by M C Beaton
He himself wrote the cookery column, plagiarizing Mrs. Beeton without the smallest shred of conscience. He lived for the evenings, which he spent at the bar of the Red Lion around the corner, when, after the fifth pint, he could pretend he was a real Fleet Street man and hint darkly at scoops in far countries with all the other failures who were doing exactly the same thing.
Suddenly the whole morning-after futility of his job hit him.
“Very well,” he said to Sally. “But only a trial, mind. We only publish six letters and answers. But you have to reply personally to everything that comes in.”
“Is there a lot of correspondence?” asked Sally anxiously, looking around the cluttered room.
“No,” sighed Mr. Barton. “Aunt Mabel was too much of a Bible-basher to be popular. If you run short, make ’em up.”
“Isn’t that dishonest?” asked Sally, round-eyed.
Mr. Barton stared at her in disgust. “If you want to work in Fleet Street,” he said caustically, “you’d better learn the ropes. I am not asking you to report on wars that don’t exist or social scandals that never happened, although there’s plenty of those in the popular press. If you don’t have letters, write them yourself. That’s not selling your soul.”
Sally nodded. He stared at her, and then he said, “And another thing—don’t, whatever you do, tell anyone you’re Aunt Mabel. You’re too young, see! We’ve got a drawing of this sweet little old lady with specs at the top of the column, and that’s what you’re supposed to look like.”
“What are my wages?” asked Sally faintly.
“Two pounds and fifteen shillings a week,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it,” said Sally breathlessly. It seemed like an awful lot of money to her, and she had hardly made a dent in her fortune of two hundred pounds.
Mr. Barton gave a weary flip of his hand and strode out.
Sally slowly walked around the desk and sat down, hugging herself in excitement. She had made it! Here she was in Fleet Street, and an editor—well, Letters Editor—but still.
Sally’s first flight into journalism didn’t exactly hit the streets. That was not the way of Home Chats. It rather filtered its way into domestic homes and vicarages, where it mostly lay ignored until the cook took it away to the kitchen to copy the recipes, unaware that she had them already in her copy of Mrs. Beeton.
But first one person turned idly to the letter page and stared and showed it to another and another. Word of mouth is better than advertising any day, and soon copies of Home Chats were disappearing off the book stands and out of the kitchens as people exclaimed over Sally’s advice.
It was her reply to the pregnant housemaid that caused the most furor. First of all, letter editors were not supposed to publish such letters. They were supposed to send vague, woolly replies in plain envelopes. But not only had Sally published it, but she had gone to town on her reply.
She had urged the fallen housemaid not to waste her time with unnecessary guilt. The child must come first. The father, if he were not in a position to marry the girl, must be made to pay child support. The man was just as responsible as the girl for the unborn child. Sally had urged the woman to ask her mistress for advice, since “no lady with a true Christian spirit would even consider turning you out of doors.”
So those who were shocked at Sally’s forth-rightness felt hobbled when it came to writing a blistering reply, because nobody wanted to be accused of lacking in Christian spirit.
Then there was the girl who was being forced by her parents to marry the rich neighbor’s son. “Don’t do it,” said Aunt Mabel—Sally.
“Money cannot buy love, and there are times when one’s parents do not know what is best for one. Honor thy father and thy mother—but by all means follow the dictates of your conscience.”
Well, it was rather hard to argue with that one too.
By the time the next edition of Home Chats reached the public, the bewildered Mr. Barton found he had to increase the print, and Sally was in dire need of a secretary. Letters poured in by every post, and she worked long and hard to answer all of them. Then one night Mr. Barton had a brainstorm. He had never thought of that incredibly dull magazine ever blossoming into anything else. But why not? He, James Barton, could still be the reporter he had always longed to be. He knew he was good.
He walked out of the Red Lion, his pint of beer standing on the counter, untasted, and went back to the office and wrote a blistering article on the evils of prostitution. He had all the facts and figures at his fingertips, for he had written a free-lance article only the year before in a last-ditch attempt to prove himself. Now it would have a market.
In another month the big newspapers were beginning to sit up and take notice of this new child in their midst. Sally had an elderly secretary, a friend of Miss Fleming recruited from the lodging house, and two whole pages in the magazine. Mr. Barton had hired a reporter and spent the nights in consultation with his printer. The headlines became bolder and the stories stronger.
Following Sally’s example, Mr. Barton qualified his most lurid stories by pointing out that they were just what every God-fearing, thinking man and woman should know about.
God, the Bible, and titillation was a heady mixture. The public lapped it up. They could read all those scandalous letters and stories and know that it was their Christian duty to read such things.
Sales soared, and so did Sally’s salary. The dissolute relatives of the late Reverend Entwhistle became even more dissolute on the proceeds, and Mr. Barton could be seen drinking champagne occasionally in El Vino’s instead of sipping bitters in the Red Lion.
Sally and her secretary, Miss Frimp, and Miss Fleming left the lodging house and took an apartment in Bloomsbury.
Sally forgot about Emily and the children. Her whole life was centered in that one cluttered room behind the frosted glass door. She worked long and late. She enjoyed the heady feeling of exhaustion, the smell of success, the feeling of a day’s work well done, as she walked out into Fleet Street and looked down that famous canyon, breathing in the smell of hot paper, feeling the thud of the presses, and seeing the sooty dome of St. Paul’s floating against the night sky.
She hardly thought of romance or love or marriage.
In fact, she was getting a peculiar insight into the pitfalls of love, romance, and marriage as anguished letter after anguished letter reached her desk.
But strangely enough no one ever tried to find out the identity of the now-famous Aunt Mabel. The little old lady with the spectacles still beamed out wisely from the top of the page.
No matter how much he imbibed in the hostelries of Fleet Street, Mr. Barton always referred carefully to Aunt Mabel as “a nice old girl.”
And then one day the axe fell—in the form of a crested letter. Much impressed, Miss Frimp passed it over to Sally to open personally.
Sally read it through twice and then said faintly, “I must consult Mr. Barton.”
That gentleman was happily engrossed in his latest exposé—“A Day in a London Slum”—when Sally walked in and handed him the letter silently.
He whistled between his teeth as he read.
It was more like a royal command than a letter. The Duchess of Dartware had written, requesting Aunt Mabel’s presence at a house party in a week’s time. The duchess said her son was about to become affianced to a most unsuitable young girl, and she wished to have Aunt Mabel’s advice.
Mr. Barton stared at it and then stopped whistling and looked up. “Well, you can’t go, Miss Blane. Aunt Mabel must remain anonymous. Tell you what. I’ll write to her nibs and tell her that you never go anywhere, but that if she supplies you with a few more details, you’ll write the advice. That should fix her.”
Sally sighed with relief and went back to bury herself in her work. But somewhere there was a nagging feeling of disappointment. It would have been marvelous to have been able to visit a ducal home… just once.
Mr. Barton sent t
he letter to the duchess, and the duchess replied by wire.
Stop waffling stop send Aunt Mabel stop if you do not send Aunt Mabel I shall call at your office in person stop so don’t be a silly twit stop
Mary Duchess of Dartware
Sally and Mr. Barton stared at each other over the wire in consternation.
“We’re sunk.” said Mr. Barton, clutching his head.
“I have it,” said Sally. “We’ll let her call here. Miss Frimp can pretend to be me.”
But Miss Frimp nearly fainted at the very idea. Normally a timid soul, she dug her heels in on this one occasion and refused to budge, which left them exactly where they were.
Mr. Barton scowled while Sally paced up and down the room. She stopped suddenly and stared at a theatrical poster on the wall, and a mischievous smile lit up her face.
“I’ve got it!” she exclaimed.
“What?” cried Mr. Barton, who truly believed Sally to be omnipotent.
“I’ll hire a theatrical makeup artist,” said Sally. “A white wig, some spectacles with plain glass, and some rubber wrinkles, and—voilà! Aunt Mabel.”
“It’ll never work,” said Mr. Barton, but he looked longingly toward his unfinished article.
“Of course it will,” said Sally bracingly.
“Nothing to it! Two days with the old trout and I’ll be back.” She twitched the wire out of Mr. Barton’s unresisting fingers. “I’ll reply to this. Imagine! I’m going to be a duchess’s guest!”
Her hope and happiness buoyed her up all the way back to Bloomsbury, but there she met with a setback as her two older flatmates digested the news.
Miss Frimp, released from the social confines of the office where Sally was her boss, flatly stated that she thought the whole idea was “terribly dangerous.” Miss Fleming said gloomily that Sally was bound to be found out.
The three women were sitting drinking tea around the table of their sparsely furnished living room, which was devoid of the usual feminine knickknacks that one would expect three single ladies with good salaries to have.
But the fact was that all three worked long hours and never seemed to have the time to pay much attention to their home, short of paying a char to keep the place clean.
Sally had never regretted having chosen such odd flatmates instead of girls of her own age. She enjoyed Miss Fleming’s tough, intelligent brain and inside-out knowledge of the workings of Fleet Street, and she enjoyed equally Miss Frimp’s old-maidish manners and frequent shy little jokes.
They argued the pros and cons far into night, and by bedtime, Sally was more than ever determined to go.
Miss Frimp, who looked so like that picture of Aunt Mabel in the magazine, said with her infectious feminine giggle, “What if you were to marry the duchess’s son yourself?”
“He’ll probably be some pimply adolescent who’s fallen for a chorus girl,” said Sally. “And don’t forget, I shall be covered in rubber wrinkles.”
“Hadn’t you better look him up in Debrett’s Peerage? volunteered Miss Fleming. “Might as well find out who he is.”
“Time enough for that,” said Sally, yawning.
“All the time in the world…”
CHAPTER THREE
There has always been a lack of respect for titles and dignitaries in Fleet Street. A story is a story, whether it concerns Little Johnny Bloggs, age three, in Clapham, stuck down a coalhole—“He was ever so brave,” said thirty-year-old brown-haired, blue-eyed Mrs. Mary Bloggs, laughingly, yesterday—or the latest goings-on of His Royal Highness, King Edward. Sally had acquired the Fleet Street outlook by a sort of osmosis, and therefore had not paused to really think about what being a guest of a duke and duchess would entail.
Admittedly the theatrical man had done a wonderful job, and even the anxious and critical Miss Frimp had failed to recognize Sally as the sweet little old lady who had emerged from under the hands of the expert.
Sally had bought most of her wardrobe at a sale for Indigent Gentlewomen, balking at spending much of her precious salary on this masquerade.
She was to travel by train to Bath, and there she would be met and conveyed to Banjahar Palace. Sally had still failed to look him up in Debrett’s before leaving, and so had only a vague idea of the family she was going to meet.
The Dukedom of Dartware was pretty young by British standards. The first had gained his title in an obscure and undramatic way. With a handful of men, he had fought and overcome the small town of Banjahar in India, a place no one had heard of. He had also overcome the local nabob and had taken the man’s fortune in jewels as a sort of military reward. The most magnificent of these, he had presented on his return to King George II, who had not heard of Banjahar, nor did he even know where it was, but his royal eye was delighted with the presents. The king had also been imbibing a little too freely, and so he had made Colonel John Daumaunt First Duke of Dartware, Dartware being the name of the village over which the Daumaunts had ruled since the Norman Conquest. The first duke had decreed a stately palace to be built, and to celebrate his “famous” victory, he named it Banjahar.
That brilliant soldier, Clive of India, Baron Clive of Plassey, certainly had been heard to mutter on frequent occasions that he had never even heard of Banjahar, and why had Daumaunt gone to war against the nabob when he and his regiment were supposed to be somewhere entirely different?
But for all his failings as a military man, the first duke had proved to be a brilliant farmer and had made good use of all the agricultural revolutions of the eighteenth century, trebling his original fortune.
Of all this history Sally was only a little aware. It was after she had alighted from the train at Bath that she got an inkling of what was in store for her.
The magnificence of the carriage that was to bear her to Banjahar made her blink. Its crested panels gleamed in the dusty sunlight filtering through the sooty glass of the station. The footmen in their powdered wigs were at least six and a half feet tall, and the coachman looked as grand as a duke himself.
The well-sprung carriage bowled out of Bath, and Sally began nervously to consider her position. Where would she eat, for example? With the family? With the servants? In the nursery with the governess? The day was very warm, and she sent up a silent prayer that her rubber wrinkles would not become unglued.
Her worries and anxieties prevented her from admiring the view, and she was not even aware that they had traveled quite a distance until the coachman on the box shouted “Banjahar!” As she leaned from the carriage window he pointed down into the valley with his whip.
Sally took one look and leaned back, her knees knocking in sudden fright. The valley of Dartware lay spread out below the ridge along which they were traveling. And set in the middle of the valley like some exotic gem lay Banjahar.
Built of mellow portland stone, the huge mass of Banjahar, with its many towers and courtyards and pinnacles, lay spread out in the sun. Behind the house the lake and the many ornamental trees that set it off were a beautiful example of the work of Capability Brown.
The carriage turned and rolled to a halt before two imposing gateposts topped with stone tigers lying on their backs with their paws in the air. This, as Sally was to learn later, was to symbolize the first duke’s successful battle, but all her frightened mind could take in as the lodgekeeper ran to open the gates were idiocies such as What on earth is the heraldic term for an animal in a stupid position like that? Rampant? No… that’s standing up with paw raised like the lion of Scotland. Couchant? No, that’s lying down. Oh, dear, I wish I hadn’t come. It’s like going to Buckingham Palace to play some awful joke.
The carriage was now through the gates and bowling smoothly up a long, straight drive lined alternately with wellingtonias and statues of nude ladies with large hips, thick legs, and superior smiles on their faces. All too soon for Sally—although it was a very long drive indeed—the carriage was swinging around to stop at the main entrance under the shadow of an enormous statue of Palla
s Athene on a pediment.
Sally, feeling as frail as the old lady she was supposed to be, allowed herself to be helped down from the carriage.
A small figure in black silk with a black straw hat and black lace mittens, Sally slowly mounted the marble steps, flanked on either side by slain Indians—executed by Grinling Gibbons—and felt her heart sink somewhere down inside her elastic-sided boots.
I’m frightened to death, thought Sally.
“I’m frightened to death,” said Her Grace, the Duchess of Dartware.
“Well, you asked the woman, darling,” pointed out Mrs. Annabelle Stuart, a thin, acidulous lady. “You should have consulted me first. Fleet Street is packed wall to wall with grubby, encroaching people. I should know! When Jeremy—my cousin, you know—had that unfortunate affair with that chorus girl, they printed the whole thing all over the social page, carefully wrapped, tied, and delivered in genteel prose.”
“Ugh!” The duchess fanned herself vigorously and stared around the room for support.
The duke and duchess and their houseguests were seated in the long drawing room, which took up quite a sizeable portion of the ground floor of the palace.
The ducal son, Paul, Marquess of Seudenham had gone out riding.
The houseguests were Miss Margery Wyndham, an aristocratic beauty who had been invited by the marquess and to whom the duchess had taken a quite unreasonable dislike—hence the summons to Aunt Mabel; Lady Veronica Chelmsford, a faded beauty, and her thin, horsey husband, Sir Sydney Chelmsford; Peter Firkin, a friend of the marquess, famous for his good-naturedness and total lack of brain; and the aforementioned Mrs. Stuart and her husband, the Honorable Freddie, a thin middle-aged man with a white weak face, held together by an eyeglass.
They were all dotted about the huge room in various chairs and clutching various drinks. Conversation was by necessity full-throated, since it was like trying to carry on a chat with someone at the far end of a rugby pitch.
