by Wendy Holden
‘They do want you there. You’re the cast, basically. The extras in the film.’
‘Is it really going to be a film?’
‘Only in Carly and Jed’s heads,’ Julie snorted. ‘They’re the leading actors and you’re the cringing retainers, house servants and so on. Carly wants you to murmur admiringly as she comes in to the chapel.’
A gleam of humour suddenly pierced Nell’s misery. Was there a funny side to all this?
‘Just one thing, though. The costume supplier’s run out of empire line dresses. Would you mind wearing breeches instead? And a tricorn hat, at a push?’
‘No problem.’ Nell felt like a fool; what did it matter if she looked like one too? And, as her own Prince Charming had twice failed to materialise, why not impersonate him herself?
‘But on one condition.’
‘Anything,’ Julie said fervently. ‘Just say the word and it’s yours.’
‘Can you put me up in your spare room?’
Julie sounded surprised. ‘Sure. But why? Has something gone wrong in Beggar’s Roost?’
Nell breathed in. ‘Kind of.’
‘You can tell me about it later. If it’s fixable, Tim can sort it.’
No, he can’t, Nell thought. Tim could no doubt sort most things, but not broken hearts and distracted minds.
‘And you’re sure it’s OK about the breeches?’
‘Fine. I’ve always fantasised about wearing some.’
‘A dream come true then.’ Julie chuckled. ‘And, actually, you’re escaping pretty lightly. Bert Blood’s in drag, as a shepherdess. It’s just the way the costumes pan out. He’s having to shave his cleavage.’
At five minutes to five the following day Nell, resplendent in a frayed silk waistcoat, some battered buckled shoes and a pair of grubby, tight satin breeches whose previous wearers she was trying not to think about, joined the forty-plus rest of the cast in the chapel.
Several of the women in long cotton dresses and shawls, their hair in buns, whispering and giggling, she recognised from the farm shop, cafés and main entrance to the house. Many of the men chuckling at each other’s buckles, breeches and smocks she had often seen in the gardens, or driving trailers around the estate roads.
Bert Blood looked even more amazing than expected in an embroidered gown, a wig of considerable height and bright pink circles of rouge on his cheeks. He seemed to Nell to be rather enjoying it; certainly he was taking the teasing he was receiving in good part. Perhaps, after the ill-starred stint as a house guide, he had finally found his vocation.
‘Can we have a word?’
Nell turned to see a woman in a tall silver wig regarding her nervously. It took her a few seconds to recognise Angela.
‘Er . . . sure,’ Nell said apprehensively. ‘Is this about the office?’
Angela nodded. ‘That and a few other things. Let’s find somewhere quiet.’
After everything else that had happened, the news that it was Angela who had impersonated her was almost too much to take in.
‘Aren’t you furious?’ Angela asked, almost timidly. She had expected excoriation, fury, denunciation. Indeed, she was almost looking forward to it; it was what she deserved.
But Nell simply looked sad. She had only part-absorbed the background reasons for Angela’s enmity; they seemed trivial. The main point was that Angela had been to Bess’s Tower and explained her innocence to Dylan. Now, at least, she could no longer be blamed for Eve’s appearance. But the knowledge brought her no satisfaction. She could hardly bring herself to ask what he had said. She did, nonetheless.
Angela explained, in a low, ashamed voice, that Dylan had been devastated. ‘He was going straight round to see you.’ She raised her head. ‘But I’m guessing that he didn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t have had to tell you any of this.’
Nell shook her head. ‘But I haven’t been home.’ She pictured Dylan arriving at Beggar’s Roost, jumping out of the car, striding up the path, rattling at the door. Almost the worst aspect of the whole sorry matter was that the image provoked no emotion within her. It was as if Dylan’s outburst in the tower had killed all her feeling for him. There was a faint and distant echo of regret, but nothing more. All the anguish and the passion had dwindled to a deadening, despairing numbness.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Angela said, reading some of this in Nell’s face. She had expected to bring joy with her revelations. Relief. But the other woman’s eyes looked flat and dead.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Nell said dully. It seemed to her that nothing, now, mattered at all. She would go through life, speaking, doing, seeing. But not feeling, so far as she could possibly help it.
That the first thing she must now do was go to a wedding was unfortunate. But it would be a good test of her new resolve. If she could avoid feeling at a wedding, she could avoid it anywhere.
As Bert’s house tour had only whisked through the chapel, Nell had a blurred memory of lots of marble and painting. As the wedding began, she was able to examine the room in more detail. It was astonishingly ornate; hardly a surface was uncarved, undecorated or unembellished in some way. The painted ceiling was entirely covered in figures, temples and trees set against blue skies and billowing clouds. The carved marble altar stood in a carved marble apse containing a painting of a Jesus with truly splendid biceps. It was at this that Nell was gazing abstractedly when the chapel organ struck up and the cast stood to attention.
At the back of Nell’s mind had been the possibility that Jed might not turn up; this, after all, had been her own experience of bridegrooms. Jed, however, now entered the chapel, his long, large legs tightly encased in a pair of cream breeches and his enormous shoulders looking still huger in a long, dark coat heavy with silver buttons. His expression was fixed and tremulous; he looked as if he were trying not to cry, which seemed both touching and, given Jed’s general force of personality, rather surprising.
Mr Bingley was beside Jed, or at least the friend chosen to impersonate him. The fashionable white-framed glasses he sported possibly struck an anachronistic note.
A chorus of dutiful ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aaahs’ now greeted Carly as she appeared in her Elizabeth Bennet dress. They were not as forced as Nell had expected; Carly’s demanding and dominating character was effectively disguised in a white silk dress of empire line teamed with a white gauze shawl. She actually looked rather angelic, with her honey-coloured hair in satiny ringlets topped with a coronet of orange blossom.
The vicar, dressed as Mr Collins, stepped forward and cleared his throat. ‘Dearly beloved . . .’
The wedding breakfast took place in Pemberton’s dining room, a formal chamber on a massive scale whose red walls were punctuated with great marble fireplaces and enormous gold-framed paintings of past Earls and Countesses. Huge windows hung with thick brocade curtains framed long, green views over the park, and a coffered ceiling painted white and gold soared over a table that could seat twenty and was doing so. Carly and Jed sat at each end, invisible to each other through the tall forest of silverware and crystal that grew in the centre. It all looked rather impressive. And the joy of the occasion was palpable. Even to Nell; especially to Nell. She did not respond to it, however.
She threw herself into the work instead, of which, fortunately, there was plenty. Her task was to hurry with plates between the dining room and the makeshift kitchen in the nearby sculpture gallery, where the food historian was supervising the negus. This much-discussed menu item, the one that had caused so much trouble, was actually just warm mulled port.
‘What’s this?’ Nell asked, returning to have a plateful of something grey and gluey thrust at her to carry out next.
‘Torrington of sheep’s trotters!’ declared the food historian, a portly bearded gentleman who seemed immersed in the eighteenth century to an alarming degree. ‘A great delicacy. Hurry up
now, and come back for the flummery.’
Nell hurried up, trying not to look at the sheep’s trotters, let alone smell them.
‘Service, please!’ called the food historian from behind her. ‘Can someone come and carry in the bustard fricassee?’
Angela, meanwhile, sat outside on a bench and watched the staff practise the dances for the candlelit ball. There had been a hasty rehearsal that morning, supervised by Julie and run by a rather harassed local dance teacher. Angela, who couldn’t waltz at the best of times, let alone in an awkward dress and sloppy shoes, had already decided that her contribution to the ball would be purely decorative and stationary; she would find a pillar, lean against it, and not move. She didn’t feel well enough to dance anyway.
As she observed the farm shop manager, in a white Mozart wig, pirouetting with the large young woman who ran the children’s farmyard, Angela felt a curious sense of peace. She had settled all her scores now, confessed to everyone she had hurt. She was ready for whatever lay ahead.
CHAPTER 60
Nell knew the Pemberton ballroom well. She and Julie had walked round it together while Julie puzzled how to make Jed and Carly’s dream of a candlelit dance come true. The question had remained unresolved during Nell’s time in Weddings but it had now, she could see, been most spectacularly answered.
As Nell entered now, behind the wedding party and the cast of servants, she heard a general gasp of awe. By the time she had shuffled in herself, she could see what had elicited it. The great room, which she had only ever previously seen with daylight bouncing off its polished surfaces, was bathed in the soft golden glow of hundreds of candles. Heritage candles, Nell reminded herself with a smile.
Two vast chandeliers, ablaze with flickering flames, hung from a painted ceiling which seemed alive with mythical animals and winged goddesses. There were more candles along the walls, in the silver sconces set at regular intervals in the polished panelling. All were reflected in the bevelled glass of the windows; as darkness gathered in the park outside, the light danced and glittered in the panes.
The effect was as dramatic as it was beautiful, and the excitement in the room was palpable as the string quartet struck up for the first dance and the crowd stood admiringly back to let Jed and Carly take the floor.
Nell knew from Julie that she had had a considerable struggle making Handel with Care exchange their micro-minis and skyscraper heels for the prevailing eighteenth-century aesthetic. The four string players had complied, up to a point, but had managed to raunch up the Austen look with their cleavages extensively displayed above their buttoned bodices. Their heavily streaked blonde hair, while nominally pulled back into buns, tumbled wantonly round their faces. The cello player had even managed to hitch up her skirts to feature gleaming, tanned, wide-apart legs.
Jed and Carly, whirling around in the centre of the polished floor as everyone clapped, seemed not to notice this lapse in authenticity. Those that did seemed generally appreciative. ‘Say,’ Nell overhead Carly’s father, in character as Mr Bennet, observe. ‘Those dames are really something.’
Dylan, in Bess’s Tower, was in a rage of regret. He could not sit still for more than a few seconds, but pacing about the small rooms was making him equally agitated. The Japanese toilet had struck up expectantly five times.
Quite apart from the blaze in his own head, it had been a hot day outside. The warmth gathered in the stones of the old tower walls was now releasing itself inside, making the small rooms stuffy. Dylan decided to go out on to the roof. He put his hand on the rope-banister and mounted the winding stairs.
But it was more than fresh air that he was seeking. He knew that real relief would only come when he had apologised to Nell. Acknowledged to her, too, that he was the author of all his problems. Other people were not to blame for the chain of events in which he had become tangled and trapped, and in which he had tangled and trapped her.
That relief did not seem imminent because now another hideous link had been forged. Nell had disappeared. Dylan had searched for her in all the usual places but there had been no sign of her. Not even at Beggar’s Roost. Dylan’s fear that she had left the area for ever was becoming a horrible possibility. He had left endless messages on the voicemail of her mobile, which he could now do as he had finally bought one of his own. His first call on it had been to reassure his mother. She, at least, had been pleased to hear from him. Touchingly pleased. Far more pleased than he deserved.
What a bloody fool he had been. Pacing about the tower, Dylan clenched his fists. What should he do? What could he do?
Leave. Head to pastures new, start all over again. But the pastures would not be new; if he had learned anything, he had learned that. He would just be repeating old behaviour, running away again from another mess of his own making.
He had, at least, apologised to Eve, who had been cool in her acceptance of his hot, blustering speech. ‘Well,’ she had said at the end, ‘if you ever feel like writing again, you know where I am. But you’ll have to call me, I won’t call you.’ It had seemed fair enough to Dylan. Had he been Eve, he wouldn’t have taken his call.
Julian had been his usual relaxed self. ‘Good to hear from you, dear boy,’ he had purred. ‘I wonder if you might swing by the office soon. Latvian internet TV want to turn All Smiles into a mini-series.’
Dylan assured him that he would, at the first opportunity.
‘Jolly good. Oh, and any sign of the Muse?’ Julian added, according to his habit of making the most important part of the conversation sound like an afterthought.
‘Not really. But I’ve felt the odd stirring.’ Dylan surprised himself, saying this. But quite suddenly, it made sense. Surely the very least he could do, after what he had put everyone through, was to make it up to them by producing a novel?
And one sure-fire, tried-and-tested way to use up all the agitation and misery he felt was to write it all down. He was, generally speaking, useless and stupid, but he was not useless and stupid at that.
‘The odd stirring, eh?’ But Julian – like Eve – did not press him on this. Perhaps they didn’t believe him, Dylan thought. Well, he would show them. But not just now.
Angela was sitting at the very back of the ballroom while the music, dancing, clapping and laughter went on around her. She concentrated her gaze on the clodhopping feet of the various Pemberton personnel now attempting, with mixed success, to remember what the dancing teacher had taught them. Once, of course, she would have derived a spiteful amusement from all this.
It was while staring at the floor that Angela noticed the candle that had fallen there; presumably from one of the wall sconces. It had rolled, unnoticed, under a low stool near to the one on which she sat herself. The flame from the wick was licking, in an exploratory fashion, the varnish on the herringbone parquet floor.
The alarm shrilled. Handel with Care stopped playing immediately, sprang to their feet and lunged for their instrument cases. There were gasps, exclamations and screams among the guests and cast, but almost immediately the firm tones of Julie rang out.
People were not to panic and were to file out calmly from the ballroom and down the stairs into the main hall. From here they would be shown out into the Earl’s private garden, where they would await further instruction.
Nell shuffled out with the rest. Having been at the back of the crowd throughout, she was one of the last to leave. Looking apprehensively behind her at the now flaming corner of the ballroom, Nell’s eye fell on the figure of Angela Highwater, who seemed to be having problems tying up her shoes. She was sitting, bent, her head over her feet.
‘Angela!’ Nell shouted. ‘Come on!’
Angela continued pretending to fiddle with her shoes. She had decided that she did not want to come on. What was there to come on for?
Dylan stayed, thinking, on the roof of Bess’s Tower long after the blazing set
ting sun gave way to a silver sliver of moon.
It was quite dark now, and he could see, from his vantage point above the building, something gleaming in one of the windows of Pemberton House.
Gleaming, not glowing as the rest of the windows were tonight. It was unusual for the house to look this illuminated. Every single room was lit up. Pemberton looked like a fancy box with lots of holes in and a bulb inside.
Someone was getting married. Dylan had seen, on his return from Beggar’s Roost, a couple in a bonnet and top hat arriving at the house in a horse-drawn carriage. He had only vaguely registered the detail; lots of guests got up in costume. They were obviously, now, having a big party. But this light had a different quality to the dull glow elsewhere in the windows. It was flickering and much brighter; it seemed alive. As well as, somehow, familiar.
He realised that it was fire.
The sight made his nerves shrink and the blood shriek round his veins. Even from this distance it seemed too close.
His instinct was to hurry back downstairs, into the tower where he could no longer see it. But what about the people in the house? Did they realise that part of Pemberton was in flames? The building was enormous and they seemed to be using all of it. One part could easily be on fire while people in the other parts remained oblivious.
Of course people knew, Dylan reassured himself. And anyway, the house was sure to be equipped with extinguishers, alarms and staff drilled in fire procedure.
But what, a niggling inner voice demanded, if they weren’t? What if people hadn’t realised? At the very least, the lovely rooms would be damaged. There were valuable paintings in there.
And at the most, people’s lives might be threatened.
Dylan had to be sure. His memories of being trapped in fire-ravaged rooms were terrifying. He could not bear the thought of anyone else suffering the same.
He rushed down the stairs.
