by M C Beaton
She placed a sympathetic hand on Mr. Baines’s arm (Bloggs choked into his beer) and said in a soft voice, “It’s better to tell someone, Mister Baines. Is it about Lady Blenkinsop? You must forgive me. I couldn’t help hearing…”
Mr. Baines looked into her warm, sympathetic eyes and began to talk. What an agony of love, passion, pain, rejection, and loss came pouring out in the staid confines of Spielmann’s. With a new maturity Polly realized that she could ease a lot of her own pain by helping someone else.
She said cautiously, “Perhaps you do not wish me to interfere, Mister Baines, but Lady Blenkinsop asked me to call on her at any time. Maybe if I visited her, I could convey a message or let her know how you feel….”
“Would you?” breathed Bertie Baines.
“Of course,” smiled Polly. “But you must ask Amy to get the call for me. I am not allowed personal calls.”
“Certainly! Certainly!” said Mr. Baines, cracking his knuckles. “Are you finished? Good! Let us go to the switchboard immediately.”
Amy dutifully asked the operator to get Putney twelve but not before she had cast Polly a withering look. Amy believed that Polly had reported her to Mr. Baines, and once more in her mind the lifeless corpse of Miss Marsh was borne from the office.
• • •
The Marquis of Wollerton was hunched in an armchair in his club. He could not get Polly Marsh out of his mind and it was all he could do to stop himself from rushing down to Westerman’s.
Hadn’t his mother just been congratulating him on the fact that that “terrible little Marsh girl” was gone from their lives? He frowned unseeingly at his crisply ironed newspaper. He really must either do something or put the girl from his mind entirely. Her memory was spoiling the even tenor of his day. He suddenly thought of Lady Blenkinsop. She had seemed sympathetic toward the girl. It would do no harm to call in at Putney… just a social call of course. Perhaps he might even hear something that would put him off the girl entirely. After all, she was an absolute outsider.
The heavy gray clouds seemed to crouch in a threatening mass behind the Blenkinsop mansion as Polly once again pushed open the heavy iron gates. The bitter wind hissed across the surface of the Thames throwing up little whitecaps on its black surface and turning the broad sweep of the river into a stormy and miniature Atlantic, with the corpses of dead trees holding up their branches above the winter water, as if appealing for help to a race of ancient and uncaring gods.
Polly was wearing the serge dress, which felt thin and inadequate against the bite of the wind. All the fog had been ruthlessly sponged from it leaving it only a limp memory of its former warm glory.
Lady Blenkinsop was reclining on a chaise longue in the sitting room. Two patches of rouge stood out sharply on her thin white face and she raised a thin, skeletal arm in a gesture of welcome as Polly was ushered into the room.
“Oh, my lady,” gasped Polly. “What is the matter?”
“I am going into a decline, I think,” said Lady Blenkinsop, with a flash of her old humor. “I have another guest arriving so please tell me your news first.”
“I am worried about Mister Baines,” said Polly simply. “He seems to be grieving.”
A blush swept over Lady Blenkinsop’s thin face. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” she said in a painful whisper. “I am a married lady, my dear, and, in society, we are only allowed to have our little affairs until we are found out.”
“But surely you must feel something,” said Polly, aware that she was being impertinent but determined to have some news with which to console Mr. Baines.
“Tell Bertie,” she said, “that I shall always remember him with affection. But nothing more. Nothing more.”
“I’m sorry to upset you, my lady,” said Polly, “but—” She broke off as the Marquis of Wollerton was announced.
Polly and the marquis stared at each other in dismay. The marquis made a little gesture, almost as if to leave, when he heard Lady Blenkinsop saying weakly, “My dear Marquis, you must forgive me. I feel quite faint.
“Tell Wilkins to send my maid to me and please show Miss Marsh the conservatory. I shall be quite well presently.”
After Wilkins had been sent on his errand, Polly and the marquis entered the suffocating heat of the conservatory and stared in silence at the plants. The hum of the steam heating system underlined the hot and heavy silence. Far above the glass roof the gray clouds tumbled across the winter sky, driven by a rising wind.
“They are splendid plants,” said the marquis pleasantly.
“Y-yes,” stuttered Polly. “Very green, aren’t they?”
“Very green,” agreed the marquis. “And so leafy.”
“W—what a I—lot of glass.”
“Yes. Isn’t it. And so glassy.”
Polly gave him a fulminating look. “You are teasing me.”
“Yes,” he replied gently. “I am talking nonsense to stop myself from taking you in my arms.”
Immediately he wished he had not said anything so provocative. Polly was looking at him wide-eyed. He was aware of his own strong desire, almost as if strong cords of desire were stretching out from his body to draw her closer.
She edged away from him, further and further, until the small heels of her button boots were pressed against the edge of a goldfish pond in the center of the conservatory.
Polly stared up at the pale golden eyes as the marquis came close to her. Her legs felt weak and trembly but she knew she must not let him touch her. Still staring at him as if mesmerized, she took a step backward—and landed with a splash in the warm water of the goldfish pond.
She struggled to get up. The marquis leisurely stepped into the pond as if he were in a drawing room and knelt down in the water beside her. Slowly his arms went around her and held her close, and his lips found hers and both floated away on a silent tide of passion, unaware that they were lying together in the middle of Lady Blenkinsop’s conservatory and in the middle of Lady Blenkinsop’s goldfish pond. His kisses were searching and exploring and Polly realized for the first time in her young life what it is to want a man with every fiber of your being. Still kissing her, he opened the tiny buttons at the front of her dress and then drew back and looked down at her magnificent breasts lying white and gleaming under the green water of the pond. He caressed them gently and bent his head to hers again, feeling the weedy taste of the water against his lips and then feeling almost nothing but an uncontrollable passion.
“Tea is served.”
The voice of Wilkins came from the direction of the conservatory door.
The marquis swore and sat up. Polly became aware for the first time since he had kissed her that she was lying among the weeds of the pond and that curious goldfish were nibbling at her hair.
Shielding Polly from Wilkins’s protruding stare—so very like that of the disturbed goldfish—the marquis snapped, “Tell Lady Blenkinsop that we shall both need to borrow dry clothes. We both had an accident and fell in the pond.”
“Quite, my lord,” said Wilkins, his face an impassive mask.
• • •
“So tell me all the London gossip,” said Lady Blenkinsop, looking curiously over the tea things at the odd couple in front of her. The marquis was dressed in one of Sir Edward Blenkinsop’s tweed suits. It was miles too wide for him and miles too short. Polly was wearing one of Lady Blenkinsop’s wool dresses that was miles too long and miles too small in every other direction.
The marquis chatted away pleasantly while Polly felt waves of shame washing over her. She must have been mad! Bad enough to have submitted to his caresses like any common miss—but in a goldfish pond?
Polly shared the religious beliefs of Stone Lane. If you sinned—and all pleasures were sinful—then God would punish you. You had to pay for what you got in your spiritual life as well as in the earthly life of Stone Lane. Having absolutely no inkling of the facts of life, Polly began to fear that she might become pregnant, and her face became whiter a
nd whiter. Surely the intimate caresses she had allowed were as far as anyone could go. Why, she had been almost naked to the waist!
Polly sat in agonized silence over her untasted tea and at last became aware that Lady Blenkinsop was ordering the marquis to drive her home. Polly made a few incoherent noises meaning that she would return home alone but nobody understood her and she soon found herself alone with the marquis in his carriage.
He immediately tried to take her in his arms again but she shrank from him as if he were some species of poisonous reptile. “Keep away from me,” she gasped.
“I don’t understand you,” he said testily. “One minute you’re swooning in my arms and the next you’re backing off as if I’ve got the pox.”
“Oh, the shame of it,” sobbed Polly, bursting into tears. “I’m ruined!”
“Rubbish!” said the marquis nastily.
Polly sobbed harder. “In a goldfish pond,” she wailed. “It’s not natural!”
“Balderdash! What do you consider natural? I know. Furtive fumblings in bed with all the lights out.”
Shock dried Polly’s tears. He had mentioned bed. She must be pregnant. Her face grew very white indeed.
The marquis suddenly became concerned. “You look frightened to death. What on earth is troubling you?”
“What if I am pregnant?” There! She had said it.
The marquis tried hard not to laugh. “How on earth could you possibly be pregnant?” he asked gently.
Polly bowed her head and whispered, “I had no clothes on from the waist up.”
“Well, my dear,” he said in the same gentle tones, “it’s when you are naked from the waist down that you have something to worry about.”
A mental picture of Polly naked from the waist down made Sir Edward Blenkinsop’s short suit seem suddenly unbearably short in the wrong places. He closed his eyes and reached out his hands.
But Polly was immersed in the relief that she had done nothing to endanger her virginity. Never would she make such a mistake again! She had let her wicked senses and thoughts of lust lead her astray. Decent women did not feel like that. She looked at the marquis with his closed eyes and stretching hands and jerked open the carriage door as they slowed in the press of Putney traffic.
The marquis felt the cold wind on his face and opened his eyes. The carriage door was swinging open and the snow whirled and danced but of Polly Marsh, there was no sign at all.
CHAPTER TEN
Winter had settled his icy grip on London. Snow fell heavily for two days, flying in white sheets across the City, and Polly, trudging homeward in the freezing cold and press of equally cold businessmen, felt gloomily as if time had played some awful trick on her and that she were taking part in the retreat from Moscow.
Snow pitilessly covered the human bundles of rags lying in doorways and froze innumerable families to death in their East End tenements.
The New Year dawned grim and white, a glittering extension to the kingdom of winter, where no bird sang and human souls and human emotions seemed frozen by the cold and the incredible effort of getting to and from work.
Fear of unemployment drove the working masses into the City in droves in the morning, stumbling and falling over the drifts, almost dreading the warmth of their offices, which would only mean the painful return of life to numbed hands and feet.
In a bitter way, Polly was glad of the cold; glad of the battle of the elements that kept feelings at bay and made thoughts of love amongst the goldfish a mad and distant memory.
Then the frost came, bitter, biting hoar frost that glazed the windows of Westerman’s with fantastic flowers, burst the mains in the roads, and removed a good lot more of the unwanted poor from the face of the earth.
The austere discipline of Westerman’s was relaxed as the staff exchanged horrendous stories about their various safaris across icebound London.
Alf Marsh felt weary and chilled to the bone. Sometimes there were no vegetables to buy at Covent Garden Market after his early morning trudges through the snow. The whole of the south of England was in the grip of winter, and often the ships with their cargoes of produce from warmer climates were delayed by the awful weather.
He was shivering looking over his meager stock and was just about to call it a lost day when he became aware that a tall, elegantly dressed swell was standing in the dark doorway of the shop against the blinding backdrop of the snow outside.
Alf scurried forward, rubbing his numb fingers. “Can I ’elp yer nibs?” he said cheerfully. “Ain’t got much.”
The thin white face of the stranger stared at him curiously from under the brim of a tall silk hat. Alf’s quick eyes traveled over the tall figure. Frogged beaver coat, pigskin gloves, gold-topped cane. Alf’s face hardened. One of the nobs out slumming. Out to pick and poke and insult for Gawd knows what pleasure. The stranger remained silent.
“If you don’t want nuffink,” said Alf, “’op it!”
The stranger smiled. “I am Wollerton—Edward, Marquis of Wollerton, and you, I believe, are Mister Marsh, Polly’s father.”
“Ho!” said Alf. “Friend o’ Polly’s. Well, what abaht it?”
The marquis closed his eyes slightly, drew a deep breath, and said, “Would you do me the inestimable honor of presenting me with a… stone of potatoes.”
Alf looked at him in amazement. “All right, yer ludship. Potatoes is abaht all I’ve got—this bleedin’ weather.”
Alf scurried off to pile the potatoes on the scale. Wot’s ’e want? he thought to himself. Gent like ’im talking abaht potatoes and bein’ a friend o’ Pol’s. Maybe ’e wants ’em free!
But he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Anyfink else?” he asked brightly.
“Yes,” said the marquis desperately. “I would like… deem it a great honor… oh, five pounds of turnips, please.”
“Turnips it is,” said Alf faintly. He wished his wife were here. She would know what to do. Then he remembered that this was the marquis who had taken his wife to tea at the Ritz. Should he mention it?
“Look, dash it all,” said the marquis. “What I really want to ask you is—”
“Didn’t you entertain my missus to tea?”
“Yes,” said the marquis abruptly, and then repeated “yes” in a milder voice. “I enjoyed her company immensely.”
“Beg pardon, yer ludship,” said Alf, “but these ’ere turnips is big. Get abaht two weighing five pounds.”
“That’s all right,” said the marquis. He paused and looked down into Alf’s innocent, sparkling eyes. Alf rubbed his grimy mittened hands. He envisaged presenting Alf to his mother. He shuddered.
“Anyfink else?” asked Alf helpfully.
The marquis looked wildly around the small, dark shop. “Give me everything you’ve got,” he said.
“Naow then, naow then,” said the amazed Alf.
“Seeing as how yer ludship is in the way of being a friend of the family, like, I feels I ’as to tell yer that all that there stuff ain’t as fresh as it could be, wot with there being nothing ahrand the Market these days.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Marquis, suddenly desperate to get away and noticing that Alf Marsh was showing every sign of meticulously weighing every vegetable in the shop. “Just wrap it up.”
“Wot? The ’ole shop full?”
“Yes. I’ll call the servants. Load it in the carriage and—here.” He pulled out his purse. “Here is twenty guineas. That should cover it.”
Alf stared at the gold as if he could not believe his eyes. Times had been hard recently for the Marsh family because of the lack of sales. But Alf Marsh could not cheat.
“Look, yer ludship,” he said in a kindly voice—as if talking to one of the wild young traders down at the pub when one of them tipsily tried to buy drinks for everyone—“put yer money away. There ain’t one guinea’s wurrf in the ’ole lot.”
“Take it, man! Take it!” said the marquis, putting the money down on the scale.
His puzzled servants were already loading the fruit and vegetables into the carriage.
“I am delighted to have made your acquaintance, Mister Marsh,” said the marquis as correct as ever. “Please convey my best regards to Mrs. Marsh and to Polly.”
He bowed and left. Alf Marsh turned slowly and stared at the small pile of gold bobbing on the scales.
“Cor lumme,” he said. “Stone the bleedin’ crows.”
A turnip rolled across the carriage and nudged the marquis on the foot. It looked like a great blind head.
“Damn Polly Marsh,” said the marquis. “I must be mad.”
• • •
Polly paused at the foot of the stairs and sniffed. Delicious, exotic smells were floating down from the Marsh’s flat—smells of goose and roasting chestnuts and plum sauce and crackling-hot roast potatoes and sage-and-onion stuffing.
Polly’s chilblained feet flew up the stairs. She crashed open the kitchen door.
The small kitchen was crammed not only with her family but with what seemed like every single old-age pensioner in Stone Lane. Amid a reverent silence Alf was mixing a rum punch, his wrinkled apple of a face gleaming with pleasure. Mrs. Marsh had her sleeves rolled up and was basting a huge goose in the oven.
A large glazed ham glittered on the table, cheek by jowl with an enormous game pie with raised pastry. A small barrel of oysters was being prized open by Gran, and Joyce was removing a giant fruit cake from its tin box, on top of which Queen Victoria was portrayed holding out her chubby little hands in benediction over the feathered head of a Zulu chief and, from the look on her face, not enjoying the occasion one bit.
Polly wanted to scream, “Where? What? How?” but the silence was almost religious as the old people, who could not remember their last decent meal, gazed with wide eyes on the glory and splendor of the feast.
She silently took a tray of glasses of punch from her father and passed them around. There was a universal sigh of satisfaction as rum and sugar and lemon and boiling hot water seeped into old bones and frozen feet.