The Secret Countess

by Eva Ibbotson

  Muriel’s own taste would have been for a fashionable wedding in a London church, but she had been quite happy to agree to Rupert’s offer of Mersham and a village wedding. For, studded about in impossible Yorkshire hovels which they refused to quit, were some ancient and deeply unsuitable relations of her father’s. Grandma Hardwicke with her rusty bonnet and clacking teeth might have dared to brave a big London church, but she would hardly turn up, uninvited, at Mersham. And after all, even a simple country wedding could be conducted with order, propriety and style.

  This being so, Muriel was determined to make a clean start. Her house was to be sold, her servants dismissed. Only her chaperone, Mrs Finch-Heron, would travel with her to Mersham and then she too would be sent away.

  But first she would go and say goodbye to the man who had clarified all her aspirations, the man whose ideas had come to her as though all her life had been leading towards such a goal. Dr Lightbody was giving a lecture tonight at the Conway Hall. She would go to it as a perfect preparation, a kind of blessing on her new life. And tomorrow, Mersham.

  Slipping into her seat, Muriel noticed with irritation that the hall was half-empty. It was truly appalling what this gifted, handsome man had had to endure in the way of calumny and indifference. Dr Lightbody had a Swedish grandmother from whom he had inherited his fair hair and pale blue, visionary eyes. A devoted grandson, the doctor had most naturally decided to visit the old lady on her farm near Lund. The fact that his departure for Sweden happened to take place just two days before the outbreak of war was obviously a complete coincidence, yet there were people vile enough to accuse him of cowardice. The Swedes themselves had been so unreceptive to the implications of his ‘New Eugenics’ that the poor man had had to uproot himself immediately after the armistice and return to England.

  And yet his doctrine was as uplifting as it was sensible and sane. Briefly, the doctor believed that it was possible, by diet, exercise and various kinds of purification about which he was perfectly willing to be specific when asked, to create an Ideal Human Body. But this was not all. When his disciples had made of their bodies a fitting Temple of the Spirit, it was also their obligation to mate with like bodies. In short, Dr Lightbody wished to apply to human beings those laws which farmers and horse breeders have used for generations. For as the great man was now most persuasively arguing, what was the use of producing swift racehorses, pigs with perfectly distributed body fat and chickens whose egg-boundedness was only a distant memory – while permitting the human race to perpetuate idleness, physical deformity and low intelligence by unrestricted breeding?

  Muriel, her full lips parted, her pansy-blue eyes fixed admiringly on the doctor’s blond head, sighed with satisfaction as he reiterated his well-remembered points. Everything made sense to her. There were people who, by physique and training, were somewhat superior and she would have been foolish not to recognize herself as one of them. That these people had a duty to the human race seemed to her clear. Muriel was serious about her beliefs and if Rupert had shown any flaws, mental or physical, or any insanity in the family, she would have set aside her inclinations and refused to become engaged. Fortunately, Rupert had in every way passed the test and as Countess of Westerholme it would be her privilege and duty to see that the doctor’s ideas were carried out.

  Dr Lightbody was now drawing to a close.

  ‘All of us, ladies and gentlemen,’ declaimed the doctor, looking round to see if, among the sea of swelling bosoms, there were, in fact, any gentlemen, ‘have it in our power to acquire – by Right Diet, Right Living and the avoidance of lechery and vice – a body that is a flawless and an unsullied chalice, a hallowed temple for the human spirit. Can we doubt that, having acquired it, it is our duty to pass it on to our unborn children and make of this island race a nation of gods? Valhalla is in our grasp, ladies and gentlemen. Let us march towards it with confidence, unity and joy! Thank you.’

  ‘Get a taxi, Geraldine,’ said Muriel to her chaperone. ‘And buy some of those diet sheets on the way out, won’t you? They didn’t sell too well last time. I’m going backstage to congratulate the doctor and say goodbye.’

  Dr Lightbody left the Conway Hall in an excellent frame of mind. The lecture had gone well; the audience had been appreciative and the diet sheets had sold better than usual. He had particularly enjoyed the visit of Miss Hardwicke afterwards. Now there was a disciple worth having! Other women had to strive to become a chalice, but not she! A few followers like that and he could make of this dispiriting country a Mecca and a place of joy. She had invited him down for the wedding. Might there be something for him there? A chance to work under a wealthy patroness? To set up an Institute of Eugenics at Mersham, free from the financial anxieties that plagued him? Yes, he’d have to keep that very much in mind.

  His mood of elation lasted until he turned into the dingy street in Ealing where he rented lodgings. But as he let himself in it collapsed, pricked by a weary exhausted voice asking, in the appalling Midlands accent he had never been able to eradicate: ‘Ronnie? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, Doreen, it is I,’ said Dr Lightbody in the careful voice, as of a teacher speaking to a backward child, that he always used when addressing his wife.

  Doreen sat in a shabby armchair, her glasses on the end of her nose, darning one of his socks. She looked pale and exhausted, there was a spot on her chin and her shoulders were hunched in their usual pose of resigned weariness. Angrily, he waited for her to cough and, sure enough, after a short struggle to hold her breath, she began the dry, infuriating coughing that always seemed to assail her these days.

  ‘There’s some coffee on the stove,’ she said when she could speak again. ‘And a piece of chocolate cake, if you want it. It’s freshly baked.’

  Dr Lightbody went through into the tiny kitchen. How had it happened that he, with his vision of what the human body could be, had been trapped into this appalling marriage? Why had he been so weak as to listen to his parents when they insisted he marry the girl and why, having done so, had he not left her two months later, when she miscarried? It wasn’t just that she was socially completely his inferior – a lowly clerk’s daughter in whose house he had lodged in his last year at college – it was that all along Doreen had been antagonistic to his ideas. First, she had not wanted to accompany him to Sweden and had produced some nonsense about sharing the fate of her countrymen. Then, when in the purity of the Swedish air and the freedom from conscription he had at last been able to formulate his ideas, Doreen had mutely and obstinately misunderstood everything he was trying to do. And when they returned to England and his teaching had at last begun to gain ground, had she been behind him, helping him, building up his image?

  She had not. When he had suggested she come with him on a tour of the docks, to encourage the dock workers to marry only when there was healthy blood on both sides, Doreen had said she didn’t think it was any of her business. No wonder that when she had half-heartedly followed his diet sheets, it had done her so little good. One had to believe. Not only was Doreen’s body not a temple, Doreen’s body was a disaster. Lately he had not even asked her to come to his lectures. It was better for people not to know that he, to whom they turned for leadership and guidance, had to share his life with someone whose very appearance was a denial of all that he was working for.

  And, deep in self-pity, Dr Lightbody bit into a large slice of Doreen’s feather-light chocolate cake and sighed.

  5

  Unlike Rupert, Muriel was spared the reception by massed servants on the grand staircase. This did not mean, however, that the servants did not watch her arrival. Perched on various strategic stepladders and in convenient look-out posts, Mersham’s staff gazed curiously at the Daimler and saw the earl hand out a tottery lady, whose motoring hat and swathed veils suggested high winds and the keeping of innumerable bees. But before despondency had taken root, the earl handed out a second lady, full-breasted and voluptuous, in a flesh-coloured duster coat tasselled with skunk tai
ls.

  And over Sid on a ladder in the west landing, over Louise and Mrs Park wobbling on stools in the store room, over everyone, there spread a look of pure satisfaction. Not only was the new countess beautiful, but there was also plenty of her and James, balancing Mr Sebastien’s telescope on a Roman urn, summed up the general feeling when he said simply and lustingly: ‘Cor!’

  ‘This is your room, dear,’ said the dowager, leading Muriel into Queen Caroline’s bedchamber. ‘We thought you’d like it, it has such a pretty view of the lake.’

  Muriel looked with pleasure at the graceful, airy room, the low bowls of roses. ‘But it is delightful! Charming! I have never seen a lovelier room.’

  The dowager smiled affectionately at her beautiful new daughter-in-law. ‘And this is Anna, who will wait on you till you have engaged a maid of your own.’

  Anna curtsied. The depth and intensity of her curtsy, which had so disconcerted the earl and his butler, in no way troubled Muriel, who felt it to be only her due. She turned back to the dowager. ‘The guests are invited for eight o’clock, I believe you said?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s just a small party of our intimate friends to welcome you and drink your health. With the wedding so soon, we didn’t want to delay in introducing you to the neighbourhood. You have the whole afternoon to rest.’

  ‘Thank you, but I am seldom tired,’ said Muriel composedly.

  The dowager could believe it. She had never seen a more magnificent creature. She turned to go, but at the door she paused and said to Anna: ‘The flowers are quite beautiful. You have a real feeling for this kind of work. Mrs Bassenthwaite told me how much trouble you took.’

  A slight crease furrowed Muriel’s forehead. She had never heard a servant addressed in such familiar and affectionate terms.

  ‘You may unpack, Anna,’ she said. ‘You’ll find a picture in a silver frame in the crocodile-skin case. I want that on my bedside table.’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ said Anna, and set to work.

  Hanging up a dance dress of green accordion-pleated chiffon, a tea gown of coffee-coloured lace, a magenta boucle suit with a fringed hobble skirt, she presently came on a silver-framed photograph. This turned out to be, not as Anna had expected a portrait of the earl, but of a fair man with sticking-up hair and visionary eyes. The signature: ‘From Dr Ronald Lightbody with kindest regards’, meant little to Anna but, obedient to her mistress’s instructions, she placed it on the bedside table.

  ‘I shall wear the orange crêpe de Chine tonight,’ said Muriel from the chaise-longue, where she was lying with closed eyes, drawing deep and systematic breaths of air into her lungs. ‘The one with the crystal beading. See that it is pressed. And with it the matching bandeau and ostrich feather fan . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  Slipping into her seat in the servants’ hall for a quick meal before the party, Anna faced a battery of faces . . .

  She did not fail them. Clasping her hands in her best annunciatory-angel manner, she said: ‘She is beautiful all over. I can tell you this absolutely because I have seen her in the bath.’

  James put down his knife.

  ‘She wished, you see, that I should wash her back and also rub her with some cream of Dr Lightbody’s and I assure you she is like a goddess,’ said Anna, delighted to have such happy tidings for them all.

  ‘Who’s Dr Lightbody when he’s at home?’ enquired Louise.

  ‘He is a very important man whom Miss Hardwicke admires very much and wears his hair en brosse and is the president of the New Eugenics Society.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Sid.

  ‘Eugenics,’ said Proom in his most professional manner, ‘is the science of selective breeding. It is an extremely important field of study and Miss Hardwicke’s interest in the subject is entirely to her credit.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too,’ said Anna, her eyes ablaze with enthusiasm, ‘because in Russia, in the country, about twenty versts from us there lived a farmer who suffered very much with his chickens because when they were roasted they always had blisters on their breasts and . . .’

  ‘Anna!’ Louise had long since made her peace with the Russian girl, but there were words which, as head housemaid, she had no intention of permitting her underlings to use.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anna apologized. ‘If I say chest blisters is it all right? So he went to see a professor of eugenics in Kazan and—’

  But Anna’s account of the chicken farmer’s triumph in eliminating breast blistering was destined to remain unfinished. For Mrs Park, who had been lingering in the kitchen, now arrived at the door, shy and blushing like a bride, and said with simple dignity: ‘Will you come, everybody, and see . . . ?’

  Among her other anxieties, Mrs Park suffered from the conviction that guests at Mersham were in danger of starving to death. For the fifteen or so intimate friends invited that night to a buffet supper to celebrate the earl’s engagement, she had prepared three freshwater salmon grilled and garnished with parsley butter, a mousseline of trout adorned with stuffed crayfish heads and a pike poached in court bouillon. There was a fricassée of chicken with morels and cream, half a dozen ducklings, a York ham and a piece of boeuf royale which took up the whole of a side table . . .

  But it was none of these that held the servants’ gaze. For, in the centre of the huge table, drawing the eye as inevitably as the Winged Victory compels the eye of those ascending the main staircase of the Louvre, was the dessert that Mrs Park had created in homage to Muriel Hardwicke.

  The gentle cook had seen in her mind’s eye a great swan made of snow-white meringue – The Swan of Mersham, which was part of the Frayne coat of arms. She had visualized its wings made of the palest almonds, furled and slithered to feathered authenticity and its beak and eyes picked out in silver. She had imagined the inside of this mighty, heraldic bird as consisting of the most delicate and subtle mousse Bavarois which, at the touch of a knife on the creature’s heart, would ooze out in a fragrant mouthwatering slither . . . She had conceived of a great lake of crème Chantilly with islets of whipped syllabub for the swan to float upon and, surrounding it, an emerald shore of fringed angelica . . .

  And what she had seen she had created.

  For a moment, the servants marvelled in silence.

  ‘You’ll be sent for after this, Mrs P,’ said the butler, ‘so make sure you’re ready to go upstairs. Miss Hardwicke’ll want to see you, no doubt about it.’

  ‘Oh no, surely?’ Mrs Park, flushing rosily, demurred.

  But secretly, modest as she was, she did think she’d be sent for. The swan had kept her and her devoted amanuensis, Win, from their beds for the best part of a week; but for once it seemed to her that she had made something of which Signor Manotti himself need not have been ashamed.

  At Heslop Hall, Lady Byrne, already dressed for the party, was saying goodnight to Ollie, sitting like a small sunflower in her white-canopied bed.

  When she had first come to Heslop, Minna Byrne had left untouched the bleeding stags, dismembered antlers and dripping, severed heads of John the Baptist which adorned the halls and corridors of Lord Byrne’s enormous Elizabethan mansion. But when she had discovered that her infant stepdaughter was supposed to sleep under a malodorous tapestry of St Sebastian being quite horribly stuck with arrows, Minna had acted with decision and despatch. Ollie’s room was now simply furnished, but looked delightful with its American patchwork quilt, bentwood rocking chair and gaily painted chests and it was there that the Byrnes tended to congregate at the end of the day.

  ‘You look lovely, Mummy,’ said Ollie.

  Minna smiled. She always dressed plainly and had retained the Quaker air she had brought from her New England childhood. But for Muriel Hardwicke, who had saved Mersham from ruin and chosen Ollie for her bridesmaid, she had added the Byrne pearls to her cream silk dress and put diamond drops in her ears.

  ‘I wish I could come,’ said Ollie wistfully. ‘I haven’t seen Muriel yet.’

  ‘I kno
w, lovey. But it’s really a very late party.’ While encouraging Ollie in every way to be independent, Minna secretly guarded her like a lioness against fatigue. ‘You’ll meet Muriel next week when you go to fit the dresses.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ollie gave a blissful sigh. Heslop had of late abounded in trapped housemaids pinned against walls, resigned under-gardeners and delayed tradesmen, all receiving, at Ollie’s hands, the details of her outfit.

  Tom Byrne now wandered in in his evening clothes, to ruffle his sister’s hair and receive her compliments on his appearance.

  ‘You look very cheerful,’ said Minna, smiling at her eldest stepson.

  Tom grinned. ‘I am. I can’t wait to meet this paragon of Rupert’s. Beautiful and devoted and saved his life and an orphan so we can have the fun of the wedding down here! It seems almost too good to be true. Not that anything’s too good for Rupert.’

  ‘No, he’s a dear and just the person for Mersham,’ said Minna, to whom Rupert’s war record had come as no surprise. ‘And Mary seems to have quite abandoned all those spirits of hers now he’s home and there’s a wedding to plan for.’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ said Tom. ‘Last time I called I had to take a message for Mrs MacCracken at the schoolhouse from a Passed-On Lady who was having trouble with her knitting on the other side.’

  Minna sighed. She dearly loved the dowager, whose kindness when she first came to Heslop had been unceasing, nor was she disposed to mock anyone who sought comfort in the knowledge that the death of the body is not the end. If only the spirits, just once in a while, would come up with something interesting.

  ‘You won’t forget to give Anna the letter I wrote?’ Ollie asked her brother. ‘It’s very important. It’s all about the hedgehog.’