Well, she might not have received a formal education, but she still had a wonderful way with a story. Even if Kitty couldn’t read her rough notes.
She closed the exercise book just as from behind her she heard someone say, ‘What are you doing here, Kitty? I thought you were out riding with your mama.’
Kitty jumped. The only person she knew who could move without making a sound, Hester Drax had entered the room, tall and thin in her chapel-going clothes, determinedly unattractive, in a grey, three-quarter-length coat-and-skirt, her large, droopy, brown hat skewered to her bun with a hatpin. She was myopic and viewed the world through a pair of severe, steel-rimmed glasses, which at the moment were fixed directly on Kitty.
Mortified by being caught in the act, but determined not to feel guilty, Kitty said carelessly, ‘I had a little headache and Mama thought I could be excused. It’s quite gone now, thank you,’ she added, though Miss Drax hadn’t expressed any concern. ‘I was just hoping to sneak a preview of the next book – but I can’t make head nor tail of Mama’s handwriting. It’s almost as though you have a secret code.’
She smiled but Miss Drax was not amused. ‘Which is why she doesn’t like people to see it at that stage,’ she replied sharply. Kitty pretended not to notice the rudeness. The woman had a high spot of colour on both cheeks. The Methodist preacher’s sermon must have been very stimulating.
‘Is your mother not home yet?’
‘No. She’s awfully late. She should be changing by now. And Papa’s not home, either.’ Kitty crossed the room and put the ring she was still holding back into the trinket box.
She knew Miss Drax had already noted the open lid but she made no comment, other than to say, ‘I suppose I had better go and ask them to put luncheon back.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘I think not. It will come better from me,’ Hester Drax said, with the martyred air of one whose fate it was to impart unpleasant news.
Two
The tedious service at last came to an end and Bridget and her mother were finally able to leave church after shaking hands with the vicar. Ursula had politely complimented him on his sermon but Bridget could not bring herself to do likewise. Nothing short of hypocrisy, that would have been. He was a dry and humourless man, which had translated itself to the sermon.
Impatient and cramped from sitting in the pew, she longed to stretch her legs but of necessity she had to accommodate her stride to her mother’s much shorter one. She was unusually silent, frantic with calculations about whether she would be able to get away this afternoon without attracting attention. Although she was naturally devious she wasn’t sanguine about achieving this. Sunday luncheon, to please Uncle Louis who liked to keep up tradition, was always a family occasion, a big, heavy meal compensated for with something light in the evening, a reversal of the usual daily proceedings. Everyone was expected to be present and it went on for ever. No question of avoiding it entirely – she and her mother were, after all, guests in the house – or of trying to slip away before the pudding and cheese, though she might possibly dodge the coffee. The meeting was scheduled to begin at three thirty and she was on pins to hear the result of what had happened that morning. Always presuming, she thought, her heart beating faster, that she had not heard anything before she got to the meeting.
Shortly before Christmas, Lady Devenish had decided she must take charge of bringing Kitty out. (No use relying on her sister-in-law for that, she would be hopeless! Nor had she the right connections. Whereas Ursula knew Debrett’s Peerage from A to Z and saw it as a failure on her part that Bridget had emerged through two Seasons without catching a suitable future husband from those listed within its pages, one she did not intend to be repeated with Kitty.) Since Lydia had thanked her gracefully, no doubt glad to be rid of the obligations, she and Bridget had moved into the Challoner house in Egremont Gardens, where they were to stay until Kitty was safely launched, and had completed her first Season.
Early in the New Year, Bridget had been working in the little room at the back of the house that was known as the book room because Lydia thought that to call such a small room with only a moderate amount of books in it a library was too pretentious. It was cosy and quiet, and people rarely came in to disturb Bridget as she worked, preparing for her first term in Cambridge. She looked up as a tap on the door announced the arrival of mid-morning coffee.
Emma, the parlour maid who had now also been detailed to maid Kitty if and when she needed it, which was not yet very often, came in with the coffee and put it on the table Bridget was using as a desk. Absorbed in her work, she murmured her thanks absently and went on writing. After a moment she was aware the girl hadn’t left the room but was still standing by her side, her eyes fixed on the banner headlines of the newspaper lying across the corner of the table. The big story of the East End siege a few days ago, when hundreds of police had surrounded a house where a trio of armed criminals, said to be Russian anarchists, had been holed up, and which had ended only when the house caught fire and two of the three had been burnt to death, was still eclipsing even the news of the forthcoming coron-ation. ‘Too dreadful, isn’t it?’ Bridget remarked, though she was surprised that the girl hadn’t been careful enough to conceal her interest. Servants were expected to keep their thoughts to themselves. ‘Let’s hope they catch the one who escaped very soon.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Emma replied surprisingly. ‘They’re only fighting for what they think is right.’
‘What? But they’ve deliberately killed several policemen!’ And they had been Russian revolutionaries, too, originally disturbed in the act of armed robbery, breaking into a jeweller’s shop. Supposedly to enable them to send funds back to Russia.
‘Well, I don’t say that’s right, but you don’t get what you want without a fight, do you?’
Bridget looked at her in astonishment and Emma flushed. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Bridget. It’s not my place to have said anything.’ She bobbed and went to the door.
‘No, wait, Emma. What did you mean by that – having to fight?’
Emma stood with her hand on the door-knob. Bridget had been living in this house since Christmas but if she’d been asked before that moment to describe Emma she couldn’t have done so. She was simply one of the servants. She’d never noticed before what a good-looking girl she was, with a fresh complexion and thick, curly brown hair, and she had certainly never considered that she might be a person with opinions of her own. ‘Come on, sit down and explain. You intrigue me.’
‘I should be getting on.’
‘Another minute or two won’t hurt.’
Emma looked at her steadily, then came back and sat stiffly on the chair Bridget indicated. She waited, and after a minute Emma said, ‘I would have thought you would have known about all that more than most, Miss Bridget, you going to a university and that. But I’ll bet you’ve had to struggle for it, haven’t you? Being a woman.’
Bridget laid down her pen. She wasn’t ignorant of the fact that the servants in any house were bound to know a great deal more about the people for whom they worked than those people liked to admit, but she was a little taken aback to find her own affairs such an open book. The hours she spent here, absorbed in her books, had obviously revealed the extent of her obsession. ‘I hadn’t taken you for a women’s rights supporter, Emma. Are you a suffragette?’
‘I haven’t got the time for that, Miss. And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to be getting on, or I’ll have Mrs Thorpe after me.’
‘Of course, I mustn’t keep you, Emma. But we must have another chat when you have more time. I think you and I might have something in common.’
‘I don’t think so, Miss Bridget, best leave it. I’ve already said too much.’ Emma bobbed again and left the room.
But they did meet again, and they talked. The meetings were necessarily brief encounters, snatched by Bridget whenever she could catch Emma between duties. She hadn’t realised how long the girl’s hours were, how hard
she worked. But she was physically strong, a willing worker and possessed of a great deal of common sense. Bridget learnt that she had been employed by the Challoners since leaving school. Before that she had lived in the East End where she had been born and brought up, which explained her sympathy with those who lived there, in particular the women whose lives were so hard. She had not been entirely truthful about her involvement with the women’s movement. As an uneducated working girl, her time and input was severely limited but since every pair of hands was needed, anyone with enthusiasm was welcomed into the suffragette fold.
Until Bridget went to that first meeting with Emma, purely out of interest, her sympathies with the women’s movement had been theoretical, absorbed in her studies as she was. She had read terrible stories of arrest, imprisonment and, lately, hunger striking, and had been horrified – but at a distance. Now she had met women who had experienced all three, not once, but several times. Some of the hunger strikers had even suffered forcible feeding, an intolerable practice permitted through the non-intervention policy of Prime Minister Asquith’s Liberal government. At last medical objections, backed up by outraged public opinion at the highly dangerous and inhumane practice, was prompting the government to question whether it had become too politically embarrassing to allow it to be continued.
Even so, not all the population by any means – not even most women – were inclined to support the suffrage movement, a situation that deterred neither their leader Mrs Pankhurst, her daughters, nor their followers from their intentions to press forward. Bridget’s eyes had been opened. She had not known such passion and commitment existed: the barbarous treatment some of those women had received had not diminished their fervour for the Cause by one iota. The health of many of them had been permanently damaged, but it had not broken their spirit.
However, at the moment, due to the Conciliation Bill (designed to allow some women, though not all, the vote) which was going through Parliament, an air of hope was stirring and in return, Bridget learnt, some of them had agreed for the duration of this time of celebration to suspend plans for such violent protests as smashing windows, setting fire to pillar boxes, pouring corrosive acid over golf courses and any other form of guerrilla warfare they could think of.
Absorbed in her own thoughts as she and Ursula walked along, Bridget became aware that her mother had been speaking to her and had to ask her to repeat what she had said. ‘I asked what it was that seemed to be amusing you during the sermon, Bridget.’ Ursula had to turn her head so that she could look from under the brim of the enormous chiffon-and-flower-bedecked hat she wore, a fashion that was not kind to women of her stature.
Bridget had forgotten how observant, under that vague exterior, her mother could be. She assumed vagueness herself. ‘Oh, was I amused? I don’t recollect. It couldn’t have been the Reverend Philpott making a joke, at any rate.’
Ursula smiled slightly. ‘I don’t suppose it could. Well, never mind. We must hurry. Your aunt is bringing Mr Villiers home for lunch. Shall we cut through the public gardens? I hear the tulips are spectacular this year.’
In fact, Bridget knew only too well what had amused her. A bizarre but tension-relieving intrusion into the turmoil that was churning her insides, consumed as she was by a febrile excitement, knowing what might happen today. Frightened, too, and struggling with her conscience. Should she, or should she not? And yet, in the midst of all that, she had suddenly wondered during that tedious sermon what would happen if she were to emulate one of the women she had met at that first suffrage meeting, who claimed she had the previous week jumped up in church and stood on the seat of her pew, shouting ‘Votes for Women!’ The same thing would have happened to her, Bridget, she supposed, if she had dared to do it. A few moments of frozen disbelief, then men in the congregation rushing to manhandle the woman from the church, and the vicar himself quoting the scriptures on the lines of it being shameful for women to speak in church. (‘Or to speak at all!’ someone at the meeting had added, to much laughter.) Remembering that, Bridget had had to suppress a giggle during the sermon.
She had expected amusement from her Aunt Lydia, too, one of her infectious laughs when she had recounted the incident. But it didn’t raise so much as a smile. For all her enthusiastic espousal of various good causes, Lydia refused to have anything to do with the women’s struggle, or even to listen to the arguments Bridget put forward.
‘Take my advice, Bridget, and keep away from those women.’ It was so out of character that at first Bridget hadn’t believed she was serious. Lydia was usually all too ready to fight for the underdog. But then she went on, ‘You’re not the first to approach me, you know. But my dear, that sort of thing always leads to trouble, believe me.’
‘You don’t have to be a militant,’ Bridget had retorted. ‘I for one am not.’
‘I should hope not.’
‘There are other ways of showing your sympathy.’
But Lydia was not to be swayed. She had always held herself adamantly aloof from politics. It was politics that had caused her father’s exile from his beloved homeland, Russia.
Not quite a quarrel, but nearly so, it was causing a tight-lipped constraint between Bridget and the aunt she loved and admired.
‘Yes, Mother, you were right, the tulips are magnificent,’ she said as they entered the public gardens, ordering herself to dismiss that particular problem from her mind, only for it to be taken up with that other, more pressing apprehension.
Although he was so easygoing, the axiom that punctuality was the politeness of princes had been drilled into Louis Challoner by his nanny until it was almost as much a way of life to him as the concept of keeping time was unknown to his wife. It was especially unusual for him to be late for a meal. On the other hand, although no one was ever entirely surprised when Lydia failed to put in an appearance by the right time, on this occasion one imagined she would have made an effort to be there by one o’clock, since Marcus Villiers was invited to lunch with them.
Louis in fact arrived home just after one in a motor-cab, looking unusually hot and bothered, and quite upset, giving the explanation that he had been held up by one of the club bores, who had then, poor old fellow, collapsed in front of his eyes with what looked like a heart attack. A doctor who was lunching at the club had been found and fortunately the attack was thought to be nothing more than severe indigestion. Louis had managed to slip away during all the subsequent fuss, but it had been almost impossible to get a cab. All the world, it seemed, was out gawping at the preparations for the coronation. Foreign visitors for the event were already arriving in the capital, adding to the crowds thronging the streets, and families were out too, making a day of it, taking advantage of the fine weather, picnicking in Green Park and elsewhere. Horse-drawn traffic was becoming more of a problem every day, holding everything up, Louis declared. Maybe it was time to think about buying a motor-car, instead of the hansom detailed to take him to the City each day.
Ursula, annoyed with Lydia but anxious to stave off crisis in the kitchen, said crisply, ‘Well, maybe it hasn’t come to that just yet. Meanwhile, Cook’s becoming worried about her roast.’ It was a prime rib of beef, and the master liked it rare.
‘Oh, very well, we’ll eat at once. It’s no use waiting for Lydia. There’s no telling with her, is there?’ For a moment, an unfathomable look crossed Louis’s face. ‘Give me five minutes to tidy myself. She may be back by then.’
Three
It hadn’t really happened. It was a bad dream, a nightmare, it had to be. She would wake up to see Mama walking through the door, tossing her hat aside, breathless, smiling and accompanied by Marcus, full of apologies – so sorry we’re late, darlings, please forgive!
The detectives were mistaken – it was some other person who had been shot at while trotting down Rotten Row.
That’s what Kitty longed to be true, but she knew it wasn’t. The plain, unvarnished truth was that in Hyde Park this morning someone fired a gun, the bullet
had hit her mother, Lydia Challoner, and she was dead.
A couple of plain-clothes detectives had come to break the news. Detective Sergeant Inskip, who stated baldly that he was afraid he was the bearer of bad news, told them what it was and seemed to think that was that. With him was another man, a more nondescript, quieter person but who turned out to be his superior, Detective Chief Inspector Gaines. Gaines said very little at first, apart from adding the condolences the sergeant had omitted. He wore a luxuriant, old-fashioned moustache which made him look mournful. Or perhaps he really was sorry, unlike Inskip, who seemed to parrot out the words mechanically, as if they were something he had learned by rote to bring out when the occasion demanded.
Kitty had known that she wasn’t being either fair or reasonable. However much they were accustomed to it, she could not truly believe that even the police would relish having to deliver this sort of news. Perhaps it really had upset that Sergeant Inskip, and keeping it so impersonal was his way of dealing with it. Chief Inspector Gaines had a similarly stern face but his eyes were kinder. Inskip’s eyes were sharp and shiny, like black boot buttons, the sort that missed nothing. Other than that, he was handsome, and looked as if he knew it. Dark, flat curls like a Grecian statue. His skin was tanned and he looked athletic, tight-packed into his clothes, wearing a check suit that was too loud.
The Firebird's Feather Page 3
