‘Most probably.’ He turned towards her, a lump rising in his throat. She looked so very beautiful in her shimmering white ballgown and with her mother’s pearls around her throat. With every atom of his being he wished Blanche was at his side, sharing in his joy and pride.
‘Where will he be?’
He patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry about Hal, Thea. Broadbent has made sure he’ll be looked after.’
Thea looked towards their butler, who was supervising the waiting at table, wondering just what arrangements he had made for Hal. Presumably, as he was there to report on the ball, Hall would be in the ballroom once the ball began, but what would he be wearing? He didn’t possess a formal suit, and certainly didn’t possess evening clothes. If the evening was going to be ghastly for her, it was going to be even more so for Hal. She dug her nails deep into her palms. Royalty was going to be present, and Hal would not have the slightest idea of the protocol this entailed and, even if he did know of it, would very likely ignore it.
She abandoned all pretence of eating and drinking. She had to find him. She had to ensure he didn’t enter the ballroom, for all she could see ahead, if he did, were disasters of the most horrific proportions.
Abruptly – and before a footman could do so for her – she pushed her chair away from the table.
‘I’m sorry, Papa. Please make my excuses. I’ll be back in a few minutes, I promise.’
He shot out a hand to restrain her, but she was too quick for him. Aware of her guests’ startled bewilderment, she left the dining room as fast as her floor-length ballgown would allow, followed, as she had known she would be, by Broadbent.
As he closed the dining room’s double doors behind him, and before he’d had time to ask how he could assist her, she said urgently: ‘Papa has arranged for Mr Crosby of the Richmond Times to be in attendance this evening. Has he arrived yet? And if so, where can I find him?’
‘If Mr Crosby has arrived in the last half-hour he will either be in the servants’ hall, where a cold collation has been left in readiness for him, or in one of the attic rooms set aside for visiting valets.’
Broadbent’s voice was as impassive as his face – and would be when, on his return to the dining room, he gave an account of their conversation to her father.
Thea, aware that he would be doing so and that though her father would be justifiably cross with her, he would at least be relieved she hadn’t been taken ill, headed straight towards the nearest green baize door and the back stairs leading down to the basement and the servants’ hall.
It was the room where the servants both ate and relaxed, but with a dinner for thirty now well under way and 300 guests about to arrive for the ball, no one was relaxing in it now. There was, though, on the long deal table in the centre of the room, a covered plate and a place setting for one.
She paused in the doorway, her heart hammering. Did the untouched plate mean Hal hadn’t arrived yet? Or had he arrived and gone straight to the room set aside for him? She bit her lip. Being found looking for Hal in the servants’ hall was one thing. Looking for him in a part of the house where the footmen and other male servants slept was quite another.
Her hesitation lasted barely a second. She had to find him. She had to tell him he needn’t suffer the embarrassment of the ball in order to write about it – she could give him all the information he’d need. That way, although he would still see her in her dress (there was absolutely no way of avoiding that now), he wouldn’t see her in a setting that might well convince him that the class gulf between them was unbridgeable.
It didn’t seem unbridgeable to her, because she wasn’t going to allow it to be so. Politically she thought of herself as just as much a socialist as Hal was. He had taken her to Labour Party meetings in Richmond and, unknown to her father, she had continued attending them by herself in London. To her surprise she’d discovered that she wasn’t the only upper-class girl with socialist sympathies.
‘We’re known as ballroom pinks,’ a girl who recognized her as a social equal had said when she had attended a meeting in Farringdon Street’s Memorial Hall. ‘Quite a hoot, don’t you think?’
Thea hadn’t thought it a hoot. She’d thought the term both derisive and condescending and was certain that whoever had coined it had done so believing that girls of her class couldn’t possibly be seriously committed to Labour Party principles.
As she ran once again in the direction of the back stairs she wondered if the expression was one Hal was familiar with. If it was, she was certain he would never apply it to her. He knew her too well to imagine that she would play-act about something so important.
She ran up the first two flights of stairs, remembering the world of working-class poverty to which Hal had opened her eyes. There had been the Tetley family in Richmond. Their oldest son, Wilfred, had been knocked down by a horse and cart. One of his legs had got stuck in the wheel spokes and, as the cart had moved forward, the rotation had twisted his leg so badly that it had had to be amputated.
‘And now the lad’s stump is festering, and Joe Tetley is unemployed and they can’t afford the doctor,’ Hal had told her, flinty-eyed. ‘If you want to see real poverty, Thea, come wi’ me and see what happens when folk like the Tetleys are still paying off the last doctor’s bill and he won’t come to ’em again before it’s been paid – not even for a little lad who’s lost his leg.’
She had gone. In a house with no sanitation and no running water she had seen Wilfred’s father apply live maggots to his sobbing son’s putrid stump. She had been there when the doctor’s debt collector had made his weekly visit to collect payment off the bill they had incurred at the time of the amputation. And she was there when, with tears streaming down her face, Wilfred’s mother had pleaded with the debt collector that he put in a word for them with the doctor, and he had curtly told her that he could do no such thing.
Halfway up the third flight of narrow stairs she paused to let a startled housemaid who was coming down them squeeze past her. Thanks to her father – who, when Thea had told him of the Tetleys’ ghastly situation, had promptly paid off the doctor’s previous bill and paid him for future visits – Wilfred had survived.
‘But he can’t do that for all the hundreds and thousands of other Wilfreds,’ Hal had said grimly. ‘Families like the Tetleys are caught in a trap of poverty they can’t break free of. Things you take for granted – a doctor coming when you’re ill – can’t be taken for granted when you haven’t the money to pay for one. That’s why we need a Labour government. So that things will change. So that provision for the sick and infirm can be put in place, and the vileness of the workhouse can be done away with forever.’
She paused to get her breath on the small landing before the fifth and last flight of stairs. That conversation with Hal, and the incident with the Tetley family, had taken place three years ago. Just over four months ago King George had appointed James Ramsay MacDonald as Britain’s first Labour prime minister. It was a minority government, reliant on Liberal goodwill for its survival, but already it had passed legislation on housing, education and social insurance.
She hurried up the stairs leading to the topmost floor. Set aside for male servants, it was somewhere Thea had absolutely no right to be. There weren’t many bedrooms. Though extra footmen had been drafted in for the evening, only two footmen were Fenton regulars, and as they were at present in attendance in the dining room she knew she ran no risk of running into them.
Panting from her long, hurried climb up the stairs, and knowing that she had very little time – when her guests began arriving, she absolutely had to be standing next to her father in order to greet them – she hurried down the short corridor, giving an urgent rap on each door she passed. No one called out. No door opened. At the last door she didn’t bother knocking; she simply yanked down on the handle and burst into the room. ‘Hellfire!’
With water dripping from his hair, Hal spun round. He had been standing at the washbasin, bare-chested
and with the braces of his trousers hanging loose.
As shocked by the sight of him semi-naked as he was by the sight of her in a ballgown, tiara and pearls, Thea fell back against the door.
‘I had to find you.’ She gasped the words, the breath tight in her chest as the door slammed shut.
She was aware of a small skylight window. And a bed, narrow and functional with a sheet and blanket tightly tucked in and clothes she recognized – a jacket and a waistcoat – flung down on top of it. She was vaguely aware that she was leaning against other items of clothing: clothing that had been hung on the back of the door. Whoever it belonged to, she neither knew nor cared.
The last time she had seen Hal in nothing but his breeches had been when they had been children, playing in the river. She, Olivia and Carrie would scream and splash in the shallows, their skirts hitched high into their bloomers, while Hal would tear off his shirt and cavort in the deepest part of the river like a sea lion.
Seeing him in a state of undress then hadn’t had the same effect as it was having on her now. Her knees were so weak that she put her hands behind her, digging her fingers into what felt like a gentleman’s tailcoat, in an attempt to stay upright.
‘Why did you need to find me?’ he demanded explosively, his body taut with tension. ‘This is a valet’s bedroom, Thea! You can’t be found in here!’
She wanted to say that she wasn’t going to be found; that every servant in the house was on duty floors below them, but her mouth was too dry, her throat too tight. She couldn’t even remember why she had needed to see him. She was too overcome with desire; so confounded by it that she was speechless.
He had been watering his hair, trying to tame his tight black curls into some kind of submission. Droplets of water dripped onto a chest that was olive-skinned, wide and firmly muscled.
She wanted to be crushed against it. She wanted to sink her teeth into the strong curve of his shoulder; to lick the drops of water away, to taste every part of him. So overcome with longing that she didn’t know how she was remaining upright, she finally found herself capable of speech, but not in order to tell him why she was there.
‘Kiss me, Hal!’ Her voice was hoarse, desperate with need. ‘Kiss me now! Please!’
Instead of moving towards her, he clenched his fists, his arm and shoulder muscles bulging. ‘In a gown covered with diamonds and wearing a tiara? You might as well be carrying a placard saying, “Prohibited. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”’
‘They aren’t diamonds. They’re crystals.’ There was a sob in her throat. ‘As for this . . .’ She ripped the tiara from her hair and tossed it on the bed on top of his jacket.
Her action unleashed a raging desire, which until now in their romance he had struggled to keep tightly checked. Moving so swiftly that she had no time to catch her breath, he pulled her into his arms, his mouth coming down violently on hers.
They had kissed passionately before, but never like this, with all restraint gone.
With a low moan she dug her fingers deep into the coarseness of his still-damp curls, her tongue sliding past his, her entire body ablaze with the need to be made love to.
And it was going to happen.
As she felt the urgent hardness of his body against hers, she knew it was going to happen – and she wanted it to happen. She wanted to lose her virginity there and then, more than she had ever wanted anything else, ever. The bed was a bare two feet away. The door was closed. No one would walk in on them. The occupants of the other rooms in the part of the house they were in were all on duty, anticipating the imminent arrival of 300 distinguished guests.
As Hal swung her up in his arms and turned with her towards the bed, she had a cataclysmic vision of her father standing without her at the head of the grand staircase. How would he explain her absence to her mother’s family and his political friends? Even worse, what if she wasn’t beside him when her royal guests arrived? She would be the talk of the Season, and her father’s bewilderment would be total, his humiliation and bitter disappointment all-consuming.
Though she was aching with longing, desperate with every fibre of her being to take advantage of the little room and its neatly made bed, she knew she couldn’t do so. Never in her life had her father embarrassed her, and he didn’t deserve that she should embarrass him.
‘Put me down, Hal!’
He sucked in his breath, took one look at the urgency in her eyes and abruptly did as she’d demanded.
For a brief, delicious second the flat of her palms pressed hard against his naked chest and then she spun away from him. How long had she been away from the dining room? Had the family dinner already ended, and were the ball guests already beginning to arrive?
As she snatched her tiara from the bed he said tautly, ‘What the heck’s the matter, Thea?’
‘My guests!’ She ran to the door. ‘They’ll be here any minute and I have to greet them. For me not to do so would be just too shaming for Papa. I simply can’t do that to him.’
‘Then why did you run the risk of it? Why did you have to find me?’
She tugged the door open, saying in swift haste, ‘I came to tell you not to go down to the ballroom. There’s no need. I can tell you everything you need to know about the ball. Papa wasn’t thinking of how uncomfortable you’ll feel . . .’
He frowned, tilting his head questioningly to one side. ‘Uncomfortable?’
‘Not having the right clothes. Not knowing the correct etiquette. Oh God, I must go, Hal! If I’m not there when Prince Edward arrives, the world will cave in!’ And she fled down the corridor as if the hounds of hell were at her heels.
He didn’t move.
He heard her reach the end of the corridor; heard her begin to run down the stairs. A few seconds later there came the faint sound of a door opening and then rocking shut. And then nothing.
Still he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.
In just a few words she had ended everything there had ever been between them. Because Thea had said that she would – and could – move from her world into his, he had allowed himself to believe her. Where her politics were concerned she was, he knew, sincere. But it wasn’t enough. When the chips were down, she cared too much for things he didn’t care about at all. Things like having the right clothes and knowing the correct etiquette. And instead of being uncaring at the thought of him standing out like a sore thumb among her high-and-mighty guests, she had been horrified by it. So horrified that she had ordered him not to make his scheduled appearance in the ballroom.
He breathed in hard, knowing that both of them had been fools ever to think the class gulf between them could be bridged. Seeing her in her family’s London town house – a house so palatial it possessed a full-sized ballroom – had slammed the realization home, even before she had burst in on him looking like a vision from a royal fairy tale.
In all their years of being first childhood friends and then secret sweethearts, he had never seen her dressed up – as common sense told him she would be dressed – for high society. He had only ever seen her in and around Outhwaite, where the clothes she wore were country clothes, barely distinguishable from those Carrie wore. The sight of her in a sumptuous ballgown and wearing a tiara as if it were a crown had robbed him of breath, first because she had looked so jaw-droppingly beautiful, and second because it had shown him that left-wing politics alone could never remove her from the class into which she had been born.
Whatever had been between them was over. Pain sliced into his heart as deeply as a knife wound. He gritted his teeth; he would get over her. There would be other girls. No doubt there would be lots of other girls.
And he was going to take no notice of her demand that he steer clear of the ballroom. He hadn’t wanted the assignment he had been given, but by God, now that he was here, he was going to carry it out.
He stepped grim-faced towards the door and lifted down the formal evening clothes that had been left for him to change into.
Thi
rty minutes later, wearing a black tailcoat, black trousers, a stiffly starched dress-shirt and collar, a low-cut white waistcoat, a white bow-tie that he’d had a difficult battle with, black patent shoes and white kid gloves, he strolled into the flower-filled ballroom looking every inch a member of the class he so despised.
Chapter Nine
With spiralling excitement, Rozalind looked around the crowded ballroom. Her dance card was almost full. The hired swing orchestra was playing a foxtrot. The Duke and Duchess of York had arrived. Soon the Prince of Wales would be making his entrance. He would be duty-bound to dance with Thea, but might he also dance with her? She remembered Violet’s remark about her height and for the first time in her life found herself wishing she was a petite five foot two, instead of a willowy five foot eight.
‘The next dance is mine, I believe,’ a chinless young man said affably, breaking into her thoughts.
He was Barty Luddesdon, eldest son of the 2nd Marquess of Colesby, and someone with whom she had been partnered in a jolly treasure hunt at a party she had attended with Thea only a few days ago. He was not someone she would ever wish to be romantically involved with, but he was nice and knew enough about her passion – photography – to be able to talk intelligently about it.
‘Why, so it is,’ she said with a wide smile. She looked down at her dance card. ‘And it’s a quickstep, Barty. What fun!’
As the orchestra struck up with a fast-paced, upbeat melody, she said teasingly, ‘I hope you’re going to be up to all the syncopations, Barty. The quickstep has been a craze in New York far longer than it’s been a craze here, and I’m pretty much an expert at it.’
‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head,’ Barty said comfortably. ‘They don’t call me fast-as-greased-lightning-Luddesdon for nothing.’ And he proved it by leading her off into a whole series of hops and runs that had her giggling in delight.
A Season of Secrets Page 10