The Secret Countess

16

‘I can’t write a letter like that, Mr Proom,’ said Mrs Bassenthwaite weakly. ‘Not to a countess, I can’t.’

Ten days had passed since the interrupted wedding and Mrs Bassenthwaite, released from hospital, was convalescing on the sofa in the housekeeper’s room.

‘I’d write it myself,’ said Proom, ‘but it would be better coming from you. More correct, you being in charge of the maids.’

Mr Proom had emerged as a local hero, sharing with Leo Rabinovitch and the Herrings, the acclaim of the entire district during the merrymaking which had followed the departure of Miss Hardwicke. Even the knowledge that Mersham would almost certainly have to be sold in order to meet the demands of Miss Hardwicke’s solicitors had not diminished the delight of the villagers, the tenants and the gentry in being rid of a woman so universally detested. To the general happiness, however, there was one exception — the earl himself, who had put Mersham’s affairs into the hands of his agent and was about to depart for the Hindu Kush.

‘I’ll tell you what to say,’ persisted Proom — and went to fetch the inkwell and the paper.

‘There’s a letter for you, Anna!’ said Pinny, looking at the postmark and trying not to let the relief show in her voice.

It was Petya, coming to London to greet Niannka and discuss the sale of the jewels, who had told them about the interrupted wedding. Pinny, watching Anna, had seen her turn almost in an instant from the kind of thing one expected to find under a pile of sacking after an earthquake or a famine into a radiant and enchanting girl. Anna, discussing with the delighted Mr Stewart at Aspell’s, the jewellers, what he assured them would be ‘the sale of the century’; Anna, helping her mother buy presents for the other emigrés, treasuring the conviction that it was through Rupert’s good offices that Niannka had been found, was the Anna of the old St Petersburg days with a new glow, a new maturity.

But that had been more than a week ago. Since then, Pinny had watched, day by day, the glow lessen, the joy ebb as the postman still brought no letter, the doorbell still failed to herald the longed-for visitor.

Anna had opened her letter, begun to read — and as she did so the eagerness and expectation in her face was replaced by puzzlement.

‘It is from the housekeeper at Mersham,’ she said, her voice bleak. ‘She says that I have broken my contract. I was engaged till the end of July so I have five more days of work owing to them. She refuses to send the rest of my clothes or Selina Strickland until I make up the time.’

‘Well, really!’ Pinny was outraged. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’

‘No, they are correct. I thought as I had not been paid for the last week it would be all right but she says not. Rup… the earl… has already left for India and the house must be made ready to go up for sale so there is a great deal to do.’

‘You aren’t going, Anna?’

‘I must, Pinny. Petya will be at his school camp in Scotland so it will be all right. If there is work owing,’ said Anna, lifting her chin, ‘it must be paid.’

‘You’re to treat her exactly as before,’ Proom had instructed his staff. ‘She may be a countess, but while she’s here she’s still a maid.’

‘I can’t!’ wailed Pearl. ‘I’ll curtsy to her, see if I don’t.’

‘You will do nothing of the kind,’ said Mr Proom — but he was not as relaxed as he pretended, and secretly felt outraged by what he was about to do.

The outrage, the embarrassment, lasted exactly as long as it took Anna, in a blue cotton dress, carrying a straw basket, to cross the kitchen floor and be enveloped in Mrs Park’s motherly arms. But the instructions she received from Mr Proom when the greetings and gossip were over and she had changed into her uniform made her for a moment doubt her ears.

‘You wish me to wait at table? In the dining room?’

For the butler’s view on women actually waiting at table, with its middle-class overtones, were well known.

‘One must move with the times,’ said Mr Proom portentously. ‘It is only a small dinner: Lady Westerholme, Mr Frayne, Lord and Lady Byrne and a Mr and Mrs Clarke-Binningfold who are considering the purchase of Mersham. His lordship, as you know, has already left.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna, managing to keep her voice steady. ‘I had heard.’

For she knew, now, that Rupert had not cared, had not meant what he’d said in the garden, wanted only to be free of her and all entanglements.

‘The meal is a simple one,’ Proom continued. ‘Grapefruit, Consommé Beauharnais, Sole Marie Louise, carbonnade of beef, macaroon soufflé and the dessert. James’ll be at the sideboard, Sid’ll be handing the main dishes. All you have to do is follow him with the vegetables and the sauces and help clear. Can you manage that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Anna, rallying. ‘Because it is all in the Domestic Compendium. How I must approach from the left to serve but from the right to remove the plates, and how I must clear the crumbs with a napkin because a crumb brush is déclassé and how I must not breathe ’eavily and not address the guests.’

‘You must certainly not do that,’ said Proom.

The dinner party, whose dénouement was subsequently reported in detail by Sid and James to a spellbound audience below stairs, began quietly with the consumption of grapefruit and some rather desultory conversation. The dowager was discussing the launching of the new airship with Lord Byrne, Mrs Clarke-Binningfold was giving Uncle Sebastien her views on The Fecklessness of the Poor — when the door opened to admit Anna, her head bent in profound concentration over a famille rose tureen of Mrs Park’s incomparable chicken soup.

Gravely, aware of the honour that Proom had done her, she began to move towards the sideboard.

‘You!’

Anna jumped, clung desperately to her tureen — and looked up to find that the Earl of Westerholme, supposedly absent in the Hindu Kush, was glaring at her from the head of the table like an assassin out of Boris Godunov.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ continued the earl, his customary good manners quite banished by the shock of seeing this girl whose treachery had not prevented her from haunting his dreams, sleeping and waking, ever since she had gone.

Anna, resolutely maintaining silence, had reached the sanctuary of the sideboard and put down her tureen. Rupert was mad, he no longer loved her, but he was here and there was nothing she could do to still the pounding of her heart.

‘Rupert, you really must not speak to the maids like that,’ said the dowager, suddenly looking extremely happy and aware that she had been less than just to dear, departed Hatty Dalrymple.

‘Who is this person?’ said Mrs Clarke-Binningfold, greatly displeased.

‘An excellent question,’ said Rupert. He turned to Anna, who was now clearing the finger bowls, totally concentrated on her task. ‘You don’t seem to be wearing a wedding ring, so may we assume that we are not yet addressing the Princess Chirkovsky?’

James had served the soup, Sid had begun to hand it round. Anna, still resolutely maintaining silence, picked up the silver filigree basket of bread rolls and followed him.

‘I asked you a question, Anna.’

She had reached Lady Byrne on Rupert’s left. ‘I am not permitted to address the guests,’ she said under her breath.

Rupert’s hand came up and fastened round her wrist. ‘This guest, however, you will address. Please answer my question. When are you getting married? Where is your fiancé?’

But Anna had now had enough. Disengaging her wrist, holding with both hands on to her basket, she drew breath.

‘Very well. You have, of course, ruined this dinner party in which I wished to wait perfectly at table so as to help with the giving of more responsibility to women. So I will tell you, first that I think you are mad, and second, that I am not going to marry Sergei because that is not how I love him and in any case I do not wish to have children who will have breast blisters — only, I must say chest blisters, I think, because this is a country of hypocrisy and coldness where breasts are not respectable. And also Sergei has proposed to the Baroness Rakov, although I have told him it is not necessary because we are now rich and will of course share everything, but he says she is tranquille and will keep away from him the other women. And last, if I had not been assured,’ she said, glaring at Sid and James, ‘that you were already in the Kush, where you absolutely belong because it is full of stones and ice, I would never have come back,’ she finished — and burst into tears.

‘Don’t, Anna! Ah, don’t, my darling,’ said Rupert. He pushed back his chair, removed, with ineffable tenderness, her basket of rolls and, quite impervious to the assembled company, gathered her into his arms. ‘Only, you see, I saw you in the garden with the prince. You were hanging from his arms like…’ He broke off, even now racked by the memory.

‘A dishcloth?’ suggested Anna.

‘What?’

Anna, her career abandoned, was now ready to converse. ‘In La Fille Mal Gardée, which is a most beautiful ballet, she hangs exactly in this way from the shoulder of the hero, very soft and… limp, you know, like a cloth and at the same time she does little battements with her feet. It is in Act Three and very moving; you will like it very much.’

‘Shall I, my love?’ said Rupert, dabbing gently at her eyes and nose.

The door opened. Proom stood on the threshold.

‘Ah, Proom,’ said the earl. ‘Just the man! We want some champagne. The Veuve Cliquot ’83 that you’ve been guarding with your life.’

‘I have it here, my lord,’ said Proom, advancing. ‘Thinking you might be requiring it, I took the liberty of putting it on ice earlier in the day. I think you will find it to your satisfaction.’

The wedding of Anna and Rupert the following June was not a quiet wedding. For one thing, absolutely everybody cried. Miss Frensham, preparing to thump her way lustily through ‘Lohengrin’, cried, as did Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer, who had framed the altar steps in an entrancing riot of delphiniums, larkspur and phlox. The Ballets Russes cried, the dowager soaked three handkerchiefs before the bride even set foot in the church, Kira, who had come from Paris with her banker fiancé, wept elegantly into her muff. Susie Byrne did not actually cry, but she seemed to find it necessary to polish her spectacles a great many times and Hannah Rabinovitch, sitting beside her daughter, was quite simply awash.

Nor were the servants at the back of the church any more restrained. Mrs Park, next to her devoted Win, was already blotched and swollen; Peggy and Pearl, Louise and Florence and the two pretty housemaids engaged with an eye on Uncle Sebastien had completely ruined, with their sniffs and gulps, the effect of their morning ablutions in the new attic bathrooms. Mrs Proom, in her wheelchair, had howled herself into hiccups and outside, Baskerville, shut into the gigantic limousine which had been the Baroness Rakov’s engagement present to Sergei, enduring both social exclusion and the company of the dachshund Pupsik, threw back his head and bayed in agony.

To this outburst of emotion there was one notable exception: Heslop’s formidable butler, Hawkins, sitting with disgust beside Old Niannka and listening with loathing to the raucous blubbering of this malodorous foreigner who was now permanently installed at Heslop, trying to set up icons in the billiard room and driving him insane. For it was Niannka who had cut through the gentle persuasions and medical advice which had followed Ollie’s despairing collapse on the night of the ball. What exactly had happened when Anna took her ancient nurse to visit Ollie no one knew. But the old woman had banished everyone from the nursery, wax had been asked for, and pins, and in the silence that followed, Ollie’s voice had been heard gleefully joining in the utterance of unspeakable Russian curses. Minna, returning to find a silver-wigged and unmistakable effigy of Muriel Hardwicke spreadeagled on the floor, had been shocked and angry — until she saw Ollie’s bright face; since when Old Niannka could do no wrong.

But now the bridal car drew up and, on the arms of Petya, almost as tall now as she was herself, Anna walked towards the porch. Her dress was simple and unadorned, she carried only a bouquet of the roses that Mr Cameron had so cunningly named for her, but Countess Grazinsky, waiting to adjust her daughter’s veil, had to turn her head away, so overcome was she by what she saw in Anna’s face.

‘Here are your gloves, dear,’ said Pinny, trying — and failing — to achieve some kind of briskness. And then, ‘It’s time…’

But as Anna stepped inside the church, saw the sea of faces, heard the pounding music, she faltered and stopped. It was too much… the gods would not permit such joy.

‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered, the colour draining from her face. ‘I’m terribly afraid.’

A small voice, brisk and marvellously motherly, came from behind her.

‘That’s silly, Anna,’ said the Honourable Olive. ‘Being afraid is silly, you know it is.’

Anna turned and met the shining blue eyes of her chief and only bridesmaid. The Honourable Olive’s dress, like Anna’s, had been made by Mrs Bunford. The child had been given free reign for she was all of nine years old now, her natural taste beginning to form, and the white wreath and muslin dress were as simple as Anna’s own. But if ever there was a bridesmaid suffused with the sheer joy of living on such a splendid and dazzling day, that bridesmaid was Ollie Byrne.

And Anna smiled and laid her hand lightly on the bright curls, and turned to walk steadily to where Rupert waited: a man who had passed beyond all doubt and uncertainty — a man who had come home.