Jane and the Canterbury Tale Read online

  Fanny could not have done better than to have accepted Julian Thane for the waltz; she must be in hot request for the remainder of the evening—provided Thane consented to part with her. He looked much as a lion might, that had felled a gazelle; and he was supremely indifferent to the rancour of his friends.

  “Young Thane is heir to Wold Hall, in Leicestershire,” Tylden supplied, “tho’ he inherited little enough but debt when his father went off—the old gentleman being as deep a gambler as ever lived. All the Thanes are sadly ramshackle, tho’ it does not do to say so on this happy occasion—Ah, Mr. Knight! Is not this an excellent ball? Are we not blessed in the amiability of our friends?”

  “Good evening, Tylden,” my brother Edward answered. “I have come to claim my sister for the waltz. She appears too handsome, indeed, to stand stupidly by with the rest of the chaperons. Dance with me, Jane?”

  I had watched Fanny often enough in recent days to have an idea of the steps, tho’ I had never attempted the waltz myself. I might have demurred, indeed—but here was Edward, a man of consequence in the neighbourhood, still handsome at six-and-forty, and from his lost expression, acutely lonely amidst the general revels. As I allowed him to lead me to the floor, I wondered for the thousandth time why my brother had not chosen some one, among the eligible ladies of his acquaintance, to marry. Five years had passed away since the death of his beloved Elizabeth, and still he mourned her. It was not for me to trespass on such private ground, with officious suggestions of companionship and suitable matches. I could only consent to partner him about the ballroom, when wretchedness pressed too hard upon him.

  “What do you think of that fellow commandeering Fanny?” he demanded, as he led me to the floor. “Is he an insufferable bounder, or a callow youth not yet up to snuff? I cannot like the steadiness of his hands, Jane—the sensation of grasping a lady’s waist ought to be novel enough to make him tremble with embarrassment, whereas that jackanapes is as cool as a cucumber! One would think he spent every evening with his fingers tangled in a lady’s bodice!”

  “Perhaps he does,” I said with amusement. “But you need never fear for Fanny; she is the soul of propriety. Confess, Edward—Mr. Thane is excessively handsome, and Fanny is enjoying herself hugely! I have not seen such an elegant fellow—or such brilliant indifference to publick opinion—since …” I paused, having been about to utter the words Lord Harold died, but supplied instead, “… my time in Brighton.”

  “Ah, so now Julian Thane’s the equal of Lord Byron, is he? My cup runneth over.” Edward glanced darkly at the pirouetting pair. “Poor Fanny is aflame with blushes!”

  “Edward,” I chided, “she is merely flushed with the exercise! You refine too much upon a trifle—the waltz is everywhere accepted at private parties now, and Fanny looks very well as she turns about the room. How her mother should have delighted in it! Such a picture as she makes!”

  I had long thought privately that Fanny was too little seen, too little known, beyond the circle of her intimate acquaintance in Kent. She ought to have had a true London Season, with a hired house and vouchers for Almack’s—but such an establishment was not to Edward’s taste. It was unfortunate that one of her mother’s relations did not take Fanny under her wing, and chaperon her about the Marriage Mart, for Elizabeth had been of baronet’s blood, and her family might claim the notice of the Great—but I could not raise the subject without being assured that Fanny was perfectly content with her lot. Of course she was! It was not in her nature to find fault with circumstance. Fanny was apt to be grave and sober, when she ought to have been dreaming and frivolous; and for my part, I rejoiced to see her spinning about the room as tho’ her feet had grown wings. Little danger that so circumspect a child should let a man of Julian Thane’s stamp run away with her.

  Edward’s eyes followed his daughter as he clasped my hand and waist. “She looks nothing like Elizabeth, you know. Too much Austen in her for real beauty. But she’ll do. By God, she’ll do. My Lizzy would be content, I think. I haven’t failed them all entirely, Jane, have I?”

  “Impossible, dearest.”

  But when he dragged his gaze from Fanny, I saw that the lost look had not entirely left my brother’s eyes. And I feared that it would remain with him forever.

  Perhaps, I thought, as my feet found the music, there really were such things, once, as marriages made in Heaven.

  IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN CAPTAIN MACCALLISTER besought the attention of our entire party, to offer a short speech of thanks. He was supported by his hosts, Mr. and Mrs. James Wildman—he an elderly man victimised by gout, and she a handsome woman of easy manners, much given to company and gossip. It could be no surprize that the Wildmans had insisted upon throwing a ball in their cousin’s honour; they were forever looking for an excuse to welcome half the neighbourhood at their board.

  “I am no Kentishman,” MacCallister commenced, “but from the kindness shewn me in recent weeks, could imagine myself an intimate of the neighbourhood from birth; and my gratitude is boundless. When duty and honour call me far from home, when the heat of battle rages about me and my thoughts revert to blessed days of happiness, Chilham shall hold no small corner in my heart. Indeed, it shall stand as the place I owe the greatest joy any man may claim.”

  At this, he took the hand of Adelaide, and raised it to his lips with such an expression of mingled pride and humility that I wonder she was not overcome. “To the lady,” he cried, “who has made me the happiest of men, in consenting to be my wife—may she live long in beauty!”

  “Hear, hear,” murmured the attendant company, and it seemed to me a sigh ran lightly about the room, as tho’ a faint breeze had passed over it.

  I sipped at my champagne, and found my eyes drawn to the figure of a woman. Still handsome despite her advancing years, she stood a little removed from the family party of Wildmans and Thanes; a stately lady enough, with a strong aquiline nose and hair the colour of iron, whose shoulders were wrapped tightly in a costly Paisley shawl. She was a stranger to me. And yet there was something tantalisingly familiar in her looks—a haughtiness that suggested she cared for nobody.

  “Edward,” I whispered. “Who is that lady, to the rear of Captain MacCallister? She looks capable of commanding an army—indeed, I should not be surprized to learn she was the soldier’s mother!”

  “There you would be out, Jane—for she is the mother of the bride.”

  “Of course!” I said with sudden comprehension, tho’ the lady looked nothing like Adelaide. “She puts me more in mind of her son, Julian Thane—the one who was waltzing with Fanny.”

  “Waltzing,” Edward said testily, “and claiming the next two dances, until that excellent John Plumptre was forced to intervene—which is most particular and unbecoming behaviour in Thane, do not you think? That young buck has the air of a hound who will not be turned from the hunt, once he has caught the scent—”

  “And so you have taken a strong dislike to him,” I rejoined. “You have nothing to fear in Fanny’s good sense, and surely she could do with a bit of flattering attention, Edward. She is twenty, after all.”

  Very well, I will confess that I cherish a certain anxiety regarding Fanny—who so ably filled the post of mother to her ten younger brothers and sisters, as to be almost spinster-like in the very bloom of her youth. My anxiety is that she will end her days like my sister, Cassandra, or God forbid, like me: Content enough, to be sure, and freed of all the cares attendant upon marriage and children—but lingering, and dwindling, on the fringe of a world she once claimed as her birthright. I could not bear for Fanny to be merely everyone’s aunt. And her apprenticeship in that order was already marked: She had been so busy preparing the boys for Winchester, and compelling the girls to see the London dentist, and ordering the cook which joints were for the table, and which for the kitchen, and overseeing the stillroom, and ensuring that her father’s every comfort was met, so that he might be observed to feel the loss of his cherished wife as little as pos
sible—that the poor child was quite worn out. Fanny had been forced to the management of a great household at too young an age, and it was a wonder she did not choose the sanctuary of a convent, over the gaieties of a ball.

  Further debate was suspended, however, for the bride had chosen to speak.

  Adelaide’s voice was clear and deep, with a musical timbre, and her white hand seemed almost translucent as she lifted her glass.

  “To my gallant husband, Captain Andrew MacCallister—may God preserve him from harm as he serves King and Country, and return him to this loving heart, which has such cause to know his unexampled worth.”

  We drank to this, and had only just drained our glasses dry, when a singular interruption occurred.

  A footman belonging to the Castle made his way through the throng, bearing a curious item on a silver tray. It was a small silken pouch of a warm rosy colour, intricately embroidered in gold threads, and knotted with tassels. The servant’s object was clearly Adelaide MacCallister, and as she watched him approach, her lips curved in a smile as tho’ she was expecting a childish treat. If the peculiarity of the purse being delivered in the midst of a ball were not enough to silence the assembled guests, the bride’s response certainly was.

  “Is this your doing, Andrew?” she demanded as the footman bowed, and presented his prize.

  But her husband laughingly declined all knowledge of the gift.

  “Very well,” she cried. “Whom must I thank for this beautiful reticule? Some one of our guests? Or—Julian! Have you made over to me all your unscrupulous winnings, from playing at lottery tickets with our dashing cousins?”

  There was a ripple of amusement from the onlookers, but no Julian Thane appeared to answer his sister; he must be absent from the ballroom.

  “How came this here?” the bride asked as she took up the silken pouch.

  “I received it of a stranger at the front door, ma’am,” the footman said.

  Mrs. MacCallister’s eager fingers stilled, and to my surprize, I saw the colour slowly ebb from her cheeks.

  “A gift to the bride on the occasion of her wedding, the man said.”

  “Man? What sort of man?”

  “A common enough fellow, ma’am. He did not give his name—and I neglected to ask it, perceiving him to be merely the bearer of another’s gift.”

  She nodded faintly, and took the thing from the tray—but with an expression of such dread on her countenance now that I felt an answering chill trace its finger along my spine.

  “My darling,” Captain MacCallister murmured. “Are you unwell?”

  “Nothing I regard.” She loosed the strings of the pouch with deft fingers, and tipped the contents into her palm.

  If I had expected a pile of rubies, I was fated to disappointment. The pouch contained nothing but a quantity of dark brown beans, rather like coffee only twice as large; several slipped from Adelaide MacCallister’s fingers, and scattered on the ballroom floor.

  A murmur of conjecture rose from the assembled guests, and I glanced at my brother Edward, curious to know what he made of the anonymous gift; his eyes were narrowed, but his countenance betrayed only a vague puzzlement. I imagine all of the observers felt the same.

  Swiftly, the bride tipped the brown pods back into the embroidered pouch and knotted the tassels with fingers that seemed almost nerveless. Then she turned with a brilliant smile and called, “Pray let us have music! The night is young, and we must dance!”

  “My darling—” Captain MacCallister attempted, but she held up one hand in mute refusal. As the guests turned in search of partners and the strains of a violin rose around us once more, I observed Adelaide MacCallister make her way haltingly from the ballroom, her husband staring after her in confusion.

  The bride had not entirely quitted the place, however, before her formidable mother intercepted her. I may have imagined it—my eyesight is not what it was in earlier days, alas—but I would swear that Mrs. Thane slipped the offending pouch from her daughter’s hand.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Shooting-Party

  Jealous folk have always been dangerous people—

  Or at least that’s what they want their wives believing.

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “THE STEWARD’S TALE”

  THURSDAY, 21 OCTOBER 1813

  IT WAS NEARLY TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WHEN THE carriage drew up before the doors of Godmersham Park, and I confess I retired immediately, regretting that the fire in the Yellow Room’s grate had turned entirely to ash. The Yellow is generally my bedchamber, or Cassandra’s, when we are come to stay with Edward in Kent—and a very comfortable room it is, only not in the dead of night, when the buttercup hue of the silk hangings are entirely devoid of warmth, and the autumn draughts are hurrying along the Great House’s corridors like so many unquiet souls.

  Fanny’s maid was sitting up in expectation of her, but having accepted of the sleepy girl’s services only long enough to know my tedious length of buttons was undone, I stepped out of my wine-coloured silk and straight into bed. My endurance for such endless amusements dwindles with each passing year; I have not endeavoured to make a study of insomnia, or cultivated the practice of judicious napping upon the sopha each afternoon, that I might hope to shine in Society.

  In this I must be a sad disappointment to Fanny, whose spirits remained so elevated throughout our brief carriage ride home—Chilham being but a few miles from Edward’s estate—that in her mind it might have been only eight o’clock, and the whole evening before us.

  I did not neglect to twit her on the immensity of one of her conquests.

  “Mr. Thane?” She spoke airily, with an insouciance I failed to credit for an instant. “He is very elegant, to be sure, but I could not be entirely easy in his company, Aunt. He lacks … conversation.”

  “Conversation?” her father repeated, indignantly. “Manners and all sense of propriety are what he lacks, my girl—and don’t you mistake!”

  Fanny opened her eyes very wide; I detected a hint of a smile about the corners of her mouth, but could not be certain of this; the glow of a carriage’s side-lamps will make of every shadow a genii.

  “Papa!” she exclaimed. “Do not tell me you were put out by Mr. Thane’s air of town bronze?”

  “Town bronze! Is that what you call it?”

  “Oh, not I,” Fanny assured Edward innocently. “It was Mr. Tylden who described him thus. The clergyman, you know. He informed Mrs. Wildman that Mr. Thane displayed the very best sort of ton.”

  “—For a sadly ramshackle family,” I murmured almost inaudibly. It seemed Mr. Tylden suited his praise to his auditors.

  “I thought Mr. Thane excessively handsome,” piped up Harriot Moore, from the corner of the conveyance, where she was quite crushed against the bulk of her husband.

  “But as personal perfection invariably masks a host of worldly faults,” returned George Moore coolly, “we cannot suppose Mr. Thane possesses even one amiable quality.”

  I have neglected to mention the Moores until this moment, which would sadly discomfit one of them. Mr. Moore is a tiresome creature in his early forties, the son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, and tho’ commendable for the gravity of his thoughts and the depth of his understanding—neither of which I should attempt to deny—he is sadly wanting in a sense of humour. Mr. Moore is rather too apt to stand upon ceremony, and consider what is his due in matters of precedence, and the deference that ought to be shewn to the son of so august a prelate—a prince of the Church. As he is unlikely to attain those heights his father once commanded, despite taking Holy Orders, I must suppose that an insistence upon precedence and deference are all that are left him. But I cannot abide a clergyman who must harp upon the grim vicissitudes of human existence, and neglect to revel in its absurdities. For what else do we live, if not to make sport of our neighbours, and be laughed at by them in turn?

  Harriot Moore is a very different creature than her husband, sweet-natured and loving and a trifle
simple-minded, tho’ generally prized as being the youngest sister of Edward’s cherished Elizabeth. She is Mr. Moore’s second attachment, and a full ten years her husband’s junior. Harriot makes it her business to be as much in company at Godmersham as Mr. Moore will allow. On the present occasion, the pair have been staying with us nearly a week, with the object of attending the wedding at Chilham, for both Harriot and George Moore have long been on excellent terms with the Wildman family.

  “I was sadly disappointed in Mr. Tylden’s sermon,” he declared, turning the conversation adroitly from Julian Thane and his disputed degree of polish. “I thought it dwelt too much upon the temporal, and too little upon the sacred aspects of matrimony. Had I been offered the duty of uniting such an ill-sorted pair as that soldier and Mrs. Fiske, I should have known where my conscience lay—I should have abjured them sternly to cast off the enticements of the Fashionable World, and prepare rather for the inevitable end of their earthly toils.”

  “But is not that your funeral text, dearest?” Harriot enquired with pardonable bewilderment.

  “You do not, then, regard an excess of gallantry and beauty as the perfect foundation for conjugal bliss?” I demanded, with a mental wink at Mr. Tylden.

  “Both have brought Mrs. Fiske—I should say Mrs. MacCallister—nothing but grief in the past,” Moore replied.

  “You are acquainted with the lady, I apprehend.”

  He shrugged. “Only a little, and quite long ago.”

  “Pshaw!” cried Harriot gaily. “You were in love with her, George, before she consented to have Fiske! And the merest child Adelaide must have been, too—no more than seventeen, and you a widower in your thirties! I am sure I shock you, Jane,” she confided, leaning a little across her husband, “but I ran a very poor second to Adelaide Fiske, when Mr. Moore looked about him for another wife. I was six-and-twenty, you know, and long since on the shelf.”