The Joneses’ mansion was called Mon Repos, conjuring up visions of quiet suburban villas standing among laurel bushes in a tree-lined road.
But Mon Repos was a great towering Gothic house perched on the edge of a barren cliff and set about with spires and turrets and gargoyles. Elinor Glynn would have loved it. A fine, powdery snow was blowing in from the sea as Lucy and MacGregor alighted. To heighten the Gothic effect, flambeaux flared from sconces in the walls, sputtering and smoking in the bitter wind.
The entrance hall was a veritable armory of halberds and suits of armor. Ancient flags fluttered in the drafts high up on the beamed roof and Lucy only learned much later that they were modern and that Mr. Jones had paid a great deal to have them cleverly faded, tattered, and frayed.
A powdered footman with a bad case of temper—Lucy wondered if his hair hurt him—led them to the first floor where they were to leave their cloaks. Another bad-tempered footman—it must be the hair—accosted them outside and marched them along a complicated series of passages which suddenly opened into a circular hallway where Mr. Jones himself stood at the top of the stairs leading down into the ballroom, to receive his guests.
He was a fat, jolly little man with a fat, wet handshake. He seemed greatly taken with MacGregor and promised them both a tour of his “museum” later in the evening. They were then passed on to a cross-looking majordomo, who was dressed in scarlet livery bedecked with a great deal of silken cords. Lucy felt that if she pulled one of them, his whole uniform would roll up like a Venetian blind. A carved wooden staircase adorned with carved wooden unicorns and lions stretched down to the polished floor of the ballroom where a great assortment of people seemed to be inexpertly performing the quadrille. A small orchestra sawed away with great verve at selections from Offenbach in a worm-eaten minstrels’ gallery which was suspended over the ballroom at one end.
Andrew Harvey was not dancing. He was standing against the far wall chatting amiably with Didi. He was thinking about what a charming and witty girl Didi was and that if he got around to settling down he could certainly do much worse. He thought briefly of Lucy and mentally shook his head. He must be getting overly susceptible in his old age.
He had not heard Lucy or MacGregor being announced, which was not at all strange, since the cross majordomo was mangling every announcement with Gallic verve. His roar of Monsieur et Mademoiselle Bugger-Macgreeg had fallen on deaf ears. Lucy was halfway down the staircase when Andrew Harvey looked up and saw her.
She was dressed in a gown of heavy crimson brocade, cut low over the bosom. Her midnight-black hair was tied back in a heavy knot at the base of her neck and was without ornament. She looked like a medieval princess. Andrew Harvey felt his heart give a little wrench and Didi looked down at her own simple white tulle and felt the world come to an end.
Andrew’s feet seemed to walk toward Lucy of their own accord. Didi followed silently at his side. Lucy stopped at the foot of the stairs when she saw their approach. The viscount’s blue eyes looked unusually serious and Didi was staring with the hurt, lost look of a stray dog.
“May I?” Andrew took Lucy’s dance program and began to write in it busily. Lucy gave a breathless little laugh. “Why, you are engaging me for nearly every dance, my lord!”
“Shall we begin now?” He held out his arms and Lucy moved into them. They moved slowly off to the strains of the waltz, the fair head bent over the black one, and MacGregor heaved a sigh of relief. He had not been sure, he realized, whether Lucy knew how to dance.
Thousands of candles blazed from the walls, lighting the ballroom with a soft, flickering light.
Andrew Harvey held Lucy sedately at regulation arm’s length and resisted an overwhelming impulse to hold her closer
Lucy could not remember afterward who else had been at the ball apart from herself and Didi and MacGregor. Faces formed an enchanting blur at the edge of a kind of stage where she danced alone with the viscount.
Didi refused several offers to dance. She stood over beside the long windows and watched Lucy and Andrew with her heart beating fast. She must do something—anything—to stop what was happening. She slipped behind the heavy curtains and leaned her hot forehead against the cool glass. On a sudden impulse, she reached up and seized the heavy metal clasp and pulled the great window open.
The curtains ballooned out into the ballroom, the candle flames streamed sideways and then went out, and the ballroom was plunged into blackness. There were screams and scuffles, someone swearing in French, someone calling for lights. Didi slipped away from the window. That would stop them.
Andrew Harvey had indeed stopped. “Lucy!” he whispered.
“Yes?”
The voice was soft and faint, somewhere below his chin. He drew her close to him, feeling the faint trembling of her body vibrating beneath its heavy armor of stays. He bent his head and gently placed his mouth on hers. The world whirled away for Lucy, into beautiful deep black velvet, a world of silent passion, enclosed and burning, far, far away from Marysburgh, far, far, away from the casinos. One shaft of light stabbed into the ballroom as someone carried in a lamp.
One by one the candles were being lit. Andrew gave a shaky laugh. “I feel, Miss Balfour-MacGregor, that I should apologize for …” The rest of his words were drowned in a sudden burst of music.
“Don’t apologize,” said Lucy softly.
“What?” He strained to hear and then felt an imperious tap on his arm. The mayor and his wife were standing smiling at them. “My dance, milord, I think,” said the mayor’s wife. Andrew wrenched his eyes away from Lucy’s face, bowed, and led the plump lady into the dance.
Lucy stood irresolutely for a moment and then moved toward the dowagers who were lined against the far wall. She saw Boodles bearing down on her and veered slightly and almost ran toward a curtained entrance. She must be alone. She must have time to compose herself.
She pushed back the curtain and opened the door. It opened into an anteroom which was divided into by a huge lacquered screen. She could hear two men—very English by their accents-chatting on the other side. Unconsciously imitating Didi, she leaned her forehead against the window.
She became aware after a few minutes that someone was watching her. Lucy swung around and found herself looking into Didi’s glittering eyes.
“It’s time we have a talk, Miss Balfour-MacGregor,” said Didi. One of the men behind the screen gave a loud, drunken laugh and Didi started and then lowered her voice. The room smelled of stale beer, potpourri, and hot wax. The driving snow hissed and whispered outside the window.
“You must leave Andrew alone,” said Didi, her voice a whisper like the snow.
“Why?” asked Lucy baldly.
“Because we are practically engaged, that’s why,” whispered Didi, still in that venomous manner.
“Practically,” said Lucy softly. “Practically.”
The two girls faced each other in silence. The two men behind the screen were having a joke competition and to Lucy their voices seemed to be coming from miles away.
“How do you make a Venetian blind?” said one of them in a slurred voice.
“Poke his eyes out. Old, that. Damned old,” said the other. “I’ve got one for you. How do you make a sauerkraut?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bones.”
“Kick him in the balls.”
“Oh, jolly good. You didn’t hear that at the minstrel show!”
“Know the one about the waiter? Diner says to him, ‘How do you serve shrimp?’ Says waiter, ‘On my hands and knees.’ Know that. Fell out m’cradle.”
“Leave him alone or I will kill myself,” said Didi, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” said Lucy. “You surely do not wish to marry a man whose attentions stray so easily.”
“If only you had never come here, they would never have strayed.”
There was a crash of glass from behind the screen. “Oops, sorry old boy. Did your watch stop when it fell on the floor?”
“Of course,” replied the other with a giggle. “Did you expect it to go right through?”
“Listen well, Miss Balfour-MacGregor. Listen well. I do not make threats lightly. You are breaking my heart. If you take Andrew Harvey away from me, I will kill myself.”
“We could have been friends,” said Lucy sadly, but she spoke to the empty air for Didi had gone.
She turned back to the window where the myriad voices of the snow whispered, “kill myself, kill myself, kill myself …”
“What is black and comes out of the ground shouting ‘Knickers! Knickers!’?” roared the voice from the screened end of the room.
“Don’t know, old boy.”
“Crude oil.”
“Don’t get it. Crude oil. Whash crude oil got to shout knickers for? Les go an’ dance.”
Lucy went slowly back to the ballroom.
Didi was surely being melodramatic. But there she was, watching Andrew Harvey with those lost eyes blazing in her white face.
Lucy went straight up to MacGregor. “I want to go back to the hotel. I must get away!”
“No need to rush,” said MacGregor. “Mister Jones, here, was on the point of showing me his museum. Come along with us and perhaps you’ll feel like dancing later.”
Mr. Jones was looking at her with a pleased, expectant air, like that of a child about to show off his favorite toy. Lucy felt she could not possibly refuse.
He led the way from the ballroom through a maze of passages to the back of the house, at last coming to a stop before a low door.
“This,” he said triumphantly, throwing it open, “is my museum.”
He lit the gas and Lucy and MacGregor blinked at the strange sight that met their eyes. It was a collection of water closets from the time of Joseph Bramah on. There was even a roped-in area containing water closets that had belonged to famous families. “Queen Victoria sat here,” said MacGregor under his breath.
It was the final, grotesque episode in a strange and weird evening. It took them an hour to cut short Mr. Jones’s enthusiasm and make their escape. Pleading a headache, Lucy insisted on being taken home. The mocking, tinny sound of the dance music followed them out into the courtyard. MacGregor looked down at her still, white face. “What’s the matter, lassie? You look as if the walls of the pumpkin are closing in on you.”
Lucy did not deign to reply and they arrived at the hotel in silence. “Talk about it,” urged MacGregor. “It never does to keep hurt locked up inside.”
When they were safely in their sitting room with a great fire roaring up the chimney, Lucy began to talk in a rush, words tumbling over the other, as she told MacGregor of Didi and of her threat of suicide.
“Havers,” said MacGregor succinctly. “‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them—but not for love,’” he quoted. “And that goes for women too. Miss Didi is a very determined young lady. But the viscount seems to have fallen for you in a bit of a way. But with that one, it’s always come too easy. I suggest we remove to London on the morrow.”
“What if he falls in love with Didi?”
“He won’t,” grinned MacGregor. “He didn’t before you’d arrived and he certainly won’t now.”
“I don’t like these games,” said Lucy. “My love needs no such intrigues to fuel it.”
“Believe me,” replied MacGregor heavily, “if you were as old and as spoiled by women as Andrew Harvey, you’d need every trick in the book.”
“I shall trust you this once,” said Lucy.
“Do that. Just thank your stars I’ve got you a maid to pack for you!”
Andrew Harvey threw down his pen and stared unseeingly at the pages of his manuscript. He had been working happily on his book for the last month—Military Maneuvers on the North-West Frontier. He had felt he had been producing something worthwhile, something that might, in time, honorably grace the walls of Sandhurst library, but now it seemed very dull and flat—as if it had all been written many times before.
He watched the vedettes bobbing out on the swell as they carried their passengers to the liner at St. Malo and wished heartily he were on one of them. Why had she left? Why had she not remained at the ball? Why had Didi looked so triumphant? Women!
The hotel manager had told him that they had gone to London, and his first impulse had been to throw his clothes into his trunks and pursue them. But there was his aunt to think of. She was a lonely old lady and patently glad of his company during the long winter months. He turned again to the manuscript. Perhaps he should never have left the army. But he was weary of the hot sun blazing down on foreign landscapes. All he wanted to do was to settle down on his estates under the soft English rain and raise a family. There had been plenty of amiable and amenable girls around. Now the whole scheme seemed boring and lacking in adventure.
Damn Lucy Balfour-MacGregor, who could kiss so casually and leave without even saying goodbye!