Read A Countess Below Stairs Online

Authors: Eva Ibbotson

A Countess Below Stairs (7 page)

BOOK: A Countess Below Stairs
7.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘We’ll be there,’ said Mrs Park, giving her another spoonful of jam. ‘There isn’t one of us as you could keep away.’

-
-
-
-*

While Ollie was holding court in the kitchen, Tom Byrne was offering his stepmother’s help in introducing Muriel to the neighbourhood.

‘She wants to give a ball at Heslop in Muriel’s honour. She thought a few days before the wedding, so that houseguests could stay for both. Would Muriel care for it, do you think?’

‘I’m sure she would! I can’t imagine a greater compliment. ‘ Rupert was nattered and touched, for Minna, like many unassuming and self-effacing women, was a marvellous hostess.

‘She’d have come over today to discuss it with your mother but she’s gone up to Craigston to see Hugh.’

‘How is Hugh these days? Happier?’

Tom’s young brother had paid for his happy home life with excrutiating attacks of homesickness when he first went away to school. Rupert’s last memory of him was of a small, carrot-headed boy in a brand new uniform being wretchedly sick on a clump of wasteground behind Mersham station.

‘Oh, he’s fine now, he’s really settled at last. He’s made a new friend this term who seems to be a paragon of all the virtues. He’s bringing him down to stay after the end of term. If the wedding’s on the twenty-eighth he should be here in time for it - and for the ball.’

‘In that case, would he like to be an usher, do you think?’

‘He’d love it, I’m sure. Thirteen’s just the age for that to be a real honour. Now tell me exactly what you want me to do. Lavinia Nettleford’s chief bridesmaid, I gather…’

The talk became practical. It was only as he rose to go that Tom, his cheerful, freckled face very serious, suddenly said, ‘I haven’t told you how very happy I am for you. Really. For all of us at Heslop there’s nothing and nobody too good for you.’

Rupert flushed. ‘Thanks, Tom. To tell you the truth, I can’t quite believe in my own luck. And knowing that it’s not just for me. That because of Muriel all the people here will be looked after.’

‘You’d have had to sell otherwise?’

‘I think so. I promised George I’d hang on, but quite honestly I saw no hope.’

‘And you’d have minded?’

‘Not for myself,’ said Rupert who had recently and

regretfully refused an invitation from his erstwhile tutor to join him in an expedition to the cave monastery near Akhaltsikhe on the Black Sea. ‘Not even for mother; she’s always said she’d be happy in a cottage. Only … when I was thinking I’d have to sell I kept remembering such silly things. Once I came back on leave and there was Proom in the pet’s cemetery - you know, that place behind the orangery where all our dogs are buried. He’d dug a new grave and he was burying a pair of unspeakable khaki socks that Mother had knitted for the troops. They were past unravelling, he said, and our soldiers had enough to contend with!’

Tom laughed. ‘Yes, Proom’s a paragon all right.’

‘And when I was still at Cambridge there was this maid - a spindly, pert little thing. Louise. She’s head housemaid now but she was very young then. I once found her coming out of Uncle Sebastien’s room with her cap all askew and it was obvious he’d been pestering her. I was really angry and I began questioning her. And she snubbed me - oh, so politely, so chivalrously. And she was right, of course, he means no harm. He just went on loving women when he should have stopped and somehow she understood this. It’s people like that I didn’t want to “sell”.’

‘Yes, I can see that. You’ll be a good master for Mersham, Rupert. Better than George though you’ll hate me for saying so.’

‘Don’t! If you knew the guilt I feel. Just to be alive …’ He broke off, seeing Tom’s face, remembering Geoffrey, Tom’s shadow, blown up at Paschendale. ‘God, what an idiot I am! Forgive me.’

Tom shook his head. ‘We’re both in the same boat, I guess. Guilt for the rest of our lives.’

‘If it teaches us humility…’

Tom smiled. ‘You don’t need teaching it, Rupert. It was always your gift. Come, let’s find Ollie.’

They found the Honourable Olive already sitting in the Crossley, in a state of evident bliss, holding a cardboard box on her knees.

‘It’s a baby hedgehog. Anna found it and she’s given it to me. She’s got it to drink milk from a saucer so it’s old enough to go out into the world, she says. She’s very nice, isn’t she? I think she’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ said Rupert, and there was something in his voice which made Ollie look at him, her brows furrowed.

‘Yes, she is. And I like the way she talks and she told me a poem in Russian because I asked her. It’s about a crocodile walking down the Nevsky something. She’s going to teach it to me next time.’

‘Who is this girl?’ asked Tom, looking curiously at Rupert.

‘A new maid.’ Rupert was still brusque.

‘I should like to meet her.’

‘You will,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s almost impossible not to meet Anna somewhere in this house.’

CHAPTER THREE

On the following day Rupert returned to London to fetch his bride and Anna and Peggy were sent upstairs to make ready Queen Caroline’s bedroom, which had been assigned to Miss Hardwicke until the wedding.

It was in the midst of these preparations that Anna received a letter from her beloved Pinny:

‘My dear Anna, I am writing to give you some news which I know will delight you. Your cousin, Prince Sergei Chirkovsky, is safe! When the White Army was routed at Tsarytsin he managed to escape and reach Odessa and eventually made his way to London. He arrived last week, very exhausted, of course, but basically in good health. As you know, his parents are still with Miss King and their joy as he walked in may be imagined. Sergei wouldn’t stay more than a few days since it is true that Miss King’s flat is rather overcrowded and he has gone off to look for some kind of employment - out of London, if possible, since the grand duchess does not seem to have abandoned her scheme for marrying him off to that dumpy lady-in-waiting of hers. He called to see us and was particularly anxious for news of you. I told him where you were but not what you were doing. You know how protective he has always felt about you and I had visions of him posting off to Wiltshire and challenging your employer to a duel!

Petya’s letter I enclose. As you see he is settling down very well and has made a friend who has invited him to stay after the end of term, so you need not be afraid about missing his return. As for your mother, she is reasonably well but a little vexed with me for refusing to buy six vats of buttermilk from the United Dairies. The Baroness d Wodzka has convinced her that she could market it as pregnant mare’s milk from Outer Mongolia at a considerable profit. I was obliged to tell her that in my view the koumiss cure is not sufficiently well known in West Paddington to ensure the success of the scheme.

I hope that you are not finding your new duties too onerous and look forward very much to your return. Yours affectionately,

Winifred Pinfold

 

‘What’s the matter with Anna now?’ enquired James, coming into the servants’ hall at lunchtime.

‘She’s happy,’ said Louise gloomily.

‘It’s because her cousin’s safe,’ said Mrs Park. ‘She thought the Bolshies had got him but they haven’t.’

‘Well, you can send someone else up there with her after dinner,’ said Peggy. ‘She’s like a bloomin’ tornado up there, getting ready Miss Hardwicke’s room. She’s had all the feather beds out in the courtyard an’ poundin’ the daylights out of them and now she’s at the mirrors with some brew she’s mixed from that dratted Selina Strickland and you can’t get her to stop for a minute.’

The Honourable Mr Sebastien Frayne, padding past the door of Queen Caroline’s bedchamber, was arrested by a young and ecstatic voice trilling Mozart’s Hallelujah.

‘You seem in very good spirits this morning,’ he said.

Anna turned, jumped off the chair and curtsied all in a single movement.

‘I am sorry, I shouldn’t sing, I think, though I cannot remember if Selina Strickland has said one may or not. But I am so happy!’ said Anna, added ‘sir,’ - and spoilt the effect completely by throwing her arms round the old gentleman’s neck and kissing him on the cheek.

‘Well, well,’ said Uncle Sebastien, blushing and entranced at the first unsolicited kiss he’d had in twenty years. ‘And what has happened to make you so happy?’

‘My cousin, Sergei, is safe! He was fighting with Deni-kin in the Crimea and we had no news for so long that we thought he had been killed. He was exactly like a brother to me and to Petya and now, because I am so happy, I am going to make Miss Hardwicke’s room so beautiful that she will be amazed!’

Anna was as good as her word. Queen Caroline’s room was one of Mersham’s loveliest with its hand-blocked wall paper of azure fleur-de-lis, its Venetian fourposter, white-curtained and white-valanced like a cloud bed on Olympus, and its exquisite view of the lake. Like all the rooms in the main block, however, it had been shut up during the war and now showed signs of neglect.

Anna blackleaded the grate and annointed the bedsprings with sulphate of ammonia, she took down curtains and scrubbed drawers and, to add the final touch, she purloined from the other rooms, bringing in a finely wrought candlestick here, a Dresden shepherdess there, working for this unknown girl with skill and love. Nor was her task made easier by the fact that Baskerville, the earl being absent, was again persistently padding after her, only pausing with his customary howl of despair every time she disappeared down the service stairs and through the green baize doors.

‘Why are you so stupidT she berated him. ‘Why don’t you come through into the kitchen when I have finished so that I can scratch you properly, but now I must work.’

‘You’ll never get that dog to go through that door,’ said Proom, encountering her at bay with a bucket of suds. ‘He must have swallowed Debrett’s Peerage when he was a pup.’ Then, addressing her in a way in which so kingly a person seldom addressed a housemaid, he said: ‘Mrs Proom was wondering whether you’d have a moment to look in after supper tonight. Only if you’re not busy, of course.’

Anna, whom he had at last trained not to sink to the ground every time he encountered her, smiled and said: ‘Yes, I shall like to come very much. Only …’ She broke off and looked shyly at the august figure of the butler. ‘I don’t know if it is permitted, but this afternoon I must polish the toilet set in Miss Hardwicke’s room and also the candlesticks and the inkwell… many things. And I have noticed that Mrs Proom has strong hands still and she told me she was once in service. So do you think I might perhaps take them over with the polish and a lot of newspaper so that there is no mess and we could do them together? She would truly help me, I think, and it would not take longer.’

Anna stopped, misinterpreting Proom’s silence as one of disapproval. She had been foolish, the silver was valuable…

Proom was fighting down a number of emotions. Gratitude to this young girl for detecting, behind his mother’s eccentricity and tantrums, her desperate desire still to be of use. Shame that he himself had so seldom made this possible.

Clearing his throat, which seemed to have become a trifle choked, Proom said magisterially, ‘Very well. You have my permission. Just see that nothing is mislaid.’

-
-
-
-*

Mrs Bassenthwaite, inspecting Queen Caroline’s bedroom when Anna had finished, was moved to praise.

‘You’ve done very well, my dear.’

‘But who will do the flowers?’ asked Anna, knowing that everything depended on this.

Mrs Bassenthwaite hesitated. She had always done them herself, but she was very tired these days and there was a niggling pain in her side which never quite seemed to go away.

‘You will,’ she said. ‘Go to Mr Cameron. Tell him I sent you.’

So Anna, her face screwed into what the other servants had learnt to call her ‘monkey look’, pondered massed delphiniums in delft-blue and white or low bowls of peonies in alabaster jars; but in the end as anyone who thinks of a bride in the month of July must do, decided on roses. Cutting short her lunch hour, she went to find the deaf and misanthropic old Scotsman who had ruled Mersham’s gardens for three decades.

Walking with delight between beds of celery, nascent cauliflowers, strawberries nestling like little crimson eggs on their beds of straw, she came to a green door in a high wall, pushed it open - and stood, spellbound.

The rest of the garden at Mersham, though incorrigibly beautiful, suffered from the neglect and under-staffing caused by the war. But the rose garden was a miracle of husbandry and care. There were roses as dark as spilt blood and roses with the delicate pink of a baby’s fingernails. There were beige and blowsy roses and mysterious golden roses, tightly furled. Roses climbed the stone walls, rambled across arbours or stood in dark green tubs as demure as Elizabethan miniatures. And as Anna started to sniff her way ecstatically from bloom to bloom, Mr Cameron, who had seen her enter with foreboding, began to hunt for his ear-trumpet, finally tracking it down in the bottom of a watering can, and to jam it into his whiskery ear, a rare sign that he was willing to communicate.

‘I thought they should be very pale and gentle like flowers in a dream, you know?’ said Anna when she had explained her errand. ‘Not strong roses, not red — though of course his lordship will wish to give her red roses for passion and so on,’ said Anna, waving a dismissive hand. ‘But for now I want everything very soft and welcoming and a little loose, you know? Those roses that seem to be shaking themselves out a little?’

Mr Cameron nodded. ‘You want the old-fashioned ones… The Bourbons and the Damasks. There’s Belle de Crecy; she’d do you fine. And Madame Hardy over there. Or Konigan van Denmark - there’s no one to touch her for scent.’

They wandered about in total amity, selecting, discussing, rapturously smelling, while Anna’s little Tartar nose turned yellow with pollen and her Byzantine eyes glowed with contentment.

Arriving at a single bush, growing quite by itself in a centre bed of fresh-mulched earth, Anna stopped dead.

BOOK: A Countess Below Stairs
7.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

I don't Wear Sunscreen by Kavipriya Moorthy
Dark Ice by Connie Wood
A Dinner Of Herbs by Yelena Kopylova
In Too Deep by Grant, D C
Almost Home by Damien Echols
A Pattern of Blood by Rosemary Rowe
Dinner for Two by Mike Gayle