The Ruby Rouge Calamity
When a bottle of Ruby Rouge nail varnish collides with a priceless Persian rug, Daisy the housemaid finds herself on the sharp end of Lady Worthington’s unyielding standards. After a very instructive encounter with a wooden hairbrush, the redness might well extend beyond the rug. The Ruby Rouge Calamity is an exquisitely upholstered tale of red stains, raised eyebrows, and lessons thoroughly learned.
In the well-upholstered calm of post-war England, where domestic staff still curtsied while polishing the silver every Thursday, there resided in a grand Mayfair mansion one Lady Henrietta Worthington.
She was a buxom, formidable creature, discreetly entering her fifties, and possessed of the stature of an Edwardian sideboard—with a similar air of uncompromising permanence.
Her floral-print dresses billowed with the pomp and ceremony of garden parties long past, and the pearl necklace she wore was not so much an accessory as a warning label. A descendant, or so she claimed, of minor nobility, she viewed the world as one might view a puppy in need of correction.
Her voice, delicate as a trumpet, could silence a dinner party with a single utterance or scatter unwelcome visitors like startled pigeons.
Her standards were impeccable. And her manners—though exquisite—bore the sharp edge of a rapier concealed in the finest lace. These qualities were exceeded only by the expectations she projected onto everyone else; particularly her staff.
Among these souls was the newest recruit, Daisy. Young, lovely, and dangerously demure, she moved with hesitant grace and an aura of innocent competence that Lady Worthington found both promising and faintly suspicious. Her voice was soft, her eyes large and liquid, and her hair the colour of silken gold.
Lady Worthington had come to regard her with a cautious fondness. Was she a fragile treasure to be nurtured—or a disaster waiting to happen?
The Calamity
It was on a sunny afternoon in June that Lady Worthington hosted her weekly bridge club. The room, thick with pearls and polite venom, hummed with the lacquered composure of its occupants. Cucumber sandwiches waited politely on the side table. Polished teacups clinked in genteel approval.
And then—disaster.
A shriek tore through the drawing room—a shriek so sharp and despairing it brought conversation to a standstill.
There stood Daisy. One trembling hand clutched an upturned bottle of nail varnish; the other was clamped over her mouth in mute horror. A slow, shimmering river of Ruby Rouge—Lady Worthington’s most decadent shade—was pooling across the Persian rug. Yes, the rug. The one rumoured to be a gift from the Shah himself. Or from one of his wives. Depending on which version Lady Worthington told that week.
The bridge ladies froze, pinky fingers poised mid-air. A silence settled so profound that one could hear the moral fibre of the household tightening in protest.
Lady Worthington rose.
Not abruptly. Not with panic. But with a glacial majesty that suggested someone was about to be professionally undone.
“Ladies,” she said, her smile utterly divorced from warmth, “it appears we have a small crisis on our hands. If you’ll excuse me for just a moment…”
She sailed from the drawing room with unhurried grandeur. Behind her, the bridge table erupted into whispers and meaningful glances. The short-sighted Baroness Wilberforce raised her gold-plated lorgnettes with the enthusiasm of a barrister preparing for cross-examination.
The Remedy
Daisy remained frozen, still clutching the empty bottle like a sacrificial offering. Her voice, when it emerged, was barely audible.
“I—I’m terribly sorry, ma’am… it was an accident—I didn’t mean—”
Lady Worthington paused beside the hallway mirror and raised a single imperious finger. It curled slowly—like a queen summoning her footman—or thunderclouds summoning rain.
“Daisy, my dear,” she said, with the gentle menace of a lion inviting a rabbit to tea, “you’ve created rather a dreadful spectacle. Fortunately for me—and unfortunately for you—I have a time-honoured remedy, both swift and practical.”
With the precision of a woman who once reorganised an entire village fête because the bunting clashed with the roses, Lady Worthington reached for the stoutest of her grooming instruments: a heavy, gleaming wooden hairbrush. Its usual task was subduing rebellious curls. Today, it had a very different duty.
“Over the armchair, if you please,” Lady Worthington said sweetly, in the tone one might use when offering someone a delicate pastry laced with hot chili sauce.
To her credit—or perhaps out of sheer survival instinct—Daisy obeyed with only a small, strangled whimper. She bent gracefully across the overstuffed arm, her posture that of a penitent statue.
Her skirt was hoisted with the theatrical flourish of a magician revealing his grand finale. Her undergarments, modest and blameless white cotton knickers, were—regrettably—positioned to bear the brunt of the consequences.
Daisy's complexion bloomed a furious crimson, deepening by the second into a hue not dissimilar to the now infamous Ruby Rouge.
The stage was set. Justice, or at least an entertaining facsimile of it, was about to commence. Lady Worthington adjusted her grip.
Lady Worthington, with a force and precision that would be the envy of a timpani orchestra, set about her task with admirable resolve. The hairbrush rose and fell with metronomic certainty, each crisp thwack landing upon Daisy’s trembling derrière like an exclamation mark in a particularly emphatic letter to The Times.
A series of sharp, deliberate thwacks echoed through the house.
“Ouch!” yelped Daisy, again and again, her pitch growing higher with every stroke, until one might have feared for the integrity of the chandelier crystals. Her hapless cries sang out in a poignant harmony, part contrition, part soprano, while the hairbrush maintained time with unrelenting conviction.
It was as though she couldn’t quite believe this was happening in real life and not in one of the more pragmatic chapters of a Victorian etiquette manual.
Observers and Aftermath
The bridge ladies materialised in the doorway, drawn like society moths to a scandal. Half-moon spectacles glinted. Eyebrows arched.
Frances Hardcastle, still stinging from an incident in which she was caught dancing barefoot on Lady Worthington’s tennis court the previous summer, looked on with the uncomfortable empathy of one already acquainted with her hostess’s disciplinary repertoire. She would have preferred not to be reminded.
Lady Worthington, un-distracted by such paltry matters as human dignity, at least insofar as housemaids were concerned, paused in mid-swing. Ever the consummate hostess, she took a moment to turn and address her audience.
“Ladies,” she said serenely, “please accept my sincerest apologies for the interruption. But as we all know, a stitch in time…”
She let the proverb hang—much like Daisy, who was still draped over the chair arm, modesty granted only by the mercy of Victorian tailoring.
With a genteel nod, she resumed her rhythmic labours, unperturbed by the growing chorus of titters from her companions. It was noted later, over sherry and wafer biscuits, that whilst Lady Worthington’s cheeks betrayed a certain pink flush from her exertions, nothing could rival the shade Daisy’s bottom cheeks had achieved by the conclusion!
At long last, after what felt like an eternity to the poor girl, Lady Worthington straightened up with a satisfied sigh. Stepping back, she surveyed her handiwork with a critical but approving eye.
“There we are, dear,” she said, giving Daisy’s glowing behind a final, almost affectionate pat. “All better now.”
Daisy rose gingerly, her expression a mixture of tearful contrition and well-flogged resolve. She curtsied—albeit somewhat off-kilter.
“Thank you, ma’am,” she whispered. “I’ll attend to the matter immediately.”
Lady Worthington nodded. “See that you do. I believe there’s a particularly uncompromising rattan carpet beater in the laundry. Should that stain remain by the end of our rubber, it shan’t be the rug that bears the brunt of it. I trust I make myself perfectly clear?”
Daisy nodded with the fervour of a girl newly acquainted with the concept of cause and effect. She would be standing for the foreseeable future.
Lady Worthington swept back into the drawing room with the imperious calm of one who is accustomed to unquestioning obedience.
“Now,” she said, resuming her seat, “spades are trumps, I believe. Oh—and do pass the biscuits, Frances.”
And thus their game resumed, with the incident of the Ruby Rouge calamity and its chastening consequences quickly relegated to the growing volume of “colourful episodes” in the annals of Lady Worthington’s formidable hospitality.
Footnotes and Future Precautions
As for Daisy, she came to appreciate, with a clarity born of experience and distinct lack of padding, that the ill-advised union of nail polish and Persian rugs is a scandalous affair, best left to the pages of sensation novels and never again to reappear beneath the roof of Lady Worthington’s uncompromising household.
And, though she dusted the sideboard daily with dutiful care, she never looked at Lady Worthington's hairbrush in quite the same way again.
Selected from the Archives of Post-War Poise