Jane and the Barque of Frailty jam-9 Read online

  At this, she buried her reddened nose in a square of cambric and said nothing audible for the space of several moments.

  It is true that Henry was besotted with Eliza, who is almost ten years his senior, when he was a callow youth and she a young mother fresh from a château in France. She was infinitely captivating in those days, black-haired and exquisitely-dressed, with jewels at her throat and a delightful penchant for shocking conversation. Even our elder brother James, destined for the Church and a prig from infancy, was wild for Eliza. It became a sort of game for Henry and James to vie for my cousin’s favour when they were both up at Oxford, and she living in London far from the protection of her husband; but by the time the self-styled Comte de Feuillide was guillotined, and Eliza free, James had buried his first wife and was the father of a child. He courted Eliza for months, allowed her to toy with his heart and his future, and took her eventual refusal to become a clergyman’s wife in good part. The idea of Eliza — who at five-and-thirty was still the girlish beauty she had ever been, carrying her pug about Town and riding in the Park — as the mistress of James’s parsonage, was not to be thought of. Henry offered himself twice to my cousin, with a heart that had always been her own, and to the relief of the entire family — Eliza at last accepted him.

  It was feared that such a rackety and volatile pair — one with more hair than wit and the other possessed of more charm than is good for him — should be run off their legs by debt. Dire predictions of a frivolous end — desertion or debtor’s prison — my brother’s affections elsewhere engaged as Eliza inevitably aged — were bruited about the family with ruthless disregard for the feelings of this junior son. But the Henry Austens have jogged along steadily in tandem harness for more than a decade now without disaster; and the family must declare Eliza much improved. It cannot be wonderful that a lady so intimate with death — of a mother, a husband, a son — could fail to be sobered by the prospect of eternity; but I must credit my brother with excellent sense, and the uncanny ability to manage his wife by never attempting to manage her at all. It was he who supported my cousin through every loss; he who travelled to France in the wake of revolution to demand recompense for the Comte de Feuillide’s confiscated estates; he who bore with Eliza’s extravagant tastes and exalted acquaintance. As a French countess, she had been much in the habit of attending Court Drawing-Rooms and the exclusive assemblies at Almack’s; she saw no reason to leave off doing so now that she was become the wife of a mere banker. There are still few in London who fail to address Eliza as Comtesse, rather than Mrs. Austen; but it is Henry who franks her style of life.

  “You would tell me the d’Entraigueses are embarrassed in their circumstances?” I enquired now as Eliza emerged from her handkerchief. “But that muff—! Her opera dress of last evening! The furnishings of the house in Surrey!”

  “As to that — it never does to betray one’s poverty to the milliner or modiste. You must know, Jane, that when one is in debt, the only sure course is to order another hat or gown; it keeps such encroaching persons dependant upon one’s custom. My sainted mamma never did any differently; but Henry prefers to be beforehand with the world, and naturally I would not deviate a hair from his wishes.” Eliza, despite her fifty years, looked as conscious as a girl as she uttered this palpable falsehood. “But the d’Entraigueses are quite at a stand. He cut a dashing figure in the early days of revolution, and escaped the guillotine by playing every side false; denounced his friends and turned traitor to the world; but when at last he was obliged to flee the country, his château was burned to the ground and his property seized. He has never entirely come about, and relies upon the kindness of friends — the gratitude of the various governments he has served— and something in the way of a pension from the present forces in France — in short, I do not know how they contrive to live. But that is not the worst, Jane.” Eliza leaned closer and dropped her voice to a whisper. “He has lost his heart to a hardened Cyprian — a High Flyer of the most dashing order — a Demi-rep of the worst kind — and is demanding of Anne a divorce!”

  “But he must be sixty if he is a day!”

  “He is not above five years older than myself,” she returned, a trifle nettled, “and there is quite as much of that in one’s mind at our age as in the youngest stripling’s. The Comte thinks, perhaps, to reclaim his youth by taking a bride likely to be mistaken for his daughter. Every kind of folly may be imputed to a man in love. But consider of Anne! She has long known what her husband is — she became his mistress while performing on the Paris stage, and cannot expect fidelity from one who seeks solace in such places — and yet! To be setting up her own establishment at her age, and without the slightest hope of a suitable settlement from the Comte — for, in truth, he has not a pound to give her!”

  “She told you all this?”

  “In strictest confidence, of course. I do not consider myself as having violated that confidence by reporting the whole to you,” Eliza said comfortably. “You are almost my second self. But Jane — she has begged me to assist her, and I am sure I do not know what Henry would say if he were to learn of it!”

  “She requires a loan? From Henry’s bank?”

  “If only it were that.” Eliza plucked diffidently at the shawl draped across her knees. “Anne wishes me to sell her jewels for her. At Rundell & Bridge. She is convinced that a true English lady, as she is pleased to call me, will never be cheated by the most reputable jewellers in London — whatever nasty turn such a firm might serve an impoverished French opera singer.”

  “You did not agree?” I faltered, as the breathless image of Rundell & Bridge rose in my mind. “Good Lord, Eliza — Henry should be appalled to find his wife despatched upon such an errand! What if the jewellers should assume that his circumstances are embarrassed? Consider of the damage to his reputation! The possible loss of custom at his bank! The spurt of rumour and innuendo in the clubs of Pall Mall — and the consequent run upon his funds as clients shift their money elsewhere! You cannot seriously contemplate such a thing, even in the service of a friend!”

  “No-o,” Eliza conceded faintly, “tho’ poor Anne did beseech me most earnestly, and I suffered the greatest pangs in the knowledge I must disappoint her. I only succeeded in forcing her from the house, Jane, with the suggestion that you might be willing to oblige.”

  “Me? Eliza—!”

  “It is not such an abominable notion, after all,” she said. “You observed only yesterday that you wished to step into Rundell & Bridge. You might find a pair of earrings for your niece Anna, or perhaps a brooch for Cassandra. If you have nothing better to do, you might very easily slip into Mr. Bridge’s back room and negotiate the sale—”

  “Indeed I might not!”

  “But only look at them, Jane.” Eliza unfurled the paisley shawl. “Is it not a queen’s ransom poor Anne left behind?”

  I stared wordlessly at the gems winking in my sister’s lap: earrings of ruby and emerald, a diamond tiara, a sapphire necklace. There were brooches in the shape of peacocks and tigers; jewelled ribands as might represent the honour of foreign orders; a spangle intended for dressing the hair; a quantity of rings. It was as tho’ a treasure from an exotic clime, redolent of incense and intrigue, had sprung from the carpet at our feet. The glory of the fiery stones caught the breath in my throat.

  “Eliza,” I whispered. “What in Heaven’s name are we to do with them?”

  “Secure them among the dirty linen,” she said briskly. “Else we shall certainly be murdered in our beds this night.”

  Chapter 4

  Lord Moira Shares His Views

  Tuesday, 23 April 1811, cont.

  “ARE YOU AT ALL ACQUAINTED WITH THE PRINCESS Tscholikova’s maid?” I asked Manon.

  She was arranging my hair for the musical evening with her usual deft grace: a Frenchwoman of exactly my own age, with snapping dark eyes and a firm, thin-lipped mouth. Dressed in a charcoal gown with a starched white collar and cuffs, she is always precise
as a pin, and terrifies my sister Cassandra with her swift step and haughty air. Manon and her mother, Madame Bigeon, fled the south of France during the Terror, and have been with Eliza ever since — Madame as nurse to Eliza’s son, Hastings de Feuillide, and after the poor boy’s early death, as general keeper of the household. Manon — whose given name is Marie Madeleine, too difficult a mouthful for daily usage — is in some sort Eliza’s dresser, with the superiority natural to such an upper retainer; she is also Eliza’s most loyal confidante, a soul to be trusted with matters of life and death. Not even a brief marriage to a soldier from Périgord — who gave her his name and a certain dignity before disappearing back to France — could detach her from the Henry Austens.

  “You would mean Druschka?” she returned as she bound the bugle band about my forehead, and affixed the stem of a flower just above my left ear. “But of course I am acquainted with her. She is not French, you understand, but speaks our tongue to admiration. I know all the women in London who speak French, me. And most of the men also.”

  I studied her inscrutable reflection in the mirror, and understood there was another life entire behind Manon’s picture of perfection: seething with hope and desire, perhaps, or tormented by loss; a human epic replete with character and incident, of which I knew nothing.

  “Have you spoken with the maid today?”

  “Non et non et non,” she said crisply. “Today I have procured a pair of soles for Mr. Walter and Mr. Egerton to eat, I have swept the back parlour and the front, I have arranged the flowers for the mantelpiece and directed the setting of the glass which is lent by the cabinet-maker, I have dressed Madame Henri and yourself — all this I have done, and it is not yet five o’clock.”

  “Naturally,” I murmured.

  “You are wondering about the death of the Princess,” Manon surmised. “It piques the interest, no? How such a one — with everything at her command, all the world in her favour — should do herself a violence. It is the artist in you. I perfectly understand.”

  “The artist?” I repeated. I had never considered of myself in such exalted terms.

  “La romancière,” she explained. “Madame Henri, she has told me of this book you have written. I have a great envy to read it one day soon, when the pages they are printed.”

  There are times when the charming Eliza is too much of a rattle. “I had not wished my authorship of the novel to be known,” I faltered. “It is a great secret, Manon—”

  “But of course,” she replied. “You should rather ride the horse bareback at Astley’s Amphitheater, non, than be seen to ridicule all your acquaintance so acutely with your pen? I shall say nothing, me. I shall be dumb as a post. But all the same, I comprehend your interest in the dead one et ses affaires. It is in the nature of writers to paint life in all its violence and glory. Naturally you wish to know why it was necessary that the Princess should die.”

  The branch of candles on my dressing table sent flickering shadows across Manon’s face, but her eyes were firmly fixed on the task at hand — the taming of the short front curls about my temples — and her countenance was serene, as tho’ she talked only of the weather, and not my soul. It is true, nonetheless, that all my life I have wished to plumb the workings of the human heart — have sought to know the inner yearnings of my fellows through word and observation — and have found a sort of command of nature, in my ability to dispose of my acquaintance with the swift composition of an acid line. Was it mere vulgar curiosity, then, that animated my thoughts on the subject of the maid and her mistress? Was I to be self-condemned as no better than the Comtesse d’Entraigues, with her endless rapacity for gossip?

  An image of Evgenia Tscholikova as I had glimpsed her in life — the earnest gaze fixed upon Lord Castlereagh’s box — and the idea of the lady grown rigid in a pool of her own blood on the London street, arose before me as tho’ reflected in the shifting candlelight. An echo of the maid Druschka’s words, guttural with misery, rang in my ears: It’s all lies. All lies.

  “What do you know of the Princess?” I enquired.

  Manon shrugged. “What everyone must know. She was born to the noblesse — she graced the Tsar’s court at fifteen — she married a man of exalted position whom she knew not at all, and was miserable as a matter of course. She travelled with Prince Tscholikov to Vienna, where he was envoy to the Court; and there she fell in love with a man. Disgrace and ruin followed. She journeyed to Paris, alone and almost without means. Her brother succored her. And so, at the last, she came to this country — her bloom fading, her hopes gone, a woman not above thirty who must establish her credit amidst a sea of foreign faces and tongues. It has happened, vous savez, to others before.”

  “I suppose such a history might well end in suicide.”

  “Bah,” Manon said briskly. “That is like your Englishness. Always the propriety, out? But I, who have seen the world — I tell you that nothing, not even the shameful letters published without warning in the newspaper — is so terrible as death, mademoiselle.”

  I thought of the Terror: of the young girl Manon had once been, of an entire world lost to the guillotine.

  “The man in Vienna — was that Lord Castlereagh?”

  “Who knows? He is but the most recent in a string of lovers, perhaps. A woman denied all happiness will snatch at anything. But me, I should not snatch at Lord Castlereagh. He is … du glace.”

  Ice. I recollected the studied indifference of the former Minister of War: he who had nearly killed a fellow Cabinet member defending his honour; he who could brave the ridicule of the press with insouciance. Ice was required of a man who must send entire regiments to their deaths; had he also sent the Princess to hers?

  Manon’s hands stilled, and she smiled into the mirror. “There,” she said. “C’est fini. Does it please you?”

  She could not restore lost youth, or conjure me a Beauty; but she had accomplished, all the same, something on the order of a miracle. My dowdy cap was discarded, my locks brushed with pomade until they shone, and my headdress as smart as my means would allow. The band of bugle beads bound about my forehead exactly matched those on the flounce of my dress. I would never be mistaken for an Incomparable — but as a secret scribbler of novels, a Bluestocking of a certain age come upon the Town — I would certainly do.

  “Thank you, Manon.”

  She curtseyed, once more the modest servant. “I shall call in Hans Place tomorrow,” she said with a sidelong glance, “to pay my respects to the Princess Tscholikova’s household. Who knows what Druschka may tell?”

  “Who knows, indeed?” I replied.

  OUR DINNER GUESTS ARRIVED AT HALF-PAST FIVE: MR. Henry Egerton, whose principal virtue appears to be that he is the son of a clergyman resident in Durham; and Mr. Henry Walter, a serious young man of philosophic and mathematical stamp, who ought to have quitted London this morning, but stayed to eat sole in my brother’s house. Eliza would wish to have nothing to do with Mr. Walter, as he is the nephew of her cousin Philadelphia — a prudish woman whose disapproval of Henry’s wife is rooted in envy — but the most common family feeling dictated that Mr. Walter being in London, Mr. Walter must be invited to Sloane Street. And so he was placed at Eliza’s right hand, and Mr. Egerton at mine, with the Tilsons to balance the table.

  Mr. Egerton fell to my lot, and as he was barely half my age, and fatally tongue-tied, I found him heavy work. Having enquired where he had studied, and what poets he preferred, and whether he hunted a good deal or even at all — I left him to demand how I liked my visit to London, and whether I had yet penetrated the British Museum, or been favoured with a glimpse of Mrs. Siddons. This last bow, drawn at a venture, struck home — and I was able to speak with animation of Macbeth until the covers were removed and I turned with relief to the partner on my left, Mr. Tilson.

  “You have won an admirer, Jane,” he observed. “Mr. Egerton is overflowing with admiration — to the extent of apparent apoplexy. But do not be throwing yourself away upon a man
with so little conversation; you would be sadly wasted. You require a partner whose cleverness equals your own — and not half a dozen exist in the entire Kingdom.”

  None, I thought, since Lord Harold’s demise; but said only, “Flatterer. I could wish that your praise did not depend upon the abuse of my neighbour — for there can be no harm in him; he has not lived long enough to run to vice. If you must abuse somebody, let it be my cousin Mr. Walter — whom I cannot love, however worthy his achievements may be. He is a scholar, you know, dedicated to the education of Youth — and will bore the unfortunate Eliza to distraction.”

  “A prosy individual,” he agreed, “and unbearably full of consequence for a sprig of his years — he cannot be more than four-and-twenty. But his relation to yourself I may comprehend. Mr. Egerton I do not comprehend at all. Why is he of the select few invited to dine this evening?”

  I saw that for all his playfulness, James Tilson was anxious. “I believe him to be nothing more than the son of an old family friend. What is it you fear, Mr. Tilson? That my brother is got among thieves and adventurers?”

  My companion said nothing for a moment, his brow faintly furrowed. “You hold your brother in esteem and affection, my dear Miss Austen — as certainly do I. I will not scruple to say that Henry Austen is dearer to me than any but my own family. But I will also state that his judgement — so sound in most cases — has of late seemed wanting. There is a sort of recklessness in Henry … a desire to circulate among the Great … and if this fellow Egerton is another of them, I thought—”

  He faltered, lips pursed.

  “This is speaking seriously, indeed!” I rejoined, all fear of self-exposure forgotten. “Do not trifle with me, Mr. Tilson. Is my brother on the brink of ruin?”