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  The Duchess halted in her path, leaning heavily upon her cane, and glanced around the supper-room. “Jenkins!” she called, her voice low and clear. “Send round the wine, if you please. I shall attend to Mr. Portal.” And grasping her cane with one hand and the White Harlequin with the other, she led him unprotestingly away.

  “I might almost think it a set-piece of the stage,” said a wry voice at my back, “did not my familiarity with a lady’s tears argue its sincerity. What think you, Jane? A lovers’ quarrel? Or something deeper?”

  “Madam Lefroy!” I turned in delight, and held out my hands. “Do my eyes misgive me? Or is the magnificent Elizabeth reborn in the form of Ashe?”

  The masked figure of Queen Elizabeth, whom I had observed earlier in conversation with the Red Harlequin, seized my fingers and laughed.

  “As you find me, my dear Miss Austen!—My dear Mrs. Henry! And how do you like the Duchess’s party?”

  “I may forgive her the disadvantage of a large acquaintance, however much it ensures I shall be crushed, now that there is a touch of scandal to the evening,” Eliza declared mischievously. “Of what else might I speak in the Pump Room tomorrow?”10

  “Eugenie should never forgo a chance to set the town to talking—but I wonder if the Lady Desdemona is quite of her way of thinking? She seemed much distressed.”

  All discussion of the interesting episode was forestalled, however, by my brother’s return. Henry carried a chair with effort in one hand, and a glass of punch in the other; and the result of his exertions, in having raised a fine dew along his forehead, did little for his Richard.

  “My poor Henry,” I exclaimed. “Your benevolence for naught. I have secured my dear Madam Lefroy, as you see, and will leave you to your lovely Antoinette, and the comforts of iced custard.”

  1 In Austen’s day, it was the custom to travel about the streets of Bath and other major cities in hired sedan chairs carried by a man fore and aft.—Editor’s note.

  2 Eliza de Feuillide was both Jane Austen’s cousin and the wife of her brother, Henry, but Jane usually refers to Eliza simply as her sister. It was a convention of the time to address relatives acquired through marriage in the same manner as blood relations. —Editor’s note.

  3 Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) was the foremost tragic actress of Austen’s day. With her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons dominated the London stage at this time, where it is probable Jane had seen her perform.—Editor’s note.

  4 Robert Adam’s renovation of Old Drury Lane Theatre in 1775 featured pale green and pink paint with bronze detailing—which the Dowager Duchess apparently emulated. Old Drury was pulled down and replaced by a newer building in 1794. This building burned to the ground in 1809.—Editor’s note.

  5 This was the original Bath theater on Orchard Street, where Jane was a frequent patron. Its company divided performances between Bath and Bristol, playing houses in each city on alternate nights— Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in Bath; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Bristol.—Edilm’s note.

  6 Elizabeth Farren was a member of the Drury Lane company during the 1780s and the recognized mistress of the Earl of Derby, who made her his second countess at his first wife’s death in 1797.—Editor” note.

  7 James Gtllray (1757-1815) was the foremost caricaturist in aquatint engravings, which began to make their appearance in the London newspapers in the 1780s. The engravings generally made sport of fashionable scandals or political missteps, much as do present-day political cartoons. Lord Moira and Charles James Fox were noted Whig politicians; Countess Frances Jersey, although a grandmother in her fifties, was a scheming and unscrupulous woman who had served briefly as the Prince of Walcs’s mistress in the 1790s. She had displaced the Catholic and twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert, whom the Prince secredy and illegally married in 1786, but by 1804, Mrs. Fitzherbert was once more the Prince’s companion of choice.—Editor’s note.

  8 These were the government’s public funds, one of the few reliable investments in Austen’s day, which generally yielded annuities of four percent per annum.—hAitor’s mite.

  9 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the noted Georgian playwright of The School for Scandal and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, was also a member of Parliament. Sheridan first came to Jane’s notice in 1787, when he made a four-day speech against her family’s friend Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, during Hastings’s seven-year parliamentary trial for impeachment.—Editor’s note.

  10 The Pump Room was one of the social centers of Bath. It adjoined the King’s Baths, near the Abbey and Colonnade in the heart of the city, and was frequented by the fashionable every afternoon. There they would congregate to drink a glass of medicinal spring water presented by liveried pump attendants; to promenade among their acquaintance; and to peruse the calf-bound volume in which recent arrivals to the city inscribed their names and local addresses. Austen describes the Pump Room to perfection in Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe make the place their second home.—Editor’s note.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  JANE AND THE MAN OF THE CLOTH

  A Bantam Book

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1997 by Stephanie Barron.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 96-24851.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-48654-7

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