The Secret Countess

10

Three days later, Mrs Park woke up aware that something was wrong. She looked at the round, brass clock on the chest of drawers. Half past six. Win should have been in half an hour ago with the cup of tea she always brought.

Mrs Park rose, put on her pink flannel dressing gown and carpet slippers and padded through her own snug sitting room behind the kitchens down the stone corridor to where Win slept, in a little slit of a room between the laundry and the stillroom.

There was no sign of Win. The bed was empty, the pillow uncreased, the grey blankets pulled tight over the iron bed.

Mrs Park’s heart began to pound. Instinctively knowing that it was useless, she went through the kitchens into the servants’ hall. The range had not been lit, the servants’ breakfast had not been laid. Still searching and calling she went through the sculleries, the pantries, the larder… In the sewing room she found Anna, changing out of her riding habit into her uniform.

‘Anna, Win’s gone! Her bed’s not been slept in!’

Anna turned, her cap in her hand. ‘It was her half-day off yesterday, I think? So she will have gone into the grounds, perhaps, and fallen asleep? The night was so beautiful. I have done this myself — often have I done it,’ said Anna, but her eyes were grave.

Within half an hour every single member of staff was searching for the little dimwit who was as much a part of Mersham as the moss on the paving stones. Mr Cameron and his underlings searched the walled garden, the greenhouses and the orangery — for Win had loved flowers. Potter rode off to scour the woods; James and Sid circled the lake.

By lunchtime it was clear that the matter was one for the police and Proom, his face more than usually grave, went upstairs to inform the family.

The dowager and Muriel were in the morning room. Rupert had not yet returned from Cambridge.

‘My lady, I have come to tell you that Win is missing. We have searched everywhere, but her bed has not been slept in and I’m afraid the matter is serious.’

He addressed the dowager as lady of the house, but it was Muriel who answered.

‘Is that the simple one? The kitchen maid?’

‘Yes, miss. Win is employed in the kitchens.’

‘Oh, dear!’ The dowager had risen. ‘We must get hold of the police at once. And Colonel Forster, too. I’ll go and—’

‘No, wait!’ Muriel spoke with authority. ‘There seems to have been some mistake. Surely Mrs Bassenthwaite told you that Win was going away?’

Proom turned to her, his face impassive. ‘No, miss. Nothing was said about it, I’m sure.’

‘Going away?’ echoed the dowager in surprise. ‘But where to? Win has no family of any kind. She came from an orphanage in Maidens Over. As far as I know, she’s been in the parish all her life.’

Muriel nodded. ‘Mrs Bassenthwaite must have forgotten to mention it. It’s often like that before a gall bladder operation — there can be almost complete amnesia. But I discussed it all with her very carefully.’ She turned to the dowager. ‘Rupert asked me to concern myself with the indoor staff without delay, as you know, and I felt that something should be done for the poor girl.’

‘What sort of thing?’ asked the dowager, puzzled.

‘Well, you must have noticed how she lives? Almost like an animal. No speech, no rational thought.’

‘Win has been very useful to Mrs Park, miss,’ said Proom. ‘Mrs Park is very fond of her. She doesn’t say much, but she’s got a way of knowing what Mrs Park wants almost before Mrs Park knows it herself. Mrs Park’ll be very upset at losing Win.’

‘I know. But of course I mean to replace Win immediately. There is to be a considerable increase in kitchen staff. And if Mrs Park is fond of Win — and I’m sure she is — she will want what is best for her.’

‘I still don’t quite understand,’ said the dowager. ‘Where has she gone? And how did she go so quickly without anyone knowing?’

Muriel smiled reassuringly. ‘Fortunately, with my connections as a nurse and with the help of Dr Lightbody, I found an excellent institution where they give first-class guidance to girls of her sort. Speech therapy, training in handicrafts, everything. You’ll see, Win’ll be fit for something much better than kitchen work when she’s been there a while…’

‘But why was it so sudden, Muriel? Surely Mrs Park should have had some warning?’

Muriel’s placid face turned towards her mother-in-law. ‘People don’t always understand what’s best for them. A distressing scene would have been so bad for Win. It’s like a child going to boarding school; the mother’s tears make it impossible. So I arranged with Mrs Bassenthwaite that she should be fetched away quietly by someone sympathetic and experienced.’

‘Mrs Park will want to know where she’s gone, my lady. She’ll want to be able to visit her.’ To Muriel’s irritation, Proom continued to address the dowager.

‘And so she shall,’ said Muriel. ‘But the poor girl must be given a few weeks to settle down. I’ll be in touch with Mrs Park myself. Just tell her she must be brave for Win’s sake.’

‘Though why,’ Muriel continued, when Proom had bowed and left, ‘one has to make so much fuss about the feelings of a cook, I don’t understand. I hope Rupert will be pleased at least.’

But the dowager was silent.

Mrs Park accepted it. She accepted it for Win, trusting soul that she was. Nevertheless she suffered, silent and uncomplaining, berating herself for her selfishness in wanting Win around when the girl was learning to speak properly and take her place in the world.

‘You’ll see, she’ll be back,’ said James, unable to bear the stricken look in the cook’s round, blue eyes, ‘driving a big yellow motor as like as not and talking like a duchess.’

‘There was a girl over my auntie’s way,’ Louise put in, ‘she went to one of them training places and they taught her weaving and basket work an’ all. She’s got her own shop now.’

Mrs Park nodded. ‘It’s just I would have liked to say goodbye to her,’ she said in her slow, soft voice. ‘I’d just have liked to say goodbye.’

Muriel was as good as her word over Win’s replacement. A new girl, sent down by Mrs Finch-Heron, arrived the following day. Mildred was bright and pretty and full of excellent suggestions for improving the routine. At night, kneeling by her bed, Mrs Park followed her prayers for Win’s safety and happiness by asking God to forgive her her wickedness in wanting Mildred to shut up — or even better — go away.

Uncle Sebastien was playing the Liebestod. He thought that this was probably the last time he would play it, for he had been shamed and caught out and was to be punished. Muriel had seen him giving Pearl a squeeze as she sidled past him in the corridor. Pearl had squealed and jumped — she liked to act up a little — and he had turned to find Muriel standing in the doorway staring at him with contempt and disgust.

And she was quite right, of course. Right to despise him and to engage for him, as she had done, it seemed, a kind of jailor, a hospital nurse who would keep him from the maids.

How had it happened, Uncle Sebastien asked himself, sitting pink-faced and wretched by his gramophone? All his life he had loved women, but he was nervous and shy with those of his own class. It was the uncomplicated, half-glimpsed servant girls that had beguiled and enchanted him for three-quarters of a century. And just as a devoted gardener lingers at nightfall over his herbaceous border, so Uncle Sebastien, overcome by misery and Wagner, let his mind wander through the well-remembered treasury of serving maids.

There had been so many in his youth. The dairymaids in blue caps like coifs to keep their curls out of the milk, their breath as sweet as that of the cows they tended. The dimity sewing girls in checked pink gingham with quick, pricked fingers… Scullery maids, patient as oxen with their hessian aprons and humped behinds, forever scrubbing pale circles in the darker stone… Laundry maids singing like blackbirds as they hung up the sheets…

He forgot so many things these days, but he could still remember almost all their names. Daisy, the little freckled nursemaid with streamers in her cap… Even in his pram he’d loved Daisy. Netta, the poor little drudge at his public school who’d still managed to force a dimple into her pinched cheek when he’d passed her in the interminable, dank corridors with her buckets… And Elly, the Irish chambermaid, who’d given him so lightly and gaily what most youths had to buy with trepidation and risk from some professional. Ah, the panache of that girl who’d seduced him, not in some haystack or barn but on the needlepoint rug in the tapestry room, in the still hour between lunch and tea.

But of course it was wrong. Oh, one could find reasons, perhaps. Easy to say that if his parents had been able to show that they loved him, if the girl he’d asked to marry him hadn’t laughed in his face, he’d have been different. Those were just excuses, thought the humiliated old man, while Isolde died and the gay and beguiling ghosts continued to walk inside his head.

The parlourmaids at his club, the tips of their delectable, shell-pink ears peeping from beneath their caps as they bent down to serve… The hoity-toity ladies’ maids in rustling black silk… And down in the kitchen another world, hard to penetrate but glorious, with the flushed, busty and bustling girls and the delicious smells of the food caught in their white-bibbed aprons and later (if Fate was kind and they were willing) in their loosened hair…

Isolde was dead. Uncle Sebastien rose and took the needle from the record.

It was over.

There was a knock at the door. Not Mary, he hoped. The dowager, when she learned what had befallen him, had offered to take him with her to the Mill House. He’d refused, of course. There were only three bedrooms; he’d be impossibly in her way with his music and his insomnia. It wasn’t even as though Mary was really his niece. He’d already been living at Mersham, a beached-up middle-aged bachelor, when she came there as a bride. She owed nothing to her dead husband’s uncle. No, he wasn’t as selfish as that but, all the same, he hoped it wasn’t Mary. If she came now he might just weaken…

‘Come in.’

A dark, enquiring head, a questioning: ‘You are not busy, sir?’ A curtsy.

Anna. He smiled. The dowager was right, he had not laid a finger on Anna. Too much of a snob, he told himself, for he had known her at once for what she was. Yet with this girl he felt none of the constraints he sometimes felt with women of his own class. And, as she stood before him, he understood what Rupert could not do: why the other maids, so quick to peck out an outsider, accepted her. For all her intelligence and breeding, Anna had something of their essence: a lack of self-regard, of priggery, a deep and selfless capacity for service.

‘Miss Hardwicke is out and I have finished my work downstairs so Lady Westerholme has sent me to see if you require anything,’ said Anna, paraphrasing the dowager’s anguished: ‘Go to Mr Frayne, Anna,’ as she met her in the passage. She came closer. ‘You are sad?’

‘No… no,’ said Uncle Sebastien, wondering what it would be like to have a daughter such as this. ‘It’s just… well, you may have heard, I’m to have a nurse. Miss Hardwicke feels I need looking after… that it’s too much for the maids to keep carrying trays. It’s very thoughtful of her.’

Anna nodded and tried to give him the concept back in an endurable form. ‘Nurses are so beautiful,’ she said. ‘And they have such lovely uniforms, caps and cloaks and everything so starched and crisp.’

‘This one is middle-aged and sensible. I’m going on a diet, too.’

Even Anna was daunted by this prospect. Then she came and slipped to her knees by his side and said, ‘Please will you play for me? Not the gramophone. You, yourself. The Waldstein Sonata, perhaps, because I love it so much and particularly the last movement where the hands cross?’

The old man shook his head. ‘I can’t, Anna. I can’t play properly any more.’

‘Please,’ said Anna, knowing that he must be led into his place of refuge — and waited.

Forgetting his own troubles, Uncle Sebastien looked at her, noting the weary droop of the shoulders, the dark smudges under her eyes, and something else, something that had not been there, he thought, when first she came to Mersham — a look, almost, of bewilderment, of puzzlement, as though she was troubled by something she did not yet understand.

‘If you’ll play with me?’ he said cunningly. ‘I have the Schubert duets. What about the Fantasia in F?’

‘Ah, yes!’ Her face was suddenly transfigured. ‘But I cannot play with you, it is impossible.’

‘Not Selina Strickland, I hope. Because—’

‘No.’ She sighed. ‘I shall be gone so soon that it doesn’t matter, I think. But you are a professional.’

In silence, Uncle Sebastien held out his hands, bent and swollen with rheumatism and age.

‘Yes, you are right,’ said Anna quietly. ‘God understands these things. Come.’

And so they played some of the world’s loveliest piano music — the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.

The next day, after taking up Mr Frayne’s tea tray, Peggy came back to the kitchens heaving with an almost operatic rage.

‘When I got up the stairs there was this blinkin’ great cow all done up in white overalls met me at the door an’ wouldn’t let me past. “All trays are to be put down on the table outside from now on,” she said.’ Peggy’s mimicry of the nurse’s genteel tones was accurate and savage.

Anna turned. ‘Was she beautiful?’ she asked, clutching at straws.

‘Beautiful! You must be joking. A nose like a hatchet and a huge black wart with whiskers on it.’

Anna sighed. Baskerville’s wart, contrasting so poignantly with the blond undulations of his cheeks, was one of his greatest assets, but she could see that it might not be the same for a lady.

‘None of us are allowed in the room from now on,’ raged Peggy, ‘not when Mr Frayne is in it.’

‘Well, you used to grumble enough about the way he carried on,’ said Louise. ‘I’d have thought you’d be pleased.’

Peggy bit her lip. She seemed to be terribly upset. ‘’e didn’t mean any harm,’ she said.

‘He’d never push it too far,’ echoed Pearl. ‘A proper gentleman he was, really.’

‘Crikey, you talk as if he was dead,’ said Louise.

‘’e might as well be,’ said Peggy, and spoke truer than she knew.

While Mersham was preparing for the wedding, Heslop was no less busy preparing for the ball.

Heslop’s butler, Mr Hawkins, had been trained by Proom himself and he brought to his work an iron rigour and indomitable sense of style. At Heslop, The Times was still ironed before it reached the breakfast table; the footmen, their hair powdered, wore their claret-coloured knee breeches and swallow tail coats even when the family dined alone; Monsieur Bourget, the chef, throwing off quenelles fricassées and temperaments with equal abandon, defended his kitchens, with their scurrying retinue of minions, as if they were Fort Knox. If Minna yearned sometimes for the simplicity of her American childhood or the easier ways of Mersham, she knew better than to interfere, and Heslop ran like clockwork.

Now, as she planned the ball in honour of Muriel Hardwicke with her housekeeper, her steward, her butler and her cook, no one could have guessed that the task afforded her anything but pleasure and delight.

And yet the truth was very different.

Welcoming Ollie back from her day in town, Minna had naturally been eager to know how her stepdaughter had enjoyed her day.

‘Oh, it was lovely, Mummy. It was simply lovely!’ Ollie’s flushed face had been full of delight yet Minna, with her sixth sense for the child’s well-being, had been uneasy.

‘Was your dress very beautiful?’

‘Yes, it was.’ Minna, bracing herself for details, watched with surprise as Ollie’s bright eyes slid away from her own. ‘And then I saw Pupsik who is a sausage dog and he’s got a huge diamond right inside his stomach and the lady let me hold him and he fell asleep on my lap and snored and snored and—’

‘Pupsik? Is that the Lady Lavinia’s dog? Did she bring him to the Ritz?’

‘No, I didn’t go to lunch with them.’ Ollie’s face had gone blank again, a look of defeat flickering in her eyes.

Still trying to make sense of all this, Minna asked, ‘But why, honey?’ Her voice sharpened. ‘Surely they didn’t forget about you?’

‘No, they wanted me to come but… I wasn’t hungry. Well, later I was hungry and I ate four piroshki that Anna’s mother made and some little eggs that fishes lay, all black and slithery, but Pinny wouldn’t let me have any vodka,’ said Ollie, frowning at the only cloud on an otherwise flawless afternoon.

‘But where was this, Ollie?’

‘At the Russian Club. Anna took me there. It’s where she goes, and her friends. It’s lovely and Cousin Sergei was there and he has white, white teeth and he spoke to me in French and afterwards he gave me a piggyback to the taxi and he said—’

She was off again. Minna let her run on and said no more about the fitting or the bridesmaid’s dress. But that night she tackled Tom.

‘Tom. I can’t understand what happened in London. Why did Ollie spend the afternoon with Anna? I thought she was supposed to be having lunch with you and the bridesmaids?’

‘Yes. well…’ Tom’s shifty expression was so ridiculously like Ollie’s that Minna, worried as she was, managed a smile. ‘She got very tired, you know how it is in those hot shops. So Anna took her off to her place — it was her day off, you see, and I’d given her a lift to town. And I must say I was most grateful to her because it was absolutely grim at the Ritz. You can’t imagine what those girls are like.’

And Tom flushed. Whether or not the hot, sharp imprint that he had felt while eating his vichyssoise, wedged between a screen and a potted palm, had or had not been the Lady Lavinia’s knee, the whole thing had been a nightmare. Only for Rupert would he have endured the company of two women who might have been hand-picked for all that was most objectionable in the female sex. And in the hope of diverting his stepmother he began, most entertainingly, to tell her about his lunch.

But though Minna listened with amusement, it was impossible to deflect her from any anxiety that touched her stepdaughter and when she had finished laughing and commiserating with Tom, she said, ‘But all the same, something must have gone wrong at that fitting. You know how Ollie went on and on about her dress and how wonderful Muriel was and now suddenly she won’t talk about it at all. She just shuts up like a clam. And though she obviously had a lovely time with Anna, I feel that underneath she’s had some kind of shock.’

Tom was silent. Muriel was Rupert’s chosen bride. Living at Mersham, she would be their closest neighbour and Minna would find it impossible not to be involved and friendly. There was no point in making mischief. So he shook his head and said: ‘Nothing happened, Mother. As far as I am aware it all went perfectly well.’

Minna stared at her stepson. The Byrnes were bruising riders, passionate lovers and gallant soldiers. As liars, however, they had always been bottom of the class.

‘Tom, I try not to fuss about Ollie, not to pamper her. But what she has to deal with is not easy. If anything goes wrong she can become bitter and twisted for life. And to help her, I have to know, I have to have the facts. What did happen at Fortman’s?’

So Tom told her.

Minna said nothing then or later. No breath of criticism escaped her lips and she continued to prepare for the ball as if Muriel were a beloved daughter or dear friend. Only once, as she stepped into her huge, cavernous kitchens and Monsieur Bourget rushing forward, said excitedly: ‘I ’ave just ’eard that Miss ’ardwicke eats nothing that ’as in it alcohol so I cannot cook, I cannot function, I cannot exist!’ Minna, forgetting herself for the first and only time, said, ‘Miss Hardwicke will eat anything that is served to her in this house. Anything.’

The news that the ball was to be in fancy dress had profoundly depressed Lord Byrne, who had at first been convinced that his wife was joking.

‘You’re not serious, Min? You mean I’m to dress up as some ridiculous cowboy or something? I won’t do it!’

‘Muriel asked me, Harry. She has a dress she particularly wants to wear.’

‘Well, let her wear it then. But you can’t expect me to go gallivanting round my own place making a complete idiot of myself.’

‘I thought maybe you could wear one of the military uniforms out of the costume gallery. They’re really not so different from your dress uniform for the Cold-streams. And it would please her so much.’

‘Not sure that I want to please her all that much,’ snorted Lord Byrne. ‘Met poor little Miss Tonks coming out of the church today when I went to see the sexton about old Hunston’s grave. Seems Muriel doesn’t like her flower arrangements — says they’re too countrified. Won’t have “The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden” either, Morland tells me. Got Miss Frensham trying to read some newfangled hymn and she’s as blind as a bat, poor soul.’

Minna sighed. She had not told her husband what Muriel had said to Ollie, but the fear that Muriel had done some real and permanent damage to the child was always present in her mind.

Lord Byrne looked at his wife. He’d married her blind, knowing nothing about her except that she had a quiet voice, a sensible manner and some spare cash. Now, eight years later, he would have died for her without a second’s hesitation. To dress up as a hussar in Wellington’s army would be harder, but he would do it.

‘What about Tom?’ he asked. ‘Does he know about all this dressing up?’

Minna nodded. ‘I’m relying on Ollie to bring him round. Hugh’s the one who’s made most fuss. He actually got the headmaster to let him ring from Craigston to complain. The friend he’s bringing down doesn’t have anything to dress up in. So I said their cadet uniform would be all right.’

Lord Byrne nodded. ‘Rabinovitch won’t like it,’ he said darkly, allowing himself a moment of glee.

Lord Byrne was right. Rabinovitch didn’t like it. Informed by Hannah that he was to attend the ball at Heslop in fancy dress, Rabinovitch turned his liquid frog eyes on his wife and said: ‘Hannerle, make not the stupid jokes.’

‘I don’t joke, Leo. Minna has asked that we dress up. It is for Miss Hardwicke who wishes to be the Pompadour.’

‘And because some stupid shiksa wishes to be—’

‘Leo! Miss Hardwicke is a most charming girl.’

The conversation now descended into rapid and agitated Yiddish, ending, as was to be expected, in defeat for Leo, who agreed to add a red cummerbund to his evening clothes provided it was understood that this, and this alone, would turn him into a bullfighter.

‘But no sombrero! Absolutely no sombrero,’ said Leo, going down fighting.

Surprisingly it was Susie, usually so easy-going and uncomplicated, who proved difficult, stating that she had no intention of making a fool of herself to please that opinionated blancmange who had ensnared Rupert.

‘Susie!’ said her mother, deeply shocked.

But Susie, to whom Tom had fled after his day in London, was unrepentant. In the end, however, she too yielded, seeing how much it meant to her mother; for Hannah Rabinovitch, like Minna Byrne, was a woman who reaped as she had sown.

It was while Susie was bending her usual, quiet attention to the problem of whether she would look less ridiculous as a gypsy or a shepherdess, that a maid entered with a letter on a salver.

Hannah opened it. ‘It’s from Mersham. From Muriel,’ she said, pleased and eager, and began to read. ‘She thanks us most kindly for the wedding present.’

Leo, who had just paid the staggering bill for the six-hundred-piece Potsdam dinner service, was heard to murmur that he was glad to hear it.

‘What is it, Mother?’

Something in his daughter’s voice made Leo lift his head.

Hannah was standing by the window, the letter in her hand. She looked, suddenly, immensely, unutterably weary and as old as one of the mourning, black-clad women in the Cossack-haunted village of her youth. And indeed the hideous thing that had crept out from beneath Muriel’s honeyed, conventional phrases was as old, as inescapable, as time itself.

It is always a mistake to go back — and to go back to a place where one has been wholly happy is foolishness indeed.

Knowing this, Rupert was nevertheless badly shaken by the intensity of the memories which gripped him. He had survived well enough at Eton, but it was at Cambridge that he entered his heritage. It was here that he had discovered his passion for scholarship, here that he learned to excel at the solitary sports he so greatly preferred to the endless team games of his adolescence: here, above all, that he had learned the meaning of friendship.

Now, crossing Trinity Great Court, passing the shabby rooms on Q staircase with the carved motto on the mantelpiece (“Truth thee shalt deliver: it is no drede’) which had been his own, he walked through a gallery of ghosts. On the rim of this fountain, Con Grainger, deeply drunk and wearing striped pyjamas had declaimed, verbatim, Demosthenes’ Second Philip pic, before falling senseless into the water. Over that ridge of roof, now bathed in sunshine, Naismith, besotted with love for an Amazonian physicist from Girton, had climbed at night to hold hopeless court beneath her red-brick tower. Naismith had been killed outright within a month of reaching France — luckier than Con, perhaps, who still lay, shell-shocked and three-quarters blind in a Sussex hospital. And Potts, the brilliant biochemist who had kept a lonely beetroot respiring in a tank… Potts, who was a ‘conchie’, and had been handed a white feather by an old lady in Piccadilly the week before he’d taken his stretcher across the lines to fetch back one of the wounded and been blown to pieces by a mine…

Rupert walked on through the arch on the far side and made his way down to the river, only to be led by its lazy, muddy, unforgettable smell into another bygone world: of punts moored behind willows, of picnics at Byron’s pool — and girls.

But this, too, was forbidden country now and turning, Rupert made his way back to the master’s lodge, where he had been bidden to take sherry before luncheon at high table.

Later in hall, among the napery and fine glass, the ghosts crept quietly away. Here time really had stood still. Kerry and Warburger were still splenetically dismembering a colleague’s ill-considered views on Kant; Battersley was still laughing uproariously at his own appalling puns; the fish pie was still the best in England.

‘Coming back to us, then?’ enquired Sir Henry Forster, regarded by most people, himself included, as England’s foremost classicist. ‘Quite a good chance of a fellowship, I should think. I remember your paper for the Aristotelian Society. An interesting point you made there, about the morale factor in Horatius’s victory over the Curiatii.’

‘Keeping up your fencing, I hope?’ said the bursar, who had won ten pounds from his opposite number at Christchurch when Rupert and his team had taken the cup from Oxford.

Rupert answered politely, but his mind was already on his interview with the man he’d come to see. Professor Marcus Fitzroy was not in hall, because he despised food as he despised sleep and undergraduates and anything else which prevented him from getting on with the real business of life, namely the total understanding and expert disinterment of those distant and long-dead peoples whose burial customs so powerfully possessed his soul.

As soon as politeness permitted, Rupert made his way to the professor’s rooms in Neville Court. He found them marvellously unchanged. A shrunken head on the mantelpiece supported an invitation to a musical evening; jade leg ornaments, axes and awls, and Rupert’s own favourite, the skeleton of a prisoner immolated in the Yangtse Gorge, lay in their former jumble. Among the debris, a more recent strata of half-packed boxes, rolls of canvas and coils of rope indicated signs of imminent departure. The crumbling, highly archaeological-looking substance on a saucer seemed, however, to be the professor’s lunch.

‘You’re off tomorrow, then, sir?’ asked Rupert when greetings had been exchanged.

Professor Fitzroy nodded. He was a tall man, sepulchrally thin, with a tuft of grey hair which accentuated his resemblance to a demented heron. ‘Pity you couldn’t come,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to take that ass, Johnson.’ The professor’s contempt for students had not extended to Rupert, who, on a couple of undergraduate expeditions, had shown himself to possess not only physical endurance and the investigative acumen one might expect of Trinity’s top history scholar, but also something rarer — a kind of silent empathy with the tribesmen and mountain people they had encountered. That a man like this should be wasted on an earldom and a rich marriage seemed to the professor to be an appalling shame.

‘You’re making straight for the Turkish border?’ enquired Rupert, holding down the lid of a crate for the professor to hammer in.

‘Yes, it’s only a quick trip,’ said Fitzroy disgustedly, for his real passion was for the wastes of Northern Asia — and the Black Sea, professionally speaking, did not rank much above Ealing Broadway. ‘I’ve been landed with a field course back here in September; these damned ex-servicemen are so keen.’

‘You said in your letter you hoped to go up to the cave monastery above Akhalsitske?’

‘That’s right. It’s an extraordinary place — everyone seems to have been there. Alexander, of course, and then Farnavazi when he set up court at Mtskhet… And then there’s the Byzantine stuff plonked down on top of it all,’ said the professor, waving a dismissive hand at the modern upstart that was early Christendom. ‘I’m going to look at the rock frieze in one of the inner caves. I’ve been corresponding with Himmelmann in Munich and he’s convinced there’s a link there with the Phrygian tomb monuments at Karahisor.’

‘But surely, sir, that’ll take you across the Russian border? Isn’t there some fighting still going on there?’

The professor shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll bother me.’

Rupert thought this possible. Professor Fitzroy, who had carried a mummified goat across the Kurrum valley in Afghanistan while being shot at by both sides during the Ghilzai’s rebellion, would probably not be greatly troubled by the remnants of a Russian civil war. In addition to a total indifference to hardship and danger, the professor possessed a brother who was something very high up in the Foreign Office and of whom he unashamedly took advantage to get his archaeological finds back through customs including — so rumour had it — a beautiful Circassian wrapped in a camel blanket whom he was said to have installed in his house at Trumpington.

For a while they talked of what interested them both. Then Rupert, aware that he was holding the professor up, came to the point. ‘I was wondering, sir, if you’d do me a favour? A very considerable one, I’m afraid.’

Professor Fitzroy straightened from the bedroll he had been tying and looked at the Earl of Westerholme. Most of his archaeological colleagues had been German and he had hated and despised the war. Yet when they’d heard that Rupert Frayne, with exactly ten hours’ solo flying to his credit, had won the MC for coming to the rescue of a wounded fellow pilot, Fitzroy had surprised himself by treating his whole staircase to champagne. Now he answered Rupert’s query with a single word: ‘Yes.’

An hour later, while making his way down King’s Parade, Rupert heard his name called and turned. Beckoning him from beneath a muslin parasol was an enchantingly pretty girl with blonde curls and huge, blue eyes, dazzlingly arrayed in pleated white linen.

‘Zoe!’

Delightedly, Rupert went over and took the hand she offered in both his own. Zoe van Meck had been the nicest, the most sensitive, of the VADs who’d nursed him, and he remembered with admiration the efforts she had made to overcome her tender heart and achieve the degree of efficiency the job required. ‘My goodness, you look devastating! Going on the river?’

Zoe nodded. ‘I’m just on my way to Cat’s.’

‘Unchaperoned?’ said Rupert, pretending to be shocked.

‘Well, not quite; I’m going with a party,’ she said, smiling up at him, ‘my aunt and uncle live here; it comes in very handy for May Balls and things.’

Her voice was a little breathless, for suddenly seeing Rupert like that had stirred up something she’d believed safely buried. The tendresse which so many of his young nurses had felt for the Earl of Westerholme had gone rather deeper with Zoe van Meck — so much so that she had been almost relieved when she was transferred from the officers’ quarters down to the men’s wards on the floor below. But after her move she had seen almost as much of Rupert as before, for as soon as he was even partially ambulant, Rupert had insisted on going down to talk to the men. The only time she’d seen Rupert lose his temper was when the bossy ward sister, obsessed by rank and protocol, had attempted to turn him back. She could see him now, sitting still as stone by Corporal Railton’s bed until he died — and Railton hadn’t even been one of his own men, just a lad he’d met on the hospital ship coming home.

‘You’re not married yet?’ asked Zoe.

‘At the end of this month,’ said Rupert, his voice expressionless.

Zoe sighed. She’d had three offers of marriage at the Peterhouse Ball alone and a young merchant banker sent her roses every day — yet at this moment she would gladly have changed places with Muriel Hardwicke.

And partly from mischief, partly to give her thoughts a more cheerful turn, she said, ‘And how do you like your new relatives?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Rupert, puzzled.

‘Muriel’s family, I mean, up in Yorkshire.’

Rupert frowned. ‘Muriel doesn’t have any family, Zoe.’

Zoe dimpled up at him. ‘Oh yes she does! I was up there for Verena’s ball and she took me into the village. Old Mrs Hardwicke was truly splendid, especially after she’d had her morning stout, but I think my favourite was Uncle Nat…’

Rupert took her arm. ‘I’ll escort you to St Catherine’s,’ he said. ‘And now, please tell.’

And Zoe, accepting his escort with alacrity, told.

Mrs Bassenthwaite’s illness hit Proom hard. True, it was a while since the housekeeper had taken a very active part in the running of Mersham, but in her quiet way she had held the strings together. Deprived of a working companion of nearly thirty years’ standing, Proom found that a great many extra tasks fell on his shoulders. Normally, in the spate of work building up for the wedding, he would have relied on his right-hand man, James. But James had been acting strangely of late. Nothing could make James incompetent, but these days Proom would often see him in his pantry, the polishing cloth hanging from his hand, staring listlessly at the silver. He scarcely ever seemed to whistle, and when Peggy had enquired in her friendly way after his trapezius muscle he had turned from her without a word.

Then one morning he didn’t come down to work at all. The new hallboy, engaged as a result of the affluence Muriel had brought to Mersham, was despatched to the men’s attics and came down to say that he had knocked on the first footman’s door and been told to scram, and scram fast.

Proom himself went to investigate.

James was sitting on his bed, wearing only his pyjama trousers. Over the years he had turned his attic into a replica of the gymnasium where his heroes built up, with patience and dedication, their splendid, monumental bodies. There was a long mirror, and a set of iron dumbells racked in pairs from the smallest five pounder to the hundred-pounder that James now worked with ease. There was a chest expander with coiled springs like the hawsers of an ocean liner, a stationary bicycle it had taken him thirty weeks to save up for and a pair of scales discarded by the old weigh house at Maidens Over. And on the walls, everywhere, pictures… Pictures of Mhatsi Adenuga, the fabled ‘Abyssinian Lion’, his oiled and ebony muscles held in a classic ‘double biceps’ pose… of the great Sandow, supporting on his shoulders a platform containing nineteen people and a Pekinese…

And on the bed, James, staring blankly into space. James who, through years of unremitting labour, had turned his scrawny, undersized body into something that could be set with honour beside these giants. No one, not even Proom, knew what it had cost James. The freezing hours before dawn doing the endless leg curls, the agonizing bench presses, never giving up even when, week after week, the scales held steady and the next weight proved immovable. But he’d done it… and now…

Proom’s footsteps, silent as always, made no impression.

‘What’s up then, James? Why aren’t you downstairs?’

No answer.

‘Come on, lad, what is it? Are you ill?’

James shook his head.

‘Well, if you aren’t, there’s work to be done. Sid’s brought the Venetian glass down from the store room, but I’m not trusting anyone but you to set it out.’

Again that wretched shake of the head. ‘What’s the use?’ said James tonelessly. ‘What’s the blinkin’ use? All this stuff—’ he waved his hands. ‘I might just as well throw it in the sea. I’m fifty inches round the chest, Mr Proom, and that’s not bad going seeing I was thirty-six when I began. But there’s not a darn thing I can do about my height. I can flog my guts out and I’ll still be five foot eight, and will be till the day I die.’

‘Well? I myself am only five foot nine. I cannot see the relevance of your remark.’

James turned. ‘Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to bring in matched footmen.’

‘Miss Hardwicke did mention it. She’s going to bring back powdering too. It’s old-fashioned but you never minded it, if I recall.’

‘No, I don’t mind. I’m all for a bit of class. But I’m not going to be a footman. They’ve got to be over six feet. Six foot two she wants them, if possible.’

Mr Proom shrugged. ‘It never seemed to me wise to employ servants for their size or the shape of their calves, but that is neither here nor there. Whatever happens, you’ll still be first footman in this house.’

‘No, I won’t,’ said James tonelessly. ‘She’s not going to sack me, you understand. “His Lordship speaks so highly of my work.”’ James’s parody of Muriel’s genteel tones was devastating in its accuracy. ‘There’ll always be some odd jobs I can do about the place. “Mr Proom will find you something useful to do, I’m sure.”’

The butler was silent. No one more than he, who had trained James from the age of twelve, knew the blow Muriel had aimed at James. James’s skill with the silver, the unobtrusive bravura of his work at the sideboard, his knowledge of wines, all had been instilled by him. The little Cockney lad had turned himself from a scruffy lamp boy into one of the most highly trained servants in the land — and now this!

‘You’re ready for promotion, anyway,’ said Proom at last. ‘I’d hoped you’d stay and take over from me. I know her ladyship intended it. But… well, we’ll have to do it different. It’s no use speaking to Lady Byrne because Hawkins’s got his own team, but there’ll be a vacancy somewhere. When they hear you’re on the market, offers’ll come flooding in, you’ll see.’

‘I’d like not to go too far away. I reckon I’ve got used to it here,’ said James, coming as close as he could to expressing his sense of desolation at leaving the companions of a lifetime and the man who’d made him what he was. ‘Do you think her ladyship might take me on at the Mill House?’

Proom frowned. The dowager’s departure from Mersham, the restricted circumstances in which she would find herself, were a hard cross for him to bear. ‘I doubt if she’ll be taking more than a gardener-handyman. But something’ll turn up. Let’s just get this wedding behind us, shall we? You’ll stay for that?’

‘Aye, I’ll stay for that.’

Mr Proom returned to his cottage at dinner time with a heavy heart. Mrs Bassenthwaite was gone, James was going; he doubted if Mrs Park would last much longer with Win away. Miss Hardwicke had promised him an increased staff to train, but it was already clear that her ideas would not accord with those of Mersham.

He opened the door of his mother’s room. The bed was perfectly tidy, the flowerpots intact, even the appendix floated quietly in its bottle, but Proom was at once aware that something was wrong. He went over to the bed. Mrs Proom was cowering back against the pillows, shrunken and tiny as a child, and she was crying.

‘What is it? What’s the matter, Mother?’

The suffused blue eyes stared wretchedly up at him, the tears continued to flow silently down the raddled cheeks.

Mr Proom was appalled. His mother furious, unreasonable, mad, he could cope with. His mother unhappy and pitiful was more than he could bear.

‘I know… I’m… a nuisance to you, Cyril.’ The tears continued to well up, spill over. ‘But I’ll try to be better, Cyril… You’ll see, Cyril, I’ll be better.’ She stretched out a hand, clawed desperately at his arm.

‘Mother, what is all this about?’

Another spate of those heartrending and silent tears…

‘I won’t do nothing bad no more, Cyril, I won’t throw nothing. Only don’t send me away. Don’t send me to the workhouse.’

‘The workhouse? Are you mad, Mother?’

‘She said… as ’ow I must be lonely. But I’m not, Cyril.’ The little speckled claw dug deeper into his arm. ‘I’m not lonely, I’m used to it here.’

‘Who said this?’ asked Mr Proom but already, sickeningly, he knew.

‘’er that’s going to marry ’is lordship. ’er with the eyes that don’t blink. She said… ’as ’ow I’d be happier with people like myself. But I wouldn’t, Cyril. I wouldn’t…’

‘I’m quite sure you wouldn’t, Mother,’ said Mr Proom, trying for a little joke.

But the terrified old woman was beyond his reach. The sobbing was building up now, she was beginning to gasp and choke — she’d make herself ill.

He began to pat her hand, to soothe her, but as she gradually became calmer Proom’s own fears increased. Had anyone asked Proom what he thought about his mother, he would have said that the old lady was a nuisance the like of which had probably never been equalled. If Mrs Proom’s Maker had seen fit to take her to his bosom one night as she slept, Proom, after giving her a fitting funeral, would have regarded himself as the most fortunate of men.

An honourable release through death was one thing. Putting the old lady into a home for deranged old people was another. Proom knew he could have gone straight to the earl and been listened to, but making trouble between a man and his intended wife was not something he cared to do. No, it looked as though he too would have to leave Mersham. Only where, with a burden such as this, could he possibly go?

The problem of what to wear at the fancy dress ball at Heslop did not concern the Herrings, for they had not been invited. Indeed, the Herrings had expressly been bidden not to arrive until the day before the wedding, and had been informed precisely from which train it would be possible to collect them. Even so, nothing could damp the pleasure of that family of layabouts and spongers at the thought of being taken up again by their posh relations.

For the Herrings’ star, which had never been conspicuously high, had of late plummeted catastrophically. The Herrings owed rent to their landlord, their grocer had forbidden them his shop and they had been turned out of their local pub. The supply of suckers on which Melvyn relied to keep body and soul together seemed, in the weeks before his noble cousin’s wedding, to have mysteriously dried up and, in the proposed visit to Mersham, Melvyn saw a clear sign that Fate was about to smile on the Herrings once again.

‘Don’t worry, Myrtle,’ he said now. ‘Aunt Mary’s a soft touch, really. She’ll see us all right.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Myrtle, who was standing by the stove in a mauve satin peignoir liberally sprinkled with grease, mixing the lethal concoction of peroxide and vinegar with which she dyed her hair. ‘But ’ow the dickens are we goin’ to get there? There isn’t a hope in hell of raising the rail fare for the four of us.’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Melvyn.

‘Well, not that locking us in the lavatory one while the guard comes round, because that’s got whiskers on it,’ said Myrtle. ‘And what about clothes? I ain’t got a stitch to wear and the twins’ll have to have new trousers.’

Melvyn sighed and looked at his obese and pallid offspring sitting on either side of the sticky kitchen table reading comics. Donald was methodically sucking a long black stick of liquorice into his mouth. Dennis was licking at a dribbling bar of toffee. Like certain caterpillars whose short lives are dedicated to achieving simply the maximum possible increase in size, the twins seemed to have done nothing but eat and burst out of their clothes since they were born. Watching them, Melvyn had to abandon another of his half-formed schemes — that of smuggling them to Mersham in a cello case in the guard’s van. Even a doublebass case would not take more than half of either of his sons…

‘Don’t worry, Myrtle,’ he said again, giving her shoulder a squeeze. ‘I’ll think of something. You’ll see.’

Dr Lightbody, on the other hand, was one of the favoured ones who, at Muriel’s request, had been invited for all the festivities and therefore faced the problem not only of morning clothes for the wedding, but of acquiring a suitable costume for the ball. A hot afternoon just a week before his departure for Mersham accordingly found him standing in front of the long, fly-stained mirror in the dim, dusty shop of Nathaniel and Gumsbody, the theatrical costumiers in Drury Lane. An enormous tricorne hat with a cockade lurched over his left eye, he wore a blue military coat heavily braided in gold and his arm was folded in a characteristic gesture across his chest. Unmistakably, he was the Emperor Napoleon as immortalized in the famous portrait by David.

‘What do you think?’ he asked the pale young man in charge of rentals.

‘It suits you, sir. It suits you very well.’

‘I don’t like it,’ pronounced Dr Lightbody. ‘It’s the hat, I think.’ He removed it to reveal his high and intellectual forehead.

‘What about Admiral Nelson, sir? We do a very nice line in him. He comes in three sizes and the eye-patch is free.’

The doctor shook his head. To go as a person in any way injured or defiled, even in battle, was against his principles.

He allowed the young man to divest him of his uniform and, clad only in trousers and braces, began to walk along the rows of ermine-lined mantles and sumptuous velvet cloaks.

‘You don’t fancy a nice cavalier, sir? Those hats with the big feathers always go down very well with the ladies.’

Dr Lightbody shook his head. Though the ringleted Jacobean wigs were very flattering one never knew what went on underneath.

It was all so annoying, he reflected, pausing now by the leather jerkin and feathered head-dress of an Indian brave, Doreen still being in hospital. Doreen was a good needlewoman, he had to give her that — she’d always made his shirts. It would have been no trouble to her to have run something up for him. Instead of which she just lay there in that awful ward full of disgusting, wheezing old women and yellow people with tubes in them, staring at him with those big, grey eyes of hers as though he could help her. The sister had given him an odd look when he’d asked if it would hurt Doreen to do a bit of sewing while she was in there, so he supposed it was no good pursuing the subject. As a matter of fact, the hospital visits were an embarrassment altogether — the staff who talked to him about Doreen’s condition seemed to think that his title of ‘Doctor’ would make him understand their jargon. Whereas in fact his title was a courtesy one, the courtesy being one that he had, so to speak, bestowed on himself when, in the drudgery of his last year at the catering college, he had first glimpsed his vision of the perfectibility of man.

‘These are nice, we always think,’ said the assistant, holding up a Viking helmet and breastplate. ‘With a red beard, perhaps — and thongs?’

Again Dr Lightbody shook his head. He wanted something which would suggest what he saw as his threefold role: of teacher, of healer, of leader of men. Something in white and gold, possibly? A High Priest? A Zoroastrian?

Suddenly he had an idea. ‘What about the Egyptians? Akhnaton, the Sun King — do you have him?’

‘I don’t know if we have him specifically, sir, but our Egyptian section is very well stocked. If you’d just come through here…’

Ten minutes later, in the many-layered, pleated linen skirts, the curved sandals and golden, cap-shaped crown, Dr Lightbody stood before the mirror again.

It was closer, much closer — but there was something a little bit effeminate about the whole ensemble. Not surprising, really — when all was said and done there was a touch of the tarbrush about the Egyptians.

Then, with the inner certainty of all visions, inspiration came.

Why go as a mere Sun King? Why not a Sun God?

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said to the weary assistant. ‘I’d like to see the Greek costumes, please.’

It was obvious, really. He would go as Apollo.

In the breakfast room at Farne Castle, a great turreted keep set on a wave-lashed shore which the Nettlefords’ ancestors, after centuries of bloodshed, had wrested from a doomed Northumbrian king, the Lady Lavinia was eating kedgeree.

She was well satisfied with life. Her bridesmaid’s dress had arrived that morning, her costume for the ball was waiting for her in Newcastle. This time, she was certain, all would go well. At the Ritz, Tom Byrne had been charming and attentive, there could be no possible competition from the goitrous Cynthia Smythe and she had been able, by certain feminine gestures, to show the best man that she found him pleasing. Meanwhile, the morning’s shopping trip to Newcastle would provide more immediate delights. Not that one would ever seriously demean oneself, but still…

Stretching away to her left on either side of the dark oak table, sat the Ladies Hermione, Priscilla, Gwendolyn and Beatrice, all of them sporting, in various combinations, the close-set eyes, haughty expressions and huge, beaked noses which had struck dread into so many subalterns and Lloyd’s underwriters in the ballrooms of high society. At the head of the table sat the duke, buried in The Times, which he had scarcely put down since he’d discovered that his fifth child, too, was a girl. And opposite him Honoria Nettleford, his duchess, surveying, with some anxiety, her brood.

The season was virtually over and none of the girls had had so much as a matrimonial nibble. In three weeks it would be the twelfth and though they’d got up a good party for the shooting, it was singularly short of eligible young men, all of whom seemed to have previous engagements. Which was a pity, for the girls, though thin, were strong, hardy girls and showed, the duchess considered, to better advantage jodhpured and oil-skinned against the keening winds of a Northumbrian summer than in the tulle and feathers suitable for the overheated ballrooms of London Society.

What a problem it all was, thought the duchess, helping herself to kidneys. Where, oh where, in a world which the war had so cruelly decimated of young men, was she going to find anyone suitable? Because there was going to be no lowering of standards for the Nettlefords. Let other women bestow their daughters on fledgling curates or half-baked university professors. She, Honoria Nettleford, would never lower the flag!

So everything now depended on the wedding at Mersham and the ball at Heslop which preceded it. Lavinia herself seemed confident that Tom Byrne had grasped the advantages of marrying a Nettleford, but the duchess had seen too many best men scratch at the starting post to be certain. Should she give young Byrne a hint, perhaps? Mention Lavinia’s certificate for the 250-yards breast stroke? Or tell him what the vet had said about her when she delivered the Jack Russell of six puppies and one of them a breech? Lavinia was not only the eldest but — it had to be admitted — the bossiest and the plainest: once Lavinia was off her hands, the duchess was certain the others would quickly follow. Surely, at the ball, waltzing with Lavvy (but here the duchess closed her eyes, for the waltz was not quite Lavinia’s forte) Tom Byrne would see her worth? He had a younger brother too — perhaps he would do for Beatrice?

She was glad, really, that Lady Byrne had decided on fancy dress. It would give the girls more scope. Priscilla was going as Cleopatra, Beatrice as a Daffodil, Gwendolyn as Grace Darling, the local heroine. With Hermione (who had made rather a jolly severed head out of papier mâché) as Salome, and Lavinia as the water sprite, Undine, they should make quite an entrance. Once Lavinia’s costume had been altered that is, because those tight-fitting, glittering scales had suggested something quite different when Lavinia had first tried them on. It was to add a gauze overskirt and some gauze veiling that she was taking her eldest daughter to Newcastle. This done, she was sure the effect would be all they hoped for: mysterious, subtle and marine.

‘Don’t forget to be ready on time, Lavvy,’ she said now. ‘I told Sergei to bring the car round at ten.’

The Ladies Hermione, Priscilla, Gwendolyn and Beatrice stopped chewing in unison, and in unison put down their forks. Four pairs of pale eyes fixed themselves on Lady Lavinia. Here was treachery: naked and unashamed.

‘You said Hudson was driving you,’ hissed Hermione to her eldest sister.

‘I really can’t see that it matters which of the chauffeurs drives us,’ replied Lavinia, tossing her head.

‘Oh, can’t you just!’ muttered Gwendolyn under her breath.

‘Mother, can I come in with you?’ asked Beatrice, quickest off the mark. ‘I’ve completely run out of wool for my tapestry cushion.’

‘Me, too,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘I want to go to the library.’

‘Well, I’m not staying by myself,’ said Priscilla. ‘Can I sit in the front, Mother? I always feel so sick in the back.’

‘You never feel sick when Hudson’s driving,’ hissed Lavinia.

‘Girls! Girls!’ The duchess held up her hand. ‘Silence, please! If you all want to come we’ll have to take two cars. Gwendolyn and Beatrice can go with Hudson in the Daimler and—’

‘No, Mother, why should we? It isn’t fair, just because we’re the youngest!’

It was at this point that the duke, though he had trained himself never to listen to a word spoken by his family, subliminally heard the warning bell which caused him to fold his newspaper and quietly steal away.