The Secret Countess

15

Baskerville woke first on the morning of the wedding. Woke, stretched and yawned in the small room in the bachelor’s wing which Rupert still occupied for this last night. Woke and padded over to the two suitcases, strapped and labelled for Switzerland and howled as dogs have howled at their master’s luggage for centuries.

And after Baskerville, came Proom.

Proom had seen to the arrangement of the trestle tables for the tenantry and the timing of the cars to go to church. He had supervised the setting out of the striped awning and the strip of red carpet that led from the front door down the steps. He had seen that the telegrams were laid out on a silver salver by the best man’s chair and that the Damascus steel knife from the Topkapi Palace was in place next to the wedding cake. He had even procured five pounds of rice from Mrs Park and ordered it to be parcelled out and delivered to the villagers, who, in the matter of spontaneous festive gestures, could not, where this particular wedding was concerned, be relied upon.

No one seeing him would believe how heavy his heart was, for his plan had not succeeded. He had wasted Rabinovitch’s money. He had failed.

It had been necessary to take the old-established servants into his confidence and they had played their parts to a man. By the time Proom, the previous night, had gone to Dr Lightbody’s room and requested a private interview with that eminent eugenicist, everything was ready. But though Proom had been able to substantiate his disclosures, though the doctor had been violently agitated and upset, he had not acted. ‘He hasn’t slept a wink,’ Sid, who had brought up his shaving water, had just reported, ‘but he hasn’t done a thing.’

And now it was too late.

‘No luck, then?’ enquired Mr Potter, fetching the white ribbons to tie on the Daimler — a query echoed with increasing hopelessness by Louise, directing the extra village women hired to carry the jellies and syllabubs, the patés and terrines upstairs, by James, busy with the wine coolers, by Mr Cameron, bringing in the corsage for the dowager and the buttonholes for the bridegroom and the guests…

By eleven o’clock no one even asked any more, and on the instructions of Mr Proom they went upstairs to change for church. But when the maids came down in their polka dot muslins and cherry trimmed hats, they found Mrs Park still in her overalls.

‘I’m not going to the church,’ she said with finality. ‘I can’t leave Win.’ The little kitchen maid whom Mrs Park had put in her own bed was slowly recovering, but she was still very weak.

‘Oh, Mrs Park,’ wailed Peggy. ‘And your new foulard and all!’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Park. ‘I’m not keen. It’s just Miss Ollie I’d like to have seen.’

Upstairs, the dowager’s Alice was lowering Mrs Bunford’s powder blue silk over her employer’s head. ‘It’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘Except for the sleeves, of course.’ She sighed, noticing the dowager’s shadowed eyes, the lines of strain round her mouth. Well, there was nothing to be done. They were packed and ready to go to the Mill House on the following day and a damp, dark hole it seemed to Alice and the worst place you could think of for her rheumatism, but where Lady Westerholme went there Alice Spinks would follow. ‘Mr Cameron’s waiting, my lady, with your corsage. He wanted to give it to you himself.’

‘Oh, Mr Cameron, how beautiful! It’s got your new rose in it!’ The dowager’s eyes misted. The garden at the Mill House was small and overshadowed, and she and this dour old Scotsman had shared thirty years of delight in flowers. ‘Have you found a name for it yet?’ she asked into his ear-trumpet which had proved staunchly Muriel-proof. ‘Anna said you were thinking of naming it for Miss Hardwicke?’

The old man’s face broke into a crafty smile. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I’m calling it “Countess”.’

‘Just “Countess”?’ said the dowager, puzzled.

The gardener nodded and began to wheeze with his special brand of private laughter. ‘Just “Countess”,’ he said — and took his leave.

‘It’s time to go, my lady,’ said Alice gently.

‘Yes.’

Well, at least, thought the dowager, letting Alice adjust her hat, I’ve been spared the Herrings.

For Proom, sent to settle the Herrings’ outstanding fares and bring them back to Mersham, had returned empty-handed. The Herrings, it seemed, had taken umbrage and returned to Birmingham. God did that sometimes, the dowager had observed. Pushed you to the limit and then gave you just one little bonus: in this case, a wedding without Melvyn, Myrtle and the twins.

In the east wing, James, offering to valet Uncle Sebastien, had been repulsed by the sour-faced nurse, who was now helping the old man to get ready, talking to him like a child, with a dreadful, arch coyness. ‘We’re going to be very important today, aren’t we? We’re going to give the bride away, aren’t we? So we don’t want any nasty cigarette ash on our nice clean clothes, do we?’

And in her bedroom the baulked and furious Lady Lavinia snapped the gold bracelet that had been the bridegroom’s present to the bridesmaids on to her scraggy wrist and went along to Queen Caroline’s bedchamber.

But at the sight of the bride even Lavinia’s ill-temper subsided and she gave an involuntary gasp of admiration. Flanked by the obsequious Cynthia and the new Swiss maid who had providentially arrived the day before, standing erect and without a trace of nervousness in her glorious ivory dress, the future Countess of Westerholme was quite simply breathtaking.

‘My prayerbook and my gloves, please,’ she ordered. ‘Cynthia, pick up my train. I’m ready.’

Mr Morland, robed and waiting in the vestry, came forward with outstretched hands to greet the bridegroom. If the medieval saints had gone to their deaths as to a wedding, the Earl of Westerholme, thought the kind and scholarly vicar, looked as if he was preparing to invert the trend.

‘I’m afraid Mr Byrne’s not here yet,’ he said, concealing his surprise, for the best man had hitherto been most punctilious in the performance of his duties.

He moved over to the door and stood looking out at the congregation. Sad that the bride had no relatives at all. In the packed church only her erstwhile chaperone represented her side of the family. At the organ, Miss Frensham was peering with her half-blind eyes at the keys, anxiously memorizing the strange piece that Miss Hardwicke had ordered instead of ‘Lohengrin’. The formal urns of lilies, the gardenias and carnations stiffly wired to the pew ends by the London florists who had replaced Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer gave off an almost overpowering scent.

Mr Morland frowned. What was it that struck him as so unusual?

And then he realized. Absolutely no one was crying! Strange, thought Mr Morland, who could not remember such a thing. Exceedingly strange.

But if no one was crying there was one member of the congregation who was clearly in extremis. Dr Lightbody, sitting beside old Lady Templeton in the pew behind the dowager, was in a piteous state. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, his hands were shaking and once he rose in his seat and threw out an arm as if he were about to break into anguished speech.

‘Are you ill?’ whispered Lady Templeton, who could not approve such conduct in the House of God. ‘Do you wish to go out?’

The doctor managed to shake his head, but the phantoms that had haunted him since the Mersham butler, nursing a grievance against the family as these old retainers were apt to do, had been to see him, ran riot in his brain. For the fate awaiting Muriel Hardwicke was too terrible to contemplate. This white goddess, this vessel of perfection was going — and on this very night — to be most hideously defiled by the satanic brute that she had chosen to espouse. And he had been too weak to save her. Well, it was too late now. He closed his eyes, buried his head in his hands. Let him at least not see…

Five minutes passed, ten… The congregation was growing a little restive. Miss Frensham’s store of introductory music was running dangerously low. But it was not the bride who was causing the delay. It was the best man, who should have been here hours ago to help and succour the bridegroom.

‘Of course his presence is not essential to the ceremony,’ said Mr Morland. ‘Even if he has the ring.’

But now Tom came striding into the vestry. His apologies were perfunctory, his expression grim and it was almost with hostility that he led Rupert — whose sense of being caught in a nightmare from which he could not wake was growing stronger by the minute — to the chancel steps.

And now it was beginning. With her old mouth nervously puckered, Miss Frensham began to play the strange piece demanded by Miss Hardwicke — and on the arm of Mr Sebastien Frayne, the bride entered.

A gasp of sheer admiration greeted her. A slightly different gasp followed the entry of the two adult bridesmaids in their pink ruffles and petalled caps.

Then a rustling, whispers of surprise, of indignation, murmurs of disappointment, puzzled looks…

The bride reached the altar rails, handed her prayerbook to the Lady Lavinia; Mr Morland cleared his throat, when the voice of the bridegroom was heard saying clearly and imperiously, ‘Wait! Where is the third bridesmaid? Where is Ollie Byrne?’

Tom turned to his friend. Everything in him longed to blurt out what Muriel had done. Longed to show him Ollie as he had left her, lying white and despairing in her bed because there was nothing, now, to get up for and nowhere, now, to go. Ollie, who had seen so totally and searingly through Muriel’s concern for her health, her unctuous bribery… who had told the nursemaid coming to brush her marigold curls that there was no point because cripples didn’t need to be tidy, and now lay with her face to the wall beyond reach of comfort or of hope.

But Muriel, shocked at a voice raised in church, whispered, ‘Hush, dear. Ollie isn’t well, it seems,’ — and Mr Morland bent his head and began to repeat what are surely the best-loved words in the world:

But Tom’s disclosure would have been superfluous. Rupert had understood, and as clearly as if he were again present he remembered Ollie’s sad little question in the taxi on the way from Fortman’s and his own answer: ‘If you are not a bridesmaid at my wedding then there will be no wedding, and that I swear.’

Only there was a wedding. He was in the midst of it. He was marrying Muriel Hardwicke.

In his pew, Dr Lightbody groaned. The procreation of children yes… But what children? What monsters, what fiends in human form would that lewd and treacherous earl beget on the unsullied body of his bride? Oh, God, was there no one to warn her, no one to whom she could turn?

I gave my word to Ollie, thought Rupert — and lifted his head. But it was not his own voice which suddenly tore through the church: the frenzied voice of a human soul in torment, crying: ‘Stop! Oh, stop! This marriage must not be!’

Mr Morland looked up. The startled silence which followed was broken only by the small exclamation which escaped Lady Templeton as the doctor, stumbling from his pew, stepped heavily on her bunion.

‘It must not be!’ repeated Dr Lightbody, his pale eyes glittering now with a Messianic fervour. He brushed aside the Lady Lavinia, reached the altar rails: ‘This lovely woman has been most hideously deceived!’

The vicar blinked. In her pew, the dowager, who had read Jane Eyre no less than seven times, shook her head in disbelief. And Muriel, within minutes of her goal, turned furiously on the doctor.

‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses, Dr Lightbody.’ And to the vicar, ‘Pray, proceed.’

‘No, no!’ The doctor was now quite beside himself. ‘You must listen, Miss Hardwicke. You are in danger — terrible danger! There is tainted blood in the Westerholmes!’

‘Nonsense!’ But Muriel’s pansy-blue eyes had dilated in sudden fear. ‘It isn’t true, Rupert?’

‘Of course it isn’t true,’ said Rupert contemptuously.

‘It is true, it is true!’ screamed Lightbody. He pointed with a shaking finger at the earl. ‘Ask him what is hidden in the folly in the woods. Ask him, Miss Hardwicke. Ask him!’

The whispers and murmurs among the congregation were growing to a climax.

‘Ask him,’ yelled Dr Lightbody. ‘And if you don’t believe me, ask him!’ And he swivelled round to point at Mersham’s butler, sitting composed and immaculate in the back pew. ‘Go on! Ask Proom!’

The name, with its overtones of high respectability, rang through the church. Mr Morland, who had been about to order the doctor from the church, laid down his prayerbook. And Mr Cyril Proom rose slowly and majestically to his feet.

‘Please come forward, Mr Proom,’ said the vicar. ‘I’m sure there is a perfectly respectable explanation for this gentleman’s remarks.’

Steadily, with his usual measured tread, Mr Proom advanced up the aisle. As he drew level with her pew, the dowager threw him a glance of total puzzlement and he held her eye for a long moment before he moved up to the altar rails and, bending his head respectfully, addressed the vicar.

‘I’m afraid Dr Lightbody is perfectly correct, sir. I felt it advisable to make certain disclosures to him in view of his well-known interest in eugenics. And in any case,’ he said, ‘I am owed several months’ wages by the family.’

The lie, in its pointless blatancy, momentarily pierced Rupert’s sense of nightmare and he narrowed his eyes.

‘What is in the folly?’ demanded Muriel, who was no longer calm. ‘Tell me at once!’

‘Imbeciles!’ cried Dr Lightbody. ‘I’ve seen them! Dreadful, dribbling imbeciles. And they’re his cousins! His first cousins. By blood.’

‘It isn’t true! Rupert, tell me it isn’t true!’

‘He won’t tell you — he won’t admit it, he wants your money. But I tell you, I’ve seen them! I saw them last night. He keeps them locked up in that tower and they’re like animals — worse than animals.’

Mr Morland’s bewilderment was total. He’d been Vicar of Mersham for twenty years and never heard a whisper of scandal. But could Proom be lying?

‘Is it really so?’ he asked the butler, above the growing uproar in the church.

‘I’m afraid so, sir. The family’s given it about that the folly’s haunted by the ghost of Sir Montague Frayne, so nobody goes near it. But the screams — well, they’re not the screams of ghosts, sir; they’re the screams of his lordship’s relatives.’

Rupert had been listening to this farrago of nonsense in silence. Now he turned and raised enquiring eyes at his mother.

The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:

‘Oh, Rupert, darling,’ she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, ‘don’t you see? The game’s up!’

Proom had been against Myrtle Herring pretending to be a chicken laying an egg. It was his opinion that people asked to simulate mental derangement always picked on chickens and the routine, wing flapping, squawking performance was invariably hackneyed and unsatisfactory.

Myrtle, however, had convinced him. Myrtle had been in vaudeville and during their run-through in the folly, sitting atop a pile of straw, brought to her frenzied cluckings such an extreme of gynaecological anguish rising — as she examined the imagined egg — to such awed and ecstatic triumph, that Proom had been deeply impressed.

He had expected to encounter some difficulty in persuading the Herrings, as he conveyed them by a roundabout route to the back gates of Mersham, to follow his plan. True, they were lucky not to be in prison. Still, they had expected to come to a wedding. Instead, he proposed that they should give a full performance in the folly tower for the benefit of Dr Lightbody, spend the night there (albeit surrounded by oil stoves, mattresses and a hamper of food sent up by Mrs Park) and then — all traces of these comforts having been removed — give a repeat performance should the doctor decide to speak.

No persuasion had been needed. The sight of one hundred pounds in notes with the promise of another three hundred to come, should they succeed in convincing Miss Hardwicke that they really were deranged, had stilled all doubts. Not only that, but in setting the deception up they had proved to be cooperative and creative. The scruples that had troubled Proom and Mrs Park, the accusation they had levelled at themselves of appearing to make light of the mentally afflicted, did not trouble the Herrings. Nothing troubled the Herrings faced with four hundred pounds.

Towards the folly, then, in its setting of deep woodland, came the wedding party. Proom was at its head, his expression grave, his bearing deferential. Dr Lightbody followed, the bearer of terrible news, the man who had taken fate into his own hands and felt the decision pressing on him almost unbearably. Then came Muriel, holding up the train of her dress, still stately but no longer composed, and beside her, Rupert, convinced that his grasp on reality had finally slipped away. The dowager, the old Templetons, and Mr Morland, escorted by Tom Byrne, brought up the rear. Everyone else had been persuaded to stay behind.

The padlock on the door yielded to Proom’s fingers, the door creaked back. A smell of damp and decay met them, cobwebs brushed their faces…

‘But this is disgusting,’ said Muriel. ‘What—’

She was arrested by a scream. A truly horrible scream, followed by a burst of cackling laughter.

‘This way, miss,’ said Proom — and led the way up the round, dank stairs to the first of the tower rooms.

The thing that lay on the floor must once have been human, but it did not seem human now. Its face was livid and distorted, it had burrowed into the straw like an animal, its filthy fingers tore and clawed at its ragged clothes.

‘Good heavens!’ Old Lady Templeton was deeply shocked. ‘It can’t be… surely that’s poor dear Melvyn, isn’t it?’

‘Quite so, my lady.’ Proom turned to Miss Hardwicke. ‘This… er, gentleman, is his lordship’s first cousin, Mr Melvyn Herring.’

‘Oh my God!’ Muriel’s poise was shattered at last. She was as pale as her wedding dress. ‘No, I don’t believe it. His first cousin!’

‘Yes, miss. You will see he has the Templeton eyes and — oh, careful, miss.’

For the thing had arched its back, blobs of spittle came from its mouth — and suddenly it sprang.

It was Dr Lightbody who saved Muriel, dragging her back before the demented creature could sink its teeth into her hand.

‘He’s been like this for a while, miss, and I’m afraid he’s getting worse.’

‘But there are others,’ cried Dr Lightbody. ‘Dearest Miss Hardwicke, there are others! This monster has been allowed to marry, to beget other tainted beings.’

Proom inclined his head. ‘Dr Lightbody is correct. If you would care to follow me.’

They ascended another dark and curving staircase to the next room. On the floor lay two enormous boys, to all outward appearance, boys of fourteen or fifteen. But they wore nappies, their fingers were in their mouths; one drooled, the other hiccupped…

‘Master Dennis and Master Donald Herring,’ announced Proom. ‘As you see, they have remained in an infantile stage. The doctor gives no hope of improvement.’

‘It isn’t possible!’

But even as she spoke, Muriel saw that it was possible. Like the mad thing that was their father, these boys had the grey, gold-flecked eyes, the short nose of the Templetons.

A last flight of steps and they reached the top of the tower.

Myrtle had made a splendid nest. There were feathers in her hair, a deep and committed broodiness lit up her features and, even as they watched, she emitted a loud and fulfilling squawk…

‘And this is Mrs Herring,’ said Proom. ‘She, of course,’ he added conscientiously, ‘is no blood relation.’

But Myrtle Herring had been too much for Rupert. And collapsing against a wall, he began to laugh.

It was this laugh which finished Muriel. Hysteria, another dangerous mental aberration, began in just this unbridled way — and stepping forward she slapped him hard across the cheek.

‘You swine! You unmitigated, vile, scheming swine! Trying to get my money out of me! Trying to trap me into a marriage so that I could bear you some more deformed and squirming… things. I’ll have you for this, Rupert! You’ll pay me back every penny I put into that estate — every brass farthing, and the damages I’ll sue you for!’

‘Oh, Miss Hardwicke, if you would only take my protection!’ cried the doctor. ‘We could go to America! I could make you the priestess of the New Eugenics. You would be a goddess to me all my life!’

‘And your wife?’ said Muriel coldly.

‘She is dead.’

Muriel registered this information with a flicker of her pansy eyes. Then she began to remove her engagement ring. The doctor’s pale, beautifully manicured hand, closing over the solitaire diamond like a vice, prevented her.

‘I’m sure his lordship would want you to keep it as a memento.’

Rupert, still weak from laughter, nodded.

‘Yes, indeed! Do please keep it, Muriel.’

‘Very well.’ She replaced the ring, gathered up her train. ‘Come, Dr Lightbody.’

‘Ronald,’ he begged.

‘Come, Ronald,’ said Muriel Hardwicke, and with a last look of disgust and loathing, swept down the stairs.