Jane and the Stillroom Maid Page 9

  “Of economy,” I returned, “and of my brother, Captain Francis Austen, who makes his home our own. Southampton is but seventeen miles from Portsmouth, and the naval stores; wherever Frank’s duties may take him in the world, he shall always return to the Hampshire coast.”

  “I see.” Lord Harold declined Sir James’s offer of refreshment and drew forward a chair. “It was very wrong of me to speak as I did—the effect of surprise alone must explain it. But what brings you then to Bakewell? It is rather more northwards than Southampton, surely?”

  The Gentleman Rogue had never been given to idle chatter, and if I wondered at his distracted air, and his random pursuit of subject, I forbore from comment. I found his appearance to be remarkably ill. I had never seen him so obviously prey to an inner torment as he now appeared, and I experienced the most lively anxiety on his behalf. His beak of a nose looked sharper than ever, the skin being stretched tightly across the bone; his eyes were hollow, and I should judge that his rest had been disturbed for some nights past. Perhaps the affair of the Russian Countess—so vaguely alluded to, in the slyest of morning papers—had exacted a greater toll than I realised. Had there been a duel? A suicide? An illicit birth in a small town on the Continent? It seemed as though a great sickness or a desperate sorrow must gnaw at the man. Lord Harold looked all his eight-and-forty years at least.

  “We have been embarked on a journey of pleasure this summer,” I told him gently, “and being so near to the Peaks as my cousin’s home in Staffordshire, could not defer a glimpse of Derbyshire’s beauties.”

  “I rather imagine it is a chance you will forego next time it offers,” observed Sir James. “If Mr. Cooper is to be consulted, you should better have stayed at home.”

  “Tess Arnold would still be as dead,” I replied.

  Lord Harold said nothing. His grey eyes were fixed upon my face. In the usual way I would never have presumed to enquire as to his movements, but he was so little master of himself that the question sprang thoughtlessly to my lips. “And you, my lord? What brings you to Derbyshire?”

  His eyelids flickered. “A visit of condolence,” he said. “The heaviest I have ever been called upon to pay. You will have heard, naturally, of the Duchess’s death.”

  “The Duchess of Devonshire?”

  Lord Harold dropped his gaze to the pair of gloves he clutched tightly in his hands; and it was then that I troubled myself to notice that he was arrayed entirely in black. It had often been a habit of his—a kind of elegance of attire—but on the present occasion was accompanied by a total lack of adornment. He was plunged into the deepest mourning. Was this, then, the source of his trouble?

  The passing of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, so recently as March, had been the sensation of the Season. Not only was she the most powerful hostess of the great Whig families, a lady who had presided over a veritable court to rival King George’s, but she had been the most fashionable figure of the past age, almost a queen in her own right. It was Georgiana and her circle at Devonshire House that Richard Brinsley Sheridan burlesqued in A School for Scandal, and it was Georgiana, not Queen Charlotte, whom the public followed in blind adoration. Her blond curls, her sweetness of temper, and her youth—she was a Duchess at seventeen—had recommended her to the multitude; and no gown was adopted, no style or habit worn, that Georgiana did not set. More than this, however, had been her ambition. Her intellect ranged beyond the frivolities of Fashion. Some two decades ago, in the Westminster election of 1784, she had discarded the reserve so usually associated with great ladies of her station and fortune, and had condescended to campaign on behalf of the Whigs’ political light, the Genius of the Rabble, the Monster of Richmond, Charles James Fox. It had been rumoured in broadsheets that the two were lovers; Her Grace had been everywhere reviled, for buying votes on the hustings in return for kisses; but Fox prevailed in his parliamentary contest, and went on to sustain a brilliant career. With the death of the Tory leader, William Pitt, this past January, Fox at last bid fair to win the post of Prime Minister for which he had apprenticed all his life—and he owed his ascendancy in no small part to the Duchess of Devonshire.

  When a liver ailment at last would claim her, huge crowds stood vigil with flaming torches before the gates of Devonshire House in London. The Prince of Wales paid a death-bed call. And the newspapers squandered oceans of ink for ensuing weeks, in eulogizing her fame.

  I had known, of course, of Georgiana’s death—much as I had known of Marie Antoinette’s, and with as little personal sensibility. Although my brother Henry and his little wife, Eliza, the Comtesse de Feuillide, may have attended her routs at Devonshire House, the Austens were not in general a Whiggish family. My mother regarded the great ducal families, and their determination to control their King, as a select form of heathenry—one that possessed more wealth and influence than any heathen ought. Georgiana was as remote from my world as might be the moon.

  But she had not been remote from Lord Harold’s. He was, after all, the son of a duke.

  “You were intimately acquainted, sir?”

  “From our infancy,” he replied. “I am Devonshire’s junior, of course—he is eight years older than his late wife—but with Georgiana I was always of an age.”

  “My deepest sympathy, my lord.”

  He shrugged slightly, as though from embarrassment at his own emotion. “The best-natured and best-bred woman in England is gone, Jane. There is nothing more to be said.”

  “Hear, hear,” murmured Sir James. I glanced at him, and found an unwonted gravity in his looks. It was to be expected, I suppose, that a baronet and a native of the country would be acquainted with the Cavendish family—he must often have been invited to dine at Chatsworth when the Duke was in residence.

  “Do you make a long stay in the neighbourhood?” I enquired.

  Lord Harold seemed to rouse himself from a brown study. “Unhappily, not so long as I could wish. Parliament is at present recessed, but when it sits again we shall have much to do, if Fox is to prevail. Napoleon’s victories in Austria have satisfied the Emperor’s appetite, for a time; but more of Europe, and its armies, and its resources, are in thrall to the Monster, and he has never been a man to let fall a weapon when he might rather use it. Worse is yet to come, and we must be prepared to meet the Empire with force on both land and sea. I am come to Chatsworth, Miss Austen, to consult with His Grace the Duke—for no one may move the Whigs as Devonshire, if only he will give himself the trouble.”

  I smiled faintly at Lord Harold. “You would do well to guard your tongue, my lord. You speak to a respectable Tory, who must declare with Pitt that the map of Europe had better be rolled up again, for we shall not be wanting it this decade or more. I will not listen to the schemes and stratagems of a Whig! And I rather wonder whether His Grace is in any condition to hear you? Is not the Duke at present prostrate with grief?”

  Lord Harold exchanged a look with Sir James, and both men were silent a moment. “His Grace must feel his wife’s passing, to be sure. But his consolation in life has always been the friendship of Lady Elizabeth Foster; and she is presently his guest at Chatsworth.”

  “I see,” I said, although I saw nothing but that Lord Harold would dissemble, and that he moved in deeper waters than I had previously understood. A change of conversation appeared advisable. “Pray tell me, my lord, how does your family?”

  “Very well, thank you. My nephew Lord Kinsfell is very lately married.”

  “I wish him joy! And your delightful niece? Is the Countess of Swithin in health and beauty?”

  “Desdemona is blooming,” he replied, with more of lightness than I had yet seen; “indeed, she is increasing. We expect the child to put in its appearance at Christmas.”

  “How delightful!” I cried, and marvelled inwardly at the effect of time. I had first made the acquaintance of Lady Desdemona Trowbridge some two years before, in Bath, when she was a girl of eighteen and all unmarried. Now she was a lady of fashion—a formidab
le hostess in Town—a Countess in her own right, and soon to be a mother. Life for Lady Swithin had only grown more dazzling, while life for Jane Austen had contracted yet further. I had survived the passage of my thirtieth birthday, the loss of my father and a very dear friend; I was soon to give up my abode of three years, and venture forth into the unknown. I possessed even less inclination for marriage, and fewer prospects of achieving that state; I must live upon the princely sum of fifty pounds per annum—the probable cost of one of Lady Desdemona’s gowns—and did I dwell too long upon the impoverishment of my circumstances, I should grow unutterably depressed.

  “It was precisely this that drew me to your side today, Miss Austen,” Lord Harold was saying. “My niece is come with me to Chatsworth, to condole with Lady Harriot Cavendish, who is of an age with Mona and a friend from her earliest years. The Countess learned of your presence in Derbyshire only last evening, from Sir James”—this, with a glance for the Justice—“and could not know of it, without desiring to renew the acquaintance. My niece would have waited upon you this morning, indeed, but that Sir James assured us you were to appear as witness at the Inquest; and so it was settled that I should seek you out and bring you back to Chatsworth when all was concluded. Lady Swithin is wild to meet with you again—I say no more than she would herself,” he added with a smile, “for those were her very words.”

  Chatsworth! Second only to Blenheim as the most venerable and exalted estate in the land! That I should be invited, the acquaintance of one of its intimates—that I should walk into its grand foyer, not as a member of the touring public, but as a guest desired and welcomed! I might stroll through its extensive grounds, arm-in-arm with a Countess, and admire the fabled fountains and the Spanish oaks scattered about the lawns—I might take tea at a table set out on the grass, or sample fruit from a hothouse tree. I might fancy myself an equal with such a man as Lord Harold, and turn to find his gaze upon me. I, Jane Austen, an intimate of Chatsworth—and of the heathen Whigs it harboured!

  Whatever would Cassandra say?

  But then, with an inward sinking, I considered my state of dress. I had donned a respectable muslin gown of pale blue that morning, and had gone so far as to submit to a navy-blue spencer, despite the heat, in deference to the austerity of the occasion. I was very nearly suffocating. My gown, moreover, was not in the first stare of fashion, and grossly unequal to the grandeur of the Cavendishes.

  And I was emphatically not in mourning.

  “The Countess is very good,” I told Lord Harold haltingly, “but it is beyond my power to accept her invitation. Perhaps, if she intends to prolong her stay in the neighbourhood, we might walk together in Bakewell—”

  “Courage, Jane,” said Lord Harold quietly. “You always possessed it of old. Do not fail me now.”

  His grey eyes met my own, and held—and for the barest instant, I saw deep into his soul. Lord Harold was oppressed with worry, an anxiety so fearful he could not share it before Sir James; and I knew with absolute certainty that the visit to Lady Swithin was in the nature of subterfuge. He desired my counsel. And if I would learn of his secret concern, I must brave all the impropriety of appearing without black gloves, in a suffocating spencer, at the most hallowed house of mourning in all England.

  “I await your pleasure, my lord,” I said.

  To Make a Tart That Is Courage to a Man or Woman

  oil two peeled quinces, three peeled burdock roots, and a pared potato in a quart of wine until tender. Put in an ounce of dates, and when these are tender, force the whole through a strainer. Add the yolks of eight eggs, and the brains of four cock sparrows, or mourning doves if sparrows be not handy, and add a little rose or orange water.

  Next stir in some sugar, cinnamon, and ginger. Add cloves and mace if they be close at hand. Put in some sweet butter, and place the whole in a copper pudding mold. Tie the mold with cloth and string, and boil until done.

  If courage be not found in the eating, then a dose of strong spirits be advised.

  —From the Stillroom Book

  of Tess Arnold,

  Penfolds Hall, Derbyshire,

  1802–1806

  Chapter 9

  A Fine House Richly Furnished

  28 August 1806, cont.

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  THE CAVENDISH FAMILY ARE WITHOUT QUESTION AMONG the Great in Derbyshire—indeed, throughout all of England. It may fairly be said that the Whig party was born among these peaks in 1688; for it was the Cavendishes who conspired with their near neighbours, the Manners family—later the Dukes of Rutland—to call William of Orange and his consort, Mary, from Holland in a Glorious Revolution. Having seized the throne of England from James II, William III rewarded his king-makers with dukedoms; and they served him in turn, by reminding him that though the throne might be his, the kingdom was now theirs. It is a Whig tenet that the monarch serves at the pleasure of the people—if one considers the people to be solely those who own a vast deal of property. The Whigs will court the common rabble in order to preserve their own heads secure upon their shoulders, without ever intending to do very much to ameliorate the rabble’s condition—other than to set them against their kings.

  I write all this in the pages of my journal despite my deep regard for Lord Harold Trowbridge, a Whig if ever there were one. The Dukes of Wilborough, having always possessed a keen sense of interest, were no more slow to champion William than their Cavendish brothers; and thus fortunes were made, influence won, and Lord Harold preserved from want from the moment of his birth. It should not be remarkable that such a man is an adept at the manipulation of faction, and at the preservation of his own life, regardless of the tempests of warfare and politics; he was formed in intrigue, schooled in calculation, and took the cynic’s breath with his mother’s milk.

  And now he was to carry a respectable Tory Austen into the very heart of Cavendish territory. If I must storm the gates of Chatsworth, then no one but Lord Harold would do for my lieutenant.

  At our first entering the country, my mother determined that we should view Chatsworth’s grounds and some part of the house, which by custom are made open to the public. But upon learning that the family were down for the summer, and thrown into the deepest of mourning, we gave up the scheme in excessive disappointment. A sense of delicacy would not allow even Mrs. George Austen to invade the Cavendishes’ privacy at such a time.

  Her surprise would be great indeed upon learning that I had now secured an invitation to the house. In anticipation of the fevered exclamations such intelligence would excite—the inordinate concern for my state of dress, my speech, my manners, and my looks—and fearful that my mother would end by determining that she must accompany her younger daughter on so august an occasion—I undertook to leave my dearest relation in ignorance of events until they should be entirely past repair. I settled it with Sir James Villiers that he should call upon my cousin Mr. Cooper at The Rutland Arms, and convey to my mother a note I swiftly penned, explaining the nature of my absence.

  I might trust Sir James to make all my party easy as to the propriety of my visit, and the considerable honour of the Countess of Swithin’s notice—for he is possessed of exactly that buoyant self-assurance, that familiarity with the Great World, calculated to impress my mother and comfort my sister. When Sir James is done, I might well be the object of envy for having glimpsed Chatsworth on so intimate a scale—despite having entangled myself once more with Lord Harold.

  His lordship had come to Bakewell in an elegant landau, drawn by four matched bays, the panels and doors emblazoned with the Devonshire serpent and stag. A liveried coachman handed me into the carriage, and I settled myself opposite Lord Harold with all the sensations of delight attendant upon an airing in such an equipage, behind such a team, and through such splendid country. It was useless to attempt much conversation amidst all the bustle of the village; and until we had descended the length of the town, and crossed the ancient stone bridge that led towards Chatsworth, Lord Harold said nothing. Bu
t a journey of three miles cannot be passed entirely in silence; and presently, in a lowered tone, he enquired how I did.

  “Perfectly well, my lord, I thank you.”

  “The breeze is not too distressing?”

  “Not at all. I find it most refreshing. You will recollect that I have my spencer.”

  He then enquired whether I had yet ventured the Baslow road, and upon my answering in the negative, observed, “Then you may expect nothing but delight. This part of the country is known as Manners Wood, after the Rutland family. Do not neglect the view, Jane, as we achieve the top of the hill.”

  “I am sure I shall find it charming, Lord Harold.”

  He studied my countenance an instant, and then ventured, “You look very well, Jane. I rejoice to find you so obviously in health. It has been too long since we last met; and yet you appear not a day older.”

  “You flatter me, sir,” I chided him.

  “Not at all. I merely detect in you a resilience I am far from feeling myself.”

  “You do appear to have sustained a trying period.”

  “Most trying. From a variety of causes, this past twelvemonth has proved the most difficult of my life.” His gaze wandered over the woody hills to left and right, the gentle slopes of pasturage fading now in late summer, without appearing to register their beauty. “And now this brutal death in Miller’s Dale. It is by far too much.”

  I frowned. “I had not expected you to feel the maid’s murder with any personal sensibility, my lord.”

  “I confess I do not,” he returned, with a brusque laugh. “Indeed, I have entirely failed to consider of the wretched girl. She is nothing to me. It is for those who might be encompassed in the affair, that my anxiety is all alive. If I but knew what Georgiana would do—how she would wish me to act—” He broke off, and raised his hand to his lips in mute frustration.

  The late Duchess. Comprehension and astonishment broke upon my head at once. I leaned forward and spoke in no more than a whisper, conscious of the footman behind and the coachman before.