The Arrival of Perpetua

Summary

Perpetua, a porcelain-pale heiress orphaned before she can spell ‘dowry,’ is shuttled like a rare stamp between the foggy corridors of two equally suffocating kingdoms: the crumbling manor of her guardian-cum-astronomer Thaddeus, whose telescopes gaze farther than his heart, and the tartan-draped menagerie of Miss Majerdie, a sixty-year-old scalene woman who converses more fluently with macaques than mammals of her own species. The child arrives at the spinster’s estate armed with lace gloves, a reticule of rebellions, and a conviction that love can be bartered like gilt-edged stock. Majerdie’s drawing room reeks of cedar, bird-lime, and the sour promise that a girl’s worth is measured by the rustle of her petticoat and the silence of her bank ledger. Perpetua flees across moon-drenched turnip fields, her boots swallowed by mud as thick as gossip, and hurls herself upon Thaddeus, who treats her sudden presence like an algebraic error—interesting, inconvenient, ultimately erasable. He sends her back; she returns; the pendulum of possession swings until rumor scissors her fortune from her name. Suitors—first a velvet-waisted baronetcy aspirant, then a gambling-hall tenor, finally a celluloid-smile stockbroker—scatter like pigeons when word spreads that the heiress is now pauper. Only then does Thaddeus’s stoicism crack, revealing a molten core of desire he had disguised behind star charts and moral arithmetic. In the final reel, he offers not rescue but retroactive possession: a marriage proposal that smells of mildewed chivalry and the iron certainty that a woman is safest when she is both beloved and broke.

Synopsis

Perpetua is a rich little orphan with a guardian very much older than herself. This man is an absent-minded dreamer, unaware of his responsibility to Perpetua. The girl wants to live in her guardian's house, but instead is sent to her father's half-sister, Miss Majerdie, an angular spinster of 60 with a predilection for monkeys, parrots, cats, and dogs. Perpetua is not happy in this antique environment, so she runs away and forces herself upon her guardian, Thaddeus. He endures her for a time and finally ships her back to his sister's. The pretty girl is pursued by several suitors whose ardor cools when she is said to be not worth a cent. And here the moody guardian steps in. He has loved the girl but her wealth has prevented him from declaring his affection for her. But now that she is poor, he doesn't hesitate to offer himself.