Love in the Dark

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1907-1

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1907Susanna walked down the back stairs and, moving along the passage, entered a sitting room that was seldom used.

This was her way of approaching the drawing room, for she knew that if she went down the front stairs Hibbert, the butler, would insist on announcing her.

If there was one thing that made Susanna really shy it was to walk into the drawing room where all her mother’s friends were gossiping round the tea table.

At the sound of her name there would be a silence and all eyes would be turned towards her as she advanced into the room.

She knew only too well how unprepossessing she looked, far too fat and ungainly even in her new gown, lacking the small and elegant waist that was part of the beauty that made her mother acclaimed wherever she went.

Lady Lavenham was one of the famous beauties who made people stand on their seats in Hyde Park to watch her and who was described in every newspaper as one of the most beautiful women in England.

What they really meant was that she was one of the most beautiful women in the King’s circle and therefore envied by everyone else in Society.

Susanna knew that it was a cross for her to bear that her second daughter was not beautiful but decidedly plain.

Susanna would stare at her reflection in the mirror and wonder what she could do about her round, puffy pudding face in which her eyes, nose and mouth seemed much too small.

Her hair too, instead of being the shining gold of her mother’s or the attractive darkness of her father’s, was an unimpressive compromise between the two.

When she had looked at herself for some time, she would invariably go to the drawer where she kept a box of chocolates and nibble away until the cloying sweetness of them made her feel slightly better.

It was only by eating that she could somehow recompense herself for her mother’s sharpness and her father’s disappointment.

Her sister May had been so different. She had been slim and lovely long before she emerged from the schoolroom as a debutante.

“May is as beautiful as you were when I first met you,” her father would often say and only Susanna was aware that it brought a little frown to her mother's white brow because she disliked rivals of any sort even if it was her own daughter.

But one thing was quite obvious that there was no thought of any rivalry where Susanna was concerned.

As she crossed the sitting room now and entered the writing room that adjoined the drawing room, she could see a reflection of herself in several gilt-framed mirrors and realised that she looked dumpy.

That was exactly the right word!

‘Rather,’ she told herself with a flash of humour, ‘like a cottage loaf!’

Her waist was pulled in tightly to try to make it seem smaller, so that her body bulged above and below it.

The dress she was wearing, of oyster crêpe trimmed with pleated frills of silk round the hem, would have made May look like a young Goddess, but on Susanna it merely appeared dowdy.

‘There is nothing I can do about it,’ she told herself defiantly.

She felt a sudden longing for the small meringues and little pink-iced cakes that she knew would be part of the elaborate tea in the drawing room and she quickly crossed the room to the communicating door.

As she turned the handle very softly, she heard her name mentioned.

“At which Reception are you presenting Susanna?” a voice enquired.

“Oh, the first,” her mother replied. “It’s a tiresome bore, so the sooner I get it over with the better.”

“After that what plans have you made for her, Daisy?” someone else asked.

Lady Lavenham laughed, a tinkling laugh that her admirers described as sheer music.

“Marriage, of course,” she replied, “and quickly!”

“You are quite right,” the first speaker approved, whose voice Susanna recognised as that of Lady Walsingham, “and who have you in mind for her? Another Duke?”

There was a little burst of laughter at this, before Lady Lavenham responded coolly,

“But of course.”

Susanna realised that, holding onto the ornate doorknob, her fingers were stiff.

Lady Walsingham now asked,

“Which Duke? Do tell us, Daisy, who you have in mind.”

“And I hope you will all help me,” Lady Lavenham replied, “I will be frank and tell you that the only Duke who is eligible at the moment is Southampton.”

There was a little shriek following the almost breathless hush as Lady Lavenham spoke and then Lady Walsingham said,

“But my dear Daisy, Hugh Southampton has not a penny to his name!”

“Exactly!” Lady Lavenham replied. “That is why he will be delighted to marry Susanna.”

There was another hush before someone enquired tentatively,

“Are you telling us that Susanna has money?”

“Of course she has, ” Lady Lavenham replied. “I thought you knew that her Godmother, a most tiresome woman, left her a fortune.”

“How exciting! I had no idea,” Lady Walsingham exclaimed and the other ladies round the tea table joined in with cries of astonishment.

“Poor Susanna will need every penny of it,” Lady Lavenham went on. “We all know that Hugh Southampton needs a rich wife, so what could be more convenient?”

“What indeed?” someone added. “Really, Daisy, you are a genius. But then you always have been.”

There was a note of envy in the speaker’s voice because Lady Lavenham’s elevated position in the Social world had inevitably made her a number of bitter enemies.

“It’s not fair,” they had often complained, “that she is not only beautiful and has married the charming Charles Lavenham, who, being such a good shot, is persona grata in the sporting world, but she is also amusing enough to captivate the King and to have married her first daughter, May, to the Marquis of Fladbury, who on his father’s death will be the Duke of Haven.”

But dear Daisy’s second daughter was undoubtedly so fat and plain that she would be a brake on the meteoric ascent of her mother to the social pinnacle that no one could depose her from it.

To have learnt now that the ugly duckling was an heiress was too much!

Most of the ladies were thinking privately that the Duke of Southampton, whose ancestral home was crumbling around his ears and who owed money in every direction, would be only too delighted to sell his title for a wife who was rich and English.

He had, as they well knew, been taking a critical look at some of the American heiresses crossing the Atlantic in the hope of acquiring a distinguished husband.

The only ones who were even passably tolerable had preferred more important Dukes or rather their mothers had preferred them.

It was understood in the strange unwritten code of Edwardian Society that a mother’s job was to marry off her daughter as soon as she left the schoolroom into the highest Society position obtainable.

What the daughter felt was of no consequence whatsoever.

Susanna, listening at the door, could hear her sister May repeating over and over again,

“I cannot marry him, Susanna, I cannot! I hate him and when he touches me I feel sick inside.”

Susanna remembered May sobbing her heart out night after night.

No one, except herself, would listen to what she said and dressed as a bridesmaid Susanna had followed her up the aisle of St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, and heard her take her marriage vows in a weak tearful voice.

She too had disliked her brother-in-law from the moment she had seen him. However red-faced he was from the quantities of claret he consumed, he was acclaimed by everyone, including her father, as a fine sportsman and a first class shot, and no one would have found it credible that May might have other ideas for a husband or find the Marquis repulsive.

When May had come back from her honeymoon, white-faced and dull-eyed, she was, for the first time in her life, uncommunicative with her younger sister.

Susanna had told herself then that never, never would she be forced into matrimony with any man. But she knew now, as she listened to what was being said, that it was not going to be easy.

Lady Lavenham ruled her husband and her children with a rod of iron. As it happened she had had very little interest in her daughters, finding them boring when they were small and gauche and tiresome when they were older.

She was pleased, when following two unwanted daughters she was able to present her husband with a son and heir. But that, she said firmly, was the end of the family.

Henry was now at Eton, a handsome little boy remarkably like his father, and in the holidays his mother, as a special favour, often took him driving with her in Rotten Row.

It was a treat that occasionally she had accorded to May, but it was something that had never happened to Susanna.

She was well aware that it was because her mother thought her plain and unattractive and would never admit that anything connected with herself should be anything but perfect.

This meant that she was ashamed of her second child and Susanna therefore was kept more in the background even than May had been.

Children were expected not to be either seen or heard.

When they were small, at five o’clock they were brought downstairs by Nanny and taken into the drawing room for exactly half an hour.

Their mother’s guests enthused over them and they would be given a sweet biscuit. Then they were supposed to sit quietly in a corner until Nanny collected them and took them upstairs to the nursery.

It was an ordeal that had made Susanna embarrassed even when she was very small and it was an inexpressible relief when, as she grew fat and plain, her mother said two girls in the drawing room were too many and May was to come down alone.

“It’s not fair,” May would protest furiously upstairs when Nanny made her change into one of her best dresses, “that I go downstairs and Susanna stays up here.”

“You know the answer to that,” Nanny would reply sharply. “You obey your mother and make her pleased with you, otherwise you’ll be sorry.”

“I will not be sorry, I should be glad if she does not want me,” May retorted, but she had been taken down regardless.

Susanna had been quite content to stay behind in the nursery.

It had been the same when they were at Lavenham Park in Hampshire.

When they were in the country, they were much happier being free from the constraints that were inevitable in London.

They could ride their ponies, play hide-and-seek in the shrubberies, steal peaches from the kitchen garden and be hardly aware of the large house parties their mother gave, except sometimes they would peep over the banisters when the King had arrived.

Once there had been three Kings staying in the house at the same time and, despite the fact that they felt it was patriotic to admire King Edward, it was inevitable that they should find the dark handsome King Alphonso of Spain the most attractive.

But it was impossible for the children, although far away in the nurseries on the third floor of the West wing, not to realise what a commotion there was when the King was a private guest.

Supplies of his favourite aubergines, ginger biscuits from Biarritz, bath salts and cigars were all ordered in abundance.

One room in the house would have to be converted into a private postal and telegraph office. And at Lavenham Park the lines had to be brought ten miles cross-country.

The King’s entourage included equerries, valets, his secretary and grooms and in the shooting season, loaders, horses and dogs as well.

Whether there were three Kings or not staying at Lavenham Park, Susanna when she watched her mother’s guests going down to dinner thought that it always appeared to be a Royal procession.

Her mother with her tiny waist and her tulle-encircled shoulders would be ablaze with diamonds from a huge tiara on her carefully waved hair to the sparkling diamond buckles on her satin evening shoes.

The ladies who followed her were just as magnificent if not so beautiful.

As it was inevitable that every gentleman who stayed with them should bring a valet, so every lady brought a lady’s maid carrying in her hand a large leather jewel case emblazoned with its owner’s coronet.