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‘That little, hmm?’
She nodded.
‘That’s all right. Look, it’s going to be a bit of a slog but we will get through it.’ Then she invited Elodie to sit, and brought over textbooks and workbooks.
By the end of her first day, Elodie was bone tired. She’d never spent that long at a school before. Her mother had taught her herself when she was little – how to read and write, simple mathematics and lessons in history and geography, but that was all, and they usually only lasted a few hours a day.
This was different – focused learning on one subject. Mrs Hammond was firm, but kind.
She had met the other girls at luncheon. There were six of them, who boarded like her, and they seemed a firm group. Unfortunately, the one who could speak French best seemed the least interested in her. She was tall with thick black brows and gimlet eyes. She wasn’t quite rude, but she made it clear that she did not appreciate that she’d been told to make her feel welcome. It appeared that her main objection to Elodie was her being an illegitimate child. She explained things with reluctance, like the nightly routine, and where to put their laundry and how to fold her clothes.
One of the others, a plump, kind-faced girl named Kitty, tried to make her feel welcome. It turned out that she too was considered a bit of an outsider, because unlike the other girls, her father wasn’t a gentleman. He was a banker.
‘Why does it matter?’ Elodie asked, when the other girl confided this to her in a whisper the next morning at breakfast.
Kitty helped herself to a slice of toast, and began to butter it. ‘It shouldn’t, but here, well, it just does.’
‘It doesn’t in France,’ said Elodie and she told her a little about her life in Provence. But it was soon clear that Kitty couldn’t understand too much of what she was saying.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘I get my tenses mixed up, I’m hopeless, I will try to get better now that you’re here, though,’ she said warmly, incentivised to learn now that there was a real chance of a friend.
Elodie was touched. ‘Don’t worry, it’s me that needs to learn English.’
The girls around her were speaking English and giving her covert glances. It was clear that they were speaking of her. It riled her that she couldn’t understand.
‘It would help. I’m a dunce with languages. They all think you’ll never be particularly good.’
Elodie frowned. ‘One of the others said that unless you learn a language when you’re really young you’ll never be fluent – so you’ll probably always come across as a bit of foreigner.’ The girl who said that actually said that she would likely always have an accent but Kitty didn’t know how to say that in French. Her words though caused a small seed of determination to grow in Elodie’s heart. She would show them, she vowed.
