Free So Well Remembered by James Hilton

Kingdom: “Please, Miss Fortescue, what’s the LOWEST?”
* * * * *
    Another war did begin, as Emily had envisaged (but it was
between Russia
and Japan, and so not one in which an English household had to take sides);
meanwhile Livia passed her sixth birthday; meanwhile also the cotton trade
boomed and then slumped. This would have mattered more at Stoneclough had not
Emily possessed a little money of her own; indeed, it was a subject of bitter
comment throughout Browdley, where hundreds had been ruined as a result of
the Channing crash, that the family responsible for it seemed to be
flourishing just as formerly. But this was not quite accurate. Browdley did
not realize how much had been abandoned—the town house in London, the
holidays at Marienbad, the platoon of servants; and while to Browdley life at
Stoneclough was itself a luxury, to Emily it was an economy enforced by the
fact that the house was of a size and style that made it practically
unsaleable, and thus cheaper to stay in than to give up. So they stayed
—she and Livia and Miss Fortescue and Watson the gardener-coachman-
handyman (a truly skeleton staff for such an establishment); and the blacker
the looks of Browdley people, as trade worsened and times became harder, the
more advantageous it seemed that Stoneclough was so remote although so close
—a moorland fastness that no one from the town need approach save in
the mood and on the occasions of holidays. All of which, in its own way,
conditioned Livia’s childhood. Sundays in summer-time were the days when she
must, above all things, remain within the half-mile of garden fence;
week-days in winter-time permitted her the greatest amount of freedom. It was
easy, by this means, to keep her ignorant of everything except Miss
Fortescue’s teachings and a general impression that all nature was kind and
all humanity to be avoided.
    And Emily, who liked to put things off anyway, kept putting off the time
for correcting all this. “Next year perhaps,” she would say, whenever Dr.
Whiteside mentioned the matter. He was an old man who had brought both Livia
and Livia’s father into the world; he did not greatly care for Emily and
doubted the wisdom of most things that she did. “It’s time the child went to
school and mixed with people,” he kept urging. “Why don’t you tell her the
truth and get it over? You’ll have her self-centred and neurotic if she stays
here seeing nobody but you and Sarah and Miss Fortescue… What does John
think about it?”
    “He left it to me to tell her when I think the moment is right,” replied
Emily, with strained accuracy. “She’s only eight, remember.”
    But it was just the same when Emily was able to say “She’s only nine” and
“She’s only ten”. And by that time also another thing had happened. John had
been transferred to a prison in the south of England, and Emily no longer saw
him every month. After all, it was a long journey just for the sake of one
short interview, and it was possible also to wonder what good it did, either
to him or her; letters were much easier.
    Not that Emily was a hard-hearted woman—far from it. She had no
bitterness against her husband for either the crash or the crime, or even
against the country for having jailed him; she had no conviction that he
deserved his punishment—nor, on the other hand, that he had been
monstrously over-punished. The whole situation was one she could no longer
come to terms with at all, since it had passed the stage of romantic
interpretation. She was still able to weep whenever she thought of him, but
equally able to go without thinking of him for long periods, and the idea of
raking the whole thing up by telling Livia was not only distasteful, but
something she was a little scared of. Already she was aware of something in
Livia—character or personality or whatever one called it—that
outclassed her own. For one thing, Livia had no fear—of