A Bright Young Thing

by Brianne Moore

  As I reached the spiral staircase, Reilly came out of her room, calling, “Miss!”

  I paused and turned. “Yes, Reilly?”

  “Miss?” She stood in front of me. “Do you trust me now?”

  My heart broke, just a little, thinking of her pleading with her friend to help because her mistress’s chill convinced her she’d be sent packing any moment. I reached out and clasped both her hands, looked her full in the face. “Yes, Reilly, I trust you.”

  * * *

  What does one do with a scandal such as this? I was unaccustomed to handling such volatile information. Should I use it? Light the fuse and see what could be salvaged from the wreckage? Or keep it, and risk missing my chance and being left with something useless?

  Because once Millicent was married, she’d be safe. Oh, a rumor like this might sting a little. Might make her an object of sly grins over a few dinner and card tables, but that was all. It wouldn’t ruin her, by any means. But if it got out now, suitors might think twice about pursuing her. People love a scandal unless it’s about their own family.

  But heaven only knows how she might retaliate. I still had a spy to worry about. I still had secrets and people to protect.

  I was still thinking about it when I came down to the much-dreaded dinner with the Lush Wycombe party. This was all very formal, which meant the Wotting Park crowd was lined up in order of precedence as the guests arrived. I, the lowliest, was last in line, next to Laura.

  Joyce and David greeted the arriving guests at the door: Lord Woolmer, Laddie, Millicent, three other houseguests from Lush Wycombe, and Jeremy, who pulled up in his car right behind the others. He shook hands with both Laddie and Woolmer, asking about some horses and commiserating on their bad luck at Cheltenham that year. His greeting for Millicent, I noticed, was cooler. She pursed her lips but then glanced my way, smiled slyly, and slid an arm through Laddie’s, whispering in his ear.

  The guests were taken down the line and introduced. Lords received a curtsey and a hand to bend their heads over. Woolmer—a rotund, white-haired gentleman with a handlebar mustache —gave me a smile as well as a nod. His son, whose own foray into facial hair yielded a pencil-thin upper-lip fuzz, ignored my raised hand, refused to touch or acknowledge me, and turned away, clearing his throat against his fist. I was so thrown by this blatant snub I actually kept my hand dangling in midair for a moment. Jeremy rescued me from embarrassment by smoothly tucking it into the crook of his arm.

  “I hope you’ll allow me to see you in to dinner, Miss Davies,” he murmured.

  I smiled gratefully up at him. “You’re too kind.”

  Laura clapped Millicent heartily on the back. “Hullo, old girl! Sorry to have to tell you there’s no babies’ blood on the menu tonight.”

  Millicent remained unnervingly quiet over dinner, letting the others lead the conversation. Joyce had Lord Woolmer talking about his work in the House of Lords and what he thought the odds were of another general election in the coming year (“Oh, there’ll be one for sure. Did I tell you Laddie’s thinking of standing for Newcastle? A fine thing, I think, for a young man to be an MP. We all owe it to the country to serve.”). Millicent spoke only to Laddie, leaning over to whisper to him while laying a hand gently atop his. I watched, unable to ignore it, wondering what she was talking about. She looked at me often when she spoke. Was she talking about me? Telling him lies? “That wicked girl, you know what she’s like. I should never have her at my dinner table.”

  I wished I knew how to lip-read.

  When she wasn’t murmuring to Laddie, she was smirking at me every chance she got, almost as if she knew something. Had her spy passed along something useful to her? He must have, if she was still paying him. What? What did she know?

  I watched her, and I watched the footmen circling the table, eyeing us as they removed plates. Was she looking at one of them more than the others? I couldn’t tell anymore. Couldn’t figure out what was real and what I was conjuring up in my anxiety.

  After dinner I escaped to the terrace with a cup of coffee, wishing it was something stronger. I needed to clear my mind, steady my nerves. I saw Jeremy glancing through the open French windows and understood the subtle question on his face. I gestured that it was all right for him to join me.

  “Not that I blame you, but you seem very pensive tonight,” he observed after closing the window behind him. “Is it simply because of Lady Millicent?”

  “It is,” I admitted. “But not only because she’s here.”

  He grimaced sympathetically and offered me the glass of whisky in his hand. I took it, smiling my gratitude, and drank. We stood in silence for a little while.

  “May I ask your advice in confidence?” I asked.

  “Of course you can.”

  “If you knew something very damaging about someone who had hurt you, would you use it? Or would that just seem … I don’t know, petty? Or cowardly?”

  He took his time answering. “It might,” he acknowledged. “I suppose it depends on how widespread the damage would be. One can’t ignore the innocent bystander.”

  I had considered that. This would certainly harm Millicent, but Cee would be caught up in it as well. She seemed to have such a romantic notion of her parents’ married life, it would be a shame to damage that. And her father too: how much did he know? He’d evidently thought Millicent was his child when she was born, and he had fond memories of his wife. This wouldn’t kill, but it would surely wound.

  And Collins was unlikely to escape. Millicent would surely trace the story back to her, and Collins would be dismissed without a reference. She’d be unemployable.

  “If I may be forgiven for falling back on a naval metaphor,” said Jeremy, “if your ship has been hit and is sinking, it’s tempting to ram the enemy ship. And it may be that’s the best course: your enemy dies with you. But you can’t ram the ship thinking you’ll keep your own afloat on the wreckage. There is no salvation here: all hands go down.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought too.”

  He took my hand and squeezed it. “Don’t play her game. It’s not worthy of you.”

  “I think you think more highly of me than I deserve,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “Would you be cheered by some cautiously good news?”

  “I’ll be cautiously cheered,” I answered.

  “Well, then: I think I have found a mine owner.”

  “You haven’t!” I gasped, feeling my heart lift. Perhaps I could repay Reilly for what she’d done for me.

  Jeremy laughed, buoyed up by my excitement. “I have. One of my Dartmouth classmates comes from a mining family. He’s stationed at Portsmouth, so I thought I’d go and pay him a visit.”

  “Oh, Jeremy, that’s wonderful! I could almost kiss you!”

  His smile teased, a little. “Almost?”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said Laura, poking her head out, “but Joyce is summoning everyone. The show’s starting.”

  The library had been set up like a miniature cinema, with a sheet stretched over the bookshelves on one wall and rows of chairs in front. Joyce and the butler fussed with a projector as we all filed in and sat down.

  “Nearly ready,” Joyce said, placing a record on the gramophone. She then turned off the lights and slipped into a chair between David and Woolmer as “I Wanna Be Loved By You” spilled from the gramophone and a panning image of a mansion flickered onto the makeshift screen.

  “Oh, Lush Wycombe!” exclaimed one of the ladies Woolmer had brought along.

  “That’s right,” Joyce confirmed. “Heavens, how did these films get in here? Ah, well, we can still enjoy them!”

  The film moved from Lush Wycombe—a Gothic sprawl of a place—to a cottage smaller than the room we were sat in, with moss growing on the roof and two half-naked toddlers cavorting out front.

  “You know where this is, don’t you, Lord Woolmer?” said Joyce. “This is the cottage the Hastings family lives in on your estate. Lovely peopl
e! Two parents, two grandparents, seven darling children, and Mrs. Hastings’s sister, all under one roof! I imagine things would be much easier for them if they had indoor plumbing and their roof didn’t leak, but these things are such luxuries.”

  Woolmer shifted uncomfortably in his seat and cleared his throat.

  The film moved on to another family. An exhausted-looking woman and an alarmingly thin teenage boy were struggling to wrangle some cows.

  “Oh, and these are the Mitchells,” Joyce went on. “Poor Mrs. Mitchell lost her husband in the war, and her brother has terrible shell-shock, so it’s just her and her boy trying to work the farm. They’re up every day at four o’clock—can you imagine!—milking those cows before the boy goes off to school. They manage to keep body and soul together, but I hear dairy prices are taking a terrible downturn—surely that’s not true, Lord Woolmer? Of course you and the other members of the House of Lords would do something about that. Otherwise, how will your own tenants manage to pay their rent?” She turned questioningly to Woolmer, who pointedly avoided her gaze.

  Joyce faced forward as we moved on to scenes from a city. “Laddie, you’ll appreciate this! Newcastle! Your future constituency!” Up came an image of a mass of men bunched at the tall, spiked gates of a shipyard. A man came out of the gates, and the waiting workers surged forward. “Please don’t forget these good men, Laddie, who built England’s great ships and are now in desperate want of work. Their wives and children”—thin-faced women and children hauled heavy buckets of water and waste, queued at soup kitchens and hawked family trinkets—“face terrible need because the dole simply isn’t enough. I tried to do what I could, but …” She shrugged. “I’m only one woman. But surely you gentlemen have a plan! You always do have a plan, don’t you? To fix things?”

  The record ended, leaving the gramophone to go, hic, hic, hic, but nobody got up to change or restart it. Nobody seemed to know what to do. The Newcastle images disappeared, and the Arc de Triomphe flickered into view. David pranced into the frame and pretended to heave the distant Arc up onto his shoulder. “Oh, here are the honeymoon films,” said Joyce in a “silly me!” tone. “Paris was enchanting, but it was nothing to Germany! You know, we were there during the election, and I’ll say this for the Nazi party: they do like a parade, and they do celebrate. I’ve never known anyone to be so excited to come in second place!” This was accompanied by images of a frantic, swastika-flag-waving crowd at a rally, and then shops and businesses with their windows smashed. In one shot, a man with a beard, wearing a skullcap, picked through the debris of his ruined livelihood.

  “Apparently there was quite a bit of celebrating the first day the Reichstag reconvened,” Joyce told us. “I believe we have India next.”

  Lord Woolmer jumped to his feet. “Heavens, how late it is!” he said stiffly. “You’ll forgive us if we see the rest of this some other time, Mrs. Bradbury?”

  “Of course, Lord Woolmer,” Joyce purred. “We’ll see you out.”

  As soon as the front door closed behind the guests, David turned on his wife.

  “You did that on purpose!” he sputtered.

  “Dear me, there must have been a mix-up with the editing,” Joyce responded disingenuously. “What a silly goose I am!”

  “That was outrageous, Joyce!” he continued, even in the face of his wife’s cool-eyed indifference to his rage. “Those are our neighbors!”

  “For God’s sake, David, if you’re going to scold your wife like a child, at least have the decency to do it in her dressing room, out of sight of the guests,” said Laura.

  David shook his head, sputtered, and stomped off toward the billiards room.

  “I think I’ll go see if I can smooth things over,” Jeremy offered.

  Laura smiled wryly at Joyce. “You sly sausage. I’m glad to see I’ve taught you a thing or two.”

  Joyce pretended to be very interested in a bracelet. “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “You have a member of the House of Lords—two, if you count Jeremy—and a possible future MP to dine so you can trap them into a shame-filled social lecture. Brava, dearest. Honestly, I always thought it’d be Cee who’d have the do-gooder streak.”

  Joyce shrugged. “I filmed what I saw. Everyone can draw their own conclusions.”

  Laura planted both hands on her hips. “Don’t be coy with me, missus. That day we were meant to lunch in New York, you went to the Hooverville, didn’t you? And then you ran up an astonishing bill at Macy’s. I’d bet good money most of the people in the park received a very welcome parcel from a mysterious benefactress that day.”

  Joyce left off the bracelet and looked up at us. “Have you been through there, Laura? All those people—decent people, who’ve worked hard for years and lost it all through no fault of their own—in shacks and threadbare clothes, cooking tinned beans over open fires, if they’re lucky enough to even have that. Winter was coming on, and they needed coats and blankets. I could give them that.”

  I felt deeply ashamed of myself for failing to do anything to help anyone other than myself, and for failing to give Joyce the credit she was obviously due. I glanced at Laura and saw her bite her lip, the only sign that she, too, was thinking the same.

  “I’ll be sure to tell David he’s a heel if he gives you grief over this,” Laura said.

  “Don’t bother, he’ll get past it,” Joyce told her. “I’m to bed. Good night, ladies.”

  We watched her go up, admiring her boldness in silence.

  “If she achieves nothing else, she at least enraged Millicent, and I support that,” said Laura. “She was practically steaming at those films from Germany.” She glanced at a nearby clock and bit her lip again. “I have some phone calls to make now.” She strode toward the telephone, and as I ascended the staircase, I heard her say, “Yes, I need to schedule a call to Albany, please, and then there’ll be three to New York City.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Our host and hostess were no longer on speaking terms. He spent his days shut up in the billiards room or out somewhere. Joyce shrugged it off and threw herself into preparations for the fete with an enthusiasm that actually surprised me.

  “Good heavens, Joyce, it’s just a little village fete,” Laura commented after Joyce had filled us in on her increasingly elaborate plans.

  “It’s not just a little village fete; it raises funds for the Ladies’ Benevolent Society,” Joyce countered. “Do you know what they do?”

  “Munitions distribution?” Laura guessed.

  Joyce rolled her eyes. “They provide support for those in the neighborhood who find themselves wanting. And it’s becoming dashed difficult for them just now because so many more people are in need, and fewer people have extra money to give. So this fete is important! If you paused in your jumping jacks or whatever it is you’re doing, you’d realize this. Lord! You’re just like your brother: can’t be bothered to care about anything that’s important or doesn’t directly affect you.”

  “I resent that,” Laura protested. “Do you have any idea how many charity auctions I’ve been dragged to this past year? And I’ll have you know: I always overbid.”

  I helped Joyce as much as I could, reining in some of the more extravagant ideas and planning for Freddie’s arrival. I needed to move things along there as quickly as possible, to neutralize the threat from Millicent. I was already anxious, looking over my shoulder constantly, wondering if my mail had been read, speaking to Reilly and most of the others in whispers. (“What’s wrong with you?” Laura demanded. “Speak up!”)

  Jeremy left for Portsmouth the Monday after the dinner party, and that afternoon I went to the station to collect Freddie.

  “Miss Davies!” Freddie called, hopping onto the platform as soon as the train stopped. He bounded over, flushed and sweaty, and grabbed my hand. “Glad to see you! Gosh, you are the cat’s pajamas, aren’t you? Not the sort to hold it against a fellow when he’s been at the champagne. I mean, it was a wedding, and y
ou did send that note—”

  “Enough, Freddie.” I steered him into the station’s tiny (and thankfully empty) waiting room and sat him down on a bench. I stood over him, hands on hips, giving my best schoolmarm glare. It must have worked, because he visibly shrank.

  “First of all, Freddie, I want to make it very clear that you’ve put me in a terrible spot. You know that now, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “My aunt is scandalized. She’s going to throw me out of her house. I may be homeless because of you, Freddie!”

  He whimpered. “Listen, I’ll talk to her. She’s all right, isn’t she? She’ll listen.”

  “No, you most certainly are not going to talk to my aunt, Freddie. You’re going to talk to me. Are you sober?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, is it more, or less? Say ‘indubitably.’”

  He blinked up at me. “In-dewb-it-a-blee?”

  I sighed. “That’ll have to do. Tell me straight: Is there any hope at all for Vandemark Rubber?”

  “Oh, well, there’s always hope, isn’t there?” He retrieved a handkerchief and began mopping his glistening forehead. “Show’s not over until the fat lady sings, right?”

  I clenched both fists, longing to smack him. “Freddie …”

  Something about my blazing eyes, or tone, knocked the joking out of him. “It’s not hopeless,” he said. “There were one or two others who thought of leaving, but I think I’ve convinced them to stay.” He beamed, pleased with himself. “The sisters didn’t think I’d manage it, but by gum I did! They always did think I was a sap.” He glowered.

  “So you’ve stemmed the tide—for now—but what about replacing Porter’s order? Your father made it sound like the whole company rested on it.”

  “Yes, that was a blow,” he admitted. “And I’m dashed if I know what to do about it right now. We’ll have to find someone else who needs tires. Lots of them!”

  “I might have something. But I need to know that anyone who orders from Vandemark will get their tires. Why were Porter’s orders so late?”