An Accomplished Woman by Jude Morgan

revived by the news of her
engagement to Dr Templeton of Heystead. Surprise was the general first
reaction; but as no one likes to admit their failure of observation, the event
was swiftly transformed into something that had been plain all along. One
extreme wing of opinion said that a woman with such a history could only have
come here to trap a man by the surest way: others, more moderate, reminded each
other that town ladies could manage to put these things behind them, and that
she was still after all a pretty young woman with a fair fortune — in that
respect, quite a desirable match for Dr Templeton, past his youth and a little
dry. The entering of Edmund Templeton and Rosina Holdsworth into blameless
matrimony, very quietly at Heystead church, rendered the couple uninteresting
once more. Lady Eastmond could congratulate herself on her success; and
Heystead Priory, after a long interval, accustomed itself again to the chancy
enterprise of a family.
    For Lydia, thenceforth,
the story became dimly and haltingly her own. The carefully collated historical
figures of Edmund Templeton and Rosina Holdsworth became her parents, and
George’s, and everything swarmed with the sharp yet scattered detail of memory.
And as a child, of course, even a young girl, she had known little or nothing
of what came before. She had always felt, perhaps, that there was something
different about her mother, and when later her adult mind could receive the
truth, by gentle steps, from her father and from Lady Eastmond, she had chiefly
felt a sort of unsurprise. Her mother had never, for Lydia, been entirely
present. Even at cheerful family occasions — Christmas, George coming home from
school — she had seemed to perform her role with a faint constrained
bewilderment, like a trusted governess or nurse called down to make up the
numbers. Loving her and admiring her, still Lydia had always looked to her father
as one looks instinctively at the clock: that must be right. That will
tell me where I am.
    Then when Lydia was ten
her mother died: her illness was slow and yet swift: there seemed time only to
register the oddness of her busy, frowning, twitching mother becoming the flat,
solemnly watching woman in the bed before all was over. George, who was also
present, seldom referred to this afterwards: Lydia never. Like her he learned
the whole history in adulthood, and he had at last fortified himself with a short,
round lesson: ‘Sad business: horribly sad: and yet not, you know, because she
met Father, and there was a good happy time before she was taken from us.’
    Half concurring, Lydia
envied him his wholeness of sentiment. She had reflected on the story time and
time again — sadly, wryly, with worldly cynicism, with stern morality — but had
never been able to reconcile all the things she thought and felt about it.
Which was not to say it had not affected her. She was prepared to admit, as she
hugged her knees and blinked at the peopled darkness of her room, that it had
affected her more than anything in her life.
    But it was harder to
admit how much she owed Lady Eastmond — because that meant admitting that the
debt really ought to be paid.

Chapter VII
    Oh, Lydia, I am glad you
are come — I am so very concerned about Charlotte, and I know you will be
truthful with me. Look.’ Emma Paige thrust the shawled milky-smelling bundle
into her friend’s arms. ‘Now look. The whites of her eyes — is there not a
faint, a very faint yellowish tinge?’
    ‘It must be very faint
indeed. She looks to me the picture of health, and twice the size she was when
I went away. And that, I believe,’ said Lydia, as the baby gave her finger an
experimental suck, ‘is another tooth coming.’
    ‘Where ... So it is. Ah,
now that explains a great deal. Dear, I only hope she will not begin
biting, like Sophie. The other day she bit my sister, quite hard, and in
public’
    ‘That shows sense, if
not discretion. And so, where is Mrs Vawser? How long