Daisy
Page 2
Daisy then went up to her room to hurriedly stuff a blanket along the bottom of the door, so that her aunt would not see the light and know that she was reading in bed. Daisy picked up a copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and happily sailed off down the Thames with George and Harris and the dog, Montmorency, and let the worries of reality fade away.
But as she leaned over to blow out her candle—gaslight in the bedrooms was considered a needless extravagance—the face of the Earl appeared before her once more.
Life would never be the same again. Daisy had a feeling that she had turned into a woman all in one day. And she didn’t like it one bit.
Chapter Two
The Gods above knew that Daisy Jenkins was about to receive her just punishment. Huge black clouds tumbled across the heavens and icy blasts of wind sent the dead leaves dancing in the corners of the school yard.
Daisy bent over the desks, refilling the ink wells, the weight of fear inside her so heavy that she felt she might topple over. She had dressed with unusual care as though to meet her executioner, her heavy brown hair in two severe braids and her white pinafore gleaming and crackling with starch.
If only she were in one of the noisy lower school classes, bursting at the seams with girls, instead of this rarified upper strata of only seven prim misses. Few parents in Upper Featherington had the money or the inclination to educate a mere girl beyond the year of fourteen. Daisy had some idea that the penny-pinching Miss Sarah Jenkins had kept her on at school so that she might subsequently earn her living as a schoolteacher or governess. A quiet, biddable scholastic girl, she was a great favorite with her teachers and usually enjoyed the dull school routine.
The door of the classroom suddenly burst open with a crash and, without turning her head, Daisy knew that the ax was about to fall.
Miss Meaken’s voice rang across the classroom. “Miss Pomfret and Miss Jenkins. To my study immediately.”
The moment had arrived and Daisy was glad. Whatever punishment that befell could not be worse than the anticipation of it.
But Amy went white under her freckles and clutched Daisy’s arm for support as they hurried down the long corridor. The school had been built on mock ecclesiastical lines and the headmistress’s study looked as cosy as a monk’s cell. Miss Meaken was seated behind a large refectory desk, with her back to the window where the black clouds tumbled with undisciplined abandon over the deserted hockey pitch.
On hard upright chairs to one side of her sat Miss Jenkins and Amy’s mother, Mrs. Pomfret. Miss Jenkins’s light-blue eyes searched out Daisy’s. They contained a peculiar gleam. Could it be satisfaction? The sinner had finally sinned.
Miss Meaken was a small, dumpy woman encased in herringbone tweed. She wore a stiff, uncompromising wig, and her weak pink eyes peered nervously out at the world from beneath its shadow.
Had she screamed or roared it would have been bad enough. But her voice trembled with unshed tears as she peered through a lorgnette at a crested letter in her hand.
“I was told yesterday, by a message from the lodge boy, of your trespass. This, however, was followed by a letter from the Countess of Nottenstone expressing her strong displeasure. It leaves me with no alternative but to expel you both.”
Mrs. Pomfret began to sob noisily and the hairs on Miss Jenkins’s mole pointed their accusing fingers at Daisy as she stood with her head bowed, unable to speak or move.
The word “expel” hung in the chilly room like an obscenity.
Amy began to roar and cry like her mother and despite her misery, Daisy could only admire her friend’s noisy release.
“You have been a very good pupil, Miss Jenkins… one of our best I may say…” Miss Meaken was beginning when a housemaid catapulted into the room, her cap askew and her face polished with excitement.
“It’s the Dook, mum,” she gasped. “’Is Grace ’imself wants for to talk to you about them.” She jerked her cap at the two girls.
Miss Meaken looked at her in a bewildered way, and uttered a few bleats of surprise. The door swung open again, and there on the threshold stood the Duke of Oxenden. He strolled languidly in and laid his hat and cane on the table.
His harsh aristocratic features softened slightly as the pale-yellow eyes took in the scene. Then he perched himself on the desk and, without taking his eyes from Daisy, he said in a hesitant, light voice, “I am sorry I am a little late in presenting the Countess’s apologies.”
“Apologies!” exclaimed Miss Meaken faintly.
“Yes, indeed,” he went on smoothly. “Her ladyship was suffering from the deuce of a migraine yesterday. She begs me to convey her apologies for the hasty letter she wrote you. Her ladyship wishes me to say that both girls were very prettily behaved and a credit to your school and begs that no disciplinary action be taken against them.”
Miss Meaken rose to her feet, her short-sighted eyes blinking their relief and amazement. “Well, I must say, Your Grace, that it’s very handsome of her ladyship. Very handsome indeed! Daisy Jenkins is one of my best pupils and is shortly to finish her schooling. I would not have liked to see her leave before the end of the term.
“Come girls. Make your best curtsies to His Grace and return to your classroom.”
From a sobbing wreck, Amy had become positively radiant. She swept her best curtsy and bestowed her best smile on the unmoved Duke who still watched Daisy.
Daisy had reached the door when she heard his voice calling her, “Tell me, Miss Daisy Jenkins. Does the name Chatterton mean anything to you?”
Daisy shook her head and then stared at her aunt. For as long as she could remember, Daisy could not recollect her aunt’s face as being anything but scarlet. But now it was paper white.
“No!” shouted her aunt. “Never! Chatterton! No! Never!”
The Duke gave Daisy a slight bow and she left the room with her head in a whirl. The mystery of her aunt’s violent reaction to the name Chatterton soon fled before the glad thought that the Countess was as kind as she was beautiful. It was only what the Earl deserved. In fact she was so happy with this thought, that the mild Daisy became almost snappish with Amy for suggesting that the Countess knew nothing of the Duke’s visit. Amy laughed, “Mark my words, Daisy Jenkins, His Grace is sweet on you. Never took his eyes off you.”
“But he’s too old!” protested Daisy.
“Old! He’s only about thirty. And ever so good-looking.”
Daisy looked at her friend in surprise. She thought the Duke looked hard and cruel and that his elegance was positively inhuman. How on earth could anyone consider the Duke handsome compared to the Earl?
The end of the school day arrived all too soon. Daisy could not imagine her stern aunt letting her get away without any punishment whatsoever. She walked slowly homeward, stopping occasionally to answer the questions of the smaller school-girls. “No, the Duke had not been wearing a robe. No, he had not been wearing a crown. Yes, he was very handsome,” she said, to make up for the disappointment that the Duke had arrived dressed in an ordinary suit of clothes.
As usual Aunt Sarah was waiting on the door-step, complete with knitting needles. But instead of the usual stabs, Daisy was summoned into the parlor where, wonder upon wonder, a small fire was burning, its meager flames struggling against the surrounding gloom of heavy overstuffed Victorian furniture, stuffed birds, and marble statuary.
“Sit down, Daisy,” said Aunt Sarah, not unkindly. She herself sat ramrod straight on the very edge of a high wing chair as if to lean back would encourage Satan himself to snatch her back into the red-velvet depths of the upholstery.
“It is time to talk to you about—men,” said Aunt Sarah importantly. “We shall say no more about the disgraceful behavior of trespassing on the Countess’s property, since my lady herself has seen fit to forgive you. And I was never one to question the ways of my betters.”
Daisy remembered many of her aunt’s criticisms of the sinful aristocracy, but prudently remained silent.
“What is he thinking of, Auntie?”
“Lust!”
“Oh,” sighed Daisy.
“So I have decided that the time has come to tell you the facts of life. Do you know what a man does with a woman?”
“Well… he kisses her and… and… he says he loves her…”
“Codswallop!” said Sarah Jenkins, her face deepening to purple. “Now you listen closely, my girl, and I’ll tell you…”
She leaned forward in the firelight, her voice dropping to an intense whisper, and began to outline the mysteries of sexual intercourse.
Daisy stared at her, her wide brown eyes growing enormous with bewilderment. As far as she could make out, the gentleman took his mumble, and mumble, mumble, mumbled with it.
“There!” said Sarah Jenkins. “Now you know. I fear I’ve shocked you but I am a Christian woman and it is my duty to tell you these unpleasant things for your own good.”
Daisy was none the wiser and not much worried. Her aunt could make just reading a novel appear to be some terribly sinful act, so whatever the gentlemen got up to was probably something innocuous. All Daisy wanted to do was to escape to the privacy of her room and dream about the Earl.
But her aunt’s whisperings had awakened something in her mind and that night, as she unhooked her Liberty bodice, she looked in the mirror and tried to see herself with the eyes of a sophisticated man. Wide, soft, fawnlike eyes stared back at her, a soft, well-shaped mouth, a soft chin, and masses of soft brown hair.
I’m all soft, thought Daisy sadly, remembering the hard l-shaped line of the Countess’s jaw. Colorless—that’s what. I wonder what Auntie plans to do with me when school finishes?
But winter passed, then spring, then came summer and the end of school days, and still Miss Jenkins had not suggested that Daisy earn her bread.
Daisy had been asked to play Juliet in the end of term play to Amy’s busty Romeo, but on the subject of playacting, Sarah Jenkins stood firm. It was sinful, it was wicked, and Daisy was to have no part of it. Instead she would attend the methodist chapel that very evening in order to improve the dangerously low tone of her mind.
Nearly in tears, Daisy fled to her room to get ready for church. For once, it had seemed, she was to have a little glamour and excitement. She knew she played the part of Juliet well and now it would be played by Clarrie Johnson who roared her lines as if the audience were all stone-deaf. With a jerk, Daisy raised the heavy window of her bedroom and stared across the town with unseeing eyes.
The gardens rioted in all the summer glory of roses. There were red and white roses tumbling over trellises, roses in the hedgerows, and cultivated beauties holding up their heads in the formal gardens like so many ladies at Ascot with their heavy, elaborate hats. The air was heavy with their languorous scent; disturbing and moving. Unbidden, a picture of the house party on the lawn of the castle flashed across her brain. The characters moved with silent grace across the lawns of her mind and the Earl’s eyes flashed as blue as the summer sky. With a heavy sigh she turned from the window.
She hauled out her heavy stays from the drawer and examined a tear in the material where a vicious piece of whalebone was poking through. There would be no time to mend it. Well, what did it matter if it dug into her, what did it matter if it were uncomfortable?
She dressed and went downstairs to where her aunt was waiting, encased in black bombazine with multiple jet ornaments that glittered with reptilian brilliance in the dark hall.
Taking her aunt’s bony arm, Daisy moved toward the chapel, numb with misery. She felt as if she and her aunt were encased in an impregnable black cloud that no sounds or scents of summer could ever penetrate.
The sermon was to be given by a visiting preacher and her aunt, she knew, was looking forward to the occasion with all the excitement with which London society awaited the first notes of a visiting diva.
By the time they reached the redbrick chapel, her aunt was leaning heavily on Daisy’s arm, and for the first time, Daisy felt a pang of concern. Her aunt’s face was so red it shone like a beacon.
“Are you all right, Auntie?”
“Yes, of course,” her aunt wheezed. “A little short of breath. I will be all right when I sit down.”
Sarah Jenkins paused on the porch and turned to the girl at her side. “You know,” she said in a rush, “I do care for you, Daisy. Worry over you makes me a bit strict. I do care, Daisy.”
Daisy looked at her aunt in puzzled embarrassment and searched for a reply, but her aunt was already marching ahead into the chapel. Daisy followed and sat primly next to her on the hard wooden bench.
The preacher was young and intense and was burnt up with the sins of Upper Featherington. The catholic church, he said with a dramatic shudder, had been running a raffle. The prize was a box of groceries. It had come to his ears that not only had members of this congregation taken part in this Devil’s lottery, but that one of them had actually won. Gasps and cries of consternation arose from the congregation, while heads twisted trying to seek out the sinner.
Gambling, he said, was the sport of Satan. “Amen!” breathed Sarah Jenkins wisting her head to stare at Daisy. Daisy wriggled uncomfortably, feeling that nasty bit of loose whalebone beginning to spear her armpit. Why was auntie staring at her so intensely? She had not bought a raffle ticket… much as she had wanted to.
The preacher’s voice droned on. “A simple thing like a raffle can breed the devilish seed. First it is a box of groceries, then the gambling tables at Monte Carlo.”
“Hallelujah!” cried Sarah Jenkins, her jet ornaments flashing in the gaslight.
Delighted with the fervent response, the preacher warmed to his subject.
“Men forsake their wives and families and their children are cast into the gutter. And why? Because the evil vice of gambling has them in its grip. Because…”
He broke off. Sarah Jenkins was on her feet, choking and gesticulating wildly.
“It’s true,” she yelled. “All true. And the righteous have to care for their children and feed them—and—and—”
With a choked moan, she toppled over the pew in front of her, head down. Her ancient elastic-sided boots waved feebly in the air and then were still.
There was silence. Then a long indrawn breath like a sigh, from the congregation. As they gathered around in silence and pulled Sarah Jenkins upright, it was all too evident that Death himself had stalked into the sacred confines of the chapel to claim Sarah Jenkins’s soul.
Kindly hands led Daisy from the church. She was aware of the comforting bulk of Curzon, the butler, helping her out into the open air. With a broken little cry, Daisy fell into his arms.
“Why did she have to say she cared for me?” cried poor Daisy with all the selfishness of youth. “Then I wouldn’t have cared so much….”
The three days before the funeral passed like a dream. There were constant callers at The Pines from morning till night, constant help, constant advice. And Daisy, as pliable and meek as ever, did exactly what she was told while the corpse of her aunt lay stretched out in the parlor. She numbly went through the ritual of taking in friends and neighbors to “see her,” lifting up the lace doily from the now waxen face and standing mutely to attention while the visitors stared and commented.
Curzon had gone through her aunt’s meager collection of papers to discover Sarah Jenkins’s will in which she left everything she had possessed to “my dearest ward, Daisy.”
“This might create a few difficulties,” said Curzon, lifting his heavy eyebrows in surprise. “But someone from your aunt’s lawyers is to call. And a very classy set of lawyers she has, too. Same as the Earl’s. Why now does she refer to you as her ward?”
Daisy shook her head. She had accepted the fact that Sarah Jenkins was her aunt without question.
Th
e doorbell gave an imperious clang and Curzon got to his feet. “That’ll be the lawyers now, Daisy. Would you like me to stay?”
”Oh, yes please, Curzon,” said Daisy, thankful for a familiar face in a world which seemed to be becoming rootless and strange.
The gentleman who entered the hallway with a brisk step did not seem at all like Daisy’s idea of a lawyer. He was a fashionably dressed young man with a breezy manner and clever little eyes like boot buttons winking in a chubby, polished face. He sported two magnificent waistcoats and a small diamond pin winked impudently from his stock.
His first words fell like a thunderclap on the startled ears of Daisy and Curzon. He surveyed Daisy up and down with a cheeky grin and then said, “So this is the Honorable Daisy Chatterton. Well, I must say, you don’t look a bit like his lordship. Must favor your mother.”
Chapter Three
God would surely strike her dead for twittering with excitement on the day that Sarah Jenkins was laid to rest. But the change in Daisy’s world had bedazzled her so much that she could scarcely think straight.
She was indeed the Honorable Daisy Chatterton. Her father, Lord Chatterton, was alive and well and living in the South of France. Her mother, Emily, had died giving birth to her and her father had left her in the care of a retired upstairs maid, Sarah Jenkins.
The lawyers had received a letter from her father requesting that she be put in the care of the Earl and Countess of Nottenstone until his return. He had written to the Countess to explain the situation.
The door to the magic garden was wide open. Poor Daisy was only human. Her mind fled from the more unsavory aspects of the case—that, for example, her father had failed to supply Sarah Jenkins with any money for her care and that her education had taken up a good part of the spinster’s life’s savings. She would see the Earl again, talk to him on equal terms, be a part of that fairy-tale world glimpsed from the bushes and never forgotten.