The village school was a fine school, and under the tutelage of Mrs. Cherry, the schoolmistress, Tristran Thorn learned all about fractions, and longitude and latitude; he could ask in French for the pen of the gardener’s aunt, indeed for the pen of his own aunt; he learned the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror, 1066, to Victoria, 1837. He learned his reading and had a fair copperplate hand. Travelers to the village were rare, but occasionally a peddler would come through the village, selling “penny dreadful” accounts of grisly murders, fateful encounters, dire doings and remarkable escapes. Most peddlers sold song sheets, two for a penny, and families would buy them and gather about their pianos to sing songs such as “Cherry Ripe” and “In My Father’s Garden.”So the days went by, and the weeks went by, and the years went by also. At age fourteen, by a process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads,Tristran learned of sex. When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr.
Thomas Forester’s house: more specifically, from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester’s bedroom window. To Tristran’s regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalizing glimpse of Victoria, who was his sister’s age and, without any doubt, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around.
By the time Victoria was seventeen, and Tristran also, she was in all probability, he was certain, the most beautiful girl in the British Isles. Tristran would have insisted on the most beautiful girl in the entire British Empire, if not the world, and boxed you, or been prepared to, had you argued with him.
You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in Wall who would have argued with him, though; she turned many heads and, in all probability, broke many hearts.
A description: She had her mother’s grey eyes and heart-shaped face, her father’s curling chestnut hair. Her lips were red and perfectly shaped, her cheeks blushed prettily when she spoke. She was pale, and utterly delightful.
When she was sixteen she had fought vigorously with her mother, for Victoria had taken it into her head that she would work in the Seventh Magpie as a pot-maid. “I have spoken to Mister Bromios about this,” she told her mother, “and he has no objection.”
“What Mister Bromios thinks or does not think,” replied her mother, the former Bridget Comfrey “is neither here nor there. That is a most improper occupation for a young lady.”The village of Wall watched the battle of wills with fascination, wondering what the outcome would be, for no one crossed Bridget Forester: she had a tongue that could, the villagers said, blister the paint from a barn door and tear the bark from an oak.
There was no one in the village who would have wanted to get on the wrong side of Bridget Forester, and they did say that the wall would be more likely to walk than for Bridget Forester to change her mind.
Victoria Forester, however, was used to having her own way, and, if all else failed, or even if it did not, she would appeal to her father, and he would accede to her demands. But here even Victoria was surprised, for her father agreed with her mother, saying that working in the bar at the Seventh Magpie was something that a well-brought-up young lady would not do. And Thomas Forester set his chin and there the matter ended. Every boy in the village was in love with Victoria Forester. And many a sedate gentleman, quietly married with grey in his beard, would stare at her as she walked down the street, becoming, for a few moments, a boy once more, in the spring of his years with a spring in his step.
“They say that Mister Monday himself is counted amongst your admirers,” said Louisa Thorn to Victoria Forester one afternoon in May, in the apple orchard.
Five girls sat beside, and upon the branches of, the oldest apple tree in the orchard, its huge trunk making a fine seat and support; and whenever the May breeze blew, the pink blossoms tumbled down like snow, coming to rest in their hair and on their skirts.
The afternoon sunlight dappled green and silver and gold through the leaves in the apple orchard.
“Mister Monday,” said Victoria Forester with disdain, “is five and forty years of age if he is a day.” She made a face to indicate just how old five-and-forty is, when you happen to be seventeen.
“Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having someone else break in one’s own pony.”
“Personally I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widower,” said Amelia Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities.”A flurry of hastily suppressed giggles amid the apple blossom.
“Still,” said Lucy Pippin hesitantly, “it would be nice to live in the big house, and to have a coach and four, and to be able to travel to London for the season, and to Bath to take the waters, or to Brighton for the sea-bathing, even if Mister Monday is five and forty.”The other girls shrieked, and flung handfuls of apple blossom at her, and none shrieked more loudly, or flung more blossom, than Victoria Forester. Tristran Thorn, at the age of seventeen, and only six months older than Victoria, was half the way between a boy and a man, and was equally uncomfortable in either role; he seemed to be composed chiefly of elbows and Adam’s apples. His hair was the brown of sodden straw, and it stuck out at awkward, seventeen-year-old angles, wet and comb it howsoever much he tried.