My Lords, Ladies and Marjorie

by Beaton, M. C.

  But one fine morning, she woke up in Eaton Terrace and found herself “on stage.” Waiting in the wings was the mysterious Lady Bywater whom Marjorie had not as yet met.

  She was to meet her that very day and had conjured up a picture of a sort of stage Duchess.

  At first sight, Lady Bywater was a startling disappointment. She was, first of all, very old. She was as thin and tall as Mrs. Wilton was small and fat. She wore a shaggy white wig decorated with artificial flowers and was dressed in a long trailing black velvet gown that smelled unpleasantly of sweat and mothballs. Around her scrawny neck, she wore an enclavage, that type of necklace that goes round and round the neck several times and then falls to the navel in a cascade of jewels. The jewels were so large and gaudy that Marjorie could hardly believe they were real.

  She had pale myopic eyes and tobacco-stained false china teeth that made irritating clicking sounds. Marjorie felt fashionably doomed from the start but Mrs. Wilton seemed to find nothing amiss with her aristocratic guest and treated Lady Bywater with uncharacteristic deference.

  “So this is the gel,” said Lady Bywater, raising a lorgnette that was held together with ginger-beer wire and staring at Marjorie from head to foot. “She’ll do, Mary, she’ll take. I’ve got us invitations to old Crummers’s ball tonight. That’s a good place to launch her.”

  “Who on earth is old Crummers?” thought Marjorie drearily envisioning a Season of partying and dancing with every septuagenarian in London.

  “Crummers?” she queried politely without much hope.

  “The Duchess of Dunster, my dear,” explained Lady Bywater not knowing that with these magic words she had transferred herself into Marjorie’s fairy godmother. “She’s a lot younger than me but we used to be friendly. I always used to call her Crummers though I forget why.”

  Marjorie suddenly felt terrified. It was all too soon. The Duchess of Dunster was Lord Philip’s mother. She would see him that very evening!

  All of a sudden her fantasy about marrying Lord Philip seemed ridiculous. In the quiet of Haddon Common, there had been nothing else to do but dream and all dreams had seemed possible since reality was kept so far at bay. How could she have fallen in love with a photograph, of all things? But in the photograph, he looked like the aristocrat of her dreams—haughty and proud. It was one thing to dream about meeting a haughty young man and another to actually envisage doing it, now that that very moment had come so close. He was probably bad-tempered. He would probably glare through the silk and lace of Marjorie’s expensive ball gown straight into the depths of her middle-class soul. Marjorie cautiously raised her arm and sniffed it. Perhaps one actually did smell of the shop after all and she had been, all unaware, exuding an aroma of sugar and spices and blacking and tallow candles.

  She began to suffer from acute stage fright. What did she know of the aristocracy apart from Lady Bywater? In Haddon Common, Lady Bywater would be considered an eccentric frump. But she seemed strangely to belong to this new milieu of Belgravia. And just look at this house!

  By the rich living standards of the wealthy middle class, it did not seem to amount to much. Mrs. Wilton had rented it furnished. It was Marjorie’s first inkling of the strange parsimony of the aristocracy. Nothing in the furnishings that could still conceivably be used had been thrown away. Faded Chinese wallpaper lined the walls. Spindly furniture dating from the Regency was sparsely set about the room. The curtains at the windows were of the finest silk but sadly threadbare in patches. The rugs were Oriental but very well worn and almost bare in places. There was no gaslight in the bedrooms and one had to take a candle up to bed. A set of Hogarth prints in black wood frames ornamented the staircase, depicting gin-sodden women nursing dirty babies and horrible little boys disemboweling cats or hanging dogs from the lamppost.

  But there were certain expenses, it seemed, that were de rigeur. “A brace of footmen, I think,” Lady Bywater was saying in her light, drawling voice. “Come just as cheap by the pair. Duties? Well, they help you out of your carriage and knock at the door when you’re making calls. They serve the luncheon and clean the gold and silver and wash your small change so you don’t get an infection from the tradesmen’s dirty money. Iron your newspapers, brush the mud from the hems of your dresses, all that stuff. You’ll need a carriage, nothing grand. A groom and a gig will do nicely and Marjorie must be taught how to handle the reins. You can use my servants and landau for more formal occasions but I expect you to pay their wages and forage. Then there’s a butler. Have mine for the season. He’s quite old but very imposing when he’s not drunk.”

  Marjorie was to learn that the venerable butler was never drunk but Lady Bywater, like most of her class, put all her servants’ frailties down to drink. When exhausted footmen tumbled asleep off the carriage backstrap, they were drunk.

  When aged and infirm butlers stumbled on their way to answer late night calls, they had been at the master’s brandy again. When a harassed housemaid broke the china, she was damned as an inebriate.

  But at the moment, all Marjorie could do was shrink inside as she hovered in the wings of this new and strange world.

  “Marjorie may use my lady’s maid,” Lady Bywater was saying. “You will pay her for her services, of course. In return for all this, I will make sure that Marjorie is introduced to the right sort of chap.”

  Mrs. Wilton raised a plump hand in protest. “I do not want Marjorie to move in very high circles, Lady Bywater.”

  “Why ever not?” Lady Bywater stared curiously at the plump figure of her friend. “What on earth is the point of all this expense?”

  Mrs. Wilton’s face became suffused with a delicate pink. “I think it would be better if Marjorie could fix her interest with one of her own kind … a doctor or a lawyer or a Lloyd’s underwriter or …”

  “How frightfully dull!”

  “It does not do to move out of one’s class,” said Mrs. Wilton firmly.

  Lady Bywater looked quite huffy. “But you have already done just that,” she pointed out. “You will certainly find plenty of rich middle-class young men ornamenting the London Season but they are not, mark you, chaperoned by me and I move in the first circles.”

  The old lady was becoming quite flustered and Mrs. Wilton hastened to reassure her. “I am well aware of that fact. Let us say this Season is not entirely a means to secure Marjorie a husband. I would simply like her to enjoy herself and become used to the society of young men. We have no young men in Haddon Common.”

  “You have no nothing in Haddon Common,” snapped Lady Bywater, made ungrammatical by irritation. “You are very rich, Mary, and that is all that counts these days. Why, the flower of our aristocracy have been marrying quite impossible creatures from America for the past decade and longer.”

  “Americans do not count. They are foreigners,” said Mrs. Wilton, sure of her ground at last.

  “It’s no use talking like this,” said Lady Bywater impatiently. “I will go and organize the servants for you. My lady’s maid, Stavely, will be here in good time to prepare Marjorie for the ball. Now, Marjorie,” she went on, fixing that young lady with a steely glare, “your voice is pleasant and clear but it requires slightly more of a drawl.”

  “Do you wish me to speak like this, for example,” said Marjorie with an uncanny imitation of Lady Bywater’s upper-class drawl.

  “Splendid!” said Lady Bywater. “Good-bye, my dear. Until this evening!”

  “Until this evening …,” echoed Marjorie faintly. Oh, that it would never come.

  But like Christmas and dentists’ appointments, it came all too quickly. One minute the hours of freedom seemed to stretch out in front of Marjorie, and the next minute it seemed she was standing, trembling, on the doorstep as the carriage was brought round.

  In her usual way, Mrs. Wilton had told Marjorie she looked “very well.” Privately, Mrs. Wilton was alarmed. Marjorie had blossomed in one evening under the expert hands of a lady’s maid into a young lady of quite startlin
g beauty.

  The new sueded tricot corset with lace trimming that Marjorie wore under her evening ensemble had thrust her bosom forward one way and her posterior the other, giving her girlish Figure an air of voluptuous maturity. She was wearing a white lace evening bodice with pagoda sleeves, which was securely hooked onto a heavy silk “mermaid” skirt—so called because it fitted tightly over the hips and then flared out from the knees in a fishtail effect. Her soft brown hair was dressed low on her forehead and threaded with white jasmine flowers made of delicate silk. A heavy choker of real pearls secured by a diamond clasp—rented—supported her slender neck.

  Her white silk evening shoes had long pointed toes and Louis heels. Over the whole, she wore a white velvet cloak, three-quarter length, and gathered at the hem at the back. Its high collar and hem were ornamented with rich silver embroidery.

  Mrs. Wilton was resplendent in lilac crêpe and Lady Bywater wore her favorite black velvet.

  The ladies were assisted into Lady Bywater’s landau by the “brace” of footmen, hired that very day from an agency.

  The Dunster town house was situated on Park Lane, a short drive away—too short, thought Marjorie, who felt life rushing in on her at a tremendous rate.

  The landau swayed sedately through the evening streets. The weather was mild, and somewhere among the city smells of horse and smoke crept the elusive scents of late spring. Marjorie sat in the carriage in an agony of anticipation. She did not want to go to this ball. She did not want to meet Lord Philip. She wanted to creep back to Haddon Common and play with Mackintosh and never, ever leave it again.

  All too soon the carriage came to a halt. There were two majestic policemen on duty outside, resting their shiny regulation boots on a strip of red carpet.

  The tantalizing, jaunty strains of a polka drifted out into the evening air. Marjorie hesitated, waiting for her cue.

  “Come along, girl!” said Lady Bywater testily. “Or are you going to stand out in the street all night?”

  As if walking in a dream, Marjorie moved forward toward the lighted doorway and placed one white silk-shod foot over the threshold.

  She was on stage. She was In Society. There was no going back.

  At first glance, the ballroom looked as if a piece of the African rain forest had found its way to Mayfair. “I think you overdid it this time, mama,” remarked Lord Philip, looking down at his mother who lurked in the shade of an enormous potted fern.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” said the Duchess of Dunster sulkily. “It was Madge Barrington’s latest protégé, Cyril Wilks. He designs parties and things. ‘I must have trees, trees, trees!’ he kept yapping, just like a terrier. So now I have trees, trees, trees. Half of Kew Gardens, by the look of it. But everyone has Cyril you know. It’s frightfully up-to-date.”

  “Aren’t you frightened your guests might get lost in the undergrowth or start sporting with Amaryllis in the shade?”

  The Duchess was not of a literary turn of mind. “Sport with who? … oh, never mind. Their morals are their own concern. There’s room enough to dance. It just gets a bit overgrown around the perimeter. By the way, you have to ask a Miss Montmorency-James for a dance.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Nobody has. The Montmorency bit is from the mother whose family were wealthy haberdashers. The James bit is the father who owned grocery stores. Both dead. The grandmother is a Mrs. Wilton and she is Wilton’s groceries, Wilton’s tea, Wilton’s butter and I don’t know what else. The girl is rich.”

  “I’m not looking for an heiress,” said Lord Philip. “You really must stop trying to arrange marriages for me.”

  “I’m not,” said the Duchess crossly. “The girl is being chaperoned by Riddles, you know, Penelope Bywater. All you need to do is give her a dance and introduce her to some chaps from the City. Grandmother wants her to marry middle-class money. Here they come. Hello, Riddles!”

  “Evening, Crummers,” drawled Lady By-water. She presented Marjorie and Mrs. Wilton.

  Marjorie kept her eyes firmly glued to the floor. One glance at Lord Philip had been enough to confirm her worst fears. He was arrogant and frightening and did not look in the least pleased to see her.

  In that, she was wrong. Lord Philip had been taken aback by her very feminine beauty and in normal circumstances would have set himself to please but at that moment, a very attractive debutante, Amy Featherington, came up with her parents to shake his hand and Lord Philip, after asking Marjorie for a waltz and signing his name hurriedly in her dance card, promptly forgot about her and turned his not inconsiderable charm on Amy.

  And Marjorie, watching the play of that famous charm from a little way away, fell headlong in love with Lord Philip all over again. She studied Amy to try to find out the attraction this girl had for Lord Philip.

  She was a very frilly, feminine miss with wide blue eyes and light brown hair that had a strange smell of burnt feathers. Amy had just spent twelve hours having one of the new permanents inflicted on her head but Marjorie did not as yet know that. She had a lisping little voice. “Does oo want to dance wif ickle me?” she said, looking up at Philip from under her long eyelashes while Marjorie studied every word and gesture.

  Marjorie glanced back at Lord Philip. He really was a remarkably handsome man. His face was slightly tanned and his eyes were of a brilliant, intense blue with long curling black lashes. He had a firm chin and a humorous, sensuous mouth. His hair was not black as she had guessed from the photograph but dark brown streaked with gold. His evening coat was molded to his broad shoulders and the collar of his shirt was at least eight centimeters high. When he was not trying to charm, however, his face resumed the stern and arrogant expression of the photograph.

  Then Marjorie no longer had any time to study him. Her dance card was quickly filled, Lady Bywater having put it around London society that she was a wealthy heiress. A lot of the aristocracy were feeling the pinch and did not care where the money came from as long as it came.

  Marjorie hardly noticed her partners and answered their conversational sallies mechanically. She was intent on watching Lord Philip.

  Lord Philip found he was looking forward to his waltz with Miss Marjorie. Amy’s simpering baby talk had grated on his nerves and he no longer found her appealing. Marjorie was an exquisite dancer and he had been very much aware of her.

  Marjorie noticed the look of increasing boredom on his face and wondered what to do. She had rapidly been rehearsing the role of Amy. Now that would not do and she did not have time to find another. The fact that Lord Philip might like her for herself never once crossed Marjorie’s agonized mind.

  And so it was that Lord Philip found the reality so much less enjoyable than the anticipation and a strangely silent Marjorie, when it came her turn to dance with him, moved stiffly and awkwardly in his arms and said not a word.

  He experienced a pang of disappointment. He had thought Marjorie might prove to be something out of the ordinary.

  “Are you enjoying the ball?” he asked politely, while his bored, restless eyes ranged over the floor.

  “Yes,” whispered Marjorie, staring into his chest. At last Marjorie found the courage to raise her eyes only to find he was no longer paying any attention to her. She wondered what she was doing wrong. She worried and wondered about it so much that she could barely enjoy the pleasure of being held in his arms and it seemed no time at all before the precious dance was over. She watched him in wide-eyed dismay over the shoulder of her next partner. Lord Philip seemed to be much taken with his new partner, a thin, angular girl in a long beaded gown.

  “I shall study her,” thought poor Marjorie.

  Her large eyes noticed that Lord Philip had left the floor with his partner and disappeared into the shrubbery. A pang of pure jealousy stabbed through Marjorie’s bosom. No sooner had her present dance ended than she scanned her dance card. The next two dances were taken up by a fictitious Mr. Hubert. Marjorie had written his name several times in her ca
rd hoping to keep two or three spaces free for Lord Philip.

  She gently glided toward the banked jungle of ferns into which Lord Philip had disappeared with his partner.

  A pair of eyes, sharpened by jealousy, watched her go. Hermione Ffofington considered herself more or less unofficially engaged to Lord Philip. Both were of a cynical turn of mind. They had been childhood friends. Somehow there had always seemed to be an unspoken agreement between them that they would eventually settle down together after they had had their fun. Hermione had calmly watched one impressionable debutante after another falling head over heels in love with Philip and had also enjoyed their eventual and inevitable dismay when he quickly lost interest.

  But this Marjorie-girl disturbed her. Marjorie was beautiful in a strange and disturbing way. She quietly followed Marjorie into the shrubbery.

  Unaware that he had two hidden listeners, Lord Philip was suffering the outpourings of his partner. She had seemed like such a good sort on the few occasions when he had spoken to her before. Now she seemed most absolutely and frightfully nuts. Her name was Jessie Wuthers. She had begged a word with him in private in an intense sort of way that had led Lord Philip to hope for the best. But it seemed that all she wanted to do was talk about Art and Life and Shared Thoughts. She had very black hair and an intense white face and high Slavic cheekbones. Her speech was abrupt and clipped. Philip realized to his acute embarrassment that his few light flirtatious remarks had been taken as signs of intense fellow feeling.

  “You are too much a gentleman to say so,” Jessie said, staring up at him with eyes like two pieces of jet, “but I have this, you know, jolly sort of feeling of Being at Home with Somebody.”

  “Quite,” said Lord Philip, easing a finger into his high collar.

  “How fast!” thought Marjorie in amazement from behind the shadow of a giant fern. She could not hear Lord Philip’s reply.