Dorothy Eden (21 page)

That must be how the garment had come to arrive. Must be. Ordered by someone who knew Uncle Jonas’s address. And hers, too. Lady Hazzard, Loburn near Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England. The label was correctly addressed.

Lionel said easily, “If this was meant to ravish Hugo, Hetty, you’ll still allow the rest of us a preview, I hope.”

“For our modest party!” It was the first time Hetty had heard Kitty speak snappishly to her husband. “It will be much too dressed up.”

“It will be a sight for tired eyes. Do us all good,” Lionel’s voice was equable, but final. The conversation, as far as he was concerned, was finished.

Lady Flora sent for Hetty later that day. She said she would like Hetty to have tea upstairs with her.

Hetty frankly didn’t relish a tête-à-tête. She had never been at ease with the stiff, elegant old lady, and wondered what had provoked Lady Flora’s sudden attention. The arrival of that wretched dress? The puzzle of it was weighing her down and making her have impossible fantasies. Who could have ordered it? Surely a letter would arrive with an explanation. If not, she would have to write to Lord and Taylor for information. But that would take so long and in the meantime Effie, with cries of admiration, had hung the dress in the wardrobe to rustle like small sea waves in the night.

“Come in, my dear.” Lady Flora was sitting at the window in her usual high-backed chair. The tea table had been drawn up to her and her hands were hovering over the delicate china. “I think you prefer lemon, don’t you? Isn’t it ridiculous that after a year there are still so many things I don’t know about you? Or is it my bad memory?”

“What is it you want to know about me, Lady Flora? Don’t I run the house properly?”

“Oh, excellently. Surprisingly well. And you look so charming, too. What a tragedy that you and Hugo have had to miss the first year of your marriage. There’s so much this war has to answer for. But you are as happy as possible, under the circumstances, aren’t you?”

Hetty answered carefully, “Yes. As you say, as much as one can be in these times.”

“Sometimes I think you have a haunted look.”

“I do feel haunted at times. Lionel does, too, and Hugo.”

“My dear child, I do understand. That’s why I’m glad there’s going to be a party at Loburn. It will do us all good. And I hear you have a wonderful new dress sent especially from New York. How clever of you to think of doing that. You must have been desolated about losing all your lovely trousseau.”

“On the contrary, Lady Flora, I don’t want to be reminded of it. It seems frivolous, after such a tragedy. That’s why I can’t understand that dress arriving or who asked for it to be sent. But I intend to find out.”

“What an intriguing puzzle.” Lady Flora’s large dim blue eyes had the ghost of a sparkle, as if she were diverted and amused. “Someone who meant well by you, of course.”

“Of course,” Hetty agreed, not believing her words for an instant.

“Someone who didn’t think of the painful memories the dress would evoke,” Lady Flora observed.

Uncle Jonas? The housekeeper, Mrs Crampton, who had once written asking for information about her. Miss Natalia herself? After all, she, a little wasp-waisted woman with pinched lips, had visited the house dozens of times for fittings, and had become deeply interested in Clemency’s romantic future.

No, it must have been someone closer than that.

Not Clemency! How
could
it possibly be Clemency, attempting a macabre revenge?

“I expect,” said Lady Flora in her clear precise voice, “it could bring back that awful sensation of drowning. But you must overcome that. People have only seen you about the village and in church on Sundays, looking just a little mousey, if you will forgive me for saying so. You have been much too retiring. Why not look like an heiress for once?”

“No, I would only look like a peacock and that isn’t suitable in these times,” Hetty said stubbornly.

“You’re wrong. What you will look like is the girl Hugo came back from New York talking so much about. You’ve scarcely given us a glimpse of her, you know.”

“You make me feel like an impostor!” Hetty burst out unthinkingly.

“Nonsense! How could you get that impression? What I meant is that you’re only a shadow of that girl. But how can you be otherwise, with Hugo away so long, and you losing your baby, and always waiting and waiting for news. My poor child, these times are very sad. Will you have some more tea?”

The beautiful limpid eyes could surely not look so completely innocent without being innocent.

Hugo wrote:

Wish I could be home for the party, but leave doesn’t look possible at present for various reasons that I can’t mention. Though, my God, I am overdue for it. I hear you have a sensational new dress from New York. Time the Yanks sent us something towards the war effort, but I don’t much like you wasting it on patched-up officers home on sick leave. Such as my brother, Lionel. I hear that you and he have found a lot in common. But the new dress was meant for me, I hope.”

Yes, it was meant for you, Hetty said aloud in the quiet bedroom. More than you’ll ever know. But I hate it, hate it, and I have the craziest suspicions which must be unfounded. Do come home, Hugo. I really need you rather badly …

She was getting into the habit of talking aloud to herself. It was a dangerous habit. One day someone might be listening.

Then Uncle Jonas’s letter arrived, and she tore it open in the greatest haste. Now there would be an answer to the mystery.

There was not, however. Uncle Jonas merely said:

I have had a rather large account from Lord and Taylor for a garment you asked them to send you. I have paid it, of course, but it has left me astonished at the price of ladies’ clothes. However, this is your own money, so I won’t do anything but caution you about too great extravagance. No one knows what state the world’s economy will be in after this European war is over. Disasters on the stock exchange can happen overnight. So don’t let your husband and his family think there is a bottomless well.

And that, exasperatingly, was all he had to say.

L
IONEL SILENTLY PASSED THE
scrap of paper, faded brown, with curling edges, to Hetty.

With difficulty she read the pale handwriting.

My dear husband,

I never meant to deceive you but you had been away so long and your mother had got up the masked ball to amuse us all and cheer our spirits. It was mid-summer eve and balmy, the moon shining. I had a momentary madness. Oh, my dearest husband I had been lonely for so long. Now I am with child …

“Jacobina!” Hetty exclaimed.

Lionel nodded. “Dated 1720 if I can decipher the figures correctly. The year George I came to the throne. Exit Queen Anne, and exit Jacobina. Yes, it must have been she.”

“And no one knows what happened after her husband got that letter?”

“Only that her baby didn’t live, and soon afterwards she died in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps from the result of harsh treatment. Naturally the family hushed up the scandal.”

“But they kept her portrait.”

“It wasn’t destroyed but I should think it was relegated to the attics for a century or so. Until some romantic like you unearthed it and tried to believe poor Jacobina wasn’t a wanton, but just high-spirited and reckless.”

“And warm-hearted and loving and lonely and neglected by her husband. Surely one lapse should have been forgivable.”

“I expect the same rule applied then as it does today. So long as the guilty parties aren’t found out. Is that description you just gave me one of yourself, by any chance?”

“In some ways.”

“Warm hearted and loving?”

“I hope so.”

“I would think so. And other things that you have been too modest to say. Charming and witty and amusing, when not pressed down by secret worries.”

“Secret worries?”

“You jumped when I said that. What are you guilty about, Hetty?”

“Not because I’m pregnant like Jacobina,” Hetty answered sharply.

“Then what?”

She had to invent an answer. “Perhaps because I’m mistress of this lovely house and I’ve hardly had a chance to know my husband. It seems a cheat, somehow.”

“And perhaps because you haven’t been treated very well,” Lionel said. “Not by my mother, anyway. She still makes you feel an outsider, doesn’t she?”

“A little. But I’m fighting back.”

“You have to understand English people like her. They’re cool and reserved and disciplined, but quite passionate underneath. When Mother decides to accept you it will be whole-heartedly. So keep on fighting.”

“Lionel, how nice you are. If it hadn’t been for Kitty and darling Freddie, and now you—”

“Yes? What would you have done?”

He expected her to say she would have gone right back home. Little did he realise she could never do that.

“Oh, I’d have kept on. My mother taught me to face challenges.”

Lionel began to smile.

“I’m beginning to admire the Americans more all the time. I’m very glad to have you here, Hetty.” He touched her hand. It was the briefest of gestures but the contact sent the warm blood spinning to her head in a way that no touch of Hugo’s had ever done.

She said, “I think I’d better read that letter of Jacobina’s again. It might be salutory.”

Something flashed in his eyes. “These are reckless and uncertain times. Life could be very short. It’s only common sense to live as happily as we can.”

Not common sense. Not sense at all. Falling in love would be a new and dazzling experience, but she simply couldn’t allow it to happen. What a mess it would all be. She must begin a difficult exercise in self-control by spending less time in Lionel’s company and reminding herself that she was a rich and important lady, mistress of this wonderful old manor house, and eventually to be mother of its heir. Those things were sufficient. They must not be put in jeopardy by an illicit love affair.

But she didn’t think she could have faced her next ordeal without Lionel’s help.

A letter had arrived from the American Embassy in London. The mystery of the dress from Lord and Taylor’s, still unexplained, had been bad enough, but this was infinitely worse.

Someone from the Embassy had written asking her if she would attempt to identify a young woman, almost certainly a passenger from the
Lusitania.
She had been sheltered by an elderly Irish couple, turf cutters, who lived in an isolated cottage some miles from Kinsale, and who had picked up the young lady half dead from drowning, and suffering from loss of memory some months ago!

They were illiterate peasants. They hadn’t known of the sinking of the
Lusitania.
They had been waiting for the young lady to regain her memory and tell them who she was. The wife had cared for her and grown fond of her. They were a lonely couple. Now, the young woman did simple tasks in the small dark cabin, still apparently unaware of who she was or where she had come from.

Recently a nephew of the old people had come from Dublin to visit, and had said they must notify the authorities at once. Someone might be searching for this luckless young woman, and already so much time had gone by. So, reluctantly, the old man had made the long journey by donkey cart to Kinsale, and told his story.

We still have a short list of survivors to be identified, [the letter from the Embassy said]. We think there is a possibility that this young woman could be your missing maid, who appears on the passenger list as Miss Harriet Brown, aged twenty-two years. The young lady has now been brought to London and the wife of one of our staff, Mrs Pamela Brough, is very kindly looking after her. Would it be asking too much of you, Lady Hazzard, to travel to London and see this young person? It would surely be of great comfort to her family to know she was still alive, even in this distressing state, and I am sure comforting to you, too, if by any chance she is your lost maid.

Hetty was shuddering uncontrollably. Now her fancies that she had seen Clemency sitting in the church, or looking in her bedroom window seemed trivial, harmless. This was the real confrontation. Clemency alive, albeit without memory.

What memory might Hetty’s face set alight in her dull shocked mind?

Was this the end of all the things she had begun to cherish so deeply? She couldn’t bear it. She would rather jump in the dark lake beyond the yew avenue. To die by drowning would surely be ironic justice. She could join that other luckless lady, Jacobina, who had perhaps ended her life there. She, too could come back as a shadow on the garden wall, a rustle of silk skirts on a summer evening.

“Hetty, have you had bad news?” came Julia’s voice. The ever watchful Julia. “You look as white as a sheet.” The voice went on speaking at large to the people round the table. “Poor Hetty doesn’t get many letters, but they all seem to give her a shock.”

Sudden sharp anger at Julia’s inquisitiveness and maliciousness partially dispersed Hetty’s nightmare. The blood flowed back into her face and she was able to say, in a tone of despair,

“It’s not finished yet.”

“What’s not finished yet?” Lady Flora asked quite gently. “Please forgive our curiosity, Hetty. We know that letter isn’t from the front because it was in a very rich-looking envelope. Not the kind they issue to the troops.”

“It was from the third secretary at the American Embassy in London, Lady Flora. And when I said it’s not finished yet, I meant the sinking of the
Lusitania.
This letter says there’s a survivor who could be my maid Brown. They want me to go and try to identify her.”

“A dead body!” exclaimed Kitty.

“No, no, she’s alive, but she’s lost her memory. She’s been looked after in an Irish cabin in the hills somewhere, and only just discovered.”

“You’ll have to make a journey to Ireland?” asked Lady Flora.

“Oh, no, it’s not as complicated as that. She’s been brought to London and I suppose will be sent back to America—I mean if she can’t be identified.”

“And if she can?” queried Lionel interestedly.