The Secret Countess

by Eva Ibbotson

  Only there was a wedding. He was in the midst of it. He was marrying Muriel Hardwicke.

  . . . but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

  First it was ordained for the procreation of children . . .

  In his pew, Dr Lightbody groaned. The procreation of children yes . . . But what children? What monsters, what fiends in human form would that lewd and treacherous earl beget on the unsullied body of his bride? Oh, God, was there no one to warn her, no one to whom she could turn?

  . . . for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together . . .

  I gave my word to Ollie, thought Rupert – and lifted his head. But it was not his own voice which suddenly tore through the church: the frenzied voice of a human soul in torment, crying: ‘Stop! Oh, stop! This marriage must not be!’

  Mr Morland looked up. The startled silence which followed was broken only by the small exclamation which escaped Lady Templeton as the doctor, stumbling from his pew, stepped heavily on her bunion.

  ‘It must not be!’ repeated Dr Lightbody, his pale eyes glittering now with a Messianic fervour. He brushed aside the Lady Lavinia, reached the altar rails: ‘This lovely woman has been most hideously deceived!’

  The vicar blinked. In her pew, the dowager, who had read Jane Eyre no less than seven times, shook her head in disbelief. And Muriel, within minutes of her goal, turned furiously on the doctor.

  ‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses, Dr Lightbody.’ And to the vicar, ‘Pray, proceed.’

  ‘No, no!’ The doctor was now quite beside himself. ‘You must listen, Miss Hardwicke. You are in danger – terrible danger! There is tainted blood in the Westerholmes!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ But Muriel’s pansy-blue eyes had dilated in sudden fear. ‘It isn’t true, Rupert?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t true,’ said Rupert contemptuously.

  ‘It is true, it is true!’ screamed Lightbody. He pointed with a shaking finger at the earl. ‘Ask him what is hidden in the folly in the woods. Ask him, Miss Hardwicke. Ask him!’

  The whispers and murmurs among the congregation were growing to a climax.

  ‘Ask him,’ yelled Dr Lightbody. ‘And if you don’t believe me, ask him!’ And he swivelled round to point at Mersham’s butler, sitting composed and immaculate in the back pew. ‘Go on! Ask Proom!’

  The name, with its overtones of high respectability, rang through the church. Mr Morland, who had been about to order the doctor from the church, laid down his prayerbook. And Mr Cyril Proom rose slowly and majestically to his feet.

  ‘Please come forward, Mr Proom,’ said the vicar. ‘I’m sure there is a perfectly respectable explanation for this gentleman’s remarks.’

  Steadily, with his usual measured tread, Mr Proom advanced up the aisle. As he drew level with her pew, the dowager threw him a glance of total puzzlement and he held her eye for a long moment before he moved up to the altar rails and, bending his head respectfully, addressed the vicar.

  ‘I’m afraid Dr Lightbody is perfectly correct, sir. I felt it advisable to make certain disclosures to him in view of his well-known interest in eugenics. And in any case,’ he said, ‘I am owed several months’ wages by the family.’

  The lie, in its pointless blatancy, momentarily pierced Rupert’s sense of nightmare and he narrowed his eyes.

  ‘What is in the folly?’ demanded Muriel, who was no longer calm. ‘Tell me at once!’

  ‘Imbeciles!’ cried Dr Lightbody. ‘I’ve seen them! Dreadful, dribbling imbeciles. And they’re his cousins! His first cousins. By blood.’

  ‘It isn’t true! Rupert, tell me it isn’t true!’

  ‘He won’t tell you – he won’t admit it, he wants your money. But I tell you, I’ve seen them! I saw them last night. He keeps them locked up in that tower and they’re like animals – worse than animals.’

  Mr Morland’s bewilderment was total. He’d been Vicar of Mersham for twenty years and never heard a whisper of scandal. But could Proom be lying?

  ‘Is it really so?’ he asked the butler, above the growing uproar in the church.

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. The family’s given it about that the folly’s haunted by the ghost of Sir Montague Frayne, so nobody goes near it. But the screams – well, they’re not the screams of ghosts, sir; they’re the screams of his lordship’s relatives.’

  Rupert had been listening to this farrago of nonsense in silence. Now he turned and raised enquiring eyes at his mother.

  The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:

  ‘Oh, Rupert, darling,’ she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, ‘don’t you see? The game’s up!’

  Proom had been against Myrtle Herring pretending to be a chicken laying an egg. It was his opinion that people asked to simulate mental derangement always picked on chickens and the routine, wing flapping, squawking performance was invariably hackneyed and unsatisfactory.

  Myrtle, however, had convinced him. Myrtle had been in vaudeville and during their run-through in the folly, sitting atop a pile of straw, brought to her frenzied cluckings such an extreme of gynaecological anguish rising – as she examined the imagined egg – to such awed and ecstatic triumph, that Proom had been deeply impressed.

  He had expected to encounter some difficulty in persuading the Herrings, as he conveyed them by a roundabout route to the back gates of Mersham, to follow his plan. True, they were lucky not to be in prison. Still, they had expected to come to a wedding. Instead, he proposed that they should give a full performance in the folly tower for the benefit of Dr Lightbody, spend the night there (albeit surrounded by oil stoves, mattresses and a hamper of food sent up by Mrs Park) and then – all traces of these comforts having been removed – give a repeat performance should the doctor decide to speak.

  No persuasion had been needed. The sight of one hundred pounds in notes with the promise of another three hundred to come, should they succeed in convincing Miss Hardwicke that they really were deranged, had stilled all doubts. Not only that, but in setting the deception up they had proved to be cooperative and creative. The scruples that had troubled Proom and Mrs Park, the accusation they had levelled at themselves of appearing to make light of the mentally afflicted, did not trouble the Herrings. Nothing troubled the Herrings faced with four hundred pounds.

  Towards the folly, then, in its setting of deep woodland, came the wedding party. Proom was at its head, his expression grave, his bearing deferential. Dr Lightbody followed, the bearer of terrible news, the man who had taken fate into his own hands and felt the decision pressing on him almost unbearably. Then came Muriel, holding up the train of her dress, still stately but no longer composed, and beside her, Rupert, convinced that his grasp on reality had finally slipped away. The dowager, the old Templetons, and Mr Morland, escorted by Tom Byrne, brought up the rear. Everyone else had been persuaded to stay behind.

  The padlock on the door yielded to Proom’s fingers, the door creaked back. A smell of damp and decay met them, cobwebs brushed their faces . . .

  ‘But this is disgusting,’ said Muriel. ‘What—’

  She was arrested by a scream. A truly horrible scream, followed by a burst of cackling laughter.

  ‘This way, miss,’ said Proom – and led the way up the round, dank stairs to the first of the tower rooms.

  The thing that lay on the floor must once have been human, but it did not seem human now. Its face was livid and distorted, it had burrowed into the straw like an animal, its filthy fingers tore and clawed at its ragged clothes.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Old Lady Templeton was deeply shocked. ‘It can’t be . . . surely that’s poor dear Melvyn, isn’t it?�
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  ‘Quite so, my lady.’ Proom turned to Miss Hardwicke. ‘This . . . er, gentleman, is his lordship’s first cousin, Mr Melvyn Herring.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Muriel’s poise was shattered at last. She was as pale as her wedding dress. ‘No, I don’t believe it. His first cousin!’

  ‘Yes, miss. You will see he has the Templeton eyes and – oh, careful, miss.’

  For the thing had arched its back, blobs of spittle came from its mouth – and suddenly it sprang.

  It was Dr Lightbody who saved Muriel, dragging her back before the demented creature could sink its teeth into her hand.

  ‘He’s been like this for a while, miss, and I’m afraid he’s getting worse.’

  ‘But there are others,’ cried Dr Lightbody. ‘Dearest Miss Hardwicke, there are others! This monster has been allowed to marry, to beget other tainted beings.’

  Proom inclined his head. ‘Dr Lightbody is correct. If you would care to follow me.’

  They ascended another dark and curving staircase to the next room. On the floor lay two enormous boys, to all outward appearance, boys of fourteen or fifteen. But they wore nappies, their fingers were in their mouths; one drooled, the other hiccupped . . .

  ‘Master Dennis and Master Donald Herring,’ announced Proom. ‘As you see, they have remained in an infantile stage. The doctor gives no hope of improvement.’

  ‘It isn’t possible!’

  But even as she spoke, Muriel saw that it was possible. Like the mad thing that was their father, these boys had the grey, gold-flecked eyes, the short nose of the Templetons.

  A last flight of steps and they reached the top of the tower.

  Myrtle had made a splendid nest. There were feathers in her hair, a deep and committed broodiness lit up her features and, even as they watched, she emitted a loud and fulfilling squawk . . .

  ‘And this is Mrs Herring,’ said Proom. ‘She, of course,’ he added conscientiously, ‘is no blood relation.’

  But Myrtle Herring had been too much for Rupert. And collapsing against a wall, he began to laugh.

  It was this laugh which finished Muriel. Hysteria, another dangerous mental aberration, began in just this unbridled way – and stepping forward she slapped him hard across the cheek.

  ‘You swine! You unmitigated, vile, scheming swine! Trying to get my money out of me! Trying to trap me into a marriage so that I could bear you some more deformed and squirming . . . things. I’ll have you for this, Rupert! You’ll pay me back every penny I put into that estate – every brass farthing, and the damages I’ll sue you for!’

  ‘Oh, Miss Hardwicke, if you would only take my protection!’ cried the doctor. ‘We could go to America! I could make you the priestess of the New Eugenics. You would be a goddess to me all my life!’

  ‘And your wife?’ said Muriel coldly.

  ‘She is dead.’

  Muriel registered this information with a flicker of her pansy eyes. Then she began to remove her engagement ring. The doctor’s pale, beautifully manicured hand, closing over the solitaire diamond like a vice, prevented her.

  ‘I’m sure his lordship would want you to keep it as a memento.’

  Rupert, still weak from laughter, nodded.

  ‘Yes, indeed! Do please keep it, Muriel.’

  ‘Very well.’ She replaced the ring, gathered up her train. ‘Come, Dr Lightbody.’

  ‘Ronald,’ he begged.

  ‘Come, Ronald,’ said Muriel Hardwicke, and with a last look of disgust and loathing, swept down the stairs.

  16

  ‘I can’t write a letter like that, Mr Proom,’ said Mrs Bassenthwaite weakly. ‘Not to a countess, I can’t.’

  Ten days had passed since the interrupted wedding and Mrs Bassenthwaite, released from hospital, was convalescing on the sofa in the housekeeper’s room.

  ‘I’d write it myself,’ said Proom, ‘but it would be better coming from you. More correct, you being in charge of the maids.’

  Mr Proom had emerged as a local hero, sharing with Leo Rabinovitch and the Herrings, the acclaim of the entire district during the merrymaking which had followed the departure of Miss Hardwicke. Even the knowledge that Mersham would almost certainly have to be sold in order to meet the demands of Miss Hardwicke’s solicitors had not diminished the delight of the villagers, the tenants and the gentry in being rid of a woman so universally detested. To the general happiness, however, there was one exception – the earl himself, who had put Mersham’s affairs into the hands of his agent and was about to depart for the Hindu Kush.

  ‘I’ll tell you what to say,’ persisted Proom – and went to fetch the inkwell and the paper.

  ‘There’s a letter for you, Anna!’ said Pinny, looking at the postmark and trying not to let the relief show in her voice.

  It was Petya, coming to London to greet Niannka and discuss the sale of the jewels, who had told them about the interrupted wedding. Pinny, watching Anna, had seen her turn almost in an instant from the kind of thing one expected to find under a pile of sacking after an earthquake or a famine into a radiant and enchanting girl. Anna, discussing with the delighted Mr Stewart at Aspell’s, the jewellers, what he assured them would be ‘the sale of the century’; Anna, helping her mother buy presents for the other emigrés, treasuring the conviction that it was through Rupert’s good offices that Niannka had been found, was the Anna of the old St Petersburg days with a new glow, a new maturity.

  But that had been more than a week ago. Since then, Pinny had watched, day by day, the glow lessen, the joy ebb as the postman still brought no letter, the doorbell still failed to herald the longed-for visitor.

  Anna had opened her letter, begun to read – and as she did so the eagerness and expectation in her face was replaced by puzzlement.

  ‘It is from the housekeeper at Mersham,’ she said, her voice bleak. ‘She says that I have broken my contract. I was engaged till the end of July so I have five more days of work owing to them. She refuses to send the rest of my clothes or Selina Strickland until I make up the time.’

  ‘Well, really!’ Pinny was outraged. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’

  ‘No, they are correct. I thought as I had not been paid for the last week it would be all right but she says not. Rup . . . the earl . . . has already left for India and the house must be made ready to go up for sale so there is a great deal to do.’

  ‘You aren’t going, Anna?’

  ‘I must, Pinny. Petya will be at his school camp in Scotland so it will be all right. If there is work owing,’ said Anna, lifting her chin, ‘it must be paid.’

  ‘You’re to treat her exactly as before,’ Proom had instructed his staff. ‘She may be a countess, but while she’s here she’s still a maid.’

  ‘I can’t!’ wailed Pearl. ‘I’ll curtsy to her, see if I don’t.’

  ‘You will do nothing of the kind,’ said Mr Proom – but he was not as relaxed as he pretended, and secretly felt outraged by what he was about to do.

  The outrage, the embarrassment, lasted exactly as long as it took Anna, in a blue cotton dress, carrying a straw basket, to cross the kitchen floor and be enveloped in Mrs Park’s motherly arms. But the instructions she received from Mr Proom when the greetings and gossip were over and she had changed into her uniform made her for a moment doubt her ears.

  ‘You wish me to wait at table? In the dining room?’

  For the butler’s view on women actually waiting at table, with its middle-class overtones, were well known.

  ‘One must move with the times,’ said Mr Proom portentously. ‘It is only a small dinner: Lady Westerholme, Mr Frayne, Lord and Lady Byrne and a Mr and Mrs Clarke-Binningfold who are considering the purchase of Mersham. His lordship, as you know, has already left.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna, managing to keep her voice steady. ‘I had heard.’

  For she knew, now, that Rupert had not cared, had not meant what he’d said in the garden, wanted only to be free of her and all entanglements.
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  ‘The meal is a simple one,’ Proom continued. ‘Grapefruit, Consommé Beauharnais, Sole Marie Louise, carbonnade of beef, macaroon soufflé and the dessert. James’ll be at the sideboard, Sid’ll be handing the main dishes. All you have to do is follow him with the vegetables and the sauces and help clear. Can you manage that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Anna, rallying. ‘Because it is all in the Domestic Compendium. How I must approach from the left to serve but from the right to remove the plates, and how I must clear the crumbs with a napkin because a crumb brush is déclassé and how I must not breathe ’eavily and not address the guests.’

  ‘You must certainly not do that,’ said Proom.

  The dinner party, whose dénouement was subsequently reported in detail by Sid and James to a spellbound audience below stairs, began quietly with the consumption of grapefruit and some rather desultory conversation. The dowager was discussing the launching of the new airship with Lord Byrne, Mrs Clarke-Binningfold was giving Uncle Sebastien her views on The Fecklessness of the Poor – when the door opened to admit Anna, her head bent in profound concentration over a famille rose tureen of Mrs Park’s incomparable chicken soup.

  Gravely, aware of the honour that Proom had done her, she began to move towards the sideboard.

  ‘You!’

  Anna jumped, clung desperately to her tureen – and looked up to find that the Earl of Westerholme, supposedly absent in the Hindu Kush, was glaring at her from the head of the table like an assassin out of Boris Godunov.

  ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ continued the earl, his customary good manners quite banished by the shock of seeing this girl whose treachery had not prevented her from haunting his dreams, sleeping and waking, ever since she had gone.

  Anna, resolutely maintaining silence, had reached the sanctuary of the sideboard and put down her tureen. Rupert was mad, he no longer loved her, but he was here and there was nothing she could do to still the pounding of her heart.