Red Rowan Berry, page 13
The notion of Aunt Matilda being pushed into doing anything she did not want to do had not before occurred to Janet but she supposed it must have been a possibility: already she knew she was no longer the same green girl who had listened to well-meant advice from older people six months before. Her instincts had been right and their advice misplaced. Her train of thought was interrupted by Aunt Matilda thumping her on the knee with a heavy jet-studded fan.
"They'll be in before long," she said. "Always quarrel those two. They'd have been in before if I'd not been here. Before they come I want to say something. What do you know about Anna?"
"Staindrop's first wife?" asked Janet.
"The same ... poor silly creature ... "
"Not a great deal. Staindrop told me she was drowned. She was on a yacht and it was wrecked ... something of that nature."
Aunt Matilda nodded.
"You haven't been about the Town at all and no one has gossiped to you?"
Janet looked a little uncomfortable.
"Mrs Summers ... she is the housekeeper here ... she did hint that they were not very comfortable together ... "
The old woman gave vent to a high-pitched cackle.
"Comfortable!"
She thumped Janet's knee with her fan again.
"They fought like Kilkenny cats. And ... "
She fixed Janet once more with that grim, grey eye.
"Eight years married," she asserted, "and no heir. Not even the whisper of one. 'She ran off, you know. Out of the frying pan and into .the fire if you ask me. He was a young whippersnapper of a soldier. Borrowed his friend's yacht and carried her off. All very romantic I don't doubt. Pity he didn't learn to handle the boat. He ran it aground on the Isle of Wight and drowned both of them."
The sound of argument in the hall heralded the approach of the men. She thumped Janet for the third time.
"You get in a pickle, gal, don't run off with a soldier ... come to me. I like you. I'll see he don't come making a nuisance of himself, I warrant ye."
Janet had no chance to do more than look her thanks for this unorthodox but obliging offer before the men came in bringing a whiff of cigar smoke with them, but she felt that she had found a friend.
At the end of June when Staindrop suggested that Janet might care to come to London his motives were nothing if not mixed. His first annoyance at her activities on the estate had died down when he realised that they were liable to prove profitable. Janet's lack of the kind of social gloss to which he was accustomed in his female companions he found irksome and embarrassing and he was not eager to parade his new wife before the amused and keenly critical eyes of London Society for fear of the caustic comments on his lamentable taste. He lacked the perception to see that other qualities which Janet possessed made that lack of polish unimportant.
However, he was still anxious to oblige John Laidlaw, whose influence in shipping circles might well frank his son-in-law on to some useful (and profitable) boards of directors: it would not oblige his father-in-law to hear that Staindrop was determined to keep his daughter out of Society altogether. In this he did John Laidlaw an injustice, as Janet's father was totally ignorant of Society and having got his daughter well and advantageously disposed he was prepared to put her out of his mind altogether and concentrate on more absorbing matters, such as the perfection of the Laidlaw Bearing. However, his wife was not prepared to let Janet drop out of sight: Hannah had two daughters to marry and Janet had had a key role to play in this project since the beginning.
" ... I do trust," she wrote at the end of a long letter, "that you intend to open the London house soon. The girls are so looking forward to a visit to you and a share in your London gaieties. They tell me you have promised them a ball ... I did not look for this my dear, but I do not deny that it would be a blessing to have my little doves launched in such style ... "
Janet's eyes opened widely at this gentle reminder: she could remember no such promise but knew well enough that Phoebe and Aramintha would probably recall what they were told to recall.
She was folding this letter and smiling rather ruefully at the prospect of having to find her feet in Town when her husband came down to breakfast. Among his letters was a coquettish reminder from his current 'flirt', one Lady Amelia Brambell, that he had not fulfilled a promise to attend her to the opera.
" ... and I must needs fall back on Jackie Ballard," she wrote in her sprawling hand, "but he is so prosy compared with my own Phillibilly ... "
He grimaced slightly; such a pet-name was acceptable between the sheets, on paper it was embarrassing. He eyed the name of Jackie Ballard with distaste and foreboding. If he did not return soon Ballard would doubtless attain a similar idiotish accolade and he was not yet ready to relinquish the delectable Lady Amelia to any prosy buffoon like Ballard. But, but ... he looked across the table to his wife presiding over the coffee-pot ... Janet was still not in a satisfactorily promising way: he must' take her to Town with him. He grimaced again at the prospect of the 'complications which must ensue to his pleasant urban round. He tried to visualise Janet moving among' the elegant matrons and the gauzy debutantes. Though he was unimaginative to a fault, the picture of a seagull in a hen-run came into his mind and he dismissed it irritably.
"I mean to leave for Town tomorrow," he announced. "Do you care to join me in a week or so?"
Janet nodded.
"I'll send to open the Queensgate house," she said, with the air of one who had already made up her mind. "You can come there on ... say, Monday."
Staindrop stared.
"And can you leave all your buildings and plantings so easily?" he asked sarcastically.
"Mr Denholm has it all in hand," she said, "and the Queensgate house has been shut up since your wife died. Mrs Summers says it must be in a real pickle."
"And is Mrs Summers modelling her speech on yours?" he enquired; Janet's Scotticisms irked him beyond measure. "I understood her to be a pattern card of gentility."
Janet flushed.
"I intend to invite my good-mither and my two good-sisters to bide with us a whilie," she returned deliberately, "and my faither ... though I doubt he'll not come. And ... "
She paused and smiled at him without liking.
" ... I thought it would be no more than civil to ask your Aunt Matilda to meet them."
He glared.
"That should certainly ensure that their visit is mercifully short."
Janet's London debut was smoothed and made comparatively easy by her new stepmother. Hannah exerted herself to do this mainly in her own interests. It would not serve if the Queensgate house were not an accepted part of the social scene, so the actors on that scene must be coaxed and hoaxed into accepting Janet as she was and not merely accepting her but making her welcome. Even Hannah knew better than to attempt to change Janet. For one thing she knew her limitations and for another she had developed a respect and even a liking for the girl who firmly refused to pretend to be anything other than she was, a Scots country girl. What was more, Hannah conceded that Janet had no need to pretend. She had a clear intelligence, a sense of humour and great commonsense. Her education at Luss school had given her a beautiful copperplate handwriting, her reading in history and geography, thanks to her father, had been considerably wider than most of the debutantes could boast and if she lacked knowledge of the complex interrelationships, official and unofficial, of her new circle of acquaintance this was an area in which Hannah was more than competent to coach her and Janet was interested enough in her fellow-creatures to learn willingly. For the rest, her beauty secured her the good opinion of the men and an indefinable quality of warmth and honesty secured her from all but the most confirmed of the backbiters among the women. After a somewhat breathless fortnight she found, rather to her surprise, that she was enjoying herself. Staindrop discovered that he had no need to blush for his bucolic bride and illogically resented her success in this, his own milieu.
Occasionally Janet remembered the figure of her mother asleep at the end of a hard day and protested at the frivolity and superficiality of the round of visiting, theatres, soirees, breakfasts and similar jamborees, but Hannah reassured her, tongue in cheek.
"It's not all so useless," she protested, "how else would we marry off our daughters. All this frivolity as you call it is a beautifully decorated shop-window to display our wares. Men don't care to go shopping so we make it as pleasant as possible with dances and dinners ... "
" … especially dinners," Janet put in with a vivid memory of her partner of the previous evening.
" ... and music and good wine and while they're enjoying these they consider our wares without ever being aware of it!"
Janet screwed up her nose at the pun and the maker twirled in front of the mirror, regarding herself in an elegant high- crowned hat decorated with blue ostrich plumes.
"And what about me?" she asked. "I have no daughters."
"Oh, we demonstrate to the customers what elegant creatures our chicks will hatch into."
Hannah invited comment on this contention with a tilted eyebrow, but Janet just smiled and took her parasol from her maid's hand. Hannah glanced out of the window.
"Your carriage is there. The Park will be crowded today. And no doubt Messrs Waring and Appleton will appear ... "
These two gentlemen were her current quarry.
"I think you're wasting your time, Hannah " said Janet bluntly they'll not do."
"Why ever not?"
Hannah was taken aback.
"They're of good family," she argued as they rustled through the hall, "and they have money. And they are perfectly conversable."
Janet smiled her thanks at the footman who opened the door.
"They are a pair of tumphies, Hannah, and you know it fine."
"And what species is a tumphie?"
"And if Phoebe or Aramintha lose their hearts to them they haven't the sense they were born with."
Ararnintha and Phoebe were already in the barouche and their presence prevented Hannah from continuing the argument. Janet was not basing her contention solely on her impression of these two young men. Phoebe had persisted in her desire to learn the essentials of housekeeping and Janet, to the open scandalisation of the London cook, had been giving her lessons in the kitchen when the opportunity offered. The London cook and his satellites were bribed into silence. During these lessons Phoebe had confided that her intended was at present in India but wrote to her regularly through his sister who had been, a governess to the Lampeters: he was due to come home in November when, so Phoebe declared, they would be married and return to India. Janet believed her. As for Aramintha, her eye had fallen on a young subaltern presently home on leave from the same country, and if Hannah concentrating her attentions on her pair of well-to- pass young ninnies, had not noticed this, Janet had. Aramintha, at least, would not need to bake scones. Young Lieutenant Marshall was the son of a wealthy India merchant.
The drive in the Park went much as such drives usually did. The coachman took his gleaming pair of high-steppers at a strict trot through the traffic and into the Park where there were twenty or thirty similar equipages, full of female Society enjoying the mild June afternoon in the company of male Society mounted on a variety of horses and riding as close to the carriages as they could press.
Before long, Messrs Waring and Appleton rode up sedately and took station on either side of the barouche whence they conducted a stilted conversation with Phoebe and Aramintha sitting demurely in the forward seats, protecting their complexions from the rigours of the June sunshine by means of elegantly ruffled parasols. It was as well for Hannah that she was too busy spinning wedding plans to hear much of this conversation which was of a triteness hard to equal even in a Society where triteness was equated with safety in any converse between young people of different sex. Janet, sustaining her share in observing the fineness of the weather and the pleasantness of the season, was surprised but not displeased to be distracted.
The distraction was mounted on a large grey gelding with a Roman nose and a barely controlled distaste for accompanying carriages. His rider was already known to Janet, to whom he had persuaded his hostess to present him at an evening party two days since. The hostess had hesitated, knowing his reputation, but being susceptible herself finally agreed. The distraction had introduced himself as an acquaintance of her husband, and Janet, to whom this was not a surpassing recommendation" had been fairly cool and distant. This had piqued Captain Jasper Pelham-Villiers, who was unaccustomed to such treatment.
Captain Jasper Pelham-Villiers took a fairly relaxed view of his military duties which left him plenty of time for his more serious ambition, which, so his fellow officers declared, was to make Don Giovanni's celebrated list appear rather abbreviated. As he was exceedingly good-looking, over six feet in height, wealthy, amusing, good-humoured and above all discreet, he had found plenty of women eager to help him achieve it. It was inevitable that Janet would catch his eye sooner rather than later as she was beautiful, young, married and apparently neglected by her husband. It was well known that Staindrop was still living at his club in spite of the presence of his wife at the Queensgate house. That this was due to the presence of his Aunt Matilda was not so generally known as she rarely appeared in a Society which she described as insipid.
Controlling his gelding expertly with one, hand the Captain took Janet's hand and kissed it. It was a feat which so took her attention that she ignored the purpose of it.
"I've been hoping you would appear," he told her, "this daily parade is an intolerable bore without agreeable company."
This observation would not have obliged his current lady-love who was regarding him with disfavour from her carriage, now halted for the better convenience of the Captain under a tree at the side of the road. Janet was unaware of this presence though she was conversant with Pelham-Villiers's reputation, for Hannah had told her after that first encounter and was even then reminding her of the warning by nudging her discreetly in the ribs. Janet, however, saw little harm in a conversation with the most notorious rake in Town when it was conducted in an open carriage in which were three other people. She found the Captain's practised flirtation entertaining and considered his reputation was probably exaggerated: Hannah had a penchant for hyperbole. Consequently she was less reserved than she had been at the evening party and he stayed by her side for some ten minutes. Society trotting by observed this and drew its own conclusions: it also observed the neglected lady order her coachman to drive on. Society prepared to watch the coming siege and keep an amused and penetrating eye on all the players in the drama.
CHAPTER 8
ONCE BACK IN the house, Hannah lost no time in enlarging on the dangers of the situation. Janet laughed at her and Hannah was constrained to be blunt.
"I tell you, Janet, you can't afford even to talk to a man like that. Even now people will be saying that ... "
At this point Aunt Matilda stumped into the drawing room.
"And what will people be saying, ma'am?" she demanded. "It's my experience that what most people say is always nonsensical and usually untrue to boot."
Hannah, who was used to treat Aunt Matilda much as an anarchist would treat an unexploded bomb, grasped at a possible ally.
"Jasper Pelham-Villiers has been making up to her in the Park," she told the old woman, "and she encouraged him."
Aunt Matilda sat down and grunted inelegantly.
"Did she? Then I expect they're saying you're his mistress, gel."
"What!"
Janet dropped her book. Aunt Matilda grunted again and then chuckled cavernously.
"None of yer modern milk-sops, Pelham-Villiers," she said not without relish. "And I'll tell you another thing ... Staindrop won't like such talk, not he. Not before he's got himself an heir. He's like all men, a dog-in-the-manger."
She proved a true prophet. Staindrop, informed of the day's event by no fewer than three of his acquaintance, for once dined at home and took Janet to task for such an indiscretion. When she laughed at his agitation he flung off in a fury to speak to Hannah, ordering her to keep Janet out of Pelham-Villiers's way and accusing her in the same breath of playing the go-between. Hannah, angered by such implication, retorted, "Escort her yourself, once in a way, if you want to prevent such gossip. This is the first time you've been in the house in a week."
Staindrop enquired whether she expected him to live among a pack of penniless hangers-on and malicious old women and got what he deserved, for Hannah took a firm grasp on her temper and replied evenly that he would have plenty of leisure to do his duty by Janet.
"Lady Amelia will have to excuse you after next week, I dare say, when her husband returns. If you are there Pelham-Villiers won't come sniffing round. He's got some sense."
Staindrop, still in a tearing fury, stumped out of the little sitting room which Hannah had made her own and met with his Aunt on the landing. When she saw his state she grinned at him like a witch who saw her spells working and gave him some advice in terms which were plain enough to scandalise the butler in the hall below.
"Only got yourself to blame," she said and poked him painfully under the fourth waistcoat button with her fan. "Leave a pretty piece like your Janet alone for weeks as you've done while you trot like a pug-dog at the heels of some feather-brained trollop and all the town watches and you've got to expect that the men of the town will come making up to her. They've more sense than you seemingly. Tell you another thing ... "
She considered him as if he were a somewhat grubby schoolboy.
"I wouldn't blame her if she decided to take advantage of his advances. Pelham- Villiers is twice the man you'll ever be ... not that I'm throwing bouquets at him ... "
"I'll pack her straight back to Derbyshire," he spluttered.
Aunt Matilda smiled nastily.
"Oh, but that really will set the fools laughing at you," said she, "married six months and daren't keep his wife in Town because he's used her so ill she'll be off with the first half-decent creature who looks her way!"
