Free The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith Page A

if we’re to find you a husband, it’s best you be in a real town, in society.” He didn’t say it, but she knew what he meant. Until she married, he’d have to support her. Till then, at least he’d have his spinster daughter to take care of him.
    As she walked about the house with its strange walls, she felt as if the boundaries of her selfhood had somehow melted, as if she no longer knew who she was. From her bedroom she could see the three spires of the city, the factories in the distance, and the tortured little cottages of the slums. Going to market, she saw groups of children streaming in through the gates of the ribbon factories, some but five or six years old, their breath steaming in the cold, carrying their little lunch pails. They worked as winders. Outside the almshouses there were long lines of women in ragged clothes, babies at their breasts, stompingtheir feet in the freezing air, queuing for bread. All those poor souls coming to the city from the countryside hoping for work.
“The prevalence of misery and want in this boasted nation of prosperity and glory is appalling,”
she wrote to Maria Lewis, her old teacher at Miss Wallington’s school. Maria had taken a position as a governess in a clergyman’s family in Northamptonshire. They still corresponded, but Marian felt increasingly distant from her. Maria could not possibly know her world now, the books and learning she had taught herself. She’d gone so far beyond that sad little girl that Maria had taken in her arms at Mrs. Wallington’s.
    The people of Coventry were cold and unfriendly. The only acquaintances they had were their next-door neighbors, Abijah and Elizabeth Pears, whom her father knew from conducting business in Coventry for the Arbury Estate. The Pearses were pious Evangelists. Marian and Elizabeth became friends. Elizabeth was impressed by all the books Marian had read. They discussed the shocking conditions in the city and decided to found a clothing club for the miners’ families.
    Elizabeth came from a family of ribbon manufacturers; her brother, Charles, ran the business, C. Bray & Co., and he and his wife, Cara, lived at the top of Radford Road. “They have all sorts of strange types visiting there,” Elizabeth told Marian. “Rather disreputable sorts, I’m afraid, freethinkers, reformers, writers. Perhaps if I introduce you, you’ll have a good influence on them.”
    So, one brisk November day, Elizabeth led her across the fields and along the canal to visit her brother and sister-in-law. Marian was nervous at the prospect of meeting thesevaguely “dangerous” people, these supposed “radicals.” She was afraid she’d fail completely in the company of such exotic types, that they’d find her dull and provincial.
    They came to a Georgian mansion, Rosehill, surrounded by acres of grounds.
    Elizabeth’s brother, Charles, was at the front door to greet them. “Come in! Come in!” he cried. Charles seemed like a force of nature, with ruddy cheeks, a full, sensual mouth, unruly hair, a sturdy body. Behind him stood his wife, Cara, a tiny, pretty, gentle creature, with a vague sadness about her, Marian thought. She looked like a doll, with round blue eyes, lovely, long, blond ringlets around her face, and sloping shoulders.
    Marian sat on the ottoman in the drawing room by the French window and Charles pulled a chair up next to her. He looked down at her intently.
    “My sister, Elizabeth, says you are a most extraordinary young woman. She says you’ve read everything.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Marian said.
    “Well, have you read Emerson’s essays?”
    “I have,” she said.
    “Have you read
Sartor Resartus
?”
    “Of course.”
    “What about my brother-in-law Charles Hennell’s book,
An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity
?”
    “He’s your brother-in-law?” she asked.
    “Indeed, he’s Cara’s brother.”
    “I am amazed to be sitting here,” she said with a smile. “The way he