Slowly she went from the room. She was tired; age at the moment was telling on her too. She had not counted her birthdays since she had turned a blind eye on seventy. The misery in the house of late had brought home to her the fact that there was nothing kept age at bay as much as happiness and a cheerful atmosphere around one, and that nothing made it gallop towards its end quicker than misery. Well, although she couldn’t bear to think what the house would be like devoid of Nancy Ann, she was determined she at least should know happiness. And to this end she went to her, where she was sitting in her bedroom still crying, and, putting her arms around her, she said, ‘Cry no more, but put on your cloak and hood and go over there and tell him that you can be married on your eighteenth birthday.’
Two
When the parson’s wife died a number of staff at the House were elated, albeit they hid their faces behind masks of mournful sympathy. What did it matter if they had to forego their own special ‘do’ which had promised to equal that of the wedding guests. The master was still free, and if they knew anything about the vicarage and the protocol there, there would be no wedding for a year or two at least. And what would he do in the meantime? They knew what he would do: visit London more often than he had done of late. And those in the hierarchy had reminded one another that Mrs Rene Poulter Myers had not raised a storm at being thrown off, but had played clever and remained his friend. According to Staith she had visited the London house twice and had had tea with him. She was a clever woman, Mrs Rene, they all agreed.
Then in December came the news that he was to be married in January; as Mrs Amelia Conway said bitterly, on the parson’s prig’s birthday. But she, together with the butler and the valet, thanked their master when the day before his marriage, he told them they must have a wedding breakfast among themselves, all the staff to be included, and that twenty bottles of wine and spirits could be taken from the cellar.
They thanked him most profusely and wished him happiness, to which he answered, ‘Thank you, but that is already mine.’
As the honeymoon was to be curtailed to a fortnight, he said he knew that everything would be in order when he returned with their mistress. It seemed to them as they said later, he stressed the last word.
And now the valet was in the housekeeper’s room, telling the butler and Mrs Conway as well as the first footman McTaggart the details of, as he said, the shabbiest wedding he had ever attended. ‘The church was like an icebox,’ he said. ‘And there the master and her stood before her father, and the old fellow seemed to throw the service at them. Sometimes he mumbled and sometimes he almost barked. Her brother gave her away, and Sir George Golding was the best man, while Lady Golding attended the bride. And there was the grandmother and the three maids sitting in one pew and the churchwarden and his daughters sitting at the other side. When it was over they didn’t go back into the vicarage so there wasn’t a glass raised. There was some kissing and shaking hands all round, but when she came to her father, who was standing apart, she threw her arms around his neck and he held her for a moment, then pushed her away, only to grab her again and hug her as if he would never let her go. Oh—’ The valet shook his head mockingly before going on, ‘It was all very touching, for as she was about to get into the carriage she turned and, taking the small bouquet she had been carrying and which was half crushed now with the encounter with her dear papa, she went up to the warden’s daughter and gave it to her. Then, what do you think? She, the warden’s daughter, began to cry. Oh my! Oh my! I tell you, it was all very touching. Then they were off, taking only two valises, a case and a trunk. That warden’s daughter would have had as much. Well now’—he looked from one to the other—‘let’s make hay while the sun shines, for the harvest, from now on, is going to be very poor unless we put our heads together.’
Three
The couple spent the first night of their married life at their London house where they had been warmly welcomed by the four servants, particularly by the man Johnson and his wife. The house, as Dennison had described to her, was comparatively small, the rooms not as big as those in the vicarage, but so comfortably furnished and warm as to be called homely. The dinner was not elaborate but they lingered over it. Their talk was perfunctory and after dinner they sat on a sofa before the fire to have their coffee. When this was cleared away, he drew her into his arms and held her gently, saying, ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.’
Nor could she believe it, for not only her mind but her whole body seemed churned with a mixture of feelings: she was sad because of her father’s attitude; she was full of wonderment that she was now the wife of a rich landowner and was mistress of two estates and a town house; but above all these other feelings, she was fearful of what lay ahead in this first night of marriage. Yet, childishly, she told herself, her mama, and papa, had experienced such a night, and they were good, even holy people, so what was there to be afraid of?
She was still asking the same question when Mary Johnson bid her goodnight and left her alone in the bedroom, after having been told gently that she could manage in her undressing.
Her grandmama had bought her her nightdress and matching negligee. Both were of soft white lawn. The nightdress had a filled lace collar threaded with pink satin ribbon; it had a ruched front and an extra full skirt. She had taken down her hair and, remembering her grandmama’s instructions, had not plaited it but had tied it loosely with a ribbon that matched the nightdress.
She was standing looking at herself in the long cheval mirror and being surprised by her reflection when a tap came on the door and it opened. Instinctively, she wanted to scamper to the bed and seek cover beneath the bedclothes, but she remained still, looking across the room to where he stood for a moment surveying her. He was wearing a brown velvet dressing gown with deep revers; his hair was brushed well behind his ears; his face had been newly shaved; his eyes seemed lost in their own light.
It was some seconds before he moved towards her, and then, taking her gently into his arms, he said softly, ‘Smile.’
‘I…I can’t. I…I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, my dear, never be afraid of me. Just remember, I love you. Always remember, I love you, and from this night onwards you will love me.’
Her first night of marriage proved to be a mixture of embarrassment, pain, and a strange new feeling that she had no word for, as yet, for it was beyond happiness, beyond the feeling of love her family had engendered in her. Its source was somewhere outside herself, yet deep within her being. It was elusive and couldn’t be held. It was born of contact, born out of pain which was to lessen as the days of the honeymoon progressed. And they progressed in a maze of wonderment.
On the second day of their marriage during which he seemed to have grown younger, so boyish did he act, he played guide through the museums, took her to see Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London and lastly the Zoological Gardens, where at the entrance the hired cabby cried, ‘Mondays sixpence, every other day a shilling.’ He was a very jolly man, the cabby, and had seemed to enjoy driving them, on and off, all day through fine drifting snow.
In the evening, after a dinner served in a restaurant, the grandeur of which, she observed, outdid the ballroom at the House, she visited her first theatre and sat in a box, but could hardly keep her attention on the stage, where scantily dressed ladies danced and men sang funny songs and made jokes, the gist of which she was unable to laugh at because she could not understand them. What interested her was the galaxy of people and the way the audience was dressed, especially those in the boxes. The upper parts of many of the ladies were almost as bare as the ladies dancing on the stage. Her own dress of blue velvet had a lace top to it which ended in a blue velvet ribbon around her throat. Dennison had chosen that she should wear it.
The following day they crossed over to France. She had prided herself that she could speak French, that was until she heard the Parisians talking, and but for answering ‘merci’ and ‘oui’ she did not attempt to converse
in their tongue. But not so Dennison, for he was very much at home with the language, and with the people.
The weather was cold and stormy, but did not keep them indoors. Again he played guide, but his manner now was not so much boyish as gay. They went in a rocketing cab to Versailles, to Notre Dame, to the Conciergerie. The second evening they attended an opera and during the interval he proudly took her arm and paraded her among the packed throng in the comparatively small foyer and was not at all annoyed when gentlemen’s eyes were turned on her.
It was nearly two in the morning when they drove back to their hotel. Later, as she lay in his arms, he asked her if she had enjoyed the opera, and she answered truthfully, ‘Not very much, not as much as the entertainment in London.’ And at this he had rolled her backwards and forwards as he laughed, saying, ‘Where has my little vicarage maiden gone?’
There had been times during their short stay in London when she was rudely jolted out of this fairy-tale existence into which she had been drawn, and jolted into life that was real and awful, such as when the cab driver had driven them along out-of-the-way routes in the city and they had passed through narrow streets where men lurked in doorways and women had hard and weary faces; even the very young ones looked old, and most of the children were ragged and barefoot. But of course she had seen ragged and barefoot children before; not so many, though, as seemed to swarm in London. And yet these London children were chirpy individuals, more so than those nearer to home. There was, she knew, great poverty in the towns round about Newcastle, even in their own village. Her papa had once got up a clog club and had asked the parishioners to subscribe whatever they could afford to provide for the needy children of the neighbourhood. And when the subscriptions had been thin, her papa had pointed out it was because the parishioners didn’t like collections of any kind, especially the farming community who objected to the tithes and anything else that meant the laying out of money without visible return.
But overall the essence of the fairy tale remained with her until what was to be their last evening in Paris when he took her to a casino. This experience would, he said, expunge the vicarage forever.
He often joked about her vicarage upbringing, but she didn’t mind in the least because, in a way, she felt he was glad she’d had such a narrow experience for it gave him the opportunity to open up a new world for her.
But the visit to the casino was to have the opposite effect on her from that intended. In the first place, she was shocked at the sight of women gambling. Ladies all, at least so it was proclaimed by their dress, and the tone of their voices, and the arrogance of their manners.
She was further amazed when Dennison was greeted warmly by an immaculately dressed gentleman who was not a patron, but who seemed to be in charge of the establishment, for he greeted him by name and was enthusiastic in his welcome. But it was noticeable to her that she wasn’t introduced to this gentleman. After he had left them she whispered, ‘You know him?’ And he whispered back, mockery in his voice, ‘Yes, my dear; it is not the first time I have been in Paris.’ She remembered now her papa referring to him as a gambler. ‘And don’t look so frightened; there are no tigers about, they are all very nice people. Come!’ He took hold of her hand. ‘I shall show you my only skill.’ …
For the next hour she watched him practising his skill: first at a roulette table. And when, after twenty minutes or so, he rose from it, she looked at him in something like horror as she said, ‘You have lost the equivalent of fifty sovereigns?’
‘Yes, my dear, I have lost the equivalent of fifty sovereigns. But the night is young. Please,’ he pleaded with her now, ‘do not look so forbidding. I cannot recognise my Nancy Ann when you look like that. What is fifty sovereigns anyway?’
He now led her to a corner of the room where four men were sitting at a table, one of them rattling dice, and as they approached it he said, ‘Give me three numbers.’
‘What kind of numbers? High numbers?’
‘No; anything from one to six.’
She blinked, thought a moment, then said, ‘Two, three, six.’ It was as if she was back in the nursery finding it difficult to say twice, so she would always say, two, three, six, instead of twice three are six.
‘Two, three, six, it will be.’
When a man vacated a chair, Dennison took it, and there followed some quick exchanges in French between him and another man.
She could not follow the game. She could only see that three times out of four the die came up with a six for Dennison. After this there was more rapid exchange. One thing she noticed was, there was no actual money on the table, only small counters not unlike those she and the boys had used to play ludo, except these were larger. She watched Dennison push all the counters lying in front of him towards the middle of the table. She saw the other men shrug their shoulders, then push their counters likewise. Now Dennison glanced up at her before taking up an ivory cup and putting the die in it. There was silence round the table. When the die again turned up three there was a murmur of, ‘Trois, trois, un, deux, trois.’
He glanced at her again; then proceeded to make further throws, the continued silence accentuating the ominous rattling of the die in the cup. When, for the third time, it turned up two there were exclamations of amazement from two of the men, but the third one’s face looked blank. This man was sitting opposite and he now handed Dennison a bag.
Having put the counters in the bag, Dennison guided her down the room.
At the touch of his arm, Dennison turned to the man of the blank countenance who spoke rapidly at him. When Dennison shook his head and pointed to Nancy Ann, the man shrugged his shoulders and turned away. And when Nancy Ann asked, ‘What was he saying?’ Dennison answered, ‘He wanted to know if I had a special system, or was it a trick, and I said, no, I just had a clever wife who gave me the numbers.’
The gentleman who had greeted them when they first entered was standing by the desk at which the counters were exchanged, and, his manner still bright, he said in stilted English, ‘It is your lucky night, Monsieur. You are staying long?’
‘Long enough to come back and lose my gains.’
‘You are a sportsman. Always a sportsman. It is a pleasure both to see you and your lady.’ And as he inclined his head towards Nancy Ann, Dennison said, ‘My wife, Monsieur.’
‘Ah! Ah!’ His mouth opened wide on the exclamation and, taking her hand, he bowed over it before raising it to his lips, then saying, ‘Congratulations, and happiness, Madame, always happiness.’
She was still blushing as they passed through the doors into the cold night air. When the cab rolled up out of the darkness, he helped her inside and gave the name of a restaurant on the Champs Elysées.
‘How…how much did you win?’ she now asked in a small voice. And when he, patting the pocket of his greatcoat, answered, ‘Five hundred guineas,’ she actually jumped away from him along the seat, and her voice seemed to come out of the top of her head as she muttered, ‘Five hundred guineas!’
‘Yes, my dear, five hundred guineas. But don’t forget you upbraided me for losing fifty guineas, so you can say I am only four hundred and fifty guineas to the good, or at least we are only four hundred and fifty guineas to the good, because you know, you did it.’
‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I…I don’t like gambling. I…I don’t like to see you gambling.’
‘Oh, my dear, it is a harmless pastime…when you can afford it.’
‘And…and can you really afford to lose such sums?’
‘I didn’t lose, my dear, I won.’
‘Do you always win?’
‘No.’ He leaned forward and gave her a peck on the lips, then repeated, ‘No, madam, I don’t always win.’
‘But…but how did you manage to win on those numbers tonight?’
He did not answer her for a moment, but lay back against the smelly leather seat of the cab, and his voice seemed to come to her from a long distance, so soft was it as he replied, ‘I don’t know.
I’ll never know. I only remember that I thought deeply, I wished deeply. It seemed as if there was another voice saying, “I will lay a bet that I can turn the die up on the same number three times out of four.” It wasn’t the usual game. I realised now I was taking a big chance, yet not at that particular time. I willed it to happen and it did.’ He turned quickly to her now, saying, ‘I know what I’ll do. Every time you accompany me to a game and I win—and I will if you are beside me—I will share the spoils. So tonight, madam, I owe you two hundred and fifty guineas.’
‘No! No!’ Her voice was emphatic. ‘I could never touch money got like that. No, no; never!’
In the dim light given off by the side lamps, she watched his expression change, his voice also as he said, ‘Then you are saying you will have nothing to do with my home or anything in it for, my dear, I come from a long line of gamblers. I am not as foolhardy as my ancestors who lost even the clothes from their backs. Nor will I ever make enough money or bet everything on a wager that would enable me to lose or build a house like my present home, or the lodge in Scotland, or that in London. It may further surprise you that my great-great-grandfather, one of the first chronicled in the early seventeen hundreds, was famous for running a gaming house in London. He is one of the men who lost his clothes, but he regained them again and it was his grandson who built Rossburn towards the end of the last century. My father was a moderate gambler, but he gambled. My grandfather was more daring, for he also bought the lodge and our London house.’
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