A Season of Secrets (12 page)

She had been prepared to argue further, but he had then put a conciliatory arm around her shoulders, saying, ‘Mama always intended that on your presentation you would wear the Prince of
Wales’s feathers that she wore when she was presented and, bearing her wishes in mind, I have kept them very carefully stored. With Mama’s feathers in your hair and her pearls around
your throat, I think, Thea darling, you will feel Mama is very close to you when you make your curtseys in front of Their Majesties.’

After that, of course, there could be no further argument and, for her father’s sake, she had resolved to put her left-wing principles on a back burner for the duration of the Season. It
hadn’t been too hard to do. She’d enjoyed shopping for an extravagant new wardrobe of Parisian-designed clothes and anticipating a coming-out ball at which royalty would be present. It
was enjoyment that had ended the moment she’d realized Hal was also going to be in attendance – though only as an onlooker.

How was she ever going to convince him that the class difference between them didn’t matter, after he had seen her in a gown that cost five times the annual salary of a working man,
waltzing around the ballroom of her London family home in the arms of royalty or of men he disparagingly referred to as ‘chinless wonders’?

A nanny, wheeling a perambulator and wearing a spruce brown-and-cream Norland uniform, walked up to the bench and, with a polite bob of her head to Thea, sat down. The baby, frustrated by the
perambulator’s sudden lack of movement, clenched its fists, went red in the face and began to bawl.

Wishing that she, too, could give vent to her feelings, Thea rose to her feet, not knowing which was worse: her distress that Hal was going to see her in a role she knew he would find
contemptible, or the agonizing prospect of dancing until the early hours with partners she was indifferent to, when the person she longed to dance with was only there to write a report for a
newspaper.

As she walked back through the park she was certain of one thing. Far from enjoying her coming-out ball, she was going to hate every single agonizing minute of it.

Hal stood outside a small cafe fronting the obelisk in Richmond’s cobbled market place. His train for Darlington, from where he would catch a London-bound train, left in
just over an hour’s time and, as it was Carrie’s day off, she had suggested they have a cup of tea together and that she walk to the station with him and wave him goodbye.

‘I’m only going to London,’ he had protested, shooting her a down-slanting smile, ‘and I’ll be back by tomorrow night.’

‘So soon?’ she had said ingenuously. ‘Won’t you be staying for a few days? I know Thea, Olivia and Roz won’t be able to spend much time with you at the ball –
there’ll be too many grand people they’ll have to be polite to – but they’ll want to spend time with you once it’s over.’

‘Thea, Olivia and Roz won’t be spending
any
time with me at the ball,’ he’d said bluntly, exasperated by her naivety. ‘And they won’t be spending time
with me when it’s over, either. London isn’t Outhwaite, Carrie. The Fenton girls may ignore the class difference that divides us when we’re all at the vole place by the river, or
up on the moors, but when it comes to London, there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of them being able to do so.’

He had seen her happiness at the thought of him spending time in London with their friends extinguished, but he hadn’t hated himself for having killed it. She had to learn that the
friendship between the five of them couldn’t endure for much longer in the same uncomplicated way it had endured until now. Not, he thought wryly as Carrie turned into the market place and
began hurrying towards him, that his relationship with Thea had ever been truly uncomplicated. As far back as he could remember there had always been a clash of wills between them. For one thing
she was far too bossy, and he’d never allowed himself to be bossed by anyone – and certainly not by a girl. Now, with the sexual tension sizzling between them, it was even more
complicated, but Carrie didn’t know that yet and, as far as he knew, nor did anyone else – which just went to show how blind people could be.

Carrie ran up to him breathlessly. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said sunnily, tucking her hand through his arm and giving it a hug. ‘Have we still time for a cup of
tea, or do you want to head straight for the station?’

‘We’ve time for tea.’

At the nape of her neck and beneath a shallow-brimmed straw hat her long plait of hair was coiled into a chignon. A narrow band of mauve ribbon decorated her hat and there was a bunch of
artificial violets pinned to the lapel of her summer coat. She looked neat and pretty and wonderfully wholesome. He wondered how long it would be before some young man asked her to walk out with
him – and how he would feel about it when they did.

‘What are the footmen like at Monkswood?’ he asked when he had ordered a pot of tea for two from a waitress who couldn’t keep her eyes off him.

‘Some of them are very nice, and some of them think a little bit too much of themselves. As a chambermaid, I don’t see as much of them as I did when I was a tweeny. Why do you
ask?’

‘Have any of them asked you if you’d walk out with them?’

‘Of course they haven’t!’ She flushed rosily. ‘What on earth put that idea into your head?’

The waitress served them their pot of tea, giving Hal a long, come-hither look as she did so. It fell on stony ground.

‘Just that when someone likely asks to court you, I’d like to check him out before you let him,’ he said as the waitress flounced away, disappointed that Hal should be more
interested in a girl who looked like a Sunday-school teacher than he was in her. ‘It’s what your father would do if he was still alive, and it’s what a brother would do, if you
had one.’

Common sense told Carrie that such concern for her was a great compliment, but she didn’t feel complimented. Instead, and for some reason she couldn’t quite define, she felt
exceedingly cross.

‘That sort of thing doesn’t happen in service,’ she said, trying to keep the crossness out of her voice as she began pouring the tea. ‘Romance between members of staff is
a no-no everywhere. If anyone was to get a whisper of it, both people involved would immediately lose their positions.’

‘Would they? Doesn’t that make you angry, Carrie?’

‘No. Why should it? It’s a fact of life, and being angry about it isn’t going to change anything. Are you still liking your lodgings in Richmond? Have you been back to
Outhwaite since we last met up? Granny writes me a weekly letter, but her gossip is never about Jim and Charlie and Miss Calvert. Do you have any news of them?’

Twenty minutes later, as they walked past the obelisk and into the steeply cobbled street known as Frenchgate, they were still talking about their Outhwaite friends.

‘Charlie never wears his mask now,’ Hal said as they neared the turning into Station Road. ‘He’s still not the bonniest thing on two legs, but what his surgeon did for
him is beyond belief.’

Charlie’s prosthetic mask, made for him when he first became a patient at Queen Mary’s Hospital in far-away Kent, had become a talking point in Outhwaite – and for miles
around. Made of silvered copper, it had been sculptured to resemble the shape of his face, before his face had been destroyed. Carrie had never liked it, but during the long years when his face had
been being gradually and painfully reconstructed, Charlie had been deeply grateful for it. It had been something for him to hide behind; something at which people stared in morbid, fascinated
curiosity, but which, unlike his face, they didn’t recoil from in revulsion and horror.

She said, ‘Lord Fenton says Mr Gillies should be knighted. He says he’s saved Charlie’s life.’

‘Lord Fenton’s right.’ Usually Hal was disparaging when talking about anyone with a title before their name, but he always made an exception for Gilbert Fenton, who treated
everyone – from agricultural labourers to his fellow peers – with exactly the same kind of courtesy and respect. ‘Gillies couldn’t have done what he’s done, though, if
Gilbert Fenton hadn’t been so determined to help Charlie and taken him to the other end of England in order to meet the surgeon.’

Carrie nodded her head in eager agreement. ‘Lord Fenton is the handsomest, kindest man I know.’

‘You find red hair handsome then, do you, Carrie?’ he said teasingly as they began crossing the bridge over the Swale that led to the station. ‘Is that why you don’t
fancy any of the lads at Monkswood? Is it because none of them are copper-knobs?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ She flushed rosily again. ‘And you like red hair, too. Think how much you like Olivia’s hair.’

He made a non-committal sound in his throat, amazed that even Carrie, who knew him so well, didn’t realize that it wasn’t Olivia’s waving marmalade-coloured hair that he ached
to feel between his fingers and the palms of his hands, but Thea’s deeply burnished, chestnut-red hair.

Olivia, of course, had had a crush on Hal ever since the day they had first met, and Carrie wasn’t the only person to think it would be quite natural if her romantic feelings for him were
returned. Certainly Hal’s Uncle Jim and Charlie thought so, for whenever they made any sly remarks – and they made them often – they were always about him and Olivia, never him
and Thea.

At the thought of Thea the muscles in his stomach clenched.

All morning he had been fighting against thinking of her and of how fiendishly difficult the next twenty-four hours were going to be, standing as an impotent bystander as other men – men
of her own class – danced and flirted with her; men with whom he couldn’t possibly compete when it came to status and wealth and eligibility.

As they entered the station a voice over the loudspeaker system announced that the ten o’clock train to Darlington was about to depart. Urgently Carrie grabbed hold of his arm. ‘Run,
Hal, or you’ll miss it!’

There was nothing Hal would have liked better than to miss it, but if he did so, it would mean the end of his job on the
Richmond Times.

He kissed her hastily on the cheek and ran for the already-moving train, clambering into a carriage with the help of a gentleman already inside it. As the door slammed behind him he leaned out
of its window, waving an energetic goodbye.

Carrie waved in answer until the train had vanished from sight. Whenever she and Hal met up in Richmond, they never seemed to have enough time together for her to chat to him as she would have
liked to chat, and today had been no exception. She would have liked to have asked him about Miss Calvert, and whether Jim was still romancing the barmaid from the Pig and Whistle in
Outhwaite’s High Street. Now, chat about Jim and Miss Calvert would have to wait until she had time off from Monkswood that coincided again with time when Hal was free to meet up with
her.

She always tried hard not to feel sad that the years when she and Hal had met almost daily with Thea and Olivia – and Roz, too, when she was visiting – were over. Though her friendly
nature ensured she was on good terms with other members of the staff at Monkswood, there was no one there she had come close to, in the way she was close to Thea, Olivia and Roz.

She made her way back to the market place, her heart aching at being so cut off from them – and at being cut off from other friends at Outhwaite, friends such as Jim and Charlie. She
paused on the bridge, biting her lip, telling herself how lucky she was to have a position in a house like Monkswood and, at seventeen, to have risen from being a tweeny to being a chambermaid. The
tears that were threatening abated now, but her painful sense of isolation didn’t. Though Monkswood was much grander than Gorton Hall, it wasn’t Gorton, and Lady Markham wasn’t
Lord Fenton.

Something she had never admitted to anyone, not even Hal, was how much she missed the little exchanges of conversation that Lord Fenton had always had with her when he was at Gorton and she was
a visitor there. With no father to watch over her and take an interest in her doings, knowing that Lord Fenton did so meant a lot to her.

She began walking again, thinking how proud Lord Fenton would be of Thea that evening and wishing that, like Hal, she could be at her coming-out ball, to see Thea become the centre of all
attention in a fairytale white ballgown.

Thea viewed herself in a cheval-glass and liked what she saw. Her white silk and tulle Parisian-made ballgown was embroidered with tiny crystals that shimmered and shone with
every tiny movement she made. Her mother’s pearls glowed seductively at her throat and her delicately beautiful tiara was a Fenton family heirloom.

‘You look sensational, honey,’ Rozalind said truthfully from behind her. ‘I guarantee you’ll have a proposal of marriage before the ball is over.’

‘A proposal of marriage, from any of my guests, is the last thing I want.’

‘Catching a rich husband is what the Season is all about.’ There was amusement in Rozalind’s voice. ‘And some of us are aiming even higher than merely rich.’

Thea pulled a long white glove high above her elbow. ‘Explain yourself, Roz. D’you mean fabulously rich? Monumentally rich?
Stupendously
rich?’