than theirs.

Once Mrs Firhill had identified the issue, the signs of Emma’s desire to control others seemed to become more and more obvious. On one occasion Mrs Firhill came across her playing by herself in the playroom, Isabella being in bed that day with a heavy cold. In a corner of the room was the girls’ doll’s house – an ancient construction that had been discovered, dusty and discoloured, in the attic. Now with its walls repainted and repapered, the house was once again in use, filled with tiny furniture and a family of dolls that the girls shared between them. Long hours were spent attending to this house and in moving the dolls from one room to another in accordance with the tides of doll private life that no adult could fathom.

Unseen by Emma, Mrs Firhill watched for a few minutes while Emma addressed her dolls and tidied their rooms.

‘You are going to have stay in your room until further notice,’ she scolded one, a small boy doll clad in a Breton sailor’s blue-and-white jersey. ‘And you,’ she said to another one, a thin doll with arms out of which the stuffing had begun to leak, ‘you are never going to find a husband unless you do as I say.’

Mrs Firhill drew in her breath. It would have been very easy to laugh at this tiny display of directing behaviour, but she felt somehow that it was not a laughing matter. What she was witnessing was a perfect revelation of a character trait: Emma must want to control people if this was the way she treated her dolls. Bossy little madam, thought Mrs Firhill. But then she added – to herself, of course – without a mother. And that, she realised, changed things.

3

‘Boarding school?’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary, do you? Not for your girls.’

Mr Woodhouse shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The conversation he was having with the governess was taking place in his study – his territory – and he would have imagined that he would have had the psychological advantage in such surroundings. It was a large room, furnished with a substantial desk, and to speak to somebody from behind such a desk surely must confer some degree of authority on one’s pronouncements. He had read somewhere that Mussolini had a very large desk indeed, placed at the end of an exceptionally long room. This meant that visitors had to walk for some distance before they even reached the dictator, by which time if they had not already been intimidated when they entered the room they certainly would be by the time they reached his desk. And it was not just dictators who were keen on such tactics: there were several democratically elected presidents who were known to use elevator shoes, to stand on strategically placed boxes to gain height, or to insist when group photographs were being taken on being placed next to those shorter than themselves. He generally needed none of this, being secure enough in his estimation of himself, but Miss Taylor had a knack of making him feel perhaps slightly less than authoritative, as she was doing now, even in his own study.

‘I think that their mother would have expected it,’ he said. It was sheltering behind his late wife – he knew that – but it would be hard for her to argue with a pious concern for the feelings of the girls’ mother.

‘But she may well have changed her views,’ retorted Miss Taylor. ‘Had she lived, that is; I was not suggesting that views can change after one has crossed over, so to speak. Things have changed since … since her day. And both of them are perfectly happy where they are. Why send them off to some wretched boarding school, some Dotheboys Hall? What’s the point of having children if you then just send them away?’

Mr Woodhouse looked out of the window. It was all very well for Miss Taylor to barge in and give her opinions on this tricky issue, but she was Scottish and did not understand the nuances of English life. Highbury, their village, was the embodiment of England; and there was a social order, complete with nuanced expectations, that she could not be presumed to understand. The local primary school was perfectly adequate for young children – and Miss Taylor was right to say that the girls were happy there – but now that they were getting older, there arose the highly charged question of boys. If they went to the local high school, then they would simply become pregnant; Mr Woodhouse was sure of that. That was what happened at the local high school. They would meet the wrong sort of boy whose sole ambition would be to make any girl whom he met pregnant.

He wondered if he could explain his fear to the governess, who was staring at him intently, as if trying to fathom the nature of his unsettling suggestion that the girls might be sent away.

Miss Taylor now spoke. ‘How long have I been here now? Almost three years, have I not?’

He nodded. She had become a fixture in their lives, and it seemed as if she had been there for much longer than that. And he hoped, quite fervently, that she would be there for much longer – indefinitely, really, as it was hard to imagine Hartfield without her now.

‘Well,’ continued Miss Taylor, ‘it would be a pity if I were to drop out of their lives after all that time, simply because they’ve been sent off to boarding school.’

Mr Woodhouse gasped. ‘But there would be no need for that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t need to leave.’

‘I don’t see what the point of my remaining would be,’ said Miss Taylor coolly. ‘My role here is as governess. As governess, I must emphasise. I would have nothing to do were the place to be devoid of children.’

‘But there’d be the holidays,’ objected Mr Woodhouse. ‘They would need supervision during the holidays.’

‘Mr Woodhouse,’ said Miss Taylor reprovingly, ‘surely you wouldn’t expect me to sit about for months on end with nothing to do.’

He was about to say, ‘But that’s exactly what I do myself …’ but he stopped. He could not contemplate her leaving, and it had now occurred to him that there was a way in which this could be avoided.

‘May I suggest a compromise?’

‘I don’t see what compromise there can possibly be,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Either they go to boarding school, or they do not. You weren’t going to suggest that I accompany them? I’m not sure that that would be viewed with favour by the school concerned.’

Mr Woodhouse laughed. ‘You going off with them and sleeping in the dorm with the rest of the girls? Eating your meals in the school refectory? Playing hockey? Hah!’

She looked at him with disdain. ‘Very droll,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you could tell me what this compromise is.’

‘There’s a school in Holt,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘That’s not far, as you know. You will have seen it. Gresham’s.’

‘I could hardly miss it,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I do not go about with my eyes closed, Mr Woodhouse.’

‘They take day pupils,’ he continued. ‘I could drive them there in the morning, and then you could pick them up late afternoon.’

Miss Taylor looked thoughtful. ‘It has a very good academic reputation, I believe.’

‘Exceptional. And some very distinguished people went there. Benjamin Britten, the composer, for example.’

‘My tastes are a bit more robust,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘That’s a personal view, of course. There are those who like Britten, but what he has to say about Venice would hardly encourage one to visit the place …’

‘And then there was Donald Maclean,’ mused Mr Woodhouse. ‘He was at Gresham’s too, and became a very well-known spy.’

‘I see. Neither of those would have made very good husbands, I think …’ She gave him a wry glance. ‘One would not want one’s husband to defect to the other side, would one?’

Mr Woodhouse looked puzzled. He thought that there might be something subtly humorous about her remark, but he was not quite sure what it was. The other side? Moscow? That was a bit obvious. ‘Well, it’s all different now,’ he said. ‘We would not be sending them there to find a husband. There’ll be plenty of time for that, later on.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘There are those who believe that is what universities are for.’

She rose to leave. She was not one to prolong a conversation once a decision had been made. ‘I’m not at all sure that Emma will be the sort to want a husband,’ she said quietly. ‘Isabella, yes. She definitely will. And sooner rather than later, I think. She’s probably thinking of boyfriends more or less now. I know I’m talking about a twelve-year-old girl here, but character, Mr Woodhouse, is formed at a very early stage in our lives, and there are some girls who, even though only just twelve, give very clear indications of what lies ahead in the amorous department. I have seen it, Mr Woodhouse. I have seen it all before.’

Mr Woodhouse seemed lost in thought and did not pursue with her what she had said. This suited Miss Taylor, as she was not very sure herself what she would say if he were to press her on her judgement of his daughters’ characters. She was sure enough of her assessment of Isabella, but when it came to Emma she was a good deal less confident. There was something very unusual about Emma, who was, she felt, considerably more complex and therefore more interesting than Isabella. That was not to be dismissive of the older sister; Isabella was a pleasant enough girl and Miss Taylor was sure that she would be a social success, particularly with boys. It was much more difficult to make such a prediction in Emma’s case. She was a pretty child and that would guarantee the attention of friends – the beautiful, Miss Taylor had noticed, are seldom lonely, unless they choose to be. But it seemed to her that Emma had depths that might well be lacking in Isabella and girls like Isabella. There was something about her …

An aesthetic awareness? Was that it? Shortly after she had first arrived at Hartfield, Miss Taylor had become aware of Emma’s interest in how things looked. There had been a curious incident in which Emma had ventured into her governess’s room and started to rearrange the toiletry items set out on the dressing table. These included two silver-backed brushes – one a clothes brush and the other a hairbrush – that had been given to Miss Taylor by her aunt in Aberdeen. ‘Scottish silver,’ the aunt had said. ‘The very best silver there is.’ Miss Taylor had wondered about that: how could Scottish silver possibly differ from all other sorts of silver? Silver, surely, was silver, wherever it came from. But that was not the point: the real point was the large ornate letter T engraved on the backs of the brushes.

Now these brushes sat alongside an eau-de-cologne dispenser in the form of a squat bottle of thick-cut glass, a tortoiseshell comb, a bottle of nail-varnish remover, and a small Wemyss Ware bowl containing cotton-wool buds. For the average young child, such a collection would have been a positive invitation to fiddle, to take tops off, to press and spray things. The eau-de-cologne dispenser would have been the greatest temptation, closely followed by the cotton-wool buds. But this was not what happened with Emma, who spent ten concentrated minutes moving the items about the dressing table until they were placed in a position that appeared to satisfy her.

‘You’re very busy,’ said Miss Taylor as she observed what was happening.

‘They must be beautiful,’ said Emma.

‘What must be beautiful, Emma?’

‘Things.’

Miss Taylor smiled. ‘But they are beautiful, these things of mine. Those lovely silver brushes, for instance – they’re very pretty, aren’t they?’

The young Emma nodded. ‘Like this,’ she said, moving the brushes to the side. ‘They go there. These go …’ She shifted the eau-de-cologne dispenser to the centre of the table. ‘There. Right shape.’

That was not the only incident of that nature. Miss Taylor soon realised that the furniture in Emma’s room, along with the pictures on her wall, rarely stayed in the same position for more than a few weeks on end. There were three chairs in the room and they were shifted about with regularity: under the window, beside the wardrobe, at the end of the bed, and then back to the window. Similar things happened in the rest of the house, although that was less noticeable. However, Mr Woodhouse once commented that somebody seemed to have moved two of the pictures in his study, swapping their position.

‘I can’t see why Mrs Firhill feels it necessary to dictate what I look at,’ he said over breakfast.

‘There are others who may have a tendency to rearrange things,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that Mrs Firhill has views on what pictures go where.’

Emma, busy with her bowl of cereal, said nothing.

‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Why can’t people leave well alone?’

Miss Taylor thought about a reply to that. He was right, of course, but only to an extent: there were too many people who imagined that there was some sort of duty incumbent on them to change things. These people were often unwilling to leave things as they were, which could be irritating. Yet if nothing were ever changed, she mused, then wouldn’t life be rather dull? She was distracted from this rather interesting question by the thought that some people not only liked to interfere with the way that inanimate things – possessions and paintings and the like – were disposed, but also liked to change the way in which people themselves were arranged. She glanced at Emma, who now looked up from her cornflakes and smiled at her.

Later that day, Miss Taylor said to Emma, halfway through their French lesson, ‘Tell me, Emma, why do you like to move things about? I’m not scolding you, darling, I’m just curious to know.’

Emma stared at the book they were reading. It was the adventures of Babar the elephant, in the original French. The three young elephants, Pom, Flora, and Alexander, were in peril and she wanted to continue with the story.

‘To make them happier,’ she said. ‘Now can we carry on reading?’

The girls settled in well at Gresham’s and both Miss Taylor and Mr Woodhouse became accustomed to their daily school run. In the mornings Isabella and Emma were driven to Holt in a mud-bespattered Land Rover that was normally used for farm work; in the afternoon, Miss Taylor, who insisted on wearing motoring gloves, cut a fairly dashing figure as she drove to collect them in a silver-coloured Mercedes-Benz that had belonged to Mr Woodhouse’s father.

With the girls at school for more of the day, Miss Taylor initially found that time hung heavily on her hands. But after she enrolled for a number of Open University courses, she discovered that the study and essay-writing that these entailed filled the gaps in her day. Mr Woodhouse encouraged her in this, and insisted on making available a fund for the purchase of textbooks and other materials needed for her studies. In her first year she completed two courses on Medieval Spanish History along with a course on the Trade Routes of the Ancient Middle East. In her second, she achieved a particularly high mark in both Classical Culture and Civilisation and the Dance and Drama of Restoration England, and then embarked on a more advanced course on the Art of the Baroque.

For the girls she was by this time very much a stepmother in all but name, her relationship with Emma being particularly close. But while most stepmothers encounter resentment on the part of their stepchildren, she did not. This resentment is based on the feeling that the stepmother is harsh and unkind: a pattern so common as to attract a name – the Cinderella Syndrome, Cinderella having been the victim of an egregiously unpleasant stepmother and stepsisters. Just as Cinderella did, the stepchild pines for the mother who would have treated her better, and resents the usurpation by the stepmother of her place in her father’s affections. At Hartfield, important elements in this psychological equation were missing: Miss Taylor was anything but unfeeling – in fact, she regularly and unapologetically indulged the girls. But then she was not married to their father – who had no interest in any relationship with her other than as an appreciative employer and, in a sense, friend. Without those complications, a fully blown psychopathology could hardly get started, and there was nothing to mar the reasonable, loving relationship that the two girls enjoyed with their governess. It was to Miss Taylor that they turned for advice; it was she who comforted them when they encountered the torments that beset any adolescence; it was she who looked after them and gave them the love that their own mother would have given them had she survived.

Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, it was decided that Isabella should not remain at school any longer. Most of her contemporaries were to spend a further year at Gresham’s, but in Isabella’s case it was felt that there was no point in persuading her to study for examinations that she had no desire to sit and that she would evidently not pass. She wanted to go to live in London and find work there. She had met somebody on a train who said that she could find her a job with a firm of fine-art auctioneers that specialised in providing employment for the daughters of county families. She would not be paid very much, she was warned, but that was not the point; she had a regular income from her mother’s estate that would be more than enough to pay the rent and ordinary living expenses, and her father, she felt, would provide for any luxuries. London, with its plays and its parties, beckoned; it was as if its lights, bright and seductive, penetrated into the country even as far as Hartfield itself, lighting the winding way to the distant city.

Mr Woodhouse, of course, felt that London was highly dangerous.

‘I cannot understand,’ he said to his daughters when Isabella first mentioned her desire to go there. ‘I just cannot understand how anybody would wish to live in London. I can see why people might wish to go in for the day – to see what’s on at the Royal Academy or the Science Museum or whatever. Perhaps even to do a bit of shopping. But to live there?’ He shook his head in disbelief at the inexplicable nature of such a choice.

‘But …’ began Isabella.

She did not get far. ‘The very air is sixth-hand,’ continued Mr Woodhouse. ‘Just think of it: when you breathe in places like London you’re taking in air that has already been in and out of goodness knows how many lungs.’

‘Twelve,’ said Emma. ‘Strictly speaking – if each person has two lungs and the air is sixth-hand.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Twelve lungs. Imagine the microbial load, and the viruses …’

‘But viruses are everywhere, Father,’ said Isabella. ‘We learned that in biology at school. Miss Parkinson – you should have seen her.’

Emma giggled. ‘Old bag.’

‘A very good teacher, I believe,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘And obviously aware of viruses – which is a good thing.’

Isabella smiled. ‘She said that we need to be exposed to a few viruses in order to build up our immune system. She said that the rise in the number of people with allergies is partly to do with the fact that everybody is eating over-purified food.’

‘Should we eat dirty things?’ asked Emma. ‘Should we wash the crockery maybe only once or twice a week?’

Mr Woodhouse tried to smile at this suggestion, but he found the whole discussion acutely painful: one should not talk about microbes lightly, he felt; it was an invitation to disaster. Of course microbes could not hear what they were saying, but it seemed somehow foolish to talk about them as if they were not there.

‘There may be a smidgeon of truth in what Miss Parkinson says,’ he conceded. ‘You do need to be exposed to a certain level of microbial activity, but London goes way, way beyond that.’ He paused. ‘No, I cannot see living in London as anything but foolhardy. Theatres and museums are all very well …’

‘And parties,’ added Isabella.

Mr Woodhouse glanced at her, but ignored the provocation. ‘These things may be all very well, but what if you’re in such a wretched condition that you can’t enjoy them? What then?’

‘They look fine to me,’ said Isabella. ‘There are loads of people at Gresham’s whose parents live in London – or work there – and they seem fine to me.’

Mr Woodhouse shook his head. ‘The air is far healthier out here,’ he said. ‘And if you lived in London, young lady, you’d know all about it. You’d have a streaming cold 24/7, as you people like to say. And you’d be running the risk of much worse, believe me. If the water’s been through however many sets of kidneys … No, don’t make that face, this is science I’m talking about. If London water has been through all those systems …’

‘Through boys’ systems too,’ contributed Emma.

Isabella smiled. She did not object to that.

‘If London water has had that experience,’ continued Mr Woodhouse, ‘then what’s the chance of at least some viruses escaping the attention of the chlorine, and, I believe, ammonia they dose the stuff with? What about hepatitis? That’s water-borne, as I think I’ve told you in the past.’

‘Hepatitis turns you yellow,’ said Emma.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Woodhouse, glancing at Isabella. She did not take these things seriously enough, he felt, and shock tactics were sometimes necessary to emphasise a point. ‘A fact worth remembering.’

There were several such conversations about the dangers of London, but it seemed that none of them had much impact on Isabella’s desire to move there as soon as possible. Mr Woodhouse agonised over this in private, but also raised the subject with Miss Taylor.

‘She seems dead set on going off to London,’ he said as they walked together one evening in the shrubbery. ‘I’ve talked to her about it, but it seems to go in one ear and out the other with that girl. In fact, I’m not sure that it even goes in one ear at all. I think that a lot of what I say is completely ignored. Emma’s quite different, of course – she listens to what I have to say, but her sister …’

‘Her sister is a very different girl,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘We all know that.’

‘I can’t understand it,’ said Mr Woodhouse, shaking his head with exasperation. ‘They have the same DNA.’

‘Not quite the same,’ corrected Miss Taylor. ‘They share some DNA but they have their own genes. They’re not identical twins.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘But they come from the same background and at least they have the same broad genetic inheritance, and yet …’

Miss Taylor reached out and placed a calming hand on his arm. ‘Isabella is more physical,’ she said. ‘It’s as simple as that. In fact, I’m sorry to have to say this, but there’s only one thought in her head at the moment: the opposite sex.’

The words the opposite sex were carefully enunciated – as if she were speaking with gloves on – and uttered in a slightly disapproving Scottish accent. The effect was electric.

‘Boys?’

Miss Taylor nodded. ‘Isabella is interested in boys. They are all she thinks about. They, I’m afraid to say, are her destiny.’

He fell silent. He did not like to think about the implications of what the governess had said. Was this the reason why one had daughters – to hand them over to be seduced by lascivious boys? He shuddered. He did not want the world to claim his girls. He wanted them to stay with him forever, in the security – or at least the relative security – of Hartfield. Let the outside world do its worst, but let it do it outside, and not within the curtilage of this agreeable old house and these gentle acres.

‘We need to marry her off,’ he muttered.

Miss Taylor frowned. ‘I didn’t think people spoke in those terms any more.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘The fact of the matter is that I have a daughter who is going to get herself involved in all sorts of affairs if we don’t.’ He hesitated, looking at Miss Taylor as if for advance confirmation of what he was about to say. ‘That will happen unless we find a husband for her as soon as possible.’

‘But Isabella’s only seventeen,’ protested Miss Taylor. ‘She hasn’t really lived yet.’

‘Many people get married at eighteen or nineteen,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘The average might be higher, but remember that you only have to be sixteen.’

‘Child brides,’ said Miss Taylor dismissively.

‘My mother was eighteen when she married my father,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘And it was a very successful marriage, as I think you know. My own wife was twenty-two when we married.’

Miss Taylor was silent.

He felt more confident now. ‘So you see, it’s not so outrageous an idea to want to fix your daughter up with a husband in order to protect her from what might be a string of unhappy affairs with all sorts of unsuitable young men. In fact, the more I think about it, the more attractive it seems.’

Miss Taylor now spoke. ‘But you can’t fix people up, as you put it. She’s a young woman now. She’s going to have her own ideas of what she wants, and I’m sorry to have to spell it out, but those ideas won’t necessarily be the same as yours.’ She frowned. ‘This is the twenty-first century, you know.’

‘That’, he said, ‘is a fact of which I am only too acutely aware. And I’m also aware of the fact that you cannot choose your daughter’s husband for her.’ He paused. ‘But what you can do is to let suitable people know that your daughter is about the place. That’s all. Then nature will take its course – or at least you hope it will, and some suitable young man – somebody from round about here – will step forward and win her over. That’s all.’

Miss Taylor stared at him. She had wondered whether he was being entirely serious; now she understood that he was.

‘And how do you let people know?’ she asked.

Mr Woodhouse smiled. ‘Do you read those copies of Country Life I get?’

Miss Taylor knew immediately what he had in mind. ‘You mean we should get Isabella’s photograph into Country Life? On that page near the front where they have a picture each week of an attractive young woman, with details below of her parents and what she’s doing?’

Mr Woodhouse nodded. ‘It’s a great tradition,’ he said. ‘They’ve been doing it for years, you know.’ He lowered his voice. ‘In fact, my mother had her photograph there. I’ve got the copy of the magazine in my study. I’m rather proud of it. To have a mother who had her photograph at the front of Country Life is quite something, don’t you think?’

‘I shall never completely understand the English,’ muttered Miss Taylor.

‘Don’t try,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘There are some things that pass all understanding, as they say.’

4

It was a matter, they said, of submitting a good photograph to the editor of Country Life and asking him to consider featuring one’s daughter in a future issue. Success was by no means guaranteed, even for the highly photogenic: there were many girls in many counties, all most eager to appear, or at least all having parents who were eager on their behalf. And parental support in this was crucial; self-nomination was unheard of, as the very act of putting oneself forward would be incontrovertible proof that one was not suitable.

The photograph had to be reasonably interesting. Country Life girls did not simply sit for the camera against some featureless backdrop but were pictured striking a pose in surroundings that gave an indication of their normal social milieu or talents. The daughters of major gentry – those with stately homes – might be photographed leaning against a stone pillar, the clear inference being that this was just one of the many stone pillars owned by her father; those who had no stone pillars but who had, say, a small ornamental lake, would be photographed standing in front of this. Those who worked with horses – and this was large group – might have a hunter in the background, or at least a saddle. Dogs were a popular accoutrement, usually Labradors, who would be at the young woman’s side, ready to retrieve or flush birds, enthusiasts all, and given the same appraising scrutiny by the readers, in many cases, as the young woman herself.

Not everybody, of course, lived in the country, although most of those who were urbanites had at least some country connection. Parents might be described as being of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and East Woods Manor, Chipping Norton, or whatever it was that provided the country bolthole for those who lived in town. And of course in any such juxtaposition it was Chipping Norton rather than London that counted: anybody could live in London, but not everybody could live in Chipping Norton.

The accompanying text also revealed the subject’s plans. Many young women were studying something at university – particularly at Durham, Edinburgh or Bristol. Many were planning to work in public relations or in a gallery; one or two – the lucky ones – had already opened their own interior-decoration business. Some were planning to get married in the near future, and the month of the wedding was given so that the readers might know whether they had been invited or passed over. If the wedding was to be the following month and no invitation had yet been received, then the conclusion was inescapable that one was not going. If, however, the marriage was to take place next September or October, and it was only May, then an invitation was still a possibility.

Mr Woodhouse had never paid much attention to any of this, which he regarded as the sort of thing that appealed to women but not to men. The wording of any caption to Isabella’s photograph could be worked out later – his immediate task was to find a photographer. This sent him off to the Yellow Pages, but he had not even begun to page through these when he remembered that he knew of a photographer who was right on their doorstep, or whose brother was.

George Knightley was the owner of one of the largest houses in the area, Donwell Abbey (twenty-four bedrooms). At the time at which Mr Woodhouse was thinking of publishing his daughter’s photograph, George was just twenty-five and had owned Donwell for four years. He had inherited not only a house, but looks too, his father having been described in a magazine article as one of the ten most handsome men in England. Knightley père had also been one of the most modest, as he never made any reference to this, or any other accolade that came his way. He had that endangered and most attractive quality: an old-fashioned Englishness, in appearance, garb, and manner, and a generosity of spirit that made him extremely popular in the neighbourhood. This ensured a sympathetic reception for his son when he took over the property. ‘Thank heavens,’ said people. ‘Think of what we might have had, with all these …’ Typically there then followed a listing of those who might have bought Donwell Abbey had it been put on the open market: hedge-fund people, dot-com people, Russian oligarchs, celebrities of various stripes – the list was a long one and generally concluded with a sigh of relief that the Knightleys remained exactly where they had been for centuries.

His parents were divorced when he was barely seven. It was not an acrimonious parting: both parties had gradually grown away from each other and recognised that they were, quite simply, bored with the other’s company and that this boredom was beginning to turn to irritation. They understood that when another’s mannerisms begin to grate, it is probably too late to retrieve the situation, even if a relationship might be patched up with a lot of effort and forbearance. He went off to live in Vancouver; she stayed at Donwell, which had now been given to her as part of a generous divorce settlement. The boys stayed with her and, for reasons of geography, saw their father only intermittently. He lost touch with England and, to an extent, with his sons, although he had never intended to desert them. For her part, she developed a close friendship with a man she met at a bridge club, and ended up travelling with him to competitions all over the world. It was on one of these trips, a visit to an international bridge tournament in Kerala, that she was hit by a car – an old Hindustan Ambassador with minimal brakes – and died. Her last memories were of the sun above her – so brilliant, so unrelenting – and concerned faces looking down on her: a boy wearing a blue shirt, a man in a khaki uniform who was shouting at the others; and then the sun again, and darkness.

Under the terms of her will, George inherited Donwell and the estate surrounding it, while his brother, John, was given such investments as his mother had. It was a roughly equitable division and it suited both of them. George had a sense of duty that his brother lacked; he also rather liked the challenge of restoring the Donwell farm to profitability. For John, his inheritance of easily realisable assets would enable him to indulge his taste for expensive cameras, forget the house that he had always found hopelessly uncomfortable and dull, and buy a flat in a fashionable part of London.

The young George Knightley’s commitment to Donwell was no passing fancy. Aided by his astute farm manager, he made sure that fields were used in such a way as to ensure maximum European Union grants. Old farm machinery was replaced with brand-new equipment, and diversification – the saviour of many a farmer who had found it impossible to make a living growing crops – was pursued with single-minded enthusiasm. This meant that several farm cottages that had been lying empty were made suitable for holiday lets; that beehives were introduced and a centrifuge bought for the extraction of honey from the comb; that a large flock of rare-breed sheep was established, as well as a farm shop selling home-cured bacon, jerseys and mittens made from the wool of the rare-breed sheep; in short, that every way of making a farm pay was examined, tried, and, if successful, implemented.

The proximity of Donwell Abbey to Hartfield meant that the Woodhouses and Knightleys saw a fair amount of each other. George Knightley had always been aware of the Woodhouse girls, of course, but they were, in his eyes, no more than two rather attractive teenage girls who had always been about the place and with whom he occasionally chatted. Isabella, of course, had always appreciated his looks, but the age gap between them made any thought of romance impossible. When she was sixteen, and beginning to take a strong interest in boys, he was twenty-four, and therefore impossibly old by teenage standards.

‘Life after twenty?’ Isabella said to a friend. ‘I don’t think so!’

‘Well, you’re hardly dead when you’re twenty-something,’ said the friend. ‘Maybe a bit past it, but not actually finished.’

‘That comes later.’

‘Yes, forty.’

They had laughed, but they actually meant it.

George thought nothing of age gaps. He might be older than Isabella, but he was nonetheless amused by her. He compared her with some of the girls he had met at university: in a few years she would be exactly like them, he thought – a county girl itching to find the right husband from the ranks of those young men who would make up her social circle. It was a harmless enough fate, even if a rather predictable one.

He was not so sure about Emma. She was a good dozen years younger than he was, and so when he returned to Donwell at the age of twenty-one she was only nine – a mere child. Over the years that followed, though, he saw the uncoordinated adolescent grow into a self-assured and rather beautiful young woman. He often saw her when he went to visit Mr Woodhouse, but it seemed to him that he was largely invisible to her. That, of course, was because he was a friend of her father and therefore of no interest to her other than as a vaguely avuncular figure. In spite of her indifference to him, he found himself appreciating her rather intriguing manner, her frequently unexpected, not to say mischievous observations, and her independent, insouciant manner. Emma, he thought, was growing up interesting.

Now Mr Woodhouse remembered what it was that George Knightley had said to him. He had told him that his brother had become something of a success as a photographer and had actually won a national competition a year or two earlier. ‘John has a bit of an eye,’ he said. ‘He always has had one. Odd, really, given that I can’t take a snap myself.’

Mr Woodhouse had not paid much attention at the time, but now it came back to him and he thought that the simple solution to his quest would be to invite John Knightley to take the picture.

He asked George for his brother’s number in London. Then, when he made the call, the telephone was answered after only one or two rings – always a good sign, thought Mr Woodhouse – and John Knightley came on the line.

‘We haven’t seen one another for some time,’ said Mr Woodhouse, trying to remember when it was that he had last seen John and wondering whether he still had an unhealthy complexion and rather lank hair.

‘Ages,’ said John. ‘Yonks.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘I see your brother quite a bit, of course. He often comes round here.’

‘He hasn’t got much to do,’ said John.

Mr Woodhouse sounded peeved. ‘He keeps busy enough, I’d say. He runs the farm rather well.’

‘With a manager, yes,’ said John, and then added, ‘Good old George.’

Mr Woodhouse ignored this remark. ‘You still taking photographs, John?’

‘Yes, Mr Woodhouse. That’s my job. I’m a fashion photographer in London. Vogue. Vanity Fair. Tatler. That’s me.’ He paused. ‘You won’t have seen my work, of course.’

Mr Woodhouse cleared his throat. This was a very irritating young man – very different from his equable and well-mannered brother. ‘I need a photograph of my daughter.’

‘Which one? The tall sexy one?’

Again Mr Woodhouse bit his tongue. ‘Isabella. She’s seventeen.’

‘Great age,’ said John. ‘You want me to do it?’

‘Yes. Can you?’

‘Do dogs bark?’ replied John. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

Mr Woodhouse frowned. ‘What?’

‘The answer’s yes. Happy to oblige, old son.’

The tone now became formal. Mr Woodhouse would expect John the following Saturday for the taking of a couple of portrait shots in the house and gardens. This was agreed and the conversation came to an end.

Mr Woodhouse sat and reflected. It was all most unsettling: John came from a good county family, and had he not gone off to London might well have ended up helping his brother run their small estate. He had had a perfectly good education, too; like his brother George he had gone to Marlborough, yet here he was using the language of a cockney barrow boy – if barrow boys still existed – and if cockneys still existed too. Old son! Is the Pope a Catholic? What had the Pope got to do with it? Mr Woodhouse asked himself. And of course dogs barked; did they not understand that in London?

Isabella required no persuasion to have her photograph taken. ‘In a mag?’ she shrieked. ‘He’ll put me in one of his actual mags? Are you serious?’

Mr Woodhouse realised that they were probably thinking of different magazines. He knew that Isabella liked to read glossy magazines full of ephemeral news about celebrities and their doings; he had come across these magazines left lying about the house and occasionally sneaked a look at their contents. They were absurd, of course, and the people they featured were without any interest at all – highly made-up, unhealthy-looking specimens who appeared to have no other purpose in life than to evade the paparazzi who pursued them. But occasionally the very same hounded celebrities opened their doors to admit the photographers to their homes, and the resultant features, plastered with high-definition pictures of white sofas and opulent swimming pools, gave an indication of just how little taste these people had. And yet there was a certain fascination in seeing them in their natural habitat and he had occasionally had to drop a magazine hurriedly and guiltily as a daughter came into the room. ‘Tidying,’ he would say quickly. ‘Why do you girls insist on leaving all these ridiculous magazines about the place?’

Isabella was rarely fooled. ‘What do you think of that photo of her?’ she might ask. ‘Can you believe that he actually bit her? Did you see the love-bite – it’s on her left shoulder – you can just make it out?’

‘Most unhygienic,’ he muttered. ‘A human bite can be a very toxic thing. There are numerous germs on people’s teeth.’

‘Not celebs,’ retorted Isabella. ‘A bite from a celeb is different.’

Now he was faced with something of a moral dilemma. Should he tell Isabella that the destination for her photograph was not to be some glossy gossip magazine, but Country Life, where photographs of humans are often outnumbered by photographs of horses and dogs, or sometimes of old houses?

He decided to be honest – or at least a bit honest. ‘It won’t be one of your glossy mags,’ he said. ‘It’s another magazine altogether. A bit more sedate, but still.’

He need not have worried. ‘I don’t care where it goes,’ she said. ‘It’s enough to have your photo in anything. Think what they’ll say when they see it at school. They’re all still sitting in the classroom and I’m posing! That’s seriously cool.’

‘I’m glad that you’re pleased,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘The photographer will be coming tomorrow. He’s George Knightley’s brother. You’ll remember him. He went off to London for some reason best known to himself.’

Isabella looked thoughtful. She did remember John Knightley. She remembered thinking that he was rather good-looking and had long hair when everybody else around him seemed to have his hair cut short. And he had gone to London, she thought. A London photographer is coming to do a shoot with me. With me.

While most people drove sedately up the drive that led through the parkland to Hartfield, enjoying the trees and the view of the shrubbery in the distance, John Knightley arrived at speed on a 1982 Ducati motorcycle, a throaty roar announcing him well before anybody saw the handsome Italian bike and its equally handsome rider. Mr Woodhouse went out to meet him and shook hands with the leather-clad brother of his neighbour.

‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ said John. ‘There was a pile-up on the motorway and I had to stop and get a few shots of it. Not my usual stuff, of course, but in my business you’re always looking for things you can sell to the red tops. They love a bit of gore, those editors.’

Mr Woodhouse struggled to keep his composure. ‘An accident? You took photos of an accident?’

John took off his helmet. ‘Yup. I don’t go in for anything too gory – not like some. There’s a chap I know in London who does the really bad scenes – you know, hands and stuff lying about. Not for me.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Mr Woodhouse.

‘You’re looking at respectability,’ said John, smiling. ‘You’re looking at the upper echelons of the profession.’

Mr Woodhouse availed himself of the invitation to examine John Knightley. He was a very striking-looking young man – tall, as he had remembered him, but with a bit more weight than he recalled him having. The face, though, was by no means chubby, but had a sparse, sculpted look to it, and the head was topped by a mane of flowing dark hair. John Knightley, he decided, looked rather like a lion; an absurd idea, he told himself, and then went on to think: Long hair requires frequent washing if it is not to become a sanctuary for microbial life. His gaze descended to the leather jacket and tight-fitting trousers and then to the boots with metal attachments on the heel – spurs? he wondered; surely not. How quickly, he thought, could one effect a transition from one world to another; from the world of George Knightley, with his faultless taste, his life of understatement and simple English decency, to this world of leather jackets and … He had noticed the tattoo; he had missed it at first because it was so discreet, but now, as the sleeve of the leather jacket inched up following a movement of John’s arm, he saw the small picture of an angel, or what looked like an angel, on his visitor’s wrist and underneath it a few tiny words, illegible at that distance. He caught his breath; the social descent seemed to him to be complete, and terrible. Tattoos were unacceptable; they just were. People could argue as much as they liked that conventions had changed and a tattoo now meant nothing; that they said nothing about you; but tattoos, in Mr Woodhouse’s mind, constituted a line in the sand that one simply did not cross. John Knightley had stepped across that line.

‘I think Isabella’s in the morning room,’ Mr Woodhouse said. ‘Would you care to come with me? We’ll see her there.’

John nodded. ‘I remember this place. We came here to a party once – my brother and I – when we were kids. He was sick in the conservatory, as I remember, and I tried to clear it up before anybody noticed.’

‘You’re a loyal brother,’ said Mr Woodhouse.

‘Poor George.’

‘It sounds as if you feel sorry for him,’ said Mr Woodhouse.

‘Yes, I do. Being stuck out here in that great barn of a house and the tedium … My God, how does he manage it: having to put up with the same old people year in, year out?’

Such as me, thought Mr Woodhouse.

‘Mind you,’ said John. ‘I can’t picture him in London, can you?’

Mr Woodhouse felt that he must defend his friend. ‘I can’t see myself in London either,’ he said.

John threw him a sideways glance. ‘No, possibly not.’

They reached the morning room, a large rectangular room with French doors giving out on to a terrace beyond. It was a favourite room of the girls, and Isabella was waiting, nonchalantly pretending to read a magazine.

For all his preoccupations Mr Woodhouse was not an unobservant man, and he noticed immediately the spark of response in Isabella’s expression. As he did so, his spirits sank; it had been a mistake to invite John Knightley to take Isabella’s photograph, and even as he made this admission to himself he came to the further realisation that the consequences of this introduction could be serious, and long-lasting.

‘I’ll start in here,’ said John. ‘I’ve got my gear in my backpack.’ He turned to Mr Woodhouse. ‘OK. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you before I go.’

It was clear to Mr Woodhouse that he was being dismissed, and it was equally clear to him that Isabella was anxious that he should not linger.

‘Can’t I help you in some way?’ he asked. ‘Hold a light, or something?’

John shook his head. ‘It’s easier if just two people are present at the shoot,’ he said, and then added, ‘Chemistry, you know. Energy flows. More intimate.’

Isabella smiled. ‘See you later, Pops.’

Mr Woodhouse resisted the temptation to lurk in a corridor or peer out of a window when the shoot moved outside. Burying himself in his library, he spent the next half-hour paging through an issue of Scientific American but retaining very little of what he was reading. He was convinced that John Knightley would take completely unsuitable photographs of Isabella, and that all that he would receive from Country Life would be a polite note about their inability to feature many young women who clearly would merit inclusion if only there were more room. The photographs would be gimmicky, he feared, with Isabella being draped seductively over the bonnet of a car or sprawled out wantonly on a pile of leaves; they would completely fail to embody the qualities of demure Englishness – mixed with an appealing and modest confidence – that could attract the right sort of husband.

He sighed, and laid Scientific American aside. It was important to have an understanding of particle physics – he had been reading about the Higgs boson – but the intellectual challenge of Scientific American was definitely secondary to a father’s duty to protect his daughter. Rising to his feet, he retraced his steps into the morning room. This was deserted; Isabella and John had presumably left for the formal garden and the outside shoot. But when he looked out of the window he saw that they were not there, and nor was there any sign of them in the shrubbery, of which the morning room had an equally commanding view.

The unease he had felt up to this point was now replaced by real concern. Leaving the morning room by a French window, he made his way quickly round the outside of the house, scanning neighbouring fields for any sign of the young people. There was none; the ripening barley, swaying in the breeze, showed no signs of intrusion; sheep grazed in a neighbouring paddock undisturbed by human presence; it was a landscape quite without figures. It was only when he turned the corner of the house and reached the broad turning circle at the head of the drive that he spotted them.

They were standing by the shining red Ducati. John Knightley, having packed away his photographic equipment, was now busy extracting a helmet from a large metal pannier behind the motorcycle’s seat. Mr Woodhouse breathed a sigh of relief at the realisation that the photographer would be leaving, but then he noticed that there were two helmets: the one being taken from the pannier and the one that John was already wearing, the unfastened strap dangling casually under his chin. He watched as the photographer handed the spare helmet to Isabella, who took it, and laughed as he showed her how to secure the strap.

He called out, and she looked up sharply.

‘Daddy,’ she shouted, as he approached. ‘Look at me. John’s going to take me for a ride on his Duc … Duc …’

‘Ducati,’ prompted John. ‘Just as far as Cambridge. We’ll be back by eight tonight.’

‘But …’ protested Mr Woodhouse. He felt a sudden tightening of his chest, a symptom, he knew, of extreme panic. It was now, he thought, that he should have a stroke; at such a time as this, when fear sent the blood through his veins under such pressure that somewhere, in some obscure corner of the brain’s plumbing, a tiny vessel might rupture and fell him just as surely as would a great blade. It was every bit as bad – worse indeed – as he had feared. ‘But you can’t, Isabella. These things …’ He gestured helplessly at the motorcycle; in his distress, words seemed to fail him. ‘These things … these things are Italian.’

She burst out laughing. ‘What? Italian?’

He corrected himself, ashamed because John was smirking. ‘Lethal. I meant to say: these things are lethal.’

He wanted to weep. He was convinced that as he watched her go down the drive it would be his last glimpse of his beloved daughter. He should do something to stop her: throw himself in front of the machine; or seize the key – if these things had keys – from John and run off with it, back to the house, ignoring his shouts. The most outrageous act on his part – even fetching his shotgun, his father’s old engraved Purdey – and pointing it at John would be justified in order to save Isabella from this dreadful folly.

‘It’s perfectly safe,’ said John. ‘I’m a pretty careful rider, Mr Woodhouse. Your daughter will be quite safe with me.’

‘See?’ said Isabella. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Daddy.’

‘You mustn’t, my darling. Please, please, I beg of you: you mustn’t.’

He did not think she heard him, as the flaps at the side of the helmet had now been fixed in position. She mouthed the word Goodbye. If only she hadn’t done that, he thought. If only she hadn’t tempted Nemesis to oblige and make it a real and final goodbye.

In slow motion – or so it seemed to the agonised Mr Woodhouse – he watched Isabella mount the pillion seat. It was so prolonged, so deliberate – just as some article on human perception in Scientific American had explained it would be, because our minds register an event like that with heightened clarity, and that makes it seem to happen slowly.

‘Isabella!’ he called out. But his voice was drowned by the roar of the Ducati and the crunching sound of its wheels on the gravel, and she did not hear him. She waved, though, and waved again when they rode past him in a spray of tiny stones.

5

‘Dearly beloved,’ began the vicar. ‘We are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation …’ The echoing opening of the Wedding Service, couched in the Cranmerian prose of the Book of Common Prayer, could not but move every one of the one hundred guests attending the wedding of Isabella Woodhouse to John Knightley. Emma listened to each word, and was impressed by the sheer solemnity of what she heard: ‘… which is an honourable estate … and first miracle he wrought, in Cana of Galilee … and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly …’ The resonant language brought home to her the significance of the occasion. This was her Isabella, her sister, taking such an irrevocable and adult step, leaving the security of her childhood home and venturing out as a married woman, as Mrs Knightley. It was hard for her to accept that this was actually happening; it was all so sudden, and so dramatic – almost an elopement, but not quite.

She looked about her at the congregation almost filling the small Norman church in Highbury. The Knightley family was led by George, and was well represented by an assortment of cousins, even if somewhat distant ones; there were fewer Woodhouses – not because various relatives had been passed over, but because they were a smaller family. Then there were people from the village: Miss Bates, an unmarried woman in her fifties who occupied, on a fixed rent, a cottage in the village, and who lived a narrow life in severely reduced circumstances; James Weston, a widower whose Georgian house of eight bedrooms was barely a mile from Hartfield, and who had always been a good friend to Mr Woodhouse; Mr Perry, an exponent of alternative medicine, regarded as a charlatan by some (but not by Mr Woodhouse), and his wife, an illustrator of educational textbooks; and a number of friends whom Isabella had known at Gresham’s: Rosie Slazenger, Timmy Cottesloe, Kitty Fairweather. Emma knew them too, although she was a few years younger; Mr Woodhouse had heard their names before and had met some of them from time to time, but could never tell which one was which.

Mr Woodhouse had reconciled himself to Isabella’s choice. His attempt to marry her off had succeeded, of course, but not in the way he had imagined. He had wanted her to find a husband in order to protect her, and she had done just that, with alacrity and determination, although not alighting upon quite the sort of husband he had envisaged for her. Still, it could have been worse; and the most important consideration, he knew, was her happiness. John Knightley made her happy. She adored him, and as far as Mr Woodhouse could make out, this adoration was fully reciprocated. And he accepted that the fact that he had a tattoo was far less important than the fact that they were both happy. His tattoo, moreover, was a relatively discreet one, and not something that people would necessarily notice, although it was a pity, Mr Woodhouse felt, that the best man should choose to mention it in his speech.

Immediately after the wedding she informed him that she was three months pregnant, and that she was expecting twins. Emma, who was sixteen at the time, greeted this news with delight, but proclaimed, quite spontaneously, ‘Not for me! I’m never going to get myself pregnant! Yuck!’

She addressed this to Miss Taylor, who was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction. ‘But it’s a wonderful thing to have children,’ she said. ‘You love children – I’ve seen you with those little girls in the village shop.’

‘Children, yes,’ said Emma. ‘But pregnancy, no. All that …’ She assumed an expression of disgust. ‘All that fumbling.’

Miss Taylor smiled. ‘You shouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘That’ll take care of itself. The important thing is to meet a young man whom you love. Once that happens, and I hope it does, then everything else – fumbling, and so on – will seem quite natural.’

Emma shook her head vigorously. No, Miss Taylor did not understand; how could she – at her age? ‘I don’t ever want to get married,’ she announced. ‘Never. Never. Not in a thousand years.’

Miss Taylor was tolerant. ‘Millennia come round so quickly, Emma.’ She smiled again. ‘I’ve already experienced one in my lifetime. And you may think that of marriage now, you know, but one’s views do change.’

‘Mine won’t,’ said Emma, with conviction. She was certain; she knew what lay ahead of her: she would continue to be pretty, clever, and rich. That did not include getting married: pretty, clever, and rich people did not have to bother with such things.

‘Oh well,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘There are other lifestyles. There is a great deal to be said for being single.’ And she thought: Exactly what? Not having to worry about another person; not having to accommodate a partner’s wishes; not having to tolerate the slow, gravitational decline of the flesh into middle age and beyond, into that territory of sleepless nights and infirmity; not having to listen to familiar views on the same things, time after time? Not having to have to, in short. And yet, she thought, if I had to choose between being a governess and having a man …

Emma, having pronounced, now looked thoughtful. ‘Of course, I quite see how lots of other people want to get married. I can see how it’s fine for them. In fact …’

Miss Taylor waited. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s probably rather fun to help other people find the right person. Yes, I think it must be.’ An idea had entered her mind. It was unbidden, but it excited her, and had to be expressed. ‘You, for example, Miss Taylor … What about you and James Weston?’

This was not an area into which Miss Taylor felt they should stray. She was, after all, Emma’s governess, and there were boundaries to be observed, no matter how easy and familiar their relationship had been. ‘Leave me out of it,’ she said sharply. ‘Cadit quaestio.’

‘Cadit quaestio,’ muttered Emma, under her breath. ‘Sed quaestio manet.’ She had asked her Latin teacher at school for a suitable rebuttal to cadit quaestio, and she had said that one might retort: But the question still remains, and that could be rendered sed quaestio manet. That was to put it simply, she explained. Simpliciter. Emma loved Latin because it gave her a sort of power. At school she had tossed a Latin phrase at a boy who had been staring at her in a disconcerting way, and he had been crushed – there was only one word for it: crushed.

Over the next couple of years, Isabella was more or less constantly pregnant; so much so that Mr Woodhouse found it embarrassing to have to answer enquiries as to how his elder daughter was. The usual answer to this now was simply ‘pregnant’ or ‘pregnant again’ but this began to sound almost faintly disapproving – as if he were somehow censorious of her single-handed efforts to redress the demographic imbalance. He disapproved of excessive fecundity on the grounds that over-population inevitably created conditions in which microbes flourished. ‘The more there are of us,’ he said, ‘the more we invite the spread of infection. Superfluous human population leads to environmental degradation, and that leads to unhealthy water sources. That, in turn, encourages the proliferation of water-borne disease.’

He wrote about this in a letter to the local paper, and the editor obliged by printing his letter prominently under the heading: ‘A Warning’. He had hoped that this would lead to a lively debate in the columns of the newspaper, but it did not. There had been one or two letters on the subject, including one from a reader who said: ‘But this is nature’s way, surely, of putting us in our place. And roll on the day when the next flu epidemic leads to a major culling of our species.’ That had drawn more responses than Mr Woodhouse’s original contribution. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ wrote one correspondent in the newspaper. ‘You have access to antibiotics. What about all those poor people who don’t have any antibiotics? What about them?’

Mr Woodhouse had shaken his head over this letter. When would people learn that antibiotics were useless against viruses, and that penicillin would not have made all that much difference to the ravages of Spanish Influenza – other than helping with incidental pulmonary infections? He had tried to explain the matter to Mrs Firhill on numerous occasions, but the message had never got through, and she continued to say that the best treatment for a cold was a course of antibiotics.

But that issue, serious though it was, was only incidental to the main question of overpopulation, to which his very own daughter was contributing so enthusiastically. The first pregnancy brought twins: two boys, and they were followed at the shortest possible biological interval thereafter by a further set of twins, this time girls. While this enthusiastic breeding programme was being pursued in London, back in Norfolk Emma continued to attend Gresham’s. At last the time came for her to leave, and she was driven away from the school one afternoon, zeugmatically, in floods of tears and the silver Mercedes.

‘I feel so silly, crying like this,’ said Emma.

‘It’s not silly at all,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I cried when I left school in Edinburgh. I cried when I left St Andrews. It would be unnatural not to cry in such circumstances. It would demonstrate, I think, a certain indifference to separation – from place, from friends.’

This set Emma off with renewed weeping. ‘All my friends,’ she sobbed. ‘Betty Slazenger,’ the name being uttered as if it were redolent of painful disaster, as are the names Titanic, Gallipoli, or the Somme.

‘Rosie’s sister?’ asked Miss Taylor.

Emma nodded miserably. ‘And Pippa. Harry. Ellie.’

‘You’ll see them again,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You needn’t lose touch. Isabella still sees Rosie Slazenger and Kitty, too, I believe.’

Emma wept not just because she was leaving her friends, she wept because it was the end of a world – the brief, temporary world of school that we never feel is brief or temporary until it is suddenly over. But her regret did not last for long as Miss Taylor had planned a busy summer for her: they enrolled, as fellow students, on a three-week course sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum, The English House through Three Centuries. They went together on a fortnight’s trip to Florence and Siena – a trip to which Mr Woodhouse was eventually persuaded to accept and finance, after a great deal of anxious hand-wringing and warning about the dangers of travelling in Italy, where the men, he said, were predatory to a degree that ‘we in England simply cannot comprehend’; where the drivers were ‘quite without concern for other road users’; and where ‘even the politicians were either certifiably insane or unashamedly criminal’.

They returned to England unscathed by any of these dangers – although Emma did have her bag snatched in Florence by a dwarf on a motor scooter (‘I warned you, my dear; I warned you,’ said Mr Woodhouse). It was not this incident, though, that stuck in Miss Taylor’s memory, but something altogether different – something that showed a side to Emma’s character that people often did not see, but that, in Miss Taylor’s view at least, was the real Emma. Within us all, thought the governess, there is often more than one person, more than one self. She had even discussed the subject with Emma – there was no point talking to Isabella about such matters, as she was given to yawning ostentatiously, though genuinely, when matters of the mind were raised. Emma, though, had listened as Miss Taylor told her about Plato’s famous chariot.

‘The chariot is the soul,’ she said, shaking her finger gently into the ether as if to pinpoint the insubstantial. ‘The chariot, you see, is driven by a charioteer but is pulled by two horses – one dark and one light. The dark horse represents all the brute appetites – concupiscence and so on …’ She paused. ‘Concupiscence is to do with lust.’

Emma closed her eyes. Was concupiscence really what they called lust in Edinburgh?

‘Anyway,’ continued Miss Taylor, ‘the two horses that pull the chariot are of opposite inclination. The light horse is to do with the finer things: awareness of others, generosity, civilisation – the finer side of our natures, in other words. The job of the charioteer is to harness the energy of the dark horse and to make sure that the light horse is not pulled downwards by its companion.’

Emma looked at her governess, imagining her, like Boadicea, in command of a chariot. And then something had occurred that distracted them: a telephone rang, and Miss Taylor for a moment or two seemed to be thinking about whether to ignore it or answer it, her chariot for an instant poised between the choice of ascending or descending. It ascended and she went to answer it, but it was the end of the chariot conversation.

And then, in Siena, on their Italian trip, while Miss Taylor sat at a table in the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, looking down on to the bowl of the shell, Emma detached herself from her governess for a few minutes while they were waiting for their order of coffee to be fulfilled; and found herself in a small side street lined with shops selling Sienese ceramics. One shop window had caught her eye for the sheer beauty of a bowl that it was displaying. This bowl was white and lemon-yellow in its colouring. Around its sides were glazed figures of young men in Renaissance costume picking fruit, while a troubadour plucked at a stringed instrument. A hunting dog, its back arched, as the backs of such dogs so often are, pranced ready for the pursuit of some creature not shown. Emma stopped and stared, and then entered the shop hesitantly.

Fifteen minutes later she was back with Miss Taylor, who remonstrated with her, as the coffee was getting cold.

‘I began mine. I couldn’t wait.’

Emma ignored her cup. ‘You have to come with me,’ she said. ‘I have to show you something.’

Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving until I have finished my coffee. You can’t just leave such a beautiful place and dash off somewhere on a whim.’

She waited impatiently until Miss Taylor was able to accompany her back to the shop. The window now had a large space where the bowl had been.

‘These places …’ began Miss Taylor, but was silenced by the effusive greeting of the proprietor.

‘It is here,’ he said. ‘Then I will pack it and send it over for you. We guarantee its safe arrival.’

‘Safe arrival of what?’ asked Miss Taylor.

The bowl was produced and placed on the glass surface of the counter. ‘Eccolo!’ said the proprietor.

Miss Taylor reached out and touched the rim. ‘You understand,’ she muttered.

‘It’s for you,’ said Emma. ‘It’s for you, from me.’

It transpired that she had spent her entire spending allowance on the gift and during the remainder of their trip to Italy she would be able to buy nothing except essentials.

‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Cadit quaestio.’

There was no arguing with the finality of cadit quaestio, and Miss Taylor, who had introduced the phrase, of course knew that. She knew, too, that there was a time to accept gifts, even the most extravagant ones, and to cherish them. She reached out and took Emma’s hand and knew, at that moment, what the true nature of her young charge was. But then she thought of the chariot and the two charioteers, and she lowered her eyes and hoped.

Once back, there was university to think about, and the challenges of the decorative arts course at the University of Bath on which she had been offered a place. The choice of Bath had surprised Mr Woodhouse, who said that he had not even known there was a university there. Miss Taylor had been more encouraging, even if she had her reservations; she would have preferred St Andrews, which was, she pointed out, a mere six hundred years older. ‘Not that these things matter all that much,’ she said, in such a way as to indicate that they mattered a great deal.

For others, though – and this included her teachers at Gresham’s – Bath somehow seemed a natural place for Emma to choose, although it would be difficult to say exactly why this was so. ‘She’s that sort of girl,’ said the English teacher enigmatically. ‘She’ll fit.’ And then, as an afterthought, expressed as if only to herself, ‘Perhaps she has Bathos.’ This reference eluded the chemistry teacher, who simply remarked, regretfully, ‘She never grasped chemistry. I tried, you know, but she never grasped it.’

The course was certainly ideal: Emma had long been interested in patterns, whether in wallpaper, carpets, or in clothing. For her fourteenth birthday she had been given a book on the work of Edward Bawden, and had responded immediately and instinctively to his pictures of the English countryside – all plough horses and wayside pubs with suspended board signs; all fields of wheat and old-fashioned tractors; all open skies and wispy clouds. She tried to imitate his style, and that of Ravilious and the Nashes, succeeding sufficiently to be encouraged by her art teacher to persist; but what she really liked were Bawdenesque fabrics and wallpapers. She could gaze at these for hours, luxuriating in triangles and trompe l’oeil.

She had not given much thought to the need to work – Mr Woodhouse had never mentioned the subject to his daughters – but Emma was far from lazy and she felt that if she had a destiny it was in working with designs like these. She could start off as an interior decorator and progress to designing her own curtains and wallpaper; she would create fabrics for sofas and bedspreads. It was ambitious, but clear enough, at least, for her to find a course that would equip her to do just this. Her friends agreed. ‘Emma Woodhouse Designs,’ said one. ‘Brilliant. The name works, Emma – it really does.’

Now that Emma was away at university, the question of Miss Taylor’s continuing employment at Hartfield could hardly be avoided. Miss Taylor herself had tried to raise the subject several times even before Emma left, but had been fobbed off by Mr Woodhouse, who either quickly changed the subject or, when more deliberately cornered by the governess, put it off until later that day. Then, of course, he failed to return to it or managed to ensure that he was not around at a time when it could be discussed. It was obvious that he was reluctant for her to leave, and that he simply wanted the normal routine of the house to continue as it always had, even if there was nothing for her to do. There was no reason why he should not continue to pay her – he hardly noticed her salary going out of his account each month, and, anyway, there was not very much for him to spend his money on, given that he rarely, if ever, left the house.

Disinclination to discuss a subject that needs to be discussed is never a solution: the topic merely assumes increasing prominence the longer it remains untouched. Every conversation that is then embarked upon, even if on a totally unrelated subject, will be conducted in the fear that it might suddenly be interrupted by the forbidden issue; every pause might be read as a sign that what has been unsaid so far might now suddenly be said. Eventually, of course, the strain tells, and the matter can be put off no more.

‘My position,’ blurted out Miss Taylor one morning as she sat at the breakfast table with Mr Woodhouse.

‘On what?’ he replied. ‘Your position on what?’ It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to evade the issue.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You know what I’m talking about: my position here at Hartfield. You may have observed that Emma is no longer here.’

There were untapped wells of denial. ‘But she is!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s away at university during the term, and then she comes back. How can she be said to be away when she always comes back? If I go to London for a day or two and then return, I can hardly be said to be no longer here.’

It was an improbable example. Mr Woodhouse had not been to London for eight years, and showed no signs of changing his views on the undesirability of ever doing so.

‘She is effectively now in Bath for more weeks of the year than she is here,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘In my view that means that she now lives in Bath. And anyway, she’s eighteen, and an eighteen-year-old does not need a governess.’

He looked at her with dismay. ‘But eighteen is so young,’ he said. ‘Remember what we were like at eighteen? We knew so little.’

Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘That’s not the way eighteen-year-olds look at it. When you’re eighteen you imagine you know everything. An eighteen-year-old will not accept guidance, I can assure you.’

‘But Emma doesn’t have a mother,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘You’re the closest thing she’s had to a mother since my wife died. If you were to leave …’ He left the sentence unfinished; even this hypothetical talk of departure made him feel bereft.

‘But I can’t sit here and pretend to be a governess when both my charges have grown up,’ she said. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘It’s your Presbyterian background,’ muttered Mr Woodhouse.

She stared at him. ‘What has the Church of Scotland got to do with it? I frankly do not see the connection.’

‘If you were a Catholic,’ said Mr Woodhouse, ‘you would have no difficulty with the idea of sitting around and doing nothing. That has never been a problem for Catholicism; it is only the Protestant outlook that makes us feel guilty about not being busy.’

‘Oh, really,’ she began, ‘this is nothing to do with John Knox, or Calvin for that matter.’

‘I beg you to stay,’ he continued, ‘I beg you, Miss Taylor. If you were to leave, then Emma would feel that a vital part of her home life was lost to her. I know that sounds extreme, but it really is true. You represent stability to her. You represent home.’

She stared down at the floor, avoiding his anguished gaze. It would be easier to stay than to leave; she would not have all the bother of looking for a new job – who wanted governesses these days? – and she had to concede that Hartfield was extremely comfortable. The salary was generous, too, and since she did not have to pay for her board – or for anything else for that matter – it would enable her to continue to build up her savings, now standing at a total of eighty-seven thousand pounds. Reading that figure, recorded on her quarterly statements of account, filled her with pleasure: a governess had to look after herself and to ensure that she did not find herself, at sixty, penniless and homeless. And that meant saving, and not indulging oneself in non-essentials, unless, of course, a husband should materialise and bring with him financial security. But husbands, she reflected, did not appear that easily; there were plenty of women who lived in hope that a husband might suddenly descend; that they might draw back the curtains one morning and see, standing outside their window, a husband; or that they might take a seat on the train to work and find themselves sitting next to … a husband. That happened, of course, for some, but for others it did not, no matter how hard they wished, and no matter how much they deserved a husband.

Mr Woodhouse suddenly brightened. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought I needed a secretary.’ He looked at Miss Taylor with the air of one about to make an important announcement. ‘You could be my secretary – the pay and conditions would be exactly the same, but the job description would be different. You would not have to worry about being governess to a young woman who was away much of the time.’ He made a gesture of supplication. ‘Please say yes, Anne.’

She had been about to concede, with a suitable show of reluctance, that she should continue as governess, but this new secretarial post – which she knew was almost certainly a sinecure – would do as well.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I accept.’ She paused. ‘What will the duties be?’

For a few moments he looked blank, but then he smiled and said, ‘Secretarial.’

She nodded. There was no need to discuss the matter further, as everything, she imagined, would be exactly the same as it always had been. And that, of course, was what Mr Woodhouse wished for above all else, and what Miss Taylor, for want of anything better, was prepared to accept.

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