Love by the Morning Star (4 page)

“It's straight out of P. G. Wodehouse,” she said aloud, too loud, grinning for the first time in weeks.

“I live in hope,” said a voice behind her. She hadn't even heard the car, it was so quiet, a sleek black Bugatti coupe looking like a panther stretched full-spring. Inside the rolled-down window, a rakish face looked up at her. “We have the aunts, we have the valet, we even have a silver cow creamer.” He pushed his floppy, too-long chestnut hair out of his eyes. “But no matter what pains I take to set up a clever screwball comedy, my family remains steadfastly pedestrian.”

“Except for you,” Hannah said, eyeing the Bugatti.

He laughed, the freest laugh she had ever heard. It would knock down prison walls. “No, I'm rarely a pedestrian. I imagine myself taking long woodland strolls, but like the Wodehouse, staging it never quite happens. I'm always behind a wheel or atop a horse. You must be a new one.”

“Rather new,” she said, blushing.

“From Germany?”

She nodded, reminding herself to sound English. She could, of course, but since even her mother spoke German most the time, her English tended to be accented unless she thought about it.

“We just got another one last week. Hop in­—I'll take you to the door.”

Hannah ran around to the other side.

“You read Wodehouse, eh? I hope this doesn't sound too bigoted, but I never thought of a refugee maid reading . . . oh, hullo!”

Hannah was so entranced by his poetic way of calling her a maid—for
maiden
, she assumed, another example of ever-changing English slang—that she found herself holding the car door open for the large blond woman who had just pulled up outside the gate in a second cab. Her hair was twisted into fantastic serpentines, and her very long dress was a shade away from white, just enough so that her attire suggested virginal glamour, not nursing. Her gloves, however, were pure white and immaculate. She slid into the two-seater.

“Thanks,” the woman said, to the driver, not to Hannah. “Oh, you're not a chauffeur.”

“Lord Winkfield, at your humble service, madam.”

“Winkfield?”

“I know, embarrassing to no end, but what can one do? Still, ever so slightly better than Lord Liripip, what? May it be many years before I accede to my father's title, for more reasons than one. My mother is expecting you, I believe.”

He seemed to suddenly remember Hannah, standing at the car-side, a shadowed little obscurity. “I'll be back for you directly,” he said, with a smile that had the decency to be contrite.

“But I—” Hannah began, only to be cut off as the blond woman slammed the door. The Bugatti sent up refined puffs of dust, which settled on Hannah's travel-stained suit.

She waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, staring hungrily at the castle, thinking, in an abstract sort of way, about the young man she'd just almost met. As glib, but not, she thought, as foolish as a Wodehouse hero. He was Lord Liripip's only son and heir.

Her mother had given her a rundown on all of the family, from pottering old Liripip, who had married and buried two wives in quick succession before finally producing an heir, to Lady Liripip, who, unlike the more congenial wives before her, steadfastly refused to expire. There were two married daughters by the first late wife who, with their broods, often occupied Starkers. There was the obligatory eccentric uncle best known for riding to the hounds à la Godiva, minus the hair. All this Hannah's mother had gleaned from the society pages of English-language papers that trickled into Berlin a few days out of date. Of personalities, though, she could offer little, except to say that Lord Liripip almost always meant well, and Lady Liripip didn't.

The line of kicked-up road dust between Hannah and the castle had time to rise and settle again, and still no one came for her. She could have walked—she was bone weary from her journey, and from a fright she hardly let herself acknowledge, but she could have walked. However, he had said he would come back, so out of courtesy she waited. There was a square hunk of rock outside a faux guardhouse. She sat upon it and, to pass the time, took out an oft-folded copy of the letter Lady Liripip had sent.

 

You should know, Caroline, that my husband has never forgiven you for leaving England when he was in mourning for your late sister. It showed a most irresponsible and, may I say, unkind spirit. And to marry a foreigner, a stage jester no less, when Lord Liripip would have been so pleased to arrange a union more suited to your fine family connections! And now you say the unfortunate fruit of that mésalliance must come to England? You never lacked nerve, Caroline. Very well, she may certainly come, but mark my words, we will teach her better than anyone ever taught you about what it means to be an Englishwoman of good blood and family. Here at Starkers, she will learn her proper place
.

 

It was a hard letter, from a hard woman, Hannah could see that, and rested on her mother's assurance that Lord Liripip was a gentle, easygoing man. No one had ever been unkind to Hannah, and she imagined Lady Liripip as a character, a stereotype, whose company one endured stoically, but whom one laughed at behind her back.

Hannah and her mother had had a good laugh together over that term,
the unfortunate fruit
, and Cora had taken to calling her daughter by that name, with wry affection. She'd been wary of putting Hannah's full name in any of the letters, never being quite sure what the government might read. A neighbor had been taken in for questioning after writing to a Russian acquaintance about beet-seed, though her only Communist leanings were toward the neighborhood's communal vegetable garden. If anyone knew Cora was desperate to get her daughter out of Germany, it might attract attention. If she wanted to get out so badly, could it be because she was hiding something, selling secrets, dangerous in some way? The world was changing, Cora knew, and one couldn't be too careful. So she used her maiden name, Caroline Curzon, and Hannah's first name alone, giving a hotel as her return address.

Hannah had a particular aptitude for being sanguine in the face of trouble. Looking at the castle, at the grounds, she couldn't help but believe that Lady Liripip would be far less formidable than she appeared in her letter. Her parents would leave Germany in a few weeks without a hitch, and they would be together again, free of all danger. Why, in a few months Germany would probably come to its senses and a change of government would leave them free to go home again. Meanwhile, she was on holiday.

So she told herself, and tried to believe it. Then the sun shifted, casting clear slanting light on the dewy grass, and each silver drop shone like shattered glass. She shivered, feeling a gimlet of panic prod through the assurance she'd wrapped around herself. Was it here too, in this idyllic spot? The hate and the pain and the fear?

It couldn't be, because here, suddenly, was music, lilting over the grounds, and where there was music those bad things could not exist. The past days of travel were the first she'd spent in her entire life without being constantly enveloped in song. There was always someone practicing at Der Teufel—comic songs, ballads of tragic love, wry and subtle political songs that hid their jabs in syncopation. Scales rose and fell in the background of her life as birdsong does for a country dweller. And Hannah herself was rarely without a tune, murmuring songs as she bustled through her work in that low contralto so startlingly at odds with her slight form. Among the things she had given up—family and home—was music. In addition to her cabaret performances, she'd been taking private lessons most of her life, and her teacher thought it might be time to collect on the favor the director of the Vienna Opera owed him and send his young protégée.

She'd resigned herself to the loss of her career, because she told herself it was only a temporary loss. Even if she couldn't go back to Germany, even if Austria never welcomed her, there was opera in England, wasn't there? At worst she could take supporting roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas—they, along with Wodehouse, were her standard for interpreting the English. But it was only now that she realized how acutely she missed music in her everyday life. There had been no singing on the train, where she'd trembled at every stop and checkpoint. There had been no singing on the Channel crossing, during which she had been most humiliatingly ill. The refugee office had been all bustle and efficiency, everyone far too busy to pause for a song.

Now, as the uplifted voice reached her ears, she felt she was breathing for the first time in days, and gasped it in eagerly. She saw him then, a strapping fellow a little older than she, with that typical floppy English hair, a shade or two darker than Lord Winkfield's. He was pushing a wheelbarrow, belting out a song she'd never heard before but that she instantly wanted to steal and translate for Der Teufel.

She was still puzzling out how she could change it to German, the impossibility of it making her mouth curl most becomingly, when the man parked his barrow at her feet.

“You're the new maid?” he asked.

It occurred to Hannah that either she'd missed some colloquialism in her mother's English or expressions had changed since her mother had left the country. She knew women were called bird, chick, hen. It sounded so medieval to be called a maid, but if that was the slang of the day . . .

“I am. I've just arrived.”

He grinned at her. “I know. If you'd been here already you'd already be my girl.” He winked at her, and it was so like the backstage flirtation, which never meant a thing, that she felt instantly at home. “Just remember, I've called dibs. Why have a footman when you can have a gardener? Well, under-gardener.”

“Does that mean you just do the potatoes and bulbs and such?”

“Under-gardener for underground things! Oh, you're a doozy, you are. And not quite as scary as the other new refugee maid. Whoo-ee, but she could eat a man alive! You're a much handier morsel. Now, where are your things?”

“I don't have any. They were . . . lost.” She was ashamed to admit she was foolish enough to have let them be stolen. No, the truth must be faced squarely. “When I was getting off the boat someone in an official-looking cap took my bags and said to follow him to the cab. He wove through the crowd and I never saw him or my bags again.”

“Cheeky. But not so cheeky as me. I would have asked for a tip. I'm Hardy, by the way. That's your cue to play Nelson and say
Kiss me, Hardy
. I tell you in case you don't know, being a foreigner. Though you hardly speak like one. I will, you know.”

“Will what?”

“Kiss you, of course.”

“No, thank you,” she said amiably.

“Suit yourself. Hop in.” He tipped the barrow.

She glanced up at distant Starkers. What would they think? Suddenly, she didn't care. She was herself, Hannah Morgenstern. Let others take her as they may.

She slid her tush into the wheelbarrow, crossed her ankles neatly, and began to sing, catching the words easily.

A few minutes later, Lord Liripip, nursing his gout and scribbling away at his memoirs in an upstairs library, heard the melodious uproar and heaved himself to the window, ready to yell or chuck a volume of Trollope at the offender. He froze as soon as he drew a preparatory breath, for below him was nothing less than a memory made flesh, a delicious and painful spirit coursing down his throat, warming and intoxicating and befuddling him. There, cavorting on the green, was his youth. There, raising her voice in unselfconscious song, was the love of his life, many years gone, made fresh and new again. The resemblance was only superficial, he realized a moment later—a small, lissome, vibrant form, dark hair parted virginally dead center over quizzical black brows. What really caught him was her animalistic joy. Like another girl, many years before, she seemed to have a sense that no one else's opinion mattered in the slightest, yet combined with that, a total lack of selfishness.
I will make myself happy
, her free voice and body seemed to say,
and through that, may you be made happy too. If not . . 
. a shrug, a gay laugh, and on with the Maenad frenzy of sheer living.

It hurled Lord Liripip into his past, to a time when he still had hope of happiness. Now, all he had were the things that made other people assume he was happy: vast amounts of money, a secure estate, and a son to carry it all on after he was gone.

Leaning out the window to see her better, he twisted his big toe at a painful angle and staggered back, crystalline needles stabbing his swollen joint. “Damned hooligans,” he swore. But he did not hurl the Trollope.

Hannah and Hardy reached the front steps. “Is that an actual portcullis?” she asked in awe.

“That gate thing? No, this castle isn't real, you know.”

Hannah cocked her head up at the massive edifice. It looked real enough.

“It's neo-romantic,” Hardy said, pronouncing the term carefully, as if it might get stuck on his tongue if he wasn't careful. “Built not more than a hundred years ago, after they knocked down something
really
old, and made to look like five hundred. 'Cept the heating's better, a bit. That's what Umbel, the head gardener, says, anyway, when the ladies from the gardening clubs come on tour days. That's only once or twice a year, though. Lord Liripip hates outsiders.”

“What will he think of me, then?”

“Fancy him thinking of you at all!” Hardy said, laughing. “Hey, where do you think you're going?” For she'd mounted the smooth-edged marble stairs and grabbed the velvet bell-pull. “Stop!”

She turned back to him, wondering why he looked so aghast. Was she supposed to wait for him to ring the bell for her? She had no patience for inaction, or the indolence of propriety. Hannah acutely remembered going to her mother in tears of laughter one time when she'd read some English melodrama in which the heroine had never once in her eighteen years of existence put on her own stockings.
It is true
, Cora had said with a rueful smile.
English ladies—real English ladies—are notorious for doing as little as possible, except ride to the hounds. There are servants for everything else
. Young Hannah had scrunched up her face into unaccustomed earnestness and said,
Then, Mama, I am glad you moved to Germany. I should not like to do nothing all day. And shouldn't the servants get awfully tired?