Love by the Morning Star (9 page)

Flailing as he fell, the footman knocked Judy over a stool, where she crashed on top of another footman with black hair and very interesting sideburns.

“I bet she was pleased with that,” Waltraud said. “She's been trying to straddle him for ages, I hear, but he says that she is a nothing of a creature who has more bosom than brains, and he will only marry someone with the potential to rise to housekeeper or cook so he can be a butler or valet and make them a package deal.”

“You've been here a week and you know about everyone's personal lives?”

She shrugged her shapely shoulders. “Of course. I do not care for novels, so I must have human drama. Go on, ask me what love song Lord Liripip sings in the bath, or what they say about Lord Teddy's dearest friend from Oxford. But no, Judy was straddling Corcoran—I must know what happened next.”

“Nothing lewd,” Hannah assured her. “I wish it had. Better that than what really happened. Corcoran—and thank you for telling me his name, because I've forgotten everyone's already—pushed her off and grabbed at whatever he could to pull himself up. Unfortunately that was the tea towel, the one I'd folded so cleverly into sleeping twins, and somehow it went flying right onto the range, where those poor sleeping innocents went up in an absolute holocaust. I have heard the phrase ‘chickens with their heads cut off,' but I had never seen it until this day. Glenda had the presence of mind to fetch a pail of water from the scullery, but it was a soapy one, and sadly she flung it on yet another footman, the one with eyes like a lizard and no lashes to speak of?”

“Samuels,” Waltraud supplied.

“Yes, him, and he was absolutely soaked, and two other footmen went down in the slipperiness, and someone's tails caught on fire too, and poor Sally, who I must remember to call Cook, was moaning that His Lordship was ready for his pudding and someone had to take it out
right this second
, even if all the servants were drowning and burning to death, or the world would come to an end.”

“She didn't!”

“Well, that's what it sounded like at the time. Which is how I made my most terrible blunder.” Hannah turned down her lips in a pretty little mock frown, but her eyes were merry.

She had promised to watch, to learn, above all things to be useful. While the world dissolved into injury and anarchy around her, one clear mandate rang through: The dessert must go out. While Cook was fuming and the footmen were burning and drowning, Hannah did the only practical, logical thing that could be done. She picked up the chocolate timbale and carried it out to the dining hall.

“No one ever thought to tell me that it is a mortal sin for a woman to serve at the dinner table!”

L
ORD
L
IRIPIP SAT AT THE
head of a table as long as a tennis court. His foot, swaddled like a particularly colicky and troublesome infant, was propped up on a velvet tuffet. His wife, his son, Anna, assorted visiting married daughters, and the eccentric uncle (happily clothed) sat far enough away so that there was no danger of them accidentally jarring his gouty extremity, and incidentally out of spitting range—for Lord Liripip was wont to talk with his mouth full when excited or angry, as he almost always was. Beyond the small cluster of humanity stretched dozens of mournful empty chairs that seemed to remember all the titled—and even royal—buttocks that had filled them in happier days.

“Must you go away so soon?” Anna asked, keeping her voice low and dulcet. Her natural voice was somewhat shrill, but if she tried she could keep it in an aristocratic, cultivated register far below her usual squeak.

She was sitting across from Teddy and his mother, in a perfect position to let Teddy's gaze linger. Taking minuscule bites and appearing to chew only with her front teeth, she was doing her best to throw herself at the son without attracting the attention of the mother. Teddy seemed so charmed with her, she almost forgot her true purpose in being at Starkers. Almost, but not quite. Coombe had delivered a letter to her on a silver platter. (“Misdelivered downstairs; apologies, miss,” he'd said.)
Good luck in your new position
, it read.
Sincerely, N
. N for NAFF, of course. She had torn it into bits.

“I'm afraid I must,” Teddy said. “Oxford waits for no man. But I'll return at Christmas and be here until Hilary term begins in January, I hope.” He crammed in a mouthful of duck. “What an absolutely magnificent breast,” he said, chewing slowly and twitching his eyebrows at Anna.

Anna flushed and looked down. For five years at least she had attracted every nearby male gaze, and she never let it arouse in her more than a passing curiosity at most; more often, contempt. Those men had been practice. They hadn't mattered. Lord Winkfield—
Teddy
, she corrected, with another blush—did matter.

“We will have quite a large house party arriving the day after Christmas,” Lady Liripip said. “Things being what they are, we do not entertain quite so much as we once did.” This was as close as she would ever get to talking about money. The global financial crash, the decline in land value, the shift from farming to manufacture, had all taken their toll on Starkers, as they had on every landed family, from the lowliest baronet to the king himself. Not that they were poor, of course. They just couldn't prove quite so frequently or ostentatiously how very rich they were.

“They come for the Servants' Ball,” Teddy explained.

“Is it a costume party?” Anna asked. “Do we all dress as servants?” She found the idea distasteful, but then she remembered that Marie-Antoinette had often dressed as a milkmaid or shepherdess. She had a pretty little book at home about great queens of the world, and had been fascinated by a picture of Marie-Antoinette dressed in peasant garb made of silver and blue watered silk. She hadn't actually read that chapter, so she didn't know what sometimes happens when the lower classes resent being aped by their betters.

“No, no. On Boxing Day we have a grand festival to honor the servants for all the work they do through the year. We serve them tea earlier in the day, and then in the evening there is a banquet for them, and a ball. The local tradesmen and some of the villagers are invited too.”

“Mingling with the servants,” Anna said. “How . . . delightful.” She had almost forgotten that until a little while ago, she had been supposed to be a servant. Now she was adapting so well to her new position that she probably would not correct anyone who called her
my lady
.

“Simply everyone will be there,” Lady Liripip said. “They clamor for an invitation. Shall I wear my sapphires, do you think? So suitable for winter. But Their Majesties might come, and she will probably wear those tired old sapphires of hers. Why she does not put the state jewels to proper use, I cannot claim to know. No, I shall wear my pearls. Anna, perhaps I will lend you a strand. They are considered quite the best collection in England. And Theodore, some of my dearest friends' daughters will be here.”

Lady Liripip gave Teddy a pointed look. He ignored her insinuation—he had a lot of practice in that, having been told since he was fifteen that he must one day marry this girl or that. It had become background noise.

“Splendid girls, every one,” Teddy said, thinking of their horsy faces and identical minds and hips designed for the sole purpose of bringing forth an heir. “But my dear step-cousin will be the belle of the ball. And by the way, coz, when I return for the holidays I plan to monopolize all of your free time.”

He smiled at her, gazed at her with his earnest hazel eyes in such a steady, intimate way that the dining hall seemed to dissolve all around her. She leaned her chin on her gloved hand, her elbow on the table, and stared dreamily back, thinking in the corner of her mind what a nice ring
Lady Anna
had. Then she remembered how very lower class it was to put her elbow on the table and sat up straight, primly folding her hands in her lap. “You do?” she asked.

“Yes, I plan to be quite a pest and a bore. I've been studying German, you see, and though I speak it excellently—that's not bragging, I'm just repeating what my professor says—it seems I have the most appalling accent. My goal is to sound exactly like a native. I figure if we spend several hours each day chatting, I'll pick up a proper accent in no time. You lived in Berlin, right?”

Oh good lord! No, no! Who on earth do they think I am? Damn that Von! Why didn't he tell me what to expect, and who was in on the secret?
She took a sip of wine to steady herself.
I am clever. I am a heroine. I will one day be Lady Liripip. I overcame a Cockney background and I straightened my own teeth with rubber bands. I can carry this off
.

She knew she was masquerading as a real person, though one whom none of the Liripips had ever met. She could tell them almost anything. Then she caught Lady Liripip's stern, puckered frown and saw her salvation.

“I'm so sorry, Teddy.” She made her eyes moist and melancholy. “Your dear mother, who has been so kind as to welcome me into your home, has asked me not to speak of Germany during my stay.”

“Oh, but surely . . .” Teddy began.

“And I must say I agree with her. My life in Germany has been so unpleasant, every day longing to be an Englishwoman—I have made a vow to put it all behind me and devote myself to the land where I belong. Germany is dead to me, and if you are kind you will not ask me to speak the language.” There: that might be poignant enough to put him off.

Lady Liripip nodded. “How terrible it must have been for you to be kept away from England,” she said. She turned to Teddy. “The Germans are practically savages, my dear. Why, I remember reading of the things they did in the Great War. Huns, they called them. I don't know why you study the language of those uncivilized people.”

“Goethe,” he said, with a smile he seemed to expect Anna to share. She did not recognize the name but gave a little smirk. “Schiller. Hesse. Mann. Rilke. Well, Rilke gets on my nerves a bit, but I read him passionately in order to dislike him passionately.” Suddenly his flippant, devil-may-care demeanor dropped. “Besides, everyone at school says we'll have to fight them again someday. My friends and I thought it might be a good idea to know how Germans think.”

Remembering what the Von had said, Anna offered, “Perhaps there doesn't have to be a war.” Before sending her to Starkers, the Von had promised there wouldn't be, if she could do her job properly—whatever it was.

“Yes!” Teddy cried, pounding the table with his fist so vehemently that the eccentric uncle woke from his doze and mumbled “Tally-ho!” before nodding off again. “You're exactly right, Anna. There doesn't have to be a war at all. Not if right-thinking people in England and Germany take action now and unite to—”

“Pudding!” Lord Liripip shouted.

“Husband, please,” Lady Liripip whispered, trying to hush him, but he was having none of it.

“Don't you ‘husband' me—it's time for afters. Am I or am I not the earl? Do I or do I not pay the salary and room and board of that pack of wastrels and ne'er-do-wells who call themselves servants? The least I can expect is to get my sweets in a timely fashion.”

Anna tried not to stare. For years she had been working on her impeccable manners, yet one of the leading members of the aristocracy was allowed to behave like a spoiled child?

Teddy winked at her and whispered across the table, “We all think he'd be better for a good spanking, but who would dare give it to him?”

Lord Liripip started banging the table with his fork. “I swear I'll sack every last one of them!”

“The royal family likes to come for the show,” Teddy hissed confidentially. “It's amusing for outsiders to see his tantrums. Less so for his family, though.” He rolled his eyes to the sparkling chandeliers that dangled dangerously above their heads.

“What good is it to be a lord these days?” Lord Liripip roared. “There was a time when being the lord and master meant you didn't have to wait for anything. You got what you wanted, and everyone bent over backwards giving it to you.”

He was ranting so loudly that no one heard the door swing open, or noticed the small, dark personage who entered rear first. When they finally heard her voice, it was more shocking than Lord Liripip's tirade. It was as if a hound had spoken, or Liripip's tuffet had interrupted him.

“Having people bend over backwards for you was called
droît du seigneur
, and it was a most terrible thing,” Hannah said in her clear, penetrating stage voice. “Some say it wasn't ever so—the right-of-the-first-night part, I mean—and my friend Otto said that with many of the old lords and kings they were just as likely to take their right with the groom as with the bride. But in any event, to think of a lord having rights, those or otherwise, more than any other mortal, just because he is a lord . . .” She made a little
pff
sound. “You would not like to be that sort of a lord. Truly you would not. People would write satires of you and the anarchists would do you in. Timbale? I have not tasted it, because of course I must not, but it smells so heavenly that I'm sure you will like it.”

When she noticed that every single mouth was hanging open, she realized something must be dreadfully wrong.
They are embarrassed to see me, of course
, she thought.
Shamed of not embracing me as family, of making me work. Well, I am not ashamed of work. Labor is ennobling
.

She would not say a single thing to the Liripips about her position, would not utter a word of complaint. She would show them by her cheerfulness that she didn't mind at all. She would be just like a waitress in Der Teufel, vivacious and talkative. The family might be unkind, but she was not.

Utterly struck dumb, Lord Liripip accepted his portion of timbale and stared at the girl who reminded him so acutely, so painfully, of another girl from long ago.
She's the little singer, the one from the lawn this morning
, he thought.
Just a servant, beneath my notice. Yet here I am, noticing her again
.