A Natural Sort of Woman

By Frances Nugent

At five foot eleven in her stockings, and certainly not slender, Harriet Murray is painfully aware that she is unattractive to men. By choosing to work in her father’s office, she is looked on by her mother as a failure, eccentric and unwomanly, and by the age of 24 she is considered a confirmed spinster. But a visit to her sister in Brittany in the summer of 1870, just before France declares war on Prussia, propels her into quite a different life of love and war during the siege of Paris, and in the aftermath she battles to follow a profession that only a handful of women have ever tackled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Nugent
• Release date: May 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463962626

Frances Nugent

Frances Nugent has been a copyeditor of non-fiction for 30 years. In the 1990s she had two books published by Sceptre: Drawing from Life and Northern Lights. She has also self-published The Azalea Garden (2012), but her first love was always writing historical fiction. Frances lives in Nottingham with her husband. She has two daughters and three grandchildren.

Book preview

Chapter 1

April, 1870

Harriet Murray fingered two thin sheets of writing paper in the pocket of her black stuff dress. The letter from France had come that morning, not addressed to her at home but at the offices of A. Murray & Son, wine merchants of Bristol, and it had been handed to her by one of the junior clerks among the pile of correspondence that arrived each day upon her desk. When her sister Selina did that, it meant the letter’s contents were for Harriet’s eyes only, and not their mother’s, since Grace Murray was not above rifling through her children’s correspondence.

It was an appeal: ‘Harriet, you must come this time, please...’

Three years ago, when Selina Hurst had travelled to Paris with her new bridegroom, the whole city had been in holiday mood. Over the Champs-de-Mars rose the huge glass pavilion of the Great Exhibition, which displayed to marvelling visitors the most up-to-date achievements and inventions of modern man. At the Tuileries Palace, lights powered by electricity lit up the Empress Eugenie’s ball.

To Selina it seemed there had never been such a honeymoon. ‘Today we went up in a balloon over the Exhibition grounds ...’ she wrote to her mother and sister. ‘This afternoon we took an excursion on the Seine ...’ ‘Last night we waltzed at the British Embassy ...’

‘You must come,’ she urged Harriet. ‘Everything here is so lively and beautiful.’

The idea of Paris had always entranced her, but Harriet didn’t imagine she would ever be allowed to go. Her mother thought brisk sea air and country walks the best holidays for young people, the Grand Tour was out of fashion, and there was much in foreign art galleries that girls could not be exposed to. At one time Harriet had hoped to travel with her father to the wine-growing countries, but even that had not been considered proper. She was now a woman of twenty-four, but still she was not permitted to go abroad even with her own father.

And now the plea had come again, even more urgently: ‘Harriet, please come...’

There may have been other female clerks in other offices during the fourth decade of Queen Victoria’s reign, though Harriet had never heard of any. Girls were supposed to marry, not tax their brains with facts and figures. But Harriet, at five feet eleven inches tall in her stockings, and certainly not slender, was not considered ideal marriage material. Her mother seemed to take her size as a personal insult, as though Harriet had done it on purpose. Too tall, too outspoken, too clever. In a daughter these were considered faults. In a son, Harriet reflected, they would have been virtues.

At the age of eighteen she had rebelled against all that was expected of her. There was that deathly boredom once her governess Mademoiselle Arnaud had been dismissed, the long blank days, punctuated by morning visits (‘do not by any means remove either shawl or bonnet during your stay’) and receiving company (‘it is a proof of attention and politeness on the part of a lady always to be in readiness to receive her guests; the contrary is disrespectful’). Harriet, to her mother’s chagrin, could never come to terms with the etiquette book.

She was supposed to study the piano – she was all thumbs at the piano. Dancing was thought to provide both exercise and amusement – she was ungainly and always forgot the steps. Reading, at least, she could enjoy, though after Blanche Arnaud’s abrupt departure some novels were suddenly forbidden. Mademoiselle used to receive the latest books from France, which arrived in anonymous brown paper packets, and since her mother was unfamiliar with French, Harriet was able to pass them off as improving literature.

After Selina left the schoolroom, Harriet and Blanche had been left alone to discuss what they pleased in a language Grace couldn’t understand. It was supposed to be geography and history, drawing and embroidery, deportment and correct conduct, but often it was not.

‘To live in a world ruled by men – it is difficult,’ Blanche said. ‘Especially if you have intelligence. You are supposed to obey. It is in the marriage service.’ She smiled. ‘But you – you will find a way. We must all find a way.’

Harriet never discovered why Mademoiselle Arnaud had been so summarily sent away, but she gleefully believed it was because she had a lover. She knew what a lover was, because Blanche had told her.

When Mademoiselle had gone, Harriet was expected to receive visits from young ladies her mother approved of, who thought of nothing but fashion and hairstyles and which one would be first to become engaged. Becoming engaged was supposed to be the whole object of her existence. But Harriet didn’t envisage ever receiving a proposal. Men were apt to look straight past her to Selina, who was prettier and daintier, who didn’t tower over them, and who certainly didn’t contradict them.

Rather than being a landmark in her life, Harriet’s first grown-up ball was a torment to them all.

‘She’s like an elephant.’ Harriet heard the words quite plainly, and she announced to her parents that she couldn’t bear it and she was going home.

‘I don’t like being … paraded!’

‘Surely not as bad as that …’

Harriet’s eyes were aflame. ‘Papa, I might have been a piece of meat! I’m surprised I wasn’t prodded and poked.’

But that was only the beginning. It was her duty to endure many more dances and parties, trussed up in elaborate silk to attract a mate, like a tropical bird, even to the ostrich feathers stuck in her hair, which made her taller still. For her father’s sake she tried to be polite, but she certainly wasn’t going to pretend to be empty-headed, just to please some man who was less intelligent than she was. And who wanted to dance with an elephant?

Harriet raged, her mother cried. And Harriet cried too when she was alone. Her life seemed to consist of a mixture of utter monotony and humiliation. Her father was wealthy and what she saw in the mirror wasn’t ugly, but a few extra inches and a mind of her own apparently made her completely ineligible. Yet if she didn’t marry, what was she to do? She had no other function in the world.

But eventually she began to find a way. Harriet may not have had the other accomplishments her mother esteemed, but she did have one talent that her father appreciated. When his clients – wine growers from Europe, important buyers from London – came to dinner and she was allowed to converse with them on equal terms, Harriet could be herself. If the visitors happened to be French, Harriet impressed them by talking fluently in their own language on a variety of subjects, not just wine. It was even a pleasure to wear the silk gowns in her parents’ dining-room, where no one was weighing her charms in the balance.

‘You see, all that conversation with Mademoiselle Arnaud wasn’t wasted after all,’ Arthur Murray said, with a knowing glance at his wife. ‘I wish you’d come into the office occasionally, Harriet, to translate letters and so on. It would be a great help to me.’

Of course Grace disapproved, but while her efforts was diverted towards making sure that Selina at least would make a good marriage, Harriet took to visiting her father’s offices two or three times a week, translating letters and writing to the wine producers of France and the port manufacturers of the Douro, though her Portuguese needed brushing up at first. It made her feel useful and engaged. The burden had been partially lifted from her shoulders.

The offices were by the river, and when Harriet was ten or eleven Arthur Murray had occasionally taken his daughter down to see the sailing ships at anchor, their wooden masts bristling against the sky. She saw the wine casks in the warehouse, brought from far countries where the wind was warm and scented, and the sight of the tobacco-chewing sailors and flamboyant women who jostled each other on the quayside kindled in her imagination a taste for the exotic.

She had been addressed politely by the old chief clerk in his shiny suit and his mask of a face. She wished she could make him laugh. In fact that was one of her aspirations on the first day she entered the office with her father.

But after a sojourn of nearly five years she had still not quite succeeded.

The occasional translations had gradually turned into a full-time presence, but it was only her father who gave her any encouragement. Her brother Robert, the Son in A. Murray & Son, barely tolerated her. He thought this fad of hers for doing a job of work would have burned itself out long ago.

And now, after so many years, she was becoming restless. The relentless routine, the dinginess of her surroundings, her isolation as the only woman in the office, were all beginning to oppress her. She was aware of the constant sniggering of the junior clerks behind her back, and although by now she knew as much about the business as her brother, he had never valued her and she was never given any real responsibility.

Of course she could have left the firm at any time, but pride forbade that. Besides, what else was she to do? By now marriage had passed her by, and she was a confirmed spinster, dressed always in black, as befitted a woman in a man’s world.

Her musings about Selina’s letter were interrupted.

‘Miss Harriet, if you please.’

Mr Wigglesworth, who had been chief clerk with Murray’s since before she was born, had never called her Miss Murray, but always Miss Harriet as though she was still a little girl.

‘Your … er … Mr Robert Murray would like to have a word with you in his office.’

And that was when her brother dropped the bombshell.

Sitting behind his ample desk, his hands behind his head, he announced that their father, Arthur Murray, was to retire.

‘In June he will be sixty. He promised Mama.’

Harriet clenched her fists. Everything inside her fought against it. Papa to leave his beloved business and retire? To her it was unthinkable, but she was sure her brother couldn’t wait to see the day. No wonder he looked smug.

‘Mama’s heart is set on a little house in the country. She’s made a few enquiries already. It was a bargain made between them years ago that he would retire on his sixtieth birthday.’

‘But he’s still so active. Almost a young man. He’ll never agree.’

‘He will,’ said Robert. ‘After Mama and I have made him see sense.’

After Mama has cried and pleaded, she thought. After you have both worn him down with your nagging and your bullying. Her eyes narrowed in anger. She knew them both so well.

‘How can you? How can you push out your own father? It will be like a death sentence to him. He has this business in his blood.’

Arthur Murray still kept up his annual visits to the vineyards of Portugal and France, jealously guarding his precious suppliers from his son’s ministrations. He knew Oporto, Bordeaux and Rheims like he knew the streets of Bristol. And when clients came to dinner they didn’t go to Robert’s but to the house of the head of the firm. Harriet knew full well how eager Robert was to take such privileges upon himself. But in his eyes, it was none of her affair.

‘Nonsense, Harriet – what a fuss you make. I should think he’ll be glad to go after all this time.’

Harriet had watched her brother carefully over the last few years and in her opinion this would mean the death-knell of the firm if it came to pass. Arthur Murray had a way with him. Over the years he had built up his contacts with a genial self-effacement which hid his business acumen. He liked his clients and his suppliers and they liked him, but his son was of a different mould. Robert Murray was a humourless man, to whom business associates represented banknotes, nothing more.

What would Papa do all day in a house in the country? Harriet knew the aching boredom of staying idly at home, and to a man like him it would be hell. And all because he had promised Mama!

But it was not her father’s fate upon her lips when she next spoke. ‘And what about me?’

Robert frowned. ‘Naturally, if Papa does retire, the office will have to be reorganised.’

With no place in it for her – she knew that without even asking. It was only Papa who wanted her. She had always tried not to be envious of her brother’s position in the company – he was after all the eldest, and by virtue of that the heir – yet surely she had a right to something? He couldn’t just throw her out. If she had been a man there would have been no question of it.

‘You may get rid of Papa,’ Harriet warned. ‘But I won’t go without a fight, believe me.’

She realised he was jealous – bitterly jealous of the influence she had with Arthur Murray, though he’d always done his best to hide it. She was her father’s child, as he had always been Grace’s.

‘I ought to have the position of chief clerk when Mr Wigglesworth retires. I’ve worked here for enough years and I can take on the responsibility. It’s not just because my name’s Murray, but because I’ve earned it.’

‘Of course if circumstances were different …’

She could read him like a book. ‘You mean that I’m a woman and you don’t want me!’ she finished for him.

‘Clerks don’t like taking orders from a woman, you know that. We’d never get anyone to work in the place again. It’s bad enough now, with the juniors. Honestly, Harry, it just won’t do. And don’t think you can twist me round your little finger, like you can Papa. He’s been altogether too soft with you.’

‘Don’t call me Harry!’ she said. ‘As you’ve made perfectly clear, I am not a man.’

‘I don’t think anyone realised how long you’d stick it out.’

‘You thought I’d be married long ago, did you?’

‘It is quite a natural course of events.’

‘Perhaps I’m not a natural sort of woman.’

He said nothing and Harriet rose to her feet. There was a lot more she would like to have said, but the walls of the room were thin and raised voices would only provide entertainment for the general office. Besides, what could she say to convince him, this tedious man who was also her brother? They had probably never agreed on anything in their lives. If there was anything to love in him, she had never found it.

She knew he thought their father had been mad to take her on in the first place. That having a woman in the office made them a laughing-stock. He would make sure it ended as soon as he could.

Harriet went to the tap which was situated at the back of the general office and took a drink of water from the mug that hung on a hook. Then she returned to her stool and took up her pen, resolved not to let anyone see she was upset. Outwardly she carried on with her work in the usual way, but inwardly she was seething.

It would not have been so bad if she had failed. She could have faced up to failure – made more effort, improved herself. But however much effort she made she could never overcome this stumbling-block. She could not alter what she was – a woman.

Chapter 2

At precisely six o’clock the day’s work was over and the junior clerks eagerly grabbed their hats and bundled down the stairs. Outside it was raining and the lamp at the corner of the cobbled yard was already lit. When her father was in the office they drove home together in the carriage, and on the days he was absent Harriet normally caught a cab. But today she needed a walk, and putting up her umbrella she picked her way through the narrow Bristol streets. At one time she would have been afraid to venture alone along these thoroughfares, so near the teeming heart of the city, but apart from a few catcalls she had never been accosted, and nowadays she didn’t give it a second thought.

At the top of the rise she turned aside to walk along one of the nearby Georgian terraces to her Aunt Eleanor’s house.

‘You aunt’s dressing for dinner, Miss,’ the maid told her as Harriet shook out her umbrella.

‘And Miss Whittaker?’ Harriet asked, referring to her aunt’s elderly companion.

‘She’s suffering a little today. She’s not been downstairs.’

To their left, from the drawing-room, came the strains of Mozart, at once mirthful and uplifting, and Harriet smiled for almost the first time that day. So Freddie must be alone.

The maid relieved her of her wet things and left her to her own devices. In the drawing-room Harriet found her cousin Freddie sitting at the piano in his shirt-sleeves, and as she entered she put her finger to her lips to indicate that he must not stop playing. She went towards him and turned the pages silently until the last note had died away.

‘I think I needed that,’ she said, sinking into an armchair.

‘Vines been hit by some dread disease?’ enquired Freddie. ‘Or is it just the rain?’

He was a thin young man, about a year older than she was, with cheerful, rather mocking hazel eyes and he sat in a wheeled invalid chair.

‘Tell Freddie,’ he said. ‘I’m used to listening to other people’s woes. It’s something to do with the chair. They know I can’t run away.’

He put his hand into the back of the piano and produced a bottle. ‘Here, let’s have a drink. Put a new perspective on life.’

‘Freddie! Sherry in the piano? What does Aunt Eleanor say?’

‘Good God, she has no idea. Mama’s very funny about drink these days. Her brother may have made his fortune in the wine trade but she’s getting rather too hot on abstinence for my liking. Get a couple of glasses, there’s a good girl.’

Harriet went to the sideboard and produced two glasses which Freddie filled to the brim. They both sipped on the sherry in silence for a moment or two. Harriet knew that anything she told Freddie would go no further. They had always confided in each other from being children.

‘It’s Robert,’ she said at last. ‘He’s insisting that Papa retires, now he’s going to be sixty. And of course it will be an excuse to get rid of me as well.’

Freddie contemplated the brown liquid in his glass. ‘At least it gives you an excuse to leave. I don’t know how you can stand it, poring over bits of paper all day when you don’t need to. It’s all right for Uncle Arthur and Robert. They’re making money and their names are above the door. But you – aren’t you bored to death with it all?’

‘Of course it’s tedious sometimes. But what else am I supposed to do now? Get married? Have babies? Can you see me submitting to domestic despotism like Jane?’

She knew Robert would have been astonished to hear himself referred to as a despot, but Harriet had no time for a man who subjected his wife to one baby a year as if she was no more than a breeding machine.

‘Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever had an admirer, much less a suitor.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought you’d want one,’ her cousin said. ‘Some jackass dancing attendance on you, paying you compliments, writing silly letters? If anyone tried it, you’d soon send them packing.’

‘I would, wouldn’t I?’ she mused, looking at her hands and then out into the garden. It was good to know that Freddie would never be shocked at anything she said. ‘But sometimes I long for someone who would …’

‘… love you?’ he finished for her. ‘I know. That’s where you and I are in the same boat, my girl. We don’t quite fit into the right category when it comes to love.’

‘You?’ she asked, for Freddie had never let the fact that he was unable to walk be a handicap to him. ‘You always have girls hanging round you. After you’ve played at a concert they’re queuing up to meet you.’

‘Ah, but they only want to mother me. They think they’re safe because I’m sitting in this thing. It’s very romantic for them to minister to the invalid genius.’

‘All that adulation sounds rather appealing.’

‘So it is, to begin with. But as soon as I hint that I might be capable of being a proper husband, they run. It’s alarming to realise what notions all their little heads are stuffed with. They don’t really want a man, just a clever boy.’

Harriet had come to pour out her own troubles and she felt ashamed of herself.

‘Freddie, I’m so sorry.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘What silly people there are in the world …’

But he interrupted her, firmly removing the sympathetic hand. ‘Don’t you start pitying me as well. I didn’t mean to sound maudlin – I’m just giving you an illustration. Because you’re a woman who works in an office, and I sit in a chair all day, we’re odd, and people treat us differently. But you’re a fine figure of a woman – there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t appreciate you one of these days.’

She laughed. ‘You don’t have to flatter me. I know I’m an elephant.’ She had never managed to get that taunt out of her mind.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way you look. From what I can judge, you go in and out in all the right places. Quite an agreeable armful, I should imagine.’

Harriet was unsure how to reply to that, and she took another sip of sherry.

‘But seriously, Harriet, going back to Robert. This is your chance to quit before he throws you out. You don’t need the money. On your birthday you’ll have four hundred a year.’

‘But it’s the principle of it. I’m a Murray, just as much as he is. Why should I have to leave because I’m not a man?’

‘Why should you insist on staying when Robert doesn’t want you? That’s slavery not emancipation.’

She met his eyes, nettled that he should be urging her to do what she’d been telling herself ever since Robert made his announcement. And she didn’t want to see the firm with Robert in charge. It would start to go downhill and she would have to stand by, powerless to stop it.

‘I wanted to prove that I could do the job as well as a man, and a man can’t give up his job in a fit of pique.’

‘He can if he can afford to. Why don’t you make a clean break like me? I’m spending the summer in Provence. I’ve a friend who’s renting a place near Avignon. He’s going there to paint and I’ve some composing to do. I might get down to it if it’s sunny and there’s plenty of wine. Then in August and September I’ve a couple of engagements in Geneva and Paris.’

‘How wonderful! You’ll be world-famous yet.’

He had been giving concerts in England for a couple of years, but this was his first sally on to the Continent.

‘I’ll never be famous stuck at home. That’s why I’m going to find somewhere to live in London in the autumn.’

So this bird was flying his nest at last. ‘What does your mother think?’

‘I haven’t told her yet, but I can’t be tied to her apron-strings for ever. I may be a cripple, but metaphorically I have to stand on my own two feet. Anyway I feel stifled at home. I want to stay up late, playing and composing. I want to entertain the people I like, not the kind of friends Mama approves of who wear dark suits and believe in temperance.’

‘She’s proud that you’re artistic, Freddie.’

‘Only because I’m not possessed of all my faculties. If I could walk I’d have been put into some awful profession years ago.’

Freddie’s mother lived on a small annuity left to her by her husband, clinging precariously to respectability on next to nothing. The piano, and a music master, had come from Arthur Murray, who also paid for Lambert, the manservant who looked after Freddie. This house wasn’t large enough for him and his accoutrements and a couple of the middle-aged ladies.

Harriet understood very well what it was like. Even in the big stone house where her parents lived she had little privacy. When she was at home she was expected to sit with her mother in the drawing-room. The library in Grace Murray’s eyes was for men, the bedroom was for sleeping, and there was nowhere else to be alone.

‘Why don’t you come to London too?’ he offered. ‘Between us we could afford a couple of servants besides Lambert. I’ve my concerts, and Uncle Arthur’s been very generous. We could both do as we liked while lending one another respectability.’

She had a feeling there was quite a difference between his idea of respectability and her mother’s, though the fact that Freddie was unable to walk would probably make the arrangement acceptable in the eyes of the world.

‘Harriet! I didn’t realise you were here.’

Freddie’s mother was standing in the doorway and her son deftly seized Harriet’s empty glass and slipped it behind an aspidistra that sat on a plush-covered side-table. Harriet sprang up.

‘Yes, Aunt, I just stopped by to have a word with Freddie. I’d better be getting home or Mama will be wondering.’

‘So nice of you to call, dear. Freddie likes visitors,’ his mother said, and Harriet understood why he felt suffocated. It was just the same for her. Perhaps she would do as he suggested – follow her own whims and be done with Murray’s for ever.

‘I’ll let you know, Freddie,’ she promised by way of farewell.

By good luck she found a cab at the end of the street and managed to be home in time for dinner. She only had ten minutes to change, and if she wasn’t ready her mother would make a fuss, questioning her about where she’d been. But it would have been even worse to appear at the dining table in her black working clothes, with no ornament except a fob watch, like a man. That, Grace Murray declared, reminded her of a schoolmistress or a curate’s widow.

Harriet was aware that her mother was deeply ashamed of her. In her eyes Harriet was a failure, eccentric and unwomanly. She was reconciled to the fact that her second daughter would never marry now. These days, even if Harriet could be induced to attend a ball, she was more likely to be found advising her partners on the replenishment of their cellars than dancing.

Dinner was eaten mostly in silence. Arthur Murray had spent the day in London and Harriet would like to have asked him about his trip, but Grace discouraged shop talk at home.

When the meal was over Arthur excused himself and went to the library to write some letters, while Grace and Harriet adjourned to the drawing-room where Grace took up some tapestry work. Harriet had always refused to sew – it was another of her failings. So she sat with a newspaper on her lap, but in an hour and a half she hardly read a page. Then at a quarter past ten her mother rose and said it was time for bed, so Harriet was obliged to put aside the paper and obey her.

But a few minutes later she was downstairs again and Arthur Murray laughed as she bounded into the library, conspiring with her in this game against her mother which they often played. ‘Have you just come for a chat, or was there something particular?’ he asked, patting the seat beside him.

There was much on her mind, but she didn’t want to talk about Robert yet, and she embarked on the other subject that had been worrying her all day.

‘Papa, this morning I had a letter from Selina. I think you ought to see it.’

‘Brittany?’ he asked, catching sight of the address. ‘Villa des Iris, Saint-Judoc. What’s she doing there at this time of year?’

‘That’s the puzzle – and this place is miles from anywhere. Stephen is still in Paris. It’s just Selina and the baby.’

‘Not such a baby now.’ Her father’s eyes wandering to a framed picture of his grandson among other family photographs on the mantelpiece.

‘It’s a strange letter,’ Harriet went on. ‘She talks of staying there indefinitely. I think there must be trouble between her and Stephen.’

‘Poor child,’ Arthur Murray said. ‘It’s been hard for her in a foreign country. And Stephen isn’t turning out to be as reliable as we first believed. I wish she’d come home for a holiday.’

At the wedding Arthur Murray had realised that all Stephen’s relatives were not quite so genteel as he had pretended, though his business of importing Yorkshire woollens into France did appear to be prosperous, and he was educated and convivial.

‘I’d like to go to her, Papa.’

‘Well, you’ve been wanting to visit ever since she were married. All in all, I think it would be best. You’ve spoken to Robert, I suppose?’

‘Is it true that you’re going to retire?’

His hair was greying but his eyes were still those of a young man.

‘I promised your mother that I’d retire from the business when I was sixty. The trouble is I don’t really feel as old as I thought I would.’

‘Then stay!’ she said, indignation sweeping over her again. ‘What are you going to do in a little house in the country? It’s like pulling up a tree by its roots. Mama has no right to expect it.’

Harriet had always wondered what had attracted her parents to each other. Arthur Murray ought to have married some full-lipped, raven-haired girl from Jerez, heiress to one of the great vineyards of Andalusia. He must have had his chances. Yet he had chosen Grace. She was the sort of woman who ate you up.

‘I think she has,’ he said. ‘I’ve left her alone too much. And now her turn has come.’

‘I couldn’t bear it – nothing to do, no one to see …’

He saw her expression and understood what she was afraid of. ‘Harriet, on your twenty-fifth birthday you will be entirely independent and you may do as you wish. It is I who am married to your mother, not you.’

Grace had always maintained that a daughter had no need of her own income, but Arthur had never forgotten his own childhood when he and his sister and his mother, widowed at less than thirty, had been thrown on the mercy of distant relatives. His mother had been treated like a servant, but she had swallowed her pride and borne the humiliation bravely for her children’s sake, putting her last penny into providing Arthur with a decent education and making sure he went into a respectable business. He didn’t want the same to happen to Harriet, dependent on her brother for the rest of her life if she never married.

‘Robert doesn’t want me – I suppose you know that?’

Her father squeezed her hand. ‘You’ve done well for Murray’s, Harriet. I’ll never forget that. I wish you could have made a tour of the vineyards with me, for you’ve an excellent nose for a wine, better than Robert’s in my opinion, and the clients have always liked you. I’m not sure how Jane will get on as hostess to some of our Portuguese friends. She has nothing in common with the Latins. Robert’s foolish not to realise what an asset he has in you, but I can’t prevent him.’

‘I thought if I could be chief clerk …’

‘You would have been first class, and I’ve told him so, but he wants to make a clean sweep, bring in different staff and so on. And a woman in the office really is quite unusual.’

Harriet didn’t have to ask her father what he thought of Robert’s clean sweep.

‘Do you … trust him?’ she asked.

But Arthur Murray was fair enough not to prejudge his son, and he didn’t reply to that.

‘Whatever happens to the business, Harriet, I want you to know that your money is absolutely safe. Even if you marry, your husband will have no claim on it. If I were you, I’d go to your sister. I’ll square it with Mama, though she may like you to take a maid.’

But Harriet was determined to nip that notion in the bud. She wasn’t the innocent her mother seemed to imagine. She worked among men and was used to listening to the banter of the office, however much her father and brother tried to quash such talk. And before she’d been there many weeks she’d come across a couple copulating in one of the warehouses. Fortunately, thanks to Mademoiselle Arnaud, it hadn’t come as quite such a shock.

‘There’s no need for a chaperone at my age, surely? Freddie’s spending the summer in Provence so we can travel as far as Paris together. Lambert will see me on to the right train.’

‘Going nearer the wine country, eh? That boy ought to have worked for Murray’s. He’d have been very successful.’

Inside Harriet felt an overwhelming sense of despair. Any other woman would have welcomed it: being released from work, going off on holiday with the prospect of life-long financial independence not far ahead. So why was it that she could gladly have picked up one of her mother’s precious Chinese vases and hurled it into the fireplace?

Chapter 3

‘So there really are irises,’ Harriet said, as she stood on the veranda overlooking the front garden under its shelter of pines. The Villa des Iris was a white house with a slate roof, and the dormer windows at the front were topped by conical turrets. Clumps of purple irises in full bloom grew in front of the painted fence. It was a still, blue day, silent except for the distant sound of the sea.

‘And it’s so quiet.’

Selina, who was standing at her side, pursed up her perfectly shaped lips. ‘It’s like the grave. But I’ve dug the grave myself and I must lie in it, I suppose.’

Harriet didn’t know what to say. Last night there had been no time for Selina to explain why she had come here, and Harriet had been too weary after her journey to ask. All she had done after their first fervent greetings was to eat a bite of supper, introduce herself to her small nephew, and tumble thankfully into bed.

This morning she awoke to the sound of the tide and the seagulls screeching. The pines smelt of summer, filtering the June sunlight between their branches. To a person so long used to noise and drizzle and soot-blackened buildings this was an enchanting place.

‘Can’t we have breakfast on the veranda?’ she asked. ‘It’s warm already.’

Selina looked doubtful, but when her son started clamouring that he too would like to eat outside, she relented with an indulgent smile.

‘I’m surprised you’ve never thought of eating out here before,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s quite private. There’s only that house across the road with the shutters all closed. Doesn’t anyone live there?’

‘Just the doctor,’ Selina replied. ‘We’re away from the rest of the village here. The only people who pass by are the peasants on their way to the fields.’

Harriet sensed her sister’s low spirits and realised she’d touched on a sore point. Selina loved company, so why had she buried herself in this remote spot, miles from anywhere?

‘Hadn’t you better tell me the trouble?’ she suggested.

Selina lifted her son on to her knee. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ she said, kissing the top of his head. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose him.’

Harriet was baffled. ‘Why on earth should you do that?’

She smiled at her chubby nephew with his fuzzy fair hair and wide brown eyes. As a rule she wasn’t fond of children, and Robert’s insipid brood repelled her, but Teddy was a pretty little boy with a mischievous look on his face. ‘Mama’s itching to see him. Why didn’t you come home for a while, instead of here?’

‘I would lose him if I left Stephen, wouldn’t I? Oh, not at this age – not until he’s seven. A woman who leaves her husband has no right to her children once they’re seven years old. At least that’s what happens in England.’

‘Surely you can’t have left him for good? We imagined you’d had a quarrel, that’s all. You were so much in love when you were first married.’

‘It’s not that I don’t love him,’ Selina said, suddenly struggling against tears. ‘Of course I do – at least when he’s nice to me. But he’s never there. He’s always out somewhere with his clients – in the cafés until midnight. He never seems to think I need company too.’

‘I thought you had your own friends.’

‘I wrote that I did because I didn’t want you all to think I was complaining. Celia Black is the only real friend I have. She’s an American. Her husband’s a diplomat at the US Legation.’

‘Is that the couple who own this house?’

Selina nodded. ‘They like it here because it’s remote and he goes bird watching. But they’ve gone home for six months and there’s no one else. I was quarrelling with Stephen all the time. I wanted him to stay at home more often or take me out occasionally. In the end I said I wouldn’t put up with it, and that if he wanted me, he would have to come and find me. The trouble is, he hasn’t come. He could force me to go home, but