No one else had come down for tea. She had the dining room to herself. It had been dark to start with but had grown perceptibly darker in the few minutes she had been here even though it was still only the middle of a July afternoon. Any hope that the storm had moved off for good dimmed with the light. It was about to return for an encore.
The tea was piping hot and on the strong side, as she liked it. She eyed the platter of cakes and pastries. She must eat at least one or the innkeeper’s wife would be hurt. What a wonderful excuse to indulge her sweet tooth. She considered a piece of currant cake before taking a puff pastry oozing with thick cream instead. Only her waistline would know. It was a good thing high-waisted dresses were still in fashion. She jumped slightly at a sudden rumble of thunder followed almost immediately by the sound of a child’s voice just behind her shoulder.
“I am delighted,” the little girl she had encountered earlier said, “that we are not the only ones who have been forced off the road to be stranded here in what Papa declares to be the middle of nowhere. It would be dreary, I think, to have the inn all to ourselves, though even that would be better than being stuck in the mud somewhere out there. You are the lady who came in right behind us. May I sit on that empty chair across from you for a little while? It might be considered forward of me, I know, when we have not been introduced and I am only ten years old besides. But there is no one here to introduce us, is there, and no one who knows us both anyway. I am Georgette Benning.”
She was a thin child with a narrow face, large brown eyes, and dark hair clipped back from her face and flowing in loose waves down her back. She was gazing solemnly at Eleanor, who really was not craving company, especially that of a talkative child. She spent her days with young persons, talkative and otherwise, at her school on Daniel Street in Bath. She had enjoyed her life there for several years after making the decision to teach rather than go with her mother to live at Lindsey Hall when Christine married Wulfric. She had enjoyed it so much, in fact, that when her friend, Claudia Martin, the former owner, married the Marquess of Attingsborough, Eleanor had taken over from her, purchasing the school with the aid of a loan from Wulfric, a loan he always tried to insist was a gift. Holidays were meant to be different from one’s everyday life, however, and this was the summer holiday. There would be children at Lindsey Hall, it was true, but they would be someone else’s responsibility. Eleanor had pictured herself spending several weeks of blissful peace and leisure, consorting with none but adults.
The child was starting to look anxious at her silence. A flash of lightning lit up the room, flickered for a moment, and then flashed even more brightly. Eleanor smiled.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Georgette Benning,” she said, “and would be delighted to have you join me. I am Eleanor Thompson. But will not your papa and your nurse be worried about your whereabouts?”
“Oh, no,” the child said, seating herself opposite Eleanor as the thunder rumbled, crashed, and then rumbled again. “Papa is shut up in his own room, nursing his bad temper—or so he warned us when he closed his door, though there was a twinkle in his eye as there always is when he says such horrid things. What he really meant was that he wanted to escape Robbie’s clinging and my questions. I do tend to ask a lot of them. It is my Affliction, according to Nurse, and she always makes it sound as though the word would be spelled with a capital A if it was written down. Robbie was terrified of the storm, which he thought was going to strike our coachman dead and us too inside the carriage, though he is always frightened of thunder and lightning anyway. He is tucked up in bed for an afternoon nap with Nurse to keep an eye on him, which she will need to do with the storm come back. She would not let me sit on the side of his bed because I was fidgeting. Ooh! That was a bright one, was it not?” Her eyes widened and she got half to her feet before sitting again. “Ooh! And a loud one.”
“Indeed it was,” Eleanor said as rain suddenly sheeted down outside and pelted the windows, the force of a driving wind behind it. “Perhaps you would like to take this chair next to mine.”
“I am not at all frightened,” Georgette assured her, getting to her feet once more and scurrying about the table anyway, “but I will. I shall not stay long. But I could not sit still upstairs, for the one book I pulled out of my trunk last night for reading today—I had finished the other one—is really very boring indeed though I have no one to blame but myself as I am the one who chose to bring it. It is Robinson Crusoe. Have you read it? There are almost no characters in it except Robinson, who is stuffy, and I always like lots of characters. Do you? And lots of adventure. Being marooned alone on an island is an adventure, I suppose, but it is a dull one, is it not? Nurse was looking reproachfully at me when I kept fidgeting on my own bed and turning pages to see if the story gets any more exciting though I could not see that it does, so I said I would go and sit with Papa for a while until Robbie fell asleep, but when I got outside the room I thought it would be mean to disturb his peace so soon and decided to come down here instead to explore and see if there was anyone down here who is not nursing a bad temper. It really is quite safe to come down, is it not? There are no highwaymen or desperate villains down here, only you. I don’t think either Nurse or Papa will be very annoyed with me for coming, though I daresay they will both be cross with me for disturbing you. Do you find this delay very trying? Oooh!”
A very bright flash of lighting was accompanied by an almost simultaneous crash of thunder, and the child’s hand closed tightly about Eleanor’s arm.
“You must stay here for a little while,” Eleanor said. “But as soon as the storm abates it will perhaps be better to return to your room before your father and your nurse realize you are missing and become alarmed. Will you have a cake or pastry? When the innkeeper appears, I shall have a glass of lemonade brought for you.”
“Oh, I shall not bother,” the child said. “Ooh!” She scraped her chair a little closer to Eleanor’s. “They will be even crosser if they think I have invited myself to tea. Ooh! Here comes another one.”
Eleanor set one arm about the child’s thin shoulders as the thunder shook the inn. “It is tedious to find oneself held up in the middle of a journey,” she said, “but at least we are safe here and not marooned alone and for an endless time as poor Robinson Crusoe was. There is something rather magnificent actually about a thunderstorm, provided one is safe indoors.”
“Nurse says it is God being angry,” the child said, “but I think that is silly, don’t you? If God is just a crotchety old man, I do not see why we should have to sit very still on hard pews every Sunday at church worshiping him and being bored silly. Papa is thinking of sending me away to school. He says I am restless and inquisitive and school will do me good. He may be right. There would be teachers and lots of books, would there not, and other girls and plenty to do all the time, and I would find out about all sorts of things, perhaps everything, though I do not believe girls’ schools teach Latin and Greek, do they? But I would not enjoy having to sit still and silent all day long and having to do as I am told without any chance to discuss any rules that seem silly to me. Mostly, though, I do not want to leave Robbie. He is five though he looks younger, and he is shy and timid and I don’t think everyone should be trying to make him come out of his shell, as Nurse describes it, and behave like a proper boy and stop sucking his thumb, which he does not always do anyway, only when he feels the need for some extra comfort. Mama died when he was a baby and he misses her even though he never knew her. I did know her for five years though I cannot remember her as well as I wish. I look after Robbie, but I don’t smother him, even though some people say I do. I let him be who he is, which Nurse says is wrong because he has to learn to be a man. Oooh! I thought that one was coming right through the roof.”
She reached out for the creamiest pastry on the plate, twin to the one Eleanor had just eaten, and bit into it. Eleanor slid a napkin toward her.
“Your brother is fortunate to have you,” she said. Poor little boy. What a tragedy to have lost his mother soon after his birth. And what a tragedy for this little girl, who was trying to take her mother’s place and appeared to be too intelligent for her own good. She would need some very patient and understanding teachers if all that was good and bright in her was not to be stifled at school in the name of discipline and making a lady of her, indistinguishable from all her peers. Not all voluble children were intelligent, of course, but Eleanor would wager a great deal that this one was. The child’s next question confirmed her in this belief.
“Do you think children ought to be allowed to be who they are?” she asked after sucking cream from her fingers. “Or ought they to be brought up and educated to fit in, to be what their parents expect of them and what other grown-ups expect of them? Is that what life is all about, Mrs. Thompson? Learning to fit in?”
Oh, dear. What a very profound question, and how difficult it was to answer. But Eleanor never brushed aside girls’ questions, profound or silly. She tried always to give them due consideration.
“Allowing people to be who they are sounds like a very wonderful idea,” she said. “But carried to an extreme, would it perhaps lead to anarchy? If wild children were permitted to become wild young persons and then wild adults, would society work? For we have to live in society whether we wish to or not. We have to share our world with other people. If we all did whatever we wished to do, we would almost inevitably clash with other people intent upon doing what they wished to do, and quarrels and fights and even wars would result as they all too often do anyway. On the other hand, mindless conformity is not a desirable thing either. The answer to your question ought to be a simple one, but it is not. I have lived a great deal longer than you, and I am still not at all sure how much freedom and how much conformity create the perfect balance in our lives. The answer lies, I suspect, somewhere between the two extremes. I have not answered you very satisfactorily, have I? And it is Miss Thompson.”
She wondered if the child had understood a word of what she had said. But Georgette’s eyes, fixed upon Eleanor, were alight with approval as she reached absently for a piece of fruit cake, broke off a corner, and put it into her mouth.
“No one else—no one—has ever even tried to answer me when I ask that question,” she said after swallowing. “Everyone tells me not to be silly, that children are not real persons until they have been shaped into the people their birth and station in life have determined for them. Admittedly, I have not asked Papa, though. I shall think about your answer. I may decide that I do not agree, but I love that you have spoken to me as though I were twenty instead of ten going on eleven. Or as though I were thirty or forty. It is sometimes very tiresome to be a child, Miss Thompson. Can you remember that far back? Did you find it tiresome?”
“Having to go to bed when the evening was only half over?” Eleanor said, pulling a face.
“Having to eat the cabbage someone else has put on your plate when you hate and despise cabbage?” the child said.
“Having an adult remind you every single morning to wash behind your ears when there is nothing wrong with your memory?” Eleanor said.
“Having to be silent in company until you are spoken to,” Georgette said, “even when you are bursting to say something?”
“Having to count aloud the number of brush strokes you give your hair each night?” Eleanor said.
“Being told which books you can read and which are beyond your understanding?” Georgette said.
They both dissolved into laughter.
“I do believe the worst of the storm has passed over,” Eleanor said, turning her glance to the window as Georgette ate a jam tart, “though the rain is still coming down hard.”
“Perhaps Robbie has fallen asleep by now,” the child said. “I had better go up before you have to suggest it to me again. That would be lowering. Oh, dear, have I really been eating your cakes? I did not mean to. I was not thinking.”
