‘Richard will be here any minute,’ Violet went on. ‘He will explain.’
Kitty wanted to run out of the office, but not back to her father – that would indeed be from the frying pan into the fire – anywhere, back to Bauders, perhaps, back to a life that she knew was decent and honourable, not complicated and hitter-making. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to put out her arms to her again.
‘No, Mamma.’ She turned away from her mother. ‘I can’t go to you, really I can’t. I have to have time to think.’ She turned back to her. ‘And where is Mr Collingwood, or Mr Skells, or whatever they are called, or even the other one? Where are they, may I ask?’
Violet straightened herself. It was not like Kitty to be so vehement.
‘They very kindly lent us this office, Kitty. They are very kind men, truly they are. Mr Skells is so kind, why he could almost be a vicar,’ she added quietly.
It was with some relief that the sound of feet approaching in the corridor outside put an end to their really rather futile conversation.
‘I think I can guess at what you are thinking, Miss Rolfe,’ Dr Charles said, sitting her down in a large comfortable leather chair in the corner of the office while he pulled up an ordinary wooden one to sit before her in his accustomed style. ‘But I must stress that from the outset of my acquaintance with your mother, right until this present moment, there has never been the slightest impropriety. Our feelings for each other were never stated, not until the New Year, when I had to attend your mother suffering a fit of nerves at the prospect of your father’s return. It was then that I felt it imperative that I make my long-held feelings clear to your mother.’
‘I see.’
Kitty still couldn’t, of course. She still felt that Dr Charles should stay as he was to her – a doctor, not her mother’s lover.
‘What will happen now?’
Violet turned at the window. ‘What will happen now, Kitty, is that I will call in Mr Rathbone and he will discuss everything with you.’
‘I will leave you at this point.’
Kitty watched Dr Charles picking up his hat. She had watched Dr Charles picking up his hat just like that for so many years, but now she was watching him in a different way. She was not sure that she liked the way Dr Charles picked up his hat. It was perhaps a little prissy, a little bit too like a valet would pick up a hat, a little bit too like a professional person, not like her father would pick up his hat. But her father was a drunken bully. He had betrayed her mother and squandered her money; he had behaved like a cad.
Mr Rathbone was next into the room.
‘As the only child of your parents’ union, arrangements must now be made for your immediate future, Miss Rolfe,’ Mr Rathbone said. ‘Your mother will be seeking a divorce from your father on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Divorce is always difficult, particularly from the wife’s point of view, but nevertheless with the testimony of the maid of all work and so on, I feel sure that we will be able to prove cruelty.’
From the look in her mother’s eyes Kitty guessed this would not be as easy as the lawyer was trying to make it sound. Women were still in effect, despite the law, the property of their husbands, and any money a woman had was her husband’s unless she had earned or inherited it herself. Besides all that, as everyone in the room well knew, once divorced, women were considered unacceptable in society.
‘We feel confident your father will not oppose the proceedings, Miss Rolfe.’ The lawyer leaned across his desk, removing his spectacles as he did so, in order to issue his caveat. ‘But it must never be supposed that your mother and Dr Charles here enjoyed anything other than a perfectly proper relationship, as indeed is actually the case.’
‘What a good thing you only have one daughter to worry about, Mamma.’
‘How do you mean, dearest?’
‘I mean that a whole clutch of daughters such as the Duchess has would be a bit of a headache, especially when it came to finding work for them.’
‘You are not going out to work, Kitty. I will not allow it.’
Kitty looked from her mother to Mr Rathbone. ‘Mr Rathbone knows what you do not then, Mamma. Mr Rathbone knows that work is all I can have ahead of me now.’
Mr Rathbone shook his head. ‘This is, once again, in the strictest confidence, Miss Rolfe, but Dr Charles is insistent. He wishes to make you a small allowance, so that you can continue your education.’
‘I would rather not accept.’
Violet shook her head. ‘You must, Kitty.’
‘I must not.’
‘You must, Kitty.’
‘I do not wish to accept anything from Dr Charles.’
‘No, but if you wish for my happiness, you must accept.’
Kitty turned away. What could she say to that? After all her mother’s sufferings, how could she hurt her more?
The following day, her father having left for a house party in Scotland, Kitty and Bridie started to pack up their belongings in almost unnatural haste. It was as if they expected Evelyn Rolfe to change his mind and return home at any minute.
‘We must stop looking over our shoulders, Bridie!’ Kitty said finally, after they had both started at the sound of a door slamming unexpectedly.
‘Sure, how can we?’ Bridie’s hands were shaking. ‘How can we do anything but live in fear? And with your mother gone, what protection have we?’
‘Post.’
Mary was calling from the hall. It was a letter for Kitty. Kitty saw from the crested envelope that it was from Partita. Yet another ill-spelled letter. But she was not interested in the spelling, only in the message. Partita was sending for her to share her lessons at Bauders. She was not able to come to London any more, she wanted nothing more than for Kitty and Bridie to return to Bauders. They all wanted it. Her mother and her father too wanted it. She enclosed a letter from the Duchess to Violet as proof of this. They were to put on a musical. She must come back to Bauders. ‘Plees, plees, plees!’
Kitty sat down on the bottom step of the Regency staircase. Upstairs she could hear Bridie banging about with hat boxes, and heaven only knew what else. Downstairs Kitty stared ahead, knowing that the doors of her cage had once more been flung open. She and Bridie could now fly off back to Bauders, where life would be beautiful once again, beautiful and kind, everything that her life with her parents had never been.
Chapter Five
The Pirates Club
Kitty’s return was not the only one of note that month. Two weeks after she had settled down into a place that, despite its great size, she now felt to be her second home, the Duke and Duchess’s debonair younger son, Augustus, often known as Gus, had returned from a long sojourn in Austria and was at the castle briefly before dashing up to London.
‘They really feel their Empire is being threatened,’ Gus explained to his family as they sat at dinner in the family dining room that night. ‘They make that clear at every turn. They speak of nothing else.’
Circe smiled down the table at her younger son and fairest offspring, for Gus was, if anything, even blonder than Partita, although a great deal less pugnacious, possessing the easiest of natures, which was probably why everyone was listening to him, feeling as they all must, that if Gus, of all people, had noticed political unrest in Austria, then there must indeed be cause for worry.
‘They’ve outgrown their strength, Gussie,’ his father replied, carefully removing some shot from his pheasant breast. ‘Sneaking their way into Italy and Hungary, and heaven only knows where. A great many people think, although they are a small nation, they’ve been asking for trouble for quite some time.’
‘Couldn’t the same be said for England, Papa?’ Almeric wondered. ‘Look at the size of our Empire.’
‘Take your point,’ the Duke replied, finding another piece of shot. ‘And we’re running into the same trouble for the same reason – and I dare say we’ll run into a lot more before the race is run.’
‘Everyone is making everything so diffic
ult for people like us,’ Circe murmured.
The Duke stared at his plate. ‘This bird is all shot and no bird. Must have been a foreigner that brought it down.’
‘I often wonder what people in the future will make of us when we are just paintings and photographs on walls like our ancestors,’ Almeric said, turning to his younger brother.
‘They’ll think we were beautiful, educated and irreplaceable,’ Gus returned, straight-faced. ‘All true, of course.’
‘Just remember history’s never fair,’ their father reminded him. ‘People think that history is a way of understanding the past, but that’s not it at all. History’s a way of understanding the present, and that’s its value.’
‘So how does that answer my earlier question exactly?’ Partita wondered, looking round the table. ‘I wanted to know about women taking a part in running the country …’
‘It doesn’t,’ her father said. ‘But it does express what I believe. We are a much more liberated society than we used to be, and more confident.’
‘Even though women don’t have the vote?’
Everyone stared at Kitty. It was a bold statement from a young guest.
‘Yes, even though women do not have the vote, Miss Rolfe.’
‘So how will people understand that, if women are still not proper citizens of their own country?’
‘With difficulty,’ the Duke agreed. ‘The rights of women are a continuing blot on our country, I do believe that, Miss Rolfe. There can be no true democracy when one half of the population has fewer rights than a common thief.’
‘Do we have a little tittle Liberal in our midst?’ Almeric wondered, smiling across the table at Kitty.
‘Or maybe even a secret suffragette?’ Cecilia suggested, eyeing Kitty.
‘I would love to be a suffragette,’ Partita said, hiding her deliberate provocation behind a sigh. ‘In fact, Kitty and I were thinking only the other day we might join the movement.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Allegra retorted. ‘Suffragettes are becoming more dangerous by the day.’
‘I thought that was the point, Allegra?’ her father wondered quietly, nodding to a footman for some wine.
‘No, Papa,’ Allegra insisted. ‘They have gone from being tedious to being dangerous. One only supposes they do what they do because they’re all so wretchedly plain.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Partita said hotly. ‘Mrs Pankhurst is a beautiful woman.’
‘Mrs Pankhurst is the sort of woman who does things purely for attention,’ Cecilia stated coldly. ‘The movement has got out of hand, and everyone knows it. They have lost the sympathy of the country.’
‘This is true,’ the Duchess agreed. ‘But sympathy or no sympathy, the truth is the same. Women should be allowed a say in the running of their country. American women have been enfranchised, why not English?’
‘Mamma,’ Allegra replied, ‘why should we need to have the vote in England? We don’t have the need.’
‘You don’t. But other women do, Allegra. In America,’ Circe continued, ‘women are considered. They have so much more freedom, are more cherished.’ The Duchess looked troubled. ‘One has to ask just how much do Englishmen dislike women when in the Morning Post the other day they actually suggested in all sobriety that suffragettes should have their heads shaved and be deported. How can people be living in this day and age and be allowed to express such opinions? You do not want that, do you, John?’
‘Most certainly not.’
The Duke shook his head and sighed. The question of women’s suffrage was beginning to become wearisome to him, if only because he himself always took care to defer to Circe on matters where he knew her to be more knowledgeable than himself, while she seemed to leave other matters to him. They worked in tandem, in harmony; so much so that he found it difficult to understand why the rest of the world could not do the same.
‘Your father is in favour of suffrage,’ Circe continued for the Duke. ‘He is in favour, but not for the usual reasons. He has seen how capable the women on his farms are; how very clever at managing their books, their land, and last but not least their men.’ Circe smiled round at the girls, hoping that they were listening, while knowing that they were not. ‘I wonder at politicians sometimes, really I do,’ she ended a little lamely.
‘And I am wondering about the next course rather more than politics at this moment,’ the Duke gently reminded his wife, looking round for Wavell.
‘Your father also maintains that no right-thinking man who admires women could possibly wish on them the same kind of dreadfully dull responsibilities men have to bear,’ Circe continued. ‘He says that women, particularly young women, instead of worrying about such mundane matters as politics, should be allowed the full rein of their natures. Women, he says, should be concerning themselves with the beauty of life, and not the mire of politics.’
‘What’s for pudding, Wavell?’ the Duke asked in a loud aside. ‘Chap’s getting ready to eat his napkin.’
‘A jam roly-poly, as you requested of Cook, I believe, Your Grace,’ Wavell replied.
‘Your father says that no man who loves women wants them to be concerned with such a desperately tedious and dull business as deciding which dull and half-brained dimwit should be elected to Parliament to try and tell us how we all should behave,’ the Duchess continued, by now seeming to be talking to herself. ‘He says it is utterly inconceivable that any man who loves women should wish such a fate upon them.’
‘That is very considerate of the Duke,’ Kitty put in, straight-faced, as the footmen quickly removed their plates, making ready for the pudding, while Partita and her sisters’ faces registered boredom and disinterest.
Kitty, however, knew it was a serious subject. Besides, she thought the Duke had a point. Politics were dull, and perhaps more the preserve of men, while children and the house, the real politics of life, were in women’s hands. It was up to them to change a nation, to influence it for the good.
‘I can’t really see you as a suffragette, Kitty,’ Almeric murmured. ‘You would be utterly wasted. Besides, you would simply hate those dreadful prison uniforms covered in little arrows.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ the Duke spoke up suddenly after not appearing to be listening, ‘if I were a woman, I would want the vote and for a very good reason – so I could help abolish taxation!’
‘Quite right but most of all, John,’ Circe prompted him, ‘you want the vote for women because you think Asquith completely wrong in his attitude towards these brave women. We must understand that by imprisoning and force-feeding these poor creatures we are horrifying Europe and America. Do admit, everyone,’ Circe looked round the table, ‘do admit that looked at from the outside, our behaviour towards these poor women is not that of a civilised nation.’
‘Damn good roly-poly, tell Cook. Tell her she gets my vote any day,’ the Duke announced from nowhere, which more or less put paid to the discussion of women’s rights.
‘That’s one of the few good things about being a duke,’ Partita confided to Kitty when the ladies had withdrawn. ‘You can demand your pudding in the middle of the first course, wear togas in the evening if that is your wish, or a wig and lipstick just like William Frimleigh, or a cricketing shirt with evening clothes, as Papa sometimes likes to do. It makes up for all the other dull things you have to do.’
Kitty was left to wonder what all the other dull things might be – but not finding an answer she left it at that.
‘You haven’t been back to see the new things they’ve done in the theatre they’re building in the Great Hall; so ravishing,’ Partita announced one afternoon when, tuition being over for the day, she and Kitty found themselves with nothing much to do. ‘Come along – it really is worth seeing what they have done – and on the way I want you to tell me what you really think of our governess, Miss Danielle – now that we have broken her in.’
As they made their way through the great house towards the theatre, the two young wome
n discussed Miss Danielle, whom they discovered to their surprise that they both liked from the moment they had met her. Partita was especially astonished since she had an unreasonable aversion to anyone trying to teach her anything at all, preferring just to pick up her education as she went along.
‘After all,’ she had argued, ‘Mamma speaks French, German and Italian, my father knows history backwards, my brothers ride, play tennis, fence and swim, Wavell is a walking encyclopaedia as far as etiquette and manners are concerned – and who on earth needs to know how to do more than add and subtract, which is something Hawkesworth, our estate manager, can do in his sleep? I do wonder sometimes, Kitty, what on earth is the point in sticking us up in the attics to be taught things we can pick up just by being around the place, really I do.’
Yet the pretty and good-humoured Miss Danielle, an Englishwoman, despite her continental-sounding surname, utterly confounded her patrician pupil and delighted Kitty, managing to interest them both in the subtleties of poetry and literature, and best of all, drama. Within days of being under her tutelage the three of them were enacting scenes from every sort of drama, so much so that, to her astonishment, Partita found that learning could be exhilarating rather than a trial; while Kitty, used only to Miss Woffington’s polite but unambitious style of teaching, never wanted her lessons to end.
‘So we would now consider her to be a friend, wouldn’t we, Kitty?’ Partita wondered, as they finally arrived in a small, beautifully panelled hallway that served as an ante-room. ‘Something which I have to admit is so much easier than having someone so awful coaching one that all one does is spend the whole time thinking up ways to get rid of them. Mind you, that could be quite fun as well. Now then – the theatre. Here we are. The Great Hall has been transformed, I think you will agree.’
In Distant Fields Page 10
