Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  She was lost for a moment in her reverie, thinking of cruelty near and far, of the helplessness of each person to fight it.

  “What, no floor show for me?” came a gently teasing voice at her elbow. “I particularly like stories about aunts, and valets, and cow creamers.” Teddy, easy in his lordship, free with his friendship, was the only one of all the family looking at her as if she was an actual human being, a person and not an automaton on the fritz.

  There is always a light in the darkness, Hannah thought. However small, it is always there, and it makes the darkness disappear. Teddy’s bright hazel eyes shone with earnestness, laughter, camaraderie, sympathy.

  Then he looked across the table to the stunning blonde who had usurped her seat that morning, and Hannah saw that his countenance was exactly the same for her.

  He is the world’s friend, not mine, Hannah realized, and though that made him a better human being, she found it pained her somehow, a little hurt as if from a splinter that cannot quite be grasped and pulled.

  Suddenly, she found there was one thing she could not manage to forgive. “You never came back for me,” she said, knitting her brow so furiously that her cap slipped dangerously askew. “I waited at the gate for you to come back and you never did.”

  “Damn!” He looked sincerely contrite. “I had this niggling feeling in the back of my head that I was forgetting something.” He seemed to examine her more intently, and his expression shifted from that generic geniality to something more intimate. “I can’t imagine how I could have forgotten you.” He lowered his voice, but Anna, straining, heard him say, “I never will again.” More loudly he went on, “Why, with that chocolate lump of whatever it might be on that plate, and your eyes flashing Old Testament vengeance, you look a perfect model for Judith with the head of Holofernes. I have an artistic friend coming for Christmas who will be delighted with you. He has a knack for capturing fierce women. Somehow I don’t think I want you, of all people, to be angry with me. If you don’t forgive me, I doubt I’ll sleep very well tonight.”

  Hannah felt warm and peculiar. What did he mean by that caressing look, that intimate voice?

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked all at once. There was something so honest and upfront about him, she couldn’t imagine him not acknowledging who she was. He might flirt with a real servant, be kind to a real refugee—that was his nature, she could see that—but he would not pretend that a relation, however tenuously related, was a servant.

  His mother, though, had finally found her tongue. “Don’t speak to her, Theodore. Not another word. I’ve heard about these foreign girls. Communists and anarchists, every one. Did you hear her threaten your father?” She turned her ire on Hannah. “How dare you show yourself here among us?”

  “The footmen were occupied, and I—”

  “Silence, creature! Your place is in the kitchen. Return there at once. I shall speak to Cook about you, and if I ever see so much as a glimpse of you again, you can go back to whatever slum you came from.” She sounded exactly like a fishwife. Then she flutteringly fanned herself with her pristine napkin and turned apologetically to Anna. “So difficult to find decent servants, my dear,” she said with syrupy sweetness. “And foreigners are the worst of the lot. Excepting you, my dear. How clever of you not to have any accent at all. One would almost think you had spoken nothing but English your entire life. But you must not forget about your elbows, my dear. Only merchants’ daughters put their elbows on the table.”

  Smiling and simpering, she returned her attention to her family, and Hannah ceased to exist.

  I’m leaving, Hannah swore to herself. Even if Waltraud doesn’t come with me, even if I have to beg in the streets, I won’t stay another minute in the same house as that wretched woman and that childish, petulant man!

  Then Teddy changed her mind. He stood and deftly lifted the platter out of her hands. “Yes, Fräulein,” he said to Hannah. “How gauche of you to have been born in another country. It is almost a capital offense. Here in this house we believe that one must be severely punished for the happenstance of one’s birth.” His face was a jester’s mask of mockery, but there was a tightness about his eyes, a tense set to his smile. “What a dilemma for the English, though—we agree with Germany on so many things, including the patent inferiority of anyone who is not us. Darling Mum, did it ever occur to you that to the rest of the world, we are foreigners?”

  “The very idea!” Lady Liripip said with a nervous titter.

  “Just a silly philosophical notion. As you say, Oxford has been the ruin of better men than me. Serve from the left, Fräulein, and remove from the right.” He dumped a ludicrous portion onto his mother’s plate, then took Hannah’s arm and marched her out of the dining hall, silently seething.

  “Are you angry with me?” Hannah asked when they were in the narrow stairwell leading to the servants’ chthonic realm.

  “With you? No, of course not. With the world, I suppose. Poor Mum is of the world. Still, I am too, and you don’t see me being such a towering clod. Maybe if Mum had gone to Oxford—there now, I’m merry again already, just thinking of that—or talked to anyone without a title or a fortune, she might see things a little differently. Don’t worry: I’ll make sure you don’t get fired or sent back to Germany. No one with an ounce of compassion or common sense should be there. Not to mention a drop of Jewish blood. Is it as bad as they say?”

  She nodded. “My mother is there, and my father. They’re supposed to follow me to England but I haven’t heard . . .” She fixed her eyes on Teddy’s shirt studs.

  He took her chin in his hand. It was rougher than she’d expected. She thought a lord’s hand would be soft, but his had calluses on its palm and fingertips. He tilted her face up to his.

  “What do you say I look into it for you, eh? I’m sure they have things well in order, but I have a few friends in the government and . . . elsewhere. Maybe they can hurry things along. What are their names?”

  “Aaron Morgenstern, and Cora Pearl Morgenstern.”

  “I’ll remember.” The names didn’t seem to strike a chord with him. He really doesn’t know who I am. Did they never tell him we existed?

  He was still holding her face in his hand, examining her. He leaned closer. “I’ll help you, if you’ll do something for me.” His voice was low and caressing. “Something personal.”

  She pulled away and slapped him as hard as she could.

  “How do you dare! You would be so mean, so base as to bribe me with my dear parents’ lives to win my attentions? Do you think that just because I am low and you are high you can gallop over me like I am a little fox? I do not sit at the table with your beast of a mother and your child of a father, but I am no vermin, and neither is a fox. They are beautiful and clever. Not to say that I am, though you’ll never find out if you try to threaten me into tumbling into your bed or a closet or the summerhouse or wherever you have in mind.” Her eyes flashed darkly.

  “I never meant—” he began, his cheek turning scarlet.

  “Do not attempt to deny it—I have read all the right novels. You silly lord, do you not know that you can win anyone with kindness, only it takes a little longer? Do you not think I would allow myself to be seduced as well as any other girl if you gave me sweets and told me my hair was pretty and perhaps wrote a bad poem, or stole one out of a book I have not yet read, though I have read a great many, so there you would not succeed. Still, I might be charmed by your buffoonish attempts and yield. But to hurry things along with threats? For that I will slap you again.”

  She did, on the other cheek.

  “Are you quite finished?” he asked stiffly.

  Standing out of reach, Hannah crossed her arms over her accoutrements. “I wish to add that I do not want to be seduced by you, only that I understand human nature, and mine, enough to say that should you earnestly attempt, you would likely succeed.” She frowned. “Would likely have succeeded. Now that you have threatened, of course that
is no longer possible. Good day.” She curtsied. “You see, I am polite, not menial. I do not bend over backwards for you.”

  With that, she ran down the hall, and did not hear Teddy mutter, “But I only wanted to speak German with you!”

  Hannah told Cook about her gross blunder, but not about Teddy’s.

  Sally mustered as much ire as she could so late in the day, and told Hannah that if she ever again did something so foolish she’d be let go on the spot.

  Then, after the servants’ dinner, when she was alone in her comfortable little bedroom, she laughed herself into a jelly at the thought of her chatty little kitchen maid discomfiting the Liripips. The girl might not be made for service, or have any kitchen skills whatsoever, but all things considered, Sally was rather glad Hannah had come.

  It was only as she was drifting off to sleep that she remembered one little thing Hannah had said, about the pancakes she liked to eat. The ones with cheese and scallions and bacon . . .

  TEDDY RETURNED TO FIND the dining hall empty, and joined his family in the drawing room for coffee. Anna, licking her lips and watching the door with predatory attention, spotted him instantly, and glided toward him. But she was not more alert than the butler, who intercepted him first and handed him a small envelope on a silver tray. Teddy read it swiftly and crumpled it.

  Anna sidled up to him. His face was flushed, she noticed. She had not at all liked the way he’d been looking at that mousy little maid, that dusky foreigner. Still, she kept her voice sweet and said, “How kind of you to help that poor unfortunate girl. Why, she must be a simpleton, though I’m sure she meant well.”

  There was something in Teddy’s eyes, a sort of anger and amusement and determination, that alarmed her. Surely not. . . not that little nothing of a servant. Oh, but she’s German, isn’t she, and he wanted help with the language. Help that I refused to give. Can’t give.

  Recklessly, before she could change her mind, Anna laid a hand on his arm—what a strong arm, too, she thought, as muscled and sinewy as those of the dockworkers who used to sometimes paw her before she realized she shouldn’t be flattered by that sort of attention. “I was selfish,” she said to him, taking his elbow and leading him away from the others. “I will help you with your German, if it is important to you.”

  He seemed to shake something off, and it was a moment before his face lit with its usual open, affable grin. “Bully! We’ll start tonight.”

  Hiding her panic, she said, “No. I’ve promised your mother I’ll help with the . . .” She drew a blank.

  “The village fete, I’m sure. She recruits everyone to do the work, and keeps all the credit for herself. When I return for the holidays, then?”

  “Of course,” Anna said, trying to find a graceful way to slouch. In her heels she was as tall as Teddy, and she had practiced all of her most appealing expressions looking up.

  “I have to leave tomorrow, early. I just got word.” His balled fist uncurled, revealing the crumpled slip of paper. Anna, twisting her neck, read: Qui tacet consentire.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. It was the sort of ignorance she did not have to hide. Even now, women rarely learned Latin, though it was still mandatory for schoolboys.

  “‘Silence means consent,’” he said. His grin was still there, but his eyes were focused far away, unsmiling.

  She tried it, consenting to everything he might ask of her as silently as she could, but it produced no measurable result.

  “We’ve been silent too long,” Teddy said harshly, still looking beyond her as if he were talking to someone else.

  “But I don’t have to tell you that. Your parents are still there, suffering.”

  They are? Anna almost said. Then she caught herself. Of course, he believed she’d just escaped from Germany, leaving her parents behind. She tried to look suitably sorrowful without making any wrinkles in her perfect skin.

  “Never fear,” Teddy said. “I’ll search for Mr. and Mrs. Morgan while I’m in Germany. My father mentioned which cabaret they run—they should be easy to find. You must be so desperately worried about them.” Then he turned on his heel and left.

  I only have a few weeks to learn enough to fool him, she thought. Once we’re spending hours alone together, I know he’ll fall in love with me. Why, he’s halfway there already. Then when we’re married, it won’t matter what I really am. I’ll be Lady Winkfield, and I’ll never look back.

  Tomorrow, Anna told herself, I make friends with that mouse of a maid.

  Lord Liripip Berates a Star

  TEDDY WATCHED HIS FATHER METHODICALLY smooth the wrinkled paper on his library desk. It is so strange, he thought, how a man can be both what he is and what he was at the same time. Lord Liripip was a ruin of a man now, plagued by gout and a dozen minor ailments that robbed him of his digestion, his sleep, his breath, his comfort.

  But he had been a giant once, one of the great liberal lords, an oratorial power in Parliament. He had been the terror of foxes in three counties, and such a ladies’ man that he was officially declared not safe unchaperoned in carriages by two generations of debutantes.

  Teddy had never known that man, but he heard it in the whispers of the oldest servants, and from his father’s brother, the loony who rode in the nude. Thumbing through ancient scrapbooks kept as curios in dowagers’ parlors, he had run across clippings of society columns depicting quite a different man from the temperamental, decrepit creature who smacked his gums and looked at him with rheumy, anxious eyes. Exactly when his decline had begun Teddy didn’t know, but from gossip and guesses he thought it must be either when Lord Liripip fell in love with one woman when he was fifty-five, or when he married quite a different woman when he was fifty-six. Or perhaps even when that woman died in childbirth not long afterward, and he had married the current Lady Liripip.

  Difficult as it was—and difficult as Lord Liripip was—Teddy loved the man his father had become. In his alternating gruff and petulant way he was a kind and generous father. And of course, Teddy was his father’s future. Through him, Liripips would go on. Sometimes Teddy caught his father examining him incredulously. He used to think his father was marveling that after all those years he’d managed to produce an heir. Then one day, a bit drunk, his father had said, “Damn my eyes, how a miserable prune like your mother ever managed to squirt out a noble specimen like yourself is beyond me.”

  “I can forbid you, you know,” Lord Liripip said now, a trace of his old power and canniness flashing in his pale blue eyes.

  “No, sir, you can’t. I’ve reached the age of majority.”

  “All the same, I think if I forbid you, you won’t go.”

  Prevaricating, Teddy said, “I would not like to disobey you, sir.”

  Lord Liripip laughed, which he had not done in a long while. “But you would, wouldn’t you, and what am I supposed to do about it, eh? Disown you? Couldn’t even if I wanted to, and wouldn’t even if I could. What, give Starkers kit and caboodle to that yahoo up in Edinburgh? Har!” If Teddy had not been born—or if he should die—the entire estate and title would pass to a distant relative no one had ever met.

  “But think about it, boy. You’ll be leaving Oxford . . .”

  “Not at all! This is officially part of a study program. I’ll be there under school auspices.”

  “But not doing schoolwork. Teddy, you don’t have the makings of a proper spy. You’re too friendly by half. I’ve seen you, making the housemaids smile and chatting with Caroline’s girl.” He winced. “Don’t care for that one, even if she is Caroline’s get. Looking about with those big cow eyes of hers as if she’d like to eat the place up. Her father must be a piece of work. Bah!”

  He was prone to inarticulate exclamations, and went on in that vein for a while—pah! and humph! mingled with his hacking cough—before remembering the matter at hand.

  “People like you, Teddy, which is well enough for skullduggery, but you like them back, which is fatal. You’re not hard and calculating
and cold.”

  “The world is hard and cold enough, sir. I think I can change it by being something else.”

  “And get yourself shot, no doubt.”

  “Did you get shot in Mafeking, or the Great War?”

  “Only shot at, but that is neither here nor there.” Lord Liripip slapped the paper on his desk. “Does Burroughs think you’ll do for this kind of work just because I did? These are different times.”

  “Yes, sir—worse times, and that’s why all good men have to act. Now, before it escalates. War is coming. Any fool can see that. There’s an entire continent at risk right across a ribbon of water.”

  “That’s their business.”

  “It’s our business to keep this world peaceful,” Teddy said. “And it’s an awfully skinny ribbon.”

  “I still say Burroughs has some nerve recruiting my son and heir for spy work.”

  “I’ll just be a student, making friends, learning the territory while it’s still easy to get into Germany. I won’t be doing anything dangerous.”

  “ . . . Yet,” Lord Liripip said darkly. “They don’t take you into the fold if they don’t mean to put you to use.”

  “Look on the bright side, sir. Maybe we can put things right enough so that Germany gets a new regime and everything gets better. Maybe it won’t come to war after all. Then I can go back to reading poetry and rowing crew.”

  “Wipe that cocksure grin off your face, Teddy. There’s a man over there with a puny heart and weak brain and dreams as big as Alexander or Napoleon. You won’t get rid of him so easily. Do you know what they do to spies in wartime? You’ll be tossed into some black pit of sadists and set to work upon, and when they’ve milked you of all the things you’ve sworn you’d never tell, when they’ve cut off bits of you that you never thought you could live without, they’ll shoot you in the head and dump you in an unmarked grave. Then won’t that Edinburgh blighter laugh his head off?”

  Unflappable Teddy said only, “I’ll be back by Christmas. I told you, sir, I’m there as a student.”