MAXIS MATCH CC

Things are strange here. I think Mama suspects I know where you are, but she won’t ask me- at least, not directly. That’s a relief as I’d find it hard to tell her a direct untruth. 

The most important news is that Jem was accepted into Brindleton College on a full scholarship! Mama has told everyone in the village a dozen times over and took him into Greater Windenburg to have his uniform fitted, even though he doesn’t start for almost a year. Papa has been telling him he mustn’t grow another inch, and Jem has resolved to give up his bedtime glass of milk ‘in order that I shan’t grow any more’ (although I think this is only an excuse as you know he hates milk).

Mama made Jem walk up and down the parlour in his uniform to show us all. Biddy fell about laughing and got sent upstairs and Papa hummed Burlington Bertie, which made me think of you. I couldn’t help but think of what you would have said. It does seem silly to make a ten-year-old boy wear a top hat, but then I suppose I don’t know anything about being a gentleman.

I’m glad there is a little while until Jem leaves. It will be strange when it’s just me and Biddy. I know she’ll miss Jem, too- the two of them are thick as thieves. Of course she will be starting at the village school next year as well. That will be a relief really. She was always headstrong, but since you left lately she’s become a bit of a terror. She got a tin of molasses out of the larder and by the time Mother found her half of it was in her hair and wouldn’t come out! You’ve never heard such ructions. In the end Mother had to cut her hair quite short and she cried bitterly at first, but I showed her some fashion plates of little girls with shingled hair from one of my magazines and told her none of the village girls had anything a bit like it, and that perked her up in no time. It really does look pretty on her, but then she always was the prettiest of us. I suppose you won’t mind me saying that, now that you…well, you know. 

Perhaps showing her the magazines worked a little too well. This afternoon I caught her walking up and down the pasture wall with a book on her head, and when I asked her what she was doing she said she was practising to be a mannequin for the House of Worth.

The village is much the same as ever. Paul Farber and Sybil Copeland were married last Sunday. Myrtle was head bridesmaid and looked like thunder. I suspect she’s chafing that Sybil is married before her, and her not even engaged. I think she and Justice Bowlinger have had a lover’s quarrel; she hasn’t been boasting about him nearly as much lately.

Eli has been teaching me songs in Yiddish (his mother’s language) and Ladino (his father’s). I’d never heard either before. I’m sure I make an awful mess of them, but he’d never say so. He’s begun calling me Margeritke, which means daisy, after one of the songs. Daisy is such a prosaic name, the sort of name you give to cows, but Margeritke seems quite different.

He laughed a good deal when I showed him your picture, but he swore he wasn’t making fun. He said you looked more natural in men’s clothes than you ever did in skirts.

I must go to bed now; I have to be up early to milk Betsy. Oh! and I enclose a portrait of Jem in his uniform. Mama had so many copies made, I don’t think she’ll miss one.

Your loving sister,

Daisy

———————————————————————————————————–I’m having such a great time making these! Please comment if you have any ideas for further costumes for Bella.

Miss Christina has a popular female impersonation act. It feels strange to call her a female ‘impersonator’, when she lives as a woman on-stage and off. Everyone calls her Miss Christina. (I called her Miss Pickering once and everybody laughed.) I don’t know what her male name is and have no inclination to ask; I can’t imagine calling her Mr Anything. I suppose in a way she is like me.

Mr Berel and Mr Rivkin are quite a different kettle of fish. They work backstage, like me, and are very political. They stay up until all hours of the night arguing about Marx and drinking dreadful Russian spirits, and usually finish up singing maudlin songs in Yiddish until someone goes and thumps on their door. Otherwise they spend their free time going to political meetings in Vatore Street in the Jewish neighbourhood, near where Eli’s family lives! Although they argue incessantly they are plainly devoted to each other.

Then there is Bella Rosen. Some days the door rings two or three times with  deliveries of flowers, bonbons or love-notes from one of her gentleman admirers. I can well understand why. She is very popular in the vaudeville and musical comedies, and some of her costumes are quite astonishingly skimpy, but I think she could stand stock still in the middle of the stage wearing a potato sack and still bring the house down. Her rooms look as though they were transposed from the more scandalous sort of French novel. Mother People back home would say she was no better than she should be, but so far as I can see 'as good as she should be’ is perfectly sweet. She is forever passing on boxes of bonbons from her admirers, and I know she gives half of the jewellery she receives to Miss Christina, with whom she is great friends.

Miss Hammond and Miss Healy work in scenery and wardrobe respectively.  Miss Hammond is rather fierce. She smokes cigarettes just like a man and wears knickerbockers on her bicycle and even on occasion about the house! I suppose it would be rather rich of me to cast stones in that regard. Miss Healy is Irish and rather scatty. They are friends of long standing and share a room.

And lastly there is Cecilia Rheinhold, who is in the play with Hon. She is from Germany and apparently already quite well-known there. One certainly gets that impression to hear her talk, in any case. But Hon seems very taken with her. She says she is being perfectly sweet to her in rehearsals and showing her how things are done, etc. and even offered to ‘run lines’ with her (that means practice) outside rehearsal. The play is called The Cherry Orchard; it is by a Russian and apparently it is supposed to be a comedy. I must say the Russians must have a very odd sense of humour.

At present I am still working backstage as a sort of general dogsbody or factotum, generally with Mr Berel and Mr Rivkin. The work is so much more exhausting than anything we ever did on the farm. I fall into bed aching all over and some evenings it’s all I can do to stay awake at dinner! So you can rest easy knowing I have no time for fleshpots or debauchery.

All this is so I can make myself useful until Leslie King, the celebrated male impersonator, returns from tour. I am to be trained up as a sort of apprentice, and if I am good enough I might even have my own act some day. Just think of it! You might come and see me in top and tails. Quite a way from the Little Windenburg Dramatic Society!

Enclosed is a studio photograph of Hon and me, paid for extremely rashly out of my first month’s wages. You can’t think how exciting it is to have money one has earned oneself- even if it is hardly more than the pin money I used to get back home.

Your loving brother,

Clement

P.S. Please convey my gratitude to Eli for his willingness to pass on my letters.

Honour was very still. Not for the first time, Clem wished she wasn’t so difficult to read. It was confounding how when she was on-stage she managed to communicate her characters’ every thought, and yet in moments like this she was inscrutable. 

‘Mother wants me to go to Shibden College and read Theology’, Honour said after a long pause. ‘She thinks Britechester is just the place to meet a serious-minded young man.’

‘That’s not what I asked’, Clem said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to go.’ Honour’s voice was quiet, but resolute. ‘I want to act.’

Excitement, terror, relief, all flooded Clem at the same time. Honour put her hand out and took Clem’s. ‘They’ll never speak to me again’, she said quietly. There was nothing Clem could say to this. Certainly she couldn’t deny it. 

‘What about your family?’ Honour asked, after a long pause. 

‘I’ll leave a note for Dizzy. But my parents-‘ A lump rose in Clem’s throat. She forced it down. ‘I can’t be their daughter. That’s what they want from me.’

‘Clem…’ Honour said slowly. ‘When we go to Greater Windenburg, which you will be going?’ When Clem didn’t speak, she went on, ‘I found this book in my father’s library, Psychopathia Sexualis. It isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Well, parts of it are, but this man, Krafft-something, he says that some people are what he calls inverted. Some people just in certain ways, some…more so. It means their body and their soul don’t line up. So some people have a woman’s soul but in a man’s body, or…’

‘Or they’re like me’, Clem said. Her mind was racing. Inversion seemed like such an odd word, as though one was turned inside out, but it came the closest to describing her of anything she’d ever heard. ‘Hon…do you think you could try to call me him?’

‘Well if you’re dressing as a man I’ll have to, in front of other people’, Honour said. ‘Would you like me to do it when it’s just us, as well?’

‘You don’t have to’, Clem said, afraid of asking too much, ‘not if it’s too hard.’

Honour smiled her secret little smile. ‘Clem, you’ve been him in my head for a long time now.’

Clem drew himself up on his elbows. ‘Since when?’

‘Since I saw you in Lady Elaine’s old breeches on top of the hermitage.’