Half a Crown

by Jo Walton

  “But you were missing and anything could have happened to you,” Mrs. Maynard said. “You shouldn’t have separated yourself from Betsy and Sir Alan, that was most foolish. We’re all fortunate that the police found you and restored you to your uncle. And apart from Sir Alan, unavoidably, who is practically a member of the family and will not tell, nobody else knows, and nobody else will.”

  I blinked for a moment at the way she emphasised this last part. Then I realized. I had been out alone and unsupervised overnight. For a debutante, this was the equivalent of throwing my bonnet over the windmill or declaring open season on myself. My precious virginity could have been threatened, and just the rumor that it could have would be enough to ruin me. For a moment I was horrified. Then I remembered that Mrs. Maynard’s poisonous whispers about my background would have ruined whatever chances I might have had in advance, and that I didn’t care anyway. “Nothing like that happened,” I said.

  “Yes, so your uncle assured us. The police were looking after you all the time.”

  “That’s right,” I said, though it seemed to me a remarkably twisted view of my time in the cells, especially when I thought of that redheaded officer shoving me.

  “Well, that’s all right then,” Mr. Maynard said, exchanging glances with his wife. “We’ll say no more about it, and as far as anyone else is concerned, you were with poor Betsy the whole time. Now how about having a look at your note from Sir Alan?”

  There was a sealed envelope among the flowers. I got up and took it. “Miss Royston,” it said, correctly, on the outside. Inside it began: “My dear Cinderella.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m more sorry than I can say that I didn’t manage to get you home before midnight, and that you ran into some trouble. I’m glad to hear it’s all sorted out, and, having been sworn to secrecy by Mrs. Maynard, shall of course tell no one. I’m sorry my choice of entertainment—and yours as well— turned so unexpectedly violent. I must assure you I had no idea whatsoever that things would get out of hand so quickly. Elizabeth told me you had taxi-money in your bag, and that in the circumstances would be sure to use it. Nevertheless, and despite her injury, it was very wrong of me to leave you alone in such circumstances. Please accept these flowers with my most sincere apologies, and permit me to hope for a dance with you when next we find ourselves in the same circles. Yours sincerely, Alan Bellingham, Bart.”

  “It’s just an apology,” I said.

  “He sent a matching bouquet to Betsy,” Mrs. Maynard said. “As I said, he’s practically one of the family. He hasn’t actually proposed, but we have very high hopes....”

  “How lovely,” I said, smiling brightly. I was not about to steal Betsy’s boo, nor betray her secrets to her parents.

  “We didn’t want you to think...,” Mrs. Maynard said, in another of her famous trailing sentences.

  “Oh no, I’d never have let any such thought cross my mind,” I assured her enthusiastically.

  Betsy came down for dinner, looking awfully pale. Her freckles stood out like islands on a map. She didn’t eat much, just pushed the food around a little with her right hand. Her father kept encouraging her to take something, but all I actually saw her eat was part of a bread roll and a few grapes. I wanted to show her my pearls and my pendant after dinner, but she said she wanted to sleep so I said I’d study, and in fact fell asleep almost at once.

  On Friday morning Nanny woke me, looking sour. “Insisting on you both having your fittings, she is,” she said, setting down a cup of tea on my bedside table and drawing back the curtains. It was raining.

  “Our fittings?” I asked, yawning, then remembered. “For our Court dresses?”

  “Miss Betsy with a broken arm and hardly able to sit up, but Miss Tossie insists that you both go off to have them. What’s the sense in it?” Nanny was an elderly woman, with iron gray hair and a rigid deportment. She had been Mrs. Maynard’s nanny, and come back to her for Betsy’s birth. Betsy always said she had a very soft center and was wonderful with illness and small children. Everyone agreed that she was rather too inclined to continue to treat her erstwhile charges as if they were three years old, but precisely because they once had been, she continued to get away with it. In fairness to Mrs. Maynard, while I’d been delighted to learn that Nanny called her “Tossie,” I should record that her baptismal name was Theresa.

  “There’s no use asking me, Nanny,” I said, sitting up and reaching for the tea. “I hoped we’d put the whole thing off until Betsy was better.” Nanny had known me for years and had seen my transformation from guttersnipe to young lady. These days she regarded me with a certain amount of limited approval, as if I were a puppy or a kitten Betsy had taken a fancy to and who had been house-trained more successfully than she had feared. She didn’t necessarily like me, but she saw I was good for Betsy and that was enough.

  “It’s not Miss Betsy who’s panting to get on with it,” Nanny said.

  “In a way she is,” I said. “Our whole life for years has been leading towards this.”

  “Then why is she crying into her pillow this morning? And don’t tell me it’s the pain, she tried that one on me but I’m too canny for her.”

  “You’re cannier than the whole family put together and you know it, thank you, Nanny,” I said, jumping out of bed and making for the door.

  “Slippers!” Nanny said, sounding thoroughly horrified that I’d contemplate going out of the room without them. I pushed my feet into them, snatched up my teacup, and was off down the corridor towards Betsy’s room.

  Betsy’s room was twice the size of mine, but all the same it was absolutely dominated by the bouquet, twin of mine downstairs even to the urn. I was very glad they hadn’t tried to put mine in my room. The primroses were much more to my taste.

  Betsy was sitting up in bed, not exactly crying, but wiping her nose in her handkerchief and very red around the eyes. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Nanny is really worried.”

  “Did she tell you to come?” Betsy asked.

  I sat in the bedside chair and settled my teacup on the arm. “Nanny wouldn’t do anything so uncouth. She told me you were upset, knowing that of course I’d come. What is it?”

  “Mummy had one of her little talks with me last night, and now I can’t see how to get out of marrying Sir Alan,” she said. “It wouldn’t normally make me cry, but it just seemed too much along with the ache and the pills. I kept waking in the night every time I moved, and remembering.”

  “Your parents can’t make you marry him,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “You have to agree. Just keep saying no. Be firm. I’ll ask Uncle Carmichael about finding a job for you at the Watch, like you said.”

  “It’s easy for you to say be firm. I realized last night that I’d been secretly hoping I’d meet someone during my season, someone possible—someone with enough money but not an eldest son and not caring a straw about my not being a catch. Someone nice. But now, dragging around this cast, there’s no chance of that.” Betsy buried her face in her handkerchief.

  “You’ll just have to tough it out and keep saying no. I hear that Oxford is full of men—eighty percent men. I’ll find one for you, nice, and with a preference for redheads, and I’ll lure him back here with stories about how wonderful you are.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were still spilling tears.

  “Just keep saying no,” I said. I knew how wearing Mrs. Maynard could be.

  “Look at the flowers he sent. I almost persuaded myself in the middle of the night that marrying him would be better than living here with Mummy, beard and all.” She looked desperate.

  “He might be persuaded to shave. But if you don’t like him it would be wrong to marry him. Besides, your mother might be counting chickens. He sent me a bouquet every bit as towering. And she explicitly warned me off him in the drawing room yesterday. Why not have one of your painkillers and see if that helps you feel better about the world?” I smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

  “Would you draw him off?�
�� she asked.

  I almost choked on my tea. “I’ll try if you really want me to, but good Lord, Elizabeth, he’s a grown man, it’s a terrible risk if I make him think I like him. Besides, I don’t know if he’d draw. You’re the one with the connections, and the settlement. His mother likes your mother, and all that. I don’t know that he’d pay any attention to me except to be polite to you.” He would though, I thought, remembering his eyes on mine and thinking of his note, but it wouldn’t be at all safe. There was a funny kind of excitement in the thought. “He might think I’m the kind of girl you don’t marry, and that really wouldn’t be safe, you know.”

  “You wouldn’t have to marry him, or even be alone with him, just so long as you drew him off me a bit,” Betsy said. “And he would draw. He likes you. Mummy said he called you Cinderella in the note. He called me Miss Maynard. She might have warned you off; she was warning me about the danger of you.”

  “Then your mother read my note somehow, because I didn’t tell her that,” I said, indignant.

  “She steams them open,” Betsy said. “She thinks she’s the Watch. But will you draw him off? It’s the only thing I can think of that might work.”

  “Well, I’ll try if you really want me to, but I’m not very comfortable about it, and if I signal you I want you to stick to me like a limpet!” I said.

  “That’s such a relief,” Betsy said, and smiled her sweetest smile. “Now I’d better get up and have breakfast before we go off to have our Court dresses pinned onto us. Ugh, mint green for me and rose pink for you. I’ll look like death warmed up and you’ll look feverish. Do you think they’ll do me a sling to match?”

  “And our trains draped over our arms,” I said. “I’ve only ever worn a train in dancing lessons. At least we know how to curtsey. There’s an advertisement in The Lady for a place that offers to teach debs how, if they don’t already know.”

  “They say if you smile at the Queen she always smiles back,” she said. “Think how stiff her face must get with all that smiling.”

  “Do we actually get to talk to her?” I asked, thinking about what Aunt Katherine had said about Queen Victoria. It might sound utterly stupid, but before that I hadn’t thought about being presented as a case of meeting the Queen, only as a ritual we had to go through.

  “There’s a hand signal we can give if we particularly want to speak to her. I believe that afterwards she summons those who have given the signal into her drawing room. Then after that she comes out and mingles, and she might come up to any one of us then, of course, when we’re all mingling like mad. I don’t think you could exactly have a conversation when you’re curtseying. Think of everyone being in line behind.”

  “You’re right. It’s a funny ritual when you think about it. Your mother can present us because she was presented to Royalty, and so on back to what, William the Conqueror? And I’ll be able to present my children, because I was presented, even though I’m not anybody.”

  Betsy rolled her eyes. “You’re you, Elvira Royston, and you should stop being so idiotically diffident about the class thing.”

  “It does matter. It matters like mad to your mother.” I shrugged. “Never mind.”

  “It won’t matter to the Queen. Probably you’ll do much better than I will. I always get so nervous at things like that. Still, once it’s done it’ll be over, and there’s nothing but balls and dinners, and if I don’t have to worry about evading Sir Alan I think I can endure it.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “And we have a ball tomorrow night, in case you’ve forgotten; Libby Mitchell’s party.”

  “That’s where you can start drawing Sir Alan off,” she said at once.

  “I’ll try, anyway,” I said. “I’m a bit apprehensive about this, but oh well.” Then I remembered. “Your pearls! I hope we have them back by then. Uncle Carmichael’s doing his best, but I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

  “I can always wear Aunt Patsy’s seed pearl thing, Mummy won’t think anything of it. Probably.” Betsy frowned. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. And I can’t lend you anything anyway, because she will be there and she will notice.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said, pleased. “You were right. Uncle Carmichael took me to Cartier and bought me pearls and a pendant, so I have what I need.”

  “What are the pearls like?” she asked.

  “Like a string of pearls. A single strand, well matched, a little bit pink.” Betsy’s were a little bit yellow.

  “Then if the worst comes to the worst and Mummy insists it’s a pearl occasion I can wear your pearls; she’s not going to look at them under a microscope, after all.”

  “I suppose so,” I said, somehow reluctant to lend them before I’d had a chance to wear them myself, and knowing this was rank ingratitude after all the times she’d lent me jewelry. I put my teacup down on her bedside table. “I’m off to dress, and then we can enjoy a couple of hours of having pins stuck into us.”

  “It’ll remind me of a confidential chat with Mummy,” she said, and we laughed as I went back to my own room.

  12

  The Watchtower was in a flap when Carmichael arrived in work at ten o’clock on Friday morning, much refreshed after his day in the countryside. Miss Duthie’s desk was overflowing and she was pacing the hall awaiting his arrival.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked at once.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Ogilvie wants to see you, and so does Lieutenant-Commander Jacobson, and Captain Hickmott called twice and the Home Office called six times for you yesterday, and the Times has been calling this morning, and the BBC, and the Prime Minister, and Mr. Penn-Barkis of Scotland Yard, and”—she lowered her voice—“the Duchess of Windsor, if you can believe it.”

  Carmichael did his best to hold on to his good cheer. “Oh, I believe it. Out of the office for twenty-four hours and I could believe all hell is breaking loose, never mind Wallis Simpson. Give me the list, Miss Duthie, and I’ll take care of it. Do you know what any of it is about?”

  “I think it mostly has to do with the conference opening, oh, and the arrests, of course.” She looked flustered.

  “Tell Jacobson and Ogilvie that I’m here, Jacobson first, please.”

  “Certainly, sir.” Miss Duthie pushed back her hair and handed him a neat sheet of paper with a list of calls. “Oh, and today’s watchword is raven, by the way. And there seems to be a lot of mail this morning, but I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Well, when you get to it, bring me whatever’s urgent. But first, a cup of tea if you wouldn’t mind, Miss Duthie?” Carmichael smiled at her encouragingly.

  “I’ll put the kettle on right away. I was just about to when you came,” she said. “But is Elvira, I mean Miss Royston, is she all right?”

  “She’s perfectly all right, no harm done at all, don’t worry. Her friend, Miss Maynard, broke her arm, which is why the Maynards didn’t get in touch with us. But she’s back there now and everything is fine, don’t worry.”

  “Oh good, that’s such a weight off my mind,” she said, and disappeared down the corridor towards the kettle.

  Carmichael went in and sat down, leaving the door open. He felt a little guilty that he had left her in a state of distress about Elvira all this time. He had thought Sergeant Evans would have told her the news. But then Evans had the discretion he expected in Watch officers.

  He looked at his list. Normanby had to be first, regrettably. Hick-mott probably wanted clarification on the Duke of Windsor business, and Wallis Simpson—imagine her ringing him!—the same. The BBC and the Times very likely wanted comments on something; no doubt Jacobson or Ogilvie would know what. As for Penn-Barkis, he had no idea what his old Chief wanted, but the Prime Minister came first. He picked up the receiver, and suffered through three layers of secretaries, during which time Miss Duthie came back with the tea tray, before Normanby came onto the line.

  “Whatever anyone says, we hold our course,” the Prime Minister said.
r />   “Yes, Prime Minister,” Carmichael said, considerably startled.

  “That’s all. Good.” There was a click as the line disengaged. Carmichael put the receiver down thoughtfully as Jacobson came in, grinning.

  “Tea?” Carmichael asked, pouring his own.

  “Not your dishwater, thanks all the same. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “Would you like to sit down and tell me what’s going on?” Carmichael sipped his tea and looked at Jacobson over the rim of the cup.

  Jacobson closed the door and sat down. “Normanby’s overstepped. The people are finally getting fed up with all this. It’s like Coriolanus. The papers, the ordinary papers and the broadsheets, are all full of it. Arresting all those rioters was one thing, sending them off to the camps is another entirely. The Telegraph has even raised the question of why we have anything to do with the death camps in the first place.”

  “The Telegraph!” Carmichael said. It was the most conservative and right wing of the daily newspapers; generally, if anything, to the right of the government.

  “I really do think he’s finally overstepped and people are starting to be outraged at last,” Jacobson said. “But why are you frowning?”

  Carmichael put down his teacup deliberately. “Because I had news the other night of a coup from the right, led by the Duke of Windsor, to oust Normanby and install him as an absolute monarch, with backing from both the madder Scottites and the people who think Normanby is a moderate and soft on crime because he doesn’t send gentile criminals to the camps until their third offense.”

  Jacobson’s smile became a sagging jaw by the time Carmichael had finished his sentence. He closed it with a visible effort. “You think they’re behind this British Power movement?”

  “It certainly seems so. There is some good news, though. I’ve discovered a Quaker movement shipping Jews to Zanzibar, and we’re going to funnel as much money and as many people their way as we can without being noticed. They’re the ones who tipped me off to this Duke of Windsor business.”