1851: Margaret deMallard, Glasgow
Letter fragment to her sister in Shanghai
The snow is lying thin upon the heather this morning, and the wind comes down from the hills with that clear, cutting edge which belongs only to a Scottish January; yet my thoughts, perversely, have wandered back to the soft green lawns of Mallard and the glitter of that Centenary luncheon. How strange a spectacle it was—tents like palaces, fountains that fancied themselves Roman, and every species of second cousin fluttering about as if the family name were a freshly discovered virtue. And yet, for all that display, what struck me most was not who was present, but who was not.
Did you observe, as I did, that none of the Dowagers from their estate lodges appeared at table? Not one of those formidable relics of earlier reigns, though they must, by all propriety, have been invited. Their absence sat oddly upon the whole affair, like a missing panel in a stained-glass window. I had my carriage stop at North Lodge on our way back to enquire after the old Dowager there, being curious to know if illness had kept her away. The butler, with a face as long as a winter afternoon, informed me that Her Grace “conveyed her regrets, that she might rest and be thankful in her garden.” A curious phrase for December, when the rose-beds are nothing but thorns and memory.
I could not help but feel there was more in it than fatigue, some quiet resistance to the new order of things at Mallard. The young people may parade in their silks and railway carriages, but the Dowagers, it seems, prefer the company of their ghosts and their winter shrubs. When next you write from Shanghai, tell me how such matters are managed among the great houses there; do their old ladies also retire to their gardens when the world grows too noisy, or is this reserve a peculiarly British ailment?
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