Jane and the Genius of the Place Read online

  “His action, is it? Lord, Fanny, how you do go on. I suppose we have you to thank, Miss Sharpe, for this cunning miss’s tongue!”

  A look of horror suffused Miss Sharpe’s flushed cheeks, and she searched in vain for a word. Fanny’s governess cannot be more than two-and-twenty, and however proficient in French and instruction on the pianoforte, is possessed of a delicate constitution. She holds my amiable brother in something very like terror.

  “I should not have thought you equal to the mortification of the governess, Neddie,” Lizzy interposed quietiy. “You are usually possessed of better taste.”

  “I believe Henry deserves the credit of schooling Fanny’s tongue,” I quickly supplied, while Miss Sharpe sank back into her seat in confusion. “The children have acquired all manner of cant expressions in the short time he has been with us. I was treated to a sermon on the art of boxing this morning, from litde George—who offered to show young Edward his fives, and threatened to draw his cork, if he did not come up to scratch, and I know not what else. Miss Sharpe is hardly equal to Henry’s influence. She shall merely be forced to remedy it, when he has at last returned to Town.”

  “But, Papa—may not I accompany you to the rail?” Fanny persisted, having heard not above a word of the abuse visited upon her favourite uncle.

  “The Commodore’s action shall hardly be worth viewing, my dear,” Neddie said easily, “after the three heats he has already survived. We shall be in luck, does he finish the race at all.”

  “Nonsense!” Henry cried. “The horse was never fitter!”

  “But, Papa—”

  “Now, do not teaze, Fanny. You know it would never do. We shall return directly the race is run, for there is sure to be a crush in leaving the field, and the oppression of the weather is fearsome. I will not have your mother tired.” And with a forage into the picnic hamper for some bread and cheese, the two men set off for the rail.

  Fanny burst into tears and buried her head in Lizzy’s lap.

  “I suppose,” Lizzy observed distantly, while one hand smoothed her eldest’s bedraggled curls, “that a finer lady would lament the ruin of her best muslin at such a moment, and shriek for Miss Sharpe to come to her aid. But I have never been very fine in my ways, Jane.”

  “No,” I fondly replied, “only born to an elegance that is as natural as breathing, and that must serve as a lesson to all who meet you. The muslin shall survive, Lizzy, without the intervention of Miss Sharpe.”

  The governess was in no danger of hastening to her mistress’s aid, however, for her interest was entirely claimed by a scene unfolding well beyond the limits of the barouche. As I watched, Miss Sharpe drew a sudden breath, and clasped her gloved hands together as tho’ desperate for control. I glanced over my shoulder to discover what had so excited her anxiety—and found myself arrested in my turn.

  The lady in scarlet, whom I had remarked some time earlier, now stood upright in her elegant perch phaeton. Her countenance—which in easier moments might well have been judged lovely—was contorted with rage, and she held a whip poised in her right hand. A gendeman stood calmly at her carriage mount, as tho’ braced for the issue of her fury; and as I watched, the whip lashed down with a stinging sigh upon his very neck. Beside me, Anne Sharpe cried aloud, and then stifled the sound with her hand.

  Lizzy’s green eyes narrowed. “Whatever has Mrs. Grey got up to now?”

  “Mrs. Grey?”

  “The banker’s wife. She is capable of anything, I believe—”

  “She has just struck the gentleman by the phaeton with her riding whip. Are you acquainted with him?”

  “Not at all.” Lizzy sounded intrigued. “I have never seen him before in my life. A gendeman from Town, perhaps, come down to Kent on purpose for the races.”

  “He is possessed of the most extraordinary countenance,” I whispered. “But why should she abuse him in so public a manner? I cannot believe he offered her an insult—there was neither heat nor drunkenness in his looks.”

  Not a commanding figure, to be sure—for he was slight and taut as a greyhound, in his elegant coat of green superfine and his fashionable high-crowded hat. A young man of perhaps thirty, whose auburn hair fell loose to his shoulders, like a cavalier’s of another age. In these respects, he looked very much like any other gendeman of breeding who strolled about the race grounds; but in his aspect there was something more: an air of nobility and unguessed powers, that demanded a second glance.

  “Perhaps he has declined the offer of Mrs. Grey’s favours,” Lizzy murmured, “and she could not abide the affront. It would be in keeping with her reputation, I assure you.”

  As we watched, the scarlet-clad woman pushed angrily past the man she had injured, and hastened from the phaeton. He gazed after her a moment, his countenance devoid of expression, and then drew a handkerchief from within his coat. This he applied to a great weal standing out above the line of his neckcloth; and then, rather thoughtfully, his eyes shifted towards our own. He held our gaze some few seconds, and then, quite deliberately, raised his hat in acknowledgement.

  ‘Yes, Jane,” Lizzy breathed, “self-possession and nerve are in all his looks. I would give a great deal to know his name.”

  “Fanny,” Anne Sharpe said abruptly from the seat opposite, “you are crumpling your mother’s dress. Do come and sit by me, dear, and partake of the jellied chicken. I am sure this litde fit of temper is entirely due to your nerves. They cannot withstand such heat, you know, if you refuse Cook’s excellent luncheon.”

  “Some jellied chicken, Lizzy?” I enquired.

  “Every feeling revolts,” she said dismissively. Her eyes were still trained on the elegant young man, who had moved off through the crowd in the direction opposite to Mrs. Grey. “I shall never make a patroness of the turf, my dear Jane, for I find the stench of dust and dung very nearly insupportable. Without the parade of fashion that always attends such events, I should be bored to tears.”

  “Are you perhaps increasing again?” I enquired delicately.

  “Lord, no! That is all at an end, I am quite sure,” she retorted; but I thought her voice held a note of doubt. Lizzy’s ninth child is as yet a babe in arms; but at the age of two-and-thirty, she might expect any number in addition. “Perhaps some raspberry cordial.”

  I secured her the collation. “Fanny? Miss Sharpe? Some cake and cordial, perhaps?”

  My niece raised a tear-stained cheek. “I could not stomach a bite, Aunt Jane, from all the anxiety attendant upon his prospects.”

  “His prospects” her mother repeated in some perplexity. “Whose, my dear?”

  “I believe she means the horse, ma’am,” Miss Sharpe supplied in her gentle voice.

  “Such elevated language! You have been lending Fanny your horrid novels, Miss Sharpe, I am certain of it.”

  “Indeed not, I assure you, madam—merely Mrs. Palmerstone’s edifying letters to her daughters.”3 Anne Sharpe raised eyes full of amusement to my own, and I could not suppress a smile—for we had debated the merits of such writers as Mrs. Radcliffe and Madame D’Arblay for nearly an hour in the schoolroom, with Fanny pleading to borrow my subscription volumes of Camilla. I had pressed them, instead, upon Anne Sharpe—and did the governess often resort to horrid novels, I should be the very last to blame her. With the schooling of two small girls in her charge, and limited reserves of strength or health to aid her, she must find in the Austens’ exuberance a trial.

  Particularly since the Commodore had come to plague us all.

  A fearsome, snorting chestnut steed of nearly sixteen hands, the Commodore might be termed my brother Henry’s latest folly. Being a man of some means, well-established in banking circles, and possessed of an elegandy-aristocratic wife in my cousin Eliza, Henry aspires to the habits of the Sporting Set, and has gone in for horse-racing in its most vicious form. Not content with losing breathless sums at Epsom and Newmarket, he has gambled his all on a dearer stake—the possession of an actual beast.

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sp; Knowing litde of horseflesh, and still less of such points as action or blood, I have been rendered mute in almost every conversation since Henry’s arrival in Kent a week ago. He is full of nothing but the subject; and it has been all a matter of furlongs and oat mash and Tattersall’s betting room for a se’nnight.4 The children have caught a dose of the fever; Neddie himself is hardly immune; and never have I found dear Henry’s company so profoundly tedious. The flight of his wife, the litde Comtesse Eliza, to a shooting party in the North, suggests that she is as impatient for the fad’s decline as any of us. And so I prayed that the Commodore might stumble to his ruin in the present race, or perform as wretchedly as a carter’s nag, and thus save us all the trouble of adoring him.

  “It is too bad!” Fanny was craning over the carriage’s side for a view of the course. “In sitting at such a remove, we shall be denied the smallest glimpse of the Commodore’s triumph. I believe my heart shall break!”

  “My dear Fanny.” Miss Sharpe laid a gloved hand on her charge’s arm. “We are privileged in attending the meeting at all. Recollect that ladies must never approach the rail—it is not the done thing, and is left to the province of such hoydens as may claim neither rank nor breeding among their charms.”

  “Mrs. Grey may claim rank and breeding, Sharpie, and yet she is allowed the liberty of the grounds,” Fanny retorted. “I should not be so nice as you are, for a kingdom! Mrs. Grey for me!”

  And, indeed, the child spoke no more than the truth. The dark-haired beauty in the scarlet riding habit was strolling freely among the assembled carriages, with the eye of more than one gendeman lingering upon her wistfully. As we watched, she caught the banter of one and returned it playfully, her countenance alive with laughter. The brutal cut of a few minutes earlier was plainly forgotten. She appeared a ravishing young lady of exuberant spirits—forward, perhaps, but entirely in command of her circumstances.

  “Perhaps we should read a little of Palmerstone aloud,” Miss Sharpe suggested, with a slight note of reproof. She drew a volume from her reticule and patted the empty seat beside her. “Sit down by me, and endeavour to attend. I believe we left off at letter number twelve.”

  “Mrs. Grey has never read Palmerstone,” Fanny retorted darkly, but she sank down next to Miss Sharpe.

  “Mrs. Grey is not the pattern I should choose for your conduct, Fanny.” Lizzy’s words had the tenor of a scold, but I observed her mouth to twitch. “However dashing in moments, Mrs. Grey has notbeen gendy reared. She is a Frenchwoman, moreover, and her manners must be very different from ours.”

  Miss Sharpe commenced to read, in a quiet tone; and at that moment, I caught a glimpse of scarlet as Mrs. Grey passed to the rear of the governess’s bent head. As Lizzy and I watched her wordlessly, she approached a shabby-looking chaise but a hundred feet from our own. It was equipped with neither footman nor tyger, and but for its sweating team of matched bays, appeared all but deserted. At Mrs. Grey’s swift knock, however, the carriage door was thrust open by an unseen party within. With a swift glance about, the lady disappeared into the darkness, and the door closed sofdy behind her.

  “Good Lord!” Lizzy murmured. “So Laetitia Collingforth makes Franchise Grey her friend. This is news, indeed.”

  “Has she so little acquaintance among the neighbourhood?”

  “I am afraid that Kent has not embraced the Greys as it should,” Lizzy replied. “But, then, Mrs. Grey is very young—”

  “—and very French,” I concluded.

  Lizzy nodded abstractedly, her eyes still fixed on the shabby chaise. “That cannot be agreeable, at such a time.”

  The London papers have been full of nothing but the rumour of invasion the entire summer. Buonaparte’s dreaded army, which is said to number some one hundred thousand men, sits but a stone’s toss across the Channel from Kent, and many of the less stalwart families among our acquaintance have quitted the neighbourhood for safer regions far from the sea, until the danger should be passed.

  “A lesser woman than Mrs. Grey might find her situation awkward,” I observed, “and adopt a retiring appearance; but that has hardly been the lady’s choice.”

  Lizzy laughed abrupdy. “Retirement would never be Mrs. Grey’s preference. I fear she endures our company better than we suffer hers!—Tho’ I cannot think why she remains in Kent; London should prove a better field for her appetites and pursuits. Perhaps the country air suits her—or, more to the point, her horses.”

  “She has set up her stable?” I enquired.

  “—And is passionate about the turf. Some one of her racers is entered in the Commodore’s heat, no doubt, and thus we may account for her extraordinary behaviour in strolling about the meeting-grounds. She considers herself quite one of the Sporting Set, and spends a fortune, it is said, on the comfort of her mounts.”

  “Her husband must be in possession of easy circumstances, then.”

  “Mrs. Grey has never had the appearance of a pauper,” Lizzy observed enviously. “I, for one, cannot afford her modiste. My pin money should never run to such sums. You observed the cut of that habit, I presume? The quantity of gold frogging about the neck and bosom? And having displayed it to all of Canterbury, she should never presume to wear it again.”

  “Well, well.” I sighed. “The French are known for their ruinous habits, I believe. Perhaps she shall run through her husband’s fortune, and serve as spectacle for us all. We cannot do without a little amusement, the news from the Channel being so very bad.”

  Lizzy threw me a mocking glance. “We are not all without resources, Jane. Some little money attaches to the lady herself. She is said to be the ward of a French banking family—de Penfleur by name, although her own was Lamartine. Grey married her for her connexions, I believe.”

  The judgement was callously expressed, but was no more than Lizzy should serve upon any number of her acquaintance. It is rare to marry for love, as my brother has done. Calculation is the more general advocate of worldly alliance, as every baronet’s daughter must know.

  “She must be new to the neighbourhood,” I replied, “for I cannot think I have ever met her before.”

  “She has been resident in Kent but seven months, and her husband, Mr. Valentine Grey, acceded to his estate only three years ago. You may have heard me speak of it—The Larches. It is one of the finest places in England, Jane. Perhaps we shall pay a call there, one day, if you persist in your fascination for the lady.”

  I frowned. “The Larches! But is not that only a few miles from Goodnestone? How have we never come to meet them before?”

  Lizzy’s childhood home, Goodnestone Park, is a lovely old place some seven miles from Godmersham. Her elder brother, Sir Brooke-William Bridges, acceded to the tide nearly fifteen years ago, and at his marriage to a respectable young woman, Lizzy’s mother retired to Goodnestone Farm a mile distant from the great house. My sister Cassandra has been gone on a visit to Lady Bridges and her unmarried daughters this fortnight, but her letters have made no reference to any neighbours, near or far.

  “The Greys do not mix very much in Society, Jane. He is the principal member of a great banking firm— and however genteel a profession, it remains one that many still consider to be trade.” Lizzy glanced sidelong at this, to see how I should take it; for banker or no, Henry has always been my favourite brother, and I have no patience with snobbery of any kind. “And as Mr. Grey has been resident in these parts only a little while, moreover, he cannot be said to be truly of the neighbourhood.”

  “No,” I rejoined with a touch of irony, “for that he should have been forced to endure his infancy here, and have married the daughter of a local worthy—a Miss Taylor of Bifrons Park, perhaps, or one of the Wildmans of Chilham Castle.” Kent, for all its wealth and easy manners, can be a very closed society; it suffers from a touch of the provincial, as every country neighbourhood must.

  “Perhaps I have not done as much for Mrs. Grey as I ought,” Lizzy admitted, “but I like her too little to further
the acquaintance. She is far too young, far too pretty, and far too much of a temptation to the local bloods to stand my friend; such a woman must always be seen in the light of competition. I confess, Jane, that I have withdrawn from the field, rather than tilt with such an adversary.”

  “Lizzy! You may command any number of dashing young gentlemen with the slightest curl of your finger! You know it to be true!”

  “—Unless they have already accepted one of Mrs. Grey’s dangerous card-parties,” Lizzy retorted. ‘You can have no notion, Jane, of the fascination the woman exerts. My own brother has fallen victim to her charms; and yet, she cannot be more than two-and-twenty!”

  “—With all the cunning of a Countess Jersey,” I mused.5 “And Mr. Grey? He cares nothing for his wife’s reputation?”

  “Mr. Grey is often from home on business. He maintains a house in Town, and spends the better part of his time there. He is certainly not in evidence today.” Lizzy’s gaze roved restlessly among the crowd, and her attention was immediately diverted. “Only look! Captain Woodford and my brother!”

  “Captain Woodford! Uncle Bridges!” little Fanny cried, and sprang up from her perch near Miss Sharpe, waving a napkin at the pair. “Do come and tell us! How do the horses appear? Is the Commodore stamping to be off?”

  “They have not yet approached the starter’s mark, Miss Fanny,” Captain Woodford called jovially as he achieved the barouche, “but I have called upon your champion in his stall, and must declare him in excellent form! As worthy of the plate as any horse lately born. Ladies, your humble and devoted.” He swept off his hat with a smart military bow, and we murmured our salutations.

  Captain Woodford is a favourite with Lizzy—and did I not believe calculation and cunning quite beneath the daughter of a baronet, I should declare that she intends to secure him for her little sister Harriot. Though well past his first youth and decidedly not handsome, being marred by an eye patch that covers half his brow, the Captain is blessed in possessing a sunny nature that renders all misfortune delight, and cannot fail of finding solace in the simplest of pleasures. In Captain Woodford’s company one is always assured of good sense, good humour, and honest feeling. I like him the better for his eye patch, as being the outer mark of a life lived honourably in the service of his country.