Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus

by Beaton, M. C.

  And in answer Dolores let out a series of stentorian barks. “Theh you ah!” said Joey triumphantly. The gentleman appeared to be English, to judge from the strangulated accents coming from him. But his fair lady had undoubtedly sprung from Brooklyn soil. Molly looked feverishly around the shop. No cough medicine.

  She stood irresolute. She did not want to send these grand customers away empty-handed. Then Molly remembered her grandmother’s old receipt book in the back shop. Surely there would be something in that.

  “We have just the thing, if you will wait a few minutes,” said Molly, nipping deftly around the counter and placing a chair for Dolores next to the shelves of canned goods. And hustling the wide-eyed Mary in front of her, she bustled into the back shop.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Mary.

  “We ain’t got no cough syrup.”

  “Haven’t got any,” corrected Molly automatically. “But there’s bound to be something in Gran’s book. Here it is! Now, let me see—cough, cough, cough—ah, got it! Find an empty bottle, Mary, and draw a label—you’re good at that—and call it…oh, something fancy.”

  While Mary seized her ever ready paints and paper, Molly got to work. In a small bowl she mixed fennel, cinnamon, anise, and lemon and added two spoonfuls of honey. It needed more. It needed something to bring these fabulous people back to the Maguire store. Alcohol! That was it! Coming as she did from a Polish-Irish background, Molly was convinced that adults were fueled solely by alcohol. Her mother’s bottle of 140 proof Polish vodka stood over by the sink. She added a great slug to the mixture and turned to see how Mary was getting on.

  Mary had cut one of her small drawings out of her pad. It showed a rather evil-looking leprechaun sitting on a rock, leering up at several fairies who were dancing through a rainbow overhead. Mary had quickly added the words MAGUIRES’ LEPRECHAUN DEW in bold black gothic lettering.

  “Oh, that’s very good. But it’s awful, too,” laughed Molly. “They’ll know we’re taking the Mickey.”

  “Come along, gels,” trumpeted the voice of Joey. “Meh Dolores is waiting.”

  “It’ll have to do,” hissed Molly, pasting the label on the bottle. “Here goes!”

  “This is our own recipe,” said Molly sweetly, handing Dolores the bottle. Dolores looked suspiciously at the leprechaun who seemed to look suspiciously back, but Joey was already pulling out a purse and demanding the price. Molly thought quickly. She did not want to charge too little. She did not want to charge too much. She took a deep breath. “Fifty cents, please,” she said. “It’s a very old recipe and we don’t give it to many customers.”

  “It had better work or youse’ll hear from me,” said Dolores nastily. Joey was looking at the Maguire sisters in a way Molly did not like.

  When the door had crashed shut behind the customers, Molly and Mary remained standing primly behind the counter until they could hear the car no longer. Then they both burst out into peals of laughter, hanging on to each other. “Leprechaun Dew, indeed,” howled Mary. Then she sobered. “But why are you always after me to talk proper, Molly? She don’t. I mean she talked like a regular Brooklyner.”

  Molly hesitated. And then, lowering her voice, she said, “I think Dolores was that man’s mistress.”

  “Ooooh!” screamed Mary in gleeful dismay. Then her face fell. “It’s a pity if she is. Thought she was one of them East Siders who’d take a fancy to us and introduce us to society, where we would meet a prince.”

  Molly gave her an affectionate hug. “Let’s forget about the whole thing. Wouldn’t Ma be mad if she knew what we’d done!”

  Perhaps Mrs. Maguire would never have heard of their visitors had they been sold something other than cough medicine. Dolores moved on the fringes of the best circles, where she was only barely tolerated because of her protector’s great wealth. No lady was going to listen to Miss Dolores’s views on anything. Anything, that is, but the common cold, that most democratic of minor illnesses.

  The stunned Maguire parents found themselves being besieged during the following week for Maguires’ Leprechaun Dew. The secret was out and the custom was in as Molly mixed and filled and Mary drew and painted and the limousines and carriages blocked the narrow lane outside.

  By the following week the Maguires were closing up shop very early indeed so that they could cope with the flood of orders. Neither parents had any proper business sense and the whole thing might have fizzled out for lack of supplies, but Fate decided to take a further hand in the presence of Mr. Bernard Abrahams who ran the tailoring shop next door.

  Mr. Abrahams was in his thirties and had recently and gloomily inherited the business from his father and was reputed to make the worst suits in the whole of Brooklyn. But Bernie had also recently discovered a talent for turning money into more money by gambling shrewdly on Wall Street. He elected himself advisor to the bewildered Maguires. With his beaky nose and brightly colored waistcoats, he darted around the Maguires’ small living room above the shop like some strange bird of paradise. Soon a small factory in Red Hook was turning out the precious bottles of cough mixture, and the huge bull-like figure of Mr. Maguire twisted and turned to follow Bernie’s mad gyrations and his large cauliflower ears strained to take in a flood of talk about stocks and shares and distributors and international markets.

  Now that the factory was in operation, Molly and Mary felt somewhat at a loss. The work and bustle had gone now that bottles of Maguires’ Leprechaun Dew were now appearing in all the major pharmacies.

  One evening after she had put up the heavy wooden shutters, Molly climbed the stairs to their small dark living room to find Bernie, as usual, holding the floor. Her mother had been darning a sock but it lay limply in her hand as she turned her large, dazed white face to Bernie’s small animated one. “Millionaires!” she was saying faintly.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” said Bernie, hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat and then peering down to admire the gleaming white of his new spats. “So you’ve gotta move in with the nobs, now…see. Can’t go on living in a rat hole like this.”

  Mrs. Nadia Maguire looked dazedly around the dark living room. “But what will we do? What will happen to the girls?”

  “They’ll become ladies, that’s what,” said Bernie. “As for you, Ma, don’t you want to travel? See the Riviera and places like that? I’ll find a companion for the girls. One of their schoolteachers’ll do the trick.”

  And that, reflected Molly, had been the beginning of the end. They had moved to a great dark brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with Miss Simms, their former English teacher, as companion while their parents went off on a world tour.

  Miss Simms was a brisk, ferrety woman who hid a penchant for gin under an energetic exterior. Her way of introducing the girls to Brooklyn Heights society was to inform them that their neighbors were “common” and to take them for long, dreary walks on the Promenade. They still wore their plaid school dresses and white starched aprons and had their uncomfortable boots bought for them for two dollars and fifty cents a pair at the Waldorf Shoe Company in Fulton Street. They could do little else about it for Miss Simms held the purse strings. Bernie would occasionally relieve the monotony of their existence by taking them to Dreamland, the great pleasure park at Surf Avenue and West Eighth Street, where they could do their own world tour through four simulated corners of the globe. But mostly he was absorbed in his business affairs.

  Then at last the Maguire parents returned, much changed. Mrs. Maguire seemed to think it fashionable to appear chronically ill. Her fat figure had dwindled to angular lines and she perpetually held a long, trailing handkerchief in one hand and a bottle of smelling salts in the other. Pa Maguire had adopted what he fondly believed to be an English accent and rivaled Bernie in the brightness of his waistcoats and the whiteness of his spats. But the homecoming welcomes were hardly over when the last blow fell. The Maguire parents had arranged for Molly and Mary to travel to England.

  They were to stay with a cert
ain Lady Fanny Holden at a fashionable English resort called Hadsea. There they would be polished and molded and prepared for a London Season. They would both marry lords and live happily ever after.

  Mary began to cry. Everything had been taken away. Her school, the cosy shop, the work, their home, and now their parents. Molly stood protectively over her, prepared to do battle. But the arrival of Bernie knocked the wind out of her sails. For Bernie, noisy, garrulous Bernie, whom she had looked upon as an uncle, was equally enraged. He, Bernie, had planned to marry Molly. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, Molly found she had nothing to say.

  She would look on the bright side of things. Perhaps when they sailed to England there would be other young people on board the liner. There might even be a prince, she told Mary.

  So two white-faced and sad American misses set sail on the great liner Titania. And right into one of the worst of the Atlantic storms.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The beaten and battered Titania crept up the oily estuary waters of Southampton as one by one the shaking passengers began to emerge on deck, most of them for the first time. They walked up and down, talking in shocked whispers and staring in awe at the battered superstructure of the ship. The ship’s doctor bustled from cabin to cabin with his black bag, ministering to those who had not yet recovered from the horrendous journey.

  The Maguire sisters huddled together for comfort beside the rail and stared in dismay at what they could make out of their new homeland. A steady drizzle was falling from a dark-gray sky. The clouds were so low that they lay in great sodden masses along the low hills of the Southampton estuary. It all looked bleak and unfriendly and foreign.

  Both were reflecting dismally on what Miss Simms had told them in a fit of drunken venom. “Think you’re going to marry lords?” the ex-schoolteacher had hiccuped. “Why, they’ll laugh in your faces.”

  “B-but Lady Fanny—” Molly had stuttered.

  “Her!” sneered Miss Simms. “She’d groom a pair of Hottentots for the London Season. She’s being paid to do it. You’re nobody special.”

  It was then that Molly had felt a cold rage taking possession of her.

  “You, Miss Simms,” she said with an edge to her voice that Mary had never heard her use before, “are also being paid to be a companion and not a drunken, venomous mentor. I am dismissing you.”

  “You always were a fresh kid,” retorted Miss Simms indifferently. “Cheese it. You ain’t firing nobody. Your pa hired me and your pa fires me. So there.”

  She had then turned back to her ever constant companion, her bottle of gin, leaving Molly to stare at her with baffled fury.

  Now as they stood at the rail, Mary said suddenly, “Perhaps if we behave very badly, Lady Fanny will send us home.”

  Molly straightened her spine and stared out at the dark shores of England. “No we won’t, Mary. We’re American. We’re democratic. We’ll do our best, and if they don’t like it, they can send us home.” A sudden vision of the cosy shop in Jane Street, with its cluttered sacks and cans of goods, its smell of spices and coffee and candy, sprang into her mind; a little world shielded from the dark by the warm flare of the gaslight. And then she realized that her home was gone and her parents—two posturing strangers she did not recognize. Two salt tears rolled down her cheeks, adding their moisture to that of the now steadily falling rain.

  The bustle of departure from the ship went by like a rain-soaked dream. The press swarmed over the Titania, taking photographs of the storm damage and lightening the dark day with their magnesium flashes. Ignoring a very white-faced Miss Simms, the Maguire sisters walked arm in arm to the barrier and noticed, still as if in a dream, that a smartly dressed footman was holding up a placard bearing their names.

  In no time at all, they were cosily tucked up in rugs in a large traveling carriage and bowling away from the bustle of the port, with the coachman gaily cracking his whip and two enormous footmen perched up behind.

  Molly was glad to see that Miss Simms was beginning to look cowed. The Maguire sisters had been treated with every deference and Miss Simms with practically none at all. In fact, one of the footmen had taken a contemptuous sniff of the strong aroma of gin that surrounded the companion, had given Miss Simms one scandalized look, and then retreated to his post. Miss Simms began to chew peppermint pastilles as hard as she could and kept muttering that she wished she had not come.

  Their journey was broken at a large inn and it was there that Molly first became aware of how strange they must look.

  Both girls were dressed in their green-and-white plaid school dresses covered with their best starched aprons. All their clothes were to be bought for them in England so Mrs. Maguire had thoughtlessly provided nothing new for the journey. Molly had grown since leaving school and she realized, to her embarrassment, that she was showing an unseemly expanse of ankle. The dining room of the inn seemed to her unsophisticated eyes to be extremely richly furnished, with its deep turkey-red carpet and its small, glittering chandeliers.

  Every time she said something to Mary, everyone in the dining room would stop eating. They did not stare, they were too polite for that. They simply sat and listened and then leaned their heads together and whispered. Molly had cut up her roast beef and vegetables and was eating it all with her fork. But this, she realized, was completely the wrong thing to do. It seemed one must use both knife and fork at the same time and hold them rather like pencils. It was all very strange.

  All too soon they were back on the road, bowling between high hedgerows that filled the carriage with green gloom, up little rises past tiny farms—like farms in a children’s storybook.

  Molly’s head was beginning to droop. The lunch had been heavy and she was feeling sleepy.

  “Hadseal” called the coachman, and she straightened up. Mary and Miss Simms had both fallen asleep, the latter snoring with her mouth open and her once jaunty straw hat askew. Molly let down the carriage window and looked out. The carriage was winding down a steep road. On the right, the sea seemed to stretch to infinity, and as they turned another bend the heavy clouds parted and a broad, sparkling ray of sunshine lit up the little town nestling in the curve of the bay.

  The clouds parted more and more as the carriage wound down the hill. Colors sprang magically out of the dark landscape. Great clumps of sea pinks clung to outcrops in the springy turf, harebells quivered in a light breeze, a whole field of buttercups blazed out to welcome the return of summer, and brightly painted fishing boats bobbed and danced at anchor on a sea of pure aquamarine. And a long curve of golden sand bordered with little creamy waves stretched around the length of the bay.

  The Maguire sisters and summer had arrived at Hadsea.

  Lady Fanny Holden gave a final authoritative twitch to a vase full of roses and, having decided that they had been properly disciplined, turned to her husband, Lord Toby, as the next thing that needed to be put in order.

  “Now, Toby,” she barked, “it’s no use standing there shuffling and muttering in that irritating way that it’s all a bore. The gels will be here shortly and you must change. You are not an example of an English gentleman of the aristocracy in that filthy old tweed jacket. I shall never forget the humiliation the day I gave it to the church sale and found that you had bought it back.”

  Lady Fanny was an energetic woman in her fifties, with thick white skin, pale-blue eyes, and well-ordered salt-and-pepper hair. She was inclined to be plump but kept the unseemly bulges rigorously at bay in the confines of a long Empire corset.

  Her husband had a hunted air. He was tall and thin with thick fair hair, a fair mustache that he kept fingering nervously, and rather bulging weak eyes. He was at that moment dressed in the offending jacket, an old pair of knickerbockers, worsted socks, and elderly brogues cracked and trodden into comfort. Sometimes it seemed to him that his whole married life had been a desperate search for ease and comfort, constantly stymied by the rigorous discipline of his wife.

  For one whole beautifu
l summer last year he had enjoyed the peace of Hadsea while his wife chafed at the inactivity. He had pottered in the garden, stared at the sea, gone for long walks with his silent dogs, and occasionally dropped into the Prince of Wales down by the pier for a pint. Now all that had fled. His wife had insisted that they needed more money. Hadsea had become fashionable. Already other titles—the sort of bores one tried to avoid at the club—were all around, alive and well, doing Larsen exercises on the beach and generally mucking up the scenery.

  Any money for the tutoring of the Maguire sisters seemed to have been used up already on a too-large army of supercilious servants who kept popping out of the shrubbery like damned jack-in-the-boxes to light his bloody cigar when he least bloody wanted it lit! His beloved garden was now the property of two crusty, gnarled Scottish gnomes with their numerous undergardeners who had a positive mania for making straight lines and bordering them with the shells from last night’s dinner. It was downright upsetting to see the remains of one’s moules rémoulade keeping a bed of petunias at bay.

  Driven from the sitting room by the noise of carriage wheels outside and the impatient cluckings of his wife, he muttered and pottered his way upstairs.

  Lady Fanny adjusted her enormous white lace hat to precisely the right angle—one inch more to the left would be rakish and one more to the right would be common—and turned with a smile of welcome on her face.

  The Maguire sisters stood in the doorway, holding hands and looking at her “as if I had come out of the Ark” as she often said afterward.

  Lady Fanny’s opening words were typical. “Oh, dear, dear, dear. Those clothes. Horrid. What can your mama have been thinking of? And what’s that?”

  “Miss Simms. Our…er…companion,” said Molly weakly.

  “Then take it away. It won’t do,” said Lady Fanny, waving her gloved hand.

  Miss Simms pushed past the sisters into the room. “Are you talking about me?”