Love by the Morning Star (17 page)

No, she decided. The English have such rigid codes dividing the classes.
For him to go into the kitchen to seek me out would be nearly as bad as being in love with me in the first place. I must be patient. Tonight he will come to the twin yews. Or tomorrow morning
.

When she unlatched the door to the hothouse she heard singing, something about a flat-foot floozy with a floy-floy.

“I think I know what a floozy is,” Hannah called into the lush, junglelike greenery, “but what is a floy-floy?”

“Something Americans catch from floozies, I think,” Hardy said, coming out from behind a potted lemon tree and wiping his hands on a towel. “What, not even a blush? I'm losing my touch. Good to see you, Hannah. I thought for sure you'd be out on your ear by now.”

“Not for lack of trying, on my part and nearly everyone else's. My, it's like summer in here!” The air was richly humid and smelled positively green.

“I stay here as much as I can during the winter. You're welcome to visit me whenever you like. Some evening when you're free . . . or very early morning. Oh, now I see a blush! It must have gotten awfully cold in that yew bole, but neither of you seemed to mind. Is it the heat that makes your face so red, Hannah?” He grinned wickedly. “No wonder I pitch the woo at you and it bounces right off. You've been vulcanized by flash Teddy, bane of the maidens.”

Hannah tried not to look distraught. Not
feeling
distraught was utterly beyond her. “Is he really so . . .” She could not find the word.

“They claim he's more of a ladies' man than his father was, and that's saying something. The laundry maids all swear he's, er—damn, I can't think of an appropriate euphemism.”

“Popped their bubbles?” Hannah suggested, her voice shaking. “Starched their knickers?”

“Oh, Hannah, you aren't serious about him? We might have progressed a bit past the Victorian era, but we keep the fine old tradition of lords knocking up the servant girls and the girls being dismissed without reference. Then it's factory life, the evils of gin, and before you know it you're a flat-foot floozy with a floy-floy, trolling Haymarket.”

Hannah couldn't help but laugh. How peculiar life had become, when the most crushing things could be coupled with merriment, a strange gallows humor, hope and despair hand in hand.

“Is he really so bad?” she asked softly when the laughter died away to uncomfortable silence.

“Frankly, I don't know. That's what they say. What the girls say, that is, but you know how they are. But I've never seen any of
them
out with his lordship in the morning starlight. Don't fret. You're clever enough to sniff out a man's real intentions.”

“No, I'm not,” Hannah admitted.

Which might, Hardy thought, be why Teddy was so interested. But he kept this to himself.

“But look on the bright side,” Hardy said. “If he breaks your heart, you always have my open arms to rush to. At least, the way things are going, you will. My love life with the toffs isn't progressing as neatly as yours.” He tossed the earth-covered towel over a smug-looking rosebush in full flower. “Can you keep a secret?”

“I don't know. I've never tried.”

“Funny,” he said dryly. “Though keeping it a secret is probably the problem. She doesn't know I'm smitten.”

“Who?”

“You'll laugh.”

“Very likely, if it's funny. But it can't be as funny as Teddy and me, which you will keep under your hat, will you not?”

“Trapped beneath my beaver in perpetuity,” he said. “Now will you help me?”

“Of course, but how? Who?”

After a great deal of squirming he said, indistinctly and out of the corner of his mouth, “Anna Morgan.”

“No! But she's—”

“As much of a swell as your Teddy? But it's different for me, isn't it, because a woman rises—or sinks—to her husband's rank. Fine for you and Lord Ted, he can make a lady out of a guttersnipe. Not so peachy for me and that goddess.”

Hannah wondered which goddess Anna might be. Aphrodite was a troublemaker, and ignorant and selfish, but it was probably hard not to like her. Hannah tried to like her part-time mistress, and often she succeeded. But sometimes Anna would say something that made Hannah freeze and gape, because that was the only possible safe alternative to whacking her with the hairbrush.

Once Anna said that poor people should not be pitied, because they evidently chose to be poor. Another time she opined that birds—not just pigeons but songbirds—should be prohibited in cities because of the mess they make. “You can so rarely hear their songs over traffic noise, and then they always seem to sing when I have something interesting to say. Oh, I know: There can be a bounty on their heads, and then the poor people can hunt them and not be poor anymore!” When Hannah, with shades of Swift, muttered that they could just put a bounty on the heads of the poor, Anna looked at her with patient contempt and said, “But they could eat the birds too, and make pretty hats out of them. You can't make anything out of the poor.”

But she could be kind, too. Hannah was surprised at how interested Anna was in her life and past, and how eager she was to learn German. She was abysmal, true, but she tried awfully hard, watching her face in the mirror as she wrapped her tongue around difficult words. And she gave Hannah curling papers she didn't want, a scarf she didn't need, and a manicure set for nails that had been broken down to nubbins so there was nothing left to file.

She could see how a man could fall in love with Anna, because as Waltraud said, men seemed to love with their eyes.

“Have you even spoken to her?” Hannah asked Hardy.

“Well . . . no. But she's looked at me.”

“That's something,” Hannah said, doubtful.

“That's everything, if they look at you right. You can tell, can't you, the second you meet someone, even in the instant you first set eyes on her, if it will be yes or no. It might not ever come to that—you might not have the chance, she might remember Mother and think better of it in the end—but she looks you over and decides all at once if you're a possibility.”

“And she looked at you with a yes?”

“With a yes that drooled, Hannah!” Hardy said, sidling closer to her. “She came into the hothouse a few times, and I took pains to be there, nearby, always ready if she had a question. She never talked to me, but she fondled my gardenias like they were my—”

“Hardy!”

“She did, bob's your uncle. And she looked at me sideways-like, out of her eyelashes, and her lips curled and I could see what she was thinking about.”

“Hardy, dear, I hate to disappoint you, but Anna Morgan thinks love without money is a sort of disease. She might fancy you, but I don't think she'll let you tickle her fancy in return. Although . . .” She cocked her head in consideration. “Do you think it might be that the lady doth protest too much? Why would she take the trouble to knock love of a poor boy so violently about the head if she had not been inflicted with the symptoms herself? Maybe you have a chance. No, I have changed my mind already. She thinks she is far too much of a lady to fall in love with poor handsome you, though you might come into her bedtime thoughts now and again.”

Hardy leaned close and whispered in her ear. “That Anna ain't no lady.”

Hannah's eyes flew open wide. “What do you mean?”

“She was looking at these gardenias here. I'd just come in the back, quiet-like, to spy on her a bit, and she didn't have a clue I was there. She smelled the biggest and said . . .”

Hannah held her breath, quivering in anticipation.

“She said, in a shrill voice, ‘Cor blimey, ain't that a beaut!'”

“And what's wrong with that? It is a . . . beaut.”

“You're a foreigner and haven't got a proper ear, though you do speak far more like a lady than some.
Cor
is straight out of the East End. It's something an eelmonger might say. A lady might pick up slang and use it to be cute when she's talking to her friends, but what a person exclaims when she's alone always goes back to her roots. If she blurted out
cor
, it means she was raised saying
cor
.”

“Hardy, I had no idea you were such an etymologist.”

“Can't say if I'm that, but my own grandmother sold eels and she said
cor
twelve times a day.” His voice suddenly took on a profoundly genteel tone. “My mother, however, was a schoolteacher, and when she's listening, my own elocution is superb.” He laughed at himself and slipped back into his careless accent. “Say, I ought to talk like that in front of Anna. She'll think I'm a real swell. What do you know about her, anyway? None of the staff seem to know where she came from or why she's here. Some connection of Lady Liripip's, they think, because she's taken her under her wing, but is she a relative? A friend? A blackmailer?”

Hannah laughed and shrugged. “No one tells me anything. Maybe she's a parasite, like the ancient Greeks had—a poor hanger-on who earned his bread through flattery and a laugh in the right place and occasionally doing clandestine deeds.” She thought for a moment. “Whatever she is, I don't think she's very comfortable here. She's always on edge, and trying not to look like she is, and mostly succeeding but not always.”

“I'm not rich,” Hardy said, drawing himself up to his full—and considerable—height and looking the very picture of yeomanly pride. “But I have a bit put by, and the job comes with a cottage on the grounds. Umbel says I'm ready to be full gardener, so if she's not happy here I could get a place as head gardener at a smaller establishment, and she could keep house and help with the lighter work, herbs and such.”

Hannah couldn't quite see Anna mucking about with herbs, but she said only, “You haven't even talked to her, and you're making plans to marry her?”

“Or not, if she'd prefer. I'm not picky about the particulars, long as she came to live with me, let me take care of her.”

“What if you aren't compatible?”

“Oh, those things work themselves out, once you're stuck together,” Hardy said. “But I guess we ought to chat a time or two before I risk popping the question. So will you help me?”

“How?”

Hardy pulled a pair of shears from his leather apron and began snipping creamy gardenias. “Can you sneak these into her room? With a note?”

 

A
ND SO THAT EVENING
A
NNA
found her room redolent with cloying gardenia sweetness. She'd been a little disappointed in Teddy's demeanor earlier. Of course, he'd motored home just in time to dress for dinner, and brought a friend with him, a slender aesthete named Maurice, who had monopolized the conversation by quizzing Lord Liripip about his memoirs. Teddy had been as charming as ever, but not nearly as intimate as his letters from Germany seemed to indicate he ought to be.
Of course he wants to keep it from his mother for now, the sensible man
, she thought,
but can't he even manage a whispered word of love?

He and his friend talked about Germany in a most depressing way, and much to her consternation kept addressing her in German, so she had to affect an earache and pretend she couldn't hear much of the conversation. Anna was getting into quite a pet when Teddy excused himself early, pleading the rigors of travel. But then as he was wishing everyone good night he whispered to Anna, “Later, my darling, in the delicious darkness,” which made her feel like one of those quivering aspics impregnated with strange edibles.

And when she found the blossoms, and read the note—
Meet me where these flowers slumber
—she was certain a proposal was imminent. Or, she thought with some alarm, pondering the references to darkness and slumber, if not a proposal, then some other proposition of increased intimacy, to which, as a cow who most decidedly would not give her milk for free, she would certainly say no. Probably say no. Very likely say no, unless the proposition was accompanied by an engagement ring. Or not.

The moon was new, the stars obscured under a lowering gray nacre of clouds, and Anna stubbed her toe many times in the pursuit of love. But all incidental injuries were forgotten when, the moment she set foot inside the midnight blackness of the sultry hothouse, strong arms encompassed her, pulling her close to a warm chest made hard and muscular, she knew, by vigorous rowing for the Oxford crew team. Any objections she might possibly have were stifled by the beguiling press of very skillful lips.

“But . . .” she managed to gasp at last.

“But nothing,” a manly voice murmured in aristocratic tones. “Do you like it?” In the absolute darkness he felt her head nod, brushing him cheek to cheek. “Do you like me?” Another nod, and this time she sought out his lips herself. After that there were very few words.

H
ANNAH HAD DONE EVERYTHING POSSIBLE
to see Teddy Christmas evening. Almost—almost she risked another debacle of female-in-the-dining-room, but Sally caught her lingering by the door with a bowl of relish and, smelling danger, sent her to the pantry to fetch an extra fish slice (there being a superabundance of this useless utensil, since every married Liripip couple for the last four hundred years had received no less than twelve of them as wedding gifts). Before dinner she paced in the hall outside of Anna's room, in case he should stroll by. She brought up his name in clumsy and obvious ways, hoping to hear some tidbit about him. Luckily it didn't rouse the other maids' suspicions, because they were all in love with Teddy, though slightly more resigned to the fact that they could not possess him.

Not for himself
, she thought.
Not for me, not for love. Only to see if he has word of my parents
.