London Calling Read online

  “I’m sure I don’t know what servants are coming to. I have to watch the girls every moment to be sure they don’t break anything. And half the time they won’t obey my orders at all. The younger footman was quite insolent to me the other day.”

  Mrs. Careme gave a low, throaty laugh at that. “My dear Fanny, as I’ve told you before, it’s all in the way you give the order. I’m sure I never have any trouble with the servants obeying me.”

  Miss Fanny’s face reddened again and her lips tightened, but she made no reply. Instead, she turned to Ruth. “Perhaps, Mrs. Maryvale, you would care to see the conservatory?”

  Both Susanna and her aunt accepted, and Miss Fanny swept off, her shoulders, under her rather shabby lace shawl, rigid, hands clenched at her sides. The conservatory was at the back of the house, a long, high-ceilinged room, walled in with glass, filled with baskets of hanging plants and the moist, warm scent of earth and growing things.

  When they all three stood on the flagstone path that wound through the urns and potted palms, Miss Fanny leaned back, still trembling.

  “That woman.” The words burst out as though she were powerless to contain them. “That woman is impossible.”

  Her voice shook. “What my brother-in-law can have been thinking in taking up with her, I do not know.”

  Ruth looked at Susanna helplessly, then made a vague, sympathetic murmur, and Miss Fanny winked the tears away fiercely from her watery blue eyes.

  “For nearly twenty years‌—‌ever since his marriage to my poor sister, I’ve lived with Charles. And after my sister died, I stayed and kept house for him. And now he means to push me out for that . . . ‌that common trollop. It’s not fair.”

  Miss Fanny’s quavering voice became quite fierce, and Susanna was suddenly sorry for her.

  “Surely it’s not as bad as that,” she said gently. “The Admiral wouldn’t turn you out.”

  “No‌—‌no, I’m to go on making my home here. But she’ll be in charge. She’ll be the mistress of the house, then.”

  Miss Fanny’s voice broke and she fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief. Susanna felt another pang of pity. After the Admiral’s marriage, Miss Fanny’s position would be an unbearable one. A penniless relation, despised, unwanted, pushed out of her meager position of authority by the arrival of the new mistress.

  Susanna and her aunt exchanged another helpless look, and Miss Fanny appeared to take hold of herself. She gave a loud sniff, and scrubbed at the end of her rather prominent nose.

  “Well, never mind.” All at once, she spoke briskly, as though regretting her momentary outburst. “I’m sorry to have burdened you with all this. Shall we go back?”

  When they returned to the morning room, the Admiral looked up from where he was seated beside Mrs. Careme.

  “Ruth . . . ‌and Miss Susanna. Charlotte has just suggested a wonderful idea. She’s asked me to invite both of you to join us for dinner tonight. I hope you’ll agree?”

  Ruth looked a little startled by the invitation, but she turned to her niece. “I should be delighted,” she said slowly. “Susanna, we have no other plans, have we?”

  Susanna was studying again the hard, handsome face of Mrs. Careme, eyes now wide and innocent, lips stretched in a bland smile.

  She had come here hoping to gain information. Which would, of necessity, take time‌—‌since she could hardly march up to Charlotte Careme and demand to be told whether James had made her acquaintance under another name.

  Especially since, even on first sight, she instinctively trusted Mrs. Careme approximately as far as she would be able to throw her.

  “We have no other dinner engagements at all.” Susanna smiled brightly in Mrs. Careme’s direction. “Thank you so much for inviting us.”

  Mrs. Careme nodded slightly in reply. The Admiral rubbed his hands together.

  “Capital, capital. We’ll have a regular party. I didn’t mention it before, but I have a surprise for all of you.” He looked round the room. “I’ve invited a pair of guests to stay here with us for a few days. A Major Haliday. Major Haliday and his wife, Helen.”

  There was a brief, electric silence. Though why it should have been electric, Susanna could not see. The announcement, on the face of it, had been ordinary enough. But someone in the room‌—‌though she could not even tell who‌—‌had been surprised‌—‌no, more than that, shocked and dismayed by the news.

  She looked round at the other three for some sign in one of their faces, but could find none. Marianne looked merely sullen, while Miss Fanny’s face held nothing more than a mild, faintly anxious frown. Mrs. Careme’s look was as smooth and glassily poised as ever, lips faintly curved, lids lowered to veil her eyes.

  And yet from someone in the room she had caught the sound of a sharply indrawn breath, and felt the sudden quiver of tension.

  Miss Fanny was the first to break the silence. “Two more guests? Staying here? Really, Charles, I do think you might have told me. It makes for a good deal of extra work and . . .”

  “Don’t fuss, Fanny,” Admiral Tremain cut in tolerantly. “There’s no need for you to do anything. We’ve extra bedrooms‌—‌may as well use them, that’s what I say.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say.” Miss Fanny’s voice was fretful. “But the servants . . .”

  “Oh, bother the servants.” All at once, the Admiral was impatient. “The servants will have to lump it, that’s all. What do I pay them for, I’d like to know?”

  “When did you say the Halidays will be arriving?” Mrs. Careme’s voice was quiet, but Susanna looked at her sharply. Her eyes were still hidden, but there was something a little rigid about her‌—‌a fixed, frozen quality to her graceful pose that had not been present before‌—‌and the long, slim fingers clenched around the stem of her glass as she waited for Admiral Tremain’s response.

  The Admiral, though, noticed nothing amiss. “They should be coming any minute now. I said sometime this morning. Why—” He broke off, as a bell pealed in some distant part of the house. “Why, that must be them, now.”

  Again there was that brief, electric silence, charged with a tension Susanna didn’t understand. The next moment, the door opened, and a powdered footman stepped in.

  “Major and Mrs. Brooke Haliday.”

  A couple entered, and paused in the doorway, the man fair-haired and handsome, with a weak, dissipated face and slightly petulant mouth, the woman dark, statuesque, and intense. They stood there, and, with a jolt of shock, Susanna recognized the couple from the night before whose bitter quarrel behind the pillar she had inadvertently overheard.

  Chapter 7

  “A handsome couple, wouldn’t you say?” Susanna jumped. She had, without meaning to, been staring across the room at the Halidays, and now Mrs. Careme’s voice at her shoulder made her turn.

  It was evening. Susanna and Aunt Ruth had taken their leave of Admiral Tremain’s household soon after the Halidays’ arrival that morning. They had returned to the house and spent one of the most tedious days Susanna had ever endured in unpacking and arranging the rented house. Though she tried not to let Ruth see how tightly her nerves were stretched.

  Finally, the hour had come to dress and ready themselves for the Admiral’s dinner invitation. Susanna wore a white muslin gown with a beaded silver overdress, and her aunt a deep russet-orange satin. The coachman had driven them to the Admiral’s house in Berkeley Square. And now they were all assembled in the drawing room, awaiting the gong that would announce dinner.

  “A handsome couple, yes,” Susanna said slowly in answer to Mrs. Careme. “But not, I think, a very happy one.”

  “Happy?” Mrs. Careme gave a sudden laugh. “Do you think any woman would be happy with such a husband as that?”

  There was an underlying harshness in Mrs. Careme’s beautifully modulated tones as she spoke, and as Susanna turned, she saw that Mrs. Careme, too, was staring fixedly at the couple across the way. She looked suddenly older, and her
face, above a splendidly draped evening gown of emerald silk, was hard and set.

  Susanna studied her face more closely.

  “Have you met them before?”

  Instantly, Mrs. Careme’s eyes fell, thick lashes veiling the slanted green eyes.

  “No. I was speaking generally. Major Haliday is a very common type. So many men are, do you not agree?”

  Mrs. Careme’s eyes came up, then, to meet Susanna’s in a long, guileless look that was studiously square and level.

  Before Susanna could reply, the gong sounded.

  Mrs. Careme’s eyebrows lifted. “Dinner time already. Shall we go in?”

  She moved towards the door, and Susanna was left, still watching the Halidays. Helen Haliday was dressed in a flame-colored gown of watered silk, her lush dark hair swept back from her brow, and a turban of matching silk wound round her head. Her face was sullen and closed, and she stood consciously a little apart from her husband, eyes turned steadfastly away.

  As Susanna watched, the Admiral came up and offered Mrs. Haliday his arm, and she, still without looking at her husband, took it, moving off in the direction of the dining room.

  Brooke Haliday stood alone a moment, looking slightly foolish, and, at the same time, angry. His eyes, as he watched his wife move off, were hard, and Susanna saw his jaw tighten. Then his gaze lighted on Mrs. Careme, and his eyes kindled. He smiled a queer, almost triumphant smile.

  “May I escort you in?” He offered her his arm.

  Susanna had moved to take her own place in the procession, but still she saw the sudden flush of color under Mrs. Careme’s skin, then saw it ebb and fade just as abruptly, leaving it white as wax. When she replied, though, her voice was perfectly controlled and cool.

  “Thank you. I should be delighted.” And, taking his arm, she swept forward through the open double doors.

  The Admiral’s dining room was a lofty, handsome chamber, with paneled wood walls and heavily carved, high backed chairs. A vast canvas of a hunting scene, painted in oils, hung on one wall, while on the others were ranged a series of what Susanna took to be family portraits, men and women in the tri-cornered hats and long-waisted dresses of a generation past.

  Mrs. Careme sailed to the hostess’s place at the foot of the table. Susanna noticed Miss Fanny, in grey with a white spinster’s cap, watching resentfully. She had wound a string of cheap onyx beads about her neck, and fingered them nervously, her long, bony fingers moving over and over, twining the chain this way and that.

  As Mrs. Careme seated herself, Susanna saw the hand tighten and clench on the beads. Miss Fanny turned to her brother-in-law and said, in slightly too loud a voice, “Charles, I have been meaning to speak to you about the footman, Albert. He is really getting to be quite impossible. I caught him today without his jacket on, and he seemed not in the least ashamed of himself. Indeed, he was quite impertinent when I rebuked him.”

  “Eh? Albert?” Admiral Tremain looked vague. “Always seemed all right to me. What do you say, Charlotte? The boy Albert’s all right, isn’t he?”

  Mrs. Careme, with a little half-laugh, inclined her head, and the Admiral turned back to Miss Fanny with a benign smile. “There, you see, Fanny? Now, don’t you bother about the servants. No need for you to trouble yourself about such matters anymore.”

  Miss Fanny’s thin lips compressed, but she didn’t reply, merely moving off to her own place at the table, fingers still moving compulsively over her beads.

  Susanna found herself seated near the foot of the table, between Mrs. Careme, to her right, and Major Haliday on her left. The food was beautifully prepared, and throughout the first course of turtle soup, green goose, and veal ragout, Mrs. Careme kept up a steady stream of polite conversation, inquiring of Susanna whether this was her first visit to London, whether she had been to the theater, to the opera, to the fireworks demonstration at Vauxhall Gardens.

  She spoke intelligently, and listened with surprisingly polite interest, but Susanna felt throughout that her thoughts were far away. She ate little of the food before her, and once, when the conversation lapsed, her eyes strayed beyond Susanna to Brooke Haliday.

  The Major’s eyes were a trifle over-bright, his color flushed, but his voice was still perfectly clear and distinct.

  ”Yes, I can assure you, Lady Grey’s the horse for Newmarket. If you take my advice, you’ll put a goodly sum on her nose. I assure you, I intend to.”

  He had spoken to the table at large, but only his wife responded. She had been watching him, face taut with disgust, and now she snapped out, “Oh yes? With whose money?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence, while the angry color rose under Major Haliday’s collar, and his eyes narrowed. It was Ruth who intervened to avert the crisis. Turning to Major Haliday with her most charming smile, she said, “Do, please, go on with what you were telling me about the Duke of Clarence’s stables. I was so interested in what you had to say about the manner of feeding.”

  Major Haliday hesitated a moment, then relaxed. He poured himself another glass of wine, and began to talk, only a little defiantly.

  Mrs. Careme, after a brief pause, turned back to Susanna. “And you say you have not been to the theater, Miss Ward? Then you and your aunt must come with us on Tuesday. Admiral Tremain intends to take us all to Covent Garden. We should be most pleased to have you join us.”

  “Eh?” The Admiral had caught the last of this speech, and looked up. “The theater?” He frowned. “Yes, I’m afraid I have bad news, Charlotte. I shan’t be able to escort you after all. The War Office has called an important meeting I must attend.”

  “The War Office.” Mrs. Careme made a slight face. “I’m sure they see far more of you than we do.”

  “I know, my dear, I know. But duty calls, you know, in times of war.”

  “War.” Mrs. Careme turned to Susanna with an elegant lift of the shoulders. “I don’t understand why there ought to be a war at all. It seems so unnecessary. And terribly inconvenient. The Admiral tells me it would be too dangerous for us to travel to Paris at all this year.”

  Susanna felt her pulse quicken and tried to frame a question that would arouse no suspicion; young ladies were not expected to know about, much less converse on, affairs of state. “You are fond of Paris?” she asked at last.

  “I was brought up there. I lived there until I was fourteen.”

  Susanna nodded. “I see.” That accounted for the faint accent.

  “It’s this wretched Napoleon,” Mrs. Careme went on. “In my opinion, the French people ought simply to expel him from the country. Then we could call off the war and all behave sensibly.”

  Admiral Tremain smiled down the table at her indulgently. “I’m sure we all wish that, Charlotte, my dear. But as long as Napoleon is on the throne, we must be prepared to fight. He’ll invade England, if given half the chance.”

  “Oh.” Miss Fanny gave a little gasp of alarm, and lifted a hand to her throat. “Oh, don’t say such things, Charles. You make me quite frightened.”

  “Now, now, Fanny. There’s nothing to be frightened about. Our British troops are a match for the Frogs any day.”

  Marianne looked up from her plate, at that. She had been sitting throughout the meal in smoldering silence, casting occasional black glances towards her father and Mrs. Careme, and now she spoke, her voice cutting harshly across the silence like the lash of a whip.

  “Yes, Aunt Fanny. I’m sure we have nothing to fear.” Her voice was heavy with irony. “With men like Father in charge.”

  There was another uncomfortable silence, and the Admiral’s face darkened. “Now, see here, young lady,” he began.

  But Mrs. Careme interrupted before he could go on. She rose from her chair in a single, fluid movement. “I think it’s time we ladies retired to the drawing room. Shall we?”

  She glanced inquiringly round the table, and Susanna, Ruth, Mrs. Haliday, and Miss Fanny rose as well. Only Marianne hesitated, her strongly marked, square-jaw
ed face sullen. Mrs. Careme’s eyes rested on her a moment, a flicker of amusement lurking in their green depths, a faint smile curving the corners of her lips.

  Marianne, too, had seen the look. Color swept up under the fair skin, and she lifted her chin, but she rose from the table, trembling. She wore a shapeless gown of some dull grey muslin that could scarcely have been less flattering, and her hair was frizzed out clumsily about her face. She stood there, quivering a moment, eyes bright with tears, and looking pathetically young. Then, without a backward glance, she turned and marched out of the room.

  The others followed more sedately, regaining the drawing room and seating themselves about the hearth, where a fire had been kindled in the grate. Susanna found herself seated between her Aunt Ruth and Mrs. Careme. Marianne had refused to join the rest of the group, taking up a book and stalking pointedly to a place on the window seat, while Miss Fanny drew out her tapestry work, threaded her needle, and began making minute stitches in the canvas. Helen Haliday seated herself on the sofa, and appeared to forget the others, staring blindly into the dancing flames.

  Mrs. Careme leaned back in her chair with a faint sigh.

  “I hope the gentlemen won’t be long. You know what men are, when they get to talking over the port.”

  Susanna had not thought Mrs. Haliday was listening, but her head jerked up at that, and her lips tightened. She said nothing, though, and after a moment’s pause, Mrs. Careme went on.

  “Though the Admiral is far less inclined to linger, now that there’s no more French wine to be had.” She smiled faintly. “Another casualty of the war.”

  “You speak as though doing without French wine were the worst threat we had to suffer.” Miss Fanny’s face was disapproving.

  Mrs. Careme shrugged. “So far as I’m concerned, the war is only of interest in so far as it effects our lives. I leave all the worrying over political business to the Admiral. Heaven knows he’s plagued often enough by all this dreary business with the War Office.”