Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [41]
We had decided that my lavender dress, worn with the white muslin tucker at the neck, was the more suitable one, though she insisted I must remove the bunch of silk flowers from the waist. My shoes were scratched from scrambling around at Calais, but would have to do, so I must tuck them away under my skirt as far as possible.
‘You can’t wear those stockings.’
‘Why not?’
I was pulling them on carefully. They were my only good pair.
‘Governesses don’t wear silk stockings.’
‘Very well. I’ll wear my blue thread ones.’
‘Blue stockings are even worse. They suggest unorthodox opinions. You’ll have to borrow a pair of mine.’
White cotton gone yellowish from much washing, darned knubbily around toes and heels. I had to garter them tightly to take out the wrinkles and what with that and the bonnet strings felt as thoroughly trussed as a Christmas goose. Miss Bodenham looked at me critically.
‘It will have to do. Be careful of stepping in gutters on the way and make sure you arrive ten minutes early.’ Then she added, unexpectedly, ‘Good luck.’
The house in St James’s Square had the elegant proportions of old King George’s time, an iron arch over the bottom of the steps with a candle-snuffer beside it, stone pots of blue hydrangeas with a thin maid watering them. She couldn’t have been much more than twelve years old and stepped aside to let me up the steps as if she expected to be kicked. As instructed, I was precisely ten minutes early. A footman – the same one who had resented the doorstep in Store Street – opened the door to me and led me to a small drawing room overlooking the square, where I was to wait until summoned. If I had been, as I pretended, a timid applicant for a much-needed post, it would have unnerved me thoroughly. In truth, it almost did. I got back some of my self-possession by reminding myself that I was a spy and that this family, this very house perhaps, could tell me something about my father’s death. I must keep my mouth shut, my eyes and ears more wide open than they’d ever been.
The drawing room told me nothing that I didn’t know already – that the Mandevilles were rich and proud of their ancestry. For evidence of wealth, the room bulged and writhed with marquetry, carving, inlaid work and gilding as if the sight of a plain piece of wood were an offence against society. Swags of golden flowers and fruit, probably the work of Chippendale, surrounded a great oval mirror over the fireplace. Golden, goat-footed satyrs gambolled up the edges of two matching cabinets in oyster veneer with veined red marble tops supporting a pair of large porcelain parrots in purple and green. The chairs, gilt-framed and needlepoint embroidered, looked as comfortable as thorn hedges for sitting on, so I stood and stared back at the Mandeville family portraits that encrusted the silk-covered walls. Hatchet-like noses and smug pursed mouths seemed to be the distinguishing features of the men. There was the first baronet, with his full wig and little soft hands, and his lady who, from her expanse of white bosom and complaisant expression, was probably the reason King Charles gave the family their title. An eighteenth-century baronet stared at the world from between white marble pillars with palm trees to the side, presumably the Mandeville West Indian plantations. One portrait near the door clearly belonged to the present century and seemed more amiable than the rest. It showed the head and shoulders of a beautiful golden-haired woman in a blue muslin dress, hair twined with blue ribbons and ropes of pearls. She was young and smiling, eyes on something just out of the picture. The lightness of her dress suggested the fashion of twenty years or so ago. Puzzlingly, she seemed familiar, but I couldn’t think why. I was still staring at her when the door opened and the footman told me to follow him.
CHAPTER TEN
Two women sat facing me, side by side in gilt-framed armchairs, their backs to a window draped with heavy curtains in peacock-blue brocade. The older woman, in her late sixties, wore a ruffled black silk