The Buccaneers (44 page)

Darting out of the office, Nan hastened past a stairway leading to depths from which a smell of fresh bread wafted, past closed doors, to a doorless pantry where a young man in livery with his sleeves rolled up, polishing silver, saw her and let a porringer slip to the floor.

“I want to go out—is this the way?” she asked.

“Yes... yes, Your Grace,” he said, and led her down a cross-passage to a door, which he held open for her.

“Aren't you Arthur, from Longlands?” Nan asked, “and weren't you in the dining-room the night when my friends stayed here?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Well, thank you, Arthur,” Nan said with the sketch of a smile. “And goodbye.”

(“She spoke sweetly,” Arthur Bliss Was to say in the months that followed, telling and re-telling the story as the scandal rocked England, “and she smiled at me. A sweet lass she were, even though she were a harlot.”)

 
Nan was in a narrow cobblestoned mews, among pails of water and bundles of hay. At one end, the horses unharnessed from the carriage in which she had been driven from Belfield were being rubbed down, blocking the exit. Taking the other direction, she passed under a high narrow arch into a street, turned a corner, a series of corners, found herself in Oxford Street, and knew that she was safe from recognition. Her progress in the shuffling throng of women shoppers on the pavement was scarcely slower than that of the congested street-traffic of cabs, carriages, and horsemen. Passing a brewer's wagon drawn by two huge Percherons, redolent of hops, she came up with a black-moustachioed organ-grinder who was singing to the metallic tinkle of his barrel:

 
To that tune, seven carefree young people and a poodle with an orange bow had met her governess in the dusty heat of the Saratoga railway station—where everything had begun. Feeling in her purse, Nan found a sixpence and gave it to the musician's monkey.

 
At last, feeling safe from pursuit, Nan paused to get her bearings. She turned into North Audley Street, and, automatically following paths which had become familiar when she and Jinny and their mother lived in town before Jinny's marriage, walked back into her former life. At the tiny house in Curzon Street, pink geraniums still at its windows, her knock was answered by a new beruffled maid no less amazed to see a lady arrive on foot, hatless, than Arthur Bliss had been to see her leave; and when the maid asked, “Whom shall I announce?,” Nan replied without thinking: “Annabel St. George.”

 
 
In her daintily appointed drawing-room Miss Jacky March started from her chair, and Miss Laura Testvalley, already on her feet, exclaimed, “Annabel!”

“I have left the Duke,” Nan said. “I have left my husband....”

Miss March dropped back onto her chair. A strange expression crossed her delicate faded face—indefinable, but not of amazement only.

“When did this happen, Annabel?” Miss Testvalley asked quietly.

“Just now. He is in town, at Folyat House; I have just told him. I came here because I thought Miss March might know where I could reach you....”

Miss March's countenance now revealed what was unmistakeably anxiety. “ ‘Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie,' ” thought Miss Testvalley, eyeing her friend not ungently. Taking Nan by the arm, she said to her: “How lucky, you haven't needed to ask Miss March, after all! and she knows nothing whatever of all this.—Jacky dear, I was about to leave, so I'll just take Annabel along.”

 
Miss Testvalley led a passive, almost inert, runaway Duchess into Hyde Park to a couple of chairs set under a plane tree, and asked bluntly: “Have you left because of Mr. Thwarte?”

“No. That is, in a way.” Nan told her governess about Lady Churt's attack at Bainton House.

Miss Testvalley listened raptly, and more than one expression crossed her vivid face; but at the end she said only, quietly: “Ah, that unfortunate visit to the Correggio room.”

“I am afraid he has given up his candidacy, because of that lie, but... Val, that's the end of it. Even if he wanted anything to do with me, after all this, I—I don't want to hurt him any more.”

Looking at the changed face of the cheerful girl she had said goodbye to after the visit to Cheyne Walk, Miss Testvalley sighed. “Annabel, have you come here from Belfield? You need a place where you can be by yourself for a while—away from your sister and the other girls—and from Mr. Thwarte,” she said with a mild emphasis that made Nan drop her eyes, “and where, my dear, you will not embarrass your hosts. Some place respectable but obscure. I think... yes, I think you would be well advised to collect your things from Belfield and go to my family, in Denmark Hill. Only it would be best not to say where you are going. I can't stay till you go to Belfield and back—I must meet Kitty and Cora, to take them home—but when I fetch my bag at my family's I shall tell them to expect you, and they will be happy to put you up.” Miss Testvalley gave Nan the address. “I'll write, and I'll come back to town and talk with you at the first possible moment.—Now I must be off; I'll take a hansom, and Belfield is close enough for you to take one too.”

As they walked toward Hyde Park Corner, Miss Testvalley stopped in her tracks. “Have you any money?”

Nan looked in her purse. “Masses. And when I was at Champions, Ushant forwarded a letter from my father saying he's deposited money for me at his London bank. It's a huge amount.”

(It was far and away the largest of the sums the Colonel had sent, irregularly, to his daughters. He was on to “something big,” he had told Nan in his cheerily dashed-off note, and this was for her private, “secret,” purposes. If only she'd had it earlier, she realized, she needn't have asked Ushant for money for Conchita. She suddenly felt a craving for her father, for him to engulf her in his bear-hug and promise with a grandiose wave of his cheroot that he would “take care of things.”)

At the Hyde Park Corner stand, Nan insisted that the governess take the first cab and waved as it set off—then swayed where she stood. She had had no lunch, no breakfast, and next to nothing at dinner last night, a dinner aeons distant. She bought and devoured, standing, two large buns, with a cup of strong India-tea, before setting off in a cab herself.

 
The arrival of the Duchess of Tintagel in a hackney-cab caused a sensation at Belfield among the servants who witnessed it. When she asked where she would find Mrs. Robinson, she was reminded: “Your Grace, it's the time when the mistress goes up to see Master Aeneas.” She had forgotten Lizzy's schedule of motherhood. At the foot of the last flight of stairs to the crenellated turret that housed the day-nursery, she drew her skirts back to make room for a buxom nanny preceding two young nursemaids, one carrying Lizzy's boy, and the other Mabel's girl, down to perambulation in fresh air. In the nursery, its Gothic walls papered with bright pictures of kittens and jack-in-the-boxes, Lizzy, Mabel, Virginia, and Conchita were laughing about something, two of them on a sofa and two on small chairs at a small table.

Seeing Nan's face, all four fell silent.

“I have left the Duke.”

A stunned silence was broken by a shriek: “Nan St. George! Are you crazy? You—you—why, you just wait till I tell—” Virginia stopped, but Nan knew how the sentence would have ended: “—till I tell Mother.”

Conchita hugged Nan and murmured: “But, darling, you don't need to leave your husband to be happy.” Mabel cocked her head, puzzled but alert; Lizzy frowned and pursed her lips.

Virginia recovered from her regression to childhood. Her blue eyes blazing in a face crimson with a fiercer rage than yesterday's, she lashed out: “How can you do this to us? We all stood up for you against Lady Churt!—And was it true, what she said, after all?”

Nan shook her head wearily. “No, it wasn't, Jinny. But I
must
leave Ushant, and I had to tell all of you.”

She went down to her room, rang, and, when her maid appeared, asked: “Will you please pack some things I'll need for two or three days? And then I'm not going to need you, and I think you'll want to go to Longlands.”

Mabbit, stiff with injured pride, asked, “Haven't I satisfied Your Grace?”

“Oh, yes,” Nan said in eager reassurance, “you have, and I thank you; only from now on I shan't have a maid. And at Longlands they'll be glad—”

Having knocked, Lizzy came quietly in. Nan told Mabbit: “Mrs. Robinson will see that you get to Longlands safely—won't you, Lizzy?”

“Certainly, if necessary,” Lizzy said formally, “but, as you may know, Mabbit, my sister, Mrs. Whittaker, needs a personal maid; hers is ill. Could you stay on with her?”

“Very kind I'm sure, ma'am.” Mabbit looked down her nose. “But I have always been in the service of the Family.”

“Yes, of course; but if you could bear to help out for just a little while? Mrs. Whittaker would be more than grateful—”

“Well ...” Grudgingly, Mabbit nodded.

(“You've installed an agent of the Dowager Duchess in our house,” Mr. Robinson protested, when he heard of this arrangement. “She'll store up everything she sees and hears and report to Longlands.”—“We'll be able to decide what the Dowager gets,” retorted Lizzy. “Mabbit's description of Mrs. Whittaker as a model young widow in every way may arouse interest.”)

When Mabbit had left, Lizzy perched on a chaise-longue, her face softening, and said gently: “Nan, I didn't say, but I ... I want to help—”

“Oh, Lizzy!” Surprised—she had not expected Lizzy, who managed life so competently, to feel concern for a woman who'd made so poor a use of greater opportunities—Nan knelt beside the chaise-longue and took Lizzy's hands in hers. “You're generous, but—well, Jinny and Conchita are secure, but you and Mr. Robinson... I am already damaging someone's career, I don't want to compromise the two of you.”

Lizzy gripped Nan's hands while her fine blue eyes searched Nan's face. “Nan, tell me....” Lizzy hesitated. “Do you really, truly, want to leave the Duke? Have you thought carefully?”

“Yes.” Nan met Lizzy's question with equal gravity: “I can't go on. I'm too unhappy with him. Ushant needs a different sort of wife entirely. He wants to do right, but he thinks he has to be perfect, and so he has this mountain of perfection bearing him down.... Lizzy, he is
scared stiff
of his mother! Any of you would have been a better wife to him than I. He needs someone”—Nan had a flash of illumination—
“someone
like
Mabel!
—who would help him stand up for himself, and please the Dowager at the same time. And Mabel is so rich, maybe the richest woman in the world, it said in the papers! She'd be on equal terms in a way.—Well, almost,” Nan emended with a crooked smile, thinking of the Dowager's expectations.

Lizzy embraced Nan to hide a mounting blush.

 
 
“We might as well have taken her into our confidence,” she told her husband when they went up to bed. “She suggested Mabel, herself. I am ashamed.”

Mr. Robinson, who intended to become a statesman, not a mere politician, had trained himself to see all sides of a situation. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It would be unwise to write Guy Thwarte off. Sir Helmsley's not what you'd call a good life. That high colour—those wheezing fits—an apoplexy could carry him off any day, and then it'll be Sir Guy and Lady Thwarte; and with a duchess who wasn't hostile to Annabel... Let us suppose—” Assuming his parliamentary posture (unconsciously modelled on Napoleon's well-known attitude), Hector began to tick points off with a finger as he did when presenting a bill in the House: “Let us suppose that the Duke marries Mabel and has a son and then dies... is killed in a shooting accident, say—he's said to be a careless gun—leaving Mabel as guardian of his heir. Sir Guy and Lady Thwarte return to Honourslove. Mabel's influence makes them accepted by the county. In time, her son the new Duke marries a daughter of theirs....” Hector halted, belatedly aware of Lizzy's icy stare.

“I never knew,” she said tartly, “that you were so imaginative.”

 
 
Nan had told Lizzy that she would take a valise with things for a few days to London, by train. Lizzy could send the rest of her belongings to the left luggage at St. Pancras.

“But where will you go, in London, Nan? Will you be all right?” Lizzy asked as they waited at the door for the fly to come round from the stables. The others were at tea. Nan had told Lizzy that she would leave quietly; she'd write to Virginia later.

Unused to deception, Nan answered, “To Miss Testvalley's family in Denmark Hill” before she remembered that Miss Testvalley had counselled secrecy. “But, please, Lizzy, don't tell anyone.”

The fly carried the Duchess to the local station. From St. Pancras she took a cab to the Testavaglia house in Denmark Hill.

XXXVI.

When the Duke of Tintagel was informed that the Duchess had left Folyat House by a door into the mews, he said, “Very well,” and told his informant he might go. He dined alone that night without uttering a word.

The Dowager Duchess had carefully grafted pride of rank and reverence for custom on a nature already cautious, humourless, and self-distrustful, but neither nature nor scientific improvements had rendered her son capable of violence. He could endure; could resist, dig his heels in; he could insist, and (as he had just proved) could even threaten if convinced that his cause was just. But he knew he could not employ physical force. Annabel's religious duty to produce as many children as he saw fit was also a legal obligation. He could have the police find her, wherever she had gone (to one of her American friends, probably), and hale her back. But, the abhorrent public show aside, if when she was restored to him she remained recalcitrant, was he to break her door down, or order his servants to do so? Impossible. And once he had entered her room? The Duke tried to imagine.... “Perhaps, if I were angry enough,” he thought, “but... how many times?” He
must
have a son. He must have more than one son. But his mother, conscientious though she was, had produced six girls before
he
was born.... In trying to keep Annabel at Folyat House—actually shouting to his servants to bar the door—he had gone as far as he could.