The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (4 page)

Fred leaned close. Her face was a perfect heart shape, and he could just make out the shape of her breasts under the sheets, small and perfect. ‘I won't hurt you. I promise.'

The girl backed away and gasped, but in terror rather than delight, and clamped her legs hard against his hand.

He pulled away. ‘For pity's sake, Betsy! You might try and enjoy it a little!'

‘It's Essie, sir,' she squeaked.

Fred saw that her eyes were full of tears. He might have been holding a knife to her neck rather than seducing her.

‘Essie! Bessie! I don't give a fig for your damn name!'

‘No, sir.'

Fred stood up. ‘You could do a lot worse than me. Next time it'll be some toothless old sot with no hair on his head – and the pox, I don't doubt.'

‘Yes, sir.' Her voice was trembling.

Fred rolled his eyes. ‘I have paid for you, Bessie. Look at me. Do I disgust you? Could you really not bring yourself to kiss me? Would that be such a hardship?'

‘I do not know, sir.'

‘My name is Fred, not sir!'

The girl sniffed. ‘I wanted to be a dancer, sir. I'm good at dancing!' She looked at him, the bedsheet held up to her chin, bottom lip wobbly with grief. He felt his passion cool as surely as if a jug of cold water had been emptied upon him.

‘You'll not tell Mrs Ingrams, will you, sir?'

‘So you can part another patsy from his cash tonight?'

The girl sobbed all the more.

Fred sighed. He almost sat down on the bed but remembered that his proximity only upset the poor scrap. ‘I will not speak of this. I have a reputation of my own. If Edmund found out—'

‘Thank you! Oh, sir, thank you!'

Fred turned away and began to dress. He would not tell Edmund about this debacle; his friend would only laugh and say he ought to have taken her no matter what. Fred stole a glance at the girl in the bed. She was wiping her tears with the bedsheet.
Did she not understand her lot?
he wondered.

Fred decided to get to the inn early and take some coffee before the coach left. He thought about Oxford: he was planning to persuade Father to let him do the tour before his studies. Edmund was so lucky – he had it mapped out: Italy, Greece, perhaps even Turkey. Fred could hardly think of anything better. The shine was definitely off London as far as he was concerned. And foreign girls were supposed to be something very special, weren't they? It was a shame Father viewed a tour as a waste of time, merely a chance to put off employment.

Fred thought of the prospect of weeks at Knole Park – weeks that would stretch out into a lifetime if he wasn't careful. Mother would ask about the books he'd read – none – and Father would talk about banks and stocks and shares, and Cass would try and interest him in her equally silly friend Diana Edgecombe.

He sighed. He hoped there'd be a chance to escape for some sport. He turned to the girl again, but she simply looked away.

Fred had put his breeches on and was buttoning his shirt when there was a commotion on the stairs and the door flew open.

‘Letty!' Fred grinned, then glanced at his pocket watch on the bedside table. ‘I am so pleased to see you!' His mind ran ahead and he stopped doing up his shirt. There was still a good half-hour—

Letty strode in and slapped him hard across his face. The sting was not quite as shocking as the fact of the blow.

‘Ow.' Fred put a hand to his face. ‘Ow! Letty, are you completely mad?' She looked dishevelled, her hair unpinned and her silk gown a little grubby in the morning sunlight.

‘Only 'cause you made me so!' She made to hit him again, but Fred caught her hand.

‘Letty!' He would be firm with her. ‘Letty, I will have words with Mrs Ingrams. Stop this now!'

Letty dissolved in a pool of tears. ‘Please, sir! No, sir!'

Fred threw her off him. ‘Lord! Not you too! Are tears contagious?'

‘No, Mr Fred, my love, my darling. Please, Freddie, I am sorry. Forgive me – I was driven to it! I never meant to hurt you, honest to God. I do so love you, my own, my love!'

‘Well, don't go slapping me about the face again, there's a good girl.'

Letty took a deep breath in through her tears. ‘I love you!'

‘No you don't, Letty.' Fred smiled at the girl in the bed, who was looking on, mesmerized.

‘She won't be no good for you, that one!' Letty pointed at her.

‘I think I know that now, but if you will get out of my way, I do have a coach to catch.' Fred fastened his cuffs and took down his jacket from the back of the door.

‘Don't leave me! Mr Fred, please! You said you loved me – you said I was your own, your special one!' Letty was wailing, her face wet with tears.

‘Letty, don't be a bore. I have to go.'

‘But you promised me . . .' She threw herself at his feet, holding onto his legs. ‘You promised me there weren't no other!'

‘I promised you nothing of the sort, Letty. Ever. I am leaving. Let me go, woman!' He practically had to kick her away.

‘But the child, Mr Fred! Our child!' She lay on the floor, sobbing. ‘I won't be able to work no more and you promised me – you said you'd buy me out of Eden's!'

Fred hid a flash of fear. ‘Do you think me soft in the head? The old “child” lay? Edmund warned me about this. That child could have ten fathers as soon as blink.'

Letty wailed again. ‘It's yours, sir. It's yours, I knows it! And all those words, Mr Fred – you said I was yours. You
said
!'

‘We had some fun, Letty, don't go spoiling it.' Fred retrieved his hat and put it on, checking his reflection in the looking glass.

Letty was still crying inconsolably. ‘You have broke me, Mr Fred, you surely have!' She went to the window. ‘I shall throw myself out, myself and the baby! I shall die flat on the pavement like Polly Marsden, all the blood seeped out of me!'

Fred froze. He had been there, with Letty, when it happened. He had never seen anything so vile in all his life.

‘For God's sake, Letty!' He grabbed her wrist with one hand, and with the other reached deep into his pocket and fished out half a crown. ‘There.' He pressed it into her hand. ‘Better now?'

Letty stared at the money then looked at him. She stepped down off the window seat and cursed him. ‘You are a bastard in all but name, Mr Fred, an' that's the truth.'

‘Letty, I am leaving, and that's an end to it.'

Her face turned murderous. ‘You are rotten inside and no mistake.' She came closer to him. ‘There is no baby! And if there was I'd kill it three times over if it was yours.'

Fred stared at her. ‘I knew it! Edmund was right, you girls are all liars—'

‘I never loved any of it, not one single second. I only loved your money.'

‘Yes, well, that's the lot of a trollop—'

‘Mr Fred, you don't know nothing about love and you never will. Your heart is dead and rotten – if you have a heart at all!'

Fred opened the door. ‘So please leave. I have a stage to catch.'

Letty didn't move.

He sighed. ‘What is it you want now?'

‘From you?' She looked at him with utter contempt and swore, her words dripping venom.

‘How dare you speak to me like that? You girls need to remember how to treat your betters.'

‘Betters? You! You are a disease that walks on two legs! You wouldn't know how to make a girl love you unless you gave her cash up front, and you never will.' She started laughing at him, then sat down on the bed, almost hysterical.

He shouted down the stairs: ‘Mrs Ingrams!' He shouted louder. ‘Mrs Ingrams! Come at once! Letty is having a turn.' Then he tipped his hat at the girl in the bed and left.

The coach journey was long and uncomfortable, and not, which was a new feeling entirely, just physically. Fred tried to sleep as the coach bumped and jolted along the rutted conduits that passed for roads, but he could not stop thinking about what Letty had said. However hard he pushed the memory away, she came back, laughing at him, telling him he didn't know anything about love.

How ridiculous was that? What in heaven's name could a girl like Letty know about love?

And what did she know about
him
? Nothing, that's what. Absolutely nothing. Of course, when he married, it would be for love, not simply some commercial transaction. He would love someone – some girl, some pure and decent maid – and she would love him back.

Wouldn't she?

What did love feel like when you hadn't paid for it?

He couldn't sleep.

Letty was jealous. Love was not for trollops and tarts. Everyone knew that.

Knole Park House
April 1819

The Princess woke suddenly, gasping for air. For a second it felt as if she was fighting for breath.

Perhaps she was dead already, drowned in rotting leaves and cherry blossom. Then she opened her eyes and all she could see was white; shining, clean, burning white. This was death, surely.

Once her eyes became used to the light, she saw that she was in a small whitewashed room. Yellow sunlight flooded in through the square window and bounced off the white walls, the white sheets, the white rug.

‘Miss? Miss!' A girl was shaking her shoulder.

The Princess knew she could not be dead, unless the angels in heaven went about their business dressed as housemaids.

Suddenly it all came back. The burning thirst on the road; the collapse – she must have collapsed; the inn, dark and stinking of ale; and the ride in the cart to this big house. It looked old, not one of the smart white stuccoed houses of London or Marlborough. This one was brick built, with a castle turret stuck on one side which looked as out of place as a girl wearing a summer straw hat in the rain. It was not a castle, the daughter of the house had explained when she saw her looking. It was, she said, waving her hand, nothing more than a kind of fancy.

Her old self had seen grand houses before – in Exeter and in London, when she had worked as a nanny for families of quality. Indeed, she thought, the people she had worked for in London had finer paintings, but she had never seen anything like the drawing room the pretty blonde girl – Cassandra, that was her name – had led her into . . .

The wallpaper was pink – rosy, precious pink like the clouds at sunrise – with blue flowers and birds, that striking clear blue of high summer skies. She had looked around and her mouth must have fallen open like the worst sort of village idiot, but Cassandra merely steered her to a chair.

‘Mama! Mama!' she had called, and a woman of middle age, hurried in, untying her bonnet, closely followed by a tired-looking gentleman.

The woman clapped her hands. ‘This is the girl? Oh my!'

The man harrumphed. He was still wearing his fine travelling cloak. ‘Finiefs! Bless my soul, where is the man?'

‘Mr Worrall – Samuel.' The woman came close and stared at the girl in the chair, ignoring the black gown, covered with dust from the road. She looked at her face. ‘They found her at the inn, Cassandra?'

‘Yes, Mama. She speaks no English, not a word.'

The man, Mr Worrall, harrumphed again. ‘She is a beggar – Bristol is crawling with them. I will get Finiefs or Vaughan to take her to the workhouse in the city. See the dust she is trailing! I did not pay a sultan's ransom for your Chinese drawing room to be filled with filthy foreign beggars who might be crawling with vermin and have an eye to steal whatever we have!'

‘Father!'

In the chair the girl made no move. Whatever anyone said about her, she would not let it show. Nothing could hurt her any more. Not after her heart had been broken, her baby dead and her body ruined. She would be a princess now, a princess who knew nothing of pain and sadness. She was new; she was spotless. She sat taller in the chair and regarded the man, the woman and the girl with the same intensity as they regarded her.

‘Perhaps we should take her into the library, Cassandra.'

‘Take her away, more like.' The man opened the door and yelled into the house, ‘Finiefs! Dammit, man, I don't pay you to sit upon your—'

Suddenly a man in servant's livery came into the room. He was puffing with exertion.

Mr Worrall nodded. ‘Ah, Mr Finiefs.'

The black-haired man dipped in a bow. ‘Sir?'

‘I want this girl on the trap and back to the Bristol poorhouse.'

The girl in the chair smiled as if this meant nothing, as if she had never heard the word and had no idea what the thing was. After all, the person she was now had never spent a night in such a place. Ever.

‘Papa! Please,' Cassandra begged.

‘Yes, Samuel, one night, let her stay one night,' Mrs Worrall said. ‘I should like to hear her speak – they had no idea of her language?'

Cassandra shook her head. ‘And, Mama, you should have seen her when she saw this room. I do believe it means something to her . . .'

‘Take her through to the library.' Mrs Worrall opened the door; her husband made a face. ‘Samuel, please. This is a chance to study someone at close quarters. She is most interesting, it is clear.'

‘She is a foreign beggar! In Bristol we have Negro beggars, Lascar beggars – Mr Finiefs, I wager, in Athens or wherever you were born, the beggars are as dark as this one.'

‘Oh, darker indeed, sir, madam.'

Cassandra had taken the girl's hand. ‘Come,' she said, and led her back across the marble tiled hall and into the library.

If the Chinese drawing room had been a source of wonder, the library, with its rows and rows of books, had been a revelation. Of course she could read. Every year she had won an orange at Sunday school in the Primitive Baptist chapel in Witheridge for her knowledge of the scriptures. Where had her first stories come from? All those stories of marvels and enchantment? And here were more books than she had ever seen in all her seventeen years. And weren't stories more rewarding than life? Stories had never let her down, had never promised anything they did not deliver.