Jane and the Barque of Frailty Read online

  A brisk walk was required—a filling of the lungs, even if it be with sulphurous air—and so I ventured across Sloane Street into the pretty little wilderness of Cadogan Place, where nursemaids sat in careful watch over their infant charges, who played at battledore and shuttlecock upon the greening lawn. 3 Hans Town, as this village on the edge of the city is called, is by no means a fashionable abode, being fully a quarter hour’s brisk walk west of Hyde Park; but it will do for such gentlemen of business as my banker brother Henry, for hopeful families of second sons, who regard the country air as more healthful than that of the city generally; and for those shabby-genteel members of the ton whose fortunes have been gambled away. We are a heterogeneous lot, part pretension, part vulgarity; but I cannot repine, or wish my brother returned to Upper Berkeley Street. His rooms are more commodious, and his neighbours infinitely more colourful, than I should discover elsewhere.

  I was swinging with energy along the gravel path, when a “Good morning, Miss Austen” rang brightly in my ear, to be seconded by a chorus of little voices; and I turned to find Mrs. James Tilson some ten paces behind me, with her maid and a collection of children bestowed about her, bent upon their exercise.

  “Fanny!” I cried. “I should expect you to be laid upon your bed, with a warm shawl about your shoulders, recruiting your strength for the dissipations of this evening! You cannot fail us, my dear! We depend upon you, however much it should come on to rain!”

  Frances Tilson is the wife of my brother’s chief banking partner in London, Mr. James Tilson, and the mistress of just such an household as is everywhere to be found in Hans Town. A boy of twelve is presently away at school; but no less than seven daughters fill the drawing-room in Hans Place, the youngest not above a year of age. Mrs. Tilson’s excellent sense and tolerable understanding make her an attractive companion for these walks about the square, while her children—in small doses—provide amusement. Eliza will say that Fanny Tilson has no sense of humour, and that her taste for the exalted— her air of piety and sober reflection—are tiresome in the extreme; but I cannot abuse goodness, tho’ I lack it myself. Such abuse must smack of envy.

  “But of course we shall not fail,” Fanny replied simply as the party came up with my position on the path. “We have been eagerly anticipating the party a fortnight at least. I have promised the older girls they may help me dress.”

  Squeals of delight greeted these words, and as we fell in together, and began to pace the gravel path, I observed, “It is as well, perhaps, that you have some frivolity to distract your thoughts. You have lost a neighbour, I understand.”

  “I do not care to speak of it,” Fanny said, turning her head away. “Everything to do with that person is repugnant to a lady; and however much we may deplore the manner of her end, I think I am safe in stating that it was not unfitted to her mode of life.”

  I considered of the Princess, lonely and friendless as I had observed her the previous evening, her throat slit and her body cast upon the streets; and thought her death totally at variance with a life of privilege and indulgence. I apprehended that Fanny wished me to draw a moral from violent death, and being surrounded by her tender daughters, did not chuse to pursue the subject. My companion surprised me, however, by continuing the debate with vigour.

  “Her body has been returned to the house,” Fanny said, “and black crape hung from the doorway. There is a coat of arms—quite foreign—suspended above the door, and the knocker removed. I should have thought that the world would shun the remains of one so wretched as to take her own life, but in point of fact a succession of carriages has been coming and going all day, for the leaving of cards and condolences. I am sure there is no one to read them. She lived quite alone, as one would expect of a woman so lost to propriety as to abandon her husband, and desert all her friends.”

  “Not all, it would seem, from the succession of carriages,” I replied.

  “They say there is a brother,” Fanny confided in a lowered tone. “A prince of some kind, tho’ what that may signify among Russians, who can tell? He is said to be travelling even now from Vienna. The husband does not appear. The obsequies must be suspended until the brother arrives; and indeed, what sort of burial shall she receive? She cannot be a member of the Church of England. And then there is the fact of self-murder. Perhaps they will remove the body to Paris, where I understand she lived until lately … ”

  At that moment, a woman I judged to be a maidservant cut across our path, her chin sunk upon her breast and her expression abstracted. She was so near I might have brushed her arm, had I not pulled up short; and she quite ran into little Charlotte, a stout girl of seven, who cried in pain at the trodding of her foot. The maid never deviated, or lifted her head, or acknowledged our presence in any way—and as I gazed at her in consternation, I saw great tears slip unheeded down her cheeks. She moved as one bent upon an unholy errand, or in the grip of a horror so profound that no human voice might penetrate it.

  “Druschka,” Fanny Tilson said in some irritation as she bent to chafe her daughter’s foot. “The Princess’s maid. Perhaps it is shewho reads the condolences. —If, indeed, she is able to read.”

  The woman had crossed Sloane Street and paused before the door of the apothecary, Mr. Haden. It was time, I thought, to fulfill Eliza’s errand.

  1 A charley, as London’s night watchmen were termed, was supposed to make the rounds of his neighborhood every half hour during a set period of work—usually twelve hours at a stretch—and could rest in his wooden booth when not so employed. In point of fact, however, many such watchmen never bothered to make the rounds but drew their minimal pay for huddling in their boxes and periodically announcing the time and weather. They were frequently bribed by prostitutes and petty thieves to ignore minor acts of crime; they were also subject to being overturned in their booths by drunken young gentlemen. At this time there was no regular police force in London.—Editior’s note.

  2 In June 1809, the Portland Cabinet authorized a military campaign to take the Island of Walcheren, in the Dutch river Scheldt, held by Napoleon. The object was to destroy the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp and Flushing. Some 40,000 troops and 250 vessels were dispatched in a well-publicized raid, conducted with poor intelligence and worse weather. By August, the Cabinet ordered a withdrawal. The Walcheren campaign has gone down in history as a fiasco.—Editor’s note.

  3 This part of the fashionable West End is now Cadogan Square. Hans Town was named for Sir Hans Sloane, whose daughter married the first Earl of Cadogan in the 1770s, uniting the two families’ estates. Architect Henry Holland leased the area and built the original brick houses, many of which were altered in subsequent centuries.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 3

  A Queens Ransom

  Tuesday, 23 April 1811, cont.

  ∼

  MR. HADEN WAS NOWHERE IN SIGHT AS I ENTERED his shop. It was clean and commodious, which must inspire confidence in the healthfullness of the man’s wares: a high-ceilinged space, lit by suspended oil lamps, and lined with shelves. Rank upon rank of glass jars held every conceivable tincture and herb, simple and poison; earthenware bowls stood ready for the pestle; a set of brass scales graced the front counter, along with a volume in which the apothecary recorded the names of his clients, the nature of their complaints, and the remedies he had prescribed. With so many children in Hans Town, Mr. Haden was never wanting in work, and Eliza—who is prone to illness as the years advance—finds it a great comfort to be lodged so near a capable quack.

  The maid Druschka was standing next to the counter, her gaze fixed upon the scales as tho’ she might read her future there. I had thought her countenance forbidding in Cadogan Place—an impression derived, perhaps, from the grim force of misery. Under the light of the oil lamps, however, I saw that age had deeply etched her visage. This woman could have known the Princess Tscholikova from her cradle.

  So lost in reflection was she that my broaching of the door, and the faint tinkle
of the bell suspended over it, might have been soundless for all the response they drew. Still as a statue, Druschka waited for Mr. Haden.

  “There you are,” he said briskly, appearing from the rear of his premises with a slim purple vial. “Tincture of laudanum. I would advise you to use it sparingly. Do you understand?” He held aloft three fingers. “No more than three drops each night.”

  Druschka reached wordlessly for the bottle, her aged hand swathed in a fingerless black mitt. If she comprehended the apothecary’s speech, she made no sign.

  “Here,” Mr. Haden said impatiently. “You’ll have to sign my book. Here!”

  But the maid was already halfway to the door, and did not chuse to regard the apothecary behind his counter—an inattention born of a lack of English, I must suppose, or a misery so profound it no longer considered of a stranger’s expectations. As she brushed past me towards the street I summoned courage and said, “Pray accept my condolences on the loss of your mistress, Druschka.”

  She turned upon me a pair of fathomless eyes and muttered, “C’est tout des mensonges.”

  “What did she say?” Mr. Haden demanded, as the maid stepped out onto the street.

  “It’s all lies,” I repeated thoughtfully, and procured Eliza’s draught.

  THE COMTESSE D’ENTRAIGUES HAD QUITTED THE house by the time I returned, but she had left Eliza no gayer for all her promised scandal.

  “The poor creature is beside herself, Jane,” my sister confided. 1 “Never knowing where her next shilling is to come from, looks and voice quite gone, the years advancing—and who can say how many light-skirts that old roué of a husband has in keeping? I thank God I was fortunate enough to consider of dear Henry’s offer when I was at low ebb myself. You can have no notion how comforting it was, to know I might drop my handkerchief at any moment, as the saying goes, and he should come running to pick it up! When I think of his goodness—”

  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 Demirep 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.”

  1 In Austen’s day, a sister-in-law such as Eliza de Feuillide would be referred to as a “sister” once she married Jane’s brother Henry. The fact of Eliza’s being also Jane and Henry’s first cousin makes for a tightly knit relationship.—Editor’s note.