Tilly (6 page)

“Heppleford’s coming for dinner,” she told her cronies. “Great hopes there. You know, of course, that he’s got to get married?”

“Of course,” echoed Lady Wayne, a tall, angular committee member. “How did you manage it? We’ve
all
invited him to dinner and he’s refused every single invitation. He won’t even look at those cousins of his.”

“My fairy is very beautiful,” said the duchess in a smug voice.

Lady Wayne bridled. “My little Emily is accounted quite a picture. Perhaps there is some other attraction….” she added maliciously with a sly look in Tilly’s direction. She lowered her voice to a sort of booming whisper. “He spent quite a bit of time with her at the Quennell ball, you know.”

“Nothing to it,” replied the duchess with a
massive sneer. “He knew her father. Taking pity on her, mark my words.”

Tilly heard the last words and came down from her dreamworld with a bump. She had been indulging in a glorious vision of the dinner party, where the handsome marquess had eyes for no one but herself.

She was relieved when the duchess suddenly produced a turnip of a watch and exclaimed it was time to leave.

She climbed into the victoria after the duchess and sat with her back to the horses. The hard sparkle of the sun hurt her eyes. It bounced from the white, fluttering blinds of the shops, from the plate glass of the windows and glittered on the burnished roofs. The press of horse traffic was immense and hot smells of manure mingled with the smell of dust. A pieman jogged past, his tray of steaming pies on a level with Tilly’s nose. All London was hot and baking. Flushed faces wilted above boned and celluloid collars. The duchess’s great red, hairy face seemed to burn like a Highland sunset and the sunlight glittered and flashed on her huge steel hatpins. Above the burning city stretched a sky of deep, fierce blue—
Like Philip’s eyes,
thought Tilly with a sudden stab of pain. She wanted to cherish and nurse her dreams. She
did not want to be faced with the reality of his presence that evening. She was so absorbed in this novel thought that it was a few seconds before she realized the carriage had stopped and the duchess was barking at her from the pavement “to stop gawking and dreaming.”

The Glenstraith’s house was musty and cool behind drawn blinds, the servants moving quietly through its subterranean light. Tilly longed to stretch out on her bed after releasing her body from its prison of stays and her swollen ankles from the torture of a pair of high buttoned boots. But no sooner had she removed her straw hat when she was summoned again to the duchess’s presence.

The Duchess of Glenstraith was in her bedroom. As Tilly entered, Her Grace was just in the act of plonking her great hairy feet into a basin of cold water.
So
, thought Tilly unromantically,
must the Highland cow cool his hot hooves in the chill waters of a Highland bog.

“Read to me,” ordered the duchess. “You’ll find
The Times
over there. Read the letters.”

Tilly stifled a sigh. A barrel organ was playing “My Little Grey Home in the West” somewhere at the end of the street, the tinny music rendered poignant by distance. And
the unbearably hot world of the outdoors seemed infinitely desirable now that it was shut away behind a screen of thick lace-edged blinds.

Tilly read mindlessly and then suddenly concentrated on what she was reading as the writer’s ironic humor penetrated her tired brain. The writer to the
The Times
was complaining that although the opera management of Covent Garden regulated the dress of its male patrons, it did not do the same for the females. The writer explained that he had worn the regulation evening dress. Tilly read:

Tilly looked up, her eyes crinkling with laughter, and then stared in dismay at the look of purple rage on the duchess’s face.
“Who wrote that—that
twaddle
,” spluttered Her Grace.

Tilly peered at the signature in the gloom of the bedroom. “Someone called G. Bernard Shaw,” she said.

“Might have known,” said the duchess, her agitated feet sending a great slop of water over the side of the basin. “Troublemaker!”

Tilly remembered with much amusement that the duchess herself possessed such a hat.

But the duchess’s next remark wiped the amusement from her face.

“I say, Tilly,” said Her Grace, lifting one foot out of the water and staring in seeming wonder at her toes, which well she might, since they looked like globe artichokes, “there’s no need for you to attend this dinner tonight. Be happier with a tray in your room, what? You never like this social twaddle anyway.”

Tilly felt suddenly rebellious. “I would like very much to attend,” she said in a choked voice.

“Well, you ain’t going to, so there,” said Her Grace nastily.

Tilly gave a stifled sound and fled from the room. She reached the sanctuary of her bedroom and hurled herself onto the bed and cried and cried. Now that there was no possibility
of seeing the marquess, her fickle heart told her that that was what she really wanted more than anything in the world. Her dreams and fantasies could no longer sustain her. She cried for the fall of the Burninghams, for the death of her father, for the humiliating days of her present existence. She cried so long and so heartily that it was some time before she became aware that someone was pressing a cool handkerchief soaked in cologne against her hot forehead. She twisted around and looked up into the sympathetic eyes of Francine. “You must not cry, mademoiselle,” said the lady’s maid softly. “I shall make you some tea and you will feel better. I, Francine, shall be upstairs also this evening, so we shall play the cards and I shall tell you very,
very
scandalous stories.”

“You’re dashed decent, Francine,” said Tilly, sobbing. “A real brick.”

Francine said nothing and simply took Tilly’s hot little hand in her own and sat quietly at the edge of the bed until the girl’s sobs had ceased.

They made an odd contrast, the flushed, tousled, and tearful Tilly and the cool and svelte lady’s maid with her neat black hair and snapping black eyes. But it was the beginning of a real friendship, a friendship that
was to mean more to Tilly than she could ever begin to guess.

The marquess shifted uneasily in his chair later that day and wished he had not come. The heat in the dining room was oppressive. Various Art Nouveau products of Louis Comfort Tiffany winked at him from the table and a madonna by Edvard Munch seemed to waver restlessly on the wall. The baking heat of the outside walls of the house had finally penetrated to the interior. Flowers wilted sadly in their bowls of melted ice.

Philip had hoped to see that strange tomboyish girl again, since he felt sorry for her, but she was unaccountably absent. The heavy meal and heavy wine combined with the heat of the room made him feel sleepy, and he would have been content to relax and exchange desultory pieces of conversation with the duke had it not been for Lady Aileen, who restlessly sparkled at him and postured and tittered and chattered. Any time she looked like flagging before the almost tangible air of boredom emanating from the marquess, her mother would spur her to fresh efforts with great nudges of her massive elbow and strange little whoops that sounded like muted hunting calls.

At last he put down his glass and said mildly, “I trust Miss Burningham was not affected by the heat. What is the matter with her?”

“Nothing that I know of,” said the duke in surprise. “She always joins us for meals. What is up with Tilly?”

His wife looked as if she would like to strangle him. Aileen’s beautiful face took on a sulky look. The duchess leapt into the awkward silence that had followed her husband’s question. “Yes, it was the heat. She’s not very strong, you know.”

“Dear me,” said the marquess. “I would have said she was as strong as an ox.”

Aileen giggled. “Oh, I must remember that. Poor old ox, Tilly.”

“I trust,” said the marquess in even tones, “that you would not repeat anything so cruel. I did not say ‘looked like,’ I said ‘as strong as.’”

Aileen bit her lip and her mother rose majestically from the table. “Shall we leave the gentlemen to their wine, my precious? Don’t be too long,” she added, waving a roguish finger at her husband. “Fairy’s going to play the piano for us.”

The marquess groaned inwardly. Would the evening never end? He and the duke sat in silence after the ladies had gone. The duke
was working himself up to snatching his guest away from the table as soon as was decently possible, and the marquess was plotting how soon he could make his escape and wishing he were a woman so that he could plead a headache.

All too soon the duke gave a diffident cough and suggested they should join the ladies.

Aileen was already seated at an upright piano. As soon as the marquess was seated she began to sing a selection from
Die Fledermaus
in a high, thin voice, which acted on his nerves like a knife being scraped across the bottom of a pot.

Finally he leapt in with his excuses when she paused for breath. He would need to get an early night. He had a lot to do in the morning.

Plainly disappointed, they reluctantly let him go. He felt guilty and pressed Aileen’s hand rather more warmly than he had intended as he made his good-byes. Aileen was immediately transported from a sulky child to a dazzling young woman. She was confident he was in love with her after all and put his long silences of the evening down to manly reticence. She would plot and plan and contrive to get him on his own.

The marquess stood for a moment on the steps outside and took in deep breaths of the now cool evening air. He climbed into his carriage with a sigh of relief and settled back against the leather upholstery, glancing up at the windows of the house as he did so.

He saw Tilly Burningham staring down at him from an upper window, her face lit clearly by the light of an oil lamp. It was flushed and swollen with crying. She raised her hand in a half salute. And then she was gone.

Poor child!
he thought as the carriage moved forward.
They deliberately kept her abovestairs
.

He was suddenly weary of the heat of London and of the idle gossip of the Season. He would travel to Paris in the morning and get away from it all for a bit.

A week had elapsed since the dinner at the Glenstraith mansion, and the marquess was sitting up in bed in his apartment in the Avenue Foch in Paris, reading the illustrated papers and well content with life.

By his side, still asleep, lay Cora Duval, one of the most beautiful courtesans in Paris. It had been, reflected the marquess, the most satisfactory liaison he had ever entered into, if not the most expensive. Cora was splendid in bed and witty and amusing out of it. He looked down at a copy of the
Illustrated London News
and frowned. There was a picture of Aileen and her friends, taken at Ranelagh, with the usual caption reading, “Enjoying the London Season are…” followed by a long list of names. To anyone who did not know the situation it would seem as if Aileen and her friends were enjoying an innocent joke.
The marquess searched on his bedside table, found a magnifying glass, and held it over the picture. The malice in Aileen’s eyes seemed to leap out of the page.

Her friends’ heads were half turned, and in the strong lens the marquess could make out the object of their mirth. Tilly Burningham was sitting a little behind them with the duchess. She was unbecomingly dressed in a dark gown with a severe collar, and the duchess was leaning toward her with an angry expression on her face. He looked up from the picture as his gentleman’s gentleman, Lennox, appeared with the morning post.

He flicked through it until he found himself staring down at a letter from his lawyer. He sliced open the embossed envelope and read the contents.

His lawyer begged to remind his lordship that the month was nearly up, and that if his lordship did not wed soon, he would forfeit his father’s fortune.

The marquess swore under his breath. Cora had made him forget the whole cursed business. He picked up the
Illustrated London News
again and stared thoughtfully down at the Ranelagh picture.

I’ll marry her
, he thought suddenly,
and then I can return to Cora. Tilly won’t mind.
I’ll get the fortune, she’ll get a home of her own, and then we can go our separate ways.

He leaned over the white length of his mistress’s body, revealed by the tossed back bedclothes, and shook one white shoulder gently. “Wake up, my heart,” he whispered. “I have to travel to London for a few days. But I shall be back as soon as I have attended to… er… some unfinished business.”

“Do not eat so much, Tilly dear,” said Francine. “You’ll ruin the figure.”