The Ladies In Love Series

by M. C. Beaton

  By the time Carter put Susie to bed at the inn, a gentle smile was playing across her mistress’s lips, and Susie fell asleep with the roar of the London mob, crying for Giles’s blood, sounding comfortably in her ears.

  Chapter 8

  The Camberwell visit was a disaster from almost the start. After Mrs. Burke had enjoyed all the neighbors staring at a real, live countess, she began to nourish a deep-seated resentment for Carter. Right at the start the lady’s maid had said in chilly accents that it was not her place to do Mrs. Burke’s hair or to help her dress. Mrs. Burke had said rather incoherently that an unwilling servant was like an adder nourished in one’s bosom, to which Carter had replied with a disdainful sniff.

  Lady Matilda was an added disappointment, in that she did not look like a lady with her trailing old-fashioned clothes and endless pieces of sewing and knitting. She had ensconced herself in the most comfortable armchair in the front parlor, from which she had refused to budge, and listened in to all Mrs. Burke’s talks with her friends.

  Dr. Burke had found his little girl changed into an elegant lady he did not know in the slightest. He too began to build up a resentment. With all her fortune, Susie had not supplied one penny to the household, and her mad entourage was costing him a small fortune. Her coachman and two footmen—or rather Lady Matilda’s—had had to be supplied with accommodation at a nearby alehouse. The stabling and fodder for the horses all had to be paid for.

  He had hinted, he had suggested, he had pleaded downright poverty, and his dreamy daughter had not appeared to have listened to one word he said.

  In despair, he finally faced her with the problem outright. He called her into his study and, telling her to sit down, swung his swivel chair around from his desk to face her.

  “My dear Susie,” he began, stroking his beard. “You are my daughter.”

  “Yes,” replied his daughter in a vague way.

  “You must honor and obey your father and mother.”

  “Yes,” said Susie, yawning.

  “Your mother and I are very poor people, very poor indeed.”

  “Oh!”

  “Listen, Susie,” said her father, moving into the attack. “I cannot afford to go on paying for your guest and your servants.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, Papa?” said Susie infuriatingly. “I shall give you money.”

  Dr. Burke visibly brightened. “How much?” he asked eagerly.

  “Present me with the bills,” said Susie, “and I will take them to Mr. Jasper, my man of business.”

  This practical approach did not suit the doctor at all. He wanted more than the mere payment of the household bills.

  “Look, Susie,” he said earnestly. “You are a very rich girl. Don’t you think it unfair that your poor father should still have to work for a living?”

  “I might have done,” replied Susie fairly, “if you and Mama had not told me so many times that your work was God’s business. Healing the sick and all that,” she added helpfully.

  Dr. Burke put a quaver in his voice. “I am a very old man Susie.…”

  “You are younger than my late husband,” put in Susie with a tinge of acid in her young voice.

  Her father stared at her in exasperation. “Are you going to give me any money or not?” he demanded.

  “Oh, yes,” said Susie calmly. “I shall see Mr. Jasper this very day.”

  “I shall come with you,” said Dr. Burke, rubbing his hands gleefully. “You must leave these money matters to us men of the world.”

  “No,” said Susie flatly. “I have discovered I am quite clever when it comes to handling money. The money is mine, Papa, and I feel I have earned it in ways you could never begin to imagine.”

  Dr. Burke turned an embarrassed color of puce. He thought she was hinting at unmentionable sexual matters, and so he let her escape. He did not know the earl had leapt to his death before anything interesting had happened.

  Mr. Jasper was delighted to see Susie. He had invested her fortune wisely and told her with pride that it had almost doubled. He readily agreed to settle a large amount on Susie’s parents, a gesture that gladdened his old-fashioned heart.

  Then, settling back in his chair and carefully putting the tips of his fingers together, he asked Susie why she had left Blackhall Castle.

  Susie told him, beginning calmly enough and ending up in a heavy and refreshing burst of tears. Mr. Jasper removed his pince-nez, sent a clerk to fetch tea, and patted Susie on the shoulder in a clumsy but reassuring way.

  “It’s a miracle nothing about this got into the newspapers,” he said. “Has young Giles gone mad?”

  “I don’t know,” wailed Susie. “I never want to see him again.”

  “And are you happy at Camberwell?”

  Susie dried her tears and looked at him and then said slowly, “I don’t think I am. Is it very terrible, Mr. Jasper, not to like one’s own parents?”

  “No, only very natural,” said Mr. Jasper, smiling. “In time, as you grow older, you will learn to forgive them for their idiosyncracies. Ah, tea, the cup that cheers, as the poet says. Now, drink up, my lady, and tell me more of Camberwell itself. Is your parents’ house large enough for all of you?”

  “Not really,” said Susie. “And does it sound very snobbish of me?—but it all seems so poky and dark.”

  “You are a young lady of fortune and title,” said Mr. Jasper, hitching his chair closer.

  “You should be taking your place in society and going to all the balls and parties. Lady Matilda could chaperon you and, as a young widow, you would have much more freedom than, say, a debutante.”

  “But I don’t know how to get into society,” said Susie.

  “You are in,” said Mr. Jasper cynically. “You have a title, a fortune, and you’re young and marriageable. All you need is to set up your establishment somewhere in the West End. Rent a place first, and then we will look around for something to buy. I could arrange everything for you, servants and all. It is my job, you know. I extract quite a large fee from your income, you know, but I like to earn it.”

  “Very well, then,” said Susie, seeing a whole new world opening in front of her. Hope began to spring anew. She would go to balls and parties, and she would soon forget Giles, soon lose this terrifying lost, black ache inside her body.

  Giles had easily discovered Susie’s whereabouts from the servants. After all, he was about to raise their wages, so they were anxious to oblige him in every way they could. They reasoned that he was really in love with Susie and would probably marry her, so they weren’t being disloyal to the girl who had saved them from the excisemen.

  Instead of rushing to lay his apology at her feet, Giles sent a messenger with a brief note, expressing his apologies in stilted sentences, which sounded slightly offensive, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. Susie, crying over it, did not know that she was reading the final draft of about fifty torn-up letters and hours of mental anguish.

  Giles felt his first duty lay with his guests. His family honor was at stake. He had landed in this mess by allowing his feelings to rule his head. He had behaved disgracefully. His ball had been worse than an undergraduate rag.

  His noble guests were soothed on the following day by extravagant presents, gold cigarette cases for the men and gold watches for the ladies, and by the news that the real ball was to take place that very evening.

  It was, however, a restrained party of guests now assembled again in the ballroom under the striped marquee. Giles worked with a will. He danced with all the wallflowers; he kept as many men out of the bar as possible. The fireworks display, which had fortunately been overlooked in the drunken revels of the night before, was set alight to gasps of admiration from the party. The highlight of the evening’s entertainment was a guest appearance of that celebrated opera star, Yvette Duval, whose soaring, perfect notes acted on the troubled souls of the guests like a blessing. Madame Duval had been rushed down by special train from London that very day and br
ibed with an enormous fee to perform, but Giles reflected it was worth every penny. The Earl of Murr hugged his wife and asked her in more gentle tones than she had ever heard him use before to forgive him.

  Harriet Blane-Tyre took the bull by the horns and told the young man who had stolen her virginity that she would be obliged if he would forget about the whole silly thing, at which news he was much relieved, having parted with his own virginity in the process and not enjoyed a minute of it.

  Lady Sally Dukann came out of her sulks and behaved almost prettily, and Cecily Winthrope chased Harry Carruthers with alarming zeal.

  The evening was a resounding success, and all except Giles enjoyed themselves immensely.

  Giles had come to the conclusion that he had not been in love with Susie at all. He had behaved disgracefully, of course, and could only hope she would in time forgive him, but he privately admitted to himself that he did not really want to see her again.

  After all, she was middle-class. A girl of his own class, he felt sure, would not have made him lose his senses and behave in such a foolish and insane way.

  In the days that followed, the guests left one after the other. At last there was only Giles left.

  There was still modernization to oversee, electric light to be installed in the keep, and one of the guest bedrooms to be changed into a bathroom, so that he and Susie could have one each. Damn it! She wasn’t coming back. What had made him think of that?

  There were some fine rhododendrons from India to admire, and he had a lilac tree planted down by that stone bench at the lake. She might see it in flower if she were here next spring…. “What is up with me?” he asked himself.

  He was having the boulders torn from that field by the gravel pit, so that wheat could be planted in the following year. He could almost see the wheat, turning and glinting in his mind’s eye like the sun on Susie’s hair. Damn the girl!

  “She is not suitable,” he told his mirror sternly. “Just think of her horrible encroaching parents. Think how she leaves a trail of death and disaster everywhere she goes. I am a handsome and rich young man. Women like me. I need a wife. I’m lonely, that’s all.”

  But her ghost haunted the castle and its walks until one day, when he was inspecting the repairs to the top of the gatehouse, he saw the flutter of a white skirt away in the distance, at the top of the cliff by the bluebell wood. He ran and ran until he reached the top of the cliff and embarrassed one of the underhousemaids with one of his footmen, who were making sedate love in the bushes.

  I shall go to London when the summer is over and find myself a bride, he decided, and, having made up his mind, he worked harder than ever to make the long days pass quickly.

  Susie enjoyed the rest of the summer in her new residence in Hapsburg Row in Knightsbridge. It was a placid existence. Society had not yet heard of the manner of the deaths of the late earl or of Lady Felicity, and it now seemed as if they never would. But they knew that the young Countess of Blackhall was “common”—“greengrocer’s daughter or something”—and snubbed her accordingly.

  Susie had come to expect just such behavior from her new peers and did not mind in the least. She spent pleasant sunny days wandering about the shops or exercising Dobbin in Hyde Park at the unfashionable hour.

  Lady Matilda had explained, her surprising championship of Susie by saying she thought she was a silly girl who needed an older woman to take care of her, and, with that, resumed her tangled knitting and sewing and appeared to forget Susie’s very existence.

  Lady Matilda, however, noticed more than anyone ever gave her credit for. She was very loyal to Giles and had judged him to be so much in love with Susie that he was behaving like a madman. She therefore considered it her duty to keep an eye on Susie and see that she did not get married to anyone else. She enjoyed Susie’s unfashionable life, since she was left with plenty of time to tat and stitch and was not obliged to chaperon the girl anywhere at all.

  Susie’s new home was a large square white house built around the end of the last century. It had electric light in the reception rooms and gas in the bedrooms, and Susie considered it the height of modernity. A staff of servants had been hired for her by the efficient Mr. Jasper. All she really had to do was to check her housekeeping books, order new curtains and furniture, and keep a sharp lookout for the handsome young man she would marry.

  Susie had decided that homely young men were not to be trusted—witness the appalling behavior of Arthur Winthrope. She conjured up a vision of a handsome young fellow who had a square tanned face, honest brown eyes, and brown wavy hair. He neither looked nor talked like Giles.

  As Susie continued to be unaware of society, society began to feel a little piqued with the common countess. She should, they felt, have been running after them, seeking invitations, or riding in the Park at the fashionable hour, when they would have their rightful pleasure in cutting her dead. But she continued to go about her infuriating concerns completely unaware of any of them.

  Then, one early autumn day in September, when the leaves in Hyde Park were just beginning to turn and there was a pleasurable nip in the smoky blue air, Susie got herself into a scrape that was to bring her to the notice of society and, for that matter, to the notice of the rest of Britain.

  Susie was exercising Dobbin in the Park early that morning, when she was sure of having the Park practically to herself.

  She was seated sidesaddle on Dobbin’s back in a smart blue velvet riding habit, with a jaunty little topper perched on the top of her immaculately dressed brown hair. Dobbin was cantering sideways and rolling his eyes and tossing his head in a very frightening manner. Susie was undisturbed. She was used to clinging on for dear life and knew that Dobbin would settle down once he had asserted his independence.

  But to two dowagers taking an early morning stroll, it was a shocking display of bad horsemanship. The ladies were the Honorable Miss Belinda Fforbes-Benedick and Lady Jessica Whyte, two formidable spinsters.

  “Isn’t that the Common Countess?” asked Miss Belinda of her companion.

  Lady Jessica took out her lorgnette and glared through its lenses at the cavorting Dobbin with his pretty rider. “By gad, so ’tis,” she exclaimed. “Can’t handle a horse. Horrible-looking beast. Needs a touch of the crop. What’s she doin’?”

  “Feeding the brute sugar,” said Miss Belinda, who had the sharper eyes.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all,” said Lady Jessica, who was proud of her own horsemanship. “She ain’t in Camberwell now, and so I shall tell her. Shouldn’t be allowed out on that brute, since she can’t handle it. I shall tell her for her own good.”

  Meanwhile Susie had leaned forward and given Dobbin a lump of sugar and patted his nose and talked soft nonsense in his ear, and the silly horse closed his eyes and stood still in a sort of ecstatic trance.

  Lady Jessica marched up and stood under Dobbin’s nose. “Hey, you!” she said rudely to Susie.

  Susie looked down in surprise. She did not wish to dismount, for without anything to use as a mounting block, she doubted whether she would be able to get back on Dobbin again. So she simply stayed where she was and said gently, “I am afraid I don’t know your name. I believe we have not been introduced.”

  Susie meant to be polite, but to Lady Jessica it sounded like a colossal snub, and she turned a mottled puce with anger.

  “Never mind that fiddle,” she snapped. “You oughtn’t to be allowed out on that beast. You’re no horsewoman, miss! You’re a disgrace. That animal needs a touch of the whip.”

  Somewhere in the back of Dobbin’s small, narrow brain, alarm bells began to ring. That harsh, squawking voice reminded him of the cut of the whip and the stab of the spur. He stared down his long nose at Lady Jessica’s hat. It was a black felt hat ornamented with a whole dead ptarmigan with red glass eyes. Dobbin decided he did not like Lady Jessica. Furthermore, he hated her hat.

  He leaned forward and pulled Lady Jessica’s hat from her head, dropped it on th
e grass, and then trampled on it with his great splay hooves.

  Susie let out a little gasp of horror. Miss Belinda came waddling up to give her friend support.

  “I’m really so very sorry…” began Susie, but Dobbin had decided to go home, and so he set offal a brisk canter with Susie hanging gamely on his back.

  “You shall hear from my lawyers,” screamed Lady Jessica. “Common little slut! Just you wait!”

  Two days later Susie was summoned to appear at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, charged with assault.

  “Don’t go,” advised Lady Matilda calmly. “Send a lawyer instead.”

  “Who?” asked Susie.

  “Don’t know,” said Lady Matilda. “Ask somebody.”

  And that is how Susie came to ask Basil Bryant, who had passed his bar exams the year before.

  And that is how Basil Bryant came to be killed.

  But when Susie initially saw Basil, he was as radiant as that young man could possibly be. He would not hear of her staying at home. This case would be a cause célèbre, he said, pacing Susie’s elegant drawing room and stabbing his long bony finger in the air. He had shaved off his toothbrush mustache. His large nose gave him a commanding air, but his lank hair glittered with overmuch grease, and he had doused himself too liberally with eau de cologne.

  Susie was horrified at the idea of going to court. She had no idea what it would be like, but her scared imagination conjured up a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan Trial By Jury scene, where everything and anything could happen.

  The forthcoming trial received a great deal of publicity in the newspapers, since there wasn’t much else to write about in that quiet month.