Page 1 of Threads that Remain

Chapter I.

There was a particular kind of quiet that fell upon a house in the weeks after Margaret Dashwood, having just turned fifteen, had not expected to find so difficult to bear.

The plan had been for her and her mother to remain at Barton Cottage, but after a bitter winter, Marianne had insisted they move into the bigger, more comfortable house at Delaford; and she had come gladly, for she loved the Colonel, and she loved the great grey house with its park and its lake and its chalky hill behind the home farm, a great deal better than she had ever loved the cottage at Barton. But it occurred to her that in the space of a single winter, she had begun to think of her father more often than before, wishing she had had more time with him for a great many reasons; one of which of late was imagining spending hours on end in his study exploring topics involving all sorts of academic knowledge, such as nature and history. In her younger years she had not appreciated her studies, but now, as a young woman having just turned fifteen, she regretted her neglect. She had tried to engage others but soon realised her mother just indulged it, her busy sisters tolerated it, the Colonel was willing to answer her questions about places he’d been to, but only Edward, who read a great deal, had ever asked her a question that she could not answer.

She had taken up the habit of writing in a journal, a gift given to her by Elinor on the last night they were to share the same roof and had slowly but surely begun to contemplate matters for which she had never previously spared a second thought. At the time of moving to Barton Cottage, had she already absorbed a good deal of her sister Marianne’s philosophy and idealistic romantic approach to the world in general? She knew the honest answer to be a resounding yes, much as she would rather not admit to it.

Had her family continued on the path they found themselves on after Mr. Dashwood’s death, with barely enough of a living to support four females, situated in a little cottage on a relative’s out-of-the-way country estate, and without much variety in their new neighbourhood, the youngest Dashwood’s personality might have been cemented along very different lines.

However, so much had happened in the interim of the aforementioned assessment of her character and countenance, as well as to her ever emerging features, that the current Miss Dashwood — no longer simply Miss Margaret, now that her two older sisters had married and had relinquished the title to her — was, the keen observer might begin to think, a rather different creature from the one she had been.

She had been an eyewitness to the folly of throwing off propriety in favour of unreserved affection for a dashing young gentleman with handsome features. Her sensible eldest sister, Elinor, had warned against such conduct towards a man whose character was little known, yet the other ladies of the household had dismissed her as if she were the one with little sense.

Margaret had been entirely taken in by the romance of it all and decided her eldest sister’s heart must be less than it should be. Besides, Elinor’s interest in the household’s economy and insistence on her youngest sister’s education was less than appreciated by herself or by others in the family. Mamma often made expressions of exasperation towards Elinor’s censure, while enthusiastically encouraging Marianne’s choices.

However, Margaret was unprepared for the turn of events which led to Marianne’s heartache. It was unfathomable that Mr. Willoughby, the very definition of what a gentleman should be, according to Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne, could cause such intense pain as he did. It was not like anything she had ever experienced; not even the death of their father had elicited such suffering. Their father had been ill for a long time, and his death had caused great grief and sorrow indeed. But this pain caused by Mr. Willoughby was vastly different. It was more than suffering, it was terrifying.

The consequence was such that they had almost lost their beloved Marianne. The thought of it made Margaret question a great many things she had accepted beforehand without question.

Without question.

The more she pondered the matter, the more she realised therein lay the difference in her sisters’ approaches to matters of importance. And much like clouds parting after a dark and stormy morning, ushering in an afternoon full of bright sunshine and blue sky, Margaret had realised, with a startling clarity, that much of what had previously seemed acceptable was in fact not so easily accepted once one’s eyes had been opened.

That is not to say that she lost her good humour or ceased to be diverted by people who had not yet learned, nor, it was beginning to seem, were ever likely to hold their tongues. She admitted to herself that she enjoyed people and situations of interest. She decided she would always be willing to lend an ear to the latest gossip but not add to it. She would take notice of the conduct of others and give serious contemplation as to whether it was good or bad. She would always be outwardly respectful of her elders, while at the same time, inwardly making up her own mind as to the merits of their counsel.

She had noticed, in the course of that first quiet autumn, a want that she had never had leisure to feel. She had been given, by a most bountiful circumstance, two sisters of very superior understanding, whom she loved with her whole heart, and who had between them taught her nearly everything she knew; but a sister, however dear, is not quite the same article as a friend of one’s own age, who has not the right to tell one to sit up straight, and who has not, in her own recollection, ever held one upon her knee. Margaret had never had such a friend. There had been no girls of a suitable age at Barton, and none, that she had yet discovered, in the whole of the parish of Delaford; and she had begun to suspect, with the particular gloom that appears between childhood and adulthood, that there never would be.

It was Mrs. Jennings, who had come to stay at Brooks Green, her family home near Delaford, for a few months to visit her dear friends in the area, who dropped in upon a wet Tuesday with a basket of hothouse grapes and the whole of the local intelligence, and put an end to the suspicion.

“Ashgrove is let, my dear,” said that lady, settling herself by the fire with the satisfaction of a woman who has been first with the news. “I had it from my own coachman, who had it from the man who drove the furniture. A Professor, if you please — a professor of some sort of old bones and broken pots, who has been digging up Egyptians the whole of his life, and has at last consented to retire, upon his wife’s representations, and take a quiet house in the country, at least until their only child, a daughter, comes out. And I can tell you a great deal more than that, my dear, because I had it all from Charlotte, who had it from a friend who knew the family in town.”

Mrs. Jennings paused to take a long sip of her tea. “The Professor, you must know, was the only son of a very wealthy man — no title to him at all, only a great deal of trade money, very cleverly kept — and the old gentleman never in his life got round to buying himself an estate, being too busy making the fortune to spend any of it upon land; and the son has gone on in exactly the same way, so that between the digging and the travelling he has never bought so much as a hen-house. His wife, now, is a very different article: the daughter of Mr. Clements of Clements Hall, a most respectable old, landed family in Hampshire, and her own mother was a Fortescue, which is about as good old English stock as you could wish to find. It was a love match, my dear, which is not always the way with these things; she had fifty thousand pounds of her own when she married him, and her brother had the land and his fair share besides, to keep it running. And the Professor, when his own father died, came into the whole of that fortune — every penny of it in the funds, and not an acre to show for it; and between the two of them living twenty years and more as they have, with no house to keep up and no tenants to be plagued by, I am reliably informed that the sum has grown to a point that would keep a small country in bread and candles.” She gave a comfortable, wheezing laugh at her own wit. “I could not tell you, for my life, what is to be settled on the daughter; but you may depend upon it, Miss Margaret, it will be a very tidy sum indeed. Among the family’s possessions, besides, is a quantity of luggage that is said to include a stuffed crocodile; and the daughter, I am told, is just fourteen, and uncommonly clever, and draws.” She looked at Margaret over the rim of her cup. “There, Miss Margaret. I thought that would make you sit up.”

Margaret sat up, with much interest in these new acquaintances.

She had discovered a chalk pit within an easy walking distance of Delaford, and when she deemed it was going to be a fine day, and Betsy could be spared, she would take her hammer, her satchel, and her notebook, and see what treasures she might find and document. She had chanced upon a book on the subject in the Colonel’s library and was surprised to learn there was an abundance of various kinds of stone she might unearth in that little corner of the world.

On this particular fine day she found her destination, for the first time in her memory, occupied. A young lady in a plain grey gown, with her sleeves pushed up and a drawing-board propped against a boulder, was sitting on the rim of the pit, sketching the opposite face with an air of the most complete absorption; and she looked up, at Margaret’s step, with a pair of quick dark eyes, and a face that was not, upon the whole, as handsome as some, but was extremely alive.

“You are Miss Dashwood,” said the stranger, without any preamble at all. “I hoped that you would come. Mrs. Jennings told me that you like to come here and break rocks with a little hammer. It is an occupation that I have often taken up during my childhood.”

“Have you any unusual specimens?”

“Yes, an exceptionally good one or two. If you would like, you may call and I would be glad to show them to you.” She turned back to her board and frowned at it. “I am trying to draw that layer, the dark line running through the white, and I cannot make up my mind whether it is flint or chert.”

“It is flint,” said Margaret.

“I was thinking it is chert. Let us find out.”

Margaret went down the face of the pit without the smallest ceremony, in a manner that would have appalled her mother, and knocked a fragment from the seam, and held it up to the light; and the young lady came scrambling after her, with a great disregard for her petticoat, and took the fragment, and turned it over, and considered it with real attention.

“It is flint,” she admitted, at last, smiling cheerfully. “My apologies. My name is Cecilia Aylmer, and I am fourteen, and I have been wrong about a great many things since I came into Dorsetshire, and I expect to be wrong about a great many more; but I do not think that I have ever been so glad to be told so.”

They sat down together upon the rim of the pit and did not get up again for two hours. They talked about everything. Margaret discovered that Cecilia had crossed the Alps at the age of nine, and slept in a Sicilian temple at eleven, and could tell a genuine scarab from a Birmingham one at a glance; and she discovered, with rather more surprise, that none of it was the thing that Cecilia most wished to talk about.

“I liked it,” said Cecilia, when they came to this part of the history, twisting a bit of grass between her fingers. “I liked it very much when I was small. I do not think that there is a girl in England who has seen more of the world than I have, and I am not sorry for a single mile of it. But I discovered, somewhere about my thirteenth year, sitting on a camel in a great deal of dust, that what I actually wanted, more than the whole of the Nile, was a blue silk gown, and a ball, and a room full of candles.” She said it with a kind of rueful honesty that Margaret found she liked exceedingly. “If you knew my parents, you would understand that it is a shocking thing to want, in a family like mine. Oh, they have had many opportunities to dress in finery and attend notable events, but Mamma would go back to Egypt tomorrow, and sleep in a tent, and be perfectly happy. I have thought about it a great deal, and I believe that I am fond of knowing things — I cannot help that part, it was put into me too early to be got out again — but I find that I am eager to have my share of beautiful gowns, and make morning calls upon London society, and leisurely stroll the streets of Paris, and eat all sorts of delicacies. For you, it would be nothing of consequence. But for myself, it would be just as new an adventure as I have ever had.”

“I do not think that is shocking at all,” said Margaret, who had never in her life encountered a person who spoke of things entirely delightful. “I can easily imagine it would be like a person from Africa, or some other far-off place, coming to England. For them it would be quite foreign as well.”