The Domino Effect, Chapter Six

Phyl’s sleep was a succession of jagged thoughts and dreams about her home, her family, the solicitous women who had installed her in a guest room with much sympathy and few questions. Despite her distress, she had resolved not to mention her former association with the premises. It was best to keep silent and enjoy this unexpected visit. Had the house not been lost under such baleful circumstances, she could have hoped that a new friendship would allow her many more opportunities to stay there. But such an alliance was impossible, considering the role of the current occupant, a most heinous, unlikely thief.

When the distant shouts of small children finally roused her from her mental wanderings, the sun was high and a note in the stranger’s hand lay on the side table:

”The family is eager to meet you. But if you prefer to remain in your room, please avail yourself of the bell chord, and we will accommodate you with breakfast and whatever else you may need.”

I’ll lay a wager the family is indeed eager, Phyl thought, casting the note aide.

She just as quickly snatched it up. Did he really write “family is eager”? Family are, she muttered, disgusted but hardly surprised, for it was typical of low-born criminals to confuse nouns and number.

Phyl deigned to go down to breakfast, mostly because she preferred not to have anybody come to her, but partly because she was curious.

A chorus of conversation about ordinary things drew her away from the route she was taking to the breakfast room and towards the dining room, which was crammed with card tables in addition to the long ebony table that had been her mother’s pride and joy. Every table, long and small, was filled with diners of every age imaginable.

Lud, it’s an inn! Phyl thought. He’s turned the place into an inn!

Indignation that her home should be consigned to so banal an existence at the hands of the masses nearly brought Phyl to tears. Her complexion went from white to red and back to white again in the brief time it took for every male guest, adult and child, to stop what he was doing and respectfully stand upon seeing her.

Her stranger stepped forward but stood aside, bowing to another man who had also come forward, beaming upon Phyl. The second man was a shorter, plumper, somewhat younger version of the first.

“If you don’t mind, miss, my brother asked me to make introductions. There are so many of us, he’d fear we’d be here all day if he had to write out the names!”

The accent, full of hard “r’s” and drawled vowels, struck Phyl as odd, and she believed she was enjoying an encounter with people to whom English had not come naturally. Imagine her surprise, then, when she realized that the man was advising her of the ladies’ names, and they all began with the rather English-sounding Mary: Mary Ann, Mary Alice, Mary Claire, Mary Katherine, Mary Rose, Mary Elizabeth, Mary Barbara. The eldest woman among them, a rotund, white-haired lady in a frilly day-cap, was just plain Mary by birth but Mrs. Cornelius Wallis Hartshorne the Third by marriage. Clearly, these were not inn-stayers, but a family. An incredibly large, noisy family.

Phyl, who had every assurance she would not remember everybody’s name, could hardly wait until the man had presented every single man, woman, child and infant before asking, in as restrained a tone as her agitation would allow, “You are, I understand by your accent, not from around here?”

Heartened by the good-natured laughter that filled the room, Phyl went further, “From the Netherlands, perhaps?”

“She’s an original, Wal!” a boy shouted as the crowd laughed ever louder.

The old lady summoned Phyl by raising her gnarled finger. “And what did my son say your name was? Phyllis Athlyte? Wallis!”

The crisp enunciation of the name elicited “Yes, Mother?” from no fewer than three of her male offspring. “Boys. They’re so attentive,” Mrs. Hartshorne the Third confided to Phylidda before scolding, “I said Wallis, not Wallis Frederick, Wallis Thomas or Wallis Paul.” Three Wallises went “Ho-ho-ho” as they otherwise shrugged and returned to their tables. Phyl’s rescuer alone remained, standing at his mother’s side like a puppy ready to indulge its mistress, and in so doing, indulge itself. “You haven’t found a governess for all my grands yet, have you?” the lady challenged.

The remaining Wallis mouthed, “No, ma’am,” for, apparently, his mother needed no notes to understand her eldest son.

The woman eyed Phyl with the shrewdness of someone accustomed to sizing up people. “Do you like children, Miss Athlyte?”

Phyl could not stand children, but for the sake of politeness said she did. “However, I should add that I have little—“

“You seem educated. Intelligent. Can you sing? Draw? Dance? Add figures? Speak French?”

Upon hearing Phyl apply the affirmative to each category, Mrs. Hartshorne turned to her son. “This is an accomplished girl, Wallis. You would be out of your mind to send her back to London, where she can get into Lord knows what trouble with those infamous friends of hers. You have a moral duty to hire her.”

Good heavens, she’ll next be telling him he has a moral duty to marry me! Phyl thought. She looked upon Wallis, half expecting him to reason with the woman. Don’t just stand there, say something, she willed him. Pleeeaaaassse say something.

Wallis held his little notebook so Phylidda could read as he wrote, “With pleasure, Mother.”

Though she smiled and pronounced Mr. Hartshorne “too kind,” Phyl could not deny the ice that gripped her fingers along with the fate that twisted her stomach. After a moment she excused herself with a modest curtsy, delicately made her way between the tables and took the stairs towards her room.

Two flights up, she feverishly paced the hall, assured that nobody could hear her through the happy din below. It was madness, utter madness: not merely being in her former home. Agreeing to work as a governess. For the very person who had assured her family’s poverty for the rest of their lives!

She had no business being there. She would walk home, this minute, though it take hours. She would tell her brothers what had happened to her… Her brothers! Ohdearlord, her brothers. Her mother! They all must be worried to death about her. They would never believe she stayed so long at a ball! She had to send a message to them without delay.

In the haste that obliterates all sense of matters that have nothing to do with the cause of that haste, Phylidda dashed from room to room, searching for paper and pen until she ran straight into Wallis. Feeling his coat on her cheek and his hands on her arms, she jumped back, fearing what he would ask her and not knowing what she would tell him. She tried to appear calm, but lacking confidence in her ability as an actress, she instead accidentally manipulated her features into a grimace of disdain that made her host shift his concern from her face to her hands and what possibly lay therein.

Phyl bridled. He thinks I've stolen something, the fool! “I’m not a thief,” she declared through her teeth.

Wincing, with a faraway look in his eyes, Wallis pulled the notepad and pencil from his tail pocket with such difficulty that the pencil dropped and rolled along the carpet. As he bent to retrieve the item, Phyl succumbed to the desire to humiliate him, the real thief who had usurped her home.

An expert dancer, quick upon her feet, she kicked the pencil so it scudded across the room. The act produced on Wallis’s face a look of dismay, hurt, and frustration that made him appear much younger than Phyl had assumed the night before, and not so expedient as she had presumed the moment before. He had, after all, saved her from a woman’s ultimate shame when there was no need for him to become involved. Ashamed of her lack of gratitude and abundance of selfishness, she retrieved the pencil and held it at arm’s length, her eyes lowered in contrition.

Rather than accept the pencil, Wallis took her hand in both of his and studied her fingers. She knew what he was thinking: She had told him she was a dressmaker, yet her fingers were too smooth for somebody who professed to wield needles for hours at a time. His study ended with a face wrought in sorrowful resignation. He leaned so low as to brush Phyl's ear with his breath. Slowly, barely formed words emerged in a craggy whisper: “It would hurt me, beyond measure, to know that you are anything other than the decent, unsullied young woman I meant to help.”

Phyl’s answer was polite but assertive. “I assure you, sir, that in the course of my situation here, you may encounter many witnesses who could attest to my character. Many witnesses,” she repeated, hoping the emphasis on “many” would infer the possibility that his neighbors would know precisely how he came in possession of the estate, and, feeling for Phyl and her family, press him to return it to the rightful owners.

But the hint went unnoticed. Wallis Hartshorne took his pencil and in writing advised Phyl that his mother would help her plan the children’s schedules and send for someone to make a dress more appropriate for her new station in life.

“I can make one myself,” Phyl protested.

Wallis wrote quickly: “I wouldn’t want to spend money on fabric to find out that you can’t.”

“Then we see through each other,” Phyl muttered after Wallis, with a sparkling eye, bowed out and left her to herself.