‘You were thinking of Charles?’
She nodded, wondering if there were anything in the stories about vampire mind-reading abilities. Her mind, she admitted, must just now be written in large print. She would concentrate on keeping her forehead smooth or she would end up like poor silly Kate, only twenty-two and her face already pulled out of shape by laughing and crying.
‘Even when I have you all to myself for an evening, Charles is between us. Curse the fellow.’
Charles, due to accompany the first-night party, had sent his man with a message, pleading off and entrusting Penelope to Florence’s care for the evening. He was off on some government business she could not be expected to bother with. It was most vexing. After the wedding, unless she underestimated her own powers of persuasion, the situation in the Beauregard household would be much changed.
Her stays were so tight she could hardly breathe, and her décolletage so low the whole stretch of skin between her chin and bosom was insensate with the cold. And there was nothing to do with her fan but wave it about, for she could not risk setting it down on a chair and having some tipsy clod sit on it.
The original scheme had been for Art to chaperone Florence but he was as abandoned by her as Penelope had been by her fiancé and evidently felt obliged to loiter about like an ardent swain. They had been twice accosted by acquaintances who congratulated her, then indicated Art with an embarrassing ‘and is this the lucky gentleman?’ Lord Godalming was taking it with remarkable good humour.
‘I did not mean to speak ill of Charles, Penny. I apologise.’
Since the announcement, Art had been most solicitous. He had once been engaged himself, to a girl Penelope remembered quite well, but something horrid had come of it. Art was easy to understand, especially set beside Charles. Her fiancé always paused before addressing her by name. He had never called her Pamela but they were both waiting in dread for that awful, inevitable moment. All through life, she had been plodding in her cousin’s brilliant wake, chilling inside whenever anyone silently compared her with Pam, knowing she must eternally be judged the lesser of the Misses Churchward. But she was alive and Pam was not. She was older now than Pamela had been when she was taken from them.
‘You can be sure that any matters which detain Charles are of the utmost importance. His name may never appear in the lists, but he is well known in Whitehall, if only to the best of the best, and rated highly.’
‘Surely, Art, you are important too.’
Art shrugged, his curls shaking. ‘I’m simply a messenger boy with a title and good manners.’
‘But the Prime Minister...’
‘I’m Ruthven’s pet this month, but that means little.’
Florence returned, bearing an official verdict on the piece. It had been something called Clarimonde’s Coming-Out, by the famous author of The Silver King and Saints and Sinners, Henry A. Jones.
‘Mr Sala says “there is a rift in the clouds, a break of blue in the dramatic heavens, and seems as if we are fairly at the end of the unlovely”.’
The play had been a specimen of the ‘rattling farce’ for which the Criterion was known. The new-born leading lady had a past and her supposed father but actual husband, a cynical Queen’s Counsel, was given to addressing sarcasms directly to the dress circle, affording the actor-manager Charles Wyndham opportunities to demonstrate his aptitude for aphorism. Frequent changes of costume and backdrop took the characters from London to the country to Italy to a haunted castle and back again. By the final curtain, lovers were reconciled, cads were ruined, fortunes inherited justly and secrets exposed without harm. Barely an hour after the last act, Penelope could accurately describe to the smallest detail each of the heroine’s gowns but could not recall the name of the actress who took her part.
‘Penny, darling,’ came a tiny, grating voice. ‘Florence, and Lord Godalming. Hail and well-met.’
It was Kate Reed, in a drab little dress, trailing a jowly new-born Penelope knew to be her Uncle Diarmid. A senior staffer at the Central News Agency, he was sponsor to the poor girl’s so-called career in cheap journalism. He had a reputation as one of the grubbiest of the Grub Street grubs. Everyone except Penelope found him amusing, and so he was mostly tolerated.
Art wasted his time kissing Kate’s knuckly hand and she turned red as a beetroot. Diarmid Reed greeted Florence with a beery burp and enquired after her health, never a sound tactic in the case of Mrs Stoker, who was quite capable of describing extensive infirmities. Mercifully, she took another tack and asked why Mr Reed had lately not been attending the after-darks.
‘We quite miss you in Cheyne Walk, Mr Reed. You always have such stories of the highs and lows of life.’
‘I regret that I’ve been trawling the lows of late, Mrs Stoker. These Silver Knife murders in Whitechapel.’
‘Dreadful business,’ spluttered Art.
‘Indeed. But deuced good for the circulation. The Star and the Gazette and all the other dogs are in it to the death. The Agency can’t keep them fed. They’ll take almost anything.’
Penelope did not care for talk of murder and vileness. She did not take the newspapers, and indeed read nothing but improving books.
‘Miss Churchward,’ Mr Reed addressed himself to her, ‘I understand congratulations are the order of the day.’
She smiled at him in such a way as not to line her face.
‘Where’s Charles?’ asked Kate, blundering as usual. Some girls should be beaten regularly, Penelope thought, like carpets.
‘Charles has let us down,’ Art said. ‘Most unwisely, in my opinion.’
Penelope burned inside, but hoped it did not show on her face.
‘Charles Beauregard, eh?’ said Mr Reed. ‘Good man in a pinch, I understand. You know, I could swear I saw the fellow in Whitechapel only the other night. With some of the detectives on the Silver Knife case.’
‘That is highly unlikely,’ Penelope said. She had never been to Whitechapel, a district where people were often murdered. ‘I cannot imagine what would take Charles to such a quarter.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Art. ‘The Diogenes Club has queer interests, in all manner of queer quarters.’
Penelope wished Art had not mentioned that institution. Mr Reed’s ears pricked up and he was about to quiz Art further when they were all saved from embarrassment by another arrival.
‘Look,’ squealed Florence with delight, ‘at who has come again to plague us with his incorrigibility. It’s Oscar.’
A large new-born with plenty of wavy hair and a well-fed look was swanning over to them, green carnation in his lapel, hands in his pockets to bulge out the front of his striped trousers.
‘Evening, Wilde,’ said Art.
The poet sneered a curt ‘Godalming’ of acknowledgement at Art, and then extravagantly paid court to Florence, pouring so much charm over her that a quantity of it naturally splashed over on to Penelope and even Kate. Mr Oscar Wilde had apparently once proposed to Florence, when she was Miss Balcombe of Dublin, but been beaten out by the now-never-mentioned Bram. Penelope found it easy to believe Wilde might have made proposals to a number of persons, simply so the rebuffs would give him something else about which to be wittily unconventional.
Florence asked him his opinion of Clarimonde’s Coming-Out, whereupon Wilde remarked that he was thankful for its existence, for it might spur a canny critic, such as he obviously adjudged himself, to erect a true work of genius on its ruins.