Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (54 page)

It is very difficult to make passionate love in full evening dress but then as Miss Ginny Bloggs was heard to say, giggling much, much later, “One can really do anything when one puts one’s mind to it.”

The Lanchester bowled merrily down the road toward Dover and the Channel ferry the next morning. Everything was clear and bright and new and washed by the previous night’s rain. Lord Gerald turned to smile at Ginny, who was sitting happily at his side. And at that moment the engine gave several thumps, a cough, a hiccup, and died.

There was a silence, broken only by the sweet singing of a lark soaring high above their heads.

“Hell and damnation,” said Lord Gerald. “We’ll
never
get married at this rate.”

“If you have a toolbox, I can fix it,” said his fair partner.

“Look, dear girl,” he said testily, “fixing a motor is not a job for a woman. It’s—”

“Gerald!” said Ginny with a warning note in her voice.

He dumbly lugged out the toolbox and handed it to her and then watched in amazement as she opened the hood and fiddled with the engine. “Try it now,” she called, raising an oil-streaked and triumphant face from the motor.

The engine purred into life and Ginny replaced the toolbox in the boot and climbed in.

Gerald grimly drove on and then gave her a reluctant smile. “I might have known you would know all about motor engines.”

“Yes, you might,” said Ginny sweetly. “I do know all about engines. And headlamps as well.”

He turned and glared at her. “You didn’t.
You couldn’t!
Did you tamper with my lamps outside the theater so that they would conveniently give up right before The Eagle? Tell me you didn’t!”

“All right,” said Ginny sweetly, “I didn’t! Do pay attention to the road, dear heart. You nearly hit that nice cow.”

“I’ll never understand you.
Never!
” said Lord Gerald as the Lanchester bowled merrily on its road to the coast. Then he gave a reluctant grin.

“But at least it’s going to make life very interesting,” said Lord Gerald de Fremney. “Very interesting indeed!”

M. C. Beaton

For Sally and Michael Murphy
and their sons, Conal and Gavin
,
with love

The Honorable Miss Matilda Burningham paced the smooth lawns of her family estate on all the perfect glory of an early spring morning and bitterly envied the peace of nature. Blossoms frothed in a sea of pink-and-white waves in the orchard, daffodils blazed gold under the old trees on the lawns, and the sweet, heady exotic smell of hyacinth floated on the slight breeze. A blackbird at her feet cocked its glossy head, looking for worms. All was as it had been—on the outside at least.

King Edward, accompanied by his stupendous retinue, had departed, leaving Jeebles, the rambling ancestral home of the Burninghams, to relapse into its usual rural torpor. But inside, Matilda—Tilly to her few friends—were stirring faint, uncomfortable prick-lings of unease. She was
glad
to get back into her customary dress of old riding breeches and jersey, she told herself. The royal visit had forced her into fashionable clothes for the first and, she hoped, the last time in her life.

Tilly was only just seventeen years old and still carried around a layer of puppy fat that was slow to melt because of Tilly’s fondness for nursery teas. But she had done her best to please her father, Lord Charles Burningham, who had nearly had an apoplexy over the excitement of the king’s visit.

A lady’s maid had been hired specially to try to turn Tilly into a swan. Tilly’s skin still itched at the memory of the layers of clothes she had had to put on.

To begin with there was a garment known as a “combination,” a kind of vest and pants in one piece, made of fine wool with legs reaching to the knee. Over this had gone a corset made of pink coutil with busks fastening down the front and tight lacing at the back to produce a fashionable swanlike figure. To accentuate the bust and hips, silk pads were attached under the arms and at the hips. Then came a camisole or petticoat-bodice that buttoned down the front and was trimmed with lace around the neck and had diminutive puffed sleeves. Then came the knickers that had lace frills at the knee and buttoned at the waist. Then the steel-gray silk stockings that were clipped to the corset, and then the vast and rustling petticoat.

A blouse and skirt had been deemed suitable day wear for Tilly and proved to be an added torture. The junction of the skirt and blouse was concealed by a stiffened belt that fastened at the front with a clasp and at the back was pinned to the undergarments so that never an unladylike gap would show. Going to the lavatory had been turned into a full-scale military operation, reflected Tilly with a sigh.

She had been placed next to King Edward at the dining table. She had been told that the king liked to listen rather than talk, and Tilly had tried hard. But she was unused to making social conversation, and a cloud of boredom had soon settled over the royal brow. “Old Tum-Tum,” as the gourmand king was called, began to peevishly rattle his cutlery and drum his fingers on the table, a familiar sign that he was displeased with his partner. So poor Tilly had been supplanted by a dazzling charmer who had not even had her first Season, Lady Aileen Dunbar.

Tilly had always been rather scornful of frilly, fussy, and twittery girls like Lady Aileen, but she had to admit that she did envy her during the royal visit. And not only because of the king’s flattering attention to Lady Aileen, but because of the interest shown to the silly girl by none other than the Marquess of Heppleford. The marquess was designed like a Greek god with thick fair hair, sleepy blue eyes, and a classic profile. He was just over six feet tall and was accounted to be the finest shot and huntsman in all of England. Tilly, who was a keen huntswoman herself, longed for the handsome marquess’s notice. But, no. He only had eyes for Lady Aileen. Rats!

Tilly moodily kicked at a piece of manicured turf and turned her mind away from that particular worry to another. How on earth had her father managed to
pay
for all this magnificence. An extra wing had had to be built to house the royal servants, the library had been wrenched apart and rebuilt as a bowling alley to pander to the current royal fad, and then there was the food—the lobster, the quail—and the rare vintage wines, the champagne!

Since the departure of King Edward, her father had been closeted for long hours with his steward, only emerging from the estates office for meals, and each time he seemed to have grown older and more worried. But to all Tilly’s anxious queries he would only conjure up a thin smile and ruffle her carroty curls and say, “Don’t worry, my son. We shall come about.”

Lord Charles could be forgiven for often forgetting that Tilly was not a boy. She had faithfully dressed and behaved like the son he had always longed for, with the sad result that the marriageable young men of the county referred to her as “a good sport,” and her former girl friends, who had lately blossomed into ribbons and bows and whispers and giggles, now shuddered and said Tilly smelled of the stables.

Tilly set off on her rounds of her tenants, trying to banish the feeling that she had woken up on this spring morning to find that she was, well, somehow
odd
. She briefly wondered what her mother, who had died when Tilly was a baby, had been like and then pushed that thought aside as she headed for the South Lodge to inquire after the lodge keeper, Mr. Pomfret’s, weak chest.

Mrs. Pomfret looked none too pleased to see Tilly, as she was surrounded by stacks of clothes waiting to be ironed and had three small children clamoring and clutching at her skirts, but nonetheless she dropped Tilly a low curtsy and replied politely that Mr. Pomfret was “coming along remarkable.”

“I told him he shouldn’t have been out in that damp weather we had,” said Tilly. “I shall bring him some of my own medicine from the stillroom.”

“Well, I don’t know but that what the doctor’s given Fred ain’t the best thing—”

“Nonsense!” said Tilly brusquely. “I know what’s best for him. I’ll bring it along tomorrow. Goodness, I’m parched. Any chance of a cup of tea?”

“Of course, miss,” cried Mrs. Pomfret. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

Tilly stretched out a booted foot toward the hearth with a sigh of satisfaction. Mrs. Pomfret made very good tea indeed. It never crossed Tilly’s mind that Mrs. Pomfret had more to do with her time than make tea. Tilly had been treated like visiting royalty by the tenants and the servants for as long as she could remember. Like many of her peers, she had fallen into the habit of believing that she alone knew best what to do for them.

She enjoyed living her tenants lives for them and genuinely believed she was bringing a little glamour and excitement into their mundane existences by her frequent visits.

There was the rattle of carriage wheels on the gravel outside the lodge and Mrs. Pomfret turned around with a cluck of dismay, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’d better go open the gates, seeing as how Fred is poorly,” she said.

“I’ll go,” said Tilly, bounding to her feet and surprising both herself and Mrs. Pomfret. “You attend to the tea.”

Thrusting her hands in her breeches pockets, Tilly strolled out to the massive iron gates. Her bright-red hair was shoved up under a boy’s riding hat and she screwed up her eyes to see who was in the carriage, a mannerism she had caught from her father, which dully prevented the world from finding out that the Honorable Matilda had an exceedingly fine pair of large blue eyes.

A brougham was drawn up at the gates, pulled by a spanking pair of glossy chestnuts. A liveried coachman in a spun-glass wig stared down at Tilly from his box.

“Open the gates, lad,” he called to Tilly. Tilly stood staring with her mouth open. Looking out of the window of the carriage was the exquisite and handsome Marquess of Heppleford.

“Come along,” said the coachman. “Damned inbreeding,” he added under his breath, making the footman on the back strap snigger and Tilly turn as red as fire.

Tilly swung open the heavy gates and stood aside as the brougham rolled past. The marquess’s cold gray eyes stared indifferently at her and then, it seemed, through her.

Tilly swung the gates shut again and made her way slowly back to the lodge. Should she have told that cheeky coachman exactly who she was? But for the first time in her life, Tilly began to feel vaguely uncomfortable about her own appearance and a vision of the sparkling and lovely Lady Aileen flashed before her eyes. The coachman would never have mistaken Lady Aileen for a lodge boy. But then Lady Aileen would never have lowered herself to opening the lodge gates!

Worse was in store for the Honorable Tilly. As she walked around to the back of the lodge and into the kitchen, Mrs. Pomfret’s voice from the bedroom above carried down the stairs with fatal clarity. “I dunno that I should have let Miss Tilly open those gates, and that’s a fact, Fred. But then there never was any use in telling her anything nohow. She means well, but she do take up a body’s time, asking for tea, and me with the ironing to do and the kids to feed. Thinks she’s doing us a favor, Fred, and that’s a fact. Bessie Jenkins down by the Five Mile says as how even when the king was here, she had Miss Tilly sprawled around her kitchen for a whole afternoon, telling her how to make seedcake—as if Bessie hadn’t been making it since the day Miss Tilly was born. And why don’t she dress like a lady?” Mrs. Pomfret’s voice dropped to a murmur and Tilly stood on the cold flags of the kitchen floor as if turned to stone.

She had felt she had been doing something worthwhile in visiting the tenants, thinking that they looked forward to her calls as much as she did herself. The kettle began to sing on the hob and Tilly gave it an agonized stare, as if it, too, were going to accuse her of time-wasting. She gave a little gulp and turned and ran from the lodge, up the graveled drive, cutting across the lawns to where the mellow pile of Jeebles lay basking in the morning sun.

There had been Burninghams at Jeebles for as long as anyone could remember. Perhaps in the days before the Norman Conquest there had actually been a Saxon called Jeebles to give the house its name, but if there had, there was not even a tombstone to mark his passing. The huge mansion was a conglomeration of different architecture that time and ivy had blended into a harmonious whole.

Tilly scuttled quickly up the back stairs to her bedroom and then marched up to the long looking glass and stared at her reflection. She had a shapely, if immature, plump figure. Tendrils of carroty hair escaped from under her riding helmet and her wide, brilliant blue eyes, for once uncrinkled, stared back at her in dismay. She was blessed with a creamy English complexion, unusual in a redhead, but it was already unbecomingly and unfashionably tanned.

She slowly pulled off her riding helmet and gazed in disgust at the rioting mass of red curls, unfashionably soft and round, not frizzled like those of the ladies in the fashion plates.

“I don’t like me,” said Tilly miserably. “I look like a freak… I pester the tenants… I wish I were a man. If I were a man, Heppleford wouldn’t look at me. He won’t look at me anyway. Oh, I wish…” But all these new agonies were so bewildering that Tilly did not know exactly what she wished.

It was not as if Tilly had never contemplated marriage. On her eighteenth birthday, she knew she would be “brought out” and have a Season in London, like other girls of her class. She would endure the hell of corsets and skirts until such time as some jolly good sort would propose, whereupon they would agree to give up all this London nonsense and retire to the country, where they would hunt amicably from morning to night. Tilly had been kissed after the hunt only the previous winter. Tommy Bryce-James, one of the local lads, had drunk too much champagne and had staggered with her behind some trees at the edge of the woods and had planted a wet kiss on her mouth. It had not been a particularly enjoyable experience, but Tilly vaguely gathered it was something that women either got used to or, if they could not, they shut their eyes and thought of the Empire.