Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron Page 6

  “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 father, 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?”

  “But a fortnight, I believe.”

  “And you are lodged …?”

  “At the Castle.”

  “Excellent! So perfectly to hand!” She reached into her reticule and offered me her card. “Swithin has taken a house for us on the Marine Parade, tho’ he is hardly ever there. I shall hope to find you in my drawing-room one morning, Miss Austen.”

  And with that she passed on, to bespeak of Miss Jennings the latest verses of Lord Byron, the name of which she had forgot, but which her friend Lady Oxford assured her were most extraordinary.

  7 The first edition of Pride and Prejudice, published by Thomas Egerton in January 1813, was acknowledged as having been written “by the Author of Sense and Sensibility”—which had been written anonymously “by a Lady.” Later newspaper advertisements transposed these words as: “by Lady A—.,” which gave rise to much speculation regarding the identity of the supposedly noble authoress.—Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Encounter at the Camp

  SATURDAY, 8 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON, CONT.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK, JANE?” MY BROTHER EXCLAIMED as I perused the fashion plates of La Belle Assemblée, the latest edition of which was in considerable request among the patrons of Donaldson’s. It was clear from the exq
uisite modes draped on the impossibly tall ladies represented by the artist’s brush that I was fortunate in being obliged to wear black; not even the hundred and forty pounds I have earned from Sense and Sensibility—much less the hundred and ten Mr. Egerton gave for the copyright of P&P—should purchase a wardrobe suitable for Brighton. Spring fashions ran to jonquil crape, Nakara silk—a pearly shade ideally suited to a lady of my colouring, and which I guessed had been exactly the hue the Countess of Swithin was wearing—and apple green. Slippers were beaded and embroidered to match; pelisses of white jaconet, falling just to the knee, were buttoned over gowns; and a profusion of frills graced hemlines this season, which had risen above the ankle to reveal patterned stockings!

  “Jane,” Henry repeated, somewhat more stringently this time, and I set down La Belle Assemblée, only to see it immediately taken up by the lady on my left.

  “What is it?” I asked with pardonable crossness.

  “The Regent.”

  I glanced about me wildly. “In Donaldson’s?”

  “Good God, no. In Brighton. Lord Moira informs me that the Prince came down from London but two days ago, and already intends a Reception at the Pavilion this evening. We are both to go!”

  “But would it be entirely proper? Recollect that we are in deepest mourning—”

  “Piffle! I should not like to be seen dancing at an Assembly, Jane—but the crush of the Pavilion on Reception evenings is akin to that of Picadilly Circus; one may meet the world there, and be jostled about in the greatest discomfort, in an attempt to pay homage to the Crown.”

  “Little as I admire the Regent, I cannot think that Eliza would forgo such an opportunity,” I admitted doubtfully.

  “She should be wild to see the Pavilion—and all the quizzes who frequent it—and moreover, should already have secured the cards of invitation herself; for you know she was a little acquainted with Prince Florizel, as he was known in his elegant youth. But I have had our cards expressly from Colonel McMahon—he is the Regent’s private secretary.”

  “The gentleman in buff and blue, I collect?”

  “All of the Regent’s intimates sport that livery. McMahon had only to hear my praise from Lord Moira’s lips, to beg the honour of our presence. Do consider, Jane! The notice of the Regent! What a spur to my banking concerns!”

  “—Or a possible run on them. That gentleman’s pockets are perpetually to let; and you should be bankrupt in little more than a week, did his notice prove too great.”

  Impervious to caution, Henry merely grinned. “Our retiring Jane, amidst the Carlton House Set! How Mamma should stare!”

  “She should suffer palpitations,” I corrected, “and utter a vulgarity. She cannot help but do so—which is the spur, no doubt, to her daughter’s deplorable novels.”

  “Who dares to say that your books are vulgar?” Henry demanded, momentarily diverted.

  “The proprietress of Donaldson’s,” I returned dejectedly. “She abused Pride and Prejudice as mercenary, Henry, and not fit to spring from a lady’s pen.”

  “As to that,” he drawled, slipping my arm through his and leading me towards the door, “you should hate far worse to learn it was called dull, and that nobody of consequence could look into it without yawning. You must know by now, Jane, that your books are all the crack! You ought to be in high gig! I have half a mind to bring you into Fashion—see if you do not hear P&P spoken of, at the Pavilion this evening!”

  “Henry,” I said, in a voice heavy with suspicion, “you are not going to puff off my consequence before McMahon and his ilk, are you?”

  “Puff off—! Where do you learn such cant expressions, Jane?”

  “From my vulgar mother,” I rejoined calmly, “and my fashionable brother. Promise you will not expose the secret of my authorship. I have a dread of its being generally known.”

  Henry cast up his eyes to Heaven. “I cannot think why. I should be proud as a peacock, had I done anything half so clever!”

  “And I should as soon ride bareback at Astley’s Amphitheatre as admit to publication! Were my identity known, I could not walk at liberty through the village of Chawton! I should be suspected as a spy at every dinner table, every Assembly—and I should never be so frank, Henry, in my expressions; or so faithful a depicter of the world and its follies. Anonymity accords me freedom to speak as I find—and I cherish freedom above all else!”

  “Lord knows you have had little enough of it,” he answered soberly. “Very well—I promise to guard your secret. Tho’ it shall go hard with me! Do you not apprehend, Jane, that your whole family is bursting to boast of your accomplishments—that we are all devilish proud of you?”

  “Then praise the novels rather than their wretched author,” I told him roundly, “and inflate Mr. Egerton’s sales! You cannot display your pride more profitably, or in a manner more suited to my taste; for I mean to have one of those gorgeous confections,” I added with a nod towards La Belle Assemblée, “as soon as I have put off my blacks.”

  WE DAWDLED ALONG THE SHOPS OF NORTH STREET, STOPPING now and again to admire a particularly fine picture displayed in a window, or a daring hat, or a zephyr cloak such as might have driven Eliza wild; and after taking a cold collation in a parlour at the Old Ship, drove out in a hired gig along the coast. All manner of natural beauties may be found to the west of town—the fall of boulders known as The Rocks, at the mouth of a little inlet just brushed by the road near Southwick—and the natural wonder called Egypt, just shy of Shoreham, which looks to be the work of antique Pharaohs in its scattering of monoliths, standing upright amidst the sea. With the wind on my cheeks and my curls whipping from beneath my bonnet, I might almost have been nineteen again—and felt lighter of heart than I had in all the sad weeks since Eliza’s decline.

  On our return to Brighton, Henry elected to drive out a mile or two along the Lewes road to the encampment of the 10th Royal Hussars—being an inveterate Paymaster, my brother must needs renew acquaintance among the officers; he can never be entirely at his ease, even at a watering-place, but must be about the business of winning custom wherever it may offer. As his conversations could in no way include me, I was at leisure to walk about. I had alluded to Brighton Camp in Pride and Prejudice, without ever having seen it—and thought it should prove very good sport to learn how much the truth differed from my invention.8

  There is much colour in the general scene, for the Prince of Wales Own, as they are called, are scrupulous as to the quality of their horses, their curricles, and their uniforms. They are among the most dashing set of men in England, and betray little sensibility of their losses in the Peninsula, at Corunna and Vittoria. Their manners, when in possession of their senses and not foxed from the bumpers of brandy they are known to take at all hours of the day, are elegant in the extreme; and so I suffered no impropriety or insult—on account of my black clothes, and matronly cap, and general appearance of outworn looks. There are silly girls enough for hanging on the sleeve of every red coat—and one of my advanced years must appear in the nature of deserted chaperon.

  It was with a start, therefore, that I heard my name called in an excited accent. Turning, I observed Miss Catherine Twining, accompanied by her father. She was dressed with extreme propriety this morning, in dove-grey muslin drawn up to the neck and a dark blue spencer; a close bonnet concealed her glossy chestnut curls; her eyes, however, were sparkling with delight.

  “Miss Austen! What good fortune! Is it not remarkable that we should meet again, within a day of our first acquaintance? I must ascribe it to the workings of Fate!” Miss Twining cried.

  “Providence, rather,” the General corrected drily, “who sees all and orders all. I wonder you have the courage to call down His notice, unfortunate child.”

  Miss Twining’s pink cheeks blanched; her imploring gaze fixed on my countenance.

  “General Twining,” I said with a curtsey. “Miss Twining. I hope I find you fully recovered from your ordeal of yesterday?”

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bsp; “We were not to speak of it!” General Twining looked all his rage. “I wonder at your insolence, ma’am! And your lack of delicacy! Indeed, I must suspicion some dark purpose in your deliberate allusion to events that cannot too soon be forgotten. Understand, Miss Austen, you shall never hope to profit by your shameful knowledge.”

  “Profit?” I repeated, bewildered.

  The obsidian gaze swept over my figure. “Was it that hope that brought you to Brighton Camp? A handsome sum, perhaps, in exchange for the preservation of your silence—the alternative being the publication of my daughter’s wantonness throughout the streets of Brighton?”

  “Sir!” I gasped, outraged.

  “Papa!” Miss Twining cried, at the same instant.

  “How else am I to understand your pursuit of us here this morning, madam? Disgraceful! On such a day of melancholy importance to the Twining family! If it is not advantage you seek—if it is not interest that has brought you hard on my daughter’s heels—then how may you account for your brazen appearance here, in an encampment of soldiers, and entirely without protection? I might almost assume you to have been Byron’s confederate, and posted in Cuckfield a-purpose, the better to blackmail your victim!”

  I stared at him, my body rigid with indignation. “I am thankful that my brother, Mr. Austen, is unable to hear your insults, General—for he should not hesitate to answer them with a demand for justice. I have nothing further to say to you but Good day.”

  I would have stepped past the repugnant fellow on the instant, and made my way blindly in any direction opposite the Twinings’ own, had not Miss Twining impeded me. “Pray—I implore you, Miss Austen—do not—do not take my papa in bad part—it is only that he is suffering, you see, on account of dear Richard.”

  I stopped short. What courage the child possessed, to speak out against all caution, all portents in that black and furious face, wavering above her! Where had she learnt such courage? Or was it the broken voice of desperation that spoke—seeking a support of any kind that offered? I could not walk coldly from such a plea; my heart must hear it, and my temper cool. I felt my looks soften, and I forced a smile for the girl. She was so very young, after all—