The Buccaneers (51 page)

“I'd like Annabel to go to Boulogne,” said Guy, who had sat back in relief. “To the Hotel de Boulogne et de l'Univers. It's a quiet family place. I should be able to join her soon afterwards, and from there we'd go to Brest or Bayonne, and then by sea to the Piraeus.”

Miss Testvalley nodded. “I can go to Boulogne with Annabel.”

“I'm capable of going by myself,” Nan protested; but Guy and the governess simultaneously said “No!” and the latter went on: “A young lady of fashion travelling alone would attract curiosity. It's not inconceivable that detectives are watching the ports.”

“Dear Val,” the new Annabel exclaimed, “all the more reason for you not to be with me!—And I see a way to manage,” she pursued. “Serafina's niece wants to go back to Italy. I'm sure she'd go with me and stay with me in Boulogne. I can pay her more than she'd get in her restaurant, and her fare on to Florence besides. And
she
wouldn't be accused of being a—an accomplice, or whatever.”

“She must travel in your compartment,” the governess, yielding, insisted, “and have a room next to yours in the hotel, as if you were mother and daughter.”

Slowly, Nan shook her head. An Italian country-woman. A stranger ... A sense of guilt too deep for conscious recognition kept her from saying it aloud to Miss Testvalley, but she thought:
“You
are my mother.”

XLI.

Conchita was already in St. Paul's, waiting. She kissed Nan and cried: “Oh, are you really going to America? Jinny says you are. But how ghastly!”

“I thought I was. And don't tell people otherwise; it's important!”

“I won't, truly.” Conchita was relieved. “But where are you going, then?”

“To Greece ... with Guy Thwarte.”

Conchita's amethyst eyes shone. “Nan, how lovely ... And Ushant?”

“When I meant to go to America, I supposed he would divorce me for desertion, but now—”

“But now it will be adultery,” Conchita cried happily, “and that's a thousand times faster; you and Guy Thwarte can be married sooner. So can the Duke. I wonder whom he'll pick? Or be picked by ... ! Darling, I
am
glad. At first I couldn't see why you needed to
leave
the Duke, but it will be heavenly for you two to be together all the time, not just snatching half-hours.”

“Jinny's mad at me.”

“Well, she would be,” Conchita said matter-of-factly; “besides, remember H.R.H. doesn't like his friends, or their families, to be in the public eye.”

“H.R.—Oh, I see,” Nan said slowly. “So. Conchita, will you do something for me? I asked Jinny, but I don't think she will. I am worried about Miss Testvalley. Will you help her find a new post?”

“But I'll do it for
her!
You know I've always liked her a lot, and I can see that she can't produce credentials from your mother-in-law—or mine! I'll try—I'll find people who want a governess and persuade them! Give me her address. I'll tell them she had nothing to do with your bolting.—Oh, Nan,” Conchita exclaimed as Nan wrote down the details. “Could we ever have dreamed—? Think of the Grand Union Hotel—! For you to be a duchess, and then not want to be! It's like Cinderella running away from Prince Charming and going off with the raggle-taggle-gypsies-O! Or, no, it's like her finding that he was an impostor, and going off with the
true
Prince Charming....” Conchita's voice changed. “But, Nan, will you write to me?”

Tears were running down Conchita's dusky cheeks.

“Ah, don't, Conchie; of course I'll write, and you'll write to me, and we'll meet again, I simply know it! Conchie, don't,” Nan begged, “or you'll make me!”

 
 
Upstairs in her room that evening, Miss Testvalley carefully placed her candle on the table beside the jug of anemones. She found some paper, and took up her pen.

“My dear Sir Helmsley ...”

She clenched her fists so tight that her nails cut into her palms. Where next? A textile magnate's family in Yorkshire? A broker's in Purley? Or New York again? Saratoga? With no respectable references ... She dismissed the idea of help, through Annabel, from any of “the girls.”

He might never suspect. But more probably her role
would
come out. Things usually did. In any case, could she live a lie?
“Noblesse oblige,”
she muttered without joy, almost without pride, and began a letter which she ended—

 
“He will not even answer,” Laura muttered as she dribbled molten wax on to her envelope and impressed it with her Testavaglia signet ring: Tar
ublia chi bien eima.

 
 
“It's all hypothetical. It's fanciful. It's playing a game.”

Mr. Robinson faced his wife, unobstructed either by his paper (there was no Sunday
Times)
or by the monumental apparatus of the Belfield breakfast-room. A notable success in Lizzy's undermining of his stubborn British orthodoxy had been her persuading him that cozy breakfasts in her little boudoir, on a round table by the window spread with crisp white linen, before he had doffed his dressing-gown, were not wickedly Continental and had special charm, even if he felt obliged later to sally below for blood pudding and kippers.

But this morning, despite the cheerful sunlight on his one side and cheerful firelight on his other, and an enjoyment of comfort that was also a virtuous concession to a wife's wish, Hector Robinson, usually sanguine, experienced an unwonted disenchantment. There were intrigues enough in Whitehall. He wished they could be banished from the home.

Thwarte's readiness to leave his ancestral estate (it was now said that he was going to South Africa) was imbecilic. As for Annabel—! Yet she was intelligent, as well as delightfully lovely. “Are you quite sure,” he had asked Lizzy, “that Annabel doesn't want to change her mind?” “Can you possibly think—?” Lizzy had begun, but had abandoned rhetoric to answer quietly: “Believe me, if Nan had liked duchessdom, none of this would be taking place. We'd none of us take something from her that she wasn't ready to lose.”

But it was a long road from Annabel's rumoured elopement to Tintagel's marrying a second wife of Lizzy's choice. Out of delicacy, Hector had not discussed the programme with Mabel herself, and he had shied away from asking Lizzy directly: Did her sister even endorse the plan? Did she really expect it to work? On this fine Sunday morning, he allowed himself to grumble.

“It's all hypothetical,” he repeated testily. “Not only is there no assurance that the Duke will be interested; the probabilities are almost infinitely against it. One can't simply decide that two people are going to marry each other—”

He was about to expatiate when Mabel, by previous invitation, came into the room. Relieved of the black she punctiliously wore in public, wrapped in a rose-coloured peignoir—fresh, clear-eyed, and glowing with health and good humour—she helped herself to coffee and smiled at Hector.

“Of course it's all uncertain—absolutely!—and I'm so glad you realize it. Goodness, remember, I've never even met the Duke.” Mabel buttered a bit of toast and spread marmalade. “That is, I know he came to Runnymede once, but I can't remember what he looked like, let alone know what he really is, as a person.” She nibbled at the toast. “How can I know that he would suit me?”

As her brother-in-law swallowed his tea the wrong way and choked, Mabel continued earnestly: “You know, Hector, in the last few months, since Mr. Whittaker died, I've been forced to be, well, I hope not cynical, but—I have had to think very carefully about the motives of men who—and there already are some!—who want to marry me. Money becomes a frightful burden. I do not want to be married for my money. And I wouldn't want the Duke of Tintagel to have false hopes.”

After Mabel, two pieces of toast and marmalade later, had drifted from the room, Lizzy observed quietly: “You see the note to strike.”

“Yes,” Mr. Robinson muttered, “I see. But,” he posited, unconsciously throwing out his chest—if Lizzy had her “Hail Columbia” moments, he had his “Rule Britannia” strain—“Tintagel is a duke! It is all very improbable. There are other rich women, and other, ah, entrepreneurs, eager to make arrangements. We have not one fact—no firm advantage—nothing solid.”

“There's one advantage solid as marble. What does the Naxos throne mean to you?”

“Nothing. Oh, ah—” Mr. Robinson had a highly trained memory. “Didn't one of the obituary notices your mother sent us mention that Whittaker had a very important classical sculpture in his collection?”

“Part of one. By an act of providence.”

“How so?”

“Mab says the other part of the sculpture is at Longlands. And Nan told me that the Duke loathes having a fragment. He considers it demeaning, like having one shoe.... So, Mabel will ask if she might be allowed to view the throne. Whereupon she—with me, or you and me, to chaperone—is invited to Longlands to see it. Or she might stay alone, decorously, at the Dower-House. She has a drawing of her part of the throne. The Duke will ask if he may call on her to look at it. By that time, of course, she'll have taken a house in Belgravia.—Did I tell you that she's looking at one in Eaton Place?”

“And she'll offer to sell?” But Hector blushed at his crudity even before Lizzy's impatient “Certainly not! She will offer to restore her part to its proper place at Longlands as a gesture in keeping with her late husband's international spirit. And so on, and so on ... I admit that it isn't quite a Q.E.D., but the odds are high.—And as for selling,” Lizzy added sedately, “from what Mab says, it's unlikely that the Duke could afford it.”

Mr. Robinson sat motionless, fixedly gazing at the tea-cup —the dagger, as it were—in the air before him, held by his forgetful hand. His mind rapidly reviewed the plunder, pillage, sack, and rapine of his native land throughout the course of history. First, the Romans had come. Then the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons. Then the Danes terrorized England for three centuries. Norman pirates took the country over in 1066. Five centuries later Turks raided the Thames and took prisoners to sell in the Libyan slave-market.... But never had there been any phenomenon to match this, this—he recalled an article—this “invasion of England by American women and their chiefs of commissariat, the silent American men....” “What a gang of buccaneers you are!” he breathed to his wife.

“Buccaneers,” Lizzy reminded him gently, “were not notorious for paying fortunes for what they took.”

 
The post which brought Sir Helmsley Thwarte Laura's letter, evoking the emotions she had foreseen, also contained a request from D. G. Rossetti for a loan of thirty guineas which provided more fuel for the baronet's wrath and grief.—“Damnation! Hell! Damnation!” He'd suspected—
he'd known for certain!
—that Guy had begun to say that that ... that
woman
—that false woman—was sheltering that girl....
“Damnation!”
This catastrophe was the work of Italian—Italian—Sir Helmsley shook a crutch at his little Rossetti and barely refrained from knocking it into the fire with the two letters—“Damnation!—Italian banditti, and American—American
pirates!”

 
“My dear love.” Guy held Nan tight, in the cramped entrance hall of the house in Denmark Hill from which she, Miss Testvalley, and Serafina's niece were about to set forth in the hansom waiting outside the door. “Darling, be brave. We'll meet at the Hotel de Boulogne et de l'Univers.”

Nan, her arms about his neck, smiled up at him. “With such a name, how can we fail to reach the Isles of Greece?”

“And then the Vale of Kashmir.”

“I ...” Nan broke off.

“What—?”

 
Nan choked. If she told him again how happy she was she'd begin to cry. “Will you do something for me?” she asked instead, and, when Guy had murmured “Anything,” said to him: “Please bring a side-saddle for my donkey. I doubt if they sell them in Athens.”

 
 
In the grimy chill of Charing Cross Station, passengers for Paris and Milano via Folkestone-Boulogne, and those seeing them off, milled about the boat-train. English gentlemen in travelling-caps and valets carrying tartan travelling-rugs, French bourgeois couples muffled to the ears in prevision of
courants d'air
in their carriage, vociferous Italian
contadini
laden with victuals for a two-days' journey, London porters shouting, “Mind your step, please,” jostled in a medley of embraces and waving hands and high-pitched bon voyage's,
arrivederci's,
and goodbyes. Serafina's niece Anna, a cloak encompassing her sturdy bustled form, dwarfed Miss Testvalley in a new dolman, Nan's parting gift, and Nan in a slim ulster and small neat hat and veil. When a porter had found her compartment, Nan boarded and dropped her handbag; then, while Anna disposed their travelling-oddments, jumped down onto the platform and with bursting heart threw her arms around Miss Testvalley and hugged her tighter and tighter. “Oh, Val ... How can I ever ... ?” Weeping, as the guard blew his whistle for the third time, she let go of the governess, lunged at the steps of the carriage, and climbed aboard. A second later, she leaned from the open window of the compartment and waved, in tears and smiles, as with a deep laborious chug, chug the train began to move.