by Rhys Bowen
Then I took it to the post, held my breath and waited.
Chapter 3
CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, AND BUCKINGHAM PALACE
It was only two days before the end of the month and Mrs. Tombs was dropping not-too-subtle hints that she hoped I’d hurry up and clear out because she had cleaning to do before the next lot came in. I was beginning to despair when I received a reply from Buckingham Palace.
“My dear Georgiana,” Her Majesty had written in her own hand. “Your letter arrived at a most fortuitous time. If you would care to come to tea tomorrow, I think I might have an interesting little assignment for you.”
It was signed “Your affectionate cousin, Mary R.” (the R meaning Regina, of course). Even when she was being affectionate she always remained correct.
I stood there, studying the letter, not knowing whether to be excited or worried. The queen’s past little assignments had ranged from hosting a visiting princess to stealing a purloined snuffbox. One never knew. At least it would be better than a cold, bleak castle in Scotland. I went upstairs to make sure I had something suitable to wear. I chose the skirt and dusky-pink cashmere cardigan that my mother had given me for Christmas. They were the closest I had to daytime chic. Then I had to remind Queenie not to pack them with the rest of my belongings.
“So where are we going then?” she asked.
“I have no idea. But somewhere.”
“I hope it’s abroad again,” she said. “I could do with some of that Froggy food again after her downstairs. And sunshine too.”
A glorious picture of the villa in Nice swam into my head—the Mediterranean sparkling blue at the bottom of the cliff, the scent of mimosas in the air. It was probably too much to hope for. Then I reminded myself that it had been dangerous too. I hoped this assignment would not involve danger. Excitement was fine, but I’d prefer not to come within an inch of my life again.
“So where are you off to then?” Mrs. Tombs asked, appearing in that uncanny way every time I came into the front hall. “Another bit of shopping?”
“No, I’m going to have tea with the queen,” I said.
“Go on with you. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” she said, chuckling.
“No, honestly.”
“Why would the queen want to have tea with you?” she asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Because I’m her cousin,” I replied. “I’m Lady Georgiana Rannoch. I’m frequently invited to the palace.”
“Blimey.” She put her hand up to her face. “And I never knew. I thought your face looked familiar somehow. Wait till I tell her next door that I’ve been entertaining royalty.”
I almost said “And serving her leftover stew,” but I contented myself with a smile as I went out.
I arrived at Buckingham Palace on the stroke of four. It always took every ounce of courage to approach those tall, gilded gates and to tell those impossibly tall guards that I was expected for tea. Then I had to cross the forecourt, which always seemed to take forever, with the eyes of passing tourists upon me, before I went under the arch, across the courtyard and up to that terrifying main entrance.
“Good afternoon, my lady,” the welcoming footman said, bowing. “Her Majesty is expecting you in the Chinese Chippendale room. Allow me to escort you there.”
Oh, crikey. The Chinese Chippendale room. Why couldn’t she have chosen somewhere else? Any other room in the palace would have done. But the Chinese Chippendale room was her favorite: small, intimate and decorated with far too many Chinese vases, priceless porcelain statues and her jade collection. There’s probably something you should know about me: in moments of stress I tend to get a little clumsy. I remember tripping over the footman’s outstretched foot when he bowed to usher me inside once, thus propelling me rather rapidly into the room and nearly butting HM in the stomach. I would be all too capable of turning around and knocking a priceless Ming vase flying.
Still, I put on a brave face as I was escorted up the grand staircase to the piano nobile, where the royal family actually lived and entertained. Along those never-ending, richly carpeted hallways with marble statues frowning down at me from their niches. Then a light tap on a door, the footman stepping inside and saying, “Lady Georgiana, Your Majesty.”
I stepped past him, carefully avoiding his foot, pushing the door into an unseen table or tripping over a rug. I stopped in surprise and thought I was seeing double. Two middle-aged ladies with identical, waved, gray hair, upright carriage and lilac tea dresses were sitting on the brocade sofa beside the fireplace. My first thought was that I should have worn a tea dress and the cashmere cardigan was inappropriate, but then one of the ladies held out her hand to me.
“Georgiana, my dear. How lovely to see you. Come and meet my dear friend.”
I saw their faces then and realized that the other lady had a more prodigious bosom than the queen, but wore that same imperious look on her face as Her Majesty. The next thought that passed through my mind was that I would hate to be her maid.
“You may tell Mary that she can serve tea now,” the queen said to the waiting footman, then she smiled up at me as I took her outstretched hand and tried to curtsy at the same time I kissed her cheek—a maneuver I had never quite managed to accomplish without bumping my nose.
“Edwina, I don’t know whether you have met our cousin Georgiana?”
“I don’t believe so, ma’am,” the formidable lady said, picking up her lorgnette to examine me more carefully, “but of course I was acquainted with her dear grandmama.”
I realized she meant Queen Victoria’s daughter, not the grandma who bought her fish and chips on a Friday night from the corner chip shop.
“I’m afraid I never had the chance to meet her,” I said, not sure whether she was to be addressed as “ma’am” as well. “She died before I was born.”
“Such a pity. A great loss.”
“Georgiana, this is one of my oldest friends, Edwina, Duchess of Eynsford.”
“Dowager duchess these days, ma’am, now that dear Charles is no longer alive.”
“Do take a seat, my dear,” the queen said, indicating a low gilt chair beside their sofa. “Tea will be arriving any minute.”
I sat cautiously. To one side of the chair was a small lacquer table on top of which were several jade statues. The dowager duchess had folded away her lorgnette. “Oh yes, I can see she’d be perfect,” she said to the queen.
It looked as if my fears were coming true. I was to be shipped to be a young companion of some sort to a dowager duchess.
There was a tap at the door and a tea trolley was wheeled in, laden with every kind of delectable tiny sandwich and cake imaginable.
“I hope you have come with a good appetite,” the queen said. “It looks as though my chef has surpassed himself.”
I almost smiled at the irony of this. I had been to tea with the queen often enough to know that protocol demands that one only eat what Her Majesty eats. And Her Majesty eats very little. I had suffered the agonies of watching those éclairs, Victoria sponges and petit fours sitting untouched while we chewed on pieces of plain, brown bread. Still, food was among the least of my worries today. Another, more alarming thought had entered my mind: Did this dowager duchess perchance have a son who needed a suitable wife? Was that why I was deemed instantly suitable?
The maid poured cups of tea and placed them on a low table in front of the ladies. When she handed me my cup, however, I realized there was no space to rest it on the small table beside me. I would have to balance it on my lap somehow. Oh, golly.
“Help yourselves, my dears,” the queen said and took a piece of malt bread herself. To my amazement and delight, the dowager duchess leaned across and put two large cakes on her own plate. “I think I’ll dispense with the sandwiches and go straight to the good stuff since I have to dine at the Savoy and there’s always so much
food,” she said.
I was trying to work out how I could lean across to take any kind of food without spilling my tea. I hastily drank the top two inches, although it was a little too hot, and managed to take a watercress sandwich.
“Now, Georgiana,” the queen said. “I expect you’re wondering what you are doing here with two elderly ladies like us. The truth is that a tricky problem has arisen and you’d be just the person to help sort it out. Would you like to apprise Georgiana of the situation, Edwina?”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the Duchess of Eynsford said, wiping cream from the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “You see, Georgiana—if I may call you by your first name—it’s like this. Two years ago my dear husband, the Duke of Eynsford, died. The title and property passed to my son Cedric. Cedric is no longer in the first flush of youth; in fact, he is approaching fifty.”
My heart rose to my mouth. They want to marry me off to a man of fifty!
“Approaching fifty,” she repeated, “and has flatly refused to do his duty and produce an heir. He told his father and me outright that he saw no reason to share his bed with an unappealing horse-faced female just to ensure the continuation of an outmoded title.”
“It’s the current generation,” the queen said and they exchanged a look. “No sense of duty. We were brought up to put duty above all things. When I was told to marry the king’s older brother, the Duke of Clarence, I agreed, although I found him not to my taste. Between ourselves, I was most relieved when he died of influenza before the wedding, and it was suggested that I marry his brother instead. His Majesty and I have been most content, which proves that duty need not be a chore.”
“We suffer together in our disappointment, don’t we, ma’am?” the duchess said. “Each of us with sons unwilling to step up and do their duty for the greater good. Although the Prince of Wales is still young enough to marry and produce the heir.”
The queen gave a refined little snort. “He has turned forty, Edwina. And as long as that dreadful Simpson woman is in the picture, he won’t even look at another woman. Truly, I sometimes wish we were back in the dark ages, where I could dispatch the royal assassin to dispose of her on a dark night. But then he’d probably find someone else just as disagreeable.”
“At least you have other sons,” the duchess said. “You already have grandchildren.”
“And fine little girls they are too,” the queen said, beaming. “There would be no shirking of duty with Elisabeth. She has the right stuff, that one. Fell off her pony the other day trying to jump a fence at Windsor. And do you know what she was worried about—whether the pony had hurt himself!” She shook her head, smiling. “Margaret Rose—well, I’m not so sure about her. Delightful child, but a mischievous strain too. Hid her grandfather’s spectacles the last time she was here. He thought it was funny. But we digress.”
She turned back to the duchess. “I’m sorry, Edwina. Please continue.”
I had been sitting frozen through this dialogue, trying to think what to say when they suggested that I’d be exactly the right person to marry a fifty-year-old woman hater and give him an heir.
“Is the current duke your only child then, Your Grace?” I asked.
“I have a daughter, Irene. She married a foreigner—an absolute bounder, a Russian count she met in Paris. He worked his way through her fortune then took off for South America with an Argentinian dancer, if you please. Leaving her with three children, and no money to raise them properly. They are living with us at Kingsdowne Place at the moment.”
The queen leaned closer to me. “Her Grace’s younger son was killed in the war on the Somme,” she said. “A most valiant young man. Awarded the VC posthumously after carrying several of his wounded men out of the line of enemy fire.”
The duchess was now smiling, which completely transformed her face. “My son John. He was always quite a handful but what a charmer. I can’t tell you how many tutors we got through before m’husband sent him to Eton. He was nearly expelled for setting the dormitory on fire, smoking under the sheets. Also got into a spot of trouble while he was up at Oxford. Something to do with cheating on an examination. Johnnie always did like to take risks. So my husband shipped him off to the colonies to make a man of him. He spent a couple of years in the Australian outback doing all kinds of manual work on sheep stations, cattle ranches, God knows what. One rather gathers the lifestyle suited him and if war hadn’t broken out, he might never have come home. But the moment war was declared, he caught the first boat back to England and enlisted in his father’s old regiment. He was killed within the first few months of fighting.”
She stopped, and I watched her fight to compose her features. I waited patiently, wondering what might be coming next.
“So will the title die out with the present duke?” I asked. “Is there no other heir?” I had finished my watercress sandwich and, emboldened by the way that the duchess was stuffing cream cakes, I leaned across and took an éclair. It was light as a feather, with cream oozing out of it.
“That was what we all feared,” the duchess went on. “There appeared to be no male heir even among the most remote of cousins. Under the entailment, the title would die out with my son and the estate would revert to the crown. But then about eighteen months ago, we received the most extraordinary letter. It was from a doctor working in the Australian outback, of all places. The newspapers from England containing my husband’s obituary had just reached him. He saw that my husband’s family name was Altringham—Charles Forsythe Altringham, Duke of Eynsford. He said that he knew a young man working on a sheep station who bore an uncanny resemblance to my late husband. He was reputed to be a relation of nobility and his name was also Altringham—Jack Altringham, to be precise.”
She paused and looked up, waiting to see the significance of this in my face. “Jack being the common nickname for John, of course.
“Well,” she went on, after taking another quick bite of her cake, “we hired investigators in Australia to look into the matter. John had been there for two years, after all. It was possible that he had fathered a child—but as to being a legitimate heir. . . .” She brushed crumbs from her impressive shelf of bosom before she said, “But it turned out to be true. It seemed he had formed an attachment with a young woman who worked as a schoolteacher in a remote community. When he found that he had”—she lowered her voice and coughed with embarrassment—“that she was in the family way,” she corrected, “he did the honorable thing and married her. There was a marriage certificate filed away at some county courthouse. Miss Ida Binns to John Jestyn Altringham. He left out his title, you notice. Typical John. Always wanted to be ordinary, even though his father told him that he was born to the highest levels of nobility and had to accept it whether he liked it or not.” And she wagged a finger at us. I had to admire her pluck at wagging a finger at the queen.
“But that’s wonderful,” I said. “You now have your heir.”
“Well, yes,” the duchess said hesitantly. “If one must accept the child of a Miss Ida Binns—a young man who works on an Australian sheep farm—I suppose one must. One simply can’t let the title die out.”
“This is where you come in, my dear,” the queen said.
I had forgotten for a moment that I was somehow to be involved in this matter. What on earth could they want from me now? A suitable marriage for the young sheep farmer?
“How old is this Jack Altringham?” I asked.
“Twenty, so we understand—which would make sense, because John left to come home at the outbreak of war in 1914. He may actually have left Australia before the child was born.”
Twenty. Did they want to marry him off before he could get into any trouble?
“And what exactly would you like me to do?” I asked. I took a discreet bite of éclair. Without warning, cream shot out and landed on my front. If the queen and duchess witnessed it, they were too well-bred to
say anything. All I could think of was thank heavens it had shot toward me and not onto Her Majesty’s brocade sofa, or, worse still, onto HM. I was dying to wipe it off but couldn’t do so while their eyes were on me. Also I realized that I held a cup in one hand and the éclair in the other. That left no hand free to pick up a napkin. I felt my face turning red.
“The young man will be completely uncivilized, unused to our kind of society,” the duchess said. “He will be overwhelmed by Kingsdowne Place and our way of life. We thought that someone his own age—someone who has been brought up to the highest social standards—could show him the ropes and help him to learn his new position in life. He will find you less intimidating than an old dragon like me.”
The cream was now sliding down the front of my white blouse. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. If they had, I was hardly exhibiting those highest standards of social behavior at this moment. I half expected the dowager duchess to say that she had changed her mind and wanted someone who didn’t squirt cream to educate her heir.
“So what do you say, Georgiana?” the queen asked. “Do you feel up to the task?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. I put the half-eaten éclair into my saucer and reached to set down the cup and saucer on the low table by the sofa.
“Splendid,” Her Grace said. “I am delighted. A load off my mind, if you must know. If you are free to travel immediately, I am staying tonight at our house on Eaton Place, dining with friends at the Savoy and return to Kingsdowne in the morning. You can travel down to Kent in the Bentley with me.”
Kent, I thought. The garden of England. How lovely. For once I seemed to have fallen on my feet. Surreptitiously I picked up my napkin from my lap and dabbed at my blouse. As I lifted my elbow I must have knocked the table beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dragon figurine teeter. I reached out and made a successful grab for it as it was about to fall. Then I turned back to the two ladies.
“Thank you. I’ll be ready in the morning,” I said, giving them what I hoped was a confident smile.