Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron Page 7

  “If I have offended you, Miss Austen, I beg leave to apologise,” her father said stiffly. “Such words ought, I apprehend, to have been reserved for Byron himself. But he is unfortunately from Brighton at this present. When he returns, I shall know how to act.”

  “Papa!” In alarm, Miss Twining grasped his coat sleeve. “You cannot challenge a poet to a duel! Every feeling must be offended!”

  He shook her hand away as tho’ it had been a fly.

  “It is difficult, Miss Austen, for a father to know what he should do for so wayward a daughter. How Catherine can have abandoned propriety yesterday, and entered the coach of a stranger—abandoning reputation and every claim to honour.… I know my duty—the girl ought to have been soundly whipped, and confined to her room—but circumstances prevented the natural consequence of sin.”

  This was heaping mortification upon mortification; Miss Twining looked weak with shame, and she could not lift up her eyes. I sincerely pitied her.

  “I have an idea that your daughter repents of her impulsive folly,” I said firmly, “and would be grateful for silence from us both on the subject. It is no deprivation to me, sir, I assure you, to talk of more cheerful matters.”

  “It would have been better for her, had she not been seen abroad this se’ennight,” General Twining persisted heavily, “but our visit to the Camp could not be put off. I observe you are in mourning, ma’am—and that you will have noted, for your part, that I am in blacks as well. My son—my only heir—was killed on this day, a year since, under that disreputable fool Wellington’s command in Spain. It is for that reason—for that solemn observance of our irremediable loss—that Catherine and I have visited the Hussars this morning.”

  “You have my deepest sympathy,” I murmured.

  “Mr. Hendred Smalls,” the General said broodingly, “—a most respectable clergyman, with every distinction bestowed by the Regent himself—was so good as to offer a service of penance for the redemption of my poor son’s soul. His brother officers took leave from their duties to attend—they have not entirely forgot my martyred Richard. You will apprehend that Catherine’s absence should have excited comment, at a moment when comment was least desired. Her penance, therefore, has been forestalled a little.” He unbent so far as to lean towards me, as if to confide. “I would not have Mr. Smalls think ill of her for the world. I should not wish that gentleman to have a horror of one who might, with a little push, be all to him in future.”

  I collected the General intended to make a match between his daughter and the loyal clergyman—was it for Mr. Smalls that Miss Twining had rebuffed so dramatic a parti as Byron? Was it possible the clergyman had won her heart, to the exclusion of all other interests—even the most Romantic Lord to walk the streets of Brighton? And how had such an ardent attachment won the General’s approval? The girl was, after all, but fifteen; Mr. Smalls, if he had advanced so far as to earn the Regent’s notice and favour, must be somewhat older than a curate, and an unlikely companion for a child barely out of the schoolroom. I glanced at Miss Twining in sympathy—there is nothing as dreadful as the publication of one’s love affairs—and found her disgusted gaze fixed upon some object behind me.

  I turned, and espied a rotund gentleman of advanced years hastening towards our party. His face shone with perspiration, despite the mildness of the day; his hatless head betrayed a balding pate; and his general corpulence suggested a familiarity with the pleasures of the table that must supersede all other pursuits. A cheerful-looking gentleman enough; and however unlikely it seemed, on excellent terms with General Twining. He appeared determined, in his purposeful waddle, to pay his respects on the sad occasion.

  “Ah,” the General muttered uneasily. “How very unfortunate—Miss Austen, I must beg you to preserve the profoundest silence on the subject of my daughter’s recent disgrace, before Mr.… That is, I hope I may depend upon your discretion … Catherine, do not slouch so, and at least attempt to suggest the angelic in your looks!”

  “You cannot mean, sir—”

  “Indeed, Miss Austen,” Miss Twining burst out. “Behold the aspirant to my hand! Am I not to be congratulated? Every girl in Brighton must envy me such a beau! I do not think he is above three years older than my father, indeed! May I present the extremely respectable Mr. Hendred Smalls to your acquaintance?”

  8 Henry Austen began life as a banker when he was appointed regimental paymaster of the Oxfordshire Militia at the age of twenty-six—the year he married Eliza de Feuillide, his widowed cousin.—Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Regent’s Reception

  8 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON, CONT.

  “A PLEASURE, TO BE SURE,” MR. SMALLS PRONOUNCED AS he bent with effort over my hand; “for any young lady who is accounted a friend to our dear Miss Twining, must be a treasure indeed.”

  I murmured some pleasantry, acutely aware of Catherine Twining’s discomfort; she had stepped back a pace, as though to put as much distance as possible between herself and this preposterous suitor, this puffing Romeo some four decades her senior, whose countenance shone with the exertion of making his bow and whose fingers clutched damply at my own. Hendred Smalls effected a smile—his teeth, as should not be unusual in a man of his span, were very bad—and then turned with a simper to his real object, Miss Twining. Having learnt, no doubt, from previous experience, she kept her hands firmly clutched on her reticule and merely bobbed a curtsey, her face all but obscured beneath the brim of her bonnet.

  General Twining placed his hand in the small of his daughter’s back and thrust her ungently towards the clergyman. “Pray show your gratitude to Mr. Smalls, my dear, for that most eloquent tribute to your brother. Mr. Smalls, for my part, I can conceive of nothing more fitting to the martial nature of Richard’s life—and the bitter waste of his end.”

  “Sacrifice,” Mr. Smalls observed, with his small black eyes fixed upon Miss Twining’s cheek, “is the highest purpose of man’s existence on earth. You may be proud, General—if I may so express it—that Richard’s life was wasted; for it is the death won without glory, the obscure and insignificant ending, that is most valued in the eyes of the Creator. We should not set ourselves up as rivals, I am sure, of that consummate sacrifice at Calgary.”

  I found this sentiment so revolting I had not a word to utter in response to it. Miss Twining’s fixed regard for the paving-stones at her feet—she had ignored her father’s injunction to effuse her thanks—suggested that the poor child was as little moved. Mr. Smalls’s eloquence may perhaps have been marred by his manner of speaking—he was given to richly rolling consonants, as affected as though he had been trained up in the theatre in his youth, rather than the pulpit; one might suspect him of prating Hamlet when he had no babes to baptise. I wondered if he spoke thusly even in the breakfast parlour, crying out for his bread and butter; or if he was liable to declaim from the nether end of the table, when desperately in want of soup.

  “I am sure you have much to say to one another,” I murmured, “and must beg to leave you in peace. General, my condolences on your sad loss; and Mr. Smalls, I shall hope to have the pleasure of listening to your sermon on the morrow.”

  His round face flushed darkly; his head inclined. “That is not likely to be possible, Miss Austen. You may not perfectly comprehend my position in life. You will know, I am sure, that there is but one church in Brighton—so charming a town should hardly need more—and that is the venerable St. Nicholas’s, which dates from the fourteenth century, tho’ certain of the tower stones are decidedly Norman in origin. It falls under the authority of the Bishop of Chichester, and his chosen vicar is the most Reverend Mr. Michel, an excellent man. We have argued points of great doctrinal significance from time to time. I myself am attached, however, to Brighton Camp; I am chaplain to the 10th Royal Hussars, whose Colonel-in-Chief is no less a personage than the Regent himself. I owe everything in life to His Royal Highness. Such benevolence! Such condescension!”
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  “Such unexpected wisdom,” General Twining interposed warmly, “in a Royal of indifferent morals.”

  Hendred Smalls positively swelled with pleasure at this speech; his round shoulders thrust back, and the hidden stays that bound his torso creaked ominously. “I should like to offer your party some refreshment, General, before your return to Brighton—a glass of brandy, the hour being already advanced, with perhaps a lemonade for the ladies!—if such an indulgence should not be adjudged improper, on the melancholy occasion. There is something,” he added, with a particularly offensive smile at Catherine Twining, “that I should like to say to Miss Twining.”

  I hastened to reply for myself in the negative, and with a final nod to Catherine—whose countenance was compounded of indignation and dread—hurried off down the High Street in the direction of Buckingham House, hopeful of encountering Henry. My pulse had quickened under the influence of recent events; I could not quite contain my wrath, indeed—and had General Twining not grasped his ebony walking-stick so firmly, I might have soundly thrashed him with it.

  ———

  “IT WAS THE WORST SORT OF HUMILIATION, HENRY, TO see that perfect flower of a girl bound over as chattel to an odious old man, who might easily have been her grandsire!” I fumed, as we mounted the stairs to our bedchambers at the Castle some hours later. We had contented ourselves with a moderate dinner in the publick coffee room, the better to restore ourselves and prepare for the Regent’s reception, to which we were bid at eight o’clock. “Only conceive of the domestic picture! Little Catherine, huge with child at the tender age of sixteen, and her toothless husband laid up with the gout, from a constant overindulgence in Port! It should certainly drive the poor girl mad—or to publick ruin.”

  “She’s not quite bound over to this fellow, however,” my brother said thoughtfully. “There was no mention made of a formal engagement. Do not despair, Jane. Miss Twining, recollect, is not without alternatives. Byron may yet prevail!”

  “Henry! Do not even joke of such a thing!”

  He grinned at me heartlessly. “I should not put it past a girl of Miss Twining’s mettle to escape her father’s plots; she cannot be entirely without friends.”

  “She has no mettle at all!” I gasped. “I never knew a more shrinking child. It is clear she has been beaten into conformability from the time she could toddle. But perhaps we may contrive—perhaps the counsel of a friend …”

  “Jane, do not involve yourself in the girl’s affairs,” my brother cautioned. “Recollect how her father meets opposition—with the back of his hand. You would not wish to heighten Miss Twining’s misery.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but I may yet stand her friend. If our intimacy should progress, I could perhaps invite her to accompany us to Chawton, for a visit of some weeks. She might then escape Lord Byron’s notice—the General’s wrath might cool—and his incomprehensible desire to shackle her to a dotard might dissipate. Excellent Henry! You have put me in mind of the very thing!” I seized his coat excitedly. “For you will not mind a third in the curricle, I am sure, when we quit this place at the end of a fortnight. It should not be so terribly uncomfortable. We are both of us slender ladies, after all—and you are remarkably fit for a widower of advancing years.”

  “Such a crush is not to be contemplated,” Henry retorted firmly, “and if you think for a moment that I shall assist you in carrying off that girl, whose father has not the least inclination for our society, you’ve more hair than wit, Jane. I will undertake nothing of the sort. If your heroine is to escape the misery of her unnatural marriage, she shall have to shift for herself. I predict that an ardent young swain will soon appear, desperate to prove his honourable intentions. Allow him to rescue Miss Twining, I beg.”

  “Abominable!”

  “But unanswerable,” he concluded fondly. “Lie down a little while on your bed; take a glass of the excellent claret I have had sent up to your room; and be ready at my knock to storm the Marine Pavilion. I am sure its magnificence will put the Cheltenham tragedy of Miss Catherine Twining entirely out of your head.”

  THE PRINCE REGENT, IT IS SAID, FIRST VISITED THE SMALL village of Brighthelmston around the year ’83, when he was a handsome youth of one-and-twenty. He was urged into Sussex by his doctors, who thought the sea water might ease the ominous swelling of certain organs in the Royal neck; being as yet unacquainted with the vastness of the Prince’s appetites, they apparently mistook the thickening of his person for a more sinister disorder. Whether he dipped his head in the sea or not, remains a question for posterity; but certain it is he dipped his wick—as the Vulgar would say—in every unprotected maiden the surrounding country offered, until the reputation of Brighton, as it came to be known, was too black for any decent lady to contemplate. The Prince sampled every possible pleasure the watering place could offer, from horse racing to card playing to the wines of the King’s Arms—and was led in dissolution by the example of his uncle, the notorious Duke of Cumberland. The Duke held the lease of Grove House, on the Steyne; his nephew enjoyed every freedom of the place, and its raffish circle; and within a few months of his coming of age, hired a modest farmhouse from the principal landowner in these parts—one Thomas Kemp.9

  Mrs. Fitzherbert was swiftly installed at a neighbouring villa; and within a few years, the architect Mr. Henry Holland was tasked with transforming the farmhouse into a neoclassical Pavilion, complete with a domed rotunda and numerous columns. Christened the Marine Pavilion, it soon acquired two wings, clad in cream-glazed Hampshire tiles, and a conservatory jutting from the rear. Some eight years ago—so Henry informs me—the riding school and stables were begun, structures so vast as to dwarf the Pavilion itself, and constructed quite curiously in the Indian stile. The Prince was three years building these, and his debts mounting all the while. Happily for His Highness, however, he had by this time taken his detested cousin Caroline of Brunswick in marriage, got an heir to the throne, and been accorded a handsome independence by Parliament; and could thus afford to be careless of money matters.10

  “Sixty horses,” Henry muttered as we crossed the short distance between the Castle and the Royal abode. “Sixty horses the Regent houses in that stupendous block of stalls, Jane. He has a passion for prime cattle—and for racing, of course. Yet they say he’s grown so fat, he finds it difficult to spring into the saddle. Requires the assistance of four grooms, two at each Royal leg.”

  “More of a heave than a spring, I collect.”

  We were arrived at the gate, joining a throng of other finely dressed and coiffeured gentlemen and ladies; in any other town a line of carriages and teams, with shouting flambeaux-bearers, should have rolled up to the Pavilion doors; but in Brighton there are few who bother to drive the short distance between one house and the next—even when the house in question is royal. Most of the Regent’s guests have only to step across the Steyne, like ourselves, in their slippers and shawls.

  I could not allow myself to regard the finery all about me; I should suffer a pang of mortification at my own simple black silk, which appeared as incongruous amidst the paler colours of May as a vulture got among turtledoves. More than one of our fellow guests looked askance at Henry and me—as tho’ we could not possibly be wanted here, and must be forcing ourselves on the Regent’s notice. I knew none of them, and cared less for their opinion; and my brother’s arm supported me the length of the gravel sweep. After an interval, we achieved the front portico under its imposing dome; the massive doors were propped open to permit a flood of lanthornlight to spill out upon the marble steps; and we joined the throng of the Select who trod slowly past the line of footmen arrayed in buff and blue.

  Henry presented his cards of invitation coolly enough; an august personage took them in one gloved hand; and before I had time to entirely collect myself, “Mr. Henry Austen, Miss Jane Austen,” were announced to the milling crowd.

  What is there to say of the Marine Pavilion, that has not been said by others more intimate with
its glories?

  The interiors are very fine, in the classical manner, with much gilt and paint picked out à la Robert Adam; the furnishings, too, are of the latest mode—with winged gryphons and curving swans at the corner of every console table; and the walls of a certain gallery are remarkable for their hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, so intriguing and exotic in the boldness of its colours, and the strangeness of its figures, as to transport one to an Oriental clime. Here there are bamboo sophas, and japanned cabinets; Ming porcelain, and pagodas; and most startling of all—statues of fishermen dressed in Chinese silk, large as life and posed in niches built to purpose. The Regent, it is said, has a passion for the Exotic, and for the acquisition of fine things; for pictures in oils brought from every corner of Europe, and for snuffboxes, enamels, clockwork birds—for jewels of exquisite craftsmanship, which he bestows as the merest baubles on the ladies who excite his favour. The Pavilion, therefore, is less notable in its mere mortar and paint than for the objects placed in profusion on every surface: one could wander among them a se’ennight, and not be satisfied in their study.11

  One might wander, I should say, if one did not swoon within a quarter-hour from the excessive heat of the Pavilion itself. The Regent abhors a chill; and requires his rooms to be as raging as a blast-furnace at every season of the year. There are fires in each of the principal rooms, and braziers of hot coals line the long passages; add to this a crowd of some two hundred of Brighton’s Fashionables, and the resulting swelter is easily credited. I was soon wilting from the heat, the mixture of perfumes and pomades, the scents of warmed wine and of hothouse flowers, which were massed at every side; the odour of humanity in too close proximity; and the smells of food: pineapples and fish soup and the tiny, fragile figures of roasted ortolans—