Jane and the Stillroom Maid

Chapter 8 A Period of Mourning

28 August 1806, cont.

THE APPEARANCE OF LORD HAROLD TROWBRIDGE HAS ever been a source of astonishment in my life, the sudden intercession of a breathless world, imperfectly understood. His taste for fashionable intrigue and clandestine statecraft, when allied with a character already prone to discretion, make him an elusive figure. Although an intimacy of sorts subsists between us — as much as any such condition may, when the lady is single and impoverished and the gentleman one of the most pursued partis on the marriage circuit — I never know when he is on the Continent or in Town; in danger of his life on behalf of the Crown, or dying of boredom at a country retreat. Ours is not the sort of footing that might encourage a voluminous correspondence. The exchange of letters between a lady of my station, and a gentleman of his, might suggest an improper liaison or a secret understanding. I have never enjoyed either in my association with Lord Harold.

On the present occasion we met after a silence of above eight months, and the absence, on his part, of nearly a year. I had seen vague reports in the public journals of diplomatic sallies in the Baltic, and visits to the Prussian Court; I had snatched at rumours of romantic alliance with a certain Russian Princess, and the whiff of scandal in the Montalban chit’s elopement. I knew not what to credit, what to deny, what to approve, or what should give me pain.

I cannot presume upon Lord Harold’s notice, or even look for the continuance of his friendship. But he is, without exception, the most intriguing member of my acquaintance; to move in his circle is to drink a kind of elixir, not necessary to the maintenance of life, but sparkling in its effect and invariably invigorating.

Though my mother and sister disapprove Lord Harold’s influence, I consider my intimacy with the Gentleman Rogue to be a considerable honour, and one not lightly bestowed. On certain occasions, and in certain circumstances, I have known some part of Lord Harold’s confidence and his counsel — and in this, I understand myself to have been the keeper of his trust. Should he disappear from the face of the earth and persist in silence the better part of a decade, I should still meet his renewed attentions with cordiality.

“I understand your mother and sister are also in Bakewell,” he said to me now, and I replied in the affirmative. “They are well?”

“Perfectly well, I thank you.”

“Despite the intrusion of a murderer in their midst?”

“I do not think my mother has afforded the Arnold girl more than a quarter-hour of consideration,” I said drily, “and my sister, though greatly distressed by the reports she has heard, was spared all sight of the corpse. We must remember, Lord Harold, that it is August. The world’s concerns cannot be too deeply felt when the weather is fine.”

This sally won the barest ghost of a smile. “What brings you into Derbyshire? I should have thought to find you in Kent, at Mr. Edward Austen’s estate, in such a season.”

“My brother is from home at present,” I told him, “having taken a house at Ramsgate; but I may find it in my power to visit Godmersham again in the autumn. We intend a removal in October to Southampton, my lord.”

“Southampton?” he repeated, with a slight frown; “I should not have thought your character any more suited to a watering place, Jane, than it has been to the dissipations of Bath. Of what is your mother thinking?”

“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 formidable 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.