Susie

by M C Beaton

  Instead of rushing to lay his apology at her feet, Giles sent a messenger with a brief note, expressing his apologies in stilted sentences, which sounded slightly offensive, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. Susie, crying over it, did not know that she was reading the final draft of about fifty torn-up letters and hours of mental anguish.

  Giles felt his first duty lay with his guests. His family honor was at stake. He had landed in this mess by allowing his feelings to rule his head. He had behaved disgracefully. His ball had been worse than an undergraduate rag.

  His noble guests were soothed on the following day by extravagant presents, gold cigarette cases for the men and gold watches for the ladies, and by the news that the real ball was to take place that very evening.

  It was, however, a restrained party of guests now assembled again in the ballroom under the striped marquee. Giles worked with a will. He danced with all the wallflowers; he kept as many men out of the bar as possible. The fireworks display, which had fortunately been overlooked in the drunken revels of the night before, was set alight to gasps of admiration from the party. The highlight of the evening’s entertainment was a guest appearance of that celebrated opera star, Yvette Duval, whose soaring, perfect notes acted on the troubled souls of the guests like a blessing. Madame Duval had been rushed down by special train from London that very day and bribed with an enormous fee to perform, but Giles reflected it was worth every penny. The Earl of Murr hugged his wife and asked her in more gentle tones than she had ever heard him use before to forgive him.

  Harriet Blane-Tyre took the bull by the horns and told the young man who had stolen her virginity that she would be obliged if he would forget about the whole silly thing, at which news he was much relieved, having parted with his own virginity in the process and not enjoyed a minute of it.

  Lady Sally Dukann came out of her sulks and behaved almost prettily, and Cecily Winthrope chased Harry Carruthers with alarming zeal.

  The evening was a resounding success, and all except Giles enjoyed themselves immensely.

  Giles had come to the conclusion that he had not been in love with Susie at all. He had behaved disgracefully, of course, and could only hope she would in time forgive him, but he privately admitted to himself that he did not really want to see her again.

  After all, she was middle-class. A girl of his own class, he felt sure, would not have made him lose his senses and behave in such a foolish and insane way.

  In the days that followed, the guests left one after the other. At last there was only Giles left.

  There was still modernization to oversee, electric light to be installed in the keep, and one of the guest bedrooms to be changed into a bathroom, so that he and Susie could have one each. Damn it! She wasn’t coming back. What had made him think of that?

  There were some fine rhododendrons from India to admire, and he had a lilac tree planted down by that stone bench at the lake. She might see it in flower if she were here next spring…. “What is up with me?” he asked himself.

  He was having the boulders torn from that field by the gravel pit, so that wheat could be planted in the following year. He could almost see the wheat, turning and glinting in his mind’s eye like the sun on Susie’s hair. Damn the girl!

  “She is not suitable,” he told his mirror sternly. “Just think of her horrible encroaching parents. Think how she leaves a trail of death and disaster everywhere she goes. I am a handsome and rich young man. Women like me. I need a wife. I’m lonely, that’s all.”

  But her ghost haunted the castle and its walks until one day, when he was inspecting the repairs to the top of the gatehouse, he saw the flutter of a white skirt away in the distance, at the top of the cliff by the bluebell wood. He ran and ran until he reached the top of the cliff and embarrassed one of the underhousemaids with one of his footmen, who were making sedate love in the bushes.

  I shall go to London when the summer is over and find myself a bride, he decided, and, having made up his mind, he worked harder than ever to make the long days pass quickly.

  Susie enjoyed the rest of the summer in her new residence in Hapsburg Row in Knightsbridge. It was a placid existence. Society had not yet heard of the manner of the deaths of the late earl or of Lady Felicity, and it now seemed as if they never would. But they knew that the young Countess of Blackhall was “common”—“greengrocer’s daughter or something”—and snubbed her accordingly.

  Susie had come to expect just such behavior from her new peers and did not mind in the least. She spent pleasant sunny days wandering about the shops or exercising Dobbin in Hyde Park at the unfashionable hour.

  Lady Matilda had explained, her surprising championship of Susie by saying she thought she was a silly girl who needed an older woman to take care of her, and, with that, resumed her tangled knitting and sewing and appeared to forget Susie’s very existence.

  Lady Matilda, however, noticed more than anyone ever gave her credit for. She was very loyal to Giles and had judged him to be so much in love with Susie that he was behaving like a madman. She therefore considered it her duty to keep an eye on Susie and see that she did not get married to anyone else. She enjoyed Susie’s unfashionable life, since she was left with plenty of time to tat and stitch and was not obliged to chaperon the girl anywhere at all.

  Susie’s new home was a large square white house built around the end of the last century. It had electric light in the reception rooms and gas in the bedrooms, and Susie considered it the height of modernity. A staff of servants had been hired for her by the efficient Mr. Jasper. All she really had to do was to check her housekeeping books, order new curtains and furniture, and keep a sharp lookout for the handsome young man she would marry.

  Susie had decided that homely young men were not to be trusted—witness the appalling behavior of Arthur Winthrope. She conjured up a vision of a handsome young fellow who had a square tanned face, honest brown eyes, and brown wavy hair. He neither looked nor talked like Giles.

  As Susie continued to be unaware of society, society began to feel a little piqued with the common countess. She should, they felt, have been running after them, seeking invitations, or riding in the Park at the fashionable hour, when they would have their rightful pleasure in cutting her dead. But she continued to go about her infuriating concerns completely unaware of any of them.

  Then, one early autumn day in September, when the leaves in Hyde Park were just beginning to turn and there was a pleasurable nip in the smoky blue air, Susie got herself into a scrape that was to bring her to the notice of society and, for that matter, to the notice of the rest of Britain.

  Susie was exercising Dobbin in the Park early that morning, when she was sure of having the Park practically to herself.

  She was seated sidesaddle on Dobbin’s back in a smart blue velvet riding habit, with a jaunty little topper perched on the top of her immaculately dressed brown hair. Dobbin was cantering sideways and rolling his eyes and tossing his head in a very frightening manner. Susie was undisturbed. She was used to clinging on for dear life and knew that Dobbin would settle down once he had asserted his independence.

  But to two dowagers taking an early morning stroll, it was a shocking display of bad horsemanship. The ladies were the Honorable Miss Belinda Fforbes-Benedick and Lady Jessica Whyte, two formidable spinsters.

  “Isn’t that the Common Countess?” asked Miss Belinda of her companion.

  Lady Jessica took out her lorgnette and glared through its lenses at the cavorting Dobbin with his pretty rider. “By gad, so ’tis,” she exclaimed. “Can’t handle a horse. Horrible-looking beast. Needs a touch of the crop. What’s she doin’?”

  “Feeding the brute sugar,” said Miss Belinda, who had the sharper eyes.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all,” said Lady Jessica, who was proud of her own horsemanship. “She ain’t in Camberwell now, and so I shall tell her. Shouldn’t be allowed out on that brute, since she can’t handle it. I shall tell her for her own go
od.”

  Meanwhile Susie had leaned forward and given Dobbin a lump of sugar and patted his nose and talked soft nonsense in his ear, and the silly horse closed his eyes and stood still in a sort of ecstatic trance.

  Lady Jessica marched up and stood under Dobbin’s nose. “Hey, you!” she said rudely to Susie.

  Susie looked down in surprise. She did not wish to dismount, for without anything to use as a mounting block, she doubted whether she would be able to get back on Dobbin again. So she simply stayed where she was and said gently, “I am afraid I don’t know your name. I believe we have not been introduced.”

  Susie meant to be polite, but to Lady Jessica it sounded like a colossal snub, and she turned a mottled puce with anger.

  “Never mind that fiddle,” she snapped. “You oughtn’t to be allowed out on that beast. You’re no horsewoman, miss! You’re a disgrace. That animal needs a touch of the whip.”

  Somewhere in the back of Dobbin’s small, narrow brain, alarm bells began to ring. That harsh, squawking voice reminded him of the cut of the whip and the stab of the spur. He stared down his long nose at Lady Jessica’s hat. It was a black felt hat ornamented with a whole dead ptarmigan with red glass eyes. Dobbin decided he did not like Lady Jessica. Furthermore, he hated her hat.

  He leaned forward and pulled Lady Jessica’s hat from her head, dropped it on the grass, and then trampled on it with his great splay hooves.

  Susie let out a little gasp of horror. Miss Belinda came waddling up to give her friend support.

  “I’m really so very sorry…” began Susie, but Dobbin had decided to go home, and so he set offal a brisk canter with Susie hanging gamely on his back.

  “You shall hear from my lawyers,” screamed Lady Jessica. “Common little slut! Just you wait!”

  Two days later Susie was summoned to appear at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, charged with assault.

  “Don’t go,” advised Lady Matilda calmly. “Send a lawyer instead.”

  “Who?” asked Susie.

  “Don’t know,” said Lady Matilda. “Ask somebody.”

  And that is how Susie came to ask Basil Bryant, who had passed his bar exams the year before.

  And that is how Basil Bryant came to be killed.

  But when Susie initially saw Basil, he was as radiant as that young man could possibly be. He would not hear of her staying at home. This case would be a cause célèbre, he said, pacing Susie’s elegant drawing room and stabbing his long bony finger in the air. He had shaved off his toothbrush mustache. His large nose gave him a commanding air, but his lank hair glittered with overmuch grease, and he had doused himself too liberally with eau de cologne.

  Susie was horrified at the idea of going to court. She had no idea what it would be like, but her scared imagination conjured up a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan Trial By Jury scene, where everything and anything could happen.

  The forthcoming trial received a great deal of publicity in the newspapers, since there wasn’t much else to write about in that quiet month.

  Giles read an account of Susie’s forthcoming trial, swore, and ordered his man to pack his bags.

  To Susie’s eyes the court was refreshingly drab. She had to wait through a long series of charges for shoplifting and vagrancy before her name was called. The ladies, Belinda and Jessica, had elected to appear in court. So had the whole of London’s press.

  Now, Basil was not an experienced lawyer. In fact, his manner was downright irritating. He babbled sentimentally about nature’s four-footed friends and the cruelty of stuffing birds and wearing them as ornaments, failing to notice that at least four ladies in the court were adorned with dead birds.

  Mr. Williams, the prosecutor, on the other hand, described the case very simply. A horse belonging to and ridden by the Countess of Blackhall had assaulted Lady Jessica. If he had left matters there, Susie would have been found guilty.

  But he went on to say that, in his noble client’s opinion, the incident had arisen because of the Countess of Blackhall’s lower-class background. “Persons from Camber-well,” hinted the prosecutor with a sneer, “cannot expect to be versed in the ways of the beau monde.”

  The magistrate, Sir John Smith, put up his hand to his thin mouth to hide a nasty little smile. For Sir John not only hailed from the middle class, but from Camberwell as well.

  He cast a cold eye at the press benches to make sure every one of the ink-stained wretches was listening, and cleared his throat.

  “The courts of London,” he began in his dry, precise voice, “have more to do with their time than to waste public money settling the squabbles of certain society ladies. I myself have long deplored the use of dead birds as hat ornaments and consider that the horse…heh, heh, heh…showed remarkable taste. (Laughter in court and frantic and delighted scribbling from the press bench.) ‘Persons from Camberwell,’ I think you said, Mr. Williams? Dear me, Mr. Williams. The day when I uphold sneers against the middle classes, the backbone of English society, will be a sorry day for British justice.

  “Pray, what has Mr. Williams got against Camberwell, that noble borough, that he should state that its people do not know the ways of the beau monde? The ladies and gentlemen of Camberwell, like the ladies and gentlemen of any other borough from Hampstead to Kentish Town, are more concerned these days with the state of the nation and the Empire than with the trivial squabbles of a certain section of society who should know better what to do with their position and wealth than to take up the time of this court over such a matter.

  “Case dismissed!”

  Lady Jessica squawked with rage. Susie looked dizzily around. She had not been asked to say anything. The next case was already being called.

  “Don’t let the bleeders get yer down,” advised a plump and dirty prostitute, giving Susie’s arm a squeeze as Susie was led from the court by a triumphant Basil Bryant. “They ain’t worth getting your knickers in a knot over.”

  “Very true,” murmured Susie, ever polite.

  Susie would very much have liked to leave Basil and go home alone, but Basil jumped into her carriage after her.

  “By Jove, Susie!” he cried, patting her knee in a familiar way. “Wasn’t I marvelous?”

  “Yes,” said Susie gratefully, because she really believed it was thanks to Basil’s legal talents that she was a free woman. “Thank you very much. How can I ever repay you?”

  “Wait till you get my bill,” said Basil with a jolly laugh. Then he leaned forward, gazed intently into Susie’s eyes, and said thickly, “Not that I mean to charge you anything. ’Pon my soul, no, not a penny!”

  “Really, Basil,” protested Susie, feeling decidedly uncomfortable under the gaze of his protruding eves, “you must send me your bill.”

  Basil tipped his silk hat to one side in what he hoped was a rakish manner and hitched his thumbs into his waistcoat. “We can talk about it later. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.”

  “We are?” queried Susie faintly, but Basil was already dreaming of the next day’s headlines and then of those future headlines, which would announce, BRILLIANT LAWYER MARRIES LOVELY COUNTESS.

  “Oh, dear,” said Susie in a whisper.

  Giles had arrived too late for the court proceedings. He told himself he was glad. He told himself he didn’t really want to see Susie again and turned in the direction of his club. He was walking along Bond Street when the glitter of a brooch in a jeweler’s window caught his eye. He stopped and bent down to look. The brooch was in the shape of a small ptarmigan, an exquisite little thing in gold and rubies. He decided on impulse to send it to Susie as a present.

  When he had bought the brooch and given Susie’s address for delivery, he began to feel strangely comfortable. It was a very expensive brooch, but he felt obscurely that the price went a little on the way to making amends to the girl.

  A red sun was burning down behind the houses into a bank of fog. The lamplighters were already out with their long brass poles to turn the lig
hts of London on.

  Smells of food, smells of wine, smells of spices, rose into the smoky air, which already held the exhilarating bite of winter. Carriage lamps bobbed and swayed along the streets. People hurried home from work, packing onto buses, plunging down below to the underground trains, or simply walking, their heels beating out an overture to the London evening.

  What a splendid evening to go to the theater, thought Giles. Nothing too clever and nothing too silly. He had it! He would go and see Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and have dinner at the Troc afterward. He thought perhaps he might call on Susie first—but she might not yet have received the brooch. She might look at him with those large hurt eyes and make him feel like a cad. But he could not help wondering what she was doing.

  Susie was trying to cope with Basil Bryant and failing miserably. Lady Matilda had chosen that day of all days to visit an old school friend in Hertfordshire and had said she might stay overnight. Basil was going over and over his success while his eyes roamed a little too freely over Susie’s slender body.

  They should celebrate, he said. He had it! He would take Susie to see The Pirates of Penzance.

  Susie had never been to a theater before. She realized that if she said yes, she could take quite a bit of time changing, and that would get her away from Basil, and then after the theater she would firmly shake his hand on the doorstep and send him home. Accordingly she told him she would be delighted.

  When she had left the room, Basil put his thumbs in his waistcoat and gazed around him with smug pleasure. It was a pretty room, with its white furniture, long mirrors, and pale-green walls. He liked something a bit more robust himself. He unhitched a thumb and rang the bell.

  “Hey, fellow,” he said to the liveried footman. “Nip out and buy two tickets for The Pirates of Penzance. Money’s no object.

  “And jump to it!” Basil called gleefully after him, feeling a heady sense of power. It was only a matter of time before he would be master here.