The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  Leonie stared down at her patient and then across at her visitor. The sister in charge of the younger nurses was off eating her supper. It would not be difficult to fetch a bowl of ice from the outer room near the kitchens, and it was certainly, surely, worth a try?

  Perhaps seeing her hesitating, Mercy went on, ‘The fact is, Miss Lynch, you see, that the Ancient World believed that much that goes wrong in the body, or needs putting right in our heads and hearts, is linked to the feet. There is much mysticism associated with the foot in ancient medicine, and Granny Lovelace – she was this witchety person – used to make poultices of herbs and all sorts of things that made people’s headaches and pains disappear, all through applying them to the feet.’

  ‘I am prepared to try anything for our patients, even if people do laugh at me. What does it matter? Wait there, Miss Cordel, if you do not mind, and if your maid is not going to fall asleep in the hall, would you help me?’

  ‘Willingly, Miss Lynch. But after that I really must go. My brother is being allowed a few days’ leave before returning to his regiment, and I must be at our house to dine with him.’

  ‘I perfectly understand – Lady Angela too is a stickler for punctuality.’

  Together the two girls applied the ice to the soles of the unconscious girl’s feet, but with no discernible success, and a great deal of effort on their part.

  ‘It might take a few hours of constant attention.’

  Miss Lynch looked at her small gold fob watch, a much treasured gift only recently given to her by Mrs Dodd.

  ‘You must go, Miss Cordel.’

  ‘I will come back tomorrow.’

  Leonie nodded. ‘You have given me hope, at any rate. There is nothing worse than clinging to nothing, but once one has some sort of slim thread, things do not seem so black, do they?’

  Mercy waved from the door, and, since she was already late, fled to find Clarice waiting outside.

  After she had gone Leonie stared out of the window at the sight of her climbing into her family carriage, closely followed by her primly dressed maid.

  ‘What a charming girl,’ she remarked out loud to her unconscious patient. ‘Let us just hope that what she has recommended may help to bring you awake.’

  She turned her attention back to her patient, and stood applying ice to her feet for the next hour or two, hurrying backwards and forwards with fresh bowls once she knew that there was no senior member of the nursing staff likely to observe her indulging in such an unorthodox form of cure.

  She was about to cross the hall once more for fresh ice, her last effort for that night, when she heard heavy breathing and smelt the strong smell of cigars coming down the wide polished staircase. The footsteps descending towards her were as heavy as the breathing, and the smell of cigar smoke grew stronger and stronger until it seemed to Leonie that she might start a coughing fit from just breathing the now clouded air. She could not reach the door which led to the kitchen passage without attracting attention, so she shrank back against the wooden panelling, praying that she would not be seen. Fortunately, in the half light that came from the outer lights, and the hall light that was way above them, the man did not seem to look up, perhaps more occupied by keeping his cigar alight, by putting on his hat, by opening the side door which led out to the back street and through which, the rule was, only Lady Angela came and went by night or day.

  As he passed within a few feet of her Leonie’s terror increased and she knew at once who was going out of the door to the street. The future King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith, a man who, once crowned, would accept the Sword of State, and the homage of bishops and peers. A man so powerful that, had he seen the young nurse flattening herself against the panelling, it was in his power to do anything that he wished with her. But what he was doing at Sister Angela’s Nursing Home late in the evening, she dared not even think.

  Four

  Dorinda’s mouth would have dearly liked to drop open, and stay open, when she followed Gervaise Lowther into the St John’s Wood house that he had insisted was to be ‘hers’ from now on. It was so charming, so mignonne, so soignée, so everything that she had ever wanted a house to be. It was as if Gervaise had, before he met her, had the house designed just for her, Dorinda Montgomery, with no-one else at all in mind.

  American wallpapers, flower-strewn and delicate, silk-lined curtains, not a wretched potted palm in sight, nor a stag’s head; everything so up to date; and such chintzes! Chintzes such as she knew, from the periodicals that were available even in the provinces, were even now being taken up by the most fashionable, so that the rooms echoed not stark Victorian ideals and morals but gaiety, and – above all – cosmopolitan attitudes.

  ‘Mais c’est tellement chic! C’est – ador-able!’

  Dorinda turned, and, since the housemaid was busy hurrying out to the hansom cab to help the hall boy fetch in the luggage, she felt quite able to kiss her lover on the lips. Not too much so as to be embarrassing, just briefly; enough to make him realize that she appreciated him, but not so much that he would not wonder whether she had perhaps cooled a little. For Dorinda was already mistress of the art of keeping a man at a sufficient distance to intrigue, but not so far that he would become bored and take off for fresh fields. It was the greatest fun, and, what was more, she knew now that in this ability lay her future. Not with Harry Montgomery – and goodness knows she had been forced to practise just such wiles on even him – but with much bigger fish, fish so big that soon it would be her photograph, along with the others, that the shopkeepers would be hawking in all the London windows. It would be she for whom everyone would stand upon chairs or park benches when they heard she was passing.

  Gone was the dull old wifely routine, the subservience, the poverty; from now on she would be a leading member of the demi-monde, that select band of beautiful young girls and women who were kept in total luxury by everyone who was anyone, including the Prince of Wales.

  ‘A man has a wife,’ Gervaise had said during their stop for lunch and a change of horses on the way to London, and as he spoke he had drawn straight lines with the tines of his fork on the white, linen tablecloth, ‘and his wife has given him a son, and once that has happened, they have their separate lives. She has her entertainments, and he has his petit amour who entertains him informally and pleases him. In return he gives her a house, a fine carriage, horses, jewels and clothes, and they both observe the one golden rule, which must never ever be broken – discretion!’

  Dorinda might be only twenty but she well understood what was what when it came to rules, and regulations, and indeed who was what. Even with her mouth full of the most delicious chicken pie and sipping at a white wine of whose delicacy she had never before dreamed, she thought that Gervaise’s contract, his bargain, as it were, was the fairest, nicest bargain of which she had yet heard. As a matter of fact she was quite sure that she was getting the best of it, and that she must quite definitely not let him know! Poor fellow. He must be mad! Or else his wife was so terribly dull that it was almost unimaginable. But no, it seemed not.

  ‘My wife is the sweetest, kindest, most sensitive of creatures, but she has been quite ill, and so – well, it is not possible for her to entertain me as she has previously been able. We were married when she was barely seventeen, and after three children … it is not possible – her doctors forbid. She finds her pleasures with friends and entertainments of all kinds, and we love each other devotedly. But you understand – ahem.’

  Dorinda understood ‘ahem’ very well already. ‘Ahem’ had been awfully boring and dull with Harry who, apart from everything else, was recently proving to be much more interested in collecting rare butterflies than in keeping his wife entertained. Dorinda, withering away in yet another boarding house (accommodation that she frequently referred to as ‘boring houses’), found that by the second year of her marriage she had come to know exactly how one of her husband’s wretched butterflies felt.

  She felt a
s if he had pinned her, lifeless and dry, to some hideous little piece of backcloth with her name in Latin underneath it – Dorinda Montgomerius Rare Blue, Guernsey.

  Whatever her feelings might be, her mother had been most unsympathetic.

  In all seriousness, she had wondered when Dorinda sighed and looked forlorn. What had Dorey expected of marriage? Happiness? Love? Surely not. She was not some housemaid with foolish ideas scraped from some penny booklet, was she?

  Dorinda had been forced to admit that she was not a housemaid – although, when she came to think of it, she realized that she might have quite liked to be a housemaid, in a real house with other people to talk to, rather than a lodger in a boarding house. Indeed, as the weeks and months crawled listlessly by, with nothing much to think about, and certainly nothing to which to look forward, and she listened to Harry snoring his way through the dull, long, unmoving nights, she came to see that she was actually becoming just like a housemaid who read penny booklets, for she longed with all her heart for a life outside her own trivializing existence – in short, she wanted more!

  ‘My dear, here is your maid, Blanquette.’

  Dorinda eyed the curtsying maid sharply. She was not so young that she did not know that to be able to trust your servants meant everything to a person of affluence. And then of course, having been brought up in the Channel Islands, she knew the ‘French’ very, very well. She knew half-Frenchies and whole Frenchies, she knew Breton from Parisian, and Parisian from the Loire, and the whole boiling lot from a southerner with his sometimes unfathomable accent, and often very mixed Mediterranean origins.

  Blanquette, when Dorinda had cross-examined her swiftly in French, turned out to have been brought up to be a nun, and had run away rather than face having her hair cut. A dim look to her face was balanced by a sly expression in her eyes, and she had a soft voice which belied that same shifty glance. Dorinda made up her mind at once that not all her servile manner, nor her foolish face, would allow her to trust Blanquette an inch, and what is more – half French though she might be herself – she thought it a very good thing for Holy Orders that the girl had been too vain to become a nun.

  ‘You speak very pretty French,’ Gervaise said, sounding just a little surprised. But then, remembering, he laughed and said, ‘But of course you would! The Channel Islands.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dorinda told him, smiling, ‘nothing to do with the Channel Islands, everything to do with being educated in Paris. An academy run by nuns – enfin!’

  She waited a second, her eyes drifting up the small pretty staircase of her new house, its walls decorated by charming lithographs of eighteenth-century women with dreamy expressions wearing large hats or becoming ribbons.

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Gervaise took her silent point, which was meant to prompt him to an unspoken understanding, and gestured to her to go ahead of him up the stairs, which Dorinda did with some delight.

  Upstairs was as charming and as appropriate as downstairs, with only one disappointment. Dorinda dismissed the maid at the door of her boudoir, and gestured to Gervaise.

  ‘This will never do,’ she told him sorrowfully.

  Gervaise looked around the bedroom with its matching dressing room off, its screens and its mirrors, its gilt and its gold, its pictures of cherubs partially clothed, its rounded velvet-covered furniture, and then into Dorinda’s reproachful eyes.

  ‘My dear, is there something you do not like?’

  ‘Cher Monsieur Gervaise, blue! Never, never, never for the boudoir. Blue is beautiful but it is not the colour, let us say, of – love! Rose or lemon, or deep red, particularly deep red, but although I love dresses in blue, and cloaks in blue, and leather in blue, never, never for the bedroom. It makes the gentleman feel brrrrh – cold!’

  Gervaise was humbled.

  ‘But of course! Change it at once! No wonder––’ He stopped, remembering his last love, and realizing all of a sudden that the deterioration of their relationship, his ardour cooling as it had, might well have been due to something as simple as the colour of a boudoir. He sighed.

  But then seeing Dorinda smiling, her hourglass figure, so slender and so appealing, he forgot all about Louette who was now posing as a French governess in a vastly grand palace in Oxfordshire, and turned instead to the beckoning charms of the late afternoon sun playing on Dorinda’s rich chestnut coloured hair. And what with her violet blue eyes and her charming full lips and small retroussé nose, he became extraordinarily interested in helping her divest herself of her clothes, while she chattered on about the benefits of rose colours in the boudoir. Or perhaps a French grey contrasting with a pale yellow?

  Whatever the merits of either, not very long after it seemed to Gervaise that, blue or no blue, he was in heaven.

  Not many days later Dorinda too was in heaven, but of a rather different sort, as painters and decorators, milliners and costumiers, tradesmen of every description, came pouring through the door of her chic little house in St John’s Wood, while at the livery stables only half a mile away stood her very first carriage pulled by a pair of dark bay horses, with her ‘coat of arms’ about to be painted on the door that very week.

  ‘But do you have a coat of arms, my dear?’ Gervaise had asked her mildly, if perhaps a little impolitely, puzzled.

  ‘Oh, yes. It is very ancient…’

  ‘And it is?’

  ‘A heart rampant with two cupids supporting!’

  Gervaise had thought this so funny he had ordered the coach painter to design his new mistress something just such as Dorinda had joked about. Two cupids, discreetly clothed, at angles to each other with ribbons tied with love knots linking them, the two holding bows and arrows, with a pierced heart in the middle, and Dorinda’s family motto underneath being inscribed as She Who Loves Wins, or as the coach builder translated it Vincit Quae Amat.

  It was all the greatest fun and it seemed to Dorinda that every morning when she woke she was about to embark on some new and utterly enthralling adventure, an adventure so lovely that she could not believe that her life had changed so dramatically in such a very little time, and all because of a newspaper.

  Sometimes, after her maid had brought her a cup of chocolate in the early morning, she would pick up her hand mirror and stare at her lovely face and thank it for what it had done for her life, not to mention her beautiful body.

  This morning, shortly after she had performed this singular little ceremony – a ceremony which had started to take on something of a religious ritual – she was interrupted by Blanquette scratching on the door and calling to her.

  ‘It’s all right, Blanquette, you may come in. In England we never knock on doors.’

  But despite obeying her mistress Blanquette’s fluster became more pronounced as she announced in total bewilderment, ‘There is a monsieur below, madame, who say ’ee is your mari!’

  As she said ‘mari’ Blanquette crossed herself as if the very mention of a husband required extra help from the Almighty to protect them both from such a devilish phenomenon.

  ‘You must tell him,’ Dorinda said, after a slight pause as her blood too ran just a little cold, ‘that I will be down in a minute.’

  Blanquette backed out again, and as she did so Dorinda flew from her bed and locked her bedroom door. Whatever happened she was not going to allow her husband into her new boudoir, now palest lemon and a beautiful French grey. She dressed herself in double quick time, managing her corsets and everything else as she had always used to do before Gervaise came into her life, and pinning up her hair really very adequately. But this time as she stared at herself in the mirror she was determined that no Harry Montgomery was going to defeat her. She was now a proper lady living in St John’s Wood with her own carriage – just about to be embellished with her own coat of arms (sort of) and her own pale blue leather interior, and her own dark bay horses with silver trimmings on their bridles setting off their beautiful dark bay heads.

  ‘Harry.’

  D
orinda said her husband’s name as if it was a pebble she was dropping into a pond, a pebble whose waves she would note with interest but which would undoubtedly, before long, sink to the bottom without a trace.

  ‘Dorinda!’

  Harry said his wife’s name as if he had been having hysterics for the past week, as if he had been calling it, over and over again, becoming more and more despairing when there was no answer.

  If Dorinda had ever loved her husband, even a little bit, she could have felt sorry for him at that moment, but Harry was so cold, and had always been so indifferent to her welfare, not caring in the least if she was always in rags and forever trying to make ends meet in boarding houses, that not even her initial mild affection had survived.

  ‘How are you, Harry?’

  Something in her manner stopped him from being as angry as he wanted, she thought, and then from the look on his face she quickly realized that it was nothing to do with her manner but everything to do with her new clothes. She must be looking magnificent compared to the mangy drab that she had been when he last saw her trotting ahead of him onto the boat for England, for he suddenly seemed unable to think of what to say next.

  ‘I am … very well, Dorinda.’

  Dorinda waved one jewelled hand towards a beautifully upholstered sofa, and her husband sank into it, it seemed to her, most thankfully.

  ‘May God forgive me, Dorinda, but I do not know whether I am on my head or my heels. One minute I have a wife, and the next minute – after hearing that Gervaise Lowther had acquired a new mistress by the name of Dorinda Montgomery – I have no wife, but am visiting the one I thought was my wife – in, of all things, another man’s house! It is not a matter that I can take lightly, Dorinda, I do assure you. But I can forgive you if you come home with me now. I find that I can do that.’

  Dorinda’s large, usually good natured violet blue eyes suddenly seemed to glitter, matching the light catching the colour in her large new oval sapphire ring, a ring which Gervaise had sweetly presented to her only twelve hours earlier because he felt so sorry for her not having any jewellery whatsoever, aside from her dreary little wedding ring.