The accomplished young lady reads to improve, and converses to please; she is admired for the one and trusted for the other., The Young Lady's Counsellor, 1872There are women who enter a room, and women whom a room seems, quietly, to have been expecting.
Serena was the second kind, and she would have been the first to tell you it was an accident of arrangement, the light, the chair, the hour, because she had been raised to distrust the word presence and everything it was used to excuse. But the fact remained.
Men lowered their voices when she passed, and then resented her for it. Women assessed her and, more often than not, decided to like her, which surprised them both.
She was beautiful in a way that photographs of the period fail to convey, being built for motion: tall for a woman of her generation, straight-backed from a girlhood of governesses and correction, with that economy of gesture which the poor learn young and the rich pay dancing-masters to imitate.
Her hair was a true gold, not the ormolu of the hairdresser's art, and she wore it without the elaborate constructions of the day, a plain knot, severely dressed, as if to say: this is not the part of me that matters.
The part that mattered, she appeared to believe, sat behind a pair of deep blue eyes and a mouth that was grave more often than it smiled, and which read, in repose, as a kind of permanent quiet assessment of the world's account-books.
The world she assessed was the London of the late eighteen-eighties, the London of four million souls, of underground railways and Jubilee illuminations, of statistics and sermons, a city drunk on its own improvement and poisoned by its own refuse.
She belonged to its middling stratum: not the peerage, not the street, but that anxious, literate class which reads the papers, keeps one servant, and measures its virtue in shillings carefully given away.
It was a world in which a woman's name was a kind of currency, and a tarnished name no currency at all, a lesson her family had paid, in full and with interest, to learn.
For the family had once been rich. Her grandfather made the money, no one quite remembered in what; something to do with indigo, something to do with ships, and her father, a gentleman of generous instincts and unsecured judgment, unmade it with the confidence of a man who has never personally missed a meal.
Bad investments, in that decade, wore respectable names: Patagonian mines, American railroads, an irrigation scheme in Mysore of which the prospectus was a work of genuine literary art.
The crash, when it came, came quietly, the way these things did in families of a certain standing, no auctioneers, no scandal in the papers, merely a gradual, mortified shrinkage: the house in Cadogan Place first, then the country visits, then the servants, then, at the last, the frank conversation across the breakfast table that ended with her father weeping into his tea and her mother taking to her room for a month.
Serena was nineteen. She had been presented, expensively, for a Season the money had secretly already gone to pay for.
What the ruin left her was instructive, and she took instruction. There was the education, which was real, her father, whatever his sins against compound interest, had engaged tutors of the first water and never once suggested that German or mathematics was wasted on a daughter.
There were the clothes, quietly recut. There was the name, unblemished as yet. And there was a small, hard nugget of resolve which she afterwards mistook, for some years, for her character, though it was in fact only its foundation stone.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
She earned her living the way women of her sort did when they had brains and no husband: half-governess, half-companion, full-time improviser.
She taught French to the daughters of manufacturers in Kensington; she corrected proofs for a publisher in Paternoster Row who paid late and flirted as a substitute; she sat with an invalid aunt in Bayswater who was not, in truth, particularly invalid, but who liked an educated voice reading aloud of an afternoon, and paid for the company.
It was a narrow life, but she made it an orderly one. She rose early. She read for two hours before breakfast, history, then philosophy, then, as a disciplined indulgence, the novels everyone was abusing in the reviews. She kept accounts.
She walked, whatever the weather, because the body, she held, was an instrument and not an ornament, and she had a lifetime's use planned for it.
If she had a flaw, she had several; let us be honest, she is the heroine and must not be embalmed, it was a certain governessy certainty that virtue, sufficiently organised, could be made to prevail. She believed in effort the way other women believed in providence.
She had been sheltered past the age at which sheltering becomes a disservice, and it left her with an innocence that was not stupidity but something more dangerous: a lag.
She understood wickedness in the abstract, she had read her Dickens, her Brontë, her French novelists with the good pages razored out, but she did not yet recognise it at close quarters, in a well-cut coat, holding out a glass of sherry.
When it finally presented itself to her, in exactly that form, she mistook it, as such women do, for complexity, and complexity for depth, and depth for love.
Her beauty, meanwhile, went on being a fact of her existence, and a complicated one. It opened doors, literally; doors were opened for her all her life, and it closed them too, because the same men who were gallant to her face were, behind it, unanimous in their explanation of any success she had.
She learned early that a pretty woman who speaks her mind is impertinent, a plain one merely opinionated, and she made her adjustments.
But she refused the largest adjustment of all, which was the one the age proposed as a career: to be looked at, well, by a man of means, and to trade the looking for a lifetime's board and lodging.
Her mother, in the shrunken lodgings in Bayswater, spoke of this possibility with the desperate tact of a woman watching her last ship prepare to sail. Serena listened kindly, and did not board.
"There will be time," she said, which was what one said.
There was not, particularly, time. She was twenty-three, then twenty-five. The manufacturers' daughters grew up and married. The invalid aunt died, kindly, leaving her fifty pounds and a cameo.
The publisher in Paternoster Row was absorbed by a larger firm with views about female proof readers.
Her small, hard nugget of resolve began, imperceptibly, to change its character, from a thing braced against the world to a thing braced against despair, and it was at precisely this juncture, as such things are arranged in novels and in life, that the envelope arrived.
Heavy cream paper. No crest. Violet ink. An address she did not know, and an hour after dark.
She ought to have burned it. She read it four times, instead, and noticed with detachment that her hands were not entirely steady, and spent the evening in a state she would have described, to anyone who dared ask, as moral indignation.
She went, of course. They always go; that is how there comes to be a story. But the reader should understand that she went as an educated woman goes to an examination, curious, wary, and entirely persuaded of her own invulnerability, and that the man who sent the note had counted on precisely that persuasion, having made a close study, over several weeks, of the way she held her chin.