The Deer Leap (8 page)

She allowed herself the vain thought that she didn't know which pair of eyes, deep violet or glittering green, she would have given her soul for. She had always hated her eyes, faded like her denim dress, hated her hair, her pale face — all of her. It was shameful, perhaps, in a world full of suffering, to want to be pretty. Carrie wanted to be absolutely smashingly beautiful. That was worse.

As she neared the store, she thought, well, at least she could buy bread, and that was more than a lot could do.

T
ry as she might, and huge as were the grounds of “La Notre,” it seemed impossible for Carrie Fleet to circumvent the Baroness Regina. At eleven-thirty, the Baroness should have been taking her late coffee and brioche on the vine-tangled terrace overlooking the duck pond.

The Baroness was as unpredictable as her history. Her maiden name was Scroop, a Liverpudlian. The Baron Reginald de la Notre had made himself a fortune in fine leather gloves and it was indeed behind a glove counter in Liverpool that he had discovered Gigi Scroop. And had been bewitched (according to the Baroness) by her hands. Carrie had often been treated to the look of her graceful, beringed fingers when pouring another tot of gin or lighting another cigarette.

It wouldn't surprise Carrie at all if they'd married because of their names — Regina and Reginald — so they could call each other Reggie. “Gigi” had been the diminutive in Regina Scroop's family. Carrie wondered how she had got the Liverpool accent out of her speech. She even knew French; or enough of it to make people believe she even knew French.

“La Notre.” What a stupid name in an English village,
Carrie thought, as she walked through the deer park, one part of her mind checking for signs of poachers. (The only person allowed to carry a rifle on the grounds was Carrie, an allowance made to herself by herself.) Before the Baron had got his chubby fingers on the property, the old house had been called “The Grange.” The Baron (dead these fifteen years) had seen (according to the Baroness) the incredible possibilities of both house and grounds — the “estate” through whose history she had boringly sifted so many times that Carrie wondered there could be any more grains left on the mental beach. The Baron was a descendant of that famous gardener who had done Versailles. Carrie had been treated to enough pictures of famous gardens to make her feel like going out straightaway and trampling the lobelias.

Yet, she was sometimes sorry the Baron had passed on to his long line of flowery ancestors, for it would have been a lark to find someone else both as silly and determined as was the Baroness. To watch them take walks together, probably arm-in-arm, up and down the paths, past the Roman statuary, round the pools and ponds. What a team they must have been. She could not understand how anyone could have taken the simple
before
picture of “The Grange” and turned it into this enormous, ugly building of dark gray stone, bay windows bulging inappropriately underneath the battlements, a building that sat on a swell of ground overlooking the pretty green of Ashdown Dean, like a king of the toads on a lily pad.

Carrie walked in the covering shade of willows and immense dahlias, screened from the terrace, when suddenly a sun-hat popped up amongst the begonias and larkspur and asked her where she'd been.

Carrie answered with her own question. “What're you doing out here
gardening?”
making it clear that no occupation of Carrie's could match in idiocy the Baroness's being caught with shears in her ringed fingers.

“One must have an occasional bout with exercise.” She
made it sound like flu. “Gillian didn't do the flowers
again.”
Snip. “You haven't answered. What've you been up to? Here, take these, will you?” She handed Carrie a rough-cut bunch of wilting lupines.

“You always think I'm ‘up to' something.”

“You always are. What's in that box? Oh, God, don't tell me.” The sun-hat disappeared, reappeared, a few roses browned at the edges like burnt toast in her hands.

“A stray. I found it in the woods.”

Beneath the sunshade of her giant hat, Regina squinted. “I think you call them like spirits from the vasty deep.” Her shears stopped, midair. “That could be poetry. Did I invent it? How wonderful.”

Although Carrie had quickly put it down so the Baroness wouldn't notice, the kitten was mewling. To divert attention, she said, “You want me to get you some fags in the village?”

“Don't use guttersnipe words like that. It's moving.”

“What is?”

“You know what. Oh, never
mind
.” One of the cigarettes she ordinarily plugged into her ivory holder was dangling from the corner of her brightly painted mouth. The Baroness pulled some money from her coverall pocket. When she dressed for something, she dressed for it, and always, for some undisclosed reason, carried money. The diamond earrings seemed a bit out of place, however. “Did you bring the Tanqueray?”

Carrie nodded. “But there was a fight with Ida. Over me being too young to buy it.”

“So what? You always win.”

The first thing Carrie Fleet had seen of the Baroness Regina de la Notre two years ago was a silver-buckled shoe on a sheer-white-stockinged leg, followed by a mauve and gray-blue dress, and then a matching hat. This mannequinlike display
had descended from a cab outside of the London Silver Vaults. The face above the dress, however, was running on a different time schedule from the shoes, dress, and hat. It was painted and powdered to erase the difference, a good twenty years of it. The Baroness had (as for two years she had been advising Carrie to do) “taken care of herself.” Avoidance of sunlight was important, she was always saying. A similar avoidance of gin and cigarettes might have had the same effect, allowing the sixty-year-old face to run neck-and-neck with the forty-year-old body.

As the woman disengaged herself from cab and cabbie, Carrie was further intrigued by her having a Bedlington terrier on a rhinestone studded lead — mauve, like the dress. And since the Bedlington was grayish-blue, it blended perfectly: a dog chosen to complement the ensemble.

Carrie, seated on her portable canvas stool, had already taken on a whippet and a poodle. Round her neck was a plastic-covered card. “You can't take the dog inside, madam.”

The formidable woman stared. “Who are you?”

“I mind animals.” The brief blaze of the look Carrie Fleet shot Regina de la Notre could have melted the glove leather shoes on her feet. “For a pound an hour.”

The Baroness looked the situation over. The Alsatian was having a nap in a pool of sunlight. The poodle was doing the same beneath the canvas stool the girl sat on. Neither seemed to care that its owner had gone. Nor would, apparently, the Bedlington terrier, straining at the lead when the girl held her hand toward it.

Probably a witch, thought the Baroness. Covens of them all over England. “I find this amazing and, surely, illegal.”

“Here's a constable coming. You can ask him.”

Strolling slowly, hands behind him, seeming to enjoy the unearthly spring sunlight, the policeman looked as if he too might just curl up on the sidewalk and nap. The Baroness looked from him to the girl. “Kickbacks, probably. I suppose
you want your money in advance. Or do you just hold the animals for ransom?”

“No, madam,” said the unflappable girl. “Like I said, pound an hour.”

As if to turn her words to gold, a handsome couple walked up the steps from the vaults and collected their whippet. The gentleman plucked two pound notes from his money clip. The girl took them and opened her little purse and returned fifty pence.

He seemed embarrassed. “Oh, heavens, my dear child —”

There was a look that the Baroness rather liked on the face of the dear child. It reminded her of the flower girl being taught to speak properly.

“You were only gone for just over an hour.” She handed him the lead to his whippet. The dog seemed nervous and baffled; its sleep had been disturbed and, worse, it was to go back to the same old routine, the same old people, to be hauled about like a dog. It gave its temporary keeper a beseeching look. The girl returned the look, but let it go, like the realist she was.

The Bedlington was clearly ready to take the other dog's place in the sun.

Regina's tobacco-brown eyes followed the couple and the dog. “Part of the setup?”

Carrie Fleet flicked her a smile like someone tossing pennies. “If I may say so, madam —”

“You may not. Very well. Here's Tabitha, and you needn't wince. It's as good a name as any.”

Tabitha lay down at Carrie's feet and the Baroness started down the steps. Then she turned, curious. “What were you going to say, anyway?”

“You don't seem to trust people much.”

“Aren't you clever. I don't.”

“Neither do I,” said Carrie Fleet in a tone like dry ice.

There was forged between them an immediate bond. Mutual curiosity and reciprocal distrust.

She was the first interesting thing that had happened to the Baroness since the Baron had died.

T
he negotiation for the life of Carrie Fleet was carried out in a run-down street near the East India Docks, but not in that dockside area lately running toward chic, where warehouses and crumbling waterfront properties were being bought up by the sorts of people who usually lived in mews in Kensington or Chelsea and realized that proximity to Harrods no longer did much for status. Decorators were followed by artists, actors, and retired brigadiers.

Although the general ambience of the Crutchley Street house had a certain warehouse flavor — orange crates doing service as tables — the Brindles, Joe and Flossie, weren't fortunate enough to have one of those properties the moneyed were looking for. It was one of several on this mean little street, where doorjambs and window moldings had been tarted up by Pakistanis and Indians with more of a flair for color — especially marine blues and rusty reds — than had the Brindles. They had decided to let well enough alone, a decision which extended both to their property and themselves.

The Baroness was sitting on an orange crate covered with an India-patterned spread and drinking tea the color of coffee from a permanently stained mug.

The cab at the door, from which the Baroness and Carrie had exited, had been regarded through the windows by several pairs of eyes. Probably, the last cab at the door in this street had been a hansom.

“Now, then,” said Joe Brindle, the vest undulating over his loosened belt, “you're sayin' you was thinkin' a findin' a bit a work for our Carrie here?” He gave Carrie a friendly smack across the buttocks that made the Baroness, well traveled and used to the various breeding practices of many countries, somewhat uncomfortable.

Flossie, drinking a bottle of Bass, one thin leg tucked under her other on the sprung couch, said (for the dozenth time) “Well, I never.” She kept curling and recurling a ringlet around her index finger. “Whatever'd you want t'do that for?”

The question that the Baroness had wanted to ask ever since she'd put her silver-buckled shoe out of the cab was: Whatever had
they
been thinking of when they took the girl in in the first place? Mercy and succor did not seem to be the Brindles' strong points. Sex and avarice would have beat them out by several lengths.

Then there were the others — children, dogs, cats — the last two categories fallen apparently into the hands of Carrie, and the Baroness hoped they knew how lucky they were. The dog Bingo, a rat terrier missing half a leg, had yipped and yapped and got up in a strange dance on its good legs like a circus animal the minute Carrie came into the house. It was the sort of animal that made the Baroness shudder — but then she had no interest in animals, anyway. Even the Bedlington did not belong to her, but to a friend in Eaton Place. She had thought it rather chic. The other dogs and cats could have been regulars or casuals; it was hard to say. A
couple of them were growling over a dirty bone. That got them a boot in the side from Brindle. A one-eared cat got the same when it wound too close to his whiskey glass.