A Countess Below Stairs (17 page)

‘Baskerville goes to the vet every six weeks to be checked,’ said Rupert, his voice deceptively quiet.

‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.’ She launched into a description of the lifecycle of Toxacara canis which would have given nightmares to Edgar Allen Poe. ‘So you see, dearest, I really must insist.’

‘Very well, Muriel; it shall be as you wish,’ said the earl. ‘Come, Baskerville.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ Muriel called after him, disconcerted by the look in his eyes.

But Rupert had gone.

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It was not unexpected that the earl’s attempts to dismiss Anna should reach her ears. The following day, returning at dusk from an inspection of the haunted folly whose re-roofing his bailiff regarded as urgent, Rupert noticed that the door of the rose garden was ajar. Mr Cameron must be working late. He would just go in and have a word with him. Muriel had meant well, earlier in the day, when she offered to replace his ear-trumpet with one of the newfangled hearing aids, but the old Scotsman was a crusty fellow and the moment had perhaps been unfortunate, for Mr Cameron had been showing them his new and lovely snow-white rose.

Putting his hand through Baskerville’s collar, Rupert pushed open the door. Judders of ecstasy and a violent vibrato of the single, coal-black wart on Baskerville’s blond cheek, prepared Rupert for what he would find -Anna, carrying a trug and a pair of secateurs, moving in a kind of dream among the flowers.

Tightening his grip on his dog, the earl advanced.

‘Good evening,’ he said pleasantly.

Ambushed, Anna stood her ground. Her head went up. ‘Good evening, your lordship.’

Rupert recoiled. Not since she had deplored Mersham’s lack of bathrooms had her ‘r’s rolled quite so terribly. It was her curtsy, however, that showed Rupert the full extent of her displeasure. Gone was the balletic homage, the dedicated servility. Anna had bobbed.

‘Is anything the matter?’

Anna had decided on frostiness, on silence, on le style anglais.

‘Nothing is the matter. As you perceive, I am picking flowers for Miss Hardwicke’s room. Mr Cameron has permitted it. I am not stealing.’

Rupert looked at her, completely bewildered. ‘No, of course you’re not stealing. What’s happened, Anna? Have I done anything?’

‘No,’ said Anna, still struggling with the concept of the stiff upper lip as purveyed in her infancy by Pinny and Miss King.

It was Baskerville, never an exponent of silent suffering, who put an end to this by twisting himself out of the earl’s grasp. He would, so long after his suppertime, have marginally preferred a rabbit, but Anna was undoubtedly the next best thing. By the time he had made this clear to her, Anna, trying to save her basket, had lost both her cap and her sang-froid.

‘Oh, chort!’ she said, looking up at her employer through pollen-dusted eyelashes. ‘You have made me so sad.’

‘I?? For God’s sake, Anna.’

‘I was in the dressing room when you boasted to Miss Hardwicke how you have tried to send me away. And I do not know why because I have really tried to work hard and it is true I did not know how to gopher but this turned out not to be at all necessary and though I did play a very little the piano in the music room last week when I was dusting it was only for perhaps three minutes because it was the B flat etude which is very short as you know and in Russia always when we sent away a servant we allowed them first to explain so—’

‘Stop it! Stop it, Anna!’ Rupert reached out, took her by the shoulders. A mistake…More of a mistake than he would have believed possible. He dropped his arms, stepped back. ‘Please, for heaven’s sake, Anna. It wasn’t because I wasn’t satisfied with your work. Your work is excellent. It was because I met someone who’d stayed with you in Petersburg.’

He recounted his conversation with Mr Stewart, to which Anna listened with growing amazement.

‘You wished to dismiss me because Petya had cut his teeth on the Crown of Kazan?’

‘All right, I know it sounds absurd but—’

‘Absurd? It is crazy! Sergei has always said that the English aristocracy have brains like very small aspirins and now I believe it. In any case, the Crown of Kazan was very heavy. Niannka was always angry with Mama when she wore it because it gave her a headache.’

‘Niannka? Is that the lady with the mummified finger?’

Anna dimpled, but her eyes were sad for Niannka’s desertion had hurt more than anything in the dark days of the revolution. ‘Yes. It was the finger of St Nino who lived in the monastery at Varzia where she was born. He has many fingers, that one, perhaps three thousand -the monks are such rogues!’

‘You’ve been there?’

She nodded. ‘We stayed with Niannka when Mama took the waters at Borzhomi. It was very beautiful. We ate with our fingers and slept on the ground and washed in the Kuru, which is very cold and green and runs down from the Caucasus, and the men had great moustaches and got drunk and fell out of their caves,’ said Anna, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘Only the chickens I did not like,’ she added, turning her thumb to reveal a white scar across its base.

‘And it’s certain that she robbed you?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Kira’s aunt saw her on the Anchikov bridge laughing with some soldiers of the Red Guard after we had fled. It is natural, perhaps. She was a woman of the people.’

‘She undoubtedly seems to have been that,’ said Rupert reflectively. Then returning to the attack: ‘Anna, you must see how unsuitable it is, your being here.’

‘No, I do not see it.’ Her eyes kindled. ‘I know. It is because I am a woman! It is all right for Sergei to be chauffeur to an amazingly stupid duchess, though he has seize quarters and his grandfather was a grand duke, and it is all right for Colonel Terek to drive a taxi though his family has owned three-quarters of the Kara Kum, but I … I may not work. Naturally. In a country where women must be trampled to death by ‘orses before they are permitted to vote one would expect this.’

‘No, Anna, you’re wrong. I worked with women in the war — I know very well what they’re capable of.’

‘Then why? Just because we are rich in Petersburg?’

‘Not only rich - Oh, Anna try to understand. In Russia they probably wouldn’t have allowed me over your doorstep.’

‘Pas du tout.’ She dimpled up at him. ‘Mama was extremely democratic. Earls with large estates and many Christian names were frequently admitted. By the front door, even.’

‘Oh, God.’

They had begun to walk between the fragrant bushes, drawn by the remembered perfection of Mr Cameron’s new rose.

‘You really like it here, don’t you?’ said Rupert wonderingly. ‘Though we work you half to death, though your hands are raw and chapped, though you’re cruelly short of sleep…’

They had reached the rose. ‘Yes,’ said Anna so quietly that Rupert had to bend his head to hear. ‘Yes, I like it here. I like Mrs Park who. is so gentle and so good and James who has struggled and struggled to make himself strong. I like the courage of your mother, who is so patient with the spirits who plague her, and I like your uncle who hears music as if each time it had been just composed. I like the warriors on your roof and your foolish dog and the catalpa tree that leans into the lake … And this rose, I like,’ she said, bending in reverence to Mr Cameron’s masterpiece. ‘Yes, very much I like this rose.’

She fell silent. (And if I were to take the secateurs, thought Rupert, and cut each and every blossom from this incomparable bush and pour them in her lap, what then?)

Anna looked up at him. Her face crunched into its monkey smile. ‘And the appendix of Mrs Proom,’ she continued, ‘ah, that I truly love!’

Rupert lifted his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender. ‘Then stay,’ he said, ‘heaven forbid that I should come between you and Mrs Proom’s appendix,’ - and left her.

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The dowager was tired. She had spent the morning in the village comforting Mrs Bunford, who was still very much upset at having been asked to make neither the wedding gown nor any of the dresses for the bridesmaids and, to console the widow, had ordered her own outfit of powder blue wild silk. To give Mrs Bunford wild silk to ruin was the act of a lunatic and the dowager was already regretting it. Then as she walked to her brougham she was accosted by tiny, tottery Miss Frensham who had played the organ in Mersham Church for forty years. Miss Frensham, rheuray-eyed and quavery, wanted to know if it was true that Miss Hardwicke wanted neither ‘The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’ nor the ‘Lohengrin March’ like they always had, but something modern that Miss Frensham was almost sure she wouldn’t be able to play since she couldn’t see too well nowadays to read new music. Because if so, perhaps they’d like to get someone else to play, though it wouldn’t be easy not to see Master Rupert married, not after she’d read him every single page of The Prince and the Pauper when he had the measles, because he always noticed when you missed a bit out, not like other children…

By the time the dowager had soothed Miss Frensham she was late for her appointment with Colonel Forster at the Mill House and must, she realized, have made a mess of explaining why she had to move into the Mill House immediately without waiting for the improvements that the Forsters were so kindly putting in for her, because Colonel Forster had looked at her very strangely and Mrs Forster had patted her hand in quite the wrong way when she left. And when at last she had gone home and sat down for a moment to rest, there had been the usual psychic vibrations and the voice of Hatty Dalrymple had come through as clearly as if she were still beside her in the dormitory all those years ago at school. Hatty, who had passed over as the result of a boating accident at Cowes, had always been a gusher and the information that she could see rays of aetheric ecstacy emanating from Rupert and his lovely, lovely bride did little for the dowager, remembering the look in Rupert’s eyes these days.

And now she really had to make up her mind whether or not to send a wedding invitation to the Herrings.

Mr and Mrs Melvyn Herring and their twin sons.

Donald and Dennis, were not so much herrings as sheep, and extremely black ones at that. The dowager came from an old Irish family whose pedigree was excellent, but whose upbringing, on a wild and lovely estate in County Down, had been unconventional and lacking in discipline. As a result, when the dowager’s youngest sister, Vanessa, fell passionately in love with the extremely handsome hairdresser who came to prepare her glorious, golden ringlets for her coming-out ball, she had put lunacy into action and eloped with him. For this attack of passion, poor Vanessa Templeton paid dearly, coining round, so to speak, a few months later - to find herself pregnant, penniless and desperate. Whether she died of a broken heart or puerperal fever following the birth of her son, Melvyn, it would be hard to say. Whatever the reason, there now began the long process of dumping Melvyn on anyone who would have him which was to take up so much of his father’s life. For Vanessa Templeton’s love child was one of nature’s genuine abominations: a deeply unpleasant child who grew in deceit, temper and general sliminess into the kind of adult who can empty a room within minutes of entering it. Melvyn’s sojourn at the Templeton’s estate in County Down was burned into the marrow of every one of its inhabitants, from Lady Templeton herself down to the obscurest scullery maid. The dowager, inviting him to Mersham in his early adolescence, had been harrowed by this resemblance and by the fact that he looked like a smeared and blotched version of her own Rupert. During this visit, Melvyn had (at the age of fourteen) got the stillroom maid pregnant, lamed George’s favourite hunter with an air gun and stolen a hundred gold sovereigns from her husband’s desk. During a second visit, at the age of sixteen, he had started a fire in the morning room with an illicit cigarette and left with his aunt’s favourite Meissen figurine which he sold to a dealer before it could be traced. Fortunately, Nemesis overtook him in the form of a waitress called Myrtle who, finding herself pregnant by him, got him to the altar. The birth of Dennis and Donald squared the account for the twins, growing from pimpled, puking and overweight blobs of dough into pallid, whining mounds of flesh, finally put the Herrings beyond the social pale. No one felt able to invite four horrible Herrings to their house and, after an abortive attempt by the Templetons to ship them off to America, Australia - anywhere - the Herrings dropped into obscurity in a Birmingham suburb.

But Rupert’s wedding … The dowager, remembering her lovely, youngest sister, dangerously allowing sentiment to overcome reason, made up her mind.

‘I’ll ask them,’ she decided. ‘After all, Melvyn is my nephew.’

And so the gold-embossed invitation bidding Mr and Mrs Melvyn Herring and Donald and Dennis Herring to the wedding of Muriel Hardwicke with Rupert St John Oliver Frayne, Seventh Earl of Westerholme, in the church of St Peter and St Paul on the 28 July at 12.30 and afterwards at Mersham, dropped on to the threadbare linoleum of the Herrings’ hall in 398 Hookley Road, Birmingham - with consequences which no one, at this stage, could possibly have foreseen.

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The wedding preparations now accelerated towards their climax. Carriers drew up, continuously, delivering antique wine coolers, famille vert bowls, ormolu clocks and a set of matching beermats showing views of the Hookley Road which the Herrings, enchanted to be taken up again by their grand relations, had pilfered from their local pub. The Rabinovitches, exceeding even their usual generosity, sent a six-hundred piece armorial dinner service decorated in sepia and gold. Muriel moved among her wedding gifts with great efficiency, acknowledging everything meticulously as soon as it arrived and personally instructing Proora as to its display -in the ante-room to the gold saloon. Old Lord and Lady Templeton wrote that they would come from Ireland. Minna Byrne most nobly offered to accommodate the Duke and Duchess of Nettleford and their four younger daughters, leaving only the Lady Lavinia to sleep at Mersham. The dowager wrote a friendly note to Dr Lightbody and his wife and was relieved, though surprised, that Muriel apparently had not one living relation who would wish to see her married.