Chapter 2 #2
“We’re a young family, Mrs. Fletcher, about the same age as the house. Of no antiquarian interest, and without literary aspirations. The ancestors hanging in the hall are someone else’s. But I expect you have heard the story?”
“No, actually.” The Dalrymples stretched back into the mists of time and Daisy had never been particularly interested in noble lineages.
Moreover, the War had allowed her to avoid a young lady’s usual introduction to Society: she had worked in a military hospital instead of attending balls and hunting a husband of her own class.
It was odd, she now realized, that Lucy, who was much more conscious of such things, had never talked about her own family’s history.
“It all started,” said the Earl, “with Eustace Fothers, who was a manufacturer of umbrella silk in the Suffolk town of Haverhill. You know it perhaps?”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Unsurprising. It is a small and very dull town.”
Mr. Eustace Fothers, it seemed, did rather well with his umbrella silk and quadrupled the resulting fortune by shrewd investment. The purchase of an estate (from a noble but impoverished family who had not soiled their hands with trade since the sixteenth century) scarcely dented his wealth.
Mr. Fothers had torn down the house and, having built the present pile, renamed the place after the source of his fortune, then changed his own name to Fotheringay.
His investments continuing to prosper, he had next made a very large donation to the political party then in power.
His reward, not unexpected, was a viscountcy, soon raised to an earldom.
His son, the second Earl, had been lucky in both his investments and his marriage to a daughter of the old nobility.
“My mother,” said the third Lord Haverhill, “did not cavil at the umbrella silk. By that time, fortunately, the taint of trade was no longer regarded as an insuperable obstacle.”
“A great deal more respectable than being a peer because a distant ancestor was Charles the Second’s mistress,” said Daisy.
The Earl shouted with laughter. Heads turned.
Mr. Walsdorf looked faintly puzzled, as if he couldn’t see what was funny in the ignoble origins of the English peerage.
After all these years in England, all those bound volumes of Punch catalogued, he still did not quite fathom the English sense of humour.
On the other hand, Daisy suspected Lucy would be equally unamused.
Smiling at Lord Haverhill, she set down her empty cup and saucer. “If you’ll excuse me, it’s time I said hello to Lucy’s parents.”
The Honourable Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Fotheringay were a staid, rather dull couple. He sat on the boards of a couple of companies,
doubtless due to his courtesy title, and was a churchwarden.
She pottered contentedly about the garden of their small manor house in a small Essex village, driving her gardener to distraction, and was sometimes asked to open church fêtes.
Their two sons, Lucy’s brothers Timothy and George, were both equally stodgy.
Daisy had never understood how they could have produced a vivacious daughter like Lucy.
However, they had always been kind to Daisy, ever since her first visit from school, and she was fond of them. She was making her way towards them when Sally came up to her.
“I wonder what you said to amuse Grandfather?” she said. “He’s been feeling under the weather lately, I’m afraid. We are a little anxious for his health. I only hope laughing won’t overtire him. I’d better see if he wants to go in and lie down.”
“A good laugh’s more likely to do him good, if you ask me,” asserted a woman Daisy didn’t recognize. “I’m Angela Devenish, Mrs. Fletcher. How d’ye do? It was splendid to hear my great-uncle laughing.”
Lady Eva’s spinster granddaughter looked to be in her early thirties.
Even in her youth, Daisy thought, she could never have been anything but plain.
Her boyish figure was skinny rather than svelte.
Her jumper was grubby and the hem of her tweed skirt had all too obviously been turned up to the newly fashionable knee length by an amateur seamstress—probably herself, and probably with more regard to convenience than fashion.
Her boots suggested she had been a Land Girl during the War.
A small dog of undistinguished parentage lurked at her heels.
Her grin was infectious. Daisy smiled at her and held out her hand to the dog. “It looks a bit like our Nana.”
The dog cowered.
“Tiddler’s been badly treated,” Angela Devenish said gruffly, and added in a slightly belligerent tone, “I work for the RSPCA.”
“Good for you. It must be rather upsetting at times.”
“You can’t imagine. Not fit for tea-time conversation, my mother would say.”
“No, I expect not. But I’d like to talk to you about it sometime. I’m a journalist. Maybe I could write an article that would encourage people to help.”
Angela beamed. “Jolly good show. Anytime.”
Daisy exchanged a few more words with her before resuming her pursuit of Lucy’s parents, who had moved to the other side of the terrace.
Sally, she saw, was bending solicitously over Lord Haverhill, who waved her away, looking irritable.
Lord Fotheringay was contemplating a stone urn of geraniums and lobelia, plainly bored by such commonplace plants.
Lucy stood at bay by the balustrade, surrounded by a swarm of giggling girls, cousins no doubt. She shot Daisy a look of desperate appeal. Daisy altered course. This, after all, was why she had been invited.
“Lucy, come and reintroduce me to your parents. I haven’t seen them in such ages.”
“Coming! Daisy, these are my cousins Julia, Alice, Erica, Mary, Ursula. My bridesmaids. Girls, my friend Mrs. Fletcher.” Linking arms, she hurried Daisy off with no time to respond to the chorus of “How do you do.”
“I’ll never remember which is which,” Daisy said.
“They’re interchangeable. Were we ever so silly?”
“We never had the chance, darling. At that age, you were busy being the most elegant girl in the Land Army, and I was busy in a hospital office because I couldn’t face being a nurse on the wards. I expect we’d have managed to be just as silly if we hadn’t been otherwise engaged.”
“I might have. I doubt you would. Darling, thank you for rescuing me, but you don’t really need me to help you tackle the parents.”
“Of course not. It was all I could think of on the spur of the moment when I saw you were drowning. Who is that heading our way?”
Lucy glanced round at the approaching woman and groaned. “Aunt Josephine. Lady Devenish. Great-aunt Eva’s daughter-in-law.”
“Angela’s mother?”
“That’s right.”
It was possible to imagine Lady Devenish in youth as a pretty, doll-like creature, but the years had added flabbiness to her short figure and discontent to her round face. “I’ll leave you to her,” said Daisy.
“If you must. She’s bound to ask me yet again to give Angela a few hints about dressing decently. She simply can’t believe the poor fish doesn’t care two hoots. Angela won’t spend a penny on clothes. It all goes on her wretched animals.”
Lucy turned away to intercept Lady Devenish, and Daisy at last caught up with Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Fotheringay. They thanked her for coming to support Lucy.
“I simply don’t understand her,” said Mrs. Fotheringay in bewilderment. “A girl’s wedding should be the most wonderful day of her life, but Lucy is utterly offhand about the whole thing. I’m trying to make it perfect for her, but nothing I do seems to be right.”
Daisy did her best to soothe the poor lady. Lady Haverhill came to join them, and Daisy found herself having to defend “the modern young woman.”
Meanwhile Oliver Fotheringay wandered off to chat with his brother, Aubrey. Lord Fotheringay had descended the steps to the rose garden and was on his knees poking at the soil. Angela Devenish should have been Lord Fotheringay’s daughter, Daisy decided. They would have understood each other.
Mrs. Oliver and her mother-in-law agreed to blame the Germans for the shortcomings of the modern generation.
“Look at my grandson Rupert now,” said Lady Haverhill. “In my day, a young man was proud to be an officer in a Household Regiment, but since the War Rupert finds it boring. Haverhill won’t let him quit and live in town, doesn’t want him to turn into a useless
drone like Montagu. Of course, he could come home and help take care of the estate, but apparently that’s equally boring. I’d say there’s no moral fibre there, but the boy did have a ‘good war,’ as they say. Medals and so on.”
“Timmy and George did their bit, of course.” But Mrs. Oliver was not presently in the least interested in her sons, far less her husband’s nephew. She reverted to Lucy’s unaccountable behaviour, for which Lady Haverhill had no patience.
“In my day, girls were brought up to do as they were told,” she said tartly, and departed, leaving Daisy to take up the soothing where she had left off.
One of the girls who had been brought up to do as she was told drifted up to them.
Lady Ione Fotheringay, Lord Haverhill’s spinster daughter, was a vague, drab creature whose mind usually seemed to be otherwhere.
According to Lucy, in youth Lady Ione had fallen in love with an unsuitable young man but meekly acquiesced when her father forbade the match.
She lived at Haverhill, dowdy and dull, disregarded by all.
Her time was spent knitting lumpy garments to give to ungrateful relatives who had never been known to wear them.
Her dismal example was one reason Lucy had reached for independence with both hands and set up as a photographer.
The crowd on the terrace was dispersing. Among the younger and more energetic, Sally Fotheringay was rounding up a foursome for tennis and others were heading for croquet or to walk to the folly. Jennifer Walsdorf came to take Daisy to the nurseries to see her daughter.
It was a relief to Daisy to talk pregnancy and babies instead of Lucy’s vagaries.
Emily Walsdorf was a blond cherub about the same age as Sally and Rupert’s little boy, Dickie, much too young to be a bride’s train-bearer even if Lucy had wanted him.
Also present, Lucy’s brother Timothy’s children were the right sort of age.
At present they were far too busy pestering their nursemaid to take them down to the lake to care about being excluded from the ceremony.
After half an hour in the nursery admiring children and half an hour in the conservatory admiring orchids and hibiscus and rare palm trees, Daisy went to take a much-needed bath before changing for dinner.
Several more relatives arrived in time for dinner, most unknown to Daisy.
At the long mahogany table, she was seated beside Sir James Devenish, a brawny, red-faced man with a bristling moustache.
A thoroughgoing hunting-shooting-fishing country squire, he was not at all in sympathy with his daughter’s views on the treatment of animals.
He confessed he’d only turned up early for the wedding because he wanted to fish Lord Haverhill’s stream.
His incredibly boring recital of every detail of his angling day required no more of Daisy than an occasional “Not really?” She was happy to be able to give most of her attention to the excellent meal.
The Haverhills were truly splendid hosts, she thought with a replete sigh as the ladies withdrew via the Long Gallery to the crimson-and-gold drawing room. If it weren’t for Lucy’s troubles, she’d be looking forward with pleasure to a peaceful and relaxing few days in the country.
After a good night’s sleep, Daisy was enjoying a warm, comfortable drowse when a maid brought morning tea, with two Bath Oliver biscuits. Since the end of her morning sickness she always woke ravenous. Before she even sat up in bed, she reached for a biscuit and bit into it.
So her mouth was full of crumbs when the screaming started.