“And I?” Mother asked softly.
“I will readily subsidize your board with any private and respectable family.”
She swallowed hard. “Then we are not to resume…as things once were.”
Papa’s expression was pained. He felt the impropriety of his conduct, but it was in vain that my mother tried to change his resolution. I was convinced that Papa was held by a fatal fascination, the slave of a young and artful woman who had availed herself of his American solitude to undermine the felicity of his family and his affections for his wife. I knew my father’s better qualities: his mind was strongly organized, his sense of honor delicate even to fastidiousness—therefore, the only answer I could fathom was that he was the dupe of his passions, the victim of an unfortunate attachment. My girlish mind, and the conflicted loyalties of a devoted daughter, viewed Elenor as evil, my mother as blameless, and Papa as caught in a purgatory not entirely of his own making.
“My decision is…final,” he said, his voice breaking.
Though in private I would rage against it, refusing to accept its finality, this information dealt the death blow to my parents’ domestic hopes.
With no further expectation of future reconciliation, within a few days of our arrival in London, Mother made arrangements to board at a clergyman’s home in Chelsea and plans were settled upon for the education of myself and little George.
I was placed at the nearby Lorrington Academy under the tutelage of a rare bird named Meribah Lorrington. All I ever learned I acquired from this extraordinary woman. Deprived of my chance to be father’s little girl, his favored one, I threw myself headlong into the role of the diligent scholar, applying myself rigidly to study, and acquiring a taste for books, which has never from that time deserted me. Mrs. Lorrington herself had enjoyed the benefit of a masculine education, owing to the resolve of her father, who, once widowed, vowed to cultivate his daughter’s superior mental powers in every respect.
Here was the opportunity for an education that would actually prove useful in the world beyond the confines of a middle-class drawing room. True, Mrs. Lorrington passed along to her charges the ability to paint on silk (she was in point of fact a great proficient in that most ladylike of pastimes), but at the eponymous academy girls were taught such “masculine” subjects as the proprietress herself had learnt. Even during that Age of Enlightenment, a female who was schooled in the sciences and mathematics was an anomaly. At most girls’ boarding schools, an education was deemed sufficient if a pupil read authors whose works she did not comprehend, prattled a foreign jargon without knowing the meaning of the words she uttered, finished needlework which in half a century would only adorn the lumber room of her granddaughter, and learned by ear a few old lessons on the harpsichord—so little graced by science and so methodically dull that they would scarcely have served as an opiate to a country squire after the voluntary toil of a fox chase.
Mrs. Lorrington had but five or six students under her tutelage, and it was my lot to be her especial favorite, perhaps because I applied myself to my lessons with particular diligence. I even slept on a little cot in her bedchamber, and she made no scruple of conversing with me on domestic and confidential affairs, though I was still only twelve years old. “My little friend,” she called me. Mrs. Lorrington would take it upon herself to read to me after school hours, and I to her. It was she who taught me to read aloud with dramatic inflection—she, herself, had a husky and melodic voice that reminded me of my father’s, its warm tones caressing the words as though they were intimates—and it was under her tutelage that I first turned my hand to poetry.
Though Mrs. Lorrington was proficient enough in the classical and modern languages, astronomy, and arithmetic to impart them to her pupils, she suffered from a singular and unfortunate failing. The poor creature’s frequent intoxication too often rendered her unable to withstand the task of her lessons. Though even the youngest student could detect, at least by virtue of her olfactory senses, that something was amiss, it was my special fate to learn the root of poor Mrs. Lorrington’s misfortune. Taking me into her confidence one rainy evening, she knit her dark brows together—though they had not far to go, for they were nigh to greeting one another just above her nose—and confessed the immitigable regret of a widowed heart.
“Mr. Lorrington was a printer,” she told me. “A fine man who worked long hours at his press, taking any job that came his way.” She knelt down and began to search under her bed for something. “Broadsheets, ballads, newspapers, theatre programs…for he so loved the written word that he took delight in sharing it with others.” With a triumphant “Ah!” she withdrew a large paper box, its surface covered with a quantity of dust.
The abundance of tiny motes tickled my nose; I sneezed into my sleeve and was immediately mortified by my own indelicacy.
“He would come home smelling of ink,” Mrs. Lorrington murmured wistfully, her words slowed and slurred by the effects of the gin. “Pour me another; there’s a girl.” Fearing some sort of retribution if I did not comply with my tutor’s request, I poured her half a tot.
“Don’t be stingy, Mary. It’s not a trait to be cultivated, particularly in one so young.” Guiltily, I filled her cup to the rim. “I grew to love that odor.”
“The ink, you mean?” I asked her, wondering if she was not referring to the spirits instead.
She nodded her head, eyes closed as if to conjure the scent through memory, transporting her back in time to happier
