The Grand Tour of Aunt Philippa

On the second Sunday of January, 1764, in the parish of Saltwood in Kent, over a dish of boiled mutton that nobody was enjoying, Aunt Philippa put down her fork and announced that she was going on the Grand Tour.

There was a silence at the table. It was the particular silence of a family that has heard Aunt Philippa announce things before.

Elias's father, who was her younger brother, cleared his throat. "The Grand Tour, Philippa."

"France," said Aunt Philippa. "The Alps. Venice, Florence, Rome. Naples, if the roads allow, and Vesuvius, if Vesuvius allows. I have the money, I have the time, I have a sound constitution and a good pair of boots, and I am sixty-one years old, Henry, which means that if I do not go now I shall go to my grave having seen nothing but Kent and Bath, and I have seen quite enough of Bath."

"The Grand Tour," said Elias's father again, carefully, "is for young gentlemen. To finish their education. To polish them."

"I have watched a great many young gentlemen come back from being polished," said Aunt Philippa, "and most of them came back exactly as dull as they went, only with worse debts and a taste for French wine. I intend to do it properly." She picked up her fork again, and pointed it down the table, past the mutton and the boiled carrots and the cruet, until it came to rest on Elias.

"And I shall take Elias."

Every face at the table turned.

Elias had been, until that moment, thinking about nothing more dangerous than whether there was any pudding. Elias was seventeen, and had spent seventeen years in Saltwood, and had never been farther than Canterbury, except once to Rochester, which had rained. Elias drew a little, not well, and read a great deal, not always the right things, and had been told by the curate that his handwriting was the only tidy thing about his whole person.

"As my secretary," said Aunt Philippa. "I shall need letters written, and accounts kept, and a journal, and I cannot see to thread a needle any longer, let alone read a French bill of fare by candlelight. Elias writes a clear hand and has a good memory and is not, so far as I have observed, a fool. That is more than can be said for most of the people I shall meet."

"Philippa," said Elias's mother faintly. "A year abroad?"

"Ten months," said Aunt Philippa. "Perhaps fourteen. We leave from Dover on the first of February." She looked at Elias, and for the first time her voice changed, very slightly, as if something under it had shifted. "If Elias will come. I shan't drag anybody across the Alps who does not want to be dragged."

Everyone looked at Elias again.

Aunt Philippa Wraxall had been a widow for nine years. She lived alone, except for her maid, in a tall, cold, untidy house on the hill above Hythe, full of books and fossils and stuffed birds and the smell of lamp oil, and she walked the shore below the cliffs every morning in all weathers with a hammer and a basket, looking for the shells of creatures that had been dead for longer than the Bible said the world had existed. She had once told the bishop so, at dinner. She had once told a duke that his hounds were badly bred and his opinions worse. She had once, when Elias was nine, sat up all night with Elias through a fever, reading aloud from a book about volcanoes, and had not told anybody.

Her husband, Uncle Edmund, whom Elias could only just remember as a large, gentle, wheezing presence with a smell of snuff, had made the Grand Tour himself as a young man, forty years before. He had brought back a marble head from Rome. It still stood in the hall of the house above Hythe, on a pillar, where it had always stood: a Roman lady with her hair dressed in tight curls, a broken nose, and an expression of mild, eternal disappointment. Uncle Edmund had loved it more than anything he owned. He had called it the Signora. He had talked to it, the family said, when he thought nobody was listening.

"Well?" said Aunt Philippa.