The Sun Is Often Out

Chapter Seven

Miss Prince commenced her education of May and Jessie on the first Monday in February. Olive and Gertie remained at Redruth House when the summer holiday came to a close; Lance returned to Gamboola with only his parents for company while his wife awaited the imminent birth of Annie's child. It was a strange coterie of women who spent their leisure hours in each other's company—the elegant schoolmarm, the disappointed wife, the reluctant debutante, and the young maids looking to each for example, for understanding of their place in this world they all inhabited.

May found her lessons stimulating; after her years in the comparative mental drudgery of the village school, where reading, writing and arithmetic were the only attainable goals, the tutelage of Miss Prince was as fresh and enervating as the scent of petrichor after a summer storm. It washed away the dust that had settled on her eager mind in Molong, and her teacher provided her with new avenues to explore through the novels and philosophy of her French forebears. Gertie's library seemed a dismal, old-fashioned collection now, when Emile Zola was horrifying her with the degradations of Paris and its inhabitants. Her greatest blow was that she had no aptitude for languages other than her mother tongue, so she was reliant on Miss Prince's own careful translations where a published version was unavailable.

Jessie fared better than her there, with her excellent memory and ability to mimic sounds, though her quick mind also made her a lazy scholar. While May pored over verb tables, conjugating in vain until her eyes watered and her fingers ached from writing, her cousin breezed through rudimentary French until she reached a wall that only serious study would vault her over. There she stopped, and would go no further, like a recalcitrant child in a fit of pique. She knew enough, she wagered, to get by with should she ever have the good fortune to visit France, and anything beyond that point was useless to her in the colony of New South Wales. In the end, May was the more accomplished, though her speech would always be stilted and unnatural.

Dancing was where Jessie put her considerable stamina to good use. They practiced in the hall, where Olive assisted Miss Prince by partnering with her sister as they were taught the steps to the Quadrille, the Scotch and Highland reels, the Polka Mazurka, and the dangerously intimate Waltz. In the evenings they pushed back the furniture in the parlour and Gertie would play the piano to accompany them. As they twirled about the room in a flurry of skirts and petticoats, May dizzy and breathless from the exertion, Jessie savoured every moment, her head thrown back in ecstasy in spite of Miss Prince's careful instruction and Olive's pointed protests.

"You dance like that at a ball and Mother will have your hide," she scowled at her sister, pushing her aside as Gertie closed the lid over the keys. "Spectacle doesn't even cover it."

"You're just jealous," Jessie purred, continuing to spin, her eyes half-closed as she hummed to keep time. "Every man in Bathurst will want to dance with me once I'm out, and no one ever even glances at you."

"They won't want to dance with you. They'll want to—"

"Girls!" Miss Prince interjected, causing Olive to freeze and Jessie to come to a sudden halt. A few tendrils of hair had escaped her tight chignon, and she tucked them away before continuing. "That's quite enough. Needlework."

Chastened, Olive reached for her embroidery while Jessie flopped onto a chair at the far side of the room. May took out her own work, an intricate sampler with a red waratah as its focal point, and picked up where she had left off the night before. The dim firelight reflected off her needle as she pulled it through, and they sat in silence as they laboured, each stitch a meditation. There was the crackle of a page as Miss Prince turned it, the click of a knitting needle as Gertie crafted a blanket for her baby, a sigh as Olive realised she had made an error and struggled to unpick her mistake.