Later, she’d sought solace before that seed of a home, even though she’d grown too old for such fancies. After Caroline married Richard and moved away to London, she would slip to the nursery, long empty of Dellaforde children young enough to inhabit it, to sit on a low stool before the doll’s house. She came there to cry one night, holding a letter from Caroline, a letter too similar to its predecessors: Only another few months, dearest, and we’ll send for you. Richard tells me the household expenses are simply too close now, but soon . . .
But the nursery had not been empty that night. Thomas Dellaforde, home from university, was there hiding his smoking from his father.
Stay and have one. It will distract you from whatever’s made you cry.
On a tiny stool, she’d sat and pretended this was her first cigarette, shocked to discover Thomas Gregory Dellaforde already knew her name.
“But it’s not a very nice name, anyway, is it?” he’d said. “Lizzie? You’d be better with Liza, or Beth.”
“My mum always called me Elisabeth. Elisabeth with an s. Mrs. Filgage called me Lizzie when I come here, though, and I was too timid to say different, so everyone else says it, too, now.”
But his sister was Elizabeth. “Let it be Betsey between us. Awfully pretty, I’ve always thought. Very—”
He had said a word she’d not known back then, and couldn’t remember now, but she’d liked the sound of it. She forgot her desolation over Caroline’s letter. She forgot the doll’s house, only a few feet behind her. She didn’t think of it again for a long time after that, even when she and Thomas went back to the nursery sometimes.
Still, as the tin house on the biscuit container warmed beneath the tip of her finger, she remembered it clearly, more clearly than she remembered Thomas’s face.
Sit in an erect and comfortable position close to the machine.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
You are aware, Miss Gilbey, Lord Tennyson has a poem named for you.”
Lillian continued leafing through Mr. Dunning’s sheet music, pleased to think of him brushing up his Tennyson just for her. They were using this Sunday afternoon to rehearse their duet for her music society party, though on a break for tea at the moment.
“Yes. Papa used it to scold me when I was a very little girl, if he thought I was sulking.”
Mr. Dunning turned from the table to speak to Mama and Aunt Constance, chaperoning from a distant corner of the drawing room. “Ladies, you must tell me the greater fiction, that little Miss Gilbey sulked or that her father ever had need to scold her?”
“Horace Gilbey cajoles his daughters into obedience,” Aunt Constance said. “I’d be surprised if he knows the meaning of the word scold.”
Mama smiled. “Little enough reason for him to.”
“As I suspected.” Mr. Dunning rapped Lillian’s knuckle with a single finger. How exquisite, his musician’s hand. “You fabulist. Poetic justice is one thing, but whoever heard of poetic scolding?”
“‘Airy, fairy Lilian’ is hardly a pleasant girl. I should have to change my name if I truly had inspired such a deplorable depiction.”
“Deplorable!”
Lillian laughed, supposing him surprised that she could find fault in her beloved Lord Tennyson. But genius was not infallible. Witness Mr. Dunning’s music collection, whose only standard for inclusion appeared to be notes on a staff. Hymns and drawing-room ballads and operettas were as likely to appear as Schumann or Handel. At a chance meeting at Albert Hall last week, he had confessed a penchant for the music hall, and just now, she had come to a piece titled “Oh! Angelina Was Always Fond of Soldiers.” The lack of boundaries perplexed her.
“Mr. Dunning, your indiscriminate assortment of music here worries me enough. Please don’t say you admire that poem.”
“I found it . . . well, lovely, rather. I suppose.”
They had often sparred like this, debates that enlivened them both, but he was giving up now—his single fault, to Lillian’s observation, this diffidence to which he surrendered occasionally. He must learn to manage it if he hoped to get anywhere; it only required the right sort of discipline.
Thus, she pressed, “But so trivial and obvious! No theme but a coy and guileful female, do you not agree?”
The tips of his ears turned pink. He pulled his portfolio of music from her, thumbed to the back, and removed a manuscript.
“I suppose I don’t—that is, I set it to music, you see.”
Lillian froze, envisioning herself having to strike Noel Dunning from her List tonight, and not because she wanted to. If he learned something of the perils of beating round the bush, fine, but that good lesson was no use to her now. How was she to repair this insult?
She began by sniffing at the manuscript, a skeptic. “Well, I certainly must hear it. If you can make something bearable of those verses, Mr. Dunning, I shall avow your genius far and wide.”
With an air of challenge, she directed him toward the piano, prepared to rhapsodize over any old thing he mashed out. But within the first measures, she knew no playacting would be required. Under the spell of his melody, doggerel became achingly beautiful, and “cruel little Lilian” seemed worthy of the heartache the speaker lavished on her. Lillian halted the maid entering with tea with an upraised hand and went like a sleepwalker to the piano, where she leaned, transfixed, until the final note faded.
Mama and Aunt Constance applauded, but Lillian could only sigh, “Oh, Mr. Dunning, oh. Mr. Dunning.”
After a bashful glance, he started to fold the manuscript. Lillian snatched it from him.
“No, no, no, Mr. Dunning! It is . . . exquisite, extraordinarily exquisite. Did you hear it, Mama?” Her skirts swished as she twirled to her mother, then again to the piano. “You must play it at the party. Tell me you will, you must.”
“But our piece . . .”
“Yes, yes, the duet—you’d have two pieces in the program, if you’re willing. You are, aren’t you?”
“I’m grateful to possess the means to grant any of your wishes, Miss Gilbey, but I shouldn’t impose—you were remarking upon how crowded the program is already.”
Mama brought Mr. Dunning a cup of tea. “Dearest, it’s true. You spent the whole of yesterday afternoon putting the performances in an order that suited you—it is all ready for the printer’s. You’d undo all that?”
Lillian waved away this question. She had slaved over the program not to suit herself but to create sensations and transitions and moods, not to mention balance politics and protocol. Mama little understood the complexities.
Nor how they signified nothing. The very theme of this gathering was new pieces: a composition never yet published nor played in public, performed by the dashing son of a famous composer who happened to be a baronet . . .
Coup was the word. Sydenham Music Society would get a notice in the papers, which would open the door to who-knew-what-number of new invitations.
And it was a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of music.
She would have too many performances, though. But someone might develop laryngitis, or stage fright, or magnanimously step aside to make room for Mr. Dunning—
John. Surely by now he was regretting the task he’d set for himself. He would be positively relieved for a way out. Not to mention how it would ease her own mind. She’d already had a nightmare of John taking the stage with something appalling, even worse than “Oh! Angelina Was Always Fond of Soldiers.”
She didn’t voice her idea. Mama was partial to John and wouldn’t like it. And Lillian and Mr. Dunning no longer used John as a topic of conversation. It was uncomfortable, and besides, they’d found so many other things to discuss.
She offered Mr. Dunning the plate of biscuits. “It will work itself out. Nothing to bother over now.”
She persuaded him to play his song again before he left for the afternoon. She declared it perfect, absolutely perfect.
“Except . . .”
She hesitated, certain Lord T
ennyson would condemn this request. But with phrasing like “love-sighs” and “crimson-threaded lips,” and John, not Tennyson, in company, did she have a choice?
“Might you use another name, Mr. Dunning? Marian? Gwendolyn?” To protect him from insult, she dropped her gaze sideward—her modesty could not bear such attention, he must understand.
A true gentleman, he did. “Marian it is. But will you grant me a similar favor? A change of name?” Into her ear, he whispered, “Noel. If only now and then, Noel.”
Success. Desperately, she wished for privacy, having hypothesized lately that John’s kisses were not as singular as she’d thought, that other men might like to kiss like that. Perhaps the son of a baronet?
Revising the program after Mr. Dunning departed took only a moment. She could hardly cut the regular society members, and John, he could not care so much. And if he did—well, he would forgive her. He’d just have to forgive her.
• • •
“He must be mad for you,” concluded Sarah as she and Betsey gathered herbs from the kitchen garden Sunday afternoon. “To come from London, to fight for you. One could almost pity the man”—she smiled self-consciously as she reached up to place her cuttings in the basket Betsey held—“if you would let one.”
Betsey put a sprig of rosemary to her nose. She couldn’t join Sarah in fantasies of Avery’s unrequited love for her. Nor could she begin to explain the prosaic arrangements of her life to someone like Sarah. A way of going along.
More than that, she’d told Mr. Jones last night, and what had she meant? A type-writing machine to practice upon? Extra writing lessons? A reminder of Thomas Dellaforde, with those lines of literature Avery carried about in his head and the books stacked up in his flat once upon a time?
She wouldn’t risk an alteration of Sarah’s soft warmth toward her, and thus, she spoke of last night’s events in the most general terms possible.
Laughing, Sarah stood and tucked a flower behind Betsey’s ear. Sarah’s haze of curls was already strewn with tiny blossoms and leaves. “All right, then, he is the lowest sort of cad, and I shan’t waste my pity on him.”
“He could have—he still might—cost me my position, Sarah.”
“I meant to say ‘villain,’ of course. The seedy variety, without a trace of romance.” She frowned with renewed concern as she considered Betsey. “Your poor mouth. How did you ever—”
She interrupted her own question to cock an ear at the house, and Betsey was glad, for Sarah’s curiosity about Avery had been driving toward increasingly difficult-to-dodge questions.
“I shall absolutely wring his neck.” Sarah dropped her shears into the basket and started to pull off her gloves. “A thousand and one times I’ve warned him about his noise in the house, especially when there are boarders at home.”
But when her son burst through the door that led to the back garden, he got no more than “Darling, hadn’t you best stay out of doors if you want to make such a racket?” The fist planted on her hip was very stern, however.
Charlie, who appeared ready to take flight, such was his excitement, failed to notice it. “John’s come back with me—he’s waiting out front.”
“I’ll take these cuttings to the kitchen,” Betsey said. She had managed to avoid Mr. Jones at church this morning, keeping Charlie and Sarah as a buffer between them, distancing herself from the groups of chatting congregants after the service. With luck, she could escape to her room without seeing him now.
Charlie said, “Let ’em rot. It’s you he’s waiting for, come on.”
She glanced at Sarah, and regretted it. Sarah looked so curious and . . . alert. All that had passed between herself and Mr. Jones last night had been communicated to Sarah as “he’s disappointed in me,” a broad umbrella of a phrase that covered everything from her mistake with the budget to the fact that she wasn’t an heiress, or a virgin.
She didn’t want to be forced into civility after he’d insulted and condescended to her. She didn’t care to spend another jot of time remembering how foolishly she’d allowed her feelings to run away from her.
But Charlie, impatient, said, “He told me to fetch you,” and she understood she’d been sent for. She pulled Sarah’s flower from her hair and permitted Charlie to tug her through the house to the front door, where she followed his order to cover her eyes before he opened it.
A bicycle. Mr. Jones had brought her a bicycle. It and he stood in the road before the house, waiting for her.
“John and me picked it,” Charlie said. “It’s from the hotel—they got new ones for the guests, and you get an old one, just to borrow, but it’s not old, really, it’s good as new—we fixed it for you, John and me.”
He ran down the walk and hopped the fence at the edge of the front garden, then squeezed the front tire of the safety bicycle. “Pneumatics!”
Betsey came to the gate, but she didn’t go through. She stared at the bicycle.
“I asked Tobias,” Mr. Jones said. He added, “A solution to getting you home when you are late at the hotel,” as if that predicament had been the extent of their interaction last night.
As Charlie swung a leg over the cycle, she murmured, “Keep us safe from dillydallying, won’t it?”
Mr. Jones colored. He looked like a boy, blushing, standing there in his Norfolk, his soft cap pushed back on his head. Very different from Mr. Jones in his dinner suit, but both versions produced the same impossible longing in her, and she was glad she could make him uncomfortable, glad she could rattle John Jones’s easy confidence.
“I don’t know how to cycle, Charlie.”
“Why, John’ll show you—he taught me, and you see how I do.” Charlie pedaled away, suddenly looking gawky as he turned his elbows out and made laborious shoves down on the pedals, causing the bicycle to list to and fro. He wobbled up the road in an awkward hunch with elbows and knees poking out, putting on an act of incompetence only an expert could manage.
Betsey glanced sidelong at Mr. Jones. He was smiling. “There’s cheek,” he said.
“You see, a fine teacher!” Charlie called as he turned around. Then he was graceful again, releasing the handlebar and holding his arms out at his sides as he came coasting back toward them.
“A peacock.” Mr. Jones raised an eyebrow at her. “Taken him out of my pocket, have you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean you’re a witch, Dobs.”
The comment dropped mildly enough, but she bristled anyway. She hadn’t tried to influence Charlie, enchant him away from his devotion to Mr. Jones. He was lucky Charlie pulled up just then, or perhaps she was the lucky one. In any case, she checked her tongue.
“You see?” Charlie said, dismounting. “It’s ever so easy.”
“I don’t need a bicycle,” she said. She reached across the gate to draw a single fingertip along the curve of the handlebar. “The tram’s good enough for me.”
“But cycling’s much more fun than an old horse-tram,” Charlie said.
“And no fare to pay,” Mr. Jones pointed out. “Not that you worry much for paying fares, but—” He put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and leaned over the boy. “You see that look, Charlie? Like we’ve sold her cow for beans instead of gold. Forgot, she has, that the beans did turn out to be magic.”
“They did,” Charlie said, as if this were a completely logical point that didn’t overlook the facts of the ruined garden, a missing son, and an ill-tempered giant. Also, that it was a fairy tale.
“I haven’t a cycling costume.”
Mr. Jones phh-ed, knowing this excuse to be even more preposterous than the magic beans argument. Ladies had specific costumes for every public activity in which they engaged, and probably for their private activities as well, but she was just Betsey Dobson.
“You’ll manage fine. Mind your skirts is what there is to that.” He gestured as if to demonstrate how she ought to lift her skirts. But as their eyes met, the motion turned awkward and charge
d, and he left off, blushing again.
He used both hands to pull his cap down, then held open the gate. “Come along then, Miss Dobson,” he said, so Englishly, so supervisorously. “The afternoon is about to get away from us.”
She wanted to refuse, remind him this was Sunday afternoon, and that even given the because-I-have-said-so factor, he hadn’t any right to demand she learn how to ride a bicycle, nor to send Charlie to fetch her at his convenience. It didn’t matter that cycling seemed a rather glorious activity, and that she’d long wanted to try it. Just now, she wanted to be difficult.
A small bit of torture. Just to even things up.
“Very well, damn it,” she said, and came through the gate.
Well, fairness was a luxury, after all, and one made dearer by her actions last night. If she became more difficult than he cared to abide, what would happen to her?
Sarah called Charlie back to the house. Mr. Jones adjusted the saddle for Betsey, then straddled the steering wheel to hold the cycle steady while she mounted to test the height of the saddle. He made a clumsy inquiry regarding the angles of her knees, and she lifted her skirts so he could judge for himself.
“Off,” he ordered. “More height, you need. Go put on some low shoes whilst I fix it.”
“I’ll make do with my boots.”
He raised his brows. He clearly did not care to repeat the command, thus compelling her to explain, “I haven’t any others.”
“They’ll do, then,” he admitted. “’Tis but a matter of comfort.” A few moments later, his focus trained on the saddle, he murmured, “You made yourself scarce after church.”
He didn’t ask why or where she had gone, so she let the comment hang. The second adjustment was perfect, and they walked, pushing their bicycles, toward a neighbor’s open field where Mr. Jones said she should have her first lesson, and she promptly questioned why she couldn’t practice on the road before he shoved her into oblivion down a hill, and he said it was a slight downward grade, not a hill, and it would help her learn more quickly. Also, he’d be right beside her, not shoving her anywhere. It was a hill, she insisted, and she was sure she would do better on the road. He explained about motion and friction and balance, and how the grade—“the hill”—would make gravity work for her, and she explained how she’d seen bicycles on roads many a time, and in fields exactly never.
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