The Widow's Secret by Brian Thompson

Author:Brian Thompson [Brian Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE NEXT DAY turned out to be sultry and overcast. The hazy cloud that obscured London raised the temperature and thickened the air. In the mid-morning, feeling tetchy and ill-tempered, Bella had a sudden recuperative idea. She asked Charles Urmiston to dinner that night, promising a cab at the door of Shelton Street for seven. He was on no account to accept the invitation out of duty. If he felt too battered to attend, then he must refuse. But she knew he would not. Nor did he – the boy that took round her note returned it with ‘At Seven’ scrawled across the bottom. Those additional stains were not from tears of gratitude – the invitation had caught Urmiston in the tin bath, wearing a helmet of suds.

Bella spent a happy half-hour in the principal cellar of the house in Orange Street, choosing wine. In the afternoon she walked out into Leicester Square to buy flowers. These exceptional preparations astonished Marie Claude.

‘Does the Prince of Wales come tonight?’

‘Don’t be impertinent.’

‘If it is Lord Broxtowe I am going out.’

‘When has Lord Broxtowe ever dined with us? And if he ever did, don’t you suppose I would pack you off with the blessed Lydia Titcombe for the evening?’

For answer, Marie Claude burst into tears. It seemed that two nights ago Miss Titcombe had been shown the door. She had lately inherited a cottage on the Kent coast from her aged grandmother and there she planned to set up house with her beloved, keeping chickens and growing vegetables. There were other romantic inducements. The property had a well from which to draw water and from her early childhood visits Lydia remembered bacon hanging on hooks. Rare orchids hid in the fields roundabout and any amount of wading birds decorated the mud flats. Bella was stunned.

‘She has no idea who you are,’ she observed incautiously.

‘Oh yes!’ Marie Claude shouted. ‘Do find it funny, why not!’

‘I find it sad. Poor Miss Titcombe. Who will she ever find as beautiful as you?’

‘I hate you both! I wish I were dead!’

‘No you don’t. Or not more than usual.’ She embraced the sobbing girl. ‘You will live a very long time and see miracles,’ Bella promised.

‘I don’t want to see miracles.’

‘Twentieth-century miracles.’

Marie Claude howled. By the time Urmiston arrived, Bella was emotionally exhausted.

‘This is kind of you,’ he said shyly.

‘It is something I have wanted to do. I entertain very seldom.’

Marie Claude came to table in a surly and jealous mood but found their guest to have impeccable manners, which was to say French manners. He knew Paris; and of course, Boulogne. Without revealing the reason for his journey, he gave a pleasant and witty account of travelling by train to Mentone and the people he had met along the way.

‘This comtesse, the mystery woman, offered you a job?’ she asked incredulously.

‘As tutor to her daughter.’

‘Was she beautiful, the girl?’

‘I was shown a daguerrotype.’

‘The picture bewitched you?’

‘I am slow to bewitch,’ Urmiston smiled.

‘But about that you can’t say. No one can say.

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