Page 2 of The Tuscan Child
The memory of my mother brought sudden tears to my eyes. All these years gone and I still missed her. If only she’d still been alive, things would have been so different. She’d have known what to do and say. She would have been my refuge. Hastily, I brushed the tears away. I was not going to let anybody see me cry.
As this memory played itself out in my head, the wall came to an abrupt end, and I found myself standing outside the massive wrought-iron gates that led to Langley Hall. On the other side of the gates the raked driveway ran between manicured flower beds to the house. The red brick of the Tudor façade glowed in the afternoon sunshine. The sun winked back from leaded paned windows. The front part of the house was pure Tudor, the property given to Sir Edward Langley by King Henry VIII for helping him to dismantle and plunder the monasteries. In fact, this very property used to be home to a monastery until my ancestor destroyed it, drove out the monks, and built himself a fine new house in its place. I suppose I should have guessed from this that a curse would eventually catch up with us.
The house was bigger than it seemed from the front. Subsequent Langleys had added on two fine Georgian wings and a touch of Victorian monstrosity in a corner tower and large conservatory at the rear. I stood still, gawking like a tourist, my hands wrapped around the bars of the gate, as if seeing it for the first time and admiring its beauty. My ancestral home. Home of the Langleys for four hundred years. And I was not unaware of the irony that I had never personally lived in the house—only in the small, dark, and poky gatekeeper’s lodge.
The sign on the wall beside the gate proclaimed it to be “Langley Hall School for Girls.” Instead of attempting to open one of the gates, I went past to a small door in the wall and let myself in the way I had always done. I turned off up the narrow path to the lodge and tried the front door. It was locked. I don’t know who I’d been expecting to find there. My father had lived alone after I had gone to university. We had lived together there, just the two of us, after my mother died when I was eleven.
I stood outside the front door and noticed the peeling paint, the dirty windows, the tiny square of lawn that badly needed mowing, the neglected flower beds, with just a few brave daffodils showing through. A shiver of regret shot through me. I should have swallowed my stupid pride and come to visit. Instead, I had let him die all alone.
I hesitated, unsure what to do next. Langley Hall School was closed for the Easter holidays, but there should still have been someone in residence since the telegram had been sent from that address, indicating that Father had been found on school grounds. I presumed it had been sent by the headmistress, Miss Honeywell. She had a suite of rooms in the hall—what had been, according to my father, the best bedroom in the old days. I turned away from the lodge and willed myself to walk up the drive and confront my former nemesis from when I had spent seven miserable years at that school. After my father had been forced to sell Langley Hall and it had been turned into a girl’s boarding school, he had been allowed to stay on as art master and to have the use of the gatekeeper’s lodge. And when my mother had died, I was offered a scholarship to attend the school as a day girl. I suppose it was meant well—a kindly gesture. My father was delighted that I’d finally be mixing with the right sort of girls and would get the right sort of education. I would rather have gone to the local grammar school with the brightest of my classmates from the village, but one did not argue with my father when he had made up his mind.
And so I acquired a green and white uniform, with a striped tie, a panama hat for summer and a wide-brimmed velour one for winter, and a blazer with the school crest on it—which was our old family crest, acquired with the building. I entered what was for me a life of misery. Langley Hall could not be called an academic institution. Instead, it attracted the daughters of the upper class and of those who could pay to be considered upper class, and it readied these girls for good marriages. Of course, this was the nineteen sixties, and one did not actually broadcast this quaint notion. Girls were expected to learn useful skills to help them work in suitable jobs—PR, publishing, the BBC, maybe running art galleries or designing clothes—until they met the right sort of husband with the correct amount of money.
So from the very beginning I was an anomaly: I might have had a father with a title, but he was the art master at the school. I lived in the lodge and I was attending the school on a scholarship. And, worst of all, I was bright and driven. I asked questions of the teachers and longed for harder problems in maths classes. Some of the teachers loved me and encouraged my lively mind. The lazier and less qualified ones found me a nuisance and disruptive. They would send me to the headmistress and put me into detention, where I had to write out, one hundred times, “I must not interrupt my teachers,” or, “I must not question my teachers.”
Miss Honeywell’s skull-like face with its high cheekbones and withering sneer came back clearly into my consciousness. “So you think that you know better than Miss Snode, do you, Joanna?” or, “May I remind you that you are only here as a gesture of my goodwill because your father is no longer able to look after you properly?”
The latter was undoubtedly true. My father had never cooked a meal or ironed a shirt in his life. My mother had taken perfect care of us both. And so my becoming a pupil at Langley Hall also included taking my evening meal with the girls and doing my prep with them in the study hall, going home only to sleep. I was glad of at least that small mercy. Sharing a dorm with my enemies would have been the last straw.
Not that all the girls were against me. I did make friends: quiet, studious girls like myself. We read and exchanged books and discussed them as we walked the grounds. But it was that core group of popular girls who moved in a pack, like wolves, and loved to pick on anyone weaker than them who made it quite clear that I did not belong.
“Sorry, there’s no room at this table,” they would say when I needed a place to sit with my lunch tray.
My gym shoes would mysteriously disappear. The wolf pack smirked as I got into trouble for losing my equipment. Unlike them, I’d had no private tennis lessons, and they mocked my feeble attempts to hit the ball. They talked loudly about where they would be going skiing or if they were off to a villa in France. As we got older, these pranks eventually stopped, partly because I never let the girls see that they were getting to me, but also because boys and parties became more important. Then they would talk loudly about which dances they would attend and which boys were being given fabulous cars for their eighteenth birthdays and might drive down to visit, giving the girls an incentive to sneak out at midnight. The trouble was that they were all part of the same social set—all interconnected in a giant web by family or business. I was one of the few outsiders.
And so I had endured until I reached the sixth form. I was driven by a burning desire and a plan for life. I was going to go to university, become a lawyer, be brilliantly successful, make a lot of money, and buy back Langley Hall. I pictured myself taking my father by the arm and leading him up the drive. “This is now ours again,” I would say. “You are back where you belong—lord of the manor.”
And to Miss Honeywell I’d say, “I’m so sorry, but I need you to be out of here at the end of this term.” And I’d smile.
I had to smile now at my naïve optimism. Now my father was dead. I was the last of the line. The title would die out and there would be no point in restoring Langley Hall to its former glory. I took a deep breath as I went up the broad steps to the front door and pressed on the bell.
CHAPTER THREE
JOANNA
April 1973
I heard the bell echoing through the foyer, and then, after a long interval, the door opened, revealing Miss Honeywell herself. I had been expecting a porter or a maid and took an involuntary step backward when I saw that face. As always, her face was a perfect mask of makeup, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in as thin brown lines, and her hair, now greyer than I remembered, had been permed into perfect layers. What I had not been expecting was for her to be wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt. During the school year, I remembered her as wearing a tailored suit in winter with a gold pin on her lapel, and in summer a crisp linen dress and pearls.
She, too, looked startled for a second, then her face broke into a smile. “Joanna, my dear. I hadn’t expected you so soon.”
“I came as soon as I received the telegram.”
“I wasn’t sure we were sending it to the right place. Your father had several addresses for you, but we thought the firm of solicitors would find you.”
“Thank you. Yes, they called me when the telegram arrived.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I am so sorry to be the bearer of such sad news. Do come in.” She stepped back to allow me to enter the black and white marble-tiled entrance hall. Inside felt delightfully cool. Miss Honeywell shut the front door behind her.
“I was supposed to be in Italy right now, but I had some important meetings with the board of trustees and so I am stuck here,” she said as she went ahead of me, her high heels tapping on the marble floor. “But it could have been worse. We are certainly experiencing some lovely spring weather, are we not?”
She was doing what the English did. When anything embarrassing or emotional threatened to come up, one discussed the weather. Always a safe topic.
“Are you planning to go away at all this year?” she asked.
“No plans as yet,” I replied, certainly not about to admit to my current impecunious state.
We had reached the door of her study. I remembered it well, staring at that brass plate on her door—“Miss Honeywell, Headmistress”—and trying to breathe before I knocked and went in to face my doom. Now she opened the door and smiled at me again. “Do come in,” she said. “Take a seat. I’ll see if Alice is around to bring us tea. As you can see, the place is pretty much deserted. Only a skeleton staff. Everyone else is gone for the Easter holidays. In fact, it was lucky that I always take a morning walk myself or your father might not have been found for days.”
