Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (38 page)

Ginny had addressed her last remark to Barbara Briggs, who rushed up stammering apologies. They had thought she would have her
own
carriage. They had not thought for a minute that she would be
alone
.

“Then it’s just as well I’m not,” replied Ginny with a dazzling smile. “This is Sir Philip Vere, who kindly rescued me. I met him by chance at the station.”

Sir Philip raked Miss Briggs up and down with a fiery glance. “Humph!” he said. “Must be on my way. See you look after this little lady, now, or you’ll hear from me. By gad, never heard the like!” And off he went.

The company surveyed Miss Ginny Bloggs in stunned silence. Lord Gerald smiled cordially to conceal his disappointment. Why, she was like a China doll.

And indeed, Ginny did look rather like a very expensive doll. She looked as if she had stepped out of a bandbox rather than someone who had just endured a long journey on a hot day. She was wearing a blue chiffon dress with a high boned collar, and her waist could not have been more than nineteen inches. The blue of the dress was not one of the smoky colors so fashionable at present. It was an uncomplicated blue: a clear summer’s sky-blue; a bright-blue straight from a child’s paint box. Her large and startling eyes were of the same color, set wide apart in an exquisite heartshaped face. Her hat was a ridiculous floppy thing in straw of the same blue, the crown being formed by a nosegay of artificial sweet peas. Tiny white openwork shoes with ridiculously pointed toes peeped out from beneath her hem and she carried a blue lace parasol with an ivory handle.

After a glance in Jeffrey’s direction, Lord Gerald stepped briskly forward with Alicia Benson. Alicia was feeling cheerful. To anyone else, of course, Miss Bloggs might appear glamorous, if you liked that chocolate-box type of look. But she knew that Gerald did not, and the girl typified everything he most despised in women… as long as she didn’t turn out to have a brain….

“Welcome to Courtney,” Lord Gerald was saying. “I am your next-door neighbor.”

“Oh, good,” said Ginny with a dazzling smile. “We shall be able to have long chats over the fence.”

“
Long chats over the fence!
” said Tansy with a bray of laughter. “My dear Miss Bloggs, we’re not in Bolton now.”

Ginny gave Tansy a bewildered look. “Of course we are not,” she said gently. “We are at Courtney, in the county of Kent.” And then she added in an undertone that was somehow perfectly audible to the listening guests, “Poor, poor lady. Imagine not knowing where you are? But then… it’s said there is one in every family.” And then, raising her voice, Ginny said, “I would like some tea. Do you think that is possible, Lord Gerald, or may I call you Jerry?”

“No, you may not,” said Lord Gerald firmly. “I dislike nursery names. Tea you shall have. Would you like to have it on the terrace?”

“Yes, please,” said Ginny. She sailed forward gracefully and sat down. “What a lot of people,” she remarked. “Do they all live here?”

“No, no,” said Barbara Briggs, laughing. She had dumped herself down on the chair on one side of Ginny while Lord Gerald and Alicia took the other two. “This is simply a house party in your honor, my dear.”

“Good,” said Ginny with devastating simplicity. “I do not like crowds of people to live with, although I do love parties.”

“I’m sure all this must be very bewildering for you, Miss Bloggs,” said Alicia earnestly. “But you shall find I shall be of inestimable help to you. I have done a great deal of charity work among the lower classes.”

“Indeed,” said Ginny, picking out the most fattening cake she could see. “Are part of my duties as mistress of Courtney to run charities?”

Alicia winced. “No, my dear. You misunderstood me. You will find this way of life a great deal different from the one you have been used to.”

“Oh,” said Ginny blankly. “In what way?”

“Well…” Alicia hesitated delicately. “There’s the running of the household, of course. You are surely not used to so many servants.”

Ginny looked at Alicia with a wide, blank, blue-eyed stare for a minute and then around, and waved the butler forward.

“Are you the butler?” asked Ginny.

“Yes, madam. Harvey is my name, madam.”

“And have you been here long?”

“Nigh on twenty years, madam,” said the butler proudly.

“And you run this household? I mean—all the servants come under you?”

“Yes, madam.”

Ginny’s clear blue gaze took in the elegant tea table and the well-appointed drawing room beyond.

“It seems to me you do an excellent job, Harvey,” she said. “Just keep on doing it and I shall be
very
happy.”

“Yes, madam,” said the much-gratified Harvey, beaming, bowing, and withdrawing.

“So that’s that,” said Ginny calmly. “What else is there?”

Alicia’s olive skin began to take on a shade of pink. “There’re… oh, so many things, my dear. You will be presented at Court. You must learn to curtsy—”

“Oh, I can do that… very well,” said Ginny.

Alicia did not know quite how it happened but she had been made to feel as if she had just committed the grossest of impertinences. She muttered some excuse, rose hurriedly from the table, and left.

Lord Gerald leaned forward. “Mr. Frayne very kindly left me the contents of his library in his will, Miss Bloggs. Perhaps you would care to look over the shelves when you have time. If there is anything you would particularly like, perhaps you would care to let me know… Miss Bloggs?”

He stared across the table as if he could not believe his eyes. Miss Ginny Bloggs had fallen neatly, suddenly, and quietly asleep.

Lord Gerald leaned back in his chair and battled with a series of unaccustomed emotions. Never had any girl or woman turned her eyes from him, let alone dropped off to sleep! Common, common girl! He wanted to shake her till her teeth rattled. How dare she sit there like the Sleeping Beauty, looking so fragile, so infinitely feminine, so
sickening
!

There was an embarrassed little silence. Then Barbara Briggs coughed very loudly in Ginny’s ear and Ginny woke up as simply and as suddenly as she had fallen asleep.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, yawning, “but I must lie down.”

“Of course,” said Barbara. “I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Ginny rose gracefully, and then turned and smiled up at Lord Gerald. “You were saying something or other about the library. I’m sorry I fell asleep. But we shall have a good long gossip about it this evening,” said Ginny comfortingly, “so don’t worry about a thing.”

And with that, she gave him a motherly pat on his well-tailored sleeve and drifted off upstairs.

“She’s impossible,” raged Lord Gerald de Fremney. “Utterly impossible!”

Ginny was still yawning as a maid undressed her and took the pins from her soft gold hair. Then the maid wrapped her in a kimono and brushed her hair with long, even strokes until it flowed in a shining golden cascade down Ginny’s back. When the maid had gone, Miss Ginny Bloggs climbed into the four-poster bed, vacated by the late and unlamented Mr. Frayne, and stared blankly at the ceiling. Slowly one small hand crept down and cautiously fingered the silk ribbons that were threaded through the sheets. Then the wide blue eyes stared around the room, from the gardenias at the window in their luster bowl to the marble washstand with its copper jugs of hot water covered by beribboned cozies bearing the Frayne crest. A portrait of Mr. Frayne stared down at her from above an Adam fireplace. Ginny stared back, and then with one blink of her blue eyes, fell fast asleep.

The four relatives met in the library and locked the door.

Cyril was the first to speak. “She
c-can’t
be as stupid as she looks,” he said.

“Chats over the fence, indeed,” sneered Tansy.

“You’d better be careful, Tansy,” warned Barbara sweetly. “Our dear Miss Bloggs implied you were not right in the head.”

“Useless little doll,” grumbled Jeffrey, fortifying himself from a decanter. “Needs putting in her place.”

“She’ll be put in her place this evening, all right,” said Tansy grimly. “Let’s make sure everyone dresses up to the nines and makes her feel small. And let’s all use the new small talk—you know, the Italian stuff. She’ll never know what we are saying. And as for you, Cyril, you’ve been playing simply frightful practical jokes at house parties for as long as I can remember. Why not play some on Miss Bloggs tonight?”

“I c-can’t h-have been p-playing practical jokes as l-long as you c-can remember,” said Cyril, “’cos you’re at least twice as old as I am.”

“I am
not
,” cried Tansy, outraged.

“Well, you look it,” said Cyril gleefully.

“Steady on! Steady the buffs!” cried Jeffrey. “We’ll never get to a plan of action if we quarrel among ourselves. Let’s just start by making things a bit uncomfortable for the gel, heh, what?”

“We mustn’t make it too obvious,” said Barbara nervously. “After all, we
are
being paid to bring her out, so to speak.”

“We’ll bring her out, all right,” said Tansy grimly. “We’ll bring Miss Ginny Bloggs out in a way that no debutante has been brought out before!”

The double doors of the drawing room had been thrown open to reveal a blue salon and that in turn led to a green salon, the three rooms forming the stage—or the battle-ground—all laid out in preparation for the humiliation of Ginny Bloggs.

“I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” muttered Barbara to Tansy.

Tansy raised her thin eyebrows. “Something in sateen, or something vulgar like that, I should imagine,” she barked.

Tansy felt that she herself was looking magnificent. She was dressed in black satin, a long tube of a dress, which bristled with aigrettes and sparkled with jet embroidery.

Barbara, on the other hand, was dressed in baby-blue satin with a large collar of diamonds. The diamonds were in fact a very good imitation, the originals having been sold long ago. She wore a bandeau studded with diamanté, which supported one white osprey feather. She felt she looked like the lady of the manor and Tansy depressed her considerably by telling her she looked like a female novelist.

Cyril and Jeffrey fidgeted beside them, both men enduring the social hell of boiled shirts. Cyril’s studs were genuine diamonds, a present from a lady poet with more money than inspiration, and he was seriously thinking of selling them and asking Barbara where she had had hers copied.

“There’s dear Lady George,” said Jeffrey, pointing to an enormous woman who had just entered and was cleaving a path through the guests rather in the manner of a battleship plowing up The Solent. “She’s very much on our side, you know.”

Lady George was, in fact, the Lady Georgina Breem but she preferred to be called George. It made her feel, she said, as if everyone was a chum.

“Well, where is she?” she demanded, heaving to beside the four relatives and screwing a monocle in her eye.

“N-not here yet,” muttered Cyril.

“What’s she like?” demanded George, her large powdered face peering over a hedge of feather boa.

“Qu-quite p-pretty,” Cyril was beginning, but he was interrupted by a snort from Jeffrey. “
Pretty
. Well, I suppose she is in a common sort of way. No style, eh what?”

“Know what you mean,” said Lady George. “Got a cook just like that. Looks marvelous in uniform but in mufti, she’s as common as the day.”

“Good God,” said Tansy.

Miss Ginny Bloggs had made her entrance.

And what an entrance!

She was dressed in charmeuse silk, the color of tender young spring leaves. It was swept up at the back into a saucy little bustle reminiscent of the 1870s that accentuated the ridiculous size of her slender waist. It was cut low on the bosom, revealing that Ginny had an excellent pair of shoulders. The whole gown screamed Paris from every stitch. One millimeter lower at the neck and the gown would have been vulgar, one millimeter higher and it would have been dowdy. Her golden hair was dressed low on her forehead and her soft childish mouth was free of rouge. She looked all of seventeen years old. Miss Ginny Bloggs was, in fact, all of nineteen.

The house party had been swelled by the arrival of several families from the local county. Hard, insolent eyes bored into Ginny, and Ginny stared calmly back at them with her wide-eyed, slightly vacant stare.

Poor child
, thought Lord Gerald,
I simply must go and rescue her
. He took a step forward and then stopped. Ginny now seemed to be surrounded by every man in the room while the women formed a sort of glaring circle of eyes on the outside. He turned to Alicia Benson and said with a half-laugh, “And to think, a minute ago I felt that I had to rescue her.”

“She’s really quite a pretty little thing,” said Alicia, tugging furtively at her own dress and wondering if a William Morris pattern had been quite the thing. Her mother had dryly remarked that she looked exactly like a roll of wallpaper. “But where did she get the money to buy that gown? It looks most frightfully expensive. Do you think she found some elderly gentleman like Sir Philip Vere to pay for her wardrobe?”

Lord Gerald looked at his companion in patent surprise and Alicia blushed for the second time. The first time had been when she had lost her virginity to a young Bolshevist, lying on the floor among his pamphlets advocating the New World in his flat in Bloomsbury. Alicia felt she had been caught out in that most despicable of old-fashioned feminine faults—petty jealousy. She decided to go right over and be extra sweet to Ginny.

“Hullo, Miss Bloggs,” she said in a breezy way, pushing her way to the front of Ginny’s court of admirers. “Remember me? I’m Alicia Benson. We met at tea this afternoon.”

“Of course I do,” said Ginny pleasantly. “You want me to help you in your good works. Am I right?”

Alicia gave a brittle laugh. “No, no, my dear. You misunderstood me. I was simply trying to anticipate any social problems you might come across.”

“Such as… ?” queried Ginny gently.

Once again Alicia had that nagging feeling that she was being impertinent but she launched on regardless.