The Mirage

Book 22: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

George Morland, newly master of Morland Place, embarks on a grand improvement and expansion of the estate. His sister Henrietta, eager to be both good and useful, marries the scholarly rector, Mr Fortescue. And in London, their cousin Lady Venetia Fleetwood, moved by the medical horrors of the Franco-Prussian war, sets out to become a doctor.But the agricultural slump threatens Morland Place with ruin; the medical world rejects Venetia with contempt; and Mr Fortescue proves to be not what he seems. The Morlands have to come to terms with hard reality, and find their happiness in other, unexpected places.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 512

Sample

May 1870

A shepherd has his dogs for company, and his sheep, and his thoughts; and on the whole he does not want for more. Old Caleb
had been looking after Morland sheep for more than forty years, but he was not Yorkshire bred. He came from Wiltshire – from
the Old Hills, as they called them – where his father had been shepherd to Mr Johnson, whose place was called Gilpin’s Low.
But times were hard in the South, and Mr Johnson’s sons had both been killed in the wars, and when he died his daughter couldn’t
hold things together. The great flocks had been sold to pay off the debts, and what was left did not warrant more than one
shepherd. So Caleb had said goodbye to his father and mother, to Gilpin’s Low and White Sheet Down and the green, rounded
hills he had been born to, and walked north.


Yorkshire was his goal, where there was always work – far away as a foreign land, but it was sheep country, and sheep men
everywhere speak the same language. At first he’d done odd jobs, waiting for the hiring-time to come round. Then at the Michaelmas
fair he had stood in his smock with his crook amongst the other shepherds, and there had caught the eye of Mr James Morland.
Mr James had taken a fancy to him and hired him, and he’d been here ever since. He had never seen the Old Hills again, but
a place in his chest still ached when the wind was in the south-west, smelling of green softness, and little turf streams,
and home.


He had a good place here. He worked first for Mr James and his wife, and then for their sons, Mr Nicholas, and after his death Mr Benedict. Thirty years Benedict Morland had been
the owner: Caleb thought of him simply as Maister, without qualification.


Sitting on a rocky outcrop that served him for a chair, Caleb looked away over his flock, grazing quietly downwind of him.
His dog, Watch, was at his side, his nose working, the breeze stirring the little hairs on the tops of his ears. He was a
comical-looking dog with a face half white and half black, and a black patch over the eye in the white half. Looked like a
clown, he did – and knew it! Liked to play the fool when he was off duty. The other dog, Monk, was away on the other side
of the flock, out of sight. Caleb knew where he was. He could feel him with that sixth sense long partnership develops.


It was what Caleb called a shiny day, fresh and clear, with a breeze bowling light clouds across the washed sky. After the
rains of last week, this good, drying wind was just what was wanted to stand the hayfields up for the sickle. A shiny day,
and a quiet time of year, between lambing and shearing: a good day for wandering over his thoughts.


Maister, now: he was a queer one. Always restless. When he was only a young lad he had left home and gone off to be a railway
engineer. It must have been an exciting life on the workings, Caleb allowed. After he inherited Morland Place, it seemed he
missed the excitement, for he always had something on the go, some scheme or other. Always wanting to be somewhere else.


Went off all the way to America once, to visit his daughter, Miss Mary, who’d married an American, a cousin of sorts. Nearly
got caught up in the war over there. Ah, that was a bad business! Civil wars were the worst kind – brother fighting brother.
And Miss Mary, poor thing, had disappeared, and try as he might, Maister could never find word of her. It broke his heart
– she’d been the apple of his eye. To Caleb’s mind, he’d never been the same after that. What with that and then poor Mrs
Morland dying, they’d had hard times of it, one way and another, up at the house.


A horse was cantering up from the direction of Rufforth. It was still a way off, but Caleb recognised the nice bay pony, Dunnock, that belonged to Miss Henrietta, the Maister’s eldest girl. You couldn’t want better than a nice bay, he always said:
blacks and chestnuts might be fancier, but a good bay was as smart as a Sunday suit, and lasted as long. Watch made a small
sound in his throat and shifted his feet in excitement.


‘Aye, lad, tha knaws who that is,’ Caleb said. If a man couldn’t talk to his dogs, who could he talk to? ‘Coming up to see
us. Well, we don’t mind that, do we? She’s a bonny lass, and a mind full o’ queer starts.’


As he watched she slowed from a canter to a trot, because she was approaching the sheep – not like her brother Master George,
the heir, who thought nothing of scattering a flock before him. She was riding bareback, her long legs dangling round Dunnock’s
grass-fat sides. Born on a pony, like all the Morland children – but getting too big for Dunnock now. Ought not to be riding
about the countryside like that, for she was – he furrowed his brow in calculation – well, fifteen or sixteen, anyway. But
who was there to tell her such things? Four years, it was, since Mrs Morland died; and Maister, to Caleb’s mind, had turned
a bit queer in the head. He took no more interest in the house or the estate, still less in his children; and these two years
past he had been far away in a foreign land on some wild scheme or other, leaving Morland Place to take care of itself.


Watch looked at him and whistled softly, and Caleb said, ‘Doos tha want to meet her, awd lad? Goo on then.’ The dog raced
away down the slope. The girl reined up at a little distance and slid off. She was not thin, but brown and wiry; and you wouldn’t
call her pretty, but she had a nice face. A lot like her poor mother, with the same narrow chin and red-brown hair, but her
father’s brown eyes. Like a little fox.


‘Hello, Caleb!’ she called.

‘Now then, miss.’

‘May I come and sit with you?’

‘Set down and welcome,’ he said, appreciating the politeness. Many folk would just assume.

The pony had lost no instant in getting his head down to graze: short moorland turf, tougher than paddock grass, but sweet with wild thyme and ‘eggs-and-bacon’, and all the tastier
for being different. Henrietta knotted the reins on its neck and let it go, and it walked away a few steps to establish independence
before getting back to the serious business of eating. All creatures like their little bit of freedom, he thought.


‘Run away from thy lessons, hast’ow?’ Caleb asked slyly.

‘You know I haven’t done lessons for years,’ Henrietta said. ‘Anyhow, who is there to teach me?’ She sat down on the grass,
and Watch came up to paw at her, thrust his head between her updrawn knees, and generally play the fool as if he were a puppy.
Soon she was tussling with him, and Watch was rolling on his back with one ear turned inside out.


‘No fool like an old fool,’ Caleb observed. ‘Don’t tha try that sort o’ nonsense wi’ Monk, or tha’ll be sorry.’

‘I know. I won’t.’ Henrietta said, sitting up and dusting herself off. Watch righted himself, shook vigorously until his ears
rattled, and took up his duties again, refreshed by the interlude.


‘No-one can’t take liberties wi’ Monk,’ said Caleb. ‘He’s as good a dog with the sheep as you’ll find, but he’s no time for
people.’


‘Funny how different he is from Watch,’ Henrietta said, clasping her arms comfortably round her knees.

Caleb nodded. ‘Watch, now, he sleeps on the mat at the foot o’ my bed, but Monk stops in the yard, even in the worst weather.
I’ve coom out some winter mornings and found him covered so deep in snow he’s nobbut a mound. But go into a house he never
will; no, nor barn nor byre, nor anything men have built.’


‘Is it because he was ill-treated once?’

‘Nay, I bred him myself from my old bitch Meg. He were never any different. God makes a few that way, for His own reasons.
They can’t like the soft life, try as they might. Folks too,’ he observed. ‘I reckon your faither’s one. Restless. Never one
for stopping home.’


Henrietta nodded, watching the wind as it passed over the uncut fields like a shadow. ‘Yes, and the funny thing is that Mama warned me about it – at the end when she was ill and I
was sitting with her so much. She said Papa would be off again one day. I thought she meant he would go back to America. I
don’t suppose even she could have guessed where he’d end up.’


‘What’s it called, again, that place he’s gone?’

‘Suez. It’s in Egypt.’

‘Oh, aye? And what sort o’ place would that be?’

Henrietta was flattered to be asked for information by someone so much older and wiser than her. ‘It’s a desert place,’ she
said. ‘All sand. And camels.’


Caleb pondered. ‘Like what our Blessed Lord wandered forty days in?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Henrietta said. ‘It’s very hot there, so you’re always thirsty, and there’s something called a mirage,
which makes it look as though there’s a lovely pool of water ahead, but it’s not really there, and when you get to it, it’s
just more sand.’


‘The world is full of falsehood and deceit,’ Caleb said wisely, ‘put there a-purpose to lead men astray.’ After some further
consideration, he asked, ‘What are camels, then?’


‘Animals – like horses a bit, you know – but with bumps on their backs.’ She drew them in the air.

‘Whatever for?’

‘They just grow that way.’ A picture she had seen in one of the books in the library was the sum total of her knowledge, and
she hoped he would not probe it too far. ‘The people who live there ride them like horses. The bumps stop them falling off,
I suppose,’ she added inventively.


‘Maister won’t like digging a canal through sand,’ Caleb said. ‘No good, is that. Won’t hold up.’

‘That’s why they sent for him,’ Henrietta said, ‘because he knows so much about it, after the Kilsby Tunnel. He was terribly
proud to be asked, because the company that’s digging the canal is French, and the French consider themselves better engineers
than anybody else. Not that Papa agrees about that, of course; but in any case, he’s what they call a specialist, so he knows things other people don’t.’


‘I knawt what folk want wi’ digging canals in countries not their own,’ Caleb said disparagingly.


‘But the canal’s a benefit, so Papa says,’ Henrietta told him. ‘Ships won’t have to sail right round the bottom of Africa
any more – the Cape of whatever-it-is – which will cut the journey time to India by half. And since most of the trade with
the East goes in British ships, it will be especially good for us.’


If Henrietta’s knowledge of geography was sketchy, Caleb’s was non-existent. He didn’t know where India, Africa or Egypt were,
but they were Abroad, and that was enough for him. ‘Well, but what’s it to do with thy faither?’ he said. ‘If it was here
in Yorkshire, mebbe it’d be different.’


‘You think it wrong of him to have gone?’

‘A man should not neglect his duty. He’s Maister, and his duty is here.’

‘I suppose he’ll come back soon,’ Henrietta said, but doubtfully. His letters, which had been frequent at first and more full
of detail than anyone at home had the education or even the desire to assimilate, had grown shorter and rarer as the canal
neared completion. Last year when it was finished he wrote that he must stay for the opening, to solve any teething problems
that might arise; then that he was going up country to look at damming and irrigation systems. It was as though he were making
excuses not to come home.


‘We’ve had no letter from him for weeks,’ she went on at last. ‘We thought for sure he would be back for Georgie’s twenty-first
birthday, but that’s not possible now, unless he’s already on his way.’


‘Will there be a celebration for Master George?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not, for who’d organise it? Besides,’ Henrietta went on, ‘Georgie’s being twenty-one won’t change
anything. We shall just go on as we are.’


‘Aye, as you are,’ Caleb said, and it was plain from his voice he didn’t think much of that.

They lapsed into silence, and Henrietta, squinting against the sun, thought of the way they were. Home, being what you know,
has to be normality, but she wondered if other children lived as they did. The nursery, ruled over by Mrs Gurney, who’d first
come to Morland Place when Georgie was born, had always been like a separate kingdom, apart from the mainstream of the house. Her parents, busy about their own
affairs, had been remote figures to the children, loved and admired, but distant, like the Queen at Windsor, and only nominally
‘theirs’.


There’d been a chaplain-tutor in those days, the awe-inspiring Mr Wheldrake, but he’d only concerned himself with the boys,
Georgie and Teddy. Henrietta and her sisters, Sabina and Regina, had been left to scramble themselves into whatever education
they fancied. Girls were destined for marriage, so they didn’t need to be clever. There was a library full of books, but with
all the estate to roam over, and horses and dogs to roam with, it had only been on really rainy days that Henrietta had thought
of opening a book.


She had always been a girl who needed someone to love, and from the time Sabina was born, when Henrietta was two, she had
lavished all her affections on her. Together they had played, roved the country, and at night shared a bed in the nursery,
where in the dark they continued in murmurs and whispers the unbroken stream of conversation that meandered through their
days.


Golden days, she recalled: a golden age of happiness and security. Her father’s departure for America had been barely noticed;
his return, Odysseus-like, was a nine-days’ wonder. The American war had seemed as remote as a Bible story, and her father’s
grief over the loss of Mary had not touched the children. Their lives were bound by the nursery walls and nursery rules; their
aims beyond pleasure merely to get enough to eat – nursery food was always sparse – and to remember Gurney’s prohibitions
and avoid whippings.


Papa coming home had meant new arrivals to the nursery: first Manfred, then Seraphina. But ’Phina had only lived a year, and
it seemed in retrospect that her death had begun the time of sadness which had ended the golden age. Henrietta remembered
vividly the day they had lowered the tiny coffin into the crypt. Bewildered, not knowing what to feel or how to behave, she
had looked at her parents. Papa was grim and grave; Mama – already then pregnant again – white and weeping. It had shocked
her that they could show so clearly the effects of the event, when they ought to have been invulnerable and unchanging. An autumn day it had been: the
chapel filled with chrysanthemums cut by the gardener for poor little ’Phina. Ever since, the memory of that time was mixed
up with the smell of chrysanthemums and hot candle-wax.


In the cold and dark of February 1866, Mama had lost the baby, and after that she had never been well. From the security of
the nursery Henrietta had emerged as suddenly and completely as a chestnut being shelled. For seven months she had attended
her mother, run messages, fetched and carried, and, as Sibella grew ever more bedridden, nursed, entertained and listened.
In her last weeks Mrs Morland had come to confide in her eldest daughter. A warmth and tenderness had grown up between them;
and just as Henrietta began to depend upon this new intimacy, she became aware that her mother was dying, and that it must
soon end. Sibella died the day before Henrietta’s thirteenth birthday, and of all those who mourned, none felt the loss more
keenly than the bewildered girl who had found her mother only when the shadow of death was already on her.


There had been no way back to the safety of the nursery for Henrietta. Before she had so much as begun to come to terms with
her mother’s death, during that dreadful winter when the house was paralysed with mourning, Sabina had fallen ill, and before
the first hint of spring could lighten the gloom, had followed her mother to the grave. The world had become intractable and
real. There were things that were so bad that a black draught and early-to-bed couldn’t mend them; deeds had consequences
that a beating from Gurney couldn’t deflect. People could die, really die, and you couldn’t turn the page back and have them
alive again.


After that, life had seemed to unravel. Papa grew very strange, shut himself away and withdrew his controlling hand from the
reins. Wheldrake departed, and the chapel stood empty. Servants left and were not replaced, and the house grew a little shabby.
There was no more entertaining, no visitors, no visiting. Teddy went away to school and then to university, Georgie went his
own way. The rhythm of the masterless house slowed and, like a spinning top, seemed to grow unstable.


In the nursery Regina and Manfred were still cocooned to some extent by their youth and Gurney’s authority, but Henrietta
had nothing to do but wander, purposeless, lonely. There was no-one to tell her what to do. Since her father had gone to Egypt,
Mrs Holicar, the housekeeper, ran the house, and Atterwith, the steward, took care of the estate. Officially he did so in
consultation with Georgie, but Henrietta suspected the consultation mostly took the form of Mr Atterwith saying what he meant
to do and Georgie saying that was all right by him – for Georgie never cared to be bothered with anything that took him from
his own pleasures.


Henry Anstey, whom the children called Uncle Henry, was Papa’s man of business and his agent while he was abroad; but he never
interfered in their day-to-day lives. His wife had died not long after Papa left, and they never saw him at Morland Place
any more. So Henrietta roamed the estate, looking for something to love, and something to be. She helped the estate people
with their work, visited their cottages, ate with them and played with their babies; but she was not satisfied. The sweet
intimacy she had shared with her sister and her mother, first as the senior and then as the junior partner, had left a hunger
in her. Besides, she was sixteen years old, and childhood was behind her. What shape would the life ahead of her take? She
wanted to know what she was for.


Caleb, abandoned by her conversationally, had taken up a bit of whittling. His old, weather-punished hands were all knuckles
and swollen fingers, looking as stiff and unwieldy as rocks, but they turned and worked the wood with astonishing nimbleness.
He had his place, his purpose and his work: he belonged. She envied him.


‘What are you making?’ she asked. He showed her silently. It was a bell. ‘Will it ring?’

‘Course it’ll ring. What’d be use of a bell that didn’t ring?’ Caleb said, amused.

‘Church bells are made of brass, aren’t they?’

‘Bronze,’ he corrected. ‘But I’ve all sorts. Bronze, copper, silver, bone, wood. I’ve thirty altogether.’

‘Thirty?’


‘Aye, and I wish it were sixty.’

‘Do you need so many for telling where the flock is?’

He snorted softly in derision. ‘Nay, miss, doosta think I need bells for that? A poor shepherd I’d be if I knawt where my
flock was at! I’ve two good eyes in my head – aye, an’ two good dogs.’


She was never sure with Caleb when he was roasting her: in his brown and wrinkled face his eyes seemed to glint with knowing
laughter. ‘Then what are they for?’


‘They are music,’ he said. ‘Listen, and tha’ll hear.’

She listened. The different sizes of bell produced different tones, from the sharp tinkling of the smallest to the deep clonk-clonk
of the largest; and the sound varied, too, as they were differently agitated, quietly as the sheep grazed head-down, more
rapidly as they walked, with a carillon as a sheep shook its head, or broke into a run from one grazing-spot to another.


‘I hear it,’ she said delightedly. It was a strange, remote, aching kind of music; beautiful like the cry of the curlew, or
the way a silver band of light would fall far away from behind rain clouds.


Caleb nodded. ‘It’s company, too, for me and the sheep. It’s lonely out on the moor, most of all when it’s wet or cold and
we’re like not to see a sawl all day. The bells keep us from feelin’ it too much. Aye, we knaw what we have ’em for, the yows
an’ me.’


‘Are you lonely, Caleb?’ she asked him shyly.


‘Aye,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Did tha think it were only thee? Nay, miss, all creatures are lonely – us human-folk most
of all, because we’ve the minds to know it. It’s being separate from God, that’s all. We want to get back to Him, and we know
we can’t, not for a space; not till we’ve worked out His purpose.’


A cloud shadow chased across the moor; in the distance a windhover hung quivering on the air, its tail-feathers fanned to
balance it. One part of her mind marvelled: it seemed living proof that the impossible was possible. The other part thought,
perhaps the old man beside her had answers for her. His face was as brown and old as a prophet’s, the creases so deep in it, they were like the cracks in the riverbed when it
dried out one year. An impossible face; just as his hands were impossible, seen beside hers, slim and flexible. But they were
the same clay, and she felt a kinship with him. He knew solitude, understood it.


‘And what is His purpose?’ she asked him.

‘To do His will, that’s all.’

‘But what is it?’ she cried in frustration. ‘What am I to do? I want to do God’s will but I don’t know how, and no-one will tell me. What’s
to become of me?’


‘Nay, be still, miss,’ Caleb said gently. ‘Tha can’t hear God’s voice if tha makes all that commotion.’

She was silent. The breeze pressed lightly against her ear and stirred her hair; the sheep grazed to their bell-music, the
bees droned in the gorse flower, and the sun lay hot on her head like a blessing hand. If that were God, she thought, it would
be easy, for she saw it and knew it and loved it, and it was all around her. But there must be more to it than the sweet day
and the warm smell of earth: that still left the question and the hunger – the feeling that was like the trembling cry of the curlew, for ever out of sight,
out of reach.


‘Nay, it will come to thee,’ said Caleb, as if he had heard everything she thought. ‘Don’t fret, miss. Tha’rt still young.
Only do thy duty and listen for God, and tha’ll find out soon enough what He wants thee for.’


‘Do you know what He wants you for?’ she asked.

‘Why, to mind the sheep,’ said Caleb, ‘and to love the beautiful world He made.’

‘Is that all?’

‘We must each do what we’re fit for,’ he said. ‘See awd Watch, here—’ He reached out a hand and the dog leaned into the touch.
‘He doesn’t fret because he’s not a man and can’t read and write. He serves by being what he is. Tha’rt a woman, and must
serve in a woman’s ways. I can’t tell thee more than that.’


It didn’t seem much; but Henrietta found that she felt comforted. Perhaps that was why she liked visiting Caleb. He seemed
so contented with his isolated life that it rubbed off on her. With a sudden sense of well-being she stretched her arms and then hugged her knees to her chest and said, ‘It’s
a glorious day, isn’t it?’


‘Aye, thank God,’ Caleb said. ‘They’ll be haying tomorrow. Grass is ready – they on’y wanted a bit o’ dryin’ wind. They’ll
be cutting Watermill Ings first.’


‘How do you know?’ she marvelled. ‘You always seem to know everything. I think you must be a seer.’


His fathomless dark eyes twinkled at her. ‘Mester Atterwith were by yesterday. Doos tha think I niver speak to anybody but
thee?’


She spent the afternoon with the gamekeeper of Acomb Woods, and got home late, dishevelled, and with a brace of wood pigeons
across her pony’s withers. She was very hungry. In any other household, a girl of sixteen would have dined down, but nothing
at Morland Place was like anywhere else now. Georgie was the nearest thing they had to a master, and when he dined at home,
which wasn’t often, it was with his bachelor friends. Henrietta took her meals in the nursery still. Nursery tea was at five;
hers, in deference to her greater age, usually fortified with a bit of something left over from midday dinner.


When she rode into the yard, Askins, the home stables head man, took Dunnock’s rein from her and said she had better go straight
in, she’d been looked for, he would put the pony up for her.


‘I s’pose you’ve been rattling him round all day in this heat, and never a thought o’ resting him,’ Askins grumbled, looking
at the bright-eyed bay as if he were lathered and sagging at the knees.


‘As if I would,’ Henrietta protested, hurt. ‘He’s been dozing in the shade all afternoon, while I was going round the woods
with Mr Ellerby.’


Askins’s scowl intensified. ‘You’ll catch cold at that some day, Miss Henrietta, frolicking about with the likes o’ that one!
He’s a bad lot, is Ellerby.’


‘Everyone says he’s a very fine gamekeeper.’

‘’At’s as may be, but company for a young lady he is not! I wonder Master George lets you run wild the way you do. I’ve a mind to have a word wi’ ’im.’


‘Why should Georgie mind what I do?’

‘He’ll mind all right when your name’s ruined,’ Askins said with gloomy relish. ‘Dragged through the mire, it’ll be. And it’s
time you had a proper lady’s horse. Dunnock’s too small for you. You’ll have his wind going next. And,’ he piled another complaint on to stop her answering, ‘you s’d have a side-saddle. Ridin’ across is not dacent for a young
lady and daughter o’ the house.’


‘I’m not a young lady yet,’ she objected.

‘Aye, well you soon will be,’ Askins retorted, and clucking to the pony, led it away to a diminuendo grumble of disapprobation.
‘Riding across! No-one’ll marry you, you’ll see. Time the Maister coom back an’ set a bit of order t’ th’ house! I never knew
the like of it, harum-scarum ways, all to rack an’ ruin, females running shameless, no-one where he should be day or night
…’


Swinging the pigeons, Henrietta ran up the steps and into the great hall. Her brother George was there, still in his breeches
and dusty boots, surrounded by a moving carpet of dogs. He had one of the hounds gripped between his knees and was holding
it up by the forepaws, trying to examine its belly. The captive struggled wildly to get free, while the rest of the pack,
with the general perversity of dogs, were thrusting their noses in, wanting to be the one to get the attention.


He straightened up as she appeared: a big, heavyset young man with a healthy, high-coloured face, rather small, round blue
eyes, and thick, wavy brown hair that he wore a little too long, so that his outdoor life left it looking somewhat shaggy
and unkempt.


‘Where have you been?’ George demanded. ‘Gurney’s been looking for you this hour.’ And without waiting for an answer, ‘Have
a look at Philo’s belly, will you? I think she may have picked up a tick.’ Henrietta came over, and the dogs all caught the
scent of the pigeons at once and closed on her. ‘What’ve you got there?’ George asked.


‘They’re for you. I went out shooting with Ellerby.’

‘Give ’em here.’ He freed one hand to take the pigeons and sling them over his shoulder where they dangled like a strange grey tippet. The dogs lapped him like sea waves leaping up
at a rock. ‘You shot two pigeons?’ he said, impressed.


Henrietta crouched. ‘Well, no, I missed,’ she admitted. ‘Ellerby says “rabs” and “woodies” are the hardest things of all to
shoot. Poor old Philo, then! What’s the matter, old lady? Oh, I see it. It’s not a tick, it’s a great big thorn! Where’ve
you