The Secret Countess

  The fatigue below stairs, the anxiety above, as the dowager wondered whether Uncle Sebastien, aged by five years in the last weeks, would get to the church to give away the bride, were not echoed by Muriel herself. Muriel felt fine. With five days to go she was certain that her decision to have a quiet wedding at Mersham had paid off. Not one of her father’s disreputable relatives had shown any sign of life and soon, now, Dr Lightbody would arrive to see the completion of her journey into the aristocracy.

  Yet at the very moment that Muriel was anticipating his arrival with such pleasure, the doctor was sitting in an ante-room in the Samaritan Hospital in the Edgware Road, in a state of bewilderment and shock.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his blond and handsome head. ‘It isn’t possible. Not Doreen.’

  ‘We’ve expected it for some time, Dr Lightbody,’ said the matron, who had indeed tried several times to give the obstinate man an idea of his wife’s condition. ‘She was very ill when she was admitted, as you know. It was only a matter of time.’

  Alone in his lodgings that night, the doctor sank wearily into his chair. He was a widower. Doreen had done the unbelievable thing and without a word to him, without, so to speak, his permission, she had died. Really, it was quite appalling, quite unbearable.

  And not only that. In two days’ time he was supposed to go to Mersham, to Miss Hardwicke’s wedding and the ball which preceded it.

  He would have to cancel it, of course. But how dreadfully disappointed Miss Hardwicke would be. She had been so interested when he had hinted that he might be willing to come and work at Mersham. And how agonizing it was for him to break his word.

  But would he in fact have to break it? The doctor rose and walked over to the mirror. Considering the shock he had just sustained he was looking wonderfully well. Supposing he went very quietly to the wedding? In a black armband to signify bereavement, emitting a restrained sadness which could not fail to touch Miss Hardwicke’s heart. Yes, in a sense it was his duty to go. One could, after all, be a little vague about exactly when Doreen had died.

  Yes, he would go to the wedding. It was, when all was said and done, a religious ceremony. But not to the ball. People might really think it was odd if he came to the ball in a black armband. And in any case a black armband would not go at all well with the white tunic, the golden circlet of laurel leaves and the lyre of Apollo. Sighing, the doctor moved over to the wardrobe and opened it. Nathaniel and Gumsbody had done him proud – the outfit was extremely becoming, simple yet regal, and they had thrown in, at half price, a bottle of liquid make-up for his arms and legs. He had tried a little on his knees last night and the effect was excellent: sportive yet glowing. But of course a black armband would kill that. It was impossible.

  For a while he stood looking at the white folds of the chiton, the finely wrought sandals. Was he perhaps being rather selfish, obtruding his grief like that? Why wear a black armband at all? Why, in fact, tell anyone that Doreen had died? To go, keeping to himself this bereavement, to pretend to laugh and dance and be merry when his heart was breaking – was not that the noble thing? Was that not what Apollo himself would have counselled? To dance with Miss Hardwicke, to hold in his arms her full-breasted, white skinned loveliness, to remind her, under cover of the music, of her procreative duties, was that not a worthier task than to sit here mourning and grieving, a victim of self-pity and despair?

  Of course there was the funeral. But Doreen’s parents, with whom she had never quite cut off relations though he had begged her to often enough, would be only too happy to organize all that without interference. And a thoroughly lower-class business it would be – but that was their affair. The actual interment, after all, wouldn’t be for at least a week and he’d be back by then.

  Yes, it was a hard choice, a task that would take all his self-control but he would do it. He would go to the wedding and the ball – and somehow contrive to enjoy himself. In which case, as he was going to see the florist anyway about a suitable wreath, he’d better enquire about a white carnation to go with the morning clothes he’d hired. Or would a gardenia be better? That is, if gardenias were worn at country weddings before lunch . . . ?

  The Herrings, meanwhile, had perfected their plan for getting to Mersham with a minimum of financial outlay. It was a complicated plan and though Melvyn had explained it several times to Myrtle, she was having trouble with it, her physical endowment, though generous, not being of the kind that extended to the grey matter of the brain.

  ‘Look, it’s like this,’ Melvyn explained patiently. ‘I buy one ticket for the two of us, see?’

  ‘What with?’ asked Myrtle, unhooking her corsets, for they were preparing for bed.

  ‘Just leave that to me, will you? I buy a return ticket, see? Then you wait till there’s a good crowd pushing round the barrier an’ you go through and give up your half of the ticket all properly like, and as soon as you’re through you push the return bit of the ticket back in my hand. Then I come along and the inspector says, “Tickets, please” and I say, “I’ve already given it to you”.’

  ‘But you haven’t,’ said Myrtle, rubbing the weals the whalebone had left in her burgeoning flesh.

  ‘No, Myrtle; I know I haven’t. Because you have. So then I say, all innocent like, “But I gave it to you” an’ he says, “No, you didn’t” and I say “Yes I did an’ if you look you’ll see I have because ’ere’s the return half with the number on it and if you look you’ll find the same number on one of the tickets in your hand.” And then ’e looks and sure enough, there it is.’

  ‘What about the twins?’ asked Myrtle, slipping back into the black crêpe de Chine petticoat that did double duty for a nightdress. That was what she liked about black undies; there wasn’t all that bother about washing them.

  ‘We’ll do the same with the twins. Buy one ticket between the two of them.’

  ‘All right. Only you go and explain to them what they’ve got to do.’

  Melvyn rose and opened the door of the adjoining room. Owing to an unfortunate spot of bother with the bailiffs, the twins were sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Dennis was lying on his back; his full-lipped mouth hung open and, as he breathed, the mucous in his nose bubbled softly like soup. Beside him lay Donald, apparently overcome by sleep in the act of eating a dripping sandwich, the dismembered remains of which lay smeared across his face.

  Melvyn stood looking down at the swollen cheeks, the pendulous chins and bulging arms of his offspring and his fatherhood, never a sturdy plant, wilted and died.

  ‘Meat,’ he said wearily to himself. ‘That’s all they are. Just blobs of meat.’

  He went out and closed the door. ‘They’re asleep,’ he said to Myrtle. ‘I’ll tell them in the morning. But it’ll work, you’ll see. It wouldn’t have done if we were going all the way to Mersham, but they’re sending the car to Maidens Over. There’ll be enough of a crowd there.’

  Myrtle got into bed and reached for the cold cream. ‘I suppose it’s better than being locked in the lav,’ she said. ‘But your Aunt Mary’d better come up with something good once we’re there.’

  ‘She will. She’s got a soft spot for me on account of I look like her Rupert. I’ve got the Templeton eyes, see.’

  Melvyn, for once, was not boasting. Both his own features and the twins’ dough-like countenances, were unexpectedly pierced by the wide, grey eyes, with their gold-flecked irises, which the dowager had bequeathed to her son.

  ‘Mind you, I’ll have to get past that old sod of a butler,’ said Melvyn, remembering Proom’s unequivocal stand over the gold sovereigns and the Meissen figurine. ‘He hasn’t half got it in for me.’

  ‘Oh, leave ’im to me,’ said Myrtle. ‘If ’e’s a man I’ll ’andle ’im,’ and began to giggle, delighted at her double entendre.

  Melvyn was less sanguine. From what he remembered of Cyril Proom, Myrtle was on a losing wicket there.

  Prince Sergei Chirkovsky, sitting in his neat, grey
uniform at the wheel of the huge, plum coloured Daimler with the Nettleford Arms (a serpent extended in fess, the head raised . . .) embossed on the door, steered his way expertly between the carters’ drays, the buggies and dawdling delivery vans of the interminable stretch of road between Darlington and York and wondered how long he could endure his present post.

  He was the most easy-going of men, his incredible good looks reinforced by a serene and undemanding acceptance of what life brought. ‘God was in a good mood when he made Sergei’, the matrons of Petersburg used to say, looking fondly at the charming, handsome, unassuming boy. But Sergei, who had accepted without complaint the hardship of exile from the land he deeply loved, was fast meeting his Waterloo at the hands of Honoria Nettleford and her ‘gals’.

  The duchess’s snobbery and meanness, her rudeness to him as an underling, were deeply unpleasant but not unexpected. It was what he had to put up with from Hermione and Priscilla, from Gwendolyn and Beatrice and the equine and haughty Lady Lavinia, all of whom he was now conveying southwards to the Earl of Westerholme’s wedding, that made Sergei wonder how much longer he could hold out.

  All his life, Sergei had been pursued by women. He was six years old when the tiny, dimpled Kira Satayev, eluding the vigilance of his Miss King, had ambushed him behind the Krylov Monument in the Summer Gardens and informed him that he found favour in her eyes. The peasant girls on his parents’ estates, the gypsy dancers on the islands, the ingénues in the ballrooms of Petersburg and their worldly mothers in its salons – all had made it clear to him, in their different ways, that they were his for the asking. He had learned very early to accept with gratitude and pleasure where acceptance was appropriate, to refuse with tact and gentleness where acquiescence might involve impropriety or pain. But never in all his life had he encountered anything as crude and displeasing as the advances of these snobbish and lascivious girls.

  He accelerated to pass a Model T Ford and though his skilled driving had effected the manoeuvre with perfect smoothness, the Lady Lavinia managed to hurl herself, as if impelled, against his side. She was the worst by far. When it was her turn to sit in front there was nothing to which this high-born lady would not stoop, yet when there was anyone looking on she spoke to him as his reactionary old grandfather would never in his life have spoken to the humblest of his serfs. And in the back of the car he could hear her four sisters snickering and bickering and awaiting their turn. How had Hudson wangled it, Sergei wondered, so that he went ahead conveying only the duke and duchess and the trunks? True, Hudson was the senior chauffeur, but he might have distributed the load a little less unevenly.

  Sergei sighed, assisted the Lady Lavinia to right herself and apologized for the non-existent jolt. If only, he thought, any of the girls had had just one redeeming feature: pretty hair, nice eyes, a fondness for little children – it might have been possible to snub them even if, as seemed likely, they would retaliate by seeing that he lost his job. But how could one rebuff girls of such unredeemed ugliness, girls who had only to appear at any social gathering to send every young man in the room running for cover?

  “Boch ti moy,’ sighed Sergei, calling on his Maker. And at Heslop, where he was to spend three nights, there would be the lady’s maids, the upper housemaids . . . And another complication. For one of his duties there would be to drive the Lady Lavinia to and from Mersham where she was staying. And Mersham was the place where Anna, so Pinny had told him, was also staying as a guest. He’d have to be very careful not to be seen by her in his role of chauffeur. Anna was quite incapable of acting sensibly and cutting him dead.

  Anna . . . As he thought of her, Sergei smiled – that dazzling, tender smile of his – and the Lady Lavinia, seeing it, edged closer. But Sergei was far away now . . . In the birch woods round Grazbaya as Anna ran towards him cupping fresh-picked wild strawberries for him in her hands . . . Anna, whose cry of ‘Look, Seriosha, oh, look!’ had been the thread running through their childhood as she shared with him her delight in a ring of white and crimson toadstools, a new foal, a skein of wild geese flying south to the Urals. If only he could find a job that would make it possible for him to look after her, and Petya too. She’d looked so tired when he saw her last at the club, so thin. Or should he, after all, marry Larissa Rakov like the grand duchess wanted? He’d fled from the baroness’s pallid plainness, her boring conversation, but compared to the Nettleford girls, the grand duchess’s dumpy lady-in-waiting seemed a miracle of propriety and intelligence and she was certainly very rich. Her banker father had seen the catastrophe coming long before anyone else and transferred all his assets to London. If he married Larissa, he could make a home for his parents and the Grazinskys too.

  Beside him, the Lady Lavinia, watching the tender lines of his mouth as he thought of Anna, felt her heart miss a beat. There was no question, of course, of her losing her head. She was travelling towards her destiny in the person of the Honourable Tom Byrne, in whose arms, as Undine the Water Sprite, she would, in less than twenty-four hours, circle the ballroom of Heslop Hall. But really this foreigner was shatteringly attractive. Would a small pinch on the thigh be going too far?

  They had reached York and, following instructions, Sergei drew into the courtyard of the King’s Hotel where Hudson was already parked. He opened the doors and the girls swept haughtily past him into the restaurant.

  ‘We’re to wait here by the cars, her grace says,’ said Hudson. ‘No gallivanting off.’

  Sergei nodded. He had been less than six weeks in the service of the Nettlefords, but long enough to know that their chauffeurs need not expect anything as vulgar and mundane as lunch.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Hawkins, Heslop’s awe-inspiring butler, staring disapprovingly from his great height at Anna.

  It was the evening of the ball. Anna had been conveyed to Heslop by the carter, an uncle of Peggy and Pearl, and now stood nervously before Hawkins, her eyes cast down. She had not thought of Selina Strickland for some days, but now she felt a pang of longing for the Domestic Compendium. For Heslop, with its labyrinthine corridors, its vast staff and rigid protocol, was a different world from Mersham.

  And she was late. Furious at being deprived of Anna’s services, Muriel had kept her to the last second, finding a dozen unnecessary jobs for her to do, so that if it hadn’t been for the dowager’s Alice almost pushing Anna out of the door, she could not have come at all.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ she said – and immediately came under fire from the other half of Heslop’s Dual Monarchy: the formidable housekeeper, Miss Peel.

  ‘Pull your hair back, girl. We don’t allow waves!’

  Anna pulled dutifully at her hair. Louise, consulting with Mrs Bassenthwaite in hospital, had put Anna into the uniform the maids had been issued for Lord George’s Twenty-first: a black silk dress to the instep, a white fichu, a short apron of snowy lawn finely tuckered and edged with lace. A frilled cap of the same lawn was set demurely back on Anna’s dark head.

  ‘It’s old-fashioned but it’ll be right for Heslop,’ Mrs Bassenthwaite had said, ‘with Miss Peel being such a stickler.’

  Unable to find fault with Anna’s appearance, yet aware that the girl somehow did not look as she wanted her to look, Miss Peel said, ‘Let me see your fingernails.’

  Anna extended her hands. The obvious antagonism she had felt the moment she set foot in Heslop hurt and puzzled her. She was too inexperienced to realize what an affront her arrival was to servants jealous of their privileges and rights. As though they couldn’t provide all that was necessary for the ball without an upstart and a foreigner being wished on them! Not only that, but she was to be employed upstairs, in a position of prominence, serving drinks in the great hall when the guests arrived and showing the ladies to the cloakrooms. Unable to take their resentment out on Lady Byrne, who had given these instructions, they prepared to give no quarter to the foreign girl, who by all accounts had been thoroughly spoilt at Mersham.

  ‘I’ll take her alon
g to get started,’ said Hawkins now. ‘She’s too late for tea, the girls are just coming out.’

  Anna, who due to Muriel’s bullying had had no lunch, repressed a sigh, curtsied to the housekeeper and followed Mr Hawkins down a short flight of steps, along a winding corridor and through an enfilade of sculleries and store rooms to the pantries. Minna had done everything she could to provide her servants with comfort: the floors were carpeted, there were electric lights, new boilers, glass-fronted cupboards – but the tone of an establishment is set by those who run it and Anna was not surprised, passing the kitchens, to hear a scream and see the door burst open to eject a hysterically weeping kitchen maid, who gave a gasp of terror at the sight of Hawkins, threw her apron over her head and scuttled blindly away.

  Mr Hawkins stopped at the door of a large pantry where three girls, under a barrage of admonitions from the first footman, were laying out trays of glasses and cutlery.

  ‘Here’s the Russian girl, Charles,’ said Mr Hawkins, pushing Anna into the room. ‘She’s to go upstairs at eight, but there’s plenty of time for her to make herself useful before then.’

  ‘There is indeed,’ said the first footman with a sour smile. He turned to Anna. ‘You can start by rinsing all those knives through hot water and polishing them. Hot water, mind, and no fuss about it hurting your hands. The sink’s over there.’