Leading Lady (4 page)

“Mr. Pearce, please let go,” she said, trying to pull away. Others upon the platform were stopping to gape at them.

“Can’t you see? Are you
that
stupid?” He held fast, digging his fingers into flesh even through her coat. “If that coachman’s son loved you, he wouldn’t have gone off to Italy!”

“Leave go of the lady at once!” said a male voice.

“Or we’ll make you regret it!” said another.

The grip upon her arm released. Bethia mumbled thanks to her rescuers—one college-aged, the other an older man—but was too mortified to meet their eyes. She turned away, gave Mrs. Jordan an apologetic look, and hastened down the platform, ignoring curious stares, weaving her way around people and luggage carts, and fearing being seized again.

“You led me on, Miss Rayborn!” she heard from behind. “You trifled with my affections! What do you do, carve men’s hearts in the handle of your hairbrush?”

Don’t cry,
Bethia willed herself. She made her way to the row of hired cabs, meeting no one’s eyes, every nerve on alert. She hired a coach instead of a carriage so that she could hide behind drawn curtains, and instructed the driver not to stop, should anyone short of a policeman wave him down.

Three

Not until Bethia stepped down from the coach could she breathe more easily, though her hands still trembled, and humiliation still clung to her like moss to a stone. Girton College stretched before her like a biblical city of refuge, its monotonous main block enhanced by the more recent round terra-cotta brick towers with conical roofs and rising windows. The two-and-a-half miles to the center of Cambridge may as well have been a million to any young man—even those with closer family ties than distant-cousin-by-marriage—who dared trespass these gates without permission of the headmistress.

Miss Welsh stood with notebook in hand beneath the clock at the main entrance, where headmistresses had greeted incoming students since the college moved from Hitchin twenty-four years ago.

“Of course you may telephone your parents,” she told Bethia after an exchange of pleasantries. “And do wish them my best.”

“Thank you, Miss Welsh.”

Bethia went on inside to the reading room, set umbrella and satchel in a chair, and lifted the earpiece to the telephone mounted upon the wall.

“Number five Cannonhall Road in Hampstead, London,” she said to the operator.

She had once teased her mother, labeling her as old-fashioned for marveling that persons could converse from opposite ends of England as if they were next door. But when a maternal “Bethia?” came through the earpiece, Bethia did not take that technology for granted. She needed to hear her parents’ voices, even though she could not reveal to them just why.

“Two of those girls you saw in my coach were new Girton
students,” she said into the mouthpiece. “I was able to give them some advice about what to do when they arrived.”

“Lovely,” her mother said. “Then you had no difficulties.”

“I did some reading,” Bethia said evasively.

She spoke with her father next, and managed to sidestep his query about her journey. When she turned the knob to her upstairs apartment door and pushed it open, she felt the weight of someone on the other side.

“Oh dear me, Miss Rayborn!” gasped chambermaid Anna Fisher, hand to her chest.

Bethia had to wait for her own heart to cease pounding. For a split second her imagination had conjured up the image of Mr. Pearce, waiting behind the door.

“Are you all right?” Anna said. She was a couple of years younger than Bethia’s twenty, ruddy-faced and freckled, with hair the color of copper.

“I’m just jumpy. Did I hurt you?”

“You only frightened me out of a year’s growth. But I expect I’ve enough to spare.”

Bethia could not help but smile at the maid’s playful exaggeration. She stepped on into the room and dropped her umbrella into its stand, her satchel into the damask-upholstered chair near the door. Coals hissed in the grate. Pulling off her gloves, she said, “Mmm . . . toasty. Thank you.”

The girl looked pleased. “I just now added more. Is that one of those French hats?”

“It’s called a beret.” Bethia took it off and handed it over for her to inspect. Bit by bit, the scene at the railway station was becoming a distasteful but distant memory. “I don’t think there’s anything more welcoming than a fire in the grate.”

“Except food, to my way of thinking.” Anna said. She set the beret upon the study table and stepped over to help Bethia out of her coat. “You should see the spread downstairs.”

“Sandwiches, you mean?”

“Hardly,” Anna chuckled. “There’s boiled prawns, every sort of cheese, and figs the size of my uncle Ralph’s nose.
Miss Copage, who graduated this summer—only it’s Lady Sherwood now, as she’s married to a duke in Lincolnshire—ordered it as thanks for all her fond memories of the place, so says Miss Jones.”

“What a thoughtful gesture.”

“She even had some sent back to the kitchen for us servants too,” the girl said, patting her stomach. “We sampled at it all morning, and still there’s enough left for lunch.
And
Harold’s roasting venison for mum’s birthday supper tonight. Mrs. Jones said I can take off early. They’ll have to carry me here in a wheelbarrow in the mornin’.”

“It’s good of you and your brother to do that. I hope your mother has a wonderful celebration.”

“Thank you, Miss Rayborn.” Anna took three steps toward the door but then turned and said, “Dear me, I almost forgot . . . you’ve had a letter waiting on the chimneypiece for days and days.”

The envelope was propped up against the sea-green bisque vase Guy had won at Bartholomew Fair seven years ago, when he was but sixteen and Bethia was days away from turning fourteen. She smiled at the memory, as crystal clear in her mind as if it were yesterday.

“You’ve won yourself a pretty to give to your favorite girl!”
the huckster at the darts counter had bellowed, which should have brought a blush to Guy’s cheeks, especially with her parents and Danny in hearing distance. But instead, Guy had solemnly handed the vase to her, as if offering his heart. She accepted it in the same spirit, and their longtime childhood friendship took on a new dimension.

Noting the Bond Street address in the left corner of the envelope, Bethia slid a fingernail beneath the flap.

Dearest Lilly,
she read. It was Guy’s pet name for her, derived from Lilliputian, one of the tiny inhabitants of an island in
Gulliver’s Travels.

Bethia smiled. Guy would never know how much she needed to hear from him today, even if the letter was written weeks ago. She folded it up and put it away in the drawer of her small walnut davenport. Then she looked about the apartment, reacquainting herself. Everything was freshly dusted, the windowpanes clean, the nap of the rugs bristly from a recent beating.

In the bedroom, a glance in her wardrobe and stocking drawer revealed that Anna had already unpacked her trunk and sent it up to the attic. Bethia tipped the servants well at the end of every academic year, still, those like Anna went far beyond the second mile. Obviously Norma Copage had grateful memories of the same treatment. As Mother said occasionally, gratitude was the icing on the cake of life. Bethia thought of the spread waiting downstairs. Or
the prawns on the tray of life.

She was not quite hungry yet, despite Anna’s glowing descriptions. The thought of facing Ursula and Florence further quelled her appetite. She pulled out the chair at the davenport and filled her pen. She would answer Guy’s letter first. She
asked how his studies were progressing, and described stopping in to bid farewell to his parents yesterday morning on the way to the theatre.

Your mother was hurrying your sisters to dress for school, but made time to give me four lovely embroidered handkerchiefs. And your father spoke of plans to hire another clerk.

Guy’s parents, Stanley and Penny Russell, had been servants at the Hampstead house for years, until they fulfilled a dream by investing their savings in a saddle-and-tack shop on Bond Street when the owner wished to retire.

This place is growing noisier by the minute,
Bethia continued writing, as laughter drifted from down the corridor. It was such a relief to converse with him, if only on paper. After all, the bond between her and Guy had been forged from her earliest memory. Perhaps it was because that same sensitivity he had toward music allowed him a keener sense of what people felt in their hearts.

She made no mention of Douglas Pearce’s attempts at courtship, nor had she in the two letters she had written since that Wednesday in Covent Garden. To be offered the scholarship was a great honor, and Guy needed to concentrate on his music. Mr. Pearce would be on his way back to London now—surely he had boarded the train again for its return.

This time the thought of food stirred a bit of interest in her stomach. And she could not hide from Ursula and Florence for the rest of the year. Capping her pen, she went to the bathroom to wash her hands and went downstairs. The voices from the dining hall were even more animated than the usual first-day chatter. Bethia discovered that Anna’s glowing description had not done justice to the spread of food taking up almost every inch of the serving table. Besides the prawns, figs, and cheeses were artichokes
à l’Italienne
and pickled tongue, baked pears and eggs
à la tripe,
dishes of almonds and raisins, large Spanish olives, and three kinds of cakes. Bethia filled a plate with a bit of each and went over to one of the tables where freshers were collected.

“I’m glad you made it,” she said to Ursula and Florence.

The two gave her cautious smiles and thanked her. Bethia did not ask if their mothers had allowed them to ride from Cambridge themselves. She had a feeling that, after the scene at the railway station, the women had walked them to Girton’s front door.

The discomforting obligation over, Bethia joined a group of fourth-year students. Her classmates greeted her as if pleased to see her. But they addressed each other with far more intimacy, and some related visits to one another’s homes over the summer and referred to letters they had exchanged.

Unfortunately, one consequence of juggling her studies with her theatre costuming responsibilities was that the school friendships formed during Bethia’s freshman year had atrophied from lack of nourishment. Instead of a few intimate friends, she had several warm acquaintances. She realized she had only herself to blame and wished the situation were different. Still she seldom grieved over it. When would she find the time?

So why did a wave of sadness sweep through her as she peeled a shrimp and listened to the banter? It hovered briefly at the back of her mind and then took a step through the gauze curtain of conscious thought, becoming a mental photograph of the torment in Douglas Pearce’s hazel eyes. Would he have been so persistent if, instead of hiding from him and refusing his calls, she had gently explained from the first that she felt nothing beyond friendship? How would
she
feel if Guy did not care for her in return?

You could have been more sympathetic,
she said to herself,
instead of worrying over what others were thinking.
Her appetite deserted her again, but she finished her plate before excusing herself. A heady aroma met her nose as she opened the door to her sitting room. At the center of the study table, a bouquet of hothouse roses fanned out from the vase Guy had won for her.

Mother and father . . . Guy . . . Sarah and William?
flitted
through her mind. But she picked up the note propped against the vase with some trepidation.

She tore up the note and threw it into the wastepaper basket. In an instant the aroma had changed from pleasant to cloying, nauseating.

A soft tapping sounded at the door, still ajar. “Miss Rayborn?”

“Come in, Anna.”

“Aren’t they lovely?” the girl breathed. “A delivery boy from Thornton Gardens brought them by while you were downstairs. I was about to go down and fetch you, but then I thought you might like to be surprised.”

“I was surprised,” Bethia said dully.

“I put a piece of willow bark in the water to make them last longer.” Anna leaned her head. “Is something wrong, Miss Rayborn?”

“No . . . yes.
They’re from a man who won’t leave me alone.”

“Oh . . .” A hand went to the servant’s cheek. But dreaminess mingled with the concern in her green eyes. “It’s quite romantic, isn’t it? Does he say he loves you?”

“Yes.” Bethia rubbed her temple. “It’s not romantic when you don’t care for the other person and he won’t stop.”

“Oh, no it isn’t,” Anna amended quickly, even though the dreaminess had not quite left her expression.

Not able to bear the thought of even touching the roses, Bethia was just about to ask Anna to take them and throw them out. But the enormity of the waste struck her. She could not stop Douglas’s infatuation by destroying flowers that someone else might appreciate. “Do you think your mother would like them?”