Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  Very suddenly, and hardly before they had had time to make themselves comfortable, the French doors of the drawing room were throw open and the formidable figure of Aunt Augustine appeared with Mildred, one of the housemaids, whom she was now heard ordering to go and fetch Master Edward to her at once. In the background Portia could see Aunt Tattie sitting in a chair by the window with a lace handkerchief clutched to her face while behind her Uncle Lampard was staring ahead in bemusement.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Master Edward!’ the maid said, retracing her steps quickly as soon as she spotted Edward and Portia crouching behind the hedge. ‘You’d better run off and let me find you a bit further away or Lady Medlar’ll know you been listening. Go on!’

  ‘I wish we could run away,’ Portia said as they wandered down the side of the large house with Mildred trailing behind them. ‘I just have this feeling we ought to run away.’

  ‘Why?’ Edward wondered. ‘Do you hate it here too, Porty?’

  ‘I don’t hate it here, Edward, don’t be silly. I love Bannerwick. I just want to run away because I have this feeling something awful is going to happen.’

  ‘I hate Mr Swift,’ Edward said, carefully catching a large red admiral from the heart of a flower. ‘I want to go to school like other boys. That’s what I hate about being here.’

  ‘I thought they’d get rid of Mr Swift,’ Portia said, looking at the butterfly inside Edward’s cupped hands. ‘But I don’t think that’s what they’re planning to do at all.’

  ‘I hate Mr Swift. I’m not staying here any more.’

  With the butterfly still in his closed hands, Edward then turned and ran back past Mildred towards the house.

  Whatever happens, Portia thought, watching Edward running, whatever it is that happens now it will all be my fault.

  Later, as she helped Edward pack his toys into a Gladstone bag which just wouldn’t shut, Portia wondered why he had to leave so soon.

  ‘Because Aunt Augustine said so,’ Edward told her, taking the bag and trying to shut it on his own. ‘She said the best thing was for me to return with her this very instance.’

  ‘Instant, Edward. The word is instant,’ Portia corrected him, wondering in desperation suddenly what her life would be like at Bannerwick without Edward. ‘Perhaps it won’t be for very long. Perhaps I can persuade Aunt Tattie to get you another tutor—’

  ‘No more tutors,’ Nanny Tradescant interrupted, coming in with an armful of clean clothes which she deposited on the bed beside the trunk they were packing. ‘Edward is going off to school as all normal boys do, and there’s an end to this nonsense.’

  ‘What about me?’ Portia wondered. ‘Am I to go to school too?’

  ‘Of course you’re not. Girls like you don’t go to school. Girls like you don’t need to go to school. It’s my little soldier here who needs the educating.’ Nanny Tradescant ruffled what was left of Edward’s hair. ‘All you have to do, Miss Portia dear, is to get yourself the right husband. While my little man here has to help run the Empire.’

  Nanny Tradescant shut Edward’s Gladstone bag with one easy snap before leaving to fetch some more of his clean clothes.

  ‘Send me one of your drawings of a dragon, Edward, when you have time to do one, won’t you?’ Portia asked him.

  ‘Aunt Augustine says I’m to have a pony of my own and go out hunting,’ Edward said, lifting up the Gladstone bag to try out the weight. ‘You can ride it when you come to stay with us at Shepton, Porty. Maybe you’ll even be able to come and live with us, and leave all of them.’

  Us. Them. Us. Them. They were all to be separated now, maybe for ever. And it was all Portia’s fault, because if she hadn’t hesitated and Evie hadn’t snatched the letter, then everything would be just the same as it had been. They might have had to suffer doing the play, but finally it wouldn’t have mattered because they would still all be together and so everything would still be all right.

  An hour later Edward and a triumphant Aunt Augustine were gone. It was truly agonizing for Portia to watch poor Aunt Tattie doing her best not to cry in front of the servants, knowing all the time as she must that Edward’s going off with Aunt Augustine meant that she had lost him for ever, that he would never ever be one of their number any more.

  ‘How can she do this?’ Portia wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, she can, dearest, Augustine can do anything really. It’s your father, you see. Your father is far more like them than us. You know how it is, dearest, he likes the same things. So she knows you see that she would only have to tell him about – about something like the play rehearsals and well – those kinds of things and he would tell her to take Edward to live with her. There is nothing I can do now. Nothing any of us can do.’

  She had turned away from Portia with her face suddenly a mask, and Portia, who had after all caused her all the pain, found herself wishing and wishing that she would hold her breath and faint, or burst into tears and scream, anything that would show how she was really feeling, rather than this quiet self-control.

  That same sense of self-control reigned over Edward’s departure. He was in fine and excited fettle, looking up at Aunt Augustine with pink cheeks and eyes bright as if in his eyes Aunt Augustine was his heroine and his rescuer, and he didn’t mind who saw it.

  Everyone managed to wave Edward off as if it was the most normal thing in the world, without anyone seeing the need to recognize that possibly he was in fact leaving Bannerwick for the very last time.

  ‘Goodbye old chap, see you soon,’ Uncle Lampard said and patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘Goodbye Edward dearest,’ Aunt Tattie said. ‘Be a good boy now.’

  ‘Goodbye Edward,’ Portia said. ‘Don’t forget the drawing.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t feel carriage sick,’ Aunt Tattie sighed as they made their way sadly back into the drawing room where Uncle Lampard promptly sat down and ordered Louis to pour him a glass of something nifty.

  ‘Here’s to Augustine fallin’ off her horse,’ Uncle Lampard said when he got his drink, holding up his glass. ‘Death to the infidel.’

  ‘What will happen to Mr Swift now Edward’s gone?’ Portia wondered.

  ‘Yes, what shall we do with Mr Swift now, Lampard?’ Aunt Tattie wanted to know. ‘I suppose he could stay on and help Portia with her lessons, as well as Miss Collins, that might do.’

  ‘I don’t need lessons from Mr Swift, really I don’t.’

  ‘Whatever-she’s-called has hit the nail on the head. Rem acu tetigisti, Whatever-you’re-called,’ Lampard said and he winked at his sister. ‘Rem acu tetigisti.’

  ‘Don’t ask me what he’s talking about, Portia dear,’ Aunt Tattie sighed. ‘Latin is all Greek to me.’

  ‘No point in having a tutor if there’s no-one for him to tute, right? Thingy here’s completely right if you ask me, which I’ll be blowed if you ever do.’

  ‘All in due course, Lampard dearest, we must think of poor Mr Swift,’ Aunt Tattie said, speaking more to herself than anyone else. ‘Poor Mr Swift has not only lost his pupil but now his play is not to be performed, so imagine if you can his disappointment. So no, I would rather not discuss the matter of his future quite at the moment. Not quite now. Soon, of course. But now most certainly is not the time. No no, I would far rather not talk about the matter until we are all much calmer.’

  Of course Portia knew the real reason why Aunt Tattie did not wish to broach the subject of Mr Swift’s future, but it was not her place to mention it.

  * * *

  In fact everyone in the whole house now seemed to know that Mr Swift was staying on even though there was no purpose in him doing so, because Aunt Tattie had formed an attachment to him. And while Sir Lampard found his continued presence more than faintly ridiculous, with Edward now gone his sister spent an inordinate amount of time in his company under the pretence that it was her fault he was now without a pupil, allowing him to read her poetry in his inimitable manner in the drawing room or to stroll around the garde
ns enjoying endless discussions on the nature of the Aesthetic.

  Meanwhile Portia still had to endure the indignity of being educated by Miss Collins who had of late become not just increasingly eccentric but strangely melancholic, insisting on making Portia concentrate mainly on what Portia considered to be excessively sentimental poetry at the expense of most of her other subjects, asking for the verses to be read out loud to her during which time Miss Collins would sigh a great deal, or sit on the window seat staring mournfully up at the sky.

  Nanny Tradescant, however, was the one who was not going to put up with Mr Swift’s continued pointless residence.

  ‘That wretched man came here with one intention and one intention only,’ she said. ‘Namely not to prepare young Master Edward for the ways of the world but to feather his own particular nest. From the very moment he arrived here he set his hat at someone we know very well. I would say that he is nothing but the very worst kind of fortune hunter.’

  ‘But Uncle Lampard says there’s no money, so that can’t be true,’ Portia protested in return.

  ‘Poor is as poor does, Miss Portia. To a man like that your aunt is a pearl. She has standing, she has the entrée to Society, and he has and is nothing.’

  ‘So what will happen, do you think, Nanny? Particularly if there is no money left.’

  ‘One thing at a time, young lady. Nanny hasn’t got two heads on her, you know. Firstly, this family will never be poor, not as such. Not poor as in destitute. The Tradescants might be poorer than they were, but we are hardly all going to end up in the workhouse. For an instance I understand your aunt has a small nest egg in a portfolio of shares, so she is never going to starve, young lady. While Mr Swift on the other hand may well do if he does not get his hands on some money. Why, from the cut of him I shouldn’t imagine he has ever worn anything new in his life. So imagine, Portia, when someone as poor as he comes to a house as fine as Bannerwick, he must see it only in terms of great wealth. To someone as poor as Mr Swift, five hundred pounds is a fortune and anything above that figure unimaginable. So of course should he be able to win your aunt’s hand in marriage, why – he would find himself rich beyond his dreams. He would never have to work again for one day in his life.’

  ‘But surely Aunt Tattie would never consider marrying someone like Mr Swift, Nanny? Mr Swift is hardly what you would call suitable, is he?’

  ‘Your aunt, Miss Portia, is of an age where suitability is no longer the prime requisite.’

  ‘I don’t understand what that means.’

  ‘Nor need you. There are many men or should I perhaps say there were many men who were entirely suitable as a match for your aunt, but for a variety of reasons they all fell by the wayside. Until now your aunt loved only one man, but now she is older she is becoming vulnerable once more, you understand.’

  ‘No I don’t actually, Nanny.’

  ‘You will when you are older,’ Nanny murmured grimly.

  ‘Who was the one man Aunt Tattie loved?’

  ‘He was someone unsuitable, at least in her parents’ eyes he was,’ Nanny replied. ‘Not that it’s any of your concern, madam.’

  ‘As unsuitable as Mr Swift?’

  ‘Heavens above, no! Mr Swift is entirely unsuitable, while this young man was simply not particularly suitable. Your aunt was only a girl. She was seventeen at the time and since you must know, he was a musician who used to come and play in the small orchestras your great-uncle and aunt used to hire for their soirées and their dances. Such a match would never have done, do you see. He was quite the wrong class of young man altogether.’

  After a long silence, punctuated by occasional but extremely telling sighs from Nanny Tradescant during which Portia gave the matter much thought, she came to the conclusion that far from being rid of Mr Swift it looked as if they were to be saddled with him for ever more, particularly if he got his way and managed to get Aunt Tattie to marry him.

  Indeed for the next weeks all did indeed seem to be lost, so apparently inseparable had her aunt and Mr Swift become, with the result that Portia found herself sighing out loud almost as often as Miss Collins, although Portia’s sighs were from frustration and discontent rather than sheer melancholy. But then as autumn began to turn to winter the fates decided to step in once again, and with their intervention Portia found that the tide of luck which had seemed to be running against her turned once more in her favour.

  The turning point came one winter’s evening when she was playing cards in front of the library fire with her aunt, Uncle Lampard having taken himself off into the nearby town on what was always described as one of his jaunts. Bored with eternal whist Portia suggested to her aunt that they try playing bezique instead. As was usually the case with Aunt Tattie, however, as soon as a new game was embarked upon she became totally confused and had to be taken through the whole set of rules before a hand was dealt, and then when the first hand was finally set out an argument developed as to how to score a common marriage as opposed to a royal one and what was the point value of a double bezique. In order to settle the argument Portia was despatched to fetch Miss Collins who had fast become the final authority on card games in the household, but search Miss Collins’s quarters in the East Wing as thoroughly as she did Portia could find no trace of her governess and so returned to the library to report her lack of success.

  ‘Perhaps she’s still out walking,’ Portia suggested. ‘You know how she’s forever walking the grounds spouting her dreadful poetry out loud.’

  ‘Ssshhhh!’ Aunt Tattie warned, as if the library books had ears. ‘And of course she’s not out walking. It’s still simply teeming down with rain. Are you quite sure you looked everywhere?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Portia said, searching the shelves for Professor Hoffman’s revision of Hoyle’s Compendium of card games. ‘She’s not anywhere in the East Wing, I promise.’

  A moment later, while Portia was still searching for the book which would solve the argument, Aunt Tattie got up from her chair and went to the window, pulling back the curtain. She stood looking out and upwards across the windswept courtyard for a moment before announcing that there was a light on in the tower room occupied by Mr Swift. Portia idly remarked that Mr Swift had no interest in card games so he would be of no help to them whatsoever, only to find when she climbed down off the library steps her aunt had already left the room. Puzzled, she followed, hastening along the corridor that connected the tower to the main house and up the stone spiral staircase. Ahead of her she could hear the clatter of her aunt’s feet, and occasionally caught sight of the hem of her skirt as she hurried on above her up towards the room at the top of the stairs. For the life of her Portia could not imagine what the sudden urgency was, nor did she dare ask because the whole drama of the moment seemed to preclude it. Instead she kept her distance in case Aunt Tattie, realizing that she was being followed, might stop and send her back, thus depriving Portia of discovering whatever it was that waited behind the studded oak door now in sight on the landing.

  There was light flickering through the gap underneath it, which Portia took to be candlelight fluttering in the draught, and as Aunt Tattie stopped outside the door Portia could hear the soft sound of dropped voices, a small burst of laughter, then silence.

  Her aunt stood simply staring at the door, as if wondering what to do, while Portia hung back in the shadows still two or three steps down the stone spiral. To her there seemed to be no good reason why her aunt should not simply knock on the door now that it was obvious this was where Miss Collins was and tell her that she was wanted, yet Aunt Tattie still held back as if waiting for something.

  All at once came the sound of low moaning, as if from someone who had suddenly fallen ill. Aunt Tattie took a step back with a sharp intake of breath, putting both her still clasped hands to her mouth without ever taking her eyes off the door.

  While still remaining out of sight on the stairs Portia could not begin to imagine what could possibly be happening behind that heavy
oak nail-studded door. Then a sudden sharp loud cry of anguish from within convinced her that her governess was being murdered.

  She was about to rush up the last few stairs and say as much when Aunt Tattie, obviously arriving at the same conclusion, found her courage and all at once stepped forward swiftly to the door to knock on it with one lace-mittened hand. But the door was so heavy and her knock so faint beneath the now considerable crying and moaning that was coming from within that there was neither respite in the sound nor any response to her knock.

  ‘Miss Collins?’ she then called, her mittened hand cupped against the oak door. ‘Miss Collins? It is I, Miss Tradescant!’

  Even that supplication went unnoticed. Portia, now well and truly frightened, grabbed the iron banisters in front of her and called to her aunt above, while still remaining safely where she was on the stairs.

  ‘Don’t go in, Aunt Tattie!’ she urged, thinking that whatever was happening within the sight of it would be sure to make her aunt faint, and for no reason she could think of she added, ‘Wait and I’ll fetch Nanny!’

  Aunt Tattie looked round for a moment in surprise as she heard Portia calling up to her. Then, as if she could do nothing to help herself, she stepped forward and turned the large pendant iron handle and the unlocked door swung open at once.

  For a moment all was silence, but only for a moment because one second later there came the beginning of another sort of cry, an altogether different sound which was immediately muffled by something, as if the screamer – who in this case had to be Miss Collins – had either buried her head in something or had it buried for her.