Rich Girl, Poor Girl Read online

  RICH GIRL,

  POOR GIRL

  EILEEN RAMSAY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Welcome to the world of Eileen Ramsay!

  About the Author

  A Letter from author

  Eileen’s Recipe for Cranachan

  An Exclusive Chapter From The Farm Girl’s Dream

  Introducing a new place for story lovers

  Copyright

  For

  Mr and Mrs James Harrison McGlothlin

  from No. 4

  1

  Washington, D.C., 1888

  THAT YEAR THERE was a particularly fine Indian summer. For those foreign residents of this capital city who had alternately burned and sweated profusely during July and August and who could not afford to leave for cool cottages on Cape Cod, it was doubly welcome. Mind you, here in the old colonial city of Georgetown with its splendid trees, relief from the usual breathless days could be obtained. Lucy Graham lay back in the swing beside the man she loved more than anybody or anything in this whole world and idly watched the blue sky appear and disappear behind leaves. Just round the corner the Bliss Estate with its friendly name, Dumbarton Oaks, ran from high ground all the way down to the waters of Rock Creek. A bridge from the Dumbarton Oaks side straddled the clear waters of the creek and gave access to Virginia: home of fine horses, gracious living and, of course, several presidents starting with George Washington.

  ‘Maybe I should have put Washington first,’ thought Lucy idly, ‘before the horses.’

  She spoke for the first time in several somnolent moments. ‘Have you ever met anyone who was born and bred in this city, Father?’

  Colonel Sir John Graham lay back in the garden seat beside his daughter and considered the question.

  ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘Can’t say I have. Everyone at the embassy is a foreigner. All the politicians, too, come from other states.’

  With his heel he set the swing in motion again, and father and daughter drifted back and forward under the massive trees watching the sun chasing its beams in and out of the leaves above them. They revelled in the time that they could be alone together. Beside them, Amos, Lady Graham’s general factotum, finished sweeping the afternoon’s drift of leaves while he listened to their gentle well-bred Scottish voices. He loved the sound and paid little attention to the content, unless it was directed at him. It would never have occurred to him to say, ‘Look at me, colonel, sir. I been born here, and my daddy and my daddy’s daddy.’

  ‘Not many more days of sitting outside, Lucy.’

  It was September and already chill winds were blowing down from the north.

  ‘Mother will be pleased. She finds swinging with one’s own father a complete and utter waste of time.’

  They laughed together.

  ‘Not that I agree with her,’ Lucy went on lazily. ‘Poor mother. To be stuck with a bean-pole for a daughter.’

  ‘A delightful bean-pole.’ Colonel Graham stopped the swing and looked measuringly at his daughter. ‘You have my height, Lucy, but your mother’s looks and her grace. I can’t understand why this garden isn’t swarming with teenage boys sporting boating blazers and carrying tennis rackets. There are enough of them in the diplomatic community.’

  ‘I inherited your brains too,’ said Lucy flatly. ‘I cannot simper.’

  ‘You refuse to simper.’

  ‘I cannot chatter.’

  ‘You refuse to chatter.’

  ‘Would you have me different?’

  ‘Not me, my darling child. A woman like you, Lucy, is rare as a butterfly in December.’

  A butterfly in December. How sweet he was, and how poetic for a soldier. She looked at his clear-cut profile.

  ‘We must look for a collector of rare butterflies,’ she said lightly and watched him laugh.

  ‘Auguste Arvizo-Medina?’

  Lucy started up from the swing in mock horror. She was enjoying this repartee, knowing perfectly well that they could not speak so boldly and openly if Lady Graham were present. ‘Good heavens, no. Would you have me mother of at least five fat babies in as many stultifying years?’

  ‘He says he is fascinated by you.’

  ‘I would bore him to distraction when I refused to turn into a brood mare. I should have been a man, Father, and then I could have, could have . . .’

  ‘Followed me to military college?’ The colonel spoke the words lightly, rather as though he and his daughter shared some absurd joke.

  ‘Rather to Oxford.’

  There, she had said it. Lucy looked at him from under her eyelashes, but there was no shock on his face.

  ‘It’s not the way of our world, my dear. Don’t despair.’

  ‘American women go to college, Father.’

  ‘My dear child. I will not have my only daughter labelled a blue-stocking and, besides, there is something so unfeminine about the college girls we have been obliged to meet.’

  ‘Perhaps because they have had to fight like men for a place they should have by rights, although you must agree that Americans have been so much more modern in their thinking than we Scots. It’s perfectly acceptable for well-bred American girls to be educated. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary must have been in existence for almost fifty years – and there’s Vassar Female College, and Wellesley, and Smith.’

  ‘You’re remarkably knowledgeable, Lucy,’ said Sir John drily and decided to change the direction of the conversation; he was a brilliant strategist. ‘You can still use that not inconsiderable brain.’

  ‘How?’ Lucy almost jumped from the swing and he registered, with appreciation, the compelling picture she made as she walked about the garden. ‘By deciding how much chicken feeds two hundred guests, or how much cream is needed to pour over those peaches Amos gathered this morning? Women have brains, Father, and I have been luckier than most. Because of Kier, I am as qualified as any man to enter a university.’

  She sat down again beside him and he set the swing into gentle motion. They did not speak but Lucy knew that her father, Colonel Sir John Graham, military attaché to her Britannic Majesty’s embassy in Washington, D.C., had to be thinking, like her, of the son of their neighbour in Scotland. Kier Anderson-Howard had been Lucy’s friend since early childhood. Having had a bad riding accident when he was twelve years old, for nearly five years he had been unable to continue his education in the public school system. Because his parents did not want him to be educated alone, they had invited their neighbours, Sir John and Lady Graham, to send along their daughter to share Kier’s tutor.

  A new world had opened for Lucy: Latin, Greek, Mechanics, German, Philosophy, Mathematics, a world away from the History (abridged), French, English literature (censored), and Drawing, which was the bulk of what Miss Bulwark had been able to teach her.

  ‘That prissy girls’ school where you were enrolled would have collapsed from shock at your ignorance if you had ever joined them, Lucy,’ Kier had teased after their first morning together in Herr
Colner’s classroom.

  ‘I’m glad dear Mr Colner did not,’ Lucy had said seriously and had gone on to astound herself, her friend, and their tutor with the remarkable agility of her mind. By the time Kier was pronounced strong enough to return to Fettes to take the entrance examinations for the university, Lucy was as ready and as able as her schoolmate. But in 1886, no one considered sending young ladies to university with their brothers.

  She had joined her father in his appointment to Washington, where she received long interesting letters from Kier who did not try to spare her maidenly blushes – knowing she had none – and told her about everything he experienced, first at Fettes and later at Oxford University.

  ‘What of Kier, then?’ asked the colonel into his daughter’s silence. ‘You will come out next winter and then . . .’ He did not add that his daughter, even at sixteen, should be thinking of a future with a good husband.

  ‘Kier is my best friend,’ said Lucy, and then, because he was her father and she had always known that she could tell him absolutely everything and anything and never be judged, she poured out her feelings. ‘I love him desperately. I think I always have . . . even before the accident, I mean. That changed everything. Not just my education but . . . my relationship with Kier. That first year when he couldn’t move, I did so much for him. I saw him in so many moods, dealing with pain, with fear, being sick. There’s little romance left when someone has wiped up your vomit.’

  She lost herself in her memories and her father looked at her in wonder. His sheltered, protected daughter cleaning up vomit! Her mother would faint at the very idea.

  ‘I read to him in the afternoons sometimes when Herr Colner would rest. He was ill too, you know, some wasting sickness from years of privation: the Jews have never been well treated, have they? I wonder why that is? I hardly think God chooses to punish them for eternity for denying Christ.’ Lucy shook away that thought impatiently. ‘Anyway, Father,’ she went on, ‘Kier could not bear his mother about him – she fussed so, and wept constantly over his broken bones. It was easier to clean him up and dispose of his soiled nightshirts than to send for her. I cared deeply, but somehow I was able to do what had to be done for him with the minimum of hysteria. Still, I doubt that he sees me as a delicate flower; a butterfly, if you will.’

  ‘He will see quite a change when we return home next Christmas. You will be sixteen; your hair will be up. Your flashing eyes will devastate him.’

  Two years in one of the most sophisticated and richest cities in the world, albeit one that was still classed as a hardship post by Her Victorian Majesty’s Government, had had quite an effect on Lucille Graham. Her father could hardly wait to see the effect she would create in London and Edinburgh salons.

  ‘Sir John, stop filling the child’s head with nonsense.’ They had not heard Lady Graham glide elegantly out of the French doors, managing her skirts with a grace that Lucy would always envy. ‘Senator du Pay and his son have called. Lucille, I would like you to meet the du Pays. They are very wealthy and, what is more important, very influential.’

  ‘I’d like to meet them, Mamma. Max du Pay is the one with the matched bays.’

  Lady Graham threw up her head – almost, thought Lucy wickedly, like one of those self-same horses. ‘Not one word about horses.’ Elizabeth Graham looked at her daughter, almost ‘out’, and all that was in her head was books, horses, and books again. Where had she gone wrong? John’s influence. Not for the first time she wished that she had been able to give her husband the son they had both wanted. ‘Go and tidy yourself, Lucy. Max du Pay is already at Harvard. He is used to sophisticated young women, not hoydenish schoolgirls who can think only of books and horses.’

  Lucy went upstairs, but not to her room. She went to the circular landing where she and her father had their favourite indoor retreat. It was no more than an enlarged landing really, and was full of huge, comfortable, but decidedly unfashionable, armchairs, bookcases and dog baskets.

  From the huge windows, almost as tall as the room, which flooded the staircase with light in all but the depths of the Washington winter, she could see the street and, more importantly, the horses Max du Pay was driving today. She caught her breath. Oh, such beauty!

  ‘Aren’t horses the most beautiful creatures God put on the earth, Digby,’ she told the elderly Sealyham who had merely raised one eye by way of greeting. ‘If you weren’t too old you would adore to chase this pair; they’re black as night and they shine like polished jet, like Mamma’s mourning beads. Oh!’

  She remembered that her mother was waiting for her and without doing a thing to her appearance, ran downstairs. She had time to stop and compose herself before entering the drawing room and, because she was late, the guests were already drinking tea and she had the opportunity to look at them before they saw her. She knew Senator du Pay by sight, but she had never seen his son before. What do they feed them on in the South? she asked herself, for if her father and the American senator were tall, this young man was a giant.

  He turned and looked at her and the oddest feelings ran through Lucy.

  ‘Why, here is your little girl, colonel, sir,’ drawled the young man and his eyes, as he looked at Lucy, registered her blush and laughed at her.

  She lifted her head and ignored him completely.

  ‘Senator du Pay. How do you do, sir. Father and I were just analysing your dissertation to Congress this week.’

  The senator took her hand and tucked it into his arm as he led her to a seat in the window. ‘My dear young lady. I can’t believe such a beautiful young woman bothers her pretty little head with such dull stuff. Lady Graham, you British mothers are to be congratulated. Beauty, charm, and brains too. Why have I not met this delightful young lady before?’

  Lady Graham revelled in the game the senator was playing; he and his son could tell the tale being told by the long hair dancing on Lucy’s shoulders and catching the light from the candles already burning on the tables. ‘Senator, you know perfectly well our daughter is not yet out.’

  He pretended surprise. ‘Why, ma’am, she will lay waste this city with her beauty as her compatriots once wasted it with their bullets.’

  Lucy looked at him. She was not unused to such silly talk; it was the way all her parents’ elderly friends flirted with her, but the senator’s son said nothing and Lucy was intensely aware of him. He was laughing at her. Why? She put her nose – classically straight, thank heaven – even higher in the air.

  ‘I will be too busy to take Washington, sir. Why, Father and I were discussing college this very afternoon.’ Not completely true, but she would not have Maximilian du Pay look at her as if she was nothing but a silly schoolgirl allowed for a moment to a grown-ups’ party.

  ‘Together with Father’s speech.’ He laughed down at her, down. Lucy was used to looking into the eyes, if not over the heads of most men.

  Why was he teasing her? He made her uncomfortable. Never, ever, had she been so aware of a man. She threw herself into the verbal fray.

  ‘And many, many more important things.’

  ‘Oh, shush, Lucy.’ She had gone too far and even Father was angry. But he said nothing; that would come later.

  ‘Lucille, would you go to the kitchen and ask Amos to bring those peaches we picked from the glasshouse this morning? I would like the senator to try them.’ Lady Graham was ushering her daughter to the door. ‘And then you go straight to your room, young lady,’ she whispered as she opened the door.

  Lucy almost ran to the kitchens. She was angry and embarrassed and she hated that supercilious, overbearing Maximilian – what a stupid name – du Pay. It was his fault that she had been rude. She would never, ever, ever speak to him again. He would beg but she . . .

  From the kitchens came the sound of a crash, a scream, a muffled groan. Lucy picked up her skirts and ran. She opened the door and saw the cause of the commotion. Female, the young black maid, had obviously tipped over a kettle of boiling soup and i
t had splattered Amos as he was in the act of slicing some of the splendid peaches. The knife had slipped and buried itself, not in a peach but in his hand. Lucy did not even pause to think.

  ‘Stop screaming, Female, and get me some water. Sit down, Amos, and keep your hand up.’

  ‘This ain’t no job for you, Miss Lucille,’ whispered the old man. ‘What will your mamma say?’

  Lucy knew perfectly well what her mother would say, but she lied. ‘She’d say that we should get you to a hospital as soon as possible. (Hospital: doctor. How did one staunch blood? Should the knife come out or be left embedded in the wound? Tell me, tell me.) ‘Female, go to the drawing room and ask Sir John to come down.’ She did not wait for the girl’s flustered protests: ‘The drawing room. I doesn’t go in there when there’s white folks there,’ but calmly went on staunching the blood with a cloth. ‘Right now, Female.’ The girl threw her apron over her head and ran.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t bump her head on something,’ she said and in spite of the pain Amos grinned. ‘She know her place, Miss Lucille, and it ain’t in your mamma’s drawing room.’

  They could hear the servant girl shrieking out her story and in a minute or two the kitchen was invaded. Lucy ignored the du Pays.

  ‘An accident with a knife, Father. We’ll take him to George Washington, or would Georgetown be better?’

  The four men, three white, one black, looked at one another, and one of the white faces flushed.

  ‘It don’t make no never mind, colonel, sir,’ said Amos gently. ‘I can’t go to them fine hospitals, Miss Lucille; that’s for white folks. I thank you for your help: she didn’t swoon or nothing, colonel, sir. I can take care of it myself now, Miss Lucille. Female can sew it up with the thread she been using to sew up that chicken. The knife ain’t cut nothing important, and now she’s stopped screaming she’ll do a good job. Won’t you, Daughter?’

  Female wiped her tear-stained cheeks and nodded. ‘Pappy’s learned me lots about wounds, colonel, sir, Miss Lucille. I’m sorry I yelled so; I just hates the sight of blood. How can you stand it, Miss Lucille? Ain’t it indelicate in a young lady – and a white one at that – not to swoon?’