A Mad, Wicked Folly (12 page)

Mrs. Fitzhughes, our housekeeper, was waiting in the
hall when I walked in the door. “Your mother wishes to see
you in her drawing room,” she said. “The new lady’s maid
has arrived.” Mrs. Fitzhughes drew herself up tall. “She has
red hair. It’s very bright. Not befitting a servant at all.”

It took everything I had not to laugh. “Oh,” I said.
“That’s . . . that’s a shame.”
“A letter arrived for you earlier, delivered by Mr.
Carrick-Humphrey’s footman. I had Emma put it in your
room.”
A personal letter from Edmund boded well. If my
behavior had made Edmund’s father change his mind, Sir
Henry would have written my father and I would have
heard nothing from Edmund himself. I left the housekeeper and went upstairs to the drawing room. I heard a
murmur of voices coming down the hall.
“Have you seen the latest
La Mode Illustrée
?” asked a
voice tinged with a northern accent. “There’s a ball toilette
illustrated there that I think would suit. It has a higher
waist with ruching round the hips. The skirt is narrow with
a slight train, and the bodice is sleeveless with a rounded
décolletage.”
“Yes! I know the gown,” my mother said, excited. “What
do you have in mind for garniture around the décolletage?”
“Plain, I think.”
“Oh?” Mamma sounded disappointed.
“Yes, I think that’s more suited to a young lady. You
don’t want too much frippery or else she’ll look overdone.
I can do a sash round the waist, folded at the hip and held
on with a silver buckle.”
Definitely a creature of my mother’s.
I peeked around the door. My mother was sitting in
her chair, and the lady’s maid was standing in front of her,
but they leaned toward each other, eyes sparkling with
unbridled fashion frenzy. They were clearly ecstatic in the
realization that they were able to communicate in the style
devotee’s native tongue.
Miss Sophie Cumberbunch was younger than any lady’s
maid I had ever met, maybe only eighteen or so. She was
dressed in the usual simple black gown appropriate for her
station, but it was fashionably cut and fit her perfectly, as if
made for her. She had dark-red hair, as advertised by Mrs.
Fitzhughes. But it wasn’t flowing down her back in a flaming fall of siren’s curls. It was gathered in a loose roll at the
nape of her neck. She wore a pair of steel spectacles, which
would look dowdy on most women, but the juxtaposition
of the workmanlike accessory against her elegance made
her look intriguing.
“Hello,” I said, stepping into the room, and taking care
to hide my bandaged hand in the folds of my skirt.
“Cumberbunch, this is my daughter, Miss Darling,”
Mamma said.
The lady’s maid turned toward me and curtsied.
“Pleased to meet you.” Those eyes behind the spectacles
were as green as emeralds, and she had a dusting of freckles across her nose.
I felt childish and plain compared to her. “And I you,”
was all I could think to say. I had never been tongue-tied in
front of a maid before.
“We’ve been discussing your engagement gown,
Victoria.” Mamma said. “Lady Carrick-Humphrey and I are
going to set the date of the ball for the evening after your
presentation at court. Cumberbunch says she can make the
dress herself.”
“I can select the cloth and notions from Liberty on
Monday after luncheon,” Cumberbunch said, “and begin
immediately.”
“Take Victoria with you. You can choose shirtwaists
and chemises for her. Have a look at the hats and whatever
else you think she’ll need.”
I couldn’t help but notice that Cumberbunch looked
dismayed when Mamma said this.
The feeling is mutual.
“I would go along,” Mamma continued, “but I have a
luncheon party to attend.”
“Actually, my charity is meeting at Temple Church
on Monday after luncheon, and I don’t want to miss it.” I
watched Cumberbunch out of the corner of my eye as I
said this. She looked relieved.
“I’m happy to walk to Liberty, madam,” Cumberbunch
said. “It’s not far. Perhaps we can all go together another
day. I think it would be better if you were there to help
choose.”
Definitely not better.
This settled, Mamma waded in with the second phase
of Victoria Darling’s reformation. “Now, Victoria, since
you’re missing the final classes of finishing school—
the preparations for coming out—I’ve enrolled you in a
school in Kensington called Miss Winthrop’s Social Graces
Academy. Cumberbunch will escort you there once a week
and you’ll be taught the popular dances of the coming
social season, important etiquette for the debutante, and,
most importantly, the court curtsy.”
Cumberbunch didn’t look dismayed at that chaperone
duty, oddly. She looked as friendly as she had when I first
came into the room.
A few more pleasantries were exchanged, and then I
was excused. But Cumberbunch remained. As I went along
the corridor to my room, I heard her telling my mother
about the new machine-made lace she had spotted during
the grand opening of Selfridge’s earlier that week, and
Mamma’s exclamation of delight.
In my room, I removed Will’s handkerchief and soaked
it in a basin of water. It was a simple cotton handkerchief,
frayed at the edges and torn in one corner. My heart tugged
a little to think of him carrying such a shoddy thing about.
I tossed my beret onto my bed and was starting to pull
the pins out of my hair when I caught sight of myself in the
mirror. I held up a hand mirror to look at the back of my
head. Actually, Will had done a stellar performance. He
had wound my hair into a coil and laced the pins through to
hold it all together. I lifted my hands to undo it but changed
my mind and left the bun in place.
Edmund’s letter was lying on my writing desk. I picked
it up and flopped onto my bed on my back. The envelope
was expensive-looking cream-colored paper with a wax
seal. I broke the seal and drew out the note.

I do hope you’ve gotten over your bout
of dyspepsia and that you’re feeling much
better today. I apologize for not coming by
to see you and express my wishes myself
but I had to return to Oxford for rowing
practice. I will be in touch regarding the
Boat Race. It would be my honor to have
you there.

I dropped the letter onto the bed.
Dyspepsia.
How gentlemanly of him to continue the indigestion charade. My
mind jumped to that cringe-worthy kiss. Our first, and I
had been sick all over him! How humiliating. It would be a
long while before I touched brandy again.

I stared up at my canopy and tried to picture what married life would be like with Edmund. Despite the outcome
of the evening, I had enjoyed my time with him. But when I
tried to picture Edmund doing homey things like sitting by
the fire reading a book,
or lying next to me in a bed
, William
Fletcher’s face appeared instead of Edmund’s.

Alarmed, I turned over onto my stomach and buried
my head under my pillows.
Goodness gracious!
What took
my imagination in that direction? Possibly because Will
was my inspiration for art. But why didn’t I long to paint
Edmund? He was handsome, with romantic good looks,
yet I had not the first urge to draw him at all.

But that was the peculiar way with artists. You never
knew who was going to inspire you. Étienne’s muse was
Bernadette. He had told me that a muse usually wasn’t
conveniently available. Often the person was out of one’s
reach. Before Bernadette, he himself had pined over a
mayor’s daughter for years, drawing her from afar, until
her father threatened him and he had to leave his own
home village. Dante Gabriel Rossetti poached Lizzie Siddal
from his friend and fellow artist Walter Deverell, creating
a rift in their relationship.

Don’t be so
naive and stupid and girlish as to believe
that Will is anything but your muse
, I told myself firmly. I
reminded myself that attraction for an art model was
acceptable—as long as it fed the creative process and not
the physical passion. However, the image of Will lying
next to me in my bed wouldn’t depart from my mind’s eye
as quickly as I would have liked.

Later, after Mamma went out to tea with friends, I sat
down to write Edmund a letter. There was no writing paper
in my desk, so I went into my mother’s drawing room to
look for some. There was a box sitting on her desk with the
lid off to one side. Thinking it was stationery, I took the
first page out. But it wasn’t stationery.

Inside the box were sketches. Not sketches for needlepoint patterns, but amazing sketches. I took them out,
one by one, and looked at them in the light streaming in
through the window.

My mother must have drawn these years ago, because
the sketches were of my brother and me when we were
children. There was a young Freddy, holding his cricket
bat, looking off in the distance at something, a sad expression on his face, as though hoping for something that would
never come. There was me as a toddler reaching toward a
flower where a butterfly sat feeding, an expression of joy
on my little face. Each drawing was better than the last,
showing mastery and skill that must have taken years to
perfect.

And then I took out the final one. It was of me, about
seven, squatting down to throw corn to a bird in the garden. But I was half drawn; only one side of my face was
finished. It was as though she were called away in the middle and never returned.

Why was Mamma dead set against my art ambitions
when she was so talented herself? Why had she put her art
away so long ago? And why was she looking at her drawings now? Was it because she, like me, had a voice inside
her that told her she wasn’t any good? That she was
preposterous
for trying?

Whatever her reasoning was, it had been enough for
Mamma to put it all away and to dissuade me from trying
to be an artist. I put the sketches back where I found them.
I didn’t want to ask my mother what had happened to her
art, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

IN LIGHT OF
the discovery I had made about Mamma,
I had hoped that she might be more on my side than she
let on. So on Sunday after church, I decided to ask her if
I might have my pocket money returned to me. At school
my parents had sent me money each week, but I had had
nothing since I returned. I had spent the last on hansom
cabs the day I went to the RCA.

But she laughed when I asked for money.
“I do not understand why I cannot have pocket money,”
I said. “Surely if I am old enough to be married then I can
have the responsibility of money.”

My mother stood arranging flowers in a large crystal
vase that sat upon the table in the hall. “I hardly think one
follows the other, Victoria. I can well imagine what trouble
you would get up to if you had the means. I’m sure you’re
after art materials.”

“No! I want to shop for my trousseau,” I said.
“If you want something for your trousseau, put it on
your father’s account, just as I do.” She snipped a little
off the bottom of a stem and placed it carefully into her
arrangement. “I’m not sure Harold can grow roses. These
look as though beetles have been at them.”
“Mamma, can you just consider what I’m asking?”
She frowned and pulled the roses out of the arrangement, discarding them on the table. “It won’t do. No, these
are dreadful.”
I stared at the red roses lying there. A petal was damaged on one bloom. She had dismissed the entire bunch
based on one flaw. For a moment I wondered if the sketches
I had discovered had truly come from her, because there
didn’t seem to be any sign of an artist left in my mother.
I nearly opened my mouth to ask her about them, but she
was staring at the roses angrily, so I gave up.
I went to my room and sat on my bed. There were so
many things of value in my room. Maybe I could sell something. But what? I scanned the top of my dressing table.
No, my mother knew everything that sat there, and she’d
ask questions. I thought of my grandmother’s jewelry that I
had inherited. There was a silver-and-jet ring that Mamma
deemed unfashionable and so I had never worn it. She’d
never notice it gone, I was sure of it.
I took the ring out of my jewelry box and turned it over
in my hands. It was solid silver, and the jet was fine, so it
must be worth a fair bit. But how would I sell it?
The only person who was able to come and go without
question was John, my father’s coachman. John wasn’t that
much older than I, and as he’d shown the previous day,
he didn’t appear to be as old-fashioned as servants who’d
been entrenched in their occupation forever like Mrs.
Fitzhughes or the cook. If Mamma asked, they’d tattle on
me without pause.
I found John at his usual spot, in the mews behind
the house, where our two Cleveland Bay carriage horses,
Chance and Ruby, were stabled. My mother was ever after
Papa to replace them with a Daimler motorcar, but my
old-fashioned father refused. He said motorcars were only
a trend and would never replace horses. I was glad he said
no, because I loved the horses.
I explained to John that I’d purchased the ring in an
antique shop in France, meaning to give it to my mother as
a gift, but only just discovered that she had one already. Did
he know of a shop that might be interested in buying it?
He did. And promising me he’d get a fair price, off he
went. An hour later he sent Emma up to my room with an
envelope. There were several notes tucked inside: enough
money for art supplies and a little left over.

N MONDAY, I
left in the carriage after lunch to
go on my first clandestine outing. I felt daring
and wicked and filled with giddy freedom, just
as I used to feel when Lily helped me slip away
from finishing school to attend Monsieur’s atelier. An an

ache of longing filled me, thinking about Lily. She would
have loved this caper. She always delighted in finding
new excuses and ruses for sneaking me out of the school.
I wished she were here now. I wished I could write to her,
but I knew Madame Froufrou would have seized any letter
from me, opened it and read it, even.