Eleanor was as surprised as I was, but she said, ‘Very well, Tuesday is just as convenient for me.’

‘I told her it would be! She had better hold tight when I take her out or there will be no knowing what the horses might do!’

And with this, off he went.

As we continued on our way back to our lodgings I could not help wondering whether Miss Morland had sent any such message or if Thorpe had interfered again. The matter was soon settled when, having just reached the house and gone up to the drawing room, the sound of running feet could be heard mounting the stairs. The door opened and there was Miss Morland, having not even waited for William to open the door but having opened the door herself.

She began at once, still breathless from running, and said that it was all a mistake. As I suspected, Thorpe had invented the whole thing. The Thorpes had wanted her to accompany them to Clifton and had not accepted her declaration that she was already engaged. In an act of unwanted officiousness, Thorpe had attempted to rearrange her appointment with us but Miss Morland, brave soul, was having none of it. Regardless of convention she had run after us to set the matter straight. The affair thus happily settled, Eleanor introduced her to my father, who, to my surprise and pleasure, greeted her warmly and apologized to her for having to announce herself.

‘What did William mean by it?’ he asked. ‘To leave you to open the door yourself. I cannot think what he was about. You must think us a sad family, Miss Morland, when we offer you such poor hospitality.’

‘No, indeed, it was not William’s fault, I came in so quickly and ran by him so suddenly that he could do nothing except follow me up the stairs,’ she explained.

‘Well, if you say so, then we will have to forgive him,’ said my father, at his most charming.

Eleanor invited her to sit by her side and asked after Mrs Allen, and my father added his hopes that Mr and Mrs Allen were well.

‘They were pointed out to me as most agreeable people,’ said my father, ‘respectable in every way. We will be happy to make their acquaintance.’

Miss Morland admired my sister’s paintings, which were hanging on the wall, and was such a mixture of innocence, vitality and earnestness that I was disappointed when it was time for her to leave.

My father was equally sorry to see her go and invited her to stay and dine with us. She could not accept the invitation, having a prior engagement, but expressed herself willing to come on a future date. Arrangements were made for the day after tomorrow.

My father further surprised me by attending her to the street-door himself, saying ‘How well you walk, Miss Morland. Your grace of movement is exactly what I thought it would be when I saw you dancing. We are obliged to you for coming to see us, and we hope to see you again.’

‘Is it really the waters?’ Eleanor asked me, wondering as much as I did at my father’s unexpected good humour. ‘I did not expect them to have such a miraculous effect.’

‘I can see no other reason for it, unless he has had some good news.’

‘But what news could produce such a reaction.’

‘Perhaps Frederick is paying court to an heiress?’ I said.

‘It is always possible,’ she returned doubtfully.

‘But whatever the reason, I am glad of it, and I only hope it will continue. He has been more used to scaring your friends away than welcoming them in the past. Perhaps he has learnt from his mistakes and now sees that if you are to have company, he must put himself out to be agreeable.’



Monday 4 March

The morning was fair and Eleanor and I called for Miss Morland at the appointed time. We decided to go to Beechen Cliff, just out of town, and were soon walking alongside the river.

‘I never look at it,’ said Miss Morland, ‘without thinking of the south of France.’

I was surprised that she had been abroad, and said so. France these days is no place to visit, or at least, not for anyone who wants to return with their head on their shoulders.

‘Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about,’ she said.

I could not help smiling when she went on, ‘It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho.’

Eleanor and I looked at each other, delighted to have found another fellow admirer of Udolpho.

Your heroine? Eleanor mouthed silently to me.

I smiled, for Miss Morland certainly had all the hallmarks of a heroine. She was sweet and innocent and honest and loving. She had a great affection for her brother. She was, for the present at least, without a mother, and under the care of her mother’s friend. And if she was not presently threatened by some cruel marquis, well, she was young and there was still time!

Mistaking my silence for disapproval, Miss Morland went on hesitantly, ‘But you never read novels, I dare say?’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because they are not clever enough for you – gentlemen read better books.’

‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid,’ I assured her. ‘I have read all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time.’

‘Yes,’ said Eleanor, ‘and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.’

‘Thank you, Eleanor – a most honourable testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of your suspicions. Here was I, in my eagerness to get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my sister, breaking the promise I had made of reading it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most interesting part, by running away with the volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.’

‘I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly,’ said Miss Morland.

I assured her I had read dozens and laughed when she called Udolpho ‘nice’. Eleanor upbraided me for my impertinence, saying to Miss Morland, ‘He is treating you exactly as he does his sister.’

And she was right. I was talking to Miss Morland with the ease that comes of friendship, instead of with the strained politeness that is usually necessary in Bath.

‘I am sure I did not mean to say anything wrong,’ said Miss Morland. ‘But it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?’

‘Very true,’ I said with a smile, ‘and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement – people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.’

‘While, in fact,’ said Eleanor, ‘it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best. It is a most interesting work. You are fond of that kind of reading?’

‘To say the truth, I do not much like any other.’

I laughed. There were many people who, I am sure, felt exactly as she did, but very few who had the courage to say so.

In the next half-hour I learned that she did not like history – ‘it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all’ – and was astonished when I admitted I was fond of it.

I discovered that she thought it was a torment for little children to learn to read – ‘if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that “to torment” and “to instruct” might sometimes be used as synonymous words’ – but she admitted that it was worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.

‘Consider, if reading had not been taught, Mrs Radcliffe would have written in vain, or perhaps might not have written at all,’ I said.

‘That indeed would have been a dreadful thing, for I have spent many happy hours with her books. It is a sad thought to even contemplate that she might never have written them. I begin to think as you do, that learning to read and write is no bad thing, after all. Her books are so very entertaining. And instructive, too. I am sure I know a great deal about Europe through reading her books; about France and the Alps and Italy. Why, without them I would know nothing of Venice at all. Do they really have gondolas to ride in?’ she asked.

‘Yes, they really do.’

‘And is the city really full of canals?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Then I think that Udolpho is as good as a history book, and as instructive as any other, for though it does not contain as many facts, those facts it does contain are eagerly sought after and easily absorbed.’