A Mad, Wicked Folly Page 12

Mrs. Fitzhughes, our housekeeper, was waiting in the hall when I walked in the door. “Your mother wishes to see you in her drawing room,” she said. “The new lady’s maid has arrived.” Mrs. Fitzhughes drew herself up tall. “She has red hair. It’s very bright. Not befitting a servant at all.”

  It took everything I had not to laugh. “Oh,” I said. “That’s . . . that’s a shame.”

  “A letter arrived for you earlier, delivered by Mr. Carrick-Humphrey’s footman. I had Emma put it in your room.”

  A personal letter from Edmund boded well. If my behavior had made Edmund’s father change his mind, Sir Henry would have written my father and I would have heard nothing from Edmund himself. I left the housekeeper and went upstairs to the drawing room. I heard a murmur of voices coming down the hall.

  “Have you seen the latest La Mode Illustrée?” asked a voice tinged with a northern accent. “There’s a ball toilette illustrated there that I think would suit. It has a higher waist with ruching round the hips. The skirt is narrow with a slight train, and the bodice is sleeveless with a rounded décolletage.”

  “Yes! I know the gown,” my mother said, excited. “What do you have in mind for garniture around the décolletage?”

  “Plain, I think.”

  “Oh?” Mamma sounded disappointed.

  “Yes, I think that’s more suited to a young lady. You don’t want too much frippery or else she’ll look overdone. I can do a sash round the waist, folded at the hip and held on with a silver buckle.”

  Definitely a creature of my mother’s.

  I peeked around the door. My mother was sitting in her chair, and the lady’s maid was standing in front of her, but they leaned toward each other, eyes sparkling with unbridled fashion frenzy. They were clearly ecstatic in the realization that they were able to communicate in the style devotee’s native tongue.

  Miss Sophie Cumberbunch was younger than any lady’s maid I had ever met, maybe only eighteen or so. She was dressed in the usual simple black gown appropriate for her station, but it was fashionably cut and fit her perfectly, as if made for her. She had red hair, as advertised by Mrs. Fitzhughes. But it wasn’t flowing down her back in a flaming fall of siren’s curls. It was gathered in a loose roll at the nape of her neck. She wore a pair of steel spectacles, which would look dowdy on most women, but the juxtaposition of the workmanlike accessory with her elegance made her look intriguing.

  “Hello,” I said, stepping into the room, and taking care to hide my bandaged hand in the folds of my skirt.

  “Cumberbunch, this is my daughter, Miss Darling,” Mamma said.

  The lady’s maid turned toward me and curtsied. “Pleased to meet you.” Those eyes behind the spectacles were as green as emeralds, and she had a dusting of freckles across her nose.

  I felt childish and plain compared to her. “And I you,” was all I could think to say. I had never been tongue-tied in front of a maid before.

  “We’ve been discussing the gown for your coming-out party, Victoria.” Mamma said. “I’m going to set the date of the ball for the evening after your presentation at court. Cumberbunch says she can make the dress herself.”

  “I can select the cloth and notions from Liberty on Monday after luncheon,” Cumberbunch said, “and begin immediately.”

  “Take Victoria with you. You can choose shirtwaists and chemises for her. Have a look at the hats and whatever else you think she’ll need.”

  I couldn’t help but notice that Cumberbunch looked dismayed when Mamma said this. The feeling is mutual.

  “I would go along,” Mamma continued, “but I have a luncheon party to attend.”

  “Actually, my charity is meeting at Temple Church on Monday after luncheon, and I don’t want to miss it.” I watched Cumberbunch out of the corner of my eye as I said this. She looked relieved.

  “I’m happy to walk to Liberty, madam,” Cumberbunch said. “It’s not far. Perhaps we can all go together another day. I think it would be better if you were there to help choose.”

  Definitely not better.

  This settled, Mamma waded in with the second phase of Victoria Darling’s reformation. “Now, Victoria, since you’re missing the final classes of finishing school—the preparations for coming out—I’ve enrolled you in a school in Kensington called Miss Winthrop’s Social Graces Academy. Cumberbunch will escort you there once a week, and you’ll be taught the popular dances of the coming social season, important etiquette for the debutante, and, most importantly, the court curtsy.”

  Cumberbunch didn’t look dismayed at that chaperone duty, oddly. She looked as friendly as she had when I first came into the room.

  A few more pleasantries were exchanged, and then I was excused. But Cumberbunch remained. As I went along the corridor to my room, I heard her telling my mother about the new machine-made lace she had spotted during the grand opening of Selfridge’s earlier that week, and Mamma’s exclamation of delight.

  In my room, I removed Will’s handkerchief and soaked it in a basin of water. It was a simple cotton handkerchief, frayed at the edges and torn in one corner. My heart tugged a little to think of him carrying such a shoddy thing about.

  I tossed my beret onto my bed and was starting to pull the pins out of my hair when I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I held up a hand mirror to look at the back of my head. Actually, Will had done a stellar performance. He had wound my hair into a coil and laced the pins through to hold it all together. I lifted my hands to undo it but changed my mind and left the bun in place.

  Edmund’s letter was lying on my writing desk. I picked it up and flopped onto my bed on my back. The envelope was expensive-looking cream-colored paper with a wax seal. I broke the seal and drew out the note.

  Dear Miss Darling,

  I do hope you’ve gotten over your bout of dyspepsia and that you’re feeling much better today. I apologize for not coming by to see you and express my wishes myself, but I had to return to Oxford for rowing practice. I will be in touch regarding the Boat Race. It would be my honor to have you there.

  Sincerely,

  Edmund Carrick-Humphrey

  I dropped the letter onto the bed. Dyspepsia. How gentlemanly of him to continue the indigestion charade. My mind jumped to that cringe-worthy kiss. Our first, and I had been sick all over him! How humiliating. It would be a long while before I touched brandy again.

  I stared up at my canopy and tried to picture what married life would be like with Edmund. Despite the outcome of the evening, I had enjoyed my time with him. But when I tried to picture Edmund doing homey things like sitting by the fire reading a book, or lying next to me in a bed, William Fletcher’s face appeared instead of Edmund’s.

  Alarmed, I turned over onto my stomach and buried my head under my pillows. Goodness gracious! What took my imagination in that direction? Possibly because Will was my inspiration for art. But why didn’t I long to paint Edmund? He was handsome, with romantic good looks, yet I had not the first urge to draw him at all.

  But that was the peculiar way with artists. You never knew who was going to inspire you. Étienne’s muse was Bernadette. He had told me that a muse usually wasn’t conveniently available. Often the person was out of one’s reach. Before Bernadette, he himself had pined over a mayor’s daughter for years, drawing her from afar, until her father threatened him and he had to leave his own home village. Dante Gabriel Rossetti poached Lizzie Siddal from his friend and fellow artist Walter Deverell, creating a rift in their relationship.

  Don’t be so naive and stupid and girlish as to believe that Will is anything but your muse, I told myself firmly. I reminded myself that attraction for an art model was acceptable—as long as it fed the creative process and not the physical passion. However, the image of Will lying next to me in my bed wouldn’t depart from my mind’s eye as quickly as I would have liked.

  Later, after Mamma went out to tea
with friends, I sat down to write Edmund a letter. There was no writing paper in my desk, so I went into my mother’s drawing room to look for some. There was a box sitting on her desk with the lid off to one side. Thinking it was stationery, I took the first page out. But it wasn’t stationery.

  Inside the box were sketches. Not sketches for needle-

  point patterns, but amazing sketches. I took them out, one by one, and looked at them in the light streaming in through the window.

  My mother must have drawn these years ago, because the sketches were of my brother and me when we were children. There was a young Freddy, holding his cricket bat, looking off in the distance at something, a sad expression on his face, as though hoping for something that would never come. There was me as a toddler reaching toward a flower where a butterfly sat feeding, an expression of joy on my little face. Each drawing was better than the last, showing mastery and skill that must have taken years to perfect.

  And then I took out the final one. It was of me, about seven, squatting down to throw corn to a bird in the garden. But I was half drawn; only one side of my face was finished. It was as though she had been called away in the middle and never returned.

  Why was Mamma dead set against my art ambitions when she was so talented herself? Why had she put her art away so long ago? And why was she looking at her drawings now? Was it because she, like me, had a voice inside her that told her she wasn’t any good? That she was preposterous for trying?

  Whatever her reasoning was, it had been enough for Mamma to put it all away and to dissuade me from trying to be an artist. I put the sketches back where I found them. I didn’t want to ask my mother what had happened to her art, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  IN LIGHT OF the discovery I had made about Mamma, I had hoped that she might be more on my side than she let on. So on Sunday after church, I decided to ask her if I might have my pocket money returned to me. At school my parents had sent me money each week, but I had had nothing since I returned. I had spent the last on hansom cabs the day I went to the RCA.

  But she laughed when I asked for money.

  “I do not understand why I cannot have pocket money,” I said. “Surely if I am old enough to be married, I can have the responsibility of money.”

  My mother stood arranging flowers in a large crystal vase that sat upon the table in the hall. “I hardly think one follows the other, Victoria. I can well imagine what trouble you would get up to if you had the means. I’m sure you’re after art materials.”

  “No! I want to shop for my trousseau,” I said.

  “If you want something for your trousseau, put it on your father’s account, just as I do.” She snipped a little off the bottom of a stem and placed it carefully into her arrangement. “I’m not sure Harold can grow roses. These look as though beetles have been at them.”

  “Mamma, can you just consider what I’m asking?”

  She frowned and pulled the roses out of the arrangement, discarding them on the table. “It won’t do. No, these are dreadful.”

  I stared at the red roses lying there. A petal was damaged on one bloom. She had dismissed the entire bunch based on one flaw. For a moment I wondered if the sketches I had discovered had truly come from her, because there didn’t seem to be any sign of an artist left in my mother. I nearly opened my mouth to ask her about them, but she was staring at the roses angrily, so I gave up.

  I went to my room and sat on my bed. There were so many things of value in my room. Maybe I could sell something. But what? I scanned the top of my dressing table. No, my mother knew everything that sat there, and she’d ask questions. I thought of my grandmother’s jewelry that I had inherited. There was a silver-and-jet ring that Mamma deemed unfashionable, so I had never worn it. She’d never notice it gone, I was sure of it.

  I took the ring out of my jewelry box and turned it over in my hands. It was solid silver, and the jet was fine, so it must be worth a fair bit. But how would I sell it?

  The only person who was able to come and go without question was John, my father’s coachman. John wasn’t that much older than I, and as he’d shown the previous day, he didn’t appear to be as old-fashioned as servants who’d been entrenched in their occupation forever like Mrs. Fitzhughes or the cook. If Mamma asked, they’d tattle on me without pause.

  I found John at his usual spot, in the mews behind the house, where our two Cleveland Bay carriage horses, Chance and Ruby, were stabled. My mother was ever after Papa to replace them with a Daimler motorcar, but my old-fashioned father refused. He said motorcars were only a trend and would never replace horses. I was glad he said no, because I loved the horses.

  I explained to John that I’d purchased the ring in an antique shop in France, meaning to give it to my mother as a gift, but only just discovered that she had one already. Did he know of a shop that might be interested in buying it?

  He did. And, promising me he’d get a fair price, off he went. An hour later he sent Emma up to my room with an envelope. There were several notes tucked inside: enough money for art supplies and a little left over.

  Fifteen

  City of London, Clement’s Inn,

  Monday, twenty-second of March

  ON MONDAY, I left in the carriage after lunch to go on my first clandestine outing. I felt daring and wicked and filled with giddy freedom, just as I used to feel when Lily helped me slip away from finishing school to attend Monsieur’s atelier. An ache of longing filled me, thinking about Lily. She would have loved this caper. She always delighted in finding new excuses and ruses for sneaking me out of the school. I wished she were here now. I wished I could write to her, but I knew Madame Froufrou would have seized any letter from me, even opened it and read it.

  John escorted me to Temple Church, and I hid in the vestibule for a few moments while he walked back to the carriage. I pinned the DEEDS NOT WORDS badge that Lucy had given me on my lapel and left the church. I walked along the Strand and past the Royal Courts of Justice, and as the girl in the band had said, I saw the notices for the WSPU headquarters chalked upon the pavement. Many people walked around them, as though the markings would somehow contaminate their shoes.

  I followed the arrows pointing the way, and fell in behind a group of women—two older women and a teenage girl—headed in the same direction. Even though I was going to the headquarters to meet Sylvia Pankhurst and sign up to work on the mural, I was curious about the WSPU. I found that I was eager to see what they were about, how it all worked.

  Clement’s Inn turned out to be an old chancery inn that had been turned into flats and offices. The headquarters were in the basement and resembled a busy office space, not unlike my brother’s publishing company. The first room I stepped into was a visitors’ entrance. Boxes of leaflets and pamphlets were laid out on a table, and a woman sat at a desk, talking on a candlestick telephone. The group I came in with made a beeline to a table filled with goods and began selecting postcards, badges, and banners for purchase. Another woman sat behind the goods table, waiting to take their money.

  A dapper gentleman with thinning hair, perhaps in his late thirties, came forward from the back of the room. “Can I help you?” he asked me.

  “Yes, um, I’m interested in signing up to help Sylvia Pankhurst with her mural. I’m told this is the place to come.”

  “Yes, indeed. Well, that’s lovely! Come through. She should be along any moment. I’m Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. I manage the headquarters here and keep things running smoothly, as it were.”

  A woman poked her head out from a hallway and asked for his help with a jammed typewriter.

  “Is Jane not available?” asked Mr. Pethick-Lawrence. “She’s better with mechanical things than I am.”

  The woman shrugged. “Haven’t seen her yet.”

  “Feel free to look around while you wait,” he said to me, and then hurried off to help.

>   I stood in the foyer, feeling slightly awkward and out of place. Everyone else seemed to have a job to do. The telephone rang often, and the clicking sound of typewriter keys accompanied by laughter drifted in from the back. Women floated in and out of the room, carrying boxes filled with leaflets. More women came in the front door, filling the place up. I went to the back of the room and waited in a dark hallway between two rooms. One on the left looked to be a newspaper office. A huge stack of newspapers titled Votes for Women teetered precariously near the door. Men and women leaned over broadsheets spread out on tables. Other people sat at tables cutting things out with scissors or typing. I saw Mr. Pethick-Lawrence patiently helping the frustrated woman unstick her typewriter.

  The room on the right was much calmer. Here a group of young women sat stitching letters to banners and talking. I felt a prick of jealousy and loneliness. Their camaraderie reminded me of the relationship I used to have with Lily and a few of the other girls at school.

  A girl by the window looked over and smiled at me. I was about to step inside and introduce myself when one of the women stood up and stretched, and I saw the signature red hair and steel spectacles of Sophie Cumberbunch, my lady’s maid.

  Gone was the somber dress she had worn at home. Now she was dressed in a tailor-made suit, but instead of the jaunty pinstripe seersucker or somber face cloth of most tailor-mades, hers was bottle green. Knotted around her neck was a man’s tie printed with peacock feathers. On one lapel was a green-and-purple enameled badge. Her bright-red hair was gathered in a braided knot at the nape of her neck, and a small straw boater trimmed in yellow ribbons sat at a jaunty angle on her head. She was as colorful as a stained-glass window.

  I backed out of the room so fast that I collided with Mr. Pethick-Lawrence coming out of the newspaper room.

  “My word!” he exclaimed.

  “Sorry!” I stumbled away from him and dodged through the scrum of people in the visitors’ entrance, ignoring the cries of I say! Watch out! and shot outside. I didn’t look back to see if anyone was following me. I walked away from Clement’s Inn as fast as I could without actually breaking into a run.