A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

‘Oh, Mr Cameron, how beautiful*. It’s got your new rose in it!’ The dowager’s eyes misted. The garden at the Mill House was small and overshadowed, and she and this dour old Scotsman had shared thirty years of delight in flowers. ‘Have you found a name for it yet?’ she asked into his ear-trumpet which had proved staunchly Muriel-proof. ‘Anna said you were thinking of naming it for Miss Hardwicke?’

The old man’s face broke into a crafty smile. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I’m calling it “Countess”.’

‘Just “Countess”?’ said the dowager, puzzled.

The gardener nodded and began to wheeze with his special brand of private laughter. ‘Just “Countess”,’ he said - and took his leave.

‘It’s time to go, my lady,’ said Alice gently.

‘Yes.’

Well, at least, thought the dowager, letting Alice adjust her hat, I’ve been spared the Herrings.

For Proom, sent to settle the Herrings’ outstanding fares and bring them back to Mersham, had returned empty-handed. The Herrings, it seemed, had taken umbrage and returned to Birmingham. God did that sometimes, the dowager had observed. Pushed you to the limit and then gave you just one little bonus: in this case, a wedding without Melvyn, Myrtle and the twins.

In the east wing, James, offering to valet Uncle Sebastien, had been repulsed by the sour-faced nurse who was now helping the old man to get ready, talking to him like a child, with a dreadful, arch coyness. ‘We’re going to be very important today, aren’t we? We’re going to give the bride away aren’t we? So we don’t want any nasty cigarette ash on our nice clean clothes, do we?’

And in her bedroom the baulked and furious Lady Lavinia snapped the gold bracelet that had been the bridegroom’s present to the bridesmaids on to her scraggy wrist and went along to Queen Caroline’s bedchamber.

But at the sight of the bride even Lavinia’s ill-temper subsided and she gave an involuntary gasp of admiration. Flanked by the obsequious Cynthia and the new Swiss maid who had providentially arrived the day before, standing erect and without a trace of nervousness in her glorious ivory dress, the future Countess of Westerholme was quite simply breathtaking.

‘My prayerbook and my gloves, please,’ she ordered. ‘Cynthia, pick up my train. I’m ready.’

- - - -*

Mr Morland, robed and waiting in the vestry, came forward with outstretched hands to greet the bridegroom. If the medieval saints had gone to then-deaths as to a wedding, the Earl of Westerhohne, thought the kind and scholarly vicar, looked as if he was preparing to invert the trend.

‘I’m afraid Mr Byrne’s not here yet,’ he said, concealing his surprise, for the best man had hitherto been most punctilious in the performance of his duties.

He moved over to the door and stood looking out at the congregation. Sad that the bride had no relatives at all. In the packed church only her erstwhile chaperone represented her side of the family. At the organ. Miss Frensham was peering with her half-bKnd eyes at the keys, anxiously memorizing the strange piece that Miss Hardwicke had ordered instead of ‘Lohengrin’. The formal urns of lilies, the gardenias and carnations stiffly wired to the pew ends by the London florists who had replaced Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer gave off an almost overpowering scent.

Mr Morland frowned. What was it that struck him as so unusual?

And then he realized. Absolutely no one was crying! Strange, thought Mr Morland, who could not remember such a thing. Exceedingly strange.

But if no one was crying there was one member of the congregation who was clearly in extremis. Dr Lightbody, sitting beside old Lady Templeton in the pew behind the dowager, was in a piteous state. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, his hands were shaking and once he rose in his seat and threw out an arm as if he were about to break into anguished speech.

‘Are you ill?’ whispered Lady Templeton, who could not approve such conduct in the House of God. ‘Do you wish to go out?’

The doctor managed to shake his head, but the phantoms that had haunted him since the Mersham butler, nursing a grievance against the family as these old retainers were apt to do, had been to see him, ran riot in his brain. For the fate awaiting Muriel Hardwicke was too terrible to contemplate. This white goddess, this vessel of perfection was going - and on this very night -to be most hideously defiled by the satanic brute that she had chosen to espouse. And he had been too weak to save her. Well, it was too late now. He closed his eyes, buried his head in his hands. Let him at least notsee…

Five minutes passed, ten … The congregation was growing a little restive. Miss Frensham’s store of introductory music was running dangerously low. But it was not the bride that was causing the delay. It was the best man, who should have been here hours ago to help and succour the bridegroom.

‘Of course his presence is not essential to the ceremony,’ said Mr Morland. ‘Even if he has the ring.’

But now Tom came striding into the vestry. His apologies were perfunctory, his expression grim and it was almost with hostility that he led Rupert - whose sense of being caught in a nightmare from which he could not wake was growing stronger by the minute - to the chancel steps.

And now it was beginning. With her old mouth nervously puckered. Miss Frensham began to play the strange piece demanded by Miss Hardwicke - and on the arm of Mr Sebastien Frayne, the bride entered.

A gasp of sheer admiration greeted her. A slightly different gasp followed the entry of the two adult bridesmaids in their pink ruffles and petalled caps.

Then a rustling, whispers of surprise, of indignation, murmurs of disappointment, puzzled looks…

The bride reached the altar rails, handed her prayerbook to the Lady Lavinia; Mr Morland cleared his throat, when the voice of the bridegroom was heard saying clearly and imperiously, ‘Wait! Where is the third bridesmaid? Where is Ollie Byrne?’

Tom turned to his friend. Everything in him longed to blurt out what Muriel had done. Longed to show him Ollie as he had left her, lying white and despairing in her bed because there was nothing, now, to get up for and nowhere, now, to go. Ollie who had seen so totally and searingly through Muriel’s concern for her health, her unctuous bribery… who had told the nursemaid coming to brush her marigold curls that there was no point because cripples didn’t need to be tidy, and now lay with her face to the wall beyond reach of comfort or of hope.

But Muriel, shocked at a voice raised in church whispered, ‘Hush, dear. Ollie isn’t well, it seems,’ - and Mr Morland bent his head and began to repeat what are surely the best loved words in the world:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in Holy Matrimony…

But Tom’s disclosure would have been superfluous. Rupert had understood, and as clearly as if he were again present he remembered Ollie’s sad little question in th taxi on the way from Foreman’s and his own answer: ‘If you are not a bridesmaid at my wedding then there will be no wedding, and that I swear.’

Only there was a wedding. He was in the midst of it. He was marrying Muriel Hardwicke.

. . .but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

First it was ordainedfor the procreation of children…

In his pew, Dr Lightbody groaned. The procreation of children, yes … But what children? What monsters, what fiends in human form would that lewd and treacherous earl beget on the unsullied body of his bride? Oh, God, was there no one to warn her, no one to whom she could turn?