Poppy (3 page)

“Because you are so beautiful,” said Freddie simply.

“Aw, garn!” said Poppy, laughing, but secretly she was enchanted by the compliment.

Poppy was shocked immensely by the small amount of food it seemed de rigueur for one to eat in polite society. She did not know that many society ladies still kept up the old practice of eating a hearty meal before they left home, so that they could maintain the fiction of eating like birds in public. In Cutler’s Fields it was a heinous crime to waste any food, and so Poppy ate her way manfully and steadily through nine courses until her heart was thumping uncomfortably against her ribs and her eyes were glazing over.

Freddie rambled on throughout the meal, talking about a great number of people she did not know and had never heard of. The only time Poppy really paid any attention was when Freddie shocked her profoundly by criticizing the old Queen.

“I’m glad she’s dead,” he said while Poppy stared at him, round-eyed. “All that mourning for the eternal Prince Consort! Those endless photographs of her sitting next to his photograph, and always in that dreary widow’s cap. Why, do you know what she did?”

“No,” breathed Poppy, beginning to get over her first shock and to enjoy the heady feeling of listening to gossip about Queen Victoria as if she were hearing about, say, Ma Barker.

“Well, you know she hardly used Buckingham Palace, and closed down all the State functions and entertainments. As if that weren’t enough, the old Queen insisted that Prince Albert’s rooms at Windsor be kept exactly as they were before he died. Fact! She had a can of hot water taken into his room every evening after the bell for changing was rung, and his evening clothes were prepared and laid out on the bed just as if he were alive. She had even stopped entertaining foreign royals, and do you know why?”

“No.”

“Well, she entertained some Eastern monarch—I won’t say who—and he sacrificed a sheep in the bedroom, ruining her carpet; something that amused her not at all.”

“Garn! You’re making it up!”

“I wouldn’t lie to
you
, Poppy… I mean Miss Duveen,” said Freddie with sudden intensity, and Poppy blushed and looked at her plate.

“I say, what’s this?” cried Freddie all of a sudden, picking up the bill, plugging a monocle in his eye, and squinting down at it.

“The bill, sir,” said the waiter apologetically.

“Well, what are you giving it to me for?” said Freddie crossly. “Put it on the Duke of Guildham’s account.”

“Again, sir?” faltered the waiter. “The last time, sir, His Grace said—”

“What a fellow you are for gossipping,” said Freddie, rising from his chair with great alacrity and slapping the waiter on the shoulder. “But don’t bore me with my uncle’s jokes, there’s a good chap. Come along, Miss Duveen. These fellows will chatter all night if you let ’em.”

He hustled Poppy from the table and toward the entrance, and she only caught a fleeting glimpse of the waiter’s face as he opened and shut his mouth helplessly like a landed mackerel.

“Now, where to?” demanded Freddie, cane at the ready to flag down a cab.

Poppy’s face fell. All at once, like Pip in
Great Expectations
, she realized what it was to be ashamed of one’s home, something all people have felt at some time or another, despite their place in the caste system. Certainly Poppy’s was a hard case, as she envisaged her father communing with his snakes and angels and the dirty dishes piled high in the sink and the drawers hanging drying on the kitchen pulley and the stale, cold, cabbage-smelling air of the house.

“Thanks ever so,” she said, “but I gotter go alone. Me pa don’t like gentlemen callers.”

“Strict, is he?” asked Freddie sympathetically. “My uncle’s a bit like that.”

“You mean that one you said was a duke?” said Poppy.

“Yes. Him. Miserable old codger. Don’t worry about it. Only say you’ll have supper with me tomorrow night. Please.”

“Oh, all right,” said Poppy quickly. She was anxious to get away.

Freddie’s face became transfigured with joy, and then he flagged down a passing four-wheeler. Freddie knew instinctively that Poppy did not want him to know where she lived. He pressed a guinea into her hand.

“I insist,” he said over her protests. “Till tomorrow.” And with that he ran lightly away.

Poppy climbed into the growler. “Bermondsey, my good man,” she called to the driver in accents of freezing gentility, and then sank back, suddenly bone tired.

That “old codger,” the Duke of Guildham, was not precisely old, being thirty-eight years of age. He was, however, hardly in the flush of youth, and was a very imposing-looking man even when stark naked and sitting on the edge of his mistress’s bed, which is what he was doing some two days after Poppy’s supper at the Café Royal. He was one of those haughty men who contrive to look fully clothed even when they are not. He had a trim, muscular body, and piercing black eyes fringed with heavy lashes, set in a stern, handsome face. His hair was as pure white as it had been since his twentieth birthday. His mistress, a merry widow of impeccable lineage and beautifully doubtful morals, Freda von Dierksen, was sprawled on the bed behind him, drawling in her deliciously slight German accent, “Dahling Hugo, stop looking so stern and tell me what we are to do today. I want to go somewhere
low
, really, terribly, frightfully low.”

“Very well,” he said indifferently, without turning around. He rose, shrugged his broad shoulders into a dressing gown, and rang the bell.

“Ah, Stammers,” he said as his butler entered the room. “We wish to go somewhere… er… low today. Please tell us an appropriate spot.”

“If Your Grace pleases,” said Stammers, poker-faced, “I will descend to the servants’ hall and ascertain the whereabouts of a suitably low festivity.”

Stammers bowed himself out and made his stately way down to the lower regions of His Grace’s town house. “Rally round, boys, and give us a bit o’ help,” he called to his minions. “’Is nibs wants to go slumming.”

After racking of brains and much consultation Stammers made his way back to His Grace’s bedroom.

“May I suggest,” he ventured, “the Feast of Saint Twudey.”

“The what? My dear man,” drawled the duke, “there’s no such fellow in the whole calendar.”

“He’s a Saxon saint,” said Stammers, who had returned via the library. “The folks down in Bermondsey have held a festival in this saint’s name every year, but it’s more like a fair, Your Grace, with sideshows and carnivals and the like.”

“And where in Bermondsey does this event take place?”

“A street called Cutler’s Fields, Your Grace, is the center of the activities.”

“Very good, Stammers.”

The Duke poked Freda—who had fallen asleep—awake with one long finger. “We are going to a festival in Cutler’s Fields, in Bermondsey,” he said. “Is that low enough for you?”

“Couldn’t be lower,” said Freda, yawning. “As low as you can get.”

Whoever Saint Twudey had been or what he had done to achieve sainthood had long been forgotten by the residents of Cutler’s Fields. All they knew was that on February twenty-eighth of each year, they set up their stalls and invited the gypsies with their sideshows, and forgot about their poverty for one whole day.

As long as anyone could remember, the weather had always been fine, but this particular year the weather was at its dreariest. Rain thudded down, drumming in the puddles, rattling on the iron roof of the fagot-and-hot-pease-pudding stall, soaking through cracks in worn boots, dripping down necks, rising in steam from the ragged clothes of the habitués of the Pig and Crumpet.

Bert Smith, released from the guardianship of Ma Barker for one whole day, was making the most of it, alternately abusing and praising his eldest daughter. Mrs. Jenkins, with an ancient feather boa wrapped around her neck, crouched behind a stall of old and cracked china like some molting bird. Mrs. Tyson, who had been crocheting doillies for a year for just this occasion, had the eldest of her brood lined up hopefully behind a makeshift stall. Ma Barker was selling jam tarts, Mr. Barker was selling homemade cider, and old Solly the pawnbroker was selling all the items that no one in Cutler’s Fields could afford to reclaim, and so it was doubtful whether he would make even one sale.

Up and down the dark street the gypsies flogged their amusements: rifle ranges, each rifle with the sight carefully bent; coconut shies, each coconut but one, carefully glued down; hoopla, where a small ring had to be thrown around a large square peg; fortune-telling by a gypsy who told depressed, downtrodden housewives of the tall, dark stranger who was coming into their lives They all believed every word, for hadn’t Gussie Morris been told just that five years ago, and hadn’t she run off with the sweep?; swings shaped like gondolas that threw you up to the dark, rainy sky; carousels with their jaunty music; and a barrel organ at the corner, competing as best it could.

And in the very middle of Cutler’s Fields was a small stage with a piece of tattered canvas serving as a canopy, and a legend in curly type telling all and sundry that the “Nightingale of Cutler’s fields, Miss Poppy Duveen, darling of the West End audiences and the crowned heads of Europe,” would sing at precisely five
P.M
. Poppy had agreed to sing for everyone before she journeyed up to town for her evening’s performance.

The day had had a dismal start, but as five o’clock drew closer the terrible, drumming, insistent rain had almost been forgotten. Warmed by Mr. Barker’s potent cider—a farthing a glass, a halfpenny if hot—and dazzled by the whirling lights from the carousels, the denizens of Cutler’s Fields slowly began to enjoy themselves. The spectres of disease, starvation, and cold were banished on that one magical day. Where there was life in their rags, there was hope. Anything could happen. Just look at Poppy Duveen! No one called her Penny-lope anymore.

Poppy was feeling very wealthy indeed. Her pay had been raised to twenty-five shillings a week. She spent as little as possible on herself, and any money left over was given to Ma Barker, who locked it away in a large tin box in Poppy’s bedroom.

Even Mrs. Tyson was tipsily leaning against her husband’s thin, tubercular chest and smiling dreamily up into his face while everyone smiled indulgently and prophecied her fifteenth would be on the way.

Ma Barker’s great laugh rang out through the thudding rain, along with the cry “Roll Up! Roll Up!” from the gypsies. A man lit matches and ate them, affording Emily and Josie exquisite joy. Alf, the bread delivery boy, bemused by cider and music, awaited Poppy’s arrival, a wilted bouquet of Channel Islands daffodils behind his back. He had walked all the way to Covent Garden and back to get them early in the morning. “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms…” played the barrel organ, and everyone sang the song Thomas Moore wrote about poor Kitty Packenham before she became the Duchess of Wellington, way back before the Battle of Waterloo. In the Pig and Crumpet, Bert Smith, immersed in a gin haze, reflected how he had never seen so many people in the old pub, and since he was seeing two of everyone and everything, his view was understandable.

Was there ever a place like Cutler’s Fields?

“It is absolutely, divinely horrible!” cried Freda, peering through the misted windows of His Grace’s brougham. “Have you ever seen such squalor?”

His Grace did not reply. He was wishing he had not come. Freda was delightful in bed, and boring and vulgar out of it. He would allow her but one half hour to gloat and then return her smartly to her own home, making his escape.

His liaison with her had drifted along fairly comfortably for several months, fueled by passion on her side and tepid familiarity on his. The duke had never married, nor did he intend to. His cousin, a stolid and worthy young man, would inherit the duke’s title and estates when he died, and the duke had quite simply never been in love. No hopeless passion had marred his life so far, as no calf yearnings for some unattainable female had spoiled his youth. He had satisfied his masculine urges with a series of mistresses, chosen for their beauty and their ability to remove themselves from his well-ordered life exactly when he wished.

He ruled his vast estates and his many sponging relatives, including Freddie Plummett, with a rod of iron.

Followed by two footmen holding umbrellas over their heads, the duke and Freda began to promenade along Cutler’s Fields. Now, in more middle-class surroundings, they would have occasioned a great deal of comment and would have received a great deal of toadying. But the poor, in their way, were very like the aristocracy and had a healthy contempt for outsiders, and Freda was quite piqued to find they were all but ignored.

The madcap heroine had just begun to inflict herself upon London society via novels and the stage, and so Freda decided to enliven the occasion by being madly gay. While the duke waited patiently she climbed on a gilded hobby horse, screaming with laughter as she was whirled around and around, allowing her skirts to ride up above her ankle. “Tart,” said a man behind the duke with cockney indifference, and the duke found himself agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Still, he had promised himself to give her half an hour. And so he endured it while she clambered down from the carousel and insisted on shying coconuts and sampling Mr. Barker’s cider with little chokes and giggles.

“Now, Freda…” he began sternly, pulling out his half hunter and looking at the time, but Freda had stiffened and was staring down Cutler’s Fields. She was smarting at having occasioned so little interest among the peasants, yet someone was arriving who was being treated like royalty.

Miss Poppy Duveen made her way toward her stage through her cheering admirers. She accepted the bouquet of daffodils from the blushing Alf, and then mounted the small stage where the piano from the church hall stood, shrouded in tarpaulin.

“Poppy Duveen,” said Freda, giggling. “What a name!”

“I really would like to go,” said the duke firmly, but Freda’s jealousy had excited her interest in the fair Poppy. The girl probably sang in a common, hoarse voice, which would make her, Freda, feel superior. “We’ll stay just for the first song,” she whispered.