A School for Brides (10 page)

Miss Pffolliott took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment to calm herself.

“Sir,” she said at last to the kneeling man before her. “I pray you, do get up. You
must
not address me in this manner, you know you must not! I do not even know your name—”

“Gideon Rasmussen, at your service.”

“—or your family or anything else about you. It is most improper of you to seek to meet me without any chaperone present or to write to me without permission. I must beg you to desist. If you wish to know me, please do so by more conventional means. I am sure you can obtain an introduction; the mistresses of the school I attend are most amiable and would be pleased to receive a respectable gentleman who wished to call on one of their pupils.”

Here she paused, well pleased with this assessment of the case.

“Hang it all, Miss Pffolliott, I had hoped—”

“No, sir,” said Miss Pffolliott firmly, her resolve solidified by the difficulty with which Mr. Rasmussen was struggling to his feet. “Pray do not address me again until you have obtained an introduction. Please allow me to continue on my way unmolested.”

As she turned to leave him, she caught one last glimpse of his face. He was scowling; he had evidently expected an easier conquest.

MRS. HUGH FREDERICKS
gently stroked the fat cheek of her newborn son and sighed with contentment. In possession of an excellent constitution, she was rapidly regaining strength. Defying the concerted efforts of her physician, the midwife, the nursemaid, and her personal maid, she had risen unaided from her bed, fetched her baby from his cradle, and was sitting with him in a chair, looking out over the castle garden.

“What the deuce do you think you are doing out of bed?” demanded her husband, who had put his head into the room to see if mother and child were awake. “And where is that useless nursemaid when she is required?” He came and sat down beside them, ruffling the infant's scant hair.

“I am planning the ball I mean to give as soon as your son allows me a little leisure time,” she replied. “Our niece is in love, and a young lady in love
needs
a ball, just as a flower needs the sun and the rain.” She continued in a sentimental tone. “
We
met at a ball, if you recollect. A ball is a most tremendously exciting event in the life of a young woman, and I have never been in a position to give one before. I have sent the maids downstairs to consult with Cook about the dinner we shall serve.”

“Oh, you have, have you? That will be far too much excitement for
you
, young woman.” Her husband frowned. “You know quite well you are meant to remain in your bed for at least a fortnight and think about nothing but your health and the health of our son. I refuse to consider
any
entertainments whatsoever until you have recovered entirely. Say, around about the time young Rodney here reaches his majority, at age twenty-one. That will be
plenty
of time for balls, and we shall no longer be in a state of uncertainty about your well-being.”

“You are in the right
there
,” she retorted. “There will be no uncertainty, because I shall have expired of old age and ennui. Don't be foolish! It will only be a small dance—I ought not to have called it a ball—just the young ladies from Prudence's school and the Throstletwists and the gentlemen staying with them. Oh, and I suppose we ought to ask the Borings as well, if Her Ladyship is able to leave her couch by then, which I very much doubt. And Mr. Godalming, of course, will come in his character of Only Eligible Local Bachelor. We can hire a few musicians from Scarborough, and there ought to be
some
flowers left in the garden, and—”

“Hush, now, you'll fret yourself into a fever. Cease your scheming at once.
I
shall organize this dance, if dance there must be.”

“
You!
Pardon me, my dear, but you couldn't organize a game of hunt-the-slipper for a Sunday school class.” Waving away any offers of assistance from Mr. Hugh Fredericks, who, when not fully occupied with being her husband, controlled a vast empire of textile factories, financial institutions, and ship-building yards, she continued, “No, no, I am quite well. Within the week I shall be downstairs and presiding over your dinner table quite as usual, I assure you. But do not tell Cecily about the dance yet. I wish to surprise her.”

Miss le Strange, governess to Miss Crump, did not think well of the inn at Lesser Hoo. When shown to a room at the Blue Swan by the barefoot child who served as the inn's maid-of-all-work, she began immediately pointing out its deficiencies with the aid of her furled umbrella.

“Dirty,” she said, prodding a pitcher on a bedside table so that the water sloshed over the rim. “Dirty,” she said, stabbing at the bedcoverings and lifting them half off the mattress. “Dirty, dirty, dirty!” She thumped the point of the umbrella's ferrule against damp spots on the wall. With the toe of one exquisitely shod small foot she curled back a corner of the rug, exposing the accumulated dirt, fingernail parings, and bread crumbs that had been swept underneath. A shiny black beetle scurried away to safety under the wardrobe. Miss le Strange raised eyes like ice picks to meet those of the cowering maidservant.

“Do you
really
expect me to sleep in these conditions?” she demanded.
“Really?”

“Eee, Mistress,” quavered the small servant, who was unaccustomed to dealing with the Quality, “'tis summat t'matter?” Thinking that it was the beetle alone that was causing dismay, she added reassuringly, “'Tis nobbut a black-clock.”

Miss le Strange continued to stare at her. At last she said, “I do not have one
single
idea what you just said. Can you not speak the King's English?”

“Dunno, Mistress,” said the girl, who for her part was also struggling to understand Miss le Strange's beautifully articulated vowels. In any case, her attention was on the point of the umbrella, which seemed to be positively trembling in its anxiety to find another object to poke and prod.

“Yorkshire!”
muttered Miss le Strange. “It had might as well be Outer Mongolia.”

In a fury she dismissed the child and ordered her own maid, who had accompanied her, to strip the bed and replace the soiled sheets with the bedclothes she had brought from the Baggeshotte linen presses.

She had been informed that every bed was taken at the Winthrop Hopkins Academy, so that she could not be received there. In her opinion, the girls should have been forced to sleep two or three a bed in order to free up a chamber, but this expedient did not appear to have occurred to anyone else. However, she did not intend to remain in this disreputable hostelry any longer than necessary; surely
someone
in the neighborhood, of gentle birth and comfortable habitation, could be made to offer hospitality until her business with the school was satisfactorily settled.

The tone of the letter she had received from the headmistresses in response to her announcement that she was coming to take her pupil away was disquieting. Instead of the immediate compliance she had expected, objections had been enumerated and barriers erected. Evidently the schoolmistresses would not give up their most socially prominent pupil without a struggle. They actually dared to demand the direct instructions of Miss Crump's papa, the Viscount, now in Bath, and had refused to accept
her
word, the word of a
le Strange
. When Miss le Strange protested that the Viscount was ill and unable to make such a decision, they replied that they would wait until his health improved.

The most charitable construction Miss le Strange could put upon this attitude was that, in this barbaric, out-of-the-way part of the world, the ladies of the Winthrop Hopkins Academy had never heard of the le Strange family.

“When you have finished, Maggie, I want you to go downstairs and find out who the principal people are in this place,” she instructed the maid. “And be sure to mention to the other servants who my great-grandfather was. It is essential that it become known that I am no ordinary governess, but a person of consequence. Apparently, we shall have to remain in this dismal place for some time; at least until we can receive word from Lord Baggeshotte. Very tiresome, but those ridiculous schoolmistresses won't give up Miss Crump without it.”

“Yes, Miss,” said the maid, who knew that her mistress would be difficult to manage so long as she was forced to remain in this rather run-down country inn. She made her way down to the kitchen to order some hot negus for Miss le Strange and a sip of gin and lemon for herself. While awaiting these items, she rattled off details of her lady's fabled ancestry, and the high esteem, amounting almost to awe, in which Viscount Baggeshotte held her.

“He's that grateful to her for condescending to teach his only daughter, why, you wouldn't believe it,” she said, drinking down her gin in the kitchen so that the negus did not go cold. “Practically went down on his knees. Thinks the world of her, he does.”

Maggie often found it convenient to forget that she was employed by the Viscount, rather than by Miss le Strange. Although the other Baggeshotte servants disliked the governess and feared for the well-being of little Miss Crump under her care, Maggie found that the lady's cold and imperious temperament matched her own. She flattered herself that
she
, at least, could tell quality when she met it.

Suitably impressed, the staff at the Blue Swan was ready enough to accept Miss le Strange at her own valuation, and in return confided to Maggie a list of those gentry in the area who might be worthy of her acquaintance.

Miss le Strange received this information with satisfaction. She would, of course, have to await an introduction, and the bitter truth was that, instead of being the person of property she was so obviously
meant
to be, she was, in fact, a governess, only one step up from a servant. However, Miss le Strange had never allowed this dispiriting reality to impinge upon her comforts, or upon her sense of her own importance. She faced her future with the steady eye and firm grip of a military commander; she believed that, if called upon, she could produce the courage and audacity so conspicuously exhibited by her ancestors at the battles of Crécy and Agincourt.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead,” she said aloud in thrilling tones, striking the bedpost with a small fist.

Maggie nodded in grave approval of this display of aristocratic defiance. “Yes, Miss,” she said, and awaited further orders.

It was annoying to discover that the two great ladies of the place, Lady Boring of Gudgeon Park and her stepsister, Mrs. Fredericks of Crooked Castle, were both undergoing confinements after the birth of their first children. Miss le Strange was made for better things than sick-nursing; invalids were
so
demanding and ungrateful, and babies shrieked with such self-willed abandon that it quite gave her a headache.

Yellering Hall, owned by Sir Quentin and Lady Throstletwist, was reported to be filled with young men visiting an injured friend, who was in turn recuperating at the school. It would be quite improper to attempt to insinuate herself at the Hall. Miss le Strange was an unmarried woman and, as such, must protect her reputation. In her position she could not be too careful, and young gentlemen were all too apt to think themselves irresistible. Miss le Strange much preferred older men, who were grateful for any attention.

Only one possibility remained in this limited set of people. Lord Boring's mother, Mrs. Westing, had recently moved from the great house at Gudgeon Park to the dower house, a small but elegant residence within the Park grounds. All parties involved agreed that the mother-in-law and her new daughter by marriage would get on better in separate houses, and Mrs. Westing, like Miss le Strange, found the wailing of infants to be extremely trying.

So far as Maggie's information went, Mrs. Westing, who was said to be a lady who enjoyed games of chance to the exclusion of all other entertainments, was not particularly well-bred. She had married into the nobility and had never owned a title herself, being but the mother of the heir to the barony. This did not worry Miss le Strange; on the contrary. She had found that it was infinitely easier to impress those who had only relatively recently ascended in society. Mrs. Westing would do very well for her purposes. In addition, Miss le Strange was not unacquainted with games of chance herself; many a genteel evening of whist had supplied her with dress money in years past. She had no fear of Mrs. Westing's skill.