Джорджетт Хейер - Duplicate Death

She then remembered that the library, where Beulah usually partook of meals served to her on a tray, was swept, garnished, and furnished with card-tables; reflected that the servants would infallibly be affronted by any suggestion that they should serve two separate meals that evening, and became more cheerful. Beulah received a curt intimation that she was expected to dine with her employer with outward apathy. Her spirits were not raised by the contemplation of her image in the mirror set within the panel of her wardrobe door. The discreet dinner-dress, bought for just such an occasion as the present one, had, for its provenance, the Inexpensive Department of a London store distinguished more for its reasonable prices than for its exclusiveness of design, and had been worn rather too often. Not even the addition of a pendant of antique and charming design, bequeathed to her by her Italian mother, could redeem it, she considered. A dab of Indian ink had concealed a cut on one of her satin sandals; but her thick brown locks, springing attractively from a broad, low brow, would have been the better for re-setting. "Oh, blast, who cares, anyway?" demanded Beulah of her scowling reflection, and dragged a comb through her hair once more.

She was guilty of the extravagance of hiring a taxi to convey her from Nevern Place to Charles Street, and alighted from it just as Mr. Seaton-Carew was about to press the bell beside the front door of the house. He waited for her to join him, saying, in the half-caressing, half-bantering tone he was apt to adopt when addressing pretty young women: "Well, and how is my little protegee?"

"Thank you, I am perfectly well, and you would oblige me if you would stop calling me your little protegee!" Beulah replied.

He laughed gently, and gave her arm a squeeze above the elbow. "What a farouche child it is!" he remarked. "Ungrateful, aren't you? Eh? Who got you this job, I should like to know? And what thanks has he ever had for doing it? Now, you tell me that, you impossible young termagant!"

"If you had got it for me without telling Mrs. Haddington every detail of my past career, I might have been grateful - even to the extent of letting you paw me about!" retorted Beulah fiercely, detaching his hand from her arm.

Again he laughed, and this time playfully pinched her chin. "Does Lilias put it across you? What a shame! But I really couldn't foist you on to her without letting her know the worst, could I?"

Beulah sought angrily in her purse for her latch-key, realised that she had left it in her shopping-bag, set her finger on the bell, and pressed it viciously. "I told you the truth, and you pretended to believe me!"

"Of course I did! That's one of the rules of the game, my silly sweet."

"And, what is more, you did believe me!" Beulah flashed. "I know enough now to be sure that you'd have found quite another use for me if you hadn't! You saw I wasn't in the least the sort you were looking for, but it occurred to you that you could supply your dear old friend with a slave who wouldn't leave her the first time she was poisonously rude if you sent me to her - complete with my dossier!"

He still seemed to be genuinely amused. "Poor little savage! Do you hate me for it?"

"No more than I hate cockroaches!"

At this moment, Thrimby opened the door. Mr. Seaton-Carew stood back with an exaggerated gesture of civility to allow Beulah to precede him into the house. His eyes mocked her; he said, as he handed Thrimby his hat: "What do you do to cockroaches, my dear? Put your foot on them?"

"When I get the chance!"

"What a cruel little girl! I'm afraid you won't, you know!"

She turned, at the foot of the stairs, to look back at him. "Don't be too sure of that, Mr. Seaton-Carew! Add determined to cruel, and you'll be very nearly right!"

"Your overcoat, sir?" said Thrimby, in a voice that clearly expressed his opinion of this interchange.

Beulah postponed her entrance to the drawing-room until the last moment, and did, not join the party until after the separate arrivals of Lord Guisborough and Mr. Harte. She found her employer very stately in black velvet and diamonds, with a large black lace fan, mounted on ebony sticks, which she carried in one hand. This was in imitation of a certain much admired Duchess, and was a plagiarism which Mr. Harte had instantly recognised and appreciated. He caught Beulah's eye as she entered the room, and directed it to the gloves and the fan. Since Beulah had not been informed of the identities of the two extra guests Mr. Harte's presence came as a glad surprise to her. Her rather forbidding expression was lightened by an involuntary smile, and a faint flush. These indications of her pleasure were not lost on her employer, who observed them with a steely light in her eyes. But Mrs. Haddington never committed the solecism of being rude to her secretary in public, and she said, with her mechanical smile: "Ah, here you are, Miss Birtley! You know my secretary, don't you, Lance?"

The latest flower of the peerage was seated beside Cynthia on a deep sofa, engrossed in expounding the high principles infusing every Russian bosom, but he turned his head at these words, waved a vague hand, and said graciously: "Oh, hallo!"

"And Mr. Harte I feel sure you have met before, Miss Birtley," said Mrs. Haddington.

"How do you do? May I mix you a drink?" Timothy said, shaking hands with his unofficially betrothed, and moving towards the tray laid upon a side-table.

Beulah refused it, and Mrs. Haddington, who saw no reason why she should provide a member of her staff with cocktails as well as an expensive meal, said lightly: "I'm afraid you won't be able to persuade her, Mr. Harte. Miss Birtley doesn't drink."

"What an exemplary character!" remarked Seaton-Carew, amusement in his sleepy eyes.

"Dinner is served, madam," announced Thrimby, from the doorway.

A buffet had already been set up in the back half of the dining-room, and the mahogany table, much reduced in length, had been thrust wholly into the front half. Mrs. Haddington, with a graceful apology for what she described as a picnic-meal, requested Lord Guisborough to take the head of the board, seated herself at the foot, with Timothy on her right, and Seaton-Carew on her left, and directed her daughter to the vacant chair between his lordship and Mr. Harte. This left the place beside Seaton-Carew to Beulah, and since Lord Guisborough continued to address himself exclusively to Cynthia, and Timothy, handicapped by an upbringing, politely set himself to entertain his hostess, she was obliged to maintain an unwilling exchange of small talk with him.

Of this he had an easy and inexhaustible flow. He was a middle-aged man who had wonderfully preserved his figure, and his air of youth. He was handsome, in a slightly florid style, and possessed a marked amount of rather animal magnetism. His manner, which was a nice blend of indulgent amusement and affectionate flattery, strongly attracted a certain type of woman, and various young men whose careers had not hitherto earned them any very distinguishing attention either from their contemporaries or from their seniors. He lived in a service-flat in Jermyn Street, and was apparently a gentleman of leisure. His position in Mrs. Haddington's house was undefined, but it was generally supposed that the past veiled a greater degree of intimacy than now prevailed between them. As Miss Mapperley so shrewdly phrased it: "Anyone knows what to think when someone asks a gentleman to go and fetch her something out of her bedroom." Miss Mapperley added with relish: "But if My Lady thinks he's still got a fancy for her she'll very soon smile on the other side of her face, for it's her precious Cynthia he's after, as anybody could see with half an eye. Disgusting, I call it!"

Lord Guisborough, who, while rapidly disposing of half a dozen oysters, was angrily condemning a state of Capitalism which had neglected to make oysters the staple diet of the Masses, had long since decided that Mr. Seaton-Carew was a parasite who, in a more golden age, would have perished under a guillotine, and paid little heed to him, beyond casting one or two fiery glances in his direction, and contradicting three of his statements. These in no way discomposed Dan Seaton-Carew, but seemed rather to amuse him. He had very little interest in impoverished peers; and as it was common knowledge that the late Lord Guisborough, upon the death of his last surviving son, had divided all his unentailed property between his daughter and his more favoured nephew Kenelm, he had never made any attempt to captivate the heir. Lord Guisborough was a bony young man, with a cavernous eye and hollow cheeks, who had been employed for some years on the staff of a firm of left-wing publishers. He was not without ability, but he lacked ballast. An older and a shrewder colleague had once described him as being over-engined for his beam. He was capable of bearing an intelligent part in discussion for just as long as the subject had no bearing on the Kremlin, but the smallest reference to Soviet Russia acted upon his brain like a powerful drug, slaying in an instant his critical faculty, and inspiring him with a fanaticism that dismissed as Capitalist Propaganda all the more displeasing activities of an Asiatic race which from time to time came to light. He had taken no active part in the War, at first because he had conscientiously objected to it; and later, when the enforced participation of Russia in the hostilities had altered his outlook, because he was engaged on Educational Work of paramount importance. This consisted of a series of lectures, which he was perfectly well qualified to deliver, having completed his education at the London School of Economics.