Kitty went up to her room in a happy daze to find another surprise. A fire was blazing merrily on the hearth and the scuttle beside it was topped up with a generous supply of coals. Feeling dimly that it was wrong to be so comfortable on the day of her father’s funeral, Kitty went to bed. She would not have been so happy had she known the plans in her mother’s head.
Mrs. Harrison was shrewd enough to know that money alone would not allow her into the hallowed circles of top Society. She would need a sponsor—some impoverished female of impeccable background. Without consulting any of her local acquaintances who would have considered it vulgar and indecent on the day of her husband’s funeral, she had gone to the offices of the Times and had had an advertisement inserted in the personal column. She would await the results of that, before making her next move.
Making sure the curtains were tightly drawn, she picked up a bottle of her husband’s best brandy and poured herself a generous goblet and, with a pleasurable feeling of sin, threw an enormous shovel of coal on the already blazing fire.
The next week produced a surprising number of replies to Mrs. Harrison’s advertisement. With a gimlet eye on Burke’s Peerage, she vetted every name until she came to that of Lady Amelia Henley. Lady Henley was the wife of the late Sir George Henley, a Tory M.P. of apoplectic disposition, who had died the previous year at the opening day of Ascot races. Mrs. Harrison remembered the gossip at the time in the newspapers and subsequent mention of Lady Henley at various society events. She was sure this was an answer to her prayers and, with a trembling hand, penned a letter to Lady Henley asking her to call.
At the time fixed, a hansom deposited Lady Henley outside the Harrison home. Mrs. Harrison took gleeful note of the hansom from behind the lace curtains of the parlor window. So Lady Henley had no private carriage!
Lady Henley stood on the pavement outside for a few seconds, surveying the house. She was a huge, massive woman encased from throat to heel in chinchilla. A pair of small black eyes surveyed the world from under the eaves of a black fur hat. She kicked open the gate with her smart buttoned boot and came lumbering slowly up the path like some rare species of bear.
Her first words of greeting were, as Mrs. Harrison was later to learn to her cost, entirely in character.
“Poky little place you’ve got here. You sure you’ve got money?”
Mrs. Harrison smiled sourly and ushered her into the parlor and then set about to impress Lady Henley with the exact magnitude of the Harrison fortune.
“Quite a tidy sum,” said Lady Henley, stuffing a cream cake into her capacious mouth. “Well, do you want me or not?”
“It depends on your terms,” replied Mrs. Harrison, hypnotized, as cake after cake disappeared into Lady Henley’s maw. She gave the impression of inhaling pastry rather than eating it.
“My terms are this,” she said indistinctly through a barrier of cream sponge. “I’ve got this great house on Park Lane and I can’t afford it. You take it over, servants and all, and I’ll make sure you’re presented everywhere. As for what you’ll pay me—leave that to m’lawyer to settle. There’s a girl y’ say?”
“My daughter, Kitty,” said Mrs. Harrison, ringing the bell. The parlormaid slouched in. “Lumley fetch Miss Kitty.” Lumley stood for what seemed an age with her mouth open until the request was ponderously sorted out in her slow brain and slouched out again.
“An old retainer, you know,” simpered Mrs. Harrison. She spoke to deaf ears. Lady Henley was bent over the cake stand. Contrary to custom, instead of starting with the thin cucumber sandwiches on the bottom and working her way up through the layers of buns and tea cakes and scones to the cream cakes at the top, Lady Henley had started eating the other way around. As Kitty entered the room, Lady Henley seemed surprised by the empty cake plate and moved her huge hand down to the fruitcake on the plate below.
She straightened up with a slice of cake halfway to her mouth and stared at the girl in the doorway. Kitty stood there, looking questioningly at Lady Henley, with her big gray eyes. Lady Henley felt a twinge of resentment. This stockbroker’s daughter had a natural elegance, a natural breeding, which under the circumstances, she had no right to have. Lady Henley posted the cake into the mailbox of her mouth and reached for another tea cake, keeping her eyes fastened on Kitty.
“Lots of material there. But raw. Very raw. Needs polishing. Well, when I’ve finished with you, you’ll marry a lord.”
Mrs. Harrison hesitated. Could she endure living with this woman?
She addressed Lady Henley. “My name is Euphemia.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Since we are to become friends, I shall call you ‘Amelia’ and you may call me ‘Euphemia.’”
There was a silence as light colorless eyes met small black ones. Lady Henley recognized the steel in Mrs. Harrison’s voice. After all, she heard it in the voices of her creditors nearly every day. “Euphemia,” she said sourly.
The first hurdle was over.
“We met Lord Peter Chesworth at church one Sunday,” said Mrs. Harrison. “I gather he is not married?”
“No,” replied Lady Henley, her voice nearly drowning in Bath bun. “Furthermore, he’s looking for a rich wife. Told me so the other day. He loves nothing but that great pile of his at Reamington. But it eats up the money and he’s talking about taking out a mortgage.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Harrison with a sidelong glance at Kitty. “Indeed.”
“I can get your daughter invitations to everywhere he goes during the season,” said the remains of the Bath bun.
The next hurdle was over. Both middle-aged women stared at each other in silent agreement.
“Then I think we should discuss the matter of money in more detail before broaching it with our lawyers. Don’t you agree… Amelia?”
Lady Henley looked at a cucumber sandwich and sighed. “Oh, all right.”
Kitty was dismissed. She ran lightly up the stairs to her room to sit before her precious picture and dream of stepping through the frame into that happy, painted world.
Spring at last came to the Heath. The new grass turned and rolled in the sun all the way to Highgate. During the light evenings when the remains of winter hung on in the bluish hue at the end of the Hampstead streets and lanes, the faint sound of the German band playing in the tearooms at the Vale of Heath could be heard, jauntily banishing the middle-class night.
But the Harrisons’ old home remained deserted with a few weedy daffodils blowing around the FOR SALE sign in the front garden. The Harrisons had taken up residence in Park Lane.
Kitty was preparing for her first ball. She had been kept out of sight until a truly massive wardrobe of clothes suitable for a debutante had been arranged. Lady Henley had ruthlessly instructed Mrs. Harrison to say that her husband had died the previous year. “Can’t have the girl going about in black.”
Kitty had often dreamt of getting ready for her first dance, and what she would wear, and how she would fix her hair. Until now, she had refused to let her French maid, Colette, dress her, but Colette had reported the fact to Lady Henley and Lady Henley and a huge plate of petits fours had assaulted the privacy of Kitty’s bedroom to “put an end to such shopkeeper nonsense.”
Poor Kitty! To have to stand naked in front of a supercilious French maid and endure the touch of her long, cold fingers, seemed humiliation indeed.
First her silk chemise was put on. Then the silk stockings were smoothed over her legs and clipped to the long, heavily-boned stays. Colette pulled the lacings round the waist with what seemed unnecessary savagery and then fastened pads on the hips and bust to achieve the hourglass effect. Then her drawers were hauled on, then her petticoat, and then the ball gown.
The ball gown was of simple white taffeta sweeping to a small train at the back and was cut lower on the bosom than most debutante dresses. But Lady Henley had crudely pointed out that if you wanted to sell the goods, you had to present them to their best advantage.
Her hair was piled up on her head over more pads and dressed with artificial flowers. A long fan with fringes was put in her hand, a string of pearls placed around her neck, and Kitty was ready to meet her new social contemporaries for the first time.
Lady Henley and her mother rose and stared at Kitty as she shyly entered the drawing room. Mrs. Harrison’s eyes filled with sentimental tears. “Why, you look really pretty.”
Lady Henley snorted and walked slowly around the girl, looking her up and down. “Not bad. Not bad at all,” she commented finally. “But you need a bit of animation. Pour her a glass of sherry, Euphemia.”
Mrs. Harrison moved stiffly across the room in all the glory of shot taffeta, a tremendous bustle and a new diamond necklace that she kept fingering nervously to make sure it was still there.
Lady Henley was encased in a purple silk dress of an old-fashioned cut showing a great deal of mottled bosom. A collar of large and dirty diamonds was clasped round the rolls of fat on her neck.
All three sat bolt upright with their drinks, restricted by their heavy stays. The drawing room, like the rest of the mansion in Park Lane, was light, charming, and characterless. Lady Henley had employed the services of an expert decorator and then imposed none of her heavy personality on the furnishings, unless you could count the trails of pastry crumbs that she left in her wake.
“Now remember, Kitty,” she said. “We’re going to a lot of expense to get you suitably married, so don’t let us down.”
“What about love. No one has mentioned love,” said Kitty softly.
“Love! Pah!” said Lady Henley. “Love has no place in a high-society marriage. Have your fun afterwards if you want. There’ll be plenty of chaps ready to oblige.”
Kitty blushed and bit her lip. A conversation such as this could never have taken place in a middle-class drawing room.
Mrs. Harrison felt a strange pang of maternal anxiety. If only Kitty had some more spirit. She had a sudden wish that her biddable daughter would tell Lady Henley to go to hell. Then she stiffened her resolve. Such thoughts were mawkish. Once Kitty was married to Lord Peter Chesworth, she would be in the company of other young married women and then she would find that most of them had settled for money or a title. Romance was for novelists and shopkeepers.
“Isn’t it time we left?” said Kitty looking at the clock. It was ten-thirty.
“We’re going to make an entrance,” said Lady Henley. “Make sure all the fellows get a good look at you.”
Kitty’s heart sank. She forced down her sherry and “felt light-headed and slightly sick. Finally, Lady Henley rang for the carriage and they made their way out into the April night. They bowled briskly along the London streets which seemed to be alive with all sorts of jolly, unfashionable people having a good time. The air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and lime. A young couple stood at a crossing, gazing into each other’s eyes. Kitty looked away.
The ball was held at a mansion in Kensington. The hostess was a Mrs. Brotherton, a wealthy woman who had outlived her husband; it was an age when society women survived their spouses in great numbers.
The sound of a waltz drifted tantalizingly on the air as Kitty and her two formidable chaperones walked up the red carpet on the pavement, past the policeman on duty, and into the entrance hall. After leaving their cloaks, they mounted to the ballroom on the first floor. As they were late, their hostess had already joined the dance.
Kitty stood at the entrance watching the chattering, glittering, circling throng and tried to remember that they were only human beings. Various young men who all looked bewilderingly alike in black and white evening dress, white gloves and patent leather hair, wrote their names in her dance card. She stumbled her way dutifully round the dance floor, bewildered by the strange speech. Everything was “cheery” or “ripping,” words she had not heard before. Finally, she was left to sit beside her mother. Then Lady Henley sailed up. “I must introduce you to a very good connection, Mrs. H—I mean, Euphemia.” With a look in her eyes like a hunter closing in on his prey, Mrs. Harrison got to her feet with a protesting creak from her stays, and followed her massive friend.
Kitty sat on that uncomfortable piece of furniture called a rout chair and felt wretched. All the young people glittered and laughed and chatted around her as if she did not exist She stared across the room and, for the second time, found herself looking straight into the eyes of Lord Peter Chesworth. He made every other man in the room look shoddy and insipid and very young. He moved slightly as if to cross to her side, but was waylaid by a dazzlingly smart lady dressed in scarlet chiffon. Long ruby earrings fell like drops of blood from her exquisite little ears and her black hair was piled on top of her head in glossy curls. Her eyes, which were of a light, clear blue with black lines round the irises, were gazing up at Lord Chesworth in an intimate and tantalizing way. He took her arm and led her into the dance where she swayed against him, her tiny feet barely touching the floor.
The tiny spark of hope that the evening would turn out to be anything other than depressing, died in Kitty’s heart as she watched them. She had spent her lonely hours building the Baron into a dream-lover because she had no other man to think of. She had heard that he was unmarried. She had never considered that he would be attracted to anyone else. But there was worse to come.
“Have you met the new heiress, Kitty Harrison?” The voice seemed to be almost in her ear and she jumped. Leaning back in her chair, she realized that one of her dancing partners was on the other side of the pillar with a friend.
“Gawd, yes. Pretty little thing but she jumps all over one’s feet and says ‘beg pardon, beg pardon’ the whole time, just like a bloody scullery maid.”
His friend whispered something and the dancing partner popped his head around the pillar, saw Kitty, gave her a cheeky, unrepentant grin and moved off arm in arm with the other man.
Kitty sat on in misery, staring at the toe of her dancing slipper. What was wrong with saying “beg pardon”? At Miss Bates’s seminary it had been considered a very polite and ladylike thing to say.
The guests continued to circle under the orange glare of the recently installed electric lights. Not a very grand ball. At grand balls they used masses of candles, thought poor Kitty viciously, sitting surrounded by other wallflowers and the heavy scent of gardenias and wishing she were dead. No, that was not true. She wished them all dead first.
A shadow fell across her white dress and she looked up. Lord Chesworth was standing before her, flanked on either side by Lady Henley and Mrs. Harrison. He looked like a man who had just been arrested.
“May I have this dance, Miss Harrison?”
How Kitty longed for the courage to say “no,” rather than dance with a man who had obviously been coerced into it by her stern chaperones. She merely bowed her head and moved out onto the dance floor and, because she was past caring about anything, she danced beautifully. Lord Chesworth looked down at the silent girl and felt a twinge of pity which he immediately dismissed. The girl was obviously as pushing as her mother. Any girl who would sell herself into marriage for the sake of a title was not deserving of pity. Lady Henley had made it quite plain that Mrs. Harrison and her daughter were prepared to restore his estates for the sake of his title. A fair bargain.
He thought of Reamington Hall with affection. The spacious light rooms, the long driveway lined with magnificent lime trees, the pleasant park with its rolling lawns. If only he were there now instead of tied down in this stuffy, overheated room with this colorless girl.
Well, he must talk about something. He began to describe his home to her and, to his delight, found Kitty to be an enthusiastic audience. She knew nothing of the country. Hampstead Heath was about the nearest, she admitted with a shy laugh. Pleased and surprised, the Baron chatted on and surprised himself even further by taking her in for supper. He would marry the girl, he decided suddenly. She needed some social polish but she was malleable. Accordingly, when they returned to the ballroom
, he left Kitty with her mother and returned to the supper room in search of Lady Henley.
She was tucked away at a corner table and the Baron watched her for a few minutes before joining her. After all, he thought, it was not every day he had the privilege of watching anyone eat smoked salmon and chocolate éclairs from the same plate.
The irony that this vulgar woman should be accepted everywhere while the refined and delicate Kitty was considered to lack “class,” did not occur to him. This was the only world he knew and he would no more have questioned its taboos and shibboleths than he would have dreamt of selling Reamington Hall.
He sat down beside her and got right to the point. “I’ll marry the girl.”
“Good,” said Lady Henley, wiping her fingers on her bosom. Traces of her progression through the dishes on the buffet were scattered through her diamond collar. A shred of Virginia ham clung to the top strand, a small piece of lettuce to the second, a sliver of quail bone pierced the third, and bits of éclair and smoked salmon were roosting on the bottom.
“She is willing to marry me?” questioned Lord Chesworth. “She seems such a biddable little thing.”
“All to the good then,” said Lady Henley, impaling a pickle. “Oh, she’ll marry you right and tight. The only thing is—how much do I get out of it?”
“You don’t,” said Lord Chesworth, putting his thumbs in his waistcoat and leaning back in his chair. “Mrs. Harrison’s already paying you to fix this. I know it and you know it, so don’t get greedy.”
Lady Henley shrugged and sent the debris of her repast flying about her skirts.
“Allonamurrerinamorden.”
“What?” said Lord Chesworth, wondering if she was perhaps attempting to speak Swahili. Lady Henley spat out a mouthful of canapés au parmesan.
“I said, ‘Call on her mother in the morning.’”
Lord Chesworth felt that surely Kitty would consider anyone a relief after company such as this and took his leave. He had better get started right away and dance with Kitty again.
Kitty Page 3