embarrassment and apprehensiveness fell away at the sound of the voice.
“Oh, Aunt Lily, dear Aunt Lily! It is I, Gardenia. I arrived last night. I do hope you are not angry. There was nothing else I could do, absolutely nothing, except come to you.”
There was a movement amongst the pillows, then a hand came out towards Gardenia, which she clasped thankfully.
“Gardenia, my dear child, I have never been so surprised in my life. I thought Yvonne must have got it wrong when she told me that my niece was here. I tried to think who else it could possibly be, but you are my only niece. Why did you not write to me?”
“I could not, Aunt Lily. I had to come at once. You see, Mama is dead.”
“Dead?”
The Duchesse sat up and, even in the dim dusk of the shrouded room, Gardenia could see the expression on her face.
“But it cannot be true! Your mother dead! Poor darling Emily. The last time she wrote to me, after your father’s accident, she sounded so brave, so full of fortitude, determined to look after you and to keep her home going.”
“She did try to do all those things,” Gardenia said. “But it was just too much for her.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, child!” the Duchesse exclaimed. “I have to hear all this. Oh, my poor head! It feels as if it is going to crack open. Yvonne, bring me my cachet faivre, and pull back the curtains just a little, I want to see what my niece looks like. It is years, yes years, since I have seen her.”
“Seven years at least, Aunt Lily. But then I have not forgotten how beautiful you looked when you came down to see us and brought us all those wonderful hampers, boxes of little plums, and the pâté de foie gras for Papa and that lovely lace negligée for my mother. You seemed to me like a Fairy Godmother.”
“Dear child. Fancy remembering all that,” the Duchesse said. She put out her hand as if to pat Gardenia’s shoulder and groaned again. “My head, it is just agony to move. Be quick, Yvonne.”
She spoke to her maid in French and to Gardenia in English and could not help being impressed with the ease that her aunt switched from one language to another.
But when Yvonne raised the sunblind a little so that more light came flooding into the room, Gardenia could hardly restrain a start of astonishment as she saw her aunt’s face.
She remembered her being breathtakingly lovely, a blonde Junoesque figure of a woman with an exquisite pink and white complexion, golden fair hair and blue eyes, which had made everyone describe her as ‘a perfect English rose’.
“You were wrongly Christened,” Gardenia could remember her father saying gallantly. “Lily is a pale, reserved, rather cold flower. You are warm and glowing and as beautiful as my Gloire de Dijon on the porch outside.”
“Henri, you are a poet,” her aunt had answered, flashing her eyes at him and curling her lips in a way that, young as she was, Gardenia had recognised as being irresistibly attractive.
The woman she saw now against the pillows was a very pale shadow of the English rose that had burst on them unexpectedly one day in their tiny village, causing a sensation among the inhabitants by arriving in something that most of them had never seen before, a horseless carriage, the much discussed and much feared motor car.
“I have persuaded my husband to come to England to buy a Rolls-Royce,” Lily had told them. “French cars are not nearly as smart or as distinguished. I was determined to see you while I was here, so I drove all this way just to have a glimpse of you.”
“Darling Lily. It is like you not to let us know but to drop out of the skies unexpectedly?” Gardenia’s mother had laughed.
The two sisters had kissed again, clinging to each other for a moment as if they would somehow bridge the great gulf that lay between them. A gulf of money, position and, though Gardenia was too young to realise it at the time, an entirely different way of life.
She had often dreamt of Aunt Lily’s beauty, her exquisite face framed by a long chiffon motor-veil that fell from her motoring hat and flowed over the pale dustcoat that protected her elegant dress.
It was difficult to recognise that radiant loveliness in the tired-eyed, heavily lined face, with puffy eyes half-closed against the light that she saw now.
Aunt Lily’s hair was still golden, but it had a tinny almost garish look instead of being the pale yellow of ripening corn. Her skin seemed grey and listless and, even while she was covered in the bedclothes, Gardenia could see that she had grown rather fat.
“Gardenia, you are grown up!” Aunt Lily exclaimed.
“I am afraid so,” Gardenia said. “You see, I am now twenty.”
“Twenty!” Aunt Lily seemed to gasp the words and, closing her eyes for a moment, she said, “Where is it, Yvonne? Where is my cachet faivre? The pain in my head is intolerable.”
“They are here, Your Grace.”
Yvonne was standing beside the bed with a small silver salver in her hand. On it rested a glass filled with water and a small black and white cardboard box on which reposed a row of white cachets.
“Give me two,” the Duchesse ordered, putting out her hand for the water.
“You well know, Your Grace, the doctor said – ” Yvonne began, but she was silenced sharply by the Duchesse.
“Never mind what the doctor said. When I have had a night such as I had last night and my only niece comes to tell me that my sister is dead, I need something. Bring me a brandy and soda. I don’t want any coffee. The mere idea of it makes me feel sick.”
“Very good, Your Grace,” Yvonne said in a resigned way that expressed her disapproval far better than words.
“And be quick about it. I don’t want to wait all day. I want a drink now.”
“Immediately, Your Grace,” Yvonne said seeming to flounce across the room.
“Twenty!” the Duchesse repeated, looking at Gardenia, “It cannot be true. It cannot be possible.”
“One grows older, Aunt Lily,” Gardenia pointed out.
Her aunt put her hand up to her forehead.
“Alas, that is indisputable. God! How old I feel,”
“I did not like to disturb you last night,” Gardenia said apologetically, “but I felt it was rather rude to creep up to bed without telling you that I was here.”
“You did entirely the right thing,” the Duchesse approved. “I should not have been able to attend to you. Besides I don’t suppose you had the right clothes for a party.”
Gardenia could almost see the cynical smile on Lord Hartcourt’s lips.
“No,” she said humbly. “I am afraid that my clothes would not have been right ‒ at the party.”
“You are in mourning now, of course, but the dress you
