“No indeed.”
“Dippy says she was married to some perfectly dreadful Eyetalian; that’s why she has the airs to call herself a Contessa. Why, she’s no more a Contessa than I am Mamie Eisenhower.”
Laura bites her lip as Belladonna shakes her head and motions her to remain silent. Eventually, the overgrown debs heave themselves back up, sighing with happy maliciousness, and, after sticking their noses into all the other rooms on the second floor for a peek and a poke, wind their way back to the revels downstairs.
Belladonna is smiling broadly for the first time tonight. She gets up without a word, leaving Laura, finds me, and whispers an altogether splendid idea in my ear. I go off in search of Orlando, bring him back, and we straighten our bow ties as we approach Shirley and Letitia. They’re standing near the punch bowl in the glistening copper ballroom, engrossed in their gossip. Bowing deeply, I leaning on one of Leandro’s lion-topped canes for support, we ask for a dance.
With enough flutters and coos to stock a pet store, Shirley and Letitia drop into deep, creaky curtsies, thrilled and simpering that two men seen so close to the Contessa are singling them out. As they rise and I circle behind them, they remain oblivious to my sudden jab with my cane. A razor-sharp blade springs out and just happens to slice at a particular angle into Shirley’s sparkling heels. Blink and you would have missed it. My point entirely.
Orlando whisks Letitia away as Shirley coyly bats her lashes at me. I hand my cane to the waiter serving the punch. “They say I’m the best dancer in the county,” she tells me smugly as the music starts. She practically leads me all over the dance floor, making sure every guest in the room can see her.
“Then I am fortunate indeed to have chosen such a delightful partner,” I reply, and her smirking smile deepens.
After only a minute or so of a breathless waltz, though, Shirley’s heels break clean off, and she stumbles awkwardly into my arms with a sharp, ugly cry.
“Whatever could be wrong, dear lady?” I ask, my voice dripping with solicitous concern. “Are you hurt?”
“My heels!” she cries. “My beautiful Belladonna heels!”
She hasn’t got it quite right. She is the heel and Belladonna is her hostess.
I help her limp off the dance floor, and she shrugs my hand away in anger when we reach the wall and she can stand without losing her balance. Everyone is staring at her with veiled amusement, and several ladies are tittering loudly. Shirley’s mouth is set in a hard line as she takes off her shoes and stomps away to sit down in a chair in the hall to examine them carefully. Heels don’t break like that. Not the custom-made heels of Shirley Marriner.
She feels a shadow fall on her peacock feathers and looks up, to see the Contessa regarding her with bland detachment.
“Forty-eight thousand six hundred and fifty-five dollars and twenty-four cents,” the Contessa says coolly before turning to walk back to her guests. “But such a chandelier is worth it, don’t you agree?”
Shirley pales and nearly swoons, her heels forgotten.
As the party begins to wind down, we send Laura to the folly to wait for Hugh. That area of the estate is off-limits for our “guests,” so she can mope in total privacy without worrying about the likes of Shirley and Letitia.
Belladonna moves to the balcony, so she can watch Laura find the path to the pool and the folly, her dejected shoulders slumping more with each step. The sky is a luminous, deep blue and the stars thickly clustered. The band is still playing and people are laughing, but Belladonna’s heart is weary.
She stays out there, watching everything and nothing, until there is a knock on the door. I come in with another one of our guests. “I beg your pardon, Contessa, but I should like to introduce you to Mr. Hugh Trevenen,” I announce.
So he made it after all. How splendid. Hugh smiles nervously, and his gray eyes are weary. He’s slim and not mat much taller than Laura would be in her espadrilles, and his sandy brown hair is thinning at the temples. There’s nothing spectacular or flashy about his appearance"not like Guy’s at all"but he seems pleasant and desperately eager to see Laura.
“I am most dreadfully sorry to be arriving at this late hour,” he says. I notice that he has beautiful long fingers and doesn’t wear a wedding ring. “Please do forgive this intrusion on your privacy.”
I love how these upper-crusty Brits say privacy. It sounds like a clipped hedge.
Belladonna shrugs.
“There’s no need to apologize,” I tell him. “We’re happy to have you. Guy will be happy, too, I expect. Wherever he’s disappeared to.” Probably nuzzling with Nancy in the hayloft. “But no one more so than Laura.”
“You are too kind,” he says, and he’s so earnest I almost want to hug him.
“She’s in the folly,” I say. “I’ll take you as far as the path toward the pool, and point you in the right direction. It’s a little house with a thatched roof; you can’t miss it. I expect Laura has locked the door, but the spare key is under the pot of pinks, just to the left of the geraniums.”
Hugh doesn’t move, a bit dumbfounded.
“Why are you standing there like a big lummox,” I tease, “when she’s been waiting for you all this time?”
I can’t help but be pleased at the sudden shy happiness shining in Hugh’s eyes and the transformation of his anxious expression. It is as if his entire face has been lit from within by love.
Hugh says good night and one last thank-you, and I drop him at the path, handing him a flashlight. He practically runs down the steps, then slows to a tiptoe when he sees the house. After only a minute he finds the key under the pot of pinks. Laura has flung herself facedown on the bed, sobbing her heart out, and she doesn’t hear the door open softly or the tumble of the lock as Hugh secures it. She doesn’t hear his quiet footsteps as he strides to her. She thinks she’s dreaming when she hears her beloved calling her name. She still thinks she’s dreaming when she sits up and then flies into his arms.
Back at the house, Belladonna is still standing on the balcony. She has seen Hugh hurry away, just as she had seen Laura walk with such dejection only a short while before. She doesn’t know and she can’t see him, but Guy is standing in the dark, hidden by the shadows of a great oak, watching her. From his vantage point, her face is clearly illuminated from behind, and he can observe a curious mixture of satisfaction mingled with an overwhelming melancholy. Weariness as well, he thinks, and resignation.
She hasn’t moved when a few minutes later he knocks on the door Hugh had left open. “Would you care for a drink?” he asks when she turns to see who it is.
“No.” She turns her back, clearly signaling her lack of interest.
“May I ask you a question?” he says. “About your daughter.”
Oh ho, what a persistent bugger! He knows this’ll get her attention.
She turns back, her face a blank.
“She asked me this afternoon if she and Susannah could call me ‘Uncle Guy,’ and I told her she’d have to ask your permission,” he says, seating himself comfortably in one of the silver-blue wingbacks. “She said she already has an Uncle Jack in New York and wants to have an Uncle Guy in Virginia.”
The expression on Belladonna’s face doesn’t change. “I don’t mind,” she says, “if it’s what Bryony wants.”
“I shouldn’t want you to think there’s anything untoward in my behavior toward her,” Guy goes on, “given the circumstances of our first meeting. Yours and mine, I mean.”
“Given those circumstances, I expect an answer to this question: Why did she startle you?” Belladonna asks, sitting in the other chair, her dress rustling softly.
Guy stares at his nails, buffed as perfectly as his shoes, for several minutes before replying. Belladonna doesn’t move, or press him.
“She looked like my little sister,” he says eventually. “Gwendolyn. My Gwennie.” His eyes mist. “I rarely talk about her, you see. When I first saw Bryony from a distance, it was as if Gwennie had come b
ack to life. It was a trick of the light, that’s all. Wishful thinking, too, I suppose, for the more I come to know Bryony, the less similar she becomes. But the expressions on her face, the way she’s always singing and dancing around, remind me so much of Gwennie. She died a long time ago, when she was nine.”
“I’m sorry,” Belladonna says, although her voice remains cold and detached. “How old were you?”
“Twelve,” he says.
They sit in a fairly affable silence for a long while. He obviously does not want to talk about Gwendolyn, and she feels no need to ask. An occasional loud drunken laugh wafts up to the balcony. Some of the guests are obviously reluctant to leave, probably because they are too drunk to remember where their cars are. No matter"Winken and Blinken will be only too happy to steer them in the right direction.
“I’m glad Hugh is here,” he says eventually.
“Tell me about him.”
Guy, who’s obviously an indefatigable sort, is only too pleased to be of service. “Hugh has perfect manners, which you may have noticed, but that is an amiable facade,” he says, “His father was notoriously promiscuous. Once, during a drunken binge, he sliced his leg and his mistress’s leg with a razor so they could bind themselves in blood. As if that weren’t enough, he showed everyone the photographs of the event, and proudly displayed his scar to all and sundry.” Guy shakes his head. “He thought that children should be seen as little as possible, and so, like most boys of our class"and I use the word advisedly, mind you"Hugh was raised by his nanny. His was a loving one; I think it’s what kept him sane. Nanny would stretch his wool undies with a hairbrush so they wouldn’t fit too tightly and itch. Nanny loved him and protected him from the world, and most especially from his father. His mother was busy entertaining, going to parties and fittings and teas and so on, so as not to be bothered with the frightful mess of either her children or her husband.”
He can’t help a tinge of distress from creeping into his voice, and his eyes are focused on the lights flickering in the distance. He’s describing some of his own childhood, she realizes, the memory of the kind of neglect and pain that never goes away.
“When did you meet?” she asks.
“At school. He was eight and I was nine, so I’d already weathered a year of abuse. I think leaving Nanny for school’s brutal realities is a shock from which part of us never really recovers.” He’s not saying this because he expects sympathy, only because it’s true.
“What was school like?”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
But she does, forcing herself to sit calmly with him and ask these questions, tolerating his overwhelmingly male presence because he can answer some of the questions that have been plaguing her for years and years. She wants to hear him talk, because he knows about what formed them, the members of the Club. Belladonna can picture them at school, obsessed with punishment, thrilling to the sound of a good flogging to get the juices flowing. Reveling in and abusing the power of their rank, delighting in the misfortune and unhappiness of their peers.
“Tell me anyway,” she commands.
“It seemed the premise of the public schools I grew to loathe was to forbid any activity once it seemed to give pleasure,” Guy says. “Hence the bad food, bad beds, bad heating, bad masters, bad everything. God help any little boy
who showed signs of weakness or despair. No one to ask for help, no one to turn to, no one protecting you.”
He could be speaking of her. What they did to her.
“And not a female to be found, save the cooks, who brought Attila the Hun to mind rather than Nanny or mummy or the little girls you used to play with before they sent you away,” he goes on. “After my mother, after"”
After his mother died, he means to say, but can’t. This she understands instinctively.
“School made me hard. I became quite an enterprising little chap, expert at constructing a sort of lasso out of twine to catch rats as they poked their noses out of all their little holes in search of the cheese I’d baited them with,” Guy goes on. “The other boys found it an admirable skill, and learned to stay in my good graces or they’d find a dead rat in their pockets or their beds. I learned this from one of my schoolmates. Landis, his name was. When Landis arrived, the boys planned their usual hog pile, jumping atop him, pummeling him into dust to show him who was boss. Landis, however, managed to outfox the bullies. When he installed himself in his room and began unpacking, everyone was astonished at the sight of his lovely monogrammed ivory hairbrushes, the kind you’d see on a lady’s dressing table. One of the boys, who was at least eight inches taller and three stone heavier, grabbed them, thinking a good paddling was in order. Landis swung around and punched him full in the face. Down he went, covered in blood. Then Landis offered his hand, yanked him up, brushed him off, kicked his backside, and sent him on his merry way. Landis taught me how to fight, to defend myself. That was the only way to earn respect at school"with sudden, brute force. It wasn’t so easy for Hugh, who was small and delicate.” He runs his hands through his hair. “If school doesn’t break one’s spirit, it certainly leads one to believe in one’s superiority for having mastered it. It makes one a glutton for love.”
“For romps in the hay, you mean,” she says.
Guy smiles. “Especially romps in the hay.”
“And vengeance,” she says.
Guy looks at her curiously. “Yes, quite. Hugh and I would lie in our beds at night, shivering with too much cold to sleep, and dream of our revenge.”
“Did you get it?” she asks.
“Some of it,” he says. “It takes planning.”
“That I understand,” she replies. “But tell me, what exactly does Hugh do?”
“He’s at Lloyd’s. Insuring my tea plantations.”
“And his wife?”
“Ah yes. The splendid Nicola.”
“I take it Laura is nothing like her.”
“Quite right. Laura has a heart.”
“Why did he marry her?” she asks. “For the same reason Laura married Andrew?”
“Pride,” he says. “Stubbornness. Foolishness. But mostly to get back at his father.”
“I don’t understand,” Belladonna says. “She’s Lady Pembridge, isn’t she, so it wasn’t a disgrace to his family to have married her.”
“Can I trust you?” Guy asks. “I’ve never told this to anyone.”
“Of course,” Belladonna replies. She wonders what he might be about to say, and I wonder why this conversation is even happening. It’s more than her needing to know about men of Guy’s class. Although, obviously, she does have a particular knack for eliciting confessions of the most intimate sort. It’s the intense, quizzical, yet hard look in her dazzling green eyes, one that seems to dare a person, Tell me, I need to know.
But Belladonna is spending more time alone with Guy than with any man she’s met since we came to America. This worries me, yet I still like him. I can’t help it. He’s a terrible roué, but funny and charming, devoted to Hugh and Laura as he nurses his own bruised heart. Maybe that’s why she can tolerate him. He has asked nothing of her but to listen.
“I never trusted Nicola. Perhaps because I always knew she was an opportunist like myself,” Guy says. “But Hugh was in love and I tried to be happy for him, although I knew something was"what’s the word?"off. So I had her followed.”
He looks at Belladonna, expecting to find censure, but she is merely watching him intently.
“I discovered something of a most alarming nature, and debated for weeks what to do,” he goes on. “The wedding was meant to be one of the social events of the season, you see.” He shakes his head. “But I had to protect Hugh. The night before his wedding, after a bit too much to drink, I took him for a walk to sober him up. His family had taken a suite, an entire floor, actually, at Claridges. We had adjoining rooms, so I could keep an eye on him. My idea, of course.” He sighs. “By some great coincidence, our walk took us to his parents’ hous
e very late on the eve of his wedding.”
“His parents who were supposed to be at Claridges.”
“Precisely. Luckily, Hugh was drunk enough not to have sussed out my intentions, because I took him into the garden and pointed to a ladder I’d bribed one of the servants to place there for me, against the wall and leading to a bedroom window upstairs. I handed him a torch and told him to climb up, that he couldn’t get married until he climbed up the ladder.”
“So up he climbed and shined in the light,” she says softly, “and whom did he see?”
“His father. And Nicola.”
She frowns and looks away. “Finita la commedia,” she says.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll never forget the look on his face when he climbed down the ladder. ‘Do you have photographs?’ he asked, and I nodded yes. He said nothing more as we found a taxi and went back to Claridges. I tried to apologize; I didn’t know what to say, for once.”
“They went through with it, obviously,” she says.
“Yes. He pulled it off, too; no one suspected a thing"not Nicola, not his father"until they were about to leave for their honeymoon. Hugh asked his father to come into his room, and he handed him an envelope full of photographs, and he told him he was never going to speak to him again until the day he died, and that if he ever tried to touch his wife again he’d send these photographs to the papers and that his solicitors already had the negatives and family be damned.
“That evening, once the happy couple was ensconced in the marital bed and Nicola was preparing to surrender her prized virginity to her beloved, he handed her another envelope full of photographs, and told her he wasn’t going to touch her until he had proof she wasn’t carrying his father’s child, and that then, if he so desired, she’d do whatever he told her to do, strictly for the purposes of producing an heir.”
“She must have made quite a scene.”
“Quite. The tears, the pleading, the apologies. He was adamant. She had no choice but to behave, for a short while at least. She wormed her way into his good graces, knowing that he still carried quite a torch for her. After she rapidly produced two children, she went back to her former bad habits. Except with more discretion. That’s when he met Laura.”
Belladonna Page 34