Love by the Morning Star (20 page)

Ah, well
, she thought, not bothering to stifle the next yawn.
I can sleep when I'm married. Mmm . . 
.

She was alone in the kitchen as she indulged in this pleasant thought. Just then one of the bells rang.

In the hall beyond the kitchen was a miniature carillon. Bells of every size, tone, and timbre were mounted on the wall, each with a name or location written in precise copperplate script. Whenever a bell rang, it was the job of whoever was closest (or if several servants were present, whoever was lowest on the social totem pole) to make a mad dash to see who had been summoned, and where. They were supposed to recognize the caller or room by its pitch, but only Coombe and Mrs. Wilcox could do that. For the others, it was a matter of reaching the bell before it stopped pealing, or, failing that, before it stopped trembling. The smaller, lighter bells might quiver for several seconds after they fell dumb, but the largest—which were for the most important people—gave two rings at most and were then utterly still. A terrible system, Hannah thought, because a lesser guest, with his faint, tinny ring and long, silent shuddering, would forgive the necessity of a second ring. Lord or Lady Liripip, never, and don't bother explaining that the only servant in the vicinity had been making a béchamel that simply would not tolerate abandonment. White sauce lumps be damned—she'd better drop everything if she liked (or at least wanted to keep) her job.

The bell that rang now was the largest, the deepest, a veritable church bell. Hannah had only been smashing almonds with a satisfying ferocity, so she could drop her mallet and see who had called. It was Lord Liripip.

The problem was, who could attend him?

Usually when he rang, it was for his valet, his gentleman's personal gentleman, Brigand. Hannah had heard the name of this elusive man for days before she finally saw him, and had been expecting something considerably more piratical than the lean, long-shanked cadaver who attended to Lord Liripip's intimate wants. He looked as if he should be even more of an invalid than his master, but in his slow, spiderlike way he seemed to get His Lordship dressed and groomed and Macassared. (Hannah clearly remembered the frisson of terror she felt when she intercepted a note stating that Brigand was ready for the massacre. She'd never dreamed of an infusion of
Treasure Island
in her Wodehousean idyll. But it turned out that the servants weren't very good spellers, and the valet was only ready for the Macassar oil he used on Lord Liripip's hair.)

Very likely, Lord Liripip was calling Brigand to double as nursemaid and bathe and swaddle his gouty foot. Unluckily, Brigand had been sent into town to fetch the only sort of shoe polish His Lordship could tolerate, and he wouldn't be back for another hour.

But someone had to attend him, and as Hannah had learned, there was an accepted order to everything, to violate which could spell disaster. Perhaps not to quite the same extent as a female serving in the dining hall (which practically heralded an apocalypse), but it could still make the masters gape in disbelief and very likely talk of termination.

The butler would be the next best choice to send up to Liripip's library—he was quite gravid and male enough to suit. But he had been dispatched to London to get the various kinds of cigars and cigarettes their assorted Royal Highnesses preferred, in case any of them should show. (They were notoriously lax in their RSVPs, and at best their social secretaries might manage to call when they were en route.)

Everyone else was occupied too. The housekeeper, the parlor maids, the ladies' maids, all so far above her on the social hierarchy and far more suited to attend His Lordship in his hour of need.

But there was only she, and heaven forbid he ring the bell a second time.

There was nothing for it but to go and chance the consequences. Giggling at her own temerity, and more at the thought that there was anything to fear—imagine, her, Hannah Morgenstern, being afraid of a gouty old man—she picked the last bits of almonds out of her ragged, short nails and dashed upstairs.

She gave a soft rap at his door.

She didn't see Lord Liripip's head shoot up in alarm, didn't have a clue that her gentle tapping reminded him of the deathwatch beetles he'd heard in his youth. His grandmother had told him the story, and ever after he'd lie awake listening to the minuscule animal noises found in even the best houses. The skitter of mice in the walls. The insidious chewing of woodworm. And sometimes, rarely enough to make it seem more like an omen, the tip-tip-tap of a deathwatch warning of someone's imminent demise.

And so when Hannah poked her small dark head through the door, Lord Liripip was feeling particularly . . . mortal.

“You rang?”

How
, he wondered,
are all the ages of man contained in one moment? How am I a timorous child in my bed and a lusty young man and a love-struck middle-aged man and at the same time this rusted-out old hulk that can do none of the things those other selves could do?
Seeing Hannah, that peculiar servant girl who had spoken to him so flippantly of
droît du seigneur
, who had bearded them all in their lairs, he wanted his flesh to be firm and strong once again, filled to the brim with vital juices like a ripe peach toasting in the sun.

Foolish old man, to be rutting after the skivvies
, he chided himself.
Just what they would expect of you, though. As if you had the heart or lungs for it . . . or any other body part, for that matter
.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice querulous with the sense of his own inadequacies.

“Everyone else is busy preparing for the ball tonight.”

“And you were lounging around eating bonbons, what? What do I pay you for if all you do is sit on your bum taking your ease?”

“I have never had a bonbon, I think, though I have danced to Strauss's
Wiener Bonbons
waltz. Do you know it? With the terse little pizzicado opening and then those long, grand sweeps? But no, I do not take my ease, and neither have I taken my ease in all the days I have been here. I sleep, you will say, but not so often, or for so long, and the bed is simply abominable. True, it doesn't have bedbugs like the beds at the refugee center, but that was not their fault. The poor people who stayed there had come from the most
horrid
conditions. But bedbugs are not the only things that can disrupt a good night's sleep. Lumps are nearly as bad, and thin blankets. Worries and cares, also, but for those I cannot entirely blame you. Do you think they will play
Wiener Bonbons
tonight?”

Lord Liripip got that slightly dizzy sensation people tended to have when Hannah got a good head of conversational steam going.

“Where is Brigand?”

“In the village. Do you need someone to tend to your buttons? I can fetch Waltraud, one of the parlor maids, who happens to be my particular friend. She has great skill in the removal of male attire.”

Liripip grunted. “Women valets? Continental effete buffoonery.”

“Oh, no, her experience is strictly of the amateur kind. I assume she can reverse the process and help you dress, though.”

“Harrumph. I don't want to dress yet,” he said. “I've finished another chapter of my memoirs and I need to try them out on someone. What I need is Brigand to give me his ear.”

“Ah, like friends, Romans, and countrymen? Well, I am none of those things, but perhaps you could read them to me?”

What a peculiar specimen
, he thought,
chatting with me in her magpie way, with her faint and pleasing accent, just as if she were a favorite daughter
. He thought of his own two daughters, plain and lumpen things who took after their mother. Since infancy they seemed to be delicately offended by everything about him except his title and money. When their mother—his first, unlamented wife—died, he left them largely to the care of governesses and later shipped them away to finishing school. Age and motherhood had not improved them. If only he'd had a bright, lively little thing like this servant to entertain him.

“Wouldn't be suitable,” Liripip said. “What I do is read them to Brigand, and if I can make his cheeks turn pink I know they're salacious enough. If he refuses to blush, I go back and add some more dirty bits.”

“I never blush,” Hannah said. “But I should like to hear the dirty bits all the same. Are your memoirs true?”

“
Ahem
. They are as I remember them. True enough. No, you must have work to do. I can't trouble you. Fetch Anna Morgan for me.”

Still harboring thoughts of anchoring his only son by a marriage, he'd been making an effort to cultivate Anna. And what an effort it was! She was chatty enough, but the things she said! Like conversing with a peacock, all squawk and feathers. Still, he could not escape the glamour of the idea. She was the child of his lost love. He did not know how Caroline Curzon had produced this big, brash, blond thing, but he supposed after Teddy married her, he'd get used to her. The important thing was to keep Teddy out of spy work. No newly married man volunteered for a dangerous assignment.

“I will not do that,” Hannah said, folding her arms decidedly.

“What!” No one, noble or humble, had ever said no to him. Well, some of those girls in the carriages, but they had said yes with their eyes and that was what counted. This servant's eyes held a world of refusal.

“She is deeply asleep. I do not believe in waking people who are asleep. It is bad for the constitution, and for the soul. Plus, they often throw things at one's head.”

“Do you mean to say that you will not wake her?”

Hannah nodded, the immovable object.

Liripip blinked heavily, owlishly. “You really want to hear my memoirs? Very likely your ears will fall off. Don't say I didn't warn you. Have a seat right here.” He patted a chair close to his own.

“Perhaps I will sit over here instead.” She took up a position on a chaise. “Out of arm's reach, in case your youth springs upon you again.”

The look they exchanged made his heart do roebuck leaps. He was beyond desire (or at least the capacity to fulfill it), but no one is ever beyond memory, and the servant girl's conspiratorial smile, like a wicked little seraph, made him flush in unaccustomed places, near what might be the cockles of his heart. He wanted to take her out on the town. He wanted to buy her dresses and jewels, as he used to do for women of every stamp. Only, he wanted nothing from her in return except that mischievous grin, that effervescent spark of life she shared with him so freely.

“Hrrum.”
He cleared his throat with one of his eloquent grunts that was part articulation, part protest against the aches and creaks of age. “Would you like to hear what I wrote yesterday, which is bad, or what I scribbled today, which is far worse?”

“The worse, please,” she said. “Then afterward, when I'm flushed, the merely bad will be soothing.”

He shuffled through his papers and commenced a story involving him and the late King Edward VII, about whom his own mother, Queen Victoria, once wrote, “I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder.”

“And that,” he said when he finished reading, “is the real reason Bertie collapsed back in March of 1910 at Biarritz. The papers put it out that it was bronchitis. Balderdash and stuff, I say. The man had lungs of iron. It was really that Fifi who wore him out, and of course I had taught her all the tricks I'd learned from that whore from Bayonne, so I suppose his demise was all my fault after all. Har! Think I'll be tried for regicide once these memoirs are published?”

Hannah pulled a face. “Someone's really going to publish this?”

“Are you kidding? They're fighting over it, and the Americans, too. I can do it, you see, because everyone I talk about is already dead.”

She rose to stand and peered over his shoulder, flipping through page after page of the most salacious scandal written in the very purplest prose. “And if not, they will be when they read this.”

“But you didn't bat an eyelash, girl. What were you back in Germany, eh?”

She gaped at him. Didn't he know? But he must.

“Lady Ascot says she has a doctor polishing her boots, and that upstart Psmith's children are being tucked into bed by a female professor of mathematics. All kinds of interesting people are going into service—lucky us, poor them. We're like the Romans with their learned Greek slaves, so much smarter than their masters. Let me see: What could you be? What sort of girl can't muster up a gasp for a story like that?”

“You know what kind of girl I am,” Hannah said archly. And then, because a person can only control herself so far, she added, “Not the kind of girl who belongs in your kitchen.” Deep as her resentment might be, she found herself warming to this ribald old gentleman. Very likely keeping her in the kitchen, humiliating her as a servant, was all Lady Liripip's doing, and he went along with it for the sake of a peaceful household. Hannah imagined Lady Liripip might be capable of making a household very unpleasant indeed. Still, Hannah would forgive him. It is easy to forgive when you're in love. When he was her father-in-law, they would probably laugh about this.
It is a lover's trial
, she thought,
as princesses have to do in fairy tales. Psyche had to separate grains, I have to pluck high pheasants. And when Lady Liripip is a dowager and I am Lady Liripip myself, I will only occasionally rub her ill treatment of me in her face, and always send game and fruit to her dower house. Though she will not eat dinner with us more than twice a year
. On that, she was adamant.

Lord Liripip got a much different impression than she had intended. Lost in the delightful fug of his licentious youth (and middle age), his mind on a certain kind of woman who had given him so much pleasure, for such a great price, he immediately decided what kind of girl Hannah must have been in Germany.
Yes
, he thought, stroking his whiskers in meditative luxury,
I know your sort intimately
. Not a whore, exactly, but a hussy all the same. Clever, witty, pretty, unashamed, with that bit of outward primness they so often used as their cloak . . . She must be a courtesan.