Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Don’t press your luck,” said Carolina hollowly, for she was wondering how—if Reba’s present unlikely plans did not work out—Reba would ever explain to some outraged bridegroom about not being a virgin? “Marry him out of hand if you get the chance and let all else go!”

  “Yes, I’ll probably do that,” agreed Reba. “I—” She ended with a screech as she was flung forward, the coach having given a violent lurch and then skidded crazily to a halt. The girls tumbled together in a corner.

  Carolina realized that she had landed on Reba. “Are you hurt?” she cried.

  From beneath her came Reba’s sputtered “No”—for she had brought her hand up to brace herself and her muff was half stuffed into her mouth. She could hardly speak for the fur.

  Assured that Reba wasn’t injured, Carolina fought her way clear of Reba’s body and clawed open the leathern flap only to confront the crestfallen face of the coachman, vague in the white darkness of the snowy world outside. He made sure they were all right and told them glumly that they had lost a wheel.

  Reba had struggled up now, and she interrupted Carolina’s bewildered, “Where are we?” with a relieved, “Oh, thank heaven, we’re at the gates—I can just see them over there. Untie the coach horses, Giles, and boost us up—we’ll ride in. Our trunks and boxes can follow later.”

  So it was by this novel method of travel, riding bareback and astride on coach horses unused to riders, that the girls reached the great house at Broadleigh via a long winding driveway. Snow kept falling on them in small avalanches from the branches as they rode beneath the overarching trees and they looked more like snowmen than young ladies as they came out of the driveway suddenly to be confronted by a long Jacobean timbered façade. They dismounted through sheets of now blinding snow. The coachman leaped off his mount to bang the huge iron knocker. And then they were going through the big oaken door, and a chambermaid appeared from somewhere to scurry forward and take their wet cloaks and hoods and cluck over the condition of their wet skirts.

  From the outside Carolina had not had time to appreciate the size of the house, but once she was stamping her pattens in the great hall to rid them of the snow and letting a servant take her cloak, she was startled to realize that she was standing in a room large enough to encompass the whole of Farview back home on the Eastern Shore. She looked with awe at the ancient yawning fireplace, the echoing stone floors, the dark beams lost somewhere above the glow of candlelight, the rich medieval look of everything.

  “You didn’t tell me your home was anything like this,” she murmured as they brushed snow off each other’s hair.

  “Well, it isn’t exactly an ancestral seat,” laughed Reba. “Papa bought it.”

  Carolina’s mouth opened—and shut again. Back in Virginia she had been told of the wealth of England’s new merchant princes, but somehow to be confronted with it was staggering. Perhaps Reba was right and she could aspire to a marquess after all, she thought, studying the echoing vastness of the hall and the roaring fire in a fireplace which would easily accommodate the tallest man standing erect.

  “Oh, here comes Drewsie,” cried Reba. “She always sees through me!”

  A stoutish woman with a homely pleasant face was hurrying toward them. She wore a spotless white linen apron over her serviceable dark wool dress, and a white cap just barely held back the strands of gray hair that kept escaping.

  “Reba, child, ye’re back!” she crowed and threw her arms around Reba and hugged her. “’Tis good to have ye home for the holidays!”

  At Reba’s laughing, “No, I’m home for good, Drewsie,” the older woman stood back, held Reba at arm’s length and fixed her with a severe expression. “That fancy school threw ye out?” she hazarded a guess.

  Reba gave Carolina a droll look out of the corner of her eye. “Of course not, Drewsie! I left in good standing. Didn’t Mamma tell you? She sent for me. I’m home to stay.”

  “Lor’ no! She didn’t tell me!” Drewsie hugged Reba again. “That’s the best news I’ve had!” she declared warmly.

  Reba extricated herself from the older woman’s embrace. “Where’s Papa?”

  “Your papa’s gone to London and he’ll be away all through the holidays,” declared Drewsie importantly. “He’s tied up in some business deal or other. I heard your ma talking about it with him but I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it. Something about some young Lord in London gambling away his fortune and needing money and being willing to put up his country estate as collateral.”

  Reba sighed. “Papa’s always away chasing after some business deal. Carol, this is Drewsie, our housekeeper. She’s had a time of it, trying to keep me out of trouble! This is Carolina Lightfoot, Drewsie, my friend from school. She’s from the Colonies—Virginia.”

  The stoutish woman regarded Carolina with immediate interest. “You’re a pretty girl, Carolina,” she said approvingly. “From the Virginia Colony, you say? But you wasn’t born there surely?”

  “Indeed I was,” said Carolina, amazed not only by the question but by a servant’s casual use of her first name and comment on her appearance. Plainly Reba did not remark any strangeness.

  “But I thought they was all red Indians over there!” insisted Drewsie. “Excepting for them as just went over!”

  Carolina laughed but the older woman’s words brought home to her again just how alien a Colonist could feel in the Mother Country. The girls at school had made her feel that way too—at first, before she became wealthy Reba's roommate and therefore acceptable. “I should have brought along my moccasins,” she muttered to Reba as the housekeeper disappeared and they turned toward the wide stairway.

  “Oh, indeed you should have,” agreed Reba. “You’d have created a sensation padding around in them—and they do make wonderful bedroom slippers!”

  But of course Reba wore satin mules for bedroom slippers. Carolina decided to drop the subject of moccasins. “Drewsie must be a very old retainer, I take it?” she asked.

  “Oh, she’s much more than that. Drewsie’s a second cousin of Mamma’s—you remember I told you Mamma only speaks to one of her blood relations? Well, Drewsie’s the one! There were sixteen children in Drewsie’s family, mostly daughters, and they simply couldn’t get them all married off. Drewsie was one of the leftovers and she came to live with us before I was born. But Mamma says she’s not well spoken and will never be ‘accepted’ by the county gentry and she mustn’t appear to be related to us, so she’s to have the post of housekeeper now that we’ve ‘moved up in the world’—and Drewsie says she doesn’t mind.” She laughed. “You mustn’t let on to Mamma that I told you Drewsie is related to us.”

  But of course Drewsie would mind! How it must hurt her to be treated as an upper servant when actually she was a member of the family! Carolina’s head whirled. In Virginia, you might cast off your blood relations as unacceptable, cut them out of your will, turn your head away from them at social gatherings or cut them dead on the street—but they were still your blood relations and she couldn’t imagine a situation in which a cousin of her mother’s would live in the house with them and not be acknowledged as a relative.

  She began to understand how Reba could speak so casually of waiting for her lover’s wife to die. She was her mother’s daughter!

  The maidservant who had helped them out of their wet cloaks was back with a candle to light their way up the broad Jacobean stairway they must climb to greet Reba’s mother who, Drewsie had told them, was feeling “indisposed.”

  “Never you mind, Rumsey,” said Reba, taking the candle. “We’ll light our own way up.” She turned to Carolina. “I’ll show you something of the house as we go.” She picked up her emerald green velvet skirts and prepared to ascend.

  Carolina, all too aware of her sensible brown worsted traveling dress and worn shoes, gave her splendidly garbed friend a fleetingly wistful look. It would be much more fun right now to be padding around in a pair of Reba’s high-heeled satin slippers—even though those
Reba found too tight were a little too large on her—and wearing one of Reba’s beautifully sewn creations, always in the latest style from Paris. Even the gentleman’s suit she had borrowed from Reba for that night at the Star and Garter was more becoming than her own dowdy things!

  She sighed. Not much chance she would get to do anything like that again!

  From what she’d seen and heard so far, Reba’s family was nothing like she’d expected. These were the “upstarts” she had once overheard Mistress Chesterton complain of at the school, for Jenny made up in lineage what she lacked in morals and it annoyed her to be running a school for the daughters of merchants and wealthy tradesmen rather than the “true aristocracy.”

  Carolina followed Reba up the stairs and stopped when Reba paused and raised her candle to highlight a large but rather stiff portrait of a willowy overdressed woman with hard russet eyes and a face hauntingly like Reba’s.

  “That’s my mother,” said Reba.

  Carolina paused before the portrait and wondered at the hardness of those eves.

  “But it doesn’t look a thing like her,” scoffed Reba and Carolina felt relieved. There was something she didn’t like in those eyes, something harsh and cold. “She told the portraitist to make her look younger. And prettier. And thinner. And he did because he wanted to be paid for his work!”

  At the head of the stairs stretched a long balustrade with pillars. Ordinarily this would have made a wonderful balcony from which to look down and observe what was going on in the great hall but it had been hung with a number of large tapestries depicting chivalrous scenes. The effect was to obscure the view for tapestry after tapestry, hanging like a solid wall, rendered the corridor behind dark and gloomy.

  “Those were there when we came and Mamma’s going to take them all down come spring.” Reba nodded casually toward the handsome tapestries. “But meanwhile she says they make the upstairs halls less drafty.”

  “What does your father say about it?” wondered Carolina. She was thinking that Reba’s father rather got lost in the shuffle as Reba spoke of “Mamma says this” and “Mamma does that.”

  “Oh, he couldn’t care less,” laughed Reba, lighting their way down a long corridor. “He’s interested only in making money. And perhaps,” she added, “getting his daughters all married off to men who can support them!”

  Carolina sighed. That seemed to be the preoccupation of all the parents she ran across—interfering in their offspring’s matrimonial plans. She decided that what England needed was Marriage Trees, at least one group at the border of every county!

  When they reached her mother’s door, Reba turned to Carolina, suddenly nervous. “Don’t say much,” she cautioned. “Just go along with anything I say. You have to be careful with Mamma. She wrote me that she hasn’t been well,” she added as she gently knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” said a sharp voice.

  They went inside.

  The furnishings of the spacious bedroom did not jibe with the force and drive Carolina had sensed in the woman she had seen in the portrait. Pale rose satin draperies obscured the tall windows and matched a coverlet trimmed in ecru lace. A big delicate canopied bed with fluted posts and carved gilded angels was set like a wedding cake in a shower of French gilt furniture that looked out of place in this big square English bedroom with its dark heavy Tudor paneling and lofty beamed ceiling. But the square-faced heavyset woman in the elegant rose satin robe, who turned about from the ministrations of a maidservant who was combing her tight orange curls before the mirror of the delicate gilt dressing table, certainly matched the architectural surroundings by strength alone. In fact she seemed to overpower the whole room.

  “So you got through the snow?” Mistress Tarbell greeted her daughter.

  “Yes, Mamma,” said Reba meekly.

  Mistress Tarbell pushed aside the hovering comb. “From the look of things outside, I thought you might be staying over in London until the weather was better.”

  “No, Mamma.”

  No embraces, thought Carolina. No warmth. She was glad this wasn’t her mother. For whatever Letitia Lightfoot’s other failings might be, she always greeted people as if she was glad to see them!

  Now those flashing russet eyes—her best feature in that square dogmatic-looking face, and even more like Reba’s than they had looked in the portrait—narrowed as she surveyed Carol. “And who’s this?” she asked bluntly. “If you’ve hired yourself an abigail, you can send her right back to London—I do my own hiring!”

  Reba winced visibly at this crude assessment of her friend and Carolina’s cheeks were burning as her young body stiffened. She knew that her heavy worsted dress was plain and unfashionable but it was the warmest thing she owned for a coach ride in weather like this—and she certainly did not think she looked like a lady’s maid! Taut with indignation, she lifted her chin haughtily and glared back at her formidable hostess.

  “Mamma, this is my best friend from school— Carolina Lightfoot,” Reba said nervously. “I’ve brought her home with me for the holidays.”

  So Reba hadn’t written to tell her mother she was coming! Carolina could feel her face turn crimson.

  The stocky figure in satin sat straighter, and a pair of thick heavy brows elevated in amazement. Carolina could almost feel what the woman was thinking: This is one of your friends from that elegant school I sent you to? Lor, she looks more like one of the chambermaids! Mistress Tarbell pushed away the hovering maidservant and came to her feet. She was not very tall but she had a commanding presence. Behind her the maidservant’s covert grin completed Carolina’s humiliation.

  Carolina made perhaps the most elegant and exaggerated curtsy of her career. “I must apologize for my condition,” she told Reba’s mother in a frosty voice. “The snow. ...” Her little deprecating shrug fairly dripped hauteur—for was she not her mother’s daughter? She gave her wet woolen skirts a slight illustrative shake that deposited tiny droplets all over the rich green Aubusson carpet. “I do hope I have not come at an inconvenient time, Mistress Tarbell,” she added distantly. “Reba led me to believe that although you have but recently moved in, the house was in condition to receive guests.” Her gaze passed disdainfully over the delicate gilt furnishings that seemed so out of place against the stout dark paneled walls. “But of course if it is not, I will betake me to an inn.”

  The moment Carolina spoke, it was plain to all in the room that this was no servant girl speaking but a daughter of the aristocracy. She knew she had overdone it a bit but she had been goaded by that awful woman in rose satin whose square form faced her. Behind Mistress Tarbell the maidservant’s smirk disappeared and she regarded Carolina in some alarm.

  Her hostess looked a bit dazed but she recollected herself immediately. “Oh, ’tis a most convenient time,” she insisted with a reproving glance at her daughter. “Reba should have told me she was bringing home a friend. Shouldn't you, Reba?" Her russet gaze was so fierce that Reba took a step backward as if she expected her ears to be boxed. “But indeed you’re most welcome —Carolina, is it?”

  “We call her Carol at school, Mamma,” said Reba. “And where is your home, Carol?”

  “Virginia,” said Carolina firmly. “The Eastern Shore.”

  “The Colonies?” Mistress Tarbell could not keep the incredulous note from her voice.

  “Oh, Carol’s father has a magnificent estate over there,” cried Reba, seeing her mother’s expression. “Doesn’t he, Carol?”

  He might not now, but according to Virgie’s letter they soon would have one. Carolina gave her hostess a grim smile.

  “Thousands and thousands of acres,” babbled Reba. “And he’s building a fine new house with a stairway broader than ours!”

  “We are not all savages in Virginia, Mistress Tarbell,” said Carolina softly. She tried to make her tone light but the words came out sounding like a challenge.

  -“No—no, of course not.” Again Mistress Tarbell’s view of things was knocked
askew. “I will put you in the green room,” she decided.

  “Oh, Mamma, couldn’t Carol have the room next to mine?” cried Reba, almost childishly. Carolina was amazed how much younger Reba seemed here with her mother. Plainly the presence of her formidable parent reduced her to quivering jelly!

  Her mother frowned. The green room was by far their handsomest guest bedchamber and had just been given elegant new draperies and French wallpaper over the plastered walls. But Carolina was looking as if she might join in Reba’s request. “I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “But the draper hasn’t got to that one yet.”

  “Then I’ll take her there right now,” cried Reba in relief. “And she can join me in my room while the chambermaid makes up her room. And Mamma, we’re starving, we haven’t had supper. Could we have something sent up?”

  Mistress Tarbell calculated quickly in her head. Which would impress her daughter’s aristocratic friend most—a forest of silver in the cold dining room or an elaborate tray such as could hardly be carried? She decided on two elaborate trays—the forest of silver in the dining room could wait till tomorrow. And tomorrow morning she would corner her daughter and learn all about this cool-eyed ill-dressed young beauty she had brought home with her. Her manner suggested aristocratic lineage—and younger sons of great houses went out to the Colonies all the time. It was too bad Jonathan wasn’t home—he was a miracle at finding out things about people.

  “I’ll see to it. Take Carol along with you.” She made a dismissive gesture and watched Reba bear her friend away.

  The room Carolina had been assigned was delightful, she found. Soft shades of orange and russet blended in the heavy damask hangings and cast a warm glow by candlelight upon the buff walls and the gold of the faded carpet.

  “Mamma hasn’t had at this room yet,” Reba told her cheerfully. “Papa bought the house furnished, but Mamma had almost everything sent up to the attics. This room she’s left alone until she could get to it. She’s planning puce draperies and coverlet and a red Turkey carpet to brighten it up.”