Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (62 page)

“Home!” said Tilly triumphantly.

As if in answer the heavens opened and Gaskell steered the car through the glistening streets, feeling as if he were piloting a ship on a stormy sea.

But he got a surprise one mile outside the limits of the city. Tilly called to him to stop at a large and comfortable-looking inn. Then she issued brisk instructions. Gaskell was to pay the ostler to look after his beloved car by putting it somewhere under cover. Then he, Gaskell, was to go directly upstairs to the bedchamber that Tilly would reserve for him, divest himself of his wet clothes, and give them to the chambermaid to dry and she, Tilly, would send him up a substantial meal.

Having seen to these arrangements and having brushed aside the startled and voluble thanks of the delighted Gaskell, Tilly settled down in the inn parlor and looked with satisfaction at her companion.

“Won’t that old trout be as mad as fire when she finds you’ve scarpered,” she said.

Francine stared at her severely. “You must not use such schoolboyish expressions, Tilly.”

“Oh, don’t change me
now
,” wailed Tilly. “Wait until we get home. But, tell me again, Francine. Do you think you can do it?”

Francine looked at the flushed and earnest face opposite her. “Of course,” she said calmly. “I, Francine, am the best lady’s maid ever. It will be… how you call it…? a challenge. But you must do everything I say, my lady.”

“I’d rather you call me Tilly, like you used to,” said Tilly shyly. “I’ve been pretty lonely.”

“No,” said Francine, “it would not be
comme il faut
What if one of your servants should hear me?”

“Oh, all right,” said Tilly, crinkling up her eyes.

“
That
will have to go for a start, my lady,” said Francine. “That trick with the eyes. You have very pretty eyes, but how can anyone see them when you twist them so?”

“You’ll do,” said Tilly happily. “I’ll change, you’ll see. Philip won’t recognize me when he comes home… if he ever comes home.”

Rebellion had arisen in Tilly’s much humiliated breast after she had read the newspaper item. The blood of her battling ancestors had seemed to course in her veins. She was not going to go down without fighting. It had struck her that perhaps Francine’s undoubted genius could transform her in some way. The startled Francine had agreed. There was, she had said, enough raw material to work on. And the clever Francine knew that by the time she was finished with Tilly, then she, Francine, would be famous among ladies’ maids.

She suddenly looked sympathetically across at Tilly, who was eating huge slices of fruitcake as if they were going to be her last (
Which they are
, thought Francine), and said, “I can promise you beauty, my lady. I cannot promise you love.”

“Just give me the one,” said Tilly, “and I’ll just see what I can do about the other.”

The Marquess of Heppleford was suffering from burnt-out passion and a guilty conscience. He sat at his desk in the apartment in the Avenue Foch and stared moodily at the pile of unopened correspondence on his desk. He had just spent what should have been two glorious weeks with his mistress in the South of France, but the whole thing had been haunted by Tilly’s hurt face and accusing eyes.

As his man unpacked his trunks he opened the first letter with a sigh. It was from one of his aunts, Lady Mary Swingleton. Pinned to the top of the letter was that cutting from the newspaper. Underneath, Lady Mary had given vent to her lacerated feelings: That the marquess should marry this freak of a girl was bad enough, but that he should have the family name dragged through the columns of the gutter press was outside of enough!

The marquess crumpled it and threw it into the wastepaper basket. He picked up the next one and opened it.

Much to his surprise, his father’s will fell out, accompanied by a brief note from his steward explaining how the will had been found. The marquess read it slowly. “‘A most ingenious paradox,’” he quoted bitterly. Then he picked up the will again. “Let me see,” he muttered. “Who gets the moneybags if I don’t comply with the terms? Cyril Nettleford! My god, over my dead body.” Cyril Nettleford, his nephew, was a spotty youth with doubtful sexual tastes and worse manners.

I shall contest it
, thought the marquess,
though I don’t think it’ll do much good. I’m supposed to show evidence of an heir within twelve months! What will my beloved wife say to that? Probably
, “
Oh, rats!
”

He leaned back in his chair and called to his man, “Pack the bags again. We’re leaving for home.”

Home.

He had a sudden vision of Chennington with its quiet rooms and cool lawns. Then the picture was marred by a vision of Tilly. His home was no longer his own. He now had to share it with a tomboy who would no doubt rebuke him for his well-broadcast infidelity in the language of the stables.

His gentleman’s gentleman, Lennox, coughed discreetly. “Does your lordship wish to apprise her ladyship of our return?”

“No. Oh, damn it,
yes
.”

Had Tilly seen the newspaper? he wondered. No doubt some well-meaning friend would tell her. Yet, after all, he had nothing to feel guilty about. They had a business arrangement. But he should never have caused her such humiliation. He would make it up to her, he decided.

And then he remembered that he had to produce an heir.

“He’s coming home,” cried Tilly, dancing into the drawing room and waving a marconigram. “He’s coming home!” She smiled and crinkled up her eyes, and received a glass of iced water straight in the face.

As she choked and sputtered Francine put down the glass and said grimly, “I had to do it, my lady. Shock tactics. You must never again twist the eyes up so.
Jamais!
”

“Oh, Francine, you are a slave driver,” moaned Tilly, dabbing her eyes with the towel that Francine had handed to her. “I’m absolutely starving, my eyes are sore from reading, my back is sore from sitting up so straight, I’m tired of mock dinners and mock tea parties, and I’d like to go riding.”

“Not yet,” was all Francine would say. “It is time for your rehearsal, and you must pretend it is real.” She rang the bell on the wall beside her and a group of ten servants, including Masters, the butler, and Mrs. Judd, the housekeeper, came in.

“Now,” said Francine, smoothing down the folds of her new black silk gown, “you must all pretend you are actors and that I am your producer. Lady Tilly, this is your house party and you must work the imagination and pretend these are your guests. Now, begin!”

The servants enjoyed these mock parties immensely and played their parts with gusto. Mrs. Judd made a formidable duchess; Mr. Masters a boring elder statesmen; and James, the second footman, a wild young man whose conversation showed an alarming tendency to become too intimate. Among them they managed to represent all the social embarrassments that Tilly might meet, while Francine carefully listened and schooled Tilly’s replies.

Francine looked at her protégée with some complacency—as well she might. Rigorous dieting and the right sort of exercise had melted away Tilly’s puppy fat like magic, leaving her with a slim figure, rounded in the right places. Her red hair was brushed until it shone and fell in soft, natural waves on her forehead. Her skin was creamy with only a faint blush of pink on her cheeks, which owed nothing to art. She was wearing a high-collared dress of smoky-blue tulle that emphasized the blue of her eyes. Her gown had the latest thing in hobble skirts, the narrow hemline, as the lady’s maid pointed out, being an excellent device for curbing Tilly’s long mannish strides.

At last the rehearsal was over and Tilly was flushed with success, for Francine had hardly had to correct her at all.

“Now we will have a
real
house party for his lordship’s return,” said Francine.

Tilly’s face fell in disappointment. “I—I wanted to be alone with him,” she said shyly.

“And what good would that do?” asked the lady’s maid. “It is better that he sees you in a crowd of people first. The men, they always want what is elusive. And we shall ask the duchess and her so-horrible
fille
.”

“Oh, no!” wailed Tilly. “Anyone but them. Anyway, they won’t come.”

“Yes, they will,” said Francine. “They will want to see exactly how your marriage has failed.”

“Mr. Toby Bassett,” announced Masters.

Francine whipped up her workbasket, escaped to a chair in the corner of the room, and then bent her black head over her work, looking the very picture of a correct lady’s maid.

Tilly rose gracefully to her feet. “Mr. Bassett!” she exclaimed in a soft voice, quite unlike her usual ringing tones. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

Toby sat down suddenly on the nearest chair, holding his hat and cane, since society decreed that a gentleman should never surrender hat and cane to the butler on making a call, as it might imply that he meant to stay longer than the prescribed time.

He looked at Tilly with his familiar brooding stare.

“You
are
Miss Burningham… I mean, you are Philip’s wife, aren’t you?”

Tilly gave a light, silvery laugh that ran carefully up trie scale and down again. Mrs. Humphry, in her book
Manners for Women
, which Tilly had studied at length, said,

There is no greater ornament to conversation than the ripple of silvery notes that forms the perfect laugh. It makes the person who evokes it feel pleased with himself, and even invests what he has said with a charm of wit and humor that might not be otherwise observed.

But Toby continued to smolder at her and in no way looked pleased with himself, so Tilly said lightly, “Don’t I look the same, Mr. Bassett?”

“No, you don’t,” said Toby. “In fact, you look like all the other ladies… you know, pretty.”

Tilly glowed with pleasure and said, “Thank you,” although she felt his remark had not been meant as a compliment.

There was an awkward silence. Then Tilly remembered Masters’s maxim. “
If conversation fails, my lady, ring for tea
.”

Tea gave Tilly a splendid opportunity to watch how the elegant Mr. Bassett was able to roll up and eat tiny cucumber sandwiches without getting any butter on his gloves. She wondered if he were able to do the same drunk, for she realized that perhaps some of the strangeness emanating from Mr. Bassett was because he was stone-cold sober.

“Is Philip home?” asked Toby.

“No,” replied Tilly. “But I had a marconigram from him this morning. He is traveling from Paris to London to see his lawyers and then he will be arriving here. I am sending out invitations to a house party to celebrate his arrival. Perhaps you would—”

“Yes, I will. Love to. Great. Splendid. My bags are out in the carriage. I’ll tell my man to get ’em,” said Toby, roused to rare enthusiasm.

She waited while he left to see to the arrangement of his trunks, and Francine murmured from her corner, “He is escaping from something, that one… perhaps from some
one
. Congratulate him on his engagement.”

“Commiserate, more likely,” said Tilly. But as Toby reappeared, minus hat, gloves, and cane this time, she duly offered her congratulations on his engagement to Lady Aileen.

Toby visibly paled and his face took on a hunted look. “Very kind of you,” he said, nonetheless, in his usual impeccable drawl.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Francine was making drinking motions, and so Tilly asked him if he would like something stronger.

“I can’t,” said Toby wildly, looking more like the young Byron than ever. “I promised Aileen. And her mother has enrolled me in the Toward the Light and Away from the Bottle Society. She’s on the committee,” he added unnecessarily, for Her Grace appeared to be on the committee of everything.

“And does this society help?” asked Tilly.

“I can’t understand it,” he said, losing his usual lethargic elegance and running his fingers through his curls. “I get served with a cup of tea and one white, hard, iced cake with a brown fern painted on the top in mudcolored icing. Then everyone laughs a lot and is very jolly, and on my first attendance, a large, jolly sort of woman wagged a finger under my nose and asked me if I had found Jesus Christ. I said I hadn’t lost him and she said, ‘Oh, what a wag you rips are!’ which I thought was most ghastly, frightfully rude, you know. And then they show lantern slides all about a man who kicks his children and beats his wife, and when he’s not doing that, he’s in the boozer, kicking his friends and beating them, and then he sees the light, which is a sort of sunbeam with a great scaly angel in a nightgown hanging around it, you know, and he claps his forehead and falls on his knees and smashes up all the bottles in the boozer. And then you see him out in the world, preaching to the drunken sinners and kicking and beating them when they won’t listen, so I ask myself, What’s the difference?” Toby paused for breath and looked hopefully at Tilly.

Tilly tried to hide an enormous grin, particularly when she heard a discreet cough from the lady’s maid. After all, the redoubtable Mrs. Humphry had been very definite about grins:

As to grins, very few of them can be, in the remotest sense of the word, described as pleasing. Pretty teeth may redeem some of them from absolute ignomony, but, as a rule, the exhibition of whole meadows of pale pink gums is inconsonant with one’s ideas of beauty.

“Well, can’t you just stop on your own?” she eventually asked.

Toby shook his head with some pride. “It’s the family failing, you see,” he explained. “I come from a long line of tipplers.”

Francine was making walking movements with her fingers across the top of her work-basket.

“You must excuse me, Mr. Bassett,” said Tilly, rising to her feet and swaying slightly to get her balance on a pair of very high heels. “We shall meet at dinner. Masters will show you to your rooms.”

She curtsied gracefully as Toby stood up and swept from the room, followed by her maid.

But there was no rest for Tilly that afternoon and dressing for dinner was to be a scrambled affair. The guests had to be at Chennington as soon as possible, Francine had said. So invitations were quickly written and dispatched by messenger to various members of the local county. Gaskell was sent up to London to deliver an invitation to the duchess and family. Then with the help of Francine, Tilly scrambled into a dinner gown of sleek black panel velvet trimmed with jet. It was an extremely sophisticated dress for such a young girl, but the new Tilly carried it with an air. A pair of long crimson kid gloves and a crimson ostrich-feather fan with diamond-studded sticks completed the ensemble. Tilly twisted and turned in front of the looking glass. “Don’t you think I look a bit like a French tart?” she asked doubtfully.