Susie (8 page)

“Perhaps,” replied Susie hesitantly, “they feel they are following your example.”

“What do you mean, girl?”

“I—I m-mean,” stuttered Susie, “I know you have my best interests at heart, b-but the s-servants hear you ordering me about, and therefore—just perhaps, you know—that makes them think that I am not a person to be treated with respect.”

“Balderdash!” said Lady Felicity vehemently, and then quickly changed the subject, for she privately felt that there might be some truth in what Susie had said. “We will continue your education in good vintages,” said Felicity. “Go down to the cellar and bring back a bottle of
good
vintage claret.”

“Very well,” said Susie meekly, all the fight going out of her.

She left the room only to return some minutes later.

“The cellar door is locked,” she said, “and I can’t find the key anywhere. I can’t find Thomson or any of the servants.”

“Wait a minute,” said Felicity, striding over to an old escritoire in the corner and jerking open the drawer. “I keep a few spare keys here. Ah, this is the one. Don’t lose it.”

Susie took the huge key, which weighed a ton, and wondered how anyone could be supposed to lose a monster like that.

She then went back through the hall and along a stone passage leading off the far corner until she came to the cellar door. It took all her strength to turn the huge key in the lock, but at last the door swung silently open on well-oiled hinges.

Susie went silently down the stairs and paused in amazement halfway down. The cellar was ablaze with candles burning in various empty bottles. On the far wall a wine rack had been pushed aside to reveal an open door with steps leading downward. The cellar was full of the thud and boom of the sea. It was also full of every servant of Blackhall Castle and five rough-looking seamen who were rolling barrels into the center of the floor while Thomson, the butler, ticked off various items in a notebook.

Now, to a more sophisticated young lady, Thomson would simply have been checking a consignment of brandy from the wine merchants, which was being delivered by a hitherto-unsuspected door.

But to Susie, who lived more between the pages of romances and in her own fantasies these days than she did in the real world, the explanation was simple.

“Smugglers!” she cried, clapping her hands in childish delight.

The servants stood frozen with shock. Thomson’s face was ashen.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Thomson,” said Susie, “but perhaps you could find me a good bottle of vintage claret. I’m supposed to pick it myself, but perhaps, this once, you could do it for me and not tell Lady Felicity.”

“No, indeed, my lady,” said Thomson, galvanized into action. He seized a bottle of Chateau Lafite less tenderly than he should and presented it to Susie.

“My lady,” he said desperately. “My lady,
please
…that is…I mean to say…we should be
most
grateful if you did not mention this to Lady Felicity.”

“Oh, no,” said Susie innocently. “Smuggling is so very secret, is it not? I shall say nothing to anyone.”

She tripped lightly up the stairs, swinging the bottle by the neck as if it were lemon squash.

The servants and smugglers waited in silence until she had gone.

“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Wight, the housekeeper, collapsing onto a barrel.

“That was a close one,” said Thomson, mopping his brow.

“Think she’ll keep mum?” grated one of the smugglers.

“Yes, God bless ’er,” said Thomson fervently. “She won’t tell. She’s no more than a babe who thinks we’re playing games.

“We’ve been a bit rough on her,” he added slowly. “Reckon as how us ought to be extra polite to her. For she’s not always going to think smuggling’s a game like Hunt the Slipper or Forfeits.”

And so it was that a very gratified Susie and a much-surprised Lady Felicity noticed the servants’ change of demeanor. Lady Felicity’s grim lady’s maid, Carter, knocked at Susie’s door before dinner and begged most humbly to be allowed to arrange Susie’s hair and help her with her dress. Susie duly presented herself in the dining room, looking as elegant as a fashion plate and as beautiful as a spring day. Lady Felicity felt quite ill just looking at her. But it was the behavior of the servants that really made Lady Felicity jealous—a jealousy that was indirectly to lead to her death.

The servants were simply fawning on Susie, she thought sourly, so Felicity tried to think of some new way to make Susie feel inferior.

At last she hit on it.

“Do you ride?” she asked casually.

“No, not really,” said Susie.

“Every lady should learn to ride,” said Felicity grimly. “I shall teach you myself. We will begin your lessons tomorrow. I shall personally choose a mount for you.”

“Very good of you, I’m sure,” said Susie meekly.

“Good God!” said Felicity waspishly. “Have I not yet cured you of speaking like a scullery maid? Don’t say ‘I’m sure’ at the end of a sentence like that.”

“Very well, Felicity.”

“I don’t know why you never seem to listen to me,” Felicity went on. “That dreary, common little face and that voice of yours get on my nerves.”

Felicity intercepted a sympathetic look that Thomson threw at Susie, and this championship from a most unexpected quarter drove her to further lengths of bitchiness.

“I suppose a silly goose like you thinks a lady can be made overnight. But she can’t! In fact, anyone from your class can only hope for a veneer of refinement. Underneath, they’ll always be the same. Common as dirt. Just like your parents.”

Now, there is just so much that even a girl like Susie can take.

She rose to her feet and threw her napkin down on the table.

“Oh, shut up!” she said distinctly.

Felicity rose to her feet in a rage. “How dare—”

“Yes, I dare,” shouted Susie, feeling all the rage and satisfaction of the turning worm. “Furthermore, I’m tired of your lectures. I wish you were dead, do you hear? Dead! Dead! Dead!”

“Go to your room,” said Felicity, suddenly as cold as she had been hot. “I shall expect your apology in the morning.”

Susie’s fit of rebellion fizzled and died. She felt small and insecure and thoroughly ashamed of herself.

She trailed miserably up to her room.

She knew she would apologize to Felicity in the morning. She had not the courage left to do anything else.

Two footmen and a housemaid kindly brought the rest of her dinner up to her small sitting room. They banked up the fire, laid out her slippers, brought her up piping-hot cans of washing water, and Susie gave them a grateful, timid smile, which, as the housemaid, Gladys, told the rest of the servants later, “went right to ’er heart.”

I can’t go on like this
, thought Susie miserably.
I wish I were dead
.

Then as she thought about dying she began to weave a romantic funeral for herself while a small smile began to play about her mouth. The service would be held at the village church. All the servants would cry. Lady Felicity would tear her hair and beat her bosom with remorse. She would throw herself on Susie’s coffin and cry with grief. The vicar who would perform the service would be a homely young man with an honest, tanned face and blue eyes. “Weep, oh unfortunate woman!” he would admonish Felicity as he removed the pipe from between his manly teeth. “You and you alone are responsible for driving this child into the decline from which she died.” A ray of sun would strike her coffin, and the manly vicar would begin to cry as well. “So young and so beautiful,” he would sob. “Had she not been so far above me in social station, why, I might have married her and helped her escape from her dreadful life.”

Nursing her fantasy and taking it carefully to bed, as a child would a favorite teddy bear, Susie soon fell into a dreamless sleep. She never once thought about Giles, Lord Blackhall.

Why should she?

She had nearly forgotten that he existed.

Giles, Earl of Blackhall, had, on the other hand, not forgotten Susie. He had stayed with friends in Paris for a month and then had slowly drifted southward toward the sunny Mediterranean shore. The farther away from Blackhall Castle he traveled, the more it seemed to pull him back. It was his now, and there was so much to be done, so much land that could be farmed and was, at present, lying fallow. The moat could be drained, the keep modernized, made warmer, more comfortable. It was something to still have a castle to live in these days.

But still he traveled aimlessly on until one night in the garden of a villa in Nice, he kissed a very beautiful, very sophisticated, very passionate, and very willing lady and was deeply surprised that he should be unable to conjure up any answering response. While he pressed his lips against the warm face beneath his own, he remembered vividly the passion one kiss from Susie had aroused in him. He wondered urgently how she was and if she had forgiven him, realizing thoroughly and for the first time that she did have something to forgive.

He led the lady in his arms to a convenient summer house and performed his part with athletic expertise, while all the time his thoughts roamed homeward to the bleak castle on top of the steep cliffs above the roaring sea.

“Use your whip, you ninny! Use your whip!” But Susie would not.

It was her fifth riding lesson, and she was so bruised and battered, she could hardly stay on the vicious mount that Lady Felicity had deliberately chosen for her. The horse was called Dobbin and was anything but the docile animal that its pedestrian name conjured up. He had a nasty temper and a rolling eye. He did not want Susie on his back; he did not want any human on his back, and only endured Susie for brief stretches at a time because she fed him sugar lumps and spoke to him in a soft, pleading voice that somewhere in the back of his bad-tempered brain he rather liked.

Lady Felicity was herself a hard-bitten horsewoman, and prided herself on the fact that there wasn’t a horse alive she couldn’t ride.

During this, the fifth lesson, she and Susie were riding toward the steep edge of a gravel pit. The sky still lowered above them, and a dry, cold wind whipped across the rock-strewn moor. Felicity had become bored with Susie’s torture and turned her attention instead to Susie’s horse.

Suddenly she reined in her own mount. “It’s time I showed you and that animal of yours how a horse should be mastered,” she said. “Dismount and take my horse, and I’ll take yours.”

Susie gladly complied, climbing awkwardly up onto the back of Lady Felicity’s more docile horse.

Felicity leapt nimbly into the sidesaddle on Dobbin’s back, wrenched his mouth, and then lashed the animal viciously across the rump with her whip so that a thin trickle of blood ran down his flanks.

She then dug a wicked-looking spur hard into his side. “Gee-up!” she said.

And Dobbin did.

Right to the edge of the gravel pit he flew like an arrow from a bow, and right at the edge he dug in all four hooves and stopped short.

Lady Felicity went sailing over his head. Her astonished voice sailed back in the wind as she seemed to hang suspended for a moment over the gravel pit.

“Deary me…!” cried Lady Felicity.

And then she crashed down and down and down and died instantly as her neck snapped on a convenient rock.

There was a great silence. Then a sea gull screamed overhead, and Susie began to shiver uncontrollably, climbing down from her horse and falling onto the ground, because her trembling legs could not support her.

After a time she gritted her teeth and, rising, made her way slowly and painfully down the steep sides of the gravel pit, her long skirts bunched over her arm.

There was no doubt about it—Lady Felicity was very much dead.

Susie began to laugh hysterically. Then she burst into stormy tears while a startled rabbit fled in fear from this peculiar human.

Susie sat down beside the still body and cried and cried, wrapping her head in her arms and rocking to and fro. This un-English manifestation of shock, this lack of stiff upper lip, was what kept her from having a complete breakdown.

Finally, after a long time she made her way slowly back to the castle on foot while Dobbin, now lazy and placid, strolled after her, accompanied by the other horse.

A year had passed since the death of Lady Felicity. Susie had recovered a long time ago from her shock, but still remained much the same dreamy, immature girl as ever.

Giles had thrown himself into plans for modernizing the castle, and workmen seemed to be hammering upstairs and downstairs morning, noon, and night. He had not had the energy or the inclination to find a home for Susie and had, instead, invited an elderly aunt to stay as a kind of chaperon. His aunt, Lady Matilda Warden, was a fanatical knitter, tatter, and stitcher, and trailed cheerfully from room to room of the keep with long, different-colored threads and skeins of wool hanging from her workbasket. She was extremely kind to Susie; that is, when she happened to notice her, which was about once a month, and Susie, in return, was very fond of the old lady.

The servants now treated Susie with nervous respect. They had not forgotten that Lady Felicity had died mysteriously, just shortly after Lady Susie Blackhall had wished her dead. The servants had, of course, conveyed their suspicions to Giles’s valet, who in turn had told his master. But Giles had shrugged it off as gossip. He was too busy with his plans for the castle, and he did not mind Susie in the least so long as she did not get in his way.

Sometimes, however, he could not help wondering what there had been about Susie that had so attracted him and so repelled him at the same time on the night he had kissed her. Now, to him, she seemed like an ordinary girl—a bit vague and dreamy—but inoffensive for all that.

He had not even noticed that Susie, for all her vagueness, had taken on much of the direction that had once belonged to Lady Felicity. Susie must have been one of the few ladies of England in charge of a large staff who was not cheated in any way by the servants. They were too frightened of her to fiddle the books, and furthermore, she continued to turn a blind eye to their smuggling activities, at which they made a comfortable profit, Thomson taking the largest share, the housekeeper the next, and so on down to the little knife-boy, who had his meager wage augmented by a weekly smuggling bonus of three shillings.