202. Love in the Dark Read online

  To Susanna it was a new world.

  She and Miss Harding searched the bookshops for volumes that contained reproductions of pictures to be found in the great Galleries of Europe such as the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence.

  Every time she found a picture she particularly liked, Susanna began to feel that it was a treasure that belonged to her and that she owned it in a way that was impossible to explain in words.

  Then most unexpectedly at the beginning of the year Lady Lavenham had told Miss Harding that she would be expected to leave in three months’ time.

  Without waiting for an explanation from her Governess, Susanna had rushed downstairs to her mother’s boudoir in a manner that she had never done before and burst in on her.

  “I hear, Mama, you have given Miss Harding notice!” she cried. “Why? Why must she go? I cannot lose her!”

  Lady Lavenham was lying on a chaise longue wearing one of the clinging chiffon tea gowns that were the fashion for every lady in the afternoon.

  It was a relief, Susanna understood, for the wearer to take off the tightly laced corset that pulled in her waist.

  She was too innocent to know that the tea gowns had been invented for a very different reason.

  She was, however, aware that when her mother was in London, the King and sometimes other gentlemen would call for an intimate hour when no one under any circumstances was to disturb her.

  Fortunately, as they were in the country, Lady Lavenham was alone and the house party was not being expected until the following day.

  “Kindly do not burst in on me in that rough manner,” Lady Lavenham said in an icy voice that usually made her daughter tremble.

  At the moment Susanna was too upset to feel anything but indignation.

  “Why have you told Miss Harding to leave, Mama?” she enquired.

  “You are being rather more stupid than usual,” Lady Lavenham replied. “Your hair is untidy and I can see there is a spot of ink on your dress.”

  “I asked you a question, Mama!”

  “Then I suppose I must explain it in words of one syllable,” Lady Lavenham replied, “that as you are over eighteen, in fact almost too old to be a debutante, were it not that you were in mourning last Season, you are to be presented.”

  Susanna looked at her wide-eyed.

  “But does that mean Miss Harding must leave?”

  “But of course. You would hardly want a Governess when you are ‘out’ and I presume, boring though it will be, I shall have to chaperone you everywhere.”

  There was no doubt from the way she spoke that Lady Lavenham would find the task unpleasant.

  Then she added sharply before Susanna could speak,

  “For Heaven’s sake go upstairs and make yourself look more presentable. God knows how I will ever get you off my hands looking as you do now.”

  For a moment Susanna stood staring at her mother. Then, as the blood rose crimson in her cheeks, she turned and walked from the boudoir.

  Upstairs she went into her bedroom and sat on the bed feeling as if unexpectedly her whole world had fallen about her ears.

  It was foolish of her but she had forgotten that she would have to make her debut and would be taken, as May had been, from ball to ball and from Reception to Reception. She knew that she would hate every moment of it.

  How could she do anything else knowing that her mother was ashamed of her? That no man unless he was forced to do so would dance with her?

  Foolishly it had never struck her that because she was to ‘come out’ she would lose Miss Harding.

  She had been happier these last two years than she had been in her whole life, but she knew now that she might have realised that she was living in a fool’s paradise because she ought to have made her debut the previous summer.

  It had been impossible because her grandmother had died and they had been plunged into deep mourning that made her mother look exquisitely lovely while she herself resembled a fat crow!

  But now at eighteen and a half she would emerge on the Social world and she was intelligent enough to realise that from her mother’s point of view as well as her own, it would be a disaster.

  The idea was so horrifying that Susanna sought for a bag of sweets that she had bought from the village shop and stuffed several of them into her mouth at once.

  ‘I shall look awful and feel worse,’ she told herself, ‘and when Miss Harding goes there will be no one to talk to and no one to be interested in anything I think or want to discuss.’

  Then, as if everything moved with the smoothness of one of the new Express trains, plans were made to open the London house, to leave the country and for Miss Harding to say ‘goodbye’.

  The night before she left, Susanna had cried until she could cry no more.

  “What shall I do without you?” she sobbed. “You are the only person who has ever been kind to me, the only person who has treated me as if I was real. When you are gone, there will be no one!”

  “Quite frankly, Susanna,” Miss Harding had said in her quiet voice, “there is little more I can teach you.”

  Susanna had been so surprised she stopped crying and stared at her Governess, the tears wet on her cheeks.

  “It is true,” Miss Harding said. “You must realise by now that you are very intelligent, far too intelligent for the life you will live.”

  “But I shall – have to – live it,” Susanna answered.

  “I suppose you must,” Miss Harding said with a sigh, “and there is no alternative for a girl born into your position in life. But it need not stop you from thinking, reading and from developing.”

  “For what?” Susanna asked bitterly.

  “For yourself,” Miss Harding replied.

  She paused for a moment as if she was choosing her words carefully and then she said,

  “Some people are completely happy with the Social round, the excitement of giving a bigger and better dinner party tomorrow than the one they attended yesterday, but I think you are different.”

  “I hope – so,” Susanna murmured.

  “I am sure you are,” Miss Harding said, “and I therefore think, Susanna, that you will always find new horizons for yourself. If you cannot do actually all you want to do, you can at least, do it in your imagination.”

  Susanna clasped her hands together.

  “But – you will not be here to – help me.”

  Miss Harding paused a moment before answered,

  “I have always believed that when we need something very much, and I am talking spiritually and not materially, someone is there to guide and help us. If it is not a person, it is books, music or prayer, we are never left entirely alone.”

  Susanna was still for a moment and then she said,

  “I understand what you are saying to me, but it will be hard, very hard, and I am not likely to find anyone to help me amongst Mama’s friends.”

  Miss Harding thought the same thing, but she knew that it would be disloyal to say so.

  Instead she replied,

  “You have to believe in yourself, Susanna. You have to find your own way, choose your own direction and, because I know you so well, I know that eventually you will not fail yourself.”

  “Or you,” Susanna added quietly.

  “I shall be thinking of you,” Miss Harding said, “and let me tell you, I have never had a pupil whom I have loved more or of whom I have had such high hopes.”

  Her words brought the tears into Susanna’s eyes again, but now they were not tears of despair but of delight because no one had ever given her such words of praise before.

  When Miss Harding had left, Susanna had cried again because she could not control her own unhappiness. She felt as if she was starting another life that she knew nothing about.

  Lady Lavenham had taken her to London earlier than was normal because Susanna had to be provided with a new wardrobe.

  Every morning they drove to the shops and spent what to Susanna seemed long weary hours cho
osing materials, having fittings, buying shoes, gloves, sunshades, hats and lingerie in a way that made her feel as if she was being fitted out for an expedition that might last for twenty years.

  “I must try at least to make you look presentable,” her mother had said sharply, when Susanna had suggested that she had too many gowns.

  Then she had added,

  “Your father has said I can spend as much as I like, so you might as well try and be grateful even though unfortunately we cannot alter your face or your figure!”

  Every moment she spent alone with her mother made Susanna feel more insignificant. She could see the difference between them reflected in every shop window.

  The intonation in the voices of her mother’s friends when they met them in Bond Street or in the shops would have been humorous if it had not been so hurting.

  “Daisy, darling!” they exclaimed. “How exquisite you look, like a breath of spring. Oh! Is this Susanna?”

  There was always a pause before the last three words. A pause Susanna knew meant that they were surprised and even a little shocked at her appearance.

  She knew too that the dressmakers thought dressing her to be a waste of time except that the bills mounted higher and higher in their efforts to try to make her appear attractive.

  They laced her into boned corsets until she could hardly breathe. She would try on bodices, embroidered, frilled or ruched, but whatever the trimming the effect was the same, she would merely look fat.

  Hairdressers came to the house to try out new arrangements for her hair.

  When her mother inspected their efforts, it was obvious that they had effected little difference and they metaphorically shrugged their shoulders as if they longed to be brave enough to say that they had been given hopeless material to work on.

  Fittings and more fittings! In and out of shops!

  Susanna had done nothing else for the last month, and now it was nearly the end of March and the first drawing room was scheduled to take place at the beginning of April.

  She found herself counting the days until the Season would be over and they could return to the country.

  There she would be able to ride and she would not have to stand for hours in stuffy dressmakers’ shops. She would walk in the garden without being accompanied by either her mother or the housekeeper who escorted her when Lady Lavenham was busy.

  She missed Miss Harding almost unbearably.

  Because she felt that it would please her Governess, Susanna, whenever she went out with anyone except her mother, always insisted on the way home on stopping at a bookshop.

  The pile of books in her bedroom grew every day, but the difficulty was to find time to read them.

  Fortunately, until she was presented, she was not allowed to go down to dinner parties and only came downstairs to dinner when her father and mother were alone or joined by relatives.

  Then when they gossiped and chattered Susanna tried to understand what they were talking about and attach the scandals that they lowered their voices over, to the right person.

  It was like, she thought, listening to a foreign language and only understanding half of what was said.

  It seemed too rather like reading a very badly written novel.

  The fact that Isobel had lost Henry who had danced attendance on her for over a year might have been more interesting if Susanna had been able to fathom who Isobel and Henry were.

  That Bertie had gone big game shooting, because he had come home unexpectedly one day and discovered what he had long suspected, was completely incomprehensible!

  ‘Oh, to be at Lavenham!’ she kept saying to herself.

  The thought of the sunshine on the lake, the scent of the woods and the blue haze over the hills was like a drop of water to a man in a desert dying of thirst.

  Now shatteringly and horrifyingly, she knew that she would not be able to go home. She would be married to the Duke and, just as May had been, exiled from everything that was familiar and everything that had meant, if nothing else, security in her own small world.

  ‘It’s impossible! I cannot face it! I will not marry a man who only wants my money,’ Susanna told herself.

  She had known, although she had almost forgotten, that her Godmother had left her a fortune when she was ten.

  “Susanna! Why Susanna?” her mother had asked querulously at the time.

  But then as she understood as she grew older that her father handled her money and would do so until she had a husband, it really had seemed of no particular interest.

  Lord Lavenham was quite a wealthy man and a generous one. Her mother had everything she wanted and, although the cost of the parties when they entertained at Lavenham Park must have been astronomical, he never complained.

  There would often be thirty guests, with sixty visiting servants and their own huge domestic staff in the big Gothic-style house that towers, gargoyles and a great deal of stone masonry had been added to in her grandfather’s time.

  It was, Susanna knew, in bad taste but it was her home and she loved all of it.

  Now, because she had a fortune, she would be a Duchess and would live somewhere else and her mother would be pleased with her for the first time in her life.

  Upstairs in the schoolroom, which had always seemed empty now that Miss Harding had gone, Susanna flung herself down in the chair in front of the fire.

  All she could see at the moment was May’s unhappy face and hear the agony in her voice.

  She wondered if she could go to May and ask her advice, but she knew that if May had not been able to prevent her own marriage to a man she disliked utterly, she would be quite unable to do anything about her sister’s.

  ‘What can I do?’ Susanna asked herself and her thoughts flashed to Miss Harding.

  If only she could go to her. If only she could talk to her, she just knew that she would understand.

  But Miss Harding had written only two days ago to say that she had found employment with the Duchess of Northumberland and had therefore gone North.

  ‘I have to think,’ Susanna told herself. ‘I have to think calmly and sensibly how I can prevent this from happening to me.’

  She felt as if she had been walking along a straight road and without any warning suddenly found a tremendous chasm in front of her.

  ‘I will not panic,’ she told herself, ‘I will just find a way of escape.’

  She knew, however, that it was a forlorn hope. How could she defy her mother’s wishes, who would undoubtedly bring pressure to bear on the Duke to do what she planned because he needed the money?

  Apart from that there was always the King as a last resort!

  Susanna had heard in snatches of conversation how the King had assisted his special friends in marrying their daughters advantageously to the right sort of Noblemen.

  “I said to the King,” Susanna had heard her mother say once, “‘you are so clever and so diplomatic, do help Vera marry that girl of hers to the Earl of Bexley. You know he will do anything you tell him. Just a word in his ear would make all the difference’.”

  “What did His Majesty reply?” Lord Lavenham had asked.

  “Of course he was delighted for me to ask for his help,” Susanna's mother answered. “He rather fancies himself as Cupid. And you must admit in a great many instances he has been extremely successful.”

  “Few people are brave enough to refuse the King anything he desires,” Lord Lavenham commented somewhat cynically.

  Susanna knew that her mother would not hesitate to ask the King’s assistance if her plans for her to marry the Duke did not move towards a quick conclusion.

  “I shall be married by the end of the Season!”

  Susanna whispered the words and gave a little cry.

  ‘I will go away,’ she told herself. ‘I will hide somewhere.’

  It was lucky, if she really had to run away, that she had plenty of money.

  There was never any difficulty in getting her mother’s secretary to provide her
with cash for the books she wanted to buy from shops where she did not have an account.

  She had also found since she came to London that she liked to have money in her purse to give to the numerous beggars who held out skeleton-like hands as she crossed the pavement from the expensive dressmaker’s shop into her father’s luxurious carriage.

  ‘They have so little and I have so much,’ she would say to herself.

  Surreptitiously, behind her mother's back, she would press a sovereign into some dirty hand and know by the expression of incredulous delight in a woman’s dull eyes that she had given a fleeting happiness, if only for a moment, to someone very much worse off than herself.

  ‘But if I do run away, I cannot sit back doing nothing,’ she thought now, ‘that would be impossible.’

  Vaguely she thought that she might take a room somewhere and sit reading all day. Then she knew that was not really the solution to her problems, although she did not know what was.

  On the fire stool beside her chair there were a number of newspapers.

  Her father took both The Times and The Morning Post and usually read them at breakfast. The servants took them later to his study where he read them in the evening if he had time before dinner.

  Susanna knew that it would raise a whole lot of questions if she took the newspapers away before he had finished with them. She therefore told the footman to bring them upstairs to the schoolroom the following morning.

  They were a day old, but that did not really matter, since no one discussed the news with her or expected her to be interested in anything that did not concern clothes or people.

  Now she picked up yesterday’s Times and wondered if she could find employment of some sort, not because she needed money, but simply because it would fill the hours.

  ‘Perhaps I could work in a library,’ she mused.

  Then she remembered that she might be seen by the very people she would wish to avoid.

  ‘What I really would like,’ she told herself, ‘would be employment in one of the Art Galleries, although she had the uncomfortable feeling that in all the Galleries she had visited at one time or another the attendants had always been men.