Menfreya in the Morning (21 page)

“As the daughter of an M.P. you’ll make a good M.P.’s wife.”

“A very practical consideration.”

“Why not be practical? Choosing a wife is a matter worthy of the utmost consideration. Far more than selecting a Member, you know. They can be out after five years. A wife must last for a lifetime. So, an M.P.*s daughter is the perfect

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wife for a rising M.P., particularly when it was for the same constituency.”

“So you will expect me to help you in elections, and the necessary nursing process in between.”

“Certainly I shall. You’ll be excellent.”

I felt the tears in my eyes then and I could not stop them. I was so ashamed, for he had never seen me cry before. In fact I couldn’t remember when I had.

He drew away from me, and I have never seen tenderness such as his as he took a handkerchief and wiped away my tears.

“At such a time/1 he scolded. “Tears … and Harriet!”

“They don’t go together, do they? Don’t imagine I’m going to be a weeping wife. It’s because I’m happy.”

He too was moved, and he sought to hide it.

“You don’t know anything yet,” he said. “This is only the beginning. We’re going to be known throughout the duchy as the happy Menfreys.”

Before I left for Cornwall I went to see Mr. Greville of Greville, Baker and Greville that he might explain my financial position to me. He told me that the death of my stepmother had made me the heiress to a considerable fortune. Everything would now be mine when I reached the age of twenty-one or on the occasion of my marriage, which must have the approval of himself and the other executor of the will.

“I have already heard from Mr. Menfrey that you have promised to marry him, and I can set your mind at rest without delay. There will be no objection, and your fortune will pass into your hands almost immediately after the marriage has taken place.”

“What of the second executor?”

“Sir Endelion Menfrey.” Mr. Greville’s rugged features were as near a smile as they could come. “I think your father would be very pleased by your engagement. It was a match which was talked over by him and Sir Endelion when you were a child.”

Then,” I said blankly, “we are doing what was expected of us.”

The plump white hands were spread out on the desk, and their owner surveyed them with satisfaction. “I am sure,” he said, in his dry, precise manner, “that this is a highly de-

rfrable union, and I can tell you, Miss Delvaney, that it simplifies matters greatly.” He picked up some papers on his desk* as though weighing them, and looked at me over his gold-rimmed pince-nez. “Now, your allowance will go on as usual until we have the formalities settled. I hear that you will shortly be traveling down to Cornwall hi the company of Lady Menfrey. Excellent! Excellent! And the marriage will take place there. Congratulations I I do not think there could have been a more satisfactory finale to these unfortunate happenings.”

I felt as though I were being neatly filed away in a cabinet labeled “Heiress safely disposed of as prearranged. Unfortunate matters satisfactorily settled.”

And as I went out to the carriage I wished that my father and the Menfreys had not discussed my future so thoroughly. I wished that Bevil and I had met a few months before and been swept off our feet by an irresistible passion.

I was beginning to suspect that, for all my display of cynicism, I was at heart a romantic.

“Here is no reason for postponing our departure for Cornwall,” said Lady Menfrey. “There you will be able to plan what you intend to do about the house … about everything. BevU will naturally see that what you want is carried out, when you have made your decision.”

I thought of the house where life would be going on as it had before the accident. It would be a silent house. I imagined the servants speaking in whispers, tiptoeing past the room where Jenny’s body had been found. They would be wondering what the future held for them, and it was unfair to keep them in suspense.

Fanny would, of course, come with me, but the others would have to find fresh places and were no doubt anxious about their future. I discussed this with Bevil and as a result I again went along to see Greville, Baker and Greville, and it was decided that annuities should be arranged for Mrs. Trant, Polden and the elderly servants, and gratuities for the younger, and that although they should remain in their posts for the next two or three months, they should begin making other arrangements, and if any succeeded in finding new places they would be released.

I felt relieved having settled this and went along to the house the day before I was due to leave for Cornwall.

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I asked Mrs. Trant to summon all the servants to the library, and there I told them of my situation and what had been arranged. I felt deeply moved to see their relief, and on behalf of them all Polden expressed gratitude and their wishes for my happiness.

“You’ll be selling the house, I reckon. Miss Harriet,” said Mrs. Trant.

“Certainly.”

“Well, Miss, if ever you and Mr. Menfrey should be needing the services of any of us … you would only have to say so, and speaking on behalf of us all, we should be glad to leave what posts we had and return to you.”

I thanked them all and then went up to my old room with Fanny to discuss what I wanted her to bring to me in Cornwall when she came down a few days after me.

I tried to be practical when we reached my room.

“I shall discard most of these things,** I said. “We shall pass through Paris on our honeymoon, and I intend to buy some clothes there. So just a few things will be needed, Fanny.”

“There’ll be your books and some of the little things you cherished.”

I thought of them. My postcard album; letters which I had always kept; little things which had pleased me; a box covered in shells in which I kept buttons and needles; a musical box which played Widdicombe Fan- and which William lister had bought for me when he had taken a brief holiday in the Devon village; a row of pearls which my father had given to me—his Christmas present (he preferred to forget my birthdays) over the years, one pearl added each year. I had never liked it although now looking at the perfectly shaped beads of that deep, creamy color, at the flashing diamonds in the clasp, I realized that it was a beautiful ornament and probably worth a great deal But to me it had been symbolic of bis lack of interest. Custom demanded that he give me something, so there was the pearl, costing so much more than the baubles Fanny had given me, yet far less precious.

I thought again of how much I owed Fanny, who had understood how a child would have felt on waking on Christmas morning and looking in vain for the bulging stocking. She it was who had told me the Christmas legend; she who had bought those oranges, nuts, bags of fondants,

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fascinating cutout cardboard marvels, penny plain and tuppence colored, those sixpenny dolls. Fanny had put the happiness into my Christmases when she roamed among the market stalls looking for gaudy, glittering objects which would delight a child, not my father in the thickly carpeted jeweler’s salon selecting the pearl to add to my necklace, which would prove an investment.

I put a few things on my bed—the music box from William Lister, my books—yes, they must come, all of them, because they had provided the escape from fact Elsie Dins-more, Misunderstood, The Wide Wide World, Peep Behind the Scenes, A Basket of Flowers .. . stories of children whose lot had been as unhappy as my own; Little Women (how I had thrown myself into that delightful family, taking the parts of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in turns); Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Stories of endurance and triumph. I could never part with them. Fanny watched me. “You don’t want that” she said.

It was the cutout cardboard stage—tuppence colored.

“Fanny,” I said. “I remember the first time I saw it It was … wonderful. Six o’clock on Christmas morning.**

“You would wake early. I used to lie there listening for you. I was awake at five on those mornings. You used to get out of bed in the dark.”

“Yes, and feel the stocking; and then take it back to bed and hold it … guessing. I had a pact with myself that I mustn’t open it till the first streak of light was in the sky; because if I did it would disappear and all be a dream.”

“You and your fancies!”

“If it hadn’t been for you, Fanny, there wouldn’t have been a stocking.”

“Oh, some of the others would have seen to it.”

“I don’t think so. They were the best mornings of the year. I remember waking up a week later and the terrible disappointment I felt because it wasn’t Christmas, and that I should have to wait fifty-one weeks for the next”

^Childrenl” said Fanny, smiling tenderly.

I stood up suddenly and threw myself into her arms.

“Oh, Fanny, dear Fanny, we’ll always be together.”

She was militant in her fierceness. “You bet we will, Miss. Td like to see the one as could part me from you.”

I released her and sat down on the bed.

“I shall be glad to be finished with this house. I don’t re-

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member ever being really happy here except on those Christmas mornings and times with you. Do you remember how we used to go out into the markets—how we used to toss with the pieman and buy hot chestnuts?” “You always loved the markets, Miss.” “They seemed so exciting and colorful, and those people who were so anxious to sell their goods … they were poor and I was rich … but I used to envy them, Fanny.”

“You didn’t know what their lives were, Miss. You just thought selling there in the market was a nice sort of game, and never having felt the chilblains driving you mad with the itch and the soreness, and the rheumatics bending you double, you just thought what a good time they had. You can’t always know what’s going on out of sight, can you.”

“I was too sorry for myself in those days, Fanny. Now all that is over. I shall expect you in Cornwall by the end of the week.”

“You can depend upon it, Miss, that as soon as I’ve cleared up here I’ll be on that train. And what about all the furniture and everything?”

“I suppose the good pieces will come down to Menfreya; the rest well sell. Mr. Bevil will make the arrangements.” “I reckon he’ll be making all the arrangements in the future* Miss.”

I smiled and I suppose my happiness shone through the smile, because she was silent for a moment; then I noticed her own expression harden and I understood, because Fanny was not usually one to hide her true feelings, that she disapproved of my wedding.

“I hope so, Fanny. As my husband it is natural that he should!”

“Oh yes, hell make them all right.” “Fanny, for heaven’s sake, stop itl This is a time for congratulation—not doleful prophecy.”

“The time for prophecy is when it comes naturally to make it”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” “I’m not at ease in my mind, Miss. Couldn’t you wait a while?”

“Wait, Fanny? What for?” “You’ve been rushed into this.”

“Rushed. I’ve been waiting for Bevil to ask me to marry him for years.”

Tm afraid …”

“Don’t be. Now, I’m not going to discuss this with you anymore. Everything will be all right.”

“There’s one thing I’d like to know.”

“All right. What is it?”

“Did he ask you before your stepmother died … or after?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means a lot to me, Miss. Before you had only your income, didn’t you? I don’t understand these things much, but I reckon that when your stepmother died all that money was yours … without strings like … as there was with her. Well, you see, if he waited till after she died …”

I could have struck her because I was so angry, and I knew myself well enough to understand that I was whipping up anger to hide fear. Why had she put that vague, uneasy thought of mine into words so that now I could no longer ignore it? I had to faring it out and examine it in the light of day.

“What nonsense,” I said. “He was going to ask me before she died … only we were interrupted.”

If only Aunt Clarissa had not come in at that moment when he had called on me! I was certain then that he was about to ask me to marry him. But was he? If he had meant to ask me, wouldn’t he have made the opportunity?

Fanny was looking at me steadily, her eyes dark with fear and suspicion. She was firmly convinced that Bevil was marrying me for my money; more than that, she had watered those seeds of doubt in my own mind so that they were already springing into life.

She twisted her hands awkwardly. “You see, Miss Harriet, I want you to be happy. I just want everything of the best for you. And when things start to go wrong, they have a habit of going on that way.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

**I can’t help thinking of that poor lady. She’s on my mind. I see her looking at her lovely skin in the glass and men putting that stuff in her drink , . . and then going like that”

“It’s horrifying. I’m trying not to think of it, Fanny, but I can’t get her out of my mind. Dying like that … without being prepared.”

“Without being prepared,” whispered Fanny. “Yes, that was how it was. She didn’t have a warning. She was there

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one day and gone the next I expect my Billy had a warning. He’d hear the storm rising, wouldn’t he? They’d be fighting the storm and they’d know there was danger all round… but she, poor lady, she didn’t know.. .**

“We’ve got to stop thinking of it, Fanny.”

“Thinking can’t do no good,” she agreed.

**Now stop worrying about me. Everything wfll be all right”

“Oh yes. Well see to that between us.”

Her mouth was set, her eyes hard; she looked like a general going into battle.

And although she had made those doubts spring up in my mind, I knew that as long as Fanny lived I should always have someone to love me.

Lady Menfrey and I were met at Liskeard, and I shall never forget driving to Menfreya. The lanes, made narrower by the summer foliage on the banks, had never seemed so green and colorful; I sniffed the warm breeze as we came near to the sea and when I saw the towers of Menfreya I could have wept with emotion. Now it was more than a house which had caught my fancy, more than an ancient fascinating house; it was my home.