Jane and the Barque of Frailty Read online

  “Except those, apparently, whose first duty it should be to protect her,” I observed. “Her family.”

  “As I am ignorant of the particulars of her folly, I cannot undertake to judge.” Mr. Chizzlewit met my gaze squarely. “She is the object of general admiration; a shifting party of gentlemen—many of them among the highest in the land—collect around her, and tho’ most bestow expensive tributes, she has allowed no one to become her sole protector. I know for a fact that any number have offered Miss Radcliffe carte blanche—and she refuses to take it up. 2 There are conjectures as to her reasons, of course— some would have it she remains faithful in her heart to a dead lover, others that she is angling for a title willing to offer marriage—but her independence has only increased her desirability.” The solicitor frowned. “To figure as the receiver of stolen goods— if indeed she apprehended that they were stolen— and to convey them, with malicious intent, to an innocent victim of her toils—is a piece of villainy I should like to think impossible.”

  “I agree. There is a dignity in her carriage—a sweetness of expression unmarred by her traffick with the world—that must impress the observer with a belief in her goodness. I cannot make it out at all. I believe I shall have to pay Miss Radcliffe a call.”

  “Pay her a call!” Eliza cried, scandalised. “Jane, you would never venture to such a den of iniquity! Only think if you were found out! I should not be able to look your mother in the face—and only conceive how lowering to reflect that in this instance, she would be justified in her poor opinion of me!”

  “You speak as tho’ you are already acquainted with Miss Radcliffe,” Mr. Chizzlewit said.

  “We have chanced to meet some once or twice. She was first raised as an object of interest with the Comte d’Entraigues—it is Julia Radcliffe he is said to wish to marry, when once he obtains his divorce.”

  Mr. Chizzlewit’s countenance changed colour. “That old roué! It does not bear thinking of! Why, the girl is young enough to be his daughter—”

  He rose, and took an agitated turn about the room.

  “I understand she is but seventeen. But recollect what the Comtesse has told us: Miss Radcliffe pressed the jewels upon her as recompense. It would appear that she has made her decision—and means to seek a respectable alliance, even at the price of d’Entraigues.”

  “Impossible!” Mr. Chizzlewit spat.

  I shrugged, as tho’ indifferent to his contempt. “Then perhaps she merely intends to use d’Entraigues to secure the interest of another. Miss Radcliffe’s name is frequently linked to Mr. George Canning’s. But my sister assures me that Canning is unlikely to desert his wife and children—however much amusement he may find in salons of Harriette Wilson’s type.”

  “Canning’s eldest son is lame,” the solicitor observed, “and Canning and his wife are both devoted to the boy. He would not so wound his family—and there are considerations of public office—”

  “Then Miss Radcliffe deludes herself. Her affections, nonetheless, may be ardent and real—and thus could be used to villainous ends, when urged by an unscrupulous man. Mr. Canning has at times been described to me this way.”

  “Unscrupulous?” Mr. Chizzlewit’s brow furrowed. “It is not a word I should apply. Bold in his ambitions, yes—implacable in his hatreds—but there is nothing in his career one may point to, as being less than honourable—”

  “Even his efforts to unseat Lord Castlereagh, behind that gentleman’s back?”

  Mr. Chizzlewit laughed. “Oh, well— If you would speak of politics!”

  “Do not the laws of honour apply, in the House of Commons and Lords? I was assured that was why Lord Castlereagh felt no compunction in challenging his enemy to a duel—and humiliating him before the world. He did but defend his honour. It has been suggested to me that Mr. Canning, in fact, was so reduced in his public stature that he has an interest in revenge—and that in Princess Tscholikova he found his tool.”

  The solicitor was standing near Eliza’s fireplace; he thrust his hands in his pockets, and turned his head to stare broodingly into the flames. I said nothing further, allowing him time for thought.

  “You would have it that Canning deliberately created an aura of scandal around Castlereagh, through the publication of the Princess’s letters, and her subsequent appearance of suicide,” he said at length. “For that to be true, the Princess must have been in his power—or intimate to a degree we cannot have understood. How else can he have obtained what was private correspondence?”

  “She refers to Canning at least once in her journal, which I have had occasion to read. She also mentions Julia Radcliffe—and is determined, but two days before her death, to warn the girl. I use the word because the Princess chose it.”

  “Warn Miss Radcliffe? Against whom? I find the notion fantastic!” Mr. Chizzlewit cried. “Could Canning have both Tscholikova and Miss Radcliffe in keeping? And if the Princess was as deep in love with Castlereagh as her letters suggest—how should she have come to entertain Canning’s schemes? She must have known him for his lordship’s enemy.”

  “You go too swiftly, Mr. Chizzlewit, in assuming that Mr. Canning is the sort to show his hand! What if he were to employ an intermediary—a gentleman long known to Princess Tscholikova, one she has reason to trust? A man known equally well to Julia Radcliffe … and a man Canning has often employed before?”

  He looked up from his contemplation of the flames. “D’Entraigues?”

  “I knew we should return to Emmanuel presently,” Eliza said comfortably. “For how else could we come to the jewels? Julia Radcliffe got them somehow!”

  “But why should d’Entraigues steal them?” Mr. Chizzlewit argued. “It should be the height of folly to do so!”

  “He needed something to lay as tribute on the Radcliffe altar,” Eliza suggested reasonably. “You told us yourself—the world entire is showering that girl with baubles and frivolities! And poor Emmanuel has not two guineas to rub together! But how diverting that his tribute should come directly back to his wife!”

  The solicitor shook his head. “D’Entraigues is too old a man of the game to preserve so dangerous a piece of evidence as that treasure. If he stood behind the Princess’s death, he must certainly deny all knowledge of her. The jewels alone might hang him.”

  “Then how came they to Julia Radcliffe?” Eliza demanded.

  “Is it not obvious?” I looked from my sister to Mr. Chizzlewit. “Princess Tscholikova gave them to her.”

  1 According to Austen historian Deirdre Le Faye, this may be Jane’s personal name for St. George’s, Five Fields, Chelsea. In Austen’s day this would have been on the edge of what is now Belgravia, and would have provided a pleasant walk.—Editor’s note.

  2 Carte blanche was a euphemism for unlimited financial support a man might offer his mistress; it implied an exclusive sexual tie in return for the maintenance of a courtesan’s lifestyle.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 23

  Willoughby’s Shade

  Monday, 29 April 1811

  ∼

  ELIZA’S FRIEND, MRS. LATOUCHE, IS A FAIR-HAIRED and plump little woman with protuberant blue eyes, who dearly loves to talk a good deal of nonsense about her health, her clothes, and her acquaintance among the ton. Born Mary Wilkes in Kingstown, Jamaica, she embarked at seventeen upon a storied career: marrying first Mr. Edward East, a widower with several children, to whom she dutifully presented two more, before his taking off with a fever peculiar to those island parts. In the handsome swell of her twenties, she bestowed her hand, her surviving child Miss Martha East, and her late husband’s considerable revenues from the production of sugar, upon Mr. John-James Digges-Latouche, also of Jamaica. Mr. Latouche eventually rose to such distinction as a Governor-Generalship of that island; when he died, his widow determined to sell her holdings and her slaves, and decamp for England—the better to puff off her daughter in a respectable marriage. But Miss East did not “take,” and the hopes that buoyed her first Se
ason in the year 1798, have long since gone off. Like me, she is now firmly upon the shelf, and appears to find that it quite suits her—a spinster lady of some five-and-thirty years, established in all the style and comfort of Portman Square. As she may expect to inherit her mother’s fortune when that lady’s aches and nerves put a period to her existence, Martha East is hardly to be pitied.

  She is decidedly unlike the round little Dresden doll that is Mrs. Latouche, being tall and angular, with what one must presume are her father’s sharp features. Moreover, Miss East is of a bookish disposition, quite formidable in her understanding—and has taken to wearing spectacles and a cap. In honour of Sunday dinner among friends, it was a lace cap; and Miss East looked very grand last night in her amber-coloured silk. She might almost have been headmistress of a school for girls, and her mother her incorrigible pupil.

  I am chiefly useful to Eliza on such evenings in monopolising Miss East’s attention, so that my sister might have a comfortable coze with Mrs. Latouche—and canvass all the latest spring fashions. Miss East, I observed, was armed and ready with conversation from the moment of our arrival in Portman Square, for she held in her hands a volume of Mary Brunton’s Self-Controul. 1

  “What do you think of this novel, Miss Austen?” she cried as I advanced with words of greeting unspoken on my lips. “It is everywhere praised as a piece of perfection; and tho’ I would hope I am more exacting in my tastes than the common run of humanity, I will own there is much to admire in the heroine—for rather than self-control, the author would champion self-reliance; and thus in Laura every woman must find a salutary model, do not you agree?”

  “I regret to say that I have not yet had the pleasure of reading Mrs. Brunton,” I said, “being unable to locate the set of volumes in my last expedition to Lackington’s. But how happy for the author that you find much to admire!”

  “The author?” Miss East repeated, as one amazed; “I confess I never think of the author when reading a book—my mind is wholly given over to the conduct of the characters, to the representation of life as one finds it for better or worse portrayed; I am wholly given up to the situations presented. The author never enters my consciousness—except, of course, when I am reading Scott.”

  “Indeed! I do not think Sir Walter Scott may be barred from anywoman’s consciousness,” I returned.

  “Only consider what perils to mind and virtue Laura must withstand!” Miss East shook her volume with enthusiasm. “First made the object of a rake’s unwelcome attentions—escaping seduction by a hairsbreadth—refusing marriage from that same disreputable (tho’ very dashing) gentleman when he sees the error of his ways—she attempts, as so many of us must, to live upon her own resources—and yet finds not a single lover of art willing to sell her paintings in the entire Metropolis! I am only just come to the part where she must escape the savage horrors of America in a canoe; but the whole is of the deepest moral instruction, I assure you. I should not hesitate to press it upon any young girl of my acquaintance, as a warning against the bitterness of the world.”

  I eyed the book somewhat dubiously, and wondered what best to say; but was happily forestalled by a bustle of arrival in the front passage.

  “That will be the Count. How tedious the interruption! But we shall talk more of literature later, I hope.”

  “The Count?”

  “Young Julien. He was supposed to bring his mother—but in the event, she is lying down with a sick headache.” My companion made a moue of distaste. “These elderly women and their disorders! I refuse to countenance Mamma’s continual appeals for attention, on the score of some megrim or another; but naturally she was inclined to sympathise with the Comtesse d’Entraigues, and accepted her refusal—tho’ Watkins had already laid the places—with her usual grace.”

  I glanced towards the door, and there he was: slim, elegant, dark-haired, and roguish of eye, with an exquisite air of fashion. He was bowed low over Eliza’s hand, his lips grazing it; then with a swift, laughing look he muttered something in French that caused her to giggle, and rap him with her furled fan.

  “Naughty boy! And my poor husband not twelve hours absent from London!” she cried. “Jane—come and say hello to Julien!”

  I approached the young Comte with a strange sensation of trepidation. Could this scion of a scheming roué and an opera singer be other than venal in his habits and intercourse? He was present only briefly in the drawing-room at Barnes when we descended upon Surrey a week ago, playing an air upon the pianoforte before quitting the house; Eliza had explained carelessly that a young man of nineteen could not be expected to spend his evenings with a parcel of dowds. I understood Comte Julien had set up his own establishment in the Albany, where any number of single gentlemen take rooms; but how he lived, when his parents’ pockets were entirely to let, must be cause for conjecture.

  “Miss Austen,” he said with a bow. “I am honoured to renew the acquaintance of one whom la Comtesse de Feuillide must always speak of with esteem and affection.”

  “The pleasure must be mine, monsieur,” I returned. “I hope your mother is not decidedly unwell?”

  “A trifling indisposition—the return of an old complaint.”

  “And your father, Julien?” Eliza put in with unusual acid. “Does he sit by her bedside, bathing her temples with lavender water?”

  The gentleman smiled as tho’ she had offered him a jest, and turned to greet Martha East.

  “Is he not a buck of the first stare?” Eliza murmured. “And but nineteen!”

  “He bears himself with the possession of a man twice that age.”

  “Your Frenchmen usually do. They are not suffered to run about with guns and dogs as our English boys will; their sport is of a deadlier kind, involving swords and hearts, and their apprenticeship is from infancy. I wonder where the old Comte has gone this evening?”

  “To sit at the feet of Miss Radcliffe.”

  “Let us hope she kicks him, then,” Eliza said, and went off to coze with Mrs. Latouche.

  “YOU HAVE QUITE THE LOOK OF YOUR EXCELLENT brother,” Count Julien observed, as the first covers were removed from the table. “He is from home, I collect?”

  “Yes—called away to Oxford, on a matter of banking business.”

  “And you are not uneasy? Forgive me—but the violence of the neighbourhood of Hans Town—the suicide of the Russian Princess—and your house now unprotected by a man—”

  “My brother left his valet in Sloane Street,” I answered evenly, “and the Princess died in Berkeley Square.”

  “Indeed. I was forgetting. My family was a little acquainted with the lady, you understand, and all I have heard in recent days is Hans Place.”

  “I suppose it is only natural for émigrés to know one another,” I observed.

  His smile twisted. “Our very un-Englishness makes us cling to one another? There is some truth in that, tant pis.”

  “I am sorry—I did not mean to offend—but her death must have come as a shock to all your family. I believe your mother felt it so.”

  “They were not on the best of terms,” he said, fixing his eyes on my countenance, “but I esteemed the lady, and pitied her loneliness. Yes, I felt her death to be a horror. I had seen her alive that very evening.”

  “At the Theatre Royal? I had not known you were one of your parents’ party.”

  “I sat in the pit, among my acquaintance,” he said simply. “But I do not think I noticed the Princess then. I saw her later in the courtyard of the Albany, where I have my rooms.”

  A frisson of interest swept up my spine, but I schooled my voice to indifference. “I wonder what she can have found to take her there?”

  He shrugged. “Un amant, n’est-ce pas? It is an abode for single gentlemen, after all; and at such an hour—it was all of two o’clock in the morning. Pauvre enfant. She was an unhappy woman.”

  This was the first hint of information I had been certain must elude us—a suggestion of the Princess’s tragic
course, in the hours between her first visit to Castlereagh’s house, and her death four hours later.

  “She was alone, I collect?”

  “Always—that night, and every night, no matter how many persons she gathered about her. La Tscholikova had a genius for solitude; she carried it, like the Russian winter, within her.”

  “What very extraordinary behaviour! I wonder whom she might chuse to visit in the Albany? Nothing of a friendship in that quarter was mentioned at the inquest.”

  His expression sharpened. “You attended the coroner’s panel?”

  “My brother was required to give evidence,” I said primly, “and I merely accompanied him, my sister being indisposed.”

  “I see.” He hesitated an instant, as tho’ weighing my words; then said, “Whomever she sought, she did not find him. She would not otherwise have been standing like a lost child in the courtyard.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “I did not. I was already in my rooms, vous comprenez, and observed her from the window. And as I watched, she turned and quitted the courtyard for the street. I assume she had a carriage waiting there—for she was still in evening dress.”

  It was remarkable how neatly he offered this intelligence, pat as a rehearsed recital, and I must be forgiven for meeting it with as much suspicion as interest. I studied Count Julien’s profile as he bent over his dinner, and noted once more the maturity behind the youthful façade—the look of a young man too well-acquainted with the world.

  “You are an admirable son to devote your evening to a parcel of dowds, Count. What is the meaning of such charity?”

  I had used the phrase deliberately, as reflecting Eliza’s careless remark, but in truth the insipid conversation of several women in their fifties, two spinsters nearly twice his age, and a clutch of gentlemen whose long association with Mrs. Latouche’s husbands recommended them to her society, must have proved unbearably tedious to the boy. I was certain some other interest compelled his attendance; and my evil genius whispered that he was come in the guise of spy—at his mother’s behest. Was it possible that the Comtesse d’Entraigues had learned to fear her oldest friend—Eliza?