Chapter 5
Chapter five
Ormdale
Having completed the full tour without mishap, Una showed Mr Anderson to the table in the glasshouse with great relief.
The building was very quiet now because it was teatime, and the crowds would be gorging themselves on Martha’s excellent cream teas on the lawn.
Shaded by palms, the ironwork table was nicely laid for tea with the best china and a pitcher of elderflower cordial.
Una herself was positively gasping for a cup of tea, but she had ordered the cordial for Mr Anderson in case he might prefer a cool drink.
As she opened her mouth to ask him, she caught a glimpse of something that filled her with terror.
A hand—a small and dirty hand—snatching a scone from the table and disappearing it into the flourishing fern at her feet.
She snapped her mouth shut.
“Tea or cordial?” Una asked.
“Tea, please,” he said, as if that answer were the only possible one.
“Sugar?” she asked.
“Two, please,” he said.
She was spooning the sugar cubes into his cup when Mr Anderson said sharply, “Two, not three.”
“Oh! I am sorry,“ murmured Una, and gave him her cup instead, which she had not yet drunk from.
She eyed the vegetation—if one twin was there, the other could not be far. Ought she to toss another scone after the first, to keep them at bay? Or would they have the sense to divide it?
She must keep Mr Anderson’s attention from wandering to the bushes behind them.
“Mr Anderson,” she said brightly, “do please tell me all about your work at the Smithsonian.”
He began to drone about herpetology and American reptiles while Una smiled and nodded and spread jam and cream on scones for both of them.
“The Cornish way,” he muttered with an air of disapproval as she handed him his sprigged china plate.
“I beg your pardon?” Una asked.
“Never mind,” he said quickly. “I will write to George and tell him what an excellent job you are doing here without him, Miss Worms. Of course, you have a great many servants to help you, I’m sure.”
Una took a sip of tea. It was overly sweet, and brought her no pleasure.
The fern behind Mr Anderson trembled hungrily, and a small hand began to stretch towards the plate of scones.
Una was considering an impromptu diversion—hysterics? choking?—when one provided itself.
Two tiny dragons, wings whirring, darted close to them.
Mr Anderson jerked back.
“They are attracted to the sweetness,” Una explained, and she stretched out her teacup as an offering. A scarlet dragon the size of her thumb hovered at the lip of the cup, tasting the liquid with its proboscis, delicate as a crocus stamen.
“Oh, look there!” Una said, pointing upwards at the blur of an aerial combat. “A duel!”
While Anderson was staring up, shading his eyes from the glare, she tossed a scone behind him. It was caught by a small hand before it hit the tiled path.
“They fight each other?” he asked.
A strained quality in his voice came into focus, and she suddenly knew what he reminded her of.
A few of the men in the village had come back from the war in South Africa ten years ago. Some of them had been unchanged, but a few of them had been rather the worse for wear—she had noticed it herself, as well as hearing her aunt and uncle talking about what might be done for them.
“Yes, they fight over the females, you know,” Una explained.
She debated asking him about his leg, and if he’d been injured in the war, but then remembered that the Americans hadn’t had anything to do with South Africa; that was between the Empire and the Boers.
“The females,” he repeated in an ominously soft voice. “But they don’t care about the men fighting for them. It’s all one to them. Isn’t it, Miss Worms?”
Una was taken aback. Did he really expect her to have a special insight into the mating habits of nectar-eating reptiles by virtue of her sex?
“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” she replied sweetly. “More tea?”
She was looking forward to Mr Anderson’s departure. And not just because it would be a relief to her nerves.
There was something wrong about him. Decidedly wrong. All in all, she was glad that he lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As soon as she had farewelled Mr Anderson by the pond, watching him stroll out the gates with relief, Pip strolled up and deposited Oolong at her feet.
“Well?” Pip asked idly. “All disasters averted?”
“Only narrowly,” she sighed. “Iggy and Dolly were hiding in the undergrowth, extorting scones from me. What greedy pigs they are! After I left them no less than two bags of boiled sweets, and a scavenger hunt with clues to find them! They must have asked Hanna to help them, the sneaks! I was relying on it being her day off. Help me find them and send them home to Drake Hall?”
They combed the glasshouse, but the only sign they found of the infamous pair were two round indentations in the humus, decorated with crumbs. The ticket stubs and sandwich wrappers from the tourists would be picked up later by a boy from the village who was paid for all of the rubbish he found.
“Was he disappointed the American dragons were still deep in sleep?” Pip asked.
“American dragons?” Una repeated in confusion, stacking the teacups and plates on the tray and shooing the tiny dragons off them.
“The quetzalcoatls, Una. The only dragon species from the Americas currently known to science?” Pip tried again. “Currently hibernating in the caves down by the river?”
“Oh,” Una said. “How strange. I didn’t think of it, and he never asked.”
Despite the warmth of the glasshouse, she felt cold, and she picked up and held Oolong while he licked jam from a teaspoon.
“Strange bird, if you ask me,” said Pip.
“You thought so, too?” she asked quickly.
Pip shrugged. “All of George’s friends are odd, from the great Walter Rothschild all the way down.”
“Yes, I suppose that must be it,” she said, comforted. Oolong wriggled out of her arms and launched himself off her to stretch his wings. Una looked at Pip thoughtfully. “And what about you? You’re George’s friend, too.”
“Me? Can you see anything odd about me, Una?”
He looked at her almost defiantly.
Pip’s quiet tie and summer flannels had just the correct air of studied carelessness. No one would ever guess he had grown up doing odd jobs on a remote Yorkshire estate.
Una felt a flicker of disquiet. She understood that these changes must be an improvement in the world’s eyes, but she could hardly recognise the boy she grew up with. Was the boy Pip hidden somewhere inside this laconic young man?
None of this, of course, could be spoken aloud, so she shook her head. “What’s odd is that you are home—during term time.”
He winced. “I wondered when you’d notice that.”
She sat down on the nearby chair. “What happened, Pip?”
Pip scraped the other chair into the shade and sat. Oolong circled about among the tops of the palms.
“The worst, quite simply,” Pip said, drawing a cigarette from his pocket.
There were NO SMOKING, PLEASE signs posted inside the glasshouse, because salamanders were apt to get excited in the presence of embers and ash. Any other person, any other time, Una would have stopped. But this was Pip, and something was wrong.
Una hardly dared speak it. “You weren’t—“
“Expelled? As a matter of fact, I was.”
“No! For what?”
“A fight.” He lit his cigarette as if it was his only care in the world. “A fight I lost. Spectacularly. Not to mention predictably.”
“Oh, Pip,” Una breathed sympathetically. “That sounds perfectly awful.”
“Oh, it was.”
“Is it very hard to just—not fight?”
He blew out smoke and watched it dissipate while she bit her lip at the criticism implicit in her question. She was also struggling not to cough at Pip’s new habit, which reminded her unpleasantly of her late brother.
“Very hard,” he said in a calm voice, “when someone is holding your head under a fountain until you say something beastly about your own mother.”
Una sat up straight. “But surely you’re not in trouble for that?”
“No. Not for that. I’m in trouble for smashing up the sculptures of the one responsible. They were for his final assessment, you see. I didn’t say it, by the way.”
“Say what?” she asked.
He flicked a bit of ash off his sleeve, which Una tracked to the tiles.
The Count, the only salamander presently dwelling in the glasshouse, appeared to be asleep behind a rock—she could just see its little arrowhead-tail from where she sat.
Una kept an asbestos blanket hidden behind a potted palm, and she could easily whip it out if the worst happened.
“The thing about my mother,” Pip answered. “I didn’t say it.”
“Of course you didn’t!“ Una burst out, then offered more hesitantly, “But smashing up his work…was it worth it? Everything you’ve been working towards for years?”
He threw down his cigarette stub. “Whether it was or not, I’m done with it all now. I’ve got to see if I sink or swim as an artist on my own. Just as myself. Philip Dugdale. A nobody from nowhere.”
The bitterness in his voice surprised her.
“You’re hardly that,“ she said. “We’re famous—too famous. Who hasn’t heard of our family? Why, The Strand did another article on us last year! They sent a photographer out. He made me look like a stricken doe.”
Pip ground the cigarette under his heel and did not look at her, and Una realised belatedly what she had said.
Our family.
It was a common belief in Ormdale that Pip was Una’s illegitimate half-brother. It seemed the most logical explanation when the pretty young housemaid at Wormwood Abbey had produced a baby boy without husband, sweetheart, or any kind of explanation.
Una herself had never questioned Pip’s provenance until her uncle George’s wife, Aunt Emily, had begun educating him along with her own son and nieces.
Una had taken it all as a matter of course—she liked Pip and was pleased to have her lessons with him.
It was when they were having their lesson about the Norman Conquest and Violet would keep saying that coarse word that the French used for Duke William of Normandy that Aunt Emily took them aside.
She told them that Pip’s parents had never been married, and that throughout his life people would probably use that word to hurt him.
“But why didn’t Pip’s father marry Lily, whoever he was?” pestered Violet. “Did Martha scare him off? Or was he just a bad’un?”
Aunt Emily had sighed. “I’m afraid it’s rather more of a muddle than that. For now, please just treat Pip as you would your own brother, if he were alive.”
Their own brother had been very unpleasant, while Pip was disposed to defer to the girls, so this was no hardship.
Before long, Violet had returned bursting with information acquired from children in the village.
“I always suspected Father was a bad’un,” Violet had concluded with satisfaction after she explained what they told her, “and now we have proof.”
All this had developed in Una a strong sense of sisterly obligation towards Pip.
While it was George who had been Pip’s closest playmate in their childhood years, it was Una who wrote to Pip at Art School in London, giving him all the Ormdale news.
It was Una who worried about whether he was making friends there, and knit him a muffler to protect him from the noxious city fog.
It was Una who kept writing, long after Pip stopped answering.
“Our family?” Pip repeated, bringing her back to the present.
Una swallowed. Yes, she thought, you are my brother, Pip, more than my full-blooded one ever was.
Then she felt a wave of sadness. Both of her sisters had left Ormdale. One had never returned. But good old Pip—at least he had come home, instead of running away without a word. Before she could open her mouth to say it, he spoke again.
“Whose family are you talking about, Una?” he said, his eyes cold. “I’m the son of a servant. Or did you forget that? Because I never have. Not even for a moment.”
He got up and strode away quickly, leaving her alone.
It hurt, sharply. It seemed she could never find the words to keep the people she loved at her side.