Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

“These are my pearls,” she said, doing her best to sound calm and reasonable, though she was both frightened and furious. “At least, not exactly mine, although . . .”

  “You see, she admits she has stolen them. Police!”

  Constable Bates, who had been hired to keep the village riffraff out, heard the call and asked what seemed to be the trouble.

  “I told the maids to clean my pearls—an heirloom set, you see how perfect they are. Then afterward no one could find them.”

  “They are mine!” Hannah said, trembling, outraged.

  “She says they’re hers,” the constable said with a shrug. He’d been the object of too much condescension and even outright rudeness from Lady Liripip to take her side readily. Besides, the girl she was accusing looked like a princess.

  “How could they be hers, you dimwit! She’s a kitchen maid. Kitchen maids don’t own pearls. Get them off her before they get filthy.” She made a snatch at them, and Hannah backed out of reach, right into Teddy’s arms.

  “Help me,” she whispered to him, but he only gave her an uncomfortable smile and gestured to the constable. Hannah felt her throat tighten, and for a moment she was sure she’d never breathe again. She felt the tears begin to burn behind her eyelids, but she caught Lady Liripip’s malevolent glare and swore she’d die before she shed them in front of that woman.

  “Let’s take them off now, shall we, missy?” the constable said coaxingly. “Don’t worry—we’ll get to the bottom of it.” He reached for the dangling strands, but she jerked away.

  “They’re my mother’s!” she shouted. “She knows that!” She pointed her own accusing finger at Lady Liripip, who rounded on her in fury.

  “If you won’t do your duty, Constable, I will,” she said, and snaked her gaunt, clawlike hand out, catching one of the magnificent strands. She pulled at it, ripping it free and tearing Hannah’s dress half off her shoulder. The rope broke and pearls scattered and fell, bouncing and rolling across the ballroom.

  “No!” Hannah cried. The pearls were so connected to her mother, it felt as if she had been violently ripped from a maternal embrace. She fell to her knees, slithering among legs, hunting them down one by one, while Lady Liripip continued to screech and the gossip columnists filed away every thrilling detail for their papers.

  Above her, Hannah heard Teddy say, “Come away from all this fuss, Anna.”

  After that, even pride couldn’t burn away her tears. Constable Bates took her by the shoulders and helped her up, only to have her fall weeping against his chest.

  He patted her back soothingly, which was not at all how he had been trained to deal with dangerous jewel thieves. “Don’t cry, my dear. Prison ain’t such a bad place. They feed you well, at least, and teach you a useful trade.” Unable to quiet Hannah’s increasing hysterics, he requisitioned a room in which to question her, and then pointedly slammed the door in Lady Liripip’s face.

  “He didn’t even care!” Hannah moaned when they were alone, much to Bates’s confusion and consternation. “I am nothing to him.” She buried her face in her hands. “He said so many pretty words, and they are lies—all lies!”

  “Who’s that now, your partner in crime? If you were coerced, you can make a plea and the scoundrel will do the time. Now then, tell me everything and it will go better for you.”

  She did, treating him like a confessor. As the tears gave way to hiccups, she told him of Germany, of her lovely mother and gallant father, of her love for Teddy. By the time she was done, the grizzled old constable’s eyes were positively dewy.

  “The blighter,” he whispered. “The absolute rotter. Forget about the toffs, miss. I have a son, now, would be proud to know such a girl as you. At least, if you really aren’t a thief. Tell me how you came by these pearls.”

  Before she could speak, there was a sharp rap at the door, and Lady Liripip stuck her beak in. “What’s taking you so long? I demand my pearls back!”

  Bates excused himself and left one of the royal bodyguards to watch over Hannah (and the pearls).

  “Can you describe the pearls in question, ma’am?” he asked Lady Liripip when they were alone, deliberately neglecting the “Lady” as she so deliberately had left off “Constable.”

  “They are . . . pearls,” she snipped. “Surely you’ve seen pearls before, if only the costume variety. These are similar, though better, and worth more than you’d make in twenty years. They have been in the family for six generations.”

  “Then I must say it was rather careless of you to mislay them,” he said blandly. “Can you identify them with any more precision? Length, perhaps, or number? Type of clasp? Size?”

  “They are pearls, you imbecile,” she shouted. “Lots and lots of pearls, and they’re mine! I want her taken into custody. What do I pay you for, if not to arrest a criminal from under my own roof?” She stomped her foot.

  “The county pays me, ma’am, to uphold the law.” With that he excused himself, smirking, as she sputtered behind him. He sincerely hoped the girl had not stolen the pearls.

  When he rejoined Hannah he asked her again, very gently, to take off her pearls. She handed over the two remaining strands around her neck, but when she reached up to uncoil the pearls gleaming like stars in her hair, he shook his head and said, “Not just yet. There may be dancing left in your night, and you don’t want to be mussed.”

  Constable Bates examined the pearls closely.

  “Your mother, what is her name?”

  “Caroline Morgenstern, née Curzon.”

  “I remember her. A bonny girl.”

  “Onstage she goes by the name Cora Pearl. Like the, um . . .” There had been too much talk of courtesans that day.

  “Exactly.” He held one of the clasps very close to his eye. Engraved in minuscule script were the initials CP inside a heart. On another necklace he found the name Cora.

  “These are very fine pearls, my dear,” he said, carefully draping them over her head and settling them, with paternal disinterest, against the soft, creamy skin of her bare back. He gathered up all of the loose pearls and broken segments and put them in one of the evidence bags he kept in his pocket. “You should take great care of them. Particularly in a house where valuable things seem to vanish.”

  He gave her a little pat on her upturned head.

  “I’m free to go?” she asked.

  “Unless you’d care to give me the next dance. But no, I’m on duty, and I must go break the happy news to Her Ladyship that she does not harbor thieves under her roof.”

  “You won’t tell them, will you? About . . .” She gulped. “About Teddy?”

  “Not a word, miss. Now go back to your party. There are plenty of young men for you there. Men who will stand by you.”

  But Hannah did not return to the ball. How could she, when the man who said he loved her, who swore that he was hers, forever, did not so much as lift a finger to come to her rescue when she was being dragged away by the police?

  “He looked at me as if I were nothing,” she fumed to herself in her room, weeping and raging all at once. She flung the pearls onto her narrow bed. “There he was, a toff among toffs, hanging on Anna because she is blond and English and Aryan. Yes, Aryan! That’s what it comes down to. I’m foreign, poor, a Jew. That makes me good enough to talk to when no one can see, but to acknowledge me in front of his family and friends—impossible. Scheisse!”

  She slipped out of the dress—carefully, because she would give it back to Waltraud, who might be able to use it as a cocktail dress now that it was too short for an evening gown.

  “Stupid, stupid me,” she wailed as she stomped around her room, fury winning for a moment. “And stupid, stupid him. I cannot stay here any longer. What a fool I was to think that I could possibly be accepted here. Though my mother warned me, and Lady Liripip wrote that horrible letter, I was convinced it was a Wodehouse comedy, so very amusing and English, full of obstacles easily overcome. But she is a witch, and Teddy is an invertebrate, and I do no
t belong here.”

  Yet where did she belong? In Germany as it once was, but not as it is, she thought.

  What a shame that Georgie, as she could not help calling the Duke of Kent, only wanted her as a mistress and not as a singer. She wondered how he and Waltraud were getting along. Perhaps if things worked out well, her friend would let her use her apartment in Mayfair, her smart little coupe, while she looked for a job. Hannah was hesitant to leave, because Starkers was the only contact information her parents had, and she had surreal visions of them all wandering around foggy London for an eternity, searching for and never finding one another.

  That’s nonsense, she told herself. Sally or Coombe will keep any letters for me if I ask them, and forward them. I go tomorrow.

  Resolutely, she packed her bags, a task that was completed in the space of one minute. While the band played in the great hall below her attic chamber, she sat shivering in her slip and painstakingly sewed her mother’s pearls back into her traveling suit and stitched the buttons on again. She left her Boxing Day parcel on her dresser. Then she curled up under her paltry blankets and slept, more or less, on a tear-damp pillow.

  IN THE GARDEN, beneath the twin yews that grew so closely entwined they were almost one, Teddy waited. He did not wait patiently. The ball had ended at one (earlier than most successful balls, out of consideration for the servants it honored, for they had to be up again by five or six), and after bidding Anna a formal good night under his mother’s eye, he retired to his room, waited until the house was quiet, then crept down to find his love. “Meet me in our special place,” he’d murmured as they danced.

  He was there; she was not.

  He paced, thinking of Anna’s transcendent beauty as he held her in his arms. She was like a benediction, and he was grateful for the privilege of being allowed to look at her. It was like a spell, he thought, or perhaps more like a drug. For the first hour of waiting, he was consumed with the visual and tactile appeal.

  Then, as his glances toward Starkers became more frequent, as the cold began to seep into his bones, as the proposal speech he’d prepared began to sound trite on the twenty-fifth rehearsal, he forgot to think of her beauty. Instead, he thought of her.

  Of her lovely low voice . . .

  No, it was a lovely voice, but not so low. If anything, as he’d noticed when they were dancing that evening, it sometimes squeaked. Trilled like a bird would be kinder, though less accurate. It was a changeable voice, rising and falling in pitch. Was it night that softened it, or only memory? For surely when she spoke in their hushed secret nighttime German, her voice was dulcet. And her singing voice! He would beg her to sing tonight. Perhaps he’d even invade her private concert hall in the yew bole.

  But her occasionally squeaking voice didn’t matter, not in the least. He loved her most for her mind, for the marvelous, funny, clever things she said.

  Such as . . .

  That was odd. When he imagined her speaking in her high-pitched English, he couldn’t remember any of the witty things she’d said. Ah, but that’s because she’s a spy in the daytime, he remembered with a grin. All of the delicious things she says are at night, when we’re alone. How funny to think that if I only knew her in the daylight, I wouldn’t love her at all!

  Night grew deeper under the slim sliver of newborn moon, and still she did not come. It would be dawn in a few hours and he’d have to leave, again. He thought back wistfully to those endless holidays of his youth (as he thought of the time only a year or two past) when he would lounge at home for weeks, playing rugby and cricket with the village boys, swimming naked in the pond, with that last mad dash of cramming to do his Latin translations before the new term. If only he’d met Anna then, so he could woo her properly, instead of all these moments of interrupted bliss.

  Maybe he should tell Burroughs he didn’t want any part of this spying business. It had all been so exciting—it still was, for as things in Europe got worse, he knew how vital his sub-rosa role might be. But it pained him nonetheless to think of finding love only to leave it behind to play his very serious, very dangerous game.

  I’ll talk it over with her after I propose and see what she thinks. He honestly didn’t know what her opinion might be. Oddly, when he thought of her answering in English, he thought she would insist that he stay safe in England. When he imagined her replying in German, he was sure that, whatever sorrow it might cause them both, she would urge him to continue his undercover mission.

  He heard steps and his heart lightened. (And sank, too, in some way he didn’t quite understand. Was he doing the right thing, proposing to a girl he hardly knew? It felt so right, so perfectly right . . . most of the time.)

  But no, there were voices too, those rising and falling tones of the tipsy trying to be quiet, and laughter. It was a couple, he was sure. Who? Two of the servants? Some lingering guests? They were going to the glass hothouse. Ah, yes—Anna had mentioned that Hardy had a paramour. He heard a little shriek, a moment of silence, and then more laughter. Whatever was going on didn’t concern him. Where was Anna? Why didn’t she come?

  He gave it one more hour, and then took a small notebook and pencil stub from his pocket.

  I waited for you, he wrote. That sounded petulant, but he was on his last piece of paper and couldn’t tear it up and start fresh.

  Marry me, he added, to make up for it.

  Then he felt along the inside of the yew bole until he found a loose piece of bark and fixed it in place.

  As he walked back to Starkers he almost turned around to retrieve his scrap of a proposal. She deserves better, he thought, and then: She doesn’t deserve that much, because she didn’t come. He thought of the unkind thing she’d said about his beloved old governess, of the misguided (and sometimes frankly stupid) things she’d said about politics, the lower classes. It was an act, he knew, but if she could act that part so well . . .

  Will she think less of me if she learns I can act like a perfect Nazi? Will I be a different person because I pretended to be a different person?

  Tired of thinking, and simply tired, he made himself stop worrying. You don’t have to think about love, he decided. You love, or you do not.

  He remembered the night she called him an ass and told him tschuss, not auf Wiedersehen, then assured him that they were no longer formal. Her tschuss had been like a kiss. I haven’t even kissed her, he realized. Not really. Only her hand, that precious scar on her left thumb. No, it was the right. Was it? If only she’d take off those damned gloves during the day so he could have a proper look.

  Half an hour later his Bugatti was purring toward London and Burroughs.

  Tschuss, he whispered to the wrong window, a kiss of promise blown through the cold, sharp air.

  NEAR DAWN, WALTRAUD LET HERSELF into Hannah’s room. She looked at the girl’s tear-streaked face and almost decided not to wake her . . . but really, joy should always defeat sorrow, she thought, so she sat on the edge of the narrow bed and shook her friend gently awake.

  “Thank you!” she whispered as Hannah opened her eyes. “Do you realize what you’ve done for me?”

  Hannah sat up, frowning, still lost in a confused dream. “What have I done to you?” she asked.

  “For me, silly. You introduced us, and whatever you told him about me beforehand, he was primed, my love, simply primed. He has a reputation for favoring entertainers, but so fast! Perhaps royals move in different time frames. They have the money to do as they like, and then people to take care of any messy termination. Perhaps one day a large man will haul me out of my flat and a lawyer will explain how I have no recourse, and then if I protest or go to the papers I’ll end up floating in the Thames.” She gave a melodramatic sigh. “From cabaret trollop to mistress of a royal, can you imagine? Quite worth the looming faux suicide, don’t you think? So exciting to be with a man who doesn’t have to worry about consequences, or his wife. If I ever become a wife, let me not be a silly, jealous one. You must be, though. You must positively
kill Teddy if he so much as looks at another woman. Like that fright of an Anna he was dancing with all night after you left.”

  She noticed Hannah’s pained expression, and wondered if that was the cause of the tears. She had meant to stick to Hannah’s side and do everything in her considerable power to make Teddy realize he simply had to propose, but things had taken such an interesting turn with His Royal Highness.

  “I didn’t hear about the pearl incident until later, and everyone was strangely reticent with details. I would have been there staunchly defending you, except I was ensconced with HRH, as I’ve decided to call him, doing . . . well, doing such as can be done with a hundred people on the other side of a curtain. Still, that’s quite a lot. And then afterward, to have some real privacy, we went to the hothouse, only we found that dishy gardener Hardy there, tending his tubers by moonlight, and HRH and he got to talking about plants and I was almost—almost—jealous, but then Anna came, and a few other couples drifted in, and it was practically a nightclub. HRH is so kind. It seems to be his hobby to whisk people off to brave new worlds. He said he can get Hardy an apprenticeship at the Windsor gardens, and after six months of that, practically anyone would take him on as head gardener. I’m glad he didn’t think to do anything for that Anna. Oh, darling, we leave for London this morning! Farewell to servitude!”

  “You have the flat in Mayfair and the coupe?”

  “Or Rolls, though I think I’d prefer to drive myself rather than have a chauffeur snooping, making notes whenever I visit a gentleman who’s not my uncle, and of course I haven’t any uncles.”

  Amid her own troubles, Hannah marveled at her friend, already thinking of infidelity when her adulterous affair had scarcely started.

  “But what a pain for you to have been persecuted by that vile old harridan. I know it was all cleared up, but still. Was Teddy quite heroic? I didn’t hear a thing while it was going on, and when HRH and I emerged you were gone and the party was winding down. Teddy was dancing with Anna, no doubt to please his mother, and I couldn’t exactly go up and ask when the happy day was to be. But I can picture him charging to your defense like an enraged bull.” Waltraud’s cheerful voice started to get a little forced, and she realized her extreme happiness wasn’t as important as she’d thought.