Jane Austen Mysteries 10 Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (28 page)

"She was by way of being a friend," I retorted. "And indeed, I should relish any list you could summon. You might send it to my direction at the Castle Inn."

"Then start," he said bitterly, "with Caro Lamb--she lives for the amusement of spinning webs, and is entirely capable of drowning a rival. There is a Lucretia Borgia quality to the act that should undoubtedly appeal to her more lurid phantasies. And now, Miss Austen--I
beg
your pardon--but I feel an overwhelming need to relieve myself. You
will
, I know, excuse me."--With which churlish frankness, he quitted my side--and I felt myself to have been released from a disturbing influence, powerful and heady.

All of us in that room, so carelessly crowded, fell silent as we observed his limping progress towards the door--the club foot swinging with clumsy violence. It was as tho' a spirit beloved of the gods--given every gift of beauty and conceit by a benevolent Olympus--had been deliberately blighted. Lord Byron was a warning against the human quest for Perfection; it could not be attained in
all
things.

I doubt I am the first to make this judgement of his lordship--and I am certain I shall not be the last.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Rivals

W
EDNESDAY
, 12 M
AY
1813
B
RIGHTON, CONT
.

W
E PARTED FROM THE
E
ARL AND
C
OUNTESS ON
S
CROPE
Davies's doorstep. It had been agreed that Henry should accompany Swithin to the day's race-meeting--"for murder or no," he said, "I have a horse running at four o'clock, and must not fail to appear, or the betting shall be all against me. Wyncourt--old Gravetye's heir, you know, and as sound a judge of horseflesh as any ever born--is my only competition."

"I have seen Lord Wyncourt's gelding," Henry observed coolly, "and thought it a trifle too short in the back--" At which the Earl clapped my brother delightedly, and the two set off in search of a hackney carriage bound for the Downs east of town.

Lady Swithin was to return to the Marine Parade, in expectation of her friend Lady Oxford's arrival; and she invited me cordially to accompany her--but a nearer duty obtruded. Directly opposite our position was General Twining's house, its doorknocker muffled and its windows hung with crape.

"I must pay a call upon a bereaved parent," I said, "however much I should prefer a few hours of sun and excitement on the racing-ground."

The Countess's face lit up. "But I have a capital scheme! I shall call round in my perch phaeton, with or without my London friend, in half an hour's time--to save you from the General's clutches, and carry you off to the races. All the world shall be there, you know, and it
must
prove an excellent opportunity for your researches."

"I can have no objection, and should be delighted to accept of your ladyship's invitation," I replied.

Lady Swithin unfurled her sunshade with a look brimful of mischief and said, "I almost hope Lady Oxford is delayed. We might enjoy a most delicious tete-a-tete in the phaeton--for I mean to hear
every word
Byron spoke to you this morning. Never have I seen him so little bored by a lady's conversation--even Caro Lamb's!"

I coloured, and deflected suspicion with the novelist's chief tool--a facility for timely invention. "That is because I was impertinent. Lord Byron cannot often meet with a woman so little inclined to captivate him."

"I wonder it did not send him into strong hysterics," Desdemona said, "but you must school your tongue a little, my dear, before entering the opposite abode--it should never do to carry pugnacity to the General!"

She was correct, of course; the encounter with Byron had perhaps been
too
invigourating. I ordered my emotions into a confirmed serenity, bade her ladyship
adieu
, and crossed to the far paving with a step that was the very picture of meek womanhood.

It seemed, at the first, as tho' my efforts were for naught--Suddley the butler being little inclined to admit me this morning, whether he recognised my countenance from my previous visit, or no.

"The General is not at home to visitors," he said austerely; and I could well imagine that the General was loath to parade his grief before the stream of the curious and the hypocritical who had left their cards upon the foyer's table. Suddley's elderly face was marked with the ravages of grief; and I recalled how Catherine had greeted him as one might an old nurse, a friend of the schoolroom. How little right the serving class was accorded to mourn for those they loved, of whatever station--duty must always intervene.
Someone
must lay the fire each morning;
someone
must answer the door.

"I quite understand." My voice was firm and a trifle over-loud; behind Suddley's stooped form was the hushed length of the Twining hall, and if there was to be any hope of the General's overlistening our conversation, I must condescend to bray a little. "If you would be so good as to convey Miss Jane Austen's deepest sympathy to General Twining. Tho' I knew his daughter only briefly, I could not help but regard her with admiration and respect--and know how severe his loss must be."

"You are very good, ma'am," the butler said in a quavering voice, and his gaze--which had been correctly fixed at an indeterminate point over my right shoulder--met my own. "It is an affliction we never looked for, in plain terms. Such a sweet and biddable child as she was--hardly one of these harum-scarum misses, wild for a red coat and no thought to her family name. I wish that Lord Byron had never been born! Her death, that Devil's imp was, from the moment his evil foot crossed her path."

I murmured encouraging nothings.

"Right there on the paving he bowed to Miss Catherine, being arm in arm with our friend Mr. Davies. I may say, meaning no disrespect to the gentleman, that I was surprized at Mr. Davies's judgement--knowing Lord Byron's vicious tendencies as he does, he should
not
have encouraged the acquaintance, in my opinion. But, however, Mr. Davies may have felt he had no choice but to accede to his friend's wishes, in all politeness."

Scrope Davies, on intimate terms with the Twining family? I had not had an idea of it--and felt a ripple of excitement twist my entrails. I
must
speak to Henry. Surely my piquant brother would have learnt much from his brief conversation with the gentleman.

"Not a moment's peace did any of us know, from that day to this," Suddley went on. "His lordship was fair took with a passion for Miss Catherine. It wasn't like the usual courting of a gentleman and a young lady. Quite dotty he was--mooning about below her windows of a midnight, and calling her by some foreign name."

"Leila?" I suggested.

"That was it! Spanish, I thought it," the butler confided, "or maybe French. It was as tho' his lordship had been took with a sickness, of the heart and head. Miss Catherine went in fear of him--her poor little self all of a tremble when the bell was pulled, lest it be his lordship calling--and the General could not abide him! A
wolf
, he said,
come to ravish my white lamb
. And look where it's ended! With that Devil's white hands round the sweet child's throat!"

"You believe, then, that he drowned her?--Tho' so respectable a friend as Mr. Scrope Davies vouches for Lord Byron's movements?"

"Suddley!"

The General's voice, as harsh and bellicose as tho' he commanded the heights of a battlefield, rang out from the far end of the passage. "Cease your prattle at once and send that woman away! She calls only to feed upon our misery, like all the rest!"

"Very good, sir," Suddley said woodenly; then added in an undertone, as he made to close the door in my face, "May I beg leave to apologise--"

"Pray do not regard it. You have all my sympathy." I turned away.

"Miss Austen, is it?"

The General's form was just visible behind his man's as Suddley hesitated, his hand on the door.

"I am come to condole, sir--but have no wish to intrude upon so profound an affliction."

"Then be off with ye," he snarled, thrusting his head round the jamb, "and do not presume to return! I have nothing to say to you, madam! Nor to any woman of my acquaintance; you are all jades, whores, and vultures--not a pure soul among you. Not even," he added, his voice breaking down entirely, "my poor Catherine, tho' her winding sheet be white! Oh, God, that I should live to see the sins of the mother visited upon the child--"

There is no uglier sound, to my mind, than that of a grown man weeping; its utter desolation strikes the heart to stone.

"Forgive him, ma'am," Suddley whispered as he drew his master inside. "He does not know what he says."

But I wondered very much, as I walked towards Marine Parade, whether Suddley lied. A new train of thought had been opened to me: I must speak to Mrs. Silchester once more.

L
ADY
O
XFORD HAD
NOT
BEEN DELAYED, HAVING FLOWN
south that morning with the lightest of traps and a team of four high-steppers to speed her journey. She declared herself an excellent traveller, who suffered not at all from the headache, requiring only a simple nuncheon to restore her jangled nerves--was only too happy to encounter all her acquaintance at the race-meeting that afternoon--was sure that Byron would venture out to lay a wager on Swithin's horse--and would be charmed to further her acquaintance with
any
of dear Mona's intimate friends.

I had progressed, in a matter of days, from a lady briefly recollected from Mona's Bath girlhood, to an
intimate friend
, and was hardly likely to quarrel with the change.

Jane Elizabeth Harley, Countess of Oxford, was nothing that I expected. From her reputation as a captivator of powerful men--her liaisons with such Whig potentates as Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Granville, and the reformer Lord Archibald Hamilton being everywhere known--I had predicted a heavy-lidded seductress, with expansive bosom and swaying hips, her indolence suggestive of the boudoir. But here was a trim and adorable creature some years my senior, whose pert nose and rosebud mouth belonged to an ingenue. Brisk and merry in her attitudes, she was nonetheless as sharp as she could stare--pronouncing some blistering insight upon her fellows with every second sentence. She kept a lorgnette in her reticule, the better to examine any fragment of leaf or fossil that might fall in her way, and was forever losing herself in a book. At present, she informed Desdemona, she was engrossed in fourteen volumes of a history of Ancient Rome, and had brought Volume the Seventh with her to peruse in the phaeton on the way to the race-meeting.