The Secret Countess

by Eva Ibbotson

  Then they came, two girls, ceremoniously carrying the ensemble that for weeks now had been the stuff of Ollie’s dreams. They carefully unwrapped the rose pink dress, the velvet cloak, the pearl-encrusted muff.

  ‘Oh, Anna, look!’ said the Honourable Olive, holding her arms up. ‘Oh, gosh . . .’

  Next door things were proceeding less smoothly. Cynthia Smythe, it was true, oozed meekness and gratitude as she turned and twisted at the fitting girl’s behest and the Lady Lavinia, in her booth, staring over the heads of the assistants with the bored hauteur of a thoroughbred being decked out for a minor agricultural show, gave relatively little trouble.

  The same could not be said of Muriel Hardwicke. Muriel had the clearest possible ideas about the way her dress and train and veil should look and these ideas, though she expressed them forcibly, the staff of Fortman and Bittlestone were failing to realize.

  ‘No, no . . . that dart is in quite the wrong place. And the sleeves are much too full at the wrist.’

  ‘But when mademoiselle has her bouquet—’

  ‘I’m not carrying a bouquet,’ snapped Muriel, ‘flowers are far too unreliable. I’m carrying a gold-bound prayer-book, so please don’t use that as an excuse.’

  The girls grew hot and flustered, Madame Duparc’s varicose veins throbbed and pounded across her swollen legs . . . But at last, though grudgingly, Muriel declared herself reasonably satisfied.

  ‘If the others are ready, tell them to come out, please. I want to see the effect of the whole ensemble.’

  The door of the left-hand booth now opened and there emerged, like one of the puppets in Petroushka, the apologetic and slightly goose-pimpled figure of Miss Cynthia Smythe.

  The door of the right-hand booth followed – and the Lady Lavinia Nettleford, lofty and indifferent in her eighteenth bridesmaid’s dress, stepped out.

  After which Madame Duparc, the little sewing girls and the chief vendeuse gave the same experienced and slightly weary sigh.

  For her bridesmaids Muriel had chosen identical dresses of rose pink satin with a bloused bodice, a pink velvet sash and the three-tiered skirts which the great Poiret had just introduced in Paris. A wide frill of pink accordion-pleated chiffon lined the hems, encircled the cuffs of the short sleeves and edged the square neck – and dipping low on their foreheads like inverted tea cups, the girls wore close-fitting, pink satin-petalled caps.

  Pink is a lovely and becoming colour and the image of a rose is never far from the minds of those who contemplate an ensemble of this shade. Unfortunately, there are other images which may intrude. Cynthia Smythe, emerging soft-fleshed, goitrous and apathetic from her ruffles, suggested a prematurely dished-up and rather nervous ham. The Lady Lavinia had other troubles. Though the bodice was generously bloused, the Lady Lavinia was not. With her stick-like arms, jerky movements and the tendency to whiskers which has been the Nettleford scourge for generations, she relentlessly reminded the onlookers that pink is not only the colour of budding roses, but of boiling prawns.

  But now the door of the centre booth was thrown open and there emerged – to the sound of imagined trumpets – the bride herself.

  Muriel had chosen not white, but a rich brocade of ivory which better took up the colour of her creamy skin. Cleaving to her magnificent bosom, clinging till the last possible moment to her generously undulating hips, the dress fanned out dramatically into a six-foot train, embroidered with opalescent beads and glistening pailettes. Richly elaborate threadwork also spangled the bodice and, eschewing the simple white tulle so beloved of ordinary brides, Muriel had set her diamond tiara over a veil of glittering silver lace.

  And seeing her, Madame Duparc and her staff broke into the expected applause, but half-heartedly, for weddings were their business and Muriel, in her metallic splendour, looked more like some goddess descending from Valhalla than a bride.

  A very small noise, like a cricket clearing its throat, caused them to turn their heads.

  In the doorway leading from the other fitting room stood a tiny figure in rose pink satin – and pushed gently forward by Anna, who then stood aside – the Honourable Olive, en grand tenue, began to walk across the deep pile of the dove grey carpet towards Muriel and her retinue.

  And as they watched her the tired sewing women began to smile, remembering suddenly what it was all about. The sheer joy of a wedding: the sense of wonder and humility and awe . . . the newness of it and the hope . . . all were there in this child, limping with a shining morning face towards the bride.

  Holding in one reverent hand the flounces of her dress, clutching in the other the pearl-encrusted muff she had not been able to relinquish, Ollie advanced. Apart from a head-dress of fresh flowers for which Minna had begged, Ollie’s outfit was the same as the other bridesmaids’, but her radiance and delight had transfigured it. The pink ruffles nestled beguilingly against her throat; she listened with parted lips to the rustle of her skirt as if it were the sound of angel’s wings. One of the fitting girls, forgetting her place, had sent downstairs for rosebuds, which by some alchemy blended, instead of clashing, with her flaming hair.

  Now Ollie was close enough really to see Muriel and the blue eyes widened behind the round glasses. Ever since she had heard Muriel spoken of, Ollie had seen her as a fairy tale princess. Here in reality, she surpassed all Ollie’s dreams. Untroubled by considerations of suitability or good taste, Ollie gazed at the glittering, shimmering figure with its diamond crown. And forgetting about herself completely, she came to rest in front of Muriel, looked up adoringly, and said:

  ‘Oh! You do look beautiful!’

  Muriel seemed not to have heard. Ever since Ollie had appeared in the doorway she had been staring in silent fascination at the child. Now she drew in her breath and as Anna, guided by some instinct, stepped forward and Tom Byrne entered to fetch the bridesmaids, she hissed, in a whisper which carried right across the room:

  ‘Why did no one tell me that the child was crippled!’

  8

  Ollie had heard. As though the words had been a physical blow, the colour drained from her face, she bent her bright head and the small hand which had been proudly holding up the flounces of her skirt dropped to her side. In shocked silence, Madame Duparc and the shopgirls stared at the woman who had done this deed.

  Tom Byrne had checked his first steps towards his sister to control a rage so murderous that it terrified him. He wanted to shake Muriel till her teeth rattled, to press his fingers into her throat. Horrified to find these feelings in himself, he stood stock-still in the middle of the floor like a bewildered bull.

  It was the Lady Lavinia, with her well-bred indifference, who saved the moment by suggesting an alteration to Muriel’s train and the fitting continued.

  But when it was over and it came to carrying out the next part of the programme, Ollie quietly refused to cooperate. To the suggestion that she should now join the other bridesmaids for luncheon at the Ritz, the Honourable Olive gave a low-voiced but unalterable ‘No’. She wasn’t, she said, hungry and, clinging to Anna’s hand, she added that she thought she would like to go home.

  ‘I can’t take you home yet, love,’ said Tom, desperately distressed – turning, with appeal in his nice brown eyes, to the Lady Lavinia Nettleford and Cynthia Smythe. Surely they would release him, let him attend to his sister? But in the eyes of Muriel’s adult bridesmaids there was only a desire, implacable as the urge of a wildebeest towards a water hole, for luncheon at the Ritz.

  ‘Well, really,’ said Muriel, ‘all that fuss just because I said—’

  But even she did not repeat what she had said.

  Anna now took charge. Her rage had been as instant and murderous as Tom’s, but it had been extinguished by an emotion even more intense: a deep pity for the man who had linked his life with a woman such as this. Now she rejected this too, bent only on helping Ollie.

  ‘Perhaps it would be nice if you came home with me and we made cinnamon toast and I showed you a little dog
that has in his stomach the diamond that the Empress Elizabeth gave to Rastrelli and also a stuffed grandmother?’

  Ollie, though she did not speak, indicated her approval by nodding into Anna’s skirts and Tom looked at her with gratitude.

  But, in the event, they shared Lord Westerholme’s taxi. Arriving as planned to escort Muriel to lunch, Rupert was told that she preferred to stay behind and shop.

  ‘Oh?’

  Muriel glanced up at him sharply. It had been her intention to punish her fiancé by depriving him of her company, for it seemed to her that in concealing Ollie’s handicap he had been deceitful and underhand. Now, too late, she saw her mistake. The flash of anger in Rupert’s eyes had only lasted a moment, but it had been unmistakable.

  ‘In that case I’ll get myself off to Aspell’s,’ he said, turning away. ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting. Does anyone want a lift?’

  So it was arranged that Rupert would drop off Anna and Ollie, before proceeding to the queen’s jewellers to purchase Muriel’s bridal gift.

  ‘Who was that girl?’ asked the Lady Lavinia, looking after Anna as she led Ollie away. ‘The foreign one?’

  Muriel shrugged. ‘Just one of the Mersham domestics. She seems to have forgotten her place and cadged a lift to town. A Russian refugee. Why do you ask?’

  ‘She reminds me of someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Actually, our new chauffeur. He’s a foreigner, too.’

  And the Lady Lavinia sighed. For Sergei was rather more than a foreigner . . . To have the fur rug tucked round one’s knees by him, to have him hold open the car door and see him smile that devastating yet protective smile, to catch the warmth in those dark, long-lashed, gold-flecked eyes was to feel so cherished, so curiously excited, that it was best not to think of it. Not that she made an idiot of herself like her four sisters did, likening him to Rudolf Valentino, carrying on like kitchen maids. Sergei was, in fact, a great deal better-looking than Valentino – taller, stronger, in every way more manly – but that was neither here nor there. Whatever he had been in his native land, a chauffeur was a chauffeur. It was a good job she had given him the afternoon off. With Mama and the younger girls still in Northumberland, Hermione and Priscilla were quite capable of ordering him to take them on joyrides round the park.

  But Tom Byrne was waiting – and with Cynthia docilely in attendance, Lavinia swept off to the powder room to prepare for the luncheon which she hoped would seal her fate.

  Ollie sat between Rupert and Anna in the taxi as it crawled down Piccadilly, festooned with bunting for the victory parade. She was still very white and quiet and Rupert, sensing her distress, was too wise to ask what had happened. Instead he watched as Anna, summoning up all her forces, turned to attack the little girl.

  ‘So. You wish to sit there like a small, wet blancmange because someone has said a word to you.’

  ‘It’s not a very nice word,’ said Ollie, in a thread of a voice.

  ‘Nice, nasty . . . It’s a word,’ said Anna shrugging. ‘It means someone who is lame. Well, you are lame. You are also pretty and good and have about one hundred and twenty people who love you very much and a hedgehog called Alexander. To be frightened by a word is an idiocy and you know this very well. In fact, I think I am a little bit ashamed of you.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Ollie. A trace of colour was returning to her cheeks.

  ‘Yes, I am. Of course, if you wish to be sad on purpose that is all right. We can all be sad. Lord Westerholme can be sad because under his shoulder is a piece of shrapnel and this gives him pain when he lifts his arm,’ said Anna, ignoring Rupert’s quick look of surprise. ‘And I could cry almost immediately because my father is dead and they have taken away all our houses—’

  ‘Did you have a lot of houses?’ asked Ollie, momentarily diverted.

  Anna bit her lip and Rupert, at his most silky, said, ‘In Russia all the housemaids have a lot of houses, Ollie.’

  Not quite understanding, Ollie nevertheless responded to the feeling of warmth and affection which had grown up, almost tangibly, in the back of the taxi. And able, now, to put the dread question into words, she asked:

  ‘Will Muriel still want me to be a bridesmaid?’

  Rupert, not knowing the reason for the question, answered it in a voice that she had never heard him use.

  ‘Ollie,’ said Lord Westerholme, taking both her hands in his, ‘if you are not a bridesmaid at my wedding then there will be no wedding, and that I swear!’

  Ollie sighed and let her head fall back on to the seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was silly.’

  Anna nodded, conceding this. Then, allowing the tenderness to come back into her voice she said, ‘Do you know what is best of all? When one has been hurt or saddened, then suddenly to turn everything upside down and be very happy. So I think we should have an absolutely beautiful afternoon – an afternoon that you can lie in bed and remember for years and years.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ asked Ollie.

  ‘Most certainly,’ said Anna.

  Anna was as good as her word. It was into an enchanted world that she now led Ollie Byrne.

  Pinny, opening the door of her little mews house, did not need Anna’s hurried aside to see that the child had had a shock. To the information, tendered by Ollie, that she was not tired or hungry and almost never went to the lavatory, Pinny listened attentively and with respect. Half an hour later, Ollie, having drunk two glasses of milk and eaten a large helping of macaroni cheese, was lying on the sofa feeding the budgerigar the strips of cinnamon toast that were his passion.

  But Pinny’s house was only the beginning. Anna had run upstairs to change into her only ‘good’ dress – a green velveteen which Kira had sent from Paris. The Countess Grazinsky gathered up shawls, leaking packets of tea and lorgnettes, and when Pinny was satisfied that the little girl was properly rested they set off for the Russian Club.

  For the rest of her childhood, if anyone asked Ollie what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always replied: ‘A Russian.’ The club was on the first floor of a large, dilapidated house behind Paddington Station, but the trains which shook its foundations every few minutes might have been travelling, not to Plymouth but to Minsk, not to Torquay but to Vladimir the Great, so exotic and foreign were its delights.

  For there really was a stuffed grandmother. She lived – so everyone swore – in a most beautiful and gaily painted chest which stood under one window. The chest was heavily padlocked and covered with a crimson gypsy shawl and no one would have dreamt of putting down a tray of glasses or a plate on it without saying, ‘Sorry, Baboushka’, or ‘Forgive me, Ancient One’. Nor was there anything sad about her, as Anna was quick to explain. For the old lady had belonged to the two pale young men, Boris and Andrey, who now owned the house the club was in and spent their time at a corner table playing Halma and planning to assassinate Lenin. Boris and Andrey had adored the old lady and when she died had, with the help of a famous Egyptologist, found this way of keeping her with them when they fled their native land. Or so they said.

  Above the Baboushka there hung an icon of St Cunouphrius, the saint who grew a beard to cover his nakedness and whose stick-like arms and little, white legs were all that protruded, wistfully, from behind the curlicues of coal-black hair. Beside him, there was another picture showing forty martyred bishops busily freezing to death in their shifts on an ice floe, and beneath them was a small shrine containing a crimson icon lamp, a bunch of withered marigolds, a lump of bread and a packet of Cerebos salt. There was an enormous, stuttering, smouldering samovar of fluted brass . . .

  And there was Pupsik himself, the mythical dachshund, his sagging extremeties hanging exhaustedly over the edges of a low footstool which had become a kind of altar. Pupsik, to whom his owner the Baroness de Wodzka had fed, in a moment of panic on the Finnish border, the Rastrelli diamond embedded in a chunk of liver sausage. A priceless diamond, the baroness’s only remaining jewel, which somehow, mysteriously,
the ancient, wheezing animal had managed to retain in some diverticular abnormality along the clogged and malodorous drainpipe of its body . . . Every day during the six months of his quarantine, the baroness had rung the kennels, terrifying the kennel-maids with her imperious, ‘Vell? ’ass ’e voided?’

  But Pupsik, though functioning normally in other respects, had not voided the jewel.

  Bets had been laid, horrendous physiological disputes had split the club – but Pupsik, returning from quarantine to find himself famous and feted, continued to deprive the baroness of the jewel which would have reunited her with her children in America, secured her a livelihood, a home.

  Anna’s entry, with her mother, her governess and Ollie, was the signal for an explosion of hugs, kisses and endearments. The Princess Chirkovsky, Sergei’s mother, enveloped her in an enormous motheaten chinchilla stole; a grey-bearded poet who had been writing verses to her since she was six years old rushed forward with his latest ode. Colonel Terek, who had parked his taxi in the mews, went for more vodka . . .

  For a few moments, Anna gave herself up to the joy of being welcomed. Then she held up her hand and, switching to English, said: ‘I have brought you a very special friend of mine, Miss Olive Byrne. She has been a little bit sad and I have told her that here it is possible to be instantly and completely happy. Was I correct?’

  And the party began.

  An hour later, Ollie had reached unimaginable heights of glory. Her health had been drunk and the glasses thrown away so that no lesser toast could ever be drunk than the one dedicated to her. Gentlemen behaved in this way in the presence of beautiful women, Anna explained, and she must accustom herself to it. Now she was not only sitting on the stuffed grandmother, but holding in her arms the greater part of the dachshund, Pupsik, bestowed on her by the Baroness de Wodzka herself. On either side of her, as unobtrusively watchful as the Praetorian guard, stood Pinny and Sergei’s erstwhile governess, Miss King. Boris and Andrey, the pale young counter-revolutionaries, were playing the balalaika; Princess Chirkovsky, waving her arms, was expounding to Anna’s mother her latest, absolutely sure-fire method of retrieving the family fortunes: the setting up of a piroshki stall on Paddington Station.