‘Let’s get back to the stables,’ she said abruptly, unshed tears making her eyes overly bright. ‘Papa says he has something to tell us. Some kind of a happy announcement.’
‘Perhaps he’s about to be made Foreign Secretary.’ Rozalind turned her horse around. ‘Or perhaps he’s going to announce Olivia’s engagement to Dieter von Starhemberg.’
‘Perhaps.’ That Olivia was in love with a man who wanted to marry her wasn’t something Thea wanted to talk about, when she was beginning to doubt that she would ever achieve a similar happiness. ‘The Row is practically deserted,’ she said, her face set and pale. ‘Let’s gallop back.’
She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks and, without waiting for a reply, set off headlong for the stables, her heart and mind full of Hal, and hot, tortured tears streaming down her face.
Chapter Twelve
‘Now that Rozalind is with us again,’ Gilbert said, his obvious happiness touched with a trace of nervousness, ‘I have a very special announcement to make.’
Rozalind wondered if his nervousness was because of Dieter’s nationality. If so, he was worrying about nothing. The war was in the past. Young people – people like herself, Thea and Violet, who had been children at the time – barely gave it a thought. During the war King George had changed his family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, but German blood still ran strong in the royal family’s veins. Thea had told her that Prince Edward spoke high German faultlessly.
‘. . . this may seem a little sudden,’ Gilbert was now saying.
Rozalind wasn’t sure it was sudden at all. As far as she was concerned, it was no coincidence that within weeks of meeting Dieter at Thea’s coming-out ball, Olivia was at a finishing school in Berlin. This outcome – an engagement between her and Dieter – was what Olivia had been working towards from day one.
She glanced towards Thea, who she knew was of the same opinion. The announcement was taking place in the drawing room, and Thea was looking fixedly not at her father, but at a splendid George Stubbs painting of a horse and foal that hung above the mantelpiece. Rozalind wondered if Thea minded Olivia being the first of them to become engaged, especially as the engagement was taking place before Olivia had even been presented at court. It wasn’t a reaction she would have suspected of Thea, but Thea was more than capable of keeping her feelings to herself, and their long separations – this was the first time Rozalind had been back to England since Thea’s coming-out – meant that she didn’t always know what was going on in Thea’s life and in her mind.
Violet was perched on the arm of one of the deep sofas, hanging on to her father’s every word, in happy anticipation of soon being the centre of attention as a bridesmaid.
‘I hope you are all going to be as happy as I am,’ Gilbert continued, ‘when I tell you that my engagement to Lady Zephiniah Pyke will be announced in tomorrow’s Times. Zephiniah is the widow of—’
He got no further.
Violet gasped and burst into tears.
Thea said crossly, ‘Please don’t play jokes, Papa.’
‘It isn’t a joke, sweetheart. I know this has come as something of a surprise, but I was introduced to Zephiniah at a dinner party some months ago and we have been seeing each other constantly ever since. She is an absolutely wonderful person and I consider myself truly fortunate that she has consented to be my wife.’
It was the first time Rozalind had ever seen Thea lost for words. With a face drained of colour, she floundered, ‘But . . . but if you have been seeing Lady Pyke for months, why haven’t we met her, Papa?’
‘There have been circumstances – nothing that is of any importance now.’ He beamed at them reassuringly. ‘Please be happy for me, my darlings. Zephiniah has no children of her own and is so looking forward to having three stepdaughters.’
‘Will I have to call her Mama?’ Violet asked fearfully, too avidly curious to continue crying.
‘Perhaps not at first, but it would be nice if you felt able to do so, when we have all settled down together as a family.’
At the prospect of settling down as a family with a stepmother she had never expected to have and hadn’t yet met, Thea winced.
Trying to make amends for Thea’s reaction, Rozalind said swiftly, ‘I do hope, Uncle Gilbert, there’ll be an opportunity for me to meet Lady Pyke before I sail home to New York.’
With relief Gilbert turned his attention away from his daughters and towards her. ‘So do I, Rozalind. I can’t promise, though, as at the moment Zephiniah is in Argentina, and I am not quite certain of her date of return.’
‘Argentina!’ Thea looked at him with incredulity. ‘But why on earth are you announcing your engagement to Lady Pyke when she isn’t even in the country?’
‘And why is she in Argentina, Papa?’ Violet’s eyes were as round as saucers. ‘Is she Argentinian? Will she wear a national costume? Can she speak English?’
‘Of course Zephiniah isn’t Argentinian, Violet.’ Irritation had crept into Gilbert’s voice. ‘She has, though, lived for many years in Argentina, and now that her homes will be in London and Yorkshire she has returned to settle her affairs there. And now I think it’s time to celebrate my announcement with champagne.’
He rang the bell for the butler. Rozalind, realizing they had all been too stunned to offer any kind of congratulations, sucked air into her lungs and, making good the deficiency, said, ‘Congratulations, Uncle Gilbert. I hope you and Lady Pyke will be very happy together.’
‘Zephiniah,’ Gilbert said, shooting her a grateful smile. ‘Please refer to my future wife as Zephiniah, Rozalind. It is what she would ask of you herself.’
Half an hour later, in the privacy of Thea’s bedroom, Thea, Rozalind and Violet sat cross-legged on her bed.
‘The champagne was the last straw.’ Thea’s face was still bloodless. ‘What we needed were stiff gins.’ Her eyes held Rozalind’s. ‘I hate even suggesting this, but do you think my father’s lost his marbles? Why have an engagement announced publicly tomorrow when we, his children and his niece, have yet to meet her? And do you suppose he’s already telephoned Olivia, or is she still in the dark?’
‘The Lord only knows. I think it must mean, though, that Dieter hasn’t popped the question to Olivia. If that engagement was about to be announced, your father wouldn’t be so insensitive as to announce his own engagement first. It would be stealing their thunder, and he wouldn’t do that.’
Violet said glumly. ‘He might, if he’s lost his marbles. And what if Olivia then calls off her wedding? I can hardly be a bridesmaid to Papa and Lady Pyke. It would be just too mortifying. And I want to be a bridesmaid. I’ve been looking forward to it for ages.’
It was the first time Rozalind could remember Thea including Violet in the way she was including her in the present conversation. Generally she simply shooed Violet away and closed the door on her. That she hadn’t done so this time Rozalind found interesting, and she put the change down to the fact that Violet’s sixteenth birthday was only a few weeks away and that continuing to treat her as a child was, even for Thea, getting a little difficult. It didn’t mean, though, that Violet no longer exasperated her.
‘Stop being so utterly self-absorbed,’ Thea said now, crosser than ever. ‘Why does being a bridesmaid matter so much? What matters is that this Zephiniah person is going to become part of our lives and we have no idea what she’s like, or even how old she is.’
‘If she’s a widow, she must be very old – at least as old as Papa.’
‘Papa is forty.’ Thea looked across at Rozalind. ‘I suppose the Zephiniah person could be forty as well, but she could also be much, much younger. Papa’s friend, Lord Brassington, remarried last year and his wife is young enough to be his daughter.’
At the thought of such a scenario they stared at each other in growing horror.
Violet said with fierce passion, ‘If she’s only old enough to be my sister, then I’m not going to call her Mama.’
Thea ig
nored her. ‘Is that why she wants us to call her by her Christian name?’ she said to Rozalind, her horror growing. ‘Is it because she’s close to us in age?’
‘I don’t know.’ All Rozalind could think of was that Max Bradley was Gilbert’s age; that she certainly wouldn’t think marrying him was an odd thing for her to do; and that if her circumstances were similar to Lady Pyke’s, then she too would ask any adult stepchildren to call her by her Christian name. Which wouldn’t be much comfort for Thea and Violet.
Two weeks later she was having almost exactly the same conversation with Olivia in the Cafe Kranzler on Berlin’s Unter den Linden.
‘But when does this Zephiniah person come back from Argentina?’ Olivia asked in bewilderment.
She was wearing a cherry-red polka-dot silk dress, a white cloche hat and white high-heeled sandals. Fourteen months ago, when Rozalind had last seen her, Olivia had been a typically gauche English rose. Now she looked every inch a sophisticated Berliner.
‘She hasn’t yet left Buenos Aires, so your guess is as good as mine.’ Rozalind wondered if the startling change in Olivia was due to finishing school or whether Count von Starhemberg was responsible. Either way Thea was going to have to look to her laurels if she didn’t want to find herself in Olivia’s shade, when Olivia returned to London.
‘I was hoping to see her when I came home for Hermione’s wedding, but that’s only six weeks away, so it looks a little problematical.’
‘Hermione?’ Rozalind stared at her blankly. ‘Hermione who?’
‘Our Hermione, of course! Hermione Cumberbatch. Good gracious, hasn’t anyone told you?’
That they hadn’t was obvious by the stunned expression on Rozalind’s face.
Olivia flipped open a grosgrain envelope bag and withdrew a cigarette-case and a lighter. Both were silver. Both were monogrammed.
‘Hermione,’ she said, fitting a Sobranie into an ebony cigarette-holder, ‘is to become Mrs Charlie Hardwick on the tenth of August. The wedding is to take place in Outhwaite’s Methodist chapel. It’s going to be quite an event. Papa is giving her away. Jim is to be best man. All of Outhwaite is bound to be there. How it can have slipped anyone’s mind to tell you, I can’t imagine.’
‘I’ll have to alter the date of my return to New York.’
Rozalind felt so dazed it was almost disorientating, though whether that was because of news of the wedding or because it was Olivia who was transfixing her, she wasn’t sure. She wondered when Thea had last seen Olivia; when, in fact, her father had last seen her. One thing was certain, when Olivia arrived back in Outhwaite, the eyes of the entire village would be out on stalks.
‘How about another two coffees?’ she asked, feeling in the need of one. ‘And bring me up to date on you and Dieter. When your father said he had a happy announcement to make, we were all certain it was about your engagement, not his.’
‘If Papa had been reasonable,’ Olivia said bitterly, tapping ash off her cigarette with a red-lacquered nail, ‘it would have been. As it is, he says I’m too young. He says that if I had come out as a debutante this summer it would be different, but that under the circumstances it would raise eyebrows. After much wrangling we’ve come to an agreement. If I still wish to become engaged to Dieter at Christmas – which of course I will do – then he’ll give his consent, but only on the understanding that the wedding won’t take place until my eighteenth birthday next August.’
She paused, ordered two more coffees from a smartly uniformed waitress and then said, ‘The downside of all this is that once my engagement to Dieter is announced, I can’t stay on in Berlin without having a family member here as a chaperone. Until now it hasn’t really been an issue. At finishing school the authorities served as chaperones – and a huge nuisance they were. Then when I left finishing school and stayed on by going to language school, I moved into a house with other English girls studying German, and we are collectively chaperoned – supposedly – by Frau Würtz, who runs the house. Having a family friend such as Count von Starhemberg calling for me, and squiring me around, has caused no problems whatsoever. One thing I’ve learned is that Germans are just as snobby as anyone else.’
‘But if it’s known that your relationship with Dieter is a romantic one, not just a family friendship, the situation will be different?’
The answer was so obvious that Olivia didn’t even bother to put it into words. Crushing her barely smoked cigarette out in an ashtray and pushing it to the far side of the table, she said, ‘Papa wants me home now. Either that or he’s sending Aunt Hilda out as a chaperone. Hideous as that thought is, I was going to opt for it, but there’s no need now. Dieter put in for a posting to London as early as last Christmas, and it’s just come through.’
She shot Rozalind a smile of mischievous triumph. ‘From the first of September Dieter is going to be at the German Embassy in Belgrave Square – and Belgrave Square is so near Mount Street that I’ll be able to see the German flag from the attics!’
Minutes later, as they left the cafe and began strolling arm-in-arm down the tree-lined boulevard, Olivia said, ‘What about your love life, Roz? Are you and Barty Luddesdon a couple yet?’
‘Barty?’ Roz’s sleek eyebrows rose nearly into her hairline. ‘Great Scott, no! I haven’t seen him since Thea’s coming-out ball.’
‘But there is someone?’
‘Oh, yes. There’s certainly someone. Someone very, very special.’
As they continued walking in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate, attracting admiring male glances all the way, Rozalind began telling Olivia of her meeting with Max aboard the Aquitania. Her thoughts, though, were not of their initial awareness of each other on the ship’s gangplank, or of their self-introduction to each other as she was taking photographs before they sailed, but of what had happened the night before they had steamed into Southampton. To Thea, she had said that Max had admitted there was someone waiting for him in Boston. What she hadn’t told Thea was the circumstances in which that admission had been made – or what had happened after Max had made it. And what she hadn’t told Thea, she certainly couldn’t tell Olivia.
‘Do you really think he’ll break it off with whoever it is he’s been seeing in Boston?’ Olivia asked.
Rozalind nodded, heat surging through her body as she remembered the sexual tension there had been between her and Max on the last night of the crossing.
The final night of any voyage was always special and she had dressed for it by wearing aquamarine jewellery with a halter-necked pale-blue beaded dress. Waistless, it fell straight from her creamily bare shoulders to deep fringing around her knees.
The ship’s ballroom had been en fête. Balloons and coloured streamers had rained down as they danced. Champagne corks had popped. It had been as hectic and as fun-filled as a New Year’s Eve party. But it hadn’t been fun for her – and though Max had been as inscrutable as ever, she’d been sure he shared her feelings. How could he not, when tomorrow they were destined not only to go their separate ways, but to do so with no acknowledgement of the overwhelming physical attraction sizzling between them?
By now she’d only been able to think of one reason for his not having made a romantic move on her. Despite her intuition to the contrary, it had to be that he was married – and though she’d vowed she was never going to ask, that vow had been taken days ago, when it had seemed impossible that Max wouldn’t volunteer such information, or show by his actions that he was free and available.
And so she’d made up her mind to ask the question she had so far been avoiding.
She’d known, though, that the ballroom would not be the right place – not when she was determined that, whatever the answer, she was going to ensure his straight, tough mouth came down hot and hard on hers.
‘I need to change into another pair of dance shoes – the ones I’m wearing are killing me,’ she’d said as they made their way to their table after an exhilaratingly fast quickstep. ‘Would you keep me company while I go an
d change them? Everyone is as high as a kite tonight, and I don’t want to run into unwelcome attention en route.’
With the amount of champagne everyone was drinking it had been a reasonable request and, with an assenting nod, Max had walked her out of the crowded ballroom and in the direction of the first-class passenger accommodation. As always when they were walking side by side he’d kept a couple of inches of space between them, so that their hands didn’t accidentally brush against each other. The contrast to the close hold they had been enjoying only moments earlier, as they danced, had been so stark that Rozalind had felt completely disorientated by it.
As they had neared the door of her cabin and she had wondered what his answer to her question was going to be, her inner tension had become almost uncontainable. Was he married or wasn’t he? The question had roared through her brain until she’d been dizzy with it. If he wasn’t married, why was he behaving towards her with such stiff propriety when she knew – absolutely knew – that he was as mad for her as she was for him? And if he was married . . . ?
As they’d come to a halt outside her cabin her mouth had been dry, her heart racing. One thing she’d known for certain. If he was married, then the sooner she knew about it, the better.
‘I’ll wait here,’ he’d said, leaning nonchalantly against the far wall of the narrow corridor, one foot crossing the other at the ankle, his arms folded.
She’d opened her cabin door and had then taken a deep breath and turned to face him, the ice-blue of her dress shimmering in the corridor’s muted light. ‘There’s something I have to know,’ she’d said, holding his eyes steadily.
He’d waited. Not moving. Not speaking.
Now, days later as she neared the Brandenburg Gate with Olivia, Rozalind remembered how furious she’d been with him for not making it easier on her. She hadn’t hesitated, though. She’d said starkly, ‘Are you married, Max?’
‘Why?’ he’d asked, the expression in his dark-grey eyes unreadable.
A Season of Secrets Page 15