‘Yes, m’lady, it’s Louisa here.’
‘Oh, come up, would you?’
The line went dead.
Louisa walked up the flights of stairs – at least she would get fit on this trip – and opened Lady Redesdale’s cabin door after a brief knock. Inside she found her mistress and Unity standing over by the writing desk, staring at a white card. An empty envelope lay on the blotting pad.
‘We’ve been invited to drinks this evening by the captain,’ said Lady Redesdale. ‘It’s a bore, but I suppose we can’t refuse.’
Unity took the card out of her mother’s hand. ‘You’ll need your tiara.’
‘Not unless it’s white tie, I won’t.’
Her daughter had already lost interest in the subject of her mother’s jewels and was focusing again on the card. ‘It’s Captain Schmitt,’ she said to Louisa, as if reading the name for the first time. ‘A German captain. Do you think he’ll be very good-looking?’
‘That’s certainly not something for you to be thinking about,’ her mother intercepted briskly. ‘Louisa, would you go to the purser’s office and fetch my jewellery case. You’d better bring Mrs Guinness’s too. We’ll need to start dressing in half an hour now we have the wretched drinks. Unity, you can wear your yellow dress.’
‘I don’t know why you insisted I brought it. I look like a child in it.’
‘You are a child. Don’t argue with me and go and get yourself ready. If Louisa has time she can help you with your hair.’
At seven o’clock, all three of them had left their cabins, dressed in their frocks and jewels, and Louisa had stayed behind to tidy Lady Redesdale’s cabin. Unity’s had, in a few short hours, already taken on a state of permanent disarray, just as her bedroom was at home, driving Nanny Blor to despair with scraps of paper everywhere and things always going missing. Stockings would be dropped on the floor with no thought as to who might have to pick them up, hair grips would apparently vanish into thin air, and sweeps under the bed would regularly net a haul of blunt pencils, pocket mirrors, combs, ribbons and discarded books. Louisa put away the last of Lady Redesdale’s things and put out her nightdress before she looked at her watch. Supper would not be served in the third-class canteen for another half an hour. She could tidy Unity’s room too, but something in her resisted it, and anyway, there would be a maid arriving soon to prepare the cabins for the night. Instead, Louisa thought she would attend to Diana’s cabin. It wasn’t strictly necessary either, a maid might even be there already, but Louisa could feel that folded piece of paper in her pocket as if it were a heavy stone. She gave the room a final glance and left, closing it behind her.
She had turned towards Diana’s cabin, away from Unity’s, and perhaps it had been because her head was lowered, or perhaps the lights were dimmer in the passage, but whatever the reason, Louisa bumped heavily into a woman standing at a cabin door, jiggling at the handle.
They both started to apologise and Louisa was about to move off when she noticed the woman was crying. She was exceptionally pretty, even with the tears streaking her mascara, with a heart-shaped face and a slight figure beneath her cream satin dress, which had a nasty red wine stain on the front.
‘He won’t let me in,’ she sobbed.
Louisa didn’t like to ask who had locked the door, but she didn’t need to.
‘Joseph,’ said the woman, agitated now. ‘Please, don’t do this.’
Louisa hesitated but the door remained resolutely locked.
The woman let go of the door handle and covered her face with her hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, muffled. ‘We haven’t been introduced and this is terribly embarrassing.’
‘Please don’t worry,’ said Louisa, seeing at once the mistake the woman had made. ‘I’m not staying in these rooms. I’m a lady’s maid.’ The words still caught in her throat. She wanted to say: ‘Not just a lady’s maid’, but she could not.
At this, the woman’s hands dropped down and Louisa could see the relief bloom. ‘Then you probably have a magic trick to help me with this?’ She gestured at the stain. It wasn’t large, but it was noticeable.
‘I’m sure there’s something we can do. Come with me.’
They hastened along the narrow corridor, and Louisa opened Diana’s room – she had keys to all three cabins – and beckoned the woman in.
‘Thank you so much. I’m Mrs Fowler. What’s your name?’ Her voice carried no hint of either regional dialect or aristocratic breeding, it gave no clue as to where she had come from, only where she was now. Attractive, fashionably dressed and embarrassed.
Louisa answered Mrs Fowler’s question, making sure she spoke soothingly as she dabbed at the stain with some white wine from the drinks’ tray in Diana’s drawing room. They adjusted a brooch to cover the worst of it, then Louisa left her in the bathroom to fix her face. In a few moments, Mrs Fowler came out and there was no trace of the distress remaining.
‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said. ‘I had better return to the party now or it will be over. Whose room is this, by the way?’
‘Mrs Guinness,’ said Louisa, knowing the effect this would have.
‘Oh.’ Louisa saw the shame return to Mrs Fowler, and tears sprang to her eyes again.
‘Please don’t worry. I won’t say anything to her.’
Mrs Fowler shook her head. ‘No. I couldn’t stand it.’
‘Truly, it’s fine.’
‘You’ll keep my secret?’
‘Of course.’
Reassured, Mrs Fowler departed. But Louisa couldn’t help wondering whether the secret was something bigger than a stained dress and a locked door.
CHAPTER TEN
Left alone in Diana’s cabin, Louisa tidied the bathroom – Mrs Fowler had helped herself to the powder puff and a red lipstick – then summoned the courage to do that which she had planned before she’d met her fellow passenger in distress. She was at least safe in the knowledge that even if a maid were to come in, even Diana herself, she wouldn’t look suspicious. She had been hired, after all, to look after Diana’s wardrobe, take shoes to be cleaned and jewels to the purser’s office, where they were locked in a safe. There was nothing at all out of the ordinary about her straightening the books on her bedside table or the papers on the bureau. But still Louisa’s heart hammered like a woodpecker the whole time. She may not have been guilty of anything underhand – yet – but she wasn’t convinced she looked innocent. Her cheeks felt hot enough to fry eggs. Nor was she even sure what she was looking for. Iain had said they were interested in any relationships Diana might be forming with European fascists, but the more Louisa considered this, the more ridiculous it seemed. Sir Oswald Mosley had met Mussolini, she knew, but Diana hadn’t.
She opened a drawer in the bedside table and saw there were a sheaf of letters bound with a red ribbon. Louisa recognised the handwriting: she had come to dread the arrival of these letters when she had been a lady’s maid to Diana only the year before. Diana sat next to Mosley at a dinner party at the beginning of 1932, eighteen months ago, and it wasn’t long before it was clear to anyone close to her – if not, sadly, to her own husband Bryan – that she had developed a full-blown crush on him. Louisa was sure things were kept above board and proper for several months, but there had been lots of notes and hastily arranged meetings, apparent coincidences when they had both turned up at the same party. Increasingly, Diana chose to stay in London rather than accompany Bryan to their country house at the weekends. That was when Louisa noticed the repetition of a certain handwriting on the envelope, and how its arrival on the breakfast tray signalled a change of plans by Diana, a different party that she was going to attend. She’d be late home on those evenings, full of unstoppable admiration for ‘Sir O’ and his ideas that were going to save Britain from the quagmire of the Depression. Barely six months after Diana met him, she was calling him ‘the Leader,’ and six months after that she had left Bryan.