The Journals of Rowena Elaine Dangerfield
1873–1876
Part I:
The Marble Goddess
One
I sit at my window looking out at the hot sunlight reflecting off the sunbaked, pink brick of my patio, and try to imagine myself back in London, and eighteen years old again. Somehow I find that calling up the distant past is less painful than recalling events that happened only a few months ago.
Suddenly I have a compulsion to write—to chronicle everything that happened to me since I arrived, so unwillingly, on the doorstep of my stepfather’s house in London. Perhaps I am only seeking excuses to escape into the past as a barrier against the present. Or perhaps I will understand better the whole train of events that led me here, once I set them down and can see them in perspective.
Only a few years have passed since that time, and I am still a young woman. But so much has happened since then, and I have lost a great deal of the arrogance and self-assurance that they used to complain of. “They” were my mother and stepfather, and their large, anonymous household staff.
The opinions of the servants didn’t concern me, for I was too occupied with my own thoughts and plans. I took care to stay out of the way of my mother and stepfather, and in all honesty, they were rather kind to me in those early days.
With surprisingly mature logic I came to realize that I had, in effect, been forced upon my mother. I was unwanted. I was not a child of love, but the child of a man she had been compelled to marry. Mellyn, whom my mother still called Nanny, spoke bluntly to me on the subject. “Barely out of the schoolroom, my precious lamb was at the time,” she grumbled. “But they decided that she was ready to be married. He was much older than she was, had money, and the prospect of being an earl some day. I remember how she cried, her eyes turning all red and swollen. ‘I’m not ready to be married yet, Nanny, and he’s so old,’ she said to me. ‘I want to have fun first, to come out in style and go to parties and balls…’ but her feelings were never even taken into account! Guy Dangerfield met her at a house party, and as pretty as she was, he was taken by her, I suppose. He was looking for a wife, to please his father, and she was the one he chose.”
According to Nanny, my father had had nothing to recommend him beyond the money he had made in the gold fields of America. He was a dark, gloomy man, she said, who preferred the country to the city, and would have made a recluse of his wife if he could.
“I suppose he didn’t want me to be born either?” I questioned.
“Don’t you talk like that, miss! You don’t know the whole of it, and that’s for sure! Your grandfather turned you against her, I’ll be bound, and for all that he’d have nothing to do with Mr. Guy after it all happened. He had a great notion that the Dangerfields were better than anyone else. My poor baby was no more than a child herself when you were born. I ask you, why couldn’t he have waited awhile? Why couldn’t he have taken her to live in London for a while? But no—he liked the country, he said, and he wanted a child. And he had his way. When you were born, it was just as if my poor Miss Fanny didn’t exist for him any longer. He fair doted on you, he did—had your nursery moved into the room next to his, and it was he got up at nights when you began to cry. ‘You take care of your baby, Mellyn,’ he’d tell me, ‘and I’ll look after mine.’ Unnatural, I called it. It was no wonder my lady pined and pined, and finally went off to London by herself. Who can blame her?”
A few new clothes were purchased for me—all in somber colors, in deference to the fact that I was still in mourning. I refused to have my hair done up in tortured coils and ringlets and preferred more severe styles, and on the few occasions when I was dragged out to teas and small evening gatherings I always managed to find myself sitting with the older ladies present, who complimented me on my “old-fashioned looks.” I had none of the accomplishments that young ladies of my status in life were supposed to have. I could not play the pianoforte and I refused to sing; I could not paint a passable watercolor, and I could not dance.
I always scared away the bolder and more persistent young men by showing myself to be intellectual, and better educated than they were. I know that I gained the reputation, in a short while, of being a dowdy bluestocking—a born spinster. My mother despaired of me. Her friends commiserated with her, sometimes in tones loud enough for me to hear.
I do not know how long matters might have gone on the way they were if Sir Edgar hadn’t suddenly decided that I must be married off. I had hardly spoken to him since that first day, but I’m sure my mother must have complained to him how recalcitrant I was, and how embarrassed I had made her feel on several occasions. Edgar Cardon had never liked my father, and I’m sure that my presence in his house was a living reminder to him of Guy Dangerfield.
Several months had passed since I had arrived in England, and the dull routine of my days had almost become a habit, when Tom Wilkinson came calling on me one afternoon.
We were already into autumn, and the servants had begun lighting fires every afternoon. I was in the library, desultorily searching through the shelves for a book I had not yet read, as he was announced.
“Mr. Wilkinson, to see Lady Rowena.”
I turned around in some annoyance when Briggs announced him, and then quickly withdrew. I did not like Tom Wilkinson, especially since he was the most persistent of my so-called suitors. “A stout Yorkshire lad,” Sir Edgar had stated bluffly when he introduced us, and indeed Tom was not only stout but short and squat as well—a dark-featured, bumptious young man who was always boasting of his fortune, his father’s mills, and the grand house he had built for his future family.
Of
all the young men I had met, Tom Wilkinson was so conceited and so full of himself that he ignored—or pretended to ignore—the fact that I had no time, and hardly any conversation to offer him. He implied, in fact, that my quiet demeanor and dowdy way of dressing actually appealed to him. I was obviously not the kind of woman who might give him cause for jealousy, and my reserve and coldness of manner seemed to attract him, instead of putting him off.
On the last occasion we had met I’d hardly said two words to him, and had thought, thankfully, that I’d seen the last of him—and now here he was, intruding into my privacy, with that annoying, everlasting grin still on his face.
“No need to look at me so haughty-like, Lady Rowena. I’ve your stepfather’s permission to call on you this afternoon. ‘You’ll find her in the library,’ he said. ‘Just get Briggs to announce you.’ And so here I am!”
He looked at me, grinning and licking his thick lips. “Come, lass—no need to pretend you’re not glad to see me, eh? They told me you’ve a habit of hiding yourself in here, but that’s a waste! You’re a lady, and I know that, but I’m here with the consent of your stepfather—aye, and your mother too. There’s no more need to act so priggish and standoffish with me. I’ve come to offer for you—and I hope you aren’t going to be missish and act surprised, for I’m sure you’ve known what I’ve had in mind. I may be a blunt Yorkshireman, but I’m proud of it, and I’ve made up my mind! You’re not going to act coy, now, are you? I think you’re a sensible lass, with no fuss or frills about you—and that’s why I chose you.”
All the time he was talking he kept stalking me around the room, forcing me to retreat, and quite ignoring my angry protests. “Come, now,” he said coaxingly, his pop-eyes looking paler than ever in the diffused light, “I ain’t going to hurt you, you know! Haven’t I just proposed marriage? All I’m asking is a kiss to seal the bargain. Now, you ain’t too shy for that, are you?”
“Mr. Wilkinson—Tom—I do wish you’d stop making a ridiculous fool of yourself!” I protested angrily, but my denial of his suddenly declared passion only seemed to make him more ardent.
I moved backward, and he moved forward. I passed by the window, blinking in the light let in by the partially drawn blinds, and I saw him give a start of amazement.
“You’re not wearing those spectacles today! I’ll be damned if you don’t have pretty eyes, after all. In fact, you’d make a handsome woman, once you’re dressed right and proper—damned if you won’t! And I’ll have the last laugh on all those others, won’t I?”
By now I was as much annoyed with myself as I was with him. I stopped running from him and with my hand on the back of a chair, said forbiddingly, “Mr. Wilkinson, you are taking far too much for granted!”