Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron jam-10 Page 5

  Henry looked impressed.

  “But should his lordship fail me,” I continued, “I shall learn to be content with reading. The Circulating Library is certain to have the latest publications. Perhaps even Lord Byron has been scribbling something — provided Lady Oxford accords him sufficient liberty.”

  “Could not Miss Twining supply the intelligence?”

  “I should never distress her by alluding to his lordship, Henry!” I scolded. “But Miss Twining assures me that all the most respectable persons in Brighton may be found at Donaldson’s. The ladies display their gowns, and the gentlemen consult the London newspapers, and members of both sexes play cards there of an evening. It would not do to be a stranger to Donaldson’s. Besides, I wish to see how often my book is in request. If the Fashionables of Brighton do not constantly solicit the privilege of reading Pride and Prejudice, I shall find no good in them at all — even if Lord Byron is the writer most commonly claimed by the town.”

  “Again, Lord Byron! That gentleman has certainly seized your fancy!”

  “Gentleman?” I repeated, astonished. “—Merely because he claims a title? He is no gentleman, Henry, and well you know it! But I confess Lord Byron has seized my fancy. I should like to make his acquaintance, and tell him in the strongest possible language my opinion of his Turkish treatment of Catherine Twining!”

  “The fellow is a common blackguard, for all he is a lord,” my brother returned. “One has only to consult his past conduct. I do not regard his current inamorata — Lady Oxford is an established woman of the world, and entirely mistress of what she is about; but consider Lady Caroline Lamb! And her unfortunate husband! There one may justly say that hatred for the tender sex, as much as love, has animated Lord Byron.”

  My brother’s intimacy with the Great, tho’ it sprang from his banking trade rather than privileged birth, had made me familiar with the names and histories of the gossiping ton. I had even seen Lady Caroline Lamb some once or twice during my sojourns in London; Eliza had been on nodding terms with her ladyship. Caroline Ponsonby was born the Earl of Bessborough’s only daughter; her mother, Lady Bessborough, formed a vital part of the Devonshire House Set; her aunt, Georgiana, was Devonshire’s first Duchess. I was once acquainted with the Cavendish family, during a precious interval in Derbyshire some years ago, when Lord Harold — an intimate of Chatsworth — introduced me to the family’s notice. Caro, as she was called, had grown up in the chaotic and amorous atmosphere of that great Whig establishment, and had emerged as one of its chief eccentrics. Brilliant and charming in conversation, faerie-like in her figure, outrageous in her behaviour, Caro Ponsonby was apostrophised the Sprite by her gallant admirers and took London by storm in her first Season, when she was but seventeen. William Lamb, heir to Viscount Melbourne, married her two years later; and for nearly a decade now had endured her tantrums and scenes. Tho’ Caro screamed hysterics at their wedding, tore her gown in a passion, and was carried fainting from the room, this was considered nothing out of the ordinary Devonshire way — and so William and his Caro determined to be happy. They read Great Works together all day, that Caro might complete her education, and went into Society all night; dressed their pages in a livery of crimson and chocolate; and once sent Caro to the dinner table, naked beneath a chafing dish, as amusement for her relations and friends. A notable Whig orator, William Lamb stood for Parliament and was rumoured for a Cabinet post — until George Gordon, Lord Byron, burst upon the scene with Childe Harold last year.

  His lordship has said that he awoke upon the day of his poem’s publication to discover that he was famous. Certainly no one has shot from obscurity to fame as swiftly before. The street outside his lodgings was blocked with fashionable carriages delivering endless invitations; publick riots broke out whenever his lordship walked abroad. It was inevitable, in such a general fever of admiration, that Caro Lamb must pursue him. Byron’s looks and verse alike were calculated to inflame her wild imagination; all decorum and propriety forgot, she committed every publick folly — riding openly with him in Hyde Park; entertaining him at Melbourne House, where he mounted to her rooms by a back stair; loitering outside the doors of gentlemen’s clubs in the livery of a page. She was said to have entered his rooms by the upper-storey windows, a feat only a monkey might have performed. And like a monkey, she grew a dreaded nuisance on Lord Byron’s back.

  Once ardent and attached, he became, in a matter of mere months, indifferent and cold; met her protests and pleas, her hundreds of letters, with formal refusals; and in sum, cut the connexion dead.

  It was as tho’ he had studied the character of my Willoughby, confronted with an unreconciled Marianne, in his calculated cruelty.[6]

  Caro, for her part, became nearly lunatic: stalking her Love by night or day; refusing food, refusing sleep; running out into the street, hatless, to pawn her jewels, with the intention of taking ship alone for God Knows Where, provided it were far from England and the desolation of her heart. Alternately disgusted and enthralled by her persistence, Byron played with the lady as a cat might with a mouse — and reduced her to a state of mental and emotional incapacity.

  William Lamb has stood by his wife, but declined to stand again for Parliament. His misery may be observed at any private gathering of the haut ton, by whom he is generally supported.

  “Lord Byron does appear to confuse love and hatred,” I admitted to my brother. “There was nothing very tender in his treatment of Miss Twining today — and yet he must be violently in love with her, to attempt a flight to the Border!”

  “Perhaps he is simply mad,” Henry replied. “A thread of misfortune dogs the Gordon family — and the men die young and violently, it is said.”

  Mad.

  A poet touched by the insane.

  A diabolical figure of licence and flame, armed with a pen.

  Little as I could like him, I should wish to know more of Lord Byron. So few real writers ever come in my way. Perhaps, if I am very lucky, his lordship might yearn to sail again during my stay in Brighton.

  Chapter 5 A Patron of Donaldson’s

  SATURDAY, 8 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON

  THE LOBSTER PATTIES WERE ALL THAT COULD BE DESIRED, the champagne beyond anything I had yet imbibed; and I fell into a dreamless sleep from the moment my head hit the pillow — despite the considerable degree of noise from both within and without the Castle Inn. A party of officers from the Brighton Camp had stormed the neighbouring King’s Arms publick house, with a number of women from the Cyprian Corps — as the local members of the Muslin Company are known, in deference to their military service — and the echoes of rowdy laughter were the last I heard before insensibility claimed me.

  I awoke to a sparkling sea under a brilliant blue sky; a freshening wind; and the chambermaid Betsy, who kindled a fire and placed a pot of tea on a silver tray directly next to my bedside — which unaccustomed luxury quite resigned me to the depravities of the Prince’s chosen pleasure ground. Henry had been correct in turning to Brighton: where I should certainly have fallen into melancholy at Lyme, nursing my grief for Eliza amidst the desolate cliffs and ravines that mark that wilder coast, I could not help but be cheerful in such a place on such a morning — and hoped that the little Comtesse forgave, and somehow approved, my selfish happiness.

  I informed my brother at breakfast that I meant to secure my subscription to Donaldson’s without delay, having left Chawton so swiftly that I had brought little in the way of reading material — only my scribblings of Mansfield Park, in the small hand-sewn booklet of paper I construct for composition. I confess that the thought of sober Fanny Price held little attraction this morning, in the face of Brighton’s charms. She is often a tiresome creature — very nearly as quelling as my sister, Cassandra, when she believes herself to be in the right, which is on almost every occasion; and did I open the composition book, I should be certain to hear Fanny’s reproofs ringing in my ears each time I dawdled before a shop-window. It was not to be
borne. Therefore I tucked Mansfield Park into a bandbox for safekeeping. I do not expect to require that bandbox until I am forced to return to Hampshire.

  “I shall accompany you, Jane,” Henry said with alacrity, “that I might have a glance at the morning papers — and learn whether any of my acquaintance are in town.”

  Donaldson’s being but a few steps across the Steyne, our object was very soon achieved. It was a handsome establishment, equal to any circulating library I had experienced in London, and far surpassing those of Bath — elegant, airy, and possessed of a large collection of books neatly bestowed on its shelves. The principal papers and important periodicals were arranged on broad tables, for the greater ease of perusal; and an extensive suite of rooms, becomingly draped and fitted out with occasional chairs, led to apartments at the rear, where card parties were held.

  “We are pleased to offer musical recitals on certain evenings,” Miss Jennings, the excessively genteel proprietress, informed me; “and I think you will find the company most select. Madame Valmy, late of Milan, is to sing airs in the Italian for us tonight.”

  “And the subscription?”

  “Is five shillings the week,” she returned — which dear sum I offered her with an indifference I should not have been equal to, a few years since. The return on my labour of love, however — my investment on the ’Change of novel-writing — permits me these little luxuries. I have been so happy in the publick’s reception of Pride and Prejudice, which may actually run to a second edition, as to observe a set of the volumes prominently displayed among Miss Jennings’s offerings.

  When her clerk had pocketed my fee, and written my name in the subscribers’ book, I enquired with affected carelessness, “I see that you have that interesting novel everyone is talking of — Pride and Prejudice. I wonder you may keep it on your shelves!”

  “Indeed, I believe the story to be all that is charming,” Miss Jennings said complacently, “ — tho’ there are some who will insist it is unpardonably vulgar. To be forever speculating on the matter of fortune in marriage is to appear unpleasantly mercenary — for even if the two are inseparable, it does not do to say so. I confess there is just that indelicacy in the notion of husband-hunting that argues against the work having sprung from a lady’s pen, however boldly the papers may have advertized it as such.”[7]

  “And yet,” I could not resist observing, “so many young ladies profess to enjoy it!”

  Miss Jennings’s delicate brows knitted in distress. “Indeed — indelicacy is all the rage! How else might one explain the success of Lord Byron? But it is true that Pride and Prejudice was greatly in request among the ton when it first appeared in January. I spend the better part of the winter in London, you must know, and was wont to hear of it everywhere. And so Donaldson’s purchased several sets of the novel on the strength of my regard — but the volumes are less in request at present, the entire world having already looked into them.”

  “That must be sadly distressing for the author!”

  “Fame is fleeting, Miss Austen — as even Lord Byron shall discover by and by, I daresay. Should you like to take the set on approval?”

  I could not suppress a smile. “Unfortunately, I, too, have read rather more of Miss Eliza Bennet than is good for me.”

  Miss Jennings’s eyes sharpened. “And what is your opinion, pray? Do you believe the tale to have been written by Mr. Walter Scott, as so many profess to do? No less an authority than Mr. Sheridan, the playwright, assured me it was one of the cleverest things he has ever read — and you know he must be considered a fine judge of words, however embarrassed his circumstances.”

  “Perhaps he wrote it himself,” I suggested idly.

  “That is just what I think,” Miss Jennings returned warmly. “It has that lively flavour — that rapier wit — we may recall from Mr. Sheridan’s early work. And he should never hesitate to comment on the rapacity of fortune-hunting mammas with daughters on the Marriage Mart, having been yearly witness to their triumphs! Indeed, I am sure the whole is far too clever for any lady of my acquaintance. We have not the brush for so broad a canvas.”

  “You are severe upon our sex!” I cried.

  “Miss Jennings is severe upon the whole world,” observed an amused voice behind me. “Surrounded as she is by opinions — printed or voiced, wise or illiterate — she has fodder enough for a lifetime’s contempt.”

  I turned. And beheld a visage I had not seen in many years: the lovely face of Desdemona, Countess of Swithin — the niece of my late, lamented, and never to be forgotten Lord Harold Trowbridge.

  I FIRST MET LADY DESDEMONA NEARLY A DECADE AGO, when she was barely eighteen and at the height of her first Season. The years which intervened between that occasion and this, have greatly altered both our fortunes. She has become the wife of the man she would have fled, when first I knew her; and has grown in consequence as a formidable Whig hostess, presiding over one of London’s most fashionable salons. Allusions to her name, discreetly abbreviated in the accepted mode as D., the C. of S___, appear from time to time in all the principal papers; she moves (with an occasional hint of scandal — she is a Trowbridge, after all) among the most exalted in the land; her taste in dress is everywhere approved and generally copied; and her dashing perch phaeton with its team of blood chestnuts is a piquant sight in the Park of an afternoon — for she is an accomplished driver, and to be taken up beside the Countess is considered a great mark of favour.

  All this I know purely as an interested observer: for Desdemona long since dropped my acquaintance. We met when I lived in Bath, at the behest of her uncle, the Rogue; she was a headstrong and willful young lady then, who learnt at her cost the value of respectability. The circumstances of Lord Harold’s death — my apparent complicity in those events — and his lordship’s bequest to me of a valuable cask of private papers, have alienated the interest and affection of the Trowbridge family. In short, I should not have been surprized had the Countess discovered my identity at a glance, and immediately cut me dead.

  Instead, I was saved by the remarkable Miss Jennings.

  “Your ladyship will give the world a very poor opinion of me,” she said roundly, “and just when I had hoped to pass myself off with some credit! I was forming a new acquaintance. But Miss Austen will forgive me, I am sure, if I claim the press of business. There is always a crush at Donaldson’s! How may I serve your ladyship?”

  “Miss Austen,” the Countess repeated, and studied my visage searchingly. “I should not have believed it possible!”

  Am I, then, so wretchedly altered from 1804? It must be inevitable that the countenance of nine-and-twenty is fairer than that of seven-and-thirty; and I shall be eight-and-thirty this December. I am becoming an old woman, tho’ I resist the knowledge.

  “Miss Austen, in Brighton, of all places!” Desdemona continued. “No, I should not have believed it possible. I think of you perpetually in Bath, tho’ why I should — It is a habit, I believe, or perhaps a failing in all of us, to fix our friends forever in the life we last knew of them. But how delightful to meet with you again!”

  Delightful? She must have forgot the coolness of her parting letter, the implicit reproaches, the suggestion that I had been, perhaps, something disgraceful — her uncle’s mistress, and had learnt to profit by it.

  “I shall leave you now,” Miss Jennings said briskly, “in the hope of seeing both of you often within Donaldson’s. Do not forget, dear Countess, Mme. Valmy’s concert this evening!” And she moved off in the direction of my brother — who was absorbed in conversing with a gentleman in buff pantaloons and a blue coat whom I did not recognise, and another I knew at once for Henry’s banking client Lord Moira — Eliza’s inveterate admirer.

  “My lady,” I said to Desdemona with tolerable composure, “you are well, I hope?”

  “Very well, I thank you.”

  “And the Earl?” I could not enquire after her family; that must be taken as an impertinence — a reference to her f
ather, the Duke of Wilborough — who had believed me a potential blackmailer, and very nearly threatened me with a court of Law.

  “Oh, Swithin is in his usual roaring health,” she said carelessly. “Nothing ever ails him, you know — he is disgustingly stout, unless one requires him to do what he does not like. But you, Miss Austen! How long has it been since we have met, I wonder?”

  “Very nearly ten years.”

  “And you have not altered in the slightest,” she said warmly, if untruthfully. “But I observe you are in mourning. May I offer my sympathy? A near relation, I collect?”

  A lesser woman might have uttered unforgivable things at such a moment — A paramour, perhaps? You are come into someone else’s ill-gotten gains, I collect? But she did not condescend to lash me. I do not think I should have been so benevolent, were our positions exchanged.

  “My sister, Mrs. Henry Austen,” I said with difficulty.

  “The Comtesse de Feuillide?” The shock in her voice was audible as she gave Eliza her French title — how Eliza would have revelled in the notice! “I am sorry to hear it. I recollect her a little from our meeting in Bath — she was the gayest of creatures.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well.” Desdemona inclined her head, and held out her hand; for a fleeting instant, there was something of the Gentleman Rogue in her look, a flash of the satiric in her eye. She was as well aware as I, how magnanimous she was being.

  I took her hand, and curtseyed.

  “Now that we have scraped our disreputable acquaintance,” she told me, “I hope we shall no longer be strangers — in Brighton, at least. It is a town for easy manners, you know. Do you make a long visit?”