Daisy was learning to be a lady’s maid very quickly, but Rose often sensed a naughtiness in her little maid and often wondered how long Daisy would be content to be a servant.
Telby Castle had been built in the latter years of the old queen’s reign. It was a sort of folly with towers and battlements, arrow slits and stained-glass windows. It even had a drawbridge and a moat.
The new building had replaced a Georgian gem of a house with furniture and rooms designed by Robert Adam.
“Not a good master,” volunteered Daisy, who had been told she was allowed to speak freely when she was alone with her mistress.
“Why do you say that?” asked Rose.
“Didn’t you notice? When we came through Telby Village, it was ever so poor.”
Rose had been brought up like everyone else in England to believe that God put one in one’s appointed position, but surely not to abuse that position, she thought, wondering if she might find the courage to tell the marquess he ought to do something about his tenants. Then she sighed. Such a remark would be considered the height of unfeminine insolence.
She was shown to an apartment in one of the four towers. To her relief, Daisy was allocated a small room off her own bedchamber. When the housekeeper left, Rose said, “When you go down to the servants’ hall, you will need to find out which is my bell. Oh, there’s the dressing gong. I wonder who else is of the house party.”
Daisy was rapidly unpacking the trunks. “What dress, my lady?”
“White, I suppose. The moire with the lace inserts. My pearls, I think. White gloves. The kid shoes with the little bows and those new sequinned evening stockings.”
Daisy helped Rose put her hair up over the pads and fixed it in place after she had dressed. “You look really beautiful, my lady. Maybe there’s a handsome gentleman in the party.”
“After my recent experience, I have no interest in men.”
“Garn!”
“No, I mean it. Now pick up my stole and fan and follow me to the drawing-room. The second gong has just been sounded. You’d better ring the bell first and get a guide.”
A liveried footmen escorted them down from the tower into an enormous fake baronial hall where fake suits of armour glistened under fake tattered medieval flags.
A butler took over and led them across the hall, opened a heavy carved door and sonorously announced, “Lady Rose Summer.”
It seemed to Rose at first that she had entered a room full of staring eyes. Red light from a large fire flickered on monocles and lorgnettes. Then the marchioness came forward. “Nice to see you, dear. Pleasant journey?”
“Yes. I –”
“Good. Let me see. Take you round. Introductions. No, I won’t. You’ll get to know everybody in good time. Ah, dinner.”
“Got the honour,” said a young man with patent-leather hair, holding out his arm. “I’m Freddy Pomfret. Deuced fine place this, what?”
“Very fine, yes,” said Rose politely and was led into dinner. She wondered briefly whether the marquess would serve roast ox to chime with the surroundings, but the dinner was the usual extravagant fare. A large silver epergne in the centre of the table depicting General Wolfe’s army scaling the heights of Quebec restricted her view of the guests opposite her. Freddy was on her right and his friend, Tristram Baker-Willis, was on her left.
The words of Miss Tremp came back to Rose. “Ninety men out of every hundred,” the governess had said, “offer a remark upon the weather, but unless there has been something very extraordinary going on in the meteorological line, it is better to avoid the subject if possible.”
Fortunately for Rose, the bomb explosions near her home fascinated her two dinner companions so much that she was obliged to say little. Freddy ranted about the Bolsheviks and when she eventually turned away to Tristram, he ranted in much the same vein.
At last the marchioness rose as a signal that the ladies were to follow her to the drawing-room.
Rose had counted nine men and nine women in the house party, the number not including their hosts.
The marchioness introduced Rose and she tried to remember all the names. There were two American sisters, Harriet and Deborah Peterson, buxom and healthy-looking but disappointing Rose because they did not have American accents but the clipped, staccato speech of the others.
Then there was a thin, waspish girl called Mary Gore-Desmond who said little but kept flashing angry little resentful glances all around her. A Scottish beauty, Frederica Sutherland, was telling them all about the joys of hunting in a voice which could have been heard across two six-acre fields and three spinneys.
Mrs. Jerry Trumpington, ensconced in an armchair by the fire, was a toad of a woman with a fat lascivious face and very thick lips. She was talking about food to a dark, elegant woman, Margaret Bryce-Cuddlestone.
Standing together in a corner:mousy Maisie Chatterton, and a tall, pseudo-theatrical lady called Lady Sarah Trenton.
After the introductions, it looked as if Rose was going to be ignored, but Margaret Bryce-Cuddlestone approached her and said with a smile, “Are you getting over your terrible treatment at the hands of that cad, Blandon?”
“I’m getting over it,” said Rose ruefully, “but I don’t think anyone else is.”
“Walk with me a little,” urged Margaret. “That awful Trumpington woman is about to heave herself to her feet. She’s just been watching you as if you are a particularly succulent lamb chop. If we engage in deep conversation, she’ll hopefully leave us alone. This party does seem like a bore and I’ve only just arrived. Still, we’ve all got to find husbands.”
“Have you had a season?” asked Rose.
“Yes, and I failed. Ma and Pa got two offers for my hand and I turned both down, so I’m in disgrace. I was let out of my cage to go to this house party and more or less ordered to come back with a husband.”
“Is there anyone you find attractive? Who are they all?”
“Well, there’re your dinner companions, Freddy and Tristram. Need I say more? The Honourable Clive Fraser is handsome and rich, but dull, very dull. Sir Gerald Burke is terribly amusing. Quite the rattle. But no money and there are rumours that he was, well, a friend of Oscar Wilde.”
“Is he a playwright as well?”
“Not quite. Harry Trenton is so-so – hunts, shoots and kills everything that moves, ideal for the Scottish female over there. Jerry Trumpington is married to the awful Mrs. Trumpington. And then there is Neddie Fremantle. He’s called Neddie because he laughs like a donkey, haw, haw, haw. And finally Bertram Brookes, quiet and acidulous.”
“It was very kind of Lord Hedley to invite me,” said Rose. “As you will understand, I have not been in the way of getting any invitations at all.”
“It’ll pass. You are not what I expected. The rumour was you didn’t like anyone and talked like an encyclopaedia.”
“I wanted to find an intelligent husband,” mourned Rose.
Margaret gave an elegant little shrug. “You will have to forget that. They do not exist in our class. Did you not meet young men before your come-out? There must have been the local hunt balls and parties, dinners and so on.”
“My parents really thought I was a schoolgirl and I am afraid my governess did not remind them of my age. It was only on my seventeenth birthday when they asked how old I was that they realized they would need to prepare me for a season. So I was trained in etiquette and dancing by various ladies. I first attended a few parties, just before the start of the season in London, but it was at one of those parties that I met Sir Geoffrey.”
Margaret nodded in understanding. Parents of their class quite often saw little of their children.