Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (21 page)

So two white-faced and sad American misses set sail on the great liner
Titania
. And right into one of the worst of the Atlantic storms.

The beaten and battered
Titania
crept up the oily estuary waters of Southampton as one by one the shaking passengers began to emerge on deck, most of them for the first time. They walked up and down, talking in shocked whispers and staring in awe at the battered superstructure of the ship. The ship’s doctor bustled from cabin to cabin with his black bag, ministering to those who had not yet recovered from the horrendous journey.

The Maguire sisters huddled together for comfort beside the rail and stared in dismay at what they could make out of their new homeland. A steady drizzle was falling from a dark-gray sky. The clouds were so low that they lay in great sodden masses along the low hills of the Southampton estuary. It all looked bleak and unfriendly and
foreign
.

Both were reflecting dismally on what Miss Simms had told them in a fit of drunken venom. “Think you’re going to marry lords?” the ex-schoolteacher had hiccuped. “Why, they’ll laugh in your faces.”

“B-but Lady Fanny—” Molly had stuttered.

“Her!” sneered Miss Simms. “She’d groom a pair of Hottentots for the London Season. She’s being
paid
to do it. You’re nobody special.”

It was then that Molly had felt a cold rage taking possession of her.

“You, Miss Simms,” she said with an edge to her voice that Mary had never heard her use before, “are also being paid to be a
companion
and not a drunken, venomous mentor. I am dismissing you.”

“You always were a fresh kid,” retorted Miss Simms indifferently. “Cheese it. You ain’t firing nobody. Your pa hired me and your pa fires me. So there.”

She had then turned back to her ever constant companion, her bottle of gin, leaving Molly to stare at her with baffled fury.

Now as they stood at the rail, Mary said suddenly, “Perhaps if we behave very badly, Lady Fanny will send us home.”

Molly straightened her spine and stared out at the dark shores of England. “No we won’t, Mary. We’re American. We’re democratic. We’ll do our best, and if they don’t like it, they can send us home.” A sudden vision of the cosy shop in Jane Street, with its cluttered sacks and cans of goods, its smell of spices and coffee and candy, sprang into her mind; a little world shielded from the dark by the warm flare of the gaslight. And then she realized that her home was gone and her parents—two posturing strangers she did not recognize. Two salt tears rolled down her cheeks, adding their moisture to that of the now steadily falling rain.

The bustle of departure from the ship went by like a rain-soaked dream. The press swarmed over the
Titania
, taking photographs of the storm damage and lightening the dark day with their magnesium flashes. Ignoring a very white-faced Miss Simms, the Maguire sisters walked arm in arm to the barrier and noticed, still as if in a dream, that a smartly dressed footman was holding up a placard bearing their names.

In no time at all, they were cosily tucked up in rugs in a large traveling carriage and bowling away from the bustle of the port, with the coachman gaily cracking his whip and two enormous footmen perched up behind.

Molly was glad to see that Miss Simms was beginning to look cowed. The Maguire sisters had been treated with every deference and Miss Simms with practically none at all. In fact, one of the footmen had taken a contemptuous sniff of the strong aroma of gin that surrounded the companion, had given Miss Simms one scandalized look, and then retreated to his post. Miss Simms began to chew peppermint pastilles as hard as she could and kept muttering that she wished she had not come.

Their journey was broken at a large inn and it was there that Molly first became aware of how strange they must look.

Both girls were dressed in their green-and-white plaid school dresses covered with their best starched aprons. All their clothes were to be bought for them in England so Mrs. Maguire had thoughtlessly provided nothing new for the journey. Molly had grown since leaving school and she realized, to her embarrassment, that she was showing an unseemly expanse of ankle. The dining room of the inn seemed to her unsophisticated eyes to be extremely richly furnished, with its deep turkey-red carpet and its small, glittering chandeliers.

Every time she said something to Mary, everyone in the dining room would stop eating. They did not stare, they were too polite for that. They simply sat and listened and then leaned their heads together and whispered. Molly had cut up her roast beef and vegetables and was eating it all with her fork. But this, she realized, was completely the wrong thing to do. It seemed one must use
both
knife and fork at the same time and hold them rather like pencils. It was all very strange.

All too soon they were back on the road, bowling between high hedgerows that filled the carriage with green gloom, up little rises past tiny farms—like farms in a children’s storybook.

Molly’s head was beginning to droop. The lunch had been heavy and she was feeling sleepy.

“Hadseal” called the coachman, and she straightened up. Mary and Miss Simms had both fallen asleep, the latter snoring with her mouth open and her once jaunty straw hat askew. Molly let down the carriage window and looked out. The carriage was winding down a steep road. On the right, the sea seemed to stretch to infinity, and as they turned another bend the heavy clouds parted and a broad, sparkling ray of sunshine lit up the little town nestling in the curve of the bay.

The clouds parted more and more as the carriage wound down the hill. Colors sprang magically out of the dark landscape. Great clumps of sea pinks clung to outcrops in the springy turf, harebells quivered in a light breeze, a whole field of buttercups blazed out to welcome the return of summer, and brightly painted fishing boats bobbed and danced at anchor on a sea of pure aquamarine. And a long curve of golden sand bordered with little creamy waves stretched around the length of the bay.

The Maguire sisters and summer had arrived at Hadsea.

Lady Fanny Holden gave a final authoritative twitch to a vase full of roses and, having decided that they had been properly disciplined, turned to her husband, Lord Toby, as the next thing that needed to be put in order.

“Now, Toby,” she barked, “it’s no use standing there shuffling and muttering in that irritating way that it’s all a bore. The gels will be here shortly and you must change. You are
not
an example of an English gentleman of the aristocracy in that filthy old tweed jacket. I shall never forget the humiliation the day I gave it to the church sale and found that you had bought it back.”

Lady Fanny was an energetic woman in her fifties, with thick white skin, pale-blue eyes, and well-ordered salt-and-pepper hair. She was inclined to be plump but kept the unseemly bulges rigorously at bay in the confines of a long Empire corset.

Her husband had a hunted air. He was tall and thin with thick fair hair, a fair mustache that he kept fingering nervously, and rather bulging weak eyes. He was at that moment dressed in the offending jacket, an old pair of knickerbockers, worsted socks, and elderly brogues cracked and trodden into comfort. Sometimes it seemed to him that his whole married life had been a desperate search for ease and comfort, constantly stymied by the rigorous discipline of his wife.

For one whole beautiful summer last year he had enjoyed the peace of Hadsea while his wife chafed at the inactivity. He had pottered in the garden, stared at the sea, gone for long walks with his silent dogs, and occasionally dropped into the Prince of Wales down by the pier for a pint. Now all that had fled. His wife had insisted that they needed more money. Hadsea had become fashionable. Already other titles—the sort of bores one tried to avoid at the club—were all around, alive and well, doing Larsen exercises on the beach and generally mucking up the scenery.

Any money for the tutoring of the Maguire sisters seemed to have been used up already on a too-large army of supercilious servants who kept popping out of the shrubbery like damned jack-in-the-boxes to light his bloody cigar when he least bloody wanted it lit! His beloved garden was now the property of two crusty, gnarled Scottish gnomes with their numerous undergardeners who had a positive mania for making straight lines and bordering them with the shells from last night’s dinner. It was downright upsetting to see the remains of one’s
moules rémoulade
keeping a bed of petunias at bay.

Driven from the sitting room by the noise of carriage wheels outside and the impatient cluckings of his wife, he muttered and pottered his way upstairs.

Lady Fanny adjusted her enormous white lace hat to precisely the right angle—one inch more to the left would be rakish and one more to the right would be common—and turned with a smile of welcome on her face.

The Maguire sisters stood in the doorway, holding hands and looking at her “as if I had come out of the Ark” as she often said afterward.

Lady Fanny’s opening words were typical. “Oh, dear, dear,
dear
. Those clothes. Horrid. What can your mama have been thinking of? And what’s that?”

“Miss Simms. Our…er…companion,” said Molly weakly.

“Then take it away. It won’t do,” said Lady Fanny, waving her gloved hand.

Miss Simms pushed past the sisters into the room. “Are you talking about me?”

“And you poor girls must be so exhausted after your journey,” said Lady Fanny, ignoring Miss Simms completely. She touched the bell. “Wembley,” she said to a stern individual in a striped waistcoat, “send for Miss Betts—the dressmaker, you know—and despatch this back to America.”

Molly looked around the sitting room, over the tapestried chairs with their curled gilt arms; at her reflection in the old greenish mirror over the fireplace; at the bowls of flowers; but there was no sign of a package for America. Then she realized that Lady Fanny had been referring to Miss Simms.

So did Miss Simms.

“You can’t do this,” yelled that unfortunate lady. “You’re worse’n the Bowery gangs.”

Lady Fanny deigned to notice Miss Simms. “What’s your name, woman?”

“It’s Euphemia Simms.”

“Well, Simms, from the smell of you and from your manner, you’d be far better back on the other side of the Atlantic. Good God! I do believe the woman is going to argue. Take her away, Wembley.”

“Very good, my lady,” said the butler, easing the infuriated companion toward the door. “There is a boat from Southampton tomorrow morning.”

Miss Simms let out a despairing squawk. “Say something, Molly,” she shrilled. But Molly remembered the isolation of Brooklyn Heights and the insolence of the boat and turned away. So Miss Simms departed from the room and their lives, leaving behind a faint odor of gin and peppermints.

The girls stood awkwardly while Lady Fanny walked around them, tugging at a crease here and a fold there. Both girls were wearing depressing felt hats: the kind, called by English schoolchildren, “pudding basin.” With one large white muscular hand, Lady Fanny twitched the offending headgear first from Molly’s head and then Mary’s. The springy, black, glossy curls came tumbling in a cascade down the girls’ backs and Lady Fanny caught her breath. Why, the girls were beautiful! Molly had perhaps too much determination in her square chin, but Mary’s little heart-shaped face was perfection itself.

Molly found her courage and her voice. “If you please,” she said firmly, “we are both very tired and would like to wash and change.”

“Of course, of course,” said Lady Fanny briskly. Another touch of the bell and the efficient Wembley was sent to fetch the housekeeper, Mrs. Barkins. Mrs. Barkins led the girls up a wide sunny staircase to the bedrooms. The house was quite modern, late Victorian, Molly judged. It was, she had gathered, the Holdens’ summer residence. Lady Fanny had described it to Mrs. Maguire as their “little summer cottage—very rustic.” The little cottage boasted at least thirty bedrooms. It was a vast, sprawling mansion, built like a small castle with mock battlements and even a few fake arrow slits let into the walls.

But the architect had fortunately not carried his passion for medievalism as far as the windows, which were large and square, affording glimpses of a perfect English garden, complete with tennis courts, rolling lawns, English oaks, and a gazebo.

Mrs. Barkins pushed open a heavy mahogany door. “This will be your room, miss,” she said to Molly. She then led the way through a bright rose-decorated room that opened onto a little sitting room, on the far side of which was a door that led to Mary’s room.

Both girls turned dark red with embarrassment when they realized that their small stock of shabby clothes had been neatly hung away and their worn and darned undergarments placed in the drawers.

“Goodge will be your maid,” said Mrs. Barkins, who was a stout, motherly woman with eyes as hard as pebbles and whose aprons and petticoats crackled with so much starch that she emitted a sharp series of noises like little pistol shots every time she moved. “Goodge is a local girl,” Mrs. Barkins was saying. “I trust you will see that she does her work properly.”

“That is surely your job,” said Molly sweetly.

Mrs. Barkins looked at her in amazement. She had been looking forward to a mild spot of bullying. After all, Americans were heathens and didn’t know what was what. But this young American had a steely glint in her eye and a firm set to her jaw. Mrs. Barkins reluctantly dropped a curtsy.

“I’ll see to it, miss.”

When the door had closed behind her, Molly found that her hands were trembling. What did one do with a maid? She had never ordered anyone around in all her young life.

But when Goodge appeared, a shy apple-faced girl not much older than Molly herself, and stood in the doorway with her eyes down, twisting her apron nervously in her hands, Molly recovered her courage.

“Now, Goodge,” she said, “you will find that we are not used to having a lady’s maid and you, I gather, are new to the work. I guess we’ll manage somehow between us. Okay?”