Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits Page B

Lord Grey, reached out his hand and said, ‘We knew each other a little at Oxford.’ But in fact they had not met and Mr Musters gave him rather a puzzled, cold stare.
    Elizabeth and Mary professed themselves greatly pleased with each other, and I had the occasion to compare them in the flesh . It amazes me now that I ever considered her pretty. Her face is too narrow and brown and her complexion not at all good, though she makes up for this by the liveliness of her expressions. She is also perhaps a hand’s breadth shorter than Mary, which I had not suspected, and carries herself in an under-bred comfortable way. But they claimed each other instantly as friends. Elizabeth said to me, as we left the breakfast table and disposed ourselves again in the yard, ‘I am glad she is pretty; she is really very pretty. I should not have liked you to fall in love with a frump.’
    And Mary, when she sent me in again for something she had forgotten, Thompson’s Tooth-powder, which she could not at all do without, whispered in my ear, ‘I like her immensely. She is not so pretty as I.’
    It was agreed at breakfast that Southwell , as the Pigots were called (with the addition of Mr Becher), and Annesley should intermix – it only remained uncertain to which party I belonged. In the end, Mr Musters took us all in hand. He accompanied Elizabeth and her brother John, along with Miss Wollaston, in Lady Hathwell’s barouche, leaving Mrs Pigot, Mr Becher and Mary to me. This occasioned the first little drop in Mary’s countenance. But we set off in high spirits. The weather, as Elizabeth promised it must be, was perfectly blue and clear. There was just a shadow of autumn in the sky, which prevented the sun from scorching and robbed the fields and the hills of any garish brightness. Mary attempted to flirt with Mr Becher.
    When we passed through Kirkby, on the half-hour, the bells of St Wilfrid’s tolled, and even Mary fell quiet because there was something to see. If only the usual sights. A dressmaker’s, showing a dark red dress in its window, with the hems undone; a tea shop; a baker’s – at which Mary called quickly for the coachman to stop and sent me out for a currant loaf. Then Mrs Pigot wanted another, and John emerged from Lady Hathwell’s barouche on a similar errand. I asked him, as we waited with our pennies in hand, what he made of Mr Musters.
    â€˜I don’t make much of him,’ John said. ‘We had an argument about sitting in the box. He strikes me as one of those men who won’t have a favour done him. But I won out at last. I said, I can’t be sitting with my sister. But Lizzy finds him amusing enough. At least, all I can hear is her laughing. Miss Wollaston, too.’
    When I gave Mrs Pigot her loaf, Mary complained, ‘It is really shameful of Mr Musters to have put us in the post-chaise. I had much rather travel in a barouche, in this weather. Are you not intolerably hot, Mrs Pigot? Perhaps we may have the hood down, a little; the sun is not very strong. I apologize for Mr Musters, but it is always his way, he always takes the best plum for himself.’
    A bell marked the quarter when we set off. There was in fact a shout of laughter from the carriage ahead, as we cleared the graveyard and followed the turn of the road towards Sutton. Uphill and down again, with a view of the spire at Kirkby, on one side, and the spires of Hilcote and Huthwaite showing by glimpses. Between the towns, the wide green fields bending to their hedgerows – fields where nothing distinguished itself but a few odd cows and trees.
    Mary said, ‘I often find that the spirits of a party of people sound much higher at a distance. I can’t think what Mr Musters might be saying. He can never think of anything to say to me.’
    My heart sank at all this, for it showed Mary in the strongest light; and if I had planned, as I half intended, to confess my