Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus

by Beaton, M. C.

  “Yes, madam.”

  Ginny’s clear blue gaze took in the elegant tea table and the well-appointed drawing room beyond.

  “It seems to me you do an excellent job, Harvey,” she said. “Just keep on doing it and I shall be very happy.”

  “Yes, madam,” said the much-gratified Harvey, beaming, bowing, and withdrawing.

  “So that’s that,” said Ginny calmly. “What else is there?”

  Alicia’s olive skin began to take on a shade of pink. “There’re… oh, so many things, my dear. You will be presented at Court. You must learn to curtsy—”

  “Oh, I can do that… very well,” said Ginny.

  Alicia did not know quite how it happened but she had been made to feel as if she had just committed the grossest of impertinences. She muttered some excuse, rose hurriedly from the table, and left.

  Lord Gerald leaned forward. “Mr. Frayne very kindly left me the contents of his library in his will, Miss Bloggs. Perhaps you would care to look over the shelves when you have time. If there is anything you would particularly like, perhaps you would care to let me know… Miss Bloggs?”

  He stared across the table as if he could not believe his eyes. Miss Ginny Bloggs had fallen neatly, suddenly, and quietly asleep.

  Lord Gerald leaned back in his chair and battled with a series of unaccustomed emotions. Never had any girl or woman turned her eyes from him, let alone dropped off to sleep! Common, common girl! He wanted to shake her till her teeth rattled. How dare she sit there like the Sleeping Beauty, looking so fragile, so infinitely feminine, so sickening!

  There was an embarrassed little silence. Then Barbara Briggs coughed very loudly in Ginny’s ear and Ginny woke up as simply and as suddenly as she had fallen asleep.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, yawning, “but I must lie down.”

  “Of course,” said Barbara. “I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  Ginny rose gracefully, and then turned and smiled up at Lord Gerald. “You were saying something or other about the library. I’m sorry I fell asleep. But we shall have a good long gossip about it this evening,” said Ginny comfortingly, “so don’t worry about a thing.”

  And with that, she gave him a motherly pat on his well-tailored sleeve and drifted off upstairs.

  “She’s impossible,” raged Lord Gerald de Fremney. “Utterly impossible!”

  Ginny was still yawning as a maid undressed her and took the pins from her soft gold hair. Then the maid wrapped her in a kimono and brushed her hair with long, even strokes until it flowed in a shining golden cascade down Ginny’s back. When the maid had gone, Miss Ginny Bloggs climbed into the four-poster bed, vacated by the late and unlamented Mr. Frayne, and stared blankly at the ceiling. Slowly one small hand crept down and cautiously fingered the silk ribbons that were threaded through the sheets. Then the wide blue eyes stared around the room, from the gardenias at the window in their luster bowl to the marble washstand with its copper jugs of hot water covered by beribboned cozies bearing the Frayne crest. A portrait of Mr. Frayne stared down at her from above an Adam fireplace. Ginny stared back, and then with one blink of her blue eyes, fell fast asleep.

  The four relatives met in the library and locked the door.

  Cyril was the first to speak. “She c-can’t be as stupid as she looks,” he said.

  “Chats over the fence, indeed,” sneered Tansy.

  “You’d better be careful, Tansy,” warned Barbara sweetly. “Our dear Miss Bloggs implied you were not right in the head.”

  “Useless little doll,” grumbled Jeffrey, fortifying himself from a decanter. “Needs putting in her place.”

  “She’ll be put in her place this evening, all right,” said Tansy grimly. “Let’s make sure everyone dresses up to the nines and makes her feel small. And let’s all use the new small talk—you know, the Italian stuff. She’ll never know what we are saying. And as for you, Cyril, you’ve been playing simply frightful practical jokes at house parties for as long as I can remember. Why not play some on Miss Bloggs tonight?”

  “I c-can’t h-have been p-playing practical jokes as l-long as you c-can remember,” said Cyril, “’cos you’re at least twice as old as I am.”

  “I am not,” cried Tansy, outraged.

  “Well, you look it,” said Cyril gleefully.

  “Steady on! Steady the buffs!” cried Jeffrey. “We’ll never get to a plan of action if we quarrel among ourselves. Let’s just start by making things a bit uncomfortable for the gel, heh, what?”

  “We mustn’t make it too obvious,” said Barbara nervously. “After all, we are being paid to bring her out, so to speak.”

  “We’ll bring her out, all right,” said Tansy grimly. “We’ll bring Miss Ginny Bloggs out in a way that no debutante has been brought out before!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The double doors of the drawing room had been thrown open to reveal a blue salon and that in turn led to a green salon, the three rooms forming the stage—or the battle-ground—all laid out in preparation for the humiliation of Ginny Bloggs.

  “I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” muttered Barbara to Tansy.

  Tansy raised her thin eyebrows. “Something in sateen, or something vulgar like that, I should imagine,” she barked.

  Tansy felt that she herself was looking magnificent. She was dressed in black satin, a long tube of a dress, which bristled with aigrettes and sparkled with jet embroidery.

  Barbara, on the other hand, was dressed in baby-blue satin with a large collar of diamonds. The diamonds were in fact a very good imitation, the originals having been sold long ago. She wore a bandeau studded with diamanté, which supported one white osprey feather. She felt she looked like the lady of the manor and Tansy depressed her considerably by telling her she looked like a female novelist.

  Cyril and Jeffrey fidgeted beside them, both men enduring the social hell of boiled shirts. Cyril’s studs were genuine diamonds, a present from a lady poet with more money than inspiration, and he was seriously thinking of selling them and asking Barbara where she had had hers copied.

  “There’s dear Lady George,” said Jeffrey, pointing to an enormous woman who had just entered and was cleaving a path through the guests rather in the manner of a battleship plowing up The Solent. “She’s very much on our side, you know.”

  Lady George was, in fact, the Lady Georgina Breem but she preferred to be called George. It made her feel, she said, as if everyone was a chum.

  “Well, where is she?” she demanded, heaving to beside the four relatives and screwing a monocle in her eye.

  “N-not here yet,” muttered Cyril.

  “What’s she like?” demanded George, her large powdered face peering over a hedge of feather boa.

  “Qu-quite p-pretty,” Cyril was beginning, but he was interrupted by a snort from Jeffrey. “Pretty. Well, I suppose she is in a common sort of way. No style, eh what?”

  “Know what you mean,” said Lady George. “Got a cook just like that. Looks marvelous in uniform but in mufti, she’s as common as the day.”

  “Good God,” said Tansy.

  Miss Ginny Bloggs had made her entrance.

  And what an entrance!

  She was dressed in charmeuse silk, the color of tender young spring leaves. It was swept up at the back into a saucy little bustle reminiscent of the 1870s that accentuated the ridiculous size of her slender waist. It was cut low on the bosom, revealing that Ginny had an excellent pair of shoulders. The whole gown screamed Paris from every stitch. One millimeter lower at the neck and the gown would have been vulgar, one millimeter higher and it would have been dowdy. Her golden hair was dressed low on her forehead and her soft childish mouth was free of rouge. She looked all of seventeen years old. Miss Ginny Bloggs was, in fact, all of nineteen.

  The house party had been swelled by the arrival of several families from the local county. Hard, insolent eyes bored into Ginny, and Ginny stared calmly back at them with her wide-eyed, slightly vacant stare.
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br />   Poor child, thought Lord Gerald, I simply must go and rescue her. He took a step forward and then stopped. Ginny now seemed to be surrounded by every man in the room while the women formed a sort of glaring circle of eyes on the outside. He turned to Alicia Benson and said with a half-laugh, “And to think, a minute ago I felt that I had to rescue her.”

  “She’s really quite a pretty little thing,” said Alicia, tugging furtively at her own dress and wondering if a William Morris pattern had been quite the thing. Her mother had dryly remarked that she looked exactly like a roll of wallpaper. “But where did she get the money to buy that gown? It looks most frightfully expensive. Do you think she found some elderly gentleman like Sir Philip Vere to pay for her wardrobe?”

  Lord Gerald looked at his companion in patent surprise and Alicia blushed for the second time. The first time had been when she had lost her virginity to a young Bolshevist, lying on the floor among his pamphlets advocating the New World in his flat in Bloomsbury. Alicia felt she had been caught out in that most despicable of old-fashioned feminine faults—petty jealousy. She decided to go right over and be extra sweet to Ginny.

  “Hullo, Miss Bloggs,” she said in a breezy way, pushing her way to the front of Ginny’s court of admirers. “Remember me? I’m Alicia Benson. We met at tea this afternoon.”

  “Of course I do,” said Ginny pleasantly. “You want me to help you in your good works. Am I right?”

  Alicia gave a brittle laugh. “No, no, my dear. You misunderstood me. I was simply trying to anticipate any social problems you might come across.”

  “Such as… ?” queried Ginny gently.

  Once again Alicia had that nagging feeling that she was being impertinent but she launched on regardless.

  “For example,” she said, “a correct accent is most important. I am very glad you have not got a Lancashire accent, Miss Bloggs.”

  “You are?” Ginny looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Well, you see, a Lancashire accent would be such a drawback and you do come from Bolton and—”

  “Where do you come from, Miss Benson?” asked Ginny.

  “Why… London.”

  “But you do not have a cockney accent.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why should you expect me to have a Lancashire accent?” asked Ginny in a puzzled voice.

  Because you come from the lower classes, screamed a voice inside Alicia’s brain but she left the thought unsaid because several of the men were beginning to look at her in a way she did not like and Alicia prided herself on being a good sport where men were concerned.

  She tried to pass it off with a light laugh, especially since she noticed Gerald had joined the group. “Oh, we don’t talk the same language,” she said.

  Ginny’s blue eyes clouded with concern. “I am sorry,” she said gently. “I did not realize you were a foreigner. How difficult for you! But let me tell you, I think you speak English remarkably well.”

  Gerald let out an unmanly giggle as Alicia stood there, opening and shutting her mouth like a landed carp.

  “Do you think I could have something to drink?” queried Ginny. The gentlemen wildly snatched glasses of champagne from the trays carried by the footmen until Ginny found she was being offered about a dozen glasses.

  “Now, which one shall I pick?” she said with a delightfully roguish smile, and Lord Gerald gloomily watched the play of an enchanting little dimple on Ginny’s cheek and thought to himself, A flirt. I might have guessed.

  “Mine, mine, mine,” the men were crying.

  “I know,” said Ginny suddenly. “I’ll take a tiny little sip out of each and then we’ll all be happy.”

  This was loudly applauded and Lord Gerald and Alicia walked to the other side of the room and stood looking out onto the terrace in silence.

  Alicia was the first to break it. “Ginny Bloggs is the most insufferable common little girl I have ever met. And to think I was prepared to give her the benefit of my advice! I must have been mad.”

  Now, Lord Gerald, who had been thinking some pretty hard thoughts about Ginny himself, found himself irrationally annoyed with Alicia.

  “There was no need for you to be so patronizing. Miss Bloggs is really uncommonly stupid but seems a pleasant-natured girl, for all that.”

  “How can you say that?” demanded Alicia. “Miss Bloggs is everything you despise in a woman—ogling and flirting.”

  “Exactly,” he said coldly. “But I dislike snobbery just as much. Come, Alicia. It is not like us to quarrel.”

  Dinner was a splendid affair. Exotic course followed exotic course and the guests murmured and exclaimed in surprise as each new delicacy was placed in front of them. Mr. Frayne, although he had spent a great deal of money on the upkeep of his house, had spent none on his table.

  Goggling with food and flushed with wine, Jeffrey Beardington-Smythe decided it was time to assert himself; to show this distinguished company that he was the true master of Courtney.

  “Harvey!” he called loudly to the butler. “This food is simply delicious. My compliments to the chef. I would never have believed the kitchens of this house could have produced such a banquet. ’Pon my soul, no, no, no, I wouldn’t.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Harvey gravely. “I confess to being surprised myself. We were inspired by the mistress, sir. It was her suggestion.”

  Everyone looked at Ginny in amazement but Ginny was demolishing her ninth course with the same relish as her first and did not appear to have heard.

  Lord Gerald looked narrowly at the beautiful top of Ginny’s head. How could a coal merchant’s daughter even have heard of all these exotic foreign dishes, let alone know how to order them. One could not, of course, question Harvey. But Harvey would undoubtedly know the answer.

  And Harvey did. He was remembering his strange interview with the mistress that had taken place earlier in the evening.

  Harvey and the cook and the housekeeper had had a hurried consultation downstairs. As the new mistress, said the cook, Mrs. Silver, Miss Bloggs should be allowed to see the evening’s menu and suggest any last-minute alterations. But “her, being what she was,” would probably only know about things like Lancashire hot pot and Irish stew. “I wouldn’t know how to deal with her, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Silver. “So you’d better go up there yourself, Mr. Harvey.”

  A footman was sent, and the message came promptly back that Miss Bloggs would be pleased to see Harvey.

  She was sitting in a chair, looking vacantly out of the window, when he entered. He coughed politely and said, “This is the menu for tonight, miss. Cook wondered if you would like to make any alterations.”

  Ginny squinted slightly at the gilt-edged card. “Just what I used to have at home for Sunday dinner,” she had commented vaguely. And then she said in a slightly sharper tone, “Why is that?”

  “The late Mr. Frayne,” said Harvey, “did not believe in wasting money on food. He despised French cooking and ‘all that foreign muck’ as he called it.”

  “Perhaps Cook does not like or does not know how to cook foreign muck?” suggested Ginny gently.

  “But she does, madam, miss… madam. She does. She’s always threatening to move to a new place where they’ll appreciate her.”

  “Then why doesn’t she?” asked Ginny with the simple absorbed interest of a child.

  “It’s her sister, madam, what is poorly. She lives in the village nearby and Mrs. Silver takes care of her.”

  “Mrs. Silver being the cook.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  There was a long silence while Ginny picked up a silver pencil and began to rap it on her teeth in an irritating manner.

  Her next question, as he said afterward, “shook him rigid.”

  “When did any of you last receive an increase in salary?”

  “We haven’t, madam. Our wages have stayed the same since we was employed.”

  “And why did you not all find other positions?”

/>   “There ain’t any,” said Harvey, forgetting himself. “The queues at the agencies are a mile long.”

  Ginny yawned and stared out of the window again.

  “Do I have a steward or a secretary, Harvey?”

  “No, madam.”

  “Oh, dear, I shall just have to get you to do it then, Harvey.”

  “Do what, madam?” asked Harvey woodenly, wondering if his mistress was slightly off her nut.

  The blue eyes surveyed him with complete astonishment. “Why, give all the staff that deserve it a raise.” Harvey’s mouth fell open. “More money,” explained Ginny patiently.

  Harvey appeared to come to life. A large smile broke up his austere features. “Oh, thank you, madam,” he said. And then, remembering his duties, “The menus?”

  “Yes,” said Ginny. “I’m sure Mr. Frayne was a great hoarder… of food, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, madam. He believed to the last that the Boers were going to invade Britain and he had special storage rooms built.”

  “Open them then,” said Ginny with a vague smile, “and tell Mrs. Silver to allow her talents full play.” Her brow suddenly creased as if the effort of thought were too much for her. “And since it’s such short notice, you had better hire extra help from the village.”

  And that had been that, thought Harvey with a reminiscent smile, thinking of his own splendid dinner, which would be waiting for him in the housekeeper’s parlor.

  Tansy sat poised on the edge of her chair. She felt sure that Ginny would not know enough to usher the ladies from the table at the end of the meal and leave the gentlemen to their port. Then she, Tansy, would take over as hostess—as she should have been in the first place. Her thin bosom heaved and the jet embroidery glittered as she crouched to spring—so to speak—and put Miss Bloggs in her place.

  She glanced imperiously around the table in the best manner and coughed gently to catch the eyes of the other ladies as a signal to leave, but she noticed, to her intense irritation, that Ginny had risen and that that idiot Barbara was simpering out of the door after her. There was nothing else for Tansy to do but follow meekly in their wake.