Cousin Kate

by Джорджетт Хейер

  “No, it has been rather too hot,” she explained, smiling at him. “How is your sister? I hope you, and Lady Templecombe, are pleased with her engagement? I wished to send her my felicitations, but thought our acquaintance too slight to warrant my doing so.”

  “I don’t know that—never much of a one for the conventions, y’know!—but she’ll be very much obliged to you, that I can vouch for! Took a great fancy to you! As for Amesbury, I should rather think I am pleased! He’s a great gun: known him all my life! Wouldn’t you agree that he’s a great gun, Philip?”

  “Yes, an excellent fellow,” said Philip. “What do you want to say to me, Gurney? I can’t stay: we are going to be late for dinner as it is!”

  “I’ll go along with you as far as to your gates,” said Mr Templecombe obligingly. “Only wished to warn you that I’m going on a bolt to the Metropolis tomorrow, and don’t know when I shall be back. So you can’t come to stay with me, dear boy! A curst bore, but there’s no getting out of it! M’mother’s beginning to cut up a trifle stiff: says it’s my duty to show my front! Says I ought to bear in mind that I’m the head of the family. Says it presents a very off appearance when I don’t show. I daresay she’s right. She’s holding a dress-party, and says I positively must be there.”

  “Undoubtedly you must!” said Philip. “If only to see to it that the butler doesn’t water the wine, or the cook spoil the ham!”

  “Exactly so! Not that there’s much fear of old Burley’s watering the wine: he’s a strict abstainer! Still, I do see that it wouldn’t be the thing for me to stay away from m’mother’s dress-party.”

  “No,” agreed Kate. “How uncomfortable it would be for her not to have you there to be the host!”

  “Just what she says, ma’am! But the deuce of it is that once she gets me to London it’s all Lombard Street to an eggshell I shall find myself regularly in for it! I can tell you this: I’m fond of Dolly, but I shall be glad when we’ve got her safely buckled!”

  All this time he had been riding beside the curricle, but a cart was seen approaching, and he was forced to fall back. As he continued to rattle on, in his insouciant style, and Philip’s eyes had naturally to be fixed on the road ahead, the burden of maintaining conversation fell on Kate, who slewed round into a most uncomfortable position, and was heartily glad when it was again possible for him to ride alongside the curricle. “I say, dear boy, what happened to that groom of yours?” he asked, suddenly struck by the groom’s absence.

  “He—er—is suffering from an indisposition,” replied Philip, directing a quelling look at his tactless friend.

  “Suffering from a—Oh—ah! Just so!” said Mr Templecombe hastily. “What I wanted to say to you is that I’d be glad of a word with you before I go. Tell you what! You take Miss Malvern back to Staplewood, and come and eat your mutton with me! No need to change your dress! I want to ask your advice.”

  “I’m sorry, Gurney: I believe I must not,” said Philip, looking anything but pleased.

  “Humbug, dear boy! Her ladyship don’t want you, and you’ll excuse him, won’t you, Miss Malvern?”

  “Of course I will,” replied Kate, with a cordiality that earned her a fiery, sideways glance from Philip. She said, in a lowered voice: “Please go! I must have time to think, and—and you must know there will be no opportunity for you to be private with me this evening!”

  Apparently he did know this, for after hesitating for a moment he said curtly: “Very well, Gurney: I’ll come.”

  “Capital!” said Mr Templecombe, undismayed by this ungracious acceptance. “I’ll be off then: must warn my people to lay an extra cover! “Servant, Miss Malvern! Shall hope to see you again when I come back!”

  The gates of Staplewood were within sight; Mr Templecombe waved his hat in farewell, and cantered off. Kate said reproachfully: “How could you be so uncivil?”

  “Easily! I felt uncivil!”

  “But you can’t be uncivil to people only because you feel uncivil!” Kate said austerely. ,

  “I can, if it’s to Gurney. He don’t give a button! We’ve been friends all our lives—even went to school together!”

  Since Kate knew, from her military experience, that young gentlemen who were fast friends greeted one another in general by opprobrious names, and never seemed to think it necessary to waste civility on a chosen intimate, she had long since abandoned any attempt to fathom masculine peculiarities, and now said no more, merely smiling to herself as she tried to picture the inevitable results, if any two females behaved to each other in a similar style.

  Mr Philip Broome, having negotiated the entrance to Staplewood in impeccable style, glanced down at her, and instantly demanded: “What makes you smile, Kate?”

  “Oh, merely that gentlemen are always uncivil to their friends, and polite to those whom they dislike!”

  “Well, naturally!” he said, making her giggle.

  “I won’t ask you to explain,” she said. “Even if you could do so—which I take leave to doubt—I shouldn’t understand!”

  “I should have thought it must be obvious! However, I don’t mean to waste the few minutes left to us in trying to explain what is quite unimportant. Kate, my darling, will you marry me?”

  “I—I rather think I will,” she replied, “but you must give me time to consider! I know it sounds missish to say so, but you have taken me by surprise, and—and though I would try to be a good wife to you I can’t feel that I ought to accept your offer!”

  “One thing at least you can tell me!” he said forcefully. “Do you feel you could love me? I mean—on, deuce take it I—do you love me? I don’t wish to sound like a coxcomb, but—”

  “Oh, Philip, how can you be so absurd?” said Kate, stung into betraying herself. “Of course I love you!”

  “That,” he said, whipping up his horses, “is all I want to know! Tomorrow, my darling, when you have considered, we will discuss when it will be most convenient for us to settle on a suitable date for the wedding! Yes, I know you are wondering how to break the news to Minerva, but you need not: I’ll do that—and instantly remove you from her sphere of influence! O my God! there’s the stable-clock striking six already! Why did you urge me to dine with Gurney? Shall I come in with you? Minerva is likely to be out of reason cross, you know!”

  “Perhaps she will be, but not nearly as cross as she would be if you were to accompany me!” replied Kate, preparing to alight from the curricle. “She dislikes you quite as much as you dislike her, Philip! I mean to come to points with her, and nothing could more surely bring us to dagger-drawing than your presence, believe me!”

  “You are full of pluck, Kate!” he said admiringly. “But if your courage fails you at the last moment, don’t hesitate to tell me! I shall fully sympathize!”

  She smiled, and took the hand he was holding out to her, to facilitate her descent from the curricle. Once on the ground, she looked up at him, with shyly twinkling eyes. “I promise you it won’t. I don’t mean to tell her that you have been so obliging as to make me an offer, of course!” She pulled her hand out of his tightening clasp as she spoke, and went swiftly up the steps to the principal entrance to the house.

  It stood open, as it always did in summertime, during the daylight hours, and the inner door, leading from the lobby into the hall, was on the latch. She let herself softly in, without, however, much hope of being able to run upstairs unobserved. Lady Broome insisted that one or other of the footmen should keep a watch on the door, and be at hand to bow her, or any visitor, in, and to relieve the gentlemen of their hats and coats. But on this occasion no one came into the hall, and Kate, who had more than half expected Pennymore to meet her, charged with a reproachful message from her aunt, thankfully darted up the stairs, to fling off her crumpled walking-dress, and,to hurry into the evening-gown she trusted Ellen would have laid out in readiness. She thought, fleetingly, that it was odd that neither of the footmen had been lying in wait for her; but she was not prepared to be greeted
by the news, conveyed to her by Ellen, in awe-stricken accents, that the household was in an uproar, because my lady had fainted clean away an hour after Miss had left the house, and had been carried up to her bed in a state of total collapse.

  “And they say, miss—Mrs Thorne, and Betty, and Martha—that her ladyship has never fainted in her life before, and Betty says as her aunty was just the same, never having a day’s illness until she was struck down with a palsy-stroke, and never rose from her bed again!”

  Without attaching much weight to this story, Kate was surprised, for it had not seemed to her that Lady Broome was on the brink of a palsy-stroke, although, looking back, she remembered thinking that her aunt was out of sorts when she had sent her on a useless errand. She said, in a disappointingly matter-of-fact way: “Nonsense, Ellen! I expect she has contracted this horrid influenza, which is rife in the village. Quickly, now! Help me into my dress! I’m shockingly late already!”

  Ellen obeyed this behest, but said that everything was at sixes and sevens, on account of her ladyship’s being very ill, and Mrs Thorne’s having given it as her opinion that it was a Warning: a pronouncement which had operated so powerfully on the cook’s sensibilities that he had ruined the cutlets of sweetbread ordered for the Master’s dinner, and had been forced to boil a fowl, which he proposed to serve with bechamel sauce, being as the Master couldn’t seem to stomach rich meats.

  While privately thinking that the chef had seized on Lady Broome’s sudden indisposition as an excuse for having overcooked the cutlets, Kate realized that it must be a very rare occurence, for it had clearly disorganized the establishment.

  She discouraged Ellen’s ghoulish desire to cite all the examples of fatal collapse which had, apparently, carried off half her aunts and uncles and cousins, and repeated her belief that Lady Broome’s disorder was merely a severe attack of influenza.

  In the event, she was justified, greatly to Ellen’s disappointment. Just as she was about to leave her room, and to go in search of Sidlaw, a perfunctory knock on the door was instantly succeeded by Sidlaw’s entrance. She said immediately : “Come in! I was just going to see if I could find you. What’s this I’m hearing about her ladyship? Has she caught this horrid influenza that is going so much about?”

  She was well aware that the dresser regarded her with mixed feelings, being torn between jealousy and a reluctant admiration of her sartorial taste; and had long since come to the conclusion that she owed the grudging civility paid to her by Sidlaw to her aunt, who must, she guessed, have laid stringent orders on her devoted attendant to treat her niece with respect. She was not, therefore, surprised when Sidlaw sniffed, and she was sure she was thankful Miss had come home at last.

  “Yes, I’m late,” agreed Kate. “I’m sorry for it, since I apprehend her ladyship was taken ill suddenly.”

  “There was nothing you could have done, miss!” said Sidlaw, instantly showing hackle. “Not but what—”

  “I don’t suppose there was, with you and the doctor to attend to her,” interrupted Kate. “What’s the matter? Is it the influenza?”

  “Well, that’s what the doctor says, miss,” Sidlaw replied, with another sniff which indicated her opinion of the doctor. “What I say is that she carried a bowl of broth to that hurly-burly creature—for Female I will not call her!—that lives in the cottage all covered over with ivy, not two days ago, and, say what I would, I couldn’t hinder her! She only laughed, and said that I should know she never caught infectious complaints.”

  “Yes,” interpolated Ellen, unable to restrain herself. “And Miss Kate was with her, Miss Sidlaw, and she hasn’t caught the influenza as you may see for yourself!”

  “That’s nothing!” said Kate hastily, to save Ellen from annihilation. “I am not prone to succumb to infectious diseases! And it must be remembered that I didn’t enter the cottage! You may go now!”

  “She’ll never be worth a candle-end!” said Sidlaw, with gloomy satisfaction, as the hapless Ellen withdrew. “I told my lady how it would be if she took a village scrub into the house!”

  Kate thought it prudent to ignore this, and asked instead if she might visit her aunt. To this, Sidlaw replied with a flat veto, saying that the doctor had given a dose of laudanum to my lady, to send her to sleep. “She told me, miss, that she felt as though she’d been stretched on the rack, and had all her joints wrenched, and she isn’t one to complain! As for her head, she’d no need to tell me that was aching fit to burst, because I could see that from the way she kept turning it from side to side on the pillow! And nothing I could do eased it: not even a cataplasm to her feet! So I was obliged to send for Dr Delabole, for all she kept on telling me she’d be better presently! I knew she was in a high fever!”

  A second knock fell on the door; Sidlaw, ignoring Kate, opened it, and said sharply: “Well, what do you want?”

  Kate, having caught a glimpse of Pennymore, said coldly: “That will do, Sidlaw: you may go!”

  Sidlaw turned white with anger, and shut her mouth like a trap. Paying no further heed to her, Kate smiled kindly at the butler, and said: “What is it, Pennymore?”

  It was beneath Pennymore’s dignity to betray even a flicker of triumph. To all appearances he neither saw nor heard Sidlaw as she stalked, snorting, out of the room. He said, with undisturbed calm: “Sir Timothy sent me to inquire, miss, if you would do him the honour of dining with him. In his own room, miss.”

  “How very kind of him!” said Kate. She had not been looking forward with much pleasure to an evening spent in Torquil’s and the doctor’s company, and she spoke with real gratitude. “Pray tell Sir Timothy that I am very much obliged to him, and will join him directly!”

  Pennymore bowed, and said: “Sir Timothy’s dinner will be served immediately, miss. We are a little behindhand this evening. Her ladyship’s sudden indisposition has, I regret to say, quite upset certain members of the staff.”

  “So I’ve been given to understand!” said Kate, twinkling.

  An almost imperceptible quiver of revulsion crossed Pennymore’s face. He said: “Yes, miss. It is unfortunate that Mrs Thorne’s nerves are so easily irritated. The maids naturally take their tone from her, and if the housekeeper falls into a fit of the vapours one can scarcely blame her underlings for behaving in a deplorably theatrical way. And the cook, of course, is a foreigner,” he added, not contemptuously, but indulgently. He then bowed slightly, and withdrew.

  It had not taken Kate many days to realize that the senior members of the staff were split into two factions: those who owed allegiance to Sir Timothy, and those who were Lady Broome’s supporters. Pennymore, and Tenby, Sir Timothy’s valet, were at the head of the first faction, and were followed by the two footmen, the coachman, and the head-groom; while Sidlaw and Mrs Thorne, both of whom had come to Staplewood with their mistress, were Lady Broome’s worshippers. Whalley, Kate thought, was certainly one of Lady Broome’s chosen servants, and possibly Badger as well. The leaders of each faction lived in a state of constant warfare, which was not the less bitter for being concealed, in general, by a cloak of exquisite civility. Kate, nettled by Sidlaw’s insolence, could not help chuckling inwardly at what she knew would be Sidlaw’s rage at having been betrayed into speaking so roughly to Pennymore. Then she scolded herself for being uncharitable, knowing that Sidlaw, who really did love her mistress, was overset by anxiety.

  When she left her room, Sidlaw was hovering in the gallery, and moved a few steps towards her, holding herself very stiffly. She said, in a wooden voice: “I am afraid, Miss Kate, I took a liberty which you did not like in opening the door to Pennymore without your leave. I hope you will be so kind as to overlook it.”

  “Why, of course!” said Kate, with her swift smile. “You are in a great worry about her ladyship, aren’t you? I shan’t think of it again! But pray don’t let yourself be thrown into gloom! Depend on it, my aunt will feel very much more the thing tomorrow. I have only once in my life had influenza, when I was ten years old
, but I recall that for the first twenty-four hours I felt so ill that I told my nurse that I was dying!”

  Sidlaw showed some signs of relaxation, and even tittered, but Kate’s next words, caused her to become rigid again. Kate said: “I hope you won’t hesitate to tell me, when you would wish to be relieved for a little while: I should like very much to be of use to my aunt, and can very well sit with her while you rest.”

  “Thank you, miss,” said Sidlaw, in arctic accents, “I do not anticipate the need to ask for assistance.”

  Kate had expected to be snubbed, so she did not press the matter, merely nodding, and going down the stairs.

  Chapter XIV

  Kate had not previously penetrated to the East Wing, but when she passed through the door which shut it off from the Great Hall, and was met by Tenby, who conducted her to the saloon that was known as The Master’s Room, she knew, after a quick glance round, that Sir Timothy, allowing his wife a free hand in the rest of the house, must have prohibited her from laying a finger on his own apartments. The room was not shabby, but it was rather over-furnished, as though Sir Timothy had crammed into it all the pieces for which he had a fondness, and cared nothing for the formal arrangements dear to Lady Broome’s heart. He was seated in an old-fashioned wing-chair when Tenby ushered Kate into the room, talking to Dr Delabole, but he rose, and came forward, murmuring, as he saw the appreciative look in her eyes: “More homelike, Kate?”

  She laughed. “Yes, indeed, sir! Good evening, Dr Delabole! I learn from Sidlaw that my aunt has contracted the influenza which is running so much about, and is feeling very poorly. I hope you don’t expect any prolonged indisposition?”

  “Oh, no, no!” he replied reassuringly. “It is a severe attack, you know: very severe, and we must expect her to be pulled by it, and must endeavour to persuade her not to exert herself prematurely: she must resign herself to being in a tender state for at least a sennight. We shall be hard put to it to do it, if I know her ladyship!” He laughed gently. “I daresay you won’t credit it, but when I revived her from her faint, she tried to struggle to her feet, and insisted that there was nothing amiss! And when our good Sidlaw told her that she had fainted she snapped her nose off, saying: “Nonsense! I never faint!” However, she soon found that she couldn’t stand without support, so we were able to carry her up to her bed, and mighty glad she was to be there, for all she wouldn’t own it! I have just been telling Sir Timothy that I have given her a soothing draught, and that she is now asleep. I shall visit her during the night, but I fancy she won’t wake for some hours. And Sidlaw will be with her, you know: she has had a truckle-bed set up in the dressing-room, and is entirely to be relied on.”