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  “You seem, Cousin Bella,” acidulously remarked Alfred, drying his nose, “to be a proclamation of something, but for the life of me, I don’t know what.”

  “I don’t know what either, Cousin Alfred,” Bella said, “unless it’s of Independence.”

  “She’s altogether too blue-stocking to get a husband,” Great-aunt Annie remarked, “though I have met women, physically less unprepossessing but in spirit more accommodating, who have found men, and made them good wives, too.”

  There had appeared already at this time in Hampstead a gentleman whom Bella had first noticed from behind as she walked down Heath Street toward the shops. His walk, the way he held himself, the “cut of his jib” reminded her of her father. He was a man of confidence, she thought, who might think well of himself, but not without justification. His body was lithe, his clothes were cut well and he wore them with assurance. People observed him in the street as he passed. He was Somebody; as opposed to the nobodies whom her great-aunt had invited to her house. “Now there,” Bella thought, “goes a man I might marry.”

  Bella followed him down the hill, smiling to think how shocked Cousin Alfred would be at her remorseless pursuit. He went into the butchers. (How strange that a man should do his marketing, even if a bachelor, not relying upon his housekeeper or perhaps a landlady!) Bella was intrigued. She entered the shop behind him. In a voice of thrilling resonance, not so much theatrical as parliamentary, he demanded a point steak, some twelve ounces in weight. But when the butcher produced a huge bleeding jump of beef, he shook his head. “The middle cut,” he said.

  Bella knew little about meat, except that it should be “well hung.” She was surprised to see the butcher cut off several pounds of steak, which he laid on display plates before choosing the cut for this male customer. “I think you will find this to your liking, sir.”

  “I can assure you that if I do not, I shall not continue my custom,” the gentleman answered. “Will you have it sent, and charged, to Mr. Manningham, 4 New Square?” There was on the wall behind the counter a large mirror on which had been painted a woolly lamb. In its unpainted surface Bella could see that Mr. Manningham had an impressive bearded visage, with startling blue eyes beneath heavy black brows. In this looking glass he was staring at her, though the words he spoke were addressed ostensibly to the master-butcher. “All I want,” he said, leaning earnestly forward, “is tenderness.”

  As he turned abruptly, he almost knocked into Bella. Indeed for a moment he caught her hand to prevent her falling backwards. It was a momentary grasp but while it lasted, very firm. Then he stepped back, raised his hat with a muttered apology, and went out.

  Bella felt herself blushing involuntarily from her bosom to the base of her throat. She was wearing a high-necked blouse, so nothing showed. But she was embarrassed at the weakness, which she blamed the stranger for betraying, and for a moment she disliked him.

  But later she realized that this was the beginning of the liberation which she had been awaiting all these years. Persephone was returning from the underworld. Andromeda was released. This was it, at last!

  Bella’s life was so changed that even Great-aunt Annie could sense it. The old lady’s rheumatism and temper grew worse. Her charcoal biscuits were munched with an aggressive clacking of dentures. She did not know what was happening, nor would she have mentioned it, if she had. Great-aunt Annie and Cousin Alfred were human icebergs, only showing to the outside world the tips of their emotions and colliding with other people in their submarine depths, only betraying the collision by a tremor above water.

  From living among such people, Bella herself had contracted the habit of reticence. With her father, expression of feeling had been open and happy, even when the feeling itself was slightly shameful, of jealousy, pique, anger or hurt vanity. But dining the purgatory of life in Hampstead, Bella had learned to hide what was dearest to her heart, like someone given a present who must lock it away in a drawer; only a wound, a slight, a grievance could be displayed, because it was painlessly covered with a scab of rancor.

  So Bella kept to herself this, perhaps trivial, exchange of glances in the butcher’s shop, the ambiguity of the object of Mr. Manningham’s professed tenderness, herself or a middle cut of rump steak. But this privacy merely served to heighten the brilliance of the small illumined enclosure. In her walks to the heath, she passed by New Square, the most enchanting, she considered, of all the corners of the lovely village. Number Four was not the smartest house, drab indeed rather, not to say tumbledown. But reference to the Street Directory showed that this was not Mr. Manningham’s fault. Number Four was tenanted by a lady, named Mrs. Creeps; no doubt a landlady, perhaps a widow come down in the world.

  The magic of the stranger’s personality invested even this with charm. “Mr. Manningham,” she smiled to herself, “is presently in the care of Mrs. Creeps.” She wondered on what floor he lodged, how carefully he presided over the grilling of his tender steaks and how he came to be in Hampstead Village at all, so far from the beau monde. (Quite what or where the beau monde was, Bella was not then certain.)

  It was nearly a week before she caught another glimpse of Mr. Manningham, and she had begun to think that he had left the neighborhood. She was returning from the heath, and suddenly he emerged from New End into Heath Street some fifteen yards ahead of her, and instead of turning in her direction walked down the hill, the finest figure of a man with his silver-topped black ebony cane, his chamois leather gloves and his smart gray spats. It was the man in Manningham she admired, a devil-may-carelessness which made him the most debonair creature in the village, even though he didn’t seem to care a fig for the effect.

  He did not, Bella thought, remind her of her father, whose tragic death had brought her into bondage. Mr. Manningham was the liberator—or rather could be. What had been to her a wonderful occasion was probably to him a flirtatious and forgotten moment. Like the sun, he gave off energy, unaware of whom he burned.

  Her life, so long monochrome, took on color and interest. There was the moment, meeting suddenly face to face at a corner’s turn, that he started, raised his hat and smiled. It seemed that the sun had started from behind a cloud a golden blaze. Half an hour later going into her great-aunt’s house and seeing her, like an aged toad, linking in the dark mahogany, Bella was back in the underworld, with the maids in black cotton dresses and white starched uniforms like monstrous grubs. Yet, what was the significance of the raised hat, the smile, except what a gentleman like Mr. Manningham gave any lady of casual acquaintance? She plunged into despair.

  But then the gloom was lightened one morning as she observed that she was being followed by him. She quickened her pace instinctively but could hear his lengthened stride keeping an equal distance behind her. In moments of emotion, she blushed, not charmingly in the cheeks, but betrayingly from the bosom up to the base of the throat, a stainful red like a scald. She could feel this disfigurement and she hurried forward (even though her back was turned toward him and anyway her dress fitted high up in the neck, so that nothing could be seen.) He followed her into the grocers shop and as she waited to be served, he said, “I think this is addressed to you,” and he slipped into her hand a small envelope embossed like lace.

  “I don’t understand.” She was genuinely puzzled. Could he have found in the street some letter she had dropped, even though she had none in her reticule addressed to her?

  “Perhaps I am mistaken,” he whispered, “but I pray not.”

  She glanced at the name and address. It read:

  To The Most Adorable Girl

  In The World

  She was conscious of his watching her. Instinctively she crushed the letter, but she did not fling it away. She thrust it into her muff and there she held it, like a bird, like a fledgling that she feared might be crushed, or die, or fly away.

  “Was I,” he bent forward and down to her ear, “wrong?”

  She turned away to look out of the window at the street down which
walked people. She could not speak. Blood leaped into her throat like throttling fingers. But dimly outside she saw Mr. Manningham looking toward her, head bowed, hat raised, teeth bright within the bearded face.

  She had bought all the wrong things, sago instead of semolina, currants instead of raisins, treacle instead of golden syrup. But she did not care. “I am not well,” she said to Great-aunt Toad, lurking in the mahogany darkness, “I am sorry. I must go to my room.”

  “Then we shall send for Dr. McIntosh,” the old woman called. “We are not going to have you ill without the doctor.” She was a witch. She knew.

  But Bella was armed to deal with such attacks. “Remember your own queasiness yesterday morning,” she called back from the half-landing, “when you were sure you were dying and the wind passed before the doctor came.” It was cruel, but in this family it was the survival of the cruelest. Great-aunt Toad retired into her hole, and Bella went to her bedroom and bolted the door. (She knew that the key which her great-aunt pretended was lost had in fact been hidden, but she had fitted the bolt herself.)

  Then she took the crumpled envelope from her muff and smoothed it out on the escritoire. Whatever the letter might say, it was uniquely precious. It would be treasured for a lifetime, though she did not yet know as a memento of what. With the slender paper-knife her father had used to cut his books she opened the envelope. There was no address at the head of the paper which was illuminated with an engraving of Mont Blanc, a snowy pinnacle of celestial or social aspiration. “What can a man do,” she read, “who coming to Hampstead, having roamed the world over, and seeing the most adorable girl in the world in a butcher’s shop, does not know what her name is and yet must meet her again at any cost? Only, surely, beg a tryst. And since it was a butcher’s shop, where better than the Leg of Mutton Pond this afternoon at three? My most adorable girl—and you must not forbid me to think of you as this, because you are—I can assure you that my intentions are the most honorable, however unconventional my attentions may appear. But I do not have to say this. You are a brave spirit. You have fire. I know it. Unless I am mad. And I am afraid that I shall go mad, unless I see you. You probably do not realize your power, my adorable one! But you have haunted me, since I first saw you; that beauty, locked away! Like Rapunzel. Remember:

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair

  That I may climb upon your stair!

  Oh, I know now what I was born for!

  Please!

  Jack Manningham”

  Bella’s first impulse was to go to the Leg of Mutton Pond that afternoon. Nobody had ever written to her before in this fashion. Yet to accept immediately was to make herself cheap. Jack Manningham might just be a masher with an eloquent pen, an adventurer, a despoiler of women, a philanderer.

  She did not go to the Leg of Mutton Pond at three p.m.

  But she went at half-past three and he wasn’t there.

  Which was what she might have expected.

  Or was it?

  Weeks passed without her seeing him, weeks in which she grew short-tempered with everyone, perhaps especially with herself. How could she have been so mad, she asked herself over and over again, to reject the man who offered her release from the purgatory which threatened to become a lifelong hell? But how equally could Jack Manningham, if he was sincere in his suit, be so easily put off? He was not a shy man. On the contrary! So must she assume he was a trifler? Between these two termini were countless stations at which, when her emotions did not run express, she stopped and pondered.

  Restlessness consumed her. She must go constantly abroad, making not one but several journeys to the shops in case by accident she missed him. She walked each afternoon past the house of Mrs. Creeps in New Square and then up to make her tryst at the Leg of Mutton Pond promptly at 3 p.m. taking with her crusts to feed the mallards for a decent waiting time. She even wrote a dozen letters to explain, excuse, apologize for her failure to make the original rendezvous. Twice she went as far as the letter box before she realized the extent of her folly and tore the letters up.

  How desperate she had been did not strike her fully until the prospect of escape which had opened seemed to have closed. Day after identical day passed with the same pattern repeated like a Chinese torture. Every word that her great-aunt spoke she knew beforehand. She could see it coming minutes ahead.

  Bella found herself dreaming of possible other lives, of becoming, like Mary Kingsley, a missionary and venturing into jungles festooned with snakes to convert the heathen or like the Lady of the Camellias scaling the romantic heights of courtesanship with a rachitic cough. Anything to get away from the conventional heights of Hampstead! She had thought of her relatives’ matchmaking efforts as an auction in a slave market. Now she felt like an unbought slave when all bidders had departed.

  Thirty-three days passed and the only sign that Mr. Manningham was more than a creature of her fantasy was the letter dropped in the grocer’s shop, read and re-read and hidden safely away between each reading.

  Then she met him in Heath Street. He came straight up to her and before she could say anything, he grasped her hand. “My dear young lady,” he said, clinging to her, “you can never forgive me. But that very noon I was called from Hampstead on the most urgent business, from whence I returned only last night. Not knowing your name, address nor anything about you except that you are the most adorable girl upon whom I have ever set eyes, I had no means of communicating with you.”

  The reality of Jack Manningham, after weeks of idealization in which he had become almost St. George in shining armor, was sobering and yet still stimulating. No St. George, he was a very handsome man but convicted of being in the wrong.

  Bella disengaged her hand. “I did not know that you failed to keep your appointment, Mr. Manningham,” she said, “but I trust that your business prospered.”

  The shot went home, but he soon recovered. “Oh, I am so glad! It was unpardonable arrogance on my part. But lovers are driven to desperate measures. Will you, please, tell me your name?”

  “Bella.”

  “Ah, the Beautiful One!” he said. “What could be more appropriate! Prophetic parents! But you have a surname?”

  It was what Bella dreaded. “I’m afraid it’s Hickok.”

  “H-I-C-K-O-C-K?”

  “No C before the final K.”

  “I think the Beautiful One ought to change that as soon as possible.”

  “To what?”

  “Manningham!” he suggested. “That has a ring to it. Bella Manningham!” He bent down and grinned in her face. “Isn’t that the perfect name? Where d’you live?”

  She gave the number in Holly Place.

  “Well, if you don’t meet me at the Leg of Mutton at three this afternoon, I’ll come ’round hammering at your door to know the reason why, my lovely witch.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was never a man in Bella’s experience like Jack Manningham. When she met him that afternoon, there was no formal proposal, no protestation of love. It was more like an interview with a Harley Street surgeon, who, having diagnosed a morbid condition, was concerned with arranging immediate entry into the hospital. There was no question of whether they should be married, merely of how soon. “There is no need to explain, my dear Bella, about this great-aunt of yours,” he said, brushing aside her ‘family duties.’ “Your first duty is to yourself. You are making yourself ill wasting your youth on her old age.” He seized her hands and looked long into her eyes with the tenderness almost of a loving parent. “I cannot allow you to do this. Your beauty must not be squandered.”

  Bella was outraged that he swept away the log jam of her objections on the flood of his eloquence and at the same time entranced because he took for granted what she had only timorously dared to think. In his eyes, in the grip of his hands and the certainty of his voice there was a resolution, for which she had yearned for years. He overwhelmed her with his strength. “But what will they say?” she asked, terrified at the thou
ght of having to face her great-aunt, as sour as a hanging judge, and Cousin Alfred, the skeptical clerk of the court. Jack Manningham was Life As It Should Be. They were life as it drearily was. The confrontation terrified her.

  “You just leave it to me, my dear,” he said. “You are of an age to decide for yourself whom you marry. We don’t live in the Dark Ages. This is 1881. You just leave it to me. Shall we go now to Holly Place?”

  The tempestuousness of this suggestion was too much for Bella. “But we don’t know one another,” she protested. “This is the first time that we have exchanged more than a few words. How can we tell that we are really suited?”

  They had descended to the Vale of Health and were walking along the embankment of the pond. At her words he stopped in his tracks as if she had struck him. Flushing, he turned away, gazing out over the pond toward some swans, which seeing him pause came swimming over in hope of food. Bella had not suspected him of such sensitivity. She was devastated at causing him such pain. “But, Jack,” she said, “you do see what I mean?”

  He turned slowly and looked down at her with a mixture of contempt and sadness. “Then you don’t . . . ?”

  “What, darling?”

  He turned back to look at the swans, which, having come close, were beginning to hiss. “The only girl in my life,” he said, almost to himself, “to whom I felt instantly drawn, as if I had known her and loved her in previous incarnations. And I could have sworn,” he swallowed with emotion, “I could have sworn she felt the same.”

  Bella was alarmed as the swans began to climb the bank on clumsy black feet bending their ugly black-knobbed yellow beaks forward viciously. She backed away and Jack turned to protect her. “They remind me of your relatives!” he laughed. “They want to be looked after but all we have to do is walk away.” As they did so, he turned and already the swans were waddling back to the pond.