The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  Crossing the street, with her skirts held high in one gloved hand, it seemed to Dorinda that the combustion engine would be a godsend to cities. It was so much cleaner and less offensive than carriages and horses, whose muck and manure caused mayhem to pedestrians, and assailed visitors’ nostrils a good half hour before they entered London.

  Dorinda reached the safety of the pavement and rounded the corner to Leveen’s town house. It had balconies and a magnificent front door, and its first floor drawing room had an uninterrupted view of the Park.

  She had been shown up the wide and beautiful staircase and was enjoying watching the riders and the carriages far below when the door opened and Mr Leveen came in. Dorinda had not given any thought to what he would actually be like, only to whether he would give her enough money for her timepiece to enable her to remove herself from her dull, grey, rented rooms and set up once again in a small charming little house somewhere near to where she had lived before. She just wanted a nice little place with dear little curtains and chintzes and flounces and fringes, somewhere to call her own. Nothing too much, just a small, or even tiny, little London house.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Montgomery.’

  His voice was rich with amusement, as if the very notion that this young widow was in his house was immensely diverting to him. Everywhere there were flunkeys, and marble, and gilt, and paintings, and objects of great value, but Lawrence Leveen did not seem part of the setting that he had given himself at all. He gave the impression of being quite other, more like the smugglers that Dorinda had occasionally glimpsed while she was growing up in the Channel Islands, more like the gamblers that Harry Montgomery was forever being lured by, more like herself, someone on the outside of Society.

  Dorinda dropped a curtsy, Mr Leveen bowed, they sat down, and within seconds Dorinda knew that he wanted her.

  ‘You have the most beautiful blue eyes, Mrs Montgomery. I had heard of them, I have read of them even, but now that I see them for myself they are quite as breathtakingly beautiful as any eyes I have ever seen. And your hair, that rich chestnut, rarely seen, always appreciated.’

  His dark eyes were literally brilliant, and his aquiline nose and pointed chin quite as fine and noble as you would wish to see, reminiscent, Dorinda suddenly thought, of the kind of looks seen in Elizabethan portraiture.

  She looked across at him, as if he was as much an object as the timepiece in her possession, assessing him, summing him up. She concluded that despite his lack of height, he was immensely attractive. He had a vitality at the centre of him which, again like the pocket watch, was intricate in the extreme. His inner mechanism however was balanced between intelligence and mockery.

  ‘Mr Leveen, I am here because I was told that you like beautiful things, and therefore would be interested in my late husband’s timepiece.’

  ‘Certainly.’ He looked around him. ‘I hope that my love of beauty is obvious.’

  ‘It is.’ Dorinda too looked around her. There was too much of everything for her taste, but the everything that there was too much of was certainly magnificent.

  ‘Would you like to continue, Mrs Montgomery?’

  She knew that he would know exactly why she had requested to see him. She also knew that he would be on tenterhooks to see if the timepiece was as beautiful as he had heard, which of course it was.

  ‘I was told that this timepiece came into my husband’s hands by way of business, and that it would be interesting either to you, or to Sir Joseph Porter, or to one of the Rothschilds, so exquisite and rare is it.’

  ‘May I see it, Mrs Montgomery?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Leveen.’

  She did not move. He did not move, but looked across at one of the footmen. Without saying a word the footman trod across the carpet to where Dorinda was seated and, taking the leather box from her, trod back to his master and placed it in his hands.

  Leveen opened the box, and because his face reflected no emotion when he took out the watch Dorinda knew at once that it was of the greatest interest to him. After a minute or two spent in examining it in reverential silence, during which Dorinda could hear the ticking of what now seemed to be a thousand clocks set about the great room, he looked up at her.

  ‘Where exactly did you say your husband obtained this, Mrs Montgomery?’

  Dorinda sighed inwardly, already toying with the idea of pretending that Harry had inherited it from an uncle, but sensing that Leveen was too shrewd a businessman to be fooled by some genteel lie she said, ‘I am sorry to tell you, Mr Leveen, that my late husband won it at cards. But he was so foolish, and so profligate in a way, that he forgot all about it, and it only came to light in one of his pockets when the nurses were laying him out. He is dead, you see.’

  ‘It is reasonable to presume that he would be dead, if he was being laid out.’

  Leveen’s face was so serious that Dorinda bit the inside of her cheek in an effort not to laugh. She was remembering how Miss Lynch had taken the watch as quickly as she could to the safe especially kept for such things.

  ‘Never leave anything for the undertakers,’ she had warned Dorinda. ‘Undertakers are the biggest robbers you will ever come across. They would follow you underground if they could. Oh yes, it’s not just ghouls that go to churchyards, you know, Mrs Montgomery, but undertakers too.’

  It had surprised Dorinda that Leonie knew so much about such things. She had supposed it was because Miss Lynch was a nurse, and had been surprised to find out that it was actually because she had been brought up near enough to the East End of London to make her, Dorinda thought, a cockney born within the sound of Bow Bells.

  ‘I will buy this timepiece from you, Mrs Montgomery, but on one condition only.’

  ‘And what would that be, Mr Leveen?’

  ‘That you have dinner with me, here, tonight.’

  Dorinda smiled. ‘I am afraid that is not possible, Mr Leveen.’

  He looked momentarily taken aback, as if he was not used to not being able to buy anything and everything at the very moment that he had a mind to do so.

  ‘Not possible, Mrs Montgomery? Have I to take second place to someone else? Is there, could there be, someone more important to you than the prospective buyer of your beautiful timepiece?’

  Dorinda perfectly understood that he was using business methods to bribe her, but since she was a humble landlady’s daughter, she was neither impressed nor shocked.

  ‘No, certainly there is no-one to take the place of the buyer of this timepiece,’ she returned briskly, because she never had much time for misunderstandings. ‘Of course there could be no-one more important to me at this moment than you, Mr Leveen. I am not a rich woman and I want the best possible buyer for my timepiece. But that is not the reason why I cannot come to dine with you tonight.’

  ‘What could be the reason then, Mrs Montgomery?’

  He said her name, ‘Mrs Montgomery’, just a little mockingly, as if he did not truly believe that she could have been married. Or perhaps because he was longing to call her ‘Dorinda’, which she could never allow, not until the skies fell in, or something just as extraordinary.

  ‘The reason, Mr Leveen, that I can not have dinner with you tonight is quite simple.’

  Dorinda looked around the room in which they were seated, and imagined that through the double doors to the next room, and doubtless in the next, and the next, and above them, and below them, all around them, in fact, was nothing but gold and more gold, very nearly a surfeit of gold, if that was possible.

  ‘I cannot dine with you here,’ she continued carefully, ‘because while I can wear my newest Worth dress, which is exactly the colour of my eyes, I no longer have any jewels.’

  Now the look in his eyes turned from shrewd appraisal to suppressed laughter, for he was with her at once, realizing that he had perhaps in her met a worthy adversary. And of course Dorinda herself could not keep from smiling, so that the look in her wonderful orbs was the same, although of course, she realized, her
eyes were yards more beautiful than his. So there they sat, suppressed laughter in both their gazes, and for a second neither of them moved, knowing that to do so would mean that they would dissolve into laughter.

  At last acknowledging Dorinda’s gesture to the flagrant beauty and moneyed luxury which surrounded them, Mr Leveen walked across to her sofa, and taking her hand in his surprisingly elegant white fingers he bent low and just brushed the back with his lips, in what was the approved fashion for married women. Dorinda appreciated his meaning at once.

  ‘Mrs Montgomery, I will have Tarleton send you round some suitable jewels. What colour is the gown, did you say?’

  ‘Why, Dorinda Blue, of course. I can surely leave off mourning if we are to dine alone, would you not say?’

  ‘Very well, I will have Tarleton send you round some sapphires to go with your gown. No, better than that.’ He stared down into her famously blue eyes. ‘Better than that, I will go to Bond Street and choose a necklace for you myself. A very good necklace. Not so good that it will make the Princess of Wales jealous, just good enough to make Mrs Keppel look up and stare when you enter a room.’

  He did not choose just a necklace, he chose a set of three pieces, which he sent round by his carriage.

  In fact his coachman delivered to Dorinda’s landlady a gratifyingly large leather tooled jewellery box, attached to which was a small card with two words written on it.

  For tonight.

  Once opened, the box was found to be lined with black velvet. A necklace lay in the centre, while to each side were placed earrings, and beneath the main piece a bracelet. Each piece was studded with small, perfect diamonds, so that as Dorinda opened it up both she and her landlady gasped as the light from the cheap overhead lamp caught the diamonds that were clustered about the perfect sapphires.

  ‘That necklace is so beautiful, Mrs Montgomery, I think I will faint,’ exclaimed Mrs Goodman. ‘What a generous man Mr Leveen is, to be sure. Or do you think, Mrs Montgomery, that he has more money than sense?’

  The two women stared at each other.

  ‘Oh, he has money, all right, Mrs Goodman.’ Dorinda looked at her landlady. ‘He has money, and lots of it, so much that I think it would be better if neither you nor I ever know just how rich he is. The question is,’ she hesitated as she looked at the older woman, ‘do I have sense?’

  Leveen had perfectly cut evening clothes. In fact they were so perfectly cut that it occurred to Dorinda that they were too perfect, and that Gervaise, whose evening clothes too had been most elegant, looked better simply because he wore his clothes, whereas Leveen looked as if the clothes were advertising his tailor, and not setting off the man.

  ‘You really should not have sent me round quite such beautiful jewels, Mr Leveen.’ Dorinda made a tut-tutting sound and looked at him, straight-faced. ‘But I have to tell you that I am so glad you did. I could not possibly have dined with you here, in this Aladdin’s Cave of beauty and art, bare-necked. It would have been insulting both to you and to your taste, you will agree. But you see, circumstances have forced the sale of so much in my life, due to my husband’s death, and so on.’

  ‘Of course you could have come here barenecked, Mrs Montgomery, but I have to tell you I should straight away have sent round for something for you, no matter the hour. I could not have borne not to have decorated such an exquisite neck with jewels. By the way, we are dining downstairs. Quite alone. We can talk business there – quite frankly.’

  ‘I always think if one must talk business it should be frankly. Not to do so would be to risk being taken for unworldly, don’t you think?’

  The room was beautifully set out as a second, very intimate dining room, which as Dorinda immediately appreciated, had been designed for just such a dinner as they were to enjoy. There were the latest in electric hot plates on the sideboards, so that they could serve themselves, and although candles were still used there was a delightful sense of sitting in a room that had the best of both possible worlds.

  And of course Dorinda was already so well versed in the way of amusing a man with gossip and stories that once dinner was under way there were no awkward silences, only a great deal of laughter. As a result she forgot all her vows to be sensible, and enjoyed herself to such an extent that, as she said, ingenuously, to Mrs Goodman the following afternoon, I am afraid I quite forgot to come home.

  That afternoon also saw Mrs Goodman sailing out of her rooms, in the second of Mr Leveen’s carriages, leaving behind her lodging house, her cheap furniture and her maid of all work, in favour of becoming Mrs Montgomery’s personal maid.

  It is quite the best thing I have done, she told herself, as she saw just exactly where Mrs Montgomery had forgotten to come home from. It is quite the best thing either of us have ever done.

  ‘Mrs Goodman is my personal maid. She must be given the best rooms possible,’ Dorinda told Leveen’s housekeeper.

  ‘Naturally, madam.’

  Dorinda turned. There was something in the woman’s tone that she did not like. It reminded her of someone else. The resemblance nagged at her as she climbed the magnificent staircase to the upper rooms, past all the classic paintings with titles so long that the words underneath them had to be painted in two sections.

  ‘Why do so many of your paintings have such tarsome titles, Mr Leveen?’

  ‘It was the fashion fifty years ago in painting competitions, such as the one Ingres won at Rome, to impress the judges by using very long titles, sometimes as much as twenty-five words long, or longer.’

  Leveen smiled at Dorinda and, as he did so, embarrassingly, she realized that she still had not called him by his first name. Last night, and again this afternoon, he was still ‘Mr Leveen’.

  She immediately decided to make a joke of it. It was always her way, when faced with some piece of her own ignorance that she could not get around, that she made a point of it. It was a feature too of her personality that she could not bear to be bored. If faced with even walking a few yards, if she could not think of anything else, she would as like as not pretend to be someone else, with the result that nowadays it often seemed to Dorinda that she could not remember what she herself was actually like. It was just how she was.

  ‘Mr L.’

  He did not turn immediately, but a few seconds later, and as he did so she saw at once that he liked her to tease him in this way.

  ‘Mr L, am I to have my own suite of rooms?’

  ‘But of course, Mrs Montgomery. Under my protection you are to have everything.’ He bent suddenly and, for him, almost dramatically towards her, the expression on his face serious in its sincerity. ‘You are to have everything that you have ever wanted, and more. And if I hear that more than two seconds have passed and your wishes, whatever they are, have not been granted, I will dismiss whoever kept you waiting for your desires.’

  Of course it was romantic nonsense, and yet as the impeccable Leveen straightened up and looked at her with his deep set black eyes, Dorinda could not help but be impressed. She dearly liked to see a man at her feet, she suddenly decided, but only if he was impossibly rich like Leveen, not if he was merely moneyed and aristocratic like Gervaise. She liked it because it was a game, and not real, for Leveen’s money made everything really quite fantastical. It was as if she was living in a fairy tale.

  The impression was strengthened when the footmen flung open the double doors of her ‘apartment’. Dorinda realized with a sharp sense of satisfaction that she could probably fit all her St John’s Wood reception rooms in just this space.

  It was as she thought back to St John’s Wood that the realization came to her, and she knew at once of whom the housekeeper downstairs reminded her. It was the wretched Blanquette. The plain maid who had landed her in such trouble with Gervaise, by, it was obvious now, letting him think Dorinda had left him for her husband. But of course, as always with such situations, by the time she had tried to write to Gervaise his pride was irrevocably hurt. With rumours of his humiliation alr
eady circulating in all the top circles he had sold her carriage, and anything else that reminded him of his beloved Dorinda Blue, and turned his attentions to a quite delectable young blonde – which was at least flattering.

  To Dorinda’s way of thinking, she was, as of that moment, going to be far better off where she was. She was not passionately or dangerously in love with her really quite fascinating ‘Mr L’, but she knew that she could love him if only for his generosity.

  Even so, whatever her present complacency, she realized that the housekeeper would have to be watched. In fact – and here she glanced sideways at Mrs Goodman who was busy gasping at the marble bathrooms and silk furnishings, at the Aubusson rugs and the crystal chandeliers, at the silver on the dressing table, at the beautiful hangings of silver and turquoise around the bed – now that she came to think of it, it might not be very long before Mrs Goodman rose from personal maid to a new position as housekeeper.

  But that was for the future. Now Dorinda frowned at her image in the old silver-backed mirror in the dressing room where Mrs Goodman had already begun to unpack and hang up her best gowns.

  She must never, she told her face, ever again find herself in such a position as she had found herself with Gervaise. She must never again be at the mercy of servants, or indeed anyone else.

  And so it was that Dorinda immediately began to secretly plan to replace Leveen’s servants with her own. It was quite simply a necessity. If she was not to lose everything again, to be once more out in the street having to sell jewellery to keep body and – to a certain extent – soul together, she had to surround herself with servants whom she could trust. She would begin with the housekeeper.

  Dorinda looked round at Mrs Goodman.

  ‘We are here to stay, Mrs Goodman, and you are going to be part of this with me, always.’

  ‘If you say so, Mrs Montgomery.’