The Ladies In Love Series

by M. C. Beaton

  Her reflection stared back at her in sad agreement, a serious girl with long nutmeg-brown hair and enormous golden-brown eyes in a heart-shaped face. Her dress was of a pretty and becoming shade of pink, but it was rather short, reaching only to her ankles, and had no waistline but a high yoke embellished with babyish frills. It was a suitable dress for a twelve-year-old girl going to a party, but for a seventeen-year-old miss it was decidedly unfortunate. Her hair was confined in two bunches tied with pink ribbons. The blue silk she was to wear that evening in honor of Basil was designed on similar lines.

  The man she really would like to marry, thought Susie dreamily, would be very kind to animals. He would have a square, honest, homely face, and he would smoke a pipe under the old elm in the cottage garden in the evening while she leaned on the back of his chair. They would have a dog and two cats and perhaps some chickens. They would have a cow called Bluebell, who would wear a straw hat covered with roses in the summer. She could never imagine there being any children in her dream world. Susie was still too much of a child herself.

  She rose and walked to the window, lifting the lace curtain and looking out. The roofs of Camberwell glittered in the winter sun.

  There was something about a sunny Sunday winter’s day in Camberwell that was the essence of boredom. Firstly, it was nearly Christmas and had no right to be sunny. It should be snowing, great thick white flakes, blanketing the drab world of rows and rows of identical Victorian houses stretching across the south of London. Secondly, since it was sunny, it had no right to be so bitterly cold. One of the chalky teeth of the gas fire had broken, and it whined dismally behind her in the room.

  Susie had been fairly popular at school, but her closest friends had all seemed to move away to either the country or other parts of London. Her parents had paraded all the suitable young men of the suburb through their front parlor in a bewildering succession, but to Susie they all seemed strange and frightening.

  Down below in the garden a few sooty sparrows bounced across the dull green lawn, still white in the shade with the unmelted morning’s frost. A few old cabbage stalks were all that ornamented the vegetable bed, and a sulky-looking stunted sycamore crouched against the garden wall as if refusing to come out and play.

  As Susie dreamed by the window the sky slowly changed from blue to milky white, then light gray, then dark gray.

  It’s going to snow, thought Susie. Oh, please let it snow.

  It would snow and snow and snow, she decided, great white drifts up to the tops of the houses. Basil Bryant would not be able to call. They would have to live on the stores they had in the house, just as if they were on a desert island.

  It would only snow on this small section of Camberwell, of course, so that the whole world would hear about it and scan their newspapers for word of the survivors. A large Saint Bernard would be brought from Switzerland to find them.

  The army would be called in to dig them out. They would dig a marvelous tunnel right up to the front door. It would swing open. A pleasant, homely young man smoking a pipe would stand there. He would say, “Miss Burke, I represent the Daily Mail, and I want your photograph for my newspaper. You are very beautiful.” And he would come in, and they would talk, and there would be no one to chaperon them because Mama and Papa would be sick with the—well, with the something-or-other that wasn’t too serious—and it would snow again, so that he couldn’t leave and neither could the Saint Bernard, thought Susie wistfully, for she had often longed to have a dog as a pet. And then he would ask her to marry him and all at once the snow would melt and all the bells would ring. “Beautiful survivor of the blizzard…” the papers would say as she was married. And…

  And the bell sounded for tea.

  Susie fiercely hugged her dream to herself. If she nursed it carefully, she could go on with the next installment at bedtime. But she had just been married. Oh, dear, she would have to start the dream all over again.

  She managed successfully enough until the arrival later that evening of Basil Bryant. It wouldn’t snow, he was sure. He was almost sure the wind had changed to the south, and if anything it would rain. He had an irritating habit of stabbing his forefinger to emphasize each point. He had grown out of his spots and into a small toothbrush mustache. He had a very thin, very prominent nose and large liquid-brown eyes. A prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down above his hard celluloid collar. He stood with his back to the fire and delivered his case a against the arrival of snow, bringing forward Old Moore’s Almanack and his mother’s left hip bone—susceptible to weather change—as witnesses for the defense. He had put too much macassar oil on his hair, and it gleamed wetly in the gaslight.

  He finished his summing up. The case rested. The jury in the form of Dr. and Mrs. Burke agreed with him heartily. Not guilty of snow.

  Susie’s dream world of reporter and snow drifts and a Saint Bernard and marriage and fame crumbled. She was back in the real world. She simply must find another dream before bedtime.

  Mr. Bryant was addressing her. “I say, Miss Burke,” he cried, while his long, bony forefinger with its bitten nail went stab-stab-stab, “you look prettier every day. Almost a young woman.”

  “Almost a young woman of a marriageable age,” said Mrs. Burke archly. “Susie was very clever at school. We hope she will marry a clever man, someone like, say…a lawyer?”

  Susie winced at her mother’s pushing ways, but Mr. Bryant seemed to find nothing amiss. He was warmed by the fire and mellowed by Dr. Burke’s old port. “Lawyers make the best husbands, Miss Burke,” he said (stab-stab-stab). “And one young fellow, quite near to you at this moment, Miss Burke, has ambitions to rise in his profession.”

  “Ah, well,” said Dr. Burke, smiling, “every cloud has a silver lining, and it’s an ill wind that bloweth no man to good.”

  Susie stared at the window. Through a gap in the drawn curtains she could see the iron lamppost with its flaring gaslight. As she watched, one snowflake drifted slowly down, then another, and then another. While Mr. Bryant elaborated on his ambitions, she stared, mesmerized, at the little patch of light on the street outside. Faster the snowflakes fell and faster, until the gaslight was only a soft glow behind a curtain of white.

  “It’s snowing!” she cried, unaware that she had interrupted Mr. Bryant’s progress to the top of the legal tree.

  Mrs. Burke’s eyes looked daggers at her daughter, but she forced a thin smile and said archly, “Quite a child, our little Susan. Why, I would not be at all surprised to find out she still believed in Father Christmas!”

  “Everyone knows Father Christmas does not exist,” said Dr. Burke ponderously and unnecessarily.

  As if to contradict him, there was the sound of muffled hooves on the street outside and the jingle of a harness.

  A carriage came to a stop in front of the house.

  Then the doorbell clanged.

  “You had better answer it, Dr. Burke,” said his wife. “Probably one of your patients. It’s Rosie’s night off.” Rosie was the parlormaid.

  “How dare they!” grumbled the doctor. “Everyone knows I do not practice on the holy day.”

  “Even Christian principles?” asked Susie wickedly. “What about the Good Samaritan?”

  “Watch your tongue, miss,” said her father, too startled at his daughter’s impertinence to be anything other than amazed. “Had it been a Sunday, then let me tell you, Susie, the Good Samaritan would have done nothing about it.”

  The bell clanged again.

  Dr. Burke opened the door.

  Two liveried servants stood on the already whitening step, supporting a heavy middle-aged man who appeared to be unconscious.

  “Carriage overturned, Doctor,” said one. “Think he’s broke his leg.”

  “I cannot do anything about it on a Sunday,” said Dr. Burke testily. “You have your carriage I see. You will just have to convey him to the nearest hospital.”

  “Come along, Charlie,” groaned one of the servants. “L
et’s do as he says and get my lord back in the carriage.”

  The swirling snowflakes momentarily thinned, and in the light of the streetlamp Dr. Burke’s widening eyes made out the gold of a crest on the side of the carriage.

  “My lord?” he queried, suddenly flushed and excited. “My lord?”

  “That’s right, Doctor,” said the servant called Charlie. “This here is the Earl of Blackhall. Carriage got rammed by a coal cart and overturned.”

  Dr. Burke took a deep breath. “My dear,” he called to his wife. “Prepare a bedchamber immediately. We have a patient.

  “The Earl of Blackhall, my dear! The Earl of Blackhall!”

  Chapter 2

  There was no homely, pleasant reporter marooned with Susie during the blizzard. Instead there was a middle-aged lecher by the name of Peter, Earl of Blackhall.

  Lord Blackhall proved to be suffering from a sprained ankle rather than a broken leg. He passed his days between the best bedroom and the front parlor, running up an enormous wine merchant’s bill, which Dr. and Mrs. Burke gladly paid. They would have served him with fricassee of larks’ tongues had he asked.

  The vicar, Mr. Pontifax, when he called, had taken an instant dislike to my lord. He was shocked at the way the Burkes waited on him hand and foot. But Mrs. Burke would not listen to the vicar. Mr. Pontifax, after all, could not be trusted. Had he not said only the other day that Amy Bennet would sit on the right hand of God?

  She informed Mr. Pontifax stiffly that she at least knew the honor due to her betters. Mr. Pontifax countered by saying that one’s betters need not necessarily be the members of the aristocracy, at which Mrs. Burke became somewhat hysterical and accused the vicar of being a Bolshevist.

  The irksome Mr. Pontifax being thus routed, Mrs. Burke had the leisure to fawn on her noble guest and nurse her dreams. The earl was not exactly in the first bloom of youth. In fact, he was fifty-five and had seen three wives into their graves.

  In her fantasies Mrs. Burke imagined the earl dying peacefully in the best bedroom. His soul would naturally receive a royal welcome at the pearly gates, and she could hear the earl telling St. Peter that he owed the comfort of his last moments to none other than Mrs. Christina Burke.

  But on the third day of the earl’s stay, Mrs. Burke’s dreams took a more realistic direction. For there was no denying that his lordship had formed a tendre for Susie.

  Now, had Lord Blackhall been a greengrocer, Mrs. Burke would have been the first to be shocked at the idea of fifty-five matched with sweet seventeen. But the more the bloated lord ogled her daughter, the more she thought him a remarkably young-looking man for his years.

  At last she plucked up courage to confide her ambitions to her husband.

  “Well, well,” said Dr. Burke, taking off his reading spectacles and polishing them carefully. “I cannot say I am surprised at your ambitions, Mrs. Burke. I cannot say I am surprised at all. My own thoughts have been running along those lines somewhat. ‘It is better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s warling,’ as the Good Book says.”

  The Good Book had said nothing of the kind, but Dr. Burke assumed all quotations came from the Bible.

  He suddenly frowned as he felt an uneasy feeling somewhere in the region of his waistcoat. Dr. Burke was actually suffering from a guilty conscience, but he put it down to a twinge of indigestion.

  His wife saw the frown and hastened to put her point across.

  “It is not as if Susie will ever make up her own mind. She is so very shy. She needs an older man to take care of her. Just think, Dr. Burke, our Susie a countess!”

  The word “countess” banished the last of Dr. Burke’s twinges. “I do not know how long Lord Blackhall is staying,” he said. “But we will not say anything to Susie about this. We shall just throw them together a little bit more.”

  And so it was that when Susie entered the front parlor for afternoon tea, she was to find the earl alone. She shrank back, but the earl had already seen her.

  “Come forward, my pet,” he said, leering awfully. “Nobody here but me.”

  Susie wanted more than anything to run away. His lordship was a thick, heavy, coarse man with a bulbous nose, a waxed mustache, and protruding, red-veined eyes. He was wearing a smoking jacket and clutching a fat cigar between his fingers. The backs of his red hands were covered with coarse black hair.

  Susie sat down on the edge of a chair next to the tea table. The earl sprawled in an armchair opposite, with his sprained foot up on a small tapestry stool.

  Susie was frightened of him. She was frightened because he belonged to that mysterious top class. She was frightened to offend him and watched her table manners carefully. She felt guilty because she longed for the day when he would drive off. She hated the way his eyes slid over her body but put it down to a peculiar mannerism of the aristocracy.

  “The snow has stopped,” observed the earl, fingering the waxed ends of his mustache.

  “Indeed yes,” said Susie, staring down at the tea table while the earl admired the shadow of her long lashes on her cheeks.

  “So,” went on his lordship, accepting a cup of tea, “I feel I must be on my way, although I’ll be sorry to leave. I didn’t know people like you lived in such style.”

  “We don’t normally,” said Susie quietly. “My parents are very generous to their guests.” She plucked up her courage. “When are you leaving, my lord?”

  “Ah, can’t bear to lose me, my pretty puss.” He leaned forward and grasped her hand. Susie let her hand lie in his while her large eyes flew to left and right, looking for a means of escape, and a barely hidden look of repugnance crossed her face.

  Lord Blackhall noticed the expression of distaste on her face and felt the way her hand trembled in his own. He felt an almost heady excitement. He liked them when they shrank before him. It added a certain piquancy to the conquest.

  He squeezed her hand tightly. “I think I shall take you with me when I leave.”

  “I beg you, my lord,” quavered Susie, tugging her hand away. Her eyes flew to the window. “Oh, goodness. There is Mr. Bryant.”

  Never had Susie been so grateful to see Basil Bryant. The parlor maid ushered him in. He presented Susie with a bunch of flowers and the earl with a bottle of vintage claret.

  He blinked slightly at Susie’s radiant smile and pulled a chair up to the table and sat down.

  “Well, I suppose you’ll soon be on your way, my lord,” he said cheerfully (stab-stab-stab). “I have it on the best authority that the roads are clear. Your estate, I believe, lies on the Essex coast.”

  “Don’t point. It’s rude,” said the earl, stubbing his cigar out on the cake plate and ravishing a meringue in the process. Basil blushed and hitched his thumbs in his waistcoat.

  “I say, my lord,” pursued Basil. “I saw a picture of Blackhall Castle. It looks very grand.”

  The earl to all intents and purposes fell deaf.

  “Sun’s beginning to shine, my lord,” said Basil in a very loud voice. The earl suddenly hauled himself to his feet and, without another word, limped from the room.

  “He’s a rum sort of cove,” commented Basil anxiously. “Did I say something to offend him?”

  Susie shook her head. “He’s not very easy to get along with,” she confided shyly.

  Basil hitched his chair closer.

  “I say, Miss Burke,” he said, taking his thumbs from his waistcoat, and his finger, like a spring released, immediately began its stabbing motions in the air. “I think your noble guest is sweet on you.”

  “He’s old enough to be my grandfather!” exclaimed Susie.

  “Quite,” agreed Basil. “But it’s brought you to my notice, Miss Burke. You’re very pretty.” And for the second time that day, Susie found her hand being held.

  “Mr. Bryant!”

  Mrs. Burke stood at the double doors that separated the back parlor from the front, holding on to the red plush portiere with one thin, trembling hand. “How dare
you make overtures to my daughter! And unchaperoned, too.”

  Basil leapt to his feet and immediately began to state his case for the defense.

  “When I entered this room, Mrs. Burke,” he exclaimed hotly, “Lord Blackhall was already here with Miss Burke, unchaperoned.”

  “That is not the same. Lord Blackhall is a gentleman, a member of the aristocracy, and old enough to be Susie’s grandfather!” retorted Mrs. Burke, and then bit her lip, for that was not what she had intended to say at all. His lordship was closeted in the study with Dr. Burke, and already she saw her daughter as a countess.

  “You led me to believe that any intentions of mine toward Miss Burke would be more than welcome,” said Basil, beginning to pace up and down the room.

  “Please stand still and listen to me, Mr. Bryant,” said Mrs. Burke, trying to control her anger. “You have obviously misinterpreted my husband’s kindness toward a young man. He has honored you with his hospitality, and that hospitality you have abused. You are a masher, sir!”

  She tugged the bell impatiently.

  Basil opened his mouth to reply but the fight had gone out of him. He began to feel that perhaps Mrs. Burke was right. Susie did not help a bit either, sitting quietly at the table with her head lowered.

  After what seemed an age, Rosie, the parlormaid, eventually answered the summons, hobbling slowly into the room and complaining bitterly about her “haricot veins,” which she said were bothering her something awful.

  Basil tried to stumble out something in the way of an apology, but Mrs. Burke merely clutched the portiere with one hand and pointed toward the door with the other in a gesture worthy of Sarah Bernhardt.

  Basil made a last try. He turned and looked down at Susie. “I’m jolly sorry if I offended you, Miss Burke. After all—” He broke off in confusion, for Susie had raised her head and had stared straight at him with such a world of pain and bewilderment in her eyes that he recoiled before a depth of emotion utterly and completely alien to him.

  There was a long silence in the room after he had left. “Mrs. Burke!” suddenly came the voice of her husband from the study. “Mrs. Burke!”