Jane and the Barque of Frailty Page 2

  The question arose with a pang. At five-and-thirty I cannot pretend to any beauty now. My evening dress of blue, the beaded band encircling my forehead, the flower tucked into my hair—arranged with all the genius Eliza’s French maid could command— is yet nothing to draw the eye. One must be possessed of extraordinary looks or a great deal of money to figure in London. Had his lordship lived, he might have called at No. 64 Sloane Street, as he condescended to do in Bath and Southampton—and left his card as my Willoughby does for Marianne—but in the Greater World Lord Harold’s notice may have been denied to me.

  I like to think, however, that he would have approved of my book. It was always an object with Lord Harold that I should write.

  “Blue-deviled, Jane?” my brother Henry enquired gently as he reappeared in the box. “We have been leading you quite the dance these past few weeks. I daresay you’re wishing yourself back in Hampshire!”

  “Not at all,” I replied, banishing my ghost with effort. “You know me too well for a frivolous character, Henry, to imagine me ungrateful when such divine absurdities are laid at my feet! What writer worthy of the name should prefer the confined and unvarying circle of the country to this? Only observe Eliza’s French count, old d’Entraigues, paying court before Mr. George Canning—and he no longer Foreign Minister, with favours to bestow. Observe Lady Castlereagh endeavouring to ignore the fact that Beau Brummell and the Ponsonbys prefer Harriette Wilson’s box to hers! But tell me— who is that woman with the aquiline nose and jewelled tiara, quite alone in the seat opposite? She cannot tear her regard from Lord Castlereagh. I should consider her excessively rude, did I not imagine her to be a princess of the blood royal, and thus beyond all censure.”

  “A princess indeed,” my brother replied with a careless gesture of his quizzing-glass, “but not of the Hanoverian line. You have detected a Russian noblewoman, my dear—the Princess Evgenia Tscholikova. She is resident in London nearly a year, and may be claimed as one of our neighbours—for she has taken a house in Hans Place, hard by Sloane Street.”

  “A princess, rusticating in the oblivion of Hans Place!” I declared. “I should rather have expected Berkeley Square, or Brook Street at the very least.”

  “Her means, no doubt, are unequal to her station.”

  “But why does she gaze at Lord Castlereagh so earnestly? His lady certainly does not notice the Princess; and the gentleman is deep in conversation with another.”

  “That is like Evgenia,” broke in the Comtesse d’Entraigues, with a disparaging glance at me over her bare shoulder. “The Princess will always be playing the tragic actress, non? A man has only to spurn her, to become the most ardent object of her soul.”

  Eliza rapped her friend’s knuckles with a furled fan. “You will shock my sister, Anne. Do not be letting your tongue run away with you, I beg.”

  “But surely you have seen the papers, Eliza?” The Comtesse’s voice was immoderately loud; several heads turned. “It is everywhere in the Morning Post, if one has eyes to see and the mind to understand. The Princess’s letters to Castlereagh—most importunate and disgusting, the very abasement of a woman in the throes of love—were sold to the Post but a few days ago. The editors would disguise the principals in the affair, of course—as ‘Lord C——,’ and ‘the Princess T——,’ but the truth is known among the ton. Evgenia has disgraced herself and his lordship. Lord Castlereagh has only to conduct himself as usual, to silence the impertinent; but I wonder that she dares to show her face.”

  The malice behind the words was sharp and pitiless; a worse enemy than the Comtesse d’Entraigues I should not like to encounter, and of a sudden my sympathy went out to the Russian noblewoman, who alone among the Great at the Theatre Royal was lapped in a chilly solitude, no friend to support her. I, too, had read the salacious excerpts in the Morning Post, but lacking all familiarity with the ton, had no ability to put a name or face to the initials. My cheeks flushed with consciousness as I recalled a part of the correspondence. My limbs burn with the desire to lie once more entangled in your own … There is nothing I would not sacrifice, would not risk, for the touch of your lips on my bare skin … I can hardly write for anguish, I tremble at the slightest glimpse of you in publick, my dear one, desperate to have you alone … However abandoned the prose, it was vile to consider of it strewn before the publick eye.

  “What I desire to learn,” I said indignantly, “is who should undertake to traffick in a lady’s intimate correspondence?”

  “Her maid, perhaps—if the girl was turned off without a character,” suggested Eliza.

  “But Castlereagh was the recipient of the letters,”

  Henry objected, “which must point to a culprit in his lordship’s household.”

  “Unless he returned the Princess’s correspondence,” I offered.

  “I will lay odds on it that she sold them herself,” the Comtesse d’Entraigues pronounced viciously. “She would enjoy the fame, however black.”

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

  “Twenty years, at least. She has the habit of inserting herself in my affairs; I will not deny that I abhor the very sight of her.” The Comtesse rose abruptly, smoothed out her silk gown, and said, “Eliza, I will wait upon you in Sloane Street tomorrow. Do not fail me.”

  Eliza bowed her head in acknowledgement, and the Comtesse swept away—the curtain being about to rise on the second act, and all further conversation being impossible in the presence of Sarah Siddons, and the blood that stained her hands.

  BY THE MORNING I HAD ENTIRELY FORGOT RUSSIAN princesses and French countesses, their affairs of the heart or their implacable hatreds—for it was Tuesday, the twenty-third of April, and thus the very date determined by Eliza nearly two weeks before, for an evening of musical entertainment, the professional performers to include a player upon the harp, one upon the pianoforte, and a succession of glees, to be sung by Miss Davis and her accompanists. The evening was intended as a sort of tribute to Mr.

  Henry Egerton—no relation to the publisher of my book, but the son of one of Henry and Eliza’s friends—and Henry Walter, a young gentleman who is a cousin in some degree to all of us. I like to refer to the party as “the evening of the three Henrys,” and have served my hostess best by staying out of the way. There is a great deal to be done—the final orders to the cook, the shifting of a quantity of furniture from the passage and drawing-rooms, the disposition of chimney lights—but at ten o’clock in the morning Eliza and I paused to draw breath, and to drink a cup of tea. Eliza has suffered the slight indisposition of a cold, resulting no doubt from the necessity of quitting the coach briefly on our journey into Surrey Sunday evening—it being a chilly night, and the horses jibbing at some rough paving on the hill prior to the descent into the village, and all of us forced to stand about in the cold air while the coachman went to the leaders’ heads and led them over the broken ground. Eliza’s nose is streaming, and she will not be in looks this evening for her party—a vexation she is happily able to disregard, in all the bustle of preparing for her guests.

  “Here is Henry,” she said impatiently as my brother stepped into the breakfast room, the morning paper under his arm, “come to eat up all the toast! I dare swear you smelled the bread baking halfway down Sloane Street, and hurried your feet to be in time.”

  I held out my plate, but Henry was not attending to Eliza’s teazing words. His face was very white, and his countenance unwontedly sober.

  “What is it?” his wife demanded with sudden perspicacity. “You look entirely overset, my dearest. Surely it is not—not one of the family?”

  Henry shook his head, and set the newspaper on the table. “Nothing so near, thank God. But terrible, for all that. I suppose it is because we saw her only last evening. I cannot get over how alive she was, at the Theatre Royal … ”

  As one, Eliza and I bent over the Morning Post. And read, in implacable print, the news: the Princess Tscholikova was dead—her throat slit and he
r body thrown carelessly on the marble steps of Lord Castlereagh’s house.

  1 In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, dated April 25, 1811, Jane states that Henry gave up their tickets for this performance, and that she was unable to see Mrs. Siddons—a curious prevarication, in light of this text.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 2

  Blood and Ministers

  Tuesday, 23 April 1811

  ∼

  “HOW VERY DREADFUL,” ELIZA BREATHED. SHE SET down her plate of toast and pressed her hand to her heart. “And to think she lodged but a few steps from our door! How thankful I am that she was not killed at home!”

  “ Was it murder, Henry?” I enquired.

  “The editors would intimate suicide. The Princess is believed to have done herself a violence after being refused admittance to his lordship’s household.”

  “But at what hour?” I reached for my brother’s Post. “Only consider—she cannot have importuned Castlereagh on the very steps of his home, even at the close of Mrs. Siddons’s play, and not been remarked by all the world! London does not go to bed so early as one o’clock!”

  “Neither would she have sought an interview with his lordship at dawn, Jane.” Henry frowned. “Yet her body was found by a charley in Berkeley Square at a few minutes past five o’clock in the morning.” 1

  “She might have lain there some time, I suppose. Does a London watchman make regular rounds?”

  Eliza sniffed. “Never if he may avoid it. The charleys, as you will observe, are elderly louts. I cannot recollect ever meeting with one in the lawful conduct of his duties—even when we resided in Upper Berkeley Street, which you must know, Jane, is most select. We must account it the merest mischance that the Grosvenor Square man stumbled upon the body at all.”

  The Post had furnished its readers with a small line drawing of the Princess, in full evening dress, her looks ghastly and her torn throat dark with inky blood. The editors were amply recompensed for their part in the poor creature’s ruin; her violent end should sell numerous copies.

  “And was this revenge?” I mused. “Her character destroyed by the publication of her correspondence, did the Princess think to shatter Lord Castlereagh’s peace? Prick his conscience? Shame his wife? Or was she simply mad with grief?”

  “All Russians are mad,” Eliza observed.

  “She did not appear to be out of her senses last evening, however. Recollect her earnest gaze! Princess Tscholikova greatly desired to be private with his lordship—but could have no opportunity. It must be impossible to command Castlereagh’s notice in so publick a venue as the Theatre Royal. Did she seek him, then, on his very doorstep? And to what purpose?”

  “It cannot look well, her having been found at his lordship’s,” Eliza said doubtfully. “If the world fails to credit the notion of suicide, Lord Castlereagh must be suspect.”

  “Fiddlestick,” I retorted. “Why should a gentleman of high estate—heir to an earldom, and known to be powerful among government circles—chuse to discard the body of his mistress in his own entryway? It will not do, Eliza, and you know it. Throw the lady into the Thames, by all means, but do not leave her lying about for the charley to find. Besides, Lord Castlereagh has no need of murder. He is the sort of man so complaisant in his own regard, as to consider the denial of his society as punishment enough.”

  “What is this?” Henry cried. “Is Jane to ridicule a Tory minister? And she such a staunch opponent of the Regent and his Whiggish friends!”

  “I cannot admire Lord Castlereagh,” I admitted, “Tory tho’ he is; and he has not been in government these many years, for which we are taught to be thankful. The little fact of his having a mistress is as nothing to his want of brilliance in oratory; and you well know, Henry, that his conduct of the Walcheren campaign was everywhere deplored. 2 The Great World did not mourn when he resigned the post of Minister of War.”

  “—Because he afforded the Great World such sport, in throwing over his political career!” my brother countered. “Consider, Jane, his treatment of Mr. Canning! Surely the violence he showed on that occasion is a great deal more to the present point, than all your talk of oratory?”

  “You would refer to the celebrated duel, I suppose.” It has been nearly two years since Lord Castlereagh, incensed at the poor opinion of his fellow minister, George Canning, called out the latter to defend his honour on a ground of his lordship’s chusing. Pistols at dawn might seem a dubious method of debating Cabinet policy, but both gentlemen are Irish, and Castlereagh is renowned for his temper.

  “He refused all the Seconds’ attempts to mediate,”

  Henry persisted, “and could not be satisfied until he had fired twice, and winged Mr. Canning in the thigh. I have it on excellent authority that poor Canning had never held a pistol before in his life! —Compared to the wilful attack upon the Foreign Minister, the cutting of a woman’s throat is as nothing.”

  “But why should Castlereagh put himself to the trouble?” I demanded. “Recollect what Eliza’s friend said last evening: Lord Castlereagh has only to conduct himself as usual, to silence the impertinent. Why should he resort to violence at all?”

  “The Post ascribes the Princess’s end to self-murder,” Eliza interjected, “and self-murder it undoubtedly was! Retire to your book room, Henry, and leave us in peace. We shall neverbe ready for our musical evening, and we do not make haste!”

  IN ALL THE WORRY OF PROCURING A SUITABLE QUANtity of Naples biscuit, and tasting the ratafia syllabub we intended to serve once the music should be done, and colluding with Eliza’s maid, Manon, in the fashioning of a cunning headdress—not to speak of a stolen hour spent reading through my printer’s proof—I might have put the gruesome death in Berkeley Square entirely out of mind. I should thus have avoided a period of tiresome activity, meddlesome impertinence, and no little danger to myself; and I might have remained in happy ignorance of the depravity and betrayals of the Polite World, quitting London much as I found it: secure in my view that the Metropolis was replete with honourable and godly people, whose predilection for frivolity was no more to be despised than a child’s affection for playing at spillikins. But it was not to be. The death of Princess Evgenia Tscholikova obtruded on my notice at a few minutes before two o’clock, with the arrival of the Comtesse d’Entraigues’s carriage at our door.

  The Comtesse, as I have said, was not to be of our party that evening. Eliza had solicited her old friend for the honour of her song, but Anne de St.-Huberti affected humility; she never sang before strangers, she protested, but only in the intimacy of her own home, and only before chosen friends. Having heard her in voice on Sunday evening, I will confess to relief that the Comtesse was not to sing for Mr. Egerton and our guests; her instrument cannot now be what it was.

  I hastily stowed the pages of my book beneath a circulating novel that lay discarded on the drawing-room table, and rose to greet the visitor.

  “Mes chères amies,” the Comtesse sang out as she sailed into the room, a swansdown muff negligently disposed on one arm, “what dreadful weather you have for your evening, non? It comes on to rain! You will be fortunate indeed if half your guests venture out into the streets! And my dear Eliza, how swollen and red your nose!”

  I foresaw a similar vein of conversation, richly mined by the Comtesse’s malice; and being unable to explain Eliza’s attachment to Anne de St.-Huberti— unless it be an affection for some memory of her own glorious career at Versailles, before Louis’s fall— I determined to salvage what I could of the day and my own peace.

  “Eliza is decidedly unwell,” I observed, “and ought to be laid down upon her bed, with hot lemonade and sticking plaster. Indeed, I was just upon the point of quitting the house for the apothecary. You will forgive me, Countess, if I go about my errand … ”

  “But of course,” the lady said earnestly, her gloved claw clasping my fingers. “It is always the office of the spinster sister, non, to sacrifice herself to her wretched family? You are admirabl
y suited to the role, my dear Jane. You will darn the socks to perfection, and nurse other people’s children without a thought for yourself. Run along while I amuse la pauvre Eliza with every sort of scandalous nonsense.”

  If I did not utter a retort that should set the harpy’s ears to flaming, I may say it was from a sense of what I owed my brother Henry: those precious typeset pages carefully concealed beneath an overturned book. He is the most excellent of brothers, Henry—however many dubious females he may admit into his house.

  I DID NOT HAVE FAR TO SEEK FOR MR. HADEN, THE apothecary and surgeon, as his shop was directly next to Henry’s home—at No. 62 Sloane Street. I might have despatched my errand with alacrity, had I been desirous of returning to the Comtesse d’Entraigues and her repellant conversation; but I had been within doors all day, and fretted at my confinement. For nearly two years now I have been accustomed to walking the lanes of Chawton, in mire or dust, in pursuit of the post, or acquaintance, or the broader delights of neighbouring Alton. I rejoice in the daily revelations of the garden in such a season as this: the tentative spurt of sunshine; the first daffodils waving in the stiff breeze; the inadvertent torrents; the appearance of the bluebells. London, with its fashionable throng, its noise and dirt, its persistent and impenetrable fogs, its rackety business of carriages and midnight hours, is a type of enjoyment to which one must be schooled. I might in youth have relished the heady excitement of money and power that is here everywhere on parade; but in my more sober years—in the fullness of my womanhood—I cannot ignore the immense want I see in the pinched faces of the streets, nor the gin-soaked decrepitude of the women and men who beg at every corner. There is a ruthlessness to London life perfectly in keeping with its glittering masters: I thought once more of the Princess Tscholikova, her blood running down the steps of one of the most exalted residences in Town—and shivered in my pelisse.