The Peculiar Pink Toes of Lady Flora Read online

  Remember, the ocean of time is wide and deep, so keep your wits about you. This journey, like a pirate's voyage, is not for the faint of heart.

  Chapter Two

  To tell what she remembers now, she must go forward in time, not backward, and that alone would confuse this good gentleman.

  She would have to take him on a bus. A double-decker bus. He wouldn't know what that is, of course.

  Mind the step.

  Doors close behind her with a clatter and as the engine rumbles to life she trips forward to find a seat.

  She checks the time on her phone. It's 8:44 a.m. on a Friday, and she's on her way to the city center with her friends on an A-level art class trip. While the others chatter excitedly about their plans for the weekend and how to get this morning over with as soon as possible, she looks forward to her time at the museum. A place where everything has beauty in its own way, soul and meaning; where everything provokes thought and inspires imagination, breaking the mind out of that somnolent prison in which the modern, marketing-driven world has tried to trap it.

  She wears tiny ear-buds to hear Mozart and block out as much noise as she can. Serenade for winds, third movement. It's music that takes her to another world, another state of being. It was created simply for the pleasure of listening and playing, not to sell a product.

  Through the bus window she watches pedestrians on the pavement, all rushing along with their heads down, clutching their creamy lattes from Costa Coffee in one hand and their phones in the other. So far that morning, three people have knocked into her without an apology. She is either inconsequential, or an irritant. Nobody smiles back at her. Most will not even make eye contact.

  Sometimes she wonders whether she is a ghost. She expects her hand to pass through the seat in front of her.

  But for these folk on the bus this is just another working day, grey, noisy and grubby. Hers is one forgettable face— if noticed even for a moment— among countless hoards of glum drones buzzing about the city, dodging between the flashing lights, choking engines, howling sirens, beeping horns and jangling ringtones. It is a ceaseless, throbbing, churning, sad noise and the people are swept along, moving with it, under it and even sometimes thousands of miles above it, cutting through the clouds. But never escaping the incessant clamor of everybody trying to be heard at once. Everybody in a hurry to get somewhere else.

  None of that would make sense to the man now seated before her. Not a word.

  But that was almost certainly the day all this began. The day a mistake was made, and something accidentally led her seventeen-year-old self back to him.

  She'd almost forgotten it all— the noise, the bus, the museum —until a few weeks ago, in this year that was supposed to be 1783, when she had found, in his coat pocket, something unexpected.

  A cacophony of harsh sound had returned as she held her found treasure. It rushed through her head like water bursting through a breached dam, bringing with it those pictures of a strange world: of people on bicycles, traveling in flocks; of trains rushing through stations, the force of their speed blowing hair across her face; of neon light tubes twisted into words and hung in grimy windows; of dentist's drills and pink-painted toe nails; of hot showers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. And signs everywhere she looked: Wet Paint; Don't Walk on the Grass; No Entry; No Trespassing; No Loitering; Out of Service; No Parking. Stop.

  Exit.

  Here, in his world, where she thought she had lived for many years, growing from a girl to a woman, he had kept this object hidden away like a naughty secret inside his greatcoat, and he had no idea that it was somehow a key to that loud, shoving place she'd forgotten all this time.

  He, being this eighteenth century gentleman seated before her on an upturned crate. The Duke of Malgrave, otherwise known to her as "Fred".

  You see her dilemma?

  In this moment, he— and the curious, gently chortling doves that had returned to the window ledge— wait for her to tell a story that makes no sense. Not even to the woman who must tell it.

  "I think I should tell you the story Great Aunt Bridget told me, of how I came into being." Anything else would be too strange for him to comprehend just yet. One shock at a time.

  He nods, sits up straight and folds his arms. All official now. "Proceed."

  Eventually, perhaps, she will tell him the whole truth, but for now, until she understands it all herself, this story, this excerpt from her many lives, must suffice.

  * * * *

  "I never knew my mother's name, nor would she ever know mine. She would much rather I did not exist at all, and so she concealed her pregnancy for the entire duration, perhaps hoping I might go away, or be nothing more than a stout case of wind. It was a great inconvenience to her, therefore, when I insisted on emerging into the world without her permission. Born on a grassy verge, beside an abruptly stopped carriage, I was breathed into life by a passing shepherd and immediately placed in a hatbox, because she did not know what else was to be done with me. Eager to conceal her misfortune, and being a woman of scheming mind, she quickly evaluated her situation— what I would cost to keep, how quickly I would outgrow the hatbox, and how I would hinder her ambitions. She soon concluded that we would both be far better off without each other and that she must go on with her life as if I had never existed. And vice versa.

  This, of course, is the story according to Great Aunt Bridget. In her words my mother was a ruthlessly ambitious, mercenary harlot, well-known in London and mentioned in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies as being in possession of

  'exquisite form, a liberal mind and astonishing talents; a sweet brew, occasionally spiced by a quickly-ignited, hot and willful temper which, in itself, can be a challenge pleasing for the sporting gentleman to extinguish. If he is not put out first.'

  Although her origins were of the humblest kind, my mother had collected a very prominent and influential clientele. Let us just say that she was not one who could be had for a supper and two guineas.

  As for my accidental sire, Earl Chelmsworth, a busy man of title and consequence (and wife), he had scant interest in babes unless they were equipped with that all important tail for mischief and mayhem between their legs. He had even less attention to spare for those appendage-less bastards born to a concubine.

  "Another girl," he commented flatly upon receiving the whispered news of my birth. "'Tis as little use as a dead ferret on a rabbit hunt."

  Had he ever laid eyes on me, I daresay he would have been all the more disgusted, for I was an unprepossessing hatbox squid with a shocking amount of red hair— a Chelmsworth trait, but nothing one wanted to see on an unsightly, screaming baby. I was, in fact, so hideous to look at that if I were born in the dark ages, some superstitious nurse maid who still believed the world to be flat and witches to roam its surface, would have thought it best and kindest to smother me in my sleep.

  But my father's aunt, Lady Manderby, otherwise known in my story as Great Aunt Bridget, took command of the situation. Apparently, she had practice in these unsavory matters. Put into her hands by my natural mother, who lamented only the loss of a pretty hatbox, I was to be sent away and raised elsewhere, before the Chelmsworth family resemblance could be too marked. After all, these things happened all the time, but one should always be discreet about it, when possible. If something is never mentioned, it does not have to be denied. And that was how I began."

  Was it true? Sometimes she thought she remembered the hatbox, which would surely be impossible at such a young age. Unless her soul was never that young at all and had lived for a very long time.

  She held the collar of his coat and tugged it more firmly around her, suddenly sensing that it — and he—might disappear, leaving her cold and alone again, wrenched from this world and forced into another.

  "That, at least, is how Great Aunt Bridget explained my existence," she said, the words thin, struggling for air.

  "Go on." He unfolded his arms to rest both hands on his thighs.

>   So she swallowed that knot of anxiety and continued her colorful story. Even if he didn't believe all of it, he was listening, attentive, interested. He was staying. She could make it last as long as possible, keeping him enthralled, delaying the end. Like Scheherazade spinning her stories for one thousand and one nights. To stay alive.

  "The wet nurse, to whom I was given, called me a scrappy, red-headed naughty misbegot, who ought to be kept on a leash like a pet monkey— and so I was named Rosie Jackanapes.

  As you must know, an unwanted, bastard child is destined for an undistinguished life, toiling among the servants on a grand estate, or parceled off to a ‘good’ family in need of a spare pair of hands.

  But, as you will also know by now, it all turned out rather differently in my case. For miraculous works, however unlikely, very occasionally do come to pass, even for the most ordinary of nobodies once secreted inside a hatbox.

  It happens more oft than you might believe."

  Act One

  Blind Man's Bluff

  Chapter Three

  Castle Malgrave, Suffolk, England

  A sunny spring day, circa 1762

  "So, there you are then, Plumm, settle the matter, won't you? The sooner the better."

  Looking down at the list he'd just been handed, Halfpenny Plumm, long-suffering and most excellent, devoted legal advisor to the Fairfax-Savoy family, breathed a worn sigh.

  "We daresay you are surprised by our choice," his master added, noticing perhaps the hesitancy.

  "Indeed, your grace. Just when I think I have heard it all, there is always another... surprise... in my path." Like a trap door, a flaming runaway cart, or a falling ten-ton weight. Or all three. "Still," he added with as much cheer as he might muster, "these challenges keep us from growing idle in our autumn years."

  "We should hope so too. Can't have that, can we?"

  "Apparently," he sighed, "we cannot, your grace."

  "Then we leave the matter in your capable hands."

  As his master turned away, Plumm stepped forward and made an impulsive pinching gesture toward the younger man's sleeve, but did not dare make contact and so his fingers were left snapping at the air like a nervous crab. He managed a tight wheeze of warning. "But, your grace, I wonder if this mission might not be so straightforward as we—"

  "No need to make great harvest of little corn, my good man. With so many demands upon our time today and this house full of guests— you know how we despise people cluttering up the place— we rely upon you to get it done. We have every confidence that you can manage the business efficiently on our behalf."

  Plumm, the dedicated servant, had never failed at any task with which he was charged, not for this man, nor for his father before him. So as he watched the master's fine and noble shoulders walking away, all he could do was turn his mind to this challenge of getting the duke a bride— this particular bride that his grace had, most unexpectedly, inexplicably and unfortunately, settled upon.

  The flaming runaway cart.

  He stared forlornly at the notes provided by his master. With this document he was expected to present a good case to the young lady in question. Oh dear, he could already picture her expression. Apparently his grace could not. Of course, the young duke had never known anybody deny him anything he wanted. Nor had he much occasion to examine the world from any other person's point of view. His life was ruled by duty and guided by the constraints of centuries-old tradition.

  As for the incendiary wayward vehicle, Plumm and his master had only known her for a matter of weeks and yet it was already patently clear— to one of them at least— that Lady Flora Chelmsworth grabbed life for herself with both hands, after she'd run over it, traveling at speed, forward or backward; that she did not wait for anything to be acquired for her, and she enjoyed a very lively perspective that was seldom upright and steady, but taken from all manner of precarious views. Furthermore, she appeared to have formed opinions of the world and a woman's place in it, that had no foundation in real life.

  And her fiery collision was now imminent with that sturdy, immoveable, brick-lined icehouse known as the Duke of Malgrave. Plumm rather suspected the icehouse would come out of this with the greater injury, and yet it was his responsibility to keep that structure free from scrapes of any kind.

  How on earth was disaster to be averted? Just as puzzling: how had it ever come about?

  He quite blamed himself. Should have foreseen the imminent disaster when his master secretly and anonymously commissioned her portrait in miniature. Plumm was not supposed to know about that, of course. The young duke had yet to learn that his faithful servant knew everything— that he was especially diligent in finding out those things that anybody tried to keep from him.

  But Plumm had dismissed the portrait as a whim, fervently hoping it was simply a temporary youthful folly on his master's part. Or a practical jape of some kind to tease his mama— to get some sort of concerned reaction out of that aloof, emotionless bolt of starched silk.

  Alas, he should have known better. Fortitudo Maximilian Fairfax-Savoy was not prone to folly. Indeed, even the purchase of new cannons for his tin soldiers when he was seven and a quarter had required a list of pros and cons. As for pranks, he had no taste for them, having been the unfortunate target of several cruel jests in his early school days.

  No, the sixth Duke of Malgrave made no move without giving every potential consequence grave consideration beforehand. Usually.

  So that damned portrait should have served a warning; instead, the solicitor had been caught napping. Unfortunately, the young duke, unlike his father, was so very upright, dutiful and self-controlled, that in the five years since he came into his inheritance, the able solicitor's intervention was rarely needed. Plumm had gradually let himself become complacent. There were still the occasional problems to manage, but for the most part the sixth duke steered himself well clear of those "surprises" that had frequently turned up in his father's path.

  Now this. A rude awakening. As Plumm had remarked glumly, just when he thought he'd heard it all...

  He had not even had his breakfast yet. Better get something to line his innards. A soldier could not march into battle on an empty belly, and this could be his last meal.

  * * * *

  There appeared to be a piece of ham attached to his wig.

  She had tried, several times, to politely draw his notice to it, but the man was too preoccupied by his earnest speech and after a while she decided it was simply too late. The moment to save his embarrassment was a slim one, and it had passed. She had better leave him to discover the random morsel later for himself, and she would pretend never to have noticed it. Besides, the presence of that misplaced porcine fragment soon faded in comparison to the bizarre proposal that spilled haltingly from his lips.

  "His grace believes, madam, that although you are young, naive, imprudent and somewhat enamored of yourself as a rebel, even you will recognize the great honor he bestows upon you with this generous proposition."

  She was tempted to look over her shoulder, just to be certain there was nobody else present to whom he addressed this strange soliloquy. But no, this was all for her. They were quite alone and he had engineered it so, to have her attention in this furtive manner.

  The gentleman paused, his gaze cast down at the floor, but since she was still speechless, he cleared his throat and once again consulted the crumpled paper in his trembling hand.

  "In light of your reputation, we do not think it wise of you to assume you'll ever receive a better offer." With a pained smile at his notes and a concerned tilt of the head, he added, "Yes, his grace is fully cognizant of your myriad faults and shortcomings. All drawbacks have been fully disclosed to the young gentleman. But he vows never to reproach you for those youthful errors and indiscretions, especially since you have not enjoyed the benefit of strong parental guidance during your formative years. His grace is adequate to the task of managing your wayward tendencies, where others have failed
. Be assured that he has given due thought and consideration to how his own life will be altered by the presence of one who has yet to fully mature and find her proper purpose. Over time, no doubt, you will settle to the duties of a wife and— god willing— motherhood. As it is for most women once beyond their most trying and awkward years."

  Finally, for the first time in this entire discourse, the fellow's gaze made contact with her face. He had spoken to the floor, the ceiling, the note in his hand, the nearby unlit candelabra, the portrait above the mantle, a china vase, and the grass stain on her dress. Everything but her face. From the swaying of his body and the unkempt state of his wig, she wondered if Plumm was inebriated. That could excuse his eccentric behavior, but it did not explain his master's.

  "Why does the duke not come to me himself?" she asked, exceedingly amused. "Where is he?"

  "At this time there is no need to express the extent of your gratitude to his grace in person, dear lady," the fellow replied somberly. "Rest assured that my master shall, of course, approach your guardians to make the engagement official, and then the necessary contractual arrangements can be put to paper."

  The moment her host's odd little solicitor had stumbled after her with a whispered desire to "discuss a matter of great import", she knew something was amiss. Had somebody noticed her naughty rearrangement of the precious china figurines in the drawing room cabinet, or discovered the crumbs from her midnight foray to the kitchens? Had they found the pieces of a once very fine vase that she inadvertently knocked against in the dark during the aforementioned transgression? Or was she about to be unmasked as an imposter? After all, she was surprised this game had lasted as many weeks as it had.