Wasp (21 page)

Beth gives a brief account of the afternoon’s events. The Abbess listens without comment. ‘You were not hurt?’ she asks after Beth has finished describing the tea-room fracas.

‘No. It was shameful though. Moth’s antics didn’t improve things.’

‘Really?’ The Abbess leans forward. ‘What antics were those?’

‘What’s happened?’

Two of the elegantly framed windows of the George Lane tea room are boarded up. The brass knocker has been ripped off leaving a bare oak scar.

‘These streets can be lively,’ Hummingbird says. ‘Things can happen if people aren’t careful. Shall we go in?’

‘Hummingbird, this is a mistake. You saw the look on the proprietor’s face. I’ve suffered enough troubles in my life without walking into more, especially over something as stupid as a dish of tea.’

‘No one is going to cause trouble.’

Beth glances back down the lane. Leonardo is waiting with the carriage around the corner, whip clutched in his hand. On the way here a group of jeering urchins had been sent scattering by a few expert flicks of that leather coil.

Hummingbird is halfway up the steps. Beth follows. Inside, the blocked windows cast a gloom over the tea room and motes of dust swirl in the light creeping through the one remaining window. Candles have been lit and placed along the mantelpiece. The air is stuffy and smells of hot wax. Patrons, fewer than before, sit at tables, sipping tea or squinting at newspapers. Someone coughs.

‘Sit down, Kitten,’ Hummingbird says.

‘Are we being punished?’ Beth asks. ‘Why isn’t Moth with us?’

‘I believe the Abbess wants her for something, and no, this isn’t punishment.’

Bethany notices, as she pulls back a chair, a group of young men playing dice at the table in the bay window. Overdressed, faces blanched with powder, rouge painting little kiss-me mouths. Teetering on their heads are wigs as big as pillows. If it wasn’t for their striped and tasselled breeches they’d pass for girls. As the maid goes by, a pot of tea in her hands, one of the dandies squeezes her rump. She squeals and tips forward, spilling hot liquid on the carpet. The group dissolves into giggles. The maid, blushing, retreats with the pot, rubbing her backside with her free hand.

‘Who are those oafs?’ Beth whispers. ‘That poor girl could have been burned.’

‘Another gang of puffed young dandies,’ Hummingbird replies. ‘There seem to be more plaguing the streets every day. I’m surprised their heads don’t collapse into the witless gaps between their ears.’

More laughter. Beth snatches glances around the room. An old fellow dozes in one corner, newspaper open on his lap. Near the door sits a lady in a wide-brimmed bonnet hung with ribbons. A child is beside her, a tiny mirror image of the older lady in a looped dress freckled with satin bows.

The maid, composure regained, approaches their table. Beth’s fingers are knotted in her lap.
Now there’ll be trouble,
she thinks.
What’s Hummingbird doing, bringing me here again? We’ll be back on the street in an ace
.

The maid opens her mouth then gets a good look at Hummingbird’s smiling face. Blood rushes out of cheeks that were bright red only a moment before. ‘Pray how
 . . . 
how may I serve you?’

‘You can get me the landlord,’ Hummingbird says. ‘I would have him attend to us.’

Beth tries to nip her under the table but Hummingbird seems resolute. The serving girl hesitates a moment then skitters off. A few seconds later the landlord appears. Beth, who has resigned herself to an almighty row and possibly a thump across the ear, feels her breath catch. A mass of black and yellow bruises colours his face. One eye has closed completely. The other is watery and bloodshot. His arm hangs in a dirty sling, the fingers bandaged together. He stands at their table and stares at his feet.

‘Tea and a selection of your best sweetmeats,’ Hummingbird says.

‘Yes, Miss.’ His voice is barely more than a whisper. He fetches their order, bows and leaves without uttering another word.

The young men’s laughter fragments into whispers. They stare and nudge one another. Hummingbird pores over a magazine as if nothing untoward is happening. The dandies finish their whispered debate. One shoves another who rises and approaches the girls. Beth wants to bury her head in the tablecloth. If he speaks how will she respond? She peeks at him from beneath the rim of her bonnet. Impossible to tell his age under the powder and rouge. Her mother could guess a person’s years just by glancing at their hands. This fellow wears satin gloves ringed with lace. Bright blue eyes, sharp with mischief, glitter beneath the soft wig.

But he doesn’t say anything. He reaches inside a jacket pocket and produces a calling card. His friends watch as he drops it on the table. Hummingbird lifts her dish of tea and takes a sip, gaze not shifting from her magazine.

Bethany stares at the card. Should she pick it up? Is the fellow an admirer of Hummingbird’s and this some complicated social ritual? The youth has returned to his seat and is talking to his companions.

Hummingbird, as if sensing her friend’s discomfort, slides her periodical aside, plucks the card off the tablecloth and drops it into her reticule. Beth opens her mouth but the other girl silences her with a waved finger. ‘Try one of these.’ Hummingbird offers the plate of sweetmeats. ‘You’ll burst your stays but it’s worth it.’

Sugar and cream explode across Beth’s tongue. Hummingbird calls the serving girl over and orders more tea.

‘D’you want the master to bring it, Miss, like last time?’

Hummingbird shakes her head. ‘No, I think we’ve frightened him enough.’

The girl scuttles off, apron ties flapping at her back. The tea room fills. Merchants, bankers, ladies in frilled summer gowns. Beth begins to relax. Up till now she’s wondered if this has all been some perverse game. The hubbub of voices soothes her frayed nerves. The three lads have stopped staring and returned to their dice game. She settles back in her chair and glances at the discarded magazine, which lies open at the society pages. Tea parties, seasonal Balls, names of people Beth doesn’t recognise. All look pompous and important. There are lists of births and marriages; families securing dowries and heirs being born. Then, on the facing page as if of secondary importance, is parliamentary business. The ‘den of donkeys’ as Father once denounced it. Beth has no knowledge of politics. It’s a part of the strange world of men and she can’t make any sense of the words printed there. Why is Hummingbird reading this?

Cries of delight and outrage explode from the dice table. Purses are opened and coins exchanged. Beth regards the young man with the blue eyes and feels her stomach pinch. His name is printed on the calling card but that’s at the bottom of Hummingbird’s reticule. And the card itself? Clearly an invitation of some sort but to whom, and for what? It had not been handed over, merely left on the table.

She steals a glance at the lad’s powdered face. Is he disappointed? Should Beth have said something? Would that have been proper? Even the way these young men move is exaggerated, every gesture overplayed. Beth shifts on her chair. The heat is back in her cheeks. She’s conscious of Hummingbird watching her, the trickle of a smile on those dark red lips. But Beth can’t afford to let her mind off the leash, to go down the path to the brink of the pit, the pit which held George, the children, and her life at Russell Hall. Friend should have killed her, or refused Kingfisher’s bribe and let her rot.

Then it happens twice more.

The first is a uniformed army officer. He slaps his card onto their table, scattering crumbs. The second is a fat fellow in black garb who resembles the fire-and-brimstone vicar from the church on the east side of Beth’s home village. He slips the card from his sleeve as if palming a guinea to a tavern whore. Such is his haste to return to his seat that his hip catches a table edge and sends a teapot clattering onto the floor. Scarlet-faced and puffing, he mutters apologies and buries himself in a newspaper.

Both calling cards follow the first into Hummingbird’s reticule. No words have been exchanged. She drains her tea, scrapes back her chair and stands. ‘Time to go.’

Who Are You, Bethany Harris?

August. A wasp became tangled in her hair. She ran screaming from the garden, shoes kicking up gravel from the path. George found her slumped on the terrace, red-faced and shaking, hair a broken haystack around her face.

‘Where is it?’ she said. ‘Has it gone?’

George bent and picked up a broken yellow-and-black shape by the tip of one stilled wing. ‘Look.’

‘Get it away from me.’

‘Are you stung? Let me see?’

‘Don’t touch me. And throw that thing away. I don’t want to see it.’

She’d spent the morning beside the flowerbeds with Julia and Sebastian where they’d been identifying the different blooms. The children were sunbursts of life bound by neither tact nor guile and she had taught them through a three-season glory of glittering frost, spring shoots and hot summer meadows.

‘The flowers are like jewels,’ Bethany told them. ‘Close your eyes, breathe deeply, smell their pretty scent.’

‘I am told when I come of age I shall have my mother’s jewels,’ Julia said.

‘Really? My first jewel was a polished chestnut my father brought home. It was perfectly round, the only one of its kind I’d seen. He placed it in my cupped hands and I spent minutes running my fingers across its smooth skin.’

‘It wasn’t worth anything.’

‘Not true, Julia. It was a treasure. My father found it and made the effort to keep it for me. He knew I loved such things.’

In the reds and golds of autumn, Father brought back more horse chestnuts. Beth laid them out in rows across her dresser, the fat clunky ones on top, the tiny brown pebbles at the bottom. ‘Aren’t you going to make something more out of those?’ Father asked, but Beth thought them perfect arranged as they were.

When clopping around the grounds Father hung dun-coloured sacks from his pommel. In these he collected the small detritus any estate of significance attracts: a broken flower, a wing-shattered crow, a poacher’s illicit snare. Other items he thought might interest Bethany found their way into his pockets. She pressed oddly shaped leaves, like green and brown faces, into a scrapbook received one birthday. She filled the corners of her room with everything. Father had whitewashed the house from kitchen to attic. ‘White is the best background for furniture and other things,’ he claimed. Then Mother discovered ‘tapestries’ and smothered the walls of her bedchamber. Given leave she’d have spread them across the parlour and hall, but Father wouldn’t consider such a notion. She spent hours running her hands across the material. Beth thought they resembled old rugs with bad stitching. Her own treasures came straight from nature’s mouth. Finally Father built shelves for her using odd cuts of wood begged from the Russells’ stables. Beth laid out her larger pieces, arranging then rearranging until each was in its proper place.

‘Move just one and they all end up looking wrong,’ she explained.

‘You’re a peculiar sort, Bethany, make no mistake,’ Father said, shaking his head. ‘How much of me is in you? How much of your mother? And where did the rest come from?’

Peculiar or not, she taught Julia and Sebastian to take delight in simple things, and to find wonder in almost everything that grew or lived on their uncle’s estate.

Then the wasp appeared, and the day was ruined.

Beth shut herself in her bedchamber. An hour passed before she brushed civility back into her hair and returned to the schoolroom. Despite the children’s protests she did not go outside for the rest of the day. Eventually they gave up and dabbled with watercolours. Beth’s brittle face warned she would not be swayed. As the paints swirled over paper, however, she softened, remembering her time in the round tower and the soft kiss of the brush against her skin. Julia looked up from her work, a dab of blue smeared on the end of her nose. Beth felt a flood of affection for her and Sebastian, whose face was folded in concentration.

I wish I could do this forever.

George caught her while she was hanging the paintings on the schoolroom wall. Julia and Sebastian were off for their afternoon nap. Russell Hall had, for a short time, settled into a warm silence.