The Buccaneers (39 page)

When at last Lady Glenloe threw up her hands and declared that it was easier to get from St. Petersburg to Tashkent than in and out of London, and the Duchess, after hesitation, suggested diffidently, “Would you ... if I ... Suppose I went to London too? We could all stay at Folyat House overnight,” the girls held their breath; and when their mother gratefully returned, “My dear Annabel, how kind!,” they hugged each other for joy.

The Duchess said happily: “I'll write to Folyat House to tell them to have things ready ... and I'll write to Longlands to let the Duke know.”

Perhaps, Annabel thought, bringing bright young company to the great morose mansion in Portman Square would break the dark spell it exercised over its mistress.... At any rate, she would be acting as Duchess in an unexceptionable undertaking. Ushant might even be pleased.

 
Gritty smoke from the locomotive billowed past the compartment window as the train bustled toward London. Cinders rained on the scorched grass along the rails; beyond, visible between gusts of smoke, raying out from a distant focus of rounded hills, sped pastures, sheep, fields, hedges, neatly demarcated woods, yellow-gray stone farm-buildings, and huddled hamlets. Now and then the train hooted and puffed to a stop at little stations where Corisande and Kitty pushed the window down and craned to watch two or three passengers descend and board. It was the first time they had been away from home by themselves—or
would
be by themselves when they left Miss Testvalley. (It didn't count that they would be accompanied by a maid, assigned to them ad
hoc
by their mother, who was travelling two carriages forward, second class, with the Duchess's maid, Mabbit, and their luggage.)

As they came out of a long roaring tunnel, Kitty sighed: “Oh, Duchess, if only you could come to the wedding too!”

“I have something exciting to look forward to myself,” said the Duchess. “Miss Testvalley is taking me to meet Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”

“Oh, what is he like?” Corisande asked Miss Testvalley. “He is the only famous artist we know about from somebody who knows them.”

“Knows
him,
Cora!” Miss Testvalley wrinkled her brow, considering. “From what critics who understand such matters say, I believe he will have a place in history as a poet and painter. But, apart from that, people—even writers and artists greater than he is—see him as a king. A leader! There's something about him.... Even now that he's old and very ill, they'd give their lives for him.... I felt like that myself, from the time I was a little girl.”

And then glancing out the window, she said briskly: “We're coming into London. Collect your odds and ends, girls!”

 
It was dark when Folyat House loomed high and stately in Portman Square, light shining from its long rows of windows and torches flaming at the grand portal. Footmen jumped down from the barouche which had met the travellers at Paddington, opened its escutcheoned doors, and helped them out. Other footmen led them up steps and into an oval colonnaded lobby. The Glenloe girls' eyes widened as the groom-of-the-chambers, attended by yet other footmen, conducted them into a great rectangular hall three storeys high which offered the vista of another hall through an arch at the opposite end. The girls were led up a marble-and-wrought-iron staircase which swept up along two sides of the great hall, past embrasures containing marble statues, to a balustraded balcony, its pilastered arches two storeys high, and on to their rooms.

“I've said we'll dine early,” the Duchess told her guests. “I'll knock on your doors at seven and we'll go down together.”

 
Dinner was laid on the longest table the Glenloes had ever seen. “Oh, bother,” the Duchess murmured. “I ought to have said the breakfast-room.... We'll be miles apart.” After biting her lip for a moment, she told the butler: “We shall all sit together at the head, Ogilvy”; and when
couverts
and candelabra had been moved and she and her friends had taken their places, she indicated a pyramid of ferns and gardenias that mounted two feet high in front of her, saying: “And move that, please, so that we can see each other.”

Kitty and Cora, seated at the Duchess's left, opposite Miss Testvalley, watched by the mutes with powdered hair, knee breeches, and silk stockings who stood motionless along the walls, dared not look up from the plates into which other mutes were ladling turtle soup.

The Duchess turned to Miss Testvalley. “Since this is the prelude to a special occasion, don't you think Corisande and Catharine might take some wine?”

Corisande and Catharine, eyeing their governess hopefully, saw a fierce mock-scowl form on her mobile brown face and melt into an infectious smile as she replied: “I certainly do! Especially as Kitty and Cora face several days of festivities when wine will pour like water. But you
will
be prudent, won't you, girls? A little water in the wine, do you think, tonight—
and
at the Binghams'?”

“Do you know,” the Duchess said to her younger guests, dimpling, “Miss Testvalley let me drink wine for the first time when
I
was a bridesmaid too. It was at Lady Richard Marable's wedding, in New York; and something so funny happened just around then. There was a ball—an Assembly ball, rather like the ones in country towns here; only in New York it's a little like being presented at Court, because there isn't any Court, and the White House isn't the same thing; so if you weren't invited it did hurt—”

What with hot soup and watered Chablis, Kitty and Cora were no longer intimidated by their surroundings.

“Oh, Duchess, did you suffer?” Kitty asked pityingly.

“Oh, I wasn't even out yet. But some other girls felt awfully bad. Well, two of the ones who weren't invited went to the ball even so—by pretending they were the sisters of a English lord! Someone got them tickets, using the English girls' names.”

“Highly reprehensible,” Miss Testvalley interposed, as the Glenloes gasped.

“The New York papers,” the Duchess continued, “said how beautiful and elegant and lively and what wonderful dancers English girls were, compared with Americans.—But that's not all,” she went on, over the sisters' squeals of laughter. “Can you imagine, the papers
here
copied the New York articles—giving the names of the real English girls!—who'd never left home, of course, and were totally, absolutely
dumbfounded!
In fact, they still are, I happen to know.... No, I can't tell you their names. As Miss Testvalley says, it was an unforgiveable masquerade.”

Dover sole had followed soup. Miss Testvalley carried on the Duchess's chatter—neither her present pupils nor her former one had ever seen her so animated; so keyed up, even—with anecdotes that lasted through veal, beef, partridge, salad, syllabub, cheese, fruit, and a savoury, to which the two youngest diners, though the others flagged, did full justice.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a menagerie. It was supposedly in his back garden, which is a good size, but the animals actually had the freedom of the house—and sometimes of the neighbours' gardens, I'm afraid. He had ... Let me think. He had peacocks ... he had gazelles and armadillos and kangaroos, a raccoon—the raccoon ate one of his manuscripts. He had a wombat ... I believe a sloth ... but what he really wanted was an elephant....”

“Oh, why?”

“He wanted the elephant to clean the windows.”

From behind Miss Testvalley came a deeper sound than the trills of laughter at the table. One of the statues lined against the wall stood tensed, his eyes squeezed shut and his cheeks puffed out, as though he were trying to control a fit of hiccups. Glancing over at him, the Glenloes saw that the Duchess also looked, but quickly averted her eyes.

 
“Cora, we are in London, and tomorrow we'll be in Norfolk,” Kitty told her sister, as they snuggled in bed, “and the day after we'll be in the wedding.”

They had been escorted to separate rooms, but as soon as their maid departed Kitty had run out of hers and jumped into bed with Cora.

“I can't sleep, can you?”

“Oh, no ... Did you notice how the Duchess pretended not to hear that man laugh, so he wouldn't be punished?”

“Oh, yes,” Kitty said reverently, “the Duchess is my ideal!”

“Then I suppose she can't be mine too, so I don't know who my ideal is—Yes, I do. The Princess of Wales. Ah ... lex ... ahn ... dra ... Such a beautiful name ...”

“Ummm.”

“Are you awake? I can't sleep either....”

 
 
Miss Testvalley, peeking in, heard, unsurprised, the breathing of two sleepers, and made her way, with guidance by servants, to the Duchess's narrow, high-ceilinged boudoir and on through a tapestried bedroom to a pretty octagonal room walled with mirrors. There sat Annabel, in a dressing-gown that was far from pretty, having her thick brown-gold curls brushed into ruliness by a prim-visaged woman whom the governess knew to be her maid.

“Come in,” Nan cried. “Thank you, Mabbit, good night.—Oh, Val, what fun, thanks to you! And tomorrow, after all these years, I'll meet Mr. Rossetti! I can't believe it.”

“It's possible too that we may meet ... That is, Sir Helmsley Thwarte may come with us. He wants to see that replica of his Madonna and show Dante Gabriel a copy he's made, and he may be in town on business.... Annabel, I must explain that Dante Gabriel is vague about money. His problems—” Miss Testvalley paused, eyeing Annabel's innocently receptive face. Why tell her that Dante Gabriel was addicted to chloral mixed with whisky? “He is ill, you see, and he sometimes asks for, for ... financial help. I hope and pray he won't importune you—or Sir Helmsley.” She was afraid that Nan would wonder at her jerky babbling, but Nan only asked:

“Do you think that Mr. Guy Thwarte will come too?”

Next morning, an important person in black bombazine with a tall footman and a chubby buttons in her wake identified herself as the Bingham Nanny and supervised the transfer of the Glenloe party into the Bingham carriage. Shortly afterward, Sir Helmsley Thwarte, unaccompanied by his son, arrived at Folyat House in a hansom-cab into which, vigorously, and limping only slightly, he helped the two ladies, telling the driver: “Chelsea. Tudor House, Cheyne Walk.—It is, in fact, Tudor,” he observed to Nan as they bowled along. “You like historical associations, Duchess; did you know that Henry the Eighth's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, lived there after his death?—Am I not right, Miss Testvalley?” Stroking his fine auburn beard, the baronet turned deferentially to the governess, but she had her head at the window, watching for what proved to be a bow-fronted ivy-grown brick house separated from the walk and the river-bank by a little neglected-looking garden.

 
 
Rossetti, seated by an ornate fireplace, apologized with an expansive and courtly gesture for not rising, and murmured: “Laura,
cara!
... Enchanté, Duchess! ... Sir Helmsley!” He looked far more ill than when Sir Helmsley had seen him last. His pallor was accentuated by the black circles around his deep-set, dark, liquid eyes, but the eyes had all their old magnetism.

After careful scrutiny, pulling at the long drooping moustache that made him resemble at first glance a Chinese mandarin rather than an Anglo-Italian painter-poet, he pronounced Sir Helmsley's water-colour exquisite. “I wonder if it wasn't
I
who copied
you,
Sir Helmsley!”

“But why,” the baronet asked him, “have you not painted Miss Testvalley?”

“Ah, but only Goya could do justice to those incandescent eyes!” Rossetti answered.

“Precisely the painter I have always thought of for her!” Sir Helmsley accepted the statement as an accolade; he could have had no more gratifying confirmation of his artist's sensibility. “As Petrarch is the poet!
‘Costei, ch'è
tra le donne
un sole, In me, movendo de' beglio ochi i rai, Cria d'amor penseri....'
”

Rossetti, raising his heavy brows, looked, blandly quizzical, from his old patron to Miss Testvalley; who blushed darkly and asked her cousin, in haste, “And for the Duchess?”

“For that naive grace”—Rossetti was as prompt as magisterial in his reply—“those soft eyes, that eloquent play of expression—Romney! Without a doubt, Romney.”

Leaving Miss Testvalley to chat with her cousin, Sir Helmsley and the Duchess walked about the high shadowy parlour, looking at Rossetti's drawing of the austere profiles of his sister Christina and their mother and other works by him and and his Brethren, and investigated the ancient room that was now a studio, with its smell of turpentine, recalling to the baronet his own Paris
atelier in les beaux jours d'autrefois
and of—he sniffed uncertainly—some sort of exotic incense. After he returned to the others, the Duchess lingered, turning over canvasses here and there. She re-joined the older people with a look of puzzlement.

 
 
When the three visitors had taken leave of the great Pre-Raphaelite, the Duchess strolled down the little garden path and crossed the walk to the edge of the Thames. Sir Helmsley gently detained Miss Testvalley. Tapping the re-wrapped water-colour he held pressed under his left arm, his voice urgent, he said: “My dear Laura, in offering you this trifle I beg you to accept the poor copier with it. You must know that I hope you will consent to be my wife.”

Miss Testvalley's lids fell over the eyes which only Goya could have painted, and she crimsoned almost painfully; but after a moment she looked her suitor straight in the face. “And you must know my regard for you, Sir Helmsley; but it is a very serious step—for each of us; and not to be taken on impulse.”