by M C Beaton
“All right,” said Sally drearily. “I’ll work and work and work, and one of these days I won’t need to disguise myself as Aunt Mabel. I’ll look like Aunt Mabel.”
“There’s nothing wrong with age,” said Miss Frimp severely, and Sally apologized hurriedly, for Miss Frimp did look exactly like Aunt Mabel, except her wrinkles were real.
Sally took herself off to bed but, tired as she was, it was a long time before she fell asleep. The marquess’s handsome face and mocking blue eyes seemed to float in front of her in the darkness of the room. She loved him utterly and completely, and he was probably as mad as a hatter. They all were. And with that dismal thought, she at last fell asleep.
A week passed while a brief thaw turned the London streets into miserable canyons of slush. Sally worked and worked, the pain in her heart almost constant. Now she knew why love was described as a sickness. “Love is a sickness full of woes,/All remedies refusing.” She was touched by the affection and sympathy of her two elderly friends.
Her distress was not helped by a surprise visit from Emily, who arrived at the Bloomsbury flat one evening with all the children.
Emily was remarkably uninterested in Sally’s job or her friends. She simply sat there, large and placid, while her children kicked the furniture and Marmaduke got sick on the carpet. Sally envisaged presenting, as her only family, Emily and offspring at Banjahar, and shuddered. Perhaps she should welcome Emily’s visit, yet it surely underlined the vast gulf that lay between her background and that of the marquess. Their father had been a colonel, but his regiment was not one of the famous ones, and his background had been unashamedly middle-class. The social code was strict. Everyone knew that the good Lord placed people in their strata on the day they were born, and to try to climb higher was flying in the face of Providence.
Certainly the aristocracy married actresses and chorus girls, but somehow they did not seem to lose their heads over middle-class girls and, if they did, it was usually to ally themselves with some wealthy American heiress who would save the crumbling family estates from going under the hammer.
Matilda Fleming was very worried about Sally. The girl was not eating enough. Matilda racked her brains to try to remember if she had ever been in love and could not. Her sole aim in life had been to be financially independent. Mr. Wingles, her boss, was a bachelor. She had been his secretary for many years, anticipating his every need, filling in as substitute wife when he was summoned to the newspaper proprieter’s estate. She was very fond of him, very fond indeed, she admitted to herself. But her feelings toward him had never blossomed into anything warmer than a sort of maternal affection. So mused Miss Fleming as she stared from her window down into the congested traffic of Fleet Street.
And then she craned forward. A glittering carriage was pulling to a halt a little way up the street but still in her line of vision. As she watched, the Marquess of Seudenham alighted. He looked up and down the street and then started to say something to his coachman on the box.
“Ah, Miss Fleming,” said Mr. Wingles, coming out of his office, “if you will just type—”
“Can’t!” said Miss Fleming, leaping to her feet and shooting past him at a rate of knots.
He stared after her in amazement. In all the years she had worked for him, he had never even seen her flurried.
Miss Fleming shot out of the office of the Daily Bugle and, lifting up her skirts, sprinted up Fleet Street like a six-year-old. The marquess was still talking to his coachman and was fortunately about the only person who did not turn around to watch the strange sight of an elderly lady pelting through the slush as if the hound of Heaven were after her.
Sally jumped to her feet in alarm as Miss Fleming erupted into her office, babbling, “He’s here. He’s coming here. The marquess.”
“What am I going to do?” wailed Sally.
“What’s all the row?” demanded Mr. Barton, coming into Sally’s office and staring, amazed, at Miss Fleming.
“I think,” said Miss Frimp primly, “that Miss Fleming is trying to tell us that the Marquess of Seudenham is coming here to unmask Aunt Mabel.”
“Oh, no, he’s not,” said Mr. Barton, springing into action. “Here, Sally, get into my office, lock the door, and stay there. Miss Fleming—go with her. Miss Frimp—get behind the desk. You’re going to be Aunt Mabel and that’s that. All our jobs depend on it.”
He hustled Sally before him into his office, Miss Fleming following on their heels, ignoring Miss Frimp’s frightened cry of protest.
“Oh, please,” begged Sally. “He knows I’m not an old lady. He saw through the disguise. Can’t I see him?”
“Look here, my girl,” said Mr. Barton sternly, locking Sally and Miss Fleming and himself into his office. “You gave me your promise that no one—I repeat, NO ONE—would ever find out that Aunt Mabel is not the sweet old bird she’s cracked up to be, and I’m holding you to that promise. I—”
He broke off as they heard footsteps on the stairs.
“It’s him,” whispered Miss Fleming. “Shhhh!”
The Marquess of Seudenham was feeling remarkably cheerful. Freddie’s funeral had gone off well. Not a breath of scandal had reached the press. Mrs. Stuart had found on the reading of her late husband’s will that she had been left a very wealthy woman indeed, and that had gone a long way toward mitigating her grief.
His mother, on calmer reflection, had forgiven Aunt Mabel. “If one didn’t know that Annabelle Stuart was practically certifiable, then a mistake like that could arise,” his mother had said.
Now all he wanted to do was see the girl he had held in his arms in the snow. He felt sure she would not wear her disguise in the office.
He stood for a moment on a small, dark, dingy landing. And then he saw the frosted glass door marked LETTERS EDITOR.
He found that his heart was beating hard. He straightened his waistcoat, straightened his tie, opened the door, and walked in.
The room was in semidarkness. Miss Frimp got up and came around the desk. “Can I assist you in any way, sir?” she asked nervously.
The marquess threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, my darling love,” he said. “Do you have to wear all that rubbish in the office as well?”
Miss Frimp opened her mouth and let out a small bleating sound. Still laughing, he pulled the old lady into his arms.
“You enchant me,” he said, suddenly serious.
Then he bent his head and kissed her passionately. All at once he realized he was, in fact, holding an elderly lady in his arms. He released her abruptly and looked at her in dawning horror. “Oh, God, I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he gasped. “My apologies, ma’am.” And turning on his heels, he fled out of the door and down the stairs.
Miss Frimp stood, one hand leaning on the desk for support, staring after him. Across the landing, Mr. Barton cautiously unlocked his door.
He waited a few moments before gingerly opening the door of Sally’s office. Sally and Miss Fleming followed close behind.
Miss Frimp was still standing where the marquess had left her.
“Are you all right, Miss Frimp?” asked Mr. Barton anxiously. “You look strangely flushed. He—he didn’t hit you or anything?”
“He kissed me,” said Miss Frimp dreamily, “and… and… do you know, I liked it!”
“Oh!” wailed Sally. “It should have been me!”
The Marquess of Seudenham retired to his country estate, his mind a blank. He tried to lose himself in the intricacies of estate management and farming, which usually kept him totally absorbed. But as the long winter wore on, that wretched girl, whoever she was, began to creep back insidiously into his thoughts. At first sheer humiliation and rage kept him from thinking of her, for he had been made to look an utter fool twice, and for that he put the blame fair and square on “Aunt Mabel’s” shoulders.
The bitter cold vanished at last as the spring finally arrived. His mother had telephoned several times, asking him to come home on a visit,
and each time he had put her off, always preferring to immerse himself in his own affairs. At last, as the days grew warmer, he began to make several trips up to town to see his friends. Then once again he began asking a select few to go back with him for weekend house parties. The talk was all of the forthcoming Season, but the marquess felt little interest in it. For some reason he felt sure he would not find his adventuress at any of the functions.
It was only when he admitted that she would not leave his thoughts that he finally decided to sit down one day and either exorcise her or find some clue as to her whereabouts.
And so he sat down and wrote as much about “Aunt Mabel” as he knew. As his pencil flew over the paper a strange picture began to emerge.
He sat back and reread what he had written and frowned. He was all at once sure that his lady had, in fact, really been employed as Aunt Mabel and that the old lady he had embraced so passionately had been masquerading as Aunt Mabel to deceive him. Lady Cecily—he still called her that in his mind—was undoubtedly a very young girl. Would it be at all possible that the magazine did not want anyone to know that their famous Aunt Mabel was a young girl?
He took a deep breath and decided to try once more. But this time he would see the editor.
As he mounted the steps of Home Chats he was met by the office boy, who laconically informed him that Mr. Barton was in “Auntie’s” around the corner. The marquess looked puzzled, his brain full of Aunt Mabel. “Auntie’s,” explained the office boy, was the Red Lion.
Fortunately for the marquess, the Red Lion was comparatively empty, and the obliging landlord indicated Mr. Barton, who was sitting at a small table in the corner over a pint of beer. His head was bent over a sheaf of notes, and he was writing busily.
His look of surprise when the landlord and the marquess came up to him soon changed to one of trepidation at the sound of the marquess’s name.
“Sit down,” said Mr. Barton with a sigh. “I suppose you’ve come about Aunt Mabel, my lord?”
The marquess nodded, ordered a pint of beer, and sat down at the table with Mr. Barton.
“Well, my lord,” began Mr. Barton reluctantly. “How can I be of assistance to you?”
“Who is Aunt Mabel?” demanded the marquess.
“The elderly lady you saw on your last visit to our offices? Her real name is Miss Frimp.”
The marquess took a deep breath. “Now, I want the truth, Mr. Barton. At the time of Aunt Mabel’s visit to my mother, was that Miss Frimp?”
Mr. Barton hesitated.
“The truth, man!”
Mr. Barton spread his hands in an oddly Gallic gesture of resignation.
“No, my lord.”
“Then who was she?” The marquess resisted a strong temptation to pick up Mr. Barton and shake the information out of him.
“I suppose since I don’t know where she is now, there can be no harm in telling you,” said Mr. Barton, taking a pull at his beer.
And so he told the marquess about the death of the original Aunt Mabel, and how the young girl in the crumpled sailor hat had taken over and had been so good at the job that he had employed her on the understanding that no one must ever find out her true identity.
He explained how they were frightened that the duchess would find out that the famous Aunt Mabel was only a young girl and that Sally had disguised herself as an elderly lady.
“But something happened,” said Mr. Barton sadly. “Sally suddenly ups and says—let me see, about the end of January, I think—that she doesn’t want to go on pretending to be someone she’s not. She says she’s already trained Miss Frimp, her secretary, how to answer the letters, and she says as how Miss Frimp looks like the picture of Aunt Mabel in the magazine. I still didn’t want to let her go. Said she could stay and write another column. But she insisted she had to get away. I don’t know why,” said Mr. Barton, although he knew precisely why. He knew it was because Sally was in love with the marquess and had come to the conclusion that marriage was out of the question and had decided to remove herself from anything that reminded her of him.
“But you must have her address,” said the marquess eagerly.
Mr. Barton shook his head reluctantly. He did not know where Sally was working now, but he felt sure she was still sharing diggings with Miss Frimp and Miss Fleming.
His loyalties lay with Sally, and Sally had not wanted the marquess to know her whereabouts.
“I don’t even know where she’s working,” said Mr. Barton, glad to be able to tell part of the truth. “I warned her that jobs were hard to find in Fleet Street.”
“But her home?” protested the marquess. “Her parents?”
“Don’t know,” said Mr. Barton. “I really don’t know. She never spoke of them.”
The marquess finished his beer. Another dead end. He began to wonder if he would ever see her again.
At that very moment Sally was, in fact, not very far away, working at her job and hating every minute of it.
She was the household editor of the London Gentlewoman, a small glossy monthly magazine that did not have the distinction of being on Fleet Street or even beside it but was down one of those back alleys near Blackfriars Underground Station.
Sally had accepted the job because it was the only one she could get on short notice, the pay was reasonably good, and they did not know she had been previously employed as Aunt Mabel, Mr. Barton having given her a glowing reference as having been employed by him as household editor.
She discovered she was not a very domesticated girl, but she was a conscientious journalist and worked hard to supply her readers with hints on everything from the gentle art of poti-chomania—oriental-vase painting—to ornamental buttonwork.
She had just finished an article entitled “How to Make a Summer Decoration for Your Fireplace.” She had raked up every idea she could, from simple fire paper—“Green is the best color for brightening up a room”—to shredded tartalan with a myrtle wreath. The magazine was read by an audience of ladies who would not dream of leaving their fireless fireplaces naked in summer, and who felt compelled to dress them up with paper, material, looking glasses, or rustic fenders, and who loved to drape their mantels in snowy folds of point lace.
Sally was faced with working on her first knitting pattern for a cardigan. To Sally knitting was of the same vein as higher calculus—totally incomprehensible. A wool company had supplied her with some information, and she was laboring over the instructions, which meant nothing to her at all, but which she hoped her readers would be able to transform into a cardigan.
It was only after she had translated the first page of the wool company’s instructions that Sally realized she had lost the second. She looked at the clock frantically. It was six-thirty on a Saturday evening. The company would be closed, and the article had to go to press that night. Now, the editor, Miss Huntley, was a stickler for method, discipline, and accuracy, and loved hinting that any suggestion of a lack of them would result in dismissal, and so Sally decided to do the best she could. Had the directions been “repeat this row forty times” or had they said fifty? Perhaps eighty? One hundred on the other hand sounded like a good round number, and it was only a sleeve anyway, and sleeves were surely not desperately important—and—Oh!, who cared anyway when one’s heart was one large ache and the days dragged their weary length along.
She finished it quickly, through half-closed eyes, feeling that if she did not look very closely at what she was writing, it would somehow turn out all right. After all, the magazine had a small circulation, and she had never seen anyone actually reading it.
The marquess wandered into the library of Banjahar Palace, wondering what he was doing, moping uselessly about his parents’ home.
Mr. Worthing, the secretary, was engaged in dealing with the day’s correspondence with his usual admirable patience, since most of it was what he considered privately a waste of time. The duke had been in one of his complaining-about-everything moods since he had recovered fr
om his latest infatuation, and had sent long and very boring letters to every dignitary in the county, complaining of everything from the state of the roads to the decline of the lesser-crested grebe. The people who had received his complaints had written back equally as long and boring explanations, to which the duke in turn had dictated long and boring replies, which, Mr. Worthing felt sure, would elicit even more boring and longer letters, and so it would go on until the duke fell in love with someone else.
Mr. Worthing was glad to see the marquess, who always had a pleasant word for him and who would sometimes sit down and pass a quiet hour or two discussing books. He was the only member of the household who seemed at all interested in the family library. Now Mr. Worthing was watching the marquess pacing up and down restlessly, and it dawned on him that his lordship had been troubled and upset for some time.
Mr. Worthing communed with himself briefly. He wondered whether to remark on his lordship’s demeanor, and then decided it might be taken as stepping out of line. After some moments he contented himself by asking, “Can I be of assistance?”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” snapped the marquess. “It reminds me of Aunt Mabel. That was her stock phrase.”
“I found Aunt Mabel a very pleasant old lady,” ventured Mr. Worthing.
“I can’t get her out of my head,” said the marquess, suddenly sitting down and burying his head in his hands.
Mr. Worthing had felt that his post at Banjahar Palace had placed him beyond shock, what with the eccentricities of the marquess’s parents and their various houseguests, but he had to admit to himself that the marquess had shocked him. Imagine such a handsome man as Lord Seudenham pining over an old lady! Well, George IV had had a penchant for older ladies, and there was…
