The Ladies In Love Series

by M. C. Beaton

  Her white shawl flying about her shoulders like wings, Amy fled through the sleeping town of Brinton. The beach had been deserted, but heavy footprints had marked a stumbling path up and over the dunes to the shore road. The cobbles of the town shone in the moonlight, a stray cat made a sudden dash across the road, but apart from that, no other figures moved. Amy was just about to give up the search when she remembered the pier.

  The long white sanded boards stretched out into the bay. The flags at the entrance hung motionless in the still air. The slot machines stood against the rail on their squat legs, like some fantastic army lined up for review. Amy ran lightly along the pier, her slippered feet making no sound on the boards, past the theater where the coming attraction of “Romeo and Juliet” featuring that well-known actor, Bertram Dufresne, was billed in large ornate letters, and out to the platform at the end.

  Bertie Burke stood at the very edge, his forehead pressed against a post and his thin chest heaving with great sobs. Amy did not find Bertie in the least ridiculous. She was happily at home in the English caste system and Mr. Burke was a gentleman.

  Moving gently so as not to frighten him, Amy said very quietly, “What are you doing out here, Mr. Burke?”

  He turned around. Seen through a mist of tears, with her white shawl, and the moonlight shining on her blonde curls, Amy looked like a vision.

  Then he blinked his eyes and registered that the vision was none other than Daisy’s maid. His humiliation was complete.

  Pulling himself together with pathetic dignity, he said, “I’m about to make a great, big hole in the water.”

  “You’d be very much missed,” said Amy, moving cautiously as close to him as she dared.

  Bertie looked at her with contempt. “Who’d miss me? Daisy?”

  “Well, now, I suppose she would. She ain’t in love with you. But she likes you a lot.”

  Bertie began to cry again. He tried valiantly to stop, but seemed unable to.

  “Then there’s all your friends,” said Amy. “Oh, I know they tease you a bit. But they’d miss you. Why, only the other day I heard his lordship, the Earl, say, ‘That Bertie always makes me laugh. He’s a jolly good sport.’”

  Bertie wiped his weak eyes with a sodden handkerchief and looked at her suspiciously, but Amy went on, “You see, you’re always so merry and the life and soul of any party, that people don’t think you’ve got feelings same as them. Us cheery ones always get the sticky end. Take me now…I was walking out with a fellow and we had an understanding like. Then he starts on as how he wants to be a butler and how nobody recognizes his worth…on and on he’d go. I’d try to sympathize and say I understood and he’d sneer at me and say ‘How can you understand the feelings of a chap what wants to make his mark in the world? You’re always laughing. Always got a cheery word. You don’t know how to suffer.’ Well, maybe I don’t. But I don’t go around making everyone else miserable and taking myself too seriously, if that’s what he means by suffering.”

  She had moved next to Bertie and now put a hand on his arm. “But you get it off your chest. Doesn’t do to suffer in silence. Just take it very quietly and tell Amy. There now.” She put a comforting arm around his narrow shoulders and held him until his sobbing ceased.

  He gave a tired little hiccup and sigh like a small child, and began to speak: “Well, you see, it’s like this. I’m most awfully, terribly in love and she’s such a ripping girl…”

  A little breeze began to wrinkle the water, the moon slid down the sky, and still the two figures stood at the end of the pier, the man talking earnestly and the blonde girl holding him as tightly as a mother holds an injured child.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning the sun blazed down from a brassy sky and the air was heavy, still, and humid. The gardener weeding the flower beds was the only moving thing on the immediate horizon. The Earl and Countess of Nottenstone were breakfasting on the terrace. Their guests were still in bed although it was eleven in the morning. The heat was already suffocating and definitely un-English.

  Angela threw down her fork and picked up her fan and started flapping it angrily.

  “I’m bored, bored, bored,” she said petulantly. “Why did we have to come to this boring bourgeois place anyway? It positively reeks of aspidistras and Low Anglicans. Why didn’t we go to Trouville with everyone else?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Earl sleepily. “You liked it well enough last year.”

  The year before, the Earl and Countess had bought the villa at the height of one of their more dramatic reconciliations.

  “Or Paris,” went on Angela. “Paris is such fun. Do you remember when the Comte de Leon was racing his carriage down the Avenue du Bois and knocked that silly little man over who started shouting ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ and the Comte simply took out one of those old-fashioned green-silk purses that ladies used to carry—absolutely weighted down with gold—and threw it in the fellow’s face? So Balzacky,” she sighed. “Now, there was a man.”

  “Implying that I am not,” said the Earl icily, putting down his beer tankard.

  “Don’t pout,” said his wife maddeningly, looking more cheerful now that she had succeeded in upsetting him.

  “And furthermore,” snapped her husband, “the comte and the rest of them are degenerates, always fathering each other’s children and creeping around each other’s bedrooms and living in each other’s pockets.”

  “You know, you really are a rather ghastly Victorian. The old Queen must have loved you. I’m sure Neddy thinks you’re a stuffed shirt.”

  “Are you by any chance referring to the King in that familiar manner or do you mean Daisy Chatterton’s father?”

  “That ghastly old tottering drip? No, my precious darling, I mean Kingie.”

  “His Highness has always been all that is pleasant.”

  “Exactly,” sneered his wife. “If Kingie didn’t think you were a stuffed shirt, he’d take you out roistering with him.”

  “King Edward does not roister.”

  “Hah!” remarked the Countess with Palmerstonian venom. “What is up with you, Davy? What little piece of merriment have you planned for us all today?”

  The Earl gazed out over the oily sea. “The vicar and his wife are coming to tea.”

  “The vicar and—oh, you can’t mean it. You’ve gone stark, raving mad. Have you started worrying about your immortal soul, my dear? Well, I agree with Mr. Darwin. We are all descended from chimps. But if you think I am going to stay home this afternoon listening to some dreary vicar’s wife giving me her recipe for cauliflower—oh gracious, you can think again.”

  The Earl turned around in his high-backed cane chair and looked at her with eyes as flat and expressionless as the flat, summer sea. “You will stay to meet the vicar. You will do the pretty to Mrs. Vicar. I am weary of this racketing around. Oxenden was the last straw.”

  “Toby. What has Toby got to do with it?”

  “Oxenden breaks hearts whether he means to or not,” said the Earl. “He’s heavy stuff. Now, you will start behaving like the Countess of Nottenstone and not like some demi-mondaine, or you can pack your bags and get out.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but Ann Gore-Brookes rushed in and dragged a chair up to the table with much scraping and scratching. She was obviously bursting with news for her long nose was quite pink with excitement. “You’ll never guess what,” she began.

  The married couple stared at her with disdain. She hesitated and then rushed on. “Bertie Burke is quite bouleversé with love over that Daisy-girl. Fact, darlings, the second footman, George, was returning along the shore road late last night when we were all at the dance and Bertie dashes past him with tears running down his face and sobbing like the Mock Turtle and saying he’s going to end it all and nobody loves him.”

  “And the second footman no doubt rushed to your arms to tell you,” said Angela coldly.

  Ann Gore-Brookes bridled. “Of course not. He told my maid and my mai
d told me.”

  The Earl rang a small handbell on the table. “Ah, Curzon,” he said to the butler. “Would you please ascertain whether Mr. Burke has committed suicide or not.”

  “Very good, my lord.”

  Curzon went off and left the three to sit in silence. Ann was insulted, Angela shocked over her husband’s threat, and the Earl was burning with a slow, smoldering anger.

  In a few minutes Curzon was back. “Mr. Burke is still very much of this world, my lord,” he said. “He asked me if we had kippers and said he would like two large ones served with strawberry jam.”

  “There you are,” said Angela with forced jollity. “He’s going to kill himself a bit at a time, starting with his stomach. What do you think Bertie’s stomach is like anyway? I imagine it as being slightly flabby and covered with a thin film of sweat and…”

  “Go to your room,” roared the Earl.

  Angela stared at her husband. Ann Gore-Brookes let out a nervous tee-hee and Curzon withdrew behind a wisteria-draped column.

  The Duke of Oxenden strolled languidly into the scene. Angela stretched out an appealing hand toward him. “Oh, Toby. Davy has just ordered me to my room. Just as if I were a naughty child or something. He…”

  “Then why don’t you go?” remarked the Duke with bored indifference.

  Angela gave a choking sob and fled.

  Daisy stayed hiding in her room, breakfast-less and luncheon-less until, by the time the tea gong rang, she could bear it no longer. Amy had assured her that Bertie had recovered, but she still felt ashamed and guilty.

  Her entrance onto the lawn where everyone was assembled around a table under the willows was something of an anticlimax. No one-not even Bertie-looked around at her. All attention was focused on Angela, Countess of Nottenstone. She was dressed in a cheap cotton-print gown with a high frill at the neck and long, tight sleeves. Her hair was scraped painfully from her forehead and screwed in a bun at the back. She had hung several crucifixes around her neck and placed the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer conspicuously beside the Queen Anne silver teapot.

  “Now don’t you think I look the part?” teased Angela, grinning at the Duke. The Earl seemed to be almost immobilized with fury.

  His Grace looked at her thoughtfully from under drooping lids. “My dear Angela,” he said finally. “Members of the Church of England are not always as unworldly as you seem to think. Your own vicar is quite the sophisticate.”

  “Dear Percy,” sighed Angela. “That’s why we chose him. But Brinton, my dear Toby. They’ll be terribly Low Church.”

  To add to her dowdy appearance, she had covered her face with a layer of gray powder. As soon as the vicar, the Reverend Peter Blessop, and Mrs. Blessop were announced, she cast down her eyes and folded her hands in her lap.

  The vicar turned out to be a mild and courtly gentleman in his forties, wearing a shabby but respectable New College blazer and white flannels. His pale blue, myopic eyes looked around the guests like a pleased child and he actually clapped his hands when he saw the tea table. “Plum cake!” he cried with a high, fluting voice. “What a treat. I cannot remember when we last had plum cake. Now let me see…was it at little Johnny Spencer’s christening or was it when Jean Barrington-French got married to that captain in the Lifeguards…?”

  He rambled on but no one was paying him the least attention. All eyes were fixed on his wife. Mrs. Blessop was in her early twenties and with all the startling beauty of a Dresden figurine. Her golden curls rioted over her small head in artless profusion, her complexion was a miracle of peaches and cream, and her tea gown was in the latest fashion.

  Angela looked as if she had suddenly discovered an extra slice of lemon in her tea, the Honorable Clive was fingering his mustache, the Earl was leaping about to procure a chair for the beauty, and even Bertie Burke looked as if the sun had just risen over a particularly gloomy horizon.

  “So pleased to meet you, my lady,” said Mrs. Blessop in a soft, babyish voice. “I have heard so much of your beauty that…” her voice trailed away and she stared at her teacup. It was beautifully done. It was only long afterward that Daisy discovered that Mrs. Blessop had been a promising young actress at the Haymarket Theater. Angela glared and remarked, “I think of higher things than clothes, my dear Mrs. Blessop. I may not be in my customary looks today, but I think that one should occasionally devote one’s time to more spiritual things.”

  “Oh, indeed,” sighed Mrs. Blessop, pouting prettily. “I am afraid you will find me a very shallow creature, my lady. I do so love pretty clothes and parties and—and—you don’t mind if I say this, do you Peter, darling—the company of all these handsome gentlemen.”

  The handsome gentlemen beamed upon her with the exception of the Duke who merely looked quietly amused.

  “Now, of course, there is my sister Edna. She’s terribly plain and has a wart on the end of her nose. It’s so easy for her to keep to the straight and narrow path because, you see, no one ever wants to lead her from it. And she wears these terrible gowns, print cottons, my dears, and—” She looked at the Countess’s gown, blushed prettily, and stared in confusion at her hands. That Angela was seething was quite obvious to everyone and most were delighted. There is nothing more delicious than to sit on a beautiful lawn on an English summer’s day and comfortably survey the mortification of one of your best friends. But Daisy felt that someone ought to go to Angela’s defense.

  She gathered her courage and gave a little cough to catch everyone’s attention. Daisy knew that her own tea gown was a miracle of sophistication straight from Paris, so she said, “I am extremely lucky. I do not have much dress sense myself, so I have to rely on her ladyship’s impeccable taste. I follow her advice in everything. This Paris gown was entirely her inspiration.”

  Mrs. Blessop surveyed Daisy’s gown for a few seconds. A flicker of something not quite holy flashed briefly in her eyes and then she said in her soft, carrying voice, “Oh, my dear, you are so lucky to be able to afford Paris gowns. Now I, I am only a poor vicar’s wife and I made this poor little rag all by myself.”

  The Earl, Bertie, and the Honorable Clive immediately exclaimed in surprise, “though,” as Clive Fraser put it, “you look so enchanting, my dear, that I believe you could wear a sack and still look divine.”

  “There you are, Angela,” said her husband heartily. “Instead of costing me a fortune in gowns, you could be running them up yourself, what!”

  Daisy found herself looking to Ann Gore-Brookes for help. As the only other lady of the party, it was surely her turn to say something.

  Ann Gore-Brookes had no wit, so she fell back on that last bastion of the English upper classes. “What school did you go to?” she asked in a loud voice, pointing her long pink nose in Mrs. Blessop’s direction.

  “I didn’t go to school,” said Mrs. Blessop. “I was educated at home.”

  “Hah!” said Ann, moving in for the kill. “I think I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your maiden name?”

  “Higgins,” said Mrs. Blessop softly.

  “Higgins? Higgins? Never heard of them. Which county?”

  Mrs. Blessop’s blue eyes filled slowly with tears. “The Higginses of nowhere,” she said sadly. “My mother and father were not anybody special, you see. That was why I was so amazed when a gentleman like Peter fell in love with me. ‘You should not be ashamed of your background,’ he told me. ‘And if anyone tries to tease you about it, why then, they must be very insecure about their own.’”

  Ann Gore-Brookes flushed an ugly color and retired defeated while the gentlemen made soothing noises. Ann’s grandfather had been a Yorkshire button manufacturer and she immediately assumed that the horrid Mrs. Blessop had divined all. In fact, the shrewd Mrs. Blessop had discovered that almost all families had some sort of skeleton in their closet, after a short lifetime of parrying social snubs.

  Her perfect performance—and by now Daisy was convinced that Mrs. Blessop was a consummate actress as well
as a bitch on wheels—made Daisy think of the theater. To change the subject she asked if anyone would be going to see the performance of Romeo and Juliet in Brinton during the coming week. She had heard that Mr. Bertram Dufresne was a superb actor. The Earl, who was now giving Mrs. Blessop the benefit of his chiseled profile, said with a laugh that he didn’t go in for all that “slushy nonsense.”

  Mrs. Blessop turned her brilliant eyes on the Earl and fluttered her beautiful hands. Daisy stared spellbound. Somehow for a few seconds, Mrs. Blessop was Angela. Every flirtatious movement was correct to an inch. Daisy suddenly felt that somehow, somewhere, sometime, Mrs. Blessop had seen and studied the Countess and knew that Angela’s present dress and appearance were all part of an act.

  “But you must go, your lordship. I will be there.”

  “Then in that case,” grinned the Earl, “I’ll certainly be there, too. We’ll make up a party. What do you say, vicar?”

  The vicar, who had been carrying on a low and intense conversation with Bertie, looked up and remarked vaguely, “Of course, of course. Anything you say,” and went back to his conversation.

  “Do you by any chance disapprove of the theater, my lady?” asked Mrs. Blessop.

  “I do not disapprove of playacting, provided it is confined to the theater,” said Angela waspishly. “It’s getting late. Curzon, clear these things. It has been charming to meet you, Mrs. Blessop. So educational. It is not every day that one meets someone with the courage not to be ashamed of their low beginnings and…”

  “It’s too early to hurry away,” said the Earl. “I’ll take you on a tour of the gardens and Angela, you can show Mr. Blessop the library.”

  Angela went quite pink with anger under her gray powder. She longed to go and change. But to do so would be to admit to this horrible vicar’s wife that she had been playing a game. Then she wondered whether Mrs. Blessop could be made jealous. “Perhaps,” she mused, “I will put on my prettiest gown, and to hell with what she thinks.”