Jane and the Wandering Eye: Being the Third Jane Austen Mystery Read online

  “Miss Austen!” Lady Desdemona cried in horror; but horror swiftly gave way to amusement. Not for Lord Harold’s niece, Miss Conyngham’s outraged sensibility; and this alone could tell me much. She looked again at the dozing Dowager, and then dropped her voice to a whisper. “Had Mr. Portal suspected there to be money in the act, I do not doubt he should have entertained the notion. He prized riches above all things—even, perhaps, the glory of his company.”

  “Did he, indeed? And did he possess considerable means?”

  “I cannot undertake to say. He was hardly murdered for his purse, if that is what you would suggest, Miss Austen. For it was discovered upon his person.”

  “I merely wondered how such a man—with reputation, wealth, and every consideration of good society—should have occasion for making enemies. For someone must have despised him enough to end his life. You were acquainted with the gentleman, my lady—surely you must have formed an opinion on the subject. What can Mr. Portal have done, to warrant his violent end?”

  “I do not know,” Lady Desdemona replied. Her brow furrowed. “I have worried at the subject like a terrier at a bone. My acquaintance with Mr. Portal was hardly so intimate, as to permit me to form anything but the most cursory judgement of his character. He perpetually ran in a high flow of spirits; he was fond of company and of wine; he possessed energy enough for ten; and was rarely so nice in his sentiments or expression, as to render him the safest of companions. In short, he was boisterous and crude, and sadly wanting in tact.” She shook her head. “I could imagine him to offend any number of persons without the least intention of doing so, and forget the insult as readily as he ignored his engagements—which was repeatedly, I assure you.”

  “Does want of tact, then, explain the gentleman’s scene with Lord Kinsfell?”

  Her eyes slid away. “Of that I may say even less. For Kinny is chary of taking offence, particularly among his friends; and so I must believe the injury to have been a peculiar one. My brother was excessively grieved.”

  “Mr. Portal does not seem an ideal lover for Miss Conyngham,” I mused. “I wonder what she saw in him to recommend his suit?”

  “Was he to marry her, then? How come you to know of it?” A quickening of interest, and a faint blush to the lady’s cheeks. “I had not heard that rumour.”

  “Nor had I. I speculate, that is all. Miss Conyngham was sadly shaken by Mr. Portal’s murder—and must have felt the loss quite deeply.”

  “—Though not so deeply as to forgo her present performance,” Lady Desdemona retorted. “She would sacrifice everything to the goddess of success, I believe.”

  “You do not esteem her.”

  My companion shrugged. “I cannot claim any great knowledge of the lady. But I have observed, Miss Austen, that they who earn their bread in the performance of a role, have often difficulty in quitting the stage. They dissemble, as it were, in everything—and the truth of their characters is difficult to seize. I should never be certain whether Miss Conyngham were dying of grief at Mr. Portal’s loss—or if her feelings were quite the reverse.”

  I had not looked for such penetration in a girl of eighteen; but she was, after all, Lord Harold’s niece.

  “You do not endure a similar sense of ruin?” I enquired gently.

  “My brother, indeed, is sadly circumstanced—but I can have no occasion for despair. Now Uncle is come, all shall soon be set to rights.”

  I was prevented from pursuing this interesting line of intelligence, by a circumspect cough from the direction of the box’s door. Lady Desdemona’s head swung round, her grey eyes widened, and involuntarily, she seized my arm.

  The cold blue glare of a fair-headed gentleman, arrayed in all the brilliance of fawn knee breeches and a bottle-green coat, met my interested gaze. The very Lord Swithin. He was a remarkable figure of a man—and yet the good looks of his countenance were undoubtedly marred by the arrogance that suffused them.

  “Lady Desdemona.” He bowed with exquisite grace, but the hauteur of his glance might have guttered a candle-flame. “I am happy to see you. Your Grace—”

  The Dowager Duchess awoke with a start, glanced about, and then held out her hand with all the appearance of cordiality. “Swithin! I declare! It is like your insolence to come to Bath at such a time. I could wish that all our acquaintance were as careless of convention.”

  If he took the measure of her ambivalence, the Earl betrayed no sign. He bent low over the Dowager’s hand.

  Eugenie patted the empty place beside her, with a look for Lady Desdemona, who sat stiffly upright in her chair. “Do sit, Lord Swithin, I beg. We have not talked this age.”

  “I fear that the honour is beyond my power at present to indulge, Your Grace. A large party of friends awaits my attention.”

  “Of ladies, you mean?” Lady Desdemona cried, and lifted her glass to peer about the theatre. “Now where is your box? I should dearly love to see the rogues’ gallery you’ve carried in your train.”

  “You have quite failed to acquaint me with your friend, Mona,” said the Earl in a tone of quelling severity.

  “And are you due any such civility, Lord Swithin? I am not entirely convinced. But since you shame me to the courtesy—Miss Austen, may I present the Earl of Swithin. Lord Swithin, Miss Austen.”

  The gentleman bowed and clicked his heels. “You are visiting Bath, Miss Austen?”

  “A visit of some duration, my lord,” I replied easily, “since it has been prolonged now these three years and more. You are only just arrived, I collect?”

  “I am.”

  “For the Christmas holiday?”

  “I may, perhaps, remain so long. I cannot undertake to say.”

  “You do not attempt a trial of the waters, then? For their effects cannot be felt, I am assured, in less than two months.”

  My brilliant line of chatter had not so entirely engrossed my attention, that I failed to notice Lady Desdemona’s furious regard for the Earl, nor the intensity of his returning stare; and the evident unease of the Dowager Duchess, as she surveyed the pair, did little to soften my anxiety. All attempt at forestalling a dispute, however, was as naught; for rather than responding to my gentle interrogation, the Earl abruptly broke out with—

  “What the devil do you mean, Lady Desdemona, by throwing yourself in the path of a common upstart, who must necessarily get himself killed in your grandmamma’s house, and involve us all in the very worst sort of scandal?”

  “Scandal? Is that now to be laid at my door?” Lady Desdemona retorted indignantly. “And what, might I ask, were you thinking, my lord Swithin, when you threw down your glove at poor Easton’s feet not a month ago—and all for the impropriety of having named your mistress in my hearing!”

  “Easton is a fool.” The Earl replied with contempt. “He observes me riding with a married woman in the park, and suggests the greatest calumny. When I consider the injury that poor pup visited on Mrs. Trevelyan—I should have killed him when the opportunity served. But such vengeance, even in an affair of honour, is beneath me. Having no desire to flee the country on Easton’s account, I barely winged the fellow at twenty paces.6 And what of Easton, indeed? It is hardly Easton who has driven me to Bath! Your conduct and impropriety, madam, have so involved my reputation, that I am forced to require an explanation.”

  “And I shall certainly never give it!” Lady Desdemona cried. Her face was pale with anger. “I cannot conceive how my private affairs should involve a gentleman so entirely a stranger to my interest and happiness as yourself. But if ever I require your opinion, sir, regarding the intimates of Laura Place, I shall not hesitate to solicit it.”

  “You may attempt to brave this out, Mona,” the Earl retorted in a warning tone, “but you shall not do so by abusing your friends. You will require as many as you may command in the coming weeks. Do you remember that, when the faint among them desert you. I could do a vast deal for Kinsfell, did I choose. You would do well to remember that also.”

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bsp; “Your concern for my brother quite overwhelms me, Lord Swithin,” Lady Desdemona observed with a sneer. “Had you formed no intention of profiting by the Marquis’s misfortune, I might almost have credited the sincerity of it.”

  The Earl bowed with frigid care and turned for the box’s door.

  “Whatever they may say of Richard Portal,” Lady Desdemona threw at his retreating back, “he at least attempted to play the gentleman—in which guise you appear, my lord, as the merest caricature!”

  1 William-Glanvill Evelyn (1734-1813) was an old friend of the Austen family; he maintained a second home in Queen’s Parade, Bath, and was suspected of adultery. Jane liked him almost as much as his bewitching phaeton, and enjoyed joking about the damage to her reputation sustained from driving out alone with Mr. Evelyn.—Editor’s note.

  2 Persons pursued for debt could be seized at any time or place, except in the Liberties of the Savoy, a few square blocks in the heart of London, where debtors were accorded sanctuary. Similarly, a member of Parliament could not be taken up for debt.—Editor’s note.

  3 It was the custom in the theater of the time to stage two performances each evening. Lovers’ Vows was produced no less than six times in the years Jane spent in Bath; her dislike of and familiarity with the play, as well as its immense popularity, probably caused her to use it for the Bertram family’s amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park. In that novel, Mary Crawford is Amelia and Edmund Bertram is cajoled into portraying the morose clergyman Anhalt.—Editor’s note.

  4 Public hangings in Tyburn (now Marble Arch) were a thing of memory by 1804, with most such executions taking place before the gates of Newgate prison; but Jane refers to the public crush and brawling for seats that hangings had formerly occasioned.—Editor’s note.

  5 Dorothy Jordan, a comic actress of great renown, unwillingly shared the stage at Drury Lane with the Kemble family throughout the 1780s and ‘90s. Jordan was the mistress of the Duke of Clarence, George Ill’s third son, and bore him ten children before he abandoned her in her old age.—Editor’s note.

  6 The fighting of duels between gentlemen like Colonel Easton and the Earl, although very common in Austen’s day as a means of settling disputes, was nonetheless illegal. If a duelist were mortally wounded, his assailant was liable for murder. A common circumvention of this result was escape to the Continent—although with England at war with France, such havens were dwindling.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 7

  Performance of an Ingenue

  13 December 1804, cont.

  ~

  “OH, GRANDMAMMA—HOW DISTINCTLY ODIOUS SWITHIN is!” sighed Lady Desdemona despairingly, when the Earl had left us. “That a man may seem the very soul of elegance—possessed of understanding, education, and knowledge of the world—and yet be so utterly abominable.!”

  “He is a hateful fellow, indeed,” the Dowager replied with a soothing pat. “He would have us all fear and love him to distraction, for which no one can forgive him.”

  “Perhaps,” I said thoughtfully, “if he expected that adoration a little less—”

  “I am sure I can have given him no expectation of the kind,” Lady Desdemona said stiffly. “I made every effort to assure him of my indifference.”

  “And so appeared as spiteful as a cat,” the Dowager observed. “Your comment about his rogues’ gallery was far too broad, my sweet. I can detect no other ladies in the Swithin box than his sisters, Louisa and Augusta. You are far too attentive to the company he keeps. I might recommend, pauvre Mona, that the best way to turn a man enrage, as I suspect you mean to do, is to ignore him completely.”

  “That should not be difficult,” her granddaughter retorted.

  “Ah, Wren,” said the Dowager, “there you are at last.”

  Miss Wren was revealed as drooping in the doorway, Her Grace’s wrap in her arms; and so the interesting discourse on Desdemona’s heart was allowed to fall away.

  The young lady herself sank into her seat, lost in contemplation of the deserted stage; I guessed her thoughts to be wandering along the paths laid out by her helpful grandmamma. But at last, with a look for me, she attempted to elevate her spirits.

  “You must be thinking me a terrible shrew, Miss Austen! I behaved just now with the height of incivility. I find that I cannot see Swithin without I abuse him hatefully.”

  “I cannot think that Lord Swithin comported himself any more admirably; and he must be held to a higher standard. He is, after all, some ten years your senior—and yet you seem to have reduced him to the querulousness of a schoolboy!”

  “I dread meeting him,” Lady Desdemona confessed. “It is excessively awkward to be thrown in the way of a man one has refused! It was to avoid scenes of that kind that I quitted London. And now—Swithin is come to Bath! What can he mean by it?”

  “Perhaps he hopes to persuade you of the brilliance of his suit,” I suggested gently.

  “Then I shall have to use every means within my power to convince him of my indifference!”

  “By encouraging the attentions of other gentlemen, for example?”

  She started up hotly, as though to protest, and then subsided in her chair. “I had entertained the notion,” she murmured.

  “And chose Richard Portal as your primary object?”

  “Mr. Portal does seem to have thoroughly enraged Swithin, does he not? It is too delicious! For the abominable Earl to accuse me of inciting scandal—and with such a man!”

  Any answer I might have given was forestalled by Lord Harold’s return to the box, and the sounding of the bell that signalled the recommencement of the play.

  WHEN THE CURTAIN HAD AT LENGTH RUNG DOWN ON Lovers’ Vows, and risen again for the gratification of the players’ vanity, and was at last required to close forever the scene of that forsaken German village—the Dowager Duchess thrust herself to her feet with some difficulty, and the assistance of her ebony cane. “Wren!” she cried. “Make haste! Make haste! To the wings, I beg you, with our felicitations for Miss Conyngham! Lord Harold and I shall follow.”

  I linked arms with Lady Desdemona, and we proceeded in company towards the stairs.

  What a soaring infinity may be hidden by a proscenium curtain! What shifting worlds, in sliding panels of scenery—what hustle and bustle of figures to-ing and fro-ing about the business of the play—and what odours of beeswax, powder, paint, and scent! I stood upon the threshold of the stage’s wings, and felt myself at the border of another world. The most democratic of worlds, too—for any may rise to greatness in treading the humble boards. There is a nobility bestowed by art that mere birth can never imitate, as Mrs. Siddons and her brother have shown. Would Maria Conyngham achieve a similar elevation one day, and be celebrated in word and deed? Or would she end a discarded drab—full of blasted hopes, and riven dreams, and the oblivion drunk from a cup of gin?

  “Your Grace,” called a voice from the obscurity of a screen.

  Our party turned, and discovered the figure of Hugh Conyngham, arrayed still in his paint and court dress, a formidable Frederick. A slim, lithe figure, with a cap of dark curls arrayed in the fashionable Brutus; a sulky line to his mouth; restless blue eyes the colour of the sea. He bowed stiffly, but offered no other word.1

  “Our deepest felicitations, Mr. Conyngham,” the Dowager cried, with all the energy of an enthusiast. “It was nobly played, sir—you do our Kotzebue great credit, I am sure.”

  “And Mr. Portal as well, I hope,” the actor returned. His eyes were fixed upon Lord Harold; but he seemed disinclined to an introduction. It was as though, I thought, the actor wished to be anywhere but in the presence of the Wilborough clan.

  “I am Lord Harold Trowbridge, Mr. Conyngham,” the Gentleman Rogue offered smoothly. “I must join my congratulations with my mother’s. For a company so thoroughly bowed in mourning, you comported yourselves with the utmost distinction. I was particularly struck by Miss Conyngham’s performance. She was as unmarked by grief as the Comic Muse.”

/>   “Then I may thank the excellence of my art, my lord.” Maria Conyngham abandoned a small knot of fellow players at the nether end of the stage, and drew close to her brother. Her colour was high and her countenance stormy. “I should think you guilty of the grossest presumption, sir, had I not already learned to expect it of the Trowbridge family. For any of you to show your faces here must excite comment—and we have drawn the public eye far too much already!”

  “Maria—”

  She stayed Hugh Conyngham’s words with a look. “My brother is too noble to reproach you, my lord. But I cannot claim so admirable a restraint. Your family has reduced us to our present misery—has nearly accomplished our ruin—and yet you would burden us with your attentions! This is hardly kind, sir; and it cannot be met with civility. I would beg you to quit the theatre as soon as may be. Any notice from the murderers of Richard Portal must be an insult to his memory.”

  Her brown eyes blazed with indignation, and perhaps a film of tears; but the wonderful carriage of her head—courageous, unbowed, determined—must quell the most impertinent.

  Lord Harold parted his lips as if to speak, a curious expression on his countenance—but at that moment, Maria Conyngham started forward, the Trowbridges forgotten.

  “My lord!” she cried, and dropped an elegant curtsey. “You honour us, indeed.”

  The Earl of Swithin brushed past our party, his eyes fixed on the actress, a bouquet of hot-house flowers in his arms. “My dear Miss Conyngham,” he said with a smile, “I cannot remember when I have been made so thoroughly happy by any theatrical performance. Your servant, ma’am.”

  And while the Dowager Duchess looked on, aghast at the myriad discourtesies visited this evening upon the house of Wilborough, her favourite ingénue received the blossoms with a cry of pleasure, and the most ardent look. Mr. Conyngham, however, was less happy in the Earl’s attentions; for he paled, stepped back a pace, and swallowed convulsively.