66 The Love Pirate Read online

  Then she told herself that she supposed Missionaries were a law unto themselves, and, rather like nuns, could go anywhere in the world unprotected without getting into any difficulties.

  It was all rather hard to sort out in her mind and she was just taking several more books from the shelf, intending to carry them upstairs, when Lady Alvinston came into the room.

  Bertilla turned round with a smile to greet her mother and then, at the expression on her face, looked apprehensively at her.

  Dressed in a fur-trimmed jacket with diamonds glittering in her ears and a hat ornamented with crimson ostrich-feathers, Lady Alvinston looked very beautiful.

  But there was a frown on her smooth brow and her eyes were dark with anger as she looked at her daughter.

  “How dare you,” she fumed, her voice resonant with fury, “How dare you tell Lord Saire your age!”

  Bertilla started and the colour drained away from her face.

  “H-he – asked me,” she stammered.

  “And you were such a half-witted little fool as to tell him the truth,” Lady Alvinston replied furiously.

  She pulled off her long kid gloves, as she said in a voice that was almost vicious,

  “I might have known that to bring you here even for two nights was to court trouble. The sooner you are out of this country and out from under my feet, the better I shall be pleased!”

  “I-I am sorry, Mama.”

  “And so you should be! Can you imagine what I felt when Lord Saire asked me how you were and enquired whether I was presenting you at Court this spring?”

  Lady Alvinston pulled off one glove and started to undo the six pearl buttons on the other.

  “Fortunately, unlike you, I am quick-witted. ‘Present Bertilla?’ I exclaimed. ‘Whatever put such an idea into your head, my Lord? She is much too young!’ I told him.

  “He looked at me searchingly, as if he half-suspected that I was not telling the truth. ‘She told me she was eighteen and had just left school,’ he said. I managed to laugh, although I felt like throttling you!

  “‘You could not have really looked at her if you believed that, my dear Lord Saire,’ I replied. ‘Girls love to be thought older than they are and actually Bertilla is only fourteen.’

  “He looked surprised and I went on, ‘If she had told you the truth – but I am afraid my little daughter is a very accomplished liar – she would have informed you that she has been very naughty at school and has been expelled.’ That is what I was smart enough to tell him!”

  “Oh, Mama, why did you say that?” Bertilla exclaimed.

  “I had to say the first thing that came into my head,” Lady Alvinston snapped, “and to erase from his mind the idea that you are eighteen. Eighteen! That would make me well over thirty-six and everybody believes I am much younger.”

  Bertilla knew that actually her mother was thirty-eight, but she said nothing and, after a moment, Lady Alvinston went on in a quieter tone,

  “I think I convinced him! After all, you are very small and that idiotic, child-like face of yours, which mirrors your even more idiotic mind, certainly appears immature. The sooner you are out of my sight, the better!”

  She threw her gloves down on the sofa before she said,

  “If anyone calls unexpectedly to see me this evening, stay in your bedroom and do not come out. You have made quite enough mischief already.”

  “I did not – mean to, Mama. I did not – know you did not – wish to acknowledge me as your – daughter.”

  “Well, you know now!” Lady Alvinston said and stalked out of the room.

  The tears gathered in Bertilla’s eyes and she stood irresolute, looking at the door that had closed behind her mother.

  She had always felt unwanted ever since her father had died, but she had not realised that her mother positively disliked her.

  “You will be very pretty when you are grown up, my dear,” her father had said to her once, “but thank goodness, as you are such a different type from your mother, there need be no rivalry between you.”

  Bertilla had at the time been surprised that he should imply that there could ever be such a thing.

  ‘I am certain that I could not rival anyone as beautiful as my mother,’ she had said to herself.

  And surely it was absurd to think that there could ever be any competition between a mother and her daughter?

  Now she knew instinctively that her mother’s irritation was not only because of her age but because her father’s prophecy had come true.

  She was in fact very pretty or, as several of the girls at school had told her, lovely.

  “When my brother took me out last Sunday,” one of them had said to Bertilla, “he saw you and said you were the loveliest apparition he had seen in a month of Sundays, let alone in a place like this!”

  Bertilla had laughed, but she had been pleased and flattered.

  I would not want Mama to be ashamed of me, she had thought ingenuously. I have often heard her say in the past how sorry she was for people like her friend, the Duchess, having such plain daughters to present.

  Even her mother’s indifference in not writing to her at school, not seeing her in the holidays and not telling her of any plans for the future had not prepared her for the fact that she was to be exiled from all that remained of her family.

  “With the exception of Aunt Agatha!” Bertilla whispered and felt an uncontrollable shiver.

  *

  It was raining, the sky was dark and dismal and the quayside wet and what could be seen of the sea was turbulent as Bertilla went aboard the Peninsula and Oriental steamer Coromandel, which was to carry her away from England.

  With its black hull and high superstructure, the lookout alert on its flying bridge and the Red Ensign fluttering at the stern, it was an impressive if not a large vessel.

  All of the ships, which were the lifeline of the British Empire and carried every year two hundred thousand passengers and as many merchant seamen, were smaller than eight thousand tons.

  But a thousand new ships were being launched almost every year and the great shipping lines, the Peninsula and Oriental, the Elder Dempster and the British India, who all based their fortunes on the Empire trade, were considering building bigger and better ships as they competed with one another.

  The shipping lines were intensely proud of their ships and advertised them extravagantly. The Coromandel was a steamer with a trace of sail about her, having four tall masts and complicated rigging.

  But what with the rain and feeling very small and very alone, Bertilla was concerned at the moment only with finding her cabin.

  All the way down to the coast in the train she had thought that during the voyage she would at least be able to read and sew and, if no one spoke to her over the long weeks, she must just become used to her own company.

  She was trying to be brave and it had been hard to say goodbye to old Maidstone and not cry when he had wished her ‘God-speed’.

  Even Dawkins had seemed like a close friend who would leave a gap in her life because she would never see her again.

  She had not been surprised to learn that she was not to say goodbye to her mother. She had to leave the house at eight-thirty and Lady Alvinston had left strict instructions that she was not to be called.

  “Her Ladyship didn’t get in till after two o’clock last night,” Dawkins said.

  Then, as if she thought she could salve Bertilla’s hurt feelings with an explanation, she went on,

  “Dead tired, her Ladyship was, and none too pleased that some clumsy gentleman on the dance floor had torn the frill on the skirt of her new gown. But there, I always says that dancin’ was only invented to give a wretched lady’s maid more work!”

  Bertilla tried to smile and failed.

  “Did Mama leave a message for me, Dawkins?” Bertilla had asked in a small voice.

  “I know her Ladyship will want you to take care of yourself and have a good time, Miss Bertilla,” she replied, which was
not the answer Bertilla wished to hear.

  Maidstone had her ticket, her passport and some money ready and a footman was sitting on the box of the carriage with instructions to see her trunks into the guard’s van and find her a comfortable seat on the train.

  It was only when she looked at her ticket that Bertilla found that she was travelling not First Class, as she had expected, but Second Class.

  This surprised her because she knew that neither her father nor her mother would have contemplated going anywhere either by train or ship without booking the best and most comfortable accommodation. She knew that her mother resented having to spend money on her and she told herself that she might think herself fortunate she was not in fact going Steerage.

  Because there was not only the rain but also a strong wind, Bertilla hurried as quickly as she could up the gang plank of the Coromandel and found herself waiting with a number of other passengers to be told the number of her cabin.

  The Second Class passengers were herded up one gangway and along the quay, while another was reserved for those exalted beings that travelled First Class.

  Bertilla noticed that her fellow passengers on the Second Class deck were predominantly foreigners.

  She thought how colourful they looked and tried to guess from where they came.

  Was the hugely fat man from Kuala Lumpur? Could the dry-faced lawyer be from Saigon and the small slant-eyed man from Sumatra or perhaps Borneo?

  There were a number of Chinese people, who must be, Bertilla thought, returning to Singapore, where she knew that there was a large community of them.

  Most of them appeared to be very prosperous, but she saw on closer inspection that there were a number of sunburnt Europeans who she thought must be planters.

  One item she had brought with her was an atlas and she hoped that on board there might be something as helpful as a guidebook.

  She had always been interested in people from other cultures and now, as she looked round her, she thought that if nothing else there would certainly be new people to study and perhaps she could learn a little of their customs and history.

  She was looking at an Indian woman with a beautiful scarlet sari draped over her dark hair and hiding her face, when she noticed a man was staring at her. His expression made her feel somewhat embarrassed.

  He had golden skin and dark hair and for a moment she found it hard to place him. Then she thought that he had a combination of Dutch and Javanese features.

  She had heard that the Dutch planters in the East often married Javanese girls.

  With a sense of triumph she told herself that she was quite certain that she had guessed this particular man’s nationality correctly and yet it would be hard to verify if she was right.

  Then, because he was still staring at her, she felt the colour rise in her cheeks and she looked away, glad at that moment to be able to attract the Purser’s attention.

  “Miss Bertilla Alvinston?” he questioned. “Oh, yes, miss, you are in cabin thirty-seven, a single cabin to yourself. A Steward will take you there.”

  A Steward came forward to take Bertilla’s small valise, which she carried with her and to lead her along a narrow low-ceilinged passageway.

  “I have other luggage on the train,” Bertilla said.

  “It’ll all be brought aboard, miss,” the Steward replied.

  He opened a door.

  “Here’s your cabin, miss, and I hopes you find everything you require.”

  The cabin seemed to Bertilla to be little bigger than a very small cupboard.

  She remembered that Charles Dickens, on going aboard a ship for the first time in 1842, had called his cabin ‘a profoundly preposterous box’ and understood instantly what he meant.

  But Bertilla was too thankful not to have to share a cabin with some strange woman to be too critical.

  There was just room for a bed and a fitted chest of drawers, while a curtain covered one corner behind which she could hang her clothes and there was a washbasin. This could be swung down over what was supposed to be a dressing table. After use it had to be tipped up again to send the water cascading down into a waste-tank.

  It was certainly not the luxury that she had been led to expect on the Coromandel in the brochure she had read coming down from London in the boat train.

  But she supposed that the pictures of the dining salon with armchairs and potted palms doubtless referred to the First Class, as did the huge comfortable lounge, the organ in the picture gallery and the writing and card rooms.

  ‘Never mind,’ she told herself, ‘at least I can be alone here.’

  She could not, however, escape the feeling that her cabin was rather like a cell allotted to a prisoner being transported to another part of the world whether she liked it or not.

  Because the idea was so depressing she thought that she would go up on deck and watch the ship leave.

  She had always been told it was a gay and encouraging sight with a band playing, streamers being thrown from the quay towards the passengers and cheers from the watching crowd as the ship set off on its long voyage.

  But, when she came out on deck, Bertilla found that there were few people prepared to brave the stormy weather to wave their goodbyes.

  Those bustling about on the quayside were mostly porters still bringing trunks and cargo aboard.

  There were some last minute passengers climbing the First Class gangway who had obviously delayed their arrival until the hurly-burly of the first arrivals had subsided.

  There were several ladies, Bertilla noticed, wrapped in furs and carrying umbrellas, who seemed as elegantly gowned and, at a quick glance, almost as distinguished as her mother looked when she was travelling.

  They were with gentlemen in tartan overcoats with long caps attached or bowler hats on their heads, which because of the wind they had to hold firmly in place with one gloved hand.

  There were also a few children in the charge of uniformed Nannies.

  Then, just as the gangway was about to be removed, Bertilla saw sauntering with noticeable dignity along the quayside someone she recognised.

  She felt her heart give a leap of excitement.

  There was no mistaking the broad shoulders and handsome features of the man who had befriended her at the Railway Station and taken her home in his brougham.

  ‘It is Lord Saire,’ she said to herself. ‘And he is to be aboard the Coromandel.’

  She watched him walk up the gangway and then disappear onto the First Class deck above her.

  ‘I shall never meet him or even see him,’ she sighed to herself.

  At the same time she could not help feeling a sudden glow of satisfaction that there was at least one person on board whom she had seen before, whose name she knew and who came from the world she belonged to.

  The fact that Lord Saire was there seemed to lighten the tightness within her breast and dispel the feeling of emptiness that she had experienced ever since the train carried her away from London. Even the sensation of being utterly and completely alone was not so intense.

  The gangways were pulled away from the ship’s side and now very faintly, because it was playing under cover, she could hear the strains of a band.

  There were just a few people standing below on the quayside to wave goodbye, but they kept out of the rain and the Coromandel moved off smoothly without any commotion and without the dramatic effect of fond farewells.

  The wind coming from the sea was cold, the rain was beating down and Bertilla felt herself shiver.

  Yet she did not feel so despairingly alone as she had expected.

  It was because, although it seemed absurd, Lord Saire was aboard and he had been kind to her, very kind, when she had been in trouble.

  *

  Lord Saire, as it happened, was surveying his cabin and adjacent private sitting room with a sigh of relief.

  He had got away from London without Lady Gertrude being aware that he was leaving and he had avoided what he knew would have been an
uncomfortable and dramatic scene.

  He told himself as he had done before that he had become far too involved.

  What he had intended to be a light frothy affair, a game played by two people who knew and understood the rules, had in fact become far too serious.

  It was something that Lord Saire had never meant to happen, but it was what inevitably occurred in his love affairs and made him, as events repeated and repeated themselves almost monotonously, more cynical than he was before.

  “I love you, Theydon! I love you madly, desperately! Tell me that you will love me for ever and that we will never lose this enchantment, this heavenly happiness,” she had cried.

  It was the sort of thing that every woman said to him after he had made love to her for a short time and he knew, just as if they had raised a danger signal, exactly what it meant.

  They wanted to tie him down, they wanted to make sure that they possessed him and he could not escape.

  Most of all, where it was possible, as in the case of Gertrude Lindley, they wanted marriage.

  ‘Damn it all!’ Lord Saire had said often enough to himself, ‘surely one can make love to a woman without having to make it a life sentence?’

  But in his case it seemed as if that was almost impossible to avoid even with the women who were already married.

  There was always in the insistence of their kisses the suggestion that their love should be eternal and that he should dedicate himself to them for all time.

  As Lord Saire had told his friend d’Arcy Charington, he had no intention of getting married.

  He found that the freedom he enjoyed as a bachelor was an ideal existence that at the moment he did not contemplate relinquishing without a struggle.

  But Gertrude Lindley had been very persistent.

  She had seemed to twine silken cords round him, which he had begun to feel were strangling him and might, if he was not careful, become unbreakable.

  She had even involved the Prince of Wales in her plotting to push Lord Saire into proposing marriage.

  “Only you, Sire,” she had said, looking at the heir to the throne with her velvet dark eyes, “will understand how desperately in love I am and how different it is from anything I have ever felt before.”