In Distant Fields (5 page)

Kitty was rescued from any more conversational essays by the arrival of Partita's brother, still in his hunting clothes.

‘Forgive me, everyone,' Almeric said, making a dramatic, mud-spattered entrance. ‘Forgive me,
Mamma, but we have had such a day and I am thirsting for a cup of your delicious tea, and some cake.'

Almeric Knowle padded in bootless feet across to the fireplace where he collected a cup of freshly poured tea from his mother.

‘We shall forgive Almeric for his
déshabillé
, shall we not?' Circe wondered, watching with affection as her son tucked into his tea while warming himself in front of the welcoming fire.

‘Everyone forgives Almeric,' Partita sighed. ‘He is the son and heir.'

‘Not quite true, dearest, not quite true,' Circe said, smiling.

At home Kitty would have helped pass round sandwiches, if there were any, but at Bauders she could only stand, one of a group, while footmen in their country tweed livery, their carefully padded stockings making their often sadly thin legs look flatteringly muscular, circled with plates of delicacies. Everyone talked and laughed as they were meant to do. The truth was, she felt as if she was taking part in a play but, as yet, did not quite know her lines, and yet wanted nothing more nor less than to learn them, before the curtain fell.

‘There seems to be something on that mind of yours, Miss Kitty,' Bridie remarked through chattering teeth as Kitty sat by her bedside fire, trying not only to warm herself, but also to come to a decision as to what exactly to wear for the
evening. ‘You have the look of a broody hen, so you have.'

‘It's nothing, Bridie,' she told her maid, who was now standing to one side of the fireplace, offering her thickly mittened hands to the warmth of the flames. ‘I'm just a little fatigued after the journey.'

It had all seemed so simple when she and her mother were shopping; they had thought that two or three outfits for the daytime, and the same number of gowns for the evenings would prove quite sufficient, and in more modest households they would have done, but not at Bauders. Yet it wasn't the amount of dresses and outfits Kitty now guessed she might need that concerned her, but their quality. The clothes she and her mother had purchased were shop bought, while every gown and ensemble Kitty had seen so far were all couture, which was why she was now frightened that she might look unfashionably cheap.

Partita opened the intervening door between their rooms.

‘Scratch – scratch?' she said from the doorway. ‘I don't know what you're planning for this evening, but Mamma sent her maid along with this. She thought it might fit you.'

Partita was holding up a simple silk dress inset at intervals with Brussels lace. The gown was not only exquisite it was quite obviously couture and bang up to the minute, being in the Grecian style, slim and close-fitting.

‘Your mother is very kind—' Kitty began, only to be overridden by Bridie, who was obviously going to have none of it.

‘Miss Katherine has dresses of her own, so she does,' Bridie told Partita. ‘She has no need to be borrowing of a gown from anyone at all, God love you all the same. Tell Her Grace thank you, but Miss Katherine will be addressed in one of her own gowns, so she will.'

‘It's not that at all,' Kitty stated, feeling and looking mortified at Bridie's outburst.

She could have spared herself the embarrassment because it seemed Partita had long ago summed up the maid for what she was – a fashion devotee. She sidled up to Bridie.

‘Now, Bridie, I know you have the best taste in the world because my maid, Tinker, too has the best taste in the world, and so I know when you look closer at this you will appreciate the work that has gone into it. There was, after all, nothing like Mr Worth's gowns, and this was made by his pupil, Monsieur Soren, whom, as you know, some people feel could be even more inspired than his master. Do see.'

Bridie paused. She had a friend who worked in one of the back rooms of the great couture houses. She knew of the work that went into the new gowns, of the outworkers crowded in a stifling room, who ruined their eyes stitching and sewing to make such dresses as Partita was holding up in front of her.

‘Sure wouldn't I know it was couture, just to
look at it? Just one look and you could tell,' Bridie conceded. ‘This is a gown designed by Monsieur Soren, did you say? Well now, he is, as you say, gifted all right.'

Partita smiled. ‘Take a closer look, Bridie. See the way he has had the pearls set so delicately in the lace insets?'

‘There's a lot of women's work gone into that, Lady Partita, a great deal of work. Sure I know that just from glancing at it.'

‘I'll leave you to talk it over with Miss Kitty.'

Partita slipped from the room, and when she returned it was to find not only Kitty looking ravishing in the dress, but to overhear Bridie's version of recent events.

‘And there was I, frightened to death you was going to refuse to wear it,' Bridie sighed, walking round and round Kitty in order to make sure everything was perfect. ‘Sure you could hardly be too proud not to wear such a lovely gown as this, Miss Kitty.'

‘I love this high belt with the pearls strung across it.'

‘And couldn't it just have been made for yous?' Bridie was adding, with one final tug at the hem, which was so strong it nearly unbalanced the wearer. ‘Which is why Her Grace must have gone especially to find it for you, for must not she have known in an instant that this dress could have been made for yous and yous alone?'

‘It is beautiful,' Kitty agreed, looking at herself
in the looking-glass and feeling once again that she had stepped into a world that had little reality but was somehow lit by its own magic.

The mood was further enhanced when she once again followed Partita down the great wooden staircase to the marble hall. By now, due either to the mighty fires, or the ever increasing population of the castle, the temperatures everywhere seemed happily to have risen. The marble Great Hall glowed even more at night, the colours of the stone warmed by the candlelight and the flames of the log fire. Partita had marked Kitty's card as to the progression of events. It seemed everyone was to congregate for drinks in the Chinese Room, followed by a formal dinner for forty guests.

‘This is really dull,' she sighed, stopping to check her hair in an ancient silver-framed mirror hanging on a nearby wall. ‘Allegra and Cecilia commandeered Tinker – so now I keep wondering whether or not my mother's maid has made a drover's pudding of it.'

Kitty, who had put up her own hair into a perfectly formed chignon held at the side with a dark tortoiseshell buckle, stood behind her.

‘It looks perfect, Partita, really quite perfect.'

To reach the Chinese Room they had to pass down a long ornate Gothic corridor, hung about with rows of ancient leather fire buckets, along which, and quite out of keeping with the decoration of the Great Hall, were arraigned an endless array of magnificent stags' heads, all staring
across the corridor into each other's dark soulful eyes. The guests then mounted another set of stairs lined with footmen in white wigs, the gold facings of their dark blue coats gleaming in the candlelight. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, two of the tallest footmen, clothed in faded green velvet laced with gold, flung the double doors open on to the Chinese Room, so named because it was inevitably hung about with eighteenth-century wallpaper and hangings in the Chinese manner.

Across the room the young bloods waited, fresh from their day's hunting, fired up by their sport, the champagne, and now the notion of the festivities to come. Groups of older relations and friends, such as are always invited everywhere at Christmas-time, had stationed themselves together, gossiping and chatting, their jewellery reflecting the light of the hundreds of candles above them, the women's priceless diamonds giving out a pale dullish blue.

The arrival of the girls did not occasion any particular stir among the older guests, but a great deal of interest among the young bloods.

‘Ah ha. That must be Partita's new friend with her, ain't it, Almeric?' Teddy Heaslip asked.

‘It certainly is, Teddy,' Almeric replied, without turning to look at him since he too was busy surveying the room.

‘Quite delightful, wouldn't you say, Hughie?' Teddy continued.

‘Positive delight to the eye,' Hughie Milborne
agreed, turning his large, dark, and oddly sad countenance momentarily to the red-haired Teddy. ‘In fact, positively so.'

‘Still,' Teddy sighed, taking another glass of the champagne offered to him from a silver tray held out by a footman, ‘can't mind her. Duchess's instructions are for me to take Partita in to dinner, so off I go before some other fellow gets clever and jumps the queue.'

Teddy wandered off towards Partita, watched in some amusement by his friends, who all knew that Teddy, along with most young men of her acquaintance, had fallen hopelessly in love with Partita when she was hardly more than fourteen years old.

‘Who is it precisely that's alongside Partita, Almeric, old fellow?' Hughie asked. ‘Take it she does have a name?'

‘As a matter of fact she's Evelyn Rolfe's daughter.' Almeric raised an eyebrow. ‘You know who I mean?'

‘Yes, I know who you mean,' Hughie replied. ‘We all know Sir Evelyn.'

Indeed almost everyone who was anyone knew of Sir Evelyn Rolfe, brilliant horseman, incurable gambler and notorious rake.

‘How he is still actually in circulation, not fled the country, is something that is beyond everyone,' Hughie continued, turning to Almeric.

‘Quite, particularly since the chap's game is baccarat, which my father always describes as a game played by bores.'

There was a small silence as they all contemplated Kitty's father's indelibly black reputation.

‘Poor child.' Peregrine Catesby spoke for the first time, and as he did they all turned slowly to look at him.

Peregrine Catesby was the eldest of the group of friends by some six years. He was not so much handsome as actually beautiful, and already as famous for his brilliant scholarship as Kitty's father was for his vices.

‘Poor, poor beautiful child,' he murmured again, staring across at Kitty, who had produced a little fan and was waving it about her face against a sudden flush of high colour caused by the candles. ‘Introduce me, Almeric. There's a good fellow.'

‘Of course.'

‘Miss Rolfe,' Almeric said after the two men had crossed the room, ‘allow me to introduce you to Mr Catesby.'

Kitty nearly found herself staring a little too long into Perry Catesby's famously handsome face.

‘Mr Catesby.'

‘Miss Rolfe.'

Peregrine turned to indicate Almeric. ‘Lord Almeric here has just told me that I am to have the pleasure of escorting you in to dinner.'

Almeric managed a smile, despite the fact that he himself would have liked that privilege, but in common with everyone else at Bauders Castle,
including the Duke and Duchess, he could refuse Perry Catesby nothing. Quite apart from anything else, everyone knew that if it had not been for Peregrine Catesby's inspired coaching, Almeric would never have got a place at Oxford.

‘I shall just confirm this with Mamma,' Almeric went on, a look of envious resignation on his face.

Left on her own with Peregrine, Kitty found herself about to become tongue-tied. Perhaps Peregrine sensed this, because with that ease that is second nature to the kind-hearted, he proceeded to make pleasant conversation, looking round the room in which they were standing as a museum guide might.

‘This and the Marble Hall at Bettingsby are perhaps two of my favourite rooms in England,' he said. ‘It is more tasteful than the Brighton Pavilion, which I always think verges on the vulgar, while this is light and graceful. Do you have an interest in domestic architecture and design, Miss Rolfe? Or do you find such matters too trivial?'

‘By no means. I am fascinated by architecture and domestic design.'

‘I truly believe, like that great philosopher Thomas Aquinas, that design is a moral issue.'

‘I dare say it must be,' Kitty agreed. ‘After all, where and how we live must influence how we think. It must be difficult to be dirt poor, I should have thought, and put your trust in God.'

Peregrine stared at her without speaking for a
few seconds. This was not the kind of reply he had expected, nor the kind of conversation to which he could normally look forward when escorting a young lady into dinner. Perhaps because he refrained from saying anything that could be construed as being patronising, in no time at all they found they were both discussing the merits of various exhibitions that had taken place lately at South Kensington, before taking their places in the line of guests forming a queue behind the Duke and Duchess, who were now beginning to proceed into dinner.

The happily chattering crocodile of guests followed their hosts through a long picture gallery, on into the great gilded dining room with its elegant coffered ceiling, beneath which they sat down to dine at a magnificent long table set about with tall, flower-bedecked silver epergnes, vast gold ivy-decorated candlesticks and gold knives, forks and platters, while a ten-piece orchestra, seated on a podium at the far end of the room, played a selection of Strauss waltzes for their entertainment.

Once the first course had been finished and the plates removed, Partita turned her attentions to Valentine who, like Teddy Heaslip, she liked to think was liable to become impassioned by her, although thankfully not in the habit of delivering books of handwritten poems to her. But as she chatted and flirted, she observed Peregrine turning his attention once again to Kitty, whom, she noted, had been escorted by him into dinner.

Peregrine can't like Kitty. He can't!

By the time the ladies had withdrawn from table, leaving the men to pass the port, Partita realised that no matter how
she
might feel, Peregrine might feel very differently.