Last Nocturne

by Marjorie Eccles

  Edwina knew, however, that underneath the gently rippling waters of Bernard’s dilettante exterior there ran a deeper current: a strong, inherited religious tradition and a fanatical scrupulousness regarding family honour and reputation. The Aubreys had come over with the Conqueror and there had never (at least in recent years) been a breath of scandal attached to their name. As long as Eliot lived, there had been no question of any extra-marital relations, quaint though that notion was nowadays; Bernard might dance attendance on Edwina, flirt with her, occasionally kiss her quite passionately, in private, but that was as far as it had gone. But Eliot had been dead now for nearly eight months and Edwina was worried that Bernard was showing no signs of remedying the situation. It was almost as though he was hesitating over marrying the widow of a man who had taken his own life – in his book, an undoubted sin – grossly unfair though that was. Guilt by association, wasn’t that what it was called? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the reasons behind Eliot’s death had never been satisfactorily explained. If there were even a hint that some hidden scandal might have caused it, to bring gossip and vulgar publicity to the name of Martagon, then Bernard would withdraw from any involvement with her faster than a hot knife through butter.

  And more than that: Edwina knew that she might just as well have been dragged through the mire of the divorce courts as have that sort of stigma attached to her name. Doors would be closed to her and in certain circles she would be as much of a social outcast as if she were a fallen woman. It was unfair, but there it was. And it was the only explanation she could offer for Bernard’s equivocation. Unless she had grossly mistaken him of course, and he was, after all, not the marrying kind.

  It wasn’t Bernard’s money she was after; Eliot, with all his shortcomings, had left her and the children well provided for. A little more never came amiss, but more importantly, it would be the ultimate feather in her cap to be known as Lady Blyborough, and maybe even to gain an entreé into the Marlborough House set – and certainly to have a country house. She’d never been able to persuade Eliot, who didn’t care for either sporting activities or the sort of society which was meat and drink to Edwina, of the necessity for a house in the country as well as a London establishment – no matter that, extensive though it was, this house was really not large enough for entertaining on the scale she’d once envisaged.

  She sighed deeply and glanced impatiently at the little ormolu clock fussily ticking away on the mantelpiece. What on earth was Manners, stupid woman, doing with her frock? Cynthia Cadell would be arriving before she herself was downstairs, at this rate.

  She reached for the bell, but then changed her mind and drew her hand back. Instead, some impulse sent her to check her desk – although she knew she had no need – just to reassure herself that she hadn’t been imagining goblins where none existed these last few weeks. Blinking as she opened the desk at the unaccustomed tidiness brought about by Grace Thurley’s attentions, she pressed a little knob in the carving and the ‘secret’ drawer at the back slid smoothly open. She froze.

  The drawer was empty. Her heart jerked so painfully that she thought the shock might have been too much for her.

  Like a blind woman she stumbled back to the dressing table, groped for the little gold-stoppered crystal bottle which held her smelling salts and took a deep sniff of the strong, ammoniac crystals. The vapour brought tears into her eyes, but it steadied her a little. In a few moments, she’d recovered herself sufficiently to try to think what might have happened. Perhaps Grace had taken the little parcel away, along with the disorderly heaps of papers which had filled the other drawers of the bureau? Grace, who was turning out to be such a treasure? The hope turned out to be short-lived when Edwina remembered that she herself had tipped out the contents of every drawer she’d wished Grace to deal with, and knew that the hidden one had never been opened in her presence. Nor had anyone else, she was certain, ever known of its existence. Not even Eliot. Her bureau had come with her when she married, its concealed drawer the recipient from childhood of everything she wished to keep to herself. For several moments she sat motionless and then, as if galvanised, began a frantic search of the rest of the room, just in case she might have had a brainstorm and transferred the silk-wrapped package to somewhere else, forgetting where she’d put it.

  For quite ten minutes, she rummaged feverishly in drawers and cupboards, like a burglar searching for loot, tossing aside each precisely folded article of clothing, layered with sachets impregnated with her own special Parisian-created perfume. She threw out chemises, stockings, nightgowns and petticoats, busks, stays, handkerchiefs and scarves as her frenzy grew. Even the corners of her wardrobes, where her gowns and costumes hung in scented velvet and silken folds, received the attentions of her predatory hands; nor was the cupboard forgotten where her elaborate hats rested, swathed in tissue paper, on the numerous shelves. She ransacked the adjoining bathroom, then her boudoir. Finally, she sank down on to her dressing stool and stared into the looking glass at her blanched face, admitting defeat. Her mind worked furiously. One thing was clear: the dangerous package had gone, not merely been misplaced.

  Manners was the obvious suspect; or the maids who cleaned the room. Who else came in here? Her friends sometimes, who used her rooms to titivate in the dinner party interval between the ladies withdrawing and the gentlemen rejoining them later, though none of them, she was sure, would have had either the opportunity – or the bad taste – to rifle through her desk and accidentally find the knob to the hidden drawer. Dulcie, perhaps? But even as a child, playing with her mother’s pretty things, she had never been allowed to touch the contents of the bureau and could not know its little secret.

  She sat stiffly at her dressing table, looking in the glass, seeing a woman grown suddenly old.

  Then with a plunging, sickening thump of her heart, she remembered that she had taken the package with her when she had visited the Cornleighs in Cambridgeshire several weeks previously. What an idiocy! She was not at all clever in remembering where she put things at the best of times, and in a strange house – why, it could be just about anywhere by now – anywhere at all, and in the hands of God knows who. Her mind remained a complete blank when it came to remembering replacing it in the drawer after she came home, and she had not opened the drawer since, out of some silly superstition, perhaps.

  Automatically, she went on with her toilette. She picked up her pearls – magnificent matched ones her father had given her as a wedding present. Her fingers shook too much to manage the clasp. Angrily, she pushed them to one side.

  Manners came in at last with the chestnut silk carefully draped over her outstretched arm and was unable to conceal her astonishment and dismay as she looked around the ransacked room, though in a moment she had assumed her usual, professionally blank expression.

  ‘You’ve been a long time, Manners. I’ve been looking for something,’ Edwina said, unnecessarily. ‘Help me into my dress and fasten my pearls, then tidy up.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Martagon. I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. The fire had gone down and the iron took a long time to heat.’ As her mistress continued to stare at her reflection, her colour quite gone, her lips ashen, the maid, who was a good-natured woman and thankful to have received only such a mild reproof for taking so long over the dress, ventured, ‘What was it, that you couldn’t find? Maybe I could—’

  ‘No,’ said Edwina. ‘It was there, and now it isn’t. There’s no more to be said.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The room Mrs Martagon had designated as the place where Grace might work was the late Eliot Martagon’s study, situated at the back of the house, at the end of a dark passage. An insignificant but cosy room which Eliot had nevertheless chosen as a private bolt-hole where he could be alone to smoke a cigar (which his wife would not permit elsewhere), to read, or think, or even just to be alone for a while. He had seldom allowed anyone except Dulcie to disturb him there. It had now been stripped of all reminders of him, rendered
anonymous, which had precisely the opposite effect of that intended. The shelf where his tantalus had stood was crying out for something to replace it; there were empty spaces on his bookshelves and especially on the walls. Large as the new looking-glass over the mantelpiece was, for instance, it didn’t quite conceal the unfaded wallpaper which had been behind the picture it had evidently replaced.

  Grace thought, studying her reflection in this mirror: I’m beginning to look like the perfect secretary. Hitherto, her neat, carefully chosen clothes had never felt inadequate, regardless of the fact that she generally made them herself, despising ready-made garments, with their poor cut and finish disguised by over-fussy trimming. But compared with the clothes of Edwina Martagon and her friends, she was beginning to wonder if her own were not just a trifle too perversely plain.

  Well, that was an unprofitable line of thinking. With only the slightest sigh, and defiantly tweaking out of position a strand or two of her smoothly coiled thick fair hair, she turned away and faced the pile of papers on the desk. Secretary is what I am, as my mother predicted I would be, she told herself firmly – though in reality, her position in the household was more ambivalent than that: not quite friend, not quite employee, an uneasy compromise.

  On the whole, however, she wasn’t entirely displeased with the way things had turned out in the short time since she’d come to live with the Martagons. The house was run by a meticulously efficient housekeeper who had learnt her trade at one of the royal households and saw it as her mission in life to emulate that establishment. Largely unseen servants kept the house immaculate; delicious food was provided for every meal; fires were lit in all the rooms and kept going; huge arrangements of fresh flowers were replaced daily; newspapers were ironed. And besides that, there were constant comings and goings of well-bred, polite and agreeable persons; there was always something interesting happening, different people to meet, not to mention things to see and do in London itself.

  Reservations there were, of course, but then, Grace had not expected her new life to be all plain sailing. Her free time was theoretically her own to do with as she wished, although so far it had proved an elusive concept: Edwina Martagon was overbearing and demanding, expecting instant obedience and attendance whenever she lifted a finger. Grace found no difficulty in putting up with this – Edwina was not, in essence, so very different from that difficult woman, the last vicar’s wife at St Mark’s, and she had managed to cope with her well enough.

  Yet she had a feeling that all was not well with the lady, despite the splendid sangfroid she outwardly maintained. She’d fairly recently lost her husband – and in horrific circumstances – but although the statutory period of mourning wasn’t yet quite over, the unbearably constricting mourning rules which had applied during the late queen’s stifling forty-year devotion to the memory of her husband had gradually and thankfully been relaxed, and Edwina already went out freely in society. She’d abandoned her widow’s funereal black, and even the mauve of half-mourning, without an eyebrow being lifted. Grace’s own sense of loss after her father’s death was still acute, and she admired the rigid self-control which had enabled Edwina so soon to follow a continual round of pleasure, as if quite unaffected. Perhaps, of course, she was.

  This was certainly not true of Dulcie – poor Dulcie, with all her frustrated ambitions, whom Grace liked very much and had determined to help as much as she possibly could. Dulcie was a girl who kept her thoughts largely to herself, but it was obvious she was still grieving deeply for her father. Indeed, the respect, admiration, even love, with which almost everyone spoke of Eliot Martagon indicated that he’d been a powerful presence, and his untimely death, and even more the manner of it, had created an inexplicable mystery. Perhaps this accounted for the curious air of – she could only call it suspension – in this house, of things unspoken and avoided. Despite the busy social veneer which lay over it, it was, Grace felt with a slight coldness, a house of secrets.

  She hadn’t mentioned any of this when she wrote to her mother.

  Nor had she mentioned the other member of the family, the son of the house, Guy Martagon, except in passing, mainly because her contact with him had been so far limited. He wasn’t much at home, and they met only occasionally when she was coming down to breakfast and he was striding across the hall in his tight breeches and riding boots after his morning ride in the Row, when he would give her a polite but distant good morning. Or when he was going out, impeccably dressed in his city clothes. Lean, loose-limbed, elegant, moody. Kind in a big-brotherly way to his sister, who adored him, it had been hinted that he was a problem to his mother. On the only occasion Grace had had the chance to observe him properly – a low-key dinner party at which she’d been present, where the guests weren’t important – she’d sensed a held-back energy, fancied she’d glimpsed on his dark face a bitter sense of time being wasted. Across the table, in the candlelight, he waved away dessert and occasionally spared a social smile for mousy little Miss Cadell, who had been put next to him and was doing her best, under her mother’s eye, to be fascinating, and failing miserably, poor thing. Guy’s thoughts were obviously elsewhere and he wasn’t being very successful in concealing it. Aware that she’d been staring too long, Grace had picked up her spoon and turned to her syllabub, and when she looked up again, she saw that Ginny Cadell had now been claimed by the elderly man on her left, and that Guy Martagon was leaning back in his chair, in his turn ironically observing her, Grace. She hoped she wasn’t turning pink. Then she became aware of his mother’s sharp assessing eye also resting on her for a moment, before being turned dismissively away. A spurt of indignation that Mrs Martagon clearly saw no threat to her son in the person of Grace Thurley was followed by amusement. As if she would wish to have designs on him!

  Dulcie had spoken of her brother’s recent history and Grace could see that the life he was leading now must seem tame after fighting the Boers and thereafter following manly pursuits in Tibet – or was it India? – where he’d spent so many years, only interrupted by his father’s death. But surely nothing was preventing him from going back, if that was what he wished? The family affairs must surely now be all in order and he could return and look to his heart’s content for the source of the Brahmaputra or the Tsangpo or whatever the river was they sought. The yaks and camels out there wouldn’t care if he glowered all day long.

  And meanwhile, her lowly position in the house meant Grace would be spared the necessity of having much to do with him.

  So that when he came into the study a few minutes after she had returned to her desk from that dissatisfied perusal of herself in the looking glass, she felt only mild annoyance at being interrupted, and answered his good morning coolly before returning to her duties, while he wandered, frowning, over to the bookcase and began to inspect the shelves.

  She picked up a sheaf of papers. It wasn’t so much Mrs Martagon’s inability to keep track of her correspondence, social arrangements and appointments – not to mention bills and accounts, or forgetting birthdays, even those of her children – as her reluctance to be bothered with any of it, which made for the chaos which had faced Grace when she arrived. Edwina’s idea of method was to push her correspondence, after it had been read (and sometimes before, if it gave any indication of being tedious), into whatever drawer happened to be handy, and then to forget about it, eventually causing the sort of desperation which must have forced the writing of that letter to Grace’s mother. The last person to help Edwina out, she of the crockery-smashing episode, now had Grace’s ardent sympathies. She must have been sorely tried. Sometimes she felt like emulating her when it came to keeping track of everything, to arranging dinner parties and soireés, and making sure there were no clashes between Edwina’s many invitations, and that her Saturdays-to-Mondays at the country houses of various friends were organised well in advance. All this untidiness accorded ill with Mrs Martagon’s personal fastidiousness, her insistence on being faultlessly groomed at all times. She was perfec
tly turned out on every occasion, smelling deliciously, not a hair out of place, but presumably leaving the same sort of disarray in her wake for her maid to tidy up as Grace found herself having to deal with on another level.

  She looked up from trying to decipher a scrawl across an engraved invitation on thick cream card, which she finally interpreted as ‘Do not accept on any account’, to find that Guy Martagon was watching her, leaning against the door frame, his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘I can see why my mother thinks you’re a paragon, Miss Thurley. Method and order are foreign to her way of life. Anyone who can make sense out of the chaos and confusion she creates has my deepest respect.’

  More than a little put out at being regarded as a paragon, Grace flushed. No young woman likes to be seen as having attributes generally regarded as finicky and spinsterish, and Grace was no exception, especially when she was reminded of her mother’s remarks about her resemblance to Miss Grimshaw. Setting things in order made life easier all round, but she knew she could very soon get sick of running after Edwina, picking up loose ends – which no sooner were straightened out than ravelled themselves back into chaos. But she smiled, and perversely tucked back the tendril of hair into its secretarial tidiness, and went on with what she was doing.