Frederick frowned, unsure.
‘Unions,’ Simion said with a snarl. ‘Murderers of business. They won’t rest until they’ve seized the means of production and put men like you out of action.’
‘Father paints a vivid picture,’ Teddy said with a diffident smile.
‘I call things as I see them,’ Simion said.
‘And you?’ Frederick said to Teddy. ‘You don’t see unions as a threat?’
‘I believe they can be accommodated.’
‘Rubbish.’ Simion rolled a swig of dessert wine round his mouth, swallowed. ‘Teddy’s a moderate,’ he said dismissively.
‘Father please, I’m a Tory—’ ‘With funny ideas.’
‘I merely propose we listen to all sides—’
‘He’ll learn in time,’ said Simion, shaking his head at Mr Frederick. ‘Once he’s had his fingers bitten by those he’s fool enough to feed.’
He set down his glass and resumed the lecture. ‘I don’t think you realise how vulnerable you are, Frederick. If something unforeseen should happen. I was talking with Ford the other day, Henry Ford—’ He broke off, whether for ethical or oratorical reasons, I couldn’t tell, and motioned me to bring an ashtray. ‘Let’s just say, in this economic climate you need to steer your business into profitable waters. And fast.’ His eyes flickered. ‘If things should go the way of Russia—and there are certain indications—only a healthy profit margin will keep you in good odour with your banker. Friendly as he may be, the bottom line needs to be black.’ He took a cigar from the silver box offered him by Mr Hamilton. ‘And you’ve got to have yourself protected, don’t you? You and your lovely girls. If you don’t look after them, who will?’ He smiled at Hannah and Emmeline then added, as if an afterthought, ‘Not to mention this grand house of yours. How long did you say it had been in the family?’
‘I didn’t,’ Mr Frederick said, and if his voice contained a note of misgiving, he managed quickly to dissolve it. ‘Three hundred years.’
‘Well,’ Estella purred on cue, ‘isn’t that something? I adore the history in England. You old families are so intriguing. It’s one of my favourite pastimes, reading about you all.’
Simion exhaled impatiently, eager to get back to business.
Estella, practised after so many years of marriage, took her cue. ‘I wonder if we girls might retire to the drawing room while the men continue their talk,’ she said. ‘You can tell me all about the history of the Ashbury line.’
Hannah coached her expression into one of polite acquiescence, but not before I saw her impatience. She was at the mercy of her warring selves, longing to stay and hear more, yet recognising her duty as hostess to retire the ladies to the drawing room and await the men.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course. Though I’m afraid there’s not much we can tell that you won’t find in Debrett.’
The men stood. Simion took Hannah’s hand as Mr Frederick assisted Estella. Simion registered Hannah’s youthful figure, his face unable to conceal its coarse approval. He kissed the top of her hand with wet lips. To her credit she concealed her distaste. She followed Estella and Emmeline and, as she neared the door, her gaze swept sideways and met mine. In an instant, her grown-up façade dissolved as she poked her tongue out at me and rolled her eyes, before disappearing from the room.
As the men retook their seats and resumed their talk of business, Mr Hamilton appeared at my shoulder.
‘You may go now, Grace,’ he whispered. ‘Nancy and I will finish up here.’ He looked at me. ‘And do find Alfred. We can’t have one of the Master’s guests look out the window and see a servant roaming the grounds.’
Standing on the stone platform at the top of the rear stairs, I scanned the dark beyond. The moon cast a white glow, painting the grass silver and making skeletons of the briars that clung to the arbour. The scattered rosebushes, glorious by day, revealed themselves by night an awkward collection of lonely, bony old ladies.
Finally, on the far stone staircase I saw a dark shape that couldn’t be accounted for by any of the garden’s vegetation.
I steeled myself and slipped into the night.
With each step, the wind blew colder, meaner.
I reached the top step and stood for a moment beside him, but Alfred gave no sign that he was aware of my presence.
‘Mr Hamilton sent me,’ I said cautiously. ‘You needn’t think I’m following you.’
There was no answer.
‘And you needn’t ignore me. If you don’t want to come in just tell me and I’ll go.’
He continued to gaze into the tall trees of the Long Walk.
‘Alfred!’ My voice cracked with the cold.
‘You all think I’m the same Alfred as left for France,’ he said softly. ‘Folks seem to recognise me so I must look close enough to the same, but I’m a different fellow, Gracie.’
I was taken aback. I had been prepared for another attack, angry entreaties to leave him alone. His voice dropped to a whisper and I had to crouch right by to hear. His bottom lip trembled, whether from the cold or something other, I wasn’t sure. ‘I see them, Grace. Not so bad in the day, but all the night, I see them and I hear them. In the drawing room, the kitchen, the village street. They call my name. But when I turn around . . . they’re not . . . they’re all . . .’
I sat down. The frosty night had turned the grey-stone steps to ice and through my skirt and drawers my legs grew numb.
‘It’s so cold,’ I said. ‘Come inside and I’ll make you a cup of cocoa.’
He gave no acknowledgement, continued to stare into the darkness.
‘Alfred?’ My fingertips brushed his hand and on impulse I spread my fingers over his.
‘Don’t.’ He recoiled as if struck and I knotted my hands together on my lap. My cold cheeks burned as if they’d been slapped.
‘Don’t,’ he whispered.
His eyes were clenched shut and I watched his face, wondered what it was he saw on his blackened eyeballs that made them race so frantically beneath his moon-bleached lids.
Then he turned to face me and I drew breath. It was a trick of the night, surely, but his eyes were as none I had ever looked into. Deep, dark holes that were somehow empty. He stared at me with his unseeing eyes and it seemed that he looked for something. An answer to a question he had not asked. His voice was low. ‘I thought that once I got back . . .’ His words floated into the night unfinished. ‘I so wanted to see you . . . The doctors said if I kept busy . . .’ There was a tight sound in his throat. A click.
The armour of his face collapsed, crumbled like a paper bag, and he began to cry. Both hands leapt to his face in a futile attempt at obfuscation. ‘No, oh no . . . Don’t look . . . please, Gracie, please . . .’ He cried into his hands. ‘I’m such a coward—’
‘You’re not a coward,’ I said firmly.
‘Why can’t I get it out of my head? I just want it out of my head.’ He hit his palms against his temples with a ferocity that alarmed me.
‘Alfred! Stop it.’ I tried to grab his hands but he wouldn’t let them leave his face. I waited, watching as his body shook, cursing my ineptitude. Finally, he seemed to calm some. ‘Tell me what it is you see,’ I said.
He turned to me but he did not speak, and I glimpsed for a moment how I must appear to him. The yawning gulf between his experience and mine. And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost. Would play out on the one man’s mind until, little by little, they recessed deeper into the folds of memory and could, for a time, be forgotten.
So I didn’t ask again. I laid my hand on the far side of his face and gently guided his head to my shoulder. Sat very still as his body shuddered next to mine.
And like that, together, we sat on the stair.
A SUITABLE HUSBAND
Hannah and Teddy were married on the first Saturday of May, 1919. It was a pretty wedding at the little chur
ch on the Riverton estate. The Luxtons would have preferred London so that more of the very important people they knew could have come, but Mr Frederick was insistent, and he’d suffered so many blows in the months preceding that no one had much spirit for arguing. So it was. She married in the small church in the valley, just as her grandparents and her parents had been before her.
It rained––many children, said Mrs Townsend; weeping past lovers, whispered Nancy—and the wedding photographs were stained with black umbrellas. Later, when Hannah and Teddy were living in the townhouse in Grosvenor Square, a photograph sat upon the morning-room writing desk. The six of them in a line: Hannah and Teddy at centre, Simion and Estella beaming on one side, Mr Frederick and Emmeline blank-faced on the other.
You are surprised. For how could such a thing have come to pass? Hannah was so set against marriage, so full of other ambitions. And Teddy: sensible, kindly even, but certainly not the man to sweep a young woman like Hannah off her feet . . .
But it was not so complicated really. Such things rarely are. It was a simple case of stars aligning; those that didn’t being nudged into place.
The morning after the dinner party, the Luxtons left for London. They had business engagements, and we all presumed—if indeed we gave it any thought at all—that it was the last we would ever see of them.
Our focus, you see, had shifted already to the next grand event. For over the coming week, a cluster of indomitable women descended upon Riverton, charged with the weighty duty of overseeing Hannah’s entrance into society. January was the zenith of country balls and the mortification of leaving things too late, being forced to share the date with another, larger ball, was unthinkable. Thus, the date had been picked—20 January—and invitations long since sent.
One morning in the early new year I served tea to Lady Clementine and the Dowager Lady Ashbury. They were in the drawing room, side by side on the sofa, diaries open on their laps.
‘Fifty ought to do well,’ Lady Violet said. ‘There’s nothing worse than a thin dance.’
‘Except a crowded one,’ Lady Clementine said with distaste. ‘Not that it’s a problem these days.’
Lady Violet surveyed her guest list, a thread of dissatisfaction pulling her lips to pout. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘whatever are we to do about the shortages?’
‘Mrs Townsend will rise to the occasion,’ Lady Clementine said. ‘She always does.’
‘Not the food, Clem, the men. Wherever shall we find more men?’
Lady Clementine leaned to observe the guest list. She shook her head crossly. ‘It’s an absolute crime. That’s what it is. A dreadful inconvenience. England’s best seed left to rot on godforsaken French fields, while her young ladies are left high and dry, nary a dance partner between them. It’s a plot, I tell you. A German plot.’ Her eyes widened at the possibility. ‘To prevent England’s elite from breeding!’
‘But surely you know someone we could ask, Clem? You’ve proven yourself quite the matchmaker.’
‘I counted myself lucky to find that fool of Fanny’s,’ Lady Clementine said, rubbing the powdery rolls of neck beneath her chin. ‘It’s a great shame Frederick never took an interest. Things would have been a lot simpler. Instead, I had to scrape the barrel’s bottom.’
‘My granddaughter is not to have a husband from the barrel’s bottom,’ Lady Violet said. ‘This family’s future depends upon her match.’ She gave a distressed sigh which became a cough, shuddering through her thin frame.
‘Hannah will do better than poor simple Fanny,’ Lady Clementine said assuredly. ‘Unlike my charge, your granddaughter is blessed with wit, beauty and charm.’
‘And no inclination to use them,’ Lady Violet said. ‘Frederick has indulged those children. They’ve known too much freedom and not enough instruction. Hannah in particular. That girl is full of outrageous notions of independence.’
‘Independence . . .’ Lady Clementine said with distaste.
‘Oh, she’s in no hurry to be married. Told me as much when she was in London.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Looked me straight in the eyes, maddeningly courteous, and told me she didn’t mind a bit if it was too much trouble to launch her into society.’
‘Impudence!’
‘She said a ball would likely be wasted on her as she had no intention of going into society even when she was of an age. She said she finds society . . .’ Lady Violet closed her eyes. ‘She finds society dull and pointless.’
Lady Clementine gasped. ‘She didn’t.’
‘She did.’
‘But what does she propose to do instead? Stay here in her father’s home and become an old maid?’
That there could be another option was beyond their ability to conceive. Lady Violet shook her head, despair bringing a sag to her shoulders.
Lady Clementine, perceiving that some amelioration of spirits was called for, straightened and patted Violet’s hand. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Your granddaughter is still young, Violet dear. There’s plenty of time for her to change her mind.’ She tilted her head to the side. ‘I seem to remember you had a touch of the free spirit at her age. You grew out of it. Hannah will too.’
‘She must,’ Lady Violet said gravely.
Lady Clementine caught the whiff of desperation. ‘There’s no particular reason she need make a match so soon . . .’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Is there?’
Lady Violet sighed.
‘There is!’ Lady Clementine said, eyes widening.
‘It’s Frederick. His confounded motor cars. The bank sent me a letter this week. He’s missed more payments.’
‘And this was the first you knew?’ Lady Clementine said hungrily. ‘Dear, dear.’
‘I dare say he feared telling me,’ Lady Violet said. ‘He knows how I feel. He’s mortgaged all our futures for the sake of his factory. He’s even sold the estate in Yorkshire to pay the death duties on his inheritance.’
Lady Clementine tut-tutted.
‘Would that he’d sold that factory instead. It’s not like he hasn’t had offers, you know.’
‘Recently?’
‘Regrettably not.’ Lady Violet sighed. ‘Frederick is a wonderful son, but a businessman he is not. Now I gather he’s pinning all his hopes on receiving a loan from some syndicate that Mr Luxton is involved with.’ She shook her head. ‘He lurches from disaster to disaster, Clem. Not a thought for the duties of his position.’ She rested her fingertips on her temples, sighed again. ‘I can hardly blame him. The position was never meant to be his.’ Then came the familiar lament. ‘If only Jonathan were here.’
‘Now, now,’ Lady Clem said. ‘Frederick’s sure to make a success of it. Motor cars are quite the thing these days. Every man and his dog is out driving them. I was almost flattened the other day as I crossed the road outside Kensington Place.’
‘Clem—! Were you injured?’
‘Not this time,’ Lady Clementine said matter-of-factly. ‘I’m sure I won’t be so fortunate the next.’ She raised one eyebrow. ‘A most gruesome death, I can assure you. I spoke to Dr Carmichael at great length regarding the types of injuries one might sustain.’
‘Terrible,’ Lady Violet said, shaking her head distractedly. She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much about Hannah if Frederick would only marry again.’
‘Is it likely?’ Lady Clementine said.
‘Hardly. As you know, he’s shown little interest in taking another wife. He didn’t show nearly enough interest in his first wife if you ask me. He was far too busy with—’ She glanced at me and I busied myself straightening the tea cloth. ‘With that other despicable business.’ She shook her head and tightened her lips. ‘No. There’ll be no more sons and it’s no use hoping otherwise.’
‘Which leaves us with Hannah.’ Lady Clementine took a sip of tea.
‘Yes.’ Lady Violet sighed irritably and smoothed the lime satin of her skirt. ‘I’m sorry Clem. It’s this cold I’ve got. It’s put me in quite a mood.’ She
shook her head. ‘I just can’t seem to shake the ill feeling I’ve been carrying of late. I’m not a superstitious person—you know that—but I’ve the oddest sense . . .’ She glanced at Lady Clementine. ‘You’ll laugh, but I’ve the oddest sense of impending doom.’
‘Oh?’ It was Lady Clementine’s favourite subject.
‘It’s nothing specific. Just a feeling.’ She gathered her shawl about her shoulders and I noticed how frail she had become. ‘Nonetheless, I will not sit back and watch this family disintegrate. I will see Hannah engaged—and engaged well—if it’s the last thing I do. Preferably before I accompany Jemima to America.’
‘New York. I’d forgotten you were going. Good of Jemima’s brother to take them.’
‘Yes,’ Lady Violet said. ‘Though I shall miss them. Little Gytha is so like Jonathan.’
‘I’ve never been much for babies,’ Lady Clementine sniffed.
‘All that mewling and puking.’ She shuddered so that her second and third chins quivered, then smoothed her diary page and tapped a pen on its blank surface. ‘How long does that leave us then, to find a suitable husband?’
‘One month. We sail on the fourth of February.’
Lady Clementine wrote the date on her journal page then sat up with a start. ‘Oh . . . ! Oh, Violet. I’ve had rather a good idea,’ she said. ‘You say Hannah’s determined to be independent?’
The word itself brought a flutter to Lady Violet’s eyelids. ‘Yes.’
‘So if someone were to give her a little kindly instruction . . . ? Make her see marriage as the way to independence . . . ?’
‘She’s as stubborn as her father,’ Lady Violet said. ‘I’m afraid she wouldn’t listen.’
‘Not to you or me, perhaps. But I know someone to whom she might.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Yes . . . With a little coaching even she should be able to manage this.’
Some days later, her husband happily ensconced in a tour of Mr Frederick’s garage, Fanny joined Hannah and Emmeline in the burgundy room. Emmeline, swept up in the excitement of the upcoming ball, had persuaded Fanny to help her practise dancing. A waltz was playing on the gramophone and the two were triple-stepping about the room, laughing and teasing as they went. I had to be careful to avoid them while I dusted and made up the rooms.