“We are married in the eyes of God and in our own two hearts,” Mrs. Coulter said.
“Well good then,” said Miss Grant, thinking that two hearts and the eyes of God were all very well but did not explain weeping on an omnibus or living behind a barber’s.
“Money, however, has become a problem,” Mrs. Coulter conceded. “As I said, my husband was cut off when he married . . .”
“Za-Za-Zita,” Miss Grant supplied.
“But I had a settlement, a very generous portion, from my father. All was well until my sister, whom I turned to for help and comfort, to still my troubled thoughts, betrayed me. My own sister. And do you know why?”
“Because your portion was a wedge cut from the same pie as hers?” Miss Grant guessed, making the other woman blink. The Hon. Miss Elizabeth had gone from castle to villa to rooms without becoming inured, it seemed, to plain speaking.
“My mother, while she lived, gave me a little income from her own,” said Mrs. Coulter. “But when she died, even that money stopped. My father warned my husband not to try to get work: “worming his way in to the homes of respectable men by passing himself off as one of them.” I shall never forget those ugly words! And every penny that was meant for my children is gone.”
“Gone?” said Miss Grant.
“Gone to my sister. My father could reverse it if he cared to. I went to him just days ago and begged him again. My older son is finishing school. He should be going to Oxford. I begged him. But he just sat there glaring at me, telling me that when his father set the terms the words were mere formalities.”
“What words?” asked Miss Grant gently.
“Legitimate issue,” whispered Mrs. Coulter. “I begged. I told him we were desperate. That my husband was very foolish, but nothing more. He was bedazzled by her. She was a temptress and a trickster and she has ruined all our lives.”
With that she stood, put her chair neatly under the table, said good-bye and walked away, leaving Miss Grant a-quiver.
She had not met many Americans in her life and none of them burlesque dancers, but those she had come across were dazzling. There had been that one, years ago now, not long after she had arrived here. He was walking along the road, just walking along the road, swinging a carpet bag and singing a music-hall song at the top of his lungs, his voice as rich as treacle. His hair had been like raven’s feathers, his skin like milk, and his teeth when he smiled at her had glittered in the sunshine.
“Are you lost?” she had asked him.
“Nope,” he had replied and kept walking.
If a single American man in ordinary clothes in a country lane could set the heart of Delia Grant fluttering and stay in her dreams for weeks afterwards, she could not imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might do when seen across the footlights by a Perthshire architect far from home.
Neither could she easily imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might wear. The thought of her clothes, just sitting there in the attics at Benachally, called to Miss Grant with a siren song. Clothes to make a judge grant a divorce, she thought. Clothes in which to dance a hoochie-coochie.
“I’ve come to sort those trunks in your attics, Lorna,” she said casually, sweeping into the Benachally kitchen the next afternoon. Lorna exchanged a glance with the cook, who shrugged. “There might be some very interesting . . .” Thankfully, the door to the passageway closed behind her before she was forced to finish this sentence, and she went on her way.
They were easily found. Most of the attics were still empty, only a year or so after Master Donald had moved in; swept and bare, they echoed her footsteps back to her, but in one corner, under the eaves, at the farthest point from the stairs, the humped shapes of two steamer trunks lay waiting.
“She was no pixie,” Miss Grant said to herself, presently. The first trunk held hatboxes, shoe bags, and glove cases and, when she tried one of the hats on, what was supposed to be a flirty little concoction in the pillbox style fell down around her ears and looked like nothing so much as Bo-Peep’s bonnet. The gloves—red satin, black lace, kid dyed a shade of pink unknown to both nature and fashion—were as large as pruning gauntlets. And when it came to the shoes, Miss Grant began to pity poor Zita and wonder if perhaps she was a comedy act and not a glamour girl after all.
For the shoes were quite simply enormous. They were beautifully made, hand-stitched, with fine leather soles, and even the silver tips of the high heels glittered with lacquer, but all the hand-stitching in the world could not change the fact that Zita had feet like loaves.