After Clare (3 page)

‘I'm not sure.' She avoided his eyes. ‘Maybe the Blue Bird. With Xanthe and a few others.'

‘Don't do it, Poppy.'

He'd heard of the Blue Bird of Happiness and what went on there. He caught hold of her wrist to emphasize his point. Her bracelets jangled. ‘Let go, you're hurting me,' she said pettishly. ‘I know what I'm doing, I am not a
child.
'

No use telling her not to act like one, then. There was no coping with Poppy lately. He dropped her wrist and picked up his scarf. Before he could say anything else, she added, ‘By the way, Dee tells me Lady Fitzallan is coming home for the wedding.'

‘What, the Female Fitz? After all these years?'

‘The
rich
Female Fitz.' Shortly before he died, their father, Jack Drummond, had extracted a promise from his older friend, Sir Patrick Fitzallan, to keep an eye on his boy, should anything untoward happen. A reluctant promise, Val was sure, for he and Sir Patrick had never met, although he had sometimes received gifts at birthdays and the like which he suspected had not come from him – or not without prompting.

Now, remembering this generosity, he felt ashamed of using the absurd nickname he and Poppy had once thought so amusing – why, he could not now recall.

‘Paddy Fitzallan did promise to look out for you, remember, even though he seemed to find it convenient to forget more often than not,' Poppy reminded him, ‘so you see why I think we might even have to consider hiring a suit for you, dear brother, so that you can be at the wedding. Just a jog to the memory.'

‘You are the giddy limit sometimes, Sis.'

‘Well, since he died without seeing fit to leave you anything – or scarcely anything . . .'

‘Maybe he hadn't anything more to leave?'

‘But she has, hasn't she?'

His expression as he stared at her turned to pity. It hurt Poppy more than it hurt him to be poor. What, in the ultimate, did it matter, as long as you ate and had somewhere to sleep? But sometimes he thought Poppy would do anything to be free of the worry about money. He said softly, ‘Don't be like this, Pops. It's twisting the way you are, as if you didn't care any more, though I know you do.' He paused. ‘You'll have to get over him some time, you know, but this isn't the way.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' said Poppy.

Rosie stood in the middle of Dee's bedroom for her last fitting, feeling a fool in pale primrose crêpe-de-Chine. Yellow – it
was
yellow, whatever Dee liked to call it – was positively the
last
colour she would have chosen for herself, though she felt there was probably nothing else that would suit her either, not with this gingerish hair and pale skin. She was certain it would make her look washed-out, or jaundiced, and cruelly emphasize the band of freckles across her nose.

‘Do pull your shoulders back, for goodness' sake, Rosie,' her sister said impatiently. ‘It doesn't make you look one inch shorter to hunch up like that.'

Rosie tried to do as she was bid. It was Dee's wedding, after all, and she knew that it was useless to try and make herself look inconspicuous, since that was something she would never achieve, however hard she tried. Having been told decisively that no, she could not wear flat shoes, she was going to tower even more over them all, especially over Dee, who took after their mother, and not after their father's side of the family, the tall Markhams. But yellow! It was all right for the other five bridesmaids, most of whom came in varying shades of brunette, and it was, of course, all part of the colour scheme, everything designed to complement the bride's flaxen hair and Dresden-china complexion. Not that
Dee
would be wearing primrose – ivory slipper satin for her, orange blossom circling her brow and holding down Great-grandmother's cherished Valenciennes lace veil, a single string of pearls round her neck, her bouquet a sheaf of pale roses and lilies, dripping with maidenhair fern and, tucked in for luck, a sprig or two of Scottish white heather. The white heather would also feature in the flower arrangements around the church, as a gesture to all the Erskines who would have made the long journey down from Scotland. There was going to be a lot of tartan, too, at this wedding. Rosie suppressed a giggle at the thought of Hamish with bare knees and a kilt.

For the bridesmaids, there were to be posies of cream moss rosebuds, a fillet of gold leaves across their brows, buckled black satin shoes and the black and gold enamelled pendants the bridegroom was going to give all of them, and of course the wretched primrose dresses.

‘Ouch!' Rosie winced as a pin stuck into the fleshy part of her hip.

‘Sorry, Miss Rosie, but you'll have to stand still while I mark where this seam needs a little – er –
release
. Just a teeny-weeny little bit, that's all it needs.'

That meant she hadn't lost the five pounds she'd been determined to shed before the wedding, even though Miss Partington from the village, who was making all six of the bridesmaids' dresses, was notorious for erring on the generous side with regard to measurements. Her usual customers were robust country ladies, not the fashionably thin clients of the London couturier who had made Dee's dress, an extravagance dear old Dad hadn't batted an eyelid over. Gerald had even offered to pay for Dimitri to make Mother's outfit for the occasion as well, but she had raised her eyebrows and said no thank you, she would go to the same little woman in London who always made her clothes, an impoverished Frenchwoman who sewed beautifully, entirely by hand. Well, who could blame Stella for not wanting to change? Her clothes were never anything but a perfect, immaculate fit.

‘There, that should do,' Miss Partington said, rising triumphantly and flush-faced to her feet and standing back to allow Rosie to admire the effect in the long pier glass.

Maybe she hadn't done such a bad job, after all. Apart from the colour, Rosie was surprised at how well the dress looked. Perhaps she was a few pounds thinner. She still wished she had won the battle over the shoes.

Miss Partington, who wore a handkerchief scented with Phul-Nana tucked into the vee of her brown moiré silk dress, a little pincushion strapped to her wrist with elastic and a tape measure around her neck, watched her walk across the room and then darted in to mark another ‘teeny-weeny release', plus an adjustment to the handkerchief points of the skirt. Rosie sighed, but she knew that the dress-maker had put her heart and soul into this most important commission of her life, working her fingers to the bone for weeks so that there would be no room for supercilious comments from any of the London guests. ‘Thank you, Miss Partington, that looks really lovely,' she said, and Miss Partington blushed a dusky red, captivated, as everyone always was, by Rosie's smile.

Dee sat at the dressing table applying nail varnish while all this was going on, making the most of it while she could. Whatever she wanted, she wouldn't be allowed to walk down the aisle with painted nails – or lips. Mother, so chic, never behind the fashion herself, was adamant about that. ‘No,' she had said, and because Stella so rarely bothered herself to forbid anything, Dee knew there was no room for argument. Mothers had to be especially vigilant nowadays – no one wanted to be left with spinster daughters on their hands, which was more than a possibility when so many young men, eligible or otherwise, had been lost forever – and Stella was not about to allow anything to mar this brilliant marriage one daughter at least was about to make.

Dee herself was euphoric at having caught the eye of the heir to a Scottish whisky fortune, especially one who was not mean, as Scotsmen were reported to be. Freezing to death in a dreary old castle or tramping about in the damp heather, eating nothing but porridge and making babies to continue the Erskine dynasty didn't appeal much to her. But that wouldn't happen until old Trump retired (an event not likely in the foreseeable future) and Hamish became head of the Erskine whisky-distilling firm, rather than just managing its London affairs as he did now. Meanwhile, Hamish was prepared to give her anything she asked for, and more. She already had a twenty-one diamond bracelet, a fabulous fur and the divine little house just off Sloane Square, furnished in the very latest style on the advice of Poppy Drummond and Xanthe Tripp, and just waiting for them to move into.

Oh yes, Poppy.

Dee picked up the guest list and saw that she had accepted, after all. So she hadn't taken the huff at not being asked to be a bridesmaid, though she was supposed to be one of her best chums and an old school friend. Dee felt a tiny twinge of remorse about that, but with Poppy's looks . . . well, she would have been a fool to risk having her thunder stolen on her big day, wouldn't she?

He was a virtual stranger to Emily – Dirk, this cousin who was more than twenty years her junior. Unknown to her apart from that short, very surprising visit he had made to her in Madeira, the year before the war, and by the few brief letters which had since passed between them.

It was the spectacles, though, that made him virtually unrecognizable. Heavily horn-rimmed, with thick lenses, they drew attention to themselves and disturbed her almost as much as the exaggeratedly careful way he walked. She followed his tall figure into the library where he said tea was waiting, and once there, he slumped clumsily into a chair. He couldn't be drunk, surely? At five o'clock in the afternoon? She thought not; his speech was in no way slurred when he introduced his stepsister Marta – a name evidently more acceptable to English tongues than Maartje, the one she had been given at birth – and he was taking his teacup from her easily, heaping jam onto a scone without any trouble.

Emily's aunt, Florence Vavasour, had not married until late in life, after accepting a proposal from a prosperous Dutchman called Kees Heeren, a widower with a young daughter. She had gone off with him to Holland, expecting to live happily ever after, but her hopes had been brought shockingly to a halt by his sudden and unexpected death after barely two years. The shock was not lessened by finding he had not been the well-to-do man he had led her to believe. She was left alone in Utrecht, with very little money, to bring up both his daughter, Maartje, and her own child, Dirk, who was still little more than a baby, whereupon her brother, Anthony, had invited Florence and the children to move back into Leysmorton, her childhood home. It would alleviate his own lonely existence – his wife dead, Emily already married and beginning to live that new, peripatetic life in various distant parts of the world. While as for Clare . . . it was best not to speak of Clare.

The Heeren children, then, had grown up in England, cared for by his housekeeper, once his daughters' old nanny, and becoming to all intents and purposes wholly English. It had never occurred to Emily, when she became the house's owner on her father's death, that she should not allow them to stay at Leysmorton, occupants and custodians, for as long as they wished. She was still living abroad, with no reason to believe she would ever return. Every reason indeed why she should stay away.

But when Dirk had decided to pursue his career in London and Marta, evidently unwilling to live at Leysmorton alone, had joined him, the house was left alone for the first time in its history. With some trepidation, Emily had agreed to it being leased, furnished, to the Beresfords. It had turned out to be a short-lived tenancy, though their eventual departure fortunately coincided with the taking over of the house by the army for use as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.

She had been puzzled by Dirk's initial reluctance, when the war was finally over, to move back to Leysmorton. It had, after all, been his home for most of his life, and since Emily, the last of the Vavasours, was childless, the house, not to mention her fortune, would eventually come to him. Perhaps he had not wished to appear too eager to let it be seen he had an eye on his inheritance. In the end, though, he had returned, bringing Marta, still unmarried, with him.

Now, observing the ease with which he sat in a chair that was obviously ‘his', Emily wondered what he felt about her return, and was relieved when he broached the subject himself.

‘It's good to see you here,' he began, when the small talk languished somewhat. ‘I hope, Emily—' and then he stopped, uncharacteristically hesitant, fiddling with those spectacles, an annoying habit he seemed to have. ‘I wouldn't like you to think that I – we – don't still regard Leysmorton as your home, you know, and if you wish to come back and live here, Marta and I would leave—'

‘My dear Dirk, don't be absurd! I have no plans for that.' Indeed, when Paddy had died, she had stayed where she was, unwilling, or perhaps afraid, to leave her island home. ‘In any case, do you think I would dream of turning you out, as long as you're content to stay here?'

But he did not know her well enough to know what she might do, any more than she had insight into his wishes on the subject. That one time when they had met she had felt he was something of an unknown quantity, and now she was not sure whether it was relief or something else that showed on his face at her reply.

Her young cousin had succeeded in carving out a place for himself as an established author, reinvented as Dirk Stronglove. ‘Heeren won't do, these days,' he'd remarked then, with a touch of cynicism. ‘Could be German, as far as most English folk are concerned, and being thought German is hardly a thing to encourage in view of the feelings against the Kaiser and his countrymen at the moment.'

She knew he was right. The suspicion, if not downright antagonism with which the British regarded anything German had reached them even in Madeira; it was all part of the simmering cauldron of European politics that was boiling up in countries with unpronounceable names, and would soon disrupt the peace of the whole of Europe.

‘At any rate,' he had concluded, attempting a lighter tone, ‘the name Heeren wouldn't help to sell the books – not the sort I write, anyway.'