Table of Contents
For Neil, Ed and Tom
This novel was inspired by the book A Private Life
of Henry James: Two Women and His Art, by
Lyndall Gordon
It is so hard for one soul to know another, under all the necessary and unnecessary disguises that keep them apart.
MINNY TEMPLE, 1869
PROLOGUE
LONDON LATE SUMMER, 1863
Before daybreak on a rainy August morning a young gentleman, stooped, respectably dressed, was seen to alight from a cab at the Westminster bank of the Thames. He was accompanied by a servant; together, in silence, they carried a substantial bundle of materials of different kinds to a waiting boatman, who loaded them on to his vessel.
In the increasingly heavy rain, mingling with the river mist, an observer could be forgiven for thinking these were rags, perhaps curtains discarded or faded bedclothes. But by the light of the lamp the boatman carried the materials gleamed with some beauty of decoration, luster and detail, and the rags revealed themselves to be dresses in bright fashionable colors. Each item, from day dress to evening, was exquisitely made, heavy with laces, velvets and embellishments of the highest quality.
With difficulty they were loaded onto the barge, followed by the gentleman, who made his way toward the bows. The servant was turned away. Rocking in the filthy slime of the shallows, the gentleman looked as if he might fall, but then sat down in the boat with the dresses heaped about him. The craft was rowed out into the swift part of the river, where it was kept steady only by the kindness of the wind.
Once the vessel was still, and at a nod from the boatman, the gentleman began methodically to throw each dress into the moving filth, attempting to submerge them with an oar. But their voluminous skirts filled with air and the movement of the tide, and they floated, like so many bodies, away.
PART ONE
ONE
MR. WILLIAM CORNFORD
CORNFORD HOUSE
BOSTON, MASS
HIGH TREES SCHOOL
ROCHESTER, NY
March 10th, 1861
Dear Mr. Cornford,
It is with regret that I begin the task of writing to you about your niece, Emily. Her recent behavior, which I have outlined to you in previous lettersmost specifically her unfortunate, extravagant friendship with a fellow pupil, Augusta Dean, and its unsettling effect on the other pupils, all girls entrusted to my care and to whom I owe a great dutycompels me to request that she be formally removed from the school and returned to your care with immediate effect. It is a sad request. I am aware that it comes before the completion of the school year, but we all believe that any shock felt by her abrupt departure would be less than that felt by her remaining.
For your consideration, her many faults are as follows: she is too vigorous, too quick to question, and her temper is variable. You will not find any consistency in her behavior. She is by turns bewildered, goodhumored, angered, merry, pained and aloof. She always says what comes into her head, as if she has a right to her peculiar thoughts. She laughs loudly. She is untidy. She almost expects to make an impression. She suffers from a lack of meekness, a lack of decorum, a lack of discipline. It is as if she is surprised that there are rules by which she must be controlled.
Yet for all her abundant defiant life, she can often be extremely solitary and remote. She can spend hours in drawing, if ever she is given an opportunity. On nature walks, she is always trailing behind the other girls, gathering keepsakes and talking to herself and the trees; at streams kneeling and plunging her fingers into the water, even when there is ice and the sky is dark and obscure and threatening rain and we really should be hurrying, going, turning for home.
And when she is laid up in bed shivering and burningher health is never robust despite her waysone or other of the servants will always take pity on her and come with beef tea or gruel and a hot brick and tell one another how she is the only one of the girls who will always say thank you and never complains.
During the holidays when she has remained at school, she has been notably self-contained, befriending the cat and looking out for its every comfort. She rambles in the woods for hours a day, returning to school with her thin hands sunburned because she swears she has not worn a bonnet in the glare. All these things she will not wear: gloves in summerhow many pairs dropped by the side of the road?shawls, wraps, coats, hats. She has even boasted of taking her shoes off and paddling in the streams but I can neither countenance nor believe it. When questioned she looked right at me and asked directly if she were being accused of lying.
As a consequence of my affection for her, I admit that I may have been indulgent toward her these two years. But now my duty has been made especially clear to me because of this business with Augusta. Augusta is a girl of good family, one of the best families in the school. She has an acute understanding but a somewhat impressionable disposition, and it is this that I fear could influence her prospects. She and Emily became inseparable immediately after she arrived and in a thousand ways. At first, I welcomed her influence. In her society, Emily became calmer, and Augusta, homesick to begin with and fretting, was devoted to her, steady as a sister. But as one term has passed and now another is nearly at its close, the girls have proved that together they are anything but steady.
The passion of their friendshipexclusive, possessive, overweeningis clearly developing into something that could become unhealthy. I take daily notes on conduct and I am afraid to inform you that your niece and Miss Dean have now accrued several black marks against their names. But it is not so much what they have done as how they are. Discipline has suffered; the very spirit of the school is being challenged; their studies have been compromised: I have no other choice but to take this course.
The reason I write to you at such length is so that you may attempt to understand the girl, having not seen her for two years. I should like to impress upon you that she is by no means a bad creature by nature, but that the death of her family, and the immediate separation she then suffered from the place of her birth and all that she held dear, I am convinced, has contributed largely to the formation of her character.
As I trust you are aware, we are all deeply fond of Emily. On reflection I remain convinced that she would own that she has not been mistreated in any wayquite the oppositealthough I imagine she might claim to have been misunderstood. Our task, which has been to show her that the world need not trouble to understand her, but that she should be at pains to understand the world, is one at which I fear we have failed, and I must admit my part in that. Perhaps a change of society, to be amongst thinking people of her own family in a home such as yours, could well be to her advantage; if her wildness continues, none of us can predict the consequences.
We shall miss her. We entrust her to your care with affection and regret.
Yours truly,
Miss Margaret Alice Miller
