by M C Beaton
Kitty was dismissed. She ran lightly up the stairs to her room to sit before her precious picture and dream of stepping through the frame into that happy, painted world.
Spring at last came to the Heath. The new grass turned and rolled in the sun all the way to Highgate. During the light evenings when the remains of winter hung on in the bluish hue at the end of the Hampstead streets and lanes, the faint sound of the German band playing in the tearooms at the Vale of Heath could be heard, jauntily banishing the middle-class night.
But the Harrisons’ old home remained deserted with a few weedy daffodils blowing around the FOR SALE sign in the front garden. The Harrisons had taken up residence in Park Lane.
Kitty was preparing for her first ball. She had been kept out of sight until a truly massive wardrobe of clothes suitable for a debutante had been arranged. Lady Henley had ruthlessly instructed Mrs. Harrison to say that her husband had died the previous year. “Can’t have the girl going about in black.”
Kitty had often dreamt of getting ready for her first dance, and what she would wear, and how she would fix her hair. Until now, she had refused to let her French maid, Colette, dress her, but Colette had reported the fact to Lady Henley and Lady Henley and a huge plate of petits fours had assaulted the privacy of Kitty’s bedroom to “put an end to such shopkeeper nonsense.”
Poor Kitty! To have to stand naked in front of a supercilious French maid and endure the touch of her long, cold fingers, seemed humiliation indeed.
First her silk chemise was put on. Then the silk stockings were smoothed over her legs and clipped to the long, heavily-boned stays. Colette pulled the lacings round the waist with what seemed unnecessary savagery and then fastened pads on the hips and bust to achieve the hourglass effect. Then her drawers were hauled on, then her petticoat, and then the ball gown.
The ball gown was of simple white taffeta sweeping to a small train at the back and was cut lower on the bosom than most debutante dresses. But Lady Henley had crudely pointed out that if you wanted to sell the goods, you had to present them to their best advantage.
Her hair was piled up on her head over more pads and dressed with artificial flowers. A long fan with fringes was put in her hand, a string of pearls placed around her neck, and Kitty was ready to meet her new social contemporaries for the first time.
Lady Henley and her mother rose and stared at Kitty as she shyly entered the drawing room. Mrs. Harrison’s eyes filled with sentimental tears. “Why, you look really pretty.”
Lady Henley snorted and walked slowly around the girl, looking her up and down. “Not bad. Not bad at all,” she commented finally. “But you need a bit of animation. Pour her a glass of sherry, Euphemia.”
Mrs. Harrison moved stiffly across the room in all the glory of shot taffeta, a tremendous bustle and a new diamond necklace that she kept fingering nervously to make sure it was still there.
Lady Henley was encased in a purple silk dress of an old-fashioned cut showing a great deal of mottled bosom. A collar of large and dirty diamonds was clasped round the rolls of fat on her neck.
All three sat bolt upright with their drinks, restricted by their heavy stays. The drawing room, like the rest of the mansion in Park Lane, was light, charming, and characterless. Lady Henley had employed the services of an expert decorator and then imposed none of her heavy personality on the furnishings, unless you could count the trails of pastry crumbs that she left in her wake.
“Now remember, Kitty,” she said. “We’re going to a lot of expense to get you suitably married, so don’t let us down.”
“What about love. No one has mentioned love,” said Kitty softly.
“Love! Pah!” said Lady Henley. “Love has no place in a high-society marriage. Have your fun afterwards if you want. There’ll be plenty of chaps ready to oblige.”
Kitty blushed and bit her lip. A conversation such as this could never have taken place in a middle-class drawing room.
Mrs. Harrison felt a strange pang of maternal anxiety. If only Kitty had some more spirit. She had a sudden wish that her biddable daughter would tell Lady Henley to go to hell. Then she stiffened her resolve. Such thoughts were mawkish. Once Kitty was married to Lord Peter Chesworth, she would be in the company of other young married women and then she would find that most of them had settled for money or a title. Romance was for novelists and shopkeepers.
“Isn’t it time we left?” said Kitty looking at the clock. It was ten-thirty.
“We’re going to make an entrance,” said Lady Henley. “Make sure all the fellows get a good look at you.”
Kitty’s heart sank. She forced down her sherry and “felt light-headed and slightly sick. Finally, Lady Henley rang for the carriage and they made their way out into the April night. They bowled briskly along the London streets which seemed to be alive with all sorts of jolly, unfashionable people having a good time. The air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and lime. A young couple stood at a crossing, gazing into each other’s eyes. Kitty looked away.
The ball was held at a mansion in Kensington. The hostess was a Mrs. Brotherton, a wealthy woman who had outlived her husband; it was an age when society women survived their spouses in great numbers.
The sound of a waltz drifted tantalizingly on the air as Kitty and her two formidable chaperones walked up the red carpet on the pavement, past the policeman on duty, and into the entrance hall. After leaving their cloaks, they mounted to the ballroom on the first floor. As they were late, their hostess had already joined the dance.
Kitty stood at the entrance watching the chattering, glittering, circling throng and tried to remember that they were only human beings. Various young men who all looked bewilderingly alike in black and white evening dress, white gloves and patent leather hair, wrote their names in her dance card. She stumbled her way dutifully round the dance floor, bewildered by the strange speech. Everything was “cheery” or “ripping,” words she had not heard before. Finally, she was left to sit beside her mother. Then Lady Henley sailed up. “I must introduce you to a very good connection, Mrs. H—I mean, Euphemia.” With a look in her eyes like a hunter closing in on his prey, Mrs. Harrison got to her feet with a protesting creak from her stays, and followed her massive friend.
Kitty sat on that uncomfortable piece of furniture called a rout chair and felt wretched. All the young people glittered and laughed and chatted around her as if she did not exist She stared across the room and, for the second time, found herself looking straight into the eyes of Lord Peter Chesworth. He made every other man in the room look shoddy and insipid and very young. He moved slightly as if to cross to her side, but was waylaid by a dazzlingly smart lady dressed in scarlet chiffon. Long ruby earrings fell like drops of blood from her exquisite little ears and her black hair was piled on top of her head in glossy curls. Her eyes, which were of a light, clear blue with black lines round the irises, were gazing up at Lord Chesworth in an intimate and tantalizing way. He took her arm and led her into the dance where she swayed against him, her tiny feet barely touching the floor.
The tiny spark of hope that the evening would turn out to be anything other than depressing, died in Kitty’s heart as she watched them. She had spent her lonely hours building the Baron into a dream-lover because she had no other man to think of. She had heard that he was unmarried. She had never considered that he would be attracted to anyone else. But there was worse to come.
“Have you met the new heiress, Kitty Harrison?” The voice seemed to be almost in her ear and she jumped. Leaning back in her chair, she realized that one of her dancing partners was on the other side of the pillar with a friend.
“Gawd, yes. Pretty little thing but she jumps all over one’s feet and says ‘beg pardon, beg pardon’ the whole time, just like a bloody scullery maid.”
His friend whispered something and the dancing partner popped his head around the pillar, saw Kitty, gave her a cheeky, unrepentant grin and moved off arm in arm with the other man.
Kitty
sat on in misery, staring at the toe of her dancing slipper. What was wrong with saying “beg pardon”? At Miss Bates’s seminary it had been considered a very polite and ladylike thing to say.
The guests continued to circle under the orange glare of the recently installed electric lights. Not a very grand ball. At grand balls they used masses of candles, thought poor Kitty viciously, sitting surrounded by other wallflowers and the heavy scent of gardenias and wishing she were dead. No, that was not true. She wished them all dead first.
A shadow fell across her white dress and she looked up. Lord Chesworth was standing before her, flanked on either side by Lady Henley and Mrs. Harrison. He looked like a man who had just been arrested.
“May I have this dance, Miss Harrison?”
How Kitty longed for the courage to say “no,” rather than dance with a man who had obviously been coerced into it by her stern chaperones. She merely bowed her head and moved out onto the dance floor and, because she was past caring about anything, she danced beautifully. Lord Chesworth looked down at the silent girl and felt a twinge of pity which he immediately dismissed. The girl was obviously as pushing as her mother. Any girl who would sell herself into marriage for the sake of a title was not deserving of pity. Lady Henley had made it quite plain that Mrs. Harrison and her daughter were prepared to restore his estates for the sake of his title. A fair bargain.
He thought of Reamington Hall with affection. The spacious light rooms, the long driveway lined with magnificent lime trees, the pleasant park with its rolling lawns. If only he were there now instead of tied down in this stuffy, overheated room with this colorless girl.
Well, he must talk about something. He began to describe his home to her and, to his delight, found Kitty to be an enthusiastic audience. She knew nothing of the country. Hampstead Heath was about the nearest, she admitted with a shy laugh. Pleased and surprised, the Baron chatted on and surprised himself even further by taking her in for supper. He would marry the girl, he decided suddenly. She needed some social polish but she was malleable. Accordingly, when they returned to the ballroom, he left Kitty with her mother and returned to the supper room in search of Lady Henley.
She was tucked away at a corner table and the Baron watched her for a few minutes before joining her. After all, he thought, it was not every day he had the privilege of watching anyone eat smoked salmon and chocolate éclairs from the same plate.
The irony that this vulgar woman should be accepted everywhere while the refined and delicate Kitty was considered to lack “class,” did not occur to him. This was the only world he knew and he would no more have questioned its taboos and shibboleths than he would have dreamt of selling Reamington Hall.
He sat down beside her and got right to the point. “I’ll marry the girl.”
“Good,” said Lady Henley, wiping her fingers on her bosom. Traces of her progression through the dishes on the buffet were scattered through her diamond collar. A shred of Virginia ham clung to the top strand, a small piece of lettuce to the second, a sliver of quail bone pierced the third, and bits of éclair and smoked salmon were roosting on the bottom.
“She is willing to marry me?” questioned Lord Chesworth. “She seems such a biddable little thing.”
“All to the good then,” said Lady Henley, impaling a pickle. “Oh, she’ll marry you right and tight. The only thing is—how much do I get out of it?”
“You don’t,” said Lord Chesworth, putting his thumbs in his waistcoat and leaning back in his chair. “Mrs. Harrison’s already paying you to fix this. I know it and you know it, so don’t get greedy.”
Lady Henley shrugged and sent the debris of her repast flying about her skirts.
“Allonamurrerinamorden.”
“What?” said Lord Chesworth, wondering if she was perhaps attempting to speak Swahili. Lady Henley spat out a mouthful of canapés au parmesan.
“I said, ‘Call on her mother in the morning.’”
Lord Chesworth felt that surely Kitty would consider anyone a relief after company such as this and took his leave. He had better get started right away and dance with Kitty again.
Outside the supper room his arm was caught by Mrs. Veronica Jackson, her red chiffon dress swirling in the evening breeze from the open windows around her perfect, hourglass figure.
“Peter! Why didn’t you take me in to supper? It’s not like you to dance attendance on school-girls.”
“Well, I’m dancing attendance on this one,” he said, straightening his waistcoat with a jerk to cover his embarrassment. How could he tell this mistress of five years’ happy liaison that he was about to get married to someone else? He had always parried her hints in that direction by persuading her that they were happy enough as they were and that he did not intend to get married at all.
As he crossed to Kitty’s side, Mrs. Jackson watched him with an angry glare. She was thirty-two years old and very beautiful. But, looking at Peter Chesworth dancing with Kitty, she began to feel old for the first time.
Kitty was in seventh heaven. The Baron was not at all as cruel and supercilious as she had expected. He was charming and kind—and every other woman in the room was jealous of her; Kitty was feminine and human enough to like that.
When her formidable escort finally took her home, she was in such a happy daze that she allowed her maid to undress her without her usual shiver of distaste.
Lord Chesworth called promptly at eleven the next morning, resplendent in a gray frock coat, biscuit-colored trousers, and a yellow silk waistcoat embroidered with gold and scarlet humming-birds.
Lady Henley was waiting for him in the morning room, sitting contemplating a plate containing six poached eggs, with great satisfaction.
“Trying to lose weight,” she explained. “I always have a light breakfast.”
Mrs. Harrison came fluttering in wearing an unfortunate choice of pastel-colored organza, which highlighted her yellowish complexion.
“Dear, dear, Peter. I may call you that mayn’t I?” she gushed.
“Better let’er,” mumbled the poached eggs.
“Well, Peter. We have a lot to arrange. But first I would like to speak to you privately.”
Lady Henley was about to protest but at that moment the butler entered bearing a fresh plate of toast, dripping with butter. She gave a primeval grunt and settled back in her chair.
In the study at the back of the house, Lord Chesworth politely waited for Mrs. Harrison to come to the point. In his short acquaintance with her, he would not have thought her shifty. But she moved about the room nervously, picking things up and putting them down. At last she said, “It’s about Kitty. We are very honored by your proposal of marriage, but it suddenly seems all so mercenary.”
“Of course it’s mercenary,” said Lord Chesworth. “You never tried to pretend it was anything else.”
Mrs. Harrison’s pins started to rattle to the floor, a sure sign of inner tumult. She said, “Kitty is such a young thing. It would be nice if you—if you—well, if you could pretend to be a little in love with her.”
Lord Chesworth’s gray eyes narrowed. “You mean the girl knows nothing of the arrangement?”
“Well, of course, she does. But young girls are romantic.” Another hairpin fled the nest.
“I don’t call it romantic to want gilt on the gingerbread in this situation,” said the Baron roundly.
The softer emotions deserted Mrs. Harrison’s bosom. The business gleam was back in her eye.
“I have agreed to restore your estates at no small cost, Peter. Surely this little thing is not too much to ask.”
Peter Chesworth sighed. It was all so squalid but… there was Reamington Hall and it must be saved. In an unconscious imitation of Kitty, he bowed his head in assent.
Mrs. Harrison gave a grim smile. “I shall send her to you.”
Kitty, who was enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of a long lie in bed, struggled awake as her mother erupted into the room and began dragging dress after dress
from the wardrobe.
“Lord Chesworth is below, waiting to see you. I shall let him explain everything,” said Mrs. Harrison, tugging at the bell rope to call Colette.
The two women thrust her into her stays and laced them so tight she could hardly breath. Then a delicate Indian muslin was put on her slim figure and her brown hair was piled over the pads on the top of her head.
“Quickly, quickly,” hissed Mrs. Harrison. Her hour of triumph was at hand and she did not wish the Baron to escape at the last minute.
She pushed Kitty ahead of her into the study and slammed the door on the happy couple. Mrs. Harrison stood in the hall for a moment, leaning her hot forehead against the cool wall. “And how’s that, Frederick Harrison?” she muttered. “If you had been alive, you old miser, you would have had her married to the butcher’s boy!”
She marched into the morning room. Lady Henley looked at her over a piece of toast. “Don’t go leaving them alone too long,” she commented.
“Chesworth’s got a bit of a reputation.”
But in the privacy of the study, Lord Peter Chesworth was all that was correct. Clasping Kitty’s trembling hand in his, he explained that he had fallen in love with her at first sight. He had to declare himself immediately before she was snatched up by someone else. Would she marry him?
Kitty looked up into his white, handsome, aristocratic face with her heart in her eyes. Would she? She would indeed. All her dreams had come true. She was marrying for love after all.
What a little actress, thought his lordship, gathering her into his arms.
He pressed his mouth to the fresh young lips in a chaste kiss and suddenly thought longingly of a pair of warm and fiery ones. What on earth was Veronica Jackson going to say to all this?
Mrs. Harrison opened the door and beamed on them. Ever correct, his lordship turned, holding Kitty by the hand. “Mrs. Harrison, your daughter has just done me the inestimable honor of accepting my hand in marriage.”
After Lord Chesworth had left and she and Kitty and Lady Henley were sitting in the drawing room celebrating their triumph in their separate ways, the butler entered. “Lady Worthing and the Misses Worthing,” he intoned.
