Tilly (3 page)

And poor, unsophisticated Tilly played right into her hands. The glittering youth of social London embarrassed her dreadfully and she was apt to reply to any conversational sally with a grunt. She was unused to wearing skirts and would therefore stride
mannishly into a room and flop down on a chair with her legs spread apart.

Tilly’s education had been scant, having only had the benefit of a governess for a mere two years of her young life. Her mind was still very immature. She lived in the pages of penny dreadfuls, filling her lonely hours with glorious tales with titles such as
The Jew Detective, The Blue Dwarf,
and the aforementioned
Robin Hood.
She read American imports such as
Unravelling the Twisted Skein; or Deadwood Dick in Gotham,
and
The Ghouls of Galveston,
and she followed the adventures of Frank Reade’s
The Steam Man,
a metal steam-driven coal-burning robot, wearing a topper out of which poured smoke as the robot waded into the Comanches.

She vaguely dreamed of marriage to some good sort of fellow with a predilection for hunting. She often thought of the handsome marquess, but only as a man she would like to have as a friend. She was not for one minute aware that she had fallen in love with him during the king’s visit. Her comics were no help in educating her mind along the path of passion, for her heroes, if they did get married, seemed to enter into a sort of fourth-form friendship.

She looked around the room, feeling lost and somehow foreign. The Duke and Duchess of Glenstraith were very “up-to-date” as the latest slang had it.

They slavishly followed the Art Nouveau movement and had had all their massive Victorian furniture enameled in dazzling white. Sticky-looking chintzes with large cabbage roses were draped over the sofas and chairs and uncompromisingly hard William Morris settles flanked one of the latest gas fires, a terrifying sort of black-lead sarcophagus hung with asbestos stalactites that glowed red when the gas was lit.

A sort of chandelier embellished with glass flowers hanging on brass stalks hung down from the center of the ceiling, and in the center of each flower was a glass electric light bulb that shed an orange-yellow antiseptic glow, quite unlike the soft light from the old oil lamps back at Jeebles.

I shall have to talk to Aileen,
thought Tilly.
I’ll ask her not to make fun of me and then maybe she will advise me how to behave.

Tilly was to accompany Aileen to a ball that night. She had not been told that she must not dance or that she was expected to sit with the chaperones, but in some strange way it seemed to be expected of her.

The gong was rung for afternoon tea and Tilly wearily made her way to the drawing room. Tea was too delicate an affair for Tilly’s robust appetite, consisting as it did of tiny cucumber sandwiches, wafer-thin bread, and thin fingers of cake. She longed for one of her old nanny’s nursery teas, with bread slices like doorstops and fat slices of plum cake. But nanny was dead, having waited only a month before following her master to the grave.

It had been a source of wonder that Tilly had no relatives to take care of her, but such was the case, both Lord and Lady Charles having hailed from singularly sickly and short-lived families.

The duchess, Aileen’s mother, was already presiding over the teapot. There were no guests.

The duchess betrayed her Scottish heritage by being built like a Highland cow. She had a great, lowering, massive face, which was very hairy, and wore large hats that always seemed to have embellishments sticking out of them like horns.

She was dressed in a rose-colored silk blouse with a huge bertha of Irish lace and a long black skirt. For once her hat was a plain biscuit straw, but it was adorned with two
huge, bristling steel hatpins that curled up like the horns of the animal she so resembled.

“Sit down, Tilly,” she barked. “My fairy’s lying down.” The fairy was Aileen.

“You should have gone with her today,” went on the duchess, pouring tea. “Like to know what she gets up to, and it’s not often she don’t want you along. Thoughtful gel!”

“Quite,” said Tilly faintly. She always found the duchess rather overwhelming. Like most people who have absolutely no manners at all, the duchess felt that she was the one best suited to train her daughter’s companion in the social arts.

“Have you read your etiquette book?” she demanded, putting three small cucumber sandwiches into her mouth at once.

“Y-yes,” stammered Tilly.

“Where have you got to?”

“The bit about snubbing. ‘The woman who cannot snub, on occasion, may be pronounced almost incapable of giving good dinners,’” quoted Tilly dutifully.

“Quite right,” said Her Grace. “The world is full of nasty pushing toads who don’t know their places. Keep up the good work. Pity no one’s come to call, but they must know my fairy’s getting a rest before this ball. I’ve only
got you to talk to and it’s a bit boring, but nonetheless I’ll have to put up with it.”

Tea was enlivened by the arrival of the duke. He was a very tall, very thin man with a vague apologetic air, and he aspired to dandyism in a timid way. He was wearing a single-breasted sack suit with the latest in peg-top trousers, a high wing collar, and a polka-dot tie. He was carrying a novel in one hand.

“Found this in the library,” he twittered. “Who’s been reading this muck?” He brandished a copy of Elinor Glyn’s
Vicissitudes of Evangeline
which had just been published and damned in the press as “scandalous.”

“I have,” said his lady indifferently, removing a piece of watercress from one of the long hairs on her chin. “Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. There’s nothing in it except that it says that the heroine looks very becoming in bed.”

“What’s up with that?” asked Tilly, forgetting her usual silent role in her surprise.

The duchess looked at her with contempt. “No nice woman wants to look becoming in bed, that’s what!”

“I will not have that word spoken in this house!” declared the duke with surprising vigor.

“What word?”

“Bed!”

“Tcha!” said the wife of his bosom nastily. “What do I say to the upstairs maid if she leaves wrinkles in the sheet, eh what? ‘Mary, you haven’t made the er—er up properly.’ She’ll think I’m talking about the piss-pot.”

The duke subsided, yet looked ready to cry at this final vulgarity. Tilly took pity on him and tried to change the conversation. “What’s the country like at Glenstraith?” she asked. “Good hunting?”

“Don’t know,” said the duke. “Cruel sport. Poor little foxes.”

Tilly felt flushed and crushed. She had never thought of foxes as anything other than vermin. It seemed as if every single one of her ideas was wrong in this strange city.

“The Marquess of Heppleford hunts,” she finally said.

“Heppleford?” said the duke, momentarily diverted. “Sound chap. Something funny about his old man’s will, you know. His father died not long before yours and, of course, he inherited the title, but there wasn’t a will. Now the will’s turned up in one of the books in the library and Heppleford’s gone to see his lawyers today. He’ll be at the Quennell’s ball tonight but—I mean—there shouldn’t be
any difficulty. He’ll inherit all right. The old marquess didn’t have any other heirs to speak of. He’s a rich young man in his own right, of course.”

Tilly felt suddenly elated at the thought of seeing the marquess again. Perhaps he might even ask her for a dance….

Poor Tilly had been dubbed the “Beast” by Lady Aileen and her frivolous friends. The Marquess of Heppleford, on the other hand, had long enjoyed the title of “Beauty.” Because of his startling good looks, he enjoyed high popularity with both sexes, the men accounting him no end of a good fellow and the ladies, down to the last crusty dowager, swooning at his approach. He had remained remarkably unspoiled by all this adulation, having a cynical turn of mind combined with a sunny good nature.

At that moment, however, he looked neither beautiful nor good-natured. His perfect features were marred by an angry scowl as he allowed his valet to assist him into a boiled shirt. His father had been very strange indeed before his death. He had frequently preached to his son on the merits of married bliss, aided and abetted by the marquess’s two aunts, who had marriageable daughters.
Now the late marquess’s will had descended on his heir like a bombshell. The marquess naturally inherited the title, but he would not see one penny of his father’s considerable personal fortune were he not married one month after the reading of the will.

He had planned to marry eventually in his own good time. Now he was forced into a scrambled courtship. Although he was a wealthy young man in his own right, he would need every penny of his father’s fortune to keep the family home, Chennington, and estates in good and profitable order.

One aunt, Lady Mary Swingleton, had three daughters and the other, Lady Bertha Anderson, had two. All were quite well-favored girls, but the marquess had no intention of marrying one of his second cousins just to oblige. In fact, he was already hellbent on marrying any girl who would drive his scheming aunts into an apoplexy. He thought briefly of the beautiful Lady Aileen. Now, there was a young miss who would take the shine out of any other aspiring marchioness. Well, he would make haste to further his acquaintance with the beautiful Aileen at the ball that very evening.

Feeling better now that he had decided on at least some vague plan of action, he slowly
descended the staircase of his town house in St. James’s Square to find his friend Toby Bassett waiting for him in the library.

Toby was often compared to the poet Byron, having a dark and brooding sort of beauty. Like his friend the marquess, he was tall. He had a luxuriant mop of black curls and dark liquid eyes that were often half-hidden by heavy lids. The marquess was well aware that his friend’s brooding air of mystery was because Toby was almost always slightly inebriated, being not quite drunk, not quite sober. But the ladies were not so aware, and wove fantastic fantasies to account for Toby’s strange, slumbering gaze.

“How did the reading of the will go?” asked Toby indolently from the depths of a Thonet rocking chair.

The marquess briefly outlined the terms.

A look of unholy amusement enlivened Toby’s brooding good looks. “Famous,” he said. “Nice to see you embroiled in some human difficulties for once, Philip. Had it too easy all your life. Drifted through your exams as a boy, drifted into wealth, drifted into the title…”

“It doesn’t disturb me now,” said the marquess lightly. “I shall drift into marriage just as easily. And who is going to refuse my title
or fortune? I was pretty angry at first, and I’d still like to get back at those old tabbies of aunts of mine. I know they made Father put that ridiculous clause in his will.”

Toby abruptly lost interest, two minutes being his normal attention span. “Who’s the Beast?” he asked. “Glenstraith’s girl keeps telling funny stories about her Beast.”

“I don’t know,” said the marquess. “Probably someone she met at one of those society parties. You know, the latest thing. A mad artist or a tattooed boxer or something like that.”

“Probably,” echoed Toby, adjusting his tie in the looking glass and pulling down his white piqué waistcoat. “Shall we go?”

Tilly turned around in front of the long glass in her bedroom and considered that she looked as well as could be expected. The duchess had insisted on furnishing her with a new ball gown. It seemed very grand to Tilly, who did not know that the duchess had bought it at the Indigent Gentlewoman’s Annual Sale for a very small sum indeed, and only then because she was on the committee and felt obliged to buy
something.
Unlike Lady Aileen, who enjoyed the services of a French lady’s maid, Tilly had to rely on her
own resources. So there was no one around to tell her that the dress was quite unsuitable for a plump red-headed virgin. The dress was made of coral velvet with a blue chiffon fichu that was tied with a black velvet bow at the back. The coral velvet, which clashed quite dreadfully with her red hair, was elaborately embroidered with pink roses and ended in a thick hem of fox fur.

Having decided that her gown, at least, was elegant, Tilly plumped herself down at the dressing table and studied her healthy, tanned complexion in dismay. Since she had been given one of the guest bedrooms, there was an ample supply of unguents and lotions in front of her. “May as well do it properly,” muttered Tilly to herself and unscrewed a pot of white enamel that was the foundation base used by every lady from Queen Alexandria down. With a liberal hand, she began to apply it to her face until a white mask stared back at her. Much encouraged, she opened up the onyx powder bowl and liberally applied pearl powder—made from bismuth oxychloride—to her face with a large swansdown puff. Then she tried to blend rouge into her cheeks so that she would have the perfect fashionable doll’s face. She had put her hair up over pads so that it seemed
at least a foot high. Tilly decided to frizzle her hair at the front with the curling tongs to complete her appearance.

She set the tongs on their little spirit heater and then spat on them to make sure they were hot enough. She raised the tongs to her hair.

“Mademoiselle!” came a sharp cry from the doorway.

Tilly swung around with the curling tongs in her hand to see Aileen’s pert French maid, Francine, standing with her hands raised in horror.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tilly. “Is anything up with Lady Aileen?”

“No, it is
you
, mademoiselle,” said Francine. “The maquillage is so bad for you. All that white. It is bad cosmetic.”

Tilly looked at her in surprise and then picked up the jar of enamel. “Seems all right,” she said. “It’s called Blanc d’Argent. Very pretty.”

“But these creams have a base of lead, mademoiselle,” said Francine earnestly. “The lead, it eats away at the skin. Even your Jersey Lily, Lillie Langtry, she now have the dreadful skin from such stuff, so. And you must not frizz the hair. You have a natural curl. You have—”

“Francine!” said Lady Aileen, tripping into the room. “You must not stand here gossipping and neglecting your duties.”