Poppy (20 page)

With that he began to tiptoe about the room, as if any noise on his part would resurrect Bert Smith from his Bermondsey grave.

“There is no need to
creep
,” said the duke acidly, earning himself a look of deep reproach.

The whole thing had been a mistake, he decided suddenly. He would need to hold his fire. He put any romantic longings for Poppy down to sheer frustration. Romance was, after all, simply a polite euphemism for sexual frustration.

She looked so frail and grief-stricken when she eventually entered the room, that he was glad of his decision to behave himself—for that day anyway. He sympathized with her grief, and found to his surprise that he meant it.

After a light luncheon he took her on a tour of the house, and then suggested she might like to lie down for the afternoon, and Poppy, overcome with emotion, was delighted to escape.

She fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, not awaking until darkness had fallen as the early winter night stole over the countryside. Feeling much better, she rose to her feet and looked out of the window, gasping in dismay.

Blinding sheets of white snow were whipping across the countryside, piling up against the house in great drifts. A maid softly entered the room and lit the lamps as the dressing gong sounded for dinner.

Poppy put on the blouse and skirt she had worn that day she had gone to Mr. Lewis’s in Chelsea. She did not feel like wearing anything more formal.

“Isn’t the snow terrible, madam?” said the maid as she hooked Poppy into her blouse. “His Grace says as how you will be unable to travel to London tonight.”

“I hope I shall be able to travel to London tomorrow,” said Poppy anxiously, thinking of the performance.

She was to join the duke in the drawing room before dinner. He was formally dressed in white tie and tails, and Poppy wished she had worn something grander. He seemed to find no fault in her appearance, however, as he led her to the fire.

“Am I the only person here?” asked Poppy, staring around the empty splendor of the long room.

“Yes. Does it trouble you?”

“Well…” Poppy bit her lip. “Aren’t I supposed to be chaperoned?”

“I assure you, you are,” he said dryly. “There is a whole army of servants to look after you.”

“It’s not quite the same, is it?” said Poppy. “I mean… where’s your mother?”

“South of France.”

“Oh!”

Poppy looked at him nervously. Although he was smiling and seemed very much at ease, there was something in the atmosphere which belied it. After a few moments she decided he was tense and angry about something.

“Did you want to go to London tonight?” she asked, accepting a glass of sherry. “Is that why you are angry?”

“My dear child, what on earth makes you think I am angry?”

“I don’t know,” said Poppy weakly. “Something about you.”

“I am anxious about us being stranded here,” he said. “That is all. I know you have to be at the theater tomorrow.”

“Dinner is served, Your Grace,” said Stammers.

The duke offered Poppy his arm, and noticed that her hand trembled slightly. His brain ticked over rapidly. Perhaps tonight was the night.

When they were seated at the dining table he said cautiously, “I fear I did not realize how upset you actually were over the death of your father. I must have seemed callous.”

“It’s all right,” said Poppy. “I didn’t know myself it would take me like that. He was my father, after all. You know how it is.”

“Yes, indeed,” he replied politely, reflecting all the while that in fact he did not. Then he remembered that Mrs. Pullar had lost her mother the previous year, and that Mrs. Pullar’s mother, by all accounts, had been a greedy, grasping, horrible old woman. But Mrs. Pullar had trailed around, red-eyed, for weeks. It was all very strange.

He then thought of his own mother, and wondered how he would feel if anything happened to her. Although he had not seen much of her in his youth, they had grown very close in recent years. He suddenly knew that he would mourn her deeply, and felt as if he had joined the human race. Then he began to wonder if Poppy were as calculating and cunning as he had thought. But if she were not, then he could not go ahead with his seduction, and he wanted to seduce her very much.

She was eating very little, for Poppy had now learned that it was not necessary to plough through all nine courses. He studied her face in the candlelight and decided that it held a new maturity.

“How did Freddie hurt you?” he asked suddenly. “I was watching from the window that day you both drove up—the day he died.”

“Oh, that,” said Poppy. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Try,” he said, watching her curiously.

“Well… I wanted to leave Everton, you know, and get Josie and Emily to St. John’s Wood as quickly as possible, and Freddie said something about them being used to that slum, so they could stay there a little longer. And I suddenly thought that none of you lot would ever forgive me for my background… ever… no matter how much I changed. You would always find me common. Funny, isn’t it? I once saw a Shakespeare play,
The Merchant of Venice
, where that moneylender, Shylock, well, he says something about ‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?’ Well, I feel that’s me surrounded by all of you. With you, but not
of
you, if you know what I mean. And yet I’m flesh and blood, and I hurt just the same as you. It’s not my fault I was born in Bermondsey. That was why I was so surprised and grateful when you forgave me for going on the stage.”

“Why? Why did you do it?” he asked urgently. “It’s important.”

“Well, I’ll tell you because I hope we’re friends.

“First of all, you see, it was the villa. It was so perfect, and it even had the roses and the apple tree and the swing. Something like that, people like me have to work and slave a lifetime to get. But for people like you, well… you just wave the magic wand and there it is. Anything you want. Any
dream
you want. That made me angry. Then Mr. MacDonald made me angry, telling me you didn’t want me to go on the stage. I was proud of being a Lewis girl and making my own living. That would be a big step down for someone of your class, but for someone of mine, it’s a big step up. Then there was that day in St. James’s Park.…”

“Yes?” he prompted, studying the expression on her face.

She propped her chin on her hands and stared into the middle distance. A sudden blast of wind shook the windows, and the candle flames streamed horizontally across the table.

“You cut me dead,” said Poppy in a low voice. “And you were with Freda. I wanted revenge that day. I wanted to see if I could make you notice me… even if it made you angry. I don’t like to be passed over. I don’t like to be parceled out of the way like so much dirty laundry.”

He looked down into the depths of his brandy goblet.

“I thought you married Freddie for his money,” he said.

“I did.”

“That’s honest,” he said. “But mercenary.”

“I had to… for the girls,” said Poppy. “Pa had drunk all the back rent, and we were going to be put out into the street. I had to get the money. I knew Freddie didn’t have all that much. I was honest with him. I never pretended to love him. I told him I was marrying him for the back rent. I would have made him a good wife, you know.” Her voice dropped in a note of pain. “And he would have had the best of the bargain, because, before God, he would have made me a rotten husband.”

There was a long silence while Poppy stared at her plate and thought wildly,
Why did I tell him all this? I’ve disgusted him
.

She looked up quickly and saw with a sinking heart that his face was cold and withdrawn.

“I should retire and leave you to your brandy,” said Poppy, desperate to get away before he could say anything cruel.

“We’ll both retire,” he said in an abstract voice, picking up the brandy decanter. “Bring your glass. Ah, here is Stammers.… Stammers, get one of the footmen to carry this into the drawing room. We shall have the brandy in front of the fire. Mrs. Plummett, your arm.”

The duke escorted Poppy to a chair on one side of the fire and placed himself in a chair opposite. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the leaping flames, while Poppy wondered what on earth was going through his head.

The duke’s brain felt like a kaleidoscope—all his thoughts spinning in a jumble.

So that’s that… she told me why she did it.… I think I really love her very deeply… worse than before. I can’t seduce her.… I’d better marry her.… How Mama will scream!… I’ll need to wait another year for decency’s sake, yet when I look at her, I don’t think I can wait another minute.… Why couldn’t I fall for a girl of my own background?… ‘If you prick us…’… Nothing up with her… Don’t be such an awful snob… the servants like her
. And so ran his thoughts as he stared at the fire, unaware that Poppy was watching him in an agony of despair.

The wind roared outside as the storm increased, and Poppy shrank back in her chair, dying for him to speak, dreading his words.

When he did he said the last thing she ever expected him to say.

He raised his head and looked across at her with a strange, twisted little smile.

“I love you, Poppy,” he said.

She rose slowly from her chair, and he got up at the same time as she came toward him.

He opened his mouth to say “Don’t touch me,” for he knew that once she was in his arms, he would not be able to control himself, but before he could say anything she had rushed forward and flung her arms around his neck.

He kissed her then, savagely and brutally, holding her closer and closer, his senses reeling and clamoring. And somehow he was still holding her, still kissing her, and they were in his bedroom, and he was removing her clothes with feverish hands and stretching out on the bed beside her.

She gave a faint moan of protest and fear, and then seemed to fall a long way down, engulfed by a sea of passion, drowning and crying in his arms, twisting and turning while the storm tore and battered at the old house, helpless under his caressing, probing fingers, driven beyond reason by his hard, muscular, experienced body, hanging on to his shoulders and helplessly crying his name over and over again. And then when the first savage onslaught was over, there was the exquisite, painful ecstasy of slow lovemaking, where the nerves seem to throb just beneath the surface of the skin and the lightest caress leads to further madness.

She gave him her heart, her soul, her body, until they both fell into an exhausted sleep. And outside, the storm blew itself out.

A blood-red sun rising over the snowy horizon awoke Poppy early, and she stretched luxuriously in the duke’s large bed and smiled at his relaxed face, asleep on the pillow next to her. She then twisted her head and looked around the huge bedroom, and at the red embers of the fire dying on the hearth. The room was cold, and she pulled the bedclothes up over their naked bodies, and then decided to put some coal on the fire. Holding the quilt around her, she scuttled over to the hearth and piled up the fire, poking it vigorously until the flames went shooting up the chimney.

There was a door open at the end of the room, and Poppy realized it led to the duke’s study.

She had an impulse to go and look at it—that room where they had first sat. That room where their romance had first begun.

The red sun was blazing through the icy panes of the windows, across the papers on his desk. She smiled and idly turned them over, wondering what he worked at when she was not in the study with him.

And then she saw her name.

It seemed to leap up at her from the page.

She sat down slowly in the chair behind the desk and began to read. And so she read the duke’s plan of seduction, finding out that he thought her an excellent actress, that he planned on revenge.

All at once she realized he had had it. With eyes dulled with pain, she looked wonderingly across at the chair opposite, remembering how she had sat there when Freddie was alive.

“We were above this sort of thing in Cutler’s Fields,” she said aloud.

Then she drew a blank sheet of paper forward and began to write. So he thought she was a good actress. Then let him go on believing it.

“Your Grace,” she wrote.

Then she walked back to the bedroom and placed the note on her pillow.

Somehow she found her way to her own rooms, and dressed without encountering any of the staff. Wrapping herself in the sables the duchess had given her, she tiptoed downstairs and let herself out into the snow. Some delivery cart had already been at the tradesman’s entrance, since the screen of trees on the drive had protected it from the storm. Following in the wheel ruts, she hurried away from the house as fast as she could. She had left her other clothes behind, so that she could travel unencumbered.

Once beyond the shelter of the trees, the drifts were deep and thick, and she panted and stumbled, thinking at times that she would never make it, at others that the duke would come and find her and drag her back to humiliate her further.

At last, frozen and soaked, she reached the railway station to learn with relief that the line had been kept clear. She sat in the ladies’ waiting room in a frenzy of fear.

At last the local train came chugging around the bend, sending great black puffs of smoke over the white landscape.

She climbed into a second-class compartment, sinking down thankfully on the dusty velour seat and leaning her head back against the dirty lace antimacassar.

The train gave a long whistle, which touched an echoing chord in the dreariness of Poppy’s soul, and with a vicious lurch chugged out of the station.

It seemed to stop at every lamppost on the road to London. It stopped at dreary little deserted railway stations where the chocolate machines, blazing red under their hoods of snow, seemed the only bright things on the landscape. Soon, by the increasing darkness of the sky, she knew they were crawling into London, under its usual pall of smoke. Then somehow she was out of the station and had bribed a cabbie with double fare to take her home through the snow.