A Countess Below Stairs (32 page)

The thing that lay on the floor must once have been human, but it did not seem human now. Its face was livid and distorted, it had burrowed into the straw like an animal, its filthy fingers tore and clawed at its ragged clothes.

‘Good heavens!’ Old Lady Templeton was deeply shocked. ‘It can’t be… surely that’s poor dear Melvyn, isn’t it?’

‘Quite so, my lady.’ Proom turned to Miss Hardwicke. ‘This… er, gentleman, is his lordship’s first cousin, Mr Melvyn Herring.’

‘Oh my God!’ Muriel’s poise was shattered at last. She was as pale as her wedding dress. ‘No, I don’t believe it. His first cousin!’

‘Yes, miss. You will see he has the Templeton eyes and - oh, careful, miss.’

For the thing had arched its back, blobs of spittle came from its mouth - and suddenly it sprang.

It was Dr Lightbody who saved Muriel, dragging her back before the demented creature could sink it’s teeth into her hand.

‘He’s been like this for a while, miss, and I’m afraid he’s getting worse.’

‘But there are others,’ cried Dr Lightbody, ‘Dearest Miss Hardwicke, there are others! This monster has been allowed to marry, to beget other tainted beings.’

Proom inclined his head, ‘Dr Lightbody is correct. If you would care to follow me.’

They ascended another dark and curving staircase to the next room. On the floor lay two enormous boys, to all outward appearance, boys of fourteen or fifteen. But they wore nappies, their fingers were in their mouths; one drooled, the other hiccupped…

‘Master Dennis and Master Donald Herring,’ announced Proom. ‘As you see, they have remained in an infantile stage. The doctor gives no hope of improvement.’

‘It isn’t possible!’

But even as she spoke, Muriel saw that it was possible. Like the mad thing that was their father, these boys had the grey, gold-flecked eyes, the short nose of the Templetons.

A last flight of steps and they reached the top of the tower.

Myrtle had made a splendid nest. There were feathers in her hair, a deep and committed broodiness lit up her features and, even as they watched, she emitted a loud and fulfilling squawk …

‘And this is Mrs Herring,’ said Proom. ‘She, of course,’ he added conscientiously, ‘is no blood relation’.

But Myrtle Herring had been too much for Rupert. And collapsing against a wall, he began to laugh.

It was this laugh which finished Muriel. Hysteria, another dangerous mental aberration, began in just this unbridled way — and stepping forward she slapped him hard across the cheek.

‘You swine! You unmitigated, vile, scheming swine! Trying togetmymoneyoutofme! Trying to trap me into a marriage so that I could bear you some more deformed and squirming . . , things. I’ll have you for this, Rupert! You’ll pay me back every penny I put into that estate -every brass farthing, and the damages I’ll sue you for!’

‘Oh, Miss Hardwicke, if you would only take my protection!’ cried the doctor. ‘We could go to America! I could make you the priestess of the New Eugenics. You would be a goddess to me all my life!’

‘And your wife?’ said Muriel coldly.

‘She is dead.’

Muriel registered this information with a flicker of her pansy eyes. Then she began to remove her engagement ring. The doctor’s pale, beautifully-manicured hand, closing over the solitaire diamond like a vice, prevented her.

‘I’m sure his lordship would want you to keep it as a memento.’

Rupert, still weak from laughter, nodded.

‘Yes, indeed! Do please keep it, Muriel.’

‘Very well.’ She replaced the ring, gathered up her train. ‘Come, Dr Lightbody.’

‘Ronald,’ he begged.

‘Come, Ronald,’ said Muriel Hardwicke, and with a ‘last look of disgust and loathing, swept down the stairs.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘I can’t write a letter like that, Mr Proom,’ said Mrs Bassenthwaite weakly. ‘Not to a countess, I can’t.’

Ten days had passed since the interrupted wedding and Mrs Bassenthwaite, released from hospital, was convalescing on the sofa in the housekeeper’s room.

‘I’d write it myself,’ said Proom, ‘but it would be better coming from you. More correct, you being in charge of the maids.’

Mr Proom had emerged as a local hero, sharing with Leo Rabinovitch and the Herrings, the acclaim of the entire district during the merrymaking which had followed the departure of Miss Hardwicke. Even the knowledge that Mersham would almost certainly have to be sold in order to meet the demands of Miss Hardwicke’s solicitors had not diminished the delight of the villagers, the tenants and the gentry in being rid of a woman so universally detested. To the general happiness, however, there was one exception - the earl himself who had put Mersham’s affairs into the hands of his agent and was about to depart for the Hindu Kush.

‘I’ll tell you what to say,’ persisted Proom - and went to fetch the inkwell and the paper.

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‘There’s a letter for you, Anna!’ said Pinny, looking at the postmark and trying not to let the relief show in her voice.

It was Petya, coming to London to greet Niannka and discuss the sale of the jewels, who had told them about the interrupted wedding. Pinny, watching Anna, had seen her turn almost in an instant from the kind of thing one expected to find under a pile of sacking after an earthquake or a famine into a radiant and enchanting girl. Anna discussing with the delighted Mr Stewart at Aspell’s, the jewellers, what he assured them would be ‘the sale of the century’; Anna helping her mother buy presents for the other emigres, treasuring the conviction that it was through Rupert’s good offices that Niannka had been found, was the Anna of the old St Petersburg days with a new glow, a new maturity.

But that had been more than a week ago. Since then, Pinny had watched, day by day, the glow lessen, the joy ebb as the postman still brought no letter, the doorbell still failed to herald the longed-for visitor.

Anna had opened her letter, begun to read - and as she did so the eagerness and expectation in her face was replaced by puzzlement.

‘It is from the housekeeper at Mersham,’ she said, her voice bleak. ‘She says that I have broken my contract. I was engaged till the end of July so I have five more days of work owing to them. She refuses to send the rest of my clothes or Selina Strickland until I make up the time.’

‘Well, really!’ Pinny was outraged. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’

‘No, they are correct. I thought as I had not been paid for the last week it would be all right but she says not. Rup … the earl… has already left for India and the house must be made ready to go up for sale so there is a great deal to do.’

‘You aren’t going, Anna?’

‘I must. Pinny. Petya will be at his school camp in Scotland so it will be all right. If there is work owing,’ said Anna, lifting her chin, ‘it must be paid.’

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‘You’re to treat her exactly as before,’ Proom had instructed his staff. ‘She may be a countess, but while she’s here she’s still a maid.’

‘I can’t!‘wailed Pearl. ‘I’ll curtsy to her, see if Idon’t.’

‘You will do nothing of the kind,’ said Mr Proom -but he was not as relaxed as he pretended, and secretly felt outraged by what he was about to do.

The outrage, the embarrassment, lasted exactly as long as it took Anna, in a blue cotton dress, carrying a straw basket, to cross the kitchen floor and be enveloped in Mrs Park’s motherly arms. But the instructions she received from Mr Proom when the greetings and gossip were over and she had changed into her uniform made her, for a moment, doubt her ears.

‘You wish me to wait at table? In the dining room!’

For the butler’s view on women actually waiting at table, with its middle-class overtones, were well known.

‘One must move with the times,’ said Mr Proom portentously. ‘It is only a small dinner: Lady Wester holme, Mr Frayne, Lord and Lady Byrne and a Mr and Mrs Clarke-Binningfold who are considering the purchase of Mersham. His lordship, as you know, has already left.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna, managing to keep her voice steady. ‘I had heard.’

For she knew, now, that Rupert had not cared, had not meant what he’d said in the garden, wanted only to be free of her and all entanglements.

The meal is a simple one,’ Proom continued. ‘Grapefruit, Consomme Beauharnais, Sole Marie Louise, carbonnade of beef, macaroon souffte and the dessert. James’ll be at the sideboard, Sid’H be handing the main dishes. All you have to do is follow him with the vegetables and the sauces and help clear. Can you manage that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Anna, rallying. ‘Because it is all in the Domestic Compendium. How I must approach from th left to serve but from the right to remove the plates, and how I must clear the crumbs with a napkin because a crumb brush is declasse and how I must not breathe ‘eavily and not address the guests.’ ‘You must certainly not do that,’ said Proom.

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The dinner party, whose dénouement was subsequently reported in detail by Sid and James to a spellbound audience below stairs, began quietly with the consumption of grapefruit and some rather desultory conversation. The dowager was discussing the launching of the new airship with Lord Byrne, Mrs Clarke-Binningfold was giving Uncle Sebastien her views on The Fecklessness of the Poor - when the door opened to admit Anna, her head bent in profound concentration over a famille rose tureen of Mrs Park’s incomparable chicken soup.

Gravely, aware of the honour that Proom had done her, she began to move towards the sideboard.

‘You!’

Anna jumped, clung desperately to her tureen — and looked up to find that the Earl of Westerholme, supposedly absent in the Hindu Kush, was glaring at her from the head of the table like an assassin out of Boris Godunov.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ continued the earl, his customary good manners quite banished by the shock of seeing this girl whose treachery had not prevented her from haunting his dreams, sleeping and waking, ever since she had gone.

Anna, resolutely maintaining silence, had reached the sanctuary of the sideboard and put down her tureen. Rupert was mad, he no longer loved her, but he was here and there was nothing she could do to still the pounding of her heart.

‘Rupert, you really must not speak to the maids lik that,’ said the dowager, suddenly looking extremely happy and aware that she had been less than just to dear, departed Hatty Dalrymple.

‘Who is this person?’ said Mrs Clarke-Binningfold, greatly displeased.

‘An excellent question,’ said Rupert. He turned to Anna who was now clearing the finger bowls, totally concentrated on her task. ‘You don’t seem to be wearing a wedding ring, so may we assume that we are not yet addressing the Princess Chirkovsky?’

James had served the soup, Sid had begun to hand it. Anna, still resolutely maintaining silence, picked up the silver filigree basket of bread rolls and followed him.

‘I asked you a question, Anna.’

She had reached Lady Byrne on Rupert’s left. ‘I am not permitted to address the guests,’ she said under her breath.

Rupert’s hand came up and fastened round her wrist. ‘This guest, however, you will address. Please answer my question. When are you getting married? Where is your fiance?’

But Anna had now had enough. Disengaging her wrist, holding with both hands on to her basket, she drew breath.

‘Very well. You have, of course, ruined this dinner party in which I wished to wait perfectly at table so as to help with the giving of more responsibility to women. So I will tell you, first that I think you are mad, and second, that I am not going to marry Sergei because that is not how I love him and in any case I do not wish to have children who will have breast blisters - only, I must say chest blisters, I think, because this is a country of hypocrisy and coldness where breasts are not respectable. And also Sergei has proposed to the Baroness Rakov, although I have told him it is not necessary because we are now rich and will of course share everything, but h says she is tranquille and will keep away from him the other women. And last, if I had not been assured,’ she said, glaring at Sid and James, ‘that you were already in the Kush where you absolutely belong because it is full of stones and ice, I would never have come back,’ she finished - and burst into tears.

‘Don’t, Anna! Ah, don’t, my darling,’ saidRupert. He pushed back his chair, removed, with ineffable tenderness, her basket of rolls and, quite impervious to the assembled company, gathered her into his arms. ‘Only, you see, I saw you in the garden with the prince. You were hanging from his arms like…’ He broke off, even now racked by the memory.

‘A dishcloth?’ suggested Anna.

‘What?’

Anna, her career abandoned, was now ready to converse. ‘In La Fille Mal Gardée which is a most beautiful ballet, she hangs exactly in this way from the shoulder of the hero, very soft and… limp, you know, like a cloth and at the same time she does little battements with her feet. It is in act three and very moving; you will like it very much.’

‘Shall I, my love?’ said Rupert, dabbing gently at her eyes and nose.

The door opened. Proom stood on the threshold.

‘Ah, Proom,’ said the earl. ‘Just the man! We want some champagne. The Veuve Cliquot ‘83 that you’ve been guarding with your life.’

‘I have it here, my lord,’ said Proom, advancing. ‘Thinking you might be requiring it, I took the liberty of putting it on ice earlier in the day. I think you will find it to your satisfaction.’

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The wedding of Anna and Rupert the following June was not a quiet wedding. For one thing, absolutely everybody cried. Miss Frensham, preparing to thump her way lustily through ‘Lohengrin’ cried, as did Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer who had framed the altar steps in an entrancing riot of delphiniums, larkspur and phlox. The Ballets Russes cried, the dowager soaked three handkerchiefs before the bride even set foot in the church, Kira, who had come from Paris with her banker fiance, wept elegantly into her muff. Susie Byrne did not actually cry, but she seemed to find it necessary to polish her spectacles a great many times and Hannah Rabihovitch, sitting beside her daughter, was quite simply awash.