I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany was astonished. Single-handedly the Duchess had made her do something that she never thought she would do, which was to feel sorry for the bride-to-be, who at this point was standing in front of her mother like a naughty child.

Her hobby, and quite possibly one activity in life, was painting in watercolours, and although Tiffany was trying, against the worst of her instincts, to be generous to the girl, there was no denying that she looked like a watercolour – and not just a watercolour, but a watercolour painted by someone who had not much colour but large supplies of water, giving her the impression of not only being colourless but also rather damp. You could add, too, that there was so little of her that in a storm it might be quite possible that she would snap. Unseen as she was, Tiffany felt just the tiniest pang of guilt and stopped inventing other nasty things to think. Besides, compassion was setting in, blast it!

‘Now, Letitia, recite again the little poem that I taught you,’ said the Duchess.

The bride-to-be, not just blushing but melting in embarrassment and shame, looked around like a stranded mouse on a great wide floor, uncertain of which way to run.

‘If you,’ her mother prompted irritably, and gave her a prod with the stick.

‘If you …’ the girl managed. ‘If you … if you grasp the nettle lightly, it will sting you for your pain, but if you grasp the nettle boldly, soft as silk it will remain. So it is with human nature, treat them kindly, they rebel, but if you firmly grasp the nettle, then your bidding they do well.’

Tiffany realized, as the damp little voice faded away, that there was otherwise absolute silence in the hall and everybody was staring. She rather hoped that somebody might forget themselves sufficiently to start clapping, although that would probably mean the end of the world. Instead, the bride took one look at the open mouths and fled, sobbing, as fast as her very expensive but seriously impractical shoes would carry her; Tiffany heard them clicking madly all the way up the stairs, followed very shortly afterwards by the slamming of a door.

Tiffany walked away slowly, just a shadow in the air to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. She shook her head. Why had he done it? Why in the world had Roland done it? Roland could have married anyone! Not Tiffany herself, of course, but why had he chosen that, well – not to be unpleasant – skinny girl?

And her father had been a duke, her mother was a duchess and she was a duckling – well, one might try to be charitable, but she did tend to walk like one. Well, she did. If you looked carefully you could see her feet stuck out.

And if you cared about these things, the dreadful mother and the soppy daughter outranked Roland! They could officially bully him!

The old Baron, now, had been a different sort of person. Oh yes, he liked it if the children gave a little bow or curtsied if he passed them in the lane, but he knew everybody’s name, and generally their birthdays as well, and he was always polite. Tiffany remembered him stopping her one day and saying, ‘Would you be so kind as to ask your father to come and see me, please?’ It was such a gentle phrase for a man with such power.

Her mother and father used to argue about him, when they thought she was safely tucked up in bed. In between the symphony of the bedsprings she often heard them almost, but not exactly, having a row. Her father would say things like: ‘It’s all very well you saying he is generous and all that, but don’t you tell me that his ancestors didn’t get their money by grinding the faces of the poor!’ And her mother would retort: ‘I have never seen him grind anything! Anyway, that was the olden days. You’ve got to have someone to protect us. That stands to reason!’ And her father would come back with something along the lines of: ‘Protect us from who? Another man with a sword? I reckon we could do that by ourselves!’ And around this time the conversation would peter out, since her parents were still in love, in a comfortable type of way, and neither of them really wanted anything to change at all.

It seemed to her, looking down the length of the hall, that you didn’t need to grind the faces of the poor if you taught them to do their own grinding.