Helga in Hiding, page 1
Authors Note
The Gaiety Theatre was a London institution and the Gaiety Girls were unique over the whole world. Lovely as Goddesses, they floated to the theatre borne as it were on immortal sandals, whether they rolled up in hansom cabs, came in their own private broughams or were escorted by gentlemen with tail coats, top hats and white ties.
As they passed by they left a glimpse of grace and beauty and a fragrance of femininity which the world does not know today.
There were all classes in their ranks, some of them from what was almost the gutter and some from the aristocracy, but each one had the polish and stamp of The Gaiety.
They were selected by George Edwardes, who was the best judge of female charm the world has ever known, just as he was the best judge of talent. He was the supreme Manager of his time and his name on the bill of a play was the equivalent of a hallmark of quality.
Nobody since George Edwardes’s days has meant what he did and one name only since his time has stood for something like the same thing in the minds of the public and that was C. B. Cochran.
The Gaiety shows shone and glittered and all of London flocked to see them. They gave London its lighter moments, its laughter and its glorious girls.
It is difficult now for us to realise, when everything has become dull and mundane, what these beautiful exotic women meant to the men who watched them from the stalls and prayed that they would be lucky enough to take them out to supper after the show.
The Gaiety Girls were all beautiful and wonderful women, they not only had charm and glamour but many of them had genuine talent as well.
Chapter One ~ 1891
Millicent Melrose sat in front of the mirror in her dressing room at The Gaiety Theatre and wondered how it was possible to feel so tired.
She had come to the theatre early, as she always did, because it gave her a chance to be quiet before the show and also, she recognised, to pull herself together.
Ever since she had lost Christofer it had become increasingly difficult for her to keep up the façade of being a star not only before the public but also in front of those who she worked with.
She was certainly well aware that it was fatally easy to slip into being a nonentity and to find herself after all the years of her success out of work.
It was traditional for people to say,
“I could not imagine The Gaiety without you, Milly.”
But she was quite sure that they would be the first to say that she was well ‘past it’ and showing her age.
The mere thought of age made her glance at herself nervously in the mirror, looking for the lines which she was sure were beginning to form round her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.
“Thirty-nine next birthday!”
It seemed as if even the flowers in the room screamed it at her and it was like a dark menacing cloud hanging over her head.
None of it would have mattered if Christofer was still alive, but he was dead and could not help her now.
At night when she cried into her pillow she wished that she had died too.
It was true that he had been twenty years older than she and she might have expected him to die before her, even in those far-off days when they had both been carefree and so certain that neither of them would ever grow old.
Even now she could hear, as if it was yesterday, him saying to her,
“Come away with me, my darling one. I cannot live without you. I know it will cause a scandal, but my wife will then divorce me and, when we are married, it will all be forgotten soon and the Social world will accept you again with open arms.”
It had all sounded so very plausible with Christofer kissing her so that she thrilled with a rapture that she had not believed possible.
When Christofer told her how blissfully happy they would be, it was just impossible to be cautious, sensible or to think of anything or anyone but him.
She remembered how very exciting it had been when, leaving a note for her father and mother, she had crept out of the house one night after she was supposed to have gone to bed and Christofer had been waiting for her at the end of the drive.
He had helped her into a closed carriage and they had driven off to what she believed would be a Heaven on Earth with no regrets.
‘How young I was,’ Milly said to herself now, ‘and how extremely foolish.’
And yet she knew that, if she was able to put back the clock, she would do the same thing all over again, because Christofer had been irresistible and she would have had to be made of stone to be able to refuse him.
She could still remember the little hotel where they had stayed the night and the ecstasies they had evoked in each other so that Christofer had said to here hoarsely,
“How could we fight against a love as great as ours? How could we ever contemplate life without each other?”
He had been so confident and so had she when they had settled in a small Manor House in an obscure village in Gloucestershire and they both believed it was only a question of time before they were legally Lord and Lady Forsythe.
But Christofer’s wife was made of sterner stuff and, when he asked her for a divorce’ she refused categorically and saying,
“I am your wife and your place is with me. When you are ready to return, your home is waiting for you.”
“It is ridiculous!” Christofer had raged. “She will change her mind, of course, she will. It is only a question of waiting.”
The difficulty while they were waiting was how they were to live.
Lord Forsythe had very little money of his own and the Trustees of his wife, who was a comparatively wealthy woman, had made sure that, while he had the handling of her income, it was impossible for him to touch the capital.
Not very intelligent over money, he found he was committed to keeping up the running expenses of the house where his wife lived and which, as she had truly said, was his home.
It left him very little indeed to expend on Milly. They struggled in the country for nearly a year and then moved back to London.
“I think perhaps I had better find something to do,” Milly suggested a little nervously.
And to her surprise Christofer did not immediately refuse to discuss such an idea.
It took time, time during which they worried frantically as to how they could go on, how their bills could be met and how Christofer could somehow extract money from his wife.
Then finally they succumbed to the inevitable and Christofer returned to London to see what he could do about it.
What this entailed was that to all intents and purposes he was once again a married man, appearing at social functions with his wife and, as many men have done before him, keeping a mistress on the side.
It was Milly who suffered most, of course, she did.
The Staffords, who were extremely respectable and had played their part in the history of England, had cut her off with a proverbial shilling and, although she might have crawled back to beg their forgiveness, she was too proud to do so.
In desperation Christofer introduced her to George Edwardes and one look decided the most astute Showman of the age that she was just what he needed at The Gaiety Theatre.
The Gaiety Girls were renowned for being quite different from ordinary show girls.
In the first place a number of them were well-educated and, besides being beautiful, they behaved like ladies and had in consequence a glamour that made them superb on the stage and sought after by every man about town who was proud to be seen in their company.
The applause, the acclamation of her beauty and the many compliments she received did a great deal to assuage Milly’s feeling of guilt towards her family.
She, of course, did not use her real name, but instead called herself ‘Millicent Melrose’ and hoped that her relatives would never find out what she was doing.
But whether they knew it or not she had no idea since she had no communication with them.
From the moment she became a Gaiety Girl life was far easier than it had been before.
Not only was she earning money for herself but, as Christofer played his part at home as skilfully as she played hers on the stage, his wife became more generous and he had more money to spend.
He set Milly up in a very comfortable flat in a quiet square not very far from The Gaiety Theatre and spent every moment he possibly could with her.
This usually meant that he was in London mostly during the week and returned home at weekends to entertain on his estate with shooting and hunting parties in the winter and in the summer there was tennis, archery and boating on the lake.
Milly tried not to think of what he was doing when he was not with her.
She was often lonely, but she told herself that it was the price she had to pay for being so blissfully happy when they were together.
Of course she was approached by other men. She was too beautiful for there not to be a constant flow of flowers and invitations to supper which made Christofer even more jealous.
But it meant nothing to her except that her admirers filled in the hours when he was not with her.
There was one man in particular who was very persistent and had pursued her now for nearly six years.
Sir Emanuel Stiener was exceedingly rich and so most of the Gaiety Girls were only too eager to accept his invitations and his presents, which were always very generous.
They fell over each other to ingratiate themselves with a millionaire who, because of his astuteness in business, was known to be a friend of the Prince of Wales.
It was perhaps Milly’s indifference that made him all the more determined that sooner or later she would be his.
It was Sir Emanuel Stiener who Milly was thinking about now as her eyes fell on a large basket of expensive orchids.
She was well aware that he was waiting impatiently but cleverly for her to get over the shock of Christofer’s death before he approached her, as he had before, with suggestions of what a difference he could make in her life.
“I will cover you with diamonds, wrap you in sables and cosset you against everything that might distress or hurt you,” he had promised.
She laughed at him and then replied,
“You know I have everything I want, not diamonds nor sables, but Christofer!”
Sir Emanuel had made no reply, but looked at her with his shrewd eyes and she thought now that perhaps he had known clairvoyantly that the sands were running out and the days of her happiness were numbered.
When she had read in the newspapers that Lord Forsythe had suffered a stroke while a guest at Marlborough House, she had been frantic with anxiety.
It was impossible for her personally to make enquiries at Forsythe House in Park Lane as to how he was, but she persuaded a half dozen of her admirers to do so on her behalf.
All they were told was that he was very gravely ill, but there was still some hope for his recovery.
Of course there was no question of Milly being allowed to see him and she could only wait and know as the days passed that it was inevitable he would die.
Actually it was her work on the stage that helped her get over the shock better than if she had been a lady of leisure with nothing to do but sit at home and weep.
The show must go on was the old troupers’ cry and Milly played her part brilliantly.
She had by now become an institution in the shows produced by George Edwardes at The Gaiety.
She had been promoted to having small parts in the main cast and, because her voice was soft and cultured and her diction clear, she eventually always had one sketch in which she was the principal.
She was well aware that this would not last for ever and, when she thought of the future, there seemed only one end to it and that was with Sir Emanuel.
At first she had felt that if another man even touched her hand she would scream with the horror of it, but Sir Emanuel was far too clever to put pressure on her or to impose himself physically upon her.
Instead he sent her flowers, notes of sympathy which were very eloquent, and expensive but practical presents like a case of champagne or a pot of pâté de foie gras or even caviar.
She wondered if she should send them back to him and then knew that it was something that she dared not do.
‘I hate him!’ she told herself a million times.
But she knew that her hatred was because he was alive while poor Christofer was dead.
“Dead!”
The word seemed almost to echo round her dressing room and she then put out her hand, aware that it was shaking a little for the bottle of brandy that was concealed behind a large photograph of herself at the end of the dressing table.
She poured out two tablespoonfuls into a glass and stared at it as she put down the bottle, knowing that Christofer would have been angry with her for giving in to what was inevitably the actor’s panacea of Dutch courage.
“I cannot manage without it, darling,” she had said to him pathetically.
Her brain was telling her that she had said just the same thing every night for the last two weeks and the brandy bottle had been replaced more times than she cared to count.
“I cannot go on like this!” she said aloud.
Even as she spoke, she lifted the glass to her lips and felt the fiery liquid slipping down her throat, sweeping away a little of her overwhelming fatigue.
She drank again and as she did so there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” she asked, slipping the glass behind another photograph of herself wearing a spectacular gown.
“There be a lady to see you, Miss Melrose.”
It was Joe the doorkeeper who spoke and she was just about to say that she had no wish to receive visitors when the door opened and somebody came into the dressing room.
Milly looked at her without interest.
It was a young woman who she supposed must be a fan and she could not understand how Joe had been so absurd as to let one of the autograph hunters, who were always outside the stage door, come up to her dressing room.
Then the girl in the doorway piped up,
“You are as beautiful as I thought you would be, Aunt Millicent! And I am so excited to meet you in real life.”
As the girl spoke, she came nearer to Milly, who stared at her in sheer astonishment.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am your niece, Helga Wensley, and you must please forgive me for coming to you so unexpectedly, but Mama told me what I was to do before – she died.”
There was a little tremor in the girl’s voice and Milly saw the tears come into her eyes, very beautiful eyes that seemed to fill her small pointed face.
“Are you telling me,” Milly asked, “that you are my sister Beryl’s daughter and that she is dead?”
The girl nodded as if for a moment it was impossible for her to speak.
Then she said,
“Mama died four days ago. She was buried ‒ yesterday. I have come here to ask you to help me – as she was sure that you would.”
Milly put her hand up to her forehead.
“I can hardly believe what you are telling me,” she said, “or that Beryl could be – dead.”
“She has been ill with consumption ‒ for the last two years,” Helga replied, “and, as she grew weaker – and weaker there was nothing the doctors could do to – help her.”
Now the tears were running down the girl’s face and, as if Milly realised that it was up to her to take control of the situation, she suggested,
“Sit down, child, and tell me about it. But I cannot see how I can possibly help you and I am sure that there are many people to look after you even though your mother is not here.”
“That is – not so,” Helga replied. “Please – may I tell you – everything?”
“That is what I want you to do,” Milly replied.
There was an empty chair beside the dressing table that Helga sat down on and, as she did so, Milly realised at once how lovely she was, looking so very like her mother when she was a young girl.
Milly guessed that Helga must be about the same age as she had been when she had first met Christofer.
“How old are you?” she asked curiously.
“I am eighteen,” Helga replied.
That was what Milly had thought she would be and she remembered that Beryl, who was two years older than herself, had married Lord Wensley just six months after she had run away with Christofer.
She had read every mention of it she could find in the social columns of the newspapers, and she had wondered if Beryl, despite being shocked at the way that she had left home, had missed her amongst her bridesmaids.
Then after the Wedding she had heard no more about her sister and sometimes when she was alone she had longed to be able to gossip with her as they had done when they were girls.
She could see a great resemblance in Helga’s face to her mother’s, but she thought with a little pang that the girl was more beautiful.
Beautiful in a young and springlike manner that she herself had lost years ago, but which when she was behind the footlights, she still tried to recapture even though now it was only an illusion.
“I have come to you, Aunt Millicent,” Helga was saying, “because Mama told me to and I am also desperate!”
“Why should you be desperate?” Milly asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I-I don’t expect you would know that Papa – died five years ago?”
“I had no idea of it,” Milly answered. “There seemed to be very little about your mother in the newspapers and I had no other way of learning what she was doing.”
“There was nothing in the newspapers because there was nothing to write about,” Helga said. “We were very very poor before Papa died and we lived in a small house in the country where Papa bred horses and, although we were so very happy there he used to worry because they brought him in so little money.”
“I always imagined your mother would be well off,” Milly remarked. “What happened?”
