The Wager. Sally Cheney

Marianne Trenton found herself two days later once again behind Rickers, in an open coach on her way to the Farnham Academy for the Edification of Young Ladies of Quality.

      She had been at Kingsbrook for just twenty-one days, but they had been the most tumultuous days of her young life. She was surprised to feel an ache of homesickness in her throat as a turn in the road concealed the manor house and parkland surrounding it. Her days at Kingsbrook had perhaps not been happy, but they had become an important part of her.

      

      The academy was housed in an unremarkable gray stone building of three floors, with two smaller adjoining buildings. One of the outbuildings served as the kitchen, from which food never arrived hot at the long table in the dining room, though the room was on the ground floor, with a door that opened directly onto the walk leading from the cookhouse.

      The other outbuilding was for physical exertion and exercise, “as necessary to the well-being of the body as nourishment.” Mrs. Avery, a spiky woman of rail-like thinness, was a great advocate of the benefits of physical exertion and exercise.

      The main portion of the school, where the girls spent most of their time, was inside the big center building.

      Mr. Desmond’s careful inquiries had indeed located a very creditable institute of learning for “young women of quality of that advanced day.” Occasionally, though, as Marianne attended Miss Gransby’s elocution classes, Mrs. Lynk’s deportment classes or Mr. Brannon’s ancient history classes, her attention strayed, and she wondered if a school slightly less tailored to young women of quality might not have been more interesting.

      Mrs. Avery taught the Latin classes. “Not all schools for young ladies include the study of Latin,” she often reminded them. “Young women are taught to speak softly and work their needlepoint, while all the most sublime thoughts of mankind are locked away in the classic languages. Young men are taught Latin. Boys of eight years old are taught Latin. You young women are extremely fortunate to receive that same mystic key.”

      Rickers delivered Marianne to the gaunt stone edifice on the afternoon of this fine day in the latter part of June.

      “Miss Trenton.” It was Mrs. Avery herself who greeted the new student. “Welcome to the Farnham Academy. I hope you will be happy here.”

      Marianne hoped she would, too, and murmured vague words of agreement. She was shown to her room, or rather, to the dormitory where half the girls in the school slept. The other half, the younger girls, ages eight to twelve, slept below stairs in much more cramped quarters.

      Next to her bed was a stand with two drawers for her smallclothes and other personal possessions. Marianne, like everyone else, was issued a lightweight, brown woolen skirt and two muslin blouses to be worn to classes. The skirts, blouses and any dresses the girls might have brought with them from home hung in a long common closet at the end of the room.

      Owing to Mrs. Avery’s emphasis on exercise, and the laundry being done only once a week, the odor that issued forth from the closet when she folded back the screen was heady, and Marianne was not at all sure she wanted to hang her things in there. But she had little choice, so she changed dutifully from the frock she had worn from Kingsbrook into the school uniform. Rejoining Mrs. Avery in the receiving hall, she was shown to her classes.

      “’There is a place within the depths of Hell/ Call’d Malebolge…’“ A thin, pale girl, who looked younger than Marianne was reading aloud from a worn book she and her deskmate were sharing. The little woman at the head of the class clapped her hands sharply and the reader stopped, looking up, like the rest of the girls, to curiously study the new student disturbing their lessons.

      “Girls, this is Miss Marianne Trenton. Miss Trenton, you may sit there, in the last desk. Judith, see that Miss Trenton has a copy of Mr. Aligheiri’s Divina Commedia. Nedra, you may continue. We are in Hell, Miss Trenton….”

      The girls were pleasant enough, but Marianne was slow to make friends in the school. It was a week before she said a complete sentence to anyone, two before she divulged any personal information about herself, and that was only to reveal her age and birthday to Nedra, the pale reader in that first class.

      Marianne and Nedra Stevens were drawn together the same way two falling leaves are thrown together atop a swirling stream.

      More or less isolated for the past two, pivotal years of her life, Marianne did not know how girls her age were supposed to behave. So she withdrew into a shell that, even a month later, had been only slightly eroded by Nedra’s gentle personality.

      A year younger than Marianne, she presented no threat, and so colorless both in body and spirit as to be practically transparent, she did not intimidate Marianne, nor overshadow her. When Marianne could be dragged from her books, the two girls spent quiet afternoons together.

      Nedra told her she lived in a house overlooking the ocean. Marianne described the mysterious wonders of Kingsbrook. Nedra told Marianne of her two brothers, both older than she was; of her mother, who suffered from poor health; of her father and his business of selling water-resistant clothing to the local seamen; and of her cousin, with whom she had been hopelessly in love since she was seven.

      For her part, Marianne supposed she may have mentioned her guardian and his physical attributes a time or two.

      In fact, Marianne was somewhat distressed to find Mr. Desmond so often in her thoughts. For one thing, there was that envelope she received from Mr. Bradley, Esq., every week. “Mr. Desmond has arranged for you to receive a small allowance to provide for the miscellaneous necessaries of a young woman,” Mr. Bradley explained in a letter accompanying the first banknote. Her clothes were provided, her food was provided, her living quarters and books were provided, and there were very few additional “miscellaneous necessaries” on which to spend the money. She took the bill from the envelope every week and put it in the first very stiff, very white, very solemn-looking envelope she had received from the solicitor’s office. At the end of two months that envelope was becoming quite thick and could not help but remind Marianne of the man and the favors for which perhaps he thought he was paying in advance.

      The other reason it was so difficult to dismiss thoughts of Mr. Desmond was, having had Uncle Horace and now Mr. Brannon, the history teacher, as points of comparison, she was beginning to realize how unusually good-looking her guardian was.

      

      “Now, young ladies, I trust you will conduct yourselves as such today. Miss Gransby, Mrs. Grey and myself are here to direct you, but not to tend you as if you were infants. Reading, as you have been told, offers a very fine art gallery where, it is hoped, some of you will be inspired to improve your own artistic efforts. In the Reading museum we will find a number of ancient relics, some dating from the time of Henry I. You remember the remains of the Benedictine abbey we saw. That was founded by Henry I, converted by Henry VIII into a palace….”

      Mrs. Avery lectured dryly over her shoulder at the brood of young girls trailing at her heels, all of them agog at the sights and sounds to behold in the town, at the thrill of being on an outing of such magnitude.

      Calling it a “marvelous learning opportunity,” Mrs. Avery had already lectured them for hours on the wonders they were to behold at the Reading museum and art gallery, “not to mention—” though she did, often, at great length “—the free lending library, and, of course, the university.”

      Whenever Mrs. Avery spoke of the university, she raised her eyebrows and looked over the top of her reading spectacles at the girls. She had warned them that Reading was a university town, but that they were to take no notice of young college men they might see on the streets of the city.

      Such warnings were useless. How could the girls, all of them in their teen years, not notice the handsome young men who thronged the streets of Reading, looking terribly serious as they hurried along?

      Mrs. Avery had also advised her charges to keep their heads down, their voices low, and to stay in step with the girl in front of them at all times. Instead they clustered together in excited little groups, pointing and giggling shrilly and tending to wander away from