“I am touched,” said Mr. Tillingham.
“If Mr. Tillingham prefers to dine in his own home, we should make an effort to invite him less often, Aunt,” said Hugh. “It would be terrible to think that we distracted him.” He smiled, but Beatrice detected that Hugh was not altogether joking. She wondered why he didn’t like the great man.
“I trust Mr. Tillingham knows he is at liberty to come to dinner anytime and to decline dinner whenever he feels like it,” said Agatha. “We do not stand on ceremony with those we consider family.” She turned to Beatrice and added, “Mr. Tillingham is always writing to me to enquire about the boys and has taken a kind interest in Daniel’s poetry.”
“To help along the next generation of young writers and poets is a duty I consider both sacred and rewarding,” said Mr. Tillingham. “I’m hoping, Daniel, that you will come to dinner and bring me some more poems to read?” He raised a thick eyebrow and gave Daniel a conspiratorial smile.
“I’m afraid they’re hardly in a fit state,” said Daniel, maintaining a languid air of indifference. “But I’m trying to wrestle some life into one or two pieces.”
“I believe Miss Nash also writes,” said Hugh.
“Oh no,” said Beatrice, flustered by an urgent desire to have the great writer offer a smile of interest towards her and the competing wish to heed Agatha Kent’s injunction. “I mean, I have spent the past year editing my father’s personal letters in the hopes of publishing a small volume.” She looked at Mr. Tillingham, whose face showed a hint of relief.
“Collecting and sorting such material is an admirable project for a daughter,” he said. “I’m sure it will be of great interest to your father’s friends and family; and at least it is a sober endeavor and not some flighty female novel.”
“Perhaps Miss Nash also wishes to write a novel?” asked Hugh.
“Miss Nash will be fully occupied by her vocation as a teacher and will have no interest in such frivolous pursuits,” said Lady Emily. Agatha Kent looked at Beatrice with an eyebrow raised in mute hope.
“My teaching duties will be all my concern,” said Beatrice, bitterly disappointed but resigned to the practical.
“Thank the Lord,” said Mr. Tillingham. “There is a great fashion for encouraging young women, especially American women, to think they can write, and I have received several slightly hysterical requests to read such charming manuscripts.”
“And did you?” asked Daniel.
“Goodness no, I would rather cut off my right hand,” said Mr. Tillingham. “I delegated my secretary to compose her own diplomatic replies and to consign the offending pages to the kitchen stove.”
“I thought you were great friends with that American woman who insists on writing even though her position and fortune make it quite unnecessary,” said Lady Emily.
“The lady of whom you speak is in a category by herself,” said Mr. Tillingham. “She does possess a fastidious eye for the narrow milieu of which she writes, and I cannot fault her competence nor argue with her considerable success.”
“Plus she’s very generous, I hear,” said Daniel. “Doesn’t she come down and take you out in her enormous motorcar?”
“Daniel!” said his aunt.
Mr. Tillingham waved his hand to indicate his lack of offense. “I assure you, dear boy, that I am quite capable of accepting friends’ generosity and still telling them exactly what I think of their art,” said Mr. Tillingham. “Indeed I wish it were otherwise, for I have lost friends and chased away a great love or two in my time with what some of them described as my brutish candor.” To Beatrice’s great surprise, he pulled out his large silk pocket square and dabbed at his eyes, which were filling with tears.
“I would never describe you as brutish,” said Daniel. He turned to the room at large and added, “But the last group of poems I showed to Mr. Tillingham was so thoroughly and precisely dismantled that all I had left was a single couplet.”
“It is a curse, but I have never been able to speak anything but the truth when it comes to the written word,” said Mr. Tillingham. “I believe your father felt the same way, my dear.”
“You do remember him?” said Beatrice.
“It is coming to me,” said Mr. Tillingham. “Is it possible that he wrote an absolutely scathing review of my very first play?”
“I believe he did review it,” said Beatrice, blushing.
“Well, he wasn’t the only one, to be sure,” said Tillingham. “But I do remember his analysis was astute enough for me to feel unable to write my usual long and detailed rebuttal.”
“Thank you,” said Beatrice.
“I will look for his book as soon as I get home,” added Tillingham. “And you must come to tea and show me one or two of your father’s more interesting letters.”
Beatrice felt tears sting the backs of her eyes, and she dug her fingernails into her palms to keep from betraying her gratitude. Mr. Tillingham patted her hand, and Beatrice felt Lady Emily’s astonishment.
“Wonderful,” said Agatha. “Remind me to make sure the Headmaster and the Vicar also extend invitations.”
“It is an act of common decency to take turns in relieving the loneliness of the parish’s lady spinsters,” said Lady Emily. “Whenever I’m home, I have two elderly sisters in for bridge on Tuesdays. Perhaps you play, Miss Nash?”
Beatrice struggled to find an acceptable evasion, as she was rather proud of her bridge skills.
“On Tuesdays, Miss Nash will be tutoring some of the grammar boys,” said Agatha smoothly. “I had not wanted to impose on you any more, dear Lady Emily, but an invitation to tea from you, issued publicly in the middle of the garden party, would be just the thing to make our little project unassailable and stop Mrs. Fothergill’s intrigues.”
“Well, if you think it would help,” said Lady Emily, looking somewhat mollified. “I would willingly endure absolute hardship to put Mrs. Fothergill in her place.”
As the dinner gong rang, Beatrice caught sight of Hugh and Daniel exchanging a smothered grin. She suppressed a smile of her own and thought that she would willingly hear herself compared to a hardship just as long as she did not have to join Lady Emily’s parade of spinsters.
The girl who knocked at Beatrice’s bedroom door the next morning did not seem strong enough to carry the heavy tray on which rested a cup of tea in a florid porcelain cup and a heavy jug of hot water for the washstand. She was hollow in the cheeks and narrow-shouldered, her hair pulled back mercilessly into a single braid. Her dress and apron hung loosely, and her boots looked comically large laced onto such scrawny ankles.
“Cup of tea, miss,” she said. “And I’m to tell you breakfast is under a cover below because Mrs. Turber is gone to church at eight and she hopes you won’t expect her to set God aside for people who use the Sabbath for sleeping late.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” asked Beatrice.
“I tried, miss, but you didn’t want to stir and I took the tea away cold.” She put the tray on the floor, transferred the jug to the washstand, and brought the tea, her lips clamped in concentration to keep the cup from wobbling on its gilded saucer. Even when Beatrice took the tea from her, the girl did not look up but merely turned away to the tray.
“I’ve never failed to wake up,” said Beatrice, taking a long gulp of hot tea. “I suppose I was tired from traveling.” She was used to the pale dawn hours, the birds’ thin choir accompanying her waking thoughts of her father. Curiously, she did not feel guilty for sleeping so late into the hot morning. And if she was tired, from the travel and all the new impressions around her, at least it was a different kind of exhaustion than she had felt all year; more a good physical tiredness and less the enervating lassitude that comes with hopelessness.