Kitty (15 page)

The darling boys were rolling around the room in fits of the giggles. Kitty began to be annoyed. The room was stuffy and overcrowded with all sorts of irritating bits and bobbles. Heavy blinds sealed off the summer sunshine and cast a pale light upon a large portrait of a nude of indeterminate sex which hung above the fireplace.

Kitty was reminded of a time in the schoolroom when her dress had been unfastened at the back and, instead of telling her about it, the other girls had sniggered all day. She decided it was time the new Kitty took over. A faint look of hauteur settled on her young face. “What are you all sniggering about?” she demanded in a high clear voice.

The giggling stopped. The bevy of young men looked at each other helplessly. “Oh, don’t mind them,” said Charlotte. “Boys will be boys, I always say.”

“How unoriginal of you,” said Kitty sweetly. “What for example do you
not
usually say. I’m sure it must be something
very
witty.”

To her surprise, the young men burst out in a sort of Greek chorus of “Oh, naughty, naughty. Claws in! Claws in!”

Kitty stared at them in surprise. A little light began to dawn. “Mr. Styles is a devotee of Mr. Oscar Wilde. Are you all perhaps of the… same… religion, shall we say?”

There was a stunned silence. The innocent, naive child of the middle classes that Charlie Styles had promised them, was turning out to be as formidable as a dowager.

“Oh, do have a cake,” said the much-flustered Charlotte. She bent over the tea table and a corner of her dress caught on her chair and lifted up to expose a length of black, hairy, muscular leg encased in a black sock and suspenders. Charlotte Styles was Charlie after all. Blazing with fury inside but keeping a calm, social smile on her face, Kitty got to her feet and insisted on taking her leave.

“Do not trouble yourself, Charlotte. I can see myself out,” said Kitty. As she reached the door, she raised the point of her lacy parasol and, watched by a horrified audience, she neatly lifted “Charlotte’s” blond wig from his head and threw it into the fireplace.

Charlie Styles burst into tears. “Get out!” he screamed, his face like an anguished clown’s, as the tears mixed with paint and powder coursed down his cheeks.

Kitty took several deep breaths when she reached the street. She decided to take the underground railway home in the hope that the novel experience would take away some of the nightmare of the afternoon.

She bought a ticket at Sloane Square station and went down the steps to the platform which was surely unusually crowded. As she waited in the press, a portly man told her that a train had broken down but that the line was now clear and another train would be through any minute. “I’ve never traveled underground before,” confided Kitty.

“Oh, I’m used to it,” said her portly friend. “But m’ daughter—she’s about your age—gets very excited. Here… if you move a little to the front, you’ll see the train coming along the track.”

Kitty leaned forward but all she could see was the black mouth of the tunnel. Then she heard a faint rumbling sound and the ground began to tremble under her feet. “That’s it now,” she cried. “I can hear it coming.”

She turned her head to smile at her new friend and received a vicious shove on the back which sent her sailing onto the tracks. Everyone started screaming at once and Kitty saw the lights of the train bearing down upon her. Suddenly a man was beside her on the tracks. He lifted her bodily, threw her like a rag doll onto the platform, and then leaped to safety himself as the train thundered into the station. It was Judson, Lady Mainwaring’s footman.

Kitty was so terrified and flustered and dizzied by the anxious faces, that she would have allowed herself to be swept onto the train with the crowd, but Judson held her back. “This is a matter for the police, my Lady,” he said.

She put a trembling hand to her brow. “The police, Judson?”

“Wot’s all this ’ere?” said an authoritative voice. Judson explained, the policeman took out his notebook, and everyone began to talk at once. It had been a little fellow with a scar, it had been an old lady in a big hat, it had been that fat man over there. Kitty’s new friend explained that he had been standing beside her when she fell but that he had not seen who had pushed her. Kitty, Judson, and the most coherent of the witnesses were led off to Chelsea police station where they spent a confusing hour making statements and getting nowhere.

The inspector settled the babble. If my Lady would go home, then a gentleman from Scotland Yard would call on her as soon as possible.

Lady Mainwaring was very worried when she heard the news about the latest attempt on Kitty’s life. The sooner the girl’s marriage was settled the better. Emily Mainwaring, who had always considered herself a sympathizer with the agitators for women’s emancipation, now suddenly wished Kitty would get pregnant. That would settle her down. Nothing like a nursery full of children to keep her out of mischief. She told Kitty to go and relax in the garden and sent a messenger off to find Lord Peter Chesworth.

The light was fading over the city as Kitty sat at the edge of the canal and wondered who was trying to kill her. Perhaps the incidents were not related at all. The incident at Hadsea could simply have been a practical joke that had gone too far. And the press on the platform at Sloane Square underground station had been so great, someone could have lunged against her by accident.

She was suddenly aware of someone walking across the grass toward her and turned her head sharply. It was her husband, the expression on his face unreadable in the dimming light. He sat down next to her without a word and they both stared straight ahead at the glassy waters of the canal. The orange glow that was nighttime London began to spread across the sky and the ever-present hum of the great city reached their ears, faintly. Some wild animal roared in his cage in the nearby zoo and the sharp clop of a horse’s hoofs on the street outside the house only served to punctuate the stillness of the evening.

Kitty slid her eyes sideways and studied her husband’s profile, the high-bridged nose, the hooded eyes, and the long, thin, mobile mouth. He suddenly turned and looked at her and she blushed.

“My dear,” he said, “this situation is ridiculous. Your life is in danger and I feel I should have some right to protect you.”

“You have no right,” said Kitty in such a low voice that he had to strain to hear.

He studied his wife’s averted profile for a minute and then began. “Before I met you, I was having an affair with a certain lady, I think you know that.”

“Yes,” whispered Kitty.

“That is all very definitely over.”

Now Kitty jerked her head around. “Over! It certainly doesn’t look like it.”

“I have tried to explain matters to the lady but she is… well… very possessive. I’m sorry about it, Kitty. Will you forgive me? Our marriage has had such a bad start. I feel sure we could make something of it if only we tried a little. Will you come home with me?”

He rested his arm along the back of her chair without touching her but she felt as if an electric shock had been passed through her body. She sat very still, her face unreadable in the gathering dark.

He went on, his voice hesitating slightly. “I have not been, by any means, a saint, Kitty. I have had a lot of experience with… well… experienced women. I have never had to… court a young girl like yourself and I find myself somewhat at a loss and that makes me behave in a somewhat boorish manner at times.”

Still his wife kept silent.

“I heard you say the other night that you were lonely. Well, I am lonely too, in a certain way. At the moment, all that I am asking you for is companionship. I will not… share your bed until we have perhaps reached a certain understanding.

“I was worried sick about losing Reamington. A lot of the chaps in my position marry heiresses and, like a fool, I did not realize that I was also responsible for another human being. I thought you would go your way and I’d go mine. But I hate it when you go away, Kitty. Please come home with me.”

It had cost Peter Chesworth a great deal to make this speech and suddenly he realized that if she rejected him, he would feel like an utter fool. His wife gave a little sigh and he suddenly burst out, “Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you open your bloody mouth?”

The instant it was out, he could have bitten off his tongue but his wife gave a low gurgle of laughter. “Now
that
sounds more like the husband I know. Yes, Peter, I will come back with you on those terms. Goodness knows, I have been getting into some terrible messes. I had better tell you about them because I’ve discovered that society gossip is faster than Marconi any day.”

She began to tell her husband about her adventures with Henry and then of her visit to Charlie Styles. At first she began quietly and sorrowfully but finally the idiocy of both adventures struck her and she began to laugh. Peter laughed with her, particularly at the tale of Charlie Styles’s wig but he inwardly decided to give Henry Dwight-Hammond a bloody nose at the first opportunity.

Gratified to find that her aristocratic husband was not going to call her a naive fool and that he, on the contrary, was the first person that had ever really listened to her, Kitty went on to tell him about the evening at the Pugsleys. He laughed heartily at the story of Mr. Pugsley’s new suspenders but stopped when Kitty began to tell him about little Jane Pugsley’s “imaginings” of a hand at the window setting fire to the curtains. He would have put it down to a child’s vivid imagination had it not been for the subsequent attempts on Kitty’s life.

Peter closed his long fingers around Kitty’s little hand. “You need not be frightened again, my dear. We will go everywhere together.”

Kitty looked down at the hand clasping hers. She was held rigid in a sea of ecstatic emotion as little waves of feeling lapped through her body. All thoughts of her handsome husband being a murderer fled into the dark corners of the summer evening. Kitty sat as still as a statue, frightened to move and break the spell, quite unaware that her highly sophisticated husband was experiencing the same emotions.

Peter Chesworth was fascinated that this slight physical contact with this young girl—his wife—could hold him imprisoned in a stronger current of passion than he had ever felt before during the most intimate contact with other women.

Both of them sat, rapt and enchanted, almost painfully aware of every sight and scent in the dark summer’s night. A clump of delphiniums blazed in the darkness like a blue flame, a single ripple snaked across the canal like a brush stroke in a Chinese painting and the tinny music from a party in one of the nearby houses sounded infinitely poignant. The smells of cooking from the kitchens—wine, onions, fresh bread, and herbs—mingled with the heady scents of the flowers in the garden.

Lady Mainwaring took one step into the garden, looked at the silent figures by the water and retreated into the house. How odd to think that she had sat just like that one summer’s evening long ago with a young man who was to become her husband. Emily sighed. All that magic of youth and love fleeing before the humdrum daily routine of marriage, turning the tremulous young girl into a brittle sophisticate and the young man into a middle-aged eccentric, dying of diphtheria contracted in a London slum, because his pride had been hurt.

Past forgotten and future unheeded, the enchanted couple sat on, mute, their hands still clasped. Then there was a discreet cough behind them and the evening shattered like fragile glass. Kitty became aware of a cramp in her leg and Lord Chesworth noticed that a large beetle was crawling across the garden table.

“A person from Scotland Yard to see you, my Lady,” said the butler. “I have put him in the study.”

“That’ll be about what happened this afternoon in the underground,” said Kitty, getting to her feet. “Do come with me.”

But the detective from Scotland Yard said, firmly and politely, that he would like to see the Baroness alone. Lord Chesworth opened his mouth to protest but Kitty smiled at him so warmly and said, “I am sure it will only take a minute, Peter, and then we can go home,” that he merely shrugged and left the room.

The detective introduced himself as Mr. Albert Grange. At first sight, he was an unprepossessing man. He had a round, fat, middle-aged face embellished with a tired mustache and thin strands of hair carefully arranged on the top of his head to conceal as much of his baldness as possible. His grubby, high, celluloid collar was cutting into his jowls and his dark gray suit showed shiny patches of wear. But his little brown eyes were twinkling with intelligence and he had a fatherly manner that was very endearing.

“Well, my Lady,” he said, “I’m blessed if I know where to begin. How’s about you beginning at the beginning and telling me about everything in your own words. Now, there’s no one in the room but you and me and I’m not going to take notes. So just you talk away about every little bit that you can think of.”

“It all started at Hadsea,” said Kitty.

Mr. Grange interrupted. “No… start before Hadsea. Before you was married would be a good beginning.”

For the second time that evening, Kitty had found a good listener. She told more than she knew. The astute Mr. Grange quickly grasped that her mother had arranged the marriage but he said nothing until Kitty had reached the end of her story.

Then Mr. Grange asked in a deceptively mild voice, “You don’t suspect your husband, now, do you?”

“Of course not,” Kitty nearly screamed and then calmed herself. “Why should I?”

“Well, now. You’re a very wealthy young lady by all accounts.”

“But he has my money. I—I—mean, my m-money is his,” stammered Kitty.

Mr. Grange looked at her thoughtfully. “You must pardon me, my Lady, if my questions seem impertinent, but money breeds more crime than anything—next to passion that is. We get lots of these here creem passionellies down at the Yard. But in this case, there’s no question of another lady, now?”

Kitty thought of Veronica Jackson. He had said it was over. She must trust him.

“No—none at all, and may I suggest, Mr. Grange, that we look for someone else. I do love my husband, you see.” Her voice broke a little on the last sentence and Mr. Grange took mental note. Loves her husband all right, he thought cynically, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is—does he love her or that Mrs. Jackson he’s been seen around with? But he felt he had gone far enough.