“Now the stars align,” said the young man, coming to press her towards the door, his bag against her leg. She almost wept to feel him breathing on her neck. “If you’re staying in the area you must allow me to call on you.”
She opened the door and stepped from the carriage, nearly falling to the platform as the train gave a last lurch. She hit her left ankle with her bag and felt at least one hairpin come away from the side of her head. Not caring for her appearance or the pain, she fled towards the baggage car to retrieve her trunk and ran right into a man standing enveloped in the steam. She could not prevent a cry of fear as he grasped her elbow to stop them both from falling.
“Are you all right?” asked the man. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Let go of me,” she said, and she could hear her voice fierce with suppressed rage.
The man, a young man, stepped back, raising his hands in submission. “I meant no offense, miss,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“I saw her first, Grange,” said the man from the train.
“Please leave me alone,” said Beatrice, holding her hand to her face. She was suddenly too exhausted to fight anymore. Her rage drained away, and she could feel her limbs tremble as if the light breeze were a winter squall.
“Wheaton, you’re an ugly drunk,” said the young man in a voice so calm he might have been talking about the weather. “Can’t you tell a respectable young woman from one of your floozies? Behave yourself.”
“Didn’t think you were much for the ladies, Grange,” said Wheaton with a sly chuckle. “Or is that just your pretty cousin Daniel?”
“Don’t be a bully, Wheaton,” the young man replied. “Go home before I’m obliged to make you go. No doubt you’ll pound me into the ground, but you’ll ruin those perfectly good clothes doing it.”
“I’m going; expected home for the fatted calf by my sobbing mother,” said Wheaton, unruffled by the veiled threat of physical harm. “You can have the schoolteacher.” He staggered away, and Beatrice felt her face flush.
“Are you Miss Nash?” asked the young man. She looked at him but could not trust herself to speak. “I’m Hugh Grange. My aunt, Agatha Kent, sent me to meet you.”
“I think I need to sit down,” she said. She could tell the young man had kind gray eyes, but she saw nothing else as the whole station began to slowly spin. “Please don’t allow me to faint.”
“Here’s a bench,” he said, and she felt his hand tugging urgently at her elbow. She sank down. “Good. Hang your head below your knees and breathe,” he added, and she felt her head pushed down towards the dusty bricks of the platform. She breathed deep, slow breaths, and relief came as a light sweat on her forehead.
“Sorry. Ridiculous of me.”
“Not at all.” She could see only a pair of country boots, well oiled but creased and scuffed with age. “I’m sorry Wheaton upset you.”
“He did no such thing. I just—I should have eaten more lunch, that’s all. I usually eat very well when I travel.”
“It’s important to keep up one’s strength,” he said, and though she could not detect any note of sarcasm, she felt the anger she had held in all day return. She shivered again, and the young man, his fingers on the pulse in her left wrist, added, “Shall I go ask the stationmaster for some water, or do you think you can make it out to the car? We really should get you to my Aunt Agatha’s right away.”
“I’m perfectly all right,” she said, standing up slowly. “I must see to my trunk and bicycle.”
“Smith will arrange to fetch them later from the stationmaster,” he said. “Let me carry your bag.”
Beatrice hesitated, but there was no hint of condescension in the young man’s tone, and his blunt face showed worry in a single vertical crease between the eyes. He was trying to treat her well. She understood that not just in the past couple of hours, but in the past few months, she had lost some trust in how people would treat her. She blinked her eyes and handed him her bag without a word. He took it and hefted its unexpected weight.
“Sorry,” she said. “I packed too many books as always.”
“That’s quite all right,” he said as he took her arm and steered her out through a side gate. “Though I hate to think how heavy the trunk must be. Maybe I’ll ask the stationmaster to telephone for a cart and save the car from breaking an axle.”
On the ride up the hill away from town, the young woman kept her face averted and her gaze fixed on the passing hedges and cottages. Hugh contemplated the curve of her long neck with the thick brown hair loosely bunched at the nape. She must have been tired, and yet she did not have the rounded slump of permanent defeat that seemed to Hugh to be the hallmark of the schoolteachers he had known. Even his professors at Oxford, many of them secure in family and finances, had seemed to bow over time as if under the perpetual onslaught of student ignorance. The woman’s summer traveling coat was made of thick, supple linen that seemed of some quality, and her trim jacket and skirt were fashionably narrow, though unadorned. He judged her to be almost his own age; perhaps twenty-two or -three to his august twenty-four. While she was not a tremulous girl fresh from the schoolroom, she was far from the dull spinster he had been expecting. He acknowledged a flicker of interest best investigated and fanned by conversation.
“I apologize again for poor Wheaton,” he said. “He’s perfectly gentlemanly around women when he’s sober, but when he drinks he sort of launches himself at any female in the vicinity.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Obviously it was my fault then for occupying a railway carriage in which he wished to ride?”
Hugh found himself flushing under her stare. “Not what I meant at all,” he said. “But men like Wheaton…”
“Are there different kinds then?” she asked.
“Different kinds?”
“Of men? Only the majority seem prone to some similar lapse of manners under the influence of alcohol.” She pressed her lips together, and Hugh began to wonder how to get himself out of the conversation.
“Do you wish me to apologize on behalf of us all?” he asked, quietly.
“I would prefer you did not apologize for anyone else,” she said. “My father always says that if we were as quick to own our own faults as we are to apologize for those of others, society might truly advance.”
“I’d say he’s right, but woefully optimistic,” said Hugh. “Very religious man, is he?” He had a vision of a purse-lipped temperance type with thin fingers tapping the cover of a Bible.
The girl gave what could only be described as a snort of laughter and then covered her mouth with her gloved hand and seemed to struggle with her emotions.
“Sorry,” said Hugh, unable to bite back the word.
“Thank you,” she said at last. A smile transformed her face and set her brown eyes alight. “He died a year ago, and I didn’t think it would be possible to laugh about him again.”
“Not religious then,” said Hugh.
“No,” she said. “Not exactly. But I do hope you won’t repeat it to your aunt. I’m sure schoolteachers are expected to have irreproachable parents.”
“I’m sure they are,” he said. “Have you studied their other attributes?”
She gave him a doubtful look.
“I assure you I’m completely qualified,” she said. “But I’ve been told I have to work harder to cultivate an appropriate attitude of grateful subordination.”
“Lucky for you, my aunt has taken such a stand with the school governors that she would be loath to tell them her candidate was unsuitable,” he said as they drew up on the broad gravel forecourt of his aunt’s comfortable villa. He meant it in fun, but he noticed the young woman looked worried as Smith opened her door. As she preceded him in to meet Aunt Agatha, he wondered if he should also have mentioned to her that she was in no way as plain as his aunt would have preferred.