The American Heiress (8 page)

Odo was still speaking. ‘No wonder Ivo is lying low. Shame really, because what he needs is a nice rich wife. Who knows, Mrs Cash, perhaps you will spirit him back to Newport and find him a lovely young heiress? She’ll have to be beautiful, though. Ivo is very particular.’

Mrs Cash was deciding how to reply when a small hubbub erupted at the other end of the table. Charlotte Beauchamp, who had been fingering the choker of black pearls around her throat, had inadvertently touched upon a weak link in the stringing, and the necklace snapped, the pearls exploding across the table, rattling across plates and ricocheting off the crystal glasses. Charlotte, making a sound somewhere between a shriek and a laugh, was trying to recover the pearls as nonchalantly as she could. The Rural Dean found one in his claret and embarked on a long-winded allusion to Cleopatra’s dinner with Antony.

‘She said she would give him a priceless dinner, so he was very surprised to be given indifferent food and then Cleopatra took off one of her pearl earrings, dropped it into her glass of wine where it dissolved and she offered him the glass to drink. What a magnificent gesture. I can’t claim to be Antony of course but, my dear Lady Beauchamp, you are surely a modern Cleopatra.’ The Dean stopped, rather amazed at where his unexpected eloquence had taken him.

Charlotte was busy trying to retrieve the pearl with a teaspoon when her husband called out, ‘I hope, Dean, that you are not suggesting that my wife should have herself delivered to you in a carpet, the better to seduce you. You really mustn’t put such fancies in her head.’

The Dean looked rather pleased with himself. ‘Age cannot wither, nor custom stale her infinite variety.’

‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty,’ said Charlotte as she counted the pearls rolling about on her dinner plate. ‘Only one missing. Is it in your waistcoat pocket, Dean, I wonder?’

‘I will ask Druitt to have a thorough search afterwards,’ said Lady Bridport hastily, alarmed equally by the thought of Charlotte going through the Dean’s pockets as by the Dean’s willingness to quote Shakespeare at a civilised dinner party. She rose and gave the signal for the ladies to withdraw.

When Odo went to visit his wife’s bedroom later that evening, he found her in her peignoir at the dressing table. He noted the blue veins that threaded her slender arms as she pulled the silver hairbrush through her long fair hair. Cleopatra was altogether too coarse an image for Charlotte, he thought. She had the head of an Italian Renaissance beauty. When he had last been in London, Snoad the dealer had shown him a painting by the Sienese painter Martini of Bianca Saracini. She had long fair hair and a high forehead like Charlotte’s, in her hand she held a snowball to signify her purity. He must have Charlotte painted, although he could think of no one who could do her justice. Meanwhile, he would buy the Martini and give it to Charlotte for her birthday. She liked presents.

‘I’m sorry about your necklace, Charlotte. Such an exotic colour. Have I seen it before?’

Charlotte’s hair flickered in a sudden storm of static. Odo took the brush from her and began to brush it himself. He liked to pacify it into a shining sheet. Charlotte flinched and avoided his eyes in the mirror as she said, ‘It belonged to my great-aunt Georgina – you know, the one who was in India. I never thought to wear it before but, faced with all those American sparklers, I didn’t want to appear dowdy.’

‘Pearls before swine, eh?’ He put the brush down, and pulled back her hair so he could kiss her neck. ‘Such a pity I lost you today at the meet. Where did you get to?’ Odo began to pull the fastenings of her peignoir.

‘Oh, I don’t know, my stirrup kept twisting and by the time I had fixed it, you had gone. Had to spend hours dodging that buffoon Cannadine.’

Odo squeezed her nipple hard. ‘Cannadine indeed. Poor Charlotte. But you know I don’t like it when you disappear. I shall have to punish you.’

He picked up the hairbrush.

In the servants’ hall, Bertha was finishing her supper. She was eating some kind of pudding laced with currants. It was a dish that everyone else seemed to relish, but she found it hard going. She longed suddenly for an ice-cream sundae. That had been her treat on her afternoons off at home, ice cream from the drugstore in Newport. She would go there dressed up to the nines in one of Miss Cora’s fanciest cast-offs, with a parasol and a bonnet with a veil. Bertha could just pass for white, and in her secondhand Paris finery the man behind the counter was not about to question her colour. It was the combination of cold ice cream and hot chocolate sauce that made her gasp with pleasure. She couldn’t understand why Miss Cora, who could have all the sundaes she wanted, didn’t eat them night and day. That was luxury all right.

There was a tap on her shoulder. She looked up and saw Jim. ‘Think you dropped this, Miss Cash.’ He put something in her lap. It was a handkerchief, not one of hers, inside which was a tiny screw of paper. She hid it up her sleeve as she knew that Druitt and Mrs Lawrence were watching her.

As she walked out of the hall, she unfolded the note and read it by the light of her candle. In careful rounded script she read:

Meet me by the stables. I have something for you.

Yours ever,
Jim Harman

He was waiting there by Lincoln’s stall, stamping his feet in the cold. When he saw her, his face relaxed into a smile.

‘You came then. Good girl. You won’t be sorry.’

‘I should hope not, I could lose my place for this.’

‘Look.’ Jim held out a clenched fist to her. Bertha hesitated. ‘Go on, open it’.

Bertha pulled back his fingers one by one. There, on his outstretched palm, was a black pearl. Under the lamplight she could see its faint iridescent sheen like a slick of oil on a puddle. It was as big as a marble and almost perfectly spherical. Bertha took it and rubbed it against her cheek.

‘It’s so smooth. Where did you find it? You did find it, didn’t you?’ She looked at his face, hoping he would meet her eyes. He didn’t flinch.

‘I was waiting at table tonight, on account of it being such a big party, and just as I was coming round with the savoury, one of the ladies went and broke her necklace by fidgeting with it at the table. She thought she picked ’em all up but this one rolled under my foot and I stood on it tight until all the ladies went upstairs. I wanted to give it to you. You’re a black pearl, Bertha, that’s what you are and it’s only right that you should have it.’

Bertha looked at him, astonished. No one had ever talked to her this way before. Honey talk, that’s what her mother would call it. ‘Honey talk is fine and dandy but make sure you get the ring first.’ Bertha’s mother had never had a ring though. The man who had seduced her had been white, so there was no question of marriage. Mrs Calhoun had kept her on in the laundry after Bertha was born. The Reverend called it an act of Christian charity, but Bertha’s mother never looked grateful. But Bertha did not pull away as Jim leant down to kiss her. It was different from all the other kisses she had had, softer, more tentative. His hands were holding her head as if it was made of glass.

When he drew back she said, ‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Mind what?’ he whispered.

‘My skin. Don’t you mind kissing a coloured girl?’

He didn’t answer but kissed her again, this time with more urgency.

Finally he said, ‘Mind? I told you, you’re my black pearl. When I first set eyes on you in the servants’ hall I thought you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. When old Druitt told me to take you into dinner I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’

There was no mistaking the sincerity of his tone. Bertha was touched. She felt for his hand and squeezed it. She saw Jim’s blue eyes go round with concern.

‘You’re not cross, are you, that I kissed you? You just looked so fine standing there, I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t that I thought I could, I don’t think you’re fast or anything.’ He looked so worried that Bertha laughed and swung his hand.

‘No, I’m not cross. Not at all.’ She leant towards him, the better to show him how far from cross she was, but they heard footsteps and Jim drew away.

‘I must go. Save this for me.’ And he touched his finger to her lips and was gone.

Bertha turned back towards the house, rolling the pearl between her fingers. It grew warm in her hand. She slipped it into the bodice of her dress and as she walked into the house she could feel the glow somewhere just above her heart.

Chapter 6

A Link in the Chain

I
F MRS CASH HAD BEEN EDUCATED AS ELEGANTLY
as her daughter, if she had read Byron, or had pored over Doré’s engravings of Dante, she would have recognised Lulworth with its turrets and its twisted chimneys silhouetted against the shining sea as a glorious example of the Picturesque. But Mrs Cash was the daughter of a colonel of the Confederate Army, and when she had been growing up, there had been no call for poetry. Mrs Cash was a crack shot and could command an army of servants but she had not had a sentimental education.

After the Confederate surrender at Appomatox, Nancy Lovett, as she then was, had been sent North to stay with her aunt in New York. She was a handsome girl with dark hair and a delicate but firm jaw. Her mother had sent her into enemy territory with misgivings, but Nancy had not looked back. She liked the rich colours of her aunt’s house, the wide skirts, the elaborate pelmets. She enjoyed the plentiful food and rosy prosperous company. When Winthrop the Golden Miller’s son had proposed, she had accepted gladly. Her mother had sighed and thought about what might have been, but her father was by then in the institution where he would die three months later. Later, as Nancy the bride solidified into Mrs Cash the society matron, she had felt some of the lacunae in her education; she could not speak a word of French, for example. But for a woman with such a natural talent to command, her inability to talk to the French Ambassador in his native tongue was the faintest of setbacks. Colonel Lovett had been a keen disciplinarian before his ‘indisposition’ and he would have appreciated his daughter’s ability to impose order.

So Mrs Cash did not gasp, as so many visitors had before her, at the romantic charms of Lulworth. The house with its four turrets flanked by lacy Jacobean wings studded with mullioned windows was imposing but delicate, like a queen whose coronation robes cannot disguise the slenderness of her waist or the fragile tilt of her head.

No, like the commander she was, Mrs Cash sized up the strengths and the weaknesses of her new billet. She could tell from the irregular façade with its towers and battlements that the food would be at best tepid by the time it reached the dining room. Driving in through the park gates, Mrs Cash looked up only briefly at the bronze stag over the cast-iron gates; she was far more interested in the dilapidated state of the gatehouse windows. By the time she was halfway up the drive of two-hundred-year-old elm trees she had made a realistic assessment of Lulworth’s plumbing.

But even Mrs Cash could not fault the magnificent matching pair of footmen who handed her out of her carriage. The Lulworth livery of green and gold was certainly elegant, she had never seen shoulder tassels of such splendour. She would have smiled with appreciation, if it hadn’t been so painful. She had to husband her smiles for more important occasions. Perhaps the Duke might give her the name of his livery maker.

A voice murmured in her ear, ‘Welcome to Lulworth, Madam. His Grace has asked me to take you to see Miss Cash and then he hopes you will join him for lunch.’ She followed the butler up the stone steps through the great arched door into a vaulted hall with a carved stone chimney piece at one end. The blackened oak of the roof timbers was not to Mrs Cash’s taste, she preferred her wood gilded, but she felt its weight.

‘If you would like to come this way, Madam.’

Mrs Cash followed the servant up a wide wooden staircase lit by a glass lantern roof. There were fantastical beasts on the newel posts: gryphons, salamanders and lions. Mrs Cash admired the carvings but noticed that they had not been carefully dusted. At length they reached a wide gallery and the servant turned left and proceeded until he reached a door about halfway down.