by Sara Seale
He was just as she remembered him; gay, good-looking, the ready tongue which had first charmed her and now demanded to know how on earth the two of them had met.
“Perhaps it’s slipped your memory that you invited Harriet here?” said Duff with cool amusement, and Harriet, observing Rory’s mystification, realised that he had, indeed, forgotten. In sending off that hasty telegram which had never arrived, he had clearly put a little girl he had only met once straight out of his mind.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, memory evidently coming back to him with a rush. “But surely you got my wire? You didn’t, I hope, traipse all over from England to this benighted country on a wild-goose chase, did you?”
“Hardly a wild-goose chase, as it turned out,” Duff said on an odd little inflection which seemed to have a message for his cousin, who gave him a swift, amused look, then turned to Harriet with cheerful impudence.
“Well, it’s an ill wind, they say. I can’t for the life of me imagine what you can have seen in my ugly cousin, but I hope you find Clooney to your liking, now you’re stuck with us,” he said, and when she replied, it was with the first conscious recognition that in the eyes of the world she was Duff’s wife and mistress of his house, and could accept the role of hostess, if nothing more.
“Very much to my liking, thank you. If you’re staying over Christmas, I’d better go and see about a room for you,” she said.
“My room’s been the same for years and is always ready, so don’t bother,” he told her with a twinkle of amusement she did not altogether interpret, and she felt relieved when Nonie created a diversion by appearing from nowhere and flinging herself upon Rory with most uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
“Uncle Rory—how super! Have you come for Christmas?” she cried with all the pleased excitement of any normal child, and Harriet, catching a glimpse of the expression that contorted Duff’s face for an instant and was gone, knew a queer little stab of pity for him. It could not be pleasant to be obliged to accept such a pointed preference.
“Did you know I had a new stepmother, Uncle Rory?” Nonie was saying, with sidelong glances at Harriet which seemed to invite participation in some obscure joke, but Rory pulled her hair with a none too gentle tug and replied;
“Of course, and you’re a very lucky young woman, let me tell you, for I saw her first.”
“You did?” You mean Father pinched her from you?”
“Well, hardly that; let’s say your papa, for once, accepted what the gods sent him without asking silly questions, and that goes for you, too. Now, Princess, tell me what you’ve been up to at that prim academy of yours, since last I saw you.”
Harriet briefly described the adventures that had led her to the Castle, and Rory’s grin grew broader.
“So all my false claims to the Castle were exposed. Cousin Duff took you in, and—settled the whole matter by making an honest woman of you. Well, well, well, life is full of surprises!”
Nonie, who had been listening with an expression of dark frustration, trying to fill in the tantalising gaps of a story she had already gleaned for herself from snippets of gossip, hastened to add her own contribution.
“And what do you think, Uncle Rory? She mistook the Castle for Clooney Gaol, and Molly says—”
“That’s enough, Nonie, Harriet’s adventures might wait until after lunch, I think,” Duff said, cutting short his daughter’s interpolation with a sharp air of dismissal which brought a sulky look to her face. He was not, Harriet thought, best pleased with his cousin’s frivolous findings, and she wondered how he would explain the matter with satisfaction to a young man who must realise by now that his own unintentional part in his cousin’s affairs had set in motion a whole, unlikely chain of events.
When later, however, she managed to find an opportunity to ask him, he replied with an air of polite surprise which made her feel foolish:
“I told him the truth, naturally. There was nothing odd in the fact that our meeting came about through a natural misunderstanding on your part, and Rory is the last person to ask awkward questions so long as he can avoid being saddled with any responsibility himself, so don’t go making mysteries where none exist, will you, Harriet?”
“No, Duff,” she said dutifully, but she was aware that he had really explained very little, and during the days that followed, she did not think that Rory’s mischievous curiosity was so easily fobbed off. He would glance from one to the other of them with bright, inquisitive eyes, every so often dropping a remark which made Duff raise speculative eyebrows, but she soon became used to the impudence that was always good-natured, and felt at ease with him as she seldom did with Duff.
Nothing had been seen or heard of Samantha for a week or so, and Harriet wondered if she had tired of the prolonged visit with her unsociably inclined Aunt Alice and taken herself off for a gayer Christmas elsewhere, but one afternoon she walked in with her usual omission to announce her arrival by ringing the front door bell, carrying an enormous box of expensive baubles and decorations which she said she had ordered especially from Dublin for Harriet’s tree.
“Rory darling!” she exclaimed, handing the box to Harriet and embracing Rory with every evidence of delight. “I’d heard the prodigal had returned and had to come over and say hullo. A long-time-no-see, isn’t it?”
“Oh! How lovely!” Harriet exclaimed suddenly, unwrapping the first of the glittering surprises, and from then on had no attention to spare for the conversation of the other two until she heard Rory say with that little spice of malice back in his voice:
“Are you staying for Christmas too, then, sweetie? What a gay time we shall all have!”
“I’m stopping on with Aunt Alice, yes, but I haven’t been invited to your shenanigans at the Castle as yet,” Samantha replied, and Harriet looked up.
“But of course you must come for lunch on Christmas Day, if you would care to,” she said quickly. “It would be nice if you could make up the family party.”
“Now that I consider to be a very broad-minded suggestion in the circumstances,” Rory remarked airily, and the atmosphere seemed to alter. Samantha told him to shut up with a little too much emphasis, he merely grinned back with rather unholy satisfaction in the apparent scoring of a point, and Harriet turned to look at them both, one of the shining silver balls still cupped in her hands.
“Have I been tactless?” she asked. “Is there some reason why—” she broke off, not knowing how to finish without suggesting more than had possibly been intended.
“Tactless to offer your very charming hospitality?” Samantha mocked gently, and Harriet looked embarrassed.
“Well, I was forgetting,” she remarked awkwardly. “I suppose the last family party was when your cousin was alive. Duff mightn’t like to be reminded, perhaps.”
“Very likely not, but that was hardly a family party, it was a free-for-all for Kitty’s rowdy Dublin friends,” said Rory. “Now this, of course, would only be different in the sense that—”
“Pay no attention to Master Rory, Harriet, he loves to stir up trouble like a little boy,” Samantha said with a return to her lazy unconcern, but her dark eyes seemed to challenge Rory, and Harriet was beginning to feel uncomfortable. It was a relief when Duff walked into the room and she turned to him thankfully.
“Duff—” she said with the badly expressed haste of a schoolgirl, “I suggested Samantha came to us for lunch on Christmas Day as she’s stopping over with her aunt—not a real party—just to make more fun for Nonie. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”
“Not a very happy way of phrasing things, perhaps,” he replied with a faint smile. “I could hardly say I did mind with your prospective guest sitting there, could I?”
Harriet flushed and looked abashed, but Samantha stretched her long, elegant legs out before her, deliberately inviting admiration, and retorted with the easy intimacy of long association:
“You could and you would if you had a mind to, darling. There’s no need to walk on hot bricks
where I’m concerned, Harriet; Duff and I have known each other too long to stand on ceremony where feelings are concerned, haven’t we, Duff?”
“Hot bricks, of course, are enjoyed by martyrs—or am I thinking of nails and hair shirts? Are you a martyr, Harriet?” Rory said with apparent inconsequence, and Duff, before Harriet could be driven to one of her more literal interpretations of confusing observations, guided her firmly back to the table and began turning over the Christmas decorations, scattering a further litter of shavings and paper on to the floor.
“Rory’s rather good at talking nonsense, so treat him with the contempt he deserves,” he said. “What have you got here—loot for the Christmas tree?”
“Samantha ordered everything from Dublin—wasn’t that kind?”
“Very kind. Was this the bait with which to buy your Christmas invitations, Samantha?”
Samantha began to look angry. It became her very well, Harriet thought, and wondered why it was that she seemed to arouse an unwilling sort of antagonism in most of the men she had dealings with.
“You’re becoming rather a bore, darling, with all this schoolmarm stuff you seem to be handing out lately. I’m not Harriet, you know,” Samantha said with a sudden very cool stare, and one of the fragile glass ornaments snapped with a sharp little splinter of sound between Duff’s fingers.
“No, you’re not Harriet,” was all he said, however, and turned back to his wife. “I’m sorry, Harriet, it was extremely careless of me,” he said, but she took the pieces from him and threw them on the fire.
Harriet now had the whole glittering mass of the Christmas decorations spread out on the table and was quite unaware of Duff’s attention on her rapturous face as she fingered first one and then another of the entrancing trifles.
“Oh!” breathed Harriet. “How beautiful they are! I wish the orphans could see our tree when it’s finished ... we never had anything so like a fairy-tale at Ogilvy’s—not ever.”
She had been speaking to Duff, but the brief moment of silence which followed reminded her that others were listening. Samantha said sharply: “What orphans?” and Rory enquired with casual interest: “Some charitable connection with your home?”
“It was my home,” Harriet replied. “Ogilvy Manor is an orphanage. Didn’t Duff tell you?”
Duff was standing behind her and he rested his hands lightly on her shoulders, but said nothing. Samantha narrowed her eyes in fresh alertness and was the first to speak.
“Well, well!” she said softly. “So that explains a lot.” Rory burst out laughing and exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned!” and Duff spoke at last, his hands still resting on Harriet’s shoulders.
“Well, now—since that rather unimportant little detail of Harriet’s upbringing is presumably clear to everyone, suppose we just forget it and carry on as usual,” he said, and began scooping up handfuls of the shavings and packing that had fallen on the floor and tossed them on to the fire.
“I think Uriah wants to go out,” Harriet announced suddenly, making the first excuse that came into her head, and Rory, with an amused wink at his cousin, lifted the dog by the scruff of his neck and deposited him in the hall.
“Now, Princess,” he said to Harriet as she opened a door at the back of the hall and shooed the dog outside, “will you kindly tell me why you led me up the garden that fine summer’s day?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “At least, not on purpose. You see, the orphanage was always known as Ogilvy Manor and I—I didn’t think it was necessary to explain when I wasn’t likely to see you again.”
“H’m ... a pity, perhaps, that Samantha had to know.”
“Why?”
“Because—s-sh! Listen!”
The door of the snug was not quite closed and Samantha’s voice reached them clearly, high and shrill and quite unlike her usual husky drawl.
“So you were running away from me!” she was saying. “The minute you knew I was free—in your stuffy, puritanical sense of the word—you couldn’t wait to put a barrier between us, and you picked the first come-by-chance bride that offered—a little girl from an orphanage who happened to cross your path through a freak of the weather. Had you already taken what you wanted, that she agreed so meekly to marry a stranger?”
Duff’s reply was inaudible, but he must have retaliated with something sharp, for when she spoke next, Samantha’s voice had more control.
“Very well,” she said, “let’s assume that for your purpose a charity child was a heaven-sent tool—no parents to make mischief, as in Kitty’s case, no expectations of anything more than bed and board, and gratitude unbounding, to give or accept anything you chose to offer—or take, if it comes to that. Weil, I’m civilised enough to behave, but in the meantime—you’ll need more than the milk-and-water overtures of a dutiful little wife before very long, if I know you, my dear. You’ll need compensation, and I—” she broke off with a sharp little cry, and to Harriet, rooted in that implacable moment of eavesdropping, the ensuing silence could mean only one thing. Duff must have stopped her mouth, not with words, but with a kiss, however angry, for what else could a woman so provocative and so sure of an old passion drive a man to?
“We shouldn’t have listened,” she muttered distractedly to Rory, as her mind and her limbs unfroze again. “You shouldn’t have let me hear all those—those very private things.”
She darted back to the terrace door to let the dog in, but as the cold air from outside greeted her with a cleansing rush of freshness, and she looked up at the myriad of stars shining down so impersonally from the heaven, she slipped out into the night, slamming the door behind her.
She ran down to the shore of the lough, the dog at her heels, and stood there watching the water lapping at her feet. She was unaware that she was crying, because tears always came easily, and she was unaware of the cold or the fact that she was without a coat, so welcome was the night air on her burning face.
“Harriet...” Nonie’s precise little voice behind her made her jump and she turned in surprise to see the little girl standing there, holding out a coat.
“I thought you would be cold,” she said, and Harriet slipped her arms into the sleeves, realising she was beginning to shiver.
“Isn’t it a beautiful night?” said Nonie conversationally. “I walked as far as the point and back while you were all unpacking Cousin Samantha’s pared.”
“Did you?” Harriet felt at a loss. Nonie had been politely tolerant of her since Rory’s arrival, but it was the first time she had made an unprompted overture of her own. “I thought you would be there to help me unpack. Don’t you want to see those lovely decorations for the tree?”
“I can see them later when Cousin Samantha’s gone,” the child said. “Shall we sit down on this rock for a while if you’re warmer now?”
“Yes, if you like,” said Harriet rather helplessly, and they sat side by side on one of the flat, low boulders dotted sparsely along the shore.
“How did you know I was out here?” Harriet asked, and Nonie replied: “I saw you go. I was listening, too.”
“Oh!” Harriet felt she was in no position to deliver a mild homily on the undesirability of eavesdropping, so she said instead: “Well, I hope you didn’t hear anything to upset you?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t understand much. I often listen, you know. It’s the only way you ever get to find out what’s going on in this house.”
“Well, that’s probably because you go off on your own and won’t mix. You should come down when we have a guest, you know, because you are the daughter of the house, after all.”
Nonie looked pleased at the acknowledgement of her own importance, then she said carelessly;
“Cousin Samantha doesn’t count. She isn’t a guest.”
“Well, she’s a very lovely woman, and it’s always nicer to look at a pretty face than a plain one,” Harriet said with some vague idea of giving credit where credit was due and discouraging childish prejudices, but Nonie turned her
mouth down.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “When you’re ugly yourself, it only makes it worse.”
Harriet felt a rush of tenderness and her first moment of liking for this difficult, unchildlike little girl.
“You are not ugly, Nonie,” she said gently. “And children alter so much. I was a hideous child, all skin and bone and eyes—like a scared white rabbit, they used to say, only fortunately my eyes weren’t pink! I know I’m no beauty now, as you once pointed out, but I’d pass in a crowd, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, yes, you would,” the child conceded politely, “though you’d never set the Liffey on fire, Agnes says, which she seems to think is a good thing as Father is very jealous.”
“Jealous? Your Father?”
“Oh yes. My mother was very pretty, you know, and that caused trouble. Are you really a charity child, Harriet? That was the only interesting thing I heard Cousin Samantha say.”
“Well, they don’t call orphans that any longer, because it was supposed to carry a sort of stigma and nowadays orphanages are quite different sorts of places, and many of them are simply called Children’s Homes, which is what they are, really. Orphans, you see, can’t help being left alone in the world and some charity has to look after them.”
“It must,” said Nonie, wiping a dewdrop from her nose with the back of her hand with a heartening disregard for nice behaviour, “be wonderful to be an orphan—never to know who you are, or what might happen next—why, you might turn out to be a princess in disguise!”
“Oh, Nonie...” Harriet put an arm round the child and found she was half laughing and half crying. Here was no smug little girl prepared to condescend, but only another wool-gathering echo of herself, and she remembered that Nonie, too, devoured unsuitable literature in her father’s library and probably, no less than Harriet, made up impossible fantasies as part of her defences.
