Another Regency Romance Ch. 01

This is my personal homage to Georgette Heyer, the doyenne of romantic comedy writing. Of course, my take on the Regency period is very different from hers, but she has written very astutely and sympathetically about the equivocal position of secretaries, stewards, housekeepers and governesses in noble households, and I have unashamedly taken a leaf from her book.

Alas I have not her wit and humour nor her gift for wonderful, sparkling dialogue, but I comfort myself that she was halfway through her career as a writer before those gifts fully manifested themselves.

1. George's tale:

I must admit to having been singularly fortunate in my life so far. At twenty, I had come down from Cambridge with an excellent mathematics degree and the title of Second Wrangler. Not bad for the second son of a Norfolk tenant farmer, whose grandfather had fled to the sandy fields of Norfolk after the Jacobite rising and the slaughter and repression that followed. My family, formerly clansmen of the Clan M'Crimmond, are not wealthy, or well connected, but we rent six hundred acres, and have an excellent local reputation and the patronage of a powerful local family, the Cokes of Holkham.

As a poor Scholar at Cambridge, I did not have to pay fees, something my parents could not have afforded, but I soon learned that, in return for room and rather meagre board, I was obliged to act as an unpaid servant to a rich student, known as a Commoner.

This service could be, and often was onerous and humiliating, but I had great good fortune. Another George, George Dutton, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, was within six months of my own age, and going up to Christ's College in the same term as myself. As a Fellow-Commoner, (one who has the privilege of eating at the Fellows' table), Dutton enjoyed considerable privileges, and I found myself told off to serve him, much like a fag at public school. (Or so I understand. I never came near a Public School. I got my Latin and Greek at the ancient Grammar School at King's Lynn, and my mathematics from the Rector of our parish, Dr. Keithley.)

George Dutton and I quickly established that we were fellow East Anglians, and that we both knew the Holkham estate well. Soon our true status was as close friends, rather than master and man. I was of course careful to keep up the proprieties, even in private, but we were soon on familiar terms.

Dutton's parents promised to buy him a Majority in the Honourable Artillery Company when he got his degree. Being a well-meaning and conscientious young man, he requested me to coach him in trigonometry, in the assumption that an artillery officer would be expected to lay guns and calculate loads and trajectories.

Happily he was a man of parts, and I was able accomplish this so successfully, that when Major, the Honourable George Dutton arrived at the barracks; his fellow officers were all astounded. It was rather as if he plucked and dressed his own pheasants for mess dinner. Mathematics, it seems, was something an officer and gentleman left to senior NCOs.

I graduated with first class honours, and prepared to return home to Fakenham. With a Masters degree in train, I was technically a clerk in holy orders, and well qualified to be a curate of the established church, despite having no shred of religiosity in my nature. However, having attended Matins and Evensong from a babe-in-arms, I knew the liturgy inside out.

My sojourn in Fakenham was not to be long. George Dutton had not been idle on my behalf, and within a month I was offered a post of great responsibility as private secretary to Edward Fox, the third Baron Russell, another of the Coke family's Whig connections.

I travelled by Mail to Leicester, and by the family's crested coach to Seagrave Hall. By that time I was struggling to stay awake, but we arrived at dusk, to find it raining. Lord and Lady Russell came out to the coach to greet me in the pouring rain, along with their daughters. As they stood, sheltering under umbrellas held up by the footmen, I was deeply impressed by their courtesy and grace, putting up with such discomfort in order to make a stranger and dependent welcome.

I hate to be unoccupied. Parliament was in summer recess, and Lord Russell had rather less work for me than would have been comfortable for me. I made work for myself by filing and organising his correspondence and annotating the political letters, then asked if I might update the library catalogue, which had not been opened for a generation. This work was pleasant and not laborious, so I thought that next I might turn my attention to the muniments room. Lady Russell had a better idea.

"Mr M'Crimmond. I hear from Selina Dutton that you coached her son in mathematics with great success."

"I like to think that I was able to be of some help, Lady Russell, but George did all the hard work, and the credit is entirely his. I doubt there is a young officer anywhere with a better grasp of trigonometry and he tells me that he is still persevering in his studies. He will be a Major General before he's forty."

Lord Russell, who had kept out of the discussion so far, interjected:

"God forbid that we should have that speed of promotion in our lifetime, for that could only mean another great war."

"Be that as it may", interrupted his Lady brusquely. "I doubt if she will have the same level of application or understanding, but I wished to ask if you would do us the favour of helping my Amelia with arithmetic. I have been trying to teach her to cast up household accounts, and I was dismayed to find that she could not add up a column of figures and get the same answer twice."

"Weel, I can only try, my lady."

"Thank you Mr M'Crimmond, I shall tell her to attend you in the library at ten o'clock each morning for an hour. If she leads you the dance she led some of her governesses, speak to me. She is not yet too old to heed her mother's voice."

Eratosthanes

Miss Fox came into the library with such grace that she seemed to glide rather than walk. As she entered the room I stood up to greet her.

"Good morning Mr M'Crimmond". She stood demurely, hands loosely clasped. She bobbed a small curtsey and I gave a slight bow.

"Good morning Miss Fox. You are very punctual, and you seem well prepared."

Coming over to the long table under the window, she sat down beside me. She aligned the notebooks and her arithmetic primer exactly parallel with the table edge, and lined up her pencils on the right of the books in size order, the smallest next to her hand. She smiled at me sweetly, and waited for me to begin. Butter would not have melted in her mouth.

First of all, we had to get back to the solid base; the point in the past before the problems began. So we started with addition. By her mother's account, she could not add a column of shillings and pence in an account book. I started with a piece of mental arithmetic.

"Please work this out in your head. Add the following numbers. I shall say them slowly. Thirty-one; twenty-eight; thirty-one."

She scarcely paused for thought.

"Ninety."

"Method?"

"I added 31 to itself, to get sixty-two then added twenty-eight."

"Very good. Now add three hundred and sixty-five to itself."

She thought harder, and I saw a charming wrinkle form between her delicately arched brows.

"Seven hundred and thirty", she announced

When I asked her method, she replied confidently:

"I added sixty five to itself to get one hundred and thirty, then I added 600."

"Why six hundred?"

"Because it is twice three hundred, of course."

"Did three hundred and sixty-five have any meaning for you?"

"No. Why? Should it?"

"Only that it's the number of days in a year."

"Is it?"

A topic for later, I thought,

"Good. You have good number sense."

She coloured slightly and beamed at me as if I had just called her the most beautiful girl in the world.

We progressed rapidly through the rule of four. She was a bit shaky in multiplication and division, and needed anything over tens and units written down. I discreetly tested her memory of the multiplication tables, and learned that she had never been pushed beyond twelve times three. I was a bit dismayed. How can you hope to build with no foundations?

Now was the time to test out the idea I had been forming over the past

Year or two as I had coached several young men in mathematics, to earn some pocket money. Is it possible to teach number skills painlessly through forms of play? I certainly believed so.

"Miss Fox, have you ever heard of Eratosthanes' sieve?"

"No, Mister M'Crimmond, I have never heard of Eratosthenes' sieve."

"I have some letters to write. What I should like you to do is prepare a grid, ten squares by ten, and put in the numbers 2 to 100. First, go and fetch your water-colours box, brushes and a water-pot".

She got up without a murmur, and went off to do my bidding. I was impressed. I had collected the idea that she and her sisters had tried a succession of governesses who had been totally unable to impose any control or discipline. But here she was, sweetly co-operative and as eager to please as a toddler. As I read through the letters and my notes on Lord Russell's responses, she sat down quietly and began ruling up the matrix.

She worked neatly and meticulously, and numbered the squares from one to a hundred. I looked over her shoulder and corrected her:

"No, Miss Fox, I said two to one hundred. One is irrelevant for our purposes. She blushed and apologised, picking up an eraser and emptying the square.

Tell me, what is one multiplied by itself?"

"One times one is one," she chanted.

"And what is sixty-two multiplied by one?"

"Sixty-two of course".

"Exactly. One set of sixty-two".

Now, on your grid, colour the number two in red, and then go through colouring all the multiples of two on your grid until you come to one hundred...."

We worked for an hour. In that time, one of her younger sisters, the Steward and a parlour maid came in on one excuse or another. It was clear that a girl not yet out and a young male private secretary, needed intermittent, but careful scrutiny.

As she left the room, to return to her mother and sisters, she had one request.

Mr. M'Crimmond, I would deem it a great favour if, when we are at our lessons, you would call me Amelia."

As the eldest daughter, she was, of course, entitled to be styled Miss Fox, and her younger sisters Miss Lydia and Miss Doria.

"Very well, Miss Amelia, I shall endeavour to do as you wish."

Over the next couple of weeks we played around with factors, square numbers, prime numbers, common multiples, common denominators, fractions and the decimal fractions recently introduced by Napoleon, in fact the whole framework of arithmetic. The sieve was an admirable tool for seeing number relationships, and we soon extended it to 400 on a twenty by twenty grid, to allow more permutations.

Miss Amelia's confidence grew as her number sense expanded, and she soon took the games we played to her younger sisters, and caught their imaginations too. Several times a week, with their mother's permission, Miss Lydia and Miss Doria joined us to work as a team of four. Amelia's mother relaxed, and her stern face broke into a little smile as she listened to the pleasure her daughters were taking in what had been the most daunting of school-time drudgery. The surveillance relaxed.

Then came a change that grew and grew, The first time it happened, both Miss Amelia's sisters were present at the long table. Miss Amelia was sitting close beside me, and, when the girls had their heads down, hard at work, she put her hand firmly on my thigh and stroked, fingertips brushing along the inside of my thigh in what was unmistakably a caress. I jumped in my seat, and an unwanted and an embarrassing physical manifestation occurred. She must have noticed, and she unhurriedly removed her hand. Her colour was a little heightened and she smiled at me mischievously.

The girls finished their lesson and tidied the desk. Then, as had become their practise, they bobbed a little curtsey to me, and I stood and bowed to them.

"Thank you Mr. M'Crimmond", they chorused. I am sure that Miss Amelia mouthed silently, "I love you", as her wide, brilliant eyes bored into mine. And then they were gone.