Leading Lady (5 page)

Anna’s eyes widened. “You mean that, Miss Rayborn?”

“Yes. Say that they’re from
you,
mind you . . . for they’re yours to give. It’ll mean more to her that way.”

“But the vase . . .”

“Surely Mrs. Bancroft will lend you one,” Bethia said, rising again to hold open the door. For now, all she wanted was to have the flowers out of her sight. As the scent lingered in the air, Bethia swept up a couple of loose petals and threw them away. She remembered the nudging of her conscience on the stairs, and moved aside the unfinished letter to Guy to start another.

She placed the envelope in the outgoing-mail basket in the reading room with a great sense of having a load lifted from her shoulders. This would bring about the end of it. She was positive.

But even indirectly, Mr. Pearce still caused her distress, for she answered a knock a half hour later to find Anna standing in the corridor with face splotched and eyes watery, the vase cradled in her arms.

“Anna?”

“I dropped it!”

Bethia led the sobbing girl inside by the elbow. Between gulps of breath, Anna explained how she had successfully transferred the roses into a vase the housekeeper lent her and was on her way to return this one when she tripped upon the staircase.

“But it doesn’t seem damaged,” Bethia said, taking it from her arms. When she turned it over, she spotted the triangular crack where the curved side met the base.

“I’ll buy you another,” Anna said with wavering voice.

Bethia hurried into her bedroom, the vase secure in the crook of her arm. She brought back a handkerchief to press into the girl’s hand.

“It was cheap. That’s why it cracked.” There was no constructive purpose in adding that its sentimental value far outweighed its monetary value. She set it back in its usual place on the chimneypiece, turning it just so. “You can’t even see it now.”

“But it won’t hold water.”

“I’ll bring another from home.” Bethia smiled. “We’ve dozens.”

The misery did not leave Anna’s expression. She pressed her lips together. “I scorched your blouse last term, and now I’ve gone and ruined something again. And this morning I
tore some lace on Miss Mead’s curtain. I
try
to do good work, but I’m clumsy as a cow!”

“Now, that’s just not so.” Resting a hand upon the girl’s trembling shoulder, Bethia said, “Every student here wishes she had you assigned to her room.”

The girl blew her nose into the handkerchief, her red-rimmed eyes giving Bethia a look of hopefulness mingled with disbelief. “You’re not just saying that?”

“Cross my heart.” Bethia gave her a little sideways embrace. “It’s only a vase. Please put this out of your mind and enjoy your mother’s birthday.”

Four

In the year 1677, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Davies was wed to twenty-one-year-old Sir Thomas Grosvenor, bringing to the union, as her dowry, some three hundred acres of damp and substandard farmland west of London. For over one hundred and fifty years the land lay undeveloped and useless, until an entrepreneur named Thomas Cubitt persuaded the Grosvenor descendants of its potential. In 1830, on their behalf, Cubitt began developing the former Mary Davies’ marshland into what became one of the most desirable neighborhoods in London.

Belgravia, an area bounded by Hyde Park, the gardens of Buckingham Palace, Sloane Square, and South Kensington, was the most aristocratic of these neighborhoods. And it was in Belgravia in June 1888 that another child bride took her vows on the arm of her much-older intended. The ceremony was conducted in the groom’s house on Belgrave Square. It was a smallish affair attended by only the handful of family members and friends not outraged that sixteen-year-old Muriel Pearce was marrying barely divorced Lord Sidney Holt, twenty years her senior.

The bride and groom had met when Muriel was fourteen and accompanying her mother on a Christmas shopping foray into London from their home in Sheffield. As fate would have it, Lord Holt was visiting his mother, Harriet Godfrey, at the same time Muriel and her mother paid a call to Mrs. Godfrey in their former neighborhood of Belgravia.

This was actually Muriel’s and Lord Holt’s second meeting, but they did not count the time when she was eight and he saved her from dashing out into the street during a garden party—though they had enjoyed relating the incident to each other every so often over the course of their six-year marriage.

The two would have been well into their ninth year as
husband and wife, had not Lord Holt’s own shotgun misfired three years ago during a pheasant hunt on his Northamptonshire estate. Fortunately, he had directed his solicitor to draft a new will shortly after the honeymoon. Lord Holt had accumulated great wealth, hardly dented by the fifty-thousand-pound divorce settlement to the former Lady Holt, Milly Turner, who now shared a house in Chelsea with her friend Peggy Somerset, a chemist for the Hassall Commission. Muriel Holt’s future was secure, as well as that of her daughter, Georgiana, born five months after her father’s untimely accident.

The peerage of Belgravia held its collective breath in the waning days of the present Lady Holt’s first year in mourning. Surely the young widow would not mourn beyond the societal set-in-stone minimum of twelve months and a day. Surely she would shed the black silk and crepe for the Parisian fashions and fine jewelry that had adorned her marvelous figure before her husband’s passing. Certainly other men would begin calling. Some would be opportunists seeking fortune. Others would be enchanted by her violet eyes and ash-blonde and golden waves, such as in the paintings of angels by the old masters.

Whatever their reasons for ignoring the fact that she had contributed to the dissolution of Lord Holt’s first marriage, the actions of these gentlemen callers would generate fresh gossip, the essential ingredient in every Belgravia party, soirée, and high tea.

But Lady Holt surprised them all by continuing to wear black another six months, then the half-mourning pinstripe-black for another six, followed by gray for still another six. When, after two-and-a-half years, she put aside the widow’s weeds and began appearing in public—an evening at the Royal Opera House, lunch at the Savoy, shopping at Harrods—it was usually on the arm of her brother, Douglas Pearce. Those gentlemen callers, who shot out of the gates like thoroughbreds at the Derby when the word spread that Lady Holt was
officially out of mourning, were not even shown into the hall of the Belgrave Square home.

“M’Lady is out” would say whichever servant happened to answer the door.

Often “out” simply happened to be out in the garden, where last summer she had discovered a fondness for digging in the soil. Why should she allow gentlemen to court her when courtship inevitably led to marriage? The six years with Sidney were more than enough.

It wasn’t that she had not loved him. But after the initial breathy and wondrous first months, she had discovered that being kept upon a pedestal was wearying, as was having a constant companion whose happiness on any given day depended upon her mood at the time. And now with years to reflect upon it, she quite regretted having stepped out of childhood and into marriage so abruptly.

Not even to her mother had she confessed the rush of relief that had accompanied the news of Sidney’s death. It was guilt over feeling thusly that had prolonged her mourning. Clothing herself in somber black and gray was surely due penance for the mornings she woke feeling giddy that her days were her own again. Why would she wish to surrender this newfound freedom?

There was a second, just as important, reason she had no desire to remarry. While her family was far from poor, thanks to an inheritance from Grandfather Lorimer, she grew up aware of a certain nervousness toward money in the house—Father grumbling at Mother about overspending, at her brothers every time a ball shattered a window; Mother scolding a parlourmaid for forgetting to extinguish the lamps when the family left the dining room, instructing the cook to trim costs by using margarine instead of butter in the servants’ hall.

And then to marry Sidney, who recorded in his ledger virtually every penny they spent!

She enjoyed being wealthy enough to indulge her every
material desire without considering the cost or having to ask anyone’s permission. Horrid was the thought of another having access to her fortune, even if it was only to comment upon how she spent it. Better to shower her affections upon her wardrobe, decorating her house, pottering in her garden. These demanded nothing of her that she was not willing to give.

On Monday, the eleventh of October, she was on her knees by the east wall, transplanting annuals for the coming winter, when she heard female voices from Mrs. Beckingham’s garden.

“How do you keep your eucalyptus so healthy, Maude?”

“Ramsey covers the trunk with fleece in winter, and every spring he prunes a third of the branches.”

“A third?”

“He says you want some young foliage mixed in with your old.”

Another voice said, “I hope you’re paying Ramsey well, or I may steal him from you.”

That remark prompted matronly giggles and Muriel to think,
How simple life is for the easily amused.

Heaven forbid the Belgravia Literature Appreciation Society would invite
her
to join them. Milly had been a member, and Sidney had once said that his first wife was not nearly so avid a reader as Muriel was.
She probably poisoned them against me before she left.

The only group to extend any sort of invitation to her was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society, of which her neighbor three doors to the east, Mrs. Fiske, was a member. Muriel had accompanied Mrs. Fiske to a meeting in the Holland Park home of a Mrs. Millicent Fawcett, but the women gathered had frightened her with talk of carrying signs and stopping traffic outside Parliament. She thought it would be rather nice to be allowed to vote, but at the risk of going to jail? She would just as soon pass.

“ . . . still does, unfortunately,” drifted over the wall. Mrs. Beckingham’s voice.

“One would think she would have moved off to be with her people by now.”

“Perhaps
they
don’t want her either” was said, prompting another round of giggles.

“Did anyone see her in that purple gown at the opera last week?”

Muriel held her trowel motionless and cocked her head.
She
had worn a purple, or rather amethyst-colored satin when Douglas escorted her to the Tuesday evening performance of Puccini’s
La Bohème.

“Are you sure it was a gown? I think she put on a petticoat and dipped herself in paint.”

“Perhaps she was stomping grapes for wine and got carried away?”

More giggles and a “Sh-h-h . . . her gardener’s looking.”

That was enough. Stabbing the ground with her trowel, Muriel rose. The top of the brick wall stopped just at her shoulders, so she could easily see the five women standing near the eucalyptus. They had not yet noticed her.

“Oh, Mrs. Beckingham?”

Five faces turned as one.

“You may wish to speak with your grandsons about using your garden for a water closet. I realize they’re young, but you know how difficult it is to break a habit the longer it goes on.”

“How dare you!” her neighbor exclaimed with a hand to her pearl-throttled throat.

Muriel smiled her sweetest. “But then again, it probably keeps the bugs away from your eucalyptus bark. Perhaps you could send them over here? My Himalayan birch is prone to algae.”

“The cheek of you!” one of the other women said, giving Muriel the malignant look worn by most of the others. Muriel shrugged and dropped to her knees again, while on
the other side she could hear sounds of hustling inside, and then a door slamming.

So much for book chat, when you can gossip about your neighbor.
She was congratulating herself for the insects remark when she heard footsteps in the drying grass, then the voice of her daughter’s nanny.

“M’Lady?”

Muriel continued gingerly pulling the geranium’s fragile root tendrils from the soil, while her left hand held the bulk of the plant. “Yes, Tucker?”

“May I have a word with you?”

“Where is Georgiana?”

“Taking her nap, m’Lady. I asked Joyce to watch her.”

Joyce was the chambermaid, who had her own work to do while Nanny Tucker was out here neglecting hers. But Muriel restrained herself from scolding, saying instead, “Here, push that closer.”

The nursemaid bent down and, with a faint grunt, pushed the clay pot toward her. Muriel made a well in the soil with her gardening trowel, then dropped the bulk of roots and soil into it. Gardener Abe Watterson, mulching the base of the birch while whistling what sounded like a hybrid of “And the Band Played On” and “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” would later transport the pot and others to the greenhouse. Muriel shoved her spade into the dirt and got to her feet.

“Now, what is it?” she said, wiping hands upon her gardening smock. Nanny Tucker was a good six inches taller than Muriel’s five-foot-five, so she still had to look up.

“I’ve a letter from my brother Robert in New York, m’Lady.”

Excitement shone from Valarie Tucker’s amber eyes, while the tremble of her lips betrayed some dread. Both displays of emotion gave Muriel an uneasy feeling. Was she about to give notice?

Were she any other servant, Muriel would have reminded her that the housekeeper Mrs. Burles handled all employment matters. As long as the household ran smoothly, Muriel could
give a tinker’s curse who dished her soup or made her bed. But the nursery was another matter. Having had a succession of nursemaids herself during childhood, Muriel wished her daughter to have more stability in her life. Besides, Georgiana was very fond of her nanny, so said Mrs. Burles.