Love by the Morning Star (10 page)

“Who's next?” She spied Anna. “Oh, hello again. What a lovely frock you are wearing, and you wear it so well. I, alas, lack the accoutrements for such a dress.” Hannah sighed, raising her meager accoutrements with her breath. “Here you go.”

She continued on to the next diner, one of the married daughters. “I'll give you a bit extra,” she said confidentially. “I see you hardly touched your duck. Don't you care for duck? I knew the most lovely ducks who lived in a little park but liked to cross traffic to paddle in the fountain. Perhaps you have a friend who is a duck? I can always eat animals even if I am friends with their brothers. It is too terrible if you think about it, so you must
not
think about it. If you did, before you knew it you would make friends with a carrot and never be able to eat again. Here, have some of the raspberry goo from the inside.”

Hannah was beginning to believe that the English did not talk very much. Perhaps it was a mass eccentricity of the aristocracy. She tried with the next sister, chatting about the raspberry cane wall one of her neighbors had planted around her small garden to keep marauding children away. “A sort of guard and bribe all at once,” Hannah prattled. “The children would be placated by the berries and pierced by the thorns. I have a scar—I bled like a stuck pig. In fact I looked rather like this timbale, leaking red juices.”

Nothing—not a single response, only stiff, paralyzed stares, gaping mouths, wide eyes. The odd uncle peered at her, trying to puzzle out whether she was a hallucination. The other sister looked steadfastly at her dish as if none of it were happening. Poor Hannah's voice grew weaker, filled with ellipses as she broke off one unsuccessful topic and launched into another, hoping to get something, anything, out of these hard, cold, unfeeling aristocrats.

They hate me
, she thought.
Why did they take me if they were going to treat me so cruelly?
There was not even a faint look of acknowledgment, not one indulgent nod recognizing the unfortunate fruit. No guilty smile. Not even a word of rebuke for inflicting herself on their presence. That would have been better, somehow, than being utterly shunned. Half of them looked at her as if she were some improbable and unattractive creature that had heaved itself up out of the muck, and the others appeared to have entered a fugue state, pretending not to notice her at all.

Her eyes were feeling hot by the time she got to Teddy.
I'm angry
, she insisted to herself.
Not sad. Not at all sad. There are too many horrible things happening in the world for me to be sorrowful over a little coldness
. Anger made it better, though. Let them be disagreeable—she would be happy nonetheless, and entertain herself by thinking of all the nasty things that might happen to them. In the books, bad things always happen to bad people, though it sometimes takes ever so many words before they do.

She was lost for a moment in her reverie, thinking of cruelty near and far, of the helplessness of each person to fight it.

“What, no floor show for me?” came a gently teasing voice at her elbow. “I particularly like stories about aunts, and valets, and cow creamers.” Teddy, easy in his lordship, free with his friendship, was the only one of all the family looking at her as if she was an actual human being, a person and not an automaton on the fritz.

There is always a light in the darkness
, Hannah thought.
However small, it is always there, and it makes the darkness disappear
. Teddy's bright hazel eyes shone with earnestness, laughter, camaraderie, sympathy.

Then he looked across the table to the stunning blonde who had usurped her seat that morning, and Hannah saw that his countenance was exactly the same for her.

He is the world's friend, not mine
, Hannah realized, and though that made him a better human being, she found it pained her somehow, a little hurt as if from a splinter that cannot quite be grasped and pulled.

Suddenly, she found there was one thing she could not manage to forgive. “You never came back for me,” she said, knitting her brow so furiously that her cap slipped dangerously askew. “I waited at the gate for you to come back and you never did.”

“Damn!” He looked sincerely contrite. “I had this niggling feeling in the back of my head that I was forgetting something.” He seemed to examine her more intently, and his expression shifted from that generic geniality to something more intimate. “I can't imagine how I could have forgotten
you
.” He lowered his voice, but Anna, straining, heard him say, “I never will again.” More loudly he went on, “Why, with that chocolate lump of whatever it might be on that plate, and your eyes flashing Old Testament vengeance, you look a perfect model for Judith with the head of Holofernes. I have an artistic friend coming for Christmas who will be delighted with you. He has a knack for capturing fierce women. Somehow I don't think I want you, of all people, to be angry with me. If you don't forgive me, I doubt I'll sleep very well tonight.”

Hannah felt warm and peculiar. What did he mean by that caressing look, that intimate voice?

“You don't know who I am, do you?” she asked all at once. There was something so honest and upfront about him, she couldn't imagine him not acknowledging who she was. He might flirt with a real servant, be kind to a real refugee—that was his nature, she could see that—but he would not pretend that a relation, however tenuously related, was a servant.

His mother, though, had finally found her tongue. “Don't speak to her, Theodore. Not another word. I've heard about these foreign girls. Communists and anarchists, every one. Did you hear her threaten your father?” She turned her ire on Hannah. “How
dare
you show yourself here among us?”

“The footmen were occupied, and I—”

“Silence, creature! Your place is in the kitchen. Return there at once. I shall speak to Cook about you, and if I ever see so much as a glimpse of you again, you can go back to whatever slum you came from.” She sounded exactly like a fishwife. Then she flutteringly fanned herself with her pristine napkin and turned apologetically to Anna. “So difficult to find decent servants, my dear,” she said with syrupy sweetness. “And foreigners are the worst of the lot. Excepting you, my dear. How clever of you not to have any accent at all. One would almost think you had spoken nothing but English your entire life. But you must not forget about your elbows, my dear. Only merchants' daughters put their elbows on the table.”

Smiling and simpering, she returned her attention to her family, and Hannah ceased to exist.

I'm leaving
, Hannah swore to herself.
Even if Waltraud doesn't come with me, even if I have to beg in the streets, I won't stay another minute in the same house as that wretched woman and that childish, petulant man!

Then Teddy changed her mind. He stood and deftly lifted the platter out of her hands. “Yes,
Fräulein
,” he said to Hannah. “How gauche of you to have been born in another country. It is almost a capital offense. Here in this house we believe that one must be severely punished for the happenstance of one's birth.” His face was a jester's mask of mockery, but there was a tightness about his eyes, a tense set to his smile. “What a dilemma for the English, though—we agree with Germany on so many things, including the patent inferiority of anyone who is not
us
. Darling Mum, did it ever occur to you that to the rest of the world,
we
are foreigners?”

“The very idea!” Lady Liripip said with a nervous titter.

“Just a silly philosophical notion. As you say, Oxford has been the ruin of better men than me. Serve from the left,
Fräulein
, and remove from the right.” He dumped a ludicrous portion onto his mother's plate, then took Hannah's arm and marched her out of the dining hall, silently seething.

“Are you angry with me?” Hannah asked when they were in the narrow stairwell leading to the servants' chthonic realm.

“With you? No, of course not. With the world, I suppose. Poor Mum is of the world. Still, I am too, and you don't see me being such a towering clod. Maybe if Mum had gone to Oxford—there now, I'm merry again already, just thinking of that—or talked to anyone without a title or a fortune, she might see things a little differently. Don't worry: I'll make sure you don't get fired or sent back to Germany. No one with an ounce of compassion or common sense should be there. Not to mention a drop of Jewish blood. Is it as bad as they say?”

She nodded. “My mother is there, and my father. They're supposed to follow me to England but I haven't heard . . .” She fixed her eyes on Teddy's shirt studs.

He took her chin in his hand. It was rougher than she'd expected. She thought a lord's hand would be soft, but his had calluses on its palm and fingertips. He tilted her face up to his.

“What do you say I look into it for you, eh? I'm sure they have things well in order, but I have a few friends in the government and . . . elsewhere. Maybe they can hurry things along. What are their names?”

“Aaron Morgenstern, and Cora Pearl Morgenstern.”

“I'll remember.” The names didn't seem to strike a chord with him.
He really doesn't know who I am
.
Did they never tell him we existed?

He was still holding her face in his hand, examining her. He leaned closer. “I'll help you, if you'll do something for me.” His voice was low and caressing. “Something personal.”

She pulled away and slapped him as hard as she could.

“How do you dare! You would be so mean, so base as to bribe me with my dear parents' lives to win my attentions? Do you think that just because I am low and you are high you can gallop over me like I am a little fox? I do not sit at the table with your beast of a mother and your child of a father, but I am no vermin, and neither is a fox. They are beautiful and clever. Not to say that I am, though you'll never find out if you try to threaten me into tumbling into your bed or a closet or the summerhouse or wherever you have in mind.” Her eyes flashed darkly.

“I never meant—” he began, his cheek turning scarlet.

“Do not attempt to deny it—I have read all the right novels. You silly lord, do you not know that you can win anyone with kindness, only it takes a little longer? Do you not think I would allow myself to be seduced as well as any other girl if you gave me sweets and told me my hair was pretty and perhaps wrote a bad poem, or stole one out of a book I have not yet read, though I have read a great many, so there you would not succeed. Still, I might be charmed by your buffoonish attempts and yield. But to hurry things along with threats? For that I will slap you again.”

She did, on the other cheek.

“Are you quite finished?” he asked stiffly.

Standing out of reach, Hannah crossed her arms over her accoutrements. “I wish to add that I do not
want
to be seduced by you, only that I understand human nature, and mine, enough to say that should you earnestly attempt, you would likely succeed.” She frowned. “Would likely
have succeeded
. Now that you have threatened, of course that is no longer possible. Good day.” She curtsied. “You see, I am polite, not menial. I do not bend over backwards for you.”

With that, she ran down the hall, and did not hear Teddy mutter, “But I only wanted to speak German with you!”

Hannah told Cook about her gross blunder, but not about Teddy's.

Sally mustered as much ire as she could so late in the day, and told Hannah that if she ever again did something so foolish she'd be let go on the spot.

Then, after the servants' dinner, when she was alone in her comfortable little bedroom, she laughed herself into a jelly at the thought of her chatty little kitchen maid discomfiting the Liripips. The girl might not be made for service, or have any kitchen skills whatsoever, but all things considered, Sally was rather glad Hannah had come.

It was only as she was drifting off to sleep that she remembered one little thing Hannah had said, about the pancakes she liked to eat. The ones with cheese and scallions and
bacon . . 
.

 

T
EDDY RETURNED TO FIND
the dining hall empty, and joined his family in the drawing room for coffee. Anna, licking her lips and watching the door with predatory attention, spotted him instantly, and glided toward him. But she was not more alert than the butler, who intercepted him first and handed him a small envelope on a silver tray. Teddy read it swiftly and crumpled it.

Anna sidled up to him. His face was flushed, she noticed. She had not at all liked the way he'd been looking at that mousy little maid, that dusky foreigner. Still, she kept her voice sweet and said, “How kind of you to help that poor unfortunate girl. Why, she must be a simpleton, though I'm sure she meant well.”

There was something in Teddy's eyes, a sort of anger and amusement and determination, that alarmed her.
Surely not
. . .
not that little nothing of a servant. Oh, but she's German, isn't she, and he wanted help with the language. Help that I refused to give
. Can't
give
.

Recklessly, before she could change her mind, Anna laid a hand on his arm—what a strong arm, too, she thought, as muscled and sinewy as those of the dockworkers who used to sometimes paw her before she realized she shouldn't be flattered by that sort of attention. “I was selfish,” she said to him, taking his elbow and leading him away from the others. “I will help you with your German, if it is important to you.”

He seemed to shake something off, and it was a moment before his face lit with its usual open, affable grin. “Bully! We'll start tonight.”

Hiding her panic, she said, “No. I've promised your mother I'll help with the . . .” She drew a blank.