107. Soft, Sweet & Gentle Read online

  There was silence for a while before Georgina said,

  “What you are saying, Aunt Marjory, is that I own nothing and have to beg my cousin Alister for every penny I need.”

  She spoke very slowly as if she was thinking it out for herself.

  “Yes, that is true, but, of course, your mother has left you her jewellery and a number of other items, which I should have thought she would have discussed with you.”

  “No, she did not discuss it,” Georgina answered. “Strangely enough Papa never mentioned it when she died. I have never worn jewellery and what belonged to Mama was put away in a safe and I did not think of taking it out.”

  “Well, I should take it out now because it’s yours. At the same time you must be very pleasant and obedient to anything that your cousin Alister asks of you.”

  “I thought of asking him if he did not want me in The Castle, if I could have the Dower House. But perhaps I would be wise to go away. But where to, I have no idea.”

  “That would be a disaster for all of us,” her aunt replied sharply. “You have to stay here and make yourself indispensable to Alister, so he will listen to what you say. He will then understand how dependent we all are on him.”

  She made a gesture with her hands and went on,

  “Heaven knows if he has any idea at all of what has happened here in England as he has been away so long. I am certain that he had no idea he would become Head of the Family.”

  “But suppose he will not listen to me?” Georgina enquired.

  “That is what we are afraid of,” her aunt replied. “It is why I wanted to see you today immediately after the funeral and before Alister arrives.”

  She spoke so seriously that Georgina stared at her,

  “We were all aware when your father was so ill that if he did die the only person who could help us was you. You will therefore have to make Alister listen to you.”

  “But suppose he will not,” Georgina asked.

  “Then you are condemning us to a future which is unbearable to think about,” Lady Crawford retorted with a sniff.

  Then in a quieter voice she went on,

  “Surely you understand that, as everything depends on you, we have to beg you to consider the plight we will be in. If Alister does not understand because he has been away so long what his position is as the eleventh Earl of Langfield and the Head of the Family, one that has been admired and respected in this country for generations, then you must force him to understand!”

  “I appreciate your feelings, but, if Alister does not like me, there will be nothing I can do about it.”

  “You have to make him like you,” her aunt said firmly. “That is why I have come to tell you from the family that you have to change your ways and become a very different woman from the one you are now.”

  “Change my ways?” Georgina questioned.

  “Don’t be so silly! You must be aware that dressing up as a boy and pretending to be a boy might have pleased your father, but to us it is a complete and utter disaster and will be to Alister too.”

  “You mean Cousin Alister will be shocked?”

  “Not only shocked, but you may drive him away as his wife did. If he disappears out into the world as he has done before, we might even starve because of his absence.”

  There was a long silence before Georgina said in a voice that sounded very different from her own.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Now you are talking more sense and realising your responsibilities. Of course the answer to your question is obvious. First you have to behave like a woman and the sort of woman that Alister admires, which, as we already know, is soft, sweet and gentle.”

  Georgina stared at her.

  “That is something I suppose I have never been and have no idea what I should do.”

  “That is what I have come to tell you,” her aunt replied. “I assure you that we have all been very shocked for a long time at the way your father treated you as if you were a boy and made you look like one.”

  “It is the way I have always been – ”

  “Yes, we have all thought it disgraceful, I can tell you. I don’t know how many times I have had to pretend to strangers that it was because your father was so unhappy that he could not have a son that his wife and you made him happy by pretending you were one.”

  She gave a laugh with no humour in it as she added,

  “Most people thought we were crazy. Frankly it was what I always thought you were.”

  “I suppose because Papa had treated me as if I was a son ever since I was born,” Georgina answered her, “I have never thought about it. I loved riding and shooting with Papa and discussing the estate and because we did everything in every sort of weather it was easier to wear boy’s clothes than the frills and furbelows of a girl.”

  “Well, that is what you must have now, because we all realise that there was little time for you to go shopping even if you knew the right things to buy, so I have brought with me a selection of clothes which I am sure you will find delightful once you have put them on.”

  Georgina put her hand up to her forehead as if she found it difficult to understand what was being said.

  Then unexpectedly she laughed.

  “This just cannot be true!” she exclaimed. “You are telling me I have to change in twenty-four hours from being what I have always been and become very feminine. And I don’t think that I will be able to play that part at all successfully.”

  “If you don’t, we will all starve,” Lady Crawford cried angrily, “so get that into your head! Now we are going upstairs and I want you to transform yourself in the beautiful clothes I have brought. I want you to change the rather scruffy young boy into a pretty, soft, tender, alluring woman.”

  She was speaking so seriously and again Georgina laughed.

  “This cannot be real! It cannot be happening to me and I know I will make a mess of it.”

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” her aunt said. “We never stopped being told by your father how clever you are, how many languages you speak and how every Tutor would have given you a certificate if it had been in his power.”

  “Papa certainly wanted me to be intelligent,” she agreed. “But now I am afraid that I am too intelligent to be a successful and subservient woman.”

  “If you have any intelligence at all you will realise it is absolutely essential that you should be,” her aunt went on. “Therefore the sooner we get to work the better.”

  “But how can you be certain, as you have not seen him for so long, that Alister still hates women who have brains?” Georgina asked.

  “That is the sort of question you should not ask as a woman. If you have any brains then acting out what you really are should not be difficult as long as you don’t assert yourself or in any way show that you don’t consider a man as a superior being to a woman.”

  Georgina rose and walked across the room to the writing desk.

  It was almost as if she expected her father to be sitting there and then she would discuss some difficulty on the estate with him.

  She would firmly express her opinion as to what should be done, knowing that he would listen attentively and they would finally work out together what was the best way to put matters right.

  She had read enough books and magazines to know that women were beginning to assert themselves as they had never done before. If Queen Victoria, they said, could rule over a third of the world and Britain could lead the way and intimidate every other nation, then women should take their rightful place in Society.

  And they should also be acknowledged as having in their own way the same standing as men.

  Her father had often criticised the fact that women were pushing themselves forward in a number of ways that he thought unbecoming to their sex.

  He had in fact been very much against Florence Nightingale going out in the Crimean war with a team of nurses. It had never happened previously and some people believed that it would end
in disaster. That she had come back triumphant with an acknowledged success had made him refuse to talk about her again.

  It was only through the reports in the newspapers, which she did not show to her father, that Georgina was aware that because of Florence Nightingale nursing gained a reputation it had never had before.

  There were articles in the newspapers suggesting that women should play a greater part in the education of children and in fact they should come out of the home and into the world that was ruled entirely by men.

  Georgina knew exactly what her father’s answer to such questions would be and so she prevented herself from mentioning it.

  She could understand in a way that Alister, having run away from his wife because she opposed him, would not tolerate any woman interfering with him in the future.

  Because she was thinking it out, she asked aloud,

  “Why did Alister’s wife die? I was not told about it, but I gather from what you said that she has died.”

  “She died four years after he left her and it was the sort of death one could expect from a woman who asserted herself to such an extent that her husband ran away.”

  “What happened?” Georgina asked.

  “She bought, in Alister’s absence, some horses at a local sale which were known to be high-spirited. Actually they had been badly broken in.”

  “Then why did she buy them?”

  “Because she wanted to assert herself,” was the reply. “Several men, including my husband, advised her they were not a good buy and that she would not be able to handle them.”

  “But, of course, it was a challenge?” Georgina said enquiringly.

  “Exactly. She bought the horses and on the first report we were told it had been an excellent buy and the horses had completely changed since she had become their owner. They were, of course, highly bred to start with. It was only through mismanagement that they had grown out of control and thus a danger.”

  “So what happened?” Georgina asked.

  “You can guess the answer to that. Teaching one of the worst of them to jump, he threw her and rolled on top of her. Several of her ribs were broken and she died a fortnight after the accident.”

  Georgina sighed.

  “So everyone said it was because she was trying to assert herself,” she murmured.

  “Of course they did,” Lady Crawford agreed. “She was, in everyone’s opinion, quite unnecessarily doing a man’s job and therefore deserved the consequences.”

  Georgina sighed again.

  “Poor woman, I feel rather sorry for her.”

  “You need not be. It was entirely her fault that she drove Alister away and her fault that he has been out of touch with the family until now.”

  “It must have been clever of your husband to find him,” Georgina remarked.

  “Very clever. In fact we spent a great deal of money sending people to look for him in different parts of the world where we had heard vaguely that at one time or another he had been seen.”

  “And you eventually found him in Japan?”

  Lady Crawford nodded.

  “He was in Japan with the entrancing and very feminine Japanese women!”

  “Do you honestly think that I can play the same part for him and at the same time help him on the estate?” Georgina asked.

  “The estate is excellent, as my husband learnt when he made enquiries, it is not only paying its way but making a large profit compared to your grandfather’s time.”

  Georgina smiled.

  “Papa was so interested in farming. He put forward new ideas that have helped the farmers enormously.”

  “That is another thing which I am sure will interest Alister when he arrives,” Lady Crawford told her. “But you have to be very clever to prevent him sending you away immediately as he might do especially if he saw you as you look now.”

  “I will do what I can,” Georgina murmured, “but I cannot promise that I will be successful.”

  “You have to be!” her aunt said firmly. “We are all depending on you. If you heard how everyone deplored the manner in which you have been brought up by your father, you would now welcome us when we offer you the chance of becoming what you were meant to be, a pretty, tactful and charming woman.”

  Georgina laughed.

  “It’s no use, Aunt Marjory, you know I will never be that. But I promise you I will try very hard.”

  “Well, after the excellent education you have had from the most distinguished and expensive Tutors in the country,” Lady Crawford retorted, “I should have thought that you would find nothing impossible.”

  Georgina wanted to argue that what she had learnt from her Tutors had been the lessons that a boy would have enjoyed.

  The knowledge she had gained would have been of great help to a man.

  Now, she thought, to change herself completely into a woman was worse than any examination she had ever taken and the result, as far as she could see, would be one of complete failure.

  “Now what we have to do,” Lady Crawford was saying, “is to go upstairs to your room where you will find what I have already had unpacked for you. We will throw away those ugly unpleasant boy’s clothes you are wearing at the moment.”

  With difficulty Georgina prevented herself from protesting that would be unnecessary and an extravagance.

  Then she told herself that in her new role she must be subservient and appear to have no mind of her own.

  They therefore walked out of the study in silence up the passage where her father had hung the pictures and had positioned the furniture.

  From the first moment anyone came through the front door they were impressed with what they saw and Georgina had helped him arrange the other rooms so that the furniture and the pictures were of the same period as each other. In fact even when she was quite young, Georgina had learnt a great deal of history from the possessions of The Castle.

  Her father had made the library one of the finest and largest in the County and, when a new history book or the memoirs of a great man became available, they would read it together.

  The Earl had expected Georgina to express her opinion on all that they said and what they had done.

  So it was not surprising that, as she and her aunt climbed the stairs, she was wondering if her cousin Alister would expect her, if anything was wrong, to prevent herself from mentioning it.

  Georgina’s room on the first floor was an especially beautiful one and she had moved into it to be close to her father.

  It boasted a large canopied four-poster bed, which was one of the treasures of The Castle and her boudoir was furnished with exquisite French furniture that had been brought over to England after the Revolution.

  However, as she opened the door, she was unable to speak.

  Lying on the bed, hanging from every wardrobe and over every chair, even on the window seats, there were gowns.

  There were so many that for the moment Georgina was speechless.

  Her aunt laughed.

  “I thought you would be surprised. Every member of the family has contributed what they could spare. Even if they wanted to keep them, they felt they were giving to a good cause!”

  “But I will never wear all these dresses!” Georgina exclaimed.

  “You will,” her aunt answered smiling. “And you will soon say that you have nothing to wear and be asking for more! That is what every woman is expected to do and will, of course, be your guideline from now on.”

  As she spoke, Lady Crawford moved over to where there was a large trunk lying on the floor.

  She opened it and Georgina saw that it contained all the underclothes she would require if she was to become a woman.

  She could not prevent herself shuddering when she saw the tight-laced bodice that she knew every fashionable woman wore under her gown and it was an article she had never possessed.

  There were countless underclothes made of silk and embellished with real lace that she remembered her mother had always bought.


  There were also silk stockings, high-heeled shoes and pairs of long kid gloves the like of which had never graced her arms.

  “Because I thought it would embarrass you,” her aunt was saying, “I told the maids not to come here until you rang for them. So change your clothes now and let’s be rid of those hideous trousers once and for all.”

  “No, I will keep them,” Georgina breathed, “so that I can remember the happy days when I was free to be myself. But now because you insist on it, Aunt Marjory, I am going to act the part of a woman for which I have no talent and practically no knowledge!”

  “You will soon learn and I promise, if you persuade your cousin to invite us to stay here, we will be only be too delighted to accept.”

  “Oh, please,” Georgina insisted. “It would be much better if you were here when he arrived.”

  “We thought that over, but we decided it might be overwhelming for him to meet too many of the family at once. After all he has managed quite well without us all these years.”

  She glanced at Georgina before she continued,

  “Although we have no wish to impose on him, it is entirely up to you to make him realise that we utterly and completely depend on him.”

  “I should have thought that would make him run away even quicker than he did the first time,” Georgina replied with a twinkle in her eyes.

  Her aunt gave a cry.

  “That is the sort of answer that a soft, sweet and gentle woman would not make to anyone, especially to a man!”

  Because she found it funny, Georgina laughed.

  “I don’t think that I am going to make a very good woman.”

  “Good or bad you are going to be a woman and you must be clever and subtle with Alister.”

  Quite suddenly her aunt’s face altered completely and she said angrily,

  “Now listen to me. You have been told over and over again how clever you are, how if you were a boy you would have achieved a First at Oxford and doubtless made your mark in the House of Lords. Was that all lies?”

  “No, it was true. But that did not teach me how to persuade a man who apparently does not like women to do what I want.”