Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron jam-10 Page 28

  Mona uttered a shocked exclamation of sympathy.

  “You may imagine how I felt,” Morley said in a low voice. “Indignation—outrage—on the point of personal honour, and family pride—Had he been anyone but a senior officer, I should have thrown my glove in his face. As it was—I bade him goodnight with the barest civility and showed myself out of the old blackguard’s rooms.

  “I loitered in the Pavilion’s foyer a moment, in the hope that Catherine might descend, and require an escort home. I wish to God I had waited longer! I must have missed her only by moments.”

  The Pavilion footman responsible for the door that evening should of course corroborate this, did we ask.

  “But Catherine did not appear, and I had no business disturbing Lady Caroline. I recollected I was expected on the Parade Ground to train some raw recruits early the next morning, and slipped regretfully out the door. The stable clock had just finished tolling the half-hour.”

  “And General Twining was nowhere in sight?”

  Morley hesitated, then continued with marked distaste. “In fact, he had lain in wait for me, if you will credit it. He stepped forward out of the shadows and offered me such abuse—the sort of violent obscenities only a man in his cups should utter—that I so far forgot myself, as to knock him down. No doubt that was his very object, that he might have the pleasure of calling me up before a court-martial.”

  “You struck the General?” Mona cried gleefully; she seemed to regard a mill as excellent sport.

  Morley smiled at her sadly. “He was excessively foxed, I fear—Hanger is notorious for a deep drinker, and the General had been keeping pace with his old comrade. Indeed, he was so unsteady as to take the blow full on the chin, and lose his footing—and once he fell, appeared senseless. I was horrified enough at the result of my actions to search for a pulse—satisfied myself that he breathed still—and then left him. My feelings were so uncharitable towards General Twining at the time, that I had no interest in aiding him—and hoped he should suffer acutely from the head-ache in the morning.”

  Mona laughed delightedly, and her team seemed to take some of their excitement from her—slipping into a canter that hurtled the precarious phaeton down the road towards the sea.

  “And then?” I gasped, clutching at my seat as Mona sawed at the ribbons. The chestnuts dropped back into a walk.

  “I returned to the Castle, where I had stabled Intrepid,” Morley said, patting his charger’s neck. “We must already have achieved our road home when Catherine—when she quitted the Pavilion, entirely alone.… How Lady Caroline can have allowed it …”

  “As to that,” Mona began—but I pinched her near arm and she shot me a look of enquiry. I gave my head the slightest shake. There was no need to inform the Captain of Byron’s appearance in Caro Lamb’s rooms. Morley appeared in ignorance of it, and I had no wish to heighten his conviction that Byron was a killer.

  We had reached the final descent into Brighton when the Captain drew rein, and doffed his hat.

  “Will you not dine with us this evening, Captain?” Mona asked, at her most engaging.

  “I should enjoy nothing better,” he said, “but must decline the invitation—I do not have leave. Indeed, I have neglected my duties already too long. I shall be fortunate not to be thrown in the stocks! But I could not resist the chance to speak of Catherine to a few who knew her—and wished to thank you, Miss Austen, for having saved her that day in Cuckfield. Would that she had never known a greater danger!”

  He wheeled Intrepid, and galloped away from us then, but not before I had seen an unexpected rush of tears stain his cheeks.

  “It is remarkable,” Mona told me sombrely, “that such gentlemen may cut their way through scores of French—and yet return home possessed of hearts enough, to mourn the loss of a green girl.”

  “He makes no mention of meeting Byron as his lordship entered the Pavilion, tho’ the timing was such, it is extraordinary their paths did not cross,” I observed. “Do you think we ought to believe him, Mona?”

  Chapter 30 The Giaour

  SATURDAY, 15 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON

  A REVENGE TRAGEDY, LADY OXFORD HAD SAID OF THE verses Lord Byron was presently writing. I had thought that she referred to her lover in this—that it was Byron who sought revenge, for Catherine Twining’s murder—but as the phaeton swiftly descended towards the village by the sea, and the beautiful youth who was Captain Viscount Morley disappeared behind us, I asked myself which of the gentlemen might have had cause to feel the spurs of jealousy more.

  A man I knew for my enemy, the young captain had said of his lordship; and who could blame him? Morley had, in retrospect, shown remarkable restraint while playing at cards with Byron the previous evening. Was this a testament to the quality of his breeding—or the depth of his satisfied revenge?

  “I wish we had been able to speak to Byron,” I fretted, as Mona pulled up at the meeting of the Lewes and London roads.

  “It is a pity,” she agreed as she headed her team south. “Had we been able to put Caro’s story to him point-blank, he might have confessed the whole—and we should then be saved the embarrassment of interrogating poor Scrope Davies. I shall make Swithin do it, of course; he will manage exactly the right blend of sympathy and sternness. He is forever adopting that tone when my modiste’s bills prove shockingly high, and we are forced to engage in an uncomfortable interview in his book room. Shall I set you down at the Castle, Jane? I confess I should prefer you to come back with me to Marine Parade—I do not like to face Lady Oxford alone.”

  “Mona,” I said, shaking the sealed packet of paper, “if this proves to be a letter from Byron to the Countess, you shall be greeted with joy.”

  “And if it is not?” she countered. “Pity me, Jane!”

  I glanced at her sidelong. “I believe all this fresh air has given me an appetite. I should be happy to partake of a nuncheon in Marine Parade—and shall stand buff as heartily as Scrope Davies, should you require it!”

  LADY> OXFORD STILL KEPT TO HER ROOM.

  We discovered her established on a settee, in fetching dishabille, with a pretty lace cap covering her light brown hair and a pair of spectacles on her nose. She was reading Volume the Eighth of her history of Rome.

  “We intend a trip to Sardinia, you know, in June,” she told me carelessly as she set aside the book; “or perhaps we shall simply stay at Naples. Oxford hopes to find some antiquities there—his friend Lord Hamilton is forever singing the praises of Naples for such treasures, and if watching poor labourers dig in the dirt will make my lord happy, I find no cause to complain.”

  “—Provided Vesuvius does not erupt again,” Mona murmured. “Jane—we carried a hamper of provisions to Byron this morning, but the sentries at the Camp would not allow us a glimpse of him. He sent this to you by way of his gaolers.”

  “At last,” she breathed. “A communication.”

  She reached eagerly for the packet, broke the seal with impatience, and began to scan the first page.

  I observed her with interest and some apprehension. Closeted in her rooms without the benefit of dress, hair, or such touches of powder and rouge as a fashionable London lady must always employ, she looked all her forty years; and the recollection of Byron’s haunting visage and vigourous frame, despite the club foot—proclaimed all the disparity of the five-and-twenty-year-old. Theirs was a misalliance, undoubtedly a misalliance—and as I studied the Countess’s face, I guessed that she apprehended the same. Without Byron’s overwhelming presence, she might better command her reason.

  “What effrontery!” she exclaimed, casting aside the sheet she had been reading. “Only look at it, Mona, and tell me whether I have not been exceedingly ill-used!”

  “It grows late, and I should take my leave—” I began, but Mona had already perused Byron’s words, and with a snort, thrust the page into my hands.

  A Song

  Thou art not false, but thou art fickle,

 
To those thyself so fondly sought;

  The tears that thou has forc’d to trickle

  Are doubly bitter from that thought.

  “Shall we sing it together, Mona, you and I?” Lady Oxford jeered. “Or shall we cast it into the fire, as cold fuel for forgotten warmth?”

  The Countess of Swithin stared despairingly at her friend. “Indeed, I am truly sorry—he is an uncouth yokel, my dear, and unworthy of your love. He shall repent of his harshness, however, given time.”

  Lady Oxford threw back the light shawl that had covered her ankles, and got up from her settee. “I have given Lord Byron too much of my time already. I believe I shall return to London, Mona—if I set out within the hour, I might arrive in time to kiss my children goodnight; at the very least, I shall sleep in my own bed, and may awake next morning prepared to embark on all the preparations for Sardinia. Oh, to see the blue of the Mediterranean again! I am wild to pass Gibraltar! There is nothing like travel, after all, when one is brokenhearted!”

  She had cast aside the remainder of Byron’s packet with her shawl, and the pages were scattered on the floor. I bent to retrieve them.

  “Lady Oxford,” I attempted. “There is more he has written here—a further communication—”

  She glanced at the sheets I held, and her lips curled. “It is only the last of that wretched poem to his dead Leila,” she said. “I suppose he has been scribbling away at it, under the light of a single oil lamp, at Brighton Camp. Here—” she moved swiftly to the writing desk placed beneath her bedroom window, and gathered a sheaf of pages together. “Here is the entire work, fresh from the Genius’s pen. Keep it, if you like, Miss Austen—sell it, if the spirit moves you. I shall not look into The Giaour again.”

  AND SO TONIGHT, AFTER A MOST RESTFUL DINNER WITH Henry, I curled up in bed to read Lord Byron’s epic poem, of a hareem maiden drowned alive in a canvas sack, for the crime of loving another than her master.

  A revenge tale, Lady Oxford had called it, but the opening lines gave little hint of this. They were rather a paean to Greece as it must once have been, before the yoke of Turkish rule.

  Fair clime! Where every season smiles

  Benignant o’er those blessed isles,

  Which, seen from far Colonna’s height,

  Make glad the heart that hails the sight,

  And lend to loneliness delight.

  I sighed.

  There was a great deal more of such stuff, about the Tyrant’s bitter lash, and the Eden of the Eastern Waves that once was Greece, and so on. I had an idea of Byron looking about him during his travels in Attic climes, and seeing only what he could despise—a race of men far different from himself, that he might ennoble in his verse, and yet regard as undoubtedly inferior. My Naval brothers, Frank and Charles, had been sailing about the globe for most of their lives, and the excellent sense of their observations, in the letters each faithfully sent home, was greatly to be preferred to this. However—I could not imagine a roomful of young girls, only just embarked on their first London Season, swooning at the excitements of my brothers’ letters; while they should certainly suffer palpitations at:

  Though like a Demon of the night

  He passed, and vanished from my sight,

  His aspect and his air impressed

  A troubled memory on my breast,

  And long upon my startled ear

  Rung his dark courser’s hoofs of fear…

  Yes, there would be countless young girls who should take the dark courser’s hoofs of fear to bed with them, and read long into the night by their flickering candles—if Byron lived to see The Giaour published.

  I could not think it entirely certain that he would.

  “You will hardly credit it, I know,” Henry had said over dinner, “but the Regent appeared at Miss Twining’s funeral, and so far condescended as to spend a half-hour over the cold collation in the Officers’ Mess.”

  “As I understand it, His Royal Highness is the very last man to forgo a meal,” I retorted, “however melancholy the occasion. Did he have anything intelligent to say on the tragedy?”

  “Only to assure the General that Justice should be served as soon as may be, and the scoundrel Byron punished for his sins.”

  “—Lest he cast a shadow of murderous doubt over the sanctity of the Pavilion, and its unmentionable tunnels. So Lord Byron is to be assumed guilty until proven innocent, in the best English tradition. And General Twining?” I enquired keenly. “How did he appear?”

  My brother hesitated. “I must suppose that grief takes each of us in different ways—and that it is impossible for any man to judge another’s heart—but he looked very oddly, Jane. Cold, and severe, and as tho’ he stood in judgement upon the remains of the poor creature going into the earth before him. One might have thought he blamed Catherine for having been murdered—that the manner of her death embarrassed, rather than destroyed him.”

  “I should have expected little else.”

  “He almost hurried the attendant company out of the churchyard when poor old Smalls had done—the man fairly sobbed his way through the service—and seemed impatient the full hour he was required to converse with the mourners at the collation.”

  “How dreadful,” I mused, “to be the sort of man to take consolation solely in his pride. All else may be sacrificed—human warmth, love, compassion in the face of weakness. I begin to think we were very fortune in our father, Henry. However little of wealth or station George Austen may have possessed—he did not set himself up as God over others; and there must be a good deal of temptation in that way, for a clergyman.”

  Later, as I read Byron’s verse by candle-light, I found The Giaour had much to say on the matter of Judgement, and playing at God; and as I had not yet come to Leila, and was growing sleepy, I determined to push on. It had been a shockingly wearisome day.

  —And here was a description of the poet’s jaded heart. Had Lady Oxford read it? I wondered. And was it meant for her—or Caro Lamb—or Catherine Twining?

  The lovely toy so fiercely sought

  Hath lost its charm by being caught,

  For every touch that wooed its stay

  Hath brushed its brightest hues away,

  Till charm and hue, and beauty gone,

  ’Tis left to fly or fall alone.

  All that I had read thus far had been written long before the events of the past week—the description of Hassan’s court, and the scented gardens with their plashing fountains where Leila reposed; the flight of the brooding Giaour, whom Leila had loved at her peril—

  For she was flown her master’s rage

  In likeness of a Georgian page,

  And far beyond the Moslem’s power

  Had wronged him with the faithless Giaour…

  Yes, there would be innumerable mammas forbidding their daughters to read anything remotely penned by Byron in the coming winter, lest the rage for dressing up as a young boy should overcome an entire generation.…

  And here was the murder.

  Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank,

  The calm wave rippled to the bank;

  __________

  I gazed, till vanishing from view,

  Like lessening pebble it withdrew;

  ________

  And all its hidden secrets sleep,

  Known but to Genii of the deep…

  I shuddered, and closed my eyes. Byron had certainly written these lines before Catherine Twining was murdered. Unlike the scraps Lady Oxford had shown me a few days before, or the ones lately delivered to her boudoir, these pages were penned in fair copy, without correction, and thus must represent finished verse. He had written it, and then the drowned girl had been delivered, in her sack, like Leila to his bed.…

  The conviction grew stronger within me that the revenge tragedy was not of Byron’s seeking; it had been visited upon him, by one who hated him profoundly—or, hated, perhaps, the victim….

  I turned over the successive verses. There were more tha
n a thousand lines, by my estimation, most penned in black ink. But here, at the bottom of the pile, were words less neatly scrawled—lines penned at random, in the discomfort of a gaol, with much crossing out and revision, written in blue ink … and on the very last page, the word emphatically placed:

  FINIS

  He had finished it, then, on the day of Leila’s funeral.

  I worked through these final pages, struggling to pick the sense from the alterations—the true words from the discarded—the rhythm and flow of poetry from amidst the lumber-room of Byron’s mind. For a writer such as myself, accustomed to reading pages that were fitful starts at best, before the typesetter’s art gave a neater appearance to my prose, it did not prove too taxing; but my eyes were growing tired in the poor light of the single candle.

  And then, about line seven hundred and sixty-five, as best I might judge, I stopped dead—and reread the verse, my heart pounding.

  I had not mistaken; it was there, buried in the middle of The Giaour, as Byron had shaped it in his gaol—an accusation of murder. In his poem, he had all but named Catherine Twining’s killer.

  I stared at the lines, wavering in the candle-flame, and felt a cold dread. Then I began, unthinkingly, to bundle the pages together—as tho’ by squaring the edges I might make sense of them. It was well after midnight; would Henry be asleep? Or if I braved the draughty passage of the inn, would he open his bedchamber door? I had a decided need for human conversation—and the counsel of my brother.

  Outside, in the darkened street below, there was a sudden chaos of shouting, and the cantering of a horse—unusual for Brighton of a Friday, when no Assembly was held and most of the world established at card tables or private parties. Obeying instinct rather than reason, I hastened to the window and threw up the sash.