Jane and the Stillroom Maid (12 page)

“Such events in your life as were then unfolded,” he continued without a yea or nay, “confirmed my good opinion of your penetration and firmness of mind—and determined me in my course of soliciting your aid in the present affair.”

“Good God!” I cried. “What
can
my cousin have told you, Sir James? I fear that he has grossly exaggerated my talents, for some mischievous purpose of his own.”

“Mr. Cooper would never presume to impart particulars so injurious to the reputation of a lady, and a lady so closely connected to himself,” Sir James said quietly. “In the present instance, indeed, he would not wish it
known that you have been associated with past cases of murder. It might enflame the gossip already circulating about the town.”

I coloured, doubted, and was silent.

“The intelligence I received, Miss Austen, was from a very old acquaintance we hold in common. He is presently residing at Chatsworth, being an intimate of the Duke.”

“Chatsworth!” I cried. “I must believe you to have been imposed upon, Sir James! For I know no one in Derbyshire.”

At that moment, the rustling in the passage increased and the parlour door was thrust open. I turned, gazed, and rose immediately from my chair. A spare, tall figure, exquisitely dressed in the garb of a gentleman, was caught in a shaft of sunlight. He lifted his hat from his silver hair and bowed low over my hand.

“It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss Austen. We have not met this age.”

Nor had we. But I must confess that the gentleman had lately been much in my thoughts.

“Lord Harold,” I replied a trifle unsteadily. “The honour is entirely mine.”

28 August 1806, cont.
∼

T
HE APPEARANCE OF
L
ORD
H
AROLD
T
ROWBRIDGE 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?”