“I am not the favorite, you are the favorite,” said Daniel. He turned to his friends. “They think he is ever so clever with his science and his medicine, and I am just a poor penniless poet…”
“And I bet you can’t say ‘poor penniless poet’ three times without spitting beer at everyone,” said Hugh. “Let’s be getting along now, Daniel.” Tucking a hand under his cousin’s arm, and with much protestation from the friends and shouted arrangements that made no sense to anyone, Hugh pulled Daniel bodily from the public house and marched him at a half run in the direction of a bus to Whitehall.
The cottage of Algernon Frith and Amberleigh de Witte was a low, thatched building standing amid the fields in a tangle of untended garden. Paint flaked on the green-painted windows, and the eaves and the plastered walls were grayish with mildew. The front gate hung open, green and rotten on its posts, and a bicycle lay carelessly toppled against the porch, where two large glazed pots, of the most intense blue, foamed with flowers in hues of Mediterranean red, pink, and orange. The cottage should have inspired only disdain for its tumbledown air, but instead Beatrice, approaching with Celeste along the narrow, grassy lane, found it strangely romantic. A girl appeared at the doorway and curtsied as they approached. “Come in, misses, if you please,” she said, a little breathless and wide-eyed, as if she were unused to guests. “Mistress is in the back garden.”
From the rough stones of a back hall, they emerged into a garden thick with shade from trees bent under the weight of ancient vines. Beneath a smothered pergola by the edge of a pond, Amberleigh de Witte reclined in a sagging wicker chaise, dressed in a loose green tea dress with her hair down over her left shoulder, tamed only by a narrow ribbon. She was writing in a large leather book and did not get up as Beatrice and Celeste approached but merely waved a long, thin hand and called out to them.
“Do come and have some tea. I’ve asked for champagne, but it’s still chilling in the icehouse.” On a wooden table at her elbow, a tea urn hissed above its small burner, and a stack of old blue and white china teacups waited to be filled. A cake stand held an assortment of the usual small sandwiches and the plain rock cakes that were popular now that sugar was scarce. But a stoneware plate nearby held a glistening pork pie. And a bowl of what looked to be confit duck legs, furred with yellow fat, was propped on an old barrel and attended with rapt attention by a panting spaniel, whose nose came almost to the rim. Champagne glasses and a dark bottle of some unknown liquor completed the lavish, unconventional tea setting.
“It was very kind of you to invite us,” said Beatrice. The note, on pale blue stationery suffused with the smell of iris, had reiterated Amberleigh de Witte’s hope that Beatrice might bring some of her writings. Such an overture from the prominent authoress was balm to Beatrice’s bruised hopes, and she had spent much effort in picking over her meager stock of original poems and written sketches. Any whisper of hesitation, any thought that Agatha Kent might fault her for visiting a woman now as notorious as she was renowned, could not stand against the thrill of being asked to share her work.
“And I see you have brought some pages for me to read?” asked Amberleigh, setting aside her own book and pen and indicating the cardboard portfolio Beatrice clutched under one arm.
“I hardly dare to ask you,” said Beatrice, blushing at presenting the usual self-deprecations of the eager student to Amberleigh’s all-piercing hazel eyes.
“I would much rather read your work than pen my own on such a lovely afternoon,” she replied, turning her head towards the lake to call out, “Johnny, Minnie, we have visitors.” With some surprise, Beatrice looked for an unexpected man, but across the pond she saw only Miss Finch, the photographer, crouched in a large bank of rushes. She wore a long linen coat and knee-length cycling bags tucked into boots. A large trilby hat shaded her head and her camera.
“Coming,” called Miss Finch, waving at them. “Just one more shot, Minnie. This time half a turn towards me.” Minnie Buttles now emerged from what Beatrice had assumed was a clump of weed and rose naked to her waist from the water. She draped herself partially in one end of a wet linen sheet that spread itself on the green surface. Her hair hung wet and loose down her back, and the crown of weedy fronds and blowsy roses tilted over her eyes.
“This is the last one, Johnny,” she called back. “This nymph of the spring is about to become a victim of pneumonia.”
“You know Miss Finch and Miss Buttles,” said Amberleigh, as casually as to suggest it was perfectly normal to have one’s guests swim naked in one’s pond in the middle of the afternoon. “Oh, do tip the cat off that chair and sit down,” she added, waving towards a collection of rather down-at-heel lawn chairs. “He knows he has to make way for guests.”
“I—we work together for Belgian Relief,” said Beatrice. As she tried to gently tip the thin gray cat onto the grass, she wondered at how little you really know the people you meet in the committee room. She could hardly believe that demure Minnie Buttles was in the pond before her, but she dared not look again to confirm. She concentrated on the cat, which spit and hissed as it ripped a claw free of the wicker and slunk away.
“And Mademoiselle Celeste, the princess from Belgium,” said Amberleigh, holding out a hand to Celeste. “How nice to see you again.”
“Thank you, madame. I am happy to be in your home.”
“You are quite exquisite. Miss Finch may want to take your picture too.”
“No, no I cannot. My father, he does not approve the photography,” said Celeste. “He thinks the photography, it destroy the art.”
“And what do you think?” asked Amberleigh.
“I do not have the—how you say?—opinions,” said Celeste. She sat down in a light blue chair, the arm of which had been repaired with a tight bandage of red knitting wool.
“A woman must always have an opinion,” said Amberleigh. “Perhaps no one will ask it, but we cannot be prevented from forming one.” Celeste seemed to take a moment to translate and digest before she replied in her careful English.
“Well, I was sad to leave behind the picture—la peinture—of my mother,” she said at last. “If I had a small photograph, perhaps I could have carried it in my heart.”
“Very well said, Miss Celeste,” said Amberleigh. “You have all the makings of a true bohemian.”
“I am not sure Celeste’s father would approve of such an idea,” said Beatrice.
“Have we shocked you before the tea is poured, Miss Nash?” asked Amberleigh. “I should have warned you that we would be a garden of women.”
“The gardens of Sussex seem to hold an unexpected number of women en déshabillé,” said Beatrice, not to mention, she thought, those that preferred the occasional use of a man’s name and trousers.
“C’est en toute innocence, je vous assure,” said Amberleigh, smiling at Celeste. “My afternoons are merely a gathering place where women can rest, discuss, create—with no strictures of fashion or of society. We kick off our shoes and our corsets and enjoy the freedom of our private space.”
“Sort of like the Rational Dress Society?” asked Beatrice.
“Dear God, I hope none of us would be seen wearing such dull attire as they propose,” said Amberleigh. “Exchanging the limits of the corset for the invisibility of a hemp shift is hardly freedom.”
“I would like to take off my shoes,” said Celeste timidly. “My feet are hurting a little from walking through the lanes.”
“I’m so sorry, Celeste,” said Beatrice. It was a good three or four miles to Amberleigh’s cottage, and Beatrice had tramped at her usual pace, making no allowance for Celeste walking in ill-fitting, donated shoes. As usual, she had been uncomplaining.