by M. C. Beaton
The clocks of Brussels were chiming eight o’clock in the evening when he finally awoke.
Mary sat on the cabin roof of a public boat and watched with dull eyes as the placid fields and quaint villages slid past. Across the fields, the spires of Ghent rose in the evening air. Behind lay Brussels, with its smells of blood and gangrene. She was going home.
She was going to change. First she would go to her parents’ home and demand money—money to pay for the best dressmakers and hairdressers in the kingdom. “If a Clarissa is what he admires,” she thought savagely, “a Clarissa is what he will get.”
A little nagging voice in her brain tried to tell her she was being too hard on him, that she had not given him a chance, that he had been battle-weary and at the end of his tether, and that was why he had struck her. But the louder voice in her brain crying for revenge, crying over the ruin of wasted love, soon silenced the other.
Down below in the cabin she could hear the clink of glasses and the loud, jolly voices of her compatriots, celebrating their release from Brussels.
“He has won his battle,” she thought grimly. “Now I must win mine. No man shall hurt me again. No man shall touch me again.”
Chapter 3
The Tyres, Mary’s parents, lived a prim well-ordered life in a prim well-ordered mansion. A trim line of pollarded elms marched all the way up to the well-scrubbed steps. The lawns were smooth and shaved like billiard tables, and the neat, well-ordered patchwork fields seemed to frown under the unruly shadows of the large fleecy clouds romping in an indecorous way across a pale blue summer sky.
Mrs. Tyre was as prim and upright as her home. She had gone into mourning some twenty years ago for a second cousin and had affected deep mourning ever since, enjoying the interest it caused, but always failing to discuss the reason for her mourning weeds, merely sighing mysteriously, into a black edged handkerchief, “Poor Albert.” (Albert having been the name of the second cousin.) Her figure was spare and straight, with never an ounce of womanly flesh to relieve her stern silhouette. She had a neat, prim mouth and well guarded eyes which surveyed the world from behind a barrier of thin, white eyelashes. She wore black mittens, winter and summer, and her pale, lavender-scented skin was cold to the touch.
She kissed the air some two inches from her daughter’s cheek and remarked in her high, drawling voice, “Do not, pray, fatigue me with boring battle stories, Mary. It’s Waterloo this and Waterloo that, and one will be glad when one can return to the more important business of the everyday world. Now, why are you come home and where is your husband?”
Mary walked with her mother through the familiar dark square entrance hall which smelled of beeswax and wood-smoke. Mrs. Tyre kept fires burning in all rooms of the house despite the warmth of the sunny day outside.
“My husband is stationed in Paris with his regiment,” said Mary, removing her bonnet. “I am come to ask for money.”
“Money!” A startled look flashed across the arctic wastes of Mrs. Tyre’s pale eyes. “We were exceeding generous with the marriage settlements.”
“I know,” said Mary, turning to face her mother at the door of the Rose Saloon. “But I am a lady of title now, mother, and it is essential that I dress according to my rank.”
“Come in,” said her mother holding open the door. “We cannot discuss such matters devant les domestiques.”
The Rose Saloon remained the same. Perhaps it had been rosy sometime in the early eighteenth century when the house was built, but now it had plain white walls with the familiar prim landscapes of country roads running straight as rulers into the middle distance; or long lines of poplars running straight into the middle distance; or an avenue of funeral urns marching away into the middle distance. A straight, tall grandfather clock stood as rigidly as any soldier in the corner, its heavy tick-tock seeming to issue orders to the seconds—“Left-right! Left-right!”
Mrs. Tyre sat down on the very edge of an upright chair and placed her mittened hands along its arms, placed her feet neatly together and surveyed her daughter.
“Well, Mary, you may tell me now. What is all this fustian about dressing to suit your station in life. Did I not furnish you with a monstrous elegant trousseau?”
A thirst for revenge had made Mary dishonest. She knew she had only to appeal to her mother’s snobbery and so she decided to lie.
“I had better explain,” said Mary calmly. “I was at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels…”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Tyre with a pale smile of satisfaction. “The Duchess of Richmond. Very good.”
“And,” went on Mary, “I overheard the Duchess saying to her husband that the new Lady Challenge would do very well but ’twas a pity her clothes were so provincial.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Tyre in quite a different tone of voice.
She sat for a long moment in complete silence while Mary patiently waited for her mother’s snobbery to do its inevitable work.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Tyre. “I appreciate your good sense, Mary. I am glad to see you have finally come to appreciate your position. Your clothes looked very well to me but… alas, I must admit I am not au fait with the current modes. How much?”
“Two thousand pounds,” said Mary grimly, “just to start my wardrobe.”
Mary had deliberately asked for much more than she needed. She knew instinctively that her mother would be impressed by the outrageous figure.
Mrs. Tyre’s white lashes flickered rapidly, but she was too proud to say she was astonished at the amount. She felt, instead, a dawning admiration for her daughter.
“I shall speak to your father, Mary,” she replied. “Now, why do you not go to your room and change for dinner. We still keep country hours you know.”
Mary rose and went upstairs to her old familiar bedroom on the second floor. She sat down in the old ladder-backed chair by the open window, and felt her courage desert her.
She had written to her husband’s servants at their town house, informing them of her imminent arrival. She had now all but got the money she required to cut a dash in polite society. But, how could she cut a dash when she suddenly felt very young, inexperienced and unsophisticated?
Mary conjured up a vision of her husband as a cold, autocratic boor. The more she concentrated on this image the more it solidified in her mind, until at the end of some half hour’s meditation, she thoroughly hated her husband and was once again hell-bent on revenge.
Her lady’s maid, Marie Juneaux, who had sulkily followed her mistress to this foreign land, answered Mary’s summons and laid out a fussy, frilly dinner dress of pale pink sarcanet on the bed and proceeded to groom her mistress.
Mary entered the cool, square dining room with its square mahogany table and prim regiment of hard, upright chairs an hour later to greet her father.
Her father was fat where his wife was thin, but he contracted his bulk under a formidable pair of Cumberland corsets and, in general, contrived to look as prim as his wife. His shaven head was covered by a plain brown wig and he wore an old-fashioned chintz coat, a striped waistcoat and knee breeches.
He had a soft white face which seemed to be pinned in place by two short narrow lines for the eyes, one short narrow vertical line for the nose and one long, thin horizontal line for the mouth. Mary had never really known her father, and often wondered if she ever would.
He did not ask her how she was after her journey, or waste any time at all on social chit-chat, but went straight to the point. “Your mother says you need two thousand pounds to rig yourself out in style,” he remarked in that high drawling voice which was so like his wife’s. “And so you shall have it. Never let it be said that a Tyre was not of the first stare.”
“Thank you, father,” murmured Mary. “I shall indeed do the family name credit, when I am suitable at-Tyred.”
“Quite so. Now, come kiss me child, before we enjoy our dinner.”
Mary dutifully bent over him as he screwed up his face unt
il all the lines quite disappeared into the flesh. He looked for all the world like a singularly tough baby suffering its mother’s embrace.
He then bent his head and said Grace, and the Tyre family began to eat in their usual silence. For as long as Mary could remember, there had been no conversation at mealtimes.
A soft twilight settled down on the garden outside, and, one by one, the birds went to sleep. Mary remembered the clamor and noise of Brussels and the booming of the guns sounding from the battlefield. For the first time she enjoyed the peace and dull quiet of her home.
But she excused herself directly after dinner and went back to her bedroom only to lie awake for a long time into the night, nourishing her anger against her husband, so that she might draw courage from it. She could not hope to conquer the fashionable world, but at least if she tried very, very hard she could make enough of a ripple in it and bring a look of surprise to her husband’s arrogant face.
With a draft on her parents’ bank securely in her reticule, Mary set out for London a week later. She had never stayed in London in her life before, she and her husband having spent the first days of their marriage with the Tyres, and then at a succession of posting houses in England and the Low Countries on the road to Brussels.
The noise and dirt and bustle of the great city alarmed her and she shrank back against the squabs of the Tyre traveling carriage and wondered how on earth she was going to fare alone in this large city.
By the time the carriage rolled to a halt in front of the mansion in St. James’s Square, she was feeling dirty and tired and defeated.
Her groom ran lightly up the steps to ring the bell, only finding, after repeated pulling on something like an organ stop, that it did not work. He applied himself to the knocker and at last the door swung open and the strangest butler Mary had ever seen stood on the threshold. He had a large squashed-looking face and little twinkling eyes like boot buttons. His livery consisted of a much darned, red military coat, worn over a yellowing white waistcoat and a yellow-white neckerchief.
His hair stood up like a scrubbing brush and was imperfectly powdered, making him look a bit like a porcupine that had strolled through a bucket of whitewash.
Behind him, a swarthy footman, who looked like a reformed assassin, was diligently swabbing the hall floor.
The butler made Mary a jerky little bow. Then he straightened up and saluted smartly. “Name of Biggs, my lady,” he announced, staring straight ahead. “Butler to my lord. Servants present and correct, my lady. ’TENSHUN!”
A strange assortment of servants filed into the hall and lined up for their new mistress’s inspection. Instead of livery, all wore remnants of military uniforms. The cook was a large, bearded highlander with a white apron tied over his kilt. Mary was introduced to them all. When the introductions were over, she sent her maid upstairs to superintend her unpacking and asked Biggs to follow her into a saloon on the first floor.
“Biggs,” said Mary wonderingly, “are there no female servants employed in this household?”
“No, my lady,” barked Biggs, springing to attention. “All of us is soldiers what was invalided home after the Peninsula so Captain Challenge—he was a captain then, my lady—he says he can’t pay us much but he can house us and feed us and give us these here jobs.”
Biggs suddenly ran his thick hands through his hair making it stand more on end than ever, producing a small cloud of flour dust. “See here, my lady,” he said anxiously, looking full at Mary for the first time. “We’re a rough and ready lot, ma’am, and we’ve not been in the way of being servants except to His Majesty, King George, so to speak, and God bless him, but we has kept the house as clean as a pin.”
Mary looked about her. The saloon was very large. The floor was scrubbed and bare. A few dingy, dark paintings ornamented the faded wallpaper, and a few ancient chairs stood about the room, looking as if they had dropped in a century ago for a visit and had not yet summoned up the social courage to leave. The room was dominated by a vast black marble fireplace depicting the rape of some unfortunate Greek maidens who screamed soundlessly into the long room.
“How can I become fashionable with such unfashionable servants as these?” thought Mary. But, sheltered as her life had been, she had heard many stories of soldiers starving in the gutters of London when their country no longer needed them. So instead, she cleared her throat nervously and said, “Yes, I can see the house is very clean, Biggs, but sorely in need of carpets and curtains and furniture. Also, you must order livery immediately for yourself and the other servants. This day, I shall make good your wages. You will be paid as fits your station in this household.”
“Thank you, my lady,” said Biggs, and to Mary’s embarrassment she thought she heard the sound of tears at the back of the butler’s voice. “We never thought for a minute you would let us stay, ma’am. I took a ball in the chest at Salamanca and it’s still in there somewhere.”
He stiffly saluted. “Just you give orders and we will follow them out, ma’am—my lady. Stand by you to the death, we will. Lay down our lives for you!”
Mary felt a lump in her own throat but she answered quietly. “I shall indeed need your help, Biggs. I am determined to surprise your master by becoming the fashion. I shall need to set up my stables since he is still in Paris. I must also find a good dressmaker, which is really why I would have liked to see some female member of the staff. My own maid is still new to London.”
Biggs’s face lit up with genuine joy at being able to help. “James, the first footman, my lady, him what got it in the leg at Vittoria, is a-courting a housemaid at the Duchess of Badmont’s. I’ll send him there drecktly and he will find your lady-ship all necessary directions. As to your stables, ma’am, you can’t do better than to ask John, the groom who looked after the best horses in the cavalry and he got his in the arm, my lady, at Badajoz. I knows Gilberts is the best warehouse for furnishings, my lady, and I shall have a gent from that there establishment call any time you wish. We are sparse on provisions in the kitchens, my lady, so if you were desirous of a tasty dinner, it would be…”
“Send all bills to my mother and father,” said Mary firmly, “and order all that is necessary for the kitchens.” She sent up a private prayer that her parents’ snobbery would honor the bills. “I am sure you will prove a good general, Biggs.”
Biggs saluted. “Sergeant, my lady. Sergeant Biggs it is.”
Mary dismissed him with a nod of her head and Biggs clattered joyfully off down the stairs, his heavy boots doing a sort of clog hornpipe.
Mary rested her chin on her hand and prayed for courage. Perhaps she was lucky in these strange servants. A fashionable butler would not have been nearly so sympathetic.
“I shall become fashionable,” she vowed, “even if I kill myself in the process.”
And during the next few weeks, she indeed thought at times she might die from exhaustion. The house was jampacked from morning to night with a succession of dressmakers, milliners, haberdashers, decorators, carpenters and grocers.
Many cards were deposited on the hall table, but Mary did not yet feel ready to venture into society. The court hairdresser himself cropped her long hair into a short cap of saucy curls, and although Marie Juneaux, the lady’s maid, assured her mistress it was all the crack, Mary felt very strange, getting a shock every time she caught her reflection in the looking glass.
At last the day arrived when she felt ready to receive visitors. She informed Biggs—resplendent in a new claret and silver livery—that she was “at home.”
The house was not as large as many of the other London town houses, but it had a certain quiet charm. The ground floor boasted two public rooms, a study and a library, the first floor, four connecting saloons, each now decorated in a different color, the third floor held the bedrooms, including a new suite for his lordship and one for her ladyship, as well as the guest bedrooms, and the top floor, a chain of attics.
The saloon where Mary had first interviewed
Biggs was now called the Green Saloon, its walls now panelled in green watered silk. The black marble fireplace was still there but did not seem so grim, now that the rest of the room was softened by rugs and vases of flowers and objets d’art. Brussels-lace curtains floated beside the open windows, for the weather remained sunny and warm.
Mary now sat in the Green Saloon. Her cropped hair had given her face an elfin look, and her gray eyes looked larger than ever. She was wearing a deceptively simple white muslin dress, tied under the bosom with long gold ribbons. The delicate white of her gown gave Mary a charming look of vulnerable virginity. She longed for a friend or companion to support her in her debut. In fact, she longed for any company but that of her husband.
All at once, she heard Biggs’s heavy tread of the stairs. He had changed his thick-soled boots for a pair of equally thick-soled shoes and was so obviously proud of his new feathers that Mary had not had the heart to tell him that a good servant should be seen and never heard.
He swung open the double doors and announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Witherspoon and the Honorable Cyril Trimmer,” and with a click of his heels, and a stiff salute, he clattered off, leaving Mary to rise and greet her guests with a sinking heart.
“La! Don’t we look grand!” cried Mrs. Witherspoon, seizing Mary in a hot embrace. “We called and called and you wasn’t at home but Mr. Witherspoon says to me, he says, ‘Lady Challenge won’t forget a promise not after the way we took care of Mrs. Godwin,’ so here we are.”
The Witherspoons were exactly as Mary remembered them in Brussels. Mrs. Witherspoon’s bosom and turban were the same. Both she and her husband carried the same ingratiating leer. Their companion, the Honorable Cyril Trimmer, came forward to be introduced.