The Magnificent Masquerade (4 page)

Kitty had made no sound during her examination
of the scene, but some instinct told Miss Marchmont she was there. "Well,
come in, come in!" the headmistress snapped, not looking up from her
letter. But as soon as Kitty closed the door behind her, Miss Marchmont lifted
the lorgnette which hung on a chain round her neck and stared at the girl
through it. "Ah, Kitty, my dear," she said with the grimace that was
her way of smiling but which was often construed by the young and the guilty to
be a frown, "do sit down."

Kitty dropped a curtsey, mumbled a greeting,
and sank nervously upon the chair facing the desk. "You's-sent for me,
ma'am?"

"Yes, I did. Do you have any idea
why?"

"No, ma'am."

Miss Marchmont sat down at her place behind the
desk and fixed her eyes on Kitty's face. "Are you sure?"

Kitty's eyes fell. "Almost sure." She
twisted her hands nervously on her lap. She took a breath and then another. The
room was so silent she could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the
hallway outside the closed door. Time began to stretch so that the space
between each tick of the clock became interminable. The silence thickened and
made the air oppressive. Kitty suddenly decided she could bear it no longer.
"If you've sent for me because of the poor, undernourished little terrier I've
been keeping in the tool shed," she blurted out hurriedly, "I hope
you understand that if I hadn't found it, it would have starved or been mauled
by the wheels of an unheeding carriage."

Miss Marchmont's lips twitched in what an
impartial observer might have described as amusement but what appeared to Kitty
as annoyance. "So you've been keeping a dog in the tool shed, eh?"

"It's only a puppy," she corrected,
automatically defensive. Then she blinked as the import of the headmistress's
remark dawned on her. "Oh, blast!" she exclaimed. "You didn't
know about it, did you?"

"No, I did not."

The girl wanted to kick herself. Why had she
permitted her nervousness to make her a blabbermouth? She felt her cheeks
redden in embarrassment. "Then why-?"

"Why did I send for you? Try another
guess." Kitty clenched her fingers and swore to herself she would not be
tricked again. "I have no idea, ma'am." Miss Marchmont leaned
forward. "No idea at all?"

"No!" She looked at her inquisitor
directly in the eye.

"None."

Miss Marchmont resorted to her lorgnette again.
"You're quite certain?"

"Quite!" Kitty was prepared to
outstare the headmistress for as long as she had to. The silence no longer
frightened her.

She stared stoically back at Miss Marchmont's
impassive face. But after a moment or two, she realized she was no match for
the lorgnette. The glasses glinted with reflected light and seemed to the
nervous girl to be sending out evil rays that could penetrate her soul. Her
eyes fell. "At least I don't think it could be the ..."

“the-?" Miss Marchmont prodded.

“-the play?"

"The play?" Miss Marchmont's
expression remained unreadable.

"It isn't meant to offend, you know,"
Kitty assured her hastily. "It's only intended to be a series of gentle
gibes-"

"Ah, yes. Gentle gibes, to be sure.
Against-?"

"Only twitting the faculty and ...
yourself. If you found anything offensive in it, it can be changed, I promise
you. Why, we haven't even begun rehearsals yet. No one's even read it yet,
except Clara... and she's only read the opening act."

"I'm much relieved to hear it," Miss
Marchmont murmured, amusement now quite apparent in her eyes.

Kitty recognized the glint and winced.
"Dash it all, I'm ten ways a fool! You didn't know about the play either,
did you?" "No, I'm afraid not," Miss Marchmont admitted. Kitty
exploded in self-disgust. "Confound it! I've confessed to two additional
crimes-just handed them to you on a platter!-and I still don't know what crime
you've called me down to punish me for!"

Miss Marchmont’s face seemed to fall. “Heavens,
child,” she exclaimed in surprise, "I don't only see my pupils to inflict
punishment.”

"In my case you do." Kitty sighed.

"Do I?" Miss Marchmont stared at
Kitty thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose that's true. I hadn't realized ... I
wonder if that comment isn't a greater reflection of my shortcomings than
yours," she said, more to herself than the girl before her. "I don't
mean to imply that I haven't deserved it," Kitty said, suddenly finding
herself unwilling to let Miss Marchmont take the blame.

"That also is true. You have been a most
devilish prankster." The headmistress's tone was, of all things, quite
affectionate. "But I haven't sent for you this time to discuss a
prank-,"

Kitty looked up in astonishment. "You
haven't? Then why have you sent for me, ma'am?"

"Are you sure you have nothing else to
confess before I tell you?"

"Yes, ma'am," the girl said, grinning
ruefully, "very sure."

"Then please turn your attention to
this." Miss Marchmont picked up a sealed letter that had been lying on the
desk before her and handed it over to her high-spirited pupil. It was a letter
from her father. Kitty recognized the hand at once, even though he hardly ever
wrote to her. "Good Lord!" she exclaimed, staring at the seal with a
sudden chill in her bones. "Something must have happened at home!"
"There's no need for alarm," Miss Marchmont said. "I, too, have
had a letter from your father, and I am aware of the information your letter
contains." She threw her pupil a speculative glance. "It is possible
you may even consider the news to be quite exciting."

"Exciting?" A weight seemed to lift
itself from her chest. If her interpretation of Miss Marchmont's manner was
correct, she was not to be punished. Nor was she to be the recipient of tragic
news. She had nothing at all to be worried about. For the first time since
she'd been summoned, she felt her usual, lighthearted self. She was absolved of
past transgressions and was therefore quite ready for life's next adventure. If
this letter promised something exciting, she was quite eager for it, whatever
it was. Or so she thought while she broke the seal. She read the letter twice
before the full import broke upon her. Then she read it once more to make sure
she had not misunderstood. By this time the color had completely receded from
her cheeks. "He cannot mean it!" she muttered, aghast. Miss Marchmont
eyed her curiously. "You do not like your father's plan for you,
then?"

"Like it?" The girl was
horror-struck. "How can I like it? Would you?"

"I must admit that I would not. But then,
I was not made for wedded life. I've always been more interested in education
than in matrimony. You, on the other hand, have surely grown up in the
expectation of being wed as soon as you came of age, have you not?"

"Yes, but I'm not of age. Not yet."
There was a crack in her voice. "This is ... too soon!"

The headmistress took off her spectacles and
looked at the girl with sincere sympathy. "I am very sorry, Kitty. In my
view, you should at least have been permitted to finish your schooling here before
. . . " She paused, sighed, and lowered her eyes. Lord

Birkinshaw's letter had made her furious, but
she knew it would do the girl no good to show her feelings. She pulled a
handkerchief from her sleeve and polished her glasses vigorously before she was
able to go on. ". . . before being launched into wedded life. But your
parents seem to have made an irrevocable decision. We have no choice but to
abide by it."

Kitty's lips trembled. "I's-suppose
so," she said tonelessly. There was no reason to prolong this torture,
Miss Marchmont decided. "We have many things to discuss, my dear."
she said, getting up from her chair, "and much to do before your father's
carnage comes for you. But perhaps you'd like to be alone for a while first, to
pull yourself together."

"Yes, please, Miss Marchmont," the
girl said, rising also. She dropped a curtsey like an automaton and went
dazedly from the room.

Emily, who had waited for her in the corridor
despite Kitty's orders to the contrary, noticed her pallor at once.

"Good heavens, Miss Jessup, was it
something really dreadful?" she asked in a whisper.

Kitty nodded. "Very dreadful."

"Oh, dear. She hasn't sentenced you to
Coventry
, has she?"

"I wish it was only that. A week in the
solitary bedroom would be bearable. At least I'd know that it would soon
end." Emily's brows rose. "Do you mean it's worse? Not ... ? She
couldn't have ... ! You haven't been expelled, have you? Is she sending you
home?"

"Even worse than that. I am being sent off
to ... to. . She could barely bring herself to utter the word.

"To where?" Emily prodded.

"To ..." Kitty's tightly held
self-control deserted her, and she fell into the maid's arms with a choked cry.
"Oh, Emily, how can they have done this to me? I'm not ... ready!"

"But what is it, miss?" Emily asked,
truly alarmed. "Where are they sending you?"

"To someplace worse than school, worse
than
Coventry
,
worse even than prison!" She lifted her head, stared straight out before
her, set her shoulders, and marched off down the hall, her last words echoing
back to Emily like the thrums of a muffled drum. "I'm being sent off to
... to death!"

Chapter Four

When a young woman of not-quite-eighteen is
struck a severe blow, she can immediately resort to the one course of action
guaranteed to be both appropriate and effective: she can throw herself upon her
bed and cry. The act is appropriate because it is instinctive (girls have done
it since the beginning of time), and it is effective because it postpones other
action (which might be dangerous or ill-considered when the girl is in turmoil)
until the weeper's brain has ceased to seethe. Kitty wisely took just such
action.

When her bout of tears had ended, it was
bedtime. The girls of the upper school, dressed in their nightgowns and
supposedly asleep in their beds, had waited patiently for her sobs to subside,
and they now gathered round to hear her explanation and to offer their sympathy
and advice. The door of their dormitory room was safely shut against all
intruders, they'd all perched comfortably upon Kitty's bed, and they'd lit only
one candle (shaded by a green glass ginger jar which they kept hidden away
under a floor board for just such occasions) so that no telltale light would
seep under the door to alert the night guard that a colloquium was in session.

Kitty read her father's letter aloud in a voice
that still trembled with despair. When she'd finished, there was a shocked
silence, for the enormity of the problem momentarily overwhelmed the
white-gowned listeners. "Good God!" Bella breathed in something like
awe.

"Yes, exactly so," Kitty muttered
glumly. "I couldn't have expressed it better myself."

There was an immediate outpouring of sympathy,
but it was not sympathy that Kitty wanted. "I need advice," she told
them firmly. "Good, practical advice. How am Ito get out of this
fix?"

They promptly set their minds to the problem.
They were not without imagination, and soon they were able to offer a number of
suggestions. The ideas they concocted varied with their personalities. Hannah,
the quietest of the group, was the first to get an idea. "A rope
ladder," she suggested. "We'll tie our sheets together. Then all you
need do is climb down and run away."

Of course this suggestion was immediately
vetoed. There was no place to which Kitty could run. Where could she go without
funds or resources? If she had a maiden aunt who could be counted on to be
sympathetic to her plight and take her in, something might be contrived, but
Kitty could think of no such convenient relation.

Dolly suggested falling into a trancelike
illness that might frighten her parents into relenting, but everyone else
disagreed. Kitty looked much too healthy to feign illness. However, that idea
led directly to Bella's notion: the threat of starvation. "If you refuse
to eat a morsel of food until they release you from this betrothal, you might
get your way. My threats to starve myself work wonders with my father."

"Your father is a pussycat," Kitty
pointed out. "Mine is a mule."

Plump little Clara had listened to the
discussion with frowning detachment. "I don't know why you're making these
suggestions at all. You're all doomsayers without there being a sign of doom! I
don't think the situation is the least bit tragic."

"Not tragic?" Kitty exclaimed in offense.
"I thought you were my best friend!"

"I am your best friend. But I, for one,
would consider such an event quite fortunate ... at least until I laid eyes on
the man in question. After all, he might very well turn out to be hand some and
charming. If one found him so, one could then live happily ever after."

"And if he turned out to be a
bag-pudding," Bella demanded, "what then?"

"Then one could lower a rope ladder or
starve oneself to death," Kitty muttered with hopeless irony.

The girls' colloquy did not prove fruitful.
Before a really useful plan could be concocted, Miss Hemming, who had night
patrol, came in and discovered them. Her shrill scolding sent the girls
scurrying to their beds. But after she left, Clara crept over to Kitty's bed to
offer one last bit of hope. "I

wouldn't despair, my love," she whispered.
"I think you may be pleasantly surprised by your betrothed. Tobias Wishart
is a very romantic-sounding name, isn't it? You may very well fall in love with
him at first sight. And if you don't, you'll think of some way out of it. If
there's anyone in the world who can find a way out of a fix, it's you."

The two girls embraced and, realizing it was
for the last time, shed a few tears. Then Kitty buried her head in her pillow,
expecting to spend a sleepless, agonizing night. How ever, her friend's last
words echoed in her mind and gave her unexpected comfort. Although Clara was
surely mistaken in hoping that she would fall in love with a fellow named
Tobias (Tobias, ugh!), she was not mistaken in her evaluation of Kitty's talent
for devising schemes. If Kitty found herself in a fix, she was quite capable of
getting herself out of it. With that consoling thought, and with the resiliency
of youth, she soon fell asleep.