Rob could think of nothing to say except, “I’m not a professor.”
The smile widened. “Is it Doctor Hillman, then? I do want to get it right.” She tried to set the tea tray down in front of him, but with exclamations of alarm he motioned her away from the manuscripts. “Down there at the end of the table, please. Uh, just ‘Mister’ will do.”
Slightly but perceptibly, she pouted. Rob wondered, as she set the tray down in the spot he’d indicated, if she had been angling for “Call me Rob.”
“Thank you very much,” he added politely. “Tell me who you are, for despite the fact that you are delivering tea trays, you’re clearly not one of the servants.”
“Why, thank you,” she replied coquettishly, under the impression he had paid her a compliment. She sat on the edge of the table, effectively blocking him from the tea tray, and leaned her breasts toward him preceded by an open hand.
“Julie Crumper. But call me Crumpet. Everybody does.”
“Oh!” Rob exclaimed in surprise, shaking hands automatically. “Are you Crumper’s daughter?”
“If I tell you I am, will you promise not to hold it against me?”
“Why on earth would I hold it against you?”
She dimpled at him. “That’s right, you Americans, you don’t believe in all that rubbish about class.”
Rob realized with a flash of guilt that she was giving him too much credit; he had his own class system, and had not hesitated to place Crumpet on one of its lower rungs the moment he looked at her. (The butler, her father, Rob had classified as his equal.)
“Um, Crumpet, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have my tea.”
“Oh! Of course.” She hopped up and grabbed the teapot. “Shall I be Mother?”
With polite resignation Rob suffered her ministrations, accepting his Earl Gray and sandwich from her hands while wondering how he could best get rid of her.
She had strolled around to the other side of the long table and poked the corner of one of the older parchments. “What is all this stuff anyway?” she asked.
“Mostly bits and pieces of devotional texts, pages cut out of books of prayers or hymns or such like.”
Her cute nose wrinkled in distaste. “Boring! Besides, it doesn’t make sense. If they cut out those pages, why didn’t they just throw them away? Why hide them in the wall with the silver?”
“They didn’t cut them out because they didn’t want them. They cut them out to hide them from Cromwell. Like the silver.”
It was clear to Rob from the look on Crumpet’s face that he had lost her. The teacher in him suddenly overcame his revulsion at her blatant sexuality; he pointed to a chair and invited her to sit.
“O.K., Crumpet, here we go, the English Civil War. What do you know about it?”
Crumpet squirmed. This wasn’t the sort of conversation she had been looking for. Still, if this was the only way to get to the man, she would go along with it. With tremendous effort of memory, she produced: “Sixteen-something. Cromwell thought we shouldn’t have a king, so he fought against him and won and chopped his head off. The King’s, I mean. Then Cromwell ruled for a while, but people got tired of it and decided they wanted a king back again, so we went back to kings and queens.” The look of surprise on Crumpet’s face as she finished this speech informed Rob that she had remembered more than she had expected to.
“Good girl,” he said, deciding to accept her oversimplifications on the grounds that correcting them might take all day. “So during the war Cromwell’s troops and the King’s troops were fighting all over the country, and Oxfordshire was for the King, right?”
“Yeah, and all the rich people and the Oxford colleges gave their silver to the King to help pay for the war, but really they didn’t give it all, most of them took the best bits and buried them or hid them or something, and that’s what they found in the wall here, the family silver that the family didn’t want to give the King.” Crumpet was starting to preen herself on how well she was doing.
“Bravo, Crumpet. They hid it so the King wouldn’t know they’d held out on him, and also so that if Cromwell took the castle, he couldn’t find it, either.”
“Yeah, but I know all that. What I don’t know is why anybody would hide a bunch of prayers, for God’s sake.”
“Ah. That brings us to the other thing Cromwell was against, besides the monarchy. Fancy churchmanship.”
“Huh?”
“Cromwell was a puritan. He thought worship should be very plain, very protestant. Everywhere he went, he destroyed stained glass windows in churches and statues of saints and anything he thought was like Roman Catholicism, because he believed the Church of England should be pure and simple.”
“Oh, yeah,” she was nodding as more long-forgotten history lessons struggled to the surface of her underemployed mind. “Yeah, I remember now. Anything pretty or fancy, he couldn’t stand it. So a lot of old church stuff got smashed up. Oh! And not just church stuff, too. Didn’t he destroy the Crown Jewels? The old ones, I mean? So we don’t have any of Queen Elizabeth’s jewelry or anything from the kings and queens from way back in the Middle Ages?”
“Bravo again, Crumpet.”
“Yeah, I remember now, that really pissed me off when I heard it. All these nice old things, just because they were beautiful he had to go and smash them. Like he didn’t want people to have anything that was, like, fun.”
“Exactly.”
“But why,” asked Crumpet, returning to the original point, “would anybody hide prayers from him?”
“Because these prayers—and hymns”—Rob gestured at the spread of manuscripts before him—“are full of references to the Virgin Mary and other Saints, and Cromwell hated that. He would have burned these manuscripts.”
“What an asshole!”
Rob could not help grinning, but he said, “Look, Crumpet, thanks for bringing me my tea, and I’ve enjoyed talking to you, but I really must move on.” He indicated a large bundle of manuscripts yet untouched.
She pouted again, and he had to pour a lot of oil over her, but finally he got the heavy door shut after her. To the end she remained flirtatious, making Rob wonder how a woman could be so unaware that her techniques weren’t working. Not on this man, anyway. Presumably there were others who would eat it with a spoon. In fact, he decided, there had probably been quite a lot of others who had done precisely that. His own taste in female companionship, however, ran more toward Meg Daventry. Or Meg Daventry a couple of decades older.
With a sigh of relief at ridding himself of the unseductive seductress, he poured himself a second cup of tea, walked across the muniment room to the smaller door, opened it, and mounted the tiny circular stairway to the parapet.
Elsewhere in the castle, the object of his indifference was finding a warmer reception.
“Hallo, Poppet,” exclaimed Derek Banner, sweeping her into a crushing embrace and gnawing loudly and comically on her neck. Crumpet giggled and gave every indication of enjoying this activity, but he stopped it to ask her, “How’d it go?”
She stopped giggling and gave him a smug smile. “How do you think it went? He wanted me to sit down and have tea with him and we talked for ages.”
Derek looked pleased. “Eating out of the palm of your pretty little hand, was he?”
“Too right he was!” she assured him.
Chapter 12
JUNE 1962
Thirty-five Years Before Rob Hillman’s Death
She knew that Nigel Daventry had taken her in the backseat of his parents’ Bentley, but she could not afterwards remember anything but their laughing stagger toward the car. Nigel had an arm about her waist and his left hand wrapped about the neck of the second champagne bottle, or perhaps the third. Every few steps he had pulled her to a stop and kissed her neck and pulled at the straps of her gown. She had squealed, “Nigel! You wicked boy!” but had not hindered him. About the third stop, he had pulled hard enough that the straps on her left shoulder, gown and bra toget
her, slid down and exposed her left breast. Immediately he put his mouth on her nipple and began to suck.
She just had time to emit a shriek of laughter—Nigel was pretending to be a baby!—when a quiver went through her entire body as though she were a plucked string. She gasped for breath and kept gasping as he backed her up against one of the cars and pressed his body against hers. The pressure against her pubic bone (she would not have known to call it that) began to generate as much wild pleasure as the ripple of Nigel’s lips on her breast.
When he pulled away she cried desperately for him not to stop, but he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her again toward the farthest rank of vehicles parked in the darkness.
“Be better in th’ car,” he slurred. “Better in th’ car. C’mon.”
She went as eagerly as he, and they stumbled on. There was no more raucous laughter but their breathing was very loud.
“This one,” he said, fumbling with the back door handle and dropping the champagne bottle. The gravel was grassy this far back in the yard, and the bottle landed with a crunch but did not break. Nigel started to pick it up but she pulled at his sleeve.
“Leave it, Nige. We don’t need it.”
She was right. They didn’t need it.
When she woke, she felt cold and uncomfortable and at first had not the slightest idea where she was. It was dark. She managed to sit up, and discovered that her dress had fallen down about her waist. Her bra seemed to be missing. She attempted clumsily to lift her bodice to cover her nakedness, simultaneously becoming aware that her head was pounding and that she was in the backseat of a car parked with a lot of other cars. In the distance she saw the lights of the house and heard music.
Of course. Her party. Why wasn’t she there? She realized she was cold because the car door by her feet was standing open. There was just enough moonlight for her to make out her elegant silver dancing slippers, intact, as were her stockings. But she could see the tops of the stockings, and her garters. Her skirt, she realized, was rucked up about her hips.
Things got worse. She was wet between her legs and she hurt in unfamiliar places. There was a funny smell; she didn’t know what it was and this frightened her. She found that she could not remember much of what had happened after they got into the car. Her knowledge of the facts of life was sketchy at best, gleaned from hushed giggling conversations in the girls’ rest rooms at school. But it was abundantly clear to her that she had done “it.”
You weren’t supposed to do it. If you did it, your parents would kill you. If you did it, you got preggers. Then you had to get married.
Her mind hit the word “married” like a fast car hitting a brick wall. There was a silent crash followed by a confused wreckage of thoughts. She couldn’t get married. She was seventeen, for God’s sake.
Carefully she got out of the car. She made an attempt to straighten her gown, pulling the straps back up over her shoulders and doing up the zipper in the back. She began to move through the ranks of parked cars toward the house. As she approached it she could see people on the veranda and in the formal garden, all talking and laughing as if the entire world hadn’t just changed. She turned her steps toward the kitchen yard.
Three servants sat on the steps enjoying a cigarette break. They were mostly silhouettes against the light pouring out from the open kitchen door; she couldn’t recognize them. As she approached, one of them—a footman, she was pretty sure—saw her, froze to immobility for an instant, then turned to a plump girl and ordered, “Get Phyllis. Run!”
Phyllis had saved her. Phyllis had smuggled her up the back stairs through the servants’ door to the wide hallways of the family bedroom wing (happily deserted) and whisked her back to the safety of her own bedroom. Phyllis ran a quick bath, encouraged her into it, and plied her with cups of strong black coffee as she sat in the soothing lukewarm water. When she emerged from her bathroom, she saw that Phyllis had laid out a new dress for her.
“Here you go, Miss Clare, yes, step into it, I’ll do the zip, don’t you fret, you just tell your parents that somebody spilled wine on your green gown, now sit you down, I’ll fresh up your hair.”
And Phyllis, dear Phyllis, had gotten her through the months that followed. She had found Clare a discreet doctor and comforted her when the news proved to be as bad as she’d feared. She had persuaded Clare that an abortion was nothing but a good way to get killed and further persuaded her to drop the bomb on her parents before Mrs. Banner figured it out for herself.
Wisely guided by Phyllis, Clare had gone first to her father, and begged him for his help.
“Daddy, I’m so sorry. I know it was very bad of me. But I didn’t want to embarrass the family, so maybe I could go away somewhere to have the baby, and give it away, and nobody would know. Could we do that? Please?”
John Banner had risen from his huge leather chair and embraced his penitent daughter, loaned her his handkerchief to dry her sniffles, assured her that they would do whatever Clare wanted, and even volunteered—heroically—to break the news to Mummy.
Clare, limp with relief, returned to her bedroom where the faithful Phyllis was waiting anxiously.
“Oh, Phyllis, dear”—she kissed her maid on the cheek—“you were so right. Daddy’s going to take care of everything.”
The two of them sat down happily to discuss the rival merits of France and America as suitable places to have a secret baby.
If it is possible for a door to open angrily, it did. Mrs. Banner stood in the doorway, terrible as the siege of Stalingrad.
“Out,” she ordered curtly.
Phyllis fled.
Clarissa regarded her unsatisfactory daughter with steely eyes.
“Oh, Mummy, I’m so sorry,” Clare rushed, “Nigel got me so drunk, I didn’t know—”
“Silence!”
Clare shrank back in her chair.
“Presumably you were not drunk when you spoke to your father in his study just now?”
Confused as she was frightened, Clare just managed to shake her head.
“Then what madness is this about running away to have this child in secrecy and then give it away?”
“I—I—just—I thought—well, obviously I can’t marry Nigel, and if—”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a pig!” Clare cried, surprised out of her fear. “He got me drunk, he seduced me, and then went off and left me! He’s avoided me like the plague ever since. I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last—”
“Be silent. Do you know how many miscarriages I had after you were born?
It was the most intimate utterance Clare had ever heard from her mother, and she gaped, speechless.
“Three,” announced Clarissa. “In the end I was forced to give up. I could not give your father an heir. Now you will give him one. Nigel Daventry may be a half-wit, but at least he comes from a good family. I shall speak to his parents. I will make it clear to them that we expect him to do his duty as a gentleman.”
She rolled on, as oblivious to her daughter’s horrified protests as a herd of stampeding cattle to the ground they flatten beneath their thundering hooves.
Clare and Nigel, Mrs. Banner made clear, were to be married in a civil ceremony, utterly private, in Scotland, as soon as it could be arranged. Immediately thereafter friends of both families were to be told that Clare and Nigel, the naughty children, had eloped the week after the party and had been keeping their marriage a secret from their parents because they knew they had misbehaved shockingly.
“Then you will have a son,” Clarissa ordered her daughter. “He will be born in wedlock and baptized like a proper Christian in the village church.”
Clare knew, looking at her mother’s face, that nothing would avail her. That did not stop her trying first pleading, then an attempt at reason, then angry tears. All these things failed her, and so did her father.
“I’m sorry, Kitten,” he apologized when she sought him in his study, “but perhaps your mother is righ
t.”
So a sulky Nigel had been married in a Scottish registry office to a resentful Clare.
The baby arrived in due course. It was delivered in Banner House, where the newlyweds were living because Nigel couldn’t afford to buy a house or even rent a flat, and his parents wouldn’t have them. The baby was a girl.
Clare named her Phillipa, remained in bed for the three days recommended by the doctor, arose before dawn on the fourth day, packed a small bag, wrote two brief notes, and left the house before even the servants were stirring.
Phyllis found the empty bed when she entered the room with Clare’s morning chocolate. On the dressing table she found an envelope addressed to herself. The note inside read:
Darling Phyllis,
I am so sorry to have to leave you. Thank you for everything.
Love, Clare.
Phyllis ran out of the room and across the hall and threw open the door to the nursery. The nurse, standing near the cradle, was startled into a small outcry, and began to scold in a soft, irate voice. “Heavens, Phyllis, don’t you know anything about babies? You shouldn’t wake her up with a sudden noise like that—you’ll frighten her.”
“She’s still here?”
The nurse stared. “Are you mad, girl?” Of course she’s still here.”
Phyllis strode swiftly but quietly to the cradle. Yes, little Phillipa was there, sleeping peacefully after her dawn feeding, not yet ready for her eight o’clock. Tucked into her blankets was a cream-colored envelope, identical to the one in which Phyllis had found the note to herself. This one was addressed to Mrs. Banner.
Phyllis, quaking in her boots, went to her mistress’s bedroom.
After hearing the maid’s brief report, Mrs. Banner predictably demanded to see Phyllis’s note. She scanned it, cast it aside, and opened the second envelope. It was without salutation or signature. It said simply, You wanted this baby. You can have it.
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