A convoy of police motorcycles, sirens blazing, spearheaded the drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the baroness had taken the Presidential Suite. She rode with her limousine window down, waving at clusters of well-wishers, and noting with pride the many billboards along Sunset Boulevard that welcomed her arrival.
Los Angeles area papers featured front-page photographs of the baroness being greeted by the hotel staff, who were spiffed up in gold braid, crisp collars, and wingtips. Press and radio reported the ceremony that followed in the Polo Lounge, during which the manager presented her with the keys to the hotel, and the mayor offered her the keys to the city.
For her part, the baroness read a gracious statement thanking Los Angeles for its hospitality. “We look forward to the opportunity to thaw and revivify in this City of Angels, having laboured to teach the social graces to the colonial rustics of Canada.” She concluded with the announcement that the following day she would be receiving delegations from city and state banks. The day after that, she would be giving an audience to those intimates to whom her secretary had sent official invitations. The list was select and confidential. She trusted that the press would respect her privacy.
The idea that she was a baroness, or rather that she ought to be a baroness, had first occurred to Miss Bentwhistle in a dream she’d had shortly after moving in with the Mandibles.
Maybe it was because of sleeping at the rectory, or maybe it was the extra laudanum, but Miss Bentwhistle dreamt that the entire town had turned up at her reception for Mary Mabel dressed in Bible clothes. She wasn’t entirely sure that it was appropriate for the Reverend Mandible to be wearing dress socks with a toga, but this was the least of her worries. She had just discovered that she was stark naked. Not only that, but she was pinned to a cross, and everyone had crowded around to stare at her privates.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” intoned the Reverend Mandible. The entire St. James Board of Session began throwing rocks at her head. She was further plagued by an insufferable whining from the cross to her left. It was Clara Brimley. “If you don’t get me down from here, I’m telling my father!”
“Go to hell,” snapped Miss Bentwhistle. Lo and behold, the ground opened up and a screaming Miss Brimley was spirited off by a cauldron of devils chewing at her entrails. That didn’t stop the wailing. Now it was coming from the cross to her right. There dangled head secretary, Miss Dolly Pigeon. “What’s to become of us, Lizzy?”
“Fear not, oh good and faithful servant,” replied Miss Bentwhistle, “for you shall be with me in paradise.”
No sooner said than done. The clouds parted, it was a beautiful sunny day, and Miss Bentwhistle wasn’t on a cross, she was dripping ermine and pearls on a chaise lounge beside a swimming pool. Dolly was there, too, sitting on a beach towel in a maid’s uniform, giving her a pedicure. A waiter set down a tray of highballs. It must be a party. Miss Bentwhistle recognized a number of the guests. Wasn’t that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford playing footsie in the shallow end? And W.C. Fields passed out on an inner tube? Why, there was Harpo Marx chasing a dazzle of chorus girls down a water slide, and Charlie Chaplin doing the dog paddle.
“So you’re the Baroness.” The voice was familiar. She looked up to see Clark Gable, eyebrows at a rakish tilt. Was he referring to her? Absolutely. She couldn’t quite remember how it had come to pass, but beyond question she was a baroness. The Baroness Bentwhistle of Bentwhistle in fact. No wonder everyone had started to bow and curtsy.
Next thing she knew, she was in the back seat of Mr. Gable’s roadster with her legs in the air. She licked her lips. He smelled of marmalade.
“Want me to put some butter on it?” Mr. Gable asked.
“Mmmm,” she moaned. “I’ll take it any way you give it to me.”
“As you wish.”
How strange. Mr. Gable sounded like the rector’s wife.
Miss Bentwhistle had opened her eyes. Mrs. Mandible was standing over her with the breakfast tray.
“Doesn’t anyone knock around here?” the headmistress grumped as she propped herself up against a pillow.
“I did knock,” Mrs. Mandible countered. “Three times. I asked if you’d care for your breakfast. You hollered, ‘Yes, yes! I want it now!’”
Miss Bentwhistle eyed her with suspicion. “What else do you imagine I ‘hollered’?”
“I’m sure I don’t remember.” Mrs. Mandible smiled discreetly. She placed the tray on Miss Bentwhistle’s lap and departed.
The headmistress wasted no time. She put her breakfast aside, snuggled back under the sheets, pulled the covers up to her ears, closed her eyes, and tried to picture herself back in that roadster. Mr. Gable! Oh, Mr. Gable! Oh! Oh!
Oh, it was no use! She cast a critical eye at the light fixture on the ceiling. The closest she’d ever get to Clark Gable would be at the movies. As for the rest of it, being a baroness …
Her eye fell on her family crest and genealogical parchments from the Heralds’ College of Westminster sitting on twin easels at the foot of the bed. At the Academy, those squiggles tracing her lineage back to an eleventh-century English barony had seemed important. They made her an aristocrat. A minor aristocrat, perhaps, but an aristocrat nonetheless. That mattered in a colonial hinterland like London, Ontario, where dynasties were counted on three fingers and indoor plumbing was a source of pride.
It mattered not a whit, however, in the world of her dreams. In that world, the world of international affairs, soirées, and pool parties, she was but a social asterisk, a squiggled worm at the end of a hook descended from Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V, himself a worm on a hook on a line on a document teaming with hundreds of other worms and hooks on lines, all leading back to that scurvy pair of worms at the top of the parchment — Henry the Bent and his child bride Mathilde. And who were they, this army of Bentwhistles? They were nobodies, that’s who. Savages and imbeciles whose sole function in life was to have reduced the space available for her inscription on the family tree.
Miss Bentwhistle knew this for a fact, thanks to a certain Dr. Archibald Moorehead, an itinerant professor from Liverpool who years ago had given a lecture tour throughout the Dominion to various chapters of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. According to Dr. Moorehead, Canada was teeming with blue blood whose birthrights had been forgotten in the dustbins of history. It was a tragedy that he would rectify for a modest fee.
Intrigued, the headmistress had invited him back to the Academy. She was thrilled to discover the name Bentwhistle listed in his well-thumbed copy of Debrett’s Peerage, and immediately hired him to research her genealogy. She also agreed to underwrite the publication of his research, and to pay for his efforts in securing official documents from the Heralds’ College of Westminster. The Bentwhistle Family Tree and Coat of Arms subsequently graced the Academy’s dining hall. However, the monograph, all copies bought up at her expense, graced its fireplace.
It seems that paterfamilias Henry the Bent had arrived in England with the Norman invasion. He was reputed to have been a fierce warrior who took particular delight in dismembering the battlefield dead. William the Conqueror made him a baron for clearing the Whiftle Bog of Saxons. The original manor house was essentially a cave in one of the few outcroppings of rock on the barony. From here, the Baron of Bentwhiftle presided over a few thousand acres of inhospitable moors noted for swamp gas so vile it was rumoured to drive men insane. The family needed no such excuse. Lacking other diversion, it rutted itself into a frenzy of inbred half-wits, their spawn the tangle of worms and hooks and lines that cluttered Miss Bentwhistle’s prized parchment. These were her relatives, dammit, addled cousins, legitimate and illegitimate, a hundred times removed. Worse, many were still alive, breeding like maggots in north England bog country, spreading like germs throughout the Empire.
Now, lying in bed staring at her family tree, Miss Bentwhistle was overcome with despair. It was all so squalid. She dabbed her eyes and reached for the
laudanum. A capful turned into a tumbler, and soon Miss Bentwhistle was possessed of the most wondrous visions. History came alive as she imagined innumerable lines of Bentwhistles poisoned, garroted, and beheaded, their skulls cleft by broadswords, their gullets stuffed with coals, and their bodies drawn and quartered, dipped in lye, and roasted on spits. Those living when Dr. Moorehead wrote his drivel fared no better. Worm by miserable worm, she saw them sucked into the quagmire whole, or succumbed to scurvy and pox, consumption and clap, their puling infants ground beneath carriage wheels, poor things, or savaged by birds of prey.
Last but not least, she conjured the death of the current baron. According to the monograph, the barony had become so reduced that he and his family lived without servants in a small cottage, subsisting on the goodwill of squatters. The headmistress pictured them gobbling a tin of tainted veal. As they fell to the earthen floor, befouling themselves in agony, vermin feasted on their living flesh.
In the midst of such happy thoughts, Miss Bentwhistle became aware of distant knocking and a voice remarkably like Mrs. Mandible’s asking if the breakfast dishes might be cleared.
“Go away,” Miss Bentwhistle replied, or imagined she replied. Her voice was low and gravelly, like a gramophone winding down. Nonetheless, it roused her sufficiently that she realized she was no longer in bed. She was standing in front of that genealogical chart from Westminster. Something odd caught her eye, something she had never noticed before. A tiny d. and date of death were attached to every name but her own.
Why, it was a miracle, the document transformed in accordance with her visions!
A light dawned through the fog, a truth self-evident. As the sole surviving descendent of Henry the Bent, she wasn’t simply the beleaguered headmistress of some bankrupt girl’s academy (correctional institute) in the colonies. She was the rightful heir to the family barony. Indeed, she was none other than the Baroness Horatia Alice Bentwhistle of Bentwhistle!
Stunned by the revelation, the baroness staggered to the chest of drawers for support. En route, she realized that her left hand held the pot of India ink from the writing table. A recently dipped quill was in her right. Even in her fragile state, the nature of her miracle was apparent. Her father had been a master calligrapher, a skill which he had put to good use revising the wills and financial statements of his clients. She had clearly inherited his gift. Her alterations of the little d’s for death appeared genuine, the script exact, the chronologies plausible. A veneer of dust from the rectory’s window sills and who would be the wiser?
All the same, Miss Bentwhistle was horrified at the knowledge that she’d altered a royal document. It was one thing to play tricks on the neighbours, quite another to forge one’s way into a barony. She imagined an army of Beefeaters descending on the rectory to cart her off in leg irons. She slipped the evidence under the bed and ran to the closet, where she hid for the next half hour.
Things became clearer in the dark. There was no need to worry about the law. No one knew about her inventions but herself. Besides, she owned the document and could do with it as she pleased. The worst that could be said about her was that she had wished her relatives dead. Well, who hadn’t?
Miss Bentwhistle crept out of the closet, navigated to the bed, and retrieved her folly. The sight of her handiwork no longer terrified her. It made her heartsick. Oh, the fruits of delirium! The addenda could never be erased. Her precious parchment, her pride and joy, was ruined. In happier days, she might have ordered another, but the Heralds’ College demanded cash in advance, and royally certified gilt calligraphy was now beyond her means.
This was but another entry in her catalogue of woe. She fretted through the index: her Academy’s implosion, her financial straits, her inevitable confrontation with the town, and the humiliation sure to follow. It was too much to bear.
Miss Bentwhistle rarely thought about God. Since she was a regular at St. James, she figured she didn’t have to. At the moment, however, there was no one else to turn to. So with nothing to lose, she fell on her knees and did what she always did during her bouts of piety. She made God a bargain. If He would fix her problems, she’d believe in Him and never sin again. To prove she was serious, she began to mortify her flesh, whipping herself silly with the sash of her housecoat.
The stratagem paid off. Whether from boredom, amusement, or a sense of professional obligation, God threw her a lifeline. His assistance came by way of a powerful memory of the “Introduction to Philosophy” course Miss Bentwhistle had taken at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Professor Slater had peered around the lecture hall and declaimed: “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around, does it make a sound?” He’d proceeded to yammer away about some eighteenth-century Irishman by the name of George Berkeley who believed that nothing exists unless it is perceived — “to be is to be perceived” — and, consequently, that material objects are no more than ideas. What nonsense. Trust the Irish!
Still, Miss Bentwhistle had appreciated the practical applications of this philosophy. Dust behind the tea cabinet didn’t exist unless one rearranged the furniture. Neither did young men in women’s dormitories, provided they were spirited in after dark. Poverty and injustice likewise disappeared the instant one turned one’s back on them.
A convert to Mr. Berkeley’s thesis, she’d stopped attending her classes in the hope that they, too, would cease to exist. Come the mid-term report, however, her professors concluded that it was she who didn’t exist. Happily, they altered their deduction at year’s end thanks to the perceived evidence of essays, which she’d bought, and exams, which she’d arranged for friends to write on her behalf.
Such were the memories that the good Lord sent the headmistress now in her hour of need. He also tossed in an epiphany. Miss Bentwhistle grabbed it. “‘To be is to be perceived,’” she exclaimed in full eureka. “Ergo, ipso facto, a priori, to be perceived is to be!”
In a blaze of tautological insight, she grasped that it wasn’t important for her to actually be a baroness; it was only important for people to perceive that she was. She cackled with the enthusiasm of a madwoman. Empirically speaking, hadn’t the use of appearances been her principal modus operandi since her father’s demise? If she’d managed to wring privileges as a mere Middlesex County Bentwhistle, think what she might accomplish as an English noble!
Euphoric, Miss Bentwhistle saw her problems resurrected as opportunities. The annotations on her family tree, for instance. According to Mr. Berkeley, material objects are simply ideas. The document from the Heralds’ College was a material object. Ergo, the irrefutable syllogism: “My document is simply an idea! An idea I’ve improved upon!” Best of all, those improvements provided her with prima facie evidence of her aristocratic bona fides.
The joys of philosophy.
She paused to remember dear Professor Slater and his lonely tree in the forest, the one that fell unobserved. Did it make a sound? The answer was clear. Of course not. A corollary to the riddle: “If somebody commits forgery, and no one notices, has a crime occurred?” Likewise, no. More to the point, who cared? If her peccadillo ever came to light, she’d blame it on one of her girls. She’d choose a delinquent whose family hadn’t contributed to an endowment fund. It would serve them right, the cheap bastards.
However, there was no need to fear discovery. The current Baron of Bentwhistle was an illiterate pauper who stuck to his bog. If he wouldn’t know what she’d done, who would? The title “Baron” might impress folks on this side of the pond, but when it came to British nobles, barons were the lowest of the low. Even lower in the case of her family, according to Dr. Moorehead, whose monograph had kindly noted that it was “over a century since the last Baron of Bentwhistle took his seat in the House of Lords, owing to the law excluding the bankrupt and insane.” In short, the name Bentwhistle was a nothing beneath notice, its barony a pustule on the rump of history. She could forge a new life undetected.
Too much happiness is hard on the nerves. In m
id-cavort, Miss Bentwhistle collapsed in despair. A new life? Here? In London, Ontario? Her credit was exhausted. A peerage would buy less than a month’s reprieve. If she was to fulfill her destiny, she’d have to relocate. But where? She thought of the other London, the real London across the sea — but that London wouldn’t give two hoots for her title. She imagined the city’s hostesses turning to their butlers: “What, a baroness to tea? Put her in the kitchen with the squires.” If not London, England, the continent? That would mean dealing with Frenchmen. As for those other continents? Be serious.
Down for an instant, Miss Bentwhistle bounced back like a punching doll. For God had tapped her on the shoulder and reminded her of this morning’s dream. Mr. Gable. Hollywood.
Of course! There was nothing that fascinated Americans more than British nobility: it was the one thing they didn’t have. And although being a baroness wasn’t as good as being a queen, it was close enough for a cigar. She imagined herself as a sought-after house guest, rotating her way throughout the mansions of Beverly Hills and Hancock Park, with getaways to exclusive oceanfront retreats and Palm Springs spas. She’d have the nouveau rich and famous eating out of her hand. Most certainly, she’d be eating out of theirs.
Miss Bentwhistle paused. People see what they expect to see. All the same, if one’s hawking a fake painting, it helps to have a nice frame. And if one’s passing oneself off as a peer of the realm, it pays to look the part. She took a little medication and considered her needs. No self-respecting baroness would be caught dead without a fabulous wardrobe, a fortune in gems, and a maidservant. Miss Bentwhistle had none of the above. Not to fret. Thanks to Mr. Berkeley, she knew that material objects were simply ideas. Ergo, what she really needed were props.
Miss Pigeon flew over the moment she was called. She almost fell on her backside when Miss Bentwhistle pointed out the fine print on her family tree.
“I am the last of the Bentwhistles, Dolly,” the noblewoman sighed. “The recent fire has awakened me to my ancestral duty. Much as I treasure my young ladies, I must close the Academy and take my proper place in society. Know that we have chosen you, dear friend, to serve as our cherished handmaid.”
The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Page 17
