by Susan Barrie
THE WINGS OF MORNING
Susan Barrie
“My dear Kathie,
My godson, the Marques de Barrateira, and his stepmother have arrived unexpectedly, several days before I was looking forward to having them. I would like you, dear child, to come and join us for the week-end, and I hope this won’t upset any of your own personal arrangements! My car will pick you up at two- thirty this afternoon.”
Kathie’s two sisters could not understand this invitation from Lady Fitzosborne. Why would she invite quiet, plain young Kathie instead of her much more attractive sisters? And indeed Kathie was puzzled too. But she reasoned that no doubt Lady Fitzosborne needed someone to help with the household arrangements rather than someone to help entertain her guests, and so she set off for the week-end intending to be as useful as possible.
Thus begins a delightful story set in Ireland and later moving to Portugal.
CHAPTER ONE
Kathie was still cycling along the lane which led from the village when the excitement broke in Little Carrig.
With one eye on the dull grey surface of the loch, and the other on the road that wound between green shoulders of moorland, she was wondering how she was going to pass on to Eileen Miss Murphey’s futile suggestions for the white dress she was to wear for the O’Shaughnessy dance on the twenty-sixth.
Miss Murphey, dignified by the title of ‘local dressmaker’ — although by no means a follower of fashions set by people like Yves St. Laurent and Pierre Balmain (of whom she had certainly never heard!) — didn’t think there was enough material for a full-length evening dress, and what could be nicer or more useful than something full-skirted and short that could be worn for afternoon parties later on? It would do also for the garden party at Mount Osborne, for instance, and the September fete ... And, with a little red velvet jacket, would even do beautifully for Christmas!
Kathie, who knew that Eileen had set her heart on at least three rustling petticoats to wear beneath the evening dress, and a silver lamb jacket, could not imagine her looking forward to Christmas when it was as yet only early April. And although the garden-party at Mount Osborne had been the high spot of their lives since childhood, it was the O’Shaughnessy dance that was preoccupying her at the present time to the exclusion of practically everything else.
And when she learned of the shortage of material she would simply fly into a rage — one of her tempestuous rages that shook the walls of Little Carrig, and caused the Irish half of her to ignite — and the sight of her blazing blue eyes like stars on a frosty night, and tossing mane of golden hair, would so upset their mother that in all probability she would rush her off to Dublin and buy her something straight out of one of the most exclusive little establishments devoted to haute couture.
For that was the way Eileen, the beauty of the family, got things done — or, rather, achieved things. Mrs. Sheridan could never resist her in any of her moods, and since it was Mrs. Sheridan who handled the purse-strings nowadays, it was wise of Eileen to be temperamental sometimes.
Kathie sighed as she bumped over a familiar mound in the deplorably bad surface of the road, and then turned in at the drive of Little Carrig. She knew that she herself would be wearing her old pink lace on the night of the twenty-sixth, and it didn’t trouble her in the least. Not because she wasn’t dress-conscious, and hadn’t a certain amount of pride in her appearance, but because there wasn’t much point in deriding the pink lace.
To have done so would have been the equivalent of finding fault openly with Little Carrig — objecting to its faded stucco, and the plantains on the front lawn which nobody ever did anything about, with the result that they grew worse and worse and now entirely overlaid the once-prized Cumberland turf. She had to live in Little Carrig, and in a way she was very fond of it, just as her father was fond of the plantains. He said that the lawn would look bare without them.
She expected to hear Bridie playing the piano as she skimmed like a bird up the drive. Bridie was the eldest of the three sisters, and although she was not particularly good at piano-playing, it was the only thing that afforded her any diversion, since she had had to cut short her modelling career in London and return home to recuperate after a bad bout of influenza that had ended in pneumonia. She was languid and wan and beautiful — although not, of course, as beautiful as Eileen —and expecting to marry well one of these days. In fact, very well!
For Eileen everyone confidently looked forward to a millionaire to restore the family fortunes.
Kathie was the only one of Patience Sheridan’s daughters who had escaped dazzling good looks, but her godmother, Lady Fitzosborne, once said that the pixies were out en masse at the time of her birth, and they gave her her fly-away eyebrows and dew-washed complexion. In fact, Lady Fitzosborne insisted that they bathed her in dew, and bestowed upon her a look of perpetual springtime that would last her right through life until her hair turned as white as Lady Fitzosborne’s own.
When neither a Chopin waltz nor something more modern and in a livelier tempo floated out to greet her as she propped her bicycle near the open drawing-room window, Kathie felt surprised but nothing more. And instead of entering by way of the eternally open front door, she slipped round an angle of the house to her father’s study, where she found him snoozing comfortably in his favorite armchair. He opened an eye and goggled at her as she dropped a package of tobacco on to his knee, and then sat up and chuckled and approved her guile.
“Doesn’t do to let your mother know everything that goes on in this house, eh?” he said. “Nor misbegotten doctors, either! All that talk about tobacco choking up the lungs is just blarney and eye-wash!... Mine’ll stay as sound as a bell until Gabriel blows his horn! The blessed St. Patrick’ll see to that!”
Kathie sat down on the arm of his chair, and ruffled his hair.
“You know very well you’ve had a wretched little cough all winter,” she reminded him. “I feel like a conspirator pandering to your weakness when I go shopping for you without anyone’s knowledge. And I’m not at all sure St. Patrick would approve.”
“Aren’t you?” He reached for a well-seasoned pipe and loaded it, and his brown eyes twinkled at her above a puff of smoke. “I am! It was St. Patrick who ensured that you were sent along in order to prevent me sinking right under the thumb of the strong-minded folk who once lived in Castle Carrig!” Kathie’s eyes twinkled back at him at this reference to her mother, and her mother’s family, and she knew that it was a sore point with him that their present home had had to be linked in name with a far more ostentatious dwelling. “Another couple of determined lovelies like Bridie, and Eileen and I’d have given up the ghost long ago. Simply couldn’t have borne it without a kindred spirit around.” She laughed.
“I’m a Sheridan, aren’t I? I look like you, and I believe I’ve a lot of your less admirable qualities.”
“You’ve got red in your hair, and your eyes, I believe, resemble mine.” He smiled at her gently. “And you speak nothing but the truth — unless the situation demands a skilful wrapping up of the truth!” He touched her knee. “But I wish you wouldn’t wear slacks, and those atrocious jumpers. The one you’ve got on at the moment looks as if it’ll hardly survive another wash, and it’s the wrong color for you, anyway. You should never wear pink.”
“My one and only dance frock is pink,” she murmured.
“Then throw it away in the dustbin and get another. Why don’t you get Bridie to take you in hand and teach you the gentle art of grooming? You could do with a few lessons in that sort of thing, you know, Kathie!”
Kathie laughed more loudly this time.
“Oh, Daddy darling, I thought you didn’t want to be swamped by lovelies!” And then, more seri
ously: “And what would I use for money to buy a new dress, if that’s what your heart’s set upon?”
He laughed, and coughed, and shook his head at the same time.
“Don’t you earn any money at Lady Fitzosborne’s? You spend a lot of time at Mount Osborne these days, and I always thought she was an extraordinarily generous person. She’s not the type to use your services for nothing.”
She said quickly:
“Of course she doesn’t. She’s a darling! ... But I’m saving up to send you to the Bahamas next winter, and get that old cough of yours cured.” She sighed. “I wish I could win a football pool, or something, and then I would send you to the Bahamas! But, as a matter of fact, my modest means are intended for a new tailor- made as soon as it’s practicable. Like you, I am occasionally aware of a few of my shortcomings,” she added, pushing a strand of red-gold hair out of her eyes, and standing up to peer disparagingly at her innocent-of-make-up complexion in a mirror.
Gerald Sheridan looked suddenly concerned.
“As bad as that, is it?” he demanded. “Doesn’t your mother give you anything to supplement what you earn?” He dived a hand into his pocket and produced a crumpled one-pound note. “Here, add that to your little horde, and see if it makes any more sense! I’d give you more if I could spare it, but...”
She tucked the pound note back into the pocket of his faded tweed hacking jacket, and shook her head at him.
“You’ll need it, darling, although you’re feeling rash at the moment! You’ll need it for tobacco — and other things!”
“What other things?” he questioned, as if he never knew the need to bribe Bridget, the housemaid, to perform his errands for him when Kathie was nowhere around, and the half bottle of whisky he kept in the bottom of his wardrobe needed replenishing. And then he remembered something that should not have been allowed to slip his memory for so long. “I can’t understand why I’m always dropping off into a doze these days, but I must have had a nap between all that excitement and your getting back from the village! Lady Fitz sent round a special messenger — you know how she declines to use the telephone! — and you’re invited to Mount Osborne for the weekend. The girls are furious, and your mother can’t make it out. Why you, she wants to know?”
“Invited to Mount Osborne — for the weekend?” His daughter, who was so like him, stared at him. “But, Daddy!... how extraordinary!”
“That’s what your mother said, and Bridie and Eileen echoed her.”
“I don’t understand it...” Kathie began. And then she looked round for her shopping basket, and the things she had bought for her mother. “I’d better go and find out what it’s all about, but I’m sure there’s some mistake. Lady Fitz was looking forward to a quiet weekend as usual when I saw her yesterday morning, and it’s next weekend she’s expecting visitors...”
“Perhaps they’ve turned up unexpectedly, and she can’t cope.”
“She wouldn’t want me to help her cope with these visitors. They’re very special, and frightfully wealthy, and rather exalted. The man is her godson, and recently inherited a title. He’s been on a kind of a world tour.”
“I’d go on a world tour too, if I was frightfully wealthy,” Sheridan sighed. “Anything to get away from the climate of southern Eire!”
Kathie didn’t stop to commiserate with him just then, although he started to cough and splutter over his pipe as if the very thought of the cold grey mist that was pressing down over the loch just beyond his windows affected his bronchial tubes. She could have told him that he shouldn’t be smoking his pipe, but she couldn’t deprive him of everything that made life worth living when nowadays existence seemed to hold so little for him. A wife who controlled what little money they had, a houseful of daughters with plans of their own, a shabby old ‘den’ in which to spend most of his waking hours.
And since his last bad bout of illness the doctor wouldn’t allow him to play golf, or even to fish. He grew tired of the daily newspapers, and he was reduced to doing crossword puzzles for diversion.
Kathie looked back at him with the keenest possible sympathy ere she escaped from the room, and then she made her way quickly to the drawing-room to find out why her female relatives were lined up against her.
CHAPTER TWO
Bridie was doing something her mother occasionally objected to rather feebly, and that was removing stale nail varnish from her nails with a bottle of remover propped precariously beside her on the cushioned window seat; and Eileen was moving restlessly about the room as if the spirit of resentment that possessed her would not permit her to be still even for a moment.
Mrs. Sheridan was endeavoring to add up household accounts at her little rosewood writing desk, and complaining because Eileen’s restlessness was affecting her powers of concentration.
Kathie took in the picture they all three made against the background of the room with its conflicting features — gilded cornices and a lovely white marble fireplace and splendid proportions sadly let down by faded cretonne covers on the armchairs, and an almost threadbare carpet. One or two of the vases contained a few spring flowers, and there were photographs of both Bridie and Eileen in silver frames and prominent positions. Bridie — the up-and-coming model — had hers taken by a London photographer; but Eileen had never been farther afield than Dublin, and her perfect face had been reproduced in a slightly less sophisticated manner.
At the moment that Kathie swung open the door and looked at them Eileen was biting her lip, and she suddenly came to a pause in the middle of the carpet and burst out:
“We never get invitations to Mount Osborne — except when you and Daddy are invited as well!” she complained to her mother. “And then it’s only for some stupid old lunch, or a duller dinner party. With the leading guest, Squire Donovan, who can’t keep awake after his third liqueur!”
“That’s because he lifts his elbow too much all day,” Bridie observed. “How otherwise do you think he got that marvellous puce-colored complexion?”
Eileen whirled on her, as if that was the whole point of the argument.
“The only people we know locally are interested in horseflesh and market prices, and the poor quality of the whisky nowadays! At least, that’s all they can talk about! There isn’t an interesting or eligible young man within miles ... not really eligible! And the one weekend Lady Fitz is entertaining a marquis — a marquis, mind you! — we’re not invited! But Kathie is! What irony!”
Kathie said quietly from behind her:
“The marquis is a Portuguese marquis, and he’s Lady Fitz’s godson. And anyway, it’s next weekend he’s expected at Mount Osborne.”
“How wrong you are!” Eileen exclaimed, and whirled on her. She thrust forward a note. “Look at that! Read it!... Read it and mark carefully every word! ‘My dear Sebastiao, the Marquis de Barrateira, and his stepmother, the Marquesa, have arrived unexpectedly, several days before I was looking forward to having them. I would like you, dear child, to come and join us for the weekend, and I hope this won’t upset any of your own personal arrangements! My car will pick you up at two-thirty p.m. this afternoon.’ ”
“There—there must be some mistake,” Kathie stammered. “Why would she want me to join them?”
“Why, indeed?” Eileen demanded disdainfully, her blazing blue eyes travelling up and down the slight figure in the well-worn tailored slacks and the appalling pink jumper that fought so badly with dark chestnut curls and matching brown eyes. The fact that the pale complexion glimmered like a pearl didn’t seem to strike her. “I hope you haven’t any very pressing personal arrangements this afternoon that you can’t afford to cancel!”
Kathie bit her lip and Bridie looked at her in her languid fashion.
“Don’t get any ideas into your head, darling,” she advised. “Your presence is urgently required because the whole household has been thrown into a flat spin, and it will be your job to make certain the Portuguese guests aren’t frozen in their beds at nights, and that t
he temperature of the hot-water bottles is just right! And as Lady Fitz is crippled with arthritis she’ll need you to manipulate that heavy silver coffee-pot after dinner. Left to herself she’d probably drop it and scald the lot of them!”
“Lady Fitz always pours out coffee after dinner,” Kathie heard herself saying automatically, and then she saw her mother’s glance resting on her, and realized that for once Mrs. Sheridan was appealing to her. The faded beauty who had been struggling with accounts at her desk had had about enough for one morning, and although she adored Eileen — and sympathized with Bridie — she thought that the subject of Lady Fitzosborne and her weekend visitors had gone far enough. And since Kathie after all was employed by Lady Fitz, it was not so extraordinary that she should be sent for.
If only her note had been slightly more businesslike, and had not included that bit about joining them for the weekend, and referred to Kathie as a ‘dear child’ — which, however, was like Lady Fitz—no particular excitement would have been caused by it. But since it had been caused, and the atmosphere of Little Carrig looked like being badly ruffled over the whole of the weekend, she was anxious to get things into their right perspective as quickly as possible.
She signalled to Kathie silently to aid and abet her in this admirable intention, and her youngest daughter rose almost instantaneously to the occasion, and said at once that of course the only reason she had been sent for was because she could be of some use. Mrs. O’Hara, the housekeeper at Mount Osborne, was becoming a little difficult owing to advancing years, and Kathie had discovered the art of smoothing her down. And it was highly likely that she needed smoothing down after the descent of a couple of guests upon them who had not been expected for another week. And Kathie’s services in a secretarial capacity might be required. The Marques might want someone to whom he could dictate letters, and the Marquesa, too...