From Chiltney [a fragment]
She’d been baptized Elizabeth Darby but at Chiltney Farm she was Lizzie, second youngest of ten, with lips that felt less outsized when she was moving them, and a broad face that to her oldest sisters’ secret astonishment boys couldn’t steal enough glances at. She took the longest time at the mirror, getting her reflection right. A blessing, the oldest sister said; a curse, said the next, the undisputed pretty one until Lizzie came along, not that anyone called Lizzie exactly ‘pretty’; not that you’ll do well to think pretty lasts or will do you much good, said their mother.
What did do Lizzie good—and if anyone wanted to argue they kept it to themselves—was that in June when she finished Third Form, her mother said a girl her age, with her face, would do better bringing home a few pence extra minding Galston’s High Street Shop than doing her sisters’ chores.
Tha knows best, Lizzie’s father said.
I guess I do, her mother said.
And so Lizzie had a new frock and sat on the back of Crulwich’s milk cart six mornings a week be dropped off at Galston’s, purveyors of fine teas and coffee, and millinery in the new extension down the wooden stairs and through the Corinthian columns (she knew the orders, Doric, Ionian, too). Plenty of time through the dark months, fluttering alone in the gaslight with those words: mill-in-ry; ost-rich feath-a; pur-vay-r; each a different coloured scoop of musky air.
Her schoolmaster had said he’d never taught a lass who took so to her lessons, who wrote with such a pretty hand or recited so boldly, in front of the entire school:
Courage! he said, and pointed toward the land,
This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All you had to do was not to focus on any one of the faces in front you. Same in the shop.
Take our Lizzie now, her father said, in the rainy kitchen.
Ost-rich feath-as.
There aren’t, her mother said. Naught in Galston’s.
Are, too! Lizzie said, hating herself for falling back into her mother’s accent. Sundays she was helpless, after a whole day in the house’s warm animal smell, and after service the soggy turf, the farmhouse rooms too dark to read in, oil for lamps too dear.
But then Monday came in the dark and for six days the town tilted towards the sea, and in summer she had nigh on a full day of sea-shine before the shadow of the bluffs spilled across the bay with the tall width of England behind them and even the pennants of the striped beach tents stilled. The sight of the beach—she could walk to it—was well enough, but no sooner, her sisters said, would she catch sight of those fine ladies and gents all done up proper-like to promenade than she’d no more be content, never.
But her sisters had no notion, did they? She had all day, daily, to imagine how it might happen. It might. Why shouldn’t she? Galston’s was two shop fronts wide from their brass, ladies from Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester, as Lizzie knew because she asked (and why shouldn’t she?) and took their packages to their hotels herself, no trusting Shuttlesworth’s no-good boy, and sometimes there was a toffee in it. Factory owners’ daughters. Solicitors’ wives. Aunties of Harrogate boys. Branded by every syllable they spoke to the North for those who knew, which Lizzie wouldn’t, not yet having gone further than York once by train.
Only York?
A gent, buying a silk scarf.
No sir. She knew how to wrap the Galston’s-emblazoned tissue paper by then without looking down: double crease like the front of a gentleman’s shirt and fasten with a black-bobbed pin.
A well-spoken lass. A bold little thing.
Yes, sir. A quick look up, then down at her quick fingers. Biting back a snicker so that he could see; you could tell he wanted to, sure enough he did.
What’s your name then? He was shuffling bank notes in a soft brown wallet.
Darby, sir.
The gentleman tapped his hat on, good day to you then. The milliner counter girl busied her hands wrapping and rewrapping a straw-hat black sash until the front door rang shut behind him, and then didn’t she bustle over ever so quick.
Do you have any notion who you’re talking fresh to?
A Scottish gent, I suppose, Darby said.
That was Mr. Galston. You talked fresh to Mr. Galston.
I wouldn’t call that fresh. Her voice slipping.
Then what would you call it?
The next week a note, from Mr. Galston. To Darby. He could use a smart lass in Edinburgh.
She would have turned eighteen, that summer.
