In saying this, Mrs William was perhaps trying to persuade herself as well as her husband that her idea was as good as she was making it out to be. After all, it was not ideal to be seen to be elevating a governess to the highest echelons of society. The wretched girl might start to get ideas above her station – although, she thought grimly, she should be more than able to bring her straight back down to earth again should Maggie show the slightest tendency of doing a thing like that. But then, Mrs William was realist enough to know that she was not living in an ideal world. Unwelcome and uninvited guests did turn up unexpectedly for dinner from time to time and hostesses in these situations could only make the best they could of an otherwise extremely bad job indeed. Time was moving on apace. Even had she managed to think of an alternative it would have been most unlikely that she should get a suitable substitute at this late stage in the proceedings. So, whether she were fully persuaded to the idea or not, there was nothing further to say about it. No, there was nothing else for it. Maggie must make up an extra place and partner Mr Robertson into dinner.
Sadly, Maggie did not receive this communication with quite as much gratification as Mrs William could have hoped for. Indeed, it is probably true to say that she felt very little gratification at it at all and that the only gratification that she did feel was as a result of the opportunity it would give her for sharing an evening with Mr Wright – not a reason for his wife to feel contented with, to be sure. No. Rather than feeling gratified, Maggie was feeling distinctly uneasy and, on balance, would much rather have avoided the invitation if she could. Despite her education she had never felt quite at ease with ‘quality’. Perhaps some early put-downs, resulting from a somewhat insolent air of superiority over anyone with a background in ‘trade’, had had their effect on an impressionable young mind. Or perhaps it had wanted another full year at Mrs Whitemind’s educational establishment for superior young ladies in which to perfect the ladylike art of being at ease in whatever situation one found oneself. Either way, and for whatever reason, Maggie had never learned to revel in the formalities of a full dinner with the ease for which she would most certainly have wished, an omission which was perhaps further exacerbated by her current inferior position in society – a position of which she was herself most acutely aware. So it was in some real trepidation that she finally retired to her room in order to get herself ready for her ordeal.
Perhaps she should have felt more comfortable once she had met her enforced companions, for it turned out that Mr Robertson was so little used to dining in company of any sort, genteel or not, that he had a full year’s worth of conversation readily to hand with which to regale her the moment she was introduced to him, whilst Mr Freddy Staveley, who would be on her other side at table, was perhaps the least frightening individual that a governess could ever hope to meet. Tall and burly, with a broad chest and even broader feet and hands, he must have found the cramped conditions at sea to be particularly uncomfortable for want of being able to stand upright anywhere on a ship other than entirely out on deck. Perhaps he had discovered this for himself, for though he was tall he did not hold himself at all erect. Rather, he held himself in what Maggie could only think of as a rather self effacing stoop – a stoop which gave him the unfortunate air of being for ever just in the act of talking to a little dog and offering it a bone. His shock of straw-blond hair topped a round, jovial but oddly vacant-looking face – a face which displayed a ready grin, a grin which appeared, often as not, to mock himself rather than anybody else. Even worse, it became immediately apparent as soon as he started to speak that Mr Staveley was possessed of a most unfortunate speech impediment which caused him to stumble quite regularly and, in particular, the more animated he became, and most embarrassingly over his ‘ps’ and ‘bs’ as well as many of his ‘ms’. He was speaking just then to Mr Berkeley and a rather arch-looking young lady in a most exquisite ivory silk gown and sparkling diamond brooch. The somewhat stumbling discourse appeared to revolve around his acquaintance with the privateer Captain who had so obligingly brought him home. Had she stopped to think of it at all Maggie would have put Mr Staveley down immediately as a kind of risible but harmless buffoon. However, she had not stopped to think of it, for no sooner had she appeared downstairs than the dinner bell was sounded and, the introductions complete, she found herself being accompanied by the obliging Mr Robertson and finding her place in the dining room next door.
Despite being at least minimally acquainted with several of the guests at the table – Mr and Mrs Berkeley, Captain and Mrs Wright, Mrs Staveley – none of whom could exactly be called frightening at all, Maggie was feeling strangely ill at ease as she took her lowly place at the table with her partner. To be fair, her particular acquaintance were generally situated at a rather inconvenient distance in the more regal regions of the table. The other guests opposite – the arch-looking young lady, who turned out to be Miss Brewer, together with her papa, who were, apparently, local dignitaries, Mr and Mrs Buxton, some other friends – could reasonably have been expected to appear somewhat grand. Indeed, all the participants were garbed in the most exquisite and obviously expensive finery imaginable, albeit that the Buxtons appeared much less conscious of their finery than the Brewers and several of the others did. But, other than Miss Brewer, who did come across as somewhat haughty by dint of turning her elegant nose in the opposite direction if ever she happened to look Maggie’s way, none of them really gave her any reason to feel other than comfortable as she removed her gloves for the meal. Mind you, Mrs William had certainly done everything in her power to ensure that all her guests felt suitably overwhelmed. The dinner was to consist of the full three courses, with a particularly splendid first course of a watery disposition which consisted of salmon-gundy, Yarmouth pie, la matelote au vin de Bordeaux and a splendid selection of shellfish. Maggie felt almost dazzled by the impressively shimmering array of cut crystal and polished silver which just then adorned the dining table. After all, she was not to know that the vast majority of it had been hired only that morning from Mr Watson’s china shop along the way. This was complemented by some equally dazzling, if not exactly tasteful, Chelsea porcelain plates and bowls. Luckily, though, she managed to drag her gaze away from these impressive symbols of grandeur in time to catch Mrs Berkeley’s kind nods and smiles from further up the table as that lady listened respectfully to Mr Wright’s rather one-sided conversation regarding the tribulations involved in the purchase of a new grandfather clock for the hall. Not that Maggie could hear any of it, though, for Mrs William, eating her food in quick little bursts which reminded Maggie forcibly of a rabbit, delighted that her dining room should now hold the cream of society then to be found residing in Weymouth, was loudly dominating the conversation at the far end of the table and attempting – albeit not entirely successfully – to get Mr Buxton to agree that the fashion for sea-bathing, which she personally found to be faintly disgusting, was surely contrary to the recognised will of God.
In spite of all this, for some reason best known to herself, Maggie found her agitation growing rather than diminishing as the first course was tackled and rapidly consumed. Mr Robertson’s conversational ability, though formidable, was not sufficient to prevent him from stealing long moments of silence as he savoured his Yarmouth pie. Maggie could not help but wonder whether tonight’s meal might represent his main source of nourishment for the whole of the rest of the week. Certainly he gave all the appearance of its being so, from the vast amounts of it which were constantly heaped upon his plate. In contrast, at her other side, Mr Staveley’s conversational ability did not appear large at all and it was directed, in the main, towards his mother whom, to be fair to him, he had hardly seen for a year or more and certainly since that lady’s rather odd decision to remove herself from London and set up home with her niece’s family down here in the wilds of Dorset. This left Maggie with far too much time on her hands – time in which to worry about which dishes to ask for, and how much food to accept from each;
time to worry about dropping her food down her best gown and ruining it for a lifetime; time to worry about whether Mr Wright was noticing her, watching her, admiring her – and what impression, if he were doing, she had actually managed to make upon his heart.
So, having so much time to herself made her nervous. And in all her nervousness and anxiety not to trouble her partner, engrossed as he was in managing his pie, she managed, in an attempt to reach the condiments in front of her, to catch her newly-filled wineglass with her hand and knock it entirely over. The slow red stain crept its way inexorably across the table cloth in a reasonable replication of a map of the world. Sadly, the embarrassment elicited by this activity was apparently quite insufficient to satisfy her, for no sooner had she found the cloth expertly dabbed, the glass replaced and the claret reinstated than she did the self same thing again. She could see William close his eyes and sigh. She did the same herself. Only then did Mr Staveley appear to notice it. Finding a great stain creeping nefariously towards his left arm and imminently threatening the whiteness of his shirt cuffs, he suddenly let out a loud ‘Oh, damnation’, effected a swift leap backwards, knocking his chair quite over as he did so, followed the chair himself on its journey to the floor, ended up in a most inelegant heap, arms and legs akimbo in what, in another situation, might reasonably have been interpreted as an impression of a dying fly, and threw what remained of his own glass of wine over his shoulder onto the intricately patterned pale green, cream and apricot carpet to his rear.
In recalling the incident later Maggie could take just the one crumb of comfort from an otherwise totally calamitous event – that Mr Staveley’s activities in reaching the floor had at least had the effect of totally diverting everyone’s attention away from her crime and onto his instead. Mrs William, indeed, had shrieked so loudly at the thought that her new Axminster carpet might be stained for ever that her husband had thought it politic to rise from his own seat, traverse the length of the table at some speed, and assist her dextrously from the room. Mr Buxton and Mr Berkeley, both of whom were looking considerably more amused than their hosts, had risen as one and assisted a struggling Mr Staveley to his feet again, while the servants repaired the damage as best they could by adding a further cloth to the table in the vicinity of Maggie and her unfortunate victim, and providing each of them with yet another substantial glass of wine.
Leaving the gentlemen in the dining room after their meal, Mrs Buxton led her fellow guests back into the drawing room for some quiet conversation until the gentlemen should decide to reappear. Having been instructed to bring the five Wright children to meet their guests before being put to bed, Susan, the nursemaid, had just then delivered them into the room and was engaged, at that moment, in attempting to maintain them in some reasonable semblance of order. Sadly, and despite the recency with which they had appeared downstairs, they had already managed to ransack their mama’s writing table by the window, scattering the contents far and wide across the carpet, and were just in the process of attempting to kill one another with the fireside pokers when the ladies glided unsuspectingly into the room. Maggie was immediately called upon to assist and – with very limited effect – attempted to divert Master William into the marginally less potentially harmful occupation of playing with some marbles on the floor. His sister Augusta, failing to elicit the same amount of attention through her saucy flouncing about the room, immediately decided to rob her brother of his best marble by the simple expedient of slipping it down the dress of her younger sister Amelia. It took the combined efforts of Maggie, the nursemaid and Mrs Wright herself to quell the furore, introduce the children to the ladies and to Mr Staveley, who mistimed his entrance into the drawing room to such an extent that he was obliged to carry young Georgia, kicking and screaming as if her life depended on it, directly up to her cot, and finally restore a veneer of order to the drawing room by removing the children without delay.
After this it was something of a relief to Maggie to be able to hide her confusion by providing a little background music on the Zumpe pianoforte next door. At least this was an activity in which she could hardly go astray. She was an accomplished pianist and though few, if any, of her audience were able to grant her their full attention at least those who granted her a modicum of it were well rewarded by a performance which would not have disgraced a professional. At one stage Mr Berkeley and Mr Staveley, who had spent much of the remainder of their dinner in taking wine together, felt it incumbent upon themselves to join her with a vocal accompaniment, which sounded surprisingly decent - although this may have had as much to do with the lateness of the hour as the quality of the actual renditions themselves. At another stage Mr Wright joined her to sing a duet. His voice was magnificent – powerful and deep. It complemented her fine soprano exactly. The sensation of sharing an activity, sharing the same music, sharing the same area of space with him – of finding him so close to her that she could feel the caress of his shirt cuff upon her arm - and afterwards, as they all stood on the front steps to watch the celebratory fireworks in the bay, his whispered congratulations on the excellence of her playing – well, such a sensation could only fill her with the utmost delight. It almost made up for the embarrassment of the meal.
Chapter 6
Despite his little disaster at the dining table, Mr Staveley appeared to have made a positive impression upon at least one of the guests that evening, for the next afternoon Miss Brewer appeared at Grosvenor Place asking for Mrs Wright, but actually apparently seeking him out instead. Now Miss Brewer already had some history with the family, having at one time been the affianced bride of Mr Berkeley himself and now, six years on, she was a remarkably pretty twenty-two year old surprising only in that she was still in her maiden state. Not that she had been without suitors. A fascinating young lady, with an eye for the gentlemen as had Miss Brewer, would scarcely have hidden herself away all her life. But from her perspective none of her suitors thus far had quite lived up to her exacting standards – and, more precisely, her exacting standards in terms of income. Indeed, Mr Berkeley himself had only escaped her clutches once her papa had revealed that gentleman’s immediate financial situation to her which, him having invested heavily in the land reclamation at Weymouth several years ago, was only now beginning to take on a particularly healthy hue.
Now, Sophie Brewer was a shrewd young lady. She knew full well that the salary of a junior officer in His Majesty’s navy and, in particular, of a new lieutenant who was still awaiting the availability of a suitable ship on which to start the next phase of his illustrious career, was quite insufficient to meet her pecuniary requirements, even when added to a small independence inherited from his papa. Nevertheless, it appeared that the bear-like form of Mr Staveley intrigued her. Perhaps it was an attraction of opposites. Certainly she was fairy-like compared to him, with a good deal of social grace, whereas he appeared to be large and awkward and ill-equipped for the drawing room, with no apparent social graces whatsoever. Whatever the reason, Mr and Mrs Wright being already gone out for the afternoon – Mr Wright to his favourite haunts in the vicinity of the Royal Hotel, Mrs Wright, together with Maggie, to acquire some new shoes for Master Will, who had unaccountably managed to destroy his previous best pair in some way which no-one really cared to question - Mr Staveley found himself in the not entirely unwelcome position of welcoming the visitor into his cousin’s house, and of entertaining her himself for a while.
‘I do hope that you have not suffered unduly as a result of your unfortunate accident last evening, Mr Staveley,’ were her first words to him after accepting a glass of aniseed cordial. Miss Brewer spoke with an attractive little lisp. It sounded most engaging. ‘I felt most concerned for you. You appeared to fall quite awkwardly.’
Mr Staveley gave a somewhat apologetic guffaw.
‘Less than cousin’s carpet, that’s for sure, M...Miss B...Brewer. I fear that the housemaid is still scrub....scrubbing away as we speak. I only hope that she does not scrub it quite away.’
Miss Brewer gave a silvery tinkle of a laugh. It sounded quite musical.
‘I daresay your cousin engages staff who know what they are about,’ she assured him. ‘I am persuaded that the carpet will be of no consequence to her whatsoever. She must have been delighted that you were able to join us last night. I understand that you had not been expected for quite some time.’
Mr Staveley felt quite unable to share his charming visitor’s confidence in the delight that his sudden appearance must have evinced in his cousin but he nodded his head quite sagely and smiled at her instead.
‘And you say that you arrived here with a privateer? How exciting. I have always thought privateering the most adventurous of professions. It wouldn’t have been on the ‘Splendid Sylph’ by any chance, would it? Only I seem to remember seeing her before, moored on Weymouth quay.’
Mr Staveley confirmed that he had indeed been given passage on a ship called the ‘Splendid Sylph’ and Miss Brewer bestowed a charming little smile upon him in return. She rose from her seat to take a look at the bits of bone and wood that he had been busily carving as she had entered the room. ‘But what have we here? It appears that you have hidden talents, Mr Staveley. I thought you might. You naval gentlemen are always most clever with your hands.’
An Indelicate Situation (The Weymouth Trilogy) Page 4