The Observations Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 - I Find a New Place

  Chapter 2 - New Clothes and New People

  Chapter 3 - Friday

  Chapter 4 - What I Did Not Write

  Chapter 5 - The Master Returns

  Chapter 6 - I Make a Discovery

  PART TWO

  Chapter 7 - A Most Particular Case

  Chapter 8 - Depression

  Chapter 9 - An Important Dinner

  Chapter 10 - I Have an Idea

  Chapter 11 - Both Strange and Startling

  PART THREE

  Chapter 12 - I Get Another Shock

  Chapter 13 - A Trip, a Tea Party and a Mysterious Object

  Chapter 14 - Missing Pages

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 15 - An Apparition

  Chapter 16 - I Get a Fright

  Chapter 17 - Ominous News

  Chapter 18 - A Startling Revelation

  Chapter 19 - I Lose Hope

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 20 - I Am Made Captive

  Chapter 21 - Pandemonium

  Chapter 22 - An Unexpected Loss

  Chapter 23 - Desolation

  PART SIX

  Chapter 24 - A New Preoccupation

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for The Observations

  “To match Bessy you’d have to go back to Becky Sharp or the more astute observers of Charles Dickens. Her eye is keen, her mind quick and tart, her voice gorgeously in love with language. . . . She bewitches and amuses from the first moment.”—The State

  “Entertaining ... rollicking and engaging. A confident, fresh, roguishly charming first work.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Sharp, funny and tenderhearted, Bessy is an accomplishment for Londoner and first-time novelist Harris, who also manages the pace, period and book-within-a-book conceit nicely.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Bessy’s unique, witty voice distinguishes this boisterous novel.” —Booklist

  “Bessy’s is the freshest voice to come along in a long time. . . . The Observations will make you laugh and it will make you cry, and it will be remembered for a long time to come. Told by the highly entertaining narrator, Bessy Buckley, it is utterly unputdownable.”—Bookreporter.com

  “The Observations is a deliriously captivating tale of sex, ghosts, lies and mysteries. But that’s not the good part; the good part is our narrator Bessy, a fifteen-year-old Irish maid living in Scotland with the freshest, sharpest, naughtiest and most charming voice you’re apt to encounter in literature for a good long time. I adored her, and couldn’t put her story down.”

  —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Last American Man

  “In Bessy, Jane Harris has created an unlikely heroine with all the appeal and fearlessness of Moll Flanders and Scarlett O’Hara. Her complete lack of self-consciousness makes Bessy the perfect narrator. Throughout four hundred pages of mystery and intrigue, it is not the flawless plot that leaves the reader rapt but instead, Bessy’s comic observations. This novel could be held up as an illuminating slice of social history. . . . But The Observations is so much more than its title suggests. In this, her first novel, Harris has shown that powerful characterization is the real key to literary success.”

  —Daily Express (London)

  “The comparisons with Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, and especially with Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, are inevitable but misleading. The book’s size, its young criminal female narrator, its use of cross-class deceit and Wilkie Collins-influenced layering of plot twists may conveniently categorize it, but Harris’s voice is an original one, and her rollicking yet delicate narrative pitch sets the book apart. . . . Jane Harris has pulled off a difficult trick, showing the heart behind the tart with genuine and affecting empathy, cleverly undercutting preconceptions that the character has, at least on the surface, fulfilled. The beleaguered but spirited protagonist’s emotions are suppressed, hinted at, and beautifully described in a series of stories within stories built on shifting realities as deception is met with counter-deception. Despite the easy comparisons, this is a true one-off.” —Joanna Briscoe, The Guardian (London)

  “This first novel by Jane Harris moves with assurance and pace. . . . Harris’s research into the lives of servants in 1863 is impressive, as is her knowledge of the experimental and haphazard treatment of mental illness at the time. Her creation of a voice and a vernacular for Bessy is one of the novel’s pleasures. . . . [Harris] skillfully addresses the nature-and-nurture question in this accomplished novel.”

  —Felicity Scott, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “Bessy Buckley can hold her head up with Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp as a living, breathing mortal. . . . Her speech is peppered with happy similes, drawn from the slums of Dublin and Glasgow. . . . The most impressive aspect of Harris’s management of Bessy’s written and spoken language is that it entirely resists condescension; there is no patronizing aspect even to the humor that it produces. . . . The plot is not the most important element of this book. What one takes away is Bessy Buckley’s earthy voice, clear as a bell, ringing out her tale of love, loss and redemption.”—The Times (London)

  “Jane Harris has created a piece of Victorian Gothic, told with unVictorian bluntness and humor. . . . Intriguing, with a gloriously twisty plot.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Harris is already being spoken about in the same breath as Sarah Waters and Michel Faber. In Bessy, she has created a bawdy, picaresque character who holds our attention for more than four hundred pages. The Observations combines the best qualities of literary fiction with page-turning accessibility.”—The Observer (London)

  “I wept at the end of this brilliant first novel because I was so moved at the way Jane Harris sustains the vivacity, eloquence and pathos of her tale. Comparisons might well be made with Michel Faber and other writers who have turned to the Victorian cat’s cradle of social and sexual tensions for context. But Harris’s exploration of this territory is unique, not least in the ebullience of the language that issues from Bessy Buckley’s errant Irish tongue. Bessy is an unforgettable character. . . . Her observations bring extraordinary verve and veracity to the novel. . . . These are Harris’s raw materials: obsession, domination, transgressive love and above all sexuality, repressed and otherwise. Harris has distilled these themes into a superbly uncorseted evocation of life in Victorian Scotland that never falters.”

  —Jennie Renton, Sunday Herald (Glasgow)

  “Jane Harris’s debut novel is a confident and carefully wrought tale of secrecy and revelations, full of the twists and turns of classic nineteenth-century melodrama. . . . Harris maintains [Bessy’s] voice with aplomb throughout this captivating novel. A thoroughly satisfying and engrossing read.”—Waterstone’s Books Quarterly (bookseller)

  “It’s a rare feeling to be swept up by a book in the childhood way, but when it happens it’s extraordinary: deeply familiar and strangely unsettling. I was staying in a large house in the middle of a French field when I first discovered Rebecca. . . . Jane Harris’s first novel, The Observations, which is set in 1863, has all the necessary ingredients for a Rebecca-like absorption. There’s a bright young Irish maid for a heroine, with a mysterious past that is only gradually revealed; a beautiful mistress with her own set of secrets; and a rambling old house complete with creaking attic. . . . There are enough twists and turns to keep a cynical adult reader up half the night. . . . Historical romances can only be derivative—that is their point—but Bessy is an original narrator. She is down to earth and worldly, not easily led,
the very reverse of the impressionable young girl of gothic fiction. She’s impossible not to like.”—Eleanor Byrne, London Review of Books

  “The Observations is an astonishing imaginative feat, brilliantly written in bravura, bawdy style. . . . Harris’s richly comic, deeply touching novel is destined to be one of the publishing sensations of the year. . . . What makes it such a thrilling read is Harris’s lively language and sheer love of words.”

  —Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday

  “This intriguing, ghostly read will have you hooked from page one. Fantastic.”—Company magazine (London)

  “Harris’s skillful unravelling of her labyrinthine plot is a joy that will keep you reading well into the small hours.” —Easy Living magazine (London)

  “What makes this novel exceptional is the voice of Bessy. . . . There is an authenticity about her language, which derives partly from the contemporary Irish-Scots slang she uses but mostly from the truthfulness with which Jane Harris has drawn her character. . . . [Harris] has shown brilliance, warmth and understanding in both characterization and in realizing the period. And of course, bringing the servant’s voice into this classically Victorian fiction is ingenious. The phrase ‘astonishing debut’ is about to unleash itself, but sometimes great writers are just great writers whenever they start.” —The Book Magazine (UK)

  “The Observations is a powerful story of secrets and suspicions, hidden histories and mysterious disappearances that is darkly comic and compelling. . . . [It] has the potential to be a big commercial success in up-market historical women’s fiction, as it combines page turning accessibility with a literary quality.”—Publishing News (London)

  “Like a breath of fresh air—witty, bawdy dialect making it all the more tantalizing. The author undoubtedly has a wicked sense of humor.”

  —NewBooks (London)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE OBSERVATIONS

  Jane Harris’s short stories have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and she has written several award-winning short films. In 2000, she received a Writer’s Award from the Arts Council of England. She lives in London with her husband.

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  First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 2006

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  Copyright © Jane Harris, 2006

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-69598-8

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  MY MISSUS she often said to me, ‘Now then Bessy, don’t be calling me missus.’ She said this especially when the minister was coming for his tea. My missus wanted me to call her ‘marm’ but I always forgot. At first I forgot by accident and then I forgot on purpose just to see the look on her face.

  My missus was always after me for to write things down in a little book. She give me the book and pen and ink the day I arrived. ‘Now then Bessy,’ says she, ‘I want you to write down your daily doings in this little book and I’ll take a look at it from time to time.’ This was after she found out I could read and write. When she found that out her face lit up like she’d lost a penny and found sixpence. ‘Oh!’ says she, ‘and who taught you?’ And I told her it was my poor dead mother, which was a lie for my mother was alive and most likely blind drunk down the Gallowgate as usual and even if she was sober she could barely have wrote her own name on a magistrates summons. But my mother never was sober if she was awake. And when she was asleep, she was unconscious.

  But wait on. I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin nearer the beginning.

  PART ONE

  1

  I Find a New Place

  I HAD REASON to leave Glasgow, this would have been about three four years ago, and I had been on the Great Road about five hours when I seen a track to the left and a sign that said ‘Castle Haivers’. Now there’s a coincidence I thought to myself, because here was I on my way across Scratchland to have a look at the Edinburgh castle and perhaps get a job there and who knows marry a young nobleman or prince. I was only 15 with a head full of sugar and I had a notion to work in a grand establishment.

  Not only that but this lad from the Highlands had fell into step with me the past hour, he would have been about my age and he had been to get a tooth pulled. He kept dragging his lip down to show me the hole. I was sick of this boy and his grin and his questions, fair are you going? fair do you live? fwot is your name? fwould you like to lie down with me?—all this. I had told him a whole clatter of lies hoping he would go away but he was stuck to me like horse dung on a road sweepers shoe. If I slowed down he slowed down, if I sped up he sped up, if I stopped to fix my shawl or shift my bundle, what did he do but stand with his hands in his pockets to watch. Once or twice he got a jack on him would have put your eye out, you could see it poking behind the trousers, and the feet on him were filthy.

  I have to admit there was one added factor in my desire to leave the Great Road and that was the pair of polis that was coming towards us on horseback. Big buckers by the look of them. I had spotted them in the distance five minutes back, their top hats and big buttons, and ever since I had been looking for a way off the road, one that didn’t involve me running across a field and getting mucked up to the oxters.

  So I stopped walking and turned to the Jocky. ‘This is where I go off,’ I says, pointing at the sign to the castle.

  ‘I fwhill be coming with you,’ he says. ‘Hand you can be making me dinner. Hand hafterwards fwhee can be making a baby.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ says I and when he stepped forward as if to kiss me I grabbed his danglers and give them a twist. ‘Make your own babies, ’ I says. ‘Now away and flip yourself.�
�

  Off I went up the lane and when he followed me I gave him a shove and a few more flip offs and stamped on his bare foot and that was the last I seen of him, for a while anyway.

  The lane to the castle wound up a slope between two beech hedges. It was September but uncommon warm and lucky for me as I had no coat. After I had been walking about a minute there was the faint thud of hoofs on dirt and I turned to look back at the Great Road. The two grunts trotted past on their way towards Glasgow. Did they even turn their heads, did they buckie. Hurrah, says I to myself and good flipping riddance. What I always say is if you can avoid the scrutiny of the law then why not.

  With them out the way I thought I would have a quick skelly at the castle then find somewhere to sleep before it got dark. I had only 6 Parma violets and two shillings to my name and Gob only knew when I would get more, so I could ill afford a room. But I was hoping for a barn or a bothy where I could lay my head a few hours then press on to Edinburgh once it got light.

  I had gone no more than two steps when what did I see but a red-haired country girl about my age come skittering round the corner. She wore a dark stuff frock and plaid shawl and she was dragging a box along the ground by means of a leather strap. Even though she was in a queer hurry, she was laughing away to herself like a woman possessed. The most notable thing about her was her skin, very rough and red it was like she had had a go at her phiz with a nutmeg grater. I stepped out her road and gave her good afternoon as she passed. But she just cackled in my face and carried on stumbling towards the Great Road, dragging her box behind her, there was not much would surprise me then nor now, but all the same you expect more manners from country folk.