“I am – sorry, Mama,” Bertilla murmured again.
“I might have guessed you would make a mess of it,” Lady Alvinston moaned. “You always were stupid. If you had had any brains at all in your head, you would either have not told him your name or invented something.”
“If only you had – told me that was what you – wanted me to do,” Bertilla said miserably.
“Quite frankly, I never thought that you were likely to encounter any of my friends,” Lady Alvinston said, “and I have always made arrangements so that they should not meet you.”
Bertilla did not speak and Lady Alvinston said suddenly,
“And what do you mean by driving alone with Lord Saire in his brougham? Surely you realise that, if there was nothing to meet you, you should have taken a Hackney carriage?”
“I did suggest it,” Bertilla answered, “but he offered to take me home and he had been so kind after I hurt my foot.”
“I am sure that he would not have offered to do that if he had thought you were grown up,” Lady Alvinston said as if speaking to herself. “He must have thought you were only a child. You don’t look eighteen.”
Bertilla had an uncomfortable remembrance of Lord Saire asking her age and she recalled that she had told him the truth, but, because she was so scared of her mother, she kept silent.
She would not have lied if her mother had asked her if she had told Lord Saire her age. But she had learnt long ago when she was only a little girl that it was unwise to volunteer information, because Lady Alvinston was unpredictable and it invariably turned out to be something that should not have been said.
“Let me see – ” Lady Alvinston went on as if she were talking to herself, “if you had been born when I was seventeen that would make you – fourteen and myself – thirty-one.”
She regarded her daughter with critical eyes.
“You could easily pass for fourteen,” she said, “you are so small and insignificant. If anybody asks me, that is what I will say you are.”
She picked up a letter, which lay on the bed and added,
“Now that is settled and after all you will not be here for long. So all you have to do is keep out of sight.”
“Am I going away, Mama?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Lady Alvinston replied. “You are going to stay with your Aunt Agatha, your father’s elder sister.”
Bertilla looked puzzled.
“Aunt Agatha? I thought that she –”
“Agatha is a Missionary, as you well know, Bertilla, and I have decided that you should dedicate yourself to the same cause.”
“Do you – mean that you – want me to be a – Missionary – too?” Bertilla asked in a voice that shook.
“Why not?” Lady Alvinston asked. “I am sure it is a very commendable career for any girl and, as you know, your Aunt Agatha is living in Sarawak.”
Bertilla made a little muffled sound of dismay and Lady Alvinston continued,
“I wrote to Agatha when Margaret died and told her that, when you left school, I would send you to live with her.”
“And she – said she would – have me?”
“There has not been enough time for me to have a reply, but I know that she will be delighted to see you.”
“How can – you be sure of – that, Mama?”
Lady Alvinston did not reply and after a moment Bertilla asked,
“When did you last – hear from Aunt Agatha?”
“How can I be expected to remember every letter I receive?” Lady Alvinston replied angrily. “Agatha always wrote to your father for Christmas.”
“But Papa has been – dead for three years.”
Lady Alvinston looked at her daughter’s anxious face and troubled eyes and her expression hardened.
“Will you stop making difficulties!” she said fiercely.
“But – Mama –”
“I don’t intend to listen to any arguments,” Lady Alvinston snapped. “There is nowhere else you can go now that your Aunt Margaret is dead.”
She paused to add,
“Most girls would think themselves very lucky to see the world. You should find it very interesting and I have always been told that travel broadens the mind.”
“Am I to stay in – Sarawak for – ever, Mama?”
“There will certainly not be enough money for you to make the return journey,” Lady Alvinston replied. “It’s extremely expensive to send you all that way and I suppose you will want some clothes, but not many. No one would expect you to be fashionably dressed when there is no one to see you but a lot of natives.”
Bertilla clasped her hands together.
“Please, Mama, I don’t wish to – live with Aunt Agatha. I remember being – frightened of her when I was a little girl and Papa always said that she was – fanatical.”
“Your father said a lot of silly things to which you would have been wise to pay no attention,” Lady Alvinston retorted. “You will go to your aunt, Bertilla, whether you like it or not. I don’t want you here.”
“Surely one of Papa’s – cousins could – have me?” Bertilla suggested desperately.
“Everybody who might accept you lives in London and, as I have just said, I don’t intend you to be here,” Lady Alvinston said. “Get it into your head, Bertilla, that I have no wish to be hampered by a grown-up daughter.”
As she spoke, she turned her face towards the mirror on her dressing table, in which she could see herself reflected.
She looked with satisfaction at the darkness of her hair and the whiteness of her skin against the pink of her dressing jacket.
Then she said,
“You are old enough to understand that I hope one day to marry again, but nothing, Bertilla, could put a man off more than to find himself saddled with the children of a previous marriage.”
“I can – understand that, Mama,” Bertilla replied, “but please don’t send me – away from – England. Could I not go to the country? No one would know I was there and the old servants could look after me.”
“It would not be at all convenient,” Lady Alvinston answered. “I intend to open Alvinston Park this summer. Everyone gives weekend parties in the country and there are certain friends I would like to entertain.”
She gave a little sigh before she added,
“That is, if I can afford it.”
“Then could I not go somewhere – else, Mama? I promise I would not – cost you – very much.”
“The answer is no, Bertilla, and I don’t intend to discuss it,” Lady Alvinston said firmly. “I have managed to find enough money one way or another to send you out to Sarawak and that is where you are to go and where you are to stay!”
“But – Mama –”
“Go away and leave me alone!” Lady Alvinston shouted. “You had better start packing what things you have. I will arrange for Dawkins to go shopping with you this afternoon, as I imagine you have no summer dresses. It will be hot in Sarawak, but you are not to buy anything expensive.”
As she spoke, Lady Alvinston rang a bell which stood on the table by her bedside.
The door opened almost immediately and her lady’s maid, a gaunt-faced elderly woman, came into the room.
“Here is Miss Bertilla, Dawkins,” Lady Alvinston said, “and she has come home on the wrong day, which is just what we might have expected. But at least it gives you two afternoons in which to get her all she requires.”
“I’ll do me best, my Lady,” Dawkins replied, “but you knows as well as I do we’ll not find summer clothes in the shops at this time of the year.”
“Do the best you can and don’t spend too much money.”
Lady Alvinston’s tone was decisive and, as she picked up her letters again, Bertilla knew that she was dismissed.
She went from the room and found her way to the small bedroom she had occupied in the past, which was on the same floor, but found it full of large wardrobes containing her mother’s clothes.
With some dif
ficulty she discovered that she was to sleep on the top floor in a room adjoining those used by the maidservants.
It did not upset her any more than the interview with her mother had already done, because, she told herself, it was the treatment she might have expected.
She had always known that her mother did not love her and in some way resented her very existence, but, since her father’s death, things had become worse and her mother made it plain that she was nothing more than an encumbrance.
As she sat down forlornly on the bed, she told herself that she should have expected to be sent away into obscurity. After all, she had spent all her holidays with her Aunt Margaret in Bath and her mother never wrote to her at school.
Clothes were never provided for her except when the Headmistress wrote to say quite firmly that she required certain articles of the school uniform and that it was essential that she should be provided with new books or school equipment.
But this, to be sent to a strange country, Bertilla thought now that her mother could not have found a place farther away or disposed of her more effectively.
She remembered her Aunt Agatha as a hard forbidding-looking woman whom her father had never liked and who had obviously frightened her younger sister, Margaret, when they had been girls together.
Aunt Margaret had once told Bertilla that when she was young she had the chance of marrying, but Agatha had prevented it.
“She thought that I was too frivolous, Bertilla,” she said with a little laugh. “Agatha despises worldly goods and worldly thoughts. She was always praying and used to become furious with me when I wanted to dance.”
Bertilla felt herself shiver.
What sort of life would she have with her aunt?
She knew that once she reached Sarawak there would be no escape!
Chapter Two
“It’s no use, Dawkins,” Bertilla sighed, as they came out of the fifth shop where they had tried to find suitable gowns.
“I told her Ladyship there wouldn’t be anythin’ to be bought at this time of the year,” Dawkins replied sharply.
She was, as Bertilla knew, getting tired, and as a result she became more irritable with the saleswomen every time they were unable to find what Bertilla required.
It was not the fault of the girls who in the big shops were always underpaid and invariably at this time of the year were overworked by the rush of customers.
They did their best, but it was impossible in London in December to find thin gowns suitable for the tropics.
Bertilla was too small for the majority of gowns, which were designed for tall women who could carry a bustle with grace and dignity.
“The only thing we can do, Dawkins,” Bertilla said in her soft voice as they walked along the crowded pavement, “is to buy the material and I will make myself some dresses during the voyage.”
She sighed again and added,
“I shall have plenty of time.”
She had lain awake all night after her mother had told her she was to go to Sarawak, feeling desperately that she would never be able to cope by herself on the journey.
She had been abroad once with her father and she had travelled with him to Scotland, but she had never contemplated looking after herself on a journey that would take her halfway across the world.
In ordinary circumstances, she thought, it would be rather a thrilling adventure, not going alone, but travelling with someone like her father, whom she had loved.
But to know that at the end of the long days at sea she would find her Aunt Agatha was like walking into a nightmare knowing that one would be unable to wake up.
The more she thought about what her life would be like solely in her Aunt Agatha’s company and having to pretend that she wished to become a Missionary, the more she felt like running away and hiding herself in some place where her mother would never be able to find her.
But she knew that such an idea was hopeless, she had no money, for one reason, and she was quite unfitted to earn her own living.
She looked at the shop girls as they attended to her and thought that many of them looked thin and under-nourished and had lines under their eyes and bad complexions.
She was sure that this was the result of the unhealthy life they led and the fact that, as she read in the newspapers, they were very poorly paid.
Because her father had been interested in current affairs, Bertilla had tried while at school to keep up with the subjects that had interested him and the events that were taking place all over the world.
In this she was very different from the majority of her classmates, who were interested in only one thing and that was in getting married.
As soon as they were within sight of leaving school and being launched on the Social world, their conversation was entirely of men and how to attract them.
They would giggle for hours with one another over some episode that had taken place in the holidays or over a man they had seen when they were walking from the school demurely in a crocodile.
As an intelligent girl, Bertilla found all this extremely boring.
She supposed that she would get married one day, but in the meantime there were so many more interesting issues to read about and, if she had the opportunity, to talk about than some hypothetical man whom she found impossible to contemplate as a husband.
She was well aware, even before her mother told her, that Lady Alvinston intended to remarry.
Almost before she was out of mourning, the servants had gossiped about her admirers in Bertilla’s hearing.
Her Aunt Margaret had been insatiably curious about the parties Lady Alvinston attended and the reports of them in the magazines and newspapers.
“Your mother is so beautiful, dear,” she said to Bertilla, “one could hardly expect her to stay single and faithful to your father’s memory.”
“No, of course not,” Bertilla had said.
At the same time she could not help feeling that her mother was being disloyal to her father in agreeing so easily that she should have another husband.
But she had realised a long time ago, when she was still quite small, that, while her father adored her mother and was extremely proud of her, there were many other interests to occupy and amuse Lady Alvinston.
It was not only Sir George’s placid acceptance of the fact that he and Bertilla should be in the country while his wife stayed in London which made Bertilla aware that their lives ran on separate lines.
It was also the little hints that were dropped, many of them with deliberate unkindness, by guests who came to Alvinston Park when her mother was not there.
“Is Millicent still in London?” they would say with raised eyebrows. “Of course, she never liked the country, but you must be so glad, dear George, that the Duke is there to look after her.”
If it was not the Duke, it would be Lord Rowland, Lord Hampden, Sir Edward, or any number of other names, which meant nothing to Bertilla except that they were frequently mentioned in The Court Circular.
Although she accepted that her mother’s beauty attracted a great number of admirers and that finally she would choose one of the most suitable of them to be her stepfather, Bertilla had not expected that this would mean her expulsion not only from her mother’s side but also from England itself.
‘How can I bear it?’ she had asked herself in the darkness of the night.
Now, walking down Regent Street with Dawkins, she felt she must look at everything about her, even the passers-by, carefully and searchingly because soon they would only be a memory.
Finally they arrived back in Park Lane with some rolls of muslin, cheap silk for linings, and cottons and silks for accessories to match the gowns that Bertilla must make for herself.
“Thank you very much for helping me, Dawkins,” Bertilla said, as they walked up the stairs carrying their parcels.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Miss Bertilla,” Dawkins said, suddenly gracious now that she was home and there was a cup of strong tea wai
ting for her, “I’ll sort out some bits and pieces which her Ladyship has no further use for. There be waistbands, ribbons and some pretty trimmin’s which I’m sure would come in useful.”
“That is very kind of you, Dawkins,” Bertilla smiled.
Her mother was out and, when she had taken off her coat and bonnet, she went downstairs to the sitting room at the back of the house where they usually sat when they were not entertaining.
There was a portrait of her father over the mantelpiece and Bertilla stared up at his kind intelligent face, wishing as she had wished a thousand times before that he was still alive.
“What shall I do, Papa?” she asked out loud. “How can I live with Aunt Agatha? Sarawak is so far – so very – far away.”
She waited almost as if he might answer her, but then told herself that the one thing he would expect was that she should be brave.
She would never have shown him that she was afraid in the hunting field and, while this was far more terrifying than jumping a high hedge, she must not be anything but courageous about it.
“I will try, Papa,” she said at length with a sigh, “but it is going to be difficult – very – very difficult.”
She went to the bookcase to find some books to take with her to read on the journey, hoping there might be something about the part of the world where she was being sent.
But apart from a slim biography of Sir Stafford Raffles, who had built up Singapore, there was nothing else and she wondered if she would have time to go to Mudies Library in Mount Street to see what she could find there.
She wished she had thought of it when she was out with Dawkins, but it was really too late to ask her now as she would be sitting down having her tea and would deeply resent being dragged out again.
‘Perhaps there will be books on board ship,’ Bertilla told herself.
She had a sinking feeling inside her at the thought of starting off on a long voyage without anyone she knew and with no one to help or advise her.
She could not help thinking it was extraordinary that her mother should even consider sending her so far away without a chaperone.
66 The Love Pirate Page 3