The Season

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘What? What is it this time?’ she demanded, fury written all over her face, her blue eyes coldly staring at Lady Devenish. ‘This is all just make-believe, and your laughter foolish.’

  Lady Devenish snatched a fan from the top of the piano. It was a beautiful ivory fan, large, and strongly made, painted with wonderful scenes of Court life in previous centuries. She smacked her own hand with it, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind for whom the fan might really be intended, had not Lady Devenish been at heart both gentle and kind.

  ‘So this is make-believe is it, Miss de Nugent? I doubt it very much. Do you not know why I was laughing? I am vastly afraid that you do not. I was laughing because you stepped back without waiting for the Court pages to adjust your train, you stepped back before even turning to see if the little wretches had done their duties, so what in real life would you have done if you conducted yourself in such a manner? You would have tripped, Miss de Nugent! That is what you would have done. You would have fallen in front of Their Majesties and the whole court, thus doubtless affording them their first laugh of the day. No, that is not make-believe, Miss de Nugent, that is the truth. That is the truth of what will happen to you if you do not do as you are told by me at your Court lessons. You will be the laughing stock of the Season. But, perhaps, that is what you wish, Miss de Nugent?’

  Phyllis went to say something, but found, as she inevitably must, that there was nothing to say, and so stayed silent.

  ‘Oh dear, Miss de Nugent, nothing more to add to your mockery of the make-believe, as you call it, that we are going through here? Nothing more to say?’

  ‘No, Lady Devenish.’

  ‘I am sorry, did I hear you make your apology?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I am waiting, Miss de Nugent.’

  Yet another silence, during which Lady Devenish fixed her eyes in assumed boredom on something outside the floor-length windows at the other end of her drawing room.

  ‘I am sorry, Lady Devenish.’

  ‘And for what are you sorry, Miss de Nugent?’

  ‘For making fun and larking about.’

  ‘Better, but not good.’ She stared from Edith to Phyllis and back again. ‘You, both, to me, are the “know betters”,’ she told them, smiling, for it was surely her turn to smile? ‘Every now and then we do have a “know better” here, and sometimes they leave me just that – no better. And sometimes, always, as a matter of fact, the “know betters” come to me much later in the Season, utterly destroyed, because they have made solecism after social solecism. But by then of course there is nothing I can do, believe me, nothing. It is too late. Sometimes they have made themselves a laughing stock. Sometimes the “know betters” are just so foolish that they destroy their reputations within seconds of their coming out, and there is nothing to be done but to return to the Shires, or Scotland, or Ireland, and become old maids. That is their lot, and more than likely always will be. Or they might pick up an elderly husband, or a widower, much later in life, in which case they become glorified housekeepers with nothing to reward their efforts except a roof over their heads. That is the fate of the “know betters”.’

  Lady Devenish’s colour was now heightened in a quite pretty way, for the truth was that she was really rather enjoying herself.

  ‘So, there it is. You two, Miss de Nugent and Miss O’Connor, you will remain standing – both of you, and in Court position, eyes down, holding your ostrich-plume fans, while I take Miss Hartley Lambert through her courtesy. You will now note, please, that an American gel is already able to cope with train and fan, remembers to pause and check on the pages before stepping away from Their Majesties, and can laugh to the sound of my scales on the piano, and mount and dismount gracefully. She walks without whistling and looking as if she was wearing riding boots instead of shoes, and altogether conducts herself in a better manner, after only one week, than you two are capable of at this moment. Miss Hartley Lambert, step forward, please.’

  In high dudgeon the ‘know betters’ watched from under their eyelashes as Sarah stepped forward and executed the perfect Court courtesy, sinking into the most elegant obeisance, remembering to look for the pages, and then, having finished that lesson, turned to the piano and played and laughed exactly in tune with each note before rising and pirouetting as gracefully as any dove.

  Lady Devenish watched her, thrilling to her grace and elegance. No matter that she was tall, she was truly marvellous to watch, and took the eye in everything that she did.

  But that night as she wished her good night she could see in poor Sarah’s eyes that the ‘know betters’, although they might be newly concentrating on the finesses that they now realised were going to be necessary to them if they were going to get through their first London Season without a hitch, were still not able to like or embrace Sarah in their company in any way at all.

  It was hurtful and puzzling, but it was, nevertheless, a fact.

  As Lady Devenish turned out her bedside light she thought that both Edith O’Connor and Phyllis de Nugent were hard and cruel, for it seemed to her that it must be because Sarah was American that they so delighted in ignoring her at every turn. And then it came to her, in the darkness, and she quickly put on her bedside light again, and sat up and leaned back against her mountain of cushions and pillows.

  Of course! It was nothing to do with poor Sarah Hartley Lambert’s being American, or an heiress, but everything to do with Sarah’s patroness for the Season’s being Daisy. The two girls must surely have taken sides with their mothers against the Countess’s protégée. The past had come galloping into the present, as it nearly always did, in some form or another.

  ‘Oh, how foolish I am,’ Lady Devenish told the photograph of her late husband on her bedside table. ‘How very, very foolish. And really, if I am so foolish I should make this my very, very last Season. Imagine not thinking of this before. Imagine not realising what a clash it was bound to be – the history being such, Daisy having been so triumphantly embarrassed by their dear friend May Wokingham’s Mr Forrester. Oh dear, oh dear, is it not always the way! The past will not lie down, but insists on popping up when not wanted or sent for.’

  She put out her light again, and sank down against her pillows once more. What was history was history, and really, no-one could be blamed for taking arms against Daisy and the sea of troubles that she constantly created. She was, and always would be, a typhoon, a volcano waiting to erupt. Like a gun in St James’s Park, Daisy needed only a touch, and she would explode into terrible, noisy life.

  Every Season it had been the same. Always some scandal to be hidden, some new devious plan to be carried out.

  ‘The past is the past, is the past,’ Lady Devenish murmured to herself into her top pillow as she hugged its soft beribboned lawn surface to her face, ‘but the past, as we all know, will never go away.’

  She thought she really ought to warn Sarah Hartley Lambert against the Countess and her doings, but then, knowing that Daisy, since the fall in land values and other misfortunes, would be sure to be being paid, and quite substantially, by the Hartley Lamberts for entrées and other such favours, she realised that to do so would be to create an impossible situation.

  Finally, she sighed, and putting on her bedside light again she took her husband’s picture from the table and spoke to it once more.

  ‘I am afraid, darling, this is going to be our last Season. It is not that I am too old, but they are all too young. The motor car is everywhere, people are dancing dances that you would never believe and no-one is content with just going to balls, they have to go to costume balls. They cannot be just decorous and charming any more, and frankly I am too tired to go on. I would look ridiculous in a hobble skirt, and I like going about in a carriage and horses, not a motor car, so I am going to take us both off to a villa in Florence where we can be quite quiet, and friends will visit. It will be so much better to be ageing in a gentle way. No more debutantes, no more Seasons, from now on th
e most exciting thing to which I wish to look forward is a glass of wine in the shade, and you beside me in my heart.’

  After which she switched off the light yet again and fell into that particularly contented sleep which is brought about by coming to terms with both the past and the present and welding them together to make a settled picture of the future.

  The Name of the Month

  May was her name, and May was the month when she knew that she must, most reluctantly, obey her husband’s request to leave him and their beloved castle and proceed to London, where their town house was already prepared and waiting for her.

  ‘But you never bother to come to London until the very last moment.’

  The Duke of Wokingham smiled across the luncheon table at his duchess. She was a charming, beautiful woman, and he, in unison with everyone around him, their servants, and the people who worked on the farm, in the stables, in the laundry, in the town, adored her. May had what his mother would call ‘the common touch’.

  ‘My dearest of dears,’ John replied, ‘you must, alas, prance and dance attendance on the London Season or you will never be able to pick the most suitable gel for our eldest and very beloved son.’

  ‘But George has no interest in debutantes at this moment. He is far more interested in his gun and his fishing rod.’

  ‘All the more reason, my dearest, all the more reason.’

  The Duke rose in his chair, and as he passed his wife, because they were nearly alone – only three footmen present – he tickled her lightly on the cheek.

  She in turn touched the tips of her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss up to him. And so John walked happily away, leaving his wife, as always, to arrange everything that he wished, and some of what she wished too.

  Leaving the luncheon table shortly after him May passed out into the great hall, pausing in front of the portrait by Lavery of herself and the Duke, George their eldest son and John, always known as ‘Boy’, their second son, and the family dogs. It now seemed to May that her life had passed all too quickly since the painting of their portrait, and yet there had been a time when it had passed all too slowly.

  For the fact was the first months of her marriage to John, then Marquis of Cordrey, had not passed but crept by – each dull day following the other with an inexorability which reminded her of the days that she had known as a child at her convent school, days of Lent and fasting and penance, and church, church and more church.

  Indeed so slowly had those first months of her marriage passed that she realised, now she looked back down the years, despite her so-great love for John there had been moments when she very nearly wished that she had never met him, let alone married him.

  No, if she had her life again, she would not go back to that particular time, not for anything in the whole world.

  May’s marriage to the future Duke of Wokingham had thrilled everyone alike. Of course it had thrilled May too, until she had returned home from her honeymoon.

  Cordrey Castle, near the city of York, outwardly a magnificent statement of power, remodelled in the eighteenth century by John van Petersen, was to all intents and purposes a brilliant palace for any returning bride to begin to think of as her marital home.

  Indeed, to May, born on the wrong side of the blanket but now seated in the back of an open carriage and waving as graciously as she knew how to the crowds of tenants on the side of the road, it seemed as if her life had truly turned to fairy tale.

  And, as the young couple’s flower-bedecked carriage was pulled by eight strong tenants under the archway of the great, grand house and into the courtyard, she could only thank God for her good fortune. A handsome young husband with a brilliant future in politics, marriage into a family with an ancient history, sixty indoor servants, twenty gardeners, luxuries beyond the expectations of any normal human being – they were all more than anyone from her supremely un-patrician background could have ever hoped or indeed longed for.

  That sunny summer morning May was wearing what at the time was the most fashionable of summer clothing. Palest blue picked out her high collar, her waistband, her large hat most beautifully set upon her long neck with its blonde, blonde hair. The sun caught at the tip of the parasol held over her head, and the light, English summer breeze swayed only slightly the fringes of the Chinese silk shawl at the back of her carriage seat. She was a great beauty, and never more so than that morning. Indeed, the tenants’ wives would never ever forget the sight of May, the future Duchess of Wokingham, returning to Cordrey Castle from her month-long honeymoon. What, they must have wondered, as they stared at the apparition that was May Cordrey, what could it possibly be like to be her, to be born beautiful but poor, only to have married into a great and wealthy family?

  At dinner every night, they knew very well she would be wearing jewels worth thousands upon thousands, and she would never have to do more than turn her head and a footman would be at her elbow. She would be required to go to the opening of Parliament each year wearing upon her blonde hair both a coronet and the family tiara, not to mention a diamond necklace worth a king’s ransom. What would they, in their small, tied cottages with their authoritarian husbands, their too many children, and their daily tasks of washing and cooking, ironing and baking – what would they not have done to swap places with May, the new Marchioness of Cordrey?

  But as they all turned back towards their homes, towards the work load waiting for them, towards their husbands and their too many children, one of the more sage among them was heard to remark, ‘Poor little scrap, wait until she comes up against Her Grace.’

  Happily perhaps as her carriage was pulled by strong men and true into the castle courtyard May did not hear the old woman’s remark, any more than the woman herself, sincerely wishing the young future duchess every happiness, would ever come to know just how true her statement was going to prove to be.

  Of course May had met her mother-in-law before the marriage, and of course she had realised that she was being looked over, and had felt nervous. But with the union’s receiving the approval of no less a personage than the Prince of Wales, she had not thought that there really was so very much cause to worry. The then heir to the English throne had always appreciated a beautiful young woman, and His Royal Highness had certainly appreciated May, even going to the trouble of congratulating John Cordrey on his choice of bride and saying, in an aside to his godson, ‘Well done, Johnny, well done!’

  And May was something for which to be congratulated, for the young May was beautiful beyond the dreams of man.

  But she was not just beautiful, she was virtuous, and kind, and that, naturally, added to her beauty. She loved people, and had the sweetest ways with them. She loved to talk to ordinary folk, because she knew herself to be one of them. Everyone could see that having the ‘common touch’ meant that she would make the best kind of duchess. Everyone, that was, except the then Duchess of Wokingham, her mother-in-law, who had remained a silenced witness to the whole courtship of her only son to a former actress.

  May would never forget her first sight of the Duchess at home, standing at the top of the great, grand staircase that led down to the great, grand gilded reception rooms that seemed to mock the smallness of human beings.

  On seeing May standing beside her young husband, who himself had stiffened at the sight of his mother, Her Grace had made a sound that was something between a ‘humph’ and a ‘huh’.

  ‘So you are arrived.’

  Naturally the flurry of footmen, the housekeeper outside, the butler inside, the Duke waiting in the library, had already pointed to this.

  May had dropped into a deep Court courtesy, not because she had been told to do so by her young husband, but because she knew, instinctively from her days in the theatre, that it was the right thing to do, to exaggerate her curtsy to her new mother-in-law in a way that would say to everyone present: This young woman is acknowledging the fact that her parents-in-law are, in their own way, monarchs. They are monarchs of all that the
y survey. They are the King and Queen of this particular part of England.

  ‘Much good did it do her,’ Watt, the young Marchioness’s newly appointed maid at the castle had commented wryly, and as she said it, to a circle of admiring younger women, she raised her eyes to heaven. ‘You know how it is with Her Grace. Let’s face it, I’m not a native of these parts, but havin’ watched her these last ten years, the deeper the curtsy the more she treats you like you’re lickspittle. However. For God’s sake and her own, let us just get down on our knees and hope that the Marchioness will soon be delivered of a son and heir, and that way she’ll have the hold on the Duchess, rather than the other way round, eh?’

  The pattern of life at Cordrey Castle was more like that of a small township rather than of a normal household. And so now Watt, having given her opinion on the matter and seeing the housekeeper advancing towards her, moved off into a large gathering of other domestic servants, much as an illegal salesman on the corner of a crowded city street on seeing a policeman might quickly move off and disappear into the crowd.

  Watt might be praying ‘for God’s sake and our own’ for a son and heir to the great house to be born to the Marchioness, but the young Marchioness herself, wildly in love with her husband though she might be, had no joyous news to announce to his family as yet.

  Weeks crawled by, and as what sometimes seemed to be endless and tedious meals were served at horribly regular intervals in the great dining room with its Italianate painted ceiling, its church-like atmosphere and its rich dishes, May felt more and more desperate. She might be getting plumper from the regularity of the fare, but not, alas, for any other reason.

  Perhaps her underyling disconcertion at the distancing that she sensed between herself and her new family had frozen those parts of her that were meant to be fecund, but there was no doubting the fact that she was not pregnant. Even she, ignorant of so much though she still was, knew that she was expected to become pregnant and produce an heir within as short a space of time as possible. It was her duty, and, while John was nothing short of a saint as far as she was concerned, it was not a matter he could discuss with her. He just was not that sort of man.