Free All My Sins Remembered by Rosie Thomas Page A

went to Blanche. She kissed the top of her head, in the middle where the dark hair parted to reveal the white skin beneath. Then she wandered to the window, and looked down at the wide park.
    ‘Will the baby be an heir for John and all this?’
    ‘I am quite sure it is a boy, and so is John,’ Blanche said composedly.
    Blanche’s son was born a week later, and named Hugo John. By family tradition he took his father’s second title, Viscount Culmington.
    It was an easy, uncomplicated birth. Eleanor stayed with her sister until she was well enough to leave her rooms, and then she travelled back to Nathaniel with her own news.
    Seven months later, in April 1898, Jacob Nathaniel Hirsh was born in Oxford, arriving as quickly and easily as his cousin Hugo had done.
    Before his son’s birth Nathaniel had found the family house he had always intended to own. It was to the north of city, in the Woodstock Road, in the heart of an area of solid new houses colonized by the first generation of University dons who were allowed to marry and live outside their colleges. It was a tall red-brick building that reared up from its newly planted garden and loomed over the quiet road like a Gothic castle in miniature. There were arched windows at a dozen different levels, doors in unexpected recesses and a round turret topped off with its own pinnacle of purplish slate. Inside there was a good deal of stained glass and polished mahogany, and short flights of shallow stairs leading from one mystifying level to the next. It had ten inconveniently sited bedrooms and only one bathroom; it cost much more money than they could afford; and Eleanor and Nathaniel both loved it.
    The new house stood on an oddly shaped three-quarters of an acre plot, which Eleanor claimed at once as her own with the garden at Fernhaugh as her model. By the time Jacob was born, she felt her house and her garden fitting around her as comfortably as a shell enclosing an oyster. She told Nathaniel that he had better find that it suited him too, because she had no intention of ever living anywhere else.
    ‘It is too big,’ Nathaniel protested. ‘All these rooms, just for us and Jakie and his nurse and a couple of maids. We need more children, Eleanor. We need to fill up the house. I want a dozen children, a whole team, a chamber orchestra.’
    Eleanor laughed at him. ‘A dozen? How will we feed them all?’
    The Hirshes had very little money.
    ‘Leave that to me. I shall be Professor Hirsh before you know it.’
    Eleanor didn’t doubt it. She was proud of her husband’s growing academic reputation, and she was glad to see the students who began to flock to their house to hear him talk.
    ‘A chamber orchestra it shall be then,’ she agreed with mock obedience. Nathaniel loved music almost as much as he loved books.
    In the next year Eleanor made a long summer visit to Stretton, taking Jake with her, and the sisters sat tranquilly in the shade of Capability Brown’s trees with their babies beside them. Blanche came to Oxford in her turn, and discovered how much she enjoyed the Hirshes’ unconventional domestic life after the formalities of Stretton. Eleanor often forgot to order food; the Irish cook was no more reliable; Nathaniel could turn up with two or twenty hungry undergraduates at any hour of the day; but the odd corners of the red-brick miniature castle were full of the twins’ laughter all through Blanche’s visit.
    Their only regret was that their husbands would never be friends. John Leominster was courteous, but he clearly regarded Nathaniel as a dangerous barbarian. And where Eleanor had made gentle fun of her brother-in-law, Nathaniel’s jokes were sharper, rooted in his mistrust of the English aristocracy itself. But both men liked to see their sisters-in-law, and Eleanor and Blanche contented themselves with that much.
    Towards the end of 1900, when Jake was well out of babyhood and Nathaniel was beginning to be anxious and impatient, Eleanor