The Slightest Provocation

Chapter Twenty-seven

Their tea had grown quite tepid when Mary had finished recounting what she knew of the Oliver affair.

“Remarkable.” Anna sighed. “And not a little bit frightening, an official of Lord Liverpool’s government sending a provocateur among the people. Well, that is what we’re saying, isn’t it? That Lord Sidmouth sent this man on a tour of the Midlands, to stir up insurrection?”

“It does seem to be the case,” Mary said, “as with that other man earlier this year.”

“Indeed, a Mr. Castle played a large role in instigating the riot at Spa Fields. Luckily, it all came out in court. But this could have been so much worse, implicating men from the whole region. Well, we’re fortunate that Oliver was unmasked. And that now that the word is being circulated, no one will venture out and get hurt. But do you suppose that this Oliver fellow might have gone rather beyond what the Home Office expected of him?”

“It does seem possible,” Mary said. “And I’d almost like to think so, having recently developed a certain tolerance for Kit and his… loyalties. Still, leaving aside all prejudice, the evidence does mount up, and not in Lord Sidmouth’s favor. The government does seem to want to stir up anger among the people, turn reformers into insurrectionists for the purpose ofmaking the rest of us fearful.”

The ladies were silent for a time until Anna spoke again. “He’s well worth tolerating, Mary.

“And how fascinating finally to meet him,” she continued. “After all these years he’d become a figure of legend to me, rather like the angel Lucifer, if not so tall as one imagines Lucifer to be. Richard didn’t speak of him often, but occasionally he’d retreat into a horrid little melancholy over the rupture of their friendship.”

“They were awfully close.” Mary sighed, paused, and then smiled at a new thought. “And they may become so again, in the course of protecting each other from calamity out in the countryside tomorrow. Those outdoor bare-knuckle matches can get rather raucous. I used to beg to be taken along-disguised as a boy, you know-but Kit wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Is pugilism really so interesting?” Anna asked.

“Actually, it is-there’s something to all that twaddle you were entertaining him with. For myself, I could dispense with the gentlemanly self-congratulation it inevitably evokes, about English pluck and bottom, our native honest virtues, and so forth. But the strategic elements are worth following. While as to the boxers themselves, the muscularity…”

“Ah, there is that. I wonder that more ladies don’t…”

“We’re allowed to watch the gloved exhibitions in London. There’s a fives court near Leicester Square; one can sit in an enclosed area. Perhaps, when… well, perhaps if…”

She’d been drifting into a pretty fancy, about London, about the future, about Kit. A fancy only, she told herself sternly.

“Today’s discoveries are a great confusion to him,” she told Anna now. “He’d hoped for a position in the Home Office, you see.”

“I do see,” Anna said, and covered Mary’s hand with her own.

Nor had Anna been speaking twaddle about the Misses Raddiford. Kit had been a favorite, as Richard’s aunts reminded him several times over an excellent dinner, the reminiscences of his eyes and manners being served up once more to accompany the dessert course.

Fortunately, it was necessary to make a brief night of it. Kit and Richard wanted to get an early start tomorrow morning, to join the throngs at the boxing match, while Anna would spend the day at the old ladies’ hearthside. The oldest Miss Raddiford had bought a great many skeins of wool, very cheap for the quality, that needed to be rolled up and then to be worked into several dozen shawls for the parish poor for the winter months; of course, the work would go much faster if Lady Christopher would consider joining them.

“Most assuredly, Miss Raddiford. I shall be delighted.”

Thank you. Anna shaped the words silently from across the table.

“I shall think of you,” Kit said, “your hands quite immobilized, held captive by Miss Sophy Raddiford as she winds an endless ball of wool.”

They’d come to the top of the narrow staircase at the inn.

“In fact”-he shut the bedchamber door behind them-“I’m thinking of you that way at this moment. And quite an appealing picture you make, too.”

They didn’t speak of Mr. Oliver that night; in truth, they didn’t speak very much at all until the following morning.

“Belcher,” Mary said, “will be scandalized by the condition of that neckcloth.”

“Yes, I expect so.” His eyes had grown distant again, even with his body so warm and his arms tight about her.

“Come on,” she said. “Time to pull ourselves out of bed. You and Richard will want to be at the front of the crowd. And at least his aunts will give us a decent breakfast.”

In fact, they didn’t speak at all of Oliver until two days later-and then very briefly, in the carriage, their arms about each other, watching the afternoon skies darken and the clouds pile up high above the moors and then the meadows. The air was cool and tremulous, the leaves quivering as though in nervous anticipation of the impending rain, as Mr. Frayne drove them south through Derbyshire again.

She expected that Kit had continued to discuss the Oliver business with Richard, before or after the boxing match (which, both gentlemen had agreed, was a splendid exhibition of native English pluck) or perhaps while walking on the moors the following day. They’d discussed a great many things, Kit said, in the course of rebuilding their friendship.

Which wasn’t to ignore the fact that they disagreed rather more than they agreed, their only areas of pure accord being pugilism, a sense of fair play, and an affinity for strong-minded women. Still, he concluded, a friendship could go pretty far on those three.

Mary thought she discerned a hint of ruefulness, a knowledge that their affections could never be so pure as in boyhood. At least they’d never duel again, though-which might be saying the same thing in another way.

“His newspaper isn’t bad, you know, even if it’s far too enamored of its own rhetoric.” Kit stared at the blue velvet ceiling, as though the words he needed were written on it. “Too clever, too… fatuous in its claims for progress and the future, even when it speaks the truth about present injustice.”

“He showed you a few pages?”

“He pressed a few years’ worth of pages upon me; Belcher has packed it up somewhere. I don’t object to it, but there was only one of his scribblers who truly impressed me. A Mr. Elyot, in one of the older issues. Excellent treatment of the Corn Laws. Sober, not afraid to use facts.”

He’s jesting, of course. Richard must have told him that she was Edward Elyot; Elyot was her mother’s family’s name, though he might have forgotten that information. No, she thought, he’s teasing me.

“I shall have to read this Mr. Elyot myself one of these days,” she said, and kissed him to show that she was amused but hardly gulled by his joke.

There wouldn’t be more than kisses, however, today in the bouncing carriage. One could lose one’s taste for an old pleasure. No matter: they’d found some fascinating new ones last night, at an extremely comfortable inn at Matlock.

“I wonder what he’ll do now,” she said. “Mr. Oliver, I mean, now that he’s been exposed. Well, he can’t have any further career as a provocateur…” Her voice had trailed off at the word career.

She began again. “In any event, it’s a good thing that the workingmen of Grefford won’t be embarking on his false crusade. It would have been tonight, you know, around midnight. I should hate to think of Nick and his grandfather, arrested by the militia, tried for sedition…”

She thought she might be in for a little lecture on disorder and the need to contain it. But all he said was, “Of course, it rather leaves them where they’d begun, doesn’t it? With nothing settled-the whole affair come to nothing.

“The odd thing,” he continued, “is that the Home Office might have been able to pull it off, if they’d better coordinated what they told their magistrates, saw the whole thing more strategically.”

“If they’d had you working for them?”

“Yes, in fact. Well, it wouldn’t have been easy…”

“You’ve been thinking how you might have managed it.”

“The idea, you see, was to tell a great many people what they wanted to hear. Those in possession of power are likely to believe that any challenge, any change to how things have always been done, might well be an insurrection. In a certain sense I don’t believe Sidmouth or the Committee of Secrecy was lying. Not by their lights anyway. Workingmen speaking their minds, manufacturers who want representation for their districts-it’s all suspicious and frightening. And if the workingmen don’t know how to organize their own insurrection, if they’re waiting for London to tell them how… well, why not send a London delegate to do the job, even if he represents a rather different London from what they think they’re getting? Get the whole thing done quickly and frighten everyone else into quiescence.”

His voice was quiet. “Spies and informants are excellent at telling people what they want to hear. Pretty soon you’ve manufactured a truth as well as an insurrection. Of course, different people want to hear different truths, so things can get unruly. It’s possible that Oliver told Sidmouth what he wanted to hear; the Home Office might have begun with something a great deal more modest in mind. But if they’d had a detail man like me to help them keep their truths straight…”

To which she had no reply, except to kiss him again, rather clumsily on the cheek. He didn’t speak for a few minutes after that.

“You’re very good, Mary, to tolerate me in this infernal, cynical mood. And of course, to have bullied and badgered me into getting my friend back. Not to speak of putting me in the way of seeing Oliver and Sidmouth exposed. I’m in your debt. Ah yes, and then there was last night… Mary?”

“Yes?”

“We shall have to speak about all this-really talk. Very soon.”

“I expect we shall.” She hoped the words hadn’t come out as doleful as she felt. You’re not in my debt, she wanted to protest. It’s not some kind of commercial, legal agreement we have between us.

She held her tongue instead, in most un-Penley-like fashion. For if (as was seeming increasingly likely) they each held a differing view of what had transpired on this journey-well, then, her view of it must be wrong.

A reunion with a friend. A reconsideration of his political position. And a delicious, scandalous night at an inn.

What more, really, had happened?

And how was it, when she could know so well what he was thinking when they were arguing or making love, that she knew so little of his mind right now?

They’d reached a bend in the road, where it forked between Grefford and Beechwood Knolls.

“Beechwood Knolls,” he called out, in response to Mr. Frayne’s inquiry.

“You’ll want to greet your sister and her family, I expect. The one from Glasgow, I mean.”

“Yes, I know which one you mean. Indeed, it’ll be very agreeable to see them…”

She wondered when this annoying intermittent rain had started falling. Better a whomping big storm than this polite drizzle.

A curricle was parked on the side of the road next to the hedge, just before the turn one took to get to the house at Beechwood Knolls.

“Hold on, Frayne,” Kit called. “What’s that? Do you suppose they need any help? They don’t look like they’ve gone into a ditch.”

“It’s some of our young people, I think,” Mary said, “returning from Colonel Halsey’s.”

Indeed, seated in the curricle were a mournful Fred and a furious Elizabeth.

And as for Lord Ayres and Fannie Grandin?

Mr. Frayne was peering down curiously from the box.

“Come into the coach,” Mary said. “Both of you. Immediately. Mr. Frayne will wait here until we’ve finished speaking.”

Her first fearful surmise proved correct. Fannie and Lord Ayres had run away together just today; Fred and Elizabeth had been parked here for an hour, arguing about who was to blame and how to tell Jessica the news. Of the two young people, Fred seemed the more capable of telling the story clearly.

“He’d bought a flash new phaeton and pair, you see, while we were at the Halseys’. Gave everyone a ride this afternoon, each in turn. Fannie was the last; he said he might as well take her home to Beechwood Knolls, as she thought she might be getting a cold. We followed about an hour later…”

“More like two,” Elizabeth interjected, “by the time you’d made your sweet farewells to Miss Halsey…”

“Make it an hour and a quarter.” Fred shrugged. “We brought Miss Kimball in the backseat…”

Mary glanced out the window, for fear that the old lady was still out there.

“You needn’t worry about her.” Elizabeth’s lip curled. “She was having such vapors, we imposed upon good Miss Williams to let her stay the night in Grefford. When we discovered that they’d eloped…”

“Discovered by means of…?”

“A note to me. I found it in the seat of the gig.” The girl opened it and cleared her throat.

“Is that quite necessary?” Fred asked.

“I think it is.”

I haven’t the heart for a Season next year, Betts. The heart I thought I had is quite broken, I feel such a fool… And so I think I’d better marry quickly-someone rich enough, anyway, and get the whole grim business done with. And if your uncle does chance to ask after me…

“What the devil?” Kit exclaimed, at the same time as Mary demanded to know what in the world he’d done to cause this.

“Nothing. I swear it. Explained a bit about Metternich over supper at Cauthorn.”

“Treated her like a rational creature.” Mary sighed. “As though you didn’t know how charming that can be, from a handsome man in evening dress. Oh, dear.”

“And as though you didn’t know”-Elizabeth turned an angry face to her aunt-“how infatuated Lord Ayres was with you.”

“Don’t speak so loudly,” Mary said. “Mr. Frayne is a terrible scandalmonger.”

“All very well,” Kit said, “for you to say at this juncture.”

“It was nothing. He’d be there mooning about in the forest, when I’d be returning from meeting you…”

The intruder in the forest… Fannie getting her heart broken, coming to look for Kit.

“Well, it’s disgusting, is all I can say,” Elizabeth said, “the two of you at your age…”

“What?” It shouldn’t matter, Mary thought, especially in the midst of the crisis like the present one. Shouldn’t, but it did. At your age… how dare the little chit? “Are the two of us so superannuated that we mayn’t be allowed a little married pleasure?”

“Certainly, if you knew how to take it reasonably, like my mama and papa, when he was alive. Well, we could tell-couldn’t we, Fred?-mornings when they’d be gazing foolishly at each other over the breakfast table, even if we were too young quite to understand…” She began to blush, as Fred had been doing for quite some time.

“Still, Betts is right.” He put his arm about his sister’s shoulder. “It was our good fortune to grow up in such a household.”

“As it was mine,” Mary said softly.

But Elizabeth (Gracious, she’s a Penley after all, Mary thought) evidently had a few more opinions on the subject.

“What’s not all right is a couple of a certain age sneaking about and misleading those around them into thinking they’re out of love and… available.”

Kit gave a low whistle, of… agreement, Mary thought.

“Especially when one can’t come near either of them for the contagion of a… well, an erotic sort of mood.”

Fred groaned, but his sister wouldn’t be dissuaded.

“Because Mama was right about you, Aunt Mary, a few months ago when she told Aunt Julia that you remained a spoiled baby, and simply had no idea… what it would really be like…”

The blue-diamond eyes had filled with tears, but Elizabeth sniffled them back.

“… to, to lose someone who’d loved you as no one would ever love you again. Really to lose him and not simply to play at it… poor Mama.”

Had Jessica really said that about her?

She took a long, deep breath.

“Well,” she said, “I shouldn’t have wished to hear it, but it was almost worth it for Elizabeth’s pronouncing her mama right about anything.”

“That’s all very well,” Fred said, “but Fannie and Lord Ayres shouldn’t be running off to marry, just to teach someone a lesson.”

“And Lady Grandin will never forgive a one of us.”

“She won’t need to,” Mary replied. “Nor will she ever know any of this happened.”

“Ah?” Kit raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”

“Because they won’t marry. Because you and I shall go get them back.”