The Abandoned Bride Read online

  But no sooner had she swallowed down the first of her eggs, when old Miss Constable, a pensioner who was living out her days at Mrs. White’s and always took a dawn constitutional, came bursting into the dining room to banish all thoughts of plans or posts or interviews. “It is over!” the old woman gasped in a reedy voice as she brandished a newssheet, so breathless and disheveled that it was clear she had actually run back to the house. “See, see for yourselves! The Duke has won out! Napoleon is vanquished.”

  The excited ladies rose from their breakfast and gathered about Mrs. White, who, as proprietor, had won the right to read to them all from the broadsheet. Then all the ladies hugged each other and raised gallant toasts with their tea cups. For it was printed plain, Wellington had won the day at a place in Belgium called Waterloo, even as Julia had been journeying all unaware to London: on the eighteenth of June. Napoleon was routed, and must surely abdicate again.

  There was nothing for it but that they must celebrate. Mrs. White gave her maid a half day off, and she then advised her ladies to get their wraps, for they would go out into the city to participate in the joyous day. In ordinary times, it would have seemed odd, the six assorted respectable gentlewomen strolling along the streets with no purpose in mind, exactly like fops on the strut. But this was no ordinary time.

  The churchbells pealed wildly in every sector of the city as the news became generally known. All sorts of odd groups wandered the streets: clots of bakers, collections of school children with their masters, knots of common workers, all laughing and congratulating each other. But there was no actual dancing in the streets, and the most abandoned revelry that Julia experienced was toward the end of the afternoon when a wild young apprentice happened to spy her and swung about to catch her up and give her a sound kiss upon the lips before the shocked cries of her companions and the boisterous laughter of his fellows ended the encounter.

  Mrs. White and her ladies were safely within their house again when evening came, for then, they speculated rightly, the more rowdy celebrations would be enacted by the lower classes. But as though they felt they must apologize to Julia, who was newly come to town, for the relatively mild reaction of the populace, they recounted tales of the previous year’s extravaganzas when Napoleon had first been defeated. Then, they told her, there had been fireworks in all the parks, and public fairs, and balloon ascensions, and mechanical displays so marvelous and enthralling that they dreamed of them still.

  “It is possible,” Mrs. White said knowingly, “that we may never celebrate so wildly again, for victory was snatched from us too soon after all our jubilation. We may never again be so quick to embrace happiness.”

  Julia nodded wisely when she heard this, for it was an attitude which she could readily approve.

  But there were some further festivities, for victory, impermanent or not, is sweet, and the city did not return to normal for several more days. Only then could Julia at last go to see the Misses Parkinson.

  Miss Lavinia Parkinson eyed Julia thoughtfully after she had done writing out her cards of introduction.

  “There,” she said, handing them to her young applicant. “Dame Franklin only wants a biddable girl to companion her daughter, and the post wouldn’t be for long, as they must have the chit popped off soon, since rumor has it their pockets are emptying quickly. Lady Kirkland wants a companion, but don’t get your hopes up, for she’s a high stickler. Lady Cunningham wants a governess, but she is a foreigner and they are impossible to understand. I have no idea of what she’s after, no one yet has pleased her. You may as well have a try at it, every other client I have has in the past days.”

  Julia agreed, took the cards, thanked Miss Lavinia prettily, and went to call upon her new prospects with high hopes. But if she had chanced to hear the conversation that ensued as soon as she left, her expectations would have fallen so low that she would have crept back to Mrs. White’s and hidden underneath her bed.

  For the younger Miss Parkinson fixed her sister with a curious stare and said, loudly (as there were no others within their offices just then), “I vow, Letty, the heat must have gotten you. Whatever can you be thinking of, sending that child off to either Franklin or Kirkland? They wouldn’t have a beauty like that in their vicinity, much less their employ. Dame Franklin would be demented if she hired on a companion who would outshine her pie-faced daughter, and Lady Kirkland fancies herself a Cleopatra. And to think that poor Miss Wittly and dear little old Miss Gowdy have excellent credentials and are in dire need of employment, and you never sent them there.”

  “Remind me, Fan,” the elder Miss Parkinson said smugly, as she pushed out her chair and leaned over to scratch her leg, “what Miss Wittly and Miss Gowdy resemble.”

  “That’s not to the point,” her sister said crossly. “The dears can’t help their looks.”

  “Neither can Miss Hastings,” Lavinia Parkinson replied. “Not that they’ll do her an ounce of good getting those posts.”

  “Then why send her?”

  “Precisely because she’s a stunner and Miss Wittly resembles a bullfrog and dear Miss Gowdy, a dried herring. After those fine lady employers get an eyeful of Miss Hastings, they’ll be more appreciative of the virtues of our less comely clients. A beauty like Miss Hastings will strike terror into their hearts and they’ll be bound to snap up our old trouts when we send them in after her.”

  “That’s beastly of you, Letty, it is,” Fanny Parkinson said, wincing to see the gusto with which her sister attended to her itching limb, although sympathizing, for Lord knew they never got a chance to unbend when the offices were full.

  “The itch or the thought?” her sister replied unfeelingly.

  It was afternoon when Julia approached the hotel where Lady Cunningham was in residence. Her interviews with Lady Kirkland and Dame Franklin hadn’t taken long at all. But then, unsuccessful interviews seldom did.

  Lady Cunningham saw her immediately after she had presented her card. The lady definitely appeared as foreign as Miss Parkinson had claimed her to be. But Julia could not determine her nationality. She conducted the interview as she lay upon a recamier in her dressing room, although she did not appear to be in any way in an invalidish condition. She was relatively young and very attractive in her white eyelet dressing gown. Her red-gold hair was artfully arranged, although obviously not altogether genuine, and her voice was clear and strong. But she seemed so anxious that Julia thought she might suffer more from nerves than any sort of bodily distress. Her accent was so heavy, however, and she spoke so rapidly, that Julia experienced some distress of her own. She had to spend most of her time trying to decipher the lady’s meaning, rather than placing her nation of origin.

  “You are, of courz, younker zan I vould like,” the lady said at one point. “But zee children vould be hoppy az birtz wiz you.” By the time Julia had reasoned that the children would be elated, rather than bouncing, the lady had gone on to explain the trip she was embarking upon. As near as Julia could make out without interrupting the lady every other word, her husband, Lord Cunningham, had been some sort of emissary at the Congress of Vienna, but Wellington’s victory had changed everything for him, and he had been reassigned to Paris. Husband and wife had been separated for a long time, but now Napoleon’s defeat had made her traveling to his side less dangerous and more feasible. The children were either a boy of seven and a girl of five or seven boys and five girls of indeterminate age.

  Julia heaved a small sigh of relief when the matter was made clear by the lady’s finally declaring, “Yez, I sink leedle Lucille and younk Villie shall be hoppy wiz you.”

  Julia dared not breathe lest her indrawn breath should be expelled too hard and make the lady aware of how thrilled she was to secure the position. It would not do for an employer to think her overeager. It was a sad fact of human nature that Julia had learned in difficult ways, that the more one seemed to be in need of kindness, the less one actually received.

  “Then,” Julia ventured to say, sin
ce she realized that her comprehension of the lady’s speech was inexact, “I am to take it that I am being offered the position?”

  “Of courz,” Lady Cunningham said with some exasperation. Before Julia could think that she had aroused the lady’s ire, she went on, “Eef you could see ze vimen I haff had to endure zis week! Old and fat vuns, skeeny and ugly vuns. Pah. Everyzing in a householt should be luffly. Everyzing should be in harmony. Beautchiful furnishings, beautchiful peectures, beautchiful peeples,” she rhapsodized.

  Julia did not know whether to be flattered or annoyed that she had evidently been picked as a governess in much the same manner that a carpet or settee might be chosen. She remembered that the butler who had taken her card had been, in fact, quite handsome and dignified, but before she could begin to wonder what it might be like to work in a household where all the employees were chosen solely for their supposed bodily perfection, the lady went on,

  “Zo! You vill begin zen?”

  “Certainly, ma’am,” Julia replied quickly.

  “Goot,” the lady sighed, lying back again. “Zen you must go and get your zings. Ve leaf in ze momink.”

  “I shall be here early, so that there will be time to take your instructions as to the children before you leave,” Julia said as she rose to her feet.

  “Vot?” the lady cried, sitting bolt upright. “Teck my instructzions? No, no. Vot are you sinking uff? You are to kom wiz us. How could I leaf my darlinks behind? Zey haff not seen zere fazzer in yearsr You are to kome wiz us,” she insisted, as Julia sank to her seat again.

  “With you?” Julia asked faintly.

  “Yez. To Pariz, of courz,” the lady said, looking at Julia curiously, for the young woman’s spirits seemed to have sunk as low as her voice.

  “Oh no, ma’am,” Julia said with honest sadness, “I did not understand that the position called for foreign travel. I’m sorry, but it is out of the question. No,” she said, shaking her head mournfully as her briefest period of employment yet came to its end, “but it is quite out of the question.”

  The sun seemed to be rising from a different direction. But then, Julia thought, she had never seen the sun rising over the sea before, and so she stood at the boat’s railing and watched the sunlight erase the puffy dark morning clouds and saw the outline of the coast of France come clear. In her excitement, Julia had been unable to even feign sleep and had stood guard through the night, waiting for the dawn.

  Only a week previously, she had vowed that she would not be standing where she now was. She had been polite, but quite firm with the distracted Lady Cunningham. That lady had been unable to understand her reluctance to take such an exciting position, as had the Misses Parkinson when she had returned with the news. While Lady Cunningham had gone on in her rambling and garbled fashion about the excitement and adventure of such an opportunity, the Misses Parkinson had stressed the fact that the foreign lady had even upped her offering price. “For you’ve got her in a bind,” Miss Lavinia had said gleefully. “She’s dragged her feet on it and now she’s in a pickle. She knows her husband don’t want a foreign governess, for she’s not bird-witted enough not to know that he don’t want ’em to grow up talking as she does, and she’s got to leave on the first fair tide.”

  Lady Cunningham had stayed Julia a full half hour in her attempts to convince her of the advantages of the position. But Julia had never doubted that the terms were generous. She had no quarrel with the salary as it was first offered, and in her extremity, Lady Cunningham had even raised that higher.

  She became so anxious for Julia’s acceptance that she had even hinted broadly of opportunities outside the position. For, she had said, looking slyly around her as though she didn’t wish to be overheard, though they were quite alone, her husband’s house was sure to be overrun with rising young men of the diplomatic corps, and she would see to it that Julia would have sufficient time off to take advantage of the situation. When that didn’t seem to move her prospective governess, she had spoken of all the other eligible young males that were teeming through the streets of Paris in the aftermath of the war. “Touzands uff younk, likely Hinglishers, and ’andsome younk Roosians, Haustrians, and Prusszians,” she had said dreamily, implying that all that the forces of the occupation were looking for in France was a suitable English wife.

  But Julia had remained steadfast in her rejection of the post. Or, at least, she had remained so until Miss Parkinson had left off her professional air, hitched her chair close up to her client, and said firmly, “Look here, Julia, I’ve got a dozen females who would jump at this post. And I tell you honestly, I haven’t another opportunity for you; It ain’t just your record, which is spotty, my dear, sad to relate it, but there it is. It’s that you’re too pretty, and too young, as well. Time will take care of all those things, and this post will buy you time.

  “I grant that Lady Cunningham seems a scatterbrain, but it ain’t her you’ll be working with. And she’s been more than fair. If it’s being stranded in the frog pond that’s worrying you, forget it. For she’s offered to buy you a two-way ticket at the start, so you won’t feel obligated to stay on with her if you’re miserable, and you can’t say fairer than that. You want a position, and she’s offered you one. Now what’s the impediment?”

  Staring into Miss Parkinson’s unblinking blue eyes, Julia could not offer up one realistic objection. That was because she suddenly understood that all of her reasons, although reasonable, were not realistic at all. How could she say that it was because she shrank from becoming an actual exile? She had left her home, she had left her district, but she had not thought she must put even further distance between herself and her past.

  It wasn’t leaving the country she feared, it was the fact that once she faced up to the matter squarely, she must forever leave off her self-deception as well. Being only a coach ride away from her family had always enabled her to think of her absence from home as only a respite, only a temporary condition that could be righted at any time. She had always considered her decision to seek employment a stopgap measure. But now, confronted with Miss Parkinson’s waiting, watchful eyes, she must at last concede that she had no real reason not to take this further step. In truth, she at last admitted, whether she was employed five or five hundred miles from her family made little difference. She had to live apart from them, and there really could never be any permanent homecoming for her.

  Never, Miss Parkinson had thought, had there ever been a client who had accepted such a plum with such an air of heartbreaking tragedy. And while Miss Parkinson surprised herself by then proceeding to go on at length about the advantages of the position, so convincingly that she even found herself regretting that she had not been offered it, Julia sat quietly and attempted to accept her final truth. She looked about at the waiting applicants, anxious, homeless females of all ages and conditions earnestly seeking positions in other people’s lives. She would be in this office many times again, she realized. For this was to be her life, and this was to be her future.

  She did not have to leave for Paris in the morning, even Lady Cunningham had not really expected that, Miss Parkinson had said. “They always like to make impossible demands at the start, even the best of them,” that astute female had confided, forgetting in her attempts to cheer Julia, that she ought not draw the lines between her wealthy patrons and her favored clients by calling the former “them,” somewhat scornfully, as she always did when she was alone with her sister.

  “That way, when you can’t go along with them, as they know you can’t, they think they have you beholden to them by their generosity. No matter,” she had gone on briskly. “Lady Cunningham leaves tomorrow morning, as planned, with the children and their nurse. You’re to take the packet when you can (and I really think a week’s time is long enough to make her grateful when she sees you, yet short enough not to make her angry at a delay), and meet up with her at Quillack’s Hotel in Calais.”

  Miss Parkinson had been quite right. A week’s time
was sufficient to all purposes. It was both long enough for Julia to make her regret her decision, and short enough to cause her to feel panic. She shopped for trinkets to send home along with her explanatory letter. She purchased some small things for her own wardrobe. She accepted congratulations on her success from Mrs. White, along with a great many stories about both the perils and the pleasures of foreign travels from the experienced ladies at the boarding house. Then, without hesitation she set out from London by day, reached Dover by night, and sailed on an advantageous tide an hour into a new day.

  Now the sky brightened to a clear fresh morning and Julia left the rail to seek the privacy of her cabin: For she knew that an unaccompanied female must never seem to be loitering, for any reason. So when the packet was docked, and customs agents boarded it, Miss Julia Hastings appeared to be a calm, composed, purposeful young female, and even the French officials did no more than to rest their eyes upon her appreciatively when they thought she wasn’t looking.

  Though she was outwardly cool, it took every bit of her training not to show her excitement. Once she had accepted her fate, it was the resiliency of her character which made her admit the thrill she felt knowing that she was to travel in a foreign land. She had some French, from lessons taken with Lord Quincy’s daughters, but now no syllable she heard from the streets struck sense to her ears. Perhaps it was because the information received from her eyes had taken precedence.

  She stared at the citizens of Calais as the hired carriage took her to the hotel. There were peasants in their colorful garb, solid middle class citizens looking not too dissimilar from the stolid English burghers she had seen in Dover, and both French and English soldiers walked the same streets without rancor. In fact, she thought as the carriage drew up to the hotel, these citizens didn’t seem to be a defeated people, they seemed happy and busy and perhaps only felt relief rather than resentment, now that Bonaparte’s fate seemed finally settled.