Daisy (2 page)

Even the ebullient Amy seemed unnaturally subdued. At last she burst out. “Oh, Mr. Curzon, do you really have to tell old Meekers about this?” Old Meekers was Miss Margaret Meaken, their headmistress.

Curzon looked down at the two girls from his lofty height, gave a slight cough, and then became surprisingly human.

“I think you have been punished enough, miss, but I’ve got to do what her ladyship says. She’ll check up. She’s that sort.”

“But she is so beautiful,” said Daisy in a subdued voice. She could not believe that such a fairy-tale creature as the Countess would be deliberately malicious.

“Well, it’s not for me to discuss my betters,” said Curzon repressively. “Let’s just leave it that I’ve got my orders to send Bill from the lodge and that’s that.” He turned to Daisy. “You’re the one that’s going to come off the worst. Your aunt isn’t going to like this a bit. She worships my lord and lady almost as much as her Maker.”

Daisy shuddered. Her aunt, Miss Sarah Jenkins, was a deeply religious spinster who felt that she had been put on earth to go about finding fault with everyone in general and Daisy in particular.

The two girls said good-bye to Curzon and walked off down the road with lagging footsteps and drooping heads. “I’m sorry,” said Amy. “It’s not so bad for me. My mum will scream and clip me over the ear and then she’ll invite all the neighbors in so’s I can tell them all about the frocks the nobs were wearing. Will you tell your auntie when you get home?”

Daisy shook her head. “I haven’t got the courage. She’ll find out soon enough.”

She fell silent and the two girls moved slowly through the golden afternoon, each with her own thoughts. A little breeze had sprung up sending cascades of brilliant colored leaves falling across the winding country road. Woodsmoke twisted up lazily from bonfires in the gardens and rooks circled and swirled over the brown, ploughed fields. But Daisy had a nagging feeling that she had been shut out from a fairyland world and that life would never be the same again.

The only way to enter that magic world again would be as a servant. Her aunt, she knew, had been a housemaid. But Sarah Jenkins moralized so much on the sins of the aristocracy and was so reticent about the family for whom she had worked, that Daisy could only assume she had not enjoyed one bit of it.

Her aunt was also peculiarly reticent on the subject of Daisy’s parents. Daisy herself could not remember them, and all questions were parried by her aunt’s infuriating sniff, followed by a long homily about how she ought to thank God for having a respectable body to take care of her.

When they reached the outskirts of the town, the lamplighter was already making his rounds, leaving pools of gaslight behind him to disperse the evening shadows as he moved slowly down the main street.

The girls came to a halt in front of a forbidding Victorian villa which rejoiced in the name of The Pines. There were no pine trees, only a weather-beaten monkey puzzel and some sooty laurels, but Sarah Jenkins had been in service in Scotland and considered the name to have an appropriate Highland flavor, redolent of grouse shoots and large sprawling picnics on the moors.

Amy opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. After all, what was there to say? Daisy needs a bit more spirit. Ought to tell that old harridan where to get off. Amy pressed her friend’s shoulder sympathetically, and marched off to cope with her own battles.

The stained glass door of The Pines was jerked open as Daisy reached the top step where Sarah Jenkins stood waiting, crackling with starch and bad temper.

She was a very thin, tall, bony woman with black hair scraped painfully back from a fiery red face. Her complexion made her look as if she were in a perpetual temper which, in fact, she nearly always was. She had a large mole at the side of her thin, traplike mouth, with two stiff hairs growing out of it that waved like the antennae of some peculiar bug. As a child, Daisy used to have nightmares that the mole had crept off her aunt’s face and had taken on a life of its own and was crawling around the house waving its feelers.

“Dawdling home from school again, you sinner,” snapped Miss Jenkins. “Life is one long sinful, idle pleasure for you, miss. Isn’t it? You have been looking at boys, haven’t you? Lust is in your blood and in your mind, Daisy Jenkins. Isn’t it?”

With each sentence she poked the girl in the ribs with a pair of steel knitting needles from which hung a long brown, lumpy scarf. Miss Jenkins knitted brown scarves that she posted off to South Africa for the army, as her contribution to the Boer War. Amy had once been invited to tea and had whispered to Daisy that the army used them to bore the Boers to death. She had gone into convulsions at her own wit and had never been invited again.

“Your tea has been ready this past half hour,” remarked Miss Jenkins, giving the unfortunate Daisy a final stab. “And after that, remember to finish your housekeeping duties.”

Tea was a silent meal. Daisy usually tried to make some sort of conversation, but she felt crushed down by an overpowering weight of guilt. She hurriedly ate her two slices of doughy white bread and thick burnt crust, two transparent wafers of ham, a miniscule portion of mashed potato, and a nauseating concoction called Russian salad—tinned vegetables mixed with watery mayonnaise.

She carried the dishes downstairs to the kitchen as soon as she was finished, glad to escape from her aunt’s basilisklike stare.

The kitchen was dark and cold and smelled of genteel poverty—a mixture of Jeyes fluid and cabbage water.

As she polished the heavy pottery dishes and diligently scrubbed the knives and forks with bath brick, Daisy found the Earl’s handsome face constantly in her thoughts. He was the most handsome man she had ever seen. And he had such laughing blue eyes!

Daisy was nearly finishing her studies at St. Cecilia’s Parochial School for Girls and had begun, timidly, to notice that mysterious opposite sex. But none of the boys of the town had sparked her imagination like the handsome Earl.

The rest of the evening passed like a thunderstorm, with lightning images of the Earl’s laughing face interspersed with heavy clouds of fear and guilt.

Sarah Jenkins did not employ servants, so it was ten o’clock before Daisy thankfully completed her last task—polishing the leaves of the aspidistra that crouched in its brass bowl by the parlor window.

Daisy then went up to her room to hurriedly stuff a blanket along the bottom of the door, so that her aunt would not see the light and know that she was reading in bed. Daisy picked up a copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat
and happily sailed off down the Thames with George and Harris and the dog, Montmorency, and let the worries of reality fade away.

But as she leaned over to blow out her candle—gaslight in the bedrooms was considered a needless extravagance—the face of the Earl appeared before her once more.

Life would never be the same again. Daisy had a feeling that she had turned into a woman all in one day. And she didn’t like it one bit.

The Gods above knew that Daisy Jenkins was about to receive her just punishment. Huge black clouds tumbled across the heavens and icy blasts of wind sent the dead leaves dancing in the corners of the school yard.

Daisy bent over the desks, refilling the ink wells, the weight of fear inside her so heavy that she felt she might topple over. She had dressed with unusual care as though to meet her executioner, her heavy brown hair in two severe braids and her white pinafore gleaming and crackling with starch.

If only she were in one of the noisy lower school classes, bursting at the seams with girls, instead of this rarified upper strata of only seven prim misses. Few parents in Upper Featherington had the money or the inclination to educate a mere girl beyond the year of fourteen. Daisy had some idea that the penny-pinching Miss Sarah Jenkins had kept her on at school so that she might subsequently earn her living as a schoolteacher or governess. A quiet, biddable scholastic girl, she was a great favorite with her teachers and usually enjoyed the dull school routine.

The door of the classroom suddenly burst open with a crash and, without turning her head, Daisy knew that the ax was about to fall.

Miss Meaken’s voice rang across the classroom. “Miss Pomfret and Miss Jenkins. To my study immediately.”

The moment had arrived and Daisy was glad. Whatever punishment that befell could not be worse than the anticipation of it.

But Amy went white under her freckles and clutched Daisy’s arm for support as they hurried down the long corridor. The school had been built on mock ecclesiastical lines and the headmistress’s study looked as cosy as a monk’s cell. Miss Meaken was seated behind a large refectory desk, with her back to the window where the black clouds tumbled with undisciplined abandon over the deserted hockey pitch.

On hard upright chairs to one side of her sat Miss Jenkins and Amy’s mother, Mrs. Pomfret. Miss Jenkins’s light-blue eyes searched out Daisy’s. They contained a peculiar gleam. Could it be satisfaction? The sinner had finally sinned.

Miss Meaken was a small, dumpy woman encased in herringbone tweed. She wore a stiff, uncompromising wig, and her weak pink eyes peered nervously out at the world from beneath its shadow.

Had she screamed or roared it would have been bad enough. But her voice trembled with unshed tears as she peered through a lorgnette at a crested letter in her hand.

“I was told yesterday, by a message from the lodge boy, of your trespass. This, however, was followed by a letter from the Countess of Nottenstone expressing her strong displeasure. It leaves me with no alternative but to expel you both.”

Mrs. Pomfret began to sob noisily and the hairs on Miss Jenkins’s mole pointed their accusing fingers at Daisy as she stood with her head bowed, unable to speak or move.

The word “expel” hung in the chilly room like an obscenity.

Amy began to roar and cry like her mother and despite her misery, Daisy could only admire her friend’s noisy release.

“You have been a very good pupil, Miss Jenkins… one of our best I may say…” Miss Meaken was beginning when a housemaid catapulted into the room, her cap askew and her face polished with excitement.

“It’s the Dook, mum,” she gasped. “’Is Grace ’imself wants for to talk to you about them.” She jerked her cap at the two girls.

Miss Meaken looked at her in a bewildered way, and uttered a few bleats of surprise. The door swung open again, and there on the threshold stood the Duke of Oxenden. He strolled languidly in and laid his hat and cane on the table.

His harsh aristocratic features softened slightly as the pale-yellow eyes took in the scene. Then he perched himself on the desk and, without taking his eyes from Daisy, he said in a hesitant, light voice, “I am sorry I am a little late in presenting the Countess’s apologies.”

“Apologies!” exclaimed Miss Meaken faintly.

“Yes, indeed,” he went on smoothly. “Her ladyship was suffering from the deuce of a migraine yesterday. She begs me to convey her apologies for the hasty letter she wrote you. Her ladyship wishes me to say that both girls were very prettily behaved and a credit to your school and begs that no disciplinary action be taken against them.”

Miss Meaken rose to her feet, her short-sighted eyes blinking their relief and amazement. “Well, I must say, Your Grace, that it’s very handsome of her ladyship. Very handsome indeed! Daisy Jenkins is one of my best pupils and is shortly to finish her schooling. I would not have liked to see her leave before the end of the term.

“Come girls. Make your best curtsies to His Grace and return to your classroom.”

From a sobbing wreck, Amy had become positively radiant. She swept her best curtsy and bestowed her best smile on the unmoved Duke who still watched Daisy.

Daisy had reached the door when she heard his voice calling her, “Tell me, Miss Daisy Jenkins. Does the name Chatterton mean anything to you?”

Daisy shook her head and then stared at her aunt. For as long as she could remember, Daisy could not recollect her aunt’s face as being anything but scarlet. But now it was paper white.

“No!” shouted her aunt. “Never! Chatterton! No! Never!”

The Duke gave Daisy a slight bow and she left the room with her head in a whirl. The mystery of her aunt’s violent reaction to the name Chatterton soon fled before the glad thought that the Countess was as kind as she was beautiful. It was only what the Earl deserved. In fact she was so happy with this thought, that the mild Daisy became almost snappish with Amy for suggesting that the Countess knew nothing of the Duke’s visit. Amy laughed, “Mark my words, Daisy Jenkins, His Grace is sweet on you. Never took his eyes off you.”

“But he’s too old!” protested Daisy.

“Old! He’s only about thirty. And ever so good-looking.”

Daisy looked at her friend in surprise. She thought the Duke looked hard and cruel and that his elegance was positively inhuman. How on earth could anyone consider the Duke handsome compared to the Earl?

The end of the school day arrived all too soon. Daisy could not imagine her stern aunt letting her get away without any punishment whatsoever. She walked slowly homeward, stopping occasionally to answer the questions of the smaller school-girls. “No, the Duke had not been wearing a robe. No, he had not been wearing a crown. Yes, he was very handsome,” she said, to make up for the disappointment that the Duke had arrived dressed in an ordinary suit of clothes.

As usual Aunt Sarah was waiting on the door-step, complete with knitting needles. But instead of the usual stabs, Daisy was summoned into the parlor where, wonder upon wonder, a small fire was burning, its meager flames struggling against the surrounding gloom of heavy overstuffed Victorian furniture, stuffed birds, and marble statuary.

“Sit down, Daisy,” said Aunt Sarah, not unkindly. She herself sat ramrod straight on the very edge of a high wing chair as if to lean back would encourage Satan himself to snatch her back into the red-velvet depths of the upholstery.

“It is time to talk to you about—
men
,” said Aunt Sarah importantly. “We shall say no more about the disgraceful behavior of trespassing on the Countess’s property, since my lady herself has seen fit to forgive you. And I was never one to question the ways of my betters.”