The Honourable Mr Sebastien Frayne, padding past the door of Queen Caroline’s bedchamber, was arrested by a young and ecstatic voice trilling Mozart’s Hallelujah.
‘You seem in very good spirits this morning,’ he said.
Anna turned, jumped off the chair and curtsied all in a single movement.
‘I am sorry, I shouldn’t sing, I think, though I cannot remember if Selina Strickland has said one may or not. But I am so happy!’ said Anna, added ‘sir,’ - and spoilt the effect completely by throwing her arms round the old gentleman’s neck and kissing him on the cheek.
‘Well, well,’ said Uncle Sebastien, blushing and entranced at the first unsolicited kiss he’d had in twenty years. ‘And what has happened to make you so happy?’
‘My cousin, Sergei, is safe! He was fighting with Deni-kin in the Crimea and we had no news for so long that we thought he had been killed. He was exactly like a brother to me and to Petya and now, because I am so happy, I am going to make Miss Hardwicke’s room so beautiful that she will be amazed!’
Anna was as good as her word. Queen Caroline’s room was one of Mersham’s loveliest with its hand-blocked wall paper of azure fleur-de-lis, its Venetian fourposter, white-curtained and white-valanced like a cloud bed on Olympus, and its exquisite view of the lake. Like all the rooms in the main block, however, it had been shut up during the war and now showed signs of neglect.
Anna blackleaded the grate and annointed the bedsprings with sulphate of ammonia, she took down curtains and scrubbed drawers and, to add the final touch, she purloined from the other rooms, bringing in a finely wrought candlestick here, a Dresden shepherdess there, working for this unknown girl with skill and love. Nor was her task made easier by the fact that Baskerville, the earl being absent, was again persistently padding after her, only pausing with his customary howl of despair every time she disappeared down the service stairs and through the green baize doors.
‘Why are you so stupidT she berated him. ‘Why don’t you come through into the kitchen when I have finished so that I can scratch you properly, but now I must work.’
‘You’ll never get that dog to go through that door,’ said Proom, encountering her at bay with a bucket of suds. ‘He must have swallowed Debrett’s Peerage when he was a pup.’ Then, addressing her in a way in which so kingly a person seldom addressed a housemaid, he said: ‘Mrs Proom was wondering whether you’d have a moment to look in after supper tonight. Only if you’re not busy, of course.’
Anna, whom he had at last trained not to sink to the ground every time he encountered her, smiled and said: ‘Yes, I shall like to come very much. Only …’ She broke off and looked shyly at the august figure of the butler. ‘I don’t know if it is permitted, but this afternoon I must polish the toilet set in Miss Hardwicke’s room and also the candlesticks and the inkwell… many things. And I have noticed that Mrs Proom has strong hands still and she told me she was once in service. So do you think I might perhaps take them over with the polish and a lot of newspaper so that there is no mess and we could do them together? She would truly help me, I think, and it would not take longer.’
Anna stopped, misinterpreting Proom’s silence as one of disapproval. She had been foolish, the silver was valuable…
Proom was fighting down a number of emotions. Gratitude to this young girl for detecting, behind his mother’s eccentricity and tantrums, her desperate desire still to be of use. Shame that he himself had so seldom made this possible.
Clearing his throat, which seemed to have become a trifle choked, Proom said magisterially, ‘Very well. You have my permission. Just see that nothing is mislaid.’
----*
Mrs Bassenthwaite, inspecting Queen Caroline’s bedroom when Anna had finished, was moved to praise.
‘You’ve done very well, my dear.’
‘But who will do the flowers?’ asked Anna, knowing that everything depended on this.
Mrs Bassenthwaite hesitated. She had always done them herself, but she was very tired these days and there was a niggling pain in her side which never quite seemed to go away.
‘You will,’ she said. ‘Go to Mr Cameron. Tell him I sent you.’
So Anna, her face screwed into what the other servants had learnt to call her ‘monkey look’, pondered massed delphiniums in delft-blue and white or low bowls of peonies in alabaster jars; but in the end as anyone who thinks of a bride in the month of July must do, decided on roses. Cutting short her lunch hour, she went to find the deaf and misanthropic old Scotsman who had ruled Mersham’s gardens for three decades.
Walking with delight between beds of celery, nascent cauliflowers, strawberries nestling like little crimson eggs on their beds of straw, she came to a green door in a high wall, pushed it open - and stood, spellbound.
The rest of the garden at Mersham, though incorrigibly beautiful, suffered from the neglect and under-staffing caused by the war. But the rose garden was a miracle of husbandry and care. There were roses as dark as spilt blood and roses with the delicate pink of a baby’s fingernails. There were beige and blowsy roses and mysterious golden roses, tightly furled. Roses climbed the stone walls, rambled across arbours or stood in dark green tubs as demure as Elizabethan miniatures. And as Anna started to sniff her way ecstatically from bloom to bloom, Mr Cameron, who had seen her enter with foreboding, began to hunt for his ear-trumpet, finally tracking it down in the bottom of a watering can, and to jam it into his whiskery ear, a rare sign that he was willing to communicate.
‘I thought they should be very pale and gentle like flowers in a dream, you know?’ said Anna when she had explained her errand. ‘Not strong roses, not red — though of course his lordship will wish to give her red roses for passion and so on,’ said Anna, waving a dismissive hand. ‘But for now I want everything very soft and welcoming and a little loose, you know? Those roses that seem to be shaking themselves out a little?’
Mr Cameron nodded. ‘You want the old-fashioned ones… The Bourbons and the Damasks. There’s Belle de Crecy; she’d do you fine. And Madame Hardy over there. Or Konigan van Denmark - there’s no one to touch her for scent.’
They wandered about in total amity, selecting, discussing, rapturously smelling, while Anna’s little Tartar nose turned yellow with pollen and her Byzantine eyes glowed with contentment.
Arriving at a single bush, growing quite by itself in a centre bed of fresh-mulched earth, Anna stopped dead.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘How beautiful1.I have never seen such a rose as this.’
The old man’s eyes shone with pride. ‘She’s new,’ he said. ‘I bred her myself.’
The new rose was white. At first sight it appeared pure and flawless white, and yet this was a contradiction for somehow, most strangely and marvellously, the whiteness was irradiated as if from within by a hint, a blush of pink.
The old man became technical, explaining fertilization problems and grafting, while Anna, who had lifted the other roses towards her with questing fingertips, knelt before this one, reverent and untouching.
‘I need a name for her,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult, that.’
‘She’s like snow in Russia,’ said Anna. ‘Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that; so pure and yet so strong.’
Mr Cameron scratched his head. ‘I could call her that,’ he said. ‘ “Russian Snow”. It’s a good name, that.’
Anna’s face was sombre. ‘People wouldn’t like it. They are angry with us because we made peace too soon.’ Suddenly she straightened and turned towards him, her face illumined. ‘I have had such a good idea!’